Pazar

Pažar Hlarce

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Pažar - ♫♫♫ || Pažar / Alianna - ♫♫♫

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Love me tender… love me true...

Alianna dances like grace incarnate, even when she’s barely moving. Her head pressed into his chest, tucked up in the hollow of his throat, she nudges back and forth in his arms and Pazar feels like he owns the entire world. The fires are burning low enough that he can just feel the way the evening nips at the backs of his wrists. Alianna doesn’t feel it. Or if she does, she doesn’t care.

Around them, the dance floor has long since emptied. Their wedding is, technically, over. But the bards were paid for a full eight hours, and don’t show any signs of stopping. Alianna, too, seems content to simply move against him. Pazar won’t be complaining. What was it that poet said? About music and the food of love? He can’t remember. But it doesn’t matter. Play on.

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She owns so many records. Pazar hadn’t anticipated that. She’s so particular about them, each crate he lifts is met with anxious glances and warnings not to disturb their careful packing. They’ll scratch, she reminds him, the hundredth time over. I can fix it, he replies. There’s a spell for that.

She takes the box from him herself, tossing her hair as she goes. Maybe so. But I’ll always know it was there. They just won’t sound the same.

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She sings, too. Alianna. Quietly, mostly. And she hums. While she moves, while she thinks, while she dreams. Songs Pazar never knew before her, but can now recite by heart. Snatches of Moon River while she’s sewing, a refrain from Strangers in the Night while she’s showering. Sometimes he hums with her, almost silent, while he cooks. Sometimes, she’ll catch him. Always, she smiles.



Asen learns to sing almost before he learns to talk. Alianna turns his little bubbling nonsense noises into music, plays I Fall in Love too Easily when he can’t sleep. She makes her own lullabies. Or- well. He can’t swear she’s doing that, but he thinks she does. He’s never heard them before, anyway, and who would write that many songs about just birds?

He doesn’t care. She could make up songs about nothing- has done- and he would still stand outside their son’s bedroom and listen while she sings him to sleep.

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It’s raining when they lower them into the ground. Someone hired a bard- Pazar doesn’t know who- and they have them for four hours. No funeral has ever lasted that long.



It takes him two weeks making her coffee in the morning before the muscle memory starts to wear off. It takes him six months to stop reaching for her in bed.


Alianna’s records languish. They gather dust, untouched beside the player, for the entire year between the day they died and… The day that they died.

Pazar’s hands shake when he lifts the needle. He can hear her in the whisper of paper over vinyl when he removes the record’s sleeve, feels her hands guiding his when he drops it carefully in.


The piano twinkles through its opening refrain and he can’t breathe. ...Whenever it's early twilight, I watch 'til a star breaks through…

There’s a knock on the door, but Pazar can’t process it, can’t be anything other than broken shards of a broken man, scarred hands clutched tightly in his lap. Funny, it's not a star I see, it's always you…

It’s always you.

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Here, Always written by EdenAziraphale

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