MARCH SADNESS - A Symphony of Sorrow

[pumpkinhollow]

SYMPHONY OF SORROW

If the Audience Would Please Take Their Seats

You find yourself at the theatre.

You may be asking how you got here, why you are here, when did you arrive. But none of that matters, does it? Nothing matters. Whether you are shocked at yourself for thinking so or whether you have known that nothing matters for years on end does not matter either. Whatever meaning there was to be had in any of this escapes you now. Who you were and what you wanted, what you valued and stood for, it all seems now like such a hazy dream. Out of reach.

There is a ticket in your hand. It tells you where to go. You follow it dutifully. Ticket stubs are exchanged for playbills. A schedule of performances. Whatever. You numbly proceed to where you belong. Performers and stage crew to their places, orchestra to the pit, workers to their positions. All with the knowledge that there can be only pain.

A four-armed conductor in moth-eaten robes raises his baton, and there is music.

You deserve this.

You deserve this.

You deserve this.

Observer’s Overture

First Movement in E Minor

adagio, con dolore
PP

Lights down on the chorus, who sits in the stands. They are playing the role of the audience. Ad lib spoken word between chorus members seated near one another. Soft music begins to swell eerily.

Lights up on the stage. A performance begins, apparently in media res, where the chorus is meant to observe.

vacillante, improvvisato
cresc. P

The performers on stage play out their acts, appearing fearful. The chorus ad libs quiet uncertainty from the stands. Some of them will look down at their playbill and find their own name on the schedule of acts to come. There is a brief description on the page of the act that is scheduled for them. It is clear by the state of the ones already on stage that this isn’t something they have a choice in.

Chorus members attempt to rise from their seats, but cannot. Not yet. Foreshadowing to a later movement. For now, they must endure the overture.

Opera Infernale

Second Movement in Various Keys
( A medley of vignettes, performed in various styles)

chorale concerto a tutti, con affetto

F

Various chorus members rise between songs and make their way to the green room, where they are costumed. They have some time to talk with other incoming acts. They will find themselves and their loved ones being prepared for their acts.

segue

Those who performed before stop in the green room again. They look drained. A fate which awaits the incoming acts.

segue

On the stage, each act is a musical recreation of trauma. A worst fear, a most painful moment, an act of cruelty, a time of hardship. The styles will vary accordingly. If the other players in a given tale are present, they will receive their role without question. If a cast member has no fellow performers from their own world present, an understudy will be chosen to play any other roles from those that they are close to. Everyone is off book. Vocal quality is adjusted to match the conductor’s standards. Staff ensures there are no interruptions. The show must go on.

CODA: Für Nimona
A Coda in A Minor

There is a stranger in the green room, unmoving. Pale glowing eyes peer out from an ungulate-shaped void perched atop a high end suit. Antlers leer overhead. He is waiting for someone. Staff take no notice of him.

Ensemble's Lament

Third Movement in G Minor

bocca chiusa
PPP

There are other places to be besides the stage. Other roles to play.

pesante

Behind the stage, the stage crew toil under Baritone, the stage manager and the Viscount of Suffering. There is a pipe organ built into the man’s chest, and the bell of a horn where his heart ought to be. It shows. He is as cruel as he is miserable. He runs a tight ship.

declamando, letando

There are others in the pit, if they have the musical skill for it. And while this part of the performance is managed by a kinder sort, the Contessa of False Comforts is not so named for no reason.

The opera is long. There are no intermissions. The orchestra plays until their lungs ache and their fingers bleed, while Sonata assures them that it will all be over soon. Surely she cannot be lying. Surely there must be an end…

freddo, pietoso

Just outside the auditorium, there is work for the chorus serving food and drinks, taking ticket stubs for the endless stream of audience members, cleaning messes, or all other manner of soulless work. Perhaps these ensemble members simply did not interest the Conductor. Or it could be that they were made more miserable elsewhere.

Reprise - Observer’s Overture

Fourth Movement in E Major

impetuoso
FF It would seem that once a chorus member’s concerto is complete, they are free to move about the premises. At least until they are scheduled in a supporting role for another soloist. This means a chance to explore--- or escape.

presto repente, bellicoso
cresc.

Those attempting to escape will be met with resistance, however. Guarding the doors are shades, creations of the Conductor who can wear the faces of those held dear by those that look upon them. Escape, more likely, will come from within.

Members of the chorus who attempt to do battle with the Conductor, however, will find themselves up against something far more dangerous. Figures of glass, in all different shapes. Some abstract and solid, some hollow and human-like, and everywhere in between. Perhaps some chorus members will find one to be familiar.

The Hero will need an ensemble of her own to make it through and strike at the Conductor. Perhaps a resistance can be formed in a hidden location near the green room.

Homeward Aria

Fifth and Final Movement in C Major

tiempo di fanfara, vittorioso
F

When a dagger of Aster is driven into the heart of Prince Efrain of Sorrow’s Song, at last, the illusion fades. The members of the chorus relinquish their roles and find themselves on the summit of Crane’s Ridge.

It will be an arduous journey home, but it can be done with the solace that there is one less Demon Prince to trouble Pumpkin Hollow. Music in a joyful major key swells, then decrescendos.

enfatico, mancando poco a poco

| CONTENT WARNINGS: altered states of consciousness, entrapment, grief, depression, mood control, loss of bodily autonomy |

Comments

[lovethyneighb_or]

Doesn't he always.

He sighs. Mulcahy sinks into the chair, folds his hands in his lap, tilts his head back to the ceiling, and closes his eyes. If they need him out there again, they can wait, he resolves mildly. If these demons are here to draw utmost misery out of everyone, surely it's in their interest to let him sit here and marinate in it.

Fever, at least, has such patience with him.

[abhorrently]

Enough time goes by that she wonders if he's sleeping. Perhaps he is, exhausted enough by everything that there's nothing for it but to rest. Her protection is unwavering, but feels almost unnecessary. Back against the wall, her gaze unfocused, returning to a single night over and over, wearing a path to the graveyard for one without even a headstone. There is no good advice, nothing that makes the echo any less than what it is, a stillness that was not there before once the haze clears away enough to draw a circle around what has happened (what cannot be undone.)

When she speaks, it's less a conscious thing than she'd like, words dredged up, suspended like so much sediment. Whispers half to herself, half to someone who may not hear at all. The opera's scraped her raw enough that some filters feel terribly thin.

"...you feel it on your hands first. Even if you scrub them hard - it's still there. That film of it. Like it'll be in everything you touch - red-handed, always. And then the toll on the body, the exertion, but you have no idea how you tired yourself. It's just there in front of you. Unmoving flesh. Cooling blood. And you don't know if you want to remember what happened or not, but you will remember this. Now that it's gone quiet."

[lovethyneighb_or]

She speaks. He isn't sure if she's speaking to him, or to herself, if... if she's speculating his feelings or describing them to him--or prescribing them to him. No, she wouldn't do that. No. Not with her hatred of 2, or the way she shielded his naked fury, the last time something like this happened. The way she let him throw a tantrum like a child. Or an animal.

After he stops speaking, slowly, he holds a out hand in front of his face. There's still stage blood underneath the fingernails.

"... I didn't..."

Softly: "I didn't even remember."

[abhorrently]

"Yeah. That's the heart of it. All the evidence is in front of you, but the most important part is just...not there at all."

Absence is its own violence. A cruelty defined by what it is not rather than what it is. It's so hard to describe the shape of something that isn't, to name when it starts and when it ends.

[lovethyneighb_or]

"And I could do it again."

He'd argue it may be even easier now, with how much bloodshed he's been forced to witness. How much he's been forced to endure. Like uncorking a bottle, or losing your grip on a leash.

Softer: "I could do it again."

[abhorrently]

A slow nod, and then another.

"You could do it again. Even if you don't want to, you could."

And knowing that, it means something. It means that the capacity exists within you, looms over you like a sword, that you cannot say I would never, because you have. You could. And it tangles itself around every one of your organs, a netting to cage them in. Every breath, every meal, every twitch of the nerves. You could.

[lovethyneighb_or]

"Because I didn't want to, the first time. And I did."

There's no running from it now. Everyone knows. It lives in him, just beneath the skin. On his worst days, he will look at another person, often his own friends, and know that he could.

"It isn't that there's something beastly in me. I am. I am not poisoned with it. I am... I am."

Poisonous. Animal.

He turns just enough to spot Fever out of the corner of his eye. "You know." It's a question.

cw: imagined body horror

[abhorrently]

"I know."

She's known since she woke up, in agonizing pain with only the drive to survive. She's known since she stepped foot on the Serena Eterna, still with the ghost of rope around her wrists. She's known since she fell to her knees on Marrow Isle, her first day, wondering when it would all be taken.

"I'm something just...wearing a person's face. Not really one at all."

(In a dream, she looks at herself in the mirror, and feels for the edges of where her face clings. Pulls on them, feeling them give way, nails sliding into meat. Prying it up like floorboards, wet and sticky. And old blood leaks out of the seams, dark and viscous, and she can see, the more it comes up, the emptiness behind the flesh.)

cw talk of intrusive thoughts, body horror and guts in the linked

[lovethyneighb_or]

...

"Even before this, I had been stationed in a war hospital near the front lines. We processed hundreds of wounded at a time. I aided in the process of processing the dead, but I always stood to help the surgeons in the operating room too--I'm very well familiar with the ways in which... in which the body comes apart. And what we're all made out of."

One body would be enough to make a man wake up screaming.

"I think about that, sometimes, the, ah... the ways in which we are all so much substance. My faith so often speaks about flesh. I have seen and known it as something that can be sewn up and taken apart. And I... I look at the people I love. And I know. I could do it. I could reach over and... do it. I could see it in front of me. There are days where I just cannot look at anyone."

He reaches out a hand in front of him, watching it, distant from him and still his. All knuckles and veins, beating blood and stretched skin. Flesh. Behold the Lord's work above; behold the Beast's work beneath. The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me...

"I am a lie," he says, quiet. "I appear kind. I speak quietly. I am a priest of a, a loving faith, and I am afforded so, so much goodwill and grace because of it. But. You saw... me. Everyone saw me."

He saw.

[abhorrently]

There is quiet, not out of shock, but to allow Mulcahy the time to keep speaking. In the distance, the murmur of movement, some other scene, some other new insult inflicted upon others. Dragged hither and thither for the damned show. Her hand's gone up, found the side of her neck where Jean not so long ago left her choking on her own blood. The one that gets stiff, and the wretched feeling of trying to live regardless.

I could reach over and do it. How often has Fever thought that herself? How many times - sitting at work, analyzing that she could use anything on her desk to strike down a coworker, a visitor? In the company of friends, when the usually comforting weight of daggers close to her body almost whispers in how simple it would be when they trust you enough to relax. Curled up beside Phil, listening to his heartbeat, and feeling it slide into her mind like a needle aimed for a tender spot.

Nowadays, her hands don't twitch as much. Nowadays, they can hold something fragile and not be sorely tempted to break it. She could do it. But she doesn't want to.

"Do you want me to hate you for it?"

Does he want her to name him a hypocrisy, when faith and violence are not incompatible, in her world? When soft voices and kindness exist in the same spheres as bloodshed? It would be difficult to do.

They know. You might never have absolute faith in your hands again.

[lovethyneighb_or]

No. Please. He wants to be loved. He wants to be loved so, so, so badly; he wants to be loved so hard that it saves him from himself, and he knows he does not deserve any of it.

He feels warmth prick his eyes, and turns away so as not to elicit undue pity.

Instead he says, "I don't know how you couldn't."

[abhorrently]

"I don't know how I could."

You don't get to decide you're not worth loving, she remembers distantly, and her voice is steady, neither pitying nor cruel.

"I don't know your faith well, but where I come from, even the most compassionate god has limits to what he can endure before he snaps. So I cannot think you're false. I can't condemn you for the violence when I've done worse for less reason. And I don't think you only appear kind."

Hate, therefore, has nowhere to take root, nothing it might falsely anchor itself in.

[lovethyneighb_or]

He bows his head briefly.

“It’s... true, yes. That even in His infinite Love, His wrath is… well—well known. He has struck down whole cities for cultures of transgressions. But it—” his shoulders shudder, “—it… it isn’t… the Lord has a plan for us, and He is… the Judge. The Judge, at the end of life. Justice is His to deliver. It is our duty to live well and follow His word as best as we can. To, to interfere, and act as Judge in His place, for us to determine who may live and who may die, is to blaspheme. To open your heart to anger and hatred. And become..."

[abhorrently]

She listens, and does not expect him to raise his head. But if he had, he would have seen a furrow cross her brow. Even with the aid her circlet brings, even after so many months away from all she knows, some things refuse to settle under the category of other people's worlds. Fever will accept much because someone says it's like that where they are from, and yet, she needs must question.

"...Why are you expected to behave better than your god does?"

No mortal is absent limits. If there is such a selfless being, that even after all he endured would have not felt rage, not felt hatred, then truly they must be something frightening to behold.

"Things happen. Things that you cannot undo, that you did not intend, but that have still happened. If he is a being of infinite love, would he not listen to you anyway? When he knows wrath himself, could he not look at you, and know what you felt?"

If he truly was acting as the Judge, would Mulcahy feel this grief still?

[lovethyneighb_or]

"It is not about behaving better." His voice is bitter, verging on acidic. "It is--it is--God's wrath is controlled, it is just, it is not mere emotional acts of vengeance, it is judgement. He--He..."

He loses the line of thought, and his arms go slack where he'd been gripping one of the armrests.

"Yes, I... I think it frightens some of the locals that our sacred icon is of the Lord dying. But the point is that at the same time He was fully divine, He was also fully human. He suffered and bled. The point of a God like this one is that He is a God who... recognizes us. And forgives--but I..."

Another pause. (Find the reason, Mulcahy. It was there.)

"That... that wasn't an act of justice, Fever. I was just... beastly. Hateful and petty. I had allowed Powell's bloodlust to pass over me a dozen times before, but just that once, there... there was always a whispering of the Devil in my heart. And that time, it listened. I had no mind and no control. I remember nothing of it."

[abhorrently]

"Of course it wasn't justice. You said that your god is the one who delivers that. But I didn't say it was justice - I said it was wrath. You remember nothing - and what I saw was something fighting to stay alive, as every living thing strives to do. I saw someone desperate for that man to stop. Who didn't enter into murder with malice aforethought, only sought to survive and to make it end. If your god was also human, then surely he knows humans have limits - even those in his service, who can't live well if they aren't living in the first place."

She's guessing her way through this, feeling the shape of the conversation as if it was at her fingertips instead of in her hands, trying to not think about how much her head aches. It pulses harder every time she resists naming her own sins, as she tries to give structure to the thoughts in her head.

"You can't have been expected to just roll over and die."

[lovethyneighb_or]

He already hears the protest in his mind, an indignant cry not in his voice, but Hawkeye’s: why should I shoot? What makes their lives less valuable than mine?

He curls up tighter in the chair.

“I already had. More than once, and not only by him.” Fever already saw the show. She knows the way in which he and Hawkeye both refused to fight, waiting for the violence to eventually pass through them.

“I don’t… he had chosen a bad time,” he says, as though describing a coincidence of rain over a shopping trip. “He caught me in weakness.”

[abhorrently]

"Is that what you'd really call it? Weakness?"

Or grief so profound it seemed like one could draw anatomy based on how he was sliced open. Here is the heart of the priest, bruised and battered, pounded by verbal fists until it might be tender enough to be consumed whole.

[lovethyneighb_or]

"What other name for it is there that does not mean the same thing?"

The point is this: he wasn't strong enough.

[abhorrently]

"You were in mourning."

The glitter still lingers under his eyes. Tears he is perpetually shedding, silent agony. As if she doesn't know. As if she doesn't sometimes feel a rippling in her spine, tingling in her skin, disconnection from the shape.

"How much are you truly expected to bear? Really and truly, as a mortal being?

[lovethyneighb_or]

He curls up tighter, his fingers curling into his hair.

And it doesn't quite sound like his own words when he says, "It doesn't matter how I felt. It matters what I did."

[abhorrently]

"Believe me. How you felt does matter."

It doesn't change what happened. But it matters all the same. It matters, because the swift stroke of an assassin is different from one's blow roused by insult is different than a parent's move to ensure the safety of their child. It matters, because all murders are different, and some are not even murders at all.

[lovethyneighb_or]

Small:

"Why?"

[abhorrently]

"Because capacity and willingness are two separate things. Because you yourself said it. You wanted to, but you did not want to."

In her mind, she is collapsed on a couch that stinks of turpentine, and she cannot make herself get up, because she is too relieved in that memory to move. She does not want to kill, and she will not be made to.

"What's the last thing you remember feeling? Before you woke up with his blood on your hands?"

[lovethyneighb_or]

It feels like his brain is prickling, the way a phone does when the connection goes bad.

"... Pain? Panic. And--and so much anger, I never... I never understood why he couldn't just--leave us alone."