The banners hit me first—too bright for a "concert," too cheerful. Paper lanterns bobbed against early evening, and kids in half-costumes rushed past with trays of taiyaki. Somewhere on the lawn a brass trio was butchering the Mario theme in bear heads. This was Kurumigaoka's "concert," apparently. Not the black-suits-and-stiff-spines kind. More like a festival that accidentally swallowed a recital.
Watari whistled low. "This is incredible. They've got yakisoba. They've got idol penlights. They've got... is that a saxophonist dressed as a bear?"
I pinched the sleeve of his jacket and tugged him toward the entrance. "We are here to listen. Not to eat everything that smells like soy sauce."
"We can multitask," he said, already craning for the food stalls. "You know, I'm starting to think music might be fun."
I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my own ponytail. He grinned and nudged me with his shoulder and I let myself laugh, even though my nerves were jittery. Kousei had asked us to come. Not the usual "come if you want," either. He'd actually texted: Please be there. It felt like he'd dropped a stone in my chest and left me to hold it, warm and heavy.
Inside the hall, the lobby didn't match the noise outside—cool air, polished floor, kids in uniforms glued to their phones, a signboard that said Welcome to the Kurumigaoka Music Festival in bubbly letters with doodled eighth notes. A girl in a panda kigurumi handed me a program and a glowstick. I gave the glowstick to Watari; he bowed like he'd been gifted a diamond.
"Hey," he said, low. "Don't look now, but Takeshi Aiza, two o'clock."
I looked anyway. There he was near the far wall, arms folded, hair neat, the permanent line between his brows sharpened by the lobby lights. Alone. Which meant Emi was probably somewhere else, saving her face for the stage or not coming at all. I pulled Watari by the wrist toward the doors as if we had seats reserved in a better life.
We found a row about five back from the middle. The hall itself felt fresh, new wood and clean lines, the stage framed by those curtains that are too red to be real. Down front, I recognized Hiroko Seto—hair tucked behind one ear, expression unreadable. A little girl with yellow hair swung her legs beside her like a pendulum counting down to something.
I sank into my chair and let the seat swallow some of my nerves. The program said the acts would be... varied. Xylophone quartet. Two-piano five-hands medley. Percussion ensemble. Solo piano—several. Violin and piano. A capella. Somewhere someone had drawn a doodle of a ghost playing a clarinet. I tried not to imagine what that sounded like.
Watari leaned in. "You think Kousei asked us here because he's nervous for his student?"
"Student," I repeated, testing the word on my tongue. "He said he's helping a first-year... girl."
"First year huh?" he said,
I nodded, pretending it wasn't weird to feel the surprise like a little throb of pain. It wasn't pain. Just... unfamiliar.
The lights dimmed a notch. Conversation folded down to a soft hum. The MC—a kid in a cape and a tiny top hat—took the mic and welcomed us in a voice that squeaked once and made everyone cheer for the squeak. First up: the xylophone quartet. Four mascots waddled onstage, mallets in paw-hands. Someone behind us whispered, "This is the best day of my life," and then the first clunking, joyful notes fell into the hall like marbles.
It was silly, and it was... nice. The sound wasn't good, not in the achieve-a-score way. But enthusiasm has a pitch, and they nailed it. I clapped and felt my own face soften, and somewhere in that softening there was still the stone Kousei had left me. He'd changed so much these last months that sometimes I felt like I was trying to hold a friend who'd turned into fog.
Another act. Two girls in cat ears did a four-hands arrangement and almost fell off the bench laughing when they bumped elbows, which made the room laugh with them. The percussion ensemble wore festival happi coats and played trash cans like they'd trained for it.
A seat two rows ahead stood up and sat down again. Hiroko didn't move. The little girl beside her had her glowstick off, then on, then off, like practicing breathing.
When the MC called a name I didn't recognize, then "piano," my back straightened on reflex. The stage emptied. A minute stretched. Another. The door on the side opened and closed—a slim figure peeking out, then ducking back in. We waited. My hands found each other in my lap and laced tight.
I thought of the text: Please be there.
I thought of Kousei's face lately—tired, fierce, empty, overflowing, all at once. Sometimes he looked like he was made out of glass. Sometimes like he had no face at all. Sometimes like he'd peeled his face off and offered it to someone else to wear because they needed it more.
"Hey," Watari murmured, and I realized my jaw was set. I tried to relax it. The red curtain held still. The piano lid caught light like a black lake. Out in the lobby a door thumped and echoed.
Then the side door opened and a girl stepped onstage, uniform pressed, hair clipped back with... little red bears? She walked like the floor was made of thin ice. She reached the bench, bowed—too stiff, too fast—and sat with her hands in her lap for a breath longer than looked comfortable. Then she set her fingers and breathed the way we were all supposed to breathe.
The first few notes trembled. The fifth didn't. The eighth cracked open a space big enough to stand in.
Somewhere in the row ahead, a boy leaned forward, elbows on knees, not blinking. Takeshi. His profile didn't move, but the air around him did. Behind me, Watari forgot how to lean back.
The girl—Nagi, the program whispered—found her stride in the second phrase. Not perfect. Human. Fierce like someone who had built a cage out of scales and then learned how to open the door from the inside. I felt pride that wasn't mine stand up in my chest like a person.
I looked for Kousei and didn't see him. Of course I didn't. He was probably where he always is lately—backstage in some corner of a hallway, holding himself together with one hand and someone else with the other...
The piece gathered itself and went. The audience forgot to laugh. I forgot to breathe. Watari didn't make a joke for an entire three minutes, which has to be a record. When she landed, she held the last note like a hand offered and then taken back with care. Silence. And then applause that felt surprised at itself, then certain.
I clapped until it stung. The little girl near Hiroko jumped up and shouted, "Yay!" The top hat MC ran out, flushed, and almost tripped on the mic cable.
"Not bad," Watari said, as if the world needed his rating to continue.
"Shut up," I said, smiling.
I imagined Kousei somewhere I couldn't see, eyes darker than air, the ghost of a smile peeking like the sun behind a building. He'd asked us to come. We were here. For once, the shape of that sentence made sense.
—
Backstage air always smells like dust and paint. It settles on your tongue if you open your mouth to breathe and I was breathing wrong. Too shallow, too fast. Nagi paced a five-step loop on a strip of scuffed floor between a stand of risers and a costume rack with a headless panda slumped over it like it had died of joy. She kept rubbing her fingertips against each other like she was washing her hands without water.
"Hey," I said.
She didn't jump. She flinched, then pretended she hadn't. "You're late," she said. Her voice was a half-octave too high.
"I've been here," I lied. I wasn't good at lying and she knew it. I let the truth out in a smaller voice. "I was listening to the trash can symphony in the lobby."
Her brows made a little knot, then untied themselves without permission. "They were good," she said, and then realized we were talking and pressed her lips into a line.
I sat on the edge of a folded riser and looked at the floor, or looked through it. A tuning A drifted through the wall from somewhere. Someone laughed in a hallway; it broke on the corner and came to us as shards.
Nagi held her music in both hands like a passport. "I'm going to mess up," she said, fast, like pushing the words over the line would keep them from sticking. "Everyone's watching. My brother. Sensei. You." She winced at her own emphasis. "It's a festival but it isn't. You know?"
"I know," I said. I do. I know too well.
Her eyes looked huge with fear and the red bear clips looked ridiculous and perfect. I wanted to hand her some of the weight I carry, not to make her heavier, but because sometimes it steadies you to hold something that won't blow away.
"This is a festival," I said, soft. "You're not on trial. No one's going to tally your soul into a rubric and post the score on the door."
"That's exactly what festivals are," she said, but even her sass sounded thin with nerves.
"Play," I said. "And if you fall, you get up. If your hands shake, fine. Let them shake and play anyway. No matter what happens, Hiroko and I are still proud of you."
She blinked like she'd been slapped. "Proud?"
I shrugged. "Yeah. That word."
Her chin trembled once, the kind of tremble your body does when it wants to refuse a kindness and can't. "I don't want to let you down," she said. It came out more like a vow than a fear.
"You won't," I said. "You couldn't."
The xylophone bears came offstage sweating. One took the head off and revealed a tomato-red face and hair plastered to a forehead. He waved the mallets at Nagi in solidarity. She attempted a smile and it looked like pulling a heavy drawer that finally slides.
"You told me not to think about perfection," she said. "But how do I stop? My hands only know how to chase it."
"I don't know...." I said, honest. "I've been trying to stop chasing it my whole life."
She stared like I'd confessed something she wasn't sure I was allowed to confess.
From the wings I could see the outline of the audience—the glow of screens half-hidden, the slow flicker of someone's fan. I was used to the geometry of rooms. I've been mapping where to stand since I was small enough that a bench felt tall. This room was warm with breathing. It felt... kinder than most.
"Look," I said, and tilted my head toward the curtains. "See that gap?"
She leaned. Through the smear between fabric and wall, a mixed parade: a kid in a cape, someone adjusting a mic stand, a teacher counting on their fingers, and in the fourth row—a shape I know too well not to feel it before I see it. Tsubaki. Next to her, Watari. Tsubaki's shoulders were drawn in and set, always ready to catch or to bump. Watari's head was tilted, grin smoothed down to curiosity. It put a little heat in my sternum that I didn't have a box for. I asked them to come. They came.
Nagi followed my gaze elsewhere. "That's my brother," she whispered, so soft I almost missed it. Across the aisle: Takeshi—a line of attention.
"You want him to hear you," I said.
"I want him to see me," she corrected. "It's not the same thing."
"Hm." I wished I had a line for that. I wished I had a hundred lines. My brain is good at making cures. It's bad at making comfort.
The MC's voice bubbled through the speakers. "Next up... piano... first-year... Aizato Nagi!"
Her hands went cold in the air like a bird shocked out of flight.
"Breathe," I said. "In. Out."
She did. Then did it again like a person practicing living.
"Nagi," I said, when she'd finished the second breath. She looked at me. "No matter what happens under those lights—when you walk back here, you're still you. That's the deal."
She pinched her lips together and nodded once, hard. "Okay," she whispered. Then she walked.
I watched her take the stage like it was a cliff path. The hall's air changed—subtle, like someone opening a window in another room. She bowed, clumsy and sincere, and sat. I couldn't see her face, just the angle of her shoulders, the lift of her wrists.
The first notes shook. I felt my own fingers twitch in sympathy. Then, as if a gear slipped and clicked, she steadied. Not into flat calm—into motion. She chose speed that belonged to her hands, not to a metronome or a teacher's throat. The left hand kept a floor the right could run across without tripping. Little stumbles became little dances. A run bloomed where a run lives. It was messy like weather, and the room liked it.
I let myself sit back a fraction. I had wanted to hold the bench under her with my bones. I didn't need to.
Takeshi didn't move. Inside not moving, he changed. I know that look: the surprise that hurts because it asks you to rewrite a story you thought was true.
Nagi hit the last shape like someone stepping onto dry land after a long swim. The hall paused—half a beat of what now—and then clapped itself open. She bowed again—too fast, again—and ran off like the applause might chase her and ask for an autograph.
She came around the corner, cheeks hot, hair escaping the bear clips, eyes glassy; then she saw my face and her chin lifted like she remembered how she wanted this story to go.
"You were fine," I said.
"Fine," she echoed, teary and insulted in a single word.
"Okay," I allowed, "you were really good."
She sniffed and shoved her score at me like I'd asked for it. "Don't say it like that," she mumbled. "Like you can't help it."
"I can't," I said, and ruffled her hair because sometimes your hands do what your mouth can't. She yelped and swatted at me but didn't step back.
"Sensei," she said, and then, softer, "Kousei."
I nodded. She looked like she might cry, and then she didn't. It's a hard skill.
"Go say hi to your brother," I said.
She made a face. "Later."
"Go," I repeated.
She rolled her eyes like a girl who will always roll her eyes and went. I watched the back of her head bob through the corridor, the red bears bright like a dare.
I leaned against the riser and let the room pour through me. The silly acts kept happening in the big space. Outside, the festival buzzed like summer had decided to come early. My phone buzzed once: You see her? from Tsubaki. I typed back: Yeah. She did great. A beat later: Good. Another beat: We're proud of her—and I wasn't sure if she meant Nagi or me or all of us, so I let the message land where it wanted.
My limbs felt heavy in the way they do when you stop bracing. I closed my eyes for three seconds and let a picture try to form—blonde hair under a tree, a fist-sized smile, a voice pretending not to tremble. I opened my eyes before the picture could turn into a room with a bed.
The panda costume was slumped in a chair like it had fainted. I was tempted to sit beside it and faint, too. Instead I exhaled and found Hiroko across the corridor, watching me with that sideways softness she only uses when she thinks I'll miss it.
I shrugged like everything was nothing. She lifted one eyebrow like she could see the knot I keep under my ribs and was making sure it didn't pull too tight. Between us, the air said: We did a small good thing today.
That would have to be enough for this hour.
I turned back toward the stage door because people always leave pianos alone between acts and I hate the way they look when they're alone. The hall swallowed another round of applause and somewhere inside it, there was the sound of a younger girl learning how to keep her balance in a room that was rooting for her to fall and get up and bow anyway.
I let the sound find me. Then I went to find her again.
__
I pour two fingers and watch the amber climb the glass like a slow sunrise. It smells like oak and honey and something that bites if you breathe too deep. I don't drink much—never really did, not even when everything went black the first time—but tonight feels like a night that needs a small, private ritual. I earned one safe mistake.
The apartment is dark except for the desk lamp. The cone of light makes a little island on the wood: notebook, pen, the corner of a printout I've read so many times I could recite the margins. Outside, the city is a low hush—the occasional car, a neighbor's laugh swallowed by the hallway. Inside, the second hand on the wall clock clears its throat once a second and won't stop.
Tomorrow, Skyclairs moves from approval to distribution.
I say it in my head and the words still don't fit. It's like trying to pick up a piano with two fingers—no matter how you try to grip it, the weight is wrong. Tomorrow hospitals will sign for cases. Pharmacies will get instructions. Priority lists will populate, and Kaori's name will sit near the top because it has to. "Priority patients." For once, the world remembered to make a list with her on it.
I take a sip. Heat spreads in the chest, and my shoulders unclench half a notch.
I think about the last two weeks like they were one breath: Saitou's blunt emails, the committee's questions, the safety board's stare, the trial data lined up in neat little rows like good students. Minimal adverse effects. Biomarkers trending right. Language that sounds so sterile you could put it in a museum and nobody would catch fire. It moved because it was safe to move. It moved because Saitou put his name in front of mine and because I had every answer ready and because luck finally stopped looking away when I spoke.
I keep catching myself waiting for the trap. For someone to say "We miscounted" or "We misread" or "A form is missing." The brain learns not to trust light. It learns the shape of "almost."
Another sip. Smaller. I'm not trying to burn the house down from the inside.
If this were the old track, the one where the story never changed, right about now someone would be saying the word surgery in a bright room and calling it hope. It wasn't. It was a last step off a dark stairwell. In this track, there's a pill. Not a cure, not salvation, but an instrument I can tune. It buys months—maybe more. It buys space around breath. It buys chance.
And I have never had more time with her than I do right now.
The thought lands and sits there like a bird that might fly if I move too fast. More time. A phrase so simple it makes me want to laugh and punch a wall at once. I didn't plan this far. I planned as far as don't let her die. I planned as far as keep her here. I didn't plan the hours after the hours after, the small stupid ones where you argue over pastry flavors or she falls asleep mid-sentence and you don't want to move because the weight on your shoulder finally feels like your own life.
I tip the glass, watch the surface tilt.
The cure isn't off the table; it's the table. Skyclairs is the steadying hand. The thing that stops the bleeding long enough to stitch. But the cure—the real one, the one that doesn't just slow the fire but rebuilds the house—that's still out ahead, a silhouette that keeps changing as I get closer. Stop the degeneration. Regenerate what's been lost. Nerve tissue is a bastard. It takes without apology and returns only under threats you can't ethically make. I've been here before in a different decade with worse tools and no time. This world is kinder, or I am meaner. Maybe both.
My phone screen lights for the hundredth time with nothing on it. Habit. I turn it face down.
I should open my textbook. I should look at the schedule for the exams. My attendance looks like a weather map where the storm never leaves the coastline. Teachers press their fingers together and ask me if music is "distracting" me, like that's the worst sin a boy could confess to. The only thing that keeps the floor from opening under me is that tests are just puzzles and I'm good at puzzles. Classwork, though—group projects, participation boxes, "share your thoughts"—I'm failing the part of school where you have to be seen.
I pour the rest of the glass back into my mouth and let it sit there a second before I swallow. The warmth makes the room feel less like a museum.
Nagi played well. I didn't sit next to her this time. No reckless, shared-bench duet to spark rumors and turn a school into a theater. I clapped from the aisle and let her own hands own the keys. She didn't need me there. That hurt in a nice way. Hiroko watched me while she watched Nagi and somehow did both with the same acuity, the way only mothers and predators do. "You're somewhere else," she said later, voice soft around the edges of the cigarette. "Get sleep. Don't turn yourself into a ghost again." As if sleep were a door I could just open.
I top off the glass, then reconsider and set the bottle down. Enough.
If tomorrow goes the way the numbers say it will, Kaori won't have to hear "surgery" in that bright room. A doctor with kind eyes will talk about a pill and priority protocols and start dates. He'll say things like "stabilization" and "slow improvement" in the careful tone people use when they are trying not to offer too much hope and accidentally offer a lot. She'll smile with a mouth that pretends it isn't tired. Her parents will grip each other's hands under the table, fingers white at the knuckles, and breathe like people who just remembered how. The word dangerous won't be invited into the room. The word necessary will finally be on my side.
I close my eyes and see her in the rooftop light again, a different year painted over this one. "I'm scared," she said, and I said something stupid and brave because I thought that's what men are supposed to offer. This time I get to hand her a timeline instead of a promise. This time I get to say wait and have wait mean something.
I didn't tell her about the medicine. I told her "yes, but wait." I told her I needed to do a few things first. I left the part where I built those things out of my bones. I hate secrets, but I hate giving someone hope on credit even more. If it breaks, I'd rather it break on me first.
The glass sweats a little circle onto the desk. I wipe it with the side of my palm.
Someone is going to ask me what my "career plan" is again next week. Science. Medicine. I said it out loud to a teacher today and his eyebrows went up like a cartoon. The rumor factory will blow smoke: the piano boy going straight. The accompaniment to a life is changing key. Tsubaki will hear it and pretend she didn't, then ask me anyway, then tell me she's proud and then ask me if I've eaten. Watari will say something dumb and warm and call it support. Hiroko will grunt like she predicted it before I did. Kaori—Kaori will keep calling me a pianist as if that word is a tether. Maybe she's right. Maybe I can be both for as long as I have to be both.
I flex my fingers and feel the faint sting across the knuckles where the keys left little ghosts earlier in the week. You don't stop being what you were just because you added a job title. Some languages you never forget.
The clock catches my eye. It's later than I intended to let it be. I picture someone barging in—Tsubaki with a lecture, Watari with snacks, Hiroko with a shoe—and me with a glass I don't usually hold. I'm not ashamed. I just don't want to explain. Not tonight. Tonight is for the quiet I never get and the victory I don't know how to celebrate.
I set the glass in the sink and run water until the smell thins. My reflection in the window looks like someone else wearing my posture: shoulders slumped, hair stubborn, eyes too old for the room they're in. If Skyclairs works like the numbers say, I'll get to watch those eyes see her stand up without help again. Maybe not run. Maybe not dance yet. But stand. Take steps she didn't borrow. That picture alone could redecorate my skull.
Don't get ahead of yourself, I think. Numbers. Timelines. Protocols. The cure still waits on a farther hill, and I still have to do the climb. Nerve regeneration is not impressed by anyone's feelings. It doesn't care that I have a deadline made of a person I love. It will take the time it takes.
But tomorrow... tomorrow is a start that isn't pretend.
I turn off the lamp. The room dissolves into outlines. From the bedroom, my phone hums once—an automated alert I set weeks ago just to hear it: "Distribution—Phase 1." I let the sound happen and don't move.
I stand there in the dark and imagine handing the future a different pen. I imagine the look on her face when a doctor uses the word maintenance instead of emergency. I imagine the ordinary cruelty of a better day: a line, a pill cup, a nurse with practiced hands, paperwork, boredom. I pray for boredom. I'd worship it if I could.
"Hang on," I say to the empty room, to the night, to all the versions of her that trusted me and didn't know it. "Just a little longer."
The second hand keeps clearing its throat. Tomorrow keeps coming anyway.