They walked back to the cave, and Zelgadis couldn't help smiling as Lina was constantly distracted by the intensity of sounds or smells. Her heightened senses had her enraptured, he could feel it.
Softly he said, "Yes, there are some good points to being 1/3 Mazoku. Senses and reflexes like a cat are not only useful, but seem to almost expand the world."
"Um hm." Lina grinned, "I can't wait to see what food will taste like!"
Zel grinned. Some things would never change, and it seemed this was one of them. "Are you hungry?" he asked her.
Lina thought about it. "No, not really." she said, "It's funny, I haven't eaten in a couple of days, but I don't feel any real urge to."
Zel nodded. "You may not feel the urge to eat right now, but you do need to. Your body is still adjusting itself, or you'd know. The change took a lot of energy, and you need to replace that."
"How do you know all this?" Lina asked.
"Well, after Rezo changed me, I seemed fine, but a day later I passed out suddenly because my body was lacking some fairly essential nutrients. My brain simply hadn't co-ordinated with my new body well enough to tell me what I needed to eat." He gestured. "There's a river over there, why don't we catch you some fish?"
In what seemed like no time at all, they had caught plenty of fish, and Zel carried them back to the cave while Lina went ahead to start a fire. While the fish were cooking, Zel pulled a battered coffeepot out of his cape and filled it with spring water then placed it next to the fire to boil.
"Don't tell me you're not gonna have any fish and just drink coffee." she scowled.
"No, of course not." Zel said, "The coffee's for you too..."
"Zel..."
He laughed. "And I'm going to share them both with you."
"Zel, honestly!" Lina laughed, "Sometimes I think you deliberately do things to make me scold you!"
Zel looked away with a slight blush. "Guilty as charged." he muttered.
Lina stared at him. "You mean all this time you really WERE trying to be scolded?"
"Not in the very beginning, but after a time, yes."
"Why?"
"It made me feel good...made me feel like you cared."
Being careful not to overturn the coffeepot, Lina leaned over to hug him.
"Oh Zel, I do care, I always have! Why do you think I scolded you in the first place?"
Zel hugged her back and gave her a peck on the cheek. "I know that now, of course." he agreed.
The water started to boil, so he took it off the heat and divided it up. Half he set to brew coffee, the other half he put into a glass bottle, and added some sort of powder to.
"What's that?" Lina asked, curious.
"This is one of the few things for which I'm actually grateful to Eris." he said, "It has all the additional nutrients and trace elements the Golem part of me needs...It's absolutely vile, though," he grimaced, "the only thing which hides the flavour at all is coffee."
"So that's why you drink coffee all the time!" Lina exclaimed, glad to have solved one of the little mysteries hovering about her little Chimera.
"Initially that was why, then I found that I actually quite liked coffee in any case."
Lina sniffed the air. "The fish is ready." she announced.
The two sat close together, and it was the calmest Zel had ever seen Lina while eating. When the coffee had perked through, Zel pulled out a couple of heavy earthenware mugs and poured most of the "Golem drink" as he was wont to call it, into one, leaving only a little for himself, then topped them up with coffee and handed Lina hers.
"Drink up," he said with a smile, "believe me, you'll feel better for having it in your system."
Lina sipped dubiously at the coffee, but as he had promised, the only thing she could taste was coffee, so she sipped it a little more liberally. "You know Zel, you make a mighty fine cup of coffee."
They both laughed.
After the meal was finished, Zelgadis sat against the wall of the cave, and Lina laid her head in his lap.
"How are we going to find the others?" he wondered.
"Oh, that'll be no problem...at least, not really. I can always find any of you."
"How's that?"
"Well, I keep a little something from each of you handy, in case we get separated."
Zelgadis gave her a quizzical look, but decided not to ask about this right at the moment.
"So, who do you want me to locate first?" she asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, just before I left, Amelia got some sort of message from home. She left in an awful rush, so it must have been important."
"We're better off looking for Gourry then." Zel said, "If it was important, she's probably shielded."
"My thoughts exactly." Lina agreed. She rummaged around in her cape until she pulled out a lock of blond hair tied with a scrap of blue cloth.
"Okay, that's it, I have to ask; what of mine do you have in there?"
Lina blushed bright red. "Yours isn't in there." she said. She slipped off her left glove. On her pinkie finger was a ring of what looked like braided wire, and caught in that wire were little chips of crystal.
"I wanted to be able to check on you whenever I wanted." she said, "And besides, it looks so pretty..."
Zelgadis could tell she was apprehensive that he might take this as an invasion of his privacy, but somehow he didn't. He'd changed, he realised, before he'd met Lina and the others, if someone had taken his hair and dreamtears in order to keep track of his whereabouts, he would have been incensed, but now it gave him a warm, contented glow deep down inside.
"It's beautiful." he told her.
"I was so worried you'd take it the wrong way." Lina said, surprised by the suddenly escalated feeling of love he was giving her.
"I know you were, but you needn't have." He ran his fingers in complicated patterns over her face. "You care a lot more about people than you'd care to admit, don't you?"
Lina just smiled. "Anyway, I should figure out where Gourry is, shouldn't I?" she changed the subject. She held onto the lock of hair and started to focus, but Zel's light, stroking fingers were distracting her.
"Hey, I can't find anyone if I can't concentrate." she said, a bit piqued.
"Do we really have to search for them?" Zel asked wistfully.
"Weren't you the one who suggested it in the first place?"
Zel nodded. "It's just..."
"I know." Lina reached her hand up to brush his lips with her fingers, "Time alone together is so precious."
He caught her hand in one of his and kissed it on the palm, then sighed. "I suppose we really don't have much of a choice though, do we? Sooner or later they'll come looking for us, and they'll be angry and hurt if they feel we were leavig them out." He moved his other hand from her face to rest it on her shoulder.
Lina sighed deeply, and Zel could feel she was just as reluctant to rejoin the rest of the world as he was.
After a couple of minutes of scrying, Lina blinked. "He's about a week's travel from here," she said, "and he's not alone...for some reason Sylphiel's there too."