A christmas festival in a small city is a strange thing. The harsh streets fill with heat and soft music, carolers on every corner asking for donations and everyone bundling up to avoid them. Christmas trees spraying the scent of pine and/or plastic across the saturated air to settle in the hair of onlooking children, harried parents, the lovestruck, and the lonely dreamers. Hot drinks were passed and spilled onto the pavement and pulled apologies after them into the puddle seeping into the cracks and the fabric. Celebrities became anonymous, the anonymous important.
He wasn't poor by any means, but if he'd known who she was when she bumped into him, startling him beyond a measure he hadn't known he'd been keeping, it would have embarrassed him and disappointed her. Fortunately, he instead extended an arm so she wouldn't fall, securing his hand against her back. She was so tiny.
"I'm sorry!" Her voice trilled, almost chirped, and you would call her a bird but her face didn't give you the impression. She was too compact, too real. Badly pinned hair fell in rivers and oceans around her, almost black and striking against a pink padded jacket. Except it wasn't exactly pink. It was more a vibrant magenta. Fuschia. It matched the dainty plastic rimmed glasses pulled against her eyes. Those eyes were a bubbling blue, and he loved them.
"Don't… be sorry." He was having a little trouble thinking of things to say. She kept looking at him with a face that said she was sorry, so sorry, and he couldn't even think of something to make that better. But he did know he wanted to see her smile. "It's fine, it was my fault." It wasn't, but it was all he could say. She beamed, mollified, and the expression melted his resolve again.
"You aren't hurt, right? You're okay?" She could have broken his arm and he would still be okay.
"I am fine. Are you alright?" She startled him by grabbing one of his hands in a pair of violet mittens, the wool pleasantly abrasive against his own night-black fingerless gloves.
"I'm Feferi." He opened his mouth to remind her that that didn't answer his question, then stammered it shut, looking out over her head at the crowd.
"…Equius."
"Equius… Hey. Let's run away." He snapped back to look at her.
"What? That is absolutely ridiculous, we can't possibly—"
"We don't have to run far. Just out of the crowd. I wanna see some stars." Her eyes were shining, and despite his confidence in his own strength, he quickly found himself on the edge of activity, dragged by her into a side street. Intuition screamed that it was a bad idea, that he didn't know her and this was stupid and reckless.
But he remembered that his whole life he'd hardly done anything reckless or stupid. Raised by a man more butler than guardian, he wasn't scolded or commanded. Feferi's insistence woke something. He liked it.
She took them right out of the city center to a children's park. Before he knew what she was planning he found himself on top of the slide, secured behind painted green bars, following her finger up to the rivers and oceans of light an infinity above them.
"They're perfect." He nodded dumbly, watching her watch the sky, moonlight and streetlamps speckling across the dark freckles across her cheekbones. He wanted to tel her she was perfect, but he hardly knew her; he couldn't.
"I love the stars," she continued on without him, "it's so hard to see them from my room, though. I'm really glad this park is still here." He dared to set his hand on hers, hushing her and lacing their fingers together into the grated floor.
"I understand." Neither of them said anything after that for a long few minutes, slowing down the sped up encounter to a single split second where just their joined hands knew each other, a discarded mitten and a ragged glove inches away.
She whispered something; he chuckled, then murmured a nervous reply. Her eyes lit up like they'd been dating for years and he'd just asked her to marry him. He almost loved her right then, but his heart sighed and pulled back and only let him hold her hand.
Feferi took a deep breath, then sagged against his chest, pressing the top of her head under his chin. His eyes widened, but then Equius smiled and took his hand off of hers to wrap around her shoulder. He could feel her smile.
The man almost didn't notice when he kissed her. He didn't remember the moment, only that he had started it and not her.
She tasted like brine and felt like a flower. He didn't know what kind, he'd always been a mechanics man. He supposed a rose, or a water lily. It didn't matter. He was kissing a starlight and snow girl who filled the angles he'd hated with curves until they were melded, and he held her in both strong arms and sucking in a breath, and she pulled one in too. And they remembered that it was cold but they didn't care. He pushed his hand into the mass of hair and tried not to crush her lips, but her fingers curled into his coat collar and destroyed his self control. He tasted her mouth, breathed the ocean scent and imagined a flower that smelled like her.
He ruined it, grazed the nape of her neck with his fingertips. She flinched, broke away and reclaimed her dark lips.
"I'm sorry," he tried to apologize, and she gave him such a sad look, and confused, like she didn't understand him. He leaned in and she sucked in her lips, so he just rested his forehead against hers. She slumped into his chest, trapped his guilty fingers with hers.
He let her hide a moment, then used her hands to lift her face and kissed her one more time. Treacherous stranger he was, he slipped a hand free while she was distracted and cupped it against the back of her neck.
Feferi jerked back, but it was too late. He was already looking, staring at his palm where a pair of cast off beetle wings, shiny in the tiny lights and so fragile, threatened to scatter in the wind. Except they weren't beetle wings. They were fish scales.
Equius opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off, voice tiny, upset. He hated that.
"I have to go," she whispered, then, quicker than thinking, which granted he hadn't been doing much of anyway, she'd dropped herself over the edge and slid to the bottom into the barkdust. Equius lashed out a hand to catch her but she was gone, climbing out of the slide and starting to run.
"Feferi!" What should he say? I'm sorry? What is that? What are you?
"I love you." She almost stopped, then did. He was leaning over the railing, watching her desperately, but she just shook her head a little. His heart was not too strong to break.
He called after her again, but in the end he let her go. He sat there, holding one of his own hands in the other, the one with the iridescent scales.
When he woke up the next morning with cold in his bones, he wondered if she was a mermaid.