Set in early May.
Word Count: 1616
“I remember when your mother first came to me,” said a heavily accented voice as a wiry, thin figure came up beside Paris, dark hair streaked with gray and pulled back into a tight, severe bun.
The Volkova Ballet Academy was not truly an academy, in that the pupils who attended did so only after they'd been to their day schools, where ballet was significantly less important and math and science made up a large potion of eight hours of study. Behind a facade of old red bricks were the collection of rooms and studios that made up the Academy. To a random passerby it might seem unobtrusive and unwelcoming, but to Paris it felt like home.
Overseen by the steely-eyed Irina Volkova, the Academy was not the sort of studio attended by those with just a passing fancy for ballet, or little girls whose silly parents wanted to see them jumping around on stage in frills and pink tulle. Admittance was competitive. Only those with noticeable talent and genuine interest landed a spot between its walls. Then the training was extensive. Often Volkova's dancers sacrificed a well-rounded social life or precious hours of sleep—if not both. It was rigorous and demanding, but, in Paris's opinion, that sort of training had its own rewards.
It looked the same as it had when he'd attended, though he'd slipped free of Madame Volkova's tutelage almost two years ago. He could note some minor renovations—the old wooden floor had been ripped up in one of the studios and replaced with a marley floor—but there was still paint peeling off of some of the walls, and Madame's office door was still covered with the same pictures of her at her prime with the Mariinsky Ballet.
Yet when he looked at the girls who stood at the very barre where he'd once stood, he could see a little of himself in them.
“She begged me to take you,” Madame said from Paris's left. “'Please take my son. Please let my baby dance,' she said. And she wept when I said no and came back with you to beg some more. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, I remember,” Paris said indulgently.
“Out of pity I let you audition. Pity, I say. And your mother cried, that silly girl, and she pulled out all the money she had saved to pay me, and she said all you wanted in all the world was to be a ballerina. And so, Paris, what did I say?”
“You said, 'Then she will be a ballerina.'”
“And I taught you myself!” Madame exclaimed harshly. Her voice almost sounded scornful, but Paris, intimately familiar with the manner in which she dealt with her dancers, could hear a great deal of pride in it.
“And what should happen then but that you came so alive,” Madame continued. “Nine years old and you were never so happy as the day I took you in.”
She said it as one might when taking in a stray or adopting someone as their own, which was more or less the case with Madame, Paris acknowledged. She took dancers who would have been great with lesser training and turned them into a sensation. Perhaps she was a bit harsh, and indeed her criticism could often seem cruel to an outsider, but she never put the time or the effort into a dancer she didn't expect to succeed. From the moment they gained admittance, Madame claimed the dancers who attended her pre-pointe and pointe classes as her girls, and she made them her sole responsibility.
From the age of nine to seventeen, that had included Paris.
The sight of the girls at the barre was achingly familiar—ten, eleven, and twelve year olds all with dreams of becoming the next Svetlana. They all wore the same black leotard, the same pale pink tights, the same blush colored ballet slippers, their hair bound back into such a severe series of buns that they almost looked like miniature versions of Madame.
Paris felt bright but sloppy by comparison, standing there in a burgundy leotard and black tights, his hair pulled back but loose in places, his growing bangs still falling out to frame his face without the constraining assistance of bobby pins. His appearance did not go without a critical once-over from Madame.
“And now you are married,” she said.
Paris's lips curved into a smile. “I am,” he said.
“But you did not even marry a dancer!” Madame scoffed.
“Trust me, Madame, I'm much better off not trying to have a relationship with another dancer.”
In some instances it was a match made in Heaven—Marianella and Thiago immediately came to mind—but Paris could not imagine dating (much less marrying) anyone even remotely like himself. He enjoyed the fact that he and Chris had different interests to balance out the ones they had in common.
“But you are still not happy,” Madame said, “and I know why.”
Paris turned to look at her in curiosity mixed with skepticism mixed with fear mixed with hope.
No, he was not in the dreadful place he'd been in for most of the previous year, nor had he had reason to revisit the equally difficult places of his early adolescence, but he could not pretend to be completely at ease with himself or with his life. He was content with many parts of his life, certainly, but he'd always known happiness to be fleeting. It came and it went without a single warning, a blessing when it arrived and illusive in its absence.
Always he was happy for a little while, before something came upon him to remind him that there remained a part of his life that was lacking.
Once it was Chris, then it was his father, and now it was something within himself.
“Why am I not happy, Madame?” he asked, half expecting her to be intuitive enough to pinpoint exactly what it was, and half doubting that she could ever understand.
Indeed, she proved herself mistaken.
“Because you have not yet danced Aurora.”
Her expression did not change when met with Paris's look of exasperated confusion. Madame continued to observe him with steel in her eyes and determination in the firm line of her mouth.
“I remember when you danced here, you always blamed me when I did not let you dance the part you wanted. You looked at me with your pouty mouth and your big, sad eyes that hurt, and you muttered to the other girls, 'Madame is mean. Why is Madame so mean? She never lets me dance the best parts.' And you stood by and you glared when I let little Stephanie be Clara, and when I let Brittany be Cinderella instead of you.”
It was a painful reminder only because of how much he'd struggled. Looking back from the present, it was hard to be too upset by it when he considered where he was now.
“Now you have danced the Sugarplum,” Madame continued, “and the Lilac Fairy, and you have been Juliet, and maybe one day you will finally be Cinderella or Odette, and you will show people that Irina Volkova did right to let that poor, silly girl cry and beg, 'Please, please, take my son.'
“You will be the ballerina you always wanted to be, here or in New York, or in England or Paris or Russia,” she said, “but they would be wise to keep Aurora from you.”
Paris could not stop the betrayed look that briefly flashed across his face before he could smooth his expression back out.
“I'm good enough,” he argued.
“It is not a question of talent, Paris. Of course you have talent. I would not have taken you otherwise.”
“Then why?”
“Because Aurora represents everything you have always aspired to be,” Madame said. “You can have talent, and beauty, and passion, but above all those things, Paris, it is your aspirations that make you a remarkable dancer. I could see it in your eyes when you were nine-years-old, and I can see it in your eyes still.”
She turned to him then, and a rare smile softened her usually stern face, and she brought a pale, wrinkled hand up to touch his cheek in a caress reminiscent of an adoring mother.
“No matter what hardships we overcome, no matter what changes come upon our lives, we should always have our aspirations,” she said.
Paris looked straight into her eyes and tried to figure out if there was supposed to be some deeper meaning behind what Madame was saying. He thought he might see something there, swirling among the austerity and pride, something that might have been a wise acceptance if she could bring herself to talk to him about anything other than ballet.
Paris smiled timidly in response, and she patted one of his cheeks in a way that was obviously meant to be affectionate.
“To the barre now, girl,” Madame said with a jerk of her head. “You have gotten sloppy under your new teachers, I am sure.”
She dropped her hand and stepped away, her stern mask firmly back in place as she shooed him over to the barre with the ten, eleven, and twelve year old girls.
A stranger to Madame might have thought such a placement insulting given Paris's advanced training, but Paris knew better.
Madame had missed him.
His smile widened as he straightened his hair and approached the barre—and the young, wide-eyed girls that stared up at him, their faces alight with a similar dream.
