Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ VIVA ❯ 13: Sonata, by Moonlight ( Chapter 12 )

Title: VIVA 13/? : Sonata, by Moonlight

Author: Lethanon

Archive: www.geocities.com/lethanon

Warnings: AU, extreme use of music terminology, general weirdness.

Notes: Once again I am sorry this part has taken so long to get out. For those interested, I was, for once, not listening to CMX while writing this part, but to Sibelius's serenades for violin. That might account for the mood, I dunno. Hope you enjoy!

13: Sonata, by Moonlight

The hall was not empty, simply not occupied. Quatre breathed out heavily as he entered, taking in the high, vaulted ceilings designed to maximize natural sound by throwing the echo's to strategically designed parts of the room so that the sound board's resonance was dominant, the sound of flesh on bass string barely audible. There was only sound. Even in silence, as he wandered up to the stage, the silence was in itself a sound. There was an ambience to this place that was undeniable, and he hungered to hear himself within it; hear the strains of music from eons past fill it and make it is his own.

The room was by no means large, but Quatre would not have called it large. It was like a small ballroom, and the stage was designed to host nothing larger than a string quartet comfortably. As there was now a much larger hall set aside for small orchestra the quartet ballroom was rarely in use any longer, but the moment Quatre had seen it he had felt it; a living presence from the hall itself, an echo of all that had come before him and loved it for what it was. The hall was not old, but its spirit was filled with music.

He placed his case on a high stool and set up a music stand with almost awe-driven fingers, still unable to believe he had managed so often to find this place deserted and play, alone, uninhibited, as he wished.

When at last he reached into his case and freed from it his violin he was no longer aware of a world outside those walls; no longer conscious of a life, or a living, only the sound of a place, and the knowing of what was to come. With instinctual ease he lifted the bow and brought it down upon the strings.

There have been many composers through time. Many famous slabs of musics that now fill whole encyclopedia's to bursting and still don't contain it all. Fugues, cantatas, organs, sonatas, jigs, reels, arias, overtures, recitatives…the list is endless. But these are not the greatest musics of all, though you may, indeed, find a hint within them. The greatest music of all was that which Quatre discovered time and again, when he stood alone on a stage, performing to the very walls, where none could hear, and he played his soul; an endless, immediate stream of melody that encompassed everything he was at a single moment; heart, mind and soul. The greatest music is that which is never heard, never written down, never played, merely felt.

It was a long time before Quatre packed his instrument away and left the hall to its silence, aware he had added something to its ambience, left a small piece of himself within.

*

"You seem distracted today," Trowa noted as he sat down beside Quatre in the large window box of the music lounge. He had noticed Quatre didn't say much at breakfast but had not thought much of it until the non-event was repeated at lunch. Then Troaw had really started paying attention and had noticed Quatre was not really paying attention to anything. It was more than slightly out of character and Trowa was finding it more than a little unnerving. Especially since he had to listen to Duo and Dorothy all day instead…

"I'm just…listening," Quatre finally replied, startling Trowa. He had thought the small blonde was not listening and had expected to have to tap him on the shoulder to break him from his reverie.

"To what?" Trowa pulled out a pad of manuscript paper from his bag and began sharpening his pencil. He had homework due the next class and while it usually didn't worry him, it was for Une and he didn't really want to get on the wrong side of her again. Last year had been enough to teach Trowa that being Une's friend was a good idea.

"To…everything," he replied, seeming a little lost. Then, without warning he turned to face Trowa completely, face as serious as Trowa had ever seen it. "Are you happy?"

Trowa let the blank mask he was so well known for shine for all it was worth. Was that a serious question? Well, of course it was serious, but did Quatre really expect him to answer it? Of course he did, he was being serious…but, was there a serious response to such a thing? Trowa's mind was valiantly trying to keep up with his sudden panic attack, but in the end all it could supply was a shrug. It did not seem to satisfy Quatre, who just glared and waited for more.

"I guess so," he finally lamented with another shrug.

"How can you settle for I guess so?" Quatre asked quietly, finally looking away, eyes following the small flakes that were starting to drift by outside the window.

Trowa wondered about that. He wasn't really sure he could settle for it, but then he wasn't sure he had ever known true happiness. He found peace playing the flute, or writing music and hearing it in his head, but happiness? He wasn't even sure what it was apart from a word one found in the dictionary. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

"I guess…if I knew what it was, I might want it all the time, and then I wouldn't like what I've got already as much, and that wouldn't do…" He trailed off, looking out the window and wondering why that was the only excuse he had. An excuse wasn't really good enough; he should have had a reason.

"I used to think I was happy, at Julliard. The people there pushed so hard, wanting me to be the best; believing I could be, and my parents were so proud of me. My sisters came to every recital…There's an entire wing of our house dedicated to my achievements. I used to think they made me happy."

Trowa studied Quare's profile as he spoke, noting the way tears almost seemed to well in the eyes but never spilled, the way the light reflected off the snow was caught in the pale blue of his eyes so they seemed to glow with inner passion, and inner sadness. The way his body sat just so, arm resting against the glass, mouth breathing lightly against it, creating a small patch of smoky haze. He seemed…to be listening. I made Trowa smile.

"And now?"

"Now?" Quatre smiled slightly. "Now I don't know if I'm the best, but that doesn't matter. I am surrounded by people just as talented and gifted as myself, but that's alright. I find…I don't need a hall of memories to make me feel special, because I have a small bedroom right here, where I feel at home. I find I don't need my teachers to push me so hard, because my friends do it for them, and they do a better job of it, and they support me in my failures as well as my success. I find…I don't need my sisters to hear me play…" He trailed off, frowning a little and again those tears were welling.

"Why?"

"Because I finally hear myself."

Trowa thought about that as the snow began to build up. He had never had a large family, but it was a tight one; some thirty members of a traveling circus. A very successful traveling circus. After every performance the family would get together and tell each other who wonderfully they had done, how perfect the performance, but Trowa had never believed them. Trowa had known when he did well, or when he failed. He had trusted himself. He assumed Quatre was only jus learning to do what he had done his whole life. Sometimes, it was better, he guessed, to see the world and know what was in it, than to look down on it and only guess.

Reaching out an arm, Trowa wrapped it around Quatre's shoulders and pulled him against his side, ignoring Quatre's startled whimper. He looked down at the music he had been writing and let it sink into his mind, hearing the notes. Then he started to hum. Quatre stilled in his arms, rested his head on his shoulder and just listened.

When he finished, Quatre didn't say anything. Just smiled. Trowa found himself smiling back.

*

"What the hell is that anyway?"

Hilde stopped playing and looked up to find Solo out from under the hood of that damned car, a wrench in his hand, face smeared with grease, a stumped look on his face.

"It's called music dear," Hilde replied tartly, pointing to the few sheets she had dragged down to he garage to practice, not that it was doing her any good. She jus didn't understand the way it was written. There was something decidedly odd about writing Bb's as H's. Finish people were just strange, she had decided.

"Oh really, I didn't know," Solo replied sarcastically, rolling his eyes as he wiped his hands on a dirty cloth and proceeded to read the music over her shoulder.

"Rakastava suite, Op. 14?" Solo raised a brow.

"Yes," Hilde snarled in response. "Part one, also known as the Lever."

Solo was quiet for a while, studying the music.

"What's rakastava mean anyway? This looks like sissy music!"

Hilde growled low in the back of her throat as she snatched the music back and shoved it on the stand once more. The problem was, it was sissy music, by a very dead composer who toward the end of his career decided to write a love suite that Hilde, in comparison to his other music, absolutely loathed. Why couldn't they learn the serenades for violin, or the Concerto! At least those pieces had some point to them. And Solo wouldn't have paid her out for learning them…

"It's by Sibelius; he's like a national bloody icon for these people, and need I remind you this is a Finnish school?"

Solo only smirked as he lifted the hood of the car he was working on and fetched two brushes from the bench. Hilde watched him in quiet amusement for a few moments, and then laughed out loud when Solo started `playing' the car's engine, in compound 6/8 time.

Forgetting classical music and the stupid assignment, Hilde cranked her small travel amp and started beating out a syncopated counter-rhythm, delighting in the way Solo always seemed to know exactly when you would do a fill, or when he needed to pick up the pace, or let the volume dwindle. It was like when he had sticks in his hands he could read your mind. Solo ran completely on instinct, just like the rest of them. He should not be in the garage, keeping their cars in tact through the winter…

Hilde frowned at that and eventually stopped playing, studying Solo carefully.

"Why aren't you a student, Solo?"

He actually dropped his brushes as he looked down at the engine in front of him and then at her little bass amp.

"I guess… don't need to."

Hilde raised a speculative brow in response and was rewarded with a laugh.

"I don't need a certificate to prove I can play the drums, any more than I need one that says I can fix a car. I don't need to stand on a stage and have people applaud me to know I'm good at it. I don't need to study it to know I enjoy it. In fact, if I did study it, I think I might learn to hate it. So I don't. I watch Duo and the rest of you do it instead, and every now and then I join the fun, without any of the fuss."

"Don't you think that's kind of…selfish?"

Solo studied her carefully now, and Hilde made sure not to give away anything. She wanted an honest response, not just what Solo thought she wanted to hear, which was what people usually got.

"No," Solo finally said softly, and it was obviously the truth. "Selfish would be to not play at all. Selfish would be to tell others not to play with me. Selfish would be not to share what I do have. It's not selfish to accept that you have what you have and don't have what you don't have, no matter what you might have wished. It's true, at one point I wanted to go here. But I couldn't get the scholarship, and in time I wondered if maybe that was because I didn't really want it, and I was right. I didn't. But Duo did, and he got it, and I love him for it. Now we're both here, and I think that's right where we both want to be. Hell, it's where we need to be. I don't think that's selfish at all."

Hilde nodded and smiled.

"Neither do I." And she went back to working out the no-longer quite so complicated notes of the Rakastava suite.

*

Heero slumped a little lower in his seat, wondering why he hadn't just left hours ago. Sitting at the end of the table, he had a clear view of both the combatants seated on either side of him, glaring coldly at each other. He didn't know exactly when it had started. He knew only that when he entered the cafeteria for dinner it had been hushed and eerily quiet, eyes swiveling now and then to look at the back table. There, Heero had sat down unknowingly in the middle of this little battle, and had so far not found in his head a single justified reason to leave. And as he kept trying to make his legs moved, Duo and Dorothy continued to glare at one another, faces frozen in fury.

Relena, still sitting on Dorothy's other side reached out once more and waved her fingers in front of Dorothy's face, to no avail. Dorothy didn't even blink, just kept staring. Hilde returned to the table with yet another plate of leftovers and started nibbling on a makkara (aka. finnish sausage, kind of like a Frankfurt but cooked on an open fire, usually) as she watched the two. What exactly she was watching was a mystery to Heero, who doubted the two had moved in the three hours they had been there.

A quick scan of the cafeteria revealed everyone else had drifted off to bed, leaving the four of them alone, not really wanting to get involved with a fight against Dorothy Catalonia. Heero couldn't blame them. Doro had a way of wrapping any poor unsuspecting fool around her slender fingers. She had, after all, managed to get him.

Heero spied Hilde fiddling with something behind Duo's back and had an uncomfortable feeling play in the pit of his stomach. He knew Hilde was doing something to Duo's hair, and doing it so deftly the other boy hadn't even realized. Still, it would not be fair for the girls to be given the upper hand, especially not by a bass player. Reaching out air-light fingers, Heero slowly began the process of gathering a fist of long blonde hair. It was a surprisingly easy task once he set his mind to it.

Smirking, quite pleased with himself, Heero reached behind Dorothy and plucked the pink ribbons from Relena's hair. She almost protested at first, but seeing the fist full of blonde strands in Heero's fist she relented and pulled another set of bright purple ribbons from her jeans pocket. Heero grinned at the sight as together they began the arduous process of weaving massive bows into Dorothy's mane.

And all the while Dorothy stared at Duo while Duo stared at Dorothy, while Dorothy stared at Duo and Duo stared at Dorothy and…

Heero's head was starting to hurt. He glanced at his watch and blinked twice before he would believe it said 11:30pm. Glaring, trying to imagine what he would feel like at 5am the following morning when he was woken by an unrepentant trumpet, Heero finally stood and fixed his rather angry gaze upon the two combatants.

"I don't care what this is about! I want the two of you to go to bed. RIGHT NOW! Or I am getting Une. I am sure she would like nothing more than to come in here, complete with curlers in her hair, to tell the two of you to stop!"

Dorothy's back straightened a little. Duo's nose twitched. As one they rose and stormed off in different directions, Dorothy heading out the main doors to the dorms, Duo heading out the back door into the snow. Heero watched Duo leave and tried to restrain his laughter. Sticking out of his hair were the entire plate of leftover makkara. They stuck out of the braid like a row of small…Heero actually blushed as he thought of it. And then there was that one down the very bottom that Hilde had been chewing on…Heero couldn't help it; he burst into raucous laughter.

"What?" Hilde asked, but she was grinning. "If he's anything like Solo under those jeans he's always wearing he's definitely good enough to eat!" Hilde followed Duo's form through the snow until he disappeared around a corner. "I'm getting horny just thinking about it," she groaned, and Heero watched her in stunned amusement as she left the cafeteria, heading for her room on the second floor. He imagined Hilde would have interesting dreams tonight.

A hand fell on his shoulder and Heero turned to see Relena, who was tugging him toward the door Duo had left through. Never able to deny Relena much, Heero let her pull him along, wondering what she had to show him this time.

As it turned out, it wasn't anything he would mind looking at. The sky was unusually clear, a wide midnight slate of darkness with speckled stars across. The weather men must have been having a party, because the command console high above them was glowing brightly, simulating the appearance of a full moon. It was the first time he had ever seen such a thing on a colony, and he liked it.

"It's beautiful."

"I thought you would like it," Relena said softly, not daring to tear her gaze from the picture above them as if she might jinx it if she dared to look away for even a moment. They stood in companiable silence, each caught up in their own thoughts, listening to the slight breeze as it carried the soft sounds of a violin.

Heero cocked his head, listening. It was Quatre, he had no doubts about that. But where was a mystery, and Heero found he liked it that way. There was something secretive about the music, something innately personal that should not be spoken of.

"The moonlight sonata," Relena noted softly, not wanting to break the mood.

"You know," Heero noted dryly, a little amused, "it's not really called the moonlight sonata. Mozart never named it, it was just another one of his symphonies. It's people who came later who named it such."

Relena smiled and Heero realized it had been quite some time since they had just stood together and enjoyed one another's presence. Friend's since high school, they had somehow drifted, unknowingly, and while they were in the same place they were never really together. Never, perhaps, had been.

"So, it's really nameless sonata? Just another numbered, nameless masterpiece?"

"If that's what you want to think of it, yes," Heero replied, still faintly amused, and still in awe of the moon above them. The snow looked blue, covering the colony in crystalline sheen. It was stunning.

"I think it will always be the moonlight sonata to me. Now."

Heero smiled and just nodded his head in agreement.

"You know Dorothy likes you right?"

"You know Duo likes you, right?"

They stared at each other, not really sure where the words had some from, then letting them sink in, and at the same moment, it seemed, they didn't really mind. They just laughed and hand in hand they made their way back inside.

Throughout the colony a piece of music designed to aide musicians in learning their scales, that remained nameless for centuries, lulled thousands of minds to sleep, and gave a single heart a small piece of happiness.