Vireo House usually hummed with a predictable cadence—the clatter of mechanical keys, the hiss of the espresso machine, the squeak of rolling chairs.

Today, however, the air felt suspended.

Aria walked down the corridor; a stack of project folders balanced in the crook of her arm. She focused on the weight of them, keeping her fingers pressed against the cardboard edges to maintain alignment. Beyond the glass walls, Rotterdam moved in a blur of motion, but in here, the atmosphere was static.

Lina's office door stood ajar. The room was vacant, save for the glow of dual monitors and the ghost of a dialogue track bleeding from the speakers—a sentence severed halfway through. Aria placed the files on the corner of the desk, aligning them with the edge of the blotter. She turned to leave, but a stack of paper near the keyboard snagged her attention.

It was a script draft, the top page curled upward as if it had been read and discarded in frustration.

Untitled (Draft 2).

Curiosity, or perhaps instinct, made her pause.

Heavy blue underlines scarred the page, and an entire paragraph had been slashed through with aggressive ink strokes. She shifted her weight, leaning in just enough to read the open page.

It was a scene on a park bench. Two characters exchanging pleasantries about the weather and missed calls. It was clearly meant to be a moment of restraint—two people talking around a subject rather than about it.

But it didn't land.

The spaces between the dialogue felt hollow, not heavy. It was a vacuum rather than a pause. The characters weren't holding back; they just had nothing to say. Aria tilted her head, reading the crossed-out transitions. The writer wanted tension, but had only written emptiness.

It collapses, she thought. If you don't put anything inside the silence, the scene just collapses.

"That caught your eye?"

Aria straightened, heart jumping once against her ribs. Lina stood in the doorway, shaking rainwater off a folded umbrella. Her glasses sat crookedly on her nose, and she looked more amused than annoyed.

"I was just dropping off the files," Aria said, stepping back from the desk. "I noticed the markups."

"It's a disaster," Lina said breezily, walking past her to set down a damp takeaway bag. She glanced at the script, then back at Aria with a sharp, assessing look. "No secrets here. The pacing is dead on arrival. Tell me, what's wrong with it?"

It was a test. Aria could feel the weight of it. She looked back at the page, thinking of how she and Reyhaan spoke—or didn't speak. How a look could carry a paragraph.

"The lines are fine," Aria said, choosing her words with the same care she used to splice film. "But what's unsaid isn't working. There's no friction in the pauses. It feels like they're waiting for a cue, not waiting for the courage to speak."

Lina blinked, then gave a low hum of approval. "Exactly. It's limp."

She picked up her coffee, took a sip, and pointed a pen at Aria. "Go take your break. Get some air. Then come back."

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The cafeteria smelled of microwave curry and industrial cleaner. It was a bright, over-lit space where conversations bounced off laminate tables and tile floors, creating a cacophony that usually made Aria want to retreat to the sanctuary of her headphones.

Today, her usual corner was occupied by a pile of camera gear and a sprawling acoustic guitar case. She hesitated, tray in hand, before spotting Chiara waving a fork from a center table.

"Over here! We're debating the mortality of color grading."

Aria slid into the empty seat. Across from her, Jasper was balancing his chair on two legs, looking entirely too relaxed for a workday, while Dev scrolled through a tablet with intense focus.

"I'm telling you," Chiara continued, green-tipped hair bouncing as she gestured with a chip. "The client wants teal shadows. In a funeral scene. Teal. Who grieves in teal?"

"Maybe he's mourning in RGB," Jasper suggested, biting into an apple with a loud crunch.

"It's a mood," Dev mumbled without looking up. "Detached grief. Very postmodern."

"It's ugly," Chiara countered. "I told him it looks like an aquarium accident."

Laughter erupted around the table. Aria smiled, picking at the edge of her sandwich. It was a different tempo here—fast, overlapping, chaotic. Words tumbled out of them without filters. It was nothing like the conversations she had with Maya, which were frantic but intimate, or Kian, which were intellectual deep-dives.

And it was nothing like Reyhaan.

With him, communication was a slow-exposure photograph. It took time to develop, but the image was always sharper.

"You're quiet today, Aria," Jasper noted, dropping his chair back to four legs with a thud. "Analyzing our dysfunction?"

"Just listening," she said. "You guys have a lot of... opinions."

"It's how we survive," Chiara said, nudging a packet of gummy bears toward her. "Want a green one? It matches the funeral scene."

Aria took the candy, the sugar coating rough against her thumb. "Thanks."

She let the conversation wash over her, a tide of banter and complaints about clients. It was nice, being part of the noise without having to drive it. But her mind kept drifting back to the script upstairs. To the empty spaces on the page that needed filling.

Everyone here shouted to be heard. But she knew that the loudest things were usually the ones people were terrified to say.

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By the time she returned to Lina's office, the takeaway bag was gone, and the afternoon sun had slanted low, hitting the spine of the script in a band of warm gold.

Lina didn't look up from her monitor immediately. "You ready to take a stab at it?"

Aria stopped by the chair. "The park scene? You want me to do the actual rewrite?"

"Second drafts are where the real work lives," Lina said, finally turning. Her expression was serious, devoid of the earlier casualness. "I liked your critique. Now fix it."

Something firmed in Aria's chest. It wasn't quite confidence—it was too fragile for that—but it was a sense of capability. She knew how to do this. She knew how to map the geography of a hesitation.

"Okay," Aria said. She reached for the script. "I'll try."

Taking the pages back to her desk, she didn't type for a long time. She just read the dialogue, crossing out lines until the page was bleeding ink. She removed the explanations. Removed the apologies. Stripped the scene down until only the bones remained.

Then, she began to add the weight.

He looks at her hands, not her eyes. She starts to speak, stops. The traffic noise swells. He shifts away. The distance feels safer.

She wasn't writing fiction. She was remembering. She was pouring the texture of her own evenings into the scene—the way the air changed when Reyhaan walked into a room, the way gravity seemed to pull toward him.

When she finally typed the last transition, she sat back. The scene wasn't louder. It was just fuller. It didn't explain the heartbreak; it forced the reader to sit in it.

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The recording booth was a capsule of pressurized air and dusk-colored lighting. On the dual monitors, the waveforms were jagged mountain ranges, scrolling endlessly to the right.

"That last part," Jay said through the talkback mic, his voice tinny in the control room speakers. "I was a breath late, wasn't I?"

Reyhaan sat at the console, fingers resting lightly on the faders. He didn't look at the others. He was listening to the decay of the reverb, the way it hung in the air for a fraction of a second too long.

"You were," Reyhaan murmured. "Don't push the note. Let it fall."

"That's what I heard, too," Silas said from the couch, tapping a metronome app on his phone. "Come in on the four, push slightly into the fifth beat."

Jay gave a short nod through the glass. Ilan tapped the talkback mic. "Whenever you're ready."

This time, when the music played, the harmony slotted into place like a key turning in a lock. It wasn't just accurate; it was right.

Reyhaan marked the timestamp lightly in the notebook balanced on his knee. His pencil tapped once, then stilled. With his other hand, he adjusted a slider, easing the backdrop under Jay's voice to give it floor space.

When the track ended, Silas sat up. "There it is."

Jay exhaled in the booth, giving a small nod.

Reyhaan leaned forward and pressed the talkback button. "Hold that version. Don't change the way you land the last line."

"Noted."

"If we keep this up," Lucian drawled from the corner, legs crossed, looking like he was posing for a magazine rather than producing an album, "we might actually finish a track this month."

"Don't jinx it," Reyhaan said, adjusting the EQ notch on the ambient track. He pulled the high-mids down, softening the bite of the synth.

"You happy with that swell near the bridge?" Lucian asked, leaning forward.

It wasn't often he heard the mix that clearly—not just the take, but how it sat inside the wider architecture of the song.

Lucian clicked to the ambient layer, isolating a short swell that dipped beneath the new harmony and returned quietly after

"This section," he said, pointing at the waveform of the ocean sound. "That's the layer you added yesterday. It feels... restless. Like something moving under the water."

Reyhaan nodded. He didn't say that it felt like standing in a kitchen with someone you couldn't touch. He didn't say it felt like watching a door close.

"It's not done telling me what it is yet," Reyhaan said quietly.

Lucian studied him for a second, then nodded. He didn't press. He reached over and added a marker on the screen: Hold – Draft.

When Jay came back in, the mood in the room had shifted from work to satisfaction.

"I like where it's going. It's got... weight. But not heavy."

"Like memory," Ilan supplied.

Jay made a face. "Why are you always saying weirdly beautiful things?"

"Because I spend less time playing video games at 3 a.m."

Silas stood up from the couch, stretching. "We're clean up to here. Let's wrap the section. We can pick it up tomorrow with fresh ears."

"Agreed," Lucian said, saving the project. "We've got shape now."

Jay rubbed his face, finally letting the weariness show. "Feels good. Haven't layered like that in a while."

"It's coming alive," Reyhaan said, closing his notebook. "You can hear the track breathing under the vocals."

"Exactly. Like breath under snowfall," Ilan noted, packing his bag.

Silas huffed a laugh. "Let's not get sentimental. Pack up before you all start writing metaphors on the walls."

The group chuckled softly, but the warmth in the room was palpable. Reyhaan lingered by the console as the others filed out. He muted the loop, his fingers brushing the edge of the desk.

The track still played in his head—unfinished, but steady. It held the shape of what they'd made, and what was still waiting to be found.