The music room holds the day's heat the way a case holds a violin—close and protective, smelling faintly of rosin and skin. Someone's last scale still seems to tremble in the rafters. Stands have been nudged to the walls like chairs after a party. The piano sits where it always sits, patient and square, a black animal that already knows our arguments and is bored by them.
Watari's by the door, half in and half out of his practice gear—jersey clinging, sneakers squeaking when he shifts weight, a duffel strap carving his shoulder. He spins a ball on one finger and then drops it, catches it, grins like gravity is a joke he'll get the hang of. Tsubaki leans into the frame of the window with her bat bag at her feet, ponytail damp with sweat, arms folded so tight her elbows look like she's trying to keep two secrets from escaping at once. The sun stripes the floor in long bars; we're all standing behind them like notes waiting to be played.
Kaori paces, bow case thunk-thunking the desk every time she turns too fast. Her hair is still damp at the ends, like it can't decide whether to obey a towel. She's trying to pretend she isn't vibrating, which only makes the vibration more obvious. The pink bunny's ear peeks from her bag, scandalized to be present for a fight.
"Okay," she says, and the word lands like a downbeat. "Let's stop doing the thing where we pretend not to hear the metronome. The finals."
I pick at the edge of the bench where the lacquer chipped last year, as if I could worry it back into place. The Saitou card is a small rectangle burning a pocket into my thoughts.
He had wanted to avoid this conversation again but avoiding Kaori's will was easier said than done, and now they had their own little audiences.
Watari bounces the ball and waggles his eyebrows, trying on a tone that would rather be anywhere else. "Sounds serious. Should I... I dunno... stand behind something?"
Kaori doesn't take the bait. She swings toward me, eyes bright and already narrowed like sun on water. "We're entering. We're not throwing away the slot we bled for."
"Bled for?" Watari echoes, then thinks better of it and mimics zipping his mouth.
I let silence try to communicate caution. It makes the wrong shape.
"Don't look at the floor," Kaori says. "Look at me."
I look. That's the problem.
"Tell him," she says, pivoting to Tsubaki with a speed that would give a different boy whiplash. "You know I'm right. Tell him to get over himself."
Tsubaki's jaw ticks. The blink she gives is slow and deliberate and full of teeth, like an animal considering whether the fence is electrified. She manages a laugh with no laughter in it. "Kaori..."
"Come on," Kaori insists, planting her hands on her hips with theatrical patience that isn't patient at all. "It's not complicated. We won. We made it. He—" She flings a hand at me, as if I'm a stubborn appliance. "—he was the elementary division champ!"
Watari winces, genuine and sympathetic on my behalf. "He was," he says, quietly, as if confessing to something embarrassing I succeeded at on a dare. "A little monster. Tiny hands, big sound."
I can feel the line of my mouth flatten. My shoes decide to study a scuff that might be the shape of Japan again if you're cruel to outlines. The bench edge bites my thigh just enough to be useful.
Tsubaki doesn't meet my eye. She grimaces and looks out the window, blinking once, twice, anger adding weight with each lower lid. It's the blink she uses when a line drive goes foul because someone wanted too much. I know that blink. I earned a small collection of it.
"We're fourteen," I say, finally, which is both a fact and the wrong answer to an entirely different test. the value of the words were cheap, she wouldn't make it past the age not even to her birthday.
Kaori laughs at that like the word itself is trying to sell her soap. "That's your big defense? 'We're fourteen'?" She throws a tiny hand up, letting the room see how small the number looks in the air. "Being fourteen is the discount you get at the door. After that we pay full price like everyone else."
"Not if we don't go in," I say. It's meant to be light and fails halfway through being a sentence.
She takes two quick steps, the bow case knocks the desk again with a thunk like a judge's gavel. "You scared?" she asks, voice gentling in a way that hurts more than if she'd thrown it. "Is it your mom..? Are you still afraid of playing on stage..? I don't understand this is an opportunity for you to show everyone who you are..."
"It's not—" I begin, then stop, because truth makes itself heavy and refuses to be carried on a single syllable. Not like that. Not today. Not here.
Watari pushes air out through his cheeks and glances at Tsubaki, eyes asking if he should keep standing here like a coat rack. Tsubaki doesn't look back. She's somewhere between the heat of Kaori's words and the cool of the windowpane, and it's a latitude she knows better than I do.
"Tell him," Kaori says again, turning the pressure up a quarter-turn, like tightening a fine string. It isn't cruelty. It's belief with a megaphone. "Tell him he doesn't get to walk away when we've finally got the stage that fits us."
Tsubaki's mouth opens, closes. She looks at me then, the briefest flash, and it's not the look I deserve or the one I expect—it's the one she gives when she watches me step into traffic without checking twice: both furious and terrified, two magnets fighting in her chest. "He looks like he hasn't slept in a week," she says, to the air, to no one, to me by accident. "He looks like he's trying to hold his breath until the semester ends."
"Oi I'm fine," I say, and the lie skates across the floor and hits the baseboard and drops dead.
Kaori's eyes soften, then sharpen right back. "No one's fine," she says, cheery in the way only honest people can be. "That's not a reason not to do the thing."
"The thing," I repeat, as if it were an object that could be put on a shelf with a label and dusted and not something that builds its own room inside me and pushes the walls out.
The "thing" would make you collapse again.... The "thing" would make you die even faster than the original time. The "THING" will make you inevitably collapse again and show your weakness to the world and me sooner than it should....
She closes the distance in four strides that take an entire future hostage. Her finger lands in the center of my chest, hard enough to make the bench shift a centimeter. "Listen to me, Piano-kun." Each word is a light she turns on. "I am confirming our entry into the finals. I don't care."
"Kaori..." My voice comes out of a throat that doesn't want to be a throat right now. I look up into the brash mask she's wearing for us, for herself, for the part of the day that keeps wanting to be longer. Underneath it I can see the rawness, the seam where brave is stitched to terrified by someone in a hurry. The pull to nod is so strong I feel my neck prepare without me. Practicality to save her and the need to please her were at war.Yes, fine, I'll split into three people and none of them will sleep and one of them will carry a lab notebook and one of them will hold your hand on a stage and make sure you don't overexert yourself and the third will keep the first two from drowning. I can do that. I can't. I can try. I can't.
I say nothing, because silence is the only thing with the right weight.
Her chin lifts. She searches my face for something that wants to be useful and finds the blank place where a promise should be. The glare she gives me is edged but not serrated—it cuts clean. "Unbelievable," she says, more to the room than to me, because the room is a safer recipient of disappointment.
Watari edges a step toward us, and the floor under him makes a sound like a question. "Uh... guys—"
"Don't," Kaori says, hand flipping to halt the empathy. She grabs the strap of her bag like a leash on an impatient dog. "Fine." She pivots so fast the bow case kisses a chair with a clack. "If he wants to sit in here and practice looking at the floor, then he can practice alone."
She throws a glance at Tsubaki that looks like an invitation and a test at once. Tsubaki's blink this time is a flinch. She looks away deliberately, like a person declining to look at a fire because if she looks she'll run at it. Kaori nods tightly, as if that confirms a theory she doesn't want to write down yet.
"Come on, Watari," she says, bright again, weaponizing the cheer. "We're going to watch your game."
"Now?" Watari's grin tries to find the angle and misses. He glances at me and Tsubaki, surprised shaving into worry. He points vaguely at the two of us with the ball like he's asking permission from a substitute teacher. "You guys—? I mean, you good?"
The look Tsubaki sends him is a razor wrapped in towel: we are very not good, don't make this worse. My mouth can't think of a word that wouldn't turn into a curse when it exits, so I go with a shrug that wants to mean I'll live and probably doesn't convince anyone.
Watari's shoulders go up, then down. "Okay," he says, dragged along by devotion and habit. As he lets Kaori hook her fingers into his sleeve and tow him, he throws me a last look—surprised, yes, but also the kind that says: man, I thought you'd be braver than this. He doesn't mean it like a knife. It still goes in like one.
They're at the door when Kaori glances back. Not at me. At the piano. Her jaw sets, and for a second I think she'll come back and wipe a spot on it out of spite. Instead she just shakes her head like she's scolding a child for playing with the wrong toys and yanks the handle.
The door swings open, the hallway's colder air leans in nosy, and then it shuts with a sound the room has absorbed a hundred times and will never get used to. Their footsteps recede, Watari's sneakers telling the floor jokes, Kaori's pace a drumline that has no use for syncopation.
Silence arrives like a person who's been listening outside and only now lets themselves in.
The piano breathes. The sun takes a long breath and lets go of a dust mote parade. I hear the faintest clack from the metronome on the side table—was it me? Was it the door? Was it the memory of someone obeying and resenting the same beat at once? The room and I do not discuss it.
I can feel Tsubaki on my left without looking, the way you feel a teammate at second who has already decided where the throw is going before the ball leaves home. Her arms are still crossed, but softer now, like a barricade you keep up because it feels safer than seeing if you can stand without it.
"She's not wrong," she says after a while. The sentence is as careful as carrying soup across a crowded room. "About you being good. About... what happens to you up there. It's like—" She does a small frustrated circle with her hand, searching for a sports metaphor that won't sound like she's mansplaining baseball to a piano. "It's like you turn on."
I let the praise land and then crawl off the bench when it realizes it came without a chaperone. "It's not about good," I say. "It's about... time." That's a cop-out and also true. "There are only so many hours."
"Then pick different ones," she says, too fast to be wise, which is how most wisdom gets born.
I exhale and hear how old it sounds, nineteen in a fourteen-year-old's mouth. "I'm trying."
"You're trying to explode," she says, and the fondness in it is the sharpest thing she's said all day.
My hands want to do something useful—wipe the keys, straighten a stand, find a page of Kaori's sheet music and align it with something square. I don't. I let them go stupid in my lap. The Saitou card throbs against my thigh like a timer that refused to be turned off. Tomorrow. That was the plan. Today has other ideas.
Out in the hall, someone laughs the way people laugh when they don't know someone the next room over is trying to figure out what stupidity to commit in the name of love. The room swallows it. Tsubaki watches the window like it might try to run away.
"Watari looked flustered," I say, because talking about him is safer than talking about the open hole in the middle of the floor I keep walking around. "Like he forgot the line in the script that gets us out of this scene."
"Watari doesn't have a script," Tsubaki says. "He has vibes. He's very brave that way." The fondness reaches him too. Then it collapses back into worry like a wave that wanted to be a mountain. "And you—" She stops and shakes her head, like starting the sentence would pour gasoline we don't have a bucket for.
The air between us is warm enough to feel like a hand on the back. I think of Kaori's finger in my sternum, of Watari's surprised eyebrows asking me without words to be the person they think I am, of Tsubaki's blink that now has anger and something colder behind it—fear. The urge to run after Kaori and say fine, I'll be your zombie, I'll carry your tempo in one hand and a centrifuge schedule in the other and I'll learn to sleep while walking—God, I want to give her that version just to stop this feeling. The smarter part of me—the one that sounds like my uncle when he's pretending to be a scientist and failing because he's really a person who loves you—tells me not this time.
"Hey," I say, and it sounds like a word you use to keep a door from closing on your fingers. "I'm... sorry."
"For what?" Tsubaki asks, and her voice is gentler than her stance. "Being fourteen? Being ridiculous? Being you?"
"Yes," I say, because it's easier than ranking my crimes.
She huffs out something that could be a laugh if you were generous and could be a sob if you weren't. She uncrosses her arms and rubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand like she's trying to erase the last five minutes from the whiteboard of her day. When she drops her hand, her gaze finally meets mine and doesn't flinch.
"You look like a raccoon," she says, and it should be an insult but it's a diagnosis. "A very stubborn raccoon who lost a fight with the sun."
"I'll take raccoon," I say. "It's better than zombie."
"I didn't say zombie," she says, and then the corner of her mouth betrays her. "Yet."
We stand there in that not-quite-funny, not-quite-crying place people end up when they're too young to be this tired and too old to pretend they aren't. The piano watches us like a stern aunt. The metronome pretends it has never made noise in its life.
"Do you want me to tell you you're doing the right thing?" she asks, and the question is such a trap we both smile at it like a mousehole.
"No," I say. "I want—" I stop. Want isn't the right verb. Want is for candy and naps and the wrong kind of courage. "I need time."
"Time," she repeats, as if testing the weight. "Which you keep spending like it's fake money." She catches herself and softens it with a sigh. "You're not eating enough, either."
"I ate," I say, defensive out of habit. "An egg sandwich."
"That is not a food," she says. "That is a rumor."
The laugh that comes out of me is a broken thing and therefore the best kind. It runs around the room, finds no corners sharp enough to cut it, and returns unharmed. Tsubaki's shoulders drop six millimeters. I see the exact moment she decides not to be angry at me for being me. It's both a relief and a disaster.
"He was the elementary division champ," she says, quoting Kaori but making it an old joke instead of a fresh wound. "You know that makes you an easy target, right? People remember trophies like they remember car accidents."
"I didn't ask to be a small and loud crybaby,"I say. "It was a package deal."
Her smile, when it comes, is the kind you hide in your pocket to take out on bad days. Then it slides off her face because the bad day is now. She steps forward one pace, and it feels like the floor moved toward me instead. She doesn't touch me. She doesn't have to. The care sits between us like a bowl of cut fruit.
"You're getting worse," she says, soft. "Your eye bags are—" She waves a hand like she can fan exhaustion away. "You don't look okay, Kousei."
And because something in me is tired of letting the day win, because I need to hurt something that will forgive me, because she is the one person who can take it and still come back tomorrow, I do the stupid, tender thing: I lift a hand and cup her cheek.
She freezes, eyes wide, the alarm and the relief hitting at the same time. Her skin is warm from running, from worrying, from being the person who notices. Her breath catches on a note between anger and something older.
"Where the hell would I be without you, Tsubaki?" I say, and it comes out like a smile that had to fight its way through brambles. "Probably dead, right?"
Her eyes fill with four emotions in four frames: flustered, furious, terrified, fond. She bats my hand away—not really, more like a pantomime of batting, because if she actually removed it she might cry—and then she scowls so hard the air gets out of our way. "Don't say things like that, idiot," she says, and her voice shakes and holds. "Not funny."
"I wasn't trying to be funny," I say. "I was trying to be... true and failing. It happens."
She glares at me and then at the ceiling and then at a poster about proper posture as if it personally wronged her. When she looks back, the edges have come off. The bat bag by her foot looks like it wants to be useful and is sad it can't be here.
"I hate that I get it," she mutters. "I hate that I can see every reason you think you have." Her mouth tugs into a shape that might be a smile if no one looks directly. "I hate you a little."
"Fair," I say. "I hate me a little too."
We stand shoulder to shoulder, not touching, watching the dust shift weight in the light. Outside, a whistle blows from the field, and somewhere Watari yells something obscene at the sky and the sky forgives him. I imagine Kaori on the bleachers, shouting his name until the letters rearrange themselves into a different language that only games understand. The pull to be where she is is a physical tug on muscle. The pull to be where Saitou might be is a tug on something like bone.
"Go," Tsubaki says at last, and I can't tell if she means go after Kaori or go toward the thing I haven't told her about. Maybe she means both. Maybe she means neither. She swallows, and I hear the sound over the quiet of the room. "Just... don't vanish."
"I'll try," I say, because promising would be an insult.
She rolls her eyes in slow motion. "Eat something with a color," she adds, because she knows which instructions I obey when the rest fall apart. "And sleep. Horizontal. For more than an hour."
"Bossy," I say, and she snorts so softly only people who grew up in my kitchen would have heard it.
At the door I pause because rituals keep floors from opening, and I don't have many left that aren't soaked in other people's expectations. I glance back: Tsubaki with her arms folded but looser now, her face making lines it shouldn't have to make yet, the bat bag a ridiculous anchor by her shoe. Her eyes are the color of the part of the day that refuses to end just because the sun is bored.
"Thank you," I say.
"For what?" She makes a little dismissive sound. "Existing? Basic duties."
"For staying angry at me in the right direction," I say.
She sniffs and pretends to be unimpressed. "Shut up and go before I change my mind and tell you what to do with more detail."
Watari's ball thunks somewhere far away. Kaori's laugh floats past the window in a key the room can't hum. I put my hand on the handle. The metal is cool, like a coin you're not sure will buy what you need. The Saitou card in my pocket presses into my leg, a small, rectangular insistence.
I open the door and step into the hallway that smells like floor polish and hallway decisions. The room lets me go reluctantly. Behind me the piano keeps being a piano. The metronome does not click. The lights don't dim. The world refuses to make a scene out of my departure, which feels rude and exactly right.
I don't look back. I don't have to. The shape of her there, arms folded, eyes narrowed in a way that means please don't die and also you owe me twenty explanations—that shape is a thing I'll carry into whatever room asks me for a password next.
The hallway smells like floor polish and the last bell. I take the stairs because elevators make you wait and I have run out of respectable ways to stall. The Saitou card rides my pocket like a second pulse. I don't look at it. I already know the font of the address, the slope of my uncle's handwriting, the name for the security desk that will put a smile on a guard's face and suspicion right after.
Outside, the air has dropped a few degrees, cities' way of forgiving everybody. The field coughs up a whistle; Watari whoops at a sky that always forgives him back. I don't look. If I look, I'll be there, and then I'll be nowhere. My feet make a decision before the rest of me votes—left at the gate, past the vending machine that never stocks the only good flavor, onto the street that smells like printer ink and dinner.
"Eat something with color," Tsubaki said, like it was a spell you had to say right or it wouldn't work. At the corner store I buy the brightest thing in reach: a clementine with skin like a small sun. I peel it on the walk to the station, oil misting my fingers, rind cracking with the soft little sigh that makes you think fruit wants to be rescued. The segments are sweet and a little sour, stubborn strings clinging no matter how careful I am.
The train arrives pretending not to be late. Inside smells like steel and old magazines. I find a spot between a window and a man asleep in a delivery jacket, and I take out my folded page. The summary has been trimmed until it bleeds. It says I know how to read and rank and not pretend. On the back I've written three questions and crossed each of them out twice.
If you only had one run left this week, what would you measure and why?
Is there a way to separate the heart from the ladder; if you had to pick which you'd save first?
What did you stop believing in after she died....?
The last one is a door that opens into a staircase that falls into a hole. I draw a line through the line through it, then write: ask something that costs him time, not blood.
Stations flick by like edits. A girl in a uniform nods off and wakes at the jerk of the car, eyes wide as if she lost a whole month. Two boys argue softly about a lyric that doesn't scan. I count the beats between the chime and the doors closing and try to match it to the click of the metronome back home. It doesn't match. It shouldn't. The lab has its own measures. If I'm lucky, I'll learn how to hear them.
Kaori's finger lands on my chest again, a ghost tap in time with the rails. I'm confirming our entry. I don't care. Her brave front is still being brave in my head, soundproofing around the fear. For a second the image of her on the bleachers jumps in—#23 sagging off her shoulder, hair still not deciding to be dry, yelling Watari's name like it owed her money. I taste river on the air that isn't there. In the next breath I get Tsubaki's face instead, the exact second she tried not to react to the way I thanked her for keeping me alive. Where would I be. Don't say that, idiot. Color in your food. Horizontal sleep.
I push them both back gently, like returning borrowed books to the right shelf. Not because they don't matter. Because the door I'm walking toward requires a different language, and I can only speak one at a time without tripping.
We surface into evening. The station by the coffee-and-printers place smells like ambition and toner. I check the map even though I could walk this with my eyes closed by now. Two blocks. The kind of walk where you could decide to turn around twice and still arrive on accident. I don't turn.
On the way, my brain tries openings again because it thinks good manners will save me. "I'm sorry to impose" dies before I finish the sentence. "I read your paper" is something people say when they want to be liked and don't know how to be useful. "I brought questions" is closer, but it sounds like I expect him to answer them for free. The right first line is probably no line. The right first line is a label on a bottle he doesn't have to fix.
The building rises like sensible advice. Not glassy or new—something that's been there long enough to know what it's for. The lobby is behind panes that reflect a thinner version of me back at myself. Inside: a rectangle of carpet, a security desk with a lamp, two potted plants that think they're trees, an elevator waiting with its mouth closed. The guard—middle-aged, bookish—leans on a newspaper and a thermos. Above, a directory I can already recite: departments as organs, floors as ribs.
I stop on the sidewalk because movement has carried me to the place where movement needs a reason. The card in my pocket heats like a compact star. I press my palm against it through the blazer and don't take it out yet, like saying a name only inside your mouth so it doesn't get stolen by air.
"Don't expect much," my uncle said, like weather and kindness. Okay. I won't. I won't expect a smile or a chair or a second minute. I won't expect the questions to land anywhere but the floor. I won't expect him to see anything in me but a boy in a tie who thinks reading late at night is a substitute for work.
What I will expect: a smell of solvents that says I have come to the right kind of room, a timer that ticks without asking me to play, a task that makes my hands competent or proves they aren't yet. If he gives me glassware to wash, I will make it a prayer. If he gives me a label to write, I will write it like a name on a headstone, clean and forever.
Across the street a couple argues softly about dinner and laughs mid-argument, remembering food is not a crisis. A bus kneels and hisses and kneels again, bored of its own grace. The building's windows hold rectangles of other people's late days—someone in a lab coat gesturing with a pipette, someone at a computer rubbing their neck, someone finally standing and remembering what knees are for.
I take the card out. The letters are the same as when I looked an hour ago and last night and in my dreams where the fonts change to see if I'm paying attention. The name sits there, a door that only opens from the inside. Saitou Yonoshita. Floor seven. The guard's name, a password disguised as courtesy.
Kaori's laugh hits me on a delay, as if someone opened a window two blocks away. Tsubaki's hand is still warm under my palm where I placed gratitude like a bandage that doesn't stick. I let them both be true for one breath longer. Then I fold them and put them back where the good things go when it's time to do the hard one.
I straighten the blazer. I tuck the page with the questions behind the card. I look at the door and imagine it opening, or not. Either way, the ground exists on both sides. Either way, I am here.
I breathe once to count it. Then I step off the curb toward the glass.