A student of ballet sees an angel practicing in the studio.
Short slice-of-life / fantasy bit, with a ballet student seeing one angel training another in the dance studio. Featuring Asbat Nur-Badr (Asmodeus) and Jean-Pierre Delacroix, who also appear in Powder and Feathers. 2k. Set in the 1950s.
When Anita came into the studio, her bag slung over her shoulder, she didn’t go immediately to change. She had fifteen minutes to spare, but it wasn’t just that — through the glass doors of the reception, she could see a lot of the other girls gathered on the walkway over the main studio, looking down at the floor, and she shouldered through the door, coming to stand beside them.
Sandrine gave her a little smile, gesturing for Anita to stand beside her — some of the others were already dressed, but most of them were still in their day clothes like Anita, Sandrine included.
Anita expected to see something more impressive down in the studio, expected to see a group of people at work, like the modern troupe, but there were only two people down there.
They were both tall, both of them men, but that was where the similarities ended.
The bigger one must have been six foot four or five, had broad shoulders, and his clothes clung very tightly, showing the thick definition of his body, especially his thighs and his shoulders. His perfect skin was very dark, and under the studio lights it almost glistened, although he didn’t seem to have broken a sweat. He had sleek black hair combed neatly back from his face, which was handsome — he had finely carved features, a very prominent nose and a prominent, carefully groomed brow, thick lips that looked as though someone had detailed them with a scalpel, a strong jaw.
The other was slimmer than he was — he was a few inches shorter, and although he had a hard angle to his jaw and a handsome face, there was a sort of delicacy to his features. She couldn’t decide, looking at him, if he was handsome or pretty — it seemed to her that he was an amalgam of both.
His hair, which was blond, was loosely gathered into a ponytail that rested over one shoulder, and as he lifted his head to look at the man instructing him, she could see the shine on his face from sweating. He had a thumb-sized scar under his left eye, and that shone even more so, the pink skin slick where the rest of his pale features weren’t.
He was breathing heavily.
“Again,” said the bigger man. “En tournant.”
“I’m tired.”
“Did I ask?” was the cold response. The man’s voice was deep, and he spoke French with a Belgian accent, although the other one sounded local enough to her.
“Is that Asbat Nur-Badr?” she asked suddenly, realising where she recognised him from, and Sandrine grinned at her, nodding her head. Anita couldn’t help but grin herself, mesmerised by the sight of him even if he wasn’t actually dancing. Nur-Badr was a hero in magical ballet, and like everyone else here she’d idolised him since she was a little girl, idolised his skill as ballerina. He was a musician, too, she was distantly aware, but it didn’t much matter how much he could sing or play instruments when he could dance the way he did. “Who’s the blond?”
Sandrine shrugged, and they kept watching as Nur-Badr gestured with his fingers, making the piano start playing again with little more than a burst of magic, and as the keys shifted, the blond took up his fouettés again.
From up here, to Anita, they looked perfect — they were better than anything she could do: the blond’s form was beautifully balanced, not veering one way or the other as he gracefully arched his leg to propel himself through the turn en pointe, and he remained so static on the floor she could have thought that he had a pin through his foot.
“Again,” ordered Nur-Badr, apparently unimpressed, and the blond whipped through a half-dozen more turns, but Nur-Badr’s blank expression did not yield to a smile. “You’re bending at the waist.”
“I’m not,” said the blond.
“Again,” ordered Nur-Badr, and this time as the blond started the turn, Nur-Badr put his hands out either side of the blond’s waist, leaning forward to stay out of range of his knee as he completed the turn. The blond didn’t startle as Anita would have if her instructor suddenly leaned over her like that, but she saw him clench his teeth — with Nur-Badr’s hands so close to his body, she could see the slight shift of his waist as he leaned into the whip at the same time as he moved his leg.
He straightened on the next three turns: the effect was subtle, and yet now seeing the difference she couldn’t believe was an improvement it made.
Nur-Badr stood back.
“Again,” he said.
“You’re trying to embarrass me,” said the blond, out of breath and sweating.
“On the contrary,” said Nur-Badr, “I am trying to stop you from embarrassing me. Are you trying to embarrass me?”
“No, sir.”
“It pleases you to have such poor form?”
“No, sir.”
“You want for us to stop so that I can pat your head and call you a very good boy for barely trying?”
His voice was so cold it made Anita shiver — she’d heard Nur-Badr give interviews on the radio before, and Mme Chevrette had a vinyl she played for one of their introductory classes, Nur-Badr speaking on the purpose of dance, talking about art, about athleticism, about control, about discipline. On the record, even through the crackle, his measured, deep voice had sounded loving, almost poetic, full of rich humour — it was the same voice now, and yet something about it made her want to quiver away. She couldn’t imagine how the dancer felt, Nur-Badr’s gaze boring into him.
He had looked away for a moment, curling in on himself, but now he looked back to Nur-Badr, his jaw set. “No, sir,” he said.
“Again,” intoned Nur-Badr, and waved to the piano.
She didn’t know how many fouettés the blond went through in a row — Nur-Badr clapped his handsome hands together on each whip of the turn, and the blond moved not just as though the pin were through his foot but through the whole of his body, perfectly straight, perfectly static, each arch of his leg, each fold in toward his knee, each turn the image of perfection.
When he finally stopped, she realised his ribbon had come free from his hair, leaving it a mess of blond waves about his shoulders, and the sweat was dripping from his jaw, his brow.
Nur-Badr reached out to him and cupped his cheek, did it so tenderly Anita suddenly worried that they were intruding on something.
“There,” said Nur-Badr quietly — although he spoke lowly, his voice echoed off the panelled floors and mirrored walls of the studio, and it carried easily up to the second level. “Isn’t that better?”
“Yes,” said the blond, and seemed to hesitate, leaning slowly forward, but Nur-Badr didn’t stop him: he pulled the blond in toward his chest, pressing a kiss to the centre of his forehead, and squeezed him tight against his chest.
“Are all of you ladies to take your lessons in your street clothes today?” asked Mme Chevrette sharply from behind them, and Anita laughed with Sandrine as they hurried back toward the changing rooms.
“Don’t you realise who that was?” asked Birgitt as she fell into step beside them.
“Asbat Nur-Badr?” asked Anita. “We realised. I knew that he was tall, but somehow I never envisioned him quite so — so big. He’s so broad.”
“His waist is narrow, though, compared to his shoulders,” said Sandrine. “He’s beautiful.”
“No, not Nur-Badr,” said Birgitt. “The man he was tutoring.”
“Who?” asked Anita. “His boyfriend?”
“Not boyfriend,” said Birgitt. “It’s another angel, his brother — I recognise him from the scar on his cheek, even without his wings out. That’s Jean-Pierre Delacroix.”
Anita felt her mouth fall open, her blood suddenly cold in her veins, as beside her, Sandrine made a low whistle.
“L’ange de la mort,” she said. “Back home in Paris. I didn’t realise he could dance.”
“He should be locked up,” said Anita. “You shouldn’t be able to just kill a man in front of a hundred thousand people and then — and then do whipped turns in a dance studio.”
“He does them beautifully, though,” said Sandrine, sighing. “I’d give anything to have Asbat Nur-Badr tutor me personally. Imagine what you could learn from that.”
When they came into the central changing room, Anita could hear the showers running, and when she leaned to look, she caught a glimpse of Delacroix under the spray, his pale body littered with even more scars than the one on his face. He didn’t look dangerous — he hadn’t looked dangerous dancing in the studio, and he didn’t look dangerous now.
He looked beautiful — imposing, maybe, but beautiful.
“You think my brother means to do you harm?” asked a voice beside her, and she jumped, leaning back from the doorway into the shower.
Asbat Nur-Badr seemed even bigger up close, and when Anita looked up at his face, she found herself surprised by how bright the green colour of his eyes was, shining in the light.
“I,” she said, shaking her head. “Um — No. No, I’m sorry, I didn’t… Sorry.”
“Madame Chevrette asked me to answer some questions for you today,” said Nur-Badr. “Once you’re changed, will you tell her I’ll be in with you in a moment? Jean-Pierre isn’t staying, I’m going to walk him across the road to our hotel first.”
Anita nodded her head, turning away, and as she went to a locker to change her clothes, she heard Nur-Badr on the other side of the wall say, as if in reply, “… won’t be long. Just an hour. You can stay, if you like.”
“No,” said Delacroix. “I’ll distract the ones that know who I am.” His voice sounded quiet — regretful, maybe, but perhaps that was just wishful thinking. “Am I better?”
“Yes,” said Nur-Badr. “You’re better every time I watch you.”
“I don’t care to practice when you’re not there,” said Delacroix.
“Well, that certainly makes all the time I’ve spent teaching you sound worthwhile.”
“Not like that,” said Delacroix. He said something else, but Anita couldn’t hear, even straining to, and she went to pull out her clothes.
“It won’t harm you to be alone for an hour,” she heard Nur-Badr say as they stepped out of the other room. Delacroix was dressed now in a cream-coloured blouse and red suit trousers, pulling on a red leather jacket.
Anita almost didn’t say anything. She didn’t know why she bothered to — Delacroix had a strange look on his face, distant and far away and slightly painful, and it reminded Anita of her own face once upon a time, whenever her mother was about to go to work and she’d be alone until she came back.
He was an assassin, a murderer, riddled with bullet holes — but he looked sad in a way she hadn’t expected. She’d have thought he’d be haughty, smug, proud of himself, but he just looked aggrieved.
She didn’t know it was right for man to play the widower when he’d killed his fiancé himself.
“If you stand on the balcony,” she said, “we won’t really see you from the studio, ’cause we’d have to look straight up. All of us were watching you two a second ago, you can just…”
Delacroix looked like he was carved from marble, tall and statuesque with his downturned, pink lips and his pale, porcelain features. When he stared at Anita, Anita stared back, and then he looked to Nur-Badr.
“If you want,” said Nur-Badr, and Delacroix gave a small, graceful inclination of his head.
“Thank you,” he said to Anita, and he walked with graceful movements of his hips, his chin high, his walk smooth and perfectly even.
“Thank you,” Nur-Badr echoed, and gestured for her to go ahead of him into the studio.
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