Some people enter your life like thunder
Others—like dust. Quiet, everywhere, settling into your lungs before you even notice they've arrived.
This isn't a love story.
Not yet.
It's the space before it.
The silence between two notes.
The last moment before the season changes.
At Ivory Spire, spring arrived with too much color. The breeze still clung to the chill of winter, but the walkways were already littered in soft pink petals, like the school had been accidentally romanticized by the weather.
Laughter echoed from the courtyard. Shoes scuffed tile floors. Clubs pinned up hopeful flyers for new members, and the vending machines resumed their usual habit of stealing coins and hearts.
In the middle of it all, two students sat worlds apart.
Mizuki Fuyune was the kind of girl who made silence feel deliberate. A second-year, top of her class, distant as a dream someone else was having. She walked through the school like she belonged to another timeline—violin case in hand, jet-black hair falling in elegant precision, not a button out of place.
People admired her.
Some even loved her.
But no one really knew her.
She didn't mind. She preferred it that way.
And a few classrooms over—sometimes on the roof, sometimes sitting beneath the gym stairs—Haruaki Tsugihara existed in the sort of quiet that didn't ask for permission. Slightly rumpled, always tinkering, always helping. A mystery not because he was hard to approach, but because most people didn't think to look too closely.
He fixed broken door handles before teachers noticed they were jammed.
He listened more than he spoke.
He ranked somewhere in the top fifteen students, not by accident, but by design.
People assume he was just... kind. Easygoing. Background noise.
They were both quiet.
But Mizuki's silence was a fortress.
And Haruaki's was a field left open.
In theory, they should have never collided.
In practice—life is rarely that neat.
They shared the same school.
The same second year.
Sometimes even the same hallway, passing in opposite directions.
Unaware of what was already shifting between them.
By the time the rain came, they would no longer be strangers.
But right now, in the last breath of spring, they were still untouched.
Still drifting towards something they didn't have names for.