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“—it’s because mana is inherently dynamic!” Marcille said with wonder in her eyes. Her voice was barely over a whisper but it was enough to carry the melody of excitement dancing in her words. “Sinusoidal functions are the best way to represent them. When we modulate the output of our spells,” she pointed to a diagram on the heavy tome between them, “it’s almost like selecting which frequencies of our mana we want to call on. The dwarven inventors understood this mathematically.”
“Mhm?” Falin hummed to keep her going. Marcille was going to anyway, pushing aside books and half-opened rolls of parchment to make space for yet another (how many was it now?) tome. It was thick and bound in dark, sturdy leather.
“The math, of course, isn’t a perfect representation of mana’s unpredictability. Just a close estimate, but sometimes it’s enough. For example—"
Falin watched, enraptured, as Marcille ran her finger across the fore edge of the tome, stopping a quarter ways up before opening it. Marcille was satisfied to see that she had opened at the right chapter by sheer memory of touch.
She’s probably read this book a thousand times.
“—you notice how in dungeons our spells grow stronger? Almost as if the environment is a modifier of those mana waves? If we didn’t understand these changes, our spells could go very, very, wrong. So we try to think about mana in terms of the width of its ripples—in frequency domain, you could say—”
Marcille was practically waving around her hands by now, straining to keep her voice low (as though the kingdom’s court mage was afraid of the librarian chastising her).
“—which is why it was so important to learn Fourier transforms back in school. It helped us visualize—uh. Falin?” Marcille tilted her head “What’s funny?”.
Oh. She was smiling.
“I wasn’t laughing.” It was true. Falin looked at the parchment in front of her, noticing (with some embarrassment) that she forgot to keep writing and left a blotchy mess of ink on her notes. She was supposed to be researching too. “I just think you look good.”
This made Marcille blink. Then it made her laugh, an amused puff of air out her nose. “Hunched over dusty books?”
“Yup,” Falin said earnestly with a sweet smile. Marcille really was. She looked in her element—happy and content amongst troves of knowledge waiting to be unearthed. She looked happy, with stray locks of hair falling along the side of her face, coming undone from the braid Chilchuck made this morning. She loved the way Marcille picked at the corners of pages while she read—as if she couldn’t wait to turn them. She loved the little gasp of incredulity whenever Marcille discovered something preposterous and new. She had an insatiable appetite for finding out more, and more, and more and Falin found herself utterly captivated by it.
Marcille—a little red in the face—thanked her.
Ha! There it was! An hour into their trip to the library, Falin finally found something. A thin chapter on magical vectors, containing a table of coefficients they might need. “Marcille!” Falin excitedly whispered, folding the corner of the page into a little dog ear (inwardly apologizing to the girl across her).
“I found an—uh—I—”
Falin sputtered.
Marcille was looking at her with round, excited eyes. “What did you find?”
She forgot was she was going to say. Completely. Except the realization that she’s just seen the most beautiful shade of green she ever had seen in her life. And Falin didn’t really know what else to do with that fact so—
“Marcille,” Falin knit her eyebrows, looking between her book and feeling a little shy and confused. “Your eyes are pretty.”
Research had turned into a hopeless case.
For Falin, at least, because Marcille had dipped into a whole other world in her books despite sitting an arm’s length across from her.
Falin allowed herself the luxury of simply watching.
She was self-aware enough to realize that Marcille was the likely cause of her diminishing focus. But why? And when did it start? It isn’t like thinking Marcille was pretty was anything knew. She’d known that the whole time they’d been friends.
But today she felt like a hooked fished, unsuspectingly ensnared and slowly being reeled into… something.
Marcille let out a thoughtful hum—probably puzzling pieces together in her head. She had one hand fiddling with the corner of her book, and her chin resting on the back of her other.
Falin didn’t even realize that she was holding her breath. Her stomach felt weird in the prettiest way.
She decided they could use a break, maybe invite her brother for some afternoon snacks before finishing up for the day—hunger was bubbling in her stomach.
“Would you like to take a break with me?”
“Mmm,” Marcille hummed, eyes still glued to the pages. “Ten more minutes?”
“Turns into to forty and then some,” Falin teased.
“I mean!” Marcille was flustered. She finally tore her eyes away to look up at Falin. “Okay, it might. But if you’re hungry we should take a break. I plan to come back anyway.”
“I’m not hungry,” which may not have been true, per se, but Falin always struggled with saying no and it didn’t bother her all that much.
Marcille squinted at her. “Are you sure?”
Falin flushed a little. “Don’t worry about—”
“You’re hungry.” Marcille crossed her arms. “We can compromise, I promise to wrap it up in twenty minutes?”
“Thanks,” Falin said in a small, sheepish voice. Marcille Donato and ‘compromise’ is no small feat.
Eating didn’t really help her focus. If anything, it just made her a little sleepy.
They were back from a break that went by too fast—but at least they were full, and it was nice to see her brother.
At this point in the afternoon Falin had given up all pretense of working. She had a book on gardening opened in front of her (she wanted to cultivate mandrakes for cake—Laios was ecstatic, Marcille horrified). She didn’t know how Marcille could do it, powering through hours of reading for entire afternoons. She stretched, pulling her arms upwards while she yawned.
Marcille watched her quietly.
“I feel like I’m keeping you here,” she pouted.
As soon as Falin had set her arms down on the table, Marcille reached out to gently touch her elbow. She liked to do that, Falin noticed, to run her fingers along the feathers of her arms. It felt nice, so she always let her.
“Mm-mm,” Falin shook her head. “You’re not.”
“You’ll tell me when you want to go?”
“I will.”
“Mmkay,” This seems to have satisfied Marcille who looked back towards her work. Her hand, however, lingered, only moving to loosely tangle her fingers around Falin’s. It’s not a novel action—a habit from when they were younger—but today was a confusing day for Falin and all she could do was stare at their hands.
There was a prickling heat that traveled up her neck—a foreign and curious feeling.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Marcille’s dissatisfied grunt. Something was frustrating her—her brows were knit and her green eyes narrowed. Then she bit her lip, perfect and pink and soft.
Falin was barely aware of how hard she had swallowed.
Finally, once the hour of sunset arrived, Marcille looked ready to go.
Falin was flushed and may have felt delirious.
Marcille didn’t let go for an entire hour—going back and forth between her fingers and the soft feathers of her arms. She did it as though it soothed her, flipping through pages like Falin wasn’t burning red in the ears two feet away from her. Falin had been pretending to write but ended up drawing comical doodles along the margins of her parchment just to distract herself, but even that wasn’t working anymore.
“I know it’s a little selfish,” Marcille looked to the side with puffed cheeks. “But I didn’t want you to go.”
“It isn’t selfish. I wanted to stay,” Falin reassured her.
“You just didn’t seem very comfortable,” Marcille stared at her a little too hard. “You’re all red and—” She put her palm up to Falin’s cheek. “Are you okay?”
Falin’s mouth felt dry. “Yeah,” She said breathlessly. “It’s just—” She tried to string together an explanation but found that it was difficult when she was still looking for one herself. Interestingly, when backed up into a corner, Falin’s flight or fight response often resulted in unfiltered candidness. “You look beautiful.”
“Uhm,” Marcille looked pleasantly confused. “Thank you?”
“I—”
She didn’t really know… she what, exactly?
“Falin?”
Marcille looked concerned but reluctant to push the issue. She pulled back, throwing her hair behind her shoulders. Falin recognized it. It was something she did whenever she started thinking too hard. Falin’s gaze followed the motion—the smooth flick of her wrist to throw her curtain of lovely golden hair back. Little strands came loose and were left behind, small slivers of gold falling forward on her shoulders, above the shape of Marcille’s perfectly sculpted collarbones and—
Falin’s quill had snapped in her hand.
It surprised them both.
“Oh.”
It finally clicked. She blinked at Marcille—disheveled from an afternoon of work and looking absolutely perfect.
“Oh, wow.”