Mordred is best friends with a Catholic and used to be into mythology and is therefore capable of talking at least semi-intelligently about most of the European art; he's careful to label his sources, to differentiate between 'this is something pretty much everyone who talks about the topic agrees on' and 'this is disputed' and 'I read this somewhere' and 'this is a guess.'

Gosh.

On the way to the bookstore Inaaya decides to teach him how to say things in Hindi.

!!good!!

Mordred picks up new phonemes quickly and is a decent-though-not-perfect mimic and wants to know about connotative meanings and heads himself off before he can go down too many grammatical rabbit holes, which doesn't mean he doesn't go down any.

"You're really good at making the sounds, Louise still can't do half of those."

She is going to KISS HIS CHEEK about this fact.

Open, genuine smile. Holding hands? Maybe?

(It's -- weird, but very welcome, to be able to just do this, and not worry about what it means.)

Bookstore!

She's not not nudging him towards the books about languages.

He doesn't take much nudging but first he wants to know if she knows who Emily Dickinson and Oscar Wilde and Edna St. Vincent Millay are.

She hasn't read any poetry!

"Oh good, that means I get to show you this for the first time --"

And here's Dirge Without Music.

Inaaya tears up reading it.

"Yeah. Me too."

Does she seem like a hug would be at all welcome, he kind of wants to hug her about this--

Yes, yes she does.

Okay. Hugs it is.

He's very very gentle, and about the right height for her face to be in his shoulder.

He's so warm.

It's....... very nice to press her face into someone's shoulder and have them be gentle with her.

As soon as she seems like she wants him to let go he lets go.

"That, um. Has been my favorite poem for about five years."

"Oh."

"It's very good."

"There... are a lot of things I am not resigned to."

"It's one of my favorite things about you." Quiet. Incredibly sincere.

She straightens herself out.

"Have you read the Necronomicon? I know you went to Miskatonic and it feels like enough people from Miskatonic have read the Necronomicon that they must teach it in introductory English."

"I haven't, no, it wasn't really my field."

"'That is not dead which can eternal lie,'" she quotes, "'and with strange aeons even death may die.'"

"'So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,'" he quotes back - Shakespeare, not the Necronomicon - "'And, Death once dead, there's no more dying then.'"

"But mine's a promise."

"Yeah. It is. I -"

Pause.

"'Knowing that better men would come, / And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags / He wars on Death—for lives; not men—for flags.'"

"I love you."

!!!!

"I love you. --I would like to learn how to say that in Hindi at some point."