Blood, Sweat, and Hanon - A Ranger's Apprentice fanfiction

Chapter Sixteen - Alyss

A/N: Lucky ducks, you get a BONUS UPDATE!!! (Mainly because I can't wait for you guys to read this. There are so many plot twists coming, you might get dizzy! Also this might sound really weird but I need someone to fangirl about this with me. Desperately.)

We're getting to the climax of the story! I hope you guys like where this is going! And yes, I'll still update on Saturday. (Speaking of competitions, I have another one that morning...Wish me luck!)

As soon as the Ensemble Contest is finished, the entire school goes on lockdown.

Not a lockdown from a physical threat, but from a more mental one.

The school-wide Junior International preliminaries, which will choose the school representatives, will take place in exactly one month.

The whole environment changes instantly, Alyss notices. Overnight, the school becomes a completely different place. The hallways are almost eerily quiet between classes, as no one is talking. Instead, everyone lives with an almost laserlike focus every waking minute.

Instead of chatting between classes, students ignore everybody else, some with headphones on listening to their competition pieces on repeat, some studying scores even while walking, paying no mind to the people they're crashing into. The practice rooms are always full, with lines outside snaking down the hallway. Alyss nearly has a panic attack after she can't find a free practice room for three days straight. Thankfully, Will says she can use his private practice room for several hours each day in the early afternoon, while he's in his lesson and supervised practice hour. Then Alyss figures out that sometimes a few open up in the middle of the night, so when she can't sleep from nerves or from bad dreams (which usually feature her forgetting her music for the judges or tripping onstage) she just goes and practices some more to get her mind off of it.

Nearly a week later, she hasn't even spoken to any of her friends since the competition, other than Will in passing when she leaves his practice room. She sees George in orchestra, and Jenny in their room, and the others in the hallways, but even in her room, either Alyss or Jenny is sleeping. They're all distant, trying to focus on the competition without losing their minds.

A week and a half before the competition, Ms. DuLacy puts her foot down when she sees the circles under Alyss's eyes. "Did you sleep at all last night?" she asks.

Regretfully, Alyss shakes her head - and yawns. "No," she admits. "I keep getting bad performance dreams, and they must trigger my adrenaline or something, because I can't get back to sleep when I'm done. I just practiced all night last night."

"Alyss," Ms. DuLacy says, "you're going to get sick if you don't get more sleep! Here's what we're going to do. You're going to give me your violin, and I'm going to hold on to it for twenty-four hours. On top of that, as soon as we're done here, I'm going to administration to tell them you're not going to attend any classes during the next twenty-four hours. You're going to spend an entire day relaxing and not practicing." She gives Alyss a look. "And I'll know if you practiced. I have eyes all over this school."

So Alyss sleeps for six hours straight that afternoon, nearly missing dinner, but it's worth it. She manages to get her sleep cycle back on schedule, and she's slightly more refreshed the next day when she goes back to Ms. DuLacy's office to pick up her violin.

And then it's straight back into practice. By this point, Alyss is actually feeling better about her program. She's sounding good, and her memory has solidified.

Three days before the competition, everything goes wrong.

Alyss spent half the night lying awake, worrying about life in general, so she oversleeps, missing breakfast. She's five minutes late to her first class, and she doesn't have time to stop by her locker to stow her violin, so she just lugs it to French with her and sticks it under her chair. Then Mr. Abelard keeps her a few minutes after class to explain her assignment, so she has to take it with her to her next class.