Eee. She's so glad she has someone who loves her here. She loves him too.

There is not a lot else to this dream, so the next time they wake up they're in bed wearing their Halloween costumes and there is no mystery baby with them.

Gosh, that went so much better. 

- too bad about the no baby though. And the yes shirt.

"No babies until we have space for them," she murmurs. But she is kind of really happy at the thought of him maybe eventually wanting them. Even though she remembers something about recently becoming suspicious of his baby parenting qualifications.

"How much does it cost to buy a bigger house?"

"Some ridiculous amount of money most places. Some much less ridiculous amount of money here. But we'd still need a lot more than we have."

"I guess we can't make money off any of your magic on account of it having to be secret."

"Yeah. Or, like, I dunno, maybe I could come up with a spell that made things that we could sell, but we're not there yet. - I guess we should at some point think about whether it has to be secret but right now I'm legally seventeen and I really don't want any extra scrutiny of, uh, any aspects of the way I'm living my life."

"Would they get mad about the slavery what with it being illegal?"

"Very possibly. Or, like - I don't even know if the government would do anything, on that front, but my parents would certainly not allow any of this to continue if they knew about it. Not even just because of the slavery, I don't think they'd - take that seriously, beyond thinking of it as some weird - I have from their hypothetical perspective clearly fallen into some kind of pit of sin and vice. On several fronts."

"Your parents suck."

"My parents - have some flaws as people, but I feel like there are honestly a lot of different aspects of this situation that almost any set of human parents would be pretty alarmed by."

"I guess. But if your parents didn't suck you could've just explained to them that Azalea's a ghost now and they'd be chill about it."

"...no? - I mean, I guess if they didn't suck I'd just have gone home to them right away and never have ended up saving your life and you'd be dead right now and I'd never have gotten any magic, but - "

"I think normal parents help their other kid when one kid gets a - weird debilitating illness, which is kind of what being a ghost is, instead of abandoning the one and making the other leave her life she likes!"

"Okay but my life is really concerning. It's - possible that I'm wrong about them being worried about Zana and actually they'd have taken her in and everything would be fine on that front, but I have you now, and they're definitely not gonna let me keep living with you. They would probably call CPS on your parents and forbid me from seeing you again. Given all of the, uh, concerningness. And I feel like most parents would probably do that, at this stage."

"Huh. Then I guess it's good yours suck so much."

" - y'know, I've never thought about it, but I guess it is."

Snuggle.

Kiss.

" - shoulda taken sit it out way back when it was offered, I have to go to school now - "

"Ugh."

"Two more years. Then we can have real jobs and a bigger house and -  it'll be good."

"Seems like such a long time."

"I agree. But - if we can figure out immortality it won't be that long. Compared to everything else."

She fishes her spellbook out of her nightstand to check whether nine or however many hours of telepathy did anything on the magic front.

Spell: Ranged telepathy

Pick a person. You can hear their thoughts even when not touching. 

To learn this spell, hold a person's hand. Say 'dilnap, eleggegor'.

She reads him the spell.

"So, uh, not healing, but we did do like nine hours of telepathy last night, so that's fair. And this is earlier than I usually get a new one, so -  I feel like that's some evidence for the 'doing magic gives you more magic' hypothesis? Which - maybe means we should do telepathy most nights, there aren't a lot of other things that lead to using that much magic - "