Work Text:
I.
Charlotte cracks open the door to her mother’s bedroom.
“This is it,” she says, frozen in the doorway with her hand still on the knob. She hasn’t crossed the threshold since changing the sheets after the funeral.
Lizzie eyes the room with caution: the cross above the bed, the picture of a younger Charlotte on the nightstand, the chair that’s indented with Charlotte’s ghost.
“Is this…” she trails off, the words caught. This is not a grief she’s ever felt, so she’s shy to transgress and press her finger into the bulla of this particular blister.
“Yes,” Charlotte says.
This is where her mother died - where she died, where Bachoff finally and torturously died. For years she sat here, haunted by Anton and her mother’s eyes in turns.
“If you’d prefer the couch,” Charlotte offers, but Lizzie is quick to shake her head.
“No,” she says, “this will do.”
She looks frayed in a way she didn’t before, or rather in a way she’s unlearned to hide. Charlotte recognized the wariness, the pain, and exhaustion under the lacquer of a performer from her own days in the academy. She remembers what it was like to lay in her bed, sore and sleepless, the image of Anton before her unclouded by the tears that welled up unbridled in the dark.
When she’d first encountered Lizzie in Shanghai, she had been so poised, Charlotte had been forced to wonder if it was only her that hurt like this. Maybe there is something in The Perfection that, when finally mastered, smoothed over all the cracks - produces Theiss’ and Geoffreys - and she just never made it that far.
And Lizzie with her nose ring and lax, bored eyes, her words were so perfectly measured around an anecdote; she didn’t need a punchline to make Charlotte’s insides bubble over with laughter. She’d made Charlotte question herself initially, but, undressed and drunk in an overpriced hotel room, Charlotte had caught sight of the tattoo and she knew .
She wouldn’t let the Perfection break anyone ever again. It’s a conclusion Lizzie, too, has reached by now, but they can’t help eyeing each other suspiciously. Lizzie shuts the door in her face and Charlotte limps away, cradling her aching ribs.
II.
She spends most of the drive to Bachoff at the wheel, the better off of the two of them despite the smarting bruises and a black eye that sucks the depth from her vision. It isn’t until a few miles out that she climbs into the trunk and curls up to wait in the dark.
There is always the risk that Lizzie is lying to her and that she’s about to sell her out in a way that’s far more genuine than their plan calls for, but it’s a chance Charlotte is willing to take.
Waking up alone with Anton, she has to trust that Lizzie is elsewhere with Paloma selling their façade, because otherwise the doubt will give way to terror - to the knowledge that she is going to die at the hands of this man - and that is not a terror she can live with right now, not when her flesh is so tender and the lives of so many girls depend on her.
Charlotte doesn’t see Lizzie again until she’s chained up in the chapel, her eyes mirroring Charlotte’s among all the hostiles.
What neither of them took into account is Zhang Li.
She’s nothing more than a child - a bud of a human being - and Charlotte’s hands shake as she picks up the cello. She can play this piece in her sleep (used to runs through it in her mother’s bedroom without a cello) but now, with all her demons present, her hands inevitably slip on a note.
It’s precisely that tendril of fear she uses to light the spark to hunt Anton down. It’s the breath she lets out at Theiss and Georffrey’s demise, the one she sucks in when Lizzie releases her from a long kiss. She blows into her fear and it lights up into a flame, a pyre, a wildfire.
It tears out of her in a scream as Anton’s knife sinks into the space between the bones of her forearm. It’s hardly the worst violation of her body he’s perpetuated, but this is a different kind of destruction - the kind that isn’t cried over and cowered before but snarled at and bitten into.
They could tear every fibre of his body apart, but Charlotte wants more. She wants to punish him with the very thing he stole from her, so she bandages her wounds and tends to Anton’s too. The price he’ll pay will exceed death itself and for that, she needs him temporarily alive.
III.
The winter in Minneapolis is harsh and unforgiving. As a child, she used to sit so close to the fire where the surface of her cello would glow with warmth as she practised for hours. Now, the house is grey and empty. She and Lizzie sit on opposite ends of the furniture arranged around the fireplace, craving distance after another of those fights that is never about the actual words they speak.
Some days, they are in perfect harmony: a single cello played by both of them, their bodies uncomplicated in their proximity. On days like these, however, her arm aches where it no longer exists and she can’t bear the sight of that tattoo in bed next to her.
What holds them together is what’s tearing them apart, and Charlotte doesn’t know if this is a wound that will gradually heal or if it’s bound to go necrotic.
IV.
They sit far enough from the stage for Zhang Li to be featureless behind her cello. Now a tender seventeen years of age, she’s premiering in her first solo concert in Shanghai, raised under the tutelage of a Swiss cellist personally vetted by Charlotte and Lizzie.
She’s a prodigy in her own right, nearly elemental. There is no showmanship to her performance because she doesn’t need it.
Lizzie watches her out of the corner of her eye, her attention rendered more acute by the fact that her head is half-turned to Charlotte, some remark or other hanging forgotten from her parted lips.
When the applause finally breaks over the concert hall at the end of the piece, Lizzie says: “She’s stellar. Imagine if she’d been under Anton.”
Charlotte doesn’t know if she thinks it’d have made her a better or worse cellist.
Lizzie purses her lips. “I couldn’t play like that at her age.”
“At least you could play like that at all,” Charlotte says, torn between amusement at Lizzie’s sour look and jealousy for never measuring up herself.
“You left at fourteen.”
“So did she.”
They glance at each other. For Charlotte, leaving Bachoff had been the end of an experience Zhang Li had never even properly begun. She’s been grateful for that every day, but never as much as in that very moment. Not only is the music that flows from Zhang Li’s fingers beautiful, it’s untainted.
V.
Her nails are black from the moist dirt in the garden. She’s planting croci under the kitchen window, the sun lukewarm on her back. Somewhere in the house, Lizzie is pacing. Charlotte can hear her anxious footsteps through the open window and wonders which ghost is haunting her today.
Four years in, Charlotte wants to say she’s healed, but truth be told, some wounds ache even when they’re scarred over. How is she supposed to forget Anton when she can still feel his knife in an arm that’s no longer on her body?
When she gets up to stretch her legs (numb from crouching for so long) the pacing has stopped. Far away, a piece they played the other night starts to play, the notes distorted by all the corners of the house they have to bend around to reach her.
It’s an old favourite of Lizzie’s and the first thing they’d attempted to play in weeks. Sometimes Lizzie still can’t stand her cello - the strings suddenly searingly painful to press down on - and then Charlotte puts it into the storage closet so they don’t have to look at it.
Three years ago, curled up on the sofa, Lizzie said: “We should burn it.”
But they hadn’t. It was too beautiful and too expensive an instrument to destroy like that. It’s seen world class stages and audiences; it’s felt the loving touch of a maestro. At the very least, they should sell it.
Charlotte suggested gifting it to Zhang Li, but Lizzie didn’t want her to play on something that had seen the horrors of the Chapel, so there it remains: propped up against Charlotte’s living room wall.
“Charlotte,” Lizzie yells from inside the house. She appears in the kitchen doorway with wet hair wrapped in a t-shirt. “Do you want to play?”
Overhead, the clouds look threatening.
“Yeah,” Charlotte says and picks up the remainder of the flowers to take into the garage, “Just let me wash my hands first.”