She was trained on the fiddle. A simple instrument, one made for simple farmers. And she, though revered to them as their mother of earth, was still just as simple as they were.
Her first fiddle was a gift from her fifty-second mother, a short and round woman, very stout but very authoritative. Perhaps it was that she was the chieftain's wife of this clan that made her such, but for all her crass control, she was still kind and just. As a mother should be, as well as a monarch of her lands.
Zhemyna had taken the appearance of a twelve-year-old child at that point, all curls and swirls and petite little dresses and caps on her head that never stayed on without threat of gluing them down. Her fingers barely fit the neck of the instrument, though she still learned how to handle such a thing for festivals and religious ceremonies and even just a stress outlet. Even with such small child's hands, she managed still to play the fiddle properly.
She played it for over a millennium, filling out to look early twenties. She had bore through so many strings, so many bows. The instrument itself had been restored several times, cleaned and maintained by a careful professional hand. She was playing it when she met Baptiste.
Frenchmen were not a regular entity in North Prussia, much less in budding Paleugmeddi. She was playing with a few street-bards, a rousing little jaunt from one of the outlying rurals that had half the crowd surrounding them clapping and stomping and dancing, reveling in the cluster of her people and feeling their energy swirl through her as though it made her flaring skirts, as any Nation should and that she was sure all Nations did. A naive notion, but she had yet to understand how detached most other cultures were kept from that which represented their sum peoples.
He had stopped to listen, to applaud when the set was done. To approach her when she moved away to let the little group play their own pieces, to fill the air with music they had been working on. Though notorious farmers and thought bumpkins, Prussians still had an air of creativity to them, and to her, it was always good to let it build and express on their own without interference.
His Prussian was terrible. It was the first thing she noticed. His inflection was wrong, his accent unsteady as one who is still novice. Words were stuttered as he tried to speak them, but thankfully she knew what he was attempting to say, correcting when she could as patiently as any teacher.
He was new to her country, had moved there for the wintery air and the balmy summers, for the people and the energy and the blooming loam in spring. He thought her a normal human at first, come from one such culture who isolates their peoples from their representative. He was surprised and maybe taken aback when she corrected that. Given that he was now Prussian as well, she assured, he should know who she was.
His nervousness was tangible, she decided to point out the case he carried with him as something of a distraction. A violin case, soft and black, meticulously cared for with polished hardware gleaming. The unease melted from his beaming face at her notice and he told her that he would show her what it was if she accompanied him to his home. That it was not a thing he wished to show in public. Apprehension was apparent at this announcement, accompanied by awkwardness. She knew what that could mean in some mortal minds. However, curiosity got the better of her and with assurances to herself that she could defend herself against a human mortal if need be, she agreed.
His intentions were pure, for as soon as he lead her to his dingy one-room loft above the fisheries of one of the many conglomerated harbors and shut the door, he set the case on the scruffy bed in one corner of the room and snapped it open. In the faint grey light pouring through the hazy oceanic morning, she saw it gleam.
He pulled out a violin, though not one of plain polished wood, but a shining masterpiece of work adorned with enameled flowers inlaid with panels of cut nacre on a polished blackwood, of carved horse heads and bodies along the delicate neck. It was magnificent, she had never seen such an instrument here in the furthest northern reaches of her country. To her, it might have been wrought by the god of music himself. The bow was just as finely matched in aesthetics as it was for functionality, and when he pulled it across the strings in a hauntingly lilting tune, it was as though he played with her heartstrings attached.
So rich, so full a sound. It filled her and tickled such depths of her emotions into being. She almost did not feel the tears spring to her eyes.
He stopped, worried her crying was a negative reaction. Once she realized, she begged him continue. Let him know that to her, it was the most beautiful sound in the world. In response, he clicked a small lever next to the neck and continued to play for her. The sounds changed, a chorded melody that sounded as though it was a duet of violins, so solid was the second tone. A tune still so dark and eerie that the walls themselves felt like they were closing in to listen.
His name was Baptiste, he said, pronounced like the fabric. She found him to be just as soft and gentle as such. And she loved him.
He wanted to be a musician, even if it was just a street-bard playing a corner for coin. To spread music was more his desires and here, the old sea and highland loam and basalt crags spoke more to him than anywhere else. It was as haunted a place as ever, a perfect match for his equally strange violin. He offered to teach her to play it, in exchange for linguistic lessons. She readily accepted this deal, enthused to start as soon as possible.
One day every week, she arrived at his doorstep. Three hours of teaching him her language, her accents and dialects, the slang to help him pass as a native. Letting him talk about himself and his homeland and his dreams and his goals, incentive to learn and in turn, teach as well. One hour for a break before he would take out that pretty violin and she learned and relearned the scales. The formats were similar, but a violin is much bigger than the fiddle she played and knew by heart.
For months, the lessons persisted until he could hold a full conversation with a complete stranger without dropping back into his native French accent, and she could play a simple song and not just scales. She was readying to tell him his language lessons were complete, he sounded like a native, when he took initiative and silenced her with a kiss, followed by an apology for intruding on her space 'like a common vagrant', as he put it. In perfect Prussian, no less. She assured him it was quite fine and after a little longer spent talking, woke the next morning wrapped in his arms on the grungy little bed in his tiny decrepit apartment.
She loved him as a lover should and lessons for the violin continued with different payment spent entangled until dawn. Though she left in spring and autumn for the planting seasons and the harvest, though she spent her days playing the hostess to festivals and ceremonies, she returned to him. She saw him grow over time from a corner street-performer to playing in smaller venues and when he started accompanying his melancholy haunting violin tunes with his waveringly haunted voice, her heart sang and pulled along with him and his playing.
He moved from that dingy one-room loft above the fisheries with its oily walls and wafting smell of dead fish to a more pleasant and cleaner loft in the inner city. She watched him change from small venues barely holes in the walls to concert halls that would echo and reverberate his voice and his music back to him and fill a room as though a complete orchestra was playing, a choir singing as though gods above could hear such tones and returned it all with highest praise. There was magic tangible in the air where he went and people would sing his successes until the air itself rang in the streets where he walked.
Oh, how she loved him and his mind and his talent and his gentleness and his heart. Oh, how she coveted their time together, spent listening to him devise a new song and rehearse it for her first so she could hear it raw from the source, how he would pridefully take her out with him where he went and saw her as his special guest wherever he was invited. How he wrapped her in his arms and so loved her back when she told him of her adventures and of what she learned and the new stars in her wafting mane and where they were mirrored in the night skies above. How she would wake with the sun and the moon in her eyes when she saw him there, sleeping peacefully beside her.
Oh, how she loved him.
It is sad to say that Nations love mortals, how immortality can be a trying thing when they do. To watch one you spend such sweet time with wither and age while you stay young, it takes one of strong constitution to handle such change. Or a note of training, a constant to be used to it, and she was sure that this is what helped her with Baptiste, having sunk so many mothers and sisters and fathers and brothers before him.
She knew when he was aging, when his bones were creaking too much to walk the stairs in his house, the final move after his successes. She never changed, but he did. Grey and stiff, every joint and bone crickling and crackling with strain. She helped him where she could, offering to help realign his back or rub his shoulders or carry him up and down the stairs. She helped him to sleep at night, looking hardly older than the day she had met him while he could barely move, a vision of snow in morning sun and carved canyons in his face and hands. Earned, every one.
He was smiling in peace when he left her, with the golden sun tinting his ancient silver mane the colors she remembered it being, having told her to take the one possession he could have never parted with in life. When it had passed hands, so had he simply sighed into his eternal sleep, breathing his soul seemingly physically into the pretty violin as special to her now as he was.
She did not cry when she wrapped him in the shroud, white and gauzy as the fabric his name was pronounced for. She did not cry when she tied the glittering golden cord around him, to light his way across the border into the Otherworld and guide him through the veins of Prussia what sprouted from the swamps. She did not cry as many of the fans of his works did when she carried him to the pools where so many more of her families in the past lay, near and far, and let him drop into the murky swampy depths.
She cried in secrecy, hiding among the basalt crags on the spring-bloom loam, and clutching the case of her inheritance to her as though afraid letting go would lose him forever.
The haze this morning is grey. Oceanic, with the breeze blowing off the sea and carrying a hint of brine over the spring-bloom loam. Delicate white flowers, a tiny tinge of blue dusted among the vibrant dark green tinted with foggy light. It is a quiet day, still as the dead.
Melancholy tugs at her, pulls her heartstrings as she sits in the music room with a cup of steaming coffee in her hands. Staring out the big bay windows in the main acoustic chamber toward the untouched landscape of the loam and basalt terraces beyond her property with a similar haze across her eyes.
The coffee is set down on a table, she climbs the stairs to the attic behind the Baroque-replica harpsichord in the entry room, making her practiced way between boxes and trinkets and treasures that still have yet to find a place. It is hidden behind a few empty violin cases, made of plastic rather than the classic wooden construction of this one. The covering is perhaps a little bit stained and ratty, she muses that she should probably take it to be restored soon.
Back down into the acoustic chamber, she sets the case next to her coffee cup and snaps it open, pulling the lid up with a creak of the old silver hinges. The violin comes to join her for the morning, and after a session of restringing its ancient neck and tuning it ever so carefully, she flicks open the second chamber and drags the bow over the strings. The sound reverberates around the room, singing to the ebony framing, the flooring, into the doorframes and window wells, across the glass panes. It is familiar, it is haunting, it is ringing, it is calming.
The dual-chamber violin is a marvel of engineering, causing the clear sound of two instruments in tune to be heard where there is only one. The sounds of one playing, a duet with a ghost. The song she plays is so sad, so full of remembrance for a time long before, that the very sound of it echoing through the young manor makes the walls weep and the ebony wail.
A/N: I got dragged back into Hetalia. You all know the disclaimers of us old folks (I own nothing but my OCs, blahblahblah), so I'll just tell a wee bit of backstory for this timeline to avoid confusion. Zhemyna is Old Prussia. In this timeline, Gilbert never slaughtered her people (which effectively killed her in ours) and instead they fortified themselves up in the north, northeast of Prussian territories backed up against Lithuania while Teuton got the southern lowlands. So there's two Prussias now; Gilbert in the South with his title by ducal conquer and Zhemyna in the North, still maintaining her life and just trying to live it without being told she's doing it wrong. They've gone 0 Days of someone not telling them to convert to Christianity.
So welcome to this new mess of mine, there will be shipping afoot and in my typical stylings of canonxoc. you have been forewarned. otherwise, thanks for reading!