Title: Modern Lilac
Summary: They found each other on the road. It was appropriate, in many ways that they should find each other again like that. Schmendrick/Amalthea because there is so little. One-shot.
Disclaimer: Yeah, like I own and make money off of these characters.
Warning: Fluff, mentions of character deaths, nothing serious.
Dedication: For Hatter and Hare Productions, who actually enjoyed one of my other tLU fics, despite itself. Also written because the lack of Amalthea/Schmendrick fics annoy me so badly it's ridiculous.

-:-
Look where life has led me to…
'Me, too.'
-What Good Will Wishing Do.

It was a funny way to meet again—a sort of reoccurrence of her sleeping in the ditch and him just looking upon her while trying not to let a witch figure out that he could see her for what she was—but, considering their history, it wasn't all that strange.

There were new blooms in the trees that seemed brighter with every step she took in the moonlight that cast shine on her forever pure white hair and these strange clothes that all the people in this 'modern' world saw as vintage jeans and a shirt that covered her and looked much like the shift the magician had placed over her still trembling figure as she took her first human steps (she had bought it from the small thrift shop she now worked—a pleasant and calming thing to do; making her feel less lonely in her own skin even though others of her kind still persevered in the world and she wasn't alone—in when she wasn't existing through taking small walks around the town that sat adjacent to her lilac wood and had grown bountiful ever since populating) in life. She could walk easily now, simple flat boots different from walking barefoot in stone castle hallways.

She stood still at the sight of him standing in the middle of a road that hadn't been travelled by anyone but herself since a hundred years before when strong explorers were still figuring out where a good place to live would be. His right hand was trained and touching on a broken branch of a peach tree that she had seen grow from a sapling in the shadows of oak and pine trees; his simple touch mending the hard skin of the bow, a light blue cast of magic twining into the wood and making sure it would last when he pulled his hand back and looked over at her like he had known she had been watching him.

It didn't seem to shock him that she had turned herself back into this woman with two legs and the beauty of a thousand-thousand queens and princesses in those fairy stories she saw at the public book stores all the time. It shocked her, however, to see him still young and handsome and wearing clothing of modern men; a time piece was latched to his wrist with leather and silver, but was lacking the arms to point out the numbers (it was impossible to tell how she knew that it wasn't time that mattered, so much as the feeling of the clock seeming to have a pulse against the inside of his wrist).

If all the magic in the world had vanished in this age of wires and metal, the Internet weaving around the sky and inside the ground, new music coming into the world every week by people whom a thousand years ago would have either been burned as heretics or worshipped like Shakespeare—if all the magic in the world had ceased to exist like the general public believed, Schmendrick the Magician wouldn't have been able to walk up to the woman that both was and was not a real unicorn; a smile adorning his face.

They spent days and nights and more days in her little apartment (oh, she had spent a long while figuring out how to get one of those before she finally conceived that all you had to do was have a job, a former proof of address and a deposit; it was worth it, though) drinking tea and eating various meals that mostly consisted of vegetables and junk food, just playing catch up on all the years that had passed between the both of them.

She had healed entire leper colonies in India and been rewarded with having her horn painted a brilliant yellow and blue in designs of the region that inevitably washed away when she left the land of tigers and deep magic of the jungles. During the Crusades, she had been a war horse for the martyr Joan of Arc and been witness—far above the masses and standing on a hill with a saddle half falling off of her—to the poor girl's burning at the stake. Amalthea stated, washing some of her dishes after a dinner Schmendrick had prepared, him standing beside her and drying the clean dishes and glasses handed to him, that she had comforted Helen of Troy during the war to bring her back to the husband she didn't love. When she somehow, with ease and pretty delight that she didn't feel so very often, had turned to the form of a human again, she had wandered around Europe for a time and reburied Wolfgang Mozart after the city gravediggers dumped him into a pauper's grave with fourteen other bodies surrounding and rotting his corpse; she had dug the grave herself and planted a still lush and still beautiful fig tree to mark the place where dirt covered the great composer's bones. She had seen her own kind in the rice patties of Vietnam trying to soothe and lend comfort to children of the country during the war some years back; and they had helped which she was grateful for — it was proof that they were not beyond caring for the world. Lady Amalthea kept an eye out for all the other unicorns like it was her duty to them, even after freeing them near a thousand years before.

("Old as the sun and old as the moon and still, you seem to me, to be as pure hearted as the day I met you, my lady," Schmendrick grinned like a young man he could never be again, sitting with her on her modest Queen Size bed and helping her fold her cleaned laundry, "How good of you to simply be."

"And yourself, magician?" Amalthea prodded, one long sleeved auburn colored sweater folding easily in her tiny palms and she set it aside with the rest of the finished wardrobe; she would put it away in her wicker drawers later.

Eyes seemed to sadden at her way of looking at him like he was worth something—she could tell that, indeed, he still thought so little of himself—but, as was his way, he was never one to deny her.)

It was better for him, after the unicorn had left him on a hill, half-happy and half-sad, to travel with Molly for a while, but after some years, he had gone with her to the Kingdom Lir ruled over and left her with him in the dead of the night. Something was still wrong with him in that, while he had become a great magician, it was true, he had not become REAL; things still happened beyond his control and too often for his liking, Molly became a victim of his foolishness and negligence. Leaving her with Lir was the best thing he felt he had ever done; Schmendrick still knew where their graves sat—right next to each other and carefully hidden from the modern people of the world.

When the night fell and he made to sleep on her sofa, she pulled him back into her room and had him tell her as much about his journey after leaving Molly as he could; he lay on the bedside nearest the window and she could count all the shadows the moonlight made his hair toss about his eyes and mouth and neck as she curled up on the other side of the bed with her arms hugging the larger pillow to make herself more comfortable.

He had walked about the Earth without a whole lot of the old urge to truly be able to control magic; it came to him when it wanted to—he was the bearer and the messenger of magic, but not the keeper of the keys and controller of all powers afforded to the universe. He made peace with that, truly. Schmendrick had come into confrontation with a few other unicorns with greetings and memory of him being on the beach when they were freed from the ocean; a couple male unicorns had thought for a long time that he had helped the Red Bull and then tried to kill him with their much longer horns until he'd been struck and explained the situations.

Amalthea had asked to see and he had (blushing, how strange) raised his shirt and showed her the kind of long scars that indeed would come from the magic and power of being struck by the horn of any unicorn. Both ugly and beautiful, her pale fingers traced the white and sort of blue veined healed wounds. His skin jumped at the touch, but he went on painting the picture of the years.

For about twenty seasons he had worked as a priest (a poor one at that) in the English countryside, but left when it became apparent that the church was corrupt and he was in danger of being found out to have magic. He'd almost been burnt at the stake three times and escaped only when the magic decided that he was worth saving by causing freak storms and explosions and once by simply letting the flames only eat away at the twined rope holding him in place so he could walk out of away from the danger to be greeted by villagers screaming 'Demon' and 'monster' and other insults. The magic once changed him into something that made him unappetizing to a pair of demon dogs in Africa that had been devouring men and children ("Not the women, you see. They stole the women and reproduced with them.") so he could get close enough to destroy them with the pair of horizontal horns on his head (not unlike your real horn and the one Mommy Fortuna gave you to please the carnival folk—though not nearly so beautiful as yours, I assure you," he grinned as Amalthea actually rolled her eyes at the image) and trample them with the strong cloven hooves that had replaced hands and feet; he hadn't liked the blood on his new brown pelt, but the villagers had been happy. He hadn't kept the form for long and a few hundred years later he'd found himself again in a carnival of Romani, reading fortunes rather than performing arts; not real fortunes, but he found that it was rather like being a therapist—someone to listen and advise wanderers and young teens and old people that had nobody else. He stayed out of wars, except to heal the injured and the sick.

"Recently I found myself looking for lilac woods," he said, winding down and finally comfortable as his shirt was pulled back down and his head was comfortable on the pillow she'd given him.

"Why lilacs?" Amalthea asked, quiet but still curious even as sleep was upon the both of them and she was sure that he would be asleep by the next answer. She had an inkling in her bones, though, so she needed to ask.

Schmendrick's eyelids drooped and held closed, his answer fogged in his brain but comforting and clear as he spoke before sleep took him, "It's your flower. I remember that."

He was asleep and she followed after a slight pause to reposition her head so she was leaning her forehead against his shoulder.