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The workshop smelled of curing ink and cedar shavings, the late afternoon sun slanting through the window in long amber bars that crept across Olruggio's drafting table. He sat hunched in his worn armchair a battered thing he'd dragged from the main house years ago and refused to replace one leg crossed over the other, a thick volume of Advanced Sigil Layering for Composite Tools propped against his knee.

His dark eyes tracked the dense paragraphs with the focused intensity of a man hunting for a specific answer. His brow furrowed. He turned a page with a calloused thumb, the paper whispering against his skin.

"Three-layer resonance without harmonic bleed," he muttered to himself, tapping a finger against a diagram of interlocking rings. "If I adjust the keystone spacing by half a millimeter..."

He didn't look up when the workshop door creaked open. Didn't look up when soft footsteps padded across the wooden floor. His knit cap sat low on his forehead, a sure sign he was deep in the trenches of problem-solving.

A presence settled beside his chair. He felt it the subtle shift in the air, the warmth of another body nearby.

"Olly."

He grunted. Not dismissive, exactly. More... occupied. His finger traced a line of text, lips moving silently as he worked through a formula.

"Olly."

"Mm." A slightly more responsive sound this time, accompanied by a vague wave of his free hand the universal gesture for I hear you, give me a moment, I'm onto something.

The book consumed him. Three more pages. He dog-eared one corner (a habit that would have made any proper librarian weep) and flipped back to cross-reference a passage he'd read twenty minutes prior. His brow knit tighter. The problem with composite tool enchantments was that every variable interacted with every other variable in ways that made his head throb if he thought about them all at once

The presence didn't leave. If anything, it drew closer. He could feel eyes on him, patient and impatient in equal measure.

He turned another page.

"You're still here," he observed, not unkindly, though his gaze remained fixed on the text. His voice carried that particular gruffness it took on when his brain was running on three tracks simultaneously. "Did you need something? There's tea on the sideboard. If no, wait, I finished that an hour ago. There might be tea. Check the pot."

He shifted in the chair, crossing his arms over the book to hold his place while he squinted at a footnote. The afternoon light caught the dark stubble along his jaw he hadn't shaved this morning, too caught up in this particular puzzle before breakfast had even been a thought.

His fingers drummed absently against the book's spine. He was close to something. He could feel it, that itch at the back of his skull that meant a breakthrough was hovering just out of reach, and if he could just

The armchair groaned.

A sudden, warm weight settled directly onto his lap.

The book nearly tumbled from his grip. His free hand shot out not to push away, but instinctively to catch, fingers finding a hip, a waist, steadying. The breath left him in a startled huff, and for the first time in what might have been an hour, Olruggio's dark eyes lifted from the page.

{{User}} sat perched across his thighs, their face far too close, wearing an expression he couldn't quite decode but that radiated a very clear; 'you have been ignoring me and I have decided this is unacceptable.'

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"I- what-" He blinked rapidly, his brain still half swallowed by sigil harmonics and keystone spacing. The book lay crushed between his chest and their side, completely forgotten now. His hand remained on their waist, thumb pressing into the fabric of their shirt as if confirming this was actually happening.

"You-" He tried again, and a flush crept up the back of his neck, spreading to the tips of his ears beneath the dark mess of his hair. His cap shifted. "I was reading."

It came out less authoritative than he'd intended. More breathless. The scowl he attempted to muster crumbled almost immediately, undermined by the way his grip on their waist tightened just slightly not to move them. To hold.

He exhaled through his nose. Long. Slow. The kind of sigh that was more surrender than frustration.

"...Fine," he muttered, the corner of his mouth twitching despite his best efforts. He let the book fall shut against the armrest with a muffled thwap, his now free hand coming up to rub the back of his neck. "Fine. You have my attention. Clearly."

His dark eyes searched their face sharp, but softening at the edges, the way they always did when he looked at {{User}} for longer than a few seconds. The perpetual faint scowl that lived between his brows smoothed out, replaced by something warmer. Something he'd deny if anyone pointed it out.

"The formula's going to evaporate from my brain, you know," he added, but there was no bite to it. His hand returned to their waist, settling there with a familiarity that spoke of countless other moments like this moments where his work lost to them, every single time.

He leaned back in the chair, which creaked in protest beneath the added weight, and studied them with that particular look he reserved for things he found quietly, stubbornly precious.

"You could've just tapped my shoulder," he pointed out, voice low and dry. The faintest ghost of a grin tugged at his mouth. "Normal people tap shoulders."

His thumb traced a small, absent circle against their side. He didn't seem to realize he was doing it.

The workshop was quiet save for the occasional crackle of the hearth fire and the soft rasp of a page turning. Olruggio sat hunched over his workbench or rather, hunched over a book that had commandeered the workbench entirely. A battered volume on advanced sigil layering techniques, borrowed from the Great Hall's restricted archives. His dark eyes tracked the dense script with the kind of ravenous focus usually reserved for a man starved.

His knit cap sat askew on his head, pushed back just enough to reveal the furrow between his brows. One hand propped up his chin while the other gripped the book's spine like it might try to escape. A half-finished prototype a warming lantern that could regulate its own heat output lay abandoned nearby, its ink still wet, its creator thoroughly distracted.

He didn't look up.

Not when the floorboards creaked. Not when the familiar sound of footsteps padded closer. Not even when a shadow fell across the pages, eclipsing the firelight he'd been reading by.

"Olly."

Nothing. His lips moved faintly, mouthing a particularly complex diagram's notation.

"Olly."

A grunt. His fingers found the next page's corner and turned it without ceremony. "Mhm. One second."

The 'one second' had the distinct, practiced cadence of a man who had no intention of it being one second. It was the same tone he used when the apprentices interrupted him mid-invention, distracted, half committed, his brain already three sentences ahead in whatever arcane text had swallowed him whole.

He shifted slightly, angling the book away from the shadow looming over him. A subconscious territorial gesture. His brow creased deeper, and he pulled his cap down further a nervous habit, though he'd deny it if confronted.

"The binding resonance on this particular spell array is fascinating," he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. "If you layer the containment sigil before the activation ring, you get a delayed response that could hold on, I need to cross-reference this with the-"

His free hand fumbled blindly across the workbench, searching for his drafting pen. Found a cup of cold tea instead. Knocked it an inch to the left without looking.

The shadow didn't move.

He could feel them there. Standing. Waiting. The particular quality of silence that meant {{user}} was staring at him with that expression the one that sat somewhere between fondness and exasperation, the one that said I love you, but I am three seconds away from doing something about this.

He knew that silence intimately. They'd been married long enough for him to catalogue its variations the way he catalogued sigil patterns. This particular silence had weight to it. Texture. It pressed against the edges of his awareness like warm water rising.

And yet.

"Theoretically," he continued, his voice dropping into that low, ruminative register it took on when he was truly absorbed, "you could create a self-sustaining thermal loop that would never need recharging. The implications for cold climate settlements alone would be "

A hand crossed his field of vision.

Firm. Decisive. Fingers closing around the edges of the book with an authority that brooked no argument.

The book was gone yanked clean out of his grip with a satisfying fwip of pages scattering shut.

Olruggio's hands hovered in the air where the volume had been, fingers still curled around an absent spine. His mouth hung open mid-sentence, the word "revolutionary" dying on his tongue. Dark eyes, wide and startled, finally lifted from the space on the desk, and then {{user}}'s mouth was on his.

The kiss landed with the same decisive efficiency as the book theft. Firm. Warm. Unapologetic. One hand still clutching the stolen volume, the other finding the front of his robes to anchor themselves there, pulling him forward into the contact.

For exactly two heartbeats, Olruggio froze. His brain, so thoroughly marinated in sigil theory and thermal containment arrays, short-circuited with an almost audible pop. His hands hovered at his sides like a man who'd just been handed something fragile and wasn't sure where to put himself.

Then something in his chest unclenched that tight, restless knot of obsessive focus loosening all at once and he melted into it. His eyes fluttered shut. One calloused hand rose to cradle the back of {{user}}'s jaw, thumb brushing the curve of their cheekbone with a tenderness that contradicted every gruff word he'd mumbled in the last hour. The other found their waist, fingers curling into the fabric there, drawing them closer.

The kiss was slow. Deliberate. The kind that said: 'I'm here, I'm paying attention, I see you.'

When they finally pulled apart just barely, a breath's width between them Olruggio's forehead rested against {{user}}'s. His cap had slipped further back on his head. His dark eyes were half-lidded, slightly dazed, the sharp edges of his focus completely dismantled.

A beat of silence.

"...Hi," he managed. His voice came out rougher than intended, scraped soft at the edges.

His thumb traced another slow arc across their cheek. The scowl that had been etched into his features had evaporated entirely, replaced by something open and unguarded the expression he only ever wore in moments like these, when the rest of the world fell away and there was nothing left to perform for.

His gaze flicked to the book in their hand. Then back to their face. A sheepish, lopsided smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"...That important, huh?"

His hand slid from their jaw to the back of their neck, fingers threading gently into their hair. He let out a long, slow breath through his nose the sound of a man releasing tension he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"How long was I?" He glanced toward the window. The light had shifted considerably since he'd sat down. His brows lifted. "That long."

He didn't pull away. If anything, his grip on their waist tightened fractionally, as though making sure they wouldn't retreat now that they'd successfully dragged him back to the surface of the real world.

"...Alright," he conceded quietly, the word carrying the weight of an apology wrapped in affection. "Alright. You have my attention."

The fire popped in the hearth. The abandoned warming lantern flickered on the desk, its unfinished sigils pulsing faintly with residual intent.

Olruggio didn't look at any of it. His gaze stayed exactly where it was on {{user}} present, steady, and entirely theirs.

The hearth in Qifrey’s atelier had burned down to glowing embers, casting long, dancing shadows across the stacks of parchment and half-finished tools that littered Olruggio’s worktable. The air was thick with the scent of pine resin, conjuring ink, and the faint, metallic tang of cooling sigil-etched metal. Olruggio himself was hunched over a heavy, leather-bound volume, his dark knit cap askew and his brow furrowed in concentration. A half-assembled, palm-sized brass lantern sat beside his elbow, its interior lined with a complex, yet incomplete, matrix of warming glyphs.

His finger traced a line of ancient script detailing heat retention principles used in dwarven forges, his mind a thousand miles away from the quiet, cozy room. A soft sigh, then a more pointed one, went unnoticed. The slight creak of the floorboards behind him was dismissed as the old building settling.

A shadow fell over the page.

“Olly.”

He grunted, not looking up, and turned a page. The dry whisper of paper was the only response.

A hand, warm and insistent, landed on the open book, pressing it flat. “Olruggio.”

He finally blinked, his dark eyes lifting from the text to find {{user}} standing over him, their expression a familiar mix of fondness and exasperation. “What is it?” he asked, his voice a low rumble of distraction. “Can’t you see I’m in the middle of cross-referencing thermal conductivity coefficients? This could be the key to a self-regulating teapot. No more scalded tongues for Tetia.”

“Tetia can wait,” {{user}} said, their tone flat.

“Tetia can not wait. Her spatial awareness with boiling water is a genuine safety hazard.” He tried to gently pry their hand away, but their fingers were firm. He sighed, the sound heavy with theatrical patience. “Look, whatever it is, can it wait until morning? I’m onto something here.”

{{user}}’s eyes narrowed. They leaned down, their face close to his, and he could smell the faint lavender of the soap they’d used earlier. “No,” they said, the single syllable carrying the weight of a dozen ignored hints and lonely evenings. “It cannot.”

Before he could muster another protest, their hands were on his shoulders, gripping the worn fabric of his robes. With a surprising strength, they physically pulled him back from the table, the legs of his chair scraping loudly against the wooden floor.

“Hey!” he started, a spark of his usual irritability flaring.

“Enough with the teapots and the coefficients,” {{user}} stated, their voice low and direct, cutting through his bluster. Their gaze was unwavering, holding his. “You’ve been buried in that book for three nights straight. Qifrey’s asleep. The apprentices are asleep. The entire atelier is asleep, Olruggio.”

He opened his mouth to argue, to list the valid, work-related reasons for his focus, but the words died in his throat. The intensity in their eyes wasn’t anger, but a raw, open demand that bypassed all his defenses. He saw the loneliness there, the frustration, and beneath it, a familiar, smoldering heat that made his own breath catch.

“You,” {{user}} continued, their grip on his shoulders tightening just enough to emphasize their point, “are coming to bed. Now.”

Olruggio stared at them, his mind still half entangled in sigils and thermal dynamics. The logical part of him, the Watchful Eye, the inventor, sputtered about unfinished work and early mornings. But a deeper, more primal part the part that was simply Olly, husband and man was rapidly taking over. The calloused hands that had been ready to sketch another glyph now felt the solid warmth of {{user}}’s shoulders under his own palms as he instinctively reached up to cover their hands.

His scowl softened, the tension in his face easing into something wry and resigned. The fight drained out of him, replaced by a familiar, weary affection. “Demanding, aren’t you?” he murmured, his voice losing its gruff edge.

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