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now:
And so Dee’s nephew falls in love, and that’s just as dreadful as you’d expect, even if not for the reasons you’d expect. But Dee’s thoroughly experienced with dreadful things happening around him – he’s lived through enough awfulness that it’s become second-nature to swim through the grief like a fish slipping and splashing through water. It doesn’t take long for the horror to die down to a kind of dull ache.
So he’s going to lose a nephew, just like he’d lost a brother and a sister-in-law and a set of parents and all the rest of them, one after the other, so very convinced that they’d be the one to survive the curse. But that’s just Dee’s life, isn’t it? He’d signed up for this when he’d refused to fall in love himself, he’d signed up for this when he’d promised to take Virgil in. So that’s fine, that’s all fine, and if you asked Dee upfront – if you asked him, do you think this situation is fine? – he’d say, yes, of course this is fine, I have absolutely no problem with any of this at all. And if you didn’t know him at all, you might even believe him.
And then four years after Virgil falls in love three-fold and a ticking time-bomb is strapped to his nephew’s life, the most objectionable of his terrible boyfriends marches up to the front doors of the Fae family home and announces his intention to marry the boy.
Not just him, of course; all three of them are in on it and they have some kind of big scheme for a proposal. Not too over-the-top, Roman is quick to assure him, even though Dee hadn’t said a word. (He really doesn’t need to say much, Roman is entirely too fond of the sound of his own damned voice. He could perform a Shakespearian tragedy start-to-finish all on his lonesome without missing a breath or a beat.) No, they’re working as hard as they can to get it just right for his nephew, because they know him well enough for that. They know him more than well enough.
“He’ll hate it, of course,” Dee says, folding his arms and leaning against the tilting wood tiling of the front. “And I completely understand why you came here to ask me about it. I am so clearly the person to be asking about weddings and proposals.”
“I wanted to ask permission,” Roman says, meeting Dee’s eyes. He doesn’t flinch at the strangeness of the eyes, the strangeness of the skin. “We all did. It’s a touch old-fashioned, yes, but – I had a feeling you’d appreciate that, right?”
“Hmm,” says Dee, which is the closest thing he can get to masking a lie or a truth in his state, and waits.
Roman clears his throat, tucks both hands behind his back; puffs his chest out. “We’ve already asked Cora, of course.”
“That’s a surprise,” Dee says, because it isn’t.
“She said yes,” Roman continues.
“A complete shock,” Dee agrees, because it’s the furthest thing from it.
“But it wouldn’t feel right if we didn’t ask you too.”
Dee doesn’t care about what Virgil’s boyfriends think of him, the grim uncle with the snake-faced grin. Couldn’t care less at all, never ever. When it comes down to it, Virgil is the only one that matters here – if he’s happy, then not much else matters. But he very nearly feels something , at this. It’s not warm fuzziness and certainly not sunshine and rainbows, because neither of those things could ever describe Dee. But Roman’s correct, for once. It wouldn’t be right, if they didn’t ask him.
He blinks, slowly, and says nothing.
Roman is still watching him with something approaching expectancy, clearly full to the brim with ridiculous youthful energy but still restraining himself from bouncing on the balls of his feet. His brother had looked like that, the day before he’d proposed to Violet. He’s going to die – they’re all going to die. It may not be today and it may not be tomorrow, but those cheerful youthful faces are going the same way as all the rest, and Dee will be left alone in an empty house once more, with snakes in the walls and moss trailing mournful paisley swirls up the outer bricks.
Roman says, “So? Can we marry your nephew?”
“Well, of course you can,” says Dee, and his tongue itches and his throat burns sour. “There’s nothing in the world I’d love more.”
*
*
then:
When Dee is twenty-two and still foolish, he runs afoul of a curse-trap in the Loch Ligerion woods – as if the one Fae curse isn’t bad enough already. It’s two weeks of pain that burns from irons and his throat twisting back and forth like someone’s trying to wring it in two; two weeks of things growing from beneath his skin like gleaming thorns. His brother curls up in bed beside him, throws an arm around him and tugs him close through the worst of it; barely leaves his side once all through. Vi brings soup that he can’t choke down, the family brings potions and charms and tricks from all manner of books
By the time the aunts snap the curse away from his soul, the damage is done and he is half-squamous with scales. The first words he says to his brother when he regains his voice are, “I hate you. I hate that you stayed with me,” and even though it hadn’t taken long for the curse’s effect to become obvious and apparent, the look of hurt on his brother’s face had stuck for years and years.
Everyone thinks it would be easy to circumvent a truth-warping spell. It’s the first thing any casual idiot suggests when they first learn about it – why don’t you just say the opposite of what you mean, all the time?
No. No, a curse is never so easy to circumvent, and the truth is never that simple. It’s not the sort of curse that flips your words around to make you say the opposite of what you mean; it is a curse that flips the truth, the absolute solid truth – takes any falsehood at its word and any truth at its mirror. Dee could shout to the clouds that the sky is green all day if he wanted; shout that there are sixteen months in a year and that red is his favorite color and that the moon is made of a particularly delectable cheese – no, the curse wouldn’t twist a single syllable of those words. But try to say something as simple as one plus two or don’t step there, that wood is rotten or I love you?
…Sometimes he lies on purpose, just so his words are wholly and completely his own, for once.
Sometimes he thinks he’s forgotten what the truth tastes like altogether.
*
“You are a most bizarre and exhausting child,” says Dee, meaning nothing of the sort.
But this small slip of a boy, all dark hair and scraped knees and cheeks flushed red from the way he is dangling precariously from the old oak tree – he doesn’t seem to care at all. “Thank you,” says little Virgil Fae with a grin, even though from this angle it looks like he’s frowning. “You are a most bizarre and exhausting Uncle.”
Children never mind the curse, he’s found – not that he has much opportunity to interact with them. Most parents are insistent that he be avoided at all costs. Maybe it’s the scales, maybe it’s the eye, maybe it’s the lies, maybe it’s the barbed clumps of fever-grass that trail in his wake. It could be the black clothes that make him a sharp shadow on the street – but most likely it’s that he’s a Fae.
He’s done nothing to dispel the illusion. He cultivates the air of unapproachability, of being the downright scariest cape-clad shadow pacing down the streets. It’s easier to do so than not. Children don’t mind the curse – it doesn’t mean he likes being around them.
…
Dee had never wanted to take his nephew in.
But it’s a very short domino effect, events going after each other in rapid-fire succession, one two three four, Virgil in the tree, his brother making him promise, no Dee, really truly promise, the clicking only Virgil can hear, the food going bad, five six seven eight, snakes near the sunning-rocks, a truly lovely day out, almond cookies –
– that detestable, awful beetle.
He’s not cruel all of the time. And he could never break a promise to his brother.
Virgil comes home with him, a silent shade in the back of his car all the way. Dee’s gloves are wrapped painful-tight around the wheel. All the while he’s staring at the windscreen and trusting luck to keep him from crashing, and trying very, very hard not to start screaming and screaming and screaming.
If he starts, he’ll never stop.
*
So here’s Virgil on the roof surrounded by neighborhood cats and strays, chattering away and calling them by name. (Snakes don’t have names, are far too instinctive to retain so much as an offhanded nickname. Dee’s never found them to be scintillating conversationalists, either, although they do keep him company, when it comes down to it.)
Here’s Virgil at Cora’s, so small he needs a stepladder to help at the register and at the soapy sink. There’s Virgil, pale and trembling in a veterinarian’s office, clutching a cat and covered in blood. Here’s Virgil, fingers flitting over tarot cards, biting at his lip as he studies the cups and coins and wands. Here’s Virgil, looking so much like his father.
Here’s Virgil, with a thirty-two on his ACT, preparing to leave town like it’s nothing at all. That’s the thing about living with a nephew you never wanted in the first place. After a while, living turns into loving and even though he can’t say a word of it out loud, Dee knows that Fae House is going to be horribly empty without the boy.
*
He writes up a contract. Virgil signs it, and he’s gone.
Well, that’s just how it goes. Dee Fae is used to losing people.
At the very least Virgil hasn’t gone and fallen in love.
*
*
now:
The next of them to show up at Dee’s doorstep is the short smile-y one, the one Dee recognizes as the most horribly naïve of them all. This one’s alone, just like the last one – made the long journey in his beat-up little car for a mission he must already know is pointless. The fact that Patton is, in fact, alone; came alone to Dee’s house after the first time… well, it must be either bravery or stupidity. Considering he’s fully informed and still in love with Virgil Fae, it’s most likely a bit of both.
“You’ve obviously learned your lesson,” Dee says from his cross-legged seat on the patio sofa, gently damp with the evening cool.
Patton closes his car door, waves, and begins to carefully pick his way up the garden path, calling, “Hey there, Virgil’s Uncle Dee! Had a favor to ask you. It won’t take long, I promise.”
Dee stands up, straightens his cloak, folds away his newspaper. Says, abruptly, “Well, I’m boiling to death out here. I’d love it if you’d join me inside.”
He watches out of the corner of his eye as the boy mouths silently to himself, repeating Dee’s words over, looking faintly confused, and then says, “So… you don’t want me in the house? You don’t want to talk to me? Gosh, I’m sorry, I’m just – I don’t entirely get it.”
Dee sighs. “Oh, all right. Stay out, then,” he says, and pauses by the door, newspaper under one arm – glances over his shoulder.
“It is my solemn promise,” he adds, “that I will once again spike your tea with drugs, and instruct every snake I know to attack you with a vengeance.”
“Oh, good,” Patton says, relieved, and slips in through the front door in his wake.
They arrange themselves at the kitchen table. Dee doesn’t offer tea this time, and Patton does not ask. For a moment, they are both silent. Patton is casting looks around the kitchen, eyes catching on all of the potted plants dangling in uneven trios from the ceiling, the runes running along the countertops, the glowing jars bubbling steam on the windowsill. The delight on his face is familiar – it’s the same whenever he visits. The other two, they’ve gotten jaded to it over the years, but Patton is never not happy to be here, in the midst of all of the magic of the Fae House.
“Well?” says Dee after many minutes of studying the naïve fool’s face, wondering if he should be making tea after all.
To which Patton starts, and says, “Right! Oh, right. Lost in my thoughts, lost in my brain, you know how it is. Where was I? What was I thinking? Right.”
“Right,” echoes Dee, already regretting this because he knows what’s coming, and folds gloved hands together grimly as Patton looks up at him, eyes bright behind crooked glasses.
“You love Virge a lot,” he says, entirely too gently and knowingly for someone his age. He’s almost half Dee’s height, tiny in the face of the hugeness of the house and the vastness of the kitchen table – tiny in the face of Dee’s grief. “We all can tell. He’s the most important thing in the world to you, right?”
Dee doesn’t say a word, because if he does speak in response to that , it will be in all shades of I hate him more than anything and I wish I had never taken him in and I don’t care, not at all, and even though Patton knows to read between the lines and hold his words up to a mirror to find the truth, it would still be the worst thing in the world.
“Well, I think we all get it,” Patton’s continuing, “because – well, we do. Because he’s the most important thing in the world to us, too. And we haven’t known him as long as you have, and of course it isn’t the same, but I thought you should know that – that we get it.”
Dee wishes he were anywhere but here.
“And because of that, I was hoping that, well…” Patton’s hands twist together, fingers twining into fingers, and he raises his head hopefully. “…We want to marry your nephew. Oh, and it’d mean a lot to us – and him, too! – if you said we could. Not that he can’t make his own decisions! But it feels like it matters, y’know? Asking you.” A breathless little pause that goes on for far too long. Dee’s not going to interrupt it. Ask. Just ask, damn you. “So – what d’you think?”
“Yes. Yes, it sounds fantastic,” Dee says shortly, and stands up. “Go right ahead, and feel free to stick around in my house as long as you’d like.”
And as he ascends the stairs, disappearing up into the furthest eaves of the house and its attic, he hears Virgil’s idiot saying, half to himself, “But, that must mean – oh. Oh, no.”
*
*
then:
Here are the things Dee Fae knows about the world, the things he knows to pass on to anyone he remotely cares about. He knows to always keep rosemary at your garden gate, plant roses and lavender (on the chance that your luck turns), throw salt over your shoulder for safety. Don’t wish recklessly; reckless wishers are invariable fools. Love makes you swiftly stupid, then swiftly makes you dead – and lies sprout lemongrass in every direction.
You don’t just plant flowers for luck or love or protection; it’s a two-way street. Feel enough, say enough, lie enough in a certain place for a good long time, and the roots will come a-creeping and the sprouts will come a-shooting. Poppies all along the edges of graveyards, marigolds bobbing in the breeze by an unhappy household, tulips out the front of a wedding chapel.
And lemongrass? Well, the house at Loch Ligerion is damn well infested with the stuff by this point. It evades all attempts at weeding, sprouts through all poisons and potions, magical or otherwise. It’s not an ugly plant by any means, but it’s a reminder. A reminder that Dee really doesn’t need, it’s not like he can forget.
Cora doesn’t mind it, how it springs up around the entrance to the diner and has to be pruned up, how it worms in through the windows whenever he spends too long perched at the counter. Cora is too kind to him. She says it keeps the bugs away, makes the kitchen smell lemony-fresh, adds a splash of green to the place. She thinks the smell is sweet.
Dee can’t agree. To him, lemongrass doesn’t smell anything but bitter.
*
Virgil writes.
Dee does a splendid job at pretending he doesn’t care when Cora passes him the letters that come in like clockwork, once every two weeks. His handwriting’s never really improved, after all these years – Dee sometimes suspects that messy handwriting is the real Fae curse. But the way he crooks his Ks and slashes his Ts is so much like his father’s that Dee can’t bring himself to suggest that Virgil fix it.
It’s updates on schoolwork. On casual dealings with cats from around campus. On how the cafeteria milkshakes don’t hold a scented candle to Cora’s butterscotch, how his plant sciences professor doesn’t know the first thing about the real uses of chamomile. He says he’s doing tarot readings, keeping up the family business from afar.
To which Dee grunts and pens a short note in response, suggesting he raise his prices – and Cora smiles, tucking it away in the envelope of her own return letter.
He supposes he could call. Cora has his nephew’s number, and the diner has a perfectly good phone. He’s never much liked talking on the phone, though, and letters are easier.
At least he can be halfway honest in writing. Never perfectly so – if it were that easy, he’d be communicating through pad and paper every day of his life – but it’s easier, like this.
Virgil writes, asking about the ordinary and medicinal interactions of geranium. Some sort of class assignment, doesn’t want to mix the magical with the mundane by mistake, doesn’t have any magical texts on hand.
Dee replies, determination, primarily. And don’t confuse it with pelargonium. Beginner’s mistake. I expect better of you than that.
Virgil writes to get a second opinion on an interesting tarot spread he’d encountered the week previously, sheepishly noting that the recipient probably doesn’t care all that much, but he hadn’t been happy with the reading at the time. Finals week’s coming up , he says, words cramping in the margins as he runs out of space on the page. My brain’s not up to much. Just want to check I didn’t screw it up completely, you know?
Dee (almost reluctantly) finds the spread just as interesting and tricky to parse, and writes a page and a half on possible interpretations – ungrateful clients be damned. The herb garden out back is thriving in the good weather. Mint and chamomile makes for an excellent stress-alleviating tea, and Virgil should know exactly what to do with it.
Virgil writes, thank you, two weeks later. When Dee checks the envelope, there is dried lavender stuffed into the bottom and rosemary needles that scatter to the floor when he shakes them out over the kitchen table.
Dee replies, As if I don’t have enough lavender choking my garden already, but he also gets Cora to compile a detailed status update on all of the neighborhood cats. Virgil worries entirely too much about them.
Virgil writes that he has friends, now. That it’s all so new and unexpected, but they’re thinking of getting an apartment together next semester, not too far from the college itself, it’s not perfect but it’s leaps and bounds better than student housing, so what does Dee think?
To this, Dee doesn’t reply at all.
*
Live long enough with dreadful things happening all around you, and you start to get a sense for the ebb and flow of it. For when something big is coming, for when it’s the future you’d feared most and there’s nothing you can do about it. But it’s not a certain thing, and in this world there’s only two ways to be really, really certain about something that hasn’t come to pass. You wait for it – or you cast your gaze forward and find out for yourself.
So Dee hisses sharp-ish, sends a small posse of snakes out frog-hunting for him. Assembles all the materials from his study, waves a hand high to the roof of Fae House and rearranges the rafters so the moonlight shines straight like an arrow to the kitchen table, and then he locks the door and pries his gloves off and starts to scry.
There’s frog guts on the cutting boards, potions boiling up a ferocious storm over the stove, moonlight scorching black marks all over the weathered and worn work surface. Dee makes cup after cup of tea to keep him awake, and reads the leaves of all of them with the keenest of yellow-tinted eyes.
And here’s the thing – the leaves, the haruspicy, the patterns of the moon on the worn wood; each and every method at his disposal, every way he tries to see how his nephew’s future will spin and spindle? It gives him a grand total of absolutely fuck-all. Not a negative, not a conclusive prophecy one way or the other, not a confirmation or denial, just nothing. As if nobody had bothered to ever fill in that page of the book of the future, like it’s just sitting there on some overseeing deity’s work desk with a sticky note saying, yes, yes, I’ll get to it later.
It’s worse than an outright condemnation. Because anything could happen. Anything at all.
Dee very calmly flings the last of his empty tea mugs against the wall to smash with a vicious shatter. And then he very calmly goes to find a broom to sweep it all up by hand. He doesn’t think he’s up to practicing any more magic tonight, no matter how mundane.
*
*
now:
And of course the last of them shows his face, only weeks later. Like is a strong word, because Dee does not like any of Virgil’s partners, not really, but if he’s honest with himself (and himself is the only person he can ever be truly honest to, really), he finds Logan the least objectionable. Although it’s a very low bar.
He’s in the garden when it happens, frowning at lemongrass, and wondering if he can fit goldenrod and valerian in the gaps where there’s still space. There are half-formed potion concepts in his head, charms and spells and rituals that he’s turning this way and that. He is in the zone, as Virgil might put it, and the closest he gets to being happy these days, and not expecting visitors, and then someone behind him clears their throat and says, “Salutations,” and Dee thinks a bunch of deeply foul words that he chooses not to voice aloud.
He turns, and calmly says, “Logan.”
Logan bobs his head, and maintains a very neutral expression. “I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.”
“Perfect timing, actually,” Dee says, aware his face is smudged with dirt and his cloak with pollen. He does his best to brush off the worst of it with the back of a gloved hand, but only succeeds in transferring the grime. He doesn’t bother to get up off the ground, although he does settle himself into a more comfortable and dignified position. He has a feeling this will be a quick conversation. “Well, do slow down. You’re not going to ask me about marriage, of course.”
“Actually,” says Logan, adjusting his glasses. “I am not.”
This surprises Dee, which is a surprise in itself. “Yes?”
“It would be pointless, for one thing,” Logan says. “I can easily predict what your answer would be, and even if I did ask, any ritual and tradition of asking for ‘your nephew’s hand in marriage’…” His nose wrinkles at the phrasing of it. “…would be somewhat negated by the fact that you are quite incapable of giving your true feelings on the matter.”
This is not the worst surprise that one of Virgil’s boyfriends has ever presented him with. He rests his chin on one upturned hand. “Yes. So?”
“I would like research resources,” Logan says. “Study materials. Anything you can supply. A variety of texts that allow me to get an initial grasp on the subject material would be preferable, of course, but I consider myself a quick study and will be able to learn from even intermediate and advanced texts.” He pauses, and then adds, “I assure you I would never do anything to damage your books,” looking worried at the very prospect that Dee might think he would.
“You aren’t talking about magic,” Dee says, leaning back.
Logan shrugs once, a trace of discomfort flickering over his face. For all of his talk of research and clear interest in Virgil’s family business, he never has fully got over that instinct, his brain shying away from the very thought of magic. “I hardly have your family’s, ah, knack for it. But that shouldn’t prevent me from researching.”
Dee makes another guess. “You aren’t attempting to break the family curse. A very fruitful endeavor. You’ll find it disturbingly easy.”
“No,” says Logan – another surprise. Dee takes a moment, and adjusts his expectations of the least objectionable of Virgil’s boyfriends accordingly and listens with suspicion as he continues, “I suspect we have conclusively broken it already, although there is no real way of confirming, of course. I wish to research… another curse.”
*
*
then:
His nephew falls in love, and then does the sensible thing about it and leaves the moment he realizes. Dee has never been more proud – but Virgil has never been more miserable.
For the first two days, he makes what seems to be an honest attempt at pretending everything’s normal – working at Cora’s diner like no years have passed, fixing charms and broken cobblestones around Fae House, face set carefully into a blank mask of indifference – but on the third day, he breaks at breakfast. Admits to the spell he’d cast at seven years of age, bows his head in the face of Dee’s slowly growing fury, doesn’t say a word even when Dee yells loud enough to shake long-forgotten dust from high-up rafters. He just crumples like a paper bag, goes all pale and distant like his cat’s wandered into a bear trap all over again. Dee has to rearrange the house to guide him back to his room and safely to bed, biting his tongue against another screaming tirade against the idiocy of children.
And it’s there he stays for days and days and days – and not long after that, Virgil’s three idiots come knocking in Loch Ligerion for the very first time.
*
He poisons the short one, and over this Virgil snaps at him for the first time in a decade, clearly furious. He doesn’t understand why. Surely this is what he’d wanted? Surely he wants his three-fold death trap out of his hair and out of his life forever; Dee’s just expediting the process. It hadn’t even been fatal , more’s the pity.
Virgil’s still angry, though – a dull, exhausted sort of fury that fades into exhaustion when they get the short one out of the house, leave him on the porch for the others to find. Virgil says, don’t do it again. Just tell them to go away. Virgil goes back to bed.
Dee shrugs, and starts planning what to do when the other two show up.
He thinks the haughty one is amusing in a very stupid shortsighted sort of way. He gets Gillian to jinx him, and gets a strange sort of satisfaction from seeing him stumble to the door in a terrified fit of uncontrollable sobs. He goes to great lengths to make sure Virgil doesn’t know about this incident. He’s sure he’d approve even less.
Now, Dee has some truly devious plans for the last of them – but, funny thing. He just doesn’t show.
Not at first, at least.
*
Dee’s nephew hasn’t left his room in days, has barely left his bed. Dee places Cora’s food on the bedside table, makes sure his water glass is full and cool, puts skullcap on the windowsill for a broken heart, doesn’t say a word.
He has the faintest inkling that he ought to be doing something more, but he’s never been one for comfort and knows that any attempt at it would be dishonest and thoroughly unwelcome. He’ll leave the soft touches and comforting words to Virgil’s little army of cats. Lord knows the little beasts adore him.
There’s a moment, one of these days, where Dee stands in the doorway and stares at the crumpled little bundle of blankets and messy hair and barely-moving limbs, and thinks he should… do something. Straighten the covers, maybe. Brush a hand over his nephew’s hair. Mutter something reassuring and entirely untrue, maybe sit with him for a while.
He thinks he should do something. He can’t bring himself to do any of that.
Dee lights the candles and leaves.
*
Then the final idiot climbs in through Virgil’s window in the middle of the night and seduces him like something out of a damned fairy tale. The others are with him too, of course. Of course they are.
Dee sees the way Virgil smiles at them, and knows he’s lost.
*
*
now:
Several weeks pass, and Dee very nearly forgets about the many books and scrolls Logan had somehow convinced him to hand over – very nearly, if not for all of the conspicuous gaps on his household shelves. He almost expects Logan to return them within a matter of weeks, a month at most, admitting reluctant defeat and refusing to meet Dee’s eyes. (The majority of his expectation is that Logan never returns the books at all. He’s almost looking forward to exacting vengeance, should that be the case – no matter how his nephew feels about it, he can’t risk Fae secrets like that being so open in the world.)
But it is exactly eighteen days later when Logan returns, with every single book and tome and scroll and notebook exactly as it had been. He unloads them from the car very carefully and assists Dee in returning to them to their places within the house without a word. Dee is lightly astounded at the perfect condition of all the materials, so much so that he doesn’t even bother to be dastardly and ominous about the entire process. Even he isn’t nearly this careful with his books.
When everything is back in place, Logan returns to his car, retrieves one final notebook that’s too modern and neatly-organized to be anything but Logan’s own. He comes into the study once more and says to Dee, “I have had some thoughts. I don’t have the materials or the natural aptitude for, well, magic, to do any of it myself. I would ask Virgil, but…” And now he hesitates. “…There would be no point. This is not for him, after all.”
Dee supposes that he owes at least one favor to Logan, after everything, so he simply nods and hopes the expression on his face makes it clear that his patience in these matters is not unlimited.
The new startling thing is this: Logan’s research really hadn’t been for the purpose of breaking the Fae curse. Dee reads all of the notes thoroughly, and says, “Oh yes, because my own attempts at fixing this delightful speech impediment have been overwhelmingly successful,” to cover up the fact that somehow, somehow, he hadn’t expected all of this to be a mad attempt at breaking the curse that has choked his vocal chords and twisted his words for over two decades.
“Sometimes an outside perspective is necessary,” Logan offers.
Yes. Fine. All right. He will admit it: this is very nearly touching. Even if he doesn’t understand why .
“You have no wish for us to marry your nephew,” Logan explains when prompted, hands folded tightly in front of him. “And I entirely understand why. I just… well, I suppose…” A frown curves his face for one second, two, and then he says, “I suppose I thought it was only fair that you object to it on your own terms. Rather than using words you don’t mean.”
Damn it. Damn it all. Dee rubs at his eyes, feeling the click and slide of the scales surrounding one of them. “I can easily see this working,” he hisses, hating that he wants to go through with this.
“If it fails, I will not press or pry any further,” Logan promises. “Just hear me out. Please?”
So Dee sighs, and hears him out. Not all of Logan’s ideas are good – some of them are downright idiotic and astoundingly dangerous, and he makes it overwhelmingly clear when that’s the case, but for an outsider, a stranger, Logan has some impressive insight, and some equally impressive ideas.
They work their way down the list. Methods vary, from charms to counter-curses to some horrifyingly reckless fusions of multiple magical branches (Dee vetoes those without hesitation, playing around with that sort of thing is a really excellent way to get yourself killed, or cursed worse ).
So, it’s a long string of failed experiments, punctuated by a few minor discoveries which are interesting, but not remotely related to the curse at hand. Dee’s patience stretches longer than expected. He still doesn’t like Logan, but he really is the least objectionable of Virgil’s awful, terrible, deadly partners.
“You don’t happen to have lemongrass, do you?” Logan asks, when they come down to the last of the notes, the last of his ideas. He looks markedly more discouraged than when they’d begun, but he’s the sort of person that will see an idea out to its very end – and in a way, so is Dee.
Dee very nearly smiles. Nearly. “Lemongrass? Never heard of her.”
Logan’s last idea is the most well-researched. He’s cross-referenced and annotated centuries’ worth of potions and concoctions, and suggested a wholly novel concoction. The theory seems to be that the curse’s effects can be reversed upon itself using a catalyst, and it’s not that Dee’s never considered using lemongrass, but…
Maybe Logan is right. Maybe it does take an outside perspective, occasionally. Dee corrects two measurements, one misplaced herb, and then has to admit to himself that it’s not the worst recipe he’s ever seen.
“All right,” he says. “I won’t make it. Go away, and don’t help me with this.”
*
The brewing process itself takes two hours, and then it’s an extra half-hour of double checking before Dee is confident enough to actually drink it. He doesn’t think it’ll poison him, but at the very least – if it does, he’ll have a good excuse to cut this entire pointless charade short. His patience has stretched longer than he’d expected, but it is running thin now. He eyes it one more time, measuring up the ingredients in his head, considering the dangers – and then shrugs and downs it in one careless swig.
It’s kind of completely and utterly awful. He’s never liked the smell of lemongrass. The taste is even worse. He chokes on it, only just managing to gulp it down, and experiences the sickening sensation of a high-speed fever racing through his system, an illness on fast-forward. Cold flushes and crawling skin, aching muscles and a crawling headache.
But just as quickly, it’s over, and he comes back to himself leaning against the front door, Logan looking downright concerned and more than a little frightened from the patio.
He nods to show he’s all right, and removes his hat to drag a hand through now-messy, sweaty hair. “Well, that was deeply unpleasant,” he says, on reflex – and then almost chokes again, hand rising to his throat. He coughs, trying to force himself to speak around the sudden panic-hope-joy , but all of those built-up words forced back over the years are sticking there at once. He forces himself to breathe. “I – my god.” Very carefully; dawning joy, “That was unpleasant. I did not enjoy that.”
Logan is bending forward, face a studious mask of academic integrity that only barely conceals the anticipation plastered all over him. He’s reaching for the pen tucked behind his air. “For clarification’s sake – if this was in fact a pleasant experience and the recipe did not work, please indicate so nonverbally, so I will know how to proceed – ”
Dee ignores him.
“This sentence is a lie,” he says, the paradox he’d never been able to force out from his lips for over twenty years, and then he’s rising to his feet with an energy he’d forgotten he could exhibit, pacing around the porch. He feels dizzy, as he says, “The sky is blue? The sky is blue. Oh, good lord, I despise carrots! I love my brother. I love him for staying with me, I always have! And you, ” he adds, whirling back on Logan, stabbing a finger at him so sharp and vicious that the boy instinctively shuffles back against the porch, looking petrified, “are a genius! ”
“And that is… not a lie?” Logan checks, hand slowly going for his notebook.
Dee lets out a shriek of mad laughter that is maybe a touch too wild to be considered sane, and flings his hands up to the heavens, twirling around on a heel. “Not a lie? Not a lie! Would I be reacting like this if it were a lie?” It’s undignified, so very undignified, it’s shattering every carefully constructed image of himself he’s held up for years, but he barely cares. Who’s going to see him besides Logan, and who will believe Logan if he tells? “You broke it! Twenty-two damn years of this, and you broke it!”
He hasn’t laughed for nearly two decades, not really, but now he can’t seem to stop. This is hysterical, this is the funniest thing that’s ever happened to him, it’s so absurd and so wonderful that he can’t not laugh. The ancient unbreakable curse that not a single living Fae has managed to crack in all these years, shattered in mere weeks by a nerdy college workaholic.
“I need you to tell me exactly how you did this,” he says, between mad cackles, and the look on Logan’s face is making him laugh even harder. The novelty of saying something aloud and having it be entirely true is not lessening, not in the least. “Oh – oh! And then you can never tell anybody else. Never, ever. Never, ever, ever, Logan, do you understand me? If a single Fae aunt or cousin ever catches wind of this, you’ll be locked up in a secluded tower in the middle of Nowhere Whatsoever and forced to do the impossible for the rest of your life.”
Logan nods to this, but he looks like he’s only barely paying attention to Dee’s entirely serious warning – currently busily writing so rapidly in his notebook that he is in dire danger of ripping a page. And then he pauses, and looks suddenly very worried. “Is the curse dispelled?” he says, looking up from his current page. He looks faintly concerned, now. “Or is it only reversed? That is to say – you still can lie? I haven’t committed you to an eternity of only telling the truth?”
Well, yes, Dee supposes that’s a fair point. He clears his throat, says, “Grass is green, grass is blue, grass is a global conspiracy developed by the government for the purpose of spying on us through our roots, I’ve never seen a blade of grass in my life. All of the above. None of the above. Ha! ” He grins madly, and Logan’s face is a picture, it really is.
“And the scales?” Logan says, after a moment of silent shock, struggling to speak.
“Permanent, most likely,” Dee says, passing a hand to the side of his face – they’re still there, his eye still variable-aperture and vertical, and he finds he’s not bothered by it, not at all. “Oh – don’t look at me like that. It’s not as if I hate snakes.”
Logan scribbles more notes for several minutes, and under any other circumstances, Dee would be right alongside him – but right now, he’s thoroughly preoccupied by muttering truths, half-truths, and circular paradoxes to himself underneath his breath. The length and range of his own ambiguity delights him.
After a while, he remembers something very important, and stops pacing around the garden and hissing the good news to every snake in his path, like a madman. He comes back to the porch, and clears his throat.
“No, I do not want you to marry my nephew,” he says, looking Logan squarely in the eyes. “And I never will. But that shouldn’t stop you – I am not the one to make that decision. He is. And in the interest of full disclosure and total honesty – ” which is half a lie in itself, even curse-less Dee doesn’t think he’ll ever be that open – “I should inform you that my nephew has, in fact, been planning to propose to the three of you for months now.”
Logan says, “What?”
“Did I stutter? I don’t think I did,” Dee says, and can’t help the little hiss of delight that escapes him at the complete and utter truth of it all. “Now, be gone with you. But, oh – leave that notebook of yours. I need to check, and check, and triple-check to make sure this is entirely permanent, and – Logan?”
Logan has already risen to his feet, glancing down at his neat little notebook with some regret, clearly upset at the very thought of losing it. “Yes?”
“Tell my nephew to visit, as immediately as he can,” Dee says. “But don’t you dare tell him the curse is broken.” And he grins. Immediately that worried look is back on Logan’s face again, for good reason. He’s sure he must look terrifying, and he rather likes it that way. “I can only tell him this once, after all. And after all these years, I deserve a bit of fun, don’t you think?”
*
When he comes into the diner later that evening, Cora is passing milkshakes off to a pair of town kids who pale and scatter to the furthest table-booth at the very sight of him. He doesn’t even bother to grace them with a menacing glare or warning wiggle of the fingers. He’s too busy making a direct beeline to the front counter, where Cora is already lifting a fresh mug from a hook and nodding her greeting.
And then she gets a proper look at him as he plants both hands on the countertop, and she says with no small amount of incredulity: “Why, Dee Fae – are you smiling?”
And Dee says, “Yes!” – and the mug in Cora’s hand drops, falls all the way to the floor, shattering to the ground with a smash.
*
*
*
The wedding is sickeningly sweet, of course. Dee tells Cora as much, relishing that he actually means it, and she just sighs and cuffs him up the side of his head.
“Most people would take the removal of a curse like yours as an opportunity to say kind things for once,” she clucks at him, and he just grins a wicked little grin and enchants the third paving-stone down the aisle to cunningly trip anyone unfortunate enough to walk directly over it.
The back yard of Fae House is dusky with twilight, lit with lanterns and candles and fireflies that flicker and float and sway over the layers of flowers and vines forming a living canopy over the majority of the garden. It’s magical, of course. Not too magical, because some of the wedding guests are less than accustomed to that sort of thing. But it’s a small gathering, tiny and bright and intimate, so any truly otherworldly happenstance could probably just be chalked up to the magic of the evening.
(Only three of the four families involved are represented. Dee had very quietly offered to curse the missing offenders on Logan’s behalf, and had been surprised to find, upon Logan declining, that he was genuinely disappointed about this.)
After a while, it seems like all of the guests are settled and the proceedings are just about ready to begin. On the east, the west, the south ends of the yard, the husbands-to-be can be seen situating themselves, hidden in the shadows and shade of the trees – but Virgil is nowhere to be seen.
Dee waits several minutes, sighs – and goes upstairs to fetch his nephew.
*
In the end, Virgil had been the one to ask. It hadn’t been a very pleasant conversation, all things considered – he hadn’t known quite what to say, and Dee hadn’t had the first idea of how to respond, but it wasn’t as if he could say no – it wasn’t as if he’d wanted to, either.
They’d worked it out, eventually. They work most things out eventually.
Dee knocks on Virgil’s door, and tells him it’s time, and from within his nephew lets out that very particular anxiety-riddled oh god I can’t believe it’s happening groan, the one Dee had heard from his own brother right before his own wedding. But there’s a surprisingly large smile on Virgil’s face when he opens the door, and says, “Just a second, Crow’s being fussy.” From behind him, there is an aggrieved meow, and Virgil says, “Yes, I know, hang on – ”
Dee settles back against a wall, arms folded. “Yes, take as much time as you want; you clearly have all of it in the world . ”
It takes only a few minutes for Virgil and his cat to reach a compromise about whatever-it-is they had been arguing about. Finally he deigns to leave his room and follow Dee to the back garden door, where they wait for the ceremony to start. Dee hums to himself, watches one of the short one’s endless parade of siblings trip and stumble on the cursed paving-stone – not hard enough to injure herself, but amusing enough to make him laugh softly under his breath.
“You know, that’s still weird,” says Virgil, looking downright radiant in all shades of gray and purple, hair combed back neat for once, arranged and arrayed with roses and lavender, rosemary and thyme.
Dee watches the cats mill scrupulously around Virgil’s feet, watches him silently shoo them back, shaking his head indulgently at them as they do their best to get fur over every inch of his best clothes at the very last second. “Hearing me tell the truth?”
“No. Well, yes, but…” Virgil trails off, pushing off the last of the cats – they scatter to perch in the rows of plastic seats all around – then shrugs. “Seeing you smile.”
“Well, there’s a lot to smile about,” says Dee, and offers his arm to his nephew as the assemblage of people finally falls mostly-silent. Virgil’s hand is light on his sleeve, tentative – their family has never been much for touch, and Dee can’t quite hide his own discomfort. But there’s no better time to start than today. He looks over at his nephew, and – not for the first time - thinks of how like his father Virgil looks.
Abruptly, he says, “I’m glad.”
Virgil says, “Uncle?”
Looking at his nephew would be a mistake, so he does not. “That you ended up here. Despite everything.”
He hadn’t told Vigil the curse had been broken – not outright, not at first. He’d just been unwaveringly honest when Virgil had come to visit that week and waited patiently for him to notice all through afternoon chores and busywork. It had taken, incredibly, several hours, although all the while Virgil had looked more and more suspicious, clearly suspecting something but unable to put his finger on what, exactly.
When Dee had said, “Yes, the rowan bark, I need it shredded to renew the protection wards,” and hadn’t quite been able to hold back the grin, Virgil had finally realized what was going on. He’d gone through a fascinatingly unique progression of delight, confusion, and fury – partially directed at Dee, for not telling him, partially directed at Logan, for also not telling him.
Dee had considered it entirely worth it, if only for the really funny moment when Virgil had nearly tripped backwards over one of his many, many cats out of sheer shock.
Now, when he looks up, he sees that Virgil is avoiding his eyes, too. He says, “Yeah, uh… I’m glad, too. Auntie Cora, and the cats, and… you, you all…” He trails off. Is silent. Then: “It’s… important. All of this. It’s important.”
“It is,” says Dee.
It’s funny how the simplest truths are the ones that make him happiest.
“Okay, enough of whatever this is. Let’s go get me married, already,” says Virgil, and squares his shoulders.
The music begins to play, and from each corner of the garden, the four young men begin to approach the middle, and approach each other, and their future. Dee walks Virgil halfway, enjoying the looks of trepidation and terror he gets from the many, many people who don’t know him – then releases his arm, standing back to watch him walk the final stretch by himself.
So this is how Dee Fae loses his nephew, one more time. How permanent that loss will end up being, well, the future refuses to tell.
He’s still not convinced the four of them will manage to dodge the curse with something as clever and silver-tongued as a loophole, a technicality. They aren’t the first to try that, they sure as hell won’t be the last. Still. The truth of the matter remains, and it’s hard to refute: multiple partners, all of the same gender, is an unforeseen anomaly in the histories of this curse. Maybe this will be it. Maybe this time, a new branch of his family will survive. Cora certainly seems optimistic enough – but Cora’s always been optimistic, more so than he.
There’s nothing he can do now, short of poisoning all of Virgil’s partners at the reception. (Which he still hasn’t discounted as an option just yet. He’ll see how genuine their vows sound, first.)
He sees the four of them reach each other, sees the way they reach out and clasp each other’s hands briefly, exchanges smiles, hums, squeezes of reassurance. And he sighs, and turns away, and goes to sit with Cora to watch it all unfold.
And, the funny thing is…
The funny thing is, it doesn’t feel like losing at all.