Celestial Variables

There was a moment of silence.

“I see,” he said flatly. “I’ll be sure to dial it down.”

Layla squinted at him through the fog of her sleep deprivation. “Can you do that?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

She nodded solemnly, as though she’d just received a sacred truth from a divine entity. “Of course not. That makes perfect sense. Reality is a fixed constant—wait, no, I wrote a paper arguing the opposite...?”

Alhaitham shut his book with a quiet thud, which made her jump a little. “Miss.. Layla,” he said, tone patient but slightly pointed, “When was the last time you slept?”

Layla blinked rapidly, as if calculating. “...T-Tuesday?”

“It’s Friday.”

“…That explains the hallucinated dissertation defense I had earlier.”

He sighed and leaned back slightly in his chair. “You’re spiraling. You’re also projecting. And now I’m part of your imaginary academic obstacles.”

Layla groaned and let her head fall onto the desk, arms flopping dramatically to the sides.

“This is why I don’t sit near people,” she mumbled into the wood. “They always turn into metaphors.”

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Time passed.

Maybe ten minutes. Maybe more.

Neither of them moved.

The table between them was a cold battleground of silence and shuffling parchment. Occasionally, Layla muttered something about planetary alignments. Alhaitham, as always, remained unreadable, flipping through pages with all the urgency of a man utterly unaffected by the passage of time.

But then… he noticed it.

A tiny movement from the edge of his vision.

Layla’s head bobbed forward — once, twice — like a puppet with a fraying string. Her quill made a shaky loop on the page before slipping from her fingers entirely.

Alhaitham didn’t look up.

He had seen this happen before with sleep-deprived researchers. He had, in fact, calculated a near-perfect probability of it happening to her before the hour was out. She was predictable like that.

So when her head finally landed on the desk with a soft thud… he barely flinched.

What made him pause and lift his gaze — was the subtle shift in the air.

The silence had changed.

Alhaitham’s eyes slid toward her. Layla was still slumped forward, but there was a strange stillness to her posture now. No unnecessary twitching and irksome soft murmuring.

And then —Her hand moved.

Deliberate. Calm. She reached out, grabbed her fallen quill with uncanny precision, and began writing again — eyes still closed.

Alhaitham blinked.

The handwriting was different. Tighter. More... confident. She wasn’t copying charts anymore. She was writing… something else.

Equations. Theoretical variables. Advanced, obscure formulations that should have taken hours of concentration.

“Interesting,” he murmured, leaning in.