A little explanation-this is the next installment of Variations on a Japanese Folk Song. This bit is about Byakuya and Renji, who play flute and percussion respectively, just as a little refresher. This installment will be in either two or three pieces. I'm not sure which yet. Anyway, this has been floating around in my head for about a week now. It is a little light on the romance and heavy on the mild musical angst. But don't worry, it's not really angsty. The focus is still the music geekery. This chapter is about how Byakuya sees Renji while he plays, and since I feel like it is unresolved, I'm planning on writing another one about how Renji sees Byakuya. And then perhaps a third with actual interaction, maybe. So stay tuned.
This story still has received a fairly small response, but multiple people have taken the time to follow/favorite/review. To those who have, thank you so much. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story.
That's all for now. No matter how many fics I write, I never can get the hang of author's notes...
Oh wait, one more thing. This does reference a fair bit of musical jargon, so if it becomes incomprehensible to the non-musician, please let me know and I'll put up a list of musical terms used and their meanings. Also, I am not a percussionist and have never played a drum in my life. There's not much technical stuff about percussion in here other than what I pick up as a band geek, but if I got anything wrong, please don't hesitate to tell me.
That's all for real! Thanks for reading!
Banish the bells, maroon the marimba, vanquish the vibraphone and purge the percussion, for at this moment Abarai Renji was a drummer, and nothing mattered but the booming of the bass drums, the clash of the cymbals and the snickering of the snares.
The sight was the most beautiful and terrifying thing that Byakuya had ever seen.
From the moment that he picked up the drumsticks, Renji began to transform. No longer was he Abarai Renji, percussionist and lover of Kuchiki Byakuya, but something else entirely as glimpses of crimson hair and tattoos dissolved, subjugated by the vibrations of stick on drum. Abarai Renji faded away willingly, replaced by a creature composed entirely of rhythms and accents, paradiddles and syncopation.
Although he had mastered most of the percussion instruments, Renji remained a drummer at heart. Drumming was sound in its purest form, vibrations rendered by one thing striking another. Funnily enough, it by no means required a drum, as any drummer could tell you. Anything that could be hit could be played, could be alternatively coaxed and coerced to release some variety of music, or failing at that, some kind of rhythm, the kind that you cannot hear but rather can feel in your bones. Renji had drummed on the steel bedposts in the orphanage he had run away from and the sidewalks he had used to run away from that place, scuffing out sixteenth notes with the soles of his shoes as he led his small band of children to a destination that was yet to be determined. Drumming was innate, and as long as his heart kept tempo in his chest, he would never be far removed.
Byakuya was fascinated by this part of his lover. Drumming was so animalistic, so wildly ecstatic, that to someone like Byakuya, it was frightening. The antithesis of the meticulously metered trills of the flute, the rhythms that Renji played seemed to flow from his fingers to the music, as he appropriated the notes and bent them to his will, shaping them as gently as a sculptor molds clay or as violently as a blacksmith hammers iron. Although he never technically deviated from the composition, he played with such emotion, such reckless abandon that you would never guess that the ephemeral bursts of vibration, the swan songs of a thousand different notes had been penned down to something as fragile as a piece of sheet music.
When Renji played, he came alive in a way that Byakuya had never seen. He knew every inch of Abarai Renji, but this drummer, this creature who was not quite human but not quite anything else either, was something completely unfamiliar. It was his greatest insecurity that there was this entire majestic aspect of Renji's life that he was confined to view as an outsider, never truly becoming part of the sound which was liberated in a way that he, as a businessman, could never be. And he wondered if Renji, the Renji that he knew, ever got the same rush from touching him that Renji the drummer did every time the vibrations of a note ran through his body. It was his greatest insecurity, that the pressure of his pulse against Renji's chest would never incite the same ecstasy in his lover that the strike of stick and drum did, that the altogether unmetered flutters of his fingers could not match the majesty of a set of syncopated sixteenths.
And although he knew that his worries were likely unfounded, he could never quell the upwelling of emotions, the conflicting forces of liberation and jealousy that rose in his chest whenever Renji (the drummer) began to play.
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