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The Akademiya library was, as always, too quiet for Layla’s thoughts.
It was where distractions went to die — or worse, multiply.
Layla hunched over a stack of star charts, her fingers tapping nervously against the edge of the desk. The rustle of parchment was the loudest sound for several minutes... until it was abruptly eclipsed by the unmistakable sound of someone pulling out a chair directly across from her.
She didn’t need to look up to know who it was.
The Scribe.
Effortlessly calm. Unapologetically present. And, judging by the heavy tome he’d dropped beside him, completely uninterested in how his sudden appearance might derail her fragile concentration.
Layla blinked at him.
He didn’t blink back.
“Uh, excuse me, but I actually had this table first…” she said meekly, her voice was low and misty—cracked at the first syllable that left her lips even she's trying not to sound as nervous as she felt.
Alhaitham didn’t even glance at her as he flipped open his book. “There are no ownership rights to library furniture,” he said smoothly. “I sat. You didn’t object fast enough. Now we’re coexisting.”
Layla stared at him, horrified. “C-Coexisting? At this table? While I’m trying to calculate stellar resonance effects on the subconscious?”
Alhaitham finally looked at her, his expression as flat as his tone. “If your focus is that fragile, perhaps the theory needs reworking.”
Layla’s jaw dropped. “That’s—! That’s not how mental endurance works!”
“You’re right,” he said, turning a page. “It’s not. Which is why I suggest you build some.”
Layla opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again, cheeks burning.
And yet… she didn’t leave.
༺❀༻
The silence that followed was aggressive. Not intentionally, but somehow… menacing.
Layla shifted in her seat, suddenly hyper-aware of the sound of her own breathing. Her quill made a tiny scratch-scratch noise on the page — far too loud in a room where even dust particles probably filed noise complaints.
She chanced a glance at him.
Still there. Still reading. Still Alhaitham.
Layla furrowed her brows, muttering to herself. “Okay, Layla. You’re the professional here. Deep breaths. He’s just a human paperweight with a superiority complex. Not a threat. Just... a mild existential disruption.”
Alhaitham didn’t react. Not visibly. But the corner of his mouth twitched.
Was that a smirk? No. Couldn’t be. Unless… oh Archons, did he hear that?
Desperate to escape the oppressive quiet, Layla cleared her throat — which only made things worse.
“Um. Scribe Alhaitham?” she ventured, not looking directly at him.
“Mm?”
He didn’t even pause his reading. Of course he didn’t.
“I—I was wondering if you could maybe… relocate to a different table?” Her voice wavered between polite academic and frantic stargazer teetering on the edge of another all-nighter. “It’s just that your… existence is kind of messing with my calculations.”
This time, he did look at her. Slowly.
“My existence.”
Layla blinked at him, unblinking. “Yes.”
There was a moment of silence.
“I see,” he said flatly. “I’ll be sure to dial it down.”
Layla squinted at him through the fog of her sleep deprivation. “Can you do that?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
She nodded solemnly, as though she’d just received a sacred truth from a divine entity. “Of course not. That makes perfect sense. Reality is a fixed constant—wait, no, I wrote a paper arguing the opposite...?”
Alhaitham shut his book with a quiet thud, which made her jump. “Miss.. Layla,” he said, tone patient but slightly pointed, “when was the last time you slept?”
Layla blinked rapidly, as if calculating.
“...Tuesday?”
“It’s Friday.”
“…That explains the hallucinated dissertation defense I had earlier.”
He sighed and leaned back slightly in his chair. “You’re spiraling. You’re also projecting. And now I’m part of your imaginary academic obstacles.”
Layla groaned and let her head fall onto the desk, arms flopping dramatically to the sides.
“This is why I don’t sit near people,” she mumbled into the wood. “They always turn into metaphors.”
──────⊱ ❈ ⊰──────
༺❀༻
Time passed.
Maybe ten minutes. Maybe more.
Neither of them moved.
The table between them was a cold battleground of silence and shuffling parchment. Occasionally, Layla muttered something about planetary alignments. Alhaitham, as always, remained unreadable, flipping through pages with all the urgency of a man utterly unaffected by the passage of time.
But then… he noticed it.
A tiny movement from the edge of his vision.
Layla’s head bobbed forward — once, twice — like a puppet with a fraying string. Her quill made a shaky loop on the page before slipping from her fingers entirely.
Alhaitham didn’t look up.
He had seen this happen before with sleep-deprived researchers. He had, in fact, calculated a near-perfect probability of it happening to her before the hour was out. She was predictable like that.
So when her head finally landed on the desk with a soft thud… he barely flinched.
What made him pause and lift his gaze — was the subtle shift in the air.
The silence had changed.
Alhaitham’s eyes slid toward her. Layla was still slumped forward, but there was a strange stillness to her posture now. No unnecessary twitching and irksome soft murmuring.
And then —Her hand moved.
Deliberate. Calm. She reached out, grabbed her fallen quill with uncanny precision, and began writing again — eyes still closed.
Alhaitham blinked.
The handwriting was different. Tighter. More confident. She wasn’t copying charts anymore. She was writing… something else.
Equations. Theoretical variables. Advanced, obscure formulations that should have taken hours of concentration.
“Interesting,” he murmured, leaning in.
“Don’t breathe on my chart, Scribe Alhaitham.”
Her voice was clearer now. The usual grogginess was gone.. There was a lilt to it — still her voice—Layla’s voice, but honed like the edge of a well-inked pen.
Alhaitham didn’t answer immediately.
The figure in front of him — slouched but poised, sleeping but articulate — was now twirling her quill between her fingers like it was a conductor’s baton. Her lips curled, amused.
“You’re staring,” she sing-songed softly, not opening her eyes. “How flattering.”
“I’m studying,” he corrected.
“Still flattering,” she hummed, tapping her chin with the quill. “Especially coming from you, Scribe Alhaitham. The famously expressionless wall.”
“…You’re different than before.”Alhaitham raised a brow. “You’re asleep.”
“Correction, Layla is asleep. I am... a work in progress.” she said without looking up. Her tone was bright but not airy — it was similar to someone who knew exactly what they were saying and enjoyed saying it just ambiguously enough to unnerve him.
He studied her closely. “An alternate personality?”
“No. A refinement,” she replied, pausing her writing to tap her quill against the table. “A conscious cluster born from dreams and pressure. You could say I’m the version of her that actually gets things done.”
“Hm.” Alhaitham’s gaze narrowed slightly. “That implies the original is inefficient.”
“Oh, no no no,” the other Layla said with a gentle scoff, as if he’d asked whether stars were hot. “We’re the same. She’s just… slower. More cautious. She doubts every beautiful thought she has before it can bloom, utterly drowning in second guesses.”
Her voice dipped just a little — still bubbly, but touched with something fiercely proud. “But me? I get to say it. Loudly.” She looked up, eyes half-lidded but bright with mischief.“Layla is a genius.”
Alhaitham tilted his head slightly. “She doesn’t believe that.”
“No,” the other Layla said with a sigh. “But she will. One day. I’ll make sure of it.”
For a moment, neither spoke. Then:
“You’re surprisingly coherent for a dream projection.”
“Thank you. I pride myself on being the most productive hallucination in the Akademiya.”
“…Do you always come out like this?”
“Only when she forgets to eat and rest for three days. I’m basically emergency maintenance.” She turned her head toward him then, eyes still shut, smile lazy but sharp. “And yet, somehow you still manage to be the most emotionally unavailable person at this table. Impressive, really.”
Alhaitham paused — the first visible crack in his usual composure.
“Given the circumstances,” he replied coolly, “I’d argue neither of us volunteered for this… conversation.”
She grinned. “Mhm, maybe. But only one of us is making it interesting.”
Alhaitham leaned back in his chair slightly, arms crossed, observing the girl across from him — if she could even be called that right now.
Another personality, she’d said. Or rather, an “improvement.”
That claim alone was dubious enough to warrant at least five peer-reviewed studies and a philosophical debate, but more than that… it felt plausible.
Too plausible.
The way she spoke, the precision of her words — bubbly but intentional — was nothing like the stammering, overworked Layla he’d watched nearly faint over her own star charts. And yet… there was no external trigger. No drama, no visible change.
Just a slump of the head and suddenly, this.
He narrowed his eyes.
Could this be a prank? Layla wasn’t the theatrical type, but students had gotten desperate for distraction before. Maybe she joined a theater troupe. Maybe someone had dared her to trick him. He wouldn’t put it past certain Darshans to entertain themselves that way.
Or maybe this entire act — the poised speech, the “alternate self,” the confident banter — was just her attempt to feel seen.
He opened his mouth, about to call her bluff—
But then she spoke. Casually. Without even lifting her head from her scribbles.
“I’d love to see your face when you finally decide it’s not a prank and start taking notes on me instead.”
His lips parted — not to speak, but because, somehow, she’d preempted his exact thought.
She looked up now, eyes still dreamy but amused.
“Go on,” she teased. “Write it down: ‘Subject exhibits unsettling accuracy in predicting lines of inquiry. Might be reading my eyebrows. Recommend mirror training.’”
Alhaitham stared at her in silence.
She smiled wider. “What? You do write internal commentary in that bored tone of yours, right?”
“…I don’t narrate myself.”
“Liar.”
“I don’t narrate myself,” Alhaitham repeated, voice calm but clipped.
Layla's other self gave a light, airy hum. She twirled the quill once, twice, then stopped to look at him with a tilt of her head.
“You do,” she said matter-of-factly. “Internally. Cold tone, too. It’s part of your distancing mechanism. Efficient, clinical. Like dissecting a butterfly without admitting it’s beautiful.”
His brows furrowed — barely.
“That’s quite the metaphor for someone who’s supposedly unconscious.”
“And that’s quite the defense for someone who hates being read.”
A flicker of something — not quite annoyance, not quite curiosity — passed through his eyes.
She leaned forward now, resting her chin on her hand, eyelids heavy but gaze unwavering.
“You catalog people, you know. Slot them into behavioral categories. Layla noticed it too, though she was too shy to say so.” Her voice softened, with something dangerously close to affection. “It’s your way of staying untouched.”
He didn’t respond, and for a moment, there was only the soft scratching of her quill again.
Then she added, like a footnote:
“But you’ve been staring at her notes for fifteen minutes.”
Alhaitham’s jaw tightened imperceptibly.
She smiled.
“Not my notes. Hers. The messy ones. The ones with constellations that loop back on themselves. You even adjusted your book so you could read them without making it obvious.”
Silence.
“You’re curious about her. Not because she’s useful. Not because she’s strange.” Her voice was gentle, but clear. “Because she thinks in spirals and you’re used to lines.”
Alhaitham’s mind was already assembling a counterargument — probable explanations, logical dismissals — but none felt satisfying. Not even to him.
And that irritated him.
He looked away first.
She grinned at that.
“Did I strike a nerve, Scribe?”
“You’re making assumptions,” he muttered, closing his book. “Dangerous ones.”
“And you’re avoiding the conclusion,” she said sweetly, stretching her arms overhead with the satisfied groan of a cat in sunlight. “Which is funny. Because you always act like you’re the only person in the room who knows things.”
Her voice dropped just a touch, tone thoughtful, like it was a secret slipping through a crack in the wall.
“You didn’t expect me to see you.”
Alhaitham stood. Slowly. Calmly. As if leaving a room that wasn’t currently unseating the entire scaffolding of his composure.
Layla — or what remained of her — gave a dreamy little wave.
“Tell her she’s brilliant when she wakes up,” she murmured. “She won’t believe you. But say it anyway.”
He didn’t respond.
He just walked away, the sound of his footsteps more tense than usual.
She waited until the door closed softly behind him, then slumped forward like a puppet with cut strings.
Layla snored once, softly, face smushed sideways on her notes.