Chapter Text
Once upon a time, there was a lost little changeling boy, a long-limbed wildling made for wilder places, who was given many fine things by a Master who chose him before all others. There will be more, it was said in the fitting room in front of a dizzy kaleidoscope of mirrors, as a tailor pulled a measuring tape too tightly around an underfed waist. The boy held his breath and did not say a word. You’ll have anything you want if you turn out how I think you might.
The fabric he selects is a fuchsia too bright to be ignored, and his Master smiles in a way that is almost even fond.
The boy does not know how far the expectations extend -- does not know how long he’ll be in service to this Master -- but he will contort himself into whatever shape he needs to be to fit them. He will wear the correct clothing; he will eat the correct food; he will be seen with the correct people, choose the correct teammates, sleep in the correct places. He will tame himself for this. Being chosen for greatness is a responsibility as much as it is a gift.
I’m counting on you to do this right, his Master says when the coat is finished nearly a week later, handing him the elegant paper box personally as though bestowing a knighthood. He has never owned new clothing until now, or received a gift. The paired watch, a glittering strap of gold polished to a glow that almost hurts to look at, is worth more than has ever been spent to keep him alive.
(He swallows a little bramble of bitterness that wanders too close to his mouth. Emotions like these are treasonous, ruinous things that must be locked away with the rest of his weakness.)
You’re representing me out there. Wear it proudly.
Oh, but he does.
Bede’s parents are taken by the fairies when he is five.
It is known that the fae do this; his mother had books that she read him. Courts of morgrem spirit away the unguarded, ply them with mulled wine and alcremie milk sweets that they drink and eat until their bodies forget what home used to be. It happens too quickly for goodbyes and be-goods and love-you-lots. He understands, even if it hurts.
He hopes they’re happy, wherever they are.
Once upon a time, there was a farmer’s girl, peasant stock, sturdy like a mudbray and just as brown. Seventeen is old enough to be a worker, but she was working long before that -- her hands have calluses that know the guts of a tractor, the tack of a mudsdale, the handle of an axe. She has strong arms made for cutting wood and hauling feedsacks. Laborer’s scars are worn like badges of honor and she speaks with an unapologetically rural brogue. The Motostoke Stadium lobby tries to swallow her, intimidate her, but she is a girl who is built to endure the killing winters of the southern highlands and she will not be made small in this space.
As he passes, she gives him a smile like a hearthfire. The changeling boy does not know why he stopped to look.
She doesn’t mean a thing to him. None of them do.
This is how the world ends: Something terrible and older than mercy snaps steel as easy as a wishbone, and the first wolves howl until there is nothing but the ringing in his ears. Every sound is a thousand miles underwater. He dangles liked the hanged man. Blood trickles up his lobes, up his temples, up into his hair where it dries sticky and matted. There is a storm outside so black and total it unreals the sun until no one in the world remembers what daylight is.
He is the only one left in the car. His parents left the windows open when they flew away into the woods, alight on the wings of fairies, and he waits there patiently for them to return. The rain numbs him. He spends years upside-down -- he is thirsty, but has nothing to drink but the blood in his mouth where his teeth have cracked.
(They never come back.)
He had hoped, when he was younger, that this dream would stop someday -- but he is still waiting for that, too.
Once upon a time, the changeling boy lived in a group home.
It was not as bad as the stories. They were clothed and fed to some kind of standard, if not loved. They had dollar shop crayons and shoes from charity drives, if the other children didn’t try to trick them, bully them, or steal them away. They had each other, for what little it was worth when their worlds shifted once or twice a week; Bede had friends, until they were snapped up by counterfeit parents and taken away with unrealized promises to call, to write, to visit. He didn’t much see the point in friends after that.
There are supposed to be meetings, sometimes, when the caretakers can hold him down long enough to get a brush through his tangle of platinum curls. A pretty blond boy with the face of a cherub, they tell him, should get adopted quickly if he minds his manners.
He does not want to be adopted.
(The prospectives do not like him much anyway once they actually meet him. His stillness is offputting, unnatural; the defiance in his too-violet eyes moreso. He is asked to show them a smile and he bares his teeth like a Liepard grins. You’re not my parents, he recites in his head, and maybe he is a psychic because that is the conclusion they always reach as well.)
Over the fence they are not supposed to climb, beyond the treeline they are not supposed to cross , he finds some comfort in a sack of stolen books and the crooked branches of a willow tree. He is not scared of the fairies in the woods, and they are not scared of him. Wild recognizes wild.
Once upon a time, a hatenna waddled up while the changeling boy dozed halfway through a novel much too big for him, and stretched herself across the book in his lap like a cat might settle for a nap. They remain best friends until they die.
Bede doesn’t understand how he loses to the girl.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he says aloud to no one. It’s been hours. He should sleep, like his hatenna snoring gently in his lap, but the wishing stones in his bag make his teeth itch and he can’t stop replaying the match in his head, details fuzzier every time. “She’s nobody.” He gestures rudely at the air. “The Champion endorsed her for being friends with his brother. That’s not skill, that’s nepotism.”
All of his training and fighting and scrapping on the rungs of the no-name Wyndon ladders crumble at the feet of a lizard, a donkey, and a pile of rocks. Again, he replays the battle, beat by beat, move by move. Thinks about his plays. Thinks he missed his moment, as the Onix held its strike, to make the tag-out. Thinks about his team’s skillsets, if he ought to diversify. Thinks about this rube, her grandmotherly sweater, how she had rolled her weight like a prizefighter and pressed him into a corner with an inevitable, immovable confidence.
(Thinks about the dapple of freckles on her cheeks, and the warming smile, and the way her dumb, ugly horse-laugh followed him down the tunnel as though he’d told her the funniest joke in the world when he lost his temper and called her something unpleasant.)
Bede doesn’t cultivate strong emotions -- Hatenna does not like it, and he loves his friend more than he loves his feelings. But he thinks he hates this girl.
He hates her more than anything.
Her trainer card, he notes, says Gloria, before he tears it in half and throws it in the trash.
Bede’s parents are taken by fairies when he is five.
“Love,” the group home’s counselor says to him, adjusting her glasses. He has seen this woman every week for the last five years. He has known her for as long as he knew his own mother. “I know it’s difficult, but we’ve gone over this. We’re not going to be able to make any progress if you keep regressing into these old patterns.”
“I don’t care,” he says.
They will try to wear him down, but Bede is not a quitter. His conviction does not waver. He will never let them take what he does not freely give.
Once upon a time in a fisherman’s town, the farmer’s girl offers the changeling boy half of her bridie pie, and his pride is much slower to react than the feral thing crouched in his hindbrain that remembers the group home too keenly. He snatches the offering and stands to eat it with a car’s distance between the two of them. She sits on a bench, eyes out to sea.
She attempts: “Hulbury’s nice.”
He does not respond.
A few beats later: “I’ve never seen the ocean afore. Have you?”
He does not respond.
She does not quit. A mouth around mince and onion and bits of pie crust, she says: “M’name’s Gloria.”
“Stop talking with your mouth full,” he spits. “Highlands barbarian.”
“Highlands barbarian, aye, tha’s me.” She swallows and grins and looks all the vision as she did in the cave, brown eyes lit with something between amusement and predation. Victory. “Figured I could get you tae talk. What’s your story, then? Bede, aye?”
(They weren’t even fighting and she still came at him, still got by him, still won.)
Last bite finished, he forgets himself and wipes his mouth on his coat sleeve, a motion unbefitting his new station. The crumpled napkin gets thrown into the trash with more force than necessary. “I don’t owe you anything.”
“S’pose you don’t.” She’s still grinning. He can see it in her eyes -- she is watching him, waiting to see what he does. Cataloging movement. Strategizing. Learning him. “I’d offer you luck tomorrow, but I'm thinkin' Nessa needs it more than you do. She’s go' her work cut out for her.”
He does not respond, and that ugly horse-laugh of hers follows him all the way down the street, into the hotel, long after the echo stops.
He dines later that night with the chairman, orders food more delicate and more expensive than he’s had in his life, and resents that none of it tastes as good as the bridie.
This is how the world ends: Something terrible and older than mercy snaps steel as easy as a wishbone, and the first wolves howl until there is nothing but the ringing in his ears. Every sound is a thousand miles underwater. He dangles liked the hanged man. Blood trickles up his lobes, up his temples, up into his hair where it dries sticky and matted. There is a storm above so black and total it unreals the sun until he can’t remember how to stay warm.
He is the only one left in the parking lot, he thinks, swinging by his ankle and a strap of seatbelt from a lamp post. He is spotlit in sodium vapor orange and his mouth buzzes-hums-itches-hurts with an alien frequency that vibrates his bones and shivers into the base of his skull. Stones tumble from his pockets and the storm gets worse as each one crumbles into rust on the pavement. Close your eyes and make a wish . The rain freezes him from the outside in and there is nothing he can do to stop it.
There is a girl looking up at him. Watching. Strategizing. You’re in a sorry state, aren’t you? Wolves are comin’, you know.
Leave me alone, he says to to her. I’m better than you. I was chosen. You’ll never pull me down.
She grins and reaches up to him. The points of contact on his changeling skin brand, too-hot -- like her fingers are made of iron.
We’ll see about that.
He wakes up scowling as hard as his heart runs quick. The silk sheets of his patron-paid suite do nothing to soothe the burning of his hand.
Once upon a time, they almost get him.
The changeling boy is thirteen when they tell him, there’s nothing to be done about it, the paperwork’s through. They tell him, unnatural you aren’t happy about it.
They tell him that they’re very nice people, and will not listen when he says no. He does not want to go with them. He will not get in that car. The fairfolk can send as many fetches as they want; they will not replace his parents in his head or his heart.
He puts all the things he owns in a bag: Hatenna in a pokeball stolen from a caretaker, a change of clothes, a pair of socks, a bag of crisps, a dog-eared copy of The Art of Battle by some dusty Kantonian warlord. They are too busy making arrangements for the exchange when he makes a break for the fence, hauls his weedy frame over, and is gone, gone, gone.
There are romantic notions that he’ll live with his fairies in the woods, eating plums and mushrooms as wild as him, befriending an alcremie who will lavish him with sweets. In reality, the woods end a mile from the property, opening out into a sad, struggling strip mall. For three weeks he washes dishes in the back of a chip shop like a galley servant; the owners feed him the day’s leftovers in return and let him shower in their apartment above the store. He always scrubs for what feels like days, trying to get the smell of the fryer out of his skin.
It is not a fairy tale, but it is his decision, and his alone. He will not be taken. That’s enough.
Highlander stories say that time is wrong in the Elphane. Days happen in seconds, or years; sometimes it is night for as long as it takes for a seventh son to bear a seventh son; sometimes the contracts between the sun and the moon are forgotten and must be renegotiated. Sometimes there is no time. Sometimes, it repeats--skipped stones, or records.
He keeps losing. He meets Gloria again in another mine, or maybe the same one, colored light and out-of-body, and he loses identically. It feels like both deja vu and future-sight. She laughs without malice as he spits an insult, retreats, eyes stinging with his back turned, tamping down his weakness. Resolves to never lose again. Runs the match back through his mind over and over into the early morning hours, spends the next day haggard and undone. Repeat.
He cannot think of another explanation. He is trapped here, with himself, with her, and it won’t stop happening no matter how much he wills it.
She will be the ruin of him. He knows it.
Bede’s parents are taken by fairies when he is five.
“Fulla shit, mate.” An older boy from one of the farming backwaters sits sprawled on the shared couch, in the shared apartment, the both of them marinating in the humid Wyndon summer. They’re both new additions to the too-cramped house, but this one’s here more for laughs than need, not like Bede. His parents still like him, he says. He just got bored, wanted to try the city. “They died, or they left. Get over it.”
(The whole arrangement’s not much different from the group home, in the end -- a Neverland of too many rowdy, lost, wrongways kids without their keepers. He’s had nine years to learn the drill. You carve some kind of place for yourself, or you get run over, and he has never been run over.)
Bede does not get mad about it like he used to. He does not suck in a deep breath and count himself to stillness. He is already still. “I don’t have to prove anything to you,” he says with a calculated edge of smugness. He has been watching -- learning. Strategizing. He finds a fulcrum and presses.
(It’s a stupid fight, but fourteen years old is its own brand of stupid. His place here will be carved.)
It plays out like Bede sees it in his head: The older boy puffs out his chest, apelike, some hairy-knuckled rise to his defiance. Reactionary. He reaches for his pokeball, which Bede knows contains his farm-family’s tired-out dubwool, years out from its fighting prime. The boy says, “I’m tired of you weirdin’ up the place, makin’ the girls nervous. Let’s settle.”
Bede placidly flashes teeth in what could only politely be called a smile, which doesn't reach his too-violet eyes. “Loser leaves?”
“Loser leaves,” the boy agrees.
The boy packs his things and slams the door on his way out hard enough to crack the drywall. Bede’s pocket is heavy with spending money, now; his team is beautiful and the pink sun flirts with the horizon over the river and his belly is full of food truck kebab bought with his winnings. He feels, for an aching moment, that he belongs at least a little to this world.
He can fight for a spot. All he needs is a chance.
Once upon a time there was a changeling boy who would do anything for his Master. The summons were irresistible, though he would never try -- he could be called from anywhere, for anything, and he would cross the distance. Nothing was too much of an inconvenience. He did as he was told, and he did it gladly.
The wishing stones array on his Master’s desk like some primordial dragon’s hoard, and the dragon counts them by twos, smiling with each pair. His changeling woman, his west wind witch, stands to the side, reading each stone for flaws. Excellent. Very good work. My faith in you was well-placed. He knows; sweats into his palms anyway. However.
He freezes.
We are moving the timeline forward.
He does not make excuses, does not use the word “impossible,” but explains -- he cannot go faster. His limits are real.
Oh, nonsense. His Master’s smile is a flashbomb; he cannot look directly at it. You’re a clever boy. You’ll find a way.
He is, so he will.
The respect and esteem will be worth it, in the end. The billion dollar man in the ten thousand dollar chair answers to no one.
Once upon a time, there was a farmer’s girl who waited at a crossroad outside of Hammerlocke for what must have been hours just to catch the changeling boy as he passed by, onward to the next challenge, and the next, and the next. She does not wear the hearthfire smile for him this time, or chase him with her laugh. Her eyes are shadowed; the calculations colder.
“Beat Hop all you like,” she says with an almost ancient, matronly grimness, “but don’t you go off bein’ cruel. I’ll no' have it. That's it.”
(He has found her pressure point--a mortal fulcrum. He’s been waiting for this; does not understand why his ribcage feels hollow, why he is looking for something in her face that is no longer there.)
He doesn’t have an explanation for her; doesn’t know what an apology would even taste like in his mouth. All he knows how to do is push. “I don’t see why you’re defending him. He treats you like you only exist to be his stepping stone.”
“Oh? You worried about my feelin’s now?”
He scoffs. “I couldn’t care less about your feelings.”
And then she grins, and the chill passes, and he takes a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “Good. Coulda troubled a lass, gettin’ off-script like that. Come on then, said my piece, no use standin’ here like a bunch ae tubes. I got supper on the fire. Let’s get some food in you.”
He hates the way her body language opens up like fortress gates, how her mismatched dimples crinkle with her broad, shameless grin. He hates the lumps in her sweater and her uneven, homemade haircut. He hates that every move around her is a misstep; hates that he can’t land a blow; hates that she takes his momentum and breaks it on the rocks of her and there is nothing he can do about it because the realization always comes too late.
He hates that he lets her take his hand and lead him over difficult ground back to her camp, fingers burning through his gloves like a fever. Hates her laugh that gets stuck in him. Hates his traitor stomach and all his turncoat bones.
Hates feeling handled, domesticated.
Hates that she wins.
This is how the world ends:
The wolves are silent. Something else speaks from inside his skull at an alien frequency he thinks might shatter the bone trying to punch out of him. He does not have the will to cry.
There were casualties.
He dangles like the hanged man, ankles purple and lungs pulling apart, from the rib of a monster older than mercy, a nightmare so large he is a speck on a pockmark on the least limb of it. Blood plugs his nose, trickles from a mouth full of brambles and stones that crumble on his tongue. I said make a wish . The storm has unrealed itself, a legacy of negative space. He has never seen a blacker black or redder red.
You were such a good boy. His Master smiles, voice leaden. His west-wind witch, his changeling woman, stands guard like a dressmaker’s doll on her pin-feet. Impossible geometry. Sound burns like kindling but nothing echoes here. It’s a shame it had to come to this.
The farmer’s girl hangs next to him. He reaches for her hand, and finds it cold.
He can’t breathe.
“Alright?” Gloria calls from beside the campfire. He can’t stand to look at her; doesn’t want to see the pity, or the concern.
He has to wait for his chest to unlock. The first pulls are wheezes. He struggles with the zipper of his sleeping bag and she’s already coming at him with an afghan. “Come on, up you get. You’re alright, Bede, you’re fine. Let’s get you by the fire. Tell me what’s wrong.”
He lets her wrap him in the blanket, guide him on sleep-drunk legs. She hands him a mug of tea and he holds it like it’s his own heart outside his body, desperate to burn out the chill. He shivers in silence. She sits close enough to smell her soap.
Minutes pass until words can shudder through the brambles, the phantom taste of rust. “I don’t understand what changed.”
(He can’t stop himself from saying it. These things are inevitable, self-propelled.)
“I was used to it, and you’ve ruined it. What did you do? ”
She gives him a look of utter confusion, and for once does not know what to say.
He leaves after she drifts to sleep, before the dawn breaks, and he’s had time to reassemble the rags of himself. He is representing the Chairman, and she is not the correct kind of people. It’s unbecoming, and he has work to do. Simple as.
But she’s ruined him.
In the brick-baking heat of Stow-on-Side, sticky-haired and sleeves rolled up, she ruins him. She is stopping him because she can, he is sure, because she thinks it’s funny ( even if she isn’t laughing, he can hear it ), contrarian and inexplicable. His future is behind this glorified fingerpainting and she wants him to throw it away for the sake of something as sentimental as history .
He doesn’t understand her; hates her still. Hates her so much his hattrem bristles and even the borrowed copperajah pauses.
“Oh come oan, Bede. This is no' gonna get you what you want.”
He does not snarl at this girl. He does not raise his voice. “You have no idea what I want.”
“Then tell me. Just stop for a second and we’ll figure this out.”
He already has it figured out. If he could just show her --
This is how the world ends:
He is disqualified.
“I suppose I have no one to blame but myself,” Rose says as the paperwork is signed and dated to scrub Bede’s name from every inch of the tournament records. The man looks pensive and very nearly remorseful, in the half-seconds Bede can stand to look him in the face. Heavy hangs the head . “I should have had Oleana vet you more thoroughly. It isn’t your fault; you just weren’t prepared to meet my expectations. Not everyone is cut out for this.”
You are dismissed.
They take the wishing stones and the badges, the security clearance and the expense card. They escort him out of the building with nothing but the clothes on his back and his team on his belt. When he sleeps tonight, wherever that is, he will wake up in the morning to find that no one even remembers he exists.
There is no point to anything, now.
Bede was taken by the fairies when he was five.
He lives in the Elphane, some gossamer, pale-veined, white-gold otherworlder who doesn’t remember another home. He does not know the crush of failure. He does not have to fight like a junkyard dog for his keep, everything but scraps and his own name stripped from him. He never met the girl who ruined his life.
He belongs there and he and his parents are happy in the faelands forever and ever the end.