At around three in the morning, a familiar wail began to echo through the house.
It woke Roderich, but he was too disoriented to get up just yet. He felt his wife shifting awake beside him.
The boy outside kept crying.
Eventually, Erzsébet tugged on his arm. "Heinrich's up."
"Mhm," he muttered.
"Can you go tonight? Please?"
He reluctantly pushed himself on his side to face her, trying to ignore the sobs from down the hall. "I never know what to do, though. I think I scare him."
"You have to try, Roderich," she begged. "I can't keep going every night. I need to sleep."
"But-" he began to say before the realization of how deep the circles under Erzsébet's eyes were getting shut him right up. "All right, but what do you do for him?"
"I sing," she mumbled, tired eyes barely open.
"Okay." He didn't feel okay. He felt like he was auditioning for Julliard all over again, except the audition lasted significantly longer, involved a child's life, and included himself as a judge. "Go to sleep. Good night."
She didn't respond, but he had the odd feeling that she was still awake.
"It's me, Heinrich," Roderich tried as he turned on the hall lights. "Just Vati."
The cries stopped for a second to listen to him. But only for a second.
"I'm going to play some songs for you," he continued, trying to speak clearly, "so come into the living room."
He regretted getting tile for the hall upstairs now, what with the echoing and the cold biting into his bare feet. The living room wasn't much better, but it had the couch in the corner for Heinrich and, of course, the piano. It'd been... about two weeks, he realized, since he'd played it, what with how busy he'd been. The keys were cooler than he'd remembered.
He heard Heinrich follow him in (it'd be difficult not to), so he started to play some Brahms.
It really frustrated him, when playing lullabies, how mechanical he sounded. His fingers knew how stiff he was when he wanted to sing one himself, or count sheep, or tell Heinrich a bedtime story. It hurt to see the little one make a face and snuggle closer into Erzsébet, who always knew what to say and how to say it. God, how he'd wanted to be a good Vati, but he was too cold, and-
Well, thinking like that surely wasn't helping his playing. He paused, and sighed. What was Heinrich's favorite song again? The one about the soldier boy? He played the first few notes, tentatively…
And Heinrich started to quiet down.
A jolt of hope surged through him, and he kept up the rest of the line. He heard the boy hiccup.
Roderich played the next few bars as a sort of question-and-answer with Heinrich's reactions, and once he was sure he had the child listening he played extra-staccato here and extra-regal there, trying to convey the explosiveness of the fight and the pride with which the soldiers carried themselves home. He finished it off with a playful flourish- because the soldier boy hadn't been to a real war, he'd probably just won a game with his friends from preschool, and maybe his mother was calling him home- and Roderich let his fingers rest on the last chord, satisfied.
It echoed around the house, bright and warm.
No crying accompanied it.
Roderich breathed in slowly, realizing that his job was done, at least for tonight. He stood up, legs shaking, and stared at the piano keys for a long moment.
He hurried out of the room, avoiding even a glance back at the couch where he knew Heinrich wasn't, not really, and shut the door as quickly as he could without slamming it. As he started back down the hall, though, he noticed that Heinrich's bedroom door had opened somehow.
Inside, it was just as they'd left it, but the sheets were tossed aside; Roderich straightened them out, trying and failing not to tear up. Before he left, he noticed Heinrich's toy soldier watching him from the windowsill.
He picked it up tenderly, as if it were his son. He hadn't wanted to return so soon after Heinrich's funeral, but perhaps he'd set it out on the grave tomorrow.