Melody was not a pretty girl. But she had all the potential to become one. For one thing, her eyes were in the right place, as well as her mouth and nose, and her hair, when she took the time to grow it, trailed after her, long and brown, like the brush of corn against shadow. In her home, a place surrounded by the inland coil of winding farms instead of a river, that was all one needed to be beautiful. And yet, while she was still caught in the trap of teenage insecurity, Melody spent hours, long, painstaking hours, peeking her head over her shoulder, as her fingers tipped her hat so that the wide brim of it covered the stray flakes of hair that bobbed, like dandruff, away from her scalp.
It felt strange to say that after a while, she enjoyed the effect of having such a cover; it was like having the support of a great tree at her back, her limbs draped over by its sprawling shadows as her skin, all the peeling acne-filled acres of it, became lost under the dim light. Later, when she was sure she would be free from all the imaginary teasing she could conjure up from the people that loved her, she would let her fingers rest on her flute and blow down hard, too hard, through its open muzzle. She felt like a violent giant as she did so, the notes coming out warbled and wrong as she distorted them with her breath. Or as her teacher put it, with her teenage angst.
'You're not running a marathon,' he told her dryly. 'Let your lungs lift up; picture the sky outside and push the clouds away with your breath. You must be both strong and gentle.'
It was terrible advice; all Melody could do was imagine the sun on her head, her hat blown from her grasp by the cruel flick of wind. She could picture her hair springing free from the hands that tried to push it down, and the laughter that rose, dreadful, like a bell, up, up, higher than any scale she could manage on her own.
Her fingers fumbled and her breath blew short, sour. She treated her instrument like a trumpet and was not surprised when it betrayed her.
Her music teacher sighed. 'Ah, well,' he said. 'I guess we can't all be great musicians.'
Melody was not a confident teenage. But something happened as she grew, as her limbs unfurled and, impatiently, she brushed those stray dregs of hair back under her hat. She did not realise it straightaway, but each day she came a little closer to meeting her eyes in the mirror and refusing to see a monster there. In time, her reflection was no longer a nightmare, though a part of her still compensated by coating her body with fine dresses and wearing alcohol in her breath.
Meanwhile, her flute lay in the corner of her room, not dusty and not untouched, but still, rarely played. For just as she was starting to feel pretty on the inside, her playing felt ugly, misshapen, and wrong. For it seemed that no matter how she blew, the notes would remain as black and as heavy as the score on the sheet, rankled down with a pitch that was too low.
'Oh, my flute playing?'
She looked down at her drink, tracing the edge of her glass with a nail. It shone a vanished pink under the amber glow of the pub lights, long and lacquered, like a diamond tip.
'No, I...I'm afraid it's not coming on well.'
He friend peered at her, gaze bleary with the fine wine he had consumed. 'C'mon, don't say that. Remember how it used to feel, listening to those violins soar on those old discs we used to play? All you need is the right setting. Maybe hear something a little bit closer to home.' He hesitated. 'Hey, hey, I might know just the thing...'
He leaned close and his whisper thrummed through her ear, reaching all the way down to her toes. For a moment something stirred, re-teaching her heart an old tempo as she heard him say, 'I've got the Dark Sonata, one part of it anyway. Wanna hear me play?'
Melody was not a brave girl. But she felt courageous enough with the alcohol inside her blood, buoyed up with a buzz that when daylight came would make her scoff at her hours-younger self. She watched, back propped against the wide slant of an armchair as her friend yanked his flute towards him, his brow caught in a twist of deep concentration.
At first, nothing felt wrong. The melody was lively, risky, the thrum of jazz stuck deep within the overarcing beat as the tune swung and swooned, the flute making reedy mincemeat out of a rhythm that was just fast enough to be off-putting.
But then it came.
Like a storm, the notes caught, hooked on her flesh like fire that could eat and eat and never stay still. Melody looked down, jaws locked into a scream as her flesh curled, her skeleton yanked down into a hump that shivered. For an instant, she was a kid locked in the dark as her bones groaned and shifted, the centimetres shaven off her height as she spilled down onto the floor. More of her was comprised of pain than had ever breathed, ever lived, ever felt a spark of happiness and she sobbed, her eyes fixed on the only points of light in the dark, twin jets of flame that rolled and sizzled in her friend's skull as he screamed, fingers still moving against the flute.
'Stop,' she whispered, or sang, her voice low and stung with the sheer hurt inside. 'Stop,' she said again and closed her eyes at each tweak of agony she heard running through her own voice, at each waver in the syllables she forced out. Never, had she heard herself as a beat of sound, a collection of notes that spun through the air in a stream, like music. The information was so much, it drowned out her friend's voice. His scream died, just as she lost consciousness.
Melody had always been a good listener. She liked to think so, anyway. Sure, she couldn't always understand the instructions her music teacher gave, but she had made sure to hear each word that he spoke, and had afterwards given them her full attention.
This, though, was something else. She stirred, felt the crinkling rasp of the bandage against her face, her wrist, her arm, felt, no heard the wrinkle and press on each scrap of space she held on the inside. Metres away, she could hear the hushed whispers of grieving relatives, a dispute over a will, each word as clearly enunciated as though she was pressed up against the bed sheets of that dying person they loved. But she was a whole room away, a solid wall and possibly a few doors between them. And there were other words too, further away, painting out a steady rhythm against her skull. And more and more; the click of the nurses' heels floors below in a sharp staccato, the clap of hands under the sink as the tap turned next to an operating theatre, all resounding like the chiming click against a triangle from the percussion stand.
'No, no,' she muttered and breathed, shocked as she felt the rise of air behind each pulse of sound, how it rose, chipped, thudded out into the knell of the letters. She never knew how each decibel could be divided, the same way a music piece would fall apart if you snipped each bar on the score free.
Melody tucked her face back under the blankets. Her world was falling apart, breaking into something new and she had yet to see the rise of her own cheek against the shimmering space of a mirror.
Melody was not a great musician. But they asked her to play at the funeral anyway. She trotted in, head bowed under the weight of her new hat, though without the tuffs of hair that lined her scalp it felt lighter than ever before. Her lips twitched, bewitched into a smile as her incisors lifted free from the shadows they pressed against her lip; for she could hear them, the sympathetic whispers people held behind their hands.
It's alright, she wanted to tell them, I know what I look like. But she found that she couldn't. It would hurt them all the more, to make them feel ashamed of wanting to be kind.
So she stood, all two tiny feet of her, holding her flute in her hands and breathed. She thought of the tunes her friend had held precious, all the discs, the mp3s they had sorted through together one night and decided to keep.
'Not enough space,' he had laughed. 'There's never enough space, is there? Not for keeping all the stuff you really want.'
What, thought Melody, do I want to keep?
It felt like most of her had been washed away, burnt by something she thought she could love. What had she got left to show?
But she took a breath. And blew.
Melody was not a natural healer. But later, after seeing the softness in peoples face and the way they left the funeral, sad, but stuck on something resembling peace, Melody looked down on her flute and thought.
Each note, each quaver of breath, she had felt, could adjust, so that the notes rang out, pure and sweet in a way they never had before. She wondered if that was how Bach and Handel had felt when losing their sight, the sound becoming so much richer in return, as though God had given them recompense and told them to let their talent flow. Her world was so much brighter, in comparison. The colours had not shifted, but the sounds had. Each vibration, each turbulent heartbeat that fluttered and held, when each person spoke, how their rhythms had smoothed into one as she played...that sensation she would never forget. Could never forget.
She had not just lost something. Something had been put inside her.
Melody ran her fingers over each metallic chink on her flute. It felt less like armour and more of a skeleton, one she could bend to the pulse of blood in her veins.
A gift from the devil, she thought, and all it took was my friend. And well, me.
She smiled thinly. Alright then, she thought, if it's something you want me to receive, then I'll take it. But you won't get the last say over what I'll do with it, and if I'm lucky, Devil, or whoever you are, you might just live to regret it.
Melody had not been bred for success. She failed her first two Hunters Exam. But passed her third. And eventually, years later, she found a boy whose eyes shone, just as bright and cruel as the smear of blood she had been left with instead of a friend.
She looked at him, right into those eyes that promised death if she made the wrong sounds, or shaped the wrong words. And she realised that she was not afraid. She knew how to play this game, how to play him. She could read his heart better than a music sheet.
Bu more importantly, she felt the urge to give him peace.
'Melody,' he asked her later, 'don't you ever feel as though you would like to...hurt the person who wrote down the Devil's Score?'
He asked carefully, as though afraid of breaking her, of inserting yet more sound into the everyday sympathy that swirled around her.
She thought for a moment. She heard a bird, nestling among the cracks in the rafters, its feathers filling the ridges loose splinters had left behind. She heard pearls, scattering across a bathroom floor like the loose coils of water on a beach, as a woman sobbed over her broken necklace. She heard footsteps, heartbeats, mingling with a thrum that reminded her of car engines.
'No,' she finally said. 'I don't know what their intent was when they did such a thing, but it doesn't matter. I've had enough of hurting; I've seen enough as well. Now, I just want to play my flute and...just stop.'
Kurapika was quiet for a moment.
'It hurts?' he asked, indicating her ears.
She smiled.
'Yes,' she said simply. 'But I'm not sure who I'd be without it.'
He nodded, and then, very firmly, looked away.
Melody touched her flute, but didn't play. She wasn't sure if this was a misstep, a casual blunder, that denoted her failure to help. Or just an interlude, a moment to break open the gulf that sometimes seemed to yawn between them. Either way, she was satisfied.
Because Kurapika didn't know who he'd be without the hurt inside him either.
'I want some tea,' she found herself saying. 'Perhaps something that smells of orange blossom?'
He looked at her again and though no chuckle escaped his mouth, she could sense that he was laughing at her. His heartbeat gave it all away.
'I prefer something a little less rich myself,' he said, though Melody noted that it didn't seem to stop him approaching the nearby kettle.
She smiled. She would take this moment, this friendship for whatever it was. After all, it was something she had managed to create herself, something free from the Devil's influence. Though for how long that would remain – well, she didn't like to guess.
So for now, she would play and listen. And hope, pitifully, that it would somehow be enough.