He saved so many....But he couldn't save her...
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The sky was gray on the day they buried Kaori.
Rain threatened but never fell, like the weather had manners. Umbrellas bloomed anyway, black and neat, ribs shaking in a thin wind. The priest's words came in a careful rhythm; shovels scraped; shoes sank a little into the soft ground. Kousei stood between Tsubaki and Watari and felt alone in a way that made the air seem thinner.
He didn't look at the coffin long. The arrangement on top—white flowers shaped to suggest a violin—caught the corner of his eye and turned it to glass. He looked away, to the trees at the edge of the cemetery, to a crow that didn't care about humans and their ceremonies, to anything that was not the last box Kaori would occupy.
In his head, she played anyway.
Not the rigid, perfect lines he used to force on pieces. The other kind—the kind only she could pull out of wood and air, wild and alive, like she had borrowed sunlight and decided to spend all of it in three minutes. Over the memory of her sound came fragments of her last letter, the bits he couldn't stop hearing even when the room was loud: Live freely. Keep playing. Thank you for everything. They were simple words, gentle ones, and they stuck like thorns. He stood still and tried not to cry because crying felt like admitting the world had won.
Kaori's parents moved through the mourners like people trying to remember their bodies. Her mother's eyes were red and bright, a breaking shoreline. Her father held her by the elbow, face set the way men's faces get set when they're guarding the last intact part of the day. When they reached Kousei, he bowed too low. He couldn't trust his mouth.
"Thank you for coming," her father said.
Kousei nodded. He wanted to say I'm sorry and I loved her and I will carry her through days she never got to see, but his chest felt bricked over. Tsubaki's hand brushed his sleeve—here and gone—like a small anchor thrown against a fast current.
Watari made it to the end of the service with his jaw locked and his mouth a thin line. When the crowd broke, he stepped away, leaned into a cypress, and let the first sob hit him like a tackle. Tsubaki turned to follow. Kousei stayed where he was and stared at the line of dirt that cut the grass.
***
He thought of his mother because grief is a collector, not an archivist. It stacks your losses on one shelf, then pushes them tight together when you're not looking. First his mother. Now Kaori. The two women who taught him how to live, and then left him to keep proof. Both stolen by failures of the body. A superstition started writing itself in the corner of his mind: Everyone I love will be taken by illness. It was stupid and unfair and it began anyway.
In the hall afterward, plates clicked against the long table. Adults spoke in soft voices they didn't use for anything else. There was tea. There were the kinds of cookies that pretend to be comfort. Kousei heard the same sentences on a loop: She was so bright. So unfair. So young. He nodded because nodding was the only verb he could handle.
Tsubaki stayed close. She poured tea he didn't drink and said his name in a way that asked permission to be his friend. Watari slipped outside and made a joke that died in the doorway. When Kousei finally followed him out, Watari kicked at the thin line of gravel along the path and said, "She was... Kaori," like that was a complete sentence. Maybe it was.
"She wanted you to—" Watari started, then swallowed the end. He couldn't say live freely aloud. It would have sounded like a command, and commands don't belong at a grave.
They walked Kousei home. He didn't argue. The streets looked normal. That almost made him angry. The bakery window still fogged from ovens. A kid hopped a puddle with both feet and landed like a drummer. A dog shook and flung rain off its ears in a glittering arc. Life moved. It kept moving even when people stopped. He had known that before. It felt like a betrayal now.
***
At his apartment, Tsubaki paused in the doorway and made her face brave. "Text me," she said.
"Yeah," he whispered. He didn't.
Inside, the piano waited like an old friend who didn't know the bad news yet. He stood across from it. The lid reflected him back to himself in a blurry strip. He lifted the fallboard. Keys stared: patient, pale. His hands hovered. The habit of a decade reached for him like a rope.
He let his fingers fall. A single C filled the room, pure and ordinary and unbearable. He took a breath and heard, behind that note, how she used to laugh at him for counting too hard; how she'd nudge him with her shoulder backstage; how she played as if she had convinced the air it would live longer if it danced. The second note didn't make it out. He shut the lid fast, wood on wood, a clap that didn't echo.
He took the letter from his pocket, the one he had read and read until the paper softened like cloth. He didn't unfold it. He could see the slope of her handwriting without looking. Live freely. Keep playing. Thank you for everything. The lines were carved into him now. He pressed the folded paper to his chest until it hurt, then loosened his hand and slid the letter into the narrow space beneath the fallboard, pushing it back until it disappeared. He let the lid down gently, like putting a blanket over someone sleeping.
He left the room. The piano stayed behind, quiet as a closed door.
***
Grief made a map out of town. There were streets he couldn't walk because her shadow lived there. There were corners where his chest tightened for reasons his body knew before his mind did. He slept in bursts. When he did, he dreamed in black-and-white. He did not touch the bench again.
Tsubaki showed up with soups and stubbornness. She opened the curtains and let light in like a dare. "It's still the world," she'd say. Some days he could stand in it with her. Most days he nodded, said he'd come outside later, and later stayed where it was.
Watari messaged him with memes and half-true stories and asked him to watch matches. Sometimes Kousei went and sat on the far end of the bleachers and kept his hood up and let the noise wash him clean for an hour. Most times he stayed where water didn't reach.
***
When the apartment started feeling like a jar with the lid too tight, he walked to the library. It was warm there and quiet in a way that didn't feel like punishment. He wandered between shelves the way you wander a familiar neighborhood when you don't want anyone to see you. He started with music texts because their titles made easy promises. The words didn't hurt. They didn't help either.
He drifted outward. Psychology, anatomy, the brain. He read a chapter about how two cells talk in the dark through slivers of chemistry and thought about duet partners. He read about a disease that stole balance and breath from the inside and thought thief out loud, quiet. He read until the library closed, then read PDFs on his phone by the blue light of insomnia until morning.
He didn't decide to study medicine. The decision happened in small, accumulative ways, like dust. One month he was watching lectures because they were interesting. The next he was taking notes and pausing to copy diagrams. He enrolled in courses because the registrar would let him and he didn't have a good reason to say no. He took the exams because showing up felt better than staying still. He passed because he had done nothing else for months, because his mind remembered what it was to sit with a hard thing until it softened.
He told himself he wasn't trying to fix anything. He repeated that lie until it lost its seams.
***
Years unspooled. Seventeen turned into nineteen, then twenty-one, then twenty-three. He collected textbooks the way his younger self collected recordings—one more finally that might change everything if he listened in the right way. He learned to love lab smells: ethanol and plastic and something cold and clean. He learned to hold a pipette without wasting a drop, to label like a person who believes tomorrow will come, to watch a plate the way you watch a stage when someone you love is about to walk onto it.
Professors remembered him. Not because he showed off. Because he didn't quit. He asked questions that crawled under the obvious and bit. He did the repeats no one wanted to do. He stayed late, not because staying late made you a hero, but because the experiment didn't care that your roommate was hungry. He wore the same gray hoodie till the cuffs thinned and then he wore another gray hoodie, indistinguishable from the first.
Tsubaki visited the university once, stood in a hallway that smelled like paper and old coffee, and put her hands on her hips the way she did when she was thirteen. "You're bones," she said, trying to make it a joke so it wouldn't be a complaint. She handed him a lunch box with her name on the lid in block letters. "Eat. Or I'm going to write my name on your forehead too so people remember you belong to someone."
He smiled, real for a second. "I don't belong to anyone," he said, not as an argument, but as a weather report. She winced like she'd walked into a low table she knew was there. She still hugged him, hard, as if proof could move back into muscle.
***
Watari kept appearing in pictures with teammates and sunlight. He almost always had his arm slung around someone else's neck, like life was better when it leaned. He invited Kousei to games, then stopped inviting and just sent times and locations. "No pressure," he'd say in voice notes. "Also I love you, bro, and no, don't make it weird." Kousei listened to the voice notes at 2 a.m. on benches under vending machines, then went back inside.
The world widened outside his small travels between apartment, lecture halls, labs. Breakthroughs were being made by other hands. He didn't envy them. He studied them until the corners of the articles frayed. He wanted to understand the exact shape of the wall so he could find the door.
***
Twenty-six found him with a desk he could call his and a team that listened when he cleared his throat at the whiteboard. He wasn't the youngest in the room anymore and he wasn't the most decorated, but when there was a puzzle that didn't like being solved, people glanced at him because he had a way of looking that made problems give up their last secret.
He started to write his own papers. The first time his name arrived in print on a journal masthead, he stared for a long minute, like reading it could chart a route back to a boy who once believed only music could make a life worth keeping. It didn't. It still felt like alphabet.
He presented at conferences in rooms that reminded him, painfully, of recital halls. He watched the audience do the same things audiences always do—lean in, check phones, scribble, cough at the same unlucky moments. Once, someone wept during Q&A, clutching the microphone like a rope. "My sister," she said, and couldn't finish. Kousei stood with his hands open, wanting to offer a cure he didn't have yet. "We are trying," he said. It was flat and honest and not enough.
***
The first time a headline used the word prodigy with his photograph under it, he took the paper off the lab table and folded it neatly and put it in the recycling. The word felt like a sweater he'd outgrown but kept wearing because people liked it. He preferred stubborn. He would have accepted obsessed. He would have smiled at tired.
He learned to manage budgets and timelines and people who needed him to be the kind of steady he wasn't sure he could be. He learned that mentorship is mostly remembering to ask Did you eat? before Where are we on that draft? He watched younger scientists fall in love with ideas and wanted to warn them about what happened when love met a clock. He didn't. Everyone has to make their own bargains.
He didn't stop visiting the piano. He never played it. Once a year—twice, some years—he lifted the lid and took out Kaori's letter. He unfolded it carefully, palm flat to keep the paper from curling back on itself. He didn't read all of it. He couldn't. He traced the fragments with his thumb, like reading Braille written on his own skin. Live freely. Keep playing. Thank you for everything. He put the letter back and lowered the lid like closing a book in a quiet library.
***
Twenty-nine brought awards he didn't attend except when attending would protect his team from losing their funding. He learned to stand under lights and say we and mean it. He got used to hands on his shoulder that belonged to people who practiced smiling. He got used to emails that began hope this finds you well and thought, it doesn't.
He moved apartments and brought the piano even though moving it was a hassle and the movers looked at him like he was a cruel person. He set it against a wall that faced east. He never lifted the lid. He put a plant on top because that's what magazines did with pianos in rooms that pretended to hold happiness. The plant died. He bought a cactus. It lived.
***
On certain mornings he ran along the river while the city was still deciding what it wanted to be. He breathed until his lungs hurt and then breathed more because that felt like practice. He didn't listen to music. He listened to the slap of rubber on path and the hiss of his breath and the small, shy sounds of a place waking.
Tsubaki called less and then not at all for a while. When she did, it was because someone else had told her to. "You make yourself hard to reach," she said when he picked up. "I'm here," he said. It sounded like a lie. They both let the silence sit. Then they asked each other questions with obvious answers. Then they said soon. Time kept its hands in its pockets and smirked.
Watari sent a picture of himself at an away game, cheeks windburned, grin big, a goofy thumbs-up in front of a stadium sign that spelled the town wrong. Still alive, he captioned. Kousei typed a reply, erased it, typed another, erased that too, ended up sending a sticker of a panda rolling down a hill. Watari sent back a voice message laughing so hard he hiccuped.
He told himself he would go home more. He told himself he would buy flowers for the grave and stand there long enough to name what he missed and what he was afraid of missing. He bought the flowers once and left them in the sink and came home to a mess and a smell. He threw them away and felt like a criminal.
***
He was good at solving problems. He was less good at being a person in a room where no one needed a cure.
Years stacked. Thirty arrived without ceremony. He woke on his birthday at his desk with a cold neck and a list of things to do. He drank water and checked the centrifuge and replied to three emails. At lunch someone from admin surprised him with a small cake and five candles. His team sang. He blew out the candles and wished for something he didn't say out loud.
The work on Friedreich's ataxia—the thing that had been a thread through his twenties, then a rope, then the whole road—moved in slow, stubborn steps. Results were encouraging, then discouraging, then ambiguous. He learned to measure hope in millimeters. He learned to say not yet like a promise instead of a punishment. He refused to declare victory for a curve in a graph that looked friendly when it might just be polite.
Some nights, very late, he put his forehead down on folded arms and watched the blur of his own sleeve in and out with his breath. He let the thought in that he kept at the door the rest of the day: Even if I can never bring her back, no other man will have to live what I lived. It didn't cure anything. It let him sit up again.
Sometimes he passed a music store and paused outside. Violins hung in velvet as if sleeping. Pianos waited with their teeth covered. A metronome clicked somewhere deep in the shop, waiting for the next hand to lift and set it free. He stood in the reflection and pretended he was a stranger. He kept walking.
He didn't know which day would be the day before everything changed. It looked like any other: a lab with the lights too bright; a calendar busy in the wrong places; the hum of machines; security guards who knew his coffee order because they'd watched him carry the same cup through seasons. The project board had three sticky notes in the corner under a heading he did not read because reading it would make it real: FA: final assays → compile → lock.
He stayed late. Then later. Everyone else left with tired waves and promises to text if the numbers did something ridiculous. He nodded and lied about going home soon. He made a note on a Post-it and stuck it to the edge of the monitor: eat. He didn't.
Night deepened outside the windows. The city softened, its edges less sharp. Somewhere in the building a vacuum cleaner made a friendly animal sound, then stopped. He turned the page of his notebook and drew a small box around tomorrow's date. He didn't draw a box around the date after that.
He took his phone out, typed Tsubaki's name, watched the blinking cursor, locked the screen. He opened a blank email to Watari, wrote Game soon?, deleted soon?, deleted game, closed the window. He looked at the old plant on the piano at home in his mind and thought about water and decided he'd fix it tomorrow, then laughed a little because water doesn't wait.
Live freely, her letter said. He leaned back, staring at the ceiling tiles, and let the words land. He had lived, in a manner. Freely? He didn't know.
Keep playing, the letter said, and he saw the lid of his piano and the narrow slot where he'd tucked the paper, and for a second his hands ached the way they used to before recitals, a bright ache, an alive ache. He flexed his fingers and the feeling went.
Thank you for everything, the letter said, and he shook his head once, slow. He hadn't given everything. He had given what he had left after he'd put everything he loved behind glass.
He stood, walked the length of the lab, checked a readout he already knew by heart. Outside, a siren wailed and moved on. He washed his hands out of habit. He told himself he'd close his eyes for five minutes on the bad couch in the office, then get up and recheck the incubations at two, then three, then call it. He told himself many things.
He switched off the monitor and the room threw his reflection back at him: older, leaner, the soft curves of boyhood filed away by years of work and nights without enough sleep. He could see Kaori's outline beside him in the glass, not as a ghost, but as a shape his life had been cut against. He blinked and the shape was gone. The hum remained.
He reached for the office door.
The Lab
The lab had two kinds of light at night. The hard white of the fixtures above me, and the smaller, warmer circle from the desk lamp I kept too close to the edge. Outside the windows, the city blurred into a low-slung constellation. Inside, the hum of machines stitched the hours together until they were one long seam.
On the bench sat the vial.
I'd handled tens of thousands like it. Clear glass, accurate label, a meniscus thin as a whisper. Ordinary, unless you knew what went into that clear. Years. Fights with data that didn't want to be friends. Trials that knocked us backward before they moved us forward. And behind all of it, a girl with golden hair who never made it to the part of the story where cure and timing finally held hands.
I stood there longer than I should have, gloved hands lifted, the laminar hood a quiet, perfect weather system. I lifted the vial as if it were breakable hope—which it was. Light ran through it and cut a pale stripe across my palm. The air in my chest tightened and then gave way.
I set it back in its rack and peeled the gloves off slowly, pinching each fingertip so the latex snapped free in one soft sound. They went into the biohazard bin with all the other skins I'd shed to get here.
I didn't call anyone. Part of me wanted to. Part of me wanted to hear Watari's laugh and Tsubaki's I told you you'd do it, even if she hadn't told me anything of the sort. But the rest of me wanted to do this alone. The first time you admit the word finished out loud, it changes the room. Tonight, I wanted the room to stay exactly as it was.
I drifted to the small office and back, unable to leave the bench for more than a minute. The clock near the door faked authority. It always did. I shut my eyes and the hum sounded like a low A, the note you tune everything to before you play. It wasn't funny, but it made my mouth move like it might be.
I put both hands flat on the bench.
"Okay," I said to no one. "Okay."
I turned off the hood, capped what needed capping, logged what needed logging. The protocols were a lullaby I trusted. When the last box was checked, when the bench looked like a photograph of a bench, I sat on the stool and let my shoulders fall.
The window glass held the city like a secret. Somewhere below, a truck downshifted. A streetlight found a moth and forgave it. In the reflection, I caught a face that used to be mine and still was—a little sharper now; a little older, the kind of older that doesn't show up in skin so much as in how still you can sit.
I breathed.
And then—because the room had become too quiet even for me, because tonight was not a night for distance—I let the voice in my head stop pretending it wasn't me.
I did it.
Not I—we. But in the end, it's my hands that are shaking.
Look at it, Kaori. It's here. Not a theory. Not a slide deck. Not a band on a gel that makes us high-five and then apologize to the universe for getting ahead of ourselves. It's here. I can point to it. I can hold it up to the light and see the future pass through.
Too late. Always too late.
The thought arrives the way water arrives—measured, patient, impossible to argue with. I try anyway. I think of the charts and the patients whose names I shouldn't know and do. The boy who walked farther this month than last. The older sister who stopped forgetting words. The nurse who wrote, He rang the bell. I think of everyone whose spring will last longer because of this.
And then I think of you.
Second woman I loved, swallowed by disease. First my mother. Then you. The two pillars that made my small world stand up. Knocked out by the same storm with different names. What exact sin did I commit, to be asked to practice this twice? What vow did I forget?
I touch the pocket where your letter isn't. It's at home, inside the piano, sealed under wood I have not lifted in years. I don't need the paper to read it. The lines live under my skin now.
Live freely.
I tried. Or I told myself I did, which is another way of saying no, you didn't. I bound myself to work and called it devotion. I rationed sleep and called it principle. I avoided music and called it self-respect. Freedom didn't look like this, Kaori. It never looked like this.
Keep playing.
I didn't. Not the way you meant. Not the way that made the windows open and the dust dance. I played other games. I learned other scores. I rewrote the ending of a tragedy for strangers. I didn't touch the one instrument that could have saved the part of me that watched you until I forgot to breathe.
Thank you for everything.
No. Don't say everything. Say something. Say enough. I could live with enough.
A sound like a laugh escapes me and dies before it can choose a direction.
What would you say if you were here? You'd sit on the bench backwards, legs swinging off where the keys are supposed to be, and you'd talk with your hands like the air owed you attention. You'd make fun of my lab coat. You'd call me a nerd and then kiss my cheek and then steal my pen. You'd tell me to come outside, where the weather does what it wants and nobody grades it.
I would follow you.
I didn't follow you when it mattered.
I stand. I can't stay in the stool anymore. The office couch is close. I can sleep there for a minute. Ten minutes. I'll set an alarm. I'll get up and run the last checks and write the first line of the email that changes our next year and maybe someone else's entire life.
My body says, down. The way a conductor's hand says downbeat, and everyone obeys.
I make it to the couch. It's the bad kind—foam that remembers everyone who has sunk into it in surrender—but right now it feels like gentleness. I lie on my back and fold an arm over my eyes. The hum of the building covers me like a blanket. I listen to the small sounds we've all taught ourselves to ignore: a vent clicking; a light threatening to flicker and then deciding not to; a far elevator dinging politely for an empty hall.
I think of Tsubaki and Watari, and it stings. I tell myself I'll call them tomorrow. I tell myself I'll send a picture of the plant that refuses to die and let Tsubaki roast me for it until the shame stops being sharp. I tell myself I'll sit at Watari's game and shout the wrong words at the right time and pretend that's how you do sports. I tell myself I'll buy flowers that don't wilt in the sink.
I tell myself many good things.
My eyes burn. Not just from the light. Not just from a decade of staring. Nostalgia is a kind of poison when you feed it wrong. I breathe in, out, count four, count four again. The ceiling tile above me has a faint crack running through it that looks like a staff. I put notes on it with my mind until the melody hurts.
I'll rest after, I used to say. After the next experiment. After this conference. After the mock. After the submission. After, after, after. I built a temple to after and then never worshipped at it.
I am so tired.....
Just a nap. Ten minutes.
If the universe has a conscience, let me borrow one more spring. I'll pay it back with interest. I'll plant every hour like a seed. I'll—
The cold should have been the last thing I felt.
Instead, there is warmth.
It spreads the way morning spreads across a floor—slow, certain, kind. The hard seam under my back loosens into something like grass. The hum of machines is gone. In its place: wind in leaves, a bicycle bell, the bright laughter of children.
For a second I think I'm dreaming. Or worse—I think the building burned down and this is whatever a brain gives you when it's done fighting.
Then a sound threads through the air—a reedy, cheerful line that bounces as it climbs. Not a violin. A small keyboard with breath in it.
A melodica.
I open my eyes.
Sky. Blue and higher than it needs to be. I'm on a lawn trimmed into neat stripes, the kind that sticks to your sleeves when you sit up too fast. I prop myself on my elbows. The world focuses.
Kids in yellow caps gather in a half-circle around the low wall of a sandbox. Backpacks piled like bright pillows. A chaperone on a bench, shoes pointed in, watching the way people watch when everything is safe. Cherry petals stipple the path like soft confetti someone forgot to sweep.
She stands on the stone lip, balanced without thinking about balance.
Kaori.
Golden hair, ribbon trying and failing to tame it. A light dress made for easy weather and running. Knees marked with tiny constellations only a playground can draw. The instrument rests against her chest, a slim plastic mouthpiece at her lips, the small keys under her fingers like a toy that never learned it wasn't allowed to be art. She presses a phrase into the afternoon and the whole park brightens half a shade.
The sound is imperfect and alive. She leans into it, fearless. She looks at the kids as if they're her orchestra and today is their debut. A little boy claps on the wrong beat with heroic commitment; she grins around the mouthpiece and adjusts the melody to meet him where he is. Another kid toots a recorder badly and proudly; she nods as if he's essential to the arrangement. Breath, keys, laughter—she makes it all belong.
I glance down at my hands because I need an anchor. They're smaller. The old lab-scar on my thumb is gone. My wrist bone looks like a fourteen-year-old's. My chest tightens. Dreams don't bother with details like this. Dreams don't smell like cut grass and sun-warmed metal. Dreams don't make the mouthpiece squeak when she laughs between notes.
She spins a little flourish and a few petals rise, as if the air wanted in on the trick. The ribbon flashes. Sunlight finds her and stays.
I want to stand. I don't. If I move, I'll wake up. If I breathe too loudly, I'll wake up. I stay very still and let the sight of her fill everything it can reach.
For a heartbeat, she sweeps the crowd with her eyes—counting, loving, taking attendance of small faces—and then her gaze catches mine.
It's not recognition the way adults use the word. It's the way a melody recognizes its own first note. Curious. Unafraid. As if to say, you—there you are.
The mouthpiece lifts. Her fingers hover over the tiny keys. Petals drift. Somewhere, a swing creaks once like a door.
I don't speak. She doesn't either.
I hold her with my eyes the way I held a vial an hour ago—careful, reverent, certain it could save a life.
The breath returns to the melodica. The next note blooms.
And I am here—at the exact beginning.
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Let me know what you think folks I'm aiming for a longer story with a good ending for poor old Kaori. Not sure how many chapters maybe 35-50.
This is my first fanfic so let me know of any plot errors I made or spelling errors.
Inspired by Your lie in April Fic with a similar plot. I forgot what the fic was called but this was heavily inspired by it and his writing.