Thanks to everyone who read, and as always reviews are appreciated.
Roddy clutched the flyer tightly in his free hand as he checked the sign on the front of the building. It didn't look like much, but the name matched.
This wasn't...he didn't like doing things like this. Oh, he wasn't as obnoxiously, uniformly uniform as his cousins were, he never had been even before anyone had discovered his abilities with music, but there were good reasons that Reinigen didn't wander around unknown locations alone. Between other Wesen objecting to vermin and humans objecting to kids from the wrong part of town, situations that might be nothing to someone else frequently ranged from uncomfortable to downright unpleasant for him, and it wasn't like he was built to discourage confrontations. Nor, in all honesty, did his habit of letting his mouth run do him any favors.
He loved Dad, but there were days when he thought that he took after him a little too much.
But right now he didn't have much of a choice, so he shoved the flyer back into his pocket, took a deep breath, and pushed the door open. With everything that had happened with Dr. Lawson and the quartet this past spring he'd completely missed the window to apply for summer camps, not that there were very many local music camps that had scholarship slots in the first place, but he had to do something music related besides play for the rats this summer. Next year would be his senior year which meant college applications and all of that crap, and if he didn't have anything to put down...as good as he was, a couple of teachers at school had been pretty open about what the life of an artist looked like. Especially an artist who didn't have other means of support. And it wasn't like Dad had a bunch of rich buddies who'd be happy to write him recommendations, either. The flyer didn't actually have many details about what tryouts entailed, but he had his favorite pieces that he could do from memory if they wanted that, or after several years at Von Hamelin he was pretty solid on the sight-reading as well. Hopefully that would be enough.
"May I help you?" a woman at the front desk asked as he stepped inside, looking vaguely disapproving.
He held up his violin case. "I'm here for the orchestra tryouts, please."
"Name?"
"Roddy. Geiger."
She scribbled his name on the pad in front of her and then gestured off to her right. "Down that hallway, and the auditorium is at the far end on the left."
He hadn't really needed the directions since he'd been able to pick out the familiar discordant sounds of instruments being tuned from the moment he'd walked in the door, but he thanked her politely anyway and heading down the hall. Supposedly this summer thing was a step up from the usual community orchestras with several of the participants being former collegiate or even semi-professional players, but even if Mrs. Menchik had called it a good networking opportunity, his record when it came to interacting with strange adults wasn't much better than it was with other teenagers. He might be marginally more likely to rein in the sarcasm with them, sure, but hiding in the corner to avoid having to talk to them at all didn't exactly make a great impression either.
He stopped at the open entrance to the auditorium, peering around the door frame cautiously. Mostly adults, no surprise there, although the fact that there was an awful lot of white hair was. Then again they were auditioning during the middle of the day on a Thursday, and supposedly this and Tuesday evenings were the regular practice slots, so maybe it made sense that most of the players would be older. That...might be okay, actually. Grandparent-type adults were usually easier for him to deal with than regular adults, and it was one of the few situations where being able to pass for younger than he was tended to be an advantage.
"Hey, I wasn't expecting to see you here."
Roddy absolutely did not jump or squeak, and anyone who said otherwise was lying through his teeth. Even if those teeth belonged to a way-too-tall Blutbad who apparently enjoyed appearing out of nowhere.
"Sorry, didn't mean to startle you," Monroe said, smiling as he swung a couple chairs from under one arm to under the other and offered a hand.
"'s okay." Not that he would ever have replied in any other way regardless of his real feelings on the matter when talking to someone who could murder him with next to no effort, and he shook the proffered hand cautiously. "Are they out of chairs?" It had looked like there were plenty of empty seats when he'd stuck his head in a minute ago, most of the players were using them to hold cases and prop up practice music and all of that, but he didn't know how big this orchestra was supposed to be.
"Nah, but apparently there's a kids' theater program right after this, and Maria asked if I'd mind bringing in a few more as long as I was still around. Are you going to play with us this summer? I'd have thought you'd be going to some kind of music camp or something."
"Not this year. And maybe. The flyer said there were tryouts today?" He retrieved the battered piece of paper from his pocket and held it out.
"You'll be fine."
Roddy tried very hard not to flinch when a big arm curled around his shoulders and pulled him into the room.
"Cleo, come meet someone," Monroe called.
Cleo, as it turned out, was both a bass player and very grandmotherly woman about his size, and she greeted his declaration that he was a violinist with pleasure. And then gestured for him to follow her up to the stage, and he hesitated. On one hand in a new place you were generally safer sticking by someone you knew and right now that was—God help him, and his father would have cats if he ever found out—Monroe, but on the other a Blutbad was pretty much the definition of unsafe.
"Go on," Monroe urged. "She'll get you set up with music and the audition sheet and everything. I'll get these set out and wait until you're done."
Roddy wasn't real sure that he wanted that either, but since Cleo was already off and moving he did as he was told and hurried after her. No sense in fucking this up before he'd even tried out.
He felt a little more confident after she'd handed over a folder of music and left him to page through it, though. A few pieces he'd played before, and of the ones he hadn't he was reasonably sure that he could still give a fair showing. Maybe not quite perfectly, and definitely not at full tempo on a couple of them, but he shouldn't embarrass himself.
Unlike some of the others in the room he didn't feel any need to put in a full practice session after he'd gotten his violin tuned and his fingers warmed up, and he headed for the sign-up sheet Cleo had pointed him towards and put his name down. There were only five others in line before him, and he took advantage of the fact that the audition room was just an annex off the auditorium to listen in on his competition. Habit after a few years at Von Hamelin, especially since three of the others were listed as violinists, but after he heard the first two play he tentatively agreed with Monroe's assessment that he'd be fine. One played one of the pieces in the folder while the other played something completely different that he didn't recognize, but he was damn sure that he could play circles around either of them. A violist followed and then a distinctly unimpressive cellist, and then there was one more violinist—also pretty unimpressive—before his name was called.
As it turned out the audition committee was just the conductor and two orchestra sponsors, and since they said to play whatever he'd like as an introductory piece he went with Brahms. Part of him wanted to go with Danse Macabre instead given that he'd seen another Saint-Saens piece in the folder, a Bacchanale that looked like it would be really fun, but after... Well, whatever. The Brahms was more than complicated enough to show off his range.
The fact that the audition committee were smiling when he lowered his violin and the conductor said to hang onto the folder of music and make sure that Cleo had his contact information hopefully meant that they agreed—only the violist before him had been asked to keep the music, and she, one of the violinists, and the cellist had been asked to sight-read as well—and he thanked them automatically and made his escape.
And found Monroe waiting by his violin case. Because of course he was. Roddy slowed, but it wasn't like there were any convenient holes he could crawl into until Monroe went away, so he took a breath and kept his feet moving. Monroe was a familiar face, even if he still wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not, and nothing bad had happened to him when Monroe had popped up at the end of year concert at school. In retrospect he'd actually been way less obnoxious to talk to than some of the other concertgoers Roddy had to interact with on a regular basis...he actually liked the music, which was a nice change.
"It sounded like that went well," Monroe said with a smile when Roddy reached him.
He'd have been able to listen in on Roddy's audition as easily as Roddy had heard the players before him, and Roddy nodded. "They said to keep the music, anyway."
"That's a good sign. Have you played any of it before?"
"A couple pieces." He hesitated. "Are you already done with your audition?"
"Yeah, I got here early to help set up so I got mine out of the way quick." One shoulder twitched. "And to be fair, I've been playing with them for quite a few years now."
"What do you do?" Roddy found himself asking. And then hoping that the answer wasn't 'murder nosy little rats,' although thus far his odds seemed okay there. But even if Monroe was older, he didn't look retired old.
"I'm a clockmaker. And clock repairer."
