Caffeine and Magix

Summary:  Larkin is curious. All Fae are. That curiosity leads her to college. That curiosity leads her to Yvette.(F/F, fantasy, original short story)

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“What did you do that day?”

There’s a cage around the bare bulb dangling above the table. Larkin looks for shadows from the bars on the walls, but doesn’t find any. The small room is evenly and uncompromisingly lit from that single lightbulb, the only shadows lying directly beneath the metal table bolted to the ground. Larkin wonders if her chair - more of a stool with a low back - is bolted down too, but doesn’t dare check. She feels if she moves, the man braced on the other side of the table will lunge for her.

The man raps his knuckles against the table, the sound like a soda can crumpling, and rocks back and forth on his heels. There’s no stool on his side. “I said, what did you do that day?”

Larkin wipes her lips with the back of her hand. There’s a red ring around her wrist left behind by handcuffs. “What day?”

“October 18th,” the man says. His teeth are probably white but look yellow next to the gunmetal walls. His canines are prominent, pressing against his thin lips. “Thursday. The day you killed her.”

“No,” Larkin says. Her long, brown hair slides over her bare shoulders as she shakes her head. The room is making her head spin. No, not spin. Ring. Like silver bells. “No.”

“Yes,” the man insists, banging his knuckles against the table again. That sets off another round of ringing in her head, a chorus of bells that seeps through the air. “You killed her on October 18th.”

“I met her that day,” Larkin says. The memory swims through the fog, presents itself like the opening credits of a movie. Curtains rising. Bells resolving into a chord so sweet that she can’t help but remember Yvette’s smile. “A year before that day. Exactly a year.”

The man stands upright, folding his arms over his thin chest. Victory flashes through his cold, blue eyes. “Tell me about it,” he commands. “Tell me about the day you met Yvette Troy.”

————— The beginning————-

It’s a stupid idea.

Larkin presses herself against the tree she’s hiding behind. The bark bites into her skin, sharp and real and painful. If she wants she can melt into the tree, slide herself sideways until it accepts the paleness of her flesh like new bark, wraps older, hardier stuff around her. Young voices - young human voices - drift on the wind.

It’s a stupid idea, but it’s one she keeps having over and over again.

Larkin sucks in a breath through her new teeth and steps out onto the manicured lawn. Immediately the sun is too bright, no longer mitigated by the thick, deciduous canopy, and she blinks against its rays. Slowly, her vision adjusts, irises shivering until they settle into a new shape. She blinks, testing the surprising lack of flexibility in her pupils.

Huh. Humans really are blind.

A heavy bell rings from deep within campus. Iron cast by the sound of it. Larkin shivers but forces herself forward. Her boon will save her iron’s sting for a year and only a year. She is not so foolish to waste a second of that time on fear.

The other students are as bright as the sun. The bell signaled a new hour and a majority of them are entering the same path through the heart of campus, splintering off into this building or that. One of them is wearing all red from the soles of her shoes to the ties in her hair. Another is singing as he walks, meaningless little syllables that nobody but Larkin can hear. Metallic nail polish waves to a woman sitting on a bench the color of sea foam.

Larkin slips amongst them as easily as she might slip into a tree. Nobody falters at the sight of her black t-shirt, her jeans, her navy blue backpack clutched against her chest. Of course not. She’s done her research, sought the wisdom of her elders, clawed through the memories of those few humans lucky enough to survive a night dancing for the Court.

A cautious and shuddering joy begins to unfurl in her chest. She can do this. She is doing this. 

And she has a whole year to enjoy it.

The classes are fascinating. Larkin never goes into the same one twice. There’s an older woman pointing to diagrams of ancient ruins in Building 6a, telling the class of bored freshmen that the ancient civilizations had urban planning, a sign of advancement ignored by early colonizers. A man in a tweed vest reads aloud in Conferences Room 178, odysseys and sonnets that remind Larkin of her native language. One class is spent entirely in silence, a nude human posed at the front of the room, staring out the sub-level room’s window and into the blackened hall.

“Auditing,” she tells curious TA’s when they can’t find her on the roster. She smiles and readies a glamor in her hand under her desk. Just in case. “For next semester.”

They never ask her to leave. It’s well past the time for audits, well past the time for casual drop-ins to test majors and minors, but nobody cares. Larkin doesn’t need to use a single bit of magic. She no longer slips into classrooms and lecture halls. She strides in, chest high, head up, her backpack slung over one shoulder.

Then on Wednesday, October 18th, she meets Yvette Troy.

Larkin is sitting in the first row of the smallest theater on campus. She came to see a play the night before. A beautiful, grating, horribly written play which none of the actors had memorized and only a smattering of people showed up for.  She’s been trying to figure out what it was supposed to be about since then and hasn’t bothered to move even as the lights turned off all around her and the sun came up outside. Why should she move? Nobody will ask her a question.

“Oh,” a woman says. “I didn’t know someone was in here.”

Larkin twists in her seat to find the woman standing at the top of the aisle, bracketed by the theatre’s double doors, and backlit by the sunlight streaming into the lobby.

“I saw Fiddler Diatribes last night,” Larkin says. She turns back to the stage, seeing the actors and stage lights in her mind’s eye. The main character entered from stage left and Larkin is trying to decide if that was supposed to be symbolic or not. “It was about the devil. Or maybe a particularly unlikeable salesman? I can’t figure it out.”

“My roommate wrote that,” the woman says. Her footsteps are soft on the crushed carpet. She walks like a dancer. Toe, heel, toe, heel. Then, at the bottom of the steps, the rhythm changes. Heel, toe. Heel, toe. “You didn’t like it?”

“I loved it,” Larkin declares. She turns to face the woman and is momentarily struck dumb. The lighting had hidden the woman’s features from her before, but now, illuminated by the low lighting of the room, she might be the most stunning creature Larkin has ever seen. High brows and a sweet, round face. Dimples pressed into the swell of her cheeks as if no matter how hard this person tries, there’s no way to hide her smile. Her eyes glitter like the crystals growing in the deepest parts of the woods. Larkin swallows. “Not to say it was good. It was really bad. Really, really bad.”

“I know,” the woman says. The physicality of her feels like a compulsion. Her hands swan through the air as if directing her own words. Like music. Like a symphony. “That’s the whole point though. It’s a commentary on how mandatory art - in this case, a play written for a grade - will never be fully authentic. Natalia cast Economic majors and Computer Science majors only. She bribed them with beer but I think they would have done it for free.”

“It was authentically awful,” Larkin says. Her nails are digging into her thighs. She eases them out of her flesh and stands. “I’m Larkin. Please, tell your roommate I’m a big fan.”

“Yvette,” Yvette says. She doesn’t offer her hand. “Natalia would hate having a fan after last night’s performance.” She cocks her head to one side, eyeing Larkin’s feet. “Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”

Larkin is in love.

Fae desires are minnows. They flash in the shallow edges of the pond, never venturing into deeper waters. If they do, they grow. All things do when given the right amount of space and nutrition.

Larkin sips at Yvette, herding the minnows of her interest into the shallows as best she can.

Yvette is 24 years old. She loves gardening but always forgets when to water or what to plant which plant in. Her counselor wants her to decide on a major sooner rather than later. She was homeschooled and protected from the crush of the masses until she threatened to run away and join a circus. College was a compromise. Her parents call every week with worry-filled words, but Yvette doesn’t believe them.

“They miss what I can do for them,” Yvette tells Larkin. She’s solving a Rubik’s cube on the lawn, propped up on one elbow and lounging  across the picnic blanket Larkin insisted on spreading out. She completes the orange side and frowns at the blue. “They’re missing a skill set, not their daughter.”

“And what skill set is that?” Larkin asks. The flower crown in her hands burns with purpose. She eyes the bowed top of Yvette’s head speculatively and dismisses it. Larkin gets the impression that Yvette will fight her to the death if she attempts to place the crown there.

“Magic,” Yvette says. She says it like a joke, that smile flashing in her dimples before she clicks her tongue at the Rubik’s cube. The orange side now has one red cube in it. “Or something like that.”

“Or something like that,” Larkin echoes. 

Larkin wonders sometimes what Yvette would look like in the woods. She wants to know how the sunlight through the canopy would lay across Yvette’s brown skin and what the brooks would look like reflected in her amber eyes. 

Yvette purses her lips and sets the Rubik’s cube on the blanket, completed blue side up. She turns all of her attention on Larkin. “What about your parents? Do they miss you?”

Once, when Larkin was small, she fell out of her tree. There was a flower just on the river’s edge that was big and red and unusual this deep into the woods. She leaned towards it, imagined what its petals would feel like against her lips, and then pop! The wet, decaying leaves beneath her tree stuck to her skin. The ground was cool and shocking against her warmth.

Larkin remembers reaching out to lay her hand against her tree. She made a conscious effort not to slip into it, intent on studying the bark from this side rather than inside. That’s where I came from, she thought. She stared at her long, spindly fingers spread out against the grooved bark. That’s what I’ll be someday.

She twisted back towards the flower, the idea that, since she was out of her tree, she best make the most of it. The flower was now leaning away from the river. She could see right into the center of it and, where there should have been a stamen, she saw only darkness. A root writhed under the earth towards her, dragging the flower a centimeter away from the water’s edge.

The wind slipping through the forest felt new and invasive. She slipped back into her tree and did not venture out again for a long, long time.

“No,” Larkin says. Then, because sometimes she is not good at keeping her minnows away from deeper waters, “But I miss home sometimes. I would like to show you it someday.”

Yvette stares at her. Her face doesn’t change, but Larkin can feel something softening in her. A barrier lowering. A cautious interest growing.  “I suppose,” Yvette says slowly, “I could. One day. For a visit.”

A visit. Larkin doesn’t know if all of her kind think the sort of mean and mischievous thoughts that are in her head. It would never be just a visit.

Larkin imagines inviting Yvette into the woods. She would help the shorter woman over the decaying logs with her hands under Yvette’s elbows, her shoulder there to lean on. She’d chatter meaningless words like birdsong, each sentence tumbling over the next until the air was filled with Larkin’s voice and Yvette had no space to think. No chance to second guess.

A visit. 

She’d sweep the twigs and branches out of Yvette’s path so nothing could trip her as she stepped into Larkin’s world. Why, if Larkin did it right, Yvette would never feel the magic close behind her, sealing her away from the human world forevermore.

She could show Yvette the dark part, deep, deep into the woods where the brooks collided into the river and the red flowers had begun to take over the banks. She could press Yvette against the harsh bark of the deciduous trees, cage her in with her long limbs until Yvette slipped into the tree, Larkin’s tree—

“No.” Larkin barks the word. It’s more directed at herself than Yvette. She grabs the hair on either side of her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “No, you can’t. You must never.”

Yvette’s eyes are wide, but not afraid. The sun shines out from her amber irises. There’s a magnetism to them that Larkin can’t look away from. “It was only a thought.”

“Thoughts grow,” Larkin says. She can’t get the image of Yvette against her bark out of her head. Larkin jerks to her feet, uses the motion to break eye contact. “I’m going.”

Larkin feels the light of Yvette’s eyes on her back like solar flares.

Larkin is selfish. It’s a new concept, a new description, a new boundary she must be mindful of. The fae are not selfish. The fae just are. But Larkin is not fae right now. Larkin is human and being a selfish human hurts.

She does not want to hurt Yvette.

She hides from Yvette after that day on the lawn. Not wanting to hurt is also new. There’s a hard, stone-like part of Larkin that doesn’t care if Yvette hurts so long as Yvette is hers. But another, softer part wonders, would Yvette cry?

Larkin growls and follows a cloud of students towards the Drama building. She doesn’t have a ticket to whatever play they’re going to, but it doesn’t matter. For the first time in ten months (and when did ten months pass?) she uses glamour to slip inside, bypassing the ticket seller entirely.

The back row is completely empty. Larkin hunches down in the center of it, arms folded tightly over her chest. She can feel her ribs shifting, thinning and lengthening as her emotions surge.

Her minnows mouth the surface of the water, hungry. Needle-like teeth fill their mouths, too big for their frames.

“Damnit,” Larkin whispers. Her heart is pounding and her palms feel clammy. She feels hunted. Haunted. Cornered. She thought she had everything under control, thought herself above the infatuation the elders had warned her against. But in her certainty, she’s trapped herself and, worse, she’s trapped Yvette. “I have to leave.”

A warm body slides into the seat next to Larkin. The smell of sun and magic wraps around her and a plump, short hand wraps around Larkin’s four-jointed fingers.

“The play has just started,” Yvette whispers into Larkin’s ear, so close that her lips brush the shell of it. She squeezes Larkin’s hand. “Stay.”

Larkin feels herself root to the spot.

“In the end,” Yvette says after the show, “you never had a chance.”

Larkin is walking in the shadows behind her. She can’t quite remember how long human legs are supposed to be so she’s dipping from one pool of shadow to the next, dodging the circles of light left by the campus’ streetlights. Yvette’s shoulders are relaxed, her hands clasped behind her back.

“I didn’t?” Larkin asks. She’s lost control of her voice too. It’s smoother. Lower. It comes from somewhere deep in her belly. “Me?”

“Neither did I,” Yvette admits. She eyes Larkin out of the corner of her eye. “I didn’t know what you were at first. You’re very good at camouflage.”

“I forgot my shoes.”

“It’s college,” Yvette says. “Lots of people forget more important things than their shoes.” She sighs, looking up at the sky. It’s a waning moon nearing its height. “In case you need it spelled out, I love you.”

I love you.

Larkin reaches out from the deepest shadows and drags Yvette out of the pathway. The shorter woman is soft and pliant as Larkin spins them behind the corner of the dining hall.

“Ouch,” Yvette says mildly. She blinks up at Larkin, one hand lightly wrapping around Larkin’s wrist. “I’m going to get a crick in my neck looking up at you.”

Larkin doesn’t want Yvette in pain. She breathes in once, twice, three times quickly and then lets the air shudder out of her. She shrinks on the exhale, skin regaining human warmth and hands shortening until her fingers barely curve over the back of Yvette’s shoulders. “I didn’t mean for you to be uncomfortable.”

“I didn’t mean that, it wasn’t bad,” Yvette says. She studies Larkin for a long moment and then sighs. “We are in quite a mess.”

“I love you,” Larkin says. She wants to press her lips to Yvette’s forehead where the skin looks smooth and soft like a flower petal. “You love me. What mess?”

“I was understating my parents’ concern,” Yvette says. “This might be their worst fear. Their precious baby mingling magic with the Unnatural.”

There’s a story there that Larkin isn’t privy to. Humans and their biases. They never let anything be. She tucks a curl behind Yvette’s ear. “We could run away.”

“You say that like you’re joking, but it might be our best bet.” Yvette frowns, eyes going far away as she thinks. After a long moment, she refocuses on Larkin. “I’ve got an idea, but it needs time. I need to think about it.”

“I only have two months,” Larkin says. It seems stupid and short-sighted now to have only asked for the boon of a year. Ten years would have been better. Twenty even. “Before I need to go.”

“If my plan doesn’t come together by then, we’ll do it your way,” Yvette says. She shivers when Larkin’s hands drop to her hips. “We can run away.”

Larkin wonders if Yvette really knows what it means to run away with the fae. But it seems like it’ll hurt her to explain it, so she doesn’t. Instead she noses at the skin behind Yvette’s ear. “Mhm.”

“We have better things to do anyway,” Yvette says breathlessly. Her hands come up to grip Larkin’s biceps. “In fact, planning can wait until tomorrow. Perhaps even the next day.”

“What better things will we be doing until then?” Larkin asks. She’s fascinated by the way Yvette’s breathing is growing more and more ragged. She wants to hear it change even more. She drags her nose along Yvette’s jaw. “What do you mean?”

“You confessed, I confessed,” Yvette says. “What do you think?”

Larkin bends down to press her lips against Yvette’s.

One month and nineteen days later, Yvette drags Larkin into her dorm room, her eyes burning like stars. Larkin’s been here any number of times, but today is different. There is electric energy in the air as Yvette closes and locks the door.

“I have it,” Yvette says, “a plan.”

Larkin’s heart is slowly losing its humanity, but the news is enough to make it beat. One week left. “Oh?”

“You need,” Yvette says, “to do exactly what I say.”

———-The end ———-

The man is an agent for the Witch’s Council. No, that’s not right. Not an agent. An investigator.

“You claim you fell in love,” he says. He raises an eyebrow, blue eyes disbelieving. “You? And a witch of Yvette Troy’s caliber?”

He’s laughing at her. Larkin keeps her face smooth and her hands hidden under the table. She’s lost her boon, but her heart stings at the mockery.

It was real. It was. No matter what this man thinks.

Let him laugh, Yvette whispers in Larkin’s mind. They’ll laugh and you must let them.

Larkin lets her roots ground her in her seat.

“You really didn’t kill her,” the man says when he’s done having his fun. He props his hands on his hips.  He watches her as if she’s a bug. “Did you?”

“I did not have the chance,” she says evenly. Her wrists sting. When Yvette’s parents found their daughter missing at the end of the school year, they exploded. Ripped through Yvette’s dorm. Found traces of Larkin, the only fae on campus, and jumped to the conclusion they wanted.

Just as Yvette predicted.

The investigator put Larkin in iron handcuffs to satiate the bloodthirsty demands of Yvette’s parents. As soon as he got her in this room, he took them off of her. No need to pretend to be afraid of a silly little fae.

“Don’t lie,” the man says. Despite his words, he sounds amused. “You didn’t have the chance. Let me guess - you tried to take her, but she was stronger than you. Didn’t expect a human to be so powerful, did you? I bet she beat you and ran.”

Larkin looks down at the table. He sees her as cowed. Ashamed. A foolish fae who tried to make prey out of the most powerful witch in Northern America.  She raises her chin to look him in the eye, lets him see what he wants to see. “Humans are more powerful than I imagined.”

It’s the truth. That’s why her words ring with sincerity. She just doesn’t mean it in the way he thinks.

The investigator laughs and his canines wink in the harsh light. “That they are!” When he’s done laughing, he sighs. “Time was I could kill you for even thinking of laying a hand on a witch, never mind a witch as protected as Yvette Troy.”

If he tries, kill him, Yvette whispers. Don’t let him lay a single finger on you.

“I saw no protections on her,” Larkin says.

“No,” the man says. He’s already looking to the door. “That’s part of the problem. Between you and me, I think she was planning to run ever since her parents let her out of the house. Probably spent the past year stripping the magical compulsions and trackers they left on her. They couldn’t see it though. They’d rather think a fae killed her.”

Larkin stares at him. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I don’t want you to get the credit for something you didn’t do,” the man says. He’s got one hand on the door. “Your kind always thinks you’re so clever. I want you to remember that Yvette Troy escaped whatever twisted infatuation you had and she did it without meaning to. You were never an adversary. You were never a player. You were nothing to that witch and it’s a shame that her parents made me waste this time on you.”

Something dark curls in Larkin’s chest, purring. This man thinks he knows. This man wants her to feel small. This man doesn’t know she’s already won.

Keep pretending, Yvette hisses, he could be testing you.

He’s not.  Larkin knows he’s not, but she won’t bet Yvette’s plan on it. She bows her head and waits as the man leaves. She watches her fingers lengthen and shorten, her pale skin mottling into bark and then returning.

She feels the man leave the building, drifting back towards the heart of campus where Yvette’s parents wait, two supernovas in her mind’s eye.

A year without Yvette and their stolen power will wane.

Larkin grins, teeth sharp and needle-like, and lets herself slip out of her chair and through the back wall.

The woods on the edge of campus will be watched, sure. That’s why Yvette isn’t there. No, Yvette is safe, deep past the brooks and the circles of oaks that mark this world from Larkin’s.

Come home, Yvette whispers. Come home.

Larkin slips into the trees and runs.

—–

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