Fic: In the Wings
Title: In the Wings
Author: rayruz
Characters: Kara, Dreilide, Socrata
Spoilers: None (Pre-mini)
Length: 2,223 words
For logopraxis, who asked for "Little!Kara gets to go to one her father's concerts. Her mother disapproves."
“Ms. Simos,” the intercom in the classroom clicked on. “Please send Kara Thrace down to the main office. Tell her to bring her things for the rest of the day.”
Kara drags her feet all the way down the second-grade corridor and into the main hallway of the school. Just because she has to go to the principal’s office doesn’t mean she has to hurry. Her hands curl around the straps of her backpack. She’s never been called down to the principal’s office before. She has to be in pretty big trouble, but she can’t think of anything she’s done to get called to the main office-except maybe kicking Tommy Meers on the playground. But he’d been making fun of her chalk drawings on the blacktop and she couldn’t let him get away with it.
As she rounds the corner, Kara sees her father standing by the front desk, talking with the secretary. Gods darn it. She really is in trouble. She slows down even more and shuffles her way up to the desk. But when her father turns to look at her, he doesn’t look disappointed with her-in fact, he is smiling. “Come on, kiddo,” he says, pulling his car keys out of his pocket.
The secretary sitting at the desk smiles as well. “Good luck at the doctor’s.”
Kara is quiet all the way out into the parking lot and until she has clambered into the back seat of her dad’s car, and her head falls back against the seat with a thud as she groans, “Do I have to go to the doctor’s?”
“That,” her father says as he slides into the front seat, “is what we grown-ups call ‘a little white lie.’” She can see him smile at her in the rearview mirror, as he turns the key and the car rattles loudly as it starts. “Buckle up.”
---
She rolls down the window so she can feel the wind on her face.
Kara watches the familiar buildings fly by while the wireless plays the Colonial Classical station that her dad loves so much. She squirms excitedly in her seat because she knows where they’re going even before they pull into the parking lot, and she’s undone her seatbelt before the car’s even stopped.
“The food’s not going anywhere,” he says with a smile as he opens the door for her and they walk together into the diner. It’s not as loud on a Wednesday afternoon as it is on a Saturday at lunchtime when they usually go.
She gets a chocolate milkshake and he asks her how school went. Kara talks excitedly about how her team won their pyramid game in gym class and the praise from the teacher about her drawing in art. She talks about math and learning about how the alligator likes to eat the bigger number, which is just silly because it would be easier to catch the smaller number.
When they finish, they head back out to the car and they don’t turn towards home.
“Daddy? Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise,” he tells her.
---
Kara lies sprawled on the stage on her belly. She’s counting on her hands, pretending like she’s doing the math worksheet in front of her. Instead she’s listening to her father warming up on the piano, staring out at the tables and chairs in the concert hall, the workers setting up for the show that night, and the people dressed in black messing around with the lights.
When the music stops, she looks over to see a man in a suit talking to her father. She pushes herself to her feet and crosses the stage. “Hey, kiddo,” he says when she walks up to the piano bench, before turning to the man in the suit. “Aaron, I want you to meet my little girl. Kara, this is Mr. de Fonte, he’s the one who got me this gig here tonight.”
Kara isn’t sure she likes the way Mr. de Fonte smells like the old cheese inside the refrigerator when bends forward, putting his hands on his knees, and says, “It’s a real pleasure to meet you Kara. I’ve heard so much about you.”
He sounds like he’s talking to a baby-can’t he see that she’s a big girl? She manages a mostly polite, “It’s nice to meet you.” Her father ruffles her hair, and blonde strands fall in front of her face. As she pushes them back, she hears the friend ask if he can show Kara around while her dad finishes warming up.
Kara grumbles as she packs up her homework and goes with the stinky cheese man as he shows her around the building. He shows her the stage, the flies, and eventually takes her down to the green room-which is a silly name because it’s not green, it’s more of a gross brown color, kind of like his suit.
Her father comes down to the green room about ten minutes later and pulls a pack of cards out of his jacket. They play a few rounds, betting with some peppermints from a bowl on the coffee table, and she is good because he folds every time.
Mr. de Fonte comes down just before eight and says, “Five minutes until show.” Her dad takes her hand and together they walk up to the stage. He kisses her on the forehead and she tells him to break a leg, because apparently that’s what you’re supposed to tell someone who goes on stage.
She hears the audience clapping for him as he sits down at his piano and she smiles because they’re going to love his music. Kara settles down in the wings, as stinky cheese man called them, and watches and listens-this is so much better than being at home with a babysitter like always. A few songs into the concert he plays the song she hears from downstairs every night after he sends her up to bed. She presses her hand over her mouth to stifle the yawn, but curls her knees to her chest and falls asleep.
---
When Kara wakes up in the car when it comes to a stop. “Where are we?” she says through a yawn.
“Home,” he says softly, then opens her door and lifts her up onto his shoulders and she thinks that his head makes a very nice pillow. She buries her cheek against his hair as he climbs up the stairs and unlocks the door, and she nearly falls asleep right there.
“Where the hell have you been?” a voice snaps, and Kara hasn’t heard it since the winter months but recognizes it immediately.
“Socrata. I didn’t think you were due home until Saturday.” She’s lifted off his shoulders and set down on the floor.
“Hi, Momma,” she says quietly. Her greeting is met with a smack on the hand and an order to get in bed. Kara mutters a quick yes, sir and disappears down the hall with her father’s voice in the background saying, “Don’t take it out on the kid.”
Kara shuts the door tight behind her and slumps against it. There’s usually yelling when Momma’s home, but it usually doesn’t start for a few days. She can’t really tell what they’re yelling about-most of the time it just sounds like dumb grown-up stuff, but tonight she’s pretty sure they’re yelling about her. And she doesn’t want to hear it. She drops her backpack by the door.
Kara takes a look around her room. She’s got clothes and toys on her floor, things that her daddy never bothers her about. He always says as long as she didn’t trip over anything and get hurt it is fine. Momma doesn’t like it when her room isn’t clean. She slides her feet out of her sneakers and puts them in the closet.
The shouting gets louder. She can’t make out what they’re saying but she hears footsteps stomping towards her room. She quickly hits the light switch and dives for her unmade bed, jeans and all. She pulls the blanket up over her head as the door swings opens and the voices echo around her room.
“What do you think you’re doing?!”
“You’re going to wake her up.”
“I don’t give a flying frak! Get out!”
“I’m already gone, just give me a minute.”
“You really think you can do this?”
“Would you be quiet?”
“NO! And you put that down right this instant!”
“I will not have this fight with you in front of our daughter.”
Kara stays quiet-doesn’t cry, doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe-even after the voices are gone, after the door has slammed shut, like maybe if she just stays still everything will go away.
The voices continue outside the bedroom, she can’t quite make out the words. She doesn’t want to. She pulls the blanket around her ears and tries to shut the world out. Under the covers it’s dark and warm, and she can hear music in her head, the memory of keys on a piano, plucking out a melody played just for her.
And finally it stops. No more yelling. No more slamming. She breathes.
Outside, she can hear the sound of a car starting up. In the darkness of her room, she pushes the covers back and tiptoes across the floor to her window. She pulls back the curtain in time to see a car pulling out of the lot below.
---
…and she was looking out the window. I wanted to go back and take her like I’d meant to at first, but Socrata had made it perfectly clear that I was “an unfit father.” Ironic that the night of my first big break would be the night I lost one of the things most important in my life.
The diary had been in a pile of boxes sent to Kara’s new address by whoever the hell had cleaned out her mother’s old apartment. She’d put off opening them up for a week (too busy with her new job as a fight instructor to be bothered with them). One box held some of Socrata’s old clothes, another some pots and pans. The third had a second, older postmark on it-Kara couldn’t make out where it had originally come from but wherever it had been sent from, it had been sent around the time of her fifteenth birthday.
What the hell, she’d thought. She’d ripped back the tape, crumbled it into a ball, and cast it aside. Lying at the very top was a note. You deserve the truth. She didn’t recognize the handwriting. Just underneath the note was a diary, and when she began to read through it she instantly knew the source-her father. She flipped through mundane entries about his work, his bit gigs, nothing important until… until a day she remembered all too well.
I never knew how obsessed she was with discipline; don’t know what happened to her. She was not the woman I met when I was playing at dives in Caprica City, the woman who danced with me. I don’t know when she fell out of love with music. I don’t know where my wife went, but I can only hope she’ll be half as good a mother as she thinks she can be-
Kara snaps the diary shut. She can’t really see the words on the page anymore-exhaustion, a week spent getting used to her new job, unpacking all her belongings, not tears. (Can’t, won’t cry over this.) She buries the leather-bound book under the piles of newspaper clippings she’d also found in the box-nine years worth of articles from the arts and culture section, everyone talking about the rising success of Dreilide Thrace. Nine years he wanted with her, nine years she never had, nine years that didn’t bear thinking about or wishing for because what would be the point in that?
She’s about to close the box when she finds a music chip buried under the newspapers. The label reads Dreilide Thrace Live at the Helice Opera House. She turns it over in her hands once, twice, before she puts the chip into her music player. Kara remembers every note of the first song, feeling the flutter of happiness and pull of tears she always felt.
Her hands itch with muscle memory every few measures, as if her father’s still guiding her fingers on the keys-so she grips the case and studies the track listing. She doesn’t recognize the second piece. It’s newer. After her. It’s good, but something about the notes is discordant in a way that still makes perfect sense; there is something angry and triumphant in the melody.
Kara settles down on the couch and draws her knees up to her chest as the third song starts. It sounds like warm blankets and comfortable pajamas, like cookies and a glass of milk, and all of a sudden the weight of the day sinks into her muscles. She doesn’t bother to stifle her yawn as she lays her head down on the armrest and thinks of sitting in the wings of a great theatre, music being played just for her. She lets her eyes drift shut, curls her knees to her chest, and falls asleep.
--0--