Chapter Text
When Isagi was younger, he lived with his nana.
She had a house by the beach. The roof was thatched straw, the windows were blue glass, and when the porch creaked, it sounded a little like the sea was talking.
Isagi's bedroom was in the loft. His nana lined it with goosefeather pillows and Isagi stuck cartoon posters on the ceiling beams, and every night, his nana lit three candles.
“One for the kelpies,” she would light the smallest one by the window, the one bright and blue as an ocean star.
Isagi would shiver. He never liked to hear about the kelpies (but they liked to talk to him, hissing watery voices and rusted hooves).
“One for the nymphs,” his nana would light the lovely slender candle by the door, the one ringed with silver.
The stories about the nymphs were primordial and full of intimacy. They made Isagi blush (he didn’t know what it felt like to have another body pressed too close, with a cold touch light as gossamer).
“And one for the knights,” then his nana would light the last candle, sheathed in iron like a sword, and Isagi would watch it burn by his bedside.
“There are many strange creatures in the world,” his nana would tell him, her face illuminated by yellow glow. “If you catch their attention, they will all fall in love with you.”
“Even the kelpies?” Isagi would shudder. “I don't want kelpies to love me.”
Isagi's nana would smile in a very, very tired way. “You won’t have a choice, child.”
“I don't like love.” Isagi would burrow under his comforter and scrunch his nose. Then he’d peek out and squint at her. “Why can’t they just fall in love with other people?”
At this, an expression Isagi could never quite place would flit across his nana’s face. “It's not about them, Yoichi. There is something about you that gives them no choice but to love you.”
She died one day in October.
The funeral was full of robin’s egg blue and burnt orange and dull green. A man in an ashen suit stood on the podium declaring how Isagi's nana was a great woman with creativity unmatched by any other: may she rest in peace, bless her soul.
Isagi stared at the coffin because he knew it wasn’t his nana in there.
She’d gone to be with the Seelie court - King Oberon and Queen Titania and Puck, and no one except Isagi knew the truth. The body in the coffin smelled like chemicals and bitter herbs crushed to a pulp.
“Yoichi,” his father said. “Come on.”
Isagi looked at the coffin, then at his father, then back to the coffin. “Where are we going?”
His father ran a hand through his hair. “Home. You’ve been away too long.”
Isagi thought of phouka. Panic rose in his chest when he couldn’t remember if they swam in salt or freshwater. “Do we live near the ocean now?”
“Son,” his father exhaled wearily. “I’m sorry. I know you liked your nana’s beach house and you miss her. But there’s nothing I can do about that.”
“Do you have candles?” Isagi said.
His mother knelt at eye level and gazed at him for a long while. “We don’t live near the ocean, but there’s a lake. You can spend as much time in it as you want.”
Isagi thought of the three candles. He thought of kelpies and nymphs and pixies and goblins. He thought of his nana, forever young in the fields of King Oberon and Queen Titania.
“Okay,” he whispered.
There was a boy in the lake.
Everything Isagi's nana had ever taught him sprung to his mind. He yanked his legs out of the water and scrambled backwards, up the dock.
The boy’s skin was the lightest shade of blue, his nails were shabby and tipped with blue, and the reeds wreathing his dark hair were blue as an ocean star. His eyes were brilliant gold.
“It’s fine,” the boy said to Isagi. “You don’t have to run.”
Isagi dug his fingers into the rotted leaves on the ground. “If I don’t - ” he sucked in a breath. “My nana told me to never trust anything that lives in the water and talks.”
The boy shook his head. “You can trust me,” he said earnestly. “I'm a good kelpie.”
Isagi pushed himself further up the dock. “There are no good kelpies. If I trust you, you’ll catch me and fall in love with me and when you’re done loving me, you’ll pick my bones apart.”
The boy broke into a smile. His teeth were human – except for the four incisors. Those were crooked and needlepoint-sharp. “I promise I won't,” he said. “I'm really not like the other kelpies. So you learned about us from your nana?”
Isagi didn’t move. “Yeah.”
The boy folded his arms on the wooden dock and balanced his chin on them. Beneath the water, Isagi could see scraggly weeds tangled around his ankles. “Where's your nana now?”
“The Seelie court.” Isagi relaxed his grip cautiously. “She’s with the King and Queen and Puck. She’ll never be old again.”
“The Seelie court,” the boy repeated. His voice was wistful. “She’s lucky.”
Isagi inched forward. “You’re a kelpie. You’re from the Unseelie court.” he swallowed. “You’re not supposed to like the Seelie faeries.”
The boy’s eyes shone. “But I do,” he said. “I want to be one of them. I don't want to live in this lake forever. I only get to leave the lake once a year. It isn’t enough.”
Isagi frowned. “For the winter solstice,” he said warily. “The Unseelie court gathers where death lives once a year during the winter solstice.”
The boy nodded. “I’m tired of death.” Opaque drops collected at the corners of his eyes. “You have to believe me. I'm not evil.”
Everything Isagi's nana had ever taught him floated to his mind. He scooted down the dock carefully, keeping his legs out of the water, and held out his hand.
“Okay. I believe you.”
The boy’s face lit up. He took Isagi's hand - his fingers were wet and slippery, but warmth pulsed beneath the skin. “Thank you.”
Isagi smiled hesitantly. “I'm Isagi. I live in the lake house.”
The boy climbed onto the dock. He was naked, and lake muck clung to his skinny legs. He beamed. “I'm Bachira.”
After a few days, Isagi Googled 'kelpie'.
"It says you're supposed be a horse," he said to Bachira. He was sitting with his legs dangling over the dock, his father’s laptop perched on his knees. Bachira slurped on a popsicle from Isagi's fridge. "You’re supposed to have a white mane and appear as a lost pony."
"I can," Bachira said. "But I don't like being a pony. It's awful inconvenient and scares people away. Horses don’t usually spend time in lakes."
"Like you aren't scary now," Isagi pointed out. "Blue skin and all."
"I'm less scary," Bachira corrected. Isagi grinned and returned to the screen. "‘Kelpies were said to transform into beautiful women to lure men into their traps. They created illusions to keep themselves hidden, keeping only their eyes above water to scout the surface.’" He looked at Bachira. "Have you ever trapped beautiful girls?"
Bachira paused. "When I was younger," he said slowly, "There was a boy. He had ink-black hair and indigo-blue eyes and snow-white skin, and his teeth were white when he laughed."
Isagi fell quiet. "What happened to him?"
"I took him," Bachira said. Bright lime syrup dripped down his arm. "To love is to destroy, and I loved him."
"Will you love me, too?" Isagi asked boldly. He felt like he deserved an answer.
Bachira looked small. "I won't destroy anymore.”
And Isagi believed him. Even if he didn’t answer the question, not really. “Okay,” Isagi said. “Tell me more about faeries.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, I know there’s two courts – Seelie and Unseelie. And I know there are a whole lot of faeries.” Isagi counted off his fingers. “Kelpies, nymphs, pixies, elves, sprites, knights.”
Bachira licked the last drops off the popsicle stick. His tongue was purple with lime juice. “There are more than that. And they’ll all love you, you know. Whether you let them or not.”
Isagi kicked the water. Droplets splashed on his father’s laptop. “Why do people keep saying that? Why do they all have to love me?”
Bachira gazed at Isagi sorrowfully. “It's not about them, Isagi. There’s something about you that gives them no choice but to love you.”
Bachira was Isagi's only friend for a while.
Isagi couldn’t help how oblivious he was. It took him years before he realized that not everyone believed in the fair folk, much less saw them, and that it was weird if you did. It also didn’t help that after he’d befriended Bachira, dozens of other faeries in the neighborhood took it as a sign to make him their new human toy. Among them, three in particular loved to follow Isagi everywhere – Igarashi, affably talkative and translucent; Naruhaya, skittish but eager to please in the way brownies often are; and Imamura, four inches tall with shiny pink cheeks. Isagi liked them, he really did. Just not when they got in the way of his school life, which was pathetic enough on its own.
Isagi spent sixth grade hiding in the bathroom, because Igarashi had gone all giggly during math class and made little flowers sprout up in someone’s candy bar, and that someone turned out to be the class bully. In seventh grade, Isagi had to explain why everything seemed to organize itself wherever he went – Naruhaya’s brownie instincts wouldn’t allow for untidiness. Eighth grade was mostly avoiding a girl that Imamura had charmed to have a crush on him. Over time that crush had budded into obsession, and when Isagi tried to reject her nicely, she threw herself off the balcony. Fortunately for Isagi, she lived. Barely.
Igarashi and Naruhaya found it hilarious. Imamura had the heart to look slightly abashed. “I was only trying to make a human love you,” he said, pouting. “You’re so lonely.”
“But you can’t make a person fall in love with someone they don’t like,” Isagi told him. “That's not how it works with humans.”
“It can be,” Imamura said softly, and left in a flutter of monarch mariposa wings.
That summer, Igarashi and Naruhaya stopped trailing Isagi around. Actually, they disappeared completely - Isagi felt a little guilty for wishing they'd disappeared earlier, but Bachira convinced him that it was about time they left him alone.
“Little faeries,” Bachira snorted. “They’re useless. All they do is play practical jokes and grow flowers. I eat them for breakfast.”
Isagi laughed, a little nervously. “You don’t really?”
Bachira only smiled, which made Isagi's stomach turn a bit. “Anyway, though. The avis – Imamura – has a point. You’re going into high school. This is your chance to start again, and make real friends.”
“I don't need real friends,” Isagi said, very quietly. “I have you.”
Bachira's face grew gentle. He reached over and touched Isagi's cheek. “You won’t always have me. And I won't always have you – you’ll grow older, and you’ll leave, and I won't. It’s like Puff the Magic Dragon.”
“That's just a song,” Isagi said vehemently.
Bachira went on anyway. “Puff the Magic Dragon lived by the sea,” he hummed, in his lovely faery voice. “And little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff.”
Suddenly, under the dock, under their dangling legs, the water began to stir. Their reflections became distorted and grotesque.
“A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys. Painted wings and giant springs make way for other toys.”
“Stop, Bachira,” Isagi said, but Bachira didn’t. The water shuddered. “One gray night, it happened – Jackie Paper came no more.”
When Isagi looked down at his reflection, it looked strange. He still had black hair and blue eyes and pale skin, but he looked strange.
“Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave. so Puff the Mighty Dragon sadly slipped into his cave.”
Isagi moved to scatter the water with his fingertips, but his reflection didn’t move. Then he realized.
“Bachira,” Isagi said sharply. “What are you doing?”
“We came here every day of the summer,” Bachira murmured. His face was horrible. “This was our lake. We used to race each other to the bottom of the shallow end. One day, I choked. I couldn't breathe. We were thirty feet down, and I couldn't swim back to the surface. I grabbed for him, but he just looked at me.”
The water churned. Isagi struggled to get up, but his reflection rose from the lake and dragged him off the deck. Isagi went under, gasping.
“He just looked at me, and then he swam away. I watched him, and when his head broke the surface, I drowned.”
Isagi could hear Bachira, faint and terrible over the sound of himself thrashing in the boy’s grip. Bubbles tore from his throat, and bruises blossomed on his arms.
“I drowned, but that was okay. I never wanted to see him again, after how he let me die. Then the Unseelie court made it their goddamn business to bring me back, and when I did, all I wanted was him .”
Isagi twisted around urgently and bit the boy in the lake. It stared back at him, lifeless eyes with whites the color of mud, and bared its teeth.
“So the next summer, when his family came back, I took what I wanted. See, I still loved him. And faeries always find a way to have what they love.”
I'm dying, Isagi thought. I'm dying, right now. He relaxed his grip on the boy, who cradled him to his thin chest lovingly. Isagi closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing at all.
(Kelpies, nymphs, knights. Oberon, Titania, Puck, his nana. Bachira.)
Then Bachira looked into the water.
“Isagi?”
And all at once, Isagi was being hauled out of the lake, arms and legs smacking wetly against the dock, splinters catching on his cheek and under his nails. Bachira placed a trembling finger against his sternum and Isagi arched off the dock, thick air oozing into his lungs. He dry-heaved over the water, feeling as if his body would crack and explode.
“Shit, I'm sorry, shit.” Bachira's voice broke, cotton caught on thorns. “I can't help it. I - I can’t – I want to destroy you, Isagi, devour you - don’t you understand, it’s all I know how to do, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t – ”
“I thought you loved me,” Isagi said shakily.
Bachira looked at him with such longing, Isagi's breath caught in his throat. He felt like he was drowning all over again. “I do love you,” he said quietly. “More than any mortal ever could.”
The summer of his freshman year in high school, Isagi left the lake house.
His father took a job promotion across the country. Isagi was unceremoniously moved into their fancy new penthouse apartment on the fifty-sixth floor. His parents paused on their way out.
“This is a chance.” His father picked up his keys from the kitchen counter. “It’s an opportunity for all of us.” To start over.
Isagi shuffled his feet and nodded. Sure, he got it. His father had enough on his hands without having to deal with a hallucinating kid. Isagi wasn’t anyone’s burden. He'd stay out of everyone’s way.
His mother took a few steps toward the door, then stopped. “You’ll be alright?” Her forehead creased the slightest bit, and Isagi was reminded of when he was a kid - a really little kid, and he was always falling out of the sycamore tree in the yard. His father would call him clumsy, but his mother always picked him up and dusted him off in the end, no matter what.
“Yeah.”
The first day of high school rolled around, and Isagi sat at a sharpie-ridden desk with two hundred other freshmen just like him: except they didn’t notice the sylphs clustered on the ceiling light.
They didn’t notice the nixie in the pool, either, or the family of salamanders living in the auto shop fire. Isagi tore his eyes away from the nixie’s jet-dark irises and went to lunch.
In the cafeteria, he met a kid named Shidou. And when Shidou mentioned elves from a computer game, Isagi swallowed and didn’t chime in with the truth about elves.
(They weren’t all tall and pretty, and they didn’t gaze into the dusk and say things like “Mars is bright tonight”, and you definitely didn’t want their hospitality.)
He learned quickly, after that. he learned the skeleton of the city – the dips of its lamplit streets, the bony curve of its back alleys and slum cul-de-sacs. He learned the fast-paced, self-obsessed way of the city’s children. He discovered all the right parties and taught himself how to smoke just about anything that could be lit and found the drugs that shut his system down.
Isagi learned everything, but oh, he stayed a safe distance away – pills and alcohol clouded his eyes, and he couldn’t see the fey – like Imamura, who still floated in his window and settled on his shoulder at night – when his veins were too syrupy.
Shidou, on the other hand, was an animal. He was a party animal who ran at a hundred eighty miles an hour and hadn’t come to school completely clean since eighth grade, and on every special occasion, Shidou took him to a different club.
“This one’s the shit.” It was some friend of Shidou’s birthday and he beamed, clapped Isagi's shoulder with an arm bruised green and blue. “The bitches are insane but like, the crazy hot kind. If you need some extra help, sit your ass down next to him.”
He jerked a thumb at the bar, where a lithe, white-haired boy perched at the counter swirled his drink with a paper umbrella.
“Who's he?” Isagi said, more out of obligation than curiosity.
Shidou shrugged. “Who knows? He comes here a ton, I see him every time, never does anything – just sits there. He gets hit on at least twice in ten minutes, I’ve counted.” Shidou shoved Isagi happily. “He knows what’s up. Loosen up and all that.”
It was really more coincidence than anything that Isagi ended up at the bar, glitter-and-vodka-spattered teenagers moshing up against him. He was contemplating whether ordering a virgin drink or a coke would be less lame when the umbrella boy stuck out his hand.
“I'm Nagi,” he said.
Nagi was tall, all torso and limbs, bottomless dark eyes and soft hair like the curled roots of a tree in the snow. At first, Isagi thought he was some kind of fey, but Nagi looked confused when Isagi asked, so he dropped the subject.
Isagi was two Shirley Temples in when Nagi suddenly stood up. “Wanna get out of here?”
“Oh,” said Isagi. “With you? With you?”
Nagi was already sliding off the stool and walking towards the exit. “Come if you want, I don’t care. I just have to get out of here.”
Isagi followed, feeling a little stupid. Shidou was nowhere to be seen, but he probably wouldn’t have been upset at Isagi for doing something outside of his comfort zone. Even if Nagi was a little strange.
“Come on, come on,” Nagi urged, foot jittery as Isagi slid into the passenger seat of an old Camry.
“Where are we going?” Isagi asked, but as soon as the door clanked shut, Nagi took off, driving like a man possessed into the night.
There were worse things for mortals than kidnapping: Isagi wasn’t worried about that. He did worry, however, about Nagi’s flushed cheeks and star-bright eyes, and the way he muttered under his breath; chanting “have to go have to leave have to get out get out GET OUT” as he weaved through the streets, lead-footed until concrete jungle broke into barren pastures. It wasn’t drug-induced delirium; Isagi had put Shidou to bed enough to know. It didn’t feel earthly at all, but Nagi had said he didn’t know anything about the fae. Nothing added up.
“It’s here,” Nagi said abruptly. He threw open his door and half-stumbled, legs almost too long for his body, out of the car.
They had arrived at a graveyard. It was gray and cold, and smelled like moonlight filtered through dust. A crow flapped its wings once, the sound lost in old snow.
“Why - ” Isagi started, but the earth beneath him thrummed and his blood went cold.
It was the winter solstice.
“Nagi,” Isagi said, voice very even. “I don’t think this is the right place.”
Nagi didn’t respond. Instead, he drifted further into the graveyard, a moth to a flame.
“Nagi!” Isagi shouted. The word splintered the silence. “We have to go, we shouldn’t be here - ”
“I should be here!” Nagi whirled on him: teeth bared in a hiss. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I should be here. I need to - ”
Isagi placed a hand by Nagi’s elbow softly, kindly; the way one would calm a spooked colt. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “Let’s just get back into the car?”
“You hear it,” Nagi seized Isagi, shaking his shoulders. His grip was like stone. “You hear the music, don’t you?”
Every nerve in Isagi’s body frayed, too-taut thread. “What music?”
“I’m going fucking crazy,” Nagi whispered. The veins under his eyelids pulsed, washing black. Isagi stepped back. “I hear them, I hear them singing…”
“Please,” Isagi tried. His voice came out fractured. “Please, let’s go.”
Suddenly, the air shifted; going frigid, like pressing his nose to frosted glass. Not a sound was made but Isagi felt a branding gaze upon him and turned slowly, caught.
A young man stood next to the mausoleum closest to them, paces away. He was tall, regally so, with tapered ears that knifed through dark hair and inky paint-stroke lower lashes. He had blue stained-glass eyes like a Roman cathedral. He lifted one hand to rest on the hilt of his sword, and Isagi saw that each finger had an extra joint, so they curled even when lax. He was no man at all.
Above them, stars began to weep pearl-white tears across the virgin sky.
“This is no place for a mortal.”