Chapter Text
Mark liked the idea.
He liked it a lot.
He'd enjoyed when he and Nico sang their songs to each other, but now things were going a step further - he and Nico were going to compose a song together, live on the show. It looked like the joke he'd made to Nico about almost writing a new song for him after Claire Litzler's blind audition was going to become reality.
It started after a contestant auditioned unsuccessfully with a song that Nico had co-written for Helene Fischer. As the coaches' chairs rotated back into the starting position, Mark asked Nico how he went about writing songs for Helene.
Nico began to explain, then Rea uttered the fateful words. "We have a band here," he said, looking challengingly at Nico.
Rea, I could kiss you, Mark thought, as people became caught up in brainstorming ideas.
"You are responsible for the lyrics, Mark," Nico told him.
Oh yes, it gets better. And it got even better when he was thinking about a title and Nico asked him if it would be a love song; Mark was very quick to agree to that. Nico told him that the title for a love song should have three syllables, which meant his first idea, Regenbogen, was out. No rainbows, then. Fortunately Stefanie quickly came up with Sonnenschein, which had the right number of syllables and also made him think of Nico, who was such a sunny personality.
As Mark mulled over the lyrical possibilities of sunshine, Nico issued instructions to the band. "120bpm, four-to-the-floor, A-moll, C, G, F." He listened to what the musicians were doing, nodded in approval, then added, "And a guitar going da-ga-da-ga-dum," playing air guitar to illustrate as he sang. The other coaches started laughing at him as the band's lead guitarist obliged.
Mark grabbed a mic and went out onto the floor with Nico, ready to perform. Nico prompted Mark by humming the melody for a first line to him, ending with the word 'Sonnenschein'. Mark put words to that tune and sang them back to Nico: "Du und ich alleine im Sonnenscheine, wir sind zusammen, Sonnenschein..." Nico was delighted.
While he sang, Mark had a mental image of himself and Nico as the 'you and me' who were alone and then together in the sunshine, and it seemed almost as if Nico was picking up on that in the way he responded to Mark, pointing to Mark when they sang 'we' at the same time that Mark pointed to him.
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Blowing a kiss to the camera at the end, Mark reflected that the memory of this night was going to bring sunshine to his life whenever he remembered it. And somehow, he was going to come up with a way to make Nico write songs with him for real.