She lowered her violin, her shoulders slumping with an exhaustion that seemed to go beyond the physical. She opened her eyes, staring at nothing, back in her own solitary world.
Kaito, hidden in the shadow of the hallway, did not dare to make a sound. It was a silence so absolute he even stopped breathing. He watched as she moved with a slow, weary grace, carefully wiping the instrument with a soft cloth before nestling it into its case. The locks snapped shut with a quiet, final click. She slung her schoolbag over one shoulder and lifted the violin case with her other hand, the weight of it seeming to anchor her more firmly into her familiar, slouched posture. The girl who had just been a conduit for a storm was gone, replaced once more by Hikari Tanaka—the untidy tie, the slightly too-large blazer, the footnote.
She moved toward the door, her gaze turned inward. Kaito pressed himself deeper into the alcove, becoming part of the wall, part of the silence. He caught a faint scent of rosin and old wood as she passed his hiding place, a ghost in the dim corridor. A moment later, she was gone, vanishing around the corner, leaving behind only the settling dust and the echo she had imprinted on the air.
Only then did Kaito allow himself to exhale, a shuddering, shaky release that echoed in the still air. The echo of the music, however, did not fade. It rang inside his skull, a resonant shard he couldn't dislodge. The orderly library tasks, his original purpose for being in this forgotten wing, now felt like a distant, irrelevant memory. Mechanically, his body carried him back to the library, his hands sorting books and aligning carts by pure muscle memory while his mind was a thousand miles away, trapped in a sunlit room with a crying violin.
He worked with a frantic efficiency, driven by a new, urgent need to be anywhere but here. The moment the last book was shelved, he grabbed his bag and fled.
He ran all the way home.
His legs pumped, his school bag thumping a frantic rhythm against his back. This was not his usual measured jog; this was a sprint, a desperate attempt to outrun the feeling expanding behind his ribs. It wasn't admiration. It wasn't simple curiosity. It was a gravitational pull, terrifying in its intensity, toward a girl he had never once considered.
Dinner with his parents was a pantomime. He gave the usual, polite answers about his day, his tests, his responsibilities. His voice sounded distant to his own ears. The food had no taste. All he could hear was the phantom violin, its raw cry drowning out the clink of cutlery and the mild chatter from the television.
In the sterile silence of his perfectly organized room, the feeling swelled to fill the space. He lay in bed, the ceiling a blank screen for the day's projection. The Hikari from class—doodling, defiant, a disruption—was a clumsy mask. The Hikari in the music room was a revelation. Which was real? Were both? The contradiction made his head spin. He thought of her scowling at a teacher's question, then of her eyes screwed shut in passionate release. He thought of her ignored in the cafeteria, then of the sunlight claiming her as its sole audience.
What is this? The question hammered against his temples. It was a problem with no variables he could solve, an equation that refused to balance. His heart gave a peculiar, lurching thump whenever the memory of the music surged forward. He tossed onto his side, punching his pillow into a new shape. Sleep was a traitor, refusing to come and silence the cacophony. He watched the digital numbers on his clock march relentlessly toward morning, a prisoner to an unfamiliar, exhilarating unrest.
The dawn brought no clarity, only a thick fatigue that clung to his bones. He arrived at Sakuragaoka High with shadows under his eyes that no amount of cold water could erase. The orderly rhythm of the school day, his anchor, felt distorted, like a record playing at the wrong speed.
In class, he took his seat at the front. He opened his notebook, his pen poised. The teacher's voice began its familiar lecture, a stream of information Kaito's brain was engineered to process and retain. But the words seemed to slide off his mind, leaving no trace. He forced his eyes to the board, forced his hand to copy down formulas, but his concentration was a frayed thread.
And then, without his conscious permission, his gaze broke away. It traveled past the rows of desks, past the tops of his classmates' heads, to the very back of the room.
There she was.
Hikari Tanaka. Her head was propped on one hand, her other arm slack across her notebook. She was staring out the window, away from the lecture, seemingly a world away. The morning light caught the same strands of hair that had escaped in the music room. She looked tired. Ordinary. Human.
A jolt, electric and unsettling, shot through him. It was her. The same person. The two images—the defiant loner and the luminous musician—collided violently in his tired mind, and he could not reconcile them. He stared, trying to find a trace of last night's passion in the slope of her shoulders, in the distant line of her profile.
His teacher's voice sharpened. "Sato-kun? Is everything clear?"
Kaito flinched, his head snapping forward. A faint, unusual heat crept up his neck. "Y-yes, sensei. Perfectly clear." The lie tasted strange. He focused on his notes, the neat lines of text a lifeline to his old, orderly self.
But the lifeline was fragile. Within minutes, his focus wavered again. His eyes, pulled by a magnetism he resented but could not resist, flicked once more toward the window, toward the girl who slept through lessons but conjured storms with a violin.
He watched her, not with the cold assessment of the honor student, but with the wide-eyed, sleepless wonder of a boy who had heard a secret melody and found his own silent world irreversibly, irrevocably changed.