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It wasn’t necessary to scream, as a banshee, and most of the time (considering Blade's profession) it was actively dangerous. But Blade understood why most banshees did: it was unnerving, the cool touch of knowing sliding along the back of his neck, cold hands resting on his shoulders, and his eyes going involuntarily to the person who he now knew was next to die. Still, Blade preferred to keep quiet. Few people knew. Ditzy did, because Blade could triage a group of bleeding people in a blink without having more than basic medical training, and Ryan did, because it was mission-relevant. Lyle did, because he had his own peculiarities, and he was possibly the only one who understood why Blade was here, why he hadn't stayed with the Royal Engineers and done something that would keep his feet a little further from the dying. If Lyle had an early warning system in his thumbs, then Blade had a last-ditch disaster alert in his blood, and it made him faster and sharper than he would ever otherwise have been. Years of wondering what the tipping point was between maybe and certain death had made him good at seeing all the risks, closing off possibilities, cutting off retreats. Blade was excellent at close protection. He'd never lost anyone yet. Ditzy had once asked if his sense for death bothered him. The honest answer was that it was the suspense that got to him; that was the moment that he didn’t like, and the less he knew a person the less he registered it. The problem, as far as he was concerned, was other people's distress, and (related) the well-meaning attempts of various authorities to stuff him into therapy against his will. He didn't need therapy, he needed a way to tell people he was a banshee without them recoiling in terror. "Therapy could help with the coping skills?" Ditzy had said, hopefully, peering at Blade over his beer. "I'm coping fine. I need to teach everyone else to cope." Blade had crushed a can in one hand and bounced it off Ditzy's forehead, and then Claire had come home from a full-moon run complaining about Mrs Peterson's wretched bloody pug, and that had put a stop to the entire conversation. Maybe he should have tried to carry it on at some other time, Blade thought, balancing the shopping awkwardly in his arms and digging about in one pocket for his keys. He'd been uneasily conscious for a while that Lorraine - solidly normal Lorraine, with no magic in her family and a preternatural calm in the face of the supernatural - deserved to know about the banshee thing. They'd been together a year. He spent half his week in her flat. Her neighbours knew him by name, and her niece kept a running tally of Risk games with him. She had casually mentioned that her lease came up in six months and her landlady wanted to know if another person would be interested in joining it. She was part of his life. The problem was that he had no idea how that would change if he told her about the banshee situation, and he was worried she would react with distaste, or (possibly worse) even-handed calm and an insistence that they could still be friends. He'd been thinking about the problem for the last two weeks, and his nerves had carried over to his behaviour, with the inevitable result that Lorraine had visibly started worrying about him. He could see she was still worried when she opened the door, even though she smiled at him and took the least-stable bag of shopping from him, even though there wasn’t anything particularly different about the way they spoke to each other. A little more stilted, maybe. A little more awkward. Blade twitched and brooded throughout the next hour, occasionally noticing that Lorraine looked upset and making a heroic effort to reassure her before relapsing. He made her favourite variation on spaghetti bolognese and poured her a glass of wine, and hoped they would both relax. He was wondering what else he could do to persuade her he was fine when he grated four of his knuckles into the parmesan by accident and swore so loudly Lorraine jumped and spilled her wine. "It's fine! I'm fine." Blade eyed the seeping rips in his knuckles and turned the tap on to wash out the now-bloody grater. "Fuck." Lorraine muttered something Blade did not catch and shoved his hand under the running water instead of the grater. It stung, but Lorraine's smaller hand was very warm around his wrist, and Blade leaned his cheek against her head. "Don't tell the lads," he said. "No, fine," Lorraine said distractedly, and then perceptibly braced herself. "You know, if you are... are upset about something, you should probably just tell me about it, instead of... well... brooding yourself into the minor injuries unit." "This is nothing," Blade said. "Just spit it out, Niall," Lorraine said, and she sounded so upset herself that Blade blurted it out without thinking. "I'm a banshee." "Oh, fucking hell, is that all?" Lorraine exclaimed, dropping his wrist and staring up at him with obvious surprise. "Uh," Blade said, dumbfounded. He'd never heard Lorraine use the word fuck before; she usually got her point across very efficiently with a meaningful stare or a delicate inflection on a theoretically much politer word. "Yes?" Lorraine leaned heavily on the counter, eyes very wide. "I thought you were working up to breaking up with me!" "No!" Blade yelped. "Why would I do that?" "Don't ask me, I have no idea." Lorraine rinsed the grater, turned the tap off and dried his hand off with a tea-towel. "Were you really that worried about telling me you're a banshee?" "Well, yeah," Blade said. "Most people don't react well." Lorraine made an automatic, and automatically disdainful, face. "The screaming at dead people doesn’t usually go down well." "I've never heard you scream at anyone." "You don't have to. I mean... banshees don't have to." Blade scratched his head, wondering how to approach this, and what to do with the helpless smile on his face. "That's good," Lorraine said, very practically. "You can't go through life screaming at people. Whatever certain ministers may or may not think." Blade decided that the only conceivable response to all of this was to kiss Lorraine, which he did until she pointed out his knuckles were bleeding again and foisted the tea-towel on him. They rested quietly against the kitchen sink for several moments, exchanging kisses and breathing in the same air, and then Blade realised the sauce was going to cook dry and hurriedly tipped a cupful of water into it. "That does it," Lorraine said, disentangling herself from him. He moved with her so he had his arms wrapped around her waist and his chin on her shoulder, and she knocked her head gently against his. "Let me finish cooking, and you can tell me everything about this." "Everything?" Blade said, surprised. "Everything you're comfortable telling me," Lorraine corrected herself. "Nobody ever wanted to ask before." "Well, I do," Lorraine said, picking up the cleaned grater. "It's important to you, so it's important to me." Blade told her everything.