SUMMARY: Details of Wink's visit to Lorelei in Chapter 41: Silver and Gold, of "Once Upon A Time," by LA Knight. After Wink has delivered Nuada's presents to Dylan at dawn (flowers and silly socks! whoo!), he takes his own sweet time making Nuada wait, and comes back to the lair at sunset with a smear of Lorelei's lip-rouge on his shoulder. Hmm, how'd he get that there?

PART 2: Directly continued from Silver And Gold Part 1: Taste of Blood, Geri has left the building, and Wink has arrived, so now we get to the start of Wink's day spent with Lorelei.

A/N - German translations at the bottom in the end-notes. A few things may be quoted from or alluding to Chapter 37: When You're Gone (Part 1) of "Once Upon A Time," or other shorts in this fic.

There weren't that many people in Fafner's Cave this early in the day, so soon after dawn, so there weren't many to see Wink at the foot of the short set of stairs that lead from the tavern's rave room down into the bar itself, standing almost perfectly still, his one eye caught by the slender form of the hostess of the establishment leaning sideways against the bar, her back to him while she seemed to gaze far off, one of her hands idling through the lower lengths of her long, midnight-colored hair. A passing bieresal tapped Lorelei and gestured towards Wink, and she turned around. Her smile right then was the most bright and beautiful thing that the troll could remember seeing in a long, long time. A smile of his own pulled up at the corners of his mouth, and he stepped forward to meet her halfway as she came towards him. He held out his hand for her, and softly, smoothly, the rhinemaiden slid her hand to fit into his. Her thumb brushed back and forth, as light as a butterfly and as soft as velvet, over the rough skin of his hand, while his large fingers curled around hers like an embrace, his thumb lightly tracing over her fair knuckles. Time stood still around the two of them, as they stood like this, each bearing a look about them that spoke clearly what neither of them had any need to say aloud. I am glad to see you.

"That boy behaving himself?" Wink grunted, giving a slight jerk of his head back in the direction that Geri had gone.

"Was?" It took a second for Lorelei's thoughts come around to processing what Wink was saying. "Oh! Geri. The, ah, fenris, ja..." She lifted her eyebrows in a kind of "shrug" that used only the muscles of her finely-featured face. "So far he's demonstrated the ability to stop when he's told," she acknowledged, before she added in an analytical undertone, "which is remarkable for one of his kind. It shows a high degree of strength of will, which stands to make him very dangerous to his rivals in pack-warfare."

"Hm," Wink grunted, unenthusiastically. "Glad to hear it." He made a mental note of the name Geri in connection with that fenris. "But," he growled, "if he ever forgets his manners..."

The river faery's face immediately split into a puckish smile, the points of her white teeth contrasting sharply with her soft, rich red lips. "Then you shall be the first to hear of it," she responded, her aurulent eyes twinkling. "Ich verspreche es." Lorelei pulled the towering troll with her over towards the bar, her hand never leaving his for even a moment, and once they were seated, facing each other, she brought her other hand to rest on his as well, brushing smoothly over the back of his rough knuckles, the outside of his thumb, all the way to his wristguard, and back around again. Enveloping his hand in her touch, igniting a tingling warmth in his chest that spread to his smile as he looked at her.

Still as lovely as always, he thought, and yet lovelier still. Her eyes, her smile, all of it was familiar and new at the same time. Gods, the way that she looked at him now! It was enough to bring a man to his knees, or a human to his certain death.

The faery beauty gave the silver warrior's hand a small squeeze as she said, in a voice like ethereal gold catching on mist, "I was thinking of you earlier, just a while ago. I've been hoping for when I would see you again." Her warm smile broadened, "And now here you are... Endlich." She gave a very soft, short sort of little laugh, golden eyes dancing like sunlight on rippling water.

The cave troll's one eye shone brightly at the river maiden. "My word, and my honor, I have upheld, I came at the soonest opportunity," he growled softly, brushing his thumb over Lorelei's slender fingers. His touch started flutters in her belly. His smile and the way that his eye held hers had them wrapping around her lower spine and crawling all the way up to her heart. "For your fine drink and your even finer company, for as long as you can spare, beautiful Lorelei." There it was again. That incredible depth and rare dimension of sincerity in the way that he called her "beautiful."

Lorelei broke her eyes from his for a moment, took a breath and said, with a very faint shiver in her voice that did not escape Wink's notice, "Actually, I have no plans at all for today, so my time is all yours, for as long as you may stay." Wink's smile broadened considerably at those words, and Lorelei returned it with another soft squeeze of his hand. "Troll beer?" He gave a short grunt and a nod by way of "yes, please," and a bieresal made short work of bringing the troll his drink. Lorelei got up from where she sat to fetch her own drink. Cider, brewed and bottled by a local clurichaun and sold only through a few select places in Manhattan, Fafner's Cave being one of them. The bottles resembled something very close to human cola bottles, complete with crimp-edged metal caps, but there was no lead in the glass, and the caps were not made from cheap plastic-coated scrap metal. Wink started into his drink as Lorelei sat down with her bottle of cider and a bottle-opener. She wrapped one hand high around the neck of the bottle to hold it steady while she made to pry off the cap with the other... But for some reason this cap just didn't want to come off. She tried a little harder.

"Ach!" Lorelei hissed. The bottle of cider, with its bent cap still half-clinging to it resolutely in mockery, managed to stay on the bar as the Germanic siren sharply retracted her hand from around its slender neck, having acquired a wound from the serrated edge of the cap in her brief battle with it, as it bent suddenly in awkward defiance of her efforts to remove it. Wink reacted instantly by setting down his mug of beer and grasping her slender hand in his, inspecting the damage with the critical eye of one who was quite accustomed to gauging the severity of wounds. It was a shallow cut, about an inch long, nothing more serious than broken skin. Glistening gold began to well up between the sliced edges and trickle thinly over her dove-white palm.

"Where is the nearest outlet for water from here?" Wink inquired.

"There is a faucet with a sink," Lorelei responded, pointing towards a back hallway off one side of the bar, "in the counter along the hall to the kitchen." Still carefully holding the river maiden's hand in his, Wink began to pull her along with him in that direction. Lorelei smiled, laughing a little as she said humorously, "Well there's no need to lead me about like a child, Wink."

The troll snorted. "I haven't thought of you as a child for a long time," he rumbled. "Not since you sauntered into your parents' tavern one night with a bzou on your arm. Your mother couldn't decide whether to be proud or mortified!" They both laughed at the memory, his deep, gravelly laughter contrasting with her lighter, clearer voice. That particular incident had been about a year and a half after Lorelei's aging had started to slow. For ten years of her life, Lorelei had not been a child but not entirely a woman yet, either. Rhine folk matured exceptionally quickly for sentient fae, though not at all at the incredibly accelerated rate that demons and angels did. The closest creature to compare to was (regrettably) a human. Essentially, a Rhine child and a human child grew and developed at the same rate... for as long as they were children. Once little girls became young women, however, dramatic differences became apparent. A human lass would take four to six years to mature, and then she would continue to age and eventually whither and die. One of Lorelei's kin would take twice that long - eight to twelve years - and then she would continue to age only up to a certain point past her adolescence (early twenties by human reckoning), and then Time would stand still.

Forever a maiden. Forever beauteous. Forever living while mortal creatures died.

Though she was born before the sinking of the Titanic, Lorelei was now as she had always been ever since sometime in the nineteen-thirties, and she always would be. Nothing had changed in nearly seventy years. Nothing ever would. Such was the fact of reality.

"Na ja, the way that I remember it," Lorelei continued, "is that she was a little of both. Proud that her daughter could charm such a creature so effortlessly, but mortified that said daughter would bring home a 'wild animal' - as she called him - and in all seriousness, essentially ask, 'Kann ich ihn behalten?'" Troll and Rhine daughter both laughed again at that, and then Wink stopped laughing once he stepped into the hallway that led to the kitchen. Lorelei might have wondered if something was amiss, were it not for the glow that he radiated, through the shine in his eye, the smile on his craggy face, and through that which she picked up on empathically from him. It wasn't difficult to deduce what might have brought this about.

Right there, on the counter-top, was the glass bowl of waterlilies that Wink had sent her.

"Kept them here did you?" The silver troll rumbled with a wide smile.

Lorelei responded with a sparkling smile of her own, "I wanted them to be where I would see them often. They are too wonderful to set just anywhere." Her words nearly made the troll's smile into a grin.

Momentarily letting go of the river maid's cut hand, Wink turned the lever of the faucet to the "on" position, and then he gently set his hand at her waist, partially over her hip, to guide her to stand in front of him. Tiny sparks flew from where his large, warm hand touched her to the column of her spine, singing up and down her nerves, and back again. It was extremely hard for Lorelei to keep down the lightest-gold flush that threatened to rise to the surface of her fair skin. Once she was in position, near the sink, Wink's hand slid forward from her hip to her elbow, and smoothly down the length of her arm to where the long, elegant sleeve of the champagne-gold shrug that she wore over her Valentine-red cami-top ended and her milky wrist began. The pads of his thumb and his final finger slid over the inside of the edges of her palm, giving the appearance of him unfolding or uncurling her hand like a leaf, until her hand lay splayed out in his, the back of it resting softly against his palm. His large thumb curled over to rest with the pad of it at the outer edge of her palm, and he guided her hand in his under the small stream of cool water. Like all creatures with scales or skin who were adapted to aquatic living, Rhine folk were slippery to the touch when in their natural element, and so Wink's thumb slid easily over Lorelei's wet palm, passing in small, slow circles, clearing away the tracks of gold that had traced their way over her skin from the cut at the inner edge of her palm. Lorelei was acutely aware of the troll's presence close at her back, dwarfing her, utterly engulfing her in the electromagnetic aura of his existence, as he smoothly traced over and over again the lines of her hand, the veins underneath, circling down lazily over the delicate, slippery skin of her wrist, where her pulse beat hard in time with his, and sweeping back up to the ends of her long, slender fingers. Lorelei already lost the battle with the amber flush that bloomed over her cheeks and chest.

The natural slick of her skin would help her to heal, Wink knew, but he was in more than enough of a mood to act on the rather undeniable urge to play along with sentimental superstition, as it applied here. With his remarkably dextrous mechanical right hand, he turned the water off again, as he curled his fingers carefully about the fair hand of the dark-haired faery beauty that lay nestled in his left. She turned to face him while he lifted her hand at the end of her long, slender arm up to his mouth.

When his surprisingly smooth lips slid over the delicate skin of her palm, Lorelei felt something indescribable crackle from the nerves in her hand, down her arm, and play like a lightning-storm over her spine, and through her slightly shivering shoulders and thundering heart.

As for Wink, he did his best not to linger, for he was quick to realize that if he allowed himself to, he very likely would not be able to bring himself to stop anytime soon. Or possibly ever. Touching her skin - softer than a swan's feather - was something that he found enjoyable enough as it was with just his hand. Touching her as he did now, with his mouth... Gods, so sweet...

Neither of them seemed to pay all that much attention to how his breathing had deepened by a fraction or how her wine-red lips had parted as he did this, though both had noticed it, vaguely.

When his mouth came away from her hand, he held onto it still, tracing light little circles in the center of her palm with his thumb. His shining one eye and her ultra-gold gaze held each other. "Better?" Wink rumbled, his voice as low and deep as the earth itself.

"Ja," breathed Lorelei, in a whisper like the lightest air passing through reed grasses in the utter stillness before dawn.

"Entschuldigung!" The voice of a bieresal barked, shattering the fragile quiet of the moment as it scurried between the startled pair on its way to the kitchen. The warrior and the river maiden hastily parted way for the bieresal, and as it passed Lorelei looked at Wink with an apologetic smile, whilst the irritated troll glared after the sprite and briefly imagined knocking it upside the head.

"It would appear that uninterrupted privacy is a rare commodity these days," said Lorelei almost wistfully, halfhearted humor very evident in her smile and in her voice, like softly chimed water-glasses.

"Indeed," muttered Wink in something very akin to a growl.

Lorelei took a breath and let it out in a sigh. Then something sparked in her eye, almost like a sunbeam glancing off a pirate's coin, and her aspect changed as a new idea took hold.

"Would you..." Lorelei bit her lip just a little, her manner becoming suddenly uncharacteristically shy as Wink turned his head to look at her. "If Silverlance does not require you to be on your way soon, would you..." She trailed off for a moment.

Say it! Her mind told her. Just ask him!

"Would you like to go to my place upstairs?"

Wink's eye widened.

For a moment, neither one of them said anything. The flutters in Lorelei beat hard and frenziedly of their own accord against the confines of her flesh, like fish in a bag of water, while Wink's heart pounded like a smith's hammer and his blood flashed as hot as a goblin forge. "If you can stay," the rhinemaiden finally said, softly, like the first rain of spring.

Wink thought of how the clock had sounded off in the small hours of the night that Lorelei had shared her company and a bottle of rare elf wine with him and how he had wished that he hadn't had to leave then, but he did anyway. He thought of how Lorelei had eventually had to get back to her work shift when he came by to see her again after that, and tend to her bar full of patrons besides him. He thought of those twenty minutes that they'd had alone in Little Budapest together that still scorched him whenever he lay his head down to sleep – only twenty minutes, and not a minute longer.

Wink had given his word to Lady Dylan that she would see Prince Nuada tonight, but in order for that to happen he would have to return to the prince, apprise him of the mortal woman's acceptance of his words and his gifts, so that the elf could be on his way.

My time is all yours, for as long as you may stay...

Silverlance could wait.

Sunset was hours away, anyway.

To Be Continued...

A/N - A clurichaun is a kind of Irish fairy similar to a leprechaun, but instead of making shoes, they're always drunk or looking for their next drink.

- Getting cut when the bottle-cap bends sharply all-of-a-sudden as you're trying to get it off is something that's actually happened to me before.

- A bzou is a kind of lycanthrope from the folklore of French peasants, and supposedly different from a loup-garou, which is a proper werewolf. The best-known bzou in history is the original Big Bad Wolf that figures in the earliest-known recorded stories of Little Red Riding Hood. The particular bzou alluded to in this short is the previously mentioned "first crush" of Lorelei, from All's Fair In Love, War, And Drinking. Ah, young love. :)

- The thing about the rate at which Rhine folk age and mature is ENTIRELY my own conjecture, and does not come from any actual source to be found in lore, please keep that in mind.

- In the Hellboy comics, HB (big red demon) really does mature quite rapidly. Snippet from the Hellboy Wiki: "Hellboy also seems to age differently from normal Humans. At the time that young Hellboy tried his favorite food, "pamcakes" for the first time, he was technically two years old but appeared to be far older, around age six. In 1954 he already appeared to be a full grown adult, but was in reality about ten years old. His rapid physical maturation is in contrast to his physical rate of aging, which seems to be much slower than normal. Throughout the sixty year span of his life, Hellboy seems to have ceased to age ever since reaching physical maturity." This seems to have been ignored and bent around quite a bit in the movies, though, because in the first movie Agent Clay says to John Myers, "He doesn't age like we do. Think reverse dog-years, he's barely out of his twenties!" But in Hellboy II, in the 1955 Christmas scene, HB looks roughly his real age, like a regular 10 to 11-year-old, but demonic. Really makes you wish that Hollywood would make up its mind, huh? ;)

- The "slippery in water" factor of Rhine maids is something I figured from general knowledge of biology. Animals adapted to living in aquatic environments that don't have fur (otters and polar bears) or fuzzy hides (seals) tend to have a slime coating to their skin or scales that keeps them from being as wrinkled up as you or I, and protects them as a first line of defense in the elements of their habitat. While Lorelei doesn't get all thick-coated in slime, per se, she does become quite slippery smooth. She's one slick chick, heh heh.

- The mouth is universally in the top 5 most sensitive organ sets in all known creatures that have a mouth, and in humans it's the set that has the second highest density of nerve endings and touch receptors in the body (you can probably guess which other set has the highest density *ahem*). This is why kissing/touching with the mouth is so significant, and I figured that trolls weren't much different in that regard. Got a mouth. Got lips. Great.

TRANSLATIONS

Was? = What?

Ich verspreche es = I promise (it)

Endlich = Finally/At last

Kann ich ihn behalten? = Can I keep him?

Entschuldigung! = Excuse me!

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