"So… I see you've redecorated."
Judal had left in a hurry that morning. After spending most of the previous night awake talking with Hakuryuu while he rewrapped his bandages, he had overslept. He couldn't be sure if he had tied his shoes before he left the house, or if the three hair ties around his wrist actually belonged to him. It was a total mystery to him whether Hakuryuu was awake when he told him to help himself to the fridge and to have a good day before he left.
He did however distinctly remember that his carpet had been red shag, his couch had been threadbare and sort of uncomfortable, and most of his furniture hadn't matched. So, unless his eyes were playing very elaborate tricks on him, that in no way described the living room he had just walked into.
Where the shag had been this morning there was now a warm looking rug of deep, deep blue that appeared soft enough to fall asleep on. The couch had been transformed into black leather with a high back and a wide seat where one could comfortably fit their whole body. His coffee table, covered in nicks and scratches from whatever hell it had been through before being in his possession, had been replaced by one made of what looked like very dark, well-polished wood.
The rest of his furniture had apparently been treated to the same makeover. Mismatched cloth had all become complimenting shades of blue, varying between navy and cerulean, and the wood had all turned into the same expensive looking, dark kind as the coffee table. There were new drapes hanging in the windows and if he wasn't terribly mistaken; a new coat of paint on his entire apartment in a shade of white so crisp it might have been fresh fallen snow.
In the middle of it stood Hakuryuu, dressed in a new pair of sweatpants and a shirt with short sleeves. His hand was resting on a potted plant that Judal had absolutely not owned that morning, and it appeared to be growing around his hand. The fae looked around himself, as if only just observing how different the room looked.
"Well… Yes." he agreed without much inflection.
Judal stepped inside, shutting the door behind himself and sliding his bag from his shoulder. It hit the floor with a muted thud as he toed off his shoes. Hakuryuu regarded him from across the room, but Judal merely raised an eyebrow, awaiting an explanation.
"I was going to discuss it with you," he continued, taking the cue. "But you left quickly this morning, I thought it best to let you go without further distraction."
"Okay but why?"
There must have been an edge to his voice because Hakuryuu's expression shifted slightly. His eyes widened a fraction and he turned himself so that he was more openly facing his host.
"When I got up this morning I realized exactly how much I had bled. Much of your furniture was stained because of my carelessness, I thought it fair I replace it."
"You really need to stop talking about nearly dying like a minor inconvenience."
Hakuryuu merely blinked at him and Judal sighed, resisting the urge to rub his temples.
"How did you get this shit in here?" he asked eventually. "Your side only just stopped bleeding."
Rather than reply, Hakuryuu disentangled his hand from the plant and walked over to the rug. Leaning over, he took the edge in hand and flicked his wrist. A ripple passed through it from where he'd started, somehow leaving all of the furniture resting atop it undisturbed in its wake. As he watched, the color shifted to a darker shade of blue.
Judal stared, marveling at the subtle change.
"Magic?" he questioned, even though he knew the answer.
"Magic." Hakuryuu confirmed. "A very basic principle of it applied in a slightly more complex manner. Not terribly difficult."
"Transformation, right?"
The fae gave him an appraising look as Judal knelt down across from him, rubbing his hand through the soft fibers of the rug.
"Correct." he agreed again.
When it came to talking, Judal had come away with too many questions and not enough answers in conversation with Hakuryuu. Fae, as it turned out, were masters of outwitting their curse of honesty. Hakuryuu managed to talk him in absolute circles until Judal wasn't sure if he had gotten an answer or not and never once seemed phased.
Trying to find the kernels of information amidst the riddles and cryptic answers was like pulling teeth. He suspected that, had Hakuryuu not liked him somewhat, it might have been considerably more like pulling teeth with tweezers.
Among his few concrete answers, Judal had learned something of magic. It existed on three basic principles; creation, transformation, and destruction. Creation referred to magic that brought something into existence from nothing. Transformative magic turned something that existed into something new. And destructive magic was not something Hakuryuu had allowed him to dwell on, but Judal thought it sounded relatively self-explanatory.
"So you transformed all my furniture." Judal said, pushing himself back up to his feet. "So what, that's your debt paid and whatnot?"
"My debt?"
Hakuryuu stood and even across the rug Judal was acutely aware of the fact that though the prince was an inch or so shorter than him he felt bigger than the skin he was in. Like there was too much of him to be contained to something smaller than Judal.
"No." he shook his head. "This was just courtesy."
"Since when is replacing furniture good manners? Most people would just send a couple hundred bucks for the cleaning bill."
"I suspect that very few mortals know how to remove faerie bloodstains. And besides, I did not do it entirely for your benefit."
"You hate my furniture that much, Hakuryuu?" he laid a hand over his chest, expression exaggerated. "I'm hurt."
Blue eyes rolled in response, but Judal was sure he saw amusement in them for just a moment.
"Your couch was ghastly. If I slept on it another night I'd have woken up with a crooked spine."
"But that was part of its charm."
Hakuryuu gave him a clearly unconvinced look, to which Judal just grinned, and turned back to the window. He returned to the plant, worming his fingers fluidly back into the greenery and focusing intently on how it began to wrap around his hand. Judal shuffled across the new rug to peer over his shoulder.
"You created that, right?" he asked.
There was an agreeable hum as answer, but he remained quiet. He got the feeling Hakuryuu was the type to talk when he saw fit, and sometimes it was best to just wait and listen.
"I had to be sure my magic was flowing correctly." he said eventually. "Adjusting your furniture was simple, good practice to be sure I could ease into something more complex."
"Why a window plant?"
Hakuryuu remained silent, seeming to consider how to answer this.
"All magic comes from the three principles I told you of; creation, transformation and destruction. But these can manifest in many different forms. Some have an affinity for fire, others for illusions, others for ice, the list continues."
"So all magic comes from the same stuff and basically works the same, but different people are better equipped to use it with different things?"
"In so many words, yes."
"And you're good with plants?"
The look Hakuryuu gave him looked like a smile, but the way his eyes flashed spoke of something far more sinister. Malicious was the wrong word for it, though there was a dark kind of amusement in him Judal didn't know the name for. Like he knew something no one else did.
"Living organisms."
Judal blinked, momentarily taken by surprise.
"What—Like… Any organism?"
"Organisms with advanced sentience, such as humans or animals, are incredibly more difficult. Far outside my current scope of ability. But in theory, yes."
They stared at one another, Judal's expression drawn into something akin to someone waiting for the scare in a horror movie and Hakuryuu unreadably calm. There was a pregnant pause, and then;
"Has anyone ever told you you're kind of fucking terrifying? Especially when you do that whole blank expression thing after basically admitting you could conceivably control all living things."
For a moment Hakuryuu was so stunned his expression dropped into almost comical shock. Then, he laughed. A real belly laugh that shook his shoulders and made him close his eyes and shake his head.
"You are fearless, you know that?" he chuckled, eyes dancing with amusement when he looked back at Judal, who was looking a little scandalized. "I can think of at least five people who would be utterly appalled to hear you speak to me that way, and that I allowed it."
"I'm just calling it like it is. You're really creepy when you want to be."
"It's not my intention."
Several of the vines had begun twisting around Hakuryuu's wrist, and though neither man had noticed, small flower buds had begun appearing in random intervals as he laughed. A few of them had blossomed into tiny flowers by the time he looked back down.
"I considered a larger base to work with, but ultimately decided the more concentrated the better." Hakuryuu explained. "I'll be using this to replace my left arm."
Judal looked between the flowering vines and the fae.
"You're gonna replace your arm with…a houseplant?"
"This is no domestic flora. It will take me some time with the constraints I must work with, but properly tended this will be growing into a Silver Lady. Or that's the mortal name for it, anyway."
"I've never heard of it." Not that Judal was exactly well read on the subject of flora and fauna. He suddenly wondered if he should be brushing up on his biology.
"It's a type of tree that only grows in Sidhe. The leaves are silver and the tree itself is white, inside and out. It's quite beautiful, but I believe the story goes that a mortal mistook one for a woman in a snowstorm in our realm."
"Well, not to be a stickler but those leaves are green." Judal pointed out. "Also I'm not totally clear on the tree-to-arm process."
"Oh, this isn't the Silver Lady. I grew these to enrich the soil. They'll reach their peak and wither soon, then rot and return to the earth. As is the cycle."
Even as he said it, the flowers that had begun to blossom all along the curling vines started to darken in color. As they watched, they wilted, shrinking in on themselves and beginning to drop off into the dirt. The vines receded, curling back towards their roots as they shrunk.
Judal watched, fascinated by the rapid decline. They stood there in silence as the plant in the pot shriveled more and more until finally it melted away into the dirt. Almost as soon as it was gone however, new sprouts began to emerge from the soil, reaching up towards the light earnestly.
"That was beautiful." Judal breathed, not totally intent on Hakuryuu hearing him.
The prince had, though. He cast a glance in his host's direction, then looked back down at the pot. The sprouts had begun to spread and grow into some kind of grass and he lowered his fingertips amongst them, feeding them more of his power to hasten their growth.
"There aren't many that would call death beautiful." he said in an equally quiet tone. "Or did you mean what came after, the new growth?"
"All of it. The whole cycle of one thing to the next. You don't see it happen so fast usually, or at least, us mortals don't."
He stared a while longer, watching the grass grow long around Hakuryuu's fingers, then snapped his attention back to him abruptly.
"So. Your arm?"
Hakuryuu smiled faintly.
"I'll be making it from the tree itself." he explained.
"Oh! A prosthetic! You're gonna carve it? Isn't that gonna be a little hard with one hand?"
"Not carve, no." Hakuryuu turned the same mysterious smile on Judal. "You'll see. I'll show you."
The way he said it sent a hum through the air Judal was beginning to recognize as the faintest traces of magic. It had been there each time Hakuryuu had made some kind of promise, sending pleasant little shivers through him. He liked it, he had decided.
"Although," the prince went on, turning to frown down at the pot. "If I had my original arm it would be much easier. This way will be difficult and likely painful."
"Sorry, didn't see any severed arms around when I picked you up."
"You must have missed it."
It took Judal a moment to realize that Hakuryuu wasn't being serious. He'd made a joke. He caught the fae watching him out of the corner of his eye and grinned widely.
"I'm rubbing off on you!"
"I should hope not."
Judal laughed, in part belatedly at the joke and in part because he was happy. Why the thought that he was influencing the prince at all made him feel so good he wasn't sure, but it did, and he would take positive feelings where he found them. His chortles carried on longer than abjectly necessary, but he caught Hakuryuu smiling and it made him carry on.
He fell silent and they both returned to watching the growing plant, each content with the silence. Judal dropped into a crouch at some point, his eyes on level with the rim of the pot. He followed the growing blades of grass as they reached higher and higher, stems emerging among them and curving upwards, topped with bulbous buds. They flowered into bright yellow blossoms, then as quickly as the plant before, withered and died.
As this next plant returned to the earth, only to emerge as the next layer of soon to be fertilizer, Hakuryuu spoke. He did so without looking away from his project, but there was a light curiosity in his tone.
"Where is it exactly you ran off to this morning, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Hm?"
For a minute, Judal completely forgot. He'd been so mesmerized by the growing greenery it took him a second to organize his thoughts.
"Oh. School." he said bluntly. "Nowhere special."
"School?"
"Yeah. Y'know. College? Higher education? Giant money pit for anyone unfortunate enough to go on their own dime?" he looked up at Hakuryuu, blinked, then said; "You haven't got those, have you."
Hakuryuu shook his head.
"No. Even "schools" as an organized concept are rare in the Sidhe realm. I was taught by instructors, but never at your age."
Judal scowled up at him, obviously not appreciating his comment.
"You don't look that much older than me."
Hakuryuu lifted his eyebrows, finally turning his eyes down to meet Judal's.
"We do not refer to your kind as mortals for lack of a better term." he said. "I suspect I am more than ten times your age, at youngest."
"I'm nineteen. Maybe twenty."
"Ah. I was right then."
He looked back at the pot, now full of various sizes of mushroom, then seemed realize what Judal had said and frowned. Still frowning, he looked back down at the man beside him.
"Did you say maybe twenty?"
"Yeah. Why?"
Hakuryuu's expression couldn't seem to decide if it wanted to be pointedly confused or slightly irritated and settled somewhere in between.
"I apologize but I've heard of the more ancient of my kind forgetting their age, but never a mortal."
"Oh. Yeah I guess most people have an easier time of that than me." Judal waved a hand dismissively, eyes back on the pot. "I don't actually know when I was born, specifically. So it's kinda hard keeping track of my age."
"Don't mortals celebrate their dates of birth rather consecutively?"
"Well, yeah, but that's assuming there's someone around to know when that date is and actually want to celebrate it."
Before he could think better of it Hakuryuu opened his mouth, only to pause before speaking. The question rested on the tip of his tongue, ready to spill over his lips, but remained there instead. He watched Judal, sitting on his toes and contently observing the growth of fungus in the pot, and realized he didn't want to ask the question. It was neither his place, nor his business to know.
He turned his own gaze back to the plants, now overflowing with vibrantly colored fungus and spindly flowers he knew to be poisonous and he'd had no intention to grow. Without hesitation he sent mold to consume them and destroy their toxicity, though this did little to distract him. The implications of Judal's words bothered him, but more than that the fact that he hesitated to upset him did.
The fungi started to die off, one at a time. Hakuryuu manipulated the pattern for his own entertainment and beside him, Judal leaned forward to watch. They spiraled inwards, descending into the earth beneath them.
"When were you born? What season?"
The last mushroom deflated back into the dirt and Judal looked up at him, blinking those transfixing crimson eyes like he was coming out of a dream.
"Winter." he answered plainly.
Hakuryuu hummed softly under his breath.
"As was I."
It was peculiar, he thought. The observation held no value or significant meaning to it, but in making it he felt himself establish yet another connection with his mortal host. He wasn't sure why he bothered, or why he felt so content to know they had something in common.