golden_lyre | The Drowning Fiddler

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eurydice

The Drowning Fiddler

The Drowning Fiddler is a little pub in Earl's Court that Orpheus has been visiting, on and off, for about two hundred years now. In more recent decades, the basement has been remodeled to double as a concert venue, and a number of bands who went on to be famous got their start on its cramped stage. Having spent a good deal of time and a good deal of coin at the bar, Orpheus has come to know the owner, Martin, well enough that he's occasionally asked to fill in for any musicians who back out at the last minute or on any nights when the stage isn't booked.

(Orpheus suspects that Martin keeps nights open when business isn't going well, so Orpheus can help him pick up the slack. Orpheus doesn't mind. He always puts a little encouragement to drink in his music when he plays. Martin deserves it.)

It's a Wednesday night, and though that's the Fiddler's least busy night in general, the room is packed. There wasn't a lot of time for advertising, but since the advent of social media (something Orpheus still can't quite get his head around), a few hours is all the notice needed to fill a room when he plays.

There's no amplification system because Orpheus never needs one, and there's no one to introduce him. He just sidles onto the stage, whiskey in one hand, cigarette in the other, and takes a seat on a wooden stool. As he settles himself (whiskey on an unused amplifier, guitar in his lap, still lit cigarette tucked between two strings), the room gradually quiets, but anyone still speaking comes to a hush when Orpheus starts to play.

He starts off with something quiet, something that feels like a Wednesday night, a needed breath of fresh air and freedom in the middle of the week. The room relaxes in the wake of it, as if communally exhaling in relief, and Orpheus smiles, loving the moment he knows he has the audience in the palm of his hand.

A quick sip of whiskey, a couple of drags on his cigarette as he retunes his guitar, and then he plays what they all came here to hear.

Something to dance to.

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Wednesdays are full. Always. She takes her neighbour’s six year old to school because the nurse gets home at 6:30am on a Wednesday and Ree doesn’t mind the company or helping out. Jonah is adorable and willingly skips and dances to nursery with her. Katie has a lunch for her that day. It’s even. But then she has a staging class, then two hours in costuming (theory and practical), then a ballet intensive, plus a choreo session for lyrical, and by the time she’s had six coffees, a pain au chocolat, and the huge serve of moussaka Katie pressed on her this morning, the very last thing she feels like doing after an external hip-hop class is going to a pub in her class wear with sweaty hair to hear whichever muso Jemma is crushing on this week (and she completely understands that. She does. She really does. It’s hard to explain why it’s awkward) and drink til the small hours. She wants her couch, her cat, her failed attempt at baklava, and old eps of The Only Way Is Essex, because Thursday she is doing nothing and she wants to adequately prepare for that.

Except Jemma is persuasive. Like, really persuasive. Nymphs could take lessons.

So Eurydice allows herself to be pulled onto the Tube, then off it, then bounced through streets (this used to be market gardens, she can feel the old life thrumming far below her feet), into a venue she doesn’t catch the name of (her English was both learned and gods-bestowed but reading things fast in the dark is not her forte) to hear a single guy with a guitar where she can’t see more than the top of his head. Modernity gave people height. She’s lucky if she’s five four in current measurements.

“His name is Orpheus,” Jemma laughs into her ear, her tongue mangling the Greek name into something modern that Ree doesn’t bother to correct. “I couldn’t not bring you when I found that out!”

Eurydice gives the sort of smile that says she’s heard this joke a thousand times before - because she has - and that it’s funny every time - it isn’t.

“Haha, good one,” is her lightly-accented reply, and she shrugs off the pang of loss the name of her love still strikes in her, thousands of years after she died. Being given a chance to live again hasn’t eased it, even after two years of pretending to be mortal as she lives among them. “I’ll get us a drink, yeah?”

So she’s at the bar when he starts playing, and it’s not at all what she’s expected. It’s beautiful. He’s incredibly talented. She doesn’t know how much of her sadness shows on her face til the older man serving her chucks her under the chin and tells her to just wait, her toes’ll be tapping in no time.

She and Jemma sip in contemplative silence until the barman’s promise is proven, and the music shifts.

She has to dance to this. It calls to her. The crowd surges and she and Jemma go with it til she’s lost in the music made by a man named for her lost love, indistinguishable from any other patron save for her nimbus of riotous curls, flying as she spins. She’s... it feels almost like home.

Edited (Phone tags, kill me now. ) 2018-08-08 05:04 (UTC)

One of the things that makes Orpheus the best at what he does is his ability to read a room. Bring it up when it's down, mellow it when it's too high. He specializes in playing what his audience needs most to hear, and that means he has to be able to tell what it is they need.

And tonight, the room reads like nothing he's seen before. There's an energy to this crowd he can almost taste, and he's torn between glancing up--scanning the room, seeing if he can pick out who or what is shifting everything into a higher gear--and throwing himself further into the music, riding this wave of strange, beautiful energy through to its conclusion.

It could be dangerous. He hasn't let his music really go in centuries now. He's not sure what effect it would have to play a feedback game with whatever it is he feels.

But dangerous has never stopped him, and it's been far too long since he's done anything new, so he leans into it. He finds the thread of communal power, the bass line of every religious experience from tribal chants to West End musicals. He finds it and he tugs hard at it, teasing out a rhythm older than this pub or the street it's set on or anyone in this room, Orpheus included. He puts into it the rituals of his childhood, the secret chants of the Orphic cults, the thrumming drumbeat of every religion Orpheus has ever respected.

It won't, he thinks, send the crowd into a religious frenzy, a bacchanalia, but it will certainly liven up their Wednesdays in ways they won't see coming.

She still doesn't know how she was allowed to leave as herself, and not as a soul for a new vessel. She's fairly sure Persephone had a more than heavy hand in it, but countless centuries of seasons turning brought with it souls with evolving thoughts, ideas, speech patterns... and there's a phrase she'd heard about a gift horse she took to heart upon learning she was to venture back out into what most humans called twenty sixteen (of what, she hadn't quite worked out). There was a family, who thought she'd always been a daughter. There was school, which was horrifying and wonderful and she prayed in thanks daily to the gods who had given her a wealth of knowledge to further her own observations of the constant stream of the dead who entered the Underworld - enough that a nymph who had been no different than any other passed easily as a mortal girl of seventeen. It sufficed. And once the shock of the pace of modern life wore off? She danced.

Oh, how she danced... her passion was unparallelled, her grace natural and unfeigned and utterly peerless, every movement deliberate yet effortless. It was impossible to hide, and after one year of learning to live in the world as it now was, a scholarship to a prestigious tertiary dance school was offered.

She took it.

Eurydice had adapted swiftly to the application of studied technique to her own inherent abilities, and already - after only a year of attendance - the eyes of company directors and choreographers were on her. She cared about impressing them only because to live in the modern world - twenty eighteen, now, and she'd marvelled at a world who took to counting years from the birth of one man - one had to work. If she could dance, she would dance - and it, too, had evolved. She's in love with the myriad new ways to move her body, and the music she could move it to reached far beyond anything she could have imagined the last time she lived.

But Hellas - Greece, they call it now - still sang in her blood, and not even the buzz and smog of a city layered upon city layered upon city could dampen its call. The musician - this modern-day Orpheus whose parents were cleary as enamored of what are now considered ancient myths as her own - is playing with a skill her own love would have acknowledged, and were she able to think straight, that thought would have given her pause. As it is, she's as caught up as the rest of the crowd in the basement of a pub, her body and soul responding to a primal beat that seems to be both her heart and the thump of his hand on the instrument.

Her feet take it up, a stomp and sliding step the villagers still danced today, the ancient motion somehow absorbed into the arch and sway of her back, the dips and lifts of her arms, the fearless yet controlled spins... she's lost Jemma in the ebb and flow of the dance, letting the music - the music! It's glorious - guide her body. Nearly everyone in the room is on their feet, a seething mass of swaying bodies, heads thrown back or down, arms lifted or holding others...

Something shifts. It's not consciously noted, but something-- the music-- the beat?-- the rhythm... something...

At some point, the girl with wild curls in baggy pants and a sports bra peeking out of a wide-neck cropped t-shirt is no longer another uni student dancing in the crowd. Eurydice is a nymph, and this music brings that part of her out. A hand settles on her hip, and her head falls back to rest on the chest of the person it belongs to, their bodies moving in time before she spins away to dance with someone else, hips and ribs rolling and arching... another partner, another dip and sway... hands on both hips, a slow grind... she's unknowingly winding a path on a route that will take her past the bar (where a natural gap in the crowd reveals Jemma chatting with the barman as she buys another drink - yeah, she knows that girl dancing up a storm - laughter, because the names are such a coincidence, aren't they!), and towards the stage, where the scent of whiskey and cigarettes winds through the notes she can almost touch in the air.

A hand drifts higher than she allows anyone these days, and the spell the music and her own dancing were weaving on her breaks abruptly.

Dove grey Nikes (she'd smiled when she bought them) carry her swiftly and silently through the still heaving crowd to the toilets, where harsh fluorescent lights do nothing to diminish her beauty. Sweaty curls cling to her neck, and she splashes cold water into her face before running wet hands through her hair, twisting it up as her breath calms.

"Fuck," she swears softly, in Greek. She can't lose control like that. Not here, not with this many humans about. Public orgies are no longer a thing, and inciting one will be noticed.

She kind of wants to, though. And it's weird. She hasn't wanted that since... well. Since Orpheus.

Eurydice stares at her reflection for several moments, before making up her mind to just go home. It's been a really fucking long day.

The music hits her like a ton of bricks when she steps back out. This time, she swears much more loudly. She wants to stay and dance.

Edited (spelling sorry) 2018-08-11 17:51 (UTC)

Orpheus feels the shift in the room when whoever had sparked this wild frenzy of music and dance leaves. It sucks something from the space, and though the mortals seem not to notice, Orpheus glances up sharply, a momentary dip in the energy in his song making the whole room pause and catch a breath, maybe two, before he's back again, chasing the fleeting euphoria he'd felt as he let himself go into the music, released his careful control.

When the strange presence returns, he glances up sharply, hoping to spot whoever is responsible, but the room is dark and crowded, and the trance-like movements of the dancers too hypnotic to see through properly.

Since he can't find the source of it, he does the next best thing. Into the music, the steady, heavy beat, Orpheus twines a thread of pleading. Soft, barely noticeable in the overwhelming force of his song.

Stay.

By rights, she should be on her way to the door, to the steps leading up to London's streets, to the tiny bedsit she calls home. She was up before the sun, she's had a full day of intensive classes... she hasn't had dinner, the vodka has sparked heat through her veins, she's sweating, it's heading for eleven, Jemma is somewhere, and the guy with the guitar is playing music that has the whole place stomping and swaying.

It's irresistible.

She steps back into the mass of dancing people, and feels her arms lift into the air almost of their own accord.

Her bones tingle, her muscles preparing to move them into ancient shapes in a deeply unconscious response to the music filling the room, despite coming from only one man. She can't possibly leave. She has to stay... she needs to be here, letting the music soothe a piece of her soul she hadn't known needed it.

Refusing to be constrained by a mere twisted loop of itself, her cloud of curls, heavy with sweat and the water from her hands springs free of its own containment, and bounces down around her ribs. It looks like it should tangle, but it never really does, and like some sort of quiet herald, it prefaces the change in her dance. No longer is she stomping and writhing, a frenzied leader of the crowd... no, there's something else in the music she's dancing to now - something delicate. Something... pleading? No... well, maybe...

A space starts to form around her, slight, but enough for her to close her eyes and let herself dance freely without fear of touching anyone - or being touched. She just wants to dance. With her eyes closed, she can almost let herself believe that this Orpheus and his guitar... it's been thousands of years. A little pretense is fine.

When he finally spots her, he knows, but he doesn't believe. He can't. That way lies madness and he's been down it too many times already.

But the crowd opens for her, and she finds his plea like it was meant only for her. (And it was, because it always, always is.) And her body moves to his song like it was born to do just that, like his fingers were formed to play for her dancing.

It's a trick of the song. It must be. One of those miracles that happen when enough people gather and open themselves to the divine. It's something in the room growing from the frenzy Orpheus sparked and this girl...this dancer blew into a flame.

Twenty years ago, maybe even ten, this mania might have lasted all night, Wednesday or no, with anyone who attempted to shut it down only being drawn further into it. Orpheus would have played until his fingers bled, until his hands failed him. He would have played a thousand years just to watch this thing that couldn't be her, dancing.

But at precisely 10:50, a bell rings over the sound system, calling for last orders, and the unexpected discordance with his music snaps the chord of his song, and it's enough for the room to pause, dazed, and catch its breath, and in the moment of confusion that follows, Orpheus loses the pattern he'd been weaving, like a kite string, lost to the wind.

Last call breaks her concentration, and whatever memory she'd been dancing with dissipates.

Green eyes open when the subtle thread of whatever she was really dancing to falters and falls away, and she's legitimately shocked to see a crowded pub basement instead of a grove of trees. Eurydice is a nymph out of place. Surrounded by people, not oaks... by a namesake, not her lost love... in dance gear she's worn for fifteen hours, not her skin.

The musician still plays, but whatever had called her is lost, and the crowd closes in front of her blocking her view of the small stage. Ree turns and blindly pushes her way out of the mass of people, hoping to find Jemma by the bar so she can make her goodbyes and go home. Tonight hadn't gone at all how she'd expected, and she's not really sure what to make of it.

"Ree!" A bottle of water is pushed into her hand, the plastic feel still somewhat foreign to her touch. "Told you he was good!"

The crowd is beginning to break up, put in their last orders, getting ready to go, and Orpheus feels the energy of the room leaking out into the London streets. He finishes the song, but it's as though he gives up. The ending works, but somehow feels hasty, unfinished. The atmosphere of the room is somehow dissatisfied, as though brought just to the edge of climax and dropped suddenly into cold water, a shocking break.

Orpheus slings his guitar over his shoulder and pushes through the crowd. He hardly knows why, but he knows he has to find her, get to that girl, that dancer. It can't be her, but he has to know. The crowd is thick and dazed with the music, and Orpheus has lost track of her, so he heads for the exit instead, hoping to catch a glimpse of her on the way out, put his curiosity to rest.

(Curiosity and hope, deep buried and slow-kindling.)

Twisting the cap off the bottle, Ree takes several large swallows of water, using the motion to cover her internal checking of her body, because it's thrumming in a way she hasn't felt in a long, long, time. The musician, this man with a name so difficult to live up to, has managed to do just that, and she'd danced - she'd danced, and everything feels weird now.

She's tired. She's lonely. She misses him.

She smiles at Jemma all the same.

"Either his parents were hopeful and pushy, or he's rightfully arrogant enough to adopt the name, but yes. He's good." She has another mouthful of water and offers the bottle back to her friend. "He's more than good."

So much more. It's too hot in here.

"But it's late. I have to go, I haven't fed Seph yet. I'll see you tomorrow?"

And she doesn't pause for any possible but-waits, but swiftly slips through the slowly thinning crowd for the stairs to take her back up to street level.

Someone cuts unexpectedly in front of her, and she has to step back to avoid crashing into them - which unfortunately sends her bumping firmly into someone else, and she hisses in pain as her elbow cracks into something wooden, which echoes on impact.

Someone bumps into his guitar and Orpheus can feel it, that energy. It's not as frenzied. It throbs, aching, and he can feel that deeper than his bones.

He hesitates. Whatever this is, whoever this is, he wants to meet them, find out what they are, but if it isn't her--and it won't be her--if it isn't her...

Orpheus has learned a lot in his time on this earth, and one of the lessons that has stuck with him is that inaction can lead to a maddening regret. If he doesn't turn, he will hate himself for it. (The irony of this is not lost on him. It is painfully, painfully clear.)

It won't be her. It won't be her. It won't be her, he tells himself in the heartbeat it takes him to turn around.

He reaches for her arm, and when he finally sees her...

It's as though all of the oxygen is sucked out of the street, leaving a vacuum that makes Orpheus' pulse throb in his eardrums. The breath goes out of him for a terrifying moment, and then he sucks it back in with a gasp and breathes out a choked, "Eurydice."

It's just as hot on the street as it was in the basement, even with the dispersing crowds, and Eurydice is feeling somewhat oversensitised already by the time she whacks her funnybone (which is a ridiculous term, there's nothing funny about it at all), and given that her entire being is practically vibrating from the full-body memories the musician had managed to draw forth, the last thing - the last thing - she wants is for someone to touch her deliberately when she can't have the touch she wants.

So the hand on her arm is a literal shock.

There's just enough room between a milling crowd of dispersing patrons for her to twist away, curls flying and a glare ready to be levelled at the person invading her space when she hears her name.

Not the mangled, Anglicised version she had to shorten to save her ears and the constant corrections she long ago gave up.

Her name. Eurydice. Hellenic and strong and she knows who said it and so the glare never manifests, because instead she stares wide-eyed at Orpheus, who was playing in some pub in London while she danced.

The sounds of the street disappear, and all she can hear is the ocean in her head. She sways once, then takes a single step forward and reaches out her hand. She has to know if he's really real, if it's her imagination from the music, if he's really standing backlit by a streetlamp and the shapes of people passing in the night, if whiskey and cigarettes and the music that felt it was for her alone - oh, hindsight! - is really him--

--she barely brushes his t-shirt with her fingertips before she sobs aloud as the truth hits home, and flings herself straight at him.

He can't move, frozen in place by the fear that he will reach for her and she'll disappear, dissipating into the night like every other vision of her that has come to torment him over the centuries.

But she moves toward him, and he feels her hand on his chest, solid and real. When she flings herself at him, he loses his breath again, but it's not enough to stop him wrapping his arms around her like she still might slip from his grasp. He lifts her from her feet, utterly oblivious to the crowd still spilling out around them.

When he manages another breath, it comes as a sob, and he says her name again, marveling at the feel of it in his mouth after all this time as much as he does at the feel of her in his arms, the beat of her heart pounding against his chest.

"Eurydice," he rasps. "Oh, gods.... Oh, my love...."

And then he can't say anymore because he's kissing her with a hunger he'd forgotten how to feel.

Eurydice died more than three millennia ago. She has been held in that time, by friends she'd made among the shades, by a goddess who saw something more in her than a mere nymph, by the family who were made to think they'd always had a daughter... by friends, by dance partners.

No touch compares to the warmth and strength of his arms pulling her close and lifting her from her feet as though he can't bear to let her go.

If he's having trouble breathing, so is she. The shock of the sudden change in her reality sucks all the air from her lungs, a sharp pain in her chest manifesting as a sound she doesn't even have a word for - some sort of sobbing, gasping, low, and ugly cry of agonised joy as her fingers venture into his hair, her arms across the tops of his shoulders.

How he manages her name again without breathing first is some sort of miracle.

"Orpheus..."

But anything more is lost in the heat of his mouth on hers as he kisses her with a searing passion she'd thought was lost to her forever. Her feet are dangling by his knees, and one tucks itself behind his thigh as she meets his lips, love and loss and sorrow and joy and lust and disbelief and euphoria all poured into a kiss she thinks might set her alight. Someone wolf-whistles good-naturedly as they pass.

She doesn't care.

Tears are streaming down her cheeks, and that blocks her nose, which is the only reason she pulls her mouth from his - enough to take in air.

"Where have you been?"

Her English is abandoned for the tongue they spoke when she last was alive, foreign to every modern ear and murmured against his lips.