A/N: Here's a one-shot I wrote, inspired by the movie La La Land, my obsession with starving artist romances (it's just so damn poetic *sniffs*), and Aelin's often-overlooked skills with the piano. (I play the piano myself, so... Yeah.) This is also for Sam and Lyria, because while we all adore the former, the latter gets overlooked sometimes. I also feature a bit of Sylvia Plath's poem Tulips in here. Read and review to let me know what you think!
Note: I wrote this while listening to "Mia and Sebastian's Theme" from La La Land. It's actually just really, really beautiful.
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I lay no claims to the ToG franchise.
It Is Winter Here
Rowan didn't know why he stopped, but he did.
He strode down the lane, choking on the car exhaust and tugging his tie loose. Manhattan was a grim, ugly city, splotchy with graffiti and addicts of every shape and size. But during the night, the dark seemed to closet the grit and grime away, sweeping a veil over the semen-stained mattresses pushed to the curb and the dime-a-dozen sketchy corner stores. It reeled in cigarette smoke and obscured starlight, a whisper of a thrill floating on the breeze.
It was the night, Rowan was certain, that had attracted Americans to this godforsaken island. The night managed to defy science and physics and reality and make him believe, if only for a moment, even as stalwart and cynical as he was, that he was still young, and magic still existed.
Not that the nights in New York City were ever safe, he thought with a half-amused quirk of his lips; quite the opposite. But Rowan had never been able to stop himself from wandering. It was nice to lose himself in the maze of streets and back alleyways, if only for a while.
He took a left turn down a street lit up with fluorescent signs, with three Chinese laundries, two pizzerias, an ethnic joint, and a crackhouse. It was the same every street, repeated in various patterns. The laundries might be substituted for magazine stands, the pizzerias for food carts, but New York had a certain identical rhythm to it. Diversified and unique as it was, the city was somehow entirely the same.
He passed by a little girl clinging to a man with slanted shoulders, a stooped old woman wailing to someone about her sesame-seed bagel; a few pigeons pecking a moldy pizza slice on the street to death. He curled his lip. Bloody American cesspool.
And then he heard the music.
It came from a door wedged slightly ajar with a shoe—a single red dancing shoe, old-fashioned and glittery, like Dorothy's ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz. A trite buckle was slapped onto the ankle strap, and the heels were thick and rubbery. The door itself was nondescript, painted black, likely a back door for a store opening up on the other side of the street.
But it wasn't the shoe or the door that caught Rowan's attention. It was the music.
It slipped through the crack, filtering out into the street. It stopped his heart dead in his chest. The music reminded him of a time too long ago—when he was a boy, listening to Lyria play for him.
He'd been fifteen then. Lyria always played the loveliest piano music—it made him forget about the rest of the world, make the earth stop spinning and halt, even for a breath, on its axis. Her slender, delicate fingers used to float over the keys, brushing and caressing.
The music made him forget how thin Lyria had gotten, how beneath her knit cap was a head of hair that had gone cancer-patient-bald, how despite the doctors' reassurances, she was not getting any better.
Rowan never really believed that Lyria was dying until the day she could no longer play the piano anymore.
It was hard to remember sometimes that Rowan was not so much older than he was then; only twenty. Five years since she had last sat down at the piano and played.
He recognized the song that was spilling out into the street, even separated by an ocean and half a decade. He didn't know the song's name, or its composer. He didn't know its key or the name of the chords.
But he knew it. It was the last song Lyria had played before she died.
That was after she'd been confined to the hospital, when Rowan had discovered that hospitals were not starch and white like they were in the movies. This hospital had yellowed linoleum floors and beige walls, and Lyria's room had been depressing and gray, not white and stainless and hopeful.
He'd brought her a vase of tulips to set on the windowsill, bright red and fresh.
Lyria had taken one look at them and smiled mournfully. "'The tulips are too excitable,'" she'd said. "'It is winter here.'"
Only Lyria quoted Sylvia Plath after a devastating round of chemotherapy that had done nothing but wreck her body and her spirit.
The hospital had a recreation room for the juvenile cancer kids, with dollhouses full of chewed Barbies, toy cars, an orange tricycle, and a plastic, miniature kitchen. But most importantly, tucked away in the corner was an out-of-tune piano, made of a glossy, vomit-colored wood. Some of the keys made hissing sounds as they were pressed down, and others didn't go down at all.
But Lyria had almost wept when she'd seen it. She had played it. Played and played and played, until her fingers almost fell off her weakened hands.
He still remembered the last day that she'd gone to the piano. He'd been there, sitting in a chair that smelled of antiseptic and cough medicine—or maybe that was just the room. He'd just looked at her, at her stooped shoulders and her hairless head, at her sunken eyes and her thin, thin lips.
Lyria had had such a beautiful mouth before: full and delicate, blooming. Rowan had known her since they were children; they'd grown up in the Welsh countryside together. She'd lived above her parents' flower shop in their pathetic, cobblestoned town. Lyria was always adorned with flowers, crocuses tucked behind her ears, daisy chains strung around her neck or resting on her head.
By all rights, they shouldn't have worked together. Rowan was an orphan, living with his rich aunt Maeve, wealthy enough to ransom a king, brooding and caustic. Lyria was the poor flower girl, kind and sweet as the scent of her roses.
It had been her mouth that Rowan had noticed first. They'd been twelve, hiding in a coat closet during one of his parents' cocktail parties. (He'd stuck thumbtacks on a very important, very dignified business friend of his aunt's, and they were waiting out the storm.) He'd glanced over, stifling a laugh, when he'd noticed her mouth, curling up in her spectacularly unique smile.
"What?" she'd whispered.
"Nothing," Rowan had said, but his heart had been beating peculiarly, his legs quaking.
The last day that Lyria had played, she'd been too weak to finish the song. Her grandmother had been a concert pianist, and the trade had been passed down from mother to daughter throughout the maternal side of the family.
"Piano is a kind of pride for us," Lyria had told him once. "We can no more stop playing than we can stop breathing. It's essential to us—like a favorite book that you set on a certain place on the shelf. It's always there, waiting for you to come back and pick it up again."
She'd once had plans—big plans. Julliard, she'd said, then the New York Philharmonic. And for a while, it looked as if she'd really get there.
But she didn't. She'd collapsed in the middle of the song, the strain too much for her frail, fragile form, bones protruding from her skin like the spine of a baby bird.
Lyria knew it, too. She knew when she was wheeled away from that awful, out-of-tune piano that day that she would never play again.
She stopped fighting after that. Two weeks later, she was dead.
It was why he had moved to New York City in the end. In that small, understated way, he was honoring her dead, withered dreams.
"Move it," someone snarled, and Rowan took a step back, jarred. He wasn't in the hospital, listening to Lyria quote Sylvia Plath about his tulips, or watching her play piano for the last time, or staring at her lovely lips in the coat closet. He wasn't in Wales at all. He was in New York City, in this wretched, horrible country full of bigoted pricks, frozen by a memory of a song and a single red shoe.
Rowan wasn't sure what made him do it, in the end. He wasn't sure what made him pick up that shoe and open that door, what made him descend the narrow staircase. Inside was a cafe, strewn with white-clothed tables and vases full of yellow daisies and Queen Anne's Lace. The mate to the red shoe in his hand was lying sideways on one of the tables; it had knocked a vase over and greenish liquid was dripping and pooling on the floor.
It was a quaint place, and he'd come into the back entrance; it likely opened up on the street on the other side. Matisse prints were stuck to the pale blue walls, pops of color among the subdued tones.
But it was the girl near the piano that caught his eye.
She was an absolute mess. Her golden hair streamed down her back in knotted, matted tangles, and her cheeks were streaked with mascara. Her lipstick was smudged, her eyeliner ghoulish. She wore a red dress that had once been floor-length but was now ripped, the skirt in frayed tears.
Her eyes were closed as her fingers flew over the keys, tears streaming silently down her cheeks. She was barefoot.
He swallowed. For a moment, he'd almost expected to find Lyria here, sitting on that bench, but it wasn't her. It wasn't Lyria at all.
He picked up her other shoe, shaking off the water. He felt like an idiot—what the hell was he doing here, anyway? Lyria was gone. She'd been dead and in the ground for five years. If he wanted proof, all he'd have to do was hop on a plane to Wales and visit her gravestone.
She was gone, and she'd left him here, and she was never coming back.
The song reached its climax, the girl behind the piano throwing her whole body into it, her shoulders shaking with sobs. But her fingers did not shake, and they did not stumble. He was certain that the piano keys were slick with tears, but her fingers did not slip or slide. They were unerring, infallible.
And as he watched her, this girl that looked as if she were no older than eighteen, as he watched her pound and weep and sob, he felt a tug of familiarity in his chest.
She was like him. She knew loss, too. He couldn't say how he knew: he just did.
The song ended with a great, horrible clamor, ringing and resounding through the streets of Manhattan, across the Brooklyn Bridge to New Jersey, to Staten Island and out to the sea, reaching across the Atlantic to brush along the dead, wilted tulips overtop Lyria's grave.
She opened her eyes.
They were exquisite, her eyes. They almost took Rowan's breath away: strikingly blue, ringed with gold.
They narrowed at him.
He held up her heels by their straps. "One of your shoes was on the street."
The girl slumped. "Are you going to kill me?" she said. She sounded almost resigned.
"I don't think so."
"Don't try," she said, standing up and pushing the piano bench in. She lowered the lid of the baby grand. "Because then I'll have to beat you like a little bitch, and I'm not technically supposed to be here, and then you'll file a complaint and it'll get very messy."
Rowan arched an eyebrow. "I just came to give you your shoe."
"I don't want my fucking shoe," the girl said, standing and facing him. "Okay?"
"You don't have to be so rude," he said. "God. You Americans."
She snorted. "What are you, British?"
"Welsh," he replied, without really knowing why.
"Well, whatever the hell you are, get the stick out of your pointy arse, governor," she said, pronouncing the word 'governor' like 'govehnah.'
"See, this?" He jabbed a finger at her. "This is why the rest of the world hates Americans."
"This is why Americans won the war, Your Majesty."
He growled, throwing up his hands. The shoes clattered to the floor. "Fine. You know what? Forget it. I just heard the piano music from the street, and saw the shoe, and thought I'd come in to give it to you. Your playing was quite lovely, actually. Unlike you." He turned around, ready to storm out of the stupid cafe where the stupid girl was playing the stupid song, fuming—
And then a hand closed around his arm.
"I'm sorry," the girl said. She let go of his arm, and Rowan turned, glowering. She slumped, rubbing her face with the heels of her hands. The fire in her was gone, extinguished. She looked small, and unsure, her arms pebbled with goosebumps. It was winter, but she was wearing a sleeveless dress.
She looked lost—unfathomably, horribly, broken-heartedly lost. As if she had been lost for some time now, and she did not know the way.
"The song was beautiful," Rowan said, because if nothing else, he could offer this kindred spirit, so filled with bitterness and hate just like him, the truth.
"It's one of my favorites." She gazed up at him, and though he was certain that he was at least a couple of years older than her, she seemed ancient to him. Aged decades, if not centuries.
She seemed wearied, trodden and beaten by her meager decades. And perhaps it was because of this, or because he would never see her again anyway (one of the perks of living in Manhattan rather than the countryside), or because of New York City's magic fucking nights, but he told her.
"My girlfriend used to play that song," he said. "Over and over again." He swallowed, a lump rising in his throat. "It was the last song that she played before she died."
Silence. Rowan didn't dare look at the girl, didn't dare to meet her eyes.
"My boyfriend's mother was a whore," she said bluntly. Rowan blinked, head snapping up. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and it came away smudged with black. "But she loved to play the piano. That's one of the things that I love about music—it doesn't matter if you're a prostitute or the Queen of England. Everybody can learn how to play or sing a tune." She smiled, and he smiled too, their gazes meeting. She had the most lovely eyes that he had ever seen. "It was his mother's favorite song to play on the piano. I learned it for Sam—played it for him, only while he was around." She took a deep, rattling breath. "Today's the anniversary of his death."
"It's a bitch, isn't it," Rowan said.
"What?"
"Losing someone you love," he said. "It hits you at first, when it happens, but it hits you again and again. You find something that you want to talk to them about, or something that you want to share with them, laugh over together—"
"And they're gone," she finished softly.
"They're gone," he said, nodding. "And it hits you like a punch to the gut every time. Every bloody time. And as soon as you think you're over it, it slams into you again like the buggering blighter that it is."
"Brit," she said lightly, but her breathing was uneven, and she was crying.
"Brat," he shot back. "You yelled at me for bringing your shoe back."
"They were really, really ugly shoes." She hugged her arms to her chest. "The only reason I kept them was because… Because he gave them to me. As a birthday present." She let out a half-sob. "He always had the worst taste."
She didn't have to tell Rowan who 'he' was.
"Why are you here?" he said, gesturing to the room. "In a closed cafe after-hours and all?"
"It's a brunch place," she answered. "I work here in the mornings, playing music, so I have a pair of keys. Technically, I'm not supposed to be here."
"Thank God for those technicalities."
She dragged a hand through her hair. "Tell me about it," she said, her voice thin and watery. "It'd be a legal mess otherwise."
They lapsed into silence for a moment. Rowan knew this was his cue to leave—that this was when he should make his exit as gracefully as possible.
But instead, he found himself saying, "Let me walk you home."
She blinked. "What?"
"I'm not a rapist or a serial killer or anything," he clarified quickly, but she only raised a brow. "It's just… Lyria—my girlfriend—died on the fifteenth of March, on a Monday, at three-fifty-eight pm. I understand."
The girl tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "I only live a couple of blocks away."
He shrugged. "If you'd rather walk there alone, I understand that, too. But you've got company if you want it, from someone who gets what it's like."
For a moment, he was sure that she would refuse, turn him away, and he'd continue to wander the streets alone. But she didn't. Instead, she bit her lip and looked down at the spilled vase and the wet tablecloth. "We have to clean this up. I kind of threw my shoe across the room earlier, and I don't want anyone checking the security cameras."
"Show me where the cleaning supplies are," Rowan replied.
She gathered up the flowers and stuck them into the slender neck of the vase, and he got a rag and soaked up the water on the floor. She filled up the vase with more water, and he spread a new, crisp white cloth over the table, smoothing it down.
For a beat, the two of them studied their handiwork, side-by-side.
"'Before they came,'" the girl quoted, "'the air was calm enough, /Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.'"
He started. "Sylvia Plath," he said.
She nodded. "Tulips. My favorite poem—I'm surprised you recognize it."
He forced himself to remember to breathe. "I'm British. We're all infinitely better educated than you American heathens."
The girl laughed. It was short, and raspy, and choked, but she laughed. She shook her head and slid her feet into her heels, wincing slightly.
Rowan slid his jacket from his shoulders. "Here," he said, extending it to her.
"I couldn't."
"It's bleeding freezing outside," he said. "You want to chill your arse off, be my guest, but I recommend listening to common sense. At least I've got proper sleeves on."
She stuck her tongue out at him, but accepted his jacket. It was comically oversized—Rowan had always erred on the extreme end of muscled—but she seemed to relax a bit, her slight shivering easing.
He jumped up the steps, holding the door open for her. "What's your name?" he asked.
"Aelin," she answered. "Yours?"
"Rowan."
She chuckled, the sound raspy and swallowed by the night. She headed down the street, and he followed her, their steps falling into sync. "Guess we both got stuck in the unusual name club."
"My parents definitely screwed me over," he agreed.
"You ever get called Ro-Ro?" she said. "Or Rowan, my man?"
He glared at her. "No."
She smiled faintly. "How about Ro the doe? Or Wan-Wan, dancing the Can-Can?"
"Buggering—Where the bloody hell are you even getting these?"
"It's all up here," Aelin said, tapping her temple. "I'm magic."
He shot daggers at her, but for a moment, as he saw her framed by the fluorescence and the headlights of a taxi, by the meager light glowing from one of the pizzerias, his breath emptied his chest in a whoosh.
It wasn't just her eyes that were magic. She was magic, as wrecked and as broken as she looked, her hair glowing as if with fire.
She didn't seem to notice him one bit.
"So," she said, "what are you doing here?"
"What?" His voice came out faintly raspy.
"Everyone comes to New York for a reason," she said, waving her slender, elegant hand. She had the table manners of his aunt, even if she did look fresh off the Jersey Shore. "Me, I'm a starving artist. Turns out that I'm really only good at three things, and that's martial arts, the ins-and-outs of the Bronte sisters, and piano. Classically trained, baby. And considering I'm not about to become some sort of assassin, as enticing as that sounds, or teach a bunch of snotty-nosed preschoolers krav maga, I chose the starving artists route." She waddled and hunched her shoulders, wailing in a feeble, godawful British accent, "'Please, sir, can I have some more?'"
Oliver Twist. Of course.
"Good Lord. Please refrain from doing any more English accents in the future."
"You didn't answer my question, dear."
"First off, don't call me dear," he said. "You're terrible at nicknames. And secondly—" He exhaled, sticking his hands in his pockets as they jogged across a crosswalk. "I'm studying at Columbia. Becoming a lawyer, courtesy of my aunt's wishes."
"Your aunt?" she said, arching an eyebrow.
"My parents are dead," he replied flatly.
A beat of silence. Then: "So are mine."
He kicked a pebble and sent it skittering down the sidewalk, rattling and echoing in the empty night. They had turned onto a more residential street, lined with shambled buildings that looked as if foreclosed stickers would be slapped onto their front doors any minute. "We're pathetic, aren't we?"
"You're pathetic," she corrected. "I'm reveling in my Dickensian tale of woe."
"Jesus Christ."
She smirked, and he smiled back against his better judgment. In that moment, he wished that she didn't have to go back home—that they could wander the streets forever, talking and laughing, mourning and sobbing. Stupid.
"This is me," she said, halting at a stucco building. It was charming in a dilapidated sort of way, the bricks crumbling, the ivy vine circling its base scraggly and brown. It was subdivided three times, a clapboard disaster. He half-expected it to collapse right then and there. "Hold the judgment, and remember not all of us are cut out for a life of soulless corporate monkey work, so we have to make do Great-Depression-style."
"Brat."
"Brit."
"That's not even an insult."
"The fact that you don't know that it's an insult makes it that much worse."
They faced each other, standing in front of her house, her cheeks still stained with eyeliner and mascara. Her smile faded, and she reached into her purse, pulled out a Post-It note and a pen, scribbling something down on the paper. She ripped the top note off and handed it to him.
He took it, furrowing his brow. Written on it in neat, curvy penmanship, was the name Aelin, and beside it a phone number.
"What is this?"
"You said that your girlfriend died on March fifteenth," she said. "You gave me company today. If you want some then, give me a call."
He blinked. "You don't—you don't even know me."
"And you don't know me. But that's the way life works, Rowan." She placed her hands on her shoulders, shaking him once, firmly. "Life's worth nothing if you don't take a leap of faith every once in a while. You took one for me. In a couple of months, should you want it, I'll do the same."
His chest was tight. "Thank you, Aelin," he whispered.
"Thank you," she said. "For taking a chance and saving my shoe." She looked down at her feet balefully. "I really don't want to lose them. I kind of look like Judy Garland, but…" She swallowed, hard. "It's the memories that count in the end, isn't it? After everything else is gone, and that's the only thing left, it's the memories that matter."
Rowan's breath hitched as she let her arms drop to her sides. "Yeah," he whispered.
She turned around, heading down the stairs. She had the basement apartment, probably mildewed and infested with roaches, rats, and spiders. (Filthy American city.) "Goodnight, Rowan," she said, and pulled out her key from her purse, sticking it into her lock. She opened her door and paused. "If… If I passed by Columbia University, hypothetically—because, you know, there's a bakery over there that sells the chocolate cake birthed from vagina of the Virgin Mary herself—should I look for a particular dorm?"
He stuck his hands in his pockets. "You might hypothetically drop by Lenfest," he said. "And go to the second floor. Third room on the right."
Her eyes shone, and a tear slipped down her cheek. "Good to know," she said. "Hypothetically, of course."
She slipped inside, and the door shut with a soft click behind her.
And then he realized he forgot.
He whipped out his phone, entering Aelin as a contact and tapping out a quick text message. What was the name of the song?
He half-thought that she wouldn't respond, that she'd collapsed and was now asleep, but a second later, his phone buzzed.
The Stygian Suite. Third Movement, A-flat minor.
He smiled.
Lyria was gone. She and her flower-sweet scent had dissipated on the wind. He would never kiss her lovely mouth again, would never hold her close again, would never see her play the piano again. He would never hear her hum or quote Sylvia Plath or get to tuck a tulip behind her ear.
But he wasn't done just yet.
He looked up at the stars, rattled by the music of mourning, and sent a silent message to Lyria, wherever she was, hovering above him. As if she were simply obscured by the lights of Manhattan, just out of reach.
Lyria,
Thank you for giving me what little time you had. Thank you for the kisses, for the flowers, for the music. Thank you for holding me. Thank you for fighting.
Thank you for letting me go. Goodbye. I'll see you again someday.
Love,
Rowan
P.S.—I think I'm going to learn how to play the piano. What do you think of that?
For Paisley
A/N: Thoughts? Review or PM and let me know! :)