Allay Pain - Witch Hunter Robin OST

Notes: It was two in the morning when I wrote this and I had the song on loop. I'd been playing with the idea of silence and expressing pain through music, and I like how this one turned out.

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There was piano music in the common room.

This in itself wasn't uncommon; after all, Wammy's was full of children with geniuses of all varieties, and the piano in the main common room was one of the most popular means of diversion for the young virtuosos of the establishment. Rain or shine, the common room had a soundtrack all of its own, it seemed, thanks to these children, and Mello had gotten used to hearing the piano all hours of the day.

The night was another story.

When he woke up at two in the morning, and he could hear the occasional high keyed note echoing down the hallways, that was something unusual, and being Mello, he had to get up and investigate it. So he rolled out of bed and padded out of his room, following the strains of music which gradually grew louder and clearer as he approached their source.

Just outside the doorway, though, he stopped, and listened, caught.

Quiet and hesitant, the person playing was of no great skill. There were discordant notes, too-long hesitations - all the signs of a beginner, or someone trying to improvise without any clear idea of what they wanted to do. But even so... even so, there was a melody, softly dropping into the night like tiny plashes of rain, blue-grey and fog-streaked. Every note, Mello felt, feeling the melody hitting sympathetic chords somewhere deep in him, was a syllable of an elegy, beautiful in its own way, the rain in the tune all the more poignant because of those hesitations, every misstep the reminder that the player was human, and as a human, could not always find the right words to say what they meant.

And Mello listened, because somewhere behind the music was a person with a breaking heart.

He shivered, the notes burying themselves in his bones, and decided that enough was enough, and opened the door.

The boy sitting at the piano wasn't one he knew to look on - a new kid, he decided, a new orphan, and suddenly Mello understood the way the notes fell like tears, like rain, and he stopped, and looked at the boy, turned to sepia in the pale moonlight, sitting there alone in the dark, playing... something, something deep and important, to no one in particular.

And he did know him, he decided, looking closer. The new boy on the second floor - Matt, he thought he was called. The boy who never spoke, who hid himself behind strange flamboyant clothing and quirks of dress, so that no one ever looked past the surface to see the person underneath.

Mello stood there, watching, listening, until the melody trailed itself off into nothingness, and the boy stood, preparing to leave - and saw Mello. His eyes flared wide, and he looked panicky.

"It's all right," Mello said roughly. "You woke me, that's all. I came to check it out and then stayed to listen."

The boy said nothing, but his eyes spoke volumes.

"I'm not going to tell anyone," Mello said.

The boy said nothing, but his eyes were grateful.

"That melody," he said. "It was... lonely. So very lonely. I hadn't heard it before."

The boy said, voice low and rasping: "You wouldn't have. I... was making it up."

"You're new here, aren't you?"

The boy nodded, eyes downcast.

"The one who doesn't talk," he said. "But I just heard you speak."

"Yes," said the boy. "I... talk. I just..." His voice trailed off.

"You speak with that," Mello said, and pointed to the piano. "Late at night, when no one can hear you."

The boy nodded.

"You miss your family."

The boy didn't move, but his head sank lower, hair falling forward to hide his eyes.

"I can hear it," Mello said, and stepped forward, sat down on the piano bench, near the boy. Touched the keys. He knew how to play, of course - every Wammy's child knew how to play at least one instrument - and he touched them, chords echoing the keen, hesitant, poignant melody that the other boy had found, but more regretful. In the light of the sun, with other children around, Mello wouldn't have been caught dead talking like this, talking to the mute boy who would never answer back in the light of day.

But here under the moonlight, with that aching tune running through his veins, he felt connected to this boy, somehow, and the other boy moved instinctively forward to seat himself at the piano beside Mello as he tried to echo the melody, and spoke of his own loneliness through the black and white keys under his fingers.

And the boy picked it up, echoed the echo back to him, threaded the melody back in, and Mello ran a counterpoint melody under it. The two streams of loneliness, his and the other boy's, wound cautiously around each other, touching briefly, awkwardly, moving away, and back together, and then Mello saw it, the hole in the middle, and hit the notes to fill it in.

Minor to major and back, but suddenly it didn't sound so much like loneliness any more, and Mello played, and the boy slowly adjusted his own melody to fit closer to Mello's, until it sounded as one thing, soft and still hesitant in places, but no longer so sad; awkward, but not lonely any more.

"My name's Mello," he said, when their tune found a natural end, keying back into the minor before dying, almost regretfully, away.

"Matt," whispered the other boy, and something almost like a smile trembled on his lips for a moment before fading away.