#tianmie

Elio, lowering his voice to a whisper, had glanced between them and the door. "We should get snacks while she's out. And maybe coffee for when she wakes up?" They all agreed to this as they began to quietly stand up and fix their things. Jamie, who had been sitting a little apart from the worst academic wreckage with a novel open in front of him, looked up only when Cameron paused beside him.

"You coming?" they asked quietly. He glanced toward the table without meaning to—toward the sleeping Tianshi folded into her own arms, the spill of dark purple curls across her sleeve, and the sharp, elegant stillness of her even now, as if sleep itself had to arrange around her rather than the other way around. She looks like a portrait.

Then he looked back down at his book and said, with practiced calm, "No, thank you. I'll stay here."

"'Kay, you want anything?" It was Percy's turn to ask.

He gave a non-committed hum. "I'll have whatever you're having."

Percy nodded, giving Jamie one brief, knowing look, before making his way towards the door. Deja also had that same knowing look, while Cameron's mouth twitched with the effort not to smile. Elio simply followed right beside Percy. Then the four of them slipped out, closing the door behind them with a quiet click.

Jamie kept his eyes on the page for a respectable amount of time. He even read a sentence - possibly two - something about a storm, maybe, or a man arriving somewhere grim with a suitcase full of bad decisions. He couldn't have said. The words had flattened into black little marks without meaning, because beside him, just one chair away, Tianshi breathed in and out, and somehow that had become the loudest thing in the room. He tried not to look at her, because that would have been ridiculous. Embarrassing, even if no one was there to witness it. There was nothing to see but an overworked law student sleeping. He turned a page he had not absorbed, shifted in his chair, and let his gaze drag once toward the window, before reluctantly, inevitably, back to her.

Sleeping had taken the edge off her in the strangest way. Not softened, exactly, Tianshi did not become soft simply because she was sleeping, which felt like a law of nature. But it had unfastened something. The alertness she wore so well, the cool and composed precision of her face, had gone quiet. Her mouth was relaxed, lashes laid still against her cheeks, and her head had tilted to one side one of her arms, leaving her face open to the room in a way he was not used to seeing, the sight of it landed in him with such absurd force that he had to look down for a second, as though he'd been caught doing something.

It was stupid. He saw her all the time. From her deadpan jokes, to her clean, but pointed politeness to random students trying to get her number, or how she has her "affectionate" days—hugging Cameron, a hand wrapped around Deja's arm, patting Elio's head, pinching Percy's cheek... and well, she'd nudge him sometimes when they're messing around. She doesn't get close to him like she does with others... Not that he noticed or anything. Ahem. He had seen her in boots, in layers, in that monochrome wardrobe she made look less like fashion and more like a personal philosophy. He had seen her tired, irritated, unimpressed, happy, and amused despite herself. None of this is new.

And yet...

There was something almost... unfair about this. How it made every detail feel louder. The faint crease pressed into her cheek by her sleeve, the soft movement of breath at her shoulders, a curl slipping near her temples, glossy even in this miserable lighting, because apparently even her hair refused to have an off day. One of her beauty marks sat in plain view from this angle, and his gaze snagged there for a breath too long before he looked away, eyebrows furrowed. He wanted to bully his own eyes into behaving. Get it together, he thought, which was rich coming from someone currently being defeated by the sight of an oblivious Tianshi taking a nap.

He stared at the book a little harder, as though menace alone would force the print into coherence. It did not. It wasn't that simple after all.

At some point, with the particular kind of surrender that came only after losing an argument with himself in complete privacy, Jamie closed the book carefully and laid it flat on the table. The sound was small, and she didn't stir. Good. He looked at her for a moment longer, then, for no reason he could explain that wouldn't make him sound completely deranged, shifted forward in his chair. His forearms came down on the table, one over the other. Slowly, feeling faintly idiotic, he lowered his head to them and turned it to the side, mirroring her posture. From here, the world narrowed. And he only saw her.

The table between them no longer seemed all that wide. He could see the fine texture of her sleeve where her cheek rested against it, the silver glint of a ring, the loosened line of her fingers near the margin of an open book. One of her curls had fallen forward in a deep, ink-dark coil, touched with muted violet where the light found it. It made him think of expensive ribbon left in the dark. Of plum skin at midnight. Of things one wasn't meant to touch in museums. That thought annoyed him on principle. Still, he didn't move. He only watched her. The way one watched snowfall through a window, perhaps—something quiet and complete happening just beyond reach, something that asked for nothing and altered the whole landscape anyway. There was no performance in her now, none of the wit or detachment or contained amusement she wore so naturally.

Just Tianshi, a little vulnerable, and asleep because her body had dragged the plug from the wall. Just the human fact of her. And maybe that was what did it—how intimate exhaustion could be, how defenseless. How trust, even accidental trust, made a person luminous in a different register. His gaze drifted to her notes, to the margins packed with neat commentary, to the evidence of hours and hours spent pushing herself past the point where anyone sensible would have stopped. Something in his mouth went faintly bitter. He knows she does this... she would work until her body forced her into stillness like a felled thing. He understood where she's coming from, since he's an achiever himself, but what he never got was why it always seemed like she was trying to prove something. She's smart and talented as is. Why is she never satisfied with her skills? She had that particular kind of competence people admired too much and protected too little, as if being capable meant being inexhaustible. As if poise were the same thing as invulnerability.

Jamie thought of everyone's reaction to it, how they all understood the shape of this tenderness and knew better than to bruise it. That softened something in him he did not care to inspect too closely. It would have been easy, once, to keep Tianshi under interesting or fun to talk to when she's in one of her moods and willing to indulge me as I do her. It would have been easier still to leave her there.

Instead, here he was, side of his head on his arms, staring at her like a man who had misplaced something important and only just realized she's been holding it for... a while now.

The revelation arrived slowly, pieced together from little truths that had apparently been conspiring behind his back. The fact that his eyes first sought her in a room, that sincere words spoken to him lived in his head for days afterward, turning over and over until he smiled at them alone. The fact that he had begun recognizing the difference between her unimpressed silences and her comfortable ones. The fact that, even now, with no conversations to spar through, he could have kept reading and did not—because he wanted to look at her. And looking at her had become its own kind of quiet.

Somewhere along the line, without his permission, she had grown prettier in that ruinous way people did when affection got involved—when your mind started attaching meaning to details it once would have passed over, turning lips into a problem, a glance into weather, a beauty mark into something your gaze returned to with embarrassing regularity.

He exhaled softly through his nose, not quite a sigh, closer to the sound of him realizing the floor beneath him had been sloping for some time. "...This is annoying." He murmured to no one.

Tianshi remained asleep, and that made his mouth twitch. There was something almost laughable about the fact that this silence, this study room, this table filled with everyone's work, and her sleeping like she'd been switched off mid-thought, felt more intimate than things far grander ever could. No spectacle to it. No romance in the obvious sense. Just Jamie lying on his arms to look at her better, as if proximity could be borrowed in inches. As if he could study this feeling the way she studied everything else—closely, patiently, without saying a word until he understood its architecture.

At one point, his own eyes began to close, but then he felt her shift.

It was a slight movement and a change in breath, but it struck through him with ridiculous immediacy. One hand flexed near her notes, her head turned a fraction more toward him, and a curl slipped further across her brow. Jamie went still as stone... but she did not wake. Her breathing evened again, slow and quiet. He held himself there for a second longer before, with rare care, he reached across the table. Not to touch her, just to catch the loose pen resting too near the edge of her elbow and move it aside before it could leave a mark on her sleeve or roll off the table altogether. Then he drew back.

When the door finally opened again, and the others spilled in with cold drinks, hot coffee for Tianshi, and snacks, Jamie was once more sitting upright in his chair with his novel in hand, one leg crossed over the other, looking like he had spent the entire time doing exactly what he had been doing.

Deja sat beside Tianshi, rubbing a gentle hand on her shoulder to wake her up. "Hey, sleeping beauty. Wake up before this turns into a three-hour nap." That made Cameron snicker, sitting beside Tianshi's other side, their cheek resting on their palm. She shifted—it was slow, almost like climbing out of deep water. She inhaled, a deeper breath this time, and her head lifted from her arms with the quiet reluctance of someone whose body had very strong opinions about staying asleep... or having proper rest.

"You seriously fell asleep this time, Tee." Cameron said, twirling one of Tianshi's curls on their finger. She cleared her throat to say, "Shit." That made both Percy and Elio laugh. Also, for a small smile to appear on Jamie's face.