New World Symphony, mvt: Sunset

The sound of the sun setting behind the clouds was a sleepy moan in the stillness, and he shivered, twitched the curtains closed. White curtains, heavy draperies across the tall sheets of crystal glass, except now they were not white, but orange-dyed in the flaming, dying sun. Golden-orange in the light...

"Oniisama?"

The sound of the record's whirring, the strings of the violins stirring the strands of his hair one by one, and then yes, there were the flutes, fluttering above his head like windchimes in the wind that was not there.

"You didn't go to school again...did you?"

He could almost predict now when the low purring of the bassoon came in to entwine with the clarinet's plaintive calling. Like a lover, he almost thought, but pushed that away even before it could come to the forefront, because who was he to know the touch of a lover's embrace?

A sigh, the squeak of the door closing softly. Footsteps down the hallway. The beat of a bird's feathers.

The orange sunset.

Dvorak swelled out from under him like a cloud of air, bearing him up higher and higher, like a dance or like flying, only without wings, and he reached out and could almost touch that orange sun, but there was something there, a shape, a body, a face, someone who had been precious. Standing before the window, shadows cool like rain.

"Saionji...?" he said, but no, there was only the strains of the Largo fading and dying, and the sun also dying, slipping away below the horizon, and everything was dark and grey and soft again, and the stars were coming out.