A/N: Musical definitions are provided after the chapter.

Pensieroso
Tohma

I owe all of my accomplishments to my parents. So I have always said in public. All I have to do is add a smile, and it never fails to gain the reaction that I have planned.

Affabilita. Appearances are everything. Know yours and how it works, and you have won half the battle. I learned that from my parents, though it was not their intention to teach me. So it is true. I owe all of my accomplishments to them.

It does not matter that it is not in the sense that people assume.

My parents are wealthy. They are not happy. They are not warm. They are not nurturing. They are successful. They are...careful.

Is that shocking? I never thought so. The Seguchis are a fixture. They have a Place in Society, which is much like having a place in society, but with catering. The Place comes with expectations. The Seguchis are a corporation. They meet demand with supply.

Society demands a certain careful architecture of life from the head of a large and prestigious international commodities brokerage. Everything in my father's life was an element of that construction. He needed the perfect past, the perfect present. He needed a respectable, well-established old family name. He had it. He needed the impeccably maintained multiple residences, ancestral and modern. He had them. He needed an attractive wife with her own fine family name. He got her.

He needed the perfect future. He needed a son.

My mother and I lived in Kyoto, in the perfect old Seguchi family estate. My father divided his time between it and the Tokyo residence close to his corporation's main office. He kept a delicately modest personal staff to attend to our needs—neither so many servants that he would be judged wasteful and indulgent, nor so few that he appeared stingy and grasping.

Among those staff were my handlers and trainers. My father required his son to be quiet, clean, obedient, mannerly, and studious. Discreetly handpicked private tutors, brought in a couple of years before formal schooling was to begin, ensured that I would be seen as an excellent student. Musical training in a classical style, from a live-in instructor, would complete the picture nicely. It would be the piano, not the violin. Mistakes on a piano are not half as unmelodious. His son would be a bright boy.

Traditional Japanese family values, thy name is Seguchi.

It was beautifully orchestrated. Perhaps that is why I smile when someone describes me as "composed".

When I was old enough to be counted upon to comport myself properly, my father instituted the next step in his plan. He began taking me back to Tokyo with him occasionally, so that I could see my future. He wanted me to learn.

I watched. I listened. I learned. Peu a peu.

I came to understand why the Seguchi life was so meticulously ordered. Less skillful men came to deal with my father bluntly, thinking themselves strong, only to be overthrown by one tiny detail. I saw how he assessed situations, breaking them down into their smallest facts, and how he coldly rearranged them until they suited his purposes. I saw how successful his approach had made him.

I knew I could be better.

When my father decided I should learn to play the piano, he was thinking only of his image. He did not know that he had unwittingly given me a key. He did not understand music.

There is something deceptively simple about a piano. It is 88 black and white keys, lined up neatly, each corresponding to a specific note. All you must do to make each note sound is press the key. Cold logic deduces that once you know how to read a sheet of the notes, and which keys to press, all that remains is to keep the proper tempi and coordinate your fingers. A computer would do quite well; it can calculate time in terms of milliseconds, and does what it is programmed to do, unhampered by such organic things as muscle memory or coordination.

So logic says. Yet computers, playing the piano, do not make music. Computers make sound.

Logic by itself is useless.

This unsuspected key my father gave me taught me a great deal. I learned that facts are not truth, for there is that which cannot be broken into facts. Music is not mere notes strung together, nor volume, nor pace, nor interval. Music is something impalpable except in actual experience; something that moves a part of us untouchable by plain facts and logic, though it requires them. Music is...

...Human.

If you understand one, you understand the other. Both require logic for structure and stability, but contain an element of unpredictability and emotion. Combined, they are no simple mixture, but something entirely new. Precision leads into and contains imprecision. Music and humanity are matters of nuance.

Therefore, power rests neither entirely in facts nor in emotion. In ignoring emotion in favor of facts, or facts in favor of emotion, you rob yourself of any hope of real control. Even once you find the balance, it takes time to gain an understanding of it—and it is as impossible to master it as it is to embrace the wind. Yet with enough patience...

...you can get very, very good.

My childhood was perhaps a bit chilly, but I had music, and so I was not unhappy.

I was planning.

affabilita – with ease and elegance; affability; in a pleasing and agreeable manner
pensieroso – contemplative, thoughtful
peu a peu – little by little