Echoes
Sayaka never came back.
The details he remembers are few, yet clear; it is all he has left of how it went, the day he was told those four words from a distance. The door barely open on his mother's face, the dim light past the sunset, the way his fingers had come to a halt.
The music had broken in half, and there had been silence. The tune was incomplete. Like Sayaka, he had thought, for reasons he still cannot find.
The next breath Kyousuke had taken in was freezing. The bare walls of his room, which he had never cared about before, had been enough to make it worse.
It still comes back to him, sometimes. It felt cold. Kyousuke had felt cold all week, until it had become months, and years — a layer of ice in his memory, never bound to go away.
Sporadic as it may be, it still stings like the first time. In the rare occasions he thinks of it, he also remembers the rigid frame of his violin.
When he got the news, he was playing. As always.
He wonders, shivering, what else he has lost to the music.
He is a teacher for most of his younger years, when the costs of travelling around for auditions are too high for his parents alone. He drags himself from town to town, along all sorts of railway lines, to deal with young kids and their first steps in his world.
Music is his whole world, now. It is bound to be. It may not be easy at all, but something leads him along; no matter how important, everything else has to wait.
It feels like following his end of a pact. Unwavering, he complies.
In quite a long time, while drinking a cup of tea with him, his old teacher will tell him about pupils they happened to share. Kyousuke's students all play with the same timbre, he will say — melancholic, passionate, with a fierce yet tender longing.
Kyousuke will think about it, and reply, in a puzzled tone, that he never recognized any of it in his playing.
His mentor will laugh. It is only natural. In the end, some things of ourselves are not ours to see.
Hitomi bursts into tears at his fifteenth rehearsal of the Ave Maria. She is inconsolable for the rest of the day. He carefully lays his violin on the table, holding her like fragile glass, and for once he is not afraid of asking why she is sad.
"I don't know," she whispers.
Neither finds anything more to say.
One night, Kyousuke dreams of conducting an orchestra that never ends.
He plays in turmoil, but his tune knows no joy — it is broken, dark, warped like a scream. All around, a jumble of colours bends to the music, rebuilding itself with his every move.
And it grows clear, all at once, that he must play to keep existing. It is he who creates and destroys that entire world.
He falls in fear as his body is torn to pieces, and the killer wraps him in a kiss that feels like ice. Only then, in between sleep and wake, he links the nightmare to the truth — what he has just known is the touch of desperation.
He wakes up in deep confusion, and forgets soon. He never understands.
He is grateful.
The thought spills out with his tears, in the closing notes of the concert. He is grateful to have them, and to have all of this. He is grateful to have this again.
Grateful to whom?
He cannot answer the question. It stays, unheard, in the strings of his violin.
In one of his solo concerts, Kyousuke notices a change in the front row.
The seats are saved for faces he knows. Between family, agents and friends, he finds in them the diverse group of people who never put their faith in him to rest.
The young woman in the last seat to the left is none of these. She does not belong there — it is the first thought reason suggests.
But the feeling vibrates in his instrument, like the echo of a past fate, and he does not dare shake it off. She is the one person meant to be there tonight.
He catches her eyes just before the first note, and they do not leave him be until the end.
Everything in her speaks of hatred. Hatred soaks her velvet dress, hatred swells her gaze. Even the fierce red of her hair reflects how powerful that rage must be — he must hold on to his violin as he plays, unable to watch, almost afraid to breathe.
In his mind, her face sets the theatre aflame before the applause.
He hears nothing. All he can see, in that moment, are her tears. She is crying hard enough for him to see — for a split second, it hurts him like an incandescent dagger.
When she rushes out without a word, Kyousuke has no time to wonder. He must play on. Before being discarded with the countless things without a meaning, the memory of her lingers for years.
Another birthday, another perfect gathering.
His father, happy and proud of a son who is now renowned in more than one country, invites Kyousuke to look at the smiling faces all around him.
He observes them closely. There is not much difference outside their features — all of them shine with admiration, full of an adoring look that knows no question.
It almost seems as if they were bound by a spell. For a moment, he feels uneasy.
"What more could you ask for?"
And Kyousuke knows he would like to say something, but he can't.
All throughout his life, there has been a truth just out of reach.
Kyousuke knows about it. He has felt it countless times, accompanying him throughout the events. The attempts to identify it, to give it a context in an existence dominated by practice and perfection, has always been at his fullest.
Maybe, he has often thought sadly, he is not the right person for that.
It takes a blessed day for a change to happen, that much is for sure. And it may be in his instrument, or in the soft light of the theatre, or maybe the fact that Hitomi is by his side — there is an unfamiliar vibration in the air of this night.
He does not really notice until it is too late to try.
Still, it works on its own. Somehow. He opens his eyes, and the applause takes him by surprise — it is too great of a gift, too long of a road, a blessing he may have missed anytime.
The truth is so close, yet so obscure. He cannot reach for it, nor hold it like Hitomi's hand. Even so, for the first and one time, he can vaguely trace its shape with his heart.
He understands what it means. It is the feeling of something missing, in the life of a man who has had it all.
It is then that his lips move, detached from his mind, to speak a word he had forgotten.
"Sayaka…"
Kyousuke cannot see the truth. He has never had a chance to know. But this is the closest he will ever get to it.
He can give it a name, and that much is enough.