"—fessor—eblood—?"
The voice came through the haze slowly, muffled enough that Lilliana did not register it at first.
Her pen remained poised above the parchment, the line of ink beneath it having long since dried, while her thoughts sat somewhere far from the staff room, somewhere she had no wish to revisit.
"—Professor R—ood."
Her fingers twitched.
Then, louder this time, with polite concern sharpening the tone.
"Professor Roseblood?"
Lilliana startled hard enough that her shoulder jerked and the papers beneath her hand shifted across the desk.
She lifted her head at once, posture straightening on instinct before she had even fully caught up with the present.
"My apologies," she said quickly. "I didn't hear you."
One of the administrative staff stood beside her desk, holding a thin report bundle against her chest.
The woman looked more surprised than alarmed, though there was a small crease between her brows that made Lilliana realise at once how unusual this must have seemed.
She was not normally the sort to drift.
"Are you all right?" the woman asked. "You seemed rather far away."
"Yes, I'm quite all right," Lilliana replied, smoothing one hand over the edge of the papers on her desk, a small, automatic gesture to conceal the fact that her pulse had not yet settled. "I was simply tired. I'm sorry. Did you need something?"
The woman's expression eased.
"I was hoping you could complete the practical midterm report by the end of the week."
Lilliana accepted the papers with both hands, calm and composed now, at least from the outside.
"I will have it done."
"Thank you, Professor Roseblood."
The woman left soon after, the door clicking shut behind her, and silence returned to the room so thoroughly that it seemed to settle over the furniture.
Lilliana remained still for a few seconds, the report resting in her hands, then lowered it onto the desk with measured care.
The stillness did not help.
If anything, it made the problem clearer.
Her gaze dropped to the first page, scanning names, marks, instructor comments, practical observations.
Her mind should have followed the neat lines of administrative work with ease.
Usually it would have.
Usually this sort of task was a comfort, something structured and clear, something that obeyed the rules of a world she could manage.
Then she saw his name.
Soren Arden.
Her breath caught so faintly she almost convinced herself it had not.
A week had passed since the midterms, yet that moment still returned with humiliating ease.
Not simply the request itself, though that had been enough to shake her, but the way he had asked it, direct and earnest and terribly sincere, as though he were asking for instruction in any other branch of magic.
— Please teach me blood magic.
Lilliana closed her eyes for a moment.
Students asked strange things.
Students took foolish interests.
Students fixated on dangerous disciplines because they were powerful, forbidden, unusual, or merely because they sounded impressive.
As a professor, she knew that.
She had dealt with curiosity before, recklessness before, the ordinary arrogance of youth before.
That was not why she had reacted the way she had.
It had been his expression.
There had been no thrill in it, no shallow appetite for something exotic, no childish fascination with taboo power.
He had looked serious.
Serious enough that she had not been able to dismiss it as a passing whim, and that alone had made something cold move through her chest.
She let out a careful breath and rested her fingertips against the parchment.
On paper, there were arguments in favour of it.
Blood magic was dangerous, yes, but danger alone was not reason enough to prohibit study.
Many forms of magic could kill the careless.
In the proper hands, under supervision, knowledge itself was not evil.
Against demons, against monsters, against the many things that made the world crueler than the academy walls suggested, powerful magic had value.
Research had value.
Control had value.
And still.
Her hand tightened.
Dangerous was too clean a word for it.
Too academic.
Too distant.
Slowly, almost without meaning to, Lilliana lifted her hand and stared at her own palm.
Her eyes had already begun to change before the thought fully formed.
Lime-green dimmed, deepened, and darkened toward red, while a scarlet circle of magic bloomed above her skin with familiar, dreadful ease.
"「Hemokinesis」."
Blood gathered above her palm, dark and suspended, shaped by obedience rather than gravity.
It responded as naturally as a hand closing, as natural as breath, and that was the part she had always found most awful.
The ease of it.
The intimacy.
The way it made the body itself into fuel.
Lilliana's jaw tightened.
For vampires, blood magic was not merely possible; it was native.
A true heart made the difference, an organ built to hold and cycle mana-infused blood, to let that blood be spent and replenished through a physiology humans did not possess.
A vampire could survive what would destroy a human.
A dhampir could stand at the edge of that boundary and understand too well what lay on both sides of it.
A human, using blood magic, did not draw on some separate reserve.
They paid with themselves.
Blood loss.
Collapse.
Shock.
Failure.
Death, if they pushed too far, and that threshold was never safely far away.
The red mass above her hand trembled once as memory pressed too close, then she let the spell disperse.
The blood dissolved into motes of mana and the room felt suddenly colder.
Her fingers brushed the desk for balance.
Why?
That was the question that remained.
Why had Soren asked?
He was not fearless.
If anything, he was almost painfully aware of fear.
She had seen it in him more than once, in the tremor beneath his composure, in the way his eyes sharpened when he was cornered, in the exhaustion he carried like someone who had been made to learn too early what helplessness felt like.
He could be reckless, yes, but never casually so.
His recklessness always looked dragged out of him by necessity.
Which meant he knew this was not harmless.
He knew enough to hesitate, and yet he had still asked.
Lilliana looked back down at the report but did not read it.
As a professor, she was not meant to let personal fear dictate what a student could or could not pursue.
That line mattered.
It mattered precisely because personal fear was unreliable, because it distorted judgement, because what frightened one person might still be knowledge another deserved.
Yet being a professor did not erase responsibility.
If she refused him outright, she needed to do so for a reason better than the fact that the subject made her chest seize.
If she accepted, she needed to be certain she was not guiding him toward something that would destroy him.
A small crease formed between her brows.
Perhaps the only responsible thing left was to ask him directly.
Not as a frightened survivor of old wounds.
As his professor.
As Professor Roseblood.
She owed him that much.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
A week after the midterms, the Class F classroom had the same late-noon stillness it always did after lectures ended, though today it felt less peaceful and more painfully aware of itself.
Soren sat at his desk with his lunch in front of him and tried not to look like someone counting every second of silence.
It was not going particularly well.
To his left, Professor Roseblood sat with her own lunch neatly arranged before her, posture as straight as ever, though there was a stiffness to it today that made her seem less composed than carefully held together.
She had barely touched her food.
Every so often her fingers adjusted something that did not need adjusting, the lid of a container, the fold of a napkin, the alignment of cutlery against the edge of the desk.
To his right was Amelia.
Amelia, who had followed him here without the slightest hesitation and then taken the seat beside him as though that had always been the plan.
Amelia, who had somehow made sitting still feel more disruptive than movement.
Amelia, whose shoulder was near enough that he was uncomfortably aware of the warmth coming off her despite the thin layer of fabric between them.
He kept his eyes on his lunch for another second before glancing sideways.
She was already looking at him.
"Something wrong?" Amelia asked.
Her voice was low and languid, the same as ever, and somehow that only made the situation worse.
She sounded so completely at ease that it threw the awkwardness of everyone else into sharper relief.
Soren looked at her for a moment, then away again.
"Nothing," he said.
That was a lie, obviously.
Almost everything was wrong with this lunch.
The first problem was that Amelia had decided they were friends.
Not might become friends.
Not wanted to be friends eventually.
Friends, present tense, simple and absolute, and apparently that had been the end of the discussion.
He had tried, once, to ask why she kept appearing beside him after the midterms, why she waited after class, why she walked with him as though there had been some unspoken arrangement made without his input.
Amelia had looked at him, mildly puzzled, and said, simply:
— Because we're friends.
After that, it had become very difficult to object without sounding ridiculous.
The second problem was that Amelia had no sense of personal space whatsoever.
At first he had assumed it was incidental.
Then repeated exposure had forced him to admit it was not.
She simply sat close, stood close, leaned in when she spoke, and occupied his space as though boundaries were vague suggestions rather than meaningful structures.
After the midterms, when they had spoken, she had sat near enough that there had been no gap at all between their legs.
He had, with great dignity and very controlled embarrassment, asked whether she always did that.
She had shrugged and continued doing it.
Not that he hated it, obviously.
But that was part of the problem.
Amelia was beautiful in the sort of way that didn't feel fair to anyone forced to remain sensible around her, and there were moments, irritatingly frequent moments, where the simple fact of her attention felt dangerously easy to enjoy.
Then she would say something blunt, or stare too directly, or smile in that strange way she had when she was interested in him, and the unease would return just as quickly.
Because enjoying Amelia's attention and feeling safe around it were not the same thing.
He liked her.
He had liked her long before this, in the distant, uncomplicated way people liked characters who existed safely behind a screen.
In person, though, Amelia was not simple at all.
She was warm and straightforward and oddly easy to be around in some moments, then unsettling in others, too sharp, too intense, too unbothered by rules that normal people seemed to need.
She was kind in ways that did not always look gentle.
She was frightening in ways that did not cancel out the fact that she could also be easy to like.
And that, more than anything, made him wary.
His attention shifted left.
Lilliana was still not eating.
Her gaze was lowered, not quite fixed on her lunch, not quite fixed anywhere.
It was the same distracted look she had worn in fragments over the past week, whenever they happened to cross paths.
She always recovered quickly, always returned to perfect professionalism before anyone else would notice, but Soren had noticed.
It was hard not to when he knew exactly what sat between them.
He exhaled quietly through his nose.
There probably wasn't a version of this conversation that became less awkward by waiting longer.
So he spoke.
"Professor Roseblood."
She looked at him at once, almost too quickly.
"Yes, Soren?"
The use of his name landed more softly than it should have.
She usually kept to a distant title, especially in class.
Hearing his name instead made her sound, if anything, even more careful.
He kept his tone even.
"Is there a reason you can't teach me blood magic?"
The question hung in the air.
Amelia's eyes shifted from him to Lilliana with immediate interest, but she did not interrupt; she simply rested her cheek lightly against her hand and watched.
Lilliana went still.
Not visibly enough that most people would have noticed, but Soren did.
Her fingers stopped where they rested near her lunch container, and for half a second the expression she wore did not look like her usual one at all.
Then her composure returned, thin and precise.
"You already know the answer to that… Mr Arden."
The correction was small, but it was there.
A retreat into formality.
Soren nodded once.
"Because it's dangerous and I'm human."
"Yes."
Her voice remained calm, but there was strain under it now, quiet and tightly managed.
"That is not a minor issue. Blood magic is not a discipline humans can approach carelessly."
"I know."
"Do you?"
The question came out more softly than sharply, which somehow made it feel heavier.
Lilliana lowered her gaze for a moment, then looked back at him.
Her expression was controlled, but not unreadable.
There was worry there, unmistakable now that he was forcing the topic into the open.
"Soren, why do you want to learn it?" she said, and this time the use of his name felt less deliberate and more like something that had slipped through.
He should have expected that.
He had expected it, probably.
He just had not known whether she would actually ask.
Across from them, the classroom windows let in a broad wash of afternoon light.
Dust drifted lazily through it.
Somewhere outside, distant voices carried from the courtyard, soft enough to make the silence at the desk feel even more sealed off from the rest of the academy.
Soren looked at Lilliana, then at the untouched food in front of her, then briefly at Amelia, who was still watching with quiet, unhidden curiosity.
He could explain.
He could talk about the skill appearing in his status after the quest reward, about testing it in private, about how little room he had left to reject power just because it frightened him.
He could tell her that being weak had already nearly killed him too many times, that "dangerous" had started to feel less like a warning and more like the basic condition of his life here.
Instead, he lifted his hand.
And let the answer speak for itself.
He raised his hand.
A crimson magic circle unfolded in his palm, thin lines of scarlet light spinning into place with a precision that made the result feel even more wrong.
Lilliana froze.
Amelia's attention sharpened at once beside him, her body going a little still in that watchful way of hers.
"「Hemokinesis」."
The spell answered immediately.
Blood drew out of him in a slow, unnatural rise, gathering above his hand into a small dark-red sphere that trembled faintly in the air.
The feeling came with it at once, that ugly, unmistakable weakness behind his eyes, a slight dip in his balance, the sense of something being pulled from somewhere it should have stayed.
He kept his arm steady anyway.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then Lilliana recoiled as though the sight itself had struck her.
"Soren—"
The name came out too fast, stripped of title and distance before she could stop it, and when he looked at her properly, he saw the professionalism in her expression fracture all at once.
The colour had drained from her face.
Her pupils had widened, and at the edges of her irises the green was already deepening toward red, not dramatically, but involuntarily, like an old instinct rising faster than restraint could suppress it.
Her hand tightened against the desk hard enough that her knuckles paled.
"That's impossible," she said.
Her voice was quiet, but there was no calm in it.
She pushed back from her seat too abruptly, the sound cut through the classroom hard enough to make Soren flinch.
"Soren, how did you learn that?" she asked, words coming faster now, tripping over the edges of her usual composure. "Humans should not be able to use blood magic like that. Did someone tamper with your body? Were you given something? Do you have vampire blood in your lineage? No, that would have been detected during your application, it should have been, then how—"
"Professor Roseblood."
He kept his voice as even as he could.
She stopped, though only barely.
For one suspended second she seemed to realise where she was, realise Amelia was there, realise she was standing in front of a student with panic plain on her face.
The professional mask tried to slide back into place.
It did not settle properly.
"That's not what matters right now," she said, though her voice had gone thin.
She moved closer, then closer again, and before he could quite process it, her hands were on his shoulders.
The touch was careful, but urgent.
"Are you feeling unwell? Tell me honestly. Dizziness, nausea, pain, difficulty breathing, anything."
"I'm a little dizzy," Soren admitted. "But I'm all right."
That was not entirely true, but it was true enough.
Her eyes searched his face with frightening intensity, not as a professor checking on a student anymore, but as someone trying to confirm that what she feared had not already begun.
Soren let the blood sphere tremble above his palm for another second, then looked at her and spoke quietly.
"Is this a good enough reason?"
The words landed.
Lilliana stared at him.
Then her gaze dropped to the blood above his hand, and something in her expression shifted, not into calm, but into conflict.
Fear was still there, visible now that it had broken through, but so was thought, and under both of them was something rawer that looked painfully close to care.
Soren dispelled the spell.
The blood dissolved into red fragments of light and vanished.
The weakness remained, light but unmistakable, enough to prove the point.
"I already have it," he said. "So whether it's dangerous or not doesn't really change anything. If I'm going to use it, I'd rather understand it."
Lilliana's fingers tightened once against his shoulders before she seemed to realise she was still touching him.
She drew her hands back immediately.
Silence followed.
Amelia did not interrupt.
For once, she only watched.
Lilliana lowered her gaze, and when she spoke again, her voice had dropped enough that it almost sounded unsteady.
"Soren, come to my dormitory after classes today."
He blinked.
At any other time, with anyone else, those words would have sounded very different.
Here, though, there was no mistaking what sat underneath them.
The tension in her posture, the cold fear still lingering in her face, the way she had not recovered fully no matter how hard she was trying.
This was not impulse.
It was not anything light.
It was a decision made against resistance.
Before Soren could answer, Amelia gasped.
"Wow."
The word dropped into the silence with infuriating ease.
Soren turned his head.
Amelia was looking at Lilliana with quiet interest, a faint smile at the corner of her mouth, as if she had just witnessed something unexpectedly bold.
Lilliana, who had only just managed to regain some part of her composure, flushed.
It was subtle at first, then not subtle at all.
"Miss Einhardt, that is not what this is," she said, voice tightening at once.
Amelia tilted her head.
"I know."
That somehow made it worse.
Professor Roseblood straightened, very obviously trying to recover the shape of herself.
"What I mean is that this is a serious discussion regarding a dangerous magical discipline and a student's wellbeing. It is not an appropriate matter to speak about here."
Soren had to look down so neither of them saw his face.
Relief had already started settling in his chest.
She had not said yes.
Not yet.
But she had not refused him either.
That was enough.
More than enough, for now.
————「❤︎」————