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Sonance pulled out her notepad and hurriedly scribbled out a note, tearing it off the pad and putting on a coffee table before making her way out of the apartment. Tenryujin picked up the note she had left and read it. |
Sonance pulled out her notepad and hurriedly scribbled out a note, tearing it off the pad and putting on a coffee table before making her way out of the apartment. Tenryujin picked up the note she had left and read it. |
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| − | ‘I’m fine.<br /> |
+ | ‘I’m fine.<br /> |
| − | I just need some fresh air right now.<br /> |
+ | I just need some fresh air right now.<br /> |
| − | I’ll be fine, so please don’t worry.’<br /> |
+ | I’ll be fine, so please don’t worry.’<br /> |
“Sonance, you dummy...” Tenryujin mumbled. “Now I’m even ''more'' worried.” |
“Sonance, you dummy...” Tenryujin mumbled. “Now I’m even ''more'' worried.” |
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Revision as of 05:40, 21 July 2020
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| Season 0, Episode 2 | |
| Air date | 7/20/20 |
| Written by | CaT |
| Episode Guide | |
| Previous Merry X Mas |
Next N/A |
Sound X Silence is a short story written for the series Tech Cross.
Episode
It had been the last concert of their tour.
Sonance and Tenryujin slowly stumbled into their high-rise luxury apartment in the middle of the night, flopping down exhaustedly on their respective beds.
“Man, that concert was a rush, but I feel like I got hit by a train.” Tenryujin groaned. “A fun train.”
Sonance nodded her head in agreement. While Tenryujin was the idol of their act, performing the singing and choreography, Sonance’s work as her DJ on stage and manager behind the scenes was fairly exhausting in its own right.
“Still feel kinda sad that it’s over, though...” Tenryujin sighed before suddenly perking up. “Oh, that’s right! The fan mail! We probably have a lot to catch up on!”
Sonance nodded again, but more hesitantly this time. Most of the fan letters were nice, but some of them could be a bit...odd. Still, she knew reading them cheered Tenryujin up, so she went with her to collect their buildup of mail in their P.O. box down below.
Sonance sat in front of the pile of mail they had dumped in their living room and carefully inspected each piece of it with a metal detector before placing in the “Safe” pile for Tenryujin to read.
“Sonance, you worry too much sometimes.” Tenryujin giggled from the couch, opening up one of the envelopes. “People love us, remember? I mean, just look at all the fan letters we have here! Like this one, saying...”
Tenryujin squinted her eyes as she read the letter.
“Hey, Sonance, what are ‘feet pics’?”
Sonance marched over and grabbed the letter out of Tenryujin’s hands before pulling out a lighter and setting it on fire.
“Oh, something bad, huh?” Tenryujin grinned sheepishly. “Still, you know what I mean.”
Sonance waved her hand in the air iffily, followed by Tenryujin suddenly pulling her in for an unprompted hug.
“I know being on this sort of public stage can be scary, but I really think everything’s gonna be alright.” Tenryujin said to her reassuringly. “I want to believe in them...in the people on this world who sincerely love our music.”
There was that word again.
‘Love’.
Sonance’s species had no innate understanding of the concept. They reproduced asexually and formed no deeper relationships with others of their kind than lifelong friendships. They were certainly capable of caring about each other, but the ‘love’ so common on Earth was on a level completely alien to them, and Sonance found it wildly uncomfortable, seeing it as a form of unhealthy obsession more than anything else.
Which is why her relationship with Tenryujin concerned her.
The more time the two spent together as Sonance was human, the more she found herself slowly falling into that trap. For someone who had never experienced love, it was a complete shock to the system. The unmatched high created by the human brain every time she was around Tenryujin terrified her; for Sonance, someone who had already lost her ability to speak, the idea of an emotion strong enough to remove her control over her own feelings was horrifying on an existential level.
She pulled away from Tenryujin, wide-eyed and shaken from the sudden rush the embrace had caused. Tenryujin tilted her head and gave her a concerned look.
“Sonance, is something wrong?” Tenryujin asked. “You know I’m here for you if you need me.”
That was sort of the problem.
Sonance pulled out her notepad and hurriedly scribbled out a note, tearing it off the pad and putting on a coffee table before making her way out of the apartment. Tenryujin picked up the note she had left and read it.
‘I’m fine.
I just need some fresh air right now.
I’ll be fine, so please don’t worry.’
“Sonance, you dummy...” Tenryujin mumbled. “Now I’m even more worried.”
Sonance stood on a bridge overlooking a river flowing through the city near the outskirts of Tokyo. She stared off into the night sky, looking up at the stars she had once arrived on Earth from. Being able to live as she was and pursue her dreams on this planet was a godsend to her, but at the same time...it was lonely. Not much lonelier than it was for her on her home planet after she became mute, granted, but lonely nonetheless. The only time she didn’t feel lonely was when she was with...
She shook out her head and began rubbing her temples in an attempt to calm down. If she was just able to speak, none of this would have been an issue for her in the first place. She wasn’t physically unable to speak; in fact, medically speaking, there was nothing wrong with her. It’s just that after what had happened to her as a child, she was never able to bring herself to do it again.
She sank to her knees and banged a fist on the bridge’s metal railing, cursing herself for her own uselessness. She was beyond pathetic, a complete failure of a person. She came all this way to Earth for the sake of working around a weakness she couldn’t overcome, and now that she was here and given a second chance, what had she done with it? Just let it fester and make things worse for everyone.
Her own voice, her own feelings...she couldn’t really control any of it, could she? She was stupid for even trying. Somewhere along the line, she had broken, and in spite of her best efforts, she couldn’t fix herself.
She thought back to Tenryujin again and felt a wave of regret. How much had she been holding her down? A musician that couldn’t even speak? What kind of farce was that? What kind of farce was their entire relationship? She’d never even had the courage to talk to Tenryujin about how she felt. The thing was, despite her attempts to convince herself otherwise, she...she really did love Tenryujin.
And she felt like Tenryujin would be better off without her.
She slowly pulled herself to her feet and climbed on top of the bridge’s railing. She didn’t really know what she was doing; her understanding of the human body’s durability was limited, and she had no idea if a fall from the bridge would actually be able to kill her.
But it was worth a shot, right?
Just as she raised a foot in the air to step off the railing, she was suddenly grabbed from behind and pulled unceremoniously to the ground. She and the puller both fell over backward, and when she turned her head to see who had grabbed her, she found herself lying on top of Tenryujin, who was still panting from the run over.
“Jeez, Sonance, you gotta be more careful with this stuff!” Tenryujin coughed out. “You’re the one who kept getting after me for playing on the railings!”
Sonance shakily picked herself up and clenched at her own face with one of her hands. The fact that she had somehow tipped Tenryujin off to coming after her just made the situation ten times worse. She couldn’t even die right.
“Why’d you run off like that, anyway?” Tenryujin asked, dusting herself off as she got to her feet. “You haven’t been acting like yourself lately.”
Sonance made no attempt to answer, having no idea how she should respond to her. This made Tenryujin even more concerned, and she gently guided Sonance’s clenched hand away from her face.
“Sonance?”
She pulled up Sonance’s shades, revealing her eyes to be a teared-up weeping mess.
“Please, Sonance, tell me what’s going on.” Tenryujin pleaded. “I’m your partner. We shouldn’t have to hide things from each other.”
Her partner.
Something about the way she worded that made Sonance break down entirely. She clung onto Tenryujin for support as she began openly sobbing, trying desperately to form words she knew wouldn’t come. She wanted to tell her. She wanted to tell her everything.
But she couldn’t.
She never could.
And it hurt more than anything she had ever felt in her life.
Tenryujin noticed Sonance’s mouth moving underneath her mask and pulled her in for another embrace, this one tighter than before.
“Sonance, I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking about right now, but...I don’t think we need words to understand each other.”
Sonance looked at her, confused.
“Like I just said, we’re partners.” Tenryujin continued. “We’ve gotten this far, and I know if we stay together like this, we can go even higher. I never would have made it to where I am today without you. You...you’re my everything. I don’t know if it’s just spending this much time as a human that’s made me feel this way, but the truth is...and I know this probably gonna sound nuts...”
Tenryujin pulled out of the embrace, placing her hands on Sonance’s shoulders and looking her deeply in the eyes.
“...I think...I’m in love with you, Sonance.” Tenryujin smiled.
A million things raced through Sonance’s head at once, this confession catching her completely off-guard. As her mind seemingly fell apart and tried to put itself back together again, her instincts kicked in, and they guided into doing just one thing:
Sonance pulled down her face mask, threw her arms around Tenryujin, and kissed her. Somewhat surprised at first, Tenryujin quickly leaned into the kiss and placed her arms around Sonance once more.
Time seemed to slow down for the two of them as they held each other tightly in their arms. Sonance, feeling the highest she had ever been, realized something about love. In its purest form, love wasn’t about one-sided obsession; it was about a genuine bond formed between people. It was something she hadn’t really considered before, but something that made sense the more she thought about it.
Sonance silently vowed to stop denying her feelings, while Tenryujin vowed in much the same manner to be more observant of her partner’s emotions. In that moment on the bridge overlooking the river, it felt like the two of them truly understood each other more than ever.
Characters
Trivia
- The title of the short references the Simon and Garfunkel song 'The Sound of Silence', whose meaning was summed up by Garfunkel as "the inability of people to communicate with each other, not particularly internationally but especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other.", lining up with both Sonance's literal inability to speak and the difficulty she has with communicating her feelings to her partner Tenryujin.