If you're wondering why on earth I wrote this: uni applications damaged me irreparably, and finding my old draft of In Time Gone By inspired me to cause more pai— ehem, expand the universe. Yes, this is set in the same AU as the last fic. Also, there's a part near the end that was written specifically for a dear reader of mine who commented on In Time Gone By: "Better [Solar] than Halilintar".
As for the choice of POV: I wanted to prove (partly to myself) that second-person fiction isn't necessarily bad. Let me know how that went.
I hope you're good at picking up on implied stuff!
Warnings: see previous chapter; mental health issues (implied).
***
When you're a guitar, you either witness very much or very little, depending on your owner's enthusiasm. Either you stare at the dark insides of a case for weeks on end, or you're loved and regularly played.
If you're lucky enough to get the latter, it's surprising how much of a story you see.
For example, you get to see your future owner carefully picking out an instrument in the store. You see how she inspects each guitar before shaking her head and moving on, moving closer to you. You see how her eyes light up, and you hear her say, "This one, please. This will be perfect for my boy," as she lays a hand on her swollen belly.
You're taken to a new home, and weeks later a screaming, kicking little creature joins you. From then on, every night in an obnoxiously colourful room, your new owner strums a gentle melody on your strings and hums a lullaby, all the while gazing tenderly at the creature. You watch it turn from a screaming, kicking creature to a snoozing, cuddling creature, and you start to empathize with your owner's gaze. The lullaby becomes familiar to you, the child dear to you.
The lullaby becomes a routine that lasts for years. You start to expect and look forward to the sunset, because that means your owner is coming soon to play that gentle melody to her child. You see them both every night, which of course is so often that you never notice any change—that is, until one day you realize with a start that the child is taller than you.
Then you can't help but notice how fast things change—how your owner's face gains permanent lines from laughter, how her husband's hair starts to lighten, how the child grows and grows and one day brings home a floating red ball whose abrasive voice bodes rather ill for your peace. You notice how your owner doesn't bring you out every night anymore.
Nowadays you see the world outside your guitar case less and less, and every time things have become more and more unfamiliar. The scribbles on the fridge disappear. Sports equipment comes and goes. Here, a shiny new motorbike helmet. There, a palm-sized box with something circular glinting inside.
You see a new person enter with the child, who isn't a child anymore, beaming brighter than the sun outside. You see the ring on her finger, the same ring you saw in that box once. You see her belly growing.
One day, a rather long while after your owner last played, different hands take you out of your case. It's the child—a grown man now—who carries you down the hall to the nursery, just like the days of old. He sits down in the same place his mother used to sit, overlooking the same crib where three babies squirm instead of one. His fingers find those familiar positions on your strings, and he plays the lullaby.
You watch these children grow, too.
You find it mildly amusing that your new owner needs to tie ribbons around his sons' wrists to tell them apart. Oh well, it benefits you too—you come to associate the cranky child with red, the cheerful child with blue, and the calm child with brown. And you love them.
You feared, at first, that because you loved the mother and son so thoroughly that now there wouldn't be enough love to go around, and you'd either have to give up one of your owners or never love these children who would become part of your life—but now you find that these children bring more love with them, more than enough, and you can still love everyone just fine.
But you remember last time, and you're afraid—afraid that one day, you'll be relegated back to your case, only able to witness crumbs of these children's growth, one day boys, the next day men. You don't want to be locked out of the lives of those you hold dear again. You watch carefully, fearfully, as the babies become toddlers far too quickly, waiting for the day the lullabies start to taper off.
Only—they don't taper off. Why? Because suddenly there are two more infants in the crib, while the last three are still scampering about the nursery. They get orange and cyan ribbons around their wrists, and they bring yet more love with them, and the cycle starts again before it even ends.
Your first owner disappears. Here one day, gone the next. Flowers and gifts and cards on the table. You feel something heavy in the air.
Soon after, the husband also disappears. Your current owner and his children all seem less lively than usual. But the result is that your owner plays your lullaby more often, so you suppose you can't complain.
You're reassured, more so when another pair of infants arrive as the twins are growing, and the triplets move out of the nursery. You're content as your lullaby soothes yet more children, the loneliness but a distant memory.
But after that, more children don't come. You watch with some nervousness, and then anxiety, then fear, as the twins with the green and silver ribbons start toddling about the nursery, and start writing crooked letters and scribbling on the walls, and start rifling through picture books, and still the crib doesn't reappear.
And the same day they go to preschool for the first time, you feel your case being picked up and carried—down the stairs, outdoors, onto something that growls deafeningly. You've only experienced this once before, when your first owner brought you home from the store. Does that mean you're being returned, being sent away from the place that's been your home since forever?
No. The next time the case opens, you see your owner's hands again. Beyond them is an unfamiliar metallic ceiling, and the growl has sunken to a muted rumble—not the music store.
Your owner carries you to a desk next to your case, where a screen projected onto the wall shows the children, all seven of them, gathered in the nursery. The lullaby is played on your strings again for the children that night, even though you have no idea where you are.
You're moved again soon after, and then you're left alone for what must be several days. You start to worry.
But soon enough your owner opens the case again, plays the lullaby through the screen again. You wait a few days again. Your owner plays again. Another few days, another lullaby. Before you realize it, you've fallen into a new routine. Sometimes your owner opens your case in a different place, sometimes you're back home—after a while the children start gathering in a different house—but you can always expect a lullaby before the week is gone. It's not nearly as often as before, but you get used enough to it that you hardly notice the in-between.
Time passes. The children start wearing caps in the colours of their childhood ribbons, while your owner keeps the ribbons themselves on his person. You almost miss the fact that the oldest of the children are as tall as your owner now.
And suddenly—your owner stops calling them. You're still taken out within the week, every week, but the devices are all off and the children are nowhere to be seen. Your owner plays quietly, morosely, with shaking hands. Sometimes, salty drops of water splash onto your curved wooden side.
Other times, you feel your case slide and jolt as the entire room accelerates and decelerates erratically, explosions of various strengths rattling your wood. Yet others, you bounce violently in your case as someone carries you away at a dead sprint, sounds of pops and metal on metal vibrating through your strings. Every time your owner opens the lid, you're in a new place, and he's in varying states of disarray.
Once, your owner has something tied around his wrist when he takes you out. You hardly recognize the deep blue ribbon, ragged and filthy as it is. Your owner's hands shake so much that he can't play at all. The water runs down your wood in streams.
After the session, the blue ribbon joins you in your case.
Eventually, another routine to fall into. But this one feels wrong: your owner never smiles anymore when he plays, and you never see the children. The brown ribbon, snapped in half, joins the blue. You miss his smile—your lullaby is supposed to soothe. You miss the children—they were all part of your routine for so long that you've come to think of them as sort-of owners too.
It's been so long. They must be grown by now. Maybe they're all taller than your owner.
All in all, you dislike this latest routine. But it doesn't change for a good long while, and when it does it's not in a good way.
It's when, for the first time in who-knows-how-long, you recognize the room your owner is in. It's that metal room that was your first residence after you left home, where your lullaby was played for the children through a screen for the first time.
Your hopes are dashed when you see no screen up and running. Your owner is especially jittery. He stops several times throughout the lullaby, head snapping up at the door like he's heard something.
Then you're left in your case for weeks. You wonder what's happened, and if it has anything to do with the state of mind you last saw your owner in.
You feel a surge of hope when the case is finally opened again, in the same room, but your owner doesn't play. He takes you out and hunts through every corner of your case, moving the tattered ribbons aside reverently, but he doesn't seem to find what he's looking for. Then he starts poking around the room, which already looks like gravity was reversed several times in it. When his search comes up empty, he looks again, a hint of frantic desperation in his eyes. And again. And again. And several more times until he sinks down in front of you, wet face buried in his hands.
The feeling of salty water splashing onto your wood is becoming familiar.
After a moment, your owner gets up and moves to the desk. A scrap of paper hastily coloured cyan flutters into your case before it closes.
The guitar sessions start to pick up again. Every now and then, your owner will take you out and play the lullaby a few times, sometimes crying, sometimes jittery, sometimes frighteningly calm. You often catch sight of the red, orange, green and silver ribbons above the desk, carefully pinned into place—although the red one is so faded it would probably be more accurate to describe it as pale pink. The orange one, already strained by the enterprises of its former owner, is threadbare. The green sports tiny bite marks, the silver chemical burns.
It's one of those times when tears are silently splashing onto you that something changes. The lullaby suddenly breaks off, your owner scrambling to his feet. You hear footsteps and shouts from outside the room. The hands grasping your fretboard tighten.
The door slides open. An unfamiliar face appears. Your owner moves, and the face rushes towards you with alarming speed, and then you're everywhere at once. On the floor, on the desk, on the mattress.
Your broken fragments are trampled underfoot as your owner wrestles with his attackers. You're crushed and kicked, wood chips bouncing around the desk, plastic sliding under the mattress, strings flying into the hall. Parts scattered across the ship, you can see everything at once, and it would have been an intriguing, perhaps exciting experience in any other circumstance.
It's not intriguing at all when your owner falls and is taken away, leaving behind eerie silence on the ship.
It's not exciting at all when you wait for an eternity, broken, for something to happen.
You think back to when you missed your first owner, when you worried about your second owner, when you feared the lullabies would become rare. It all seems so trivial now, existing as scraps in a spaceship that's been abandoned for... you don't even know how long. A guitar can't keep track of that much time.
That time you wanted your routine to change—you're starting to dearly regret that. Anything would be better than this endless, cold silence.
This is your changed routine. It's inexpressibly miserable.
But—after an infinite eternity of nothingness, you're suddenly scared half to decay by a ruckus in the hangar. There's a mighty crash and explosion. A faded chip of your wood by the door picks up frantic shouting. Then the door slides open and two people stumble out in a cloud of smoke and ash, coughing violently. You catch a glimpse of twisted metal and flaming shrapnel in the hangar behind them. The people seem familiar...
The children. Your owner's children. These are the boys who wore the red and silver ribbons, now grown and worn down.
The younger staggers, a hand pressed to his side. The older passes an arm under his shoulders and hauls him off to the sleeping quarters, stumbling every so often himself. The two of them settle into their father's old room, hunt for supplies, and fall into a new routine that doesn't seem particularly good or healthy—but you'll take it over the silence.
You don't wonder at the sheer coincidence of them crash-landing into their father's old residence; it's not in a guitar's nature to consider such things. You have room only for joy at seeing beloved faces after so long a nightmare.
You've grown used to seeing multiple rooms at once, your fragments still lying where they were scattered during the struggle. You watch your owner's children wander about the ship, worry over their state of mind (it seems to be following the pattern of their father's) and mull over how different, but in some ways not, they've become since you last saw them. It's like their childhood traits have been twisted and warped into maturity, and the result is an inquisitiveness without wonder, a stubbornness without determination.
While the younger sleeps uneasily, the older stares up at the ceiling for hours. You watch them from the debris on the desk. This you do wonder at, because your owner always had the hardest time putting his youngest son to sleep, but also the hardest time waking him up. One more instance of change.
The older boy develops a habit of getting up and poking around while his brother rests. He finds the janitor's closet, and for want of something to do, cleans the rooms. Your pieces are swept up and deposited in the trash. Piece by piece, you lose sight of the ship, and this time you fear because there's not much chance you'll get another chance to see the children.
Except—you don't lose it all. Because the older boy finds one of your old strings in the hallway outside the sleeping quarters, and instead of tossing it, he puts it on the desk. Over the next few days, you watch him assemble various scraps from around the ship by lamplight, sometimes keeping up a steady stream of curses, sometimes working with silent concentration.
Your string is tied and tuned in an intensely familiar way. Before you know it, you're once again a complete guitar.
Well, not exactly complete. You sound horrendous. But when the scratchy notes blend together into the lullaby, your lullaby, you can't bring yourself to care.
The older boy goes to store you in your old case. He opens it, sees the ribbons and paper, looks up at the other ribbons pinned on the wall. His face crumples. He sets you inside and closes the case without a word.
A few hours later, the lid is cracked open again by the same hand. The orange and green ribbons flutter in.
Your routine is new, but not. You wait in your case or against the wall. Sometimes the older boy collapses onto the mattress, idly strumming. When the room is dark but not silent, not cold—it reminds you of the nursery in the evenings—he plays the lullaby. Sometimes he cries, too.
Memory may be making a fool of you, but you feel like that's been happening more and more often as time passes. Surely a few weeks ago he didn't cry every time he played the lullaby to his brother?
Several weeks in, weeks which have flown by in comparison to the routine of silence, he suddenly stops playing. You're left, again, in your case for days on end. You wait and wonder. Your patience is eventually rewarded, weeks later, with the lid slowly opening—but not with music.
The silver ribbon is gently placed beside its companions.
The lights are never turned on in the sleeping quarters anymore. You can only keep track of the older boy when his trembling fingers pluck your strings, and when his tears drip onto your side. You don't know about anything or anyone else.
Some time passes in this way, your world reduced to warm touch and warm tears. It's not quite as bad as you would have thought, still in the presence of someone dear to you.
That is, until the touch and tears both taper off.
One day, when your case is opened after an age of abandonment, the narrow beam of a flashlight shines through. The first light you've had in weeks, maybe months. It bounces off your metal, bathing the older boy's face in a ghostly light.
It could just be the poor lighting, but you feel like there's something missing in that face. The boy was never very expressive, but there were always little tells that revealed how he really felt—now, there's no tells and no feelings.
He tosses the red ribbon, the one he himself used to wear, into the case. Then he shuts the lid, and there's a sort of finality in the resounding thud.
That's the last time the case is opened. It's not a temporary lull like that period between your owner's disappearance and his children's arrival—this period of silence never ends.
You never find out what happened to your owners, where they went after they disappeared from your routine. You can guess, but that's all they are—guesses. A guitar can't go out into the world to confirm suspicions. A guitar stays where it's left, always waiting for a player, and if none comes it will never know anything more about the world. Might as well be dead, if guitars could die.
When you're a beloved guitar, it's surprising how much of a story you get to see. But no one ever said anything about seeing how the story ends.
***
Sort of open ending, so you have a choice in how much pain you get.
For those who are studying English: "scare [one] half to decay" isn't actually an idiom. It's supposed to be "scare [one] half to death", but guitars don't exactly die, so.
Also, I'm sure it's obvious that the ribbons in the guitar case symbolize death, but here's some free extra pain for you: their appearances also symbolize the causes of death. Make of that what you will.