The final bell's echo had long faded, leaving only the deep, familiar silence of the old music room. Hikari sat on the single wooden chair, her violin case unopened on the floor beside her. Her fingers traced the familiar scuff marks on its surface, but her mind was miles away—or rather, years away.
She couldn't focus. The weightless, terrifying feeling from the rooftop—the warmth of a shared silence, the word friend spoken so simply—had cracked something open inside her. It had stirred up ghosts she usually kept locked away with the turn of a key and the cry of a string. Today, the ghosts were too loud.
She closed her eyes, and the dusty, sunlit room dissolved into the memory of another kind of quiet.
---
Eight Years Ago
The silence of the Tanaka apartment was different then. It wasn't peaceful; it was waiting. Seven-year-old Hikari's footsteps were too loud on the polished floor. Her mother's surgical roster was a grid of coloured blocks on the fridge. Her father's flight tracker glowed from a tablet on the kitchen counter, a tiny plane crawling over an ocean.
She had freedom. No one told her not to explore. So, she did.
In a closet meant for seasonal storage, behind boxes of tax documents, she found it. A long, rectangular case, coated in a fine layer of dust. It wasn't fancy. It was plain, scratched brown leather. With small, careful hands, she unbuckled the clasps.
The inside was velvet, worn in places. And resting in the curve was her mother's old violin. It wasn't a concert instrument; it was humble, honest wood. To Hikari, it was a treasure chest.
She lifted it out, the weight surprising her small arms. She found the bow, its horsehair loose. Mimicking something she'd maybe seen on TV, she tucked the violin under her chin and dragged the bow across the strings.
The sound was a cat's shriek of protest, awful and wonderful. It was a sound. In the perfect, waiting silence of the apartment, it was the first true noise she had ever made that wasn't a question or an answer to an adult. It was a statement.
She tried again. And again. Screech, whine, scratch.
"Trying to summon demons, or just murder that thing?"
She jumped. Her brother, Kenji, then fourteen, stood in the doorway of the closet, his school bag still on his shoulder. He wasn't smiling, but his eyes weren't mocking. They were curious.
"It's Mom's," Hikari said, her voice small, already braced for a command to put it back.
Kenji walked over, crouched down to her level, and looked at the violin. He didn't touch it. "Sounds like it's in pain."
"I don't know how," she mumbled, the first flicker of defeat in her chest.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he stood up. "Wait here."
He returned a week later, not with a command, but with a gift. A beginner's violin book, bought with his own allowance. It had pictures of finger placement and simple, crawling songs.
"If you're gonna do it," he said, dropping it on the floor next to her, "do it right. Or at least, do it so it doesn't make my ears bleed while I'm trying to study."
He became her first audience. While she scratched her way through "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," he did his advanced math homework at the dining table, offering only an occasional, "Your C is flat," or a rare, quiet nod when she finally got a phrase right. His presence wasn't effusive. It was just there. A steady, silent witness in the empty apartment. It was more than anyone else had ever given her.
The violin ceased to be her mother's. It became hers. The one thing in her life that was not about schedules, expectations, or measured success. It was about feeling. Fury, loneliness, a quiet joy—all of it went into the wood and came out as sound. Kenji heard it all and never told her to play something more pleasant.
The clash came during a parent-teacher conference in her first year of middle school. Her grades, always a low priority for her, were sinking. Her father, in his impeccable suit, fresh off a trans-Pacific call, listened to the homeroom teacher's concerns with a lawyer's analytical patience.
"The distraction is clear," her father said, his voice calm and final. "This violin hobby has become an obstruction. It's time to set it aside and focus on fundamentals."
Hikari's heart seized. She stared at the floor, the world shrinking to the pattern on the office carpet.
"With respect, that's a terrible idea."
Everyone turned. Kenji, now sixteen, had insisted on coming. He sat straight, his hands clenched on his knees, but his voice was firm.
"It's not a hobby," he said, looking directly at their father, bypassing the teacher entirely. "It's the only thing she cares about that doesn't come with a syllabus or a performance review. Taking it away won't make her better at math. It'll just make her…" He struggled for the word, his eyes flicking to Hikari's frozen form. "It'll just make her disappear."
The room was stunned into silence. Their father's eyebrows rose, not in anger, but in pure, logistical disbelief. An argument ensued—quiet, precise, and brutal in its logic. Kenji, armed with nothing but fierce, protective certainty, fought against the cold calculus of parental efficiency.
Hikari didn't hear the words. She watched her brother's profile, the set of his jaw. She learned the lesson not from the argument's content, but from its existence: Her true self—the messy, feeling, musical core of her—was not something to be displayed for the world's approval. It was something fragile, precious, and worth defending. And it seemed only Kenji was willing to be its defender.
She kept the violin. Her grades didn't improve. And she built her walls higher, the rebellious, failing student a perfect camouflage for the girl with the storm inside.
---
Hikari opened her eyes. The old music room's silence rushed back in, but it was different now. It was filled with the echo of that long-ago lesson.
She understood now why Kaito Sato's defense in class had felt like an earthquake. He hadn't defended her project contribution or her character. He had, without even knowing it, defended her. Not the image, but the person hidden behind the walls. He had done what only Kenji had ever done before.
She looked at her violin case, no longer just an instrument, but a symbol of everything she'd ever had to protect. For over a decade, the list of people allowed near it had exactly one name on it.
Now, trembling with a fear that was also a wild, impossible hope, she felt the list might just have grown by one.
(End of Chapter 11)