Maka sat at her desk, multiple stacks of paper covering it in a patchwork of different assignments. When she'd signed on to be a teacher, she hadn't quite envisioned this level of paperwork. Or stupidity. Seriously, how any of her students got this far in life without the basic ability to spell-check was completely beyond her. On the flip side, however, some of the papers she'd received were actually pretty good. Soul Evans in particular had a certain dry wit that made his papers particularly memorable - she tried not to show it, but she actually enjoyed receiving his work. It didn't hurt that he was hot. As in, seriously hot. She didn't usually give herself over to thoughts of hotness (there were way too many other things to be thinking about and he was her STUDENT, dammit, there were rules about this), but Soul…
NO. Bad thought, squish it! Alright, moving on.
She flipped through the papers, trying to find one that she knew would take her mind off of her distractingly hot student. There was always at least one paper that made her wish she could smack its author in the head with a thesaurus - a good dose of literary rage was just what she needed. Not that one… maybe not that one either… that one she might actually enjoy…
Her flipping was interrupted when the next paper, five or six sheets long, slipped from her fingers to scatter across the floor in defiance of the tiny paperclip with which they'd previously been restrained. Ugh, why did her students always seem to forget to keep their papers together? It wasn't THAT hard to find a stapler. Grumbling beneath her breath, Maka bent down to pick up the scattered pages without paying much attention to their contents. She straightened up after collecting the errant pages, sitting back down at her desk to find out who it belonged to, and froze as she finally registered the contents of the paper in front of her. And two things were made alarmingly clear to her as she stared down at it.
The first was that the pages she held were DEFINITELY not an essay on gender roles in classical literature. They weren't even a paper at all. Complicated tangles of handwritten notes covered the printed staff lines, and even with her near-nonexistent musical literacy she knew this was sheet music - or at least a rough draft.
The second was that her name was scribbled in the margins.
In Soul's handwriting.
She was definitely going to need to talk to him about that, she thought faintly, before carefully shuffling the pages back into order and putting it on top of her filing cabinet. Out of sight, out of mind. She had papers to grade. Her resolve didn't last very long, though, since the corner of the small stack of sheet music taunted her from the top of the cabinet even as the implications continued to percolate in the back of her mind. He wrote her a song. Or was inspired by her. For a song. That he wrote. What did it mean? She wanted to be hopeful and think that it meant he returned her affections, but the more rational side of her mind shut that down just as quickly. She was his teacher. He was her student. There couldn't be affections in the first place, never mind that they were only a few years apart in age and he was kind and intelligent and apparently musically gifted because he wrote her a song -
No. No no no she could NOT be thinking about this. Hadn't she just told herself that she wouldn't think about this until tomorrow? Because she couldn't. She had papers to grade, and things to do, and sheet music to most definitely not think about. She would talk to Soul about it tomorrow after class. Okay. That was a plan. That was a good, solid plan, and she was just going to not think about the sheet music on top of her filing cabinet until then. Now, back to her original objective: finding a paper so ridiculous that she would forget about her insane crush in the first place. Maybe Meme's. She never seemed to have it together…
Eventually, by the time Maka had finished going through all the rest of the papers, she'd managed to bench her thoughts about that sheet music. She managed to go home and get through the evening alright, but when she saw it the next morning (still perched almost innocently on top of her filing cabinet), a tight knot of… well, she wasn't even sure what she was feeling suddenly appeared in her chest. She took a deep breath and picked it up, shuffling it underneath of her lecture notes for the day. Maka just had to get through her class, and then all of this would be resolved. Hopefully. Maybe.
She turned and swept out the door towards her classroom, firmly shoving all thoughts of hot students and sheet music to the side.