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

[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."

[abhorrently]

"He caught you in your grief, after so many times you were made to endure dying, attacking you yet again with his hatred and malice. And you wanted to be left alone. And no kind words or trying to meet him as a fellow man or outreach of faith would touch him - no amount of endurance seemed to wear him out, at least, from what I gather from your demonstration."

She looks at him, and infuses her voice with a tone that does not outright command, but asks, as a touch under the chin might lift a bowed head.

"Forgive me if I'm presuming too far, but I think it's simple. I think you didn't want to die again. That doesn't make you malicious, or untrue to your faith, or false. You'd already lost him. Why should you have to lose your life again? When in that place our lives were pretty much the only thing we had that was really ours?"

Because someone came and demanded it? Because the ship in those days was ruled by might making right, bloodsport that would only ever create an unending hunger - she's fortunate, she thinks, that she came in past that era. Else she'd be little more than a blood drunk beast constantly in a war.

[lovethyneighb_or]

Curled up in the chair and facing away, his palms over his eyes and his fingers gripping his hair, his back twitches and trembles. It isn’t clear that he’s sobbing until, after a while of silence, he sucks in a strained, shaking gasp.

(Fever has found it. His truth. Finally—finally, one person to have seen it, to understand it, to know how he really felt instead of the version that 2 rather literally burned upon his mind, and to repeat it back to him. Anyone except Mulcahy himself to corroborate his account. A witness. Objectivity.

But even if Fever has cleared the briars to find it, the briars are still there; so much of him rages to be told he was anything but a monster waiting to happen. His heart wraps around the story like a bear trap; to get it to let go would require a feat of immense strength to wrest open its steel jaws.

There’s so much noise in his head. He can’t think. A million arguments that aren’t working. He can let go. He has to let go. He just can’t let go.)

[abhorrently]

He weeps, and she doesn't know him enough to soothe his hurts in the way she might someone else - doesn't know when touch is welcome, and when it's unbearable. But she sees the agony, and witnesses it, feels an echoing ache from her own chest.

(From the depths, from darkness, from something locked away in old stone where no breath of fresh air passes, where the sun does not cast its light, where nails dig into flesh and do not know how to let go. It's all she has. It's killing her. It's never going to hurt less. The door is still shut.)

When she continues, it is soft, demanding or asking nothing of him at all. Another echo, less pained and floating above all the rest - a lifeline shared to a soul who needs it.

"Right now, you're in control. Maybe not always, and maybe there are times when it will be hard to remain so, but here and now in the present - if you don't want to hurt the people you care about, you won't. No one is going to make you do anything."

It's a gamble, to say that when they're still in this demonic domain. But his tears might be price enough to pay that he's left in peace.

[lovethyneighb_or]

Fever speaks, and her words resonate in him; there is a voice inside him that repeats after her, each word, and echoes them again after she’s done. They cling to him. In time, they will grow in him, or perhaps he will grow into them; but for now, they sit on the surface, unshakable and bewildering. And it is so very painful.

He wails, quiet and long.

“Why—“ both whispered and groaned, “—why do you say these things to me? Why do you speak to me?”

[abhorrently]

"Because we're here, and you haven't told me to go away."

It's that simple. It always has been. Even as she was scavenging for the shards of a self in the dirt, cutting her hands on every broken edge, it has always been like this. Talk to people, and listen, and speak unfettered by what might hold another's tongue. It's how she found herself working to save others, time and again - how she's found herself being the listener for people who want to talk and need someone to withhold judgement while they do.

(Sometimes, she feels a little like a vessel, enough space left empty inside of herself to hold what other people need to pour out. Their uncertainty, their secrets, their pain...and sometimes their dreams.)

There is no great and grand plan behind her words, no outpouring of specific pathos for him or worried and delicate hesitation. It's simply a hand extended out to someone sprawled in the mud, fallen when the rain turned the path into something treacherous.

[lovethyneighb_or]

It is the only way he would have accepted this. Every answer involving some kind of pathos for him would have been rejected. The hateful wolf that chews on his heart neverending would never accept any words like because I care about, or am concerned for, or worry about you. It couldn’t be so. He wouldn’t deserve it.

But Fever is only acting according to her inclinations, and thus it does not matter. Mulcahy has no say over her, and if this is how she chooses to spend her time, then it is simply so. She came near him; and seeing him, was moved with compassion.

“Don’t—don’t…”

He sobs.

“Don’t. Please don’t go.”

[abhorrently]

It surprises her, this request. Perhaps it will never stop being surprising, when people ask for her, when they want her to stay. Never quite forgetting in her subconscious that there can always be a moment when you are told to go, when you're too much or when when you're no longer needed. Dismissed, because you are no longer wanted there. But he asks her to stay, and what else can she do?

"Okay."

What can she do but lower herself to sit on the ground, because standing means you can turn around and leave? Sit, and linger, for there is effort in the rise. She sits, and she does not go. When he can open his eyes again, there she will be, still there.

[lovethyneighb_or]

He weeps. He tries to pull himself together so that he isn’t making her just sit in a room while a man sobs his eyes out, but it’s like trying to climb out of a valley made of glass; he just can’t get any purchase to do so.

But he stands, slowly unfolding himself from the chair, and stumbles haltingly towards Fever, landing on his knees before her. His hands still cover his face—save for one eye and the corner of his mouth.

“You know,” he says. “You know.”

Because no one else has understood. Not like her. He has heard plenty of cases for Powell deserving it and Mulcahy just defending himself, but no one else has addressed his confusion. His feelings of having failed in his relationship with God; his feeling like beast and horror at his own personal capacity; that nevermind he keeps the company of murderers, he did that; that he had been killed before without turning into a monster, so why, why, why this time. No one else has been able to understand all of it at once—not like her.

He knows, now, and is understood. He is understood, and he is not hated.

“You understand.”

And maybe he can be forgiven.

[abhorrently]

"Yes. I do."

Just don't ask her how. Do not ask her how hard-won this understanding is, the dawning horror at knowing what you are capable of, and how one must always, perpetually, consistently choose. Just because she's not straining against its pull all the time doesn't mean it's not there. It eats away at the core, dwells in every limb, every tiny fiber of her being. Her shadow ought to live in its shape. And she knows, she would have made Powell beg for death. He would be left crawling and mangled, his hate answered with hate of her own. But Mulcahy doesn't need her vengeance. He needs her to understand.

Perhaps it is in how much she doesn't know, really. Fever cannot see the ties between Mulcahy and his god that does not even come to touch the world personally. She cannot know what is deserved, when those that deserve more are given less and vice versa, when she is proven wrong again and again about what she herself deserves, about what she will be given. She can only see the person in front of her, and what she is told, and what she has been shown. And the person in front of her weeps in horror at what he knows he can do, the weight forever upon his shoulders, thinking I failed at being good.

If he will allow her, she reaches for him slowly, following impulse. She wants to take his hands in her own, and hold them there, to give them weight.

[lovethyneighb_or]

She takes his hands, and he is, at first, horrified to be seen. Perhaps it doesn't matter--she sees everything about him for what he is anyway, including this sobbing mess--but still he tries to hide his face, bowing low. But he does not pull away.

He does not understand, but he can see this: no fear. And his hands cannot grip a weapon or form a fist, because they are holding hers.

"I'm sorry."

[abhorrently]

His hands will only do what he wants them to. If he wanted to pull away, Fever would let him - but here and now, they are still. Capable of touching another person without some kind of catastrophe taking place. She cannot reassure him that his hands belong to a human, but they are his, in the end.

"It's all right, Mulcahy."

By all laws she would dictate, the holy man should not kneel before the sinner. And yet, here they are.