The Men In Blue (TTM#2, boyxboy)

Chapter 6 - Tattooed Heart

[Picture: Leonard Caro. Video: This Girl - The Kungs vs Cookin' on 3 Burners]

Present time. . .

"So it is finally clear and proven that Ludwig Van Beethoven was deaf? Then how did he make all those masterpieces that the professors make us fucking play today?" Leo asks, leaning back on the chair as he taps his pencil on the book.

"He wasn't deaf his whole life, obviously." I chuckle. "His hearing was deteriorating slowly as he aged, and by-" I take a quick glance at the book. "1816, he had lost all of his hearing."

The expression on his face looks like I just told him I murdered fifty people and he's now in on the secret. "Wow." His jaw finally moves.

"Damn." He curses, looking out the window of our apartment where a view overlooking the near forest and the far city was. "Could you imagine that? Being a musician all your life then having your sense of hearing slowly getting worse until you were absolutely deaf." He looks down, his words making me think about how much different my life would be if I was born deaf, if I had never known music, if I had never known it's beauty.

"My fingers and my ears, those are the two things I consider most important in my body. I would never want anything to happen to them." He says, tapping each finger on the glass table, imagining a piano as he does so. "I like to think I owe my life to those two things because I'd never be here now if it weren't for them."

I let him have his little moment for about three more seconds.

"Okay," I slap the book. "We have a test tomorrow about Beethoven's biography, not yours."

He chuckles, grabbing the pencil from the table as he writes something down on the empty spaces along the sides of the page. I focus my attention on my own book as well, sighing to myself. Who would've thought that even a senior would still have to take Music History?

Leonard Caro, whom pretty much everyone calls Leo has become one of my dearest best friends in the whole campus, even though I say that a lot about many people I meet. I might even consider him more of a best friend than Lou is, but only because of the reason that Lou and I don't see each other as often as Leo and I do.

The story of Leo and I started when we were paired up during our third-year orchestra class, when we belonged in two different orchestra ensembles. The two classes were paired up randomly and were to play a classical piece that accurately depicted our new found friendship. Leo and I are barely alike, our music taste rarely intersected, our personalities shouldn't really go well together but above it all, we somehow managed to pull through. I guess the only thing we had in common was how tired we were with learning all the classical pieces since we wanted to learn music of the modern times, we both shared the fascinating idea of having such a classical and soft instrument embedded into the sounds of pop songs, EDM music or even sometimes Hip Hop and Rap.

We argue most of the time over the simplest things and that's kind of what I like about our friendship, like that one time he stood up for Mariah Carey singing horribly out of tune while I was just simply saying that the singer should just get a little break since her vocal chords were clearly not doing well. Or maybe even that one time he dared to say Ariana Grande couldn't sing and I showed him the two videos of her singing Dangerous Woman and Into You in a capella, which he still didn't believe, so I showed him the old videos of her singing covers when she still had her red hair. Even though these little banters happen so often, we aren't afraid to admit that on of us was wrong, like that one time he fully believed that Scott Hoying from Pentatonix was one-hundred-percent straight and I introduced him to the world of the YouTube channel called Superfruit.