We walk into the hall together.
The doors hush around us, and the city noise collapses into carpet and polish and the papery rustle of programs. There's a lobby table with a stack of flyers perfectly squared, a poster listing the order of performers, and a volunteer with a safety pin in her sleeve handing out numbers to late arrivals. The air is a mixture of rosin and floor wax and nerves.
Kaori checks in with a quick bow and a flash of her number. For a moment she's framed in glass and afternoon light, then she's absorbed by a corridor marked "Performers Only." She glances back once—just to make sure we're real—and then disappears down the hallway her golden hair swaying, ribbon bobbing like a small flag that refuses to hang still.
"Seats," Tsubaki says, practical as a map.
Watari swings his arm toward the ushers like he's leading a tour. "Lead the way to thunder," he murmurs, and earns Tsubaki's eye-roll.
Inside the auditorium the air cools, and sound changes shape. It goes from voices to hush, from footsteps to breath. People speak with recital mouths: low, precise, pretending not to be excited. Rows of red seats slope toward a wood stage that reflects the lights like a shallow lake. The piano's lid is propped open. The judges' table sits near the front, three name placards in a neat row, three faces that look like metronomes were their first lullabies.
We find space mid-house—close enough to see the strings of a bow, far enough to hide in company. As I sit, a familiar vertigo unspools. The edges of everything blur, not from fear, but from shock. It's like waking up mid-bridge with no memory of how you got halfway across. The seat holds my weight easily. The armrest is cool against my wrist. I run my thumb over the seam in the fabric to confirm it exists.
"Program?" Tsubaki offers.
I shake my head. The paper in her hand looks like a future I'm not ready to arrange into lines.
Near the front, two older men talk with their heads inclined, the way people do when they want to share an opinion without owning it. One of the judges—a woman with a fountain pen and a posture that could hold a building up—glances into the audience. Her eyes snag on me, move away, snag again. The other judge, the one with thin spectacles, follows her gaze.
It's like watching birds notice a shiny thing.
A whisper slides down our row from somewhere behind us.
"...is that—"
"—Arima Kousei?"
"—I thought he—"
"—the prodigy, right? The one who—"
Their mouths finish the sentence with air. I stare at the weave of the seatback in front of me until the threads stop moving. Somewhere to the left, a program flutters closed. Somewhere to the right, a pen clicks twice.
Tsubaki hears the ripple and leans closer, her shoulder almost touching mine. She doesn't say anything like "ignore them." She just anchors herself to the floor in case I forget how. Watari looks over his shoulder with a look that says he will personally challenge any whisper to a sprint, then decides the loudest thing he can do for me is to stay quiet.
The house lights soften. The announcer—a soft voice with a hard script—steps to the side curtain and tells us the rules. Set pieces. Time limits. Evaluations. It's the same speech halls have given since halls learned how to speak.
The first performer appears, and the room changes shape again into attention. She is precise. Her accompanist turns pages with military timing. Her dress does not move when she bows. She plays exactly the way the sheet music would prefer, outlining every phrase like a careful colored pencil. The judges' pens keep time on paper.
I watch because my eyes are open, but it's like looking at a picture of food when you haven't eaten in days. Form without warmth. Beautiful, maybe, but not an invitation.
Another performer follows. Then another. A boy whose shoulders are trying to become wings. A girl whose bow arm never breathes. Applause swells in respectful arcs and collapses politely.
In the pause between numbers, I notice the tiny acoustical imperfections of the room—how the balcony swallows certain frequencies, how the far-left wall throws back a faint echo a fraction late. The part of me that measures doesn't turn off just because the rest of me is stunned. I count the lights along the proscenium. I watch dust drift through a beam and decide it is proof of gravity. I let the seat hold me. I let the whisper of my name in other people's mouths pass like weather.
A stagehand walks out and adjusts the piano bench a notch to the left. He tries to be invisible. The audience watches him anyway. That's the cruel magic of stages: even errands are theater.
"Next," the announcer says, and the room inhales without instruction.
She steps out, and the stage remembers what it's for.
Kaori doesn't walk like she's entering a test. She walks like she's stepping into a river she's already swum a thousand times. Not careless—she avoids the spike of a cable, veers around a knot in the floorboards—but completely unafraid of eyes. Her violin hangs at her side for three steps, then rises as if the air lifted it.
There's a tiny mischief at the corner of her mouth. Her ribbon is tied badly and perfectly. The accompanist, already seated, looks up and re-settles his hands on the keys like he's remembering how to be awake.
She takes her place and turns, not to the judges, but slightly to us all, as if the room were one person. For a heartbeat she opens her mouth to speak—then doesn't. Instead, she nods once to herself, like a runner checking the ground.
I see the details nobody else seems to catch.
The bow hand: a near-invisible tremor that hides by calling itself anticipation. It's not afraid; it's tired in a way that doesn't admit stage time. The left shoulder: rolled forward a fraction, then corrected, then forward again. A tiny swallow before she lifts the violin to her jaw. The skin at her throat under the lights is paler than the cheeks the park gave her. When she inhales, it's just a hair longer than the breath before it, as if she's already budgeting oxygen for the phrase to come.
My chest tightens in sympathy that feels like memory and science at once. No one else would name the things her body is telling me. They're too busy seeing a girl with a violin. I see the notes the flesh is writing.
She bows—not the stiff angle everyone else used, but a quick, grateful nod that smuggles in a smile—and brings the instrument up.
It begins.
Not like the earlier performances. They began inside the frame, safe from weather. This starts like weather itself. The first note isn't the one I expect. It's softer, like a secret, and it pulls the rest of the piece into itself by invitation instead of command. The accompanist blinks, then grins—actual grin—and catches her tempo a half step later than the page would have allowed. He will chase her the entire time. He looks thrilled to be doing it.
Kaori leans into the line like a conspirator leaning over a table. Her bow skims a hair closer to the bridge than the handbook recommends, stealing brightness from the string without turning it into glass. Her wrist is loose in the way that requires discipline to maintain. She lets a note ring a fraction long just to see if the room will forgive her. It does. It applauds in silence by staying very, very still.
Technically, it's not perfect. She rushes a swell because her heart gets there first. She leans out of the strict grid of the beat to rescue a phrase that wants to fall. A double-stop arrives with more grit than polish and somehow makes the melody truer by admitting the scrape. On paper, a dozen small offenses. In air, a kind of honesty that perfect players never risk.
Two rows ahead, a judge's pen hesitates over a box. Another judge writes something and underlines it twice. The woman with the posture smiles without meaning to, then erases the smile with a press of her lips.
Kaori keeps playing the way weather keeps happening.
Every time she breathes, I hear it. Not because she's loud—she's not—but because I'm listening for it like a pulse. She times her inhales to phrases, but there's a spot in the second section where the line climbs a staircase it didn't warn her about. She takes a shorter breath than she wants, and the next bar arrives slightly hungrier. The hunger helps. She turns it into heat. Nobody else would know she made a trade.
Her bow hand trembles once when she stretches a long, singing note past the safe center of the bow. It looks like emotion if you aren't looking carefully. It is emotion. But it is also muscle asking politely for a break. She refuses. The note does not crack. It flares and then resolves, a star deciding not to explode.
There's a moment—during the soft return of the theme—when she holds her weight just a little wrong and corrects without drawing attention. The correction costs her a blink. It costs me a lifetime. I feel the urge to stand up, to walk onto the stage, to lend her the energy my body isn't using, to take the violin, to take the disease, to take something, anything.
I don't move. The seat's fabric leaves a pattern in my palms. I count three heartbeats, then forget how to count.
The hall is hers now. People who came to judge are listening like children. The cough two rows back decides to hold its breath with the rest of us. A phone that thought about buzzing changes its mind. Even the lights seem to dim their hum.
A passage arrives that wants delicacy. She gives it defiance instead. Then, because she's generous, she returns and lets it be delicate after all. The accompanist is in on the joke by now. He's playing with his shoulders for the first time tonight. The judges exchange a look that isn't approval or disapproval. It's recognition that something is happening they cannot measure with boxes.
I feel color come back into parts of me I thought I'd loaned to the lab forever. Not as a metaphor. As actual sensation—like waking from anesthesia and realizing your hand is attached to you again. I shouldn't think in metaphors, not today. Today is either a dream the brain made because it was starving, or a city the afterlife built because it missed us, or ordinary time deciding to be generous. Whatever it is, the sound she's making believes in it enough for me.
It's almost funny: the world loved a boy who could count every atom in a phrase and make the arithmetic sing. It applauded because the sums were flawless. That boy is sitting in the dark watching a girl commit beautiful crimes against straight lines, and he has never felt more counted.
Near the end she does the thing I've been waiting without knowing I was waiting: she steals a fraction of a second from the bar line and spends it entirely on a single note that didn't deserve such wealth. The note grows under the investment, round as a throat full of laughter, warm as a held hand, and then it leaves without apologizing.
I can't see my face, but I feel what it's doing. I'm sure my mouth is open. I'm sure my eyes are doing a thing I'd be embarrassed to watch on a camera later. It takes everything in me not to cry. Not because crying would be shameful. Because tears would blur her, and I have already lost too much time to blurs.
Somewhere during a soft diminuendo, I realize I haven't checked the exits once. In other halls, at other times, tension taught me the geometry of escape routes. Here, the only way out is through the end of her bow, and I don't want to leave.
She finishes not with a slam, but with a decision. The last note doesn't bang the door closed; it turns the latch and looks back through the crack to make sure we're all inside. Then the door clicks, soft as a satisfied breath.
For a fraction of a heartbeat there is nothing. Not even the creak of someone's shoe. The hall recognizes itself as a place where music just happened and has the manners to shut up about it.
Then the applause arrives like a weather front rolling over a field. It starts scattered, as if people are politely remembering what hands are for, but it rises fast. The woman in front of us stands before she has to. The boy who tried not to look up from his phone is suddenly slapping his palms like he's trying to write a sentence with them. Even people who pretend they don't like being surprised admit they like being surprised.
Watari whistles once, then turns it into a clap when Tsubaki's hand finds his sleeve. Tsubaki is clapping in that way she does when she wants the sound to carry kindness first and volume second.
At the judges' table, pens are still for the first time all night. The woman with the posture folds her hands and looks at Kaori like someone trying to remember a word that doesn't exist yet.
Kaori bows. It isn't deep. It is grateful. Her ribbon slides a little, but stays. For a second she looks toward our section—not a spotlight, just a glance a navigator gives a lighthouse—and the glance catches. It might be an accident. It might be fate showing off. It feels like a line thrown across water and tied to a cleat in the center of me.
I try to breathe and the breath goes strange, like the first inhale after a long swim.
She straightens, thanks the accompanist in a way that makes him bow to her instead of the room, and walks off as if the stage is a path that keeps going somewhere we can't see.
The applause follows her into the wings and keeps clapping for empty air until it realizes it has clapped enough. It falls in uneven steps back into silence. A cough dares to exist. A shoe finds the aisle. People look at each other with raised eyebrows that mean Did you feel that too?
I stay seated.
My hands are a mess of heat and tremor where they grip the armrests. I ease my fingers open one by one and then close them again because the world feels like it might tip if I let go. The seam in the fabric is still there. I find it with my thumb like a lifeline. The hall smells faintly of varnish and old applause. Air moves in my throat like a new language I'm learning in real time.
"She was..." Watari tries, then gives up on adjectives and shakes his head, grinning like an idiot who just saw proof that magic is allowed to be silly.
Tsubaki exhales a breath she must have been holding from the first step Kaori took. She doesn't look at me at first. She looks at the empty stage and nods to herself like a plan has just agreed to be possible. Then she turns.
"You okay?" she asks, soft as polished wood.
I open my mouth and an answer doesn't come. In the same second, six answers fight to arrive.
Dream. Afterlife. Alive. Here.
"I don't know," I say, and I mean it as a kind of awe. The words feel clean, like water poured into a glass after a long walk. I keep my eyes on the stage because if I look anywhere else the world might admit it's a trick and I'm not ready to hear the punchline.
People begin to move in the shallow way they move when they know a moment happened and they must figure out how to be normal afterward. Programs fold along creases. A bag zips. The judges lean together with their heads in a small weather system. The announcer returns to the curtain with his script freshly heavy.
"Next," he says, because time has never cared what we feel.
Some part of me registers that another young violinist is walking out, that an accompanist is nodding, that notes are about to become air again. The rest of me is still under a set of lights that just decided not to burn me.
Tsubaki's hand brushes my sleeve and then leaves it alone, which is the exact right amount of help. Watari sits back and crosses his ankles, then uncrosses them because he doesn't know what to do with feeling impressed in a chair.
I don't move.
I listen to the applause we already gave echo once, faintly, from the back wall. I think of the park and dust and a melodica pretending to be a trumpet. I think of the corridor Kaori just vanished into and the way sound leaves a trace you can't see but can swear you feel on your skin.
If this is a dream, the details are bullying me with their accuracy. If this is the afterlife, it has the patience to make me earn belief. If this is real, then the world has chosen to be generous on a weekday and I have to learn how to accept it without asking what I owe.
On stage, the next performer tightens a bow and nods to the pianist. The first note lands politely in the middle of the hall. It's fine. It's correct. It doesn't change the temperature of the air.
I sit very still, hands cooling around the armrests, and let the fact of her linger like light after you look at the sun and close your eyes. The edges of the seat are firm under my legs. My heart has finally decided to beat in a way a body can survive. The urge to stand up, to run backstage, to make sure she didn't leave with all the air, pulls at me like a tide. I don't move. Not yet.
There will be time for thresholds and hallways and words that fail in front of faces.
For now, I am a person-shaped quiet in a chair, holding together because she just pulled the room apart and arranged it better.
The stage glows the same as it did before, but that is a lie only light tells. It is not the same. Nothing is. I keep my eyes forward and choose to let the moment keep me.
I don't blink until the next applause starts