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Ur Frost was the sort of student the professors liked; punctual, never missed a deadline, interested in her subject and smart enough to follow the lectures. She was one of the few girls in the class and she was willed to work trice as hard as the boys if this was the way she could succeed. She was used to being considered too young for something or even too delicate but she had never listened to those words because she recognised fears in others when she saw it. She was there because she had something to prove to herself and not because she was making some kind of point to someone else.
(Those who mattered knew what she was capable of; she was the one who had to see it, too.)
It was an early morning when she stepped into the men’s dorm, balancing two cups of coffee in her hand and nearly kicking down the door before she remembered that she had a key. “Get up, Gildarts,” she said as she switched on the light and set down the coffee on the cluttered desk before she rolled her eyes and flopped down on the chair, throwing a book at the bed.
“Goddammit, Ur, are you trying to kill me?” her best friend since childhood groaned as he rubbed his forehead. “And why are you here?”
“You drunktexted me last night,” she replied as she mentioned towards the coffee as she got up. “You go shower and drink your coffee, I’ll see if I can get breakfast around here. You have exactly one hour until your lecture starts.”
She believed herself to be a good friend, someone who was nice and friendly but who was unafraid to take off the velvet gloves and throw books when this was what was needed.
“How can you be that damn chipper in the morning, woman?” he asked as he crawled out of his bed, gathering his clothes from where he had dropped them on the floor.
“I spent the night studying; I haven’t slept yet,” she replied as she checked her makeup in the mirror, happy to find that the bags beneath her eyes covered up and thankful for the upcoming weekend when she could sleep properly. “Anyway, you got ten minutes.”
“Ur, c’mon, ten minutes?” her friend complained as he opened the door to the bathroom.
“Don’t waste any time on your hair, it’s the first day of the semester, everyone is going to look like they survived a zombie apocalypse,” she said as she left the dorm room, her bag firmly beneath her arm and pushing her way through the busy hallways.
“Waking up Clive, Ursea?”
She turned and smiled at Ivan who was leaning against the door of his own room. “Ivan, long time no see,” she said as she leaned up to hug him and kiss his cheek. “How was it at home?”
“Boring as usual but I got something you might be interested in reading,” he replied as he fondly ruffled her home. “You and Clive both stayed here over the holidays?”
“Yes,” she nodded as she shifted her weight from one foot to the next. “Listen, I actually have an early lecture starting in twelve minutes. Here, have some cash and get him food.”
“And why would I do this?” he asked as he stared down at the money she was holding out to him. “Listen, ‘sea, don’t—“
“Thank you, Ivan,” she replied as she took a step back. “You can have my caramel latte so don’t complain. I’ll be off now. Say sorry to Gildarts for me, ‘kay?”
And so she walked away, feeling like a wary warrior in her heels and carrying her bag with books that were far too heavy like the burden that was on her shoulders.
As she left the dorm again, she switched on her phone and sighed at the sight of eight missed calls and twenty new messages. She knew that someone was trying to talk with her, she also knew that she did not want to talk with him.
Speeding up her pace – no one could outrun her in heels, after all – she headed down the street that would bring her to the heart of the campus and the building where her lecture was going to take place and on her way, she spotted her fellow medicine students.
“Yo,” one of the girls who had been in her study group three semesters ago greeted as she passed her. “This semester is going to break our necks; Dreyar is holding anatomy.”
Ur groaned as she stretched her arms. “I guess that I got to survive her when I want to become a surgeon,” she said as she shrugged. “Anyway, I’ll pick up something on my way to the building so I guess I’ll see you there.”
It was not like she needed coffee (or like coffee could prevent what was going to come) but she was a creature of habit, especially when she was a little too tired to really care, and she always had her coffee on her way to lecture and she was going to have it today, too.
She took three minutes to get in and out of the little coffee shop everyone else had long forgotten about after the first year when they had moved on to bigger dreams, bigger rooms in their dorms and different brands of coffee. And she thought as she pushed open the first door that sometimes, she would like being a child again because a child did not have this sort of problem and she did not like it at all that sometimes, all she could feel was a stinging pain.
It was a pain that was not real, not yet. It was the pain she would feel when she would fail and it was saying hello already because in her head, she had failed already although this was not quite true.
She shook her head, trying to get rid of unbidden thoughts, as she noticed that ever since she had left the coffee shop, someone had been walking behind her. Not that she cared. The university was a big one and it was very possible that he was a new med student who had found the coffee shop by accident and was now nearly late for lecture, too.
Silver was not a medicine student and therefore, he had no reasons to be in this building – or even in this part of the campus. He was studying business and that facility was on the other side of the areal. The reason why he was there was that he had spotted the probably most interesting girl on this campus and because his lecture was not starting for another hour, he had decided to follow her, waiting for a moment to introduce himself in a non-creepy manner.
(There were quite a few creeps on the campus – his roommate being one of them – and he was not going to be one of them.)
The girl was interesting because there was more to her than just a pretty face. She moved alone through the hallways and the crowds and carried herself with an air of fatigue and polite disinterest and she did not giggle at all and he liked that about her because giggly girls had been the bane of his existence when he had been on the other university and he was just too happy to have escaped them.
He nearly missed it when she threw the paper cup into the waste bin and slipped into the hall through a nearly concealed entrance but for some reason, he followed her nonetheless.
There was not a single head that turned as she found her seat on the right side of the room and he sat down right behind her, a smirk on his face as she built up her fortress of books and scribbled notes.
“Good to see that you survived the holidays, brat,” the professor, a woman with harsh red eyes and bright pink hair, said as she looked at the black-haired girl. “Now, as I was saying…”
And he rested his chin on his palm as he looked around. God, he had to stand out like a sore thumb amidst all those med students who were handling a ton of books and someone managed to take notes at the professor started to talk about things he did not even know existed in his body. Well, all of them save for the girl he had followed to the lecture because she had rested her head on the books and seemed to be fast asleep, not even moving when her neighbour nudged her harshly when the professor looked into their direction.
“Don’t even bother, Miller, she won’t wake up anyway,” the professor said as she rolled her eyes, muttering something under her breath. “I don’t know why she even bothers coming here in the first place when all she ever does it sleeping through my lecture. Anyway, the young man behind our Sleeping Beauty … you’re new here? I never saw you before.”
“Isn’t this business law for the new students?” he asked as he attempted to blink, feigning innocence.
“This is anatomy class,” the professor said as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “So you’re wrong here, I assume.”
“Hah, yeah, you’re right, ma’am. Wow, never happened to me before, well, it’s my first day,” he said as he exaggerated his embarrassment. “I’ll go search for my class, then. Oh, and in case the snoring lady over here asks after me … the name’s Silver. See you around.”
And then, he walked out of the room and smirked widely before he left the weirdly cold building and stepped back into the sunlight, strolling over to where his actual class would take place. It was not like he was actually stupid enough not to know where he had to go; he was just exceptionally good at acting like the world’s biggest idiot.
In front of the business facility, he met his roommate who was sitting on the stairs with a tired looking giant of a man who was sipping his coffee with a miserable expression on his face and who seemed to be cursing someone into the deepest pits of hell for waking him up.
“Your own fault for giving her a key,” Silver’s roommate declared with a broad smirk as he rolled his eyes at the other man. “I still don’t get why on earth you did that to be honest.”
“The original plan was to embarrass her so deeply that she’d never set a foot into the dorm ever again but then, I had forgotten that she is completely impossible to embarrass,” the student with the reddish brown hair shrugged. “It was brilliant on the paper but was lacking in the final execution. So I kinda gave up on it.”
“…your attempts on being a magnificent bastard are just as amusing as they are sad,” the roommate – something with I? Ian, perhaps? – said as he laughed darkly.
“Oh, shut up, at least I don’t have to be bribed with coffee to do her a favour,” the other man replied as he clapped the black-haired man’s shoulder. “Anyway, I’m going to class now … see you later, I guess. Lunch at the usual place.”
“Of course, of course,” Ian or whatever said as he rose to his feet. “I’ll go work on some explosives, that’s going to be very funny.”
“You know that if you’ll hurt yourself, her highness will come after you” the red-haired man said as he grabbed his bag and downed his coffee with a low chuckle. “Yo, newbie,” he then greeted Silver with a wide smirk. “Don’t let Ivan scare you off, he’s just his usual self.”
She was out for her evening run when her phone rung and as she finished her lap with a new record time, she caught her breath and accepted the call. “I swear to god, Ivan, this better be a life or death matter or I’ll kill you,” she hissed as she marched away from the stadium and headed for the dorms.
It was late and she had little interest being seen entering a boy’s room this late because the last thing she had interest in right now were more rumours about her person.
‘Gildarts cut his hand and he’s losing blood and I think he might have splinters in the wound,’ Ivan said and she could hear his smirk from miles away. ‘Stop by and patch him up, yes?’
She rolled her eyes although he could impossibly see her and so she stretched her arms as she headed for the dorm building. “I’m on my way,” she said, “but please, Ivan, keep the window open.”
She was good at being polite. She had been polite all her life, not always because she had wanted to. Sometimes, it had merely been expected from her and she was good at doing what people expected her to do. And this was why she did not yell at the idiot who was her friend and rather sped up her pace before she saw the dorm building in front of her.
‘No problem, Ursea, I can see to that,’ Ivan replied and sure enough, she heard the sound of a window being opened and as she got to the backside of the building, she saw that the window to Ivan’s room was indeed open and as she had no reason not to trust her friends, she easily climbed up the nearest tree and with the expertise and the graceful skill of a girl who had done this a million times, she performed a somersault and then, things started to no longer go according to plan because rather than to land on the carpet like she had expected to – and like she had done it a million times, she landed on a bed and lost balance – this ground was too soft, it was like she was standing on a goddamn marshmallow – and fell backwards onto someone she had just seen this morning.
Someone who caught her with one arm and helped her not to break her neck by falling, someone who smirked at her and without having ever traded any words with him, she knew that a remark to rival Gildarts’ was headed her way. “I knew I was irresistible, really, but don’t you think you’re taking it a little bit too far?” he asked and she was tempted to kick his ribs but then, she rather took up pacing around. “Slept well?” he added and she rolled her eyes.
“But of course,” she said with a smirk of her own, entirely unfazed because he was not the first one to comment on her choice to sleep during the early lectures – just because she could handle it.
“I bet you know who I am – I had people tell you once you woke up,” he replied and she had to admit that he was taking this a little further than most people would have dared. “But what‘s yours? Mind telling me?”
She huffed as she found her usual spot on Ivan’s desk, her arms crossed and her lips forming a devilish smile as she realised that her shoes were getting dirt all over his things. “You really think you’re pretty cool, huh?” she asked after a moment, wondering if she sounded as exasperated as she felt.
“Correction, I don’t think I’m cool,” he said and a sly smirk crossed his face. “I know for sure that I’m cool.”
“But of course,” she said as she looked around. “How could I ever doubt that?”
“I got no clue – and you still didn’t give me your name,” he replied as he got up. “But let me guess – you’re the friend those two idiots were going to prank.”
“Ur Frost,” she said as she held out her hand. “And yes … well, now I’m the friend who’s going to kill them both for being rude, immature little bastards who will have an important role in my next target practice.”
“As targets, yeah?” he asked and she had to admit that his smirk was nearly charming. “I could lend you a hand in that.”
“This would be … marvellous.”