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They arrived at the bus stop at the same time, from opposite directions.
It was late evening, the sky thick with clouds that seemed to froth and roil like water boiling over in a pot. The weathermen had been forecasting rain for days now, and rain it did; Iki Hiyori thought it looked like the sky was sobbing, the kind of hard, anguished tears that came from the chest, ugly and angry and raw.
Hiyori felt a little bit like crying herself. She was soaked through to the bone, every inch of her body wet and cold, the bag of groceries she’d purchased tucked haphazardly under the skirt of her long coat. Water had seeped through the leather of her shoes and into the toes of her socks, and she couldn’t help groaning a little as she ducked under the meager shelter provided by the bus stop lean-to.
She always seemed to have the worst luck.
“And it doesn’t look like it’s letting up anytime soon,” she groaned thoughtlessly.
“Fuck,” agreed the man who’d sprinted up on the other side of the shelter. Hiyori jumped a little and jerked back a step. She’d barely registered him as being there, which was odd, because now that she was looking, it was hard to tear her eyes away.
She supposed he was probably handsome, maybe a couple years older than her, with a mess of just-slightly-too-long hair, so black it was almost blue. He was wearing what looked like a tracksuit, though, the same shade of too-dark gray as the sky, and a ratty – was that a bandana? – wrapped around his neck.
Hiyori wasn’t an idiot. She knew not to talk to strangers, and this man was most decidedly strange. So she shut her mouth and stared down at the pavement in front of her instead of at him, at the rain drumming long, graceful fingers on the earth, glancing at him every once every couple seconds to make sure he wasn’t making any suspicious movements.
It took a couple minutes before she noticed the sleek, oblong case in his hand, and she blurted, “You play violin?” before she could stop herself.
He shot a sidelong glanced at her and grinned, and his eyes were not natural, intensely blue and luminescent and vaguely catlike. “Since I was five.”
“Me, too,” she said. The surprise and brief adrenaline rush was fading, and she was already kicking herself. What couldn’t she have just stayed quiet? And why wasn’t she shutting up now?
“That right?” He seemed pleased, turning his body so he faced her more completely. He was a little bit taller than she was, and she was struck by the sudden, bizarre inclination that he actually looked pretty damn good in that stupid jersey.
“I had a lesson tonight, actually. Up at the university.” Hiyori sighed and looked up at the sky. “Looks like I’m gonna be late, though.”
“Your teacher cool about that kinda thing? I had a tutor freshman year of high school that literally told me never to come back after I forgot to practice a piece. I was out on my ass before I could say ‘stomach bug.’”
Hiyori laughed. “It should be okay. Mr. Tenjin’s a little rough around the edges, but he’s all right, really.”
“Old man Tenjin is your teacher? No kidding?”
“You know him?”
The stranger grinned and shifted a little closer. Hiyori caught a whiff of his cologne, something warm and spicy and decidedly masculine. Like autumn. Like whispered secrets and the pages of old books. She beat back the sudden, violent impulse to bury her face in his shoulder.
“Yeah, I know him! He’s an old friend of the family’s. He was the one who taught me to hold my first violin, actually. Not my biggest fan, these days, though, to be honest. Says I’m ‘lazy,’ or whatever—” This with highly exaggerated finger quotes. Hiyori found herself chuckling again.
“And are you?”
He clutched a hand to his chest and gasped like the question was a personal affront. “Hell no! I’m the most motivated guy in Japan! I’m tellin’ you, in the future, there won’t be a man alive who doesn’t know my name. They’ll call me the new Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart! By this time next year—” and here he faltered, a crease forming between his eyebrows.
He’d been speaking with his free hand, gesturing and bouncing up and down a little on his toes, but now his hand dropped to his side and clenched there.
“This time next year…?” Hiyori prompted.
“No, it’s… It’s nothing. Forget it.”
“You shouldn’t give up, you know.” He looked at her, raised an eyebrow that almost seemed like a warning, but she’d started and now she couldn’t stop. “Seriously, you shouldn’t! God knows it’s stressful sometimes, but, I mean, even if you’re not world class yet, you can be with a little more practice – I mean, obviously I’ve never heard you play, but practice makes perfect for everyone, and nobody starts off a genius… well, I mean, except for, like, Mozart or whatever, but you can’t really judge by him, and anyway, I’m pretty sure he was a total asshole. I saw this movie—”
“I’m sick.”
His face hadn’t changed. If anything, the curve of his smile had twisted upward a little. There was something harsher in the lines of his face, though, something broken and furious in the blue fire of his eyes.
There was silence between them. The rain drew lines across Hiyori’s vision, and the world spun a little around her.
“Oh,” she said, quietly, and then, in a voice that was barely a whisper, “How sick?”
“I believe the medical term was ‘pretty damn,’ actually.” He shrugged, a sharp, brittle motion that cut through Hiyori like a blade. “Pretty damn sick. The good doctor gave me a little less than a year to live.”
But… he was… he was so…
(Vibrant, beautiful, funny, warm—)
How could somebody so completely alive possibly become dead?
“For… how long…?”
“Today.” His fists clenched, knuckles white under taught skin. “I found out today. Sorry. I don’t really know why I’m telling you this. I guess it’s easier, with somebody you just met. No obligations, you know? No ties.”
And this, it seemed, was the universe’s greatest travesty. Nothing seemed more profoundly, more essentially wrong than the idea that the man in front of her would die. And that was ridiculous, because Hiyori had lost people before, and she was so, so aware that everything, inevitably, ended: all people, all ideas, all cultures, all planets. Ashes and dust, starstuff returning to stars.
That was all truth. All of it, fact, and Hiyori liked facts. Facts kept things organized, kept things clean. And yet.
And yet.
“Play for me.”
His head jerked up, and those electric eyes met her own. It felt like a physical touch, like a wire connecting them together.
“What?”
“Play. The violin. For me. Go on.”
He sputtered half-formed protests, obviously bewildered (Hiyori tried desperately to keep the word cute from straying across her mind).
“What are you afraid of? I’m a stranger, remember? No ties.” she asked over him, gentle but insistent.
He snapped open his case, shot her a glare, and pulled the violin out.
When he started to play, something inside Hiyori filled up. The piece wasn’t anything she recognized… or maybe it was, but he’d changed it, covered it with the essence of himself so that the original composer was more like a gesture, eyes across a crowded room. She could feel him so strongly in those moments, close like touching, close like breathing the same air, whispering words into each other’s mouths.
The rain kept time on the roof. He kept time with his foot. Her heart kept time in her chest.
(She felt a bit like she was holding the music cupped between her palms, with memory dripping like water through the gaps between her fingers.)
When he was done, and it was silent, Hiyori took a deep, shuddering breath. She brought trembling fingers up to her face and sharply wiped a stray tear off her cheek.
“There,” she said. “Now you live forever.”
His eyes were so blue. Blue like remembering. Blue like loss. “What?”
Hiyori hesitated, then said, “When you play music, it’s like… giving little pieces of yourself to the person who’s listening. Especially good music. They carry it with them, somewhere in here—” she tapped her chest “—and from that point forward, every time they speak, a little of your music comes through with their words. They pass it on, to the people they know, the people they meet. Then, as long as their memory exists, you exist, too. So you might be dead, but you’ll never be gone. You see?”
He was staring at her, now, like he was reappraising, changing his initial assessment of what he’d believed her to be.
She finished, “In that way, I’ve always thought that being a musician is a lot like being a god.”
The rain stopped not long afterwards. The man gave her one last, long, serious look before lifting his case and striding off. She watched his back until he disappeared, and after that, she watched the place where he’d stood.
It wasn’t until Hiyori was halfway home that she realized that she’d never asked his name, and she’d never told him hers.
. . .
The notice was in the paper about half a year later. She recognized the picture next to the obituary, and rubbed her fingers across his name like that would make him real again.
The grave was marble and bare. Two lines of simple script curved their way across the stone.
The first line said, “Yato.”
The second said, “Dead but never gone.”