Chapter 30 - A Guest from Sagan

Michi caught her breath sharply, her breathing briefly catching as her brother's eyes bore straight into hers. "Bayu, don't do anything stupid. Don't go see him—"

"Who said anything about doing something stupid?" Bayu cut in, a thin smile that never quite reached his eyes. The young man adjusted the strap of his backpack, then took a slow step backward. "I just want to see for myself which indie musician managed to make the Suryokusumo family's prize pianist brave enough to challenge a conservatory professor. Relax, Kak. I just want to have a civil conversation."

Before Michi could catch up to him or protest any further, Bayu had already turned on his heel, walking off down the corridor with his footsteps ringing sharp and decisive against the marble floor.

Michi stood frozen in place, her breathing still ragged from the leftover tension of her fierce confrontation with Professor Hans. Her fingers, gripping the strap of her bag, had gone cold. She only now fully registered just how serious the threat in her brother's eyes had actually been. Just as she was about to run after him, her steps were briefly held up by another lecturer at the far end of the corridor asking about her scholarship paperwork—precious time wasted on that bureaucratic small talk.

By the time she managed to break free and sprint toward the campus parking area, Bayu was, of course, nowhere to be seen. Her brother had almost certainly already hailed a ride or taken the fastest shortcut across the city. Michi's heart dropped violently. She knew her brother's character all too well; Bayu didn't make idle threats. In a panic, Michi started up her scooter's engine, twisting the throttle hard as she cut through Yogyakarta's evening traffic, silently praying she wouldn't arrive too late at Rimba's studio.

As evening approached, the atmosphere around Tirtodipuran felt quieter, the wind carrying the damp scent of asphalt still wet from that afternoon's rain. Inside Basement Studio Number Three, Rimba was busy organizing sheet after sheet of arrangement notes on the mixing desk, while the soft sound of an acoustic guitar recording looped quietly from a small monitor speaker in the corner of the room.

With no formal knock—exactly the kind of habit belonging to someone who didn't respect the privacy of an indie band's den—the studio's sliding door suddenly swung wide open.

Rimba looked up slowly from his desk. His sharp eyes immediately caught sight of a well-built young man with a backpack slung over one shoulder standing in the doorway. The firm set of his jaw and the calm aura radiating a distinct family authority instantly set off every survival instinct Rimba had. He didn't need to guess twice to know exactly who the young man standing in front of him was.

"So, you're the one called Rimba Arya Swara?" the young baritone voice broke the studio's silence, flat, measured, without a trace of discomfort even standing in a room thick with the smell of light tobacco and scattered piles of audio cable.

Rimba set down the pencil in his hand slowly, then rose from his tall stool. He crossed his arms over his chest, studying the young man in front of him with a thin smirk deliberately put on to mask his full state of alert.

"And you must be Bayu," Rimba replied calmly, his voice low but heavy with a curiosity he was holding carefully in check. "Arunika's one and only younger brother, who apparently likes to dissect the logical structure of classical music before bed."

Bayu stepped inside uninvited, his eyes sweeping across every corner of the dirty, cluttered room. He stopped right in front of the magnetic whiteboard where Rimba had scrawled out harmony formulas, examining every mark with the eye of a genuine art critic.

"Kak Michi hasn't told me much about this place," Bayu said coldly, his fingers touching the edge of a score sheet sticking out on top of the mixing desk. "But the way she was brave enough to declare war on a conservatory professor today is more than enough to make me curious as hell about the guy behind that bad influence."

Rimba narrowed his eyes, staring directly into Bayu's without blinking. "Bad influence, you call it? Or are you actually just scared that your sister has finally realized her whole life's been arranged like some show puppet?"

Bayu let out a short huff, a cold, humorless laugh slipping past his lips. "Show puppet? You think life's just about rebelling with a beat-up guitar and clove cigarettes, Swara? Kak Michi has dedicated her entire youth, every single second of her life, to upholding this family's honor without ever once complaining or pushing back. If the fake courage you've been feeding her ends up destroying her future in Vienna... I will personally make sure you're erased from her life for good."

Rimba didn't answer right away. Rather than take offense, his jaw tightened instead, feeling exactly how precise a hit the young man's words had landed—the very fear he'd kept locked away tightly all this time: that his own messy existence would only ever become a thorn buried in the flesh of Michi's bright future. Still, he had no intention of looking weak in front of his girlfriend's brother.

"If you actually knew your sister," Rimba's voice softened but still carried a heavy weight of emotion, "you'd know she doesn't just need someone to lock her up safe inside the conservatory's golden cage. She needs room to breathe. And I'm not someone trying to wreck her dreams; I'm actually the one who made her realize she has every right to choose her own path."

Bayu went still for a moment. The sharp look in the young man's eyes locked with the dark, absolutely honest gaze staring back at him from Rimba. A thick silence crept back over the corners of the basement studio, erasing the last traces of hostility and replacing it with a quiet, unspoken understanding between two souls who both, in their own way, wanted to protect the very same person.

For a long moment neither of them moved to break that silence, each one taking the measure of the other in a way words hadn't quite managed. Whatever Bayu had come there intending to say, it was clear now that some of it had already been answered—not by an apology, and not by backing down, but by the simple fact that Rimba hadn't flinched once, hadn't tried to charm his way past the accusation, and hadn't pretended the risk to Michi's future wasn't real. It wasn't trust yet. But it was, perhaps, the first plank laid down toward something that could eventually become it.