Lucien woke up because someone was going through his fridge.
Not subtly. Whoever it was had opened every drawer, moved things around, and was now conducting what sounded like a full audit of his condiment situation. He opened his eyes. The chair. Right. He'd fallen asleep in the chair.
The woman from last night was standing in his kitchen in her torn jacket, one hand on the fridge door, looking at the contents with the specific disappointment of someone who had been hoping for something that wasn't there.
"There's no beer," Lucien said.
"I can see that." She closed the fridge. Opened it again. Closed it.
"Still no beer, my mothers catholic."
She looked at him. In the daylight she looked worse than last night, which was impressive given last night. The bruising along her jaw had deepened overnight. Her lip was swollen. She also looked like she was running on about four hours of bad sleep and a decision she hadn't fully committed to yet.
Her eyes went to his hair.
He watched her clock it. Watched something move across her face that wasn't quite guilt and wasn't quite surprise because she'd already seen it last night. It was something quieter than both of those. She looked away first.
"Did you do this on purpose," Lucien said.
"No." Immediate. No hesitation.
He nodded. That tracked with everything else about last night.
"Is it permanent."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. "The hair?"
"The hair."
She made a face that was trying to be reassuring and landing somewhere closer to uncertain. "Probably."
"Probably."
"Look it's —" She stopped. Pressed her fingers to her temple. "Do you have Tylenol."
"Cabinet above the sink."
She found it, shook two out, swallowed them dry in the way of someone who had done that before, and then picked up her jacket from the back of the couch where he'd folded it last night. She checked the pockets. Found whatever she was looking for. Put the jacket on.
Lucien watched her move toward the door with the calm efficiency of someone who had mentally already left.
"Where are you going," he said.
She stopped.
Didn't turn around immediately. Just stopped, hand not quite on the door handle, and he could see her deciding something from across the room. The back of her neck. The set of her shoulders.
She turned around.
Looked at him for a second. Then at the hole in his ceiling. Then at him again.
She sighed. It came from somewhere deep.
"Sit down," she said. "And for the record I am not a teacher."
She sat on his couch, looked around his apartment like she was seeing it properly for the first time, and said: "Okay so the thing is."
Then she stopped.
"The thing is," Lucien prompted.
"I'm getting there." She pulled one knee up, elbow on it, thinking. "Do you have food actually. Not beer. Food."
"Cabinet above the stove."
She got up, found the granola bars, came back and ate one standing before she'd fully sat back down. Lucien waited. He'd learned in the last thirty seconds that rushing this woman produced nothing useful.
"You know what mages are," she said. Not a question.
"Generally. Yeah."
"Okay so generally is about where I'm starting." She broke off a piece of the granola bar. "The whole sixth sense thing that gets talked about in the news and whatever. That's real. It's a neurological thing, specific parts of the brain that most people have completely dormant. Some people have it active. Those are mages." She pointed at herself. Then at him. "Now you too apparently."
"Because of last night."
"Because last night I was." She paused. "I was running from something and I wasn't in great shape and my Raichi was everywhere and yours was just sitting there dormant and it basically." She made an explosion gesture with her hands. "Woke yours up. Which I'm sorry about by the way. I'm not going to keep saying it but I am."
"What's Raichi."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. This was clearly a question she had never had to answer from scratch before. "It's. Okay. You know how there's like. Oxygen in the air, right. It's there, it's real, but you can't see it. You just use it without thinking about it."
"Sure."
"Raichi is like that except most people don't even use it. It runs through everything. Every object, every person, the walls, the floor, all of it. And what you felt last night, that humming, that presence thing where everything felt like it had weight suddenly?"
Lucien straightened slightly. He hadn't told her about the humming.
She caught his expression. "Yeah. I know. That's what it feels like when the sixth sense first comes online. You were feeling Raichi for the first time." She finished the granola bar. Grabbed another one. He made a mental note to buy more. "And now you'll always feel it. Forever. Congratulations."
"Great," Lucien said.
His phone buzzed. He glanced at it.
Ryan. bro you never called. you good??
all good. explain later. Sent.
"Who's that," Sora said.
"Friend. Keep going."
She kept going. The Covenant came up next and here at least Lucien had a foundation. Everyone knew the Covenant existed. Government agency, mage oversight, they registered people and made sure nothing catastrophic happened. He'd seen them mentioned in the news the same way he'd seen NASA mentioned in the news. Real, distant, not his problem.
"It's your problem now," Sora said, when he said as much. "The second your sixth sense activated you became someone they're going to want to find and register. The hair doesn't help." She gestured at his head. "You can't exactly blend in anymore."
"How fast."
She wobbled her hand. "Depends. You're not putting off much yet, you just woke up. But eventually someone sensitive is going to walk past you and feel something and make a call." She looked at him steadily. "You want to be registered before that happens rather than after. Trust me."
"Why."
"Because mages who get found before they register look like they were hiding. And mages who look like they were hiding get treated accordingly." She said it simply, no drama in it. The first thing she'd said that didn't have any performance around it.
Lucien filed that.
"So I need to register," he said.
"You need to get assessed first. Someone needs to look at you, figure out what you've got, before you walk into the Covenant blind." She paused. "And that's where." She stopped again. Seemed to be choosing words. "I'm connected to a group. A clan. They have people who can do that assessment quietly, before any of this gets official."
"And you're taking me there."
She looked at the granola bar in her hand. Looked at the hole in his ceiling. Looked at him.
"Yeah," she said. Like she'd just finished deciding it. "Yeah I am."
Sora went to the bathroom to clean up and Lucien sat in his chair and stared at nothing for a minute.
It was Saturday.
That was the thing. It was Saturday and the sun was doing that specific morning thing where it came through the window at the angle that hit the chair directly and it was warm and it was early and it was Saturday and none of this should be happening on a Saturday. He hadn't done anything to deserve a Saturday like this. Saturdays were supposed to be ungoverned territory. Sacred, almost.
He looked at his hands in his lap.
The humming was still there. Quieter than last night, settled into the background now, but present. Constant. The walls doing their low murmur, the furniture its near silence. Through the window the morning sun was coming in and he could feel that too, some quality to the light that wasn't warmth exactly, just presence. Everything had presence now. Everything was participating in something he was only just learning to hear.
He got up and went to the bathroom. Sora moved aside without comment.
The morning light was not kind to the hair situation. Or it was, depending on how you looked at it. In the direct sun coming through the frosted window his coils were almost luminous, white the way fresh snow was white, and his eyes looking back at him were the color of something that had no business being in a human face. Deep. The purple sat under the dark the way something sat under water, visible at certain angles and gone at others.
He looked like a character.
He turned his head slightly. The color shifted.
"It does that in light," Sora said from behind him, mouth full of toothpaste, using his toothbrush, a conversation he was tabling indefinitely. "The eyes. Annoying right?"
Lucien looked at his reflection for another moment.
Here was the thing.
His Saturday was objectively cooked. He had a hole in his ceiling that belonged to a building he did not own. He had a neurological situation that was apparently permanent and had given him the hair of a comic book villain and eyes that shifted color in sunlight. He had a stranger in his bathroom who had caused all of this and was currently using his toothbrush unbothered.
His life had gotten complicated overnight.
He held his hand up in the light coming through the window and felt the world hum back at him. The walls. The glass. The toothbrush situation. Everything alive in a register he hadn't been able to hear a night ago. He reached toward the feeling the way you reached toward a sound to check if it was real, and it was real, it pushed back against his attention like something recognizing him.
Oh.
Oh that was something.
He turned around.
Sora was watching him in the mirror, rinsing. Her expression had the careful quality of someone waiting to see which way something landed.
"Okay," Lucien said.
"Okay?"
He looked at his hands again. Felt the hum. Felt the specific presence of the morning light and the different presence of the walls and the distinct particular texture of Sora's Raichi still louder than everything else, the thing that had started all of this.
A night ago he'd been a kid with a retail job and a gacha addiction and a pity counter sitting at eighty-seven.
Now he was standing in his bathroom on a Saturday morning feeling the walls breathe.
"This," Lucien said slowly, "is kinda awesome."
Sora closed her eyes. "Please don't make me regret this more than I already do."
"I can feel the walls."
"I know."
"I could feel you before you woke up last night."
"I know that too."
"That's insane." He was grinning now, he couldn't help it, something had cracked open in his chest that felt embarrassingly close to delight. "Does it get stronger?"
"Yes." She pointed at him. "And before you ask a hundred more questions. Get your shoes."
He blinked. "Right now?"
"Right now." She was already moving, jacket on, checking her pockets. "The clan has people who can actually answer those questions. I cannot. I've established this."
Lucien looked at his reflection one more time. White hair. Purple eyes. The world humming underneath everything like a secret that had always been there.
He grabbed his shoes.