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Whenever Akaashi walked past the row of houses in the neighbourhood of modernized houses tucked behind the large structure of Fukurodani Academy, he would always find his footsteps halting on the street, looking up at the flat, black-roofed three storey house, where the silhouette of a person sitting before a grand piano of a deep chestnut colour.
The sound of the instrument would always flow down to the level ground in a flurry of notes, charged with emotion and passion, no matter how light, no matter how tragic the music sounded.
He would stand there for what seemed like a moment, but was more like a few minutes, staring up at the person and the piano, wind swaying his hair and music seeping into his very bones.
He would lose himself in the music, close his eyes and immerse himself in the deep, baritone keys of the grand piano, rise into the air when soprano notes were played out with frightening ferocity.
He was someone who did things for the sake of doing them, be it for volleyball, for his studies, for, heck, even living.
Akaashi was passionless as one could be.
And yet, why was he so attracted to the sight, to the sound, to the presence of the passionate? Of Bokuto-san and his spikes, each and every slam of the ball fueled by an intense love for the sport volleyball? Of the person playing piano three storeys above him, where metres below, Akaashi could feel the emotion executed into every key pressed by the figure above, reverberating into his brain, into his heart?
It was his routine. Walk home, most of the time with Bokuto-san tagging along, loudly preaching on about his volleyball plays or about the new yakiniku set menues the restaurant near Fukurodani, continue on his way much to the chagrin of the dual-tone haired ace standing at the bus stop. He would round the corners of the neighbourhood behind his school, mind blank and stride carved by habit of walking the same road for nearly two years now. Then he would stop by the three-storeyed, modernised structure and listen to the music of the piano, which was played every day without fail.
So it came as an unpleasant surprise when Akaashi walked by the three-storeyed house to find the area devoid of any music, grand piano by the wall-length window vacated and cover closed.
The room seemed to be dim, curtains halfway closed so only the seat and cover of the grand piano was seen from where Akaashi was standing.
While there was no visible change in Akaashi's facial expression, a feeling of oddly intense disappointment had formed in the pit of his stomach, and his perfectly arched eyebrows came down in a display of dismay.
Had he come too late? Too early? Did the pianist fall sick and was unable to play their music today?
He was so lost in his thoughts that he didn't notice the figure, clad in nonfashionably ripped jeans of a black colour and a tan sweater over an unbuttoned white blouse stopping by the side of the house a metre beside him. Just standing there, shoulder risen to prop her phone up to her ear.
"I - hold up," the girl said, snapping Akaashi out of his thoughts to face the girl.
She seemed to be around the same age as him, though she was a fair share shorter (three inches? Four? Three and a half?) than him. And she seemed to have emerged from the house Akaashi was so avidly gazing at.
If he were her, he would've gaped at him and thought that he was a creep with bad intentions, too. So he didn't protest to her reaction.
"Okay. Bye. Talk to you later," she hung up, visibly startled. Her grasp on her phone faltered as she stuffed said phone in her pocket, and slowly backed away from Akaashi.
"Are you a stalker …. or something?"
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After the nightmare that was the last few months of middle school, you had been homeschooled by your father, who had retired early from his lecturer job in Chuo University for you. Your mother was a lawyer at a prestigious law firm in Tokyo, working long hours which obstructed you from seeing her often.
You, unlike most people, actually want to go to school. You're a social human being, and no matter how much you want to change that, you remain an extrovert who needs the social interaction with people your age. The closest thing to a best friend you have now is is the grand piano sitting in the third storey room.
As a child, you had walked past a busker on the streets, her fingers flying on the keyboard of a small, electronic keyboard, and the music produced by that small instrument, of music full of tense staccatos, and had froze there. Just listening to the music, eyes wide with revering awe. You could feel the passion radiating from the busker; could see the way she stared down at the black and white keys of the keyboard and played something so out of this world.
The world was black and white, and the music was colour.
Splashes of red, dancing with yellows and oranges in the sky, shining down on the glittering blue sea, a forest of green trees surrounding the water body; the sun sinking into the horizon for the skyline to dance with blues, purples and pinks.
Your seven-year-old self had begged your parents to let you go for piano lessons. The first time you played the piano, it was all a bunch of gibberish, of slammed keys and randomly pressed pedals creating a plethora of messed-up tones that could not be considered as music.
Your seven-year-old self had kicked the piano, blaming it for not letting you create the music you so badly wanted to play.
When your first piano lesson came and went by, your eyes were opened. Piano wasn't just about randomly slamming your hands onto the piano keys and hoping that pretty sounds would escape from the instrument.
Memorizing which note was on which bar of the score was hard, and there were many times you stormed out of the piano room in your self-practice sessions, muttering childish curses at the piano.
As the days went by, so did your skills. You weren't naturally talented in the art of playing an instrument, and the pure and unbridled joy you fondled when the pads of your fingers pressed on the piano keys fuelled on your determination to excel.
Jingle Bells soon turned into River Flows In You, which then morphed into you sitting before a grand piano, to your side a lowered floor where the whole middle school sat on the hall floor, watching in awe as your fingers flew over the wide range of the grand piano keys, fingers pressing on the keys for less than half a second as you flawlessly executed the Bumblebee.
You were a young talent in your school, and a school competition where you performed the cliche Canon in D with such charged passion that a scout of a prestigious music school had sought you out for a music scholarship to their school.
You had gladly accepted, and spent the last few months in your third year of Dosho Middle School twitterpated over your scholarship of prestige.
You were recognised for your skills, sought out just because you loved to play the piano.
Then the last few months of middle school turned into a nightmare; high school hecame a distant dream and you spent many days away from the third floor of your house, spent many nights having nightmares of sitting at your piano and realising that you couldn'y play for your arms had disappeared.
Then what was supposed to be high school started with you waking up at 5am in the morning, waiting for your father to wake up to teach you your high school subjects.
Your feet led you to the third floor, and with trembling fingers, you turned on the light. With trembling fingers, you lifted the cover of the piano and folded the red cloth keeping dust away from the piano keys, and placed it on the chair beside the piano seat.
You sat on the piano seat for the first time in 5 weeks, clamped your eyes shut, and raised your arms to the piano keys.
When you opened your eyes, you saw your fingers resting on the keys.
And with that, you began to love the piano again.
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The stalker was apparently not a stalker.
Why did you even call him a stalker?
Maybe it was because of the way he, without fail, would stop by your house a ways from the front gate and just gaze up at where your playing the piano, at 7.20pm on Mondays to Thursdays and at 3.15pm on Fridays.
You hadn't noticed him from the start. Too engrossed in the piano, too engrossed in the floating sensation of moving with the music you produced to bother looking out of the floor-length window to see what was outside.
So when you had finished playing a Chopin piece, a little wonky as it was only your third time practicing the whole piece with both hands, and stood to clear the scores and close the piano, you had seen a figure of a person clad in a white, gold and black jacket facing your window.
At first, you had frozen, wondering whether it was a creepy old man who somehow had amazing eyesight and was able to see that a girl was playing the piano from three storeys above. When the figure turned his back on you and turned to walk off, you had dashed over to the second floor to take a closer look at who the person was.
Your heart was hammering in your chest from both the exertion and the nervousness of running down the stairs and finding out who the person was respectively.
Of course, you didn't recognise the person but you did recognise the kanji on the back of his jacket - Fukurodani . The high school just in front of your neighbourhood house.
Your heartrate slowed down. You removed your hands from the window.
You weren't expecting that, but at least it wasn't a creepy old man, just a high school student in a sports club tracksuit.
Yet it was surprising, when, the next day, precsely at 6.21pm, the same figure stopped by your house. You had been venting your frustration into your music this time, anger fueling you to slam your fingers onto the keys and your foot press hard on the pedals.
Today was an overall shitty day. And one look down out of the window was somehow enough to shift your mood from shitty to pleasantly surprised.
It had been such a long time since anyone other than your parents and yourself had heard your music.
It was nice, having an audience to play your passion to.
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Exactly eleven months after you discovered your single audience listening to you play, you had stumbled out of your house, calling a friend from middle school who wanted to know whether you could go to a middle school 'reunion lunch' later that week.
"Well, I'm not really sure what Oto-san will say, Komori-kun," you mumbled into the speaker, shoulder pressed close to your face for you were currently in a call and counting the amount of money you had to buy milk from the convenience store.
That was when you saw your audience.
And this time, not just a silhoutte or the back of his jacket, but saw him up close ; he was certainly very tall, which was saying a lot as, even though you were a girl, you were around 5'8" and a half and it wasn't easy seeing many girls or boys, in that case, taller than you.
He seemed to be around 5'11" to 5'12", and had a slim and slender build, with slightly tousled hair the shade of a crow's feathers. His eyes were thin, slanted, vertically-arched oval irises of a striking gunmetal blue colour that seemed to bore into you. His cheekbones framed his face perfectly, and he looked undeniably attractive - he couldn't be called handsome or hot - the most accurate depiction to him was pretty . He had pretty, delicate, feminine features and he made it look normal, look attractive on a boy's face.
"I - hold up," you stammered into the phone, stuffing your 3000 yen into your pocket.
" You already at the store? That was fast. Talk to you later then, bye!" Komori's ever so cheerful voice sounded in your ear, and you nodded (even though he clearly couldn't see you).
"Okay. Bye. Talk to you later." The line went dead. You, with hands that had begun to sweat intensely, stared at the boy while, at the same time, you slipped your phone into your pocket.
Of all the words you could say, you just had to say ….
"Are you a stalker, or something?"
Even though you had been aware of him since eleven months ago.
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Akaashi’s a little taken aback as to what has just escaped your mouth, but it’s rather unsurprising. After having lingered for so long in the same place at the same time, in love with the notes those fingers of yours had been playing, it would have been shocking if the girl just walked past him like he didn’t exist in her life, like nothing had happened.
Through the process, he’s fallen for the person behind the piano, their silhouette gracing his ears for months on end, soothing his tense nerves, melting the stiff, aching joints of his after a gruelling day of arms raised above his head for eternity.
He unravels into a pool of bliss before you, eyes closed and long eyelashes tickling the base of his cheekbones, staring up into the various colourings of the sky while the notes float down to him in a mix of emotion. Should he glance at the window, he would be stuck, staring at you, movements in tandem to the music, head nodding, feet pressing onto the paddles of the grand piano as the notes soften, slur together, echo through his head, his heart, his soul.
“I’m sorry,” he says instead, raising his eyes to look into your e/c eyes, bowing his head a little to hide the heat rising to his cheeks which would definitely result in a blush rising up his regal-boned cheeks. “I’ve been listening to you play the piano … the way you play it is so soothing and calming. I guess I can’t help but be enamoured with the music.”
You’ve received plenty of praises before, what your mother says before she goes on to correct you, what your father says before he tries to convince you to go to bed, for your condition would worsen whenever you lost track of time, fingers flying across the keys of the piano.
Time slips so easily through your fingers. You thought that your future was bright ahead of you, that you would be able to attend high school with the rest of your friends from Ushimi — but fate just has to strike you in the back with a blunt swords, delving into your skin and breaking bones and blood vessels of your spine, effectively ruining your life. These sorts of excursions where you head out for trivial things such as grocery shopping have become such a rare necessity in life that you yearn for, like yearning for oxygen when you’re sinking in meters upon meters of water.
The boy’s voice before is so genuine, not a simple excuse or empty praise to get you to do what other people want you to do. It’s an entity in itself, and it’s like a new gulp of air after you surface from the deep waters. Maybe it’s the last compliment you’ll ever get, because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to get out for fresh air after today, with your condition worsening even though there’s no physical change to you.
There’s a searing hotness behind the sockets of your eyes, and you blink, blink rapidly and fast and hope that the boy will continue to look down. That small, little comment of truth and eloquence rings in your ears, touches your heart, caresses the crumbling spirit you try to ignore, pouring out everything you have onto your passion, letting yourself drown in the music.
“Thank you. It’s been a while, since I played in front of an audience.”
Your voice comes out hoarse, touched, raw with a sort of … free-ness that Akaashi hasn’t detected from your previous comment. Maybe he knows that you and he will never meet again, but yet, he’s unwilling to let go of the memories he had gone through, the timeless moment that seems to skip away so fast.
Even as graduation comes rushing at Akaashi like a truck and on the day he takes back his entrance exam results, the piano on the third story of your house is gone, and the music is a mere memory of his days in high school, even as Akaashi finds a video of your last performance in middle school, transparent, glittering pearls of his entity sliding down his cheeks and dripping onto the screen of his phone, he’ll never forget that you existed.
Never forget that it was you who showed him what emotion really was. What he loved, and who he fell for after was. You’re gone from the world, gone ever since Akaashi’s first day standing outside your house to listen to you play, and you’re forgotten from the world, the whole universe of living organisms, humans and others alike who have all failed to experience firsthand what you generated. Music, but another level of it. An ode to your heart, but it was so much more raw. An escape from reality, that healed people as it slowly broke you.
He only fully talked to you once, but he loved you even before that.