Chapter Text
The seat by the third floor window had been, for two years and one semester, functionally Mephiles'.
Not officially - the university had opinions about the reservation of communal study spaces and Mephiles had read them, found them reasonable in principle, irrelevant in practice, because the principle assumed someone else would want this specific seat. Window on the left, column on the right providing acoustic separation on the right, sightline to the door without being adjacent to it.
So when Mephiles climbed the stairs to the third floor at 7:52am, coffee in hand, thesis notes flagged and ready, he turned the corner and stopped.
Someone was in his seat... had basically moved in to his seat. A small plant - a plant, on the library table, in a pot with a small painted sun on it - positioned near the window with evident intentionality. Sticky notes in three colors arranged in a system that suggested either genuine organizational methodology or complete psychological chaos, and from this distance Mephiles could not determine which.
Silver had found the spot at 7:08am, which he privately considered a personal best. The seat by the window on the third floor was the best seat in the entire graduate library. It had perfect light, was quiet even among early study chatter, the perfect distance from everything so he could see people coming without getting startled when he was deep in a source.
So when he felt someone approach his perfect studying utopia, he looked up.
It happened the way these things apparently happened - which Mephiles knew only academically, from papers he had read with the detached interest of someone studying a phenomenon that did not apply to him. One moment the world was the specific, functional greyscale it had always been.
And the next moment was everything
Mephiles' entire vocabulary for this was academic and therefore completely useless... the window was warm, but its quality was so much more than its lightness. It was soft over the hedgehog's white fur... his golden eyes... the hoodie that was some color he'd never considered picturing before. Never thought he would need to.
Color wasn't for those without a match, a mate, a future.
The person at his table smiled. It was an uncomplicated smile, open and slightly apologetic, the smile of someone who had not done anything wrong and knew it and was being friendly.
"Oh hey - sorry, is this your usual spot? I can move if-"
"No," Mephiles replied fast, cold, simple - answering both concisely, which was not what he had intended to say. He had intended to say yes. He had intended a brief, professional exchange resulting in the restoration of the correct order of things.
The correct order of things being him, alone by the window, living in eternal greyscale. The correct order of things meaning he'd remain unaffected by simple soft lines and halo'd fur, fuzzy feelings.
"Oh good! There's plenty of room, I've kind of spread out a little," he motioned around sheepishly. "I'm Silver, by the way. Social work. Second year."
Silver.
The name arrived and did something to Mephiles' chest that he did not have time to examine because he was also suddenly performing a rapid cross-reference against everything he had read in the last three weeks-
Silver. Second year social work. Thesis on support frameworks for displaced youth. The abstract had been - he had read it twice, which he had not done with any of the other assigned abstracts, because the methodological approach had been genuinely-
This was Silver.
This was Silver.
Mephiles looked at the sticky notes, the plant, the wild top quills, the too-bright colored hoodie that seemed to glow... and couldn't make sense between that and this... this bright mess. He looked at all of it and could not make the image resolve with the abstract he'd read — could not reconcile this bright, sprawling, plant-keeping mess with the careful methodological intelligence of those pages. The abstract had been precise, rigorous.
The abstract had not prepared him for color.
Among other reasons, Mephiles was not seeing the vision for how Silver was going to be a useful peer reviewer.
Not when he was so distracting.
He looked at the color of the window light, which he still did not have a name for, which was apparently something he was going to have to address at some point.
He sat down across from him because the alternative was standing in the aisle having an experience, and Mephiles did not have experiences in library aisles. He was supposed to have them, ever.
Let alone, encroaching upon the very thing that made him him. Would and were about to pull him from the either of alone by sheer accidental force.
"Mephiles," he said. "Architecture. Third year."
A rapid series of micro expressions that Mephiles, who had spent years learning to read people with precision, catalogued as recognition, recalibration, alarm, suppression of the alarm, schooled neutrality.
Interesting.
"Oh," Silver said, with the careful casualness of someone defusing something. Then, because he was constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone: "Cool. I mean - that's so cool, actually. Architecture. You must be, like, really good at spatial stuff. Do you just - see buildings differently? Like when you walk into a room, do you just know things about it?"
He was leaning forward slightly. He seemed genuinely interested. He seemed like someone who had asked this question before and gotten strange looks and was going to ask it again anyway.
The peer reviewer whose abstract demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of systemic failure points in designed environments is asking if I just know things about rooms.
Was asking a dumb question like there was nothing else on his mind. Like he wasn't discovering color for the first time - or worse, like he already knew it, was already used to it, which would mean-
"Yes," he said, and nothing else.
Silver nodded, entirely unbothered by the closed door. "That's awesome," he said, and looked back at his laptop with the satisfied expression of someone who had learned something interesting, as though Mephiles had given him something generous
He sat. He was going to work. He was going to sit here and work and the fact that the window light was doing something he didn't have language for was simply a new variable. Variables could be managed.
Mephiles opened his thesis notes, already thinking maybe he should review them again before they would be indefinitely read over by his apparent soulmate.
He was going to be fine.
He already knew he wasn't going to be fine.
He stayed for forty minutes that damn name and all the thoughts he'd read attached to it making the inside of his head insufferable, believing any more or less would be suspicious. Forty minutes of Silver working across from him with the total unselfconsciousness of someone who had simply never learned to take up less space.
When he had reached what he would only ever privately acknowledge was his limit, he looked up. Silver was highlighting something, chin propped in one hand, a small frown of concentration pulling at his expression.
Cute.
Silver...
"Is that the color you call your fur?" Mephiles heard himself asking before he sought better of it.
"Color?" Silver asked, distantly wistful, almost - then gone quickly. I've never thought about color."
"Do you not see it?"
"Oh, gosh," he blushed, rubbing the back of his head. "I'd never be so lucky."
Red, pink... orange. Not apt, not enough... there had to be better words to capture it.
It was, Silver knew, an odd thing to ask a stranger. An intimate thing, almost. You didn't ask about colors on a first meeting. It was easy to misunderstand. Easy for someone to think you were saying something you weren't, or weren't saying something you were.
He always wished he could though, see color. Thought he had a few times before - thought he should have. He'd been in love before, didn't understand how it wouldn't be enough to cause the change, how love wasn't enough. He eventually had his eyes check, was told he just didn't have the chromosome for it. That he never would.
He had not stopped hoping. He had simply learned to carry it more lightly.
Anyway was a word he had gotten very good at.
Mephiles... didn't know what to do with that. So he packed his things, unhurried.
"Can I ask you something?" Silver ventured.
Mephiles did not look up. "We're not scheduled until Thursday."
"I know." The specific rustle of Silver repositioning, someone who could not quite sit still. "It's just - your abstract..."
He'd also read ahead...
"It's just — when you talk about spaces that don't manipulate emotional states. You're positioning that as the ideal. But isn't any designed space manipulative by definition? Like - the absence of manipulation is still a choice that affects how people move and feel. You can't actually design a neutral space. You can only design a space that manipulates people toward neutrality, which is its own kind of-"
He stopped.
The question was, objectively, the single most precise articulation of the central tension in his thesis that anyone had produced. Including his advisor. Including himself, in his weaker moments at 2am when the argument started to feel circular.
"Thursday," Mephiles said.
Silver tilted his head, amused. "You need time to think it over?"
"No. You do," he defended, gaslighting as he shrugged his bag over his shoulder, prepared for departure.
"Hey, can I.... could I grab your number?" Silver asked. "We're peer reviewers for this program after all, aren't we?" He was already holding out his phone. Open, unlocked, ready. A reasonable thing between two people who would be working together.
Mephiles looked at the phone like he wasn't trying to hold his entire philosophical framework together with both hands and spared one to tap his information in. Text was easier than email, after all.
Silver was already smiling when he handed it back - not at Mephiles specifically, just in the general direction of things working out, the smile of someone for whom the world was, on balance, good. He tucked his phone away and turned back to his sources, closing a pleasant chapter and opening the next one.
Mephiles watched this for approximately two seconds.
And then he left, contemplating this reflex toward lightness when he'd always been reliably, usefully dark for as long as he could remember.
The stairwell was grey.
Just the stairwell - the rest of the world had renegotiated itself into technicolor and was not giving normalcy back. It was unmistakable.
It was remarkable.
This was going to be a problem.
His phone buzzed.
A text from an unsaved number. A small waving emoji. Then: see you thursday :)