I Didn't Want to Stop the Music
By Kudzu

My gift is my song, yeah
This one's for you
Elton John, "Your Song"

It was dark; it was always dark, and if it wasn't, how could Raan Bucahr ever tell?

Blind since early childhood, Raan had nonetheless developed a keen proficiency for two things: philosophy, which was almost in no way hindered by his condition; and music, which was slightly more challenging considering his lack of sight. But the two talents blended well, and Raan soon found himself a band.

Tonight's gig was on some Outer Rim dustball called Tatooine. Raan had never heard of the planet before and he didn't expect to ever hear about it again. But these were his clients - a Hutt named Gardulla and her guests - and apparently, they were throwing some big party as a fundraiser.

And so, as Raan had learned to do as someone very young, he just sang.

He sang from his heart and from his soul. He played his handheld, keyed opisaln and the thrum of its notes burned the air around him, filling it with some great and wondrous energy and power. This was music the way Raan played it, and this was the way that he saw.

He sang of the injustices of the galaxy: from difficulties with women to the oppression of corrupt governments. He sang of all these injustices, but he never mentioned his blindness. He lived with it. He had been coping with it for too long to ever lament it - and in some ways, the only injustice was that not everyone could see the world as he did, not through sightless eyes but through music and through the harmonically attuned ear.

Life was different for someone like Raan Bucahr. He'd always known it. Some might say that he walked through life as if it were a dream, carefree and casual.

Raan knew better. He had dealt with life as anyone else at the age of five would, and life had decided that living normally was too easy a thing for him. His blindness had been a challenge and a hurdle. He had overcome.

Now life was different. Life would always be different, and his vision was all the clearer for understanding this. He was to be, and not to want. His family hadn't been able to afford optical implants when life stole away his natural eyesight at age six. It had been fifteen years before he could even dream of having enough money to spend on them.

It was twenty years after that point, and Raan Bucahr had grown so used to his life as it was that he didn't care to want anything else. Whatever else came, as it did with any person in the galaxy - but he chose to let it come naturally.

"You live in your own little world," someone once informed him. "You are absorbed in your own doings and your own thoughts and feelings."

It might have been true. But somehow, Raan Bucahr expressed these things in his song and his music. They must have brought joy to people as they brought self-interest and wonder to his own self, or he wouldn't be here today.

And Force, he wanted to be here today! Anywhere that he could sing a note or play a tune - because for him, that was what life was. He occupied himself with it even when there wasn't an audience watching - and maybe there was, because if Raan was in his music, how would he ever know? When he sang and when he played, his own music filled his ears.

It was the greatest feeling in the world.

There had been one incident where he had simply gone somewhere and decided to begin singing. And then he had began playing, and his music flowed from him as it rarely ever did, so fluid was it and so natural.

It wasn't until he was done and thundering applause rang like sweet music in answer to his own that he realized that he had been playing onstage with his band.

He sang of the wonders of the galaxy: that so many peoples could live in harmony, of love, and of music from which both of those wonders might have sprung. Music was the foundation of existence. This was his way of life and this was his vision of the universe.

It was a happy universe.

When he let one of his band members in as a kloo horn player, he had never found out that the man was actually a female Bith until months later. It didn't matter. She was an excellent kloo horn player regardless of who she was. He could have found out that she was actually a granite slug and he wouldn't have minded one bit. She was still a damn good kloo horn player.

How amazing was that that different people of different species with different cultures from different worlds could be so alike that he could mistake a female Bith for a male Human and not even care for the difference between them so long as they played their music and played it well?

Music was truly the root of all wonders.

He sang of the horrors of the galaxy: terrifying beasts and the death of the young. Even though he could not see these things in the traditional sense, he felt them. He knew about them. He was told about them and he sang about them, and that was what he knew and the way that he knew.

The greatest monster couldn't slay the essence of someone who was great. He could not erase him from existence forever, vanished as if he never lived. To be great was to be able to be judged as great by others, and so long as they were inspired by your memory you could never pass from all remembrance.

Raan had considered this for a long time when he first understood it. Was this what he strove for? To be commemorated, remembered and beloved for all time?

It was more important, he had decided, to be himself. The whims and pleasures of others was something that he couldn't really grasp all in one. They could spend a lifetime telling him about themselves, what they strove for, and what they wanted, and he'd still never understand them as well as he understood himself.

He knew himself because that was who he spent the entirety of his life with. He could hear through his own ears and feel with his own touch, and think his own thoughts, and he could never truly do that with anybody else. He aimed to please the person who he knew best, because he could always know how to please that person.

He aimed to please himself.

Was there anything else in life?

He didn't know how long he played for. Seconds…minutes…hours…days…months…years…eternities? He let his music fill him and invigorate him. He didn't need anything but the song on his lips and the keys beneath his fingers.

And when his music finally stopped, like a hovertrain pulling into the station after a breathtakingly scenic ride, like a long life's journey finally coming to an end…

"Mister?"

The voice was that of a little boy, perhaps no older than he had been in his innocence before the dark times that had befallen him and then passed. It caused Raan a small pang to hear the child's young voice.

"What is it, son?" he asked kindly.

The boy hesitated, as if those fatherly words sounded strange and unfamiliar to him. "Mister, it's night-time now. My master's guests have all left. Your band and your singers have packed up already, and my master and my mom have both gone to bed."

Raan sighed. So it is over, he thought mournfully. "And how long has it been since then?"

"A long time," the boy whispered almost conspiratorially. "It's almost morning."

That long? "Why didn't you tell me that it was over before now, my boy?" He continued to use the fatherly phrasing and tone of voice. It gave him some sense of purpose, somehow, which was odd because normally he didn't think of himself as needing any more.

The slave boy's voice was quiet, somehow at once both more mature and also younger and more innocent. He replied softly, "I didn't want to stop the music."