Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Aw, I’m so glad you liked it, it was a lot of fun! Here, this is kind of ADHD and random but it’s KIND OF plot, right, so yeah.  Also OH MY GOD this got grim, Christ, this is just sads, I don’t…I don’t have a defense for this, except that I was kind of consumed by my feelings about Feuilly in this universe and things got away from me.

Okay so Mutant Registration, right?  And the rise of the Cure.  That’s what we’re dealing with here.  The Cure is in development, there’s discussion of forced administration to mutants who are a hazard to self or others, and the mutant population is terrified, angry, desperate, Les Amis as much as any of them.  They’ve been at least tangentially involved in at least one protest a week for months, and it’s gotten to the point where they’re recognized on the news.

They have moments of uncertainty, sure, like anyone who’s spent years being told how unnatural they are.  Even Enjolras, who is so aflame with his defense of his people that he burns like a white-hot star even in bright sunlight, has his moments where he wonders—just a little—if it would be better after all to be normal.  Those of them with obvious mutations, or mutations with nasty backlash, have worse moments, more moments, and they all objectively know that, but somehow it’s still a surprise when Feuilly, steady and smiling and gentle, wavers.

They’re all a bit drunk—it’s a Friday, they’re exhausted and safely ensconced in the back room of the Musain and Madame Huchloupe can read minds, so if there’s ever been a safe place for a rather motley crew of mutant activists to get drunk, this is probably it.  Musichetta is there, very solemnly drawing daisies up Jehan’s right arm in Sharpie while Grantaire sketches roses up his left and the honeysuckle braided into his hair twines itself into a crown—Jehan almost always has a few cuttings of his plants in his hair, living off his power.  Cosette is watching Eponine set off tiny crackling fireworks that dance over her fingers, delighted, and Marius is staring like Cosette’s glee is the most incredible thing he’s ever seen.  Even Enjolras and Grantaire are getting along (this is before they get together), having an entirely cordial conversation about the details of their last protest.

And Feuilly, who usually sweeps into rooms like a light going on, warm and friendly, slips in silently, staring at the floor, with Bahorel radiating fury on his heels.  

“Feuilly?” Courfeyrac says, turning immediately, his hands already out toward the dark blotch of Feuilly’s emotions.  Bahorel hovers behind Feuilly’s shoulder like he’s planning a murder, downright thunderous, and then Feuilly raises his head and the room goes very quiet indeed.  

He has a black eye starting and an ugly mess on his cheek, like someone ripped at the scales against the grain, pulling them out at the roots. The places where the skin on his arms—littered with bruises—blends into black snakeskin is raw and abraded.  His lip is cut and bleeding, his black-on-steel snake eyes damp, and his shirt is stained red at the nape of his neck, where his scales scraped against something rough, like stone.  He holds himself like his ribs hurt, like he might have broken bones, and stands crookedly, all his weight on one leg.

There’s a long beat, because no matter how many times one of their number appears bruised and hurting, it never becomes normal.  Feuilly and Grantaire always get the worst of it, because no matter how obvious pyrokinetics are no one wants to mess with them, but this is the most damage any of them have walked in with.

“Oh,” Jehan says, soft and grief-stricken, and he shrugs Grantaire and Musichetta away to walk forward.  He reaches out and rests his hand on Feuilly’s arm, seeking permission, and Feuilly blinks at him for a moment before he sighs and leans his head on Jehan’s shoulder, his ruined cheek turned away.  Jehan hugs him, cautious of his injuries, and Enjolras, Courfeyrac and Combeferre close behind him, is the next to reach them.  

“What happened?” Enjolras asks, unusually soft.  

Feuilly closes his eyes and doesn’t answer, and they can see his flinch when a tear streaks down to the mess on his cheek, salt water in the wound.

“They caught him on his way from work,” Bahorel half-snarls, because Bahorel is a buoyant and glad soul right up until his friends—or Feuilly, whose position is somewhat indeterminate even to the other Amis—are threatened.  “Seven guys—big guys, too.”  Enjolras nods, because Feuilly can take care of himself, but one on seven are nasty odds at the best of times.  “I don’t know what they used on his face,” Bahorel continues as Jehan steers Feuilly over to a chair and pushes him down.  “I got there and ran them off.”  He smiles grimly, all teeth, and says, “Remind me to pick up some more krav maga.”

“Feuilly, let me look at your chest,” Joly says, limping over—it’s due to rain tonight, his leg is troubling him, but he’s discarded his cane in his hurry.  Feuilly doesn’t say anything, lets Joly unbutton his shirt and doesn’t react to his hiss at the red and purple mottling that spans one side of his ribs.  “Someone get me some—thanks,” he says, taking the glass of water Bousset holds out and a napkin from the table.  Feuilly closes his eyes, as if he can’t stand to watch the others watching him—Feuilly’s proud, but right now he just looks tired, as if it’s too much to bear.  Joly starts to dab at the blood on Feuilly’s face and the room falls quiet again, except for the shuddering sound of shadows stirring over the floor and the quiet crackle of sparks showering through Eponine’s long hair.

Once Feuilly’s face is clean, the damage looks even worse, the beds of scales raw and seeping blood.  Joly cradles his cheek in one hand and closes his own eyes to focus, and the damage begins to vanish, new scales pushing through the skin and settling flat against each other.  The black eye sinks away, the bruises and scrapes evaporating like a dream.  Once it’s done, Joly brushes a thumb over the repaired scales on Feuilly’s cheek and they slide like water, black and sleek. Joly lets Bousset wrap an arm around his waist and support him as he retreats from Feuilly, and Bousset clasps a hand briefly around Feuilly’s wrist, fingers pressing against the sweep of scales over the pulse point.  There’s a faint crackle, as if of ozone, and Bousset pulls away.  Feuilly opens his eyes briefly and offers a wan smile, then closes them again and raises a hand, pressing the heel of it into the socket of one eye.

Grantaire is the one who sits down next to him and grips his arm firmly, and Feuilly leans to the side, like a strong tree toppling under a gale, to lean against him.  Grantaire’s all-black eyes half-lid, and he rests his hand between Feuilly’s shoulders instead, his shadows still for the moment so as not to disturb his friend.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Feuilly whispers into Grantaire’s shoulder, and it’s the first thing he’s said since he arrived.

“I know,” Grantaire says, heavy and tired, and Cosette and Eponine exchange a look, drifting over to the table themselves.  Cosette’s wings are pulled tight around her shoulders, as if she’s retreating into them, and Eponine’s flaming eyes are shaded by her lashes—freaks among freaks, the ones who can’t hide.

“I don’t want to be like this.”

“I know.”

There’s nothing else to say.

You are correct, I did not say that.  But you realize that now I have to EXPLAIN this shit, right?

Okay, so, Billy Johr and Colin Ramsey are from my novel Falls the Shadow, which is the 350 page monstrosity I wrote during sophomore year and which I am now editing to be sent out to an agent.  Short version: Sam Lightworth, their pseudo-adopted daughter (they’re the two Witnesses), is the Antichrist and Horseman of Death, and her brother Oz, their pseudo-adopted son, is the Horseman of Pestilence.  War and Famine are kicking around too, but they don’t really matter as much here.  The POINT is that Billy and Colin accidentally raised an Antichrist and the world barely missed ending.  That’s it, that’s the book.  And then…well.  Billy and Colin.  They are canonically in love, and have been since they hunted together as twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings.  Billy, now sixty-three and no longer spry enough to hunt himself, is an archivist and weaponeer for every hunter of supernatural things.  And the now-sixty Colin…well, Colin’s a Catholic priest…so…they’re not together and they never will be.  And Adler is never going to forgive me for that.  I’m sorry.  Please don’t hunt me with torches.

I put my music on shuffle and got I’m So Sorry by Imagine Dragons and…um…yeah, actually, this is a snippet from while the Almostpocalypse was happening.  I’m…so sorry.

“Preacher,” Billy said quietly, and Colin didn’t look at him, still standing at the edge of the porch and staring down the road.  He didn’t need to look to know that Billy would step forward, stand next to him until their shoulders pressed together, the once-red hair steely in the corner of his vision.  Billy was a broad, solid warmth at his side, half a head taller and steady as ages, and Colin let their shoulders bump together, acknowledgement that he was there.

“Did you hear it?” he asked, barely more than a murmur, and Billy nodded slowly beside him, looking out in the same direction—south, to Nevada, to where the Horsemen were, miles and hours away.  The scream had come from nowhere, from everywhere, like standing directly beneath a roll of thunder, but the voice had been Sam’s.  “The others,” Colin said, almost blank.

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I HAVE ALL THE MUTANT!AU HEADCANONS.  Listen, children, Auntie Moran has been an X-Men devotee since she was very wee, I have mutant AU headcanons for basically everything I’ve ever seen.  I think we’ll just do headcanons for this rather than a fic, though, you can hit me up later if you want actual plot.

Okay so I’m thinking that the Mutant Registration Act is going to have to be the big issue Les Amis are protesting–they’ve got to have something to be against, it’s Les Amis for God’s sake.  And I’m thinking that a number of them are in a peculiar position because a lot of them are from wealthy upper-class families and have invisible mutations, so they could have just gone on with their lives without ever telling a lie.  This is probably vaguely modern–hell, maybe the X-Men are kicking around somewhere.  Aaaaanyway, here, it got long.

• Enjolras can glow.  Actually it’s called electromagnetic manipulation, and he can do more than glow, but that’s the most common manifestation–when he’s impassioned or excited or angry, it’s as if particles of sunlight coalesce around his skin, a harsh and brilliant golden-white halo.  He can control it, but it takes some concentration.  With some practice, he learned to do other things with light, like setting off bursts of light to catch the attention of a crowd or throwing lightning-bright flashes from his hands to baffle the police and hide their escape.  It’s beautiful, watching him speak at the Musain or at a protest, his whole body outlined in not-quite-blinding light so that there isn’t a single shadow on him, like an angel or an ancient god.  It’s why Grantaire started calling him Apollo–god of the sun, of rapture and beauty, of eloquence and elegance.  It drives Enjolras up the wall, but Grantaire persists and Enjolras’ light is all the brighter in the heat of his anger.

• Combeferre has a small psychic ability, although not in the sense of reading minds.  He can share senses, specifically vision–look through the eyes of another animal.  He likes moths and butterflies for this, because as calm and logical as he usually is, Combeferre is creative and loves art and moths and butterflies have five color receptors rather than three, they can see a whole spectrum humans can only dream of.  When he’s drunk enough or exhausted enough, Combeferre will sit with his head on Courfeyrac’s shoulder and try to describe the other colors he can see through their eyes.  (He has absolutely never started crying about it, and anything Courfeyrac says to the contrary is nothing but lies and slander.)

• Courfeyrac is an empath.  I think I’ve used that one before, but I am VERY committed to Courfeyrac being an empath, y’all can fight me at dawn on that.  He’s not much good at projecting, he can only manage it in a moment of strong emotion, although once he does manage it, he can swamp everyone around him and send them reeling into hysterical sobs or blind rage or, on one memorable occasion involving Combeferre, pure blazing lust.  (They don’t talk about that one much, it’s a bit of a Noodle Incident, but suffice it to say Enjolras reacted…poorly, when they came out of it and he realized he’d kissed Grantaire.  It was a messy week until he apologized for his reaction.)  Courfeyrac is much better at receptive empathy, at reading the people around him, and he’s a master at balancing it all, knowing which emotions are his and which aren’t.  It does make being around Enjolras a little exhausting, with all that fiery passion roaring through him all the time–Combeferre, much steadier in nature, is a good balance, though.  That’s part of the reason Courfeyrac likes Gavroche so much.  He’s not a complex kid, he’s very direct and up front with his thoughts and emotions.  It’s restful to be around, unless you’re on his hit list.

• Bousset’s mutation is probability manipulation.  Nothing so large-scale as the Scarlet Witch–he’s not going to be rewriting reality any time soon, nor eradicating mutant-kind–and instead of being able to shoot bolts, he can sort of attach it to people like a curse.  It’s relatively shortlived, but he can grab someone, skin-to-skin, and attach his power to them for a while, giving them ‘good luck’ or ‘bad luck’ depending on his preference.  Problem is, entropy demands a balance, so he deals with the backlash–if he makes someone lucky, he deals with correspondingly strong bad luck until his power falls away from them, and vice versa.  He’s always having runs of really terrible luck because he’ll tag (he calls it ‘tagging’ someone) his friends with little drips and dabs of good luck whenever they’re having a bad day or a rough week or he’s feeling particularly affectionate, and little drips and dabs add up really quick when you’re doling them out to almost a dozen people.  (He did very quietly make an arrangement with pretty much everyone except Joly and Musichetta, tagged all of Les Amis with bad luck, waited for his luck to turn up, and then went and asked the pair of them if they wanted to date him.  They haven’t let him forget it yet.  They said yes.)

• Joly’s a healer, of course.  More specifically, he can alter physical functions on a molecular level through physical contact, which means that he can do anything from cure cancer to cause someone’s body to break down where they’re standing.  He’s a little wary about physical contact, consequently–it’s never happened, but he worries that if he’s touching someone when he’s angry or scared he might hurt them.  But he always kisses Bousset’s bumps and scrapes better–literally–and he aced the fuck out of his anatomy and physiology classes.  He loves medicine, really loves it, because yeah, he can make all this stuff happen at hyperspeed, but it’s so cool to learn how it works.  He can’t heal himself, though–he could, but there’s a mental block that he can’t get around, because when he first broke his leg and tried to heal it, it didn’t work, so he’s convinced himself it’s impossible.  The limp doesn’t bother him, most of the time, but every once in a while he sits there and chews on his lower lip and wonders what went wrong.

• Musichetta can draw the future.  She’s a talented artist, and she likes to work in paints when she has the money–some of her paintings were hung in a gallery and Bousset drenched her in good luck that first time, so she does pretty well for herself, and can work in oil paints more often now.  She and Grantaire have very different styles–he has a warm pre-Impressionistic style, real and living and firelit, where she paints with sharp contrasts and comic-book-esque figures and buildings–but they love to look at each others’ work, and they tease each other about the paint splotches left on their skin after a day in the studio.  She has a whole sketchbook full of pencil sketches of the future–waste of good paints, she says dryly–and it travels everywhere with her, always ready to be yanked out when she feels a flash of insight coming on.  She saves the lot of them from being arrested almost monthly, and there was one time where she saw a train wreck and called the company in a panic, and they found a loose bolt that would have come free and killed everyone on board.  It doesn’t always go that well, though–Joly lets her curl up in his lap when she can’t stop a vision, and she’ll put her head on his shoulder and cling to his shirt, Bousset’s hands gentle and soothing down her back, until she feels better.

• Feuilly is easily spotted as a mutant, because his skin is streaked in places with smooth, beautiful black scales.  They arch over one of his cheekbones, down the line of his spine and up the inside of one of his wrists.  It’s snakeskin, black mamba specifically, and he has a host of other tricks up his sleeve–he’s never felt the need to find out if he’s venomous, though.  Black mamba venom is one of the most lethal in the entire world, and he’s just as happy to never know.  But he can sense heat, taste/smell/something in between infinitesimally small particles and his skin is so sensitive that he can feel the print on a page or sense the change in vibration when an engine is low on oil.  He works as a mechanic, because he can turn on a car and put his hands on the hood and feel and smell and sense, and know what’s wrong in no time flat.  His coworkers are generally proud of his brilliance (he’s also working toward graduating summa cum laude with a Master’s in Engineering) but every so often they get a customer who’s an A-grade dick.

• Bahorel is a muscle-mimic–he can watch someone do something physical and replicate it perfectly.  He uses it for what he calls ‘cheap tricks’ more often than not, like the time he watched Feuilly fold a paper crane and settled down to folding a thousand of them.  (He gave them to Feuilly when the man came in with a bruise on his face, his scales raw as if someone had scraped them along the ground, and won a smile before Joly pounced on Feuilly to heal him.)  But it makes him unspeakably useful in a tight spot, because Bahorel’s spent so much time watching how the police fight in a riot that he can use it against them like it’s second nature.  He’d almost rather die than watch any of the others get banged up, and Joly spends almost as much time healing him as he does Bousset, just because Bahorel has no apparent self-preservation instincts to speak of.

• Jehan can talk to plants.  He’s like Layla from Sky High and I have no shame about that comparison.  He wears cuttings of flowers in his hair and they’ll grow through his braid and bloom happily and just kind of live off his energy until he puts them in dirt, and when he’s feeling particularly effusively affectionate tendrils of his plants will reach down his arms toward whoever’s closest to him.  Also, he’s normally very gentle and his plants are all pretty flowering vines and dandelions and things, but when shit gets serious during a protest or on the street, everyone is reminded very quickly that tree roots can crack open mountains.

• Grantaire can animate shadows.  He’s one of the unlucky ones–anyone can take a look at him and know he’s a mutant, his eyes glassy black and his curls shifting as if in a low wind as the shadows shift on his skin.  He’s been told all his life that it’s ugly, that the way the shadows curl lively along his jaw and under his curls and beneath his brows.  It’s useful sometimes, being able to summon a shadow army to get between the police and the fleeing Amis, or being able to animate a sparring partner out of his own shadow, but Grantaire is always the first one to call Enjolras out on being naive.  Easy to talk about how humans will trust you when you look like an angel–less so when you deal in darkness.  Enjolras is perpetually furious with Grantaire’s cynicism, but he’s more furious with the world that created him, that convinced him that his mutation is something ugly and irredeemable.  He thinks (but never says) that Grantaire’s shadows are beautiful, like ink spilled over his skin, and once they finally work their shit out (Gavroche is the one who makes it happen, probably, because he’s a sneaky little shit), he discovers that Grantaire can let his shadows spill on Enjolras’ skin, leaving dark pools against the golden radiance.

• Gavroche and Eponine (and Azelma, wherever she is) have a modification of the same mutation, which is, according to Thenardier, the only reason he knows they’re all his children.  They’re all pyrokinetics, although at different levels–Gavroche is a manipulator, able to shape heat and fire into any shape as long as he has something to work with, and Azelma is a firestarter, but Eponine is the only one of them who can do both, just like their father.  They’re all easy to spot as mutants, too, with eyes that flicker red with flames when they catch the lights and core body temperatures well north of 200 F.  She’s terrified that somehow her power’s going to corrupt her, turn her into Thenardier, and Marius is the first person who shows nothing but pure delight at the sparks that crackle out of her hair and the flames that lick her fingers.  She can’t help but love him a little for that.

• As long as we’re on the subject, Patron-Minette.  Montparnasse’s mutation is 100% out of his control, he can’t turn it off or strengthen it at all.  When asked, he tells everyone his mutation is being beautiful.  In reality, he doesn’t really understand it, but it’s something to do with pheromones–just about everyone who sees him, who draws close enough to talk, is clobbered with a metaphorical two by four of attraction.  It’s very useful in the killer-for-hire business, and he’d never admit how uncomfortable it makes him sometimes.  Eponine, her skin always just this side of burning, is one of the only people unaffected, and he’d kill to keep her around.  Claquesous is a teleporter, and Babet is a metamorph, able to look like anyone he wants, and Gueulemer has superstrength.

• Marius isn’t a mutant.  He did get booted out of his grandfather’s home and disinherited for starting a fight in polite society about mutant rights, though, so Bahorel and Courfeyrac take to him immediately.  But he also had the misfortune to walk into a conversation about the concept of a mutant ‘cure’ and open with “Well, some mutants might need it” and that went over a treat.  He managed to redeem himself, though, although Enjolras eyed him with suspicion for a while.

• Cosette!  My sweet girl!  Has wings!  They’re not the crisp white wings of an angel or a dove, either–they’re broad and angled and bronze fletched with dark red, the wings of a hawk.  She normally hides them by binding them down under her clothes–her mother had wings too, she remembers vaguely, wide and soft and wheat-pale as a songbird’s, and it was Mama who taught her to bind them down, hide them, before she went away.  Marius saw her for the first time with shed feathers braided into her hair until she looked like a spirit from another world, and she’s strong enough to take him flying (bridal style, of course).

• Valjean’s not a mutant, but Javert is.  He’s also neck-deep in denial.

ELIOT SPENCER.  THE LOVE OF MY LIFE.

Okay, for those of you poor deprived souls who have NEVER HAD THE PLEASURE OF WATCHING LEVERAGE, here is my rapid-fire pitch: take a hitter, a hacker, a grifter, and a thief, add an ex-insurance agent who hunted them all at one point or another and has a guilt complex that is…well, very Catholic.  Mix with a helping-the-helpless motto, and point at the nearest righteous crusade.  It’s Robin Hood for the modern age.  It is the five-season-long, genuinely enjoyable, never grimdark but always sincere, emotionally wringing show you have looked for.  The characters are a delight, the writing is witty and soulful and real, the women are treated excellently, they have racial diversity, every episode is a whole different flavor of wonderfully wicked glee, and it’s obvious in every moment that everyone involved loved working on it.  The found family feelings spill off the screen.  Here is a pitch, here is a pitch, also here, here is MY pitch, there’s another here, here, here’s a spoilery but super detailed one, here, here, and I could find more BUT THIS IS A LOT ALREADY.  It’s on Netflix, go forth.

Eliot, my hitter darling, I love him so much.  

Okay, like, let’s talk about how devoted he is to the Leverage crew.  Eliot is one of the ones who, quite frankly, does A-OK solo.  He doesn’t need Sophie there to grift, he can do it, he can steal stuff even if he’s not as expert as Parker, having Hardison around is helpful but not mandatory, and, as we see when Nate’s taken out of play in the Zanzibar Marketplace Job, Eliot’s a good enough tactician to wing it successfully.  Like.  He’s fine on his own, maybe even more fine than Parker or Hardison, who are a little hit or miss on the others’ fields of expertise.  He’s there because these are his people and he is going to take care of them.  It’s all about taking care of his people.  And I think the thing about Eliot is that that’s always been a part of him, one he’s had to throttle into nothingness for years.  The mercenary life doesn’t lend itself to emotional connections, and for Eliot, who–even if he’s gruff and irritable about it–loves his people with his whole self, that must have been a very lonely life.  Trust no one, because they might be hired to kill you tomorrow.  Love no one, because they might sell you out to the highest bidder.  Be alone, be safe, keep everyone more than arm’s length away and watch for the glint of a knife or the press of a gun.  Touch nothing but the object of the mission, let nothing touch you.  

And then…and then he meets the Leverage crew–only, they’re not the Leverage crew yet, they’re four people hired for a job.  Four, Eliot has to admit, brilliant people, even if they’re all their own unique flavor of bonkers.  And then one of them’s holding him at gunpoint, and then a building is blowing up and he’s pushing them ahead of him out of a building, and let me ask you something.  Do you think he knew, then?  With the fire at his back and his hand in Hardison’s shirt as he dragged him to his feet?  Do you think he had a moment of clarity, running out of that building, or waking up in the hospital, where he knew that his carefully constructed walls–cold and hard and strong as diamond, be alone, be safe–were already down?  

I do.  I think he sat there, handcuffed to a chair with ink on his fingers and Nathan motherfucking Ford out cold in the bed beside him, and wondered when it happened.  Because he pushed Parker ahead of him–Parker, who had pointed a gun at him and lived anyway–and he dragged Hardison along and he made sure Nate was outside.  And it wasn’t a job, he can’t tell himself that, because he wasn’t getting paid.  He just…had a moment of weakness, he tells himself.  He never believed in collateral damage, it’s sloppy, it’s messy, so he avoided it.  He might still need them to get his paycheck from Dubenich.  It’s okay, he’s fine.

I think he might have convinced himself of that right up until they each get a check pressed into their hands by Hardison, a huge check, a go legit and buy an island check.  And then…and then they walk away and for the first time in a lot of years, Eliot thinks I don’t want to go.  And for the first time in a lot of years, he realizes that maybe he doesn’t have to go, and he comes back.  From the very beginning, he comes back, because he’s been a hitter and a hunter and a killer for so, so long, and maybe this is a chance to be a protector instead.  Maybe this is a chance to reach back in time a little and find some scrap of that kid with a flag on his shoulder, who believed in what he was doing.

Maybe this is a chance to have a family.

LAURENS, your timing is a dream, I just finished the first part of that.  It’s going to be a longer thing, because of course it is, and I’m going to post it piecemeal under the tag “Stranger Labyrinth AU” because if people can portmanteau character names into increasingly worrying sexual diseases, I can do that.

It was the girl’s smile that drew Nancy’s eye, the first time.  There was something about it, something off-kilter and a little familiar—it was the smile of someone laughing at a joke no one else understood.  Harder than pure humor, somehow, as if looking out at the world and saying you poor oblivious bastards all the while.

There were days where Nancy lived that smile.  She hadn’t gone a day without seeing it on a face since she was in high school.  Her brother had it, sometimes, her boyfriend, often, she could feel it curve her lips every time someone suggested a horror movie. They sort of lost their thrill, when you’d lived one.

So when she saw the girl sitting alone at a table in the quad, long dark hair swinging loose and her lovely face turned up toward the sun, Nancy walked over.

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