Author Notes: So, I started writing and publishing this fic in November of 2012. I had no idea the project it would turn into or how long it would take me. So now, coming up on three years later, I decided it would be a good idea to go through and do some editing of the earlier chapters. Not much has changed, mostly just fixed some typos, took out some problematic dialogue, and I'm going to standardize Crona's pronouns but it should still read about the same - I doubt it'll even show much difference at all.


August 26th, 2009

Maka rushes down the hallway, bag smacking into her legs as she glances over room numbers. She is altogether lost.

Here it is, 401 at last. She opens the door slowly, hoping to find one of the libraries, but she doesn't find what she's looking for. Instead of a some place quiet she can think for once, she finds a single man, boy, scribbling notes at a piano while he fiddles around on the keys, little melodies jumping out at his touch.

"Are you looking for something?" his eyes were scarlet.

"Sorry, I must have the wrong room," she stammers and backs out.

"You're probably looking for 401 in the lit building," he drawls lazily and returns to his work.

"Oh yeah, thanks." She vanishes from the doorway and runs back down the hall.

She's never seen someone who looked like that before.


"Hi there, I'm Tsubaki." Maka is greeted at the door by her roommate for the year, a tall girl with long black hair - it make her feel incredibly short and incredibly flat.

"Maka, nice to meet you,. Tsubaki shakes her hand; she seems to be a very nice girl, and she seems to have taken the obviously less desirable half of the room out of charity.

She had left her bags in a corner to go exploring around the school, completely ditching the freshmen meeting. Finding books was a lot more important than finding people.

"I didn't see you at the freshmen meeting," Tsubaki says quietly, spreading out her bedding on the wall-side cot.

"Yeah, I skipped to go looking around, I saw a really odd boy when I was out." Maka starts unpacking her luggage and hanging things in her half of the closet. "He had white hair and red eyes, any idea who that is?"

"No, but I've seen him around today, he's kind of hard to miss anyway." Tsubaki replies. Maka notices that even her voice is nice. Of course her roommate is beyond perfect. "He is pretty hard to miss."


Her room set up, her roommate scoped out, she hurries down to the work-study center to look for job postings. The waiting room was devoid of other students - she guesses most freshmen aren't going to start working their first year and returning students won't get there until tomorrow. She approaches the desk with her hands twisting nervously behind her back.

"Excuse me, are you open today?" she asks when the man at the desk doesn't look up at her.

"Oh yes sorry, I wasn't expecting anyone today." He smiles placidly, "are you a freshman?"

"Yeah, I'm looking for a job, preferably related to a literature major, on campus."

"Tall order," he scoffs. "You're lucky you came in so early, just fill out these forms." He hands her a sheet of paper and looks back at his desk.

She glances at the paper, she has just answered most of the questions to the man in person, but she suffers through the bureaucracy and takes a pen with a fake flower on top. She pens in her name financial aid qualifications, and preferred job area neatly, passing the form back. The man continued typing for a few minutes before looking at the form.

"There's a register position at the bookstore, you can take this and head over there now." he hands her back a photocopy of the form she just filled out.

"Thank you for your time." She dips a little and shuffles out, boots conspicuously loud on the floor.