어둠뿐인 이 세상에 네 눈빛이

J thinks about a lot of things. He thinks of too little. He acts on impulse, or he deliberates too long. Even when he was younger, happier, he never really knew how to find the right balance. Always too much, always too little.

For a little while, he couldn't stop his thoughts racing, his mind filled and overflowing, overwhelmed. This time, when they sang to him, he heard it for the invitation it was, and he wondered if this was it — in this last movement, this final act of his, did he hear them more clearly than before? Did he understand them now in a way he didn't previously?

The professor called him a murderer. That's true. He knows it now, in a way he couldn't fully bring himself to grasp before. It's not something J can justify, even now, but he thinks, at least, with this, he's finished the task he set out to accomplish, and given all of them purpose, his victims and himself. A little bit of justice, too. He hopes he has, at least, that they'll find peace in their next lives, knowing in some intrinsic and distant fashion that their killer died too. That the sonata was completed.

There's much to be done, enough that he loses track — get the journal delivered, the music put aside, douse the room in gasoline. It has to go, all of it has to go, the room where he committed such atrocities, the piano at which he wrote this work, every trace of himself erased except for the notes on those bloodstained pages. That it isn't a room that belongs to him doesn't matter. All of this must end.

The fumes from the gasoline alone would make him dizzy, but he's already there, lightheaded, staggering over the piano with the canister. He can barely feel his left arm anymore; distantly, he's aware that's probably why he's so unsteady on his feet. He, too, must end.

Maybe it undoes his efforts, his weak attempt to offer up some kind of justice or retribution for his crimes, that he feels calmer now than he has in months. In years, maybe, except in those brief and unnerving patches of time when he's felt nothing at all. For so long, there's been such an agony tearing at his heart, his lungs, stifling him, breaking him open, so all-encompassing he often forgets how it felt to feel anything else or to feel a normal amount. This, then, comes as a relief.

It's over.

The flames catch and crackle, and he takes his customary seat at the bench. A last song — not a new piece, not for that cursed sonata, but for himself. For them.

Not that there's a them anymore, but there was. He doesn't deserve the kind of luck it would take for them to meet again, but he longs for it all the same, a thin ache in the middle of this peace.

"My hands dance on the keyboard," he sings. The song is simple and light, utterly unlike anything he's written in a long time. His finest work, perhaps, his first. The smoke and exhaustion leave him straining, but he hardly notices it, hardly notices anything now. Everything fades in and out, the room glowing with the growing flames and the light of dawn seeping through the windows. "The notes become me, the rest becomes you."

He wrote it for S long ago — his first love, his truest inspiration. His only love, really. "Mormorando, quietly and murmuringly," he sings, hissing a little at the heat, the pain. "Sforzando, playing the note with strong emphasis."

Straining, gasping, he leans over the piano, steeling himself to continue. It's important, he has to. "Come on, finish it," he urges. "I'll come to you so that it doesn't fade."

Maybe it won't. Maybe the music will weave its spell. Maybe they'll both find peace of a kind. He doesn't know if S yet lives or if he's died, if his efforts to get help for him were in vain. He doesn't know if he'll ever see him again, the very thought threatening to break his calm. But he can hope. He can hope, if nothing else, that S will be okay, wherever he is, whatever life he lives. As badly as J wants to follow through, to come to him, he knows that, if there's any fairness at all in the world, he won't be able to. He doesn't deserve that kind of mercy or forgiveness.

He closes the lid of the piano, reaching blindly for the sheet music, grasping it to his chest. It's frustrating, really. For a little bit there, he thought he felt a kind of calm he didn't think he'd know again, something like being at rest. Instead it comes crashing down over him again, the grief and the guilt and the longing for what he can never have, for so many things, for him. It doesn't matter what he wants. Tears welling up in his eyes again, he knows it doesn't matter. The blood he spilled is as indelible as the ink on these pages, and no flame can burn that way.

Incalzando. That is the last of what he knows.

And then the first. And then, light. Not the brilliance of flame, though even now everything is glowing red when J closes his eyes, but daylight seeping in, and, with it, the sounds of a city alive.

And so he stands in a new world, blinking as he adjusts — to light, to life — his clothes blackened in patches with soot, singed where the flames caressed him, blood staining his fingers. With a low, shuddering breath, J hastily tugs at his sleeve, rolling it down over the torn flesh of his left arm, only to stop when he sees how the marks have all but healed, leaving only a single fading word. He opens his mouth again, a panicked cry on his tongue, and is met instead with a racking cough, his lungs thick with smoke.