"Ooh, you are smart."

He twirls. Just because he has to let the glee out somehow or other.

Bella laughs and lets herself collapse into a kitchen chair.

"Huh," she says. "What time is it? I'm hungry. The microwave and oven are always set to different, wrong times..."

Alice checks the time.

"Ten past two," he says. "Want I should make you lunch?"

Bella leans her head down on the table. "I'm sorta wondering what you'd have done if the car had killed me."

She's pretty sure the answer is that he would have taken her star, and tried that.

"You're sweet," Bella says. She yawns again.

She's just gonna put her head on her arms on the table, that's all.

God but she's cute.



Some time later, there is pasta and asparagus resting in their pots on trivets on the counter, and Alice is facing two bright red stove elements.

He takes a deep breath, puts his left hand on one, and leans into it.

It hurts. It hurts a whole fuck of a lot. His jaw works, but no sound emerges; his other hand clutches at the handle on the oven door. His elbow rains pentagons onto the linoleum. When he looks down and recognizes the shape of the obsidian coins, he hisses through his teeth and lifts up his hand. What remains of his hand.

And wraps his right hand tightly around the edge of the counter, and leans his left forearm on the stove.

This time he moans, but quietly, so as not to wake Bella. And the coin that appears on the counter next to his thumb has six sides. So does the one after it, and the one he gets when he rips his smoking arm up off the red-hot coils.

A few more pentagons drop while he leans over and carefully turns off the elements, right-handed, hugging his left arm against his stomach and hissing whenever it touches anything.

Then he picks up a hexagon, clears his mind as best he can, and wishes.

Charred flesh regrows before his eyes. That hurts, too, which he should have expected but didn't; he gets another pentagon out of it in the few seconds before his arm is pristine again.

He brushes a few flakes of ash away and looks at the clean new skin.

Then he lays his arm across the elements again. Hexagon, hexagon—

His knees buckle; he grabs at the counter with his right hand and misses; he falls to the floor, whacking his left arm against one leg of the kitchen table and dropping another hexagon when he does it.

"Ow," he mutters, more out of surprise than anything, and relaxes whatever part of him controls his brand new healing factor. His arm fixes itself again, faster than last time. He rolls onto his back and looks up to see if all this nonsense has awakened Bella.

"You bet I did," he sighs.

The stove definitely looks like things were burned on it. Mostly not recognizable things, however.

"I hexed myself healing powers but the rest are for you if you want 'em," he adds, scooting toward her chair and offering up his double handful of black, glimmering pentagons.

"Count 'em first, maybe," he says. "I think there might be a hex in there, but it's mostly pentagons. And sure, you can have 'em all."

He dusts himself off and gets to his feet, grinning, to grab the four hexagons off the counter and hand them over. There is indeed one more among the dozen pentagons he gave her.