Chapter Text
Scott stood frozen in the doorway, full plate of food on the table behind him like he hadn’t expected the encounter at his door to take too long. His lips hung just slightly open, grip loose on the handle, and he wouldn’t take his stare off Jimmy for a second.
Right. Well, someone had to be the first to talk.
“Hi.” Yeah, great start, real elaborate.
“You’re back.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t go home.”
“Yeah, well, I -” he gestured past Scott to the kitchen “- don’t wanna starve, do I.”
“Oh!” Like I forgot you needed to eat; like I thought you were just here because you wanted to see me.
And it… Well, there was a part of Jimmy that had wanted to just leave without saying goodbye. Not a big one, mind. But Lizzie had done that, all those years ago, and it’d left him with a lingering need to solidify his farewells. And if he was stopping by, then he should at least stay for lunch, because Scott’s pantry was still stocked for two, and it wasn’t like he’d asked Joel if there was a room free at his place, and there probably wasn’t anyway with the number of partners he had living there already, and and and -
Point being, he had a room here, and he was going to use it while he could.
“Yeah.” A beat. “So -”
“I haven’t cooked for you.” Scott swallowed. “I - I mean, I thought I was never gonna see you again.”
“That’s fine, I’ll figure something -”
“No, you take my plate, I’ll sort myself out.”
Just like Scott to try and make a sacrifice that nobody was asking him to make. “Really, it’s fine. Keep it.”
He withdrew. “Okay.”
Jimmy hesitated, reluctant to step through the curtain of silence that split them apart. Maybe it was a stupid idea, to walk right back into the prison where he’d just been held for months. Maybe Scott had changed his mind, and he’d do his best to make sure he didn’t make the same mistake of letting his petal leave again.
… Or maybe he was just a guy, who’d assumed that Jimmy wasn’t coming back, who didn’t really know where to go after this either.
Jimmy ended up grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl, tossing it back and forth between two hands, while Scott plowed through his veggies. This time, when he bit into it, it wasn’t by compulsion after days of holding off. This time, it was just a piece of fruit.
And, what do you know? It tasted sweeter that way.
“How did it go,” Scott asked, though it didn’t have much pep to it - nothing like the sing-song tone Jimmy had come to expect. This Scott was… not so much sombre as reserved? More formal, maybe.
“With Lizzie?”
“I don’t know who that is,” he said, his tone unwavering.
“Oh.” That’s right - he never actually explained what he was doing to Scott.
Maybe if he’d known, he would have let you leave sooner, idiot.
(No point in dwelling like that.)
“... So?”
“She’s my sister.”
Scott gave him a look of incredulity, fork paused half to his lips.
“Seriously! I - I dunno, I guess she ran off when I was really small, and our parents never told me why, and I just didn’t ask ‘cos I was twelve years old, but she’s been here, apparently, and we reconnected.”
“And what does this have to do with Joel?”
“Oh, they’re married.”
He gestured with the fork, circling it out in front of him like go on, eyes still wide.
“I dunno what you want from me here! She met him when she got here, and they got on, and now I have a brother-in-law, apparently. That’s it.”
“Come on,” said Scott, “there has to be more to the story than that.”
“Ask Lizzie, then, if you must know.”
“Is she coming here?”
Jimmy paused, his face pulling in with thought. “Maybe. At some point. If I’m staying.”
“... Are you?”
“I dunno.”
Well, it’s my house, so I need to know if I have to strip the bed, or -”
“You were never gonna strip the bed one day after I left -”
“You don’t know that!-”
“Listen, I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid -”
“I want to meet your sister,” said Scott, and it was so sincere that Jimmy stopped cold in the middle of the argument that he’d just full-speed launched into.
“Yeah?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I do.” (Those eyes were less wide from shock and more pleading now.)
Right. “Fine.”
Scott, finally, paused to eat the bite of food that had been waving wildly through the air on the end of his fork for the last two minutes. “I did swap out your pillows, you know.”
“Really?”
“Mhm,” he nodded again, around what remained of the broccoli floret. “Thought it’d be good to freshen up in there.”
Jimmy didn’t respond. It was funny, sort of, to think of his new bedroom as that. He remembered thinking of it as a prison, once upon a time.
Maybe it was a bad, bad sign that he couldn’t pull on that fear any more. Maybe he shouldn’t stay the night after all.
“If I did want to go back for the night,” said Jimmy, “would you take me home?”
“Of course.”
“... And then come get me in the morning?”
Scott’s eyeline turned evasive. “Well, you know where to find me.”
So that was what they did.
It was a little chilling to go back to his house. There it stood, exactly where he’d left it all those weeks ago.
The back door sat ajar, same as before - okay, so he was probably not getting his cat back any time soon, then. The halls were as cold as the night air and his cupboards sat semi-full of foods he knew now would taste like sand and ash.
The bed was comfortable, sure, but it really didn’t feel like it was his any more.
He slept, just about. His dreams were fuzzy and full of mixed-up references to the world he’d been dragged into and the world he’d left behind. Back out on his boat, he tangled a blue-skinned Lizzie in a fishing net; docked at the end of Scott’s garden, he explained to his mother what he’d been doing with his plot in the allotment. He woke up a couple of times in the night, stressed and sweating uncomfortably, opening the window and then closing it again until the sunrise supplied permission for him to get back up and going.
It felt awfully lonely to go through the motions of the morning in silence. Washing and dressing and latching the door. On the bright side, at least this time he knew where he was heading when he stepped outside and followed the path along the tree line.
“Morning,” Scott’s voice lilted from behind one tree or another.
Jimmy jumped. “Bloody hell.”
“I guess I’m not really in a position to ask you what you’re doing here so early?”
Birds chirped around them, heralding the morning. “Yeah, I, uh, couldn’t really - get to sleep, properly, y’know. Too cold.”
“Uh-huh?” Those yellow eyes, the way they glinted like gold coins against the early morning blue, were unmistakably familiar - but the sharpness in them, the cruelty Jimmy used to see, was gone, dulled away like so much edge on a rusting knife.
(Man, it was weird, the way one night of sleeping alone could tint the rose right into your glasses overnight.)
“Well,” Scott continued, “let’s get moving, shall we?”
Which was, in retrospect, the only thing they really could have done.
The next day went by. Jimmy followed Scott to the allotment.
And the next. Jimmy watched as Scott sewed another gaudy patch onto his already gaudy jacket’s thinning elbow.
And the next. Jimmy made dinner, because it wasn’t fair on Scott that he hadn’t before.
Jimmy dragged Scott to the Shopping District, because he hadn’t left the house in three days.
Jimmy felt a chill blow through the house, and borrowed one of Scott’s overshirts to ward it off.
Jimmy wandered into the kitchen in the morning, hair still messy from a good night’s sleep, and said, “Ooh, you look fancy.”
“Yeah, um,” said Scott, “it’s court day again.”
“Already?”
“That’s the thing about weeks,” he shrugged, “they come around every seven days. Even with our time… difference, whatever, thing.”
“No, I just - wait, so what happened last week?”
“I… went to court?”
“Without me?”
“Yeah. I thought you were gone, you know.”
“And your response to that was to just -?”
“Well, what else was I gonna do?”
I don’t know. Mope, maybe. Scott seemed like the type to fall to pieces without him.
Then again, he hadn’t even come to say goodbye to Jimmy’s face, had he?
Eh. Mixed messages.
“That’s my shirt,” said Scott, instead of carrying on the matter.
“Oh, yeah.”
He grinned - “Why are you wearing my shirt?”
“I’ve been wearing your shirts for weeks, haven’t I?”
“Yeah, but then you brought your own shirts back here.”
“Do you want it back?”
“No. No, you keep it.”
“Alright.”
Something about it lit a spark in Scott’s eyes, and Jimmy wasn’t overly enthusiastic to find out what. “So, court?”
“Yes! Right! Are you gonna come this week, or are you gonna do your own thing?”
“No, I’ll come. Y’know, never know if Grian’s gonna be there, and all.”
They went, and Grian wasn’t there, but now that Jimmy was a plus one rather than a purse dog he had a lot more fun sitting in on the meeting anyway. (Seeing his hesitance at ending up on the floor again, Scott had nonchalantly offered Jimmy the spot in his lap instead. He’d… declined.)
Scott’s fellow courtiers expressed various degrees of surprise at his return. Cleo was the most vocally impressed. “I thought he died or something.”
“Nope,” said Jimmy, fighting the urge to do some sort of jazz-hands-gesture, “here I am.”
“I mean, I’m glad,” they continued, “with the way Scott was -”
“We don’t need to get into all that,” Scott interrupted.
“Yeah?” Cleo’s eyes flicked between the two of them. “Alright.”
At the other end of the spectrum was Scar, who had either been caught up on the whole business by Grian already, or was just taking it in stride very blithely, from the way he didn’t spare much more than a pleasant “Welcome back, Timmy!” (The nickname felt a little wrong coming off somebody else’s lips. Then again, he couldn’t really begrudge Scar for copying Grian, the guy with the most seniority in the matter.)
“Hello,” he waved, “no Grian?”
“Haven’t seen him, no!”
“Right.” Disappointing, but not distressing any more. “Well, hope your week’s been alright?”
“Oh, yes! You see, I was talking to my good friend Mumbo…”
Scar’s meandering tale of buttercups and barn specs kept Jimmy distracted through everyone else in the room falling silent, at which point Scott broke through his interest with a warm hand on his shoulder and a little pressure.
“If you two wouldn’t mind,” he said, “we were going to get started?”
Carefully worded - no demands. Not even a request. Just a reminder, and a polite implication that Jimmy had come with a guest.
(He’d come a long way from being the lapdog at Scott’s knee, hadn’t he?)
Instead perching on the arm of the chair, Jimmy followed proceedings with quiet engagement, although he did take the liberty of making several side comments in Scott’s ear whenever the urge struck him. Scott never let his composure crack, but Jimmy could tell when his blinks were just a little too long to be automatic, his breaths a little too deep to not be smoothing back laughter. Winding Scott up, too, became more fun when he didn’t have stakes to bind him to always backing down in the end.
In the courtyard, at the end, Scott finally dropped his mask enough to give Jimmy a look that could’ve killed. (He couldn’t hide the upturned corner of his lips from underneath it, though.) “Is it too late for me to take it all back?”
“Oi,” said Jimmy, “what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re so badly behaved! I can’t believe you!”
“You like it,” Jimmy argued. It was nice to be able to do that - to knowingly mouth off, and then grin about it, rather than being punished for behaving out of line.
Scott didn’t offer a response to his accusation. “So, what are we doing this afternoon?”
Alright; that was a win as far as Jimmy was concerned. “Should probably eat, at least.”
“You want to go back home for lunch?”
“Actually,” he’d been thinking about this, “I think we should go out. I haven’t been to Scar’s bakery yet.”
“We’re having elven cookies for lunch, are we?”
Jimmy paused. “That can’t be all he sells.”
“It's the signature dish. But we could go to a couple of different places if you wanted! And I could take you by Cleo’s to see the gallery?”
So that was exactly what they did. Cleo’s being closest, they stopped there first; really, it was more of a statue garden than a gallery, as far as Jimmy was concerned. Intricately detailed tableaux of sculptures playing, chatting, eating, sleeping, dotted a front yard where the dandelions grew at the feet of the figures in full force. They must have been carved from wood rather than stone, but they had a smoothness to them that was either magically borne or came from some very dedicated polishing.
Jimmy poked at one of the statues, and its cup fell out of its hand and smashed on a rock. He flinched back.
Scott made a noise, loud and disappointed, and Jimmy prepared himself to be mercilessly admonished about the whole thing, put down for his eternal clumsiness.
All Scott ended up saying, though, was “Damn it; let’s go tell Cleo.”
They didn’t seem best pleased by the news, but they didn’t seem particularly bothered, either. “Long as you didn’t get hurt?”
“No,” said Scott. And then, with a glance back at Jimmy, “I don’t think.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Okay,” said Cleo. “It’s good to see you again so soon, actually. I don’t know when the last time you stopped by was.”
Scott hummed. “Me neither. You’ve built the whole display up quite a bit!”
“Yeah, I mix things up as they come to me. And sometimes Joe chips in for brainstorming. But really - seems like I only ever see you at court these days, it’s nice to be proven wrong. Although I suppose it makes sense. You’ve got a new reason to go walkies now, don’t you?”
Jimmy bristled. “What’re you trying to say?”
“I didn’t say it was a bad thing! Long as it gets him out the house, right?”
“You - I don’t -” I don’t appreciate being treated like his dog “- you take that back.” (It wasn’t even the first time one of the fae had openly made that comparison to his face. First Bdubs, now Cleo. Was it true? Did Jimmy just give off the air of being Scott's dog to these people? Or had they all come together in agreement, gossiping behind his back?)
“In fairness,” Scott interjected with an arm on Jimmy’s shoulder once again, “I have been keeping to myself these past few years. Like, I know people, but I don’t see people - I work from home as well, you know? So it’s nice to have a change! And if you keep running off to meet new people, that’s more opportunities for me.”
Jimmy squinted at him, unsure how this was supposed to help the faeries’ case.
“You’re helping,” Scott continued. “And as much as I might like to, I’m not actually going to put you on a leash.”
The mental image of that was more than enough to throw off Jimmy’s train of thought entirely. He tried to put up a more concrete defense against the concept, but couldn’t find the words for it, and ended up spluttering all the way to Scar’s bakery.
Scar didn’t help his case whatsoever. “So, you wanna taste my kisses, folks?”
“We’d like two of each flavour,” Scott smiled - and, at Jimmy’s raised eyebrow, “unless you want to share?”
“Your money,” Jimmy shrugged.
“An excellent choice, gentlemen,” said Scar, “it’s really the only way to choose a favourite! And, Scott, because you’re a new customer, I’ll fill you in on the magical flavour varieties and what they do.” Standard elven cookies, delicious and nutritious; Elven Kisses, with a weak transportation spell that shifts you a little ways away from where you started; and the Elven Surprise, which was… a surprise.
Scott paid for his half-dozen, in a pretty little box with green-gold trim, and took them out towards the edge of the district, landing by the edge of a fairly substantial river.
“Wonder where this water goes,” Jimmy mused. “If it flows towards the ocean. I mean, you’d think, wouldn’t you, but everything’s topsy-turvy round here, you can never be sure.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Scott, cookie halfway to his mouth. “I don’t keep track of that sort of thing.”
“Well - fisherman,” Jimmy gestured to himself, “can’t blame me for trying to suss out the water.”
“For all I know, it might be different every day,” he shrugged.
“Maybe.”
The standard cookie was surprisingly good - they might have all been touched up with magic, or it might have just been fresh butter, but it practically melted in his mouth. “What are the bits in this?”
“Oh, chocolate chips?”
“I have no idea what that is, but I like it.”
“You don’t have chocolate in the mortal realm? That’s so sad.”
“Dude, you eat a lot of things I’ve never heard of. I’ve just learned to give it a go at this point.”
“And that’s been paying off for you?”
“Yeah, mostly. Some of it I’ve learned to pick around. Like that red thing.”
“... Do you mean tomatoes or peppers?”
“I have no idea.”
Scott giggled, looking down, then rapidly swept the moment away with a purple-swirled dessert, presented by the hand that wasn’t propping him up against the grass. “Ready for round two?”
“Alright,” said Jimmy, accepting the Kiss.
… The cookie.
Scott picked up his own, and held it out, so Jimmy tapped their treats together like he was toasting to their lunch. “Cheers!”
He braced himself, and took a bite, and -
“Oh my -” Scott squealed, suddenly ten feet away from Jimmy, flailing in the current where they both had landed.
The river wasn’t nearly deep enough to swim in, but even an inch of water is enough to drown you in the wrong situation, and Scott had just made it clear he didn’t have too many dealings with water under his belt. Jimmy scrambled to his feet and splashed upstream, dragging Scott to his feet by both forearms. They stood there for a second, heart rate suddenly spiking from the shock, getting their shoes completely soaked.
“My cookie,” Jimmy heard from under Scott’s breath, which was enough to shake him into laughing. It was such a ridiculous thing to focus on - it was cute.
… Oh.
Oh, no.
No, no, anything but -
“Jimmy?”
Scott looked concerned, like he wasn’t the one who had just been in danger. Yellow eyes, piercing, focused, intense. Jimmy’s heart refused to settle. “Yeah, what?”
“Are you okay? Did that freak you out? You look like you just remembered something bad.”
“... No, no, I’m fine,” Jimmy lied, and, far from the first time, cursed his stupid brain, his ever-stagnant awful luck.