"I've never played guitar, just piano. My ear's not perfect but it's good, I can tell if it's in tune with itself even if I can't tell whether the A is 440 or, uh, 441 or what."

"Perfect - then you'll just need to tune the A string from my tuning fork, and then you can check the rest?" 

He gets it out for her, and then shows her how to turn the pegs to tighten or loosen the strings. 

"So this one is the A string, though you'll want it an octave down from the tuning fork's A. I use standard tuning most of the time, that's E, A, D, G, B, and E." He points out the relevant strings. "You can tune it different ways, though, makes some songs easier to play."  

Rebecca nods, strikes the fork, plucks the A. She knows to twist pegs tighter for higher and looser for lower and does this very conservatively to be gentle on Gloria.

Then in a few minutes she'll have a beautifully tuned instrument and also a bit more familiarity handling a guitar. 

"Want me to teach you how to play some standard chords? You really don't need many, for some songs - any chance you know that one by, um, I think Bob Marley? That goes -" and he sings:

Don't worry, about a thing / Cause every little thing, gonna be all right

"I've heard it but don't know all the words for sure. I know the chorus though."

"We can do it together. Here, you only actually need three chords, A, D, and E - let me show you where your fingers go for those..." 

Vanya is a very patient instructor. One of his first pieces of advice is that she's definitely going to want to cut her nails. 

"I don't have a nail trimmer."

"I can ask Cassie for you later. She's better at keeping sharps from going bad." Also, importantly, she's ALLOWED to have any in her ROOM. She's allowed to have more doses of meds like ibuprofen, too. Vanya doesn't even have any idea if you can overdose on ibuprofen (and has not actually tried to find this out) but Larisa isn't taking any chances there. 

"Okay. I can tell it'd make it easier here but I don't want to bite my nails, they'd get raggedy." Rebecca is clearly very unfamiliar with how to handle a fretted instrument but she's musical as all get-out.

"Fair enough!" It's going to be a little awkward pressing the strings down against the frets with longish nails, but it seems like she can manage for now. "Don't overdo it," he warns her. "Your fingers are going to get sore. If you play a lot you'll get calluses." 

And once she's drilled all three chords, and transitioning between them, Vanya gets out his book of songs and chords! He memorized a lot of songs before coming here, and wrote them down before he could forget them. 

Rebecca has at least seen people playing guitar before and has the general idea. She strums through songs she knows and sings them.

This is fun! Vanya does not normal get nearly enough opportunities to SING with PEOPLE. He sings along, occasionally making up harmonies.  

- and then, in the course of flipping through his songbook (a LOT of which is in Russian), she lands on On My Own from Les Mis, and Vanyel freezes, goes rigid, and then two lines into it bursts into tears.

- Rebecca flattens her hand on the strings. "Vanya?"

He holds up a hand in what's probably meant to be a reassuring gesture or possibly just a 'leave me alone' gesture, and keeps sobbing. 

She sets Gloria gently in its case and hugs him.

Hug! Vanya will absolutely accept a hug! And then end up sort of clinging to Rebecca while sobbing on her shoulder! 

This part is not as fun as the singing part but she is getting paid for it and it's not that bad. Pat pat.

Vanyel manages to get himself calmed down after a few minutes of hug and pats. He sniffles, and pulls away from her. "Sorry. You - it's not your fault." 

"Is it - Les Mis, or just that song, or -?"

"I - I - I can't talk about it, please -" And now he's right on the edge of crying again, just from thinking about trying to answer that question. 

"- okay. Sorry."

"It's not your fault." He says it in a very small voice. "I - you can keep practicing if you want..." Vanya, for his part, is going to huddle on his bed and hug himself until he feels calmer and more able to exist in another person's presence. Right now it feels like his skin might peel off if she looks at him too hard, which is one of the many, many feelings he really hates. 

She picks up Gloria again and finds the next song in Vanya's book and strums along. Figures out another chord on her own. Her fingers are starting to hurt and she can feel mana accumulating, now that she knows to look for it.

Music. Music is always a good thing, even when everything hurts and he just wants everything to go away and stop and leave him alone so he can curl up and go to sleep and never wake up. 

Another song later, Vanya actually feels okay enough to give Rebecca some halfhearted feedback on chord fingerings.