An official welcome to my new muses!
No, this does not mean I am putting off Shooting Stars. The next chaper is partially finished, but I needed to get this out of my system real quick, so that I could get back to work! Without further aro, I present to you my first foray into Kaleido Star fanfic...
Please, even if you don't know the fandom but like my writing, read this and tell me what you think! I really like how it came out!
Title: Unsynchronized
Fandom: Kaleido Star
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance
Pairing: Yuri/Layla
Wordcount: 6,711
Description: Layla reconsiders her relationship with her long-time co-star. Set at the end of season one.
Disclaimer: Kaleido Star doesn't belong to me, but I can affect Yuri's accent flawlessly *lol*
***
It occurs to her, when she looks back at it, that their biggest problem is timing. They were always synchronized on stage, perfectly so, sometimes so much that she imagined she could feel them breathing in unison, as they stood side by side trying to catch their breath and smiling, always smiling into the blinding white lights. They were the same person then, as they stood and received the worshiping cheers of the crowd. For a little while, they were perfectly in sync, and then they would run off the stage and go their separate ways into their dressing rooms, and the timing would suddenly be all wrong.
They were never quite together, not from the very beginning. The first time she saw him was almost a year before she joined the troupe, when she went to Kaleido Stage to watch their performance, to plan and critique from her seat. The performance was an old Russian fairytale, Ivanushka; she remembers it still because it is rare now for Kaleido Stage to perform shows which lean so heavily on the male protagonist, and they had never done it again since she had come. But this was immediately after the death of Cynthia Desmaunes, their star trampoliner, and the performance rode squarely on his shoulders, though he was only sixteen years old. She remembers when he came onstage, dressed in simple white with a red sash around his waist, pale hair tied back because he wore it longer then, and even though she had spent the opening scene critiquing the performances of the tumblers onstage, the only thing in her mind as he begins performing is that he is beautiful.
She remembers that feeling of forgetting time for a while as she watches him spin and twist and jump and dance through the first act, because it was a little like the feeling she imagined her parents had felt the first time they had seen Alice in Wonderland, except this time it is she who can not look away. When he had finished the first act and he stood there surrounded by the colorful cast of forest spirits and villagers, whimsical fairytale creatures, firebirds, witches, and gypsies, it was still the unspotted white in the middle that drew her eyes, and she felt herself smiling, answering the insolent, sparkling grin he was giving to the audience. By the end of the second act, she had made her decision: she wanted to be his partner, she wanted to share the magic.
She is pragmatic. Even now, after everything she has been through, she realizes that the greater part of magic is smoke and mirrors, hidden lifelines and hours of sweat and practice and bruises. But even so, she has known this place has magic since the first time she sat in the audience and the lights dimmed, and that night, the magic seemed to sparkle around him. It remains the only thing she and her father have ever butted wills over; she remembers fighting with him, arguing and eventually slamming out for the first audition. She kept her nerves a tightly-wound bundle in her stomach as she went up onto that stage with every appearance of aloof indifference. She wasn’t quite sixteen, but even then she was cool and collected and confident, as she had been raised to be. She walked into the audition hall with her head up, and she walked out with the highest scores in Kaleido Stage’s history. The scores interested her very little; the only thing in her mind was the desire to touch that magical feeling she thought she might be able to find under those lights. She took the high scores as her due; she had worked for them, worked far harder than most of the other children who had crowded into the audition hall with her. She saw them as children even then; she felt years older than them and their giggles and whispered secrets.
She still feels years older than her peers, but the thought of it no longer makes her feel superior, only tired.
She slipped into the role of the top female star seamlessly. There was no one to challenge for the position; none of the girls in the cast were any kind of real competition. Some of them might have been jealous, she supposed, but she didn’t concern herself with that either. When her first casting came a week later and Carlos announced in his usual brusque voice that Sleeping Beauty would be co-starred by Yuri Killian and Layla Hamilton, she allowed herself a small, satisfied smile.
She had seen him backstage once or twice in that week while she waited and did tech work without complaining along with the other newcomers. She remembers the person he was then: more man than boy already, but full of jokes and ready with an easy smile and a kind word for anyone. He joked with the supporting cast and flirted shamelessly with the women, even those ten years his senior.
He hasn’t done that in a while. She doesn’t remember exactly when he became cool and detached, but she supposes it came slowly, with time. She only realized how he has changed very recently, just as recently as she realized that she misses the way he used to be.
He had a smile for her, too, the day of the first rehearsal. It danced in his eyes as he leaned over her hand and placed a light kiss on it. “It seems we finally have a princess worthy of her role,” he said, causing a few of the girls in the corner to sigh in adoration mixed with jealousy. His voice is smooth and warm, with just enough of a hint of a Russian accent to mark his heritage unmistakably. She knows now that the accent is largely an affectation-he spent the greater part of his life in the United States and can speak flawless American English if he wishes-but it is a part of the image he presents to the world.
She only raised her eyebrows at him until he released her hand. No one has ever allowed themselves such familiarities, and she remembers thinking that she is disappointed, that he is not at all magical face to face, except when she looks into those laughing eyes the color of a winter ocean and clear as water, and something inside her moves. She doesn’t know what it is and that irritates her, so she only smiles coolly and says, “I thought rehearsal started at ten. Why are we still standing here?”
That was when their timing first slipped, she thinks, and she knows better than anyone that once something is knocked out of sync, it is harder and harder to pull it back together as time passes. Every day, as they worked to synchronize on the stage, she became more and more irritated with his offstage attitude, and began avoiding him and his winter eyes outside of rehearsal. She thought it was simple enough to keep stage and real life separate, though it was harder than she imagined to ignore his gaze on her during rehearsal breaks when they collapsed, breathing heavily and drowning in sweat. He would smile slowly when she caught him watching her, but he never moved his gaze, staring shamelessly until she turned away with a sniff and jumped to her feet, disliking his seeing her weak.
But on stage, it was different. Just as she had seen, he proved again and again, day after day, that he was magic. And as long as the music was playing and the coach was shouting out commands, their timing was perfect. Again and again, when the relentless woman called, “Jump!” she would launch herself into the air, spinning off of the trapeze, dizzy and blind, trusting in him to catch her. That was the danger of the climax of the first act, she had been told: she had to jump without seeing.
The first time it had been described to them, he had laughed at her widened eyes. “Are you afraid I won’t catch you, princess?”
“No,” she said, cool, smoothing her hair back from her face. “I’m not afraid of anything. And I expect you to catch me.”
“And if I didn’t?”
“You will.”
And so he did, every time she launched herself into his arms. And every time she found herself catching her breath only when he had her by the waist and they were eye to eye. Every time, he was smiling until the coach shouted, “Again!” and he threw her back into the air to catch her trapeze and start over.
She remembers being grateful that he keeps his distance outside of the practice room, because she finds those cool eyes and that warm smile incomprehensibly irritating.
They rehearsed the finale from the very beginning, but they skipped over the rest of act two until a week before the performance because she was supposed to be asleep during the majority of it. She forgot all about it with the pressure of the two spectacular routines that capped off the first and second act-at least until she came into morning rehearsal one time to find that the greater part of the set had been assembled in the night and the director had joined the coach to go through the awakening scene. They were surrounded by the supporting cast, who lounged against set pieces and practiced dance moves, maneuvering around those too lazy to practice. More were coming in by ones and twos as the director began to speak.
“When the prince kisses the princess-”
“Are you sure I won’t get frostbite?” he interrupted, leaning against the wall, an insolent half-smile in place on his face.
She felt an angry flush coming on and suppressed it. “Be serious, please,” she snapped.
“-you sit up, Layla. You have five seconds before the pedestal starts descending, Yuri, so you need to pull her up onto the trapeze with you. Be prepared for the flash of light and don’t let it blind you. Layla, you drop first onto the trampoline when it comes up from belowstage. Then you begin the ball scene. The light is your cue to take your places, the rest of you.” The director, clearly used to his jibes, finished her description dryly and waved them towards the stage.
He only shrugged and jumped effortlessly onto the pedestal. “After you, then.”
So she lay down and closed her eyes. She remembers waiting then, feeling strangely exposed and confused as seconds passed. Her heartbeat speeds up, because this reminds her a little of jumping blind-here, she has no control; she doesn’t know when the scene will move on, only that she must wait peacefully for him to set the pace. There is a brush of breath across her face, then-
“Layla, you’re supposed to sit up; the pedestal-”
Her eyes fly open at the director’s voice as the platform starts descending, and there he is above her, sitting on the trapeze with laughter in his eyes.
She felt incredibly stupid as the platform jerked to a stop, then reversed its direction. “Again,” the director said with a hint of annoyance in her voice. There was giggling from below; someone in the supporting cast clearly found this hysterical.
“You didn’t kiss me,” she hissed at him as he hopped back down onto the platform. She remembers the blush that came with that phrase; she can count the number of times in her life she has blushed on the fingers of one hand.
“To the audience, it will look like I did,” he said. He reached out, familiar as always, and patted her cheek, which she felt was embarrassingly pink. “Did you want me to?”
“I already told you to be serious,” she said, gathering shreds of dignity around her.
“I’m completely serious.”
“What can you two possibly be discussing up there?” the director shouted up. “This isn’t like you! We only have half an hour! Would you concentrate please?”
“Layla is complaining because I didn’t kiss her properly,” he shouted down, grinning brightly at the entire cast gathered down there, and she is so affronted that she can’t find any words to spit back at him as she wants to.
“Oh for the love of-” the director sounded ready to do murder, but he was unafraid, laughing down at them all.
“That’s all right, I’ll fix it.” He grabbed her waist and yanked her towards him; she remembers putting her hands up for balance and finding them pinned against him, and being unable to utter a single sound as he kissed her, hard, in front of all those people. She remembers, for a moment it feels like falling and her blood humming in her ears, and realizing she can’t hold on for balance after all, because she isn’t really falling at all.
Then he let her go, dropping her carelessly like a limp rag doll, and she nearly fell to her knees. No one has ever kissed her before. She doesn’t know whether she wants to slap him or hold on to him, but she does neither, only stares blankly as he helpfully says, “You need to lie down; we’re holding up rehearsal.”
There was charmed silence from below as she moved slowly back to the bed on the pedestal, lay down, closed her eyes, her hands shaking. “We can continue now,” he called down, “we’re sorry for the delay.”
And so rehearsal went on, and this time he brushed his lips lightly, impersonally against hers, not at all as he had moments ago, and whispered, “Don’t miss your cue.” She didn’t, rising up gracefully as she had been instructed, swinging up to the trapeze with him, half-closing her eyes against the bright light as she somersaulted towards the trampoline, wanting nothing more than the simplicity of rehearsal, repetition, pattern.
“Layla, concentrate!” the coach kept calling to her during that day’s rehearsal. “Watch him, not me! He’s the prince, remember? You love him!”
Her eyes fly to his then, and he lifts her, throws her in the air, and she has never been dizzier than she is as she comes back down, because she realizes she does.
That was the first time she fell in love with him, the first of many. But when practice had finally ended and she tried to catch him to get a word in, he vaulted offstage and walked out with his arm around one of the new girls, a little Romanian girl with the face of a doll who snuggled up shamelessly to his side. He didn’t even turn to look back at her, because he didn’t know or begin to care that she would be following.
So now she watched him and he ignored her, as though whatever interest she could possibly have held had been exhausted. Now that she thinks about that first time, she realizes more than ever before that it is and has always been a timing problem with them; like being on a see-saw, he watches her only when she finds him frustrating and unnecessary, but he is always indifferent when she wishes he would turn and see her.
She loved him blindly for three weeks, all the way through the run of the show. Her heart beat too fast when he watched her with clear adoration and wanting on the stage, but those were only stage eyes, she quickly came to realize. They would become as cold as the winter sea they reminded her of when the performance was over, and he would leave her side with a distracted, “Good job,” never really seeing her at all. So she loved him without return in the purehearted way only a girl of fifteen can love, the first time.
Closing night was her sixteenth birthday, and she couldn’t get a straight answer out of her father about coming to the show. He made noises about a party that afternoon, but she knew this story already. She only smiled at her maid after he had left for work in the morning and told her to cancel the invitations. “Pay them as planned if they show up,” she said exhaustedly of the unnecessary guests her father invited every year. She was old enough to do this now; she had had to suffer through the meaningless parties for years and wanted nothing more to do with them. The idea that her father thought it was all right to buy her a birthday party was humiliating, but he didn’t seem to see it that way.
So she came to Kaleido Stage snippy and easily angered, and everything irritated her as she got into costume and make-up, spoke to one of the backstage technicians about a lighting problem, and limbered her muscles in preparation of the first act. When he strolled into the backstage chaos in full golden prince regalia, followed by the pretty little Romanian, she turned her face and ignored him, tired of people who pretended to care, unused to being invisible, and feeling painfully slighted. No one ignored Layla Hamilton, not for three consecutive weeks.
That was the first time she fell out of love.
After the show, when she entered her dressing room, she had already realized her father had not and would not be coming to support her, just as he had not come every other night of the show’s run. She considered briefly throwing something; she hates feeling helpless. Instead she picked the cards off of the bouquets that had been delivered in her absence, reading each one as is her habit. She was acquiring a fan base and it seemed to grow every day-she was glad for that, and felt soothed by the fact that others saw her, even if those who mattered most didn’t.
The last card she came to was attached to a single red rose, and instead of congratulations for a successful show, it read “Happy birthday!” in an angular hand. It wasn’t signed. She had the strongest urge to hug it to her chest and cry.
No one had remembered her birthday for years, either.
When she left the building a great deal later, dressed in street clothes and arms full of flowers, she didn’t find her habitual driver waiting for her. Instead, a red sports car was the only thing left in the drive-around, and he was leaning against it, his face tipped up to the wind blowing in from the sea. The lights around Kaleido Stage were just coming on when he looked over at her and raised a hand in a lazy wave. “I thought you would never come out.”
“Did you need something?” she asked. She remembers the way he looked, windswept and young in faded jeans and an old white tee-shirt with his hair in a short, stubby ponytail, and she tells herself she has not and does not have any feelings whatsoever for him aside from a respect for his abilities and an irritation, as if from an itch she can’t quite scratch.
“No, but you need a ride home,” he told her.
“I have a driver.”
“I sent him away,” he said with a casual shrug. “Go ahead, get in.” He grinned, the way he had grinned at her in the weeks of rehearsal leading up to the show. “Unless you want to walk home with all of that.”
Because the idea of that didn’t appeal, she slid into the passenger side, sinking into the soft leather seat. She wondered even then who he was, to have such a vehicle at sixteen. Not many would have been able to afford it. “I don’t like you ordering around my servants,” she said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said carelessly. “You might want your seatbelt.” He squealed out of park, accelerating so rapidly she felt her heart in her throat for a moment. “She’s fast.” He sped along the coast, then along half-empty streets. It seemed he knew where he was going.
She has ridden in that car a thousand times now, sometimes for the sheer pleasure of the speed and wind in her hair. It has always been a neutral zone-no matter how angry one or the other of them might be, they act like civilized human beings each time he’s behind the wheel and she’s buckled into the passenger seat. She supposes he must get as tired of the botched timing as she is-it’s no wonder he also needs a place where he doesn’t have to draw his battle lines. She gradually became able to predict the nights he would wait for her like this: the nights something had upset him and the nights he had somehow realized something had hurt her. She became grateful, eventually, because he is better than her impersonal driver when she is fighting down pain or fury-at least she can always channel them at him.
But that first time, she wanted nothing more than to get away from him and nurse her emotional wounds in peace. He seemed to sense that and said nothing, for which she was grateful to him. The only words he uttered were said as she climbed out of the vehicle at her own gates. “Your performance was beautiful, Layla.” Her name sounds different with his accent, sweeter somehow, and she softened a little, angry as she was with him. “Every night of the run, not just tonight. It’s something you can’t hear enough times.” As she shut the door, he looked up at her, smiled, and told her, “Happy birthday,” before squealing out of the drive before she could ask him how on earth he knows when no one else had.
That was the way they were for the next several years. Once she convinced herself he meant nothing, he would eventually do something that caused her to tumble back into love with him, somehow. She has lost count of the times she has fallen in love with him. Sometimes she loved him for days, sometimes for weeks, once for a period of months. Something always comes along to break it: one of his many girlfriends, a point of her personal pride, a carelessly said word that wounded deep. She realizes now that this goes both ways. She wonders how many times he has been silently in love with her.
He was certainly in love with her when she ranted and raged at the casting of The Snow Queen the next year. She had been overlooked as too tall and mature for the role of Gerda, being cast instead in the prestigious but secondary role of the Snow Queen herself. It wasn’t the fact of being denied the lead, though that stung-her teachers had instilled in her the understanding that all roles were necessary for the audience’s enjoyment. Only he made an offhand comment about the role suiting her to a marvel because she would be able to freeze the audience with one look, and even she was surprised at the heat in her words as she curtly told him to go practice with Stacie, the girl cast as the lead, and get out of her sight before she hit him.
She didn’t hit him then. She has only ever hit him once, slapping him full across his beautiful face because she couldn’t think of any other way to snap him out of a cycle of hatred and misdirected rage. But back then he only looked at her in shock as she slammed out of the practice room to head to the trapezes on the main stage to work out kinks in her newest routine and blow off steam. For weeks after that, he tried to get her attention, and once he tried to apologize, but she only looked at him coldly and said nothing. He has never apologized to her since, though he has done things that wounded her much deeper than the comment about her coldness.
During the show’s run she watched him, dressed and acting as a boy, young and confused, as she reigned over a land of eternal, crystallized perfection, and pretended she hated him as he failed, time after time, to find eternity. As always, their timing onstage was perfect, and as usual the newspapers praised the two of them lavishly, leaving Stacie almost entirely out of it, lead role or no. Since then, the shows have been picked specifically to highlight their talents to avoid another performer giving up and quitting like Stacie did afterwards.
After the girl stormed out on closing night, she once again found him waiting for her in the drive, her driver nowhere in sight. This was so common now that she didn’t even ask as she slid into her seat and buckled her seatbelt. As he did sometimes, he took a roundabout route, driving down the coast, then looping around to make a circle through the outskirts of Cape Mary. “I don’t like being partnered with anyone but you,” he said abruptly. “It only leads to problems.”
“You don’t like me,” she said flatly. This was before she could look at their situation objectively, long before she realized he was suffering as much as she was from the faulty timing.
“Apparently, it’s mutual,” he answered, his voice irritated. “One has nothing to do with the other, however. You’re the only one I can synchronize with so perfectly. You’re the one I want.”
“Yes, we’re well suited to working together,” she agreed. “I also prefer to work with you. You’re extraordinarily talented.”
“I haven’t had a permanent partner before you,” he said at length, turning onto the freeway to make another run down the coast. “I could wish we got along better.”
“We get along well enough,” she replied, looking out of her window at the ocean. The line of moonlight on the water was the same silvery color as his eyes, and incredibly beautiful. “It doesn’t affect our work. I suppose I should be grateful we’re both so dedicated to Kaleido Stage.”
“Dedication to something deserves respect,” he said. Abruptly, he turned off of the freeway, and she realized they had made a complete loop and were back at the circus. It was late now and the lights surrounding it had gone out. “I can tell you are proud to be a part of it.”
“I can tell you are, too,” she told him, gazing at the darkened building that means so much to her.
“Can you?” He turns to look at her, and the moonlight reflecting on his eyes seems to make them glow with a cold light. “Do you want to know the truth?” The expression on his face is so intense she finds herself completely breathless. She has never seen him like this except onstage. “I hate this place,” he says in a harsh whisper. “Sometimes I hate you because you make me wish I didn’t.”
She couldn’t find the voice or the words to ask him what he meant as he directed the car onto the quickest way to her house.
For a few weeks they were in limbo, neither making the first move towards the other in the days of empty practice and classes while they waited for the next project to be announced. Then he came back from vacation with his long hair cut shorter, the same slightly messy and spiky style he wears it in now, and she fell in love with him again. But he was as courteous and polite as he was carefully distant, as if a little wary of her, and once again he broke her heart.
It was around then he started changing, she thinks, sinking into depression and hatred even while he performed with a bright smile for those who came to watch and worship. It was around that time, too, that she first started suspecting they had a timing problem. But she was too proud then to admit the problem lay equally with her, so she left it alone, continuing only to work by his side and breathe in unison under the stage lights, letting the gap between them widen every time they walked in opposite directions.
That is simply who and what they were, at least, until she was the one who started changing due to the appearance of the new girl, the unknown with bright eyes and a devil-may-care attitude. She found her unpleasant at first because she couldn’t understand her, and felt angry perhaps for the simple reason that he was kind to this girl, unwaveringly so, while she had long resigned herself to being snappish and quietly professional in his presence because each time she reaches out with kindness she slams into cold indifference.
But Sora is the one who changed her. She knows this, and wonders if she will ever find a way to explain how much that change means to her. Perhaps, as simple as it is, by saying that even knowing how it has ended she would never change a thing.
She has never had a friend before.
She has never worked as hard or been as tired as she was when working with Sora, from the very first rehearsals for Arabian Nights. It was a point of pride that she could do anything, but with this new, unfamiliar presence on the stage next to her, she couldn’t seem to synchronize. Time after time she fell, and time after time she strove to match her timing to the other girl, and time after time she failed, until she realized, with a start, that as long as she was trying to match her and Sora was doing the same, they would never find a mean. Their timing in real life had already become perfect. When it snapped into place at first she was shocked. She has never synchronized so easily with someone offstage. Sometimes, she thinks their minds are working along the same track. She has never experienced that with anyone else.
And even then, on stage they were not quite together, always just a step ahead or a step behind, and it was not until she decided to recklessly toss the idea of timing out the window that they ever started getting somewhere.
She has tried to explain this to him. She has tried and tried and tried, while they flew along the coast in his car on the nights she thought she couldn’t take it anymore, but she can’t find the right words and he is too far gone, and maybe, just maybe, it is already too late by that point. Their timing is so far out of whack it would take a miracle to make it right again, and she is pragmatic, and doesn’t believe in miracles.
Still, she can’t think of another word for the feeling of her father’s eyes on her, seeing her and not just an asset and telling her, after she has nearly killed herself and destroyed her career that her performance was wonderful, because never, not in all the years that have passed since her mother’s death, has she been able to get those simple, necessary words out of him. And she can not describe the feeling inside her when he tells her that it was Yuri who brought him here for her, something no one, not even Sora who has bent herself on doing the impossible, has been able to accomplish.
She can not name or describe the feeling, but suddenly it makes everything she has been through all right, and she can smile as she tells Sora to continue living her dream for her. She wonders if she will ever be able to tell the younger girl how much she has come to mean to her for the changes she has wrought in her life and her way of thinking. She doesn’t think so-she can’t put feelings into words; it has always been her weakness.
But she wonders still what happens now, now that she is freshly out of surgery and pumped full of painkillers in the sunlit hospital room filled with flowers. She wonders where she will go, now that she has willingly given her last performance, and she fights down an unexpected sadness because she realizes that as long as she could synchronize with him on stage they had something, while now they have nothing at all. It doesn’t matter that she spent the last two months hating him desperately-she has come to realize that the hatred is also a product of botched timing.
When he walks into the hospital room, she is lost in thought, watching the ocean out of the window, and she doesn’t notice him right away, not until she turns around and he is standing at the edge of her bed, fingering the petals of a rose past its bloom. He is dressed in white, a color she hasn’t seen him wearing in longer than she can remember, and it makes him seem younger. She doesn’t know what to say to him.
“Hello, Layla,” he says, just that, as if he also doesn’t know what words to give her.
“Hello, Yuri.”
There is something almost familiar about this scene. She remembers every time she got hurt in practice and in performance with him. He always looked terrified, much more so than when he was the one hurt. She remembers his jerky driving as he took her to the hospital for things as insignificant as a twisted ankle. She was never able to calm him until a doctor had seen her, and he would have tightly-reined fury in his clear water eyes as she walked out of examination. She always found it foolish; only recently she has come to realize why he behaved the way he did.
He doesn’t look angry this time, only very tired. “Are you feeling… better?” He doesn’t seem happy with the words he finally settles on. She feels the discomfort between them, because neither seems to know who is a step ahead and who is a step behind. Only one thing is sure: wherever they are, they are still not together.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she says. She knows it is morphine and that she will certainly be feeling it in a few hours, but right now she is lightheaded and a little dizzy and feels like she can still fly, though she knows she will never fly again.
“That’s good.” Again, there is an uncomfortable silence, then he snatches his hand away from the dying flower abruptly and runs a hand through his hair, as if trying to regain his equilibrium. “I just wanted to make sure you got through surgery,” he says. “And to tell you you were spectacular yesterday. That’s all.”
He walks toward the door, and she feels the gap between them widening, the steps faltering, the impossibility of anything, ever, becoming more and more real. “Yuri.” Just that, just his name, but it is enough to have him turning back to her. She realizes his eyes are too bright, almost as if he is ready to cry. “Thank you.” With those two words, she feels the gap lessening a little, and struggles to find more. “My father. You don’t know what that means to me.”
“Yes I do,” he says quietly, lowering his eyes. “That’s why I did it.”
“Thank you,” she repeats, because she can’t tell him so enough. They’re good words, right, and they help, but they’re not enough to put them back in sync, and she knows it.
“I’m sorry.” More good words, words she hasn’t heard in too long. “I know it isn’t nearly enough, but I wanted to do something for you to show you how sorry I am.” He looks pained as he glances out of the window. “I didn’t want you to do it.”
“I know,” she agrees.
“I think I did it all because I didn’t want you to do it. In the end… because he was already gone, but I still had you. Only I didn’t, really. But if you had died, I wouldn’t have you at all.”
She smiles softly, feeling the gap sliding closed, the timing beginning to align itself. “I know.”
He looks at her, confused and vulnerable. “You don’t look angry with me anymore.”
“What did you tell Sora to make her give up the right to the first visit?” she asks him instead of giving her reassurance.
“The truth,” he says heavily, giving the word a thousand meanings.
“Then I forgive you,” she tells him.
“Just like that?” he asks.
“I rarely say things I don’t mean, Yuri.” She wishes she knew how to say the things she does mean. She doesn’t know, can’t even begin imagining how to say it all, about the faulty timing and his storm-sea eyes and the way he makes her blood hum the same way a particularly dangerous maneuver does, because she senses that he himself is no less dangerous to her than flying without a lifeline. She wishes there was a way to explain the way she has fallen in love with him countless times, and the way she sees him now, beautiful and so far away. There are a hundred things to say, and none of them are coming to her lips, so she only watches him, knowing that if he turns around and walks out now, all the steps they have made in the right direction will be erased as though they had never been.
He takes a step to the door, and she feels like she is choking-she cannot let him leave. More words explode out of her. “But I say the things I do mean even more rarely.” He stops, and she can breathe again. “Please,” she says, and that is the most difficult word she has uttered as he looks at her, uncertain. “Don’t leave.” She feels close to crying because she realizes some words may need to be said aloud. But she hopes they can also be audible even when they’re silent-she hopes he hears them, because she knows she can not say what needs to be said.
She has been in his arms hundreds of times in the past years, lived a hundred fairytales, a hundred romances, received a hundred cool, impersonal kisses to fuel the dreams of the audience. She has loved him and hated him, wanted him and avoided him. It doesn’t seem like there is much unexplored territory between the two of them, but when he finally moves and it is towards her and not away she suddenly realizes she knows nothing, after all. This time when his arms come around her it is different than the way it is onstage-the touch is light, almost hesitant, careful of her right shoulder, and it is up to her to bridge the gap and press close to his chest, her left hand reaching around him to pull him closer and her head settling on his shoulder.
She realizes she is crying; she has not cried yet-not when she was suffering so much and working through the pain, not when Kate told her she would never perform again, not even when she watched Sora breaking down, but she is crying now, and she doesn’t know why. One of his hands is in her hair at the base of her neck and she feels him shifting his weight onto the side of the bed so that he can continue holding her more comfortably. She feels a light kiss on her temple. He doesn’t say anything.
That’s all right. She thinks she can hear all the things he hasn’t said. It isn’t pragmatic of her. It is the sort of thing that would take a miracle. But she has seen that miracles can happen one time in a million if you wish for them hard enough, and she has never wanted anything more. As she feels his heart beating through the warm linen of his shirt she realizes that the heartbeat, slow and steady, is perfectly matched to hers. Maybe, just maybe, their timing is coming back into alignment.
And she smiles through her tears.
Please, even if you don't know the fandom but like my writing, read this and tell me what you think! I really like how it came out!
Title: Unsynchronized
Fandom: Kaleido Star
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance
Pairing: Yuri/Layla
Wordcount: 6,711
Description: Layla reconsiders her relationship with her long-time co-star. Set at the end of season one.
Disclaimer: Kaleido Star doesn't belong to me, but I can affect Yuri's accent flawlessly *lol*
***
It occurs to her, when she looks back at it, that their biggest problem is timing. They were always synchronized on stage, perfectly so, sometimes so much that she imagined she could feel them breathing in unison, as they stood side by side trying to catch their breath and smiling, always smiling into the blinding white lights. They were the same person then, as they stood and received the worshiping cheers of the crowd. For a little while, they were perfectly in sync, and then they would run off the stage and go their separate ways into their dressing rooms, and the timing would suddenly be all wrong.
They were never quite together, not from the very beginning. The first time she saw him was almost a year before she joined the troupe, when she went to Kaleido Stage to watch their performance, to plan and critique from her seat. The performance was an old Russian fairytale, Ivanushka; she remembers it still because it is rare now for Kaleido Stage to perform shows which lean so heavily on the male protagonist, and they had never done it again since she had come. But this was immediately after the death of Cynthia Desmaunes, their star trampoliner, and the performance rode squarely on his shoulders, though he was only sixteen years old. She remembers when he came onstage, dressed in simple white with a red sash around his waist, pale hair tied back because he wore it longer then, and even though she had spent the opening scene critiquing the performances of the tumblers onstage, the only thing in her mind as he begins performing is that he is beautiful.
She remembers that feeling of forgetting time for a while as she watches him spin and twist and jump and dance through the first act, because it was a little like the feeling she imagined her parents had felt the first time they had seen Alice in Wonderland, except this time it is she who can not look away. When he had finished the first act and he stood there surrounded by the colorful cast of forest spirits and villagers, whimsical fairytale creatures, firebirds, witches, and gypsies, it was still the unspotted white in the middle that drew her eyes, and she felt herself smiling, answering the insolent, sparkling grin he was giving to the audience. By the end of the second act, she had made her decision: she wanted to be his partner, she wanted to share the magic.
She is pragmatic. Even now, after everything she has been through, she realizes that the greater part of magic is smoke and mirrors, hidden lifelines and hours of sweat and practice and bruises. But even so, she has known this place has magic since the first time she sat in the audience and the lights dimmed, and that night, the magic seemed to sparkle around him. It remains the only thing she and her father have ever butted wills over; she remembers fighting with him, arguing and eventually slamming out for the first audition. She kept her nerves a tightly-wound bundle in her stomach as she went up onto that stage with every appearance of aloof indifference. She wasn’t quite sixteen, but even then she was cool and collected and confident, as she had been raised to be. She walked into the audition hall with her head up, and she walked out with the highest scores in Kaleido Stage’s history. The scores interested her very little; the only thing in her mind was the desire to touch that magical feeling she thought she might be able to find under those lights. She took the high scores as her due; she had worked for them, worked far harder than most of the other children who had crowded into the audition hall with her. She saw them as children even then; she felt years older than them and their giggles and whispered secrets.
She still feels years older than her peers, but the thought of it no longer makes her feel superior, only tired.
She slipped into the role of the top female star seamlessly. There was no one to challenge for the position; none of the girls in the cast were any kind of real competition. Some of them might have been jealous, she supposed, but she didn’t concern herself with that either. When her first casting came a week later and Carlos announced in his usual brusque voice that Sleeping Beauty would be co-starred by Yuri Killian and Layla Hamilton, she allowed herself a small, satisfied smile.
She had seen him backstage once or twice in that week while she waited and did tech work without complaining along with the other newcomers. She remembers the person he was then: more man than boy already, but full of jokes and ready with an easy smile and a kind word for anyone. He joked with the supporting cast and flirted shamelessly with the women, even those ten years his senior.
He hasn’t done that in a while. She doesn’t remember exactly when he became cool and detached, but she supposes it came slowly, with time. She only realized how he has changed very recently, just as recently as she realized that she misses the way he used to be.
He had a smile for her, too, the day of the first rehearsal. It danced in his eyes as he leaned over her hand and placed a light kiss on it. “It seems we finally have a princess worthy of her role,” he said, causing a few of the girls in the corner to sigh in adoration mixed with jealousy. His voice is smooth and warm, with just enough of a hint of a Russian accent to mark his heritage unmistakably. She knows now that the accent is largely an affectation-he spent the greater part of his life in the United States and can speak flawless American English if he wishes-but it is a part of the image he presents to the world.
She only raised her eyebrows at him until he released her hand. No one has ever allowed themselves such familiarities, and she remembers thinking that she is disappointed, that he is not at all magical face to face, except when she looks into those laughing eyes the color of a winter ocean and clear as water, and something inside her moves. She doesn’t know what it is and that irritates her, so she only smiles coolly and says, “I thought rehearsal started at ten. Why are we still standing here?”
That was when their timing first slipped, she thinks, and she knows better than anyone that once something is knocked out of sync, it is harder and harder to pull it back together as time passes. Every day, as they worked to synchronize on the stage, she became more and more irritated with his offstage attitude, and began avoiding him and his winter eyes outside of rehearsal. She thought it was simple enough to keep stage and real life separate, though it was harder than she imagined to ignore his gaze on her during rehearsal breaks when they collapsed, breathing heavily and drowning in sweat. He would smile slowly when she caught him watching her, but he never moved his gaze, staring shamelessly until she turned away with a sniff and jumped to her feet, disliking his seeing her weak.
But on stage, it was different. Just as she had seen, he proved again and again, day after day, that he was magic. And as long as the music was playing and the coach was shouting out commands, their timing was perfect. Again and again, when the relentless woman called, “Jump!” she would launch herself into the air, spinning off of the trapeze, dizzy and blind, trusting in him to catch her. That was the danger of the climax of the first act, she had been told: she had to jump without seeing.
The first time it had been described to them, he had laughed at her widened eyes. “Are you afraid I won’t catch you, princess?”
“No,” she said, cool, smoothing her hair back from her face. “I’m not afraid of anything. And I expect you to catch me.”
“And if I didn’t?”
“You will.”
And so he did, every time she launched herself into his arms. And every time she found herself catching her breath only when he had her by the waist and they were eye to eye. Every time, he was smiling until the coach shouted, “Again!” and he threw her back into the air to catch her trapeze and start over.
She remembers being grateful that he keeps his distance outside of the practice room, because she finds those cool eyes and that warm smile incomprehensibly irritating.
They rehearsed the finale from the very beginning, but they skipped over the rest of act two until a week before the performance because she was supposed to be asleep during the majority of it. She forgot all about it with the pressure of the two spectacular routines that capped off the first and second act-at least until she came into morning rehearsal one time to find that the greater part of the set had been assembled in the night and the director had joined the coach to go through the awakening scene. They were surrounded by the supporting cast, who lounged against set pieces and practiced dance moves, maneuvering around those too lazy to practice. More were coming in by ones and twos as the director began to speak.
“When the prince kisses the princess-”
“Are you sure I won’t get frostbite?” he interrupted, leaning against the wall, an insolent half-smile in place on his face.
She felt an angry flush coming on and suppressed it. “Be serious, please,” she snapped.
“-you sit up, Layla. You have five seconds before the pedestal starts descending, Yuri, so you need to pull her up onto the trapeze with you. Be prepared for the flash of light and don’t let it blind you. Layla, you drop first onto the trampoline when it comes up from belowstage. Then you begin the ball scene. The light is your cue to take your places, the rest of you.” The director, clearly used to his jibes, finished her description dryly and waved them towards the stage.
He only shrugged and jumped effortlessly onto the pedestal. “After you, then.”
So she lay down and closed her eyes. She remembers waiting then, feeling strangely exposed and confused as seconds passed. Her heartbeat speeds up, because this reminds her a little of jumping blind-here, she has no control; she doesn’t know when the scene will move on, only that she must wait peacefully for him to set the pace. There is a brush of breath across her face, then-
“Layla, you’re supposed to sit up; the pedestal-”
Her eyes fly open at the director’s voice as the platform starts descending, and there he is above her, sitting on the trapeze with laughter in his eyes.
She felt incredibly stupid as the platform jerked to a stop, then reversed its direction. “Again,” the director said with a hint of annoyance in her voice. There was giggling from below; someone in the supporting cast clearly found this hysterical.
“You didn’t kiss me,” she hissed at him as he hopped back down onto the platform. She remembers the blush that came with that phrase; she can count the number of times in her life she has blushed on the fingers of one hand.
“To the audience, it will look like I did,” he said. He reached out, familiar as always, and patted her cheek, which she felt was embarrassingly pink. “Did you want me to?”
“I already told you to be serious,” she said, gathering shreds of dignity around her.
“I’m completely serious.”
“What can you two possibly be discussing up there?” the director shouted up. “This isn’t like you! We only have half an hour! Would you concentrate please?”
“Layla is complaining because I didn’t kiss her properly,” he shouted down, grinning brightly at the entire cast gathered down there, and she is so affronted that she can’t find any words to spit back at him as she wants to.
“Oh for the love of-” the director sounded ready to do murder, but he was unafraid, laughing down at them all.
“That’s all right, I’ll fix it.” He grabbed her waist and yanked her towards him; she remembers putting her hands up for balance and finding them pinned against him, and being unable to utter a single sound as he kissed her, hard, in front of all those people. She remembers, for a moment it feels like falling and her blood humming in her ears, and realizing she can’t hold on for balance after all, because she isn’t really falling at all.
Then he let her go, dropping her carelessly like a limp rag doll, and she nearly fell to her knees. No one has ever kissed her before. She doesn’t know whether she wants to slap him or hold on to him, but she does neither, only stares blankly as he helpfully says, “You need to lie down; we’re holding up rehearsal.”
There was charmed silence from below as she moved slowly back to the bed on the pedestal, lay down, closed her eyes, her hands shaking. “We can continue now,” he called down, “we’re sorry for the delay.”
And so rehearsal went on, and this time he brushed his lips lightly, impersonally against hers, not at all as he had moments ago, and whispered, “Don’t miss your cue.” She didn’t, rising up gracefully as she had been instructed, swinging up to the trapeze with him, half-closing her eyes against the bright light as she somersaulted towards the trampoline, wanting nothing more than the simplicity of rehearsal, repetition, pattern.
“Layla, concentrate!” the coach kept calling to her during that day’s rehearsal. “Watch him, not me! He’s the prince, remember? You love him!”
Her eyes fly to his then, and he lifts her, throws her in the air, and she has never been dizzier than she is as she comes back down, because she realizes she does.
That was the first time she fell in love with him, the first of many. But when practice had finally ended and she tried to catch him to get a word in, he vaulted offstage and walked out with his arm around one of the new girls, a little Romanian girl with the face of a doll who snuggled up shamelessly to his side. He didn’t even turn to look back at her, because he didn’t know or begin to care that she would be following.
So now she watched him and he ignored her, as though whatever interest she could possibly have held had been exhausted. Now that she thinks about that first time, she realizes more than ever before that it is and has always been a timing problem with them; like being on a see-saw, he watches her only when she finds him frustrating and unnecessary, but he is always indifferent when she wishes he would turn and see her.
She loved him blindly for three weeks, all the way through the run of the show. Her heart beat too fast when he watched her with clear adoration and wanting on the stage, but those were only stage eyes, she quickly came to realize. They would become as cold as the winter sea they reminded her of when the performance was over, and he would leave her side with a distracted, “Good job,” never really seeing her at all. So she loved him without return in the purehearted way only a girl of fifteen can love, the first time.
Closing night was her sixteenth birthday, and she couldn’t get a straight answer out of her father about coming to the show. He made noises about a party that afternoon, but she knew this story already. She only smiled at her maid after he had left for work in the morning and told her to cancel the invitations. “Pay them as planned if they show up,” she said exhaustedly of the unnecessary guests her father invited every year. She was old enough to do this now; she had had to suffer through the meaningless parties for years and wanted nothing more to do with them. The idea that her father thought it was all right to buy her a birthday party was humiliating, but he didn’t seem to see it that way.
So she came to Kaleido Stage snippy and easily angered, and everything irritated her as she got into costume and make-up, spoke to one of the backstage technicians about a lighting problem, and limbered her muscles in preparation of the first act. When he strolled into the backstage chaos in full golden prince regalia, followed by the pretty little Romanian, she turned her face and ignored him, tired of people who pretended to care, unused to being invisible, and feeling painfully slighted. No one ignored Layla Hamilton, not for three consecutive weeks.
That was the first time she fell out of love.
After the show, when she entered her dressing room, she had already realized her father had not and would not be coming to support her, just as he had not come every other night of the show’s run. She considered briefly throwing something; she hates feeling helpless. Instead she picked the cards off of the bouquets that had been delivered in her absence, reading each one as is her habit. She was acquiring a fan base and it seemed to grow every day-she was glad for that, and felt soothed by the fact that others saw her, even if those who mattered most didn’t.
The last card she came to was attached to a single red rose, and instead of congratulations for a successful show, it read “Happy birthday!” in an angular hand. It wasn’t signed. She had the strongest urge to hug it to her chest and cry.
No one had remembered her birthday for years, either.
When she left the building a great deal later, dressed in street clothes and arms full of flowers, she didn’t find her habitual driver waiting for her. Instead, a red sports car was the only thing left in the drive-around, and he was leaning against it, his face tipped up to the wind blowing in from the sea. The lights around Kaleido Stage were just coming on when he looked over at her and raised a hand in a lazy wave. “I thought you would never come out.”
“Did you need something?” she asked. She remembers the way he looked, windswept and young in faded jeans and an old white tee-shirt with his hair in a short, stubby ponytail, and she tells herself she has not and does not have any feelings whatsoever for him aside from a respect for his abilities and an irritation, as if from an itch she can’t quite scratch.
“No, but you need a ride home,” he told her.
“I have a driver.”
“I sent him away,” he said with a casual shrug. “Go ahead, get in.” He grinned, the way he had grinned at her in the weeks of rehearsal leading up to the show. “Unless you want to walk home with all of that.”
Because the idea of that didn’t appeal, she slid into the passenger side, sinking into the soft leather seat. She wondered even then who he was, to have such a vehicle at sixteen. Not many would have been able to afford it. “I don’t like you ordering around my servants,” she said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said carelessly. “You might want your seatbelt.” He squealed out of park, accelerating so rapidly she felt her heart in her throat for a moment. “She’s fast.” He sped along the coast, then along half-empty streets. It seemed he knew where he was going.
She has ridden in that car a thousand times now, sometimes for the sheer pleasure of the speed and wind in her hair. It has always been a neutral zone-no matter how angry one or the other of them might be, they act like civilized human beings each time he’s behind the wheel and she’s buckled into the passenger seat. She supposes he must get as tired of the botched timing as she is-it’s no wonder he also needs a place where he doesn’t have to draw his battle lines. She gradually became able to predict the nights he would wait for her like this: the nights something had upset him and the nights he had somehow realized something had hurt her. She became grateful, eventually, because he is better than her impersonal driver when she is fighting down pain or fury-at least she can always channel them at him.
But that first time, she wanted nothing more than to get away from him and nurse her emotional wounds in peace. He seemed to sense that and said nothing, for which she was grateful to him. The only words he uttered were said as she climbed out of the vehicle at her own gates. “Your performance was beautiful, Layla.” Her name sounds different with his accent, sweeter somehow, and she softened a little, angry as she was with him. “Every night of the run, not just tonight. It’s something you can’t hear enough times.” As she shut the door, he looked up at her, smiled, and told her, “Happy birthday,” before squealing out of the drive before she could ask him how on earth he knows when no one else had.
That was the way they were for the next several years. Once she convinced herself he meant nothing, he would eventually do something that caused her to tumble back into love with him, somehow. She has lost count of the times she has fallen in love with him. Sometimes she loved him for days, sometimes for weeks, once for a period of months. Something always comes along to break it: one of his many girlfriends, a point of her personal pride, a carelessly said word that wounded deep. She realizes now that this goes both ways. She wonders how many times he has been silently in love with her.
He was certainly in love with her when she ranted and raged at the casting of The Snow Queen the next year. She had been overlooked as too tall and mature for the role of Gerda, being cast instead in the prestigious but secondary role of the Snow Queen herself. It wasn’t the fact of being denied the lead, though that stung-her teachers had instilled in her the understanding that all roles were necessary for the audience’s enjoyment. Only he made an offhand comment about the role suiting her to a marvel because she would be able to freeze the audience with one look, and even she was surprised at the heat in her words as she curtly told him to go practice with Stacie, the girl cast as the lead, and get out of her sight before she hit him.
She didn’t hit him then. She has only ever hit him once, slapping him full across his beautiful face because she couldn’t think of any other way to snap him out of a cycle of hatred and misdirected rage. But back then he only looked at her in shock as she slammed out of the practice room to head to the trapezes on the main stage to work out kinks in her newest routine and blow off steam. For weeks after that, he tried to get her attention, and once he tried to apologize, but she only looked at him coldly and said nothing. He has never apologized to her since, though he has done things that wounded her much deeper than the comment about her coldness.
During the show’s run she watched him, dressed and acting as a boy, young and confused, as she reigned over a land of eternal, crystallized perfection, and pretended she hated him as he failed, time after time, to find eternity. As always, their timing onstage was perfect, and as usual the newspapers praised the two of them lavishly, leaving Stacie almost entirely out of it, lead role or no. Since then, the shows have been picked specifically to highlight their talents to avoid another performer giving up and quitting like Stacie did afterwards.
After the girl stormed out on closing night, she once again found him waiting for her in the drive, her driver nowhere in sight. This was so common now that she didn’t even ask as she slid into her seat and buckled her seatbelt. As he did sometimes, he took a roundabout route, driving down the coast, then looping around to make a circle through the outskirts of Cape Mary. “I don’t like being partnered with anyone but you,” he said abruptly. “It only leads to problems.”
“You don’t like me,” she said flatly. This was before she could look at their situation objectively, long before she realized he was suffering as much as she was from the faulty timing.
“Apparently, it’s mutual,” he answered, his voice irritated. “One has nothing to do with the other, however. You’re the only one I can synchronize with so perfectly. You’re the one I want.”
“Yes, we’re well suited to working together,” she agreed. “I also prefer to work with you. You’re extraordinarily talented.”
“I haven’t had a permanent partner before you,” he said at length, turning onto the freeway to make another run down the coast. “I could wish we got along better.”
“We get along well enough,” she replied, looking out of her window at the ocean. The line of moonlight on the water was the same silvery color as his eyes, and incredibly beautiful. “It doesn’t affect our work. I suppose I should be grateful we’re both so dedicated to Kaleido Stage.”
“Dedication to something deserves respect,” he said. Abruptly, he turned off of the freeway, and she realized they had made a complete loop and were back at the circus. It was late now and the lights surrounding it had gone out. “I can tell you are proud to be a part of it.”
“I can tell you are, too,” she told him, gazing at the darkened building that means so much to her.
“Can you?” He turns to look at her, and the moonlight reflecting on his eyes seems to make them glow with a cold light. “Do you want to know the truth?” The expression on his face is so intense she finds herself completely breathless. She has never seen him like this except onstage. “I hate this place,” he says in a harsh whisper. “Sometimes I hate you because you make me wish I didn’t.”
She couldn’t find the voice or the words to ask him what he meant as he directed the car onto the quickest way to her house.
For a few weeks they were in limbo, neither making the first move towards the other in the days of empty practice and classes while they waited for the next project to be announced. Then he came back from vacation with his long hair cut shorter, the same slightly messy and spiky style he wears it in now, and she fell in love with him again. But he was as courteous and polite as he was carefully distant, as if a little wary of her, and once again he broke her heart.
It was around then he started changing, she thinks, sinking into depression and hatred even while he performed with a bright smile for those who came to watch and worship. It was around that time, too, that she first started suspecting they had a timing problem. But she was too proud then to admit the problem lay equally with her, so she left it alone, continuing only to work by his side and breathe in unison under the stage lights, letting the gap between them widen every time they walked in opposite directions.
That is simply who and what they were, at least, until she was the one who started changing due to the appearance of the new girl, the unknown with bright eyes and a devil-may-care attitude. She found her unpleasant at first because she couldn’t understand her, and felt angry perhaps for the simple reason that he was kind to this girl, unwaveringly so, while she had long resigned herself to being snappish and quietly professional in his presence because each time she reaches out with kindness she slams into cold indifference.
But Sora is the one who changed her. She knows this, and wonders if she will ever find a way to explain how much that change means to her. Perhaps, as simple as it is, by saying that even knowing how it has ended she would never change a thing.
She has never had a friend before.
She has never worked as hard or been as tired as she was when working with Sora, from the very first rehearsals for Arabian Nights. It was a point of pride that she could do anything, but with this new, unfamiliar presence on the stage next to her, she couldn’t seem to synchronize. Time after time she fell, and time after time she strove to match her timing to the other girl, and time after time she failed, until she realized, with a start, that as long as she was trying to match her and Sora was doing the same, they would never find a mean. Their timing in real life had already become perfect. When it snapped into place at first she was shocked. She has never synchronized so easily with someone offstage. Sometimes, she thinks their minds are working along the same track. She has never experienced that with anyone else.
And even then, on stage they were not quite together, always just a step ahead or a step behind, and it was not until she decided to recklessly toss the idea of timing out the window that they ever started getting somewhere.
She has tried to explain this to him. She has tried and tried and tried, while they flew along the coast in his car on the nights she thought she couldn’t take it anymore, but she can’t find the right words and he is too far gone, and maybe, just maybe, it is already too late by that point. Their timing is so far out of whack it would take a miracle to make it right again, and she is pragmatic, and doesn’t believe in miracles.
Still, she can’t think of another word for the feeling of her father’s eyes on her, seeing her and not just an asset and telling her, after she has nearly killed herself and destroyed her career that her performance was wonderful, because never, not in all the years that have passed since her mother’s death, has she been able to get those simple, necessary words out of him. And she can not describe the feeling inside her when he tells her that it was Yuri who brought him here for her, something no one, not even Sora who has bent herself on doing the impossible, has been able to accomplish.
She can not name or describe the feeling, but suddenly it makes everything she has been through all right, and she can smile as she tells Sora to continue living her dream for her. She wonders if she will ever be able to tell the younger girl how much she has come to mean to her for the changes she has wrought in her life and her way of thinking. She doesn’t think so-she can’t put feelings into words; it has always been her weakness.
But she wonders still what happens now, now that she is freshly out of surgery and pumped full of painkillers in the sunlit hospital room filled with flowers. She wonders where she will go, now that she has willingly given her last performance, and she fights down an unexpected sadness because she realizes that as long as she could synchronize with him on stage they had something, while now they have nothing at all. It doesn’t matter that she spent the last two months hating him desperately-she has come to realize that the hatred is also a product of botched timing.
When he walks into the hospital room, she is lost in thought, watching the ocean out of the window, and she doesn’t notice him right away, not until she turns around and he is standing at the edge of her bed, fingering the petals of a rose past its bloom. He is dressed in white, a color she hasn’t seen him wearing in longer than she can remember, and it makes him seem younger. She doesn’t know what to say to him.
“Hello, Layla,” he says, just that, as if he also doesn’t know what words to give her.
“Hello, Yuri.”
There is something almost familiar about this scene. She remembers every time she got hurt in practice and in performance with him. He always looked terrified, much more so than when he was the one hurt. She remembers his jerky driving as he took her to the hospital for things as insignificant as a twisted ankle. She was never able to calm him until a doctor had seen her, and he would have tightly-reined fury in his clear water eyes as she walked out of examination. She always found it foolish; only recently she has come to realize why he behaved the way he did.
He doesn’t look angry this time, only very tired. “Are you feeling… better?” He doesn’t seem happy with the words he finally settles on. She feels the discomfort between them, because neither seems to know who is a step ahead and who is a step behind. Only one thing is sure: wherever they are, they are still not together.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she says. She knows it is morphine and that she will certainly be feeling it in a few hours, but right now she is lightheaded and a little dizzy and feels like she can still fly, though she knows she will never fly again.
“That’s good.” Again, there is an uncomfortable silence, then he snatches his hand away from the dying flower abruptly and runs a hand through his hair, as if trying to regain his equilibrium. “I just wanted to make sure you got through surgery,” he says. “And to tell you you were spectacular yesterday. That’s all.”
He walks toward the door, and she feels the gap between them widening, the steps faltering, the impossibility of anything, ever, becoming more and more real. “Yuri.” Just that, just his name, but it is enough to have him turning back to her. She realizes his eyes are too bright, almost as if he is ready to cry. “Thank you.” With those two words, she feels the gap lessening a little, and struggles to find more. “My father. You don’t know what that means to me.”
“Yes I do,” he says quietly, lowering his eyes. “That’s why I did it.”
“Thank you,” she repeats, because she can’t tell him so enough. They’re good words, right, and they help, but they’re not enough to put them back in sync, and she knows it.
“I’m sorry.” More good words, words she hasn’t heard in too long. “I know it isn’t nearly enough, but I wanted to do something for you to show you how sorry I am.” He looks pained as he glances out of the window. “I didn’t want you to do it.”
“I know,” she agrees.
“I think I did it all because I didn’t want you to do it. In the end… because he was already gone, but I still had you. Only I didn’t, really. But if you had died, I wouldn’t have you at all.”
She smiles softly, feeling the gap sliding closed, the timing beginning to align itself. “I know.”
He looks at her, confused and vulnerable. “You don’t look angry with me anymore.”
“What did you tell Sora to make her give up the right to the first visit?” she asks him instead of giving her reassurance.
“The truth,” he says heavily, giving the word a thousand meanings.
“Then I forgive you,” she tells him.
“Just like that?” he asks.
“I rarely say things I don’t mean, Yuri.” She wishes she knew how to say the things she does mean. She doesn’t know, can’t even begin imagining how to say it all, about the faulty timing and his storm-sea eyes and the way he makes her blood hum the same way a particularly dangerous maneuver does, because she senses that he himself is no less dangerous to her than flying without a lifeline. She wishes there was a way to explain the way she has fallen in love with him countless times, and the way she sees him now, beautiful and so far away. There are a hundred things to say, and none of them are coming to her lips, so she only watches him, knowing that if he turns around and walks out now, all the steps they have made in the right direction will be erased as though they had never been.
He takes a step to the door, and she feels like she is choking-she cannot let him leave. More words explode out of her. “But I say the things I do mean even more rarely.” He stops, and she can breathe again. “Please,” she says, and that is the most difficult word she has uttered as he looks at her, uncertain. “Don’t leave.” She feels close to crying because she realizes some words may need to be said aloud. But she hopes they can also be audible even when they’re silent-she hopes he hears them, because she knows she can not say what needs to be said.
She has been in his arms hundreds of times in the past years, lived a hundred fairytales, a hundred romances, received a hundred cool, impersonal kisses to fuel the dreams of the audience. She has loved him and hated him, wanted him and avoided him. It doesn’t seem like there is much unexplored territory between the two of them, but when he finally moves and it is towards her and not away she suddenly realizes she knows nothing, after all. This time when his arms come around her it is different than the way it is onstage-the touch is light, almost hesitant, careful of her right shoulder, and it is up to her to bridge the gap and press close to his chest, her left hand reaching around him to pull him closer and her head settling on his shoulder.
She realizes she is crying; she has not cried yet-not when she was suffering so much and working through the pain, not when Kate told her she would never perform again, not even when she watched Sora breaking down, but she is crying now, and she doesn’t know why. One of his hands is in her hair at the base of her neck and she feels him shifting his weight onto the side of the bed so that he can continue holding her more comfortably. She feels a light kiss on her temple. He doesn’t say anything.
That’s all right. She thinks she can hear all the things he hasn’t said. It isn’t pragmatic of her. It is the sort of thing that would take a miracle. But she has seen that miracles can happen one time in a million if you wish for them hard enough, and she has never wanted anything more. As she feels his heart beating through the warm linen of his shirt she realizes that the heartbeat, slow and steady, is perfectly matched to hers. Maybe, just maybe, their timing is coming back into alignment.
And she smiles through her tears.