Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A rest in the conversation – sparse and dotty since London – hangs oppressive like castles of white in the huge blue sky. Smears of darkest green whisper just an arms-length away from the open car window – indistinct in an unfocused gaze. Hot, late afternoon air pulls Greg’s sweat-damp hair, and tugs at his wide open collar, shaking him if not awake – then certainly not letting him sleep. The jolting smack of each passing telephone pole’s shadow completing the miserable day’s bullying.

He wipes away a single drop – a tiny cocktail – of sweat and sadness from the corner of his eye, and seats his dark framed glasses back firmly on his stony face, and doesn’t try to talk.

Like a ribbon unfurling across a violently green sea, the hedgerow-framed road crests little rolling hills and dives down into tree-shadowed corners where furious swarms of tiny brown annoyances explode from their green-decked homes to tut and scream into the sky. A field of eye-hurting yellow brings petals and pollen and Greg sneezes into his elbow. Rusting sheds and mud-speckled tractors – yapping dogs and their screaming human children – dust and dust and dust. On and on it goes. Fields of stinking, yellow sheep, a meadow with its tiny specks and humming surface, cows that gaze right back with just the selfsame empty look behind their eyes. Blinking slowly, their eyes deep brown to his red-limned grey.

“Holiday, is it?”

Greg leaps out of his skin – or would, if only he had the energy for it. Instead, the driver’s words come with the rushing smash of the shadow of a passing tree, and Greg jerks his head back to thud hard against the passenger head-rest.

“F—! Sorry – what?” Greg asks, remembering who and where he is.

“Nice little weekend getaway?” the driver – Salih – asks again, throwing the words over his shoulder as he wrangles his white Fiesta down the narrow country roar.

Greg shifts a little – the plasticky, black seat covers clinging to his sweat-stuck plaid-shirt back. “Doctor’s orders, actually. Fresh air, apparently. And rest.”

“I wish my doctor would prescribe me a holiday!” Salih chuckles, throwing them around a corner where a battered old Land Rover has pulled over to let them pass. “Not that I have time to take one, of course!”

On autopilot – though he can’t remember when he wasn’t – Greg chuckles weakly back. Agreeing. Of course, he’s saying, and sorry – sorry for his privilege, sorry for his weakness, sorry for not toughing it out like a real man like Salih.

Salih flashes him a toothy smile – his shining dark hair flopping across his brow – and Greg hasn’t the wit or the energy to say anything back. So he smiles – that crap, mouth-squishing, closed lip smile that just says “I’m sorry.”

Several awkward seconds later, Salih turns the radio up a bit, and Greg tunes it out.

Smelly yellows and angry browns, looming whites on too-huge blues, red in the rust, red in the hedgerows, red around his stinging, tired eyes. Out the window, out of reach, smears of things that flicker past without a single care.

The door slams, and Greg starts.

They’re here.

He blinks dry eyes and breathes on purpose, fumbling for the door handle to spill inelegantly out of the rocking, too small, car. He steps in mud and doesn’t quite slip. He whacks the door against his own hip as he closes it, and bites back a curse. Legs asleep – mocking him – Greg totters between dust-smeared car and prickly, hawthorn hedge to the boot where Salih has already hauled his suitcase out, wheels landing hard on the cracked, pothole-prone lane to skitter and knock against the small white car’s ancient bumper.

“Thanks, mate,” Greg remembers to say. He reaches for the last of his bags – a backpack almost as wide around as he is – and Salih waves him away. Greg stands there, stupidly, as the man at least a foot and a half shorter than him wrestles the bag out of the boot with a grunt and hefts it to rest on top of Greg’s wheelie case.

Sorry, Greg thinks. His mouth squishes up, his chin going firm and dimpled, as he nods upwards. Sorry. Thank you, and sorry.

They don’t shake hands.

Salih’s little car disappears over a rise, and Greg taps to tip him 22%. ‘Good conversation’. ‘Five stars’.

He sighs.

The backpack’s strap digs into his shoulder, and his hip is really starting to hurt now. He bends and unclicks the luggage’s handle, the bag swinging wildly and almost throwing him face-first into the gravel-pocked road, and pulls it – tiny wheels thrashing and fighting him every uneven inch – to the gate of the AirBnB.

Fifteen tiring minutes later – involving hunting down a keypad box hidden in a nook, rather than a cubby, around the opposite corner of the whitewashed stone porch from the one Greg had assumed it was, and then confusing, circular messages through the website to finally discover that the code for the box had been changed a month ago but not updated in the automated email, and then when the key was safe in his hand and he unlocked the heavy wood door and he pulled his angry, tantruming case over the threshold – a tinny, strangely quiet ‘click’ was all the notice he got as one of the cases’ wheels popped out of its socket and the suitcase jammed against the lip on the floor and became an immovable object just long enough for Greg to yank his shoulder almost out of its socket.

“Fuck!” Greg’s voice bounces off the tiled floor, the plastered walls, and down the rug-scattered hallway into the late afternoon’s shadows.

A smack, as the case flops over to clatter on the tile. “Fuck’s sake,” Greg mutters – so tired. He’d say more – swear more, or more creatively at least – but he genuinely can’t be arsed. Instead, he looks down at the fallen case – the door still half open, the sun outside blinding compared to the cool, stone-damp air inside – with his bruised and aching hip, and his sharp, stinging shoulder and can’t even summon the strength to cry. He just stares and struggles to find the energy to breathe in again.

Against all odds, he does. Eventually.

Moving, heaving, like a continent, Greg bends over and picks up the handle from the cold tile floor. He groans as he rises, and takes another breath. A huff, a tug, and the case is all the way inside the door, and he can slam it closed – shutting out the bright summer’s day and all the shushing, rushing, buzzing, singing sounds of life outside.

Unbalanced by the bag, down a hallway too narrow for Greg’s broad body and case side by side, Greg shuffles deeper and pushes open the first white door; a living room. Probably a kitchen adjoining. No good. The next is a bathroom, and Greg almost stops, but stumbles instead and goes with it further down the hall – to the third and almost final door that opens to a pair of blinding rectangles. Squinting, Greg’s eyes adjust so slowly and find a bedroom with lace curtains, a big-enough bed, and more pillows than any human could possibly want.

Two more stumbled steps, and he lets the suitcase tip. The bag drops off his shoulder – sharp strap scraping his skin through his loose collared blue-plaid shirt – and onto the bed, and he just stalls there.

He’s so fucking tired.

The bed looks soft – blue and white striped duvet, the aforementioned pillows – and the sunlight streams softened through the gossamer white curtains. It calls to him – calls to his bones – and he sighs and turns away, back into the blue shadows of the hallway to achingly kick off his shoes by the door, hang the key on the hook on the wall, and pick up the black plastic folder of information he’s supposed to read from the little hallway table.

The living room has a sofa, which will do. A piss, a glass of water, and then he’s horizontal – neck already cricked from being bent at an angle up onto the arm of the sofa as he squints through gritty eyes at the do’s and do not’s of the little cottage.

Washing machines. Bin days. Where to put the towels afterwards. Limits on the heating. Page after page of the usual. The mundane. Words that should send him screaming for sleep, but that slip into his head pushing the waterwheel of consciousness lazily around.

Local features. Places that deliver. Entreaties to use the garden with its bench and pollinator planting. And then on the last page, handwritten in a plastic-envelope contrasting with the cheap single-sided printing of all the other pages, a pretty bit of note paper – pale blue and decorated on the corners – letters elegantly scrawled in purple ink and written in something his mother might have called Copperplate; a letter to whom it may concern.

Greg wipes his eyes hard – sweat still smeared across his brow, and reseats his glasses as he blinks his bleariness clear. He reads it – the joined up handwriting a challenge now from a lack of practice – and then blinks again this time in disbelief.

To whom it may concern,^†
Welcome, dear guest, to our beloved Horne Cottage where we hope you’ll have a blessed stay. Relax and reconnect with nature in the beautiful English countryside, enjoy the cycles of the seasons and the days, and treat the living world around you with the kindness you, in turn, would hope for. One particular kindness we request of those who stay here is to show respect to the traditions of the land and the creatures living here – whether on four feet or two – and leave a little offering of food out for the little folk who bless this home and all who’ve lived here. You’ll find a bag of marshmallows in the cupboard above the sink, and the shrine is just outside the back door – just a small handful every few days is all we ask you to provide.
We hope you find peace and serenity during your time at the Horne Cottage and – little folk willing – we’re sure you will!

Sue and Susan xox

P.S. Additional marshmallows can be bought in the village store, though other treats will also work.

Little folk, Greg boggles. Shrine? Fucking marshmallows?? He barks a single pseudo-laugh that sounds deafening in the little living room and wobbles the black plastic folder precariously where it balances on his expansive stomach. He closes the folder with a snap, and lets it fall off the sofa onto the rug-covered wooden floor. Fucking marshmallows.

He throws his arm over his face – jamming his glasses into the bridge of his nose, painfully, before he scrabbles them off his face with a grunt and lets them tumble to the floor with the folder. Then he hides his aching, red-rimmed eyes in the crook of his elbow, and groans.

Greg’s body feels heavy – every muscle sinking down, pulled by the claws of gravity, further into the flower-patterned, lavender-scented, ancient sofa. Down and down – his bent knees splaying – one resting against the back, the other hanging awkwardly over empty air and his blue-and-black-socked toes scrunching between the cushion and the stuffed far arm. His neck is going to ache but he genuinely can’t be fucked to move. Not when his arms feel like lead, his body seeps into the cushions, and his eyes feel full of shards of hot glass.

Greg sighs. Sighs again, and his arm goes slack, his mouth falls the faintest bit open, and he drifts off to sleep.

And dies.

Chapter Text

He awakes with a start, and lurches upright with a gasp – the pain in his chest sharp and awful. He clasps his hand over it – the ache burning and tight and shooting up into his armpit – and he throws his legs off the sofa to sit upright, tearing abbreviated breaths into his tightening chest.

Except… his legs don’t move. They do, and they don’t. His blue-and-black socked feet stay scrunched and stationary, dug down into the tight gap between the cushions, but at the same time, they land on the wooden floor in front of the sofa. Greg stares, confused, even though this feels familiar – feels right.

He looks the other way, even though his neck fights him for every degree, and sees himself lying prone upon the sofa in the lengthening light. His arm still thrown over his face, his mouth wide and drooling now – slack jawed and motionless. Paling even as the sunlight struggles to bring the warmth of a setting sun to his skin.

Cold settles in Greg’s gut – not of fear, or horror, but recognition. Familiarity.

He reaches out his hand to feel the warmth of his own face, and his fingers sink right through his skin – like catching the moon’s reflection in a once still pond – the tangibility of his hand is but an illusion, or a memory of the real thing.

Of course; he’s dead.

The funeral happened. His mother devastated. His sister beyond consolation. His nieces cried and his friends were there. But the world spun and the nights flew past and the living are cursed to keep on living.

Greg’s on stage and no-one’s there. The spotlight won’t follow him, so he stands within it, hoping to be seen. His cards are gone, the mic won’t leave the stand, and he’s telling jokes and no-one’s laughing. He can’t remember what they were, but he knows he told them. His best ones. His old ones. He pulls his chest open and bares his worst feelings, his darkest fears, and tries to poke some fun. A full audience now – where did they come from? – and they’re laughing, but not at him. They’re chatting and drinking and smiling – and Greg tries to say something but no-one’s listening. Louder he tries, and louder they laugh – at something else. Anything else. Greg grabs for the microphone and his hand goes right through it. He leans into it and yells his joke and no-one hears him.

The stage isn’t cold or warm. The light goes right through him – no shadow he casts. Not one gaze will meet his own. Not one ear turns to hear him yell. And yell. And yell.

He falls to his knees, and it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t anything. His hands sink into the black painted floor, and he’s in the street and people jostle and crowd and rush and rush and rush past him. He looks up, and no-one sees him. He’s sinking, and he can’t feel it. Greg flinches – throws his head right back – as someone blunders into him. No, through him. He can’t feel it – can’t feel anything. He’s sinking, and the world’s turning dark. Sinking into nothing. He reaches and tries to grab – the pavement’s edge, the passers by, anything – and he can’t touch a thing.

He’s up to his neck, now. Numb, or unfeeling. Boots and shoes smash by his face. His head tilts back as he struggles to breathe – desperate, even as the not-cold of nothing leaves him with no feeling in his chest. He’s crying – hot tears down the sides of his face – and then even that feeling fades.

He cries for help. Even as his lips go numb and he can no longer feel his tongue. He begs. He whimpers. He counts his last few breaths as even the sound of them fades from deadened ears. It’s just flashes of light and dark and dark and dark and the nothing of encroaching grey, and then a flash of wide blue eyes and—

“FUCK!”

Everything’s dark. Everything hurts, and Greg bursts with a sob just to feel something real. His heart is thundering and his breath is tight and shallow and he’s terrified because it’s happened again. He makes a fist until his fingernails bite into his palm just to prove he’s here. His shoulder aches and his neck aches and his back aches and his eyes sting and his face is wet and hot with tears that run down his cheeks and splat on the cool wood of the floor of the living room.

“Fuck…” he breathes, voice trembling, as the same old nightmare loosens its claws in him only a little.

The sun has set, the room is countryside dark, and the floors squeak and creak as the little cottage settles. It’s been, he thinks, less than half an hour. Again.

He bites his lip to feel the pain. He bites it to stop from sobbing. Then with the aches and exhaustion borne of a month or more of pitiful scraps of broken sleep, he hauls himself off the floor where he’d tumbled, and – like a ghost of himself – sleepwalks his way to the bedroom to start unpacking his things.

Hours later – spent moving through treacle from artificially lit room to room – the dark outside turns grey. Greg blinks, it feels like, and nature awakes with screams and screeches and jangling, tuneless cacophony. Another blink, and the first rays pierce the living room and blind his slowly-adjusting eyes. He goes through the motions – a coffee from a tiny machine, a search through the cupboards for food that isn’t there, a shit that takes so long, his arse goes cold on the toilet seat, and water too cold that splashes on his face and doesn’t wake him up but just hurts.

A stack of three books looks balefully at him from the bedside table, and he knows he won’t read them.

It’s barely 7 AM.

The rooms glow and make his eyes ache. The folder says the village shop opens at eight, and his stomach rumbles angrily – the only part of him with energy left to complain.

He eats three handfuls – and his hands are fucking massive – of marshmallows, and doesn’t feel a single bit of joy about it.

Fuck the little folk though, he thinks with none of the fire he wishes he had. It’d be nice, he thinks, to have someone – anyone – angry with him. Yell at him. Acknowledge his existence. Even if it’s just for marshmallows.

“Just so you know…” he says to the empty kitchen, “...I’m eating these to piss you off in particular.”

His voice just bounces around the tiled walls, the single-glazed windows, and all the twee little wooden cabinets with their fussy little floral borders – and no-one seems to pay him any attention at all.

A bell above the door jangles as Greg ducks his head inside and almost pancakes a blurry smear of a kid sprinting past him.

“Shit! Fu— Sorry!” he blurts instinctively, at the high-speed little kid who skids to a halt at the end of the tiny little shop’s aisle – her trainers squeaking on the old lino floor – and turns to look up at him. Her mouth drops open.

“Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuum!” she yells, barely over her shoulder – refusing to break eye contact with Greg. Her long, wavy dark-blonde falls over her face, and she throws her hands up around her head to get it out of the way.

Greg thinks the girl might be about five or so.

“Muuuuuuum!!” she yells, turning with the impatience of a child to bellow it through the nearby beaded doorway.

“Whaaaaat??” an equally impatient woman’s voice yells back.

“You’ve got a customer!” The little girl rolls her eyes up at Greg for a good two or three seconds, dramatically planting her hands on her hips – a caricature of disappointment.

“Alright, hold your— Oh, fuck.”

The curtain parts with a rattle as the ‘mum’ walks out of the back room and into the brightly lit little shop. She looks pissed off; a deep, expressive frown clearly visible beneath wispy, tied back, highlighted hair. She’s wearing a football shirt and stonewash jeans, which is all Greg can notice before she follows her daughter’s gaze all the way up and finds Greg. Hence the swearing.

Her mouth hangs open just like her daughter’s did, her frown never wavering. In fact now, she seems pissed off at him – specifically how tall he is.

Then she blinks, and shakes her head. “Well, bugger me, you’re a big one.”

Maybe Greg hadn’t needed to watch his language after all. “It’s been said, yes.”

“Shit. Sorry. I bet you get that a lot,” she says with a wince, as she grabs her daughter by the shoulder and walks them both around to the counter. Her daughter winces and grumbles and rolls her eyes so hard they should fall out and scatter like marbles on the floor. “How can I help you?”

“You can hopefully sell me some breakfast. I’m fuc— I’m really hungry.”

The woman gives him an enormous grin and slaps the counter. “Brilliant! I mean – not that you’re starving – that sucks.” She pauses, thinking, as she walks back around the counter. “Obviously. But we can fix you right up.” She flits around the tiny shop and its two short aisles, flinging her hand out to point at this shelf or that one in a way that Greg worries will result in a shattered dusty jar of marmalade any second now.

“We’ve got Corn Flakes and Weetabix – might be a bit old. Milk in the fridge over there – fresh this morning – we’ve got today’s baps or some pan bread for toast. Butter of course, or some of that spread stuff.” Again her hand swings dangerously close to the extra-shredded. “Marmalades. Jam. N’there’s local honey behind the counter o’ course. And bacon, eggs, and sausages from down the road.”

She throws a thumb over her shoulder as if Greg should have any idea where ‘down the road’ might be, but he’s heard enough.

“I think, if I had the energy, I would kill for sausages on a roll right now.” He thinks back, wondering if there was brown sauce on the kitchen counter. Probably. Tomato for sure. His mouth waters a little.

“Ayy!” the woman jeers playfully. “No-one can resist my baps, I tell ya!” She spins around to grab the baked goods.

“MuuuUUUuuuum!” the girl whines, horrified and dismayed. “You’re the worst!”

The woman looks utterly delighted as she turns back to face Greg – a half-dozen soft, pillowy bread rolls in a perforated, crinkly bag held against her own not-ungenerous ‘baps’. “I better not say anything about the sausages then, eh?” She gives him a massive wink.

Greg smiles – despite the exhaustion – but it’s a watery one. “Tough crowd, that one,” he said, nodding at the girl who stomps out of the shop and into the back room, hands slapped over her ears.

“Ehh, she should be GETTING READY FOR SCHOOL anyway,” the woman throws her voice towards the back. She grabs a pack of butcher paper wrapped sausages from the fridge and plops both of them on the counter. “I’m Daisy, by the way.”

“Greg,” he replies automatically. “Just staying over in the, ah, Horne Cottage?”

“Ah! Right then,” her eyebrows go up and she hustles over to a shelf and grabs a soft bag. “You’ll want some marshmallows then.”

“What? I—”

“—For the little folk. They get pissed the fuck off if they don’t get them,” she says somberly with a shake of her head. The bag gets added to the little pile of groceries.

Greg frowns, and picks it back up. “Won’t be needed, thank you. Just some butter and whatever you’ve got in the way of coffee, I think it’s only caffeine that’s keeping me—”

“—You’re kidding,” she blurts, looking at him as if he’s got two heads.

“Muuuuuuum! Where are my shoooooes?” the girl yells from somewhere.

The woman – Daisy – doesn’t even turn when she yells back, “Under your jacket behind your door where you threw them!” Her frown up at Greg doesn’t shift a muscle. “You’ve got to give the little folk their treats, you know. The Sue’s did tell you when you moved in, right?”

This is getting weird.

“There was something in the welcome folder, but—”

“—Right,” she says, nodding once and snatching the bag of marshmallows out of Greg’s hand to drop it on the counter again. “So you need the marshmallows.”

Greg just boggles – his fogged up brain barely believing what’s happening. “Is… Is this some kind of shake down? Some kind of… of marshmallow racket??” he asks, expecting Daisy to finally break and admit it’s all just a joke played on outsiders.

“Mum, I feel sick.” Daisy’s daughter bursts through the beaded curtain, one black leather shoe on and one still in her hand – a dusky dark blue jotter in her other hand and a pale, panicked look on her face.

“No, you avoided your homework until the last minute and now you’re so worried you feel sick.” Still, Daisy doesn’t break eye contact with Greg.

Greg reaches over and grabs the bag of marshmallows. He doesn’t say a word as he moves the bag with his peripheral vision and drops it back on the shelf between Daisy and himself.

Daisy doesn’t break eye contact either. “And, I’ll take a look at it in a minute, babes – mummy just needs the nice man to buy the marshmallows for the little folk.”

Daisy. Picks. Up. The. Marshmallows.

The little girl gasps. Neither Greg nor Daisy turn to look at her, but she makes it everyone’s business by stomping over – one shoe and one socked foot – to pull the bag out of her mum’s grasp and shove it against Greg’s stomach.

Greg grabs it before it falls and – absolutely gobsmacked – looks down at the girl.

“Don’t be a fuckin’ dumb-dumb,” she says up at him.

Greg gasps, and looks up at Daisy – the girl’s mother – expecting her to say something in response. Instead, Daisy just raises an eyebrow and tilts her head as if to say ‘she’s not wrong’. Greg can barely believe it.

“What the actual fuck?” he mutters.

“Ayy! Watch your language in front of my baby!” Daisy ruffles her girl’s hair as she walks over to stand, united, by her side. “Trying to help you even though she’s feeling so poorly.”

The girl pouts.

“Fine!” Greg says, not fine at all. He smacks the squishy, pillowy bag onto the counter again. “Fine, I will buy the marshmallows, but I am not participating in any wooly-headed superstitious wankery involving little people or fairies or ghosts or—”

“—Little folk,” the girl corrects him.

Biting back his annoyance, Greg hesitates for just a second. “They can folk right off is what they can do.”

“Right then,” Daisy says.

“Right then,” Greg says right back.

“Will you be wanting anything else?” Daisy asks, angry and still doing her job.

“Coffee, if you have it. Pint of milk. And I’ll take…” Greg scowls around the counter, taking it all in. Chocolate bars, packets of sweets, bags of crisps and packs of gum line every possible surface. Magazines and a couple of newspapers, some old-fashioned toys like boxes of dominoes or bags of marbles sit dusty on a taller shelf – that Greg suspects Daisy has never seen the top of – and under the counter are smoking accoutrements and vapes. He scoops his hand under a pile of Caramac bars, and dumps them onto the counter unceremoniously. “...all of those, too.”

He tilts his head, expecting judgement – and doesn’t seem to get any.

“Right. Coffee, milk, and your fuckin’ chocolate coming right up.” She busies herself gathering the coffee – granulated and in a dusty tin – and then hooking a pinkie finger into the little pint of milk’s handle to bring it over. She stabs at the register, typing in the prices, and coming up with a total that is remarkably close to what Greg would expect in London.

“That’s eleven seventy-five, thank you,” she says, thrusting the reader towards him.

“Right.” Greg brings his card out, and beeps it with all the annoyance he can muster – though he’s beginning to have trouble maintaining its fire in the face of an otherwise entirely normal transaction. The old machine starts chuntering away at his receipt.

“Do you have a bag?” Daisy asks, entirely reasonably. “Only we don’t—”

“Ah. No, I forgot. I’ll just— I’ll just carry it, thanks.” Ingrained Britishness wins out as Greg forgets to be pissed off while he figures out how he’ll carry it all. Bread under the arm, probably. Sausages in his pocket? He gathers all the chocolate and shoves them all into one of his jeans pockets and hopes they don’t start melting too fast.

Daisy hands him his receipt, and he’d barely glance at it, except one of the items is listed as ₤0.00.

It’s the marshmallows.

He holds it up, and his frown comes right back. “Hey! What’s with the f— the marshmallows??” he sputters.

“Hundred percent discount for being a dick about it, innit?” Daisy says, crossing her arms over her chest. Her daughter, still half ready for school, copies her mum and adopts the same pose.

Greg is confused. So very tired, and so very confused. “Thank you?” he tries.

Both mum, and half a beat later, daughter, nod.

With only a little difficulty – big hands once again coming to the rescue – Greg gathers up all his groceries, marshmallows and all, and hip-checks his way out of the little shop’s front door.

Fresh air, bright sunlight, and a strongly shaken head, and still Greg finds himself baffled by the encounter. Free marshmallows though? Behind him, through the door, Daisy is yelling – swears flung around without a care – as she and her daughter get ready for school.

Another shake, and Greg shambles, hands and pockets full, back to the cottage.

Chapter Text

Breakfast eaten – if not enjoyed – Greg pads around the house looking for something to do. The books on the table glare at him every time he walks into the bedroom – their judgement burning a hole in the back of his head – so he tries to stay out of their line of sight. Instead he opens the back door intending to see the garden, and almost strides out straight into a hip-high stone protrusion. Looking older than the cottage itself – which must be the wrong side of two-hundred years at least – it feels like the cottage was built around the eroded, rough-edged, lump of granite – the path out to the garden certainly was – kinking around its spot a mere pace away from the back step. There are little urns and vases, some with days old cut flowers, and small thank you cards – some faded by the sun or wrinkled from being wet and dried by the British weather, and one or two wrapped in clingfilm. Rough humanoid figures in profile a mere three or four inches tall are barely still visible etched into bits of the stone where decades of acid rain has not yet worn them away – more faded than the more ‘recent’ Roman mile stone engraving declaring this marker as sixty miles from a now indecipherable destination. And at the bottom, with a little brass plaque, is a carved out hollow forming a bowl-like shape.

“Gratitude for the little folk” the plaque reads.

Ah. Of course. Greg rolls his eyes and stands up straight again. Stupid superstitious nonsense. Probably just put there when the owners turned it into an AirBnB as a way to trick tourists into thinking they were getting some Harold Potter shit and get them to pay a premium. Probably got it from the garden center.

Well he wasn’t having any of it! Hell; maybe the owners had some kind of deal with the local shop – Daisy – some sort of kickback scheme. Sounds about right. Sure – it feels a bit questionable to get the kid involved too, and he can’t quite work out how the scheme works if she’s giving out marshmallows for free, but maybe that’s the way it works. ‘First one’s free, kid’ for both drugs and supernatural entity appeasement – the two big markets, really.

Greg scowls, and doesn’t put any marshmallows in the little offering bowl even harder than he already wasn’t. Okay, as far as protests go, there have been more effective ones. He stands there, having absolutely no effect on the world whatsoever, and gets annoyed.

Fifty seconds later, he stands by the shrine again, the half-empty bag of marshmallows in his hand.

“These,” he says, popping a marshmallow into his mouth. “Are not,” he continues, muffled now that there’s a second marshmallow going inside to join the first one. “For you.” A dribble of spit almost leaks out of the corner of his mouth as he fits a sixth and maybe seventh marshmallow in, so he sucks noisily to catch it – his cheeks bulging with the sweet, spongy confection. Chewy, and sticky, are also words he’d use to describe them, as he struggles to chew them down.

But it’s the spirit of the thing! He points at the bag – nearly empty – and then at the shrine, entirely bereft of any marshmallows at all – and then waggles his finger ‘No’. With one rather painful swallow, he frees up enough room to smash the last few pucks of white, sugary puffs into his gob, and then scrunches the bag up to stuff in his pocket.

There. That’ll teach them!

It’s mere seconds later when the absolute patheticness of his actions comes crashing down around him.

He’s not sticking it to the man – he’s standing in a little hedged off garden bursting at the seams with flowers and buzzing insects and the signs of tiny birds and creatures rustling beneath shrubs and boughs, and he’s giving himself an aching jaw and a sugar-burned mouth for the benefit of exactly no-one.

No-one sees him.

No-one knows he’s here.

And absolutely no-one cares.

He could disappear right this instant, and the world would keep going quite happily – more happily, even!

The warm summer sun feels suddenly cold and sharp; a thousand cuts into the redness that encircles his eyes. The chirping birds and buzzing bees feel distant and unreal – as if he hears them only through an old crackly radio – a recording of a recording of a recording played in an empty room.

He looks down at the little stone shrine – ancient and crumbling and covered in tokens of people’s love and attention. Thank you, one card says, for the beautiful sunsets. Thank you, another says, for bringing happiness to our stay. Greg reaches down, groans muffled out of shame, and brushes away the summer-dried petals covering a third card’s message.

Thank you, it says – written in a hand much like his own – for showing me how to live again.

And lastly, on the oldest card there; I love you.

Fuck. Greg’s heart crumples like an empty water bottle, and roaring nothingness drowns out the sights and sounds around him. The stone path beneath his knee feels of nothing. When he pushes himself upright, fingers on fuzzy moss and sun-warmed flagstones, he feels nothing. When his eyes well up and he stumbles on his way back inside, knocking his already-scraped shoulder against the door-frame – he tells himself he feels nothing then, too.

He weeps in the bathroom with the extractor fan on to hide the sound, and then runs himself a bath.

Daisy is behind the counter when Greg walks into the shop. Bent over, and paying him no attention, even when the bell above the door jangles weakly, she’s stacking bags of marshmallows onto the lower shelves from a box. Greg wants to scowl at her, but he feels like he should try a bit harder, and schools his face into a pleasant enough smile.

“Hello, again!” he calls out.

Daisy ignores him, and Greg’s smile slips a bit. The urge to say something snippy back boils up in him like bile, and he swallows the hot, bitter urge back. He locks the smile in, though he suspects it isn’t reaching his eyes.

Instead, he walks down one of the two aisles, and pretends to browse. Cornflakes and Weetabix – their brightly coloured boxes mere iconic smears in the corner of his eye – fill the shelf next to him even as he glances over the display to watch Daisy. He picks up a box for something to do.

“Hey, look – I’m sorry for earlier,” he says, and mostly means it. “I’ve just not been myself recently, and I kind of snapped.”

Daisy stands, but doesn’t turn around to face him. Greg takes it as a good enough sign.

“I can pay you for the marshmallows – hell, I’ll buy a couple of bags for the little buggers if it’ll help smooth things over.”

For a moment, when Daisy turns, she looks Greg dead in the eye – and then her gaze sweeps right past him, giving him the cold shoulder. Greg’s heart – which had briefly fluttered with light and life, hits rock bottom, shattering on the cold stone forming in his gut. Greg feels a bit frantic, and he side steps along the aisle trying to get closer – trying to plead his case.

“Please – what can I do? Maybe if your kid’s around, I could apologise to her too? I know I wasn’t very polite.”

Daisy yells, calling her daughter, and Greg looks over at the beaded curtain to anxiously see if she appears. Nothing happens for several long seconds, and Greg shuffles further along the aisle and into a puddle. He looks down, and mutters a swear under his breath – slapping his hand over his mouth when he remembers he’s supposed to be trying to behave himself. The shelves in front of him are packed full of the bright yellow, and bright blue boxes of cereal – shelf upon shelf upon shelf – which seems like an awful lot of Weetabix for anyone.

Small feet stomp closer and Daisy’s daughter bursts through the curtain, still in her school uniform.

“Whaaat?”

“Don’t you ‘what’ me!” Daisy retorts, angrily.

Greg tries to look apologetic as he looks between the two – ready to repeat his apology and more, if needed. His feet shuffle, the puddle splashing as he does and wetting his feet. He wonders idly if there’s a leak.

The girl sighs deeply, crossing her arms like she’d done earlier that day, and taps her one-shoed foot impatiently. “Yes? Mum?” she asks, attitude dripping.

Daisy points at Greg, not even looking, and says, “You’re going to drown,” but it’s not her voice.

Greg gasps, and water droplets catch in his throat. His feet won’t move from the puddle which feels deeper and deeper. His ankles are wet, but so is his back and his shoulders. Daisy and her daughter aren’t looking at him at all, but whatever they’re saying gets fuzzy and distant. Greg tries to stagger backwards, but he’s sinking into the puddle. He grabs at the shelf – but his hands go right through the blurry boxes of unreadable logos, and watery, wavering unintelligible prices labeled beneath.

“Help! Help me!” he croaks, suddenly struggling to make any sound at all. “Help?” he whispers.

The puddle rises to meet him like something from Terminator even as he sinks deeper and deeper into the impossible depths of the centimetre deep water. He can’t see over the aisle any more – can’t see Daisy or the girl – can’t see who bursts into the shop with a deafening ring of the front door bell.

The water is up at his neck now – hot and smothering as thick vapour chokes his lungs. He feels splashes against his face, against his eyelids, even though he’s wide eyed with terror. He mouths “Help”, and water gets in his mouth and he splutters – eye height now with the lowest shelf in the shop. He reaches, and touches nothing. Even the puddle shows no ripples from his terrified grasps and full body shakes. Sounds go muffled and thundering as the water reaches his ears – turning frantic footsteps into echoing distant thuds.

Things go dark – but it’s a shadow. And suddenly his hand touches something at last. He clings, desperate, and turns his face even as the water laps into his mouth and against his nose, to see, and finds a man in shadow clutching Greg’s hand with both of his own, hauling with all his strength against Greg sinking. All Greg can see are two brilliant blue eyes in the darkness – huge and staring straight into his soul when suddenly his world is shaken by a breathy, shouted, croaking, scared, “WAKE UP!”

Panic. Falling. Slipping. Splashes. Deafening. Hot and cloying. Coughing. Coughing! He barks a roar that breaks in half as a tidal wave of bath water sloshes back and into his mouth. Coughing! His eyes are wide and his arms are thrashing – slamming, smacking against the hard lip of the tub as he flails. His feet skid and slip – soap-slicked and soaking – and his body screeches a dozen slick squeaks as he sloshes and slides under the spilling bath’s surface. Dunked. A soundscape of his own bubbled scream – muffled and distant – the thud of his heels through the enamel white tub, the rattle of the plug’s chain as it jangles and dangles from his big toe, and the roaring, roaring of the waterfalls pouring from the taps – ice cold and scalding hot. Greg fears death. It grabs his heart and squeezes. It rips the scream from his lungs and leaves him breathless. He splashes and thrashes and smashes his limbs and head and struggles to grab hold of a life that doesn’t care either way.

He hits something.

Another splash – tiny and sharp – as something brushes his chest. Greg twists with shock – his scrabbling, bubble-covered hands squeaking as he fails to get purchase again – and one of his legs kicks out into the freezing cold, faraway air.

Taking the bathtub’s plug on its chain, with it.

Rushing, thundering – the water makes a break for it. Greg’s foot – shockingly cold and chained to the bath – gives him something to focus on, and he clings desperately to it. He shuts his mouth to hide his burning lungs – coughs exploding through his nose – and pulls his feet back into the bath to jam painfully against the bath’s bottom. One hand slapped to the edge, and then the other, and legs and arms and feet and hands and all at once, four points all slippery and trembling, all push him back and up and out from under the puddle’s – the bath’s – surface.

Air! Greg shakes from head to foot and gasps and sobs and coughs and just fucking breathes. His shoulders tremble and his fingers – white against the bath’s lip – slip and almost slide again and Greg cries out and twists to cling to the end of the bath like it’s his only raft in a steaming, bubble-covered sea.

Water sloshes over the edge – like so much has already done – as he crushes his chest against the enamel curve. Sweat on his brow stings his eyes as splashed and soapy water sends it sprinting down his face. His throat hurts – sharp and tight – and he almost died. He almost died! He clings to the corner of the bath, white flesh shuddering with razor-cut sobs in a tiny, tile-floored bathroom that echo them back into his waterlogged ears, and he almost died. Drowned in a bathtub. Alone and forgotten. No-one to save him! No-one to care.

Greg can’t see for the tears – ugly, awful tears. The water rushes in, and the water rushes out, and he can’t unclench his fingers because he almost died! His chest hurts and his lungs hurt and his arms are purpling where he thrashed and struck them and his toe feels almost broken where the chain was wrapped around it and there’s a stabbing by his armpit that must be what a heart attack feels like – if it weren’t for the muffled, tiny yells.

“Geff off mff!!” it sounds like.

There’s an almighty pinch of the thin, sensitive skin on the inside of Greg’s arm; he screams high enough to shatter glass, and throws himself back – buckets of water sloshing out as he does. Panic, again, as he almost slithers down through the water, before he jack-knifes his knees, jamming himself in place and bruising the ever-living fuck out of them – giving him barely enough physical stability, if not emotional or mental, to watch a tiny, sodden, furious little man climb onto the opposite lip of the bath.

“Fuck sake…” the miniature man mutters, tiny rivulets of water running down from his drenched tiny knitted jumper, his soaked tiny trousers, and out of his squelching, felted, tiny, woollen boots. He reaches the top of the lip of the bath, coughing out bathwater just as Greg had been doing, and flops onto his teeny tiny back, with his sodden tiny wings, exhausted and splayed out like a starfish – and about the same size as one. His tiny chest heaves as he catches his… well, his tiny breath.

Greg hasn’t been breathing at all – his wide, stinging, red-rimmed eyes utterly fixated on his hallucination. If he blinks, the tiny man will disappear, surely – and Greg doesn’t want that. There’s a forgiveness in being a dreamer, that wakefulness strips away – and madness permits itself while sanity brings the shame. If he’s lost his mind – who can blame him for not having one?

Sanity is pretty fucking lonely, after all.

“Okay…” the tiny man repeats to himself. “Okay.” He levers himself to sitting – his chunky, tiny, brightly coloured knitted jumper sagging with the weight of all the water it’s carrying, the little hole at the back pulling down on his wings. He looks down at it – tilting his tiny, greying-haired head, and bites his impossibly little bottom lip. There’s a gap in his tiny little teeth – barely wide enough to get a bit of paper through – but it seems big compared to everything else about him. He grabs the hem of his jumper and wrings out several huge-seeming droplets of water with the most perfect, miniscule, elegant little hands that turn pink and turn white as he grips and twists. Everything about him is too tiny, too astonishing, too completely and utterly perfect.

Greg’s eyes burn with the need to blink, and he won’t. His lungs spasm as another bathwater-powered cough struggles to burst out of him, and he refuses! He won’t blink, and he won’t breathe, and he won’t be left alone again.

And then the tiny man turns to look at Greg, and everything happens at once. “Are you alri— Oh, fuck!” the little man starts, before his eyes get wide and horrified.

Because Greg tries to gasp and cough at the same time, and his body explodes out of his face – mouth and nose simultaneously – deafening and snotty and really, really painful. His head’s thrown back, eyes scrunched tight, and several more basins-worth of water go every-fucking-where with thundering splashes.

Over the end of his thunderous, hacking yell, he can hear a faint and getting fainter – “Shiiiiiiii… Ow.”

By the time Greg can throw himself towards the side of the bath again and look down – the little man is gone. Wet footprints the size of a pinkie-nail leading away from the puddles of bathwater in the middle of the room, tiny scuttling footsteps echo into the room from the hall outside, and Greg stares, agog, at the narrow gap of the barely ajar door.

“Wait! Come back!” Greg croaks. “Please!”

The footsteps hesitate, and then restart even faster than before.

Greg is left alone.

And, it would appear, based on the red and gold, empty wrapper floating on the surface of the drip-shattered pool of water sloshing under the bath, left without his Caramac chocolate bar, too.

“What the fuck?” Greg begs the empty room, tears pooling in his eyes.

Chapter Text

The little shrine cannot hold any more marshmallows. Greg knows – he’s tried. The little stone bowl is filled to overflowing – the slightest breeze sends one or more tumbling down like the gentlest avalanche that ever was. Three mismatched saucers and a mug in the shape of a unicorn are heaped with the rest from the fresh bag, arrayed around the base of the engraved stone column. There’s even a row of them balanced along the top of the stone, jammed into cracks bursting with lush green mosses and crusty lichen, his fingers still sticky from where he’d poked and prodded them until they stuck like some demented craft snowman gone wrong.

Greg himself is vibrating with energy. He forgets to blink for minutes at a time, and then flutters his eyelids over burning eyes. His breath is shallow and sharp and all at the top of his chest because his thundering heart won’t let the air past. He’s crushed himself down between the garden wall and a spiky bush, bending a branch to give himself a leaf-muddled line of sight to the marshmallows – to the shrine – and, he hopes, his impossible, perfect, little saviour.

He can’t quite think about it, face on. Every time he tries, his chest bubbles with something like laughter, and something like madness, and something like piercing, gut-hollowing, desperation. Greg glances down at his own hand, wrapped around the rough and thorny bushes branch, and fucking rejoices in the feel of its dusty, woody texture. Stubby thorns bite into his palm and prove he’s real and here. Touching something. Existing at the same time and place. And— And he touched the tiny little man-creature too – or was touched by him. Pinched! Greg had seen the tiny, red-lined mark when he’d gotten out of the bath, in the mirror. The shape of five miniscule fingers that had grasped him and saved him and scared the fucking bejesus out of him. Greg can still feel it!

So is he real too? The tiny little man?

It can’t be possible. There’s no way at all. And yet Greg desperately needs him to be real. As real as the thorns on his skin, as real as the bruise on his arm, as real as Greg is, in a world that doesn’t seem real any more at all.

“Uhhh… What are you doin’?”

Greg screams. It seems the right thing to do. When he picks himself out of the bush and looks up from his spot splayed out on the garden’s rocky dirt, he sees the little girl from the shop staring down at him over the stone garden wall. She looks singularly unimpressed.

“Fu— udge. God—dang it, I didn’t see you there! Almost had a heart attack!” Greg pushes himself to his feet, but the girl keeps looking at him as he rises and looms well over her, and he knows she’s waiting for a real answer. He shrugs. “I’m… I’m trying to apologise to the little guy,” he says with a defeated sigh.

“Alex! Why?” Her faint blonde eyebrows pop up and then crash into a scowl. “What did you do?”

“Wait – his name’s Alex?!”

“No! Ugh. L X. He’s called LX.” She throws her hand out to point behind Greg and he turns to look.

The little stone shrine is dotted with hardening marshmallows and looks a right state – but he realises, the longer she points and rolls her eyes, that she’s directing his gaze to the Roman numerals carved when the ancient stone was repurposed as a mile marker. Sixty Roman miles to its eroded destination – or LX in Roman numerals.

The girl pokes him in the side of his plaid-covered stomach, and Greg flinches hard. “What did you do? You better not have made him angry.”

And the way she says it gives Greg pause. “It was an accident!”

“Oh nooooooo,” she says, shaking her head and crossing her arms and even past the stone wall, Greg can hear the hard soles of her school shoes tapping on the pavement as she radiates disappointment.

“Look…” Greg starts, vaguely aware that he’s trying to justify stalking a tiny pixie man to a world-weary five year old. “...I fell asleep in the bath, he woke me up, I accidentally bumped into him and he got all wet, and then he got out and stole my chocolate bar.” Greg wipes his slightly dusty hand over his face, jostling his dark framed glasses as he does. “I mostly want to thank him. And say sorry. And maybe actually introduce myself properly.”

The girl hums – but she does it verbally, by saying it out loud. “Hummm,” she says. “That sounds quite bad. My mum says you’re not even supposed to see Alex – especially not grown-ups.” She is a picture of concentration as she tries to solve his problem. Finally, she shakes her head. “You need something better than marshmallows.”

“I do??” Greg looks back at his ‘offering’ and immediately sees that it’s stupid and rubbish and was never going to work. A marshmallow falls off the top of the rock and bounces off some kind of patch of wild-looking flowers. “Shit— I mean, sugar!”

The girl gives him a look. “I know ‘shit’. And ‘fuck’. And lots of bad words. Like really bad ones. I know ‘poopoo’.”

Greg’s face twists inside out as he tries not to giggle. He spins around, slamming his fist into his mouth to muffle his laugh, and he coughs to cover it up. “Right. No. That is a bad one.” Greg clears his throat and slams on his best serious face before regarding the absurd little human he’s asking for advice again. “Okay, so better than marshmallows, you were saying? What would you recommend? Chocolates? Sausages? Oh! Ferrero Rocher?”

The girl leans towards the wall and whispers conspiratorially up at Greg, barely audible over the rustle of the breeze in the trees. “Marbles,” she says.

“Sorry, what?” Greg asks, incredulous, as he bends almost entirely in half over the wall to get his ear close enough to hear.

“He really likes…” and she drops her voice again, as if it were the world’s greatest secret. She’s almost mouthing the word instead of vocalising it – both syllables getting the full attention of her entire face. “...Mar-bles.”

Greg straightens up, one mighty eyebrow raised questioningly. “Really?”

“Yep. But it's a secret.” She looks around and then back at him. “Okay I have to go now. Don’t tell my mum I was talking to a strangerrrr!” she yells as she runs off.

“That’s… That’s not how that’s supposed to… Never mind.” Greg says after her, shaking his head. Movement out of the corner of his eye catches his attention, and a squirrel leaps wildly out of a bush, onto the stone shrine, and absolutely slams a marshmallow into its too-small mouth in a sugar-frenzy, before – grey tail twitching once, twice, and three times – the creature sprints at full speed up a tree, bark flakes exploding in its scrabbly wake.

Greg scratches a hand through his stubbly beard. “Marbles…”

One trip to Daisy’s village shop, a carefully selected stick from the garden, and a laundry basket later, and Greg is sitting cross legged on the wooden floor in front of an old stuffed armchair in the living room as the summer’s sun finally sets. He’s shoved a cushion under his arse for comfort, but more importantly, the arm of the sofa and the full body of the coffee table are between him and his target – a singular spot in the hallway, through the door, directly outside the bathroom. Greg can just peek at it from where he’s sitting – the light through the window at the top of the door fading to grey as the sunset is drained of life.

In his hand, he has one end of the belt of a robe he’d brought – the other end of it tied around the bottom of the stick that’s wedged vertically, holding up one side of the laundry basket like some oversized Mouse Trap layout. Beneath it, on a saucer on the hallway floor, are a handful of gleaming, glass, cats-eye centered marbles. Greg had, he believed, picked out the best ones – at least the ones he’d have rated as a boy. Their blue and red and yellow twists of coloured glass like brightly coloured, miniature, ghostly tornadoes – aswirl with flaws and bubbles barely the size of a pinhead but that caught the light and glittered and shone.

They had sparkled in his hand in the golden evening light.

But the lights are off, the dusk in full bloom, and Greg – hunched over like a shrimp on the cooling wooden floor – squints through the fading light at his well laid trap, and waits.

And waits.

And waits.

His lower back burns and his neck aches and his poor tired eyes sting as he forgets to blink them over and over again. Silver light slowly makes its way across the hallway – a crescent shaped window’s shaft of crescent moonlight that eventually catches the white plastic of the basket and makes it glow.

Nestled beneath that radiant cage, marbles twinkle like galaxies.

Slowly, Greg shifts in place to ease the aches and just unleashes them instead – javelins of pain launching up his spine as he hisses.

His watch says it's just gone eleven.

He blinks a few more times, and tries to find the least agonizing position to hunch in. He stretches his eyes wide open and then lets them rest, closed for a long, stinging, moment.

He takes a deep, deep breath and slowly cracks his tired eyes open with a start when Salih clears his throat.

Ah shit, he's dreaming again.

He’s in the car – crushed and hunkered down into its too small passenger seat. Salih’s driving him somewhere, and it’s nighttime – yellow sulphur streetlamps pass them one by one, their sickly light pooling onto the rolling, lumpy country lanes, turning hedges black and trees into clawing creatures of shadow. Greg is thrown up and then down – dropping his stomach like a plummeting lift – and the seatbelt bites in hard. He winces; it hurts.

He hears himself turn to Salih and ask him to slow down, but Salih’s just a shadow now and Greg’s words are too quiet to hear. Greg tries to shout louder, but another bump in the road tosses him in his seat to slam his head against the lowering car roof, jolting his neck, and tightening the belt another degree. The glove box is digging into his knees. The chair won’t go backwards. The passenger door inches closer and closer and Greg hears the crushing sound of the car getting tighter and tighter.

Greg’s breathing too fast. Panicking. He pushes back against the car’s dashboard, and feels it shift and shudder under his hands – creeping closer and closer. Another jolt, and he’s being crushed. On all sides – darker and darker. Salih isn’t Salih any more – just a darkness that presses harder against Greg’s side and drives them into the ever weaker yellowing light. Ahead, the streetlamps flicker and fade – choked and struggling – and the road gets narrower and more winding. Greg’s thrown from side to side, up and down – he can barely lift his head now, his body crushed and pressed. His panicked breath halted in his folded chest. His heartbeat thundering in the tiny space he’s left.

He snakes a hand to grab the handle, and the door is locked.

He flounders at the window controls, and they grind and groan and don’t move an inch.

Greg’s sweating. Terrified. Darkness. Closeness. Pressing all around. He’s yelling but he doesn’t have the breath. It’s not a car – it’s a coffin. Dirt lands on the bonnet like the first thrown handful and sprays across the windshield. Greg can’t breathe. His eyes are wide and terrified – his mouth open in a grimace of terror – hauling every last breath he can. Ahead; nothing. More dirt falls, hiding the yellowing light. Grit gets in his mouth, and he coughs – throwing his head to the side and scraping against the rough wood of the coffin’s lid, that is also a car roof. Flickering grey shadows fly past the car out the passenger window – too close and too dark. Greg flinches at each one – his body twisted and aching as the space he’s in tightens like barbed wire around his body. Barely a whimper squeezes out of his crushed form. High outside the window, what should be sky is just darkness – close oppressive darkness lower than the clouds and as heavy as the ocean.

He’s crushed. He’s trapped. He’s gasping and failing to breathe. He can’t move any more – not legs nor arms nor head nor body. Pinned staring out the window as he hears the dirt piling higher, the car’s engines grinding lower, the thunder of his heart and the wheezing of his ever tightening breath. His whispered, whimpered, cry for help, for space, for room to move and breathe and live. Just enough, he wishes, just enough to live.

A sparkle. Even as the dirt presses down on his body and piles up around his neck – a glint. His hand, jammed against the window, with the earth of the grave pressed up against the other side of the fast moving glass, is suddenly full and cold and hard and something catches his eye. The dirt is at his mouth now – and he can scarcely grunt his fear through his barely uncovered nose. It’s in his eyelashes as he blinks and tries to see.

It takes all his strength and more to uncurl a single finger.

There. As the dirt crushes his chest and presses the breath out of him for the final time – too heavy to inhale again through a grit covered nose – he sees it. A flash of blue. A spark of glimmering, shining, gleam. A sparkle that floats in a glassy orb – a marble, gripped tight in his crushed hand. Its depths endless. Its beauty heartbreaking. Swirls and cascades, blues and greens and the shimmering of starlight, moonlight, distant sun’s lights – a thousand million specks of colour and brightness held in his hand – a galaxy so vast he could lose himself forever.

He’s falling – into the marble, into that space. A symphony of rainbow colours that circle him, hold him, lift him up. He breathes deeper than he ever has. Stretches taller than he’s ever done. He’s free. And in his hand, a marble. Blue and lovely, shining kind, like the pair of sparkling shining sapphire blue stars that look down on him and slowly, gently, blink.

They softly whisper, “Wake up.”

Greg jerks upright and immediately cries out in pain – his hunched over back cracking like a glowstick. His eyes are scrunched, and then snap open – and confusion steals his breath. White. White in the moonlight – close and bright against his face – swaying and moving and rocking and giving mere glimpses through sharp, right-angled, gaps.

Then the laundry basket swings from its pivot on the top of his head and bonks him on the chin.

“What the fu—?” he starts, as he throws himself backwards instinctively and hits the armchair’s front. The laundry basket’s back hits the cushion and rotates away from his face, instead digging into his aching shoulders, and gives him a perfect view of his hand in his lap where a tiny, thumb-sized man is frozen trying to pry a second finger away from the marble he’s clutching in his grasp. “Hey!”

“Shit!” the tiny man – pixie, fairy, creature – gasps, before releasing his two-handed hold on Greg’s middle finger, and making a dash for it – his little boots skidding and slipping over the creases of Greg’s black jeans, as his tiny transparent wings flutter and beat and try to keep him steady in a flash of moonlit rainbow shimmer.

Greg’s frozen. Shocked. Delighted. His back long forgotten. Laundry basket who? As the little guy scrambles – falling to all fours as he climbs the steep incline of Greg’s knee, wings beating madly as he almost takes flight. Almost gets away.

“No, wait! Please!” Greg suddenly shouts all too loudly. The tiny man flinches so hard he falls on his side – barely heavy enough to feel through the thick cotton of Greg’s trousers. “Alex!”

The little man stops. His tiny shoulders heaving as he pants, his tiny hands trembling, clinging to the thick, folded seam of Greg’s jeans like a cliff’s edge. His wings stall, then flutter, and stall again as the tiny man precariously teeters on the precipice between flight and finding out more.

Greg softens his voice – lowers it, almost whispering. “It’s Alex, isn’t it? I’m… I’m Greg.”

Greg would offer to shake about now, and muscle memory twitches his marble-holding hand without him meaning to – and Alex jumps at the movement. Skittish as a foal, the tiny creature flips onto his butt, staring at the – seeming to him – enormous, all enveloping hand with its blue-centred treasure.

“It’s nice to… meet you?” Greg tries, and so slowly he can barely stand it, lifts his massive hand and extends his index finger close enough for Alex to reach.

The tiny man almost vibrates with nervousness – his gaze never leaving the hand approaching him. His wings flutter and flap. He pulls his feet beneath him, ready to jump and flee. When the finger stops and waits – Greg’s fingernail the size of Alex’s whole head – Greg watches Alex’s tiny chest rise and fall and rise and fall as the panic’s pitch flattens.

Alex looks up at him, and Greg gasps – tiny, brilliant, piercing blue eyes stare up at him. Eyes he’d seen in a galaxy’s cascade. Eyes that had pulled him from the drowning depths. Eyes that saved him from the unfeeling, untouched darkness.

“It’s… it’s you?” Greg mumbles, confused.

Alex… smirks? He smirks! Those pinpricks of endless blue twinkle, and Alex reaches for Greg’s hand at last. In slow motion, it feels, Greg smiles back – waves of gratitude washing over him – until he realises that Alex has dodged his finger, grabbed the blue marble, and is already throwing himself off Greg’s legs and onto the floor!

“Wait! No! You little—!” Outraged, Greg grabs for him and misses!

Alex – arms entirely filled with the glass sphere and running hell for leather across the hardwood floor – jinks left and right, his wings flapping to the tempo of his gasping, twinkling, honking little laughs!

He’s almost out of reach when Greg throws himself forward – buckling at the waist – to make one last grasping lunge! The laundry basket, released, thwacks back over his face, shocking the bejeezus out of Greg and maybe a little scream too. It pairs well with the shooting pains he’s rediscovered all the way from the base of his spine.

“Fuuuuuuuck!” he yells, half agonized, half laughter, and his heart so full he can barely stand it as he rolls onto his shoulder, laughing and wincing and weakly batting off the very same laundry basket he’d tried to trap Alex in. “You cheeky little bugger!” he gasps in a heap on the floor.

Chapter Text

Greg had slept fitfully – which is to say, better than he has in weeks – curled around the remaining marbles in their net bag like a dragon with his hoard, snuggled deep under the covers and ready to pounce.

In fact, he didn’t let the marbles out of his sight all through the night, into the morning – even taking them into the shower and hanging them from the temperature knob while he hastily scrubbed his hair, trying to keep one eye open at all times and getting soap in it and swearing and staggering and roaring his annoyance and pain with one hand death-gripping the shower curtain and the other clutching the lumpy net of marbles in case Alex took this as his moment to strike.

He held onto them even as he shoved his hand through the sleeve of his t-shirt. While he shrugged his green and black plaid shirt on – his hand almost getting stuck at the cuff like a bear with his paw in the honey jar. He jammed the marbles into his jeans pocket – cold and lumpy through the thin fabric against his hip – while he wolfed down some roughly buttered bread rolls and a mug of barely-qualified-as coffee from the dusty old tin of granules.

And then he hefted the net bag in his palm, the tiny glass spheres clinking and clacking against one another, as he sat on the back step of the cottage, the morning sun splitting the sky, regarding the card-bedecked stone shrine with its three inch engravings of a tiny little man, and its Roman numerals that apparently give one particular little man the name he answers to; ‘Alex’. All the marshmallows are gone – though Greg suspects the grabby paws of the local squirrels, rather than Alex’s handiwork – and Greg suspects that if he really wants to apologise to Alex – to thank Alex – for saving him from the bath, as well as three of his worst nightmares, then he should dump the bag of rattling, shining, marbles onto the little carved stone offering dish.

But Greg’s not going to do that. He’s surprised when he forms the thought, because he’s definitely not going to do that. He’s grateful and he’s apologetic – but more than that, he’s consumed with curiosity. He wants to see Alex again! With his tiny wings and his tiny hands and his teeny tiny smirking face with those glittering, sparkling blue eyes full of mischief. Staring through the thank-you cards, Greg’s mouth slowly widens into a smile. Greg had set a trap with the laundry basket – and Alex had turned it back on him. But better than that – the holes in the laundry basket were too big to keep a tiny, three inch tall bendy little man inside – and the basket was far too small to keep a six foot eight giant of a man trapped at all.

Neither trap was ever going to work.

And more than that – the bag of marbles had been on the floor by Greg’s hip the whole time he’d fallen asleep. Easy pickings – far easier than the marble clutched tightly in Greg’s hand.

Greg sucks his teeth as he thinks about it, his smile widening millimetre by millimetre; the little man was toying with him.

“So, Alex…” he says to the shrine, assuming that the tiny man is somewhere in earshot. “...You want these marbles, do you?” Greg jiggles the bag again – satisfying in their string bag, weighty and pliable. He reaches in and plucks one out – an orange and yellow centred one and it shines in the sunlight. Rolling it between his finger and thumb, he brings it up to his glasses to take a proper look. Wispy spirals of streaky colour twirl and coil in its heart like two lovers on a dancefloor. Where orange ends and yellow begins is blurred, the richly pigmented glass gleams in the rising yellow light as streaks and smears of amber and sulphur cast faint striated shadows onto themselves – striped like tiny tigers frozen in a cage of glass. The marble is cheap – like the ones of his childhood – covered in scratches and knapped like flint where a flake of glass had chipped off the surface. Flaws and bubbles catch light like marbles within marbles, and as Greg rolls the time capsule of his childhood between his fingers, bright coloured memories of games and days and moments of vivid happiness burst from each bubble like vital champagne. More real to him than the days he’s been living recently, or perhaps, the days he’s been ‘living’ that flit past like shadows unremembered.

“I used to love marbles.” Greg sighs, long and deep. “Don’t think I’ve properly looked at one in— FUCK!” Greg jumps. The marble falls and lands on the path with a crack. It rolls. Greg’s phone is ringing, vibrating in his pocket; the source of his shock.

Instead of answering the phone, Greg dives forward onto hands and creaking knees, and scrambles for the precious tiny glass ball as it bumps and rolls against fluffy bumpers of moss and springs against still-bouncy fallen leaves. He snatches and misses. He shuffles forward, scuffing jeans on flagstone, digging tiny grit into the heels of his hands, and reaches again – just as the marble pirouettes in the sunlight flashing gold and comes to a smug stop against the base of the stone shrine, nestled beside the base of a thank you card. Greg’s fingers – suddenly feeling huge and clumsy – flick and reach and finally roll the slippery smooth sphere back where he can pluck it and trap it safely in his hand once more.

Throwing himself back onto his heels with a huff – face red and already sparkling with sweat – he answers the phone.

“What!” he puffs. “Wait—” Without waiting for an answer, he pulls the phone from his ear and looks at the screen. His eyebrows go up. “Roisin?” he asks.

“No, it’s the incredibly attractive blonde who stole her phone and decided to call your dumb-arse. Who else, you big idiot?”

Okay, Greg deserves that a bit, but he’s certainly not going to let it stand. “Oh, I’m sorry – I thought for a second it might have been someone important calling,” he says, trying to hide the groans and old-man noises he’s making as he levers himself onto his feet.

“Ugh! Gregory! How could you? Here I am checking up on you and you have the cheek to—!”

“—You don’t— You don’t need to check up on me, Roisin. I’m fine.”

“Like fuck you are,” she states flatly, utterly unconvinced. “I was the one who drove you to the doctor’s, remember? After you passed out in the kitchen.”

Greg rubs a gritty, dusty hand down his face and groans at the memory. “Yes, I’m well aware. I was just tired, I—”

“—The doctor who, I might add, agreed with me and said you needed a break.”

“…”

“A medically mandated break. Which I am now checking in on. Greg.”

Greg sighs, and looks down at the marble in his other hand. He rolls it between his fingers and looks through it, wondering how much he should tell Roisin. About the nightmares. The bath. About the tiny man he’s been setting traps for. About losing his goddamned mind.

“The cottage is nice…” he says reluctantly down the line to her. “...Weather’s been good. There’s a garden.”

Immediately distracted – just the way he’d hoped she’d be – Roisin pounces like a huge, excitable golden retriever.

“Send us a photo then!” she demands. “Honestly, Greg, I’m up to my eyeballs but I’d have shoved myself in your suitcase if I fit and come with!”

“Massive ‘if’,” Greg mutters.

“What?”

“Nothing! Just finding a good spot for the photo!” Greg looks around and it’s as if he’s finally seen the garden for the first time – flowerbeds bursting with greenery and blooms. Giant blue bell-shaped flowers tower over bushes of pinhead sized white sprays and spears of foxgloves in purples and pinks. Bees — bumble and otherwise – waggle and buzz into every flower and give the garden a melodic background drone that Greg can feel on his skin. A flash of colour that hesitates and zips off again – fire-engine red and another in iridescent blue – as dragonflies flash past on their way to an overgrown pond whose surface ripples from the gold-flashing fish that teem within. Sunflowers stretch as tall as Greg himself and turn their faces to the sun and motherfucking glow with their violently yellow petals, with almost-black green English ivy and the whitewashed cottage itself providing a stark and dramatic backdrop.

The sky is so blue it hurts.

“Uhhh, hello?” Roisin demands, tinny at the other end of the phone. “Honestly, Greg, if you’ve passed out again—”

“—Hold your horses, woman!” Greg snaps back, without any heat. “You want a photo or what?”

“Sorry! I didn’t realise you had to get out the silver plates and flash powder, old man!”

“Shut up,” he says with a shake of his head. He tries to figure out what would look good to send, with the light hitting the cottage’s walls, the sunflowers and bell-shaped flowers waving gently in the breeze, and the sun in a good spot to catch his good side. Or maybe the pond where he could perhaps catch a glimpse of the flashing, buzzing insects that seem to be obsessed with dive-bombing his head and giving his ears noisy humming drive-bys. Or… Or the shrine.

Greg hunkers down – lowering himself until the flowerbeds tower over him, bending over the winding path like massive trees creating gothic arches above a forest trail, their flowerheads bowing down in their perfect, brilliant colours and forms. Wafts of scent blast off and into his face – floral and sweet and slamming memories of grandmothers’ linen, summer holidays spent sprinting through meadows, and reluctant trips to the market being dragged by his mum past buckets upon buckets of crinkly bouquets of unnamed blooms on their way to their next pack of cheap mince. The smell of the earth, the pond and its algae, the smell of cut grass and the dust off the ground. The smell of stone still damp with the dew, the smell of a morning. The smell of his childhood. From when he was small.

He takes another deep breath, eyes closing, as his senses take over – battered by memories and feelings and… loss. The phone at his ear, the marble in his other hand, he clumsily settles down to almost lean his back against the cool, cold, solid surface of the stone shrine. The sun beats down on his face, and the shrine tears all the heat from his back, and he feels torn between today and the past. He wants to fall back, just for a little while – rest his back against the stone, and cast his mind back to happier times when everything felt new, felt real, just… felt.

Instead, he sits up a little straighter, slaps on a smile, and holds the phone up high. Squinting against the sun, Greg decides on a pose – anything to distract from the bags beneath his eyes and the red around them – and brings up the marble to hold between finger and thumb.

Just as Roisin starts to complain again, Greg thinks about the marble and the smirk as Alex tried to – no, succeeded in stealing the other one, and his smile suddenly turns real. He clicks, and the shutter sounds, and only checking to make sure he hadn’t blinked – he sends it over to Roisin – smiling Greg, engraved shrine, shining marble, garden exploding with blooms, and all.

“Finally!” she chuckles. “I was going to call for a wellness check if you took much longer, old man.”

Greg harrumphs, and relaxes, bringing the marble back down as he uses that hand to hold himself upright on the ground. The marble clicks as it touches the pavestones – just audible over the sound of a buzzing insect dive-bombing him again. His smile, however slight, does stay.

“Very nice,” Roisin says, impressed. “Looks like a proper garden! You look awful, of course.”

“Of course,” Greg agrees.

“But it’s nice to see you having a bit of fun. What filter is that, anyway?” she asks.

“You think I’m using a filter and still look this bad?”

“No, you idiot!” she says, and if she were here, she’d be slapping him on the shoulder. Again. “Is it localised to the area – Cottingley or something? The paper cutout or whatever. The one with the fairies!”

Greg’s ears buzz and his eyes go wide. He hears himself asking “What?” but Roisin doesn’t hear him or just ignores him anyway.

“Bit of a funny one – weren’t they all pretty little girl fairies? This one’s more like a furry little man…”

In a blur, Greg snatches his phone to his face and – two handed – swipes and taps until he gets to the photo he’d just taken as Rosin drones on in the background like yet another insect. He pinches and zooms and zooms and squints – the harsh morning sunlight glaring on the screen and making it so hard to see a single detail at all on the black rectangle of glass. But there – just above his shoulder – bold as you like – is Alex. Fluttering in the sunlight, his buzzing, iridescent wings a blur of colour and sparkling light, tiny hands up giving the peace signs as he beams, eyes sparkling, with his tongue stuck out.

Greg stares.

Alex had been less than a few inches away from him. The buzzing in his ears had been Alex. Oh my god.

“...Anyway, what have you got that marble for? Have you finally lost them? Your marbles, I mean?” Roisin says, chuckling at her own gentle joke.

The marble!

Greg squirms on the ground, twists frantically, his free hand scrabbling at the ground where he’d dropped the yellow and orange centred marble in his eagerness to see the photo, and finds it… gone.

A final buzz zips past his ear too fast to follow, and the disappearing sound of a honking laugh goes with it – diving into the rustling undergrowth and completely out of sight.

“Mother fucker!” Greg yells.

Chapter Text

Roisin had been confused and offended, and then baffled and amused, when Greg had explained that someone had been stealing his marbles. Several more ‘lost your marbles’ jokes ensued, but Greg really wasn’t paying much attention – instead clutching his hand over his jeans pocket where the rest of the bag of marbles was – he hoped – safely secured from any thieving little menaces.

He’d made his excuses, made some hasty promises, and hung up the phone.

He had paced. He had found a stick and poked the undergrowth with it. He’d demanded and pleaded and ordered Alex to show himself! He’d hidden behind a shed when a nosy looking neighbour had slowed their walk past the little wall of the cottage, drawn by his havering and shouting like a madman into the bushes.

Through the window of the shed, on a pile of dusty suitcases, he’d spotted an old rusted hammer, and his eyes had narrowed behind his heavy-rimmed black glasses.

When the coast was clear, Greg had retrieved the hammer – feeling its weight in his hand as he hefted it – and plonked himself down on the back door step again. His ridiculously long legs bent up, knees almost by his shoulders, Greg hunkers forward – gut pouring over his belt – and lays the hammer down on the paving stone, ready.

“Alright, Alex, let's see just how much you want these marbles…”

With great effort, Greg wiggles his fingers into his crushed pocket and extracts a marble – a purple one this time. It’s pretty, and shining, and Greg thinks he used to have one just like it when he was a boy – though his was probably covered in mud at some point or other. He holds it up to the sun, huffs a breath onto its shining surface, matting it, and then gives it a shine on his soft-fabric’ed shirt. It gleams.

Then he sets it down on the flagstone – held lightly between thumb and forefinger – and with his other hand, picks up the hammer with intent.

“...Because if you don’t come out and talk to me properly…”

Greg rests the head of the hammer on the top of the marble with a quiet ‘click’ – gauging the distance, preparing to swing.

“...I’m going to smash every single one of them to smithereens.”

Maybe he imagines it, but maybe he hears a tiny gasp just off to the side behind his shoulder. Greg doesn’t turn around to check. Instead he only has eyes for the marble. He can see the pads of his finger pressed against the glass, from inside – the cheap transparent material lending a faint green tinge to his skin turned white with the pressure of his grasp. He tries to shuffle his fingers down, away from the imminent impact.

“No? Nothing?” Greg says, loud enough for the whole garden to hear. “Alright then. This is on you!”

Greg lifts the hammer – its muddy browning-orange surface a blurry smear out of the corner of his eye. He’s pretty sure he’s about to shatter his own thumb, but he’s talked himself into this now, and he’s all out of ideas.

The purple ones really were his favourite.

CRACK! The hammer swings, Greg’s aim is surprisingly accurate, and the tiny marble explodes into shards. A flash of glittering light, facets of crystalline sadness as the sphere turns to ruin and the purple heart of it fails and is lost in colourless, crushed glass crumbs.

The whole garden holds its breath. Greg certainly does. A little part of him feels awful, and he squishes the little ball of it, sharp and cold, down inside him with a gulp. The marble’s remains lay there; their light gone out.

It takes him a moment to remember what he was even doing – his eyebrows twitching with a sudden sense of the loss of something he didn’t know he had.

Then a distant bird cries and snaps him back like glass to the here and now once more – heavy hammer hanging loose from a hand still singing from the impact.

He clears his throat, and digs another marble out of his pocket, adding another cold ball of feelings to the lump in his gut.

The marble – a green-hearted one spun with a vortex of vibrant, verdant leafy tones – sits so much steadier on the flagstone, nestled into the crumbs of its predecessor with a glassy grind. Greg doesn’t even need to hold it in place. Instead, he flexes and fists his hand, sweating and wiped against the tight surface of his jeans while his other hand adjusts his grip on the hammer once more.

“I’ll do it,” he says, barely above a mumble. “The whole bag of them.” He reaches out and rests the hammer’s silver-and-rust head against the marble with a gentle tap – lining up his aim as his eyebrows twitch and slip down his face into something rather sad. “I don’t want to…”

He doesn’t want to, he realises with a slowly, swelling sense of confusion. They’re just cheap glass balls – probably churned out of a machine, a million-a-minute, in some factory half a world away. Boxed up and priced, left abandoned on a shelf for a month, a year – a decade. Destined to be forgotten or lost or… or smashed.

Beautiful. Unique. Perfectly imperfect. And no-one else in the whole wide world will ever appreciate it like he does now.

“I don’t want to…” he repeats, blinking the blurriness from his eyes as he reaches and twists the marble in place. The sunlight catches it; a nebula of greens and tiny stars, cold and smooth and perfect against his gross and lumpen fingertips. “...But I will.”

He sniffs. Sits up. Raises the hammer and holds his breath.

His elbow trembles.

A swing. A CRACK. A scream – his own – as he swerves at the last second away from a flash of colour and a croakily-yelled “Stop!” The hammer smashes into the concrete, leaves a powdered white divot, stinging all the way up his arm, but all Greg can see is the tiny little man – arms thrown wide, legs akimbo, fierce expression and burning blue eyes, breathlessly – breathily – yelling “Stop!”

It’s Alex. Standing in front of the marble, defending it with his life, tiny chest heaving and face flushed red to the tips of his ears. Greg’s heart thunders with the shock of almost crushing him – with the surprise of seeing Alex again.

“Stop. Please,” Alex says. His voice is soft; a little lispy, a little rough and breathy, gently pleading.

The hammer drops out of Greg’s trembling hand with a clatter and thump. Alex flinches, but doesn’t break that fierce eye contact with a wide-eyed Greg.

Greg hesitantly – lest he break this fragile, glass-like dream he’s in – breathes out little by little.

Alex’s transparent, iridescent wings – high and rigid, twitching with nerves, slowly ease their tension out with his tiny shoulders, as he lets his outstretched arms lower and rest.

Well, fuck – Greg doesn’t know what to say, now. He’d just been so determined to finally see the man… creature… thing… on his own terms that now all he finds himself doing is staring.

Alex is tiny and perfect and… well honestly a bit rubbish now that Greg can see him in the daylight properly – in a way that’s utterly and completely entrancing. He’s three and a half inches tall at most. He’s lanky and tube-like and his face turns into neck without warning. He’s got the absolutely most miniscule little beard – barely a millimetre in length – like the fur on a greying bumble-bee’s butt. His hair is trimmed close, made of that same greying fluff, and two almost pointed ears that flip Greg’s heart over with how tiny and perfect and adorably pink they are. His jumper is baggy and huge on him – but would barely fit Greg’s thumb – hand knitted in the chunkiest – finest – brightly coloured wool stripes in red and yellow and orange. His trousers look like jeans – by way of a stolen pair from a Ken doll chopped up and shortened and bunched up at the waist with a pink and orange belt of sparkly twine. His shoes are shapeless, purple-ish felt things – like the lint from a dryer – that would barely fit a matchstick head, and Alex shuffles and straightens in place, pigeon-toeing those booties on top of each other as Greg’s stare turns him flustered.

“Thank you!” Greg suddenly remembers to say, startling Alex. “For the bath— For saving me in— In the bath! I wanted to… to thank you. For that.”

Alex looks unconvinced, with a bit of a frown. Then he turns around and stares meaningfully at the pile of marble crumbs around the bottom of the still-whole green marble, and stares back at Greg.

If Greg didn’t have his glasses on, he’d not have been able to see Alex raise one tiny tuft of an eyebrow at him.

“Well. Okay. Fair,” Greg concedes. “But I… I wanted to get your attention! You didn’t exactly leave your number.”

Almost too quiet to hear – and if Greg wasn’t shrimped over on the back step, bent almost double, he wouldn’t have been able to – Alex hums his displeasure, his tiny thin lips pressing together and disappearing behind his beard.

“Look – you want that one?” Greg throws his hand out at the green marble. Unfortunately, the approach of his massive paddle of a hand startles Alex who leaps backwards, wings snapping through the air, and lands almost a foot away. “Fuck! Sorry! I didn’t mean…” Greg pulls his hand back and scrubs it over his face. He’s fucking it up again! His shoulders hunch as he hides in the lonely darkness behind his gritty eyelids, and he breathes a frustrated, helpless, “Fuck sake…”

Something touches his ankle. Touches it again. Greg doesn’t kick out, but he does flinch – then freeze. The touch on his ankle – barely there through the thin fabric of his striped sock – rests gently where the skin is thin over the bone, just above the padded collar of his trainer. A tiny spot of warm.

Greg holds his breath and cracks open his eyes behind his hand.

Alex is touching him. Patting him on the ankle in a ‘there there’ kind of motion. Awkwardly – so very awkwardly. His tiny wings folded down by his back, trailing like shirt-tails – he’s on tiptoes to reach the sliver of almost-skin that Greg’s shoe affords. Just a tiny, but genuine, touch of comfort.

Alex looks absurd, and Greg almost bursts into an ugly sobbing mess anyway. Only the breath he’s holding manages to hold the dam closed as his eyes sting and burn and swell with sharp salty seas.

With more effort than he can stand, Greg swallows it down. Blinks himself clear behind his hand that he totally casually turns into a wipe across his sleeve as he sniffles and swallows and shakily breathes through.

Greg’s voice is so small – smaller, maybe than the tiny creature before him – when he raggedly whispers, “Thanks.” His voice wavers. The dam cracks. Greg holds his breath – tight and crushing in his chest.

The dam holds.

With one last pat on Greg’s ankle, Alex leaves his hand hovering for a second, before deciding that’s enough. He shuffles back a bit, clearly unsure what to do with his hands. “You’re welcome!” he calls out, kindly. “But, uh… There is… Hmmm.”

There’s that hum again. Displeased or unhappy – disgruntled, perhaps, or uncomfortable. Something Alex wants to say, but also doesn’t. It catches Greg’s attention like a thorn-covered lifeline in that salty sea of tears he’s treading. Something’s wrong – and Greg wants to know what. His eyebrows pinch as he blinks away the worst of the welling.

Alex opens his mouth, and closes it again. Does it another two times, as if he’s a goldfish left speechless on stage. The fourth time, and Greg forgets to feel anything but impatience.

“What?” Greg asks, his voice still broken but his annoyance starting to show.

“Oh! Well. Um. It’s just… You’re… Ah…”

“Fuck’s sake – spit it out? What?”

“Harshing the vibe?” Alex says, turning it into a question as he winces at his own phrasing. When Greg’s eyebrows shoot up, shocked and affronted, Alex immediately starts to backpedal. “Or, maybe that’s— Not so much the ‘vibe’...” he wraps his mouth around the offending word, enunciating it for all its worth. “...as, well, negatively impacting my— uh, the whimsy?”

“The whimsy?” Greg repeats back, in utter disbelief. “Your whimsy?” he clarifies, his eyebrows creeping back down his face to get comfy somewhere in the neighbourhood of a scowl.

“Well, it’s… Hmmm.” Alex hums, squirming in place as he wrings his tiny hands and finds anything to look at that isn’t Greg’s face as he leans down closer and closer. “Yes?” he squeaks.

The absolute cheek of the man! Thing! Fuckin’ pixie little bugger! The gall of him! “Well, I’m so sorry my… my mental health issues are harshing your vibe!”

Alex winces at the words thrown back in his face.

“My deepest apologies…” Greg says, sarcasm dripping from his lips as he bends forwards even further – his stomach almost brushing the flagstones – in a deeply mocking bow. “...That my brush with fucking death isn’t positively contributing to the whimsical l’ambiance in this crappy little Air-fuckin-BnB.”

Greg feels laughter about to burst out of him – harsh, sharp, and worst of all, mean laughter as the absurdity and sudden cruelty of it strikes him just the right way. The universe finding a way to make him feel even worse about everything it’s inflicting on him. All of this – the nightmares, the sleepless weeks, exhaustion on top of exhaustion, and now this – a fucking manifestation of delight and childlike wonder telling him he’s bringing the fucking tone down.

A single, cold, “Ha!” tears out of his body, feeling like the thorn-covered lifeline gets torn out of him with it.

“No, it’s just…” Alex looks like he’s in agony. His hands are white, gripping each other as he hugs his own body – clings to himself and tears at his jumper until it’s taut and stretched. He almost paces. His face twists into dismay. “I don’t—”

“—How about; I’ll try to have my breakdown in a more convenient place for you, will that help? Maybe crushed into a closet? Or I could just quietly off myself in the shed – would that be bette—”

“—NO!” Alex yells, suddenly up in Greg’s face. Literally. His wings flapping furiously, beating an angry tattoo in the air as Alex zips up so close to Greg’s glasses he almost smashes into the glass.

Greg goes cross-eyed and throws himself back with a gasp.

“No. That’s… No!” Alex hovers. He’s practically rigid with emotion, hanging in the air – tiny fists by his side as his legs dangle down. “But you’re hurting me, and I hoped we could help each other.”

“I’m— What?”

Alex’s tiny shoulders hunch up and then fall as he sighs as deep as his little body lets him. “I’m… Well… A creature of the fae? Formed of belief and wonder? Something like that, anyway,” he mumbles as he drifts slowly back down. Eventually the tips of his dryer-fluff boots alight on the top of the green marble, and he lets his legs bend and flop over the sides until he’s sitting, slumped, on the marble like an exercise ball. “So when you don’t believe in me, or worse – actively undermine the, well, the whimsy…”

“It hurts you?”

Alex hums, apparently agreeing, as he unhappily rests his head in his hands, elbows on his knees.

Greg finds himself mirroring the tiny fae creature – Alex – and puts his own chin in his hands as the gravity settles on him.

“Sorry,” Greg mumbles, feeling like a right bastard.

“Yeah.” Alex replies. “Me too.”

“Would it help if I gave you all the marbles?” Greg asks, eventually.

Alex hums again. “Not very ‘whimsical’, is it?” he points out, dejectedly.

“No, I guess not.”

Both of them sit there, glumly looking down at the concrete of the flagstone of the path. Greg’s arse is getting cold and flat and a bit uncomfortable, and he suddenly worries if thinking about that will hurt Alex too. Probably, knowing his luck. He chances a glance up at Alex, and finds him sneaking a look back – and Greg glances away, caught out. He thinks Alex did the same.

Greg huffs. “Got any suggestions, then?” he asks.

“For what?”

“It may surprise you to hear that I’m a bit low on ideas for how to inject a bit of delight and wonder into my life right now, so…?”

“Oh! Well, uh, I mean, yes? But…” Alex’s voice picks up a bit, interested – eager even, and then suddenly turns bashful.

Which gets Greg’s attention. “But what?”

“Well…” Alex hops off the marble, his felted boots crunching over the crumbs of glass in a way that makes Greg wince. Alex doesn’t seem to pay much attention though, instead reaching out a proportionally long finger to dance across the top of the shining, green-hearted, marble’s glass surface in a way that might be very generously described as coquettish. “But how will you make it worth my while?”

Greg’s forehead is getting a workout as his eyebrows take another trip uptown.

“Worth your— What the fuck? I thought we just established that this is for your—”

“Greg!” Alex interrupts, rolling his eyes.

It’s the first time Alex has said his name, and somehow, it makes Alex seem more real. More than his little pats, his hums, or his wicked little smirk he’d had as he’d stolen a marble from Greg’s hand. Like all of a sudden, Greg feels like he’s really connected with him.

Alex is touching the marble. His other hand pointing to it, almost out of his own sight. As if he’s hiding just how blatantly he’s pointing at the marble. For Greg’s benefit.

“How…” he says, glancing at the marble with the subtlety of a brick in the face. “...Will you make me giving you whimsical suggestions…” Alex nods his entire head to the side, towards the marble. “...Worth my while.” Alex’s tiny little tufty eyebrows raise up, then scrunch down, and raise up again as he belabours his words. “Maybe some kind of prize—”

Like marbles themselves, Greg’s eyes roll so hard they’d shatter. “—Oh I have an idea,” he says, thick with attitude. “What if I decide if your suggestion is good, and if it is – you get a marble.”

Alex’s face scrunches, his head popping out to jut his chin as Greg’s suggestion seems to just miss the mark. Greg can’t help but try again.

“Or… Or I’ll award you marbles on how good it is?”

Tiny nods from Alex, encouraging. Greg leans into it.

“A particularly rubbish suggestion would only get you one marble, of course…”

Alex nods, suddenly serious. “That seems fair.”

“But for a really good suggestion… Well. I could maybe be persuaded to go as high as…” Greg brings a finger up to his lip; pondering and seemingly serious.

When he glances down at Alex, he sees him rapt with attention, and Greg fights hard to keep the smirk from his face.

“Thr…” Greg starts, and sees Alex’s frown. “Fou…” Greg watches as Alex tilts his head, eagerly hoping for more. Almost leaning so far he could fall. “Five! Five full marbles for a really good one.”

Alex claps his hands, delighted. “Oh, yes please, Greg! Mmm, five marbles!” Alex paces around for a moment, his excitement too much for one spot as his wings buffet and almost-lift him off the ground with their fluttering.

“Five marbles. Wowee. That’s… I’m not sure if I could even hold five marbles.”

“Mate, I don’t think you could even hold two,” Greg says, smiling down at Alex so tiny as he paces.

“I could! I bet I could hold three!”

Greg shakes his head, leaning into it. “Not a chance, mate. Look at the size of you.”

Alex pulls himself up straight, trying to look taller than the bare three and a half inches he must be. “Eight point nine centimetres, thank you.”

“Pff!” Greg blows out his disbelief. “Six point two at best, I’d say.”

Alex hums. Greg’s quite getting to like the sound – like the rumble of a hedge full of bees on a summer’s day but with a hundred different inflections to tell on his feelings about whatever has him bothered.

“Well, little Alex, before you can carry them – you need to earn them. Got any whimsical suggestions for me?”

“Oh!” Alex looks around, frantically. “Uh, yes, um…”

Greg feels the corners of his mouth twitch up as he watches the tiny man attempt to pull an idea out of thin air.

“Flowers!”

“Flowers?” Greg asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Mm, yes please!”

Greg sits up a bit – just as well as his back is starting to kill him – and looks around the garden. He’d not paid it much attention, but there are flowers right next to the back door dangling and waving in the warm breeze of the day. Those purplish, blue, bell shaped ones. Then, of course, the sunflowers behind them, next to the wall. In fact, the garden is heaving with them. Blue and yellow, tiny specks of white and spears of pinks and purples and yet more blue. He can see poppies further down the path, and veiny looking purple flowerheads dangling over the edge of the pond where a blush-pink, claw-shaped flower is half opened on a lily pad. There’s so many.

“What about flowers?” Greg asks, looking down at Alex who is staring back eagerly – those sparkling blue eyes so hopeful.

“You should… judge them?”

A scowl flashes across Greg’s face. “I’m not some posh wanker going on about fuckin’ ‘variatals’ at the Chelsea flower show!”

“No! No, of course— No, I mean judge them on…” Alex zips through the air to the bell shaped bloom by Greg’s knee, and shoves his head inside, wings fluttering madly as he tries to hover. “...Wearability?” He grabs the edge of the flower, holding himself inside the bell of the flower and knocking puffs of yellow pollen that stick to him in clouds. His head obscured, his voice muffled, he nonetheless tries to strike a pose and – Greg is horrified to hear – shift his voice lower and sultry. “...And sexiness!” Alex says, as he crosses his legs slowly in mid air.

Greg barks a laugh, slapping his hand over his mouth in a failed attempt to muffle it. It’s enough to knock Alex from inside the flower, and he tumbles almost to the ground. Greg reaches to catch him, but he flutters and flaps and steadies himself in a yellow explosion of shaken off pollen. Greg pulls back his hand, a little disappointed he didn’t get to help.

“Or smelliness? Or… Or deliciousness?” Alex suggests as he clamps himself like a koala around the flower and – hesitating only for a moment to open his tiny mouth as wide as it’ll go, exposing that cute and ridiculous gap between his front teeth – he bites into the flower, making a teeny-tiny ‘Raah’ noise as he does. He wriggles his head like a puppy with a rope, and finally tears out a heart-shaped chunk of the flower head – the petal juicy and ripped and hanging out of his wide-gagged face.

He looks delighted with himself.

Greg giggles. “And is that delicious, then?”

Alex is beaming, still clinging to the now-punctured-bloom. He shakes his head emphatically and loudly mumbles a “Nuh-uh!”

Greg finds himself beaming at the ridiculous little man. “Good!” He holds out his hand again, cupping it under the flower. “Spit it out, and we’ll see if we can find a worse one!”

Pfeh. Alex spits out the tiny hole-punch of a bite of flower into Greg’s palm. His clothes are dusty with pollen, his face is smeared with petal juices, stained faintly blue onto his greying beard, and he’s flushed pink on his cheeks and those tiny perfect ears as he struggles to decide whether delight or disgust will win out on his face.

He shudders, full body, to the tips of his wings with revulsion, and grins – eyes watery – back at Greg. “Yes, please!” he chirps.

Chapter Text

Ten minutes later, Greg is standing chest deep in flowers, one hand full to bursting with blooms of all different sizes and shapes and colours and smells. He brings the haphazard bouquet to his face, and breathes in – his eyes gliding closed as the heady scents envelop his face and slip luxuriantly up his nose. Sweet and spicy, the rich scent of roses, the lazy smell of lavender; even the green, grassy scent of broken stems and crumpled leaves. It smashes him full in the face like driving a florist's van straight into a highstreet Lush and tickles his nose something awful. He feels woozy with it, and blinks his eyes open again in the bright summer sun. Insects hum, butterflies flutter, and his back feels molten with the rays hitting his heavy shirt and he sweats through the t-shirt beneath. A half-hearted cough makes him shake, and he clutches at his precious, delicate cargo lest they scatter.

The danger passed, he daintily takes another step through the tall plants to the white-painted wood of the trellis and the treasure it holds.

Honeysuckle.

Strange crowns of tubular petals, pink and orange or white, peeling open to reveal their spray of thready… stamens? Greg thinks they’re stamens. They burst in a frozen moment like a circle of gaily costumed horn players. Honeysuckle climbs and winds around the wooden frame, those bold pink and white flowers drawing bees like nothing else who dive – arses wiggling – into the trumpet shapes for the delicious nectar within.

Which, Greg remembers, was plenty tasty enough for him as a boy too.

His mouth waters as he remembers picking the flowers and sucking the sweet syrup from inside, sharing stories and rumours around the schoolyard that they could make you see things or get you high. A single year or two of summer, before he’d discovered beer and cigarettes and moved on from sucking drops of lightly sweetened nectar from flowers in the hedgerows and someone’s granny’s garden.

But now – now he gets a catch in his throat when he remembers. Or rather – almost does. He can’t quite recall the taste, and suddenly it means a lot to him that he remembers.

Greg reaches up and goes to pluck a flower, when the memory slams into focus. He was small, then, and stood on tip-toes. One of the older girls had shown him how to pick the flowers – holding his hand as she guided him to pinch the flower just beneath the base, and pluck it there, green leaves and all. Greg’s hand does the same now – feeling the petals, velvety and cool against his finger tips, before he reaches for the place where stem turns to flower, and picks it with a snap.

It smells of sweetness, of childhood, of a girl who’d held his hand.

Greg’s fingers are stained green and he smiles.

He picks a few extra, and turns to find Alex.

Back at the little stone shrine, Alex is buzzing back and forth impatiently. Greg had brought one of the metal folding chairs out from the kitchen bar, and as a concession to his age, set it up next to the impromptu stone table which now has a tiny heap of about six different flowers threatening to blow away in the gentle breeze. A hopeful bee bumbles around, approaching Alex’s pile of floral treasure, and he hastily flaps towards it, shooing it away.

“No, thank you. Not for you. Sorry, friend.”

“Got some competition there, have you?” Greg chuckles as he drops onto the groaning chair, its metal feet skittering on the concrete flagstone as they adjust to his weight.

“She’s got quite enough other flowers to tend to!” Alex says primly, fluttering down to the rough, aged shrine’s upper surface to herd his blooms back into a tidier pile.

“Watch yourself!” Greg says, far too late, and gleefully dumps his cupped hand of flowers onto Alex’s head.

Alex yells and it’s the most rubbish, old-man-like yell that Greg can remember hearing, and he’s delighted by it, bursting into laughter as Alex fights his way through the petals and stamens and whatever the hell the other sexy parts of flowers are called. Greg laughs so hard, slapping a hand on his own thigh, that he doesn’t even manage to catch a rogue sprig of purple lavender that rolls off the shrine.

“Oh, sorry, mate,” Greg says, covering his mouth with his hand and not meaning it in the slightest. He’s rewarded with another Alex hum.

Alex shakes a petal off his head and dislodges a cloud of bright yellow pollen that puffs off around his face. Alex scrunches his eyes up – scrunches his whole face – and gasps and holds. His whole body tenses – almost freezes in place, wings opening wide and trembling – and he gasps again.

Greg looks at him, puzzled, before suddenly realising what’s happening.

Alex is going to sn—

“ACHOO!” he wheezes and in a flash, his wings crack the air and launch him like a bullet. Faster than Greg can see, Alex blinks off the top of the shrine to slam into Greg’s damp t-shirt with a soft thwap.

Greg blinks in shock. “What the fuck?”

Alex is still – a soft, frozen lump attached between Greg’s tits on the soft cotton of his shirt before a moment passes, his wings sag, and he peels off to land on Greg’s thigh.

“...Bless me!” Alex sniffles, holding one arm up from where he’s lying on his back, breathless.

Greg has a yellow-pollen silhouette of a spread-eagled Alex on his chest, and the sight of it sends Greg off again – laughing so hard Alex wobbles and jiggles and almost rolls off his leg. Greg catches him just before he slithers off, still boneless from his earth-shattering sneeze. Greg holds him in the palm of his hand, and his laugh dies in his throat.

Alex is perfect.

Tiny and incredible – flopped and floppy lying in Greg’s cupped hand, he’s warm and soft and Greg can feel the rise and fall of his tiny little chest through the fluff of his oversized jumper. Can feel the teeny tiny heat of Alex’s own hands flat against the rough skin of Greg’s palm – even the ticklish brush of Alex’s hair resting against the base of his index finger as he catches his breath. A flutter – delicate and incredible – where Alex’s wings tremble against his hand and brush the inside of his thumb.

So fragile and incredible. So absolutely perfect in every tiny way. Greg’s hit by a wave of terror that he’ll somehow break him, and feels his palms turn sweaty.

Which must be simply disgusting for Alex!

“Are you alright? I’m sorry – I didn’t mean…” Greg starts, his hand starting to shake.

Alex opens his eyes, finds Greg, and grins that toothy, gappy smile. “Oh yeah! I was lucky I had a nice soft landing this time! Thank you, Greg.” Alex pats Greg on the hand.

It tickles.

“Well, little Alex, you’re welcome to motorboat my tits any time,” Greg smirks, and smiles properly when he sees Alex throw his hand over his mouth to honk a laugh.

Alex sits up, and Greg lets him slip off his hand onto the shrine’s top, wincing a little at how shiny and damp his hand looks, but neither of them mention it.

Greg feels like he owes Alex an apology of some kind, though.

“Right, you! I’ve picked the first flower for you to try!” he says, trying to sound stern.

“Oh! Right. Uh, is there… an order? I could take notes, maybe? Or…”

“Nope! I’ve decided. Here.” Greg reaches past Alex who turns to watch his hand go past his shoulder, and picks up one of the honeysuckle blooms. “This one.”

Alex holds out his hands, and Greg drops the trumpet shaped – and to Alex, trombone sized – flower in his arms. He grabs hold of it properly, turning in his arms until he can get the open end close to his face, and he opens his mouth as wide as it’ll go.

“Wait!” Greg stops him. “What are you doing?”

Alex looks down, mouth still open. “–aysking –iiik?” he tries to say without closing his wonky teeth.

“That’s not how you taste honeysuckle!” Greg shakes his head, and Alex copies him, slowly closing his mouth. “Watch.” Reaching past Alex again, Greg gets one of the spares and gently holds it between finger and thumb. It’s cool and fragile and feels like it’d bruise as soon as he’d look at it – tiny and perfect in its own way. Greg leans forward, face almost level with the shrine from where he’s sitting, and holds the tiny flower in one hand so Alex can see it. With his other hand, he pinches the base – tugging off the very end of the flower where it once connected to the stem, and drawing the petally trumpet away, gently from the rest of the flower. The core of the flower – not the stamen, the other one – comes with it, drawn out like a plunger down the trumpet’s stem until just an inch or so later, the nodule on the end gathers up a precious, shining, clear and sweet droplet of the flower’s precious nectar to glint like its very own marble in the sunlight.

Alex watches, awed, his mouth falling open once again.

Greg brings the tiny morsel up to his mouth and holds it to his lips – sucking the single droplet onto his barely peeking tongue to explode with sweetness and flavour. Honey-like and tangy, floral and fresh and so evocative of a frozen moment of his childhood that it catches in his throat.

He swallows, Greg’s mouth watering and his lips sweetened by the flower’s treasure, and puts the flower down, nodding at Alex.

Alex has his hand up at his own mouth, as if touching where Greg had just tasted, mirroring the feeling he must have had, eyes wide and entranced. Greg sucks his lower lip and tastes the last, shiny echo of the flavour with a soft smile.

“Go on then. Your go.”

As if snapped out of a dream, Alex looks down at his own flower, back up at Greg, and then down again. He tries to angle the awkwardly shaped flower in his arms – at one point hefting it over his shoulder to try to get one hand on the end and the other ready to pinch, but it keeps slipping off. He hums.

He sits down hard on the stone, cross legged, and tries another angle of attack. He tries holding the flower under his knee, pinning it down, as he wrestles the other end and grasps it tight and pulls.

He falls over. He hums again. He doesn’t even notice when Greg reaches past him for the third honeysuckle flower, and nips the end off for him.

Greg holds the flower out as Alex is scrambling back to his feet.

“Oh! Thank you. That’s…”

Carefully – with hands so much bigger than when he used to do this – Greg draws the droplet of sweet syrup out with the flower’s core and holds it there – almost falling – and shining like a star for Alex to take.

“Oh.” The droplet is as big as Alex’s hand – half as big as his face – barely a morsel for Greg. Alex shuffles closer, head tilted up, and holding his entire hand out to steady Greg’s gently swaying fingertip, presses his mouth to the shining, gleaming drop.

The droplet bends, Alex’s pouting, reaching lips denied their treasure as the bristles of his tiny beard turn the bead’s surface a shimmering, polka dotted shine. He sticks his tiny tongue out, the briefest, breathiest hint of the sound of his effort reaching Greg’s ear – and then tongue and nectar make contact.

Surface tension is a bitch, Greg discovers.

SPLASH! The whole droplet suddenly envelops Alex with shocking speed. Flecks fly off! Alex’s groan explodes into an underwater muffled yell as the blob of sweetness spreads across his face, his chin, over his quickly shutting eyes and into his hair. It wobbles – Alex enveloped in a mask of juice – bouncing against the fuzzy collar of his jumper. A bubble of air – like the flaw in a marble – bursts out of Alex’s face carrying that muffled yell with a splatting pop, and Alex staggers backwards, blinded.

Oh shit!

Greg has his thumb – freshly licked – mere millimetres from Alex’s thrashing, sightless, blob-covered head before he knows what he’s doing! About to smear his massive, spit-slick fingertip all over Alex’s face like a smudge on a child’s cheek. “Crap. Wait!” Greg mumbles, suddenly embarrassed, instead tearing his sweat-touched t-shirt out from his waistband to wipe off his thumb and then stretch it – stretch it far too far, shuffling forward on his metal, skittering chair – to hold out for Alex to grasp.

Tiny thrashing pink hands – one already drenched in the slightly sticky syrup – grab the soft warm black cotton hem, and Alex yanks himself towards it to shove his face into its soft absorbent cloth.

He throws his head back, eyes still closed, and wheezes in – gasps! A deep, coughing, deeply surprised breath. Still clutching to Greg’s t-shirt, Alex trembles around another breath. “I’m okay!” he warbles, sounding ancient and shaky. “Greg?” he says, turning his head this way and that, as if unsure where Greg might be without being able to see him.

“You ridiculous little man,” Greg finds himself saying warmly.

Alex beams up in his general direction, eyes still closed, face still a mess of partly wiped honeysuckle nectar.

“You better wipe off the rest, you mucky boy, or I’ll lick you like a lollipop!” Greg threatens, emphasising the ‘pop’ at the end for sheer devilment!

Eyes still closed, Alex’s eyebrows shoot up! Then, his mouth opening and closing a couple of times, shrugs and throws his face back into Greg’s sweaty t-shirt and wipes his entire head down on it, making wobbly, silly, warbling sounds as he does. He sways as Greg laughs, that huge belly tugging the t-shirt back and forth with each rolling, natural shake of Greg’s chuckles.

Alex gasps again, then rubs his rubbery little face on Greg’s shirt like he’s blowing raspberries on a baby’s belly. And repeats the action until Greg rolls his eyes and gives him the tiniest little poke on Alex’s soft jumper.

“Alright, very funny. I think you’ve made quite enough of a mess of me, thank you.”

In all honesty, Alex has barely made any difference to Greg’s t-shirt at all – one tiny smear of syrup on the hem of a t-shirt that’s soaked through with sweat from his armpits, his neck, and leaving a mad pattern of blotches underneath Greg’s man tits. An amusingly shaped crime scene outline of pollen on his chest, and one more miniscule damp patch is hardly any comparison.

Alex hums anyway, and apologises most seriously. “Mmm, yes – sorry Greg. Thank you for the delicious beverage, though!”

“Ha! Mate, I think you’ve got a drinking problem.”

Alex nods entirely too enthusiastically, his short silvery hair glinting in the sun where the syrup is still sticky.

Greg looks down at himself – dark and dusty and damp and shakes his head. “I need a fuckin’ bath…” he mutters.

Alex is still nodding, seemingly to himself, and shoves his fingers in his mouth two at a time, sucking the syrup off them quite loudly.

Greg looks almost disgusted.

“Right! Let’s get you some points for that absolute disaster of an activity, shall we?”

Alex freezes, index and ring finger half out of his mouth, suddenly all eagerness and attention. “Poinths?” he slobbers.

“Marbles. Pay attention!”

Suddenly standing to attention, still slobbery hands at his side, Alex vibrates with excitement – or at least, his tiny little iridescent wings do.

Greg is entirely too pleased by the attention, and struggles to keep a mostly stern expression on his face as he digs into his pocket and brings out a handful of the clacking, shiny balls.

“And we’re marking you on ‘whimsy’ are we?” Greg asks.

“Yes please, Greg!”

“Hmmm. Well your task was to find the most disgusting tasting flower…”

Alex opens his mouth and then closes it again, apparently deciding not to contradict Greg on this.

“...And in the end you only actually took a bite out of one of them, so—”

“—But technically I’m disgusting now—”

“—Bah bah bah! Do not interrupt me!” Greg wags his finger at Alex, teacherlike.

Alex goes cross-eyed watching the comparatively enormous fingertip waving up and down just in front of him, and tilts his head as if mesmerised.

“I very much enjoyed your absolutely disastrous attempt to taste the honeysuckle, even if you needed my help twice. Hmm. If you’d eaten more disgusting things, I could score you higher, but as it is… Two marbles!”

“Two?” Alex asks, sadly. His face a picture of pouting disappointment.

Greg stops half way to holding out two of the tiny glass spheres. “It can be none if you’re going to get lippy about it.”

“No no! I just… Wanted to prove I could hold three at once.”

“Oh!” Greg finds himself smiling – still completely unconvinced that Alex could manage it, but now looking for an excuse to watch him try. “Well…” He physically looks around and gets a terrible idea. “I suppose you could earn a bonus point.”

“Oh?” And Alex looks so eager.

Greg almost feels bad about it. He reaches down to the base of the shrine and brushes away a couple of fallen leaves. “If you…” Greg’s other hand slaps up to his face as he tries to stop himself from giggling. “Eat this marshmallow.”

He holds the marshmallow up at Alex and two things are abundantly clear. Firstly, that the marshmallow is bigger than Alex’s head. By a lot. And secondly…

“It’s, uh, dirty,” Alex points out the obvious.

The marshmallow is from the day before – fallen from the shrine where Greg had balanced them and into the pile of heaped leaf litter the breezes had swirled and gathered in its calm lee. The morning dew had dampened the sticky white puck allowing it to stick to crumbs of cracked leaves, crumbly lumps of dead moss, and assorted grey-brown dust. About a third of the marshmallow is encrusted with gardeny cruft.

“I’m well aware,” Greg agrees. Magnanimously, he brushes a few clumps of crap off the worst affected side of the marshmallow and blows into his palm to get rid of the bits and much of the dust. It only looks mostly terrible now. “If you’re not interested in a third marble, mate, that’s—”

With a sharp buzz of his wings, Alex is up and off the stone shrine and onto Greg’s palm before he can finish his sentence. “I can do it!” he insists, landing wobbily on the mound at the base of Greg’s thumb.

Greg’s eyes widen at the feel of him – his little soft boots staggering and stumbling, pressing into Greg’s hand in a way that’s entirely too close to ticklish. His fingers twitch with the sensation.

Alex steadies himself against the almost waist-high marshmallow, plucking off a flake of colourless leaf-litter with delicacy and dismay. “I can do it…” he tells himself.

Greg stands up, turning so he can get a bit more light on Alex, tiny in his palm. He still has two marbles in his other hand, clutched with three fingers and easy to hold onto – and he offers his index finger to Alex to steady him as they suddenly rise together and turn into the sun. Alex almost stumbles back against his first knuckle, dropping to one knee into one of Greg’s palm’s creases.

“I’ll tell you when to start,” Greg says, absolutely entranced by whether or not Alex will do something this horrible for a single marble.

Alex nods, shuffling around to the cleaner side of the marshmallow and trying to casually brush off some more of the dust as he goes – getting a smear of damp white sticky gum on the sleeve of his knitted jumper for his trouble.

“Ready?”

Alex nods, determined. His tiny little hands are gripping the cylindrical ridge of the marshmallow until they almost turn white themselves – the pillowy, cushiony confection yielding beneath his elegant fingers.

“Alright. Three, two, one, go!”

Greg watches, absolutely entranced, as Alex shoves his entire face into the surface of the marshmallow. Muffled and almost at his ears, beard entirely lost and eyes gone and softly enveloped, Alex throws himself into the task with a determination that Greg is immediately horrified and delighted by! He’s about to burst into a forbidden giggle – feeling entirely schoolboyish and naughty, when—

“GREG!?”

Someone yells at him! Someone angry!

Shit! Greg hides the evidence, and turns to face his accuser, trying to look some kind of innocent.

It’s Daisy. “Greg, wasn’t it? What are you doing, then, out talking to yourself in the garden?” She demands to know, standing outside the little stone wall much like her daughter had done. She has her hands on her hips and glares at him suspiciously.

Greg starts to reply, but the words don’t come out – not when his mouth is full.

Oh. Shit.

Chapter Text

Greg’s eyes go wide. His eyebrows cannot get any higher. Horror and panic tighten his skin from the roots of his hair to the soles of his feet as he realises he’s shoved Alex – filthy marshmallow and all – into his mouth.

He tries to whimper, “Oh no” but only the voiceless, wordless, hummed sounds reverberate around his puffed cheeks behind his stretched and sealed lips. His eyes start to water and he blinks.

He desperately tries not to swallow.

“Whassa matter?” Daisy demands. “Cat got your tongue?”

Greg’s expression turns apologetic – his eyebrows working overtime – as he tilts his head at the irony. Then PAIN! A stinging, pinching pain on the tip of his tongue!

Greg groans! Flinches! Slaps his empty hand against his cheek. His stinging eyes overflow and a tear slips down the side of his cheek.

“Oh shit!” Daisy says, suddenly worried. “Toothache is it? Fuck! I hate that.” She shakes her head, visible only out of the corner of Greg’s watering eyes. “No wonder you were such a grumpy bastard the other day…”

Greg’s eyebrows are doing the samba. The lingering pain. The panic. Feeling offended and yet so fucking grateful for Daisy’s wild assumptions.

Ah fuck, Greg’s mouth is starting to water – the sweetness of the marshmallow mixing with what he suddenly realises is the shuffling, kicking, wriggling fuzz of Alex’s boots, jumper and hair inside his mouth.

He feels like he’s going to throw up.

“Let me out!” Alex yells, muffled by Greg’s mouth and almost inaudible.

Daisy suddenly stares at Greg pointedly. “What was that?”

Greg shakes his head, trying to hide the panic in his eyes. “Nothing!” he’d mumble if he could open his mouth at all. Instead the two syllables rattle around in the air-filled and Alex-filled void of his gob.

Squinting for several long seconds at him, Daisy hums. “Well, you should get that looked at, you know! The little buggers’ll kill you if you let them fester.”

Greg nods. Emphatically agreeing, even as Alex levels a serious kick against the inside of Greg’s cheek. Greg points at the cottage door, trying to look apologetic and pathetic and as if he’s in just a world of pain. It feels like Alex is punching one of his gums, so it’s very easy to do!

“Right! Right. Yeah – maybe try some hot tea? Or cold. I never know which one it is!” Daisy rambles as Greg backs up, heading to the door. “Come by the shop when you’re feeling better, yeah?” she adds, just as Greg opens the door and tries to sidle in.

Greg’s tongue suddenly STINGS like a motherfucker! Like an insect bite right on the flat of his tongue, and he almost spits everything out in one slobbery mess. Instead, he snaps rigid, tightly groaning as two fresh tears sprint down his face.

“Uh huh,” he sounds out, strangled and muffled, as he slowly regains his ability to move as the tiny little sear of pain subsides.

He takes a step back. He slams the door behind him. He jackknifes in half and throws his mouth open as far as it’ll go – tongue out, and an almighty “BLEH” sound bursting from him as Alex and the filthy marshmallow launch out of his mouth with a splatter of flob.

“Oh gny thucking goh!” Greg lisps, his tongue still out as he frantically wipes across its flat wet surface with his hands. One of Alex’s felt booties falls out of Greg’s mouth, sodden and floppy.

Alex is covered in spit, wings flattened with it, trying to heave himself off the floor with the weight of all of Greg’s flob holding him down. He’s coughing – wheezing even – with horrified “Oh my gyod!”s bursting from him every time he has half a lungful of air to spare.

“Thuck!” Greg yells, pulling his plaid sleeve down his wrist and using the fluffy surface to scrub over the white-cast, broad and almost cat-like roughness of his tongue. “I’ng tho thorry, Alegth!”

Staggering to his feet – one bare foot exposed and the other with his felt boot folded and half off – Alex brings his hands up to his face and wipes in one huge-for-him motion. Scraping the edges of his long hands from the bottom of his beard all the way up across his jaw, his mouth, around his nose and forming and shaping over the contours of his cheeks, eyesockets, and raised brow until he gets to his hairline and flings the accumulated Greg-spit off the backs of his hands onto the wooden floor with a tiny, deafening splat. The force of the action sends Alex staggering a few paces back. The shock of grey hair at the top of his head stands tall – a Greglick instead of a cowlick. Alex tries to wipe the rest of it off on his patchwork-soaked jeans. He shakes himself like a dog – his weighed down wings moving a beat behind the rest of him – and then looks directly up at a frozen-in-place, blepping Greg.

“Yuck,” Alex says, without any emphasis or expression.

And then he disappears.

Greg’s mouth falls open. He blinks, he wipes his eyes, he does everything you’re supposed to do! He even looks behind himself at the hastily slammed door and doesn’t find Alex.

“Shit! Alex? Alex where— Alex where are you?” Greg says, his tongue forgotten. Greg plucks the tiny felt boot out of his own puddle of spit, and double and triple checking Alex isn’t under his feet, stands up properly. “Alex? I’m sorry? It was an accident!”

A tiny spike of pain shoots through Greg’s mouth, as the place where Alex… pinched him?... brushes against the roof of his mouth, and he winces with a quiet gasp.

“I just panicked!” he adds, trying to figure out why the hell he’d done that himself. The marshmallow is melting on the floor at his feet, and Greg shudders, remembering the state of it. “Come on, mate – I’m really sorry.”

But Alex doesn’t appear, and doesn’t answer. Greg goes to wipe his face with his hand, and finds himself disgusting and flop-wet, and makes a face as he shudders, “Euughhhgaa!” He holds his hands out away from himself, horrified.

Right. First thing’s first. Greg dumps marbles in pocket, the bootie on the sink edge, rinses out his mouth for about five minutes solid – including some truly horrible gargling sounds – and washes his hands in the hottest water he can stand. He stops before dunking the boot in the water, half remembering about wool shrinking in the wash, and then half-chuckles to imagine one of Alex’s things shrinking even smaller. Then he frowns again, because he’s supposed to feel bad, and he does.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, wondering if Alex is near.

He turns the tap until the water is cool, and gently massages the boot between finger and thumb under its clear stream trying to get all his spit out of it without losing the shape. Greg can’t even get his pinkie finger in them. He presses as much water as he can from it, and then tries to squeeze it into its rounded shape again, wondering if there’s a cotton swab somewhere, and squinting at the tiny thing so hard his eyes sting again.

He’s been holding his breath.

He looks around for somewhere to put the tiny shoe, and sees the bath. Looks down at himself, and looks at the bath again and sighs. He really is disgusting.

Greg pivots over, shoves the plug in, and starts filling the tub while he goes and boils a kettle.

Moments later, he’s sighing into the water’s warm embrace. Sobered by his last experience, he’s underfilled the tub, ensured the taps are off before he gets in, and otherwise making sure the people who own the AirBnB – Sue and Susan – won’t find his soggy bloated corpse in a week. He hopes.

Instead, he’s set himself up carefully – his filthy, sweat-wet clothes folded on a chair dragged in from the kitchen, a weak cup of chamomile tea in its saucer – three marbles rolling to a rest around the base of it like forbidden hard-boiled sweets – and one of the books he’d intended to read optimistically within reach if he is suddenly struck by the reading whim.

He sinks down into the water as much as he can, his legs sacrificed to the cooler air, until he manages to get his head under the surface.

It’s quiet under there. Warm and muffled, and Greg holds his breath and enjoys it for a second as the bubbles of air slowly creep out of his eardrums with a tickle. Too tight to get both arms in, he brings one hand up to scrub through his hair where the last few fizzing bits of air buzz and crackle as they dash for the surface. Greg tilts his head, keeping his ears under and his eyes closed, and wipes his lips to catch an open mouthed breath. The water is just hot enough – though he’s sure it’ll cool too quickly – to get him relaxing. Hot enough that his face will sweat, again, but right now he’s underneath it and if he’s sweating, he can’t tell. He dunks his head again, and slowly shakes his head underwater, his silvery hair wafting in his wake.

With a squeak and a slopping squelch when his back creates suction against the white porcelain of the tub, Greg bursts out of the water like a so-called magnificent beast. Bathwater spraying from his lips as he breathes out and rivulets run down his face.

The water in his ears makes everything fuzzy and he feels little droplets wiggling their ways out.

Another breath out, and he sits up – exchanging a warm torso for warmed, wet feet once more. He wipes his eyes, gets his hair off of his forehead, and sighs.

He’s doing so very well at not thinking about everything.

He’s not thinking about his insomnia, or how he’s started hallucinating the local teeny tiny cryptid. He’s not thinking about seeing him in his dreams – his nightmares – and how he’s been the one to pull him out of them the moment they’d be about to show his death. He’s definitely not thinking about how he tried to catch him, or how he’d apparently succeeded after a fashion. Nor about his tiny clothes, his stupid face, his gappy, toothy grin and how he laughed like a geriatric goose.

Greg had popped the tiny felt bootie on the end of a tine of a fork, resting by the cup of hot, calming tea by his head, to try and let it dry out and keep its shape. He’d gone cross-eyed with focus trying to get his shaking hands still enough for the precision manoeuvre.

Oh, he was doing so well at not thinking about any of that. Yep.

Greg reaches down to splash some of the meager water up onto his body – over his stomach where the water shoves his sparse grey body hair about with its ebb and flow and onto his chest where it pools between his tits and trickles down the sides with a warming tickle.

He’s definitely not going to read that book.

The tea, however – he could probably have the tea.

More squeaks, and he twists in the tub, bringing his arm over to reach for the—

“AAAGHH!!” Greg yells, loud but almost deafened by the squeals of wet skin on bathtub as he flinches in a bath that can’t fit him. Tiny desperate splashes of water geyser into the air, squeezed between Greg and the smooth white bath walls.

The tea sloshes over the side of the delicate little teacup, as Alex flinches backwards almost as violently.

“Aaargh?” he yells back, his tiny flushed face red and worried at whatever it is Greg is yelling at.

“What the fuck!?” Greg blurts, knocking his knee against the bath’s lip and staring agog at Alex bathing in his cup of chamomile tea without a care in the world or – apparently – a stitch of clothing. “That’s my tea!” he points out, though some part of him feels like it should be quite obvious.

“But—” Alex starts, looking down at his floral scented ‘bath’ – the translucent tea bag still steeping in it, the little white string hanging over the side. “—You said we needed a bath?”

“What?” Greg says, cleverly. Then remembers he’s naked and slaps a hand entirely too hard against his private parts to cover them in the bare few inches of water in the bath. He winces, but doesn’t let it distract him from his outrage. “Owfuck! Hngg. I— I said I needed a bath!”

“Mmm, and I agreed we did! I nodded like this.” Alex nods, helpfully.

The teabag bobs and drifts beneath the water as Alex moves in the surprisingly roomy tea cup – and just happens to be covering his tiny bits.

Not that Greg is looking.

He doesn’t even have his glasses on, after all!

Ha. He’d need his glasses to see little Alex’s little… Oh for fuck sake. Greg shakes his head, throwing drops of bathwater from the ends of his hair and one from his nose.

“What if I’d taken a big old gulp of my tea, you idiot!”

“Mmm, no thank you, Greg.” Alex changes to shaking his head. “For one thing, I think it’s still too hot for you.” Alex leans forward and blows on the surface of the tea as if he’s trying to cool it for him. Wafts of hot steamy vapour swirl in a lazy vortex, kissing the shimmering surface of the tea and shining Alex’s forehead with tiny pricks of sweat.

Alex really is bright red all over from the warmth of the drink.

Greg scowls. “I’m not drinking it now!”

“No, still far too hot—”

“—I mean now that it’s had your hairy little body in it, you maniac!”

“Oh!” Alex tilts his head, apparently thinking. Then he pinches his nose and throws his feet up – pivoting in the curved porcelain cup and dunking his upper body entirely. A moment later, he scrambles and struggles and pulls himself out of the faintly golden liquid. “Ahhh!” he says, smacking his lips. “It’s still good!” he insists. “Though it is a bit… full bodied.”

Greg blinks at Alex.

Alex looks up at Greg, his tiny expression quite serious.

Greg’s mouth twitches.

Alex’s absolutely doesn’t. Not with Greg without his glasses, at least.

“Oh, fuck off,” Greg says, trying not to smile.

Alex immediately beams up at Greg, that ridiculous gap toothed smile that glows in the light from the high frosted window, bright enough to be seen without glasses.

“That’s rubbish, you know…” Greg says, shaking his head and twisting to get a bit more comfortable in the bath. “‘Full bodied’. Fucks sake.” It’s difficult to rearrange himself while one hand keeps cupping his unmentionables, trying to hide them from Alex. “How long have you been lurking around here, anyway?”

Alex relaxes into the cup again, letting his shoulders rest against the gold-edged lip of the fancy tea wear, and seems to loosen his entire body in the drink. His eyes drift closed. Perhaps on purpose. “Long enough, big boy,” he smirks.

Greg’s face goes through a full workout. Shock! Outrage! The flash warmth of an embarrassed blush tightening his skin. The slower, warmer blush of the compliment. The wriggle of his eyebrows as he tries to decide on whether to be happy or horrified. He looks down at himself – or rather, at his stomach which is hiding the parts in question at this angle – and his mouth opens to say… something! Something offended. Something ashamed. Something like ‘Thank you’ but definitely not.

Instead his mouth snaps shut and he looks back at Alex – just in time to catch him closing the one eye he was watching Greg with, and go back to pretending to be completely immersed in his own relaxation.

“Cheeky bugger.” Greg mutters.

But he does move his hand away. It’s too late now, apparently, and he can’t see anything from here anyway.

“You know, for an exhaustion-spawned hallucination, you’re really quite ridiculous.”

Alex hums – and the vibrations send little ripples radiating out from his pink-blushing and surprisingly hairy chest to the edges of the teacup and back. “Not very whimsical of you, Greg,” he says, eyes still closed.

“Mate, you did just disappear before my eyes. What else am I supposed to think?” Greg settles back into the water, and wishes this was a hot tub instead of a few bare inches of tepid bath.

“You’ll disappear,” Alex says.

Greg turns his head back to look at him with a frown. Alex’s eyes are still closed, but his brow has pinched, and his seemingly absurd statement is said with something that sounds a little like bitterness.

Greg shakes his head. “No, I won’t. Actually, strike that – I literally can’t. I’m not a tiny little magical bugger like someone I might mention.”

“No, but you’ll leave.” Alex doesn’t look as relaxed any more, bringing his arms down from the lip of the cup until they’re closer to his body. Until they wrap around his chest under the surface. He’s opened his eyes, but he’s not looking at Greg. “Everyone does.”

Well, shit.

“...Mate,” Greg tries to softly say. “This— This is an AirBnB. I’m only here for a couple of days.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Alex says with a pout.

Greg huffs gently. “It’s… Like a hotel? Kind of? Someone owns the place and rents it out for people on holiday for just a few days at a time. Used to be, like, normal people I think, but it’s probably big business now. Lots of fees. Pissed off neighbours. Rules as long as your—”

“—So you’ll always leave?”

Alex is looking at him now, his thin little mouth turned down at the corners. He’s leaning over in the cup hugging the sodden teabag to his chest, and Greg can just make out the tiny sparkles of his sad blue eyes despite his lack of glasses.

Ah, fuck.

“I mean, I guess… Yeah. Yeah, probably. Maybe a week or two at the longest?”

“Oh.”

It’s the saddest little syllable Greg’s heard in a while, and he’s entirely too naked, too wet, and too squeezed awkwardly into a too-small bathtub for all of this.

“Look, I…” Greg wants to make it better. Say something that’ll cheer Alex up and convince him it’ll be alright. But he’s got nothing. “I’m sorry.”

Alex just nods, breaking his desperate eye contact, and rubbing his hands down his own fluffy arms like the tea is suddenly too cold. “S’okay.” He sighs. “I should probably let you get on with it…” he says, nodding upwards at Greg and still dodging his gaze.

Then he stands up, streaming steaming weak chamomile from his body and the teabag he’s holding to preserve the little dignity that he’s suddenly desperate for, and wades over to the teacups rim and swings his legs over the side to clamber inelegantly out.

“Sorry about your tea,” he mumbles with a wave of his hand.

“Fuck the tea,” Greg says a bit sterner than he means to, and Alex flinches. “Sorry, I mean, I don’t give a toss about the tea. I’m glad you came back.”

Alex is staring at his feet which are twisting on top of each other on the rim of the saucer; teeny tiny toes entwining.

“I was worried,” Greg tells him, trying to make it sound light and breezy and missing by a mile. “I missed you.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to…” Greg twists in the bath, trying to turn and face Alex properly. He casually covers himself with his own hand as he does, crushing his other elbow beneath his body. “Want to grab dinner with me? You know, we can just hang out for a while. I promise it’ll be tastier than a filthy marshmallow?”

Alex’s shoulders jump as he almost huffs a laugh. “Not a high bar,” he mumbles ruefully, sticking out his tongue like Greg had done spitting him out in the hallway.

“Is that a yes? I’m going to take it as a yes.” Greg barrels onwards. “Okay, well I’ll need to get dressed and then dash to the shop for some things before it closes, and…”

Alex was nodding, and then his face lit up – excited. He turns and scampers behind the teacup and grabs armfuls of messily folded clothing – sticking his still flushed-red butt out where Greg can see it, tiny and surprisingly jiggly, and dropping the teabag.

“I haven’t been to the shop in ages!” he chirps, dropping to his arse on the squeaky, shiny bathtub’s lip, and starting to haul on his crinkly creased pair of toy-sized trousers. “I imagine it’s changed a lot. Hmm, I wonder if the gumball machine is still there.”

Alex has his jumper half over his head, wrestling the chunky knit to wiggle his arms through the sleeves and his wings through the cutout on the back, when Greg opens his mouth to point out he’d meant he was going alone. Then Alex’s face pops out of the neck of the jumper exposing his bright, smiling, goofy face, and Greg doesn’t have the heart.

“Well, I’m not hiding you in my mouth this time.”

“Mmm! No, thank you, Greg.”

“So how are we, uh, getting you in unnoticed?”

Alex pulls on one of his felted boots, and then stands and precariously hops over to the fork to retrieve the one Greg had washed – his wings fluttering and spraying tiny chamomile scented droplets in his wake.

“In your pocket, of course!” he says, as if there were nothing more obvious in the world.

“Oh. Of course,” Greg agrees, tickled by the idea of sneaking around with a pocket Alex.

Alex is finished dressing, and turns to look at Greg with an eager energy to him. Waiting. His fingers waggling at his sides in time with his impatient fluttering wings.

Greg looks down at himself in the bath – cock and balls cupped in one big hand and the water now thoroughly cold. Goosebumps creep up his soft white sides where the cool bathroom air steals the warmth from his wet body. “I’m not getting out in front of you!”

“Oh! Why— I’ve already, you know, seen it if that’s what you’re worried about.” Alex says it like it’s a secret, wrapping his mouth around the naughty implications and making everything so much worse.

“First of all – what the hell? Who knew pixies were pervy little voyeurs!”

Alex shrugs, entirely unashamed. “No-one asks me to leave the room…”

“Because no-one knows you’re in the room, you weirdo!”

“The concept of privacy is actually a fairly recent development—”

“—Not for me, it’s not!” Greg insists, feeling like he’s going even slightly more mad than before, but this is going to be the hill he dies on, apparently. “And secondly, I’m very graciously trying not to give you a complex on your size,” Greg says with a smirk to his very serious statement.

Alex looks down at himself – his trouser area especially – and then back up at Greg with a frown.

“I of course mean your height, Little Alex.”

Alex hums. “I’m quite tall, actually, relatively speaking!”

“Mate,” Greg says completely unconvinced – it’s all he needs to say.

Alex hums with more verve to it. A pissed off little bumble bee buzz that does nothing for his case. “Well, I’m taking my marbles!” he says in a huff.

Greg watches, delighted, as Alex tries desperately and fails to hold three of them at once. Repeatedly. The third marble falling from the armful of the other two and back onto the saucer with a little clatter and the barest hint of Alex muttering a rare curse to himself.

Eventually, Alex pulls himself up to his full three and a half inches tall – his arms laden with a red and a green-and-yellow cats-eye marble – and thrusts out his chin defiantly. “I don’t want the third one for now. I’ll collect it later, I’ve decided.”

Then he takes a few long steps backwards, continuing to face Greg, and steps entirely off the side of the bath and plummets.

Greg gasps! And leans over to look. He smiles then as he sees Alex wobbling and bobbing along the bathroom floor tiles, wings flapping furiously as he tries to stay aloft with the weight of both marbles. He veers into the bathroom door with a soft oof, and then slowly careens through the gap and out of sight.

Greg laughs so hard the water sloshes up the sides.

Chapter Text

“Alex,” Greg whispers. “Aaalex.”

Curled up, knees to his chin, Alex barely rouses at the bottom of Greg’s shirt pocket as he mumbles and grumbles, his hair shivering as Greg whispers his name over him. His wings hug his back and around the curve of his tiny little butt, and the soft warm brushed fabric of Greg’s shirt pocket bulges only slightly where Alex is snuggly bundled up.

Greg, holding the edge of the pocket open a little, and looking down with amusement, gives the pocket a gentle jostle. “Alex, dinner’s ready.”

Alex turns over as if trying to snuggle further under the covers, facing Greg’s warm soft chest and rubbing his face against the fuzzy cotton with a grumpy little mumble.

Shaking his head, lips pressed tight as he tries not to laugh, Greg brings his other hand up and cups around the tiny, reluctant lump that had until recently been quietly snoring against his chest.

They’d gone to the shop – getting in just before closing time – and Greg had first apologised to Daisy, and then reassured her about the health of his teeth, before he’d been let loose on the shop's little aisles and shelves while Alex hid himself away in Greg’s pocket. But what a handful he’d been after that – popping his head out beneath the pocket’s flap to point out everything and anything and eagerly beg Greg to get just the most random things for dinner. Salami circles, cooking chocolate, cheesy corn puffs, Ribena – just Ribena – butter – again, just butter – popadoms, baked beans, potatoes with no plan for what to do with them, a whole fuckin’ coconut that Greg was shocked the little shop even had, and eggs. So many eggs.

Greg ignored more than half of his requests, instead gathering up ingredients for a comforting evening’s meal that he could put together fairly easily. Some veg, potatoes, eggs that he’s delighted to discover he can buy individually from a little basket – in all shades of soft light brown – and a gammon steak that he can feel his doctor judging him for from here. Fuck them. He lets Alex decide on exactly which eggs, and which carrot he buys to appease him a bit.

It had all gone in the reusable bag he’d finally remembered to bring, and Alex had babbled and chatted from the comfort of Greg’s pocket as they walked back to the cottage in the dipping afternoon’s sunlight. After too long of a gap in the conversation, however, Greg had discovered that Alex had dozed off and, well, he didn’t really need his running commentary all through the cooking process, so he just let him sleep.

Something like envy twisted in his chest as he watched Alex curled up in the shirt pocket – chest almost imperceptibly rising and falling in a slow little rhythm, mouth part way open, limbs thrown wherever. But the envy – of Alex’s peaceful, carefree state – melted away with the slow, lopsided smile Greg got on his face, looking down at the ridiculous little man, safe against his chest. Safe with him. Greg had lowered the pocket’s flap with the greatest of care, wiping his eyes against his furthest away sleeve.

Which was why dinner had taken twice as long to make as it ought to have.

The sun is almost down, the kitchen a quiet mess, and Greg had put down his plate of steaming, savoury food on the breakfast bar, next to an empty saucer, dessert fork, and a few lonely wooden toothpicks he found in a container at the back of a junk drawer. Greg has a glass of Ribena in front of him, and there’s an eggcup of the same right there.

Greg feels completely ridiculous.

He lifts his hand – the one cupping beneath Alex through the fabric – and finds himself almost squeaking with how disgustingly cute Alex is. He’s floppy in the pocket – completely boneless, his head lolling about with the tiniest of snuffles to accompany it – and so warm through the fabric that Greg can feel it on his fingers as they ever so carefully heft him upwards.

“Alex, mate. Dinner.” Greg jostles him again – giving him a little nudge upwards as regretfully tries to rouse him. “Wake up!”

That does it. Alex snaps awake with a drool-fringed gasp, his little eyes wide, seemingly completely unaware of where he is. “M’awake!” he mumbles, trying to get his hands under himself to sit up and succeeding only in falling over on his side in the hammock-like setup of the smooth pocket fabric. “Oof,” he says into a mouthful of cotton.

“Dinner’s on the table, little Alex – with no help from you!” Greg teases, as he pushes Alex up and up – turning the pocket almost inside out to present him on a plinth of crumpled plaid into the cool air of the living room.

“Oh! I— Sorry!” Alex says, as he tries to regain some kind of control of his wayward limbs. He hums again, this time annoyed at himself, and Greg feels a tiny bit guilty for winding him up. Alex’s wings flutter and buzz – an iridescent cloud glittering just at his back – and Greg can feel the breeze of them like a hesitant breath against his palm. Alex manages to get to his feet, bashfully staggering there, wiping one finger down his little face.

“Don’t worry about it. Someone around here ought to be getting some shut-eye – might as well be you.” Greg tries to keep it light, and fails.

The way Alex looks up at him. Blue eyes worried.

“So!” Greg says, breaking the brittleness in the air. “I don’t know how much you eat, or what you eat – except for marshmallows and my fucking Caramac bar – so you’re going to have to make do with some of mine.”

It takes Alex a moment to let him get away with the topic change. Those tiny little eyebrows still pinched above his eyes and his thin lips thinner still. Then he sighs, and turns to look down from Greg’s hand.

“Oh, wow!”

The carrots and peas are still steaming - a knob of butter choosing that moment to slip off the top of the heap and slither in between a miniature chasm of coins of orange and tiny marbles of garden green. Adjoining it, roughly chopped potatoes fried in the pan with that same butter til they’re soft and yielding with their white-cloud centres and crisp and crunchy cubic outsides – Greg had thrown some herbs in to make it fancy. Nearby, dominating the plate, the fried egg sits shimmering, molten and golden, the white shiny and soft and lace-like on the very edges where it had almost cooked too hard. Beneath the egg, the generously sized gammon steak – caramelised to a pinkish brown on both sides and so salty that Greg’s mouth watered at the thought of it – springy and rich.

“Wow-good, or wow…?” Greg trails off, suddenly plagued by every doubt possible.

Alex takes a step, and hops a little jump up into the air – his wings beating hard and prettily – as he slowly drifts down towards the counter from Greg’s hand.

“Wow good! This looks amazing!” Alex lands with barely a stumble, his soft felt boots making no sound, and he scampers – rather stiffly – to the edge of Greg’s plate. He reaches – hand wide outstretched – as he goes for a pound-coin sized slice of steaming, gleaming, bright orange carrot – and freezes. “May I?”

“‘Course!” Greg says, frowning his certainty. “That’s why you’ve got a plate, after all.”

“I— Oh! I— Oh. I’ve never… Really?” Alex looks between the food, the saucer, and the food again, and seems lost in indecision. Flustered. His hand, the one that had been so eager to grab a carrot, flexes open and closed.

“Yes, really. Come on – let’s make you up a plate.” Greg reaches down, and using just a single finger, drags the empty saucer across the counter to clink next to his own heaping plate.

Alex scrambles out of the way.

“What do you want? You wanted carrots, right? Peas too?” Greg is ‘mother’, and grabs his knife and fork and piles up a heap of both – the butter glazing their surfaces – bringing it over to Alex’s saucer, waiting for his say so.

“Yes, please!” Alex says, watching the fork eagerly.

Greg dumps the veggies and corrals the peas to one side with a scrape. “Potatoes? In fact – let’s just get you a bit of everything, yeah?” And Greg dives in to do just that. A forkful of potatoes – then a second, because everyone loves potatoes. Then he stabs into the steak and carves out a crescent barely bigger than a tuppence, using the knife to wiggle it off the fork’s tines and onto Alex’s plate, before attacking it with both to cut it into smaller little chunks. A wriggling, slithering slice of the white of the sunnyside egg, then leaves Greg with a quandry.

“Hmm.”

“What’s wrong?” Alex asks.

“Well, obviously the best bit is dipping everything in the yolk, but I can’t exactly…” Greg makes his own sort of humming sound – more of a “Nyuhh…” as he debates internally whether he’s really going to make this kind of sacrifice, and he tilts his head. “Fine!” he says, though it comes out like a reluctant harrumph. Knife and fork working frantically, as if he’s hurrying before he changes his mind, he carves a ragged edged circle into the egg and using his cutlery like a brush and pan, scoops up the frantically wobbling dome of sunflower-yellow yolk and plops it onto the tablespoon’s worth of food on Alex’s little saucer. “There. You can dip whatever you want in that.”

The yolk stretches, back broken over the tiny cut up, bite-sized bits of ham, cubes of potato, and veggies, and slowly breaks – its savoury liquid gold oozing over everything and pooling in the saucer.

Alex is staring up at him, eyes wide, as if Greg had hung the moon for him. His tiny hands almost hidden by the baggy knit sleeves clutched to his chest – clutched to his heart. “I’ve never… No-one’s ever…”

“What, put up with you before? Yeah, that…” Greg schools his expression into one of annoyance – brows pressed into service to hide anything else that might try to break out. “...That doesn’t surprise me. Honestly, it’s probably just as well you were sleeping – your deafening snores are far less annoying. Now shut up and eat your dinner.”

Greg looks away before Alex does – away from the undaunted look of adoration the little man is beaming at him with the power of the sun. Instead looking, eyes shimmering as if they too have been glazed with butter, at his own plate – a bit worse for wear from his generosity, but Greg already feels satisfied.

Then whump. A tiny little soft impact slams into his front, and he almost drops his knife. “What the—?”

“Thank you,” Alex says, muffled, into Greg’s chest. His little fists clinging to Greg’s t-shirt, his wings flapping furiously to press him hard against Greg in what he realises is a hug.

“...Fuck sake,” Greg says, more fondly than he means to. He frees up a hand and brings it up to Alex – sliding it up beneath his wings and patting him very gently on his butt. “Yeah, alright. You’re welcome. Now are you going to eat it, or are you just going to live in my beard and survive off the crumbs?”

Alex’s wings stop, and he throws his head back to look up at Greg. “Could I?”

Greg’s face twitches – surprise, horror, confusion, and then realisation as Alex’s tiny smirk registers. Greg pinches him around the middle and pries him off like a bug. “Get off, you!”

Alex honks his laughter, and Greg can feel his little chest shake with it. Greg places him carefully back next to his saucer. “Eat!”

“Yes, boss!” Alex salutes, and then dives for the food.

Greg watches, astonished, as Alex grabs a pea bare-handed and shoves the whole thing in his mouth in one go. He seems to chew only twice, maybe three times, his cheeks puffed out like a squirrel, before he swallows. And he’s barely swallowed before he’s shoving something else in. Two handed, he holds a cube of fried potato and throws his head back – mouth open – before slamming his wide open mouth into the edge of it to bite with his wonky little set of teeth. The crunch is tiny – obscenely cute – and Alex beams as best he can with such a full mouth, crunching and munching and making little happy moans.

Greg’s cutlery almost hangs from his hand, forgotten, as he watches the tiny little whirlwind of hunger inhale the food.

Three bites later, and Alex has finished off the chunk of potato almost as big as his head – his tiny beard shiny with grease – and he’s already reaching for a misshapen chunk of ham. With the pink lump in one hand, he grabs for a carrot slice with the other – he scuttles around the edge of the saucer to reach over and dunks first one, and then the other, in the runny egg yolk before turning around and hopping – no hands – onto the saucer’s rim to sit and eat his food. One bite from one, and then one bite from the other – pink ham and orange carrot, both dripping runny yellow egg. His eyes scrunch closed from how hard he’s smiling.

Greg finds himself smiling too.

Then he gives himself a little shake, and eats his own dinner – carving out a wedge of gammon, scooping some of those apparently delightfully crunchy potatoes, and stabbing a slithery bit of egg on the end and shoving it in his gob. He chews – and it’s delicious – but he chews quietly so as not to drown out the little happy noises Alex keeps making. Greg feels warm inside.

They eat together, mostly in silence, for a few more forkfuls – though Greg finds it hard to focus when Alex is eating like a starved man. He tries to work out where it’s all going, and gives up – Alex has probably eaten half of his own bodyweight already and doesn’t seem to be slowing.

Greg reaches over to dip a bit of ham in the egg on Alex’s saucer – swiping it through the pool – when Alex swallows hard and waves at him.

“Wait! Wait I’ve got a— Hold right there!”

Greg does, weirdly, and waits to see what Alex is up to.

Chapter Text

Alex throws himself forwards – folded in half over the saucer’s rim – and grabs for some peas like they’re balls in a pit. He piles them up in the crook of his arm and then turns to Greg. “Let’s see how many I can get on your fork!” He holds up a pea, and gives it a demonstrative waggle.

Immediately, Greg wants to object. It’s stupid. He’s just trying to eat. He opens his mouth ready to shut it all down and then doesn’t do anything of the sort. “For marbles?”

Alex's eyes go wide. “Oh, yes please! For marbles. You’ll score me from one to five?”

Suddenly arch, Greg ponders. “Well… I will, yes, but it seems a bit easy, don’t you think? I can’t just be giving marbles away after all.”

“Oh! Well, no – of course not.” Alex looks from fork to Greg, and then to the plate of scattered peas in front of him. “There could be a time limit?” he asks, hopefully.

“Obviously. What else? Make it interesting.” Suddenly, Greg remembers earlier and smirks. “Make it whimsical, Alex.”

Alex nods entirely too enthusiastically. “Yes! Right. Uh… I’ve got it!” He clears his creaky little throat. “Get the peas on the fork. Alex has one hundred seconds to get as many peas onto the fork as possible. For every pea that falls off the fork, Alex must… uh… loudly make the sound of a different farmyard animal?” Alex looks up at Greg who nods – finding it acceptable. “The fork needs to remain upright.” This, Alex sees, is less pleasing to Greg, but he doesn’t interrupt. “Greg will award marbles based on Alex’s whimsical pea-rformance…”

Greg starts to interrupt, outraged by the pun, but Alex barrels on through.

“...My time starts…” Alex glances meaningfully over at the clock on the microwave. “...Now!”

Both of them are frozen for a heartbeat. Alex moves first. He pulls back his arm – pea in hand – and overarm throws with all his strength! The pea flies! A green smear of an arc that both of them watch intently!

Closer and closer to the shiny silver tines of the fork gently wavering in Greg’s astonished grasp. It hits the fork! It bounces!

Alex groans.

Greg grins and yells “Ha!” the fork shaking around as he twists in his chair to raise an eyebrow at Alex, waiting for his forfeit.

Taking a deep breath, and looking frustrated, Alex yells a really thready, warbled, sheepy “Baaaah!”

“Rubbish!” Greg declares, delighted, but Alex is already on the move.

Two peas still clutched to his chest, he scampers around the rim of the saucer, closer to the fork. He’s just inches away now – the fork almost more above him than in front – and he grabs a second pea and underarm hefts it high, trying to remove the forward momentum so the pea will land without bouncing.

Up and up! Even before it lands, Alex has grabbed the third pea in his throwing hand – eyes never leaving the arc of the tiny spherical vegetable. It reaches the peak of its arc and hangs there for an instant before it gently falls and hits the fork square on.

It lands! It wobbles! The fork isn’t entirely flat in Greg’s hand, and the pea skips over first one of the tines’ valleys and then another – wobbling and hesitating and almost falling off the edge. It balances there – on the fence over whether to fall or stay – and Alex holds his breath.

Then it makes up its mind – or Greg’s shaking hands does it for it – and the pea tumbles down.

“No! Aaargh!” Alex groans, spinning on his foot as he beats the air with his free fist.

“Ah ah! Forfeit please.”

“MoooOOOooo!” Alex starts his awful imitation of a cow when suddenly he’s gripped by an idea, and starts running – his moo wobbling in tone and volume as he does.

Greg finds himself chuckling.

Still pea in hand, Alex launches himself at the saucer and gets the top half of his body over the lip and across most of the saucer’s edge – his little felt booted feet waggling off the edge. He slam dunks the pea into the cooling pool of sticky egg yolk, and wiggles himself backwards until he’s standing upright on the saucer’s collar, wings fluttering madly to help.

“Oh I see what you’re up to, you little cheat!” Greg says, quite entertained.

“Not cheating, thank you!” Alex says, as he runs around the saucer’s edge and skids to a felted stop near Greg’s fork. The little bit of extra height makes quite a difference, and Alex hops – wings helping – and all but drops the sticky pea onto the fork.

Or he would do, but Greg clears his throat and moves the fork just a few inches away.

Alex looks horrified. Betrayed. Outraged! As the pea misses the fork and lands with a little yellow splat on the counter. “No! That’s not fair!”

“The fork is still upright, little Alex.”

Alex, his mouth open, snaps it shut. He hums and squints his eyes, and turns to face the fork that Greg is now quite happy to move around – a bit of eggy ham still stuck on the end.

Greg is quite pleased with himself.

Then zip – Alex shoots like a buzzing bullet towards the fork and slams into it before Greg can even flinch. Tiny hand wrapped around one of the tines, leg hooked around the bowl of the fork like some kind of rodeo rider, he immediately starts wrestling the bit of ham with his other hand! He punches it, shoulder barges it, crouches and springs at it – bashing it with his head – all before Greg can do more than squeak in surprise!

“What the fuck!” Greg gives the fork a shake, but Alex growls – creakily, it has to be said – and clings on tight. “What are you doing?!”

Alex ignores him! Instead spinning on the fork, wrapping both arms around the ‘shoulder’ where the fork turns to handle, and kicking backwards like a donkey at the slowly unsticking bit of cold gammon. One last kick – Alex huffing with the effort – and the postage stamp sized chunk of ham steak goes flying off the end to splat on the counter.

“Ha!” Alex rolls off the fork, even as Greg waves and waggles it, apparently out of breath and only catches himself with his tiny pair of fluttering wings the instant before he hits the ground – instead scrambling on all fours until he can get upright again, and making a dash for the nearest discarded pea.

Greg sees what he’s up to – pea-skewering. “Oh, no you don’t!” he says, suddenly certain that Alex cannot be permitted to succeed. Greg reaches up and up – his incredibly long arm lifting the fork as high as he can from his sitting position, just a few inches shy of the ceiling. He makes sure the fork is still upright. Or mostly, at least.

When Alex turns round, pea in hand, and looks all the way up, he crumples. “Ugh! That’s… Ugh!!” He dithers for a second – his wings flapping and then slowing as indecision plays out on his little body. “How long do I have left?” he asks.

Greg glances over at the microwave clock. “Twenty… three seconds, but Alex…” Greg sing-song’s. “...You owe me a farmyard animal!”

Alex looks poleaxed and so ashamed. He stands up straight, takes a breath, and at the top of his rubbish little voice, yells, “COCK A DOODLE DOO!”

His voice breaks half way through, and Greg slams his free hand against his mouth not to burst out laughing. “Oh, what a lovely cock.”

Alex turns pink – his ears glowing like beacons as he almost fumbles the pea. “Thank you, Greg,” he replies, primly, shuffling in place and looking everywhere but at Greg.

Then he freezes. Then he pretends he hadn’t frozen. It’s really quite obvious, but Greg isn’t sure what it means yet.

The seconds tick by – glowing green eight-segment readouts flicker on the popty ping – and there’s barely a dozen left. Greg’s mouth twitches as he imagines giving zero marbles for Alex’s desperate, but unsuccessful attempt.

Alex bursts into movement again – but not in the direction Greg expected! When he moves, Greg reaches higher – his arm at its full extent – but Alex instead dives for the saucer. He lands amidst the food and with limbs flying everywhere, grabs every pea he can get his buttery hands on.

There’s only seven seconds left.

Greg frowns.

Alex slips and falls on his arse in the saucer and a tiny little “No!” escapes him even as he doesn’t stop. Wings flapping, feet slipping, arms overflowing with at least four slippery peas, he gets himself upright.

Three seconds. There’s no way he can fly up that high, that fast.

But Alex doesn’t even look up. And it’s too late, when Greg realises what’s happening. With a fluttering buzz, an exhausted, panting effort of a noise, and kicking off against the lip of the saucer – Alex flaps as hard as his little wings will carry him and slams onto the top of the dessert fork Greg had carefully laid out for him at the start of the dinner.

“No!” Greg yells, laughing.

Alex has wrapped himself around the fork, panting, the peas crushed between the fork and his own chest and probably very worse for wear, and his frantically flapping wings fall floppy and exhausted against his back.

Time’s up.

“That’s not the right fork!” Greg says, as he lowers his arm, trying to get his face into some sort of scowl again and failing miserably.

Panting, and his face still pressed against the fork, Alex extracts one of his hands from his pea-crushed body and waves his finger. “‘Get the peas on the fork.’” he quotes back at Greg, emphasising the article. “Technically didn’t have to be… didn’t have to be that fork.” His arm flops down at his side.

Greg is outraged, and entirely entertained. The little bugger. He could probably try to argue Alex down, and it might be fun, but the poor little man looks utterly exhausted and it was pretty clever – even Greg can admit that. Privately. To himself. “Bullshit!” Greg says, instead.

Alex, face still smushed against the shiny silver fork, shakes his head. “Already done a ‘moo’.”

Shaking his own head, Greg reaches over and plucks Alex from the fork by the jumper, the triangular hole at the back where his wings sticks out pulled tight as he’s peeled up and off, bits of pea meat and translucent green skin falling off him where they’d been crushed. “Ridiculous little man… Do you want your score or not?”

Amazingly, Alex seems to find some energy from somewhere at that, even dangling from Greg’s pinched fingers. His little legs wiggle, his arms twist as he tries to turn and face Greg, and his wings flap – brushing against Greg’s fingertips in a way that’s horribly tickly. “Oh! Oh yes – my score! Yes, please, Greg,” Alex says, as Greg puts him carefully down on the counter again.

“Right then!” Greg clears his throat. “How many peas did you get on that fork, in the end?”

Alex looks back and checks. Counts with his fingers – thumb, index, ring and pinkie. “One third of a dozen peas. Or four thirteenths of a baker's dozen, I suppose.”

Greg frowns, baffled.

“Four peas, Greg.”

“Right. And you did your farmyard animal sounds, I suppose.”

“Mm, you enjoyed my cock.” Alex emphasises the last word – the harsh ‘k’ sounds really crackling as he very studiously doesn’t smirk at all.

“I said it was lovely – I never said I enjoyed it.”

“Ah. Hmm. Very, uh, in— inconsiderate of me. I, uh, I’ll make sure next time to try much harder.”

Greg fights the twitches and flickers of amusement that threaten to break his face into a massive grin – or at least a filthy giggle. Behind his glasses, his frown is deep as he concentrates on not giving the little menace the satisfaction. He brings his hand up to hide his mouth, and barely keeps it together.

But he can’t let it stand.

“Little prick,” he mumbles, barely above a breath.

“Sorry, what was that?” Alex asks, suddenly very keen – his eyebrows up by his hairline.

Greg’s stomach spasms as he doesn’t laugh. “Oh, nothing worth mentioning, I’m sure.”

Alex hums.

Greg raises an eyebrow at him. “Anyway, now that you’re not covered in piss—”

“—In PEAS, thank you.” Alex is so ready to correct him, Greg is sure he’d been planning his own filthy joke about it.

“That’s what I said – not covered in pea – I can rate your effort. Hmm. Four peas, barely acceptable forfeits, but your sneaky little underhanded fork-misdirection—”

“—Completely within the rules! I didn’t have time! And I didn’t think you’d mind a quick fork.”

Caught off guard, Greg explodes. Head thrown back, booming laughter that turns to filthy giggles, he stomps one foot on the kitchen floor with the force of it. His hand smacks back over his mouth as he regards Alex with played-up shock. “Oh my god?!”

A picture – a miniature – of innocence, Alex looks up at Greg as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

“I had been going to award you four marbles – one for each pea – but now that I’m scandalised…!”

Alex scampers forward, the last green flecks of vegetable falling from his slightly dampened jumper, and he grabs hold of Greg’s shirt cuff, hauling it back and forth as he looks up and pleads. “Oh, Greg! You wouldn’t! You couldn’t! I tried so hard!”

Alex looks so very hopeful. His eyes are blue like cornflowers – tiny and yet so wide and big on his little pleading face where his fuzzy little eyebrows arch sadly.

“Oh, Greg…Four marbles…” he begs, hands together. “Peas?”

It takes Greg a second to realise.

“Oh, fuck all the way off!”

Alex giggles so hard he levitates.

Greg shakes his head as Alex wobbles through the air around him – his honking laughs barely muffled by his hand as he flies, doubled up in mid air, closer to Greg’s left ear, and then right.

Greg swats at him and misses intentionally. “Fuckin’ pixies. You’ll get three marbles and you’ll thank me for them!” he barks, standing up and away from the multicoloured little buzzing menace.

When he strides out of the door and into the hallway, Alex has to stop laughing long enough to catch up.

“Thank you, Greg!” Alex calls out, still breathless from his giggles, and then follows him at around shoulder height as Greg opens the door to the bedroom and goes in.

The curtains are closed, and the sun has set, so it’s dark inside, and Greg flicks the light on and blinks for a bit. The bed is there – the covers torn back and too many pillows either bunched up in the middle of the sheets, or scattered onto the floor by Greg’s ‘side’. Even on this short trip, it’s the site of too much disappointment.

He sighs, and looks away.

Something moves at his face. Fast! Greg flinches! Throws hands! It’s Alex of course, just hovering by his shoulder, as calm as you like. “Jesus Christ! Don’t— Sneak? Whatever that is. Don’t fly in my blind spots or something! Fuck. I almost smacked you into next week!”

“Wouldn’t mind a Tuesday,” Alex says with a shrug, flapping past Greg’s face and wafting his hair with the vortices of his wings.

“Fuck off. Tuesdays are crap.” Greg’s almost surprised by how hard he spits it. He tries to move out of the way of Alex – to get to the suitcase spatchcocked by the end of the bed – and flinches again when Alex isn’t where he expects him. He grumbles wordlessly as he moves first from one side to the other.

“What’s wrong with a Tuesday?” Alex asks, seemingly entirely unbothered. “Sounds like a day for eating! Get it? Tuesday? Because— Because CHEWsday…”

“...Could you— Stop— Ugh! Alex!” Greg whirls, reaches and grabs Alex entirely around his body – snatches him right out of the air.

Alex yelps, and wriggles in Greg’s grasp.

“Just. Stay. Still for a second!” Greg says, dumping Alex onto his own shoulder, and holding him there until Alex gets a good grasp of the fluffy plaid fabric. “You’re making me dizzy.”

“Ah. Sorry. I… I don’t usually get to, you know, hang out with anyone. Bit ah, rusty.”

“You’re alright. Just. I’m really tired and if I turn around too fast I’m likely to fall like a fucking redwood.” Greg sighs. “Can you hold on there? Or, you can go wherever – I mean, it’s your place, I suppose…” Greg’s words trail off as he realises he knows nothing about Alex at all.

“Why can’t you sleep?” Alex asks, apparently getting himself settled on Greg’s shoulder like a brightly coloured parrot.

Greg half-sighs, half-shrugs – accidentally testing Alex’s grip – and then with one hand holding himself steady on the bed, he begins the long, long journey to hunker down on one knee by the suitcase. Aches and pains, groans and cricks and pops, accompany him with every inch he sinks. He holds his breath through the worst bit when the twinge hits again. Finally, he’s down, and breathes out again.

“That’s the big fucking question, isn’t it?” he answers as if Alex wasn’t there at all. “Why the doc tried everything up to, and now including, sending me out to a cottage in the arse-end of nowhere for some rest and a change of scenery.”

Alex mouths “Arse,” to himself quietly, but he’s right by Greg’s ear.

Greg unzips one of the pockets on the suitcase with a groan and a lean forward, and stuffs his hand inside as soon as a corner’s free. He brings out the little net bag of shining, glittering marbles and plops the sack on his knee as he settles himself again on his heels.

“I guess it’s the nightmares. I’m scared of sleeping because of the nightmares, and the nightmares wake me up within minutes and I feel so much worse, so why even try?”

Alex is quiet for a moment, and Greg figures he’s too fixated on the marbles to be listening to him wittering on anyway. His shoulders – including the one with Alex – slump a little as the feeling of helplessness he’d been trying to forget comes washing back over him.

He’s so fucking tired.

A long, stinging blink, and he catches himself against the bed as he sways in the dark behind red, burning eyelids.

Fuck.

Steady again, he lets go of the bed and jams his finger and thumb into the bag of marbles, the netting digging into his skin, as he fishes them out one by one, palming them as he squeezes them out of the little torn hole. A red one and two blue.

Fuck it.

He rummages around a little more, and pops out a purple one too. Alex probably deserves it for putting up with his shit.

“Like the one where you’re on stage?” Alex asks, guilelessly.

Greg, his mind like treacle, slows to a stop – marbles clinking in his hand. “What?”

“Or the one where you were in Daisy’s shop. That one was, hmm, not very nice.”

“Wait. No,” Greg says, confused. He casts his mind back through the day and all the things they’d talked about. About flowers and marbles and buying fucking eggs. Nothing about his nightmares. “Hang on...”

“I am hanging on, Greg,” Alex points out, both hands gripping the seam on Greg’s shoulder.

“No, I don’t— Fuck. How do you know what I— What my nightmares— What?” Greg twists his head and his eyes go wildly, painfully crossed as he tries to focus on Alex on his shoulder. Greg is all double or triple chin like this – staring under the rims of his glasses and mostly only able to see Alex with one eye. And even then he’s blurry. “I never told you. I never told you!” he insists.

“Didn’t you? Oh.”

“Oh?! You can’t just… Fuck sake. How am I supposed to talk when— Alex, can you— Can…” Greg half reaches up to his shoulder to grab Alex again, and then thinks better of it, if ‘thinking’ is the right word for the three desperately confused brain cells knocking into each other in the dark of his skull. He’s almost whining. “Mate. Please. It’s bad enough I’m fucking hallucinating you without my own subconscious fucking with me like this.”

Alex frowns, or at least, the blurry mess of colour out of the corner of Greg’s eye does. “Hey. That’s not very—”

“—Whimsical?!” Greg throws his hands up and almost falls on his arse on the floor. “I swear if that’s what you were about to…” Greg feels something rhythmic on his shoulder.

Alex is patting him. Really having to put his back into it, too. “There, there,” he says, softly.

Greg barks a laugh that’s more mania than humour, and hides the ragged groan it almost turns into behind his hands.

The barely-there weight on his shoulder lifts off with a flutter, and some part of Greg is sure it was never there at all. Instead, he thinks he’s lost his mind, crouched on the floor, eyes welling up with tears, hidden behind his hands – one of which is awkwardly fisted around the little glass spheres of his childhood.

And then he’s slapped.

It's unlike any he’s ever had – but it’s definitely a slap! A tiny, open-palmed smack against his cheek where his scrunched up hand isn’t covering him – no bigger than a fucking peppercorn and it fucking stings like a gob of spit-soaked paper spat through a pen.

“Aaargh!” Greg yells. “What the fuck was that for?”

Alex is hovering about three feet in front of Greg – about exactly out of Greg's arms reach. He’s rod straight, arms clamped to his sides, his little hands in fists, and his face is beetroot and blotchy.

“I am not a hallucination!” Alex yells, voice rough and wavering. “I'm not— I'm not your subconscious. I'm not your inner voice. I'm not your— your manic pixie dream guy, okay?”

Alex's voice breaks at the worst possible moment, and he scowls so hard his mouth entirely disappears behind his silvery beard.

“So!... So snap out of it!” Alex zips forward, waggling his finger at Greg's face, and then loses his nerve and flies backwards twice as quickly. He's still frowning though – ears as red as poppies – as he adds, “Please!”

Greg rubs a thumb over the tender little spot where Alex had smacked him and frowns right back. “You're not my what?”

Alex paces – if the frantic, side to side flying he's doing could be called pacing. “I'm real, Greg – as real as you and—”

“—Manic pixie dream guy?”

“Ah. No, but—”

“—You're acting pretty manic right now. Check.” Greg counts off on his fingers in a totally normal order. “You're a pixie—”

“—Fae taxonomy is actually quite fraught and—”

“—Check. And apparently you've been getting off in the bushes of my very personal nightmares.”

“No, that's not— I would never— There haven't even been any bushes!”

“Check. Check. Check.” Greg glares at Alex from over the top of his glasses.

“I'm just a little guy?” Alex almost squeaks, hands clasped tight behind his back.

“...And guy. Check.” Thighs screaming, ankles aching, Greg lets himself fall back on his arse, foot flying out and kicking the suitcase halfway across the floor. The marbles in his hand finally released to scatter under the bed, the drawers, and anywhere else they choose to flee from him. “Fuck sake,” he mutters to himself. “You really are my manic pixie dream guy.”

“No! I just—”

“—Alex, that's not on you. That's on me. What a pitiful pile of miserable, middle-aged shite I've turned into.”

“Wait. What?”

“I'm really sorry, Alex. I shouldn't have tried to use you like that. You're right – you're a real person with hopes and dreams and fucking flaws, all of your own, and I shouldn't be parasitically pinning my happiness on your innate fucking whimsy.” Greg heaves a sigh. “I've turned into one of them.”

Alex flutters down, landing on Greg’s socked big toe. He sits down – swinging his legs over Greg’s foot and leaning forward, elbows on his tiny knees, head on his hands. He’s already humming unhappily when he says, “Well, I don’t know what one of ‘them’ is, but—”

“—A miserable old letch having a mid-life crisis at the expense of some two-dimensional ingenue. Dragged kicking and screaming into appreciating the fucking beauty of life because some young thing flashed her eyelashes at him and reanimated his desiccated prick for a pharmaceutically assisted second.” Greg spits the words, the bile of them bubbling up in his gut as he sits miserable and self-hating on the floor. “I’m pathetic.”

No-one says anything for a few moments. Greg heaves in hard breaths as he tries to decide whether his chest wants him to cry or not. His lungs feel tight, each breath expelled faster than it should be through flared nostrils as he blinks away the red hot tears that sting and sting and sting.

“Hello, pathetic. I’m Alex.”

Chapter Text

Greg makes a sound that’s definitely not a sob, and then he violently shakes his head. No, he’s trying to say. You can’t. You mustn’t.

“I’m over a thousand years old.” Alex says it casually – or seems to. He’s looking down, little felt booted feet twisting together where he’s hanging off the top of Greg’s big toe.

Greg gasps, and doesn’t know what to do with that.

“Not, ah, not so much of a ‘young thing’, you see, eyelash flashing or otherwise.” Alex shrugs. “As for the effect I’ve had on, um, the level of your desiccation…” he says, with too much delicacy.

“Oh, god no! No, you’ve—”

“—So I don’t think you can be ‘one of them’. Or I’m doing a really bad job of being your manic pixie dream guy.”

“But all that ‘wonder of nature’ and ‘joy in the little things’ shit? You said— You said you needed whimsy to live.” Greg twists, reaches, and grabs a marble holding it up at Alex – it’s the purple one and it shimmers and glints and catches the light like a tornado of violets trapped in a perfect moment. “You said you’d die.”

Alex shakes his head. “No, no I didn’t. Definitely not. No, I said it hurt when you didn’t believe in me. When you felt bad, and down, and looked so miserable all the time.”

“You lied to me!”

“I didn’t! I didn’t. I saw how sad you were, and I needed to do something to help – and you weren’t going to do it for yourself, so I just… let you assume it was for me, instead.”

Greg stares, gobsmacked. “How fucking dare— Wait! Do you even like marbles?” he demands, shoving the marble at Alex and having to bend almost in half to get it closer.

“I do! But—”

“—What fucking ‘but’?”

“I like your smile when you award them to me so much more.”

Greg opens and then closes his mouth. He frowns, and then raises his eyebrows again, this time a pleading look on his face instead. Like he’s begging Alex to tell him what to do with the things he’s feeling. Like he needs his help. Again. His breaths are too shallow, and his eyes feel hot.

He brings back his hand with the purple marble in it, and looks at it, cupped and tiny in the curve of his palm. It’s cheap and lopsided and run through with tiny flaws that make it fragile. There are a million just like it in every toyshop, warehouse, and muddy verge bordering schoolyards the world over. Greg’s sure he’d had a dozen that were better – bigger or clearer or with a prettier centre that caught the light and his youthful attention for a brief summer’s moment.

He can’t remember where they went. He loved them with the bright, shining love of a child, and he can’t remember what happened to any single one.

“I lost my marbles,” he mumbles through a tight throat. “And you can fuck right off with the obvious joke,” he adds, suddenly angry about it.

Alex doesn’t say anything.

“I think… I think everyone had marbles at some point. Maybe. And then, one day, you don’t. You can lov— like them a lot, and then one day you just forget about them. You forget, and you never see them again. And… it doesn’t matter.” Greg rolls the marble around in the soft cradle of his cupped hand. “The world just keeps on spinning.”

There’s the sound of gentle fluttering and movement out of the corner of Greg’s eye, and then Alex is hovering softly by his hand. Alex reaches out and holds onto the side of Greg’s thumb, his wings making him sway lightly in mid air.

“I remember every single… marble… I’ve ever met,” Alex says.

Greg huffs, unconvinced. “Yeah, right.”

“I can prove it? If you want,” Alex asks, gently. He pulls himself up and over Greg’s thumb, and hovers just above the purple centred marble. “Is this one for me?”

Greg just nods.

With a tiny swoop – where felt boots and diaphanous wings tickle the palm of his hand – Alex wraps his arms around the marble and lifts it from Greg’s palm. He sways in the air as he rights himself again and tucks the marble under one arm like a football.

Then, to Greg’s great surprise, Alex manoeuvres himself around until he can reach out and with his tiny, free hand grab Greg’s fingertip.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

Alex is holding his hand.

Greg coughs. Laughs. Something. Wipes the wetness from his eyes with his other hand, and thinks ‘Fuck it’. He sniffs loudly and doesn’t cry.

It is incredibly awkward to get to his feet while Alex is hovering, holding, touching his finger – wobbling in the air as Greg sways him and the marble weighs him down – wings fighting so hard to keep him close. Greg’s limbs go everywhere. Knees pop. He rolls – and not on his first try – and gets a hand on the mattress to help push himself upright. His back twinges and almost drops him like a sack of screaming potatoes, but he bites it back and freezes instead and waits for the pain to pass. He looks away so Alex doesn’t see his eyes overflow.

“Come on. I’ve got you…” Alex’s quiet encouragement should be absurd. He’s smaller than a fucking sausage, and yet Greg refuses to let go. “That’s it. That’s good.”

Greg stands. Sways. Tilts his head back to the ceiling and sniffs all the snot down in a long, disgusting, reverse-foghorn of a sniff that ends with a gasp and a mumbled, “Fuck.”

And yet Alex is still holding his finger. Wobbling in the air – his grip smaller than a paperclip – Greg lets Alex lift up his finger, his hand, his arm – and lead him gently towards the bedroom’s door.

“This way, Greg.”

The two of them slowly shuffle out of the bedroom, down the hall, and Alex gets Greg to open the back door to the garden and the cooling evening air.

The sky is a deep navy blue. Huge looming pillars of caramel coloured cloud darken to black in their own shadows, and the first few shining specks dusted over an infinite velvety sky peek between their twisted golden columns. The garden is a thousand shades of midnight – yellows and reds long forgotten and turned to deeper or paler shades of shadowy blue. Across the rolling horizon, fuzzy grey trees watch over shimmering fields of ink, pouring down towards the white painted, grey on grey, form of the sleeping, golden-light streaming cottage.

They close the door behind them, and Greg’s eyes adjust to the gloom.

Beyond the garden, beyond the path, beyond the pond and shed and the short stone wall where ancient trees bend buckled over the moss-blackened mortared blocks of chalk and limestone – a flash of amber light. Another. A wink of colour. A splash of gold. A call and response of floating, distanceless, pulsing glows.

Fireflies.

“Oh, fuck!” Greg whispers, caught off guard. He stalls, standing there on the garden pave stones in his socks, and Alex accidentally flies forward a few feet with his fluttering, marble-based momentum. “I haven’t seen fireflies in years,” Greg adds.

“I could introduce you?”

“Fuck off!” Greg immediately blurts. Then the fact that he’s talking to an honest to god fairy hits him properly, and his eyebrows go right up. “Wait, really?”

Alex flies back to hold Greg’s finger again, and hums a ‘yes’. “Come on. They don’t bite.”

Greg shuffles onwards until Alex pats him on the hand and tells him to wait at the door to the shed. He starts to fly towards the fireflies, then stops – practically skidding in midair – and then comes back to Greg.

“Could you hold my marble for a minute, please?”

“Yeah, alright.” Greg opens his hand, and Alex lands on his palm – soft little pokes with every step of his felt boots on the soft hills and valleys of his hand. Alex places the marble down pride of place in the pillowy pink land connecting heart line and head, and gives it a pat.

Then he flutters off – wings shimmering faintly in the fading light of dusk.

The marble is warm. Greg wraps his hand around it to keep it that way.

Alex disappears into the dark in the direction of the pulsing gleams of pure yellow, and for a moment nothing happens. Greg can feel the path suck heat from the soles of his feet. Feels the evening’s breeze shiver through his hair. Hears the first grumbling, croaking from a frog or a toad somewhere in the direction of the black mirror of the pond.

Then Greg can hear more croaking – breathy and strangled – and it’s Alex apparently trying to shout something. Greg can only make out snatches; “...If it wouldn’t be a bother?” and “...shouldn’t interrupt your… courtship rituals…”

Greg shakes his head.

But then the strangest thing happens. The flicking, asynchronous, pulsing cloud of tiny little lights, shifts. One by one, and then clumps and clouds, they move. Fluttering up, flocking in slow motion, wheeling in barely-coherent drifts of golden motes of light. Like stirring the milky way with a glassy rod, a nebula whirls and then – following a decision that seems to take moments – slowly moves towards Greg.

“Ffuuuuck…” he breathes, and then snaps his mouth shut. His hand slams out and grabs the wall of the shed as his sense of up and down shatters when the lights arrive. The faintest buzz all around him. The hint of hundreds of wings. Lights above him, behind him, below and all around him as they lazily circle or hover or drift. He looks down, and finds himself illuminated – fireflies resting on his fuzzy socked feet, clinging to his jeans, his shirt, and then his world turns gold in his left eye as a firefly lands on his glasses and its arse turns on like a beacon, gently blinding him.

He feels a tear slip down his cheek.

“Alex?” he whispers, voice wobbling.

There’s a fluttering, different from the rest, and then Alex alights on Greg’s shoulder.

“Yes, Greg?” he asks, quietly and sounding quite pleased.

“Are these things fucking on me?” Greg can feel Alex shuffle awkwardly from foot to foot through the fabric of his shirt.

“Ah! Um. Probably only a little bit?”

Greg is flashbanged again by the firefly above his left eye, and jerks his head back a bit in shock. “Fuck!” he curses, but still whispered. He brings his hand up slowly and tries to waft the bug from his glasses. “Well, I guess they can get their freak on for a minute while I’m overwhelmed by the beauty of fucking nature.”

“That’s the spirit!” Alex says with a gap-toothed grin. “And literally!”

“Yeah, shut up.”

Alex does, and so does Greg. Nothing but the sounds of a summer’s dusk croaking and buzzing and rustling around them, swirling in a lazy snowstorm of sunflower gold. Greg holds his hand out, and two of the tiny beetles alight on his skin – lighter even than Alex, and ticklish as their six tiny feet scuttle around. Their arses glow, and Greg’s hand lights up – pink turned peach with the pretty bioluminescence. He turns his hand to follow their crawling movements under and around his huge warm hand until finally, like ladybirds, they crack open their shells, unsheathe their wings, and one after the other take flight again to join the others floating like stars in the sky.

Minutes pass. Alex sits down and sighs a little, head in his hands as he watches from his Greg shoulder perch. Slowly, the stars start to grow distant. First a few, and then more and more, as the fireflies slowly in dribs and drabs make their fluttering, buzzing way back beneath their tree.

When the last few clump together, and lazily bob away, Greg takes a breath. “So… Thanks. For that. Genuinely.”

“You’re welcome, Greg.” Alex pats him on the shoulder. “And just think! In just a few weeks time there’ll be tiny little baby beetles that were—”

“—Okay! Yeah, thank you, Alex. I get the picture.”

“...Uncle Greg.”

Greg checks his hand for beetles and finding it clear, wipes it across his face, unseating his glasses. “That’s not— That’s not how that works.”

“If you say so, Uncle Greg!”

The magical inner glow of experiencing something truly wonderful doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming any more, and Greg shoves a purple marble right up in Alex’s face. “Do you want this marble or not?”

“Ah. Yes. Marbles!” Alex stands up and flits off Greg’s shoulder – leaving him holding the one he’s got. “Come on then!”

With just a wiggle of his butt, Alex squeezes through a chipped gap in the wooden door of the shed and disappears inside.

Palming the marble again, Greg takes hold of the handle and trying to make sure Alex isn’t still stuck in the hinge or anything, opens the door.

It’s dark inside – the little scraps of light from the stars, the curtained windows, and the distant fireflies do barely anything to illuminate the dusty surfaces, but Greg lets his eyes adjust. He’d been in here to get the hammer from earlier and he remembers there being potting tables and piles of boxes, cases and junk and one of those old manual push-lawnmowers that’d take your toes off if you’d let them, with a good quarter inch of rust on every surface.

“Over here, Greg!”

Greg turns his head and squints, and just about makes out Alex’s tiny pale face against the dark of the shed – his tiny pink hands waving at Greg from a dusty flat surface where he thinks the hammer had been resting.

“It’s as dark as the devil’s arse crack in here,” Greg mutters. “Oh. Wait.”

LIGHT!

With a swipe and a click – the room explodes with bright white light and both of them yell – Greg much louder than Alex. Greg’s phone’s torch turns the tiny shed into something from Oppenheimer as every surface turns entirely blown out white.

Then everything goes red, as Greg scrunches his eyes shut, moaning at his own idiocy.

“Sorry!” he says, even as he throws his arm over his eyes. “Sorry.”

Then there’s a metallic click, and a heavy, hollow ‘whump’ sound as something swings open, and Greg dares to blink and peek from behind his eyes.

Marbles.

Hundreds and hundreds of marbles. Maybe thousands. Heapings of them filling an old dusty suitcase to the brim. Glittering madly in the swinging bright white light of his phone, they shine with yellow and red and green and all the colours of the rainbow. Some of them with the tornado of the cats-eye marble centre, some of them solid glass with shimmering metallic sheen over the top. Others are opaque glass made with patterns of flowers or geometric patterns on their brightly painted surfaces. Still more are just ball bearings made of shiny, faintly rusting metal. Some look dull and made of stone or clay or even wood in places. And oddly – sticking out in some places – the shining brighter metal of the gleaming points of the tines of mismatched forks.

So many forks. And so many marbles.

And Alex fluttering above them, wings flashing in the torchlight, little blue eyes staring up at Greg with determination.

“I remember every single one.” He turns, and dives, and slams into the clattering heap of marbles that scatter away from where he’s rummaging. He pulls out a blue one. “This is the one I grabbed out of your hand when you tried to trap me in a laundry basket.” He’s up to his waist in marbles, and leans over to grab another one – this time red and orange. “And you sent a photograph to… Roisin was it? Holding this one.”

“You mean you stole that one as well.”

Alex just hums, unwilling to perjure himself. He drops the marble into the mountain of others, and grabs one that’s definitely not Greg’s – a clear purple one with an iridescent green sheen on the surface. “This one was from a girl called Mel who played with her doll Phillip Pennyfield on the back step, and who liked to read aloud to him and I hid in the bushes and listened to her tell him about the adventures of Timmy and George and Julian and Susan and Dick. She lost Phillip in the pond one day and cried so hard she threw up, so when I was washing my clothes in the pond I dived down and brought him back and left him on the shrine and Mel was so happy she left her favourite treasure in the whole world – this marble – on the shrine for me.”

Greg’s eyebrows twitch.

Alex hugs the marble to his chest for just a second, and then releases it back to the pile.

“This was lost in a competition between Atavacus and his son Luci…” he says, as he picks up a chipped, slightly lumpy, baked clay sphere that looks as old as the shrine outside. “...and it was the last game they played before Atavacus had to leave for war. Luci slept with it under his bed for two years until he left it on my shrine and asked me to take care of his dad.” Alex sighs. “I couldn’t. He never came back.”

The marble goes back, mixed in with hundreds of others.

“And— And this one…” He leans over, scrambling on his hands and knees to grab a yellow opaque marble with brown swirls through it. “This one belonged to Daisy’s grandmother, Gwen! She would visit the boy who lived here – Bartholemew – when she was just thirteen and wrote letters saying how much she liked him. She’d seal them with a little red wax red seal and put a marble inside to give it some weight, and stand out there, by the wall, and throw her letters up to his window. But he didn’t like her back, and he’d burn the letters out in the garden and throw the marbles in the pond until she figured it out and didn’t talk to him again for a whole summer.”

Greg watches as Alex casts about for his next one – almost frantic in his eagerness to tell Greg about the one-time owners of every marble in his astonishing collection.

“And— And— And there’s—” The yellow marble tumbles down the pile and thunks against the hollow-sounding side of the suitcase, pinging off a fork as it goes.

“—Hey, it’s okay. I get it. I believe you.” Greg reaches out, and almost touches Alex. Almost pats him on the shoulder reassuringly. “You really do remember every single one, don’t you?”

Alex nods.

“And you really are that old?”

“I don’t look a day over eight hundred, right?” Alex says with a dopey, toothy grin.

Greg shakes his head, ruefully, but can’t help but smile. “Makes it difficult to complain that I’m too old for this.”

“Mmm, you have had a big day, baby boy?” Alex says, his voice raising at the end along with his eyebrows as he chances his luck.

“Oh. Absolutely not!” Greg says with a scowl with absolutely no heat to it whatsoever. “Nope. You’re not— That is not happening.”

Alex beams at Greg. He wiggles; he's so pleased with himself.

“I mean, look at the size of you! If anyone’s little here, it’s you, Little Alex…”

“Horne. Alex Horne.”

“Little Alex Horne. Wait. Isn’t it Horne Cottage?” Greg asks, remembering what Daisy had called it.

“Yes it is!”

“Are you named for the cottage, or is it named for you?”

“Oh, probably,” Alex replies, unhelpfully.

Greg rolls his eyes, and remembers how much they ache. “I am too old for this.” He rubs his eyes, seeing the splashes of reds and warped black and white checkerboard that flash behind his eyelids as he presses far too hard.

Alex extracts himself from the marbles – Greg can hear them clattering into one another – and then Greg hears the lid of the suitcase close with a thump.

“Come on, old man. Let’s get you to bed,” Alex says kindly.

Greg tenses up anyway. Freezes in place, sleeve still covering his eyes. “...Mate…” he says, exhaustion suddenly overwhelming him again. He slowly lowers his arm and his shoulders slump with it, eyes still closed and shadowy red as the light from his phone wavers and drops.

He feels the tiny whorls of air against his face before he feels Alex’s hand on his cheek, and his eyelids flutter harder than Alex’s wings – but he doesn’t flinch this time.

“It’s okay, Greg. I’ll tuck you in. I can keep you safe at least.”

Greg scrunches his eyes and just for a moment, wishes that were true. Just for a heart-clenching second. But it passes, and he knows it’s just a dream. His chest aches with it – with how much he wants it – and if he wasn’t so fucking tired, he might have been angry. He might have lashed out at poor, naive Alex thinking he could fix all the problems with a sprinkle of fairy dust and an optimistic attitude.

But he’s just so tired and sad and hopeless at last and faced with Alex who’s trying so hard, and is still around despite Greg’s miserable company that all he does is shrug.

He shrugs and opens his eyes and finds blue eyes looking back at his own from far too close – hopeful and encouraging and more lovely than any of the marbles in his ridiculous suitcase by far.

“Yeah, alright then, you weirdo.”

Alex’s face lights up with happiness.

They’re half way up the path, back into the cottage, the shed closed up and Greg’s phone showing them the way with its carefully pointed torch, when Greg adds, “Mostly I just want to see how you think you’re going to tuck me in.”

Alex fluttering ahead, and behind, and generally circling Greg like a firefly himself, briefly alights on Greg’s head, padding down his forehead until he can hop onto the bridge of Greg’s black rimmed glasses with his little felt boots and flapping his wings to keep him almost horizontal as he leans forward and looks at Greg from upside down. Then he waggles his little eyebrows as Greg goes cross eyed trying to see. “Tenderly, Greg. Tenderly.”

“Get off you little freak!” Greg yells, horrified and delighted, swiping vaguely in Alex’s direction until he giggles and falls off Greg’s forehead and flies out of Greg’s half-hearted reach.

Chapter Text

Greg stands by the bottom of the bed – the day’s dirty clothes thrown into a plastic bag to sit on his suitcase – in loose boxers and a t-shirt to sleep in. Alex had been banished to the hallway while Greg had changed – whether the filthy little bugger had let Greg keep his dignity was anyone’s guess, especially after his earlier comments in the bath.

But by the light of the bedside lamp, the bed – soft and fluffy with its duvets, pillows, and faux-fur blankets – glowers at him. Glares, even. A standoff then, between the two of them as Greg squints right back – picking a point between the two heaps of pillows to direct the full power of his resentful stare.

Surely one of them will blink.

It’s Greg.

He rolls his eyes at himself, scrubs a hand across his tired, aching face, and plucks off his glasses.

“You can come in now!” he calls out as he shuffles around the bed to his usual side, and puts his glasses down with a click on the top of the books he’s not reading.

The bedroom door creaks as it opens.

Alex appears fluttering half way up the door in the gap. “Coo-ee! Are you decent?”

“As much as I’ll ever be,” Greg says, pulling the covers back. “Look, you don’t need to do this, Alex. I feel like an idiot. Or a child. Or an idiot child. Like one of the ones that eats crayons.”

“I can probably find some if you want a late night snack?” Alex offers, fluttering over to the other side of the bed, casting increasingly huge shadows on the wall as he approaches the lamp. “I hear the green ones are best.” He lands with a gentle flump on the duvet and sinks almost to his knees. Wobbling, he tries to wade up to the pillow end as if he’s trekking through deep, fluffy banks of snow. He’s grabbing with his hands to help pull himself over each quilted hill – almost crawling.

Then Greg drops himself onto the bed – swinging one leg up – and Alex is thrown into the air with a squeak! He paffs down onto the covers, face first, and disappears in several inches of downy stuffing.

Greg slams his hand over his mouth to muffle the giggle. “You alright there?”

“Mmmhmm!”

Greg gets himself under the covers – throwing several pillows onto the floor and punching the two remaining ones until they give up and fold to his satisfaction – while Alex extracts himself from the blue and white striped ocean of rocking, wobbling, bedcovers.

Then Greg is lying there, covers loose at his shoulders, really not sure what he should be doing.

Alex, it seems, knows. “Are you all comfy, Greg?” he asks as he finally reaches the top of the bedcovers. “Snuggled down enough?”

“It’s fine.”

“Go on – have a wiggle and get snug as a bug, please!”

“Are you sure?” Greg asks, raising an eyebrow. And before Alex can answer, he wriggles for all he’s worth! Alex is flung off the covers again – this time to slam into a wall of pillows and Greg doesn’t bother to hide his smirk. Greg wiggles for a few more seconds, pulling the covers all the way to his chin and making a mess of the covers as he tugs and folds and loosens them from where they’d been tucked. “Oh. No, you’re right,” he says, as the bedquake comes to an end and Alex stands up. “That is much better.”

Alex clears his throat with a ragged ‘Heugha!’ and then his smile is back again. “Good! Good. I’ll just…” And before Greg can send him flying again, Alex takes off and flaps and flies directly over Greg’s head to get to the bedside lamp. Fluttering around it for a moment, looking exactly like a technicoloured moth, Greg is struck again by how strange, how pretty, and how very weird everything that’s happening is. The moment burns into his eye – Alex lit by the lamp's soft glow, warm light on his little peach face and red-touched ears, his soft grey boots dangling beneath ill-fitting ‘jeans’ and a chunky, stripey jumper. With each flutter, the rainbow of colours flashes on his tiny, dragonfly wings, leaving trails of greens and blues and pinks and amber with every flit and flutter. Then Alex turns, and smiles, and the light catches that too – his little gap teeth, his crinkled blue eyes, the silvery threads of his greying beard and hair that shines in the light and give him a full face halo.

Look, if it’s a hallucination, Greg thinks, – it’s a really fucking pretty one.

Then Alex turns, dips down, and ‘click’ – turns off the lamp and plunges them both into a darkness that’s at first complete and softens as the moment plays on. Greg’s eyes watch for movement – looking for the flutter of wings – and instead at first he hears them.

Soft as a bumble bee, humming like a honey bee, Greg hears Alex move through the air and land with the lightest little puff on the covers by Greg’s hands.

“Under the covers please, Greg.” Alex’s voice is close and soft – his distinct and strange little accent, his nasally breathiness, the roughness that Greg hears as gentleness now, as Alex quietly urges him on.

When Greg snakes his hands into the warmth already building beneath the duvet, Alex hums contentedly. The pitch darkness of the room slowly turns to charcoals and washed out blacks – the ceiling and wall distinct when Greg looks out of the corner of his eye. There’s the impression of movement – shadow on shadow – where he can hear Alex stride up and across the covers over Greg’s broad chest.

The tiniest little nudge. And then another. And Greg realises Alex is pulling the cover a little bit higher. Then a tug, and the duvet tightens over his body by a degree. Greg hears flapping – frantic and hard – and Alex grunts with the effort of – apparently – hauling the covers down and snug against Greg’s shoulder.

For a moment, Alex sounds out of breath.

Then gentle flutters, stereo sweeping across his head, as Alex tiredly flies to the other side. More tucks, more tugs – another desperate haul – and Greg finds himself tucked in tightly, and a puffed out little pixie drags himself onto the top of the covers to smooth out every last little crease like he’s scrubbing a ballroom floor. Greg feels wrapped up – the covers moulded to him, warm and like a hug. Like the hug that Alex is too small to give him.

“That’s… That’s enough. It’s really good, actually. Thank you, Alex.”

He hears Alex, sigh a deep, tired breath and apparently flop onto his back over Greg’s heart. Greg can’t feel it – not through the covers – but he imagines Alex spread eagled in that tiny way he does, little chest heaving up and down, as he recovers from his mighty trial.

“You’re— You’re welcome, Greg. You sleep now.”

Greg grimaces in the dark, and doesn’t say what he’s thinking. “Alright. I’ll try.”

“I’ll be right here.”

Moments later, Greg is reminded that Alex snores. Tiny little snuffling snorting sounds that are so cute Greg wants to bite him. They, and the tiny man making them, are utterly ridiculous, and Greg finds himself entirely too amused. He’d shake his head but he’s too scared he’ll wake Alex again, so instead he focuses on the gently warming spot on his chest where Alex’s body heat is seeping through the covers from where he’s curled up and dreaming.

Greg lies there, still and silent, like a dead thing.

In his grave. In the graveyard.

Oh no.

No-one visits. His grave. And Greg watches from the outside as the day goes by and people walk past and leaves fall down and no-one comes to visit his grave. Another day, and another, and no-one comes. The leaves pile up and then the rain comes down and the wind blows it all away again except in the creases and crevices and no-one comes.

Greg floats closer and sees his cold, plain gravestone.

It doesn’t even have his name.

Months and years spin past and moss grows all over the plain stone and other graves get flowers and visits and people who cry and talk and reach out and touch the stones that reminds them of the person who once touched them back.

And Greg looks down and sees himself translucent – a see-through shadow of what he was. He reaches for the gravestone and his hand goes right through it. He looks down and sees his feet fade and turn even less solid and start to sink into the black, wet, untended dirt that someone had shoved his body under. The sun wheels overhead, the moon spins by as days and weeks and months fly past, and Greg sinks deeper and deeper and deeper. Weeds choke his nameless gravestone. Empty crisp packets and discarded plastic bottles suddenly pop in from one flickered day to the next, and then turn green with mold and lichen and moss. A season spins, and flowers burst alive and die and fade and turn rotten black and brittle with frost.

Greg is up to his waist now. And no-one has come.

Then the wheeling stops and the day turns cloudy – but cloudy with a bright sun somewhere up behind the solid wall of puffy quilted clouds. The graveyard bursts with growth and weeds and grasses, and Greg’s grave is barely visible beneath the climbers, wild flowers, and fallen bits of branch.

His gravestone looks old. Looks worn. Looks like it has a carved out section at the bottom for an offering. Like it’s had scribbles and scratches in its old granite surface from a thousand years ago or more.

Someone’s coming.

Greg tries to turn around, and can’t, but he knows someone’s coming.

The clouds part a little, and a patch of summer’s sun turns everything such a violent green he tries to cover his eyes – but his arm is see through and he’s sunk all the way to his hip.

Someone comes.

Bright colours out of the corner of his eye as a man – tall and gangly – walks up to Greg’s grave and crouches down. He reaches over, and with a long fingered hand, brushes away a leaf or two, and the grave is suddenly clearer.

“It’s okay,” the man says, and it’s Alex, but his voice is bigger, deeper, real. Like a full size human’s voice softly reassuring him. “I’ll remember you, Greg.”

Then Greg can see Alex – a full size Alex – in worn out jeans that aren’t a doll’s cast-off, in trainers that are purple and grey, but not felted out of dryer lint, in a puffy jacket that’s chunky and striped, but not made of yarn the thickness of his wrist. And he smiles, and he still has a gap at the front of his teeth – but it’s now huge! So big you could fit a pound coin through it, and no less charming for any of that.

Alex reaches for his hand, and Greg is ashamed of how transparent he is – because that’s a thing you should be ashamed of. But Alex insists, and Greg holds out his hand, and Alex wraps Greg’s faint and ghostly hand in his soft, warm, long-fingered one, and Greg feels a little more real.

“But you need to touch the world, Greg.” Alex says. “If you don’t touch the world, you won’t leave a mark.”

They’re sitting on the grave now, side by side in front of the gravestone that’s also Alex’s shrine. Cross legged, and Greg is almost faded except for where Alex holds him.

The grave has “LX” on it, high up and faintly engraved, and Alex turns and hands Greg a pen – a gold one.

“You need to touch the world, Greg,” he repeats. “Make a mark.”

Greg takes the pen, and leans towards the gravestone and writes ‘Greg’ on the stone that also carves it. The letters glow like fireflies – like he’s burning each one into the stone. And with every letter he carves, he feels himself get stronger. Feels like he’s here and not about to fade.

Alex is standing, and bends to leave a card. A bouquet. A wreath. Greg turns and sees others – hints and impressions of other people he knows. Roisin leaves a jar of pesto and a damp spot on the gravestone with her tears. His mum falls apart for months, leaving flowers, which turns to bringing him all her gossip and complaints twice a week without fail. People he knew only briefly. People he doesn’t recognise at all. Cards and letters, flowers and plastic wrapped teddies. Greg reaches out and touches each one – each token – and remembers how he knew the person who left them, remembers how they touched him and changed his life.

And as people flicker past – each moment a year, and each year a moment – Alex stands by Greg’s gravestone and smiles.

The sun is brilliant and shining, and it catches on Alex’s short silvery hair and gives him an all over halo that Greg finds so familiar.

Suddenly, Greg knows Alex is going away.

“Wait,” Greg says. “Don’t go!”

But Alex is getting further away. Standing by the gravestone, but further and further away and Greg knows he’ll never see him again.

“No! You can’t go!”

“I’m not the one who’s leaving, Greg,” Alex says so sadly.

Greg feels the awful loss of it. Of hundreds and thousands of people coming and going, and Alex always staying the same. Of generations passing and barely knowing the brilliant, gentle presence who’d outlast them all. Of broken families, of loss and war, and then of people selling up and buying, leading to an endless stream of passers-by that flit past over a weekend, a bank holiday, a brief summer getaway. Each one a hope for friendship and connection – each one a heartbreak stashed in a four digit key box. Greg crawls forward, shuffling on knees that are far too solid now, and takes the golden pen. Where “LX” is barely, faintly written, he pulls the letters apart in a way that only a dream could do and writes – until right above his own name is written, “Alex”.

Alex
&
Greg

“I know it’s not the same…” Greg starts.

“It’s perfect, Greg.”

And then Greg is standing, and so is Alex, and he hasn’t left yet – though which of them Greg means by that, he can’t tell. And the stone is by their feet, names carved forever – or as long as stone lasts in rain and wind and sun – and it still doesn’t feel like enough. It isn’t enough. And Greg would really like a hug.

“Can I hug you?” Alex asks.

Greg smiles, and frowns and tries to hold it together and nods because if he breathes out it’ll turn into a sob and his eyes are watery and stupid so he holds out his arms and Alex fits himself against Greg’s chest like a lego piece.

They click.

Alex, who is the size of a man, soft under Greg’s embrace and warm against his t-shirt. He smells of chamomile and honeysuckle and, of all the stupid things; ham. Greg rests his chin on Alex’s short hair, and closes his eyes as the blurry blobs of green and golden sunshine of both a graveyard and a cottage garden blend and disappear.

Alex hums – a happy, contented hum, and hugs Greg tighter – his man sized arms around Greg’s chest, pulling at his shoulder blades and pressing his fuzzy, cosy face against Greg’s shoulder. His bright red ear feels so hot against Greg’s neck – fuzzy like peach skin warmed by the sun and picked fresh off the tree.

Like Alex is the sun warming Greg’s front, while saltwater rain runs down his face.

Greg takes so many breaths as he tries to speak, and chickens out again and again. His chest tightens with it, then collapses, as the thick lump in his throat threatens to break the dam. It’s a strangled, hesitant sound that rumbles his chest and can’t be louder than a breath, when he says, “Thank—”

Greg’s awake.

The light has turned the curtains into a screen of purest white, and Greg blinks and blinks and turns his face away. He’s in bed. He’s in bed, and it’s morning. He blinks again, this time in shock. His first thought is to check the clock – there’s no way he’s actually slept until morning – and when he turns to see the bedside table, he finds something else.

Greg had been lying, curled up on that side – the duvet tossed and turned in the night til it lay down by his stomach, kicked and creased. But where he’d thrown his arms – curled up and left in loose fists – was something else.

Someone else.

Wrapped around Greg’s thumb, his leg thrown over and his arm wrapped around, was Alex. Alex was spooning Greg’s thumb.

And snoring.

Greg’s breath hitches and he tries not to move – instead letting his head relax onto the pillow once more so he can watch the tiny rise and fall of Alex’s back with each slow and peaceful breath. Watch the light catch his hair, hear the snuffles and snorts he makes – probably drooling on Greg’s thumb, the filthy bugger – and when Alex snuggles harder, smearing his little bristly face against Greg’s knuckle with a sigh, Greg bites his lip and decides right there that he’d rather cut off his arm than wake Alex.

Which is unfortunate because he really needs a piss.

Chapter Text

It’s Greg’s last day in the cottage, and god, it’s beautiful.

Eventually Alex wakes, Greg sprints for the toilet, and when he returns, he tears open the curtains to let the perfect summer’s day inside. The garden is glowing with colour – so green it hurts his eyes – bursting with swaying banks of flowers in every shade of the rainbow. The sun glints off the pond sending petals of searing white sunshine into Greg’s eyes, onto his face, filling the room behind him, and he flinches and swears and laughs. It’s fucking glorious.

His chest feels so light.

Alex has fallen asleep again, nestled into the divot in Greg’s pillow and leaving the teeny tiniest little damp spot from the drool out of the corner of his mouth.

Greg rolls his eyes, grabs some trousers, and tip-toes out into the kitchen.

“WAKE UP!” he yells from the doorway, fifteen minutes later.

Alex snaps alert, wings beating hard, and launches himself off the pillow – flailing wildly – to thwap at full speed into the mountain of crumpled duvet. “What? Wha— I’m— What?”

Greg laughs, shaking the tray in his hands, and making the teacup rattle in its saucer. “Breakfast’s reaaaaady!” he sing-songs, as he drops himself on the bed, tossing Alex into the air with the force, and swinging his legs over to rest the tray on with barely any tea sloshing at all.

“Oooh!” Alex says, wrestling to extract himself from the covers.

They share a dippy boiled egg and toast soldiers, a cup of tea for Greg, and a second egg cup of Ribena for Alex if he wants it. Instead, Alex pulls himself up onto the edge of the teacup and dunks his face into Greg’s tea for a lengthy slurp, and then gnaws a crunchy gash into a sugar cube with his wonky little teeth as a tooth-rotting chaser, grinning the whole while.

Alex does get egg on his face as Greg tries to feed him several bites of buttered, eggy, toast so they decide they both need a bath before they face the day.

Greg makes Alex up a teacup bath with a drop of bubble-bath instead of a tea-bag, and reads the first chapter of one of the books from his bedside table to him as they both soak in the almost too hot, steaming water.

Alex asks him to do the voices.

Greg does, and gets really into it.

They don’t talk about the dream.

Instead, they make a plan for the day – grabbing the rest of the peas from yesterday’s dinner and heading out together towards the pub a half hour away and in the village proper.

It's nice. Despite Greg’s ridiculously long legs usually leaving his walking companions far behind, Greg can stretch out and really stride, head held high in the morning breeze, with Alex flapping alongside to keep up. Alex keeps a running commentary going – pointing out bird after bird flying overhead, disappearing into bushes, or singing from somewhere unseen. Once or twice, Alex zips off after one into a hedge, reappearing moments later at Greg's shoulder, puffing and out of breath, regretfully informing Greg that it wasn't who he'd thought it was, after all. As if he knew every bird on first name terms.

Or first name terns, Alex insists. Which is a type of bird, he then clarified. Like a seagull. He's never seen one. Or the sea. It's a long tern dream of his.

Greg can't roll his eyes any harder.

Just over halfway to the pub, they find the little stone bridge over the river, and Alex finally stops with the gull puns. Specifically.

The wide stream tinkles and babbles as they approach, blending with the birdsong, buzzes of insects, and rustling of the nearby willows with their long and papery leaves. Audible from a half mile away, Greg moves to the side of the single carriageway to let a car pootle past them, Alex having ducked out of sight beneath the bridge.

“Oh, you have to come down, Greg!” Alex says moments later, his voice echoing and amplified by the ancient stone arches. “It's a great echo! Echo! Eeeechoooo! Oooo!”

Greg shakes his head and, clinging to the stone wall, swings his legs over to try to find a way down the overgrown bank.

“Spoooooky! Oooo! Oooo? Bah! Boh! Wakkawakkawakka!”

“Oh my god, will you stop?” Greg finally yells.

“—top —op —op…” the bridge echoes back at him.

Greg looks at Alex. Alex looks back, grinning, the caustics on the water lighting him from below and giving him an impish look in the murky shadows beneath the bridge.

Greg takes a deep breath and sticks his head further under the damp arch. “BOOBS!” he yells.

“BOOBS! OOBS! BOO—OOBS! OOBS!! Oobs. Oob…”

Greg beams. “TITTIES!”

“TITTIES— ITTIES— ‘TTIES —ES! —ES.”

Greg smacks his hand over his mouth, giggling like a schoolboy. He stares right at Alex, who is barely keeping it together with a shocked look on his little face, then Greg takes the biggest breath he can and bellows, “FUCK! CUNT! ARSE! BIFFINS! COCK—HAHAHA Oh my god!”

The bridge trembles and rumbles as curses and naughty parts bounce and break and crash into one another in a cacophony of giggling filth.

Greg points directly at Alex – finger wagging in the uplit darkness – demanding he join in.

“Bum!” Alex yells feebly. When Greg gives him the most questioning, astounded, and unimpressed look at his weak and barely-echoing contribution, Alex tries again – voice breaking – “Nether reeegions!!!”

Greg almost pisses himself laughing. In fact he almost slips on the slicked down grass by the water’s edge and definitely doesn’t scream in such a way that he gets it thrown back in his face by the echo roundly mocking him.

When Greg turns around, he sees they’ve gathered an audience. Thankfully, it’s only of the feathered kind. A gang of ducks, stubby little tails wagging like puppies’ as they paddle up the lazy summer river, leaving interfering v-shaped wakes that hide the frantic action of their bright orange feet. Bright eyed and curious, brown speckled or green headed, a half dozen of them paddle to the shadow of the bridge – just a couple of metres away from Greg – and stay that distance, chuntering and honking quietly to themselves as they nibble at the water’s surface and each other with their yellow beaks.

“Duckies!” Alex chirps, entirely without echo, and flies out to hover by Greg’s shoulder, apparently delighted. “Did you bring the peas, Greg?”

“Of course—” Greg starts, interrupting himself with another slippery wobble on the wet bank. He grabs a handful of deep rooted grasses and uses the tether to pull himself away from danger, instead grabbing the bag and hunkering down at the water’s edge. “Of course I did. You wouldn’t let me leave the house without them!”

“Quite right.” Alex nods. “I would have never heard the end of it.”

As if answering, the ducks grumble and chatter and quack, gently bumping into each other like a cluster of pedalos powered by confused and oblivious tourists.

Greg scoops his hand into the half-empty bag of peas, and gets a handful. The ducks honk harder. “Oh! You want some of these, eh?” he asks, amused. “Come on then.” Long arm coming in clutch, Greg holds out his hand, palm flat, fingers together, and waits.

The ducks dither.

They see the peas. They want the peas. But every time one of them paddles a little closer, a fellow duck bumps into the bravest duck, whose courage pops like a bubble – sending it honking and grumbling to the back of the paddling in a literal flap.

Greg picks a pea, and tosses it over. The nearest duck darts for it and gobbles it down instantly. The other ducks are outraged! Honking and quacking and even taking a nip at the duck-victorious!

“There’s more right here, you know!” Greg says, stretching his pea-holding arm out as far as he can, just above the water.

“Ah, I see what the problem is,” Alex says.

“What’s that then?” Greg asks.

“Well, it’s tough when you’re young…” Alex starts explaining, but as he goes on, a rhythm emerges and something like music happens. “...And you’re broke and you’re tired and you’re feeling out of luck. And you’re swimming just too far away from peas… and you’re also a duck.”

“Are you… singing?”

“Indecision! Too many choices. Could swim or fly or sprint! Let me talk to them.” Alex flies over, pointedly ignoring Greg asking about the singing he was definitely trying to do.

“Indecisive ducks…” Greg mutters, but within seconds, he looks up and finds a nervous, beautiful brown speckled duck hen waggling over to see him. “Oh!” he gasps, as quietly as he can. “Hello, beautiful. Would you like some peas?”

Alex appears next to Greg’s ear. “Should I be jealous?” he asks.

“Shhh!” Greg lowers his hand even further – the backs of his fingers touching the gently lapping, cool river’s surface.

The duck tilts her head and ruffles some of her perfect, brown and black stippled feathers, flashing a band of midnight blue on her wing.

“It’s alright. I won’t bite.”

Alex whispers, “She might. Just a nibble. Careful.”

“What?” Greg asks, trying not to startle the duck. He turns to look at Alex, suddenly a bit worried, and the duck chooses that moment to make her break for the peas.

“Oh, fuck!” Greg gasps.

“Oh, duck,” Alex automatically corrects him.

The duck stretches out her neck, and nibbles and nips at the peas, now half-submerged in the water, churning peas, water, and bubbles into a frenzied little soup. Greg holds his breath, delighted at the feeling of her blunted little orange-edged beak nibbling over his palm. Clacking and clicking, she gobbles – Hungry Hungry Hippo style – a half-dozen little green pearls, happy little snarfling sounds coming from her beak – when the rest of the ducks get the idea!

Greg’s beaming grin almost slips when he’s suddenly surrounded by a cluster of quacking ducks!

“Oh, shit!” he chuckles, as duck after duck shoulders its way past its fellow ducks, gunning for the peas. A flapped wing here, an impolite nibble there, and quacks that get louder and louder as the peas on Greg’s hand get fewer and scatter and sink. “Greedy little buggers! Hold on!” Greg scoops another handful, and holds out his other hand too – both hands now serving as impromptu bird feeders as ducks waggle and quack and churn up the water with their excitable, pea-powered happiness. Blue and brown, orange and yellow, shimmering metallic green and bands of flashing white – they’re perfect and gorgeous and utterly utterly ridiculous.

In fact, it’s fucking delightful, and for a moment, Greg doesn’t even realise he’s laughing.

Within moments, all the peas are gone. The bag was shaken empty, and the majority of the ducks back off, quacking and quarrelling and preening themselves and each other as Greg leans back and shakes off his river-water dripping hands. His chuckles fade as their quacking does.

“God, I don’t remember the last time I fed the ducks.”

“Don’t you have ducks where you live?” Alex asks, hovering about Greg as he groans and stands.

Greg thinks about it. “There’s a park pretty close, and I think there’s a pond…” He wipes off his hands on his jeans and stuffs the empty plastic bag in a pocket. “Haven’t really gotten out of the house much lately, I guess.”

Long dark days of winter, hiding from the rain, had turned to shining, glaring days of gleaming spring that bounced off Greg’s laptop screen and into his eyes til he hauled closed the curtains and got back to work. Spring had passed, and summer came with hot and muggy days – too hot to leave the flat – spent in sweaty boxer briefs and a forgetful state of dehydration. From screen to screen to screen he’d flicked his tired, reddening eyes – phone to laptop to tv and back – and the biggest screen of all had held no appeal. Day and night became a jumbled mess of temperatures and noise, instead of light and darkness, only his Google calendar reminding him to put on clothes and, squinting, attend a meeting or visit a worried friend.

Or see the doctor.

“I should see if there are ducks,” he says, eventually.

Alex tilts his head, pausing in his flight to watch Greg somberly climb the bank.

Greg grabs fistfuls of grasses, hanks of weeds as handholds, and pulls himself up the steep and slippery slope. Sharp along the blades of grass, soft and yielding and staining green, the smell of dirt and broken stems bursts with every high reaching step and slaps him with the hazy half-formed memories of years and years ago. When things were right and good and easy.

He reaches the top – a mountain conquered – and stands up straight in the sun. Tall again.

“I think you’ve had enough, Little Alex!” Greg chuckles, as he slaps his hand over the top of his beer bottle with a pop.

Alex frowns, and wobbles in mid air. “I…!” he declares, “Am not a lightweight!”

The beer garden is open and airy, trellises of lilac giving dappled shade from the late morning sun, and thankfully their bench in the corner is quiet enough that no-one has yet noticed the giant of a man giggling at the antics of a dizzy pixie.

“Mate, I’ve done shits heavier than you,” Greg says with a grin. “What do you think of that?”

“My deepest sympathies to your colon!”

Greg picks up the bottle properly, and downs the last inch or two – the cold liquid still quenching as he sweats in the rising heat.

“Right. I’m getting another, but you’re on water, baby boy.” Greg stands, chair thundering on the pavers, and wavers like the summer air. “Right,” he reassures himself, as he gathers his empty plate and cutlery, and walks carefully to the bar.

The barman raises an eyebrow. “Ah, thanks, mate,” he says, reaching forward over the bar to take the plate from Greg. “You having another?” the balding, round-faced man asks, nodding at the beer bottle Greg was carrying.

“Please. And a water for the little fella.”

The barman turns to the glass fronted fridge, and rifles through the rattling bottles to get Greg’s drink. “The what?” he asks, distractedly.

Chapter Text

A flash of panic washes over Greg, and his hand twitches as the urge to slap it over his mouth almost overwhelms him. His mouth forms the shape for a really full-bodied ‘fuck!’ before he turns it into a cough, his face reddening.

The barman raises an eyebrow, the frosty bottle thudding on the wooden bar.

“Oh, you know. The, uh…” Greg mumbles. Suddenly, his eyes widen with an awful idea. “The guy downstairs,” he whispers too loudly, with a meaningful glance south.

A look of deep understanding washes over the barman’s face – judgement free and sympathetic, and he nods. “Say no more!” he says, as he swipes a pint glass and starts skooshing it full of cold, re-invigorating water.

Greg glances back outside, where he hopes Alex is staying hidden.

“Don’t take it the wrong way,” the barman says, “but I feel like I’d have noticed you around here before.”

Turning back around, Greg notes the way the barman nods his head upwards at Greg and his impressive height.

“Just visiting,” Greg says. “Over in the Horne Cottage.”

The man’s face lights up. “Oh, it’s lovely there. The old Perkins home. In fact…” He turns his head left and right, looking for something, and finds it. Finds them. “Sue! Sue over here!”

A dark-haired woman sitting around the corner of the bar turns around. Her diamond shaped face framed by neat, rectangular framed glasses, and her mouth widens into a lopsided, smirk-like smile. “What is it, Murray, can’t you see I’m about to pull?”

Greg blinks. The woman sat next to ‘Sue’ giggles – her hand over her mouth – and her dark eyes sparkle even from this distance. Her brunette, side-parted, tightly curled hair jiggles with her movement, and she reaches out to smack Sue on the arm.

‘Murray’, the barman, rolls his eyes affectionately. “Right, well, if a little interruption from me is enough to ruin your chances with your wife, then you’ve got no hope.”

Sue gasps, faux-shocked. The other woman, Sue’s wife, nods, amused. Greg looks from them both, to Murray and back again, then clears his throat.

Murray gestures to Greg with his thumb. “Just wanted to tell you this fella’s in your house!”

The as-yet-unnamed woman of the unfairly handsome pair, tilts her head, confused. “If this is your way of saying we’re in here too often, Al—”

“—Mr. Davies!” Sue exclaims. “Ah. Sorry. You must be Mr. Davies – staying with us in Horne Cottage.” Sue jumps off her stool, and strides over. “Sorry about that,” she says, as she sticks out a hand. “How are you finding it?”

Greg shakes her hand – a brief, brisk, businesslike shake that Sue takes the lead with. “Good! But, please – call me Greg.”

“Of course, my darling. Greg it is. I’m Sue – and that gorgeous ray of dark sunshine, my beloved, my soul, my reason for being, the stars in my sky, the boat on my ocean—”

“—Susan! I’m Susan. Just Susan is fine.”

Sue, both hands still resting over her heart from when she was waxing lyrical over her wife, turns to Greg and finishes her raving with one last, heartfelt, “...the jammie to my dodger.”

Susan sashays over to join her wife, slipping her arm around her waist as they both smile warmly at each other. “But you’ve been enjoying the cottage, yeah?” she checks.

“I really have, yes,” Greg nods. “It’s gorgeous. The garden especially.”

Susan nudges Sue with her shoulder, and Greg gets the feeling that one of them is particularly proud of the garden.

“Though, I do have one complaint…” he says, suddenly somber.

Sue and Susan suddenly freeze, expressions turned stern or worried respectively.

“...Your fuckin’ pixie keeps stealing all my marshmallows!”

Susan breaks, grinning widely as she reaches over and gives Greg a shove. “Oh, you!”

Sue, on the other hand nods sagely. “Oh, he’s a little shit, that one. Absolute fiend for marshmallows, he is. We should stage an intervention, really.”

“You’d have to catch him first,” Greg says with a smirk.

“Good point!” Sue agrees. “Any suggestions?”

“Not a laundry basket, I can tell you that.”

Sue gives him a funny look, not expecting such a confident answer, and tilts her head a little.

“You ever seen him yourself?” Greg asks, suddenly finding the label of his bottle terribly interesting. “The pixie?”

Sue scoffs. “I mean, of course not—”

“—That’s not true, Sue! You said you saw him when you were a little girl! Stealing a marble from your Barbies.”

“They were off-brand, generic fashion dolls, thank you. I just happened to name them all Barbie. Including the boy ones. But yes – someone told me about him when I was little, and I convinced myself he’d stolen my favourite marble.”

“He does love marbles,” Greg mumbles to himself with a wistful glance outside.

“Pardon, my love?”

“Nothing! Nothing. Just… I’ll be sorry to leave tomorrow. The, uh, place has really grown on me.”

Susan squeezes Sue. “We’re so happy to hear that!”

“Right! Yes. But if you could just tell all your friends, family, and strangers on the street, that would be terribly helpful of you.” Sue adds, a little ruefully. “Or write a review, I suppose.”

Susan tries to clarify. “You’re our last booking for the summer,” she says, a little sadly. “We’re probably just going to close the cottage up for the year – not worth the bother, otherwise.”

Sue keeps smiling, but her eyes aren’t in it any more. A brittle smile. Susan squeezes her again, this time for comfort.

“That sounds… lonely,” Greg says.

Sue’s brow flickers, and then she moves past it. “The joy of living in a capitalist hellscape, I suppose!”

Susan reaches out, and pats Greg’s arm – her dark hand warm on his sunless, pale skin. “We’re just glad you’ve had a lovely time, Greg.”

“In spite of the little marshmallow menace!” Sue adds, putting on a brave face.

“You know, if anything, it’s because of him, I think.” Greg smiles – they all do – with varying amounts of confusion or sadness. “I’m really going to miss… it. The place.”

No-one’s quite sure what to say to that, and Greg’s words hang in the warm air of the pub for a moment between them. Soft chatter from the early lunch crowd burbles like a stream in corners and booths in the dimly lit, low-ceilinged space, clinks and thuds as Murray refills a fridge from a crate from out back, birdsong streams through the wide open glass doors like sunlight from the beer garden outside where Greg left a smiling, fluttering, silly little man.

“Well, checkout is at 10 unless you’re planning to extend your stay…?” Sue says, shattering the soft silence.

Greg’s heart clenches. Staying. He pictures Alex alone in a cottage shut up for the season – dusty and cloth covered. No marshmallows. No marbles. No tea-cup baths and no one to read to him. Greg’s stomach drops. He wants to stay. He imagines how Alex would beam at him with his goofy little gap-toothed smile, if he did.

But he’s got appointments and meetings. Rehearsals and gigs. Friends, family, a flat of his own, and a life he’d been hiding from. Just when he’d realised what he’d lost, he suddenly wants to throw it away. And he...

“I… I can’t,” he says and tries to smile.

Sue almost smiles back. “Not to worry, pet. You’ll always have the memories you’ve made.”

Like a stab in the chest, it hurts. He nods, and tries to swallow around the lump in his throat. “Check out 10 AM. Got it. Thanks.” Greg stands up. “Lovely meeting you both,” he says, by way of goodbye.

Sue and Susan step back, surprised by his height, and mumble their agreements, and goodbyes as Greg carries his beer and Alex’s glass of water back out to the too-bright light of the beer garden.

Greg drops onto the bench like a sack of marbles, and stares through the wooden table for a long moment.

“Greg?” Alex asks, quietly. “You alright?”

“Mm? Oh. Yeah. Just…” Greg sighs, eyes still stuck in the middle-distance. “Just going to miss… this.”

Alex moves into his line of sight, sidling along the wooden table in his felt boots until he catches Greg’s eye. “10 AM, eh?”

Greg blinks, and focuses on Alex. “You heard that?”

Alex nods, biting his lip.

“All of it?”

Alex nods again.

“I’m sorry, mate,” Greg starts, but Alex shakes his head violently.

“No, thank you! You have nothing to be sorry about.”

Greg takes a long drink of his beer – just the sound of his own gulping thundering in his ears until he thunks the glass bottle down again. “Still shit though, innit.”

“Maybe… Maybe next year will be better? You could… Come and visit in the spring? There'll be ducklings!”

“Ugh!” Greg makes a face. “Sounds disgustingly cute.”

Alex nods. “Oh, it is. They're so fluffy and yellow about it.”

Greg listens, as he carefully tips a tiny spill of beer into the empty bottle cap, getting some of it over his fingers as it bubbles and foams.

“I tried to ride one last year, actually,” Alex says.

“A duck? How did that go?”

Asked hums and carefully takes the bottle cap from Greg's shaky fingers. “Not well. They dropped me in the water and my face got wet! I was like one of those… what's it called… Australian… lays eggs… furry body…”

Confused, Greg stares at Alex, who takes a massive-to-him sip of his beer.

“A duck spilled soggy-puss!” Alex declares.

“Oh my god…” Greg groans.

Alex, beer foam giving him a second beard, beams.

“Give me that!” Greg demands, reaching for the bottle cap, and Alex twists away and laughs.

“No, thank youuu!” Alex hops and skips and flutters away from Greg's grabby fingers, sloshing a droplet of beer here and there as they fight over the drink, blocked from view of the bar by Greg’s expansive back.

In the end, half of it goes in Alex's mouth, and half of it over his head – a compromise both seem to find acceptable.

Greg hadn’t let Alex fly home. Not after the second time he’d smacked into the glass doors of the pub like a sparrow leaving a dust-angel on the pane. So he’d stuffed Alex into his shirt pocket, pretended his laughing fit was a coughing fit, and waved goodbye to Murray behind the bar and started his slow walk ‘home’.

Alex had passed out.

Greg reaches the bridge where they’d fed the ducks, and leans on the little stone wall. It’s cool and warm and is striped and speckled with caterpillar-like wriggling streaks of mosses and drying out dirt, and as he bends and rests his elbows on it, his fingers absentmindedly pick a little tuft of the sandy-based green velvet and rolls it between finger and thumb; a sensation he remembers, and hasn’t felt for so long. He watches the birds paddle and quack to one another up and down the shimmering water for a while – letting the sun settle on his head and neck and arms where he’d rolled up his shirt – feeling like he’s photosynthesising like a flower. He tilts his head up, like the sunflower, and closes his eyes – the world turning a soft red behind gently shut eyelids as he just breathes for a moment. And a moment. And a moment.

Then he sighs, and keeps walking.

His pocket shifts and moves against his chest, and Greg looks down – pulling the pocket open and taking a peek. He finds Alex, stretching his arms and legs as far as he can in his plaid cotton hammock of sorts, looking up at him.

“Ah! Sorry. I must have just nodded off.”

Greg smirks. “Mate, you’ve been snoring so loud you scared off the ducks!”

Alex struggles to sit up. “I missed the ducks?” He grabs tiny handfuls of fabric – boots slipping in Greg’s pocket and stroking through two layers of cotton to be felt against Greg’s chest – and hauls himself upright enough to let his wings take him up. “Wait— I don’t snore that loudly!”

“You absolutely do! Thought there was a bear with sinus issues stuffed in my shirt!”

“God, I’m so sorry… I didn’t know you had sinus issues,” Alex says, quickly, then darting out of the way before Greg figures out what he’s said.

“Hey!”

Alex giggles, fist in mouth, and circles Greg’s head as they walk a little further.

Eventually, he settles on Greg’s shoulder, sounding tired and a little worse for wear.

“You should have swapped to water when I told you to,” Greg rumbles.

Alex hums, agreeing. “Thank you, Greg.”

“What for?”

“Trying to look after me,” Alex pats Greg’s shoulder in that full-hand way he does. “I’m not… No-one’s ever done that for me.”

“Oh.”

Greg walks on, past wildflowers bursting out of hedgerows, past rusted gates and mended fences, past trees gnarled and windswept still heavy with greens of every shade. Up and down the gently rolling landscape, with the dusty little road beneath his riverbank-stained shoes. Greg reaches out his hand to touch everything he can.

“I should thank you too, Alex.”

“You’re welcome,” Alex immediately answers. Then, “What for?”

“I’ve been trying to work that out myself. When I came here, I was… not right. Broken, I guess? And I didn’t want to be fixed because it’s so satisfying to know you’re messed up.” Greg sighs. “Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but there’s a safety in it? And… and maybe I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Alex hums, but politely doesn’t say anything.

“I think I needed… I needed a little whimsy.”

“Mmm, you needed a lot of whimsy. You were very sad.”

Greg rolls his eyes. “Alright, prick, thank you for a lot of whimsy. Even if it was in a very small package.”

“No need to bring my package into this, thank you, Greg,” Alex says as primly as an old matron. “Or my, ah, prick,” he overpronounces.

“Fuck sake,” Greg shakes his head, a smile winning the battle on his face. “I’m trying to be fucking nice!”

“Sorry! Sorry – please continue saying nice things about my genitals.”

“That’s not—! I didn’t— Aaargh! God damn it.” Greg shakes his fists at the sky, frustrated and laughing about it. Alex gets jostled with the shake of his shoulders and giggles as he’s thrown about. “You’re a wee fuckin’ menace.”

Alex hums, disagreeing. “I thought I was a manic pixie dream guy?”

Greg sighs, wiping his hand over his face. “God. You know what, sure – you’re my manic pixie dream guy.”

“Thank you, Greg,” Alex says, and clambers and climbs across Greg’s shoulder, his collar, and finally – wings beating a breath against Greg’s skin – reaches out his arms and hugs the side of Greg’s neck. If he wasn’t literally a centimetre beneath Greg’s ear, pressed against the bone of his jaw, Greg wouldn’t have been able to hear him whisper, “Your manic pixie dream guy.”

Greg reaches across, and shambling to a stop, gently pats Alex’s back with two fingers – hugging him back as best he can. “Alright, alright. Hey, I thought it was my turn to be thankful.”

Muffled into his neck, Alex says, “Sorry.”

“Quite right, too! Accept my gratitude, dickhead.”

Greg can feel Alex’s body convulse with his laughter; fuzzy with wool and warm against his neck and fingers. It’s soft as a trembling bird’s heartbeat, soft like the fur on the top of a purring cat’s head, soft like the belly of a snoring old dog. Greg gives him the lightest of squeezes, and so regretfully, lets him go.

Alex slips off his neck, scoots over his collar, and settles himself back on Greg’s shoulder – sniffing loudly. Greg starts off down the road again, and feels the warm summer air cooling against a patch on his neck.

They round a corner, and there’s the cottage.

Greg sees it, as if for the first time. Blinding in the sunlight, it gleams like silver – old grey tiles cap its squat little shape nestled into the pillow of greens and rainbow speckles like a treasure beyond wealth. Orange lichen dapples against the almost black roof, English ivy – black and racing green – blankets a wall and winds its way across like bushy eyebrows over dark and kindly window eyes. Hanging baskets he’d ducked around and never glanced at hang by the front door, cascades of deep pink and pastel blue dripping down their coir-brown bowls – reaching as if to join the riot of colours and shapes that spike and mat and creep and shrub the cottage’s little front garden. A trellis over the front gate hangs heavy with trumpet shaped blue flowers, some already scattered like confetti on the ground from a celebration only nature knows.

Greg opens the gate, and hears its creaking music. The garden smacks him in the face with scents and colours and life unstoppable. Honeysuckle sprints alongside the little path, and he can smell its heady nectar from here.

As if he’d lived here a lifetime, Greg slips the key from his pocket, and the door opens into the welcoming, cool dark. Greg sighs. The clock at the end of the hallway counts the hours until he must leave.

“Thank you for lunch, Greg!” Alex pipes up, startling Greg from his reverie.

“Oh! Right. Yeah. Welcome. Probably owe you it after you saved my life in the bath.”

“Mmm, I think your life might be worth more than a forkful of fish and chips and a tablespoon of beer!”

“First off – you had two tablespoons, mate, and it shows – and secondly, I’m not sure at the time my life was worth even that.”

“No, thank you, Greg. None of that. I think you’re worth a lot of fish and chips… Like, loads.”

“Then, I guess I owe you.” Greg puts the keys in the bowl by the door, and Alex flutters off his shoulder. “So what do you want to do now?” Greg asks, his eyes drawn back to the clock again, like to the bells of his own execution.

They end up in the living room area, near the breakfast bar, and Alex alights on its surface, wringing his hands. “Actually, I have to go and attend to some things. For a while. Sorry, I—”

“—Oh, shit. Yeah, of course.” Greg feels awful – assuming Alex was at his beck and call. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Shit. No. I mean, I’m on holiday, but you…”

“No. It’s fine. I’m not exactly— I just— I’ve got stuff I have to get done. Things to organise? Have to… Have to… Chores, I guess you could call them…”

“Right! Right. No, go ahead. I didn’t mean— Right.”

“...”

“...”

Alex clears his throat – a little breathy strangled affair. “I’ll be back later. Probably after sunset? We could… we could read some of that book, maybe? If… If you— I’d like— If that’s okay?”

“Absolutely!” Greg says, not even hiding how keen he is for that. “The lighthouse one, right?”

“Yes, please!” Alex nods, the start of a smile returning on his slightly frantically apologetic face. “Don’t… Don’t read ahead without me?” Alex takes a step forward, entreating.

“Hmm, I don’t know… We left it at quite a cliffhanger…” Greg starts, teasing, but Alex’s face – those little eyebrows that angle steeply and frame his wet blue eyes – stops him dead in his tracks. “...Alright. Fine. I won’t read it without you, alright?”

Alex beams, eyes still wet. “Thank you, Greg.”

Chapter Text

Greg catches up on his emails, and Alex isn’t around. He sits with his laptop at the breakfast bar, curled like a shrimp over the keyboard and too-small screen, and answers things with “kind regards” and “looking forward to hearing from you”. A flash at the window – a fast moving shadow – and Greg spins on the stool to see, but it’s just a little brown bird of some sort.

He sighs. A lot.

Two coffees later, he’s pacing up and down the hallway from front door to back, trying to figure out how to politely tell someone to fuck off in a way that won’t ruin his future career, when his socked foot hits something that moves. He gasps! Flinching backwards, eyes bleary, Greg watches the thing dart across the floor, skittering and sliding, and then ‘thock’ as the marble hits the hallway’s opposite wall. It spins and rolls and comes to a pirouetting stop. Holding himself with a palm against the white painted wall, Greg creaks and groans and bends to pluck it from the floor. It sparkles – blue green oceans entwined within its heart, looking lovely.

Without even realising, Greg looks around – along the corridor, across the breakfast bar, through the gap in the doorway to the quiet, unoccupied bathroom. But he finds nothing. No-one.

He brings his hand to his shirt pocket, and holds it there – but the pocket is empty. He drops the marble in instead, and the little round weight of it feels better. It’s cold, but it’ll warm up. He pats it there for just a moment, and decides the truth, said kindly, will probably be the best tactic for the email.

Life’s too short, after all.

He paces, he pisses – that was a lot of coffee – and he reads and rereads contracts he needs to sign, blurbs he needs to write, and requests he needs to turn down. He sits at the breakfast bar. He lays on the too-short couch and T-Rex arms as he types. He sprawls on the bed and can’t find anywhere comfy.

“What if I just fucked off entirely?” Greg texts Roisin, with exactly that much context.

“Like I’ve been telling you to” she replies, after just a few minutes. “Wait” she sends, and three little dots blink and flash as she types for a minute afterwards. Underwhelmingly, all she then sends is, “Fucked off how?”

“Don’t know. Just. London can do one” he eventually writes, knowing what he means and feeling too stupid to write it.

“Fact” and then “You alright?”

Greg wipes his hand down his face and his glasses get knocked off his face and fall, lenses down, on the bed covers. He groans. He sighs. He feels like an overdramatic idiot.

“Yes. Better than I have for ages”

“You slept!??!?!?!?!!!!” Roisin answers immediately, with screaming emojis for good measure.

“Really well actually” Greg writes. Then for good measure, “Really”

“Thank fuuuuuck!” Roisin sends.

Greg huffs a little laugh. Something moves against his chest and he almost jumps. He drops the phone on purpose and instead brings his hand to touch his pocket – but it’s only the marble, now long warmed by his body heat. Hard, and round, and not what he’d hoped for.

“So what's the matter” Greg’s phone pings, and he turns it over to find Roisin’s question.

Greg dithers over how much of a stubborn bitch to be. He decides to go with ‘quite stubborn’. “I slept really well” as his helpful reply.

“Yes. Thank you old man. I read that”

Greg doesn’t try to type anything, and waits for her to untangle his meaning – for her to roll her eyes in her flat in London somewhere, and figure him – her old friend – out once again.

Three blinking dots.

“Ooooohhhh. And you don’t want to come home”

“You said it” Greg replies as fast as his thumb will let him. “Not me” he adds, trying for that little distance.

“Found a holiday romance have you?” Greg can feel Roisin’s teasing smile from here, even as he panics.

“No”
“Shut up”
“Too old for that shit”
“No”
“Not really”
“No”
“But maybe a friend”
“?”
“Anyway what’s up with you?” he types, in possibly the most pathetic attempt to change the subject that has ever been committed to text.

“Very smooth Gregory” she replies with a winking, tongue sticking out emoji.

Greg throws his phone at the pillows and rolls over onto his back, forearm hiding his eyes. “Stupid,” he mumbles to himself. “Idiot.”

The phone pings again. Of course it does. Then another ping.

After a million years and about forty seconds, Greg groans and, wriggling like a beached turtle, hauls himself upright to check her message.

“You’re allowed to have a friend” she’s sent, “You’re allowed to be happy, Greg”

Greg’s face turns into a crumpled raisin.

Her next message doesn’t help. “I imagine your friend has a phone tho” she sends with another winking, tongue stuck out emoji. “As much as I TELL you to fuck off. You probably don’t need to”

Rolling on the bed as if he’s in pain, Greg groans. He’s not going to tell her his ‘friend’ doesn’t have a phone on account of him being three inches tall, obsessed with marbles, possibly immortal, and probably imaginary.

Which, really, is an answer all of its own.

“Yeah, your probably right” he types, each swipe of his thumb costing him something, and not even correcting the typo. “Sorry” he writes. He starts his next line with “Just got caught up in the” and then he hesitates.

Back in London, Roisin sees three dots blinking. Then fade away. Maybe she frowns.

Eventually, Greg’s message reads, “Just got caught up in the whimsy I suppose”

Three dots. Then nothing. Then three dots.

Roisin adds a sparkling heart to Greg’s message, then sends, “Been a long time since you had some of that. Must be a good friend”

Greg could write a million things. He doesn’t.

“Talk to you tomorrow”

“From home?” she asks.

“From home.” he says, the full stop at the end of the message feeling quite final.

The sun gets low.

He’s checked what time the sunset is. Twice. And set an alarm for it on his phone. But the sun sticks its head through the cottage window, casting gold light on the opposite wall of the kitchen and living room and bounces off Greg’s laptop no matter where he is, so Greg smacks it shut and gathers some things.

The sky is a brilliant, teal-ish blue that already starts to darken behind him, behind the cottage, in the other direction from where he’s facing, sitting comfortably on a chair brought out to the little back garden’s path. Wispy streaks of clouds burn fire orange, turning navy in their own thickening shadows, and the gently waving trees at the far end of the garden shimmer green and black, casting long blurry mottled patches of darkness against the brilliant white back wall of the cottage.

Greg sighs, and inhales the last thick lungfuls of the day's floral scents. Already, the shadows take on a sharp coolness; a welcomed, gentle touch on the reddened glow of his face and neck both a little too long in the sun. Bees buzz and bumble off on their final trip home for the night, and birds trill and scream alike, hunkering down for the last part of their day.

Crickets, one by one, cease creaking.

Greg squints, the last rays of sunlight smashing his face or turning to darkness, as a distant tree’s leaves waver in the space between Greg and that massive ball of distant flame – but instead of flinching, he just melts into his chair. On his lap, the book he’s been reading to Alex. Stuffed between Greg’s thigh and the chair’s arm, the bag of the last of the marshmallows – soft and squishy and warming against his body.

And in his pocket, close against his heart, a marble. Greg brings it out – warm between his finger and thumb – and the golden sunlight catches it so perfectly, Greg forgets to breathe. Blues and greens and golds – like happiness frozen in a moment in his hand as he rolls it, holds it, loses himself in streaks and bubbles and specks.

He’ll always remember this. This marble. This moment. Alex.

A tear splashes on its glassy surface, and Greg coughs a laugh at how stupid he’s being – the afterimage of the water shattering into a hundred tiny, sun-bright, shards of salty wistfulness burnt into his eye.

He palms the marble, and holds it so fucking tight, knuckles white and fingernails biting into his own skin. Forcing the feeling into his hand, his memory, his heart. He needs this, he realises, he needs to touch and be touched – by a marble, by the world – to know he’s real.

Like the marble.

He swallows, and watches as the sun sets. But his eyes unfocus as he feels the marble in his hand, the chair cradling his body, the soft press of the marshmallows against his thigh, the weight of the shifting book upon his lap. As he feels the warmth on his skin and the cool breeze through his hair, as he swallows the lump in his throat and blinks the hot wetness from his eyes, and knows – more than anything – that he is here, right now, and real. Like the paver scuffed beneath his feet, on the massive rock of dirt that spins and twirls – a tiny blue green marble – through the cold around a golden, shining face.

And for a moment, Greg feels barely more than three inches tall.

Moment by moment, the sun sinks down. A too-bright light that turns itself off degree by degree as it dips below a gently rolling hill of bright yellow flowers that glow, sparkle, and turn dark as that last sliver of sunlight slips away.

The land turns grey as the sky screams its colours. Blues and greens and pinks and reds, orange and ambers, the sky shifting darker and darker, velvety-er and velvety-er, and a v-shape of some kind of birds fly over – silhouettes against a deep navy sky with the brilliant dot of Venus already shining.

It’s fucking lovely.

Someone very near, and very small, clears their throat.

“Can I join you?” Alex asks.

Greg smiles, and doesn’t turn around. “Yeah, I guess,” he says, as if his heart hadn’t just lept in his chest.

He hears the fluttering of tiny wings, and then feels a soft press as Alex lands on Greg’s knee and walks up to where the book is resting on his thigh. Greg looks down, and watches Alex hop up onto the paperback’s cover, letting his feet dangle off the spine of the book.

“Did you do what you needed to do?” Greg asks.

“Mmm, I think so, yeah. Glad to see you survived without me.” Alex smiles up at Greg.

“Ha!” Greg barks, hiding how close to the bone Alex’s jibe might have cut. “You know, I almost didn’t? I was this close…” Greg brings his finger and thumb to his one opened eye – holding Alex’s image between the blurry digits. “...To breaking down entirely. Just… giving up.”

“Oh?” Alex twists on the book, turning to face Greg straight on – his face a picture of concern.

“Yep. That cliffhanger at the end of chapter 5 really has me in its clutches!” Greg reaches down and taps the book, right next to Alex, and lets the smirk break across his face.

Alex reaches over and smacks Greg’s finger – a playful hit that barely makes a sound but pleases Greg immensely.

A touch.

“You ready to see what those idiots are up to in the lighthouse?” Greg asks, and is rewarded by Alex’s eyes lighting up like the dawn.

“Yes, please!” Alex says, heels kicking the edge of the book and wings fluttering with his excitement. “Will you do the voices again?”

Greg looks around the garden – at the little stone wall not too far away that abuts the only road for miles. Where anyone could hear him if they walked this way. “Fuck it, yeah. Yeah I will.”

Alex dives for him – launching at Greg’s chest with his wings beating hard and slams in for a hug. Tiny and warm and woollen-soft. A touch. “Thank you, Greg! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” he mumbles.

Much better than a marble, Greg pats him on the back. A touch. “Yeah, alright you. Give over. Or I won’t give you one of these marshmallows I’ve brought out—”

“—Oh my god!” As fast as Alex had slammed into Greg, he does so again – zipping through the air and with gravity’s help, flumping into the crinkling plastic of the bag jammed between Greg’s leg and the chair.

“I love you.”

Chapter Text

Greg freezes.

Alex freezes – wrapped around a marshmallow through the thin plastic of its wrapper – and neither of them say anything for a moment.

Until, “...M— Marshmallow. I love marshmallow,” Alex says, his ears bright red even in the fading light. He peels himself off the plastic and stands unsteadily on the uneven surface of the bag of soft, puffy sweets. He clears his throat, and Greg sees that a vibrant blush covers Alex’s face down to the chunky collar of his jumper. “Big— Big fan of marshmallows,” he mumbles, pointing at himself and almost falling over.

They stare at each other. Alex’s eyebrows raised and hopeful, Greg’s low and unsure.

“You know what?” Greg asks, quietly, as he feels Alex shifting from foot to foot. “Yeah; same.”

Night fell minutes ago, but to Greg, the gap-toothed sun just came out from behind the clouds.

“Yeah?” Alex asks, wings almost lifting him off his feet.

“I mean, sometimes they can get a bit sickeningly sweet…”

The battle rages on Alex’s tiny little face as he tries to marshall it into something serious and po-faced. “Mmm, yes I could see that being a problem.”

“But they’re very fun to poke – so squishy…”

“Well! I mean, not— not always— there’s some body to them, surely?”

“But the best thing about marshmallows, Alex…” Greg says, leaning over in the chair and getting all up in Alex’s face. “...is I can fit one in my mouth in one go!” Greg opens his mouth wide and makes an ‘aaaah’ noise.

Alex squeaks and flies backwards – tumbling through the air, arse over tit. “No, thank youuu!” he gasps – horrified and delighted at once.

Greg reaches for a marshmallow, chuckling, and indeed pops one into his mouth and chews it, all the while making happy rumbling sounds.

“Hey— Hey! Leave some for me!” Alex hovers and retreats, buzzing around the bag of marshmallows like a blue-arsed fly, watching for Greg’s big hand like he expects it to grab him any moment.

He’s not entirely wrong.

Greg holds up his hands – as if defeated – and Alex dives for, and into, the bag for his puffy white treasure. As sneakily as he can, Greg reaches in. He rummages and grabs Alex by the jumper – pulling him out by the scruff.

Alex has one marshmallow hanging from his mouth, three held between his outstretched arms, and one between his knees, and he wiggles and muffledly yells his objection.

“That’s half the fuckin’ bag, you menace!” Greg laughs.

The marshmallow that’s mostly obscuring Alex’s face, nods. “Nyuh huh!” he mumbles.

“Greedy little bugger…” Greg sighs, and bringing Alex over to his slouched chest, gently puts him down on his t-shirt covered front – just above the swell of his gut. Alex sort of falls over, marshmallows overbalancing and padding him, resting on his side in the hollow between Greg’s tits.

When Greg huffs a chuckle, Alex is jostled by it.

“Comfy, are we?”

Alex spits out the marshmallow with a ‘pfeh’. “Yes, thank you!” he fibs, wriggling and kicking himself into something approaching a sitting position – the marshmallows threatening to tumble down Greg’s front before Alex frantically grabs them back. He’s huffing, out of breath, when he finally wrangles his flock of white fluffy forms into the creases of Greg’s t-shirt. “I am… sitting comfortably!”

Greg raises an eyebrow. “Then I’ll begin…” he says, finishing the phrase.

The sky is darkening – turning the blue of a ballgown as its sequins catch the night – and it’ll get darker still. Greg reaches down and flicks on his phone’s light – resting it on the chair’s arm – to bounce its light off the white wall behind them, and cast a soft white glow on the off-white pages of the book he’s opened to their last chapter’s page.

Alex sighs – the tiny movement felt against Greg’s skin as his little body warms a spot through Greg’s soft cotton top. Greg copies him – the slow rise and fall that Alex sinks into, relaxes in, and snuggles down with.

Greg starts reading, voice low and rumbling – every word and every breath felt by Alex head to toe.

“When he cracks his eyes open once more, despite his stabbing headache, he finds the walls perfectly stationary – if gently curving with the shape of the lighthouse.

Oh. He’s in the lighthouse...”

Five chapters later – five chapters of Greg doing the voices, Alex fighting off the moths drawn by the phone light, and both of them chewing their way through the last of the marshmallows – Greg yawns, and blinks his eyes a bit too long.

“Fuck, it’s getting late…” Greg rumbles, and looks down at his chest where Alex is…

Sleeping. Curled up in the valley between Greg’s pecs, on the shelf of his stomach, tiny little hands fisted in the warm soft cotton of Greg’s t-shirt, his face slack and pressed against Greg’s skin. Greg smiles and huffs – typical, he thinks – and Alex shifts in his sleep. He smears his face against Greg and leaves a streak of powdery white from where he’d got covered in marshmallow starch.

Greg closes the book with a soft thud, and lays it on the arm of the chair. He turns off his phone torch and just sits there for a moment in the dark.

The sky is black as ink, and as his eyes adjust, the wispy faint smear of a million million stars pours across as the Milky Way. It’s been so long since he’d seen it – so long in the city.

Alex mutters something in his sleep and tugs on Greg’s t-shirt like he would a too-short blanket – so Greg brings his hand up and cups it over Alex to keep him warm. Instantly, Alex turns to liquid.

Alex’s warmth against his chest matches the warmth within it, and Greg – to his great surprise – realises he’s content.

Moments pass like this. An owl hoots somewhere, the endless field of stars above is sometimes hid by the swoop of an insect-hunting bat, and Greg could just lie here and feel a part of it.

Then a nearby fox screams bloody murder, and Greg flinches, swears, and wakes Alex up with a start.

“Shit! Sorry,” Greg whispers.

“Why’d you stop reading?” Alex slurs, barely conscious. “Oh, it’s dark.”

“Got to the end of the book!” Greg lies, two chapters short.

Alex pushes himself up and frowns. “Really? But…”

“Yep. They all got eaten by a sea kraken; The End.”

“That’s… that’s not…” Alex shakes his head, looking from Greg to the book and back again. “...Are there non-sea kinds of kraken?”

“Let me check!” Greg says, and grabs the book and opens the back cover. “And then, in a gruesome and horrible scene too awful to describe, everyone got eaten by a sea kraken – which is different from a land kraken on account of it wearing hundreds of floaties all along its wriggling, writhing, and very deadly tentacles. The End.”

Greg closes the cover.

Alex hums at Greg. Alex squints at Greg, barely visible in the starlight without even the moon to read by. “It must have been so scary I covered my ears and didn’t hear it.”

“Yep, either that, or you fell asleep before I even got to the last two chapters. One of the two.”

“Oh!” Alex tries to stand, and instead wobbles on Greg’s stomach. “We should… shouuuuuyaawwgh…” Alex tries to say, overtaken by a massive yawn as he does. “Should keep going then. Keep… keep… yeeeaauuuwwwnnneading.”

Greg slaps a hand over his own yawning mouth as he mirrors Alex’s enormous, unstoppable yawns. In a gap between two, he manages to mumble, “What time is it anyway…” as he flips over his phone and takes a look. “Ah fuck, 2 AM.”

Alex collapses on Greg’s chest, grabbing at his t-shirt and snuggling in like his life depended on it. “I’ll stay awake, I promise. Just…” He yawns. “Just two more chapters.”

Greg yawns so big he fears he’ll catch one of the local, dive-bombing bats. “You’re a fuckin’ liar, and you know it.”

Alex grumbles, “Rude,” without the energy to mean it.

“Come on, Little Alex Horne, time for bed.” Greg waits for Alex to move, and when he doesn’t, Greg sits further and further up until Alex starts slipping down his stomach, scrabbling for purchase. “Up, up, up! Before you end up copping a feel of my awful genitals!”

Alex stammers his confused panic, still dulled by sleep. “Uh?! I don’t— What— Why would—? Oh my god!”

One more good shake, and Alex veers off, wings flapping out of sync as he bounces off Greg’s generous stomach and tumbles almost to the ground.

Greg chuckles to himself, stands, and stretches out with another massive, bat-swallowing yawn. He gathers up the book, its corner folded two chapters before the end, the empty plastic packet from the marshmallows, and drags the chair back inside in the dark.

Alex follows him.

There’s light enough when Greg wakes his phone – showing a quarter past two in the morning – to stumble through the bedroom door and to click the bedside lamp on; warm and golden.

Alex follows him there, too.

At the foot of the bed, the opened, stuffed and messy suitcase sits – an all too real reminder of the normal, boring world Greg will go back to tomorrow, and he glances at it with a brief grimace.

“Do you still have to pack?” Alex asks, coming in to land on the end of the bed on the fluffy, soft duvet.

Greg does, and hates it. Resents it. Days of dirty laundry have already been zipped away in compartments he won’t open again until days after he gets back. His toiletries are scattered across the bathroom counter – but it's only a toothbrush, toothpaste, and his hairbrush, and would only take a second. Laptop is out on the counter. Cables and chargers scattered around. A sweatshirt sits crumpled next to, but not on or in, the suitcase.

“I’ll do it in the morning,” Greg says, giving the suitcase a kick.

Alex nods, as if he’s some expert on the matter. “Alright.” Then he hops and bounds like an astronaut on a squishy, stuffed moon, all the way up to the head of the bed, and waits.

Greg was setting an alarm for 9:35 AM on his phone, which he places on the bedside table, and then looks at Alex, a little confused. “I guess this is good night, then?”

Alex’s eyes go wide. “Oh! I thought— I was— Don’t you— No, I don’t suppose… Sorry! Sorry.” He flutters up, wringing his hands, and blushing all the way to the tips of his ears. Hunching over, he practically scurries through the air to get past Greg, and to the bedroom door.

But Greg stops him. Holds out a hand and Alex almost bumps into the soft huge surface of his palm.

“Wait a minute. What did you think was going to happen?”

“N— Nothing! Sorry. It was silly…”

“Aaaalex?”

“M’wasgoingtotuckyouin.”

“I’m sorry?” Greg asks, looking down at Alex over his glasses.

Alex can’t get any more red. “I was going to tuck you in. Like— Like yesterday. If you wanted.” Alex looks up at Greg for the first time since he took off from the pillow. “Before you leave.”

The twist Greg feels in his gut almost makes him gasp. Makes his eyes water. Dries his mouth out. Cuts his words into pieces until he can gather up enough of the scraps to bluster, “Of course you are, dummy. I…” Greg feels the weight against his chest, and his heart leaps up into his mouth. “And I was going to give you this marble if you do a good enough job, but if you’re not going to bother…” He brings out the blue green marble and holds it between finger and thumb, showing Alex, and then palms it away.

Alex flies over to Greg’s fist where the marble has suddenly gone, and grabs Greg’s hand. “No! I… I’d like the marble please, Greg. One last marble?”

Greg looks away and blinks. “Yep! Good!” he says, throat tight. Alex is still holding his hand – resting his tiny palms and fingers against Greg’s massive ones – tiny dots of soft warmth surrounded by a wing-beaten breeze that shivers the hair over the backs of Greg’s fingers.

Another fucking touch.

“Alright. Well. You’re not getting the marble yet, so you can… let go… if you want.”

Alex gives him a squeeze – wraps his arms around Greg’s closed hand where the warmed glass ball hides and hugs as best he can – and then hesitantly hovers back.

It’s only wildly awkward as Greg peels off his shirt, trousers, and socks and climbs into bed under Alex’s bashful eye.

A click, and the lamp’s turned out. Greg lies there like a dead thing, covers up at his chest, arms underneath, when he hears Alex’s wings beating and thrumming like a heartbeat, and then featherlight footfalls across the covers as he starts his quiet work. Inch by inch the covers get higher, smoothed across Greg’s chest, and down Greg’s sides and hauled and tightened til Greg is swaddled and safe.

“Alex?”

“Mmm?”

“Are you going to big spoon my thumb again tonight?”

“Oh! I didn’t— Hmmm…”

“Only…” Greg starts, whispering in the darkness where no-one can see his face. “I don’t often get to be the little spoon. It was nice.”

“Oh.” Alex’s voice is close – somewhere near Greg’s chin – and sounds rough as he whispers back. “I’d like to! I’ve done too good a job though – you’re all tucked in.”

Greg starts moving, shifting a little, when Alex asks him to stop. “Shhh. It’s okay. I’ll just snuggle in here for now.”

Greg feels Alex slipping down the covers, over his shoulder – a tiny hand reached out to run through the stubbled beard of Greg’s jaw – and then Alex slides down into the crook of Greg’s neck.

“Is this okay?” Alex asks, his breath warm against Greg’s skin.

“Yeah, it’ll do,” Greg says.

Alex turns around like a puppy, curls up in the space beneath the tucked in covers, and bordered on two sides by the warmth and softness of Greg, settles down – a lump of softly breathing sighs and one, last, long and creaking yawn.

“Night night, Greg.”

“Good night, Alex.”

Greg closes his eyes, and waits – all of his focus on the little body nestled against his skin in the dark. He slows his breath so as not to keep Alex awake, and lies as still as he can, hoping Alex can finally drift off comfortably. Fewer and fewer thoughts swim through his mind as he listens for the tiny, snuffling, inhale and exhale just beneath his ear, and his body slowly unwinds.

Greg hears when Alex hesitates, holds his breath, and sadly whispers,

“I don’t want to miss you.”

Chapter Text

The words are almost too soft to hear and as the seconds stretch on, Greg doubts he heard them at all. He wonders if he dreamed them. His next breath hides a sigh. His next breath in, he brings his shoulders up just the smallest, tiniest, degree and in the only way he can – he hugs Alex with his body.

Greg’s phone plays a tune with chimes and bells and crap in it, and Greg breathes in the morning air. The sun is up, he blinks offended at it, and rolls over to see the time – 9:36, just as expected. Greg flops back on the bed, and sighs – expecting aches and pains and the bone deep weariness of months of insomnia.

But he’s fine. He blinks at the ceiling, and his eyes adjust quickly to the morning’s light.

And his dreams… He thinks back, and there’s nothing. No pit of anxiety boiling in his stomach, no tension behind his eyes or thunder of his heart – just a quickly fading feeling of being wrapped up and safe, the echo of a hug tight about his body.

Alex.

Greg turns his head and looks – and doesn’t find him. Not wrapped around his thumb like yesterday, not curled up and snoozing against his neck. Greg sits up and throws the covers back – and there’s no hint of felted boots or chunky jumper, blush pinked ears or multicoloured, see-through wings.

No brilliant blue eyes or gap toothed grin.

“Alex?” Greg asks, and the brightly lit walls of the bedroom don’t reply.

On the bedside table, by the lamp and Greg’s own phone – a marble. The blue and green one, still sat there from last night – the one he’d promised Alex.

Greg picks it up. It’s cold.

This isn’t right.

He checks each room, and calls his name – and Alex isn’t there. He gets dressed – fresh t-shirt back to front – and bursts into the garden and calls out again – and Alex isn’t there.

It’s ten to ten, and Alex isn’t there.

Head on a swivel, Greg throws all of his things in his case and zips it shut with a struggle. Still no Alex. Greg starts to panic.

He paces up and down the hallway, marble rolling between his thumb and the rest of his fingers, as he stops at every little sound or movement, calling “Alex? That you?” after every one.

It’s almost ten, and Greg checks his phone clock against the clock in the living room and finds they match well enough for Alex – if he were keeping track by that. Alex knows when Greg had to leave.

Two minutes after ten and Greg is pulling his hair out. He bursts out into the back garden, and yells, “ALEX!” – feeling stupid, feeling desperate, and feeling like he might just be sick. He scares a flock of starlings off the nearby tree, which catch his eye – but none of them are Alex.

“Fuck!” Greg whines, and turns to wheel back inside, when the small stone shrine demands his attention. Greg crumples to the ground cross legged, and reaches out to touch it. Runs his hand across ancient stone – finger following the faint old carvings of a tiny, three inch man and lets his gaze linger on the old Roman number sixty – ‘LX’ that once pointed somewhere, and now meant something else.

And there at the bottom, carved out of stone, the little offering bowl that’s scratched and worn and has fresh fallen petals wet with dew stuck to its surface.

Greg brushes them away, furious, and makes it clean, and then before he knows what’s happening – he’s holding out the blue green marble in his finger and thumb just above the stone hollow.

“Alex, please…” he whispers, but there’s no reply.

So gently, softly, sad and hurting, Greg puts the marble on the shrine – where the sunlight turns it sparkling, brilliant, warm and bright and the sparkles off its time-trapped flaws cast tiny flecks of rainbow up against the stone – an iridescent fluttering that Greg can’t stand.

He looks away, and turns his back and walks and gets his bag and case at last, and drags it – lopsided and heavy but not quite as heavy as his heart – out the cottage door.

The door gets locked. The key dropped off. Through blurry eyes Greg books a ride to take him back all the way to London, and waits.

The morning is beautiful, and Greg can’t see it. The hanging baskets, the trellis arch, the sweet and fragrant honeysuckles – Greg clenches his jaw and looks away. The bees buzz in a cloud of flowers, the birds sing and flit and pirouette from bush to bush and tree to tree, and Greg stares at the place where the narrow road crests the rise, and waits for the car – breath tight in his chest.

It’s not fair.

Three minutes, his app buzzes. Greg pulls his case to the gate, and hauls the rusty, creaking thing open. His case skitters on gravel and fights him every step – three wheels digging in as if it too wants to stay. Greg hates it. Greg hates everything.

Shimmering, the car – a silver one of some make or other – peeks over a rise and dips again, and then rounds a corner and appears for real, approaching the cottage from a hundred yards away.

The book!

Fuck!

They never finished reading the book. Greg feels like he just got gutted – panic lances through his body and leaves his hands weak. The book is in his suitcase. He looks back at the cottage and down at his case. Maybe he could leave it for Alex? Maybe Alex would… would like that? Fuck fuck fuck.

The car slows as it reaches him, and Greg almost cries out.

He bends over, and grabs the zip – tearing at it as he throws the case on its side.

It fucking jams! The zip won’t budge, and the car comes to a stop. Greg pulls the zip the other way – and it moves a centimetre – then he tugs it forward again, and it jams twice as hard.

“Greg—”

“—NO!” Greg yells. Then, he realises the driver had spoken. “Not you!” he throws over his shoulder.

The zip won’t budge. Not forward, not backwards – it’s stuck on something and Greg’s hands are shaking and his fingers keep slicking up with sweat.

“FUCK!”

“Uh… Mr. Davies?”

One last frantic yank, and the zip pull breaks off in Greg’s hand. “No…” he breathes, staring at the tiny wedge of metal in his hand.

The driver clears his throat, Greg closes his eyes for a long, long blink, and then stands again.

“Sorry, yes. That’s me. Just… We were reading a book… Never mind.” Greg’s shoulders slump as he pulls himself to his feet and tips his heavy case upright again – the contents clattering and jangling as it shifts and moves. “Sorry,” Greg says again, pulling the case around the back of the car.

The driver gets out – a middle-aged woman who the app had said was called Jo – and walks around to open the boot. She reaches out her hand.

“Let me get that for you,” she offers.

“I’ve got it,” Greg reassures her, and grabs the handle to heft it into the car.

Fuck, it’s heavy – and he almost doesn’t get it into the boot in one go. But he shoves it and twists it, and gets it where it might not rattle around too much – then he dusts off his hands, as the driver closes the boot and heads back to her seat.

One last look at Horne cottage – now that the anger has bled out of him, and he’s just so terribly sad.

“Goodbye, Alex. I… I didn’t want to miss you either.”

There’s no beat of wings, no honking laugh, no sparkling eyes or smile.

Greg gets in the car.

“London, is it?” Jo asks.

“Yeah,” he replies, buckling himself in, sliding the chair back, and hunching over to fit.

Jo turns the car, and Greg watches – in the mirrors, out the windshield, and twisting in his chair uncomfortably – the cottage and its garden for any final glimmer of hope.

And then they drive away.

The cottage gets smaller and smaller, until in the mirror Greg could hold it in his hand – no bigger than three and a half inches tall.

They turn the corner, take the dip, and then it's gone.

Greg stares through the glove compartment.

“Holiday was it?” Jo asks.

“Mmm? Yeah, something like that.”

“They’re always too short, eh.” Jo says, her down to earth manner friendly and relatable and entirely too much for Greg right now. “Did you get what you needed out of it, at least?”

“Sorry, what?”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Fields of brilliant yellow flowers burn his eyes with their sunshine hue, dotted with scattered copses of trees dark and emerald. Red rust sheds and barns mark the farms and rich brown muddy tracks carve into the earth like marks upon an old stone shrine, that Greg’s fingertips still recall. Dots of off-white sheep shamble slowly, soft and springy like the duvet Alex had fought to walk across, like the softness of the knitted jumper Alex wore, like the tiny little felted boots that Greg had held and washed and felt against his skin. Like the warm round lump that hid and grinned and snored in Greg’s shirt pocket on his chest. Like the lump he felt there now.

“I think I did,” Greg replies to Jo. “But… I had to leave it behind.”

“Oh, aye,” she says, taking the car down a steeper bit, and making Greg’s case slide – rattling and so heavy in the boot. “And what was it, in the end, you were looking for?”

Fuck. What could he even say? His mouth opens, and then closes. He could say peace or sleep or something. Friendship feels too much. How can he say what he found, and lost – for the cost of a marshmallow, a cup of chamomile tea, or a stupid, pretty marble. Like the one he’d forgotten to give at last.

Greg brings his hand up to his pocket, where the phantom weight of the marble still weighs – warm and heavy and… soft?

“Whimsy!” a creaky, breathy, little gap-toothed voice calls out.

Jo, eyes on the road, almost turns to look. “Sorry, what was that?”

Greg covers his pocket with his hand – presses that tiny little fluttering form against his chest where Greg’s heart is leaping and fluttering and fast.

“Whimsy. I was looking for whimsy!” Greg says, louder than any muffled complaint might be. “And…” he adds, a tightness in his throat fighting the swelling of his heart, “Turns out I might have brought a little back with me in the end.”