Gelo's POV
The morning of graduation smelled like rain and starch.
Rows of black gowns rippled whenever the breeze cut through the quad. Families crossed the lawn with cameras and bouquets, and the main stage glittered with the school seal like it had been waiting four years just for this moment.
I tugged at my collar and laughed under my breath. Four years? We'd done it in a blur—classes, concerts, council meetings, rehearsals, deadlines. Nights that ended backstage and mornings that started with exams. Somehow, it all led here.
"Don't wrinkle that," Xiarya scolded, swatting my hand. She stood in front of me, straightening my stole like it was a mission, her long hair tucked neatly over one shoulder. Her own gown fell perfectly, cords braided with the colors of the arts committee and academic honors.
"You look like a dean's favorite," I teased.
"I am a dean's favorite." She rose on tiptoe and pressed a quick kiss to my cheek. "Yung, you're shaking."
"Am not."
She laced her fingers through mine. "You always do before big stages."
I exhaled, let the noise of the field settle around us. This was a bigger stage than any arena. This was the one that rewrote who we were.
Across the crowd, I caught sight of Steve in his law hood, arguing light-heartedly with two professors who'd clearly adopted him. Ariela looped her arm through his and whispered something that made him grin like a teenager. Mark walked backward through a thicket of parents and camera tripods, hyping up Clara for a photo she didn't want, until she giggled and let him spin her beneath her cap. And Adra—quiet, steady Adra—tuned a tiny travel guitar near the side of the stage, the instrument's satinwood catching slivers of light. He'd been asked to play the ceremonial recessional. "Low-key," he'd promised the dean. We all knew what "low-key" meant when it came to Adra.
"Five minutes!" a marshal shouted. The class shuffled into columns; hats straightened, tassels checked, nerves swallowed.
I squeezed Xiarya's hand. "See you on the other side."
"See you on the other side," she echoed, and we split into our lines.
Processional
The band struck a bright, clean chord, and the rows began to move. Parents stood, phones rose, applause rolled down the lawn in waves. We walked—the heirs and hustlers and insomniacs, the kids who had been famous on Friday nights and anonymous by Monday morning lectures. We walked like we'd earned it.
I took my seat on the front row with the student leaders, the seal at our feet and the podium just ahead. Behind me, a hum of whispers, the kind that always trailed Sudden Music on campus, but it was softer now, more like respect than curiosity.
The university president welcomed everyone, a string quartet finished their movement, and then the program tipped into speeches. Faculty first—mercifully brief. Then the podium was handed to the Student Council Vice President.
Steve.
He adjusted the mic, glanced down at note cards, then folded them shut and set them aside. Of course he did.
"My professors warned me not to turn this into a closing argument," he began, and the field laughed. "So I won't. But I will submit evidence." He paused, eyes warming. "That none of us got here alone."
He spoke about nights buried in casebooks, about losing and learning in moot court, about the first time a professor said "be brave enough to be wrong in public." He thanked Ariela last, voice going softer than he realized. "For reminding me to be human when my brain tried to be a statute."
Applause. A whistle from somewhere that sounded suspiciously like Mark.
Next, they called the Business Org Chair to accept an award on behalf of student initiatives. I stood, accepted the plaque, said into the mic, "We built this place together. We'll build what comes next the same way," and sat back down before I could start sounding like my father.
Awards followed. Clara's name rang out for an academic distinction; she looked stunned, glasses back on, cheeks pink as Mark clapped like the world had just voted unanimous in her favor. Xiarya received recognition for leadership in the arts—she bowed smoothly, eyes shining as she returned to her seat. She had never chased the spotlight. Funny how it always found her anyway.
Then the dean cleared his throat. "A special performance, before diplomas," he said. "Composed for this morning, by one of our own."
The lawn hushed without being told.
Adra stepped into the center, guitar balanced easily, posture unshowy and grounded. He nodded once to the audio techs. No speech. No preamble.
He played.
It wasn't the Adra we'd met years ago—the one who wore frost like armor and turned his back on applause like it was a stranger calling his name. This was warmer, weathered. Notes flowed like breath. The melody started simple and student-true—fractured, late-night, ramen-and-neon simple—and then opened into something bigger, an anthem without words. It rose through the treble in arcs, fell back on the bass like an oath, carried mercy in the spaces between.
The lawn didn't cheer when he finished. Not right away. They did what audiences do when they've heard something that names them: they breathed out as one, like a held note finally released. Then the applause broke—fierce and grateful.
Adra bowed, small and sincere, and melted back to the edge of the stage.
"Diplomas," the president said, voice a little rougher than before.
We stood when called, crossed the boards when summoned, shook hands, grinned unabashedly when our fingers closed around thick paper and ink that meant a door had opened that would never close again.
When Sedric Angelo Alcantara Yung rang through the speakers, I walked steady. When Xiarya Erranya Buenavista followed, she walked straighter than me.
When Cleofe Adrastea Torres was called, the lawn seemed to lean in. He smiled—tiny, unguarded—and accepted what the boy he used to be had nearly lost.
Caps flew. Tassels swung. Confetti cannons did what confetti cannons do.
We were done.
We were beginning.
After Ceremony
The campus turned into a wedding reception. Photographers staged vignette scenes under jacarandas. Parents introduced themselves like ambassadors. Old grudges died under paper cups of punch.
Monique arrived late, ducking a streamer, then proceeded to cry on three separate people, two of whom were not us. "You're all adults," she wailed into my shoulder, then hiccuped into a laugh. "How did that happen?"
"Against all odds," Steve said, slipping his arm around Ariela. She angled her cap against his shoulder and smiled into the grass.
My father shook my hand longer than necessary and did that quiet Yung thing where praise sounds like a logistical update. "You did well," he said, then cleared his throat. "We'll set a meeting next week. Not for pressure—just... future."
"Future," I echoed, and felt the word settle somewhere that wasn't fear.
Clara's parents hugged Mark as if the boy had been raised in their kitchen. "He eats like he was," Clara whispered, nudging him when he pretended to be offended.
On the far edge of the lawn, Adra sat on a low wall with his guitar case open and a paper cup balanced on top. A breeze toyed with the tassel at his cap. He looked peaceful in that tilted way of his, listening to a conversation only he could hear.
I walked over and bumped my shoulder to his. "Good anthem."
"Good stage," he answered. His gaze slid sideways to where Xiarya was laughing with the arts faculty. His smile toed that line between brother and witness. "Good everything."
"Almost everything," I said carefully.
He didn't answer, but I saw it—the flicker of a bell that no one else heard.
Night
We ended the day at our place. No managers, no faculty, no obligations. Just the six of us, a counter crowded with takeout cartons, a living room floor drowned in flowers and program booklets, gowns tossed over chair backs like surrendered flags.
Steve stood on the coffee table (to everyone's extreme disapproval) and raised a soda. "To us. To years we survived. To people who saved us." He nodded at Adra. "To those who taught us to wait." He tipped his can toward Ariela. "To people who showed up." He grinned at all of us. "To everything after this."
"Get off the furniture," Ariela said, tugging at his sleeve. He hopped down, stole a kiss, and handed her the can.
Mark put music on low and pulled Clara into the kitchen to dance against the tiles. It wasn't graceful, but it was them, and that was better.
I found the balcony and the breeze. A moment later, a familiar hand slid into mine.
"Tired?" I asked.
"Happy," Xiarya said simply. "And hungry."
I laughed. "Both sustainable conditions." We leaned against the railing, city lights scribbling the horizon. "Do you ever think about how it started?"
"Which part?" she asked. "The masks? The lies? The miracles?"
"All of it."
She was quiet a long moment. "I don't regret any road that led to this one."
"Me neither."
Inside, Adra's laughter braided with Steve's argument and Mark's outrageous joke and Clara's mock scandal and Ariela's perfect eye roll. The sound wrapped our house like ribbon.
We didn't take a photo. Some nights you don't need proof to remember.
Epilogue — AfterglowAdra's POV
The dorm was too quiet at 2 a.m. The city hummed the way a city does when it's promising not to sleep and absolutely lying about it. I sat on the floor with my back against the bed frame, guitar balanced lazily across my knees, the last of the day's adrenaline evaporating like rain on a hot road.
We had a plan, the six of us. Not a fixed map—more like a compass.
Steve would dive into review season like it owed him money, then sit the bar and make the courtroom look small. Ariela would anchor him with gentleness and vinegar and reminders to drink water. Mark had a seed-stage fund lined up and three ideas so combustible he needed Clara to hold the fire extinguisher and the ledger at the same time. Gelo would split himself the way only he could—half heir, half leader—running budgets in the morning and light checks at night, building two stages that kept refusing to collapse. And Xiarya—my cousin, my friend—would walk forward as herself. Not my replacement. Not anyone's secret. She'd keep studying because learning made her feel taller. She'd sit by stages without needing to stand on them. She'd be his, and ours, and her own.
Me? I would sing.
Record when it made sense; refuse when it didn't. Write for people who needed songs the way lungs need air. Keep the band whole by not letting it get swallowed by the machine. Learn to be loud without becoming cruel, quiet without vanishing.
I plucked at a string, let it thrummm into the ceiling. Somewhere below the city noise, under the memory of applause and the ghost of incense, something chimed.
A bell. Not real—memory. Or hope pretending.
I saw her, as clearly as I had on the festival day: white and red and river-still, vows braided into her spine like a second soul. She hadn't chosen me, not because she didn't want to, but because sometimes love isn't the door—it's the hand on the handle while duty turns the lock.
I don't resent the lock anymore.
"Sing," she had said.
So I wrote a line in the dim light and then another, until the page looked like a path. I sang it under my breath, not for a crowd, not even for the band asleep down the hall, but for the thread that refuses to break just because distance pretends to be scissors.
The melody found me. It always does.
In the morning we would have meetings and forms and family breakfasts and one more photoshoot we couldn't dodge. In the morning the world would ask who we were now. I would tell them the simplest true thing:
We're the same kids. We just learned our names.
I set the guitar down, let the quiet rest. The city blinked. The bell (imagined, remembered, promised) faded into the kind of silence that holds rather than hides.
"Goodnight," I told the room.
To the past we survived.
To the stage we built.
To the thread that hums when I close my eyes.
And to the next song already walking toward us, unafraid.