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The Pianist and the Phantom


A father.

Leonard was a father.

Leonard Laurence had a child to take care of.

The musician had thought- well, no. He had entirely expected that fatherhood would not literally just be thrust upon him on a city street one day; that it would take all of the awkward romanticisms of finding the right woman for him and falling in love with her, eventually getting married and having adorable children and raising them in a house with a white picket fence around it. And they'd have a dog, too. But in an age where words like 'family' and 'parenting' had a much broader and more flexible definition than they did in yesteryear... well, never mind. This situation was still incredibly bizarre.

Because... where could one start? There was that girl who was on fire and didn't seem to mind it, and that boy who was with her... just walked up to him... and then that happened-- oh, just don't think about it, Leonard! You can't afford to lose more sleep over this!

How he would have loved a cup of something alcoholic right about now, but the mere thought of drinking in front of a child filled made him sick with so much guilt that it was as if he had skipped right over to the hangover. One could say that he was a very sensitive man. In any case, that prevented him from indulging and instead he was poring over a small table set near his piano that was littered in half-filled sheet music intent on rewriting the pieces of the score that he had lost. His fingers kept hitting dissonant chords on the piano. Kind of like how Mirorim (as he called himself) was, even the light shone on him strangely and his shadow never followed him quite right, and it was several times now that Leonard toyed with the thought that he had merely gone insane and the boy was a bold flight of his own dangerously overactive imagination.

Of course, then it was back to square one with his usual guilty tendencies and how dare you even consider that another living human being is just a hallucination! You're quite a callous man if how much you care about this child amounts to wishing you had some pills to make him go away--

"Dad?" the boy's voice suddenly said, doing little to ward off his new guardian's pessimistic thoughts.

He had taken to thinking of that man as his father far too easily. "W-w-what is it, Miro?" he replied, trying to sound as calm and collected as possible. Which really wasn't very much.

The voice continued with another question: "What are you doing?"

At least the question was as innocent and childlike as it should have been! "Well, I-- uh, you see, m-m-musicians have a way of writing down what they want to be played, and..."

Wait a minute... something was wrong. Leonard had to pause midsentence to try and figure out what the oddity was here. That led to Mirorim asking him why he had stopped talking, and it made the man realize exactly what the problem was: his voice was coming from the wrong place. And it certainly wasn't from the acoustics of the room, the composer had made sure there weren't any problems like that before he had bought the house! "M-m-miro, wh-where are you hiding at?" he nervously asked, swiveling his head about to try and find where the boy was.

"I'm not hiding anywhere, I'm right here!" was Mirorim's innocent answer. That's when Leonard looked up.

Children did not belong on the ceiling. As a matter of fact, people in general did not belong on the ceiling. And yet, there Mirorim was, sitting cross-legged on that surface as calmly as it were the floor.

Leonard uttered a small noise that sounded somewhat like a wooden chair being dragged over a parquet floor, before swallowing and trembling and shakily gripping the table with his hand. The result was a thin fluttering noise and a small thud as the table tipped over and all of his sheet music flew at the floor with it. The man soon followed, and he wouldn't get up for quite a long time-- and Mirorim would be there staring at him when he woke up, innocently asking him why he suddenly fell asleep like that.

Wasn't parenting supposed to come with the laws of physics intact?

(Caring for your Phantom)