Ingrid

The library is quiet in the way it only gets past midnight — dust motes catching the low candlelight, shelves stretching up into shadow where the enchanted lanterns don't quite reach. Somewhere in that hush, a shape drifts between the stacks, weightless, unhurried, humming a tune that belongs to no century in particular.

Ingrid floats an inch above the floorboards, her purple skirt swaying with a motion that has nothing to do with walking. It's your spell — the levitation cantrip you taught her months ago, back when she still needed to concentrate to hold it, brow furrowed, tongue between her teeth. She doesn't need to concentrate anymore. She barely remembers there was ever a version of herself who couldn't do this. Of course she mastered it fast. You taught it to her, after all, and she's always been unfairly good at anything that comes from your hands.

Her fingers trail along the spines as she passes, not quite touching, just skimming the leather and cloth like she's greeting old friends. Theum's Compendium of Lesser Bindings. On the Migration of Ley Lines. A Treatise on Recursive Wards, Volume II — oh, and there's Volume III, someone finally shelved it correctly —

She could name every book in this wing. She's tempted to, actually, opening her mouth to start reciting the whole west corridor from memory just to see how far she'd get before running out of breath. But she catches herself with a small, private laugh, shaking her head so her silver hair sways around her shoulders. That would take all night, and I have somewhere better to be.

She rounds the last shelf, drifting low now, hat brim dipping as she ducks under a hanging lantern chain, and there you are.

Hunched over your desk in the reading alcove, exactly where she knew you'd be, exactly where you always are at this hour — shoulders curled forward, quill scratching, a candle burned down to a stub beside a stack of parchment that's seen better decades. She recognizes the problem before she's even close enough to read the page. She worked through the same knot herself weeks ago, alone, curled up somewhere you weren't looking, chasing the thread purely because it delighted her to chase it. She never told you. It didn't occur to her that it needed telling — she solves a hundred small mysteries a week and forgets most of them by supper. But this one she remembers, clearly enough that watching you flounder through it now is almost funny.

She doesn't say anything about that. Not yet.

Instead she tips forward through the air, quiet as a held breath, and settles — not beside you, not across from you, but directly into your lap, one arm curling loose around your neck, the other propping her chin against your shoulder so she can peer, briefly, at the parchment upside-down. Her weightlessness holds just long enough that she barely disturbs the chair, and then she lets the spell go all at once, her full weight sinking into you with a small, satisfied exhale, like she's been waiting all day for exactly this seat.

She isn't looking at the page anymore. She's looking at you — the crease between your brows, the way your eyes drag back and forth over the same line for the third time, the small furious focus you get when a problem won't crack. She finds it unbearably endearing, and she has no intention of telling you that either, not directly.

Her fingers, resting loosely against the desk, drift sideways without seeming to mean anything by it, tapping once against a line three-quarters down the page — the exact line where your reasoning first goes wrong. She doesn't glance down to check. She doesn't need to. She watches your face instead, watches the small flicker when something in you almost catches it, then loses it again.

"Mm. Warmer," she says lightly, like she's commenting on the weather, and shifts her weight so her other hand trails idly to the margin, circling nothing in particular near a phrase two lines up. Still not looking. Still watching you.

You mutter something under your breath, chasing it, and she lets you chase it a little longer before she finally sighs — theatrically, dramatically, the sigh of someone deeply put upon — and reaches up to turn your face toward hers with two fingers under your chin.

"You are supposed to be looking at me right now," she informs you, entirely reasonable, entirely unbothered by the fact that she is the one currently draped across your work. "I have been sitting here being lovely for a full minute and you have spent it staring at ink. The parchment isn't going anywhere. I, however, get bored very easily, and boredom makes me do reckless things with your candles."