A smile sneaked onto Nemo's face. It was good to be around people who were comfortable in their creating. A little song about the grey immortal, they were making together. Comforted she also was that her bringing it up hadn't pushed Virgil away. All Lazarus had ever done was try to help her - not so much for Virgil. She wondered how many time it would take talking about it for her to forget. Maybe it just needed to be amputated into a song to live on its own, immortal itself out of their heads.

"It was my birthday," Nemo said with a patient laugh for her younger self. Deciding to mess around a little, she began to speak just so, just along in a rhythm. She wasn't as quick with couplets tonight, but it didn't matter.

"Birthdays still matter to a witch seventeen," she said, thinking. "She claimed her cloud but there she was found by a vampire curious and wandering. Guess my name, the vampire said, so thus she named him Strange." Nemo laughed a little again.

"Nobody sent him - " She'd thought it had been Hooker, "Nobody met him. He knew she'd run away."

"And ... From her he wanted only one favor, wanted to try something new."

Her fingers stopped on the keys. "He said to the witch, what could I do, what could I do for you?"

Nemo lifted her shoulders, still as surprised now as she was then. Turning a dream into a verse, it was nice; Nemo no longer apologized for self-indulgence, for aesthetic, for being young.

Nemo painted a picture with her words.

He could see it in his mind's eye, little lost witch gone wandering in dangerous places on her birthday. Birthdays could do that to you. He hadn't really thought much of turning nineteen but this year he would be turning twenty - and even though he knew it wasn't going to flick a switch, somewhere, inside of him, he felt like it would mark the leaving behind of certain childish things. At least he hoped as much.

"So he wanted to help?" Virgil spoke into the silence as Nemo's accordion fell into silence. "The helpful vampire. It sounds like something Edgar would write." A musical about a vampire who went around trying to do good things but never quite got it right, in the way Genies did not always grant you exactly what you wish for.

He rested his chin on his knees, watching Nemo thoughtfully. "What favour did you ask from him?"

It was good to have friends who appreciated flights of sweetness and prose. Virgil could be counted on for that.  When he mentioned Edgar she first thought of Poe, for the context, and showed her skepticism with a wrinkled forehead. But no - she remembered quickly that Edgar was his father, who'd come to collect him, who owned Stardust, and who conjured elaborate spectacle.

She chuckled. "Yeah, dude wanted to help. It was like he'd never done it before. Like it was his first time ever thinking about somebody else and thought this was how you did it."

Nemo shook her head and began to quietly play the chords from the Pentral song.  "But you remember this one, right? From Abby Reid and the Pentral. There's not a lick I know about vampires, other than they're old, I think. So I asked him if he knew the song."

She switched the tune into 3/4 time and it sounded a little more like a carnival song.

"He did. Called Pentrals 'banters'."

He hadn't expected conversation to veer into pentral territory. That made Virgil sit a little straighter, awake to the memories of Limbo. Nemo had asked the vampire about the song to do with pentrals and the vampire knew the tune...

            "Called Pentrals 'banters'."

"Banters?" he repeated, laughing a little at the name. "I guess they must have gone by a different name where or when he's from." It would be obtuse of them not to assume pentrals manifested differently in other cultures or in other eras. Lazarus was old, from Merlin knew exactly where, and he'd probably seen a fair bit of the world. Maybe that's what Mysteries should have first done when the pentrals started appearing.

Quizzing vampires and anyone else who had been around in the last few hundred years. Not that the Ministry had an especially good relationship with such beings....

"I'm glad you befriended him, even if he did tell Hooker to bite me." Virgil smiled dryly at Nemo. "I hope he continues trying to help people. I guess nobody's too old to try and change themselves."

Or too young.

Nemo paused in her playing.

Her friend? The prospect hadn't crossed her mind. The swaying, mumbling vampire both intrigued and unnerved her, his movement and lack of breath made her suspect a jumpscare at any moment. His brand of helping came from a different angle. Virgil seemed to accepting of her connection to Lazarus even though he'd thrown Virgil to the wolves. A knot came to her stomach; she wasn't ready to forget any of that yet and not ready to see Lazarus or any vampire again.

Nemo had come to the same conclusion as Virgil about the vampire's word for Pentrals. Lazarus had helped with that, at least.

"Not sure about 'friend'," she said. "But the other part, that's a nice hat to put on the night."

Nemo adjusted against the roof and pulled her coat around her closer. The air was getting colder, but Nemo felt warmer somehow as if she and Virgil's moment had created a pocket of coziness. Or it could just be their foggy breath. Or the onset of hypothermia, the blood retreating from the surface of the skin - to escape the cold or the talk of vampires. She shrugged the accordion strap on a little better and started again but with a change of key. One of those solemn major keys that was good for war poets.

"I'm going to stay a bit and play. Not ready to come down yet."


Fin