Everyone was Beautiful at the Ballet: France/Russia, ballet in the 1760's (pt 2)
anonymous
March 30 2009, 00:41:25 UTC
Yekaterina was another like Pyotir, pulling him to her in battle, in bed, and he followed eagerly, blood crusting on his boots as more medals of imperial conquest accumulated on her bust. He liked to watch her in the mornings, sipping her thick black coffee as she poured over the affairs of the day.
“I want you to meet someone,” she told him one morning, her eyes laughing. “He has the most interesting ideas.”
Vanya had seen him before, but only at a distance, his white-blond hair falling in soft waves even fairer than sunflowers as he swept into a perfectly graceful bow.
Vanya had no intentions of freeing the serfs, but Francois was still delighted to demonstrate his newest art. Vanya’s breath caught in his throat as he watched the nimble westerner spin and float, light as a snowflake on the wind.
“Show me,” he whispered, and when Francois’s hands stroked the long curves of his legs and pulled, stretching them farther than he’d thought possible, cooing that his body was magnifique, and Francois would make him parfait, he told himself that the trembling in his muscles came from the exertion, and not the flaring heat where Francois’s fingers curled around his skin.
He threw himself into the training with the ferocious discipline of soldier, working his body until it moved however he asked it to, however Francois asked it to.
His feet brushed against his backside in midair as he sailed through the pas de chat, exhilarated and flying and free.
“You are so beautiful, mon cher,” Francois murmured, after he finished the routine.
Vanya blushed scarlet and mumbled something; he had never been beautiful, and would not be, he was only rough farmers and rougher soldiers and wasteland, a hulking creature -
“That leaps on cat’s feet?” Francois asked, eyes steel-blue and bright.
Even vultures can fly, Vanya pointed out.
“Oh, mon beau, non. You are cat, you are my great Siberian tiger, all strength and effortless motion -”
Francois made it look effortless, Vanya thought, but as his own dancers twirled and jumped, he started, very quietly inside, to believe it.
The slavic peoples recieved Christianity from the Byzantines. Various mongol tribes, including the Kipchak, Pecheneg, and Tatar tribes, eventually destroyed the state of Kievan Rus, which included area from present-day Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. The Duchy of Moscow which formed in the aftermath is generally considered the earliest version of the country of Russia.
Ivan III (the great) fought off the Tatars. His son, Ivan IV (the terrible) also had military victories, but after the death of his son, he ordered a number of massacres. Near the end of his reign, Russia was weakened by a terrible famine. A series of weak, ineffective, and/or foreign rulers marked the Time of Troubles, when Russia lost campaigns against the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and Sweden. Ukraine was captured for a while by the PLC, but Russia fought two successful wars to get it back under the early Romanov dynasty.
Peter the Great expanded Russia militarily and cemented Russia's standing as one of the great autocracies of Europe. Also, he was obessesed with getting Russia ports. Catherine the Great also expanded the empire through conquest. She was very enamored of French Enlightenment ideas, but for political reasons, did not enact any of the liberal reforms that she wanted to when she was young. She did, however, bring French high culture to Russia.
Ballet was invented in France in the 1600's and arrived in Russia in the early 1700's, before the beginning of Catherine's reign, but it became more established then. Pas de chat literally means 'step of the cat' and it is a very difficult jump.
Raise Your Arms; Someone's Always There: Russia/Austria - ballet (sequel to above)
anonymous
March 30 2009, 01:20:56 UTC
The room was simple enough: warm polished floorboards matched the bar along the mirrored wall, a few electric outlets for a CD player or a portable fan clustered near the door, and a dark brown stand-up piano, clearly a late addition not part of the original furnishings, leaned awkwardly against the shortest wall, equipped with a mismatched stool and several loose pages of sheet music.
Roderich sat warily on the stool. Despite its dubious appearance, it held him sturdily, so he browsed the out-of-order papers. Although he couldn’t read any of the Cyrillic titles, scanning the melodies revealed stray sections of Tcherepnin’s Russian Fairytale and Rimsky’s The Snow Maiden. Roderich blew out his blew in a long sigh, making Mariazell flutter against his forehead, and fished his own, complete sheet music, adapted for solo piano, out of his bag and set it on the stand.
Tiiing.
Roderich startled and twitched, the stool spinning on its treacherous swivel beneath him so that he could see Ivan, who had apparently padded up the steep and very narrow stairway and slipped through the door into the studio without making a sound. Had he not had the courtesy to tap his pipe gently against the mirror, Roderich would never have realized he had arrived. Ivan grinned like a little boy making sport with a cat, then set the pipe on the floor in slow, obvious and exaggerated movements. Roderich breathed out, relaxing slightly. Ivan’s big fingers swiftly worked their way down the buttons of his coat, like chipped posts marking distance on a long road. He shucked the heavy wool garment off, then his sweaters and trousers and other less recognizable layers, until he stood broad and vulnerable-looking in just his graying white silk wicking layer, from his wrists to his ankles, his perennial yellow scarf still tied around his neck.
Roderich swallowed and turned back to the plain, black-and-off-white simplicity of the keys, running through scales and chord inversions to warm up his fingers (C, A, B, B flat - oh, screw B flat - G, D, E), his eyes flicking to Ivan’s large figure in the mirror, splayed and straining as he stretched. Roderich switched over to more complicated etudes, then to one of Mozart’s variations, forcing himself to concentrate on recalling the particular elaborations of the third version of the set. As he plucked out the final notes of the variation, Ivan rumbled,
“I am ready when you are, comrade.”
He glanced at the blond standing in first position, his feet flat, his sometimes violent arms held peaceably in front of him, his eyes almost closed. Roderich double-checked the key signature of his music, adjusted his posture (fingers curved, back straight, shoulders down), and counted off a measure in his head.
Raise Your Arms; Someone's Always There: Russia/Austria - ballet pt 2
anonymous
March 30 2009, 02:13:04 UTC
The rippling glissando issued forth, sweet and burbling like a mountain spring, before the music ducked into the more careful work of introducing the theme on which later intricacies would build. Ivan’s lips curved softly as his arms rose, his bulky body bending with usually hidden elegance. Roderich guided the growing music, braiding the chords into stronger bonds that thrummed around them while Ivan stepped and spun. His fingertips jumped off the staccatos as Ivan leaped and kicked, huge and weightless as he swirled, swift and effortless, across the room. Roderich improvised the peddling, letting the notes blur together at the edges, a soft impressionist backdrop to the elegant precision of Ivan’s movements, his scarf fluttering brightly after him.
Roderich raced through sweet, thrumming trills as Ivan’s legs swept around him, flicked out in turns and kicks, swished and arced above his head. Roderich regretfully kept his eyes on the music during the less familiar B section, catching glimpses of battements and temps levé sauté out of his peripheral vision. As they moved into the second repetition of the A section, Roderich could mostly play from memory, tilting his head to watch his companion. Ivan’s graceful movements consumed the full scope of the small room, once even floating to the mirror, sweeping a sleek bow, and holding out one large, delicately curved hand to brush against the fingertips of his reflection, turning the private solo into an intimate pas de deux with an unreachable phantom partner. Roderich snuck in a little rebato, matching the melancholy minor harmony with his own haunting dynamic phrases. Ivan matched him, glissandes and long, exquisite spins drawing out the deep ache that seemed to flurry like wind-swirled snow all around them.
Finally, Roderich raised the peddle from the lingering notes of the final fermata, letting his hands fall gently into his lap as Ivan unfurled from his concluding pose.
Ivan padded silently towards the piano, and Roderich didn’t tense. When they were close enough that Roderich could gaze directly into the gleaming violet eyes, Ivan murmured,
“Thank you for the music, comrade. These evenings of ours - they are one of my few true joys.”
“You were lovely,” Roderich replied, because Ivan’s pipe was still all the way on the other side of the room, and it was true.
Ivan smiled, his lips curling just enough to bare a white sliver of his teeth, his head ducking in a shy bashfulness that turned the expression from terrifying to eerily sincere.
Roderich wondered if there was a difference between the pink of Ivan’s cheeks when the cold wind brushed them and the damask blush they sported now.
“Yes,” Ivan murmured, and Roderich had only a moment to devolve into sheer and utter panic that he’d said that aloud when Ivan’s mouth landed, soft and chaste and surprisingly warm, on his own.
Stunned, still aching from the beauty of the dance and suddenly starving, Roderich brought his arms up and wrapped them around Ivan’s neck, feeling the faint slide of sweat on his smooth skin as Roderich’s fingers slipped into silky hair, pulling himself deeper into the kiss that hung shimmering between them like a single note in a performance hall, or slippered feet flitting silently in the air.
Re: Raise Your Arms; Someone's Always There: Russia/Austria - ballet pt 2
anonymous
March 30 2009, 12:08:50 UTC
Russian history, ballet, and mindblowingly beautiful prose. Anon, you've slain me. If I didn't already ship France/Russia, I would be shipping it, and hard, and I've never thought of Russia/Austria but I think I'mma start. *A* There's just so much to Russia that we so rarely see brought out in fic, and you've managed to touch on so many aspects here--Kievan Rus and PETER AND CATHERINE THE GREAT I LOVE YOU and the Time of Troubles dlfjsl;fjlkjf
You have my eternal love at your doorstep. ♥
(And I would love some links to anything else you've written, because hot damn, do want.)
Re: Raise Your Arms; Someone's Always There: Russia/Austria - ballet pt 2
anonymous
March 30 2009, 16:33:34 UTC
*squeaks* France/Enlightenment!France sdlfjlsfjdkf another of my favorites. ♥♥♥ And oh god I did read that Poland/Potato fic and fffffffff my brain. In a. Good way. I think. XD
And the Hiroshima and Nagasaki fic. ♥♥ That entire prompt was filled with amazing. And holy shit Hungary topping with a frying pan and the 10 Times Prussia fic and FFFFFFFFFFFF I was the one who requested the Germany/Prussia radiosex THANK YOU AGAIN FOR THAT ONE \o/ and the Russia/Canada iceskating one! You are totally one of my favorite writers on this meme. ♥ Just thought you oughta know. ;)
Re: Raise Your Arms; Someone's Always There: Russia/Austria - ballet pt 2
anonymous
March 30 2009, 12:13:52 UTC
This was just spot on, author!anon! ;_; Too many 2D psycho-Russias in this meme, not enough 3D historical-Russias. Would anon consider de-anoning or posting to main comm for easier access to anon's other works, in case we don't know them? You've got me addicted, Anon! <3
ooh~ all the music motifs and references make me ache inside, it's so lovely ♥
Re: Raise Your Arms; Someone's Always There: Russia/Austria - ballet pt 2
anonymous
March 30 2009, 16:45:47 UTC
Oh, thank you! *loves historical Russia*
I'm really glad the music worked for you - I studied piano for years but I know next to nothing about ballet, so I didn't really know what I was doing meshing the two.
I have a link in the comment above to my other fills. I don't have any other fic in this fandom because I'm a newbie as of the first fill up there. I do plan to deanon on the main comm eventually, if only to fix typos and fomatting and such, but I just don't have the time to organize it now.
OP wants to marry you
anonymous
March 30 2009, 19:35:52 UTC
Thank you so much for filling my request! Both the France/Russia and Russia/Austria were beautiful. It had all the history I was hoping for. Maybe not the same time period, but still it was great. Thanks again! :3
Re: Raise Your Arms; Someone's Always There: Russia/Austria - ballet pt 2
anonymous
April 1 2009, 02:30:20 UTC
Related to you!annon loves you long time 8D. Russia's childhood = <3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3 It is EXACTLY what it should be. *praises fic* And Austria/B flat is now my new ship, (took "oh screw B flat" too seriously xD).
Also, the fact that Ivan kept on his scarf is WIN.
“I want you to meet someone,” she told him one morning, her eyes laughing. “He has the most interesting ideas.”
Vanya had seen him before, but only at a distance, his white-blond hair falling in soft waves even fairer than sunflowers as he swept into a perfectly graceful bow.
Vanya had no intentions of freeing the serfs, but Francois was still delighted to demonstrate his newest art. Vanya’s breath caught in his throat as he watched the nimble westerner spin and float, light as a snowflake on the wind.
“Show me,” he whispered, and when Francois’s hands stroked the long curves of his legs and pulled, stretching them farther than he’d thought possible, cooing that his body was magnifique, and Francois would make him parfait, he told himself that the trembling in his muscles came from the exertion, and not the flaring heat where Francois’s fingers curled around his skin.
He threw himself into the training with the ferocious discipline of soldier, working his body until it moved however he asked it to, however Francois asked it to.
His feet brushed against his backside in midair as he sailed through the pas de chat, exhilarated and flying and free.
“You are so beautiful, mon cher,” Francois murmured, after he finished the routine.
Vanya blushed scarlet and mumbled something; he had never been beautiful, and would not be, he was only rough farmers and rougher soldiers and wasteland, a hulking creature -
“That leaps on cat’s feet?” Francois asked, eyes steel-blue and bright.
Even vultures can fly, Vanya pointed out.
“Oh, mon beau, non. You are cat, you are my great Siberian tiger, all strength and effortless motion -”
Francois made it look effortless, Vanya thought, but as his own dancers twirled and jumped, he started, very quietly inside, to believe it.
The slavic peoples recieved Christianity from the Byzantines. Various mongol tribes, including the Kipchak, Pecheneg, and Tatar tribes, eventually destroyed the state of Kievan Rus, which included area from present-day Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. The Duchy of Moscow which formed in the aftermath is generally considered the earliest version of the country of Russia.
Ivan III (the great) fought off the Tatars. His son, Ivan IV (the terrible) also had military victories, but after the death of his son, he ordered a number of massacres. Near the end of his reign, Russia was weakened by a terrible famine. A series of weak, ineffective, and/or foreign rulers marked the Time of Troubles, when Russia lost campaigns against the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and Sweden. Ukraine was captured for a while by the PLC, but Russia fought two successful wars to get it back under the early Romanov dynasty.
Peter the Great expanded Russia militarily and cemented Russia's standing as one of the great autocracies of Europe. Also, he was obessesed with getting Russia ports. Catherine the Great also expanded the empire through conquest. She was very enamored of French Enlightenment ideas, but for political reasons, did not enact any of the liberal reforms that she wanted to when she was young. She did, however, bring French high culture to Russia.
Ballet was invented in France in the 1600's and arrived in Russia in the early 1700's, before the beginning of Catherine's reign, but it became more established then. Pas de chat literally means 'step of the cat' and it is a very difficult jump.
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Roderich sat warily on the stool. Despite its dubious appearance, it held him sturdily, so he browsed the out-of-order papers. Although he couldn’t read any of the Cyrillic titles, scanning the melodies revealed stray sections of Tcherepnin’s Russian Fairytale and Rimsky’s The Snow Maiden. Roderich blew out his blew in a long sigh, making Mariazell flutter against his forehead, and fished his own, complete sheet music, adapted for solo piano, out of his bag and set it on the stand.
Tiiing.
Roderich startled and twitched, the stool spinning on its treacherous swivel beneath him so that he could see Ivan, who had apparently padded up the steep and very narrow stairway and slipped through the door into the studio without making a sound. Had he not had the courtesy to tap his pipe gently against the mirror, Roderich would never have realized he had arrived. Ivan grinned like a little boy making sport with a cat, then set the pipe on the floor in slow, obvious and exaggerated movements. Roderich breathed out, relaxing slightly. Ivan’s big fingers swiftly worked their way down the buttons of his coat, like chipped posts marking distance on a long road. He shucked the heavy wool garment off, then his sweaters and trousers and other less recognizable layers, until he stood broad and vulnerable-looking in just his graying white silk wicking layer, from his wrists to his ankles, his perennial yellow scarf still tied around his neck.
Roderich swallowed and turned back to the plain, black-and-off-white simplicity of the keys, running through scales and chord inversions to warm up his fingers (C, A, B, B flat - oh, screw B flat - G, D, E), his eyes flicking to Ivan’s large figure in the mirror, splayed and straining as he stretched. Roderich switched over to more complicated etudes, then to one of Mozart’s variations, forcing himself to concentrate on recalling the particular elaborations of the third version of the set. As he plucked out the final notes of the variation, Ivan rumbled,
“I am ready when you are, comrade.”
He glanced at the blond standing in first position, his feet flat, his sometimes violent arms held peaceably in front of him, his eyes almost closed. Roderich double-checked the key signature of his music, adjusted his posture (fingers curved, back straight, shoulders down), and counted off a measure in his head.
One, two, three, four…
Reply
Roderich raced through sweet, thrumming trills as Ivan’s legs swept around him, flicked out in turns and kicks, swished and arced above his head. Roderich regretfully kept his eyes on the music during the less familiar B section, catching glimpses of battements and temps levé sauté out of his peripheral vision. As they moved into the second repetition of the A section, Roderich could mostly play from memory, tilting his head to watch his companion. Ivan’s graceful movements consumed the full scope of the small room, once even floating to the mirror, sweeping a sleek bow, and holding out one large, delicately curved hand to brush against the fingertips of his reflection, turning the private solo into an intimate pas de deux with an unreachable phantom partner. Roderich snuck in a little rebato, matching the melancholy minor harmony with his own haunting dynamic phrases. Ivan matched him, glissandes and long, exquisite spins drawing out the deep ache that seemed to flurry like wind-swirled snow all around them.
Finally, Roderich raised the peddle from the lingering notes of the final fermata, letting his hands fall gently into his lap as Ivan unfurled from his concluding pose.
Ivan padded silently towards the piano, and Roderich didn’t tense. When they were close enough that Roderich could gaze directly into the gleaming violet eyes, Ivan murmured,
“Thank you for the music, comrade. These evenings of ours - they are one of my few true joys.”
“You were lovely,” Roderich replied, because Ivan’s pipe was still all the way on the other side of the room, and it was true.
Ivan smiled, his lips curling just enough to bare a white sliver of his teeth, his head ducking in a shy bashfulness that turned the expression from terrifying to eerily sincere.
Roderich wondered if there was a difference between the pink of Ivan’s cheeks when the cold wind brushed them and the damask blush they sported now.
“Yes,” Ivan murmured, and Roderich had only a moment to devolve into sheer and utter panic that he’d said that aloud when Ivan’s mouth landed, soft and chaste and surprisingly warm, on his own.
Stunned, still aching from the beauty of the dance and suddenly starving, Roderich brought his arms up and wrapped them around Ivan’s neck, feeling the faint slide of sweat on his smooth skin as Roderich’s fingers slipped into silky hair, pulling himself deeper into the kiss that hung shimmering between them like a single note in a performance hall, or slippered feet flitting silently in the air.
Yes, I totally took the titles and inspiration from the song from Chorus Line. Watch it, if you haven’t already: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfNCMMPaqXo
That song is pretty much Russia’s mindset through both of these ficlets. Perhaps with the exception of Shelia’s sexual forwardness.
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You have my eternal love at your doorstep. ♥
(And I would love some links to anything else you've written, because hot damn, do want.)
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(Man, writing this totally made me ship Russia/Austria too; Go, little ship, go!)
I'm so glad you liked the historyness! (I love Catherine too - she was so awesome.)
http://delicious.com/vibishan/myfills
That link has all of my fills other that the ones still in progress or the ones I'm too ashamed of to deanon. =P
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And the Hiroshima and Nagasaki fic. ♥♥ That entire prompt was filled with amazing. And holy shit Hungary topping with a frying pan and the 10 Times Prussia fic and FFFFFFFFFFFF I was the one who requested the Germany/Prussia radiosex THANK YOU AGAIN FOR THAT ONE \o/ and the Russia/Canada iceskating one! You are totally one of my favorite writers on this meme. ♥ Just thought you oughta know. ;)
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I'm a complete commentwhore, so this makes me ridiculously happy.
*loves you back*
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ooh~ all the music motifs and references make me ache inside, it's so lovely ♥
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I'm really glad the music worked for you - I studied piano for years but I know next to nothing about ballet, so I didn't really know what I was doing meshing the two.
I have a link in the comment above to my other fills. I don't have any other fic in this fandom because I'm a newbie as of the first fill up there. I do plan to deanon on the main comm eventually, if only to fix typos and fomatting and such, but I just don't have the time to organize it now.
Hope you like the other fills as well, but YMMV.
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It is EXACTLY what it should be. *praises fic* And Austria/B flat is now my new ship, (took "oh screw B flat" too seriously xD).
Also, the fact that Ivan kept on his scarf is WIN.
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