✧ Scene: Departures

He leaves first.

Aaric stepped away from the manuscript slowly, as though releasing something precious. He didn’t look at her. Not directly. Just enough to catch the soft curve of her expression — not curiosity, not discomfort. Something else. Something still.

He turned and walked toward the exit, his footsteps careful against the worn stone floor.

Outside, the late afternoon sun hit the limestone buildings with an ancient warmth. But he didn’t feel it.

Inside him, a restlessness stirred.

What are you doing?
You don't know her.
This is projection — the residue of a moment, nothing more.

His father’s voice again — clinical, doubting, threaded with caution:

“Longing is the enemy of clarity. Learn to master it, or it will master you.”

Aaric tightened his jaw.

She was a stranger. A scholar. A woman whose writing pierced more deeply than he was prepared for. And still… that verse. Her silence. The unwavering calm with which she had stayed.

He paused on the narrow bridge over the old canal, watching the shadows curl along the water.

Why didn’t you stay longer? Why didn’t you say something?

Because he wasn’t ready.
Because the voice in him still belonged to someone else.

He would return to Cambridge. He had told himself this would only be a few weeks.
But a voice — quieter than the old one, less familiar — whispered:

You are no longer sure what you came here for.

---

She leaves minutes later.

Zahra remained, long after the case had become just glass again.

When she finally stepped outside, the evening call to prayer echoed softly from a distant masjid. She paused in the doorway, the cool air brushing her skin, and she closed her eyes for a moment.

She had felt his presence before she saw him.
She had read him before she met him.
And now, in this holy quiet, she had seen enough.

But still, she didn’t move to stop him.

Not because she was afraid.

But because something in her whispered:

Not yet.

Her mother’s voice stirred, unbidden:

“You are always waiting for something that does not exist. That kind of man — he is not real.”

She sighed.

But Zahra knew better now.

He was real. She had seen him. Or rather, the part of him he barely knew how to protect — the part hidden beneath performance and precision.

She walked slowly, the day’s light softening around her, her steps light yet firm.

She wasn’t trying to hold on to him.

But she wouldn’t run from the alignment either.

There was still more to be written — in both of them.
And perhaps, if the pages turned rightly, together.