Archive of Our Own ^beta

She’s there in the audience, ring on her finger and spotlight clear on her face, and, as cliché as it is, Seb’s breath freezes in his chest.

Mia is sitting in the audience, in his club —the club she told him to go after, the club she didn’t stick around to see him build up because she was already too busy being hellbent on becoming Hollywood’s new it girl—with some tool in a dark suit next to her. She looks absolutely stunning in a simple black dress, dread on her face and tension in the hands clenched in her lap.

Seb pauses for a moment. Thinks about what he’s going to say. He settles for a quiet, punched-out final gasp for breath, like he can recover all of the oxygen he lost when he saw her.

“Welcome to Seb’s ,” he says hoarsely. The words scrape out of him and leave him raw.

The keys invite his fingers to play them, just the same as they’ve always done. The music boils inside of him with a furious kind of despair, a seething ocean of feeling that threatens to drown him without mercy, and he doesn’t even have to think about what he’s going to play. It takes everything in him to slowly, gently, ever so sweetly, play what he’d come to think of as Mia’s song.

And all at once, it hits him.

If he’d just said no to Keith, if he’d just gone to Mia’s play, if he’d just been less stubborn and angry and so devastatingly, savagely afraid to lose her, they would have had a life together. They would have had a house, a family, a dream trip to Paris for one of Mia’s movies, a love that would have never faded and turned pale with time. They would have had everything .

He knows this with a deep, grim certainty. He feels it down in his bones.

And so, for a second, he lets his hands carry him along. The notes had been ingrained into his muscles long ago. Playing it is as mindless as breathing.

He looks out into the sea of eyes, the chorus of judgment that is his audience, and he singles her out, glowing under the spotlight. The look in her eyes is priceless, the despair and pain and longing so clear in that lovely blue-green that he can’t help the smallest of smirks amidst the shock of agony that making eye contact generates.

She misses him .

Her husband is sitting next to her, and yet she is absolutely riveted by Seb perched up on his piano bench. There’s the telltale wobble in her chin that suggests she’s only seconds away from breaking down, a fine tremor starting up in her shoulders. She doesn’t move to take her husband’s hand.

He takes a moment to revel in her unease, to enjoy watching her realize what it is she’s been missing all this time, to watch her begin to understand that it was really her who left, that he’s been so fucking unhappy without her, that she ruined everything —

And then that moment of fevered reality ends. Seb loses himself in the daydream again, the imagined feel of Mia wrapped safe in his arms, the faded memory of her lips on his, and the wistful warmth of late-night dinners at home. The melody under his fingers carries him through an imaginary marriage, the lives of their children, their careers, their twilight years, grandchildren and back porches and sunsets holding hands. Dying in each other’s arms. Getting buried in the same plot.

His heart aches and the old cracks inside his chest widen and grief rolls over him in heavy waves. It takes everything in him to not start sobbing over the piano.

He closes the melody—their love story, an outlandish, beautiful fantasy—with gentleness and care. He lets it leave his hands so slowly, so tenderly, with the utter surety that he will never play it again. His fingertips don’t leave the keys, like they’re afraid to let go.

The last note hangs in the air, the room positively erupts with cheers, and Mia sits there, silent and frozen. Her eyes are so sharp that he can’t look away.

Bitter tears spill over onto her cheeks—he remembers how they taste under gentle kisses of comfort and tries to murder that memory—and still she sits there, dumbfounded and ensnared, held in the same chokehold of what if that has so haunted Seb every single day for the last five years. She’s blind to the applause and the lights.

She feels the same pain he does. He finally lifts his hands from the keys.

It doesn’t make him feel any better like he thought it would.

When she leaves, they stare at each other across the room. She offers up a small, watery smile. His face, if anything, hardens.

The light in her eyes dies. She walks out the door. For good, he knows.

Seb goes home and drinks himself to sleep.