‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾　☽༓･*˚⁺‧͙

DEVINA STOOD IN front of the mirror in her living room, watching her own reflection with a subtle frown as she patted makeup over the subtle bags under her eyes. She'd spent most of the night sitting inside of the empty library with Brian, their shoulders gently pressed together as they sat crouched over his textbook until the rising sun started to leak through the slatted blinds and her eyes felt like they were weighed down with lead. Brian finally called it quits after unsuccessfully trying to read the same paragraph three times over, his eyes too blurred and heavy to try and string the words together anymore. He had offered to walk her back to her own apartment, but after nearly tripping on his own feet more than once, it ended up being Devina who walked him back to his own.

When Devina finally got back to her own apartment, her hand still clasped around the piece of paper with Brian's name and number printed onto it, the sky had long since faded from a dawn orange into an early morning blue, but she couldn't have cared less as she pulled back the covers on her bed and slid in next to her dog, who was more than happy to fall back asleep as soon as she had stopped making herself comfortable. She didn't have any trouble falling into a hazy half-sleep herself, her dreams quickly becoming a fuzzy mess of curly-haired astrophysicists and the taste of burnt coffee covered up with too much cream. But, as was usually starting to become the case, her sleep didn't last as long a she would have liked it too.

"Dammit!" She cursed as her hand slipped and sent her eyeliner in the wrong direction. She reached for a tissue sitting on the counter, catching a glimpse of her dog, Sergeant Pepper, staring at her from the corner of her eye. She turned around to face him, placing a hand on her hip when she saw his bored expression. "What are you looking at?" She questioned him, making him tilt his head a little. It seemed like even he knew that Devina was getting more dressed up than usual for a simple 'study' session. "Everyone's a critic these days," she rolled her eyes as she turned back to the mirror to wipe away the black line so she could try again.

This time around, the line went smoothly, and Devina let out a sigh of relief as she placed the cap back over her makeup and stepped back to admire her handiwork. The late night was still evident in the dark marks under her eyes, but she'd covered it up the best she could, and that was going to have to be enough until she finally got her semester out of the way. Besides, based on the watch strapped around her wrist, she was due to meet Brian again at his apartment in half an hour, and she had to pick up some more coffees on her way over.

She passed by Sergeant Pepper on her way to get her bag, the small dog standing up and following her as she slung the strap over her shoulder and crouched down to pet him. "Try not to get into too much trouble today, okay?" She told him. She knew full well that he was incapable of understanding her, but it didn't stop her from talking to him as if he was. After all, he was the best listener she'd met in a long time. She stood back up, checking that her bag had everything she needed before she finally opened the door of her apartment. "Be good, I love you." She told the dog before shutting the door again behind her and walking down the stairs.

★彡

BY THE TIME Devina knocked on Brian's door, her hands full with two paper coffee cups, she was already ten minutes late. She readjusted the cups into one hand, raising the other to knock against the door before she took a step back and rocked on the heels of her platform shoes. She heard a muffled 'thud' from behind the closed wood, followed by a string of hushed curses before the door was jerked back and a messy head of blond hair poked around the side of the door to look at her. Devina's eyebrows shot up at the sight of the unfamiliar man, "Oh I'm sorry. Maybe I have the wrong apartment?"

"No I don't think so," the blond shook his head, pulling the door back further as he leant against the frame. His blue eyes were shrouded with curiosity as he let them drift down her outfit without discretion, and if she'd had a free hand, she might have snapped it in front of his face and called him out for it. "Jeez when Brian said he had a study partner coming over I wasn't expecting someone so—"

"Roger!" The blond was interrupted from finishing his sentence by a hand gripping the collar of his shirt, pulling him off of the door frame quicker than Devina could blink as another figure with a familiar set of curls took his place. Devina felt a slight grin tug at her lips when she heard a soft 'hey!' from behind the door, turning her eyes back to look at Brian as the disheveled astrophysics student pushed a hand through the front of his untidy curls. "I'm sorry about him, he's just kind of..."

"Cocky?" Devina suggested, and Brian let out a small chuckle as he nodded. "It's alright, I can handle over-confident boys, it's kind of one of my strengths." She promised him jokingly, her own smile widening when she saw the slight grin that appeared in the corner of his mouth.

"Well, luckily for us he doesn't have a very long attention span," Brian told her as he took a step back to hold the door open wide for her. "He'll probably get bored and stop bothering us as soon as we start mentioning stellar cores." Devina laughed, shaking her head as she moved the coffees back into both hands and walked past Brian into the small apartment.

"It's not big, but we can study out here if you'd like," he told her as she walked by, her eyes moving over the apartment with a sort of muted fascination. The room flowed quite seamlessly from the entry into a small living area and kitchen, with a chaotically patterned couch in the middle of it that didn't fit with any of the other furniture at all. There was a single bookcase pushed up against the wall by the door, loaded with record albums instead of novels. For some reason, it was exactly what she would have expected from the two boys, functional in the most disorderly kind of way. The same blond from the door had moved to sit on the arm of the couch as she walked in, tapping his high-top converse on the floor in a familiar beat before fixing her with a lopsided smile. "And that's Roger, my flatmate, who you've obviously already met."

"Devina," she introduced herself to the blond, officially this time, before she let her eyes drift absently over the numerous records lining the shelves of the bookcase. It seemed like Roger and Brian could have their own record store going with the amount they had, and she recognised more than a few of the artists on the covers. "You two must really like music, huh?"

"I guess you could say that," Brian let out a short laugh as he came over to take the coffees out of her hand so she could flick through the covers, all of them worn and slightly faded from being handled so often. "We all have to have a hobby, I guess."

"We play in a band, actually," Roger chimes in, and Devina's hand fell off of the covers as she turned back around to raise an eyebrow at the two boys in surprise. "Smile. We've got a gig on next Saturday actually, if Brian hasn't invited you already."

Brian's cheeks had already been washed in a pale pink when Devina switched her eyes back to him, the curly-haired boy giving her an apologetic, closed-lip smile at her questioning expression. "I was trying to think of a way to ask you last night, but you seemed like you didn't want to be distracted." He admitted with a shrug. The more Devina seemed to learn about Brian, the more complex he started to become. But if there was one thing that Devina Pierce loved more than astrophysics, it was solving enigmas.

"Well how about you officially ask me after we've finished this bloody assignment?" She suggested to him, stealing the paper cup back out of his hands before he could reply and brushing by him on her way over to the couch. She pulled her bag over her shoulder as she sat down, resting it in front of her before she took a long sip out of her warm paper cup and set it down on the coffee table as well. "And then maybe I'll think about it."

Roger let out a chuckle as he got off the arm of the couch, clapping Brian over the shoulder on his way to the door. "Well you two have fun studying," he told them, sending Devina a cheeky wink that made her shake her head in amusement. The blond grabbed his jacket from the hook on the door, pulling it open before he turned back around for a moment. "It's been lovely meeting you, Devina, but I gotta run, I have a date that officially started fifteen minutes ago." He told them before he closed the door behind himself.

Brian shook his head apologetically as he turned away from the door, making Devina laugh as she pat the empty space on the couch next to her. "Don't worry about it," she told him, "let's just get this over with, and then you can tell me about your gig next weekend."

"Deal," Brian laughed as he walked past her to grab his books and papers off the kitchen counter to bring them over to the couch. The brunette took the textbook out of his hands as he sat down, flipping open the heavy cover to find the page they'd left at the night before. Once she'd settled it on an open page between their legs she reached out to grab her coffee again, nursing the paper cup carefully in her hands and letting the waning heat of it radiate into her finger tips. It didn't take a perceptive person to realise that Devina probably had a coffee dependance, although she was far too deep into her work to acknowledge it, and she found a certain sense of comfort in the familiarity of the bitter-sweet scent as she blew the steam off of the surface.

"Mm," Brian hummed as he sipped at his own cup, letting out a contempt sigh as he leaned back into the chair. "Where do you buy this stuff? The only coffee Roger buys us is from this shitty vendor down the street. I think I singed half of my taste buds off after the first few cups."

"I used to work at a coffee store under my apartment to pay rent," Devina admitted, giving up on trying to read the paragraph in front of her as she looked back up at Brian. "I'm not much of a customer-service kind of girl, but I could make a mean latté. And you haven't even tried my spice cake yet."

"Well you're welcome to come and study here anytime if you promise to bring some of that," Brian told her.

"Are you trying to talk me into coming over more, Brian May?" Devina narrowed her eyes at the curly-haired boy, a slightly amused smile still tugging at the corner of her mouth.

"That depends," he admitted, shifting his hazel eyes off of the textbook to rest on her face momentarily. "Is it working?"

Devina caught her bottom lip between her teeth to try and bite back the smile threatening to take them over. Maybe some of his roomates boldness was starting to rub off on him more than he thought. "Maybe," she shrugged eventually, "let me concentrate on finishing this paper and I'll get back to you on it."