Archive of Our Own

Beware the branches of hazel, thorn, alder, and ash.

Patrick passes through accidentally. At least the first time. He does it at a party after their first game, drinking and playing frisbee on the back lawn that night. The frisbee sails past his fingertips and into the dark woods, and he volunteers to get it. In one moment he’s carefully navigating his way through tree roots, trying to pick the slice of plastic out of the darkness and the next there’s a gust of wind, tossing up leaves, and he’s in the middle of a stone-walled room, a high ceiling vaulted overhead, standing beside a young man all in black as he stares out a glass-paned window like a cathedral.

He’s handsome, inhumanly so. His skin glows, lit up by firelight and the shine of the moon, and his lips part in surprise, dark brows drawing together.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says, eyes narrowed upon Patrick.

“I don’t even know where here is,” Patrick replies, equally shocked, but in an eyeblink, the cavernous room has faded back into the soaring branches of the trees, and the white frisbee lies in front of his feet like a taunt.

When he stumbles out of the woods talking about gothic church-like buildings amidst the trees, his teammates clap him on the back and ask him how much he had to drink. But Patrick had only had the one beer and no amount of alcohol should allow him to hallucinate. He tells them this over and over, but they laugh and ignore him, and eventually he gives up trying to explain. The next morning the memory of the room and the man has faded, enough to tell himself that he really did imagine something out there tromping around in the dark for that frisbee.

He lets it go.

Always carry an iron nail in your pocket.

He crosses again on Halloween, walking through campus with a few friends to get to a party. He’s dressed like William Wallace this year, because that meant he got a kilt and a sword, and that shit is badass. But now, standing in an intimate candlelit room, before that same devastatingly handsome young man and the disdainful look on his face, he feels pretty stupid in the outfit.

The man sits at a table, lips parted in surprise, there’s a cut piece of fruit sitting half-eaten in front of him, forgotten in his startlement.

“It’s not safe for you here! Don’t you know anything?” he cries, straightening in his chair.

Patrick stares at him in equal astonishment. He’s got no idea what this dude is talking about.

Patrick’s eyes dart around, taking in the weird candlelit room. When he takes a step back he has to straighten the sword in his belt so that he doesn’t knock a collection of strange objects off of a desk.

The guy gestures a hand at the cheap plastic toy, acerbically saying, “You think that will be any help?”

Patrick ignores him, because he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol and this room could in no way be mistaken for the campus quad. His friends were wrong. Patrick wasn’t drunk and hallucinating that time. This is real. “What the fuck is happening?” he asks, eyes out the window where the sky is shadowed with clouds. The moon had been bright and full, shining down on the quad.

“It’s all hallow’s eve, the boundaries are thin,” the man replies, getting to his feet, as if that should explain everything. The rich velvet folds of his weird outfit fall into place as he stands. He looks like something out of a renaissance fair. “And it’s imperative that you leave, Patrick.”

“How do you know my name? Who are you?” Patrick demands.

The man doesn’t answer. He takes Patrick’s shoulder in a strange grip that feels like a static charge sinking into his skin in the shape of fingers and pushes. It’s like being shoved back through a wall of water and when Patrick stumbles out the other side, he’s back on the quad again, his friends long gone. Patrick looks around him, mouth agape. There’s no evidence at all of the room, the man, the soft crackle of candles. Only a single cloud scuds across the night sky.

When he makes it to the party they ask him where he disappeared to an hour ago and Patrick stares back at them.

“What do you mean an hour?” he says. “It’s been ten minutes.”

Sharpy starts laughing. “Fine, don’t tell us.”

Patrick thinks maybe, just maybe, he’s going insane.

Throw salt over your shoulder to give the fair folk their due.

It was just those two moments, but sometimes, Patrick thinks he sees something sparkling out of the corner of his eye, but if he turns his head to look at it straight on it’s gone. Other times, he sees weird things on campus, things that can’t really be there: bark-skinned ladies and men with reeds for arms and legs, students with narrow spiny teeth like fish and girls with bat slit-pupiled eyes, and always whenever he blinks the oddness disappears. He doesn’t sleep well after that. He doesn’t sleep at all.

His grades start slipping and then his play. One night after coach has bawled him out for a miserable showing against a rival, he’s walking back across campus by himself, frustrated tears pricking at the corner of his eyes and grateful it’s so dark out, thick fog blanketing the moon so that nobody can see his embarrassing weakness. In the next moment he’s in a hallway. The walls are covered in gruesome, startling tapestries. There are strange animals and humans twined about, a man getting skinned on a table, ghostly horses chasing children down. Not something he would ever want on his walls. Patrick steps away from them in horror. It takes him a moment to notice that he’s not alone; the young man walks towards him, distracted, eyes on the book in his hands. He’s in another one of those weird outfits, tights and a doublet, a long cloak over his shoulders.

“You again,” Patrick shouts, unable to help himself.

The man jerks his head up. His eyes are so strange, Patrick thinks, like the very night sky is trapped inside them. He looks hurriedly back over his shoulder and when he turns back to meet Patrick’s gaze, there’s a pall over his face. “You have to return,” he says, already striding faster down the hall. “They’ll have heard that.”

Patrick checks behind him, hoping futilely that the campus will slide back into view, but it’s just more hallway. He takes a firm step backward, trying to find that last spot he stepped on the sidewalk, as if that might suddenly conjure it back into existence. Nothing happens, the room remains. Somehow he’s here, to stay this time, and he has no idea how he’s supposed to leave.

“I don’t understand this,” Patrick says, voice desperate even to his own ears.

“You don’t want to know,” the man replies urgently. “Cross back over. You only have one foot over the line. Do it now!”

“How?” Patrick yells. “If you’ve got all the answers, then how the fuck do I get back?”

“Just—” his eyes alight on something behind Patrick and he stops short, face falling.

“Well, well, well,” a low lyrical voice floats out of the darkness. “What have we here?”

“Too late,” the man says in a low voice, closing his eyes.

Patrick already afraid, feels another razor-edged shard of fear stab through him at the sight of it.

He slowly turns around and finds a woman with crimson grinning lips, like the slashed-open innards of a pomegranate, her long black hair spilling down over her shoulders to the floor. She’s as perfectly beautiful as the man, more so even, but there’s something off about her gaze, feverish in its intensity. She looks at Patrick like she wants to devour him. He takes an unconscious step back and she laughs gaily, snapping her fingers. He goes to back away even further, but now there’s nowhere to go, because the hallway is suddenly impossibly choked with other creatures. Tall, short, skinny, fat, some look human like the strange dark-eyed man and the woman with the red slash of a smile, but most are a strange mix of things, subtly off-kilter.

‘Mortal’ he hears all around him in muttered excited whispers. Patrick swallows, inching back and slamming right up against the man’s chest. As he scrambles away, the beautiful woman lets out a peal of laughter, and it sounds like nails on a blackboard. Patrick doesn’t understand the menace he feels rolling off of her. But every protective instinct he has tells him that a predator is staring at him behind the flawless mask of her face.

“What a lovely little morsel,” she says, reaching out for him with red-tipped nails. He realizes with a horrified jolt that it's not nail polish on her fingertips from the way it gleams slick and wet.

“He goes to me,” the dark-eyed man says, voice ringing out in proclamation. “I have claimed him.”

“You? A prince of summer?” She lets out a sputtering laugh, eyes wide as she looks back and forth between Patrick and the man. “Nay, I’ll not believe that, Jonny Be Good.”

Patrick jumps when the man’s hand closes around Patrick’s shoulder, spinning him about to face him. “If you want to live, you’d best play along,” he growls for Patrick’s ears only, before pressing a rough unexpected kiss to his mouth. Patrick is so shocked he doesn’t even resist, and when the man pulls away he presses Patrick’s cheek into the soft fabric covering his shoulder. Patrick notes in hysteric shock the way he smells, woodsy with afternotes of ice and snow. Sharply astonishingly familiar, but he doesn’t know from where. His mind is like wheels spinning, unable to come up any coherent answer. If this is a dream he wants to wake up now.

“I saw him, I wanted him, he came to me,” the man, Jonny, says to the woman.

“Oh, aye?” she replies, amused. “No games now. You know the axioms. It’s no claim to trap the little mouse just to set him free. Wanderers into the otherworld are forfeit, and I think I like this one. He has such lovely eyes, just the right color.”

She doesn’t say for what, but Patrick doesn’t think he wants to know.

“Do you dispute my claim, Maeve?” Jonny answers. Patrick opens his mouth to protest, and Jonny somehow senses it, hand coming up in a warning grasp on his elbow, grip so harsh Patrick has to bite his own tongue to hold back a cry. “That would be a very serious thing.”

She spreads her hands in a shrug. “I’d not deprive a gean cánach of his bedsport,” she sounds casual but her eyes linger on Patrick in way that makes him feel sick.

“Then get out of my way,” Jonny orders, hauling Patrick forward by his arm and tugging him along behind him. Patrick glances wide-eyed at all the people staring so hungrily even as they move to let him pass. He doesn’t understand the interaction that just happened. He didn’t even understand the words out of their mouths. Axioms? Otherworld?

Build your threshold with rowan so that no malevolent spirit may cross.

“Strip,” Jonny tells him when they reach the room that Patrick remembers from Halloween. His bedroom, Patrick realizes from the way he strips off his cloak and tosses it over a chair. There’s a huge four poster bed with blackened red curtains that he didn’t notice last time.

“What’s going on?” Patrick demands, voice trembling, as Jonny starts to unbutton his collar. “What are you doing?”

“You’ve crossed fully over,” Jonny says, as if that’ll mean anything to Patrick. “You’re in our world. Stuck and free for the taking. So strip and get on the bed.”

“What the fuck? Are you suggesting what I think you—Why can’t I just go home?” his voice is high and thin, nearly at hysteria.

“A good Irish boy like you shouldn’t be so ignorant,” Jonny says darkly, like Patrick’s bewilderment is pissing him off. His hands are brusquely efficient as he works his shirt off, revealing luminous gold skin. He’s got a strong powerful body, thick muscles layered over his shoulders, chest, and abdomen.

“Hey! I’m not the one who’s suggesting that you—” fuck me. Patrick cuts himself off. He can’t say it out loud. He can’t even contemplate it.

“You think I want to do this?” Jonny demands, expression thunderous. “I told you not to come here. I told you to leave. And yet here you are like a fool.” Patrick winces, but Jonny keeps shouting, “Do you want Maeve to use those blue eyes for her marble collection? Because by all means, here is the door!” Jonny marches over to it and throws it open with a resounding slam.

Patrick stares at him stricken. He wants to believe Jonny’s being hyperbolic, but he saw the look on her face, the red stains on her hands. He doesn’t doubt that she’d hurt him. She’d probably even enjoy it with Patrick unable to stop her in this weird magic place. What he doesn’t understand is why. He’s never felt so powerless in his life, wishing hard and fierce for the familiar buildings and streets of campus. But they don’t materialize, and Patrick lets out a choked gasp of anguish. How can this be happening?

Jonny softens slightly at the look on his face. He says gruffly, “At least I can do my best not to hurt you.”

It’s the wrong thing to say to him.

“I hate you,” Patrick says murderously, because this is no choice. No choice at all.

“Fine.” Jonny laughs harshly. “Hate me. Now strip.”

Patrick doesn’t give over easily. He scratches and bites at Jonny, sinking his teeth into his shoulder, and elbowing him in the stomach. He’s not really fighting to get away, because what escape is there? He’s fighting to inflict pain, to make Jonny hurt for what he’s about to do. Jonny gets him naked and pins his wrists to the pillow so he can’t scratch him; he runs bizarrely slick fingers down between Patrick’s asscheeks and when Patrick bucks and spits at him, gives up whatever preparation he was attempting to shove his cock in. Patrick screams—it’s painful, worse even than he might’ve expected, like being torn apart—but also because he can’t lie still and silent for this. His body isn’t made to work this way. The violation shames him.

Jonny holds him down even harder to thrust in and out, implacable, unmoved by Patrick’s suffering. Patrick strains, fighting against the intrusion inside him, but he doesn’t start to cry messy emotional tears until it strangely, horrifyingly, starts to feel good. Not totally, Jonny’s thick cock still feels far too wide to fit inside that space in Patrick’s body, but there’s something in there, he’s heard things, and Jonny’s cock keeps stroking across it, making him shiver and clench his teeth.

One particularly devastating thrust that makes him see white behind his eyes, renews his struggle. Frantic, he bucks hard, trying to throw Jonny off of him, but that just makes the sensation stronger and he so he gives up, trying not to shake every time Jonny pushes back in, owning him so thoroughly. He looks down his body, betrayed, tears falling fast and hard now, to where his own cock has started to fill on his belly. He can’t countenance it, how this can arouse him.

The moment Jonny lets go of one of his wrists, Patrick drops a panicked hand down to cover his erection, trying to hide it from Jonny’s dispassionate gaze, but Jonny misses nothing. He brings his palm down over Patrick’s, grinding downward, forcing Patrick’s fingers closed around his cock and increasing the pressure.

“No,” Patrick cries, jerking hard underneath him. “No.”

He comes like that, ashamed, Jonny fucking him, forcing Patrick’s palm in circles over his cock, still sobbing ‘no’ over and over again. it was bad enough, why did Jonny have to make him like it?

When it’s done, Jonny abruptly pulls out and rolls off the bed like nothing out of the ordinary happened. As he walks naked to a wash stand and swabs himself off, Patrick notices his hands are shaking. The only thing that tells Patrick he even came too is the unpleasant and alien leak of semen out of his ass.

Jonny sweeps his eyes back over Patrick’s prone form, expression drawn and tight, as Patrick blinks at him, fighting hard against blacking out.

“It’s over now,” he hears him say gently before it all goes dark.

Plant gorse, rosemary, and dill to guard weary sleepers in your home.

He wakes up disoriented the next morning, back in his own bed and when he looks at his clock, late for the bus for his game against BC. Sick and determined not to let it impact him, he forces himself out of bed. Only, as he sprints across campus, he expected to feel the aches and pains of what happened yesterday. But his body feels okay. Being honest with himself, he feels like he’s in peak physical health. Like it never happened. Did it happen? Did he just imagine some weird man holding him down and fucking him? Patrick shoves that equally disturbing thought away and seals it up tight, locked in the vault of things that he never wants to examine.

And then he goes and plays the best hockey of his life against BC the next day. His stickhandling is as slick as it ever is in practice, like he doesn’t have any defenders bearing down on him at all, just all the open space he needs to get creative. His passes all connect, and he’s even a beast on the back check. He opens up the scoring in the first three minutes for what winds up being a 7-1 blowout, knocking BC from their first seed.

“Holy shit, little man was on fire out there today!” Sharpy yells out when they filter into the locker room. “What’d you eat this morning?”

Patrick flushes, suddenly remembering why he hadn’t had time. “Your mom,” he shoots back feebly, and Sharpy chortles.

“I’ll let that one slide, short stuff,” he says as he shoves Patrick in the head.

After he addresses the room, his coach stops by his stall and claps Patrick on the back. “I don’t know what I said that got you back on track, but I’m glad you listened. You sure as hell proved yourself tonight.”

Patrick nods, relieved. He hasn’t gotten over their last conversation no matter what happens after. “Thanks, coach,” he says.

He plays like he’s got the devil himself after him for the rest of the month. He can’t even begin to explain it. It’s not like he’s doing things he didn’t know how to do before. Patrick has never hesitated during scrimmage. He’s always been better when the pressure is off, but now it’s like none of that matters. He was drafted third round and been to two development camps already, but now there’s talk of the Hobey Baker and maybe forgoing his junior season, like he’s a prospect that the Blackhawks got as an unexpected steal.

“You’re cold as ice,” Duncs tells him after he scores with 15 seconds left in OT in their game against St. Lawrence.

Patrick smiles wide, because this is good, this is really, really good, only…

Even with all the good stuff that’s been happening now, he can’t stop thinking about it—what happened that night. He breaks out in a cold sweat whenever the thought crosses his mind. But worse still is the traitorous heat that rises in his belly. And the horrible fear that maybe it never happened at all. Maybe it was all just a dream, the product of his twisted mind. He hates it. He hates himself. It keeps flashing before his eyes whenever he goes to jerk off, how he’d come undone despite himself while Jonny had dispassionately screwed him on the bed like a fucking chore. Patrick’s fucked up. It’s so sick. He’s broken somehow.

Mind their words closely. They are always honest, but they do not always speak truth.

He’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop for the last few weeks, and it finally happens as he’s walking out of one of his classes. He’s outside this time. Only not on campus anymore. It’s fully dark out for one and he’s in a garden choked with unrecognizable flowers. There’s a profusion of what he thinks are roses that are the same blackened red color of those curtains in Jonny’s room. If this is his imagination, it just keeps getting stranger.

He’s all alone, no Jonny in sight, the first time he’s made the crossing without appearing directly before him. Patrick doesn’t know what to make of that, if Jonny was somehow significant. Maybe after what happened he won’t see him again.

“You little fool!” Jonny snarls from behind him, making Patrick spin around so fast he nearly trips over his feet. “Wasn’t last time lesson enough?”

Patrick hisses. “What, like I asked for it? You ra—” he cuts himself off. He can’t form the word in his mouth.

“‘Raped,’” Jonny mocks, taking even this away from him. “You can say it. I raped you.”

Patrick’s filled with a blind fury that has him striking out at Jonny before he even knows he’s doing it, everything he has behind the blow, but in a single instant Jonny’s not there and his hand passes through empty air.

Patrick lets out a frenzied cry when Jonny reappears beside him.

“I didn’t choose this,” Jonny says softly, advancing him back towards a tree.

“Well you still did it,” Patrick hisses back, lifting his chin and refusing to give ground. He’s shaking hard with adrenaline, and he has to flex his hands, trying not to look afraid or cowed.

Jonny shrugs, like they’re talking about a bad test grade or a missed shot on goal.

The wind whistles through the gardens, carrying the sound of laughter with it.

Jonny turns his head towards the sound, eyes going blank and distant, and whispers, “Reoánaigh.”

Patrick stares at him. “What?”

Jonny doesn’t give him time to think, grabbing him by the shoulders, he orders, “Do as I say or it will go worse for you.”

“Worse than it already has?” Patrick shoots back bitterly, resisting the press of his hands as Jonny attempts to spin him against the tree.

“Patrick,” Jonny snaps as he hauls Patrick around and ungently shoves him flat against the tree, cheek scraping the bark. “Now is not the time.”

“Jonny, no—what are you—Jonny don’t!” Patrick cries as Jonny hauls his sweatpants and boxers down, baring his ass. “You can’t do this!”

Patrick tries to struggle, but he’s well-pinned between Jonny’s chest and the unyielding trunk of the tree. “Much, much worse,” Jonny says into his ear as and it takes Patrick a moment to realize he’s answering his earlier question. He tears a bunch of leaves off the tree over Patrick’s head and crunches them in his hand. Patrick doesn’t know what he means to do, but when he brings that hand down between Patrick’s cheeks, fingers probing, they’re wet and slick.

“No!” Patrick attempts to jerk away, but there’s nowhere to go.

“Shh,” Jonny says against his ear, voice absent of its earlier harshness. It just makes Patrick hate him more. All he can do is bite down on his forearm to keep from crying out as two of Jonny’s blunt fingers force their way inside of him. He grunts, mouth full of his sleeve, when they find that place inside him and rub hard enough that white sparks shoot through his brain.

It’s a dream, it’s not real, it’s all in his head. He tries to tell himself that none of this is really happening to him right now. But it feels as real as anything—Jonny’s hand on his hip, the thunder and ozone smell of him, distinct from the riotous garden of flowers, the way splinters catch under his nails as he digs his fingers into the wood—these are not details his brain could easily supply.

Jonny doesn’t give him much time to adjust, thrusting his fingers in shallowly a few more times before replacing them with his cock as Patrick chokes around his mouthful of sleeve. Patrick’s shocked. It’s all happening so fast, all over again. The pace Jonny sets is punishing, rocking Patrick up against the tree-trunk, caging Patrick in so tight it feels he barely has room to breathe around the rough push of Jonny’s cock.

He doesn’t start crying until he realizes he’s gotten hard again, swollen erection trapped in his sweats against the tree, grinding uncomfortably.

Jonny tugs him backward, giving himself space to get his hand on Patrick’s cock, and Patrick renews his struggle.

“N-no, please,” Patrick stutters, sobbing harder, “please.”

Jonny ignores him, fucking in harder, driving right against his prostate. He comes with a scream, tensed up and overwhelmed, and still Jonny shoves his cock into him, squeezing Patrick’s shaft like he wants to milk out every last drop. Patrick clutches at the tree, trembling, squeezing his eyes shut, praying for it to be over soon. He can’t take much more, each thrust punching a soft ‘unh’ out of his mouth.

The wind picks up, shrieking through the trees, the temperature in the garden drops several degrees and Patrick has the uncomfortable sensation of eyes on him, eyes that pick him apart and try to peer inside him. His gut sinks in despair. He’s a horrible hockey player, he’ll never amount to anything. He can’t get it together on the ice, always deferring to the stronger players. Because that’s what he is, all potential, no follow-through. A disappointment. And his parents spent so much time and money on him and what does he have to show for it? Nothing. He deserves this, right now. He earned this. He’s worthless.

“C’mon, Patrick fight it,” Jonny says, nuzzling against his ear.

“Wha—” Patrick says, watery and congested, tears still pouring down his face.

“You’re doing so good,” Jonny tells him and the sudden feeling of desolation retreats, the sense of himself roaring back, his highlight reel plays from the last two weeks riding to the forefront of his brain. He’s not nothing. He’s fucking excellent at hockey. Maybe he’s had a bit of a confidence problem since he started in college, but now he’s not struggling with that anymore. And fuck this bullshit. Jonny will pay for this one day. He gives Jonny a vicious jab in the gut with his elbow.

“Yeah,” Jonny says, unaffected by the strike, but like he knows what Patrick is thinking, like he understands.

Patrick doesn’t know what to make of the unexpected kiss that Jonny presses to his neck, or what the weird feeling in his stomach is when Jonny gets thicker, harder in his ass before coming with a muted exhale.

He shudders and slumps forward after Jonny withdraws, suddenly drained and barely able to stay on his feet. Jonny takes a small step back and absent the bracing weight at his back, Patrick nearly pitches right over. Jonny hauls him off the ground, dragging sweats back up over his ass and gathering him in his arms like some fainting lady out of a painting. He passes in and out of consciousness as Jonny carries him back through that strange stone cathedral. It's a castle, he realizes, his head nodding against Jonny’s shoulder as he walks. A fortress right out of fairytales. People—creatures, some of them—don’t even look at them as they pass, as if there’s nothing out of the ordinary with this.

Jonny takes him back to his room. A place that feels familiar now. The smell of it that Patrick swears he recognizes, even though he doesn’t know where. It’s comforting. Patrick lets himself relax on the soft mattress with a sigh and then stiffens. He doesn’t like this smell. He doesn’t want any part of this.

“What are you doing?” Patrick asks him blearily as Jonny sets him down on the bed.

Jonny freezes. “Trying to help you,” he says after a long moment.

Patrick snorts at that, rolling his head on the pillow. “Why do you even care?”

Do not call them by name lest you draw their attention.

It is winter, and it is cold, but Jonathan has found a friend. He’s a little boy who goes skating every day on the frozen pond, playing a game by himself with a little black disc and a stick for hours. Jonathan watched for a fortnight, fascinated, until he finally showed himself and asked him, curious, how to play.

He shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t be over the boundaries at all. He is seven times the boy’s age in human years, but he is young for his own kind yet and new in his magic.

The boy just took his appearance in stride, didn’t even blink at the skates that Jonathan glamoured up for himself, and explained the rules, seemingly glad for another player.

“But you have to take it seriously,” he said with a stern countenance.

“I’m always serious,” Jonathan replied, just as solemn, and he meant it.

Patrick explained that he’d just started his first real mini-mite team and it wasn’t as fun as he’d hoped it would be because the other kids kept goofing off. Patrick decided he liked playing with Jonathan after that first time though, that he was giving it enough effort. He said they could do it again. And now Jonathan has a friend.

“Why do you always wear black?” Patrick asks one day a few weeks hence when Jonathan meets him at the pond.

“Oh,” Jonathan says, looking down at himself, and the black skates he conjured and the gloves and stick. “It’s the only color I’m allowed. Black and red.”

He thinks back to other times, times before the first frosts set in when he could’ve worn whatever he wanted, but now even when the summer comes, it won’t be the same. His chest aches, and so he shoulders the thought aside.

“Is it...weird?” he asks, testing the word that Patrick uses out.

“Hmm,” Patrick says. “Maybe.” He shoves Jonathan with a grin though like he doesn’t mind.

There are some days when Jonathan waits for him that Patrick never comes. The sun goes down and he knows Patrick won’t show up, because he’s never out on the ice after dark. He’s sad whenever this happens, and then angry at himself for being sad, even though he knows it’s not safe for little boys after dark. The boundaries are so thin, especially now during bitter winter, and even one of Jonathan’s kind would have a hard time resisting the urge to entice such a pretty child as Patrick over the lines, fascinated with his deft hands and quick smile. On those days, Jonathan crosses back over to the Unseelie Court and tries not to dwell on the fact that it feels like going to bed with an empty belly, slowly starving.

But Patrick always comes back to the pond, and when he does, cheeks red from the chill and eyes bright, he thinks Patrick maybe misses him on those days too. One day, he returns all in black.

“We match,” he says, plucking at his sweater and grinning brightly. “I asked my dad if I could do it like you and he said yes.”

Jonathan holds his breath for a moment, unsure what to say. Patrick looks at him pensively until Jonathan summons up a smile.

“Thank you,” he says softly. Patrick whoops and streaks by him, calling ‘tag, you’re it’ and Jonathan startles and takes a moment to follow. They’re two little shades darting down the ice. Patrick doesn’t know what he did, what it means, and Jonathan isn’t going to tell him.

“So, I was thinking maybe you could spend the night at my house?” Patrick offers one afternoon amidst the lengthening shadows. Soon Patrick will have to go home. “Although you can’t really get your mom to call and say it’s okay, can you,” he says with a sigh, shading his eyes against the glare off the ice.

Jonny turns himself into a sedate human woman while Patrick snorts with laughter.

“Your clothes are silly!” he says.

Jonathan looks down at himself. He hasn’t really paid attention to what they wear. Not the same things as Patrick wears apparently.

“Do a dress,” Patrick tells him. “In purple!”

Aware of his own deficit of knowledge, Jonathan adjusts the glamour for the dress, and Patrick starts giggling again. “She’s gonna think your mom’s a hippie!” Jonathan plucks at the skirt that goes to his feet and shrugs. He’ll have to spend more time across the borders to better approximate their clothing.

It doesn’t end up mattering, because all he needs to do is magic the phone so that Patrick’s mom thinks she’s talking to Jonathan’s mother. Humans are so very strange. Patrick has to supply him with the answers to her bizarre questions, like what time his ‘mother’ will pick him up tomorrow morning, and if he’s bringing his own sleeping bag.

“Maintaining two glamours will be difficult,” he says after Patrick’s mother hangs up none the wiser to the fact that her nice phone-call with Jonny’s ‘mother’ came from a payphone just down the street from her house, paid for with quarters her six-year-old son supplied.

“Is magic hard?” Patrick asks.

Jonathan pauses. He’s a prince. He’s brimming with it. When he was younger it was almost harder not to do magic than to let it happen. Not all of the fae have so much. Control though, that’s the hard part. Maeve has far better finesse and even though Jonny has more raw strength, she often outmatches him, setting nasty pitfalls and tricks too complicated for him.

“Sometimes,” he settles on.

“Maybe we can get you into school!” Patrick says, eyes alight with mischief and possibility. “Or, or onto the team! Then we could play all the time.”

Time passes, they sneak Jonathan into Patrick’s first grade class and then onto the team. Patrick’s parents get used to seeing him around, a little black-clad fixture in their home.

“Jon, your parents must miss you with you so often at our place,” Patrick’s mother tells him one afternoon when he comes home with Patrick. She’s made cookies, so much she must’ve known he’d be there too.

“Am I not welcome?” he asks very seriously and Patrick elbows him in the side. Sometimes he says Jonathan needs to work on how he talks to humans.

“Oh, of course you are, honey,” she replies, startled by the question. “Patrick’s never had such a good friend.”

And so it happens that Jonathan crosses back over less and less. Why would he? There is nothing for him there.

The time passes quicker on the human side, but now the long winter is flying by at too-fast a clip to keep up with. A brief thaw comes in January and Jonny is glad. Spring is not yet on the horizon, but with the frost retreating he can pretend.

Only he comes to regret his gladness at the warmer temperatures when Patrick, laughing and failing to pay attention, skates over too thin ice and goes through with a mighty crack.

“Jon,” he cries before he’s swallowed up by black water.

It takes Jonathan too long to find him. And when he does, pulling Patrick from the water, his face has gone pale and blue, his chest still.

“Patrick, Patrick,” he whispers, shaking him, hoping he’ll wake up. It’s still the middle of winter, thaw or no, and Jonathan’s magic is at its ebb. Reviving a life is no paltry spell, but when Patrick’s eyes don’t open, Jonathan pours everything he has into him, crying with relief after Patrick coughs and spits up water, the color rushing back into his skin.

“Jon?” Patrick asks, shivering, fisting his hand in Jonathan’s wet sweater.

“Well, well, well,” a voice says from a slushy snowbank at the edge of the pond. Jonathan looks up and there is his least favorite person, Maeve, with a cruel smile etched into her face. And all of a sudden, Jonathan knows exactly where the thaw came from.

“Why?” he asks, softly, betrayed. He knew when he left home that the unseelie were different, that they had their own ways, but they’re vicious. They delight in pain. And Maeve, especially, delights in his.

Her young face twists up. “It’s always Jonathan this, Jonathan that. I don’t know what she sees in you, a puling summer-blooded brat! You’re useless! Look at you here, playing at human. You disgust me.”

“What’s going on?” Patrick asks in a small voice, shrinking back from Maeve who in her adolescence would be terrifying enough even without magic.

And Jonathan looks down at him and knows he’ll never be able to protect him, because Patrick loves the ice and snow, and Maeve knows about him now, and she’ll never stop trying to break the things that Jonathan loves.

Jonathan doesn’t even know where he finds the strength after doing all that healing, but he throws everything that remains outward, thinking ‘forget,’ as hard as he can. He grips Patrick’s hand one last time and feels his stomach plunge in despair as all recognition melts out of Patrick’s eyes. He knew it was coming, and yet still was unprepared for what it would actually feel like. Maeve stumbles on the shore under the onslaught of his spell and Jonathan reaches up and freezes her fast, using her own winter magic against her.

“What’s going on?” Patrick asks again, frightened and cold, and on the verge of tears.

“You fell through the ice,” Jonathan tells him gently as he helps him up. “Go home now. As fast as you can. Tell your parents what happened.”

He watches Patrick run back home, staring at the path well after he’s disappeared, heart in his throat, before he returns back over the border. It’s barely a revenge, but he leaves the spell holding Maeve up until it melts on its own, leaving her to wonder why she’s waking up on the shores of a slushy little pond, human-side, all on her own. She won’t remember Patrick, and Patrick in turn won’t remember him. That’s okay, because Jonathan will never be able to go back.

Ward your eaves with the sap of poison yew.

Patrick’s always done well enough with girls. He thinks having three sisters has taught him a level of savvy not all of his friends are capable of. But once his hockey blows up, his social capital does too, and what that means is that he’s kinda got his pick. He hooks up with a different chick every night for a week just because he can. He has to prove to himself that he’s still normal. The fact that he came as Jonny fucked him up the ass doesn’t mean he liked it. That was some weird magic voodoo shit, totally inexplicable, just like ending up there at all. If it ever happened at all. He woke up back in his bed again the second time, none the worse for wear, and he’d been so certain while it was happening that he couldn’t possibly be imagining it, that he wasn’t crazy, but the next morning everything was so regular, and he’d ached all over when he’d passed out in Jonny’s bed.

Fuck, maybe he’s 100% insane. Especially because he’s thinking about this now, as he’s in a girl’s single, getting what may be the most technically proficient blowjob of his young life. It’s toe-curlingly good and somehow he can’t come. He can’t even see his way close to it and the longer she goes on, he’s a little afraid he’ll lose wood.

This is all your fault, he thinks at Jonny.

He imagines Jonny laughing darkly at him in reply, and it makes his gut tighten. It’s true. It’s all Jonny’s fault. But...maybe not for the reasons it should be his fault.

“Mm, you saying you liked it?” he imagines Jonny telling him.

“No, I fucking didn’t,” Patrick would yell back.

The Jonny in his head leans back against the girl’s desk. He sighs gustily, holding Patrick’s gaze. Not even the Jonny in his head will cooperate. “It’s okay, Patrick, I had to make you come,” he says. “I had to.”

“I didn’t like it,” Patrick feels compelled to remind him. Maybe he’s reminding himself. He’s horrified to realize there are actual tears pricking at the corner of his eyes. He dashes them away with the back of his hand.

“Shh,” imaginary Jonny says. And then he walks over, steps in close. Of course, he completely ignores the girl on her knees between Patrick’s thighs. He’s an asshole, imaginarily marauding into people’s brains where he’s not wanted, when they’re trying to hookup. He cups Patrick’s cheeks. “I know.”

The girl gives another hard suck, completely unaware of the tumult going on in Patrick’s brain, and it’s so much stimulation. He doesn’t know why this is happening. He couldn’t stop himself with Jonny, but now, he’s stuck. And it doesn’t make sense. “I can’t—I can’t—and I want to so bad,” he sobs at his imaginary Jonny.

“You can let go,” Jonny tells him. “You chose this. You can let go.”

And suddenly something, tightly wound inside Patrick relaxes. “Fuck, I’m gonna—” he says to the girl, he thinks her name is Amber, choked, with barely enough lead time before it all comes rushing out of him. Amber shoves down on his dick, deep-throating him as he blows his load, and he curses, stupid internal arguments all-but-forgotten. Jesus, yes, this is definitely the most skilfull blowjob he’s ever had.

He takes a couple breaths, trying to come back to himself, and then freezes as a deep inhale carries that familiar scent of an oncoming storm. What? It can’t be. He tells himself firmly. None of that was real. None of that happened. It couldn’t have. Amber would’ve fucking noticed if there was another dude in the room talking with Patrick while she was blowing him. Surely she would’ve noticed. How could she not…

“Are you okay?” she asks as she rolls up to her feet, voice just slightly raspy.

Patrick blinks. “I uh—I uh—did you hear something?”

“Oh, my neighbor? Yeah, you were a little loud at the end there. He’s some geek virgin who never gets laid. Whenever I have company he goes all ratchet and starts banging on the wall.”

“What? I uh—” Patrick hadn’t noticed anybody banging on the wall at all, and the way he keeps blinking at her like a fish has her starting to look at him concerned. He clears his throat. “Um, sorry, you can deep throat?”

“Well, obviously,” she says with a cute giggle. “You can avoid the taste that way.”

Patrick nods at her, distracted. “Right. You sure you didn’t hear anything?”

“No,” she says looking at him and then back at the wall behind her. “Look, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m—shit—I’m fine. Thank you,” Patrick says, shaking his head. “I think you blew my mind a little.” He fumbles out his phone and pretends to check for texts. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ordinarily ditch like this, but I have to go. Do you mind if I owe you one?”

“Okay, Kane,” she says, giving him a long up-and-down look. “But I’m calling it in.”

“Sure, of course,” he says, and gives her a quick kiss. “Anytime.”

He dashes out of her dorm room and slumps down on a bench, inhaling deep breaths of the cool night air. He really is crazy. He’s twenty and he’s going totally insane. He should march himself into student health services right now, he knows that. But. But going in there and telling them he’s imagining anal sex with weird magical creatures sounds like the last thing he ever wants to do. How do you come back from that? How does anybody ever look at you the same? What the hell would his parents say? His fucking teammates even? Maybe it’ll just go away on it’s own. It could happen. Somehow.

Oh fuck. He’s so doomed.

Hang brass bells to get first warning when uncanny interlopers approach.

He goes to the library first thing the next morning, because while going to student health services sounds about as fun as as total self-immolation could possibly get, one phrase keeps getting stuck in his head: Prince of summer.

Where did he get that? Maybe at least there’s a method to the madness. Some kind of explanation. Of course, attempting to use the library’s online catalogue is a lesson in misery and he keeps pulling down results about historical princes and summer heatwaves, but nothing with both search terms together. Finally he gives up and goes to the circulation desk.

“Um, sorry,” he asks the girl standing there, sulkily scanning a huge pile of books. “Can I uh...ask you a question.”

She looks up at him brows raised and when he doesn’t immediately say anything, gestures and says, “Well?”

“Uh, I’m trying to look something up on the uh, prince of summer. Sorry, I know it’s weird, but the library website wasn’t helping and I’m sure there must be something.”

She blinks at him, straightening. “Prince of summer? That sounds like fairies.”

“Fairies?” He repeats incredulous.

“Yeah, fairies.”

“Like, like, fucking Tinkerbell?”

She rolls her eyes. “No, more like Yeats and Celtic mythology. Those fairies.”

“Uhhhh,” he stares at her, flabbergasted.

She snorts at him and then disappears behind the desk before coming back with a huge book and dropping it down on the desk in front of him. Irish Mythic Lore it says in gold embossed letters.

She nods her head at it. “The SFF club takes stuff like this out all the time.”

“The SFF club?”

“Sci-fi fantasy?” she says and then shakes her head. “Jesus. Athlete recruits. Look,” she tells him, pulling the book open. “In traditional celtic lore or whatever, there are two courts of the fairies—seelie and unseelie. The seelie court is mischievous and stuff, but mostly good. If humans don’t insult them, they’ll leave them alone, but the other guys, the unseelie—”

“Like to torture and maim and terrify people?” Patrick says, thinking of Maeve and everybody else in that horrid castle.

She snaps her fingers at him. “You got it.” She pages to another part of the book to some in color illustrations showing a crowned blonde woman assembled before her court. “Now a prince of summer would be like, fairy royalty, but for the seelie guys. And a prince of winter would be the same for the unseelie.”

“Wait,” Patrick says. “A prince of summer is one of the good guys?”

“Yup.”

“Could he end up with the unseelie somehow?”

“Umm,” she says, shrugging. “Well, they go to war all the time. How do you usually end up with the bad guys after a war?”

“By turning traitor,” Patrick says darkly.

“Yeah, but he’s royalty. Could also be taken hostage by the side that won. History is full of that shit.”

Patrick furrows his brow. Jonny hadn’t seemed like one of the good guys. He’d hurt Patrick. Maybe Maeve would’ve made mincemeat out of him, but he could’ve let Patrick go, instead he’d taken Patrick’s choice away. He’d—he’d—

The girl shuts the book, startling Patrick out of his thoughts. “Hey wait,” he says. “Is there any thing about uh, getting better at something after you like, maybe sleep with a fairy?”

He doesn’t really think that he’s better at hockey because of what happened with Jonny, he still doesn’t even know if he’s imagining everything or not. Only, looking at this book, how could he make all this stuff up? It’s right there. And when he woke up the next morning, he was again back in his bed, thrumming with energy. That night at the game they played against Union, he notched twenty-four minutes of ice time and it felt like he had enough in the tank to do another twenty after that. He’d been playing his personal best all season long, and then somehow managed to do even better than that. It shouldn’t have been possible.

She laughs at him. “Oh man, why do you wanna know, jockboy?”

Patrick frowns at her. “Look, just because I’m not into this stuff doesn’t mean I’m dumb, alright?”

She puts her hands up. “Okay, okay, don’t get your shorts in a knot. Yeah, there’s like tons of stuff about that. Tons! Yeats talks about this one fairy woman who likes poets and she makes them great and famous or whatever, but eventually, unless they find somebody to take their place, they go insane and die.”

Patrick’s stomach drops. “Insane? Insane how?”

“I don’t know! He wasn’t like, describing the exact nature of the crazy, sorry! It’s obviously all just myth anyway. You’re getting a little extra about this, buddy.”

“I’m just interested,” he says, trying to rein in his sudden panic that it’s both real and he’s also going insane.

“Oookay,” the girl says slowly. “Well you can look her up or whatever. She’s called the leannan sidhe.” She writes the name on a piece of paper and passes it over to him. “So you won’t eff it up when you try to search google.”

He takes it and shoves it in his pocket with a sigh. “Well, thanks, for the help and the, you know, insults.”

She grins at him. “Anytime.”

If calamity should befall you and in that eldritch realm you find yourself, it must be you to will yourself away again.

Days go by. He waits for the vertigo of suddenly not being where he’s supposed to be to hit, but it doesn’t come. As he begins to prepare for exams and their game schedule ramps up before the break, he’s gradually letting himself believe that maybe they really were dreams. The most visceral dreams he’s ever had, but still.

They get their first snow of the year the last week of November. Patrick has a game the next day and needs to be up early that morning, but as the midnight flakes swirl down he finds himself outside with his buddies, packing together snowballs and whooping with laughter. Shawsy dumps snow down the back of his coat while he’s busy trying to fend off Sharpy.

“Oh, you jackass!” Patrick cries, trying to shake out his hood. Shawsy takes off laughing into the woods and Patrick follows without a thought.

It’s only when he breaks through the darkened tree line that he questions the wisdom of the idea. Shawsy is nowhere in sight and the woods have gone a deathly quiet. He can’t hear the sounds of his friends anymore even though they can’t be more than thirty feet away.

Unless he’s not where he thinks he is.

He spins around and looks behind him, and the fields in front of the dorms are gone.

“Fuck,” he says softly.

“Oh, indeed,” an amused feminine voice says right in his ear, chilly breath fanning his cheek.

Patrick jerks away and trips over a tree root in his haste. He looks up to see Maeve standing over him. She’s beautiful and terrifying and her hands are the red of fresh blood. Does she ever wash them, he thinks hysterically.

“What do you want?” he calls, hoarse and weak.

She grins, baring sharp teeth. “Mmm, I’m sure you don’t want to know.”

Patrick shuts his eyes, remembers the feeling of Jonny shoving him back over the border and tries to imagine that happening again. He doesn’t budge. He has no idea how he ended up in his own bed both times.

“I’ve never seen a little rabbit yearn for the snare more,” she laughs darkly. As soon as he blinks his eyes open he realizes it was a mistake. She’s too close now, kneeling in front of him, looking ready to take a bite out of him.

“Maeve,” a voice thunders through the woods. “Imeacht gan teacht ort.”

Jonny, Patrick realizes. He’s coming.

Her gazes on Patrick sharpens. “What is it about you?” Patrick stares blankly back at her. She growls and grabs his chin. “Tell me!”

“I don’t know,” he spits back, tearing his face out of her grasp.

“Maeve,” Jonny’s voice echoes through the woods again, before he blinks into existence next to them. “Why are you interfering with my claim?”

“What claim?” she laughs and tosses her head. “Are you fucking him right now?”

Jonny grips Patrick’s shoulder, standing over him protectively.

“Oh, Jonny, why this little rabbit?” She reaches out and tugs on one of Patrick’s curls. “Why now?”

Jonny growls at her and she jerks her head up, narrowing her eyes at him. “It’s winter, boyo, best be careful.”

“What would Reoánaigh say if she knew you were about to break the axioms?” he replied. “And all just to piss me off?”

She laughed. “Maybe she wants me to break you of your unnatural habits.”

“My unnatural habits?” Jonny laughs. “How many human toys did you gobble up just last week?”

“They’re toys, Jonny Be Good,” she replies, inspecting her nails, “not lovers.”

She’s opening her mouth up to reply, when a chill rises on the wind that makes Patrick’s teeth chatter.

“Speak of the devil and she shall appear,” Jonny says, his breath a vaporous white cloud. The bark on the trees is rhymed with a sudden crackling frost. The air is so cold it hurts to breathe. He looks up at Jonny, sees the thick crystals of frost glowing on his eyelashes, and wonders what’s happening. It must be painful. Patrick himself feels the pervasive cold, but Jonny looks unmoved.

Maeve glares at Jonny, face creased in anger. “This isn’t over, pet,” she spits out venomously, kicking at Patrick’s legs before disappearing.

The cold increases to unbearable levels, until Patrick cries out in pain. He’s going to freeze to death in this strange place at Jonny’s feet.

“Come,” Jonny says, offering his palm to Patrick. Patrick lifts a trembling hand to his and as Jonny folds his fingers in his grip the world blinks out.

It blinks back into existence in Jonny’s rooms, mercifully heated by the roaring fire. Patrick collapses in front of it with a grateful whimper. Jonny wraps him in a thick woolen blanket and then tries to offer him a cup of tea that Patrick vociferously resists. He hadn’t believed it, that stupid research he’d done, or at least most of him hadn’t. But he’d been unable to stop looking up more stuff later, and he knew you weren’t supposed to eat or drink anything you received in fairy land or you could get stuck.

“I’ll let you go, Patrick,” Jonny says. “I give you my word. Just drink it.”

Patrick stares up at him warily, still so cold under the blanket.

“You’ve obviously learned a few things since I saw you last, but didn’t anybody tell you if I make you a promise I have to keep it?”

Patrick narrows his eyes at him and Jonny raises his brows, offering the tea again.

“Why should I trust you?”

Jonny snorts. “Have I ever lied to you?”

Patrick sighs and finally holds out his hands for the steaming mug of tea. It tastes like nothing, but it soothes his raw throat going down and adds a pleasant warmth to his belly. Sensation is steadily returning into his frozen hands and feet. His eyes snag on the elegant four poster while he’s warming himself by the fire.

“So I suppose I—we—” he says with his eyes on soft mound of pillows and covers. He remembers the last time he was in that bed all too well.

Jonny follows his gaze. “Yes,” he says softly, face turning an odd shade of regretful. Patrick doesn’t know what to make of it. Jonny’s said before that he didn’t want to do any of this, and he’d barely seemed to enjoy it anymore than Patrick had, but Patrick had assumed that was all some bullshit act.

“If you let me go, am I just, what, up for grabs?” Patrick asks.

Jonny settles himself at his desk with a sigh. “The unseelie feed off of humans. Their flesh, their fear, their dreams—you’d be too great a prize to let go.”

“Why couldn’t you just...say we had…” Patrick asks.

“If it worked like that, I would have,” Jonny replies. Patrick stares at him. “I would have,” Jonny repeats firmly. “But here word is action. If I told them that I’d fucked you, I still would’ve had to do it. We cannot—I cannot lie. And without spilled seed, yours and mine, I cannot buy you sanctuary.”

Patrick looks down at his drained tea cup. “This isn’t—none of this is fair.”

Jonny turns his head away and laughs, sharp and bitter. “No it isn’t.”

Patrick makes up his mind, creaking to his feet. He sheds the blanket first and then slowly extricates himself from his coat. Jonny watches him, wordless, as he strips off his long sleeved t-shirt and then pushes down his jeans until he’s standing in front of Jonny in his boxer briefs, shivering all over again.

“Well?” he asks, arms crossed over his chest, unsure of what to make of Jonny’s expression.

After a long tense moment, Jonny uses the armrests of his chair to push himself to his feet, coming to a stop in front of Patrick. “Alright?” he asks.

“No,” Patrick replies with a laugh of his own. “Just, um, can you go slow this time?”

He feels like a twat even asking, like he can’t handle it, but it had hurt both times, more even than he would’ve expected. If they could avoid that, he’d prefer it.

Jonny gets to his feet, pressing a vial in Patrick’s hands. He doesn’t need to remove his elaborate black outfit, he just magics it away, and something about the casual use of it, makes Patrick’s memories twinge as he watches Jonny walk to the bed, an odd deja vu catching at the corners of his mind. He’s forgetting something—he doesn’t know what or how.

Jonny lays himself flat on the mattress, pillowing his chin on crossed arms. Patrick hasn’t seen him from this angle before, the thick muscle along his spine, the smooth skin, the tapered waist flaring out into a voluptuous ass.

“Do you—you want me to do you?” Patrick asks hoarsely.

Jonny looks at him curiously over his shoulder. “Would you rather have it the other way?”

Color floods into Patrick’s cheeks and he trips over himself trying to get the words out, “No, no. I uh—this is fine.”

Jonny turns away again, waiting patiently for him on the bed.

As Patrick arranges himself between Jonny’s thighs, forcing him to shift up the bed, he feels hysterical with disbelief. He’s got the vile in his hand still, the glass warming in his palm, and he drops it twice on the sheets in his attempts to unstopper it. Jonny clears his throat, back muscles tense, and buries his face in the pillows and something inside Patrick tightens further still.

“Have you done this before?” he asks, hoarse.

“Yes,” Jonny replies, equally gruff.

Patrick bites the corner of his lips. “Not like—not like what happened to me though, right?”

Jonny lifts his head off the pillow, staring at his own broad hand as he flexed his fingers. “When I first came here, I was very young. There were many here who wanted to put a prince on his belly. It was not always kind, but it was never against my wishes.” An energy seems to crackle around his fingertips, growing stronger as he clenches his hand into a fist, light sparking off his knuckles. The look on his face is impenetrable. The dark electricity dissipates with a sudden sizzle and pop, and he drops his hand to the pillow.

“Did you like it?” Patrick asks, curious, ashamed of the color that rushes to his cheeks at the memory of what it felt like for him—Jonny thrust inside him, making him take it, making him come.

Jonny slants a glance at him. “Yes.”

Patrick swallows, looks down at Jonny’s body—the thick musculature, as strong as any guy on the team. There’s no pretending he’s a chick. “I might not be able to do this. I don’t—not with guys.”

Even before it’s out of his mouth, he’s aware that’s probably a colossal lie. He’s already half-hard in his briefs, belly tight and tingling. He doesn’t even know why he bothered to prevaricate. It’s not like Jonny’s going to tell somebody about this, about how Patrick’s all fucked up in the head. Jonny drops his eyes to his groin, and Patrick feels himself stiffen up further, cheeks now burning with embarrassment and breath coming a little short.

“Okay,” he says simply, but there’s a smile lurking at the corner of his mouth, and something about it feels almost flirtatious.

Patrick finally gets the stupid vial unstoppered, the strong scent of tuberoses permeating the room. He doesn’t know what possesses him, but he tilts the bottle over Jonny’s spine, watching the viscous substance pool at the small of his back just above the full swell of his buttocks. He looks up, trying to meet Jonny’s eyes and search out his expression, but he’s hidden his face back in the pillows.

Patrick drags his fingers through the perfumed lubricant and then parts Jonny’s cheeks. Jonny shifts and makes a small noise he cuts off with a click of his teeth as Patrick’s fingertips pass over his hole. Patrick freezes, stilling the motion of his hand. He’s suddenly painfully aware of his lack of experience with this sort of thing. From this side anyway, his traitorous brain supplies, and then he’s merely angry at himself for caring.

Jonny doesn’t make a sound when Patrick sinks the first finger inside him, and the silence only expands, tense and uncomfortable, as he pushes in the second. Patrick swallows watching his knuckles catch on Jonny’s rim. He bites down hard at his lip, trying to ignore the funny fizzing feeling in his stomach as Jonny repositions himself on the bed, the muscles sliding both delicate and powerful under his skin. God, he should’ve asked Jonny to do this to himself.

He finds Jonny’s stillness even more unsettling when he gets his cock in. Jonny barely reacts beyond the slightest bunching of his shoulder muscles, even as Patrick struggles with the intensity of the hot clutch of his body, squeezing tight around Patrick girth in a way that makes him grunt and take a moment just to breathe. Patrick experiments with a few testing thrusts, trying to get used to this, to the difference of fucking somebody larger than himself who he can’t muscle around. But Jonny just lays there, limp like a dead fish, and Patrick doesn’t know how he’s supposed to keep it up. He feels sick and wrong, worse almost than the violation Jonny perpetrated on him.

“I can’t,” he finally grits out, voice cracked and raw, stilling his hips and pulling out. He’s going soft anyway. “You’ve gotta give me something.”

“What?” Jonny whispers, lifting his head, revealing his flushed face and the way he keeps worrying his lower lip with his teeth—like he—like he maybe was turned on. Patrick’s breath stops in his chest for a moment.

“Fight me, do something!” he finally says.

Jonny raises a single brow at him, running his eyes over Patrick in a way that makes him flush. “I’d win.”

“Well then—fucking—pretend to enjoy it, I don’t know!” Patrick lets out a frustrated noise. He repeats, “You gotta give me something!”

“Do a good job and I won’t have to pretend,” Jonny replies archly.

“Do a—are you kidding me?” Patrick demands, incensed. Screw Jonny, he thinks as he reaches for the lube, pouring it in his palm and then wrapping his slick fingers around his cock so that he can give himself a few quick tugs. Fisting himself back to hardness, he says, “Get on your knees.”

Unexpectedly, the look Jonny gives him is rich with amusement, but his smile lacks malice, and he complies readily enough. Patrick taps his cock against his hole, the only preface he gives Jonny before thrusting back inside, and this time he’s gratified by the way Jonny’s head dips down between his shoulders and his fists tighten in the sheets.

“Hurts?” he asks, not even sure what answer he wants to hear from him.

Jonny widens his knees and lets out a short huff of a breath. “No,” he replies, terse.

Patrick starts fucking him in earnest then, discarding his earlier gentle strokes for a hard firm pace that Jonny has to brace himself against. Patrick feels it in the way Jonny squeezes down around his cock and has to hiss.

“Oh fuck, c’mon,” he says, grudgingly turned on, hauling back on Jonny’s hips in a way that makes him inhale, almost on a gasp.

“Are you—?” Patrick breathes out, hoping Jonny’s enjoying it.

“I said do a good job,” Jonny interrupts sharply, back dipping when Patrick hits what he assumes is that spot inside, the one that made him feel all weird when it was him. Jonny flexes back against him like he’s trying to get more and Patrick finds himself slowing his brutal pace, trying to angle for that spot.

He must get it, because all of the muscles along Jonny’s spine go tight even as his arms relax, dropping his face to the mattress, ass still wantonly popped up, just taking Patrick’s cock like he was made for it. He groans as Patrick rocks back into him, firing Patrick’s blood up. It’s hot. It’s so fucked up, but it’s hot.

Patrick’s approach to sex is like hockey—focused, intent on his performance, sometimes maybe too aware to enjoy it. Now is different. He keeps telling himself it’s just a stupid exercise, suicides or split-squats that he’s gotta power through, but whatever may be said about Patrick, it’s that he’s gives his best. Don’t do anything unless you’re willing to do it right, he thinks somewhat hysterically, shifting his hands on Jonny’s waist, sliding in the sweat rising on Jonny’s skin.

He can’t help sinking his fingers into the bountiful handfuls of Jonny’s ass and marveling. It’s a weird thing to be competitive about, wrong and weird, he knows that, but Jonny had forced two orgasms out of him, and Patrick wants Jonny like that too, falling apart, crying out with Patrick’s cock in his ass.

He gets a hand low on Jonny’s belly, pressing in against the skin, keeping him angled just right for his thrusts and then drives hard inside him, directing all of his energy into nailing that one spot. Jonny goes tense everywhere, muscles locked up and gasps pouring out of his mouth as Patrick does it. His hard cock slaps against Patrick’s knuckles and Patrick allows triumph to run through him, even as he swallows with trepidation and shifts his palm, tentatively getting his hand on Jonny’s cock. Patrick wasn’t trying to pretend Jonny was some chick, but with his hard shaft in his hand any possibility for denial has gone out the window. Patrick is still insistently hard inside him, and it’s sheer will that’s keeping him from coming before Jonny does. Jonny cries out when Patrick starts fucking him into the grip of his fist, and he sees it in the sudden trembling of Jonny’s muscles before he feels it, Jonny’s cock pulsing in his hand, coming like Patrick’s fucking it right out of him.

Jonny’s body spasms under him, bearing down on his cock in a long aching squeeze that has him cursing and spilling his own orgasm inside him.

Patrick sprawls in Jonny’s bed after, dazed. Jonny himself methodically washes up but at a small washstand in the corner of the room, his expression dispassionate as he strokes a wet cloth over his skin, wiping off his belly and thighs. Dragging the cloth back behind him and down between his cheeks, Patrick catches the way his eyes dip closed as he passes over his hole, like he’s back in the moment. It makes him feel strange and warm inside, and then secondarily bitter for caring.

When Jonny dresses this time he doesn’t use magic to summon the clothes back on, instead painstakingly lacing up his breeches and doublet and pulling on stiff leather boots.

“Why bother when you can just make the clothes reappear?” he croaks out.

Jonny moves to stand before the mirror, straightening the high collar of his shirt and not meeting Patrick’s eyes. “Magic takes energy. You don’t sprint upstairs if you have plenty of time to walk them,” he says tersely.

“How did I get back home last time? More magic?” Patrick asks, puzzled.

Jonny looks over his shoulder at him, blinking in confusion. “You crossed over on your own,” he says slowly, “both times.”

“What?” Patrick asks, “How?”

Jonny sits at the foot of the bed and sighs. “It is against the axioms to carry off humans and keep them captive. We can seduce or inveigle, but if you come to cross over, it must be because you made the choice.”

“But I couldn’t leave!” Patrick pushes himself up onto his elbows, horrified. “I didn’t want to be here at all and I couldn’t leave!”

Jonny’s expression turns grave, looking off into the distance like he’s remembering something. “You have to have the way of it. It’s instinct, like breathing. It cannot be taught.”

“I’ve never forgotten how to breathe!” Patrick shouts at him. “Bullshit! How can I choose to be here if I didn’t even know about this place?”

Jonny eyes are piercing when he says, “Haven’t you? If you thought about it too hard? If you don’t allow your body to handle the rhythm?”

“Who made these fucking axioms? This is screwed up,” Patrick spits out, incensed. He knows exactly what Jonny’s talking about—gassed and down in a game, making bad play after bad play, trying to remind himself to breathe and then thinking if he stopped consciously thinking about it he’d suffocate.

Jonny’s lips quirk and he gets back to his feet. “Your namesake—St. Patrick—when he drove the snakes from Ireland.”

“Well he’s a bastard,” Patrick snaps. He doesn’t know what kind of deal that is, letting people who don’t know any better wander in and then claiming they’re forfeit. Patrick hadn’t chosen shit. And the times he’d faded in and out.

“He made a deal. One that would prevent the courts from stealing the fairest of your kind and the wee ones, but he could not also protect the unwitting and the unwary.”

Patrick drops his head back on the pillow, gut roiling. “Fuck that.”

Jonny clears his throat and gets to his feet, pulling a bundle wrapped in fine black muslin off of one ot the bookshelves and gingerly holding it out to Patrick.

“What’s this?” Patrick asks, eyeing it suspiciously. Jonny thrusts it at him and when Patrick unwraps the layers of fabric he finds a bunch of blackened nails. He looks up at Jonny, incredulous and irritated.

“They’re made of cold iron dipped in the well at St. Patrick’s cathedral,” Jonny rushes to explain. “My kind cannot bear the touch of iron. It clouds the sight. Keep it on you and Maeve will not be able to coerce you over the wards.”

“What about you?” Patrick asks, the barest touch of acid in his voice.

“You need not see me ever again,” Jonny replies, wearily.

“Good,” Patrick replies darkly.

Find a four leaf clover to see things as they truly are.

Patrick wakes up in his bed, this time will all the covers kicked off, his dorm stifling. With a groan, he shifts on the bed, stretching his back. There’s a pleasant languor in his body, suffusing his muscles, one that’s familiar now. They have a game tomorrow, and the way his body feels right now, he knows he’ll play like a beast. Every time he wakes up like this, it’s easy to think he just dreamed it all. It’s both simultaneously comforting and terrifying. On the one hand, any weird inexplicable urges he has around Jonny aren’t real, on the other, he’s having weird as fuck dreams and imagining shit. So that’s great.

He reaches for his phone to check the time and his fingers knock into something. Bleary eyed and half awake, he doesn’t see it hit the ground, but the scattered metallic clacks sound like coins. It’ll be annoying as fuck if he dumped all his loose change off the dresser. He needs those quarters for laundry.

He heaves and sigh and looks over the mattress. It takes him a while to realize what he’s looking at: a collection of iron nails, the velvet bag they came in upended beside it.

“Fuck,” he whispers, dropping his head to the mattress. Those nails seal it. It can’t be a dream and whatever instinct he has to cross over the boundaries stupidly only asserts itself when he’s sleeping. How the fuck is that fair? And when his thoughts turn to Jonny, everything inside him is a confused jumble.

He reaches down and gives his cock a light squeeze. “It was just sex,” he says to his empty bedroom. “Anybody would’ve gotten off.”

He picks the nails up and puts them in his pocket before he leaves for class that afternoon. He doesn’t have to worry about it. Jonny said he’d never have to see him again. Everything will be fine.

He does play beautifully the next day—one of his best games yet—scoring two goals, and when they’re tied 3-3 with only 35 seconds left in regulation, he scores again. It’s been a great semester on the team, and Christmas is just around the corner. But skating off the ice to the locker rooms, he’s reminded about the leannan sidhe out of his pathetic research and has a terrifying thought.

Maybe it really is only the sex with Jonny that made him better.

No. That can’t be true. Patrick won’t let it be true.

Exact a promise and it must be kept, but word it carefully, lest you find yourself ensnared by it.

Things are blessedly normal, like the respite he had in November, but the night before finals, Patrick has a strange dream of a little dark haired boy. It’s the middle of winter and he’s on skates, dressed in all black the way Patrick used to, but his thick coat doesn’t look like Patrick’s down parka. He’s shooting the puck at the net Patrick used to set up on the pond as a kid, calling, “Again,” like a mantra when he fails, and lining up another shot. Over and over.

Patrick is little too, and he finds himself skating into the boy, knocking him with his shoulder. “You’ve been doing this for hours,” he says, “if we go in my mom will have hot chocolate.”

The boy looks over at him with solemn dark eyes. “Didn’t you tell me to take it seriously?”

Patrick wakes up the next morning wondering why he’s dreaming about weird kids in the middle of nowhere.

He pushes it out of his mind, because he’s got studying and papers to finish, but the dream keeps coming, not every night, but often enough. He dreams of playing in the snow with the boy, tossing snowballs, laughing brightly. They play game after game of shinny and Patrick is glad, because the boy does take it seriously. Almost too seriously.

One day, they’re playing tag as snow falls down around them. The boy’s ‘it’ and when Patrick stops to open his mouth to let a snowflake melt on his tongue, he barrels right into Patrick, knocking him over.

“Tag, you’re it!” the boy cries triumphantly, sprawled out on top of him.

“I wasn’t paying attention!” Patrick protests.

“Not my fault,” the boy replies, his eyes bright and delighted in his little face, hovering just inches from Patrick’s own.

Patrick rolls his eyes. “You’re heavy!”

The boy scrambles off of him and when he holds out his mittened hand to help Patrick up, Patrick stares at it a moment, before grabbing it to pull himself to his feet.

“Tag, you’re it!” he yells as he darts by the boy, laughing gaily.

“That’s cheating!” he hears the boy shout back.

Suddenly the boy blinks into existence in front of Patrick, close enough that Patrick skids right into him. And now it’s the boy’s turn to be knocked over into the snow.

“And that isn’t?” Patrick says, smushing snow on the boy’s face in revenge. The boy struggles, giggling, trying to bat Patrick’s hands away. “You’re not supposed to do that,” Patrick crows, persistent in his face wash. “You promised!”

When the boy finally shoves him off, his cheeks are red from the cold and his eyelashes have gone spiky.

“You’re terrible,” the boy says, but there’s no bite to it. He looks past Patrick’s shoulder, back at the pond. “More shinny?” he asks.

“Of course,” Patrick replies instantly. He’s so glad that Jon’s always willing to play hockey, not like the other kids who want to play capture the flag and three flies up and cops and robbers. Those games are fine, but Patrick has dreams. He’s going to play in the NHL. Cops and robbers won’t help him there.

Patrick wakes with a start in his dorm room, 22 years old. His heart is racing and he still feels the unmitigated joy of playing in the woods.

Jon. The boy in the dream’s name was Jon. Patrick had known it, but he still doesn’t know who the kid is. And then Prince Jonathan echoes unbidden through his consciousness, clear as a bell. Patrick had called him Jon for short and Jon had liked it better than his other nicknames. The people in my home aren’t always very nice, he’d explained and Patrick had given him last piece of chocolate because he didn’t know what else to do.

Prince Jonathan. Jon. Jonny. The little boy is Jonny.

“What the fuck?” Patrick says, hand over his heart, mind racing. The dreams—they must be memories—but how? When he tries to think about how he met Jonny, he can’t remember anything more than the dreams.

When the boundaries thin on solstice night, it’s better to stay in.

He asks his mom about it when she picks him up from the airport on the first day of winter break.

“Do you remember a kid named Jonathan?”

“Jonathan Randall?” she says. “The kid with the biting problem?”

“What? No, that doesn’t sound right.” Patrick blinks at her. “There was a kid with a biting problem?”

“Oh yes, we had to talk to his parents several times.”

“Huh, I don’t remember,” Patrick replies, staring out the window at oncoming traffic.

“You were very little, I’m not surprised,” she says.

The dreams only come faster, night after night, until Patrick knows that Jonny doesn’t really like chocolate, but he loves mint. He’d eat the leaves right off the plant if Patrick didn’t stop him and tell him his mother would think it was weird.

“Is mint fairy food?” he’d asked him one day, after Jonny had swallowed down nearly three cups of mint tea using water Patrick had microwaved for him.

“It is in my home—the summer realms,” he’d replied.

He knows that Jonny has terrible taste in music, only classical stuff, and one time, even with all his magic, he’d gotten startled by the little radio in Patrick’s bedroom.

“Do all of your minstrels use magic? That seems like a waste when they could just come play for you,” he’d said, thinking they were projecting their music the way Jonny could project his voice on the air.

Once Patrick taught him about hockey, he’d been obsessive, willing to spend hours out there perfecting his shot, just as Patrick was.

What he can’t explain is how he forgot him or why parents say they haven’t heard of any other Jonathan. He doesn’t remember everything, but he knows that Jonny had been his best friend, his playmate in all things, and when they fought, Jonny never stayed mad at him. He didn’t get petty, and he didn’t mind when Patrick did either, always ready to help him exact justice on a classmate who’d been mean. How could that just disappear? And now they’ve fucked, which Patrick can’t get his head around. He doesn’t know if that makes it worse, or if it makes it better. Everything has gone topsy turvy.

When the frosts come, it’s the dark ones that ride the night.

He drops the nails into the trashcan. He and Jonny need to talk. Maeve might find him first, but Jonny has always come to save him before. When nothing immediately happens, he feels a little stupid. He doesn’t remember enough of how this works, if he ever knew to begin with. When Christmas passes without any change, he starts to get frustrated. Of course Jonny won’t show up when Patrick actually wants him around. That would be too easy.

But it turns out he only thought he was ready. He’s not prepared at all for Maeve to appear when he’s shoveling out the driveway late one night.

“Found you, little rabbit,” she says, right over his shoulder, making him jump in startlement.

“Why the fuck are you so obsessed with me, lady?” he yells, keeping the snow shovel between their bodies, like he’ll somehow be able to fight her off with it.

“A better question is why little saintly Jonny Be Good, who would never stoop to take a human,” she bites out, “is willing to invoke claim to keep you from me.”

Patrick takes a step back and she smiles ferally. “Not like you enjoyed it, eh,” she says, brutally mocking.

Patrick’s hands tighten on the shovel and her eyes drop to them before dodging back up to his stricken face. “Oh oh oh,” she says, “that is too much. You did!”

Patrick’s breath seizes in his lungs. He hadn’t wanted it. He hadn’t asked for it. And it was so fucked up, because every time it happened, he felt better than he had in ages afterwards. He felt like he had when he was younger. Free from all the worry, the fear of failure that has crippled his hockey for over a decade. It’s twisted and shameful, he knows it. Especially that he wants it still. And not just for hockey. Not just because he knows who Jonny is now.

“Did you crave it when he held you down and took you? Rutted with you as a man ruts with a woman?”

Patrick drops his head, tears leaking out of the corner of his eyes. What kind of person is he?

“You will tell me, little rabbit,” she whispers in his ear, behind him and then gone when he spins around. “But it needn’t be with words.”

Suddenly there’s a horrible raking pain his brain. It feels like there are hands on his insides, combing bladed fingers inside his flesh and tearing him apart. Patrick drops to his knees, barely feels it as they hit the pavement with a jolt. The pressure in his head increases, throbbing and pulsing until it hurts so much he thinks he’s going to die. He hears himself screaming, distantly, but he can’t seem to stop it, and then finally there’s a horrible cracking noise, like a dam bursting. A flood of memories come rushing in: he’s falling through the ice, and it’s so cold, but as he sinks, dragged down by his skates, he knows it will be okay, Jon will save him.

A hand closes on his shoulder and the pain stops. The absence of it feels like cold water rushing through his veins. He blinks open teary eyes and sees that it’s Jon, touching his shoulder, the soothing cold emanating from his fingertips. He’s not Jonny anymore. He knows that Jon hates that name, because it’s what Maeve always says, Jonny Be Good, right as she’s finding inventive ways to hurt him.

“It’s alright,” Jon says gently, his tone at odds with his fierce glare at Maeve.

“You! You altered my memory!” She spits, red flags of color in her cheeks. “And you preach to me of breaking the axioms? When I tell them all what you did, you think Reoánaigh will still protect you then?”

“We are not in the realms, Maeve,” Jon says. “You attacked a boy over the boundaries. You have already broken what is law. It’s time to leave.”

Jon looks over at Patrick about to say something, and in that split second of distraction, Maeve does something with her hands too quick for them to react. A cylindrical ice spear flies through the air, thudding in Jon’s chest. Jon’s lips part in surprise, his eyes going wide. Patrick screams again as Jon rocks back a step and then tumbles over, reddish gold blood spilling over his lips. It would be pretty if it wasn’t so horrifying.

“Jon,” Patrick cries, scrambling over to him. He closes his hand around the ice spear, but before he can pull it out, it disappears completely, leaving a bloody hole in Jon’s chest. He coughs, spitting up more of gold blood, face going the bleached white of paper. He’s going to die. Patrick cradles his head on his lap, unsure what to do. He doesn’t have his phone. He doesn’t think the EMTs can help with a dying fairy.

“Oops. Well, I suppose I won’t tell if you won’t tell, little rabbit,” Maeve says, cold and nonchalant. As she stands there, her face smugly satisfied, he realizes she’s going to kill them both. Nobody to get you in trouble if there’s nobody left to tell.

She moves in closer, looming above them, but comes to an abrupt halt when she smacks into a barrier that lights up around them both. Jon’s arm is raised only just barely off the ground, his palm tilted towards her, energy flowing outward, keeping her at bay. She screams, and then strikes the barrier once and then twice in fury, but it holds firm against her, Jon’s hand shaking with the effort. She strikes it a third time before giving up and stepping back with a disgruntled growl.

“Oh very well,” she says and tosses her head., “Be careful little rabbit, he’ll die if he can’t cross the boundaries, so I’d figure it out if I were you. Else you’ll be seeing me soon, law or no, boyo.” She blinks out with an exuberant laugh, like she just made the most hilarious joke. Patrick wants to kill her. He wants to grind her into dust and set her on fire.

Jon’s arm drops to the pavement as soon as she disappears, the barrier collapsing in on itself with a fizzling pop.

“Fuck, Jon,” Patrick says, “what am I supposed to do?”

Jon coughs, more blood coming up.“Y-you remembered,” he says weakly, his eyes starting to lose focus.

“Yeah I did, you asshole, so you can’t just fucking die on me now,” Patrick replies, unable to help shaking him a little.

“Y-you know...how...to cross,” Jon whispers, lids fluttering over his eyes.

“I don’t, Jon,” Patrick shouts. “I fucking don’t. We already know this.”

Jon grabs his hand and gives it a squeeze. “You...came...to me,” he says, and then he passes out.

Patrick pounds a hand on the pavement with an anguished shout. Jon’s dying and he’s stuck with Patrick trying to fix it for him. “I don’t know, Jon, I don’t know,” he whispers, but Jon’s here, body cooling in his arms, and he can’t fucking fail him. He thinks about all of the times he crossed over accidentally, the way he felt when he woke up again in his own bed. He thinks of Jon and the salt storm smell of him, and he begs the universe with all his might.

It feels like he does that for hours, heart racing faster and faster as time ticks down, when at last the otherworld slots into place, a shift across space and time he hadn’t consciously noticed before.

He peeks open with one eye, making sure, and when Jon’s bed comes into view, he finally lets himself breathe.

Jon arches up off the floor with a great wheezing gasp, startling Patrick. Color is rushing back into his face and he looks only halfway to death, rather than all the way at the doorstep. He slowly blinks open his eyes. “Hello,” he says when he sees Patrick, a sweet smile resolving across his face.

“You’re okay?” Patrick asks, helping Jon to sit up. “Just like that?”

“I’m a member of the high court,” Jon says, pushing himself up off the floor with a groan. “We draw our strength from the otherworld itself. But I'm far from summer,” he says. He goes to the mirror and pulls his ruined black doublet aside with his left hand, his good side, wincing as he reveals a nasty deep gash still seeping burnished gold, the flesh around it black with bruising. He turns slowly, tugging the neckline down over his shoulder, and it becomes clear that the wound goes clear through the other side. “I heal slower here.”

“Why is Maeve trying so hard to kill me?” Patrick asks, shedding his own coat and gloves, it’s far too hot in the room. “I think you owe me at least that much of an explanation.”

Jon gingerly walks over to the bed, sitting back upon it as if every part of him aches. “Because I loved you too well,” he says simply. He goes to take off his shirt and after a moment watching him struggle Patrick moves to help him so that he doesn’t make his injuries worse.

As they carefully work it over his head, Patrick says, “But we were kids, and we’re both guys.”

Jon’s head pops free of the shirt right then and he looks up at him through his lashes, his cut chest and abs casually on display, drawing Patrick’s eyes guiltily. “I think we both know that’s not really a problem.”

Patrick flushes and clears his throat. “I’m still angry at you. You should’ve told me. I thought I was going insane these last few months.”

“It was the best way I knew of protecting you,” Jon says, poking at the gash.

“You should’ve given me the choice!” Patrick replies, and then grabs at Jon’s hand to stop him from messing with his chest. “Ugh, stop that, you’ll make it worse.”

“You were six,” Jon replies. “The only friend I had, I couldn’t risk you.”

Patrick’s throat feels thick with emotion. He turns away from Jon quickly so that he won’t be able to see how embarrassingly affected he is. “Do you have anything to bandage that?” he says when he’s got himself under control and goes to one of the cabinets off to the side, opening the doors up at random before Jon can even supply him with an answer

He’s just finishing tying off a cloth gauze bandage around Jon’s chest and shoulder when something occurs to him. “We have to have sex now, don’t we.”

It’s Jon’s turn to blush as he leans back against the mound of cushions they’d piled up against the headboard to support him. “Yes, I’m sorry.” Patrick looks over him with a critical eye and Jon blushes deeper. “You uh—might have to do all the work.”

Patrick’s stomach sinks a little. There’s no way that he can fuck Jon. Any position they might try is bound to put pressure on his shoulder, but if Patrick were on top, with Jon leaned up against the pillows as he is now, that could probably work.

“I’m going to have to cowgirl it, aren’t I,” he says with a long-suffering sigh.

“Pardon?” Jon asks, blinking up at him.

“Um,” Patrick looks down at the bulk of Jon’s thighs, still encased in his tight breeches and is swept with embarrassment. “Me on top, uh...riding you.” It is literally the least dignified position he can think of to allow some other guy to fuck him.

Jon searches his eyes for a long moment before starting to sit up. He says, “It’s alright, I know you don’t like it, I can—”

“Shut up,” Patrick replies, firmly pushing him back to the pillows with his good shoulder. “I’m not going to make you hurt yourself for me.”

He starts stripping off his shirt and is getting ready to climb onto the bed when Jon stops him. “Wait, I couldn’t prep you when we did it before,” Jon says. He stretches over with a pained groan and pulls out the drawer of the night table, reaching in for the same stoppered vial of viscous oil that they’d used last time. “If you’re going to, best to make it easier for yourself, eh?”

Patrick bites his lip as he takes it from him. “Thanks,” he says slowly, staring down at the vial in his hand and then back at Jon. Jon has only one usable arm so he can’t really be the one to finger him open, and Patrick really doesn’t like the idea of lying on the bed next to him, fingerbanging himself right there while Jon could see him.

“Do you have a bathroom?” he asks. Jon nods his head at a door across the room. “Okay, I’ll be—like five minutes.”

“You can take longer than five minutes,” Jon says with a laugh as he shuts himself into the bathroom.

It’s an austere little water closet, only a toilet and a small sink with a strangely tiled black and white floor. He realizes when he looks closer that they’re gruesome mosaics like those tapestries he saw all those months ago. God this place sucks. He takes off his clothes and spreads them across the floor, trying to cover as much of it as he can. He doesn’t want to look at that during what he has to do next.

*

Jon’s reading a book spread out across his lap with one hand when he comes back into the bedroom. His trousers and boots are on the floor and he’s under the covers, so Patrick figures there’s a good chance he’s naked under there. He looks sleepy and comfortable, and unfairly attractive. Jon’s right, Patrick needs to get over it. The fact that Jon’s a man isn’t a problem for his libido at all. After a moment to psych himself up, he walks out of the bathroom with his clothes under his arm. It’s uncomfortably slick between his ass cheeks as he moves.

Jon looks up and set his book aside, waiting patiently for Patrick to walk over to him. He doesn’t say anything when Patrick peels the covers off, or when he gets on the bed to kneel above his waist. He only lets out a quick harsh breath when Patrick awkwardly closes a hand around his cock, letting it firm up in his grip. He’s still as stone when Patrick nudges his cock up against his hole, the barest hint of emotion flitting across his face when Patrick grits his teeth and starts to push down, trying to force Jon inside.

“Ungh,” Patrick says, squeezing his eyes shut, ground to a shaking halt with only the head of Jon’s cock breaching him. It isn’t that he forgot how difficult this part was, but he may have underestimated his ability to do this to himself.

“Relax,” Jon says softly, using his good arm to run a hand up one of Patrick’s straining and taut thighs. “Don’t force it.”

Patrick trembles over him, trying to breathe, willing himself to slide down the last few inches. Jon reaches back behind him and starts rubbing circles in the small of his back. The press of his fingertips feels good and Patrick finds himself shivering a little, rolling his hips into it. Slowly, slowly he’s able to pick up a rhythm. Jon lies so still below him, he’s barely breathing. Patrick only knows he’s getting anything out of it at all because of the way he’s biting at his lip as a flush spreads down his chest.

“Don’t do that,” Patrick huffs out as he bounces himself up and down. “Not like last time.”

Jon’s eyes flutter open. “Didn’t want to enjoy it,” he explains. “I was hurting you.”

“Not last time,” Patrick replies, and it comes out mischievously, rather than the matter-of-fact tone he was aiming for.

Jon expression turns warm, like he’s remembering, and Patrick has to drop his eyes. This is awkward. He feel so on display. It’s a lot harder to pretend he would never do this when he’s got all the control, and he’s doing it to himself. He wasn’t anywhere near hard when he started, but it’s like his body is wired for sex with Jon, cock beginning to thicken up as he keeps it up. The angle isn’t very good to get at that spot inside though and he starts experimenting, shifting back and forth to see if he can reach it. Jon makes a weird choking noise in the back of his throat, so at least Patrick knows he doesn’t hate this.

After a while though, Jon says, “You’re struggling.”

His eyes dip to where Patrick’s erection has started to flag. And now Patrick’s embarrassed about that. He’s too self-conscious, but he doesn’t know how to let himself go. There’s a frustrated burning building behind his eyes that makes him want to brain himself on the headboard. It’s like that time with Amber a few months back, when he’d imagined Jon right before he’d finally been able to come. He wonders now if Jon was actually there. He hadn’t thought so at the time, chalking it up to a confusing and deliriously real fantasy. And then he came so hard imagining Jon kissing him, thumbs smoothing across his cheeks and fucking his mouth with his tongue.

Patrick swallows. He’d dreamed up Jon taking his mouth while Amber had no idea—it had been so wrong, aching and reaching for Jon’s kiss, as another person brought him off—confused and turned on and desperate and unwilling to admit that he wanted Jon’s mouth on him, not some girl he’d picked up at a dark party who only knew he’d been scoring a lot of goals lately.

Jon feels so remote this time, even as Patrick is taking him inside his body. He wants that moment of connection they’d had, even if it wasn’t real. Patrick bends in, brushing their mouths together, because he doesn’t know what else to do. Jon’s lips part sweetly pliable under his and Patrick breathes out sharply through his nose, and then he doesn’t know what comes over him, because he’s suddenly spurred into motion, hands coming up to cup Jon’s head, parting his lips to deepen the delicate kiss into something dirty.

He doesn’t even realize that he’s started thrusting down on Jon harder until Jon lets out a winded gasp and his own body starts to register the pleasant ache of it. It’s not enough though. He feels the rising heat of something, but still feels so far away from orgasm.

“Goddamn it,” he breathes, tearing his mouth away. “I can’t get it. Why the fuck is this so hard?”

“We can switch,” Jon says. “Really, Patrick, don’t worry about—”

Patrick growls, “We’ve come this far. I’m not doing this for nothing.”

Unexpectedly, Jon laughs. “You never change,” he says softly.

And then he’s pushing his hips up, rolling Patrick under him, knocking pillows aside so that Patrick can lay flat beneath him.

“Your shoulder, idiot!” Patrick protests.

“I said don’t worry about it,” Jon tells him and then kisses him again, thrusting back inside in the same moment, making Patrick arch and gasp. That shiver-inducing lance of sensation he was looking for running through him.

“You’re too caught up in your head,” Jon whispers against his lips between kisses. “Just let it happen.”

Patrick knows he’s right. So aware that he was doing it to himself, this scary thing he was not supposed to like, he couldn’t let himself actually enjoy it.

“What the hell do you know?” Patrick nevertheless protests, but it’s without rancor, thoughts fleeing his head as Jon works his hips in, getting him just right again and again. Patrick stretches underneath him, wrapping his legs and arms around Jon, holding him close. Jon’s wound opens, blood soaking through the bandages, and smearing across Patrick’s chest, but he doesn’t stop, and Patrick can’t bring himself to make him.

He comes in the same moment Jon does, stuffed full of him, his dick trapped between their bodies, crying out embarrassingly loud. Jon’s holding Patrick’s hand on his good side, squeezing tight, his hips still shifting in little rocking motions as he shoots the last of his orgasm deep inside Patrick.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Patrick cries, overwhelmed and shaking as his own climax buzzes through him. When Jon pulls out and goes to move away, Patrick feels suddenly bereft.

“Please,” he says, reaching for him, “Stay.”

Jon carefully settles his weight back down on top of him, catching his mouth up in another kiss. “Anything you want,” he says. He still hasn’t let go of Patrick’s hand.

Play your hand correctly and merry summer mischief makers may be impelled to grant a boon.

Afterwards as they get Jon cleaned up and rebandaged and Patrick washes his coppery gold blood off of his skin, Jon tells him of the war between summer and winter. As a child he'd never told him any of this, not a word of how when winter won, the Queen, Reoánaigh did not demand the usual price of knights’ vasselage, but the Queen’s own grandson. Or that he'd been torn away from his family and made a pet of in the winter court, earning hostility and derision from its courtiers. He holds more magic than Maeve, even though he is far from summer and the strength it grants, and she has always hated him, bitter and jealous of the attention he got from her own aunt.

“Maeve worries that Reoánaigh will seek to make me her heir,” Jon says.

“But you hate it here,” Patrick protests.

Jon shrugs. “In summer, I’m one of many princes, in winter, I could be king.”

“Would you want that?” Patrick asks, eyes wide.

Jon looks away from him with a deep sigh. “I could do good here, maybe, but my people would hate me for trying to curb their impulses. They are what they are and I am what I am. I am not made for winter.”

He clears his throat and picks something up off of his desk, holding it out to Patrick.

Patrick realizes it’s the little velvet bag full of iron nails.

“You have to carry these if you don’t want this to happen again,” Jon says sternly, shaking the bag at him.

Patrick blushes and doesn’t take the bundle. “What if I don’t want to carry them?”

Jon gives him a look, leaning back onto his desk. “Every time you cross over, we’ll have to do this.”

“I maintain those rules are fucking stupid.” Patrick says darkly, but then he raises his eyes to Jon, holding his gaze steadily as he says, “What about if you come to me?” Jon stares at him until Patrick’s blushing. He kinda hates the way Jon has the power to do that to him. “I mean, you make my hockey better,” Patrick says quickly, knowing he's reaching for excuses now.

Jon lets out an abrupt laugh. “What?”

“You know—sex with a fairy muse—you get better at what you’re good at? All those artists?”

Jon brings a hand up to his mouth, blinking in incredulous disbelief. “You humans and your weird relationship to sex,” he mutters, and then he shakes his head and drops his hand. “I didn’t do anything, Patrick.”

“But—” Patrick stares back at him. “I’m playing the season of my life.”

Jon shrugs, his eyes crinkling with a smile. “Don’t know what to tell you.”

“Well, I—I guess I—maybe I should—” Patrick stumbles over his words, embarrassed.

Jon steps in close, forcing Patrick to look up at him. “Do you want me to come see you?”

Patrick shrugs like he doesn’t care. Jon raises his brows and Patrick let’s out a harsh sigh. “Yes, fine, okay, I would like to—I’m into you.”

Jon bends his head, and Patrick notes how long his dark lashes are. His lips hover over Patrick’s, as he says, “We’ll have to be more careful about it then when we were children. I’m bound to winter for two more years. Maeve is not the only one who would object to my union with a human.”

“Then we’ll be careful,” Patrick says.

“Okay,” Jon says simply.

“Okay?” Patrick repeats.

“Yes, okay,” Jon replies, “I would like to play with you again some time.”

“Well, if you’re sure you aren’t rusty,” Patrick says pointedly. “I wouldn’t want it to be an embarrassment for you.”

Jon laughs and kisses him. And Patrick knows it’s weird and fucked up, but he’s glad Jon said yes. It feels like the start of something big.