Stingue One-Shots

Sixteenth-Note Run of the Heart

A/N: This isn't super great - it was a rushed thing at like 1AM from like a few weeks ago when I had a sudden idea that I needed to get out like then. It's rushed and not great, but here you gooo

Rogue was out of the classroom and on his way to the band room before the bell stopped ringing. The halls of his high school were beyond crowded, which the teenager found to be more than a little bit uncomfortable. He awkwardly weaved around his peers, trying – and failing – not to run into anyone. After what seemed to be an eternity but was actually about thirty seconds of awkward dodging, Rogue stepped into the band room and felt a familiar calming sensation fall over him.

The band room was Rogue's happy place. The space was huge, the floors were tiled with grey-white tiles and blue accents, and along the white brick walls were sound absorbers. In the centre of the room in a half-circle around the podium were several rows of chairs and stands – the usual concert band setup. Several clusters of students spread across the large, open room. He spotted a few flute players, a couple clarinets, and the oboe player in one huddle. In another stood several trumpets (belch), a handful of low brass players, and some percussionists. The entire scene was so familiar that Rogue felt at home even though he was blood-related to exactly zero people in the room.

Although a few of his friends waved to him, the black-haired boy made his way into the music storage room, muttering "excuse me" every so often. He located his cubby that he shared with Yukino, one of his close friends, and extracted the small zippered case and a large blue folder before retracing his steps back out into the hallway. Rogue cautiously opened the door to practice room number seven and stepped inside.

Rogue sighed as he placed the folder on the creaky old stand in the centre of the miniature room. The square-shaped room was tiny – the walls were probably no more than two-and-a-half metres long – but the band nerd found it comforting to be alone in the small space. Sitting down in the black musician's chair, he unzipped the case, revealing the silver object inside.

The eleventh-grader took great pride in his instrument. It was brand-new as of the beginning of the school year, and it was the top intermediate model of a high-quality brand. It was this object that had aided in earning Rogue the first-chair spot.

He carefully removed the head joint and the two body pieces of the flute, assembling it with acquainted ease. As a test, he blew a Concert F to test how much he needed to tune his instrument. As he practiced nearly every day, he was fairly sure that he was close to in tune. Rogue ran up a Concert F scale in sixteenth notes, and it came out nearly flawlessly although he hadn't warmed up at all.

The flutist set down the metal object in favour of shuffling sheet music on the stand. The piece that sat in front of him was the literal embodiment of Satan, in Rogue's opinion, which was why he needed to practice it. Spaced across the sheet music were black notes on white, connected by slurs, and decorated by staccato and accent marks. Nearly the entire piece was written in the upper register, and the majority of the difficult part was sixteenth note phrases. The other reason why Rogue really needed to work on the selection was because the spring concert was in less than two weeks, and he did not have even a little bit of his extremely difficult solo perfected.

Taking a deep breath, the dark-haired male raised the flute to his lips and began moving his fingers as he blew air over the opening on the mouthpiece. His fingers moved faster and faster as he caught onto the way the piece flowed and as he gained confidence.

Well, until he skipped several notes in a row and suddenly he had sputtered to a stop. "Fuck," he swore, thoroughly disappointed that he couldn't even make it through a rough run of the solo.