Sorry for the wait, I was out of the country for 5 weeks and so I couldn't do any updating, and then when I came back, I couldn't find this chapter, which I'd had mostly done. Updates may be a little sparse in the next month or two, I'm moving and starting a full time job, both of which have the potential to be pretty time consuming I guess.

Chapter 3

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Corny got there midmorning a few days later. He hadn't slept except for a few fitful hours every so often, curled up in the driver's seat in rest stop parking lots, placing what he knew was an undeserved amount of trust in his car's locks and human character. By the time he reached his destination, the world looked gray and seemed distanced from him by a fog of fatigue.

The address was in a residential part of town. The few people walking down the sidewalks were his age; it must be a college part of town. The house was painted a bright green with a deep blue door, and in the gray of his mind the colors seemed so dazzling they hurt his eyes. He parallel parked crookedly, and got of the car slowly, checking the scrap of paper in his hand again. It was the right place.

He knocked on the door and stood awkwardly on the step, looking out into the gray of the street instead of at the door. Could-Be-A-Joke, beat his heart.

He was thinking about knocking again when the door finally swung open to reveal a young guy in jeans and a t-shirt looking puzzled.

"Uh, David?" Corny guessed. He should have called or something. God, he hadn't even emailed. He shifted his weight to his other foot uneasily.

"Yeah?" The guy—David-- yawned, and ran a hand through short black over-gelled hair.

"My uh… My name's Corny… And you emailed about… the uh… the…" He sure as hell wasn't going to say faerie, not until he was positive that this was David and that the whole thing hadn't been some kind of joke.

David was still staring at him, squirming and stuttering on the step, and suddenly apprehension dawned on his face. "Oh, shit, oh, you're the guy! That I emailed? I didn't know you were coming. Jesus, you're lucky you didn't get my roommate." He backed into the house, holding the door open. "C'mon, the…." He paused, doing a quick visual scan of the area in much the same style as old movie TV detectives. "The… boy… is still here."

See, Corny told his traitorous heart, stepping into the room. It was a large room, messy, much as he'd always imagined a student room to be. Furniture that looked left over from the 70's covered the ugly carpet, and there was stuff everywhere. Gingerly, he picked his way to a clean spot in the floor before looking up to meet David's gaze.

David was openly staring at him, smirking a little. "You don't look like I expected."

"What did you expect?" Corny's voice was harsh, immediately on the defense, and David looked a little taken aback.

"Oh, I don't know… Just… Someone who looked like they believed in fairies. Some little goth chick or something, I guess."

"Yeah? Well, apparently you believe in faeries, huh? Are you 'some little goth chick'?" David was making him uncomfortable; he was still staring. Corny crossed his arms over his chest. The movement seemed to startle the other boy, he snapped his eyes away from Corny and looked sheepishly at the floor.

"Yeah…" he finally said, running a nervous hand through his hair. "Yeah, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have assumed."

Corny snorted.

"So, anyway, the… guy… is down here," David finally said after a short silence, gesturing down a hallway.

Corny nodded and David started off down the hall. They passed doors left wide open and hanging ajar until they got to the last door which was rather obviously closed. "He won't be awake," David warned as he pushed lightly on the door with his fingertips.

It swung open, and Corny didn't even remember pushing his way forward, but he found himself standing in front of David, staring at the bed, his heart pounding. And there he was: the faerie, lying tangled in the sheets, a pair of wings awkwardly folded underneath him.

He looked nothing like Corny's faerie— blond hair and pale skin, his eyelashes strokes of surprising darkness where they lay softly on his cheekbones. Looked more like an angel than a faerie. He looked healthy—simply asleep—until Corny's eyes strayed from the face and down across the pale chest to where two gashes sliced open the taut skin over the boy's ribs, running from his chest to where they disappeared behind the sheet that was lying across his stomach.

Corny had crossed the room and was pulling back the sheet that covered part of the wounds when David came up behind him. "It's not as bad as it looks. Not too deep."

"It looks plenty deep to me," Corny replied, surprised when he found that he was clenching the sheet tight in anger. "Why the fuck have you just left it open?" Concentrating a few seconds, he carefully uncurled one finger at a time. "Should of put on a bandage or something, at least." Now that his attention had been distracted from the actual faerie lying there, he noticed the blood stains smeared on the sheets.

"He won't let me," David explained, shrugging. "Whenever I touch him, he struggles… kicking, hitting out at anything. He's not quite awake but it's like he knows someone is there."

"How'd you get him here then?"

David shrugged again. "He was completely unconscious when I found him. I was coming home from some party, not entirely sober, either, and there was this… person… in the alley, and it's not a homeless guy or anything, you could tell he wasn't just sleeping or whatever." He snorted. "So I'm freaking out, right, and I start to call the cops, y'know, maybe an ambulance… and then I saw the wings and shit. And I know I'm not that drunk, y'know? So I brought him back here, didn't know what else to do."

"Yeah…" Corny muttered, not paying too much attention any more. The faerie had moved a little. Not much, not even enough to wrinkle the sheet that Corny had carefully lain back over him, but he'd definitely stirred a little.

"…what I should do?" David finished his question.

"What?" Corny asked, looking away from the boy with difficulty.

"What should I do for him?" David repeated, looking bemused. "I'm completely stumped."

"What, do you think I'm a doctor?" It had only just occurred to Corny that this guy expected him to have some great answer, like he was an expert on healing faeries that looked like they'd gotten in the way of a machete. "I don't know what to do, you need to find a doctor, take him to the hospital or something. You keep him here and you're playing with his life."

David actually laughed. "What, take him to the hospital with the three foot fucking wings on his back? 'Yeah, doc, they're just his fashion statement, he had them surgically attached'? Besides, maybe what works on us would kill him, you want to chance that, huh? You think I'm playing with his life, what do you want, to get him locked up in some lab somewhere?" He started to run a hand through his hair, but caught himself halfway through, bringing his hand down to stare at his palm as though he might find an answer there.

When he began to speak again, it was quieter, and Corny knew that he was being manipulated by a soft voice and calm words, but the earnestness in David's voice cut straight to the part of his brain that equated quiet with logical as David spoke low and fast, like a man on a prescription drug commercial trying to sneak in the nasty side effects.

"Look, I know you're not a doctor. And I know that maybe you don't want to have the responsibility of this… kid's… life on your hands. But you walk away now, and he might die. You're already responsible." Corny felt his stomach shift as he recognized the truth in the words, even before David continued: "I got no clue what to do, and you're the only one I know who might even have an idea. That's all I… he needs. Just an idea. Are you not going to give it to him?"

Corny sighed. "Alright. Fine, I'll try. First of all, is there any iron in the room?"