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vii.
His mother is wearing a green sundress and silver hoop earrings when he finally winds up on her doorstep after the live, eyes smudged with eyeshadow that sparkles like rhinestones. He hasn’t seen her in three years. Akihiko, she says in her bell-chime voice, where have you been, to which he responds that he has been steadily draining his bank account of the five million yen she left him with all those years ago. He isn’t here to ask for salvation. But he does want to keep living, and there’s a fine line between the two which he supposes he doesn’t really care if he crosses. She tilts her head to one side and asks how things worked out with his roommate, and his heart makes a bruised fist in his ribcage.
“What have you been up to these days, Akihiko?” The morning cascades down her left shoulder and stops in the dip of her clavicle. She does not look forty-nine, nor does she look like the woman who gave birth to him in a sterile hospital room while her husband was standing on a concert stage in Belgium, holding onto a violin for dear life. Not for the first time, he wonders why his parents married each other in the first place. He suspects they themselves have no real answer.
“Music,” he says absently, brushing his fingertips against the cigarette pack in his pocket.
“Still?”
He nods. “Still.”
vi.
The night of their live performance there is only a single, haunting voice in Akihiko’s head telling him not to let go of Ugetsu’s hand. How it will ruin him and leave him wanting, and he will never be able to breathe again without being assaulted with grief. The night is blue and gray above their heads, reaching down greedily to touch their teeth as if it hopes it will drown them. No matter how he calls out to him Ugetsu will not look at him, and for the first time in his life Akihiko feels like he is the one holding the broken glass. He thinks, distantly, that maybe the thing Ugetsu had wanted to hide all his life was not sadness, but fear. That would explain why they could never touch each other without setting something on fire. Not with one of them facing the wall and the other staring, dead-eyed, at his feet.
Somewhere inside of him, Akihiko recognizes that part of him will probably never want to let go of Ugetsu’s hand. History is not something one can shrug off like a bad cold, and they have slept for far too long in the birdcages of each other’s chests to simply climb out in the morning and walk away.
Still, someone has to take the first step forward. So he lets go.
v.
He knows he looks intimidating. He’s never had to be told, not since he was ten years old and he made a boy at the playground cry when Akihiko tried to throw him a basketball. Once it made him bitter, but as he got older he learned how to turn his bitterness into a weapon, and delighted, meanly, at how it heralded clenched fists and other forms of broken glass. Valuable life lessons were extrapolated. For example: the one who pulls the first punch will always be haunted by a slightly larger specter than the other party. The one who looks away first will lose.
For as long as Akihiko has known him, Ugetsu has always made it a point not to be scared of him, and for as long as they have been killing each other over and over and over again in the same stagnant ritual of give and take and burn, Akihiko has wondered: when will he give in? Ugetsu’s face is pale and godless, a heart surgeon’s idea of beauty. What scraps of truth he lets bleed from his thoughts into reality, Akihiko has to take to with a magnifying glass, trying desperately to unravel the fucked up story of the boy who lived in a violin. Akihiko is the one who bares all the teeth in this relationship. Ugetsu simply smiles at him with winter under his tongue, and holds out his hands.
iv.
You know, Ugetsu says, leaning into Akihiko’s shoulder, I liked you better when we were in high school. Akihiko does not move except to shift his weight minutely to accommodate him. The morning is bright and sterile like a hospital room, safely tucked away into the sky that sits outside their tiny, walled-in world. It keens quietly at their heels. Ugetsu’s bare torso is not generous enough to carry squares of light but it is cold where he has scratched his own signature into Akihiko’s skin and they have met, however briefly.
Good, Akihiko mumbles, bleak and blurry with sleep. I never liked you. Not even at the start. He reaches out with two fingers to turn Ugetsu’s face towards him and presses their mouths together. Later that day he leaves for the studio where Haruki and Uenoyama and Mafuyu are all waiting for him, unaware of the things he has stolen from kinder people, and in the evening he gets a text from Ugetsu telling him to spend the night elsewhere. This is not a surprise, either.
iii.
The mug breaks.
They can’t decide who to blame, between the jarring ceramic carcass on the ground and Ugetsu's tears and the strange, child-like sadness that settles over the room like air pollution in a cement city, but if you really wanted to point fingers then the fates would say it was Akihiko, who bought it in the first place, and Ugetsu, who could not see past the storm of sound in his head clearly enough to receive it with both hands.
ii.
When he was a child he was good at everything. At first it was badminton. Then jazz, Taekwondo, gymnastics. The piano succeeded in holding his attention for a while. He played it for eight months, long enough to claw his way up several grades and learn most of his favorite movie soundtracks by heart. His parents, who were still together at this time, were pleased by this development, and showered him with store-bought greeting cards and extravagant birthday gifts. Still, nothing inspired within him the wonderful unstoppable desire to set himself on fire that he had read about in books where beautiful people conquered things, and so his formative years went by without fanfare until the day came that he picked up a violin and felt something raw and new inside of him correspond to it. This something had three rows of sharp teeth and claws. He thought grandly of self-immolation.
In high school he meets someone who he feels has tried comparatively less than him and yet is infinitesimally better anyway. Watching the national title drift away from him on a stranger's coattails, he experiences a surge of detached pity for the guy who always looks away first in a fight. Akihiko pictures himself in his shoes, and concludes with defeat that sometimes one’s options are limited by the circumstances. Maybe the other person is a walking miracle, and the very act of looking at him makes the first guy want to rip his eyes out, or kiss him, or throw himself off a diving board into the deep end of a swimming pool. Ugetsu’s existence wounds him as much as it reminds him of the transient nature of all things precious in life. He builds Akihiko’s body from the ground up so that he can be torn down immediately afterwards, like an old apartment complex has to be demolished to make way for new developments. He makes a game out of it. Over, and over, and over again, Akihiko falls and drags himself to his feet.
i.
Murata Ugetsu from the year above him plays the violin. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Ugetsu is his violin. Standing by the drafty window of the third music room with his hair in his eyes and his soft sloping shoulders, he seems breakable. While Akihiko is looking elsewhere, he cracks his violin out of its case and picks up his bow, and when he first starts playing Akihiko mistakes his sound for a person’s voice, stunned by the bottomless keening hunger that bleeds out of him. He is sixteen and he doesn't know a thing about martyrdom. One day he will fall in love and it will devastate him, and he will feel closer to his parents in that moment than he has ever felt before. Today, the music just makes him sad.
“I remember thinking, you were a delicate looking person.”
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Ugetsu is the devil, speaking through the mouthpiece of a pair of expensive earphones with built in Bluetooth functionality. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Ugetsu is a suspension bridge. He makes it a point not to smile with his teeth unless he likes you, and if he likes you he makes it a point to make sure you never forget it, even when, years later, he breaks up with you on the way to heaven and keeps you beside him like a bad luck charm afterwards.
Either way, Akihiko knows this: they will never be able to leave this room without ruining something. If this means blood will be spilled, he hopes he doesn’t live long enough to see who it belongs to. Or at least, that he will not be the one to make the first incision that stills the hands of fate and sends them splintering away from each other, hurtling through the darkness to opposite ends of the universe. He isn’t here to ask for salvation, but he wants it.
0.
Give me your hand, Akihiko. Please.