Archive of Our Own

He grows accustomed to the cold. He used to think he never would, but there are shards of ice in his veins as surely as his blood flows. Two years, a mere eyeblink in the lifetime of his kind, and he could at last return home. And yet, he has his trepidations. Too long in Winter now—he is no longer the warm summer breeze, damp earth, and verdant growing things, but the longest night, the necessary dieback from bitter frost. The fair folk are not supposed to change, ageless and immutable as they are, but somehow, somewhere he did.

Really it started with Patrick. He used to lose himself running through the realms, passing over the boundaries. Anything to take him away from the perverse cruelty of the Winter court. He’d stumbled upon Patrick playing on his little iced-over pond by mere accident. And then he’d gone and done the unthinkable—he’d fallen in love.

His people have stories of warped romances with humans. Selkies giving up their pelts to human husbands, bound to a land not their own, liannan sidhe becoming infatuated with their paramours and slowly stopping eating and drinking and sleeping until they wasted away. There are no good stories, no happy endings, as humans would say.

He should let Patrick go. It’s not safe for either of them. And when he returns to Summer, it cannot be with word of a human lover attached to his name. There has been no adult human in Summer since the thief and deceiver Tam Lin. He should end it, attend himself to his duties and allow Patrick to move on with his life. He managed it once before.

But he asks himself, does he think he can do it again?

The time passes quicker on the other side of the boundaries. Sometimes, he thinks this tentative liaison they have survives on Jonathan’s hope alone. If he stays away too long will Patrick find someone else? Someone who didn’t break him, erase parts of his memory, someone who didn’t violate his mind and body? Sometimes, he thinks Patrick should look elsewhere. Even without their history, he is no great prize, a Prince of Summer gradually losing himself to the cold. But Jonathan is selfish enough to keep going back, to find his way into Patrick’s dorm room on the darkest nights when nobody will miss him. Jonathan is so indelibly intertwined with him now, that he need only close his eyes to find him.

He keeps waiting for the moment that Patrick says no, draws over his lintels with yew and fill his pockets with iron so that Jonathan cannot come near. But the door is never barred to him. It remains a bright spot in his bleak existence.

He’s mediating a dispute between a phouka and a bogle when he feels a tug in his middle, between his heart and his navel. Without thinking, he crosses over the wards and emerges in a bland unfamiliar space, a motel room by the looks of it.

“You have great timing,” Patrick says without even blinking as he comes out of the bathroom, naked, toweling off his hair. Jonathan’s eyes dip down his body, taking in the wet muscle, to where Patrick’s cock is stirring. He unselfconsciously lets Jonathan look as he says, “I was thinking of you.”

“You summoned me,” Jonathan says wryly, hiding his own astonishment.

Patrick drops his hands to his side, the towel limp in his hands. He looks pleased when he says, “I can do that?”

“You shouldn’t be able to,” Jonathan tells him. “Not without my full name, which I have not given.”

Only a soul with his full name could command him, and no fae handed that prize over, not even to one who was beloved. His own blood brother back in Summer could not utter it.

Patrick’s lips quirk up in the corner. “Guess I’m just special.”

It shouldn’t be possible, but like so much between them, it simply is. Jonathan eventually smiles back, defenseless against him. “Guess so.”

He crosses the distance between them and tugs Patrick into a kiss, gratified when he moans into his mouth, hands going tight on Jonathan’s hips. It has been only a few days since Jonathan saw him last, but it has been almost two weeks for Patrick.

“Can you stay?” Patrick whispers against his mouth, pressing his body up against Jonathan’s.

Jonathan snorts. He should get back to the Phouka and the Boggle. It’s only been a few moments here, barely an eyeblink there, he could return to them with none the wiser, still wrapped up in their heated dispute.

“Why not?” he says, knowing he’s being unwise, but helpless to stop himself. Patrick’s hands on his clothes are urgent and his lips are sweet. He has a healthy libido for a human male of his age, Jonathan knows this, but he also knows that his blood is always up after he wins a game, which Jonathan assumes from the late night shower and the motel room.

He allows Patrick to pull him down on the bed and strip him of his clothes. It happens, quick and fierce, Jonathan holding Patrick close as he thrusts desperately inside his body, so glad he no longer has to keep himself from enjoying this, that he can clutch at Patrick’s back, and arch luxuriously beneath him, and demand more.

“Fuck, you’re amazing,” Patrick gasps into his neck, body all sheened up with sweat as they strain together.

Patrick’s moving with nearly all his strength now, but Jonathan can take it, was made to take it. Patrick’s cock runs hard up against that space inside him that Jonathan always feels down to his toes, and all Jonathan can do is breathe and hang on. He enjoyed sex before this, not always, but often enough. He’d admittedly not gotten either Winter’s twisted relationship to it, or the sticky intoxicated sensuality of Summer that he’d left behind. He’d been too young when he left, he supposes now, to really understand. So often he’d felt himself go detached while it happened, servicing his body’s needs without getting emotionally involved. There were times when it had felt necessary, if not good, to give into the urges of his base self. Mostly though, he’d avoided such sport. His fellows in Winter had called him an ascetic. Until Patrick, he hadn’t really known how good it could be. How much he could want this.

“Hey, where are you?” Patrick asks him, hips slowing down now to a dirty drag as he stares down at him, features etched with concern.

“What?” he breathes out.

“You’re thinking about something,” Patrick tells him, “very hard.” That slow cat-that-ate-the-cream smile spreads across his mouth. “And it’s not my dick.” He punctuates the statement with another strong thrust that leaves Jonathan gasping, clutching for the reason and rationality that has seemingly fled him.

“Be with me,” Patrick whispers against his mouth.

Jonathan lets himself sink back inside it. And when Patrick comes inside him, crying out, cock getting somehow bigger, he revels in it, can even, to some extent, feel the reverberations of Patrick’s pleasure in his own body. This. This is the reason his kind have sex with humans. They throw off so much unguarded psychic energy during sex you couldn’t help but latch on. But he feels other threads there sometimes also, Patrick’s affection and wonder coming through also. Jonathan gathers them up and carries back with him over the boundaries, holding them close.

Patrick pulls out and moves down his body to put his mouth on Jonathan’s cock, a little tentative, unused to this act, but still sexy.

“I might suck at this,” he says after a few tentative licks over the head that have Jonathan fisting his hands in the sheets.

Jonathan has to hide a smile, thinking back to that third time, the both of them forced into it to keep Patrick safe. “Do a good job then,” he’d snarked at him, anxious and uncomfortable and desperately wanting Patrick not to hate him.

“You do not,” Jonathan replies, fingertips twining in his soft hair, getting long enough now that it has just the hint of a curl. “You definitely do not.”

Afterwards, Patrick crawls back up the bed, flopping down beside him. He says, voice raspy from trying to take Jon deep, “I like that I can summon you.”

It really should disturb Jonathan that he even can. Instead he has to bite his lips against saying ‘I love you’ right then and there. It’s still not safe. And to be honest with himself, he doesn’t even know why he feels the need to say it. Love is such a strange word. The fae understand lust and obsession, but love is not something that often goes acknowledged. Besides which, he’s read that humans are leery of that word. If you say it before they’re ready, you could spook them. So he keeps it dormant on the tip of his tongue.

“We will have to see if you can do it again,” Jonathan tells him before pressing their lips together, licking his own taste out of Patrick’s mouth.

Eventually he has to return. Enough time has passed that even in faerie they’ll notice his absence. As he’s putting his clothes back on, Patrick, still lying on the bed, reaches out and grabs his hand.

“Can we set a date for next time?”

Jonathan feels that same helpless smile well up inside him. “Of course.”

He never means to get involved. It would be far better for himself not to, but perhaps there will be no time long enough in Winter that he will ever become inured to pain. He heard the screaming when he was out riding in the woods, saw the fragile weeping frost pixie and couldn’t simply ride away. One of its wings was ripped clean off, torn by two cruelly grinning red caps.

“Be gone or I shall kill you with my own two hands,” he thunders at them as he dismounts from his horse. They blink at him, startled, but words are law, and the way he worded it makes it very clear, they scuttle off almost as if plucked from the wood by unseen hands. He’ll deal with them later.

He kneels down in the autumn leaves by the sobbing pixie, its back looking bare and austere, denuded of its glittering wings.

“Broken. How will I fly?” it keens, prostrate, leaves rustling under its body.

Healing is the hardest magic for him so far from Summer, but sometimes he feels like he’s getting better at siphoning the power off. He certainly finds excuse enough to use it here in Winter where somebody is forever in need of mending.

He calls for the power and it snaps to his hand, pouring out of him in a frightening torrent. The nodal veins regrow, shimmering translucent skin growing in the cells created, until full wings are folded gently against its back, damp like they’re fresh from the cocoon.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, my lord,” it cries in its high piping voice.

He’s dizzy, the edges of his vision going dark, and his fingers tingle with pins and needles.

“It was nothing,” he mumbles with a mouth that feels full of cotton.

It presses its hands to his, and he blinks at it dumbly. Somehow he called too much power, and it burnt him out as surely as too much electricity might burn out a lightbulb.

“There are those of us who remember, my lord,” it says to him, its head swimming in triplicate in his vision as he tries to get his eyes to focus.

“Remember?” he replies as he tries to get to his feet and stumbles. The pixie is small, barely to his waist, but it takes his weight, keeping him on his feet.

“There are those of us who want another way,” it tells him.

He stares down at it. “Speak plain, pixie, I don’t have time for riddles.”

“You could be King,” it whispers. “The Winter court was not always thus.”

He stumbles away from it, blinking out of the wood and back into his room. The effort leaves him spent, gasping on the floor. He shouldn’t have used magic again so soon, but he’d had to get away. He left his horse behind, but Cadfael allows Jonathan to ride him, and in the same spirit will either find his way back to the stables or he won’t.

He had known he could be king. He’d known that Reoánaigh had wanted it. He’d even begin to suspect his attachment to Summer, but it had always felt like an abstract. An interesting thought experiment. But the rush of magic that had come to his hands when he pulled had not felt like sweet green leaves and endless days slowly fading into night. It felt like maple sap harvested after the first snows and the bright shock of ice melting on the tongue.

He may not be king, but he knows now, he also may not simply go home.

Patrick struggles with the idea of Jonathan penetrating him. He has cultural and social associations that Jonathan does not. For the fae, a man and woman are required for the act of procreation only. For the purposes of pleasure, they have no such distinction of how a man can and should act in bed or with whom or even what. But Patrick continues to struggle with what it means to merely exist in what he terms a “relationship” with Jonathan, let alone allow Jonathan to fuck him, no doubt compounded by the horror of the first two times they had intercourse.

Jonathan feels no need of it though, and so one evening in Patrick’s dormitory in midwinter, early February by Patrick’s reckoning, he’s surprised when Patrick asks. His back is turned, head bowed, too uncomfortable to meet Jonathan’s eyes.

“I mean, you don’t have to,” he says, cheeks flaming up when Jonathan takes too long to respond.

“Of course not,” Jonathan replies, “But, you needn’t either.”

Patrick looks up at him, surprised. “No, I want to.”

“You should only do it if you want to do it for yourself,” Jonathan says.

Patrick blinks at him.

“There’s no need to offer on my behalf,” Jonathan clarifies.

Patrick raises his eyebrows. “You’re really going to make me say it, huh.” It’s Jonathan’s turn to blink at him. He blows out a breath. “I want you to, for me, the last time we—I mean, I guess all the times, I enjoyed it.”

“An orgasm is not the same as enjoyment, Patrick,” Jonathan says. “I would never assume—”

“Don’t over-complicate it,” Patrick cries, grabbing Jonathan’s shoulders. “I want you to fuck me! This is awkward enough already.”

Jonathan nudges their foreheads together. “I need you to know that I hated having to do it.”

Patrick leans back and quirks a brow, that wicked and brilliant smile starting to curl the corners of his lips. “What about that last time?”

Jonathan rolls his eyes, an expression he got from Patrick when they were children. “Yes, I enjoyed it.”

“Well so did I, genius.”

Jonathan cocks his head. If Patrick doesn’t find it objectionable, Jonathan’s certainly not going to try and talk him out of it. “Very well,” he says, somehow keeping his voice even.

“Yeah?” Patrick asks, catching his tongue between his teeth and a blaze of heat pools in Jonathan’s middle.

“Yes,” he says with a nod and an indrawn breath. He’s got to brace himself here, make sure he does it right so that Patrick likes it.

Patrick’s still red with embarrassment when Jonathan kneels between his thighs, stroking slicked up fingers over his hole. He drags them back and forth for a moment over soft vulnerable skin, only pushing in against the ring of muscle the slightest bit, watching Patrick’s abdomen jump. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, tensing and clenching them in the sheets and then letting go like he has to remind himself to do it. Jonathan drops a hand on his knee, thumb pressing into his kneecap, trying to ground him. Maybe this is too much. Maybe they should stop. Patrick breathes out in a long stream when Jonathan pushes the first finger in, stroking it back and forth, getting Patrick used to it.

“You can add another,” Patrick pants, his eyes squeezed shut, and when Jonathan hesitates his shocking blue eyes snap open, and he says, “I think we both know I can take it.”

Jonathan hesitates. He was rough with Patrick the times before. It had been unavoidable. He doesn’t want to do it that way this time. But he’s so unsure what the best move is, meeting Patrick’s gaze, which is both so open and yet somehow unknowable, all the alien human workings of his mind beyond Jonathan’s ken. Patrick chews on his lower lip, dragging his teeth over it like it feels good. Jonathan leans down over him, pressing his mouth over the red abused swell.

Patrick may be able to take a second finger so soon after the first, but Jonathan knows he needs a moment here for himself; and despite his apparent urgency, Patrick kisses back, wrapping his arms around Jonathan’s neck. Jonathan feels that high fluttery feeling in his chest that he’s gotten so used to around Patrick and words gather on the tip of his tongue. Words he can’t say because Patrick’s tongue is stroking over his, words that don’t change anything, don’t stop anything, words that still hold too much power.

I.

Love.

You.

It’s enough for now that Jonathan knows them. He knows it as he carefully fits a second finger at Patrick’s hole and pushes in, trying to slick up his insides as much as possible even as he’s tight, tight, tight around his knuckles. He knows it as Patrick shakes underneath him as he strokes over that near sorcerous spot inside and then presses more deliberately. Patrick’s cock jumps on his belly and holding Jonathan’s gaze, he reaches down, wrapping his hand around the thick width and gives himself a slow stroke. Jonathan’s own arousal, so secondary up to this point when he’s been trying to be so good, roars back to life, reminding him how badly he wants in there.

Patrick breathes out, “Jon,” like he’s surprised. For a moment, despite the beautiful image he makes panting Jon’s name, he wonders if he should call a halt, but then Patrick starts rocking into his hand, rolling his hips like he wants more.

“Fuck, I’m so—” he leaves it unsaid, but Jonathan’s brain fills it in for him. I’m so hungry for it.

“Don’t want to come like this,” Patrick says suddenly. “It won’t feel as good.”

Jonathan stills his hand again, going to withdraw. He’s not disappointed, he tells himself. What they do is more than enough. It really is. But he would’ve liked another chance at this, to rewrite those old hurts into something of their choosing.

Patrick, incongruent to his words, spreads his thighs wider and says, “C’mon, Jon, get with it.”

And then Jonathan understands. He wants to come from Jonathan’s cock, not his hand. The relief he feels is so profound, he fumbles trying to get them both arranged, fitting his cock at Patrick’s hole. He’d been shaky and nervous the first time too, like he was squaring off for a fight he was sure to lose and afraid for himself in the offing. But Jonathan finally manages it, reminds himself that he’s done this before at least a few times in his life. That it’s in his blood even to be good at this.

He takes a deep breath and pushes forward, breaching Patrick’s hole with just the head of his cock. Patrick hisses out a breath, his body straining to accommodate this new intrusion.

When Jonathan pauses yet again, he knows he’s being a tentative mess. He can already see Patrick’s mouth opening to spur him on again.

“Wait, wait,” he says, looking back and forth between their bodies, somehow still functioning despite the tight wet heat clenching on the sensitive head of his dick. “The angle.”

“Jesus, Jon, could you just—” he cuts himself off when Jonathan sits back on his heels and drags him into his lap, leaving his back on the bed and his hips tilted right for the first drive into that mysterious source of pleasure inside. Patrick goes taut all over, not from fighting him, Jonathan senses, but from the bright pure shock of pleasure he got when Jonathan gets it just right.

A normal human male couldn’t do this, at least not for long, hauling another man back onto their cock like this, at this angle, but Jonathan has a higher muscular and skeletal density, and he knows, if he wanted, he could go all night. And he will if that’s what Patrick wants. He keeps it up until Patrick’s cursing at him and curling inwards on himself, a flood of semen pouring out of his cock. A groan tears itself out of his throat, eyelids fluttering and body jolting with each of Jonathan’s thrusts.

Jonathan sees the exact moment it slides into too much and stills his hips.

Patrick goes limp all over, subtle shivers playing over his body, like he’s reliving the aftershocks. “What did you do to me?” he whispers, dazed, huffing out every breath.

Jonathan’s patient, but he’s not made of stone, and after that display he wants to come so bad he almost feels sick with it. He tries to withdraw carefully, but Patrick cries out when the drag of Jonathan’s cock causes a renewed burst of sensation.

He eyes Jonathan’s insistently hard cock as it withdraws from his body, shiny with lube, and says,“Gimme just a minute and you can…”

“You’ve had enough,” Jonathan says, voice tight from denied arousal. As much as he would like to fuck right back in, pound out his own orgasm, he knows better. Patrick runs his tongue over his lower lip, staring like he’s going to fight Jonathan. He slides his fingers down between his legs, dipping them inside so easy now that Jonathan’s fucked him open. His lids flutter in seeming pleasure, but after a moment he winces.

It’s too much stimulation too soon.

“I—I kinda want…” he starts and then breaks off, avoiding Jonathan’s gaze, like he’s too embarrassed to continue. Jonathan understands. Patrick has made himself so vulnerable here. For a moment they were connected, Jonathan forced deep inside his heart and mind alongside his body. Jonathan feels that acute loss himself.

“Here, just…” he runs a hand down Patrick’s body, urging him to roll onto his side, belting an arm around Patrick’s waist to keep him close. Sweat has dampened the curls at the nape of his neck and the peculiar chemical mix of his aftershave and cologne that Jonathan still somehow finds appealing is stronger here.

“What’s the play, coach?” Patrick asks sleepily.

Jonathan snorts, fitting his cock between Patrick’s thighs, up against the high firm curve of his cheeks. The skin here is soft as a ripe summer peach.

“Acceptable?” he asks, hands shaking like he’s ill.

Patrick places his palm down over Jonathan’s, threading their fingers together. “Yeah, go for it.”

Jonathan doesn’t need any more urging. He fucks Patrick’s thighs until he comes, hot and thick between them, imagining it slicking up his hole. Afterwards, he collapses back onto his back, spent.

With a groan, Patrick reaches over to the nightstand, picking up the device he calls his “cell” and starts tapping away at it. Jonathan takes a moment to just breathe. He feels strong enough to run straight through walls with no ill-effects even as the pleasant post-orgasmic lassitude creeps into his muscles.

“Huh,” Patrick says, his eyes moving back and forth like he’s reading something on the device.

“Hmm?” Jonathan asks, turning his head on the pillow to look at him.

Chewing at his lip, Patrick says, “It’s called milking, what just happened. Prostate milking.”

It’s a hideously unappealing term in Jonathan’s opinion for an act that had been anything but. He’s not unfamiliar with the phenomenon though he doesn’t have a word for it. Like so many things, it simply is. It was pure human to question, to seek explanations. Patrick shrugs and Jonathan asks, “But...did you like it?”

Patrick drops the cell and rubs his hand over his face. He looks almost embarrassed when he says, “Yeah I did. It’s intense, but…”

Jonathan throws an arm over him. “I have to return,” he says softly. “It’s Imbolc. They’ll notice me missing soon.”

Patrick nods and then slowly rolls out of bed, putting his discarded shorts back on. “You want a water?” he asks.

“No, why?” Jonathan asks as he laces his breeches back up. The so-called “water” Patrick speaks of is bottled in plastic, vaguely alkaline from whatever treatment they do to it, nothing like the pure mountain streams he’s used to.

Patrick quirks a grin. “Maybe I’m trying to trick you into staying.”

Jonathan’s about to crack a joke of his own when the door suddenly bursts in on its hinges. Patrick’s teammate, Sharpy shouts, “Kaner, do you have my foam roller?” as it bangs back against the wall.

Patrick looks over at Jonathan, panicked. Patrick is barely able to articulate his sexuality to himself, Jonathan knows this, and he also knows Patrick’s not ready to articulate it to anyone else either, not this way.

“I—” Patrick says, face going white.

“Ahah, yes, there it is.” Sharpy says, spotting a round cylinder leaned up against the desk. Jonathan’s seen Patrick roll on it before, massaging out the muscles in his legs. Patrick had been unaware of how deeply erotic it had been, watching him move back and forth on it.

Patrick blinks, confused, opening his mouth to say something. Jonathan holds a finger up to his lips and Patrick’s mouth snaps shut.

“You okay, man?” Sharpy asks, seemingly noticing Patrick for the first time.

“Yeah yeah, fine, you just startled me, barging in here,” Patrick says hoarsely.

Sharpy snorts. “Don’t steal my shit then, you little turd.” And then he’s out the door like he was never there in the first place. Excepting the mortification on Patrick’s face.

“Why didn’t he say anything?” he whispers, horrified.

“He couldn’t see me,” Jonathan assures him. He gave Patrick the sight of his kind when they were younger. He never should’ve done it. It was dangerous for Patrick. But Jonathan had been a child, it had seemed easier than forever maintaining a thick glamour around him. He didn’t think Patrick would ever have cause to meet another one of the fae. He’d been so naive. Maeve had found them, and known instantly how deep his attachment ran. And then, too late, he’d done his best to teach Patrick to forget.

When Patrick hard started flickering in and out of the realms, he’d been ashamed at how relieved he was that he hadn’t succeeded. Especially knowing as he did now what was to come.

“That’s...that’s good,” Patrick says. “I don’t know what they’d think.”

“It can stay our secret,” Jonathan says and then, before it gets to difficult to leave, blinks out of Patrick’s room.

He feels the telltale tug of a summoning in the middle of Reoánaigh holding audience at court. He blinks out and steps into the snow at the edge of a pond to find Patrick sitting beside him, zipped up into his coat, lacing up skates. It’s the same pond they played on so many times as children.

“Hello,” Patrick says smiling up at him, his breath forming a cloud of vapor. “I wondered if that would work aga—whoa, lookit you.”

Patrick gapes at his court regalia and the warlike facepaint daubed across his cheeks and around his eyes. Jonathan snorts and glamours it away, going for a coat and hat like Patrick’s.

“Why are you not at school?” he asks, puzzled.

“It’s ski week,” Patrick replies, his eyes bright. “Got vacation. Up for a game of shinny?”

He tries to be annoyed at Patrick for pulling him away from something so important, but he can’t summon up the feelings. He’d rather be here on this pond in the dead of night, than there, watching the casual cruelty dished out upon lower orders of fae. He bends down and in a single fierce move, catches up his mouth in a kiss. Patrick, surprised, doesn’t kiss back at first, but after a moment he sinks into it, softening against Jonathan.

“Do not abuse your power, mo chroí,” Jonathan says, pulling back, still cupping his winter-reddened cheek. This can’t happen again. Not unless Patrick has great need of him.

Patrick sobers. “I didn’t...think.”

“I would like to play though,” Jonathan says, rolling to his feet. He glamours skates on his feet and strides out onto the ice. He hasn’t skated in years, and he only takes three strides before falling ass over teakettle.

Patrick laughs uproariously, half collapsed into the snow.

“So glad I could entertain you,” Jonathan says dryly as he gingerly gets up.

Still chuckling, Patrick skates over, two sticks in his hands. “Catch,” he says, tossing one to Jonathan. Next, he pulls a puck out of his pocket and drops it to the ice. “Can you provide some light, your highness?”

“That’s supreme majesty to you.” As Jonathan hooks the puck on his stick, it sparkles up to a bright glow.

“A thousand pardons,” Patrick replies, grinning. “Don’t cheat now.”

And then he snakes the puck away, tearing across the ice in the other direction. They scrimmage, back and forth, and Jonathan’s body slowly remembers what it used to do. Of course, everything he learned was from Patrick as a child, and he’s very obviously progressed from there. He gets the better of Jonathan nearly every time.

Patrick steals the puck away yet another time and it’s the last straw for Jonathan. He blinks in and out between breaths to get it back, flicking it away with a neat wrist move Patrick used on him only a few moments back.

“Yo, what did I say!” Patrick cries.

It’s Jonathan’s turn to laugh as he fires a shot off between the area they marked out as Patrick’s goal. He doesn’t even have time to celebrate before Patrick’s tackling him to the ice. The breath goes out of him in a rush as they crash down and then slide across the frozen surface of the pond, Patrick alternately laughing and yelling at him. And looking up into those bluer than blue eyes, desperately trying to pull air into his abused lungs, he wants to tell him he loves him so badly. And stupid or not, he would have done it if Patrick hadn’t been lying directly on his diaphragm, making it difficult to draw in any air.

“I love you,” Patrick says almost absently, brushing a gloved hand over his cheek.

Jonathan gapes up at him.

Patrick scrambles off of him, embarrassed, finally allowing him to breathe. “I mean, yeah, sorry, I read all the shit that said that fairies can’t. So I know that you maybe don’t feel that way. It’s just you said that one time—”

“I do though,” Jonathan replies with a breathlessly hoarse laugh. “I’ve been sitting on saying it for—I thought I might scare you off.”

Patrick rubs at his face, seemingly unable to look at him. “After everything else we’ve been through?”

He twines the bare fingers of his right hand through the gloved ones on Patrick’s left. “You’re very precious to me.”

“Oh go on,” he says with a smile, his teeth chattering. Jonathan remembers with a start how cold Patrick must be. He blinks them back into Patrick’s bedroom and starts stripping off Patrick’s heavy coat and gloves, while his magic raises the temperature to a toasty warmth.

“We can’t start anything here,” Patrick hisses out when Jonathan starts in on his pants.

“Why not?” Jonathan asks, smirking. “Nobody can hear anything I don’t want them to.”

“In my childhood bedroom?” Patrick asks in a scandalized whisper.

Jonathan pauses, arching his brows. “You can’t tell me you’ve never done anything here.”

“I mean, of course I have,” Patrick hisses and Jonathan’s delighted to see he’s blushing.

“By my count, I have fifteen of your minutes before I have to leave, do you really want to waste them?” he says as he gets his hand past Patrick’s waistband. When he gets his hand around Patrick’s cock, he lets out a groan, head tipping back on his neck.

“Oh god.”

Jonathan grins.

“What does—what does mo kree mean?” Patrick asks between heavy breaths as Jonathan kisses up his throat.

“Mo chroí?” Jonathan replies, digging his fingers into Patrick’s curls. “My heart.”

“You’re a sap,” Patrick tells him.

Jonathan smiles into his skin. “Maybe so.”

Someday, Jonathan resolves, they’ll find a way to be in the same place. He’s loved Patrick too fiercely, and too long to let him go, and this half-life forever jumping between worlds, visiting when he can, with Patrick’s life passing before his eyes, is no life at all. Someday.

Jon thinks he knows less than he does, but Patrick and the chick working the circulation desk at the library have become buds, and the library has a sizable collection of books on pre-Christian Ireland. Jon doesn’t like to talk a lot about what goes on in Winter. But Patrick’s not an idiot and he’d have to be one not to notice that Jon’s magic has gotten stronger and quite rapidly too. At first he assumed it was because they were getting closer to spring, but library chick pointed out that October was equidistant to summer as February was from spring, so that was out.

“What sources are you even looking at?” she asks him the next time he stops in. “We’ve been through Joseph Dunn and John Carey backwards and forwards, and I’m not seeing this anywhere.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Patrick tells her for maybe the millionth time. He’s been plying her with coffee and pastries and hoping if he feeds her caffeine habit enough she’ll stop asking questions.

She takes a sip of her coffee. “Okay so magic getting stronger, Prince of Summer, hostaged to winter, which, I deserve a medal for calling that one right.”

“All of the medals to you, yes,” Patrick replies with a sigh.

“I dunno, man, sounds to me like your boy’s got the powers of both Winter and Summer now.”

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know!” She says. “It’s all just myths! You won’t let me see the damn primary source!”

“Arghhh,” Patrick says putting his head in his hands.

“Admit it, jockboy, it’s an RPG isn’t it?” she says, crossing her arms and looking triumphant. “You’re a terrible secret nerd! Coming in here pretending there’s some research paper. You just want a leg up on your gamemaster!”

Patrick stares at her. He finally says, drier than the desert, “Yup, you really got me.”

“Well lemme know what happens with the Prince,” she says, “He sounds verrrrrry interesting.”

Patrick has absolutely nobody to talk to about Jonathan—nobody to confide in about how he gets afraid when he hasn’t seen Jonathan, worrying that maybe Maeve has murdered him and Patrick will never ever know. Or that somebody else will want his power and depose him. Or that Jonathan will just stop showing up one day. That his term in Winter will come to an end and he’ll go back to Summer and forget all about Patrick.

For a moment, just one, he needs to be able to tell somebody something, even if it’s the palest facsimile of the truth. Even if it’s just two words.

“He is.”

He knows he must be smiling really big when he says it because she smiles back at him like she’s happy for him.

He gets the shock of his life when he gets back to his dorm and finds Sharpy sitting in the dish chair, tossing a football and talking to Jon who’s mysteriously on their couch, wearing jeans and sneakers and a backwards baseball cap. The human clothing suits him, but it’s jarring to see him in it.

“What?” is all he manages to get out when they both look over at him, seeing him standing there, gaping like a fish.

“You okay?” Sharpy asks, eyebrow cocked.

“I—” Patrick isn’t sure if Sharpy can see Jon or not. It certainly seemed like he was talking to him. But last time he’d thought Sharpy had seen Jon and he hadn’t, so maybe Sharpy was babbling and tossing a football by himself. It could happen. It would not even be remotely close to the weirdest thing that had happened to him in the last six months.

“Who is that?” he asks, nodding at Jon, trying to feel Sharpy out.

Sharpy looks over at Jon and then back at Patrick like he’s stupid. “Uh, this is Tazer? First line center on our team? Got the room next to yours? Why are you being a freak?”

“I—” Patrick starts again, flabbergasted.

Jon gets up off the couch, brushing down his pant legs like he’s unused to the fabric. For a moment Patrick wonders if he went and found actual jeans rather than using glamour. “You’re back, good! You said you’d help me with my calc homework.”

As he gets close, he winks. He grabs an unresisting Patrick by the arm and tugs him along behind him. Now that Patrick looks again, he notices that Jon’s usual overwhelming good looks have been muted to a more regular every day athletic handsome.

“What?” Patrick asks again as soon as they’re through the door to his room. Jon pushes him back against it, pressing in close.

“Just doing what we did when we were kids,” he says, before bending in to kiss him.

“Jesus Christ, a little warning next time,” Patrick says before tilting his head back to give Jon a better angle, although he doesn’t know why he bothers. Fairies at their hearts are tricksters. And he didn’t learn that shit from his research in the library.

Later, when they’re messing around in the shower, Jon pressed against his back while he lazily jerks Patrick off, Patrick says, “I suppose it’ll be easier to sneak around now without you having to glamour everybody all the time.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Jon replies, nibbling a line down the back of Patrick’s neck, water pouring down around them. His cock is hard between Patrick’s thighs, brushing up against his balls, rubbing in a tantalizing glide over his hole every time Jonathan shifts.

Patrick chews at his lower lip, leaning back so that Jon’s forced to take more of his weight. They could keep on like this, Jon could fuck his thighs again, keep giving him this handy, or they could fuck for real. Patrick breathes in and then out, imagining the too intense and yet somehow not enough sensation of being fucked.

“What are you thinking about?” Jon asks, scraping his teeth over Patrick’s earlobe.

“You fucking me,” Patrick tells him. It’s much easier to say it now. It doesn’t feel like something profoundly shameful.

It’s Jon’s turn to suck in a breath. “Right here?”

“Mmm hmm,” Patrick replies.

He smiles when Jon magics up the lube. He wonders if Jon even realizes he’s doing it, that before he would’ve had to get out of the shower and go find something for them to use, or at least used something in Patrick’s shower caddy to turn it into something else. He couldn’t make something out of nothing, he’d told Patrick often enough. Except for now, he apparently could.

Patrick braces himself up against the tile with a forearm, biting into the muscle when Jonathan starts fingering him open. He’s not experienced enough yet that this part doesn’t hurt, but it’s gotten a lot easier, focusing on jerking himself off than on the uncomfortable sensation. He shivers and lifts up onto the balls of his feet when Jon strokes over his prostate.

When Jon finally gets his cock in, Patrick sucks in a deep ragged breath, left arm still braced, fingers curling into a fist. He feels that first stroke inside his body down to the soles of his feet. Jon presses in close, breath hot on Patrick’s ear, and slowly rolls his hips.

It only takes a few thrusts for the rhythm to slide into something maddening: almost but not quite; fucking him, but not too deep. He keeps widening his stance, trying to get more, but Jon keeps right up there with him, not giving him an inch.

Just when Jon finally gives him what we wants, a solid hard thrust that has him choking out, “Oh fuck,” the door to the bathroom bangs open, because the universe has the worst timing ever. It doesn’t stop his cock from jerking and him from crying out.

The shower curtain is solid, but it’s hardly sound proof, and one of his teammates, Shawsy, must hear him, because he calls, “You okay, Kaner?”

Jon hasn’t let up, hands on his hips, still fucking him, actions masked by the pounding spray and undeterred by their unwelcome interloper. Patrick can barely think let alone speak with Jon’s hands stroking up and down his body, his cock moving in and out of him. He blinks trying to put words together. He has to say something that isn’t ‘more’ and ‘harder,’ which is what keep threatening to come out of his mouth.

“Yeah, yeah,” he babbles, Jon smiles against the back of his neck, “got—got soap in my eye.”

“Oh, okay,” Shawsy replies. “Um, Sharpy wanted to know what pizza toppings you wanted? We’re ordering a couple of pies from Tony’s.”

“Whatever,” Patrick replies, voice going high as Jon fucks in even harder, lingering inside, really making him feel it. His hands scrabble across the slick tile for purchase. He breathes out, “I am...I am…” he breaks off with another helpless groan as Jon withdraws and then slams back in, “cool with whatever.”

“Uh, okay, good,” Shawsy says, still lingering for some reason. “You sure you’re okay, man?”

“Yes!” he grits out, too short and sharp, Jon’s chest shakes behind him with silent laughter, muffling himself against the back of Patrick’s neck. At last Shawsy finally leaves, probably off to tell everybody that he was rubbing one out in the shower.

“Y-you’re the worst,” he stutters out clenching his thighs as he feels the rise of his orgasm upon him. When it happens, it’s a rush, an onslaught, as overwhelming as it was the last time, ejaculating so hard it almost hurts. This time, Jon fucks him through it, fluid still pouring from his cock with every strike against his prostate. His body keeps reflexively clenching down on Jon’s cock, and every time he groans, burying his face in Patrick’s shoulder, finally coming himself.

It takes him a little time to come back to himself after Jon pulls out.

“Wow,” he says, as Jon gently pulls him up straight and positions him under the spray of the shower, methodically soaping up his body.

“Mmm,” Jon says, making Patrick turn to face him so he can get the other side.

“He’s going to tell everybody I was jacking off, you know,” Patrick points out. “The one time you didn’t use a glamour.”

Jon brushes their noses together with a smile. “I altered his memory.”

“While we were fucking?” Patrick asks, horrified. Cheers to Jon’s prowess and all, but he’d like for his fairy boyfriend to be focused on him when he’s got his dick up his ass, not playing around in Andrew Shaw’s memory.

“No, about two of your seconds ago,” Jon says. “As soon as you asked.”

“That fast?” Patrick asks.

Jon shrugs, stepping past him to shampoo his own hair. “Showers are such wonderful contraptions,” he says, his eyes closing in supposed bliss. As if Patrick didn’t notice that deflection.

When they’re clean, Jon transports them to Patrick’s room, magicking up towels to dry off.

“I hope you remembered to turn off the shower,” Patrick says, a little miffed.

Jon looks stricken. “I would never waste water.”

Patrick wants to laugh at the expression on his face, but they have to talk about this. “You’re getting stronger.”

Jon moves past him with a sigh, wrapping his towel around his waist as he goes to the window, seemingly looking outside it without seeing. “Yes.”

“What does that mean,” Patrick stops to swallow, “for us?”

“Possibly nothing, possibly everything,” he says unhelpfully. He turns around leaning back against the sill, looking like a bronzed god framed in sunlight now that he’s dropped the glamour. “They will begin to feel it though. The others. Maeve. I will have to make a decision, sooner rather than later. The sanctuary of Summer is no longer one I can claim.”

“Because you think you’re somehow tainted by Winter,” Patrick takes a wild stab in the dark.

Jon smiles sadly at him. “Because of you.”

“What? Because of me?” Patrick replies, oddly stung.

“You won’t be safe. Any choice without you is no choice, so...” Jon shrugs, “either forge a life here with you, or claim the throne in Winter, in which case I will be King and no one will question who I take as a lover.”

Realization dawns. “That’s why you’ve glamoured a spot onto the team.”

Jon shrugs again. “I am, how would you put it? ‘Testing it out?’”

“Well, you can tell me these things you know,” Patrick says. “I mean, that’s what a relationship is, I guess.”

Jon turns away from him again, face gone strangely vulnerable, and Patrick is reminded that he’s had nobody at all for these many long years to confide in, nobody to go to when it all became too much, no family, no friends. He’s been alone all this time.

Patrick comes up behind him, circling his arms around Jon’s middle and pressing his cheek to his back. “Let me in,” he implores.

Jonathan lets out a huff, a soft susurration of breath, almost a laugh. He drags Patrick’s palm up over his chest where Patrick can feel the strong beating of his heart, lacing their fingers together. “You’re in as far as you could go.” He looks over his shoulder at Patrick. “But, I will try to tell you things. Since it matters to you.”

“Tá mo chroí istigh ionat,” Patrick says, knowing he’s butchering the pronunciation.

Jon starts laughing, Patrick listens to it rumbling through his back.

“That bad?” he asks as Jon finally turns around to pull him back in close.

“Let’s just say it’s a good thing your ancestors can’t hear you,” he says, laying a kiss on Patrick’s bare shoulder. He holds Patrick tight. Who knows how long he'll be able to stay for today. Or the next day. But Patrick hears what goes unsaid.

There is a someday.