A/N: The main characters are all from Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales and Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series. The setting is in NYC, in Kaye's coffee shop Moon in a Cup (Holly Black's books) with the single main character being Seth from Wicked Lovely, Ink Exchange, and Fragile Eternity. This is set after the ending of Fragile Eternity and the short story The Land or Heart's Desire (about what happened after Ironside, the last Modern Faery Tale book.)
From Modern Faery Tales: Kaye, Roiben, Luis, Corny, Val, Ruth, and Ravus. Also Lolli, Dave, and others by mention and the shop Moon in a Cup.
From Wicked Lovely: Seth, Aislinn (Ash), and Keenan. Also Sorcha, Devlin, Niall, and Bananach by mention and events from all Wicked Lovley books.
Dusk had come and gone already, although the lights were still on in the coffee shop in the city that never slept, when the faeries filtered through the doors of Moon in a Cup. Kaye was sitting on the counter, Luis and Corny (still wearing the greenish skinned and horned glamour) sitting at a table, going over Luis's college homework, and Val, Ruth, Ravus, and Roiben were drinking tea and swapping jokes. And then a faery walked through the doors, a faery so…different that Kaye and Val ushered the remaining mortals out the door and flipped the open side around so that is read CLOSED in large red letters.
He had black hair, and Kaye recognized the look on his face as the one she herself had worn just after she had discovered she wasn't mortal.
The boy's (although he could hardly be called a boy, he was the same age as Luis) hand slipped into his gray messenger bag for a moment, just as his eyes widened. "Fey," he seemed to whisper to himself. It didn't seem like he had needed whatever Sidhe sensor was his bag, or even know if he was happy that he was among his own kind.
He approached the counter, glancing, in some odd imitation of normalcy, and ordered a latte. Ruth rang it up for him, and Corny made it. His eyes flickered, and he murmured softly, too softly for mortal ears, "But not all of you. What reason have you to keep company with mortals, in a mortal coffee shop?"
Kaye rolled her eyes, and repeated the words out loud. Valerie rolled her eyes, and looked at Ravus. "They always think we can't hear, and we can't, but there's no reason to be rude about it."
The raven-haired boy had the good sense to blush embarrasedly, but addressed the group anyway. "I didn't know if you knew what your companions were, sorry. I'm still learning-this faery sh-stuff is new to me." He seemed suddenly worried, and clapped a hand over his mouth. "Obviously very new," he laughed wryly, "that I can't even manage to keep my mouth shut. Niall says that's going to get me in trouble. Devlin would like it very much if it did."
Roiben raised a questioning eyebrow. "Do you have a name, strange-visitor-who-has-much-to-explain?"
"Seth. Seth Morgan, I guess. And you guys?" He spoke in an odd combination of the formality belonging to the lords and ladies of the fey that Roiben used, and the more casual, profane-prone speech of the street-mortals.
"Valerie Russel-but if you ever call me that I'll kill you, and I know how." Ravus smiled, but behind his amused mask there was a worry that Val, as usual, was rushing ahead, trusting too quickly. "I'm mortal," Val continued, "And that's my boyfriend, Ravus, he's a troll, and my best friend, Ruth." She gestured in turn at the green-skinned, skinny boy with yellow eyes and shaggy hair and the girl in a rainbow trench coat with matching hair and green eyes. "And Luis, and his boyfriend Corny." Again, hand gestures were made in the general direction of a thin, geeky-looking boy at the coffee machine and and an older boy with light brown skin. The younger nodded and gave 'Seth. Seth Morgan' his drink.
"Over there is Kaye"—a winged pixie—"and I forget what the inverse if the word is, but Kaye is Roiben's consort, and he" a jabbed finger at a slightly aloof silver-haired faery "is lord of the Unseelie and Seelie courts right now, but mostly the former. We just conquered the latter."
The elf in question scowled. "Crudely. Poorly. Even the few fatalities…perhaps, if the circumstances were different, it needed not have happened as it did."
Again, Seth seemed to speak only to himself. "So War sets her claws in even hundreds, thousands of miles away. Sorcha won't like this. But how long before my-no, the normal world is but a playground for the faery wars?"
The group looked at one another. Who was this stranger, who came neither raving nor ranting but obviously, softly, insane? But Roiben knew that often the craziest sources were the best, and help could come from unlikely places. He gestured for Seth to sit in one of the booths. "What do you know of our wars? And who is this Sorcha you speak of?"
"Not," Seth said calmly, "four wars. not even all the faery wars. War-capitalized. Bananach, Queen of, well, War. She has this thing where she wants to start a war among the faeries, and gain whatever sick, twisted power she can from it. Sorcha, Queen of the Court of Reason, of all Faerie, is Bananach's sister. and," he hesitated, wondering if it was really smart to get into that discussion. Then again, he was in New York City, in a faery coffee shop, and before that he had been looking for his girlfriend, who might not even be his girlfriend anymore. IF he had been anyone else, either a mortal or not Seth, he would have said that things couldn't get any worse. And now that he couldn't lie, he certainly wouldn't say that. BEcause things could always get worse. "Sorcha is also my mother. my faery mother. I was mortal, not all that long ago." But it felt like forever and a day all at once.
"A mortal-mortal, or a changeling-mortal," Kaye asked, who had been a changeling.
As far as anyone knew, one was born a faery, or a mortal, and were not one and then the other.
"A mortal mortal. It's a long story, and-"
Val rolled her eyes. It was a bad habit, and it seemed to Seth (who was another roller of eyes) that she made up for the rest of the group, who were far too supernatural for his taste.
"Look, if you haven't noticed, we've got all night. Sort of."
Seth sighed. "Fine. When I was human, my best friend, Aislinn, got into trouble with faeries: she could see them, all the time, for what they were. And so some idiot of a faery king-no offense-of summer decides that Aislinn is the long-missing queen of his court (the guy had been looking for hundreds of years), she starts to change to, into one of them. us," he corrected. "And she really doesn't want to. And, after this whole big fiasco, where she ends up the faery queen, tied to Keenan, and by that time Ash and I are dating and...man, it really, really messed us both up. But then, after some bad buisiness with the dark court, a friend of our gets caught up in it, and then Ash started slipping away. I'm mortal, I thought, and I'm going to die. And in a hundred or so years, or however long it takes me to kick the bucket, who's still going to be around and pressuring her? Keenan. So I had to changed the path we were one, because otherwise..." Some portion of this story hit home with the audience, all struggling silently with their own fears. "And so I went to Sorcha, and made a deal, and now I spend one faery month in Faerie, and 11 mortal months here. Well, Virginia. Except..."
Ruth was fed up of waiting for through the buts, ands, excepts, howevers, etc. She rolled her eyes, "Cut the crap, Morgan. Look, we get it. You spend a month, 30 or so measly days working for the faery queen, who, by the way, we've never heard of, and then you go back to your girlfriend. boo-hoo, your life is so hard. You wanna know what stinks? Living in a subway tunnel with two kids drugged up on stuff the police won't ever recognize, and then watching them do horrible things to the people around them, abusing magic."
"Ruth," Val pleaded, "I said I was sorry, okay? And Lolli's off Nevermore and Dave is..."
Luis looked grim. "You can say it." He stared long at Seth, and said. "Dead. They killed my brother when I wasn't of any use to them anymore. Yeah, he had a real knack for ticking people off, but they killed him and walked away. You ever done that?"
But Ruth, who was now on a rampage, ignoring the shock in the other faeries eyes, continued, throwing their stories onto the table like a dealer dealt cards at a poker table. "You know what sucks? When your live for years thinking you killed your best friend, ant then it turned out to be his girlfriend who did it. When you're a changeling for 14 odd years and then some maniacal idiot faeries decide to sacrifice you for seven years worth of freedom, and those idiots are your friends. When a girl is so doped up on a drug she doesn't see a train, she laughs as it crushes her to death. When your faerie queen decides to send you over as a gift to her twisted sister and starts to forget that she sent you in the first place. When your best friend dissappears. When you boyfriend breaks up with you for the dumbest of reasons, to protect you. When your sister is lured by a Kelpie off a pier, and then that idiot water horse tells you that she would have died eventually, that she 'died beautifully.'
Corny's, Val's, Kaye's eyes, even Luis's, solid, capable Luis, were starting to tremble with tears. Ravus's hands were tight on the counter, and Roiben stared out the window. He knew the last story left, the last horrible tale Ruth would deal to shock the Morgan boy.
"And when you have to go into a war against all you once held dear, against your sister, and watch a woman you thought you loved die at your sister's hands, and then have her suitor, your sister's, stab her through the heart. Yeah, you poor baby. Your life is so bad."
Seth stared at his hands. "I was going to say that a month in faerie is different, almost six times slower than time passes here. I was assumed dead, or worse, for six months. I thought it was one. Six months, longer than I was officially with my girlfriend. And she needed to be happy, people were suffering. You can't be the queen of the Summer Court and not be happy. So she's going out with him now. My third day back and I have seen neither my girlfriend nor any sign that she...isn't happy. And now I get eternity watching them together. Ash. Keenan. Me watching. Fucking eternity. "
At that moment, two glowing, literally emanating light waltzed through the door. They were holding hands, and once the guy leaned over to kiss the red-head.
Seth covered his eyes with his hands.
"The sign clearly read CLOSED, losers," Val pointed out. "Go on, get out."
Then she saw something that connected the pieces, Seth's tortured gaze. He looked up from the palms of his hands, morosely, and said. "Hello Keenan, Ash. Nice evening?"