welcome to chimera!

[Marianne Donahue]

Mary had never meant to take up smoking, but it had crept into her life as easily as François had crept away. A carelessly discarded pack had littered her dresser since the slam of their apartment door, and it had only been a matter of time before she was leaving their ends burning in old ashtrays, catching his scent as she hunched over his instruments and wore the clothes he'd left behind until they no longer felt like his. Putting them to her lips had felt like an intrusion at first, a taboo attempt to get closer, and the thought had given her a thrill that had made her feel - at least a little - alive again. But the longer he stayed away, the less impact smoking his last pack of cigarettes had, and when they finally ran out, it was Mary who walked to the store and bought another pack, and it was necessity rather than winsome wistfulness that guided her steps. Now she made the trip once a day: one pack of Camels - not his brand, because he imported them from France - and one meal. Often, she couldn't find the motivation to eat even that, and so her wallpaper yellowed as her wrists grew thin.

She mostly sat in their kitchen (because it was never going to stop being their kitchen, no matter how many other people told her he was probably buried up to the hilt in younger musicians), staring from a window that began bordered by begonias but was increasingly choked with weeds. The ivy gave off a choking, cloying smell, but she rarely even noticed, watching the smoke spiral into the curves of his body as she was, and so the days passed. Whenever she relinquished her seat on the grimy kitchen counter she had only one of three ideas in mind: the shop, their bed, or his instruments. They'd always called them his, even though that was quite inaccurate, because he was protective and she lax and willing to forgive. She had always reasoned that pride would only damage them - and hadn't she been right after all? As her fingers adopted their positions on the strings and plucked out his favourite melodies, she relived the moment of his departure, and the music swelled with her primary desire - to have him back - and fell with the knowledge that he had sought someone more suitable than she. He was a man of fiery passion and temper, and she a mirror; when she'd been with him, she had reflected those passions, found artistry where there had previously been technical accuracy, and they had tumbled together, as much entwined by their literal music as their metaphorical.

But the longer François had occupied her home and her heart, the more wanting Mary had become in his dark, intense eyes. Arguments were frequent, and always ended with Mary backing down 'like the mouse you are' and with the tempestuous harpist storming from their home, thoroughly dissatisfied with her brand of love. For Mary was a people-pleaser at heart, for all her musical talent and for all her reflected passion, and she couldn't bear for her lover to be angry with her - but it was this very act of submission that forced him further from her arms. He did not look for a wife, he told her, but an equal, and he could not cope with such a weak-willed woman. And so he'd stormed from the house, as he had done on so many occasions, and Mary's head and hands swam across her -- no, his -- harp as she thought about it. The memory of breath was an absent one, her fingers aching in a crescendo, and it was only at the final door slam of her memory that her music eased into soft, melodic misery again. Daily ritual complete, she tore her fingers from the strings and rubbed at her stained eyes, already reaching for the cigarette still smoking in the glass ashtray that he had always used after practice.

It's been two months, she thought, absently, as she pulled her bony frame from her stool and hunched her shoulders slightly, moving to the bathroom in a faint daze in order to check her make-up. He's not coming back. Reapplying eyeliner and mascara in as absent a fashion as she did everything but her music, she nodded vaguely at her thought and pursed her lips to slick them with the red lipstick he'd always liked. Yes, he is. François' dark eyes peered back at her beyond her own in the mirror, and she smiled slightly as she reached out her fingertips, hypnotised, to touch the soft skin of his cheek and to feel the slight stubble that she remembered so well. He smiled back at her, as though to tell her that all was forgiven, and she found herself blushing right up until she realised that her calloused fingers were touching nothing but cold, hard glass. Taking a step and a breath, she stared between her hand and the mirror twice more, but saw only her own, frightened blue eyes. Tucking a curl behind her ear, she was glad that her make-up seemed adequate, because she had no intention of staying in that room any longer, and promptly fled back to her living room.

The incident with the mirror had been far from the first of her delusions, but they still held the power to deeply unnerve her. Though circumstances differed - a face in an audience, a turning musician, a stranger in the rain - the outcome was always the same. The hazy, drug-like sense of welcome and drunken, woozy happiness to see François again, and then the sharp and unpleasant realisation that what she had been looking at had been nothing but an illusion. They had been getting longer lately - more detailed - and Mary fancied that she was going mad. The periods of lucidity between delusion and aimless, motivationless depression were rarely long, however, and so she did not dwell often. In fairness, part of her did not quite want the visions to disappear; they reminded her of his face, of happier times. Sometimes she fancied that she'd slip into the fantasy forever.

Now was not one of those times, however, for the vision in the mirror had spooked her, and she was expecting company. Forced out of her dreary, drifting state by the realisation that the reporter whose advertisement she'd had her eye caught by was due, she tried to clutch onto some sense of who she was as she smoothed the wrinkles in her satin skirt. She wasn't sure why she was wearing her pussy-bow cream blouse or her best heels, wasn't sure why she was all dressed up as though she was going to the opera, but she didn't question it too closely. Besides, the option to do that was torn away from her by a sharp rapping at the apartment door, and she extinguished her cigarette almost guiltily as she went to peer through the spyhole; what would her mama have said about letting polite company seeing such an unladylike vice?

Drawing back the deadbolt and chain, she hovered in the doorway, peering at the gentleman on her doorstep.
"Hello," she introduced, slightly awkward, having not interacted with another human being since orchestra, two days previously. Her accent was distinctly Southern, despite her modern mode of dress, and she tucked a curl behind her ear again as she wondered what her mama would say about inviting a strange man into a home she was occupying on her own. "You Mister Wallace?" She asked, shifting awkwardly on her heels, unused to wearing them in her house as she was.

[Samuel Wallace]

Sam hadn't been reporting for very long, but he'd been a freelancer for long enough that he knew - knew - with a certainty that filled him from the tips of his toes to the top of his head that he wanted to get a solid, long-term job with the Tribune that would put food on the table and wouldn't send him slinking home on Wednesday and Sundays for dinner at his parents' house on the North Side that he tried to pretend wasn't a necessity but really was. Last Wednesday his mom had been particularly insistent on asking if Sam had heard from his brother, who'd been missing for almost half a year now despite having just won a seat in the New York Philharmonic. Last time they'd talked, all the way back in April on one of those rare phone calls that Frank occasionally made when the mood seized him, he realized suddenly, Sam had been giving Frank a hard time about moving to New York City when surely there was plenty of demand for tuba players here in the Second City.

Then there hadn't been any news from him for months on end, his phone going unanswered when Sam saved up enough to call his apartment in Brooklyn. There was no news from the police, or any of Frank's colleagues in the Philharmonic that they'd managed to get a hold of, or from anyone and so finally Sam, feeling a bit ashamed since he was going to make a story out of it as well look for his brother, since he had to pay rent if he didn't want to move out of the city and back to his parents' home in the suburbs, had put his skills to use and started asking around if anyone else's musician friends or family or distant acquaintances had gone missing. Feeling very slightly embarrassed at resorting to it but determined to at least see if disappearing musicians was something that happened all the time, he'd put a brief (and inexpensive) ad in a few of the more popular city papers asking if anyone else knew about a similar situation.

It had taken a few weeks, but finally someone had answered, some lady named Donahue with an accent like he'd only seen on the television, never really heard in person before. Chewing on the eraser of his pencil now as he sat on the El, knees bouncing enough (his heels were up in the air; all the motion was from his toes, really) that the woman next to him stared at him for a few moments before standing up and moving to a different empty seat, he waited impatiently for the name of her stop to come over the crackling loudspeaker.

Out of high school by seventeen and clutching a Medill degree under his elbow to hang on the wall of his office by the time he was barely twenty-one, Sam had been ready to see his byline under headlines in the Tribune each morning - and each evening, the news was never finished! - right after graduation. That particular rosy attitude had disappeared quickly when he and his portfolio had been rather un-glamorously dismissed from the editor-in-chief's office. Why, he'd fumed as he left the building, had they even answered his letter if they'd just been planning to throw him back out? The question had never been satisfactorily answered, but after repeating the process at a few other smaller, less distinguished newspapers around Chicago, Sam had eventually given up, declared his intentions to have vengeance at last (by which he really meant a byline), and started doing freelance work. It had started slow, but soon he'd gotten to the point where he could rent his own place in the city, feed himself without his mother commenting on how skinny he looked every time he stopped by home for a visit (not that she didn't always say it; Sam was a skinny young man and had never managed to get the sort of heft and presence that Frank had - no, not had, still possessed), and even get a few job offers from the smaller papers.

He had always said thanks, but no thanks. There was one paper that Sam Wallace was going to work for, and that was going to be the Chicago Tribune. Maybe, he thought, taking the pencil out of his mouth and eyeing the toothmarks in the wood, the story of the disappearing musicians (he hadn't named it properly yet, a good title always came last) would be his ticket in. Imagine that.

Always polite to the people who agreed to meet with him, Sam had worn his nicest, if slightly threadbare, trousers and dark grey jacket. In an attempt not to completely destroy his pencil before he could even write a single word on the notepad resting in his lap, he switched his attention to his tie, sticking the pencil behind his ear - as he still imagined all proper reporters did, even after almost two years of being one - and nervously wondering if it was the proper length. He'd tied it without a mirror, since the vibrations from the El had knocked the last one off the wall. Seven years of bad luck, he'd thought, since it had been about a month after Frank had vanished and he still hadn't bought himself a new mirror. As a result, he looked a bit more scattered than professional, his hair not as neatly combed as it could have been, a few black fingerprints on his collar near the top button from when he'd gotten ink on his fingers without realizing it. He'd always been distracted, always had a pencil behind his ear and at least a scrap of paper in his pocket so he could write down what he was seeing even way back in grade school.

For a while Sam thought he was going to be a writer, until he'd found that their lives were too uncomfortably short and tragic (although he'd always thought the part about drinking constantly was pretty neat) and he realized that he liked writing about what he saw rather than just making it up. Reporting (although, little did he know, it was about to become journalism) was his calling, and he was only lucky that he looked the part.

Finally it was Ms. Donahue's - he couldn't remember if it was Miss or Missus and so he'd just go with Mizz Donahue when he introduced himself - stop and he sprang off the El like he'd been waiting his whole life to meet her. It was only a few blocks from the stop to her apartment, and he half-ran, trying his best (and failing miserably) to look like he was walking along as nonchalant as you please. But she was the first person who'd replied about missing musicians that he'd actually gone to meet. Everyone else had found theirs again - no one else's had stayed missing like his brother and whoever Ms. Donahue was going to tell him about. Climbing the flights of stairs up to her apartment since the elevator was out of order and he didn't mind climbing a staircase anyways, since he didn't smoke and was therefore not as wheezy and easily winded as many of his smokier compatriots, he flipped through his notepad for a blank page that he hadn't covered with his scrawling shorthand (he was lucky that no one else had to read it, really) of notes on where the hell Frank might be.

When he reached her door, he didn't hesitate before knocking sharply, rocking back and forth on his heels as he waiting for her to open up and let him in. He had some extra pencils in a cigarette case that Frank had got him one year for Christmas, even though Frank knew he didn't smoke and should've paid better attention than that, and spare scraps of paper in every pocket on every article of clothing he wore, even the breast pocket on his shirt. Then Ms. Donahue opened the door and looked a bit made up for an interview with some freelancer who put out an ad about missing musicians in the paper, but Sam didn't mind. He'd gotten maybe a touch dressed up - although Sam's best wasn't really dressy, if he was going to be honest with himself - to go interview some lady who'd responded to his ad in the paper, but he'd figured that it would help her take him more seriously.

"That's right," he said brightly when she asked if he was Mr. Wallace, with a touch to his forehead that would have looked less silly if he'd been wearing a hat. He'd thought for a moment about making that old joke that Mr. Wallace is my father, Ms. Donahue, you can call me Sam, but decided against it in the same instant. "Sam Wallace, at your service, Ms. Donahue." His voice clearly betrayed the fact that he'd spent his whole life in Chicago, vowels shifted and consonants softened almost past recognition, although he had an easy smile that he was sure put the people he interviewed at ease. "Thanks so much for agreeing to meet me."

[Marianne Donahue]

She hadn't really known what to expect from a reporter, if she was honest, but the couple of movies that she'd taken in with friends - that is, before François had taken over her life completely - had led her to expect something rather more dressy. Glancing him up and down, taking in his threadbare suit and lack of hat and general messiness, she felt the slightest swell of affection for him, breaking in under her awkward and easing her previously blank expression to carry a touch of a friendly smile. The lack of flash or sparkle did not have her unimpressed - far from it, it put her at ease and no longer feeling like she had anyone to impress. Not that she'd been particularly nervous of the visit, detached as she usually felt, but the unusual lucidity she was feeling had her thinking that a Hollywood style reporter - all flashing bulbs and fast, New Yorker accent - might have been too much for her.

"Hi, Sam," she offered, smiling a little wider as she pushed a hand through her hair again, touching the bottom of her curls to check whether the hairspray was holding. It wasn't vanity - this was how François had always preferred she wore it. Cracking the door open properly, she gestured inside with only a brief further thought for her mama and everything she'd disapproved of, touching the simple gold crucifix at her neck more out of habit than any real faith; François had managed to convince her that living in sin wasn't so bad after all. "Come on in," she continued, though her smile faded a touch as she glanced back at all the dusty shelves that had gone untouched since her fellow harpist had left and failed to return. Honestly, what kind of a house was this to present to someone who'd come all the way from goodness knew where to see her?

Glancing him over as she closed the door behind, she almost offered him something to eat - a hangover from the days living at home with her mother - before she remembered that she didn't have any food. "You want a drink or something?" She offered, quiet and almost shy; having a strange man in her house wasn't likely to make her any more assertive. Maybe, she thought, absently, that had been part of the problem with François. "Oh -- and it's Marianne, but you can call me Mary."

[Samuel Wallace]

Sam had a knack for following movement; without seeming obvious about it, he'd noted her motions, touching her hair, the crucifix, and drawn conclusions about her He entered at her gesture, peering around at the apartment as if by seeing all the tiny details he could get a glimpse, a sneak preview, of Miss - there was no wedding ring visible when she'd touched her hair or placed her hand on the door frame or gestured for him to enter, so he guessed that she was probably unmarried - Mary Donahue. The apartment was dusty and the smell of the ivy that clung to the outside of the old greystone had reached even the door; his mother had raised him too well for him to wrinkle his nose at the smell of cigarette smoke that became stronger the further he walked into the living room, but it seemed to have infiltrated the entire place.

He lingered in the middle of the living room, uncertain where she wanted him to sit - or if she wanted him to sit. "I'm okay," he said casually, still glancing around, now more like a tourist in an unfamiliar city than some sort of ace reporter there to ferret out the secret of mysterious disappearances. "Thanks for the offer, though. Don't let me stop you from getting anything for yourself." Still intrigued by the apartment, especially by the sense of neglect that hung about the place, he turned in place until he had stepped around almost one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and he was facing Mary where she stood by the door.

It felt sad in here, although he hardly could've failed to expect that in the home of a woman with someone missing from her life. There was a similar sort of feeling hanging around in Frank's old room at their parents' home, and Sam could only be glad that he wasn't living in there. He wasn't sure that he could've handled it weighing down on his shoulders like it was in this living room.

"Mary Donahue," he said, as if trying out the name. It sounded Irish, and the crucifix made her Catholic, but she was clearly southern. "You from New Orleans?" It was a stab in the dark, really, but one he was rather pleased with making; in his opinion, he had a solid chance of being right, and even if he wasn't then it was another tidbit of information that he'd learn about her if she answered the question like a reasonable person. "I'm from Chicago, myself," he added. "Lived here my whole life." So far their interaction had been far more like a conversation than an actual interview: Sam's pencil was still tucked behind his ear, although he was holding his notepad in one hand and the thin, nervous fingers of the other hand moved as if he was spinning a pencil between them. But he was hesitant to bring up the main question of why he'd come. What, after all, made Frank's disappearance different than the disappearance of anyone else who simply vanished off the face of the earth?

Well, he had a reporter for a brother, but besides that, it seemed to Sam like there was nothing. For a moment he thought he was crazy, coming here to interview a complete stranger about someone she knew who'd also disappeared, but the moment passed and he was Sam Wallace, future editor-in-chief of the Tribune (since years of freelancing hadn't quite killed his dreams), once more. And yet he still couldn't bring himself to ask where to sit, poise his pencil above his yellowed notepad, and broach the topic.

[Marianne Donahue]

If Sam had a knack for following movement, then Mary... didn't really have a skill of her own. She had always leaned towards the naive and the easily impressed, and her parents had never bothered to correct it because, well, she was a young, God-fearing girl, and she didn't need to push herself towards the intellectual. It was one of the reasons that her talent wasn't immediately obvious, and that orchestras had - in the past - often written her off before she'd even gotten her fingers onto the strings. There was an unconscious fragility to her that was only pronounced with the absence of François and the thinness of her limbs, perhaps in the curve of her long-lashed, large eyes or the slightly childish way she carried her manners. Whatever it was, it was obvious that Marianne wasn't a strong female role model, but closer to a conservative ideal.

Certainly, Sam impressed her, what with his quick movements and the way his eyes seemed to slide all over her apartment, as though seeking out possible leads. She had to briefly remind herself that he wasn't a detective - God himself knew she'd seen enough of those to last her a lifetime - as she grew even more nervous, because the detectives she'd seen so far had been quick to dismiss both her and her life style, and she'd been quick to accept. Every time she had backed down it seemed that she'd felt François' judging eyes, but she had, for once, paid it no mind, a combination of listless depression and her own upbringing combining to form an iron-clad reason not to pester. Anyway, she was sure the gentlemen at the police station were looking for him as hard as they thought was appropriate, and who was she to tell them how to do their job?

What impressed her more than his general manner, however, was his quick and - at least to her - almost magical ability to tell her where she was from within a few seconds. Turning as she closed, bolted and chained her door behind her, she felt both her lips and her eyes crinkle upwards into a smile, her fingers coming together in a small, delighted clap.
"Close enough," she admitted, almost immediately, her head bobbing in a nod even though he hadn't been one hundred percent accurate. "I was born in Baton Rouge. I studied in France when I was in my teens, though, so I guess I'm a little bit more travelled than y'all are." The gentle tease in her voice seemed quite at odds with the neglect of her apartment, but in another moment she had glanced around herself, and the smile faded away again. Talking to a stranger like this would've had François proud, she was sure.

And forcing her guest to linger in the corridor would have had her mother tutting under her breath and forcing her own hospitality on him, a jolt reminded her, and she moved slightly as though startled. "Oh, I'm sorry," she murmured, eyes narrowing slightly as though she was weary rather than widening with the innocence and naivety that seemed inherent to her demeanour. "You'll probably want to sit down." Moving forward, a little embarrassed by both her inattentiveness and the fact that nothing in her lounge except His harp and stool was free of dust, she patted absently at a cushion before gesturing for him to sit down. The cigarette she'd left by the ashtray still smouldered, but she didn't notice it; rather, she took a deep breath and drew comfort from the smell that she had managed to associate with Him, despite them not being His brand.

She perched herself on the stool rather than the armchair, an unconscious decision that left her hands free to wander across His harp and find solace - though not music, not while Sam was there - from the familiar strings and grooves of her own fingers. The reminder, however, served another purpose than to simply settle her stomach, and she glanced at the intricately carved and obviously expensive, well-taken care of instrument. "His name's François Lefèvre," she murmured, quite unprompted, her accent managing somehow not to make a mess of her lover's name; it was clear that she'd either spent many hours perfecting it, or she knew at least a little French herself. "One day he just left and never came back." If her segue was awkward, she failed to notice.

[Samuel Wallace]

The clap startled him just a bit; he'd already looked away at something else in the apartment, mind already bubbling with those descriptive phrase that made some people's work read more like literature than a plain restatement of the facts, fingers practically itching to replicate the place on paper. The sentences would come when he was in front of his typewriter, fingers flying across the keys, shoulders hunched as he leaned forwards so he could see the paper. For now everything was sentence fragments and clauses to be strung together later like Christmas lights glittering across the page. Subject-verb agreement and proper punctuation was for slow, careful consideration in his apartment, not when the tip of his pencil flew over the yellow pages of his notepad and leaving shorthand in its wake like the vapor trail of an airplane in the blue sunny sky, eagerly replicating words and sounds and sights in an attempt to take the world around him and cram it into eight-and-a-half by eleven inches. Slightly embarrassed at having jumped even a little bit at the sound, he looked over at Mary, turning back from locking the door (and noted the bolt and chain and lock and thought that either this was not a nice neighborhood or he didn't have enough locks on his own door), and was pleased to see her smile.

"Just a bit," he told her with a good-natured grin. Getting teased about being a relative homebody when it came to traveling had never bothered him. To be honest, Sam had never left the country; the furthest he'd ever been from Chicago was a trip to Key West to visit his grandparents with the family when he was in grade school and Frank was an awkward teenager who'd complained endlessly about not being able to practice when they were on vacation. The second-furthest he'd been was down south to Springfield on a trip to visit the State Capitol with his high school civics class - no, wait. One time he'd been to St. Louis with some friends from Northwestern, but that was it. France sounded really impressive to someone who hadn't even been to Canada. He was about to tell her that and ask her about it when she invited him to sit, which he did gratefully. "Thanks." Sam brought his feet up against the base of the couch, raising his knees so that he could rest his notepad on him. His long form was folded rather ungracefully to fit onto the couch, shoulders hunched and back slightly bent so that he could rest his arms on his legs while he wrote.

Now, sitting across from her with the pencil still behind his ear, the silence seemed especially pregnant as she sat down at the harp. She couldn't be planning on playing; Sam was sure it was lovely and all, but despite Frank's passion for the art, music had never really set free his soul or opened up his world or all those fancy feelings Frank had used to talk about before he left for New York. He enjoyed dancing, of course, and the music that went along with it, especially jazz, but never the sort that Frank had played. But his tastes were similar even in the written word: prose rather than poetry, the practical instead of the purely fanciful and (in his opinion, but nobody had ever accused Sam of having good taste) overdramatic.

He was grateful when she broke the silence and moved onto the subject he wanted to discuss so badly. Pulling his pencil out from behind his ear, he starting writing, mouth moving silently as he attempted to transcribe what she was saying. "François Lefèvre," he said, doing his best not to mangle the name completely but unable to avoid leaving it, the vowels especially, slightly battered. The spelling was equally shoddy, he was certain, but he could check that with her later, just to be sure he had it right. So that I can look for him easily, he told himself, feeling slightly guilty at planning to use their shared loss as a way to making money. It's easier to find someone when you know how to spell their name. Especially when it was a name like François. "When did you see him last?" he asked, and surprised himself by adding, "I haven't heard from my brother since April. His name is Frank. Wallace, of course. He played the tuba with the New York Philharmonic since December."

It had always privately surprised Sam that something so ungainly and visually unappealing as a tuba would be in the High Art of an orchestra - and that, when Frank played, it could sound so... so... not like it belonged in a Sousa march, that was for sure. He wasn't certain how to describe it, not even to start describing it. He flushed, slightly; talking about Frank wasn't really the most professional thing to be doing at all, but who knew? The ad had explicitly stated that he was looking for people who knew missing musicians, so he might as well let Mary know why.

[Marianne Donahue]

When had she seen him last? Well, that was easy. She still remembered the argument as though it had been yesterday; she still remembered how she'd argued back, then shrunken away and tried to ask forgiveness, and how that had only made François more angry. She remembered him telling her what a mouse she was, what an odd excuse for a musician and a human being - for what sort of musician, Marianne, cares more for the placement of her fingers than the fire behind their art? What kind of person was willing to step back and admit to wrongs that weren't even theirs just for the sake of peace?

Eyes slightly unfocused as she stared ahead, the answer slipped out without her mind really noticing, caught in familiar hysterics as it was, the cutting pain of the argument itself not at all dulled by time.
"Two months ago." In fact, it had only gotten worse. For now, as well as the pain that came from the words that François had said, she had the bittersweet longing to deal with; she'd give anything to be shouted at again, if it only meant that she could see him again. Part of her knew that this had been part of the problem - that she was too nice, too mousey for someone like her ex lover - but the larger part of her refused to often acknowledge it. When it was acknowledged, it only usually aided the depression in sinking her ever deeper into the mire. "We had argued."

But her attention was caught again with Sam's admission that his brother had gone missing, and soon she was directing her attention back at him, her forehead creasing with concern and one hand moving to cover her mouth briefly. "I knew Frank," she murmured, after the moment of shock had passed. "Not well, but... I'm so sorry, Sam." The reality of someone else's grief had, for the moment at least, grounded her again, and she rubbed at a collarbone to prevent herself from rubbing at a made-up cheek.