After he leaves the Underland for the final time, the Underland does not leave him.
He calls what he hears the "the strains of war" because it has a ring far better than the truth. From his scourings of the internet, he thinks a therapist would call them "auditory flashbacks stemming from intense trauma" or something to that extent. But, a therapist would never believe him when he told them why these flashbacks exist in the first place, and he would choose WebMD over a sanatorium any day.
His constant companion since prepubescence, what he hears has changed as he has, fluctuating over days, months, and years. Usually, it's bloody. It's the sound of hundreds of nibblers plummeting to their doom. Other days, his mind opts toward the bittersweet, filling silent hours with Hamnet's dying wishes or the subtle whoosh of Ares' wings as he swooped to save the child who was not his bond. And, on very rare occasions, he gets a few bars of something melodious, Vikus' lilting speech or Luxa's laugh. Gregor wishes those days came more often than they do; they're the only times smiles come easily.
Throughout the intervening years, he tries to get the story playing in his head down, shove the burden of it from his shoulders and out into the world. Putting pen to paper only creates ink blots and eraser smudges. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot wrest the words into the right order, one that conveys the nightmarish deaths he witnessed. They are flat, near lifeless, marching across the page like the soldier he once was. It takes pages upon pages, and even the most archaic of them in languages long dead do little to illustrate the overabundance of horrors he experienced that year.
Illustration fails him as well. Gregor uses pencil after pencil, trying to capture the memories. He burns through pastel, marker, acrylic and charcoal, but he cannot find exact shade of the moment when your light is snuffed for good.
He attempts to speak his stories soon after, and though close, he knows this is not his medium. The words gain more strength from his tongue then they did his pencil or keyboard, but Gregor finds himself bowing beneath the weight of them. He is not strong enough to bear it. So, he abandons them altogether. He finds he would rather the continuing loop in his head to being crushed by all he cannot say.
The answer comes after a decade and a half of deleted drafts, discarded drawings and stunted speeches. It tiptoes up to him as he unpacks his few possessions in an attempt to make this lonely apartment his home. When going to take a box of more plates than he'll ever need to his kitchen, he trips over a rather square something and goes flying. Collecting the (thankfully) plastic dishes, Gregor turns to glare at the offending object. The years have treated it about as well as they have him, but his saxophone remains intact.
It's the tenor he received as a high school graduation present, his one extravagance. The one he inherited from his father gathers dust somewhere in his parents' house. This one has served him well, pulling him through college marching band and a minor in music theory, along with the piano skills he picked up in high school band class.
He nudges it into a safe corner, when the idea abandons all subtlety and smacks into much like the floor did mere moments ago. Music. A song to tell his story. A sonata. No. He can do so much better.
A symphony.
Gregor steadfastly ignores the fact he has never composed so much as a cartoon jingle in his life. Instead, he latches onto the thought like a limpet to stone. He can do this. The cacophony has already made its home inside his head. All he has to do is give it order and release it into the world.
It's both easier and harder than he thinks it will be at the moment the idea strikes him. Some days, notes dance across the page, ballerinas in the key of E minor. Other days, he cannot force himself to create a single stave without wanting to retch. But unlike his other attempts to unburden himself, Gregor soldiers on. If his time in the Underland is any testament, he's always been good at the soldiering part.
And for the first time since he snapped Sandwich's sword, he feels like he's freeing himself.
The Regalians are trumpets: loud, abrasive, and overbearing, brassy in ways both right and wrong at different turns. Luxa decides to be the French horn early on, regal but bold, unique and difficult. Gregor often finds himself in the violins, the star, but one whose voice must follow the rest of the ensemble or fear becoming lost. The rats show their faces everywhere, surfacing often in the saxophone section of all the ironies, able to play sinuous, melodic lines along with the harshest of attacks. Ares, of course, is the tuba, providing unerring support and sheer presence, missed most when gone, when everything is painfully exposed.
It shouldn't work. In fact, he's not sure it does; a collection of moments in a tale too large for a single man to tell threaded together by fragments of faded melody from a long ago birthday party.
After seven years of toil, he's captured as much of the story as he can, while cramped hands and ink-stained fingertips tell their own tale. They speak of a man so consumed by the harmonies memory can create that he forgot himself. He forgot everything but the notes and his year in the Underland.
By the end, Gregor looks down at the reams of paper he's used and his heart no longer swells with pride. But it keeps beating, as the dissonance playing in his head resolves into something…bearable. It will never be gone, but the dynamic is softer, and he can ignore it for the most part. It's more than he's ever been able to ask for.
The last thing to do is title the sprawling mess. Nothing ever feels right; it deserves so much more than Gregor's meager words. Eventually, he scrapes a few together and slaps them atop the page. Then, he sticks the binder with his life's work deep in the stacks of NYU's library and promptly moves on.
Fifty years later, long after Gregor has met his grave and his bond once again, an enterprising student librarian finds a thick white binder stuffed between an aged anthropology textbook and a guide to the night sky, bursting with faded sheet music. She shows it to a music major friend who shows it to a professor, who finds a small note tucked into the front pocket. It holds one request: Give it to the world. It takes some convincing, but she does.
Critics call G. Campbell's symphony a masterpiece, a post-modernist vision, a portal to another world. They use words like inspired, genius, haunting. One particularly perceptive man says it sounds "like the grand finale of tremulous battle." Some bemoan that he never created more, while other search for sonatas he never composed.
There is no one left alive to care for the bountiful praise. And even if he were, he wouldn't. All that matters is that his Song of the Underlandis sung to the world at long last.
Cross-posted to AO3. Inspired and named after the symphony of the same name by Hector Berlioz. You should check it out sometime; it's very pretty. Also I have a Tumblr for Underland Chronicles things (remedyandwrongentwine. tumblr . com) as well as a personal Tumblr for everything else (vapiddreamscape . tumblr. com) Come by and say hi.