Chapter 47 - Footsteps on the First Snow

The days that followed in Vienna moved to an entirely different rhythm. The city that had once felt so foreign, so cold, and so intimidating suddenly turned warm every time Rimba and Michi's footsteps fell side by side along the old sidewalks lining the Ringstraße. Even the grand facades she'd once passed without a second glance now seemed to invite a longer look, as if the city itself had softened along with everything else between them. There was no more awkwardness, no more secrets hidden behind a forced smile, and, most importantly, no more fear that honesty would end up destroying everything.

For a full week, Rimba stayed in Vienna, spending the last of his leave to keep Michi company. They spent their afternoons sitting in the corner of a historic café, sipping steaming cups of Wiener Melange while arguing lightly over contemporary musical time signatures, or walking through the city park to watch the last of the maple leaves fall before winter fully arrived. Some evenings they did nothing more than sit together on the narrow apartment sofa, sheet music spread between them, correcting each other's notation without a single sharp word passing between them. In front of this man, Michi felt the weight on her shoulders lift completely. She no longer had to pretend to be a flawless, perfect conservatory student; she could laugh freely, sulk, or even argue passionately over Rimba's arrangement ideas, exactly the way she used to back in the Tirtodipuran basement studio.

For Rimba himself, this trip became the most radical turning point of his entire life. The old wound from his father's betrayal, which he had used as a restraining chain for so many years, slowly began to loosen with every day he spent in this city, watching Michi laugh without a single guarded edge to it. He learned that not every lie is born from an intention to destroy; sometimes, a person's greatest fear of honesty is rooted in a love too large to bear—the fear of losing the one person they value most in the world. Rimba realized he no longer needed to be a cruel fortress-keeper just to protect his own heart from being broken again.

But those two weeks of leave had their own limit.

That morning, the Vienna air felt far more biting than usual. The first snowflakes had begun falling slowly from the gray sky, covering the roofs of the old buildings with a thin, enchanting white blanket, the kind of quiet beauty that felt almost unfair given what the morning was about to take from her. Inside Michi's apartment room, the mood suddenly turned quiet as Rimba zipped up his black backpack. The time for his flight back to Yogyakarta was already at hand.

Michi stood near the window, hugging her own arms as her eyes watched the snowflakes dancing outside. A familiar tightness crept back into her chest, though this time it felt entirely different from a month ago. There was no more despair; there was only the heaviness of having to let go of someone she had only just managed to hold on to again.

Rimba walked closer, his steps calm, until he stood right behind the girl. He wrapped both arms around Michi's waist, burying his face in the crook of the pianist's neck and breathing in the scent of soap that had always managed to calm him.

"I have to go home, Chi," Rimba whispered gently, his voice sounding hoarse against Michi's ear. "My final project in Jogja isn't going to finish itself, and Professor Hans has already given me the absolute maximum extension he can afford."

Michi nodded slowly, though her eyes had already begun to sting. She turned around, wrapping her arms tightly around Rimba's neck. "Three more months, Rim... I've still got the program here to finish," her voice came out shaking, restrained. "It still feels like such a long time."

Rimba smiled thinly, pressing a loving kiss to the top of Michi's head. "Three months isn't as long as you think, Arunika. And this time, we're not running from anything anymore. Distance is just a number on a map, but our music... our notes have already fused together in the very same place."

He reached into his coat pocket, pulling out a small, glinting object and pressing it into Michi's palm—a new guitar pick engraved with both of their initials, one he had ordered specially before leaving for Austria.

"Keep this," Rimba continued, his gaze piercing, full of conviction. "Every time you hit the drums or touch the piano keys in this practice room, remember that on the other side of the world, there's someone out there writing a melody for the both of us too."

And under the first snowflakes falling to embrace the city of Vienna, that farewell kiss felt so sweet and so full of certainty—a quiet promise that this winter would never be able to freeze a feeling that had already found its permanent home.

Michi held the pick tightly in her fist even after Rimba's taxi had disappeared around the corner of the street, standing at the window a long while longer, watching the snow fill in his footprints below until there was no trace of them left at all. She thought, oddly, that she didn't mind the snow erasing that trace—some part of her understood now that what they'd built between them didn't need footprints in snow to prove it was real. It lived somewhere sturdier than that: in the shared arrangement waiting back in a basement studio half a world away, in a guitar pick warming slowly in her palm, and in the quiet certainty that three months, however long they felt, were simply the next measure in a song they'd already decided to finish together. She pressed the pick once against her chest, the way she once had with her drumsticks in that cold apartment weeks before, and finally turned back toward the piano, ready to keep writing her half of it.