Short, sweet, and to the point.
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About twenty minutes earlier…
A cacophony of noise erupted from the piano, frightening the little sparrows perched in the tree so bad they resolved to nest somewhere else.
Haru chewed the eraser of her pencil as she crumpled up her scales and threw them at the window, traumatizing the poor birds even more. Sighing with frustration, she stood up and walked to the center of the floor and laid down, face-up, on the carpet. Spitting out her pencil, she closed her eyes and began to rub her temples.
The room was beginning to resemble her bedroom. The large desk in the corner was so covered with papers, clothes, and other pieces of junk Haru had forgotten what color the stain was. A little silver trashcan overflowed and was oozing paper balls and pencil shavings. In another corner an easel with a blank canvas stood, surrounded by various paintbrushes and rolled-up tubes of paint. Piles of clothes concealed most of the carpet and the old, beautifully stained piano Haru was currently glowering at.
Something was wrong.
Haru remembered the day after her adventures with Baron Humbert von Gikkingen in the Cat Kingdom. She had been so… tired. It didn't seem like life could go on without Baron and Muta and Toto and Yuki. She hadn't wanted to get up that morning and face the day alone.
But she had. And she'd survived. And life had gone on.
She had signed up for an art class second semester of her senior year in high school, and had discovered she had a passion, and a talent, for it. She'd also done phenomenal in a self-defense course, since cute cat figurines weren't always going to be there to protect her. Dance lessons had lasted a couple of weeks before she and the instructor decided it was a lost cause, and she'd recently taken up piano lessons at her mother's urging. She was in college; she had a lot going for her; she was happy.
Then everything started to fall apart.
It first began on a typical morning when she took a sip of her special tea and promptly sprayed it across the newspaper. For reasons unknown, it had tasted awful, liquid hot and slimy as it attempted to slide down her throat. She had to dump the whole kettle down the drain.
The next day had been no better. Nor was the day after that, or the day after that. Eventually she had to go back to tea bags because every single pot she had blended tasted horrible.
Then her grades started to plummet. An A became a B+, then a B-, then a C-. Her GPA fell. Studying was impossible, and she froze up on tests.
Next to go was her inspiration. Page after page in her sketchbook wound up in the trashcan, and that one canvas had sat on the easel for a month now.
Now she was moody, irritable, and impatient. How had life gone from being so right to turning so wrong? But she thought she had finally pinpointed the reason for her misery.
Baron.
Not really Baron himself, but his memory. Haru missed him like crazy. She couldn't get him out of her head now. Day in and day out, all she could think about was the cat figurine.
The last words she said to him were what really haunted her. Why? Because she knew he didn't feel the same way back.
Just for the record, I think I have a little crush on you.
It made her want to pull her hair out. What had she been thinking, saying that to him? There was no way Baron could ever feel that way about her. Haru's hand groped around on the floor for a second before her fingers closed around a pillow. She brought it up and pressed it to her face and groaned into the fabric. Why did things have to be so complicated?
A dull thudding sound echoed to her ears, and she threw the pillow away and sat up, rubbing her eyes. The thudding came again, and she realized it was someone knocking on the door, though she had no idea who could possibly be knocking.
"I'm coming, I'm coming," she said tiredly, pulling herself to her feet and pushing her hair out of her eyes as she strolled over to the door. Slipping her hand onto the doorknob, she twisted the knob and pulled open the door.
Standing at her door was an incredibly handsome man with tousled golden hair and warm, jade-green eyes. Her voice failed her, and all she could do was stare. Funny, how she was just thinking about Baron and then…
Then the man smiled, and the warmth of his smile caused heat to rise in her cheeks and radiate outward, and suddenly her knees were weak and she gripped the frame of the door to keep herself from falling over.
But when he spoke, gripping the doorway proved not to be enough. "Hello Haru," he said genially, and memories of two years ago and mice in boxes and moving mazes and dancing cats and a white top hat whirred through her head so fast she became dizzy and the world began to tilt sideways. The last thing she saw before the world faded to black was the incredibly handsome man leaning forward to catch her in his arms.
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