invictus (undefeated)

invictus

At night, when the world is dark and there is nothing other than the thoughts in his own head, Eddy dreams of being a musician, playing in the violin and working in a symphony. He allows his imagination to run free and wonders what it would have been like to follow Brett to the conservatory, to follow his passion and his own path and not the one his parents set for him. Sometimes he mourns the people and places he's left behind—these are the things that money can't buy.

But he's successful now, isn't he? Everything his parents wanted him to be. He's travelled the world giving lectures and press conferences talking about his research. Everything he writes is published in papers like the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet and he's pretty sure he's been the idol of almost every medical student he's met. So young, they said, barely even thirty yet he's done more than all the old men and women out there. He's a prodigy.

If only he'd been a violin prodigy too, he wouldn't be doing this.

Research is about problem-solving, logic (which he prides himself on), perseverance, and a little bit of luck. He supposes that his luck is what those before him didn't quite have. Hell, Eddy's earned enough money from this that he could've quit work already and lived comfortably for several lifetimes and his mother asks him sometimes why he hasn't quit yet, but he tells her that maybe, just maybe, he's found a purpose greater than himself. Even after all these years, she doesn't quite understand that there are things money can't buy.

This life—it doesn't make him unhappy. He is content with how the world moves on for him, though he gets more and more annoyed every year with the travelling and the lecturing, but that doesn't mean he's happy. Some days he likes to bring out the violin from its old case, check for bow bugs, and play—sometimes Sibelius, sometimes Tchaikovsky, sometimes the first violin part of Navarra. The dance sounds lonely; there is no partner and the empty space is filled with longing, and Eddy wonders how at some point a Queen Elisabeth winner like Brett had always played second violin to him. Brett Yang's latest Bach album has been sitting on his coffee table for the past week, as a reminder of what Eddy left behind, or maybe it was Eddy who Brett left behind. He doesn't quite know the difference. Perhaps, he thinks, they left each other in the dust, two parallel lines on their way to success, glory, and fame but never meeting, never intersecting.

He gets sad thinking about it, so in the mornings he washes down his childhood dreams with a cup of black coffee and pretends everything's alright, because really, everything is alright and the life he has now isn't so bad. It's bearable, so he lives with it.

When Eddy's thirty-one, he decides he needs a break. He's getting tired of travelling every month to speak at some random university or going to some conference or getting interviewed. He walks into the lab one day and says, "I need a break" and one of his co-workers shrugs and says "It's about time you took one." He doesn't think he's had a single day to relax since he was eighteen or nineteen. It's been a decade of study, work, research, and exams, and he thinks that with all the awards and nominations he's gotten and the research he does, he deserves a break.

You overwork yourself; you need some time to yourself, take a break, his peers tell him, have told him since he was in high school, juggling academics with violin competitions. They agree on six months of paid leave, which Eddy thinks is ridiculous because he doesn't want that much time and at the ripe old age of thirty-one, he probably has millions in the bank at this point from all the shit he's done, but they force him anyways.

That evening, almost at the exact minute he hangs his coat up on the wall, he gets a call. The name on the screen is heart-wrenchingly familiar—Brett Yang hasn't called in a while, has he? They haven't done a very good job of keeping in touch for so-called best friends. Life has kept them busy, Eddy supposes.