Once More With Feeling

Prologue

This is an excerpt of a new story, that I've been working on. This story, however, is of a different ship, SasuSaku.
I wanted to try something different and I hope that you enjoy it.

Thanks,
graylu1234.

Once More With Feeling
It's late.

It's always late when I leave practice. I don't remember what it's like to take a quick lunch, or a break, or anything resembling a break during practice hours. And practice hours are every day. Sometimes I forget what it's like to feel the sun on my face. And I realize maybe that might sound dramatic, since no one's forcing me to do this. No one's forcing me to embrace the beauty and the horror of my craft with this absurd, narrow-minded focus on being the best and beating the best. No one but myself.

And maybe that's the worst kind of slave contract in the world: the one you sign yourself.

Anyway.

The other dancers have all gone home already. So has our instructor, Miss Suzume. So it's just me in the studio, facing the enormous wall-to-ceiling, unforgiving, painfully honest mirrors and the sprawling expanse of polished hardwood. Me and my sweat and my blood and tears that don't come as quick as they used to, and a little old CD player playing my newest song on repeat.

There's no clock in our dance studio. Miss Suzume tells us it's so we're focused on what we're doing, instead of what time it is. I'm not in any hurry to leave, though. Just in a really big hurry to improve.

I still have so much to do, I think, pausing for a moment. My muscles ache, but that just means I'm getting better. Stronger. Faster, more flexible, more poised. And with so much to do, I can't afford to leave just yet. Even if I can't remember the last time I ate, even if I forget what it's like to take a moment and just relax, even if I'm running on something too diluted to be adrenaline but too indistinguishable to be anything else, I still have work I need to do.

I'm late on my brise' at an integral moment in the piece. I land sloppily, since I'm trying to catch up to the music (and doesn't that just fit my whole life completely? Falling behind, desperately trying to catch up?) So I do what always works for me: I repeat the same move twenty times, until I won't, can't screw it up again.

I make the jump for the ninth time, and I move swiftly enough to satisfy myself. The CD player's been playing the same two bars on loop for close to an hour now as I try and execute a masterful performance for the girl spinning and leaping and twirling in the mirror, who is my harshest critic.

When will it be enough for you, girl in the mirror?

"Execution is everything!" I hear Miss Suzume's reedy voice echo throughout the empty studio. "Technique is key, you worthless waste! If you can't keep your toes pointed and your knees straight and your back arched, you might as well get out of this studio and never show your face here again!"

No room for creative interpretation. No room for passion or going with the flow or everything dance used to be to me, as a little girl in a rough neighborhood, dreaming of glamour and renown. Just polishing, refining, honing the basics. Blending into the background. An automaton, programmed to execute move after move on command with startling precision.

And it's what I'm best at. The technical aspect of dance. It's what has won me so many awards, so many trophies and crowns and ribbons and sashes and plaques and certificates and banners from all over the world.

But it's what's destroying me, little by little, every day. This slavish connection I have with music and with ballet, this iron grip of inescapable bondage, this seesaw of love and loathing in the only aspect of my life I ever had any control over, until recently.

I'm Sakura Haruno. I'm seventeen, a student at Konoha Performing Arts Academy, and the principal dancer in the KPAA Student Ballet.

And that's all there is to me, I think.

All you need to know, anyway.