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Zar was in his room. Lately he was always in his room so it wasn't entirely surprising, today though he couldn't work half as efficiently as normal, he kept tripping over emotions whenever he tried to haul his focus back into line.

Nuru had sneaked off and left nothing but a note behind, looking to "fix" him, convinced there was something lurking and wrong with him that the hunters were responsible for. He didn't know what to believe, it was a fact that the chip was there, he'd seen it applied - felt it excruciatingly bound to him. He'd fallen to the insanity so easily too, which implied it exerted some control over him, though that likewise could also be attributed to his state of mind.

The moment the knock came, he was up and out of his chair like a shot, throwing the heavy black door wide with an eagerness most unbecoming of a demon. When it turned out not to be Nuru as he'd anticipated, he tried to salvage some semblance of decorum, dropping his tail to the perfectly polished floor where it curled behind him, neatly folding his splayed wings and pushing his glasses up his nose with a claw.

"Hello." The boil was familiar. Even despite all the time he'd spent as a near hermit in his room, it was difficult to forget another student blessed with the health hazard that was a set of hooves. "It has been a long time.", he said, with a gracious smile.

"Can I help you?"

Zar couldn't even begin to guess what had brought Calder round to visit him, he was the first visitor the Incubus had had in a very long while and he was pleasantly surprised that he even remembered where he lived.

He tilted his head slightly, an emotive and curious gesture for the normally decidedly repressed demon and eyed the basket in the kelpie's hands. "Sorry? It is not logical to be apologetic for bringing an unexpected and beneficent gift to an individual to whom it is of tremendous worth." He realised perhaps Calder had taken his moment of scrambled composure badly. "And you are not bothering me at all. I was just anticipating Nuru's return. He." It was strangely difficult to fit words around what had happened. "He is out on an errand of uncertain duration. I was perhaps over eager to see him. Your presence is welcome though, as is your gift."

Manners, long dust covered stirred in the recesses of his orderly mind. "Come in, come in." He said, turning to pull his chair over and sit daintily in it, gesturing at the chaise longue with an elegant gesture of his claws. "Do sit. Forgive my rudeness, what did you bring?"

There was a shift in Zar's expression for just a moment, a subtle hint of what could be sadness stirring under the surface. There was a moment of internal conflict, he was very fixated on precise speech, accurate terms. Is. Was. He wasn't able to commit to the present, but he could commit to the past.

"He was a boilfriend." It wasn't a lie, and the consignment of their relationship to the past was merely one interpretation of the statement. He thought of the note again. "I regrettably cannot speak for this moment in time."

The instant of doubt seemed to melt as he smiled as charmingly as he could manage, eyeing the jars - it wasn't often he got warm food to eat - his world was a cold bland one. "My father frowns upon colours.", he explained, "He says they are a distraction from a solid business ethic. He would not fund anything else when I arrived." He had rebelled briefly with his ties, a splash of colour in a world of monotone. But after the fog of insanity, he felt that even that spark of colour had been ultimately futile. "I do not dislike colour."

There was an uncertainty to his smile, fanged as it was, as if he'd learned how it was right to smile in company but was still uncertain of himself. "I am very grateful for the food. I have a very strict schedule and I often neglect to permit time for personal maintenance in that chronological budget."

"The issue with my boilfriend was always that he visited too much. It compromised my finely tuned schedule. He did not learn how to adapt to it very well, I require efficiency. That may have been what finally drove him off, if indeed he left of his own volition. He said he was going to try and get help for me." Help for an ailment neither of them fully understood.

At the mention of arts and crafts, he looked politely baffled. "Why would one colour pictures? That would be in error." he sounded horrified. He could draw things almost exactly from memory, but anything that required imagination to render ran against the grain of his very nature. Colouring something anything other than the exact colour it was in life was almost blasphemous to him.

"That sounds complicated."

"No it means that it is wrong. That it is strange and against the natural ordeOH JACK DONT TOUCH MY PENS!" He leapt to his hooves as Calder got his hands all over his perfectly organised desk only to reject the pens as unsatisfactory in their colour selection.

He spent the entire time Calder was away obsessively rearranging his desk back into place, tail flicking behind him as he mentally soothed himself that everything was back the way it had been and no, he didn't need to start hyperventilating just yet.

Calder came back and not empty handed either. Zar almost had a fit as the pile was unceremoniously ditched on the floor, hooves scrabbling again as he skidded over to pick up a few pens that threatened to roll under his bed. "Don't just..." He sat down almost out of reflex, looping his tail around to halt any other pens making a break for it. He was dazed and looked it, dancing on the edge of absolutely freaking out and losing it but somehow holding on with the very tips of his claws. "I...I..these are the." They were bright and all the wrong colour. He picked up a piece of paper and put the pen to it hesitantly, hand shaking.

He drew an exact replica of the pen he was holding.

Zar stared at what Calder had drawn open mouthed, he was still reeling from the fact that the localised whirlwind of a kelpie had brought colours into his meticulous room as if it was nothing at all and unleashed them upon the perfect floor where he could hardly begin to think about the kind of scratching they'd done to the polish. And then he'd acted like it was no big deal and pulled a fantastical and innacurate image out of thin air as if it was easy.

He couldn't really conceal the awe at the image. He was smiling. Yet he couldn't remember smiling in a long long time. But there it was as if it was real. It was rudimentary and crude in its rendering but somehow so much more magical than anything he could do.

"I am happy?" he said, reiterating what felt like an alien concept these days.

He reached out to touch it as if he could read it through contact the way he did with words and paperwork. The chord of colour made him recoil in surprise.

"I...I .." he found himself at a strange loss for words, before holding his own picture up. It was startlingly accurate to the pen as it was, there was nothing new, nothing added, nothing stylised about it, it might as well have been a plan. "I perceived this."

Zar was completely baffled by the effortless way Calder spoke about drawing. He had wanted to draw Zar happy and therefore he had. It was like listening to someone say they had wanted to pluck the moon out of the sky and simply had. He couldn't begin to wrap his mind around it.

"I cannot simply conjure up things that do not exist, that I have never looked upon before. That would be impossible."

Zar steepled his claws and eyed another blank sheet of paper. Draw what he wanted to happen. He bit his lip thoughtfully with a fang.

And then he drew an exact replica of the smile from Calder's picture, as large as his sheet of paper in grey crayon.