Summary: (AU) Anna, a scholar; Yoh, a lazabout. The fairy tale folds in about them, but fairy tales were made to break hearts…

Notes: Taking a break from all of my projects with a silly little thing I wrote a while back. Hugely rough draft; if it works out I'll turn it into a multi-parter with the same concept. –geek- And, of course, I don't own Shaman King.

Fairy Tale
It's called love at first, and doesn't hurt

She writes treatises, essays, lines and sentences and words until her keyboard collapses into a blur of letters and all she remembers of speech comes through her fingers in darting motions. The stories spin out around her like fairy tales, broken: he did not love her but saw only the jewel box at her side; she did not love him for she chose the prince with the greatest of the gifts given to her father to woo her away; the kidnapping rocs of old stories are prejudiced against those who are not beautiful and that is another form of love like a disease. She takes the subjects of her dissertations clinically, overeasy and in the early mornings next to a cup of lukewarm coffee. During the day she clasps her binders and books to her waist, smiling a crescent-thin smile at her students.

(The heavy volumes jar against her hip bone in the rush of the day, and in rare, brutal moments she finds bruises there, when she remembers to look.)

Her subject is new, minor; occasionally at night she suspects that they only made room for her on the staff because the students had taken such a collective interest in it and because she might have looked for employment elsewhere if they had not. It is not depressing, but fact, like the letters collected in patterns at the heart of her articles to make words that resound against the minds of others, and what is depression to that?

She writes her expositions, her tracts on the shapes of love in fables and myths, until she forgets what the words mean and stumbles into the cold expanse of her bed, pulls the covers over the huge warmth of her tweed coat and loses the memory of the clock opposite her bed as it clicks the accusing time away.

-

"Are you sure you're all right?" A weedy-looking man, blinking up at her in the midst of a collision in the echoing corridors of the university. She did not remember him, though the memory might have been jolted from her head in the crash. Perhaps he is a gnome, she mused, out of habit, and smiled sparingly; it was ridiculous to imagine this tiny boy-creature as anything but human. Who else but humanity could spread their fingers across the whole of the earth and breed their way into this fragile being who could barely conquer his clothing?

"I'm fine." She said, staccato-stoic as she collected her papers perfunctorily, scattered like the discarded featherskins of birds over the stones of the passage, her impassive gaze daring him to help. She pushed away his outstretched hand, his fingers warm against hers in that fleeting touch. Neutrally, her eyes flickered over the beat of the time at her wrist, and she said, "You're going to be late for your class."

"I'm not teaching one just yet." He explained humbly – though humbly was not precisely the word. He reminded her of a child, stolen by fairies before the breathy smog of the world could touch them, but there was no one word to describe that quality that she could remember. "My relative teaches here. Hao Asakura?"

Dark hair, eyes like diamonds painted black, a woman on each arm and the apparent conviction that the rest would slaver at his feet if he should ask it. "I remember him."

He broke into a smile of his own. "Most people seem to." He told her cheerfully.

"He's an arrogant fool."

His smile grew wider. "Most people seem to say that too." He was still standing there, though she could not understand why – but then, neither could she understand why she was still planted against the ground, staring up at him in surprise.

She put her palms against the coolness of the tiles, felt the rough edges of the cement push against her palms as she rose to her feet in a single motion.

"You can go now." She said dryly. "I've gotten up."

"I never said I was waiting for you." He pointed out. She gave him a look and he laughed, the sound distorted and quick to fade in the fluorescent lighting of the hall, which seemed to discourage laughter and speech. "Maybe I was, then. But it's only polite to make sure that the person you knock down gets up again."

"And sensible." Old women in the forests and princes on horses, changed to frogs and creatures to their nature's accord through politeness, or lack thereof. "There are, after all, consequences to impoliteness."

"Not these days, surely?"

"Not these days." She acknowledged. Turning, she began to march down the corridor, her heels striking sharp and mechanical against the stone floors. "But had we been in old tales and you had left me stranded on the floor, be assured that I would have changed you into a frog."

"Not me." He angled his head forward in a turtle-like motion as he followed her; embellished with an exaggerated grace that drew humour from his gestures. "I am, after all, a third son; the favoured of fortune in fairy tales."

She quickened her steps. "Are you really? And a prince too, I suppose."

"My mother considered naming me Regulus, if it helps. Why are you walking so quickly? I can't keep up."

"That," she said, "would be the point."

"Ah." He said, and stopped in the middle of the hallway at a cross-section to watch her go.

-

She falls into her bed, steeped to the bone in an overwhelming urge to shut her eyes and break from the world into sleep. Then, methodically and with a certain amount of stiffness, she rises after a few moments, the bones of her spine cricking individually in discomfort as she sits, back parallel to the wall, to consider the day.

There were her students, who have been working well. After the usual minor dissension about the usual assumption that fairy tales are for children and that there is nothing to be learned from them, they are gathering their materials well enough, and some of their budding theses look legible. She has been a teacher for three years, but that her students can make sense out of the gibberish of their thoughts is an ever-cycling wonder that never ceases to amaze her.

There was the lunch, which she ate by herself as per usual, composing a letter to her father in her thoughts. It is, she admits candidly, slightly bitter and slightly sweet, as all daughters' letters to their estranged fathers should be. It is also informative on her mother's latest affair, which she considers to be a kind vengeance as opposed to the one she had planned. It would have been precisely what he deserved, in its exact quantity, but her father would have been hurt and she finds, rather surprisedly, that she is in no mood for bitterness and hurt at the moment.

There was the boy in the corridor, and that is worth less than a moment's thought. He reminds her of the tiny children in kindergarten, with their pointed, freckled faces and the luminous confusion of their eyes, who would use too-large words to open a path for themselves, and would be surprised when the end of the path revealed, not glory or splendor, but a bigger child's knuckles.

She could have been one of those children, but she had not been. She had been one of the shadow-eyed, who spoke when it was necessary in every possible instant because the children had not wanted her, and she had never wanted them. It was a satisfactory conclusion that they had come to after years of alternate neglect and dislike, and she has never spared a modicum of regret for it.

It could have been worse. She has seen tiny girls gasping on their swings, the wind gusting wet glitters from their faces so that their features are scorched when they descend, eyes red-rimmed only by the fury of their pace. She has seen boys clutching their arms in unnatural poses, standing to attention so that the bruises don't burn against their skin.

She could have been them, she had not been, and she does not recognize the desire that drove them – drives them still – into the fray again and again to earn the friendships of those who do not want them. These are the strange, murky actions in her crystal-glass life, and she imprsons them in test-tubes and cages of thought to inspect them later in the free time she never has.

She turns off the lights then, her fingers slick against the warm plastic of the switch. She presses her open hand to it briefly, feeling the mark imbed itself in her palm before she drags it in a down motion and plunges the room into darkness.

-

"Hey!"

She sat back against the chesterfield in the middle of writing down a comment to one of the students, the words of which flew from her mind as she stared up at the intruder. His countenance seemed familiar, and in a moment she placed it as the face of the boy-man she had crashed into in the hall the previous day.

The memory of it did not endear him to her. "What."

"Can I sit by you?" He inquired.

Instinctively she looked around the room; the tables were as full as usual in the staff room, couches seating far more than they ought, but never quite noisy. It was, however, far from the crowded place that he made it sound. There were a great many places to sit that did not necessitate bothering her, which, in her opinion, elevated their usefulness. "Go sit next to someone else." She told him. "There's plenty of room."

"But I want to sit on a chair." He told her, smiling awkwardly and watching the leaning tower of theses gathered onto a cushion next to her. She looked at it, then at him.

"Go sit on a porcupine." She suggested.

His grin broadened; not in friendliness, but as if he had caught a joke in her words that he knew she had not intended. "There isn't one in here."

"You're quite welcome to go out and find one to sit on. What are you doing in here, anyway? You're not teaching here."

"Hao wanted me to meet him for lunch." He explained easily, sitting down on the edge of the cushion. "I got here and started waiting out in the hall half an hour ago. He called me a few minutes ago and told me that he was going to be late, that he had a lunch date going overtime, and that he was still going to show up but I'd have to wait, though I was welcome to start my lunch. So I came in."

Hao, chasing girls again. She wondered vaguely if he was lunching with one of his students, and if that would be enough to get him fired. If he was removed, at least, his small and irritating relative would never return, which would be two problems in one shot. "And how did you find me?"

He waved a paper at her that she recognized immediately as one of the ones that had fallen out of her bag the previous day that she had not found. It had not worried her; the student always handed in two copies for that express purpose, and though his paranoia annoyed her, she had always taken both.

"Easier than Cinderella." He said, and grinned. "If she'd had the foresight to put her name in her shoe..."

"I should think," she said acidly, "that it would be a bit difficult to write on fur."

"Oh, of course." He said easily, smiling at the faint flicker of surprise lancing across her eyes. "What, didn't you think I knew the original story of Cinderella and how the translators turned the word for fur into glass out of a mistake in the language?"

"It's a popular thing to remember about the story." She said impersonally. "I should have guessed that you would know it."

"How kind of you."

"Kind of me to do what?"

"To say that I would know the popular facts about such a myth. I know a few things about fairy tales, but I'm afraid popular culture has never been my forte." He wrapped his long arms around his awkward knees and began to eat, occupying as little space as possible so as not to disturb the small mountain of papers beside her. "It's good to know that I'm improving about it, though."

"It wasn't meant to be a compliment." She told him dryly – was he stupid or merely dense?

One side of his mouth quirked up as his sandwich dripped onto his plate. "I know." He said. "Unfortunately, I have the appalling tendency to take things the way they first occur to me."

"You're an irritating child." She said. "Go away."

He looked entirely solemn. "After I finish my sandwich. I should hate to drop mayonnaise on your papers." It did not sound like a classic threat, but it seemed like one nevertheless. She didn't doubt that her students would have a certain amount of objection to a teacher who turned their carefully written dissertions into condiment-laden paper trays. Neither could she really move her things; the papers were arranged in great stacks, and she could not consent to abandon the field to him.

"Stay, then." She said coldly. "But make yourself useful while you're here and see if you can find any basic mistakes."

He looked gratified, and put his sandwich down to examine the papers.

-

"Why don't you like Hao?" He inquired laconically on another day. His fingers were spread out across the papers, moving lightly across her desk as he snatched out bits and pieces of words. He read them one after the other as if they were literature and not the semi-serious discussions of students looking for a good grade in order to make money. It was something about him that made her curious, drove her mad, and made her wonder if he had ever had even the slightest resemblance to sanity. She was a teacher and she appreciated her students in the same way that a cattle-farmer might appreciate his stock, but it did not mean that she enjoyed reading their papers any more than the farmer enjoyed cleaning up the muck that the cattle issued.

"He's an arrogant fool, I told you." She said shortly. "Give me the paper you're holding – I think she might have been onto something in that one and I need to change a few comments."

"I refuse." He declared, waving the paper. "Tell me why you don't like him."

She eyed him. "May I remind you that this is my office and I can quite easily kick your sorry spine from this wall to that one if you do not permit me to go on with what keeps me employed here. There's no university rule that says I need to gladly tolerate a fool."

"So I'm a fool." He remarked brightly. "Am I as much of a fool as my relative who is your colleague, I wonder?"

Her pen hovered, made a sharp scarlet mark over a questionable word in one of the more pompous papers before moving on. "You act like a greater fool than he does for the most part."

"You've only known me for a week." He protested, folding his hands over his chest. She seized the tract from between his hands and uncrumpled it to smooth out its words and inscribe her own. "How can you make such harsh judgments over me, having known me for so little a time?"

"Two weeks, idiot." She said curtly.

"Two weeks, really?"

"And you wonder why I think you're a fool. Have you lost your ability to count in your awe for the fairy tales my students are studying? Is that why you keep reading their papers?"

"I'm not in awe of the fairy tales." He informed her carelessly. "I read their papers because you won't let me look for any of yours. From their words I am gleaning traces of you, slowly but surely. Soon, I shall understand you, and your continued insistence on ignoring Hao and all questions relating to him."

"I do not ignore them." She said. "I disarm them and toss them at your head. It is quite different. And if you manage to understand me, it shall be more than anyone else has ever done, for which I will congratulate you and kill you. Having someone understand you entirely can be a dangerous thing."

"Ah, of course."

-

She did not understand why he spent time with her, why he followed her and behaved as though he enjoyed her company. If she had been asked (which she would not have), she would have never said that she liked him. Liking meant someone you agreed with, someone you saw as worth talking to, and worth listening to when they spoke. He was none of the things that would have qualified him; he was impulsive and careless and carefree, which made him difficult to talk to, as if she had only just realized that she was a relic from an age that was no longer there.

Still, when he knocked on her door she would let him in, let him fall into the battered ottoman she had lugged in to make the place seem more like a study and let his voice fall over her like a lullaby as she went over the papers. It was never an established tradition so much as an event scheduled by chance and destiny in coincidence; occasionally he would come and she would write her small, scritching script to the sound of his cheerful, rambling voice, and just as frequently he would not, leaving her to an evening of conventional silence.

She did not hate him, though, for his frequent and randomized intrusions into her life, and that she found to be strangest of all. But since the day he had crashed into her in the hall, he had become distant; less human and more a force of nature, something she could avoid as easily as she could cut out her own heart and live.

It was peculiar, as though she had stumbled herself into a fairy ring, a world that she did not recognize with creatures both wild and beautiful. And in many ways, it was a fairy tale; when he dragged her out of her chilly office mid-December, into his car whose door she could not open, to go have ice cream in a shop as hot as summer. When he took her into the bustling city, alien and glittering at night, culminating in a thumb-wrestling encounter with a huge hulk of a man that made it seem even stranger when first he, then she, managed to triumph over in turn. When, in early spring, he roused her from her bed in the middle of the night (suffering a bucket of cold water to his head) to take her to a meadow glittering with dew and pearls beneath the eerie moonlight.

She did not notice when first their lives began to blend together, and did not catch note that anything had changed at all until she woke in the morning with his name on her lips.

-

"I'm going overseas."

She glanced up from her desk, swiveled her chair towards the door so that he could see her, though she kept her eyes on a student's paper until she had determined what it warranted. "Why?"

"My father is of the opinion that I'm wasting my time here." He told her calmly, though his face had turned to a strange, ashy colour. "I've never acted much like a university creature, and I think it's unnerving him to see me change now. He wants me to get a breath of fresh air, go study a little culture, perhaps, and see what I change into after a few years of that."

"How kind of him." She observed, and went back to evaluating papers.

After a moment he said, tentatively, "Will you come with me?"

"And why would I do that?"

"I thought you enjoyed my company."

"I cannot imagine what gave you that impression." She said dryly. "And in any case, I have papers here to grade, students to teach – there is no legitimate reason for me to go." In the back of her mind there began a whispering refrain, a chain of fairy tales: there was once a girl whose beloved went over hill and dale and valley until he had reached the end of the world, and he did not return.

"There is me."

She glanced up again, cast a negligent eye over his clothing and his rumpled hair, and turned her attention back to the paper. "I doubt the university would count that as a reason."

"Well, I love you. Would that count?"

It had been the wrong thing to say. Her bones shifted, interlocking into stiffness as she lifted her head by gradual degrees to stare at him. Her voice was soft and detached, clinical as a doctor noting the progression of a fatal disease in her patient. "You have gone mad."

He laughed, shrugged, and did not meet her eyes as if he thought that the sight of him would make her uncomfortable. "You're the reader of the fairy tales, between us. Isn't it a riddle of fairies that lovers are madmen tempered with a poet's grace, which cannot be too close to sanity itself? I won't say it again, but I think I do, and I thought you should know. I did not mean to disturb you."

She closed her eyes and did not reply; not because there was nothing to say to him, but beause there was nothing that could be said. What he had spoken of so freely were the things customarily kept in silence, haunting only in the dark like a secret made between two. They were too fragile, and the words would crumble them before the truth of them could be made clear, so that they were useless when they were understood. But they did not seem useless; it was as if he had placed them between her hands, and they were bright as life now, something valuable that she did not understand and felt vaguely disconcerted in accepting.

This was something about life, and she had never really counted herself among the living so much as a scholar who recorded their deeds.

When she did not reply, he spoke again, but the jubilance had fled his tone, leaving his voice as dead and analytical as hers. "I am sorry for you."

Her eyes opened, narrowed, streets in a labyrinth fading to an end to which she could find no escape. "Why?"

"You want to be surrounded by your books. You want to listen to your old music until the world goes away to leave you in peace. And you'll never be convinced that this is not what you want until you wake up in a morning, old, to realize that the world has forgotten you."

"I want the world to forget me."

"I don't. I love you, and I want you to come with me. There is a world out there that I could show you, a thousand fairy tales that you could see if only you would step from your study to go look for them."

She folded her fingers across one another, laying across each other in a multiplex of veneers and skins. Absently, she placed them over her face, her eyes, dragged them across her features before dropping them sedately in her lap again. "Have you ever heard of the story of the princess in the tower?"

"Probably not the one you have in mind. You're a scholar of the obscure."

"She was a princess, and they were afraid for her in that world of fairy tales, because like Rapunzel she had been blighted at birth with a curse, though they did not know with what." The words sounded through her mind as she spoke them, remembering them because this was what she had studied all of her life, as faithfully as a lover might follow the hours of his beloved's day. "And so they locked her away in the tower, and one day a prince came riding by, and she saw him and he saw her and was convinced that this was love. He took her out of the tower, and the moment he set her on the horse she faded to ashes and dust. He went riding back to his palace covered in grey, and could not explain what he had seen."

"What do you mean by that?"

"What do I mean?" Her eyes snapped shut, bones pushing out against her thin, stark face. "He loved her. She loved him. But the curse would not let her go; the curse found her in the end, and killed her."

"Predestination, then?"

"No, it had nothing to do with predestination and everything to do with the fact that she should not have gone from her tower in the first place. In her tower she had all that she wanted. She would have lived until she was old and realized that she had never been outside and then it would have been only a faint, muted regret. She would have never broken anyone's heart, locked away in her tower with her face turned from the window."

He stared at her. She said fiercely, "She would have lived." and he blinked.

"Oh." He murmured, in a sigh like a shot, though he did not look away.

"I have no desire to die." She told his empty face, his closed and unreflective eyes.

"But you love me."

"As far as you would understand it, I do."

"But as far as you understand it, you don't?"

She drew out her fingers from beneath each other, stared at them as if they were alien and deadly. "What do you know about love?" She inquired of her glassy fingernails, her soft scholar's hands. "You've never made a study of it as I have, and what you know about it comes from your experiences with women. I have given you your answer, and you are welcome to take yourself back to your experiences in the outside world—"

"Do you want me to go?" He spoke quietly, and she shut her eyes again ferociously, as if to lock away the sight of him would dry out the murmur of his voice resounding through her thoughts. "If you want me to, I will. You tell me I haven't made a study of love, and so I'll call this by another name if you like. It doesn't change that I will do what you ask if you want it, because you want it and for no other reason. And if you want me to, I will go."

But if you want me to stay, I will.

Her eyes were still shut, though her lips formed murmuring whispers that she barely understood herself; stories that came from the edges of her memories. "There was once a girl who went out into the desert, beneath the dust of the stars at night. She was an ordinary girl, but her heart was full of longings and wishes, and she fed them, one by one, to the djinn in the holes, who told her that he would grant all that she would desire if only she would tell him what she wanted. He ate of her heart and grew stronger as she waned. At last, he consumed her corpse in flashes and flames when she fell to the earth after telling him all that she had ever longed for—"

"Oh god." The fine, fluting line in his voice had roughened and snapped to a hoarse, raw edge. The control that he had maintained went spiralling through his eyes into a colour like madness, and she opened her eyes to watch them in fascination."Why must everything be fairy tales! You're a scholar, I know and I understand it, and I could wait for you all of your life if you would only tell me that was what you wanted. But no, you won't tell me; you won't even tell me that you hate me and that I should go away to leave you to your dusty stories. And if things continue this way I could spend the whole of my life waiting for you without ever knowing what you think of me. I know," he resumed, after a difficult and uncertain pause, "that you don't believe in me or the idea that I could love you. You won't even let me call it that, and all the things you've told me are carefully worded to connect with my assumptions and my structured world."

"I don't know you at all." He went on. "Not the way people who love each other know each other, but I feel as though I could if only you'd let me through."

"You'd throw away your life and your dreams for the sake of a chance, a dream that might not even be real." She said. The sound of her words were hard and scraping like the motions of a rapier out of the scabbard, but the balance had been thrown, the motions wavering and unsure.

"It's a ridiculous thing to stake my life on, I know," he told her. His fingers had wrapped into each other tightly, and he was watching her as if he didn't think there was anyone else in the world. "But… I don't know. I haven't known you for long and I shouldn't know the least thing about you, but I do. I could spend all of my life in your kitchen waiting for you to wake up to get you coffee. You'd never talk to me, and it should be scary and strange but all it is is comfortable, because I want to be near you. It has nothing to do with your princesses and your stories, who all have prices that need to be paid and audiences to whom they must be told. All I need is to wake up in the dark and know that you are there with me."

Opening and shutting her eyes as if they were fans whose signals had been lost in a flurry of smoke, she turned back, stared stiffly down at the papers scattered over her desk. The students were going wrong after all; their theses were only so much gibberish to her wandering eyes. "I don't understand." She told him, her back stiffening as he came nearer, the warmth of his hand hovering over her shoulder and never quite daring to descend.

"You don't have to. You don't even need to tell me to stay; you don't need anything from me." His mouth crooked faintly, movement audible in the tense silence. "I throw myself upon your mercy."

"And what makes you so certain that I have any?"

"I hope." He told her. His voice was soft as the touch of his fingers, warm against the nape of her neck as they settled hesitantly over the light bone of her shoulder. And suddenly she was seized with a distorted incomprehension of everything except that she wanted him more than she had ever wanted anything else, and that he knew it too well for it to be comfortable. She had spent all of her life on her papers, her discourses and her tracts, and they had wanted nothing of her than to be written. But this was different, this was an unspoken price under the guise of freedom, and by the time the price was named, she would be paying – would have been paying – for all of her life until he saw fit to let her go.

She trusted him, and that was a monstrous thought in itself too; that he should have stolen her confidence so easily to place it in himself. It should not have been that easy, but it was evident that it had been, though she could not understand how or why it had come about, and for what reason he could have wanted it in the first place. She had met Hao, had seen them together in her mind and their faces in parallel, and the dissimilarities between her had struck her. Not because they had not looked the same (for they had), but because of the way they wore themselves, as though different muscles moved their bodies and drew out their thoughts.

What it amounted to was that she trusted him. And she could not.

"No." She said, too softly for it to count as a whisper or a sigh.

He reacted as though it had been a shout, though, and pulled away, moving to her side, his expression calm and polite. "Is there a reason why?"

There was once a princess who loved a prince, she recalled, though they lived at opposite ends of the world. Each day she would pick the flowers that he had planted in her garden and put it in her hair, and when the petals began to wilt, she would press it between the pages of the books that he had given her and fill her room with its scent. They loved each other as if loving another was a foreign language that they could not speak, a concept that they could not address because its logic did not match theirs.

But this is a distance that cannot be breached.

"I can't." She told him. She turned to meet him and shrugged her shoulders, her face enigmatic and shuttered closed so that her thoughts seemed in a separate world. "I could explain it to you in fairy tales, but I think we've established that you don't understand their language, and I would not want to waste your time with things that you do not know."

For a moment, she thought that he was angry; his eyes were colourless, his mouth pale and tense. Then the look went away again, leaving him calm and only slightly fragile, as he had been when she had first seen him. He was beautiful, she thought unexpectedly. There would be a woman somewhere who would see the long-lashed eyes, the childlike awkwardness of his movements, and who would love him for them, who would want him without restraint or guilt.

"Is this goodbye then?"

"Goodbyes don't end things." She told him dispassionately, her eyes still and unmoving. "They only lend the semblance of an ending until the players in the tale are ready to take up the threads of its plot again."

He smiled. She felt something cold wrench at her, as though he had pushed his fingers through her flesh to lay his hand against her heart. "Then you'll forgive me if I don't say anything but goodbye." He said. "Fools can't help but hope."

"You aren't a fool." She said. Then, quietly, "I'm sorry."

"It's all right." The look of determined cheer on his visage was unbearable. It might have been easier if he had taken a knife and drawn slow, agonizing words across her skin in blood. That, at least, would have been truth, and this was what he thought to be love, hiding itself away for her sake. "I'm not sure that I could have stayed with you knowing that you kept me there only because you wanted me to be happy. If you gave me something that you didn't have because you thought that I wanted it." He curled his fingers out in an extravagant bow, esoteric and entirely impulsive, and she bit back a smile, swallowing it to fill the emptiness at her stomach.

I should eat soon, she thought, but she was not hungry. "Idiot." She said out loud to his retreating back. "I would not give you what I did not have."

He paused at the door, though he did not turn his head to look back. Still she felt the smile curl against his mouth, palpable as a kiss. "Wouldn't you?" He asked, and was gone.

She looked back to her desk, skimmed with the papers of her students and overflowing with her own words and thoughts stuck out in odds and ends. He had changed her; had made her as messy and impulsive as himself in the brief sojourn he had spent in her company. It was good that he was gone. She would have never been able to concentrate with him constantly by her, demanding the attention that she could give to no one but her duties. They would have quarreled, would have fought and would have transformed the relationship he had explained to her from the words of dreams into a nightmare. It would have hurt him much more than this clean break, and she should be concentrating on her students and their papers now that he was gone.

Her fingers sifted through the letters and the extravagant speeches. She did not realize that she had not understood them until it came to her that she was reading one student's introductory paragraph for the third time and had yet to take in a word of it.

It was ridiculous, she thought, to take on so over someone who would have never been happy in her tower. He would have called it trapped and would have tried to bring her out again. She shook the thoughts of him from her irritably and read the paper's thesis in a drift of words. One sentence leapt out at her, its careless, esoteric words turned abruptly to a boneless clarity that struck her with a near-palpable blow.

It's called love at first, and doesn't hurt until its absense, by which time all chances for redemption have gone.

She stared down at it, read its explorations of fact and fairy tales, and did not cry, because she did not know how.

/end