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ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : To Give ❤ Featuring Rin (1.8k words) ◃◃ Previous track! || ⅠⅠ || You've reached the end, play again?▹▹ ↻ Masterlist
Fandom No Straight Roads Pairing Rin (white)/reader Chapter Summary How can he write the perfect song for her?
Music was the reason he was created, music was the reason he was given shape and sentience and the ability to share. It was his life’s mission, the blood that would run through his veins, the soul of his entire being.
Yet he stared at the pieces of paper scattered around the table in front of him, tapping on the varnish of the guitar on his lap. He had long since stopped counting the minutes and hours he had been sitting on the couch in the rumpus room but he knew that he had been there long enough to know that the sun was setting behind him, bathing him in an orange glow.
For a robot made to create music, it was surprisingly hard to do so when it wasn’t so… generic. Other songs had come easily to him; throw in some generic things that the fans liked, make a sexy dance that went along with it and then they had a hit song. There would still be some tweaking from Neon J between them and the stage, but it was still something. When it came to writing for one person though? It was like the words didn’t want to flow out onto the page.
Were there even words that would be able to describe the maid as she was? Princess was… she was beyond words now. He knew that she was beautiful, smart, and caring, but even those seemed far too tame to put onto the paper. There had to be better words, ones that could better describe them.
Picking up the guitar, he strummed a few notes he had put down. He knew what music he wanted behind the words; soft, slow, something that one would play on a date one one-on-one, but even as he picked the strings, listening to the melody as he hummed along, any words that came to the front of his mind were shredded in the trash bin before they could leave his mouth. “Even teenagers are able to do this…” Letting his head lull forward as he huffed, he could hear the others doing something off in another part of the house.
Glancing up at the scorch mark on the wall, he hoped that they wouldn’t cause further damage. They had yet to find the wallpaper that would match the one already there.
Going from the music on the sheets to absent-minded strumming, Rin ran some programs in his head as he did so. The weight of the guitar kept him grounded in the real world, stopping him from wandering into the vast endless void of his code so that he knew what was going on around him. He could get lost in it for days, weeks even, if he wasn’t careful, but the guitar made him feel human enough to keep his feet on the ground.
Princess’s voice drifted down the hallway and he stopped, listening. He couldn’t hear the exact words she said no matter how hard he focused, the limits of his robotic hearing being reached, but he could hear the melody and the way she talked, sagging his shoulders slightly as it faded.
“She’ll be around here more…” He muttered, strumming a few scales. He had to get used to the fact he would be hearing her voice more often now; after the fans had become more aware of her presence around them, some had begun to be a bit too boy-crazy. After the third time a fan had harassed her at her own home and gone after her car, Neon J had moved her into the mansion for now with her approval.
He got to see her all day, every day.
Footsteps drew closer to where he was and he raised his eyes enough to see a pair of shoes he didn’t recognise, allowing his eyes to travel further up, scanning each and every part of the newcomer until he got to her face. “Hello, Princess.” Just like it was strange to have her in the mansion after her job was over, Rin wasn’t used to the fact he saw the maid in her normal clothes, too. The others had mentioned that they had seen her in her normal clothes a few times, but it was different in person.
Frankly, she looked better than any of the memories that they had shared with him, watching as she fidgeted with something behind her back.
“You look gorgeous.” There was no better word to describe her in that moment other than gorgeous, but he was sure that he probably could’ve said so in any language he wanted and yet none would be able to fit the beauty that laid before his eyes. As she sat beside him, she seemed careful to hide the thing behind her body, watching as her eyes glanced over the papers.
“It looks like you’ve been busy,” she smiled and though most would want to pick up the music sheets to read them over, knowing how to read them or not, he liked the fact she kept her hands away from them, undisturbed, unlike other people in his life. “What’re you playing?”
That was right, he didn’t have a title for the song yet. As much as it was an untitled song, it was one about her, but ruining the surprise was to remove the genuine reaction she would give when he finally played it for her, so he shrugged. “Thinking about it…” His fingers played some scales again, letting his hand and fingers glide over the neck of the guitar. “Though I may pick something to serenade you with under starlight.”
Old programming died hard, but noting that her gaze fixated on him, he placed the guitar down on the floor next to him, turning his body to her. Sitting there, so sweet, it took him by surprise when she produced a simple white bag from behind her, a bow decorating the string handles as she held it out to him. Scanning it before he took it, he surprised himself by how gentle he was taking it, even for his standards, fingers tracing the edges of the bag before he lifted it from her fingers.
Why was he so hesitant to open a gift from her?
He couldn’t see inside the bag with how it was tied, looking between the bow and the Princess herself before he untied it, prying the top of the bag open to reveal tissue paper. Laughing as he pulled out the tissue paper, he fixated his eyes on her “Lots of nice packaging for a gift, prince… ess…” Looking down at what laid in the bottom of the bag, folded neatly, it was like all the sense in his coding scrambled for a moment, reaching inside as he felt the silk underneath his fingers.
There was no mistaking it as he pulled the scarf out from the bag, unfurling it as he looked at the intricate detailing. “There’s no way…” It really was it, even down to the way the beads at the ends felt.
“Neon told me how much the scarf meant to you,” Princess smiled, reaching out to pluck the scarf from his hands, “when I saw it in the store, I thought of you.” She wrapped the scarf tenderly around his neck, the embroidered flowers scratching against his silicon flesh.
It wasn’t the scarf that he had been given at his first show after his sentience, but it held its own memory with it. If he were a human, he knew that tears would stream down his face at the feeling that loomed in his chest like a thousand fireworks, but, a robot couldn’t cry, a robot couldn’t shed tears as his body held none, but, even he could feel the shake of his voice as he whispered, “Thank you…”
His system was overloaded with different emotions, but they all came together when he saw the maid begin to rise from her seat beside him, reaching out a hand to stop her. His fingers wrapped around her wrist, and he tugged her back down to the couch, listening to her let out a gasp at the contact.
And when she looked back at him, there would never be music in the world that would ever be perfect enough for her. The perfect muse, the princess of his eyes.
“Stay?” Was all he was able to pull from his speakers, his thoughts not catching up to what he was saying before he coughed. “I’d like for you to be my audience, please?”
And the princess made herself so pretty at the end of the couch, her back pressed against the cushions, waiting for him as he picked back up his guitar. “You know,” she said, voice flowing like honey in the air, “I’ve never had someone play for me before.”
He had never played specifically for others before, either — he didn’t count Yinu and the times he had been made to find her bedtime lullabies as he had been ordered to — but this was different, looking at her, he wanted to spoil her in any way he could. Glancing at the music sheets on the table, he began to play.
Compared to their electronic music, it was unique to come from the acoustics of the guitar. It was warm and cosy at the same time, like a crackling fire place in a winter’s night in a cabin while it snowed; he may not have seen snow, it warmed his circuits enough to see her smile as he played.
She was the first to hear this song, she was the first to—.
A loud noise was heard and he barely registered the pop-up in his vision letting him know that his silicon skin had been broken, staring at the string that had snapped on the guitar. “I must’ve been a bit too harsh,” he laughed, trying to relieve some of the tension that floated in the air, but instead of hearing anything bad, he heard the sound of clapping, raising his gaze from the guitar to the princess sitting across from him, a smile so wide across her face he swore her cheeks would split.
“That was wonderful!”
That was a recording he would be playing several times over.
“I know this is a bit out of the blue,” Rin said, “but, what do you want the most in the world?”
Her hands came to a stop, folding in her lap as she let herself think, though, as she finally answered, Rin couldn’t help but agree with every word she said. “I’d want to be able to keep doing this with you guys for as long as I live.”
And for as long as she lived, Rin knew that he wanted to make sure that every day was one where she smiled.
And he knew the others would do the same as he began to remove the string from the guitar, locking the memory in a forever folder. “I think that’s a wonderful answer.”
And he would give her the entire world to make sure that she was forever happy.
He would do it just for her.
