#myhsfic

There is a new student. He deals with robotics, mechanics, and smells like silver and iron and aluminium and copper. He doesn’t believe in the fae. You like him and all that he creates, although you cannot go near it - or him, for that matter. His disbelief does nothing to diminish the effects of the iron and silver that constantly surrounds him. To get anywhere near this person - this idiotic person, who leaves himself so open all the time - would be suicide.

It would almost be like he wants to get taken, if not for the iron. It could also just be that he’s oblivious. And so you continue to go to your own classes - Psychology and English, humans are just so fascinating, even if their bodies are, quite frankly, shit - all the while quietly watching the oddly-eyed human engineer who caught your attention so quickly and easily on that first day.

And when you can, if you can, you get as close as possible - lock eyes with him from across a twelve-seated dining table in the library, stand three humans behind him in the line at the cafeteria - and wait, and hope, for that iron to disappear. For him to take out the small chunk of it that he’s left in his pocket because he was going to mould it into something later, for him to not smile and thank the next person who attempts to gift him a sliver of it. He leaves himself so open, and that iron on his person is the only thing keeping you from meeting him.

You hate it.

Eventually, you start calling in your favours. The girl on his floor who thanked you once in passing, automatically, but the bond latched on and you kept it for later, when you’d need it. The guy in his engineering class who once accepted your gift of a precious metal he needed for his project, and now owes you for it. The not-quite-human but not-fae-enough thing that knows his friends and siblings and once apologised for bumping into you. More, and more, and more favours are called until you have a large enough following that you’re confident in this endeavour. Now, you’re grateful for your hoarding of bonds. They will come in useful.

“Take any iron from him,” you tell them “and turn away those who try to offer more. He is mine, and I cannot reach him.”

One tries to refuse. You teach him what it means to break your word, your bond, the chains that tie you to a Faerie Lady.

He screams. No one else refuses.

“Go,” you say, and they do.

The next day, your engineer has no iron on him. For the first time, instead of meeting his eyes across the cafeteria, you move up closer. The soft clink of your tray opposite his makes him lift his eyes to meet yours. You smile, kindly. He shivers in response.

Opening with a compliment is always your best choice - gives him a chance to bind himself to you, and eliminates any possibility of you accidentally binding yourself to him. You only ever made that mistake once.

“Your designs are really quite beautiful,” you say, “the silver shines like starlight.”

“Thank you,” he replies, startled and instinctive, and you feel the first of what will be many bonds fall into place. When you smile a second time, it is like the Cheshire Cat.

“Oh, of course,” you reply, careful, because even the fae have to twist their words and watch that they aren’t bound themselves.

As time passes, things start stacking up. He accepts the food and drinks you bring him, thanks and apologises with no regard for the bonds he’s creating. You’ve taken to taking them on for him and getting them over and done with fast, for this human is yours and yours alone, and no one else will bind him.

Eventually, he will try to leave, but with the amount and force of the bonds weighing down on him, he will keep coming back to you.

Sometimes, you feel guilty for this. There’s just a hint there, the pangs occurring few and far between, and you are quickly able to rid yourself of them.

You are fae. He is human.

It is how things like this work.

But sometimes you glance over at the humans in their parties and see two sitting by each other, laughing, or a girl holding her friend’s hair back as she pukes into the toilet, and you wish, just sometimes, that you had that too. That you could have that kind of relationship with someone without binding them and having to constantly watch your worlds lest you bind yourself back.

But then you look back at your engineer - Dirk, he said his name was, so careless with it - as he sleeps, and you look down at the party underneath where you sit in his open window and remember how he laughed at your joke a while ago, and you think.

Maybe he knows what he’s doing.

And maybe, just maybe, he knows what happens to those who bind themselves to fae, and he wanted it. But he got you instead, and you’ll just have to protect him from all who could give him what he wants.

Because Dirk Strider is your engineer now, your friend now, and you won’t let harm befall him.

Not now, or ever.