[moon goddess] [home for flowers]

“You hear it, too, right? The piano?” he asks the second violin when Draven stops the music to move on to a different section – quiet enough to ostensibly be speaking to his neighbour, but loud enough that Draven could hardly miss it.

“Do I hear the piano?” Kallus asks with polite confusion, without taking his eyes off a particularly tricky run at the end of the section.

Cassian sighs. Does nobody around here know how to do their fucking jobs? Has his second suddenly gone tone-deaf? That would be a fucking concern, since he has to lead the orchestra for the Stravinsky, and clearly their star pianist is no help at all –

“One of the keys is off,” Cassian says, forcing his voice into a somewhat diplomatic tone.

“Could be,” Kallus says vaguely, still scanning the sheet music. “It’s only rehearsal. Can I borrow your pencil?”

It’s dress rehearsal. Some concertmaster you’ll make. Cassian shoots Kallus a dirty look that completely goes over the young musician’s head – and instead lands on the woman at the piano, who returns it with a startlingly cold, targeted glare of her own.

So she must hear it, if she was expecting him to look. Or she heard his comment – that would require pretty good ears, though. Which, again, would suggest that she hears that fucking E is off.

That settles it. It’s dress rehearsal. This sound is unacceptable, and he still has time to fix it.

Draven’s warning glance over the conductor’s stand turns dejected, but Cassian is confident he’ll get over it. He never minds Cassian being a stickler when it suits him.

.

“It is perfectly tuned, captain,” Chirrut Îmwe says placidly, and Cassian is so annoyed about this flat-out denial of reality he forgets to be annoyed about the stupid nickname – a fucking symphony full of artists and the best joke they can come up with is that Draven is like a general, and he consequently his captain. Hilarious.

“It’s evidently not –“

“It is perfectly tuned,” Chirrut repeats in the same unbothered tone.

“E3 is –“

“Perfectly tuned as of this morning,” he replies, giving him what he clearly takes for a meaningful wink, and shuffles off into the wings again to enjoy the rest of his break, leaving Cassian to waste the rest of his on this nonsense.

Fucking fantastic.

.

Jyn Erso greets him with the same cold, defiant look she had on earlier before he’s even opened his mouth to speak.

“Ran out of other people to complain to, Andor?” she asks cooly and swigs the rest of the murky tea in her paper cup.

He bristles. Some nerve on that woman. This is his orchestra, she doesn’t get to be this uppity at the mere idea of being asked to play ball.

“Your E3 is flat,” he gives back, matching her tone. “I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“It’s tuned to my specifications.”

Go easy on the expensive soloists, Andor, Draven said. He takes a deep breath, and makes a pretty half-hearted attempt at a conciliatory tone. “Can you just check it? It’s an easy fix.”

Her nails, decked out with splintering black polish, dig into the soft lip of her paper cup, but her green eyes don’t relent.

“It’s tuned to my specifications,” she repeats.

“No, it’s tuned to –“ Cassian groans. “You tampered with – Look, whatever you did to that key specifically, can you just get Mr. Îmwe to fix it? That fucking E is throwing off the whole passage –“

She scoffs. “Can you get the stick removed from up your arse? I guarantee you most of this orchestra doesn’t even hear the difference –“

“I don’t care!” he snaps, his commitment to diplomacy immediately forgotten. “I hear it, and it’s flat, and I’m telling you to fix it.”

“I sound exactly the way I want to sound,” Erso gives back, the empty cup crumpling dangerously in her hand, “exactly the way I was hired to sound –“

“You weren’t hired to be out of tune. You can retune the whole fucking thing to G minor for your solo during intermission for all I care, but –”

“Yeah, absolutely let me retune my piano in the twenty-minute intermission, this isn’t your stupid fiddle –“

“You can do whatever you want with your own piece,” Cassian cuts her off in what he hopes to be a final sort of tone – going by the ducked heads of the people suddenly busily tiptoeing past them, it would have worked on the rest of his colleagues – and finishes through gritted teeth: “But you’re not gonna throw off the whole Rachmaninov for your – your fucking sense of whimsy or whatever this is.”

Something bright and hot sparks in her eyes at that, and she draws herself to her full height right up in his face – it’s really not a very impressive move on paper, but something in her eyes makes him want to run for cover, anyway. (Something else in him is drawn to that sudden fire like a very deplorable, very lonely moth, and he does his best to swat down the errant instinct.)

“I don’t have to explain my methods to you,” she says, still with that sudden rage he’s not sure he’s earned – but he’s not about to back down. She doesn’t scare him. Well, she kind of does (and that sad moth part of him flutters at that, too), but he’s right. The key is flat. He’s right, no matter how sharp or how green her eyes are.

“I don’t need you to explain your methods, I just need you to fix that key when I tell you to.”

“Or what?” she demands quietly, stepping even closer, and Cassian has to force himself not to look away.

“Do your job and we won’t have to find out,” he gives back, but the commanding tone that usually comes more easily than he’d like to admit comes out less than impressive. He watches Erso stalk off with another withering look in his direction, and almost thinks he hears the shaky first notes of that Vivaldi again.

He’s not surprised that she’s angry. She plays like she’s angry, angry and tired, and God, he gets that. It’s just that he’s more tired than angry these days, too tired to deal with the fallout of some wilfully contrarian “artistic choice”. A part of him – the delusional, sad moth part, probably – somehow assumed she’d understand. He didn’t think she was the artsy allures type.

(He’s just probably spent a decade building up an image of this woman in his head, and it’s not her job to live up to it, and he should stop being an ass and let it go… but also, how hard could it be to fix whatever bullshit she’s pulled with the piano? Why would she actively make herself sound worse, and then get mad at him when he told her not to do that? It’s ridiculous, all that time spent on getting the orchestra sound to perfection, only for the soloist from out of town to come in and deliberately wreck everyone’s hard work –)

“What’s going on with you two?” asks a cheerful Melshi, suddenly appearing by his side with a half-eaten bagel and gesturing to Cassian, who’s probably frozen in the middle of the room, staring daggers after the equally murderous looking soloist Melshi just passed in the doorway.

“I just told her to fix her E3!” Cassian says, altogether too defensively.

His old friend raises a brow. “Can’t leave the piano to the star pianist?”

“She messed with it! On purpose! Who does that?”

“Musicians, Cassian.”

“It’s childish. She’s throwing off the whole piece, it’s a complete waste of – of everyone’s work, and the goddamn Rachmaninov.”

“Says you, noted fan of Rachmaninov?”

“It’s childish,” he repeats petulantly, before it occurs to him that he sounds like a child. “It’s unnecessary.”

Melshi’s brow raises higher. “Well, shit. Has someone finally rattled our stoic concertmaster?”

“Rattled my sense of harmony, maybe,” he grumbles, suddenly remembers the water bottle in his hands, and busies himself with trying to unscrew the lid he screwed on way too hard in his annoyance a few minutes earlier.

Melshi smirks at him, utterly delighted. “Ah. Is that what this is?”

Cassian throws him a hard look. “I can come after you if you prefer. Draven nearly threw the baton at you. If you don’t pick up your runs for the concert  –“

“Yeah, wasn’t my best work,” Melshi says with a shrug, then grins again. “And yet, I had to come to you to hear about it? Any other day, you’d’ve been on my case fifteen minutes ago.”

Cassian returns his attention to his stuck lid and hopes Melshi will let it go but, of course, he does not. Worse, his face brightens with a sudden memory.

“Didn’t you tell me about her? Years ago? That was her, wasn’t it? That girl at that concert that you literally never even talked to?”

“Yeah, I think it was,” he replies casually, wasting a lot of energy on nonchalance that is completely lost on the tuba player, whose smirk only widens.

“Oh, you want that one so bad.”

Cassian sighs, gives up on his water bottle and the conversation and throws one last dark look to where Erso has disappeared into the shadows. “Doesn’t make her fucking E any less off.”

.

By the next break, Draven and Kallus are both looking at him like he has lost his mind, and he feels like it, a little.

Okay, maybe. Maybe he’s paying a little too much attention to the piano, for his own reasons. Maybe that’s why it bothers him so much.

But it’s audible. It’s off.

He tries to talk Chirrut into just fixing whatever she did to the key, no matter what she said. The old man just throws him a quietly disappointed look from his milky eyes and tells him “I really thought you paid more attention, captain”, which Cassian can only assume means “no”.

Hell, he had half a mind of just going to the piano to see if he can find out what she did himself. But she has clearly taken his flustered threats seriously, because Jyn Erso has become inseparable from the house piano. She’s spent the entire break sat on the floor with her back against the instrument, sipping on another cup of tea and watching the orchestra like a hawk.

Which has reduced him to acting like a complete nutjob, sneaking around a stage that’s been the closest thing to home for him for years like the fucking Hamburglar. Waiting to catch a very talented musician that he’s had a weird, distant crush on for a decade unawares. So he can untamper her piano. He’s thirty-six. This is ridiculous.

But he can’t lose this job, either, and she won’t be reasonable, and he tried to be an adult and talk to her! It’s not his fault! She knows what it’s like. She knows it’s his job to watch for the tune. She’s doing this on purpose –

And yet, the longer he stands there, going through the motions of the Stravinsky for cover more than anything, he gets that bitter taste in his mouth. She looks so defensive, and so tired – he knows the feeling, intimately, and it’s brutal. And, stupid though it is (she learned his name this morning), it feels meaningfully worse somehow that he’s done it to her. He would bet all his meagre savings that to her, he’s already just another guy in a long line of guys who looked down on her and told her what to do and couldn’t respect her enough to trust her vision.

The image grates.

He’s just talked himself into getting her another tea and trying again like a reasonable person, when he sees Melshi walk over to her, which unlocks a completely new worst-case scenario in his head.

Jyn Erso thinking he’s an annoying dick who can’t respect her vision because she’s a woman is bad enough. Jyn Erso learning he’s being an annoying dick because he, a thirty-six year old man, can’t handle the creepy crush he has on her is… substantially worse.

“So, you’ve, uh, encountered our first chair?” Melshi says, causally like he’s commenting on the weather, and she huffs.

“Yeah. Bursting with envy at your work environment.”

“He’s alright, really,” Melshi says fondly, and Cassian is torn between being slightly touched and slightly sick to the stomach with apprehension of whatever Melshi is about to say next.

“He’s just… Really, he’s just nervous about the Stravinsky.”

“Why?”

Melshi shrugs. “Some kid prodigy was gonna play the solo. But he broke his wrist a few weeks ago, so now Andor’s gotta play it –“

Erso scoffs again. “And what, he forgot he’s one of the best violinists this place ever had?”

Melshi raises a brow at her, and she adds, defensively: “What? I said he was a prick. He’s not less of a prick if he’s brilliant.”

“…I see his reputation proceeds him,” Melshi says with a smirk.

She shrugs and returns to her tea. “I do my research. Calm down.”

“Well, I’m just sayin’. He’s got a lot riding on this. So, cut him some slack.”

Cassian barely has time to be embarrassed that he’s being portrayed as some nervous kid who needs everyone to give him grace because he has to play a solo, somehow needing this more than her, the soloist on the fucking poster(as if he hasn’t been playing this instrument for thirty years, Jesus Christ – ), before that same anger from before flashes across her face again, tinged with an icy derision that makes even Melshi take an instinctual half-step away from her.

“Maybe I need some slack,” she says flatly. “None of you fucking knows me, alright? I’m sorry your friend’s nervous about doing his fucking job. I’d love to just do mine without him staring daggers at me. Maybe you can tell him that.”

“Look, I –“

“And while you’re on it, remind him he’s a grown-ass man, and the only thing more embarrassing than spending an entire dress rehearsal getting on my ass about a choice I’m making is to have to send his buddies to talk to me instead.”

She isn’t wrong.

She is also – and this thought follows him through the rest of rehearsal, and the train ride home – clearly upset about something more than just a piano key. Because, no matter how infamous of a loner you are, if something causes this much drama, you’d just explain it, right? And there was some real bitterness, a genuine hitch in her voice there – maybe I need some slack. And the look he caught in her eyes, the one that pissed him off so much, the one that looks like he’s feeling – how tired she looked, in all that anger.

He stepped on something, on accident. He didn’t make her feel that, he just brought it out. He made it worse.

And the thing is, he knows he can hurt people that way. He’s done it on purpose, a lot more than a decent person should have, and he’s good at it. It’s an unfortunate talent he has, really; he finds pain points in people, almost without looking for them.

But he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like how easy it is for him, and he really doesn’t like not even understanding what he did.

(It’s the Catholic in him, maybe. He likes to have an orderly list of his sins.)

And what’s worse, it feels like he should know. And that’s irrational, he knows that – but still. He can still feel the gut punch of that piano piece in New York, that music that felt like something written for him in a way he can’t explain. Not in a cheesy, romantic, nice way, in an uncomfortable way, in a way that made him feel transparent and fragile and brutally, shamefully lonely.

She still plays like that, and he still feels like that when she looks at him. And it feels intrusive to look back, but also like he has to – because, God, when you feel that lonely, you look for someone else, right? You have to reach out before it crushes you.

And so, he has to know. He’s only human. And he is really fucking lonely.

.

He loses hours to pointless, dogged googling until he finds it, at the end of an obscure documentary about several newcomer pianists from six years ago.

“Is there a particular sound you’re emulating?” the interviewer asks off-screen, and Jyn, looking younger than she his in an oversized black sweater, answers without quite facing the camera.

“Not in my technique, I don’t think. But… my mother played,” she adds, so quiet the mic barely picks it up, tugging her sleaves over her hands as she talks. “My father bought her a nice piano with his first paycheck. It was in pretty bad condition, scratches all over, and one of the keys was a little out of whack. But I… I don’t know, I guess I just grew up thinking that’s how a piano sounds. She died a long time ago. I, uh, I figured out how to make my pianos sound like that. Like hers. I don’t always do it, but… when it’s appropriate for the piece. Or on her birthday.”

Then, a jarring cut to Jyn at a piano on a European stage, playing a mournful solo piece, before an awkward transition to the young Chinese boy the documentary was also following.

Well, shit.

In the music playing from his other tab, on her recordings, he hears it. Everywhere. E3, just slightly off every time. Not… flat, really, but less resonant than it should be, some overtone just missing. It does sound like those out of whack pianos – he didn’t recognize it before. The one he learned on had a similar issue, but in the higher range, on one of the F keys.

It’s brilliant, really, as a statement. Poetic. The way the absence grates, subconsciously, whenever the music passes that particular key, jarring and unpleasant, every time, until enough other sounds are layered over that small, painful silence again… He, too, has been familiar with grief for a very long time. With how it catches you unawares, even years later. With how every time, it knocks everything off kilter for a while. With how frustrating that is. With how wrong it feels to get angry at that.

It’s a poignant metaphor, and a bittersweet way to commemorate a woman who probably never once got to hear Jyn play on a less shitty piano.

In his defence, Jyn didn’t do it when she played in New York – but of course she didn’t. She was nobody, back then. They would have thrown her out for messing with the sound, let alone the expensive instrument. Making artistic statements is a privilege bought with fame, after all.

The playlist switches to a recording of Tchaikovsky. E3, off, again.

He’d bet a lot that tomorrow would have been her mother’s birthday, with how angry she got at him.

Well, he certainly feels like a dick now.

He turns his head to the alarm clock in the corner and groans – two fifty AM. Mother of God, it happened again. Another stupid solo he didn’t practice enough, and instead of being sensible and going over his piece, or getting enough rest to give his brain a chance to come online in time, he’s lost most of the night obsessing over a detail of Jyn Erso’s music. A woman who did not even remember his name. Mostly because the last time he played in front of her, he couldn’t think straight because he’d done exactly the same thing: Intruded on a vulnerable moment of her playing on accident, lost an entire night of sleep replaying it in his head, and then finally been too distracted by the sight of her in that dress to remember Vivaldi.

No, he should be glad she doesn’t remember him. He doesn’t know what’s more embarrassing, almost fumbling the Four fucking Seasons, or almost fumbling them because you’re twenty-six and a sexist asshole and it hadn’t occurred to you that a woman could play like that and also be indescribably hot.

He should go to bed. He should play the fucking Stravinsky again – his neighbours would murder him, but it might be worth it.

At least if he got his head bashed in with his own violin, he wouldn’t have to play in full view of Jyn Erso in an evening dress again. Or be forced to find a way to apologise to her that doesn’t start with “so I cyberstalked you for five hours to understand what the fuck is up with you”.

He goes to bed, and leaves the music playing, and Jyn Erso’s stunted E3s haunts his dreams.