Striking the Right Chord

by Noble Thought

Chapter 1: Escaping Adagio & Aria

They were at it again.

Sonata closed her eyes and cut off the muffled shouting with a pillow to her face. Not for the first time, she considered letting it stay there.

She threw the pillow across the room as the rising tumult—it couldn’t be described as anything else—grew too loud to stifle.

Maybe it was a ruckus. Or a fracas.

And soon...

“I’m right, Sonata!” Adagio’s voice.

“No, I’m right!” Aria’s.

And then, in a duet, “You’re an idiot!” when she chose one or the other.

A whole stupid mansion to fight in, and they have to fight in the music— She stopped herself before the train reached the station. Coming in behind it, a full rail of thoughts piled up in her mind, driven by the little her that lived in her head.

Nice job, Mininata. Just what I needed.

She tossed off the covers and turned away from the door. They wouldn’t add her to their screaming match if she was asleep. I can have my own.

Like you could win against yourself, Mininata said, crawling out of the wreckage of her thoughts. Of course she would survive. Sonata rubbed the sleep from her eyes and tried to ignore the voice.

The opposite wall, paneled in rich, dark wood, still held most of the memories of another person, in a disarray that seemed appropriate for the mess in her mind. But they were the thoughts and dreams of someone long gone from the world.

But they had loved music. Even if she couldn’t remember who they had taken the mansion from, there were dusty album covers, framed, faded photographs of famous musicians, and other memorabilia from the Roaring Twenties.

Will it be another age before I can claim my love of music again? It had been barely a month, but the days seemed to stretch out interminably between fights with her sisters.

And how many days have I had to myself?

“Um…” Tuesday… last Wednesday… “Is that it?” Nothing else floated up through the conflagration of her thoughts’ smoldering wreckage.

How long has it been since we played music in the music room? A number bounded its way out of the last car and fell to its knees, followed by a word that stumbled to flop next to it.

“That long?” she sighed, and set her other self to clearing the mess left behind.

Why do I have to do it?

“Just be quiet about it. It’s noisy enough.”

Noise? Mininata tapped a still spinning brake with a hand-saw. It hummed in her mind, and electricity sizzled along her spine as the pure, metallic note spread through her.

“Don’t... it’s too much like...”

She was crouched over the shards of the record, all thought at reassembling it gone. Slivers of the brittle vinyl dusted her hands. She wouldn’t hear Ol’ Blue Eyes’ audition record ever again. One of a kind, and gone because she had been angry that she couldn’t sing even half as well as he anymore.

She cried until Adagio came in, Aria on her heels, both of them yelling at her, then at each other. Throughout it all, Sonata had pressed her hands into the crumbles and shards that had once been the first memory of a legendary musician.

Eventually, Aria had dragged her away to bandage and clean her hands, muttering and growling even as she poured fire and razors over Sonata’s hands.

All that was left of Ol’ Blue Eyes was the fine tracery of pale lines crossing her palms and fingers.

“I should...” Should what? She prodded Mininata, still hard at work pulling the unrecognizable remains of thoughts from the wreckage of her mind. “Do that quieter, please. I need to think. About…”

About the music room. Hundreds of records still waited to be heard, admired... treasured.

She chuffed half of a laugh. It was absurd. Worrying about the music room while her sisters would be close to brawling in there, and would drag her into it before too long.

The yelling intensified until she could hear snippets even through the solid sound damping of the room.

“It was your stupid…”

“...didn’t even consider my plan!”

The argument rarely changed, and it didn’t matter that she couldn’t tell which voice was which through the thick walls. One blamed the other, the other shot back.

Turn the tape to side B, press play.

“If you had just done what I told you!”

“Oh, don’t even try to blame this on me!”

Repeat.

She reached up to press play. On cue, the voices calmed again, down below the threshold where she could hear them.

“Round and round about. Circling the drain.” At least they didn’t sound like they had when they’d lost the pendants. Those first few fights had been terrible on her ears—and only Mininata’s company kept her from going truly insane. “Maybe they’ll flush one day, and things will get really, really cold. Or is it hot?” The pipes in the old mansion hardly seemed able to decide.

The voices rose in wordless shouts, crescendoed as the door slammed open, then dropped down low again. It wouldn’t be long before Adagio came to ask—tell—her to stand up for herself for once and tell Aria… or would it be Aria this time? They seemed to take turns.

“Maybe if I’m in the shower…” She sniffed the back of one hand, then the palm, and wrinkled her nose. “Stupid sushi.”

You should listen to me. Don’t eat fish and then go to sleep.

“But it’s so good…”

Says the sea monster.

“I’m not a monster.”

Of course, even the rank, fishy smell lingering on her fingers was enough to remind her that it was, in fact, well past dawn. She spent a moment fumbling through the pile of clothes on the nightstand. Ten and change by the clock, and she had yet to get out of bed and make breakfast.

Or find it. Either, or.

Her bathroom was as trashy as her room. Clothes lay scattered everywhere, draped on the sink and over the shower railing, and scattered here and there were odd scraps of clothing she hadn’t remembered owning, but that had become as much a fixture of the room as the lamp standing in the corner.

A bra two sizes too large on the toilet’s tank. A pair of men’s underpants on the ceiling fan. Various other bits and pieces of clothing, some stained, some not.

Probably from more than a month ago. A leftover of the last party they’d held in the mansion.

Probably.

The screaming started again, dwindling to incoherence as she started the shower.

It certainly wasn’t her fault. Let them scream about it.

---

She almost managed her escape without being noticed, but Aria was stamping through the front hall, kicking a divan on her way to wherever was farthest from Adagio, but she stopped long enough to glare at Sonata.

At least her being there meant that Adagio was much farther away.

Mininata cheered and pulled the whistle on the latest train.

“Where are you going?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m going out.” Sonata tried to ignore the glare Aria shot at her. “I just need some air. This place is getting…” She sniffed, her nose wrinkling. “Fishy.”

Aria kept up the glare for a moment longer, then turned her back. “Whatever. Just make sure you get some milk. We’re out.”

And that was it. She was out of the mansion and down the driveway before Aria could think of something else, or Adagio could find her and make her do the laundry, or cook, or any of the other things once done by others.

But she still didn’t know where she was headed, and it hardly mattered. She was out of the house, and hopefully beyond the range of her sisters’ ire until she came back.

“If I come back,” she muttered into the brisk spring wind, pulling the cowl of her hoodie close over her head and stuffing her hands into her pockets. That, too, had been a common thought, growing more so since…

Since music had been taken from her.

She stumbled, kicking at the root that had to have been there, and kept on walking without looking back. The walkways around their mansion, a few miles outside of the city in a once-posh suburb, were cracking and wearing into gravel.

She could remember a time, near fifty years gone, when they had first acquired the mansion. Then, the area around the mansion had been isolated, and even the notion of a suburb had been alien to the residents at the time. Then, the sidewalks had been newly paved, and well tended. Gardens tended by armies of gardeners had spread across the hills, marking the true nobility of Canterlot’s elite.

Now, as she walked along the cracked and weather-pocked sidewalk, all of the once rich houses were either abandoned or long since torn down to make way for clusters of apartment buildings or low-rent housing.

All of the nobility lived in Canterlot proper, and had started their migration soon after she and her sisters had moved in. Their thrones sat in high rise apartments or at the tops of buildings they owned.

The gardens were all gone except for a very few so overgrown with weeds they might have been part of a post-apocalyptic movie set. Like that one… The giant ant one that had filmed in their mansion. The film crew had fought with each other so much that the movie missed every deadline, and was massively over-budget, all while Sonata and her sisters provided the soundtrack for the behind-the-scenes, real life drama.

Sonata remembered sitting in the theatre watching the black and white, obviously fake giant ant trampling people, and laughing. But the movie had been a flop.

Not that it mattered. The money—and power—had served them well since. And that horror movie that they lured in afterwards, once the money had run out, as it always did.

Memories faded, and the titles of those and a dozen other movies, a hundred other parties, a thousand victims… their names were gone.

After a few decades, everything that didn’t stand out faded into little more than vague notions. Soon, the memory of those gardens would be little more than a dim impression so weak it might not have been at all.

Just like everything else.

Except for music.

She could still remember the sonata she had sung at the very first Grand Galloping Gala. The reason why she had been invited, the other guests, and the outcome were all gone more than a thousand years, little more than a fly buzz heard from a mile away.

But the song remained as clear and crisp in her memory as the day she had sung it. She could even pick out the instruments that had accompanied her in the memory, known which was out of tune and precisely how long one had lingered on a note for a hair too long.

But the players were dust—not even impressions of ponies in her memories.

Her musings carried her well into town, her feet following a path she had no more conscious memory of taking than she did of the reason they were on Earth. But she continued on, resigned to the inevitable. She would have to go back there some day and face the music.

She would have laughed if it had been a happy thought.

Mininata did laugh, and pulled the chain on the small whistle of the freshly repaired train of thought.

Sonata ignored her. Face the music. Right. She snorted.

A few blocks later, she caught the strains of someone’s car radio blaring something truly terrible. It thumped and buzzed, with odd harmonies that spun up and then down, sounds that no instrument had ever made.

But it was music. She recognized the symmetry even with the oddities, odd though they felt to her ears, and she stopped to lean against a light pole, listening to the distant rhythmic rumble.

It was beautiful.

---

Spring Break! Be careful everyone.

“Spring Break.” Sonata snorted a short laugh at the sign in front of the school. “Yeah. Spring’s broken. It’s still cold.” Or is it? She tugged the jacket more tightly around her and turned aside from the broad white sign before the display could cycle through again, to show the winners of the Battle of the Bands again.

All seven of them, playing in a concert in the school gymnasium later. Even that girl everyone had said was supposed to be from another world. Twilight Sparkle? No, not her. Sunset Shimmer. She was the one.

She took my music away!

Her blood boiled, raging through her head in a discordant thrum until her vision dimmed. It was all she could do to keep from screaming.

Always the weakest sister. Always the one who got made to do things, to follow one or the other. Usually Adagio. Her own sister, singing to her in the night, singing away the fears, the tears. That’s how it started. A song to soothe, and then a song to suggest... a song to push.

A song to command.

Mininata began to sing, the soothing lullaby sung so long ago that the memories around it were as far gone as her first gala. Then another, and another.

Around her, the wind sighed, hushed, and cooled the heat in her head.

Mininata’s voice faded for a moment, then began a different song, a wordless counterpoint to the dominating aria at climax of the duel of songs. Adagio had sung it long ago in a duet with Aria, but the why of it was long gone.

She remembered every song, good or bad, as though the players were in her head. She sighed, feeling the tension fade away as it always did at the sound of her sister’s voice. It would do her no good to hold onto it, and it never had.

Just let it go.

She turned, watching the silent performance play out on the video screen. The seven girls playing, singing, each of them smiling. The roiling in her heart faded as she watched, recognizing in them the happiness she had felt when she made music. Magic or not, it was something she envied their ability to do.

“Stupid school. Stupid Aria and her stupid milk.” She realized abruptly that she was fingering the place where the amulet had lain, day and night, for longer than she could remember, and snatched her hand back to dash the tears away. “Stupid amulet! And stupid Adagio and her stupid, lame plan!”

When the last words left her, so did the last of the tension behind her eyes, leaving her standing there on an empty sidewalk, staring at the video on loop while the wind grew into a blustery gale with the clean, cool scent of pending rain.

A sign fluttered on the front of the building, flipping an image of a guitar back and forth out of sight. Going up to it, she saw it was a poster for guitar lessons, with all of the tags hanging down below it still, and the name scrawled in an artful flourish at the bottom was Flash Sentry.

“Pft.” She almost turned away from it, to go to the grocery story and get some milk for Aria, but stopped mid-stride, the poster fluttering still in her peripheral vision.

You could get milk. You could go home now. You could just keep doing the same thing over and over again until the end of time.

She walked up the steps to snag a strip from the bottom, and halted again, her fingers holding one corner of the poster up. She ripped it down instead and stuffed it in her coat pocket.

The date for the lesson was yesterday. It was already too late. Everything would just continue on as it had. Forever.

But maybe she could dream. Maybes were better than nevers.

---

She didn’t head straight for the store, or back home like she was supposed to. Instead, she sat on the steps of the school, leaning against the railing and staring into the bush-lined park sitting kitty-corner across the street.

The wind picked up and the clouds grew darker, turning noon into dusk, and promising rain if not a thunderstorm. A cold rain, too, judging by the wind. She sighed again, stuffing her hands deeper into her jacket pockets, trying to ignore the piece of paper that might have once been an answer.

To what question, not even Mininata had an answer.

“They’ll yell at you if you get sick.” It was true, and it had happened before. They hated taking care of her, and foisted it off on anyone they could coerce. Now, though…

A gust of wind, growing stronger and then slackening off, brought a strain of familiar music to her: a guitar. She clutched the paper tighter in her jacket, and pulled it out and stared at the guitar.

The wind tugged at it a moment longer, pulling the sound of the guitar off the page.

Then it was gone, and the wind that had come from the park faded.

Need something to do this Spring Break? What about free guitar lessons! Acoustic or electric. One day only.

Flash Sentry.

The wind grew once more, carrying a whole chord this time before fading again. It was enough for her to know who was playing, and she folded the paper back up, smoothing the creases, careful of the fragile strips.

Not his band, but that was clearly him playing the music in the park.

She was walking across the street before she really knew what she was doing, or what she was planning, the poster still clutched in one fist. She was at the entrance before she thought about who else might be there—people who might hate her for what she had tried to do.

It wasn’t a large park, just an encircling hedge closing off a row of benches and a pristinely manicured lawn. A blanket lay, covered with leaves, to one side of the sole occupied bench.

Flash was alone, lying with one leg slung over the back, the other on the ground while he cradled the guitar against his chest. He plucked out a slow, melancholy melody in time with the wind.

It wasn’t a song, she realized as she shuffled forward, glancing back at the entrance to the park, drawing farther away faster than her feet seemed to be moving. The music was his feelings. He was just playing to play, and creating the melody on a whim.

His eyes remained closed, and his fingers stilled on the fretboard. She halted, breath caught in her chest, willing him to continue. And when he did, she took another step, and another, until she was standing a few feet away.

He stopped again as the wind faltered and fell silent.

She sat down in that moment, settling cross-legged as quietly as she could, and waited, letting the sound of the wind fill her, and the distant rumble of thunder, still too quiet to be real.

He started playing again as the wind rose into a howl, his right hand dusting over the strings while his left glided back and forth over the frets. Notes drifted up, slipping through the wind’s sigh and the still unheard rumble in the distance.

It took her several moments to realize that he had stopped, and another minute to open her eyes.

He was looking at her, a faint curl tugging at his lips, his brows lowered.

“What do you want?” he asked, his tone harsh. “I’m not going to fall for your tricks again.”

She flinched, the poster crinkling in her lap where she held it still in the brisk wind. No train was waiting at the station, and Mininata laughed in the far distance of her mind. No help there. She shrugged, instead, and told the truth: “I heard music. I like music.”

“Duh.” Flash rolled his eyes. “You used it to enslave us. Again.” He stuck a finger against his head. “Only, I remembered it, this time. I don’t know what’s worse. Knowing what you’re doing and thinking it’s right, or not knowing what you’re doing, and not remembering.” He thrummed a blistering, sharp chord and closed his eyes. “Go away.”

She sat there, listening to him play. The notes came harsh and quick, and hung in the air without being smoothed away. Instead, he drove them harder, harsher with plucks to the frets, and each one sent a painful jolt through her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. His fingers halted, smothering the last note into a premature flat twang that set her teeth on edge. “For what we—I did to you.”

He started again without saying anything.

“I love music,” she said.

He grunted, but didn’t stop plunking away.

The wind picked up, and the rumble of thunder it carried was no longer imaginary, threading through the wind’s whispering song and the melody he hammered out on the guitar, growing harsher and angrier by the moment.

His brow furrowed deeper and deeper until he slammed his hand down on the fretboard. “Why are you still here?”

She recoiled from the smack, losing her balance and tumbling back. Her elbow hit the pavement, and she scrambled to her feet, backing away, flicking her eyes between his and the guitar. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? Sorry?” He flung himself up, and caught his jeans’ cuff on the back of the bench. The rest of him kept moving, and his guitar flew up as his arms windmilled wildly.

She dove for the instrument, catching it just before it hit the ground, grinding both knees against the harsh concrete as she slid to a stop. Numbing needles of brief pain lanced up her legs. She cradled the instrument in her arms while tears gathered in her eyes.

Flash righted himself with a growled curse and a tug at his pant leg, and glared at her. “Give it back.” He thrust out a hand, fingers beckoning.

“Can I try playing it?”

“No,” he said, flat and harsh. “You don’t deserve to play it. You haven’t…” He trailed off, his eyes focusing on her left hand, then her knees, and the poster clutched against the side of the guitar. “You think you can control us again with your music? We’re onto you!”

“No! I can’t even sing anymore!” She held the instrument closer to her. “I just love music. I’m sorry. I just wanted to listen.”

“You…” He gritted his teeth and flung himself back into the bench. “You think apologizing is going to take back what you made me say? You think it’s going to heal anything? Do you think I won’t remember knowing it was right to say what I did to Twilight? To Sunset? Can you take it back?”

“I didn’t make you say anything!”

“No? I know I wouldn’t have even thought it if it hadn’t been for you and your… whatevers.”

“Sisters.”

He blinked at her, his mouth open. Finally, he shook his head, his eyes flicking to her knees again. He swallowed. “What?”

“They’re my sisters.”

She bent back over the guitar, shifting it so that it tucked against her like she’d seen him do on stage. But then her elbow was out of place and she couldn’t reach the strings easily.

Flash snorted, rolling his eyes.

She tried a different way, settling her forearm more comfortably on the body. She could reach the strings, but her wrist started aching after just a few bawdy twangs.

“You’re holding it wrong. That’s an acoustic, not an electric.” He held up his hands to demonstrate.

She fumbled briefly with the poster and the guitar, then stuffed the weather stained paper back in her jacket and imitated him. He was right. It felt right, holding it like that, with her elbow perched at the widest crest of the body. She let her fingers fall to the strings, her other hand on the neck while the body rested on her lap.

He shook his head after a moment and folded his arms across his chest. “You and your sisters made a mess of everyone.”

“I know.” She plunked the A string, feeling it buzz against her other hand. It wasn’t out of tune, precisely, but it wasn’t perfect. “I, um…” She stilled the note, stroked B, and stilled it, too. “I just wanted to have fun and sing.”

He shook his head, looking away towards the darker bank of clouds barely visible through the trees, past the edge of town.

“I love music.”

“Yeah. You said that.”

“Sorry. This is fun.” She studied the knobs, then stroked her fingers up the frets to touch the tuning knobs.

“Don’t touch those. I’ve got it the way I like it,” he growled, then nodded when she settled back down. “You said you wanted to have fun… Why?”

Sonata shook her head, drew her fingers back down the frets while she plucked one, and then the next down the line of strings. None of the deepening notes held an answer, but all of the notes were off by the same minute bit. Maybe he wasn’t off, but she was.

Why? Mininata shrugged. Why did you do anything?

“Because Adagio wanted it.”

“Because Adagio wanted it,” he repeated, his eyebrows going up. “Why would you…” He shook his head, brows coming back down in a taut scowl. “Just give me the guitar. We’re done.”

“Please let me try again!” She shrank back, clutching the guitar to her chest, looking up at him, trying to smile, failing, and settled for not bawling as the sidewalk ground into her knees.

His eyes flicked to her legs, and he frowned, but waved a hand at her. “Fine. Try again.”

Something simple. The wind rumbled through the trees, and a flash of light played over the distant cloudbank. Something quick. She tried to plunk a simple harmony on the strings, the same slow harmony he’d been playing when she arrived, quickened by her thudding heart.

He was wincing when she stopped, shaking his head, but didn’t say anything.

“I love music,” she said again, halfway folding herself over the guitar. “But I can’t make it anymore. See?” She tried again, but the strings felt alive under her fingers, rebelling against her wish. The music in her head stayed there, her fingers too stupid to pull it from the instrument.

Finally, she stopped, laying her hands over the fret and bridge to still the noise she was making.

“I’m sorry.” The tears came then, and she let them.

He watched her for a long moment, his eyes drifting down to her legs, then back to her face. He held out his hand again and said, in a soft voice: “Give it here.”

She held out the guitar, surprised when he didn’t snatch it from her.

“You’ve got your fingers almost right.” He flipped it around and resettled it on his lap, putting the fingers of his left hand just so on the fretboard, cradling the neck in his palm, and strummed the chord she had tried. “It takes practice.”

She blinked away the blurriness. “It does?”

“Yes.” He hesitated, fingers tightening around the neck, then thrust the guitar silently at her.

“Really?” She reached out to touch the guitar, stroked a finger along the length of the neck. “I don’t know if I can. Adagio hasn’t been able to…”

“Does she have a teacher?”

“Well… no. Not that I know of.” She sighed loudly, slumping back to stare up at the cloudy sky. “But Aria says I would miss the bus if I was already on it.”

He eyed her for a moment. “Your own sister?” He scratched his chin. “Well… I suppose I can see it. My two sisters bicker all the time. But,” he said, holding up a finger, “sisters are still family. Can’t you practice with each other?”

She shrugged, fiddling with her jacket’s zipper as she settled back to sit cross-legged again. “We just sang together. We didn’t really practice, like, ever.” Her hand crept back up to touch the place where her amulet had been. She snatched it back when he quirked an eyebrow at her. “Now, we can’t even do that without screaming at each other.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but jerked upright when a raindrop landed on the back of his neck. He stared up at the sky, sighed, and stood up, tucking the guitar under one arm. “Perfect.”

Sonata stood up, following a few feet behind him as he stalked off away from the direction she had come. “It’s raining. How is that—” She halted at the glare he shot her.

“It’s not perfect.” He snorted, tucking the guitar tighter under his arm. “If the strings get wet…” He hiked it up higher, covering it as best he could with the open flap of his jacket. “If any of it gets soaked, it could ruin it.”

Ruin it? Sonata hurried to catch up, stripping her jacket off, and snatched the guitar from under his arm. The first instrument she had touched since losing her music, the first she had thought about playing since forever.

She wrapped her jacket around it and handed it back to him.

He stared at her, but accepted the jacket wrapped bundle as the rain started coming down harder, cold against her shoulders and soaking her to the skin within a few steps.

“Come on,” he grunted, shaking his head and breaking into a sprint. “Idiot.”

Author's Note:

Editing assistance from Minds Eye and PresentPerfect (Chapter 1)

Prereading by ZOMG

Comments

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

That's so deep into Sonata's head we're looking at her toe bones! And this with her and Flash feels... natural, organic!

[Zodiacspear]

Hmm... I like the internal thought process Sonata is going through. Very organic.

Loving it so far.

[ColdGoldLazarus]

Loving this so far! I really like the look into Sonata's thought process, and the concept of their mansion and its film history. And Flash is actually written pretty well here.

[Spazzrocket]

HI! Great story! I'm sorry if this comes off needy or something. I'm thinking of making a minecraft-mlp:fim crossover story. I would like your opinion on whether I should or shouldn't publish the story.