Their icon was a humble music note, a treble clef on a lavender-colored square, and yet the sight of it made his stomach do acrobatics.
Their URL was 'pianoman', and it prompted Gilbert to send them an ask one day, asking if they named themselves after Billy Joel.
Pianoman, whose description was void of any sort of name, said they had, and Gilbert followed him immediately after that. Anyone who loved Billy Joel was well worth a follow.
/
They remained quiet mutuals for a while, occasionally reblogging each others posts. Pianoman liked Pokémon, birds and memes, too, and even tagged Gilbert's three am shitposts with something like 'lmao', but they mostly stuck to posting aesthetics. Pianoman had a classy aesthetic: gleaming pianos, breathtaking sunsets, cakes that were too pretty to eat, the handwriting of classical composers.
Then, on a Thursday morning, Pianoman said that they'd been tagged in a challenge and posted their first selfie.
Pianoman was stunning. The caption said who'd tagged him - someone with the URL queenerzsi - and he/him/they pronouns. The selfie had been taken from above, at an angle, showing the swoop of brown hair across a forehead where expressive eyebrows were raised. A pair of silver wire glasses sat upon a pointed ski-jump nose, and behind the lenses were a pair of the deepest blue eyes he'd ever seen. Pink was coloring his hallowed cheeks, and an equally pink pair of thin lips were drawn into a tiny, clearly fake smile.
Gilbert reblogged the selfie, but left the tags empty except for 'scopophobia.' No tags he wrote could express how that pretty face had made his heart skip a beat.
/
Pianoman revealed that his name was Roderich, and sometimes he made personal posts - mainly complaints about the people he worked with - in German. Some of the words he used weren't from Berlin, or just northern German dialect in general.
Gilbert sent him an anon and asked where he was from.
Roderich said he was from Vienna but currently lived in Salzburg.
Still wearing his anonymous shades, Gilbert said that he was from Berlin but was living in Munich, and playfully suggested that they meet up, he could be there in less than an hour if he did at least 241 kph the entire way.
Roderich answered with a plain, flat-coded 'perhaps someday, if I ever get to know you.'
With that, Gilbert made it his intention to do just that.
He sent anons every night, sometimes one when he was particularly tired from work, sometimes up to five if it was Sunday, his only off day, but he always kept his promise. Once, they held a conversation (or, had it been an argument?) about whether Beethoven was German or Austrian for three days in a row.
He spammed Roderich with the lenny face every Friday night at twenty hundred hours, and he snickered and liked to imagine that Roderich, all the way in Salzburg, was screaming.
/
It was August 15th, 2015 when Gilbert accidentally made an utter and complete fool of himself.
He knew Roderich was around 1500 followers now - the Austrian composed for a living, and he covered everything from Ravel to Vocaloid to Nicki Minaj. You wouldn't think that piano covers of The Queen would be enjoyable and yet Roderich proved that that was false - and he was getting asks from one of those meme posts.
'Send me a if you have a crush on me.'
Gilbert, who had trudged in at five am from covering some guy's graveyard shift at work, forgot to engage anonymous and sent Roderich at least twenty hearts before passing out.
He woke up on Sunday afternoon at thirteen hundred, brain still fuzzy and eyelids still drooping. By some miracle, his phone was still alive on 17%, and he went to plug its charger in. He lay in bed for a while, scrolling through his dash. He'd also gotten to know Roderich's friend queenerszi, and one of her fanfictions was at the very top of his dash. He noticed Kiku was on a Sailor Moon spam, Alfred was engaged in a hot debate about whether the newest Avengers film was TRULY good or not, and Feliciano had posted a cute selfie of himself with a brown tabby kitten.
After reblogging Feli's selfie and liking Alfred's argument, Gilbert rolled out of bed and went to make himself some breakfast.
He switched to his activity feed and scrolled through it while he waited for the toaster to ding. He had three new messages, but they slipped from his mind when he noticed one peculiar notification.
'Pianoman answered your ask: …..
The slowly fading sleepiness vanished in an instant, and Gilbert's heart started to pound.
"Fuck," he said. His hands were trembling and sweating, and his thumb left moisture lines across his screen as he swiped this and there and went on Roderich's blog. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck."
Roderich's answer made him freeze.
'I know.'
"'I know'?" he echoed to himself, looking up from his phone and out the window over the sink, as if the neighbor's windowboxes of violets would provide him the answers. "What the fuck does that mean?"
The toaster dinged, and Gilbert screamed when his toast shot out of it. His phone slipped from his hand, and Gilbert screamed again when it plopped into the basin of dishes he'd been too exhausted to wash yesterday soaking in cold, murky gray water.
/
It took him five weeks of extra graveyard shifts and cutting back on beer to save for a new phone. He bought an older Samsung Galaxy, which wasn't too bad, and immediately downloaded Tumblr again once he got home. His heart felt like it was sinking, like his old phone had in that sinkful of dishes. What had happened over the past few weeks? What memes had he missed? Who'd gotten dragged lately? Had Roderich even noticed he was gone?
He had twenty two new messages from over the month. All were worrying if he was okay, he hadn't posted in a few weeks, did something happen, please respond.
Gilbert hurried over to Roderich's blog, fondly finding the new icon of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart just as dorky as the plain music note. The last few posts were concerning vagues in German: what happened to him?, I'm so worried, is he okay, I shouldn't have acted so superior, fuck I miss him.
With a hard swallow, he went into Roderich's inbox and sent him a casual 'hey.'
The response was surprisingly instantaneous. After Gilbert posted an update detailing the tragic loss of his old cell phone (R.I.P. iPhone 5 he'd gotten for his last birthday, you will be missed) and answered all of the asks, he refreshed his inbox and noticed Roderich's reply.
"'Oh Gilbert, thank God you're okay'," Gilbert read aloud, feeling his heart jump into his throat as he imagined how relieved those words sounded.
His reply consisted of, 'Ofc i am, why wouldn't i be?'
Conversations via ask took a while, and it felt like every few minutes between Roderich's answers were an eternity.
'You mysteriously vanished for over a month! I thought something horrible had happened to you! Why didn't you tell me you were okay, you jackass!'
'bc i dropped my phone in the sink, and since im poor af i couldn't buy a new one until recently'
'I just saw your update… I didn't know, I'm sorry. But I was still terribly worried about you while you were gone.'
'of course u did, im aweso' Gilbert paused, thinking for a moment. He deleted the arrogant statement, and replaced it with a simple 'why?'
'Because I you too.'
Gilbert looked at the clock in the corner of his screen. Twenty hundred hours, on Friday. He replied, '( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°) ', and edited his description to say that his awesome self was officially taken, sorry ladies, gents and others, he's singing a song with the pianoman now.