The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 49: Gifts

Our monkey friend is dispatched home, and shortly after it's time to argue about where we will spend Christmas holiday.

That's not actually a fair summation of those weeks. Harry is at odds with himself in a way I've never seen. He's always so confident, and even though he admitted when he was my student that he's good at hiding doubts (as was his mother) I manage to miss this side of him much of the time.

The Harry who makes a case for going to England for at least part of the semester break does so with a new tentativeness, and then only because he thinks of Albus all alone.

"Alone? Albus Dumbledore? I'd like to see it. He'll have a train of supplicants so long it will stretch for miles. I should know—I've had to test each gift throughout the years to see if the sweetmeats are poisoned. He gets barrelsful, every year."

"All the more reason for us to go."

"One year I finally broke down and made him a Salu-Stone, keyed to his magical signature, that would sense and turn color near poison. He's been gorging himself on Indonesian candied pepperflowers ever since, and I got to avoid the whole Christmas nonsense altogether."

Harry's new, vulnerable face doesn't hide his reaction.

"At least it was nonsense when I had no one to share my miserable nature with," I amend. "We can go anywhere in the world but Britain and you want to go precisely there. Why not someplace warm?"

"I want to be someplace I belong, with you. It will be my first Christmas living my own life-even though the Douays were lovely-and with someone to share it with, and I don't want to be a tourist somewhere."

So we stay in Paris, and once it is decided Harry seems relieved. Still, we pop in Dumbledore's grate on Christmas eve and he listens to tales of our high and low points from Harry—partially in English, but the rest in the French the old man understands relatively well but butchers when he tries to speak it.

In the meantime our host and I have one of our silent conversations:

Point A: Harry looks rather well.

Point B: Harry sounds better than well.

Point C: We haven't caused an international incident yet.

Success, by the headmaster's standards in relation to me!

Dumbledore returns his full attention to the young man whose head is a fiery outline next to mine. "Your gift was most thoughtful, Harry. I do, on occasion wish to see things smaller than they actually are, and your Reverse Spyglass will be very useful in those cases." The old magician gives me a look that encompasses staff meetings, school dances and other tiresome elements of school life.

"And Severus, your Christmas potions never disappoint. This year's was especially amusing. I used it yesterday and discovered that for the space of 24 hours I was drawn to eat metallic objects and they were not only nutritious, but extremely tasty."

Harry's horrified look is accompanied by a fiery elbow to my side, but the old man and I exchange a hearty laugh.

"Severus and I have a tradition: he makes me one of his very special potions and doesn't tell me what effect I should expect. They're usually harmless—

"Usually!"

"There was one time that he gave me something that made everyone sound to my ears like they were singing opera and he didn't count on the violent passions that might come with the medium. Severus had it cleared up in no time and there was only one duel that came out of it."

Harry regards us through narrowed eyes. He's always had the sense that Albus and I share some dark humor he'd rather not know about.

"So in keeping with that tradition, here are your presents." They are levitated towards us. "Er, I hadn't thought, but perhaps opening them now might be a bad idea, as they're flammable. Harry, would you care to step into the room?"

Not as accustomed to this kind of floo-travel, Harry takes a moment to regain his form. His excitement is evident—two years ago Dumbledore got him a pair of socks that would get him out of bed no matter how reluctant he was to do so—practical if a bit sad—but the year before he got him a set of magical pigments that change color like a chameleon's skin. Harry uses them to this day.

Harry tears open the box and lifts out—

"I had no idea your French was so good," Dumbledore says by way of apology. "So I bought one volume in English and a different one in French."

Foucault, twice over.

"Every year I give Severus a book on some esoteric subject. Two years ago was—"

"Magical glassblowing. Living so far out on the seaside it's very difficult to ship in the glass phials and bottles I use. It was an extremely useful gift," though rather in the line of Harry's socks. Usually he gives me things like a collection of magical fairy tales so frightening it comes with its own sedation spell, or a volume of collected works from around the world having to do with water spirits.

Whether on the practical end or, as I prefer, indulging the fanciful side I too often forget I possess, this is the first year Dumbledore has been so far off.

But he'd never know it because Harry is rolling on the floor laughing and I'm doing the equivalent from the grate.

"You like it?" Albus asks uncertainly. "I asked one of my contacts who is in the know in the muggle world what people read at French universities, and she told me emphatically you would be very interested in this Foucault chap."

"He's sort of omnipresent, but I've not actually read one of his books in its entirety," Harry ventures, turning over the volumes.

"One sometimes wonders if anyone has," I drawl, and say for Albus' benefit, "It's like the charms book you had us assigned my sixth year. One of the best there was, but it was unfortunately over many of our heads at the time."

"Severus has no patience for doing with a lot of arm-waving and shouting for what he can accomplish with much more dignity in private with his cauldron," Dumbledore confides to Harry and we all laugh.

It feels good to not be at odds for once, the three of us. Harry gives me a significant look and I retreat to France while he has some personal time with Albus. When Harry reappears in my apartment I take my turn.

"How is your work?" the old man asks as if I'm not constantly hounding him with questions about it.

"You are well aware. Not going very fast."

"As long as we can keep your department happy—and I can't imagine they wouldn't be very happy to have your unusual knowledge on their faculty—you can take your time. Harry seems to be holding his own physically as well as academically."

"It's more to do with a treatment I learned from a Vietnamese mage than with any of my methods, I'm afraid. You know I much prefer to advance my theories alongside practical work, but that's not possible outside of taking very calculated risks with Harry."

"Does the Animate Fungus offer any hope of a treatment?"

We chuckle. I've been filling Albus in on all the unexpected complications of introducing this creature to muggle doctors. "I've given him a dose, er, before and after intimacy and it doesn't appear to help. This one is mainly for skin lesions, but perhaps there are strains that may be more helpful for our situation. Maybe tracking down Animate life forms would be a better use of my time than what I'm doing."

"Severus, what you did with the monkey, it was the sort of ingenious healing technique that only you can provide. You're doing everything you can for Harry." Albus normally isn't so much in my corner on this subject, nor was he when I broke down and told him—very vaguely—about some unnerving traits Harry had been manifesting. At the time his response was that Harry's constantly being around the very person who shared in his trauma was probably reopening old wounds.

"Tell me how you identified this character trait in Harry," a more thoughtful Dumbledore is asking.

"You know I can't explain my senses very well," I say, not wanting to go into details for either of our sakes.

And we share one of our silences I'd not trade for anything else, one that encompasses how much I want to make things work with Harry, even though nobody, not him, sometimes not Harry is helping me. This month semester break comes none to soon, is what Dumbledore and I are thinking together. I can't continue at this rate. And floating somewhere in the room is the unspoken apology from the old wizard that he'd been only looking out for the ways that I could hurt Harry and not vice versa.

I've not been able to reveal that nightmarish experience to anyone except the person who added his ounce to my already-overflowing trauma coffers, and I'm glad to be able to tell someone without having to actually tell them aloud.

"Merry Christmas old friend," I say finally.

"Merry Christmas, Severus," he says. Fawkes even gives me a muttered wish for good health, breaking his vow to ignore me entirely taken right after I took The Mark.

He is the marvelous Paracelsus, always drunk and always lucid, like the heroes of Rabelais.

Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus the Great, by A.E. Waite

"How was your audience?" I ask with good humor when I'm back in my flat with Harry.

"It was lovely, but Sev, why Foucault?" His gesture encompasses everything that the two books mean to us—they're like a food that, though we live in France fifty years, we're sure will never please our palate. I'm glad that Dumbledore's qualms about discussing sex must have precluded him from mentioning anything about some of Harry's recent struggles.

"Foucault is everything that reminds us we're English."

"That can't be the reason. He could've sent us a Cornish pasty or something."

"Albus Dumbledore never does anything without an agenda," I say. "Nor do I, so open your gift and find out what it is."

"No, you first," Harry says. "Close your eyes and I'll reconstitute them."

They are two very expensive shirts, one with a tie, the other with matching stockings. He must have used his artist's eye to convey both sets of measurements to the wizard tailor. Except the last, which must be from the Parisian wizard underworld, a place I didn't think he even knew how to locate.

"You and Julian have completely different coloring," he explains. "And you don't wear ties."

"You have exquisite taste, Harry, yet you only pay attention to what I wear. They're beautiful, thank you." His shoulders relax slightly. We've not talked very much about his "relationship with Julian" as he calls it, but a shirt and tie are a harmless gift.

When Harry opens the small box and sees the potion he groans. "There is no chance that I'm going to take any old thing and wait and see what it does to me like Dumbledore. What is it, another one of your healing concoctions?"

"No!" I snatch the golden box with the phial in it. "This isn't good for you."

"It's not?" he snatches it back. "What does it do?"

"Have you ever heard of China Cheer?"

His eyes grow wide. "Is this a recreational drug?"

I hold myself up very stiffly. "Some people call the judiciously applied intoxicant an agent for healing."

"Let's try some right now!" Harry is fumbling with the stopper.

"Wait, let me tell you what is in it first. China Cheer is the base, but there are a few other compounds bonded to it—"

"Do I drink the whole thing?" Harry has the stopper off.

"Par le trismégiste! Give me that before you go to an early grave." Sheepishly, he hands it over. "Put on your coat first. We'll want to go out and once I spent an entire evening trying to put both of my arms in the same arm of my jacket."

We hurry into our winter things and then I order Harry to stick out his tongue. Two drops of the golden fluid drop onto his tongue.

He watches me produce another phial. "You mean you're not going to feel the same thing as me?" He asks, disappointed.

"On the contrary, this compound will ensure that I do feel the same thing. China Cheer has very little effect upon my system."

A more generous serving of the golden liquid is mixed in a small cup with the second fluid, and I drink it down.

Harry's eyes are shining when I look up. "Have you taken this sort of thing a lot?"

I open the door. "Have I frequently struck you as particularly Cheerful at any point in the past?"

"No," he giggles, beginning to look quite Cheerful himself.

In a minute we're out into the cold Paris night.

Though it is a cold night, the holiday season seems to exert an irresistible allure on the entire city. Scowling delinquents, veiled Muslim women, jaded policemen—they all wander around as if part of the same event for once. Paris is at truce with itself.

Which makes Harry and me feel our difference more acutely than usual.

"Do you think they know?" Harry whispers to me, his eyes slightly dilated.

"Know what?" I whisper, walking very close.

"That we're a different species."

And at those words we're transported to another time right in the middle of the present.

We're the first two magicians. From the cover of his coat Harry's wand draws a bit of magic out of the air and there is light. It is the second discovery of fire. That is where the path becomes parallel. The two species, never to understand each other. We weep for the fissure in humanity.

Then I envy them their ignorance. Then ignorance makes me think of innocence and innocence reminds me of guilt.

"Do you think they know?" I whisper to him as we walk around a throng of parents and children.

"Know what?" Harry waves at some children with rosy cheeks and they wave back.

"That I'm a serial killer," I mumble.

Harry turns away from the children. "Oh come now, Severus, don't put on airs. You aren't organized enough to be a serial killer."

"Really?"

"No, true evil has some kind of style. You only ever managed to be bad, and that you bumbled your way into and then sniveled your way out of," he says in a mellifluous tone that sounds like the very essence of love in my ears.

"Really? You mean it?" I grab his arm, wanting to engrave every detail of my savior into my mind.

"Severus?"

"Yes, Harry?" This is truth and my soul is parched for it.

"Snapping my arm in half would be a great way to start that career in evil you so desire."

"Sorry, Harry." I loosen my grip, but the touch has produced a profound effect on both of us.

"Do you think they know?" Harry asks as we press our noses against an electronics store window where the televisions are all displaying different programs.

"Know what?" A politician is looking oddly like the British Minister of Magic, and I could have sworn there was an old man who looked like Dumbledore that flashed upon another screen.

"What I'm going to do to you later." Harry's hand grows into my arm like a sensual obsession that, once loosed, can never be extricated. His touch grows all through my muscles and down to my feet. Our skin is unbearably hot under our winter wraps, we—

Suddenly the image he flashes in my mind strikes me as wrong with all the people shuffling by my Julian form.

"I should hope not! My father wasn't a deviant a day in his life, and that ought to be clear from his face."

The awareness that Harry had this form once flashes between us and we grow silent. It's suddenly unbearably cold. I move towards a small park that has a municipal heating duct that will give us some relief.

A bird settles in its nest nearby, "What do you think they would do if we went in their bedroom while they were trying to sleep?" she grumbles to her mate.

"I'd say the more the merrier," Harry replies, rubbing his hands.

"Harry, that was a bird!"

"It was? I understand the bird language! Did it understand me?"

"No, you're speaking English. Allow me," and I translate Harry's comment.

"Your parlor trick is very amusing, sir, but would you mind terribly taking it to a more appreciative audience?"

"They talk, they talk just like," Harry is doubled over on the cold ground. "They talk just like you!"

"Birds are very intelligent," I shoot back in their language.

"Very flattering, coming from two who look like they hit the ground the first time they were pushed out of the nest."

"Don't you know of me? I'm 'That Lout.'"

"I can see that," the bird says drily.

"What did you call yourself?" Harry cackles, hearing my Bird name for the first time.

"You're missing an entire cultural context," I hiss.

"Can't you go and be That Lout and speak the Ancient Tongue with your Vulgarian friend somewhere else?"

"I'll have you know that Harry here is known as the savior of our nation."

"Is that so? Well you might want to save your savior from catching cold, because only a madman would be rolling around on the ground in this weather."

"The way you—look when you make those—neck movements for emphasis, it's—" Harry's got twigs in his hair and he's crying with mirth.

"Perhaps there is room for one more, madam? I can warm the nest for you."

Harry kicks my legs out from under me and topples me to the ground and we hold each other for a few minutes, shivering more out of delight than cold. Then we get up and wander somewhere else.

As could be expected, I can't say for certain everything we did that night. We wandered among the muggles and felt their otherness as a palpable thing, we felt as though we were extraterrestrials watching a foreign race that was foolish enough to think itself alone in the universe. This is just the sort of illusion the drug can foster, because of course neither Harry nor I is of pure blood. No, the experience is about giving oneself wholly over to the most suggestible part of one's mind. We elbowed each other and laughed over the way the cars seemed to have very French expressions all of a sudden, and we had to push each other to keep moving when one of us got overwhelmed by the music of the city that suddenly pieced itself together in our ears.

Things got confused after that. Harry says we went to a cinema but I suspect we might have just been staring off into space and imagining we were watching a film. We did go in a late-night café for hot chocolate, which we drank as if we were back at Hogwarts as children. The effects seemed to be lessening somewhat with the chocolate in our stomachs when Harry touched his pocket. "You know, I still have the books in here."

"We'll just have to be very convincing when we tell Albus we enjoyed them, but go ahead and throw them out, Harry."

"You wouldn't," he says with mock-disapproval, fishing out the shrunken volumes.

"Watch me." I reconstitute the books under the table and take mine. "What do I want to do to the man that makes every research faculty meeting more tedious than it already is?"

"You can't have it worse than I do," Harry protests. "It's in class, every class. Even art studio they drag the poor bastard in."

We stare at the volumes that seem to have nothing at all to do with Albus Dumbledore. "Hang on, do you think they're magical books?" Harry exclaims, turning over the gifts with his wand in his sleeve, and mumbling a few revealing charms.

I run my hand over them to make sure, but they have less magic than a stone. "Take it from someone who knows, my friend, these are the muggle-est books there ever were." I throw some money on the table. "Come on." Harry rushes to follow me to a dark corner, and I grab him to fly us on top of a tall building.

"You never told me you could do that," Harry says breathlessly.

"It never occurred to me to try before." The French volume in my hand, I throw it into the air and when my clumsily constructed charm turns it into a bird I'm more surprised than anyone.

"You're not terrible at charms, Severus!" Harry hugs me in the whipping wind and the bird is blinking at us. We're embarrassed to be confronted with the living exemplar of something we've been so unkind to.

"How do you do?" Harry says finally. "I'm Harry, and this is Severus."

The bird says something.

"This potion must be wearing off. I didn't understand any of that. What did he say?"

The bird says something else more insistently.

"Haven't a clue."

After a few more tries, the bird flies off, hopefully to find kindred spirits somewhere among the French bird population.

"What are you going to do with yours?" I ask after we've stood arm in arm, looking down at the toy city beneath us some minutes.

"Oh! I forgot. I don't know."

But he soon did know.

At this point I can't claim total intoxication, because I knew exactly what we were doing in some part of my mind. I just didn't care.

Though it is bitterly cold he takes off his clothes.

He shrinks them and puts them in my pocket. Quickly I envelop him in a bubble of warm air and he climbs on my back.

Harry and I fly as fast as I dare and much closer to people than I should so Harry can rip out page after page and shout "The emperor has no clothes!" as he showers Paris with shreds of the philosopher's collected works.

At that moment it starts to snow in Paris.

"Severus, I made it snow!" Harry yells in my ear.

It's just the sort of coincidence that tends to happen on the drug, so I don't make an issue of it. It's our time to believe in the sort of magic that we stopped believing in once we really understood we were wizards.

I fly us back to the building and Harry spells on his clothes as quickly as he can. Back down on the street we walk with reddened, exhilarated faces through a city that we are both convinced is being coated by our most hated French philosopher. We are suddenly at peace with him coating everything—the streets, the sidewalks, the people.

We've done what we came to do tonight. We made the city ours.

It's over very fast. Too fast.

If only we'd flown a little slower.

Because I flew so fast within inhabited territory that we did cause a minor International incident. Some muggle warning system caught our path—though thankfully we were going too fast to leave a clear picture—and for weeks there was minor speculation in the newspaper about the "rogue aircraft" that was eventually dismissed as the prank it was.

But we didn't know that this evening when we apparate into my apartment. "Warm bath, now," I say, and he doesn't argue at that, or a dose of the Vietnamese healing smoke, or the foul-tasting potion that we drink to avoid the frightful hangover I assure him would otherwise await us.

The trident reveals his magic is in fine form.

"Did you and Albus cook up this whole business when you spoke to him alone?" Harry asks from under the mound of blankets I've piled on him.

"No, we only talked about, you know, the things we talk about. Remedies and such." A flicker of what Dumbledore heard me not say must have reached my face, because Harry looks through narrowed eyes. "Do you honestly think Dumbledore would be party to you being outside unclothed in this weather?"

"No, probably not." He's settling sleepily against the headboard when I give him the other box.

"What we did tonight was for both of us. This is for you."

Harry slips off the ribbon eagerly and finds that the box contains two books. He looks at the top one uncertainly.

"Herbert and Bandicoot's Chimeric of Charms?"

"It's the sixth-year charms book I referred to earlier. Your father was probably the only person who understood it at Hogwarts with the dubious exception of the instructor. Since it never made a bit of sense to me I assumed you would understand it perfectly."

Harry sends a grin my way but his hands are tracing over the embossed binding in a way that I know has nothing to do with our waning intoxication. This is something he's good at. Not something he has to contort his brain into like French or history or calculus.

It's the kind of magic that's in his blood.

"Severus, this feels like me, the real me. Like home. I needed something like this." He puts his arm around me and kisses me. "What shall I learn first?"

"There's another book there," I point.

He reads the gilt inscription on the handsome volume, the result of another kit obtained from the Bibliophile underworld: "'Grand-mère's Collection of Expurgated Fairy Tales'?" He snorts. "Don't you think I'm old enough to read the unexpurgated versions?"

Taking care not to let him see what I'm doing, I cast the charm that makes the cover read "Unexpurgated Fairy Tales." "You asked for it."

Harry opens the book eagerly and reads for a few moments. His face turns purple. "That's outrageous! Who would ever claim that 'miscegenation,' as she calls it, is the reason why the Dodo went extinct?"

In a moment the volume has been reverted to its previous state. "I wanted to spare you some of grand-mère's views on racial purity, as I did your mother."

"You told these to her? She liked stories?"

"Oh, yes, she liked stories. Although about some of these she just said 'they explain a lot,' take that how you will. You'll see 'The Emperor's New Clothes' is in there, but in her version it's a cautionary tale about casting charms clumsily so they wear off at the wrong moment."

"You had them written by a charmed quill and professionally bound? Severus, these are two, three beautiful presents counting the China Cheer. All I got you were two shirts."

"And a tie. And some stockings."

We completely forget about the former in our exploration of the latter.

The next morning Harry has left me a note on the pillow where he had lately been sleeping. Actually he used his new charms book to spell it as in a glimmering script on the pillow. It disappears after I read it, and I curse at the intellect he and his father have to be able to manage such an effect when not even the index of that book makes sense to most people.

My lips curve up while reading his wild scrawl that has never calmed down from his boyhood parchments so long ago. "Gone to get a decent cuppa," are his exact words. Harry can't understand why I can create a compound that will make you float in the air or grow to three times your normal size, but I can't create what he will recognize as a decent cup of coffee.

It's actually become one of our pastimes here in Paris, trying to figure out why some things are so delightful here in some unquantifiable way. Why drinking a piss-poor bottle of wine in a French dive is often more satisfying than a fine glass in a posh English restaurant. Then there's the bread, of course, but it's the café experience in general that has both of our distinct but acute intelligences trying to isolate the appeal inherent in one or another of these poky establishments.

"You can't sense the magics or whatnot?" Harry hisses at me in some of these cafes.

"No, Harry, I mean, yes. It's coffee. Coffee and water."

"So it's all in our head or something?"

"C'est l'ambiance," I shrug.

Apparently this is one of my occasional spot-on Gallic gestures, which Harry rewards richly when they occur, though I am helpless to produce them on demand. I do think I was rewarded handsomely that time.

Wrapping my dressing-gown around me I stare out the window at the lazy flakes of snow falling and then wander into the kitchen. On the table I find another note, or I do once I can tear my eyes away from the thing Harry has left me on the cluttered dining table.

It's a drawing.

Those three words do not explain the discomfiting experience of finding myself rendered by Harry's gifted hand.

The background is not finished, so it depicts me in a bathtub as if floating in space. No sensitive zones are revealed, but I've never felt more revealed in all my life. My hair is undone to its full length except for one braid that my right hand is un-knotting, and the dark locks are spilling down my shoulders and out of the tub, which is an old, clawfoot tub that's too small for someone of my height. My left hand is closest to the viewer and hanging elegantly over the side. My arms and legs are spilling out along with my black hair, with the effect of making me look like a spider with untidy limbs everywhere. Since I've always had a soft spot for spiders, this is not an unwelcome likeness. I can actually recognize myself in this person, in a way I only intellectually do when I leave my body and look back on it.

The tub was from the hotel we stayed in while on our first holiday in Antibes, but I honestly can't remember the occasion this might have been inspired by. There's a window half-finished to one side that is in the wrong place for that bathroom, but it reminds me of the high, square window with the ledge where Hedwig comes in and out in this apartment's bathroom, and the green checkered linoleum that stretches across part of the floor was taken from Harry's London flat.

All that is to say that this is not really a portrait of one moment, but the distillation of a relationship.

My gaze, looking right at the viewer, is like an enormous tree with many concentric rings:

The outer ring: annoyance, apparently my default attitude with the world.

Next: A defensive formality that harmonizes very well, somehow, with my bare limbs hanging languidly over the porcelain fixture.

Then come layers of humor, a kind of justice, vulnerability, sensuality, self-doubt…

Right at the center are two qualities that seem equally essential to the portrait: an unflinching acceptance, and a strength that comes from some place I've never noticed in myself. The whole effect is eerie. It really is like looking at oneself through another's eyes, and at the core of this black gaze of mine there is an odd reflection of the viewer, as if to say, "Yes, I know, that is what you are seeing, isn't it?"

But, just like Harry's other pictures, it's what's just out of frame that completes the piece. In this case, it's the circuit completed by my eyes and Harry's unpictured eyes.

Now I can see why people find us to be overly intense together. This circuit between us is like the magic cast by a wand, or a piano wire stretched between two points: only a fool would stumble in between that connection.

That's what I'm thinking when my eyes fall on the note.

Happy Christmas, Sev. I felt bad not getting you anything more personal, but, well, I have a couple of sketchbooks filled with my attempts to draw you and they never come out the way I want. This was the most finished, and since you seem most at home in the water I thought you could appreciate the idea if not the execution.

Let's not talk of it, all right? It's not your potions metaphors, love, which I find quite adorable, it's just that if I can't express what I see properly without words, adding words in the mix just makes it more dishonest and clumsy. I know you understand.

Love always,

Harry

My eyes meet my eyes and it's the oddest sensation of feeling my passion radiating into my own heart.

This is the image of love.

And I'm not sure I'm equal to it.

The door opens.

"It's beautiful out there! I'm going sketching after breakfast, and you're coming too," Harry calls, crinkling paper sacks and stomping off his boots.

Before I can hide the drawing his eyes fall on it.

"I'm sorry, Harry, I was just—"

"Don't worry about it. Here, Café Beauborg was open, so I got you your black coffee with honey. The shop-girl that is in love with you said to tell you happy Christmas."

He distributes the breakfast things and I pick up the picture carefully to shift it on top of a bookcase where it won't be crumpled or spilled on like all my other papers. Harry catches the care in my gesture. "Don't mount it or anything. I'm still intending on finishing it at some point. Leave it somewhere where I can work on it when the mood strikes. That's usually how I do my best work; when I try too hard everything comes out dismal."

Because I can't resist I ask the question that's nagging me. "Do I really look at you like that?"

He takes a sip of his coffee and makes a satisfied noise. His face is still flushed from the outdoors and he's kept his wool scarf around his neck. "Sometimes," he says finally. "When you're not busy being tiresome."

I sit on his lap and he feeds fresh bread to me like a baby bird.