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There’s a fairy hiding somewhere in the woods.
That’s what Axel tells him, anyway, having heard it from Altare who overheard it from Jurard who talked about it with Octavio who saw it with Bettel on a dare to spend two nights and one day in the woods before they clear it out for the annual coming of age ceremony. They got caught in a fairy ring and slipped on some leaves, landing belly up in the grass. Heard the wind whip around their necks in peals of twinkling laughter. Saw nothing but starlight filtered through constellations that never existed, things that disappear in a blink.
Axel egged him on, begging him to check it out with him like the good old days where they were more dirt than human on the surface, but he didn't push when he eventually refused.
Flayon is nothing but iron and blood, so it doesn’t really interest him.
He knew a fairy once, too.
That’s how he knows it can never work out.
If he said something like that to Hakka, he would only apologise for the both of them as if he was the one who did something wrong. He’d squeeze his hand tight, eyes trained up and up and up above them, backs flat on the slanted sun-warmed roof like two parallel lines.
When he was just a child, somewhere between too young to grow out of pranking Bettel by swapping out their hats and too old to miss home when he eventually left, Flayon was the one of their group to get a taste of the world. He always thought it would be Altare, someone born to be one of their next generation of leaders, but maybe he was too valuable to potentially lose.
They didn’t lose him either though, not really, so fears like that are a little unfounded.
Every year there is one, just enough to keep a pulse on the outside, so when he was picked to be that one, he did not complain because it was his duty.
There was another boy standing outside the door, a little blackbird of a thing with gawky arms and legs and a piercing summer smile. He did not know whether they were allowed inside or not, but standing together wasn’t so bad.
School at the academy was nothing like school in the village, all small groups and hushed tones, group discussions over round tables and the friction of chalk on bare hands.
He has friends. All of his life, he has had his little collection of friends. Yet somehow, for some reason, a little bit of fear bubbled up in his chest as this boy turned to him and asked such simple things.
“You’re Flayon, yeah? I guess we’ll be roommates, so let’s be friends, okay?”
The years away were even crazier than he could have expected. Late nights cramming until he could read front to back and upside down and still make sense of it all. Running around the backs of the stage to trace the words of former students, cues and lines and curses for people long gone. Tie-dye shirts and the purple streak that settled in his nicer pair of pants for the rest of the year.
There were other things too, though. Dreams shared under the cover of darkness, eyes closed enough he can pretend it’s just sleep talking. Hakka who made a home inside him, stars painted on his cheeks. Clouds and the winter sky, walking too close because they can pretend like it’s just for warmth, the feeling of ducking and pressing fingers and backs against the rough bark as they exchange laughs through chapped lips. Waking up from dreams that feel like reality, the thought of his hand so featherlight on his cheek in the morning sun as he says all these things he imagined hearing off of willowy lips.
Little things like that linger.
Flayon is an artist because he cannot help but remember. That’s what he became as soon as he graduated, as soon as he took the long trek back to where he belonged.
Late at night he sits, cobbling together sugar and twine, and marinates in it. Paper flowers for April. Meringue and mushrooms for July. Someone taught him how to propagate strawberries once, turning one plant into infinity.
There are these long stems– runners, they’re called– and you can twirl them around wherever they need to go. You’ve got to pin it down, even if it wants to go to higher places, and leave it long enough to root. If your soil’s good, then it can happen even sooner.
You don’t let them run away.
That’s the secret.
He grows other things too, corn and broccoli, chiles and chives. Some things he likes and others he doesn’t, all wrapped up in a large patch on the edge of the woods. It’s better that way. More useful. The longer trek makes it feel more like he’s taking care of a universe just a step away from the town instead of flailing around the patch just behind his little house.
The strawberries grow too, of course, all of those pinned and potted runners.
They’re just like him.
Whenever he tastes strawberry anything, he cannot help but see Hakka’s gluttonous berry-pink face and his smile and his eyes and the little sunspot gleaming on the back of his hand that he liked to hold when no one was looking. They tried it once, just once, hands held discreetly inside his oversized pockets, but the whispers and roaring burned them up inside.
The warm outline beneath swathes of fabric inflated to the size of the moon until they both slipped away, shiny and swollen.
They did not speak for several days after that, too afraid to see what it meant. Too weighed down from all of the pressure. No one else seemed to struggle like he did, fingers itching to trace words down his back instead of splayed as neatly printed sentences in his collection of loose leaf paper, so sometimes he just had to pretend.
Boys like them are not supposed to squander their time on temporary fantasies.
There is duty to consider. Sometimes all you can do in this one life you’re given is carve out little joys deep inside the duty, valleys and craters to fill with stolen moments and pave over with a coat of fresh snow, so that no one can tell without disturbing everything else.
One day, feet tucked beneath knees deep in the fields, Hakka asked him to take off with him before midmorning. His hair stood out too much, so they had to cram themselves between rows of adjacent bushes and pray that no one would see.
There were many words churning inside him and caught in his throat, none of them quite shaped like yes. He buried all the ones that sounded like no, though, desperate to call out for a facsimile of what he wanted.
He fumbled in the dirt for Hakka’s hand, but came away with nothing but nettle and briar.
At first, Hakka had hummed, contemplative, as though accepting their fate. Then he asked again, this time at the lake, ramshackle oar in hand. He gave him another chance to pick, but there were never any choices left on the table.
He liked Hakka a lot, maybe even loved him, but no one can escape their destiny. There are many things, things much bigger than him, that cannot be abandoned because to abandon your life is to abandon the universe, and he was not strong enough then to consider how to discover a new one.
Inside the woods, there is his garden, and inside his garden is bush after bush of red and white berries. Inside the berries are memories of boyhood, of love so fleeting and haunting, of words he couldn’t give away. Somewhere deep inside them is Hakka, Hakka as he last saw him, Hakka as he chooses to remember him, a spirit on the edge of the lake as the twilight crept in. Something ephemeral and magical and impossible to share with anyone else. And then, in the dawn, when someone forced him to testify, he said he did not know where he went because he truly didn’t.
So yes, there is a fairy in the woods, and Flayon was always the first person to know. He invited him there by holding onto the memories.
It’s something that he will never forget, feelings stretched out to infinity.