The results were declared in four days.
On the first day after the exam, Rudra was fine.
More than fine, actually — he was the picture of a man who had made peace with his situation and arrived at a philosophical acceptance of whatever came next. He sat at breakfast with a straight back and a calm expression and said things like:
"It's just an exam. I can try again next year."
And: "A piece of paper cannot decide my future."
And, with particular conviction: "I will be absolutely fine."
Arjun had listened to all of this with the expression of someone who has decided, as a matter of personal policy, not to say anything.
On the second day, Rudra was less fine.
He ate breakfast without comment, which was itself unusual, and spent most of the morning standing near windows looking at nothing specific. When Edward asked him a question during their morning session his response came approximately two seconds later than it should have, which meant part of his mind was elsewhere while the rest of it tried to keep up appearances. He trained mechanically, went through every motion correctly, and looked like a person performing the tasks of someone who was fully present without actually being fully present.
That evening he went to his room and did not come out for dinner.
On the third day he did not come out at all.
Arjun knocked twice, heard a muffled response from inside that was technically a word without being specifically identifiable as one, and decided to wait. Through the door he could hear nothing for long stretches — just the particular quality of silence that suggests someone lying very still somewhere, not sleeping, just lying there with the full weight of something sitting on their chest.
Edward noticed the empty seat at breakfast and said nothing about it, which, Arjun had come to understand, was Edward's way of saying something very clearly.
By the morning of the fourth day — the result day — the situation in the guest house had taken on the specific atmosphere of the period before something either gets better or significantly worse.
Arjun stood outside Rudra's door.
The door had been closed for approximately seventy-two hours. The tray of food left outside it the previous evening had been taken in at some point overnight, which at least confirmed the basic facts of Rudra's continued existence and functioning.
"Just come out already," Arjun said, to the door. "How long do you plan to stay in there?"
A voice came from the other side. Pale, flat, the voice of someone who had been lying in the dark for three days and had adapted to it.
"I want to stay. Please go away."
"The results are being declared today," Arjun said. "Don't you want to know?"
A long silence. Then:
"I already know the result."
A pause.
"I'm going to fail miserably. And then they will take the Power Stone by force. And then I will probably die." Another pause. "You go. I'll stay here."
Arjun opened his mouth. He had approximately four different responses prepared — reasonable ones, practical ones, the kind of thing a sensible person says to another person who has just made a logical leap from exam failure to their own death in a single sentence.
He did not get to use any of them.
Footsteps in the corridor. He turned.
Edward was walking toward him. Long coat, straight back, the expression of a man who has seen something in the last few minutes that has used up a significant portion of his available patience. He was not walking quickly, but the quality of his walking communicated the same information as running would have in someone else.
He stopped in front of the door.
He did not knock.
He pulled his foot back and kicked it.
The door did not survive the experience. It came apart in a way that scattered pieces across both sides of the threshold and left the frame intact while filling the air with a sharp explosion of sound that, on the other side of it, was evidently alarming enough to produce an immediate physical response — from within the room came a startled shout, something falling, and then silence.
Arjun looked at the remains of the door. Then at Edward. Edward had already stepped through the doorway and was standing inside the room, looking at Rudra with the expression of someone who has quite a lot to say and is choosing the order carefully.
Rudra was sitting on the floor beside his bed, having apparently fallen off it during the arrival of the door. His hair had not been attended to in several days. He was wearing the same clothes he had been wearing when he went in. He looked, overall, like a man for whom the concept of personal maintenance had become temporarily theoretical.
He looked up at Edward.
Then his expression changed — from startled to something more complicated, a quick internal calculation running behind his eyes.
'He's seen the results. That face is definitely the face of someone who has seen the results.'
"Have you seen the results?!" Edward said.
"I haven't," Rudra said, his voice coming out smaller than he had probably intended. "But I can make a fairly accurate prediction about what they—"
"Do you have any idea what score you got?" Edward's voice had taken on the particular quality of someone who is not yet shouting but has made a firm decision about where the conversation is going. "Do you have any idea how much embarrassment I am carrying right now because of what you scored?"
Rudra lowered his head. "I'm sorry. I'm very sorry."
"You should be ashamed of yourself. Do you understand? Ashamed."
"Yes. I am. I'm deeply sorry—"
"You barely managed to pass." Edward's voice had gone quieter, which in Rudra's experience was more alarming than the louder version. "The lowest passing score in this entire exam. You should—"
"Very sorry, I completely understand, I—" Rudra stopped.
He looked up.
Something had reached him through the noise of his own apology. A word. A specific word that had arrived in the previous sentence and had not, until this precise moment, fully registered.
"Wait."
Edward was still talking.
"Wait." Rudra's voice was louder now. "Sorry — wait. Did you just say I passed?"
Edward stopped.
"I said the lowest passing score—"
"I PASSED?!"
The transformation was instantaneous and total. The man who had spent three days lying in the dark with the curtains closed was on his feet. The pale, flat voice was gone. In its place was a sound that was possibly the loudest noise Rudra had produced since the street outside P.R.I.S.M., and this time it was not directed at a monster but at the ceiling of a marble guest house in Dev Lok.
"I PASSED!! I ACTUALLY PASSED!! HELL YEAH!! HELL YEAH!!"
He was dancing. Not self-consciously, not with any awareness of the audience — fully, completely, with his whole body, a celebration that owed nothing to dignity and everything to three days of accumulated anxiety finding an exit all at once.
Edward stood in the middle of the destroyed doorway and watched this.
"You scored the lowest possible passing mark," he said. "In the entire exam. Out of every candidate who sat this paper—"
Rudra was singing now. It was not a real song. It had the structure of a song in the same way that rain has the structure of a plan — technically present but not meaningfully organised.
"YOU ARE CELEBRATING?!" Edward's voice had arrived, finally, at its destination. "YOU GOT THE LOWEST SCORE AND YOU ARE CELEBRATING?!"
Rudra, mid-dance, appeared to register this. He looked at Edward. He looked at Edward's expression. He performed, in a single second, the fastest sobriety recovery Arjun had ever witnessed in another human being.
"...ah," Rudra said.
"DOUBLE TRAINING! TRAINING GROUND! NOW!"
"Yes sir. Absolutely. Right away."
Arjun, standing in the corridor beside the remains of the door, watched Rudra emerge from the room with the energy of a man walking toward a firing squad and the expression of someone who had known, if he was being honest with himself, that the dancing was probably a mistake approximately two seconds before he started dancing.
Edward followed him out, and the sound of the two of them moving down the corridor faded until the guest house was quiet again.
Arjun looked at the broken door.
He looked at the corridor.
He looked at the tray from last night, still sitting outside where the door used to be.
'What an unexpected twist,' he thought.
He picked up the tray and went to find someone to report a broken door to.