creataav

Niamh shrugged through the tree trunk, the squeeze tighter than ever, eyes barely skimming the familiar wooden sign to its left. “NEVER FOUND,” it read in anguished hand carved letters. At least, Niamh liked to assume it was anguished. She hadn’t been on Prime Material when it was written, but she liked to picture one of her mothers crying as she carved the sign, lamenting the loss of her only daughter.

She knew it didn’t make sense. If her mothers had been so very anguished, why didn’t they ever come looking?

The usual pang of convoluted grief came and went, curling around her sternum gently at first, and then tight enough to squeeze enough magic out of her to cause the moss on the bark of the tree to sprout. The scent of the little purple flowers – which really wasn’t all that nice, it smelled like dirt and mold and nothing so nice as what she’d smelled in Fey – grounded her enough. She reminded her feet to keep walking, ahead to the town that she hoped was still around. She’d have to go through the awkward song-and-dance of figuring out how long it had been again. It was something she never looked forward to. She always got a lot of weird stares. “The year you get some help,” and “Ma’am, do you need a healer?” were her favorite responses. The first, she’d gotten almost twelve Material years ago now, by someone who she thought was her third or fourth cousin, but who obviously didn’t recognize her as family in the slightest, only some random chick who didn’t age and showed up every fifteen years to reconfigure her place in the space-time continuum. Sass ran in the family, she supposed. The second was from a very confused, but very kind, man in glasses that was very willing to send her to any sort of healing establishment. She assumed he thought that someone had decided to cast a Confusion spell on her. He was nice. She wondered what he was up to now. Maybe he’d started a family. Maybe he’d died. She’d learned to stop being so worried about death. None of the people she’d known from Before were still around (she’d checked, had a cry, and then struggled to get over it for about 5 years Material time). 

The various belts covered in various magical components around her waist jingled merrily as a breeze whistled through the forest. A squirrel twitched its head toward the sound, locking his eyes with hers. She held his gaze steadily. Five, four, three, two, two and a half, and… one. The squirrel scampered away across the branches, and she shrugged before beginning to mumble a quiet melody. 

Once a fair and handsome seal-lord

Laid his foot upon the sand

Something crunched further close to the edge of the treeline, and she felt her body lock into place, a small smirk blooming on her face and gold beginning to seep into the irises of her eyes. 

For to woo the fisher’s daughter,

and to gain her marriage hand

A shoe scuffed a rock nearby. They were getting closer.

“I have come in from the ocean, I have come in from the sea,

 and I’ll not go to the waves, love, lest ye come along with me.”

Niamh positioned herself carefully, sitting semi-comfortably at the base of the tree. She tilted her head up towards the leaves, as though she was directing her song at the beams of sunlight that were filtering through them and not at whatever curious mortal was inching ever closer to her. 

“Lord, long have I loved you

as a selkie on the foam,

I would gladly go and wed ye,

and be lady of your home

A second, less steady voice joined hers in harmony from behind a tree to her left.

“But I cannot go into the ocean, I cannot go into the sea

I would drown beneath your waves, love, if I went along with ye”

She inclined her head to the other voice. “It’s rude to spy, you know,” She said, raising an eyebrow and glancing down to rub a bit of dirt off of her hands. She looked up to see the man, the kind one who worried about her. He looked older. His hair was graying, he wore thick, round-rimmed glasses and time had pressed folds into his face. She felt her face light up with recognition before she could tamp it down, and she knew he saw it. “Oh, it’s you,” She tried for nonchalant.

“You are quite possibly the most bizarre Fey I’ve ever seen.” He replied, unfazed, one eyebrow cocked in a particularly teacher-like way. She wondered if that’s what he was now. It would make sense. 

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not one, technically speaking, but do tell me why,” She felt her accent morphing to mimic his. 

“There’s just so much restraint in there.” He gestured vaguely toward her, and she laughed in response. “But it’s like you’re restraining yourself from being restrained. It’s fascinating.”

“Philosophy teacher, then? That’s what you grew up to be?” Niamh said in lieu of a reply. She wasn’t interested in partaking in psychobabble, especially not about herself. That was a can of worms this guy did not want to open.

“No, I’m a barkeep.” The man looked a little bit taken aback. 

“Huh. Maybe you should have chosen a different career path.”

“With all due respect, Ms. Not-Fey, I think that teenagers with enough money to spend on something as trivial as a philosophy class are not the people that need those lessons. I’d much rather give advice to the sad people who spend half their days in one of my barstools.” 

“Oh, an altruist! How refreshing.” Niamh adjusted herself so that her back was resting more solidly against the tree trunk. “Sometimes I worry that it’ll be too far in the future and good, well-meaning people will have died out.”

“How old are you?” Now it was his turn to deflect. She didn’t push him.

She looked down at her own hands, studied the slight amounts of lines and calluses on them. “Around twenty-six, I think. It gets tricky.”

He nodded. “Archie.”

“Pardon?”

“That’s my name. Archie.”

“Terrible idea to give your name to any kind of Fey.”

“I’m trying to be a good, well-meaning person. That comes with making mistakes sometimes.”

“Natalie.” Niamh replied.

“That’s not your name.” Archie said with a sad kind of smile.

Niamh returned it. “No, it’s not.”

“I’ll call you Nat, then.” His eyes twinkled. “Since it’s Nat your real name.”

A genuine snort erupted out of Niamh before she could stop it. 

Archie lit up. “Aha! I got you!”

Niamh laughed. “Got me how?”

He smiled. “I found some humanity still in there.”

“And humanity is, what, humor?” Niamh raised an eyebrow, but there was a genuine desperation behind her voice that surprised her. The corner of Archie’s mouth ticked down; he’d noticed, too.

“It’s not something so easy to pin down,” He replied, a little gentler. “But I think a good laugh over a dad joke from someone you don’t know is part of it, somehow.” He stood up. “I have to get back into town. The wife’ll start to worry,” Archie rolled his eyes, even as a warm smile pulled up the corners of his mouth. “Feel free to stop by the bar if you’d like.”

Joel did his best to shake off the layers of sleep as he got in the car to drive over to his brother, Grian’s, apartment. He was throwing some kind of party, Joel thought. Honestly, he wasn’t sure, and he’d woken up from a nap that had gone a little too long less than fifteen minutes ago, so he wasn’t all there, mentally speaking. Or physically, what are you doing? He thought, as he repeatedly tried to open the locked passengers-side door of his car, despite not having a bag to throw there or a passenger. “Get it together,” he muttered aloud, before unlocking the car and slipping into the driver’s side and putting his phone on the little magnetic stand he’d stuck on the vent. He pulled up a playlist and Lizzie’s address (they’d be moving in together soon, for next semester, but for now she was still living by herself in a tiny apartment a little over five minutes away), pressed play on the music and rolled gently out of the driveway. He might project a bad boy persona, with the leather and the too-big glasses, but even bad boys cared about safe driving practices. Car crashes are sad, boys. He’d asked Grian and Jimmy to match, even though Jimmy wasn’t technically related to either of them but he was close enough to a brother, with how they loved and teased him equally that Joel and Grian had agreed that he’d been effectively adopted. Plus, Joel really thought everything with Lizzie was going to work out, knock on wood, so eventually they were actually going to be brothers. He could admit that having that tie with Jimmy was probably the third-best part of what he imagined getting married to Lizzie would be like. (The first two being getting married to Lizzie, obviously, and the cake.)

He bopped and sang along to “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter as he parallel parked on the street below Lizzie’s apartment. He got out and checked his parking job carefully – pretty good, a little too close to the curb but still solid – before grabbing his phone off the vent and shooting her a text to let her know he’d gotten there. Before long he heard the little jingle of her giving the text a thumbs up, and he stood to wait for her semi-patiently, drumming out a new beat on his pant legs with his fingertips. He and Oli needed to jam again. Maybe they could get Lizzie to sing for them again. 

Speaking of Lizzie, she came tumbling out of her apartment door a little too fast, before giving Joel a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. She’d left her hair down, and it was long now, hitting around the bottom of her rib cage. Her dark roots were starting to creep in, and the bright pink dye had faded to more of a salmon color, but Joel loved it anyway. She had on a cropped T-shirt that had Empires the Musical written on it in lettering that was excessively fancy, with all kinds of loops and swirls curling around the letters. Lizzie had cropped it herself, the bright blue hem looking a little ragged under close inspection. She’d paired it with gray jeans and Converse.