Title: Fille d'acier
Fandom: Sherlock
Rating: PG
Pairing: Anthea/Ella
Length: 250 words
Content notes: no warnings apply
Author notes: part of my Sleeping Beauty series. Thanks to slightweasel for encouraging me to write this one.
Summary: Steel girl, the singer calls herself.



A singer and a harpist, both female. Melancholy chords, a quiet start. Ella knows the words by heart now, though their meaning is still elusive. Steel girl, the singer calls herself. Says she loved no-one in the world but her lover (male, Ella notes, and not just because amant takes the masculine), but now everything has changed.

There’s a look Anthea gets when she listens to the song, a look Ella associates with the man whose name she doesn’t know. The writer. She doesn’t know who ended that relationship, though she knows the man pursued Anthea after it ended.

Is he the one who stopped attracting, the singer asks, or is it her, and what difference does it make anyway?

Attraction: as powerful and instantaneous as a magnet, the kind that can be switched on or off. What flips the switch either way is a mystery, however much you try to explain it.

The singer’s voice curls with self-disgust, telling how she lies down on the damp straw of love, all alone with all the others, all alone, despairing, tin girl, rusty girl. She calls on her lover to remember, but there’s no sign if he hears, or cares what love has made of her. Or why she wants to remember something that seems to bring her only pain.

She’s with you now, Ella reminds herself. Whatever he did to Anthea, she’s your lover now, not his. Not steel, not tin, not any kind of metal, but flesh and blood.


***

endnote: the song they're listening to is Joseph Kosma's Fille d'acier, with words by Jacques Prévert, in this recording by Françoise Masset and Christine Icart.