The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 50: Happiness

Harry and I spend the rest of our holiday either on our own work or socializing with Tristan, his parents and some of the other Parisian magical folk. Perhaps one of the many reasons they find us suspicious is that we need their company so desperately. We are both surprised at how much we fuss over each other's appearance before these casual gatherings, as if we suddenly enjoy the inspection we've resented our entire relationship.

It's our second Christmas together, after all, and just like the last, we're spending it with a sort of family. Last holiday was special beyond words because of the Little Witches, and with that one brief glimpse of normalcy the Douays offered us. This year our adult company is a bit more realistically familiar, however, because if they don't know all of us, they know most of us.

Tristan and Harry and other young magical folk spend time running around in the intermittent snow with or without brooms in a way I am incapable of unless Harry and I are alone or on mind-altering chemicals. This leaves me with the parents and other adults, and if that puts us once more on opposite sides of a divide, no one says anything. Instead, there are tall tales traded at the level of a mutter (Pascal is one for deadpan story delivery much like my grandmother) and recollections of holiday celebrations of old from all over the world (again, from my grandmother's age of spectacle) and the somewhat stilted relationship between Pascal and Belda and me is probably as much as I can attain with humans other than Harry.

Belda, as I get to know her, unnerves me a little. She and I are both mostly silent and reflective, so we tower over our respective partners and try to fill that lofty space with something where we are accustomed to being alone.

Her younger children, all girls, are recently old enough to take care of each other, for the most part, so she is beginning her own business: dream interpretation. I can't tell you how many times I wish I had a trusted chiromancer specializing in dreams, as I have had several important but completely inscrutable dreams, the most notable being the dreams of war that Lilly and I shared, and of course the one about my Aunt Adele. Alas, I have never been able to trust anyone and now that habit is ingrained, so I can't test Belda's gifts for myself. I do know that many people from the Arabic parts of the world are very gifted in this area, and I also see that many people are beginning to trust her enough to try out her skills.

Belda spends a lot of time at Gregor's, where, for a fee, he is letting her run her operations for now. Unlike other forms of divination, a dream remembered exists in the past, so it is not as important to have a neutral magical space, quiet, or anything else for her to ply her trade. Most of the time someone will seek her out to ask what a dream meant. Sometimes she will dream about you, but she never divulges this unless you ask in an official session. Otherwise it would be considered an invasion, a sort of forcing you to pay her to tell you what she dreamt, tantamount to blackmail, and if she were so inclined, she could intimidate people with false fears or steer them into unwise investments. This is the trust aspect that is so important when dealing with someone who is an adept of the Dream Plane, a place I hope never to meet her.

While Pascal and I are looking at each other out of the corner of our eyes, Belda and I are doing the same on a more subtle plane. Pretending that I am not a Legillimens of rare talent is like pretending to be deaf and blind, and to anyone who vibrates near the same frequency it must be like sitting next to a steady loud noise. But this woman seems to possess something few people do: real discretion. Others are gradually realizing the same, and she can be found more and more often in the corner of the bar, sharing her insights on love dreams and nightmares with a complete lack of fanfare.

"Looks like she's talking about recipes, doesn't she?" Gregor nodded at the woman one day when I ordered. "She's got something, though, I must say. She told me a few things I'd never tell anyone." Squibs are known to have intense and often disturbing dreams, as it is usually their only outlet into the magical realms that are otherwise closed to them.

Then Harry and his lot will come in from whatever they have been doing, and he'll put his arm around me and everything is all right. His eyes will flash with an awareness of how still we all were sitting, and how he knows himself to possess the key that will unlock me from this formal posture most magical folk adopt for defensive reasons. His cold-reddened skin will melt me in a second, and keeping the bridge across our two generations with that arm, he will make one of his typical jests designed to keep people from looking at us as anything other than a perfectly natural phenomenon, and then everyone is friends again.

Other than these holiday occasions, celebrated at Gregor's bar and elsewhere, I do have to select Mick's food for the day, but this process seems to be getting less difficult as we get to know each other better. It's just a matter of selecting the item from the store and dropping it at the lab. Andre's team has discovered that he doesn't have to eat once a day, though he does like to have marbles and other objects set out to discover.

Since we are out with our wizard counterparts so often, I spend more and more time with Harry as Julian. I will not allow it in the bedroom, or behind closed doors. One of my projects over the break is to engineer a sort of warning system in my flat. The potion spread around the apartment causes a tingling sensation if I'm there in a transfigured form. Harry watches me do the same in his apartment because I think I owe it to him to be open about it.

If he is disappointed at this signal of my resolve to never allow him a "date" with Julian again, he doesn't let on. I occasionally see him cleaning his glasses as an excuse to look at me in public, but I try not to take it very seriously. Perhaps this mostly fictional man Julian is who I would have been if my luck hadn't been so bad. If I hadn't taken The Mark.

But I can't shed who I am at the door to my flat as I do my father's form. I still drain Harry. When he lets me.

"Mm, Jul-Sev (Jul-Sev is my new name), that feels wonderful but I can't tonight. I want to go ride my broom tomorrow with Tristan and I can't if we—"

"I want to but we're meeting for a game tomorrow, remember? Everyone will notice if I don't play, and if I do I want to make sure my spear obeys me. Quidditch is a walk in the park compared to their sport."

Severus Snape is overworked and undersexed. For once, I don't mind.

Spending time with Rukmini is oddly a partial substitute for physical closeness. I come just to listen to the song of someone's life other than my own. That's what I used to seek in my mercenary encounters years ago. It is terrible being alone with my strange fate, and this escape into the hinterlands of a muggle's mind seem to fit the bill.

Rukmini's song is all jumbled notes up for hours on end and then a few bars prove that it's music after all. It reminds me a bit of my madness, minus the moth's voice. There are brief pictures that come to me, and as with my mother, I can't tell if I'm imagining them there because I need them, or if they're actual fragments of this woman's mind. I'm discovering, though, that these pictures, which are qualitatively different than those of any magical mind I've ever experienced—and I've gotten into at least the antechambers of hundreds—when seen from up close have a logic laid bare that is like magic.

"We're the same species," I whisper deep into her silent brain. "Think of me as a long-lost relation that's not close enough to be bothersome."

Then I place images in her mind from my recent apparations to the areas of India where she used to live. This is one of my main pursuits over the semester break, actually: to try and isolate what trauma she might have seen the first time that overwhelmed her system at the moment of the second trauma.

These excursions to Asia are very different than the ones I've made seeking a particular plant or healer. I mix with crowds of people, walking as slowly as I dare so that all the impressions seek deeply into my memory for future sharing with a comatose stranger. Who knows what Spagyrics make up a memory? If nothing else, my feeble attempts to help Rukmini are leading to interesting ideas about human psychology.

Images from Jharkhand are floating like bits of colored paper down a dark, deep well when I sense something beginning to shift in the atmosphere of the hospital unit.

Shanti is coming down the hall. I reappear with the illustrated book on India I brought to jog my memory, right before Rukmini's cousin walks in.

"They didn't tell me you were here," she says looking pleased. "How are you?"

A ghost nudges me about the same words uttered in a far-off library.

"Forgive me," I chuckle when I realize I didn't answer her. "I've been far away. Rukmini takes me places. And how are you, Shanti-ma? Do you have much of a holiday from your practice?"

Shanti places some flowers in the vase and discards the old ones. She takes an unusually long time in answering, herself.

"You know, Julian, I never told you that when you gave me that lotion the first day we met, it took my headache away. I get low-level headaches often because my work requires so much concentration, and I can only take so much of any remedy, holistic or over the counter, before it irritates my stomach. But this: immediate relief. Of both the headache and any underlying tension."

My heart is thudding at this, my Paracelsan science's first breakthrough with a muggle, but I force myself to remain impassive. "Go on."

She looks embarrassed, an expression that sits oddly on her features. "I liked this treatment so much I thought you must be playing some trick on me. That it was some illegal or addictive substance, cocaine or something that people in South America put, in small amounts, in a variety of treatments. Nothing works that well, was my thinking. And when a couple hours later I saw that it took away the eczema that has always bothered my left hand particularly, I was sure there was something unwholesome at work. What cures both headache and eczema?"

"I don't know. I'm as surprised as you. This is why I wanted to come practice at the Institute. There are certain things I've encountered in my travels that I know to be powerful healing agents when used in the right combination on the right person, but to understand more I need subjects." My eyes twinkle. "Perhaps not everyone is so daring about smearing strange lotions on themselves as Shanti-ma."

She does this tilt to her shoulders that I am learning does not indicate annoyance but mirth. "What are the chances of these treatments being harmful?"

I choose my words carefully. "What I am looking to do is less to treat than to track individual responses to these compounds, which are not treatments at all, but the building blocks of treatments. At the worst, they might have a moment of excessive hot or cold, easily wiped off with a cloth. If someone has a strong positive reaction like yours, it will be apparent immediately. If not, they have the satisfaction of having advanced a fledgling science."

She bursts out laughing. "Do you know what you looked like when you said that just now?"

My hands shoot to my face in fear that my transfiguration slipped or some other ghastly thing happened.

She takes her cousin's hand and buries her head with its mass of black curls in the sheets beside Rukmini. Her shoulders are shaking. "Mini, he has no idea what effect those manners are going to have on my rheumatic old ladies."

Apparently, I must have done something right, because Shanti-ma is very definitely not a rheumatic old lady, and by the time I have put on my coat we've made definite plans for me to come to The Sun after hours to experiment on her, my new and unnerving test subject.

For the next 24 hours I do nothing but refer to my old Paracelsan tomes and assemble substances I think might work on muggles. I'm buried in a chaos of samples and powders I'm constantly shuffling according to different hypotheses about the great unknown: the muggle system.

"I knew you wouldn't remember so I came early to remind you," Harry says, appearing in my flat.

"Oh, love, I did forget about the play. Will you tell Pascal and everyone I'm sorry I'll have to miss it?"

"It's not Pascal who you should be apologizing to," Harry says playfully and I see that he's looking especially handsome in his nice outfit. When he dresses in these clothes that are more like what our culture associates with men, as opposed to the extended boyhood the muggle world allows students of Harry's age, I can hardly believe my good fortune when he holds out his hand to me as he does now to help me out of the mess on the carpet. "We still have a week left of holiday, and this is what you want to do, play with muggles instead of me?"

I take this man's hand and hold it, staying where I am. "It's not a matter of want, Harry. It's our good fortune that this muggle woman has volunteered her time to let me test a full battery of compounds. This may be the beginning of the integration of Wizard science with these people that make no sense to me at all."

"Come spend the evening with people that do make sense to you," Harry says, crouching behind me and rubbing my neck. "I love watching all the paranoid thoughts flying around. You and Pascal crack me up with the way you look at each other."

"Like what?" I ask, relaxing into the touch.

"Like the way Professor McGonegall and you would look at each other when you would end up as partners in the Wizard Quadrille. You would put your hands about a mile away from each other's fingertips as if you were supposed to touch a poisonous toad, and those five seconds before you passed on to another partner were an eternity."

All the stifling resentment of that one mandatory traditional dance comes rushing back, and then picturing the squat Algerian in the reluctant Minerva's place has me splitting my sides along with Harry.

"I don't think Pascal would thank you for that image. Nor do I, because it will be that much harder to keep a straight face and you know he thinks I'm up to something."

"You are up to something."

The reality that I am pulling one over on a bunch of magicians always gives me pause, and then I follow his gaze and gesture. "Don't be impertinent," I snap professorially, swatting away his hand.

"We haven't had a good insult match in a long time," Harry says longingly. "Are you too much of a lily-livered lass to hear the terms of my wager, you boot-licking bumbler?"

"Mr. Potter—" The desire rushes around my body like a wildfire. It takes all my strength to clench my fists. "Harry?"

"Already tongue-tied, Snape? It's no fun when you don't put up a fight, you pathetic excuse for a professor."

"Do you want me to figure out how we can be together as much as we want, with no ill effects, or not?"

He is suddenly completely serious. "You know I do."

"What I'm going to do this evening is why we came to Paris." I sigh. "There's nothing I would like better than to be on your arm tonight, no matter where it would be."

He gets up and puts on his jacket. Instead of saying goodbye and apparating away, Harry stands there for awhile watching me collect a couple of beetles from where they've gotten into some dried moss.

"You know something, Severus? I don't care if you don't figure it out."

"What? Are you mad?"

"No, no I'm not mad. I'm happy" He sits down again. "We're happy."

He grabs a fistful of my hair and pulls my forehead to his.

"This is what happiness is," he states, swaying our heads to and fro with each word. "We're just too deprived to recognize it. We have friends; we're studying things that really interest us. And most of all, nobody is bothering us. So what if we have to be careful?"

Before I can fill in the obvious, Harry continues, "You can't deny it, Severus. You need this, all of these samples and specimens and experiments. You've been waiting your whole life for this. The first drawing I did made me realize that I'd been choking up until that point. Like I almost couldn't breathe because of this thing that had me by the throat trying to get out. You must have felt the same all those years teaching snotty kids how to do elementary potions when you need so much more, you can do—whatever you're doing with that fungus thing. Maybe you'll discover a cure for a disease, if you can keep it from dying from unhappiness in that muggle laboratory."

It surprises me that he's grasped Mick's precarious situation, or his potentially revolutionary impact on medicine.

"But when I showed you my pictures and you were being so encouraging it pissed me off, as if you were saying that I wasn't good enough without doing art, or producing something. You don't know how little I did those four years."

"You thought this, mon amant? I just wanted you to be happy."

"Now I see that, because watching you playing around with your bugs and your phials and trying to do this thing no one's thought of doing before—you've never looked better and I've never loved you more."

Suddenly he reaches over and takes my hand.

"Severus, it will only take me a little longer to finish school—because I have to finish, I've decided—and then we can make our own wizard school."

Reflexively, we both look down at my hands, remembering the sight of Mathilde's orange magic coating them. I hide them behind my back. "No. Not with me."

"No, Sev, I won't have it! If Dumbledore could ward Hogwarts so it was safe, we can do it. I loved us working together to teach the Little Witches, I want to do that again, making something together, I want it always."

Of course, I count the experience as some of our best days together too.

"What should we make?" I ask, my hand molding his contours.

"Show me the colors again,"

"This beetle is a strong green," I say, picking up the beetle crawling nearby, the one with the red and black carapace.

"Emerald green? Kelly green?" Harry asks and the sketchpad and pastels he habitually carries shrunken in his pocket are in his hand.

"Emerald, I would say. And this salt is a red, so don't touch. And this bark is pink."

"Pink like this?" He muddles two pastels together.

"Yes, my love, very close! I've told you your paintings are often magically accurate." We beam at each other. Maybe we are moving closer together after all. We play our new color game for some time, taking turns teaching. Harry sketches how he sees each item and I shyly add some colors to the page.

Then I can't help myself.

"You are an exceptionally beautiful man and I love—us, who we are together," I say in a rush before my usual emotional mutism takes hold.

Harry looks up, moved. "You never say things like that."

"I have some sort of impediment."

"Severus, you're nothing but impediments," Harry says, pulling at my clothes as some of the obstacles that most concern him at the moment.

But we know. He needs all his magic if he's going to spend time with magical folk.

"We're luckier than most," Harry points out, leaning back. "We found each other."

"I think it was more like you showed up at my door shouting several dozen good reasons why it was stupid to be apart, among other incisive points."

"Was I wrong?"

"You're usually not," I tell this mouth that is the inlet to the warm, intelligent, vibrant sea that is yet a man who is, strangely, mine.

And our lips convey to each other everything we would do together if we weren't too smart to stop.

"You take the couch," Harry says, shedding his clothes in a second.

He stands at the opposite end of the room, in the hallway near the door, while I divest myself. He then intones the charm he made, which only someone who can make sense of Herbert and Bandicoot's Chimeric of Charms would have been able to devise.

The two shimmering translucent pools appear, one extending like a window in front of each of us. We stretch out our hands and feel each other's touch though we're a few yards apart. And in a whisper that reaches his ears just fine, I tell Harry what it feels like to be taken apart and put back together by his skin that is rippling against mine, so close, closer than close, because with a bond like ours, nothing can keep us apart.

"Tell Pascal I'll make the ticket up to him," I tell Harry as he leaves.

And it is with a bittersweet happiness that I watch Harry disappear with an afterglow, something I've given him that wasn't canceled out by what I usually take away.

There are a lot of inconveniences about muggle company, but one of the worst is that you can't shrink things down and carry them in your pocket until you need to reconstitute them. For someone like me, I'm constantly needing to carry a ton of samples and assorted gear around, and rather than actually cart around these delicate specimens full-size, I just have the habit of arriving early everywhere so no one witnesses me pulling my supplies out of what appears to be thin air.

This evening I'm meeting Shanti at the end of her shift, so this stratagem won't work. My cursing at hauling dozens of cases into the Institute must contrast oddly with my own afterglow that I can feel oozing through both of my skins.

"Are you ready to be a, er, guinea pig?" I catch myself just in time before saying "Bandy-legged Mole," which is what adepts traditionally used to experiment on because they are nearly neutral in magical qualities. They're ill-tempered little beasts, however, especially now that I can understand what they're saying, so I prefer to use mice and correct for their properties when creating potions.

Unpacking all of my specimens I've been too excited to notice that Shanti looks tired until she says wearily, "Could we skip to the lotion you gave me the other day?"

My hand automatically reaches for the trident I didn't bring because it would be useless with muggles. This reminds me not to whisper any of the spells I habitually use to wipe the slate clean, so to speak, before any treatment or test. The Vietnamese sage's rejection of this foundational principle of wizarding magic has stuck with me, but doing without these charms means an infinite number of additional variables where I'm already working blind.

"You will permit me to apply it?" I take her hand and touch her forehead. There is a subtle difference to the warmth compared to what I have come to recognize as her usual temperature. She merely sits there and lets me paint the stripe on her forehead and then watches me use the special pattern on her wand-hand.

"Miraculous," she says after a moment.

"In the sense that I have no explanation for it as yet, yes, it is."

I lay out the samples I've chosen as being most likely to affect her, and she brings her finger to the bird case. "You can play with her in a moment," my hand stops Shanti from petting the bird. "Also do not touch this," I point to a smaller cage with a large beetle.

"Ugh. I wouldn't."

Once the calibration potions and the salts and live plants and other things are lined up, I unfasten the larger cage.

"Anouk, you can come out," I say, knowing it sounds like whistling to Shanti's ears.

The small bird is a dazzling white with a brown stripe to its wings and back, and a blue beak, but what is most noteworthy about her is that one leg is shorter than the other. When she hops on the table she does so like a tiny drunken sailor. With this deformity Anouk is better off in captivity than in her native Borneo, and she's also a pure Active Cool test sample like none other, so I have allowed myself to get attached to her.

"Let me use this neutralizing lotion to remove what we just treated you with," I say and wipe off the compound that would contaminate my experiments. "Put your w-writing hand palm-up and just relax and tell me what you feel: cold, hot, or nothing."

As Anouk and I had arranged, she nudges Shanti's hand a few times with her fluffy little head. Once that reaction is noted, my bird friend is free to wander around as long as she doesn't get into anything. Meanwhile, each substance is held above Shanti's hand for long enough that she either has a reaction, or is clearly not going to have one.

The muggle woman watches me intent on comparisons and taking notes and then she asks, "Can I talk?"

"Please," I urge, writing down her unexpectedly strong cold reaction to the beetle, which was quite apart from her horrified delight at feeling its horns quiver on her skin. "Tell me about the Institute."

"We're a bunch of people from everywhere who need a space to practice our particular healing art. I'm just your garden-variety Reiki practitioner, so some of them look on me as rather old hat. You've met the man with the snake?"

"Oh yes. I've seen that done before in Bangladesh. Seems an impractical thing to practice in the middle of Paris. I hope he doesn't take that snake on the metro."

My concern was for the poor snake putting up with all that rattling and clattering, but Shanti gasps at the idea of unwittingly riding the train next to a large snake hidden in the bag the man carries. Perhaps it's my near-total ignorance of muggle reactions or my general thick-headedness with all humans, but it's taken me some time to realize that when she is horrified she can also be delighted.

"Wait. I feel a very strong reaction to this salt," I say before she can open her mouth to tell me the same.

"How did you know that? It's very warm," she says. "Is this a good thing?"

If only I had a flame. My fingers itch with the desire to conjure some light.

This would ruin everything, so I settle for the next best thing. "Do you trust me to put a little of this salt on your skin? At the very worst it will do nothing." She hesitates and then nods. I put some in my palm. "You see, it is not caustic."

Quickly I put a different salt as a control between our palms and send a mild charge. "It's warm," she says, and through the bit of magic I'd have to say the same about her skin against mine.

Then we do the first salt. "Wow." She pulls her hand away. "That tingles and it's hot. No, wait, don't stop. Let me feel that again. It makes me want to laugh," and she does laugh. I start laughing too. Here I am, palm to palm with a muggle, practicing the arts my mother taught me. This woman's hand is not like cotton-wool. I actually feel something, another human at the end of this arm, unlike my foray into muggle society years ago.

Maybe our ends of the human spectrum aren't as far apart as I thought. There could be a key that can unlock all humans' systems for me so that I can experiment upon the much wider pool of non-magical humans. Perhaps I can bottle up some of their imperviousness to Alkahests and administer it to Harry.

To touch my lover without fear. That's all I ask.

"This has been most helpful," I say, gathering up my things along with the beetle and Anouk. "May I come on Saturday to seek some other volunteers?"

"On one condition," she replies. "That I sit in on one of your classes."

This takes me aback. Harry has never expressed any interest in such a thing. "If it is too complicated, don't worry. Impulsivity is one of my peculiarities." I merely raise my eyebrows at this reference to my confession about my peculiarity with touch. Which I seem to have forgotten all about during these experiments.

"You are welcome to my classes, but in at least one of them you would be in danger of dying from boredom. Are you free on Tuesday or Thursday from 1-2:30?"

This unexpected affinity would remain in obscurity if there were not some signature on the plant, some mark, some word, as it were, telling us that it is good for diseases of the eyes. This sign is easily legible in its seeds;: they are dark globes set in white skinlike coverings whose appearance is much like that of eyelids covering an eye.

The Order of Things by Michel Foucault

When I stride into the classroom I often miss my Hogwarts role that allowed me to be as much of a bastard as I wanted because I could make potions like nobody's business. This day I walk into class and wish I had the familiar black barrier of a robe to hide behind. Shanti is in the back row.

"Good afternoon students and guests," I say to her and the two other people drawn by the reputation of my parade of oddities. We are dissecting herbs and finding structures that relate to their medicinal purposes.

Using the microscope-projector thing that gives me fits with how clumsy it is, I place an herb, a cross-section of a stem, a preserved leaf before the lens. Then my instrument traces an ear shape, the outline of a dagger, or demonstrates the reaction of a certain plant to strong sunlight. Then we turn to the muggle textbooks about plant pharmacology and learn that each shape or sign does, in fact, presage a medicinal use.

It's Paracelsus' Doctrine of Signatures, of course: the outer nature of a thing indicates its inner qualities. What I show my students are common mnemonic devices such as novice potion-makers rely on. My mother used them when she taught me to read in all her old books. But the muggles' astonishment is complete, every class. I feel almost ashamed by how much they admire what I knew when I was seven, but since I am not making potions, but rather making the lessons as dry and abstract as possible, my courses are so far of no interest to the French Magical authority thus far.

So I am pleased when Shanti is not looking at me with some cheap wonder but with some other expression. When I ask for a volunteer to test the Hellenic Cupula flower, she is the first to raise her hand. The shape of the flower itself is reminiscent of the architectural structure whose name it borrows. But each individual petal is the shape of a heart, and, when concocted properly, these petals are very good for heart ailments.

They are also very Cool, a quality that I've noticed Shanti has an irregular reaction to.

Before I can prevent her she is walking to the front of the class. I take a tiny pinch of the pollen and brush it across the palm of her hand.

A few sparks fly out and she laughs. The class murmurs.

"So we have explored the medicinal properties of some 150 plants," I say to the class. "A topic upon which we have not yet touched on is how the unique human system adds a whole new set of variables."

I nod at Shanti and she sits. The rest of the lecture is about the examination they are preparing for in the coming week.

Class is dismissed. Shanti is waiting for me outside. "I'm afraid you ruined my lecture," I say, brimming with excitement at what this unusual reaction of hers might mean.

"For that I owe you a trip to the café," she says.

She leads me through the crowd of muggles in the courtyard. I still can't get used to the idea that brushing by these people is not going to infect them with my True Face. It always takes me longer to negotiate my usual touch-free transit through a crowd. This small woman has some trick that makes people get out of her way. In no time we are across and I point to the corridor with the campus coffee shop.

"What was supposed to happen?" she says as we approach the line for coffee.

"Most people are not quite so dramatic in their reaction to Cupula flowers; I would have expected you to note a feeling of calm because it tends to slow down rapid heartrate."

"So you find me dramatic? I wouldn't deny it," she tosses over her shoulder before placing her order.

"You seem to have odd reactions to what I would call 'Cold' substances," I resume when we retrieve our cups. "Remember, you felt a bit of static electricity, as you called it, with both my bird and my beetle."

"Is that bad?" she asks in such a way that indicates she has no fear of being labeled as such.

"It is very good for me because the unusual gives me a place to start. I don't know what to do with normal reactions."

She toys with her paper cup. "So if you were to ask me whether I ever drink anything but institutional coffee, such as that which we have enjoyed at the hospital and your school, what would be the appropriately abnormal reaction?"

I wrest my attention from musings about muggle Spagyrics and realize there is nothing else in my head. These days my wit only has two settings: off and eviscerate. There once was a time when it wasn't so difficult to banter. Where did I lose that part of me? This mixture of relaxation and disquiet. Where have I—

"You seem to travel very far away and back again in the space of a second," Shanti is saying.

"Sometimes I do," is my considered reply.