If by not entirely unfamiliar she had meant to lump him in with that – well, that lump, Barnaby nearly missed it. Surely he wasn’t such a nuisance! His company was a gift. She couldn’t possibly mean that.
He didn’t have time to query it, besides; she had a confession. Half-veela. Barnaby didn’t think he had ever met one, in his lifetime – the magical society he had known had been a little more insular, then, and he doubted if old Queen Bess would have stood for any competition from the sort... but he had read a little about them, seen illustrations of the angry beaked things they became.

He looked at Miss Chevalier with a little newfound uncertainty. Half-veela, she had said: perhaps it was not all so bad as that. She seemed rather miserable about it, her supernatural beauty... but his expression softened, for he was not about to make her feel any worse. He drifted sidelong, a little without meaning to. “I do not know if it works on me. Most magic is lost on spirits, you see,” he admitted, because he was impervious to most spells and enchantments, unless they were the spirit-specific sort. (Except – did that make it yet worse, that his being a plague to her was just sheer bad luck, another unhappy helping of attention? He hadn’t meant it to be.)

It was a pity that touch was lost on spirits, too, or he might have reached out to pat her shoulder in sympathy. “We spirits are no strangers to odd looks, though,” Barnaby said wryly, because he certainly received the gawking, if not the rest. Frankly, he would have preferred the fawning.

Still, in some attempt to cheer her up, he managed a chuckle and a silly joke – “Which of our curses do you suppose is worst, overall?”

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Tabi glanced at Mr. Wye while he seemed to contemplate her confession. She honestly didn't know if the veela side had the same effect on ghosts or if this was just who he was, but she was leaning toward the former. It wasn't exactly the same sort of magic that they wielded through a wand. At least he was sympathetic and had let off Mr. Browne.

Sighing heavily, she turned the last corner to her ward and unlocked the potions store room with her wand. She just had a few more things to catalog and put away and then she could go home. "Hard to say, it doesn't seem to bother you much." She appreciated that he called her affliction a "curse" though. That is most certainly what it felt like, even if she was likely the only one of her kind to think that. "Both lonely, I'll wager." Though Mr. Wye did seem to have quite a few living friends. It was hard not to enjoy his more gregarious nature, even if he was a little forward some times.

"If you are going to stay, I need you to please be useful, can you count the number of antidotes on that third shelf?" Tabitha didn't need the help, but she wasn't in the mood for a complete existential discussion right now. He couldn't put things away, but he could help her inventory at the very least. "And from here on out, I would appreciate if you waited for me outside." She gave him a pointed look over her notebook.

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absolute beauty by MJ

“I try not to let it bother me much,” Barnaby corrected gently, because that was really all one could do to come to terms with their lot, when their lot had been unchanged for three centuries. That was rather a long time to mourn oneself, even by his own self-centred standards.

And it was lonely: that was the worst of it. And, he considered wistfully, that some things were forever beyond his reach. To feel – to be loved – even to manage the barest touch. He suffered more than he let on, and even felt a pang of it here, because even Mr. Browne, the dead herring, would be set above him in those categories, no matter what he did.

“I am a most accomplished mathematician,” Barnaby declared grandiosely, half to amuse her and half to cover his despair, as he began to count vials on the shelves. “I am at your service,” he added, with a nod to express his surrender, that he understood. No more hospital visits, then. Banished to the streets like a dog. Such was his lot.

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