Chapter Seventeen #3
The ring was still warm from Zyr’s hand.
Not cool, the way metal from a dresser or nightstand might be.
Not grounding. Just a tool for blocking unlived memories of a seaside thunderstorm, curled up on the porch with hot chocolate on an autumn night, book in hand to read between the dim light and bright flashes when they crossed the sky.
He’d prefer it cool. Faerie didn’t oblige him. To be fair, Robin hadn’t asked, and he wasn’t a winter anything.
“I could … manifest some laundry if you wish.” Zyr, who was actually all old books and lightning and chocolate when he wasn’t hiding them behind magic, looked at Robin, helpless, and tried to fix things.
(Robin needed to remember he was trying to fix things.) “And you may ask me whatever you care to.”
Laundry. Questions. Telling Robin why. Apologizing, because he was a damn fae and didn’t get why this was fucked, the way Robin didn’t get obsession, and if he could just breathe at the fucking corners, he could think.
“Is there anything else?” Robin rubbed at his eyes, glasses askew, shoulders pulled in tight.
“Anything you know about me and assumed I didn’t need to be aware of?
Other decisions you made on my behalf without filling me in?
Irrelevant things on my life? Because if there is, and you don’t tell me right now, I’m done.
I’ll never talk to you again, Monarchs and veil and House heads be damned. ”
Zyr hadn’t been manipulating him. He hadn’t been. Wasn’t.
(I don’t know how to process this right now.)
Zyr’s tail twitched, before wrapping, tight, around the leg of the couch, as he continued to hold himself still.
“Your aura is sea spray and fresh coffee and clean linen drying on the line,” he offered, each word wary and slow.
“You love your brother deeply, but the Winter King makes you uneasy. You’re the only person I know who speaks to Faerie.
You read others extremely well. Too well, sometimes, I think.
You taste like biting into a grapefruit rind when you come. You seem drawn to dangerous things.”
Robin pressed his fingers harder to his eyes, and breathed, slow, unsteady, at one of the corners of his imagined square. “Okay.”
“I am yours. Utterly.” Zyr’s words were quieter now. Reluctant. “You’re my center. I won’t survive you, but I have no wish to. I find it comforting.”
Comforting. Tapping his fingers would be comforting. Drawing small boxes in his notebook would be comforting. This just hurt.
“May I have your tail?” Wait. Right. Fae took shit literally. Zyr really took things literally. “Figuratively. May I touch? I heard you. I just…” Just what? Was an idiot? Didn’t know how to figure this out? “I’m in the kitchen right now. Ass on the counter.”
Zyr didn’t ask why, thank fuck. He uncoiled his tail from the couch leg, shifting in place to let it fall across the cushions between them, tip curled so it was just shy of contact with Robin’s thigh.
“If you wish to close your eyes, I’m quite accomplished at counting to nine.”
Robin’s laugh was short, more punched out exhale than chuckle. Good, though, because it meant he’d heard Zyr and could react.
“No numbers. Just quiet.”
Noise always made it worse. Offers to help rubbed him the wrong way, made the world too damn loud, cranked his anger up every time.
Zyr listened. Stayed quiet. He was accomplished at that too, in not saying things.
(Stop it. He didn’t realize.)
Robin edged closer to his tail, legs rearranging themselves to not be tucked quite so tight. Mouth to knees, back curved, eyes on the blue, smooth scales. His hand, too, back of his knuckles over cool, smooth bumps, even the inside of his wrist.
Fingers traced over the shapes of them next, breathed whenever his fingertip reached a corner. Focused, because he still could, and people didn’t die of this, and if they did, so what? He’d be dead. He wouldn’t need to worry about what happened then.
But he wouldn’t die, because these feelings didn’t kill people. Being overwhelmed hadn’t killed him before.
Slowly, the world became more than the side effects of his body. More than the spiral of thoughts, quieted with the pass of his touch over bright blue, his other hand easing the painful clutch on his calf.
Things ached, but not separately, like cities on a map lit up with the other parts gone dark and numb. Robin’s hand was his hand. His eyes were his eyes.
He could come back to himself, because he was breathing, and he would keep breathing, and he was who he was, still.
Thoughts settled, went back to being lines of text instead of a thick, dulling fog. Where he could think, not be hit full on by STOP or swallowed up by something else.
“I’m supposed to know my own mind,” Robin murmured, his words muffled. “The only one to know the secret spots. Where it’s taped back together. My feelings. What I let people see or share. To know enough that if it changed, I’d be able to tell.” He swallowed hard. “I thought I’d be able to tell.”
Zyr shifted again, his shoulders and knees angled towards Robin. He said nothing, but nodded and flicked the tip of his tail against Robin’s fingertips. Acknowledgement.
Robin nudged the tail in return, glancing up. Zyr didn’t have the distant, wandering look to him, focused on Robin like he had when Robin said he’d talk that first afternoon, but only if Zyr listened.
“You can talk,” Robin said, propping his chin on his knees and looking back down at the tail. “But if it’s just to ask what to do to make it better, we should talk about the veil instead, or the future House heads.”
“You can’t suck venom out of a wound. Or unslit a throat,” Zyr said, with quiet regret.
It hit and comforted, both at once. The kind of understanding that wasn’t trying to make shit feel better or demanding forgiveness.
The important kind. “But, if you’ll allow, I’d like to speak further on my perspective on soulbonds.
Not as an excuse, but because I don’t wish this to be something kept from you. ”
Because Zyr listened when Robin told him things. Not listened to, but heard him, no dismissal. Maybe took it in differently, but he tried, and respected, and hadn’t once diminished what he said.
That, Robin knew. That, he could trust.
And fuck, he wanted a reason to keep trusting Zyr. Something to help quiet his fucking trauma response. Something in his head he didn’t have a name for and out of his control, no way to even set it in line because it was something he thought had been normal.
Robin twisted to face him, pulling Zyr’s tail on to his lap, and pressing his temple to a very solid shoulder. Curled in still and he didn’t know when he had moved closer, but he wasn’t tucked in so tight, leaning in when his skin didn’t snarl in protest over touching someone again.
(See? Thinking clearer. His body was a body again, one that didn’t want to claw out the eyes of anyone within reach.)
“Yeah.” He kept his eyes on Zyr’s tail, touching with light fingers and careful palm.
Organized shapes, pretty, and, more importantly, present.
Something not from the other realm that said he should’ve known about the soulbond, ring or no.
Something, someone, to remind him that there was a magic ring, and he was just a human.
A magicless number, and all the reassurance that brought.
“I’d like to know your perspective on soulbonds. ”
Zyr pressed his lips against Robin’s hair in a whisper of touch, breathing deep before the beithir turned his face away to talk.
“You’re welcome to interrupt or ask questions,” he offered. “It requires context, and I have no secrets from you. Only blind spots.”
“Context,” Robin echoed. “Like me and the library.”
“Just so. My tale also begins in my childhood.” Another sigh, still weary, a man faced with an unpleasant task.
“I was a lost cause, even when young. I asked too many questions. Became unsettled, when answers didn’t fit.
I didn’t intend it as defiance. That came later, when I started looking for the answers that did.
I wasn’t alone in being difficult. Unseelie are nonconformist by definition.
But the architects of the convergence wanted unity.
When they could not break our minds, they settled for taking our souls. ”
Short, simple sentences, offered almost entirely without inflection.
His tail twitched, though, the tip curling and uncurling, grasping at nothing.
And Robin, he listened, quiet, able to hear the words and meanings all at the same time again.
They were words in a voice he liked, not clanging things from a distance that spelled out something too big for the moment, though the tone sat badly.
He caught the tip of Zyr's tail between his fingertips. Curled index and middle finger around in answer to the flex of blue, hooked loose.
“Girl I know got her mouth taped shut in her after school church group.” Both of Robin’s thumbs kept up their touching, idle and soft, his eyes tracking their progress.
“When she was like, six. She said she was worried about Jesus not having any friends who weren't old men.
The teacher made her put the tape on herself, or she'd get in worse trouble.”
“People are much the same everywhere,” Zyr replied, as his tail played over Robin’s palm.
“We weren’t forced. We simply weren’t given any other acceptable option.
Take a seelie soulbond, generously provided to support us and guide our wayward minds or continue in the care of the Monarchs.
Indefinitely. It was all very organized.
Pleasant. The seelie like things pleasant.
The results often weren’t. I believe that’s why it’s no longer done. ”
Robin squirmed enough to look up at him from under messy curls, saw that strong jaw set. “What happened?”