chanter1944 | cross-posted music challenge response

Written for

writers_choice. I'm not sure I like this as well as I did when I started working on it. But here it is anyway.

In The Breath And The Silence
Author: Chanter
Fandom: Sliders, late season 2
Pairings: Wade/Quinn
Rating: PG13
Summary: This’s character study-ish and missing scene-ish. She’s doubly alive in the music she plays.
431 words

She'll listen.

She’ll listen when it’s playing out the jukebox at some run-down raggedy roadside café and she’s lingering at the front entrance, leaning on the wall, balanced on the windowsill. She’ll listen to Sarah Vaughn and her sentimental reasons as they’re floating on the air currents drifting out the door, wafting on the scent of black coffee and charcoal and fire, all the while trying not to picture herself hidden away beneath a patchwork quilt with Quin tangled in ivory white sheets beside her, sleepy air stirred by contented breath and the strains of classic jazz from the record player on the floor below.

She’ll remember.

She’ll remember, when it’s drifting down some rain-misted chilled cement staircase somewhere in the center of the city and she’s standing in the twilight, ambling down the sidewalk, seated on the curb. She’ll remember Selena and her getting used to and be unable to stop herself picturing a certain quartet, pizza boxes and coffee mugs and long drafts of beer, everything that makes the four of them elements of the same, earth, wind, fire and melody, the elegant, the crying man, the working scientist and her.

She’ll enjoy it.

She’ll enjoy it when it’s playing through the sound system of some restaurant with high windows and red curtains and she’s on the edge of a worn wood dance floor , seated at the narrow end of a table for four, counting out change and joining in humor. She’ll enjoy Storyville and their good day for the blues and won’t be able to stop herself equating blue with blue, bright eyes with bad days and clear skies and transit, pieces of a life that she wouldn’t trade for anything.

And she’ll surprise them.

She’ll surprise them when it’s not there at all, or when it’s only there when she taps a soft-sneaker rhythm on the carpet, keeps imaginary time against the thigh of patched jeans, picks the notes out on a local piano. She’ll surprise them, when it’s little known or when it’s underground, or when she wrote it and they never saw the notebook it came in, when chords come together, simplistic and unusual and unexpected and suddenly she’s singing. She’ll surprise them when it’s her own song and all the while she’ll be dreaming-imagining-living a second life that no alternate parallel earth can provide, hers like no duplicate has ever tried, real like no mirror image of herself can account for. She’s doubly alive flying on the music she plays, in the breath and in the silence, doubly alive before the music stops.