Unease gripped Blanc's heart as she hesitated in front of Room 960. A beige beechwood door stood before her as the gatekeeper, its light wooden face betraying nothing of what she was to face in the near future. Three minutes out from her own room, number 889, she felt like a hobbit standing at the base of the mountain of doom.

At evening times, the highly modernized hallways of the academy building tended to shine. The glass along the entirety of the south- and west-facing walls bore view to a beautiful orange sunset, captivating any students returning to their dorms at this hour. Neptune's room was one of the many located along the western edge of the housing floor, meaning she got the best of sunup and sundown: brilliant beams in the morning and muted rays just before nightfall.

The only reason she even knew Neptune's room number was because she had learned it only two days ago from Plutia, who had been present during her argument with Uni. In exchange, Blanc had explained the situation involving herself, Neptune, and the Film Club. Only as much as she was willing to share, of course, but Plutia was about as scheming as a shampuru—not very much, really.

"So you're just trying to apologize to Neppy? But she's trying to avoid you, right?" Plutia had asked in confirmation, holding her braid over her heart. "Wow... I didn't know Neppy could stay mad at anyone. Not for more than a day..."

After that depressing reminder of just how astoundingly Blanc had messed up, the sleepy senior had wished her good luck and left in her usual charm, a lazy gait that begged the question of how she managed to get anywhere without falling asleep mid-stride.

Blanc sighed. Thoughts of failure and fear were starting to grow in her mind. Despite having finally galvanized herself into approaching Neptune's room, her resolve was beginning to waver. What if Neptune knew it was her and refused to open the door? Was she even home? What if she was on her way here at this very moment, and any second now she was going to walk into the hallway and see Blanc standing outside her room?

Before she lost her nerve, Blanc got a grip on herself and shook her head violently. No, she upbraided herself, ignoring the so-called "possibilities" pervading her head. I can't think about any of that. Better to suck in her gut and do what she came here to do than hesitate for nothing. In that moment of bravado, she found the nerve in her to lift her arm and rap her knuckles three times on the door.

"Neptune. It's me, Blanc," she announced in a clear and level voice. "Can you please open the door?"

Blanc held her breath and listened, hoping to hear some sign that her friend was in fact within. Nothing yet. Worried that her voice might not have penetrated through the door, she had to resist the urge to repeat herself. The last thing she wanted was to sound too desperate, and talking into the keyhole was not likely to make a difference anyway.

She exhaled slowly and tried to calm down with a bit of on-the-spot meditation. Her heartbeat had sped up from a walk to a trot, and embarrassingly she felt a bit dizzy. Her emotions were already an indecipherable mess, and the door had not even opened yet.

Taking another look down the hallway to see if anyone was coming toward her, Blanc went over the plan in her head for the twentieth time. For almost two weeks now, she had reflected over what her argument with Neptune had really been about. She understood enough to know that she had a lot to say sorry for.

The end of the month was approaching fast. The longer she took to make up with Neptune, the harder it would be to patch up the holes in their relationship. Eventually, things would reach a point where making amends was no longer possible. Trying to resolve it in conversation would only result in a shrug of the shoulders and an "Oh, it's fine" when it really wasn't fine.

Simply put, unless she was able to make it up to Neptune, Neptune would give up on forgiving her; she was hardly the type to dither about something forever. They might still consider each other friends, but that friendship would be on icy ground at best. There was no way Blanc could live with that ending. In spite of the way she acted, she really did try her best to be considerate. Her ties with Neptune were something she never wanted to lose. They were, or at least had been until recently, extremely close friends—for Blanc, closer than anyone else.

Blanc felt her throat tighten. She could still remember Neptune's face from that day: the pained look in those normally bright purple eyes followed by that frustrated, unsympathetic glare. She had never thought she would experience something colder than a winter night in Lowee.

While she fought to keep her eyes dry, she heard the lock unlatch behind her. She turned around just in time for the door to open, and some of the air was forced out of her lungs at what she saw. So much time had passed since she had last seen Neptune—days—and for a moment she was not sure how to react. Joy and anxiety traded places in her chest so many times that they started to feel like the same thing.

"Nep... tune..." Anxiety scored a point, and her voice cracked like a broken mirror at the sight of Neptune's bedhead and cheerless smile.

"Hi, Blanc..." Neptune greeted her uneasily. She went quiet as if there was nothing else to say. "Uh… how'd you find my room?"

Blanc tried to speak around the lump in her throat and managed to mumble something about getting the number from Plutia. "I... feel really bad, okay?" she said, afraid to lose Neptune's interest if she stopped talking. "I didn't think about your feelings. I let the movie get in the way of our friendship, and I wanted to make it good so badly that I just... forgot. I was being an idiot. I shouldn't have said any of the things I said back in that classroom. I'm sorry, Neptune."

Neptune listened to her entire spiel without a word. Her hand had slipped off the side of the door, and her head was hung so that Blanc could not see her eyes underneath her bangs.

Blanc bowed her own head in apology. Not even half of the things she had wanted to say had been said; they had all been forgotten after the first stammered sentence.

I can barely look at her. Blanc rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Why do I feel so ashamed?

"Blanc." Neptune said after a few seconds. She lifted her eyes, and for a second Blanc remembered a sad movie. "Thanks for coming to tell me. I'm sorry for avoiding you. I… I needed some time to think. But I'm over it now"—she smiled and then looked down—"so don't kick yourself for it. You get really—mm... really devoted about your work sometimes. It happens, I don't blame you."

Like a ray of sun on a cloudy day, the hope Blanc had for resolution faded. Neptune's voice sounded so strained. The smile she put on looked so false. Blanc had been around Neptune longer than she could remember; her lifetime friend's smile right now was like a flicker compared to her usual radiance—unrecognizable. The spark was just missing.

Left without a proper response, Blanc stared at her, looking for the one thing she could say that would fix everything. But she never found it.

Defeated, she dropped her eyes. Neptune's smile, too, fell as if she knew Blanc could tell that it was just a travesty. All pretenses of being "over it" were gone. Something was still keeping her from being able to go back to the way things were with Blanc, like a giant invisible wall—impossible to see, to climb, to walk around.

A literal shadow fell across Neptune's face, from the sun falling perfectly into place behind a support beam.

Suddenly afraid of the silence that continued to grow, Blanc opened her mouth to break it without thinking. "W-when we were filming, your acting was really good. I just wanted to tell you that, it felt really… really… er, real."

Neptune looked up when Blanc started talking, but by the time the brunette had finished running her mouth, she had already looked away again.

"Oh, yeah. Thanks. I was just doing my best, as always."

Blanc mentally slapped herself for saying anything. What am I thinking? Bringing it up like that without any tact whatsoever was a surefire way to make things awkward. Great.

"I mean..." She faltered, searching for a way to salvage the conversation. "What do I mean, it's like..."

"Blanc, it's alright. You don't need to keep apologizing or anything, but can we talk later? It's getting kind of late." Neptune glanced over her shoulder. "Everyone should be going back to their rooms now. Don't worry about it, okay?" Blanc wanted to say she was already worried, but she gave up and nodded dumbly. "Alright. I'll… see you after class tomorrow."

Neptune said goodbye with her eyes and shut the door. Blanc heard the click of a latch. And just like that, she was locked out of Neptune's life.

After class tomorrow. The words reverberated in her head but meant nothing. Unless Neptune was planning to reinstate the Film Club, their paths never normally crossed. Maybe they would bump into each other somewhere in the school building, but there was no chance they would be able to talk about this when they passed each other in the hallway.

It suddenly hit her that she might have already missed her chance to make their friendship whole again—that it was too late, that she might never be as good a friend with Neptune as she had been before.

And the thought crushed her. She thought she was mentally strong, but she was wrong. Now that the things she had taken for granted had been taken away from her, she realized how much she relied on them, depended on them, missed them.

Neptune, and her silly, stupid, answer-to-everything smile; her excessive physical contact, even when it was a hot and sticky summer day; her goofy jokes, her way of speech; her habit of slipping into video-games-and-anime mode at random.

Somehow, the thought of not being friends with a girl like that—the thought that she was going to miss out on all of that from now on—it was depressing like none other.

Blanc clenched her fists and brought a hand up as if she were about to break down Neptune's door with a single swing. But instead, her arm trembled and fell softly against the wood, the only force she could muster being to drag a single, broken sob from her throat.

I did it. I apologized to her. This should have been the part when everything was made right. This should have been the end of all. The final destination. She had banked everything on this moment, but not one thing had changed. I apologized to her…

The problem was still unsolved, like a jigsaw puzzle missing a tiny piece in the upper corner. The whole picture was there, but it was like part of the sky was missing. Just one piece, a single color, inessential to see the painting but vital to finishing the puzzle.

Blanc's arm dropped to her side, and her head smacked against the wooden door. Whether or not Neptune heard it, she did not care. Deep down, she wanted Neptune to notice that tiny thunk and come back. But in reality, there was nothing Blanc could say to her that would matter.

"Did you hear that?"

She froze, able to hear something behind the door. It was not Neptune's voice; the voice was still definitively feminine, but it was much too low to be hers.

Someone else was in there. Another person, listening to their entire conversation. How much had they heard?

"Hear what?"

"I think she's still there. You should—"

Blanc did not wait to see if someone actually got up to check on the door. She could not bear to face Neptune again so soon, especially not when someone else was right around the corner. Taking one last look at the number 960 written over the door, she hurried away without looking back.

Her footsteps resounded in the corridor, almost as heavy as the worries on her mind. She kept walking, her brain awhirl with words. Neptune's, her own, it didn't matter. Everything melted together.

Blanc reached the end of the hall, nearly colliding with a group of girls rounding the corner. As she resigned herself to the three-minute walk back to her room, she recalled something Uni had said to her two days ago. It had been so cryptic then, but now she understood what it meant after hearing that voice in Neptune's room. But she was too out of strength to care.

Drained of the energy to even pick up her feet, she trudged back to her room with the setting sun shining on her back. Each step seemed to take her farther away from the waking world. The hallway grew dimmer, darker, until the numbers on the doors she passed were no longer readable and she was totally eclipsed in gloom.

Just Another Love Story

Neptune's arms were trembling as she closed the door. Her conversation with Blanc had lasted for less than two minutes, yet she had never felt so much anxiety all at once. As guilty as she felt for closing the door on her friend, she was too afraid to ever open it again. Her hands, her head, her heart, everything was shaking. Even making eye contact made her feel like she had been stabbed in the chest. But the sensation only grew more intense now that Blanc was gone.

Why that was, it was anyone's guess, because Neptune definitely wanted to know. Sure, she had been beyond frustrated by Blanc's insensitivity, yet it had never been her intention to prolong the issue for this long. Perhaps she still unknowingly resented Blanc for that day. But for what: the thing they had nearly done, or the things they had argued about afterwards?

If Tamsoft had not abandoned the recording, and she and Blanc had actually gone through with the scene, would things be any different, for better or worse? Would she be feeling this way, this feeling that felt like a sharp, tiny fang burrowed deep in her chest?

For a single insane moment, Neptune wished that Blanc would just disappear like a drop of water in a pond. If only the world was just her and Noire and everyone else besides just one person. But she instantly wished she could take back the thought. Even if it was a morbid solution to her own problems, it was such a selfish thing to think about that she felt as if she were the lowest of the low. She felt like the victim of an abusive relationship, kindling a perverse affection for the person who had caused her so much pain in the first place.

No, that's a terrible way to think about it! She smacked herself in the cheek lightly, mentally apologizing to her close friend. Blanc was less the antagonist than were her own misguided emotions. Her mind had already found Blanc not guilty; her heart, apparently, was not in agreement.

Neptune put a hand over her chest and rubbed the spot, trying vainly to assuage the heartache that haunted her. Ever since she had stopped talking to Blanc, she had been unable to function like normal. She would remember something at a moment's notice, and suddenly her entire body would freeze up. It became impossible no matter what she was doing to avoid imagining Blanc doing the same. It became impossible to avoid seeing everywhere the same shade of brown that was in Blanc's hair, the same shade of blue that was in her eyes. Even when Neptune closed her eyes and laid in bed, knees to her chest, she could only wonder if her friend was feeling the same hurt.

She dug her fingernails into her palm, trying to unscrew her tightened throat. No matter how badly she wanted to move on, Blanc had showed up at her door with that apologetic look that had made Neptune recall the day they tried to record that stupid scene and how their faces had been so close together. Made her recall the argument afterwards and how they had kept talking over the other, and how the words had built up in her throat like an old rubber band stretching until it inevitably snapped.

Right as she thought she would lose control, a hand touched her on the shoulder. A soulful warmth spread through her body like ivy from the point of contact. Her muscles, which had gotten so tense without her knowing, finally relaxed.

Noire had been her one saving grace. Over the last week, she had helped relieve some of the thoughts that stopped Neptune from sleeping soundly at night. In fact, the tacit promise of Noire coming to her room every day was the thing that had kept her going. Amidst all this confusion, she had been dependable and immutable: She was just Noire—tall, soft, warm, and with a heart like a frozen prickly pear.

Then the steadying hand on her shoulder vanished. "Did you hear that?" Noire asked her quietly.

Neptune swallowed and wet her lips. More like, did she want to answer this question? "Hear what?" she said evasively.

Noire paused, then coughed and motioned at the door. "I think she's still there. You should open it. Talk to her," she suggested gently, but Neptune made no move to comply. The ensuing silence gave her chills.

Noire, after a moment, stepped back wordlessly. She stood still for a moment—Neptune could practically hear her thinking—then she withdrew into the room, out of sight.

Why do things have to be so hard? she wondered as she collected herself and reached for the doorknob. She braced herself for the worst and pushed it open.

"Neptune?" exclaimed a voice, but not the one she had been expecting.

"Huh? Nepgear?" Her voice rose in surprise, and a bit in embarrassment. Her younger sister and her entourage, consisting of Uni, the twins and some other people whose names she could not provide, happened to be walking past her door at that very moment. "Oh. Um... Yeah, I was just getting some air. Didn't expect to bump into you girls."

Nepgear nodded slowly, her eyes narrowed in cognition. "Blanc just walked past us," she informed her sister. "She seemed a bit busy though. Ram called out to her, but she didn't even notice."

"Oh. I wonder what she's up to. Well, alright Junior. See you later!"

Neptune waved them off, projecting a smile. But as soon as they were gone, she retreated back into her room and locked the door.

Out of energy to maintain her cheer, she sighed and rubbed her arm as if she could smooth out the goosebumps dotting her skin. Neptune was no stranger to pain, having been in some very difficult situations in her lifetime, but she had never been cut this deep.

She backed away from the door. Whatever was on the other side, she wanted nothing to do with it right now.

The sun had moved quite a fair distance in the time she had been standing at the door, and consequently the room felt darker than before. Doing her best to mask her angst and look unbothered, Neptune sat down on the bed and pressed her fists into her lap. Smile, she told herself, acutely aware that Noire was seated just a few feet away. Just pretend to be okay. But even that felt like too much of a task for her right now. Try as she might, she could only manage a feeble smile.

There was some shuffling, and all of a sudden an arm was wrapped around her shoulder, pulling her in until she was practically propped up against Noire's person. She wished she could expel all her worries with a big sigh and give Noire an even bigger hug, but the feeling did not come. 'Sorry,' Neptune found herself saying, "I don't want you to worry too much about me."

"Hmph. Of course I'll worry. Who the hell do you think I am?" Noire scolded her with a light knuckle to the head. "Do you hate her for what she did?"

"No," Neptune replied without hesitation. "I don't, but… I'm just not sure how to talk to her anymore."

Trying to vocalize how she felt, she fell short of words. There was just never a good way to put it.

Outside the window, the sky was starting to turn red, a sign that nightfall was about to hit. It was not for a few more hours that she normally went to sleep. A hand smoothed her hair softly, but it stopped every now and then as if mind of the person it belonged to was wandering.

"You should still try," Noire told her, voice quavering. "No matter what you say, I don't think she'll hate you. And... I won't either." She pulled her legs up onto the bed, never moving her hand from around Neptune's shoulders.

"Yeah… I'll try. I will." Neptune nodded slowly, digging up every last ounce of determination in her. "Noire, I—I don't know how to thank you."

"Oh... J-just don't mention it."

Neptune closed her eyes, and all the vitality gradually seeped out of her body now that the immediate crisis was over. Tonight was her chance to regenerate, for tomorrow definitely would be difficult. Long enough she had run away from the issue, and it had finally caught up to her. Conflict was just around the corner, a storm on the horizon. Tonight—tonight was her last chance to be like this, and she was not going to waste that chance.

In a few hours, all the intimacy of right now would evaporate with the morning sun. There was no guarantee that the two of them would sit here together ever again, no guarantee they would kiss or hug or even look at each other the same way. Only one thing was sure: Neither she nor Noire could truly be happy like this, living in the shadow of something broken and left alone. They were both too conscientious to be okay with that; even if it meant the end of "them", this was a problem that she had to see to the end.

Neptune wished she could go to sleep and forget all this. She wished Noire would hold her and say that everything was going to be okay. But she could not escape shake the feeling that as soon as she fell asleep, the sun would rise and it would all be over.