Chapter Text
Everybody in the village knew that you didn’t venture too far past the tree line. Strange things lived beyond there, they told each other round the campfire in the dead of night - strange things that would take you hostage for days in a dreamlike state, or make you dance until you dropped, or snatch your selfhood out from under you and spirit you away to their domain, never to be seen again. Never to venture past the tree line at all, was best - but not to go too deep within the folds of the forest, not to speak to any strangers in the midst of the trees, and not to offer them anything you weren’t okay with losing. If you were lucky, you’d make it out unscathed.
Jimmy was a lot of things - fisherman, cat lover, cod aficionado.
Lucky, though, Jimmy was not.
The proof of this came one hot summer day that was otherwise like any other. He’d been out on the waves all day, trawling for his dinner and his livelihood, but the yield had been unfortunately low. Maybe the cod didn’t want to get too close to the surface; maybe they were trying to stay out of the heat. Jimmy would have done the same, if he didn’t need money and food. As it was, all he’d really been able to do was keep pushing his hat down on his head when the wind came asking for it, and keep throwing out his net for one more haul.
“Hey, cod boy,” had come the mocking voice when he’d finally returned to the docks by the rivermouth at the end of the afternoon, “get anything good today?”
“Yeah,” he’d snipped at Fwhip, his eternal rival, the salmon-catcher. “Found a mermaid, actually. She’s beautiful. We’re getting married in the morning.”
“Finally,” Fwhip had grinned, “out of our hair!”
“Well, what about you, then, did you catch anything interesting?”
“Nothing much. Enough to make a living, y’know.”
“Yeah, well - nobody likes salmon. They suck. I’m sorry, but it’s just the facts.”
“Whatever bizarro world you’re living in, I don’t wanna know about it,” Fwhip had shaken his head and gone back to stacking his crates, and Jimmy had left.
He’d passed Grian, too, on his way back home. “Alright, Tim?”
“That’s not my name, man,” he’d grit his teeth.
“You have a good day?”
“Weren’t too bad. What are you off to do, then? Your house is that way.”
“Oh, I’ve got to - I’m just popping over to Pearl’s. She needs her coat hangers organised.”
“That is the most nonsensical thing I’ve ever heard.” Grian was always offering stupid explanations for where he was going when Jimmy saw him out late at night. He was clearly pulling them directly out of his posterior, but Jimmy didn’t exactly have enough evidence to dispute him other than saying that’s cap, bro, so he was pretty much forced to leave the man be. Whatever he was doing out on the woodland path was his business, anyway.
“You come to me next time your coat hangers have gotten all out of order and you tell me that again,” Grian had said indignantly.
“Alright, alright. Have a good evening.”
“Oh, I definitely will.”
And that had been the end of it. The path back to Jimmy’s house was fairly long and winding, and it dipped a little too close to the tree line for anybody’s comfort but his own. (The price of the house had been pretty much the only thing that drew him to it, honestly.) Norman was waiting for him at home, though - the back door was open on its latch, and he could get out and start feasting on the local avian wildlife if he needed to, but Jimmy was sort of hoping Norman wouldn’t run off and establish a wildcat’s life without him, because he did enjoy feeding the boy some of his fish supper and giving him little scratches on the head and all that sort of thing you did with cats. And it was a nice house, and not too far from the market and not too far from the docks and not too far from his friends (one friend), and Jimmy didn’t mind passing by the forest on his way home if it meant that he could have these comforts at such a reasonable price.
This evening, though, he’d been unlucky enough to be walking down just the right stretch of path at just the right time of night on just the right day to be spotted - and that, really, was all there was to it.
Because there was something twinkling in the grass.
He’d assumed it must be a loose coin, and slowed his pace to get a better look in, which was his first mistake. Oddly enough, the further he veered over towards where he’d seen the shiny thing, the further it seemed to edge into the cover of the trees, and the further it removed itself from Jimmy’s reach. His second mistake was not realising that there was something awfully suspicious about that fact; his third was the first step he’d taken off the dirt path and into the grass at the side of the road, out of the safety of civilisation and into the unknown of the wild.
He pushed aside cow parsley growing almost as tall as his head and tried to keep his eye on the shining spot as it kept glinting just far enough away from him to be tantalisingly close but not so far that he gave up on its chase - then an unassuming branch that was getting in the way of his face, and with that movement Jimmy was across the tree line, and he’d stepped right into a terrible fate.
The shiny thing seemed to become more… solid, then, more substantial. Before he’d been intending to just take a look at it, figure out whether it was anything interesting, but now it felt like he could actually reach out and grab it if he tried. Jimmy took another step towards it, and another, and with its new realness he could actually see it rolling like a stone further away from him with every movement forward. He leaned down, focus single-minded; the glimmer in the grass seemed to almost lean back in response.
And another step, and then he frowned and made up his mind to launch himself forward, catch the thing off-guard - but as he moved it seemed to roll away again and tumble down behind some previously hidden ledge, unseen, uncatchable. Jimmy knelt, feeling around in the grass where he was sure he’d seen it fall. But there was no ledge, and there was no shiny stone. Not any more.
He stood up, and promptly found himself standing face to face with a stranger.
“Er - hello,” Jimmy began.
“Hello,” the stranger grinned. There was something… unnatural about him - his features a little too sharp in the air, his eyes unexpectedly deep and yellow-bright, his voice light and clear like a bell chime. “What brings you so far into the forest on a night like this?”
“I just - thought I saw something, I suppose.”
“Oh, really?” In the polite musing there was a touch of something darker, closer to the core. Jimmy couldn’t place it. “Did you find it?”
“No,” Jimmy lamented. “I’m not really sure there was anything there in the first place, honestly. The mind can play tricks, y’know.”
“Never trust your eyes,” the stranger nodded. “You’ll get nowhere fast if you only believe in the things you can see.”
“I suppose.”
“It’s a lovely evening for a walk in the woods, though,” he continued, “so if you’re already here, you might as well stay a while. Wouldn’t you think?”
“I mean, I guess,” said Jimmy, “I really ought to be getting home, though. Got the cat waiting and all.”
“Just the cat?”
“Yeah. I do like the solitary life, though, don’t get me wrong!”
“I would not dream of it,” the stranger smirked. “Can I have your name, before you go?”
There are other lives, maybe, where Jimmy caught this. Where he remembered what they’d told him in the village, round the campfire in the dead of night - not to go too deep within the folds of the forest, not to speak to any strangers in the midst of the trees, and not to offer them anything you weren’t okay with losing. There are other lives where he offered up some silly nickname - cod boy, maybe - and the stranger shook his head and sucked his teeth and let his conquest go without a fight, if only for the promise that he’d come back another day to speak again.
But Jimmy had already failed steps one and two, and he’d forgotten that there was more to lose than just the things he could hold.
“Oh, yeah, of course - I’m Jimmy Solidarity, I live just down by the -”
He clocked, then, the glint in the stranger’s eyes turning wicked, twinkling like the shiny stone he’d tried so hard to chase before. His heart ran cold in an instant.
“No,” he said, hands trembling all of a sudden, voice quiet, “this is - that was a trick, wasn’t it.”
“I’m sorry,” said the stranger, grinning as if he was anything but, “what’d you say?”
“I said I’m -”
It was right there. Right on the tip of his tongue, he knew his name, he knew it, of course he did, he’d had it all his life, there was no way he could forget that it was -
Oh, no.
“Not sure? That’s alright,” the stranger gave him a mocking pat on the shoulder, and he flinched away, tensing, “I heard you the first time. Now, come along with me, Jimmy - we’re gonna go home.”
He’d said it. The stranger had said his name, and yet - and yet the syllables slipped out of his mind like a deer on the ice, he couldn’t -
“Jimmy, I said let’s go.”
He took a deep breath, and let his hand be taken, too.
The path they travelled through the woods was thick and dense and dark, and before he got the chance to blink he was completely and hopelessly lost. The stranger led him onward with a confidence that he was honestly quite afraid of; the only thing he could really keep track of, this far into the forest, was the constance of the constellations above, and even they seemed to shift and dance across the sky every time he glimpsed them through the cover of the leaves. He’d been navigating by the stars ever since he was young, ever since he’d first learnt how to steer a fishing boat, but even that old knowledge failed him now. Wherever the stranger was taking him, he was beyond all hope of rescue when he got there.
Eventually, though, the trees thinned, and the grass underfoot became a path that seemed less like it had been worn down by years of footfall and more like the plants had simply elected to grow on either side of where people wanted to walk. The stranger made a contented noise and slowed to a halt, still loosely gripping his hand. “Here we are!”
“... Where might here be?” he asked nervously.
“This is my home! Don’t worry, you’ll fit right in - humans come here all the time. Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I know at least one!”
“So… so what are you?”
“Oh - oh, that’s right, I should explain! We’re in the fae realm right now. Now, you needn’t worry, there’s a lot of myths out there about us, but what the humans do get right is that we have to stick to our word, and I’m just gonna put it out there right now that I have no plans to hurt you or anything. For the foreseeable future.”
“Right,” he said, feeling more than a little bit nauseous. He’d been kidnapped by a fae, and had his name stolen to boot. Talk about identity theft.
“Oh, and you can call me Scott!” the stranger beamed.
Which - “Is that… like, were you born with that, or -”
“No, I just liked it. I’m not gonna tell you my true name. What, d’you think I’m stupid?” Scott laughed, bright and crisp like windchimes clinking.
He made a face.
“Sorry, sorry, it’s just - I have never, in my life, ever gotten can-I-have-your-name to work. This is a big day for me. And I’ve got my very own human to show for it, too!”
Right. He had, essentially, fallen for the fae equivalent of it smells like updog in here. But, like, with a lot more malicious intent.
“Okay, so - we should probably head over to my place. Are you coming, or do I have to make you?”
“No, I’ll - I’ll go,” he swallowed, not entirely sure of what the specifics of make you entailed.
Scott’s house was altogether not too unusual. It felt much less cottage-y than his own, a lot more open and less cozy - Scott liked his big windows, apparently, and his houseplants. Flowers of every variety bloomed from pots on shelves and planters hung on walls and vines that draped from the ceiling; this place seemed to be more greenery than furniture. There was a kitchen area on the far wall, though, and a bookshelf rounding out the corner, filled with strange and bright-spined books in dyes that he had never even seen used, especially not with such carelessness.
“D’you like it?” Scott beamed, pulling out a chair at a table, gesturing for him to sit.
“It’s… bright,” he admitted. “Pretty. We don’t have this sort of… massive amounts of colour, back home.”
“Oh, I love colour,” gushed the fae, “I try to make everything as colourful as possible in here. You’ve seen my wardrobe, I’m sure you could tell.”
He hadn’t, actually, really spared any thought to Scott’s clothes before this moment, but looking at them confirmed exactly what he’d said. His coat seemed to be made out of a melange of different materials, stained bright violet and indigo and teal, his sleeve sunny saffron-yellow and his collar blush-pink. (And his hair was bright blue, while he was noticing things. Surely it hadn’t been blue this whole time, right? Or did it… the more he thought about the memory, the more Scott’s unnatural hair colour came into focus, where before his mind had glided over it like it was the most normal thing in the world. Magic, he decided.) It was at once both completely inscrutable why Scott had chosen this particular piece of clothing, and entirely clear that he’d achieved what he was going for. He was an eyesore, but he was an attractive eyesore.
Wait - no. Shut up. No calling the man who’d just kidnapped you attractive. Scott didn’t deserve it.
“So,” Scott lilted, leaning over his shoulders with his hands on the top of the chair’s back, “are you excited?”
“For what?”
“To live here!”
“Wha- I - Scott,” he narrowed his eyes, “I’m not - I’ve gotta go back. I can’t just live here.”
“Well, sure you can. And you’re going to.”
“I really don’t think that’s such a -”
“Jimmy,” chastised Scott, and the name felt out of place on his tongue even though that was its new home, even though he couldn’t recall it the moment it was out of the fae’s mouth, “don’t forget who you’re talking to.”
“People will notice. They’ll wonder where I’ve gone.”
“Time works differently here. You might not even be gone for a week!”
“Oh, no, I don’t trust that. There’s a secret or it could be a thousand years on the end of that.”
His captor shrugged. “Well, it could, but I don’t think it will be. We’re not massively far off your timescale, to be honest.”
“People will notice,” he repeated, trying to convince himself as much as he was Scott. Fwhip would notice when there was nobody to tease about the cod haul at the end of the fishing day. Or - or Grian might notice that he hadn’t passed him on the path the following evening. He would be remembered. He would be missed. He had to be missed, or else he would never be found.
“And what are they going to do about it?”
He didn’t have an answer.
“It’ll be great, I promise,” Scott concluded, and flitted over to the kitchen to start doing… something. “You’re gonna love being mine!”
It didn’t sound like the kind of thing he would love. Honestly, it sounded like the kind of thing he was going to absolutely despise.
But the fisherman, cat lover, cod aficionado in the chair - the man whose name now belonged to a fae with frankly terrifying aspirations - didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter, did he?
Just his luck.