fandomhigh | Library [Sunday, March 9]

"Are you comparing me to your sister?" Lee asked, arching an eyebrow. "Better yet, are you comparing me to a girl?"

He frowned at her. "My hair is awesome."

"Oh, don't worry," Adah mused, although her attempt at a soothing, consoling voice was ruined a bit by the need to chuckle slightly. "Leah always was the boyish one; it actually caused a bit of an uproar in the village when the ones who didn't realize it yet found out she was actually a girl. If I wanted to compare you to a girl, I would have brought Rachel into the picture."

She reached out a little to brush her fingers through the Eel's insulted hair with an apologetic simper. "It is awesome hair, you're right there. I never really said it wasn't. I said that I might have to make a case that it wasn't awesome hair if there weren't other things to tease you about, so it's a good thing you give me so many other things, so your hair can be good and safe."

"My hair is awesome," he repeated, leaning into her hand a little. "You'd go insane if you didn't have anything to tease me about. One day, that'll happen. I'll just be perfect all the sudden and you'll just have to gawk and be speechless at me."

"And then the earth will stop spinning, hell will freeze over, and the universe will buckle under the sway of impossibility," Adah countered loftily, though her fingers kept shifting a little through his hair. If he wasn't going to object to his awesome hair being mussed by her fingers, she certainly wasn't going to concern herself with stopping. "Perfection is impossible; I'll always be able to find something."

She said this with the utmost certainty, because Adah felt that she had good logic behind it, though it was logic that she would fight tooth and nail against ever having to explain. But, the fact of the matter was (or perhaps it just seemed that way in the familiar comfort of the library, looking over at him with her fingers in his hair) he was practically on the edge of perfect as it was, anyway, but, then, there she was, with a list longer than a mile of things to tease him about.

"Yeah," Lee said and closed his eyes, leaning into her hand a bit more. "And perfection's boring anyway. Who wants to be perfect? They'd have nothing to talk about, nothing to improve on."

"Exactly," Adah said quietly, watching him close his eyes and hating what it did to her chest, still, and wondering if she'll always hate it. "Boring. Then again, I've always been pretty biased against perfection, being almost the exact opposite of it."

"You're perfect the way you are," Lee said quietly, nodding. "Just like you are."

Adah's eyes narrowed a bit, but her mouth was tightening to keep a smile back. She'd been doing that a lot lately; she'd have be careful or else she'd end up snapping her jaw.

"So, you think I'm boring, then?" she muttered with a sharpness to her teasing.

"Did I say that?" Lee asked, cracking open one eye. "I didn't say you were perfect. You're perfect how you are. Meaning don't change."

"It's all pulling the same string," Adah had a light grin to meet the cracked-open eye, "and wondering why the different parts of the marionette aren't moving. Perfect how I am is still a variation of perfect, and you said perfect is boring. Although, I could just be saying that out of defense; I'm not fond of perfection. It's too suspect, and I'd rather be acknowledged for my faults than have it seem like I'm fine even though I have them. I know I have them. I have a lot of imperfections, and I'm quite fond of a lot of them."

"So am I," he said and closed his eyes again. "You should know that by now."

"Yeah," Adah said, drifting her hand from the Eel's hair to cup the side of his face and lightly brush her thumb against his cheek. "Just like you should know by now I'm only just teasing you anyway."

"Oh, I know," he said and grinned. "I just like to pretend I don't. Keep that clueless image up."

"That's smart," Adah grinned a little more. "It suits you well, cluelessness."

"I thought you'd like that," Lee said, laughing quietly. "Fake cluelessness to go along with my real cluelessness, right?"

"Eventually," Adah mused, "I'll be able to actually tell the difference between the two. Until then, though, I'll have to admit, I'm going to go ahead and consider it all to be genuine."

"Har har," Lee said, mock laughing. "And until then, I'm going to consider my hair more awesome than yours."

Adah frowned at him skeptically. "Awesome, perhaps," she allowed. "Mine's prettier, though, and it covers the smarter brain, so I'll let you take your awesome."

"Mine covers the prettier brain," Lee said even though he had no idea what that even meant.

"Only on account of the fact that yours is a finer specimen on the fact that it functions like it's supposed to." Adah had to admit that she straightened a little more and narrowed her eyes a bit past the playful in response to that. "If we were to slice your head open and slice mine open and compare the two, yours wouldn't have one side of it all wilted and deteriorated from the fact that it isn't any good But if you want to have the prettier brain between us, I'm absolutely fine with that, because the prettier ones are always stupider."

"Hey, hey," he said, frowning a little. "I wasn't talking about cutting open anything and comparing. I was just teasing. I wasn't calling anything like that into account."

Adah held up a finger for a moment, before she let his reaction turn her own into a slight, vague smirk and declared, "Genuine cluelessness, there. You should know by now that even at the slightest hint of an opportunity to cut something up, I'll seize it."

"No cutting me," he said, putting a hand to his heart. "I'm allergic to cutting."

"First man in history to be allergic to stainless steel," Adah muttered lightly as she eyed him skeptically. "Saying such things only makes the desire increase. You're just lucky I tend to kind of like you; you're a treasure trove of things to get my names into the medical journals, so that inkling of affection is the only thing saving you from becoming a walking piece of human Swiss cheese."

"I could be so boring," he told her. "So dull and normal though!"

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