Chapter 2: Ink and Feedback
The rain came down in sheets the night they made something together for the first time - not just art, but a communication of chaos.
It started in their studio, a converted church in the edge of the city. Stained glass windows still watched from above, casting fractured lights across amps, wires, and canvases. The altar had been replaced with a blood red piano, its keys half-stripped, half-painted with her sketches from that first night - their face, mid-scream, drawn over ivory.
Kim handed her a pair of noise-canceling headphones like they were offering a relic. “You’ll want these,” they said, grin sharp enough to cut bone. “It gets loud when I open my head.”
Suzuka took them but didn’t put them on.
The track they cued up wasn’t finished - more pulse than song, a tangle of distorted strings, guttural breaths, and the distant echo of something that sounded like regret dressed in armor. They didn’t sing. Not at first. They watched her listen, eyes flicking over her expression like they were reading a score.
When the sound began to fracture into silence, they finally asked, “What do you see?”
Suzuka closed her eyes.
“A woman,” she murmured. “Mouth sewn shut. She’s trying to scream through her eyes.”
They didn’t move for a moment, then nodded once - sharp and fast. “Draw her.”
She hesitated. “On what?”
Kim grinned, already pulling down a massive, black canvas from the rafters. “Whatever the hell you want.”
The night unraveled from there - paint and ink splattered between beat drops, Kim improvising verses as she sketched, her lines twisting and blooming with the rhythm of their growl. They didn’t direct her. They reacted. She didn’t follow them. She led. And somewhere in that electric storm of feedback and charcoal, they found a kind of harmony neither of them knew they were aching for.
When it was over, the canvas stood dripping - a woman with threads in her mouth, tears of fire, and wings made of broken violins.
“She’s beautiful,” Kim said quietly, brushing a thumb across a smear of black. “Just like the noise inside me.”
Suzuka didn’t speak, just leaned against the piano, heart hammering like a snare drum.
For the first time in years, she felt seen. Not observed. Recognized.
And neither of them knew it yet, but that night’s creation would become the cover of their next single.