21. cassette player; name that tune

It's just the little things, at first.

They'll be sitting on the school rooftop eating lunch and Yosuke will pause in the midst of conversation or his meal in order to pull his MP3 player from his pocket and fiddle with it for a bit before pulling his headphones from his neck and holding them out for Souji to take.

Here, you've got to listen to this-

Souji's never quite sure what he's listening for, but he brings his hands up to hold the headphones in place over his own ears and listens intently anyway. It's always something different, some refrain or swell of music that's compelled his friend to share. Sometimes the lyrics are in English, and Souji takes the opportunity to practice putting meaning behind unfamiliar words as the music plays. Alone and devoid of context, though, he's usually left with little more than a handful of prose he's not sure the exact translation of.

Just because he can't feel the music the way Yosuke does doesn't make him unappreciative of the gesture, though. He'll return the headphones once he's fairly certain that he's heard whichever part of the song it was the other had wanted him to hear with a comment on the tone or the rhythm, privately grateful that Yosuke sees these moments fit to share, and Yosuke will grin and go on to talk about the song or the band or whichever section of the music he'd wanted him to listen to, never shy about the details of exactly what the music says to him.

It isn't long before he's doing this outside of school as well, leaning across the table at Junes or stretching across the sofa in Souji's room to prod him in the shoulder with the headphones while he's sitting at his desk.

"Powerful, isn't it?" Yosuke asks him one afternoon after having him listen to a man pour his heart and soul into a studio microphone, the music building into a dizzying cacophony of noise before reaching a breaking point and dropping off into slow rivulets of bass and reverb.

He's practically thrumming with the same echoes of intensity that are still fading from the headphone speakers, leaning forward expectantly with a spark in his eyes that Souji recognizes by now as evidence that the song is both newly discovered and one that resonates in a way he can't possibly hope to appreciate for himself. He's tried (and, more importantly, he understands), but the music just doesn't speak to him in quite the same way.

It takes him a moment to collect himself, trying to think up a suitable response.

"The lyrics are in English," he observes, when no other words come to him.

Yosuke just blinks at him, surprised, as though the thought had honestly never occurred to him before.

"So?" he asks after a beat. "It doesn't really matter, does it? Vocals are just another instrument, layered on top. You don't have to know what they're saying to understand, not when you can feel it."

Souji's brows pull together in an expression of thought as he lifts the headphones back to his ears. He understands, sure, but he's not sure that he gets it. Not yet, anyway. He's still trying.

"I can burn you a CD, if you want," Yosuke offers when they part ways later that day.

Souji returns a smile and replies, "I'd like that."

He spends most of his free time the following week trying to get through a song in its entirety without being distracted from whatever else he was trying to do at the time. When he's just listening, dedicating his focus toward that one thing alone, he thinks he could learn to really appreciate Yosuke's taste in music. It's a little loud and a bit all over the place, but that really only makes sense the more he thinks about it.

The only problem is that it demands his attention, frequently wrestling his thoughts away from folding envelopes or the model he's been trying to finish building or anything else, really, and it's downright impossible to concentrate on anything that requires him to process actual words. Homework is out of the question.

It's a lot like having Yosuke there, he muses, but eventually concedes defeat and simply turns the music off.

Not a few days later Yosuke's nudging him in the back with a pencil during class, while they're waiting for the last few minutes of the school day to wind down. He turns in his chair so that Yosuke can present him with a new CD, tapping him on the shoulder with it and grinning when he reaches out to take it.

"Another one?" Souji asks, and instantly hates how ungrateful it sounds.

Yosuke doesn't seem to notice.

"Yeah, the whole album wouldn't fit on the last one, but I didn't want to have to waste a disc," he explains, twiddling his pencil restlessly between his fingers. "So I figured hey, why not grab some other stuff to put on there, too? I made sure to get that one with the bass solo you said sounded cool."

Actually, Yosuke had said that; Souji had only agreed because he couldn't think of another word to describe the metallic screech of feedback that completely overpowered whatever he was supposed to be hearing.

He nods anyway, tucking the CD into the front of one of his notebooks for safekeeping.

"Thanks."

"Any time," Yosuke answers with a customary wink, and then the bell rings and he's gone - off to Junes to try and make up for the days of work he's had to skip for training lately, 'taking responsibility' before his father can notice and force him to at a less opportune time.

Souji watches him leave, and only once he's sure the other is gone does he open his notebook to examine the CD. There's a piece of paper tucked into the flimsy plastic sleeve, which he takes out and unfolds to find a handwritten track list: track number, artist, song title, and running time all included.

He shakes his head as he re-folds the piece of paper and puts both it and the disc into his school bag, assuring himself that he'll take the time to listen as soon as possible.

Attempting to fit this into his already hectic schedule proves difficult, however, and by the end of the week the CD is still sitting innocuously atop the stereo in his room, unplayed. He's running out of excuses (not that he's trying to make them in the first place, he tells himself, he just has yet to find the time) and there are only so many days that he can pretend not to notice the look of anticipation Yosuke sends his way each morning before class, anxiously awaiting some type of feedback.

With this in mind Souji tries once again to let the music serve as background noise, hopeful that his previous difficulties were the fault of the album itself and not necessarily music as a general concept. Considering the importance of the subject matter and the effort his friend has put into this one inoffensive gesture - the accompanying slip of paper had been evidence enough of that fact, after all - it's really the least that he can do to try.

The selection of music has far more variety than the last disc, but much to Souji's frustration the problem of being entirely too distracting remains. The sound is still only a disquieting buzz, a constant mental block that makes it impossible to concentrate.

When at last something finally stirs a spark in him, he only notices because his first thought is that the CD has come to a stop. He's been staring at the same paragraph in the book he's trying to read for the better part of half an hour, until the music fades out and he finds himself able to focus once again. After a matter of minutes, though, a clash of sound brings him back, and he jerks his head up to stare at the offending stereo system. He puts his book aside, going to investigate, and turns the CD back two tracks.

At first there's only quiet, but before long he's met with the soft strumming of a guitar lead in, followed shortly thereafter by a man's voice as he begins to vocalize, harmonizing easily with the instrument. Souji stands perfectly still as he listens, realizing belatedly that the lyrics are - once again - in English. But for once he's pleasantly surprised to find that he doesn't feel compelled to attempt translating in order to try and gain some better appreciation of the song.

He turns the track back again and listens once more from the beginning as he returns to his book before finally turning the stereo off for the night.

"Sorry?" Yosuke asks in class the following day, dropping his headphones from the ear he's been holding one side of them to.

Souji makes to flick his pencil at him, halting the motion only after it's convincing enough to cause his friend to flinch and hold his arms up in some mockery of a defensive position. "You wouldn't notice if a meteor landed right outside the window, would you?"

Yosuke scoffs, kicking the back of the other teen's chair. It's hardly a compelling argument.

"Anyway," Souji continues, unfazed, "I was saying that I liked the acoustic song you put on that CD for me."

The look that crosses the brunet's face is impossible to place, though if he had to hazard a guess he'd call it strikingly similar to the one of triumph that followed a particularly successful encounter against a group of Shadows in the other world. In all fairness, Souji rationalizes, it's the first time he's been the one to initiate a conversation on the subject. It only makes sense that Yosuke would be interested in any possible evidence that it might prove something they could hold on common ground.

"Really?" He asks, and his tone belies something here as well. "I mean, yeah - I put the regular version on there too, right?"

Souji doesn't even attempt to bluff an answer to that question; he's never been more confident in his complete inability to know one way or the other. He should have thought to bring the track listing with him, for reference. It doesn't matter anyway; Yosuke chuckles nervously and rubs the back of his neck with one hand as he continues, not waiting for a response, "They're both pretty good, though. It's like... even though it's the same song, sometimes it just - it feels more honest that way, you know?"

Souji's pretty sure he hasn't the slightest idea. He nods anyway.

"It's easier to listen to," he says instead, and smiles when Yosuke just shakes his head and laughs.

Monday morning finds a new CD waiting for him on his desk the moment he walks into the classroom. He doesn't waste any time retrieving the slip of paper from the protective sleeve to glance over the track titles and running times. The song names are... distinctive, to say the least. The running times are less uniform than he remembers the other two CDs having been, as well.

"I threw together a bunch of indie stuff I had on my hard drive," Yosuke interrupts when he turns to ask, as though that should somehow explain everything. Maybe it should.

Souji glances back down at the list as his classmate continues; "You'll like it, it's mostly acoustic. A couple garage band type deals, but those are pretty light, too. Some of the sound quality's a little rough, though."

"I'm sure it's fine," Souji replies, and pretends not to notice the way Yosuke smiles at his desk, twiddling a pencil between his fingers. The expression looks off somehow, in a way he can't quite place. He'll figure it out later, he tells himself, and deposits the CD into his school bag.

It only takes a day for him to get around to the stereo in his room, this time. He's anxious to see if this music will hold up to his description of the last acoustic song, accessible enough for him to listen to while he goes about the rest of his business. He's pleasantly surprised to find that it does, and even the songs with additional instruments that sound like they were recorded into a tin can are only distracting from his books.

The only things he finds himself unable to concentrate on, no matter how hard he tries or how soft the music in the background, are his homework and the translation work he's recently picked up. Getting through the disc in its entirety is slow work, considering, and he keeps forgetting to turn the stereo back on once he's moved on to an activity that it wouldn't distract from, but he reaches the final track before the end of the week.

At least, he'd thought he had. He looks up from the work table where he's been folding paper cranes when the final song comes to an end, reaching for the track listing to make a mental note of what the song had been called so as to ask Yosuke later whether or not he had anything else by the same artist, when the stereo goes on to the next track.

There shouldn't be a next track.

Souji can only just make out the sound of a guitar being readjusted, at first, but before long there are a couple of notes and a brief strummed chord (some kind of warm up, he figures, a few of the other tracks have had something similar) and then silence. He double checks the slip of paper that Yosuke included with the disc, but there's nothing written below the last song.

A few notes play, the last fading off into nothing before the same refrain plays again, an additional melody tacked onto the end. These notes too fade into silence before the music suddenly picks up and the song begins in full. It's short - a little over a minute even with the beginning stretch of silence - and entirely instrumental.

He sets it to repeat until well after Dojima's gotten sick enough of hearing it through the door to tell him to knock it off.

"You forgot to label one of the tracks," Souji speaks up over lunch, the following day. "On the last CD," he clarifies, if only because it feels like an abrupt change of subject otherwise.

"Huh?" Yosuke glances over at him, tapping a chopstick against his knee and furrowing his brow in thought.

"The last one. No lyrics, just guitar."

He watches as Yosuke stills his hand after a particularly forceful tap, recognition dawning on his face before he glances away. "Oh. Uh... no, I didn't forget. That was just some garbage I had on my hard drive from-"

"I thought it was really good."

Yosuke starts to laugh, only to catch himself when looks up to see that his friend is serious. "You... what?"

"I really liked it," Souji reiterates. "I was going to ask if you had any more like that."

Color darkens the brunet's cheeks as he rakes the hand that hasn't been abusing his knee with a set of chopsticks through his hair, pulling at the ends.

"Um. Yeah, I- I mean, sure. If you want. I can..." He laughs nervously, quickly putting on a practiced retail worker's smile to cover for himself, "I can probably find something, no problem."

Souji doesn't have time to question his odd behavior before Yosuke's launched into a conversation about something else entirely, and it takes until he gets home that evening to realize that he'd forgotten to ask who the artist was or what the song was called, if anything.

When at first a week passes with no new CD he doesn't think much of it. Halfway through the second he means to ask, but developments in their collective investigation draw his attention back toward more important matters.

It's been nearly a month when Yosuke reaches across his desk one morning in order to prod him in the side with the tip of his pencil. He glances over his shoulder only to feel another poke at his opposite side. He doesn't bother turning the other direction, instead reaching over to grab the offending pencil and pry it out of the other teen's grasp, tucking it behind his own ear once that's accomplished. Yosuke returns into his field of vision to scowl at him, unimpressed.

Souji offers a smile over his shoulder before moving to return to his notebook, the other reaching up to steal his pencil back and trading it between hands in order to poke him directly between the shoulder blades with something substantially more angled than a pencil eraser. When Souji turns around again he finds Yosuke flashing a small rectangular case at him, urging him to take it.

It's a cassette tape. Souji spares it a glance before directing a puzzled frown toward his friend.

"Who still uses these?"

Yosuke rolls his eyes, making a short sound of exasperation; "Jeez, partner, I didn't realize you were the audio format police." He folds his arms over his desk when Souji only raises an eyebrow at him in response. "It's the best I can do, man. I used to get somebody I knew to transfer things off cassettes and onto the computer, but I don't have any of the stuff I'd need in order to do that anymore."

"I'm... honestly not sure that the stereo in my room even has a tape deck."

The look he gets in return for that observation is nothing short of offended. Souji finds himself in the electronics department of Junes after school that afternoon for an entirely different reason than he's used to, listening with no short supply of amusement as Yosuke explains in detail the merits of analog audio recording.

When Yosuke rings up their purchase, he puts his own money in the register.

"It's yours, okay?" He decides as he hands off the desktop cassette recorder, forcing it into Souji's hands, "Just take it. The tape, too, you can have that. I mean- if you like it, I mean, it's not very..." He trails off, looking embarrassed with himself. "Ugh, crap, you know what I mean. Just let me know what you think."

"What about you?" Souji asks, thinking back to that morning and the reason why a tape player is a necessity in the first place. "Do you have a backup or something?"

Yosuke just slings an arm around his shoulder as they make their way out of the store, fishing his MP3 player out of his pocket with the opposite hand, "I've moved on to bigger and better things, my friend. If I wanted to listen to that stuff I'd still be carrying a Walkman. You can have it."

It's not a commercial tape anyway, Souji discovers that evening. It's the same brand of blank tape that he'd seen among others in Junes just a few hours before. He flips the cassette over and again in his hands, but there's no label and no distinctive markings. The case itself is blank, as well.

Unusual, considering the effort Yosuke had put into meticulously labeling the CDs he'd put together. On the other hand, maybe it wasn't worth going through the trouble when there was no easy way to tell which track you were on where a cassette was concerned, anyway.

Or maybe because there were no discernible breaking points between tracks in the first place.

For the first time, Souji listens to the entire selection of music he's been given in a single night: the cassette is one long, continuous stretch of solo acoustic guitar. A brief warm up of strummed notes and chords leads almost seamlessly into a rendition of a song Souji recognizes from the previous CD, though without the vocals and with perhaps a few more stumbles between measures. This continues for a while, one song bleeding into the next without much thought, until an interlude that should have picked up into something else goes on distractedly for a while, as though waiting for the next set of notes to come meet it somewhere in between.

They never come, and the tune of wayward notes instead climbs and builds and eases back apart mindlessly. It's hardly a melody of any kind, in and of itself, but it's strangely fascinating to listen to and Souji finds it more peaceful than any of the rest of what's been recorded to the tape. He's oddly disappointed when the notes finally come to an abrupt stop, the last sound a sudden sharp chord that's muted almost immediately by the player's palm.

He falls asleep with that last stretch of notes still drifting through his mind, convinced that he's heard pure and unadulterated thought for the first time, if only he could find a way to piece together meaning from the sound.

Yosuke seems almost disproportionally pleased when Souji reports back the following day that the tape was, in no uncertain terms, his favorite of the lot so far.

It takes another two weeks for him to produce another, as though drudging up some long lost piece of history that had taken no short supply of effort to find. This cassette is as unlabeled as the last, so Souji takes it upon himself to add the number two to its surface in thin, precise marker strokes before swapping it into the tape player that's made itself at home on his desk. He's treated with more of the same solo acoustic guitar that was on the previous cassette, albeit with longer stretches of wandering notes between pieces of music. Toward the end of the tape this same meandering occurs yet again, even more pronounced than before.

He listens and rewinds and listens again, trying to decipher the thoughts that must have guided hands and fingers lightly along guitar strings, using the interludes between songs as a reference point. Deciding what to play, which pitch to use, where to start, thinking better of it and launching into something else entirely at the last moment- he's convinced that he can read these easily enough, given that they're mostly consistent.

Toward the end, however, as the notes drift and weave between this thought and the next, he loses the ability to follow.

He's still mulling over this as he watches Yosuke move to a beat that only he can hear, walking home after a long and decidedly rare (more so these days, now that every encounter seemed stronger than the last) day of hazard-free Shadow-busting in the other world. The brunet's headphones are around his neck, but he's still got the rhythm of whatever his playlist for these outings must be coursing through his veins, carrying his steps with an energy that rolls off of his entire being in tangible waves.

Souji's thoughts drift after a moment, brought back by the sudden thumping intensity of white-hot noise pulsing through his core, wrenching away as Yosuke laughs and pulls his headphones back toward his own person.

"Holy-" Souji sputters, cupping a hand over one still-ringing ear, "How do you function with that going on in your head all the time?"

"It gets your blood pumping, doesn't it?" Yosuke replies easily, settling the headphones back around his neck and rocking on his heels as he walks, every movement in tune to the music, "Keeps your thoughts sharp. Focused."

Something about that strikes a chord that isn't easily dismissed.

"...what do you suppose thoughts would sound like if they weren't focused?" Souji asks.

When Yosuke just looks at him, he clarifies, "If someone was writing a song, but they just... let it come to them however it wanted. Like they weren't really paying attention."

"I don't know. Floaty?" Yosuke laughs, using his pent up energy to kick a pebble from the street into the grass, "Bad, probably. If you tried to write a song without thinking you'd just end up with a bunch of disjointed nonsense that didn't say anything."

Souji falls back into silence as they walk, considering this. He's not sure how to argue his point when he's not entirely sure what point he's trying to make in the first place.

The pieces of music on the cassettes that aren't truly songs are most assuredly disjointed, but in the odd sort of way that natural thought processes had a tendency to be anyway. Surely they said something. It was just a matter of figuring out how the pieces fit together. He'd witnessed firsthand the way that music could tell powerful stories, carry emotion raw and strong, and more importantly how those messages could be lost upon a listener who wasn't sure how to parse the information.

Surely that's what this was. Surely there was something hidden in the slow tumble of notes, the steady way they would climb and twist and fall apart, fading gradually into nothing only to jump back and collide into one another before getting whisked away into a completely different arrangement.

He listens to both of the tapes once more that night, lying under the cover of his futon and staring at the ceiling through the darkness as he tries desperately to understand. He knows it's there, somewhere just beyond his reach. It has to be.

The answer comes, at last, one weekend when Yosuke invites him over to waste away a sweltering summer afternoon playing video games. It's too hot to do anything else and too early to worry about summer homework just yet, and Souji eventually agrees just to get back indoors where he can sit in front of a fan.

"You play guitar," is the first observation he thinks to make when Yosuke returns to his room with a glass of ice water in either hand. It's less of a question than it ought to be, considering the way that the instrument has been haphazardly abandoned in one corner of the room.

Yosuke only spares the instrument a passing glance, kicking the door shut behind himself. "It's just a hobby," he says, holding out a glass for Souji to take. He presses his own against his forehead, taking in the brief repose from the heat of the day for as long as it lasts, "I'm not very good."

"Can I hear you play?"

He gets an odd look in response, Yosuke chuckling nervously and glancing away after it becomes clear that he's not going to relent easily on this one. "I told you already, I'm not any good."

"You say that like I'd know the difference," Souji replies, drumming his fingers against the side of his glass. His fingernails make a soft clacking sort of noise against it as he sits and waits patiently for Yosuke to chance another look, stilling them and raising his eyebrows expectantly once he does. "I promise to act impressed either way," he adds.

"Fine," Yosuke concedes with a heavy sigh, drawing a hand through red-brown hair. "Jeez. If you insist. I'm warning you, though..."

He trails off when Souji smiles, stricken by the gesture for a moment or two before he shakes his head and mutters to himself, sitting his own glass aside to grab his guitar from the corner and fall back into the chair at his desk.

He strums distractedly for a moment or two before settling on tuning the instrument (which he does by ear, and Souji's already impressed), this eventually bleeding directly into an easy rhythm without much preamble in between. Not two bars in he hits a sour note- or what would have been one if he hadn't used it as a spring board to launch into a different tune altogether. It's loose and the tempo uneven, notes climbing and twisting as he knits his brow in concentration, before finally smoothing out into another proper melody.

Souji stares, feeling the pieces begin to fall into place.

Perhaps it's the heat, or nerves, or the fact that he can feel Souji's eyes on him, but Yosuke's fingers stumble over another note before long, then don't quite peg the strings down to a fret right and the instrument makes a muted noise that trips him up beyond recovery. He swears and lets go, swiping his thumb across six open strings as he looks up.

"Told you I was crap," he chuckles, glancing away almost immediately. The hand at the neck of the guitar finds the frets again, fingers strumming absently; "Never bothered with lessons or anything, and dad always thought it was a waste of time anyway. Just sort of had to pick it up as I went along..."

He trails off, fingers still plucking at the strings. Wayward notes climb and build and ease apart mindlessly - thoughts elsewhere - and then Yosuke glances down and seems to realize what he's doing, playing a last sour, irritated chord before slapping his palm across the strings.

Souji blinks, startled by the sudden silence.

Erratic, energetic notes that would twist and climb and fold, settling for a moment on something like maybe it was important before flitting on again to something new, light and distracted; an irritated progression that would knot together before breaking under its own weight and petering out into nothing- he can picture it, now.

"You-" he starts, and isn't sure how to finish that thought. Yosuke sending him a questioning look doesn't help. That same look turning into one of thinly veiled panic when he moves to stand does no one any favors, either.

He can see it in the tense line of the other teen's shoulders, the way his fingers itch restlessly, sitting still across the strings.

"W-what?"

In the way his attention would be suddenly drawn to a point by some stray thought, interrupting the flow of conversation to offer his headphones; the way he was filled to the brim with a nervous energy that found its way into various outlets with no particular order, tapping his pencil against the back of Souji's chair in class or kicking pebbles out of the road as they walked home or just moving, constantly in motion, an unsteady rhythm that could pick up into a flurry of momentum all at once or ease apart into something slow and somber and-

And how had he never noticed before?

"Dude, you're... kinda freaking me out."

"You made those tapes," Souji declares, before the thought's even fully occurred to him. Amidst the other realizations (pure thought and raw emotion on display, and suddenly he's in possession of the key to what it means), the specifics hardly seem important- until he's said it out loud and the realization that he's right makes it the most important piece of all.

Yosuke pales.

"It was you all along, this whole time- why didn't you say anything?" Souji continues, and Yosuke presses himself into the back of his chair like he's trying to escape through the cracks like a cornered mouse.

All at once he's on his feet and trying to disentangle himself from his guitar, speaking over the other a mile a minute; "I didn't- I mean, I just... I was going to, but it was just a- you weren't supposed to like that first one, I only put it there because it was old and there was space and I'd just found it on my hard drive and maybe you'd ask and we could joke about it and it would be something to talk about but you-"

He's gone from pale to bright red, snapping his jaw shut with an audible click of teeth when Souji manages to catch his eyes.

"B-but..." he glances away, fiddling with a tuning peg. "You had to go and say all that stuff and I thought maybe I could... I just wanted to- ugh, dammit. It's weird, right? Should've just-" he's muttering as he moves to put the instrument back in its corner, ears burning with humiliation, and all Souji can think is that it makes so much damn sense.

Those same notes he's been dwelling on for weeks and Yosuke- the way he way he walks, the way he talks, the way he thinks- it's all the same.

Yosuke startles when he turns around again to find him suddenly very close, but Souji just grabs him and pulls him into a tight hug, laughing quietly when the other makes an indignant sort of noise in response.

"Thank you," he says, and Yosuke stops struggling long enough for him to pull back just enough to offer a smile.

"For... for what?"

"I finally get it," Souji replies, and leans forward to rest their foreheads together, hands dropping from the other's shoulders to rest more comfortably around his waist. "What it all meant... Why I liked it so much."

"What are you talking about?"

"It reminded me of you."

He wouldn't have thought it possible, but Yosuke's face burns an even deeper shade of red as he tries to punch his shoulder. He doesn't pull away, though, and that's what's most important.

His fingers move along the strings more out of habit than conscious will, notes soft and disjointed in a way that tells he's lost in thought. Souji's sitting at the other end of the cramped sofa, his feet pulled up onto the cushions so that they only just barely touch Yosuke's thigh, staring at the same line in the book he's only been pretending to read for the last half hour.

Instead, he's listening- trying to decipher a melody that isn't quite a melody at all, a tapestry of notes that bob and weave and climb and fall apart.

Sometimes he'll ask. More often, he's content to settle for the general mood, because the thoughts themselves move too quickly for each individual thing to matter all that much in the end anyway.

Today: Pensive. Thoughtful. Remembering...

Remembering what?

"You remember that first song you gave me, as a joke?"

"Wasn't a joke," Yosuke replies without looking up, shifting octaves. "Just didn't expect you to think it was any good."

"Do you remember what you were thinking about when you first recorded that?"

The next chord comes out wrong, Yosuke's hand poised over the instrument, halted in mid-strum. He laughs.

"...song I wrote for a girl in Yokohama."

"Did she like it?"

"She never heard it," he answers as his fingers begin to move. A few notes, fading off into nothing before the same refrain begins again. These too fade off into silence before starting over, a new melody strung onto the end- and then the song begins in full.

Souji smiles. This one's easy; soft and strong, gentle and steadfast. Yearning, adoration.

"She never had any taste in music, anyway."