They're paired by their music teacher for their final assessment, a Battle of the Bands-style playoff. Unfortunately, she doesn't know that a bit of high school drama went down at term-break. She doesn't know what this one song she's making them play might mean to both of them.

“John Sheppard had a son? And he plays the violin too? What is he, a masochist?”

"Look, I’m not going to beat around the bush here. You seem like you have a good head on your shoulders in addition to training and experience. I'm calling to offer you a job as Eames' fulltime bodyguard for his upcoming summer tour."

Arthur's one of the bright lights of the conservatory, but he's sharing the stage with a star about to go supernova.

"Music is the silence between the notes" ~ Claude Debussy; or, life is what happens when you're busy wishing you could be in a practice room.

Set very shortly after "Ach, des Knaben Augen".

Arthur’s face shifts from interrogatory focus to something soft and slack and longing, almost within a bare second.

"I'm next," Eames says. "If you don't smother me in blankets and tape me together my voice will be no use to you either. I'll probably sing in French instead of German or something equally disastrous."

When Eames travels, the thought of Arthur travels with him.

The story of ‘happily ever after.’

This isn't an old theory assignment; that much was clear from the instant Eames pulled it out, folded unevenly, from where it had been pressed between the pages of Thayer's dreary Beethoven tome.

Being a freshman piano performance major at a prestigious New England conservatory is difficult enough without landing the school's star baritone as your singer, and inevitably, your hopeless crush.

Of course Charles has heard the music. He has heard it on the radio, in Walgreen's, in the background of TV ads for expensive perfume and in the clubs (at least on the rare occasion that Raven manages to drag him away from work.) At some point, he has heard almost every bloody song in the man's entire sodding catalogue, and there was a point in 2010 where you literally couldn't go anywhere without hearing the summer smash hit 'Quicksilver'.

He knows who the boy is--one James T. Kirk, lauded across the nation for his amazing skill at the trumpet. He goes to Columbia, if Spock recalls correctly, where he double-majors in Music and Jazz Studies and minors in Mechanical Engineering.

A series of random meetings in the rain turn into something more than Merlin would have expected. Warning! This fic contains: a string quartet, a damp flat, one black cat and lots of rain.

The first time, Merlin really doesn’t recognize him, which Will tells him later is ridiculous, though Merlin will swear on anything that it’s true.

"My name is Charles Xavier," he says. "I hear you're a decent drummer."