I wake before my alarm, the kind of early that feels like a mistake. The room is dim and blue. The metronome in my head is already ticking, patient as ever. Not now. Later. Move.
I wash my face until the water wakes my skin. Tea, quick. Shirt, tie, blazer. I check my bag twice—scores, pencil, cloth, water, lunch I will probably forget to eat. The second check steadies me anyway. Proof I can still hold small things together.
Outside, the air is clear and thin. Tsubaki is at the corner like always, hands in her skirt pockets, ponytail slightly crooked. She gives me the up-and-down that always makes me feel like I've been measured and found slightly underweight.
"You look like you're going to fall asleep on stage," she says, not bothering with hello.
"I won't," I say.
"You say that," she says. "You also said you'd sleep last night."
"I slept some." I countered
"How some?"
"Some some."
She clicks her tongue and bumps my shoulder. "Eat. And don't push yourself." She doesn't say the word that sits behind that warning. She doesn't have to. I hear it anyway.
"Got it," I say, and I do. Or I'm trying to.
We walk in step. We've split this block since we were small enough to watch our shoes. She fills the air with small stories because that's her way of checking my pulse: Watari nearly ran into a sign trying to wave at two people at once. The cat on her porch tried to tax her for sitting on her own steps. I give her the right answers. The quiet between us isn't heavy. It holds.
At the gate, the school opens its regular noise: shoes, laughter, teachers throwing reminders into the current. Watari spots us with his unstoppable internal radar and drapes himself over my shoulders like I'm a coat rack.
"Our artist looks pale but heroic," he declares. "Protein. Sunlight. Legally questionable smoothies."
"I'm accepting donations," I say.
"I'm offering charisma only ," he says, then drops his voice and tries at sincerity. "You good, Kousei?"
"I'm here," I say. It's the truest answer I have.
He squeezes my neck and lets go. "Front row today. I'll clap so hard they'll have to replace the carpet."
We're barely past homeroom when Kaori breezes by with her case—chin high, steps light. For a blink her eyes meet mine. "Wake up for our performance," she says, not scolding so much as calibrating. The corner of her mouth lifts as she goes. The message lands: be ready.
The day moves through its usual machinery—roll call, notes on the board, the scrape of chairs—but every clock hand points in the same direction. Between periods Tsubaki shoves a juice box into my hand without looking at me. "Drink," she says. I do.
By lunch my legs feel like hollow wood. We claim a table. Tsubaki glares at my untouched food. "Eat," she orders. "Drink."
I obey halfway, which only buys me a sigh. Kaori drops into the seat across from me, case set neatly at her feet. She's buzzing under the skin. It looks like light trying to leak through.
"Don't look so grim," Watari tells her. "Smile like a winner."
"I'll smile after we've played," she says, but her mouth tips up anyway.
"You signed us up," I say, "and nearly broke the office doing it."
She tilts her chin, satisfied. "Late entry," she says. "The clerk said the list was closing. I said we'd take thirty seconds. She gave me ten. I used nine. We're on the program."
"How'd you talk her into it?" Watari asks, impressed.
"Charm and truth," she says, then points her chopsticks at me. "And a promise that my partner would show up on time and awake."
Tsubaki leans in just enough to make sure I hear it twice. "On time and awake," she echoes. "Try it."
"I will," I say. The words feel like a stake driven into the day.
After school, the four of us filter out together. The light has that flat, pre-evening calm that makes the city look like a set waiting for actors. Watari peels off for his bike with a two-finger salute. "Save me a seat you can hear from," Kaori calls. "Front."
"Loudest clapper alive," he promises.
Tsubaki and I flank Kaori to the station. The trains breathe in and out. On the platform Kaori rocks once on her heels, more energy than space. She points with her chin like a conductor choosing sections. "We'll warm up at the venue. Don't overdo it."
"You don't overdo it," I grumble out.
She acts offended. "I never overdo it. I do exactly enough."
"Uh-huh," Tsubaki says, deadpan.
The ride to Towa Hall slides by in steel and glass. Kaori studies the program on her phone; I study her hands instead—the easy economy, the way she touches the case without looking, the concentration that reads like joy with the volume turned down.
Towa Hall rises out of the street like a clean sound. Inside, everything is pale wood and soft carpet and the hopeful hush of people who came to listen. We find the registration desk. A clerk with neat hair and a stricter schedule looks up.
"Miyazono/Arima, duo," Kaori says, bright and firm. "Late entry."
The clerk's eyebrows consider saying no on principle. Kaori meets the look with her polite blade. "I cleared it yesterday," she adds. "Nine minutes before close." A second clerk checks a list, nods, slides two badges and a number across. Kaori's smile has victory in it. "Thank you," she says. "We'll make it worth the trouble."
Backstage smells like polish and dust that learned manners. Warm-up rooms breathe scales into the hallways; fragments of other people's pieces drift past like dream scraps. We claim an empty corner. I open the score and the pencil lands in my fingers out of habit. Kaori opens the case and the violin looks like it recognizes the room.
She tunes, I listen. The A rings, clean. She draws a quiet scale, not performance tone—just weight-checking, temperature-reading. I play the opening under my breath, hands on my thighs first, then on the keys when a monitor points me to a practice piano.
When the room gives us two minutes alone, I step closer. "Don't go too crazy," I say, light on the surface, serious under it. "Lean if you need to. I mean it."
She blinks, surprised by the angle, then waves it off. "I'll be fine."
"You're always exhausted after recitals." I keep my voice level. "Let me carry when the line is long. That's the point of a duo."
Her mouth tips like she might argue for sport. My face must say I'm not playing. She exhales through her nose and nods once, grudging and sincere. "Okay. I'll lean. But I'm tip-top today."
"Good," I say. "Stay that way."
Tsubaki slips in like a shadow with a bag of snacks and the authority of a small general. "Eat." She shoves me a rice ball and stares until I bite. "And don't fall asleep on the bench."
"I won't."
She looks at me longer than necessary. "Are you sure?" Not sharp. Careful. Behind it, the word she didn't say this morning hums like a low note.
"I'm sure," I say. "It's different now."
"Different how?"
"I'm not running from it," I say. "I'm running to it."
She makes a face that is not quite a smile. "Gross," she mutters, but her eyes soften.
Watari appears in a gust of good intentions. "Tickets secured. Front row. I will clap so precisely the judges will write me in as a metronome." He leans on the doorframe, gives us a once-over that ends in a grin. "You got this."
"Be loud," Kaori says.
"Loud is my brand," he says, and vanishes back into the river of people.
A runner appears with a headset and the power of a small god. "Miyazono/Arima—ten minutes."
We nod. Ten minutes is no time and all the time. I close the score, open my hands over the keys one last time, then close the fallboard gently. Kaori wipes the strings, checks the bridge, touches the chin rest like a talisman, then lets her hands hang loose at her sides for two breaths.
"Ready?" she says.
"Ready," I say. I offer my elbow like we're about to cross a busy street. She hooks two fingers there for exactly as long as it takes to feel stupid about being sentimental, then lets go. The touch stays.
The wing is a thin slice of shadow smelling faintly of rosin and curtain dust. From here the hall sounds like a held breath. The pair before us ends; applause gathers and falls away. Our number is called. The world shrinks to a square of floor.
Kaori tips her head the smallest degree. I answer with the bench: hands on the edge, a slow sit, a gentle scoot. Feet planted. Shoulder rolled once. My fingers hover and do not touch. She lifts the violin, bow angled like a weather vane searching for wind.
...
The opening is a shape I can draw blind: delicate, then speaking, line and floor, the world gathering itself. My hands find the intro and spread it thin so she can lay color on top without cracking the surface. Her first entrance is a thread pulled through silk—small, bright, decisive. The hall tilts toward it as if the sound has a gravity of its own.
Two bars in, my body reaches for old shadows the way sore muscle reaches for a flinch. I feel the pull and let it pass like weather. My mother's hands, that old white room with its locked air—I do not open those doors. I pick the other door: the girl beside me, alive and fierce and here, asking not for a ghost but for a partner.
Kaori pushes a phrase a hair forward. I bring the floor up under it before it has a chance to fall. She hears it and lets the next line sit a little longer on the edge before stepping off. Her sound isn't safe; it's brave. There's a difference. I let my left hand tell the truth and my right hand make sure it's a truth we can both stand on.
We used to wobble here, in the last life, at this bend from introduction to light. The hinge would squeak; I would hear myself from outside myself and try to step on a floor I'd hidden from. Not today. The corner comes and goes clean. The judges lean in. One of them stops writing.
Kaori breathes a touch deeper before a tricky entrance. I catch it in the edge of my vision and nudge the tempo by something you can't count, just enough for her left hand to set without having to pretend it's not being careful. She does not falter. She never does in public. But there is a cost to every smooth line, paid out of sight. I am the ledger. I adjust the balance.
We move through the dialogue the piece expects: her heat, my held line; her dare, my answer; her sudden turn into silk, my quiet breath under it so it doesn't look lonely. When she lets a note hang too long for ordinary air, I hold mine with it until the hall decides to breathe for us. When she bows through a run like she's breaking through water, I clear the current a half beat ahead. She smiles without looking; I feel it in the sound, not my eyes.
Somewhere in the second section, the room stops being a room full of faces and starts being a thing we are building. I know when it happens because my hands stop feeling like separate tools and become one body moving. Kaori drops her heel and the tone grows larger without getting heavier. I keep the undercurrent fast and flat so the size has a place to go. The piece asks for sparkle; we give it light that isn't cheap.
There is a moment where she takes a line and shapes it more playfully than we planned, a small bend as if she's turning to grin at me mid-run. I answer with a grace that makes her choice sound inevitable. The two ideas click, and the click is audible only to us. Her shoulder loosens. Mine drops a half inch. We're not fighting this thing. We're flying it.
The hall catches up to the idea of us. You can feel it even from the bench—the way a crowd decides to trust the people on stage with their next three minutes of blood pressure. There are little sounds you only hear when a performance is working: fabric settling without fidgeting, an exhale nobody notices having. Somewhere near the aisle a program slips to the floor without being picked up.
Kaori's right hand does a small tremor after a long phrase. Not during—after. It's gone in a blink. If you didn't know to watch for it, you would never see it. I widen the next corner without changing the ink, just a soft rounding, so she can take it with speed that doesn't cost. She takes it and throws a spark over the top just to prove she noticed the gift. Somewhere in the first row Watari makes a strangled noise of pride that wants to be a cheer and barely manages to become an inhaled gasp.
The cadenza comes and she owns it. I step back and forward at once: back from the center, forward to keep the air held at the right tenseness. Her bow climbs and lands; her left hand writes its little miracles with a calm that does not match the engine under her ribs. She pushes, then lets go. I lift the floor back under her foot the moment she lands. The judges are not smiling, not frowning. They're listening. It's better than both.
I think, not as a distraction but as a statement, we did it. Not finished, not safe, but we did it: the part where I used to hear the wrong voice in my head is quiet; the part where she used to have to drag me is gone. We are the only two people on this stage. It feels like the first honest version of that fact I have ever lived.
We take the last page like a promise kept. She leans one final time into a line with more weight than paper can hold; I give her a floor that will not crack, even if she jumps. She doesn't jump. She lands clean. My hands do the simple, exact thing they're supposed to do. The cadence locks. The last note blooms and goes still. For one second there is a hush so complete it feels like an extra world we fell into by accident.
Then the hall remembers that it has hands.
Sound comes at us like weather. It isn't polite applause; it's the sound a crowd makes when it forgets itself. Not a roar, not a scream—just a human thrum, a thousand small agreements turning into one big one. People stand. Some don't, but they clap like they want to. I don't hear Watari, which means he's yelling something too loud to register as one sound. I don't look for him. I look at her.
Kaori lowers the violin. Her shoulders are trembling the way a held plank trembles when the weight is set down—relief after a big ask, not failure. Tears slide down her cheeks with the easiest gravity I've ever seen. They're not show. They're not shock. They're gratitude and defiance and joy threaded together until separating them would be cruel. She looks at me, and I see the truth of them now where I missed it before. I see the cost and the choice. I see the living person in the middle of the scene, not a symbol and not a wish—just Kaori.
My own eyes burn without warning. It's not dramatic. It's just honest. I let the water come and don't wipe it because wiping would be lying. She laughs once, a small startled sound like a hiccup made of sunlight.
"Up," she mouths, and then she doesn't wait for me. She grabs my sleeve, the same old habit but harder, and pulls. I stand. Together we bow. When we rise I find Tsubaki—aisle seat, chin up, eyes glassed with pride and worry. Watari is all teeth and clapping, a barely-contained shout. Their faces blur back into the sea.
We turn. The lights tilt. The curtain's edge becomes a doorway. Backstage is dimmer, warmer; the applause thins like surf around a corner. Kaori's hand is still on my arm. We take three steps that feel like one.
She looks up, tears still on her cheeks, and smiles as if the day is a jewel she can finally hold. "I will never forget this day until I die," she whispers.
The sentence cuts clean through me.
"Kaori—" I start, meaning lean if you need to, I've got you, stay—but her fingers loosen.
Her knees soften, then go. The case knocks lightly against the floor. I catch her before the sound can turn into panic, one arm around her shoulders, the other guiding the violin away without thinking. Her weight isn't much. It is everything.
"Hey," I breathe, close to her hair. "I'm here."
Her lashes flutter once, a moth's wing. The world hushes to the small circle we make on the carpet. The stage keeps on somewhere else. Time does not.
A thought lands the way a stake goes into ground: Not again. Not this time. I will spend whatever is left of me. I will save you.
She sags further in my arms, weight settling like sleep. The light goes a shade too white. I hold her tighter and listen for the next breath, willing it into the same rhythm as mine.
I am once again reminded of the living nightmare that she faces. Of course this would happen again terminal diseases don't just get better. He won't let this curse be the end of her beautiful life,He won't let her light be extinguished...
Not again