Bit of gore ahead, watch out if you're sensitive to blood. In fact this whole story will probably have several few gory bits; beware. I mean, probably not much worse than Dire Circus, nothing insanely detailed, but I'd rather warn you guys ahead of time than scare somebody.

& thanks for all the reviews! I really appreciate the response, guys! love you and thanks for reading! bit of a short chapter, sorry.

"You really are a fairy," said one of the voices, distant and terrified. It took Maka too long to recognize it as her own. Her lips felt numb, and her trembling hands, and her feet as they wavered between forward and back. She could practically feel the old pages of her fairytale books between her fingertips, and smell their rich decay. Unicorns and demons, angels and deep-sea beasts, tricksters and gods, and fairies, the whole pantheon had kept her company on the long nights alone, when the city shook and Asura raged. Her beloved characters had been the voices in her head that didn't terrify her, and now-

"You're a fairy," she repeated, licking her lips. The repetition made it no less surreal. Soul watched her with nervous, wet eyes and a cruel sneer, rocking back and forth just slightly on his boulder with his hands crammed into his pockets. "You- you're- you've got fucking ears-"

The amateur harp music began again in the back of her mind, haunting and strange, each missed note pulling on her pulse until she was sure she would die, and her hand rose almost of its own accord as her feet finally decided on forward. Hadn't the voices broken the harp? But it didn't matter.

His hair, brushing the back of her hand, was petal-soft, and his ear felt only like skin.

She'd surprised him. The wide eyes got wider and the sneer got more vicious as he leapt up and away, batting at her hand. "Don't touch me!" Then he jammed the hat back down on his fluffy head and crossed his arms. "Yeah, I've got ears, big whoop. So do you, if you hadn't noticed." Tone dry as a bone, but his nervousness showed pink on his face.

"That's impossible," she informed him as reality finally reasserted itself. "Fairies don't-"

"Exist?" he said wryly.

"Yes!" She had gone insane, but she wasn't stupid.

He blinked at her a few times, thinking, then finally gave a shrug so vast it seemed to encompass every question he'd ever been asked. The torchlight caught and traced the sharp line of his jaw in a perfect curve of copper. "Fine, whatever."

She gave him a narrow glare, batting away a white moth that had shown up to die in the torch. "Fine." There was no call for her to be entirely rude, though, even if she'd managed to run into the only other crazy person in the whole ruined world. Her father was waiting and she had no time for Soul, whatever he was, but the least she could do was point him towards her hometown, the closest within hundreds of miles. "Listen, if you're headed to Gethsemane, it's about three day's walk due north. You can follow my trail, it'll be pretty obvious. Take a right off the road about when you see a flat-topped hill in front of you." The harp music- a little different than she was used to, smoother, as if it was a different instrument- swelled, then stopped abruptly, and she caught her breath. "Uh. Good luck."

He nodded a little. She wrenched the torch free- he could make fire, he obviously didn't need it- and circled edgily around him before heading back up the broken bridge to grab her backpack.

She glanced back once as she headed forward into the inky night, following the churning river. He was still watching, and looking almost angry; before he faded into the dark, she saw him pull his hat down tighter.

"A fucking fairy," she whispered in harsh wonder to the murmuring river. Hallucination or not, she'd touched him, brushed a fingertip across that shining skin, and he'd been warm and real enough that, even as the night wore on and the forbidding bone-white moon rose higher and higher, she didn't quite manage to rationalize him and his fire away.

"More on Heaven and Earth than you ever read about, huh, baby?" her mother would say, with just a hint of coldness on her beautiful face. Maka found herself walking faster and faster into the empty dark, almost wishing for the wolves.

For a short girl, Albarn took big steps.

She walked like it was the only thing on her mind, her tattered boots thump-thumping heavily and her wide green eyes glazed and hungry, fixed on the horizon. Even with his much longer legs, Soul had to hurry to keep up. The late-morning sun was hot above, but the river to the right was sending off sweet, cooling breezes that reminded him agonizingly of home. There was little beauty in this world, and the birdsongs were all sad.

It would be a lot freakin' easier if he could just walk next to her, but she'd made it pretty clear last night that she didn't want him to follow her, so here he was, fifteen feet behind and sweating beneath the full weight of his camouflage magic. It was annoying, and the urge to throw pebbles at the back of her head was increasing every moment-

She paused, still staring at the horizon, then broke into a dead run, hurdling rocks and brush like a deer. Black birds flew up like broken hearts.

Soul said very quietly, "Fuck!" and then, as the compulsion began to prick his heels, he growled and followed.

It wasn't like he hadn't thought about letting her drown, when she came toppling down from the bridge. It'd crossed his mind, of course. But he'd waited, shocked, and she hadn't moved for long seconds, excepting a few bubbles and a twitch of her submerged hand, and entirely on instinct he'd reached out for her.

He might as well have picked up a viper. It would have been less violent when it woke up- and then she'd carried him out of the damn water like an insane Hercules, and he'd had no choice but to play damsel in distress and let it happen. Soul could practically hear Kid's stupid fancy voice in his head, too, admonishing him. "Didn't you know about the life debt?" Soul mimicked raggedly under his breath, between gulps of air. He loathed running, and of course she was half cheetah. "Didn't you know what happens when a person saves a fairy's-"

"Quit following me, you lunatic!" she screamed, whirling around and staring right at him, despite the camouflage magic still tingling over his skin.

He tripped immediately on nothing and skidded into the grass and dirt with a choked yelp before springing to his feet and checking the status of his hat. "How the shit can you see me?" he panted, befuddled.

She had her hands on her hips, that ever-present knife a silver claw in one as she glared. "With my eyes, birdbrain," she screeched. "I thought if I ignored you you'd leave! Do you have any idea how creepy it is to run after a woman who's alone, out in the middle of nowhere? What, you wanna fight? Bring it on then! I'll kick your ass!"

He gaped at her, aware of the dirt decorating his entire front but unable to quite gather the wits to brush it away. "I- you- you can see me?"

Albarn squinted at him, clearly thrown. Now, in the daylight, he could see the almost bland perfection of her features: small, pert nose, a small, thin-lipped mouth, large hooded eyes, and dirt absolutely everywhere beneath bangs made stringy by sweat. Despite all her ranting, she didn't look all that worried, either, which made him think she knew how to use that knife. It wasn't a comforting thought. "Was I not, uh, supposed to? Be able to see you?" she said finally.

No, no she was not. Human vision, he knew, was limited to reflected light that fell within the narrow visible spectrum of about 400 to 800 nanometers in wavelength. Kid had drummed that sort of thing into Soul's head over and over until he was sure it would pop, in a desperate attempt to help him figure out how to use his magic properly. It had sort of worked- camouflage was one of the few things he could manage now, though it hadn't helped him much at the moment. Right now his skin was reflecting only ultraviolet light- bumblebees could see it, and fairies, but not humans.

So what in Nimue's name was Albarn?

He looked at her feet, getting his breath back and thinking. Whatever she was, and she clearly wasn't going to tell him a damn thing- suspicion was stark and cruel on her stern face, and he couldn't blame her- he was stuck with her. It would probably be pretty stupid to let her know he'd caught on to her secret.

Maybe Kid's politics lessons hadn't been wasted on Soul, the Youngest and Most Disappointing Royal Son, after all.

He squared his shoulders, started brushing off the dirt, and grumbled, trying for diplomacy, "No, but I guess you can see me, so it doesn't matter. Listen, I don't think you're gonna like this, and believe me I don't either, but I have to follow you around until I save your life. I- augh, dammit, I owe you. It's a fairy thing."

Albarn fell into another laughing fit, until she actually had to sit down, wiping her watering eyes. "Oh, okay," she wheezed, clutching her ribs. "Right. So I've got a pet fairy now! Fantastic. This is exactly what I needed. Perfect."

As a master of sarcasm himself, Soul didn't appreciate having any aimed at him, thank you very much, so he showed her his teeth and opened his hand, letting a whip of fire blossom up and out.

"I'm nobody's pet," he ground out, nettled. At home he was a voluntary shadow, living in Wes's wake and praying to all the spirits that Titania wasn't in the mood to make anything bleed; at first, when she'd dumped him here, he'd been both furious and afraid, but after a while- before the hunger- a thread of vicious joy had crept darkly in. Accidental life debt or no, exiled or not, he wasn't about to give that unaccustomed freedom up.

Albarn was instantly sober, on her feet so fast he barely saw her move, and there was nothing dreamy now in her calculating expression. The knife flashed in the sun.

He had the sudden, piercing thought: Something's chasing this girl, and she's getting tired of outrunning it. Were the lives of all the humans left so hard, now that the fairies had done what they did to the mortal earth? He complained about the lack of beauty here, but he knew where it had gone. Guilt put out the fire in his palm with a sizzle and a snap, and he held up both hands in a gesture of peace. He was so, so tired, and life debt aside, simply talking to something besides the wind was nice.

"All right," Albarn said then, rather unexpectedly, framed like a priestess among the waving grass and the blazing blue sky. "Fine. You can tag along. It won't hurt to have someone watching my back when we get to the city."

Right. Monsters. "Yay," said Soul, very unconvincingly.

With a final warning glare, she started walking again.

"Albarn. What's the name of the river?"

She didn't even blink. She just kept charging ahead like her feet were afire.

"Hey. Uh, Albarn," he tried again.

"I don't know. Maps are hard to find," she said shortly, casting him a single pinprick glance out of the side of one eye as if his very existence was presumptuous.

He scowled and tugged his hat down moodily to better cover his ears, just like the blue-haired boy had taught him so long ago, the first time he'd been sent to this awful graveyard of a world. What was his brother Westing doing, back home? Was he alive and whole, or had that snake bitch Titania gotten to him after all? Heavens only knew what fresh hell she'd thought up for the court. Fear put fresh speed in Soul's steps. "Whatever."

"Sorry," she mumbled, and it actually sounded sincere. "I wish I knew, too."

"Eh."

The silence swelled again. Of course, it wasn't really silent. The odd, fearful birds here- that refused to come say hello, annoyingly- were twittering all about. The river was gurgling, the wind was blowing, and the soft whispering of the tall grass was a deep and distant song. Still, it felt wrong to him, and eerie. He didn't remember things being like this the first time, though of course he'd been young then. The first time there had been a long line of laughing people and colorful wagons winding in a fallen rainbow through the land, musical and alive, and even as a lost child he hadn't been as afraid as he was now.

This Albarn girl, though, was the furthest thing from laughter. She was dying from the inside out like a diseased tree, and it made him tense. He couldn't fathom anything she did: why she'd hauled him from that blasted water, why she'd let him tag along as they hunted for a place to ford the river, why she wanted to go to that apparently lethal city in the first place. And why hadn't any of those things she was afraid of approached him when he was there?

"Why didn't you let me drown?" she asked, out of the blue. Obviously he wasn't the only one confused.

"I don't know," he said, honestly enough. It had simply seemed like the thing to do.

She said nothing for a while, still forging ahead. After an hour or three- time here still didn't seem natural to him, and the short days were always startling- she froze in her tracks, took two short sharp breaths, then folded in on herself like tortured origami, clutching her ears.

Soul found himself backing away as she hissed pure agony. It only lasted a few moments, though, and then she shook her head roughly and straightened up, grinding her teeth. She looked almost ashamed, and her face was very pale.

"Sorry," she said brusquely, not meeting his eyes. "That happens sometimes." And then she was moving again, tirelessly, her rapid footsteps telling him that the earth might burn her to ash if she stood still too long.

Soul followed, keeping just a little more distance between them. After all, even her pained breathing was better than the empty, fathomless loneliness he'd been trapped in since Titania banished him here. He'd resigned himself to death after the first day in the water, had stood there numbly and tried to lose himself inside his memories, until she materialized out of nowhere, his temperamental saviour.

He gnashed his teeth quietly. Why was she allowed to ask him ten million questions, call him a damned liar, and then march off, but he only got an answer out of her maybe one try out of three? Had the humans really forgotten about his people so quickly?

They forgot because we abandoned them, and then we- well, you know, his brother would say, always sticking up for humans. But it wasn't as if the fairies had meant for the human world to turn upside down. Not even Titania would have done it, if she'd known. Familiar guilt burned at his tight throat, and he watched her tense shoulders shift with each swing of her arms, wondering what she would do if she knew the truth- and if she, or anyone here, would ever believe him.

There were periwinkles growing in the damper spots along the riverbank, clumps of rich blue echoing the sky, and he idly plucked a bloom here and there as they went, weaving them together into a crown.

Albarn actually goggled at him when she finally noticed. "What?" he said, wondering if it was already falling apart. His flower-arranging skills had always been mediocre at best.

"Uh, nothing," she said, eyeing the wreath with extreme suspicion. "Listen, do you wanna-"

She stopped dead once she noticed her surroundings, right in the center of the fairy ring.

Soul cringed, but she only blinked and stood up straighter, looking around at the circle of flattened, trampled grass. "Huh. Deer or something."

"Yeaaah," said Soul, standing up straight to peer down his nose at her, trying to look like he understood what she was talking about. Then he got distracted for real. "Hey. Trees! Or something. No, that way."

She popped up on her tippytoes, surveying like a gopher. "Ooh! Okay, bird brain. Let's go."

"We're already going," he mumbled irritably to himself, giving the fairy ring a wide berth as he followed her.

"What?"

"Nothing."

She grunted, gave his wreath another frown, then said, "You talk under your breath a lot and I keep thinking it's… something else, can you maybe keep it inside your head like the rest of us?"

"Whatever." What on earth was going on with her?

Not that it mattered. He was stuck, trapped at her side as surely as he'd been trapped in the stupid river. He'd find out eventually.

The smudge he'd spotted on the horizon did indeed turn out to be trees, though it took them the majority of the remaining daylight to get close enough to tell. The mostly flat terrain was deceptive, apparently, and Soul was stumbling more than walking when Albarn finally stopped.

She raked him with an unreadable glance, crossed her arms, and said, "I don't think we should go in there."

"The trees?" he said, confused again. It seemed to be his natural state of being lately.

"Yeah. Um, I just… We don't know what's in there. And we still haven't found a place to ford the river, not one I can carry you over, anyway, so I guess we should just camp here and head back to the bridge in the morning."

"Why?"

"Because I don't want to get too far from the city, birdbrain. We'll backtrack and then go west instead of east when we find the bridge again."

"Thanks for taking all my suggestions so seriously," he snapped. "Fine."

Her eyes narrowed. "I didn't hear you coming up with a plan!"

"That's because I don't know shit about this world!" he roared, frustration and fatigue finally overcoming the last shreds of his self-control. When he dragged a hand down his face, he was a little surprised to realize it was on fire. It had been a long time since he'd had any sort of spontaneous magical outburst at all.

It felt good on his skin, friendly and pure.

Albarn was making a sound like a teakettle. He raised an eyebrow at her. "What?"

She stared at his hands, clearly struggling between fear and curiosity. Finally she said, "It doesn't burn you?"

"Do I look burned?"

The teakettle sound made a brief, startling reappearance before she flung up her hands and set her giant pack down on the grass, pulling out an incredible array of knickknacks. Soul found himself edging closer almost without realizing it, fascinated. There were several shiny metal things, which fairies generally didn't mess with out of tradition and instinctive dislike, despite being able to touch it now without dying unpleasantly. There were small leather packets, a funny-smelling blue contraption that reminded him of things he'd seen in the city, a disappointingly ugly blanket, clothes, a ridiculous number of knives-

She tossed one at his feet. He jumped and slithered backwards.

"It's for you," she said, not looking at him. "Just in case. I'm gonna go try and find us dinner. I just realized you probably haven't eaten in a while. Sorry."

"All right," he managed, swallowing, then stretching out a hand to grab the knife. The cold iron of the blade didn't singe the fingertip he pressed to it, but he still had to fight back a shudder.

"Can you make us a fire?"

Could he? And why? "Yeah."

"Thanks. I'll be back in a few hours, max." She didn't move, though. Instead she stood there waiting until he met her eyes, and then she said icily, "If you fuck with any of my stuff, the truce is off."

It was the first he'd heard about a truce, but whatever. "I'm not gonna fuck with your weird human shit!"

She snickered, not unkindly. "You don't know what half of it is, do you? I'll show you when I get back. But some of it's kind of valuable, so seriously, don't mess with it." Without further ceremony, she plunged into the taller grass further from the river's edge. For a moment her blonde hair blended perfectly with the swaying tips, then she was gone, leaving him holding her knife.

"Er," he called helplessly, feeling the life debt already give a warning tingle. "Don't go far, okay?"

She must have heard him, because Soul spent the next hour and a half only a little uncomfortable, rather than actually foaming at the mouth. He managed to get a fire going, promptly stomped it out in a panic as embers began to fly up, made another one that was much smaller in a slightly more rocky area, and then settled in beside it, absently throwing in bits of brush at irregular intervals and occasionally giving the tiny flames a boost with his magic.

It felt strangely easy to do, which was something to think about, but he caught the smell of fresh blood in the air and perked up. Albarn materialized from the rapidly darkening shadows not five minutes later, three colorful birds swinging limply from one hand.

"We got lucky," she said cheerfully. "I love how stupid these things are."

His mouth was watering. "Cool," he managed, licking his lips. His cramped stomach gave an agonizing twist.

She didn't seem in any hurry to feed him. Instead she sat down on a rock, stowed some wire away in her pack, and began poking the flames higher while pulling feathers delicately, one-by-one from the first bird. "You could help," she pointed out at last, and, permission granted, he practically lunged for one of the birds, ripping out handfuls of feathers with ravenous haste before sinking his teeth into the succulent breast.

Albarn gave a choked half-scream, red-smudged hands flying to cover her mouth; he raised his gaze to her inquiringly, then remembered.

"Don't do that in front of anybody," the blue-haired boy had said, very seriously, his small dirty face scrunched into a terrible frown. "People don't forget bad stuff here. You gotta cook your food, okay?"

"Shit," Soul barked, dropping the bird and leaping to his feet. "Sorry, sorry, I forgot! Don't flip out!"

He could feel blood wet and still warm on his chin. She was frozen, one hand over her mouth still and the other clutching her knife. A pile of rainbow feathers surrounded her like the silks of an empress, and the firelight turned her eyes to warmly opaque, glittering gold.

"Don't move," she whispered, very still herself, and he didn't. They stayed in their nervous tableau, with only the popping flames and their own panting to fill the air, until she finally said in a stronger voice, "What the hell?"

"I forgot," he admitted, swallowing and only just stopping himself from licking his lips. That single bite had brought his appetite back to life with a roaring vengeance; he felt almost blinded by hunger. "I forgot you humans don't eat raw. Sorry. I didn't- it wasn't to startle you or anything."

"Oh, right," she muttered, shaking her head a little. "Of course. If I ate a bird raw I'd probably die. Or I'd be so sick I'd want to. It really doesn't- that's how you like it?"

He settled for a nod, his gaze drifting to the bird.

"Can you just turn around and eat?" she offered finally, nose wrinkled.

He rasped, "Yes!" and then pounced again, whirling around and diving back into his dinner.

He tried to keep it quiet, he really did. Judging by Albarn's frequent, irritated huffs behind him, he wasn't quiet enough, but he couldn't help it. He devoured the first bird so fast that his long-ignored stomach felt like a painful knot of cramps and nausea, but the hunger was still there after he went over to the river to clean his face and hands.

She was holding out a second bird to him, already plucked, when he turned around. It was the closest she'd stood to him since carrying him out of the river that morning.

"But that only leaves one for you," he pointed out.

"I'm smaller than you and I'm not the one who got myself stuck in a river and then starved," she volleyed back, rather forcefully and looking displeased with his protests. The final bird was impaled on a stick over the fire, and Soul sneezed as a strange, rich smell hit his nose. "Besides, I'd rather not have to slow down for you tomorrow."

"Fine. Thanks." He ate this one with a lot less mess, though there was a brief moment he was afraid he might puke it all back up as his abused stomach protested. When he finished, cleaned up again, and rolled back to the fire in a drowsy haze, Albarn was delicately picking the last flesh off her cooked bird, a neat pile of bones and gristle arranged atop the feathers beside her.

"Scraps in the river," she told him firmly, standing up and sucking her fingers clean. "Don't wanna draw anything to us." Her bones made a series of soft plops like rain as she tossed them far out into the water; Soul followed suit, with much effort, then flopped back down beside the fire, idly sifting through the scattered feathers that remained. None of them seemed right for his hat, though.

She offered him water next, from the odd-smelling blue cylinder thing. "Purifies it," she said shortly, in response to his curious expression.

"Oh," he said dubiously, eyeing the thing for traces of unicorn horn and finding none. But the water tasted sweet on his parched tongue.

He wanted to ask her more questions, he really did, especially about the things she'd pulled from her pack, but it was dark in earnest now, and he'd been keeping up with an indefatigable, tiny force of nature all day on an empty stomach. Before he knew it, he was asleep beneath a far-flung velvet canopy of endless stars.

Maka was surprised. He snored, soft little wheezes with each breath through his slightly open mouth.

It just didn't seem like the sort of thing he'd do. It was too mundane, and yet too weird. During the day, he'd slowly settled in her brain as eccentric (and possibly another, particularly corporeal hallucination) but mostly she'd seen him as harmless. Even when he'd torn into the raw pheasant like a starved dog, that categorization hadn't changed. Maybe he was creepy in some ways, yes, but all his grouchy huffing and puffing did was remind her of a bullfrog, inflating to look bigger.

When she'd given him her knife, he'd held it upside down without realizing. Obviously he wasn't familiar with weapons. He'd followed behind her all day long and never tried anything except a few halting, tentative questions and some mild insults. He hadn't complained, despite surely being very hungry and tired; a twinge of guilt hit her when she remembered how hard she'd driven him, without even noticing his ragged state till they'd made camp. When she'd been overwhelmed by the voices, he hadn't fled or attacked, and he'd passed her final test; she'd strewn out all her valuables and then hidden in the grass, watching under the guise of 'hunting'. Yet, given the perfect opportunity, Soul hadn't touched anything.

"...not really… expected, and the… tomorrow, I'm sure," said Silky Voice, sounding even softer than usual, grief and an attempt at reassurance heavy in his words.

Rough Voice gave his usual, annoying hum. "Titania's driving me mad… about the wings, I swear."

"Yeah, absolutely," Maka put in quietly, feeling a little left out. Nobody answered. Soul's soft, whistling snores gave gentle counterpoint to the gurgling river and the nighttime symphony of insects.

She still couldn't quite fall asleep, though. Soul had cleaned himself up after his messy meal, but she'd gotten a smudge of pheasant blood on the toe of her left boot, and scrub as she might with a handful of sand, the stain refused to fade.

:) :) thanks for reading!