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He didn’t eat much. His stomach twisted. Churned.
Tir, sitting beside him, glanced his way. Bit a lip, let it go. Then, while listening politely to Cedric’s rendition of an overblown monologue about falling leaves, picked up a bread roll, golden-topped and hot, and slid it onto Ollie’s plate.
Ollie stared at it, mystified. A gesture? A kindness? For him, from Tir, now?
The bread sat there on his plate, equally mystified. After a second he tore off a bit, nibbled it. It was good.
He thought he caught Tir’s tiny smile, at that, though it vanished like a spectre when searched for head-on.
Some of the freshly-baked heat made its way to Oliver’s stomach. Not enough, but some.
Because he’d been opening himself up and inviting magic in, it refused, in the manner of a smirking stray cat, to leave. He’d meant to go back to his room and wallow in self-pity and sorrow and maybe some depressed charcoal drawings of Tir’s face; he was nearly there when he recalled he’d left his sketchpad in the library, and doubled back.
This meant he was on the stairs when the vision punched him in the brain. He staggered, grabbed the wall, flailed for breath. Awareness, the way he knew where people were—but sharper, clearer—
Tir. And Cedric. In Cedric’s room, where his brother’d apparently hauled his fairy off for a scolding, judging from the extravagant pointing-of-fingers. No one else, naked or otherwise, was presently occupying that room for a change; Tir, flattened against the door, seemed simultaneously surprised and disconcerted and a bit impressed.
Oliver’s first impulse was to charge down there and throw himself between astonished rainwater eyes and whatever asinine accusations his little brother might be making. But Tir also seemed upright and unharmed and actually energetic in response to whatever was going on.
Ollie sagged against his own wall. Let it hold him up. Tried for equilibrium. Listened.
“You have to say something!” Cedric jabbed the finger at Tir again. “I know theatre! This is a melodrama! Confess!”
“To you?”
“Sure, because I like knowing everything, but no! To him!”
“You don’t understand—”
“I understand that you’re hurt. I understand that you somehow miraculously came back from the dead. I understand that you’re hurting my brother by not talking to him. I can see his face. And I don’t care if you can’t climb a flight of stairs or sit in a room without a fireplace. You can say words. You’re saying words to me right now.”
Even Tir’s hair expressed dismay, backed up against the bedroom’s solid oak door. “I’m sorry—you don’t know—I’ve been trying, I know what it is now, I just need to find out how to fix it, so I can—”
“How to fix what?”
“I’m human!” Tir shouted back. Cedric, never having seen Tirian as anything other than a calmly competent patient older brother, stopped talking out of shock. “I’m human—well, mostly—and I don’t know how to fix this, I’m too clumsy and I trip over nothing and my head aches half the time and that’s not even counting the being dead part and I’m not good enough anymore!”
“What,” Cedric said weakly, confronted with this onslaught.
“I’m not good enough for him.” Tir slumped against the door. Dropped his head back against oak, with a thud. Hair got in his left eye; he batted it away impatiently. “I never was, I knew that, but at least I had magic. I could help him. A proper companion. Now I’m useless.”
“Hang on,” Cedric said, “I’m still working on the first part. You’re human now.”
“More or less. Yes.”
“And…you…think that makes you not good enough for him.”
“Not like—not only because of—never mind.”
“He loves you,” Cedric declared, “and you’re wrong. Human you, fairy you, whatever. Still wrong.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I was there when he thought you were dead. I found him when he thought you were dead. He said he loves you.”
“He feels guilty because I died. It’s a romantic cliché.”
“Seriously,” Cedric said, addressing the ceiling, “this is like talking to a waterfall. It doesn’t listen and it just keeps making sounds. Have you seen him lately?”
