“Time to go!” she declared, clapping her hands once.

“Go where?” you asked, even though you knew in your very bones.

"The Grove! Professor Anaxa is expecting you. He's prepared subjects!"

Subjects. Like you were a surgeon and not a screaming woman with a honey cake.

"I thought that was a fever dream," you whispered. "A stress hallucination. Something my brain invented to punish me."

"It was real, and he sent a very formal note. It had a wax seal."

"Of course it did."

And so here you were. Dragged back to the epicenter of academic scrutiny, your satchel restocked with remedial snacks and your dignity running on fumes. Hyacine walked beside you with the serenity of a woman delivering a lamb to slaughter while humming a lullaby about it.

The clearing was laid out in front of you. The Library of Philia extended its venerable branches all around, its bark shinning with the self-satisfied glow that comes from being old enough to have lived through many generations of your family tree. The stone benches awaited. The moss judged.

And there, standing exactly where you'd left him—had he moved in the intervening week? Had he simply stood there, notebook in hand, waiting for you to return like a spider who felt the web twitch?—was Anaxagoras.

Same eyepatch. Same teal star. Same short cape with golden trim that said I am smarter than you and I've accessorized accordingly. His notebook was already open. His stylus was poised. His single magenta eye found you the instant you cleared the tree line, and it focused with the precision of a magnifying glass angled at an ant on a sunny day.

"Ah," he said. One syllable. It contained an essay's worth of satisfaction.

Your stomach dropped through the forest floor and into whatever geological layer stored pure dread.

But that stomach-drop was immediately interrupted by a secondary plummet—a deeper, more personal, more catastrophic plummet—because Anaxa was not alone.

Seated on the stone bench to his left, legs crossed at the ankle and looking every bit like a painting that had gotten bored of its frame and wandered into a forest, was Phainon.

Phainon.

Here.

In the Grove.

At your appointment with the Blasphemer.

Your brain performed what could only be described as a controlled crash landing. Systems went offline one by one. Vision narrowed. Sound became tinny. Your hand—the kissed hand, the hand that had spent the last several days being cradled against your chest like a wounded bird whenever you thought no one was looking—clenched at your side.

Tribbie, who perched herself in a moss-covered outcropping in the same fashion that an especially naughty finch would perch itself if it saw something shiny, sat next to him. The sunlight glinted off her red hair and her purple eyes glowed with the obvious sparkle of a woman who showed up to watch something amusing.

Your feet lost their ability to work. You stood at the edge of the clearing like a guest arriving at a funeral that hadn't been announced.

"Why," you said. Your voice emerged flat, dusty, and completely devoid of hope. "Why are you all here."

It wasn't a question. Questions implied you expected answers. Questions implied you believed the universe might offer explanations that were rational, or kind, or even vaguely related to your continued wellbeing. You knew better. You knew, with the absolute certainty of a woman who had bled on a demigod and lived to flee through a restaurant kitchen, that no answer would help you.

Tribbie waved. A small, delighted wave, like greeting a friend at a party. "We heard there was going to be a show!"

"There is no show."

"Cinny said you yelled at an archivist about crumbs last time and it cured him."

"That is a gross misrepresentation—"

"I said she weaponized carbohydrates," Hyacine corrected serenely, settling onto a bench with the comfortable authority who had paid for these seats. "And used volume as medicine."

"That is also a gross—"

"I characterized it," Anaxa interjected, not looking up from his notebook, "as pragmatic cognitive disruption via absurdist escalation. The carbohydrate was incidental."

"NOTHING I DID WAS INCIDENTAL! I WAS PANICKING!"

Silence.

Every face in the clearing stared at you. Anaxa's stylus hovered. Tribbie's mouth formed a perfect little 'o' of delight. Hyacine nodded slowly, as though you had just proven a thesis.

And Phainon, Phainon, who was leaning back on the bench with one arm draped along its edge, whose white hair caught the forest light like it was personally offended by the concept of shadows, looked at you with that expression. That expression. The warm, steady, endlessly patient expression that said Yes. This. This is why I'm here.

Your heart, that treasonous organ, executed a full gymnastic routine. Triple somersault. Stuck the landing. Immediately fell off the balance beam and lay on the mat making small, helpless sounds.

You tore your eyes away from him so that they wouldn't give anything away to you. The kiss. The hand kiss. It was right there, just hanging in the air between the two of you, and if you didn’t look away from him for more than three seconds, you would have combusted, and then Anaxa would have write down the whole thing, and Tribbie would have applauded, and Hyacine would have nodded and approved, and the whole thing would have been cleaned up and mailed to Marlon with a note that read Told you so.

“Fine,” you said, that single word had worn out with use. You flung your bag on the closest bench, where it flopped down in its indignation. "Where are your victims?"

Anaxa's magenta eye gleamed. "Subjects."

"Same thing."

"Semantically divergent."

"And yet both end up confused with crumbs on their face. Show me the scholars."

The "subjects" were three junior Nousporists this time. Students of Anaxa's own philosophical movement, which you found deeply ironic in a way that tasted like copper and schadenfreude. Each of them was sitting on one of the benches of stone, some of them intellectually confused, each of them seeming to have ingested an entire dictionary and to be paying for it dearly.

The first of them was a young woman whose hands and arms bore the marks of ink all the way to her elbows. She was talking to herself very rapidly, staring down at a leaf which she held between two fingers.

The second, a gangly young man whose robes were too long for him, had his face buried in his hands and appeared to be crying. No. Not crying. Confused crying. Crying of a man who had thought too much about something, that his eyes had leaked because of the overload.

The third one was perfectly motionless, looking at a tree stump straight ahead with an entirely vacant expression, as if all of his personality had been erased from him by something.

You took in your surroundings. You turned back towards Anaxa.

"You broke your own students."

"They exceeded their cognitive parameters." He said this without a shred of guilt, the way someone might say the jar fell off the shelf. As though the jar hadn't been placed on the edge by his own hand.

"They exceeded—" You pinched the bridge of your nose. The headache was already forming, a warm, familiar pressure behind your eyes that whispered welcome back, you fool. "What did you do to them? Did you assign homework? Was it evil homework?"

"I posed a question."

"What question?"

"If the concept of identity is fundamentally a construct, and constructs require a constructor, then who constructs the constructor? And does the act of asking that question constitute its own construction, thereby making the question itself a constructor, which—"

"STOP." You raised both hands in front of your face like a screen to prevent any further progress of the thought into your mind. "Stop. I can feel myself losing my mind and you haven't even finished."

From the bench, Phainon made a sound. A tiny, aborted huff of air that he turned into a cough. You didn't look at him. Looking was dangerous. Looking was how buildings caught fire.

Tribbie had no such restraint. She was already leaning forward, chin in both hands, grinning."That is better than the puppet shows at Janusopolis," she said to Hyacine, loudly enough for everyone in the Grove to overhear.

"Alright." You cracked your knuckles. Not theatrically, but because you had been clutching your fists ever since you saw Phainon and they were actually sore. You approached Subject One, the Leaf Inspector, and crouched beside her.

"Hey," you said. "What's the leaf doing?"

She looked at you with eyes that had seen too much. "It exists."

"Yeah. Leaves do that."

"But why does it exist? Is it the tree's intention? Is it the soil's consequence? Is the leaf the cause or the effect of—"

"It's green," you interrupted.

She blinked.

"It's green," you repeated. "And it's got a little torn bit on the edge. See? Right there. Yes. It’s probably some kind of caterpillar. The caterpillars don’t really care about your question. They just eat and then transform into butterflies. And then birds eat the butterflies. That's it. That's the whole story."

Her mouth opened. Closed. The frantic light in her eyes dimmed by one candle's worth.

"The caterpillar doesn't… question its own construction?"

"The caterpillar has two brain cells. One says 'eat leaf.' The other says 'don't fall.' It's living its best life."

A small, bewildered laugh escaped her. She looked at the leaf again. Then she put it down.

Behind you, you heard the faint scratch of stylus on paper. Anaxa was writing. Of course he was. You resisted the urge to turn around and throw the leaf at him.

You moved to Subject Two, the crying young man. You sat on the bench beside him. He didn't look up. His shoulders were still shaking.

"Hey," you said, softer now. "What's going on?"

"I can't—" He hiccuped. "I can't stop thinking about whether thinking is real."

You let that sit for a second. It deserved at least a second of respectful silence before you demolished it.

"Is the crying real?" you asked.

He sniffed. "What?"

"The crying. The wet stuff on your face. Is that real?"

"I—yes. Obviously."

"Does it feel real?"

"Yes."

"So at minimum, your tear ducts are functioning. That's confirmed. We've got physical evidence." You pulled a cloth from your satchel and handed it to him. "Blow your nose. And while you're doing that, consider this: your body didn't need to think about whether thinking is real in order to produce snot. It just did it. Your nose has more practical wisdom than your entire philosophy seminar."

He stared at you. Then he blew his nose. It was a magnificent, honking, completely undignified blast that echoed off the trees and startled Tribbie into a delighted shriek.

"There!" you declared. "The Nose Knows. That's my diagnosis. Write that down, Professor."

Anaxa's stylus hadn't stopped moving. "Already noted. 'Mucous-based epistemological reset.' Crude. But the outcome speaks."

"Don't call my patient's snot crude. His snot is doing more honest work than half the scrolls in this Grove."

From the bench, the audience bench, because that was what it was, you'd stopped pretending, Phainon's composure finally cracked. Not dramatically. Not explosively. He simply pressed his knuckles against his mouth, his shoulders doing that barely-contained tremor, and his eyes, those ridiculous, unfair, candlelit-dinner eyes, caught yours over the crying student's head.

Your stomach flipped. Your ears burned. The back of your hand tingled with phantom warmth.

You looked away so fast your neck made a sound.

"NEXT PATIENT," you announced, far too loud for a sacred grove. A bird abandoned a branch in protest.

The third Subject proved to be the most challenging. The empty one. The one who had gone too far in his thinking to the point of coming out on the other side, only to find there was nothing there. He sat there without movement, with eyes wide open but looking blankly ahead with a steady breath like a sleeping person would have.

You waved your hand in front of him. Nothing.

You tried snapping your fingers. Nothing happened.

You whispered to him, "Your shoelace is undone."

He blinked. Stared at his feet. Both his shoes were tied up properly.

"There he is," you said. "Welcome back. What year is it?"

"I… what happened?"

"You thought too hard and your brain went to sleep. Like a scroll that's been opened too many times and the text fades. You're fine. You just need to think about something stupid for a while."

"Something… stupid?"

"Yes. Something with no depth, no meaning, and no philosophical implications. Quick—what's your favorite food?"

"Uh. Cheese pastry."

"Why?"

"Because… it tastes good?"

"And why does it taste good?"

He hesitated. You saw the gears turning, the philosophical muscles trying to engage, the dangerous instinct to analyze why pleasure exists—

"NO!" You snapped, raising a finger to point at him. "Not one more word about it. It's good because it's delicious cheese pastry and your taste buds enjoy it. There. Finished. Closed case. The judge has spoken. Cheese pastry is good. Go have one."

He looked at you like you had just handed him the key to a cell he had been stuck in for three days. "So, I can just …have one?"

"Yes, you can just have one."

His expression morphed into an almost painful expression of relief. He staggered to his feet and walked away from the clearing, stumbling and grateful like a released prisoner.

The clearing fell quiet. The three recovering subjects had been dispersed. One to contemplate caterpillars, one to appreciate his functional sinuses, one to pursue cheese pastry with religious conviction. The Grove's silence returned, deep and mossy and ancient, interrupted only by the scratch of Anaxa's stylus and the distant, traumatized warbling of the bird you startled.

You turned to face your audience.

They were all staring at you.

It seemed like Tribbie had just witnessed the best performance of the season and had begun writing her critique of it. Tribbie's purplish eyes looked huge. Her hands were clasped tightly together in front of her such that her fingers had gone white with excitement.

Hyacine sat with her legs crossed, teacup materialized from somewhere, you suspected she carried one at all times, hidden in her robes like a comforting weapon, and she was sipping it with the expression of a woman who had invested in a venture and was watching it yield returns beyond her wildest projections.

Phainon had had enough of faking that he could not laugh. He bent forward, put his hands on his knees, with his hands over his face, and he trembled from head to toe. He was literally shaking. This laughter which had been contained all along came out through tiny gusts of air, like those from a kettle that had been covered too late.

And Anaxa.

Anaxa stood beside you, notebook full, stylus finally lowered. His single magenta eye regarded you with an expression that defied simple classification. It was not warmth. Anaxa didn't do warmth. Instead, it resembled the expression of a collector who had found something unique and was deliberating about where to keep it.

"Three subjects," he said. "Three recoveries. Average intervention time: four minutes. Therapeutic modality: caterpillars, nasal discharge, and cheese pastry." He paused. "I've read treatises from the Grove’s top cognitive theorists that achieved less in four hundred pages."

"Are you complimenting me?" you asked warily. "Because if you are, you have to do it without sounding like you are describing a lab mouse that got through a maze."

"I don't compliment," he said. "I observe. And my observation is that your methodology, while aesthetically repellent, produces results that exceed several established frameworks."

"'Aesthetically repellent.' I'm putting that on a plaque." You crossed your arms. "Is this what it's going to be every week? You break your students, I un-break them, you write it down?"

"Essentially."

"And the audience?" You jerked your thumb at the bench without looking. You absolutely could not look at the bench. Looking at the bench meant looking at him, and your face was already operating at maximum temperature. "What's their function in this experiment?"

Anaxa glanced at the bench with the dismissive neutrality of a man acknowledging furniture. "Control observers. Their presence introduces a social variable. Your performance under scrutiny versus without."

"My performance—I'm not performing! I'm panicking in real time and hoping something useful falls out of my mouth before something embarrassing does!"

"Yes," he said. "That's the phenomenon."

You opened your mouth. Closed it. And you opened to say something. 

"I hate it here," you said, but there was no heat in it. Just the weary acceptance of a woman who had been classified, observed, and filed under Anomalous But Functional and was beginning to suspect there was no appeals process.

Tribbie jumped from her moss-covered branch to appear right by your side, appearing like she was waiting for an opportunity to jump in the conversation. “That was simply INCREDIBLE! You said he had a nose that knew more than his education! We’ve been waiting for years to say that!”

"I didn't say his nose was smarter—"

"You implied it! Strongly! With conviction and mucous!"

"That is the worst sentence anyone has ever directed at me, and I've been called an 'unresolved anomaly.'"

Tribbie grabbed your hands—both of them, with the same weaponized enthusiasm Hyacine had deployed months ago. You jolted. But unlike then, you didn't squeak. Progress. "We have to tell Castorice about the cheese pastry intervention! She'll want to document it from a medical angle!"

"Please don't tell Castorice. Please don't tell anyone. Please let this stay in the Grove where it belongs, buried under leaves and academic shame."

"Too late!" Tribbie sang. "Snowy's already memorized the whole thing. Look at him."

You looked.

Mistake.

And then Phainon had risen from the bench and been making his way towards you with his usual unhurried, steady walk that you once thought to yourself was "the walk of a man who has never stumbled over anything, even himself and his own devastating charm." He had found some sort of calm in his face, no more of that playful smile, no more mischief in his eyes, but his eyes were still bright.

"The cheese pastry?" he asked, coming to a halt just close enough to be proper but devastatingly inappropriate for your knees. "Did you plan this?"

"Nothing I do is planned," you said. "Planning implies I have a strategy. I have the opposite of a strategy. I have an anti-strategy. I walk into rooms and things happen and I deal with them by saying whatever my brain generates in the moment, which is usually wrong but occasionally effective."

"It's always effective," he said, and the way he'd say always meant your ribs were three sizes too tight.

"You're biased," you muttered, gazing intently at some particularly exciting-looking spots of bark on the nearest tree. This particular bark was amazing. This particular bark was your new best friend. This particular bark wouldn't make your heart go into somersaults.

"Entirely," he agreed, and you could hear the smile even without looking.

Anaxa appeared between you with the silent, intrusive efficiency of a man who considered personal boundaries to be an unverified hypothesis. He was still writing. He hadn't looked up.

"The dynamic," he said to his notebook, "between the healer and the observer is itself a variable. Elevated heart rate. Increased verbal output. Distinct change in vocal pitch when subject addresses—"

"GET OUT," you hissed.

"—the taller observer. Pitch rises approximately—"

"I WILL THROW YOUR NOTEBOOK INTO THAT POND."

Anaxa glanced up. Not at you. At Phainon. His single eye performed a scan so clinically thorough that it probably catalogued the thread count of Phainon's coat.

"You're affecting her readings," Anaxa told him, as flat and matter-of-fact as a weather report. "Your proximity causes measurable disruption to her baseline composure. I'll need you to sit at least ten feet away during future sessions."

The silence that followed was the kind that precedes either a war or an extremely good joke. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.

Phainon's eyebrows rose. Slowly. 

"Ten feet," he repeated.

"Minimum. Fifteen would be preferable."

A beat.

"I think," Phainon said, his voice silky and mild and carrying the gentle menace of a sword being drawn from a very expensive sheath, "I'll sit wherever I like."

Anaxa's stylus paused for the first time all morning. His eye narrowed. Not in anger—in interest. You had the horrible, visceral sensation of being a data point caught between two data analysts who had just realized they were studying the same phenomenon from opposite ends and neither intended to yield.

"Your interference compromises the integrity of—"

"The integrity of watching her yell at your students?"

"The integrity of a legitimate investigation into an unprecedented—"

"She told a man to blow his nose and you called it an 'epistemological reset.'"

"It was an epistemological—"

"It was a tissue."

Tribbie was gripping Hyacine's arm so tightly that the healer's teacup was trembling. "They're fighting," Tribbie whispered, delirious with glee. "They're fighting over her research seating arrangement. This is the best day of our life."

Hyacine sipped her tea. "I give it thirty seconds before she intervenes."

You intervened in twelve.

"EXCUSE ME!" you declared, placing yourself physically between them like a zookeeper that just came to realize two very big, very territorial animals have been put into the same cage. "Nobody is sitting anywhere specific! Nobody is measuring my vocal pitch! Nobody is compromising any integrity because there is NO integrity left! It's gone! I spent it! I spent my last integrity on a cheese pastry metaphor and I am running on EMPTY!"

Anaxa regarded you over the edge of his notebook. "Your distress is noted."

"STOP NOTING THINGS!"

Phainon’s hand, the warmth, the steadiness, the comfort that triggered a full-body response of alarm and pleasure in a single gesture, came down to rest on your shoulder for only an instant. One touch. Two seconds. A calming act so soft it was hard to feel as pressure at all, but it left a shockwave through you, down to your toes.

“Breathe,” he whispered, so near that you could smell the fragrance of him. “He is trying to provoke you on purpose. He needs data.”

"I KNOW HE WANTS DATA! EVERYTHING I DO BECOMES DATA! I SNEEZED LAST TIME AND HE WROTE 'INVOLUNTARY EXPULSIVE RESPONSE—POSSIBLE CORRELATION TO FRUSTRATION THRESHOLD'!"

From somewhere behind you, Tribbie's voice rang out, bright and helpful and absolutely terrible: "Did you really sneeze and he wrote it down?"

"YES!"

"What was the frustration at?"

"I DON'T REMEMBER! IT WAS A SNEEZE! SNEEZES DON'T HAVE EMOTIONAL BACKSTORIES!"

Anaxa opened his mouth.

"If you say 'that's debatable,' I will eat your notebook," you warned.

He closed his mouth. Considered. "The binding is leather," he offered. "Poor nutritional value."

The laugh that escaped you was not voluntary. It was dragged out of you by force, a sharp, startled bark of genuine amusement that you immediately tried to smother with your hand. Too late. Everyone heard it. Anaxa's eye glinted. Phainon's hand, still on your shoulder, squeezed once—a tiny, warm pulse of something that you refused to name.

"Leather is high in protein, actually," you shot back, because your mouth had been freelancing since birth and saw no reason to stop now. "I've treated patients who chewed worse. One guy ate his own belt during a campaign. He said it tasted like 'commitment and regret.' I had to remove a buckle from his small intestine."

A full three seconds of horrified silence.

"She's lying," Anaxa said, but his eye had narrowed with the cautious skepticism of a man who wasn't entirely sure.

"Am I?" You smiled. The smile of a woman with nothing left to lose and a surplus of buckle-related trauma.

Phainon, behind you, exhaled a sound that was either a laugh or a prayer. Possibly both.

The Grove settled into something resembling a rhythm after that. Not peace—the Grove would never offer you peace. Peace was for people who hadn't been designated as an experiment. But something adjacent. Something livable. Something with fewer screaming scholars and more banter.

You sat on one of the stone benches, legs dangling, eating a honey cake from your satchel because Anaxa had decreed a "recovery interval" which you suspected was code for I need to finish writing about the belt buckle incident before I forget a detail. Tribbie had claimed the spot beside you and was interrogating you about the blind date with the relentless joy of a woman who fed on secondhand embarrassment.

"You climbed out the BACK?" she gasped, for the third time, as though repetition might make it less perfect.

"I didn't climb. I fled. With purpose. Through a kitchen. Past a confused sous-chef. There may have been a tray of desserts that I disrupted. I prefer not to think about it."

"Was the man nice?"

"He was fine. He was symmetrical. He wanted to discuss pottery."

"What's wrong with pottery?"

"Nothing is wrong with pottery. Pottery is lovely. I love pottery. I would simply rather discuss pottery with literally anyone other than a man who's been told I'm his blind date while I'm wearing a robe that smells like eucalyptus and lost dreams."

Phainon, seated on the next bench over—not ten feet away, not fifteen, but approximately four, because he had made his territorial point and was now occupying it with quiet, elegant stubbornness—looked up from the scroll he'd been pretending to read.

"Eucalyptus and lost dreams," he repeated. "Is that the official scent profile, or—"

"It's been verified by multiple noses," you said, not looking at him, because looking at him while discussing scent profiles would kill you. "Mine, Marlon's, and one deeply judgmental sparrow."

"The sparrow weighed in?"

"It sneezed at me. I took it as feedback."

Tribbie erupted in giggles. Phainon's pretend reading stance fell away completely. He lowered the scroll, gave up all pretense, and just stared at you with that friendly openness that had, slowly and over many weeks and catastrophes and secret kisses in the dark, started to feel less threatening and more welcoming.

And you, in the cautious way of one who is walking on thin ice, started to let yourself meet his gaze.

The eye contact lasted two seconds before your face ignited and you shoved the entire remaining honey cake into your mouth to end the moment. Your cheeks ballooned. Crumbs scattered. You looked like a chipmunk having a crisis.

"Graceful," Anaxa noted from across the clearing, not looking up.

"MMPH," you replied, because your mouth was full and your dignity was empty.

Hyacine set down her teacup, her fourth, or possibly eighth; you'd lost count, and tilted her head at Anaxa with friendly curiosity who was about to say something that would ruin someone's afternoon.

"Professor," she said sweetly. "I notice you haven't asked (Y/N) about the Deliverer's influence on her methodology."

You choked on the honey cake. Not a polite cough. A full, violent, crumb-spraying convulsion that required Tribbie to pound you on the back while you wheezed like an antique accordion.

Anaxa's stylus froze. His eye slid from his notebook to Hyacine. To you. To Phainon. Back to you. The analytical gears behind that magenta iris clicked almost audibly.

"I was building to it," he said, and somehow, impossibly, he sounded defensive.

"Building to WHAT?" you croaked, voice raw from the near-death pastry experience. "What influence? There's no influence! There's nothing to build to! He's just—sitting there! Being a person! On a bench! Nearby!"

"Your vocal pitch," Anaxa observed calmly, "just rose fourteen notes."

"MY VOCAL PITCH RISES WHEN I'M BEING AMBUSHED BY NOSY PROFESSORS AND THEIR ACCOMPLICES!"

"Noted. 'Subject displays defensive escalation when the presence of Observer One is acknowledged directly.' Interesting."

"I AM NOT A SUBJECT! AND HE IS NOT OBSERVER ONE! HE HAS A NAME! SEVERAL NAMES! IMPORTANT ONES!"

"Would you prefer I refer to him by title? 'The Deliverer' is rather formal for a seating dispute."

Phainon raised a hand, the casual, unhurried gesture of a man who was enjoying this far too much. "I'm comfortable with 'Observer One.' It has a certain mystique."

You turned on him with the wild-eyed fury of someone who had been ally-betrayed at the worst possible moment. "You are NOT helping!"

His smile was soft and unrepentant. "I rarely am."

Your mouth opened. Closed. Your face, already at capacity, attempted to generate new shades of red previously unknown to science. You turned to Tribbie, the last potential ally in a clearing full of traitors.

Tribbie held up both hands. "We're staying out of this one."

"YOU STARTED IT!"

"We absolutely did not," she said, lying with the fluency of a diplomat. "We're just here to observe."

"YOU'RE ALL OBSERVERS! I'M THE ONLY ONE ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING! I'M THE ONLY NON-OBSERVER IN THIS ENTIRE GROVE!"

"That," Anaxa said, scribbling furiously, "is precisely the point."

You dropped onto the bench. Not sat—dropped. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut by a committee of conspirators. Your arms hung limp. Your head fell back against the stone. Overhead, the trees rustled in a breeze.

"I want to be a tree," you announced to the sky. "Trees don't get studied. Trees don't have vocal pitches. Trees just stand there and photosynthesize and nobody—NOBODY—asks them about their methodology."

"Trees are extensively studied," Anaxa corrected. "Dendrological—"

"Finish that sentence and I'll shove your stylus somewhere dendrological."

From the bench seat next to you, the clear indication that Phainon is losing the battle of maintaining his control. It was a shaking of his shoulders that worked its way up to his jaw and came out as a soft laugh, but not before he tried to channel it into his fist. He failed.

You cracked one eye open. Looked at him sideways. He was bent forward, face hidden, absolutely wrecked by your tree threat, and something in the helpless, young, boyish way his shoulders shook made the bonfire in your chest flare into something that no amount of sarcasm could extinguish.

Tribbie leaned over to Hyacine. "She's looking at him again."

"I'm aware," Hyacine murmured, cup to her lips. "The rate of looking has increased since last week."

"BOTH OF YOU ARE FIRED."

"We don't work for you," Tribbie pointed out, cheerful as a sunrise.

"THEN YOU'RE FIRED FROM MY LIFE. ALL OF YOU. I'M TAKING THE HONEY CAKES AND GOING HOME."

You stood up. Grabbed your satchel. Took two steps toward the exit. Turned around. Walked back. Sat down.

No one said anything.

“Actually, I do not want to go anywhere,” you mumbled, looking at your sandals. “I just wanted that dramatic exit to be authentic for once.”

"It was very dramatic," Tribbie assured you. "Good posture. Strong intent. We give it an eight."

"Out of?"

"Twelve. Lost points for the comeback."

A silence settled—not awkward, not heavy. Just full. Full of the dappled light and the herb-scented air and the faint scratch of Anaxa's stylus and the distant sound of a scholar somewhere in the Grove presumably eating cheese pastry and feeling better about existence.

Then Phainon spoke. Softly. Closely. He had moved down the bench without you noticing, or rather because you refused to notice, until he was sitting close enough for you to feel the heat from him without touching him.

"For what it's worth," he said softly, his voice meant just for you, although it was in a glade full of professional eavesdroppers and the gesture was more symbolic than anything else, "you are fascinating to watch."

Your pulse jumped. You held your satchel strap tighter. You stared straight ahead at an ordinary fern doing absolutely nothing.

"Please don't say things like that when there's a man with a notebook three feet away," you whispered.

"Eleven feet. I checked."

"He has excellent hearing."

"So do I," Phainon said, and his voice dropped a fraction further. "For example, I heard you tell Tribbie that the blind date man was 'symmetrical.' Is symmetry your standard?"

Your brain produced static. Your mouth, never one to wait for permission, launched ahead without clearance.

"I don't have a standard. I have a catastrophe threshold. If someone doesn't actively make me want to flee through a kitchen, they've cleared the bar."

"A low bar."

"The lowest. Below ground level. The bar is a trench."

"And me?" The question landed soft and precise, like a coin dropped into still water. "Have I cleared the trench?"

You turned your head. Looked at him. Full, direct, unavoidable eye contact.

His face was close. Closer than it should've been for a public bench in a sacred grove with a one-eyed audience member armed with a stylus. His cyan eyes caught the filtered light and fractured it into something you couldn't describe with any word in any language, except possibly the noise your circulatory system was making.

"You," you said, your voice doing something it had never done before—going quiet and steady at the same time, "have been standing on the other side of the trench since the day you caught a cane mid-swing in a market and didn't even blink."

His expression changed. Not dramatically. Just that way a gradual transition from one thing to another, like seeing the sun go into the clouds, then re-emerge. There was the amusement. But something else had cracked open beneath it, something real and surprised and blissfully happy as if your simple statement had penetrated all his pretensions and revealed him.

He didn't say anything. He just smiled. The quiet one. The real one. The one that made him look twenty instead of centuries old.

Across the clearing, Anaxa's stylus scratched one final, decisive line. He snapped the notebook shut.

"Session concluded," he announced. "Data set: complete." He paused. His eye swept the clearing, landing on you, on Phainon, on the vanished space between you. "It should be noted," he continued, with an ironic dryness to his voice, "that the distance from Observer One was three times the recommended level. The data may be… compromised."

"The data," Phainon said, not looking away from you, "is perfect."

Tribbie grabbed Hyacine's arm again and squeezed until the healer yelped. "Did you HEAR that? 'The data is perfect!' We're DYING!"

Hyacine pried her fingers free and rubbed her arm. "You're bruising me."

"WORTH IT."

You breathed out. Slowly. Tremulously. That kind of breath which signals the end of the fight, the final admission of defeat, the recognition that you can never survive this.

For you cannot.

You weren't surviving this. You were being fundamentally, irreversibly, beautifully changed by it. By a man who brought you pastries and defended your seating rights and wiped the wrong side of his face on purpose just to see what you'd do. By a Grove that smelled like judgment and old paper. By a Blasphemer who thought your panic was publishable. By Chrysos Heirs who watched you fall apart and applauded the trajectory.

The hand that was kissed, branded, the hand that had been held, cradled, kissed against lips that were warm because of something holy, your hand lay between you, close to him but not touching.

And when his little finger moved ever so slightly, just enough to brush against yours, a touch so slight that it could be denied, yet so intentional that it couldn’t, you didn’t pull back.

You pressed back.

And somewhere above the Grove, filtering through the canopy in shafts of green-gold light, the universe stopped laughing at you.

Just for a moment.

Just long enough to smile.

The medicine run was supposed to be quick.

In. Out. Deliver the vial. Accept the grateful nod. Leave before anyone started a philosophical debate about the medicinal properties of their own toenails. You'd had enough existential crises for one lifetime, and the evening shift was supposed to be your safe zone. The liminal hour when Okhema quieted down, the streets emptied, and you could exist without being perceived by anyone important, powerful, or capable of making your heart attempt acrobatics it had no formal training for.

Hyacine's patient lived on the far edge of the residential avenue, in one of those narrow streets that smelled like cooling bread and someone's elderly cat. The delivery itself had gone smoothly. Suspiciously smoothly, which should have been your first warning. The old woman had taken her tincture, thanked you with a pat on the cheek that felt vaguely like being blessed by an alive walnut, and sent you off with a wrapped fig pastry "for the road."

You were eating the fig pastry now. In the dark. Alone. On a silent, lamplit road connecting the patient’s house and the infirmary, the cobblestones glistening golden from the light cast by lamps placed at wide intervals along the way.

It was perfect.

Nobody was here. Nobody was watching. Nobody was going to appear from nowhere and—

"You have a fig on your chin."

Your entire skeleton attempted to vacate your body through the top of your skull.

And the pastry was hurled into the air. Not elegantly, not gracefully but more like it had been launched from your hand like a missile following a calculated path that could have made even an engineer proud, to land finally in a miserable plop three feet away on the pavement.

You spun. Your heel snagged on nothing but the very idea of surprise and you swayed over to strike a lamppost with a resounding bong that reverberated from the metal to your shoulder blade.

The lamppost did not apologize.

Phainon stood two paces behind where you'd been walking, hands in his coat pockets, head tilted at that angle—that angle—the one that said he'd been there for at least ten seconds and had been deciding exactly when to announce himself for maximum comedic impact.

His hair caught the lamplight like it had a personal arrangement with every light source in the city. His expression was mild. Pleasant. The face of a man who had absolutely not just scared the remaining lifespan out of you.

"Evening," he said.

Your lungs, which had seized entirely during the pastry-launching incident, finally remembered their job description. Air rushed in. Your hand reached your chest where your heart was trying out for the drums section.

"You—" The word came out strangled. You pointed at him with the other hand, the one not clutching your ribs. "You can't just—appear! Like that! In the dark! Behind people! People who are eating! People who have hearts that can stop!"

"I walked here," he said reasonably. "From the main avenue. At a normal pace. You were very focused on your pastry."

"I was having a moment with that pastry! A private, sacred moment! And now it's dead!" You pointed at the fig pastry lying on the ground with its sticky insides spilling out into some kind of desperate plea for life. "You killed it. You're a pastry murderer."

"I accept full responsibility." His voice was solemn. His eyes were not. They had that certain sparkle about them that meant he was just about to laugh, which meant you wanted to both hit him and look at him forever.

You pulled your hand away from your chest and crossed your arms instead, attempting to assemble something in the neighborhood of composure. It was a ramshackle structure. The walls were crooked. But it stood.

"What are you even doing out here?" you demanded, narrowing your eyes. "This is the residential avenue. At night. There's nothing here. There's no one here. There's—" You stopped. Recalculated. "Were you following me?"

"No."

"Then why—"

"I was returning from the path of parting." He took his hand out of his pocket and made vague motions pointing towards the distant city walls. "The patrol routes run through this avenue after dark. I saw someone walking alone with what appeared to be aggressive pastry consumption and thought it warranted investigation."

"So you were following me."

"Investigating. Different intent."

"Same result! Same cardiac event!"

He considered this. "Fair."

Then silence.

This silence was not an awkward one. This was the type of silence that is created when two people can no longer debate but refuse to walk away. The lights flickered. In some place, a cat was yowling as if it were an opera singer betrayed by the moon.

Phainon stared down the road, then to you, and finally stepped up with an ease that suggested he had made up his mind and was just letting the world know his intentions.

"I'll walk with you," he stated.

It was not a question. It was not an offer. This was simply stating a fact in the manner that you would state, "The sky is above" or "That cat is crazy."

Your brain produced a brief, sputtering protest—but the distance! the composure! the carefully maintained illusion that you are a normal person who doesn't vibrate at a specific frequency whenever he's within ten feet!—but your legs, those traitorous limbs, were already moving. Already matching his pace. Already falling into that easy, synchronized rhythm that happened every time, as if your bodies had agreed to something your conscious mind hadn't been consulted on.

You walked.

"So," you said, after a full minute of walking in silence that you refused to call comfortable because calling it comfortable would mean admitting this was nice and admitting this was nice would mean, "how was the watchtower?"

"Cold."

"That's it? Cold? The Deliverer of Amphoreus, defender against the Black Tide, returns from his nightly vigil with a one-word weather report?"

"Would you prefer a dramatic retelling? I could describe the way the wind howled against the stone. The way the darkness pressed against the wards. The way I stood, alone, gazing into the abyss—"

"No. 'Cold' is fine. 'Cold' is perfect. Let's never elaborate."

He chuckled quietly, and his breath brushed over you like a hand in the cold, warming you to its touch. It did not make you shiver. You absolutely did not shiver. The slight movement of your shoulders was entirely due to the air. A very specific, localized, Phainon-like air.

"And you?" he asked. "Medicine delivery?"

"Hyacine's patient. Nice old woman. Gave me a pastry." You paused. Looked mournfully at the cobblestones behind you, where your pastry lay in its final resting place. "Gave."

"I'll replace it."

"You can't replace a fig pastry given to you by someone's grandmother. That's a sacred exchange. It had emotional weight."

"I'll find a grandmother. Commission a pastry. Have it delivered with a formal letter of condolence for the fallen original."

"You're making fun of me."

"I would never."

"Your mouth is doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing. The smug thing. The 'I am absolutely making fun of you but my face is too well-bred to admit it' thing. I've noted it. It's in my files. Right between 'deliberately wiping the wrong cheek' and 'showing up unannounced to watch me yell at scholars.'"

He pressed his lips together. The smug thing intensified. And you wanted to give him a flick on the forehead while simultaneously never taking your eyes off of him. An exceedingly inconvenient set of feelings.

The street got narrower, leading through two rundown houses that seemed to lean over towards each other in a conspiratorial manner. Laundry lines ran above, with bedsheets and tunic robes hanging in the air, lifeless and motionless. There was one lone sock dangling by itself, without its matching sock.

You identified with that sock.

"So," Phainon spoke, his voice now more lighter, even idle, conversationally equivalent to someone nonchalantly lifting a grenade for an inspection. "The blind date."

Your foot caught on a cobblestone. Not because the cobblestone was uneven. Because your nervous system had just been ambushed.

"What about it?" you asked, very carefully, the way one says what about the ticking noise when one already knows the answer is bomb.

"You mentioned the man discussed pottery."

"He attempted to discuss pottery. I didn't let him get far. I was busy planning my exit route through the appetizer course."

"And his other qualities? Besides symmetry and ceramic enthusiasm?"

"He had elbows. And a collar. And opinions, presumably, though we never got deep enough for me to confirm. Why are you asking about this?"

Phainon didn't answer immediately. He walked another three steps, the lamplight sliding across his profile, illuminating the line of his jaw and the corner of his mouth in a way that was frankly hostile to your cardiovascular health. Then he turned his head, just slightly, just enough to look at you from the edge of his vision.

"Well, I was wondering," he said, and his tone had shifted to that deeper tone which seemed to bypass hearing altogether and go right down to your spine, "if you would have stayed... had the company been different."

The question detonated somewhere between your lungs.

Your stride faltered. Not a trip—you didn't trip, not this time, your body had apparently decided to give you one single moment of physical grace amid the emotional catastrophe. But the rhythm broke. Your feet lost their easy sync with his, and for two steps you were slightly behind, slightly off-beat, your brain scrambling to process what he'd just said while your circulatory system staged a full revolt.

If the company had been different.

He wasn't asking about Cane. He wasn't asking about pottery or symmetry or blind dates. He was asking—

Oh.

Oh.

The warmth hit your face like opening an oven. Your ears went first, as always—those traitorous, thermally incompetent appendages that broadcast every emotion you'd ever tried to hide. Then your cheeks. Then your neck. You were a human gradient, blush spreading downward like paint in water.

"I—" you started.

Nothing followed. It just sat there, one letter without support, a lone soldier sent forward into enemy territory as the other soldiers played at being busy with other things.

His eyes were on you. Not pressing. Not demanding. Just in a constant manner that was like a lamplight: patient. It doesn’t chase. It just sits there, and you move toward it because you want to.

Your heart was beating in a way that was structurally wrong. It was not the typical fast-paced beating of panic. It was slower, stronger and beating heavily in your chest, thudding in your ribs and in the back of your knees.

Say something. Say something funny. Deflect. Dodge. Deploy the emergency sarcasm reserves. You have trained for this. You have spent your entire life training for this specific moment of emotional vulnerability, and your training was to run from it at top speed while making jokes about soup.

"Well," you started, and your voice broke on that one little word, as though you had broken a teacup falling a few inches from some insignificant height, "that depends. Would this hypothetical different company also have tried to discuss pottery? Because I have a firm no-pottery policy on first outings. Second outings, the ban lifts to decorative ceramics only. Third outing, we can discuss glazing techniques, but only if there's wine."

Good. Solid deflection. Textbook evasion. You'd thrown up a wall of nonsense, as was your sacred tradition, and now he would laugh and the moment would soften and you could keep walking and breathing and pretending your pulse wasn't visible through your skin.

Phainon did not laugh.

He smiled. But it wasn't the usual one. Not the amused crinkle or the quiet fondness or even the mischievous not-quite-grin from the napkin incident. This smile was small. Almost shy. As if the question had cost him something too, and your deflection—which he absolutely, definitely, without question saw through—hadn't discouraged him. It had confirmed something.

"No pottery," he agreed, quiet. "Noted."

Three words. Fourteen letters total. They sank into you like a stone into still water and kept sinking, past the sarcasm, past the panic, past the multiple defense mechanisms you'd built like a fortress around the part of your chest that knew, had known for weeks, possibly months, possibly since a laughing god held your wrist steady in an infirmary, exactly what was happening here.

Your throat closed. You looked straight ahead. The road seemed to blur before your eyes, but not because of tears or any other sort of melodramatic emotion, rather, the sense of pure overwhelming emotion was just too much to fit inside of the box you had put it into.

The silence stretched. Comfortable and terrifying in equal measure.

Another twenty paces later, your uncontrollable mouth took the reigns once again.

"I should state for the record," you began, looking down at the cobblestones, "that I wouldn’t have run away."

You sensed his eyes on you. You felt the weight of his eyes fall upon your face.

"If the company had been different," you continued, and every word was a small act of bravery that you would absolutely deny later under oath, "I would have stayed for the appetizer. And the main course. And probably dessert, even if it was bad, because—"

You swallowed.

"—because some people make bad dessert worth sitting through."

The words hung in the night air. Fragile. Honest. Completely, helplessly sincere in a way you hadn't allowed yourself to be since—since ever, maybe.

You risked a glance.

Phainon had stopped walking.

He stood one pace behind you, lamplight catching the edge of his jaw, his hair, the impossible blue of his eyes. And the expression on his face—

You had seen him amused. You had seen him fond. You had seen him startled by your napkin assault and delighted by your screaming and gentle in the infirmary and boyish when he laughed. But you had never seen this. This vulnerable exposure, this surprising tenderness, as though you had just said something he had been longing to hear but didn’t know until you did say it, and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

His lips parted. Not to speak. Just... a breath. A small, caught breath that you heard in the quiet, and that sound, that tiny involuntary sound, did more damage to your composure than a hundred hand kisses.

"Bad dessert," he repeated, barely above a whisper.

"Terrible dessert. Soggy cake. Grainy custard. The worst." Your voice shook and there was no stopping it. "I would eat every bite and grumble about how bad it was later, but I would stay."

His hand moved.

Not fast. Not the smooth, practiced grace of a Chrysos Heir reaching for a weapon or a scroll or someone's hand to press his lips against in the dark. This was different. This was careful. Hesitant, almost—the movement of someone reaching for something they were afraid to drop.

His fingers found the edge of your sleeve. Not your hand. Not your wrist. Just the fabric, the hem of your robe where it fell past your forearm, and he pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. Held on. A tiny, absurd, impossibly gentle anchor.

Your lungs forgot everything they'd ever learned about breathing.

"Then," he said, and his voice was rough at the edges, scraped raw in a way you'd never heard, "I should probably find a restaurant with truly terrible dessert."

A laugh burst out of you. Not a polite laugh. Not a controlled laugh. An ugly, wet, half-sob of a laugh that came from somewhere behind your chest and tasted like relief and terror and the specific, overwhelming joy of being understood by someone who shouldn't exist.

"The worst you can find," you managed, blinking too fast. "Burned edges. Questionable filling. Presentation that suggests the pastry chef recently lost a personal battle with the concept of hope."

"I will inquire." His thumb grazed the material of your sleeve. One time. Such a delicate touch that it could have been the wind if it weren’t for the fact that the air was perfectly still. "There is a place that has a dessert which made a councilman weep."

"From how good it was?"

"From how confusing it was. Nobody could identify the fruit. There were theories. None were comforting."

You snorted. It was an entirely undignified thing to do and you did not care. "That's the one. That's our place."

Our.

The word escaped your lips before you knew it, bouncing down the deserted street like a ball bearing, compact and hard to recover. You felt it leave your mouth. You felt the specific shape of it. You watched it land between you and register on his face, a subtle widening of his eyes, a fractional tightening of his grip on your sleeve.

Neither of you corrected it.

There stood the infirmary, the red lamp glowing in the window like one condemning eye. The walk was over without your realization. The time, that unreliable scoundrel, had stolen the distance without you knowing.

You stopped at the door. He stopped beside you. The same positions as last time. The same lamplight. The same quiet.

But there was something new about all of this. There was something that had changed, not with a bang but with a click, that little sharp sound of the lock clicking into place.

He released your sleeve. The cool emptiness of his hand leaving was as if someone had bruised you.

"Good night," he whispered. Soft. Rough. Real.

"Good night," you whispered back.

You opened the door. Stepped inside. Closed it behind you.

And then you stood there, in the dark corridor, with your back against the wood and your hand pressed—not to your heart this time, but to the spot on your sleeve where his fingers had been.

The fabric was warm.

Marlon’s voice rang from within the ward, with the weary patience of someone counting the seconds down.

"You're smiling."

You were. You hadn't given your face permission and it was doing it anyway, a wide, stupid, helpless thing that stretched your cheeks and made your eyes sting.

"I'm not."

"You're smiling and your ears are pink."

"My ears are always pink. It's a circulation issue."

"It's a him issue."

You slid down the door. Hit the floor. Sat there in the dark with your warm sleeve and your burning ears and your idiot smile, and you did not argue.

Because he was right.

And for the first time, you didn't mind that he knew.

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Not rudely. Not aggressively. You simply… continued forward, as if she were a decorative pillar you had noted and dismissed. Your feet aimed for the herbal room with the single-minded focus of a migratory bird that has spotted its continent.

"(Y/N), wait—"

"No."

"You don't even know what I'm going to say!"

"I don't need to know. My body already knows. My body is telling me to run. I trust my body more than I trust you."

"That's incredibly hurtful."

"You'll recover. You have excellent coping mechanisms. I've seen you cope with Finn in the storage closet."

Daphne's mouth snapped shut. A flush crept up her neck. Leverage deployed. You kept walking.

But Daphne was Daphne. She didn't give up. Her determined footsteps followed close behind, making it abundantly clear that walking away wasn't going to end the conversation.

"It's just dinner!" she said, jogging to match your stride. "The girls and I are going out tonight. Lira and Thessaly too. A little celebration! We survived the week! Nobody died!"

"Several people almost died. I personally prevented three of them."

"Exactly! Cause for celebration! You deserve a nice evening out! Good food! Company that isn't screaming or bleeding!"

You paused at the herbal room door. Your hand rested on the handle. You turned, just enough to give her the full weight of your skepticism.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why me? Why tonight? Why is your left eye doing that twitchy thing it does when you're constructing a lie?"

"My eye does not twitch!"

It twitched. Right there. A rapid, involuntary flutter of her lower lid that she covered by blinking aggressively, as if dust had materialized specifically to provide her an alibi.

"No," you said, and pushed the door open.

"The restaurant is really nice—"

"No."

"They have that lamb stew you like—"

"I can make my own lamb stew. In private. Where nobody can ambush me."

"There's a musician who plays the lyre and he's apparently very—"

"No, Daphne."

"It's free."

Your hand froze on the door frame.

The word hung in the air between you like a baited hook. Free. Four letters. One syllable. The most dangerous word in any language, because it was never, ever actually free. There was always a cost, always a catch, always a reason some poor fool ended up signing away their firstborn or their dignity or both.

You knew this. You knew this in your bones. You had been alive long enough and burned often enough to understand that "free" was the universe's favorite opening move before it kicked you in the teeth.

And yet.

Your stomach, that treasonous organ, growled. Not a polite rumble. A full, guttural, existential complaint from somewhere deep in your abdomen. The sound of a body that had been running on anxiety, eucalyptus fumes, and a single honey cake since dawn.

Free dinner.

Free. Dinner.

Your principles, already weakened by a long day of arguing with old men and their mustaches, wobbled like a fence in a storm. Your dignity, what shreds remained after the Grove, the Garden, the Market, and many separate encounters with divine beings who found your suffering recreational, raised a feeble hand to object.

Free dinner, your stomach argued. With lamb stew.

But the catch—

LAMB STEW. FOR FREE. WITH YOUR MOUTH. WHICH HASN'T EATEN REAL FOOD SINCE YESTERDAY'S SOUP THAT TASTED LIKE PENANCE.

You turned back to Daphne. Your expression was the exact face of a person surrendering a fortress they'd defended for eleven seconds.

"…Fine."

The smile on Daphne’s face broke through her attempts at nonchalance. 

“Excellent! We depart at sunset! Dress appropriately!”

“I will dress the way that I am dressed.”

“That is a stained healer’s robe.”

"It has character."

"It has porridge."

"Character porridge."

She smiled and dashed off, not able to conceal her pleasure in her gait. You watched her leave, the enthusiasm you had felt for getting a free bowl of lamb stew slowly fading away. In its place settled a familiar feeling that you just walked straight into a trap.

A quiet scoff came from the other side of the infirmary.

You turned.

Marlon was sitting on his bed, his splintered arm resting on a pillow while he looked at you wearily for what seemed like an excessively long time for a boy his age. His soup had not been touched, nor had the chrysanthemum in its vase.

"What?" you snapped.

He shook his head slowly. The headshake of a boy, a twelve-year-old boy, but a boy nonetheless, who had seen the entire exchange, weighed it against his own considerable life experience, and found you wanting.

"Sold out for a free meal," he said, voice flat. "Like a stray dog following a sausage into a trap." He settled in further on his pillow, his eyes looking up toward the ceiling with the detachment that only comes from one who had already foreseen the whole disaster and is now just waiting to see confirmation. "You don't have a clue about what you've just gotten yourself into."  

"Dinner, Marlon. Just dinner."

He let out one cynical snort. One snort that contained more cynicism than many people manage in their whole lives. He didn't even look at you.

"Sure it is."

The sun sank below the skyline of Okhema like it wanted no part of what was about to happen.

You reached the east entrance of the infirmary on time, dressed in your healer’s robe. Your healer’s robe. That particular healer’s robe. The one stained with porridge. You had tried to clean the mess up as best as you could, but this merely resulted in an even larger stain in the form of a cloud or even a sad face. You'd chosen to interpret it as a cloud.

Daphne, Lira, and Thessaly were already waiting.

You stopped walking.

Your eyes, those treacherous instruments of observation that had failed you so many times before, performed a slow, horrified sweep from left to right.

Daphne had done her hair. Not the usual practical bun she wore for shifts. This was an arrangement. Curls had been coaxed into existence. The pins in her hair twinkled like cunning little stars above her temples. Her dress was wine-colored, a dark red with a neckline that clearly showed she had plans and none of them involved talking about wounds.

Lira, normally invisible behind her wall of stoic professionalism and sensible tunics, had materialized in something flowing and blue. There was some cosmetic she had used on her eyes to make them bigger and more darkly expressive. Her earrings reflected the last rays of dying light, seeming to share some inside secret of their own.

Thessaly, thorough, thoughtful Thessaly, who once advised a client that emotion was "an inefficient use of metabolic resources", had a necklace on. An actual necklace. With a pendant. She'd also done something structural to her hair that defied the natural laws of gravity and hairdressing, piled atop her head in an arrangement that looked like it required an engineering degree and three forms of spiritual permission.

You looked down at yourself. Porridge cloud. Wrinkled hem. The light scent of eucalyptus oil on your left sleeve. The straps of one sandal being a bit loose.

You looked back up at them.

"Why," you managed, and the word emerged as a sound much like that of a creaking door which, for sure, did not want to be opened, "do all of you have such appearances as if you were going to be wooed by nobles?"

Daphne laughed. It was the laugh of a woman who had prepared for this exact question and was now executing her prepared answer like an assassin with a schedule.

"We just wanted to dress up! Is that a crime? We spend every day covered in other people's fluids. Can't a girl put on a necklace without an interrogation?"

Lira nodded quickly. “It’s nice to feel pretty sometimes.”

Thessaly didn’t say anything but fiddled with her pendant, doing so in the careful way only a weapons expert could calibrate.

Every alarm in your body sounded. Not the soft ringing of something slightly worrying. But the loud bells of a cathedral announcing wars, disasters, or the breaking of social contracts. Your stomach felt queasy. Your skin crawled. And your hair bristled up on end.

Something was wrong. Something was deeply, fundamentally, dressed-up-ly wrong.

"We should go!" Daphne chirped, hooking her arm through yours before you could retreat. "The reservation is in fifteen minutes!"

"Reservation," you repeated, tasting the word like spoiled milk. "At a restaurant that requires reservations."

"It's a nice place!"

"How nice."

"Very nice!"

"How very nice, Daphne."

She squeezed your arm tighter, steering you down the lamplit street with the cheerful determination of a sheepdog herding a deeply suspicious sheep toward a cliff it couldn't yet see.

You followed, because your arm was trapped and your stomach was still lobbying hard for the lamb stew, and also because the part of your brain responsible for self-preservation had been overworked for so long it had simply stopped filing reports.

The restaurant, when you finally arrived at it, proved all the suspicions that you harbored inside of you.

It was no mere restaurant; it was an experience. Flanking the entryway were two columns made of polished marble. Lanterns were strung from wrought iron brackets and shed pools of gold light upon the courtyard which was decorated with flowers of jasmine and other things with an aggressive romance about them. Behind an arch in the doorway stood tables covered in white cloths with candles flickering in glass holders.

This was not a "girls' night out" restaurant. This was not even a "celebration" restaurant. This was a restaurant where people went to fall in love, or at the very least to pretend they were capable of it over expensive wine and strategically dim lighting.

Your feet attempted to reverse. Your legs, loyal and true, began the careful backward shuffle of a creature who has spotted the trap and is now making diplomatic negotiations with gravity.

"You know what," you said, your voice hitting a register usually reserved for hostage situations, "I just remembered I left the—the thing. The important medical thing. In the other place. Very urgent. Critically time-sensitive—"

Daphne's hand closed around your wrist.

Not her friendly hand. Not her "let's go shopping" hand. This was the hand. The iron hand. The hand that had once held down a thrashing warrior long enough for Hyacine to set a dislocated shoulder, the hand that had gripped a severed artery closed for forty minutes without trembling. This was the hand of a woman who had made a decision and was prepared to enforce it with the casual brutality of natural law.

"We're going in," Daphne said, and her smile was the smile of someone who knew exactly what she was doing and had made peace with the consequences long before you'd even left the infirmary.

She dragged you through the archway. Your heel dragged against the stones, marking the trail of your struggle, which the staff would eventually come to understand as modern art. Your other hand clawed at the door frame. failed, clawed at the curtain, the pole snapped in half, clawed at nothing, until your hand clutched at warm jasmine air.

The interior swallowed you. Candlelight. Soft lyre music. The scent of seared lamb and fresh bread and something herbaceous that your traitorous stomach responded to with an audible, groveling whimper of surrender.

And then Daphne turned a corner, pulled you past a partition of carved wood and trailing ivy, and deposited you in front of a long table set for eight.

Four seats were empty.

Four seats were occupied.

By men.

Four men, to be precise. Clean-shaven. Well-dressed. Sitting with the careful, slightly stiff posture of males who had been informed that women were arriving and had been coached on where to put their elbows. One was mid-process of straightening his tie. Another held a cup of water in both hands as though it might fall out if he let go. One was practicing a smile and had not gotten around to stopping in time, leaving him caught in a smile of horrified politeness. And one was looking at the bread basket in the kind of hyper-intense focus that comes from knowing that the bread is the only safe thing to look at.

Your brain made the connection.

It didn't click. Clicking implied a clean, satisfying mechanism. This was more like a series of dominos falling into a pit, each one screaming.

Four women. Four men. Fancy restaurant. Nice clothes. Candlelight. Reserved seats. Daphne's twitching eye.

Group.

Blind.

Date.

The realization landed on you like a dropped chandelier.

Your face performed what could only be described as an emotional speedrun. First: blankness, the pure white void of someone whose brain had stopped working and was displaying nothing at all. Then: confusion, the creased brow and tilted head of a dog hearing a noise it can't identify. Then: dawning recognition, eyes widening millimeter by millimeter as the truth crawled up your spine like ice water. Then: horror, the full, classical, mouth-open, color-draining horror of a human being who has been betrayed by someone they trusted with their dinner plans. Then, finally, settling into a fixed expression that could only be described as: the face of a woman watching her own execution proceed exactly as scheduled while she stands there in a porridge-stained robe.

Your jaw descended. Not in the romantic, swept-off-your-feet way. In the mechanical, unhinged way, like a drawbridge whose chain had snapped. It hung there. Open. A portal to nothing.

Your eyes found Daphne's.

Daphne, who was already sliding into her seat beside the collar-adjuster with the fluid grace of a serpent returning to its favorite sunning rock. She had the decency—if it could be called that—to give you one single, tiny shrug. One shoulder. Half an inch.

"Surprise?" she offered.

Behind you, Lira and Thessaly were already seated, engaged in conversation with their respective dining partners with the practiced ease of women who had known about this for days and had come prepared. Lira was laughing at something. Thessaly had already corrected someone's posture.

You stood. Alone. In your porridge robe. In the middle of a romantic restaurant. At a blind date you hadn't known was a blind date. With a chair waiting for you next to a man who was looking at you with the polite, mildly terrified expression of someone who had been told his date was "enthusiastic" and was now reconsidering his expectations in real time.

There was your soul, which had been hovering by the exit ever since you had seen the jasmine, making a formal declaration.

I quit.

It filed the paperwork. It cleared its desk. It walked out into the metaphysical night without a backward glance.

Your body, abandoned, sat down.

Not because it wanted to. Because gravity was still in effect and your knees had finally surrendered their long campaign of holding you upright through sheer stubborn fury. You collapsed into the chair like a building undergoing controlled demolition. Structurally coherent from the outside, utterly destroyed within.

The man next to you extended his hand. "Hi. I'm Cane."

You looked at his hand. You looked at his face. You looked at Daphne, who was pointedly not looking at you, which was the loudest not-looking you had ever witnessed.

"(Y/N)," you said. Your voice was the verbal equivalent of a flatline.

"That's a nice name."

"Thank you."

"So what do you do?"

"I prevent death."

"Oh! That's—"

"And sometimes I cause it. Accidentally. Or on purpose. Depends on the day."

Cane blinked. His smile, which had been doing its best, developed a fault line.

You took a bite of the loaf of bread you had just split in two, watching the candle flame through the eyes of an old veteran who had seen enough and was now seeing more.

Around you, the date proceeded. Lira laughed again. Thessaly was explaining the hepatic system to her companion, who looked simultaneously fascinated and ill. Daphne was being charming. Weaponizedly charming. She was performing charm the way other people performed surgery, with precision, intent, and the unspoken understanding that someone would probably cry afterward.

You sat. You chewed. You breathed.

The bread was good. You hated that the bread was good.

Half an hour crawled by like a wounded animal dragging itself across a field, each minute arriving with its own unique variety of social agony.

You had spoken exactly four times since sitting down.

Once to introduce yourself. Once to confirm that yes, you were indeed a healer. Once to decline wine with a "No, thank you" so sharp it practically drew blood. And once, memorably, when Cane had asked what you liked to do for fun, and you answered "sleep" with such bleak sincerity that the table had gone quiet for eight full seconds.

Cane had gamely tried to fill the silences. He was, objectively, a perfectly fine human being. Brown hair. Clean teeth. Symmetrical features. Employed—something with trade logistics, you had gathered from the few sentences that had drifted past your dissociative haze. He smiled a lot. He asked some clarifying questions. He had the stamina of an overly enthusiastic golden retriever trying to make friends with a cat who was figuring out how far away the nearest high shelf was.

You were the cat. The high shelf was the window. And the window was three feet to your right, which you have been working on figuring out with your peripheral vision for the past twenty minutes.

Your gaze rested on the dark pane of glass, where Okhema's evening lanterns reflected like scattered coins on black water. Out there was freedom. Out there was your infirmary, your cot, your mildly hostile patient, and an absence of romantic obligation. Out there was a version of your evening that did not involve sitting next to a man named Cane while wearing dried porridge and pretending you knew how dates worked.

You did not know how dates worked. You had never been on one. Not by accident, not by design, not by divine intervention—and you had experienced a frankly alarming amount of divine intervention lately. Your romantic history was a blank page, and you'd intended to keep it that way. Your heart was already fully booked. It had one tenant. One disastrously handsome, cyan-eyed, impossibly kind tenant who took up every available room and several that hadn't existed before he moved in. There was no vacancy. The sign was up. The door was locked. Any prospective suitor attempting to tour the property would find it already occupied by an image of Phainon smiling at her over a basket of groceries, and they would be asked to leave immediately.

"So," Cane tried again, leaning forward with the optimism of a man who had not yet learned that optimism was a trap, "have you been to the festival district recently? The night market is supposed to be—"

"Excuse me," you said, moving your chair backward. It scratched along the stone floor as though your tolerance had reached its end. "I have to go to the restroom."

Daphne's head whipped around. Her eyes, those calculating, kohl-lined eyes of deception, honed in on you like a bird of prey spotting movement through blades of grass.

"The restroom," she repeated.

"Yes."

"You're coming back."

"Obviously."

"You're not climbing out a window."

"Why would I climb out a window? That's absurd. I'm an adult. I use doors."

A pause of silence. Her eyes bored into you, trying to find the tell, the sign of imminent flight. You gave nothing to her. You were a brick wall, smooth and unperturbed, porridge-soiled plaster.

"Fine," she replied slowly, reluctantly letting you go under her intense gaze. "Come quickly, though. They are getting ready to fetch the lamb."

You nodded. You smiled. You smiled the smile of a woman that had already located all the possible escape routes within the premises and listed them in order of ease.

You rose. You fixed your robe. You left the table, taking your time as if you were indeed on your way to the restroom.

You cleared the partition. You passed the ivy. You entered the corridor that led to the washrooms.

And then you ran.

Not jogged. Not power-walked. Not did that brisk, semi-dignified shuffle you'd perfected during the Market Incident. You ran. Full sprint. Healer's robe billowing behind you like a war banner of retreat. Sandals slapping the marble with the frantic percussion of a woman who had realized, with perfect clarity, that she would rather die in a ditch than sit through one more minute of polite conversation with a man whose most controversial opinion was that the night market had "good pottery."

You break open the back door of the restaurant, this you had noted in your tactical examination of the available exits, categorized under "Social Emergency Exit." You pop out into the night like a cork in a bottle of regrets.

The alley behind the restaurant was dim and small, smelling of grease from the kitchen and the possibility of freedom. You rushed down it, with your robe catching on a box, one of your sandals about to go renegade, breathing hard in that way only possible after not having run since the Droma thing happened and being kept alive on stress alone.

You burst out onto a quiet street two blocks from the restaurant. The air hit your face. Cool, clean, jasmine-free. No candles. No lyre music. No Cane.

You stopped suddenly, doubling up and panting heavily like a windmill that was forced to work beyond its capacity.

And then you laughed.

It started small. A wheeze. A hiccup. A tiny, manic bubble of sound that popped in the quiet street and echoed off the stone walls. Then it grew. It climbed. It swelled into a full, unhinged, chest-shaking roar of delirious, feral, magnificently unhinged laughter.

"I'M FREE!" you howled at the sky, throwing your arms wide as if expecting the stars themselves to catch you. "FREE! NO MORE POTTERY OPINIONS! NO MORE SYMMETRICAL SMILES! NO MORE 'SO WHAT DO YOU DO FOR FUN!' I DO THIS! THIS IS WHAT I DO FOR FUN! I FLEE SOCIAL OBLIGATIONS AND SCREAM INTO THE VOID! I AM ALIVE AND UNMATCHED AND ABSOLUTELY NEVER SPEAKING TO DAPHNE AGAIN—"

A sound behind you.

Not a footstep. Not a throat clearing. Nothing so obvious, so courteous, so mundane.

A laugh.

Soft. Warm. Like rich honey that has been slowly aging poured on to smoldering embers. The sound that moved through the darkness in waves of gold like a tide, pressing against the back of your neck and against your chest and against the soft unprotected flesh of your heart in knowing, devastating intimacy.

Every hair on your body rose.

Your arms, still flung wide in triumph, froze in the air. Your lungs, still mid-victory-cackle, locked. Your spine, that overworked load-bearing column of your entire disastrous existence, went rigid as a board.

You recognized that laugh. You recognized it as sailors recognized the north star, as flowers recognized the sun, as your nervous system recognized the exact sound that preceded its own destruction. You had classified it, organized it, played it back when you lay awake at night, dreamed it when you had the courage to be responsible for it.

You knew. Before you turned. Before you looked. Before your traitorous eyes confirmed what your cells already recognized at a molecular level.

He was there.

Phainon.

He stood some dozen feet away, propped up against the corner of a stonewall, where the quiet street joined the broader avenue. His clothing was plain—well, plain for him, meaning he still looked like an animated picture that had discovered how to have a good laugh at itself. He wore his lighter clothes, with no armor, no ceremony. The lamplight shone in his white hair, because it wanted to, because the light adored him.

He had one shoulder braced against the wall. His arms were loosely crossed. And he was looking at you with an expression that made your internal organs attempt to reorganize themselves in alphabetical order.

It was amusement. Obviously. When was it not amusement? Yet underneath it all, buried under the wrinkles around his eyes, the subtle, helplessness curling his lips, there was something more. Something that almost seemed to resemble joy. Not joy at your expense. Joy at your being. Joy in the particular, unique being of you, standing in the street, arms raised and shouting about pots.

Your arms dropped. They fell to your sides with the limp finality of cut puppet strings.

"Oh," you said.

The syllable contained the entire history of your suffering. It was the "oh" of a woman who had survived a blind date, escaped through a back door, sprinted through a grease-scented alley, declared victory to the heavens, and then discovered that her one-person audience was the literal sun given flesh.

"Good evening," Phainon said. His voice was warm. Gentle. Infuriatingly, devastatingly gentle, like a hand extended to a creature that might bolt. Which you might. You were actively considering it. Your legs were polling on the matter.

"How long—" you started, and your voice cracked like a fourteen-year-old boy's at a school assembly. You swallowed. Tried again. "How long have you been standing there?"

He tilted his head, considering. "'I'm free' was the first thing I heard. Though the commentary on pottery opinions was particularly spirited."

Your face ignited. Not a blush. Blushes were for people who still possessed dignity. This was a full dermal event. Your skin turned a shade of red previously observed only in volcanic eruptions and emotionally compromised tomatoes. It started at your ears, which were now functioning as small, personal furnaces, and swept inward, claiming your cheeks, your nose, your forehead, your entire skull.

"That was—" you fumbled, hands making frantic, meaningless shapes in the air between you, "a private moment. A therapeutic vocalization. I was... decompressing. From a... from a thing."

"A thing," he repeated, and the smile—that small, knowing, ruinous smile—widened by exactly one devastating millimeter.

"A dinner thing. A social. It was Daphne's fault. All of it. Everything you've just seen is down to Daphne and her deceitful and conniving, it was a blind date, alright?" It came tumbling out of your mouth like pulling off a plaster too quickly from an ill-healed injury. "She fooled me. She said free dinner. She didn't say four strangers and candlelight and a man who wanted to discuss pottery—"

You stopped. Drew breath. Let it out.

"I fled," you said, flatly. "Through the back door. Like a reasonable person."

Phainon pressed his lips together. His shoulders trembled. He was fighting. Fighting hard. It was evident in the way the muscles on his jaw were clenching and how he would look up to the sky in one moment, seeking the support of the stars.

"Back door," he repeated. It was an effort to hold back a laugh.

"It was the most accessible exit. I assessed all of them. During the appetizer."

He lost. A sound escaped him—not the soft chuckle from before, but a bright, startled burst of laughter that he caught behind his hand, shoulders shaking, eyes squeezing shut. When they opened again, they were wet at the corners, and the look he gave you was so open, so freely and completely delighted, that your heart performed a maneuver it had definitely not been cleared for.

And something strange happened.

Maybe it was the residual adrenaline from the escape. Maybe it was the absurdity of the situation—being caught mid-victory-scream by the one person whose opinion could actually unmake you. Maybe it was the fact that you'd already hit rock bottom so many times tonight that the ground had started feeling like home. But the usual terror—the knee-buckling, vision-tunneling, nosebleed-threatening Phainon Effect—didn't come.

Or rather, it came. It always came. But tonight it arrived and found you already in shambles, already stripped of pretense, already standing in a dark street in a porridge robe having screamed your freedom to an empty sky. There was nothing left to protect. No composure to shatter. No dignity to lose. You'd spent it all. You were operating at zero.

And from nothing, there was only one place to go—a place that felt, terrifyingly, almost easy.

“You’re laughing,” you said, and your voice, though shaky, though haunted by the thousand screams from within, had something different about it.

"I am," he admitted, wiping his eye with the back of his hand. "Forgive me. The image of you performing a tactical evacuation through a kitchen exit while wearing—" he gestured at your robe, his smile helpless, "that, is going to sustain me through several council meetings."

"I'll have you know this robe has survived encounters with Chrysos Heirs, feral grandmothers, and a runaway Droma. It's a veteran."

"It looks like a veteran."

"Thank you."

And he laughed again, his laugh now softer. It fell into the space between the two of you, and you found yourself giving in to your mouth’s betrayal, despite your firm instructions.

The quiet that followed wasn't the loaded, suffocating quiet of before. It was the good kind. The kind where two people who have both decided to stop pretending simply exist in the same air for a moment and find that the air doesn't mind.

Phainon moved away from the wall. He stepped towards you, then paused, his hands sliding into his coat pockets with an ease that made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t trying to make you fear him in the least. It was that damned thing he did again, the careful, measured gentleness with which one approaches an animal that knows how to panic. The fact that he had learned your behaviors so well made something shift in your gut that you were unequipped to identify.

"I was actually looking for you tonight," he said.

Your heart kicked. Hard. A single, violent thud against your ribs that you felt in your teeth.

"You—what?"

"I stopped by the infirmary. Marlon informed me you'd been… conscripted."

Marlon. Of course. That tiny, omniscient gremlin had known. He had seen you fall into Daphne’s trap with folded arms and raised eyebrows, and he knew, and he didn’t say a thing because suffering was the only form of amusement he held in any regard.

"He said you went out with Daphne and the rest," Phainon went on, his voice calm but holding some underlying tone you couldn’t quite pin down. "And that you were probably, using his exact words, ‘already freaking out.’"

"Perceptive child," you muttered.

"He then explained what kind of event it was." A pause. Phainon’s eyes locked with yours, and something changed in them, a glimmer of something else, something not quite laughter. Something that had made him leave the infirmary and walk into the city in the evening. "He used the phrase ‘blind date’ and said you didn’t know about it."

The implication hung between you like a thread pulled taut.

He'd come looking. When Marlon had told him where you were—who you were with—what it was—he'd left. He'd walked across Okhema. He'd found the restaurant, or at least your vicinity. And now he was here, in a dark street, looking at you with an expression that contained many layers of meaning and not one you felt safe examining directly.

"And I was halfway here when I heard the yelling," he continued, and his smile came back, but in a different way. Gentler, almost affectionate. "And I thought maybe either you were about to die or you had found some very, very bad food. Either one was worth checking out."

"I didn't even make it to the lamb," you explained, and there was no question at all about the grief in your voice being real.

He laughed, a short huff of laughter. Then he stood up straight, and the joy on his face sobered up.

"In that case," he said, and his tone dropped into that lower register, the one that did things to your nervous system that probably required a license, "allow me to propose an alternative evening."

Your lungs stopped accepting applications for air.

"Would you have dinner with me?"

Six words. Six ordinary, completely normal, world-ending words. They arrived in your consciousness like a very polite avalanche, and everything in you—every cell, every synapse, every overworked, underpaid molecule of self-preservation—went absolutely silent.

Inside your skull, the response was not silence. Inside your skull, a choir of tiny, feral versions of yourself erupted into pandemonium.

HE ASKED YOU TO DINNER. HE ASKED YOU TO DINNER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF A DRILL. THIS IS THE THING THE DRILLS WERE PREPARING YOU FOR AND YOU ARE NOT PREPARED—

SAY YES.

SAY NO.

SAY SOMETHING.

SAY ANYTHING.

DON'T JUST STAND THERE WITH YOUR MOUTH OPEN LIKE A FISH THAT JUST LEARNED ABOUT MORTALITY—

Your jaw worked. Up, down. Up, down. A mechanical exercise producing zero sound. You looked like a woman trying to chew the concept of dinner into something digestible.

Phainon waited. Patient. Steady. His eyes on you were calm and bright and entirely too understanding of your current predicament, which was rude of him because your current predicament was his fault.

"I—" you started. The word came out as a croak. You cleared your throat. Tried again. "You want—you're asking—this is—"

Be normal. BE NORMAL. You have spoken to this man before. You have made him laugh. You have discussed the emotional lives of plants. You can say yes to dinner. It's one word. Three letters. A child could do it. Several children have done it in your presence, to lesser prompts, with less at stake.

"Yes," you said.

It came out. Whole. Complete. One syllable. No squeaking. No trailing off into a wheeze. No unfortunate addendums about soup or gravity or your own impending death.

Just yes.

You saw it happen. The moment the word reached him. His face didn't transform, it illuminated. It was as if someone had adjusted some sort of switch within him and it made everything glow. His smile, which until then had been tender, reserved, prudent, blossomed into something innocent, young. A smile of pure and simple joy that made him seem more boyish than Deliverer of Amphoreus.

Your chest ached. A sweet, dangerous ache. The ache of looking at someone so earnestly pleased by your one-word answer that you wanted to give it to him again. A hundred times. In a hundred different ways.

He looked childlike. That was the word your brain finally supplied, struggling up from the wreckage of your internal meltdown. Childlike. Not childish—never childish. But lit from within by something uncomplicated and real, something that the weight of his title and his centuries and his duty usually kept pressed flat.

You smiled. A real one. Not the panic grimace, not the fluorescent defense mechanism, not the social-survival rictus. A real, warm, soft smile that you felt in your face muscles and your chest simultaneously, and that made your eyes sting in a way you chose not to examine.

It was refreshing.

It was him. Without the polish. Without the weight. Just—happy.

You could live there. In the light of that expression. You could set up camp and never leave.

"Good," he said, and the word was ridiculously inadequate for the wattage of his smile. "I know a place."

It was a restaurant of which you have never heard before; an unassuming little eatery hidden away on a sleepy residential street at the fringes of the lower town, behind a courtyard that was more planters full of vegetation than anything else. It was not fancy. It was not marble and jasmine. It was warm and homely and authentic. Tables with dented wood, mismatching chairs, a ceiling covered with hanging herbs, filling the air with the scent of rosemary and thyme and someone's competent grandmother.

The woman behind the counter recognized Phainon. The look in her eyes was wide and then understanding, and said nothing more than leading you both to a table set back in a corner, almost obscured by vines of ivy that created an illusion of seclusion. The candle at the table was a short beeswax affair, not romantic atmosphere but practical illumination, and you savored its warmth with all the enthusiasm of a recent escapee from ambient terrorism.

You sat. He sat. A carafe of water appeared. Bread followed. The bread was warm.

"Before you—" you started. 

"It's on me," he told you, looking at the menu as though it were the most normal thing in the world. The kind of thing a guy would do when he knew exactly what argument you'd make about it and had already solved it in advance.

Your mouth dropped open. Then closed. Then you try to open again.

He looked up at you. The candlelit shadows reflected in his eyes, which, absurdly, became even more alluring up close, under ordinary light, without any heavenly rays beaming down into that perfect garden. Just candlelight, with two gorgeous iridescent blue eyes staring into you with such affection that your ribs seemed way too small for what they needed to accommodate.

“If you make an argument," he murmured, "I’ll just tell the kitchen you’re allergic to paying.”

Your jaw clicked shut. Because there was one thing you are sure about. If he looked at you, just looked, with those eyes and that voice, you'd fold like wet parchment. You'd agree to anything. You'd agree to fund a public statue of yourself in the porridge robe if he asked with that particular tilt of his head.

You hated how much power he had over you.

You hated more how willingly you surrendered it.

“Fine,” you said quietly, ripping off a piece of bread with a little more strength than needed. “But I’m ordering an expensive meal.”

“I insist upon it.”

The meals were served in waves, slowly yet generously, as if the owner was giving a personal show of some sort. There were roasted root vegetables covered in herb oil. Some kind of stew—no lamb, but another meat, deep and savory with wine and bay leaves, smelling like an embrace from a civilization that got its priorities right. Some kind of grain with soft cheese that you couldn’t identify but adored instantly for someone starved of proper food for a full day.

You ate. He ate. You talked.

But not the forced, don't-let-me-say-something-embarrassing chat that had characterized all previous attempts at communication. This was different. Slower. Easier. Like the evening had sanded down the sharp edges of your mutual dynamic and left something that fit together more naturally. You told him about the Grove. About the archivists. About Anaxa's notebook and the peer-reviewed crumb incident, and his laughter came in waves—full, unrestrained, table-shaking waves that drew brief, startled looks from the only other diners, an elderly couple who seemed mildly concerned for his health.

He told you about his day. About the council session that had devolved into a forty-minute debate about whether the eastern aqueduct's decorations should face outward, inward, or "at a philosophically neutral angle." About a letter from a frontier outpost commander whose report was so dryly hilarious that Phainon had read it three times before filing it.

You laughed. Loudly. Laughed so hard that you placed your hand on your lips to muffle the sound since it was far too loud and raw for the silent environment of the restaurant, but he grinned widely in response to your laughter, which sounded like it was his favorite sound all week long.

At some point in the conversation, though you weren’t sure when, it stopped hammering on your door. You no longer felt shaky, your voice went back to normal, and the sound of fear that was vibrating through your veins changed into something pleasing, like the ringing of a string.

It was merely two people having dinner together. Nothing else.

And then you looked up from your stew and saw it.

A smear of dark sauce. Just a fleck, really—a tiny, dark comma sitting at the left corner of his mouth, clinging to the skin beside his lower lip with the stubborn tenacity of a thing that had no right to be there but absolutely intended to stay.

The sight of it did something truly unfair to your brain. It was so normal. So human. So profoundly, wonderfully imperfect. The Deliverer of Amphoreus, the man whose cheekbones could cut diplomatic tensions, had sauce on his face.

"You've got—" you started, gesturing at your own face. "Right there. A little—"

He picked up a napkin and swiped. Wrong side. Clean side. The side that didn't have sauce.

"No, the other—your left."

He wiped again. Same side. More pressure this time, as if determination alone would relocate the offending condiment.

The sauce remained. Steadfast. Loyal to its post.

"No—" you pointed more emphatically, "the left. Your left. Left."

He wiped his right cheek. Thoroughly. Comprehensively. The cheek was now the cleanest surface in the restaurant. The sauce, on the opposite side of his face, watched from its secure position and was unmoved.

You stared at him. He lowered the napkin and looked at you, eyebrows slightly raised, mouth caught in that particular shape that—

That was when he gave that smug look. That small but very annoying twist of his lip. It was as if he was saying, with utmost clarity, "I know exactly where the sauce is."

The realization detonated.

He was doing it on purpose.

He was wiping the wrong side on purpose. He was watching you fluster and point and gesticulate, and he was deliberately, methodically, with the strategic patience of a military commander who had all the time in the world, missing.

Your eye twitched. Your jaw tightened. A furnace of pure, righteous, deeply personal frustration ignited somewhere behind your chest and began to roar.

"You—" you started, your voice climbing. "You absolute—you're doing this deliberately. You can feel it. It's right there. It's been there for thirty seconds. You are a grown man. A Chrysos Heir. The Deliverer. And you cannot locate sauce on your own face—"

"I'm not sure what you mean," he said, the picture of innocent confusion, wiping his forehead.

"YOUR FOREHEAD DOESN'T HAVE SAUCE ON IT!"

"Doesn't it?"

That was it. The final thread of your restraint, already frayed to translucency by the blind date and the escape and the screaming and the entire cumulative weight of your acquaintance with this impossible man, snapped with an audible internal twang.

You snatched the napkin out of his hand.

You leaned across the table.

And you scrubbed his entire face with one sweep.

Not gently. Not daintily. Not with the precise, careful touch of a healer tending to a delicate wound. You went full washerwoman. Both cheeks. His chin. His nose, for good measure. The napkin swept across his features with the brisk, merciless efficiency of a mother cleaning a child who'd fallen face-first into a pudding, and you put your back into it, one hand bracing against his jaw to hold him still while the other administered justice.

For approximately two and a half seconds, Phainon went completely still.

His eyes, peeping through the aggressive waving of your napkins, were wide. Wide. His lips opened just a little bit. The smug expression disappeared and in its place was something that you had never seen on his face before: utter shock. Real shock, the kind of shock that comes from being completely stripped down by a porridge-smeared healer with a napkin as a weapon.

Then he blinked.

Once. Twice.

And his head tipped back, and he laughed.

Not the careful chuckle. Not the warm huff. Not the dignified, controlled laugh of a public figure maintaining his mystique. This was the laugh. The one from the market overlook. The one from the infirmary. The one that shook his shoulders and creased his eyes and broke through every layer of composed, patient, measured grace until what was left was just a man. A young, startled, fiercely happy man who had been caught off guard by something he hadn't expected to feel.

The sound filled the small restaurant. The elderly couple looked up. The owner paused in her wiping of the counter. The trailing ivy seemed to sway.

And you—napkin still raised, hand still on his jaw, brain still catching up to what your body had done, felt the laughter roll through his skin and into your fingertips. Felt the vibration of it. The living, physical reality of his joy, transmitted through the point of contact between your palm and the warm line of his jaw.

You dropped the napkin. You snatched your hand back. Your face was approximately the temperature and color of the sun.

"There." It came out as a choke. "Clean. Thank you very much. Never ask for my assistance again."

He was still chuckling. He held his hand on his heart as if he was trying to hold something back inside him. Once he caught his breath, he looked at your eyes across the table and the expression in his eyes was—

It was everything.

Amusement, yes. Surprise, yes. But there was something more. Something tender, something devastatingly tender, something specific, something that was directed at you, at you personally, at you and no one else in the entire universe.

"Thank you," he told you, and his voice was raspy from laughter, and warm, and right up next to your ear. "It is the most thorough face cleaning that I have ever had since I was four years old."

"Good for you," you said softly in response because you didn’t know how to shout anymore.

"Yes, I do," he smiled, and the flame of the candle trembled a little due to the wind that neither of you could feel, and the whole world seemed to become very tiny and marvelous at once.

The walk back unfolded in pieces.

Close together along the silent streets in the evening, your shoulders nearly brushing, just barely, close enough for you to feel his warmth, even without touching, close enough so that every little touch of sleeves against sleeves caused a spark in your veins. The lights made golden puddles on the stones. The air held the scent of cold stone, of night blooms, of left-over dinner. It did not take any effort for your steps to fall into time, his long stride shortened, yours lengthened, and before you knew it, you were moving in time like music fallen into harmony.

You talked. About nothing. About everything. He brought up the name of a poet whose poetry he had been reading again—somebody who described everyday things, bread and doors and the sounds of rain, and made them seem huge. You told him you understood that. Because your whole life was made up of things like that—that seemed huge, whether you liked it or not. And then he laughed, and the laughter seemed gentler now, worn down by the evening, and your chest ached from the longing to hear more of it.

You told him about Marlon's chrysanthemum, the laminated chart, and the manner in which the child stared at the flower like the flower had personally betrayed him by its beauty. As you narrated your story, Phainon nodded his head a little while his profile was illuminated by lamplight, then he replied, "He reminds me of someone."

"Who?"

"Me. At that age. Furious at everything. Convinced that softness was a trap."

You looked at him. He looked at the street. Something in the line of his mouth told you this was not a topic he shared lightly, and the fact that he'd shared it at all—with you, in the dark, between one lamppost and the next—made your throat tight.

You didn’t speak, either. You just moved forward, and let your shoulder brush against his for one single, purposeful second. He did not draw back. He kept on walking in the same rhythm. You heard him breathing slowly, deeply, and something about the space between the two of you changed into permission.

The infirmary appeared at the end of the street like a loyal friend who had been awake just for you. Its windows remained dark except for the one night duty light burning inside the amber square of safety.

You stopped at the door. He stopped beside you. The night wrapped around you both, close and quiet.

"Thank you," you said, and meant it with every cell of your battered, bewildered, astonishingly lucky body. "For dinner. For the rescue. For the—" you gestured vaguely at your entire person, "tolerance of all… this."

He looked back at you. The lamplight from behind him gave his hair an aura. The shadows made his eyes darker, but you could see them. Could feel them. Clearly and warmly present.

"There's nothing to tolerate," he said. "Only to appreciate."

Your heart did something slow and enormous and devastating. A single, heavy beat that seemed to echo in the bones of your chest.

And then he reached out.

His hand found yours.

Neither a grab nor a clasp. It was as though his fingers glided under yours with a reverence that almost seemed sacred, cradling your hand in a way that it felt delicate and priceless, while his thumb brushed against your knuckles just once in a gentle gesture that made all of your nerves fire.

He raised your hand.

He bent his head.

His lips pressed against the back of your knuckles.

The world stopped.

Not figuratively. Not in the dramatic, hyperbolic way you'd become accustomed to deploying. The world stopped. Sound ceased. Air ceased. Time, the cold, unfeeling entity, froze its tracks and took its breath and let this one, terrible instant stand apart from the rest.

His mouth was warm. Warm and soft and gentle and there. The pressure was light—barely a kiss at all, more like a prayer pressed into skin. You felt the shape of his lips. You felt the warmth of his breath. You felt, with searing, impossible clarity, the slight curl of his fingers around yours, holding your hand steady in a grip that was somehow both fragile and absolute.

It lasted two seconds. Maybe three. An eternity compressed into a breath.

He straightened. His fingers released yours.

You did not move. You could not move. You had been transmuted. Your body had become stone, your lifeblood became electricity, and your spirit had become an echo, a resonant sound that filled every atom within you and made no space for thought or movement or even breathing.

You were stone. You were a monument. A slightly porridge-stained monument to the concept of being utterly, completely, catastrophically undone.

Your eyes—fixed, enormous, probably displaying pupils the size of dinner plates—stared at him.

He smiled.

It was the gentle one. The authentic one. The one that made him look human and happy and impossibly, unfairly, transcendently good.

“Good night, (Y/N). It’s a great night to be with you. I’ll see you later.” he said.

His voice went through you like light through glass.

“Good…” You tried to say. It came out as a mere whisper of a sound torn from the farthest, darkest reaches of your throat. “Good night. See you later…”

You turned. You pushed the infirmary door open. Your hand—the kissed hand, the branded hand, the hand that now contained the most significant tactile memory of your entire existence—found the handle through pure muscle memory, because your conscious brain was not currently accepting operational commands.

You stepped inside.

You closed the door behind you.

You stood in the dark corridor of the infirmary, lit only by the amber night lamp, and pressed your back against the wood. Your hand—that hand—rose to your chest. You pressed it flat over your heart, which was no longer beating so much as vibrating, a sustained tremolo of such intensity that you were fairly certain it was audible from the street.

The back of your hand burned. Not with pain. With the phantom warmth of his mouth. With the memory of pressure so gentle it made you want to scream, and cry, and laugh, and possibly never wash that particular patch of skin again for as long as you drew breath on this ridiculous, beautiful, merciless world of Amphoreus.

A tiny, broken sound escaped you. Not a word. Not a laugh. Something between a whimper and a hymn. The sound of a person whose internal architecture had been fundamentally and permanently rearranged by a gesture that lasted fewer seconds than it took to sneeze.

You let yourself fall to the floor. Finally, your knees had resigned themselves to doing so. You crumpled to the floor in a heap of healer’s robe and emotional wreckage, your kissed hand clenched in your palm, your face a masterpiece of astonishment and devastation and wonder and awe.

From the shadows of the hallway, came a voice.

"You combusted."

Marlon.

He was sitting on his cot, visible through the doorway to the main ward, splinted arm propped on his pillow, chrysanthemum standing guard. He hadn't been sleeping. He'd been waiting. Of course he'd been waiting. The little gargoyle had been sitting in the dark like a sentient security system, monitoring the door for signs of your return, ready to document the damage.

You didn't answer. You couldn't answer. Your vocal cords were still smoking.

He stared at you for a very long time. Saw the sitting on the floor. The hand grasping. And the face changing colors like a sunset having an anxiety attack.

Then he rolled onto his side on the cot, brought the blanket up over his mouth, and began speaking to the wall as one would to someone whose predictions were now confirmed.

"Told him," he mumbled. "Told him she’d blow up."

A brief pause. You heard the infirmary breathing, cots creaking, a tincture dripping, a patient snoring from three beds over.

And then, almost too softly to be heard, a voice speaking out of sheer disbelief:

"Idiot."

It was unclear whether he meant you, Phainon, or the universe at large.

Probably all three.

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A/N:

Hi everyone! Surprise!!! 😭✨ Look who's alive and has returned from the depths of work-induced hibernation with a new chapter!

First of all, thank you for your patience. I know it's been approximately 15465135 years since the last update. Work has been absolutely kicking my butt lately, and most nights my routine has been: come home → stare into the void → become one with my bed. 😴

I have been so busy that I basically vanished from the face of the internet. Tumblr? Haven't seen it. My drafts? Collecting dust. My social life? Missing, presumed dead.

So I sincerely apologize for disappearing without a trace and making you all wait so long. But the good news is NEW CHAPTER!!! 🎉🎉🎉

I really hope you enjoy it and think it was worth the wait. Thank you for sticking around despite my tendency to evaporate whenever life gets chaotic.

I miss you all so much!! 💖 And as compensation for my crimes against consistent updating, I shall do my best to bring you more chapters and less emotional damage from waiting.

“Ah, there you are!” He called out from the doorway, making his voice occupy the space. You didn’t need to turn around to know it was him. You felt it in your bones. It was the kind of voice that could command a legion of Abyss Mages to stand down, or, in this case, make you jump and accidentally reshelve a book on the history of Mondstadt’s windmills under ‘Gourmet Cooking.’

You spun around quickly while you clutched the book to your body which you used as a protective shield. Your attention shifted to Varka who stood at the entrance with his unkempt blond hair shining in the sunlight and a delicate yet interesting scar which marked his skin. His blue eyes shone with a powerful energy that made him appear to possess excessive vitality.

“Grand Master Varka.” Your voice came out a touch higher than intended. You nearly groaned at yourself but covered it with a quick cough. “How may I assist you?”

His heavy boots produced loud thudding sounds which created an impulse that made you step backward. He didn’t seem to notice. He never did.

“Lisa said you were the person to talk to about… organization.” He pointed at the shelves which extended high above him. “I’m trying to find the files on the old Ordo Favonius patrol routes since Jean mentioned them, and I figured I’d look myself. Give you hardworking folks a break.”

He winked.

Just a harmless little wink, all in good spirits.

However, your stomach did a thing. A very annoying, traitorous thing. But you immediately ignored it with the ease of someone who had been doing it for weeks.

“Of course,” you said, your voice admirably steady. “They’d be in the historical military records section. Aisle seven, top shelf.”

“Top shelf,” he repeated while grinning. The massive racks stretched toward the ceiling, catching his gaze before it returned to yours. His eyes seemed warm, like sunlight hitting your skin after hours in frosty air. “My favorite kind. A perfect excuse to show off.”

Before you had a chance to question his meaning, he had already stepped close. He wasn’t merely tall, he seemed built like a mountain given human shape. He overshadowed you physically, but the presence wasn’t sharp or imposing. It was more like standing beneath the broad branches of a massive, welcoming oak tree.

“Here,” he said, his words were soft like a whisper between walls. “Let me handle it.”

He reached past you. Both arms. To grab a book from the shelf right above your head.

He wasn’t even close to you. There was a large difference between him and you. A foot, at least. Yet suddenly it seemed as if heat folded around you, carrying traces of fresh smell of leather, open air, and a hint only he carried. Light slid across his scuffed gauntlet as he reached up. Beneath the worn leather, you could see how his tendons tightened while he worked the old book loose from the wooden ledge.

Your brain, the only part of you still functioning with any logic, screamed, He’s just getting a book, you idiot! It’s the most efficient way!

Your heart, with absolutely no respect for common sense, flipped end over end.

The book came free with a faint tug, sending old dust drifting into the light. He looked down at you, still holding the book, still with his arms essentially caging you in.

“There we go,” he said, eyes softening as they crinkled. “It wouldn't be proper to let you struggle, would it?”

He said it kindly. Helpfully. A perfectly ordinary bit of chivalry. Nothing more.

He handed you the book, as if he just passed you the sun, the moon, and the Anemo Archon’s own blessing, neatly bundled in worn leather.

You grabbed the book from him, your movements were a little bit jerky. 

“Th-thanks. Great. Struggle. Bad. I’ll just… put this on the reading table for you.”

You nearly threw yourself to the side to put some space between you, dropping the heavy book onto the nearest table with a sharp bang that rang through the quiet library.

And he just laughed. A full, rich, rumbling sound that was probably heard in Springvale. “Careful! That’s four hundred years of history you’re manhandling.”

You wanted the floor to open up and swallow you whole.

That was just the first incident.

The second happened a few days later in the training yard. You had been set to record the new equipment, a dull but easy task. You were kneeling by a crate with a quill in hand. And you didn’t notice the shadow until it stretched over you.

“You’ve got ink on your cheek.”

You looked up, startled. Varka was standing just behind you, perspiring and splendidly disheveled after a sparring match with Eula. His collar was unbuttoned, thus more of his skin was exposed. He seemed as if he had come straight out of a romance novel, only if the romance novels have the feature of men who can almost lift a horse on their back.

“I do?” You immediately rubbed at your face with the back of your hand. And you're almost certain you only made a bigger mess.

Then suddenly he dropped to his knee, meeting your eye level. His presence was so close to you. Close enough that it heightened all your senses. Now, you could smell the faint scent of iron and clean sweat clinging on him, causing you to hitch a breath. Then his huge, rough hand reached out, lifting your chin. But surprisingly, his touch was so delicate and careful.

“No, you missed it,” he said while his sky-colored eyes never left yours. His thumb, tender despite its size, traced the area just below your cheekbone. You felt a surprising spark run through you at the contact and your heart didn't fail to hammer fast inside your ribs. “There. Got it.”

He kept his eyes on yours a beat too long, and his thumb still lightly resting against your jaw.

He’s just being helpful. You had ink on your face. He got it off. This is normal human interaction.

“You should be more careful." He smirked. “Can’t have a pretty face like yours ruined with ink, can we?”

Then he released you as he straightened his posture, and gave your shoulder a clap hard enough to make your teeth rattle before strolling off for a drink, leaving you kneeling in the dirt with your heart pounding like crazy. 

Your mind only focused on one word he had said. One word that echoed in the recesses of your brain like a broken record.

Pretty face. He said you had a pretty face.

No. Stop. He was just being nice. He calls everyone pretty. He probably calls Hilichurls ‘pretty ugly’ and means it as a compliment.

The final straw was during the Weinlesefest preparations.

You were perched atop an unstable ladder where you were struggling to hang the heavy banner from the balcony on the second floor. You could sense your arms shaking from the bar. Then, when you were doing your best to hang the banner even as your patience started to wear thin, that was when two strong hands suddenly grabbed your waist from behind and earned a surprised yelp out of you.

“Whoa there, careful,” Varka’s voice rumbled against your ear. He’d climbed up behind you on the ladder. The ladder, which was already complaining under his weight. “You’re about two seconds from a nasty fall.”

He was supporting you. Helping you to keep your balance. And his chest was like a wall of heat against your back.

His presence here with you is not really helpful for your poor heart. He was too overwhelming for you. Why is he even here? You didn't even notice him entering despite his large stature.

“I-I’m fine,” you stammered while gripping the banner so firmly that your fingers were starting to go bloodless. It was your only anchor from your overdriving emotions.  “Just a little higher…”

“Allow me.” He reached up with one hand, his other arm tightening around your waist like a human safety strap. He easily hooked the banner onto the last fastener. “See? All done. Can’t have our best logistics person taking a dive. Who would I charm into finding my old patrol routes then?”

He laughed, and a deep vibration of the chuckle was passed from his chest to your back, and you felt your whole soul momentarily leave the body.

He was the first one to come down and then he looked at you, with his hands up. 

"Jump. I'll catch you."

That moment seemed to stop upon hearing his words. 

You could only gape at him, your expression frozen in surprise. A laugh almost escaped you and had this urge to ask him if he was joking. But the sight of his hands held high told you he was serious, which you stopped yourself from saying a word.

You scanned the ladder and then to him, it was a three-foot drop. You could easily manage it yourself. 

You were debating whether to agree to his proposal, or just say that you could get down by yourself. But observing him, who's got that dumb smile on his face and waiting for you to jump down, you gave in without much resistance. 

You jumped.

He caught you. Obviously. And with deliberate care, he set you down, his hands brushing your arms and lingering just slightly.

Your eyes lifted to his face, breath catching in short gasps. He smiled. It was effortless, completely unaware of the effect he had. He had no idea. He had absolutely no earthly idea that his casual kindness, his thoughtless chivalry, was thoroughly dismantling your composure piece by piece. Your heart was vigorously thumping that you were pretty sure it’s going to give you a heart attack at any moment.

He is so unfair!

And that’s when the idea struck you. A terrible, wonderful, hilarious idea.

Two could play at this game.

The first chance came around not long after. Varka was sitting in his office, buried under a heap of papers that had accumulated while he was away, and his face showed deep misery. You tapped the door which was ajar.

He looked up, his expression brightening instantly. “Ah! A welcome distraction. Come to save me from tax ledgers?”

You walked in, a small cup in your hand. “I noticed you haven’t left this office for three hours. Lisa said you didn't have lunch. Again.” You laid the cup on the corner of his desk and, quite softly, you pushed it towards him. “It’s just some soup from Good Hunter. Figured you’d need the energy.”

He looked up from the cup, blinking in unmistakable, fleeting surprise. “You… brought me soup?”

You forced a casual shrug, hiding the racing of your chest. Yet, you're still determined.

“Mmm. And…” You leaned forward, holding onto his desk with both hands, getting into his space just like he always did to you. You flashed him your most charming smile. “I thought I’d make sure you actually ate it. Can’t have Mondstadt’s mightiest knight fainting from hunger. Who would protect us from… I don’t know, overly aggressive pigeons?”

His one brow lifted higher than the other, while his lips tugged sideways like laughter was stuck halfway out. He looked unsure. Also kind of interested. 

“Was that a jab at my expense?”

"Was it?" You asked him back. You tried to sound casual. You kept looking at him. You did not want to be the first one to look away. His blue eyes were really wide. He looked a little shocked. You felt really happy and excited about this. Now, it was the other way around and that was a great feeling.

You pushed off from the desk, your movement casual. “Eat up, Grand Master. And try not to get ink on your face. It’s a gorgeous face. Would be a shame to ruin it.”

As you left his office, you offered a bit of a wave before very shakily walking away and trying not to show any signs of your nervousness. After not looking back once, you still heard him do something that was quite surprising. He made a gasp as if he were choking. The Grand Master of the Knights of Favonius, the strongest man in Mondstadt, had completely lost his words and had no idea at all why.

The revenge had begun.

The next strike was at Angel’s Share.

Varka was sitting among several knights as a clatter of laughter rose, one hand wrapped around a chipped mug filled with dandelion wine. Midway through a loud tale, something about his encounter during his expedition, you took a seat beside him on a wobbly stool. The volume of his voice would drop and rise again, creating visual scenes of the cliffs, with almost falling off. Despite arriving and sitting beside him, there was no break in the flow of his storytelling, but a hollow silence replaced the previously existing sound.

“…and then the Frostarm Lawachurl just stared at me, and I stared back, and—oh! You’re here!”

He took a bit of a moment to stop from his narration just to acknowledge your presence before he resumed. And then you ordered a drink and silence settled just enough. The moment it arrived, you waited for him to pause between words while he talked about a harbinger named Capitano. You moved closer to him and your shoulder brushed against his large arm without him expecting it.

“You know,” you said under your breath. “for a man with such legendary tales, you’re not nearly as loud as the rumors claim.”

It was a lie, by all means. He was a loud man and everyone in Mondstadt knows it. You were just saying it for the sake of your revenge. However, despite that, your next words were, no doubt, the truth. 

He blinked down at you. “I’m not?”

“No.” You took a slow sip from your drink and your gaze locking with his over the edge of the glass. “Sometimes you’re surprisingly… quiet. Thoughtful. It’s nice. Gives a person a chance to actually look at you.”

You could see his throat move when he swallowed. You observed him closely, then your eyes caught it right away, how the very tips of his ears slightly turned crimson. It was not visible, but it was proof enough you had left Varka flustered.

Noticing the awkward silence, he coughed yet his voice came out slightly hoarse as he continued. “Look at me, huh? See anything you like?”

You pretended to weigh your answer, eyes sliding over his features, catching the scar on his neck, how his blond locks framing his face, then meeting his gaze again. You smiled. 

“Maybe. I’ll let you know.”

You returned to your drink, leaving him sitting there as he pondered your words. He held his beverage half way to his mouth and looked at you. Totally baffled. Eula was observing from across the table while looking at him with a raised eyebrow like she was sizing him up.

“Grand Master? Are you unwell?”

Varka shook his head slowly. He looked dazed, but managed to smile. The confused look was gone. “No. No, I’m… I’m fine. I think.”

The final, glorious act of your campaign of reciprocal flustering happened a week later, on the battlements of the city wall.

It was getting dark. The sky had all these orange and purple colors as the sun went down slowly. You came up here to get some air after a long day, at work. You thought you would be alone, however someone was already occupying it. You tried to take a look closer, and then you saw a face you knew very well. 

It was Varka. 

Your heart started beating fast with excitement and nerves upon seeing him. It was as if your little organ already knew how to do its job when it saw a specific person. He was leaning against the parapet while watching over the vast expanse of Mondstadt. And the wind was messing up his hair. He looked really calm, not like the boisterous Grand Master you knew. His profile was etched against the fading light, making his face appear softer. 

He heard your footsteps and turned. A soft smile touched his lips. “Taking some fresh air?”

“Something like that.” Then you went to stand beside him. You leaned your elbows on the stone and watched the landscape. You just stood there for a while. It was nice and quiet.

Then, for just a little moment, you felt his gaze on you. You turned your head. He was already looking at you, which caught you off guard. His expression was open. Defenseless. He was as if not hiding anything. This was all new to you, something you had never seen before with him. After all, you had known him as a carefree and laid back man, yet really strong. When you saw him looking at you like that. You did not know what to think. Your thoughts just scattered and your heartbeat stuttering as a rush of warmth prickled through you to your fingertips.

“What?” you asked. 

“Nothing,” he said, just as softly. Then, a small, almost shy smile. “Just… looking.”

It was your turn to be struck speechless. It wasn’t a line. It wasn’t smooth or charming. Not like he had done before. It was just... confusing in a way that your impulse got the better hold of you and asked the words you did not want to blurt out.

"At what? The view?"

Varka hesitated, as if deliberating his response carefully. What you didn’t know was that the next words he chose were just as impulsive as your own. 

“At you.”

You caught a sharp breath as you looked into his blue eyes. He was also staring at you with something you couldn't fathom. It seemed soft and... fond. But you were still unsure. You were just at a loss for words and no coherent thoughts swirling in your mind. You could only hear your pulse beating faster and faster, which you were afraid that he might hear it as well.

He seemed to realize what he had said. And then a trace of color began rising along his neck. More visible than the one you saw back in Angel's Share. His gaze immediately diverted elsewhere, though not before a quiet laugh slipped out from him. The moment carried more weight than expected.

But you didn't let him, your emotions were running so wild that they dominated your rationality. Before you could even think, your hand moved toward his arm, a light contact that halted his motion. Surprise appeared in his face when he turned your way.

You smiled, a real smile, not a teasing one. And you whispered, “me, too.”

For once, there was no booming laugh, no casual touch, no easy words. He just stared at you, his blue eyes wide and full of something new. Something he was just beginning to understand. He lifted his hand, the one you were touching, and turned it, his huge fingers gently, tentatively, intertwining with yours.

He looked like he was about to speak, likely ready to ease the tension encompassing between you with that easy, effortless charm of his.

But instead, you held his hand tighter, and returned your eyes back at the view with a contented sigh. 

Then momentarily, you heard him breathe in unsteadily. You didn't turn. You didn't say anything. You just let him be while he was holding your hand. Then you felt it. His thumb was slowly moving in a careful, amazed circle on your skin.

And for the first time, the Grand Master, the Knight of Boreas, the man who could stir anyone’s heart, had absolutely nothing to say.

And for reasons you couldn’t explain, it was the most beautiful sound of all.