Chapter Text
At Stellaris University, where the brightest minds in the galaxy gathered to argue over research funding and steal each other’s cafeteria seating, Herta reigned supreme or at least, she believed she did.
Seated at the front row of Professor Rubert’s Advanced Temporal Mechanics seminar, Herta twirled a stylus between her fingers while barely pretending to take notes. Her tablet glowed softly, untouched for ten minutes now. She wasn’t interested in today's lecture. Not really. Her mind was elsewhere, like it always was these days.
Two rows behind her, Ruan Mei sat with her back perfectly straight, eyes fixed on her own screen, her fingers flying across it as she silently corrected the professor’s equations in real time. Her soft hums of concentration sent something very irritating and very warm prickling down Herta’s spine.
“Ugh, she’s doing it again,” Herta whispered, half to herself, half to March 7th, who was doodling cartoon versions of Professor Rubert on her own tablet.
“Doing what again?” March whispered back. “Breathing?”
“She’s humming,” Herta hissed. “All cute and smug. Like she’s already solved the lecture and is now composing a soundtrack for her brilliance.”
March snorted. “Maybe she’s just focused.”
“She’s never just focused ,” Herta replied through gritted teeth. “She’s mocking me with her productivity. I bet she’s five chapters ahead of the syllabus.”
March gave her a look. “...Weren’t you five chapters ahead last week?”
“That was different ,” Herta snapped. “That was a preemptive strike.”
She didn't want to admit, couldn't admit, that Ruan Mei’s aloofness got under her skin in ways no academic rival ever had. It wasn’t just that Ruan Mei was brilliant (she was), or elegant in that infuriating effortless way (she was). It was that she never acknowledged Herta. Not once. Not even a smirk or scoff when Herta answered Rubert’s questions before he’d finished asking. It was maddening.
And worse somehow was how that silence made Herta feel: fidgety, tongue-tied, and more self-conscious than she’d ever been in her otherwise charmed life.
When class ended, Herta bolted up, her stylus clattering onto the floor. She bent to retrieve it and of course, caught a glimpse of Ruan Mei gracefully walking past her without so much as a glance. She didn’t even notice.
Or she pretended not to.
Same result.
Outside the lecture hall, the halls of Stellaris bustled with overachievers, caffeine junkies, and AI-toting engineering majors trying to program emotion into robots. The campus was gorgeous, of course its architecture a sleek blend of futuristic materials and classic design, with floating walkways and softly glowing trees that hummed at night.
Herta strutted across the quad, head held high, her curls bouncing as she approached the East Courtyard tutoring pavilion. She had scheduled a 1:00 p.m. group tutoring session, reluctantly volunteering to help undergrads struggling with the logic matrix algorithms in Computational Theories II.
She arrived to find Dan Heng and Luka already seated under the pavilion’s transparent canopy. March 7th tagged along, still sipping on a galaxy-blue soda.
“I’m here for moral support,” March announced.
“You mean snacks,” Dan Heng said dryly.
“Same thing!”
Luka grinned and waved at Herta. “Heya, genius. Ready to crack some brains?”
She smirked. “Only the ones with enough neurons to be worth cracking.”
Gepard walked in next, looking sheepish. “I, uh… forgot how recursion works again.”
Herta’s eye twitched. “That’s literally the first week’s concept.”
“I panicked,” Gepard said, genuinely distressed. “There were too many nested loops!”
“Sit,” Herta sighed. “I’ll save your academic dignity—again.”
As the session began, Herta was in her element. She stood before a holographic whiteboard, drawing looping diagrams and laying out examples in sharp, quick bursts. Despite her constant sarcasm, the students followed her eagerly. There was a rhythm to it, a kind of charm to how she taught—biting, quick-witted, but always effective.
She was mid-rant about poor algorithm naming conventions when Bronya and Seele arrived at the edge of the pavilion, watching from a distance.
“She’s got presence,” Seele murmured.
Bronya nodded, arms folded. “She has control. People listen to her.”
“She doesn’t know that, though.”
“No. I don’t think she does.”
“You’re getting better at this,” Dan Heng said quietly after class.
“I was always good,” Herta replied without missing a beat, though her grin was genuine this time.
After tutoring, Herta strolled back toward the main labs. Her satisfaction from earlier began to fade as she caught sight of Ruan Mei already there, of course, deep in discussion with Professor Rubert, hands gesturing delicately as she pointed out discrepancies in the energy readouts from the school’s new particle collider simulation.
Professor Rubert was nodding, genuinely impressed. “Fascinating. Your analysis on the entropic deviation is… precise, almost predictive.”
Ruan Mei tilted her head modestly. “It was just a pattern I noticed.”
“Of course it was,” Herta muttered under her breath. “Just a pattern. Not like it took me two weeks to find the same thing.”
She stormed into the lab, forcing her tone to be light. “Oh wow, Ruan Mei! Already sucking up to the professor, are we?”
Ruan Mei turned, unfazed. “I wasn’t aware I needed to ‘suck up’ to anyone.”
“It’s a figure of speech,” Herta said quickly. “One you’d understand if you didn’t spend all your time in a lab.”
“Ah. I assumed you meant it literally. My mistake.”
Was that... a smile?
Herta’s heart skipped. No. No. She was not going to be flustered by a smile from her . She had plans. Goals. A reputation to maintain.
She looked away quickly, focusing instead on her own terminal and pretending to review data. But from the corner of her eye, she saw it—Ruan Mei, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear, then turning back to her screen, completely unbothered by Herta’s presence.
And for some reason, that made her want to throw her stylus out the window.
That evening, as she sat in the dorm lounge with Silver Wolf, pretending to study but really just glaring at her tablet, Herta groaned and slumped into her arms.
“She’s driving me insane .”
Silver Wolf didn’t look up. “Let me guess. Ruan Mei?”
“Yes!” Herta hissed. “She’s so... so Ruan Mei . All graceful and composed and never makes a mistake and—and—”
“And?”
“And I don’t know what I want from her,” Herta muttered. “A challenge? A reaction? A slap in the face?”
“A date?” Silver Wolf offered, raising an eyebrow.
Herta froze.
“I—what? No. Ew. She’s my rival.”
Silver Wolf finally glanced at her. “You’re blushing.”
“It’s the lighting.”
“There is no lighting. We’re using e-ink panels.”
Herta groaned again and buried her face into the desk.
Silver Wolf smirked and went back to her reading. “Rivals make good couples, you know. It’s the slow burn that gets people.”
“It’s not a slow burn. It’s... it’s a controlled academic combustion.”
Silver Wolf laughed under her breath. “Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”
That night, when Herta finally returned to her room, an obnoxiously stylish suite with minimalist furniture and a floating screen that displayed her weekly achievements, she paused at her window.
The stars blinked overhead, silent and vast.
She thought of Ruan Mei’s fingers on the lab screen. Her hums. That single moment when she might have smiled.
Herta placed her palm on the glass.
“I’m not in love,” she told herself.
But her voice was too soft.
And no one else was around to argue.