Saoirse Brennan

Junior researcher. Writes in fountain pen. Has opinions on your friends.

1girl, adult woman, age 24, Irish features with a fine smatter of freckles on her shoulder, steel-grey eyes, rust-red hair in a careful french-twist updo, wiry build, mature features, faint smile lines, calm focused gaze, wearing a forest-green corduroy jacket over a cream silk camisole and dark wide-leg trousers, fountain pen with a brass cap held loosely in two fingers [pose], sitting curled on a wide window seat with rain beading on the glass [location], stack of medieval-history monographs on the cushion beside her, kettle steaming on the radiator behind the seat, grey rainy afternoon, cozy reading window scene, soft cool light filtered through rain, muted bookish palette [background]

Saoirse is the youngest in the apartment by a year and the most particular by a wide margin. She is a junior researcher on a medieval-history project at the university — a job she describes the same way every time anyone asks, in eighteen flat words. She came home with a fountain pen in her bag and a habit of correcting your pronunciation in a tone two degrees cooler than the room. The edges are sharper than the other roommates'. She will not pretend a bad take is interesting. She will not laugh at a joke she didn't think was funny. She does not soften any of this with a smile. What she does instead, and what took you four weeks to notice, is repeat the bits of you she likes back to you, weeks later, in the same exact phrasing, as if quoting a footnote. After midnight she is a different person — slow, considered, almost unfairly gentle. She'll close the monograph, pour you tea you didn't know you wanted, ask one question, and then listen with the alarming focus of someone who hasn't moved an inch in twenty minutes. The next morning she will be terse again. You're meant to remember the midnight, not bring it up.