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“Hey, Josh I—”
A semi-uncomfortable silence settled after that, and the sentence was never quite completed.
“How…?”
Another incomplete sentence withered away to its death.
“Why—?”
An airy giggle filtered through the room. “I’m a master of words, Neku, but even I cannot possibly decipher your fragmented blubbering like that.”
Neku closed his mouth and stopped pointing incredulously into the room. Instead, he began to glare at the other occupant inside. “Ha ha, real funny, Josh,” he sarcastically retorted, rolling his eyes. “You know what I’m talking about.” He entered his room and crossed his arms over his chest, silently strengthening his demand for an answer.
“Why, I couldn’t possibly guess!” the blond replied with a cheeky tone. His fingers ran down the smooth surface of his seat, his eyes still steadily fixed upon Neku’s. “There’s no possible way you could be referring to this, could you?” With a wide sweep of his arm, he gestured to the grand piano that was—somehow—sitting in the middle of Neku’s extremely tiny room.
It wasn’t even a baby grand. From the looks of it, Joshua had gotten rid of his bed, desk, and closet to fit the thing. Neku was pretty sure the dimensions of his room had been warped as well; there was no way it was big enough to house a grand piano without time-space manipulation involved.
This time, Neku didn’t even grace Joshua with an eye roll.
Again, the blond laughed. “I’ll give you an answer after you sit,” he said, somewhat dismissively. He beckoned for Neku to come forward with a jerk of his chin.
It was with great self-control that Neku managed not to heave an enormous sigh. He had dealt too much with Joshua’s whimsical fancies to really react much beyond a glare or an eye roll. Through the hard way did he learn that the quickest way to getting an answer out of Joshua was to just acquiesce with his demands.
Without flourish, he plopped himself next to Joshua. “Okay. Now what,” Neku said flatly, not bothering to raise the ends of his statements into questions.
“Shh,” Joshua hushed, now turning his attention solely to the piano before him. His amethyst eyes trained themselves on the black and white keys.
Neku, who never really learned whether or not Joshua needed to breathe, watched as the blond took in a deep breath and closed his eyes, as if steadying himself for a dive into a pool. Silently, the blond lifted his arms and placed his hands gently upon the waiting keys. To Neku, it was oddly mesmerizing, just watching the other boy prepare himself. Each one of those fingers only barely touched the surface of the keys, like a nervous water strider about to break the tension of the surface it was perched upon. A second later, Joshua placed his feet on the leftmost and rightmost pedals, respectively.
“Una corda and damper, in case you were wondering,” the boy said serenely, eyes still closed.
“Huh?”
Joshua’s lips quirked up in an amused smile. “The pedals I’m stepping on. Una corda and damper.”
The redhead frowned slightly. “Right,” he said.
For a few more seconds, Joshua remained like that, still and immovable, simply breathing over the keys with great poise and dignity. Then, his slender fingers pressed down and they flowed across the keyboard, controlled and unhesitating.
Notes spilled from the huge piano, sounding grandiose even in the acoustically-challenged space of the tiny apartment room. Neku wasn’t sure how to react. He hadn’t expected this from Joshua all of a sudden. He, who was so used to hard rock, pop, and rap, was not fully acclimated to the silky folds of true classical. There was something wild and untamed about the melody—something which was only held back by the expertise of Joshua’s playing.
As the blond went on, his eyes now mere slits as he peered at the keys beneath his moving fingers, the song became more convoluted, but in only the loveliest way. Chords bloomed and whispered away between presses of a pedal, only to be replaced by a budding note and harmonizing interval. Rising notes fell by sinking trills, a flurry of sounds which somehow worked together.
With the music, Joshua breathed, swayed, and flowed, each roll of the wrist the end of a measure, each forward lean a stronger note. He danced. With his body, his eyes, his hands—he danced.
There were no sour notes, no slip-ups, or unintentional pauses…
Just the song that was somehow everything.
Neku wasn’t sure how long it lasted, but he hung on to every last tremor that came from the grand piano, his breath slightly suspended the entire time. He had seen Joshua like this before a few times, but only a few—when he was nothing short of “beautiful” and the full embodiment of grace. It never failed to capture his attention, but Neku supposed that was what came with being the Composer.
No matter how human Joshua seemed sometimes (when he gets upset at something petty; when he acts like a spoiled kid; when he is laying on Neku’s bed, looking up at him with half-lidded eyes, which were always teasing and laughing at him…), Neku would always be reminded that he was literally on another level altogether.
The spell wound down slowly, a music box which could finally cease spinning. Each sweet note was dripping away, and the real world came through in spotty blotches in the form of faraway car horns and pedestrian din. Bit by bit, the song gave way to reality again, but not without the sweetest ending that a piano and a Composer could produce.
A lingering shiver ran up and down Neku’s spine as Joshua depressed the final notes, held them there, and let them quaver into the arriving dusk. The world was in suspension.
When Joshua lifted his fingers from the keys and his feet from the pedals, Neku started to fully breathe again.
“That was for you,” Joshua said simply.
In return, Neku said nothing. His pulse was going at a crazy pace, and he felt as if he were drugged with the most pleasant of poisons. He felt hyperaware of everything around him all at once.
The blond said it again. “That was for you, Neku….” Slowly, he ran his fingers over the shiny surface of the keys, petting it with keen familiarity. It was a lost love, somehow. He turned to look at the redhead with a silent, appraising look. Joshua was testing the waters, gauging Neku’s reaction. His face broke out into a softly vivid smile. “You don’t know how many weeks I spent composing and practicing it.”
In any other situation, Neku would have scoffed at the badly-timed pun (but Neku was under the strict belief that there was never a “good” time for a pun). This time, however, he merely looked away from Joshua’s searching eyes and to the black and white piano keys.
“That was…” he started quietly, to match the melancholic end of the piece, “wonderful. Thanks…. I really enjoyed it.” To anyone else, it would have seemed like a lukewarm reaction, but Joshua understood. Underneath the staccato words was a swelling gratitude and appreciation that Neku could barely contain. The redhead placed his left hand on the keyboard gingerly as well, merely feeling how cool they were beneath his fingertips.
Within seconds, Joshua had skimmed his hands over the keys and laced his fingers with Neku’s, prompting the redhead to look at him. He was still smiling when he leaned in slowly and kissed Neku, their eyes closing on instinct. It was chaste and simple. Just a mere brushing of lips with a bit of pressure behind it.
They pulled away slightly after several seconds, and Joshua touched their foreheads together, looking at Neku closely. The corners of his mouth were still pulled up in a state of amused pleasure.
“I’m glad you liked it.”
For a while, they stayed like that, simply breathing and enjoying each other’s presence.
Then, Neku’s eyebrows furrowed, and he finally broke the silence. “So how in the hell did you manage to fit an entire grand piano into my room?”
The blond giggled slightly, tightening his hold on Neku’s hand. “Oh, Neku, I thought you’d never ask….”