A Year At The Opera

Interlude Five: Reminiscences

here's something i've had cooked up for a while. this was honestly such a fun chapter to write.

WC:1100 words

Nathan

Nathan did not want to wake up. Certainly not today, and certainly not after where he had left off last night. Even just the thought of retelling it was painful and suffocating; he felt just like he had felt when he first saw it happen.

It reminded him of the time he came home to Violet, only to find the house empty. When he stayed up for hours and called in sick the next day, waiting for her to show up. But she never showed. It reminded him of the panic he felt when he called her 87 times in a row and she didn't pick up. It reminded him of the pain of doing a tracking spell only for it to fail. And it reminded him of the unfathomable sadness when his door rang that tragic afternoon.

It reminded him of her. Her stunning eyes, her constant tucking of her hair behind her ear, her smile, her intelligence, her laugh. It reminded him of the love he once had. And more than anything, even if he was seen as selfish, her being gone just reminded him of how hollow his life was before her. In fact, he distinctly divided his life into three eras: The Before, The During, and The After.

And contrary to the way these stories usually went, The During was the happiest he had ever been.

In the bygone days of The Before, days he could barely even remember anymore— either by choice or by time, days he did not want to remember for they were days without her— there was order, control, structure, a plan. The Before was an endless void of structure, both beautiful in its detail— an architect's wet dream— and suffocating— a claustrophobe's worst nightmare. The pain in The Before was different from the pain in The After. The pain in The Before was an incomprehensible pain. He had not known what life without structure was and he did not even know he was in pain. But at least it was pain he could forget.

In the eternal suffering of The After, certainly as it stood now, there was simply unforgettable pain— especially the pain of existence— and all its traveling companions. At first, there was Anger. Her choosing to go through with the fight, despite knowing his family history. Then there was Hurt. Not even bothering to tell him what she had planned. Then there was Fury. Her stubbornness to just walk away. She could never back down from a challenge, even at the price of her own downfall. Then came the Fear. Never seeing her again. Soon the Sadness followed. Never seeing her ever again. And before long, there was Pain. Never seeing her ever again. He could never touch her, hear her, feel her. He could not bring back the person he would have just as soon given his life for. And now here he was, alone, just as trapped in a cell as he was outside it. Without her, his life was but a shell of what it had been before. Moving along without feeling, without a care, just barely managing to function. It was the pain of The Before with none of the obliviousness that came along with it.

But in the eternal sunshine of The During, all he seemed to be was happy. There was Chaos, yes, but it brought a whirlwind that swept him off his feet and toppled the architecture. The Chaos was what he needed. The Chaos was what he wanted. In The During, there was no sadness. There was no pain. There was just... warmth and love, like sunlight hitting the skin in the harsh winters. There was an enjoyable, almost addictive, hurricane that Violet dragged with her everywhere she went. When she walked into a room, it lit up immediately and everyone's frowns turned to smiles, without magic. Although I suppose you could argue Violet had magic of her own.

Aside from her personality, given her insistence on refusing to use magic unless she had to, Violet was the rarer kind of magician. Everything that she could do without magic, she would. From something as involved and complex as throwing parties and spending the time to cook everything herself instead of just using a spell to conjure something up to something as simple as getting out of bed to get a glass of water as opposed to refilling her empty glass with a time reversal spell. Violet refused to use magic.

And that was perhaps why she ended up the way she did. She took on too much against an opponent with much more practice and knowledge. She overestimated herself and not only got herself killed but broke Nathan into two. She was gone, a spirit on the Astral Plane, wandering by her lonesome, without a care or even a thought: an empty void of who she once was, waiting out the end of time and space and energy.

But while she too was an empty void, she had no ability to feel, to know, to grasp. Nathan on the other hand could do all of that and for a long while, it was all he could do. After he'd received the news, time stretched on, days passed by and blurred into one endless loop of pain and misery. He would wake up, lie in bed contemplating his excuse for continued existence — after all Violet hadn't considered what he would feel if anything happened to her, why did he continue to live? Simply because she would want him to? Why should he be the considerate one? — get out of bed, eat something, get back in bed and wait until he exhausted himself from reflection and contemplation only to wake up and repeat the cycle. But eventually, with a lot of help from Max, he did pull himself out of it.

Max was practically the reason he was still alive, and after this case was done, probably why he had survived as long as he did.

Nathan could not put into words how much he cared for Max, how much he appreciated Max. It was simply beyond comprehension. It was a feeling that was felt and mutually understood but never acknowledged. It would ruin the magic.

But it was certainly a relationship he was grateful for.

"Are you ready to start?" Andy's voice jolted Nathan out of his contemplative reminiscences.

"Well, what else is there to do?" Nathan chuckled softly.

Life now seemed so similar to what it had been after Violet, did it really matter if he was outside or in? It was a prison nonetheless.

Andy chuckled with him. "Right. So, shall we?"

"Alright, so, where did we stop?"

"With Liz and Jeff," Andy said.

"Right." Nathan sat up in his bed and leaned against the cold steel walls, staring up at the ceiling. Telling this story was the only thing that brought him any semblance of happiness anymore, perhaps because it was a distraction. But this was not a hollow distraction. This was something that kept him occupied in The After. This was something he could think about besides her. "So, the Chaudhary Case."

*

A/N: I'm working on chapter 15 rn, don't worry it's not gonna take five months again, it's gonna be a fairly short chapter, maybe a little longer than this one but it will be coming fairly soon. Until then. remember to vote, comment and stay hydrated!!!