Her train arrived to the suburban station five minutes later but she had to spend the next ten minutes in the bathroom cleaning up her face to hide the evidence of tears.

When Amelie finally emerged from the train station, it was ten-thirty. She looked around for her father's familiar black truck, absentmindedly dreaming about getting to fall into her childhood bed. Exhausted from traveling, and wrung out from her emotional notes, she didn't realize someone was calling her name until the third yell.

"Amelie!" she heard and finally turned around.

There was her dad next to the black truck, with two little kids standing beside him. A smile grew on her face.

"They wanted to see their Auntie Amie before they went to bed," her dad explained, grinning. He knew how much she loved her niece and nephew and she suspected the meeting was as much for her benefit as it was due to the kids insisting.

"Josh! Claire!" Amelie yelled and ran over to her family. She bent down and grabbed her niece and nephew in a three-way hug. Still beaming, she stood up to hug her dad.

"Happy birthday, Dad." She said.

"Thanks Am." He was grinning as much as she was. Maybe this weekend wouldn't be as awkward as she had feared.

"How are you feeling?" she asked as he picked up her back to haul it into the truck.

"Sixty years young!" he replied.

"I feel five years young!" shouted Josh. Amelie smiled at him and picked him up, hoisting him up on her hip so his head sat above hers. "Now you're five years young and six feet tall!"

He squealed in delight! "I'm taller than you Grandpa!"

"I want to be six feet tall too!" exclaimed Claire.

"Can you climb?" Amelie asked. Claire nodded. Amelie nudged her head towards the truck bed. "I bet you'd be the tallest if you were up there."

Claire jumped in excitement and ran over to the truck bed. She pulled herself up onto the wheel and swung her body over the top of the bed railing. Then stood up and reached her hands towards the dark night sky.

"I'm the biggest in the world!"

Amelie felt Josh start squirming in her arms and carried him over to the truck so he could climb in with his older sister.

"Here Josh you can be the tallest with me!" Claire exclaimed.

Amelie walked over to her dad. She paused but then put her arm around him. He stiffened from the contact but loosened up and pulled her into his side while they watched the kids.

"Thomas is going to kill us for getting them riled up this late," she said.

"He'll survive one night of crazy kids," he replied. "He keeps them too tame anyway."

"Agreed," said Amelie, suddenly not feeling quite as extinguished as she had on the train.

________________

"Claire, will you help me wash the dishes? I would love some company!" Amelie shouted from the kitchen.

"Mommy may I?" she heard Claire ask her still-seated mother.

"Sure baby. I'll come with you."

Claire ran into the kitchen and immediately started to climb up on the counter next to Amelie.

"Hand me a towel, Auntie Amelie, I'll dry from up here."

Amelie laughed and handed her niece a towel.

"I think you have more of a monkey than a human daughter, Jen," she remarked to her sister-in-law.

"I know. When we go to the mall I feel like I should keep you on a leash, munchkin," Jen replied.

"You wouldn't!" Claire screamed.

"No Claire it was just a joke." Amelie said.

Claire looked faced her mother and glared at her expectantly. Jen raised her arms over her head, "Just a joke. Pinkie promise I will never leash you."

Claire stuck out her pinkie at her mother. Jen laughed but crossed her pinkie with her daughter's.

"Sometimes I think you're too cool for my brother, Jen," Amelie said.

"Your brother is cooler than you know I think. When he thinks no one is looking he'll crawl on the ground with the kids or go on House Monster Hunts." Claire nodded in confirmation.

"Wow. I could never get him to do that stuff with me when I was a kid," Amelie said. She turned to Claire, grabbed her little swinging feet, and started twisting them around.

"He's grown down since we've had kids. I'm really proud of him. He grew up too fast when your mother died," Jen finished, smirking at her own wordplay.

"Your daddy helped raise me too, did you know that?" She swung Claire's legs around and her niece giggled, "Your granny died when I was just Josh's age, so my big brother, your daddy, was the other grown up in the house. He was fourteen. Pretty incredible responsibility now that I think about it."

Until that moment she had not given much thought to how young Thomas must have been when they lost their mother. The big brother she knew had always been more like a parent than a sibling. In her mind, that had always been because he was so much older than her and was a naturally serious person. But, maybe he acted that way to ensure Amelie had two parents to look up to? Could he have been so serious for her and maybe her father's benefit?

"How's your new job?" Amelie was broken out of her trace when she realized Jen was talking to her.

"It's okay. I haven't made any friends at work yet. No one is really in my demographic..." She trailed off, unsure how to articulate what caused her discomfort at work.

"What do you mean, your demographic? Like it's just all men over at MIT?" Jen asked.

"Not exactly," Amelie paused, "It's a lot of men, but there are a good number of women as well. It's just, the women are...very masculine in their mannerisms? I don't know if that's okay to say or not. But, like they never wear makeup or feminine clothing; they interrupt me all the time; and it just feels like I'm being squeezed out.

"I expected the men to be frustrating, but it's really the women who are making me feel unwelcome. I....I like wearing makeup. It feels like the me I want to present. Do you understand what I mean?" she asked, feeling self-conscious for even voicing such thoughts.

"Of course. I very much understand. Girls can be mean. Even girls who don't dress like girls. Did you try going to work looking like the other women ever?" Jen asked.

"Sort of. I wore no makeup and very gender neutral clothing one day, but it didn't feel like me. I was really uncomfortable. I ended up changing back to my old clothes the next day." Amelie sighed and let go of her nieces legs. She forgot she had been holding them.

"Being a woman can be hard, Claire." She said.

"Yes, being a woman is hard, but, Amelie you deserve to be respected no matter what kind of woman you choose to be. You shouldn't have to feel like you're less than the other women because you embrace femininity." Jen said.

"I know...yeah, you're right!" she exclaimed, re-energized from hearing someone validate her frustrations. "But I don't know how to convey that to them. I respect them for their choices and they should darn well respect me for mine!"

"Yeah!" Claire chimed in, excited from Amelie's energy.

"I guess I just need to keep trying and hope they come around." Amelie said.

"Hopefully they will soon see how brilliant you are and realize they were wrong." Jen replied, grinning.

Amelie smiled softly, unconvinced things would improve, but determined to hold on to hope.

_________________

Monday evening, even she was feeling downhearted and impatient while she and Adrien were training. If it could even be called training- all they were doing was staring at a bowl of water and trying to figure out if she had any magic at all to train.

They had been working for about forty minutes when Amelie finally gathered her courage and asked the question she had been dreading."Adrien, what if we were wrong? What if I don't have magic?" She looked down and played with a wrinkle on her shirt, "What if my eyes just are this color, and I'm a strange human, not an Elf?"

Adrien sighed heavily. He clenched his jaw for a few seconds, then scooted across the floor to her. He raised his arm cautiously and put it around her shoulders. She leaned into him. She didn't forgive him yet, but was beginning to trust her friend once again.

"I still believe you are. It just all fits. No known parentage, strange colored eyes, above average human intelligence.... and... I just feel drawn to you in a way I couldn't be drawn to a human." She felt Adrien's hand slowly stroke up and down her far arm. She did not understand how he could be so convinced when there really was no proof. Her scientifically trained brain was screaming that they needed to run more experiments and tests on her heritage.

"How else can you tell? What else makes Elves different?" She asked.

"Can you get your hands on a genome sequencer at MIT?" He responded, somewhat seriously.

She snorted, "Definitely not. I'm barely cleared to use all the equipment in my own lab, let alone run $5,000 worth of tests on another lab's." Amelie smiled, "Nice try though. There really is nothing else?"

"Not anything obvious or that we wouldn't have noticed already."

It was Amelie's turn to sigh, "Okay." She leaned into his warm body and closed her eyes. Her stress dissipated a little as she relaxed in the comfort of Adrien's embrace. He was safety to her. She felt so at peace with this man. She always had, even as a child. Adrien was comfort and home to her.

She had tried not to think of him over the years that they had been apart. She knew it was useless to dwell on thoughts of a man who she held no future with. But a part of her mind could not let go of the boy who she had trusted to show up every year. The boy who played games with her past the age when other had stopped. She would lay in bed at night and try to replay her memories of him on a screen in her mind.

Sometimes it was a calm quiet nostalgia that came along with the memories. Sometimes, his face would appear when she closed her eyes and she'd feel as though someone was tearing her insides out.

It was in that moment of peace when she felt it.

It was like her entire being suddenly perked up after a long nap. There was energy and she felt the sudden urge to move. To spread her fingers to their widest breadth and appreciate their touch.

She opened her eyes to find they were now lifted up on a cement platform above the rest of the floor.

And she knew she hadn't felt the movement, but she had felt the magic.

"Do it again," she requested, in a whisper.

Adrien complied and she felt rather than saw the desk make its way over to their platform, like a magnetic attraction. It broke in half and the farther half lowered into the ground somehow. He had made steps for them off of their platform. And she had felt it.