okay hear me OUT: Kelpie!Qifrey
-> oh, cygnus, don't you have enough aus? why are you sketching out another one? YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY AUs!!!
Olly being a recluse//genius inventor living in a waterside town [pond//lake//ocean//what have you] and on his way home from delivering a commission, he finds this gorgeous man slumped in the road
He's so very out of it, soaked in blood that the rain hasn't washed away, yet conscious enough to keep a wavery grasp on his human form
↓ Which is a necessity, when he's sustained injuries that his equine form-- no matter how arcane-- would surely perish from. He needs to purge whatever thing he's eaten that's made him so weak, then he'll be able to heal. Surely.
Only, he never gets the chance. Because of course he doesn't. [Notoriously unlucky, you see, especially given his albinism and missing eye- Qifrey is a far cry from the usual perfection of the fair folk]
Olruggio takes him back to his house, after a quick assessment of his surface injuries [nothing too egregious, thank the stars] and nurses him back to health in his own bed
↓ When he asks for his name, when Qifrey finally seems lucid enough to give it, it's purely because he doesn't want to keep calling this pale gorgeous man 'stranger' in his head. But of course, being fair, Qifrey immediately takes it the wrong way-- thinking he's been found out somehow and Olruggio was using his current weakness to take control of him
Thankfully, it's mostly dismissed as fevered hysteria, and Olly doesn't pry too deeply into it- he'd probably react negatively to waking up in a stranger's bed too
[It's written off as memory loss, in the duration of Qifrey's stay. He did hit his head pretty hard, after all, it's normal. Explainable.]
It's only after weeks of acclimating to each other, and brushes in the forest [and town, every blue moon] that their relationship tips into friendship, and then barely a handful of days more before Qifrey falls entirely
-> The little house Qifrey had maintained by his lake crumbles, and he finds himself once more in Olruggio's abode- soaked in rain and blood. He moves in, and he surrenders entirely to the force that is the sky's kindest, most radiant star
"My name is only for you to use. Do not share it, and do not give it to anyone else. I beg of you."
