PRESTO

five. "beautiful heist."

A kaleidoscope of confused and misplaced feelings.

* * *

Black and white keys; repeat. Pale fingers joining them. A flutter of white paper sits on the worn, wooden desk beside her, and a pen bleeding black ink onto the fading wood rests beside it. Her eyes are cold, and lips tight with displeasure.

Akaashi Yui was a sight to behold, even in her vex.

Of all people to leave in charge of the music, Viktor left Yui.

Just what went on in his mind?

The music of a routine controlled the entire performance. But he still backed her into a corner; forcing her to apply her former talents together as she once did, and she couldn't just create a random piece or abandon it like she could with others. Her student wasn't just a nobody.

She closes her eyes.

The cold mornings of St. Petersburg, the bitter, black coffees accompanied by laughing blue eyes. The sharp retorts of a boy with angry green eyes. The black sequins of a sparkling dress, the long, ivory and violet coloured, wide sleeves showing off pale and lithe limbs. The clean skates and the sparkling ice. The audience, the music, the notes. Purple sparks, navy lights, shimmering white flashes of the cameras from the sides.

Limbs sore, foot bruised, dead tiredness. Frozen fingers.

And that undeniable sense of satisfaction.

Fine. Yui opens her eyes. The tightness of competition she hadn't felt in years in the cavern of her chest and the feistiness of a younger her strumming in her veins.

Turning to the keyboard, she swore she saw the flash of colour flash across her vision. Turning to the notes of the melody she had begun scratching down onto the white paper. She turns back to the piano and closes her eyes. Raising her hand she shivers at the sudden chill on her neck.

The melody starts off slow, but then one note rings—

And then Yui lets herself go.

That elegant, midnight ebony and the glass chandelier that's been in her mind for God knows how long suddenly fades to a starry sky and then shifts to stormy clouds and then a cloudless sky and then to the blank slate that she had not seen in a long, long time. The passage of notes widen and the notes clash together in agonizing clangs in places, other times they are high and airy like those spins and jumps and everything Yui had never wanted to hear again, but then they are swallowed by their darker undertones, the keys together forming a song so beautiful yet cruel at the same time; everything that never made her any less willing to sacrifice everything to hold that unreachable piece of sky, own that forbidden fruit.

But the bitterness strikes her, and the next keys are a combination of longing and pain and utter loneliness, because throughout all her years. Throughout all her medals and enraged yells at her equally prodigious, trapped parents, she's never once had that urge, that passion for embracing the keys or the ice with all of her beings. Never once felt the ardent joy of passion without the shine of a gilded medal, without the camera flashes and the words that describe a breathtakingness that she never once experienced when she had stood in front of the world.

She bends, desperate for consolation, like a desperate flower in the violent spring storms: newborn and vulnerable, wavering and slowly breaking beneath the pressure of the wind. Those lingering regrets remain, but her fingers glide across the keyboard like the first ripples across the still pond, then a lake, then the thundering waves in the ocean. But then like the sudden wind to a flame, that flicker suddenly blows out, and all the emotions she had bottled up since seeing Viktor, since coming to Hasetsu, since leaving her parents, everything that she had thought she had long gotten over comes rushing out and the—