They don't stop running until they reach the entrance bus loop. Set the scene: three girls slumped against the horse statue as they wait for their lungs to finish screaming.
Adagio watches the marble oscillate under her hand, her breath hot and heavy, like forcing a dumbbell out of her throat. The portal - closed, not that it matters. She presses harder against the stone anyway, feeling the magic push her away, but if she can jus-
Snap out of it. Probably the one absolute truth in this world is that the spell that had trapped them here is nothing if not effective.
What, you thought they didn’t know about the portal? They’re older than the mere thought of you, by a long shot.
“What –“ oh lord, Aria’s starting again, her words interrupted by desperate gasps for air “- are we going to do now?”
“Well, we could have tried to repair our pendants if you idiots hadn’t dropped- “
“You dropped yours too!” Sonata interjects, planting her hands on her hips. “And what are we supposed to do, glue them back together?”
Adagio can feel her pulse in one of her eyes as they narrow at the two girls standing off to her side. Tomato juice staining stockings and striped shirts, red innards being now combed out of long purple hair.
“No harm in trying, now is there?” Adagio replies, feeling an edge of hysteria slip in her voice. “It’s not like those pendants were the sole source of our magic and immortality or anything! It’s totally not possible that we're going to turn into mulch if we can't repair them!"
Even that's probably being too generous – they’ll probably instantly turn into dust, Lot-style. Or wake up with their muscles so atrophied they can’t even crawl out of bed, trapped until their hearts finally give out, the ceiling’s water damage tattoos the last things they see before the face of oblivion.
Any moment now. Any moment now.
When she manages to rip her hand away from the portal, an unbearable emptiness sits in her palm, causing her fingers to curl into fists.
She can’t see much of anything in the dark, much less with the statue’s towering form blocking the light of the streetlamps, and the marble has never been reflective before, but for a moment Adagio swears she can see her face clearly for the first time in centuries. Wrinkled, haggard, pale, an orange peel molded through.
She about screams.
“Well, it hasn’t happened yet,” Sonata muses aloud.
They are King Lir’s daughters hearing bells of power chords and synthesizer chiming in the distance, and these idiots can’t even see it.
Whether they age like they opened the fairy world box, they have nothing, are nothing, without –
“Adagio, you’re shaking,” Sonata’s voice cracks through.
Adagio only now remembers she’s clutching her face, scrutinizing herself in the mirror that isn’t there. Her palms leave a few speaks of blood on her cheeks, hastily wiped off with the back of her hands before she looks at them again. At the one face drawn down with concern and the other up in a smirk.
“Oh, don’t be so sad, Adagio,” Aria drawls, pretending to inspect her dirty nails. “The ‘hardcore meth head’ look is very in vogue right now.”
Adagio’s nails fit so comfortably into her wounds she can’t help but clench them harder. “What did you -?”
“What?” Aria snaps back. “You make fun of us all the time; why can’t I make fun of you?” She steps in front of Sonata as she speaks so that her body will hide her gripping the blue-skinned girl’s hand. “It’s your fault we’re in this mess, after all.”
Oh, of course. A shark smelling blood in the water; a vulture waiting on the powerlines for the wounded to keel over. Adagio crosses her arms over her chest. “Really? Because from what I remember, you were the one who just couldn’t eat fast food anymore,” her register raising in mockery.
“We didn’t have to face them head-on! We were doing just fine turning everyone else against them. Did you ever even wonder why those girls had Equestrian magic?” And such powerful magic, the kind that made helical rainbows tall enough to touch the sky and tasted of a home that no longer exists. “This isn’t the first time you underestimating someone has cost us everything!”
Ow, Aria hadn’t meant to shout that quite so loudly.
But while her own breathing is quick and shallow, Adagio doesn’t seem as though she’s breathing at all, her lips a cool smile as her eyes flit from Aria’s scowl to Sonata’s meek, disapproving frown.
“If you suspected those girls were too powerful for us,” she says, voice disturbingly even. “Why didn’t you say anything, hmm? Oh, wait, then you wouldn’t have been able to scapegoat me and become the root. But don’t worry,” – Aria and Sonata tense in sync, fingers tightening around the other’s as Adagio strolls past them, her smile slipping for a deep grimace. “I’m sure ruling with only one brain cell is still relatively easy when your sidekick has none.”
Somehow, her legs don’t shake as she passes the statue, dragging her fingertips along its side.
“Where are you going?” Sonata calls.
Adagio stops, looking over her shoulder with a shrug. “Who knows? Someplace high and pretty.” Preferably by the sea, but you can’t always get what you want. “If I wake up as a pillar of dust tomorrow, I at least want the wind to blow me into the eyes of some worthless commuter.” Adagio accentuates this statement with a little wave of her fingers, voice lilting up ere it drops down again, disgust and exhaustion in equal, lethal measures. “You two can waste your last hours away without me.”
It’s too late for buses, so she merely walks down the sidewalk, towards the distant lights of the city. Aria’s grip keeps Sonata from running after her, even if she nearly topples the other girl trying. “Adagio, wait!”
A peace sign, no look back. The red streaks running down her hair and the back of her dress bright as she steps into the range of a streetlamp. “Ciao.”
But Sonata would have watched her vanish into the night if not for the hand pulling her in the opposite direction, away from the kids beginning to mill out of the amphitheater.
They wake up the next morning as chipper as the dead, but still breathing, soft skin still pulled taut over lean muscle. Sonata and Aria both expect Adagio to sulk through the door at any moment, mumbling about how the years catching up with them like a freight train had been a reasonable assumption.
But she doesn’t. Not even the day after, nor after that.
If they still had their voices, they would have left the door unlocked at night for her.
“Do you hear her?”
Of course Aria does; she’d woken up just before the door had quietly clicked open, hoping to go unnoticed. Aria knew it was her like she knew not to stick her hands into a flame. “Obviously,” she whispers back, cracking open an eye. “Now let go of me so I can go check on her.”
Sonata loosens her vice on Aria’s right arm, still lying sprawled on the bed as Aria gets up and picks a bathrobe off the floor. Only turns her head so she can breathe in what’s left of Adagio on her pillow. Aria had rolled her eyes when Sonata dived into bed that first night, pulling the blankets tight around her shoulders as she breathed in lavender and citrus. Aria’s body against hers had felt so foreign she could only fall asleep with an arm hugged against her chest, similar enough to pretend.
(And Aria hadn’t said anything, even though the absence of a spine pressed against hers still makes her feel more naked than she’s ever been in her life.)
Aria shrugs the robe onto her shoulders, fingers fumbling with the belt as she steals towards the kitchen.
A crash. A curse.
Sonata leaps up and follows suit.
Adagio has her old sweatshirt on, hood barely able to contain her wild mane of curls, dress and bangles discarded for her regular leggings and fingerless gloves. Knees surrounded by a small sea of empty CD cases.
Adagio bats Aria’s hands away as she stacks them back up into her arms. “I got it,” she barks.
“Why do you even want these?” Aria asks, trying again to reach towards the pile ere an arm sweeps them all away. A scoff, “You can’t still be caught up on this.”
“I’m not,” is the curt reply.
“Yeah, our voices are so bad they might make someone’s speakers explode.”
Two sets of eyes focus on the girl still standing in the doorway, clad only in a T-shirt and panties. Sonata self-consciously rubs her arm with a glower. “Well, it’s true!”
Adagio rolls her eyes and gives an exasperated sigh as she stands, pressing her stack against her chest. The door to their apartment, both residents notice now with widening eyes, has been propped open by a shopping cart. A stack of blank discs and microphones already lying inside, cords tangled atop.
For a moment, the muscles in Aria’s shoulder seem torn between whether to tense or hopelessly fall, before settling on the latter. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
A clatter. Adagio crosses empty arms as she turns back to them. “What? I’m not going to wait around for the next Equestrian reject to come through to get my powers back.”
“Our powers aren’t coming back,” Sonata says. “They shattered our pendants, remember?”
“I mean “powers” as in influence.”
A cocked eyebrow. “But that was…”
Adagio pinches the bridge between her eyes. “You don’t necessarily need magic to rule over people in this world – if you two idiots ever bothered to look around, you’d have figured that out by now. Girls the same age as the Rainbooms are getting rich beyond their wildest dreams off autotune and a pretty face!”
Aria scoffs again. “I don’t think autotune can help us now.”
Adagio simply smiles knowingly. “What do you think the indie scene is for?”
(A small chuckle, the first in days) “You’re kidding.”
Adagio rips the stereo from the wall with such force the wall almost joins her. “Not at all.”
(“I don’t get it,”) Here Aria acts, a leap towards the shopping cart, yanking it towards her so hard the front wheels pop over the threshold. (“Are you actually being serious?”)
“Let go, before I break your fingers.” Adagio hefts the stereo up, shifts her grip on its sides.
Further in, up to the back wheels. “You can’t just take our stuff!”
“Why not? I thought even autotune couldn’t help us now.”
“Nice preschool logic, Adagio.”
“Better than taking advantage of someone still mentally in preschool,” eyes briefly pointed in Sonata’s direction.
Aria’s eyebrows knit, a subtle blush threatening to light her pink skin crimson. “By your own logic- “
“Officer, she came onto me, promise! Now, move.” Adagio drops the stereo hard enough to shake the metal frame, close enough that Aria can feel her knuckles wipe off dust. “It was my idea to buy all this junk anyway.”
“It’s still our stuff, that we bought with, y’know, -“ punctuating her statement with the snatching up of a microphone – “our money.”
“Yeah!” Sonata chimes, finally joining Aria’s side. “I had to wait tables for a whole hour to get that stereo.” Not to mention getting almost assaulted by her co-workers because of her song’s ability to make not only her tables empty their wallets, but all those in the restaurant.
Adagio flashes that mischievous grin, stepping around the rest of her destruction – CD cases, crooked ottoman, shoe boxes strewn across the floor – so she can sling an arm around each of her former band mates’ tense shoulders. “Well,” she practically purrs, “lucky for both of you that like every good communist country, this is a dictatorship – “ a combat boot plants itself against the front of the cart, sending it flying into the hall, to the door of the apartment opposite with a loud crash. “So I don’t have to care what you think!”
The microphone Aria had been holding bangs against the cart’s bottom tray as it dangles by its cord, in case the neighbors weren’t now awake.
Their instinctual cringes allow Adagio to slip out from between them, quickly maneuvering the cart around to face towards the elevator. She nearly laughs as she sees the anger finally paint Aria red, the gears in her head turning, debating whether to throw a punch with nearly-audile clicks.
Sonata makes that decision for her. “Well, fine!” she snaps. “Have fun begging for chump change in the subway!”
Aria recovers from her shock enough to add, “If they don’t arrest you for noise pollution first.”
And a “too bad, so sad!” thrown in for good measure.
“I’m sure I will,” Adagio says, gripping the handlebar of the cart. “I always have liked men in uniform.”
The door behind them clicks open, a small, wrinkled face peering out. After a brief, sugar-smiles apology, the door closes again, and Adagio looks back to her old partners with an annoyed frown. “Before I go,” she says, fishing around the pocket of her sweatshirt, “don’t say I never do anything for you.”
What scatters over the ground with a glassy rattle forces both girls to their knees, scooping up scarlet shards with a primal desperation.
Sonata watches her go this time, however. Long enough to see Adagio push her cart into the elevator and disappear, that confident swing still in her hips.
Author's Note
As you've noticed, while the description implies the story will be from Adagio's POV, that's not entirely the case. These early parts will be primarily focused on Sonata, though Adagio will get the spotlight back soon enough.
King Lir is an Irish folktale where an evil stepmother turns the king's children into swans for 900 years. It's said that then they turned back into humans, the first sounds they heard were ringing church bells.
The 'root,' the internet tells me, is the note a chord is built off of.
