Haunted Sonata

The sun had settled into pools of blood and melted gold along the horizon and left obscured by the city's tall buildings. If nothing else, pollution made to amazing sunsets, even if the light and smog blotted out all but the brightest stars. Far past the bright lights and life of downtown were the commercial and residential areas, spreading further and further out towards the suburbs. The city was like a rat's nest with all of its life clustered closer to the center, places along the edges left abandoned to rot. Empty, fenced yards were filled with waist-high grass and weeds while the houses they belonged with had plywood over most every window and door, and those that weren't generally broken. Shingles on the roofs were rotting and falling in in places. In their prime, many of these houses had been prime real estate and nearly impossible to get into, everyone wanting to be part of a neighbourhood like this. Times changed with the people, and the ideals were left in the ashes.

A block of rowhouses stood in the fading light, most of them boarded up, torn down already, and not even fit for squatters, the tattered remains of condemned notices bleached and crumbling on the remaining doors. Like a forgotten grave yard, the city didn't care and neither did the people, the remains left to make a silent statement of the ideals gone by. One house in the middle of the dark row was mostly boarded up except for the highest windows in the three-story building covered in dark bricks and graffiti. he didn't remember coming home from work that day, or even what he did, but most of his days were blurred that way. Vash hated his job, but who didn't? It was only temporary, he told himself. Time and time again, the blonde reminded himself that nothing lasted forever. Well, almost nothing. He only had to hold out until after Roderich had finished his concert tours, and then he could look for toher work and their money would be secure. He walked down the hall, dropping his coat over a chair on his way to the kitchen. He looked idly at the wallpaper, wondering if he should replace it as a surprise, or paint over it just to get rid of that horrid floral pattern

Dripping from a leak unseen water spattered and echoed in a shallow puddle at the end of the hall, the teenager walking through and past it, never once hearing the drip nor seeing the ceiling tiles that had rotted from years of water damage. The tacky floral wallpaper was fine for now, and he could live with it just being hideous and outdated, not even aware that it had faded and peeled free from the plaster in so many places. With a sigh, Vash sat down in the kitchen at the little table meant to only seat four. This house would have been a joke to his family, their dining room table meant to host huge parties and a cook in their kitchen regularly. This life had been so different from the one e'd had, giving up the money he'd known all his life to scratch and scramble with his boyfriend, all for the sake of love. But it was worth it. It just felt gloomy now that Roderich was away, that was all. Suddenly he was stirring at the pot on the stove, not wanting the milk to boil while he made a sauce. He'd decided on alfredo? Vash shook his head. He was just tired, that was why things were slipping his mind; everything was a routine, so how could he bother paying attention. And it was just dinner with leftovers. Maybe tomorrow... he could call Lili and ask her to join him for dinner. It would be a nice break from counting down the days until Roderich came home.

He was upstairs. They rarely used anything on the third floor, and Vash had questioned what they'd even do with all the space this home had, but for the price, they'd never find anything nicer. In the darkness of the master bedroom's window a candle was burning, like the beacon of light from a distant lighthouse in a storm. It was an old superstition, but something he didn't mind doing since it brought him comfort that it would guide Roderich safely home soon. The second floor was almost as unused, the boys having to invent uses for, the only room mattering was the one Roderich used for his music. Walls were soundproofed, the floors were reinforced for the weight of the piano he'd paid personally to have put on the second story, and the cabinets that housed his instruments were always kept stocked and pristine. Vash sat at the bench of the piano, fingers glossing over smooth white plastic that had become cracked and yellowed with age. He himself didn't play, not really. A few little songs and basic things, and the only song that mattered to him. But he loved it. It was worth them fussing at each other through lessons to teach him, worth the brunette sulking if only to see his his eyes would change when Vash finally played the song perfectly as an apology and to say he loved him too.

The notes drifted out of the piano with the warped lid and yellow plastic keys, some wires broken from the iron harp inside and others terribly out of tune. But some were perfect, or near enough to carry the melody. The soundproofing had long-since crumbled from the walls, and there was nothing left to filter the sounds of the broken and distorted piano from inside a black and rotting house whose only hint of life was a candle burning in the highest window to help one who might have been lost, the candle's lighter never once thinking that it might have been him that was lost.