Work Text:
Agott swung her legs off the edge of her narrow bed, rubbing at her temples where a dull ache was already taking root. Agott didn’t like waking up second. Being second meant the world had a head start on her, and right now, that head start belonged to Coco, who was almost certainly doing something foolish or childish.
Agott pulled her robe tight around her shoulders and stepped into the corridor, her bare feet making no sound against the worn stone floor. The door to their shared workroom was pulled slightly ajar, casting a warm yellow wedge of lantern light across the hallway.
When Agott pushed the door open, Coco was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her hair a wild, sunny mess that looked like it hadn't seen a comb since two days ago. She was holding a small piece of heavy paper, tapping the blunt end of a pen against her chin, completely absorbed in whatever she was doing.
Agott stood in the doorway for a long time, crossing her arms.
“You're making noise again,” Agott suddenly said, her voice dry and gravelly with sleep.
Coco jumped, nearly dropping her pen, before her head snapped up and her face split into that ridiculous grin she always wore when she got caught red-handed. “Agott! Good morning. Sorry if I was being noisy, I was just—”
“I found three last night,” Agott interrupted, walking over to her own desk and pulling a small, folded square of paper out from under her inkwell. She dropped it onto the wood with a quiet flick. “And two the day before that. Tucked between my spellbooks. Behind my spare papers. Under the container where I place my nibs.”
Coco blinked, her eyes darting to the tiny square of paper, then back up to Agott. “Oh. Those.”
“Yes, those,” Agott snapped, though her usual aggression was worn down by the early hour. She sat down on her side of the room, leaning her chin on her hand as she glared across the space between them. “Why do you keep putting notes on my desk? It’s… childish…” Agott scoffed.
“If you have something to tell me about our assignments, just say it out loud.”
Coco tucked a stray curl behind her ear, her thumb tracing the edge of her wooden desk. She didn't look flustered. Just stubbornly fond, the way she got whenever Agott tried to build a wall out of technicalities.
“Well, it's because they aren't about assignments,” Coco said softly.
“Then what are they?” Agott rolled her eyes, before dramatically dropping her shoulders which she made sure Coco saw. “It’s ridiculous, Coco. I move my ruler, there's a star. I open my container, there's a little drawing of puff-puff. It’s cluttered.”
“I just like putting them there,” Coco said simply. She offered no defense, no deep explanation. Always using the truth that always made Agott’s chest feel uncomfortably tight. Coco picked up her pen again, dipping it into a pot of black ink. “I like knowing you'll find them when you're working hard. That's all.”
Agott stared at her, waiting for the punchline, or at least a sheepish apology. But Coco just smiled down at her paper, her shoulders relaxing as she began to sketch a clean line with practiced ease.
Agott let out a harsh breath through her nose and turned toward her own desk. She picked up the folded paper she’d dropped earlier, her fingers lingering on the coarse texture of the cheap scrap paper Coco loved to use. She didn't throw it away. She tucked it carefully into the inside pocket of her cloak, out of sight, before picking up her own pen.
“You're a distraction,” Agott muttered under her breath, setting the pen to the paper.
“Agott, I heard that!” Coco called out, bright and entirely unbothered.
“You were meant to,” Agott grumbled, though as she turned her head away, the faint, stubborn heat rising to her ears was much harder to hide than the note.
Over the next few three years, the paper scraps became a persistent, inescapable presence in Agott’s daily life.
It was never an organized endeavor on Coco’s part. It was messy and haphazard, born entirely out of Coco’s overabundance of feeling and her habit of scribbling on whatever surface was closest to her hand. Sometimes it was a torn strip of rough sketch-paper tucked into the pages of Agott’s favorite book. Other times, it was a tiny origami bird resting directly on top of her favorite spot in the desk, or a curved scrap hidden inside the drawer where Agott kept her spare silver.
The notes themselves were embarrassingly mundane.
Don't forget to drink water!
One had read, accompanied by a lopsided sketch of water.
The sunset turned the sky purple today, it made me think of your eyes, said another, written in Coco’s sprawling, uneven handwriting that always ran slightly off the edge of the paper.
Every single time Agott found one, her reaction was identical. Her eyebrows would draw together in a sharp line, her lips would press into a thin, tight seam, and she would let out a loud, deliberate sigh designed to carry across the room.
“Coco,” Agott would say, holding the paper up between two fingers like it was covered in soot. “You're cluttering my workspace again… This is distracting.”
Coco would look up from her own work, usually with an ink smudge on her cheek or nose, and offer that same unbothered, sunny grin. “Sorry, Agott! I just had an extra piece of paper.”
“Then throw it away," Agott would grumble, rolling her eyes and turning back to her book, though she couldn't avoid the gentleness in her voice. “We are apprentices of Master Qifrey. We shouldn't be wasting parchment on frivolous nonsense.”
Yet, not a single note ever made it into the waste bin.
When Coco wasn't looking—at least when she was out fetching water from the spring, or deep in conversation with Tetia and Richeh—Agott’s hand would slip quietly into her desk drawer. She had hidden a small, flat wooden box beneath her stack of blank papers. Inside lay every single scrap of paper Coco had ever left behind, smoothed out carefully with the flat of Agott's thumb to press away the creases.
Agott told herself it was purely for the sake of order. If she left them out, they would get lost or damaged, and leaving trash around the atelier was bad practice.
But late at night, when the rest of the bedroom was dark and her own soft, steady breathing filled the quiet air, Agott would sit on the edge of her bed. In the dim amber glow of a tiny light spell, she would pull out the box and read them again, tracing the dark ink lines with the tip of her finger.
There was a warmth in those ridiculous little scraps that Agott didn't know how to ask for, and certainly didn't know how to accept out in the open. Growing up under the heavy expectations of her family's lineage, everything had to be earned, proven, and fought for. Kindness was rare, and conditional.
But Coco just gave it away. She gave it away on scraps of trash paper, without expecting anything in return, simply because she felt it.
One evening, after a particularly long day of practicing complex geometric curves, Agott sat at her desk, her shoulders aching and her head throbbing. She pulled open her top drawer to grab a fresh piece of charcoal, and there, resting right on top, was a new note.
This one had no words. It was just a small, carefully drawn sketch of the two of them sitting side-by-side at their desks. Coco’s figure was a jumble of messy lines, while Agott’s was drawn with neat edges. Above Agott’s head, Coco had drawn a tiny, perfect star.
Agott stared at the drawing for a long time. Her fingers tightened around the edges of the paper, her chest aching with a strange, heavy affection that felt almost terrifying in its intensity.
Agott let out a quiet breath, her frown softening into something tired and gentle. She carefully opened her wooden box, placed the drawing inside with the others, and closed the lid with a soft click.
Then, picking up her own piece of charcoal, Agott tore a small corner off a blank sheet of parchment. She wrote three neat words, folded the scrap twice. She would wait until the dead of night, when Coco was really asleep, to make her way out of her room to slip it under Coco’s sleeping hand.
But she never got to slip that note.
The door to the shared workroom creaked open, but the silence of the morning immediately rushed out to meet her.
Agott stepped into the room, her hand clutching the edge of the doorframe so tightly her knuckles turned white. Her eyes were swollen, the faint red rims stinging under the light that seeped through the windows, and her head throbbed after the hour she’d spent curled on Coco's bed, choking on her own tears.
In the foggy haze of her mind, Agott’s gaze instinctively darted across the space. Her eyes drifted straight toward her own desk on instinct.
“The notes,” her mind whispered an irrational lie to keep her from breaking entirely. “The notes.”
For years, no matter how early Agott woke, no matter how miserable or dark the day felt, there was always paper. Messy, crumpled, foolish little scraps of parchment tucked into every corner of her life. Notes drawn with lopsided brushbugs or puff-puff, notes begging her to drink water, notes telling her that the sky looked like her eyes.
She expected it. She expected it all. For a desperate second, her brain refused to accept the reality of the empty atelier. She expected to see a tiny, folded square of paper tucked carelessly behind her booms.
Or maybe an “I love you” that Coco never got to sneak in.
She staggered toward her workspace, her pulse hammering in her ears like a drum. Agott reached out, her fingers trembling as she grasped the edge of her wooden desk. She looked down, her wide, purple eyes searching the smooth surface.
But there was nothing.
The wooden surface of her desk was bare.
“Coco?” she choked out, the name slipping past her lips before she could stop it. It was broken. Pathetic. A whisper that echoed uselessly off the stone walls. Yet Agott believed that if she broke, then maybe Coco would appear once again.
“She left them,” Agott muttered to the empty room. “She always leaves them. She forgets her ink caps, she forgets to clean her papers... she would have left one...”
Driven by a sudden wave of panic, Agott began pulling her desk apart. She yanked open the top drawer so hard the wooden stoppers groaned. She shoved aside her nibs, scattered her clean papers, and ripped through her reference books, her fingers tearing at the bindings in a desperate search.
“Where is it?” she choked out, her voice rising in pitch, sounding small and terrified. “Coco, where did you put it? Where is the note?!”
She dropped to her knees, looking under the desk legs, sweeping her hands wildly across the dusty floorboards. She checked behind her ink bottles, inside her pencil cases, under her ruler.
She checked again. She checked the spots where Coco used to hide them when she thought Agott wasn't looking. She flipped over every piece of paper on her desk, hoping against hope that she had missed a spot, that Coco had scribbled one last foolish, unprompted message before the world collapsed.
But there were no more paper scraps. No more frivolous distractions.
No more Coco.
Coco wasn't hiding in the room down the hall. Coco wasn’t out with Master Qifrey to help with chores. Coco wasn't downstairs making up silly spells and games with Richeh and Tetia. Coco wasn't going to look up with an ink smudge on her cheek and smile like Agott’s annoyance was the fondest thing in the world. Coco wasn't here to hold Agott.
Coco was everywhere but the atelier.
Agott pulled her hand back, pressing her fist against her mouth to smother a jagged sob that threatened to tear through her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn't help. All she could see was the empty desk.
Coco had written her final goodbye in the letter left on the desk, and now the paper had run out. There would never be another scrap ever again.
That thought, now reality, scared Agott more than her childhood fears combined.
She sobbed until her chest burned, until she couldn't breathe, crushed under the suffocating weight of a room that would never again hold the only magic that had ever truly mattered to her.
Agott stood at her desk, her cloak fastened tightly at her neck. Outside, the early morning air was crisp and still, waiting for the day to fully break.
“Are you ready, Agott?” Qifrey asked softly from outside of the room, his voice cutting gently through the morning quiet. “We have a long trip ahead of us.”
“Just a moment, Master,” Agott replied, her tone even, though her fingers twitched slightly against the edge of her sleeve.
She reached into the secret spot and pulled out the small, flat wooden box she had guarded for so long. Setting it on the dark wood of her desk, she opened the lid. Inside lay the neat stack of scrap paper, each piece carefully flattened by her thumb over the weeks.
Agott’s fingers hovered over the pile before sliding a tiny, creased piece of rough paper from the top.
She unfolded it gently. Written in Coco’s familiar, uneven handwriting—hastily scribbled months ago on a random day when they were just practicing basic spells—were two simple words:
Be safe!
Next to the text was a tiny drawing of a smiling shield.
Agott stared down at the scrap of paper. For a long second, the quiet in the room seemed to stretch into something timeless. The fading ink felt present. It felt direct. It felt like a fresh reminder left on her desk just moments before she walked out the door.
A soft, steady breath escaped Agott’s lips. She didn't let her hands shake. She didn't let a single tear fall. Carefully, Agott folded the note back into its neat square and tucked it into the inner pocket of her robe.
“I will, Coco,” Agott whispered into the quiet space.
She turned on her heel and walked back to the doorway of their workroom where Qifrey was waiting.