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Daan is a human anti-personnel mine. This struck you from the moment you'd first laid eyes on him on the train, and even more so when he later approached you in the orphanage clinging to your gun and staring into middle space barely conscious of your own existence.
Anyone with an ounce of sense could have noticed this about him; he's unstable and looking for that place he can finally blow himself up.
No one will ever accuse you of having sense, certainly not with your mind scrambled as it is post-shell shocking and heroin; and all you’ve coasted by on in this festival of death is the ever-shrinking pool of good graces the curtly doctor himself gifted you. He makes your heart hurt every time you think about him. It had been him who convinced Karin that you posed their party no harm; he who'd pulled you for the first time out of your withdrawal trance and reminded you that you were still human.
He’s on his third glass of scotch by the time Karin has finally packed up her folder of photographs and handwritten notes and retreated downstairs to the beds of the speakeasy. You had spent the previous two scotch glasses listening to her get increasingly exasperated with him, jabbing at candid shots of Bremen soldiers with faces twisted like melted candles, calling to you with a “You were there on the frontlines, Levi. Tell him about their bioweapons.” that you answered with a noncommittal shrug.
You didn’t want to think about the war. Not ever again, if you could help it. When he’d said “Leave him alone. No need to open up still scabbing over wounds just to prove a point.” your mind pulled itself out of the fear spiral of being forced to remember the gnarled bodies of mutant enemy soldiers to present you with the image of your tongue down Daan's throat.
She’d clearly had enough of dealing with him and slipped off to sleep.
Leaving the bar empty besides the lonely bartender nursing his third scotch.
Well, him and you.
You’re not really keeping him much company from over here. The back of the piano you’re cowering behind is serving as a fine buffer between you and the man you’ve found yourself hopelessly enthralled with. You watch him raise the glass to his full lips, take a far less reserved sip than the ones he’d been taking while the bar was still populated, and curl a tassel of his beautiful silver bangs around his finger absentmindedly.
The bar light casts across the bad side of his face, covering his missing eye in shadow. If you hadn’t already seen him in the proper light of day, you wouldn’t have noticed the thin strings of the eyepatch just barely peeking out around his head at all. The alcohol has made his usually pale cheeks tinted rosy. He looks healthy. Alive.
Youthful.
He’s caught you staring. You meet his single storm colored eye. He smiles in that off-kilter way that the happily inebriated are wont to do, turning his head fully to face you. You shrink down, feeling hot blood pooling in your face.
“Well, are you going to play something any time tonight? I’ve been waiting.”
You look down at the keys, if only to avoid accidentally meeting his gaze again. The little black and white teeth are grinning coy at you. They know your inadequacies; every last one of them.
“I uh…”
It’s not stage fright that makes your hand tremble with hesitation instead of striking a note. Stage fright was why you spent the whole evening standing behind the piano but ultimately unable to so much as run through the scales you still remembered. There’s no crowd here any longer, only you and Daan. Whatever paralyzes you now feels so much more intimate than just a fear of messing up in front of an audience.
He looks from you to the piano and back again with his glazed eye. He’s expectant, or worse, completely unsurprised. Was this his way of judging you? He was obviously from a social class far above your own; it took one look at his carefully maintained outfit and elegant way of carrying himself to figure out as such. He’d probably heard real maestros play in proper concert halls. And compared to that, what could you even hope to offer?
You, and your three half-remembered scales, and your trembling addict shellshocked fingers, were nothing to him; pitiable at best. If you dared to stand in the way of his path of self-destruction, he’d let you know your worth in a heartbeat.
He was something you could want but never have, watch from a distance but never touch, forever outside your grasp but just close enough to alight your imagination. Maybe, a different you, in a different life…
“I don’t really know how to play.”
You bow your head in appropriate shame. Pity wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe he’d wipe the tears from your face with a handkerchief, or pat you on the head like a stray dog. You could maybe catch a whiff of his fancy cologne, but never from the intimacy of the nape of his neck.
“Oh?” You’re staring at the keyboard instead of watching what he’s doing, but you hear the sound of a bottle uncorking and the sloshing of liquid in a glass. He’s pouring himself another drink.
He’s trying to kill himself, you remember. He has nothing for anyone, least of all pity alms for the least likely of his fellow contestants to survive.
“Would you like me to teach you?”
His question passes through you without sticking in your mind. Let himself impart a single thing from his intoxicating alien life onto you, sure. And after he can teach you to dance and apply that pretty blue lipstick of his and how to read and which fork is for desserts and-
“Please.” Your voice is a cracked whine. You sound as much like a stray dog as you look. “Uh. Um. I mean, that would be nice.”
“Mmm.” He tops off his glass and saunters towards your private shelter behind the piano, as intimidatingly classy in motion as behind his bar.
He sidles up to you on the piano bench. He's not quite as bony as you, but his frame is still small enough that he's comfortably sitting on one corner, tip of the elbow on his good side just barely brushing yours.
You wish he'd sat with his blind side facing you. His beautiful gray eye is taking in the full sight of your body up close with what you're now certain is judgemental scorn. He’s looking right at your unwashed bayonet cut hair, your grimy face without so much as a ghost of a beard growing from it, your pockmarked sunken cheeks.
If you were pitiful from a distance, you were beyond reproach up close.
He hums to himself and sips his drink thoughtfully.
“I saw your hands passing over the A minor scale earlier. Have you had any lessons before?”
He was watching you this whole night? You pray he didn’t see how badly you twitched before disappearing into the bathroom, or how you had scratched at your arms.
Or how you’d snuck so many hungry little glances at him. He spoke so smoothly, wrapping himself effortlessly deep in conversation with anyone around him. He laughed at the correct times in just the right pitch to convey both effeminate charm and pedigree. How could you look away from something like that? He was like the center of the universe, captured by accident in the clutches of your grotesque little world.
“Just what my mother taught me when I was small, s-sir.”
He chuckles at the honorific, or maybe at the implication that you at some yet defined point stopped being small. It’s airy and drunkenly from the chest.
“Know any songs?”
“Uh, p-pieces, sir.”
You cringe at yourself for letting yet another “Sir” slip out automatically, but he smiles softly at you. He waggles the fingers of the hand not holding his drink at the keyboard.
He’s expecting a demonstration.
Your hands are shaking too badly to press the keys with even a barebones approximation of proper form. Your mother once explained to you that they should be given a quick lover’s caress with the tip and pad of the finger and then on to the next one. You now had to clumsily slam down your fingertips on each key like each note was snuffing out a candle flame to keep the tremors permanently affecting you from turning the note staccato.
It’s the first few measures of Für Elise, if you’re remembering properly; the only song you ever practiced enough to have it stick in your memory. You know that it’s an intentionally easy song meant for beginners, and that what little you know of it will only further pity yourself to Daan.
At least you’re pretty sure you’re keeping in time well. The endless marching and gunfire salvos of war has a certain rhythm to it that will never fully escape you.
Your hands pause their ugly stomping across the keys when you completely forget what the next note could be.
He plucks up your right index finger in his palm, looking it over as if studying the meat underneath your skin.
“You’ve got pianist fingers.” Your mother had once said the same; that they were delicate little things meant for the tasks of an artist. Your first staff sergeant had said the same as well, though his tone had been a lot less praising. He made you hold buckets of water on your fingertips until you could pull back the trigger of the massive machine gun you’d been assigned. “Don't worry, I promise those trigger finger calluses will fade in time.”
He touches the hard chunk of skin with his thumb. It sticks out like a pale ugly lump, bulging asymmetrically on your leading hand.
He’s being polite, of course. He was an army doctor; he knows as well as you do what heroin shakes and shellshock tremors look like. Those don’t fade with time, and they’ll handicap you a lot more noticeably than some callus.
You find yourself sneaking a glance at his hands, if only to cement the ocean of difference between the two of you. As expected, his nails are well-manicured and his hands are as soft as a newborn’s. You catch what you are absolutely certain is the ghost of a scar on the inside of his left wrist. It’s clean and even and runs straight across with the kind of precision one would expect from a surgeon.
Before you can think much else of it, the arm bearing it is raising the glass of scotch to his lips.
“I wasn’t too much younger than you when I started piano lessons. Fifteen, I think?” He smiles absentmindedly. “You become betrothed to the daughter of a baron, and suddenly there's a whole score of unorthodox things you’re expected to know.”
He’s gone quiet. If he’s expecting you to say something, he’s setting himself up for disappointment.
Your throat feels welded shut. He was married to the daughter of a baron.
You look at the secretly scarred hand holding his poison of choice. No ring adorns it.
He lost her.
“When your hands have healed a bit more you might have to relearn technique, but for now we can just factor it into your playing. Maybe you can even develop it into a signature style?”
You moisten your lips, willing yourself to so much as speak in his presence. Your silence is deafening. Your hands are never going to heal, and both he and you know it. You can’t have him. For a thousand reasons, you can’t have him.
“Yes, sir.”
He takes a very long drink before speaking. It seems he wanted more from you.
“Right. Well, let’s work on improving your current technique. Try to play like you were, but with more confidence in your strokes.” He demonstrates, intentionally playing according to your sloppy fingering. It reminds you of the way you’ve seen Karin peck at her portable typewriter. Maybe typing was another thing barons-to-be were expected to know. “You don’t have to fear pressing them, love, they’re only ivory and wire. They won’t explode on you.”
He chuckles. You let the posh casual little “love” he addressed you with worm its way into the deepest recesses of your mind with the crudeness of a pervert.
You start hammering out another round of Für Elise when he suddenly grabs your hand. His hand may be soft, but his grip is surprisingly sure.
“No, no. Scales, love, scales. Can’t build a castle without first laying down the foundation.” He releases your hand. “A minor, just like you were miming earlier. Five of them, please.”
You oblige him, watching him continue draining his scotch out of the corner of your eye as you play. He’s studying you closely enough that you’re almost afraid he can read your thoughts.
In your mind you hear him echo “Love,” again and again, tone dropping from clipped and polite to intimate to a throaty moan with each reverberation. Every key you play draws a fresh wanton whimper from Daan’s lips.
In your mind, you show him artistry, depth, and competence. You show him perfection to match his own. Your hands don’t quiver. There’s not a callus to be had on them.
In reality, you’re shaking worse with each note. He keeps careful watch, his catlike eye narrowing.
“You know, you’re rather delicate under all that gruff, Levi.” You jerk your head down to the fingers flopping across the keys, willing yourself to stay on course. How dare your body betray you when you need it to prove your worth most of all? “Soft eyes, pretty face, and those pianist fingers… Oh, you’d be quite a charm with just a spot of care spent on you.”
You’re not even sure if you’re hitting keys on the right scale anymore. Your fingers come down in embarrassingly uncoordinated clumps, hitting two at the same time.
You can’t bring yourself to thank him. His forced politeness would sting so much less if you didn’t yearn to hear him say those things in earnest. But you know what he means by ‘just a spot of care’. He's implying that you’re a rat with overinflated dreams and brutish paws.
“War is never kind to men of our persuasion, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. But, mmm, times of peace bring out the sorts of gentlemen with tastes refined enough to appreciate our unique delicateness.”
“I uh. I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir. I don’t even know how to play piano.”
His right hand is resting on your own. He smiles at you, pretty blue painted lips covering his teeth. Blue lips. Even the women of Prehevil didn’t dare wear a color more bold than rose.
“Scales, love, scales. It will come to you in time.”
He does something truly surprising: he sits his nearly empty scotch on the lid of the piano and brings his left hand to cover your own.
“Follow along.” He steers your fingers across the keyboard, gentle but firm, touching the keys according to your incorrect fingering technique. His leadership has you playing Für Elise well past the point you had stopped during your first attempt. “We'll make a maestro of you yet, love.”
He leads you through the part when the tempo hits its fevered pitch, and you find it's easier to keep up with him at this speed than the simpler beginning. He has a surgeon’s steady hands to match your soldier’s quick reflexes. He knows where to go, you know how to get there; and for a moment you wonder if there's something mutual to be found in the place where your hands meet.
When the song ends, his hands rest immobile on the tops of yours.
“You're eighteen, yes?”
“Eighteen, sir.” You remember how he looked at you before, all but begging to get you talking. You try, just to keep his hands on yours a bit longer. “I'm too old to be this uh, inexperienced. I would like to learn, maybe, and be taught by you, especially by you, but- but-”
He chuckles. The poshness slips from the tips of his laugh.
“Eighteen, eighteen and too old. Oh, Levi…”
His fingers suddenly feel so cold and clammy. He pries himself away from you. The scotch is back in his hand, and then tilted to his lips, and then sucked completely empty.
“By the time I was eighteen, playing the piano was second nature to me. I’d perfected it; the right twist of the hand for an elegant flourish, just the way to press and stroke to make the notes resound across the room. And by the time I was eighteen, I dreaded every moment I had to spend touching that dreadful organ. It was joyless, and painful; every sound was like the screeching of scare chords right against my eardrums. My body wretched at the mere thought of another session, but I performed on, because what else did I have? Levi, darling, there are far worse things to be than inexperienced.”
He looks half dead propped up in the seat, leaning on your shoulder for support.
“I’m sorry, I’m drunk. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
You flounder for words.
He takes a deep shaky breath, and you smell nothing but alcohol in the stale air surrounding you. So much for his fancy cologne.
"Do you want to fuck me, Levi?" One of his clammy hands traces up the roots of your neck, manicured nails propping up your cheek. "You want me. My body. You want to pin me down by my little wrists and show me right here and now which organ it is you do know how to play. ”
You look at your feet like a beaten dog.
"I'm not any- not good at it, sir. I'm not good enough for you."
He laughs drunkenly. The rumble of his shoulders sends flecks of splashed alcohol onto your jumpsuit.
"That isn't what I asked, love. I asked you if you want to fuck me. Be a man, darling, and tell the bartender what you're thirsty for. Shame is for the sober."
As it turns out, the smell of booze has done nothing to snuff out the rising heat in your body. The way the twinge of fumes on his breath helps spark something deep and churning inside you burns deep holes of guilt through your stomach.
He's drunk. He's very, very sloppily drunk. You can’t ignore it now.
He looks impossibly sexy drunk, captivating despite it all. He’s posed all submissive and vulnerable instead of his usual reservedness. His knees are spread wide apart. He leans against the lip of the keys, head tilted resting on his collarbone. If you pushed him back any farther, it'd make one hell of a sound. Maybe one of the sleeping survivors would be awoken and climb the ladder to catch an urchin in the act of taking what is not his.
"Which fantasy of yours do you want me to fulfill, love? Do you want the doctor? The butler? The widow?"
He cocks his eyebrows, spreading his arms just as wide apart as his knees as if begging you to assess him as an object for sale.
You want the alcoholic. The part of him that hates himself, the part seeking self destruction wherever he can find it. That's the only part of him that could ever want you back.
You can’t bring yourself to speak that hideous truth.
“T-t-teacher.” you mutter thoughtlessly. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m so nervous of messing up. Show me how to be like you. Open and uh, not so scared of all this.”
He winces. You realize what you’ve said.
“Alll-mer, you really are eighteen.” His tone of voice curls up in slurred disgust. The pupil of his eye is sharp. Catlike. The contrast between the two is more enticing than any drug you’ve ever chased.
He wants to fuck you just as badly as you want him.
Your breath hitches behind your teeth as he leans forward, one hand finding its way to your shoulder to pat it in what you try very hard not to think of in terms of an instructor reassuring his young pupil that his performance will be satisfactory.
The hot air tickling the inside of your ear smells like pure poison and there’s nothing high shelf or classy about it; only something designed first and foremost to rip holes in livers. It’s a poison you could both stand to drink a little more of, maybe, if you both decided you didn’t care that it would kill you.
He spits the inviting flirtatious parody of a warning.
“Tell me to go to bed, Levi. Tell me that you’re happy that I’m teaching you to play piano, but that I’m drunk and I need to go to bed.”
You shake your head, heart pounding in your throat.
He won’t lower himself to your level again if you show hesitation. You know all too well how limited an offer this is. The only shots of craft scotch that will ever pass between your lips must be stolen.
“I w-w-want a drink.”
He strokes your chin. He’s not strong; far from it. He’s horrifyingly delicate, like a porcelain statue brought to life. You have a hard time figuring out how he’s made it this far through everything that's been thrown at him with a body as easy to bruise as his.
When the answer finally caresses you on the cheek, his own thin pianist fingers searching carefully along the ridges for a single prickle of beard hair that you know he won’t find, you ignore it.
“Good choice. I’ve found it helps with the nerves.”
He gives you a drink from the inside of his mouth. His lips smell like fermentation, taste icy-burning like the canteen moonshine soldiers traded for cigarettes and favors.
It's disgusting. Not the kiss, but the addict desire within you that makes you suck on his tongue for whatever drops of his drug he can lend you. It wasn’t all a lie; you are nervous.
You dig your greedy hands into the fabric of his vest, pulling him closer to you, grimy rat fingers clawing into fabric you know is worth more than your life. You decide that you need him naked at once; so he'll look more like yourself and less like what he’s supposed to be. You rip the buttons off his vest and fancy dress shirt with the disruptive abandon of yanking explosive detonators in your hands.
He whines into the cavity of your mouth. You half expect him to shove you away for having the gall to ruin his clothes. Instead, he fumbles blindly for the zipper of your jumpsuit.
For some reason, the plink of the fat silver button once keeping the sleeve of his shirt closed hitting the tile floor gives you pause. You break the kiss, panting.
You can see the scar you'd spotted earlier much better now. There's more than just one, as it turns out. His whole forearm is lined with them.
His eye follows yours. He flinches, but only for a second. Is it stealing if he doesn't want what you’re taking in the first place?
You drop to your knees. You need to rid him of those lavender checkered pants that make him stick out so sorely in a place like this. He runs his fingers through your hair like he’s leading you down the piano keys yet again. Teacher, or practiced alcoholic who knows exactly how to mix his favorite drink.
His pants are pooled at his ankles and your face is close enough to lap at his core. He spreads his legs wide in front of you. You slip a finger into the front of his boxers, just a greedy touch of what you yearn to taste.
You don’t find what you were expecting to find. He laughs, and you can hear the crackling strain in it. You stroke what he does have, both testingly and reassuringly. The laugh melts into a soft moan.
This suits him perfectly. Nothing about him is anything you were meant to understand.
Heat rushes through your entire body, and with it the adrenaline of a hijacking. You’re deep in something that isn’t meant for you. You shove down his boxers, heave his legs over your shoulders, and push your face into his most intimate secret.
Every instinct about how to not get caught, how to steal and get away with it, thrusts from the back of your mind into the forefront.
Your lips are wrapped around his quivering sex, tongue pressed down the shaft of what little he's got. His wetness tastes ethyl sweet. Sweet like cyanide. You swipe your tongue down him, with purpose, to prove that you're a man; you've got an adult palette that can handle the unapologetic taste of straight scotch.
He whispers the two syllables of your name like they're profanity, curt and sharp, "Le-vi.". His posh Rondon accent makes it sound high shelf and classy, unlike you've ever heard it before and unlike you'll ever hear it again. His voice vibrates through his body and into your lips. You grant him a reply, dragging slowly up him in a monosyllabic "Daan." with long held enough vowels to almost hide your own accent.
He curls his upper body back, spine twisting like a question mark with a moan too hitched to be faked. You follow his movement, up his scarred belly. There’s some kind of marking carved into it, the symbol of one of the pagan gods. You avert your eyes to the left. This isn’t for you to see. This is more of the truth than you can bear to steal. The leg resting on your shoulder is wearing long black silk stockings all the way to the knee with garters holding them up.
He's not just a shot of straight scotch, he's aged and distilled craft with some complex flavor profile your simpleton taste buds are not refined enough to discern. You're not fit to be drinking in this alcoholic ambrosia. He’s too much for you; too many layers, too far lost in the contradictions of himself.
“Levi.” This time, there’s a pleading edge to your name that makes it sound like a prayer. The famous drunk’s prayer: ‘I swear if I survive, I will never do this again.’ “You’re oh so sweet to me, Levi.”
His slick melts like dissolving sugar in the center of your mouth. As sweet to you as you are to him, so unlike the men you've opened your mouth to take before with their salty bitterness. You hope he’s as good at keeping that promise as most drunks are.
You decide you want to impale yourself on his contradictions. You want to carry these contradictions yourself. Shellshock shakes and delicate piano technique.
He’s moaning that you’re a good boy, such a good boy, learning so fast, and you remember the lie that landed you in the center of this robbery.
You remember you already are a set of walking contradictions. You take one last taste of his sex and pull back.
You’re on your feet. Your hands are clasping his wrist, nails digging in enough you can feel his pulse spike. You wonder if he expected you to take him up on that fantasy.
“I k-k-kill men, sir. I steal. I told you, I’m not good enough for you.”
He stares up at you with his narrow eye, lips slightly parted in a woozy grin not as dignified as you need it to be. You wish that was fear reflecting in his eye. It should be. You’re eighteen; and you understand just what kind of evil men can do to one another.
He performs on, because what choice does he have?
“Love, you still have so much to learn.” He bends his wrists slightly and they slip from your grasp on them. “I learned how to escape handcuffs at sixteen, too.”
He wraps his legs around your hips, pulling you in closer. His delicate piano fingers circle around your wrists in reversal.
“And I’ll leave up to the imagination how old I was when I discovered how I like to be choked.”
He’s led your hands to the crook where his chin meets his neck. He guides your fingers just as he did across the keyboard, one at a time in tune to the staccato tapping of your tremors, clamping around his windpipe.
“Atta boy. Just like that.” he wheezes out.
You boil over. Anger that you can’t convince yourself isn’t the destructive fury he’s begging you to rain upon him pulses up your body and shocks you erect. He wants your hands, he wants your cock, he wants both because they’re disgusting and he wants to destroy himself.
You ram yourself into him with a steeled emotionless look borrowed from a lifetime of enduring bombings, just like the ones the men you were supposed to admire would wear. When he yelps out in surprise, you dig your nails into him.
His back hits the lip of the piano and he has to reach behind himself to stop from smashing down a whole row of keys. You push your mouth onto his. There’s some kind of noise cooing from the inside of his throat and it sounds too much like ‘good’ for your tastes so you dig your fingers in deeper.
You fuck him sloppily and rough and without artistry. This isn’t Für Elise, and if he was the one on top you’ve no doubt you’d both be enjoying it more. He’d know how to set the pace. He’d steer your movements so that both of you could share in the enjoyment; or he’d at least ensure that you were enjoying this.
The alcoholic slick that tasted so heavenly in your mouth earlier feels like oil on your cock, melting painfully burning hot and smooth with each new turn of your hips. His eye is watering from how you thrust into him, or even worse, how you squeeze his neck. His hips rock upward to meet yours, still trying to show you what it is you need to do.
It’s only when the increasingly faint “Good”s he’s spitting out turn to “Harder”s that you give him what he needs.
Your technique is terrible. You slam him into the keyboard, sending up a horrible sour racket of a note into the air.
You do it again. And again. He said himself everything comes with practice. You can’t remember why this was a terrible idea anymore, even as you can see purples and blues forming where you're squeezing him.You understand alcohol and violence and lust and the horrible horrible places where they meet as clearly as ever before. Strip Daan of his fancy outfit and his posh accent and his piano lessons and he can be just like you are; a bruised animal shrieking its primal desire cries. You can have him like this.
You can still hear curled traces of the occasional “Harder” and that’s all the sweet music to your ears you need to keep going.
A strike of percussion ends your profane symphony.
The trapdoor leading to the speakeasy slams open. Yellow eyes and a glint of steel come swooping out.
Karin whips her drawn pistol around the bar, uncaring who or what she muzzle checks with it. She spots Daan first, still loudly clenching around your hips and squeaking rapturous moans against your fingers.
She immediately moves her crosshairs onto you. The barrel of the gun lingers on the knot of flesh where your hands meet his throat.
Daan mercifully stills.
You spend the single free second where she processes what she’s looking at wondering which one of you she’ll decide she more immediately needs to end the life of.
“I goddamn knew it!”
Your hands withdraw from Daan’s neck so you can raise them in surrender. You find yourself hoping that she’ll shoot you anyway.
“Well, shit. I was so close to coming.” Daan laughs. His slur is no less noticeable than it had been earlier, making his laugh sound faker than it already did. “Thanks again, Karin.”
She lowers her pistol. She does not lower her judgemental gaze.
“You’re disgusting.”
You turn your attention away from her and back to Daan. Your delicate addict hands have left deep red marks embedded in his skin. He smiles sheepishly at you, seemingly unbothered by the way he’s completely naked and still actively being penetrated on display for Karin to see. He doesn’t seem phased by her at all.
Something is dripping down on your feet. You came inside him without even noticing.
You’re pretty sure you’re the one she was directing the sentiment at. She’s looking at Daan, but you know better. You’re the rat stealing from behind the bar.
You pull out of him and have your jumpsuit wrapped around his not so secret shame without a word.
“He’s a teenager, you sick fuck. A junkie teenager. If I’d known you were dragging him out of that orphanage to use him for this, I would have shot-”
She’s talking around you, as if you weren’t even there.
“Hey.” She tilts her head ever so slightly to look at you. You feel as naked as you are. “You’ve got th-this all wrong. I came onto him.”
“And he, the adult, were he not an invert freak,” her voice raises in pitch with every word. Daan rolls his eyes when she enunciates “invert freak” as if she were shooting it from her gun. “Should have been the one to tell you that what you’re doing is wrong.”
Daan doesn’t speak up to defend himself. You do. He might want to die, but you still admire him.
“And- and, should he have done that before or after I started choking him?”
Her face drops. She doesn’t like this one bit; between two men too shameless to lie, there’s no easy villain. She shoves her hands in the pockets of her oversized jacket and glares at you, naked and flush, and him, naked and pale.
“I hope the things outside eat the both of you. I don’t trust either of you as far as I can spit.”
Her words ring hollow. She could still shoot you if she really wanted you dead. You again are forced to wonder if it’s twinges of pity for you, or pity for Daan that kept her gun lowered.
She crawls back down the ladder of the hole she emerged from, a scowl of disgust on her face.
“You didn’t have to do that for my sake, love. She already assumes me to be a degenerate, and I doubt the groomed words of my hapless perfect victim are going to sway her.”
He meticulously picks his clothes from the floor and puts them on piece by piece. He throws his shirt and vest on open-chested. You’ve left your corrupting mark on him.
His neck now bears a necklace of purplish hand shaped bruises. Thin, pianist fingers weave between each other on the alabaster of his sickly skin. Maybe that mark, at least, will fade.
“You’re catching on, though. You must learn to play on, even when your fingers ache and it makes you sick to your stomach. Practice it now, when neither of us involved have anything to lose.”
Maybe it won’t, but not because of your hands.
“Anyway, I doubt it would be wise to continue with that sort of lesson. Care to try some scales again instead?”
Scorned in his advances on the young Elise, Beethoven composed the later parts of the song bearing her name to be purposefully difficult. With this song, in either loneliness or pettiness, he drew an ocean of complexity between himself and her.
Für Elise, captured for a moment in her ears, but never held on her fingertips.