Just one selection. The one that had been haunting him for weeks, following his every move, shadowing him in his dreams. All it had taken were a few random notes, picked by someone not even knowing what they had chosen or why.
Passing Jon in a darkened hallway of the passages in the dead of the night, as he wandered, struggling with his grief and trying to hold together a squad of soldiers that didn't seem to care what they were fighting for any longer.
Just those few notes, Jon thought bitterly, looking again at the screen. After he'd heard them, he'd tried to push them away, but the harder he tried, the more the music seemed to well up inside him, demanding that he listen to it. Finally, it had drawn him to this console, where he could sit in relative privacy and deal with what would come of this path he'd been pulled onto.
Pulling on the headset sitting next to the keypad, he pushed play, and the first rippling notes spilled out.....
"Here," he said, coming up behind Jennifer without a whole lot of warning. When she jumped at the sound of his voice, Jon realized how much he'd startled her, without meaning to. He reached out to calm her, but before he could, Jennifer's face lost the frightened animal look and took on one more of mild embarrassment.
"I'm sorry," she said, dropping her chin, refusing to look him in the eye, like she had so many times since they had first rescued her just a few months before. "I didn't hear you coming."
Jon thought to himself that, eventually, they would have to do something about that shyness. Then again, maybe he could do something now. He went ahead and put his hand on her shoulder, prompting her to left her head, this time looking him right in the eye, a look of curiosity on her face.
"No need to apologize," he explained, a firm smile on his face, hoping to reassure her. "I just brought you something I thought you might enjoy." Before she could say a word, he handed her the small audio disk he had been holding in the palm of his hand.
"It's some pieces of music...compositions by an 18th century composer named Beethoven." He watched as Jennifer looked away from him for a moment, then down at the disc she now held in her hand. "My father used to play this for me as a child. I thought you might enjoy it."
She turned it over once, then looked up at him, puzzled.
"Why?" The confusion in her voice was obvious, and for a minute, Jon questioned bringing her the music. There was so much she could learn, so much she was just beginning to understand. The music his father had raised him on had seemed the obvious choice, but now....
The wavering lasted only a second, though, and then he led Jennifer over to the console in her quarters, took the disc from her hand, and placed it into the appropriate spot on the console. when the music selections came up on the screen, he stepped back and smiled at Jennifer, crossing his arms.
"There's a lot in the world you haven't eperienced. This," he pointed to the console, "is a good place to start." He watched for a minute as she first looked at him, and then back at the screen. Before she could object, he turned and walked out of the room.
He came back later, expecting to find Jennifer leafing throwing the selections, but instead found her asleep at the console, her head resting next the keypad, in the crook of her arm. Playing softly in the backround was Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, the first piece of music on the disc.
He reached around her to turn it off, and then realized that the disc had been set to autorepeat, and just to that one piece of music. As he listened to the composition, he looked at her face, not sure what to expect, and was shocked to see the dried tears and the flushed skin. Something in the music, or maybe just the past she was trying to get away from, Jon thought, as the music trailed off, finally.....
...jolting him back to reality, this time with the pain fresh in his heart. Abruptly, Jon reached to slap the stop button on the player, but something stopped him. He had to listen, to let the music happen. The more he tried to run from it, the more it followed him.
As the notes strung themselves together, he found the pull, the weight of the music that had always drawn him to that particular piece. The same weight, he imagined, that had drawn Pilot on the day he'd first given her the music to listen to. Now, she was gone. All that was left behind were whatever shared memories that he could manage to salvage.
And as he thought of the music, and Pilot, the final notes of the Sonata ran past him, and then were gone. He reached up and pulled off the earphones, but as he did, the emotions he had been fighting off for too many weeks piled up all at once, and the silence became too much to bear.
And suddenly, all he could do was cry.