The Tuesday lecture runs over by twelve minutes.
I know this because I check my watch at the point where the professor begins what is clearly a tangential anecdote, and again when he finishes it, and the difference is twelve minutes that belong to the library meeting we are now late for. Étienne, beside me, is already packing his bag before the room is officially dismissed, which is the kind of thing that would bother me if I weren't doing the same thing.
We take the shortcut through the east building. It saves approximately four minutes, which doesn't fully recover the twelve but is better than nothing.
"On est en retard," Étienne says, slightly out of breath. (We're late.)
"Je sais." (I know.)
"C'est la faute du prof." (It's the professor's fault.)
"C'est toujours la faute de quelqu'un d'autre avec toi." (It's always someone else's fault with you.)
"C'est parce que c'est souvent vrai." (Because it's often true.)
I don't argue with this because we've arrived at the library door and I'm already pulling it open.
---
The table by the window is occupied.
Lexin and Qingxue are already there — laptops open, notes spread between them, clearly mid-discussion about something that has nothing to do with waiting for us. Qingxue has her pen in her mouth and is frowning at her screen. Lexin has her chin resting on one hand, reading something, her other hand moving a cursor with the idle precision of someone thinking faster than the screen can keep up with.
Neither of them has noticed us yet.
Étienne leans slightly toward me and says, quietly, in French: "Elles sont là depuis un moment, j'imagine." (They've been here for a while, I imagine.)
"On dirait," I agree, setting my bag down on the nearest chair. (Looks like it.) "Elles ont l'air d'avoir avancé sans nous." (They seem to have made progress without us.)
"Bien sûr. On est en retard." Étienne pulls out his laptop with a mournful expression. (Of course. We're late.)
"C'est la faute du prof, non?" (It's the professor's fault, right?)
He points at me. "Exactement." (Exactly.)
It's at this precise moment that both of them look up.
The reaction is small but legible — a simultaneous shift in attention, the kind that happens when something unexpected enters a space you thought you understood. Qingxue's pen stops moving. Lexin's hand goes still on the mouse. They look at us, and then at each other, and then back at us.
I become aware, with the particular clarity of arriving slightly too late to a situation, that we have been speaking French for the last forty seconds.
I set my bag down properly and pull out my chair. "Sorry we're late," I say, in English. "The lecture ran over." I look at them. "Is something wrong?"
Lexin shakes her head. Her expression is composed, but there's something behind it — a small recalibration happening, quickly and privately.
Qingxue does not shake her head. Qingxue puts her pen down on the table and looks at me with the direct, interested expression of someone who has just encountered new data and intends to process it immediately.
"How many languages do you speak?" she asks.
The question is so straightforward that I answer it the same way. "Five. English, French, German, Italian, Chinese."
Silence.
Qingxue's mouth opens. It stays open. She looks at Étienne, as if checking whether he is also surprised, and Étienne shrugs with the expression of someone who knew about the French but is only now absorbing the rest of it.
I look at Lexin.
She hasn't said anything. But the composure has shifted slightly — not cracked, just adjusted, like a piece of furniture moved two inches from where it was. She's looking at me with an attention that is somehow different from her usual attention, though I couldn't immediately say how.
"French and Chinese because of my family," I tell them, because the silence seems to want filling. "English is taught as a second language in France. German for business. Italian — I have relatives in Italy. And friends."
Qingxue closes her mouth. Opens it again. "Cinq langues," she says, and then immediately looks surprised at herself. (Five languages.)
"You speak French too?" Étienne asks her, delighted.
"A little. Badly." She waves a hand. "Don't test me."
Lexin, who has been quiet through all of this, looks back at her screen. "We should get started," she says. "We've already covered the first two sections."
And just like that, we begin again.
---
The work goes well.
Better than the first meeting, actually — the rhythms of the group have started to settle, the way things do once people have been in the same room enough times to stop being careful. Qingxue talks more when she's comfortable, which it turns out is a great deal. Étienne finds his footing when there's actual work to do. Lexin moves through problems with the same clean efficiency she brings to everything, and I find myself watching the way she thinks — the small pause before she answers, the way she discards approaches quickly and without attachment once she's decided they won't work.
I do not find this particularly remarkable at the time. I am simply noticing, the way I notice things.
By the end of two hours the project is effectively finished. We review it once, collectively, catching the places where transitions are rough or phrasing is imprecise. Lexin finds two things I missed. I find one thing she missed. She accepts the correction without comment, which I respect.
"One more meeting before the presentation," Qingxue says, already writing it in her calendar. "Just to run through it. Make sure nothing falls apart."
General agreement. We agree on Friday, same table, same time.
We pack up.
---
Outside, the evening is cool and clear, the kind of autumn night that justifies having come to this part of the world. We move through the library doors together, a loose group of four, and I am thinking about the train of corrections I want to make to my section of the presentation when I hear my name.
Not Zhirui.
"Léo!"
I stop walking.
I know that voice. I have known that voice my entire life — it is the voice that taught me to swim and talked me through every difficult thing and called me an idiot with more genuine affection than most people manage with compliments. I turn around.
Arthur is standing twenty meters away on the path, bags at his feet, grinning like a man who has done something he is very pleased with himself about. He is wearing the coat he always wears when he travels, slightly rumpled, and he looks exactly like himself, which is to say he looks like home.
I am moving before I've decided to move.
The distance closes quickly. Arthur opens his arms at the last second and catches me as I reach him, lifting slightly, squeezing hard, the way he's done since I was small enough that the lifting actually made a difference. I feel the tension I carry in my shoulders — the specific tension of being in a foreign place and performing competence — release in a way I hadn't realized it needed to.
"T'es fou," I say into his shoulder. (You're insane.)
"Probablement," he agrees cheerfully, setting me down. (Probably.) "Tu m'as l'air bien. T'as mangé?" (You look well. Have you eaten?)
"Arrête avec ça." (Stop with that.)
"Jamais." He pulls back and looks at me with the evaluating expression of someone checking for damage. (Never.) "Paris me manquait pas. Toi, si." (I didn't miss Paris. I missed you.)
"T'aurais pu appeler." (You could have called.)
"J'aurais pu." He grins. (I could have.) "C'était plus drôle comme ça." (This was more fun.)
I become aware, at this point, of a sharp attention at my back. I don't turn immediately — it is rare for Arthur to leave France, rarer still for him to show up unannounced, and I am not finished being surprised by it — but the attention is specific enough that I register it distinctly, like a change in air pressure.
I turn around.
The three of them are standing a few meters back. Étienne looks like a man who has seen a ghost and is trying to decide whether to be frightened or excited. Qingxue has her head tilted, reading the situation with the focused curiosity she brings to most things. Lexin is very still, and she is looking at Arthur with an expression I can't immediately classify.
I bring Arthur over.
"These are my project partners," I tell him, in English, for the benefit of everyone present. "Étienne, Qingxue, Lexin." I turn to them. "This is my brother. Arthur."
The word brother does several things to the room simultaneously.
Étienne makes a sound that is not quite a word. He looks at Arthur. Then at me. Then at Arthur again, with the expression of a man rapidly cross-referencing something.
"Arthur," he says carefully. "Arthur Fontaine?"
Arthur looks at him with the easy confidence of someone accustomed to being recognized and unbothered by it. "C'est moi." (That's me.)
"Merde," Étienne says, quietly and with feeling.
Arthur finds this response entirely satisfying. He looks at me with an expression that says, clearly, I like this one.
I had not told Étienne, or anyone here, that my brother appears reliably in the top five of every French business publication's annual ranking. It had not seemed relevant. It is, I will admit, slightly relevant now.
Qingxue recovers first, the way she usually recovers first. "Hi," she says, with a small wave that somehow manages to convey both friendliness and the fact that she is still processing.
Lexin says nothing for a moment.
She looks at Arthur — at his easy posture, the hand he still has on my shoulder, the particular comfort of two people who have known each other their whole lives — and something moves through her expression that I don't have a name for. Then her eyes come to me, briefly, and then back to Arthur.
"I thought," she says, measured and careful, "that you were his — " She stops. Reassembles. "Never mind."
Arthur, who misses nothing, looks between us with an interest he is doing a poor job of concealing. He extends his hand to her. "Arthur Fontaine," he says. "Léo's brother. And you are?"
"Lexin," she says, and shakes his hand with the composure of someone who has decided that whatever she thought two seconds ago is irrelevant now.
"Lexin," Arthur repeats, as if filing it away. He glances at me. I look at the middle distance.
"It's nice to meet you," Lexin says, in the tone of someone closing a door politely.
"Likewise," Arthur says — the English slightly accented, warm, entirely himself. He looks at all of them in turn with the unguarded openness that has always been his most disarming quality. "I hope my brother isn't making things difficult. He has a tendency to go quiet when he's thinking and forget to mention it."
"Arthur."
"C'est vrai." (It's true.)
"He's been fine," Qingxue says, and the look she gives me afterward is the look of someone adding this interaction to a file she is keeping. I make a note to be slightly more careful around Qingxue.
We say the normal things. Étienne shakes Arthur's hand with the reverence of someone meeting a figure he has read about in professional publications, which Arthur accepts graciously. We confirm Friday's meeting. The group disperses.
Étienne catches up to me as I walk away with Arthur, falling into step briefly. "Ton frère," he says, low and slightly awed. (Your brother.)
"Ouais." (Yeah.)
"T'aurais pu dire." (You could have mentioned it.)
"Ça n'avait pas l'air important." (It didn't seem important.)
He stares at me for a moment. Then he shakes his head and peels off toward the dormitories, and I hear him say something in French under his breath that I choose not to catch.
Arthur waits until he's gone. Then he looks at me sideways. "Lexin," he says.
"Non." (No.)
"Je dis rien." (I'm not saying anything.)
"Bien." (Good.)
"Je note, c'est tout." (I'm just noting it.)
"Arthur."
"On rentre?" he says pleasantly, picking up his bag. (Shall we head back?)
I look at him for a moment. He looks back with the expression of a man who has already won and knows it.
"On rentre," I say, and we walk back through the amber evening, shoulder to shoulder, the way we always have.
---
That night, back in the dormitory with Arthur sprawled across the spare chair eating something he found at the campus café and talking about Paris with the comfortable ease of someone who has been doing this his whole life, I take my pill with a glass of water and set it on the desk.
"T'en as encore pour longtemps avec ça?" Arthur asks, nodding at the bottle. (Do you have to do that for much longer?)
"Probablement." (Probably.)
He doesn't push it. He never pushes it — he asked his questions years ago, when it first happened, and I answered them, and since then he has treated it as a fact of my life rather than a problem to be solved, which is one of the things I am most grateful to him for.
I sleep easily that night, the way I always do. Arthur's breathing from across the room, slow and steady, is the sound of home in a place that isn't home yet.