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He doesn’t begin with the intention of trespassing.
The desk had been mocking him for days. It sits beneath the slanted shelves like a wound in the Tower’s symmetry, covered in half-finished diagrams, piles of opened books, various glass jars. It isn’t the chaos that bothers him exactly — though it certainly doesn’t help — but that her chaos had started to rot. He could tell by the way she moves lately: a half-second of delay between thought and action, her speech dragged through molasses, the fading brightness of calculation behind her eyes.
She’s unravelling.
So, he does the only thing he knows: he imposes order.
He starts by clearing a space at the center of the table, just enough to see the grain of the dark wood beneath. The air around it feels different already, thinner, easier to breathe. Parchment follows parchment into neat stacks. Instruments align themselves by shape and size; sigil chalks placed in a bowl. He doesn’t throw anything away — he isn’t a fool — but he does seal several open inkwells that had begun to clot, and he rights three books she’d left open spine-up like broken birds.
He moves slowly, cataloguing the pattern as he goes. He’d lived with her particular brand of madness long enough to have learned its contours: which piles hum faintly with residual spell resonance, which jars she keeps within reach of her left hand rather than her right, which stains on the floor correspond to experiments best not repeated. Every piece of it exists in his mind before he shifts it. If she demanded its return, he could put it back exactly — and somehow, that knowledge makes the act feel less invasive.
The sound of rearrangement is almost soothing. The soft movement of parchment, the muted clink of glass, the whisper of cloth over dust. When he catches sight of his reflection in the window — hair dishevelled, mouth set in that particular frown of concentration — he looks absurdly domestic. It’d have been comical, if the quiet hadn’t been so heavy.
He hesitates at the final step: her quills. The feathered tips are frayed and bent at odd angles, each one ruined in a way she apparently prefers. He nearly replaces them with the newer set he’d brought from another study — balanced, pristine, proper. But something in the memory of her grip stops him. She twists her wrist slightly when she holds them in thought, as if the flaw in the quill helps anchor her.
He leaves them where they are.
By the time he finishes, the room resembles a mind at peace. The lamp’s reflection falls evenly across the desk. He can see the shape of the Tower again: its deliberate geometry, the pulse of Apocrypha’s light through the window’s translucent pane. He almost feels proud. She’d been sliding into exhaustion; this could help. He made things clear again — clean, rational, breathable. If she objects, she can hardly accuse him of theft. Nothing is gone, merely cleaned.
He brushes the dust from his hands, casting one last, approving glance over the ordered table. The sight calms something restless in him — that old, brittle need for precision. “Better,” he mutters to no one. “You’ll thank me when you see it.” And, because he could not admit to himself that he’s waiting for her approval, he settles into the chair near hers and begins to reread her latest set of notes. Her handwriting is nearly illegible. He smiles despite himself.
He hadn’t realized how long he’d been sitting there.
Apocrypha had no clocks, only the slow pulse of its light — phosphorescent, green-tinged. At intervals, the shelves sigh. The books resettle themselves. Beyond the window, something vast turns in the fog.
He reads to fill the silence. Or pretends to. Her handwriting is its own labyrinth: looping, knotted, half-symbolic. He follows a line until it dissolves into runic shorthand, then into something more like song. The longer he looks, the more it resembles her speech — tangents, leaps of logic, brilliance laced with irritation. He once thought it madness. Now, reluctantly, he recognizes the rhythm as something alive.
Still, even life benefits from structure. He tells himself that again as the quiet stretches thin.
A soft shift in the Tower’s air warns him she’s close. Her magic always precedes her — a faint distortion, like heat over stone, the scent of ozone. He straightens automatically, smoothing the page before him as if to prove the order has purpose. Footsteps in the corridor, light and uneven, then the creak of the door.
She steps in and stops. Not dramatic — just a halt so abrupt the Tower seems to hold its breath with her.
He’s already speaking by reflex. “You were stumbling through sentences yesterday. I thought—” he gestures to the cleared center of the table. “—clarity would make it easier to breathe.”
Her gaze moves over the desk: once, twice, a third time, each pass slower. He watches her golden gaze adjust to the new edges, the neat right angles where there hadn’t been any. Her mouth presses thin, brows pinch. “It isn’t… wrong,” she says. The words have to fight their way out of her throat. “It’s simply not mine.”
He almost laughs — out of defense, not humour. “Your piles were collapsing.”
“They were connected.”
“To what? Stains?”
“To each other.”
He feels the old instinct rise: lecture, rationalize. “Nothing is missing. I threw nothing away.” He keeps his tone even, careful. “I sealed the ink. I sorted like with like. The chaotic elements have not been—”
“Don’t call it chaotic.” The crack in her voice is small, nearly invisible, but it widens something in him. She drifts closer, fingertips hovering, not touching. “It’s mnemonic. Visual. The order in here—” she touches her temple, then the table, “—depends on where it is out here. The left-hand jar, the third book from the right, the paper that always curled at the corner. That’s how I know which thread I’m holding.”
He hears himself say, a little too dryly, “Then your mind needs stronger thread.”
Her head tilts, exhaustion washing any bite out of her reply. “Don’t be cruel because you’re frightened.”
The word lands. He stares at her. “Frightened of what?”
“Of me slipping.” Her palm flattens on the cleaned wood. “You don’t know how to hold a person in that state. So, you hold a room.”
He wants to deny it. Instead, he reaches for logic, his last shield. “Even if your system relies on position, nothing is lost. We can map it again. Better, cleaner.”
She lowers herself into the chair like someone taking a blow. The tension goes out of her spine all at once; her shoulders hunch, hands braced to either side of her skull, not quite covering her eyes. Silence collects. He waits for anger; it doesn’t come.
“What have I cost you?” he asks and hates how quiet he sounds.
“Days,” she mutters. “Possibly a week. I was close.” A small, ugly laugh. “I don’t remember how close. I kept it… outside, so I wouldn’t drop it.”
He looks at the table — at the clean geometry that had soothed him like cool water — and sees it the way she does: a floor he mopped while she slept, only to wake her standing on ice. She doesn’t lash out. She simply stops moving. The sight puts a hairline crack through the satisfaction he’d felt. He stands there, listening to the Tower hum, and realizes there’s only one thing that will matter.
“Don’t move,” he says.
“I wasn’t planning to,” she murmurs.
He goes to the shelf on the left, second rung, where a leaning stack had once threatened to avalanche. He counts the ghost-heights in his head, the weight of the papers he’d lifted. The topmost sheaf had been slightly warped where a vial had sweated against it. He takes the correct pile, brings it back, and sets it down at the exact angle it used to occupy — twenty degrees off square, corner nicked.
Her hands fall from her face. She blinks at the placement, then at him.
He moves again. The small ledger that habitually sat half under the brass divider; the failed sigil drafts that lived to the right but needed to be touching the cracked inkwell; the chalks arranged not by hue after all, but by which left the most dust, aligned with a set of burn marks he’d always assumed were accidents. A jar with a crooked lip. Three feathers ruined on purpose.
It becomes, quickly, a kind of liturgy: retrieve, return, restore the tilt. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t narrate. He just puts the machine back together in the order his mind, stubborn with disapproval, had been forced to memorize.
After the third trip, she says, not quite believing, “You remember all that?”
He doesn’t look up from where he’s angling a stack to match the stain beneath. “I remember what I can’t stand. Apparently, that includes you.”
A breath that might want to be laughter escapes her. “Charming.”
He risks a glance. The glassy edge of panic has thinned from her eyes. Colour returns enough that she begins to participate without fully realizing it — nudging a sheet two inches left, tapping a corner into place, drawing a small, crooked line where one had always been for no reason but habit.
“You’ve put the ink too close to the quills,” she murmurs, and he corrects it wordlessly.
“Those chalks dust into the open notes.”
He switches their places.
“This book needs to stay ugly,” she says, and his eyebrow lifts. “The spine. It creaks at the right moment.”
He leaves it crooked and creaking.
They work until the desk looks wrong to him again: alive, messy, the kind of arrangement that sets his teeth on edge and, annoyingly, lets her shoulders drop. She sits back. Her fingers make a slow, unconscious path through the air, tracing a thread he can’t see.
He waits. The Tower sighs, settling. “Better?” he asks. She nods once. “I didn’t throw anything away,” he says, softer than he intends. “I would not.”
“I know.” She rubs the bridge of her nose. “If you’d burned something, I’d have given payback.”
He almost smiles. “So, I’ve learned.”
“Mm.” A beat. “Thank you for remembering.”
“An unfortunate talent.”
“Useful, when it isn’t infuriating.”
He pretends not to hear the thread of gratitude. It grazes something unarmoured in him.
He studies the restored disorder as if it might collapse again the moment he looks away. “Compromise,” he says at last, because he has to put a frame around the ache gnawing at him. “You keep your… system.” His mouth twists around the word. “I will not touch it again without your instruction.” A beat. “In return, you will stop running yourself into the stone.”
Her eyes half-close. “Define ‘stop.’”
“Eat when food is in front of you. Sleep when your hands start missing the ink. Step away when you’ve looked at the same line three times and it won’t hold.” He taps the margin of a page with one fingertip. “You were stumbling yesterday.”
“Words refuse me, sometimes,” she mutters. “They come back.”
“Not if you drive them off a cliff.”
She lifts a shoulder, noncommittal. “And if I refuse?”
He leans a hip against the desk, so he doesn’t pace, arms crossing. “Then I will sit here and read aloud until you fall asleep.”
That teases a faint, unwilling smile from her. “Weaponized boredom. Cruel.”
“Effective.”
Silence folds back around them, easier now. The Tower makes one of its long, contented sighs, shelves resettling in small cascades. He reaches, then stops himself, reaches again, slower. The back of his knuckles touches the ridge of her cheekbone — no pressure, just presence. She doesn’t pull away, eyes closing. The permission is so light he nearly misses it.
“You’re warm,” he hears himself say, idiotic.
“You cleaned,” she counters, equally inane.
He lets his hand fall before he overreaches and ruins it. He feels reckless for a heartbeat and lets the truth out before he can gild it. “I don’t like watching you thin out.” It lands between them with the soft inevitability of a book closing. No grand declaration. Just a small admission, the angle of it honest enough to hurt.
Her eyes open, gaze lifts, steady. “There it is.”
“There what is?”
“The reason you cleaned the room instead of asking me to rest.” She rubs at her temple as if to ease a knot. “You’ve never known what to do with a person slipping.”
“Correct,” he says, too crisp; then he finds the softer register she’d accused him of lacking. “I’m learning. Poorly.”
“Not poorly.” She nudges a quill back a fraction of an inch, satisfied when it aligns with a stain only she can read. “Just crookedly. Like my feathers.”
He exhales through his nose, almost a laugh. “Compromise, then.”
“Compromise,” she echoes in agreement.