Chapter 43 - A Bleeding Score

On the other side of the world, thousands of kilometers from Vienna's cold air, Yogyakarta welcomed the night with the particular humidity of rainy season rising off the wet asphalt. Inside the quiet basement studio of the Swasemesta Conservatory, Rimba sat brooding in front of his computer screen. The monitor's glow reflected against his gaunt face, highlighting the dark circles under his eyes, growing more pronounced with weeks of insufficient sleep. A cup of coffee, long gone cold, sat forgotten at his elbow, a thin film already forming across its surface.

On his desk, the thick folder holding the contemporary orchestral score lay open. It was their collaborative work—the final project they were supposed to have finished together, with smiles and small arguments full of laughter. But now, the sheets of paper were covered in red ink from Rimba's own hand, revising the piano parts Michi had left behind, page after page marked up as though correcting it enough times might undo everything else that had gone wrong between them.

Every time the tip of his pencil touched the score paper, the girl's image seemed to flicker in the empty space beside his desk. Rimba could see, clearly, how Michi used to bite the end of her pencil while thinking, how those slender fingers used to tap the desk searching for the right bar, or how those brown eyes used to look at him with a glint of admiration he'd once believed was sincere.

But all of that was fake, Rimba thought bitterly, his jaw tightening instantly as the ache stabbed back through his chest.

He hated the fact that his memory of Michi was so strong that it had rooted itself into every note he wrote. At first, anger had been his primary fuel. When he threw Michi out and canceled their collaboration, he'd felt he was upholding a core principle of his life: that betrayal and lies had no place in his world. He'd buried himself in a total overhaul of the orchestral arrangement, pouring in dark, furious minor elements, channeling every ounce of his disappointment into every scrape of the cello and every strike of the timpani. He worked through the nights convinced that if he just wrote hard enough, angry enough, the shape of her would eventually burn itself out of the music entirely.

But the harder he tried to erase every trace of Michi from his music, the stranger the results became.

Last week, when Professor Hans reviewed the final draft of that orchestra piece, the old lecturer had paused for a long moment, staring at the bars in the middle of the song, his pen hovering motionless above the page. "There's an unusual rhythm here, Rimba," Professor Hans had said at the time, pushing his sagging glasses back up. "There's a wild pulse hiding underneath this classical structure. Like the heartbeat of a street kid sneaking into an opulent cathedral. This isn't your usual writing style. This is... alive."

The comment had struck Rimba dead center. He knew exactly where that wild pulse had come from. Without realizing it, in the middle of his fury, he had woven in the syncopation patterns and drum breakdown rhythms that had, all this time, been played by the masked drummer on the Tirtodipuran stage—the girl who turned out to be his own girlfriend.

Rimba leaned back in his chair, rubbing his throbbing temples with both hands. His conversation with his mother on the veranda a few weeks earlier echoed back through his head, tearing straight through the ego-defenses he had built up sky-high all this time.

"Are you angry at her lie, or are you actually angry because you realize... you can't stop caring about her?"

Maharani's voice kept spinning endlessly in Rimba's head, refusing to fade no matter how many times he tried to push it aside. The man drew a long breath, staring at his own reflection in the dark monitor screen. His defenses began to crack, slowly, one layer at a time. The hatred he had nurtured was slowly being worn away by a tormenting longing, leaving behind an achingly empty space in his chest. He didn't know where things stood between them now—whether Michi hated him out there, or whether the girl was crying alone in a strange foreign city.

Suddenly, the phone on his desk rang loudly, its harsh buzz shattering the silence of the studio night and nearly sending his coffee cup over the edge of the desk.

Bayu's name appeared on the screen, glowing bright in the dim room. Rimba's heart suddenly pounded hard, as if some kind of terrible premonition were crawling up his throat. Michi's younger brother wasn't the type to call without a clear reason, especially at such an odd hour. With his brow furrowed deep and his hand trembling slightly, Rimba picked up the call, forcing his voice into something steadier than he felt.

"Swara." Bayu's voice on the other end sounded flat as usual, but this time there was something colder and sharper hidden underneath it, something that made the hair on the back of Rimba's neck stand up. "I'm not going to keep you long. There's one thing you need to know before it's too late and you regret it for the rest of your life."

Rimba's blood ran cold instantly, every drop of anger he'd been carrying suddenly overtaken by a raw, unfamiliar fear. He sat up straight in his chair, gripping the phone tightly enough that his knuckles went pale, waiting for whatever was coming next with a dread he hadn't expected to feel this fast, this completely. Whatever Bayu was about to say, some part of him already understood, with total certainty, that it was going to change everything he thought he had settled in his own head over the past few weeks. The cold coffee, the red-inked score, the whole careful architecture of his anger—none of it felt like it was going to survive the next thing out of Bayu's mouth. He found himself, absurdly, hoping it was nothing—a lost item, a forgotten detail about the scholarship paperwork, anything at all that wasn't about her. But some quieter part of him already knew better than to expect that kind of mercy tonight.