I cannot begin to stress what a difficult desert of a lack of creativity I endured in the past 9 months. After graduating college (finally!) in May, I spent the next ~9 months writing about 50,000 words in various fics and started what felt like a million different things I could not find it in me to finish. I worked a ton, I went on job searches, I dealt with life with all of its highs and lows.

So it's unbelievable to finally finish something! I really hope that my creative struggle worked out with this. And, more than anything, I hope I can return to writing and publishing more consistently. In any case -

Enjoy~

"That someone's gaze isn't directed at you doesn't mean the sentiment isn't - and vice versa."

- Hanamonogatari: Flower Tale by Nisioisn (tr. Daniel Joseph)

Part 1

The line Asuka stands on is longer than she expected it to be, regardless of the prestigious academy shining there at the end. Middle school students preparing to graduate, just as she is, wait for their opportunity to perform before a panel of judges and their chance to make it into the Tokyo-3 Music Conservatory High School. Most of them have their instruments clutched in their hands in hard clam-shell cases; even more of them are shaking, shivering, their feet tap tap tapping, the echoes of nervous laughter and chattering teeth bouncing off of the cold concrete in the early morning. Asuka stands firm, arms crossed over her chest with her violin case dangling off of her fingers. She's not like the rest of them. She's not fidgeting. She's not even nervous. Asuka is ready for this. All of the training, all of the time she took has brought her to here and now. She watches the flash of birds passing the curved glass windows, shadows against the light. The same flicker past her face, and then are gone an instant later.

The line inches forward and curves naturally around the pillars that rise and keep the concrete pass-way awning above their heads. A finger taps at her shoulder and she waits a beat before turning her head. Exhibiting power and control are important, even here, even now. This is the pre-interview - standing above the others, standing out among the masses. The girl who tapped her shoulder has a freckled face and smiles at her hesitantly, though the end result is practiced and bright.

"Hello!" the girl says, bending forward at the hip. There's a rectangular case gripped tightly in her hand, probably a flute or a clarinet. "I'm Horaki Hikari. You're here for the interview?"

"Why else would I be here?" Asuka answers. She holds a hand at her hip, the picture of casual confidence. "I'm aiming for a spot in the string quartet. Actually," she corrects herself. "I'm here to get that spot in the string quartet."

"With that attitude, I'm glad I'm not competing against you." Hikari laughs lightly. Her shoulders shake, girlish and open. Asuka can't remember ever feeling that way. "I'm here for the wind ensemble myself."

Asuka considers this. Then, she holds out a hand. "Asuka Langley Soryu. I'm the best violinist in this line."

As the line moves forward they chat. Asuka tells Hikari only what she wants the girl to know, but her voice is loud because she wants the whole line to know, too: tales of her accomplishments, her awards, her participation not only in Japanese concerts, but in an expo in Germany. She paints, in bold words and a fiery tone, a picture of her life that seems to reflect the bright sun outside in its whites and reds, her victories decisive and rewarded. If her interested nodding says anything, Hikari isn't turned off by the bragging. Asuka thinks that she looks genuinely impressed. She's done her job, then, and so she turns the conversation around.

"And you?" she asks, "Have you done any tours or anything?"

Hikari shakes her head. "No, no - I have a lot of responsibilities at home with my sisters. My mother...she passed, so I kind of run the house."

There's a flush of pain that rides up Asuka's core, lapping at the walls of her throat. She forces it down. Her mother is dead too, and in a moment of weakness she wants to say something to the girl. Some congratulations for even being there. For not breaking down. They both understand a specific pain that neither would wish upon anyone else; at least in this, they're sisters-in-arms. But she doesn't. Different units or not, she and Hikari are still rivals. And, as the hot bravado rushes through the grooves in which her chilly pain had already run, Asuka realizes too that she has still gone further than this Hikari girl. That whatever words of encouragement or praise she could utter would be better focused at herself, certainly.

"Well, I suppose I can't blame you for not having the time. Touring doesn't give you the chance to do anything else, really." Asuka shrugs. She remembers the tight time tables she dealt with in Germany around all of those perfunctory people - not that she had any trouble keeping up. But all of the events had been in strict order, one after another, with little room for her to appreciate the time until afterwards. At least after the long beginning and the depressingly long end.

During the conversation their part of the line has all but reached the doors. Asuka moves forward on auto-pilot matching her steps to everyone else's, until the girl in front of her stops short. She bangs into the body standing there and grips the violin case protectively as she teeters, until Hikari, gripping at the corner of her dress, pulls her back. The girl she bumped into picks herself off of the floor and resumes staring out at nothing, out into the crowded early morning streets full of faceless people and vehicles whose windows glare harshly, obscuring the passengers within.

"What was that about?" Asuka yells. She pushes the girl's shoulder, watches her stumble a bit as her body turns. "Why don't you pay attention to where you're going?!"

It takes a second for the girl to fully turn around, and Asuka feels her anger double in that time. "Hey!" she yells again. "Are you just going to stand there? Answer me!"

When the girl finally looks up at her, Asuka finds herself at a loss for words. They are taken from her in anger and in exasperation. The girl is shorter than her by a head, and sickly pale. She looks at Asuka with a blank stare in the most literal way, as if her red eyes breed a silence between them that matches what seems to be the thoughtlessness in her head. Her blue hair is wispy and light, and falls in messy bangs across her forehead. She doesn't say anything; her mouth is shut, sealed like a tomb, and as stony as one too, without an expression. There's something about the way the light settles on her, touches her soft skin and powder-blue hair that blurs the girl at the edges. As if she herself is as light as her hair, as immaterial, and with a simple gust of wind or sharper glare of the sun she might flutter or flicker or fade out of view.

"My apologies." the girl says, and the breeze seems to whisk away her words, or the life in them, before they cross the small distance to Asuka with all the weight of cicada husks. Then she's quiet again. Her face would be a perfect mask - porcelain and paint, alabaster and ink - were it not for the slightest tremble in her wide ruby eyes giving something, something unknowable, away.

The shuffle of feet breaks the silent spell, and the girl moves with the crowd again.

"Whatever. People like you don't deserve to be on this line." Asuka throws out. She can't continue with these distractions. Not with the girl in front of her, and not with Hikari behind her. Instead, she goes over the piece she'll play in her head again. The bars and measures are lined up like soldiers and she hums along in review. Hikari has fallen silent. They're close to the entrance now. One person goes in at a time and leaves before the next is called in. The girl she bumped into enters before her, and in the minutes in between Asuka steels her nerves. She finds that single-minded focus she has always worked with and smooths down the churning in her gut, the fluttering in her chest that would give away her nervousness, could anyone hear it. The blue haired girl walks out of the room as quietly as she enters. She doesn't look at Asuka as she leaves, only clutches the hard-case in her hands tensely.

It's Asuka's turn after that and she marches straight ahead, head held high, ignoring the call of "good luck" that Hikari passes her way. She doesn't need luck. Her trust in her body - the muscles she's formed, the reflexes she's honed - there is no luck needed within absolute personal confidence. She doesn't need luck when she could wear her awards like a general does his medals, pinned to her chest as a testament to her work and sign to anyone who might challenge her authority among all of these other school children. She needs a unanimous decision from the three judges she'll be playing in front of in order to get into the school, but she's not worried even the slightest bit.

The room she enters is cold in temperature and tone, an arctic tundra and white enough to match that image. There's a simple platform to stand on, unadorned except for the black music stand that sticks out like a bug on a tv screen at night. She places her sheet music there. Not that she needs it. The piece is memorized, the notes all but calling to her - pre-loaded into her fingers like she's a music-playing automaton. The three judges at the table in front of the stage gaze up with wildly different views. In the center is an older man whose glasses obscure his eyes, and whose patient frown offers no mercy. To the right, a blonde woman looks on with her pen already hovering over a clip board; her gaze is cutting and critical, as if she's unraveling Asuka right there and then. The third woman has a youthful air, and she gives a small, friendly wave as Asuka pulls the violin from the case, runs the amber-colored rosin against the horse-hair bow, and then gives a few test runs against the strings. They sing like a voice, sharp and resonant, and cut into the empty tundra air of the room.

Asuka levels a fiery glare at all three judges at once. Were she to trade out her white dress for a rockstar get up, she might have an image to sell.

"I'm Asuka Langley Soryu. You might as well sign me up now," she smirks confidently, "You won't hear a better musician today."

Part 2

Asuka is filled with a rancid disgust as takes in her new school. It's a bubbling thing this revulsion, battery acid and boiling flesh that weighs her stomach down into her knees. Students filter into the school beyond the wrought iron gate, where the black paint flicks away to reveal the rust underneath - to show its weakness to the Sun. Above the gate is a sign reading Hakone School of the Arts, and just the shape of those kanji ignites the roiling brew in Asuka until she is physically sick. This is a scandal. An outrage. An embarrassment. A shame. She isn't where she's supposed to be. The morning sun beats down on her back, mercilessly pushing her forward. The concrete beneath her grips at her feet to keep her in place.

Still, she holds her head up high and takes her place among the crowd. She knew she was the best in that line two months before, but now, as she surveys the mish-mashed dregs that file into the school with peasant smiles and glassy eyes, she's assured in that statement. She is absolutely the best player at this school. Her shine and spark, like so many stars, will standout evermore against the backdrop of black-sky peerlessness here. The Tokyo-3 Music Conservatory will regret ever turning her down.

"Overly emotional. Aggressive play overwhelms the music. Arrogance belies weaknesses. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable. A total lost cause" The rejection letter said. She'd burned it after reading it twice. Those idiots - didn't they know that her confidence was her strength? That her emotion and aggression were better than the lifeless rote-playing of every one of those children who lined up with her? She knew a few of the people who had been accepted to Tokyo-3 from competitions and exhibitions, and she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that none of them - none of them - played with the kind of life and blood that she did.

Asuka takes in the school while she makes her way to the music wing. As if the school's spiritual degradation changes it physically, she notices just how run down the place is. The washed out gray-yellow of the walls, the scuffed floors, whose lack of a shine is only more pronounced in the conspicuous absence of wide windows and natural lighting, the ancient hinges on doors that squeak whenever they open to let people in and out - there's even a smell about the place, something between dust and musk and glue that has, in only a few minutes, already seeped into Asuka's clothing. Hakone School of the Arts ought to be destroyed, she thinks, smashed - crushed - battered - but the visual image is barely a comfort. She's here now. The shining glass and steel modern art of the Tokyo-3 Conservatory are as far away as anything, as that time she toured in Germany, which, though only a few years before, seems all but a dream now.

The music wing contains only one major classroom; smaller group and individual rooms line the rest of the wing like flute tone holes. She flicks her long red hair as she enters and, just as she desired, draws the eye of nearly everyone in the room. They learn from her stride that she's serious; see in her eyes and the set of her jaw her distaste; glean from her clenched fist the hunger gnawing at her for escape. Her budding body carries with it a sense of what she herself would call adulthood, right or wrong. The boys, in mere seconds, want her - though she wants nothing to do with them. The girls stew in that shaded valley between jealousy and desire. Only one pair of eyes hasn't looked her way, and instead gazes out of the window and into the blank-blue of the day. Asuka recognizes her, though it takes a moment. Realization singes her with anger and shame all at once. It's the girl she bumped into in line, the one with blue hair and lifeless eyes. There's an open seat at the front of the room and Asuka takes it. Anything for an advantage, anything to show her teachers and conductors that she is serious. Anything - anything not to have to see that girl she'd looked down on, who, like a scrape or a scar, is a testament to a mistake Asuka made.

Handsomely disheveled, a young male teacher comes in and quiets the students. He's tall and slouches with his hands in his pockets, the image of relaxed confidence. Asuka hates him immediately. Music is supposed to be taken seriously, but the vibe the man gives out is entirely the opposite. Still, she has to latch onto him. She has to use whatever means she can to get up and get out of this school with glowing recommendations.

"Class," he says. Even his voice sounds like the shrugging of shoulders. "I'm Ryoji Kaji. Welcome to your new school. Whether your time here is great or not is up to you, as I'm sure you'll all learn. I'll be heading the chamber music groups, which you will all be broken up into today." he smiles lazily at the classroom, and Asuka folds her hands together more tightly to stop herself from calling him out on his apathy. "After that, you guys will have some time to get to know your classmates."

He knows how to conduct at least, Asuka thinks, while Kaji moves his hands around in the air miming a baton. Students are placed into chamber music groups - string quartets and quintets, smaller wind ensembles, and finally, as his imaginary baton flicks at Asuka, piano quartets. She follows his hand movements and, chagrined, walks between the bunched up tables to the back of the room. She feels the glances of other students on her back, but doesn't lower herself to look at them. They don't even deserve her derision, let alone her attention.

Her heart sinks when she finally takes in the wretches she'll be playing with. There's a young boy with sad eyes and a pathetic way of holding himself; a single earbud hangs out of his ear, as droopy as his expression. He keeps glancing at the boy beside him, who has lanky arms and is wearing what she can best describe as a grin of obscurity. It's the last person in the group that all but sets her off, however. That girl, the one from the line, sits with her head still turned outwards towards the window. She glanced over when Asuka walked up with another blank stare - it borders on more than just a lack of expression, and instead it's almost a non-expression, the purposeful negation of emotion rather than the lack of it - but she has turned back again and now Asuka can only see bits and pieces of her reflection floating against the clear glass of the window.

"Pleasure to meet you," the taller boy greets, holding out a hand after running it through his cloud-gray hair. There's a strange glint to his eyes - he looks like he knows more than he lets on, or like he has removed himself in some way from the reality around him. An angel looking down from above, waiting to carry out some higher judgment. Asuka doesn't take his hand, which casually drops onto the shoulder of the boy beside him, and instead sits cross-armed in a chair around the four person group. "I'm Kaworu Nagisa." the boy continues, ignorant of the burning blush n the other boy's face.

"Shinji Ikari. I hope we get along." the other boy offers with a small smile.

Asuka doubts it very much. She ignores Shinji and glares at the back of the other girl's head. "And you?" she asks, her face scrunching up like speaking to the girl is lemon tart.

"I believe that that's - " Kaworu begins, trying to be the good hearted mediator; how honest he is in taking this role is confused by that ever-present near-smirk. Asuka finds the exuberant way he gestures with his hands as he speaks almost irritating enough to swat them out of the air.

"I didn't ask you. Why can't she answer? You, hey - you spoke to me before. Your name, what is it?"

Once more a silent moment passes like a low cloud over the group, the shade mismatched to the splendor of the day outside and the chatty excitement throughout the classroom. Their table, their group, is already ostracized from the rest: in mood, in intensity, even physically, where they're placed in the back corner and all but obscured by the dusty sunlight covering them like a veil; every one of these is a mark, a welt against Asuka's needling itch for attention, for a hold on every eye in the room. It only enrages her more. She stands and slams her hand onto the girl's desk. When the girl flinches, when she draws in a quick cutting breath, Asuka smirks. She is glad to feel this kind of power. Glad to not only draw attention, but to get reactions. Glad to get her way.

"Rei. Rei Ayanami." she finally answers. Asuka watches Rei's pale pink lips move in the reflection of the window and again her voice has come and gone like there's an electric switch controlling it - the sound coming into existence from nowhere and ending just the same. A voice as controlled as her face.

Satisfied, and yet, not, Asuka addresses the group. "Now I can't imagine that any of you have in interest in being the head here." Silence. Stares. Shinji's mouth opens like he wants to say something, but she goes ahead anyway. "That's what I thought. We're going to do things my way, then."

At the front of the classroom Kaji claps his hands twice and hushes the students. While he drones on about the expectations of the coming year and uses his fingers to list the classroom rules, Asuka finds that she can only give him a bit of her attention. Nervous energy sparks in her chest like embers from a fire. It crackles, her head turns to Kaworu, a hand lazily holding up his chin. As it sizzles she finds Shinji taking notes. But more than anything it snap, and it snaps to the other girl. Rei, beside her, hasn't moved her eyes from the scene outside the window and the courtyard down below. Only the way that her hands, once folded in her lap, now tap in silent thumps, can Asuka guess that Rei may be here, in the room, and not gone to some unknown place deep within her own mind.

She hates that the girl isn't taking any of this seriously.

She hates herself for the hypocrisy of doing the same.

Part 3

The end of the day comes far too slowly and without any of the relief she expects from it. She's tired, irritated, the dry September air and angle of the falling light adding to the painful buzzing in her head, in that spot behind the eyes that seems exclusively made for headaches. All she wants is the sanctuary of the dorm she's been given for her stay at this wreck of a school. Somewhere empty and quiet, where her thoughts, twisted shapes of disappointment and anger, could stretch and linger in the space around her instead of ricocheting inside of her skull. She hadn't been to the dorms yet - the students were ushered to their classes and promised that the goods they'd sent a week before the start of the semester made it safe and sound, and now this herd of young people crowd the walkway between the major school buildings and the prefab dorms lined up in planters' rows. They're squat buildings, the dorms. Little more than breezeblocks stacked on top of one another covered in gallons of plastishine paint and about as inviting to Asuka as the prisons they resemble.

In the last girls-only building, past the oddly-cavernous lobby filled with empty plastic chairs like molded stalagmites, Asuka trudges her way to her own room in the very back. The door looks like all of the others; the scratchy, badly trodden rug leading to it is the same shade of dull gray, and the faded paint around the entrance has the same smudges and smears as the rest. She compares the room number on the crumbled paper in her hand to the plastic sign on the door and then crumples it some more, until the sharp corners of the misshapen ball poke her palm.

The knob is cold as she turns it, the door stuck a bit on its hinges, and so she pushes too hard to open it. She stumbles in. And then, with the icy-hot combo of surprise and despair, Asuka sees what she wanted to see least. It's a shock of blue, a watercolor spill in the corner of the dusk-coated canvas of the room. Rei Ayanami is reading a book on one of the two beds with what may have been a smile, though it flees in time with the swinging door and the soundless fury of Asuka's clenched fist and tensed throat. Rei glances at her and then back at the book without saying a word.

"Why are you in my room?" Asuka asks, the rage in her voice poised on a pinhead.

"The dorms are shared rooms," Rei flips a page slowly with a finger tip. "We've been assigned as roommates." She's as listless as a tired child being dragged around on errands. There's a weight to her body that is also a weightlessness, just the suggestion of her displacement on the bed in this case; a presence made apparent by her lack of a presence overall. Asuka hates the way the girl lives this near-ethereal existence, as if she has no place in this world and exists only as the reflection of something else somewhere else. She hates looking at her in general, at the cloudy outline of the nothing girl. If her anger wasn't best directed through the narrowing of her eyes, Asuka likely would've closed them instead of looking at Rei any longer.

"Like hell we are!" The door slams behind Asuka, who has already made her way into the cramped space. Between the two beds, which are placed against opposite walls, are two night tables and a large double-doored boudoir. The room is painted an off-beige that looks to be too afraid to choose a definite hue. A bookshelf stands at the wall beside Rei's bed - and whether it was there, or whether she brought it with her isn't clear - as is the room's only window, a glowing stamp on the otherwise envelope-flat wall. Asuka's end has nothing but the box she shipped to the school weeks before, full of nothing important. The only important thing she owns, anyway, is her violin.

Still, she cannot accept the terms of this ridiculous rooming situation. Her short march sees her beside Rei's bed, standing over her much like she did earlier in the day in the classroom.

"I want you out of here." Asuka says forcefully.

"These are shared rooms," Rei repeats. "And we're roommates." There's little strength to her voice, however, and the look she gives Asuka is that same one she always wears - a statue's face, her mouth a perfectly straight line, like there's nothing behind those eyes but an infinite empty pit that the girl is falling through, ever further into the depths of an unknowing, unseeing mind. Like she's not even there, her body the last physical evidence of an existence long since vanished in spirit.

It's sickening, Asuka thinks, as that same vacuousness rips away the oxygen that had fueled the fire of her indignation. There's no use in arguing with Ayanami. Asuka's sure her voice is barely echoing off of the walls of whatever makes up Rei's mind. Or maybe it's that old image of a rock falling down an empty well - down, down, soundlessly, and Asuka's not sure if there's enough water at the bottom to make a splash. With a tut of her tongue she goes over to lay down on her own bed. There's nothing to replace the anger now that it's gone, only the hole in her chest that anger so often fills. The hole she works her hardest to hide. Asuka tries to count the dust motes floating in the shafts of sunset-sunlight that come in through the window beside Rei, but it's an impossible task, and anyway, the insignificance of the floating bits of not-much reminds her of her own place in this insignificant school - though, of course, she'd like to be seen as the sunlight itself illuminating that dust, the radiance brightening their impurity and uselessness.

Asuka tries this, but she can't sit still. Inactivity rings in her ears like the sounding of a timer, shrill and piercing and urging her into action. She stands then in the center of the room, hands on her hips, staring at Rei. The air is stale and somehow, though it's warm outside, brisk. It might just be the atmosphere, she thinks, or Rei, if the lifelessness in her body is cold where she - where living, breathing, feeling people are warm. She taps her foot impatiently. Her body is working faster than her mind now, pulling the exhausted thing along like a tired dog on a leash. Before the thought fully forms in her head Asuka rummages through her small box of goods. Moments later she finds the permanent marker she was looking for, and then, like a painter or a photographer, stands with her hands making a camera lens - her fingers a wide square, one eye squinted, measuring the length and width of the room. Rei is looking at her over the pages of her book and, perhaps for the first time, Asuka sees a flash of attention there. Maybe even annoyance. It spurns her on. At the center of the room, on the far wall, she draws a small black dot. Rei's eyes widen, though the rest of her expression is still stone.

"See here, Ayanami - this dot I just drew? This separates our sides of the room. Don't cross it. No matter what. I sure as hell won't."

Asuka watches Rei look from the dot to the other side of the room, where the boudoir sits squarely center, and obviously there for both of them to use. "What about that?"

"We'll split it too. Right down the middle. Don't touch my clothes, don't cross this line, don't even look in my direction. You got that?" Now, with more control, her beloved sense of assuredness comes over her, as if she had gone out in the cold without a jacket and found one, warm and ready to be worn, forgotten on a bench.

Rei takes a breath. When Asuka strains her ear, she can hear the little sigh that escapes the other girl's throat. It sounds, almost, as if she is going to speak. Complain, maybe. Offer some sort of truce. Yell or scream or cry, even. There's a part of Asuka that wants this more than anything; if there's blood in the other girl's veins then they can be friends, or enemies, rivals - whatever, anything that wouldn't make it so that Asuka has to live in this cold room and be reminded of her loneliness by checking it against the fact that there's actually another person with her. Not alone, but lonely. Not solitary, but feeling solitude.

But she says nothing. Rei looks once more over what has become no man's land and then returns to her book. The shuffling sound of the turning page makes up for the quietness of her sigh.

Asuka sinks onto her bed as her spirit sinks with a disappointment it ought to have seen coming, a rainstorm on a cloudy day that still catches you by surprise.

I'd like to update this twice a week, and as I've worked it out, there should be 5 chapters. It's all written and the majority of it has been revised and edited. Please look out for the rest.

Thanks for reading!

Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!