The rooftop has this slow-breathing quiet I don't get anywhere else. The city hum is far enough away to soften, the fence rattles when the wind remembers it, and the sky is a wide blank I can pour my head into. I lie back on the warm concrete with a boxed juice sweating in my hand, straw bent at an angle it doesn't like. Tsubaki is cross-legged near the door, a manga balanced on her knees, lips moving along with the sound effects like she's chewing them. Watari leans against the fence, laughing into his phone at something a girl said, the kind of laugh he keeps just for that.
Summer break might as well be a finish line painted on the horizon. Once we cross it, I can sleep like a person again. I can block real hours for the lab and not stitch them together from the leftover edge pieces of days. No competitions. No rooms full of people waiting to decide if what you just did mattered.
I take a long pull on the juice. It tastes like sugar and permission.
The door slams open hard enough to bounce off the stopper.
"Nein! There is no rest for us!"
God damn it.
Kaori comes out like the rooftop forgot to invite her to a party and she decided to host it anyway. She holds an envelope above her head like a trophy. Her hair is a little wild from the stairs. Her cheeks glow like they caught a piece of the sky on the way up.
Watari hangs up mid-laugh. "Uh—hey?"
Tsubaki jolts, manga wobbling in her hands. "Could you not?"
I prop myself up on my elbows and stare at the envelope. It's that off-white, expensive paper that makes you feel judged for touching it. My stomach tightens on instinct.
"Towa Hall," Kaori announces, as if the words need the air to hear them. "Two days ago, an invitation from the office."
Watari whistles. "Towa? The place you two had that earlier competition?"
I keep my face still. The word Towa is a small, cold hand on the back of my neck. Maihou reaches up from wherever it lives and tugs at my sleeve.
Kaori strides into the middle of us and flips the flap with a snap. "The Gala Concert," she declares. "A special concert to commemorate the whole season, to wish winners and runners-up luck in their music careers. And—" she points the envelope at my chest like it's a judge's gavel "—we've been invited at the sponsor's recommendation. Me and you."
Watari grins. "So it's like an exhibition game?"
Kaori swings her arm toward him, finger-gun. "One hundred points!"
Tsubaki's mouth pulls sideways. It's the face she makes when she wants to be happy for me and can't quite make herself ignore history. "Do you... want to?"
I look at the envelope. The roof tilts a fraction. The straw in my juice squeaks when I bite it without meaning to.
Kaori sees the shift in me. For a heartbeat her eyebrows draw together, but then she straightens, turns the brightness up half a click. "It's not a competition, Arima. No judges. No points. Just music. Just... a chance to play together on a real stage, and wave to the people who believed in us." She smiles in that way that tries to lure you onto safer ground. "We made first in prelims, remember? We were invited because we were good."
There's that word again. We.
I set the juice down and scrape my palm across my face. "You both saw what happened last time," I say, keeping my voice soft so it doesn't break. "Do you really think anyone wants me up there again?"
Watari opens his mouth. Closes it. "I mean... lots of prodigies crash and burn once. It's kind of a rite of passage? Right? Like, uh—" he flails in the thin air where examples should be "—Mozart probably had a cold once."
Tsubaki shoots him a look that could peel paint. Then she turns back to me, worry tucked into the corners of her mouth. "We can say no," she says quickly. "We can always say no."
Kaori flinches at that word like it bit her. "I'm not asking for forever. I'm asking for this." She lifts the envelope higher, like maybe the sun can bless it into being less sharp. "It's a chance to make the stage ours. To make them listen for the right reasons."
I want to tell her the stage doesn't belong to anyone. It rents itself out to whoever pays with hours and blood that month.
Instead I say, "It's an exhibition, you said?"
"Yes," she says, fast. "Yes. A friendly. A celebration. Low stakes." Then she smiles, and the smile is guilty of hiding teeth. "High sound."
"Low stakes," I repeat, tasting the lie I'm supposed to swallow.
"No judges," she says again, and that part is shaped like a promise.
I lean back on my hands and stare at the sky so I don't have to look into the reflection of myself in her eyes. "I... don't know if it's a good idea."
Her knuckles tighten on the envelope. She takes one step closer, then stops herself like she just remembered I'm a skittish animal. "You won't be alone," she says. "I'll be there. We'll be there."
Tsubaki looks down at her manga because it's easier than watching my face. Watari runs a palm over the fence wire like he's smoothing something that won't smooth.
I line up reasons in my mouth. You saw me stop. You saw me stand up and leave. You heard the room breathe like it couldn't decide whether to be angry or frightened. You watched me fail, and I am tired of rehearsing the moment where I watch it happen again. None of them sound like reasons when I imagine saying them out loud.
Kaori chews her lip once, then makes the decision she came here to make. She slides a hand into her tote and pulls out a small pink shape.
The bunny blinks in the sun with its sewn-on eyes. One ear lists, the way it does. It's the same stupid plush I handed to her weeks ago in this timeline; it's the same stupid plush I handed her months too late in the last one.
She holds it up between us. "Look at me, Mr. Bunny," she says softly, putting a silly voice on the words that doesn't quite hide the way her throat tightens. "You got him for me, Kousei."
My mouth opens. Nothing arrives.
"When we were a duet," she goes on, eyes not leaving mine, "I felt on top of the world." She hugs the bunny against her chest. "You can redeem yourself for Maihou in this."
God, no. The thought hits bone. That wasn't the point. It's not about redemption. It's not about a neat line you can draw with a marker from a broken night to a clean one and call it even.
I rub both hands down my face until the skin warms. The roof is suddenly too bright. A bus rolls through the street below and pushes a wedge of sound up between us.
Tsubaki lifts her chin. "Kaori," she says, careful, "maybe don't—"
Kaori doesn't stop. She never does when she thinks the path is the right one. "You don't have to prove anything to anyone," she says, and somehow makes the words rhyme with prove it anyway. "Just... come back to the stage with me. Let's do it together."
Watari tries to help, because that's what he does when he is out of depth. "The sponsors requested you two. That never happens. It's like fate or... or marketing with good taste." He smiles wide. "The return of the ultimate duo."
I'm not the person who gets to make fate jokes.
Kaori waits. It's not a silence that demands. It's the kind that holds a small animal in its hands and doesn't close its fingers until it has to.
I keep thinking about a hospital room in a life that will happen again, about an empty chair next to a piano bench, about a program with both our names on it and a stage I walked onto alone because I had no choice. I keep thinking about how easy it would be to say no, and how I have never been able to say no to her when she looks at me like this, like the world could be kind if we went at it together hard enough.
I exhale through my nose. The sound is smaller than the decision.
"...Fine," I say, voice thin. "We'll do it."
Kaori's smile bursts out of her like light escaping a lid. "Yes!"
Watari whoops, pumps the air like a boy at a soccer match. "Let's go! Gala time!"
Tsubaki's relief is complicated. It crosses her face and leaves a bruise behind. "Okay," she says. "Okay."
Kaori tucks the bunny back into her bag like a secret she might need again. She steps forward, impulsive, like she wants to throw her arms around me, then stops herself because she can see the way I'm holding together with string. Her hand hovers in the space between us, then falls. "We'll make a plan," she says briskly, which is how she handles feeling too much. "Schedule, pieces, rehearsal time, everything. We'll make it gentle."
The word gentle almost makes me laugh. It comes out as a breath that might be a sound. "Yeah."
"Great," Watari says, clapping once as if meetings appear when you summon them. "We'll, uh, be your... team. Snacks. Water. Security detail."
Tsubaki rolls her eyes without malice. "You faint at the sight of sheet music."
"Only when it has more than four sharps," he argues, wounded. "Which is illegal, by the way."
Kaori steps backward toward the door, already shifting into motion. "I'll text you later," she says to me, then to both of them, "and you two—help me bully him into resting. If he shows up to rehearsal looking like a ghost, I will haunt him harder."
They salute like idiots. It helps.
When the door shuts behind her, the rooftop exhales with us. Watari wanders back to his phone, already composing texts that make no sense. Tsubaki pretends to read, then doesn't. I pick up my juice and take a sip. It tasted better ten minutes ago.
I lay back down and stare at the sky until the pale blue looks like paper I could write a different life on. It doesn't bend.
—
Hiroko finds me after school because of course she does. She has a talent for arriving exactly at the point in a day when I think no one will. The kid with the yellow hair is with her, her hand snagged in Hiroko's jacket pocket like a hook.
We take the corner table at a café that pretends it isn't loud by hanging too many plants near the ceiling. Hiroko orders coffee and then looks at it like it owes her back rent. The kid orders melon soda and watches the bubbles with professional suspicion.
"I didn't think you'd ever go back to piano," Hiroko says as soon as the drinks land. She taps ash into a saucer instead of lighting anything because the waiter already told her no, twice.
"Neither did I," I say, tasting the way the words fit in my mouth.
"So how come?" she says, eyes narrow, not unkind. She turns the saucer under her finger. Ceramic sings.
I stare into the coffee I didn't order and let silence be a shape between us for a few beats. The kid tugs my sleeve like she is checking whether I'm real.
"I'm doing it for someone," I say finally.
Hiroko arches an eyebrow. "Someone who?"
I think about saying the name out loud, about letting it occupy the space between us the way it occupies every other space in my head. Instead I look at the condensation on the outside of the melon soda glass and the way the straw bends. "One day in April," I say, and my voice goes softer on its own, "I met a strange violinist."
Hiroko snorts. "They're all strange."
"This one dragged me to the stage," I say, and the corner of my mouth betrays me by lifting. "She showed me something I hadn't seen before."
"Fun?" Hiroko says, mock-innocent.
"Air," I say. The smile leaves without me asking it to. I rub my face with both hands and feel the day on my skin like dust. "But the piano—" I pause, because I know how she feels about people who say the next thing I'm going to say.
"Go on," she says, not gently.
"The piano hates me." The words land between the cups like small stones. "It scorns me. It's a gravestone with a name on it."
Hiroko's mouth flattens. The kid frowns like I just told her the sky is a door and it isn't.
"Thank you," I add, because if I don't say it now it will grow too big to carry. "For sticking with my cursed family." I try to make a smile for it. It comes out hollow but true. "You made the piano bearable. You made it all bearable"
...
Hiroko's eyes shine in a way she will deny. She pushes her chair back a centimeter like distance could stop feelings from arriving. Then she stands up and steps around the table, and before I can decide what to do with my hands, she puts her arms around me.
It's not the kind of hug people do in public. It's the kind you save for after storms, for rooms where curtains have been drawn too long. I freeze because I always do when comfort arrives without a receipt. Then I let my hands find the back of her jacket and hold. She smells like cigarette paper and lemon hand soap. The fabric under my chin is soft from too many washes. I close my eyes because it makes the world stop insisting on itself for a second.
"You're not cursed," she says into my shoulder, voice small and fierce. "Don't ever say that." She repeats "Never"
I tighten my grip. I don't agree. I don't argue. There are some true things you can't leave in the air where other people can crowd around them.
She squeezes once more and steps back, pushing my hair out of my eyes with a rough knuckle like I'm fourteen again and trying to hide behind bangs. She doesn't sit. She stands there, arms crossed, looking at me like I'm a puzzle and also a cat she's decided to adopt against her better judgment.
Her daughter reaches across the table very gravely and slides the melon soda toward me. "You can have some," she says, as if I've been promoted.
"Thank you," I say solemnly, and take a sip. It tastes like sugar and artificial green and something like being allowed.
Hiroko nods at the coffee. "Drink," she orders. "Eat later. Shower at some point this century. When's the gala?"
I blink. "You know about—"
She rolls her eyes. "Please. People are already buzzing about the duo. The internet exists. Also, I'm nosy and a musician ."
"Soon," I say. "Soon enough to feel like it's tomorrow."
She hums, the way she does when she's decided she's going to be in charge and is rehearsing which weapons to pull off the wall first. "Good," she says. "We'll need time to make you look un-dead. And to find a piano that doesn't smell like failure."
"Those exist?"
"In rooms where I have opinions," she says, smug.
I let the sound that might be a laugh scrape out of me. It's rusty. It still counts.
Hiroko sits again, finally, and pokes at the ashless cigarette on the saucer with the same disapproval she uses on my posture. "You sure about this?" she asks, not unkindly. "The stage? With her?"
"No," I say honestly. "But I said yes." Yet again
Her eyes soften. "That counts."
I nod, because if I don't, my head will do it on its own and that's undignified. We drink bad coffee and good soda and let the plants pretend they are absorbing whatever we can't say out loud. Outside, the afternoon decides to be warm on purpose. Inside, I keep my hands around the cup even after it goes cold, because sometimes you hold onto things for the shape of them, not the heat.
When we leave, Hiroko thumps my shoulder with the flat of her palm. "Practice," she says. "Eat. Sleep. I will hunt you down if you do none of these."
"I believe you," I say.
"You should," she says, and smirks. "Mediocre boy."
I watch them walk away—Hiroko's heel clacking out a steady rhythm, her daughter hopping every other tile like she's solving a puzzle with her feet. The street feels less like a corridor and more like a place people live.
I turn toward home with the faint outline of a plan sitting in my chest like a cautious bird. It doesn't sing. It doesn't leave. It's enough for now.
——
Evening takes the bridge by degrees. First the heat lets go of the railing, then the river cools the air just enough to taste. Streetlights blink to life like shy eyes. My shoes thrum the boards. Hers do, too. We've been walking side by side for a while without saying much. It's not uncomfortable, just heavy in the way clouds are heavy before they decide what kind of weather they want to be.
I said yes. I said we'd do the gala. Again. The word still feels unreal in my mouth, like I borrowed it from someone braver and forgot to return it. The closer we get to night, the more the yes pulls at me. Practice with her. They weren't even gonna be able to play together...
Kaori leans on the rail and looks out over the water. The river moves like it knows secrets and refuses to say them out loud. Down below, the brush on the banks has grown tall and careless. Little green lights stitch themselves on and off between the stems.
She doesn't look at me when she finally speaks. "Kousei," she says, almost a whisper. "Do you seriously... not want to play again?"
I keep my eyes on the ripples beneath us. "I don't know," I say, and even I can hear how tired it sounds."I said yeah didn't I?"
She huffs a breath that could be a laugh if it had more air in it. "That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have that isn't a lie."
She pushes away from the rail. For a second I think she's going to scold me, or pout, or turn back toward town and leave me to my weather. Instead she swings a leg over the edge, hops down to the shoulder slope, and sinks into the knee-high grass like it invited her. "Come on," she says, and her voice is lighter now. "Look."
I follow because I always do. The bank is soft and a little damp. Stems scrape my shins. Fireflies lift when we disturb them and hang in the air a second before deciding where to blink next. It looks like somebody is stitching the dark back together with green thread.
"Pretty, right?" she says, turning a slow circle with her palms open like she's ready to catch the night itself.
I don't trust myself to answer, so I nod. A little light drifts close to my face, brightens like it recognizes me, then winks out and reappears by her shoulder as if it changed its mind.
She reaches with easy hands and cups one without closing too tight. "Got you," she murmurs, bringing her fingers together like she's holding a secret. The insect pulses in her palms—dim, bright, dim again. "Ba-dump," she says, matching her voice to it. "Ba-dump. Like a heartbeat." She looks up at me. "This is the light of life."
Deja vu comes down so fast I have to shift my feet to keep my balance. Another river, another spring, another sentence said in almost the same shape. The world doubles a second and then merges, imperfectly, the way a bad film reel slides in front of the projector and stutters before it catches.
She pretends her hands are a microphone and pushes them toward my mouth. "Testing, testing. Mr. Arima," she says in her announcer voice that's just a shade too dramatic to be anything but charming, "what are your thoughts on your first competition after such a long time?"
I stare at her. She beams at me like she can pull an answer out of my throat with her eyes. The firefly pulses between us, patient.
"I don't belong there," I say.
She blinks. "Huh? What does that even mean?"
"The people there," I say, and the words start lining up once they find a way through my teeth. "They love the piano. They have these clean dreams. An actual drive. They want to be heard, to get better, to... to be chosen." I swallow. The river sounds bigger all of a sudden. "Me? I'm none of that."
She drops the pretend microphone a little. "That's not true."
"It is," I say. The honesty tastes like metal. "I go up there because I can't keep running forever. Because I have to face it. Because you asked." I look past her shoulder so I won't have to watch her face change. "Not because I want to be there."
A small silence opens between us. The bright speck in her hands keeps pulsing like it refuses to take a hint.
"You used to want it..." she says softly.
"Did I?" I shrug, and it feels like pulling a blanket over something broken. "I used to do it because my mother wanted it. After that... I did it because it was the only language I had left. Then it turned into a headstone and I forgot how to talk."
She bites her lower lip. In the half-light, her hair falls forward and shadows her eyes. "You weren't a headstone at Towa," she says, and there's heat under the words now. "You were a hurricane and then a sunrise. People stood up because they couldn't help it. You remember that, right?"
I remember the hall, the way it held us like a pair of hands that didn't want to drop anything. I remember her bow brushing my arm when we stood together. I remember thinking, If this is the last time, fine, let it be this bright. I don't say any of that. I just rub a palm over my face and watch the lights lift and fall over the river like thoughts I can't keep.
"I said yes," I say. "I'm going to play. I just... don't know what that says about me anymore."
She studies me like she's looking for a switch I accidentally turned off. "It says you're brave," she says.
"It says I'm foolish," I say back.
"Those can be the same thing," she counters.
I almost smile. Almost.
She takes a breath, changes tact the way she does when the first path gets muddy. "Okay," she says. "Then don't think about who you're supposed to be when you're on a stage. Think about this." She lifts her hand, peels her fingers apart just enough to let the firefly's glow leak through. "Ba-dump. That little push that says, 'I'm here.' Play for that."
"What if that light goes out?"
"Then you played for it while it was here," she says, as if the math is simple, as if the fear isn't shaped like a month spent next to a hospital bed pretending to be hopeful. "You already did the hardest part, Kousei. You turned around. You stopped running."
I breathe out through my nose. The air leaves me like I've been keeping it for someone else.
We stand in the grass like that for a while, letting the insects redraw the borders of night. Somewhere a bicycle bell rings twice and fades. A dog yips and goes quiet. The river keeps talking to the stones in a voice meant for them alone.
She glances at me sidelong. "Can I ask you something?"
"You already are."
"What was holding you together?" she asks. "At Maihou. On stage. In the hall after. What kept you from... you know." She doesn't finish the sentence. She doesn't have to. We both hear the missing words.
I answer before I can think myself out of it. "You were."
The world goes even quieter. She stops blinking, like her body forgot how.
It isn't a dramatic line. It's just the truest one. When I think about all the days I stayed upright because I didn't want her to see me fall apart, and all the nights I slept at all because she told me to and sat on the phone for an hour while I didn't speak... the sentence is a simple tally, not poetry.
Her mouth opens, closes. She swallows. The green light paints the edges of her lashes and the tip of her nose.
"Don't do that," she says finally, and her voice shakes once on the way out. "Don't... hang yourself on me like that...."
"I'm not—"
She shakes her head again, harder. "I mean, I— I want to help. Of course I do. But you can't—" She looks down at her hand like it just remembered it's holding an insect. Her words drop to a whisper that wasn't meant for me.
"You know.... I'm not always going to be around to help you...."
It hits me with the accuracy of a knife thrown by someone who never misses. My body knows the line before my mind does. Another spring, another evening, another version of her with the same brightness and the same shadow stitched underneath. The exact sentence, hardly changed. A warning disguised as a kindness you can't argue with.
Everything inside me goes still. Not dramatic—just the way ponds go still when the wind takes a breath.
She looks up and sees it happen to my face. Her eyes widen. "Kousei?"
My throat is paper. I force it to bend. "I heard you."
"I didn't mean—" She stops. Starts again, softer. "I meant... you have to want this for you. If it's just for me, if I'm the only glue you've got... what happens when I—" She cuts herself off like she bit her tongue.
"You don't have to finish that," I say.
She nods. Her mouth pulls to one side like she doesn't trust it.
I don't tell her that in the worst part of my head, I planned for the absence of her. That I built my days out of work and sleep and nothing while she was busy teaching me how not to be a statue. That I came back from an ending I never convinced myself was the last one. That even with all that, one sentence from her can still freeze me in place like I'm fourteen and someone turned the light off.
She opens her hand slowly. The firefly hesitates, brightens once more as if to make a point, then lifts into the air and goes where the others are. We track it a few beats until it becomes just another flicker in the thousands. Her palm looks suddenly empty and very human.
"I don't want to scare you," she says.
"You don't," I lie, and the lie is an attempt at kindness. "You just... reminded me."
"Of what?"
"Of the part where I don't get to keep anything," I say, and immediately wish I could eat the words back. They hang there between us like a broken note that won't stop ringing.
She steps once, just enough to close the gap the sentence opened. "You get to keep what you make," she says, firm again. "We'll make something. For the gala. For us. And if it turns out the world can't hold it, then we'll let it go and make another thing anyway. That's how this works."
I stare at her. She stares back, steady. It's unfair how good she is at being sunlight and the warning about sunlight at the same time.
"What are we even going to play?" I ask, because practical questions are safer. "It's a gala. They'll expect... something." He knew already. Kreisler's Loves Sorrow.
She brightens, grateful for the turn. "We can choose something that breathes. Not the kind of piece that tries to chop your hands off. Something with a spine but also air." She looks away at the river, thinks, then back. "We can decide together. And we'll rehearse gentle. If it hurts, we stop. If the room gets thin, we open a window. We'll make rules like that."
"You can't open a window in a hall."
"Fine. We'll open me." She thumps her chest with a fist, then winces because it was harder than she meant. "I can be a window."
That almost gets me. The smile. The way she makes fun of herself to make me remember laughing is allowed. I let a piece of it through. It feels like a tooth I don't trust but am grateful for anyway.
"And if I stop?" I ask, the corner of my mouth flattening. "If I freeze. If the past decides to run the show."
"Then you look at me," she says, like she's telling me where the fire extinguisher is. "Not the keys. Not the light. Me. I'll pull a face. Or I'll nod. Or I'll breathe loud like an elephant. Whatever works. And if none of that works, we leave. Together. No disappearing alone. No getting swallowed by a bathroom. We go somewhere with bad coffee and better bread and wait for our bones to remember how to be bones."
I close my eyes because if I don't, they might do something rude. "Okay." The only thing he will be doing is looking at you in a hospital bed.
"Okay," she echoes.
We climb back up to the bridge slowly, because climbing slowly feels kinder. The wood feels warmer under my heels now that there's a plan, even if the plan is mostly her being stubborn and me agreeing to be dragged.
Halfway across, she bumps her shoulder into mine. It's not an accident. "Hey," she says.
"Hey," I answer.
"Thank you," she says, "for saying yes."
"Thanks," I say, "for making me."
She snorts. "I prefer 'convincing.'"
"You bullied me with a stuffed animal."
"It was extremely effective."
"Terrifying," I agree.
We stand at the middle and watch a train slide over the far trestle, windows bright rectangles, people inside going home to lives that don't have this much music or this much fear, or maybe they do and they just look better at pretending. The rumble carries across the water and under our shoes and out into the parts of the city that don't care what two teenagers decide on a bridge.
I feel her hand close to mine on the railing. Not touching. Close enough for the air between our knuckles to learn something.
"I'm going to mess up," I say, and it's almost a warning, almost a plea.
"Probably," she says. "Me, too."
"I'm going to be scared."
"Me, too."
"I'm going to look at you too much."
She lets out a sound like a laugh that tripped on a stone. "Good."
"You'll get mad."
"I'll pretend I'm not," she says, then adds, honest, "and then I'll stop pretending."
I breathe. The night breathes back.
She takes her phone out, thumbs a note open, and starts typing with her face very serious. "Rehearsal schedule," she says. "Snacks. Breaks. Pieces to try. Window plan." She shows me the list like a teacher proud of a chalkboard. "Look at that. Control."
"Do you think you can schedule a nervous system?" I ask.
"I can schedule yours," she says, and grins, and the grin is reckless and exactly what I need to see. Then she softens. "We'll make them listen," she says, almost to the river. "Together."
I look out at the thread of water, then back at her. The fireflies are thinner on the bridge, but one drifts up anyway and hangs between our faces for a second like it has a message and forgot it. I think about Hiroko's arms around me. About the way the lab hums. About the way a room can turn into a coffin or a church depending on which sentence you believe.
"Okay," I say one more time, because sometimes saying it multiple times is the only way to make it true. "Together."
She tucks the phone away, lifts her arms, and stretches like a cat that just remembered it owns the day. "Walk me home?"
"Always," I say, and the word doesn't scare me like I thought it would.
We go. The city unspools in front of us. Streetlights lift, one by one, like ushers showing us to our seats. Somewhere behind us, a tiny green light does its best to be seen and then stops trying and then tries again.