Author's Note:
Thanks so much for reading the first chapter! There's a few things I want to clear up before we get into the second installment, mainly how I'll handle spoilers. I'll list whenever a chapter has spoilers for the Iron Queen in it before in a note before the chapter begins, so if you're not done yet and don't want to be spoiled, avoid reading those chapters.
For this chapter, this is a slight spoiler (it's elaborated on something that may or may not have been obvious from the first book) though I didn't use as names or specifics.
Also, if anyone reading has any suggestions for scenes or prompts, of moments of squee they'd like to share, feel free! I'd love to hear how I'm doing, especially during the first time writing for this fandom.
Thanks as always for reading and enjoy!
-cy.
He moved through the throng like a caged thunderstorm, pulsing to the beat of the bass speakers, shiny with rain or sweat- he couldn't tell which. The pounding rush of the drums echoed between his footsteps and inner ear; balance was at a premium tonight and all the fey in Blue Chaos came hungry.
Some were plastered along the walls, others found humans eager for something more exotic than the usual fare, but not Puck. Though no one would blame him if he did; after all that time loping around that dead-end school of hers, narrowly avoiding both iron and a slow death by boredom, he deserved to enjoy himself more than any of them.
Sweat dripped down his glass like a slow threat, a drooping eyelid at an opium den lost in a grinning addiction. Everything seemed oily, as though it were experiencing a slow melt and humans and faeries both were too caught up in the glamour to care.
He didn't need to drink to feel it, the currant-flavored sting of the emotion drifting up in waves from the dance floor, begging him to join it like a magnetic tide. But he still raised his glass and smiled at a woman across the room. She'd been staring at him and whispering to her friends for the past half hour and, hey, it wasn't like he wasn't curious.
Humans have always been fixated by fey. Always. Just ask the phouka pressing that guy in chain pants against the wall, or the satyr who snuck off with the red-head to explore the back alley. It never ends well for the humans, but they never learn.
So when the girl he smiled at started to make her way over through the pulsing crowd, Puck couldn't say he was surprised.
He just sipped his drink and winked.
-o-
"Robbie? Hey, Robbie!"
Puck shook himself awake. Damn, another fine nap ruined by duty. Oberon was going to owe him big time for this.
"Hey," Meghan poked him in the shoulder with her pencil and the metallic bite of the lead stung a little. "Come on, you said you'd be my partner, remember?"
Partner? Robin Goodfellow was no man's partner, no matter how many people liked to think he was. Above all, he was out for himself, even and especially when faeries were involved. And right now, he could sure use more excitement than this dreary little town could provide. He wondered if it was starting to wear him down, if it was possible for eight years with humans to erase someone like him. What was Oberon thinking, wasting his invaluable jester on this?
But his half-breed was looking at Puck so expectantly that the Summer faery forgot his grievances with her father for a moment. "Yeah, sure." Seeing how her face lit up, he laughed, and then tried to quickly remember what he'd agreed to. "So, what are we working on?"
Meghan rolled her eyes with all the indignation a small human could muster. "You weren't paying attention? Presidents."
Puck frowned. What, was he supposed to be memorizing every moment of fourth grade social studies in ecstatic scholasticism? Any reasonable human charge would be happy that he'd at least bothered to remember the name of the class, let alone its assignments. Glamouring the teachers to think that he was a middling-but-not-great student, someone that could do better if he tried, and without memorable parents or effectual parent-teacher conferences was a lot of effort. He could at least be allowed to zone out sometimes.
Shooting him a worried look, Meghan bit her lip and Puck sighed.
Okay, concession time: she didn't know all that, she couldn't. All she knew was that he was her partner on a silly project she'd probably never remember a month later, either because he'd fade out of her existence entirely and take her memories of him along or it would become insignificant in hindsight.
It was hardly worth it.
But if there was one thing that he loved, it was putting on a good show for a willing and gullible audience.
"Okay, then. What's our president?" He asked in his most earnest voice.
"'Who,' silly, a president's not a 'what.'" A gust of wind came in through the window, bearing with it a honeysuckle scent that toyed with Meghan's hair. As she pushed it back into place, Meghan smiled, something that had gotten rarer lately. Puck had meant to find out why, but had never been able to summon the effort. Probably just a human thing. "And we have James K. Polk."
"Oh." Puck replied, not knowing if this thing called a Polk was good or not. "Cool."
-o-
At the bar, a banished Winter sidhe mixed drinks, blowing on the glasses to frost them before she poured out the contents of the cocktail shaker. Puck caught her raising a brow as he led the girl to the dance floor, but her eyes went back to her task coolly, nonchalant as a shrug saying you could do better.
And hey, he probably could.
But he was not interested in doing better- no, tonight, he was only interested in how this human's emotions sang as he danced with her, running his hands down her jeans and tacitly fingering the edges of the white blouse she wore. Anticipation, daring, worry and wonder all blended into one: it was a veritable feast.
That was when it was best- the moment of extreme longing, of her not knowing whether or not he was as attracted to her as she was to him, her biting wonder at what he would say if she asked him to go outside with her for a break and maybe something more. He could taste the hope piercing the air around her, as though her sweat and perfume had combined over the course of the evening to produce a fragrance so intoxicating it could lure him into any promise.
Too bad for her that he was a faery much cleverer than that.
-o-
"Um, this is my room."
Meghan frowned and worried the hem of her t-shirt. Human culture was still so...beyond him sometimes. Puck was used to children imagining great things, worlds too extravagant to exist and only being sad when they had to return to reality. What could possibly be wrong with a clean bedroom? Puck stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked around.
She had a bed, a small-ish one, but sufficient for a child her age, a cherrywood dresser (he could feel the fruit tree humming through the wood when he brushed by it), and a pile of library books on James K. Polk piled on a table in the center of the room. Near the books were scissors, a large sheet of poster paper, a glue stick, and a pile of colored construction paper. At least the art supplies held some promise. Wouldn't it be worth it if she had some latent creative streak? She'd daydreamed a lot when she was younger, but it had started to die down recently. Maybe she had a hidden talent.
"It's pretty neat." He commented blandly, sitting down in front of the table. Maybe he was actually going to like this project. It definitely beat hanging around as a raven on the powerlines outside all night.
Her head shot up. "Really? I mean, it's a lot smaller than other kids' rooms. And they have more stuff."
Puck shrugged. Was that seriously it? "It's your room, so I like it."
That made her happy, somehow. Together, they worked on finding information on their president for a long while. Puck was impressed. He knew that she was a good student, but he hadn't imagined that she'd be this productive at home. Didn't most kids have their parents checking in on them as they worked at this age, or had he gotten that wrong?
"You work really hard."
She almost jumped, she was so entranced in the book she was reading. "Oh, um, yeah, I guess." Then she glanced at the door. "Mom said that she was going to make cookies, but I guess she forgot. She's really nice," she said adamantly, as though he was disbelieving her, "but she doesn't always remember stuff all the time. I was hoping that since you came maybe she would, but..."
She trailed off, and suddenly it all made sense.
She probably had such a great work ethic because that was just who she was; her mother certainly didn't come in to check on her all the time, and it was probably lucky that Mrs. Chase still remembered to feed her daughter, given that Meghan had half the magic of Oberon (possibly) and most humans forgot him in a moment flat. Yet, what surprised Puck most was what she said next.
"My birthday's next week. I'm gonna ask Mom if it's okay if I have a party this year. If I can, um...would you like to come?"
He grinned. A party? Here was a human activity he could go for. "Sure! Who else are you gonna invite?"
She still kept smiling, but he noted that the intensity lessened considerably. "Just you. The other kids at school have kinda been saying mean things about me, so..."
At once, Puck felt a strange tightening in his gut. What was this? Yeah, she was just a half-mortal, half-faery kid, and yeah they tended to get teased a lot or ignored or both in alternation, so why did it bother him so much that his ward was feeling the brunt of it? Every kid in elementary school knows how to single out the different one in the bunch. Why should she have escaped it?
His voice still came out darker and rougher than he expected it to when he responded. "Who?"
-o-
"I cannot believe you, Robin Goodfellow."
The project ended up going surprisingly well. Once Puck found out that he enjoyed acting out some of the exploits of Mr. Polk (a man actually with his own faery encounters, it turned out), he made Meghan laugh all through their practices and wowed the class as his partner listed facts and he performed them. For a moment, Robbie Goodfell and Meghan Chase were the two people everyone in Mrs. Harrington's social studies class wanted to be. He hadn't even needed to glamour their teacher to ensure that they got an A. Not that he would, perfectly honest as he was.
It was really more what happened after in the hallway that was the problem.
The nurse threw up her hands and the tiny office seemed to take on a darker, more earthy look as she ranted. "The Erkling will be very displeased, I shouldn't need to tell you, but apparently after today's escapades, you need some reminding of what your place is here and what rules you need to obey. Did you even think-"
"Oberon," Puck cut in smoothly, sitting on top of a filing cabinet in the guise of a red-haired high-schooler so he wouldn't be recognized as his eight-year-old self, "did not know what those kids were saying to her. Believe me, they more than had it coming to them."
"No one said you had to intervene!" The nurse spluttered back, shaking her head. "That's not your place to decide. Even more than that, turning them into rats-"
"Mice." Puck corrected.
"I've had to change them all back, make them forget, and make their parents forget, and I'll have to arrange a meeting with the principal somehow to do the same thing. How could you lose your temper so...?"
He stopped listening and gently nudged the window open. What was his problem? Obviously he didn't feel anything for her; he couldn't. Oberon was made a laughingstock for producing Meghan in the first place, and still was ridiculed by the few who knew, especially Titania.
Did he really want to subject himself to that?
The nurse was still saying something in the background, but he cut in one last time.
"You know, I really liked this gig before Oberon decided I needed backup."
And with that, the red-haired boy was gone and a jet black raven flew out the open window in a swirl of dislodged paperwork and feathers, leaving a very angry school nurse in its wake.
Faeries did not have feelings for humans and make it out okay. Every court has their own stories of abducted humans, tragic romances with death on both sides, and friendship doomed by a misplaced word or promise. The bottom line: it never works.
-o-
So he won't let anyone get close.
He dared the girl to follow him through the dance floor, told her that he wanted to take her somewhere special. Enticed, she agreed, sporting a sly smile.
It only took three minutes to lose her. In the span of one song whose bass forced his heart to beat with it, he wove through humans and faeries alike lost to sound and the ecstasy of close touch. While a DJ mashed two tracks together into a fusion of song, Puck skirted gyrating couples like an electronic riff, ducked under crowd surfers with the low beat of the drumline, and lost his pursuer in the harmony, all without changing his appearance.
It was only afterward, when he friends found her in the middle of the floor and pulled her into their group that he morphed into a brown-haired, blue-eyed businessman on a night out, tipped an imaginary hat, and left.
That she probably wouldn't remember ever meeting him by tomorrow was the perhaps greatest trick of all.
-o-
"Happy birthday!" He sang when the door opened.
Because, okay, sometimes he broke his own rules. And if it meant that he had to become a bit of an anathema himself to get her to smile like that, then so be it. The human world got too boring after a little while if you didn't break a few rules. Faery did too, he guessed.
This was probably why they called him a trickster. Really, he was just keeping things interesting.
"Oh wow, you got me a Chia pet?" Meghan gushed, hands flying to her mouth. "I've always wanted to try growing those and, awww! That hedgehog one is so cute! But didn't you know that you're supposed to wrap it, Robbie?"
"Oh, I was?" Puck replied, looking at the box askance as Meghan giggled. He would really need to start paying more attention to this human culture thing if he was going to throw rules to the wayside and be friends. But why on earth would you want to disguise a gift? Wouldn't you want to show it off and make other people jealous, like at the courts? It made no sense. "Oops, I guess I forgot."
"You forgot!" She was laughing so hard he thought she might cry. "How do you forget something like that?"
So maybe he was on the track to being a laughingstock, too, if this was any indication. But in all fairness, he would have been a very poor jester to the Summer Court if he couldn't make a fool of himself sometimes. Today was just one of those special occasions.
