Archive of Our Own ^beta

For as long as Barbara can remember, Swan Lake has been her favorite ballet. The sweeping music has always managed to make her feel as light as air, even with her toes firmly on the ground. She still remembers the way the dancers’ white tutus and feathered hairpieces transform them from women to swans and back again, and how Odette’s graceful innocence transforms to wicked seduction once Odile takes to the stage. For all the beauty of the white swans, Barbara always loved the Black Swan best.

She never did get a chance to dance the role. Dancing was stolen from her two years ago. She still loves the music and the costumes, and she still knows the steps. If she closes her eyes, she can see every movement, exactly how it’s supposed to be done- a mirror’s reflection of Odette, dancing the same steps as the White Swan but with an entirely different tone, something innocent turned wicked but still beautiful. She could have done it, once.

But now, instead of gliding through the halls of the Gotham City Ballet in slippers, Barbara rolls through them in a wheelchair.

She has by now mostly accepted it. They still let her come to the Ballet- she tidies up the studios from her chair, and makes sure the costumes are all put back the way they should be. Recently she has begun to keep the books- Barbara has always been clever; numbers and words make sense to her in a way real, living people often don’t. She is happy to be included, and happy that she at least gets to hear the music even if she can no longer dance to it. And whenever there is a performance she is allowed to slip into the back and watch. It is always as breathtaking as it was when she did it herself. She is happy at the Ballet, truly she is.

But among all the swans, it is difficult not to feel like an ugly duckling.

The Ballet has felt…unsettling, of late, and Barbara is not the only one who’s noticed. There have been whispers of ghosts, tales of strange sounds when no one should be about. Christine, one of the top dancers, has told everyone who will listen of how she was alone in a dressing room and the rack of pointe shoes came crashing down all by itself, with no one there to topple it. Barbara herself has felt more and more often as though she is being watched when she rolls through the halls.

The Ballet has always had its rumors of ghosts. It’s an old building, in an old city, and there will of course always be stories. But this is the first one that feels as though it might have some substance to it. More and more talk of strange noises at night, someone- something moving just in a dancer’s peripheral vision only to vanish when they turn to look, music turning off and on by itself- well, Barbara is a logical person, so she doesn’t turn immediately to ghost stories. But the more people lend credence to the rumors, the more she starts to wonder.

Barbara is often the last to leave the Ballet. Sometimes a few of the dancers will stay behind to practice in the empty classrooms- it is especially common in the weeks before a production to find students going over their choreography alone, over and over again until they are sure they have it right. But the Ballet is not getting ready for a production just now, and so after classes are over the students go home. Only Barbara is left to put out the lights and make sure everything is in order. 

So far, she has not encountered one of the Ballet ghosts herself. But the thought hovers unwelcome in the back of her mind as she finishes with the account books. Even one of the teachers two days ago claimed to have seen a dancing black wisp reflected in the mirrors of the smallest studio. Just a shadow, leaping on glass- but it came with the sound of pointe shoes on marley floor, and a rush of air like-

Like someone’s last breath, the woman had said, half in tears at the fright of it. 

Death is common in ballet. At the end of Swan Lake, Siegfried and Odette throw themselves into the lake to drown together. Giselle has the Wilis, its corps of vengeful ghosts. La Bayadere ends with the gods destroying the temple and everyone inside. James and the sylph do not survive La Sylphide. And of course Romeo and Juliet has the lovers die with each other in the tomb. Ballet and death have always danced hand in hand with each other.

But this- this feels like something else. This doesn’t feel malevolent. It feels…Barbara doesn’t know how it feels. It just feels like there’s something they haven’t been considering, some explanation beyond the supernatural.

Barbara runs her fingers along the smooth wall, pushing herself forward with the other hand. In all her time at the Ballet, she’s never seen a ghost. Not even the ghost of a ghost, a mysterious shadow, an unexplained sound, a movement in the corner of her eye with no one there when she turns her head. Everything happens around her, through her. Like she’s invisible.

Barbara shakes her head sharply, not letting herself go down that path of thought. She will not let herself fall into the trap of believing that she is worthless, of believing that she does not belong at the Ballet simply because she can no longer dance as part of it. Dance is still, and will always be, a part of her life.

“Of course, if the Ballet closes down because of this ghost, it’ll have to be from a distance,” she mutters. The Ballet has only kept her on because she used to dance there; no other ballet school would hire her if she lost her place here.

She doesn’t have any other business here tonight. Barbara yawns, since there is no one here to see it, and rolls down the classroom hallway. She might as well get on home, back to her father and-

Barbara stops short, frowning.

The classrooms are all dark, all silent, all empty.

All save one.

At the very end of the corridor, a dim light flickers in the doorway of one of the classrooms. Flickering in a way that tells Barbara that someone is moving inside the room. And she can hear, faintly, the strains of the theme from Swan Lake.

What in heaven’s name-

As quietly as she can, Barbara rolls forward. The wooden floors are carefully fitted together so they don’t squeak, and the wheels of her chair glide easily on them- they were made to be walked on in ballet slippers and pointe shoes, after all. Any noise she does make is covered up by the swelling music of Swan Lake.

She can tell now what the shadow is doing.

There’s someone in the abandoned classroom, and the someone in the abandoned classroom is dancing.

But it can’t be a student trying to get extra practice in. All the students know when the school closes, and have to sign in and out if they want to practice outside of class times. Barbara checked. She’s the only one in here- at least, she was supposed to be.

It might be a teacher, choreographing combinations for tomorrow’s class. But the teachers never stay so late at the Ballet- they’re usually home by dark when there is not a production being prepared for. It’s far past dark now, and there is no production.

So whoever is dancing in that classroom, they are not supposed to be in there.

Barbara rolls carefully up to the door and looks around the doorframe.

The music stops. The lights go out. And all she sees is a black shadow leaping into the ceiling- and vanishing, as if it was never there at all.

What the-

There’s no noise. No ghostly wail, no piercing shriek, no low moan. A perfectly silent, shadowy figure, dancing in an abandoned classroom until it was interrupted, whereupon it fled into the walls.

I’ve just seen one of the Ballet ghosts, Barbara thinks, dumbstruck. What else could the little black wisp have been? She didn’t see details- no limbs, no face. Just a smear of shadow that vanished as soon as she looked at it.

“I suppose I believe in ghosts now,” Barbara says. “Ghost? If you’re, um, listening? I’m not going to hurt you. Or tell anyone about you, for that matter. I’m not really the type to run screaming down the hallway about what I saw. I think…I think you just want to dance, right? I don’t think you mean us any harm.”

The school is silent, but Barbara feels as though she’s being watched. Somehow, she knows the new ghost is listening.

“I’m the custodian, sort of,” she says. “I work here. Keep the records and stuff. I- don’t know who you are, or were, or whatever the proper terminology is. But, um…if you want to dance, I won’t stop you.”

There is no answer, and Barbara sighs. “Okay, then,” she says, and switches the music back on before she leaves.

She thinks- though she isn’t sure- that she hears the soft clunk of pointe shoes on wood as she rolls away. But she doesn’t go back to check.

The ghosts of the Ballet have names, and Barbara decides that this one must, too. “Little Dancer Ghost,” she says aloud into the silence, and it sounds right.

In the darkness behind her, Swan Lake plays on and on.

She finds the safe place by accident. She finds it when she is running, running away from Cain because he made her do a terrible thing that she did not want to do. She had made the light go out of a man’s eyes, had seen the fear twisting his face into a grotesque mask, had felt his pain as his life ended- as she ended it. And Cain had been proud, had made the sounds to her that meant she had done something good. But it hadn’t felt good, it had felt wrong, so wrong.

So she runs from him, and she knows that when he catches her he will be angry and he will hurt her. She is not afraid- she doesn’t know how to be afraid- but she has the instinct that all creatures do to avoid being hurt. And she knows that when you are being chased by something much stronger and faster than you, the best thing to do is to hide.

It is the lights that draw her first. Warm, gentle, yellow lights spilling out of a big stone building, pulling her closer into them- she who has always lived in dark, dim places. They hypnotize her, and she stops running and pads closer on silent feet, pausing just before she reaches the edge of the light.

If it was only light, she might have turned and gone somewhere else. But something else catches her attention- sounds, beautiful sounds that she’s never heard in her short, dark life. The sounds make her feel something. She doesn’t know what, or if she does, she doesn’t know what to do with the feeling. She only knows that this place, with the lights and the sounds, is where she wants to be.

Cain is somewhere behind her, in the darkness and the cold and the silence. So she slips behind the building and climbs, and she makes it onto the roof just as a large shadow that she knows is Cain steps into the light from the building. Cain is not drawn by the lights and the beautiful sounds. He ignores them, and so he ignores her, and passes her by.

She doesn’t move for a long time after he is gone. She stays in the darkness and listens to the beautiful sounds. She thinks she could stay here forever- but the sky is dark with more than just nighttime, and rain begins to fall. Her thin dress will be soaked in minutes. She looks around for shelter and sees a window at the top of the building, swaying gently in the wind. Someone has left it unlocked.

It is not hard for her to scramble up the wall. The building is built of brick, and it has many columns and overhangs that she can hold onto. She climbs the wall like a little black spider, scuttling up in the shadows. Once she looks down at the ground far below. She is not afraid of falling, even from this height. She thinks it would feel a little like flying.

The open window turns out to belong to an attic wall. She slips in the window and shuts it behind her, so that the wind and the steadily-increasing rain can’t follow her inside. And then she turns around to see what inside looks like.

Inside is crammed with things that are not real. Furniture and things from outside and big cloths with scenes painted on them, and none of it is real. She tips her head, frowning- she can’t understand what this is all meant for. Why would someone need a clock that can’t chime and has a staircase hidden in the back, or a painting of a village done on strange heavy cloth, or a tree made of wire and paper? 

She moves further into the room, her head tilted like a bird’s. It is warm up here, and the smell of old things is an oddly comforting one. She finds a metal rack filled with clothes- beautiful, bright clothes, many of them stitched with jewels. She doesn’t know the purpose of the heavy, stiff skirts, but she runs a longing hand over the fabric anyway. At the bottom of the rack is a bag of shoes- strange shoes, that seem like they would be very uncomfortable to wear outside. They have hard toes. She picks one up and taps it, just to hear the sound.

There is dust everywhere, and she guesses that no one has been up here in a very long time. An idea has come into her head.

She needs a place to hide from Cain, and no one is using this place. She can leave and come back by the window, if she needs to. And it is warm here. It feels good. It feels safe.

She builds herself a little nest- all of the clothes up here are stiff and jewel-encrusted and not comfortable when she curls up on them, but there are curtains and the big fabric sheets with the paintings on them, and they are plenty soft enough to make a bed. She drags them into the corner and piles them up, patting them down with her hands and feet like a little dog treading out its bed. She has not known much comfort in her small, dark life, but she knows it now. This place has a name that is a word, a word that she rarely gets to use.

Mine, she thinks- and does not say.

She never says anything. She doesn't mind the quiet. Cain says things to her sometimes, and she has managed to work out the tone of them. If he says things, just says them, that means he is pleased with her. If he is mumbling to himself and takes no notice of her, that means he is planning something and she is not to get in his way. If his voice is loud and his hands are rough and he is cruel, then he is displeased. She can tell that one easier than the rest. She does not know what the individual mouth-sounds mean, but she can pick out their intent most of the time.

He will be angry if he finds her. Angrier than he has ever been before, and he will use his hands to say it and not his voice. She curls into her small nest. He would use his hands, if he found her, but he will not find her here.

My place, she thinks, dozily. She sleeps very lightly most nights, when she sleeps at all, but tonight she will let herself truly sleep, because nothing will harm her here. Nothing will find her. She will be...there is a mouth-sound for it. She doesn't know what it is when it is spoken, but the meaning is in her head and her heart. Safe. That is what she is. That is where she is. My safe place.

And so came a ghost of a girl to haunt the Gotham City Ballet.