20. Orion
Iwas waiting for her to finish cleaning the snack table. Why did I even want to help her? It wasn’t my job, and it wasn’t even that dirty. Fuck it. I walked over and started packing up cookies. She looked over at me like she was surprised.
“Interesting rehearsal,” she said. “All that because that girl hit on your boyfriend?”
Was that the story the plebeians were giving out? Because she didn’t just hit on my boyfriend. She deserved everything she had coming to her. I resisted the urge to bare my teeth at Harlowe. She was new, and she didn’t know better.
“Belinda didn’t just hit on Misha. She did, and he turned her down.
That girl is obsessed with him. Azriel is feral.
He can make his own paints and turn the contents of a garbage can into something beautiful.
He hates AI. Belinda started out using it to generate photos of her and Misha in ballets Misha hates.
He doesn’t like the tragic ballets. He prefers contemporary ballets, but wants to do the ones where everyone gets their happily ever after if he’s doing a classical one.
“She’s been sending him AI photos of them dancing Swan Lake and Giselle. He’s asked her to stop numerous times. She found some disgusting AI that will undress Misha and has started sending him photos of the two of them naked in bed together.”
Harlowe looked disgusted. I was glad. If I was going to have to work with her, she couldn’t be okay with that shit.
“Why is she still here? That’s sexual assault.”
Thank you! We’d been saying the same thing. Azriel wouldn’t be swatting her around like a gnat if she wasn’t at this school.
“Johann is a pig.”
I didn’t give her more because I didn’t want her running.
The man was a relic. He actually said if Misha didn’t want to be sexualized, he should wear sweatpants when he danced instead of tights.
Lines were important for dancers and that was just fucking stupid because Misha looked amazing in sweatpants too.
“So is Klaus. Do I want to know why he has a job here? And what secrets does he think I’m trying to steal?”
Ah, Klaus. If I’d known, I would have warned her about that. The man was a complete nightmare. He was probably going to call her a succubus until she graduated, even if she proved herself as a competent musician. In fact, I knew he would once he heard her compositions.
“Klaus is difficult, but he’s here because if you can survive working under him, you can handle anyone in the real world.
He’s a very talented conductor, but he’s a mediocre composer.
He’s been working on some masterpiece for thirty years.
Klaus thinks everyone is waiting on it and dying to get their hands on it, but they aren’t.
Look up Skipping Suite later. It’s one of his. It’s terrible.”
Yeah, Klaus was a fantastic conductor, but he thought he was just a misunderstood genius when it came to composing. It wasn’t an art is subjective thing when everyone agreed it was terrible. It wasn’t even one of those things where it entered into kitsch territory and got a cult following.
“Well, thanks for helping me clean up and the help with the coffee. Azriel getting retribution aside, rehearsal was inspiring. I’m going to skip the dining hall, make a bougie grilled cheese, and get some writing done.”
I let her go because I knew what that felt like.
As much as I hated being at Blackvale, they did put on good shows.
I wanted to make music with her, but I didn’t want to be responsible for her ending up like us.
So, I put it off and went back to our room.
Everyone else had singles, but they kept us together.
I didn’t ask her why she helped Misha in the dining hall, but I loved that she saw him. Well, not all of him. Misha was delicate, but he was also dangerous. Azriel was a feral menace, but his methods weren’t a felony.
All three of us were on stage during an Immortal Nightmare performance, but since Misha was dancing, most people were watching him.
We managed to hit some viral marketing early on and snagged a bunch of fans who wouldn’t usually be caught dead in a ballet or piano performance and had probably never set foot in an art gallery.
All three of us had some obsessive fans that got weird, but Misha had a lot more of them. He was fine in crowds if no one paying attention to him or making gross comments about his body. Which was impossible there because everyone knew us.
I wished I could have invited us to her dorm room.
Misha kept his body fueled the way he needed to as a professional dancer, but figuring out what he would actually eat that day was next to impossible.
He would always eat a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup.
Azriel and I knew five hundred ways to up the protein in a grilled cheese sandwich and make it taste good.
When I got back to our room, the food situation was handled. Most cooking appliances were banned in the dorm room unless you knew someone important. Harlowe obviously was given the tools to make a grilled cheese. So were we, but we also had an instant pot and a rice maker.
Misha was chopping chicken, mushrooms, and onions to go in the instant pot. Ah. He was making his other comfort food. His mother used to make this for him. We were all fans.
Azriel was practically bouncing off the walls.
“Did you do it?”
I was supposed to tell her I saw her video and ask if she wanted to experiment with adding a piano. Which wasn’t a lie. We’d all been sneaking glances at her subway video and picturing how we’d augment it. I already knew exactly how I’d add a piano to her violin.
“She said she wanted to compose and ran off.”
Azriel started laughing like a donkey.
“You said she was a fan. You look like you and you still chased her off. How the fuck did you get two hot boyfriends?”
“Oh, fuck off. She’s not some gorgeous girl with a lot of talent you can play with until you’re bored.”
“I think…I think she’s more of a muse.”
Misha and I drew in a breath. Azriel didn’t say that lightly.
He got inspired by so many things, but he’d only ever called four people his muse.
One was dead. Another broke his heart, changed his name, and now Azriel had to see Topher every day pretending like he hadn’t fucked all three of us over.
The other two were currently in the room with him. Azriel didn’t utter that term lightly.
“You know why she can’t be, right?” Misha said. “He has plans for her and we don’t exactly have the big picture behind any of this. We just know he loves his loopholes and we have no way of knowing what hers will be or what will happen with ours if we piss him off.”
Yeah, that. We were given the means to our freedom. We could reunite Immortal Nightmare if we wanted. I didn’t know why we were being asked to include a violin player, but we wouldn’t be able to keep her when this was all over.
All we had to do was betray her the same way Topher had done to us. And she didn’t deserve that.