#like did you know that the holes in the body of string instruments aren't what catches the sound of the strings?

[sandinthepipes]

I got a bit crazy and manic and in 5 days I built 2 low flutes and a tagelharpa cello with no prior knowledge on how to build any instrument.

The crush has come.

My body aches all over, my right arm is about to fall off, I don't think I can hold a pen for the next week, I'm overwhelmed and tired, there's sawdust and chipped wood everywhere, I've cried for the past 15 minute, I want chocolate.

[deadboyfriendd]

Cochise IIl: Tango

Summary: An Old Christmas tune brings Eddie face-to-face with what he has been running from. Turns out, you aren't as different as you think you are.

Warnings: Fem!Reader, Outlaw/Doc Holliday!Eddie Munson x Reader, wild west/Tombstone AU!, drug use, drug overdose (apparent suicide), death of minor character, period-appropriate death, angst, fluff, piano smut, oral (fem receiving)

My content is 18+ Minors DNI

Word Count: 2.6k

Author's Note: I've been creatively and emotionally constipated for weeks now, so the fact that I even got this out when I did was a feart on it's own and I'm very proud of myself for it.

As always, thank you to @dr-aculaaa for being my BTS on this project, love you <3

Find the series masterlist here!

Edward was a man of repose, though, in your sadness, you’d figured you’d been, too. Maybe it wasn't repose at all. Stoicism, maybe, but there was one thing you knew for certain: He was much prettier than you. His skin of alabaster, freckles across flesh kisses of vulnerability and dusted across his worn body as a reminder of the naivety of the youth he once possessed. 

You supposed this is what it was now, slender fingers plucking at strings in the dead of night. Be it the stoicism or the naivety of youth, the moon cast a glow across his cheeks and carved rivers through the valleys of his face. You listen to the inflection of strings scraping loosely across frets. F, A, B, A, in a smooth stacking rhythm. 

There is a twang to his strumming, like there was a string loose somewhere– but not entirely like your piano. The piano had a resounding twang, it echoed within itself like the ghosts of internal hammers and keys before throwing its brashness out against the walls of your bar. You did not know how to tune it, and it would not be tuned again. 

This sound was much softer, much less brash than your own, the hum resounded within the walls of the instrument itself before dissipating the sound into the open night air like an inkwell in water. It spread, filled the space and lingered until there was another sound to see it out. A choreography of sorts, yet the song was all too familiar in the way it filled the space in your head and the hole in your heart. 

Its tiny, needle-pointed feet danced across your brain in flashes of sheer white fabric and the song of the oak floors of The Grand Hotel. Their piano did not sing the same far-east folk song as yours, no, instead it hummed an autumnal hymn of reverence and elegance. It was not as perverse as your piano, but your piano was more gentle with your heart. Your piano didn’t remind you of that worn spot on the floor, or the cracking scabs forming on your hardened knuckles. 

The corner of the door jamb dug a divot into your shoulder, but you didn’t have the grace to move without making the entire balcony creak, so you didn’t. A singular step forward pulls a groan from the floor of the porch where the wood expands with the heat of the impending monsoon, and, regretfully, his fingers pull themselves from the frets like the nails holding the plants to the rafters of the porch. 

“Hello, Edward.”

“Ma’am.”

You leaned back against the post, arms folded and unable to will away the beginning semblances of a grin from your lips. You couldn’t help the roll of your eyes in his direction. 

“I think we’re past ma’am now, Edward.” 

“Well, in that case, I also think we’re past Edward, now.” A grin that resembled your own pulled at the corners of his mouth. He had asked you to call him Eddie earlier, it felt less formal than this. The formality kept you upright, kept this whole thing from crumbling.  

You folded your arms in front of yourself, hip dropping heavy across the solid singing of your piano. Kind-of-but-not-really attempting to conceal the smile spreading across your face like a disease, “That’s a pretty song you were playing.”

“Learned it from a woman.” Eddie had said to you, arms folded, starting a stride with heavy, hollow footing towards you. Slow and in a metronomy rhythm. 

You cocked a brow at him, smile spackled heavy across your face, “Oh really?” 

“Yes, really.” He insisted, “She owned a bar out west. Played it at night on an old piano.” 

“Well I’ve got an old piano here.” You said to him, arms staying folded as you kicked your boot out in a heavy, choreographed stride, “Maybe I can teach you to play it sometime.” 

It was always this song and dance. Always this beautiful waltz of back-and-forth quips, lines wonderfully blurred by the haze of smoke from a cigar and sweet as the kiss of sasparilla, though, that bitter aftertaste would still rear it’s ugly head like the snake from the hole. Rattles thick in the stagnant air like a warning. 

“Y’know,” Eddie had said to you through a puff of smoke, “You should really stop giving me all of these free things.” 

You’d never take that into account. One cigar from the humidor, in the grander scheme of things, would never be enough repayment for anything he had done for this town. Anything he had done for you, 

“Well,” You’d quipped back, sitting back down at the polished bench of your old piano, “ – maybe you should stop saving my life, then.” 

That bitter aftertaste, a sting of smoke stilled in the in-between hung heavy in the air– shattered by the opening arpeggio shrill enough to shatter it like glass. 

“I’ll always save your life.” 

You couldn’t decipher if the pause in your song had been intentional, though, you’d hoped it seemed intentional enough to be a plausible excuse for your silence in return. The bass notes rang heavy under the shifting mechanisms in the hollow underside of the piano as you placed a foot, too-heavy, against pedals in a desperate effort to drown out the harshness of noise, the heaviness of your hands– the weight of this place. 

He filled his space on the opposite half of the thin piano bench, his legs bracing against the floor to press his back against yours. He leaned his head backwards, a welcome weight against your shoulder, and tried to feel the muscles in your hands turn over each other and vibrate in time to the bass crescendos and tinny melodic trebles. 

“Where’d you learn to play something as pretty as this, anyhow?” He kept his voice soft, turning his head to attempt to look at what you were doing. You could feel the heavy breath from his nose cool against your neck. 

“It’s an old German worship song. My husband’s mother would sing it at Christmas.”

He looked at the handwriting along the ledger lines and felt sorrow for the woman that wrote it. 

He can see their Christmas, a mother’s voice a warm river across the rocks of a piano melody, a distraction from the war waging just outside of their front doors. A fire and a meal, though, he remembered the wartime– remembered a time where his own mother had rationed enough of their weekly collection to have a real, fresh meal. He thought of that warmth and then thought of you. 

He tips his head back and blows a plume of smoke in an effort to stifle the memory. Instead, he wishes to replace that warmth with you. 

He stared at the hole in the floor, the discolored groove where you had scrubbed your knuckles bloody and raw. He thought about the him-shaped divot he had scrubbed into the frozen planes of Montana. 

He thought of her, the eldest daughter of two Roman Catholic missionaries following the fur trade to an unholy promised land. 

He thought about God, and just how cruel He could be. 

Did Eddie sit where your husband once sat? Did he lean against the expanse of your back and feel the vibration of the keys travel through the wiry expanses of your arms and settle back against him, just as Eddie had? 

Would he leave a him-shaped hole in you the same way your husband had? Would you wear down the wood the same way he wore down himself? 

“I was married, too.” he admitted to you, voice shattering the turning of sheet music and the resonant patriarchal basso that echoed out against these glass windows. 

“What was her name?”

“Christine.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“Yes.” 

You sound like his mother, he thinks, authoritative but not coddling in the way you question him. He wonders if you feel a discomfort in this statement. He hopes you feel a solidarity in your grieving enough to overlook it. You do not ask him how she died, though, if you were to, he would tell you:

Christine dies at the hand of laudanum, too beautiful to not have a devastating fault. The red-haired daughter of southwest Arksansas– far across that deep blue water she lived, and it was across that water where he had loved and left her. He thought of her skin, like ivory though cold as porcelain even long before her death. Her body, as it was laid to rest, had remained the same even in death as it had during her life. No amount of insurmountable beauty could cover the sullenness under her eyes or the frailness of her wrists. The red halo of hair surrounding her head could not guarantee a peaceful end. No amount of love was enough to save her from herself. 

He thinks of her eyes, long before the hollowness had clouded them over like a storm. He remembered a time where there was a soft glow there, a gas lamp that only he could ignite. He wondered if your eyes held that same glow. 

He thinks of a time where she stood outside of her father’s river home, barefoot in the mess of cattails and thick grass to encase him in a loving embrace. He had insisted that she put some shoes on. He wondered if you did the same, letting your feet burn in the sun-warm sand. He wondered if your husband insisted that you do the same.

Their marriage had died long before she had. The kiss of opium tincture still bitter against his own lips as he pressed them to hers for a last time. 

Your hands were not as tender as hers, yet the tenderness was not what he craved. He thought about this now, as you held his arm in a grounding grip. Tight enough to know that you were still there but not enough to hurt. He wondered if you needed that, too. 

This kiss was all-encompassing, starving in nature, though awkward on the deliverance. 

He knew you would forgive him if he was being too forward, but he figured you were a little past apologies now. Your back is laid across his lap, twisting and contorting to meet his own lips from your side of the piano bench. He uses this leverage to pull you forward, more over him than against him. 

There are hot tears that run down his cheeks, though, he’d figured you were past those now, too. 

His embrace around your back is not hungry– it is desperate, as if he is clinging to anything to keep him tethered to this plane. 

The piano bench scrapes loud against the knotted wooden floors of the bar as he pushes your back against the keys. They sounded with an off-key crash and lingered for moments too long. You do not feel the way the keys and beveled finish of the piano press into your back, in the same way he does not feel the knotted pine dig into his knees when he kneels at your feet. 

“Please,” He whines, tears no longer streaming down his ruddy face, though the sticky tracks remain, “Please jus’ let me taste.” 

It is not possible for you to deny him when crystalline tears budding up against a pink lashline– when a heavy hand drags itself against your leg in anticipation– no– pleading. 

You lean further back, balancing on the slippery edge of the piano bench, and you swear you can hear a soft, “Thank you.” whispered against your thigh between soft, wet kisses. 

His grip is bruising. In the same way you had tethered him to this earth, he binds you to him. One hand lies on the pool where the outer fat of your thigh presses flat against the wood, the other a vice, at your knee in order to keep your legs open. 

The edges of teeth graze against tender skin, affixing themselves along garter belts as hungry hands find purchase on your hips beneath chemise underdresses. Hot, humid breath dampens your skin as it escapes from his teeth– clamped along the garter now sliding down your leg and off your foot. A strong hand pushes back upwards, feeling along the silken hair there. 

Edward was a man of repose. In your sadness, you’d figured you’d been, too. Though, you wouldn’t have guessed it by the way he pressed a hot, flat tongue against your core and traveled upwards slowly in an experimental taste. 

“Like fuckin’ sugar,” He wines into you, his hair a splayed mess against your thighs, his tongue finding purchase against your core. 

Thick fingers prod within you, the slow in and out a tether to focus on as you shook. He wanted you to shake. He wanted you to tremble and shiver all of the worries that had plagued you to the bone. 

Eddie could not be your husband, but he could make you forget– even if it was just for the night. 

He reaches upwards from beneath your dresses, a hand intertwining itself with yours and feeling across the ridges of your cut and calloused knuckles. 

You could not be Christine, but you could be here– even if it was never in your bed. 

At the precipice of your climax, you cry out, and he likes to think that it is for him. He squeezes your hand, emerging from beneath your clothes with hair askew and a dewey sheen across reddened cheeks. When he kisses you, it is softer and you taste yourself on his lips. He does not think of the bitter taste of opium residual on the lips of Christine. Instead, he only thinks of you. 

He does not waste time when he hikes your skirtings above your waist, hands like a vice against the fat of your hips. He is quick when he unclasps his belt and unbuttons his trousers, and smooth when he slides himself into you. 

You are quieter than other women, soft staccato breaths escaping with whispers of moans punctuate his thrusts– slowly and then with more rigor. 

He keeps a furrowed brow as a bead of sweat drips down his nose and onto the bare skin on your chest where his lips now find purchase, staccatos of his own dotting your skin like galaxies in the vastness. 

He sees the way the soft glow of the lamp light heats your skin, the pink ruddiness that graces your cheeks or the glitter that flashes over your eyelids when the light catches the oil there. He sees the way your soft lashes kiss the apples of your cheeks or the soft folds of your neck as your head lolls to the side in satisfaction. He sees the way your hair curls with sweat around your ears in soft coils or the way his saliva has settled in a gloss along your lips. 

And by the stars above you, he swears that he could love you.

A thumb is heavy against you, in circles and figure eights as it wills you towards the edge that you closely teeter upon. 

“It’s okay,” He whispers to you, by soft pianissimo whispers, “You can have this. I want you to have this.” 

A barely-there sigh escapes your lips, deeper-winded than the rest and you allow your body to fall slack as he continues to pump in a rhythm, finishing quickly and lowering your underskirts as he sinks to his knees. 

Tonight, you would hold his head against your stomach as hot tears would once again roll down his face. Tonight, you would card fingers through the tangles in his hair as he lays his upper body limp and racks with soft sobs across your lap. 

Tonight, you think you will unmake the left side of the bed.