~from Akira's POV 2nd person~
You finished the song and sat on the bench, poised like a marionette, ready at any moment to strike another key. While playing, you had felt your tension melt away and dissolve into the interweaving sound waves of melodies and harmonies and chords, but now that silence had eaten the sound, you felt your body condense slightly, crumbling in on itself, growing tense and high-strung.
Then you heard the silence broken up by a sparse spattering of applause. "It was beautiful," Decim said in his detached way. "Truly."
You stared at the keys. You didn't shake your head because the rejection of his compliment was ingrained in your soul. "All I do is make mistakes."
"No music you produce could ever be a mistake," he said, again in that monotone voice, and you looked up at him, furious out of nowhere.
"You say stupid things like that because you don't know! I could play a D sharp instead of an E natural and you would say it sounded fine because you don't understand the way human music works! There are right notes and there are wrong notes and those are the only ones I seem to ever hit! You can't possibly understand how frustrating it is to know what you're supposed to do and then fail every time because your fingers are too short and your wrists are too tight! The only thing that you can understand about me is that I can't feel pain because you can't feel human emotions, but we're still different! You don't know what it's like to feel piano wire wrapped around your neck and-" You cut off suddenly, and a moment later, your tears were landing on the ivory white keys.
Plunk. Plunk. You started laughing suddenly. "I can't hit the right notes for the life of me, but two droplets of water can do it." You clenched your hand in a fist and slammed it on the keys.
Decim just waited silently. "Akira...you're right. I do not know which notes properly theoretically harmonize or form recognizable sequences or patterns. I am not knowledgeable in this area, just as I was not particularly knowledgeable in Chiyuki's art of ice skating. You are right in that I am not human, and I cannot hope nor pretend to be. But when you play the piano, all I hear is your love for life. I don't hear your pain or what drove you to come here. You forget all of that when you play."
"But I can't play, Decim!"
"Sure you can."
"But it's wrong, it's all wrong! No matter how much I practiced, I couldn't get it right! Piano was all I had. When you break something you love and can't fix it...that's the end."
~from Decim's POV 2nd person~
Akira's words reminded me of Chiyuki. She was gone, and if I couldn't help Akira, then it was the end, for Chiyuki, for Akira, for all of their future reincarnations.
But how was I supposed to save Akira? How was I supposed to save myself?