A/N: Here's the first half of the conclusion! I underestimated last time - I still have to finish a last chapter. I'm on break but have been tied up more than expected. Thanks to anybody who's still with me - I hope you like it!
Disclaimer: Alas! Remus and Hermione are not mine and very likely never will be.
The city streets seemed to sparkle in Vienna. When she was a little girl, Hermione loved to read fairytales and wonder whether trees could really be made from gold and silver, like the ones she discovered between the fragile gilded pages of the heavy books she treasured up. The parks in Vienna were visions of verdure in spring and summer, but the trees glistened like emeralds and beryl, splendid and unfading. Perhaps it was but a projection of the euphoria of promise that she felt, but Vienna was to her a magical place, where the streets were paved with marble and cobbled with bricks of gold.
So she had felt when her smart black heel had first struck Austrian ground. She came to the city optimistic, with a formal agreement signed by one distinguished Director of Music, and with Lupin's recommendation folded in her pocket, like a talisman, a blessing. She had felt invulnerable then, and ready to make herself heard, here where all the walls and windows peered down on you with the supreme dignity of an aged civilization. This was a place where one could be proud of oneself.
Hermione began at once, playing around the city, cultivating relationships like a spider spinning its web. She worked with a set purpose, connecting people and resources until she felt as though she had fabricated a net expansive enough to support her. She could never stop striving until her web could catch her and keep her safe with all its patterned threads of communication.
The community was hospitable, the patrons generous. Warmly they outstretched their arms to envelop her into their familial sphere. It was a community that functioned on promise, driven by trust and respect. She was their darling; they nurtured her and wanted her work to come to fruition. They were kind and patient - and their tolerant smiles burdened her with a sense of heavy responsibility by day and dominated her thoughts in sleep.
But now her heels were worn thin, and the shine had all but gone from her shoeleather. Where was the promise of triumph and the vibrancy of youth and performance that had seem so near within reach at her coming? The thrill of ascendency that she had relished at the beginning eluded her now. Three years of gentle successes and gradual networking had taken their toll on her creative psyche.
Lately ideas were coming up depthless and insubstantial, when ideas occurred to her at all. The experience that she had anticipated, had chased, lent itself grudgingly to her repertoire. Was there any use in conjuring up a weightless symphony? What did it mean but unfulfilled expectation, and another commiserating smile? The recycled praise fell dully upon her ears, made her feel empty - especially when she sensed the increasing uncertainty with which it passed through the upcurled lips of her colleagues.
Her pocket felt empty, too. Lupin's recommendation, folded thin and tatty, was retired to the top drawer of her dresser, beneath newspaper clippings and missives from home. In her first season, she scarcely let it out of her sight, as though his quickly-conceived statement was both representation and safeguard of her talent. Soon enough she found out that it was worthless save as a personal reminder of her own worth. It had no power even to keep the best of her within her; not when there were benefactors to impress and virtuosos to upstage.
Amidst the competitive, expectant grind that summer of quiet progress and kind words seemed so very far away.
"Marcus Beasley, returning to Vienna for the summer season, delighted the audience on the cello. His emotive style is reminiscent of the late James Potter, whom Beasley cites as a childhood inspiration. With masterful technique and expressiveness flowing openly from every fibre of his limber frame, Beasley seems destined to rise to the dazzling preeminence that is widely sought but rarely attained in his vocation. There was not a dry eye in the Konzerthaus as he performed a splendid and heartfelt rendition of an old Foster melody; it was truly the unexpected gem of the evening.
"Also performing were John Thorpe, also of England, and compatriot Hermione Granger. Both gave proficient performances of original works, and then combined talents for a duet; a pleasant affair that made up with fingerwork what it lacked in heart."
Hermione sighed and cast the newspaper aside. Acid nibs had barely stung, but this apathy smothered her like a storm cloud - a monochromic cumulonimbus, an anvil of oppression.
It was three summers since she had left her motherland, and Hermione sat in the park adjacent to her apartment on a breezeless afternoon, dazed and vaguely wondering where her inspiration had flown to.
She had been the headliner once; liberally bathed in spotlights, as audiences waited with baited breath for something great to ensue. And here she was now, a mere afterthought in a weekend editorial - a pleasant complement to someone else's showcase. They had expected too much of her - and left her feeling deflated as they found new upstarts in whom to invest their creative attention.
Beside her, beneath the Evening Standard, was a portfolio, open at the hinge, containing, amongst papers of legal consequence, a nicely arranged pile of loose music.
Neat black staves divided page upon page of the creamy white parchment into neat lanes of pitch and rythym. Boldly, here and there, they were splashed with notes and rests and swirling clefs; there were splotches of ink leaked in stormy notation, smudges and scratches of furious dissatisfaction. The ribboned stains and scribbles swam over the pages as erratically as the strains of thought and melody swam through her mind. There was something trapped inside her still, trying to take shape and flow forth. Scattered words in margins were pondered, recalling her best emotions, trying to channel and harness and to capture that evanescent formula that could do her heart's song justice.
Her head was throbbing and she was having trouble rationalizing. She had spent a lovely morning with the wife of a celebrated composer. This Patroness of the Arts was well known for her kindness and her supreme musical sensitivity. It was said that to hold audience with her was more propitious to a career than assembling a brilliant resume. With her sterling connections and golden ear, she had the influence to elevate an artist's reputation; indeed, she had heard all of Vienna's best before the public caught on.
This lady had invited Hermione to tea after Hermione had splendidly performed a composition of the lady's equally esteemed husband. Despite a gracious reception as generous in advice as in refreshments, Hermione felt, overall, that she would rather have forgone the entire conference. The stately Frau's advice only confirmed the stale and stinging idea that plagued Hermione's career.
There was no condescension in her tone, but the words were just the same.
"You have the potential to be something extraordinary, darling," she had said. "Potentially great."
Potential.
Hermione leaned forward into her hands and for the first time wished she didn't have to walk that arbor-lined avenue to get home.
It was the encroaching darkness that drove Hermione out of the park. The doorman waved her in from his well-lit vestibule and cautioned her not to stay out too late. Hermione let him steer her onto the lift and replied with commonplaces to his expressions of kind solicitude. She imagined that she was much like the car that she was standing in - a cage for ideas, dangled by inhibiting forces that were nevertheless so integral to the experiment.
She imagined herself tethered and lowered and hoisted by her reservations, her sensibilities and her inexperience. Would she rise to achieve her destination, her consummation, or would the cables snap and fall to a terrible flare?
She found her roommate, Millie, asleep in the lounge, still clutching a sampling of wedding lace and tulle to her chest. She looked almost wraithlike, bathed in the moonlight and reclining serenely; Hermione dared not violate her slumber by rousing her. She slipped past her into her own room. It was so unusually still with all the lights put out and Millie asleep.
She shuffled in the darkness to the window to draw back the thick satin drapes that shrouded her room from the city. Light flooded in and washed away the camouflage of obscurity. Her room was transformed with spiderlike shadows and the luminescent glow of the full moon.
Moonlight was a spectral element in Hermione's cognizance. Commonplace articles and familiar courses were changed under the late evening gleam, suggesting new aspects about things that seemed so one-dimensional at noon. It was a melancholy distinctness that suited her pensive mood, and so she sat in the pool of light and waited.
The mind is most susceptible to osmosis at moments where imagination, perception, and intuition work in tandem. Hermione was sure of a heightened clarity - at once emotional, mental, and physical - as she sank into a trance of semiawareness. The associations that she drew from her surroundings, though simple, seemed to reveal secrets and beam wisdom, and undid her afternoon bemusement. She always felt at this hour that magic could exist.
Across the street a man paced back and forth beneath a dim lamp post. Ten steps forward; turn. The seams of his coat were smooth, the fabric drawn in tight planes across his back. Ten steps more; pause. He vanished under the sharp, thin shadow of a building, but reappeared before another ten measures passed. The toe of his boot glimmered as his thin leather soles stepped rhythmically, regularly on.
He turned mid-step, grinding a leather heel into the concrete, disrupting the pattern. Something had broken within him; an almost imperceptible something, noticeable now only under the moon’s scrutiny, that shifted his entire attitude. The smooth planes of his coat were suddenly wrinkled, furrowed, tense at the seams. A strong iron spine bent under pressure, curving away from a force stronger than habit. Her heart went out to this stranger who knew what the weight of the world was.
And then, unbidden, she remembered something. A lilting melody - lyrical and contemplative - stealing into her, holding her captive. A maestro both humble and wise, whose eyes were always veiling the secrets that his violin so eloquently proclaimed. And that feeling of floating, of flying whilst flightless, suspended in emotion, so completely absorbed in a song. And suddenly she understood.
She snatched a pencil from her bedside table and fumbled with the latch of her portfolio. Pen, paper - and the act. She was surprised at how easily the writing came. It all flowed together now - joggled back into place from the recesses of her learning. Every trick, every facility she had cultivated for so many years was now employed.
Music, after all, was a language. That universal mode of expressing the inexpressible, of making audible the streams of incommunicable feeling that bubble forth constantly from the depths of our hearts. Had he emphasized passion and interpretation because he understood this? He knew how to pour his jubilation and tribulation into song.
All stories must be told somehow. All people must find a means of communicating their lives. And every man deserves to be listened to.
But what if you are unable to tell for yourself? What if your voice is meaningless, scorned, despised? You play on.
He played in the hope that someone would listen - and so she must play that his story might be heard.
The world didn't want him - she wrote a sad and somber air, wrote of loneliness. The world disenfranchised him - she wrote a slow and sober dirge, wrote of poverty. The world teased of happiness then snatched it all away - she wrote with swells and declines and surges, wrote of heartache and longing and sorrow.
But he - he loved the world, and always wanted to make the best of it. There was beauty in even the forlornest places; this was the philosophy he courageously held to, and it never let him down. So must there be beauty underlying every motion of this piece - if she could find it within herself to write so.
With her heart unmasked under the great, glittering dome of Heaven, she wrote of a man like the moon and the stars; a small, steadfast light amidst the most aggressive darkness.
One of the low-hanging clouds that she had seen floating above the western horizon now drifted in front of the moon. Its shadow darkened her windowseat desk and jammed her concentration. Quickly, quickly, she thought; she couldn't divide her attention for long. On went the lights and in a split second her desk was swiped bare. She set herself up with a cup of chamomile and went to retrieve her work.
Her fingers shook slightly as she gathered up the three papers that she had baptized with ink. Thirty-seven measures, meticulously penned in spite of her brainstorming. It was beginning to take shape - an open-ended melody, with too many strains for convention, yet almost minimalist in composition. She hummed it to herself, quenching maudlin tears before they clouded her eyes. She was nervous to evaluate before it was complete. But it was definitely a start.
She chided herself for being silly as she tried to poise a quivering pen above a fresh bar.
It wasn't as though she had never written anything worthwhile before - and besides, there was no guarantee that this wasn't just a fit of midnight madness.
Concentration was key, and she couldn't afford to get ahead of herself. And so she took a sip of tea and she delved into the thirty-eighth bar.
She scribbled into the night with the happy buoyancy of a happy intuition. Reason could not stifle the good feeling she had about this piece.
This was her masterpiece.