Living with Michael had been so much easier before she wanted him to like her.

Their original arrangement made sense to her. He said she had a talent, and apparently it was a more valuable talent than pushing drugs, and so he took her in. He was a kinder owner than people who had her before, but Alice knew how it worked: sooner or later she'd fuck up, and then she'd find out the consequences of fucking up. You were useful until you weren't, and when you weren't, bad things happened to you.

Except then she did fuck up, in the worst possible way imaginable, and. She could, at a stretch, imagine being valuable enough for him to keep her even after that, but - the slashes on his face, the blood. If he'd beaten her or starved her or locked her somewhere dark, it would have made some sense. She was so horrified she would've been relieved at the punishment.

And instead Michael, well. Weeks later, she kept going over that scene in her head, turning it over and over. He'd swatted her head, after the book slammed shut, but it was more, more like. It reminded her of something she saw once and couldn't forget, a dumb little kid breaking away from her mom and running across the street, almost getting hit by a car, and when the woman caught up and snatched the kid up she shook her, angrily, and then hugged her, and held her close. Like she was worried.

So - yeah. So - Michael swatted her (and then apologised, and then let her fix his face, and said he would be counting on her) like he cared.

It was horrible. It made Alice feel all squirmy and unpleasant inside, and made her want to do something to make this feeling go away, except she didn't know what it could be. It made her hug her switchblade at night to herself and have mortifying daydreams about protecting Michael from street gangs or magical monsters. She really, really, really hoped this whole sorcery deal did not include Michael being able to read her mind, because if he found out she was just going to. To burn the house down and run away, probably.

And meanwhile, maddeningly, Michael didn't need any protection from anybody. She didn't even see him all that much. They usually had breakfast together, her trying not to wolf down the food and Michael scowling over his newspaper. These days, rather, beginning to scowl and then carefully stopping himself grimacing when the grimace pulled down at the healing gashes at his face, and every time Alice caught him at it she felt angry and flustered all over again.

Sometimes she did the dishes, and though he thanked her every time, it didn't really feel very heroic. Or useful.

Then he'd give her her homework - ugh, lessons, not even magical lessons, just maths and Latin and stupid logic puzzles she passionately hated - and pick his coat up and go out, leaving her to textbooks and a handful of chores and free time she didn't really know what to do with. In the evening he'd come back, check her homework with careful corrections and praise, they'd have dinner, and she'd go to sleep, leaving Michael to do whatever he was doing in the library she wasn't allowed to help with yet, and in the morning it would start over again.

She was determined not to fuck it up. She could do it, she decided, she could be very good and learn all the squiggly algebra letters and conjugate verbs and keep the floor clean and not get into any trouble, and she would just show him, he would see how good she could be, how useful, and then he would… he would…

She didn't know what it was, exactly, that she wanted, but she wanted it very much.

Monday began as usual, except that she woke up feeling sort of off. Her stomach felt heavy and unpleasant, and at breakfast she ended up pushing her food around more than actually eating it. She worried about Michael being disappointed she was wasting his food, but he didn't even notice.

She cleaned the kitchen after he was gone, sluggishly, furiously displeased with herself. She was not falling sick, okay, she just wasn't. By this time she was pretty sure Michael wouldn't - wouldn't lock her in or beat her for being sick, she didn't think so, but still. Nobody ever liked a brat who was making trouble, and being sick was trouble. So she wasn't sick, case closed.

She found a bottle of aspirin in the bathroom and took a pill anyway. Just in case.

There was a couple of apples left on the table, and she took one and added it to a stash she kept in the back of the shelf of the big wardrobe in her room. She wasn't sure if she needed it, she hadn't been hungry even once for the last month - such a weird feeling - but it felt better this way. Safer. Not a lot of food, just bits and ends she filched here and there when she was sure Michael wouldn't notice.

Homework took longer than usual, neat lines of text turning into incomprehensible mush the moment she stopped concentrating, but she scowled at the pages and made herself power through. Definitely not sick.

She took a nap after the work was done, hoping the pain would go away after she slept, but when she woke up, it was still there - a cold, dull rock somewhere in her side, moving when she breathed.

Michael came back at his usual time and went over her notes with her with his usual calm patience, but something was wrong with him, too. He kept rubbing his left wrist absentmindedly, like it was bothering him.

She finally screwed her courage up to ask. "Did anything happen?"

"What? Ah." He looked down at his hands, almost embarrassed. "No."

"Does it hurt? Your hand? Can I look at it?"

"No, no, the hand is fine. I just lost my watch. I think it got stolen today, when I was at Camden."

She remembered the watch now; she had noticed it a couple of times and had thought it looked weirdly squat and ugly for Michael's fancy clothes.

"Sucks," she said.

"Thank you, Alice. It's nothing you need to worry about. I should've been more careful with my things."

She thought he looked sad anyway, but there was nothing to say after that.

She couldn't fall asleep for the longest time that night, the rock in her stomach still there. So she thought about Michael's watch, and Michael's carefully neutral face, and tried to remember which of the street kids and pickpockets around Camden she knew.

On Tuesday she woke up with something like a plan, and a fever. Her stomach felt hot and swollen to the touch, and the smell of food at breakfast made her queasy, which scared her a little. She had been used to eating half-rotten food from the trash cans when there wasn't anything else, and the smell had never stopped her, but right now she felt that if she took a single bit of perfectly-made eggs, she'd throw up.

"Alice," Michael said, "are you all right?"

"Yeah," she said, "just not hungry. I'm fine."

He looked at her more carefully at that, and she inwardly squirmed and looked back, projecting as much normalcy as she could muster. Not sick, no trouble, look away. She felt relieved when he did, and then a bit disappointed, and then angry at herself. It's not like she wanted him to, to, to worry about her. She wasn't some stupid kid.

After Michael left she did her homework without paying much attention to it, squinting at the pages. Even with two more aspirins, all she wanted was to curl in her bed around her aching stomach and sleep until Michael came home.

She made herself get dressed instead - she had an actual autumn coat now, a new coat, with the tag still sticking from its collar - and went out. It felt weird. She wasn't technically forbidden from going out (Michael had even given her her own set of keys to the flat), but she hadn't been outside since Michael picked her up. London felt like an unfamiliar place now, sharp-edged and scary. Her new boots were too shiny; the sunlight hurt her eyes. She realized that she'd never asked whether Michael had settled things off with the people who had her before, or if they were still looking for her. And now she knew there were worse things around, the magical ones, the ones she couldn't see unless Michael showed her.

There was no helping it. She clutched her switchblade in her pocket and set off.

It took her several hours to get to Camden, much longer than it should have. Her head was spinning, and she kept having to stop and catch her breath. Some bodyguard, she told herself angrily, just a stupid cold and here you are, snivelling. Walk on.

Finally she made it, and then discovered another problem: the kids wouldn't talk to her, each one she spotted melting back into the crowd. She couldn't understand why until she caught her reflection in one of the shop displays and stopped to stare. Her face looked kind of bad, red with fever, glassy-eyed, but the rest of her, with her new boots and her new coat, with her hair washed clean and combed, looked normal. She looked like she belonged more with the people walking the streets than with the people hiding from trouble in trash-filled back alleys.

At that thought her stomach finally rebelled; she bolted into one of those alleys and threw up in long, painful retches, spitting bitter bile. She panted for a long time, hands on her knees, and finally wiped her mouth and uncurled with a groan.

From the shadows further down the alley, somebody said, carefully, "Alice? Holy shit, is that you?"

She willed the unpleasantly sloshing world to focus, tightened her hold on the knife just in case the voice's owner was bad news. But when he came out she recognized one of the kids she knew from - from before. Jack, one of the pickpocket kids, and he was one of the okay ones, too, never gave her any trouble when their paths crossed. He would do.

The next couple of hours were spent carefully negotiating for the information she needed, doing her best to reassure Jack that helping her wouldn't get him into trouble. She told him the watch was her new keeper's and let him think she was ordered to retrieve it, promised a favor for favor. It made sense to Jack, of course, being sent into danger for somebody else's sake. Just several months ago, it had made sense to her too; maybe more sense than what she was doing now in truth.

After a couple of hours of talking and waiting in the alley while Jack went out to ask the other kids and came back, she knew where the watch was: like she thought, swiped while Michael had been shopping, already delivered to one of the fences who kept the pickpockets in line and dealt with loot. If she was very, very careful she could probably find her way there, steal the watch back.

She imagined Michael's face when she presented him with his watch, his smile, and yeah, it would be worth the risk. Today, she needed to get back so she would be home before Michael, but tomorrow… Tomorrow, yes. And Michael would see.

She got up, and gasped; the dull rock inside of her had turned sharp, stabbing her low in her belly with every breath. Damn, damn, damn, damn. She needed to get home fast. What the fuck was wrong with her?

Walking was agony. She focused on each step, breathed through her nose, made little shameful mewling sounds in her throat. Somewhere halfway it got so bad she almost turned into another alley to curl up and stay until it passed - it had to pass, it had to - but she thought of Michael coming to the empty house and thinking she had run away, and made herself keep walking, and walking, and walking, until she realized that she was dumbly pushing at their locked door.

She got her keys out of her pocket on the third try, dropped them, and began crying in frustration. Stupid, stupid Alice, come on, who can't open a door? Leaning down was horrible, straightening up even worse; by some miracle she got the key into keyhole on the first try and stumbled into the flat.

The rock wasn't even a rock anymore, she was simply on fire, all of her. She fell to her knees and threw up straight on the carpet, bile and blood, and oh God, Michael was going to be so angry. I'll clean it up right now, she thought, I have to - tomorrow, I have to - she almost made it back to her feet, and then the floor rose and hit her in the face, and the world went quiet and dark.

Somebody was shaking her, and she lashed out blindly, smacked into something warm. "Alice," somebody was saying urgently, "Alice," - shit, it was Michael, she tried to open her eyes, shit, shit, it hurt - Michael was swearing above her, English and some other language, rough and angry, he never swore, oh, damn.

He picked her up and she screamed and passed out again.

Something was digging into her stomach unbearably, and she scrabbled at it and couldn't get it off, she was - she was moving but she wasn't, she was in the front seat of a car, and Michael was driving, leaning forwards like he was trying to push the car faster by the force of will alone, and his face was - she heaved and threw up all over the dashboard, mostly blood now, and garbled out something pathetic, she didn't even know what. Michael said "I know, detka, I know, it's okay, we're almost there, it's okay," and he sounded so calm, like he was sitting at the breakfast table, only his scarred cheek was twitching, and it was - he was scared, she suddenly knew, and it was such a greasy, slippery thought she choked on it and closed her eyes.

She woke up in an unfamiliar bed, white and hard under her. Her head was stuffed by cotton, but the fire was gone; the entire middle of her body felt blessedly, silently numb.

Michael was reading next to her bed, squinting at the pages like he had a headache. There was stubble on his jaw and his clothes were all wrinkled, like he had slept in them. She had never seen him like that, not even in those delirious first days when she had dried out and shivered and choked on water from his hands.

She made a small, miserable sound in the back of her throat, and Michael actually dropped his book.

"Alice! Welcome back. Do you know where you are?"

She whispered, "Hospital," and began to cough. He took a glass of water from the bedside table and offered her the straw. She drank, then stared at the white linen over her chest. "What happened?"

"Your appendix ruptured. I found you in the living room and brought you to the hospital, we barely… You're going to be all right now, the surgery went well. We'll go home when they finish observation."

She nodded.

Michael sighed. "You've been feeling the symptoms for the couple of days, right? I should've known when you didn't eat."

She nodded again.

"Alice, you're not in trouble, but can you tell me what happened? I do need to know. Were you afraid I will punish you for being sick?'

She was tempted to nod for the third time and let him do with it what he could. But he was sitting by her bed, unkempt and worried and kind, and it would be a lie, or not the whole truth, anyway, and she just couldn't.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, miserably. "I just didn't want to be any trouble. I thought..."

He leaned over and touched her cheek, made her look at him, and she cringed, awaiting the inevitable: now he would point out just how much trouble she had ended up being anyway. She did know how ruptured appendixes went, generally; if he had stayed out a bit later, he would have come home to find her dead on his nice carpet.

"Alice," he said instead, "do you know what it means, being master and apprentice?"

She shook her head.

"It doesn't just mean that I will teach you, or that you have to obey me, or that you'll be a sorceress one day. It means that while you're my apprentice, I'm responsible for you. That you're fed, that you're housed, that you're taught, that you are - protected. It means that while you're in my care, you are in my care. That your troubles are my troubles."

She was not going to cry, only she was already crying, choking on sobs. "I just wanted, I wanted," and he said, "to protect me, I know. I promise, one day you will. But if it's something you can't deal with yet, can you try believing that I want to help? I haven't had an apprentice in a very long while. Let me enjoy caring for you for a while."

That was. She was. She said, "I… I will… Can I go back to sleep now? I'm sorry."

"Yes," he said, and wiped her wet cheeks with his handkerchief. "Go to sleep. I'll be here."

The first thing that she saw in her room when she shuffled in there several days later was a mini-fridge with a keypad lock that definitely hadn't been there before. She looked at Michael in confusion.

Michael said, "I do apologise. I'm afraid I found your stash when I was looking for your clothes. You see, the fruits began to smell."

She was so exhausted she couldn't even find it in herself to be properly mortified, so she just stared at him.

"I hope you do know that you'll never go hungry while under my roof," Michael continued. "But it makes you feel better, right? So I thought it'll be easier for you to use the fridge. And we'll discuss an allowance tomorrow, too, you should start having your own money. And…"

"Michael," she said, "why was the watch important? Did you really like it?"

"...I did. It was my late grandfather's, it's the only thing I had left from him. Why?"

She could still go back to Camden and find it and steal it back and bring it to him. Or she could get caught and maybe even get killed, and he wouldn't even know. She could, she could, she could.

She took a deep breath and told him, "I know where it might be now. I could show you."

Michael was staring at her. "Alice," he said gently, "you were going to go for it by yourself, right? Get it for me?"

"Yes."

"Thank you for telling me," he said, and blinked, and she finally saw that thing in his face, that thing she couldn't name but wanted so badly. "Thank you, Alice. Tomorrow we'll go and find it together."