Ch.3: Music
Today was a Saturday. Unfortunately for us, we had school on Saturday. But it was just an exception today; we had a field trip.
Kuroro was the teacher who was going along with us. We watched as his class (still in deep thought), filed into an immaculately straight line and one by one approached the platform. The man at the desk gave a bored grunt when the headpiece was finally slipped over their eyes and gave the green button a push. After a flash of light, the student would be gone, away to Lomas University, and the next student would be led up to the top of the platform. This…whatever was invented by some guy called Garos Cine who somehow developed this system of rapid transport from one place to another. It was as necessary, and absolutely ordinary, as if you had a car back on the last age or so. But this didn't use up any fuel – just energy, and that could be easily provided. Hey, global environmentalists were happy, so why should we complain? Those people could get a little annoying, to say the least.
Riding the Teleporter was a little queasy. You had to put this headpiece over your eyes and it would show you the coordinates (exact down the very last decimal) and then you'd get this nauseous feeling and then you would be there. You'd step off the platform in whatever destination was that was listed at the coordinates, and that was the end of that. How this machine worked – I'd never know. I didn't particularly WANT to know. It had something to do with the mind being persuaded that it was going somewhere or such. Very strange and not at all interesting.
As every student at Brooklyn High had to do each year, we took a tour of the best university in the world. That, of course, would be the school our DEAR (that was sarcastic) GREEN teacher went to: Yorkshire University. The 'highest honor' award thing was called the Illumination Award. Every year they'd have some graduating guy get it. How Kurapika Kurata managed to get it before age fifteen was unknown to the rest of us. He must have been a psychopathic genius or something. Of course, if Kurapika had ever been a genius in the first place, he sure didn't seem like it now. He seemed like, well, a very Green recruit.
Kuroro talked to his class about the North Wing being the English department, the West Wing being whatever, blah blah blah. I tuned him out and looked around. Shalnark and several other students were looking at a map. Shizuku was hurriedly copying it down; she probably predicted she'd forget about it after two minutes or so. I pushed past both and looked up. I frowned. Damn, I was too short.
Suddenly I remembered something. I pushed back out of the crowd and raised my hand. Kuroro stopped abruptly. "Yes?"
"Where's the music and mythology wing?", I asked simply. He blinked at me once and answered, "The North – wait, where are you going?"
But I was already taking off. I had seen enough of the map to know where the North Wing was. I snickered under my breath. Stupid Green Kurapika! He didn't realize just how EASY it was to find him.
I stopped in front of a set of something like ten or twenty doors, all with the words "Music" on them. Under them were subtitles like "String", "Instrumental", "Orchestra", "Vocal"…and the list went on. All of them seemed to have music coming from them. I glared at the window that was too far up on the door for me to look through. I tried to jump up and look through. All I managed to see was the inside room's white ceiling. Giving an annoyed grunt, I then latched myself on the bottom and tried to pull myself up, the metal digging painfully into my fingernails. Just as my eyes reached the bottom border, the door opened and I fell backwards.
A little odd-looking lady was standing over me. She looked at me quizzically and asked, "What are you doing?" in a voice that sounded like it was from a little girl instead of a teacher. I sweatdropped more from her appearance than from the lack of what to say.
"Eh…", I stumbled over the words, "um, I'm looking for Kurapika Kurata."
The girl teacher's face softened a little and didn't look quite as confused for a moment. "Oh", she said, and thought for a moment. "I think he should be next door right now." When I started to go to the next door, she pulled my arm back with surprising strength in her fingers and ushered me into a room. "Sakilo, go to the Strings room and see if Kurapika's there." As I watched, a girl placed her clarinet on the stand and quietly exited. The teacher smiled at me in a sickening sweet way. "Stay here for a bit, young man. Saki'll get Kurapika for you."
I opened my mouth and shut it. She wasn't paying attention to me anymore. Instead, she was already tapping her music stand and telling the class to start on this measure and play with that ferocity. I stood back while they played. I had to admit they were pretty good. But I guess it was expected of the best university in the world. The class' music tapered off as the girl Sakilo returned and waited patiently for the teacher to notice her.
"Senritsu, Kurapika is not in the Strings room. They say he left to run copies off of something." The class gave a murmur; from what I could tell, they were debating whether or not to send me to the main office or not because I was distracting them or something along those lines. I shrunk against the wall. I didn't think my abnormally white hair was THAT distracting. The chatter grew so loud that it must have disturbed the other classes because someone had to scream, "What's going on here?" before everyone quieted down.
Bingo, I grinned. It was Kurapika.
The Green was surprised to see me, to say the least. Behind him, I could hear the chatter of the other students also from Brooklyn High, having caught up with me. Kurapika gave me a stern look and closed the door behind him. A girl giggled and Senritsu shushed her. Outside I could hear Kurapika and Kuroro talking.
The class seemed to LEAN towards the door. The door opened and Kurapika pulled me out. I couldn't even say "Thank you" before the Green closed the door behind me and pushed me against the wall. His voice was dangerous, even as the thought "He's just a Green, he shouldn't be able to threaten me" crossed my mind. His face was not the white mansion I had seen back in the classroom; it was angry, a beautiful, graceful kind of anger. Kuroro stood beside him, his hand suspended on the wall above me so I couldn't escape. They acted like a gang of two, about to ask me to give up my lunch money.
For a moment, Kurapika looked like he was going to speak. His eyes flickered once to the blue glass armband on my arm that told the world I was an Azure. And in that moment, he seemed to come to a decision. His eyes closed, and he took a breath. I tensed for a verbal reprimand, a "What the heck were you thinking?!" or a "You are SOOOO dead!". But instead, he just breathed out again, and then his eyes opened. He turned and went to the head of the line again. The class stared after him. With me running away and not found – he wasn't going to punish me? My face started to turn into a smile, relieved in having escaped some awful fate that Kurapika would have had in store for me. But Kuroro's face stopped me.
I never noticed just how his face looked until now. He had always seemed to be smiling, content, before. But now, there was a slight turning in of his eyebrows, and even though he didn't say anything and his face looked perfectly neutral, I could tell he was angry. I looked away and my face burned with embarrassment I didn't imagine I would feel. After all, what had I done? A Green was lower than me, even if he was older. You spent your whole life making SURE that the other classes behaved, right? It wouldn't be right if they got out of line, right? I couldn't imagine why I was embarrassed; there was nothing wrong with putting a Green back where he belonged. So, what was this feeling I had? It felt as if… I had disappointed someone. Which, of course, would be Kurapika.
What, did he expect our class to be nice and in line all the time like C-12D? And with that last thought, I straightened and joined the rest of the group. Several victorious snickers sounded around me, as if for congratulating me on making a fool out of Kurapika. Leorio and Gon gave me a nudge; their faces showed that I had scored a point against our teacher. And the guilty feeling inside of me only grew more as I snickered and pointed at Kurapika with them.
Kuroro seemed oblivious to us. But I could tell he wasn't happy. And that wasn't good because he was a Violet. Yet, I doubted he would apprehend me; Kurapika should have been the one to administer the punishment, if I had one. It wasn't any of Kuroro's business. And I think he knew that – and so when Kurapika didn't do anything, I guess Kuroro felt he didn't really have any right to say anything because I wasn't his student.
The Strings room was full of silent students. All of them had raised eyebrows as Kurapika walked in, followed by about sixty students or so. This should have been his fourth class today; Brooklyn High had more than ten classes of sophomores, and all of them came into whatever class Kurapika was teaching at the moment just to get a taste of what it was like. Kurapika stood at the stand, and for a moment, I could see that beautiful house with the white walls and golden curtains. His face looked triumphant, and when I looked out over the students he conducted, their faces lifted in inspiration, I knew why they could be so…joyful to play with Kurapika. Then the music started, and the glide of strings lifted the somber atmosphere.
It was etheral, angelical, the way the group was conducted. When a certain side toned down to a soft hush, the other side would rise up like a wave and bowel us away again. It was truly, truly inspiration. It lifted your spirits and lowered them. I never had had much taste for classical music before, but at the sound of the strings, harmonizing, darting between melodies, I found myself having more respect for whichever composer wrote this so long ago than the bands that played today on electric guitars and blasting sound speakers.
And then I noticed something dreadful. Something that shouldn't have been here. THE STUDENTS ALL WEREN'T WEARING THEIR ARMBANDS. Instead, they wore a white cloth, bound either on a leg, as a scarf or on an arm. My face paled. This was against the law, wasn't it. Quickly I looked back at Kurapika. HE WAS ONLY WEARING A WHITE CLOTH TOO. I was confused. The music seemed to sour in the air like over-aged milk, and I pushed past people, still awesomely inspired by the music, the people who didn't realize there was something terribly, terribly wrong here.
A teacher seemed to sense my distress. Kuroro pulled me out of the room and into the hall. Behind us, the music seemed to glimmer in the air before the door shut and the sound was completely blocked. The teacher seemed to have read my thoughts: "You've noticed it too, have you?"
"The bands", I spluttered, "he could be arrested, he could go to jail like he did before and this time he'd stay forever and ever –" I stopped, and realized just who I was defending. Confusion filled me for a moment before I knocked the thought from my mind to protest some more. Kuroro stilled me with a hand, and led me over to a bench nearby.
"Lomas University is currently the only university in the world that is something called NonColored. The students here are, essentially, potential rebels like Kurapika used to be. In fact, the main bulk of the protesters in the Rebel Color Movement of 1989 came from Lomas. The people who go here believe that the old way, back when everyone was equal and there WERE no colors, was better. They still support Marks' system of Colors and respect him for it because he was a true genius to think of all these complicated processes that comes with a new society – but they feel it isn't right. That's why instead of their colorbands, they wear white armbands to symbolize peace and equality between all. Here, there are no Colors – there are less fights here, if you've noticed. People here respect each other's differences and individual interests instead of what color they come from here." Kuroro leaned on the creaky wood and looked heavy-lidded at the ceiling. "It's a different world."
I got the feeling there was something else he wanted to say. "Are you saying that the Color system is wrong?"
He smiled faintly, as if he knew I was going to ask that. "Yes and no", he finally answered. "I respect the Color system for organizing the people, bringing the same Colors together into their own communities, and the different Colors apart. I respect it because its very complexity is the work of a genius. However, I believe that there are better ways to organize people…but it is all in the timing, all in the time." At my confused look, his smile grew a little wry and he continued, "You see, if our society was like it was back then, there wouldn't be as much respect for each other as we have here. There would always be people who WANTED the Color system type of society. Then, if we have the Color system installed, there would be people who want the old society back. So you see, one way or the other, we can never completely satisfy the people's needs."
I leaned back, more in thought at his words than I had ever been. It had never occurred to me that the Color system might be…unwanted, somewhere out there. It always seemed just THERE. It was usual, the ordinary, the routine. And the past history didn't make me think that maybe, a long time ago, there was freedom between people, the ability to pass from one class to another without going out of each other's ways to knock the other down. I could only imagine the competition back then to get into either Yorkshire or Lomas – it must have been even more packed than it was now! But I had heard that Lomas took all Colors, not just Violets or Azures. They offered this sacred freedom to walk around without having to bow down low to anyone to everyone in the world. I understood that this WAS, indeed, a wonderful, almost magical place. Here people didn't care about their families. Here they were themselves, and even though the reality of the world outside always pressed down once in a while, this place became a place where they could talk to anyone and have a conversation about anything. It was freedom, freedom to its fullest extent that I had never experienced before.
And when I walked back into the classroom and listened and watched Kurapika's violin sing in his skillful hands, I knew why he was so happy. This was the place where he could play, teach, live as nowhere else provided. In his music he explored the freedom of the past, delved into the pains of the future. This was HIS music, his place in the world where he belonged. That day, I realized the whitewashed mansion I had seen, the light spilling out like heaven's door, was here. This tattered old building was the castle Kurapika lived in, and though the walls confined physically, it was actually freer than any teaching, any lecture, any COLOR, any music could ever, ever describe.
Today was a Saturday. Unfortunately for us, we had school on Saturday. But it was just an exception today; we had a field trip.
Kuroro was the teacher who was going along with us. We watched as his class (still in deep thought), filed into an immaculately straight line and one by one approached the platform. The man at the desk gave a bored grunt when the headpiece was finally slipped over their eyes and gave the green button a push. After a flash of light, the student would be gone, away to Lomas University, and the next student would be led up to the top of the platform. This…whatever was invented by some guy called Garos Cine who somehow developed this system of rapid transport from one place to another. It was as necessary, and absolutely ordinary, as if you had a car back on the last age or so. But this didn't use up any fuel – just energy, and that could be easily provided. Hey, global environmentalists were happy, so why should we complain? Those people could get a little annoying, to say the least.
Riding the Teleporter was a little queasy. You had to put this headpiece over your eyes and it would show you the coordinates (exact down the very last decimal) and then you'd get this nauseous feeling and then you would be there. You'd step off the platform in whatever destination was that was listed at the coordinates, and that was the end of that. How this machine worked – I'd never know. I didn't particularly WANT to know. It had something to do with the mind being persuaded that it was going somewhere or such. Very strange and not at all interesting.
As every student at Brooklyn High had to do each year, we took a tour of the best university in the world. That, of course, would be the school our DEAR (that was sarcastic) GREEN teacher went to: Yorkshire University. The 'highest honor' award thing was called the Illumination Award. Every year they'd have some graduating guy get it. How Kurapika Kurata managed to get it before age fifteen was unknown to the rest of us. He must have been a psychopathic genius or something. Of course, if Kurapika had ever been a genius in the first place, he sure didn't seem like it now. He seemed like, well, a very Green recruit.
Kuroro talked to his class about the North Wing being the English department, the West Wing being whatever, blah blah blah. I tuned him out and looked around. Shalnark and several other students were looking at a map. Shizuku was hurriedly copying it down; she probably predicted she'd forget about it after two minutes or so. I pushed past both and looked up. I frowned. Damn, I was too short.
Suddenly I remembered something. I pushed back out of the crowd and raised my hand. Kuroro stopped abruptly. "Yes?"
"Where's the music and mythology wing?", I asked simply. He blinked at me once and answered, "The North – wait, where are you going?"
But I was already taking off. I had seen enough of the map to know where the North Wing was. I snickered under my breath. Stupid Green Kurapika! He didn't realize just how EASY it was to find him.
I stopped in front of a set of something like ten or twenty doors, all with the words "Music" on them. Under them were subtitles like "String", "Instrumental", "Orchestra", "Vocal"…and the list went on. All of them seemed to have music coming from them. I glared at the window that was too far up on the door for me to look through. I tried to jump up and look through. All I managed to see was the inside room's white ceiling. Giving an annoyed grunt, I then latched myself on the bottom and tried to pull myself up, the metal digging painfully into my fingernails. Just as my eyes reached the bottom border, the door opened and I fell backwards.
A little odd-looking lady was standing over me. She looked at me quizzically and asked, "What are you doing?" in a voice that sounded like it was from a little girl instead of a teacher. I sweatdropped more from her appearance than from the lack of what to say.
"Eh…", I stumbled over the words, "um, I'm looking for Kurapika Kurata."
The girl teacher's face softened a little and didn't look quite as confused for a moment. "Oh", she said, and thought for a moment. "I think he should be next door right now." When I started to go to the next door, she pulled my arm back with surprising strength in her fingers and ushered me into a room. "Sakilo, go to the Strings room and see if Kurapika's there." As I watched, a girl placed her clarinet on the stand and quietly exited. The teacher smiled at me in a sickening sweet way. "Stay here for a bit, young man. Saki'll get Kurapika for you."
I opened my mouth and shut it. She wasn't paying attention to me anymore. Instead, she was already tapping her music stand and telling the class to start on this measure and play with that ferocity. I stood back while they played. I had to admit they were pretty good. But I guess it was expected of the best university in the world. The class' music tapered off as the girl Sakilo returned and waited patiently for the teacher to notice her.
"Senritsu, Kurapika is not in the Strings room. They say he left to run copies off of something." The class gave a murmur; from what I could tell, they were debating whether or not to send me to the main office or not because I was distracting them or something along those lines. I shrunk against the wall. I didn't think my abnormally white hair was THAT distracting. The chatter grew so loud that it must have disturbed the other classes because someone had to scream, "What's going on here?" before everyone quieted down.
Bingo, I grinned. It was Kurapika.
The Green was surprised to see me, to say the least. Behind him, I could hear the chatter of the other students also from Brooklyn High, having caught up with me. Kurapika gave me a stern look and closed the door behind him. A girl giggled and Senritsu shushed her. Outside I could hear Kurapika and Kuroro talking.
The class seemed to LEAN towards the door. The door opened and Kurapika pulled me out. I couldn't even say "Thank you" before the Green closed the door behind me and pushed me against the wall. His voice was dangerous, even as the thought "He's just a Green, he shouldn't be able to threaten me" crossed my mind. His face was not the white mansion I had seen back in the classroom; it was angry, a beautiful, graceful kind of anger. Kuroro stood beside him, his hand suspended on the wall above me so I couldn't escape. They acted like a gang of two, about to ask me to give up my lunch money.
For a moment, Kurapika looked like he was going to speak. His eyes flickered once to the blue glass armband on my arm that told the world I was an Azure. And in that moment, he seemed to come to a decision. His eyes closed, and he took a breath. I tensed for a verbal reprimand, a "What the heck were you thinking?!" or a "You are SOOOO dead!". But instead, he just breathed out again, and then his eyes opened. He turned and went to the head of the line again. The class stared after him. With me running away and not found – he wasn't going to punish me? My face started to turn into a smile, relieved in having escaped some awful fate that Kurapika would have had in store for me. But Kuroro's face stopped me.
I never noticed just how his face looked until now. He had always seemed to be smiling, content, before. But now, there was a slight turning in of his eyebrows, and even though he didn't say anything and his face looked perfectly neutral, I could tell he was angry. I looked away and my face burned with embarrassment I didn't imagine I would feel. After all, what had I done? A Green was lower than me, even if he was older. You spent your whole life making SURE that the other classes behaved, right? It wouldn't be right if they got out of line, right? I couldn't imagine why I was embarrassed; there was nothing wrong with putting a Green back where he belonged. So, what was this feeling I had? It felt as if… I had disappointed someone. Which, of course, would be Kurapika.
What, did he expect our class to be nice and in line all the time like C-12D? And with that last thought, I straightened and joined the rest of the group. Several victorious snickers sounded around me, as if for congratulating me on making a fool out of Kurapika. Leorio and Gon gave me a nudge; their faces showed that I had scored a point against our teacher. And the guilty feeling inside of me only grew more as I snickered and pointed at Kurapika with them.
Kuroro seemed oblivious to us. But I could tell he wasn't happy. And that wasn't good because he was a Violet. Yet, I doubted he would apprehend me; Kurapika should have been the one to administer the punishment, if I had one. It wasn't any of Kuroro's business. And I think he knew that – and so when Kurapika didn't do anything, I guess Kuroro felt he didn't really have any right to say anything because I wasn't his student.
The Strings room was full of silent students. All of them had raised eyebrows as Kurapika walked in, followed by about sixty students or so. This should have been his fourth class today; Brooklyn High had more than ten classes of sophomores, and all of them came into whatever class Kurapika was teaching at the moment just to get a taste of what it was like. Kurapika stood at the stand, and for a moment, I could see that beautiful house with the white walls and golden curtains. His face looked triumphant, and when I looked out over the students he conducted, their faces lifted in inspiration, I knew why they could be so…joyful to play with Kurapika. Then the music started, and the glide of strings lifted the somber atmosphere.
It was etheral, angelical, the way the group was conducted. When a certain side toned down to a soft hush, the other side would rise up like a wave and bowel us away again. It was truly, truly inspiration. It lifted your spirits and lowered them. I never had had much taste for classical music before, but at the sound of the strings, harmonizing, darting between melodies, I found myself having more respect for whichever composer wrote this so long ago than the bands that played today on electric guitars and blasting sound speakers.
And then I noticed something dreadful. Something that shouldn't have been here. THE STUDENTS ALL WEREN'T WEARING THEIR ARMBANDS. Instead, they wore a white cloth, bound either on a leg, as a scarf or on an arm. My face paled. This was against the law, wasn't it. Quickly I looked back at Kurapika. HE WAS ONLY WEARING A WHITE CLOTH TOO. I was confused. The music seemed to sour in the air like over-aged milk, and I pushed past people, still awesomely inspired by the music, the people who didn't realize there was something terribly, terribly wrong here.
A teacher seemed to sense my distress. Kuroro pulled me out of the room and into the hall. Behind us, the music seemed to glimmer in the air before the door shut and the sound was completely blocked. The teacher seemed to have read my thoughts: "You've noticed it too, have you?"
"The bands", I spluttered, "he could be arrested, he could go to jail like he did before and this time he'd stay forever and ever –" I stopped, and realized just who I was defending. Confusion filled me for a moment before I knocked the thought from my mind to protest some more. Kuroro stilled me with a hand, and led me over to a bench nearby.
"Lomas University is currently the only university in the world that is something called NonColored. The students here are, essentially, potential rebels like Kurapika used to be. In fact, the main bulk of the protesters in the Rebel Color Movement of 1989 came from Lomas. The people who go here believe that the old way, back when everyone was equal and there WERE no colors, was better. They still support Marks' system of Colors and respect him for it because he was a true genius to think of all these complicated processes that comes with a new society – but they feel it isn't right. That's why instead of their colorbands, they wear white armbands to symbolize peace and equality between all. Here, there are no Colors – there are less fights here, if you've noticed. People here respect each other's differences and individual interests instead of what color they come from here." Kuroro leaned on the creaky wood and looked heavy-lidded at the ceiling. "It's a different world."
I got the feeling there was something else he wanted to say. "Are you saying that the Color system is wrong?"
He smiled faintly, as if he knew I was going to ask that. "Yes and no", he finally answered. "I respect the Color system for organizing the people, bringing the same Colors together into their own communities, and the different Colors apart. I respect it because its very complexity is the work of a genius. However, I believe that there are better ways to organize people…but it is all in the timing, all in the time." At my confused look, his smile grew a little wry and he continued, "You see, if our society was like it was back then, there wouldn't be as much respect for each other as we have here. There would always be people who WANTED the Color system type of society. Then, if we have the Color system installed, there would be people who want the old society back. So you see, one way or the other, we can never completely satisfy the people's needs."
I leaned back, more in thought at his words than I had ever been. It had never occurred to me that the Color system might be…unwanted, somewhere out there. It always seemed just THERE. It was usual, the ordinary, the routine. And the past history didn't make me think that maybe, a long time ago, there was freedom between people, the ability to pass from one class to another without going out of each other's ways to knock the other down. I could only imagine the competition back then to get into either Yorkshire or Lomas – it must have been even more packed than it was now! But I had heard that Lomas took all Colors, not just Violets or Azures. They offered this sacred freedom to walk around without having to bow down low to anyone to everyone in the world. I understood that this WAS, indeed, a wonderful, almost magical place. Here people didn't care about their families. Here they were themselves, and even though the reality of the world outside always pressed down once in a while, this place became a place where they could talk to anyone and have a conversation about anything. It was freedom, freedom to its fullest extent that I had never experienced before.
And when I walked back into the classroom and listened and watched Kurapika's violin sing in his skillful hands, I knew why he was so happy. This was the place where he could play, teach, live as nowhere else provided. In his music he explored the freedom of the past, delved into the pains of the future. This was HIS music, his place in the world where he belonged. That day, I realized the whitewashed mansion I had seen, the light spilling out like heaven's door, was here. This tattered old building was the castle Kurapika lived in, and though the walls confined physically, it was actually freer than any teaching, any lecture, any COLOR, any music could ever, ever describe.