Work Text:
“Play Salieri.”
Those words, that stupid command of selfish aim, allowed Salieri to truly see how Mozart saw him. With an outrageous display of cruel intent, the creature created a foul image of Salieri, poking fun in the most offensive way. And people laughed. Mozart laughed. It angered him, but it also pained him within his heart for reasons he could not begin to comprehend.
As Mozart’s impression of him came to an end, his gaze turned to Salieri—though without knowing—and he raised his eyebrows, likely seeking the approval of that which asked for the display. Salieri felt his face heat up, and the mask slipped from his hand onto the ground. The people who noticed gasped before laughing once more, but this time, Mozart did not join in the laughter.
Mozart instead immediately raised from his seat, eyes wide. There was no way he couldn’t see the hurt in his expression, and Salieri hated that he couldn’t hide it. When Mozart began to move towards him, beginning to speak directly to him, Salieri immediately backed away.
He shoved his way through the people of the party, quickly making his escape outside. His heart beat fast and his eyes stung, much to his own dismay. He hated how much Mozart could get and had gotten under his skin. Wasn’t it bad enough to have God laugh at you? Did He truly have to tease as well?
He heard steadfast footfalls behind, and he knew that Mozart was following him.
“Wait! Signore, please!”
A hand landed on his arm, and he shrugged it off. It quickly grabbed ahold of him once more, but the grip was stronger this time. Salieri found himself pulled to a stop, huffing agitatedly with the motion.
Salieri didn’t turn around, even as Mozart began to speak again. His arm burned where Mozart’s hand lay.
“I didn’t—I didn’t mean any harm, you must believe me.”
No harm. He didn’t mean any harm.
Salieri felt his embarrassment, jealousy, and anger bubble up, dangerously beginning to overflow. He whipped around to face Mozart, pulling his arm free again.
“No harm? All you’ve done since you got here is harm!”
Mozart eyes widened and his expression grew distraught.
“You…” Salieri took a deep breath, and then gestured wildly. “You are a vulgar, crude, and childish man. Narcissistic, even. You surpass me at every turn, and your music is beautiful, but you are cruel. For instance—just one of many—you made a self-absorbed show of ‘improving’ my march that I composed for you in front of the emperor and my colleagues. The worst part is that you did improve it! You passive-aggressively insult my music! You must think so little of me. You continue to embarrass me and put me down—“
“That’s not—“
“Must you treat me so?”
Silence. There was a lull in the moment, and Salieri did not take notice of Mozart discreetly pulling him into an alleyway.
“And you know what’s worse?” Salieri exclaimed, unable to stop himself. “What’s worse is that I admire you greatly as a composer. You are brilliant, heavenlike in your compositions. You… are beautiful, much as I hate to admit it. I despise and yearn for you and your music all the same. It is a divine joke from on high. You are a singular slight against me.” His voice cracked and the fight resolutely left him. He slumped against the brick wall behind him, scrubbing a hand over his face.
The chilled air settled silently around them. Then:
Laughter.
Mozart was laughing.
Salieri scoffed angrily, crossing his arms. His face grew warm with mortification. “Why, you insolent… I lay myself bare for you and you laugh?”
“No! No, you—“ Mozart laughed once more. “No, please, you misunderstand.”
“How could I possibly misunderstand?”
Mozart quickly schooled his features, holding up a hand. “I’m sorry.” He let his hand fall to his side after a moment, and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. But you really do misunderstand. You misunderstand entirely.”
Salieri raised an eyebrow.
Mozart took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts. He ran a hand through his hair. “I truly have never meant any harm to you. I do not think little of you at all—in fact, I think very highly of you.”
Salieri scoffed.
“No, I do! I do. You are a great composer. A great man. I… I didn’t lie when I told you I knew of your work. I’m a fan, if anything. I was overjoyed to know that you composed a march for me.”
“But it obviously did not—“
“Please, let me finish.”
Salieri sighed, nodding.
“I wanted to impress you.”
With a sharp intake of breath, he slowly uncrossed his arms in shock. “You…”
“Wanted to impress you, yes.” Mozart gave a small, nervous smile. “I did not mean to give offense. I promise you, I did not.”
Salieri’s anger began to fade. Mozart’s words echoed in his head.
I wanted to impress you.
“And I do not mean to seem self-important. I simply do not know what I am to be worth outside of my music. My father has reigned over me my whole life. I know I am, as you say, vulgar and crude. I know myself to be childish. But please know that I in no means mean to tear anyone down. I jest, as you saw back there, but do not see it as distaste. I am more complex than you allow.”
The two stared at each other. Salieri could see the metaphorical pedestal he had put the other on begin to crumble, and did not immediately know what to do with that information. When it seemed that Salieri would not respond, Mozart continued, cautiously.
“You say that you yearn. I find that I might know just what you mean. I pray you will forgive me if I am being presumptuous…” He slowly reached for Salieri’s hand. “But from what you’ve said… am I correct in assuming that, perhaps, my affections may be returned?”
Salieri sputtered in response and looked down to their joined hands. He could not have expected this turn of events in a million years. When he looked back up, he was met with Mozart’s gut-wrenchingly earnest expression. His eyes were soft and hopeful, barely hiding the anxiousness of his gaze. His eyebrows were drawn together and he had a tentative smile on his face.
Salieri sucked in a breath. In that moment, he had his first realization: this was no divine being. Not in the literal sense, anyway. This was just a man. This was just a beautiful, clever, brilliantly silly man with whom he’d found himself inherently connected to.
Then, his second realization: he had made a grave mistake.
Oh, what whiplash.
“Mozart…” His voice shook.
“Wolfgang, please. Or Amadeus, if you’d like.”
Salieri’s heart twinged. No. He didn’t deserve the informal usage of his name.
“Mozart, I fear I’ve got something to confess.”
He smiled. “Yes?”
Salieri laid his free hand over their joined ones. “It’s something rather horrid in retrospect.”
Mozart cocked his head to the side, shaking it slightly in confusion.
“You have found yourself in bad luck recently, yes? No pupils? Limited runs?”
He slowly nodded in affirmation.
Salieri took a second to observe Mozart’s face, attempting to memorize the soft openness before what he felt was the unavoidable anger and hate that would warp his expression took hold. The idea of Mozart physically inhabiting those feelings seemed so foreign, and he could not readily imagine what it would look like. That assured him that it would be all the more terrible to witness it.
“What about it?” Mozart asked.
For a moment, he couldn’t speak. He let out a noise of distress before blurting, “I am the cause.” With a grimace, he lowered his gaze to their feet.
A beat. Then:
“…what?”
Mozart’s voice came as a whisper, the surprise and confusion still somehow painfully palpable within the word regardless. Salieri could now hardly stand it, while mere minutes before he would have been overjoyed about it.
“I was so blinded by my jealousy, convinced that I hated you… I felt that I had to do anything I could to—to—I don’t know. Perhaps bring you down to earth? I felt you to be the voice of God, sent here to torment me. I couldn’t stand it. And now I am faced with the reality, and I cannot accept what you’ve confessed to me with these actions weighing upon my being. I spread the lies that lost you your pupils. I passed off that you were a debtor. I’ve played a hand in making sure your shows only play so many times. I have planned to assure your downfall, when all you have done is—“ His voice caught in his throat.
He released Mozart’s hand, curling into himself as much as he could standing up. After a long moment, in which he fought to keep ashamed tears at bay, he felt a hand upon his cheek.
“I forgive you.”
His head snapped up. As Mozart’s other hand came up to the other side of his face, Salieri shook his head minutely in disbelief.
“I forgive you,” Mozart repeated.
With those three words, something was liberated within Salieri, and he fell forward into the shorter form in front of him. Mozart stumbled back, but quickly stabilized them. Salieri’s head lay on Mozart’s shoulder, his hands hovering over the man’s sides before wrapping around him. One of Mozart’s hands flew to Salieri’s back, the other cradling his head.
They remained there for several moments until Salieri spoke.
“How can you forgive me?”
There was a sigh.
“Well,” Mozart began, “I cannot say that I am not hurt by this. But I… I feel like we are finally seeing eye to eye here. There’s always been something I couldn’t grasp, and while I had hoped it was merely something to do with your feelings, I had not planned for the prospect of those feelings being negative.” He let out an anxious huff of a laugh. “I hope I am correct in saying that you would not have done that had we had this conversation before now.”
“Yes, you are. I would not have, I promise you.” Salieri lifted his head and took a step back. “And I shall amend my actions as soon as I am able.” He did not voice his fear of what he would have done eventually had they not spoken like this. He could only thank the God he had so harshly misunderstood that he hadn’t passed the point of no return.
Mozart nodded, letting his hands drift to Salieri’s arms so as to not let him move too far away. They stayed that way for a moment as his gaze grew soft once again, and Salieri found himself lost in return.
“You know, you never did answer my question, Signore,” Mozart said, gaze now growing coy. It was frustratingly attractive.
“Hmm?”
“Do you return my affections?”
“Oh! Oh—well, I—“ He stuttered through a discordant flow of non-recognizable words.
Did he?
The line between love and hate was precariously thin.
He thought of Mozart as he saw him now, and surely saw him then underneath his jealousy-riddled mind. He saw him as a point of light, of beautiful harmonies hidden behind a wide smile and an absurd laugh. He saw him not as a god, but as the candles of the altar. Not a god, but a flourish of a hand upon ivory keys. Not a god, but a brilliant mind of human quality.
Oh.
God, he loved him.
He met Mozart’s gaze. “I rather think that I do.”
He found it really wasn’t so hard to admit in the end. It felt like a given.
Mozart’s laughter hit his ears once more, though this time it met a much more accepting man. Mozart was borderline bouncing on his heels, and Salieri couldn’t help the chuckle of his own that fell from his lips.
“Oh, how wonderful!” Mozart reached up to Salieri’s face. “Please tell me that you will allow me kiss you.”
He hadn’t thought of that. Now that the option was in front of him, however, Salieri found that he yearned for it. In an embarrassing moment he would later deny, all he said was:
“Please.”
Salieri almost expected Mozart to surge into him, but, instead, he leaned forward with a smile before placing a soft kiss on his lips. It was unbearably sweet. Salieri’s eyes remained closed even after Mozart pulled away.
What a feeling it was to be kissed by the sun.
As he finally opened his eyes, Salieri saw Mozart look back the way they had come from, a wide smile on his face.
“Wait ‘till Stanzi hears about this!” he exclaimed.
Stanzi.
Constanze.
His wife.
Salieri jolted out of his reverie with a flash of discontent.
“Your wife,” he observed, deadpan.
“Yes!” Mozart laughed. “Oh, she is going to be so surprised—“
Salieri felt affronted at the possibility of being in an affair with a married man. He was barely over the fact that it was a man in general that he found himself fixated on.
No, that wouldn’t do. He definitely found himself to love this man, but he did not think he could bear it to encroach on that route of dealing with it.
He raised a hand to stop Mozart’s words, face scrunching up with disappointment and frustration. “Now, I will not lower myself to the level of a homewrecker.”
Mozart’s jaw dropped.
“I’m afraid I cannot in good conscience, as much as it pains me, enable such behavior in efforts to pursue my longing.” Salieri’s voice was stern, though wobbly due to the sharp turns of the evenings events.
“No! You won’t be!” Mozart interjected.
“And how would I not?” Salieri asked incredulously.
Mozart chuckled. “Oh, I assure you, Stanzi has a romantic interest of her own.” He tapped his own nose. “Hint: it’s not me. Or any man, for that matter.”
With a laugh, he wiggled his eyebrows.
Salieri thought for second, before it hit him.
“Oh!”
“Yes!” Once more, laughter. “Stanzi has been with a member of the vaudeville troupe for quite some time now.”
“So… your marriage. A farce?”
“A front, really. To appease her mother and eventually my father—not that it was entirely successful—and keep people from any suspicions. It has worked wonderfully in our favor.”
Salieri sighed. “You are a being of chaos.”
And yet it was a weight off of his shoulders all the same.
Mozart laughed again—though, this time, is was a soft, quiet sound. It was a long shot away from the usual somewhat-anxious, raucous laughter he let out. Salieri adored it immediately.
Mozart grabbed his hand.
“Well. Now that that is out of the way, would you like to return to the party?” He squeezed Salieri’s hand. “This time, I promise not to poke fun.”
Salieri knew he was signing up for a quite chaotic future on this path, but he found he did not care. It would also be one of beautiful symphony, and that snubbed any few cons he could conjure.
“Lead the way...,” He paused for moment, before smiling at the other. “Amadeus.”
He received a large smile in return, and on they went.
