Anacrusis

“Do you ever think there’s more to life than this?”

A pause. “I think there’s no point in wanting what we can never have.”

 

Prelude

Chopin’s Nocturne, Op. 9, No. 1. Fingers caressing the arch of painted keys. Rising and ebbing over blacks and whites to the pulse of a tide.

This is how it began: Sora hunched over the chipping frame of the piano, and a beginning ache in her stumbling fingers. With these many mistakes, she might as well have ventured into a whole different song altogether.

Knock.

Fingers, hiccupping over the keys. Halt.

“Erm, hi,” the wariness of first encounters. Sora slipped around the piano bench to appraise whoever had dared interrupt her butchering of Chopin’s masterpiece. “I’m looking for Sora?”

It was a boy, perhaps her age, with furrowed brows and chapped lips. Broad shoulders that fanned out to a body swallowed whole by an oversized shirt, scrunched up around the strain of biceps. Then buried in a swathe of deliberately ripped jeans, pooling around his ankles and scuffed Timberlands.

“That’s me,” she affirmed. “You are…?

“Jungkook. I, uh, I’m here to learn?”

“You don’t seem sure,” Sora stood, crossed over to the other side where a chair was pulled up by the piano. She gestured to the vacated bench. “Well, make yourself comfortable.”

The boy — Jungkook fidgeted on unsure feet, thrumming with the anxiety of unfamiliarity. Sora understood. It hadn’t been long since she stepped in through the door, feeling like an imposter of a teacher who couldn’t possibly explain what it meant to feel the winding heartbeat of music at her fingertips.

Displaced, scrambling for control.

He sank into the seat, the dip between his eyebrows broadening like a chasm.

“Relax, the piano won’t bite, I made sure.”

There was a grin now, curling into the corner of his lips, tugging up over the slight protrude of front teeth. Like a bunny, feather-light innocence that untangled the knot in his brows. He looked younger this way, less worried about falling into the gap between colliding expectations. It was nice, and she wondered almost idly, if he’d smile more.

But perhaps she was a hypocrite, hoping for smiles when her chest gasped and convulsed at the slightest hint of her own. Life wouldn’t be life if it played fair.

Jungkook pulled his hands over the keyboard, over the worn keys that squeaked and the ones that got stuck sometimes when Sora pressed a little too hard. Held them there, for a contemplative second. Then ventured down with the caution one would use with a sleeping snake, to poke at a single black key.

The fizzle of a note sliced through her thoughts. “Nuh-uh, no touching the keys yet.”

But there was something else that had caught her attention. Creeping out from under his sleeves, peeking out from the underside of his arm.

Blooming purple, inscribed like a raging warning, bleeding into skin.

Ruthless forcefulness.

A million questions, a million answers. A story buried in the crevices of a heart falling apart.

But she folded her own hand over her heart, watched as he did the same, watched as the purple slipped out of view. (Out of sight, out of mind.)

Watched, as their chests heaved in tandem with the shared beat of a music they couldn’t hear but cherished.

“You feel that?” She said, as her heart ricocheted back into her palm. Almost like a flare of I’m alive! She had to ignore the stab of guilt that crept into the cavity of her chest, protesting with the same fervor. Ignore. Ignore ignore ignore. “Everything has a pulse.”

Jungkook nodded, and there was something akin to awe in his face. “Even music?”

“Especially music,” Sora breathed now, barely above a whisper. “That’s your first lesson for today.”

 

A

Tentative notes, stuttering out between them. Jungkook’s fingers dug into the keys, over and over and over again, until the hint of a melody peeked from under his palms, threaded through the gaps in his fingers.

“You’re doing well.” But it fell upon deaf ears, and Sora resisted the urge to wince at the clash of a stray note trembling under the wooden frame of the piano.

Because she understood, what it was like to have the mistakes tear and scratch away at skin like a phantom ache burning where she couldn’t reach, building up into a rearing wave of frantic frustration that sought to beat into smithereens the wavering dam in her mind: you’re not good enough not good enough not good not enough not.

And then, rub her skin raw in the friction of relentless practice, till she could convince herself that she was a blank slate, untouched by imperfections, unbound by the anxieties of inadequacy.

And that’s the genius of all artists: the paranoia that drills holes into the walls of their mind past midnight, that drives them into the ground and closes in around their hearts until they can’t breathe. The madness that tears through their veins, till they are nothing more than a mess of nerve endings and fraying emotions because the stories they breathe to life are shy of completion. The insatiable itch to expel everything ricocheting in them into the medium they wield, till everything they have is laid out bare in the vestiges of their own art.

His fingers were flattened on the keys now, and the sudden break in the juxtaposition of sounds drew Sora’s gaze to his, and the disquiet in the downturn of his lips.

He opened his mouth to silent words stuck at the back of his throat. Closed it.

Sora understood.

“You want to stay a little longer?”

“Yeah,” a hesitant pause. “I just, I don’t have a piano at home, and…”

“Don’t worry about it.” To save him the inevitable awkwardness; it would do neither of them good. “I don’t have anywhere to be anyways.”

There was a flush, steaming up in his cheeks, burning against the pallid of his skin. His lips, tugged up in the uncertainty of a smile, as though the blow of it had swooped in with the force of a wrecking ball and projected itself into the curve of his mouth before he had even parted to take a second breath.

It was the echo of an observation, but Jungkook was soft lines and sincerity when he smiled, and Sora could pretend to ignore the gaping scars trailing up his knees and believe the world wasn’t cruel to people who didn’t deserve it.

And that was how it began, quiet offers between fears of falling short of enough. That was how they began, extra hours at a piano falling to pieces and broken melodies shared between two individuals who had been shoved into the deep end of life, and been forced to learn how to swim through the crashing waves or drown trying.

Because perhaps that was when Sora had learnt, for the first time, that her heart could beat for someone other than herself.

Another hour of fumbling through the fog of notes passed, before Jungkook stopped to meet her gaze again, an apology on his lips, and gratitude in the scrunch of his eyes.

“Don’t — ”

“Thankyou,” he said anyway, and there was that smile again, and something fluttered in response, deep between the ridges of her ribcage. Something like happiness, tucked away into the back of her mind. “I owe you one.”

I chose to stay, she wanted to say, but he beat her to it.

“How about lunch?” It came out in a rush, as though he was afraid the words would vanish before he could speak them. “The school says you have classes from morning till now, so I know you haven’t eaten. C’mon, I owe you for staying back to help me practice.”

A deluge of words, broken only by a hopeful pause.

And maybe the answer was already right there, maybe it had always been. Because when he looked at her like that, like he genuinely thought that she was worth something more than a passing hi-bye, like they could find a place in each other’s lives; maybe all she had to do was to say yes.

So she did.

 

B

There was something about it, the steaming hot mugs and crinkled napkins, that made Sora’s toes curl in anticipation. Fear, perhaps, because good things could only ever be temporary. Even the sun bled away at night to the graze of inevitable darkness that must claim the sky.

She remembered being seven years old in a house empty in the day, and emptier at night. Staring up at the echo of a ticking clock, the only stirring in the silence. (Perhaps it had been the silence that was her muse in the end, that drove her to fill the rooms with the ups and downs of music preening right out of the piano.) It had been two days since her mother had left, in a fog of scented perfume, and apologetic promises. I’ll only be gone for a week, sweetheart, dad will take care of you; he promised to take you to Disneyland, didn’t he?

She remembered brightening up at the words, unconvinced but hopeful nonetheless. Waving goodbye to her mother as she strode out the front door, never once turning to see the gesture.

Her father hadn’t come home in that week, hadn’t even so much as called. Sora wondered, till today, if he had even known her mother had left her behind with nothing more than a loaf of expired bread, in a house as big as it was empty.

She remembered being hungry. Pressing her face into the hollow of the fridge, pulling a chair up to the shelves so she could rummage through its contents on her tippy toes. Looking for something, anything, to curb the wail in her stomach.

Seven year old Sora might have been independent, but even she couldn’t magically make food appear.

It was on the fourth day, that the housekeeper that came around once a month found her, curled up under the counter into herself. By then, she had turned the expired bread into a game, watching the mold creep up the crusts, and infiltrate its center. Half-awake in hunger and exhaustion.

The only thing her parents had left for her, and it had shot far past its expiration date.

Sora was seven, when she learnt that everything, including family, was only temporary.  

“Penny for your thoughts?”

And there Jungkook was, across the table, quirking a small smile up at her. Somewhere between then and now, someone had slipped their burgers onto their table, wrapped as they were, beside their mugs.

Sora hadn’t felt hungry since she was seven.

“Just wondering if I should take a picture.” Immortalize this moment. Pretend that it has a shot at lasting forever.

Jungkook furrowed his eyebrows at her. “If you like it that much we can always come back.”

Come… back?

She must have said it aloud because he laughed, and the sound fell like the jingle of chimes between them, tugging at her own lips with a flourish.

“Yeah but you haven’t even tried it yet. Come on, eat it.”

 Here they were, not separated by a running set of black and white keys giving under the weight of their fingers. Here they were, not sneaking glances at each other, trying to figure out the answers behind the gashes that lay on the expanse of their skin, and the others they couldn’t see but blazed with a vengeance anyhow.

Here they were, and Sora dared to smile up at him now, a genuine one, because maybe laughter could be infectious, and maybe some firmly unacknowledged part of her was drawn to happiness like moth is to light.

“Okay.”

Because if life was a battle, then Sora was a veteran. But so was Jungkook, with stories in the sallow of his skin, and nightmares in the shadows under his eyes. And she had trudged through this path enough times alone to know when the voices start to haunt her mind, and the memories start to suffocate around her lungs.

And maybe, she was a little tired of being alone.

Okay.

 

A

“Have you learnt any music before?”

“My brother taught me how to play the guitar once.”

“Once?”

Jungkook stared, almost blankly, at the expanse of music notes splayed before him, that mapped in inked precision, the rising and falling of a story resonated over years. Of heartbreak, of anguish. Of tears that fell and stained.

Perhaps, years ago, Beethoven had sat at his piano, pummeled with the same whirl of thoughts pulling his mind to shreds.

You pride yourself on knowing all the answers

On being brave, on pulling through

 

But you run at the first sign of trouble

Crashing over the horizon

 

You say you believe in miracles

That second chances aren’t woven fairytales

 

And yet you hold on to tattered what-ifs

Waiting for it to go wrong any second

 

You say there has to be something more out there

That there has to be more than this drawl of a nightmare

 

You claim you want nothing more than to be happy

But you can’t even face it when it’s staring you right in the face

 

There was an edge to his gaze that Sora never noticed before, a dullness lodged beneath the surface.

“It… didn’t end well.”

And perhaps that was his answer to the yellowing bruises along his temple, to the scratches sewed shut on his forearm. Perhaps, to the ruptured beats echoing in his chest, a stuttered heart.

Somewhere, out in the world, a child cowered before his bullies, praying to be rescued from his misery. Somewhere, out there, a child got tucked into saccharine dreams with the brush of loving kisses.

But choice was a concept favored by optimists, and Sora fell short of the criteria.

“I prefer singing anyways,” a quiet offer.

Because maybe even if happy endings eluded their grasp, at least they could afford a semblance of comfort in what they did already have. Maybe, what they had in the shambles of this life, could be enough.

Jungkook might no longer pick up a guitar again without seeing the gleam of blood on shattered wood, but at least he could sing. Maybe that could be enough.

“You sing?”

“A little, yeah.” And there was that bashful grin. Soft edges and scrunched eyes. “But I’m not very good.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Sora said. “Show me.”

Show me your world in all its glorious colors. Show me the ticking heart that counts out your existence. Show me everything that makes you you, and teach me to hold you in the palm of my hand.

He sang.

His gaze had fallen to the abandoned keys, buried somewhere in their midst and away from her searching one. His arms, locked into his side like he was hugging himself close, afraid to peek from behind the walls he was allowing to come crumbling down around him. Anxious over the possibility of rejection, panicked over the possibility of being hurt again.

Two weeks ago, he’d asked her if she ever wished her life were different.

“What’s the point in that? When you hope you only allow yourself to be disappointed,” she had replied, tracing notes with her fingers on the sheets before her.

His hand arose alongside hers, calloused fingers brushing against her own unmarred ones. “I think it’s nice.” He turned to smile at her. “In another world, in another time, there could be something better out there for us all.”

In another world, in another time, perhaps Sora could have been a princess, waited on hand and foot, never so much as found wanting. Perhaps she could have been a beggar, crouched along sidewalks of thousands of faceless passers-by, invisible to the rush of the world around her.

Would she be happier then?

“I highly doubt that. Besides, why dream about lives we can’t lead? I could be happier in another world, but that changes nothing about this life.”

He sighed a long-suffering sigh, but there was more amusement laced in his voice than exasperation, and maybe Sora should be worried about how well she could read him now. How familiar every little thing he did was, from the knot of his brows to the purse of his lips.

“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” he said. “Listen, the Ancient Greeks believed that if you were reborn three times and were righteous in all three, you would go to paradise.”

“We’re talking about past lives now?” but there was no malice in her tone. “Well, I guess you’ll never achieve paradise then.”

There was a look of mock hurt across his face, screwing into indignation. Here under the pale yellow of the overhead lights, the shadows loomed in the hollows of his face, staining his very skin. Weariness, of having seen too much, of having felt too much, of living in a rollercoaster of a world constantly trying to shove one off-balance.

And still, the upturn of his lips was genuine, effortless. Pulling up into the ridges of his cheeks, and Sora didn’t understand.

“Anyways, I think I might have been a king in my past life.”

Despite herself, she snorted. “I think you’re delusional.”

“I prefer the term ‘optimistic’.”

“Same difference.”

It was as though no matter how hard life tried to beat him down, he could still believe in positive possibilities. That something good could happen any second, and he would welcome it with open arms.

But, but, life didn’t work that way. Life wasn’t a wish-granting genie that birthed miracles and sprinkled happiness over those who asked. It wasn’t even fair. Some people lived their entire lives in bliss, but others weren’t so lucky.

People like Sora and Jungkook, were “others”.

Expose yourself to something enough and you start to develop an immunity for it. Eat too much chocolate, and nothing is sweet anymore. Watch too many horror movies, and your heart stops leaping at every abrupt clash in the soundtrack.

Sora had grown up with dashed dreams and the bitterness of disappointment. Of being forgotten in the confines of her own home, of falling through the gaps of inadequacy — “I expected more from you, Sora.” — of finding out she was no more than an invisible speck of dust in the spectrum of the universe.

And she had learnt, that maybe it was better not to expect anything, because the world didn’t owe you anything, and all you have is all you’re given; there’s nothing more you can do about it.

She’d learnt, and somewhere along the way, she’d stopped hoping for more.

But then Jungkook had come into this very room, bearing the brunt of ruthless forcefulness on his skin like badges of honor, a growing collection of blushing commendations: here, you survived another week on earth, congrats.

He had come into this room fumbling over the rough edges of life, with a smile as wide as a galaxy on his lips, and a scatter of stars in his eyes.

Sora would never admit it, but she didn’t want Jungkook to end up getting hurt. To slip off the jagged cliff of hope and plummet into the darkness of the abyss beneath; it was a long fall with no way up.

And maybe, just maybe, she couldn’t bear to see that smile wiped clean off his face either.

But back in the here and now, Jungkook was wavering over the pull of a single note.

He had hunched in over himself, withdrawn with an almost unnerving abstinence that rang hoarse in his voice. Pulling back over the splatter of notes, holding his breath against gritted teeth.

For a self-proclaimed optimist, Jungkook invested a lot in the possibility of failure. Held back against everything that could possibly go wrong. For an optimist, Sora had realized, Jungkook was afraid.

(And Sora wondered how much of his “optimism” had been forced, had been a lie he told himself to urge himself to push through the tumult of his own life. How much of the façade, in tatters as it was, he still clung desperately onto.)

But still he sang, with a voice like honey, melting right over the shifting threads of notes falling into place. He sang, and it was a story tumbling right from between his lips, trembling into the bitten words put to tune. He sang, and it nudged something deep in her chest, something dormant and familiar that fluttered like the jitters of nostalgia. Something that clasped around her heart with a forgotten warmth.

Something that felt a lot like coming home.

“You’re really good.”

He smiled.

 

Cadenza

Chaffed knuckles, bleeding knees, and a rage of bruises tattooed deep into his skin; that was how Sora had found Jungkook, pressed against the rigid back of the weather-beaten bench like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

The yellow of the streetlamp overhead fell around trembling shoulders, glanced off glazed eyes and a split lip that murmured tremors.

A single breath, shattered over red-hot rocks of anger. There was a rush building up in her ears, as though she could hear the blood pounding in her own veins, burgeon up to her head, and then crash right back down with a vengeance, sweeping all the way into a twisting gut. But perhaps it was her own heart, rattling at the constraints of her own ribs, wrenching with a blaze of panic she didn’t know she was capable of feeling.

Burning with an unease that made her want to throw up.

Because Jungkook, with bunching biceps and a black belt in Taekwondo, shouldn’t look like a human punching bag split open at gaping ends, swaying frail in the wind. Because Jungkook, with his stretch of wide shoulders and hard-won sturdiness of jointed bones and thrumming muscles, shouldn’t feel so small he curled into the sag of his spine as though he sought to vanish into nullity. Because Jungkook, who smiled incandescence in the face of adversity, and drew silver linings into the tumult of storms, shouldn’t look like he just had his life choked right out of the curve of his eyes, shouldn’t act like the fragments of fractured glass, holding just barely against the pummel of rampant sobs. Shouldn’t be hurt.

Something skittered in her chest, fell, broke.

Sora had been accustomed to Jungkook being strong, to the callouses on his palms when he held her hand between his after she’d rammed it against an abrupt jut of a railing, to the steel in his glare when the cashier at a gas station they’d stopped by last week leered at her like she was a special on a breakfast menu.

She had familiarized herself with the undulation of quiet strength in the cadences of his voice, the recurring ease of a smile that tugged at his lips, tugged at the walls she’d erected around her heart, the hard angles forged of a jaw that could slice through the tenacity of diamonds, but softened for the slightest that made him happy.

She had been so used to him being strong, that she didn’t know what to do now that he was splayed out in front of her, sinking into the depths of a cruel world Sora had trouble breathing in herself.

“Jungkook.” And it came out somewhere between a whisper, and a sob.

An hour ago, long after the sun had crept back to slumber, long after the clock had struck midnight and sleep was just starting to claim her mind, her phone thrummed against the edge of her desk, beaming up with the notification of a new message.

 

From Jungkook:

12:11am

Hey, you awake?

 

It was from Jungkook; the words blinked up at her, almost like a warning.

But it was too late, she had made her decision months ago, when they had first sat around a table, munching on cheap burgers made of stale bread and rubbery meat.

She had made her decision when they had continued visiting the store anyway, building up something of a routine: a class that stretched beyond its slated hours, and sharing more words than burgers in the booth at the back of the store. And then venturing beyond that; tracing their initials into dusty shelves down at the bookstore, shivering around boiling hot cup ramen as the sun descended to its chambers, and once, challenging the grime-coated claw machine and its tinny music blaring out from speakers unseen.

She made the same decision again.

 

From Sora:

12:12am

Yeah

What’s up?

 

From Jungkook:

12:12am

Oh thank goodness.

Can you come to the park we visited on the weekend?

Please?

 

And maybe there were horror stories about this, that parents told to their children at night, to keep them between the harsh margins of perfect behavior. Stories of a girl, sneaking out after midnight, to meet a wolf masquerading as a boy, but somewhere along the way, Sora had unknowingly entrusted a piece of herself to a boy with calloused hands and bruised knees, and she had yet to regret it.

Life wasn’t a fairytale; Jungkook wasn’t a wolf anymore than Sora wasn’t a princess locked up in a dilapidated ruin of a tower.

“Jungkook,” she said again, because she didn’t have an answer.

This time, he turned. Sora almost wished he hadn’t, because there was something profoundly lost in his gaze, hollow and displaced, as though he had just woken up from a dream and no longer knew the world that lay out in feverish colors and burnt emotions in front of him.  

His lips parted around words she couldn’t hear. And then finally, “You came.”

And it was a croak, rustling out from cracked lips, the decaying rust of choked tears. Nothing like the honeyed tenor of his voice when he sang other people’s stories as his own. Nothing like the trapped laughter ricocheting at the back of his throat when Sora told of the four year old kid she taught in the class before his.

She hadn’t noticed how his zealous smiles and sanguine demeanor had begun to bridge the spaces between her ribs, begun to scorch in the hearth of her heart after years of dusty cold and emptiness, until it was stolen by hand-shaped marks around his skin.

“Of course I did,” struggled to keep her voice light as the leaves, quivering in its descent from sagging branches. “You begged me to, remember?”

Four seasons in a year, days careening into nights that spin into an upward ascent on a temperature scale of negatives to digits strung together on an end. A long time ago, a scientist had sought answers to the rise and fall of the biting cold and sweltering heat, in a world bigger than anyone can ever truly comprehend, and chosen to diagnose it across a scale and careful measures of numbers.

He had been a genius; it had been a milestone in the history of mankind, and yet all Sora really knew about temperatures was the sting of cold air laced around her fingertips, and the salty sheen of perspiration against the back of her neck.

Still, now with a heavy brush of humidity against her forehead, she shivered in the unbroken gasp of a silence she hated.

“Did you know Neil Armstrong couldn’t afford life insurance? None of the astronauts on Apollo 11 could. They signed hundreds of autographs for their families to sell in case they didn’t make it back alive. How’s that for a backup plan?”

His frown softened, eased. She kept going.

“The President even had a speech written for them. Something about them knowing they had no hope for recovery, but there was hope for all of mankind yet, with all they had presumably sacrificed.”

“That’s kind of messed up,” he said quietly. Small victory.

“It was.”

It was messed up, preparing for a death that hadn’t even happened. Writing off, with careless nonchalance, a life that still beat measured pulses into the uncertainty of the future. A lot like giving up before failure even came knocking. Like surrendering, before the fight had even begun.

But Sora was intimately familiar with the concept, because hope was not an ally she kept tucked in her back pocket. She understood preparing for the worst, because the best-case scenario was one that rarely played out into fruition. She was used to appeasing herself with the ins and outs of failure, if only so life couldn’t pull the rug out from under her feet.

And it worked, because when she spiraled out of place, she’d already have had unfurled a net to catch herself before she could tumble to the ground.

“Armstrong put the American flag on the moon, but it collapsed as soon as he blasted off its surface,” she said instead, because this wasn’t about her.  This was about the boy who knew hope where she didn’t, who broke where her hands couldn’t fix; wasn’t her place to fix, but wanted to try. “Such is the grand tale of the first moon landing.”

“All about the moon today, huh.”

“The moon inspires a lot. Poetry, art, music, insanity.”

“You make them sound synonymous.”

“Who says they’re not?

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth,

And ever-changing like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?”

He raised his brows at her and there was curiosity in the brunt of his gaze now, the slightest spark of life that glimmered beyond the vacancy that had inhabited it before. “That sounds lonely.”

Once, Sora had believed independence to be the best possible state she could afford. That if no one else could learn to fit her into their patchwork world, then she’d weave together a world of her own and content herself with all that she had. That shouldering through the thicket of unkempt loneliness was better than living with a culmination of familiar disappointment and rejection. She had convinced herself that trusting herself far outweighed getting her trust betrayed by others, and had built her life between stone to guard her own heart.

And she had gotten used to it too, used to the bare polite greetings she exchanged with the people she interacted with each day, never venturing further than that, used to trudging down streets alone and the occasional buzz of her phone when she crossed someone’s mind. It was fine, because she got to do what she loved (music), was healthy (made enough to cover medical expenses), and had all the time in the world to do whatever she wanted.

She might not exactly have been happy, but she was content, and that was that.

Enter Jungkook, who took her to places she’d only ever visited alone, talked to her when she only ever had the echo of her own voice to resound the endless tangle of circles in her mind. Filled a gap between her ribs that she hadn’t even known was there.

“Percy Bysshe Shelley,” she said, gazing up at the barely perceptible slice of moon, hidden behind the clouds.

Had been as lonely as the moon once, but didn’t think she could ever go back to that now.

And it was strange, because there were seven billion people in the world. Add to that another few million species that made home out of land and sea. A plethora of people, crowded into a failing eco-system, and stacked atop hard-packed dirt worn underfoot.

She’d spent her life shutting them all out, but it took all of just one person, drawn of shadows and wounds, one, out of seven billion, to teach her to trust again.

And maybe, she didn’t want to lose this.

She bit her lip, wondered how to say what she wanted.

“You can see the moon, from where I live,” she began, almost cautiously. “Do you want to check it out?”

“Are you trying to get me to go home with you? Because I didn’t take you for someone who’d take advantage of me like that.” He gestured to the stark purple scattered around his skin with the intensity of merciless violence, mock suspicion in the quirk of his brows, but laughter on his lips. “Clearly I’m not in the right state for anything tonight.”

Sora flushed at the teasing implication. Flushed even more when she realized, one day from now, very, very far into the future, she wouldn’t mind trusting Jungkook enough to try… new things.

“No, I just,” flustered “the first part, not the others, I don’t mean…”

He laughed, and it was still broken, still halfway between a sob and the hoarse aftereffects of a scream. But his lips were curved and he was sitting a little straighter, and he was a little more like the Jungkook she knew.

He laughed, like he knew what she was trying to say too.

“Okay, Sora, I’ll come home to watch the moon with you,” he declared. She flushed again, wondered why her cheeks found such affinity with the bloom of heat.

“S’not a euphemism, I — ”

“I know,” and this time, the glint in his eyes softened into something like gratitude. “I know.”

 

Coda

Home was an apartment too big and too silent for a girl who once wanted a family, but had learnt to survive without one. Home, was untouched furniture and firmly closed doors and beds not slept in, because while it might have housed people once, it now only housed the ghosts of a girl’s disappointment. Tonight though, home was the low hum of the television, and the echo of laughter, and a girl who was learning to let a boy into a world that spun on the axis of a held breath.

“Does this hurt?” Sora asked as she dabbed antiseptic over the slice of red indented into his palm. Landmarks of a distressful story, but she knew better than to pry.

He winced when the soaked cotton made contact, but, “It’s fine.”

Liar liar, pants on fire, she wanted to say, but perhaps she shouldn’t draw any more attention to the pain than she already had. She pulled the cotton ball away to press a Band-Aid to the wound, and wondered, how to fill the crevices deep within.

“You lied,” he said now, and the irony, gritting his teeth as she ran the swab, cold and stinging, against the scrapes of his knees. “About being able to see the moon from here.”

“And yet you believed me,” she countered. “What made you think seeing the moon from the ground would be any different from seeing the moon from five floors up?”

Maybe there was some truth to that the moon made them all a little insane.

“I trusted you,” mock hurt, and was that a pout? Sora had to hold back a snicker. So much for being strong, Jungkook was an all-round generic-grade infant.

But maybe it wasn’t the moon after all, peering out from behind knotted clouds of silvery haze. Maybe it was trust that urged them to do the craziest of things, like wander out to a park in the middle of the night, and inviting someone back home even after.

“May I redeem myself by quoting more moon-related lines from great literature, oh Your Honor?”

“We’ll see.”

“Moonlight drowns out all but the brightest stars,” she recited, and for a moment there was a breath of silence, as though the words were resonating in the walls around them. Bouncing off walls, creeping somewhere into the juncture of her heart.

If the moon was loneliness then it had drained everything she’d ever wanted out of the swirling galaxies of her universe, replacing it with the blank canvas of endless darkness, that closed in around her when she’d tried to hope, that robbed her of her vision that once filled with the blaze of stars.

Jungkook exhaled. “Was that Lord of the Rings?”

And Sora remembered that she wasn’t quite so alone right now; and perhaps Jungkook was a bright star, flaring in the reign of the sky, even against the luminance of the moonlight loneliness.

She nodded, and let a smile creep over her face this time. Her fingers edged closer to his face, over the ridges of his jawline, hovered over the angry red curling up in his split lips.

His eyes shuttered to a close. A breath. “Keep going.”

She couldn’t tell if he was referring to her reciting moon references or the impromptu nursing with an open kit of antiseptic and Band-Aids over the couch, the murmur of the TV fading into white noise in the background.

“Well we all shine on like the moon and the stars and the sun,” she began, brushing a thumb over the cut.

His eyes shot open, wide and ebullient and curious and everything in between, and there was a hand on her wrist, squeezing gently in abrupt excitement. “Well we all shine on, everyone c’mon!”

There was a pause, a fissure of silence that stretched out between them, pulling taut around the synced hammering in their ribcages, beating in tandem to the rhythm of a murmured song older than them both, and a sudden rush of enthusiasm curling underneath their skin and whipping through their veins as though they shared a secret no one else was privy to.

And then, in unison, “Well we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun. Yeah we all shine on, on and on and on and on and on!”

Somewhere, as the song ran its course in winding melody, Jungkook had gotten to his feet despite the bruises, despite the Band-Aids that sought to seal the jagged lines running across his skin. Somewhere as the song ran its course through belted chorus and mismatched lyrics, he had pulled Sora up with him, and coaxed her into jumping with careless abandon all over the fraying carpet spread-eagled between the television and the couch.

Jungkook was the first to laugh as he crumpled back into the couch after yelling out the last of its melody. Loud, infectious laughter, that racked his frame even more violently than the sobs earlier had, and Sora found that she preferred him this way, even if his face was screwed up in crumpled lines of laughter. Even if his eyes seemed to wink out on his face, and his mouth had dropped open so wide she could peek into the pink of its insides.

“That was…” his voice hitched as he succumbed to the torpedo of more laughter, “That wasn’t even literature!”

“Yeah well, I’m a pianist, not an author,” but she was giggling, like she couldn’t stop, didn’t know how to stop. And coasting the waves of leftover adrenaline, “Come on.”

Across the hall, past the rooms with the closed doors, past her own room swathed in darkness, past the bare glint of moonlight fractured through the glass that danced on the floor between their feet.

Sora stopped at the very last room on the right, tugged him in through the creaking door. Reached up to flip a switch.

It was a small room, Jungkook could probably stretch out along the floor and reach either end, but there was a gleam of a piano tucked into the back of a wall, polished by loving hands and weathered over the years.

She pushed him into the embrace of a seat, took her own on the bench and poised her fingers over the keys. Began to play.

Moonlight Sonata. Once upon a time, when songs and artworks and poetry had been given to the object of one’s affections like a box of Ferrero and a hastily written text message, Beethoven had dedicated this song to a student he’d loved more than a teacher should, more than he should after the consecutive anguish of countless rejections and failed marriage proposals.

Why had he tried again? What had made him think that yet another, and a student at that, would not take the fragments of his heart and trample it underfoot?

Sora raised her gaze to the impressed smile a widening chasm across Jungkook’s face, as he bobbed to the thread of the rhythm and hummed gibberish to the melody. And thought, maybe she knew why. Maybe it wasn’t so bad to have hope after all.

“You’re really good,” he swallowed, smiled wider, and there was awe in his face where there had never really been any on anyone’s before. If her heart beat a little faster, and heat found its way into her cheeks again, Sora found she didn’t really mind, not this once, not when he looked at her like she had something intrinsically special. Was something intrinsically special. “Really, really, good.”

"Thanks, I — ”

And then he was surging forward, and she was falling back against a clash of keys on the piano, but then their lips met, and she tasted dried blood and chapped lips and the forgotten trails of salty tears.

Like bottled chaos, and saccharine desperation, and a mess burning out between the shared hummingbirds in their chests.

Said, this is gross, between the gnash of teeth.

(Her first kiss, and it was parched split lips and bruises under her fingernails. And yet, and yet, it was everything she could have ever wanted.)

Because Jungkook was bruised and broken in some places, and Sora had scars where no one could see. Because they didn’t have answers for the world crashing at their feet, didn’t stand a chance against the hurricane of tribulation threatening to jostle them off their feet.

Said, we’ll fix this right up.

 

tierce de Picardie

“Do you ever think there’s more to life than this?”

A pause. “I think there’s you, and there’s me, and that’s enough.”