These Hammers and Strings;

[Andrew Oliver;]

There wasn’t a single detail anyone knew about Andrew Oliver’s life that he didn’t want them to know. He was a very private person, which made him come off to some people as being unapproachable. There were a lot of things that Andrew didn’t like to talk about, like his first girlfriend or Colin’s line of work. There were things that he just didn’t talk about at all, not even with his closest friends. One of those things: the piano.

Andrew was out of toothpaste, and rather than take the Hummer out for the eight-block journey to the CVS down the street, the Scot threw on his jacket and decided to walk instead, despite the fact that it wasn’t even 50 degrees outside. He had walked the first four bocks of the short walk when he noticed that the music store he walked by all the time, which usually only had CDs and a few dusty records that hardly anyone in his generation even knew how to play, had something new in its window.

It was a sleek, black baby grand piano. Andrew saw it out of the corner of his eye. He stopped in front of the store’s window and stared at the huge instrument. He couldn’t explain what it was, maybe because it reminded him of home, which he hadn’t visited since March, but something made him leave the window and actually go inside the music store. Once inside, he walked to the piano and stared at it some more like it was something foreign that he had ever seen before. He ran the tips of his fingers softly over the white ivory keys, but only put enough pressure on the lowest F key to actually make a sound.

He jumped at its low booming sound as if he hadn’t been expecting it. Anyone watching him probably thought he had never seen a piano in his 19 years of life, but they couldn’t have been any more wrong.

Andrew looked around the store, made sure he didn’t see anyone he knew browsing the aisles of music, and hesitantly pulled out the piano’s bench to sit. It had been over a year since he had last played, probably closer to two, but he didn’t seem to have any trouble as he started on Debussy’s ”Arabesque”.

Yes, piano was definitely one of those things he flat out didn’t talk about.

[Peyton Howard.]

Peyton was hiding even though she knew she'd probably get slaughtered for it later, or really, really soon.
It made absolute sense that she was inside the music store. It was close to almost three weeks that she had been working on the store owner, trying to convince him that her buying 300 CD's and records was equal stakes in regards to what she wanted him to do in return; allow her to ship all his available maracas and bongo drums to Mexico, without any questions on his part. She knew it was a lot to ask, and he seemed to think the exact same thing.

"Oh my God, get over it, you've been saying that for the past three weeks!" Peyton had exclaimed, rolling her eyes. The owner had looked unmoved and began to busy himself with tidying up a small CD display on the counter in front of him. Peyton grabbed the hard plastic casing from his grasp and leaned forward on the counter.
"I'm talking over 3K, old man -," she got out, before the door opened and she had looked over her shoulder to see who it was, in case she had to book it.

It was Andrew and her instinctive reaction to duck and roll kicked in. She threw the CD at the stupid man's mustache, mimed a quick 'sssssssssshh!' and jumped behind the nearest, largest, tallest display, grappling with the ends of her scarf so they wouldn't peek out. It wasn't that she was trying to hide her intentions from him (she'd been complaining about couriers to Mexico for over a month now, at every given opportunity especially when Eiji was around), it was more that Andrew never did anything accidentally, and if he had wanted anyone to know that he was going into a music store for whatever reason, then they would have known about it.

She couldn't bring herself to look at him; it felt incriminating, particularly when the piano started to reverberate through the store. She'd known that all of her high-flying friends knew how to play instruments, sometimes more than one. The most Peyton knew to play was the clarinet and she hadn't touched the thing since fifth grade. Although if she had to play the drums, she could if not well; her parents had given her and Bradley lessons around the time Bradley almost got diagnosed with ADD, but then it turned out he was just insane.

Kneeling where she was, Peyton wrapped her scarf around her head and clumsily pushed her sunglasses onto her face. A large, foolish part of her wanted to appreciate the music coming from Andrew (even if she couldn't see him, she knew it was him), and while she could happily say that they were kind of friends and he tolerated her a lot better than he did most other people; on some days, she was kind of scared of him.
"Shit," she whispered, cringing; he probably wouldn't like that either, or he wouldn't give a fuck and that was just as bad. Standing up as calmly and casually as she could, she tried to exit the store without being noticed. She'd come back later and try to guilt the owner into believing she was on the run from an abusive boyfriend or something.

[Andrew Oliver;]

Andrew had surprised himself. He had seen hundreds of pianos since he had last played. Just about every luxury hotel had at least one piano in one of its lounges and Andrew had been to many hotels in the last year or two. Hell, he lived in a couple, but never once had he gotten the itch to play.

As his fingers glided over through the last few notes of “Arabesque,” he stopped playing. He was freaking himself out. He looked at his hands as if there was something wrong with them, like it was their fault that he had noticed the new piano in the window and felt the need to play an almost flawless Debussy piece after not so much as playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in almost two years.

Andrew quickly stood up from the bench and backed away from the piano, suddenly intimidated by the black beast. Freak.

He turned just in time to see who he immediately recognized as Peyton leave the store. Had she been there the whole time? She had to have been – he hadn’t seen anyone else come in or leave the store. She had to have seen him.

He has been caught. Andrew muttered a quiet, “fuck,” before leaving the piano display. He gave the store owner a ‘yeah, I just played your piano without asking if I could, but no, I’m not going to apologize for it’ not before following Peyton out the door.

“Howard!” he called to her back as she walked away. He didn’t know what he was going to say to her, but his brain was desperately trying to come up with some kind of excuse for what she had just witnessed.

[Peyton Howard.]

Peyton stopped, although pretty much every single part of her was really, really wishing that she would disappear off the face of Seattle's sidewalk and reappear somewhere else, like China, but mostly she was quickly trying to contemplate all the different ways she could either run away or simply run away. She was too young to die and kill her, Andrew surely would; or maybe he would do the unexpected and just slap her on the wrist or something. Probably not, no.

'NoAndrew,thatwasnotmejustinthemusicstore,' she thought in a second, her back still turned to him. He could probably see her shake her head a little; that was a stupid lie. 'AndrewIwasinacomasoreally,whatpiano?' Sleep walking would be hard to prove though. She wished she could say she was deaf, later, and continue walking away but she would never make it far since her car was parked in his parking lot eight blocks in his direction, and she would need a bus to go hide out at the Academy. Maybe she was overreacting and the horror stories she heard from everyone else (Eiji: he kills you in your sleep. Draco: he'll strangle you if you look at him) about when Andrew got angry were just made up.

Peyton briefly thought about pretending she was Vietnamese before she turned around, a bright smile on her face.
"Hi Andrew!!!!!!!" she greeted, one hand firmly clutching the end of her scarf while the other waved at him.
"Did you just come out of the record store? That's so weird! I didn't even see you!"

[Andrew Oliver;]

It was a good thing that Andrew wasn’t let in on what was going on in Peyton’s head. He knew more than anyone how much of an asshole he could be. He hardly ever smiled and it was virtually impossible to make him laugh if he wasn’t in the right mood. He had a cold stare that could intimidate even the toughest of men, but he never wanted his friends to be scared of him. And he did consider Peyton his friend. She was kind of weird and annoying sometimes, but he had never really minded her.

The California girl claimed not to have seen him, but Andrew knew it was bullshit. As if her overexcited smile wasn’t enough, he had been sitting at a baby grand in the window of an otherwise quiet store playing an almost perfect rendition of the late nineteenth century classic. That wasn’t something you generally missed.

“You didn’t?” he asked, though the question was pointless. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, a mannerism that only came out when he was uncomfortable, and walked over to Peyton.

“Well, if you had seen me inside,” he said, stopping right in front of her. He spoke softly and with a tone that more than suggested that he was calling her bluff. “Not that you did, but if you had, I’m sure I could count on the fact that you wouldn’t say anything to anyone about what you saw, if you saw something, right?”

He realized that maybe that wasn’t the greatest choice of words and that they could easily be misinterpreted to have an ‘or else’ at the end, which most definitely wasn’t the case. Not for Peyton. He added a half smile that silently said, ‘I’m asking you, please.’

Ever since the night on the deck of the Aphrodite in Havana, Andrew had been selective with what he said to Peyton and how he said it. He had been such a dick to her and he still felt bad about it. It must have been a big deal if Andrew, the guy who felt no remorse after smashing in the windows of some kid’s Mercedes when he was 16 simply because he didn’t like him, still felt guilty.

[Peyton Howard.]

So Andrew wasn't going to kill her and she was freaking out for no reason. Peyton felt terrible; she always hated it when people did this, or that, or said this, or that, and thought it was okay just because in the past, which, really, was any time from five minutes ago, she had proven herself to be a little foolish. There was never any short amount of hurt feelings when her friends or family ribbed her about the kind of decisions she made or assumed things at her expense. The one thing that had taught her was to never make assumptions about another person, and she'd just spent the past few minutes doing the exact same thing to Andrew, whom admittedly, she liked.

She was thrown by the sincerity shown on his face. It reminded her a lot of Cuba; the in-between-the-bad-but-more-favoring-the-good part, where Andrew had never apologized to her before that point. Peyton felt like she owed him something; he'd been a lot nicer since that night. She could understand it if she'd done something to deserve it, but the fact was, for her, she hadn't done anything at all.

"Okay," she said simply. Peyton was the kind of person who would do literally almost do anything for her friends, without question. If all Andrew wanted was for her to keep quiet about what she heard, because she really hadn't seen him do anything except for the two hasty glances when he'd first come in the store and while she was leaving, then she could definitely do it.

She stared at him for a moment, trying to think of what to say, ignoring the whole music store incident; she could ask him some questions but that wouldn't have been the most tactful thing to do.
"I meant to say Hello," she told him, more genuinely this time, "I haven't see you in a while. Were you going somewhere?"

[Andrew Oliver;]

That was it? She wasn’t going to make fun of him? She was just going to agree to not say anything? Andrew really shouldn’t have been surprised. Peyton wasn’t the kind of person to go around spilling secrets. That was one of the things he had always liked about Peyton – she was genuine. Dealers were hardly ever genuine, not that Peyton was just a dealer or anything. Though he honestly wouldn’t have blamed her if she wanted to rat him out to the devastating idiots he called his friends (like secretly playing the piano was a crime). Not after Havana.

“I know. I’ve been…” he began before pausing. What was the right way to say that you hadn’t been around much because you were busy searching for the right place to begin a yachting business. Andrew had spent the majority of the last month searching for the perfect location, boats, and investors. It was proving to be harder than he had thought it would be. This wasn’t South Florida. The Pacific Northwest wasn’t the ideal location for a weekend out on the boat. He refused to ask his father for help and not may investors were keen on tossing their money out to a kid who never finished school, no matter how qualified and smart he might have been.

“I’ve been busy,” was what he settled on, not having any intentions of elaborating, which was typical Andrew style.

He wasn’t trying to be sneaky by not letting his friends know about his new business venture. He planned to tell them all eventually, but not until things were definite. Not until he would be able to prove that he could do it all by himself.

“I’m going to the drug store,” he answered her question, nodding down the street toward the CVS four blocks away. It was a perfectly normal comment, but coming from Andrew, the guy who everyone knew adored his pills and occasionally something more, it needed some clarification.

“For toothpaste,” he added with the trace of an honest, amused smile attached to it, which was truly rare.

The store was the opposite direction of the way Peyton had been walking when Andrew followed her out of the store, but he had a good feeling that she wasn’t really going anywhere and was just trying to avoid him finding out that she had seen him.

“Come with me?” There was no ‘do you want to’ tacked on to the beginning of the invitation, but it as clearly a question, unlike the way his ‘if you saw something, right?’ from before.

[Peyton Howard.]

Peyton tried to not let the disappointment? Let-down? Show on her face. She had to have known that a simple question like that wasn't going to be returned as easily with Andrew. Plus, she thought she was a pretty understanding person anyway, so she tried to reason that maybe behind the three words he said, there was some explanation for them. Maybe he really had been so busy that he couldn't possibly begin to tell her how or why.

Instead she gave a small but funny look, something that resembled her saying 'oookay,' and quickly turned her attention toward the direction of the pharmacy.

If she had to be honest, which she never really liked doing consciously at least, then she would have to admit that Andrew made her nervous sometimes - like right now, for always no particular reason. It was different than being afraid of his reactions to certain things; her nervousness was more similar to self-doubt about what to do or say around him. He always threw her for a loop. An indiscernible kind of frown found its way into her expression and she vaguely directed it at a passing car, right before managing to smile when he said toothpaste.

"Sure," she answered him, without having to really think about it, and the befuddled things he made her think about were forgotten, or ignored but she wasn't being particular then. She grinned properly at him, more cheerful now that her mind was rather blank, which really said a lot about her general persona.
"Hey, you know my brother's in town right now? How weird is that." The same brother who was seriously trying to smoke out her little, insignificant side operation; she was definitely not going to tell Andrew about that.

[Andrew Oliver;]

It was weird. It wasn’t until Peyton told him she’d walk the rest of the way to the drug store with him that Andrew realized he had been anxious for her answer. It wasn’t that he’d been hoping she’d say yes, nor did he want her to decline his offer either. But Andrew still felt like a dick for the way he treated her in Havana. He didn’t know if she was still mad at him, but he couldn’t just ask her. That would mean admitting that it was bothering him, which wasn’t an option.

He found himself relaxing when she answered him right away though. So she wasn’t disgusted with him, apparently. Andrew could definitely live with that. She mentioned her brother and he raised his eyebrows, looking genuinely interested.

“Really? Which one?” he asked because he knew there was more than one. He couldn’t remember their names or what they did or how many of them there were, if he ever knew any of that at all, but at least he knew that there was more than one. He knew that Peyton was the only girl, but that was about it.

When he was younger, Andrew would sometimes wish that he had a brother or a sister to occupy him when his best friend Sam wasn’t around. It would have been nice to have someone to play with in the back yard, to boss around when there was nothing else better to do, or to teach him to tie his shoes. As he got older though, Andrew realized that it was probably better that he was an only child. It was one less kid Collin had to ignore and one less kid that Karen would have had Melsoa, the Olivers’ housekeeper turned nanny, raise instead of her.

Andrew started down the sidewalk, finally deciding that he was in fact pleased that Peyton decided to join him, even if all he was doing was getting toothpaste from the store down the street. The boy spent far too much time alone. Some company was nice, even if it came in the form of someone you felt you had to watch your words around.

[Peyton Howard.]

Peyton would never admit to her parents' faults, it wasn't like they ever mistreated her or raised her in a way that felt inadequate. They were perfectly good parents, but anyone who knew their family or simply took just one look at them would realize that Peyton was far closer to any of her brothers than she was to her parents. If she could have had done it, she would have made posters of all of them, including Bradley after he was born. She loved talking about them, if nothing else but the niggling conscience she kept reminded her that Andrew may not necessarily love hearing about them.

"Uhm, Jared. He's the eldest. I told him I was still studying so he checks up on me every now and then. I wish he'd get a job." And stop trying to compensate his failed responsibilities as a brother by making sure she was leading a criminal-free life.

"He asked about you," she told him, and then immediately amended, "I mean, not that I talk about you, I talk about a looot of people, and you just came up?" She tried to not make it sound like a question because how could she not be sure of something she was saying? Why would she even have said it in the first place otherwise. She couldn't even remember talking this much before. Peyton, she thought, expression like she wanted to fall into a hole, you're an idiot. So uncool.

[Andrew Oliver;]

Andrew laughed to himself. He was about to admit that he did the same thing – told his family that he was still going to school when he wasn’t (Collin didn’t find out until halfway through the semester when no tuition bills came in, ultimately cutting Andrew off financially, leaving him to cash out his trust fund) – but then she threw him off.

“He asked about me?” he questioned. He looked confused at first, but then something clicked and the confusion turned into something bordering smug and amused. Peyton’s brother asked about him. That meant Peyton had obviously said something about him that her brother thought was worth remembering. What was it?

Though he wasn’t nearly as self-loving as those other two bastards he lived with and secretly and subconsciously considered his back-up best friends, Andrew had enough of a complex to hope that it was something good. Something like how one time he made her nachos at two in the morning or how he let her wear his clothes when Draco accidentally and drunkenly knocked her into the pool in October, not that he almost made her cry in Cuba.

“What did you say?” he asked curiously, slowing his pace. The Scot was amused, wondering not only what Peyton’s brother wanted to know about him, but what she told him too.

[Peyton Howard.]

Peyton put in her absolute best effort to not let her face vault. If only she had played it casual and pretended that mentioning Andrew to her brother hadn't been a big deal. How completely embarrassing; he always managed to catch her with the filter between her brain and mouth missing.

"Well," she began, then instantly had to change her tone so as to not sound reluctant, "do you remember that time I got wasted?"

Peyton got stupid, definitely, but she hardly ever did anything to get totally trashed; in fact, Peyton was the designated driver even when she thought she couldn't speak English and was seeing gremlins at every corner. One time though, in a moment of extreme self indulgence and not nearly enough tact, she got so drunk that she tried to break into the ground floor only to be apprehended by the doorman.

"But you let me up in anyway? I was just telling him how you listen to me sometimes, since no one else does." Which, really, was in reference to that one night of crazy ingenuity that struck her out of nowhere, but also included all the other times that Andrew had been there for her, even if it was that she was simply hungry and needed someone to make it go away - not that she'd ever tell Jared that, he'd be more suspicious than he already was.

"He didn't like me going to Cuba, but that's not so bad. At least he doesn't think you could be gay like he does for Draco."

[Andrew Oliver;]

Andrew laughed, and it was one of those laughs that you just knew was real. The Scot didn't find many things funny. His best friend, Sam, used to tell him that at some point in his childhood, his sense of humor was replaced with an extra dose of impatience and dickheadedness. But the memory of Peyton trying to force her way into their building was enough to make him laugh.

He would have been pissed that night if he hadn't still been awake. Andrew was unwillingly nocturnal. Even after popping some triazolam or zolpidem, he still usually had a hard time sleeping. He wasn't going to leave her to fight with the doorman or get arrested. He wasn't that much of dick.

He thought he was off the hook, that she had made him look good in front of her brother, but then his face dropped.

"Oh. Cuba," he said, and there was zero inflection in the pair of words. They never really talked about that trip. Well, they never talked about that one night of the trip. It was awkward and he always either changed the subject or told someone to mind their own fucking business when they asked him why he sometimes looked at her like he was scared she was going to break.

He opened his mouth to say something, but he stopped. His brow furrowed and his lips pursed, hinting confusion and a little bit of curiosity. Andrew wasn't usually one to censor his words. If something was fucking stupid, he said it was fucking stupid. If someone was annoying the hell out of him, he told them to get away from him.

He slowed his pace even more, the CVS just yards away. For a moment, Andrew glanced at it's bright, glowing red sign and wondered why the hell they would light the sign in the middle of the damn day when it was perfectly visible on its own. He licked his lips before the blue of his eyes locked on Peyton.

"Are you still mad at me?" he asked her. "Because I still feel like a dick." It wasn't an apology, but it was. The words 'I'm sorry' were hardly in Andrew's vocabulary, but it didn't mean they weren't true. He was sorry. The boy hardly ever harbored guilt, but it was different with Peyton. He didn't even know why he felt so bad. He was an asshole to her. He was an asshole to a lot a people, but he never felt like he had to make it up to them like he did with her. He didn't know why, but he didn't like it.

[Peyton Howard.]

Peyton sometimes liked to pretend, and most of the time believe, that her sole purpose in life was to make people happy. It wasn't exactly the most stupid thought she'd ever had, but it was often said to her to be naive. If she had to really think about it, starting an opium farm in Vietnam maybe had something to do with trying to get her parents' attention. When that failed, she'd gotten herself arrested. In retrospect, she'd found everything she did up until a certain point to have been pathetic, and from then on had vowed to do anything she could to help the people around her as best as she could. It was the main reason why she had never stopped selling prescription drugs to Elliot, or even Andrew, because she knew innately that they'd be miserable otherwise. Plus, it made her feel infinitely better to know that the drugs were coming from somewhere reliable.

Hearing Andrew laugh made Peyton smile, not goofily or like any of the other kinds she usually wore, but a small, genuine one that was more quiet than revealing; she hardly ever heard him laugh. Of course, it didn't last long and at his very brief mention of Cuba, her own expression flickered but rather than avoid his gaze, Peyton turned to look at him.

"Andrew," she began, and a part of her was remorseful though she couldn't place why, "I'm not mad at you."

She'd never been mad at him, and she'd known the entire time but it felt different to actually say it out loud; more real, more possible. More important than feeling like she'd just brushed off a small part of a larger weight off her shoulders, she felt that she could finally put to rest the frowns and looks of consternation he seemed to wear sometimes, particularly if she was around. No one aside from the friends who came to Cuba with them knew of what happened, and though they all knew Peyton had disappeared again later that night just to see Andrew, they didn't know anything more than that and Peyton had never made it a point to let them in on the conversation that took place. It was oddly precious, even if she would never admit it.

"I was never mad," she said; only upset, but she didn't like talking about it.
"Please tell me you're not beating yourself up about it," she joked, a little quirk in the corner because she didn't believe the things she was saying herself; at times Andrew may have looked unsettled, but the thought of him still being troubled by Cuba wasn't one that had occurred before, and if it had, she'd always discard it. It wasn't like him to feel bad about anything.

"Hey, is that why you've been so nice to me lately?" she asked, looking rather epiphanic as well as something else.

[Andrew Oliver;]

She was a saint. Peyton Howard was a fucking saint. Andrew wasn't completely surprised when she told him that she wasn't still mad at him. Cuba was a while ago and Peyton had always stuck him as the forgiving type. She was a little out there sometimes, but she was truly a kind person. But when she told him that she was never mad in the first place, that surprised him.

When he found her on the street in Havana, he yelled at her and basically told her she was stupid for wandering off, saying she'd wasted his time during his vacation. She'd scared him. Andrew might have been the biggest hardass anyone knew, but in those two hours that Peyton was gone, all he could think about were all the awful things that could have been happening to her.

Sometimes Andrew Oliver was capable of human emotion.

The Scot was almost as relieved to find that she wasn't angry with him as he was when he found her watching the street magician in Havana. Almost. He smiled again, but it was short-lived. He wasn't expecting her to call him out on being nice to her, and the usually cool and collected boy kind of froze.

"What? No. Well, kind of," he admitted because he didn't see the point in lying. Andrew didn't spare anyone's feelings. Not even Peyton's. He would be honest with her, but he still realized how much of a dick that must have made him sound like.

They were right outside the entrance of the CVS, but Andrew didn't dare go inside yet. He stepped in front of Peyton and placed a hand on either of her shoulders. He, for whatever stupid reason he couldn't name, needed to make sure she knew he was serious.

"Hey, don't think that's the only reason why," he had to clarify. "I've been nice to you because you're my friend and I like you, Howard. I've just felt bad since then and I wanted to make it up to you, that's all."