The uniform fit well enough.
He had tried it on the night before, privately and without audience. White and black, the colors of Van Silvestria, a long black shirt with a white crest on the chest and black lines running along the seams and collar. Black trousers. Clean cuts. Nothing decorative that didn't serve a function.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
It would do.
He shouldered his bag, closed the door behind him, and walked.
The corridor smelled of stone and metal polish and something industrial he had not yet identified. The other doors were mostly closed. It was early. Most students seemed to operate on the assumption that sleep could be extended indefinitely through willpower alone.
He had no such illusions.
The elevator at the end of the corridor was old in the way institutional things were old, worn down by too many people for too long. It announced its arrival with a sound between a groan and a complaint and opened its doors with the patience of something that had given up expecting gratitude.
He stepped in. It descended.
The hall below had nothing royal about it. No marble, no gilding, no portraits of distinguished alumni with the self-satisfied expressions of people who had died before the world ended and never had to revise their opinions of themselves.
What there was instead was function.
Crates along the eastern wall bearing the colors of the Central Kingdom's military, stamped with insignia and reference numbers. Soldiers moving between them with the disinterest of people who had somewhere to be. Officers in black near the main entrance speaking in low tones about things not for general circulation. Everything smelled faintly of oil and discipline.
He walked through it toward the main elevators.
He was halfway across when someone wrapped their arms around him from behind.
He did not react the way most people would have. He had been training for three years. His first instinct was not a gentle one.
He stopped it.
Because he recognized her before he turned around. The specific pressure of that embrace, enthusiastic in a way that did not account for the possibility that the other person might have preferences about spontaneous physical contact. He knew exactly one person in the world who approached others with that particular combination of warmth and complete confidence that the warmth would be welcome.
He turned around.
Sera : "Solandre."
Sera Laurea was wearing the same uniform as every other student in the academy. Somehow this seemed to matter less on her than it did on anyone else. The black and white sat differently against the deep crimson of her hair, pinned back with the approximate success of someone who had tried and accepted the partial result. Her eyes were blue, a clear specific blue that caught available light and did something useful with it. She was smiling with the unguarded brightness of someone who had decided not to be strategic about her expressions.
She was, as she had always been, unreasonably beautiful. Not in a way that required effort. In the way of something that simply was what it was and had no opinion about whether you found it convenient.
He let her finish the embrace. Then he stepped back.
Solandre : "Sera."
Sera : "Six days. You've been here six days and I haven't seen you once."
Solandre : "The academy is large."
Sera : "I know where your dormitory is. I asked."
Solandre : "That's mildly concerning."
Sera : "It's called being thorough." She fell into step beside him. "What floor?"
Solandre : "Four."
Sera : "Four."
She said it with the satisfaction of someone who had just received confirmation of something she had already decided to believe.
They crossed the hall together. The soldiers continued their efficient movement, the officers their low conversations.
Sera : "Do you think we'll be in the same class?"
Solandre : "I don't know."
Sera : "I looked at the intake numbers. The distribution should put us in overlapping sections if the allocation is alphabetical."
Solandre : "It isn't alphabetical."
Sera : "How do you know?"
Solandre : "The boy in room fourteen has a name that begins with A and he's in section seven."
Sera : "You've been paying attention."
Solandre : "I pay attention to most things."
She looked at him sideways. There was something in that look he recognized and had been recognizing for approximately a year, since the afternoon she had said what she said in the garden of her family's residence in a voice that was steady in a way that suggested it had taken considerable effort to make it so. He had not known what to do with it then. He did not know what to do with it now.
He knew what he did not want to do with it. Which was not the same thing as knowing what he wanted instead.
The elevator arrived with the same groaning complaint, as though all the elevators in Van Silvestria had been manufactured by the same pessimist. They stepped in. The doors closed.
Sera : "A whole year. You leave, you don't write, and now you act like we simply ran into each other in a corridor."
Solandre : "We did run into each other in a corridor."
Sera : "You know what I mean."
He looked at the elevator doors.
Solandre : "I know."
Sera : "I missed you. My family asked about you. My mother asked about you three times in the same week and pretended each time it was the first."
He said nothing.
Sera : "That's all you have? You know?"
Solandre : "It's true."
It was not enough. I knew it was not enough. I said it anyway because the alternative was saying something that would require me to mean it. And meaning things had become an increasingly expensive proposition.
The elevator reached the fourth floor. The doors opened.
They stepped out and stood for a moment reading the class numbers on the doors.
She was in 4-C.
He was in 4-F.
Sera : "Of course."
Solandre : "We'll have shared sessions. The curriculum overlaps."
Sera : "That's very practical of you."
Solandre : "It's true."
She looked at him a moment longer than the situation required. Then she smiled, the smile that did not ask for anything back, and turned toward 4-C.
Sera : "Don't disappear again!"
He watched her go.
She deserved better than whatever I was capable of being. I knew that. She deserved someone who could receive that kind of honesty and return it in kind.
I was not that. I was not sure I had ever been that. I was less sure every year.
He put his hand on the door handle of classroom 4-F and pushed it open.