His Own Humanity: After-Dinner Brandy

“I was born on August 22, 1898.” Trowa sat straight in his seat on the sofa, appearing neither relaxed nor excessively stiff. There was often, Bernard had noticed, a formality to Trowa’s speech and bearing that he had to admit he liked in spite of everything he feared he disliked about this young man.

Well, ‘young man’ wasn’t exactly the right term, was it? “1898?” he echoed in surprise, brows raised, setting down his glass and staring. Yet another entry in the catalog of claims he wasn’t sure he believed.

Trowa nodded. “I was born in Greilicks, Michigan in 1898, but we moved almost immediately to Traverse City, so I don’t remember anything about where I was born.”

Quatre, seated next to Trowa on the sofa opposite his parents in their armchairs, looked up from his own brandy — he took it with soda, the way his mother did — and over at his boyfriend. He seemed to find something significant about that statement, but said nothing.

“My mother’s name was Sinead Barton,” Trowa went on. He smiled as he reminisced — a very distant smile that almost made him seem as old as he claimed to be. “She had curly red hair, and freckles just like these.” He gestured at his own face. “People looked at her and heard her name and automatically considered her Irish, which made her the subject of discrimination everywhere she went. She was third-generation Irish-American, and had a thick Detroit accent, but that never helped her find work. She found it very frustrating.”

“I can imagine!” Catharine agreed. Clearly she believed all of this far more than Bernard did, and now felt active sympathy for the unfortunate predicament in which the woman described had supposedly found herself at the turn of the century.

“I didn’t understand at the time, and as an adult I was never a victim of racism myself, but years later I remembered the complaints I overheard as a child, and realized how things must have been for her. I thought a lot about my mother later in life — more than I ever did when I was with her, sadly.”

Quatre, sipping his drink, still said nothing, but he looked very interested and perhaps a bit concerned. Bernard wondered if Trowa had been as reticent and dishonest with his boyfriend as he had been with his boyfriend’s parents. Was this all news to Quatre as well?

“My father’s name was Walter Young. Ironically, though he was an actual immigrant — from Germany, where his name was Jung — he had things a lot easier than my mother did. Even more ironic to think that my mother was refused work because people labeled her a lazy drunkard, when that was exactly what my father truly was. He could find work easily, but he rarely ever did.

“He was often in debt. I think that’s why we moved so soon after I was born: he knew he could never pay the doctor’s bills. I also think he must have been a charming man when he wanted to, or else he could never have convinced people to give him credit in the first place. He could never have convinced my mother to live with him, or stay with him for so long. He was certainly never charming to me, though.”

Again Trowa’s expression went distant, this time with no smile. Whatever Bernard did or did not believe, he recognized the genuine memory of old woes, the revelation of wounds long since scarred over but never forgotten.

And Quatre seemed distressed. He set down his glass on the end table and reached for Trowa’s free hand with both of his. “You don’t have to tell us about him.” His tone was earnest, quiet, and concerned.

“It’s part of the story,” Trowa replied, just as quietly.

“But you started the story a lot earlier than you really had to. You don’t have to force yourself to talk about things like that.”

“But I know you’ve wanted to know.”

“Yes, but…” Quatre sounded reluctant. Clearly he did want to know — and this seemed to indicate Trowa had only withheld, not lied about this information — but worried this might not be the right time to find out. “I don’t want you to think you have to tell me until you’re ready.”

Gently, ruefully, Trowa smiled. “It’s been over a century, and I’m aging again. I’m not sure how much longer I can take.”

Quatre stared with lowered brows for a long moment, and nobody in the room said a word; his parents awaited the outcome of this little interlude. Finally he returned Trowa’s smile, and his was startlingly identical in its softness and regret. “If you’re sure…”

“Quatre.” Both Trowa’s tone and expression suddenly held an edge of reproof.

In response, Quatre laughed sheepishly as he said, “Sorry.” This must be some kind of running issue between them; Bernard found it a little odd, but didn’t inquire.

“It’s all right.” Trowa lifted the hand of Quatre’s that still held his, and evidently applied some pressure. Then he looked away from his boyfriend and back at his boyfriend’s parents. “Please excuse the interruption. Quatre is concerned because I haven’t told many people about this.”

“So we see,” Bernard allowed, not unkindly — though his sympathy had been drawn out more by his son’s admirable sense of charity and consideration than by anything on Trowa’s part. “Go on.”

Trowa did so, bluntly. “My father was abusive. He would often come home drunk, shout at my mother and me, throw things, break things, hit us if we were careless enough to get close to him… From as early as I can remember, I feared and hated him.”

“I’m so sorry,” Catharine said.

Trowa shook his head, sipped his brandy, and remarked abstractedly, “It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He never bothered trying to make himself pleasant to me, so I had no mixed feelings about him; I was never conflicted in how I saw him; it was a very straightforward situation. Many abused children are in much worse circumstances.”

Bernard didn’t know how to react to this. He had very little experience with abuse or its aftermath, and Trowa’s calm, distant statements made it even harder to know how to feel about what he described. Bernard did recognize, however, his own creep toward belief again, exactly like that evening at Trowa’s house. The delivery brought it on, really: despite how incredible much of this was, Trowa’s solemn demeanor and the perfectly authentic-seeming emotion behind his words — exactly what you might expect from someone assessing the behavior of his abusive father over a hundred years prior — was subtly, perhaps insidiously convincing.

“I mentioned he didn’t work much,” Trowa went on at last. “Usually he sent us out — a stigmatized woman and a very young child doing whatever we could to scrape up a little money — and we all lived hand-to-mouth, very poor and uncertain, most of the time. Occasionally he would get up and do some real work, but he would spend most of what he made on drink.” He lifted his glass and stared contemplatively at what liquid remained in it. “Because of that, though I like the taste, I’ve never drunk much in my life, and only been drunk once or twice in all these years.”

Quatre had drawn in a surprised, unhappy breath as Trowa said this, and now remarked, “I’m sorry… I didn’t know…”

“It’s all right.” Again Trowa squeezed Quatre’s hand, which he’d yet to let go. “I was more overwhelmed and emotional that time than really drunk anyway.”

Quatre said nothing, only nodded with a slight frown. Bernard wondered what this referred to, and whether it would come up during the course of what seemed destined to be a very long story.

“My mother,” Trowa continued, “always seemed happy to get away from my father, even knowing what kind of treatment she was likely to find out in the city. And I…” He sighed. “This is the part I’m truly ashamed to admit. I hated her too. Not as much as I hated my father, but I couldn’t forgive her for always going back to him at the end of the day. I couldn’t understand why she did it, and I thought it meant she was weak and stupid. What’s more, because I suffered whenever I was at home, I thought it meant she was cruel.

“Much of my childhood is a blur; I don’t remember at all how I felt about many things, and I have only general impressions about others. But this I remember clearly — how I felt about my mother — maybe because, unlike the rest of it, I gave it a lot of thought in later years. Eventually I realized she probably stayed with my father because she felt she would have even less chance of supporting herself and me if she left. The world had taught her she couldn’t make it on her own, and even if he didn’t do much to support her, I’m sure she felt more secure with him than without him.”

“And it’s never easy,” Catharine put in sadly, “for an abused woman to leave her abuser. Men like that make sure the women they abuse think they can’t make it on their own. And if he could be charming, as you guessed, he undoubtedly had other ways to make her stay as well.”

“I realized that too.” Trowa gave a pained nod. “It took many years, but eventually I was able to look back on my mother with a more accurate… well, I’ll never know how accurate my hindsight is.”

“You must have lost her,” Catharine speculated, “if you were never able to find out for certain.”

“I could have found out for certain. As an adult, I could have looked for her, especially when I started to practice magic. And eventually, when I knew she must be dead, I could have found a medium to contact her spirit for me… but I chose not to. I think part of me didn’t want to know the truth, because what if I discovered she’d stayed with my father indefinitely? What if she’d eventually been killed by him?

“It’s one of… many things I regret in my life. And I believe, if my more forgiving and understanding thoughts about her had developed all at once, I would have tried to find her again. But my mental transition was a gradual process, over the course of many years, and by the time I was solid in my awareness of what a victim she was and how she had probably tried to protect me, I was caught up in… other concerns.” He sighed, and Bernard could easily see how much he regretted the choice of omission he’d made supposedly so many decades ago.

“Could you maybe find a medium now?” Quatre wondered.

“I… probably could.” Trowa’s lips curled down in a pensive expression, as if this idea had never occurred to him and he was therefore only just contemplating its implications. “Those other concerns, of course, are all wrapped up now…” He seemed to ponder for several moments, and finally shook his head. “I’ll have to think about that. Anyway…” He took a deep breath, readying himself for further narration. “In the summer of 1906, I ran away from my parents.”

“You would have been seven years old!” Catharine exclaimed in an almost protesting tone.

With a faint smile, Trowa nodded his agreement. “It’s a miracle I’m alive today, for more than one reason. More than once I came close to starving, or freezing to death in a Michigan winter. But at first it wasn’t too difficult. I hitched a ride out of Traverse on a train; we used to do that a lot back then. I didn’t know where I was going, and didn’t even learn the name of the next city for weeks after I arrived; I just wanted to get away. As a seven-year-old, I assumed my parents would be coming after me, without considering how difficult it would be to determine which direction I’d gone and then to find me on the streets of another large town… or how disinterested one of them must be about what had happened to me. For months I believed they must be just around the corner looking for me, and I think that paranoia may have carried somewhat into my adulthood.”

Now Quatre smiled faintly too, apparently in agreement.

“As a defense mechanism against their finding me, I abandoned my name. It didn’t make much of a difference in my life, since I was such a vagabond anyway, but I thought it was a clever trick to keep my parents off my trail. I lived as a homeless, nameless kid eating a lot of stolen meals for a few months — I don’t remember exactly how long — before I met Duo.”

“Duo?” echoed Bernard. “Heero’s boyfriend?” Surely Trowa wouldn’t claim Duo too was over a hundred years old? And yet how many people could there be, even within the entire last century, with that unusual name?

“The same,” replied Trowa with a nod. “He’s about six months younger than I am. At the time he was living in an overcrowded orphanage.”

With a sly smile Catharine put in, “To clarify, this is the same Duo who told Bernard off at your house?”

“Did he?” Quatre sounded both amused and chagrined.

“Duo is very loyal,” Trowa said somewhat apologetically.

Bernard tried not to stiffen up, or give any sign of disapproval, at his wife’s playful remark. The conversation in Trowa’s house had not been pleasant, but he wouldn’t necessarily call Duo’s words ‘telling him off.’ He did wonder, though, with some bitterness that still lingered, why, if Trowa and Duo were contemporaries, they couldn’t date each other and leave Heero to Quatre.

Trowa went on with his story. “Duo and I became friends, and he invited me to come live at the orphanage.” Fondly he added, “I don’t think he actually had the authority to do that, though if I had joined him, I don’t know that the overworked employees would even have noticed one additional child. I had no interest in living wall-to-wall with other children who didn’t get as much to eat as I did by my own wits, and instead I convinced Duo to leave the orphanage and join me on the streets.”

“You’re a bad influence,” said Quatre with a grin. Bernard worried about the extent to which this might be true, and believed his wife felt the same.

“We were better off together,” Trowa protested, “and it was one less mouth for the orphanage to feed.” He smiled as he seemed belatedly to realize Quatre had been teasing him, and added, “As we got older, we were able to do more real work, and steal less, and even eventually rent a room.”

“I remember hearing Duo talk about some of this.”

“Duo convinced me it was safe to start using a name again. Originally mine was based on the old word ‘trow,’ from the German ‘trauen’ — and now you’ve heard all the German I speak — but Duo suggested I change the pronunciation to what it is now so I could keep the name I was used to without worrying about my parents finding me by it.”

“That’s so interesting,” said Quatre.

“Of course I needed a last name too,” Trowa went on with an acknowledging nod, “and I’ve never been quite sure why I chose to retain my mother’s last name; I was, after all, still bitter toward her at the time. I suppose it was more a sign of rejection of my father than acceptance of my mother. But I kept it, and became Trowa Barton, which I never changed.”

Quatre chuckled. “The Trowa Barton.”

“Yes,” Trowa agreed with a roll of eyes.

“What does that mean?” asked Catharine.

“That comes later,” Quatre informed his mother knowingly.

Bernard stood. “More brandy for anyone?” Uncertain how he felt about what had been disclosed so far, or about Trowa in general, he thought further drinks were required to get through the rest of this. His wife and son both accepted the offer, but Trowa, unsurprisingly given what he’d said earlier, declined. Bernard moved to the sideboard to mix two drinks and pour himself a neat third.

Courteous as usual, whatever else he might be, Trowa waited for Bernard’s return to his chair before continuing the story. In the interim, Quatre asked, “Have you seen the invitations Duo sent out for the party?”

“No,” Trowa replied resignedly, “but since Heero asked me the same question, I assume there’s something in them I wouldn’t approve of.”

“I don’t think I was supposed to see them either,” Quatre admitted, “but he sent them to everyone at work, so it was inevitable somebody would show me at some point.”

“Do I even want to ask?”

“Probably not,” Quatre laughed. “I just wondered whether the way he uses commas was something you both picked up as kids on the streets.”

Trowa sounded somewhat startled as he asked, “How does he use commas?”

Seeing his father returning with their drinks, Quatre said, “After the party, we’ll have to track down one of those invitations.”

Once Bernard had distributed the brandies and resumed his seat in the armchair facing his son and Trowa, the latter picked up where he’d left off. “We weren’t interested in fighting in World War I — ‘the war to end all wars,’ they called it, but to those of us trying to live our lives in peace it was mostly a bother — and the draft only applied to our age group just before the war ended… it’s also possible we neglected to register… so we avoided that. We lived a fairly peaceful life in a poor part of town, content with what we had, at least for a while. We were especially happy in our personal lives because we had discovered magic.

“For a person’s magical talent to awaken, they must be exposed to magic. Magical scholars have done a lot of speculating about what percentage of the supposedly mundane population is actually magically gifted but has never been exposed to enough magic to experience an awakening. The amount of magical exposure required, how it varies from one person to another, and whether the branch of magic to which a person is exposed makes any kind of difference, is also a matter of debate.” Interestingly, Trowa’s tone grew more firm, more assertive, as he began to speak of something more scholarly about which he was, presumably, an expert. Of course he must be considered an expert on his own personal history as well, but this topic seemed easier for him to discuss. In fact, as he went on, it seemed like more of a lecture than the story his words had previously been.

“There are four branches of magical talent, at least as magic is practiced in most of North America: command, communion — which they call communication these days — divination, and necrovisua. Command magic, which is my primary area of skill — and Duo’s only area of skill — involves manipulating the physical world around you. The demonstration I gave you at my house–” he nodded briefly to each of the Winner parents– “was an example of command magic.

“Communication magic, which is Heero’s primary area of skill, is the magic of the mind: telepathy, influencing the minds of others, and so on. Divination magic, the branch in which I’m least skilled of those I can access, is, self-evidently, the magic of truth: learning what has happened, what is happening, and occasionally what will happen.

“Necrovisual magic, which nobody among my friends has, has to do with the dead: speaking to spirits who have passed on, and dealing with certain energies left behind when living things die.”

Trowa paused for a moment, as if giving all this information a chance to sink in with his listeners. Bernard thought it made sense, as far as it went, and was sardonically glad to be confirmed in his guess that mind-reading was Heero’s specific magical ability.

“Hajime and Sano are necrovisual, though, aren’t they?” Quatre asked.

“Hajime’s primary skill is communication, according to what he told me,” Trowa replied. He paused thoughtfully before continuing, “Sano is an interesting case, though. There is a skillset some people consider a fifth branch of magic, though I’ve never liked to describe it that way. It’s extremely rare, but some people are able to use all four branches of magic, where most magicians have access to three at most. This ability often comes without much training or practice, or even active awareness. We call that type of person a natural. And that’s what Sano seems to be.”

Quatre looked very interested at this information, but Bernard, who had no idea who this Sano person was, wished Trowa would move on. And presently Trowa did.

“Duo and I, as children, were acquainted with an old diviner woman who lived in our area of town and was undoubtedly the reason our magical abilities woke up. At first, of course, magic was very little more than a source of entertainment for us. There were certain spells that made our lives easier, but in those days we had no idea of magic’s true potential.” These last words were spoken darkly, and it seemed clear that, whatever ‘magic’s true potential’ might be, Trowa knew it all too well by now. “We entertained friends with what they considered tricks, and gradually made other friends who knew the truth, but it was all very casual and unimportant to us at the time.

“And then, in 1922, I started work at a plastics factory. You may be interested to hear, sir–” nodding at Bernard again– “that the company I worked for in those days was Raberba Manufacturing.”

Bernard was interested. What’s more, he couldn’t even try to deny his growing belief. That didn’t necessarily mean he approved of Trowa, or Trowa dating Quatre, but he was becoming increasingly engaged in this unusual story. “The company did get its start in Michigan,” he recalled.

Trowa nodded. “Plastics manufacture was a new industry at the time, so there was a learning curve for everyone, and they were always looking for new blood. My blood seemed to be the right kind, and it wasn’t long before I was given a supervisory role with a significantly bigger paycheck than I’d ever had before. That was the beginning of our problems.

“At first Duo was as happy as I was at the amount of money I was suddenly making. He even liked some of my new, richer friends for a while. But when I was promoted to General Overseer at the end of that year, and started making even more money, and rose another level in society, Duo started to get sick of it. I was… fascinated by the new life I had access to with all my new money… and I’m afraid I may have lost track of who I was in the process. I bought a car Duo refused to ride in, rented an apartment Duo refused to live in, and moved in circles Duo was no longer willing to put up with.”

Trowa sighed. “Of course I had no idea what this might lead to — no one could have predicted that — but just as a man, I should have done better. ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’ It wasn’t the money so much as the esteem, but the saying still applies.”

Quatre’s face had gone dark again, his father noticed. Because Trowa was being so hard on himself? His lament sounded perfectly rational to Bernard.

“In the spring of 1923, an acquaintance of mine — one of my old magical friends, not one of the new, rich ones — made me a present of a certain artifact. Magical artifacts are objects that have absorbed power by being in the vicinity of magical activity. They affect any magic being practiced nearby, and can be used to boost the effectiveness of a spell if you use them correctly — or if you don’t, they can interfere very badly. I believe Albert, my acquaintance, was more concerned with getting rid of this particular artifact than giving me a gift, since it was an especially powerful one and very difficult to master. He didn’t say so, but it had probably been ruining all his spellwork for however long he’d owned it.”

“What was it, exactly?” Catharine wondered, sounding intrigued.

“A silver candlestick,” answered Trowa. “It was old even at the time, and I thought it was very handsome. Eventually I changed my mind about that.”

“So it was Trowa in the lounge with the candlestick,” Catharine murmured, smile-lines wrinkling beside her eyes.

“Excuse me,” Trowa said, and Bernard was surprised to hear some irritation in his tone, “what is that?”

Quatre chuckled, and took Trowa’s hand again. “I’ll tell you another time. We’ll even watch the movie.”

Trowa frowned slightly, but merely continued his story. “Eventually Duo confronted me about my new lifestyle. He didn’t like what I had become, and he didn’t like what I’d become in relation to him. He was right, of course: I was becoming something unpleasant, and our friendship was falling apart. He accused me of no longer caring about him, and he had every reason to believe that was the case.”

At the pain in Trowa’s voice and face during this last phrase, Catharine leaned forward in pity, setting her glass down on the table between herself and Bernard. She said nothing, however, undoubtedly both unsure what she could say and eager to hear more.

Trowa took a deep breath. “This is only the fourth time I’ve ever described what happened that day. Please forgive me if it’s a little difficult to talk about.”

“Of course,” said Catharine gently. Even Bernard nodded. He was beginning to understand his son’s earlier concern about Trowa discussing things he perhaps wasn’t ready to, and he didn’t even know what had happened yet.

After another deep breath, Trowa told him. “I was so upset by the accusation that I didn’t care about my best friend, and stung at the same time by the truth of what he had to say about my lifestyle, I didn’t think through what I did next. On the spur of that very bad moment, I came up with a spell that I thought would force him to feel what I felt, to share my emotions, so he would know exactly how much I did care about him still.”

“That sounds very much like assault,” said Catharine reluctantly.

Eyes closed, Trowa nodded. “It was a terrible thing to do, but what I intended was nothing compared to what actually happened.”

“You mentioned the candlestick thing would affect any magic performed around it…” Bernard said this in fascinated horror, surprised at his own emotional engagement and waiting almost breathlessly for what would come next.

“That’s right.” Now Trowa spoke very softly, as if too horrified to put any proper volume into his words. “I hadn’t mastered the artifact yet. No one could have in as short a time as I’d had with it. And it took my spell and warped it, turning it into a curse with a much different effect than the one I had in mind.”

There was a long moment of silence as the Winner parents digested the revelation that Trowa had cursed his best friend. Duo had seemed hale and whole every time Bernard and Catharine had seen him, but between their first meeting with Heero’s boyfriend back in June or so and the moment Trowa had reached in his story, quite a bit of time had passed. 87 years, in fact. A lot of curse-related suffering could easily have taken place over such a long span.

“During the course of our argument, I pretended to misunderstand him, and that I believed he was being petty and fake with me out of jealousy over money and a woman we both knew, rather than unhappy and concerned about me and my relationship with him. I made the comment, ‘It’s as if you were made of plastic.’ The curse took that idea as if it were something I had specifically asked for: it turned him into plastic.”

Though it sounded dreadful, this statement was also not easily minutely understood, and Bernard believed, as both he and his wife stared somewhat blankly at Trowa, that they were both sorting through a number of possibilities for interpretation in a rapid and somewhat futile attempt to keep up. Quatre looked coldly grim, and held one of Trowa’s hands tightly in both of his.

“With this combination of circumstances, part of him might have turned to plastic — limbs or bones, skin or hair — or he might have become a life-sized statue made of plastic. Any of that would have made sense. But in fact he became a doll.” Only because he sounded suddenly more distant did Trowa seem suddenly less deeply miserable, and the distance, Bernard believed, hailed from an attempt at looking at this scientifically (as it were) rather than emotionally. By attempting to discuss the physicalities and magical workings of the situation, and give them priority over its other aspects, Trowa might be able to get through this retelling more easily. It reminded Bernard of focusing on the mundanities of planning a funeral rather than the crushing, life-altering loss that led to the need for it — a technique he had used himself in the past, and once again something that strengthened his growing belief in this entire story.

“Plastic was just beginning to be used to make all sorts of non-industrial or -military products, including toys, and its uses for domestic items were what led to the plastics boom and the fortune of men like me. So it really does make the most sense that the idea of a ‘plastic man’ would immediately be associated, at least subconsciously, with the concept of a doll. So I turned Duo into a doll.”

He paused once more, either to let these newest details take their places with his listeners or to yet again regather his emotional fortitude for continuing. And Bernard didn’t know what to think. This was more bizarre and troubling even than the story that Quatre had been infected by some kind of angry magical energy, and, though he would no longer claim not to believe it, he would be no more than a little surprised if Trowa finished by asking for money again. In the neighboring armchair, Catharine looked nothing but horrified and sympathetic.

“As a doll, Duo had a limited ability to move, and the ability to speak, but nothing more. I believe because of my own frustration at his inability to feel what I felt, the curse robbed him of all ability to feel. He could see and hear, but taste, touch, smell… it was all lost to him. I took that all away from him.”

Feeling a chill, Bernard wondered how all of this might possibly apply to a current relationship of Trowa’s. For if this strange man had once accidentally transformed his best friend into a doll without feeling, what would keep him from doing it again to someone close?

“Couldn’t you immediately change him back?” Catharine wondered. “You’re talking as if– surely he didn’t remain a doll, after that, for all this time?”

Trowa took a long, deep breath, then let it out again. “He did.” So short and simple a statement to encompass 87 years! “And that was because I… lost track of him. I might not have been able to change him back on my own in any case, but when I didn’t even have him with me…”

“You ‘lost track of him?’ You misplaced Duo?” The seriousness of the discussion hadn’t diminished, but despite this and Bernard’s increased worry about how this might apply in modern times, he couldn’t help finding this idea somewhat entertaining. And evidently it sounded in his voice, for both members of the family that were present shot him a reproving look.

Trowa took no offense. In fact he sounded so guilty as he explained that Bernard almost regretted the slight amusement that had colored his tone. “He fell out a window and got picked up off the sidewalk by a child who was passing by before I could get out and down to him. I didn’t know where he had gone. I’d barely gotten a look at him, saw him moving and heard his tiny doll voice, so searching for him was extremely difficult. Often when I asked people if they knew of a talking doll, they laughed at me. It was hard to get even the question taken seriously.”

“That’s so strange to think about.” Quatre grinned at Trowa as he said this. “I’ve never known you when people wouldn’t be tripping over themselves to answer your questions.”

Trowa smiled wryly back at him, and at the same moment Catharine asked in some interest, “Do people do that?”

Quatre gestured Trowa should go on, which he did. “I scoured the city from end to end. I devoted so much time and energy and attention to the search that eventually I lost my job at the factory, but at the time I almost didn’t notice. I had some money saved, and sold some of the extravagant purchases I’d made in recent days. Eventually I stored the rest at a warehouse, gave up my apartment, and left town, still looking for Duo. I took the candlestick with me, because I knew it was connected to the curse, but I didn’t know where to go or even how to search. I just wandered aimlessly for several years, living like a tramp, feeling less and less confident that I would ever see Duo again. I’ve had some very dark times in my life, but that was probably the worst.”

None of them spoke for a moment. Bernard had no new thoughts, despite Trowa’s solemn pronouncement; he just wanted to hear the rest.

“It didn’t take long to realize that asking the non-magical if they had seen a doll that could talk and move got me nothing but polite skepticism at best, but the magical community was readier to help, if they didn’t know any more than the rest of the population. So I asked magicians. Seeking out the local magicians everywhere I went was difficult at first, but eventually I developed a system. I would offer to do tasks in exchange for room and board while I was in the area. Someone would take me up on the offer, even if it wasn’t the first or the second or the tenth person I talked to, and I would quietly and magically do their chores or mend their fence or paint their store. Then word would get around about what a hard worker I was and how miraculously quickly I got things done. Then the local magicians would seek me out.”

“This is surreal,” Quatre murmured.

“The present is surreal,” Trowa replied. “The 20’s were nothing.” He let out a sigh that might have had fragments of dark humor in it, and continued. “It was all command magic at first. A lot of manual labor can be performed very simply with command magic. But as I learned to work with the candlestick, my command magic grew stronger, and I found I could accomplish more with my other branches as well. The candlestick was very powerful, and tricky to use, and I was blundering along in the dark without ever making that my top priority, but still, as I became more attuned to it, I was starting to use magic in ways I didn’t previously think were possible.

“After several years of traveling the way I was, my reputation started to precede me. The magicians would meet me on the road into town instead of making me search for them, and they would request magical favors that became more complicated as time passed. I learned to use different branches of magic in combination, and set up new spells to solve old problems more easily. If I had it to do over again…” He paused with an expression of distaste, as if the idea of doing it over struck him as unfaceably bleak. “I would use an alias. If I’d ever truly believed the curse would be broken, I would have realized some of the ways my life would change when it did, and that I might not want to be ‘The Trowa Barton’ anymore. But at the time…” He shrugged.

“After maybe fifteen years, I decided I was done wandering aimlessly. It hadn’t accomplished anything, and I didn’t think it was going to. I started making planned trips to cities where I could easily get in touch with magicians and perform magic that was beyond them in exchange for their help looking for Duo. Still nothing. And I didn’t realize at first that doing this spread my fame further, faster. But it wasn’t ‘what Trowa Barton is looking for’ that spread; it was ‘what Trowa Barton did for me,’ and any number of strange rumors.” He sighed again, this time in remembered frustration. With a slight shake of the head, he went on.

“The rest of this is 70 years long, give or take, so I’ll try to abridge it. Eventually I was corresponding more with magicians than I was interacting with them in person, so I decided to settle into a home with a permanent address. I retrieved my stored items — by then I had to pretend to be my own son–”

“I don’t think,” Quatre broke in, “you ever actually mentioned you stopped aging.”

“I think we realized it about fifteen years ago, though,” Catharine said with an eye-crinkling smile. “Go on, Trowa.” She’d obviously forgotten completely about the drink at her side, and was hanging on Trowa’s every word. Bernard realized as he assessed her demeanor that his was much the same.

Trowa nodded to Catharine and obeyed. “The non-magical community around me was a problem from the beginning. Someone who looked the way I did — you two saw what I looked like before the curse broke, but you never saw my cursed eyes without contact lenses in, which didn’t exist in those days. Someone looking like that, living alone but often receiving mysterious visitors who were mostly strangers in the area… writing plenty of letters but never socializing with his neighbors… acting like an old hermit but apparently in his early 20’s…”

“It sounds as if you’ve brought the story up to about the time Catharine and I were born,” Bernard remarked. “If society then was anything like what I remember from my childhood, I’m not surprised your neighbors were suspicious.”

Quatre wondered, “But were they suspicious? Or was this just you being paranoid?”

“I don’t know.” Trowa answered so readily, he’d clearly been expecting the question. “But over the following couple of decades, I lived in six or seven different homes.”

Quatre and his mother both made sympathetic sounds.

“Finally I forced myself to really settle down. I was so adept at jumping — traveling by magic — that I traveled that way to any appointments, and never showed my face in my actual neighborhood. I was in touch with many of the major names in magic throughout North America, and I’d become very powerful and experienced. I escaped the demanding people who’d followed me from one home to another over the years — though they found me again eventually — by making my first dark jump to a town on the east coast I’d never visited before and buying a house there.”

Forestalling the question, he explained in a tone of aside, “A dark jump is magical travel to a place you’ve never been and don’t have someone else’s mental picture of. It’s very difficult, and requires a lot of research into the place so you can understand it well enough to get there. Even I have only done a few dark jumps in my lifetime. There’s always the risk that the impression of a place you’ve gotten from reading someone’s journal or a book set there isn’t accurate enough, or the place has changed too much since the pictures you’re looking at were taken. Usually a jump simply won’t work in that case, but there are some rare bad consequences to dark jumping.”

Again the lecturing tone sounded stronger, more certain, and, if possible, less self-accusatory than everything else Trowa said. Bernard was beginning to fathom why his son gazed so raptly at this man when he spoke of magic; Trowa seemed, if not an entirely different person, at least the better part of the person he was at those moments.

“That was when my celebrity really exploded. I was doing bigger magical favors more selectively by then. I stabilized a mine. I reworked a railroad town’s entire infrastructure. I rescued a kidnapped child. I became a household name in magical circles.”

“Were there no other powerful and experienced magicians?” asked Bernard. Intending no insult, he added, “Why were you so famous?”

“There were other powerful and experienced magicians,” Trowa said with a pained look, “and they were famous too. But they lived their lives and died, or went in and out of fashion, or lost strength over the years, or made mistakes that lost them their popularity. But I didn’t change. I was startling to look at, I didn’t age, and the services I provided only got bigger and more amazing over time. Magicians told their children about me, and then those children grew up to hear about me diverting a tornado between two towns.

“It’s customary in the magical community for a service provider to work with another person. The word that’s usually used is ‘partner,’ and the person is sometimes a partner in terms of assisting with actual work, but most of the time the position has more to do with security. They’re a bodyguard, or a witness to the proceedings, or just a second person to act as a deterrent against attack or fraud. It’s a practical and useful arrangement for a lot of magicians, but it’s more traditional than anything. Some magicians can get away with it — especially if they work with non-magical clients — but in the magical community, it’s usually considered odd and inappropriate for a magician to make house calls without a partner.

“And I never had a partner. The only thing anyone knew about my past was wild rumor; it was as if I’d always been there and always would be, doing amazing things apparently easily. I was an unusual type of celebrity.”

“You saved towns from a tornado?” Trowa’s boyfriend demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

Apparently in response to the expression of almost disbelieving admiration and affection on Quatre’s face, Trowa replied in some surprise and pleasure, “I would have if I’d thought…”

“You are too modest.” Quatre shook his head with a grin that still held those previous emotions. “And I think what you’re trying to say about how magicians felt about you is that you were the first rock star of the magical community.”

Slowly Trowa nodded. “I think that’s an accurate comparison. While Elvis Presley took non-magical America by storm, I did the same in the magical community. I doubt Abner Herzberg–” evidently plucking a famous magical name out of his past– “ever had people’s daughters thrown at him.”

Bernard couldn’t help laughing. “Daughters, or panties?”

With a fierce blush Trowa protested, “‘Rock star’ is a comparison. No one has ever thrown their underwear at me.” And the thoughtful look Quatre’s face now took on seemed to indicate that might be changing any day.

Catharine laughed too, but with a touch of sorrow from that soft heart of hers. “But you did make a mistake. Didn’t that affect anyone’s opinion of you?”

“It didn’t, because nobody knew about it.” Trowa might not have grasped at this point so tenaciously if it hadn’t been helping him away from Bernard’s joke at his expense and Quatre having embarrassing ideas. “At first I thought it would make magicians less willing to help me if they knew what I’d done, and later I… I just didn’t have the courage to talk about it. I confessed to almost no one, during all those 87 years, what I’d done. There were times I even feared someone would find out somehow, and I would lose what little I had.”

“Paranoid,” Quatre murmured.

“I didn’t realize how good it would feel to tell someone at last.” Trowa squeezed Quatre’s hand again. “If I had known, I might have told the story more often back then. I might have told everyone back then, and to hell with the consequences. But instead I held onto it and let it eat away at me, and…” He raised helpless hands, one of them still in Quatre’s. “People loved me, and I hated myself. I could do anything for them, and nothing for Duo. They would try to set me up with their unmarried relatives, but I had cursed the only person I ever loved.” Hearing Trowa admit he’d once loved Duo in a way that could be set opposite the matchmaking intentions of his fans did not bother Bernard nearly so much now as it would have at the beginning of this conversation. “The celebrity made the contrast almost more than I could bear. I started to lose faith.”

Catharine’s brows went up. “Only then?”

“I don’t think I ever truly believed I would find Duo and be able to break the curse, except maybe right at the beginning, right after I lost him. But for about 35 years, I worked at it as if I did believe in it. After that, what I was doing from day to day gradually changed. I didn’t send out as many letters, or tell as many people in them what I was looking for. I still followed every possible lead, but I never had any hope they would get me anywhere — and they never did. I studied magic intensively, and worked on improving my connection with the candlestick, so I would be prepared when I found him… but I was doing that instead of actively looking for him. I studied curses and accidental magic, and I researched the organization that had originally made an artifact out of the candlestick. And none of it helped.

“I knew he must still be out there somewhere, because I never started aging again. But I think what I truly believed was that it would just go on forever — that I would keep living, searching and researching and practicing and becoming more pointlessly skilled at magic forever as a punishment for what I did to him.” The anguish in these words, so real, so present, made it obvious that, though the time referred to had passed, the pain of that long-occupied frame of mind remained.

“Anyone would,” Catharine advised him gently. “It’s a miracle you got through so many years without doing much worse.”

“Exactly,” said Quatre. He laid his head on Trowa’s shoulder and rubbed a little, insistent, as if to punctuate his agreement. Trowa put an arm around him, and Quatre nuzzled in closer.

“Thank you,” Trowa said. “I kept going, but I wasn’t much of a person anymore. Time dragged on, and I never found any sign of Duo. You would think a magical talking, moving doll that thought for itself would be easy to find, especially over such a long time, but I found out later that Duo was careful. Revealing he could talk lost him his home more than once, so he would wait until the child he belonged to seemed ready to accept him as a friend instead of just a toy. And even then, it would often be only the child who would know, so word never spread about the magical doll. He couldn’t have hidden from me better if he’d been doing it deliberately.”

“He talked to me and Heero right away,” said Quatre musingly.

“He told me he was getting tired of being careful. He’d been taken to Goodwill so often in response to him talking; he decided that time to risk it right away and get it over with before he became attached. I wonder sometimes, though, if he didn’t subconsciously sense something about Heero…”

“That early?” Quatre looked pensive. “And could he even sense things like that as a doll?”

“Aren’t you getting ahead of the story again?” Bernard broke in before Trowa could answer. “I thought we were still losing faith in the 50’s.”

“Losing faith was a process that crossed the next 40 years. And then…” Trowa smiled. “Do you know it was the internet that started to wake me up again?”

“Cat videos will restore anyone’s faith,” Catharine remarked with her eye-crinkles again. Bernard was so fond of her eye-crinkles.

Trowa cleared his throat. “I’m sure you remember what the internet was like starting out. Cat videos weren’t around for… a while.”

Quatre had slumped somewhat in his lean against Trowa, but now he sat up straight and fixed his boyfriend with a delighted look of false accusation. “But you did watch them! When they came around!”

“It’s… difficult to be on the internet and not watch cat videos,” Trowa admitted.

“Do you like cats? Do you want cats? It would be extremely easy to get you some kittens for the house.”

“Familiarization makes that… complicated. We’ll have to talk about it later.”

Quatre gave a phony pout. “Duo would have said, ‘You’re the only Quat I want.'”

“I know.” Trowa was blushing again; it seemed to set his freckles on fire. “I thought about saying it, but I couldn’t.”

Complacently Quatre leaned forward and kissed him on the chin, then nestled down against him again.

“The internet…?” Bernard prompted, restraining a laugh.

“The internet provided new avenues. At first it did nothing to help, but it was promising, and I regained some of my old resolve. I gradually changed my correspondence to email, and I joined any number of mailing lists about supernatural occurrences — forums, later, as the internet evolved. And search engines were so… Every day I would dial up and type a whole list of phrases one by one into AOL’s directory, which wasn’t even a proper search engine yet. Every day I had that faint little hope that something might have changed, that someone somewhere might have put up a website about the talking doll they’d had as a child. I never found anything at all with ‘Duo Maxwell cursed doll,’ but if someone would just document some experience with Duo, it would give me a starting point, and I could trace him from there.”

“I take it this disappointed you eventually as well.” Bernard too had witnessed the evolution of the internet, and had always appreciated it in a business sense. What it must have meant to Trowa he could only dimly imagine.

“Actually,” said Trowa with the air of telling the night’s first good news, “it did eventually lead me to Duo.”

Despite knowing Duo had been restored to his humanity, that Trowa’s coloration had returned to normal, and that therefore the curse must have been broken; despite having done the math and known the magician must be approaching the part of his story where that event had taken place, Bernard felt a little jump of heart at these words. It was like the excitement he felt while watching a good movie with a well constructed plot when something he’d known to be inevitable occurred yet still managed to stir him up. Observing his wife leaning a little farther forward, he knew he wasn’t alone.

“But I won’t say,” Trowa went on, “I wasn’t back in a pretty bad place by the time it did. It wasn’t as bad as those 40 years, but it was bad. If I’d met anyone other than Quatre, I never would have pulled out of it.”

“Yes, you would,” Quatre said firmly. “You’re stronger than you think you are.”

“I’m grateful I never have to find out what would have happened.” Trowa pressed his face to the top of Quatre’s head and paused there a moment. Then he continued in a tone as solemn as such long-delayed news deserved. “On March 20th of this year, a post appeared on one of the forums about magic I tracked. It said, A friend and I found a doll (looks like a Barbie “Ken” but with real human hair) who talks and moves on his own. Claims to be a human placed under a curse by a friend, probably by accident, in 1923. Says his friend was never powerful enough to cast a spell that could last that long. My friend and I know nothing about magic. Is a spell like this even possible? Have checked doll for wires and found nothing, but still think it’s probably a prank. Has anyone else encountered anything like this?” He recited the post as if he would never forget a single word, and Quatre looked impressed.

Then they all sat silent for a few moments, the three non-magicians probably imagining how Trowa must have felt seeing something like that, and the two more empathetic of them probably doing a better job of it. What kind of beautiful stab to the heart must that have been? Had the entire 87-year search come to rest with all its weight and misery on top of those words that promised its end? After so long and such continual failure, he must have had at least an instant of pure disbelief… but placed under a curse by a friend, probably by accident, in 1923 could not be a coincidence.

Once more Trowa had a distant smile on his lips, and eyes focused not entirely on the present. “It’s generally agreed that, in every magician’s life, at some very emotional time, they produce magic more effective and powerful than any other time in their life — something they can only do once, and never again, and they wonder for the rest of their life whether they truly did it at all.”

“Like adrenaline letting people lift cars off their loved ones,” Catharine put in.

Trowa nodded. “In 48 hours…” He let the length of time linger in the air for a moment, though Bernard suspected Trowa himself would be the only one to appreciate its significance. “In two days’ time, I put together an impossible spell. A spell no one has ever cast before or even thought of, and something I still, seven months later, can’t decide whether or not I actually managed.”

Now he shook his head in disbelief. “To divine something, you have to have some information already. And even with the candlestick’s power, I’ve always been an indifferent diviner. And divining the future is uncertain at best in the first place. But somehow, I cast a spell that allowed me to dark jump to the place where the completely unknown author of the forum post would be on the evening of March 22nd. It’s… it was… impossible. But somehow I did it.”

Bernard chuckled. “So instead of just replying to the post as a normal person would, you used impossible magic to blindly jump through space and probability.”

Surprisingly, Trowa weakly returned the chuckle. “I did. I couldn’t wait. I knew it had to be Duo they were talking about. What if they didn’t check the forum again? What if they were reluctant to give me their address? And when I was so close, I couldn’t stand to put off finding him any longer. So I jumped to where the post author would be, and I familiarized myself with the area, and at the time when I knew they would come, they came.”

“And then he weirded us out,” Quatre declared, sitting up straight again. “You have no idea how strange it was for this sexy colorless guy in coattails to meet us outside this restaurant and ask out of the blue whether we were ‘the ones with the talking doll.'” And if he’d considered Trowa sexy from the very first moment, Bernard supposed this whole thing had been inevitable.

“I’ve got it from here,” Quatre said next, kissing Trowa’s nose this time. “Let me know if I get anything wrong.” And when Trowa nodded assent, Quatre took up the story. “Watching Trowa and Duo meet each other again after all that time… it was mind-blowing, and Heero and I didn’t even know what they’d been through at that point. Trowa told us, but we didn’t understand the way we do now. I can’t even describe it, so I won’t try.

“Trowa told me later that curses — even when they’re accidental, apparently — have a kind of… appropriateness about them, and about the process of breaking them. Trowa accused Duo of being fake, as if he were made of plastic, and the curse turned him into plastic. He wanted to make Duo feel what he felt, and the curse took away Duo’s ability to feel anything. He accused Duo of pursuing a woman he didn’t love, so to break the curse Duo had to truly love someone.”

“Wait…” Bernard began.

“True love conquers all?” Even Catharine sounded skeptical.

“Well, yes,” Quatre grinned, “but there was more to it than that. The candlestick had carvings on it of cycles of the moon, and the group that turned it into an artifact was a moon-worshiping magical cult.”

“The ones who– Wait, was this the artifact that–”

Quatre did not allow his father to finish. “That’s right. And it had a connection with the moon because it spent so long with the moon-worshipers. So the curse, and breaking the curse, had to do with the moon as well.”

“Trowa’s skin!”

“I never believed anemia could make you that pale and leave you still standing.”

“Yes, so Trowa became a beautiful lunar child with moons for eyes. And he did a brilliant set of divinations to find out that, to break the curse–” here Quatre began ticking off points on his fingers– “Duo needed to stay within the magical influence of someone with magical abilities, who he was developing a true emotional bond with, for a complete lunar cycle.”

“You got it all right,” Trowa murmured.

At the same time Catharine said in much the same tone, “Hmm. True love really does conquer all.”

“I have other points of analysis,” Quatre told his boyfriend quietly, “but they’ll embarrass you.”

At his wife’s words, Bernard felt the fading of the last of his long-held bitterness that Quatre and Heero weren’t together. The ‘true emotional bond’ between Heero and Duo had been confirmed by magic, and had ended an age of suffering. He couldn’t wish that broken up, even for the sake of what he’d long considered a near-perfect pairing. Heero would be relieved the next time he read Bernard’s mind. And Duo wouldn’t have to try to defend their relationship any farther. Immediate approval of Trowa as Quatre’s boyfriend did not necessarily follow, but Bernard was much readier now to entertain the notion.

“Wait,” he said again, belatedly, once these thoughts had run their course, “what does that mean, ‘stay within their magical influence for a full lunar cycle?’ This is Heero’s magical influence, and Duo still a doll?”

And when he’d heard that part of the story, and what Heero had been willing to go through for Duo’s sake — a retelling that prompted real, hearty laughter from him and his wife, in the which Quatre joined them — he no longer needed any convincing that Heero and Duo together was the only right outcome of this strange scenario.

The chapter that followed pleased him less. The destruction of the artifact had been a necessary step, he agreed, but that Trowa had lacked the courage to take it upon himself seemed to indicate another serious character flaw. To Trowa’s credit, though, he did appear to recognize this defect in himself, along with others manifest during his story. Everyone had personal issues, of course, and that Trowa admitted to his and seemed willing to work to improve himself spoke rather better than otherwise. Still, the true scope of recent magical disasters startled and worried Bernard.

The end of the narrative came as a vague surprise, and felt anticlimactic. To wrap up with the forlorn admission on Quatre’s part, “And I still don’t feel like I’ve done everything I need to,” seemed a very inconclusive sort of conclusion. Of course the end of every story was the beginning of the next, but Bernard felt emotionally dissatisfied on hearing this one. Beyond that, he had a sort of decision to make, and hadn’t realized how pleased he’d been all along to be putting it off.

“Well,” he said slowly, “that’s a lot of information.”

“It is,” Catharine agreed. “I don’t think I’ve been so taken up with a story in a very long time, not even Downton Abbey.”

Bernard nodded pensively. Then, somewhat grudgingly, he admitted, “And I even believe it all.”

“It would be impossible not to!” Catharine raised a hand in a gesture of mock warning. “You’d better not have cast a spell on us to make us believe it.”

Trowa gave her a slight smile. He and Quatre looked tense all of a sudden, doubtless because they could feel judgment descending. That was what this had all been about, after all: revealing the whole truth to Bernard and Catharine so they could make a more educated decision on their feelings regarding the relationship before them.

Bernard went on, still slowly. “I believe in magic. I believe what you’ve told me about your history, Trowa. I even think I understand why you’ve made some of your mistakes. In some ways, magician or not, and no matter how old you are, you seem just as human as the rest of us. And since it seems you’re doing what you can to correct the flaws of character that led to those mistakes, I can even respect you.

“And I understand, now, why you weren’t open with us from the start. This is a lot to take in. I’m not sure how I would act in the same situation, but it might be similar to how you did. And I don’t know whether you were planning to tell us all of this sooner or later, but you have to understand that, from our point of view, it seems like you withheld important information and made up lies to cover it until you were forced to tell the truth because you needed something. Even knowing the details now, that makes it difficult to trust you. What I’m saying is, I’m still not sure about how I feel about you dating my son, after the lies you told us before and the… complications of your life.”

The two young men seated on the couch shifted nervously. Trowa’s face, if only in a restrained manner, held a mixture of emotions — hurt among them — and Quatre’s had gone a bit pink.

Here Catharine took up the ongoing statement, but steered it toward the emotional. “Quatre has a lot to give. I’m trying not to embarrass him,” she added, “but I have to describe him as I know him. He’s a devoted, generous, persistent young man. And he’s dated a lot of people who took advantage of his generosity without giving anything in return. I have all the sympathy in the world for you, Trowa, but it seems you may be that same type of person all over again. You obviously need so much from him, and I worry that may blind you to what he needs from you.”

Now Quatre was forced to speak up. His cheekbones had become very rosy indeed. “If it weren’t for Trowa’s support, I wouldn’t be here. He has been exactly what I’ve needed since I was cured. He’s been so forgiving and supportive… I would never be recovering from being possessed the way I am if it weren’t for him.” Bernard noticed he had nothing to offer on the subject of Trowa’s previous reticence.

“You’re forgetting Heero’s contribution,” the blushing Trowa murmured.

“No, I’m not,” Quatre replied a little impatiently. “I’m just talking about your contribution right now. You’ve treated me much better than I deserve.”

Blush deepening, Trowa said even more quietly, “That’s how you always treat me.”

“Stop that,” Quatre whispered.

“You first,” Trowa whispered back.

Catharine watched this exchange carefully, and gave a little nod. Evidently she, at least, was cautiously hopeful.

“Now listen, Trowa.” Bernard leaned forward as his wife had done several times already. “I can’t threaten you realistically, I can’t reprimand you, and I can’t make demands. All I can do is request. And I ask that you don’t make my son unhappy. No one he’s dated has ever made him happy, but I’ll settle at first for you simply not making him miserable. The two of you don’t actually need my approval, but you should know that I believe you may earn it eventually if you work hard and are honest with us from now on.”

Trowa nodded gravely. “I deeply appreciate your willingness to bear with me, and I’m sorry for the difficulties I’ve caused. Thank you.” Then expectantly he looked to Catharine.

With her sweetest expression, she said, “I can threaten you. And if you find it unrealistic, you don’t know how mothers work. So do right by my boy, or face the consequences.”

Trowa looked as if he didn’t know whether to smile, even laugh, or school his face into the deepest gravity. Probably bowing to his own natural inclination, he chose the latter. “Your warning is understood. I’m grateful for the opportunity.”

A long silence followed, during which Bernard considered ordering Trowa not to turn his son into a doll, not to have him destroy any more powerful artifacts, and not, above all things, to break his heart; he decided eventually he’d said as much as he feasibly could for now, and therefore remained wordless. Eventually, though, he looked around at the room in which they sat, with its old-fashioned decorations that yet must seem young to Trowa, and remembered the mundane details of this after-dinner tradition. He couldn’t consider himself entirely satisfied with the proceedings and their outcome, but he believed they’d accomplished quite a bit this evening. So he rose and began collecting glasses.

He still needed to process what he’d heard tonight, and not only in relation to Quatre’s love life, but in relation to how he viewed the entire world. He had to admit that if the situation persisted, if Trowa joined the family in part or even literally, it would make for an interesting little Winner secret that they had among their ranks not only a real magician, but apparently one of the most powerful magicians in history.

Catharine had risen too when Bernard started bustling about, and now as she turned her generally pleasant expression on the two young men, they rose in their turn. “I’m so glad you could come tonight, Trowa,” she said. “It’s been intriguing and enlightening.”

Bernard, finished setting the gathered cups on the sideboard, also turned more fully toward his guest and his son. “That’s right. We appreciate you taking the time.” And he reached out toward Trowa.

“And I appreciate you taking the time to listen,” Trowa replied, shaking the offered hand. “Thank you for having me.” Then for a brief moment, his typically unfailing courtesy seemed to leave him stranded as he and Quatre threw each other a quick, uncertain look. Bernard had the impression that the two of them, as a couple, were on the verge of telling him something more, something significant, yet hesitated. At least in this case, it seemed to be something shared between them; and Bernard supposed Trowa had confessed a good deal more this evening than probably any of them had expected. It still raised his hackles, though, to consider further withheld information.

But they said their goodbyes in a polite and amicable enough manner. Bernard had an arm around his wife’s waist as they waved their guest out of the room. And as the two young men walked away, heads together, Bernard heard Trowa say, “I’m going home.”

“Take me with you,” Quatre requested.

“Of course.” And presently, after some unintelligible speech in that magical language of his, all aural signs of their presence in the house disappeared.

“Quatre’s moving in with him,” Catharine murmured.

“What?!” wondered Bernard in dismay. “How do you know that?”

“They almost just told us.” Catharine’s smile was forlorn and fond. “They probably decided we weren’t ready to hear it yet.” And her eye-crinkles, along with the expression on her lips, became just a touch more sad. She added in an even quieter murmur, “The last one to leave…”

“He may come back. Some of them have.” Even Bernard didn’t know whether he spoke hopefully or morosely.

“Don’t wish for it, my dear.”

Releasing his wife, Bernard turned back to the sideboard and started peering at the glasses, trying to determine which one had been his. He believed, under the circumstances, he needed just a little more brandy.