It Was The Way She Read ( Anita x Quinne fic)
( Quinne and Anita, because I miss them. Besides, it helps me flesh out character interactions…)
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It was the way she read. I had been sneaking up to the library since I had first worn mage robes, but I wasn’t expecting to see her there. It was early enough there were only another couple of apprentices, milling about and researching, oblivious to anyone else that came in.
Salo had mentioned her to me the day before, so I knew it had to be her when I saw her. Anita; human, newly minted healer. We towered over her, sidhe that we were. She was curled up on one of the armchairs near the back, a book on her lap as she consulted another, distractedly biting a knuckle.
This was the fulcrum. Here was so much collected knowledge that it made my head spin every time that I came in. Worlds opened and changed, warriors told their tales. Here I had learned about my father and the battle mages, about the rise and fall of the clans. But I had ever looked that enthralled, that lost in thought and absorbed by those worlds?
I didn’t want to break the spell. She was somewhere that called to her more as fully as it called to me. I knew that expression, the little distracted tics. I knew the feeling of being lost to those realities, the borrowed memories of the gone.I knew the book well, the one she focused on; it was the battle of the storm mages, and Aristophe and Gadrian featured prominently on its pages. They had only been checked out a few times from the archives of late, mostly by me. Below was a tome on healing herbs, but it lay on her lap almost as an afterthought.
She let out a sigh and turned the page;I hoped the day I had the chance to write a tome of my own someone would read it in such a way.
Anita.
I reached for the treatise I’d come to find and settled on my own chair to do my research. Later, ah later, I would look for Salo and find a way for him to introduce us. For now it was enough to share the room with a kindred heart.
