Ayano's shoulders slumped down and her head collapsed into her arms, blocking her crumpled papers from the eyes of prying classmates. They milled around each other's desks, wearing smiles as artificial as the tones of their laughter, catching glimpses of their friends' test scores. Red ink, loud and angry against black and white, screamed, telling the world of each student's worthiness, of each statistic's potential.
Amid the periphrastic chatter of girls who twirled tangled strands of hair around their fingers, Ayano heard somebody cough in a deliberately loud manner.
"Excuse me." A hand ghosted over her shoulder. "May I sit here?"
Ayano lifted her head up and snatched her papers from her desk, bringing them close to her chest. "Yes. Of course," She smiled weakly, turning, and a boy with sad, tired eyes stared down at her. "Forgive me."
He nodded and pulled out the chair beside her, seating himself and fixing his posture. "What did you get?" He asked almost immediately after settling, making a show of rifling through his sheets.
Ayano paused and her heart skipped a beat, fearing the ridicule befitting of a low-scoring failure. "Same as always." She plastered a gentle smile across her lips. "You're Kisaragi-san, yes?"
The boy nodded and his empty eyes flashed with an unrecognisable emotion. He grunted. "And you're Tateyama Ayano. Pleased to meet you." He reached a hand around to the back of his neck, indirectly telling Ayano that he knew his words lacked conviction.
Ayano smiled broader still and dropped her papers back onto her desk. "Yes." Her fingers toyed with the corners of the first sheet, folding them up, creasing lines here and there and before long, a small paper crane sat before her, bearing the scarlet single-figured mark of the grieving across one crumpled wing. She played with the tail of the crane and pulled at the paper beak she'd constructed before rising from her chair and stepping over to the window. She pulled the latch loose and swung the window open.
"...What are you doing?" Kisaragi asked haughtily.
"Setting it free." Ayano faced him for a split second, grinning, before releasing the bird from the confinements of the classroom. It rose into the air and Ayano's heart soared with it, but then it stopped and crashed into the invisible, spiralling down to the concrete below. Kisaragi didn't say anything more. He simply folded his papers into his pocket, sheltering those three perfect numbers encircled in crimson that Ayano had so desperately wanted for herself. She was just about to return to her seat when her teacher announced the ending of their session.
On days like this where the sky was cloudless and the sun was high and temperatures rocketed, Ayano saw her mother and she no longer faked happiness. Her mother, wrapped in white gauze with her hair lose, cascading around her shoulders like liquid gold, eyes bright behind damp lashes. On days like this where the sky was cloudless and the sun was high and temperatures rocketed, days where newborn pilots, hopeful, scorned, aimed to float above clouds. Days where the air was knocked from their lungs and they crashed mid-air, days where the tears stung at their eyes as they fell, days where they'd be the only ones to hear their bones crack against the pavement below.