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In the times when everything got to be too much, Sylvain walked to the woods. He’d been doing so since he was a child. Since a cold and wet and well-filled day where he’d taken off into the trees, still soaked and shivering, huddled around himself and gulping air like it was water in a desert. He’d still caught a cold, but that wasn’t the woods’ fault. For a while, he went to a different place every time. A stump, near the edge of his family’s property, to start, where the well was just barely beyond his eyeline and therefore could be believed to have disappeared. Then, sitting next to a small creek that burbled ever-so-quietly with clear, cool water on balmy summer days. Then the rock, which had been nice to sit on for the first few days but eventually Sylvain’s back had started to seize and his tailbone was sore and the longevity of that particular haunt was rapidly diminishing. He learned to linger, staying longer in each pocket of nature until eventually he’d found it: the clearing. A vaguely round patch of emptiness in an otherwise crowded forest, with a perfect view of the sun at noon and the moon at midnight. Sylvain had seen it in all its seasons, by this point; the colorful wildflowers that cropped up each summer alongside white clover, creating a feast for fat rabbits that made the trek out from wherever they’d set up a hutch. (Complicatedly, Sylvain had also grown to harbor no small amount of affection for the fox he had seen stalking the rabbits from the trunks of the trees that lined the clearing. As much as Sylvain tried to separate the two, he couldn’t deny nature.) In the fall, orange and brown leaf litter made puddles across the grass, dotting the clearing throughout and collecting along the tree line. The limited amount of times he’d dared to venture out in the cold, winter brought crisp white snow to coat the clearing. Sylvain didn’t know if he loved or hated its quiet, the particular solitude of a cold winter’s day. When spring brought the world back to life, the clearing filled with vitality and energy; things were growing, thriving. Bees could buzz, birds would chirp again, the sun would start to return to her full warmth.
In all the times that Sylvain had been in the clearing, he had been alone (except for the rabbits and the fox, of course). This time was the exception.
As Sylvain walked to the clearing on a crisp autumn afternoon, he was startled to find somebody else already sitting in it. A young man, to be specific, sitting with his back against a tree, his head canted up to the sun, dark hair pushed back off his face in a loose bun. Sylvain took a step without meaning to, to try and angle himself to get a closer look at this intruder, and a leaf crunched beneath him. The stranger’s head snapped to the source of the sound, and as his hair flew back with the force of the movement, Sylvain caught a glimpse of two slightly pointed ears.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Sylvain said, taking a cautious step forward and raising his hands in a way that he hoped was nonthreatening. “But I think you’re in my spot.”
He tried for a sympathetic, what a silly situation this is that we’re in shrug-and-smile combination. The stranger– the fairy, he must be a fairy– didn’t reciprocate it.
“Ok.” His voice was like the flat of a sword. Hard, and metallic, but while it was still flat, mostly harmless. (At least, that was what Sylvain hoped.)
Sylvain’s hands dropped slightly. “Well. Ok.” He took another step into the clearing, still tentative. The fairy rolled his eyes and shifted his view back to the sky. He tracked a cloud until he couldn’t, and then moved on to a different one, and then another, and another, as Sylvain hovered over the threshold of what he’d considered to be his clearing up until this moment.
“You don’t have to just stand there.” The man was annoyed, now, the sword tilting just a little bit to catch the light on its edge. Sylvain could hear it in the huff that came out alongside his voice, could see it in the set of his jaw and his shoulders.
“Alright, then.” Sylvain crossed into the clearing, walking about halfway in before hesitating. Sensing neither approval nor disapproval, he moved until he could lean against a tree a little ways away from the stranger. A safe distance, but still a conversational one, if this fairy was actually interested in conversation. “Here I thought a fairy would be trying to charm me,” Sylvain said, something almost teasing playing across his features. Belatedly, he had the thought that maybe he shouldn’t be teasing a strange, standoffish fairy that he’d just met, but that bed had been made.
The fairy rolled his eyes again, something around the edges of his mouth tightening. “Think harder.”
Sylvain huffed a laugh. He certainly wasn’t trying, that was for sure. And yet…
“Maybe you don’t even need to try,” Sylvain mused, almost joking. “Maybe it’s the prickliness that’s your act. Draw people in, make them want to see the soft, gentle heart underneath.”
The fairy scoffed.
“Or maybe not. It was worth a thought.”
Silence lapsed for a few moments. And then, unbidden from Sylvain’s mouth: “Is there something I can call you?”
The fairy looked him in the eyes, now, for the first time. Sylvain felt his attention stick, an insect in amber. He was searching for something, Sylvain could tell by the way his eyebrows drew together but not down, the slightest crease forming between them. “Hugo.” He offered, finally, his shoulders pitched back from Sylvain as if to start backing away.
“Hugo,” Sylvain repeated, tasting it on his tongue, feeling how it landed in his stomach.
Hugo’s eyes skittered away from his, releasing Sylvain’s attention, and towards the tree line, watching a squirrel as it hopped from branch to branch. His eyebrows pinched in again as it disappeared, cheeks full with a mid-autumn harvest. “Do you—” He broke off in a sigh, ripping up a fistful of grass by his feet. “I hate the fucking— wording—”
“José.” Sylvain said, amusement bubbling up in his throat and tugging at his lips. “You can call me José.”
“Hm.” Hugo’s face twisted for a split-second. He opened his mouth a few moments before he spoke. “You don’t look like a José,” he settled on.
A practiced, easy smile slid itself across Sylvain’s face. “Well, you don’t look like a Hugo, so where does that put us now?”
“It puts me with an idiot who picked a fake name that doesn’t even suit him well.” Hugo said through a scoff.
My father’s the idiot who picked it, Sylvain didn’t say. Instead, he shook his head and moved his attention back towards the ground, tracing the individual blades of grass and the last blooms of white clover the rabbits hadn’t gotten to yet. “So you’re, what, just out here looking for prey?”
Hugo snorted. “Looking for privacy.”
“You want me to go?” Sylvain asked, the sincerity behind it almost surprising himself. “I can find a different place to sit, if you want. I’m sure this isn’t the only clearing–”
“No, no.” Hugo’s hand stayed fisted in the grass. “Stay.” He paused, fingers frozen as he moved to pull a blade out. “If you want to.”
Sylvain hummed softly before laying down in the grass, one arm propped behind his head as he watched fluffy afternoon clouds waltz over his head in the breeze. The sky was a bright, crystal-clear blue, unfiltered sunlight cast gently across Sylvain’s face, warming his nose, his browbone, the apples of his cheeks. He closed his eyes, putting aside his vision to make room for other senses at the forefront of his attention. A robin’s chirping melody reached him from somewhere deeper in the forest. Wind rustled through the clearing gently, pushing his ever-unruly (not really, he kept it that way on purpose) hair up and off of his face, to give the sun more clearance to spread her warmth onto him. And, next to that, the warmth of a body, sitting beside him, resting against a tree trunk, not touching him, but only barely. It wasn’t even a warmth, necessarily, but an awareness. Sylvain was not alone here, in this clearing he’d been to enough times to become accustomed to its expectation of solitude. He wasn’t alone; there was a person next to him. Watching him, probably. Sylvain waited for the instinct to perform to arise, for a hard smile to snap across his expression like a puppeteer pulling his strings taut, but somehow, it wasn’t there. As he laid there, with his eyes gently shut, he felt his body settle. His shoulders lowered. The small of his back finally made real contact with the ground. His knees unlocked. Why was this prickly fairy here with him? What cause would a fairy have to run away to a clearing like this one, with only the wind and the robin, the sun and the clouds, to keep him company? Maybe he just needed to be alone. He did say he was looking for privacy. But he wasn’t, because Sylvain was here, and Sylvain was being permitted– asked, even– to stay here. And while the awareness of another body wasn’t a particularly unpleasant feeling, the fact that that body belonged to a stranger meant the clearing was distinctly lacking in privacy.
Sylvain pried his eyelids, heavier than he thought they would be, open, and turned to Hugo, mouth falling open to enquire again as to why he was here, when he paused. Hugo’s eyes were closed. In fact, Hugo seemed to have fallen asleep entirely, his head dipping towards his chest, arms crossed, back still up against the tree but bending towards the ground like a willow. His legs, one knee bent, were sprawled out in front of him, his heels digging slightly into the soft dirt. Sylvain leaned closer. It wasn’t every day you ended up in an empty clearing with a sleeping fairy. His hair, blue like the liquid surface of an inkwell, and bluer in this light, was escaping from a bun at the back of his head, strands of it reaching out to brush against his cheeks and chin. The lines of his face looked as if they’d been sharpened by hand, the angles of his cheekbones and his jaw clean enough for Sylvain to cut himself on, if he would ever be foolish enough to try. There were bruises under his eyes, just barely. Sylvain could recognize them from his time spent in the mirror as the kind that originated from deep under the skin, from the mind; the kind that never really go away, that you either have to learn to live with or die trying. He had his own smell, this creature, sharp and peppery but laced with something wooden and not quite warm, but steady. Sturdy. Sylvain breathed it in for a moment, memorizing it, even as something tightened behind his sternum.
Hugo’s eyes flickered beneath his eyelids, and Sylvain hastily turned his attention back to the trees, trying (and failing) to locate the robin he had heard, his mind still stumbling across one question– why are you here?
“José,” Hugo muttered drowsily. Sylvain turned to catch the last dregs of mild distaste seep out of Hugo’s face as he rubbed sleep from his eyes.
“Hugo.”
Sylvain was encased in amber again, ears going numb for just a moment as his gaze was ensnared by Hugo’s, his eyes still dull but slowly regaining their brightness in the sunlight.
“–should probably go,” Hugo said as Sylvain regained his awareness of the conversation. That same distasteful expression was back, tightness in the corners of his mouth and the slightest tilt up of the chin, but he wasn’t saying Sylvain’s middle name this time.
“I’ll probably be back.” It was the truth. Sylvain wasn’t quite sure why he was saying it. “Tomorrow.”
Hugo’s eyes widened slightly in surprise before his features smoothed back into his resting impassive expression. He reached back to adjust his failing bun before deciding it a lost cause and undoing it entirely, ink free-flowing down to his shoulders.
“Tomorrow?” It barely sounded like a question; only the slightest raise in Hugo’s eyebrows gave it away.
“Tomorrow, yeah.” Sylvain bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.
“Ok.”
“Ok,” Sylvain said, softly, maybe too softly, considering. “Bye, Hugo.”
Hugo nodded, and rose, dusting off his pants. It’s funny– Sylvain was taller than him, he realized. This fairy made of blades and sharp edges would, at his full height, come to rest just above his chin, maybe a little higher. It seemed Sylvain was unpacking many of his misconceptions around the fair folk this afternoon. He watched Hugo leave, as he disappeared into the branches, as his hair captured the light one last time before he stalked off, back to wherever it is that fairies go. The robin from the forest left with him, her song going quiet as the clearing returned to the stillness of solitude.