Chapter 51: Shattered Stage Light
The lights never felt so harsh.
The overhead rig screamed above Ji-hoon's head as another bulb burst with a sharp pop, showering shards of glass onto the edge of the stage. He didn't flinch. He only stood there, motionless, as though the world could fall apart and he would remain untouched by its unraveling. His cane lay discarded by the side curtains, forgotten, as if in this moment he didn't need it—like the stage beneath his feet was the only constant he could trust.
The rehearsal room had been emptied out hours ago. Only a single spotlight remained on, casting his figure in an eerie glow. He could feel its heat on his skin, the tension in the air so thick it felt like a hand pressed to his throat.
Everything had changed.
He had heard things. Too many things. Whispers in back hallways. Conversations he wasn't supposed to catch. The echo of a voice from someone who didn't know he was standing on the other side of the practice room door. Names—his mother's, Si-wan's, even Joon-won's—all woven into sentences that made his stomach churn.
But what broke him wasn't just the betrayal. It was the silence that followed it. The silence from the people who should have told him first.
He moved slowly now, his fingers grazing the edge of the piano. It wasn't the one he usually played. This one was colder, less familiar. But it would do.
He sat.
His hands hovered over the keys.
And then, he struck.
A single chord.
Dissonant. Off-beat. Violent.
The room trembled with the weight of it, and for a moment, Ji-hoon looked like a conductor orchestrating the collapse of a cathedral. He played again, harder, faster, like every key was a wound and every note was bleeding. He poured everything into the sound—the rage, the grief, the confusion. He let it scream through him.
This wasn't music.
This was war.
Each note was a shout he'd never allowed himself to utter. Each crashing chord a question left unanswered. The people he trusted—Hye-jin, Joon-won, even his therapist—they had all kept something from him. Something about the past. Something about his mother.
And worst of all—he had started to remember.
Not visually. He couldn't. The world would never return to him in color or shape or form. But sounds—smells—textures—they flooded him like a memory reborn.
The smell of smoke. Cologne. The feel of warm hands dragging him from a burning room.
A child's voice—his own—crying.
And someone else. Someone saying, "Leave him."
He stopped playing.
Silence fell like dust.
Ji-hoon's breath came in shallow gulps. His hands trembled over the keys. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move.
Then the door creaked open.
He tensed. He didn't need to see who it was. The footsteps were enough.
"Ji-hoon," said a voice. Joon-won.
Ji-hoon didn't answer. Didn't turn.
"I heard what happened," Joon-won said quietly. "The lights… the tech crew thinks it was an accident."
Ji-hoon let out a soft, bitter laugh. "Everything is an accident with them, isn't it?"
Joon-won hesitated, his voice edged with pain. "You shouldn't be here alone."
Ji-hoon's hands slid off the keys. "I've always been alone. You just helped me believe I wasn't."
The words hit harder than Ji-hoon expected. Maybe because he knew they were unfair. Maybe because they were true.
"Ji-hoon…"
"Don't," he snapped, standing suddenly. "You knew. You all knew something. About her. About what happened. And you didn't tell me."
Joon-won stepped closer, but didn't touch him. "We were trying to protect you."
Ji-hoon turned his head toward him, blind eyes narrowed. "Protect me? From the truth? Or from how you'd look when I found out?"
Silence.
The kind that burns.
"I remembered something," Ji-hoon said, his voice shaking. "The night she died. I heard someone tell them to leave me. Like I wasn't worth saving."
Joon-won's breath caught.
"You said it," Ji-hoon whispered, voice hollow.
"No," Joon-won replied instantly. "I swear to you. That wasn't me."
Ji-hoon stepped away from the piano, hands clenched at his sides. "Then tell me who it was."
"I don't know," Joon-won said. "I swear, Ji-hoon. I don't know. But I'll help you find out. Whatever it takes."
Ji-hoon was quiet for a long moment. Then, almost brokenly, he whispered, "What if I'm the reason she died?"
Joon-won's eyes welled up. "You weren't."
"How do you know?"
"Because she loved you more than anything in the world. And because people like Si-wan… people like the man who murdered her—they would've found a reason to kill her no matter what. You weren't the reason. They were."
The two stood there, on the edge of a broken stage, the shattered lights above them still dripping fragments of glass. The silence between them was no longer painful. It was necessary. It was shared.
Ji-hoon turned back to the piano, pressing one key gently.
This time, it didn't scream.
It sang.
And somewhere in that sound, maybe there was a beginning again.
Maybe.
The stage had always felt sacred to Ji-hoon. Even in his blindness, he could feel the vastness of the space, the subtle tension in the air before the first note, the soft breath of the audience holding onto the silence as if it were glass. He could sense the energy of the lights, the heat that pooled on his shoulders, the echoes bouncing off velvet curtains and lacquered walls.
But tonight, that same stage was broken.
Not literally, not yet. But something inside it had shattered.
He stood backstage, fingers clenched tightly around the edge of the piano bench as someone else's piece played—a rival's. The notes were sharp, rehearsed, and soulless. Ji-hoon knew exactly who was on stage: Baek Chan-gyu. He recognized the overconfident pacing, the way the piano was bled dry of emotion, the way it tried to impress instead of speak. It wasn't music—it was performance. A trick.
Behind him, the hum of voices whispered like ghosts. Agents. Journalists. Judges. Si-wan.
Si-wan was always watching.
Ji-hoon pressed two fingers to his temple. The cologne was faint tonight, but it was there, buried under the scent of hairspray and powder and polish. That cursed cologne. It lingered in places it didn't belong. Even here.
He remembered the shattered glass at Room 507. The burning building. The sound of his own screaming, silent to everyone but him. Every step since then had been a war he waged with himself. But this... this was worse.
This stage had seen his mother play. He remembered being young, sitting close to the left wing, his little hands resting on his lap while Ara breathed life into the keys. She didn't perform. She lived in that music. Every time she rose from the bench, she left a part of herself behind.
And now it was polluted.
A stage that once held truth had become a podium for liars.
When the final chord of Chan-gyu's piece hit, the applause came quickly. It was shallow. Loud, but empty. Ji-hoon didn't flinch. He knew how this worked.
He could feel the tension knotting in his back as a crew member tapped his shoulder—his cue.
He stepped out slowly, cane tapping at his side. The lights were searing against his skin, hotter than usual, or maybe his nerves made it worse. He sat, fingers hovering above the keys. Silence returned like an old friend.
He didn't breathe.
Then, slowly, he began.
The first notes were delicate, a whisper. A lullaby no one remembered. Not from any songbook. Not from any script. This was the melody that lived in his blood. It carried the scent of rain, the flicker of candles, his mother's breath as she hummed it while washing dishes late at night.
And then—CRACK.
The lights above flickered, one of them popping with a loud snap. Gasps filled the auditorium.
Ji-hoon stopped playing.
His head turned slightly, instinctively. But he didn't need his eyes to know what had happened.
The stage light above had burst.
He could smell the faint scent of burning wires, the electricity sparking faintly in the ceiling. A pause. Then footsteps—panicked, uncertain. A technician running across the upper rafters.
"Ji-hoon!" someone called from backstage. Joon-won, most likely.
But he didn't leave. He didn't stand.
His fingers returned to the keys.
And then he played harder.
This wasn't just a song anymore. This was war. He pushed into the piece, flooding the space with his rage. He didn't care if the technicians struggled with the lighting. He didn't care if the judges leaned in, unsure of whether to be alarmed or enchanted. He didn't care if the audience squirmed in their seats, wondering if they were watching a breakdown or brilliance.
He wanted them to feel it.
Every note he struck screamed. Not with pitch—but with truth. He wanted them to feel what it was like to remember someone who no longer had a voice. To hold rage like a melody. To bleed into every chord.
The broken light cast strange shadows now—sharp, chaotic ones that moved across his body as he played. They danced across the stage like ghosts. To the sighted, it must've looked like something was haunting him. And maybe something was.
The song ended abruptly. A final slam.
And then silence again.
Ji-hoon rose. His breath was shaky. The cane tapped twice as he stood, and though the audience began to applaud, it was slower this time—like they weren't sure whether they were clapping for brilliance or madness.
He didn't bow. He turned and walked off stage.
Joon-won grabbed him just as he reached the curtains. "What the hell was that? Ji-hoon, that light—"
"I know," Ji-hoon muttered. "I felt it."
"You should've stopped playing. You could've been hurt!"
Ji-hoon's lips twisted. "I was already hurt."
Joon-won fell silent.
Si-wan stood further down the hallway. Ji-hoon didn't need to see him to know he was there. That cologne. That quiet.
"You made a statement," Si-wan finally said. "Was it worth it?"
Ji-hoon turned toward him, voice low. "I played the truth."
"And now everyone's talking about you," Si-wan said softly. "Which part of that was truth, I wonder?"
Ji-hoon didn't answer.
He just kept walking.
Behind him, the crew rushed to deal with the broken light. Judges whispered to each other. Someone cried in the hallway. And the stage that once glowed now flickered in pain.
Shattered.
Just like everything else.
He made it back to the dressing room, hands trembling. The applause had followed him backstage, but it sounded distant now—blurred, like it was happening in a different world.
Ji-hoon dropped his cane to the floor and sat on the bench, shoulders hunched over. His fingers curled into fists on his knees, still aching from how hard he'd played. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, louder than any ovation could ever be.
The memory of the burning wires lingered in his nose. That single burst of light—it had taken something from him. Not physically, but symbolically. As if the universe had thrown a match onto the dry wreckage inside him and dared him to burn too.
There was a knock. Not the gentle kind. More like a warning.
"Go away," he said.
But the door creaked open.
It was Joon-won again. Ji-hoon didn't need to see to feel the guilt rolling off him in waves. Joon-won stepped inside, closing the door behind him.
"You terrified everyone," he said.
"I wasn't trying to."
"You weren't not trying to."
Ji-hoon didn't respond.
Joon-won sighed and sat across from him. "You broke something out there tonight. Not just the stage. Not just the light. You cracked the entire illusion. They were expecting a prodigy. You gave them grief in the shape of music."
"Then I gave them something real."
A silence.
Then: "Do you think she'd be proud of you?" Joon-won asked carefully.
Ji-hoon swallowed. "I don't know. But at least she'd know it was me."
That's all he wanted. For someone to see past the press photos, the awards, the polished lies. For someone to hear his truth—even if it screamed through shattered lights and broken stage floors.
His truth wasn't pretty. It was pain made sound.
And tonight, he'd let it out.
Even if it cost him everything.