Jim looked about the room curiously.

"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you—sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

-- The Gift of the Magi, O. Henry (1917)

Lyric woke up slowly, swimming toward the surface of consciousness in a lazy, meandering way. She felt warm and content and utterly, blissfully happy. The man in bed with her murmured in his sleep and she remembered exactly why she felt so content.

The soul meld.

When they’d made love…it had been magical. Extraordinary. Music and color and light and feeling—oh, the feeling of his hard body fitting itself to the softness of her own. Silken, sensual, seduction beyond her wildest dreams. He was a man who took and took and took—every ounce of response she could give—and then gave back even more, until she’d screamed his name and soared into the stratosphere.

And then there had been even more.

He’d gasped and she’d felt…everything. She’d felt everything. She'd seen inside his soul, and he'd seen inside hers. She knew him now like she’d never known another person, ever, in her life. He’d opened his shields and let her see the lonely child—the battered adult—the pirate who threw himself into a dangerous sea to try to save the lives of a magical pair of very special animals. His bond with Seranth. And then…

Then she’d seen his love for her. It suffused every part of him with a golden glow. She saw how he saw her; how strong and beautiful she was in his eyes, and she’d fallen in love with him all over again.

The thing about the soul meld… he’d seen her, too.

And he’d said her name with such love. Such reverence.

When they’d made love again with their hearts open to each other—their souls open to each other, the experience had transcended anything that poets of artists or writers could ever capture. They had truly been melded into one, and she’d almost been afraid she’d shatter with the perfection of that moment.

Now, waking in his arms, the logical part of her felt like perhaps she should've been afraid of such intimacy, such a deep connection. She'd been alone and self-sufficient for so long. Was it too much, too soon? The soul meld was the deepest possible connection, but was it a shorthand for the years of getting to know another person that human relationships entailed?

But did it really matter?

She thought back to the jewel tones of the inside of Dare’s soul. This man—this strong, brave, wonderful man. No, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they’d found each other and would never, ever be apart.

Dare tightened his arms around her and started kissing the back of her neck, and she smiled, relaxing back against him. She loved him, and he loved her. That was the basic truth from which everything else would flow.

Nothing was easy, of course, even in a magical place like Atlantis. They had so much to figure out between them. But she knew that they could figure it out. They had love. They had understanding. They had--

"What in the nine hells was that?"

Lyric bolted upright, pulling the sheet up to cover her breasts. "What was what?"

"That."

She sighed. "Really? You’re pointing something out to me? After all these years?"

Dare drew a deep breath. "I'm sorry. I'm an idiot. The thing just caught me off guard. There's a very strong beam of light shooting up from the basket of gems on that table."

"A beam of light," Lyric repeated, feeling stupid. "I don't – what could that be?"

He pulled her toward him and gave her a quick but enthusiastic kiss, and then he jumped out of bed. "I don't know, but no time like the present to find out."

She heard his footsteps padding across the room – oh dear. He must still be completely naked. A delicious sensation shivered up her spine. She didn't know whether she was aroused, worried someone would walk in, or both. She pulled the sheet around herself in a kind of modified toga and headed across the room toward him. "Have you figured it out?"

Dare whistled, long and low. "I don't believe this. I just scooped all these gems into the basket, but I never really looked at them. You told me that it didn't matter what they were, just that they helped you in your painting. I've had this group in my collection for years and years and years, and the stone has never done anything like this."

"What is it doing?" She was consumed by curiosity crossed with a hefty dose of impatience. "Tell me already!"

"I'm picking it up now. It's a large rock, the size and shape of one of your baseballs. I love that game, by the way. The--"

“Dare. The rock?”

“Right. It's a reddish orange color, and it's pulsing with light, directing a pretty strong beam – oh, Poseidon's balls."

Lyric heard him mutter a string of what sounded like English mixed with Atlantean cursing.

"What happened?"

“It burned my fingers, but before that, it told me what it is."

She heard him cross to the bathroom and then heard the sound of running water, so she followed him across the room. "Are you badly burned?"

"No, it's nothing. I just wanted to run a little cold water on my fingers. It's a Wish."

Lyric was confused. “What do you mean it's a wish? Whose wish?"

"I don't know much about it or how it works. I just now that it's old. Not even old as much as ancient. Older than Atlantis. Older maybe than the gods. We have stories of Wishes-- that’s wish with a capital W – in our histories, but no one alive today has ever seen one."

Lyric grabbed his arm. "What does it do, already?"

She felt him shrug. "It's exactly what it sounds like. It's a Wish. According to the stories, it presents itself to a person whom it considers to be worthy. That person then gets to make one wish. Any wish. There's a legend that a stable boy was once king of Atlantis for a year and a day after he found a Wish." Dare laughed. "Hell of a story. No idea if it's true."

"That's true of all the best stories," Lyric said, smiling. "What are you going to wish for?"

He turned and pulled her close, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. "Oh no, mi amara. The Wish isn’t here for me. It told me. It's here for you."

Her mouth fell open. “It’s what?”

“It’s here for you,” he repeated, excitement in his voice. “Lyric, you can wish for your sight!”

Ice coated her skin with its cold fingers.

So fast.

He’d come to that conclusion so very fast.

She pulled away from him. “So what you’re telling me is that I’m not enough for you the way I am now. You want to fix me, too.”

It wasn’t a question. More of a statement, really. A realization. She’d been fooling herself—she’d been a fool.

“Look, Dare. If you--"

His arms came around her like steel bands, and he swung her up into them and carried her across the room and tossed her on the bed. Before she could think, or breathe, or protest, he was on top of her, holding her face in his hands.

“If you really think that, you haven’t been paying attention,” he said roughly, just before he took her mouth with his. “You’re not enough for me. You’re everything to me. You are the star that guides me and I will never, ever let you go. I love you. Exactly. The. Way. You. Are.”

And then he proceeded to prove it to her, slowly and very, very thoroughly, for the rest of the morning, until a knock at the door called him to a meeting with the king.

“I’ll be right back,” he promised, kissing her again.

“I’ll be here,” she promised. “Bring food.”

He laughed. “As you wish.”

She opened one eye. “Hey. Did you just Princess Bride me?”

His footsteps stopped. “Inconceivable!”

And then he was gone, and she sank back down in the pillows and thought that this might be the most hedonistic way anybody had ever spent Christmas Eve in the history of time.

Then she sat bolt upright in the bed.

It was Christmas Eve!

And the painting—her gift to Dare—wasn’t finished.

Time to get to work.