hh_mirror | A long- awaited introduction; Open rp

Laurie had settled in quite happily to Gryffindor, though, alas, without much of Jo's company. Since Laurie had never been comfortable around strangers, he was incredibly bored.

As such, Laurie wandered around the castle, thinking longingly of his grand piano back home. He entirely failed to notice where he was until he glanced to the side and realized he'd passed the same statue two or three times. Inwardly cursing (no one in books or in Jo's stories ever got so wrapped up in wishing for pianos they got lost), Laurie wandered around the all again... and ended up exactly where he started.

Damn it- er, bother it all? Mrs. March and his grandfather would give him horrible lectures if they even suspected he'd thought a curse word.

In an effort to stave off guilty thoughts, Laurie turned his attention to the wall. There was, rather suddenly, a door there. Thinking that he'd just missed the door the first few times around, Laurie pulled it open and, much to his astonishment, saw a grand piano in the center of the room. He walked in quickly, without bothering to shut the door after him, and propped open the lid.

After a few scales, Laurie plunged into Liszt's arrangement of Saint- Saens's Danse Macabre, the music pouring out from the open door into the hall.

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Laurie played the final chords and flexed his hands.

"Ha, grandfather," he muttered to himself. "I could have gotten into conservatory after all. There was no reason to try and ship me off to Harvard business school."

He ran a hand through his hair before deciding to go in search of sheet music, to make sure that his sight reading hadn't grown horrifically bad. When Laurie stood, he spotted House and froze.

"Um," Laurie said. "Hello." After a pause that was long enough to grow awkward, Laurie bowed. "I'm, um.... Laurie. Was I bothering you?"

House rolled his eyes in immediate exasperation, though he didn't move from his spot. He'd been enjoying just standing and listening to a good piano composition; rare moments of peace seemed hard to come by, recently. "No, if it was bothering me, I'd look like this," House pulled a dramatically disgusted face.

He dropped the exaggerated expression, and nodded at the piano. "Dans Macabre, right? Whose arrangement?" Because between Horowitz and Listz making arrangements of the original, it was getting a little hard to tell.

Laurie stared at House in undisguised astonishment. And his tutor thought that he, Laurie, acted too immaturely? Mr. Brooke obviously hadn't had anyone like this newcomer as a student.

"Yes, it's Liszt's arrangement Danse Macabre. I've always liked Saint- Saens, ever since I went to boarding school in France." Laurie had absolutely no idea who Horowitz was, since Laurie had just come from the last half of the nineteenth century and Horowitz rather postdated him. However, since Laurie hated being corrected or condescended to, he avoided the question altogether. "Are you a musician too, then, or do you just have an appreciation for piano? Or orchestra, I suppose, since it was originally an orchestra piece. The piano version's a bit better known, though. I think."

And now was the time to shut up before he got himself in trouble with another adult for being too impertinent or too talkative. It didn't seem like this particular one would really mind, but still.

House wondered if he should start charging for the time it took out of his day to stand around and wait while people stared at him in shock or astonishment. He'd probably be rich by now, considering the fact that even the tamer of his remarks tended to cause that.

"I can bang out a few tunes if I try," he dismissed with a shrug, looking far more interested in other matters. House didn't go around divulging the whole being able to play by ear thing. "You're pretty young to be able to play like that," he acknowledged, expression curious. "So what was it? Head trauma when you were young? Some of kind of mental disease, Aspergers, maybe?"

"Nothing quite so interesting," Laurie admitted, running a hand through his hair. Laurie had often lamented the fact that he wasn't a crazed musical genius and wished he'd had some sort of traumatic childhood experience to make his talent for music blossom amazingly. "My parents were both musicians and they set me in front of a piano as soon as I could reach the keys. Then they died and I had to go live with my grandfather. Since my grandfather hates piano, I practice. Constantly."

Except when he was off having adventures with Jo, or when his tutor pried him off the keyboard and forced him to study. Laurie had gotten very good at hiding from Mr. Brooke, much to everyone but Laurie's irritation.

A long- awaited introduction; Open rp

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