It's another morning to pass in calmness for Queensland Symphony Orchestra second violinist Eddy Chen: like every day before and every day to come, Death-Cast doesn't call him simply because he isn't dying today.
He's one of the luckier ones: people who don't wake up to the Allegro from Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11 blaring out of their phones, people who are lucky enough to have decades longer to live without being chosen as Death's next target—lucky people who get to live their lives in ease when tomorrow is certain.
He's unlucky sometimes, maybe. When your life doesn't quite orbit any definite motif besides survive, when your life doesn't have an outlined sense of direction and you're hanging by just the wayward compass lodged in your mind—maybe that is, in fact, a sort of death. Eddy isn't one to know, really.
When he's clicking and scrolling through the Last Friend app late into the night, wondering what it'd be like for someone to know they've completely run out of tomorrows, the moment comes that swings his heart and mind off-course and changes everything: he finds a profile he knows all too well and the pit of his stomach falls.
The unsettling blend of amazement and fear would've hit Eddy less if it had occurred to him before, why the conductor of the Queensland Symphony had sent out that email earlier in the evening, postponing the orchestra's upcoming concerts and marking the concertmaster's spot as empty. He could have had an answer, when the other string players talked about that regretfully, our upcoming concert programs will have to be postponed until further notice email.
He reaches out with a sorry you'll be lost, and with a string of messages back and forth, they connect—and it turns out the concertmaster of the QSO, bright and charismatic and exceptional on the violin as he is, really did get the call from Death-Cast.
In a spur-of-the-moment decision, Eddy offers to be Brett Yang's Last Friend and stay glued to his hip on his End Day, to get to know him outside their shared orchestral careers, to let him live every last tomorrow on his last day—even if it means he'll have to watch him die in the end.
It'll be worth the day we spend together, he tells himself countless times as he drives to his house, as little flecks of a warm childhood memory, mere minutes long and lost to all the years that came after, come to mind. It'll be worth living every last tomorrow with him.
"I'm outside," Eddy says into his phone, parking his car in the driveway and stepping out, slinging his violin case over his shoulder.
"Alright." Brett's voice comes tinny from the phone speaker. "I'll be there in a second."
Eddy hangs up, looking over to Brett's house just as the door swings ajar. A man with dark hair and glasses steps out, zipping up his jacket and slinging his violin case onto his back before walking over to where he stands.
"Hey."
"Hey."
It's different from their greetings in orchestra rehearsals, brief nods to eachother as one or the other walks in during tuning—here in front of Brett's house at four in the morning, they stand awkwardly, both waiting for the other to say something, anything.
Eddy wants to say something, anything, but he can't bring himself to open his mouth and form coherent words, to ask the question that's been etched all over his heart since day one: do you remember that afternoon all those years ago? He stays silent, and in this moment, he hates himself for it.
There's some things Eddy never stops to truly notice—but from where he stands this close, he can see the unique fleck against the white of Brett's left eye, the way the early morning breeze dances gently in his hair. It fills him with some feeling that makes his heart feel light, something he can't quite put his finger on; a feeling he carelessly wards off.
At last, Brett looks up at him with a small smile. "Thanks for keeping me company on my End Day, Eddy."
"Anytime." Eddy smiles back, but the barest hint of dejection within his ribcage almost drags him down. Does he not remember? "So...where do you wanna go first?"
Brett lifts his shoulder in a half shrug. "It's about four in the morning right now—I don't think anything's open at this hour." He gestures to the sidewalk. "Let's take a walk?"
• • •
It's a profoundly loud silence at first, both in the crisp air between them and over the entire neighborhood: it's nothing beyond faint splashes against awkward silence as their feet carelessly meet the rain puddles blotched over the sidewalk.
The minutes pass, and as the sky unveils its grayish morning blue, as the town slowly comes to life with the morning, their silence crescendoes into conversation easy as breathing. They talk about everything and nothing at the same time: themselves, music and orchestra, life and death.
"What's it like?" Eddy asks. "Getting the call?"
"It's a whole new level of terrifying—and heartbreaking too, honestly. You never know when they'll call you, if they even will—" Brett lets out a sharp breath, "and you only realize you've thrown most of your life away when you've only got twenty-four hours left of it."
"Basically when you get the call?"
"Yeah." Brett nods. "It's like your entire life's been turned around by that call. Before that moment, you have so many things ahead of you in life, but then everything, new and old, gets cut short—visiting places and meeting people you'll never get to see again."
"That's..." Eddy looks at him, lost in thought. "You always seemed like the deadpan-faced guy who wouldn't really mind if his life ended."
"I guess the whole deadpan-face thing kinda stuck after a while—but I don't want to die," Brett says quietly, looking blankly into the distance. "Not yet, when I've still got a whole life to live."
He falls silent at that, and Eddy follows, leaving him lost in his thoughts: on the other side of the blank guise he'd memorized a lifetime ago, there's a life just as intricate and whole as his. It survived easy as breathing, before today.
Before today, Brett thought he was one of the luckier ones, too.
Eddy looks up to see Brett gazing at him quietly, almost searching. He looks away, but Eddy stays looking.
He gazes at him now, and he sees life in everything that shouldn't have to die—he sees the liveliness that'd he'd never stopped to truly notice, flickering in vivid colors through every crevice of him. His heart mourns for everything that's to be lost in the soil six feet below, to exist the same as dead stars.
"Wanna get some coffee?" Brett asks suddenly. "If we're gonna be out all day on zero sleep, we at least need some energy."
Eddy tears his gaze away from Brett and realizes they're nearing a café. "Yeah, sure."
"You can go sit down—I'll order for us." Brett strides ahead to hold the door open for him: the strong aroma of coffee wafts beneath their noses, and it's far more full and livelier inside—the contrast between outdoors and indoors greets them pleasantly. "What d'you want?"
"A flat white would be good," Eddy says, and Brett nods before walking up to the counter.
Eddy sits down at a table beside the window, letting himself zone out into the morning flurry of the cafe, absently drumming his fingers to the notes of some orchestral pieces buried in his memory.
Broken lines of thought spiral endlessly in his mind, stretching every which-way. I wonder if we're going to go to today's orchestra rehearsal later. I wonder if Brett remembers anything of all those years ago at all. I don't want him to die. I don't want him to die.
"Earth to Eddy Chen?"
He looks up, and Brett's returned with two cups of coffee. "Apparently, they give food and drink for free to people who got the call," he says, taking a seat across from Eddy and holding out one of the coffees to him. "Here you go."
Eddy takes his coffee, and their hands brush, pause there, for a fraction of a second too long. In the chilly morning breeze, it's a blink of warmness between their hands that neither's versed in, and Brett averts his eyes.
"Thanks," Eddy says, breaking the tense air. His heartbeat still quavers within his chest.
Brett straightens up, cheeks still faintly flushed, drawing his hand back and taking a sip of coffee. "Yeah."
Eddy takes a sip of his own coffee: the first sip, just slightly too hot for his liking, singes his tongue. "Do we have a game plan for today?"
Brett props his chin on his hand, seemingly in thought. "I was thinking of visiting the graveyard, maybe going to today's orchestra rehearsal and playing music one final time. Having my funeral."
"Your funeral?"
"Oh, you haven't—ever since the whole Death-Cast thing went online, loved ones of people who got the call started doing funerals while the person's still alive."
"Graveyard, funeral, orchestra." Eddy counts on his fingers, raising an eyebrow. "That doesn't...seem like much."
The corners of Brett's mouth quirk up playfully. "I think living beside you on the day I'm gonna die is more than enough,maybe."
"You flatter me," Eddy deadpans, flippantly rolling his eyes—to hell with it, but his heart stumbles through its beats, and rather than butterflies, there's freaking pigeons in his stomach. It's the coffee, it's the coffee, it's the coffee.
It's fine. It's fine. He's long since mastered the art of holding up the epitome of utmost composure when, meanwhile, an entire orchestra's falling apart within his insides.
Brett laughs before downing the last of his coffee and taking out his phone—and Eddy remembers something.
"Did you get the email?" he asks Brett." From the conductor?"
Brett looks up again. "What email?"
"You probably didn't, then. He sent an email to everyone else saying the orchestra's upcoming programs are cancelled until they find another concertmaster. No one else understood what it meant—I only realized when I found your profile on the Last Friend app."
"Oh." Brett goes quiet, looking out the window.
"Are you...okay?"
"I...don't know if I'm okay, honestly. I mean, they have to promote someone else to the position, but...orchestra life has been my life for so long." Brett lets out a hollow laugh. "See what I mean with the 'life cut short' thing? It's like the difference between the sand at a beach and the sand in an hourglass."
At that, a blade twists mercilessly in Eddy's chest: at having the axis his life revolves around disappearing altogether, at something Eddy himself could never imagine.
He makes a silent promise to him, looking at the bleak night skies in his eyes: I'll make sure you live a thousand years in twenty-four hours, so long as you die with a smile.
"Let's go make your End Day a good one then, yeah?" He sips the last of his coffee and stands up. "The hourglass is losing its sand pretty darn quickly."