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Rei wakes slowly, content and warm. Nestled in numerous pillows and cocooned in a thick blanket, its edges tucked around her just so, she breathes deep, reluctant to give up on sleep just yet. Beneath the most obvious clean-soap-smell of freshly washed sheets, Asra's scent comes the strongest—smoke and tea leaves and rainwater; with another inhale comes the lingering fragrances of his latest journey—wheat and citrus and a thousand spices she can only guess at, hints of all the places he's been and sights he's seen.
Places he's left behind, too—because he's here, again. At the shop.
(At home.)
Or at least he was when she'd fallen asleep the night before.
She cracks an eye open to confirm that the other side of the bed is indeed empty, and only then realizes that the shop is far too quiet than it should have been if Asra was awake and present. Not so very long ago she'd have started getting anxious, wondering where he could've gone, whether he'd left for good, but she trusts him now when he says he won't leave for a long trip without telling her. So instead she just flops back onto the bed and reaches out sleepily with her magic, lazily seeking out the traces he must have left.
There. In the kitchenette, ingredients for . . . something are scattered haphazardly across the counter, as if he'd started making breakfast and left in the middle of it. He must've gone to fetch some missing ingredient from the market, then.
Smiling to herself at his thoughtfulness, she rolls out of bed and pads over to the kitchen to investigate, eyes still half-closed. She only makes it halfway across the room before she stumbles over something on the floor, just barely regaining her balance in time to avoid falling on her face.
It's Asra's bag. He'd tossed it there unceremoniously the night before, she remembers, and now its contents have tumbled out from when she'd tripped over it. She shakes her head, tsk-ing at his messy tendencies, fully aware of the fond smile on her face but refusing to feel embarrassed about it with no one around to see. She bends down to gather his belongings into some semblance of order, placing them back into the bag with more care than he probably had—a vial with several chestnuts, a pouch of seasoning herbs, his tarot deck, plus various odds and ends he'd presumably accrued on his travels. There is a colorful swatch of fabric with intricate woven designs in violet and gold that she assumes he must have gotten to add to her growing collection; she makes a mental note act surprised later as she stuffs it into the bottom of the bag.
The smaller trinkets all put away, there is only one more thing left on the floor—the bulky, tattered rectangle that she recognizes as his grimoire. She's seen it before; Asra writes it in frequently, often muttering to himself or to Faust as he does, and occasionally he's even shown her certain pages in the course of their lessons together.
Out of idle curiosity, she cracks it open to the middle and is immediately assaulted with a wealth of information, meticulously written down in Asra's messy scrawl: blocks of text describing the properties of crystals, or careful lists of the uses of rare herbs. She skims over the recipe to a healing salve she'd taught him herself, smiling at the memory of when he'd written it down, reminiscing fondly about his childlike excitement at learning something that could come in useful on his travels.
Interspersed between the paragraphs are drawings of glyphs, both familiar and not, each carefully labeled as to their purpose.
For cleansing water. For summoning fire. For opening portals. She sees one labeled For Protection, and is surprised when she recognizes it as the same one discreetly carved on the post by the front door. Another one bears a resemblance to the glyph he'd long ago etched on the headboard of their bed, labeled For Guarding Against Nightmares.
Her curiosity piqued, she turns the page to find more of the same—spells she's seen him cast alongside ones she's never even imagined, the ink on the page thrumming with Asra's magic. The next page has a little sketch of Faust in the corner, and it makes her smile. There are other sketches, too—fitted in the margins or wherever there's space: rolling vistas and bustling alleys and vast, untouched horizons. Places she's never seen, places he's never told her about.
(Places he could disappear to at a moment's notice. Places he may never come back from, leaving her none the wiser as to why.)
She shakes her head, willing away the little pang in her heart. She doesn't believe that, she tells herself firmly. And even if it was true, he certainly doesn't owe her anything—not tales of his travels or stories of his past or even promises to come back to the shop.
(To her.)
But still he does keep coming back, every time, without fail—and that, more than anything, makes her certain that he means to be here. That he's meant to be here. She doesn't need the cards or the stars to tell her that.
Three more pages in, the contents begin to change. Maps start showing up with greater frequency, alongside lists of magical components that make no sense at first glance. She reads and re-reads, muttering quietly to herself as she mulls it over, and realizes with a start that they're all used to help with memory problems. There are spells to remedy headaches, too, and the margins are filled with incoherent little notes—rumors about some magical artifact or another: an hourglass that supposedly lets you see the past, a crystal that can be used to store memories.
The next several pages hold more of the same—spells to help someone remember, tinctures that help improve one's memory—except the writing takes on a frantic edge, as if Asra was becoming increasingly desperate to find something that worked.
She is confused, at first; Asra has possibly the best memory of anyone she knows. He adamantly refuses to take a shopping list whenever he goes to the market, but somehow always gets everything they need. She's seen him draw complex sigils without so much as glancing at a reference. He remembers everything, like her favorite flower or the way she takes her tea, as well as birthdays and holidays and any other day of the vaguest importance, and furthermore always makes it a point to come home in time to celebrate with her, no matter how far he's traveled or how long he's been gone . . .
And yet, and yet, there are entire pages of his grimoire dedicated to helping someone remember, so could it be . . .
They never talk anymore about the blank slate of her past. She used to ask, a lot, and occasionally he had tried to help her remember fragments of it, until the inevitable headaches she'd get made him sigh in defeat and just tell her to let it go.
(She'd thought he always looked more disappointed than she felt, all those times.)
She had thought he'd given up on that venture entirely. She was certainly this close to just accepting that her missing memories would always stay missing, but now . . .
Now, with pages and pages worth of Asra's efforts spread out before her, could it be that all this time, he—
Had he . . . been doing all this for her?
The instinctive, bone-deep yes sounds through her heart even before she turns the page and is greeted with her own likeness, carefully sketched in the margins, squeezed around the edges of maps and strange lists and spells she's never been taught. Here, she's smiling; in another corner she's seemingly talking to Faust draped around her shoulders. In the upper corner of the next page, next to several charted constellations, a portrait of her has been painstakingly done, smudges of erasures lining the edges, as if he'd been trying to draw her from memory.
(If she hadn't already been so painfully, embarrassingly infatuated with him before, then she sure as hell was now.)
A tightness wraps around her heart as she lightly traces the lines of the sketch, overcome with a surge of affection in the face of his quiet, unassuming devotion. It isn't as if she hadn't known Asra cared; that he'd stayed with her throughout those first bleak days when she was completely helpless was evidence enough, but this . . .
For the first time in a long while, she's hopeful—there's the smallest possibility of her remembering, no matter how unlikely it seems.
(And for the first time ever, she's hopeful—perhaps her feelings aren't quite so one-sided after all, no matter how unlikely that seems.)
The sound of the front door opening wipes the silly smile off her face, and she hurriedly stuffs Asra's grimoire back into his bag as the jaunty clip-clip of his boots drift up from below. She peers down the stairwell and is greeted with a smile—her favorite smile in all the world—warm and bright below his messy mop of hair.
"Oh, Rei. You're up." He takes the steps two at a time, the canvas bag they use for shopping swaying with his movement from where it's slung over his shoulder. "Hungry already?"
He grins, indulgent, and gives her a one-armed hug without breaking his stride. Laughing, she returns it, allowing herself to be dragged along to the kitchen as he tells her what the grocer did and what the baker said and how he'd bought two loaves of pumpkin bread for both of them but ended up giving his to the little street urchin who tried to pickpocket him but had gotten terrified when Faust poked her head out from beneath his coat.
"They started crying, right there on the street," he rambles on, as she sits atop the counter and watches him spread out his purchases. "I guess they weren't too fond of snakes?" He laughs, then, and it echoes around the room, warming up the little space better than any fire could.
His laugh sounds like water, she thinks dreamily. How had she ever gone so long without hearing that laugh?
"Don't worry, though," he continues, oblivious to her reverie. "I still have yours. Here."
She's startled out of her daydreaming when he holds out the loaf of pumpkin bread inches from her face. She looks at the bread, then lets her gaze follow the trail of his arm up to his smiling face.
And he's beautiful, backlit by the morning sun streaming through the window, and he's here, offering her just one more solid proof that he cares.
She takes the bread, and says, softly, "Thank you."
For caring. For coming home, again and again. For staying, year after year after year.
Asra raises a brow at her, sensing the weight behind her words but not their intent.
"You're really not that hard to please, huh?" he says, offering her a teasing, lopsided grin. Normally she would blush at his gentle ribbing, but as it is, her heart is too full of happiness to feel even the slightest bit embarrassed.
"You should see what I brought back for you this time," he continues, turning back to his cooking. "You're going to love it."
"Can't wait," she says, holding a hand out to Faust when she pops out from beneath Asra's scarf. The snake flicks a curious tongue at her hand, smelling her fingers, before slithering up her arm to drape around her neck. Faust gives her an amused sort of look, red eyes bright with playful mischief.
Rei gives her a furtive wink, and the responding hiss as Faust settles around her shoulders sounds a lot like a conspiratorial giggle. Asra sends the two of them a bemused look, hands still occupied with whatever he's cooking, but Rei, unwilling to give him an explanation, just flashes him a winning smile, swinging her legs happily, marveling at how the shop feels more like home with both of them around.