Not "The Character did nothing wrong" or "The Character is irredeemably awful" but a secret third thing: The Character may display moments of deep love & compassion, may even have a strong sense of ethics, and may also be capable of brutal cruelty that is irreconcilable with those traits. The constant tension between the different sides of The Character's nature is exactly what makes them compelling, and attempting to reduce them down to simply "a terrible person" or "innocent & misunderstood" is missing the point of the questions a media with nuanced characters is asking you to consider
I love you disabled girls. I love you scared girls. I love you dysfunctional girls. I love you sad girls. I love you hurt girls. I love you trans girls. I love you racialised girls. I love you lonely girls. I hope you find people who love you and care for you like you deserve. I hope you find people who will hold you and let you hold them. I love you.
A/N: Watched Suspiria and Whiplash back to back a few days ago, and this is what bloomed in my brain afterwards! Larissa is strict, authoritative, bordering on cruel. Reader is eager to please, pushing her own boundaries for a crumble of praise from the woman she has an unhealthy obsession with. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do! <3
Morning rehearsal begins before the sun has properly decided to rise. The academy sits in a kind of blue half-light when you arrive, all long corridors and sleeping radiators, the windows filmed faintly with winter condensation. Somewhere upstairs, a piano stumbles through scales. Someone laughing too loudly in another studio gets shushed almost immediately.
Studio A smells of rosin, sweat, and old wood polished so many times it has developed a shine like still water. The mirrors along the far wall catch every movement with exhausting honesty. Girls are already stretching at the barre when you enter, their warm-up knits hanging from narrow shoulders, pointe shoes discarded in pale satin heaps beside dance bags.
No one speaks much before Larissa arrives.
You are three minutes late.
Not late enough for another instructor to notice, perhaps, but Larissa notices everything. You have learned this the way dancers learn most things, through repetition and humiliation.
The studio door opens behind you just as you tie your hair back, and the room stills with almost embarrassing immediacy. Conversations taper off. Spines straighten. Someone hurriedly removes their phone from the barre and tucks it away.
Larissa steps inside carrying the cold with her.
Snowmelt glimmers faintly at the hem of her black wool coat. One leather-gloved hand rests atop the silver head of her cane, though she hardly seems to need it. She moves with the same sharp composure she brings to everything else, as though even pain has been instructed to behave properly in her presence.
She surveys the room once. A practiced sweep. Inventory rather than greeting.
Then her eyes settle on you, moving from your face to your half tied bun.
“You were late.”
The words are not loud. They do not need to be. Larissa speaks the way surgeons cut. Neatly, without wasted force.
Heat climbs immediately into your face. “I’m sorry, Miss Weems.”
“You apologize as though it alters time.”
Around you, no one looks directly at either of you. The dancers at this academy have perfected the art of witnessing someone else’s destruction discreetly.
Larissa removes her gloves finger by finger and lays them atop the piano. “Don’t be late again.”
“Yes, Miss Weems.”
The pianist receives Larissa’s coat with the solemnity of someone accepting ceremonial robes, and then rehearsal begins.
“Barre.”
The room obeys at once.
That is the frightening thing about Larissa. Not that she is cruel—though she can be—but that obedience forms naturally around her, instinctive as breath. She does not command the room so much as arrange it around herself. Even silence seems curated in her presence.
The music starts softly. Slow warm-up exercises first. Pliés and tendus repeated until the body loosens from sleep. You settle your hand against the barre and try to ignore the lingering embarrassment beneath your skin, though embarrassment under Larissa’s gaze has a tendency to become physical. Your shoulders tighten. Your breathing shortens. Every movement begins to feel observed.
Perhaps because it is.
Larissa walks between the dancers while the pianist plays, correcting posture with economical precision. A lifted chin here. A pressed shoulder there. Her criticism is rarely theatrical. She doesn’t shout unless absolutely necessary. The disappointment in her voice is usually punishment enough.
“You look lazy,” she tells one dancer flatly. “I assume this is accidental.”
The girl flushes crimson and straightens immediately.
Larissa moves on.
You feel her approaching before you see her reflection in the mirror. Your body always notices first. Some humiliating instinct. Your spine lengthens unconsciously, your stomach tightens beneath your leotard.
“Shoulders.”
The word lands directly behind you.
You correct instantly.
“No,” Larissa says, and there is the faintest trace of irritation in it. “You’re stiffening, not opening.”
Her hand settles between your shoulder blades before you can try again. Warm even through the fabric. Firm enough to feel instructional rather than comforting, though your body has long since stopped understanding the distinction.
“Here.”
Pressure against your spine forces you upright. Not rigid. Supported.
Larissa’s hand remains there a moment longer than strictly necessary, and the awareness of it spreads through you like fever. She smells faintly of sandalwood and something colder beneath it, something clean and expensive that belongs in opera houses and nowhere near a studio full of sweating dancers.
“You collapse inward whenever you lose confidence,” she says quietly enough that only you can hear. “The audience will notice.”
You swallow. “I’m trying not to.”
“I know. Try harder.”
The words settle strangely inside you. Not praise. Not kindness. Worse, perhaps. Recognition.
Larissa steps away, and cold rushes back into the space she occupied. You hate the immediate feeling of loss almost as much as you hate the relief.
The exercise continues.
Outside, snow drifts softly against the windows. Inside, the room warms with effort. By the end of barre, strands of hair have escaped slick ballet buns and the mirrors are beginning to cloud faintly at the edges where bodies have brushed too close.
Larissa watches all of it.
“Swan Lake is in eight weeks,” she says during center work, clipboard balanced lightly against one arm. “At present, most of you dance as though this information has failed to concern you.”
No one speaks.
“You are technically proficient,” she continues, pacing slowly across the studio floor. “Unfortunately, technical proficiency without emotional discipline is how mediocre dancers convince themselves they deserve principal roles.”
Her gaze drifts across the room.
Lingers on you.
Moves away again.
The relief is immediate and shameful.
“Auditions for Odette will be next Friday,” Larissa says. “I suggest you begin behaving accordingly.”
The atmosphere changes at once. Competition arrives quietly but thoroughly, sliding itself beneath the skin of the room. Girls stop smiling at one another quite so easily. Corrections begin to sound personal. Every stumble becomes visible.
You can feel it happening inside yourself too, ugly and desperate. The role has rooted itself somewhere deep in your chest ever since the production was announced. Odette. White silk and tragedy. Fragility sharpened into precision.
You want it badly enough to embarrass yourself.
Perhaps you already are.
The rehearsal becomes brutal after that.
Larissa works the same turn sequence for nearly forty minutes, stopping the music every time someone falters. Again and again and again until fatigue begins unraveling technique altogether. Ankles shake. Breathing roughens. One dancer nearly slips during a landing and catches herself hard enough to bruise.
Larissa watches impassively.
“You are tired,” she says. “How devastating.”
The girl lowers her eyes.
“Again.”
No one argues.
You dance until your calves burn violently beneath your skin. Again until your toes feel blistered raw inside the pointe shoes. Again until the studio begins narrowing strangely at the edges from exhaustion.
Larissa’s attention settles on you more and more frequently as rehearsal drags on. You have never decided whether this is fortunate.
“You anticipate the turn before you trust it,” she tells you after stopping the music mid-combination. “Why?”
“I thought—”
“There is your first mistake.”
A few dancers laugh behind you.
Heat flashes across your face, but Larissa is already moving closer, her expression sharpening rather than softening at your embarrassment.
“You think too much while dancing,” she says. “I can practically see the calculations happening behind your eyes. Ballet is not mathematics.”
You nod quickly.
Larissa sighs through her nose, dissatisfied. “Again.”
You reset position.
The pianist begins once more.
This time you force yourself not to think about Larissa watching. Not about the mirrors. Not about the audience that will eventually fill velvet seats and decide, in a matter of minutes, whether you are extraordinary or forgettable.
You turn.
Land cleanly.
Continue.
The sequence finishes without error.
Silence.
Larissa studies you for one long moment. Her face gives almost nothing away, but you have become disturbingly skilled at reading the tiny shifts in her expression. The slight easing around her mouth. The near-invisible softening in her eyes when something pleases her despite herself.
“Better,” she says at last.
The single word settles into your bloodstream like alcohol.
Praise from Larissa is dangerous. Too rare not to become holy.
You spend the next twenty minutes chasing the sound of it again.
—
During the break, Isabelle collapses dramatically beside you against the mirrored wall, her tights already laddering slightly at one knee.
“I think she enjoys this,” she mutters, gulping water. “Not ballet. Human suffering specifically.”
You smile faintly, unwinding the ribbons from your ankles. “You say that every rehearsal.”
“And every rehearsal I’m right.”
Across the room, Larissa stands near the piano speaking quietly with the accompanist. Winter light spills pale across her profile from the windows behind her, turning the edges of her hair almost silver. Even exhaustion seems elegant on her.
Your gaze catches there too long.
Isabelle notices immediately. Of course she does.
“Oh, you’re doomed.”
You look away at once. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I really don’t.”
“She humiliates you publicly ten times a day and you look at her like she hung the moon over the theater district.”
You feel your stomach drop hard enough to hurt.
“Keep your voice down.”
Isabelle snorts softly. “Please. She probably noticed your crush before you did.”
“No, she didn’t.”
As if summoned by the conversation itself, Larissa looks up.
Her eyes meet yours across the room with terrifying immediacy. Not accidental. Never accidental.
You look away first.
Cowardly.
Necessary.
“Break is over,” Larissa says.
The room moves instantly.
—
Partnering rehearsal begins badly and deteriorates from there.
The White Swan pas de deux requires a kind of trust that exhaustion makes difficult. Girls miss cues. Hands slip. Timing fractures apart under pressure. Larissa’s patience thins visibly as the afternoon drags on, though her anger remains frighteningly controlled.
“You dance like frightened prey animals,” she says after one particularly clumsy sequence. “Odette is not fragile because she lacks strength. She is fragile because the world insists upon breaking her.”
No one responds.
Larissa gestures toward center floor. “You. Demonstrate.”
Of course she means you.
You step forward while the others retreat slightly toward the mirrors. Your partner takes position behind you, one hand hovering carefully near your waist.
Larissa circles once around the pair of you, gaze sweeping critically over every line of your posture.
“Chin,” she says.
You lift it.
“Higher.”
Her fingers settle briefly beneath your jaw, tilting your face upward with careful pressure. The touch is entirely practical. Professional. Yet your pulse reacts with humiliating speed anyway, stumbling unevenly beneath your ribs.
Larissa’s thumb lingers for the briefest moment before she steps away.
“There,” she says. “Odette does not beg to be loved. She expects it.”
You spend the next several seconds trying to remember how breathing works.
The music begins.
You dance.
Or attempt to.
Larissa watches with such unwavering intensity that your awareness of her becomes almost physical. You can feel her attention moving over every imperfect angle before she even speaks.
Halfway through the turn sequence, your balance falters.
“Stop.”
The music cuts abruptly.
Silence folds over the studio.
Larissa approaches slowly, her cane tapping once against the floorboards.
“You’re afraid of the turn.
“I’m not.”
“You are,” she says calmly. “You anticipate failure before your body has even moved.”
Shame burns beneath your skin.
Larissa steps closer. Too close.
Her hands settle against your waist to correct your alignment, firm enough that you can feel the exact span of her fingers through the thin fabric of your leotard. Your body goes painfully still beneath the contact.
“Feel where your center actually is,” she murmurs. “You keep abandoning it.”
The warmth of her palms lingers long after she steps away.
“Again.”
This time the turn lands perfectly.
Larissa’s expression shifts almost imperceptibly. Not satisfaction exactly, but something adjacent to it.
Then she says, “Now do it consistently,” and the moment disappears.
—
By the end of rehearsal, your right foot is bleeding.
You noticed it nearly an hour ago when pain sharpened suddenly beneath your toes, warm wetness gathering inside the pointe shoe. You continued dancing anyway. Most dancers would. Ballet has a way of teaching people that the body is negotiable.
The studio empties slowly around you once Larissa dismisses the class. Girls limp toward the locker rooms carrying dance bags and exhaustion alike, complaining softly about bruised arches and strained calves.
You sit on the bench and begin massaging your thighs.
“You’re staying again?” Isabelle asks.
“I need to practice.”
“You need a priest. And medical intervention.”
You smile faintly. “I was off during the turns.”
“You were exhausted.”
Larissa noticed.
The thought arrives instantly, shamefully warm.
Isabelle studies you for a moment, concern dimming the usual amusement in her face. “She’s harder on you than everyone else.”
“That’s because she thinks I need improvement.”
“No,” Isabelle says quietly. “I think it’s because she sees more in you.”
Before you can answer, the locker room door opens.
Silence follows immediately.
Larissa steps inside. “Everyone out.”
No one argues.
Within moments, only the two of you remain.
Larissa waits until the door closes behind the last dancer before looking at you fully.
“You stayed after rehearsal yesterday.”
“Yes, Miss Weems.”
“And the night before.”
You nod.
“Why?”
The truthful answer catches painfully behind your ribs.
Because your attention feels like oxygen.
Because when you look at me, I stop feeling ordinary.
Instead you say, “I need to improve.”
Larissa watches you in silence for several long seconds. The fluorescent lights flatten the room harshly, but they do strange things to her eyes, turning them pale enough to look almost silver.
“You confuse suffering with discipline,” she says eventually.
“I don’t.”
“You do.” Her voice remains calm. “You romanticize your exhaustion. You wear it like proof of devotion.”
The accuracy of it leaves you briefly speechless.
Larissa has always possessed a terrifying ability to reach directly into the softest parts of people and press there without hesitation.
“You think destroying yourself for ballet makes you exceptional,” she continues. “It does not. It makes you interchangeable.”
The words hurt because they are true. Worse because some part of you still wants to impress her by surviving them.
Larissa sighs softly then, almost tired. “Studio.”
You obey at once.
Of course you do.
The mirrors look different at night. Less honest, perhaps. The darkness outside the windows turns them strange, reflections layered over shadow until bodies appear ghostlike at the edges.
Rain taps softly against the glass while you tighten your ribbons.
Larissa stands near the piano watching.
“You favor your left foot when tired,” she says.
You glance up too quickly. “I’m fine.”
“That was not an invitation to lie.”
Heat creeps into your face.
Larissa gestures once toward center floor. “Show me the turns.”
Your muscles ache violently now that rehearsal has ended. Fatigue settling properly into the joints and tendons. Still, you rise.
The music begins softly from the stereo.
You dance.
One turn.
Then another.
Halfway through the third, pain slices sharply through your foot and your balance wavers.
“Stop.”
You freeze immediately.
Larissa crosses the room without hurry, though something sharper has entered her expression now.
“You’re injured.”
“No.”
Her gaze drops toward the faint stain spreading through the satin of your pointe shoe.
Then back to your face.
“You are a very poor liar.”
Before you can answer, Larissa crouches before you.
The movement startles you enough that your breath catches outright.
Her hands close carefully around your ankle, professional and efficient in a way that only worsens things. She unties the ribbons slowly, fingertips brushing occasionally against your skin with absent precision.
You stare helplessly at the pale crown of her hair beneath the dim lights.
Larissa removes the shoe, the blood-speckled padding earning a quiet exhale through her nose.
“There it is.”
Humiliation floods you immediately. You feel absurdly close to apologizing.
“You continued dancing on this,” Larissa says.
“I could still dance.”
“That was not the question.”
Her hand remains lightly wrapped around your ankle, warm and steady.
Rain gathers harder against the windows.
“You are reckless,” she says quietly. “And you mistake recklessness for ambition.”
The words settle heavily between you.
Then her thumb brushes once against the inside of your ankle, thoughtless perhaps, and your entire body reacts like struck wire.
Larissa notices. Of course she notices.
Her eyes lift slowly to yours.
A pause opens between you, sharp enough to split skin.
Then she releases you and stands.
“Again,” she says.
You stare at her. “I can barely stand.”
“Yes.”
No sympathy. No softness. Only that terrible unwavering expectation.
“You want Odette,” Larissa continues. “You want greatness. Yet the moment pain becomes inconvenient, you expect permission to stop.”
“I didn’t ask to stop.”
“No,” she says softly. “You asked to be admired for continuing. You wanted me to see, to notice that you endured the pain. And you thought that I would allow you to stop.”
The words land cleanly because they are true.
Outside, rain streaks silver down the darkened windows. The studio has gone almost black beyond the overhead lights, the mirrors no longer reflecting properly. Only fragments now. A shoulder. A hand. Larissa’s pale face suspended faintly in glass.
Your foot throbs violently inside the ruined shoe.
Every muscle in your body aches.
Still, when Larissa repeats, “Again,” you straighten instinctively beneath the command, and hate the part of yourself that feels proud for obeying.
In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness —from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis. —Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (insp)
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