The haze of dust in the library air always seemed to conform to the laws of nature to Henry Winter.

As he often explained, those were particles of the past, settled onto the pages. But lately, he saw how it circled around you when you spun suddenly, nearly knocking over a stack of volumes. He could not give a name to this phenomenon.

What if it was the work of the Furies? O, if only that had been the case… What a relief it would have been!

He could have called himself a truly lucky man, because then everything would have had a name—even that senseless rage directed at himself. And he wouldn't have had to rummage through the dusty shelves of his palaces of the mind again and again, trying to make sense of whatever this bloody madness was. Because with the Furies, things were simpler: there was a name, a myth, and a rage that, one way or another, could be explained. But this was something faceless.

On the sixth of October, your right knee met the armrest of a chair in the lecture hall. On the seventh, your wrist struck a doorknob as you tried to enter with a tray of coffee. On the eighth… This was sodding absurd. And yet the numbers were persistent: 72% of your movements across the room ended in contact with something solid. Although his humanitarian mind and mathematics were as far apart as two parallel lines, he kept making the calculations.

You liked long-sleeved jumpers two sizes too big, even in the September heat. At first, he thought it was just your style, until he noticed how you instinctively tugged at the fabric whenever Bunny playfully tapped your shoulder. A bruise? Or another mark from your ongoing war with corners and doorframes? His imagination, long trained to reconstruct ancient battles from fragments of pottery, began sketching a map of your micro-injuries: a lilac crescent below the knee, a scarlet scar on your elbow, not unlike a Cretan petroglyph.

Julian would have called it hamartia, or in other words, a fatal flaw of character. But your bruises were a palimpsest, speaking of a stubborn vitality. You collided with the world, and it left impressions on you, like soft clay which, by extension, could be called a form of cuneiform. And Henry, unexpectedly, found himself captivated by this living code.

It was silly. Ridiculous. Completely unscientific. And yet he kept doing it. Because for the first time in years, something in that soft chaos made him feel—

but what?

Care was too weighty. Interest was too cold.

Perhaps it was simply scientific curiosity: an entomologist observing a butterfly flap its wings in defiance of aerodynamic logic, or an archaeologist discovering a fresh flower blooming in the ashes of a shattered temple, growing through a crack in the basalt.

A fountain pen slipped from your hand, landing on the wooden floor with a gentle thud. And Henry, instinctively, held his breath. He watched it fall, waiting for the usual painful encounter between you and the furniture, but it didn't happen. The laws of the universe were disrupted: his palm was already guarding the edge of the table.

Sometimes he thought you knew everything. That your fingers deliberately drifted along the spines of books (he had just arranged), dropping them. That the bruise on your collarbone was an accidental brushstroke, waiting to be deciphered.

"Careful," he murmured, running his hand along the edge of the table as you crawled out from under it.

Henry reached out with those large, far too clumsy hands, ill-suited to your fragile world. Square fingers slid along your waist, wrapped around your sides; he feared you might once again, God forbid, kiss some treacherous surface with part of your anatomy. The young man winced slightly; the glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose. The scar along the right side of his forehead, stretching to the very top, furtively appeared from under his black hair as he tilted his head the other way. Oh, Henry didn't even notice, revealing, for the first time, this frail side of himself.

"You've collected all the corners in the last thirty minutes."