It rained all the time in Zozo, or at least it felt that way, and even in full daylight it felt dark, unlit and unwelcoming. That wasn't why Locke felt the spot between his shoulderblades twitch with shivers as they made their way out of the city, though. It was much simpler: he was carrying a piece of magicite, potent enough for him to feel power seeping into his bones. And it wasn't just that magicite was basically an esper corpse, which was creepy enough. It was—well, he'd believed in magic since meeting Terra at least, but believing that someone else could do it was one thing, and this was entirely another.

After they made camp, Celes came to sit next to him, by the fire. She didn't say anything at first. She was probably the most comfortable-with-silence person he'd ever known, except maybe Shadow, except Shadow didn't really count because 'comfortable' and 'Shadow' didn't really fit together into the same sentence very well. Celes, though, Celes seemed not to find anything odd about sitting just a foot away from him, but not looking at him, not talking to him, just gazing into the fire.

Firelight lent color to her pale skin, rippled flickers of brilliance through her fair hair; he cast glances at her sideways, stealthy, because nobody liked being stared at. She was really beautiful, he'd known that since the beginning—although not exactly the beginning, because bruised, filthy and exhausted didn't really do it for him—but beautiful like a carving, a million miles away sitting almost right next to him. Close enough to reach out and touch her easily, and yet far enough away that reaching out and touching her was inconceivable.

(And why was he thinking like that, anyway? He didn't get that close to people anymore. It wasn't a good idea, for them or for him. Friends, yes, but—)

Suddenly she turned to look at him, and in that moment she shifted from being distant as the horizon to being an actual flesh-and-blood normal person. She smiled, or almost smiled, it was hard to tell with her sometimes, and said, "I think you should carry Kirin."

Okay, maybe not exactly a normal person.

"Right now I'm the only person who can heal anyone," she continued, "and that's inefficient at best. Someone else ought to learn to cure." And then, yes, that really was a smile: "And you're always standing behind me, so you might as well do that."

"Hey," he said, "hey, hey, I use a boomerang and you have a giant sword. If I stand in front of you I'm going to wind up in about twenty different pieces."

She really smiled, then, and it was like—glacier-melt, heart-stoppingly brilliant, and he had to close down that line of thought in a hurry, because that—wasn't the point, was it. She was a friend, she was a good ally, it didn't matter that—but she hadn't smiled like that before, had she? "We can't have that," she said.

It was a day and a half later that the first spell from Kirin—or from the magicite; he couldn't decide if it was less bizarre to use the esper's name or to avoid it—soaked into him, or taught itself to him, or . . . whatever it was that magicite did to a person. The feeling was so unique and sudden and indescribable that he actually stopped dead in his tracks, and he must've had a really strange expression on his face because Edgar turned with a look of annoyance that changed almost immediately to concern. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. I think." He resisted the urge to touch his forehead, to reassure himself that he didn't have horns growing out of it. "I'm pretty sure I can heal now, though."

"Good," Celes said. "That's a burden off my shoulders."

Later, he dropped back to fall into step with her where she was bringing up the rear of the party. He was learning, maybe, a little about her; he didn't say anything at first, just walked with her until the rhythm of their footsteps matched in cadence and he felt more than saw her relax next to him. Then he said, "So that's magic, I guess."

"Mm," she said.

"Feels—really different."

"Yes," she said. "It makes you different. That's the truth, and it's best you don't try to pretend it isn't. But it's extraordinarily useful, in its way."

"It felt like—I don't know. Like at one moment I didn't just not know how to cast the spell, I didn't even have any idea how it'd be possible. And then it was there, like a hand I'd forgotten I'd had."

She didn't say anything. He looked sideways at her, her profile in the fading light, her expression relaxed and thoughtful. They'd be making camp again soon, no doubt, judging by the growing dim.

"Was it like that for you when you first learned it?" he hazarded.

And her expression slammed shut, hard and unyielding as an iron door. "No," she said curtly. "It was different for me. It was an injection, it wasn't magicite. It was—different for me."

"I'm sorry," he said immediately. "I—well, sorry."

"It's all right," she said, but it didn't sound all right. "I'm going to go ahead and find a place to camp. Stay here with the others. Your new skill might be needed."

He didn't protest that, though he wanted to.

When they caught up with Celes again, she'd found a spot to make camp. It was one of her skills: she always found a place that would be easy to keep defend, somewhere not too obvious to other travelers who might wish them ill. Of course, she was a general, and maybe that's where she'd learned it. (How that was possible he didn't know; he had no idea how old she actually was but unless there was some weird magic at work she had to be way too young to be a general, however good she might have been at it.)

She'd already laid out a fire and was cleaning a rabbit for dinner when they arrived. The look she gave Locke was warmer than he expected, and he wondered if that meant he was forgiven for his inadvertent misstep earlier. She was—he wanted to say she was impossible to predict, but that made it sound as though she was on-again, off-again, a frivolous girl leading him around by the nose. It was more as though she only occasionally shed her armor.

He wanted—but, no, that was another train of thought that could lead nowhere good. Instead he helped the others unroll the bedrolls, wash their spare clothes in the stream, refill their canteens, set up the tent.

It was the tent that caused the problem, in the end. Edgar was whittling a new tent peg to replace one that had developed wood-rot, and he was good at that kind of thing but this time his knife was a bit too dull, and it skidded off the wood and bit into the heel of his hand.

Edgar, for his part, cursed a blue streak. Sabin immediately pressed a wad of cloth to the wound to staunch the blood, and Celes said, "Locke?"

"Yeah, I know," he said. "Good practice."

He'd seen Terra and Celes, he knew there was some kind of speaking involved, but until he reached for that new part of himself, he didn't realize that the words spoke themselves. They flowed out of the part of him that had learned the magic and went straight to his tongue, quick and slippery as if he were spitting eels instead of using language. He could hear the sounds he was making and could almost make sense of them, but not quite.

Energy bubbled up around him, contracted, intensified, and imploded on Edgar—whose hand jerked. Sabin pulled away the cloth, and there was still blood there, the blood he had shed before the wound closed, but his hand was whole. Not a line, not a mark, not a scar.

Elated, he felt himself turning to Celes, who was smiling back at him—and made himself turn that same smile on Edgar, on Sabin, because this wasn't—he wasn't going to—no. She was just an ally and a traveling companion. She was.

The tent was small, but big enough to fit four without too much discomfort. Sabin and Edgar both snored, of course—must run in the family—but not so badly it was impossible to sleep. And Celes—

It was a truism or perhaps a cliche that people looked more themselves at night, and if that was the case, Celes was reserved in the extreme. In sleep she looked like she had been carved out of ice: lovely, cold, distant. And Locke felt the irrational urge to wake her, to see her soften and smile, even for a moment.

It was a bad idea. It was a terrible idea. It was—well. They would arrive at Jidoor, they would find some way to Vector, and he would remind himself that he didn't need to get attached like that. Friends were good. He liked friends. He could always use more of them. But anything else —

He could ignore that she was beautiful, or the way she seemed to wake up when she smiled. He could. He was a big boy. He turned over to face Sabin instead, who was snorting very softly in his sleep, and ignored, very firmly, the woman who was an arm's length and a million miles away.