Chapter 5 - A Common Ground Neither Would Admit To

From the day Michi's drumsticks first rang out through the basement studio, the way Rimba Arya Swara saw the school's model student changed for good.

Even though his reason and logic kept insisting that someone like Michiko Arunika Suryokusumo could never have any connection to the underground world, Rimba's musical instincts refused to stay quiet. In the gaps between music theory lectures and dean's office meetings, his sharp eyes kept catching himself watching Michi from a distance without quite meaning to—the way her slender fingers turned the pages of a book, the way her shoulders stayed rigid, as if carrying the weight of the world.

To Rimba, Michi was no longer just some boring classical robot. She was a walking puzzle he badly wanted to solve. And Rimba Arya Swara, whatever else people said about him, had never once in his life walked away from a puzzle worth solving.

That day, their second mandatory meeting in the second-floor acoustic room felt entirely different from the first. The room itself hadn't changed—same dull gray soundproofing on the walls, same faint smell of solder and old cable insulation drifting off the equipment racks, same thin gold afternoon light filtering through the single high window near the ceiling. But the air inside it had shifted completely. There was no shouting waiting for her, no razor-edged glare the moment she walked in. Instead, what greeted her was the sight of Rimba already lounging behind the mixing desk, surrounded by stacks of score paper and a cup of cold coffee, looking, for once, like someone who had actually shown up to work rather than to provoke.

Michi stepped in wearing her cream cardigan and gray midi skirt, her expression pulled ice-cold to cover the last of her wariness. She pulled out a wooden chair, sat down with her usual flawless posture, and set her notebook on the table.

"Don't look at me like I'm plotting something, Arunika," Rimba's hoarse voice broke the silence without his eyes ever leaving the laptop screen. "I'm not planning a terror campaign. Today we're strictly discussing the dean's project."

Michi let out a faint huff, crossing her arms. "Hard to trust someone whose hobby is throwing out reckless accusations, given our last meeting, Maestro. Let's just get to the point. Which part of this sonata are you planning to demolish today?"

Rimba finally looked up. The corner of his mouth curved into a thin smile—not entirely obnoxious this time, and unmistakably lit with genuine interest in his eyes. He slid a stack of score paper across the table toward her.

On the page, Rimba hadn't simply thrown two instruments together at random. He'd designed a genuinely bold harmonic bridge: Chopin's grand, melancholic, elegant classical piano melody would slowly be broken apart by a wild, high-energy drum transition—a brilliant concept for an arrangement.

Michi went quiet for a moment, studying the scrawled notation in front of her intently. Her logical defenses began to waver. Beneath his arrogant, insufferable exterior, Rimba Arya Swara really was, at his core, a musical genius capable of translating what was inside someone else's head with uncanny precision.

"Well?" Rimba's voice came out in a low murmur as he leaned in too, guiding the tip of his pencil toward one particularly complicated bar. The distance between them closed without either of them quite meaning it to. "You hate to admit it, don't you? But this arrangement... is going to be the single craziest piece our entire class ever produces."

Michi swallowed quietly, ignoring the strange flutter that suddenly slammed against her chest at the closeness. For a moment she considered pulling back, putting the polite, professional half-meter of distance between them that a model student was supposed to keep. But her eyes had already snagged on the notation, and some quieter, more stubborn part of her—the part that lived behind a drum kit at night—refused to look away from a problem she knew exactly how to fix. She picked up a pencil from the table and pointed to one of the transition sections at bar twenty.

"The core concept is good," Michi finally admitted, her voice noticeably softer now. "But this transition is still too loose. If we're actually blending classical with modern, the drum entry here needs to come in two beats earlier, before the piano takes over the major theme. Otherwise it'll land like two instruments crashing into each other, badly out of sync."

Rimba studied the section she'd pointed to, then nodded slowly. This time, there was no condescending smile on his lips—only a flash of genuine, musician-to-musician appreciation.

"Good point," Rimba murmured, low, his eyes locked directly onto hers. "You really do know exactly how a rhythm is supposed to breathe, don't you?"

Michi immediately drew her back away slightly, breaking away from that intense stare before she lost her grip on her calm mask. "I'm just relying on basic music-theory logic, Maestro. Don't read too much into it."

Rimba only smiled faintly, letting the small exchange dissolve into silence. He turned back to the score in front of him, jotting a quick note in the margin, and for a while neither of them spoke at all—just the scratch of two pencils moving over paper, the occasional hum of the air conditioning kicking on and off, and, underneath it, something unspoken settling into place between them.

Neither of them realized it, but the cold hostility that had fortified their relationship all this time had crumbled completely, replaced by a new, far more dangerous tension—a slow tug-of-war between curiosity and attraction quietly beginning to burn through the walls each of them had built. Michi told herself, on the walk back to her dorm that evening, that it meant nothing. That two musicians agreeing on a chord progression was hardly the same thing as trust. But some small, traitorous corner of her mind kept replaying the sound of Rimba saying good point in that low, unguarded voice, and she found she couldn't quite talk herself out of wanting to hear it again.