#if the formatting is off it's because I rescued this from gchat where I apparently babbled it out last night

[thought-42]

It strikes her at the oddest moments. There's a fairy in her bed. There’s a fairy in her bed and he has to set an alarm or he'll over sleep, wake up petulant and confused and rubbing grime out of his eyes. He takes so long to wash his hair. He takes sugar in his coffee and sometimes when she's stirring it in she remembers old stories about tiny creatures on the edge of flowers,  sipping nectar, or grandmothers who left out milk and honey for their "good neighbours". He has an apartment downtown with a landlord who refuses to fix the icebox and he doesn't know a single cooling spell. He has terrible taste in genre fiction and there's a selfish gremlin part of her that wants to pull him out of the story into reality and hold him down, hold him in one shape until it sticks. His autograph is illegible and it takes her a long time to realize why. Names have power and he wasn’t raised stupid. ...There's a distinct possibility he doesn't know the name he gave himself is misspelled and she's certainly not going to tell him. He gives her his true name one night, late, when they're sitting at the top of the waterfall tipsy on someone else's expensive wine and witnessed only by the stars and the moons --he has opinions about that second moon, too, don't get him started-- and he turns to her and says it as simple as anything. "That's me. That's my name. You're the only other person who knows it, at this point." It feels like a gift. It feels like a responsibility she can never set down, and at the time she can't imagine ever wanting to. (years later she'll tell herself she resents it, but she's never been good at lying) He gives her another name, too, on paper this time. One to use, one to keep. He trips over a loose stone in the street because he's too busy talking to a gaggle of fans, charm and sparkle and it's stupid, it's disgusting, but she's here, isn't she? She catches him before he can fall and doesn't let go. His bones aren't hollow but sometimes it feels like they should be. There is something at her very core, something rough and hardened and unpolished that says "I will always keep you safe". He forgets, sometimes --or maybe he doesn't-- to slip that thin mask of mortality back into place. In a lot of ways he's closer than she is except for the ways he isn't, will never be, will always remain other. In those moments she feels closer to him and further from him than she ever does. Changelings in the stories were children stolen away and replaced by a child too strange, too quiet, too focused, too sensative, too everything or not enough, maybe. Laerryn reads the stories and sees mirrors and mirrors reflecting back at her through history. Always too much or not enough. Changelings, both of them. Easier, she supposes, to blame the Fae. She certainly does every time they're out of milk.

#laerryn coramar seelie #Loquatius Seelie #cr exu tag #if the formatting is off it's because I rescued this from gchat where I apparently babbled it out last night #and yes I know fairies are a specific thing in CR but also consider #1) Brennan called him a fairy 2) Taxonomy probably changed over 1000 years 3) it's funnier