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"Moon tell me if I could send up my heart to you,
So when I die which I must do could you shine it down here with you?"
- Mitski
The wind is pleasant tonight.
It's colder up here, further uphill, water droplets condensing on his face reminding him of what the hills used to be like once back home, once upon a time, unsure of whether to call it past or present. There is no grass for him to lay his feet flat upon the ground with, and no sun to burn his skin but endless, starless night with none but the full moon's glow, the city sleeping devoid of lamps underneath him in this part of the universe.
It's colder up here, teeth chattering and body returning to its usual state of constant tremors when he removes his jacket and tosses it onto the floor. Police never bothered to check empty concert halls for some reason here— they all seemed to believe this particular one was haunted and paid their respect to spirits in these hallways, allowing him a place to sleep in for a long enough time for the backstage to become his resting place alongside the instrument he never seemed to be able to let go of. Laughable, that a man with no knowledge or sense of permanence, always finds it too hard to let go.
He bends down to place the wooden case onto the cool marble flooring of the porch, bowing the lowest he could and touching his forehead against the instrument like a grieving apostle. "It's all I can give you now," he mutters, feeling his voice disappearing inside of his throat the way the world around him was being swallowed into radio static that could only be described as indecipherable signals that he heard on space voyages, like the clouds were inhaling the Milky Way itself, like the winds threatened to flare and agitate the sun that fateful day the sky turned crimson.
The violin had stayed with him. Two things in his life had always merged into a singular constant— the violin he played on since he was seventeen, and the man he had always called his best friend. Seventeen-year-old Brett, young and freshly estranged from his home and his family, spent night after night begging and praying to every God he had ever known to take away from him anything but them. "I'm sorry," he whispers like a final urgent prayer, desperate to be heard by someone, anyone he hadn't broken himself. "You deserve so much more than I could give you. I'm sorry."
("You look at the North Star all the time, Solnyshko." He had been sitting in the balcony then, wondering how he could ever do justice to the night sky by taking pictures of it. Skin against skin had felt warm then, a warm temple resting on his collar, haphazardly cut hair tickling his neck lightly. "Care to explain what you have been pondering upon since I left to work?"
"Many things."
"Elaborate."
"This sounds so cliche and stupid and—" A glare, barely concealing a strongly worded reprimand, wrinkles under his eyes and smile lines a little more prominent than they used to be when they first met. "I was thinking about how everything in the world, no matter how different it seems, just sort of converges into something musical. Stars hum, pulsars have a sort of rhythm. Like music cannot go anywhere when everything makes music. I didn't believe in magic all my life but… it feels like…"
"I would say you being here is magic in itself," a nose nuzzle, glistening eyes gazing up at the deep Prussian blue abyss, fingers interlocking in a barely there touch, an absentminded kiss upon the crest on his shoulder, smelling like the hair wash he had prepared out of beer. "Everything sings. You fit in perfectly, like saline in water."
"I wonder how I came so far, you know."
"Why? The North Star has been humankind's other siren for centuries. It sings too, but in the way a lighthouse does.")
He climbs up onto the ledge, breathing strained in his lungs with how far the ground looks beneath him, a hollow pang of pain radiating in his chest, jaw slack open in exhaustion. No stars to look at in the sky anymore.
There is nobody in the street to watch, nobody to stop him here, nobody to soothe his fear of heights. Not in this part of the world where he is nothing beyond a listless incognito trapped in eternal limbo, a limbo he was bound to break free from for once and for all, nothing holding him back anymore.
"What have you done? Why would you meddle with what isn't ours?"
The wind blows fiercely, nearby trees bent in hushed whispers of disbelief like an audience awaiting a gladiator's lost fight with a rabid wolf. Brett closes his eyes, spreading his arms open like a bird preparing to take flight, his feet beginning to wobble, knees beginning to buckle, the drop steep beneath him.
"Kohayu." I love you.
Someone was screaming, far, far away. In another world perhaps, with how everything sounded garbled, incoherent. It's not like he was going back to a world not his own.
"The notes in the violin concerto felt unfamiliar. More than usual."
Not his world.
"This is the last letter I will ever be at liberty to write to you. I could not keep my promise. They found me So-"
Not his world.
"Did you not feel pain, Eddy?"
"I did."
"I'm scared, Eddy, I'm scared— what if it hurts too much when I drink it?"
"That's the thing. You don't have to fear it."
Not his world.
"Don't-don't talk to me like this, think of all the things we could do together! Think of the life we can still live, rich and famous and thriving! Wasn't it gonna be the two of us, birds of a feather, you and me? Trust me, it's all for you, I promise, this is all so that you and I never have to be apart ever again, it's all for us, IT'S ALL FOR US, IT'S ALL FOR US TO BE TOGETHER BRETT WHAT ARE YOU DOING NONONONODONTDRINKITDONTBRETTNODONTDOTHIS—"
The movement arrives like a tight jolt.
Pain spreads through his body like the rot of nuclear waste, but he was flying— flying farther and farther, a meteorite hurtling towards earth, like he was simply taking a dive into the sea the way he did as a child, like he was simply a small child to whom nothing bad had happened yet with his younger best friend, the two of them jumping into ponds and lakes and going too fast down death slides and giggling when their faces planted into dirt, like he was simply falling onto damp grass and Pyotr would be next to him to catch him and hold him to his chest and smile and laugh some more when they find each other in another world.
Somehow it was less of the meteor crash that he imagined and more of the float of a bird, suspended in the atmosphere for moments too long for him to break apart into iridium encasing his remains against wet earth, burning up in the sky instead, his sense of vision disappearing like his eyeballs seemed to vaporize altogether.
Wet earth doesn't arrive, and neither does asphalt.
In its stead, warmth. Warmth of wool and flesh and rugged skin, his hipbone and lower spine striking cold marble when he descends.
A hand stroking his forehead with such care Death might as well have arrived and carried him to a new room in its arms like an infant who had fallen asleep outside, patting at his cheek, voice muffled, disappearing into conversations had by other people in the house. A voice, growing quieter in its anguish and panic, far away, far far away before he was beginning to fly again.
Then ice-cold water.
Teplitz, 1811
Insular might be the most appropriate word for the house.
It's not particularly a small apartment or anything, a decently well-spaced house only a little bit cramped from clutter, piles of clothes and haphazardly thrown pillows, shelves stacked with books on poetry and political and literary theory and music, the gloss of the binded leather beginning to wear off, a small fortepiano with an unfinished cup of black coffee that would have made Brett grimace on any other day. There is the early morning sunlight streaming in through the window, pale and warm at the tail-end of winter, balls of paper like angry, spiny thorned tumbleweeds in a house lived but not necessarily loved scattered in and around the piano, their more intact counterparts of yellowed music sheets lying on the desk with metal rods used as temporal weights.
"Er," the elderly man hesitates, awkwardly sliding away empty bottles with his foot, gesturing for him to sit down at the desk. "Apologies. Make yourself comfortable."
Brett doesn't speak. Partly doesn't dare to, even with pangs of hunger for something unattainable, for the catharsis of flight brimmed uncomfortably through his body and took form for an animalistic attempt at breaking free, but the numbing seeped through every crack and corner and tranquilized him before he could.
He isn't sure if he should. Or if he even could for that matter, with how his voice disappeared inside of his lungs.
The man's gait is stiff and almost in a bit of a march, a little too forceful despite their slowness, like his bones were being pulled to the center of the earth by gravity, steps heavy as he makes his way to the kitchen and pours out some brandy into a mug. "I am aware it is too early for this, but, uh," his accent is heavier on the German side, voice low and words overly enunciated as though in an apologetic unnecessary compensation of his broken English, "I suppose this is a better alternative."
Nothing in his body feels the same. There is neither a desire to eat, nor any to drink, flesh and soul two completely separate entities with one bubbling in movement inside of him, squirming to abandon skin, and somehow they still compromise to descend him. His knees feel a sort of pressure, of fingers, fingers around his thinned shoulder blades, a brief moment of lightheadedness that he wants to last, a lingering after effect of a baby bird learning to take flight, followed almost immediately by soft bedding of the armchair.
"Water instead, you want?"
He opens his mouth to speak. All that escapes him is a short puff of air, spit gurgling in his throat. "S-S'rry-"
"It's alright, it's alright son," the man winces as he trots to the kitchen and returns with a brass tumbler of water. Brett's fingers tremble for a second too long to grip onto it, the heels of his palms finally managing to grasp the vessel heavy on his wrists and putting it to his lips.
It's just water. Fresh and boiled, but just water. None of the sweet poison he has grown accustomed to, nor the booze he has hydrated himself with over the past weeks, and yet it feels like ambrosia.
"My name is Ludwig van Beethoven," the man introduces himself when Brett looks up at him in an attempt to speak. He has met him before once, at a tavern, they have spoken before. His hair is more grey than black, in a dried frizzy unmaintained mess, built small but broad, strong, eyes that had always been fierce in paintings softer, worriedly attempting to communicate with him but unsure of how to. "B-Beethoven," Brett repeats, worried he was too quiet for him to hear, but remembering he was primarily relying on lip reading. "Yes. I am Beethoven. I remember you from the tavern. Brett Yang."
"Brett Yang," he parrots mechanically, body too heavy to still support his frame properly onto the chair, sinking further into the cushion like the final dregs of life lay at his fingertips but nowhere else in his body. A brief flash of frustration flares within him, almost accusatory at the composer for even thinking of something so horrid. Why did you pull me back? Why save a life that means nothing in any world it lives in? The world would function perfectly without me, it would keep turning and nothing bad would have happened. Why? Why? Why?
"T-Thank you," he says regardless.
"No mention," Beethoven brushes off the comment, returning to the chair opposite to him, voice stern and a little on the louder side but gentle. "Tell me when you mean it in truth."
Silence falls, the kind of weight he remembers the hospital room sunk into when his little brother had slit his wrists as a teenager. The sort when nobody knew what to say to him, nobody knew how to address a boy who had lost his best friend attempting to crawl into the afterlife just so they could be together again. Birds were still singing outside the window, probably a nightingale (or was it a thrush? Pyotr was usually the expert of these things), and he could hear the wheels of a carriage rolling in the distance. Nightingales didn't sing back home anymore.
Nothing did.
Beethoven buries the heels of his hands into his eyes, pushing forward a notebook and a pencil. "Apologies. Just… my hearing…"
Brett nods when he looks up for a response. "Please don't apologise" he scribbles, grabbing the pencil like he was holding a knife, unable to balance it between his fingers.
"I can't play, Brett," he had found Eddy sobbing in the bathroom once days before a ballet. "I can't play anymore. My hands don't work anymore, I can't play, IcantplayIcant—"
"I did it all for our sake."
He curls forward when the ache in his chest only seems to grow, an unbearable pressure squeezing in his innards as though hauling him back to his world with shackles and an iron ball.
He had tried to drown himself once, when he was very young, submerging his small body into the waters of their beloved lake in Brisbane, holding his breath till his lungs began to cave in like a balloon collapsing under vacuum, till his mouth forced itself open and murky water filled his lungs to the brim till it threatened to surge mud and clay and water out of his mouth, till he could neither inhale nor exhale.
Nobody had come to look for the boy then. No phone calls, no worried neighbors, no police reports, no adults to care about where the boy had been past nine.
Nobody except—
"If I erase the thing everybody was being killed for, they'll have nothing to kill us for, right?"
"Do you want to say what happened?"
"Heartbeat… stopped…"
"….nononononononononononononononononocomebackcomebackcomeback—"
"Yang?"
There used to be a thudding once— two of them, in sync. One inside of his chest, the other just on top, ticking together like two clocks winded to feel the exact same second as dictated by military time and yet somehow breaking away from it, measuring time where time cannot be measured, in terms of two heartbeats, one made entirely of muscle and blood and the other of crystal but still somehow holding the flesh and blood of who it was meant to personify.
He reaches up to instinctively fiddle with the locket around his neck, finding nothing but skin, pale around cold meat.
"Is there anyone you want to write to? Family, friends, loved ones, anyone?"
His entire being revolts in a tremor and he could no longer breathe.
His body was no longer his own, nothing in his body seemed to reek of a living, breathing person anymore, nothing but cold meat without a pulse, everything pertaining to a soul sucked out and collected into some sort of an IV or a bloodbag. They have done CPR on him and used a defibrillator and hooked him onto life support but corpses don't come back to life without their souls, not when his soul is here in Teplitz. He has nobody. He has nobody. He broke Pyotr's heart to get away from him and ripped his letter and pushed away Eddy and he has nobody. He pushed away his parents and by extension his brother before and stopped responding to any letters they would send, in fear they would mock him for his interest in men again.
"Everyone's gone," he isn't sure if he was shuddering in agony in an attempt to reply with the harrowing realization or if it was simply so cold all around him, it was simply such that the winter never left. "Everything is gone. Everything is gone, everyone, everyone everythingeverythingeveryoneeverythingMomDadAlanSophieHyungsukAngieOllie, lostmusictooEddyEddylostmusicmusicmymusic—"
Even Pyotr.
Even music.
Even music.
Even music.
Even Eddy.
Even Eddy.
Even Eddy.
Even Eddy.
Even Eddy.
Nobody remains. Not even him, his body no longer human or alive, nothing beyond a corpse.
Nobody remains. Corpses cannot cry. Corpses cannot feel.
Nobody remains. The people he had seen in the aftermath of the incident were corpses, soulless eyes gouging, hollow, bodies moving with neither purpose nor control, and yet to Eddy and to everybody else it looked just as normal as it used to be in the earliest moments of the Act's passing.
Nobody remains. He is now one of them too, having felt the liquid burning, blazing and corroding through all that it touched, body hitting the floor at a velocity beyond reach for a breathing human.
"I can't bear to live in this world."
Nobody remains.
Nobody remains.
Nobody remains.
"Music is not going anywhere."
The consolation comes from all around him, Beethoven having left his chair again to gaze up at him from a lower height, attempting to make eye contact with him, and he wonders if the sliver of hope on his face would still be there had he been aware that the world around him had turned to static altogether. "I… I am sorry to know you lost everyone close to you, it is agony of the most cruel kind and I might never understand the extent of it. But one thing you can be sure of is that music is not going anywhere. It did not, for me, and it will not for you. Not when it exists everywhere, in everything."
"Everything sings."
He doesn't want to think. He doesn't want to think about Pyotr, he doesn't want to think they had dragged him away and they had taken away his things, his compositions and their pictures and their letters and many more things in a flurry, and they hadn't realized music was gone from their world, they had not realized Pyotr was beginning to physically dissipate, they did not care about the agony of disintegration, of his body failing, of being in so much pain that the arsenic would be mercy, they had found him like they found everyone else, they found him, they found him when he had already taken flight, they found him, they found him, they found him in this state because Eddy didn't think it through—
"I'm sorry, my child."
Woolen sleeves gather in a periphery around him, hover in front of him, an invite for the bird to have a soft place to land.
"I'm sorry."
Everything sings.
He finds himself sinking into his open arms, smell of brandy and coffee blanketing him whole, warmed by the hug, human and present, the ticking of a beating heart, the singing of all that composes the world, offered by a complete stranger hugging a corpse. Everything sings. Everything sings.
"I'm sorry the world...'s not kinder to you. I'm sorry, my child."
And the numbness in his body is replaced with a broken sob. Then another. And another, diaphragm stopping every sound elicited from him like it was a sin to make sound altogether in a world where nothing no longer sings, choked in the entrapment of his throat. "It's alright. Come down from up there, boy. You are not flying anymore, it's alright."
A gasp brings Brett Yang back to life, clawing onto cloth for anchor, breaking into deep, heaving sobs, the exterior of his body still not having gotten the memo to let the corpse feel human in this part of the universe where nightingales still sing.
The corpse is eleven years old once again, pulled out of water and seated near the heater with a big blanket wrapped around his small body and the guilt of sin eating away at his heart at the thought of the boy he had fallen in love with, the silence palpable as a swollen vein that wouldn't go down, its clots beginning to rot every vein it surrounds the way a person acquainting themself with death in a push and pull over and over and over again in pleas to take him home eventually becomes.
Till the exhaustion of the vein begins to rot the rest of the body, but they cannot eject the putrid vein out of the system the way people can eject someone whose proximity to tragedy was always worth discarding.
"Why did..." he gulps, hesitant to ask the question, but filled with too many to simply ignore them. "How did you find me?"
The man stiffens for a brief moment, sleeve accidentally riding up for a brief moment to reveal gauze along his forearm. There is no need for a reply, nothing that in the moment might feel unnatural the way the act of speaking felt altogether, fixing his sleeve and holding the younger man tighter as one should hold their own son.
In this part of the cosmos, songbirds fleeing the fire could come down to rest.