Your Lie in April x OHSHC crossover (title to be determined)

Chapter 2

Kousei's POV

I'm playing piano. The world around me is blue. Clouds and silken pink sakura petals drift over head and below me in the reflective surface of what seems to be the floor. She is here. She's playing violin, and though I can't hear the piano, I can hear her violin. Beautiful. As always, the song, though composed by another in a different time, is hers. Or rather, it is ours. We own it. The emotions that dance in the melody are ours. It feels so familiar and yet...

I bolt up, gasping for air, soaked through in sweat as though I had just escaped a horrifying nightmare. Truthfully, my peaceful dream was a torturous nightmare. I long to feel that way again, but I can't. I can't play piano anymore. I'm back to square one.

"Why would we accept a student who can't hear what he plays?"

"How can you improve if you can't hear the notes?"

"After those competitions? Everyone knows you can't hear the sound of your piano."

All those schools rejected me. It all comes down to the same thing.

"How can you play piano if you can't hear its sound?"

It's simple. I can't. And so I won't.

"So you've woken." I snap out of my thoughts. The room I'm in is all too familiar. I lost my mother in a room no different than this. She too left this world in a room just like the one I now sit in. I'm at the hospital. A boy stands in the doorway, but with my blurred vision, I can't make out his features.

I instinctively reach out for my glasses only for pain to flare in my arm when I try to move it. Then I remember. I broke my arm trying to get away from those twins. Now my arm is wrapped securely in a cast.

I reach over uncomfortably with my nondominant arm, put my glasses on and turn to look at the boy at the door. He stares back at me with slate gray eyes not unlike hers hidden behind a pair of glasses. Though, her eyes never had that cold, calculating glint to them. He runs a hand through his raven hair and steps in to the room.

"As you can see, your arm has been properly treated and will heal soon, though you now owe the host club quite a bit of money for the hospital bill," he states, his voice void of emotion. I internally groan. Knowing them, they probably sent me to a hospital for the rich and I will never be able to pay off the debt as long as I live. The money from my part time job barely pays for food. I can't ask Seto-san for money, she already pays my rent, and she'd go insane if she knew I'd gone and gotten my arm beoken. Besides, I don't know if she and Nagi are done shunning me for dropping piano.

"Seeing as you're a scholarship student who can't even afford the uniform, you very likely won't will be able to pay us back. You could ask your guardian to pay, but she is currently performing in France. I doubt you would be willing to interrupt her to tell her your broke your arm. Besides that, your file states that the two of you are currently not on good terms," the boy whose name I don't know tells me. I do the only thing that is logical to do when a person you don't know knows about your personal life. I freak out.

"Who are you and how do you know that?!" The boy only adjusts his glasses, the way I always have to do, although it looks a lot more menacing with him than me.

"I'm Ootori Kyoya,-"

"-and he knows everything about everyone," finishes another voice, one that I can't identify as male or female. A boy with brown hair and eyes my age walks in, followed by another that I remember from the host club.

"That aside, since you cannot afford to pay us off, you will work off your debt." Kyoya continues, annoyance seeping into his voice. Suddenly, a blonde boy with violet eyes gasps.

"Arima Kousei?" He makes his way to the bedside.

'Here we go,' I think. "That would be me," I reply.

"You were my idol! To think, the Arima Kousei, the child prodigy, known to have near inhuman precision, would be in our debt!"

As he continues to ramble, I turn to Kyoya. "What do you mean by 'work off my debt'?"

"He means you're going to work for the host club, probably as a servant, until you've paid off your debt. Or, like in my case, they're going to promote you to a host an you have to flirt with girls after school every day." The -rather feminine- boy with brown eyes and hair pipes up, interrupting Kyoya yet again.

"Actually," Kyoya adjusts his glasses once more, obviously irritated at being cut off, "I was thinking he could be our entertainment, once his arm heals. He is, after all, rather well known as a prodigy in the world of piano."

I scowl. "If you know that I used to play, then you know very well that I can't anymore." The elegant speech I had adopted to lessen the disdainful looks sent my way in the school sounds foreign on my tongue. It hadn't been hard to adopt, as I had heard so much of it at competitions when I was young and impressionable, but it still felt strange.

The blonde flinches. Clearly, he knows my life story. The other, the one who doesn't seem to know a thing about me, looks around at the rest of us for an explanation, seeming extremely confused.

I sigh. 'What have I got to lose?' I think,  'I need a really good reason and the other two seem to know already anyway'.

"When I was little, I played piano under my mother's teaching." I explain, "I was considered a prodigy, as my mother ensured that I never made a mistake, never strayed from the sheet music." I leave out the part where she beat me to do so, "People called me the Human Metronome for it. When I was 11, my mother died" the boy's eyes widen as many others' have done when they heard about my mother, but I continue without letting him give his condolences, as many others have done, "I had a mental breakdown during my next performance after that, resulting in my inability to hear the sound of the piano when I play. I can hear everything else just fine, just not that. So tell me," I turn to Kyoya, "How can I play piano if I can't hear what I'm playing?"

"You performed as the accompaniment for a young violinist by the name of Kaori Miyazono last year, very well from what I heard, though it took a couple tries. You also took place in a couple of competitions and played a duet with one Nagi Aiza, and from what I could tell from the videos, you would do rather nicely as the host club's entertainment."

"Kaori is gone," I state harshly, causing the boys, with the exception of Kyoya, to flinch, "taken by the same terminal illness that took my mother. And besides that, had I now the ability to play the way I did with Nagi, I would not be attending this school but a music school. If you wish for me to pay off my debt by working for you then I will, but I will not play piano for you." The blonde, who I had somewhat forgotten about, only stared for a long time with a sympathetic look that I had grown used to receiving.

"I hope that here, you find whatever it was in Miyazono-san that drove you to play piano again, Arima-san. I hope to be there when you do," he says, before leading (read: shoving) the others out of my room.