aviary | CLOSED | prompt eight

[ He goes days (sometimes weeks) without looking at her and even though that's his own penance, a manifestation of his own shame, it hurts Perahia as if it were her own punishment. For all that Saul sees the ugliness of what transpired between them, the girl who was once Inga, then Piano, now Perahia thinks and feels only warm sentiment for him. (Passion, desire, loyalty, love.) Some would think it a miracle; others, the cruelest sentence of them all — for love and affection is not meant to be a prison and yet here he stands, shackled all the same.

Perahia frowns unhappily, as if he's just scolded her and she's fifteen again. (She'd been so very young at the time, a note which had done nothing but make a discordant chord that much more sour.) ]

But. I'm not a liar. [ Her voice is childishly stubborn, even though her brow pinches like she means to cry. ]

I know— I know you're not.

[ Still, he averts his gaze, carding a hand back through his hair in exasperation. (His temper hasn't gotten much better, though he tries and tries to get a handle on it. It makes him sad, now, more often than not; a shadow of a man passing through the streets, not looking anywhere or at anyone.)

She still loves him. And that realization hurts more than any penance. ]

Doesn't mean everyone'd agree with you.

[ She still loves him, even after that love killed her.

(In the end: twenty three dead, a dozen more wounded, an ancient building pummeled to sand. It'd been fitting perhaps, the retribution she'd always wanted — her love for him hadn't just killed her. It had killed just about everyone.) ]

Fuck the rest. [ The word is hard enough to mow a man down, some of Saul's old temper flaring in her now — or was it Perahia? Did the anger come with the name ] The rest don't know. Don't know a thing. Never did and never will. I know you.

[ Whatever edge her anger had found in her vanishes and she's soft again and reaching for him. ] I've seen, I have. [ Perahia's fingertips brush tentatively the collar of his shirt. ] I've seen your heart.

It was a gift.

[ You don't know me, he wants to say, but he knows already that that's a lie. She's seen into his heart, clawed her way into his chest with God's grace. She knows who he is. What he doesn't understand is why she still chooses to love him.

He's a broken, ugly thing. A dragon reduced to ash, not to rise again as the phoenix might; a pianist with broken hands. (I could never play God's score. I was not meant to.)

Still, she takes his name, calls him by what is now hers. He doesn't flinch away from her touch, but his brow pinches as if he might rage or simply cry. ]

Why— how can you think that?

[ She cries less now, and he cries more, the two of them gravitating inwards from their previous extremes towards some sort of middle ground. Only there is nothing temperate about this newfound center — nothing moderate or evenhanded or on a steady keel. There will always be some twist, some terrible skew to the both of them, like there's not enough room for all of her Heaven and all of his Hell in the same place.

The hand on his shirt crawls up and ghosts across his throat, brushes against the line of his jaw and creeps up into his hair. The corners of Perahia's mouth twitch and, for a moment, she seems quite mad. ]

Ruth said.

No, Piano.

[ It's not her name anymore (never was, to be fair), but he can't help it. It's what he's used to. Granted, he's used to having a name, too, but he doesn't carry one anymore. His sentence had been assigned to a blank space, and there's no one around who seems to know what to really call him. (Saul? Perahia? Nothing at all?) He thinks it's more right than not, this way. He is nothing, no one, one among billions, never meant to be anything special. But still, he'd reached for the sun, and in the end, he'd burned more than just himself.

He shakes his head, though he doesn't pull away from her touch. ]

I say.

No, Saul.

[ She knows his name. To her credit, she knows every name that he has ever carried and bore across the bloody swath of his own life. Saul. Brother. Perahia. Sally. That is a torturer's right and when Perahia — once Piano, once Inga, once nobody important either — had come tumbling down out of both Heaven and Earth to find him, she'd searched for every damned soul that had played a hand in his sentence and she burned them, broke them, tore them to ragged shreds and scattered them across all of Downside as if to say I am Perahia, and he is mine. A spectacle worthy of the name she'd salvaged from his cold corpse and placed onto her anointed head.

Her fingernails scrape against his scalp. (He'd never been kind, not even when he fucked her and those lessons have lasted, have carried her on through to Hell.) ]

You listen.

[ No, he'd never been kind, and he cannot express, not even now, how much he regrets that. But he's learned that apologies don't mean anything if they aren't paid with blood, and by the time she had arrived, wreathed in red, he'd finished his penance already (and never once, during those trials, had he shed a tear; that had come later).

Finally, he meets her gaze, and for a single instant there's a spark in his eyes that reads of the anger that had driven him so strongly before. (He has never liked being told what to do and he has always liked it even less with the application of force.) But it dies as soon as it's ignited, pummeled down by the guilt that has made a permanent home upon his shoulders. ]

Fine. Fine. What do you want?

[ Perahia sees that spark and her eyes widen briefly and for a moment, she's Piano again. Just a girl of sixteen with red hair and a borrowed name, sleeping her life away in motel rooms and through late-night car rides from here to there and everywhere death. Death and retribution.

Call it wrong, call it skewed, but here's the truth of the matter: never once did Piano fear Perahia. Never once, despite the bruises and the terrible things he called her, did she despise him or resentment or even think to wish him away. Where Perahia saw anger and ugliness, Piano had seen neverending loneliness. And her part in the Score, her silver-bell note, sang of nothing but love and companionship because theirs was her chord — discordant but true. Perahia raged and she trailed after in sweet melody and never once — not even now — does regret cross her mind.

His anger quiets but her wonder lingers, that sharpness in her eyes giving way to a distant sort of fondness. A heated longing.

Though her fingers loosen their grip they do not slip from his hair. ]

You. [ That is the simple answer. ] I want you. Saul. You will never convince me. It's already decided.

I love you.

[ In the orchestra, it is the Piano that reigns. It is an instrument capable of infinite grace as well as the harshest of chords. To that end, perhaps, Perahia had been a virtuoso. Despite the part that he had chosen to play — almost completely divergent from the great score, ugly and discordant, the instrument had turned it into the most beautiful song to come out of the whole mess even after his fingers had left the keys.

But if there is one thing that he knows, it is that he cannot claim any responsibility for that song.

As he looks at her now, it is that realization that colors his features. (Most of the time, she still looks sixteen to him. Still young, still lovely despite the life that she'd wasted upon him.) For a long moment, he simply worries at his lip, a crease drawn in his brow. ]

I love you, too, [ is all that he manages, though he seems to realize he is signing his own damnation all over again in saying so. ]

CLOSED | prompt eight | RUIN

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