Work Text:
The Pianist's Heart
In the depths of a harbor on the starless sea, at the end of a winding hallway lined with painted flowers, there is a room with a grand piano.
The piano is always open for those who feel compelled to play, though they are almost always hesitant at first.
The pianist wanders the halls in the dark, lately risen from a restless sleep. The candles are dim, and he is in the midst of groggily wondering if he had perhaps made a wrong turn when he happens upon the door. The door is an auburn oak door on rusted hinges, with a brass doorknob which squeaks as he turns it. As the door opens, the pianist's shoulders relax and he releases a breath he did not know he had been holding.
The room is large and grand and open. There is room enough for seats, but in the room there is only the piano, imposing in the center of the room, and its red-cushioned stool.
(The stool may or may not have contained books of sheet music. No one has ever thought to check.)
The pianist strides up to the piano purposefully, and then pauses to run his fingers along the wood of the rim, and then the fallboard. It feels familiar and comforting in a way he has never been able to express. He glances surreptitiously around the room to make sure that it is empty, despite the fact that he had walked in alone and there is not so much as an empty corner to hide in, here.
Sliding onto the red cushioned seat is easy.
Lifting the lid is harder.
The moment feels significant and intimate in a wordless way, a way he knows only music could ever hope to express.
(When he plays this moment later, it always feels more dream than anything.)
The Pianist's fingers run over the keys as if learning the grooves and edges of a new lover. He fills his lungs and closes his eyes.
On the exhale, he plays.
The song is about seeking and finding, love and loss and love again. He breathes every crescendo and his soul lives in his fingers, movement flurry and passion and softness and ease with the music, even as his eyes remain shut and his back remains rigid. He moves as if possessed, a vessel for the story that is pouring out of him moment by moment, note by note.
His life pours out of his fingers and he lets it; nightmares, hopes, dreams, fears, majesties. Love lost and love gained. Wishes never spoken aloud but still granted. Joy and grief and depths of emotion that could only be felt here, now, in this place. He plays for hours, only stopping when he finds himself empty, laid bare entirely as the room echoes softly with his resonating final notes.
His hands shake. He rests his head in his hands, leaning against the piano and letting it bear his weight, and he realizes that he has been crying for some time when he feels tears against his palms.
He sits there, staring at his hands, the keys, the bee-key-sword motif carved into the wood of the fallboard. He breathes heavily. Tonight he has let go of a weight he has been carrying for a long time and the release is almost as overwhelming in its emptiness as it is glorious in its freedom.
He would later play for friends and lovers, owl kings and cats and even Fate herself, once. But no night would ever compare to this one, when the pianist became frightfully, brilliantly, gloriously Himself.