Judal's room looked something close to typical if you just glanced around. He didn't make his bed and his desk lamp was perpetually on, books were scattered across various surfaces instead of on their proper shelves, and he had a collection of juice cans on one corner of his bedside table he kept meaning to throw out. But there were no posters on the walls, no photos of family or pets, no calendar. All his books were second hand and all his furniture was mismatched. Disjointed.

It looked homey, but impersonal. Like at any moment Judal could get up and leave it all behind without worrying too much about how he was going to replace it. He'd made himself something comfortable out of used pieces other people discarded, and that seemed to suit him.

Permanence was something Judal was learning. Growing up, change had been a constant and every guaranteed "certainty" seemed more effervescent than the last. He'd known there was such a thing as children with parents and siblings, homes they lived in for decades and rooms they never worried about being gone, he just hadn't been one of them.

The one thing Judal owned in excess was clothing. His dresser was crammed full of a disorganized mess of cloth sorted into tangled arrangements only he understood and the bottom of his closet was a sea of even more. There were things he wore constantly and things he had bought and tossed out of their bags never to be touched again.

He'd lived out of the same bag of clothing for years growing up. New things were second hand, passed from the last foster child to outgrow them to him. If he grew too much too fast he just had to live with shirts that constantly rode up over his stomach and jeans that didn't cover his ankles.

Did he need as much clothing as he now owned? No. Should he spend as much money on clothing as he did? Probably not. In fact arguably he could have blindly gotten rid of half of his collection and never even noticed. But the clothing was his, and that meant more to him than the actual articles themselves.

And besides, you never knew when you were going to have to clothe a faerie prince, having a wide selection to choose from was beneficial!

"Yeah. Sure." Judal sighed to himself, hanging his head. "That's absolutely what I had in mind."

Alright, so you find yourself housing a fae, inadvertently locked in some ancient contract of guest and host, and he's just gone and sworn himself into your service until the debt you unintentionally led him to incur is paid off. What do you do?

Well firstly, you find him something to wear because it's incredibly distracting to keep seeing his bare skin and he probably knows it.

Judal pulled open every single drawer in his dresser and the door to his closet, rummaging through one at a time. He really should take everything out and fold it. He wouldn't, but he should. The state of disarray might be familiar but it wasn't exactly practical. While he was at it, he should sort things into what he loved, what he wore occasionally, and what he hadn't even seen since buying it. Again, not a task for today, but something to keep in mind.

It took him about a half hour to go through everything and come up with clothing he thought might fit his guest. They were about the same height, from what he could garner, but the fae had a distinctly different build than he did. He settled on sweatpants instead of jeans and a long sleeved shirt he knew was too big for his slim torso but would probably fit Hakuryuu snugly. He dug a pair of socks out of a drawer as an afterthought, not sure if fae got cold but knowing that one could not trust the spotty heating in his building for crap.

Halfway through folding the shirt, Judal realized he was stalling.

Scared wasn't the right word for what he was feeling. Overwhelmed maybe, but even that didn't fit as well as it should. Sure, his conversation with Hakuryuu had left him with a lot to think about but it wasn't making his thoughts into any kind of jumbled mess.

But there was doubt.

Judal had a bad habit of finding himself in the kind of trouble he couldn't have seen coming and generally didn't deserve to be involved in. As a child, it had been little things. One of his foster fathers tried to cut his hair and the scissors broke, his foster brother stole the shared Gameboy and it suddenly died in his hands, a cassette Judal hated got scrambled beyond redemption.

In school he had stood up to bullies only to have the kid he was defending turn on him not ten seconds later, saying he didn't need to be protected by some freaky orphan. Teachers blamed him for things his classmates did, because who was going to complain at parent teacher conference? If something bad happened in his general vicinity, somehow he got tangled up in it.

He'd discovered the best way to avoid this happening was to simply avoid people in general. If he kept to himself his peers were less likely to drag him into their shenanigans and if he got good grades adults tended to leave him alone. As long as he made an incredible effort to avoid trouble, he did alright.

And now he had a world's worth of trouble on his couch. Of course he'd known that Hakuryuu was into some kind of sketchy nonsense but to be a fae? That was far outside even his scope of assumption. If he got involved, or at least more involved than he already was, who knew where it could lead.

Of course, he couldn't go back and change the past. What's done is done had been his motto since this whole thing started, and he repeated it back to himself now. It didn't have the calming effect it had before.

Judal took a deep breath and closed his eyes, pushing both hands into his hair, shoving his bangs away from his face for a moment.

The real question was, if he could go back and change things, would he? Would he watch Hakuryuu fall from the sky in the middle of an unremarkable rainy night and choose instead to just keep walking to his front door? Would he leave him there to bleed and not think about it twice? It would continue to rain, he would put his mostly dry groceries away, take a hot shower and go to bed. No debt, no faeries, no sense of impending doom.

But also no knowledge that magic was real and faeries liked pancakes. No use for his enormous medical kit, which would continue to sit in the bathroom and be scowled at in varying intervals. No malicious tomatoes or one armed faerie princes who didn't quite understand humor.

If he could go back, right now, and stop himself from getting involved in all of this, would he?

Judal grinned, releasing his hair and relaxing his shoulders.

"Hell no."

Immediately, he felt lighter, the weight of whatever emotion he'd been carrying lifting off him without another word. Judal mussed a hand through his hair, at ease once more, and scooped up the clothes.

"Hey Hakuryuu, think you can stand? I found somethin' that should fit you!"

Surprise! Happy Thanksgiving everyone. To all those with family and without, who enjoy this day and don't, I hope the day goes well for you~