3The Song with the Missing Half
by S'cyre Lecareixz
The mansion was broken down, boarded-up and abandoned for decades. Its walls and furniture covered with far too many layers of dust and most of their antiques and paintings pilfered by thieves. A once proud and prestigious household degraded and stripped from its former magnificence.
A ghost roamed the halls, his translucent form gracing the lonely hallways with equal silence. The thin and lanky boy looked no older than eighteen, dressed in simple clothing, a long white button-up shirt and a pair of white trousers. With his smooth and milky skin and his slightly long silvery hair, everything about him was white, save for his eyes which were black.
His name was Requiem and solemnly he crossed the hallways and into a room that was next to the garden. He gazed at the lushness longingly from the door-like windows, the ebony in his eyes dulled with unfathomable sorrow. It was as if he was pleading the windows to open for him and free him. But they had no eyes to see his yearning and he sighed inaudibly, looking around the deteriorating mess that was his home and his haunt. It always saddened him to see the mansion at such a state and whenever the feeling was too much he would turn to the piano for comfort, for illusion.
Requiem strode to the grand black piano and ran his pale fingers lightly, feeling the cold and smooth exterior, the dust on its black surface sticking to his fingers like magnet to metal. It was strange that the piano was the one and only thing his wraithlike body could touch, but he was thankful. If he was stranded as the dead in the midst of the living let him be at least with the one thing he cherished the most: music.
He sat on the cushioned rectangular chair and it didn't even take him a split second of thought to start drumming his fingers on the keys to make them sing.
With each note that echoed across the hollow passage ways, each key that was pressed, illusion formed. One by one, from the moth-eaten curtains to the dusty antiques and stolen figurines, everything came back, glorious once more.
The ebony eyed boy smiled, looking around him to see what he and his illusions had fixed and he closed them, trusting himself to play blindly yet still perfectly. His fingers were far too familiar with the keys to permit him to make a mistake as he passionately tapped on it.
Requiem sighed, a soft and contented sigh, as he listened. He loved this piece despite the missing half of the song. He wasn't the only one who wrote it after all. It was their piece, they wrote it together and without each other the song would never be complete. And he loved it for the sweet melodies and the memories attached to it, even though both the sound and reminder of the song would often leave him suddenly shuddering in melancholic tears. But the convulsion and didn't come today. Only the quiet streaming of water down his eyes and cheeks came to visit him today. It was just as painful, but the fact that he wasn't driven to cease playing the piano and stop the music that flowed from it that made it hurt a little less.
Sometimes he tried trying to fill the other half by himself, but it never sounded the same, it was never the same, not even close. And as the song started to reach its ending notes again and he repeated the whole song just before it reached that final note before it would give way to the next half. Requiem was calling out again, calling for the person with other half of the song, even though he knew it was all in vain. The other would have been gone now, gone so long ago, gone the moment he turned his back and fled. He regretted it, but there was nothing else he could do. Nothing but to play and drown in the sorrows and rue.
A/N: Successful in finally completing this one-shot, been sitting there fore ages. And I should note that I really made his lover sound dead, but the lover really isn't, just gone because Requiem knew he couldn't go back after he fled or something vague like that. There might be another one-shot to complement this, in the POV of the other half of the song, but don't know.