𝑆ℎ𝑒, 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑎 𝑏𝑟𝑜𝑘𝑒𝑛 𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐴𝑛𝑑 ℎ𝑒, 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑠𝑜𝑎𝑟𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑠...
27-year-old ex-violinist Yunagi Reiya lives a quiet and simple life as a foreign service officer and part-time barista...
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〖 Chapter One 〗
Remember the Melody
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He heard it the moment the rain began to pour; a powerful and poignant melody that pulled at the very strings of his soul, magnifying his pain and yet pacifying it.
His sadness, his rage, the emptiness, the abandonment...all of it were contained within the strident rhapsody.
He followed it, spurned by some nameless thing he could only describe as finding the only way out of the darkness. He rounded the corner and his breath stopped, followed by his footsteps.
What he saw wasn't quite what he expected. It was more, and he couldn't take his eyes off, hypnotized by the way she moved, of how she commanded the violin in her hands.
She moved as if possessed, swaying this way and that, head low and shaking as if in denial, the melody sounding angrier and angrier, lonelier and lonelier, her motions and precision a perfect balance of discord and resonance, driven with an intensity that made him feel seen.
It sounded as if the endless clamor inside of him was being told for him...all the things he had no name for...breaking him apart with a heat so sharp it invigorated him.
And she must've felt the same for she didn't seem to feel the rain, even as her dress began to soak and crumple against her skin, even as her short black hair began to drip and cling to her face, his eyes momentarily drawn to the bright red of her cherry earrings peeking out from between the wet strands.
She was too far gone, he saw. It was only her and the violin.
And in that moment he understood.
She was crying. Not with her eyes but with her entire being. She was heartbroken, inconsolable. Screaming at the world through the instrument.
Suddenly the melody came to an abrupt stop and she gasped, the spell broken. She looked down on the violin in her hands and hugged it against her chest. She was trembling then, crying in earnest.
She took off and ran away, not sparing him a glance as if she never even noticed him, and the loud drum of his heartbeat rose in the absence of her music.
He didn't call out to her, even as his legs began to move unconsciously after her. But she was faster than his hesitation and she disappeared into the rain like a sylph of mist in her wet blue dress.
She left and never returned, and for a long time he hadn't realized that she took something of his with her.He never saw her again but she remained in the back of his mind, the elegant shape of her figure and the heartrending melody coming back to him every time he dared to summon it.
