Chapter Text
Rin woke up seven minutes before his alarm and immediately decided that the day had started badly.
There was no rational basis for the conclusion. The room was still dark enough that the window reflected more of the interior than the campus buildings beyond it, his phone lay precisely where he had left it on the bedside table, and the alarm had not yet begun its daily attempt to convince him that waking up was a personal insult. Nothing had happened. Nothing was wrong.
That, as far as Rin was concerned, was not a particularly compelling argument in the day’s favour.
He lay still for another moment, staring at the ceiling, while the last fragments of sleep dissolved into the familiar awareness of his own room. His training clothes were folded over the back of the chair. A notebook remained open on his desk beside his laptop, the page covered in annotations from the previous evening’s tactical review. The curtains had shifted slightly overnight, leaving a narrow strip of grey morning light along the wall. Outside, the campus was beginning to wake in the distant, uncoordinated way it always did: a delivery vehicle somewhere below, footsteps in the corridor, a door closing on another floor.
Rin reached for his phone, turned off the alarm before it could sound, and sat up.
He had things to do.
That was generally enough to get him moving.
By the time he left his bedroom, he had showered, dressed, checked his schedule, and decided that the first lecture of the day was going to be a waste of time. He had reached this conclusion without looking at the lecture material, which was perhaps unfair to the lecturer but hardly unprecedented. The previous session had covered concepts Rin already understood, and the next section of the course outline suggested that the morning would involve an extended discussion of a framework he had read about weeks ago.
He could have used the time to work on his project.
He could have used it to review footage.
He could have used it to sleep for another hour.
Instead, he would be sitting in a lecture hall listening to someone explain something he already knew, surrounded by students who would ask questions whose answers were printed on the slides.
Wonderful.
He put his phone in his pocket, picked up his bag, and left.
The morning air had cooled enough to make the walk across campus pleasant. Students were gathering outside the main buildings, some carrying takeaway breakfasts, others attempting to finish readings on their phones while walking with the particular confidence of people who had not yet collided with a lamppost. A group from the sports-science faculty had occupied the benches beside the entrance, arguing about a practical assessment. Near the student union, two people were trying to persuade a third to attend an event later in the week.
Rin passed them without slowing down.
He was halfway across the courtyard when someone stepped into his path.
“Morning.”
Niko held up a paper cup in greeting. His hair was slightly untidy, and he had the distracted expression of someone who had been thinking about three different things before breakfast and had not yet decided which one deserved his full attention.
Rin glanced at the cup.
“Is that coffee?”
“No. It’s a very convincing substitute.”
“Then why did you answer?”
“Because I wanted to see if you’d ask a stupid question before nine.”
Rin looked at him.
Niko took a sip.
“Successful morning so far.”
“Find someone else to bother.”
“I would, but you’re here.”
“That sounds like a personal problem.”
“It might become one.”
Niko fell into step beside him without asking permission, which was not unusual enough to be worth commenting on. They had walked to classes together often enough by now that the arrangement required very little discussion, and neither of them appeared particularly interested in changing it.
For a while, they talked about the day’s schedule. Niko had a seminar before lunch, followed by a meeting for one of his own assignments. Rin had his lecture, a project meeting, and afternoon training. There was also a deadline later in the week that both of them had remembered at approximately the same time the previous night, which meant that neither had enjoyed the luxury of pretending it did not exist.
“You finished your section?” Niko asked.
“Mostly.”
“That means no.”
“It means mostly.”
“Which part isn’t finished?”
“The part that needs finishing.”
Niko gave him a sideways look.
“You know, if you answered questions normally, conversations would be much shorter.”
“If you asked better questions, they would be shorter still.”
“Excellent. We’ve both identified the problem.”
They reached the building where their schedules diverged. Niko stopped near the entrance, shifting his cup into his other hand.
“See you at lunch?”
“Maybe.”
“That means yes.”
“It means maybe.”
“Sure.”
Niko turned toward the stairs, apparently satisfied with having accomplished nothing useful, and disappeared into the flow of students.
Rin watched him go for half a second before continuing to the lecture hall.
He had not been particularly annoyed by the conversation. Niko was Niko; the occasional exchange of insults was practically a form of administrative paperwork between them. There was nothing unusual about it, and Rin would have been hard-pressed to explain why the walk had nevertheless left him feeling as though he had already spent more energy than the morning required.
He dismissed the thought.
It was too early to be irritated by something that had not happened.
The lecture hall was nearly full when he arrived. Rin took a seat several rows from the back, set his notebook on the desk, and opened the course materials on his tablet. Two students nearby were discussing an assignment, their voices kept low enough to suggest that they knew they should not be talking and had decided that knowing was close enough to obeying.
The lecturer began on time.
For the first twenty minutes, Rin paid attention.
For the next fifteen, he attempted to pay attention.
By the time the lecturer reached a diagram Rin had already studied in three different contexts, his focus had begun to wander toward the project notes waiting on his tablet. He made a few annotations in the margin, corrected a reference he had noticed the previous night, and then returned his attention to the front when the lecturer began discussing the limitations of the model.
That part was worth listening to.
The problem was that the explanation took another ten minutes to reach the point.
Rin could have endured it. He knew how to sit through a lecture without making his boredom someone else’s responsibility. He had done so many times before, including in classes where the material was substantially less interesting than this.
Then the student in front of him raised a hand and asked whether the model could be considered reliable if its results were consistent across multiple trials.
The lecturer began explaining repeatability.
Rin looked at the slide.
The distinction between repeatability and reliability was written in the second paragraph of the assigned reading.
He returned to his notes.
The student asked a follow-up question.
The lecturer answered it.
Another student added a comment that was not quite a question, and the discussion began circling the same point from a different direction.
Rin pressed his pen against the paper hard enough to leave a mark.
He was not obligated to participate.
Nobody had asked him anything.
He could sit quietly, finish his notes, and leave at the end of the session.
That was what he intended to do.
Unfortunately, the lecturer eventually opened the discussion to the room and asked whether anyone could think of a situation in which a model might produce consistent results without accurately representing what it was supposed to measure.
Several hands went up.
Rin did not raise his.
One of the students spoke about sample size. Another mentioned environmental variables. The lecturer nodded, encouraging them to elaborate.
Rin stared at the slide.
Then, because apparently his morning had not yet suffered enough, the lecturer looked directly at him.
“Rin? You’ve been taking notes on that point. Would you like to add something?”
He could have said no.
Instead, he answered.
“Consistency doesn’t establish accuracy. If the model has the wrong assumptions built into it, repeating the same process will just produce the same mistake.”
The lecturer nodded. “Good. Can you expand on that?”
Rin did.
He explained the difference between a model’s internal consistency and its ability to represent the actual system, using an example from performance analysis. His explanation was concise, technically sound, and considerably more useful than the previous ten minutes of discussion.
The lecturer thanked him and used the answer to move the class forward.
That should have been the end of it.
Then the student who had asked the original question turned around.
“So the results are basically meaningless if the assumptions are wrong?”
Rin looked at him.
“That’s not what I said.”
“I know, but I’m asking whether that’s what it means.”
“No. It means the results have to be interpreted in relation to the assumptions. If you want a simpler answer, read the section the lecturer assigned.”
The student blinked.
The silence that followed was brief, but not brief enough.
A few heads turned.
The lecturer cleared his throat and redirected the discussion toward the next slide, while the student faced forward again without responding.
Rin looked down at his notebook.
He had answered the question correctly.
He was also aware that he had not needed to phrase the final sentence that way.
He wrote another annotation beneath the diagram, underlining a term twice.
It was a stupid exchange. A minor one. Nobody had insulted him, nobody had challenged his ability, and the student had not even been particularly wrong to ask for clarification. Rin could identify every part of the interaction that had gone unnecessarily badly.
He simply did not feel inclined to do anything about it.
The lecture continued.
When it ended, Rin packed his things and left without looking for the student. He did not need to. There was no reason to turn an unpleasant thirty-second exchange into a larger event, and he had no intention of spending the rest of the morning thinking about it.
He had a project meeting.
That was an actual problem.
The meeting took place in one of the smaller study rooms near the engineering faculty, where the glass walls made the room feel more exposed than private and the table was barely large enough for the three laptops, notebooks, and printed reference material the two of them had brought.
Rin’s project partner was already there when he arrived.
She had arranged the printed data sheets in neat stacks and opened the shared document on her laptop. A small notebook lay beside her elbow, its pages filled with calculations and comments in different coloured pens. She looked up when Rin entered.
“You’re three minutes late.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“It was good until I started wondering whether you’d forgotten.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then we agree on something.”
Rin set his bag down and pulled out his laptop.
They had worked together long enough that neither needed to waste time on introductions or the polite preliminary conversation people sometimes used to make collaborative work feel less like collaborative work. She was capable, organised, and willing to challenge him when she thought he was wrong. Rin respected the first two qualities and tolerated the third because it was generally useful.
Their project was built around the EMI dataset, and they had spent the previous sessions reviewing how the model behaved across different groups of observations. The original results had looked promising. The problem emerged when they examined the error distribution more closely: the overall performance was acceptable, but the model handled certain subsets unevenly, and the apparent consistency of the aggregate results obscured the difference.
Rin had revised part of the analysis the previous evening.
He opened the document and showed her the changes.
She read them in silence, scrolling through the updated section before returning to the first page.
“You changed the validation split.”
“I adjusted it.”
“You changed it.”
“Because the previous split was making the comparison less useful.”
She turned her laptop slightly toward him. “You’ve moved these observations into the validation set without explaining why.”
“They were distorting the distribution.”
“They were part of the distribution.”
“They were disproportionately affecting the comparison.”
“That doesn’t mean you can move them wherever they make the results look cleaner.”
Rin’s gaze lifted from the screen.
“I didn’t move them to make the results look cleaner.”
“I didn’t say you did it deliberately. I said the change makes the comparison look cleaner without necessarily making it more accurate.”
He leaned back slightly, his expression flattening.
“Then look at the actual distribution instead of arguing with the layout.”
“I am looking at the distribution.”
“Apparently not.”
Her fingers stopped above the keyboard.
For a moment, the only sound in the room was the muted activity from the corridor outside. Someone laughed on the other side of the glass. A door opened and closed farther down the hall.
His partner looked at him steadily.
“Do you want to explain what you mean, or would you rather keep making comments that don’t help us finish the project?”
Rin held her gaze.
He could have answered the question she had asked. He could have opened the comparison table and walked her through the reasoning behind the adjustment. He could have acknowledged that her objection was legitimate even if he believed the revision was still worth testing.
Instead, he said, “If you understood why I changed it, you wouldn’t be asking me to explain the same thing twice.”
Her expression changed, not dramatically, but enough to make the air between them feel less neutral.
“Right.”
She turned back to her laptop.
“Then explain it to the document.”
Rin frowned.
“What?”
“Your reasoning. Put it in the notes. If the change is as obvious as you seem to think it is, it shouldn’t take long.”
She began typing again.
Rin stared at her for another second before looking down at the screen.
The irritating part was that she had a point.
The adjustment was defensible, but it was not self-explanatory. He had made the change because he could follow the chain of reasoning in his own head, and somewhere between reviewing the data and updating the model, he had treated that as sufficient documentation for a shared project.
It was not.
He knew that.
He also resented having it pointed out to him in a tone that suggested she had been waiting for him to make a mistake.
He pulled the keyboard closer.
“Fine.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t.”
She glanced at him.
“Don’t what?”
“Say it like I’ve finally agreed to behave.”
“I said thank you because you’re going to document your own changes.”
“Then say that.”
“I just did.”
Rin’s fingers paused above the keyboard.
For one brief moment, he looked as though he might continue the argument purely to avoid being the person who ended it. His partner returned to her notes, apparently unwilling to give him another opening.
He began writing.
The next twenty minutes were productive in the most unpleasant possible way. They worked through the model’s assumptions, compared the original and revised validation splits, and identified a third arrangement that might help distinguish a genuine improvement from an artefact of the sampling process. His partner questioned two of his interpretations. He challenged one of hers. They each revised a point, and neither was forced to pretend that the other had been right about everything.
By the time they reached the end of the comparison, the project had improved.
The atmosphere had not.
His partner saved the updated document and closed the table she had been reviewing.
“We should test all three arrangements before we settle on one.”
“Two of them are redundant.”
“Then the comparison should establish that.”
“We already know what the result is likely to be.”
“Likely isn’t the same as demonstrated.”
Rin’s jaw tightened.
“You’re adding work without adding information.”
“And you’re deciding the result before we’ve finished testing it.”
“Because I can recognise a redundant process.”
“And I can recognise when someone is too convinced by his own reasoning to check whether it holds up.”
The words landed more sharply than she seemed to intend. Or perhaps she had intended exactly that. Rin could not tell, and his irritation made him less inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.
He shut his laptop.
“Then run the comparison yourself.”
She looked at him.
“I was planning to.”
“Good.”
“Excellent.”
Neither moved.
The exchange had become so childish that, under other circumstances, Rin might have found it embarrassing. He could see the shape of the argument from the outside: two competent people who agreed on the objective and disagreed about the method, turning a reasonable discussion into a contest over whose judgement deserved to be trusted.
He was not interested in losing that contest.
He was even less interested in admitting that there was no contest to win.
His partner collected the printed sheets and squared their edges against the table.
“I’ll upload the additional comparison tonight. You can review it tomorrow.”
“Send me the raw output too.”
“I was going to.”
“Then we’re done.”
“We were done five minutes ago.”
She packed her notebook into her bag.
Rin watched her leave the room, the glass door closing quietly behind her.
He sat there for another moment with his laptop shut in front of him.
Then he opened it again.
The revised model was still on the screen. His notes were incomplete, and the third comparison would take longer than he had wanted it to. He could have left the room and moved on to the next thing on his schedule.
Instead, he reopened the analysis and began writing the explanation he should have written before the meeting.
He did not enjoy doing it.
He did not enjoy the fact that the work was necessary, either.
But the work was necessary.
There was no point pretending otherwise.
By the time he finished the notes, he had identified a weakness in his own argument that he would not have noticed if he had simply left the revised split as it was. The adjustment still deserved to be tested, but he could no longer assume that the improvement would hold once the comparison was complete.
Rin saved the file.
He stared at the screen.
“Annoying,” he muttered.
The word could have referred to the project, the meeting, his partner, or himself.
He did not make the distinction.
He found Niko at lunch, sitting at a table near the windows with a tray of food and a notebook open beside his drink. There was a second chair available across from him, although Niko had spread enough papers across the table to make the invitation look less deliberate than it probably was.
Rin stopped beside the chair.
“Move your things.”
Niko looked up.
“Good afternoon to you too.”
“Your papers.”
“I know what you meant.”
“Then move them.”
Niko gathered the pages into a stack and shifted them toward his own side of the table. Rin sat down, set his tray in front of him, and began eating.
Niko watched him for a moment.
“How was the project meeting?”
“Fine.”
“That bad?”
Rin looked up.
“What?”
“You said ‘fine’ like you were considering throwing your laptop through a window.”
“Maybe I was considering throwing yours.”
“That would be an inefficient way to solve your problem.”
“I wasn’t asking for advice.”
“Good. I wasn’t giving any.”
Niko returned to his notebook, though the small crease between his brows remained. Rin ate in silence for a few minutes, listening to the general noise of the dining area without paying much attention to individual conversations. The room was busy, but not unusually so. Students moved between tables, someone at the counter was asking about an order, and a group near the far wall had begun an argument about an upcoming match.
It should have been an ordinary lunch.
Then Niko asked, “Did something happen this morning?”
Rin set his fork down.
“Why?”
“Because you seem irritated.”
“I’m eating.”
“I can see that.”
“Then you have your answer.”
Niko did not immediately respond. He looked at Rin for a moment, then closed the notebook beside him.
“I’m not asking because I need you to tell me your life story. I’m asking because you’ve snapped at three people since I saw you this morning, and I’m trying to figure out whether I missed something.”
Rin’s expression went still.
“Three?”
“You snapped at me, you snapped at someone in the lecture hall-”
“You weren’t there.”
“No, but the person you snapped at is sitting two tables over and has been complaining about it to his friend.”
Rin glanced across the room before he could stop himself.
The student was indeed there, speaking to someone beside him. He was not looking toward Rin.
Rin turned back.
“So now you’re keeping track?”
“No. You asked.”
“I didn’t.”
“You’re right. You didn’t.” Niko picked up his drink. “I’m telling you anyway.”
Rin stared at him.
Niko took a sip, apparently prepared to let the silence sit between them until one of them decided what to do with it.
It was irritating, how easily Niko could do that. He did not always fill a pause just because it existed. He could wait without making the waiting feel like a demand, which left Rin with fewer obvious ways to end the conversation.
“I’m busy,” Rin said at last.
“I know.”
“I have work to do.”
“I also know that.”
“Then stop acting like I have time to discuss every insignificant thing that happens to me.”
Niko’s expression changed.
Only slightly.
“Okay.”
He reopened his notebook.
The conversation was over.
Rin looked down at his food.
There was no satisfaction in having won the exchange. There was no relief, either. Niko had not argued, had not demanded an explanation, had not tried to make him talk. He had simply accepted the boundary Rin had put in front of him and returned to his own work.
It should have been what Rin wanted.
He ate the rest of his lunch without speaking.
When he finished, he stood, collected his tray, and took it to the return counter. Niko remained at the table, writing something in the margin of his notes.
Rin could have said goodbye.
He did not.
He left the dining hall with his bag over one shoulder and his afternoon schedule open on his phone, already looking ahead to training.
He told himself that was the sensible thing to do.
He had work.
There was no reason to linger over a conversation that had ended.
The performance centre was louder than usual when Rin arrived that afternoon, not because anything particularly unusual was happening but because two training groups had been scheduled close together and the equipment staff was still rearranging part of the space. Players moved between the changing area and the indoor pitch, carrying boots, water bottles, and the last scraps of conversation from whatever they had been doing before training.
Raichi was standing near the equipment racks, arguing with someone about the allocation of training bibs.
“It makes no sense,” he was saying. “Why do we have six of one colour and four of the other?”
“Because there are six players in one group and four in the other,” Kiyora replied without looking up from the equipment list.
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
“The point is that the distribution is stupid.”
Kiyora finally looked at him.
“It’s based on the group sizes.”
“Yeah, and I’m saying-”
“Raichi,” Rin interrupted as he passed, “if you need six bibs for six people, take the six bibs. Nobody is trying to sabotage your training session.”
Raichi turned.
“I wasn’t fucking talking to you.”
“Then why are you making everyone listen?”
“Because the equipment is a mess.”
“It’s fabric in two different colours.”
“It’s a training setup.”
“It’s a pile of shirts.”
Raichi’s mouth fell open.
Kiyora looked down at the list again, his shoulders shifting once with what might have been a suppressed laugh.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
Rin kept walking.
Raichi followed him.
“Oi. What the hell is your problem today?”
Rin stopped.
The question came from behind him, loud enough that two players near the racks looked over. Rin turned slowly, his expression so flat that Raichi’s irritation briefly gave way to uncertainty.
“My problem?”
“Yeah, your problem. You’ve been acting like everyone’s personally offended you by existing.”
“Maybe you should stop making it so easy.”
Raichi stared at him.
For a second, it looked as though he might laugh. Then his face hardened.
“You know what? Fuck you.”
Rin’s eyes narrowed.
“Gladly.”
“Both of you,” Kiyora said, stepping between their lines of sight without physically getting in the way. “We have training in ten minutes. If you want to argue, do it after we finish.”
“I’m not arguing,” Rin said.
Raichi made a disbelieving noise.
“Of course you’re not.”
Rin turned away.
He could hear Raichi muttering behind him, but he did not bother to catch the words. There was no reason to make the exchange any longer than it already was.
He changed, tied his boots, and went out to the pitch.
The session began with a tactical sequence built around transitions between the middle third and the final attacking phase. The coaches had adjusted the exercise after the previous review, adding a second defensive response to test whether the attacking players could identify the difference early enough to exploit it.
Rin understood the setup almost immediately.
The first few repetitions went well. He identified the available space, adjusted his position, and moved the ball forward before the defensive line could settle. The next sequence broke down because one of the midfielders committed too early, closing a passing lane that would otherwise have opened a route through the centre.
Rin called for the play to reset.
They tried again.
The same player made the same mistake.
“Wait for the second movement,” Rin said as they returned to their starting positions. “You’re closing the lane before it opens.”
“I thought you wanted the pass earlier.”
“I want it earlier when the lane exists.”
“It looked open.”
“It wasn’t.”
The player glanced toward the coach, who was watching from the side of the pitch.
“Can we run it once more?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“I’m asking the coach.”
Rin looked at him.
“Then ask him.”
The player’s expression tightened.
“I was going to.”
“Good. We’ve established that.”
“Rin,” the coach called, his tone measured. “Reset the formation. We’ll look at the timing on the next repetition.”
Rin turned away before the discussion could continue.
They ran it again.
This time, the movement was cleaner. The midfielder held his position for half a second longer, the passing lane opened, and Rin moved the ball through the gap with enough pace to reach the forward before the defender could intercept.
The sequence worked.
The coach called for another repetition.
It failed for a different reason.
Rin stopped the play, pointed out the problem, and watched the group reset.
The third attempt was better.
The fourth was not.
By then, the session had developed the peculiar rhythm of any tactical exercise in which everyone understood the objective but disagreed about how to achieve it. One player wanted to accelerate the transition. Another was concerned about losing possession. Raichi believed the defensive pressure was being applied too late. Kiyora thought the attacking group was moving too predictably.
They were all making points worth considering.
Rin knew that.
He also knew that repeating the same mistake was wasting time.
When the midfielder missed the timing again, Rin turned toward him.
“Are you listening to what I’m saying?”
The player looked up sharply.
“Yes.”
“Then why are you doing the opposite?”
“I’m not doing the opposite. I’m trying to keep the pass available without leaving the centre exposed.”
“And you’re failing at both.”
The words came out before Rin had properly decided how he wanted to phrase them.
The player’s face went cold.
“Then show me how you want it done.”
Rin stepped closer to the starting position.
“Fine.”
He demonstrated the movement, walking through the first two phases slowly enough that the difference in timing was obvious. He showed where the midfielder needed to hold his position, when the passing lane would open, and how the defender’s angle changed if the movement began too early.
It was a good demonstration.
It was also unnecessary to have made the player ask for it that way.
The coach watched the explanation, then nodded.
“Run it again.”
They did.
This time, the sequence worked.
The midfielder received the ball, held his position, and released it at the right moment. Rin moved into the next space and carried the attack forward. The final pass reached its target, and the group completed the pattern cleanly.
The coach called the exercise there.
“Better. Keep that timing in mind when we change the defensive response.”
Players began collecting the balls and returning to their starting positions. The midfielder who had argued with Rin passed him on the way back.
“Could’ve just explained it like that the first time.”
Rin turned his head.
“I did.”
“No, you told me I was doing it wrong.”
“Because you were.”
The player stopped.
Rin could see the argument beginning again in his expression.
Then the player exhaled through his nose, shook his head, and continued walking.
“Whatever.”
Rin watched him go.
He had explained the movement. The player had understood it. The exercise had improved.
Those were the relevant facts.
The rest was noise.
He returned the ball to the equipment rack and went to collect his water bottle.
Raichi was standing nearby, watching him with an expression that was difficult to interpret.
“What?” Rin asked.
Raichi shrugged.
“Nothing.”
“Then stop staring.”
“Maybe stop giving people reasons to.”
Rin’s grip tightened around the bottle.
“Do you have anything useful to say?”
“Yeah. You’re good at this. Everyone knows you’re good at this. You don’t have to talk to people like they’re idiots every time they get something wrong.”
Rin stared at him.
Raichi held his gaze for another second, then turned toward the changing area.
“I’m going to shower before I decide to say something worse.”
Rin watched him leave.
For once, he did not have an immediate response.
He could have dismissed the comment as Raichi being Raichi. He could have pointed out that the session had gone well, that the timing had been corrected, that the midfielder had made the same mistake repeatedly before asking for an explanation he had already been given.
All of those things were true.
None of them answered what Raichi had actually said.
Rin looked down at the bottle in his hand.
Then he drank, screwed the lid back on, and returned it to his bag.
He was not going to stand around discussing his personality with Raichi in the middle of a training centre.
He had better things to do.
By the time training ended, the irritation had settled into something quieter and more persistent.
It did not disappear when Rin showered. It did not disappear when he changed into clean clothes, checked the messages waiting on his phone, or reviewed the next day’s schedule. It followed him out of the performance centre and across the courtyard, remaining somewhere just beneath his attention while he considered whether to return to his apartment or finish some work on campus.
He chose the library.
The decision had nothing to do with avoiding anyone. His apartment was quieter, but the library had the reference material he needed for the EMI project, and he could finish reviewing the revised model while he still remembered exactly what he had changed.
There were practical reasons for going.
Rin preferred practical reasons.
The library was busy enough that he had to walk past two occupied tables before finding an empty seat near the windows. He unpacked his laptop, opened the project document, and began reviewing the notes he had added that morning.
He had barely finished the first section when a chair moved across the floor nearby.
Rin did not look up immediately.
“Is this seat taken?”
He recognised Bunny’s voice before he turned.
Bunny stood beside the table with a book tucked under one arm and a drink in his other hand. His lavender hair was slightly untidy, and the expression on his face suggested that he had already found something amusing about the situation and was deciding whether it was worth sharing.
Rin glanced at the empty chair.
“Does it look taken?”
“No. But I’ve been told that asking first is polite.”
“Who told you that?”
“Several people. I’ve ignored most of them.”
“Sounds like a successful education.”
“I did my best.”
Bunny set his book down on the table.
“Mind if I sit?”
Rin looked at him for a moment.
Then he returned his attention to the laptop.
“Do what you want.”
“An invitation. How generous.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I know. That’s what makes it special.”
Bunny sat down.
He did not immediately start a conversation. He opened his book, took a sip of his drink, and began reading, apparently content to occupy the chair without requiring Rin to acknowledge him every thirty seconds.
Rin returned to the project.
For several minutes, the arrangement worked perfectly well.
He reviewed the revised validation notes, corrected a reference, and opened the table containing the original distribution. Bunny turned a page. Someone walked past the end of their table carrying a stack of books. A librarian moved between the shelves, checking a row of returns.
The library continued around them.
Eventually, Bunny glanced at Rin’s screen.
“Project?”
“No, I’m writing a very elaborate complaint about the university.”
“Ah. I wondered why you looked so happy.”
Rin did not look away from the laptop.
“EMI dataset.”
“Right.”
Bunny leaned back in his chair.
“Making progress?”
“Some.”
“That sounded painful.”
“It’s a project. It’s not supposed to be entertaining.”
“I’ve met people who disagree.”
“Those people are wrong.”
Bunny’s mouth curved.
“An ambitious position.”
“It’s a reliable one.”
“Are you going to defend it?”
“Not to you.”
“Then I suppose I’ll have to live with the disappointment.”
“You’ll survive.”
“I’ve survived worse.”
The answer was delivered lightly, without an invitation to ask what he meant. Rin did not ask. Bunny returned to his book, and the conversation ended as naturally as it had begun.
Rin worked for another twenty minutes.
He made progress on the analysis, though not as much as he wanted. The additional comparison his partner had proposed remained unfinished, and he had no intention of pretending that the issue was resolved simply because he had documented his reasoning. He made a note to review the new output when she sent it, then moved to the next section.
At some point, he became aware that Bunny had stopped reading.
Not because Bunny was staring at him. He was looking toward the windows, one elbow resting on the table, his expression distant in a way that did not appear particularly unhappy. He seemed to be thinking about something unrelated to the library.
Rin looked back at his screen.
He did not need to know what Bunny was thinking.
After another few minutes, Bunny closed his book.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You just did.”
“Wonderful. We’re already making progress.”
Rin sighed.
“What?”
Bunny turned his drink slowly between his hands.
“Are you always this pleasant after training, or have I caught you on a special occasion?”
Rin’s fingers stopped above the keyboard.
There it was.
He had known, from the moment Bunny sat down, that the conversation was eventually going to become irritating. It was simply the way things seemed to work when Bunny was nearby: a perfectly ordinary exchange would continue until one of them found a reason to say something that sounded harmless enough to deny later.
Rin looked at him.
“Do you always ask questions you already think you know the answer to?”
“Not always. Sometimes I ask questions because I’m curious.”
“Try being curious about someone else.”
Bunny’s expression remained easy, but his eyes sharpened slightly.
“That bad, then?”
“I didn’t say anything was bad.”
“No. You’ve been very clear about how little you’re saying.”
Rin closed the laptop.
The sound was quiet, but it changed the atmosphere at their table.
“Do you have a point?”
Bunny considered him for a moment.
“I was going to ask whether training went well.”
“It did.”
“Good.”
“That’s it?”
“That was the question.”
Rin stared at him.
Bunny lifted his drink.
“You look disappointed.”
“I’m trying to understand why you bothered asking.”
“Because I wanted to know whether training went well.”
“You could have asked anyone.”
“I could have.”
“And yet.”
“And yet,” Bunny agreed.
There was a pause.
Rin looked away first, not because he felt that he had lost anything by holding Bunny’s gaze, but because the conversation had begun to resemble the kind of argument he had already spent the day having with people who were not nearly as entertaining.
Bunny appeared to recognise the moment for what it was. He did not push. He opened his book again and returned to the page he had been reading, leaving Rin with no further question to reject.
The absence of pressure was, somehow, almost as irritating as the question had been.
Rin reopened his laptop.
For a while, neither spoke.
Then Bunny reached for his drink, took a sip, and said, without looking up, “For what it’s worth, you don’t have to explain anything to me.”
Rin’s eyes lifted from the screen.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“I know.”
“Then why say it?”
Bunny turned a page.
“Because I wanted to make sure you knew.”
Rin watched him for a moment.
There was no smugness in Bunny’s expression. No obvious attempt to make Rin admit that something was wrong. He had offered the thought and left it there, without attaching a demand to it.
Rin disliked how difficult that made it to argue.
He turned back to the laptop.
“Read your book.”
Bunny’s smile was audible in his voice.
“As you wish.”
And that was the end of it.
Not because the matter had been resolved, or because Rin had suddenly become willing to discuss his day, but because Bunny allowed the conversation to end without making it another thing Rin had to defend himself against.
They worked in silence for the next half hour.
Rin finished reviewing the notes he had brought with him and added two comments to the shared project document. Bunny read several chapters of his book, made a note in the margin of his own notebook, and occasionally glanced toward the windows when someone passed outside.
There was nothing especially meaningful about sitting at the same table.
They were not sharing secrets. They were not having a breakthrough. Neither had learned anything remarkable about the other.
They were simply in the same place, doing separate things, and the presence of the other had not become an obstacle.
Eventually, Bunny packed his book away.
“I have to go.”
Rin kept his attention on the screen.
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. I’ve been working toward this moment all afternoon.”
“Try not to injure yourself on the way out.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Bunny stood, slipped the book beneath his arm, and collected his drink.
He paused beside the table.
“See you around, Rin.”
Rin looked up.
“Unfortunately.”
Bunny smiled.
“Of course.”
Then he left.
Rin watched him cross the library and disappear through the doors, his expression unreadable for a moment before he turned back to his laptop.
He had no reason to think about the conversation any further.
Bunny had asked a question. Rin had answered. They had worked in the same room for a while, and now Bunny was gone.
That was all.
Rin returned to the project.
He made another correction to the analysis, saved the document, and checked the time. He had been at the library longer than he intended, and he still had work waiting at home.
He packed his things and left.
Outside, the light had begun to soften across the campus buildings. Students were moving toward the main gate in small groups, some discussing their classes, others deciding where to eat. A bicycle rolled past the edge of the path. Someone near the student union was laughing hard enough to interrupt their own sentence.
Rin walked through the middle of it, keeping to the quieter side of the pavement.
He did not feel better.
He did not feel worse.
The day had simply continued, collecting a handful of unpleasant conversations and leaving him with the knowledge that he had made several of them more unpleasant than they needed to be.
He could have done better.
He knew exactly how.
That did not mean he wanted to think about it.
At home, Rin put his bag beside the desk and opened his laptop before he had even changed out of his clothes.
The project document was still open. He reviewed the notes he had added at the library, checked the references, and made a list of the questions he wanted to compare against his partner’s results when she sent them. The work was familiar enough to settle his attention. Unlike a conversation, a model did not become offended when challenged. It did not interpret a correction as an insult or mistake a question for an accusation.
If something was wrong, he could examine it.
If something worked, he could test why.
If the results contradicted him, he could change the model.
It was straightforward.
He wished people were..
His phone vibrated beside the laptop.
Rin glanced at it.
A message from his project partner had arrived with the updated file attached. The note accompanying it was brief.
I’ve included all three comparisons. The third one changes the distribution more than I expected, so I’ve added a separate table rather than folding it into the main results. Let me know if you find any errors.
Rin opened the attachment.
He read the tables carefully, comparing them against his own notes. The first two behaved roughly as he had expected. The third produced a result that complicated his earlier assumption, not catastrophically, but enough that the model could not be simplified in the way he had proposed.
He leaned closer to the screen.
Then he read the numbers again.
His partner had been right to insist on the comparison.
Not entirely right about everything, but right about this.
Rin opened the shared document and added a note beside the third table. He identified the discrepancy, suggested another test, and marked the result for further review.
His fingers hovered above the keyboard.
He could send her a message acknowledging that the additional comparison had been useful.
It would take approximately five seconds.
Instead, he wrote:
The third comparison needs another test. I’ve added the reason in the document.
He sent it.
The message showed as delivered.
Rin stared at the screen for a moment before returning to the model.
There was nothing wrong with the message. It was clear, relevant, and sufficient for the work they needed to do. He had not been required to add anything else.
Still, the knowledge that he had deliberately omitted a perfectly ordinary acknowledgment sat at the back of his mind.
He ignored it.
He worked until the numbers began to blur together, then stopped, saved the document, and closed the laptop. The apartment was quiet, the kind of quiet he usually preferred after a day spent among people. He made something to eat, carried it to the table, and checked his phone once more while he waited for the food to cool.
There were a few messages in the group chat.
Raichi was complaining about a change to the next day’s training schedule. Kiyora had replied with the updated timetable. Someone else had asked whether the revised session meant the smaller group would need to arrive early, and the discussion had expanded into a series of increasingly unnecessary complaints about the performance centre’s booking system.
Rin read the messages without responding.
He could have added something useful. He knew the timetable had been updated because the coach had explained it at the end of training, and he could have clarified the time for anyone who had missed the announcement.
Instead, he put the phone down.
Someone else could answer.
He ate, washed his plate, and returned to the desk long enough to check that the project document had saved correctly. Then he set his alarm for the following morning and put his phone on charge.
The day was finished.
He had attended his classes, completed his training, reviewed his work, and made progress on a project that still needed more time. Nobody had been seriously hurt by anything he had said. No friendship had ended. No major confrontation had taken place. By every reasonable measure, the day had been ordinary.
And yet, as Rin stood beside his desk, looking at the notebook he had left open that morning, he found himself remembering the small moments he would usually have forgotten before reaching the next building.
The student in the lecture hall.
His project partner’s expression when he told her to run the comparison herself.
Niko closing his notebook.
The midfielder walking away from the training exercise.
Raichi’s comment beside the equipment racks.
Bunny asking whether training had gone well.
None of them had been important enough to ruin his day.
That was the irritating part.
They had been small things. Ordinary things. The kind of things people said and forgot, the kind of disagreements that should have dissolved as soon as the conversation ended.
Rin had carried them with him anyway.
He did not know why.
He was tired, he decided. That was all. The day had been crowded with tasks, and he had spent too much of it dealing with people who seemed determined to turn simple questions into prolonged discussions. Anyone would have been irritated.
Tomorrow would be different.
He would sleep, wake up, go to class, and do what he needed to do. He would review the new results with his partner, attend training, and get through the day without wasting time on arguments that had no bearing on the work.
There was nothing complicated about the plan.
Rin closed the notebook.
He turned off the desk lamp and went to bed.
Tomorrow, he told himself, would be easier.
He had no particular reason to doubt it.
That was the trouble with ordinary days. They rarely announced what they were becoming until you had already lived through them.