A/N: Takes place in the same world as "Iron Mage," but I suppose it can stand alone. Main characters have, in general, not yet appeared in the actual storyline; their profiles may be found on my website, in the Iron Mage section.

Disclaimer: All events herein belong to Val Mora (the author, not the character); however, Val Mora makes no claim of ownership of the comic book series Daredevil, nor of Kurt Wagner (Nightcrawler) from X-Men, nor the song Take Five. The first two belong completely to Marvel Comics, Inc. and Val Mora makes no profit from the use of the names. Take Five composed and performed by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. No money was made from the use of the song title.

Can you see her? The woman, with the dark-shaded sunglasses as she walks around the streets, cane in hand, crimson hair a fall of blood behind her?

Her name is Kenna. Kenna Saviach, with a long ‘i’ and a ‘ch’ like a ‘k’. She’s a writer, and a famous one at that. She wrote a series of novels about a group of mage-children when she was a teenager, and it made her a fortune before she hit twenty-two.

She needed it, because by twenty-eight, she was blind. The world champion Irish dancer, with the trademark blood-colored hair, and the master writer who could describe the most mundane of things with the most beautiful words, went blind.

It wasn’t her fault, and nobody faulted her for crying through eyes that didn’t work any longer. All she can distinguish now, a few years later, is light and dark, and mostly not even that.

Sometimes she isn’t alone. There’s occasionally someone walking with her – a dark-haired man, who watches out for her as they navigate busy streets, so she doesn’t get trampled, and who makes her laugh, occasionally.

His name is Val Mora. It’s short for Valentine, but he doesn’t like to mention that. His birthday is February fourteenth. They went to school together as children, he and Kenna. He liked Marvel comics, until Kenna went blind, and he realized that it really wasn’t like they said in Daredevil.

Val Mora is the name of one of her characters. Kenna’s. Her Val is a teenager with magic, who can change people’s minds for them. He’s reckless, dangerous, and utterly chivalrous. He’s the kind of person who’s paid to bring a girl to someone who’s going to kill her, and on the way out, his conscience attacks him, and he goes in and saves her. With a lot of gratuitously swashbuckling action, and maybe some extra ‘BAMF’s for effect. He has strange role models, and they’re all from Stan Lee.

Nobody faults Kenna for basing her characters off her friends. They’re interesting people.

"I’m moving," states Kelsey impartially, plunking something down on the table for emphasis.

"Where?" That’s Val, looking up from a deck of Braille cards, where he’s playing poker with Kenna – and losing.

"Boston. Got asked today who my plastic surgeon was."

"Tell ‘em you’re like a fine wine, and you get better with age."

"Great. Witchhunts. Just what I need." Kelsey rolls her eyes. "Anyway, I’ve got a ton of forms here that you probably want to look over – yes, Kenna, the reason it went plunk so loudly is ‘cause more’n half of it’s in Braille – since you guys get to keep most of my stuff."

"A house can only hold so much," is Kenna’s response, accented faintly with the remnants of Scots Gaelic, her first language, although she’s forgotten most of it now. "I can’t be your repository for storing grotesquely large amounts of stuff."

"Have a yard sale," is the flippant reply, and Val snorts.

"Now, that’s a nightmare if I ever heard one. Can you imagine what a kid would do with some of the stuff you’ve got collected down there?"

"As I remember, there aren’t any firearms…" Kenna responds thoughtfully. "Although Falcon might have left a crossbow or two. I think, though, that he disarmed them first."

Kelsey and Val roll their eyes at each other. "That’s not dangerous? You can make a stick dangerous with one of those things."

Kenna shrugs. "Well, someone else gets to go through it all. I’m not safe doing it." She smiles, vaguely, in Kelsey’s direction, and lays down a set of five cards that make Val mutter rather inappropriate things under his breath. "You owe me twenty dollars."

So while Val fishes through his wallet, Kelsey laughs, and says, "Happy losing, Val. I’ll be back in a week with all my stuff. Feel free to sell it, if you like."

"Mm," he says, fishing out a couple of tens, folding them carefully, and placing them in Kenna’s outstretched hand. "I’ll be sure to pawn it all."

Kenna gets the letter in the mail not long after. It’s typed, using one of the special typewriters that convert to Braille, but even though it’s from a machine, she can still feel the happiness in the dots under her fingers.

"Leia’s preggers," she says to Val when they meet for lunch two days later. "She says that the morning sickness is like having a concussion, only about fourteen times worse, and it stays longer, but she gets to throw things around at Falcon the rest of the time as compensation."

He chuckles, lets his fingers rest between hers, even though they’re not really touching; thinks distantly that he’s a little jealous of his friends.

"Must be hard for him," he remarks, and puts his hands back around his mug of coffee – an addiction that not even Kenna, with her love of tea, can break him of. "When’s the baby due?"

"Early August. Don’t worry, I already figured it out – remember how they had that big fight near Halloween?"

Val laughs. "You are absolutely, completely, incorrigible."

She grins at him. "Of course. I’m a writer. I know about these things."

"I think you’re just a voyeur who hides it with words," he teases, smiling, and feels something inside his chest go warm at the sound of her laugh. Val doesn’t know when he started falling for Kenna – maybe only a few months ago, maybe since freshman year of high school, and he never noticed until he recognized his jealousy of her characters, whom she almost loved more than her friends. It doesn’t really matter, because either way, she’s addictive, like chocolate, or coffee, or the old Marvel comics he spends hours searching for in stores, and then reads aloud to her, because she’s the only one who’ll sit through it all without complaining. He thinks to himself how lucky he is, that he has a friend like her, and wishes he had a girlfriend who was her.

They’re getting ready to go to a party for the benefactors of a charity Amy’s running when the world takes a sharp turn in some direction that upset the balance of things. Amy Corundum, an old friend of Val’s and Kenna’s, runs a shelter for abused women and children and takes care of their mental and physical well-being, and Lizbet "Jade" Jalda, her partner, runs the legal aspect of it all.

It’s close to black tie, which made Val squirm when he heard it – sure, he has a tux, for the entirely-too-common times when friends of his or organizations he supports hold parties, but the things are so uncomfortable…Kenna just smiles and remarks that at least he can get away without looking like he’s trying to get laid, or at least she hopes; women’s dresses these days are so darn revealing.

She’s wearing something Oriental tonight; a red design of plants on black silk, with a relatively high collar and a slit halfway up her thigh in the skirt. The red matches her hair; a sort of deep-blood or maybe a crimson-burgundy that makes you think of expensive, old wines imported from before the European grapes had to be interbred with American ones. She’s not wearing anything over her eyes, even though it makes her feel more naked than the skirt that reveals most of her legs does. Val doesn’t mind either; Kenna used to complain, in high school, when she still talked about how ugly she sometimes felt, about how her hips turned out too much and made anything that was supposed to be form-fitting stretch over curves it was designed to accent, but Val thinks it’s beautiful. He doesn’t mind the view. When he comes over to her apartment, to pick her up to drive her to the party, she’s got the zipper in the back still down, because she can’t pull it up herself. He wonders if she did that intentionally, because she doesn’t comment when he lets his touch linger a little longer than necessary on the back of her neck, while she holds her hair up to keep it from getting tangled up. He tries to stop himself from noticing, or remembering, the fact that she’s not wearing anything on top underneath the dress, but it doesn’t really work. Sitting there in the car, in the passenger seat, she looks every bit as elegant as any of the ladies on television, and much more intelligent.

Val wonders if he’s gone crazy, and decides that the definitions of ‘crazy’ and ‘in love’ are pretty much the same.

Kenna turns and starts fishing through the CD’s in the glove compartment, running her fingers over the Braille labels Val adds to any CD case he puts in the car. She eventually pops in one with Celtic music by one of her favorite artists when she was younger, and starts singing along in Breton to the music, even though she can’t understand a word of it and can only approximate the sounds. Val smiles, keeping his eyes on the road, and shuts it off when they get to the party. He thinks it’s cute, how she slurs all the sounds of her speech together to try to imitate what the singer is saying. It makes him go all soft and gooey inside, and want to turn around and take her back home and cuddle up to her all night, and then maybe forever after that.

"Come on, Kenna," he says, taking her hand to help her out of the car, and to lead her to the door. "Amy and Jade are waiting for us." He gets a perverse pleasure out of saying ‘us,’ because then he can imagine that they’re actually an ‘us’ and not just a ‘you and me’ who happen to have driven together to the party.

He’s cornered at the party by Ethan Rother. Ethan’s an astrophysicist teaching at the local community college. He used to be a real mess, when he was in high school – on pot, in love, and with an on-again-off-again girlfriend who eventually got him separated from the first and twined more strongly around the second. He eventually dumped her, because he couldn’t seem to understand the idea that she wasn’t about to go break his heart; his parents had a messy divorce when he was young. He hasn’t found anyone since, but that’s okay, because everyone knows he and Kelsey are still together on the inside, even though they haven’t been on a formal date since junior year.

"So," Ethan says, leaning on the table near the wall where Val is standing. "How are you? I haven’t seen you lately; too busy grading too many term papers."

"You want the short, dramatic version, or the short, normal version?"

"Whichever." Ethan half-smiles into his glass of wine that looks like Kenna’s hair. Val feels vaguely frustrated with himself, at his automatic thoughts of her.

"I’m sick, smitten, and not effing soulbonded. Oh, yeah, and work’s fine, too." He adds, after a thought, "That’s the short, normal version."

"The dramatic version?"

"Involved me going and kissing a certain lovely, blind lady right here."

Ethan made a noise that might have been strangled shock, or stifled amusement. "Seriously?"

"Hell, yes. I swear, she’s trying to seduce me, and it’s working."

Ethan looks self-satisfied. "Finally. I bet Falcon it’d only be another few months before you figured it out; he put his money on between one and five years."

"I’ll make sure of your continued existence by not asking how much," Val answers, smarting a little. Was he really that obvious?

He spends the rest of the party sulking in corners and nursing a glass of white wine. He’s not drunk, and is making sure not to get that way – if he’s not fit to drive, there’s no one else who can take Kenna home.

The party ends late, and Val manages to get Kenna away from everyone else, trying to avoid the rush out. It doesn’t work; they’re stuck in traffic. Val sighs, and turns on the stereo back to the CD from before. It’s not working. He makes a frustrated noise, and gropes around in the glove compartment for something else.

Just Dave Brubeck. Kenna reads the label swiftly, and grins at him. "Take Five, ne?" she asks teasingly as she slips it into the player after ejecting the Celtic music and starts singing along with the saxophone solo.

Val takes her home; waits in the front hall while she changes into something more comfortable. He looks around at the pictures on the walls, though he’s seen them a thousand times before; examines the furniture that she keeps hidden away in alcoves so she won’t trip on it. Around the house, she doesn’t walk with a cane.

"Sorry," she says, walking out in sweatpants and a tie-dye t-shirt. "Needed to get out of that – it’s fine, for a few hours, but once I get home, I want to relax."

"’S okay," Val says, and follows her to the living room, where they sit and pull out the deck of Braille cards. "What game?"

"‘Go Fish’?" Kenna smiles at him, teasing, but Val surprises her by dealing the cards.

"Sure."

They play a few rounds before switching to ‘Crazy Eights,’ and Val’s in the middle of losing badly when he asks, suddenly and on a whim he didn’t know he even possessed, "What would you say if I told you I liked you?"

Kenna doesn’t look up; she doesn’t need to. It wouldn’t make a difference if she did, but her posture is still like she can see, and she’s nervous, and shy.

"I’d ask if you had had too much to drink."

"And if I answered that I was completely sober?"

"I’d ask if you meant it."

"And if I did?"

"Then I’d ask you if you were lying."

"I’m not." He knows he shouldn’t have said that last, but he couldn’t help himself.

"Then I’d say that I’m not, either." She smiles; awkwardly spreads her cards out like a makeshift Japanese fan made from gambling devices. It’s charming, in an underhanded way.

"That’s lovely," Val responds, and the cards fall to the floor, unnoticed, as he kisses her. This is like magic.

Ethan and Kelsey are sitting on opposite sides of a tree trunk. It’s a childish pose for them to be in; they’re in their early thirties, even if they don’t look it, but it’s somewhat awkward nonetheless.

"It’s been a while," says Kelsey, finally.

"Lots has changed," Ethan answers, and they both know it has – even though Leia and Falcon will always be a constant, no matter how many kids they have, other things have altered themselves, since junior year. They’ve both lost friends, and gained some new ones; have moved away from others and had others leave the neighborhood. It’s not the same little Chicago suburb it used to be.

It’s been a long transition, from home to a battlefield to this place that’s neither here nor there. Home was where everything was normal, and the battlefield was where things happened. Where Kenna Saviach, in a collection of novels, begged her friends to let her tell a story that she thought the world should hear, because it was too marvelous not to be told. It’s the birthplace of a world that’s our own, and not – and it’s most certainly the reality that the blind lady knows.

Just because it looks like fiction doesn’t mean it is.

"Do you want to go out to dinner?" Ethan asks, and realizes that while the silence has lasted, his and Kelsey’s hands crept along the ground to touch each other, and their fingers are entwined.

"Of course," is the answer, and they stand, and head off, leaving the tree behind. Sometimes, the power of emotions is stronger than any magic a wizard can call upon.