First of all I should say that I'm not the suspicious, jealous type. I'm fairly permissive, you could say. Even with everything that's happened to me – betrayed, sent to Azkaban, robbed of my sight in one eye – I still find myself being too trusting all the time. Even though I'm cunning and deceitful sometimes myself, it doesn't suit me. It's not how I am. So when I decided to follow my friend Lucinda Baker, I did it because I was worried about her more than because I didn't trust her. I mean, I trust her, sort of. I trust her to always be herself, if you see what I mean. I know she's a liar and a manipulator by nature, and I can trust her to always be that way. It's why she's so good at what she does, moving and shaking the world from the shadows by way of a whisper and a rumour. I know she sells me out sometimes, but I don't mind. I like her despite this, or maybe because of it. We play this game sometimes, but I know she'd never hurt me seriously anymore.
The second thing I should mention is that I ramble sometimes. Quite a lot of the time. I need to focus when I tell this story.
You know what I mean though, right? I was following her because I was worried about her. She'd been missing from my life for a couple of months, and I felt her absence keenly. I'd seen her around sometimes but she was looking skinny and drawn. Her deep, brown eyes lacked their cunning sparkle. Her smooth brown hair was unusually unkempt. And the one time when I tried to talk to her, she only made curt, reluctant small talk before coming up with some excuse to leave.
Following Lucinda isn't easy. She's wise to all my tricks, certainly, and tricks others have tried that I'd never consider. An invisibility cloak doesn't work because she's got this weird way of knowing about people around her, even unseen ones. I think it might be part of her whole Occlumency thing, like how she can sometimes delve into someone's mind. I've never been any good at it when I've tried it. I think my own mind is too scattered, like a jigsaw made of the leftover pieces missing from every other jigsaw in the world. Like everyone's missing jigsaw pieces have fallen through a wormhole and formed themselves into my own brain.
Sorry, rambling again.
So I was transformed. I was disguised as a tall, nondescript man, wearing thick, enchanted glasses to cover up my empty eye socket rather than my usual eye patch. The stupid cursed wound means that no amount of magic will ever regenerate my damn missing eye. Sometimes I get something the muggles call 'phantom limb pain' in my eye socket, like the eyeball is still being removed. It's very nasty, and obviously no magical nor muggle treatment I've ever tried has ever helped.
It was a dark night, raining gently, which was good because it gave me an excuse to raise the hood of my cloak. Diagon Alley was nearly empty, the shops all shut. The Leaky Cauldron was throwing out the last few of its drunken patrons, including the handyman from Hogwarts. He stumbled around drunkenly, waving that stupid pink umbrella, and Lucinda had to actually pause as she walked to let him stagger past. I pretended to be interested in something in the window of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes – and to be fair I did find myself being distracted by it. It was an enchanted quill that transformed anything you wrote into the opposite of what you meant. 'Fun to lend to a friend before an exam', the advert said. I sighed – The Weasley's were so smart and brilliant, but they were so irresponsible. Recently I'd had a project I could have really used their help but they felt it was too serious and ridden with gravitas.
As Hagrid wandered off down the road, probably looking for somewhere to summon the night bus, Lucinda carried on down the road. I knew she had been up to something these past weeks, and it was taking its toll on her health. I also knew she rarely actually confessed anything personal to anyone, so I had resorted to this.
She turned down the corner to Nocturn Alley. I hate going down that street – too many people are interested in the things I make, expecting me to always be up for manufacturing a black-market item. Nonetheless I followed her. She had her hood down, her face tilted up into the rain like she was enjoying the sensation. From Nocturn Alley she turned onto Diabolik Alley, which is an even worse street. Nothing but muggers, murderers and shops selling the blackest of black magic. I mean goats blood and evil candles. Some of the applications of these things are interesting but the scummy, degrading atmosphere is very off-putting.
She was accosted by some random goblin with a dagger, but lord knows what the creature was thinking to try and mug a wizard. She summoned up a series of charms and I could tell she was very upset because she sent him spinning through the air, slamming him against a wall. Usually she'd just knock someone like that out. Instead she glued him firmly to that wall, growling something at him that made his face turn a weird, goblin-coloured pale of fear. Clearly I was right to be worried – she's usually so elegant and repressed, but now she was… emotional.
She walked down the rest of Diabolik Alley while I checked the goblin now pinned to the wall, high up. The poor thing had been stuck to it upside down, and he looked decidedly unhappy. But there was an expression on his face that I didn't like, so I left him up there and hurried to catch up with Lucinda. She was coming to the end of the narrow street and turning right, into Catastrophic Alley. That's the official name, anyway. It's also known as Dead End Row and The Pit. There's a magical sewage reclamation plant at the end of the street, pouring out sickly orange smoke and a foul smell. The only way to get here is by going through Diabolik Alley. All of these things mean that the tall, narrow tenement buildings squeezed between each other are cheap to rent rooms in. This is where the down-and-outs come before they finally end up on the streets. And when they do get homeless, they don't usually move far from here either. The narrow passage was littered with people sleeping rough, their beards and clothes dirty and knotted, their wands long ago sold or stolen, huddling into tight balls or beneath filthy blankets to keep out the cold night drizzle.
Lucinda walked up to a doorway, shadowed by an arch. She stood in the shadows and knocked on it, rhythmically. Clearly some sort of clandestine coded signal. The door creaked open and Lucinda slipped inside, closing the door quietly behind her. None of the denizens inhabiting the shadows and shelters and rotten old boxes in the street appeared to notice, but maybe they just didn't care. I was quickly looking more and more like one of them.
I was gradually transforming myself once more, ripping the fabric of my cloak and performing discreet little spells to make myself shabbier. I slunk up and down the alleyway, looking for somewhere to insert myself amongst them, intending to steak out the building she had gone inside. I had been following her like this for several days but this, and her day was made almost entirely of such meetings. I was getting rather good at surveillance and such things. Admittedly I'd been drinking certain special magical potions to keep myself alert after so much time spent awake, but it isn't the first time. Back in school I used to do this all the time, and whenever I've been facing a tight deadline the past couple of years, I've always used this specialised potion. I'm very good at them. They say it's not great for your health, but not meeting a deadline is much worse, given… the nature of some of my clients, lets say.
I had followed her around various clandestine encounters and I was getting quite good at it. The first time, I'd been completely uncertain about what to do. I'm fairly accustomed to suddenly obeying a random whim but there hadn't been time in this instance to put in my accustomed amount of research. I'd just followed her to her first meeting then wandered up and down the street in increasingly imaginative disguises, but I figured that in this place, that might attract attention. That first time I hadn't been able to do much more than wait for her and then follow her around the streets when she came out, anyway. It was… ineffective. I hate that. Luckily a few years ago I'd come up with the perfect thing for just such an occasion and it was the work of only a few hours, while I knew she was asleep in her bed, to build a new one for myself.
It was a silver circle of metal, inscribed with the appropriate runes and arithromatic symbols, that you held to your eye. It lets you see through walls and stuff. By adjusting the tiny silvery dials on the side, you can focus the distance gauge, and pick how much of the landscape you'd like to be able to see through. It was quite a simple invention, really. It's a combination of 'Old Maggie's First Class Scrying', a favourite amongst fortune-tellers, with the fourth-dimensional modifier removed, obviously adjusting for its absence in the equation. It's the same spell I use when I enchant artificial eyes – for Alastor the Auror, for example, back when I worked in the Ministry.
Then the addition of Hyposite's Imaginary Lens enchantment, because it's only a circle of silver metal, obviously. The symbols were quite hard to engrave on the silver together, but I remembered a passage by Professor Julian Mikwazi in his book 'Singing and Talking: The science of runic combination', in which he quotes the ancient S'pak Hoop, famed during the Byzantine era for magical swords. It was something about how different mineral contents affect the phase variance of the runes, and therefore the charm. But if you extrapolate that principle then, I figured, if you carve one set of runes with a very fine chisel made of, say, diamonds, and then another set of runes with maybe titanium or something similar? You could layer the runes over one another, producing what looked like just a mess of carving to the naked eye but with more than one rune occupying the same space in the carving. It's about the character of negative space, see. It's not a perfect principle but I only had a few hours to work while Lucinda was asleep, and I'm pretty fatigued no matter what I may have said earlier. Wait. I'm rambling again, aren't I. I'm sorry.
The basic idea is that I had a circle of magical silver that I could hold to my eye and see through walls. Deep beneath my hood I was doing just that. It was a strange effect – like if everything in front of you was suddenly made of glass. For an ordinairy person they'd need to close one eye or it'd be overwhelmingly confusing. Their depth perception would be overridden b all the magic. But like I said, I only have the one eye, and depth perception is only dimly remembered. I must have jiggled the device in my pocket because it was at its maximum setting, and for a very brief moment I had the strangest sensation that I was looking through the earth itself, everything transparent in front of me, seeing the stars that lurk behind the atmosphere that hide behind the buildings. I wondered briefly whether if I super-powered this charm, I wouldn't be able to see through space itself. I wondered what the furthest, most infinite limit of the universe was. Obviously the spell would be limited by the speed of light but there are ways around that, and I'd be able to see right to the edge of existence.
Damn, I'm doing it again.
I twiddled the dials on the side until the distance-gauge was making just the wall of the building in front of me transparent. It took a while, having been dialled up so high, but it turned out I had time because the only thing I had missed was Lucinda being shown into the house by a meek house-elf. Her cloak was taken, and she was guided down a hallway. I adjusted the focus to follow her into the new room. It was a fairly run-down place, with old curtains and moth-eaten carpets – even old, grey doyleys under the cheap vases full of dying flowers. There was another person in the room with her. A handsome man wearing an old-fashioned dinner suit, with long, smooth dark hair and a long, smooth, pale face. There was a quality in his eyes that I thought I recognised. They were saying stuff to each other and I realised with a shock that I'd overlooked being able to hear what she was saying when inside the buildings.
Luckily, I did know an old, obscure spell that would be perfect for this. I got it from an incredibly decrepit old medical book, full of obsolete medical techniques. Healing has progressed quite a lot in the four hundred years since the book was written, but it's basically an enchantment to be able to hear what you see people saying. Like dubbed lip-reading. It used to be for deaf wizards, but like I said, healing magic has progressed quite a lot and the spell is no longer relevant. Who knows what I was thinking when I memorised the thing – maybe that it'd be useful for eavesdropping on someone far away – but in this instance it appeared that the randomness of my brain had come in useful. I cast it, pointing my wand discreetly at my good eye and then both my ears, puzzling over how it would react with the charms engraved in the silver ring.
It turned out it made the voices strange and echoey, but nothing more than that. I listened to what they were saying now. The man was talking, his voice obviously well-bred, smooth and eastern-European.
"It sounds like quite a day," he commented.
"It was. Altogether more stress that it's worth, probably. It's not like I discovered anything particularly worthwhile," Lucinda was replying. Her voice was also similarly smooth – I've often thought it's like syrup. Her accent varies, depending on who she's talking to and what she's trying to get out of them. But her tones are always subtle and soft yet perfectly audible. I reckon she might have been referring to her earlier meeting with a very junior minister at the site of an old crime. She had poked around the crime scene casually, plumbing him for information while he did his best to fix the ruined plumbing of an old muggle basement. I had been nearby disguised as a generic magical law enforcement agent, listening in.
Like she was telling him now, she'd found out nothing particularly useful.
"Well, sit down, relax. I'd offer you some wine but I don't really have any," he was saying.
"I've told you before I could pick up some things for you," she told him as she sat down in one of the old dining chairs.
"I don't want to feel like a… how do you say? A charity case? Enough that I find myself living here, in these conditions."
"Nothing's wrong with this. It's homely," she told him. The man made a disapproving noise and Lucinda reached across the table to hold his hand. "Seriously, you could do a lot worse. Do you ever go outside your front door? Have you seen those people out there? It'd be so much worse for you, as well."
"What, because of my… condition?"
"Yes, your 'significant pause' condition. I don't know why you can't just own up to it. You know how I feel about it," and she got up out of her chair again.
"What is the word, again? A fetish? Yes, I believe you may have a fetish for me," he said as she span around, smiling softly.
"A fetish? Well, maybe. But no, I just think you're quite charming."
"There is an old saying in my family. 'Beware the smiling snake'. It means to be careful around those who are deadly and suddenly friendly."
"Yes, there was a saying like that in my old school," she said, and I couldn't see her face, she was turned away from me, but I knew she'd be smiling about it.
"I think the saying may actually have been about your old school. The Slytherin House and all of that."
"Well, Slytherin is a very old name. We're not all evil, but you should still beware when we smile," she said, and wandered around the room, looking at the old, empty picture frames. "Besides, I don't think you're deadly. After all this time, you haven't killed me yet."
"I have been tempted, many times," he said, doing something like grinning, but it was more than he was just showing his teeth. "But I wasn't really talking about me."
During this conversation, one of the other homeless things in the alleyway around me had sat down next to me, drinking from a bottle that stank worse than the sewer smog. I wondered whether it wasn't a ghoul or something, but I didn't dare to look around. For a start I might miss something in the room, secondly I've seen a ghoul before and I don't much care to repeat the experience. I wasn't entirely sure that the bottle was the cause of the smell, let's put it that way. But the man was still talking, inside that old, careworn dining room. There was still something in his eyes, and something in his teeth, that I didn't like. He reminded me of an old werewolf I had met once in Azkaban. His patient, languid movements reminded me of the Dementors from that same place.
"But I have been around a long time, and I've learnt to restrain myself. Besides, I'm not the one I was referring to."
"What do you mean?" asked Lucinda, coming over to him, sitting in the chair next to him.
"You are the snake, my dear. And you smile too often."
At this, I snorted to myself in the alleyway. The guy was becoming less and less charming by the second. And I thought I had a sneaking suspicion about why I didn't like him. Nothing to do with how obnoxious he was being to my best friend. Something much deeper than that. Something more instinctive. Something more… human.
"I hardly smile at all," Lucinda was saying.
"That's not the point. I suspect you may be a snake."
"What do you mean?"
"You're insidious and you're manipulative. And I don't know what you see in me."
"I just like you, is all. I'm allowed, aren't I?"
"The Ministry would say no," said the man, sadly.
"Pah! The Ministry. I don't care what they think."
"You know what I mean though. I really do appreciate your… gifts, but I can't understand what you see in me."
"Well, I used to admire the way you didn't let your pitiable situation ever get you down. That's changing now, obviously."
"You think me pitiable?"
"I didn't used to," said Lucinda sadly. The man got up, striding around the room, and again there was a grace to his movements that I now remembered clearly. There was a word that could describe him.
Vampire.
I had seen a few while I was inside. They were the worst, really. Always pacing, nearly always silent. Like they were just waiting. They reminded me of tigers and lions, the way they moved around their cells. Panthers, maybe, because of the darkness. This was the same impression I got from the man Lucinda was talking to. And I realised, probably quite late, that I was witnessing an incredibly intimate argument between the monster and my best friend. I had known her since I was a very, very young man so of course we had shared some intimate moments, even some very experimental sexual experiences here and there, but as my brain connected her drawn, near-starved appearance with his earlier comments about her 'gifts', I assumed that she had been feeding him, sustaining him.
This was quite confusing to me. I don't know why someone would do that for a stranger. But then I only suspected that he was a stranger to her. Maybe she'd known him for years and never mentioned that she knew a vampire. It's not the kind of thing one admits in polite society, indeed. But I got the impression they weren't very close, because of the things they said to each other. I sort of got the impression she was being dumped.
"Why are you saying these things?" she demanded, standing over him, behind him. I guess maybe she'd got that impression too.
"I think you should stop seeing me," he growled, standing up himself. There was a long, silent moment inside the room, and I could see the tension on both of their faces. Each was thinking quickly, though stunned. Each was thinking through their next response very carefully. I wondered what they must have been thinking. I wondered how intense their relationship must have been for them to have this kind of fight. It was presumably intense enough that she had permitted him to draw blood. I'd never have thought she was the type.
"If I stop seeing you, what will you do?"
"Oh, I don't know. My people have ways. We have a lot of ways. There's talk of a support network. Dilution, even! There are ways. I do not need you."
"Oh that's delightful to hear," she said, her tone growing harsher and quieter.
"I cannot keep you," he replied.
"What do you mean?"
"You are… how do you say? Nosy. You inquire. You're always so sneaky, always watching, always listening. You are a snake, and when you smile at me, I do not trust you."
She slowly walked up to him, her hands running over his shoulders, looking up into his icy blue eyes. Despite the stench surrounding me, despite the ghoul sitting next to me, despite the darkness, despite looking at them through a solid wall with the aid of magic – or possibly because of all of this – I felt a small voyeuristic thrill at seeing their intimacy. Seeing Lucinda act with actual… well, maybe not affection. But maybe seduction. It didn't feel right, but it did feel good.
"You don't need to be afraid of me. I know I'm a bit distant sometimes, I know I'm a bit hard to read. I might not be the most affectionate of people. But I really like you. And despite everything, I think we've got a good thing going here. We have great chemistry. We have a lot in common. You've always known I was a sneaky, watchful and maybe even a snake. Certainly a Slytherin. So, what's changed?" she said, kissing him gently on the neck, "Doesn't this still feel good?"
"It does," he gasped, and the gasping noise echoed strangely in my brain. I knew I shouldn't be watching but I couldn't stop. I was surprised none of the creatures around me were reacting to what I could see, until a fraction of a second later I remembered they couldn't see it either. I've always been a bit… I was going to say absent-minded but, well, you know all that already. Jigsaw-brained and so on.
"Wouldn't it feel better if you kissed me the same way?" she purred at him, offering her neck at him, sweeping her hair around her shoulders.
"It's okay," he said, looking at her creamy, smooth skin like a drowning man might look at a glass of water but still backing away.
"What?" she asked, straightening her head, looking at him with a new expression.
"I'm not especially… hungry. At the moment," he walked to the other side of the room. Lucinda was frozen apart from the act of stroking her hair back into position. I could see an expression on her face that wasn't new to me, but was probably quite new to this vampire fellow. Probably.
"You've killed someone, haven't you," she said. Outside in the alleyway I gasped, suddenly aware that I shouldn't be watching this at all. This was wholly Lucinda's affair, literally, and it had just taken a massive turn for the evil.
"That's not important," he told her.
"It's very important," she said to him.
"Why?"
"You know why."
"Because I killed someone? Are you kidding? Are you going to argue morality with me?"
"No. Because I was supposed to be your only one. I was supposed to be special. You said I was special. What, did you just get peckish?" she said, taking a step forward, sounding increasingly repressed and restrained.
"There was an encounter. I mean, this isn't how I wanted to tell you. This isn't how I planned on it going," he said to her, backing up slowly.
"Yeah, what makes you think it's ever been your plan? You're going to tell me everything and you're going to tell me now."
"Can't we just sit down and talk-"
"Now!" she exclaimed, and he backed up so far that his head bumped against the dining room wall.
"Well, it was my friend. He was in town, we met a girl. We might have had a few drinks. And then it was like the old days again. The bad old days," he said, darkly. "The days when I was… confused. The days of blood and torture."
"So you did kill her," said Lucinda, "And you drank from her. Did you fuck her?"
"…I feel bad about it," said the vampire. Lucinda was reaching into her robe. The vampire frowned, "Listen, I don't know what you think you're doing, but-"
He was cut short as Lucinda pulled out a thick wooden dagger from the inside pocket, stepping forwards quickly and plunging it into his chest. I think the only way she penetrated his bone was because of the force of her full body behind it, but the steak nevertheless penetrated him deeply. I found out later it also had a silver core, just for extra power. She had clearly put some hard work into this. Knowing her, she had probably carried it ever since she met him. Just in case. She's always been a cautious one and a relationship with a vampire is something to be very cautious about. She's always insisted on protection, if you see what I mean, and I think carrying a wooden steak with her at all times is probably part of that whole thing.
Anyway his body was spewing blood out across the whole dining room like a fountain. I was tempted now more than ever to put down the silver ring and stop watching but I knew I had to see what she did next. She did pretty much what I expected, and what I would have done. She went through his pockets, and through the room, taking anything of reasonable value including his silver watch chain – without a watch – and the rings from his fingers.
I've seen muggle stories where the vampires get stabbed in the heart and they dissolve into ash. Almost all of the muggle stories about vampires have them die that way. But that's not what happens. Vampires leave behind a body just like everyone else. Except in most cases they're bleeding blood that was never their own. Lucinda was rushing out of the dining room quickly, checking herself for blood, bellowing for the house elf. Her cloak was brought to her and Lucinda made remarkably calm, casual, engaging conversation with the meek female elf until she reached the front door. Then she stepped out. I watched the house-elf walk back down the hall, dusting her hands, muttering to herself. And then she walked into the dining room to check on her master. When she started screaming, I lowered the silver ring. When I did so, everything went dark.
It wasn't just the sudden shift from muted, interior light to the darkness of the external, rain-drenched street. Someone was standing immediately in front of me in a dark cloak. I looked up into the hood, and there was a wand pointing down at me, the tip glowing with restrained power. I sometimes like to calculate the energy spikes of magic, just as a hobby. I've rarely seen the principle in practise, though, especially not aimed at my face. I looked up past the wand but the light was too bright. Before I moved an inch, the silver circle of metal still at my chin, I said,
"It's me. It's Josh. Josh Grey."
The wand-light faded away, the tip lowered from my face. I could see past it now, into the hood of the person looking at me. It was Lucinda. She looked upset, even in the dark of the night and the blackness of the shadow over her face.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, in a whisper.
I considered responding in many ways. My first instinct was a joke, something like 'oh fancy meeting you here'. But given what I had just seen, that struck me as a bad idea. My second thought was that I should just remain silent, guilty and caught and shamed like a boy with his hand in the cookie jar. But what I had just seen deserved some comment. I had just seen my best friend destroy a man, a creature, that she'd had affection for. If it had been a dog I'd have hugged her, wept with her and kept pouring whisky until we passed out or got naked. But it had been human-shaped, and it had betrayed her. I'm not sure what I said was right, but it was at least something,
"Are you okay?"
She didn't kill me. She offered me her hand and lifted me off the ground of the alleyway. I grunted as I stood up. Her face looked morose and infuriated,
"Oh, change back. Your mind is hiding behind a different face. I don't like it."
My wand waved over my face and body, transforming me back to normal. My hair grew lank and dark. My chin sprouted a stubbly, bristly beard. I quickly fished my eye-patch out of my pocket and tugged it down over my face, hiding my ugly, scarred eye socket. Lucinda watched me do this last thing with a slightly less angry expression. Still furious, mind.
"I don't know what to say," I told her, wisely.
"Run," she told me, and started sprinting away down the road.
As the house-elf burst out of the house Lucinda had just left, I quickly followed her, my cloak billowing out around me in the moisture. We ran our way out of the rotten old alley, even though the cries of the distraught house-elf roused none of the residents. We kept running as we turned into Diabolik Alley, but then we hit a road-block. The goblin that Lucinda had pasted onto the wall earlier had apparently managed to attract some friends to try and help him down, and he'd hung around with his angry friends, knowing she'd have to come back this way. I could see one body already beaten down into a bleeding puddle, probably mistaken for her. As she drew close to them she drew her wand but stood still, facing them down. I knew this wasn't her area of expertise so I hurried to catch up. But she was already growling,
"Stand the fuck back and let me through or I'll do you all of you what I did to him," she said, gesturing at the goblin with her wand, making the creature leap back, terrified. I stood behind her, my own wand drawn, and the crowd parted in front of us like the red sea. We charged through, running less quickly. We turned into Nocturn Alley and stopped running – this is not the kind of place where one runs.
I was panting heavily and she was breathing deeply.
"I'm sorry about what I saw," I told her.
"I'm sorry about what you saw too," she replied, angrily. "If I didn't know I could blackmail you, I'd be killing you here and now."
"I believe you," I replied, thinking about how to make her know that she was still safe with me. After a few seconds of trying out various options, experimenting mentally with a variety of responses, she solved the problem for me:
"I know you've been following me. I hate you for it."
"I'm sorry," I told her.
"I know you are. But that doesn't make it better. If I'd have known he was going to do that, if I'd known about what he'd done, I'd have made you fuck off a lot earlier."
"If I'd have known, I'd have fucked off too," I told her as he walked past the midway point of the alley.
"Don't be silly," she chortled, "How could you possibly have known?"
"I'm always amazed that you deal with this sort of thing so well."
"Is that criticism?"
"No," I said defensively, "I admire your strength."
"I can't be that strong. The Cauldron was shutting when we went past earlier, but I know this terrible little place just off Horizon Alley that stays open late. It serves a wicked goblin whisky. It's so poisonous it may even grow your eye back," she said, smiling softly once more.
"Whisky sounds fantastic. Whisky please, yes please. Immediately. Jesus, how long were you with him?"
"Oh, not too long. A couple of months."
"And when did you start… feeding him?" I asked and she paused in her stride, staring at me. I raised my arms in surrender immediately, "I'm sorry, I'm just curious. You don't have to tell me anything. You're fine. We're fine. But I really do want that whisky."