After far too long, here is the companion fic to Skyline, written in a style more conducive to Michiru's somewhat un-nerving artistic nature rather than Haruka's more clear-cut and less emotionally open ramblings (guess which one I find easier to write :P). It jumps around a good deal more, being less of a semi-isolated incident and more of a series of possibly-connected vignettes in the life of a teenage musical prodigy that could possibly be construed as a coming out story. Of sorts. Now split into two chapters for easier reading!

Along my line before I derailed on a grammar nazi tangent (or possibly cosine), happy National Coming Out Day to anyone it happens to apply to. God bless all you crazy brave-ass people.

More details at the footnote of chapter 2.

11:38 PM, Tuesday, June 11

By the age of 15, she reflects, a good number of the circumstances and events compiled in her life thus far could be described using modifiers ranging from 'daring' to 'blatantly foolish'.

Daring was that first day, when her world denied gods and separated itself into light and dark; through the illumination she subconsciously understood where her talents lay, and followed the trail they paved from her bedroom into her mother's study. She climbed and stood upon the ancient chair, feet crushed into the velvet with a silent gasp of dust and a wooden creak; the girl reached for the uppermost shelf from which she withdrew the last lingering coffin of the past.

Such drama. Such pretention. It's addictive to remember petty things in ways that let them pass as grand. She would not have thought the curiosity regarding her late mother's abandoned mahogany cave to be anything more than mundane when she was five.

But today the artist in her remembered it in those flowery terms. The child smiled at the old violin and carried it to her parents, the little girl bowed stoically towards the recital audience with a smaller version of the instrument, the preteen accepted the original, and today the teenager leans against the sink and stares at the face in the mirror that, underneath the mascara and faint blush and coral lipstick, belongs to her. Belongs, or is clutched unto her possession? Perhaps she should redirect her career towards writing. Certainly, it would entail less schlepping about with a pack of other musical prodigies, banging along in a suspension-challenged bus surrounded by the tuba section cleaning spit out of their valves.

She sighs, reaches for a removal pad, and feels very old.

3:54 AM, Tuesday, June 11

Absolutely nobody in the hotel room snores. This is an incredible feat, as she'd have guessed that last night's standmate would, judging only by said individual's perpetual allergies. But the girl in question remains entirely soundless, neatly stretched along the three-cushion expanse of the hotel's sofa, which is supposed to fold out into a cot, but is broken, leaving Prodigy Soloist Kaioh Michiru to sleep in a reclining chair and stare at the murky shapes of the other ten girls in the room, none of whom seem similarly stricken by insomnia or crippling loneliness.

She can always tell she's lonely when she actually misses the night two years ago, on tour with the old group in some part of eastern Europe, when percussionist Aoki Hokuto held her hand in the elevator, before she started attracting enough attention to earn a soloist role and propel herself above the 'gofer' status. She was thirteen, and stupid, and they were supposed to go find a crate of rosin in some truck someplace that she couldn't remember, but Aoki had volunteered to show her where it was, so there they were together.

Not that she knew him particularly well, nor was he a stranger, but they had certainly chatted a few times when she had tired of the infantile spats breaking out among her fellow female orchestra members, and had ventured off into the alleyways along the backs of myriad concert halls to breath some comparatively fresh air. It always smelled of cold ozone and pavement, no matter where they performed, but it also held an aroma of clarity that made nerving herself to step out onstage with a thing made of wood—and be expected to generate nice sounds by scraping another thing made of hair across it—bearable.

That was where she first found Hokuto; one year older, a few months into the first wild rushes of testosterone, with his angular elbows, bony hands, and still-soft facial features topped off by a head of childishly bowl-cut black hair. "Kaioh-san," he greeted her respectfully, still surprised when she nearly opened the door onto him. Eventually, the reflex wore off, and he remembered that respect was not the way to behave as a teenage boy, and swept the unfortunate haircut out of his eyes, leaning against the side of the building with his tie nowhere to be seen.

"Aoki-san." His display was not in any way either threatening—or impressive—so she nodded slightly in acknowledgement—reveling in still being about a half-inch taller than he was—and lightly stepped off down the alley to a spot where she could meditate her way into focus.

Unsurprisingly, he followed, at a slight distance of four feet, fumbling a packet from his pocket. "Would you like…I mean, want a cigarette?" His voice had only just begun to break, dropping low without any of the rasp or resonance age and hormones and the smoking would eventually bring him.

"No thank you, Aoki-san."

"Hey," he said nervously, and dropped the cigarette he had been trying to align in his too-large hands. "Hokuto is fine. Really."

She smiled serenely, and asked him what he played; she hadn't seen him before.

"Percussion." The veil he wore finally gave up on maturity and let the little boy come back, at least for a while. "It's hard to see me behind all the stuff, that's probably why you didn't recognize me. Oh, and I also got a haircut because Miya-jun said I looked like the fifth Beatle."

Serenity gave way to an actual expression of mirth, and she forgot about meditation. "Miyaji-san," she emphasized the more correct title for their overseer, "Can be anal at times." It did explain the insipid hairstyle, and as soon as Aoki mentioned it she remembered a boy with a longer-yet-equally-blah haircut swaggering around while casually toting a perpetually-noisy rain stick. Oh well.

For some reason she ended up talking to him again the next day, and a few times on the bus the next week, and so a few months after that first encounter in the alleyway it was not strange that he tentatively reached for her grasp. Their fingers matched a little awkwardly, and it took some rearranging, but eventually they just stood for the remainder of the trip eight floors down, each hesitant to move in case the other might decide to break the tentative lifeline.

They were thirteen and fourteen, and they were stupid, and when they find the crate of rosin on the seat of an old white rental van, Aoki got a few boxes out and stuffed them in a crumpled plastic Tesco bag produced from his jacket pocket, a lonely remnant from another tour. She looked at him for a moment, hand frozen in place as though it still held his, heart oddly still with heat hammering in her face. "How many did we need?"

"Uh. Four. Five for good luck." He dropped another into the bag; it missed entirely, bounced off his shin, and clattered under the truck. "Uh." He said again. They became so quiet, Michiru could hear the sound of the cello section grinding into tune across the parking lot indoors.

"Kaioh-san," he whispered suddenly, and she stopped hearing the unwieldy low 'C'. "Do you ever get stage fright?"

"No," she replied abruptly, the word starting and stopping all in one barky jerk.

"You're really good though. Crazy good. I listened to you practice last night. Well, in the auditorium, when it was empty and stuff, and I think you sound better than Kouga-kun." The name of the current soloist was spoken quickly, but held a gravitas all its own. "I'm not kidding. And he has stage fright so bad he almost pissed himself yesterday when he had to go on because he thought he hadn't practiced enough so that that agent who's stalking us all wouldn't pick him and…"

That time her serene smile was entirely serene in the most horrible way possible. "Hokuto-kun, I cannot quite figure out if you are here to talk about what an overworked, unhappy young man Shinkawa Kouga is, or if you are actually flirting with me."

"Uh," he said for the third time, and a large, stupid grin visible even under the parking lot streetlight spread across his face, because she finally used his given name. They were thirteen and fourteen, and they were very lonely, and late that night after the performance she let him into her dressing room.

The next morning, after she had snuck back into her hotel room, Miyaji woke her up early to tell her that her father was there to speak with her about another agent, who turned out to be the stalker Kouga was trying so hard to impress. Oh well. She briefly felt bad; first because she would be leaving the orchestra for, as Stalker Man says, a 'more talented venue'; and second, Shinkawa's expressive face looked as though it had been erased.

She was thirteen, she was still lonely, and she did not say goodbye to Aoki Hokuto when she left, because vomiting in the bathroom at 0300 hours before slipping out was goodbye enough.

Reflecting back on her makeshift farewell, it occurs to her that she had forgotten to flush.

At fourteen (and-a-half), she was still stupid, deciding she was going to have a tumultuous affair with Imahara Kakashi, the cellist, an affair tumultuous enough to both shut up the other girls' clueless comments and possibly satisfy that aching want in her chest that drives her to fruitless tears at night. Kakashi was two years older than her, worked out when he wasn't practicing, kept himself well-groomed, and his brown hair was parted on the side in the most honest way imaginable. In short, tolerable haircut aside, he was very like posturing, puberty-stricken Hokuto, for entirely different reasons. This time she bothered next to none with buildup, and they skipped the awkward meetings stage entirely, preferring to make out in restrooms, hallways, and even just inside a dressing room whose owner was out to lunch. It was, in fact, more than a little daring.

What remained of her mother's morals screamed at her that this was the part in her life she would look back on as blatant foolishness, but she decided that a real musician ought to have a background for her music, and a tumultuous affair was just perfect for lending passion to each measure. So she played Kakashi into the shimmering eighth notes and the whistling thirty-seconds, blazing from first to third to fourth to sixth position and back again, and managed enough feigned tumultuousness to entirely forget being lonely.

In retrospect, Kakashi was quite the gentleman to allow her to use him for a year, too afraid to commit to him, and too afraid to say she does not want to repeat her mistake with a percussionist from a world that feels far away to her now. Eventually, he too tired of their façade, and so one night she found herself naked, in a hotel bed, with a large, boy-shaped lump on top of the sheets a few feet away and looking at her. The shadows pooled indigo in his face, dripping down the narrow, chiseled musculature of his perfect jaw and into the crevice below his Adam's apple. He wore no shirt.

There and then was the opportunity to properly exercise innate female curiosity by checking for such necessary traits as rippling abs and defined pectorals, but her eyes did not delve below into the deep blue shadows trickling around the highlighted ridges of his collarbone. They froze looking at the polka-dot pattern of the pillowcase where it crinkled and was lost beneath his cheek, so she couldn't count more than ten in each row, and possibly just eight where a column of marching maroon dots met his nose.

He looked back, and she wondered if she was lying on polka-dots as well, and whether he was losing count of them the way she was.

Neither quite knew when or how to begin, but somehow they did, and it was a tangle of awkwardness in which neither managed to make eye contact with the other. Michiru felt as though she ought to put forth more of an effort, and reached for his belt. The shadow of her hand, cast by the lardy yellow glow of the lamp, soars out giant-sized and rippled across the topography of the upset bedding. Halfway to the dim metallic glint-in-the-dark, it was met by a larger patch of encroaching blackness, and stopped. His grip engulfed hers, gently, and she half-imagined their fingers nesting until their palms pressed together; even half-imagining felt like a smouldering leaden weight somewhere in the crevasse of her cringing stomach. But his fingers were too large, so he wrapped them over hers instead, folding them, segmented, into a soft fist which he gently held in place.

"Kaioh-san," he said in that clipped voice she liked to imagine she loved, "I'm very sorry."

"Sorry?" she almost laughed from the absurdity of it all, the bile in her throat rising, because of course she knew this was coming. She was terrified to think that she was relieved. Her heart convulsed—beat?—in a way that wracked her entire frame; the rhythm spun around her like the arms of a galaxy, pinwheeling indomitably around that leaden weight. It contracted violently in protest, just once, for the last time.

He sighed, releasing her hand to roll onto his back, and suddenly she was very aware of the two years separating them. "I should have stopped you earlier," he murmured, and rubbed two fingers around the ridge of his fine-boned brow: a delicate, deliberate motion that only solidifies (in its painful, archetypical way) what she had been suspecting as the reason behind their eleven-almost-twelve months of willing celibacy together. She counted polka-dots. "No, I should have stopped me. This was…"

Automatically, she finished for him. "A mistake." Flat. Emotionless. Her hand was still lost in the no-man's land between them, questing where nerve endings ceased to respond to her attempt at drawing it back.

He looked at her quickly, levering himself upward somewhat with a small repositioning of his left elbow; the bed squeaked incriminatingly, as though attempting to bring the situation back to society's expected course through innuendo. They both ignored the sound. "I wouldn't say that. We're too young." And she fantasized about melting under the piercing dark eyes.

"You mean; I'm too young." And too female.

"You stopped being young the day you picked up a violin. No, let me restate that. We are too naïve," She could catch a glimpse of somebody else in the fevered, deliberately dramatic rhythm of his speech. He could have recited the Hamlet soliloquy then, and it would have seemed apt with such delivery, "opening the doors others have traveled in hopes of finding a hallway we recognize. I will admit I'm very proud to have had a girlfriend as beautiful at you." His shy, broad grin wished her luck as his words hinted at something they were both too afraid to say. Michiru wished she found that smile irresistible.

The pounding in her chest tripped heavily and landed in a shuddering mess of garbled emotion. Flatlined.

"Come here," he whispered.

He hugged her, and she almost cried (a full-on breakdown to a fellow, but recognizing that was of itself a brutal surrender and affirmation and therefore unacceptable), but Kaioh Michiru does not cry in front of almost-lovers. Never.

She slides her feet onto the floor, rearranges her attire, recites her goodbyes, ensures the door is shut behind her, walks with utmost dignity down the hall towards her own room, and pretends that her heart is breaking.

3:58 AM, Tuesday, June 11

With little ceremony, her self-induced flashback ends. My. How pointless.

A quick glance at the glowing red digits of the clock proves that less than five minutes have passed, and Michiru sighs inaudibly, because somebody has finally begun snoring. Hollow and guttural, the sound swells to fill the sweltering hotel room, and is then drowned out by a rumbling click and the dull, tremulous roar of the air conditioning unit rattling to life. It's quite an old clock; the dots do not blink to mark seconds. The display almost seems to shiver in the swampy blackness, and the longer she stares at it the more the edges of her vision feel as though they are pulling away into a crawling, velvety mass.

She should paint this; she thinks slowly, visualizing the murky browns and blunted purples she would wring out of the shadows. Then, to pull in deeper shades of green and blue to hazily forge the outlines of bedposts and nightstands and the faded, flickering gleam afforded through the closed window where it silhouettes lumpy shapes that may be people.

And right…there, she decides, narrowing her eyes into the indistinct gloom, she would emblazon the heartless crimson numerals. Flicker. 3:59 AM. Outside, a car passes, humming a muted note that goes on, and on, and on until part of her brain realizes she is asleep.

Flicker.

3:60 AM.

She can still hear the car—or at least, the memory of it lingers cohesively enough to pass as audibility—droning in the background, and is starkly aware that she is no longer in the hotel room. The baleful digital glare soaks into the world's fibers as though somebody has dropped a glass vial of some blotchy red liquid from a shelf and allowed it to shatter across the pages of a book.

It's not particularly original imagery, some part of her brain protests as the redness sweeps out towards the balding, ruin-speckled horizon. In a movie, she would find it trite and dull, and wonder what society had done to her to make this freakish notion of the entire world being wiped into something so banal. But here, imbedded in the parts of her mind that did not come and go to reason's beck and call, it can tease at the corners of memory and soak her with potentiality.

With this revelation comes the second realization that her view, from the edge of a precipice as the world falls away and burns without a sound, is not an impersonal observation. She watches from her own eyes now, and the heat burns them; she hears the nothingness with her own ears, and it seals them, and people whose faces have no name, but whose names had a face once crumble before the red wave.

It reaches the abyss on whose edge she stands.

Someone screams for her. She doesn't know the name called, only that the splintered voice is stricken in a way that quickens her with baseless sympathy shock, shredded into a pain-shattered noise that holds meaning through some context she seems to have overlooked or blatantly forgotten. Regardless, it's the last thing she hears before the tsunami of silence crashes over her. Her ears ring hollowly with the sound of soundlessness. The wave seems to break over her jaw first, snapping her neck back and driving its fist through her sinus cavity and past it into her brain. Blindly, her self fragments. There is no pain.

The world remains black when her eyes open. Hearing another car outside, she half-freezes in the makeshift bed and latches every available waking iota of mental capacity onto that comforting nasal hum. The Doppler effect sets in; the vehicle's complaint fades and is gone with all the reassurance that science and natural laws bring. It's almost as if she forces herself to think of these things in words; they filter through her mind in hollow, id-flavored sensations. I hear noises. It is light out. Hardly eloquent. She tries to resurrect the night-flavoured and despairing fluency of artistry granted her in the consuming monochrome blackness of early morning, and fails.

There is no more beautiful, tragic loneliness, she cannot dredge up any ache for either Hokuto or Kakashi, and some other girl—banished to blankets on the floor; a fate Michiru does not envy her, and which casts the soloist's own creaky recliner in a more favourable light—is grunting sleepily and awakening with a thump asher knee jerkily meets the wall.

"Mmmwm," murmurs the wall-thumper, perplexed at the sudden assault of physical objects in the unfamiliar room. "Who put that there?" She whines this very loudly, probing the still room's atmosphere for attention, which she gets.

Somebody throws a pillow at her. It sails directly past Michiru's face, and she is too groggy to blink, and too awake to really think much of the situation at all. So she yawns, not particularly gracefully or elegantly; she leans forward, rude bed protesting wheezily as she braces her hands on its dusty arms. Standing up with an unsteady wobble, she yawns a second time, and trips over to the bathroom. Everybody watches her go, because Kaioh Michiru the Prodigy Soloist hardly seems the type to wake up and go about her morning ablutions like a normal girl. After all, Prodigy Soloists typically have their own rooms, away from the unwashed masses.

Unless the manager is stingy and the hotel is too expensive and the venue is small, whereupon even the most prodigiously prodigy-esque of violinists are banished to the mortal realm. She hoped—futilely, she knew—that seeing her here, walking among them as a fellow teenage human rather than some effervescent goddess of musical adroitness, could perhaps quell their rumors. If only gossip were more controllable, and if only Kakashi were not now dating the bassist. Naturally, she was happy for him (which surprised her), but at the same time, her tumultuous affair had come out as a charade pretty quickly.

It almost hurt to hear it called that. Imahara Kakashi was gorgeous and polite and even poetically sensitive when the mood took him; overhearing the newer drivel about how she had driven him to the other side of the fence not only was embarrassing, but also far too personal for Michiru's liking. Once, she had spoken with the bass player in question, who had an accusingly denial-penetrating stare amplified by his imperious six-foot height, and whom she did not converse with again.

Some mirrors are meant to be turned face-down and forgotten.

She looks in the one in the bathroom, reaches for the fancily-named cylinder of hotel-granted 'Luxuriating All Natural Sandalwood-Jojoba Facial Wash', and feels very, very old.

This used to be a oneshot. However, 7000+ words, considering just how much jumping around I do, was too long. Thus, the remainder of the story is split off and now comprises a schnazzy new chapter 2. Thanks to petiyaka for inspiring this alteration.