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Movement I: Allegro Moderato
Dante woke up to the sounds of Vergil tuning his violin. The vibrations of an open A string bled through the paper-thin walls of the flat, soon joined by the baritone of D, then the cutting shrill of E. Laying there with his face half-smothered by a blanket and his brain still hazy before full wakefulness, his sluggish mind struggled to realize if he is entangled in another nightmare. But no screams nor heat nor pleading sobs came to his imaginary senses—and he opened his eyes with a dreadful feeling of wonder.
He noticed that there was a stain on the ceiling. A sliver of sunlight crept in between his curtains and illuminated the swirls and meandering paths traced by years of unattended water damage, and Dante’s gaze lazily followed its directions without any particular purpose. He kept getting lost in the knotted patterns. A sigh dissolved beneath the harmony between G and D.
He willed himself to get up after five minutes. Vergil has moved on to scales and arpeggios; the smooth glide of notes filled the second floor of the shop, and even Dante, ever the one to delay his rising as long as possible, felt the implied sense of urgency from the stream of flurried tones.
Nero was already in the kitchen when Dante came down the creaking stairs—not bothering to skip the second step that always gives the most grating sound—shrugging on his shirt in a failed effort to be semi-presentable for the day. Seeing him waltz in, Nero wordlessly pushed a plate of sandwiches in his direction. Dante grinned at him with no inkling of shame. Nero rolled his eyes.
He was in the middle of boiling water on the stove when Nero spoke.
“Dante?”
“Yes?”
“Is Mr. Vergil going to stay here for a long time?”
Dante’s hand stilled in its way to grab the cup from the top shelf. Nero was looking at him with those eyes again—with too much enigma and poorly hidden rawness that’s possibly fitting for the innocence of a child. His legs were unnaturally swaying back and forth from the stool that’s still a little bit too tall, and after he blurted out his question, it seems like his half-finished glass of milk became the most interesting object in the world. Dante steeled himself, careful to not show his lapse, before pouring a cup of tea and slumping into the seat next to Nero.
“Do you want Mr. Vergil to be here?” He returned the question with a poor imitation of frivolity.
Dante counted the bars of silence with a growing heaviness in his stomach, but Nero bit his milk-stained lips and glanced up—and suddenly he was just the kid he was supposed to be again, all youthful bashfulness and curious excitement and blush spreading on his cheeks. He fiddled with his silver necklace and whispered while avoiding Dante’s stare.
“……He knows how to make pretty sounds.”
“I guess that’s a yes then.” Dante grinned against the rim of the teacup and ruffled Nero’s hair. Nero swatted his hand away with an annoyed huff, unable to hide his smile.
***
Dante was trying to do his work. He was trying his goddamn best to read over police reports and contact notes, but the sounds bleeding from the second floor—Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto—kept snatching his thoughts. The notes weaved air into a thickened web, encasing his senses until all he could perceive was the melody carrying his mind away.
After a few minutes of futile attempts at interpreting the scribbles laid in front of him, he just gave up and reclined in his chair, allowing the music to take over him.
He could hear how Vergil’s sound had changed since the last time he saw him, performing for a tyrant against his own will, the piece then cloaked in grief and barely hidden vengeance. A broken instrument offering a bloody encore to the ones that crushed its sound. He remembered that night through sound more than he did through sight, the wail of his twin’s playing cutting through the overindulging extravagance of champagne and gold, not enough to veil the rancid smell of corruption.
The beginning of the first movement retained some of that anguish, and Dante had to fight to not be taken back to that winter in 1944. No, no, he’s not that place anymore, Vergil’s not there anymore— he pushed Berlin away, pushed Mundus away, banishing the still-simmering madness of pain and loss and rage threatening to boil over.
Vergil struggled with every note. Dante could feel that frustration in every out-of-tune position and unstable vibrato, in the way Vergil’s bow slid in sections a soloist of his skill and experience should never have. It’s somehow more painful to listen to him fight with his Tchaikovsky now than his grief-stricken Tchaik back in Germany, like the mania that pushed him to keep tearing sound out of his instrument was cut, and he lost his voice like a violin with its strings snapped.
The playing broke down into panic. The semiquaver notes rushed into a mush of unintelligible scales and Vergil seemed to be hashing at the strings more than he was bowing them, desperation masking interpretation and any semblance of musicality. Dante could taste the fear clogging up the back of his throat; they were so far away from Berlin yet never so close to that wretched city.
Anger engulfed him out of nowhere. Dante wanted to scream, to break, to injure, to wreck Vergil’s violin, to maim the person who stole their youth, to fall at his twin’s feet and cry, to beg to any deity until time rewinds itself to 1932 when the world holds nothing other than their father’s Bach and their mother’s Chopin and music never stopped flowing from their parent’s study, the door always ajar—
The aggressive shredding upstairs vanished into a thundering silence, yet the tinnitus in his ears persisted, and Dante collapsed in his chair, not moving, not thinking, letting this anger lick over every part of his being until his soul could no longer bear its scathing heat.
He stayed there until it was time to bring Nero back from school, escaping the haunting remnants of the notes behind.
Movement II: Andante
Vergil had been struggling with Tchaikovsky for some time. He was hidden in his room for more hours than he was not, secluded from the London noise outside that tiny space, and Dante’s sure he only crosses the barrier of his door when he’s starving or in desperate need of some necessity. When he ventures outside, Vergil is like a ghost—skin with a pale, hollow parlor from not stepping into the sun in weeks, carrying with him an air of unsettled brittleness that made Dante half sure that his twin would shatter in front of his eyes.
Nero, ever the perceptible one who was always way too mature for his age, seemed to pick up on the uneasy atmosphere and doubled his effort to cheer his father up with his admiration for his playing. His innocent sincerity was able to warm Vergil’s expression imperceptibly at times, and Dante was infinitely grateful for the kid whom he didn’t know what he did to deserve.
He also couldn’t count the times he had listened to Vergil’s practicing (it’s now more accurate to describe them as violin hacking) and stood just outside his brother’s closed door. God, the things he did to the door. He has silently prayed to it in the middle of the night, has sat in front of it while Vergil stormed through unfinished etudes, has put his hand against it—a piece of worn-down wood board that transmitted the sound vibrations in the air to his palms—and fantasized breaking it with nothing but his bare strength. Sometimes he laughs internally at his obsession with that arbitrary boundary separating them, partially aware of the hysterical irony of it all: after he finally found his other half through such suffering, it’s a worthless piece of wood that stood between them, insurmountable as the wall transecting Berlin.
Initially, he simply wished for Vergil’s music to return to him, but he was slightly less sure what miracle he was waiting for once the visits at his twin’s doorstep became a regular ritual. Dante has never been a religious man; his younger self would laugh at the thought of relaying his fate to some higher power that may or may not bestow its benevolence. He didn’t pray when he stumbled out of that burning cottage half-alive, he didn’t pray when he learned that the other half of his soul might still be out there in this cruel world, he didn’t pray when he was in Germany, loneliness eating him from within with only one obsession to keep him moving forward. He could fuel his conviction with vengefulness, but no one taught him how to march on when there is no one to direct your wrath.
So for the first time in his life, he prayed. He prayed for things he could name and things he couldn’t, things that were within reach and faraway miracles, and he raged. Against himself, against the ones buried six feet under by himself, and against the music that’s holding his brother together and splintering him at the seams all at the same time.
***
Music is holy, their mother once told them. Dante could picture her saying those very words with photographic accuracy: mother sitting on the piano bench. His child self lying on the carpet and Vergil holding his violin behind them. Honey-tinted afternoon sunlight filtering through lace curtains. Their father laughing at those words by the doorway with golden dust fluttering on his cheeks. Eva threw him one of those gazes that somehow conveyed affection and exacerbation at the same time.
Music is holy.
It’s something Dante was too scared to touch, and oh did he know why he kept it stowed away so deep down. Those hazy snippets of memories were locked in Pandora's box, and he didn’t know if he’d survive revealing what had grown and festered inside. He would rather never find out.
***
Dante closed the front door with a heavy thud, shutting the city outside and shaking his head in an attempt to let the thawing bits of snowflakes flutter out of his damp hair. Then he raised his eyes, and the first thing he noticed was Vergil sitting at the kitchen bar, violin balancing on the juncture of his jaw and shoulder blades and one hand flipping through the sheet music laid in front of him.
In that one-tenth of a second, Dante briefly wondered if what he saw was a hallucination. He’s seen this scene way too many times, on his bed in this very building, in a ratty hotel in a foreign country, passed out at some no-name bar, and each time Vergil seemed so unreachable, the seven steps from the front door to the counter expanding into an endless abyss in front of him. He attempts to outrun the darkness in every single one of those dreams, and he always trips or stumbles. Vergil’s silhouette, haloed by the tableside lamp, was inevitably engulfed by that suffocating black.
When he was half-expecting the same darkness to claim them, Vergil looked back. He showed no outward surprise and merely tilted his head minutely before resuming his previous fixation on the score, but Dante knew that this was an invitation.
“Has Nero gone to his room?” He shrugged off his coat and gloves, hanging them before stepping into the kitchen.
“Yes, he seemed quite worried about you being out this late, but I assume that this has been a regular occurrence.” Vergil picked up a pencil and traced around a phrase on the paper.
“That kid has always been a worrier.” Dante reached for the cup set on the counter and poured himself some tea to set the chill out of his body. After a pause, he added almost as an afterthought, “He knows that I will always come back.”
“Is that it?” Vergil’s response drifted up with the rising steam from Dante’s mug.
Dante slipped into one of the stools across the counter and they settled into a comfortable silence. He studied his brother while he made notes, the war waging within him for the past few weeks seemingly put on temporary pause. Several bars of tacet granted in compassion after an assault of hectic rhythm and chords.
The lamp cast shadows on the sheet music from the touch of Vergil’s fingers—slender and unmarred as a musician’s hands should be—as they drift across sections with marks reminding the performer of accents or changes in dynamics. His bow his nowhere to be found and Dante breathed in relief; he prayed for this small miracle to last a little bit longer.
Every time Vergil finished marking a section he would repeat the fingering with his left hand. Dante could see how the second movement of the concerto is sculpted into its color and texture through those dances of dexterous movements; he could hear the musical phrases coming into shape and the resonance filling the room until there was no space for anything other than devotion and heartache and overpowering grace.
It scares him a little with how easily they all came back, as if not a day has passed since 1932.
He wonders at the back of his mind if this is how Tchaikovsky fell in love, with the person who makes him whole playing the first three notes of the Andante and he was struck, enchanted, fallen uncontrollably in that spring in Clarens.
Vergil was a rest note amidst the vortex of their past and future, and Dante realized that everything comes back to this—not as a moment in time but a total escape from it, starting with and always ending with this—Dante and Vergil, nothing but each other and the music scores laid out in between them. A precarious and fragile existence unmistakably imbued with untainted hope.
The snowstorm raged outside. If he closes his eyes, he can almost believe that the sound of snowflakes hitting the window frame is willow flower clusters falling by Switzerland lakeshore.
Vergil’s fingers kept drawing feathered patterns on the fingerboard, and Dante just stayed there, entranced, letting the silent notes weave the time between them whole.
***
Dante woke up with his face against hard marble and a blanket atop his back that he didn’t remember throwing on, his cup of tea long gone cold, and half a stack of music sheets with Vergil’s looping handwriting in front of him. Vergil himself is nowhere to be found.
He flipped the score to the last page where the tremolo dissolves into a single note on open D, and smiled at the line scribbled a the end.
Movement III: Allegro Vivacissimo
The only thing their father left them was their violins. Dante and Vergil may never know how Sparda procured two golden-age Strads when he was only a musician living humbly in the English countryside, but there were a lot of things they would never know of their father. He has always been sort of a mythical figure that commands respect, even when childhood hero worship faded away to bitterness and unspoken resentment.
The violins have always been there, in their cases with velvet linings stowed on the second shelf in their father’s study. Dante remembers a time when Sparda would take them out and play a few simple phrases when he thought no one was eavesdropping, or he knew the twins were peeking from the corridor, judging from the chuckles he occasionally let out in the direction of curious stares. But none of that holds importance anymore.
Their hands were barely big enough to switch from four-thirds to full size when their father disappeared. He entrusted those priceless instruments to his hardly adolescent sons and vanished, leaving behind a deathly silence that overtook the cottage and eventually his wife. Their mother has always been a romantic—after their father left, she avoided Schubert and Chopin as if those pieces would physically tear her apart. Eva’s piano collected dust in the study, its keys neglected and yellowed until the day she burned with the music she dedicated her whole life to creating.
The only thing Dante remembered after the fire was walking in a wasteland of explosion craters, rain pouring from above, the violin case clutched closely to his chest.
He never touched his violin again.
***
The feeling of raindrops sticking to his eyelashes was still there when he stood at the bottom of his basement stairs. It’s there at the same spot—Dante’s subconscious hoped in absurdity that someone stole it—but the maroon leather case stubbornly remained there, partially illuminated by the half-open door. He walked over to it with apprehension and long-forgotten emotions eager to burst from his chest. The metal clips slipped open easily as the well-made buckles always did. Dante stared at the E string, still shiny with a crisp brilliance after all these years, and hesitated. The thick silence in the basement expanded, stretching time and agonizingly drawing out the interval between every second.
He could hear the resonance of the instrument. It was furious and pleading, luring him to touch, to caress, to pluck, to press, and his hands itched to make the invisible vibration of sounds into reality. He looked at it—the violin, his father’s inheritance, the physical conduit of a musician’s voice, and remembered Vergil’s question written between the last lines of the Andante. Dante made his decision.
***
He knocked on Vergil’s door when he went upstairs. Two slow, three quick. His brother opened the door with an air of anticipation as if he had always been expecting Dante to show up with violin in hand and their childhood secret code ringing in their ears. He was holding his violin as well, Dante noticed, though no sound came from his room when he climbed up the stairs.
Vergil held an almost imperceptible smile when he twisted his body aside to invite Dante in. The curtains were drawn open to let the brisk afternoon sun in, tracing everything in the room with a warm hue.
Dots of red were half-visible between the heavy linen against a world painted in white—two cardinals puffed their feathers against each other atop the windowsill.
Vergil pushed the sole music stand between them with the score opened to the beginning of the third movement—a full note waiting to be played—and looked at Dante.
Dante raised his bow.
It would be generous to describe the first notes as grating. His bow hair was falling apart, none of the strings were in tune, and his wrists were rigid from not touching the fingerboard for the better part of the decade. His violin let out something akin to the shrieks of a dying cat, and Dante couldn’t hold in the laugh bubbling at his throat. It quickly escalated to a full-body thing, his hands shaking and stomach cramping that he had to double over to not swing his bow into his brother’s face. In all honesty, he couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed hard enough to lift away the sadness that had choked itself around his heart. And when he finally got a hold of himself enough to resume his posture, the lightness remained. Something tentatively bloomed in the air, something too precious to be named.
Vergil huffed and shook his head with the first genuine smile Dante has seen since he came to live with him, and handed his little brother a block of rosin.
He tuned his violin first this time, the gestures foreign yet couldn’t be more familiar. Vergil did the same thing beside him, head tilted towards the wooden body when adjusting the fine tuner on his E string. Dante stared at his fluttering eyelashes, and he was suddenly reminded of willow trees, how the catkins would be carried away by the wind before falling into the embrace of surfaces of teal and turquoise.
The cardinals outside hopped closer to each other for warmth like two balls of fire in a tundra.
Vergil raised his eyes in an unspoken question, and Dante refocused his attention on the score.
“Let’s try it again.”
***
This winter’s first storm had somehow refused to let its mark disappear. The snow persistently stayed on the curbs and rooftops where no automobiles or footprints could ruin its pristine color, occasionally splattering from tree branches that couldn’t bear their weight.
Vergil and Dante continued to play together. Those afternoons slowly morphed into some sort of bizarre practice session, where Dante tried to catch up with 15 years of lack of violin practice and Vergil taught his brother while refamiliarizing with Tchaikovsky at the same time. They stumbled around in the racing melodic lines and repeated difficult eights and thirds until their fingertips had gone numb, progressing through the Allegro accompanied by each other’s notes.
Dante realized that Vergil has this particular way of phrasing, where he would bring his bow down with such vigor yet prolong the split second before contact, and when the hair meets the string, the sound is not merely produced but coaxed out of the instrument, the tentative tones blossoming into a fullness that fills the entire line with brilliant color. Dante could hear the sorrow in those vivid colors: there was too much pain and euphoria associated with performing, with their violins, with them, and Vergil was speaking to them all through his music.
Dante heard his condemnation, his doubt, his apology, his regret, all of the questions with answers too raw to be said, all of the questions that will be never answered, and accepted them with the sound of his playing. It’s tinged with an unpolished inexperience-ness, yes, but the lack of skills couldn’t mask the tenderness in the notes he painstakingly drew out. He knew that Vergil understands.
Dante also realized that Vergil’s body swayed gently along with the wind outside when he played, a waltz with the few rustling leaves at the tip of branches and shrubs. He had the sudden urge to take his brother into his arms and dance in circles around the room until both of them collapse in exhaustion.
He has been waiting for this since the beginning of time—an existence with nothing but each other and the music, and he couldn’t pray for anything more transcendent. In this tiny room, they were wanderers who finally found their sanctuary, two halves of a whole who found their way back to each other through the paths drawn in rhythm and melody.
He wished those moments to last a little bit longer.
***
Dante received the news on the day they finished the third movement. There were still several bars that they needed to practice some more, but finishing the piece with a flourish was undoubtedly one of the most satisfying moments he had experienced. He was applying rosin to his bow when Vergil spoke.
“I entered a contract with London Symphony. Rehearsal starts tomorrow, so you may see me less in the future.”
Dante was glad he wasn’t facing Vergil, or there would be no method quick enough to hide his shocked expression. The first emotion that ruptured was not joy but an undiluted fear that left his limbs icy and brittle. Oh god, he realized with horror that he was selfish till the very end, the want to keep Vergil by his side and a simmering heartbreak clogging up his airway. He felt the words ready to tumble out of his throat—when did it happen—are you leaving me—why are you leaving me—and he had to fight himself to swallow them down.
“That’s fantastic; when will be your first concert?” He forced a grimace that hopefully resembled a smile.
Vergil’s left hand settled on the fingerboard, his fingers not yet pressing down. Dante felt like that E string, pulled so taunt that he would snap from the tiniest pressure.
“Next week. I’m the soloist for Tchaikovsky.” Vergil looked away from him to focus on the third movement opened on the stand.
Dante’s laugh is more incredulous than congratulatory. So this is how it is the entire time. He was always the one to wait, to beg the return of the past that will never come back to him, to stay, while Vergil was the free one—untethered in spirit and music. He was free when he escaped and left Dante behind, when he accepted that invitation from Berlin of his own volition, when he came back to London to the detective office, and now, when he decides that the past three months are just another page that can be flipped over. Dante was the fool always chasing after the shadows of someone who couldn’t settle; holding onto a fleeting dream with the person who will never go into slumber.
He lost control for a split second.
“Why are you leaving?”
He immediately regretted it as soon as the words left his mouth. There is no going back now—the question has splattered to the ground between them, and the implied why are you leaving me screams in the air.
Vergil’s head snapped up so quickly that Dante flinched from the sudden action.
This is it, he has opened the box. What he found inside was his own heart, bare and bloody, beating weakly yet defiantly, and he offered it to the one person who could put it forever to rest.
One, two.
One, two.
One, two.
One, two.
One, two.
“Did you know what’s the thing that kept me going in Berlin?”
“…What is it?”
“…Tchaikovsky. When mother and father were still with us, she was playing that piano arrangement, I was on first violin, and I remember you butchering the first movement so badly that father had to put you on the part for second.” Vergil’s eyes closed and he seemed to smile a little to himself, “I have been chasing those horribly executed doubles my entire life, yet in the end, it was you who came to me.”
Dante couldn’t breathe. “What are you trying to say?”
“You are what I’ve been trying to find, Dante. The music always leads back to you; the thought of you was what kept me sane. You are my heart—I would rather not lose it.”
He would never know if Vergil decided to speak some more, because the rest of it was crushed between a kiss.
Encore
Dante was tying his bowtie when a ball of white came crashing through the door.
“How do I look, Dante?”
He spared a glance at the uneven cuffs and the tie that could do with some improvements and laughed.
“Here, come over, I’ll help you fix it.”
Nero was buzzing with so much excitement he was practically vibrating with the force of it.
“Will we be able to see Mr. Vergil?”
“Yes, he’ll be right next to the conductor so everyone can see him.”
“Can he hear our clapping when everyone else is doing it?”
“Of course—but remember what I told you, don’t clap between movements.”
“Does he know that we’re coming?”
“He would never think that we’d miss it.” Dante smiled, “There you go—don’t run around too much and mess it up again!”
Nero’s cuffs stayed neat and proper until they found their seat at the Royal Albert.
***
It’s almost a miracle that Vergil could return to the stage, he thought with a surreal sensation, with how scathing public opinion was after the war. Maybe he was pushed forward as a martyr, a symbol of artistic purity despite the times, and to be honest, Dante didn’t bloody care about what the papers call his brother. All he cared about right now was the person walking out with the conductor, violin in hand and hair a shocking stroke of white amidst a sea of black.
The applause died down. The conductor raised her baton. The first note filled the air, and Dante’s world held no one and nothing other than Vergil and the music between them.
***
They found Vergil at the back entrance of the concert hall after the performance. Nero immediately barrelled towards him.
“Mr. Vergil—That was brilliant!”
Dante has never seen such a soft expression on his brother’s face.
“I’m glad you liked it.” He hugged the fluffy head to his chest, and Dante wanted to preserve the sight in memory forever.
But then Vergil looked up, and Dante couldn’t think of much else other than the amount of love filling him and oozing out of every crevice of his body.
“Let’s go home.”
“Yes, let’s go home.”
Robins sang the first note of spring.