- updated Jan 8, 2016 with extra scenes at the end-

The next day, Adrien was waiting for Amelie outside the ground floor entrance to the warehouse. Rather than fiddling with the rusted door handle, he simply swept his hand and the door pushed itself ajar. He repeated the same trick with the second door and again with the light switch.

Amelie was going to call him a show-off, but there was no air of pride him. It was like he hadn't noticed he'd even used magic. She wondered if that was what life was like for everyone in the Realms.

"I can't believe over all those years I never saw you accidentally do magic. It comes out of you so naturally I can't imagine it's easy to close yourself off from it all the time."

He shrugged, "I have been training since birth to ignore my magical instincts in the human world." He walked around the room, "I think it's like being taught to constantly speak with a British accent every time you visit England. At first it feels like you're faking and everyone around you will notice it's not your real voice. Then, you think you will never master anything so unnatural. But after a while switching between the two accents becomes easy. It's like switching between two separate mind frames."

Amelie liked this clever comparison to languages. "Okay, I get that. I've always thought of a language as a way that someone interacted with the world. Like some languages had eight different words for different shades of blue, or had words for unique feelings that cannot be described in other languages, right?"

"Exactly!" He responded, smiling. "Like English recently stole the German word Wanderlust because I guess people decided they needed a word for that feeling as well! We have plenty of words like that in the Elven language that describe the way magic feels when bursts out of you uncontrollably, or seeps out in small amounts without you noticing."

Amelie released a huff of air, "Ah Adrien, all you're doing now is making me long for those feelings."

He laughed, good naturedly. "Good! Use the longing to motivate you for today's lesson!"

They sat down across from each other again and Adrien pulled out the water bottle he had brought before. This time he wanted Amelie to try to simply make the water in the bottle swirl around a bit. Once again, she failed to produce any sort of magic, nor feel any whips of the connection she had once felt.

Over the next few days, she replayed their conversation about languages over in her head. She knew it was much easier to learn a language as a child than as an adult. The language part of a person's brain was somehow much more open as a child and could understand language as a system rather sets of rules and vocabulary words.

The worst thing she thought about were the studies about kids who were not exposed to language at all until they reached puberty or so. Those kids never learned to communicate through language. It was like the language gyrus of their brain had atrophied from going unused.

What if she ended up the same way with magic?

What if she had been exposed too late and her window to learn was gone?

She tried to keep busy at work, but she had just come to the end of her data processing for her current project so there were no math symphonies to decode and distract her. Instead she was stuck working on a grant application for Cathy.

Unfortunately, such boring work gave her a plethora of idle waiting time to allow these thoughts full reign in her head.

A whole week went by with her making no progress in "unlocking" any magic, as they had taken to calling it. She had met with Adrien five out of seven days, and on the two days she was not working on magic, she was distracted thinking about it.

She enjoyed spending time with her friend again, but if she was being honest, she still had not forgiven him for such an enormous betrayal of her trust. That, and his lack of patience as a teacher was making their lessons increasingly more frustrating for her. She knew he still did not see the point in her trying to learn magic, and it hurt her that he still did not understand.

On Tuesday, about a week after she had begun training, she decided to pay a visit to the gym during her lunch break, just to see if she could make any progress harnessing her magic without Adrien's presence. She was going home that evening for her dad's birthday dinner and wanted to at least try to work on magic once today.

She left her seat as soon as the clock struck twelve and bolted to the T. She arrived at the warehouse door with about thirty minutes of practice time. It turned out, the Prost Elves took a lunch break too and the warehouse was mercifully empty. She was glad to be free of the worry of someone catching her here without Adrien, but had been hoping to get a chance to watch them practicing as well to try to mimic their techniques.

She looked through the gigantic window at the gym. It was cut into four sections. One section simply looked like the weight room at the gym. She wondered to herself if those weights were usually lifted with muscles or magic.

The next section had five or six kiddie pools, set out on top of a thick, spongy sort of mat. The third section was cut in two. One side had a wrestling mat and the other was just hard concrete. She had spied the guards in a sort of fighting match there before, but didn't quite know the difference between the two areas' rules.

The final section was the most confusing of all. There were a few pinwheels scattered around, as well as some platforms of various heights. She had not seen anyone practicing in that area yet, although she assumed it was for gas/air magic, she was unsure what exactly one did with that sort of magic.

She turned around so her back faced the window and sat down with her water.

After thirty minutes of unfruitfully staring at a bowl of flat water, picturing it jumping out of the bowl, moving her hands while trying to feel the flow of the water, and generally feeling ridiculous, she left.

Amelie leaned back in her seat and turned her ear flat against the seat so she could watch the landscape pass by her train. She stretched out her cramped legs in front of her and pointed her toes to move the blood around. It had been four hours since her train had left Boston and she had spent the time almost completely still, engrossed in the process of finished her book.

The rolling hills and quaint Pennsylvania countryside were a calming foil to the desperate battle that she had just emerged from in her book.

There was at least an hour left until she arrived at the station in downtown Philadelphia and another half hour on the train out to her father's house in the suburbs. She might as well open it.

She had brought her Adrien notes with her in case she felt the urge to look through it while she was at her house, the first place she had seen him. Thoughts of the notes then had, of course, plunked themselves in the forefront of her brain for the duration of the trip and it was only out of sheer stubbornness that she had managed this long without pulling it out.

Even if her book had been really interested. She knew it said a lot about her current predicament that she was struggling to leave her own life and dive into a book.

Sighing, she reached into her bag and pulled out the folder full of notes. She had never been the type to keep a journal. A dusty pile of artistic notebooks with less than three pages filled in were evidence of her fickle nature when it came to journaling.

With Adrien, she thought of it less as journalling and more as if she were taking notes so that she could store the moments like a photograph. Journalling was for people to help sort out their thoughts and gain a sort of catharsis from releasing them. She intended for her notes to be taken out again and reread so that the memories did not lose their gloss and detail.

She flipped through the crinkled pages trying to choose where to start. The early years were easy to date because of the handwriting. At age twelve she had been felt compelled to write these notes in her very best handwriting, which at the time had meant each "i" had a hallow circle over it, or even worse, a heart.

She smiled and laughed softly, shaking her head.

After five minutes, still unable to choose just one entry to read, she decided to start at the beginning, as if she was reading a book. It had been years since she had opened any of the notes so she was covered with a soft blanket of nostalgia with each new page. It wasn't just the memories of being with Adrien, but also the memories of writing these notes. The emptiness she felt she need to feel whenever he left.

Most of the notes were exactly as she remembered so she read through them relatively quickly, only stopping when a memory pulled at her heart or the growing lump in her throat. But when she arrived at age fifteen she stopped and again turned her head to the comforting scenes gliding past her out the window.

It was this year that had made her bury these pages beneath her bed, unread for so many years.

"I can't say goodbye again."