Chapter Text
The dying light of the late autumn evening seeped through the grand windows of the piano room, and with bow in hand and chin at rest on the wooden body of the instrument he was playing, Sunny finally came to the conclusion that he really did hate the violin.
It was something that he had considered for some time, prone to deep contemplation as he was. Sunny had told himself that, really, the violin wasn’t so bad. It was the hours-upon-hours of practice that was. Time spent sequestered away in this room, with a sister playing the part of a journeyman-seeking-mastery in lieu of her typical, oh-so-nurturing demeanor. It was time away from his friends that he hated. Time spent in toil instead of leisure. Time spent away from the sister he really wanted to spend time with - not this one.
And that was the bitter irony of it all. He had taken up the violin in his hands to spend time with Mari, and he had gotten what he wanted - just not with the Mari he wanted.
Throughout his whole life, he had always wondered why his big sister was perfect as she was - as the nursery school platitude goes, nobody is perfect; but he had demonstrable proof to the contrary, in the constant presence of Mari. He spent so much of his life in the company of a person who was perfect, in his eyes. She was loving, she was kind, she was smart, she was funny, she was hard-working, she was responsible, she was his sister and the most important person in the world to him. The question of how she ended up that way, however, went unanswered.
It eluded him no longer. Mari must be perfect as a result of practice. Constant, ruthless, intensive practice. All it took for him to find out was just one session of playing alongside her in preparation for him to figure out that her perfection had to have been achieved through the diligent honing of her every trait and feature.
Mari was exacting, and precise. She tolerated no mistake, and everything was played from the top after even the slightest off-tempo note. A mistake in key - a mistake in toto. It could not be tolerated, and it had to be corrected.
Maybe it was wrong to suggest she was a different person when she was at the piano. It was more like traits he didn’t know she possessed bubbled to the surface - the disciplinarian, the perfectionist, and the ruthless achiever in her, not always in view, had center-stage.
And maybe that was why he hated the violin. It forced him to spend time with his sister at her very coldest, and it forced him to disappoint her.
And that was what he loathed most of all. To disappoint her. He disappointed her every night they practiced, and more than once a session. She never berated him, or insulted him, or made demands of him, but he knew she was disappointed with every misstep he made - even if it went unsaid.
Mari would purse her lips, sigh under her breath, inhale sharply, run her hands through her hair, grit her teeth - she showed her disappointment in so many little ways, and he had come to recognize all of them, and each time he disappointed her they filled his stomach with an icy weight of pure shame. Sunny walked away from the piano room every night sick with it - sick with shame, and guilt, and worthlessness.
His bow rubbed the wrong noise from the string of his violin.
The music from Mari’s piano stopped a hair of a second later.
Mari inhaled sharply through her nose, and Sunny knew he disappointed her again. Like so many times before.
Her voice issued forth, clear and cool and humiliating.
“Sunny…”
He felt another lecture coming on, but she paused, humming briefly.
“It’s… Getting late. We should stop here. We can… Work on that part tomorrow. That’s enough for tonight.”
She turned around to face him, pursing her lips.
“We’re so close. You know we’re so close. But - you can’t keep letting yourself get distracted. It - It…”
Mari sighed, shaking her head.
“You just need to focus. That’s all. We both know this piece inside and out. All you need to do is to focus.”
Sunny gave Mari the tiniest nod, and bowed his head, staring at his feet as his arms came to rest at his sides.
“I’m just going to finish up on my own. You can go to bed, I’ll - I won’t be too much longer.”
An excuse for him to go. An excuse for him to stop embarrassing her.
He wasn’t going to refuse it.
His own voice broke the new silence, quavering and a pin’s drop from being a whisper.
“Okay.” he said. It was all he could muster. Sunny had never been a talker - not even in the best of moods or circumstances. Verbal communication wasn’t how he got his point across.
He turned to leave, finally free from the chore of disappointing his big sister.
“Goodnight.”, Mari said simply, as the door shut behind him.
Sunny loathed the violin.