Notes: While sitting in a café during episode one, Shuichi asks Hiro if it's natural to focus solely on your talent. That moment prompted me to write this ficlet, and I hope you like it.

It was a cold night, the chill wind made me shiver and huddle inside my thick coat. My breath fogged in the air and I could feel my face going numb, but I didn't care. The beer bottle was a cold hardness in my hand, the alcohol burning in my throat as I gulped down some of the bitter liquid.

It's funny, isn't it? I think I'd had about two drinks in my entire life, I didn't really like beer all that much, but it seemed fitting somehow, because weren't you supposed to drink when you were lonely and depressed?

Maybe depressed isn't the right word for how I was feeling. I was just… alone. Lonely doesn't quite capture the dark, empty feeling that was growing inside me, like a sucking vortex that consumed all emotion until I was nothing but an empty shell of a person.

My pocket was lumpy, the sheets of notebook paper covered in my lyrics were stuffed into a ball as if they were trash. I nearly thought they were. It wasn't that they weren't good, there was some nice descriptions, some nice emotions, but it was a distant knowledge to me. I thought them up, I wrote them down, but they held no meaning to me, which I suppose is one of life's great ironies. I had given up everything for my art, for my talent, and now, I could barely bring myself to care about it.

Everything. Was that true? Had I really given up everything? I still had Hiro, my best and truest friend, and I suppose I sort of had Mr. Sakano, but he just appreciated me for my talent. So, I had one person, one thing besides my music to live for. That was truly pathetic. I'd had lots of friends once, I used to go out to clubs and parties all the time. But… now I just had my music and my one friend.

I knew it was my fault that I was alone, that I had pushed everyone away, ignored them until they stopped bothering me. I'd just wanted to concentrate on my music, that was all. I hadn't really wanted everyone to abandon me, just to give me a little piece. How could they expect me to write good music when they were always pestering me?

They say that you should be careful what you wish for, and it's true. They say that too much of a good thing can be bad, and that's true too. I thought that if I could just finish my songs, then I could start socialising again. What I hadn't realised was that I'd never stop writing songs. My music was a huge part of me, and it always will be. And now I'm all alone, and I don't know how to escape the pain. I'd thought about drowning my sorrows, hence the beer, but it turned out they could swim, and all the beer was doing was giving me one hell of a headache.

I sighed and dug my lyrics out of my pocket, struggling to unwrap them from the tight ball. I read my hastily-scrawled words and thought about what they meant. It wasn't so much a love song as a song about losing love, about losing life. I've never been in love, so I'm not sure how accurate the words were, but the feeling was the same-that deep, mind-numbing ache that fills your soul because something's missing from your life, something that used to be everything to you, something that used to keep you alive. That is something that I know about all too well. I have to wonder what Hiro will think when he sees the new lyrics. I have to wonder if I care.

God, I was scared. I was surprised to realise it, but I was terrified. I was so terribly scared that this would be my life now, just living without being truly alive, existing without feeling. I'd thought that my talent was everything, that it would somehow keep me alive, that it could take the place of my friends. I was wrong.

But it was natural, right? To focus on what you're good at?

That was just natural… right?