The house was quiet, for once silence was a rare thing in any place inhabited by Feliciano, and it was downright unheard of for it to last for more than four minutes or so. Nevertheless, Ludwig seemed to have worked some kind of magic that even England would have been jealous of, and the usually bubbly Italian hadn't said more than two words in the past half-hour.
The only sounds in the room were the tapping of Ludwig's laptop keys, the slow scratch of Feliciano's pen, and the occasional rasp of a mug across the table when one of them took a sip of hot chocolate.
They were sat in the kitchen, at either end of the long, scrubbed-wood