Chapter Four #3
“I’m not usually this wired. Been having a slow-motion breakdown all week.
Calloway’s been leaving me ‘presents.’ I get the contract thing, I guess.
It might help. He’s– Christ, I don’t even know.
He was fourteen when I last saw him.” A pause, a sidestep of duck shit, and a sidelong glance Declan felt like a brand. “Tell me about the sluagh thing.”
Ah.
Yes.
The sluagh thing.
“What do you know of aspects?” Declan asked, as he was a coward. He didn’t meet Antonio’s eyes when the human glanced at him.
“Calloway said they were, like, why you exist. Not just as people, but the…” Antonio waved his hand, the one not being picked at. “The ‘embodiment of ideas or phenomena.’ Wisps being the unknown or something.”
Declan smiled thinly. Leave it to a bloody seelie.
“The lure of the unknown, as kelpies are the hunger of the river, watery deaths. Banshee, such as my mother, are the embrace of finality. Does that make sense?”
“Sure.”
“Sluagh are… We are the awareness of impending and inevitable death. Not of a death by fire newly set, but of a back to the wall, no windows, and flames licking close.” Declan smiled, bitter with it.
“Few things are ‘fate’. Set in stone. Not even bonds, as we’ve talked about.
There are paths. We sluagh, we see the paths that have found a single ending. No more branching.”
“Right,” Antonio said after a long pause. “Okay. So, it makes people uncomfortable?”
“Oh, aye. Though I would put their discomfort down toward how our aspect manifests itself. Banshees sing for the person about to die. A warning. We–sluagh, of course, but others around us–are not so fortunate.” Declan slowed his steps, wings pulled in tight to his back.
“Deathsight. It triggers when we’re near a person who cares for another, whose path has reached that single ending.
A vision of that death. Those final moments.
Sluagh see it once. The other will see again and again, until the vision’s fulfilled. ”
And, because he was not truly as much of a coward as he accused himself of being, Declan forced himself to add, “Contact and time spent with us heightens the risk of deathsight triggering. It’s not an immediate thing. Not usually.”
Silence.
So much bloody silence that Declan went tight with it, fingers forced still, not tapping or shifting as they walked.
Then: “That’s why all the refusals? I’ll deal. Won’t say I won’t get really fucking wasted when it happens, but I’ll deal.”
Declan laughed, albeit acrid and just a bit choked. They always thought that, didn’t they? Every time, until it happened.
“I didn’t hear from my only friend for a century after a vision,” Declan said on another rough laugh, a not-smile with a flash of teeth, white and sharp in a smile as sweet as his laugh had been.
“I’m grateful to Bo for breaking that silence.
Yes, Antonio. That is most of the reasons behind the refusals.
Bonds want to be in contact. Physical touch, even if just shoulders. ”
“That’s– shit.”
“There are standard additions to oaths most employ when bonding sluagh. Stipulations to protect bonds as much as possible from them.” Declan didn’t have to tell him this.
He could stop bloody talking. Spin it. And still, he continued on, not quite able to keep the resignation from his voice: “Ten, fifteen minutes a day near one another, and the sluagh half to leave them be outside of that.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening.”
Antonio’s blunt, direct words brought Declan up short. Antonio stopped walking, his face set and hard, even when met by Declan’s monstrous stare.
“I’ll not get up in arms if you choose to,” Declan offered, confused. “Your protection will stand. My word on it.”
That was perhaps the wrong thing to say. Antonio’s jaw tightened, his anger the burn of sun-scalded metal.
“We’re not sitting awkwardly across the table from each other while someone runs a fucking stopwatch.
Been there and brought back the goddamned t-shirt.
Shit. What do you even get out of this? Don’t answer that.
” Antonio lifted his hands as he had the day before, his barrage of words a blast of desert-baked wind.
“Look. Here’s what I need. Keep me safe from Calloway.
Make sure, if I’ve gotta be in Faerie, that there’s food.
I can’t do the thing like other humans. Take me back home when I ask.
That’s the fucking oath. Being around each other, the rest of that shit?
We can figure it out like any other pair of assholes. ”
Declan continued to stare, his eyes wide, arms crossed and hands curved tight at his elbows. Holding on to something. Or maybe he just needed something to do with his hands.
“I will protect you from any that might harm you or whom you want gone, up to and especially Calloway,” Declan heard himself say, confusion rich and careful.
“You and yours alike, as much as I can. You’ll not want for food, shelter, or safety.
And a ride with a trusted will-o’-the-wisp, so long as he’s not in the bath.
Or eating. I know you and Everil have an unsavory history–”
Antonio laughed, cut off and ugly for it. “One way to put it.”
“...yes. He had just agreed to remove the curse when you called. I understand if you wish to not have him about, but if he must be near to do it. Would you abide that?”
The human looked at him as if he’d grown two more heads. And Declan could taste it, that confusion acrid and twisting on the edges of tanned hides, curling the seams black.
“Yeah. I mean– Thanks. That– You didn’t have to do that.
And I’m not going to tell you who you can be friends with.
” Well, that was reassuring. “I’m sure the kelpie and I can learn to stand each other.
Just, maybe don’t leave us in a room alone together.
Bo keeps telling me how ‘shy and hilarious’ the bastard is. Fucker wants to eat me.”
“You were kind to me, and received the curse attempting to help Bo. It ought to have been removed as soon as their trials were dealt with,” Declan countered. “And Everil’s well aware that if he harms you going forward, it will be one of the very last things he does.”
Everil and Declan hadn’t said that, of course. But bonds carried with them some protection. You did not murder a friend’s bond. Not without their permission, which Declan would not give for this rough-edged, fidgeting human, the king of his metal castle.
If Declan could last over a century of Nimai breathing while tied to Everil, Everil could put up with his ‘sweet Bo’s’ friend living for four.
And if Declan was slightly put out at Everil’s habit of either forgetting how time worked, or that sometimes people were left in the wreckage of his very intense feelings, that was Declan’s problem.
“...right,” said Antonio, looking appropriately put off as a human might, when they were just informed the fae they wished to tie their soul to could and would kill a friend for them.
His words, too, had a keen edge to them.
“What’s the rest of it? You’ve got a reason for all this. What do you want from me?”
Oh good. An easy question, of sorts.
“I want a seat on the Council,” and they should start walking again, not watch each other within an arm’s reach, but Declan talked instead, shoulders easing while he did.
“You need a bond for that. There’s been a motion to require majority approval on all new Council members for committees and Council alike, rather than having a successor take the seat.
And there are no unseelie–what Calloway likely called death aligned–on the Council.
I’ve seen what happens when the voiceless hit a boiling point. I’d rather avoid it.”
Of course, unseelie didn’t exist anymore, if one believed the rhetoric. Malin and Aisling made sure their children didn’t. At least this was a discussion about things Declan occupied his days with, rather than what he refused to let fill his nights. He uncurled his fingers. Made himself do so.
“That’s it? Just the Council, and a time crunch?”
“That’s the immediate reason, aye. The ‘time crunch.’ But overall, I am not …
palatable. One of the ‘good ones’ as far as unseelie go.
Parents tied to power not frequently seen, strength and social skills of my own, civilized, good at rubbing elbows.
” Too much so. It made him dangerous. Anathema.
And yes, Declan sneered. “You ask creatures like me to parties. You don’t ask them to dance.
I’d much rather spend four hundred years tied to someone who might, perhaps, not mind my company one day, rather than survive a millenia alone. ”
Pathetic. He had to look away to finish speaking, head tipped back to peer into the sky, wings relaxed so the tips brushed the back of his legs. A clear night, stars sparkling overhead. May as well get the dramatics out of the way, after all.
Silence, again. But not rejection, nor Antonio fleeing him. That was something.
“Reis men don’t tend to live past seventy,” is what Antonio said after an impressive amount of time watching Declan watch the sky.
“That’s what? Forty years? Yeah. I’ve got about forty years in me.
” The man nearly sounded apologetic. “That enough? You can find yourself a fae bond for after. For the rest, I kind of get it. That things are messed up. I can’t see anyone letting me within a thousand feet of the Council but, fuck, I’ll do what I can. ”
Declan blinked, looking back to Antonio to watch the man speak. Jittery, anxious human. Wired, he had said. On edge.
“Unless Hollows are different to the point of our bond not affecting you at all, you’d have a few centuries ahead of you. Four, maximum, provided no one successfully shows us the extent of their irritation with our existence.”