Chapter Text
“Why did you bring a dead tree into your house?”
Vernon turns in the spot where he’s been crouched on the floor for the past half hour trying to adjust the wooden cross that is supposed to keep the not-so-majestic fir tree he bought in a parking lot this morning upright and standing so that it at least looks somewhat straight. When he looks up, he is met with a pair of lilac eyes staring at him from above.
Their owner is leaning against the wall behind him, head tilted in a way that spells nothing but unbridled curiosity. Months after they first met and still Vernon isn’t quite used to how otherworldly beautiful Jun looks even on an ordinary Monday afternoon in December standing among the odd collection of things that have accumulated in their living room over the years. A grandfather’s clock from an antique market. The cheapest coffee table IKEA had to offer. A couch which was saved from the dumpster and looks like it.
It is an odd contrast to say the least.
But Jun assures him that his kind gets this all the time. When he does, he does it with a wink and a smile and tells him, unreadable expression on his face, “faerie folk isn’t made to fit in.” And Vernon supposes it is hard to argue with that. It had been bad enough to try and wrap his head around the faerie thing in the first place, he isn’t going to call it into question now.
He realizes belatedly that he has just been staring without so much of an attempt at producing an intelligible answer, but Jun doesn’t seem bothered by that, perhaps used to the effect he has on mere mortals. Or patient with Vernon in particular since he does have a bad track record of functioning like a normal person even for your standard human being.
“It’s a surprise,” he says eventually, because he can’t really think of a better way to explain it off the top of his head. And it is supposed to be a surprise. Neither of them have had time to get a Christmas tree thus far and since Vernon surprisingly got the day off - a perk and working hazard of freelance journalism - he thought he would seize the opportunity. The excited smile on Seungkwan’s face had been on the back of his mind when he picked the tree and it was also the only thing that kept him from throwing it out again when he had to maneuver it through their cramped staircase because the elevator of their apartment building was last functional half a decade ago. Allegedly.
“You surprise your boyfriend with a tree corpse?” There is no judgment in Jun’s voice, he is speaking in the same dreamy tone he always uses when the human world just doesn’t make sense to him but he won’t let that phase him in the slightest. Vernon actually finds it impressive how comfortable Jun seems to be with understanding little to nothing about the world surrounding him, yet always maintaining a chipper outlook nonetheless.
“It’s not…” Well, but isn’t it? It is. Vernon considers the fir needles that tickle the side of his face and fill his nose with the heavy smell of tree sap and wood. This was once a living thing. Now it is a tree that was cut from its roots,dead or at the very least dying in their living space where it will lose its needles and wither away until the holidays are over and it will be discarded unceremoniously. Vernon swallows hard and sits down on the floor.
Shit.
That’s so fucked up.