Otho looks up and sees her. They mirror each other, again. Again? She wonders where it came from. Why does it feel like this has happened before?

Emmeline is struck by the sense that her life is overtaking her. She feels like she's chasing after it. Things used to happen so incredibly slowly: one day after the other, an infinite week, a month that spanned millennia - now she's clutching the fleeting moments that exist in the present, going hours in a haze until another one comes around. Why do things keep happening?

The session begins and their gaze breaks and her anxiety returns full force. Introductions are made and immediately forgotten. There are only six other students in the room. An octave, she thinks. There's a symmetry to it. Their teacher - guide? Emmeline doesn't know what role he's supposed to play. Conductor? This isn't an orchestra - says something about pairing off, words that make her gut hollow with dread. The only person here with a name her mind has retained is Otho. Inevitably, she looks to him.

He looks back at her with those dark, sad eyes. Poems talk about eyes a lot and she hasn't always understood: you can see smiles in them, yes, but all of the emotions and traits that artists describe, the whole windows-to-the-soul thing - it's lost on her. If she were to try, to put into words what she feels when she looks at them, at him, she'd get stuck on some metaphor about cats. He has the same detached intellect, something hidden and kept back, knowledge withheld. Really though, she doesn't think it's his eyes at all. Understanding Otho is a skill she hasn't mastered, but the way he walks towards her with his head slightly bowed, his fingers pushing into his palms, the ragged seam on his right shoulder, the ill-fitting coat - all of these things are more useful than his eyes. Emmeline thinks that it's the way people wear themselves that gives them away. Otho wears himself reluctantly; uncomfortably. He's still elegant though, which she doesn't think is fair. Envy tweaks her stomach when she looks at his beautiful hands. Is it strange to think so much about a boy she hardly knows? Is it strange that they've not said anything yet? Yes, she decides. But she refuses to break their silent mutual examination. (Heat flushes through her as she notices he's studying her back. He seems abashed, shy.) She spoke first at the - oh, god. The last time she saw him was at his mother's funeral. Nothing makes sense.

'Why are you here?' He says, though it sounds like an accident. Immediately, he shuts his eyes for a second then: 'Sorry.'

She smiles. His discomfort puts her at ease. Is she a terrible person? 'Hello.'

'Hello,' he replies, meets her eyes. He looks so tired and so awake. 'Emmeline.'

'Otho.'

Their names create a bridge between them. She'd half thought he hadn't recognised her. Well - no. That's not true; she'd half thought he hadn't wanted to recognise her. The connection between them was Adelaide (she hates that past tense doesn't take effort anymore) and even then, tenuous. She doesn't even know if they've ever had a whole conversation. (Why, then, does she feel like she knows this boy? Why does she feel like he knows her?)

Neither of them seems to know what to say. That purple-haired boy surfaces in her mind, the easy way words seemed to flow out of him. Some people take when they speak, but he gave - made room for her in the conversation. Emmeline wishes she could do this for Otho. But it's always been the way of things that language only belongs to her when she's writing it down. Poetry suits her: the sparseness of the ink on the paper, all that white space in between like breathing in dialogue. Once again, the feeling that the fates have dropped the string of her destiny into her hands dawns. Subconsciously, they flex, tighten into fists. My life is mine, she thinks. I can choose. So she steadies herself, then decides to be brave.

'Will you be my partner?'

Otho's shoulders loosen, surprise and - perhaps relief? She can't tell. She hopes that he'd wanted her to ask. She believes he feels the same weight as her - the inability to interact with the world and people and real things, the pressure from inside that suffocates when forced to act, the need for something, something indescribable and huge and important.

This is all very heavy. Maybe she's just... projecting.

Regardless, he straightens up. 'Yes.'

For a boy who appears so afraid to take a step - he walks like the clouds are going to part under his feet and he'll plummet - Otho goes to ask for a room key with relative confidence. The school is so big, so unreasonably big, bigger even than it feels (and sometimes school feels overwhelmingly big, as though it is something huge and indomitable and not just a building and a collection of hours spent in classrooms)that the music department, though funded less than science or sport, as always, has a corridor lined with smaller rooms, practice rooms. The walls are stone and echo with the ghosts of footsteps, but the rooms themselves are soundproofed and lockable. I could die in here and no-one would know, her mind observes. I could die anywhere, she thinks back at it, though she's not sure that's a helpful retort.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Emmeline sits down on the stool next to the piano, sort of a habit more than a choice. This isn't what she'd anticipated - the room is small. Oh. She'd asked him to be her partner and now they're alone in a room with less than two metres between them and this is intimate. How dreadfully romantic. Her heart wants to laugh or leave; either way, it's beating. Suddenly, impossibly, she realises she doesn't even know what instrument Otho plays. She's sat on the only stool - what if he plays the piano, too? He has to, surely - Adelaide wouldn't have abided by him not doing - will they - is this big enough for two? Talking of intimate. She'd offer to go and find another but the idea of facing the other students, the ones clothed in money and sharp lines and knee-high boots, glues her feet to the ground. Her heart leans heavily towards the 'leave' option.

Closeness is not a thing she is used to. She has been carefully distancing herself from everything for months, admittedly by accident, or at least thoughtlessly at first. Her own emotions and parents and eyes are strangers to her. Now there is a boy in a very small room with her, a boy she used to dream about. That sounds far more... something than it is. The dreams weren't whimsical. They were strange; flooded with light. Once, the two of them had been lying in a field under an oak tree that Emmeline thinks she remembers being in the garden of the house she used to live in. She'd blinked and he'd been on a swing, and she'd laughed but then the swing had snapped and instead of falling to the soft earth, he'd vanished. In the haze of the odd golden sky, she had searched and searched for him, hadn't been able to find him anywhere at all. She'd dug in the earth and found bones and been sure they were his. Then it had started raining (it always rained in her dreams), even while the sky was still molten with sunlight and she'd looked up to see him flying far away from her, so far above that all she could see were wings. Wings and the shape of him, though not a physical kind of shape.

It had been unnerving. The next time she'd been to Adelaide's and seen him silhouetted against the yellow wallpaper and bathed in golden-hour glow, she'd startled, played a dissonant note. Lightly, she presses a D flat now, trails her fingertips across black keys. They're quieter than she expects. Reality is often quieter than her thoughts lately.

Resurfacing from the memory of a dream she'd forgotten (and that feels like a paradox inside a paradox), she turns. Otho is sitting, cross-legged, on the floor, the grey of the stone next to his brown skin making it look both warmer and colder. He's unzipping a violin case that he has to have been carrying but Emmeline believes with certainty appeared in his hands as her back was turned. This is definitely not the instrument she expected so she hears herself ask: 'Violin?'

It's not even a question, just a word tilted upwards and he looks at her and why can't she believe that he's real? and says 'Yes. And piano. And clarinet.' And now she understands. Of course. A boy raised on music instead of air; one would never have been enough to sustain him. It almost makes her smile.

'What do you want to play?'

'This?'

He puts sheet music in front of her, proximity found and lost in a second. The pages are all immaculately kept, having been kept bound in a folder that says something she can't quite read on the front.

She keeps hers in piles around her keyboard. (Her parents own a piano but it's downstairs and so grand and sometimes she can't face it. She prefers her grandmother's, but as much as she doesn't let herself long for it, she doesn't live there. So. The piles by her keyboard, corners torn and edges soft with use.)

Emmeline finds herself exceptionally grateful that the handwriting in the margins is his and not Adelaide's. She doesn't think she could bear it. Although probably, she supposes, nor could he. God. There's so much of her here in this room.

Outside the windows, she half-sees a flock rise into the air, focused more on warming up. She plays something without thinking about it and begins to examine the piece while her hands move, dance. She moves to ask Otho to translate his annotations - they aren't messy, just incredibly tiny, and use abbreviations she doesn't recognise - but he's sitting with his eyes closed looking like someone punched the breath out of him. She stops and he opens his eyes and she feels the aching.

'I think my - I think she wrote that,' He whispers. Her stomach lurches. The melody is one Adelaide taught her, as they all are, every one of them, but this one so long ago that it has become muscle memory. It was one of her compositions, a light one, just for fun. Relatively simple, good for teaching. A warm-up exercise. Nothing more. (So much more, now. Grief is like Alice in Wonderland. Big things are rendered so... meaningless, while the little flashes of memory or the sound of a certain laugh or a piano melody become unspeakably huge.)

'Oh,' she manages. For all the power and majesty of words, not one of them is enough to hold this feeling. Instead, quiet swells.

Somewhere beyond the four padded walls, magpies to call to one another.