"So… what exactly happened?"
"I don't know," Soren admitted, tone caught somewhere between resignation and disbelief as he looked down at the table.
It had only been a day since he and Amelia had finally cleared the air.
One conversation, blunt and awkward in all the right ways, a few honest words neither of them had handled elegantly, and somehow the heaviness that had dragged between them for the better part of a week had lifted almost at once.
Soren had expected things to settle after that.
If anything, he had assumed Amelia would simply return to how she had been before, staying near him without making much of it, following at her usual pace, speaking when she felt like it and ignoring everyone else as she pleased.
Instead, she had become like this.
His gaze drifted down again, not because the sight was unfamiliar by now, but because it still felt faintly absurd every time he looked.
Amelia was asleep against him.
Not dozing upright out of simple tiredness, not half-aware and resting her eyes for a minute, but genuinely asleep, her head resting on his shoulder as though it belonged there, one cheek pressed against his uniform, one arm looped loosely around his.
Her grip was not tight, yet there was an ease to it that made pulling away feel less like an option and more like a crime.
Her breathing was slow and even, completely undisturbed by the noise of the cafeteria around them, by the scrape of chairs on stone, by the rise and fall of voices, or by the many glances aimed their way.
She looked comfortable enough that she may as well have been in her own bed.
"For some reason, after we talked, she became like this," Soren said quietly, careful not to move too much in case he woke her.
Felix followed his gaze, then went very still.
The change in his face was immediate enough to be almost funny.
Jealousy, disbelief, outrage, all of it arrived at once.
"You unbelievable bastard."
Soren didn't bother defending himself.
There wasn't much point.
Instead, he reached up with his free hand and carefully adjusted Amelia's uniform collar where it had folded awkwardly beneath her jaw.
The fabric had wrinkled while she slept against him, and straightening it was easier than enduring the way it tugged at his attention.
The moment his fingers withdrew, her tail moved.
Just once, slow and lazy, brushing against the bench behind her.
Then her mouth softened.
It was not a smile in any way most people would have noticed.
Amelia's expressions were rarely broad enough to be called that.
At a glance she still looked nearly the same as always, calm and unreadable, but there was a minute easing at the corners of her lips that changed her whole face if you were paying very close attention.
Soren stared at it for a second, then let out a quiet breath through his nose.
"She's like a puppy…"
Across from him, Felix inhaled at the wrong moment and nearly sent half his lunch down the wrong way.
He doubled over into a fit of coughing, thumping a fist against his chest as he looked at Soren with naked horror.
"Soren," he said at last, voice hoarse with disbelief, "did you seriously just call the Wild Wolf a puppy?"
Soren blinked at him.
"What?"
"Do you have any idea who she is?"
He glanced back down at Amelia, at the silver hair fallen over her shoulder, the ears relaxed in sleep, the tail that had gone still again only after that one content sweep, and failed to see the issue.
"Yeah," he said. "But am I wrong?"
Felix looked personally offended by the answer.
"People are terrified of her."
"As they should be."
"And you still called her a puppy."
Soren shrugged with his free shoulder as much as Amelia's weight allowed.
"Look at her."
Felix leaned back and stared at him as though he had just confessed to putting his head in a dragon's mouth for fun.
"You're not right in the head."
"That's a little rude."
"It's accurate."
At that moment Amelia stirred.
It started with a small shift of weight, then a faint crease at her brow.
Her ears twitched once, irritated by the noise around her, and she nuzzled half an inch closer before finally dragging herself up from sleep.
Her eyes opened slowly, heavy-lidded and distinctly displeased, and she looked around with the air of someone who had been forced back into a world she had not agreed to rejoin.
"…Too loud."
The words came out low and rough with sleep.
Soren winced.
"Sorry."
"It's fine," she murmured, though the look she gave the room suggested she did not think it was fine at all.
She stayed exactly where she was, pressing lightly into his side as if waking had not altered her priorities in the slightest.
"I'm hungry."
Felix stared again, this time with the hollow expression of a man watching reality rearrange itself in front of him.
Soren, meanwhile, only nodded.
He slipped one hand beneath the table, opened his inventory, and a second later brought up a small paper bag; he placed it into Amelia's hands without ceremony.
"Here."
She looked down at it, then back at him for the briefest moment before opening it.
Jerky.
Nothing elaborate, just preserved meat, seasoned lightly, something he had started keeping around because Amelia liked it.
The instant she recognised what it was, something in her softened.
"Thanks."
She took a bite at once, chewing in quiet satisfaction, and her tail began to move again, slow and steady behind her.
She was still leaning against Soren while she ate, not even pretending to create space between them, and the ease of it made the scene look far too intimate to anyone watching from the outside.
Felix's gaze shifted between them several times.
Between Amelia, who looked half asleep and entirely content while eating meat out of a bag Soren had produced for her without being asked twice, and Soren, who looked so accustomed to this already that he didn't seem to understand how absurd it was.
Felix leaned back and dragged a hand over his face.
"What am I even looking at?" he muttered in disbelief.
Soren allowed himself a faint smirk.
"I told you."
"Told him what?" Amelia asked, pausing mid-bite.
"Nothing important," Soren said easily, then, because he had been meaning to mention it before she fell asleep on him again, added, "By the way, I've got tutoring tonight, so I won't be free after classes. Is that alright?"
Amelia did not answer immediately.
The jerky paused in her hand.
Her ears gave a slight twitch, and though her face barely changed, something there tightened all the same, a minute stillness that would have been invisible to anyone not already used to reading whatever little she chose to show.
"…Okay."
She nodded after a beat, but the agreement came with reluctance that she did not bother to hide from him.
Her tail slowed.
It was subtle, yet Soren noticed it at once.
So did the hand that had been resting loosely against his arm, because for a brief second her fingers curled faintly into his sleeve, then loosened again as if she had caught herself.
Soren looked at her for a moment longer than necessary.
She had agreed, and Amelia was not the sort to take back a yes just because she disliked it, but disappointment sat on her more clearly than it did on most people.
Not because she expressed it richly, but because every tiny change mattered more when she usually showed so little at all.
Before he could decide whether to say anything else, Felix cut back in, apparently unable to bear the atmosphere any longer.
"I hate both of you."
Soren snorted while Amelia ignored him and took another bite of jerky.
For the rest of lunch, she stayed pressed against Soren's side as if that had always been the natural arrangement, and the longer it continued, the less either of them seemed inclined to question it.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
"Your Highness… please wake up."
The voice reached Amelia only dimly.
It felt distant, muffled by sleep and thick blankets and the last clinging warmth of a dream she had not cared enough to remember.
She shifted deeper into the bed instead, turning onto her side and pulling the covers closer around herself.
The mattress was soft, the pillow cool at one edge and warm where her face had been, and there was not a single compelling reason to abandon any of it.
A careful hand touched her shoulder.
"Your Highness, it is morning."
Amelia exhaled slowly through her nose but didn't open her eyes.
The hand withdrew, only to return a moment later with a little more insistence.
"Princess Amelia, if you do not rise now, you will be late."
Late.
The word brushed against her thoughts and failed to matter.
She didn't care.
Classes were classes.
Sitting through them rarely changed anything.
Most of it was either obvious, dull, or too slow to hold her attention for long, and it wasn't as though missing part of a lecture would cost her anything she actually needed.
At worst, she would lose an hour to something she had no interest in, then be expected to pretend it had been worth attending.
She moved her shoulder in a small, annoyed jerk, enough to dislodge the maid's hand, then rolled onto her other side and buried more of her face in the pillow.
The maid made a tiny sound of distress.
"Your Highness," she tried again, and there was a visible tremor in her voice now, "please, I beg you, you really must wake. I was told to make certain you attended this morning."
Amelia gave no sign of having heard.
That only seemed to worsen the maid's anxiety.
She hovered at the edge of the bed for a moment, wringing her hands, clearly torn between the fear of doing too much and the fear of failing entirely.
Waking the princess of Einhardt was not a task anyone in the palace handled casually, not when Amelia was both notoriously difficult to rouse and more than capable of making her displeasure felt in a way nobody wanted to experience twice.
"Your Highness," the maid said a little more desperately, leaning forward as if proximity alone might help, "if you miss breakfast again, Her Majesty will blame me, and if you miss class after that, she will blame me even more."
No response.
The maid swallowed.
Then, after a brief, panicked hesitation, she tried a different angle.
"…Will you not be seeing your friend today?"
Amelia's body went still.
Not gradually, not with the slow, half-conscious resistance of someone drifting toward wakefulness, but all at once.
The maid noticed it and rushed on, sensing the opening.
"The boy you mentioned, Your Highness. You told His Majesty about him, and the palace has been speaking of little else since word reached home. I only meant… if you do not go, people may think you only said it to please His Majesty."
Amelia's eyes opened.
The maid nearly flinched backwards at once.
It was always a little unnerving, the speed with which the princess could go from apparently dead asleep to sharply, completely aware.
One moment Amelia had been buried in blankets and indifference, the next she was looking straight at her, golden eyes clear enough to make the maid feel as though she had stepped into the path of something dangerous.
For a heartbeat neither of them moved.
Then Amelia pushed herself upright, grey hair sliding loose over one shoulder, the blankets falling to her waist.
"What, did you say?" she asked, voice low from sleep.
The maid bowed her head so quickly she nearly bent double.
"F-Forgive me, Your Highness. I only meant that if you did not go, people might begin to doubt you."
Amelia kept staring at her.
"He is real," she said.
The maid blinked.
"Your Highness?"
"Soren is real."
The words came out firmer this time, sleep burned off by something sharper.
There was no childish insistence in it, no embarrassment, no hesitation, only a cold certainty that made the maid's already frayed nerves pull tighter.
"Y-Yes," the maid said at once. "Of course he is. My apologies, Your Highness. I did not mean otherwise."
Only then did Amelia look away.
She threw the blankets aside and rose from the bed, still not fully pleased to be awake, yet too awake now to return to sleep without irritation.
The maid stepped back at once to give her room, relief and lingering unease mixed plainly across her face.
Amelia said nothing further while she dressed.
She did not need to.
The atmosphere in the room was tense enough already, shaped by the remains of sleep, by annoyance at being dragged from bed, and by something else that had lodged under her ribs the moment the maid mentioned Soren.
'He is real.'
It should not have mattered so much, yet it did.
Unless someone was paying very close attention, the shift in her expression as she fastened her uniform would have been impossible to catch, as would the faint set to her mouth that did not quite belong to her usual blankness.
Amelia's face rarely betrayed her thoughts, but now there was a small, stubborn pout there all the same.
Someone had spoken as though Soren might be a story, an invention, something to suspect.
The thought irritated her far more than it should have.
He was real.
He was not made up or exaggerated, not some convenient answer given to satisfy curious questions from home.
He existed.
He spoke too much sometimes, annoyed her sometimes, fed her, let her sleep against him, looked at her as though she were a person rather than a title, and all of that was real.
Her hands tightened briefly at the cuffs of her uniform.
She would not allow anyone to question that.
The maid, perhaps wisely, kept silent while Amelia finished dressing.
————「❤︎」————