Reunited:

Needless to say, the concert ended as Janet leaped from her chair to embrace Larry. The audience thought it was all part of the act and applauded, which added to the surreality of the moment. And Peter and Jeremy were dumbfounded, to say the least...

Janet thought she might never see Larry again, and Larry had no reason to believe that he'd see Janet alive, either, which made their reunion passionate but very odd and halting. Backstage, she told Larry everything about what had happened to her - including how the Dreaming had come upon her, and what she now was. She expected Larry to be rather incredulous, but he took it in stride, as though such strangeness were to be expected, rather than disbelieved.

For his part, Larry was about to tell her the truth about what had happened to him, but wisely clammed up when Peter came around to ask who this man was and - more importantly - why she was revealing her true nature to him. That was Larry and Peter's first encounter with one another, and it went fairly badly.

In fact, Larry almost lost control of his temper {something Janet never thought him capable of} and might have actually harmed him had Janet not calmed him down. Stuart advised his mentor to just leave them be. Obviously, something strange had happened here, too, and perhaps it would be best to let the truth of the matter come out when it was ready, rather than on demand...?

Faced with his own advice, Peter relented, but told Janet that this matter had to be hers to bear. If she desired to bring her friend into the Dreaming, then she would have to face any negative consequences that came out as a result of it.

She accepted it without hesitation, and Enchanted her lover right then and there, allowing him to see as they saw, and understand the true meanings of the words she had spoken to him, earlier. Saying that this brought a rapid change upon Larry's temperament was something of an understatement. It was as though a curtain had been lifted from his eyes, and everything in the world was fresh and new once more.

{Peter noted - to himself, of course - that he'd seen many mortals have that reaction, but never with that much force.}

After talking the matter over with Larry for a few hours - and hearing some of what he'd been through to get here - Janet decided that she wanted him to come with them. Now that she'd found her love again she didn't want to let him go, and they could use another hand, at any rate.

Peter wasn't too thrilled with the idea, but did his best to keep his feelings in check, agreeing that it could only help her with her recovery. Indeed, seeing her assert her will on the subject so... emphatically was a clear sign that she was doing much better.

All the same, one matter Peter insisted on was that if he was going to be visible, Larry was going to have to adopt a new identity and change his appearance, as Janet had done. That suited Larry just fine, and he agreed to assume a new persona. Stuart jokingly suggested Johnny Bedlam, but Larry took it as a serious idea, and adopted it immediately, no matter how strenously Peter tried to make him change his mind.

In the weeks to come, "Johnny Bedlam" became something of an all-around man for the group. He carried what needed to be carried before and after the shows, and made certain that no one in the audience tried anything. The latter wasn't much of a problem, really, but he did it mainly to look out for the people he'd come back to kill.

And after quite a bit of time of standing around and scowling at concerts, waiting for the moment that he matched a description to a face and had to do something about it, Larry found it easier to just scowl all the time. And so Larry slowly became more and more like "Johnny": he scowled at Peter, he scowled at Stuart, and was very snotty towards their weird friends from the Dreaming. He even occasionally made some of them - most notably Peter - think that they were a hair's width away from a good, hard kicking, but always backed off before it came to that.

{And Peter - who knew what Larry was, by that time - would reconsider allowing him to tag along. But as he was unwilling to lose Janet in the bargain, and knew that he would have to, he just dealt with it. Ghosts were often known to be tempermental and have very dark mood swings, so maybe the situation would improve as Larry got to grips with being dead?}

But Larry didn't, and Johnny predominated, and Peter never gave in to his anger. One supposes that the group could have gone on like this forever, barring an inevitable fight, but one night Peter happened to hear Johnny playing his flute to Janet. And he had never, in all his lives, heard something that sounded like that.

It wasn't just the calibre of Larry's playing - which was utterly amazing - but the quality of the sound, itself. Peter found himself thinking that if the Sirens' song had been turned into metal, and reworked into an instrument, it could have been that flute. And that made his mind reel with the possibilities of having that flute in the mix.

Even more important - at least to his way of thinking - was that allowing Larry to get up on stage and express his true talent might help him deal with his anger. Maybe getting him to feel something of what it was like to be alive again, and as he was before, would bring him around? It seemed to work for other ghosts of Peter's aquaintance, so he saw no reason why it shouldn't work for Larry.

A while later, Peter had a proposition for everyone. Making Larry do all the hauling, and just sit around like a fifth wheel during the shows, wasn't a good way for the four of them to travel. Why not have Larry join them onstage with his flute, and they could all carry an equal share of the load both off-stage and on?

Larry was against it, at first - though he kept his true reasons to himself - but was brought around to saying "yes" by Janet, who thought it was a wonderful idea. And so Stuart added flute notations to his previously-written pieces, and started coming up with new pieces with Larry's parts already there.

And that was how Bone Dance became a quartet.