booze, brunch, the nature of faeries.

Julie and Kenneth

A smile opens slowly and drowsily across Devon's lips when Rafael pulls her onto his lap, has her straddling him. Her hands on him feel as tired as she says she is, and her eyes are still underlined with dark half-circles, but she still gasps the first time his hand slips between her thighs. She still shudders; she can't help it.

They go slowly; she hardly has to tell him to take his time, to be careful with her. But there's something loose and easy in her bones tonight, too. She responds softly, but truthfully; and after a while, it seems like it's harder for her to keep herself quiet, keep the others next door from overhearing. She bites his shoulder to muffle herself at one point, and there's a renewed strength in that bite that wasn't there when he first took off her robe.

They wash up, after. Devon brushes her teeth with Rafael. Walks around naked, which is only tolerable because they just fucked. Puts on pajamas and socks, though, before she crawls into bed with him. She curls up in a ball on one side of the bed; he wraps his arms around her, nose to her hair, but she is already asleep.

--

He wakes up first. Devon has barely moved in her sleep. Even when he moves, her breath remains steady, her body limp. His phone chimes; takes a second, but as soon as he looks he'll realize it was another chime that woke him. Two texts from next door, from Kenneth:

Hey Julie and me are up. Ursula still asleep. Breakfast and planning?

and

Gonna head downstairs. Starving. Gonna let Ursula sleep some more.

Rafael

Chiming phone. Wolf's eyes open, disgruntled slits and constricting pupils. He grumbles under his breath. He reaches over sleeping girl and paws his phone off, pulls the cord out onehanded, reels the thing in. Text on the screen. Breakfast, planning.

He texts back:

ok

be there in 15

And then he drops the phone in the sheets and closes his eyes for another moment. Five.

Opens his eyes somewhat later, inhaling. Pushes himself up and kisses girl on a bare shoulder, murmuring for her to keep sleeping as he climbs out of bed. Quick stop by the bathroom, and then he's pulling on clothes, minty-breathed.

Something closer to twenty minutes after that text-back he shows up downstairs, rumpled jeans and t-shirt, rumpled hair and yawns. There's a restaurant downstairs, which is where he finds the rest of his odd little pseudo-pack. He pulls up a chair and drops into it, picking up the menu to glance it over.

"You guys sleep okay?"

Julie and Kenneth

This time, Devon does stir, murmuring as he jostles around, kisses her shoulder. Murmurs again in assent when he tells her to keep sleeping. She does not seem of a mind to argue with him on that, at least. So she yawns, and rubs her face on the pillow, and drops off again.

--

Downstairs, the restaurant's breakfast buffet is open. Kenneth is already sitting with Julie, multiple plates in front of him because he could not decide between an omelette and waffles and breakfast tacos. Julie only has the one plate, but it's piled high. She has a mimosa. Kenneth has a bloody mary.

When Rafael shows up, Kenneth has the courtesy to look somewhat chagrined. He gestures at the food. "Hope... this is okay," he says, because the Fianna in him overcomes the Bone Gnawer in him just enough to be uncertain about how far to push Rafael's generosity.

Julie does not seem to care, on the other hand. She is perfect content to crunch tidily into her bacon, chewing slowly while Rafael joins them.

"The witch was crying in her sleep," Julie informs him, in answer to his question. Her tone is rather flat, indicating indifference, even coldness to the point of cruelty. "It was heartbreaking," and one might think she's just being sarcastic, given the disdain she infuses into the words. "She stopped when I curled up with her as a fox. Mortals are ridiculous, with their stupid affection for canids."

Julie sniffs the way someone does when they're trying not to cry. She picks up her mimosa and takes a few gulps.

Kenneth meets Rafael's eyes with slightly raised eyebrows and a subtle shrug.

Rafael

Disbelief: "You didn't get carded?"

Waitress stops by. He orders: an omelette, a lot of bacon and sausage. Toast and jam. Coffee and orange juice. No, fine, he'll have an irish coffee, since everyone else was already drinking.

Waitress departs and he unrolls his silverware, spreads his napkin on his lap. Julie wants him to know witch was crying but she was totally a stone-cold hardass, to which he just smirks a little. Not like he knew anything about pretending like he didn't give a damn, or anything.

"So how does this shapeshifting work for you guys, anyway? You go through all five forms too, or what?"

Julie and Kenneth

Kenneth looks more chagrined, but it also looks like he's trying not to grin. "I... may or may not have convinced them that wasn't necessary."

Julie laughs, and it actually has a slight bark to it. Very slight, but present. "Five whatsits? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." She shakes her head, red hair bouncing around her cheeks. "Every time a baby laughs for the first time in a ten-mile radius, I turn into a fox. It's that simple. Just like how every time you hear EDM, you turn into a towering inferno of fur. An in-fur-no. Though it's really more 'in fur? yes!'"

She finishes her mimosa with one mighty long sip, waggles her empty glass in the eyeline of a passing waitress, and then turns to the two wolves. "Now don't be mad, but I may have sent a message to a friend of a cousin of a bitch named Theresa who has a friend who knows a guy who is catfishing the Queen of Thistle's assistant, and that message may have actually said something about how I'm going to drag two terrifying enemies in front of her court for a duel or something. So, if the frog that showed up on the windowsill this morning wasn't lying, which as you know they usually are, we've been granted an audience."

Rafael

"What a great use for your Gaia-given powers," wolf deadpans.

Another brief break as his breakfast arrives. Wolf glances up at the waitress, nods a terse thank-you, then picks up his recently-unwrapped silverware to dig in. Meanwhile, foxgirl talks: an incessant deluge of lies. Also, mildly charming chatter.

Also: an alarming phrase.

"Wait, what? A duel?"

Julie and Kenneth

"Gaia makes plants, plants make vodka, vodka makes bloodies," Kenneth retorts, picking up his glass. "This is a sacrament, man."

Then there's Julie, and her rambling explanation of her nocturnal activities other than curling up next to a crying girl to comfort her.

Julie looks at him. Blinks. "I said, 'or something'."

Kenneth chimes in: "I think... that 'duel' part was just... the lying thing."

Rafael

Mouth full: "Good, because if someone hands me a rapier I'll break it in half."

Sips alcoholic coffee. Eats eggs, meat. Toast.

Curious again: "What's it like being a faerie? I mean... were you always a faerie? How old are you? Were you born, or did you just appear one day?"

Julie and Kenneth

Another mimosa is brought to Julie, rich and orange and sparkling. She stares at Rafael, as questions pour out of him. She wonders briefly if she was ever like that regarding his kind, but she can't remember. She glances at Kenneth, who shrugs at her and tucks into his Denver omelette with the same relish and gusto that he polishes off burritos and pizzas and scours over room service carts. Kenneth will be no help to her.

She looks back at Rafael and clears her throat primly. "Well, to answer your first question: my essence is extraordinarily old. I don't remember most of it, but if I did, I think I might remember the dark ages and beyond. Maybe the dawn of humanity. Who knows? We don't know anymore, because we live these lives in mortal bodies and they die and we die a little with them and then we can't remember things, but we remember far more than other reincarnated essences. I have quite clear memories from the last few centuries, at least. Before that, it gets... misty.

"So, I am either twenty-four, or I am several thousand, or just a few hundred, depending on your rubric."

Another sip of her mimosa. "Now, as to your fourth question: I have been a faerie all that time, but not as I am. As I am this time around, I was perhaps always a faerie but didn't quite know it until the middle of my childhood. So, to answer your third question... yes. Yes, I was born. But I also appeared one day. Well, night. It was the most wonderful night of my life, and still is. The first time I ran under the stars, through the grass. The sadness came later, but so did other faeries, all wildlings and grumps, taking me under their wings -- sometimes quite literally -- and helping me protect myself against the banality of humankind and industrialization."

Kenneth, at this point, isn't even eating anymore. He's staring at Julie, absorbing what she's telling them, his eyes wide like a child hearing a new bedtime story.

"But to go back and answer your second question," Julie specifies, because it isn't true, not at all, and this gives her a way through: "it's very complicated. I've heard that your kind live in two worlds, but they're separated. Imagine living in both of them at the same time, all of the time. You see things in layers. The only time it's comfortable is when you're in a freehold or court, and you don't have to try and keep track of the mundane world. Then there are the ancient geas laid upon our various kiths, the entitlements the world has forgotten to give us, the oaths we swore that we are still bound to uphold even though we don't quite remember why, the memories that come and go as they please, and the politics, my god. Imagine last year's election going on for two hundred years, that is what I'm talking about."

Julie goes quiet for a moment. Her gaze has bounced around as she's talked, but now her eyes settle on Rafael's. "The world has become dull and crude, cold and unfeeling, at a loss for wonder and enchantment. It starves us. It is... well, think of what it would feel like if every day you woke up and you had to put on clothing laced with silver. If every tool you used was made of the stuff. If the people around you were obsessed with it, with making more of it, with finding new ways to use it, and you had to somehow live like that. Even when it wasn't directly wounding you, bleeding you out, it... it would be draining you. Exhausting you. Threatening your existence, when you know your existence is one of the few things that keeps the world from becoming truly grey, truly empty."

Her brow is furrowed. "It is also magical, and beautiful, and incredibly fun. But it is very easy to grow desperate. Especially among the sidhe, like Conrad. Like the Queen. They... are different. Their reincarnation is more fragile. Their mortal shells provide less armor against the banality of living in this world, somehow. I just... want you to understand...

"...why I have pity for him," she finishes, quietly. "I am not asking you to feel the same. I only want you to understand; we, too, are in a fight for our existence. We, too, are in a fight for the world."

Rafael

The fae speaks. The wolves listen.

And for a long time, they are listening. First one, then the other stops eating. Their food grows cool. Their drinks -- second drinks, in Julie's case -- go untouched.

She tells them about a sort of apocalypse they'd never considered. A slow, creeping, inexorable one; not fire and ash nor ice and flood, but simply a gradual, dreadful greying-out of the world. Not championed by some monolithic evil entity but pressed along by progress itself. By the very nature of the world.

Wolf thinks about what it would be like to try to survive that. He cannot imagine it easily. It seems awful.

Silence for a while, the soft clink of silverware around them as other guests eat. It's a nice-ish hotel. This isn't some free breakfast buffet of cereal and waffle-mix. It's an actual restaurant, with paying customers and alcoholic beverages. No one pays them much attention. No one here, except the three of them at this table, know there's anything beneath the surface of the world.

"So that's why you're all drawn to magic," he says at last. "Doesn't matter if it's witch-magic or wyld-magic, so long as it's something out of the ordinary. Because you need it to stay alive. And when someone like Conrad can't get enough by just ... osmosing it -- then he tries to tear it away."

There's still anger there. He can't help it. It vibrates beneath the surface, like tension in a fault-line.

"Because he's desperate. Because if he doesn't get it, he'll ... what? Become cold and grey? Die?"

Julie and Kenneth

Julie is bouncy and gregarious and cheerful. Julie is pretty and a born liar and yesterday afternoon spent some time talking to a squirrel like a god-damn Disney Princess. And at the same time, Julie is thousands of years old, remembering several hundred of those years, which means she can remember what she's lost. It means she has seen what humanity has lost. She has seen what humanity has done. Maybe she has always been a fox, watching her kind hunted for sport, running in panic for their lives, empty bodies left bloody and held by the tails by grinning humans with their guns.

Julie must be very angry, sometimes.

Julie must also be very sad.

--

She nods to what Rafael says. Interjects, briefly, when he realizes that they need it to stay alive: "Artists, too. Writers. Children. Just... dreamers. All kinds."

He goes on, makes sense of what Conrad does. How he can't get enough. How he tears it out. Julie winces, but

she also nods. She looks at her breakfast plate. "People like Ursula and Devon can make their dreams manifest. That's... stronger. The Glamour is more intense."

She is still staring at her plate when Rafael calls Conrad desperate, asks what will happen if he -- if any of them -- can't get what they need.

Julie looks up, then. She meets his eyes. "I'm not sure what happens to us if we lose enough of the thing that makes us what we are," she says, and perhaps this is a lie. Her eyes are opaque when she says it. "I try not to think of what that would be like!" she says stirringly, beaming at him, her eyes crossing for a moment, glistening with sudden tears.

She reaches up, scratches her head, then picks up her fork and tries to eat some more. Kenneth's shoulders are slumped, his brow furrowed. He looks like he wants to do something to help, maybe all of them. He looks at Rafael. Then he looks at Julie again.

"So Conrad's also an addict," he says, because he's not sure how worthwhile it would be to hedge on this. "To... whatever sort of 'glamour' he gets from witches."

Julie grimaces. "That is very rude," she tells him, "and not insightful or accurate at all!"

But then she goes back to eating her brunch.

Rafael

What slow-growing pity wolf may have felt for Conrad slips a notch. He grimaces, stabbing his fork into a sausage patty.

"That's fucked up," he mutters. "People aren't ... liquor brands. You can't just pick your favorite one and get hooked on it."

It's ultimately a useless comment. Whether he likes it or not -- whether any of them like it or not -- what happened has happened. Foxgirl confirmed as much. And wolf finishes rest of his brunch. Brooding again, as witch would say.

"Should go soon," he says, setting his fork down. "You guys want anything else, get it to go."

Julie and Kenneth

Maybe it's useless; maybe it's not. Regardless, neither the faerie nor the other wolf say anything to that. At least no one flips a table and goes storming off, either. Julie stirs something on her plate with her fork. Kenneth drinks some more of his bloody.

For a while, they eat quietly. Rafael suggests they go, and Kenneth glances up, but Julie tips her head.

"But what on earth are you going to say to the Queen?"

Rafael

"I'll figure it out when I get there," wolf says,

probably horrifyingly.

Julie and Kenneth

He does, in fact, horrify one of his tablemates. The Theurge one, who stares at him for a second like he's grown a second head.

The fox faerie, on the other hand, just beams at him. She finishes her second mimosa, and Kenneth shakes his head and follows suit with his bloody mary.

Check comes; gets billed to the room. Julie of all people insists on leaving a cash tip, a generous one in fact, with a phone number written on a napkin on top for their waiter.

Rafael likely doesn't ask, but for what it's worth: the tip is the truth. The phone number is the lie.

It is for an automated phone line where a friendly voice picks up and compliments you, or tells you a joke, or provides an interesting and strange fact about the universe.

--

The three of them head out. Kenneth, as they turn from restaurant towards the lobby, mentions: "What about Ursula and Devon?"

Rafael

"Was going to let them rest. Don't really want them near the faeries anyway." Glance at Julie. "Sorry."

Bright day outside. Car's heating up in the sun, paint job glistening. Headlights flash as wolf unlocks the doors.

"Why?" he thinks to ask Kenneth as they head for the Civic. "You want them along?"

Julie and Kenneth

Julie just shrugs, then nods with a sympathetic sort of grimace. It's the sort of exaggerated facial expression one sees in certain stock photographs. "Look, I've been around Conrad for over a decade, you don't gotta explain it to me."

Kenneth pulls out his phone and starts tapping away. Sends texts, receives them, somehow still has some toast in one hand to munch on.

They pile into the car, Kenneth folding himself into the back this time. "Nah, just... hold on a sec..." he mumbles, as he finishes his texting.

A couple of minutes later, the car on and AC trying to cool the air, he speaks up again:

"'Kay. Ursula says she thinks they should stay here, too, and she'll tell Devon where we are whenever she wakes up again. Your Alpha texted me to check in and to say you're better at taking good advice than you seem. And my mom told me to tell you that if you get me into trouble with any g-d faeries, she will skin you alive and she doesn't care if you're a fancy man, but I think she's only like, half serious. Also, when I go home I need to pick up laundry detergent on the way."

He lifts his head up from his phone. "So like, if we could drop by a Piggly Wiggly or something when we're done?"

Rafael

"Sure." Wolf pulls his door open, climbs in. "If we're not slaves to a faerie queen by then."

Shuts door. Turns the ignition.