⋆˙⟡ 1. the dialect of sound
chapter one of welcome home, dorothy! — a wiz!michael jackson x dorothy!reader fanfiction ✩°｡⋆⸜ 🎥
synopsis for this chapter: learn about the girl who grew up speaking music before she spoke anything else and how she finds her way to broadway, her role as dorothy, and to a party where a boy with careful hands and a woman with possessive ones leave her with more questions than answers!
a/n: i know this ones lowkey short in comparison to my other works AND theres only a bit of michael content in here BUT I CANT JUST JUMP RIGHT INTO THE STORY!!! learn about yourself a wee bit and how you got to the place youre in!!! i promise the next chapter will be more interesting. i also have a black/mixed reader in mind for this story so if youre upset by that U. CAN. LEAAVEEEE!!!
— comment here if you'd like to be in my permanent taglist for all works! ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶
the first thing you ever loved was sound.
not music, exactly—not yet, not with any of the vocabulary that would come later, the theories and the terminologies, the years of understanding what something was made of and what not. just sound. the particular resonance of your grandmother’s upright piano in the front room of her house in harlem, the one with the sticky D above middle C and the faintly yellowed keys that smelled vaguely of something you couldn’t name until you were much older and understood it to be decades of use from other people’s hands. it was as if the whole room changed when someone sat down at it, as though the air itself rearranged and became more intentional somehow–more inhabited.
your grandmother played her piano by ear. your mother sang along while she cooked—improvising words on the spot, low and habitual, entirely unconscious, in the same way others might hum or tap their fingers against marble counters, except your mother simply just took it a bit further. your uncle played trumpet in a jazz quartet that rehearsed on tuesday evenings in the basement of a church on 128th street, and sometimes, when you were very little, you were allowed to sit on the stairs outside the rehearsal door and listen, not allowed inside because the sound, your mother claimed, was too big for your delicate little ears. you sat on those stairs anyway, defying your mom as you pressed yourself against the door, letting the sound come through the wood and into your sternum. even then, at that very young age, you understood that something was being communicated that had no equivalent in ordinary language.
this was what music was in your family: not a simple pastime, not an ambition, not a gift—it was something older than any of those terms, and most importantly, less chosen. it moved through your household the way blood moved through veins, present in everything but also the cause of nothing because it simply just was.
some families passed down land, or names, or even the particular bump on a nose. yours passed down sound—not through instruction, but through environment; through the daily, unspectacular fact of it always being present in your day-to-day life. a dialect. the first one you ever learned, before english, before manners, before your own name felt familiar enough to claim as your own possession.
you were seven when your grandmother sat you at the sticky-keyed piano for the first time and placed your small hands on the keys with a care that felt ceremonial. she didn’t teach you scales or notation. she played what sounded like a phrase to you—six notes, simple and looping—and asked you to find it on your own. she watched your face the whole time, not your hands, seeing it contort as you finally figure it out on your second try. she played another, and asked you to try again. you found that one considerably quicker than the last. when you looked up at her, glowing with a new sense of pride, she wore an expression you’d spend the rest of your life learning to recognize in rooms full of people who understood what you were: she was looking at her own reflection, just decades earlier. someone who had also learned to play by ear.
your mother enrolled you in lessons the following week. formal lessons, with a woman named mrs. adeyemi who kept a studio apartment on 135th street and taught upwards of thirty children a week with a patience that bordered on sainthood and a standard that brooked absolutely no nonsense. mrs. adeyemi did not believe in coddling talent; she believed in work, in repetition, in the slow and unglamorous business of being one of the best at something, and you loved her for it even when she made you play the same eight bars so many times that your fingers cramped and your eyes stung with frustrated tears. being taken seriously at eight years old by a woman who had spent fifty years at the keys felt like being handed something precious.
singing arrived alongside the piano the way a second language arrives alongside a first—through proximity and necessity, with one instinctively informing the other with its patterns. your mother’s voice was a deep, burnished contralto that she used the way some people used their hands; expressive, an extension of whatever she was feeling that particular day. your own voice was the opposite—it was higher, warmer, with a quality your uncle once called nurturing, meaning it projected not through volume, but through something essential; some property of the voice itself that made it land in a room and stay there for as long as possible.
you sang in school choirs, in church, in the kitchen while your mother cooked beside you. you sang at your aunt’s wedding when you were about eleven and made the entire back row cry, which frightened you slightly but also thrilled you considerably more. you sang in the mirror, studying the multiple ways your own face twisted when you tried different vibratos, learning what happened to expression when different sounds moved through it.
theatre arrived when you were twelve, and it came the way most significant things in life come—sideways, through a door you hadn’t realized you were already standing inside.
a teacher at your school, a woman named miss vaughan; who wore her natural hair in an enormous halo and called a room to attention with one sharp clap; directed the annual school production with the kind of focused, rigorous ambition entirely disproportionate for a middle school play. that year it was a shortened version of the wiz, the broadway show that had opened the previous year to the kind of reception that made everyone in the industry sit up. miss vaughan secured the rights through some combination of charm and persistence that you didn’t fully understand at your age, then she cast you as dorothy without holding formal auditions. the moment occurred when she simply pulled you aside in the corridor one afternoon and said, “i know what you can do. the real question is do you want to do it?”
you’d said yes before the sentence was fully finished.
the two months of rehearsal that followed were the most alive you had ever felt. not happy, exactly—though you were extremely—but alive in the specific meaning of every sense being engaged, every part of you called upon and being used necessarily. you learned what it meant to inhabit a character, to live inside someone else’s skin without losing your own—to understand that performance at its truest was not pretending but rather a kind of radical empathy, an act of becoming that required you to be more yourself, not less, because only by being fully yourself could you access what was fully human in someone else.
miss vaughan was relentless in rehearsal, regardless of your early adolescence. during a notes session after a particularly rough run-through, she told you that dorothy wasn’t interesting because of what happened to her. dorothy was interesting because of how she chose to move through what happened to her—with hope, with stubbornness, with a love for the ordinary that the extraordinary kept failing to extinguish. “that’s your job,” miss vaughan stated. “not to play some girl simply trying to go home. you are to play a girl who already knows what home means.”
you recorded that particular comment in your notebook that night and read it every morning for the remaining three weeks of rehearsal.
the performance was held in the small, school gymnasium on a friday night in april. the set was painted on cardboard with coloured lights hung lowly from the curtains, and the yellow brick road played as strips of gold paper taped to the floor that kept coming unstuck at the corners even when nobody was dancing on them. the audience consisted of parents and siblings with a handful of teachers—a hundred people at most—in folding chairs. none of that mattered to you, though. when you walked out into the faulty lights and opened your mouth to let the first note go, something shifted in the room—you felt it, a quality of attention sharpening, the audience unconsciously leaning imperceptibly forward—and you understood, for the first time, what it felt like to hold a room all because you offered something phenomenal and the room accepted it with grace.
after the show, miss vaughan found you in the hallway outside the gym, still in costume, getting a sip of some water at the fountain. your mother stood nearby with her hand pressed over her mouth, overwhelmed tears running quietly down her face. miss vaughan didn’t say anything elaborate. she took both your hands in both of hers and held them for a moment, and what passed in that silence was enough for you.
there was never any real question after that. you were going to keep doing this.
the years between twelve and twenty were a particular kind of education—conservatory training braided with after-school programs and summer activities where you were always among the youngest. it all clouded your sense of time; the days folding into one another until you barely registered their passing. you learned to be quiet and watchful, to absorb everything in the movement of it all—but also the education of simply living in new york in a family that understood music as a native tongue, of being taken to see everything your mother could afford, of sitting in the dark in theatres across the city and watching people do the thing you were going to do and learning from each of them something different, something specific, the way each performer was solving the same problem through a different methodology.
you apprenticed. you did ensemble work in small productions. you understudied in regional theatres nearby and went on twice when the lead fell ill and both times you gave performances that people talked about in the particular hushed, slightly stunned way that preceded a reputation. you weren’t an overnight discovery like most dreams came to be. you were built, slowly and deliberately into something that lasts in the history books.
the broadway audition came just before you turned nineteen. the wiz had been running for a year by then, and the production was looking to replace its dorothy; the original lead had other commitments apparently, and the show—which was still selling out by the minute—needed someone who could carry it forward without losing what had made it work. hazel, your agent who had signed you the previous year after seeing you in a production of purlie in a theatre with forty seats and no air conditioning, called you on a tuesday morning with the kind of casualness that meant she was trying very hard not to sound excited.
“there’s an audition,” she said.
you knew what it was before she finished the sentence. something in the body always knew before the mind caught up—you were coming full circle.
you auditioned four times.
the first round had perhaps sixty different woman in a studio on west 46th street, a wide room with a piano against one wall and three people behind a folding table and the particular atmosphere of professional auditions everywhere—the careful non-acknowledgement of the other women in the room, the quiet management of nerves, the businesslike transaction of talent being assessed. you sang sixteen bars and read a side, were thanked warmly and professionally, and then walked out into the street not knowing anything, which was the only honest position available at the time.
the callback came ten excruciating days later, which was ten days spent thinking about it constantly while performing the behavior of someone who was casual about the whole ordeal—going to class, seeing friends, cooking dinner, lying awake at two in the morning staring at the stain on your bedroom wall in the shape of something that had always looked, to you, faintly like the coast of a country you’d never heard of.
the second round was significantly smaller. around fifteen women this time. the same three people sat behind the table, plus two more, one of whom you clocked as the director and the recognition produced a brief violent lurch in your chest that you smoothed over with the long practice of someone who had learned to manage stage fright by redirecting it into the adrenaline of your work; not giving it the power to collapse into paralysis.
you sang the full song this time, read more material, answered questions about dorothy, the show, about your own relationship to the story, and you answered them honestly and specifically because vagueness in auditions read as either insecurity or indifference, and you knew you were neither.
when you walked out into the elevator going down, you allowed yourself thirty seconds of something that felt like hope. then the doors slid open into the lobby and you set the feeling aside, because hope was useful only up to a point. past it, it became something that could hurt you.
the third round was shortened down to five women.
you recognized two of them from the broader new york theatre world—one a friend, or near enough, and you exchanged a look in the waiting room that communicated everything: i know, i know, here we are… what can you do? the other three were strangers, which told you nothing except that the net had been cast wide, that the production was serious about finding the right person—was it reassuring or daunting? that depended on the day.
this time they had you do a full scene with the scarecrow and the lion, actors they’d brought in for the callbacks, and the scene ran long—longer than you’d expected. twice the director stopped you mid-line to redirect you into a different route, and you took the notes and incorporated them cleanly, feeling, somewhere in the machinery of the work, that something was going right.
the fourth round was you alone.
a room, a piano, a handful of people who had now seen you three times and knew your voice, face, your choices. their attention felt differently by then—less like assessment and more like consideration, the way someone turned an object over in their hands to feel and understand its weight, physically and metaphorically. you sang. you read. you answered questions. the director looked at you across the table in a new way—quiet, and considering, and said, thank you, we’ll be in touch very soon.
he said very soon with a specificity that made hazel, who was waiting outside, sit up the moment you relayed it back to her.
the call came on an ordinary wednesday morning. you were in the middle of making breakfast, still in your pyjamas, when the phone rang from its place on the kitchen wall. you wiped your hands on a dish towel and answered it without any particular expectation—hazel's voice on the other end was doing the thing where it was trying very hard to sound casual, which meant it wasn’t.
“they want you,” she said. “welcome home, dororthy.”
the atmosphere of your kitchen continued entirely as before, despite the news tilting your world on a new axis. the slightly burnt toast popping out the toaster, the open window with ambient nose of the street rising from below. you stood at the counter and felt something so large move through you that, for a moment it had no name—it was not only joy, but something closer to recognition. familiarity. like something that had always been rue was only now becoming official.
“okay,” you managed out, breathless.
“okay?” hazel’s voice carried the specific exasperation of someone who had expected a more significant reaction.
“i mean–” you laughed, suddenly, helplessly. “yes! yes. tell them yes.”
the run of a broadway show was its own complete world, self-enclosed and self-referential, with its own rhythms and rituals and interior logic. you came to know the majestic theatre the way you knew your own apartment—every squeak and cold spot where you’d stand to cool down after the blaze of the lights, every sight line and hidden shadows that treated as blindspots, the places backstage where the floor dipped just slightly enough that you’d learned to watch your footing in the dark, lest you eat your own face by accident. you came to memorize the schedules of the cleaning crew and the name of the man who ran the lighting board and the particular order in which the orchestra tuned before each performance, which you could hear from your dressing room and which had become, over the months, as reliable and comforting as a heartbeat.
the work was extraordinary. not easy—it was never easy, the consistency of eight performances a week, the management of voice and body and energy, the constant calibration between giving everything and having something left behind—but extraordinary in the truest sense of the word; meaning outside the ordinary, exceeding it. you loved it with a completeness that sometimes surprised even yourself.
you loved the technical aspects with the same fervour as the emotional ones, which was something that set you apart from performers who experienced the two as separate. for you they were the same movement. understanding precisely how a note was produced—the breath, the placement, the physical architecture of it—it didn’t diminish the feeling for you, rather intensifying it instead, the way understanding how a particular light fell on a landscape made it more beautiful rather than less. you approached each performance with both the intellect and the body fully engaged, and this was clearly visible in your work, though you never thought about it in those words. it was simply how you were.
the audiences changed every night, which had honestly taken you a considerate amount of time to fully appreciate. in the beginning you had been aware of them primarily as a collective, a single responsive entity engulfed in darkness. but over the months you became attuned to the individual variations—the audience that laughed freely and easily or the one that was more restrained but no less moved, the matinee crowds that came slightly reluctantly, having been brought by someone else, and gradually, visibly, letting their reluctance go. you noticed the specific silence that meant genuine transport, the notable difference from the silence of mere attention. you noticed where people cried—almost always at the same moment, the same note, the same particular inflection where the strings let themselves linger a beat longer than the rest of the music—and every time, knowing it was coming, you aimed everything you had at it.
there were hard nights. performances where your voice was tired or your body ached or something in the backstage machinery had gone wrong and the energy in the wings was tense and fractious. nights when you stood in the wings before your entrance and felt, terrifyingly brief, like a fraud—like the version of you that could do this was somewhere else tonight and the version standing here in gingham and ruby slippers was an imposter who would shortly be found out on stage. you learned to move through those nights anyway, to trust the accumulated work even when you couldn’t feel it, to understand that the gap between what you were producing and what you felt yourself producing was more often an illusion than a fact.
and then there were nights like your very last one.
however, before your last show, there was the party.
it was march of 1976, eight months into the run, and the occasion was the label event in midtown that hazel had suggested you attend because being seen in rooms like that mattered, and hazel was right about these events with a consistency you had long since stopped questioning. the loft was on the fourteenth floor of a building on 57th street—exposed brick, low light, expensive flower arrangements that nobody was looking at, stevie wonder on the record player making the whole enterprise feel more honest than it really was.
you wore a deep, wine-coloured gown in liquid jersey, cut on the bias so it moved like water when you walked, the halter neckline plunging just enough to feel daring without trying too hard. a thin, gold chain rested against your collarbones, complimenting your hair that was out in its full, natural glory. you moved through the room the way warmth moves through one, and people found themselves drifting toward your light whenever the evenings glitter began to thin, in the same manner moths would find the one window still lit after the rest of the house had gone dark.
a woman named claudia—who worked in A&R and had been to see the show three times and made a point of telling you each time you crossed paths—made the introduction with the particular energy of someone who enjoyed being at the centre of things.
“you know diana,” claudia said, clearly not as a question.
diana ross in person had the quality of a lamp turned up very high—luminous and warm and slightly difficult to look at directly. she was dressed immaculately, leaving you almost insecure in your spot. she turned her full attention onto you with the precision of someone for who attention was a resource carefully allocated.
“oh! i’ve heard wonderful things about your show,” diana gushed. her voice was exactly as you’d expected from the records—rich with each word placed deliberately.
“thank you,” you said warmly, politely. “i grew up on your music. literally.” you joked lightheartedly, with a small smile.
something shifted, very briefly, in diana’s expression—not quite pleasure like you’d expected, but like a complex cousin; the feeling of being complimented by someone whose opinion, unexpectedly, might carry weight. then it quickly recalibrated, and her hand found the shoulder of someone standing just behind her, drawing him slightly forward into the conversation with the casual proprietary ease of someone arranging furniture in a room she considered hers.
“have you met michael?” she asked.
you hadn’t placed him until that moment—he’d been there the whole time, a step back and to the side, quiet in a way that made him easy to overlook in a room built for the opposite of quiet. he was younger than you’d expected, younger than most of the room by a fair margin—younger, you registered with a small private start, than you. although, it was only by a couple years. he was dressed beautifully but his attire came with the particular awkward stiffness of someone who hadn’t quite settled into his own clothes yet. michael jackson. you knew the face, of course—everyone knew the face—but the face in person was softer than its photographs, more uncertain, eyes that moved quickly over a room and then landed and stayed.
it occurred to you, with a faint, retroactive click, why diana’s expression had shifted so briefly at your earlier joke. you’d meant i grew up on your music lightly, easily, the kind of thing said without weighing it—but you understood now, doing the quiet arithmetic of his face against yours, that the line had landed somewhere else for her entirely. grew up on. a phrase that placed you, however innocently, on a particular side of a particular gap. diana’s gap. not, you were beginning to notice, the gap that now existed between you and the boy currently being drawn forward by her hand.
“hi,” he said, and held out his hand. his voice was quieter than you expected as well, careful, with a courtesy in it that felt almost old-fashioned. “it’s nice to meet you.”
“you as well,” you took his hand and shook it, finding yourself smiling at him in the easy, genuine way you smiled at most people; the same smile that put people at ease before they’d decided whether or not they needed to be.
something in his shoulders loosened, very slightly, at the smile. “i heard you’re in the show,” he continued. “the wiz? on broadway?”
“i am,” you said, pleased and also surprised at his knowledge. “you know it?”
“of course i do!” he said, something moving behind his eyes that you didn’t have time to identify, because now the hand diana had resting on his shoulder tightened—not dramatically, nothing anyone else in the room would have noticed, but you were standing close enough to see it. the small proprietary press of her fingers unsettled you as she angled herself a half-step closer to him as though recalibrating the space between the three of you.
you noticed it quietly—deciding to leave it without a snarky comment, but you did file it into your brain for later. there was something in the gesture that didn’t sit easily with you, something that read less like the casual fondness of an older family friend and more like a kind of staking; a watchfulness that didn’t quite belong to the family she was about to claim him as, and didn’t belong to ordinary professional closeness either. it was a small thing. it was also, you thought, not nothing.
“michael’s family, practically,” diana cut in, smiling at you, but the smile didn’t quite reach the rest of her face. “i keep an eye on him.” she added, with a light chuckle.
“that’s sweet,” you said, because it was the correct thing to say. though, something about the phrasing—keep an eye on him, said with a hand still resting possessively on a boy who could not have been older than seventeen or eighteen, easily a decade her junior and so much closer in age to you than to her—struck you as faintly strange. actually, incredibly strange. not alarming, exactly. just a small, dissonant note in an otherwise unremarkable exchange, the kind of thing you noticed and then set aside because it was none of your business and the party was loud and there were other people waiting to be greeted, more networking opportunities you need to take advantage of.
still, your eyes went briefly to the space between diana’s hand and his collar, and then to his face, which had gone carefully, practiced still—the particular stillness of someone who had long ago learned to hold an expression steady regardless of what was happening underneath it. you recognized that kind of stillness. you had worn it yourself, on stages, in rooms exactly like this one.
“broadway,” diana said, when the conversation moved to your work. the single word occupied more space than it should have. not unkind, precisely, but carrying the implication of a small room being politely acknowledged by someone accustomed to large ones.
“that’s right,” you said, with the same warmth as before, because warmth was not capitulation, and a smile given freely to someone being condescending cost you nothing, all the while communicating everything about the difference between the two of you.
“it’s such a committed work,” diana mused. “eight shows a week. i don’t know show you do it.”
“you find what the work asks of you,” you offered simply. “and you just give it.” you shrug.
you glanced at michael as you said it, not entirely meaning to, but you found he was already looking at you—listening with a quality of attention that seemed disproportionate to the smallness of the remark. he didn’t say anything, of course. he just held your look for a moment, something quiet and considering in his face, before diana’s hand found his shoulder again and gently, but unmistakably, steered him away from your moment together. diana (im)politely excused them toward a group of men in expensive suits who rearranged themselves slightly to accommodate her arrival.
he glanced back once, over his shoulder with a soft smile, before the crowd folded around him.
you went to the bar and talked the bartender into a glass of white wine, insisting that the difference between twenty and twenty-one was barely worth mentioning, and that your last broadway show was tomorrow—surely that earned you one small break. after finding said wine in hand, you found the window, where the lights of midtown spread themselves out below you like a field of fireflies, and you found, somewhat to your own surprise, that you were still thinking about the quiet boy with the careful handshake with the eyes that had landed and stayed on you. then your mind drifted, unbidden, to the hand that had steered him away from you—the strange ownership in it, the sense that you had witnessed something that you weren’t quite meant to notice.
michael, you thought. you didn’t know what to do with that peculiar thought, so you let it sit there, unexamined. but, beneath it, quieter and less easily set aside, set another thought entirely—about the particular, careful way diana had positioned herself near him all evening, the watchfulness in it, something that didn’t quite resemble family and didn’t quite resemble friendship either, something with an edge to it you didn’t yet have the right word for, and weren’t certain you wanted to find one.
broadway, you recalled her words.
like a small room to her.
you looked out the window at the dark city and thought: we’ll see.
the wiz had been the first thing that ever asked everything of you, and you had given it everything in return—eleven months, your voice, your body, the ache behind your sternum that had once belonged only to a girl on a basement staircase, listening to the sound her uncle created that was ‘too big for her ears’. you had built something inside that gingham dress that no review, no headline, no person passing through a midtown loft could take from you. you knew this the way you knew your own name, your own hands, the particular creak of the third stair backstage.
what you couldn’t have known, standing at that window with a glass of ill=advised wine and a city glittering indifferently below you, was that the boy with the careful handshake would turn out to matter. not in the way you might have guessed, watching him get steered away by a woman so much older than him, with a grip that didn’t quite make sense.
but something had been set into motion that night, quiet and unannounced, the way the truest things always were. a door left open by accident. a name you didn’t yet know what to do with, sitting somewhere just beneath your ribs, waiting.
you finished your wine and said your goodbyes. you went home to sleep before the last night of the only world you’d ever fully belonged to, not yet aware that another universe was already, almost imperceptibly, beginning.
tags! @strawbevrri @syrraj @sugarbombfart @animegamerfox @pixieelixer-24 @sgecat @dontsellit-tothedevil @lizbeth1002 @iwannarockwu @dykesaster @b3rk1ey @j-nae @gjhffjfd @sukunasstomachtongue @nctwichiu43 @ag1rllikeyou @yukio-tanaka @dani111 @lanibuggg
