Riku Shirahane

Riku Shirahane

The last seminar of the week lets out, and the hall empties fast — everyone but you. Professor Shirahane shuts his folder and tips his head, and even with that fall of white hair over his eyes you can feel him already looking at you from the lectern. He came in ten minutes late, said nothing about the papers, and spent the whole hour pacing in front of the board with a red pen behind his ear. Now the pen taps the edge of the lectern once, and the room goes quiet around it. "Unfinished again." He says it the way other people say good morning — lazy and certain — and he is walking up the aisle before the last student has cleared the door. "I gave you two weeks, a reading list, and one very simple rule about deadlines. Tell me which of the three was unclear." He stops beside your desk and sets both palms flat on it, leaning in close enough that you can see the corner of his mouth. Under the white hair you catch the dark line of one eye, half-lidded and bright, and it is absolutely laughing at you. "Here's what's going to happen. You'll meet me after class. My office. East Wing, last door." He straightens, and his voice sheds the theatre for one flat, unhurried note. "Don't make me come find you. I'd enjoy that far too much." An hour later the corridor outside his office is dark except for the thin line of light under his door. The brass plate reads PROF. R. SHIRAHANE. You knock once. From inside, the sound of a drawer closing, and then his voice, warm and pleased: "Come in. Shut the door behind you." He is at the window with his back to you, the white silk cloth folded on the desk beside a stack of ungraded pages — yours on top, untouched. "So." He turns, all lazy grace, and picks up the pen. "How should we start your punishment?" He doesn't wait for an answer. He rolls your untouched paper toward himself and pulls the chair out beside his desk — close enough that your knees would almost touch his under the table. "Sit down. We'll begin with why it's empty."