One month later…

The house was very, very quiet. In fact, Jean was positive the house had not been so still or so silent since the young Doctor Blake had come to stay. How one man could make such a ruckus Jean would never know; in the daylight hours he was manageable, but after dark he became a different beast entirely, drinking too much, crashing about, banging on the piano. He made such a bloody mess; he left his clothes strewn about everywhere and hid empty liquor bottles in all sorts of unusual, unsettling places, and she had never seen the desk in the surgery half so untidy. Jean was trying, really she was, to help the man establish some sort of routine, to help him feel settled. It had been her idea that he start seeing patients; the townspeople kept ringing, asking to know how old Doctor Blake was faring and if the younger could see them. Given the choice between young Blake and Doctor King they all seemed to want to take their business to Lucien, and Jean hoped it might help him, in some way, to have something to do besides visit his father once a day, and mope. Oh, he grumbled about it relentlessly - he always seemed to be unhappy about something - but Nemea had sided with Jean, and he was put to work.

There was no work to be done today, however. There was no raucous banging on the piano, no clinking of bottles echoing out from the surgery, no clatter of a drunken lout trying to find his way to bed. There was only a still and oppressive silence, and that was as it should be, for they had buried Thomas Blake today.

The funeral itself had been fine. Perfectly adequate, for a man of his status, a man whose health had been declining for some time now. All of Ballarat had been patiently waiting for him to die, and so when the moment finally came there was no wailing or gnashing of teeth or rending of garments. There was only stillness, the solemn occasion marked by thin grey clouds scuttling overhead. The turnout was respectable in size, and everyone had been calm and quiet by the graveside as they laid Thomas to rest. Jean had managed to keep her tears at bay, at least while she was surrounded by familiar faces. It would not do, she thought, to weep in public, to weep for her employer, to weep for a man who had been dying for so long now; they'd think her vain, or foolish, mutter about her connection to the old man, mutter about her living in that house with his irascible son. They'd talk, if she gave them half a chance, and so she gave them none.

Lucien, on the other hand, Lucien gave the gossips fodder for days. He had been grim and surly at the funeral, had been waspish in the face of everyone's condolences - everyone but the Clasby sisters, who did so seem to dote on him. His frown had been almost angry, not sad in the least, and as they walked back towards the church after the service he had very nearly brawled with Patrick Tyneman. The reason for their disagreement Jean couldn't say for she had not been close enough to hear them speak in the beginning, but then Lucien had begun to shout and his voice had carried and everyone had stared, and then he'd stormed off, and not returned home until nearly nine o'clock in the evening. Where he'd been for all those hours Jean didn't even want to guess. She and Halcyon had waited up for him in the sitting room, worried sick about him, but he'd come stumbling in under his own steam, and she'd heard the bedroom door slam behind him. That was enough for her; he was home, safe under this roof where he belonged, and she'd taken herself off to bed with a heavy heart.

"It's all right to be sad, Jean," Halcyon told her. She was sitting on the little bench in front of her dressing table, carefully setting her hair in curlers for the night. They'd buried Thomas Blake today, but the business of life carried on, and she would have to face tomorrow put together and prepared, whatever it might bring.

"No, I know that, darling," she said. Halcyon fluttered down to perch on the edge of the dressing table, his long black beak shining in the dim light of the lamp. "I'll miss Doctor Blake, but he's been gone for quite some time already. I suppose I just…it just surprised me, that's all. I knew he was leaving us, but I didn't think it would come so soon."

"And you're worried about Lucien," Halcyon said sagely. "Do you think he'll leave us, Jean? Where will we go if he sells the house?"

Of course he would ask that question, she thought, for it was the very same quandary that had been troubling her for the better part of a week. Lucien seemed to loathe life in Ballarat, was forever complaining of boredom and bemoaning his pedestrian neighbors, and all in all Jean supposed it would not come as a shock if he decided to leave. If he did, though, he would take Jean's home and her livelihood with him, and then what would become of her?

"We've started over before," she reminded Halcyon. "We can do it again, if we have to."

She could go to Adelaide, she supposed, stay with young Christopher and his tightly wound wife until she found employment and lodgings for herself. If Lucien gave her enough time she could inquire about town, and perhaps find a position here at home, though she knew all the wealthy families in town by name, and none of them were in the market for a housekeeper at present. It would be uncomfortable, she thought, whatever course she chose, but she could bear a little discomfort. She'd done it before.

With her hair all set and her face washed clean of her makeup Jean was very nearly ready for bed, but she found herself parched, and decided to venture back downstairs for a glass of water. If there was a part of her that also wanted to check in on Lucien, make sure he was asleep and not getting into further mischief, she chose not to examine it too closely.

Halcyon perched on her shoulder as she made her way downstairs, but she had no sooner set foot in the corridor than she saw a flash of something golden in the sitting room. The shine of Nemea's eyes was unmistakable even at this distance, and Jean approached her warily. Where a daemon could be found their human could be found also, for man and beast could not bear to be parted, and she'd never seen a daemon more than an arm's length from their person, and she worried about what he must be getting up to, wandering around the house so late in the evening. As Jean stepped into the sitting room, however, her heart rocketed up into her throat, for the house was still and silent, and Nemea was sitting back on her haunches by the sofa, and there was no sign of Lucien Blake. He was not in the sitting room, nor was he in the parlor, nor the kitchen. Where on earth could he be? And how, how could his daemon bear to linger outside his line of sight? It was more than unsettling, seeing Nemea all alone. It was like...it was like finding a severed foot, marching sedately along all by itself. It was wrong, and it felt...it felt almost evil. It should not have been possible, and even if it were Jean could not reckon why man and daemon would consent to be apart, when they were everything to one another, two halves of the same whole.

"I hope I didn't wake you, Jean," Nemea said. Normally her low, soft voice was a comfort to Jean, for the lioness always seemed to be counseling Lucien to prudence, but in the darkness, alone, without him, the sound of it made the hair stand up on the back of Jean's neck.

"No, no, of course not. I just came for a glass of water," she said. "Is...is everything all right, Nemea? Where's Lucien?"

The steady, unblinking stare of the lioness did nothing to assuage Jean's rising agitation.

"Asleep," Nemea said. "He had rather more to drink than was wise. I don't sleep, myself. I've no need for it. I thought I'd check the house. Make sure all the doors are locked, that sort of thing."

It was more words than Nemea had spoken at once in all the time that Jean had known her, but all that little speech gave her was more questions. Halcyon always slept when Jean did; he had no need to eat, and so had no need to make waste, or mate or do any of the things that ordinary animals did, but he did sleep. Every daemon did. Didn't they?

Halcyon was perched on Jean's shoulder, and she could feel his tiny talons pricking at her through the fabric of her robe. Apparently, he was as disturbed as she was. Nemea said she was checking the house, but why then had she gone to the sitting room, where there were no doors at all? Was she lying? Were daemons capable of lying? Oh, Jean had so many questions.

"I've made you uncomfortable," Nemea said slowly.

"I just...you've surprised me, that's all," Jean said, a bit lamely.

"Did you know," Nemea began, and as she spoke she settled herself more comfortably upon the floor, stretched out until she was lying on her belly and her vast, heavy paws were resting just beneath her chin. Jean took that as her cue to sit as well, and folded herself primly into the nearest armchair. "A man and daemon can survive being parted up to three hundred feet. One step beyond that, and the pain grows too great to bear, and they'll both be dead within seconds."

"I didn't know that, no," Jean said, utterly horrified. "How-"

"During the war," Nemea told her. "The Axis powers wanted to find out for certain just how far the bonds could be pushed. They thought it might protect their soldiers, if their daemons could be kept somewhere safe. Of course they didn't want to experiment on their own men. They used prisoners of war, instead."

Jean recoiled, for she had never heard anything so dreadful in all her life. She knew, of course, that POWs had suffered mightily in the camps, that their captors had been brutal, and vicious, had heard whispers of the experiments the Germans carried out in secret, but she had not known about this. It was an unthinkable form of torture, akin to pulling a man apart limb from limb, just to see what might happen. Just to see how much he could bear.

"They kept me from Lucien for forty days," Nemea told her. "They held him in a hole in the ground and kept me chained in a shed. We nearly went mad."

Tears gathered in the corners of Jean's eyes; she'd known, from the moment she first saw them, that Nemea was scarred, that she and Lucien must have suffered somehow, somewhere, but she had not known, could not have even begun to imagine, just what they had endured. She reached for Halcyon all unthinking, and he clambered onto her palm, and let her draw him down into her lap, let her hold him, her fingers running gently over his feathers while she tried very hard not to cry. We nearly went mad, Nemea said; we, both of them. They must have been desperate to reach one another, Jean thought. Clawing, feral, shattering beneath the weight of their separation, perishing for want of one another, consumed with fear. She could imagine no fate worse than that. It was no wonder, she thought, that Lucien drank rather more than he ought. There were memories lurking in the recesses of his mind no man could bear to carry unaided.

"So you see, we can be parted," Nemea said. "When he's awake, I don't like to go far. But at night...at night I worry for him, and I try to do what I can to make sure he's safe."

"Is that how you got that scar?" Halcyon asked her very timidly. Jean looked down at her little kingfisher in horror; she'd been wondering about that, too, about how Nemea had been injured, but she never would have asked; it seemed dreadfully impolite.

"Yes," Nemea answered calmly. "Before they locked him away, they lashed him. I broke free, and tried to stop them, and the whip caught me across the face. It was a very long time ago, little one. Those wounds have healed."

Have they, though? Jean wondered. Perhaps the skin and muscle and sinew had knit themselves back together but it seemed to her that Lucien's heart had been irreparably damaged.

"I can't imagine how awful that must have been for you," she said, very quietly.

"I'm grateful you won't ever have to find out, Jean," Nemea replied. "The camp...what happened in that place, the horrors we witnessed there, no man nor daemon should ever have to suffer. Lucien would be cross with me if I knew I've told you, though, so I'll thank you not to mention it."

"Of course," Jean answered at once. "We won't, will we, Halcyon?"

The little bird looked up at her, his black eyes shining, and sad.

"We won't," he agreed. "I promise."

"Thank you," Nemea said somberly. "I've kept you from your sleep long enough. You should go and rest, Jean."

And she should, she knew that she should. She should leave that strange, sad daemon right where she was, and put the troubling revelations of this night far from her mind. Surely it was unseemly, to linger alone with another's daemon unsupervised, to share secrets without Lucien there to defend himself, but it felt...it felt right somehow. As if she were meant to find Nemea here, and hear her words. As if she needed to know, what had happened to Lucien, how he had been wounded and defeated. The knowing had already changed her estimation of the man, left her feeling more sympathetic to him than she had been earlier in the day. It left her wanting to help him, not flee from him.

"Perhaps you're right," she said. She rose slowly from her chair, but her heart was heavy, and she didn't want to leave Nemea, not yet. There was one last thing she wanted to do. It was foolish, and brash, and crossed every boundary Jean had ever proscribed for herself, but her heart was heavy, and Nemea looked so lonesome, lying on the floor there by herself.

"Would it...would it be all right if I touched you?" Jean asked her hesitantly .

Nemea's great golden eyes widened slightly in surprise, not that Jean could blame her. It was a most unusual request.

"I think that would be all right," the lioness said after a moment, and so Jean went to her, knelt slowly down beside her great head, and reached out with one trembling hand. She had not touched another's daemon since Christopher died, and took Calliope with him, and she had not thought to ever do so again, but she longed, with everything she had, to offer some comfort to Nemea, and perhaps, in turn to Lucien. Gently, very gently she rested her hand on Nemea's great head, and found that her tawny fur was soft, and warm.

"I'm sorry," Jean whispered, running her palm gently over the lioness's head. Nemea was so bloody big, and so powerful, and dangerous, but she was still and quiet now while Jean touched her, docile as a housecat lazing in the sun. when Jean's hand moved so too did Nemea's head, chasing the warmth of Jean's touch, as if she enjoyed it, as if she wanted more of it.

"It's been such a very long time since anyone's touched us," Nemea sighed. "I think I've rather missed it."

Us, she'd said. Not me. No one had touched either of them, Lucien or Nemea, in such a very long time, and they were lonesome, and sad, and full of grief, and something snapped deep in Jean's chest, for no one had touched her in years, either. There had been no one to hold her hand, to brush her hair back from her face, to cradle her while she slept or comfort her when she was lonesome, and it wasn't bloody fair and she simply couldn't bear it, not a single second longer.

She wrapped both her arms around Nemea's thick neck, and buried her face in the lioness's fur, and hugged her tightly. Nemea did not panic or try to pull away; instead she leaned heavily against Jean, and they clung to one another, there in the dark and quiet while everyone else slept, with Halcyon curled on Jean's lap between them.