Nakyung was the one to break the silence.
"Well, Omma told me to show you the main practice room, and I have. This is it." She gestured at the room in a vague sweep. "Okay now your turn. Play something. Or," as if realizing belatedly how bossy she sounded, she added, "you can just sit there till dinner, that's fine too."
Jaemin cast a small smile in her direction, knowing that the words had come out snappier than she'd intended. But the smile faded when he turned back to the piano.
"I don't think I'll be able to perform anything worthwhile right now," he murmured.
"Nobody asked for a performance." Nakyung's tone was brisk but not unkind. "I asked you to play. There's a difference."
Still, he stared at the keys. White and black, familiar as breath… yet, somehow, too far away.
How many years had it been, since he'd last sat at a piano with nothing to prove?
Jaehyun's office had one, a small upright that stood in the room more as a tool than an instrument. And in the early days, the days Jaemin had arrived at the door barely able to make himself knock, Jaehyun hadn't asked him to play at all. He had asked him to listen. A recording, sometimes, or a single phrase, repeated in different ways.
Later, when the worst of it had settled into something more like scar tissue than an open wound, there were exercises. Still, it had taken a long time for Jaemin to voluntarily opt for the piano, instead of anything else.
Music in Jaehyun's office had been a place Jaemin could be clumsy in, could be openly broken. It was the only reason Jaemin had eventually been able to be anything else.
That had been for rehabilitation. And it had worked, in its way. He had come out the other side functional, capable of interpretation, of conducting, of drawing sound out of other composers' work through other people's instruments with steady hands.
But he had never played anything of his own since. That spark of composition, of creation, had sputtered out with the flames that consumed his scores on that last day in Vienna.
He'd told himself it was enough. It had to be enough.
What else was there?
Nakyung looked at him for a moment, and something shifted quietly behind her eyes.
"It doesn't have to be big, or neat," she murmured. "Just something. Anything. As long as you make it yours."
Before Jaemin could respond, before he could say that the only piece he had ever truly poured himself into had been stolen and warped and weaponized against him, she unfurled from her chair and started towards the door.
"Anyway, I've got some stuff to do. Dinner's at six. This room is soundproof, but feel free to wander if you get bored here. If you get lost, just ask the staff."
Long after her footsteps had retreated down the corridor, Jaemin sat, hands folded in his lap, in the amber quiet of late afternoon. The keys in front of him remained untouched.
He thought about what Nakyung had said earlier:
Your scent has eased since you stepped in here.
He hadn't noticed, but he felt the truth of it now: being in this room, full of the memories and life of another omega musician, had done something to him before he'd been conscious of it.
This wasn't Jaehyun's office. There was no framework here, no gentle structure, no prescribed exercise to contain whatever materialised. He looked up at the photograph of Do-hyun's father.
What else was there?
An exhale. A freedom to let go. The freedom to just be.
He reached out with one hand, and pressed a single key. The note rang out, slightly thick, before fading slowly back into the silence.
He played another. Then another. Nothing deliberate; just intervals. Testing the ice for the possibility of safe passage.
Then a phrase emerged on its own, something small and unplanned, and his hands began to move.
A folk melody his mother used to hum while chopping onions when she thought no one was watching, reharmonised in careful chords that leaned into tenderness without trying to prove anything.
The notes were soft, the phrasing cautious, as if he was afraid the air might punish him for taking up space. But as the melody moved, something loosened.
He didn't know how long he played. The light shifted and deepened around him.
At some point he thought he felt something change near the door: a presence at the threshold, there and then gone, or perhaps never there at all. His Command-battered senses were still unreliable, and he didn't trust the fine hairs on the back of his neck to mean anything real.
He didn't turn around. He kept playing.
What else was there?
Me, he thought, and felt a warmth bloom deep in his chest. I'm still here. After all you've done to me… I'm still here.
You can't silence me.
A line that rose, faltered, then rose again, refusing to resolve too quickly. A phrase which persisted, that didn't sit quite right, but held no apology for existing.
He kept playing. And here, in a room full of a dead man's things and the wreckage of everything, the crushing anxiety in his chest finally loosened, just enough to let him breathe.
…
He came back the next day. It wasn't a conscious decision; he simply found himself wandering in after breakfast, maybe because this was the only other room he knew the way to. But that was alright.
This time, he played longer. He started with the folk melody again, but it fractured partway through; his left hand wandered into unexpected minor colorings, found something darker underneath, and followed it down. His right hand lingered on dissonances longer than was polite.
It wasn't the sort of thing you played for anyone, but he played it anyway. Nobody was listening, anyway. It was just him, tugging on the threads of the music until long after the room had darkened.
…
On the afternoon of the third day, Nakyung appeared unannounced. She dropped sideways into a seat the way she always did, as if chairs were merely suggestions, peeling a tangerine and popping slices into her mouth.
The knowledge of being heard did something uncomfortable to Jaemin's hands at first: a tightening, a tremor, an impulse to make it presentable.
But Nakyung had the useful quality of appearing genuinely uninterested in being impressed. She scrolled on her phone, smiled to herself as she replied to texts, swung her feet in lazy arcs as she slid lower and lower in her seat. As if she was only there because she had nowhere better to pass the time.
When he hit a passage that was clearly unfinished, stopping abruptly on a suspended note that had nowhere to go yet, she gave no reaction except to say, "Ooh."
Jaemin turned to her, cheeks coloring slightly. "It's nothing yet."
"Mm." She kept her eyes fixed on her phone, but murmured, "Sounds like it wants to explore different possibilities."
Jaemin considered it, playing a few variations of where it could go until one slipped into place, tugging insistently at him like a small child. He played it again, and looked up to find Nakyung watching him.
"Fun." A hint of a grin played at the corners of her mouth, but it was fleeting, disappearing when she got up and stretched her arms over her head. "Anyway, it's time for dinner. Omma will start to worry if you skip your meals again today."