42. His Strings, My Keys
42
HIS STRINGS, MY KEYS
RIOT
Soren’s fingers are gentle, but the antiseptic stings. He’s quiet as he cleans my knuckles, and I’m quiet because no one has ever taken care of me before. I figured I never needed it. I can take care of myself, and no one is good enough to fix me, but this is nice. He’s doting on me… because he brought me to the patient ward of the asylum, so we don’t have to go back to Vile House yet.
“You worried a few split knuckles are gonna do me in? I’m tougher than that, sweetheart.”
Soren pours acidic liquid onto my open wounds and I hiss through the pain. “Don’t be a dick right now. I need… I just need you not to be a dick.”
I smile as he cleans up the last knuckle but doesn’t let my hand go. “Tell me. Uh, what do you need?” I ask. When he looks at me weird for asking, I add, “Never been good at that part. I know what I need. Not anyone else.”
Though that might be a lie because I’ve always understood when he needs a brush with danger and death.
He drops the gauze and leans back against the stone wall of the empty family visiting room we’re hiding out in, hand in mine, resting on my thigh. The room is mostly dim, the only light coming from a few lamps in the corners. I’ve spent a lot of time in the asylum, but never in here. It’s quiet and empty, big enough for hiding in and open enough to contain our energies.
He rubs the scabs still healing on his jaw, the three words grounding him. “I’m trying to keep a level head and believe what Krypt said about everyone just being scared.”
“But?”
“But it fucking guts me when I’m doubted. I had to tolerate that gang for years and now that I’m out I’m still fucking paying for it. They doubt me. Again,” he snaps, eyes closing and breaths deepening to calm himself. “So, just don’t doubt me.”
“I don’t.”
“You once mocked me for being the guy who craves the spotlight but succeeds in the dark.”
“I did.”
Slowly, Soren leans over until his cheek rests on my shoulder. It’s so jarringly perfect that I stop breathing, loving this moment more than I ever thought I would. “Right now, I just want to hide in the dark with you.”
I’m conflicted. On one hand, I want to ask him why he picked me. On the other hand, I know he picked me because I’m strong enough to handle him. He sees himself as superior to his family, and I see myself as superior to him. Soren is a mindfuck because he lies to himself, believes in himself to an ungodly level, and sees literally every other person as beneath him. But somewhere along the way, he unknowingly put me on a pedestal. I’m eager to stand on it, but I wonder if he knows how many different masks I wear while looking down at him from my platform.
He wanted Death? I got it for him.
He wanted someone to not stop when he said no? I did that.
He needed the Sauder curse to end? I fucking ended it.
He wanted to stop trying so hard to hold himself together? I fucking gave him that.
He wanted to hold my hand? You’re goddamn right I manipulated him into wanting it by holding that little girl’s hand.
He wanted to be superior? I did that for him when I sacrificed myself in Reaper City, putting him first just to be the stitch in his side for the rest of his life. I’m his saviour!
The room is silent and still despite how tumultuous my thoughts are. I’m making this about me again, but fuck, I can’t help it.
Because I’ve led him to where we are on purpose. I turned him into my loyal little lapdog. For as long as I’ve been rivalling him, I’ve wanted this power so I can hold it over his head. So, why the fuck am I not doing that? Why am I not forcing him to bow down to me? Why does he get away with things I’d never let anyone else get away with?
Why does his flushed skin excite me rather than repulse me? Blushing is a weakness. I’ve mastered the art of morphing my face into the exact expression I want it to wear, and anyone who blushes doesn’t have that skill. It means he’s mundane, not in control, and beneath me. I am superior to all these pathetic fools who can’t master their facial expressions, so why do I give him a pass? Maybe because it feeds my ego to know I’m the one who makes him blush…
Inwardly, I worry that he’s simply the coerced man I turned him into. I tricked him into loving me, so it can’t be real, can it? But maybe he tricked me, too. I’ve never been a protective person—at least, not towards another person. Sure, I helped save my brother, but I did that for selfish reasons. I wanted to be able to say I did it. But I protected Soren tonight without a selfish thought in my mind. Or did I? Maybe I publicly made him mine, and it embarrassed me to be tied to a man the town doubted.
Fuck. What is real?!
How can I be sure?
He asked for ninety seconds with me, and the pressure of that is too much. These are his ninety seconds, yet I’m the one freaking out because everything I know about myself doesn’t align with this version of me who loves a man. Something changed, and I don’t know whether to blame him for it or take credit for it.
Because whatever piece of me got left behind in Krypt’s bedroom that night we played piano… Well, it got added back to me when Soren said he loved me in the same room. I’m unfamiliar with this old part of me, resenting it as much as I’m cherishing it.
“What’re you freaking out about?” he asks.
“Nothing.” I shrug my shoulder to get him off it. Standing, I pace the room, giving him my back because I don’t want him to see my face. I can feel his eyes on me, though, and it sets me on edge enough that I leave the room. Walking into the adjoining room, my boots scuff the stone floors and my throat tightens up, questions and answers and insecurities getting clogged there because I refuse to let them out.
The town is turning on him. He loves me. I love him. I don’t understand any of it. He says love is ‘fucking getting it’ and now I’m doubting my ability to love because I sure as hell don’t get it. It just happened. Was Psych right? Do I use love as a strategic tool to further my own agenda?
But other than giving me attentive praise, good sex, and a god complex, what the hell does Soren do for my agenda? He’s nothing but a pain in the ass who entices my mind. But… I sought him out years ago because he’s a pain in my ass who entices my mind. My life was stagnant, and then he started fighting back, and things have been exciting since. I’d be bored without him constantly challenging me, but I never saw the feelings coming. I just wanted to prove to him that I’m a more worthy opponent than Death, and now look at where we are.
In an abnormal relationship that has no boundaries and no real goals. No definition. No idea what love means for us, yet claiming to feel it regardless. We’re liars and hypocrites for declaring an emotion we can’t grasp, yet we’re both too stubborn to admit we don’t know what it is.
I’ve wandered so far that my feet stop in front of the grand piano in the music room. I fucking hate it. I love it. I want to play it but I don’t want to touch it. What will my music say? Will I know what it’s implying?
I sit, confused by the feel of the bench beneath my ass. It’s nostalgic, yet unfamiliar. Holding my hands above the keys without touching them, I look down to take in the whole picture. My swollen knuckles, split and still bleeding, above ivory keys so aged but pristine. How do the two go together? My hands cause harm when balled into fists, but if I spread my fingers and place them on the keys, they create such beauty.
I know Soren is listening. I’m trying not to care.
When I place my fingertips on the keys, my ribs crack open and my heart pours out. Horribly, at first. The notes are all wrong, misplaced and stuttered. The music isn’t flowing. My fingers are too swollen to reach where they need to. But as they loosen and my heart bleeds, I begin to create music. It’s real, honest, from the depths of me that I haven’t touched in so many years. I bring life to feelings that don’t make sense.
Love conflicts with my personality. Shame hurts my ego, but compassion feels foreign and right. Self-appreciation is my main setting, but appreciating Soren becomes natural.
I’m all twisted up, doubting myself when I haven’t doubted myself since before I killed our parents. That night I played piano with my brother and lost a part of me to that music. It’s returning to me now, savage and abrupt. It hurts because I want it, but heals because I need it.
My music turns into a song, and when I close my eyes to feel the notes, I realize what they’re saying. They’re telling me it’s okay to be vulnerable with him, that it’s not a weakness to love a man who doesn’t know how to love because neither do I—our version of it can be different. The song tells me that together, we’ll live forever, even if we die. It’ll be a twisted trip from here to there, the afterlife he seeks and the control I crave. And the hardest part about all of it is the realization that I don’t have to manipulate him into any of it. He’s here willingly, and I think that might hurt the most.
I’m worth it. He sees me as worth it.
The piano music bounces off the echoey walls of the asylum, and the hush that falls over the halls is respect. Because the patients are listening, and whatever they’re hearing from my music is the same way I feel in bed, listening to Soren play the violin from his room. The ability to feel and heal in private.
My bloody, busted knuckles aren’t hurting anyone but me at the moment, and as I shift the sadness into something dark and beautiful, my eyes water while they stay closed. Especially when Soren’s back presses to mine, his ass behind me on the wide bench seat. He sits there, listening, breathing, letting me feel his heart beating in my chest while I remember what it feels like to play piano.
I sense it. His music is desperately hoping to join mine. I’m so afraid of it that I play louder, hoping to drown out the sounds of his violin if he attempts to play with me.
But then I hear it. The strings of his violin mix with the keys of my piano. I choke on some sense of self, a feeling of home like I’ve never had before as our music melds, meshing together seamlessly despite how deeply it hurts.
Then he plays with me, and our music becomes a real song.
And the notes of his violin are declarations, so I press the keys and step on the pedals, admitting to everything that’s hard to say. And it feels good, so good it hurts more, that healing kind of pain that rejuvenates your soul but drains your energy.
Because the town turned on Soren.
Because I love Soren.
Because I don’t know how to cope with either.
But mostly because loving him has given me this gift back, and I credit myself for that. For being strong enough to open up to him, and for letting him see me without any of my masks.
I don’t know who leads, his strings or my keys, or maybe we’re just building off each other, but the music we make starts off slow and emotional. The music room becomes our stage, the asylum becomes our amphitheatre, and Moros becomes the one and only stop on our tour. The stone walls absorb our melancholy, not letting it leach out to ears beyond, but when the dark tones and slow sounds become something more, I press my back to his and create music with the man I love.
We play together for so long that the moon disappears from one window and reappears in another. A raven pecks at the glass pane, and seconds later, rain taps on the window to join our beat.
And then we stop. Together. Breathing.
Because there’s nothing left to say.
Back-to-back, I lean on Soren and he leans on me, letting the sound of the light rain wash away the overwhelmingness of the night. Looking down to my hands still resting on the keys, I notice that I’ve bled all over them. My split knuckles are shiny and wet, the keys are turning sticky, and my regrowing fingernails are bleeding again.
Somewhere in the ward we’re in, a patient cackles and doors slam, but the sounds don’t jar me as much as Soren’s soft question. “Did you get it back?” he asks.
I remove my fingers from the keys and stare at the stains. The white and black keys and the light wood no longer seem so daunting. Did I get music back tonight?
“Yeah.”
He doesn’t take the credit like he normally would, and he doesn’t ask anything else. Instead, he leans against my back, rests the back of his head to mine, and sighs contentedly. And because he’s so calm, so silent and supportive, I let go of everything that just happened at the town meeting and put my trust in him. In us. In music and the ability to interpret it again while the sounds around us simmer along with us.
Later, after my heart has settled and my breathing has regulated, my knuckles ache when Soren says, “It was a confession.”
I try to think back on the music I played. “Confession of what?”
“Guilt.”
“No.” I shake my head.
“Shame.”
I shake my head again.
“Acceptance, then.”
I start to shake my head, but I stop. Yeah, maybe it was an ode to acceptance. Maybe I am okay with where my life has gone. Maybe all the tricks and the lies and the manipulations have benefitted me in a way I never thought they would. Because I’m here without a mask, and I have my brother, Vile House, a town to protect, and Soren.
I’m seen by him. As me, Killian and Riot all meshed into the sole version of who I really am. And I’m not a nobody like I feared I might be.
But because I don’t know how to say all that, I reach back, grab Soren’s arm, and pull him around until he’s straddling my lap. The piano keys all snarl when his back leans against them, but I bring his mouth to mine to block it out.
Maskless, I lose myself in the man who defies death.