freosan

For fullaquirkes. Happy Christmas!

For this fic, assume an AU where Dreams and Undying did not happen.

Well, they’re immortal, more or less. She a bit more than he, or maybe not. She’s come back from the dead before. Twice. He probably hasn’t, since most of the really nasty supernatural diseases don’t affect things like him.

She wonders why not. There should be some things, right? Shouldn’t there be a faerie version of lycanthropy? At the very least there should be some faeries, like some humans, who think that they’re something else.

****
James was dead. She’d known he’d die eventually, being human no matter how much he protested, but… he was dead. And he didn’t even have the decency to continue walking around.

She went to the funeral dressed as a bad imitation of a Goth, which got her a lot of stares, but allowed her to think he was still around, just a little bit. She sat in the front, just aside from his grieving children, who’d lost their mother just a year ago and now lost their father too.

No one knew who she was. She was much too young to be his best friend, almost his sister. He’d been in his eighties. She looked twenty-seven. She’d looked twenty-seven for sixty-nine years.
****

But she doesn’t spend much time with faeries. Not for a while now. Which is why, maybe, she’s so nervous about coming here.

No, that’s not even it. It’s him. Everyone’s nervous about him. Well, no, that’s not quite right. Everyone’s terrified of everything about him.

She is not terrified of him; she is fully in control of herself. She tells herself that over and over and only calms down a little when she realizes that it’s been three decades since he’s hunted her kind. He’s on to something else now, though she’s not sure what – nothing that anyone she hangs around with is.

She pushes the old glass door open, carefully. There aren’t any wards against her, so she steps inside.

This place is old and familiar – she knew it when the building around it was brand-new.

****
“If you walk three times widdershins around a liminal place, you’ll find yourself elsewhere. Usually it’s Faerie,” Rain said, eyeing the standing stone. “Remember Allvers? The weird seasons? That was a liminal place.”

“What’s widdershins? Wait, I know this one, it’s counterclockwise, right?”

“Yes. But it also means in the direction that you can’t see your shadow.”

He took her hand, sending a little shiver running up her arm to her spine, and led her around the standing stone, and they found themselves elsewhere.
****

She needs to go to Faerie. She breathes deeply and does so.

Nothing changes but the direction of the wind, but it’s enough. A world of new smells opens in front of her, strange grasses, stagnant water, something like blood but without the metal. She’s here.

“Ah, little one. I wondered how long until you came to me.”

He’s behind her. She turns around to see him perched on a fallen tree, his hair a bit longer, his clothing updated to be only fifty years out of fashion instead of a hundred, his eyes every bit as predatory as the last time she saw him.

****
“Where’s he gone?”

“Little one, even had he not asked me to keep that information from you, you haven’t the price to pay for it.”

“I could kill you right now.”

“I would have silver through your heart before you could so much as bark.”

“Where is he?”

“Go home, little one. I cannot tell you that.”
****

“Spare me the psychic act. I need information. Do you know what I need?” she asks. He can’t smell fear, not the way she can. He can see it, though. She does her best not to waver, not to shake. He won’t hurt her. She’s not dangerous. At the moment.

He smiles. She restrains the answering predatory growl. “I can hardly do both, little one… but at the risk of seeming psychic, I do know what you wish. The price is high.”

She throws the bag she’s carrying at his feet, where it lands with a clatter. “Latest microtech computers, three of them. Overclocked tazers. One of those palm-tops with a magical interface. Enough?”

He pulls the items out and inspects them, long delicate fingers dancing over the keys, running over the triggers, stripping and reassembling the weapons and pushing into the palm-top’s finger caps. Eventually, just when she’s ready to howl for something to break the tension, he puts them down and nods. “More than enough. Now, what exactly is it you require?”

She growls, hiding her relief in irritation. “Locations, times, dates, and tracking possibilities. And I want to know everything that’s been recorded about me. And him.”

****
They sat in a coffee shop. She wasn’t eating; she was picking at her sausage and hoping he wasn’t noticing her nerves. He probably wasn’t. Even over the confusion of scents wafting through the shop, she could make out the smell of faerie fear.

“I can’t stay around,” he said, holding his cup of tea like a lifeline.

“Why not?” she whined.

“You’ve – I told you about the dreams. I told you what would happen if you –”

“I had to, Rain, I didn’t have a choice! It was spring, you couldn’t’ve stopped me, I would have killed you!” she said. Her voice cracked.

“But now it’s fall, and you might kill me anyway,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I won’t kill a friend. I’m not like you.” She meant for it to be cruel, but regretted it right away. The self-loathing on his face was painful.

“I’m leaving, B. Please don’t try to follow me.”
****

“I see. Mounting a hunt, are we? It’s gratifying to see one such as you following in my footsteps.” He slips his fingers back into the palm-top, experimenting while he thinks.

“I. Am not. Like you,” she says, finishing with a whine that she covers with a growl. God, she hopes not. She’s got a reason, right? So she’s not exactly doing what he’s doing.

Anyway, her prey is going to still be alive at the finish, she hopes. Assuming she doesn’t kill him for being a complete jerk.

“Of course not, little one. I am much better at it.” She sighs. “If I weren’t, would you be coming to me to learn that he was last sighted on the fifth of this month at eight fifty-three local time, in a small bagel shop just east of Newport News, Delaware? And that he has been sighted in several such establishments on a fairly regular basis, all near towns with names that recall Newport? Sloppy of him.”

He’s not that sentimental. Maybe he really is that bad. She wouldn’t disbelieve it. But maybe it’s a signal.

Maybe he’s tired of running, and tired of waiting for her to catch up.

“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” she tells him. He smiles and nods. She is suddenly very, very tired, and she glares suspiciously at him, though she hasn’t heard a single note from his wings – and her hearing is very good nowadays.

She stifles her yawn but he notices anyway. “You should rest, little one. It’s the middle of the day.” He motions to the ground beside him, where there is a soft, mossy hollow. She shakes her head.

“I can’t. I’ll lose the time. He moves fast when he wants to.”

“Time moves differently here.” She knows that, doesn’t she? She’s heard it before.

“But we don’t know differently how.” She could wake up and find a hundred years have passed back home. Rip Van Winkle, only worse. Her lover would still be alive.

“It will be all right.” He’s always right, isn’t he? She’s not dangerous and he doesn’t hunt wolves anymore. The ground looks inviting. She’s so tired.

She steps forward, and he pats the spot near him – it’s condescending but well, it’s him. She curls up and sleeps.

****
She will be chasing him. She will look desperately through the crowd and finally, finally, see a shock of black hair, the edge of a trenchcoat. He will turn without sensing her into an alley and she will push through the masses of people, so that they’ll be all alone when she reaches the alley’s mouth.

She will shout out, “Rain!” and he will turn around in shock, not expecting that she’d still care enough to find him after five years. She will run and hug him and he will not react at first for surprise but will eventually pull her into a perfect, sweet embrace.

They will kiss. She will cry. He will try not to but his tears will leave rivulets in his white makeup. She will apologize for being too rash, he will apologize for being too chicken, they will kiss again. He will tell her she’s obsessed. She will tell him he likes it. They will climb the nearest fire escape and sit and catch up and in between questions make out like teenagers.
****

She wakes up to changed light, to his fingers running gently through her hair. She thinks at first it’s another’s touch, but they’re pulled away so fast she hardly remembers they were there.

“Good morning, little one. I have the information you asked for.” He waves his fingers, still in the caps. She sits up, then thinks better of it, and stands up. He’s still the one with all the power but she can assuage her anxiety a little if she feels like she’s got the upper hand.

“So what’s in there about me?”

“There’s not a lot. You’ve been covering your tracks well.” Courtesy of a few other friends of hers, mostly, and of the Hunter himself, though he’s polite enough not to mention that. “What there is I have put in this file,” he adds, waving his new computer, “which I have sent encrypted to your palm-top. You know the key.”

She does; a ten-twenty-four bit randomized key that would take years and massive resources to crack, if anyone could even get their hands on information sent through the faerie wireless. Faerie is slow to change, but it has many very old, very smart citizens. Faerie technology does amazing things with human bases.

“I shall have to remember that I owe you for the palm-top. An excellent piece of work.”

“Thank you,” she says, because one should never forget one’s manners in Faerie.

“You’re welcome, little one,” he says. “Do say hello to him for me, when you find him.”

“I’ll be sure to.”

She walks thrice sunwise around the standing stone and the wind shifts, bringing familiar scents: gasoline, sewage, iron-infused blood. She has her information, she has her prey, she must begin her tracking.

She walks forward.

For K-san, who wrote a lovely novel last November about demonic posession, cultists and the wizarding Mafia.

PG, Angie/Mickey/Van, 2 650 words.

When Angie got her own apartment, it came as something of a relief. In the four years since – that – had happened, things had gotten better. Damien no longer jumped when he saw her. She hadn’t had a nightmare in… well, enough time. He’d even stopped checking her room for whatever it was he checked for. She’d put basic wards and more mundane traps around her room, so she knew when he checked. And when he stopped. She never mentioned it.

*****

Van being here doesn’t make it a home, but it does make it safer. There are still things she needs protecting from, and things she needs to learn. She doesn’t want to admit that; she’s been through enough already. Van knows she knows, and doesn’t press the point.

*****

It was still good to get out of Damien’s house. She’d brought him nothing but grief, no matter what he said, and she didn’t like owing him. Also, he wasn’t comfortable around her – almost always, but not always, and she hated when he’d look at her and wince.

There were a lot of reasons to leave, but none of them were the ones she’d have liked to have.

*****

She’s a little disorganized shading to messy, and her walls are half black and half white and covered in band posters, sports pennants, and assorted subculture paraphernalia. The only things she really cares about are the journals and the scrapbook, lined up neatly on a half-hidden bookshelf.

Ming doesn’t show up in photos, but she likes to take them, and she gave Angie the scrapbook on the third Halloween (never Christmas) after Angie met her. It’s full of normal images of a normal sister and brother having a normal life. Most days Angie just likes knowing that it’s there, but some days she can’t stop flipping through the pages. Those are the bad ones.

*****

Van showed up about a week after she moved in, saying something about lacking barriers and carrying more guns than an armory. Angie only put up a token argument. Together, she and Damien had built something like a family, and it wasn’t comfortable to be living without that protection anymore.

She could tell too. Malmorgra hadn’t tried anything in a while, and it had been starting to get – not better, but easier – but when Angie moved out, the nightmares came back.

*****

Van isn’t around much during the day, but that’s okay, because Angie has classes and clubs and something approximating a real life. She’s majoring in the arts – she has no idea what she’ll do with it, but she does good work, even when it’s distressingly graphic.

Her classmates all think she’s a romantically consumptive artist type, and she plays along, because it’s easier to pass off fainting spells by saying she’s forgot to eat than by explaining that the voices in her head want her to kill something. The psychologist she visited – once – was nice enough, but she really doesn’t think he’d understand.

*****

When Van moved in, the nightmares left again.

*****

Van is always there at night, when Angie needs it, not that she’d tell him that in a million years. More than once he’s woken up the upstairs neighbors with gunshots; Angie always yells at him a bit, but he always has a good reason.

Once he’s made the fifth circle of the perimeter of the building, Van settles on the couch. Angie doesn’t know if he sleeps and has never asked.

*****

Damien didn’t want her to leave, of course. Overprotective, scared, maybe with misapprehensions of responsibility. Angie knew how to take care of herself – well, mostly. And there was nothing out there worse than she was herself.

*****

On the really bad days, Angie doesn’t go to class, and Van doesn’t leave the house. He’s never in the same room with her, but she can sense his presence – reassuring or painful, depending on whether Malmorgra is being talkative, but always there. It’s nice, almost. Van is learning silence. Someday, he might even learn subtlety.

*****

Angie had thought she’d be prepared for college. She was smart, she’d gotten into her top school, she’d lived in a group home for years, and she had a guardian angel. What kind of trouble could she get into?

Not so. Her first month was horrible; she missed classes, embarrassed herself (so no one else had noticed she was taking the wrong bus to the opposite end of campus. She knew.) and failed her first test.

Mickey showed up a week into the second month, dragged her out of bed, made her tea, yelled at Van for being emotionally retarded, and teased her until going to class was the less stressful choice.

*****

She has friends, here, though her old friends have all gone off to different schools. They’re all artists, emotional (don’t shorten that), have wardrobes that feature a lot of black and lace and heavy eyeliner. They enjoy long involved philosophical bullshit sessions.

Once Angie brings up the idea of possession, quite naturally she thinks. There is a moment of awkward silence, then somebody says, yes, maybe, but… and someone else says, a lot of people the Church said were possessed were schizo, and the conversation derails into the idiocy of the patriarchal model of religion, and Malmorgra laughs and laughs.

*****

The second month was easier. Not by much, but enough. Mickey took time out from whatever was he did to visit her at least once a week, make sure she’d eaten, say all the things that she’d yell at Van for saying. He didn’t let Van off the hook either – he found fault with everything, up to and including the way he cleaned his guns (Jeeze, Van, just because you’re indestructible doesn’t mean your weapons are, even if you do view them as a phallic substitute!).

*****

Now Mickey is as much of a staple as Van is, keeping her sane in a much less ethereal way. Van keeps her calm, but Mickey keeps her happy.

He encourages her to go out with friends, take in the occasional party, play, or concert, to have sleepovers or to date.

When he comes out with that last one, she laughs at him. She can’t help it; she can’t see herself liking the casual sex thing, and of course she can’t be open enough for a relationship with someone… normal. There, she’s said it.

He nods, and promises to see what he can do about it.

*****

There was a Halloween dance and just the thought of it was enough to send her into a panic, so she didn’t set foot out of her apartment on the thirty-first. It’d been bad enough in high school, when she could just skip that day and not have to hear about it; this was all over campus. Looking out her window, she could see zombies, vampires, and demons walking down the street. She kept the blinds drawn.

Van didn’t like the holiday either, and since she was inside, he was too. Mickey, however, loved it, and was at her door at eleven in a red velvet cape with a skull mask over half his face.

No, she is not coming out.

Yes she is, she doesn’t want to be a complete shut-in. Or maybe she does? In which case he’ll happily go away, unloved and alone, and probably cut himself to let his agony out.

He is a manipulative brat and needs to keep out of where he’s not wanted.

She is scaring her friends and anyway, what’s the problem?

He should know what the problem is.

He’ll protect her, and even get that trigger-happy hermit of an angel to come protect her to.

And so it was that Angie, in a full-skirted gown with blonde hair piled on her head and a slash of red around her throat, swept into the ballroom at the stroke of midnight flanked by Prince Prospero and Othello.

Her classmates were surprised, but not half as surprised as she was.

*****

Angie has a certain set limit of social interaction she can take; after a week she becomes completely agoraphobic and has to shut herself in her room to reset. This is difficult, because these are the times when her cravings for grace are strongest.

About every other week she does this, Van and Mickey have a blazing argument just outside her door. She doesn’t mention that she can hear them, but she knows the arguments are about the drug. Specifically, getting her back on it. Van is deeply opposed to this. Mickey is not.

*****

She visited home for Thanksgiving, and somehow ended up the central topic of conversation, even though she was pretty sure that Mickey or even Damien did much more interesting things than she did. Ming, waving a glass of I-do-not-drink-wine, pressed her for gossip and details of everything she’d even glanced at on campus, and Damien seemed excited, when he could get a word in edgewise.

They had to be the weirdest family ever, but they were definitely the real thing.

*****

Angie doesn’t do other drugs; none of them would compare, and also, the withdrawal will only make everything worse. Her new friends give up passing her the joint or the absinthe or whatever by the second month. Van approves of this, and disapproves of her hanging out with people who do drugs and are also godless heathens. Angie is just as happy to have that excuse to never introduce him to them.

*****

The fourth time they had the argument, Angie stepped out of her room and glared at both of them. Then she explained in cold, clipped words that she did not now, and would not ever, need them to decide her substance abuse habits for her. Then she told them to get out of her apartment and not come back until they could be adults.

When they did come back, Mickey had a broken nose, and Van had a black eye and a distinct aura of superiority. There were no further arguments.

*****

Very few people can say they have a wizard and an angel looking out for them because they’re possessed by a demon. Angie isn’t one of them, not because it’s not true but because it’s not sane. No matter that the angel puts up holly to keep her protected in the winter, and the wizard paints her door with arcane symbols and pours salt around the boundaries, and the demon sends her disturbing images and chips away at her sense of self.

If she is delusional, at least she’s very thorough about it.

*****

Mickey was still hung up on the idea of her dating, or maybe being seen to be dating, in December. He bought her a dress for the Christmas dance (weren’t themed dances for high schoolers?) in black velvet and blue silk, and insisted that if she didn’t find someone to take her, he’d do it himself.

Because she was still somewhat annoyed at him, she convinced Van that he really needed to be her bodyguard that night. Mickey’s face when he saw the pair of them wearing matching black roses almost made up for the effort.

*****

People have started to ask her about her ‘boyfriend’ – is she really dating him? Is he as scary as he looks? What about that guy at the Halloween dance? – and she always laughs and tells them that he’s just a childhood friend. They both are. It’s almost true.

*****

New Year’s at home was a welcome break. Damien was happier than Angie remembered seeing him, and Angie had to think (Malmorgra said) it was because she wasn’t around anymore, but maybe Ming really was good for him. Certainly she brought a lot of life to the party – between her and Mickey, Angie didn’t have time to be depressed.

Damien didn’t flinch away from her once the whole break.

*****

Van keeps telling her things, little things that she doesn’t need to know, like which saint is in charge of teenagers (she doesn’t remember) and how to slay a dragon (cut off its head, quickly). She has no idea why. Perhaps they’re his mental equivalent of silver bullets.

*****

On Valentine’s Day, she woke up to a room covered in rose petals. Stepping over them, wondering when she’d started dreaming in scents, led her to the living room, where every available surface was covered in red roses. She froze.

Mickey, standing in the middle of it all with a huge grin on his face, produced a tea tray and a box of chocolates from absolutely nowhere and told her to consider this his bid for her affections.

She sat down, very hard, on the nearest chair, missed, and sat up in a flurry of red. Oddly, her first thought was to wonder where Van was.

*****

Mickey is a very gentle and persistent suitor – that’s the only word for it. He’s not a boyfriend, not a significant other or anything so common – he is courting her. They go out dancing, to fine dinners, on romantic walks – or flights, sometimes. Angie is not open about it, but all her friends know. They like Mickey, and they approve.

Damien doesn’t, but he says, if it makes her happy. Angie thinks she is. Van doesn’t either, and adds no qualifiers.

****

A few weeks into the spring semester, Van and Mickey had another fight, and this time Angie had no idea why. She refused to get involved.

Van stayed away from the apartment that night for the first time ever, and Angie couldn’t sleep.

*****

Van is not around lately, and Angie finds that she is more and more nervous. Malmorgra says that she’s driven him off. Angie doesn’t believe it – doesn’t want to – but she can’t see another explanation.

*****

Angie woke up at three one night to find Van sitting on the tree outside her window. He didn’t notice her, or she didn’t think he did, but the sight of him was physically painful and she almost stopped breathing.

The next day, she had several opportunities to mention it to Mickey, but she didn’t take any of them.

*****

When Mickey finally kisses her, she realizes she is going about this all wrong.

*****

She left a note for Van in the tree, and got Mickey to sit on the couch and wait; then she paced a hole in the carpet for half an hour until the angel finally showed up.

It took her a while to get up the courage to explain what she wanted, and when she finally got it out, the men didn’t react for several seconds.

With Malmorgra chanting pessimism in the back of her mind, she was all ready to head back to her room and never talk to either of them again, but Mickey shrugged and said that, if it was what she wanted, they could probably swing it.

Van didn’t look convinced at all.

*****

She spends more time with Van; he needs it more. She limits her kisses to the cheek until he starts responding, then moves to his lips, his hands, his neck. He has an amazing, if subtle, blush.

She still goes on dates with Mickey, but now they bring Van along every other week. Ninety percent of the time, the evening does not end in a fistfight.

*****

In April, coming home from class, Angie spotted Mickey cornering Van against a tree. She was ready to stride over and give them a piece of her mind for fighting again, but then Mickey moved in for a kiss, and Van let him.

She smiled, and had ‘Van and Mickey, sitting in a tree, kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-en-gee’ stuck in her head all afternoon.

*****

Angie may be doomed to strange relationships, but she wouldn’t give them up for the world.