Title: Fragments
Author: alsha
Recipient: lilithilien
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Isabelle/OC
Summary: Six glimpses of Isabelle between the ages of 9 and 14. Ballet practice is more than just a pastime to her – it’s a chance to get closer to her adored teacher. And all the while she’s laying the foundations of her future self.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1860
Author's Notes: Incredible thanks goes to A. for her perceptive beta-ing and especially for her contributions to the artwork in the third, fourth and fifth pieces. You’re the best!






YOUNG


It wasn't that the slippers were too big; it was that they were old. She let them dangle from her outstretched fingers and stuck out her tongue. Miss Helena's hopeful smile went away.

“They were mine once,” she said, as if that should make it better.

“They're old,” Isabelle repeated and went so far as to stomp her foot. “What's wrong with mine?”

“They're getting too small for you, Schatz,” Miss Helena crouched down lower so she was eye level. Isabelle hated it when people did that. Didn't they know who she was? Treating her like a little girl didn't make the gesture any better.

“Mama and Papa will buy me new ones then,” she said dismissively. Some abortive lessons in manners came back to her as she put out her hands, with the worn pink ballet shoes draped across her small wrists. “Thank you for the present, but I have to decline.”

The adult words felt heavy and awkward on her tongue, but then manners always did. They always would, no matter how old she got. Even when she was as old as Miss Helena.

“How old are you, Miss Helena?” she blurted, peering up at her ballet teacher.

“Twenty-two,” she drawled, and swept a rare stray lock of hair back from her eyes.

That's pretty old, Isabelle decided, but she didn't say it out loud.



PERFECT


“Your form is looking much better, Isabelle.”

“No, it's not.” Isabelle frowned at herself in the large floor-to-ceiling mirror that stretched the length of the practice hall. “The balance isn't perfect on the pirouette.”

“You don't have to be perfect every time, you know.”

Isabelle flicked Miss Helena a narrow-eyed look of surprise. “It's all about perfection. 'Perfect unity of motion.' That's what you said.”

“It's an ideal. Something to work towards.”

“Then why not now?” It was hardly a question, the words demanding to come out.

Miss Helena smiled, a spark of humour in her blue eyes. “Class is over. That's as much as we can do today. Next week maybe you'll be perfect.”

“One more time. I want to go through it once more. Can I stay? Will you watch?” She pursed her lips at her reflection in the mirror, and then at Miss Helena's. “Please,” she said, and was inwardly delighted when her teacher dipped her head and smiled.



TOUCHED


Miss Helena held Isabelle's upper arm lightly, prolonging the stretch.

Isabelle was used to the interplay of touching. Handshakes and dry kisses on the cheek, the fond cupping of her chin when her Uncle Theo came to visit each Christmas. Brushing elbows with the boys in class and watching them fumble their pencil cases. She knew all about this. All the ways people brushed fingers passing dinner plates, and shoulders with the hired help. Etiquette. That's all it was. She knew every ritual down to her fingertips.

She allowed herself to glance in the mirror at Miss Helena's fingertips tightening briefly on her arm. Isabelle held the pose, feeling their muscles tensed in perfect, aching alignment. Her skin tingled where they touched. This wasn't etiquette. Nothing like it. Her heart raced, exhilaratingly ignorant of any rules. She had been staying after class for extra lessons three weeks in a row now, and each time she smiled with triumph as the last girl left the room. She turned against the bar; the curve of the wood against her back felt like polished ivory, worn smooth by thousands of hands.

“Am I your favourite?” Isabelle asked.

Miss Helena's fingertips were suddenly gone. She turned sideways and Isabelle felt a thin blade of disappointment in her gut. “I think you'd better get home now.” Miss Helena began to walk towards their gym bags, jumbled together near the wall. Then she slowed and cast a resigned smile over her shoulder. “You are.”

Isabelle tossed her head and grinned. “I knew it.”

It felt like winning.



IMPULSIVE


Isabelle was flying.

The balance was just right and her tulle skirt sizzled outwards in a perfect funnel of motion. Her hands came together high over her head and she flung her hair back, smiling, eyes closed. That was when the tip of her foot caught, rubbery, on the floor with a nasty squeak and she smacked into the wall before she could stop herself. The floor came up and dismantled her.

She was up on her feet instantly, chin high, self-rebuke vicious and bottled up inside her. Loser! Idiot! Her spine ached with the effort of holding herself straight and not looking towards Miss Helena, who was watching nearby.

The empty practice hall echoed with her teacher's light footfalls and with her own harsh breathing. She raked herself in the mirror out of the corner of her eye. Some unflappably professional part of her admired her own pose. She looked magnificently angry. Her shoulders held back and her body twisted like a spiralling pillar. Even in failure she had made herself beautiful. Turning accident into art was the secret of it all, she had decided, because no one could be perfect all the time, least of all in dance, when every muscle and nerve impulse and speck of dust on the floor had to coincide with the laws of gravity and the strict demands of choreography.

Let loose on its own lesson-plan, her mind jumped just as much as her body when she felt arms drape around her neck from behind.

"Relax, Isabelle. You did wonderfully."

The warmth of her body offered comfort and reassurance. Isabelle leaned back, and the hands linked loosely at her throat tightened on her skin. Isabelle's posture dissolved in surprise. Without thinking about it, she turned and pressed a kiss into Miss Helena's lips. For the longest moment, Miss Helena did nothing. Isabelle's courage stiffened into almost-anger, fed by the embarrassment of her recent fall, and then with the smallest of sounds, Miss Helena responded. One of her hands moved onto Isabelle's hair, stroking lightly.

And Isabelle was flying again.



SPOILED


Miss Helena didn't show up for class. A substitute filled in and gave the other girls easy games to play; Isabelle moped quietly at the back, wondering what had happened, hearing in every open and close of the door the possibility of her return at any moment. She waited until all the other girls had gone before approaching the new tutor.

“Excuse me. Where is Miss Helena?” she asked, dropping a curtsey for extra effect. She knew it made her look ladylike and innocent, like a doll.

“She's taken a few weeks off. I don't know the details.” He looked at her kindly.

“When will she be back?”

“End of the month.”

It was only the 12th.

Isabelle faked a fever for the next practice, and left home for the second, with the ribbons on her slippers trailing out of her rucksack, but never went to class. She browsed window displays along a fancy side-street for two hours before traipsing determinedly home. It started to rain halfway there and her slippers became bedraggled, the ribbons soaking up the dye from her red school bag.

The day of her next class she was restless. When Tom came up behind her in the corridor at school to tickle her sides, she spun around and hissed at him like a cat. He backed away with his hands up and a look of knowing suspicion in his guileless blue eyes. “I'm sorry,” she mouthed almost immediately. He shrugged and clapped one of his many friends on the shoulder - they were all indistinguishable to her, geeky little boys - and ambled off, the little prince in his group.

When the time for practice came at last, she rouged her cheeks and applied a new scented cream on the skin below her collarbones. She arrived early and through the crack in the door she saw Miss Helena standing in the hall. The edge of the door cut off who she was talking to, but she was laughing, merry-eyed as she made a broad gesture with her hands. Isabelle pushed open the door, a greeting half-formed on her lips. Miss Helena turned and smiled, and pulling her companion over by the hand, said gaily,

“Isabelle! I'd like to introduce you to David.” She paused to beam up into his face. “My fiancé.”

The stained ribbons of Isabelle's slippers trailed around her ankles as she ran from the room.



ALONE


Tom found his sister in her room, still in her ballet skirt. She sat cross-legged on the bed, her trophies and award ribbons spilling around her knees. The shelf where they'd had pride of place since as long as he could remember, five years old after her first year of dance, was empty, displaying perfect prints surrounded by dust. She was trying to hide her face, ducking over the trophy she held in her hands, scrubbing furiously with a cleaning cloth.

“What are you doing?” he asked, flopping onto the mattress beside her.

She glared at him sideways out of mascara-stained eyes.

Instead of answering, she held out the trophy. It was made of glass, a ballet slipper on a pedestal, with a small inscription on the base: 1st Place, Under-5s Cinderella Competition, 1991.

“Why is there only one, Tom?” she demanded.

She waved it at him and he took it. He looked it over carefully, but in the end he was forced to announce, “Huh?”

“The slipper! There's just one. What's the point of that? You can't dance with just one foot.”

He frowned and brought it closer to his face, until he could see his sister distorted through the glass. He drew his finger along the curves of it, feeling the speckled grooves of the lettering under his fingertips. 1st Place.

“Maybe 'cos there's just one winner?” he said seriously. “At the end of the day, it's not about the slipper, is it? It's about the winner. And there's just one.”

He poked his head over top of the trophy and Isabelle came clear again, no longer a blurry jumble of colours but still fragile. She had her mouth hitched up to the side in that pensive expression he knew so well.

“Do you think so?” she asked.

“You came first,” he said, nodding confidently. “You alone.”

He was caught by surprise when she threw her arms around his neck. She mumbled something into his shoulder that he couldn't hear. He smiled anyway and patted her on the back.

When she pulled away, it was to look determinedly into his eyes.

“That's what winning is, Tom. That's what I'm going to be from now on.”

“A winner? You're always a winner to me, sis.”

There was a dark fire in her eyes. “I'm going to be the best.”

Frowning, he put the trophy aside on the bed. She took it from him and leaned off the bed to place it in the centre of the empty shelf.

“Me alone.”