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"It isn't easy, is it?"

Oliver's voice came from behind Amelie, and it was all she could do not to jump, or even show any reaction to his presence; she knew he would come here – after all, merely three hours ago, she had given him half of the town – but she hadn't expected it now. This moment was hers to reflect on what she had done, what concession she had made in order to end the uncertainty about the town's ruling, and just whether or not she could fight off Oliver and mourn Sam at the same time, alongside giving the town its required attention.

"What isn't easy, Oliver?" Amelie replied, keeping her gaze fixed on the half crescent moon that was high in the sky; it was framed with stars around the edges, ones that sparkled distantly, and it was something that Amelie always loved to look at. No matter what changed on Earth, every twenty eight days, the moon would return to this position in the sky, and she could marvel at how so many things change, and yet how so many stay the same.

"Letting go," he said softly, more gently than she could ever have imagined him capable of managing. "You have been the sole ruler of this town since its conception; you must be finding it hard to allow me to have half of it, as suddenly as you snapping your fingers." As he spoke, he took a step towards her, and it was all she could do not to let her back stiffen, for they were equals now. This would make it that much harder for her to order him around – and if he wanted to be close to the window, even when she was there, he would move towards her.

"I suppose you are correct," she replied nonchalantly, though every word he said was the truth; there was no way that she could let the entirety of her livelihood be snatched away from her – well, half of it. "I have given everything to this town, and you have been here for…what, almost two years? And in this short space of time, you have grown to presume that you are good enough to be its ruler, even though your idea of ruling a nation was to ban anything of any significance." Her pointed reminder at his past was deliberate, and Amelie couldn't help but feel a spark of vindictive pride pass through her as she felt his body stiffen; he was not yet as good at controlling his emotions as she was.

That was what the years of working in here had done; whilst she would still, of course, be working in her office – there was no way Oliver was getting anything better than his office in Common Grounds, even as an equal 'boss' of the town – she would no longer have the need to work every single hour of the day, almost. Half of the responsibilities she did not want, or the ones Oliver demanded to have, would be removed from her, and would therefore leave her with many long, lonely hours to fill.

"Have you planned what you are going to do with your free time, Amelie?" Oliver spoke as though she had not referenced his past, and he moved to take a stance beside her body. Slowly, Amelie turned to face him, her icy grey eyes tearing themselves from the moon and landing directly on the craggy, yet strangely young-looking face of her fellow. "After all, I know you almost lived in this room before; what on this good planet will you do with the freedom my existence will afford you?"

She sighed, almost without meaning to, and the look in his eyes was immediately obvious to her: he knew that she wanted to hide something, and that it was the best practise to merely tell him how she felt. It wasn't as though revealing her feelings would leave them in a situation of civil war again, was it?

"No, I have not," she told him, moving from the window to sit down in her ornately carved chair. It was too much like her father's throne for her liking, something she had noticed when she came in here earlier, and she made a mental note to have it removed the second she could. "I have never had a home, Oliver, not here at least. There is a house in which I keep my earthly possessions, ones that mean little to me anyway, for their significance to my life is near non-existent, because this town has always been my life. This room is more of a home to me than the house in which I reside is, and you ought to know that." Her tone was soft, gentle almost, and it was the most open she had ever been with Oliver, she thought. Nothing about her screamed aggression, or even the desire to remain defended against her one time enemy; she wanted to tell someone how she felt, for once in her life.

Oliver was silent for a moment as he moved to take a seat opposite her desk, leaning forwards onto his haunches in order to make the position less formal, less as though he was her guest; this would normally have irked Amelie, yet today, it didn't. It almost made her feel as though she had a friend – a novel idea that she had never considered with Oliver, not since his actions of the seventeen hundreds.

"And with Sam?" he said, sounding as though he almost cared; it was more than just a question digging for information. "I know why you kept him away from you publicly, yet surely you continued to see him after hours, so to speak?" he didn't phrase himself particularly well, and Amelie had to suppress a smile at the potential angle at which she could take his question, yet she understood what he meant.

"No," was her answer, her fingertips drumming on the table lightly as she spoke. "I couldn't; when I left Sam, when I told him that I couldn't be with him any longer, I severed all the contact. Do you really believe that Sam could have acted as well as that, to pretend that he desired to see me every day, and that I was refusing to see him because I wanted to protect him?" she snorted slightly, a sound that she had made very few times in her life, and yet it seemed natural at this stage. "We are – were – too in love for such a show. No, I did not entertain my Samuel, no matter how much I desired to see him. This town was my life, and you have taken away part of it from me."

Once again, Oliver did not speak for a few moments, taking a while to process what Amelie had told him. "So, for fifty years, you worked solely for the town, and did not do anything for yourself?" he confirmed, and Amelie nodded slowly.

"I didn't want to think of him, and so work was the only thing that kept him from my mind," she elaborated, feeling the need to fill the silence. It was almost as though Oliver was her councillor, someone who she could tell everything…but she couldn't. It was Oliver; he would only use anything he learned against her, later on in their alliance.

This time, Oliver smiled, and it was a smile that Amelie hadn't seen in so long; there was no bitterness within it, nothing that suggested a sinister, ulterior motive: he wasn't smiling because he felt it was the only way to hide that he wanted to hurt her, but merely because he actually felt the need to smile.

That in itself was enough for alarm bells to be ringing in Amelie's mind, yet they didn't. For once, she decided to trust Oliver. Perhaps there was a chance that trust could, for a change, bring her the right result.

"Life is different now," he told her softly, there being none of the usual hardness – or sarcasm, as there was in the case of most humans and Myrnin – that usually lined his voice. "Sam is dead, and you can accept that. We now share this job. I recall the days when you would paint just because you wanted to; you would paint masterpieces, recite songs as you played on the piano, and would sew because that was how you enjoyed passing your time. You read for leisure, not just documents for the town's new…disco hall, for example." He managed to read one of the sheets on Amelie's desk upside down, and with a half amused, half exasperated expression, Amelie moved to turn it over.

"None of those interest me any longer, Oliver; I have tried, truly, to regain the independence I once had, the intense joy I once gained from completing a watercolour painting – yet it no longer works for me," she sighed, moving from her chair with a graceful movement to stand alongside the bookcase on the far side of the room. "Literature which was once so valuable in my mind has been tainted, because Samuel told me something to do with the book. We shared things such as the television, the radio, and other more modern hobbies one may have. I cannot do them without being reminded of him; I put myself through enough heartache every day, just existing without him, so why would I want to do something that would make me think of him for the entire duration?" her voice was ragged with agony, and she was barely able to contain tears she swore she would not shed after the night Claire found her at Sam's grave. Crying was for the weak, after all, and that was something Amelie was not; she was strong, brave and fearless…

…so why did she feel as though she was none of those?

The silence that reigned was so loud that Amelie almost broke it many times, wondering what Oliver was thinking about; there was a pensive expression on his face that slightly worried her, because she had never had him think about her that deeply, she thought, and yet it soothed her slightly, that he would be so interested in her well-being.

"Chess," he suggested finally, the word seeming so random in the room which had been free from sound for almost ten minutes that Amelie almost laughed.

"Chess?" she repeated incredulously, unable to understand why Oliver had suggested this.

"We never did finish the game we played when your Father arrived in town," he reminded her, a smile playing on his lips as he spoke. "And you require something to do on an evening; well, for this evening, why do we not pass the time by playing something we are both rather partial to? I can recall days when all we did was play chess, in the days before my actions potentially severed our relationship forever." His tone was steady as he spoke, and he stood up as he did so, craning his neck to look for a chess board Amelie may not have even had.

"On the third shelf in the far corner," she said instantly, a smile slipping onto her lips as she returned to her seat. "And do hurry, Oliver. I would rather my victory be quick, rather than drawn out as you tend to make it, so that I can hopefully find something to spend my free time doing."

As Oliver set up the chess board in front of her, Amelie couldn't help but wonder how this scenario had came about; one minute, she despised the man, and yet the next, she was sitting down to play chess with him as old friends. Then again, she supposed, perhaps that was the point; one minute she could hate him, the next minute she could need him, but Amelie knew that Oliver would always be in her life, in some way or another.

The only issue was that she didn't know if this was a good or a bad thing.

Again, I'd appreciate no favourites without reviews.

Vicky