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He didn’t like this.
The clothes, the surgeries, the music. If there was a song in his heart, it had long been sung.
Luka’s violin sits in its case, leaning against the sterile white wall of his room. His fingers hurt just looking at it. There was a time he would have played it for comfort. He would have picked up the instrument and run the bow over the strings, he would have coaxed out something sweet from its hollow body.
Luka collapses backwards onto the bed. His ceiling would be empty if it weren’t for clear blinding light shining through his mind’s eye. Light, hands, metal. The memory itself is hazy–he must have slipped in and out of consciousness multiple times over the course of hours–but still it’s there.
Luka reaches up to his face and runs a finger over his cheek, down his jaw, across his bottom lip. He catches on the stitches there and winces. He presses into the stitches beneath his lip with his thumb and the sting of it is sweet. He picks lightly at one of the stitches, not so much to undo it. Though, it wouldn't be the first time he had picked the stitching too much.
He remembers being a child. He was such a clumsy thing, they would say, always falling and getting scraped up. He had been patched up then too, pieces of himself sewn back into place. They would do anything to erase the mistakes, his flaws, his shortcomings. He didn’t know what it meant, at the time. He didn’t know what he was losing.
Luka turns his head to his right to look at the poster of Hyuna hung over his bed, old and torn and faded now. Even in this shot of her, grim and unsmiling, she is beautiful. Before she had vanished, Luka had run his hands through her long hair. He had touched the curve of her jaw. She had let him.
Instinctively, he smiles and it pulls at his stitching, a warm bead of blood forming beneath his mouth. Luka licks along his bottom lip and the taste of iron on his tongue is sharp and welcome. Blood was the closest he would come to seeing her again, it was the final bridge between them.
Luka curls onto his side, knees tucked into his chest. He can feel the absence of his tears, the burn in his eyes, the wobble of his lower lip. He couldn’t remember anymore how it felt to cry. He thinks it must feel nice–to empty himself, to give all of those uncomfortable emotions up. Instead, he was stuck with them–swirling, churning, disrupting.
Dying feels similar to crying. It’s just out of reach. No matter how much he craves the release of it, no matter how close he gets, he won’t get there. They’ll keep bringing him back. They’ll keep patching him up until he’s just pieces of himself.
Luka runs his hands featherlight down his arms, across perfect unmarred skin. He touches the inside of his wrist, down his forearm and up along his collarbone. He shivers and turns onto his back again.
He imagines Hyuna over him, hands around his throat. He imagines his lungs spasming as his airway seizes up. He imagines the bright light finally fading.
Live with love, she had said and it was worse, somehow. Worse than being strangled, worse than being picked apart, worse than being left alone.
Luka tastes sour bile in the back of his throat. He knew nothing about living and even less about love. If Hyuna loved him and she was gone, where did that leave him?
She had been the only person to ever coax anything out his hollow body. Her touch, her voice, her presence. It had been a song in Luka’s discordant world. And here he was, a smashed violin, fractured and splintered and entirely unplayable.
Luka holds out his hand and counts down on his fingers, folding each one down against his palm. Five, his bed is beneath him. Four, Hyuana’s poster is on the wall. Three, his violin is sitting on the floor. Three, the ceiling is white. Two, he is breathing. One, Hyuna is gone.
Five truths, counted out on cold hands. He digs his fingers into his palms until his nails have left little bloody crescents in his skin.
He squeezes his eyes closed and he’s five again and Hyuna is there. She is a different kind of bright light. He doesn’t have to squint to see her, he doesn't want to look away. It is like seeing stars for the first time–he doesn’t quite understand the vastness, the depth of them, but he knows that something great is occurring.
Only now does he understand, she was something truly wondrous.
Luka sits up at the edge of his bed and stares at his violin case. He knows when he rests his jaw on his chinrest it will pull painfully at his stitches and that thought entices him. He clicks open the case and stares at the instrument. It’s the same violin he’s had for decades. It’s the only thing left, proof that he was a child once.
He was a child with hands too small to wrap around the neck of his violin, but not too small to spill blood. Some things just don’t change. He was still blood stained, but now he was filled with music.
Luka sets his violin on his shoulder and pulls the bow across it. It sounds wrong, empty. It’s a selfish thing to want to play still. Even though there is no audience, even though everyone is gone, even though he doesn’t deserve it.
He closes his eyes and he’s ten again and music is all he knows. It flows through him, easily, purely. He can almost forget the blood that it took to get here. His blood, other’s blood.
Luka moves the bow over the violin and it sounds okay again, it sounds like proper music. He hums the sounds he wants to hear and the violin echoes it back to him. It’s beautiful, the only beautiful thing that is left.
When Luka opens his eyes again, the bow jerks awkwardly over the strings. He’s thirty-seven again. He’s thirty-seven and in pain. His chinrest pulls uncomfortably at his stitching. He tastes blood on the corner of his mouth where the stitches are starting to come undone.
He continues to play his violin, he begs it to play music like it used to.
Don’t you remember? He thinks. Don’t you remember who we were?
He wants to smash it to bits, but it’s the final piece of him and he thinks if it’s gone he might forget entirely that he is Luka.
Luka runs his hand along the familiar curve of the violin, the soft wood that has always made such beautiful music. He was eighteen once, holding the same instrument. It was more cooperative then.
His bow scratches the strings and Luka winces. He thinks maybe he and the violin are the same. The only tune he is capable of carrying now is one that is ugly and broken. His strings are too taut and his bow is frayed at its edges. They can try to piece him back together but he will never play the same way again.
Luka’s song had been sung.