Hey y’all I’m finally pulling the trigger on posting the first chapters of my asra x oc story I’ve been working on like a madwoman. Chapters 1-3 are up on ao3 live as we speak x
Moments before Asra sees her for the first time, the rain stops abruptly, and the clouds part to let faint rays of sunshine illuminate the streets of Vesuvia. He’s been hiding out from the rain with the baker, and he bids him goodbye before stepping out to roam the empty marketplace. It’s eerie, how quiet it is when no one else is around. The loudest sound is that of droplets of rain dripping from the stall awnings, the sunlight refracting in them and casting the tiniest of rainbows. Faust peeks her head out of his satchel, but gives him no sign she wants to get out of it.
It’s hotter and still humid by the time he hears it. A faint melody, notes clear and sharp, is escaping from an open window, somewhere. He can’t help but think it’s uncanny how the tune somehow sounds precisely like sunlight after the rain. Intrigued, he follows the sound, having to stop sometimes because his footsteps are louder than the song.
His eyebrows shoot up when he realizes he knows the place from where the music is drifting. It’s a hole in the wall of a shop, a narrow wooden sign bearing a single word above the door: Atelier . He remembers it from so many years ago, when his mother used to send him there with a small pouch of gold coin and a precise order of fabrics scribbled onto a piece of parchment. He hasn’t set foot in there since his parents went missing, doesn’t think he’s even noticed it as far back as he can remember. The memory of his mother stirs something odd in the pit of his stomach, a gut feeling that urges him to enter the store.
Its door is open already, but the shop appears to be empty. The melody, clear as water now, fills the narrow room around him, bouncing off the walls lined with rolls of fabric. A long counter lines the wall to his right, strewn with flyaway papers and open books, as well as a generous amount of miscellaneous thread spools. At the back of the room, a spiral stairway leads to another floor, right next to a door frame lined with a bead curtain. However, it’s the scent that is most striking. Outside, he wouldn’t have been able to remember the delicate blend of lemon, rose and lavender that perfumes the shop. Inside, it’s hard to fathom he ever forgot it.
As he contemplates his surroundings, filled with nostalgia by this place that has barely changed in all those years, he doesn’t notice that the music dies down. He only does when he picks out a faint humming, coming from behind the beaded curtain. So the shop is not entirely empty, he realizes. He wonders how he should make his presence known, hesitates as he tries to remember what the woman who owned the shop looked like back then. He ends up not having the time to pick.
The beads rustle gently as she pushes them aside, still humming. She is startled into a gasp when she sees him standing there.
