Chapter 223: Mutual Alchemy Hate
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Doran stared straight ahead, not daring to look to the side at his seat partner.
A few minutes ago, he had been at his usual seat, trying to put curiosity about what Caius and Aurelius could be discussing outside the classroom off his mind as the last few minutes before the arrival of Professor Louvene and the start of the class ticked by.
It was then that Aylin arrived at his seat and leaned closer while placing a hand atop his chest.
"Get up, I’m sitting here today," she had said. Not in a pleading or imploring tone. Just a commanding one that he was clearly meant to obey.
"Huh? Hmm?" Doran had let out in confusion.
"Get out of that seat," Aylin clarified what she felt she had made clear already. She did speak each word slowly though and with quite a bit of enunciation on each syllable while adding even more authority to her tone.
"Why?" Doran had asked.
"What does that matter to you?" Aylin asked, "Just get up!"
Doran flinched. It could have been a trauma response for when she attacked him in front of the entire class but Doran found himself feeling afraid of Aylin.
Plus, her face was very close, and while he had put the thoughts of pursuing her aside a long time ago, he would have to be blind not to acknowledge how absolutely perfect in beauty her face was. It intimidated him and added to the ’fear’, so it’s easy to see how a lump quickly formed in his throat.
"I-" he tried to speak and the sound ended up coming out like a croak.
He gathered up his stuff then and got to his feet to stand aside so Aylin could sit where he had been a second ago.
Doran turned to walk away when he realized that somehow, despite the couple of empty seats and some who had no seat partners, he had nowhere to sit. He felt... displaced. So he turned back to Aylin who quickly noticed his eyes were on her.
"What?" She asked in that snotty, high and mighty voice of hers.
At first, Doran winced and then he got angry. Not at Aylin but at himself. This was his problem; Always ready to lie down and be trampled on. He just got his seat stolen and he was still being meek about it.
’What would Caius think of me?’ Doran asked himself, ’I’m Pathetic.’
Emboldened by that self-deprecating thought and the decision to continue his good progress thus far in acting like he belonged at Lochxen (which he did), Doran placed his books back on the desk.
"You know what, no," He said in a clear voice.
Aylin had looked taken aback and she eyed Doran as she said,
"What?"
"I said no," Doran said, "I want my seat back."
Looking into those brown eyes that seemed to quiver with every bit of confidence Doran could muster, Aylin felt something that wasn’t very common for her; Compassion.
You see, she believed there was realistically nothing Doran could do to get her out of that seat. If it were to turn into a duel for the seat, she was sure she would win. She could have taken that moment to antagonize Doran with that in mind but that pesky compassionate feeling was gnawing at her.
She managed to keep it off her face though and her smile was cold and detached as it usually was when talking to strangers she couldn’t care to actually have a conversation with.
"You can take my seat beside Marianne," she said, "I think that’s a reasonable exchange. You’ll still have somewhere to sit and you get out of my face and stop bothering me."
Doran gave this a thought and, being the intelligent person that he was, he somewhat understood what Aylin meant.
If Doran looked around the class, there were other seats he could have taken but that would have been meek acquiescence. Aylin could have simply dismissed him and let him go find a solution on his own but she instead offered him one. To give him a sense of having actually given up his seat for something equivalent. Like an actual switching of seats and not just being displaced with nothing to say about it.
In other words, this was Aylin’s way—albeit still cold and nonchalant—of throwing Doran a bone and letting him appear less like a pushover and more like a person open to compromise.
Doran played into this by taking a moment to ’think about it’ and then he spoke with a reluctant tone of voice.
"Alright."
And with that, Doran grabbed his things and went over to the empty seat beside Marianne where, without saying a word, because this was so clearly an exchange and he didn’t have to ’ask for permission’, he sat down.
"Morning," he greeted Marianne out of courtesy. His voice low.
"Morning," she replied with almost an equally low voice but hers seemed to have been because of a general lack of interest rather than shyness which was the case with Doran.
The minutes ticked by, Arlette arrived and the lecture began. Caius walked in, took a look around and their eyes met. His eyes imploring Caius to help him out didn’t really have anything to do with recovering his original seat but were rather for tips to break the ice with the uninterested lady by his side and alleviate some of the awkwardness he was feeling.
The smile on Caius’ face before he looked away had Doran believing the purple-eyed boy had understood him even if he didn’t offer any assistance. Although, to be fair, the lecture was already ongoing and it would have made things more awkward than they already were if someone started shouting girl-talking tips across the classroom.
At some point during the lecture, Doran was reminded of just how poor he was at Alchemy. His brain seemed so disconnected from the subject as a concept that the words seemed to lift off the page and rearrange themselves to never make sense. Also, his eyes just didn’t seem capable of identifying Alchemical ingredients even when they were essentially common leaves he could find—and had most likely found—in nature.
Caius was usually his help in times like this but Caius was many seats away chatting it up with Aylin Khione.
So Doran turned his eyes to his seat partner for probably the first time he actually really looked at her. He got to stare at her pretty face—in side profile— and the wavy black locks of hair that fell down her head with more than a few over her shoulder. He stared for five whole seconds before she turned to look at him.
Marianne had sensed Doran’s eyes on her and now that they locked stares, she waited for him to speak. When he did not, she asked in a detached tone she had used when he first greeted her upon his arrival at the shared desk,
"What is it?"
Doran went pink but he cleared his throat and managed a smile.
"I was wondering if I could take a look at your notes," he said in a clear voice.
What he actually wanted to ask for was an explanation/simplification of what Professor Arlette Louvene was talking about thus far but he settled for at least catching up on note-taking on which he was falling very far behind.
Marianne slid her note to the side so Doran could look through it and it only took a few seconds for him to make a discovery;
"You haven’t written anything," he said, sounding incredulous. A bit hypocritical considering he was basically the same.
"Of course, I haven’t," Marianne said, "Alchemy is dreadfully boring. Aylin sort of made it alright to do. I got to cheat off her notes and processes but now she’s gone... and you’re here."
"Yeah," Doran answered in a somber tone, "I’m here."
A few seconds passed with neither saying a word. Their eyes, as one, rolled to the back of the heads of Caius and Aylin. Staring at the seating arrangement that had wrought this awkwardness upon them.
And then, Doran broke the silence between them.
"So you hate Alchemy, huh," he said in probably his first-ever attempt at small talk with a girl.
"I detest it," Marianne answered.
"Then why haven’t you dropped it?" Doran asked.
"Why haven’t YOU?" Marianne asked in a bit of a challenge, "Don’t tell me you like it."
Doran searched her eyes and then smiled.
"Touché," he said, "I despise it as well."
"I’ll drop it before the Mid-Semester Test. There’s so much I could do with that free time," Marianne said, shaking her head.
"Really?" Doran asked, feeling most of his nervousness melting away as he became a bit more relaxed and asked,
"Like what?"
Marianne looked at him, his warm brown eyes were inviting and while she could have dismissed this stranger (essentially) wanting to hear more about her, she found her lips loosen. With a little laugh, she set off listing everything she believed would serve well as a great replacement for Alchemy.
With that, in their own hushed whispers, mostly removed from the ongoing lecture, the two unlikely acquaintances became locked in conversation.
Their blank notebooks forgotten.