Work Text:
What Shouto says when he introduces himself: Todoroki Shouto. Pianist.
What Shouto doesn’t say when he introduces himself: Todoroki Shouto, pianist not by choice, but because I’ve been sitting on the piano chair ever since I could sit. We had one of those adjustable chairs, so I never had the excuse of not being high enough to get my fingers onto the keys. At first, my parents sat me in front of the piano, but then I started seeking it myself - maybe it was revenge. Maybe it was a refuge. Do you think I’m dying?
What Shouto does not plan on saying, upon introduction or ever , to be quite frank (and he is notorious for being quite frank in any and all situations, even those that call for finesse): I love music as much as I loathe it, and I’ve been hearing you play for a week now, and you pour feelings into it. You pour so many of your feelings into it that I can barely recognize the piece, except of course I do, because it’s Chopin’s Nocturne Op.9.
Also, there’s a red string tied around your pinkie. It’s connected to the one tied around my own.
Incidentally, I can see the red string of fate. As one does.
The girl hasn’t even introduced herself yet. Shouto most definitely cannot monologue about his fate or tell her they’re quote-unquote soulmates. He doesn’t even really believe in soulmates. It’s ironic, because Fuyumi does, and yet it’s him that can see the red string.
“Momo Yaoyoruzu,” the girl says, after she has given Shouto a thorough scan from head to toe. She gestures to the piano vaguely, “Also a pianist.” She pauses, but still watches Shouto with the same intensity, as if she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. “Or, aspiring to be,” she adds, and waits.
Shouto doesn’t have another shoe. He left both of them in the genkan when he decided to finally follow through with the tug on his pinkie, for reasons he can’t quite rationalize, because, between I like Chopin too and I’m curious, Shouto sounds like a child. “I heard you play,” Shouto settles on, because etiquette probably dictates giving a reason as to why he walked into the private music school he has no affiliation with.
“In a bad way or in a good way?” the girl - Yaoyorozu - tilts her head, a question and a dare all the same.
The string on his pinkie tugs again, and Shouto takes an experimental step away from the doorframe he was leaning against and into the room. It’s an old place, wooden floors and linoleum on the walls. Dust dances into the air, visible where the sunlight caresses the edge of the piano. There are music sheets spread over a table in the corner, fluttering uselessly under the sharp-sign shaped paperweight with every gust of wind coming through the open window, and a couple of recordings stuck neatly into a bookcase that spans an entire wall, but apart from that, the piano alone thrones in the middle of the study, imposing and lonely.
“Your interpretation of Nocturne strikes me as very… personal,” Shouto says instead. Yaoyorozu looks at him like he just told her water is wet. He clears his throat and tries again, “Intense. The way you hit the keys, it was intense.”
She nods, like that tracks, fingers playing over the first few notes of Funeral March. “If you don’t put your own feelings into it, why are you even playing the piano?” she mutters, and then, louder, “Do you want to play?”
Shouto shakes his head. It’s been seven days since his first death, and yet he’s still here, in front of the piano. Maybe the piano is his death. “I came to listen.”
♭♮♭
Shouto’s first memory might actually be two memories fused into one, because he was barely older than eighteen months, but he has a very clear image of his mother, tying the red string around pinkie tighter, pulling the thread into a thick knot where it’s weakened, and then: music . Shouto doesn’t know which piece it is, but he knows he hears the piano as his mother gives the string one last tug, and in his (most likely warped) memory, the first keys sound like a cry.
As far back as he can remember, Shouto has been able to see the red string. He tugs on his mother’s, and she chuckles and tugs his back. He also tries to tug on Fuyumi’s, and she just watches her pinky jerk with concern and then whines, “Mom, it happened again! ”
Shouto makes a curious noise in the back of his throat and looks at his mother with wide eyes.
“Not everyone can see their string,” his mom later explains.
“Why?”
His mother hums, like she has never considered that one-word question. “Do you know what the string is?” Shouto shakes his head, tugging at the thread tied against his pinky. Sometimes he wakes up in the morning and is surprised at how it hasn’t fallen off in his sleep. When Natsuo tickles him, the string stays untouched. Shouto can never see the end of it, and even if he tries following it, the string just fades into nothingness about fifty steps later.
He tells his mother as much, and she ruffles his hair fondly. “That’s because you’re not ready to meet the person at the other end of the string yet.”
“The other person?”
“Mhm. The string always has two ends, Shouto. There’s someone really special at the other end of it, waiting for you.”
“Who?” Shouto asks, bouncing in her lap. His father doesn’t like it when Shouto plays with Fuyumi and Natsuo instead of sitting in front of the music sheets, but if his string is connecting him to someone, that means he has to play with them, doesn’t it?
“Someone special,” his mom repeats, and Shouto can tell she’s holding something back. “Maybe that’s why not everyone sees their red string.”
“Not everyone has someone special waiting for them?” Shouto asks, feeling a bit sad. After all, Fuyumi is really nice, and Shouto wants her to be happy and play with other kids, too.
His mother smiles, but it feels wrong. It doesn’t touch her eyes when she hugs him to his chest, and that feels wrong too. The way the words leave her mouth has her chest shuddering, but when Shouto tries to pull back so he can hug her properly, she just squeezes him harder.
“Everyone has someone special, sweetheart. Some people just get to choose.”
♭♮♭
“You’re here again,” Yaoyorozu says, just like someone would say, Sunny weather we’re having today, ain’t it? “Are you going to play today?”
Shouto shakes his head and sits on one of the tables, stealing a glance at the music sheets Yaoyorozu has propted against the piano. Today, it’s Mozart. Fitting, Shouto can’t help but think, as Yaoyorozu’s back arches with every note of the Piano Sonata No.11 , fingers flying over the keys faster and faster, never losing their elegant cadence. It’s fitting that Yaoyorozu chooses a piece that plays around the whole breadth of the keyboard, that her notes seem to be dancing around in the breeze, that her foot taps along rhythmically, almost playfully.
It’s fitting that Yaoyorozu chose a work by a genius who died young when Shouto refused to play the piano. Are you dying? the piece seems to be asking.
“I’m here, you know,” Shouto mumbles.
“What was that?” Yaoyorozu asks, a challenge in her eyes. The red string is tied to her left pinky, and Shouto feels quite naive for thinking that a thread was going to somehow convey his thoughts and feelings to a stranger.
“I said, your notes were drifting at the end. You picked up the tempo.”
“I meant to.” It doesn’t sound like an excuse. It sounds like a proclamation. I’m alive, you know?
Shouto takes a deep breath - the room smells dusty, but in that old way that makes you want to stop time to travel back to when the music sheets were written, to when the sound of an engine wouldn’t trickle in through the open window and disturb the late summer peace, to when someone tied the red string to Shouto’s pinky and set him free into this world.
Yaoyorozu starts playing Piano Sonata No. 13 , and keeps playing it every day for the rest of the week, and then the following week, and then the next.
♭♮♭
“An artist first dies when they can no longer perform,” his mother tells him about a month before she experiences her first death. Her violin returns to its black case as she is sent between white walls, on a white bed, in white clothes.
Shouto tries to pick up the violin after that, but the weight of it feels wrong in his too small arms. His neck cramps after half an hour, and he starts missing the piano, the way hitting the keys feels under his fingertips, the weightlessness of his fingers hovering in the air after he’s hit the last note, the way the words reverberate in his very marrow.
The piano always welcomes him, and Shouto takes the shape of it. He never leans against the backrest when sitting down, not even at school, always keeps his back poised straight and his feet slightly raised. He keeps his nails trimmed and his hair out of his face, so he can always glance at the music sheets. He never goes around the stove without the kitchen mittens, because he doesn’t have the best track record at not being clumsy. He always washes his hands first, then wipes down the mahogany with a handkerchief that he always keeps in his pocket.
The piano becomes his friend, because Shouto isn’t allowed to play unless he’s playing music. Then it becomes his parent, because his mother is made to leave home and his father chooses to rarely be home in turn. Then, it becomes Shouto’s entire life. The piano, music, him - Shouto doesn’t know where one ends and the other one begins, ignoring the blurry in-between lines until they disappear completely.
For ten years, Shouto pretends to not see the lines, or the string, and becomes music. Swiftly, as deaths tend to happen, he finds that he isn’t immortal.
The story goes like this: boy plays the piano. Boy joins the best music academy in the country, and befriends (or rather, is befriended by) boy who plays violin. Boy remembers his mother’s violin, in a black case, dying its first death. Boy who plays violin asks if he likes playing the piano, and boy thinks, I don’t know .
Boy walks home aimlessly, wondering if he’s ever loved music at all, or if it was just comfortable, or if it was just all he’s ever known. Boy passes by a private music academy and feels his red string pull. Boy thinks about quitting the piano, then about how the person at the other end of the string is supposed to understand him.
Boy considers numbers: seven is good. It’s odd. It’s a prime number. It’s a magic number, according to his sister. Boy stalls for a week, counts down the days, then walks into the academy on the seventh day.
♭♮♭
Yaoyorozu keeps playing Piano Sonata No. 13.
“There’s an upcoming competition,” she says one day, unprompted. (It’s the nineteenth day. Shouto has been counting, because he thinks he’d like to be able to keep a record of his death. It won’t be put on his tombstone, but he’ll know how many days/weeks/months/years he’s lived until his second death, and maybe he’ll break some sort of record. Ever heard of the boy who died twice? ) “Are you going to participate?”
“Huh?”
“The Amadeus-Mozartian Competiton ,” Yaoyorozu repeats. “Are you going to participate, Todoroki-san?”
Shouto tugs on the thread tied to his pinky forlornly. Why would someone meant to be special to him twist the knife in the wound like that?
Maybe she can read his thoughts after all, because she adds, “Todoroki-san, I know how good you are. I’ve seen you at competitions before. I’ve seen you in the newspaper. Why are you really here?”
In all of his twelve days here, Shouto has learned that Yaoyorozu would abruptly stop in the middle of the play if the piece feels lackluster, bite her lower lip, mutter something inaudible to herself, and then start again from the top. She also keeps a nailclipper and a handkerchief in her purse. She sits up straight, but she hasn’t cut her bangs. Unlike Shouto, who only moves his arms for efficiency, she plays with her whole body, like music is visceral, like she’s a corporeal vessel for it rather than a blurr of lines.
In all of the almost two weeks here, Yaoyorozu has suddenly stopped playing, and looked up at him to ask, “Do you think life comes full circle?”
Or, “Do you think the recapitulations are there because we never learn lessons the first time around?”
Or, “Every time I make it to the third movement, I like to think the change in tone and the chord breaks are there because when we look at past events after a while has passed, we see them in a different light. It’s a bit like a kaleidoscope - you can look at the same image but see totally different things if you twist the angle just a bit.”
Or, maybe most memorably, “Why are you really here?”
Shouto thinks his life is like the Piano Sonata No. 13. It starts up all allegro , a child following around his string and pulling on others’ for fun and hugging his mother before bed. A child sitting in front of a piano, and thinking music is pretty, that it has a magic sort of pull to it. A rat in Pied Piper’s story.
The second movement is slow, and Shouto doesn’t like it as much, because this is where the dark violin collects dust in its black box, and where the piano shifts from being a magic box to being a refuge, and then to being revenge, and then to being just a piano, this heavy, suffocaing thing that makes noises. Shouto plays it to make noise, to substitute screaming, to have people listen to his agonizing stillness and find it beautiful. The second movement is a prelude to his first death, and yet it’s written in sonata form, a romanticism that Shouto finds ironic.
The third movement, Shouto thinks, looking at Yaoyorozu ( There’s someone special for you at the other end of the string), is probably where he is right now. (Someone who’s going to understand you.) And maybe she was right - maybe life does come full circle, and you look at your broken past (Are you dead?) and see it in a new light. (Why are you here, Todoroki-san?)
“I thought about not playing the piano, for a while. Actually, I haven’t played the piano in nineteen days.”
“Why do you keep count if you want to stop?” Yaoyorozu asks. It’s a variation on Why are you here? , a change of key.
Nineteen is a good number - odd, prime. Not magical. Fitting for a revival that was never meant to happen magically, because even when he tried to stay away from the piano, he followed the sound of Chopin’s Nocturne to the other end of his red string. As fate would have it (Shouto snorts internally), he was always meant to be music, play music, let himself be played by music.
“I think I didn’t like music that much.”
“It’s hard to like something you’ve been stuffing yourself for to the point of feeling sick.” Yaoyorozu looks at him like she can see through him, and asks, “Do you want to play today?”
The piano has always had a pull on him, but this time, it’s also Yaoyorozu, twisting the red string around her pinky like she’s casually fishing, giving Shouto a smug smile when she notices the way his eyebrows twitch. “Are you disappointed?” she asks, but looks like she already knows the answer to it and just wants to hear it out loud.
Shouto could give it to her straight ( No, I’ve been thinking about how the light plays on your hair when you play, and how much of yourself you put into music, and how I don’t really believe in soulmates but this could be a thing. Us. I think I like us. )
Instead, Shouto walks to the piano chair, and sits down with his back poised and his feet slightly off the ground, and begins his second life, after a short nineteen-day life as a music-less ghost, by playing the Piano Sonata No.13 .
♭♮♭
“You should’ve seen your face,” Momo chuckles. “You looked like you’ve never met anyone else who can see the red string.”
“Because I haven’t,” Shouto mumbles, and is entirely too aware that he sounds like a petulant child. “It’s been two years, are you going to keep lording this over me for much longer?”
Momo swings their intertwined hands, “I mean, we are pretty much stuck together, so I’ll have the rest of my life to find out new ways of bringing this up to embarrass you when we meet our friends.”
This is Jirou’s influence, Shouto is sure. The Momo he met two years ago in a dusty music study wasn’t this cheeky - but also, this Momo has no qualms implying that she’d happily spend the rest of her life with him, so Shouto considers it an equivalent exchange, maybe. Some form of divine retribution. Love, in that worn way, when you’ve known each other for two years and feel settled instead of feeling butterflies, where excitement comes from bickering and deciding what’s for lunch tomorrow and casually swinging your hands as you walk home.
Home is a two-bedroom apartment, with a piano throning the living room. Home is waking up and following the red string into the bathroom to brush your teeth side by side. Home is that feeling of playing music after being dead for nineteen days, and realizing that hating something doesn’t invalidate loving it.
Home is introducing yourself as Todoroki Shouto, pianist , and not having to come up with any footnotes.