The walk to the O'Connell's house felt different. Alex moved with a new, hard-edged purpose, his feet sure on the familiar pavement. He was still a ghost, but no longer a listless, drifting one. He was a ghost with a mission. He was pale, his eyes were red-rimmed and hollowed out from a night of tears and grim resolve, but the crushing, catatonic weight had been replaced by a sharp, clear sense of direction. In his hand, he clutched a single, folded sheet of notebook paper.
He knocked on the door, and a moment later, it was opened by Finneas. His friend's face was etched with a week's worth of worry, but his expression shifted as he took in Alex's appearance. He saw the change immediately. This wasn't the vacant, shut-down Alex who had been hiding from the world. This was someone else. Someone who was present.
Alex didn't need to explain much. The story of the past week, and the shift that had occurred within him, was evident in his posture, in the clarity of his gaze.
"I have a song," Alex said, his voice raspy but steady. He held up the folded piece of paper. "It's for Leo. I need your help to record it."
Finneas looked from Alex's resolved face to the letter in his hand, and he understood instantly. The relief on his face was palpable, quickly replaced by a somber gravity. This wasn't a creative whim; it was a necessity. He didn't ask questions. He didn't ask if Alex was okay. He simply nodded, stepping back to let him in.
"Let's do it right," he said.
He led Alex to his home studio, the room where they had spent countless hours laughing, experimenting, and building songs from scratch. But today, the atmosphere was completely different. It was hushed, respectful, almost sacred. There were no snacks on the desk, no jokes to break the tension. It was a space cleared for a solemn, unspoken purpose.
The recording session was the antithesis of the vibrant, electric energy of the "Youth" session. There was no playful experimentation, no search for a sound. The sound already existed. This was a focused, solemn act of preservation.
"How do you want to do this?" Finneas asked quietly, taking his seat at the console.
Alex unfolded the letter and carefully placed it on the music stand in front of the vocal microphone. "It has to sound like it did last night," he explained, his voice low. "Just me and the guitar. Simple. Raw. Nothing else."
He was giving Finneas the most difficult instruction a producer can receive: do nothing. Don't add, don't polish, don't fix. Just capture.
Finneas became a careful, respectful steward of the song. He understood his role perfectly. His job today was not to be a producer; it was to be a witness. He set aside his own creative instincts, his encyclopedic knowledge of plugins and production tricks. He chose a single, high-quality condenser microphone and positioned it to capture the warm, woody tone of Alex's acoustic guitar. He set up another for the vocal. He didn't suggest adding any of the elements that had become their signature—no synth pads, no layered harmonies, no subtle drum machines. His job was not to embellish the song, but to protect its raw, broken heart.
Alex sat on the stool, the acoustic guitar resting in his lap. It felt both heavy and right. He looked at Leo's letter on the music stand, at the familiar, messy handwriting, at the words that had both shattered him and given him a reason to stand up. He wasn't singing to a microphone. He was singing to his friend.
He took a breath and began to play. The simple, melancholic chord progression filled the quiet studio. Then, he sang.
His voice was not the defiant, anthemic voice from "Youth," nor was it the polished, professional voice he used on conference calls. It was the voice of the boy from the bedroom floor. It was frayed, wounded, and emotionally exposed. It cracked on the high notes, wavered with the weight of unshed tears, but it never broke completely. He poured all the pain, all the regret, all the desperate, unanswered questions from the night before into the performance. Each line was a quiet, devastating confession.
Finneas sat at the console, motionless, his hands resting on the faders, not moving a single one. He just listened, his expression a mixture of profound sadness and deep respect. He was capturing a moment of pure, unfiltered grief, a lightning strike of pain and clarity that could never be recreated.
Alex sang the final lines, his voice dropping to a near whisper, the last chord of the guitar ringing out, clean and mournful, until it faded completely into the studio's treated silence.
He stayed on the stool, his eyes still fixed on the letter, his hands trembling slightly on the strings.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The song hung in the air between them, a tangible, heartbreaking presence.
Finally, Finneas cleared his throat and quietly hit the playback button. They listened to it once, all the way through, in complete, unbroken silence. The recording was perfect in its imperfection. The slight buzz of a finger sliding on a string, the sharp intake of a breath before a difficult line, the subtle crack in Alex's voice—Finneas had preserved it all. It was a raw document of a soul in agony.
When it finished, there were no notes to give. There was nothing to fix.
Finneas gave a slow, somber nod, his eyes glistening.
"It's perfect," he said quietly.
The eulogy was complete.