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"J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans."
-Charles Baudelaire"Break, blow, burn, and make me new."
-John DonneNOW: February 1st, 2019Nicke looks around the crowded room, teeming with people and stinking of fear. Strelka is nowhere to be found, although he sees a few animals who he assumes must be other people’s familiars. Nicke never particularly thought he would end up with a familiar, but now that he has it seems logical and inevitable that it would be one who ignores him and is head over fucking heels for Alexander Ovechkin. He can feel Strelka’s consciousness tugging a bit on the edges of his own, watchful and a little curious. Hopefully she’s doing something more useful than being herded about like cattle into long, uncomfortable benches.Nicke doesn’t understand most of what’s going on. He managed to wheedle an extremely dusty old Fae dictionary out of his guard, who fortunately speaks both English and Swedish perfectly. Still, poring over a dictionary for a few days in a room by yourself does not equip you well for following rapid spoken conversation, so Nicke ends up mostly trying to zone out slightly and focus on the emotion and intonation rather than the words. It’s a bit like being back at draft day, but colder and more clinical. All he’s managed to gather in the time he’s been here is something about latent powers, fae blood, feuding courts, and a truly ominous hint about soulmates and tithing.The debate at the podium in the center of the room continues, volume and tension creeping slowly up, and Nicke looks around the room. He sees a few familiar faces, surprisingly even some from the time before the breaches opened, but it’s mostly strangers. Alex is almost directly across the room, staring down at the floor. A tiny bit of white fur peeks out of his collar: the tip of Strelka’s tail, tucked up under Alex’s ear. Nicke looks away.They haven’t been allowed to see each other alone, barely had time for a shocked exchange of glances during recreation hour two days ago before they were hustled off to different tables, planted there for the full hour and watched every step back to their rooms. Barely ten seconds, and the weight of the year since they last saw each other hanging between them. Nicke’s been mostly kept in his own room, other than two trips to the big central hall. He knows that isn’t the case for everyone, gathered that much from a whispered half-English half-Russian conversation with the woman who is four rooms down from his.“Some locked up. Until ceremony,” she had said, and Nicke hadn’t been able to muster enough Russian to understand more than that.His guard had only given that one slight indication that ‘the ceremony’ would be today, the night before.“Sleep well,” whispered in Swedish. “You meet your partner tomorrow for the tithing.”Nicke has come in sharp and alert, he’s used to sleeping when adrenaline is high, but so far he’s just winding himself up tight with no opportunity for release. There is just the endless arguing at the podium until, finally, it changes.It takes Nicke, takes all of them, a moment, to understand what’s happening. Names, he realizes. They’re calling out names.They’re in pairs almost entirely, with a few groupings of three mixed in. Nicke can’t discern any sort of order, not of name or language or even age.Whatever the order, Alex is called early. He stands without protest, and the clear slouching wakefulness of him suddenly called to attention twists something hard and sharp in the pit of Nicke’s stomach. It’s too much to hope that he’ll be placed with Nicke, and he isn’t. Instead, he’s pointed down the long left corridor with Evgeni Malkin.He doesn’t look back, but Nicke is staring hard enough at the back of Alex’s head that he notices the slight turn, the quirk of his lips moving. Strelka slips out of the collar of his sweatshirt, a lithe streak of fur running down his body and slinking quickly into the shadows.And then, somehow, it gets worse. Nicklas Bäckström is called, with Sidney Crosby of all people, and that would be hellish enough. The most unbearable part of it all, though, is that they’re directed down the right hallway, and Nicke feels a flash of real fear for the first time since he’s seen Alex again.He controls it quickly, sets it on ice until it will be useful. He has run and crawled and swam and fought his way through circle after circle of hell to get here, with Alex just barely outside the reach of his fingers. He will do what he always does. Regroup, refocus, recenter. Find the lines. Hold the puck. Wait.He will finish it, this time. -Since his capture, Nicke has been kept in the same huge industrial building that he woke up in five days ago. It’s not a particularly pleasant place, even setting aside the circumstances. It’s old and falling apart, and the entire place is hewn from concrete and metal and fear.The dark echoing hallway he’s walking down now is unfamiliar, and he fights down the strange feeling that he’s about to emerge out onto ice. This is all wrong: no skates on his feet, no grumbling roar of crowds pressing him into the moment, no comforting weight of pads and helmet. Worst of all, no teammates surrounding him, no comfortable claustrophobia of sweat and body heat and hunger. It’s too dark to see Crosby’s expression, but Nicke takes some slight solace in the idea that he must be feeling the same way right now.They reach the end of the corridor and push open the heavy double doors. Nicke flinches and shuts his eyes, giving them a moment to adjust to the brightness of the sun outside. The hiss and murmur of hushed voices swarm around him, and he sees a small group milling around a forest clearing when he manages to open his eyes again.Twenty-one people, bunched in groups and eyeing each other. They’re all in ordinary street clothes rather than any of the fae uniforms he’s seen, so Nicke assumes they are other captives. Nicke doesn’t see any of the guards, any fae at all, but no one is trying to run or leave the clearing.“Don’t,” Crosby says warningly at his elbow. Nicke looks over, raising an eyebrow. “Obviously they wouldn’t go through all of this effort to just lead us out here unguarded.”You’re not my captain, Nicke thinks.“We need to test their defenses. Now’s as good a time as any,” he says instead. Crosby purses his lips but nods, positioning himself so he can keep one eye on the double doors and one on the edge of the clearing.Everyone gets quiet, watching Nicke, as he starts toward the tree line. It’s fine, at first. The trees closely planted, but there is ample space to walk between them. As Nicke gets near the first row, though, something starts to squirm unpleasantly over his skin. He can’t pinpoint what it is, exactly, just a sense of utter wrongness. The closer he gets to the trees, the more the feeling increases, skittering and scraping across his nerves. When he passes the first tree, the pale bark swims before his eyes and starts to speckle with black, sparking and popping across his vision. Nicke grinds his teeth into his cheek, feeling blood burst sharp and warm and salty in his mouth, anchoring him.He means to keep going, he will, but someone yanks him hard back into the circle, turning him, and he falls. His head clears the second his knees hit the ground, and Nicke blinks up at the ring of frightened faces around him.Nicke spits out blood, clearing his mouth, and shoots Crosby a glare. “Why did you stop me?”“You were about to pass out,” Crosby says, irritable. He glances around the circle, at the three girls who look barely older than thirteen who are clutching each other and shivering, at the stooped grandfatherly man leaning on the elbow of another frightened teenager.As much as Nicke hates to admit it, Crosby has a point. It probably won’t be good for morale for one of them to get injured, especially not so pointlessly.The double doors to the corridor open again, and four more people spill out. Nicke uses everyone’s distraction to get himself on his feet, brush the dirt off his legs and wipe the sweat from his forehead. With escape temporarily out of the question, they should probably use this time to compare notes, get any information they can about what’s going on.The four humans are closely followed by fae, though, two in guard uniforms and two in unfamiliar robes.“Greetings, new recruits,” the one at the front says. Nicke fights the urge to shake his head like a dog. The words flit unfamiliar past his ears and settle straight into his brain in a way he doesn’t like. From the expressions of the other people in the circle, Nicke can gather they’re having the same experience. “You have been chosen for a special purpose,” the fae continues. His voice is unpleasantly silky, and baited like a trap.The fae pauses, glancing around the circle with a small frown of displeasure. He says something to one of the guards, this time without using whatever magic allows them to understand him. Nicke recognizes one word, though, the Fae for ‘familiar’. A kind of disagreement breaks out, with the guard quiet and deferential and the fae ranting and angry. The conversation cuts off abruptly as the other guard strides over to open the door, singing something down the hallway. The fae looks annoyed, if slightly appeased, when a stream of animals emerges a moment later.Strelka is toward the back, and if an arctic fox can be said to look ‘bored and unconcerned,’ she does. Most of the other animals skulk a little nervously over to their humans, looking either edgy or disgruntled. The cheetah that sidles over to Crosby looks positively terrified, with her ears tucked back against her skull and eyes wide. Strelka curls up in a ball a foot or so away from Nicke, closing her eyes like she’s about to go to sleep. Nicke folds his arms and looks around the circle, tapping his foot a little impatiently. People are crouching or sitting with their animals, and even the fae by the door has settled into a small ornamental wooden chair, brought out by the same guard who summoned the animals. A badger, alert and watchful, sits beside him.Nicke had assumed that the reason he hasn’t seen many others with familiars is because their familiars, like Strelka, tended toward independence. He doesn’t recognize any of the others from where he was being held, though, and their familiars all seem to be practically glued to their sides.The guards either don’t have familiars or don’t have them with them, and the other fae has disappeared in the rush of animals. Next to Nicke, Crosby is awkwardly trying to give his cheetah comforting pats, which just seems to make her more unhappy and nervous. When Nicke looks back toward the head of the circle, the remaining fae is watching him with narrowed eyes. Nicke stares back impassively.“Now that you’ve all settled in,” the fae says after a moment. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Bitterlight, a duke of the Unseelie Court.” He pauses, as if waiting for some kind of accolade.“That doesn’t mean anything to us,” Crosby says. Bitterlight smiles, showing sharp yellow teeth that look not-quite-human.“Humans have long failed to notice the existence of the fae,” he continues, still in that oily, insinuating, voice. “And yet, we wander among you. You were all chosen as recruits because of your own fae blood-” A confused, ragged outcry erupts from the circle at this point, but Bitterlight just raises his voice and keeps talking. “Choose to ignore your own ancestry if you so desire. The rituals have been performed,” Nicke thinks, uncomfortably, of the lock of hair they cut from his head while he was unconscious, of the barely-there healing pinprick on his forefinger when he woke up, “and your allegiance has been determined. You have Unseelie blood, and the power to speak with nature. It is time to take your place among our Court.”Nicke feels the light brush of fur as Strelka winds around his ankles. He picks her up, letting her curl around his shoulders as she’s wont to do with Alex.Bitterlight is still talking, Nicke thinks, but the panicked yelling and the seethe of the crowd is making everything hard to understand. Human languages press and slide up against each other, someone tries to run and has to be carried back into the clearing, unconscious and bleeding heavily from their nose and mouth.Strelka flicks his ear with the tip of her tail, and Nicke pulls his concentration back, focuses on her. Watchfulness, a crouch before springing, readiness for danger. Nicke widens his stance slightly, letting the muscles in his legs loosen. Less than a second later, a violent crack of thunder splits the clearing, knocking several people down. Nicke feels the pressure against his ears, the crawling electricity over his arms, but he stays steady and upright.A vast, ringing quiet settles over the group.“Children these days are so ungrateful,” Bitterlight says quietly. “You humans have cracked open and drunk the marrow of your world’s bones. You think of nothing but your own greed, the satiation of your own endless hunger.” He stands, gesturing elegantly to the guard. “Take them to the barracks. Fallon can explain the rest.”Nicke expects to be led back into the same building, but that isn’t what happens. Instead, one of the guards kneels at the edge of the clearing, laying something down and tracing a symbol in the air over it. A lightning-strike rift appears in the air, widening into a jagged doorway. It is a sign of how strange the world has become this past year, that no one expresses alarm at this.The doorway, a filmy soap-bubble of light and darkness from the outside, leads into a similar clearing.Similar, but also very, very different. It’s almost overwhelming, the change. Nicke fights the urge to slap at his arms, scratch at the buzzing, humming, vibrancy of the air. His eyes are watering so badly, he can barely make out the elegant wooden compound in front of him. Strelka digs her sharp nails into his shoulder, drawing blood, and Nicke slowly regains his equilibrium.He’s grateful when they’re herded into some kind of huge hall, allowed to sit on delicate little chairs and soft, embroidered cushions. There are more people, here, already milling through the room. Nicke, to his almost overwhelming relief, sees Tom Wilson and Michael Latta. They spring up as he walks over, jostling around him for a hug. Strelka gives a growl of annoyance, but doesn’t hop down or run away. She lets Mike run a gentle hand down her back.“What happened?” Tom whispers. “I haven’t seen you since we got grabbed.”Nicke shakes his head, later, glancing around the room. “Where’s T.J.?”“I don’t know,” Tom says, a little plaintively. “Latts and I just got put in here,” Tom gestures around the room, barely looking, but then his head snaps around. “What the fuck? Is that Crosby?”Nicke sighs. Mike and Tom are both staring over at Crosby now, who gives them an awkward wave and starts making his way over. “Just shut up,” Nicke mutters. “Let me handle this.” He can still feel whatever the strangeness in the air is on this side of the portal door, and his senses feel jangled and untrustworthy. Strelka burrows under the collar of his shirt, muzzle up against his pendant, and Nicke feels the anxious humming in his blood quiet slightly.“Hello,” Crosby says, cheetah peeking around from behind him. Mike looks like he’s torn between wanting to pet it and wanting to remain aloof. Tom is resolutely staring over Crosby’s shoulder as if he’s not even there.“You were in the big building, right?” Nicke asks. “The one where the pairing ceremony happened.”Mike opens his mouth in surprise at ‘pairing ceremony’, but quickly closes it when Nicke glares at him.“Yeah,” Crosby says, glancing around at the three of them.“How long?”“Two weeks, maybe three. I lost track a little.”“Same building the whole time?”“Yeah,” Crosby says. “Didn’t see anyone else I knew, not until today.”“When did she show up?” Nicke asks, pointing to the cheetah.“Oh, Mellon?” Mike snorts at the name, but Crosby pretends not to notice. “Day after I got here.”Nicke hums thoughtfully. He doesn’t particularly want to give Crosby any information, old instinct, but they’re on the same team. For now anyway.“What happened to you?” he asks Mike. Nicke and Tom and T.J. were all captured together, but Mike is a surprise.“I don’t know,” Mike says, rubbing his shoulder. “Maybe a few months ago, I was living in a camp in upstate New York with some other Devils guys. It got…bad, on the coast.” He looks over at Tom, then Nicke. Drops his eyes. “You know that. Anyway, we went north, and things were kind of okay. We were surviving. I was on patrol one night and heard something, a twig snapping maybe. Next thing I know I’m in this big metal building, kinda like all the shitty parts of an arena smashed together.”Nicke can’t help his snort of laughter, and Mike shoots him a grin under his eyelashes.“Anyway, I got moved over here after a few days. It’s not so bad. We have rooms of eight or ten, hammocks mostly with a few bunks. People keep showing up, but no one really knows what’s going on.”“What have the guards told you?” Nicke asks. Tom and Mike exchange looks.“Nothing,” Tom says, a little hesitantly. “I mean, they’re not human, right?” He looks a little unsure of this. The fae do look human, mostly, but there’s something….slightly off about them. Something hard to pinpoint.“No, they aren’t human,” Nicke says. Mike sighs impatiently.“What is this, anyway? What do they want from us?”“I don’t know,” Nicke says unhappily. He thinks of the word ‘tithe,’ and does not say it. “Have you seen any of these people before?” Nicke asks, carefully indicating out the others who came down the right hallway.“Just Crosby,” Tom says.“Here?” Nicke asks sharply, but Tom shakes his head.“So we’re being sorted out, somehow,” Crosby says slowly. “I don’t see everyone from the ceremony. That means at least three distinct groups.”“What ceremony?” Mike asks, ignoring Nicke’s glare this time. Crosby looks over at Nicke, flushing slightly.“Have you heard of the Unseelie Court?” Nicke asks. Getting into whatever batshit fae logic has put Nicke and Crosby together is only going to lead to distraction (and probably a lot of chirping). Tom shakes his head, but Mike perks up a little.“Oh yeah, Crazy Maud talks about that.”“Crazy…Maud…” Crosby says skeptically.“She’s a real nice lady,” Mike says, as if that was Crosby’s concern. “Old, and smells kinda weird, but nice.”“What does she say about it?” Nicke asks patiently, refusing to let them get distracted.“Uh,” Mike wrinkles his nose a little, concentrating. “The people who grabbed us are fairies, or something? They have magic nature powers and like to fuck with humans, and steal them as brides and shit. She gave me and Tom some old nails that are supposed to stop us from getting bride-napped. Husband-napped?” Mike looks at Tom, who shrugs. “Anyway, I wanted to tell her it was kinda too late for that, but it seemed rude.” He looks at Nicke for approval, and Nicke nods.“What else does she say?” Nicke asks.“Oh, all kinds of stuff. Let’s see. There’s a big war between the fairies that has been going since forever, and there’s a good court and a bad court. I think Seelie are the good ones and Unseelie are the bad ones? Anyway, Crazy Maud says it doesn’t really matter because as far as humans are concerned they’re all bad and you should stay away from them.”“How are we supposed to do that in this situation?” Crosby breaks in impatiently. Mike shrugs.Unseelie blood, Nicke thinks. Allegiance. Court. None of this sounds good.“Is she here?” Nicke asks. “Maud, I mean.”“No,” Mike shakes his head. “She’s a blue door.”“What the fuck is that?” Crosby asks. Tom glares at Crosby mulishly.“Don’t be rude just because you don’t know what’s going on, man,” Tom says.Mellon whines and churrups, and Crosby looks down at her, face softening. “Sorry,” he says, still looking down at Mellon. Nicke indicates for Mike to go on.“The bunks have green and blue doors. Lunch and rec time and stuff are all with the other green doors.”And you didn’t think this was potentially connected to the two courts thing? Nicke can practically hear Crosby think. Fuck Sidney Crosby, honestly. If there was one side to the apocalypse, it was not having to pretend to be polite to his face anymore.Before any of them can say anything else, a wave of quiet starts rippling through the room. They have company, again.A group of five fae emerge at the front of the room, flanked by six guards. Nicke recognizes Bitterlight toward the back, and he’s fairly certain at least three of the fae were involved at the pairing ceremony. The woman at the front was definitely one from the initial debate.“Unseelie brethren,” the woman at the front begins, her voice a whipcrack bringing them all to attention. The buzzing across Nicke’s skin starts pressing at the forefront of his consciousness again, heavy and distracting like a wet fog. “I am Commander Fallon. Welcome to the realm of the fae.”Nicke can feel the confusion around him, sharp spikes of fear and adrenaline, the sound of voices, but none of it will quite come into focus.It’s all wrong: the air, the way sound travels, the broken fragments of his team around him. It’s all wrong: Nicke hasn’t seen ice in a year, has been thirsty and starving and injured and bleeding and grieving and so, so lonely it hurts more than even dying.And he manages it, pushes it down, controls it, directs it, all the grief and rage pouring strength into his starving body. He has managed it for a year, let life land blow after blow and not crumpled under it. He has borne it all, and kept going, but the air here is wrong and it slams into Nicke, a year of memory hard and fast and all at once.You can balance on a knife-blade indefinitely, Nicke knows, until you fall.He goes under. -THEN: April-July, 2018I.You think you will die, here. So many have, sunk down to bones and bare strips of flesh and then, after, sun-bleached and not even enough left to rot.You think of the delicious apple-sharp cruelty of life. You wish you could carve out your innards to feed them all, nurture the candle-spark flashes of the young ones and the frightened ones and the ones who burn with endless hunger to survive.You think of the blade-thinness of irony, keeping alive a man who craves death like a lover; scything down the few who still scrabble in the hard, rocky dirt of life for a few more months, days, minutes.You stops thinking at all, let the backbreaking work of the endless, endless satiation of hunger hurt so badly that it clears your mind.The body, clinging to life, is simple. It wants to survive. It wants to endure. It wants, and it does. The mind is not so simple, you find.I can live on nothing, carved into the thin skin above your left breast, but not without you.Your heart grows around the words and beats, anyway.II. There hasn’t been water in the East for nearly a year, and it’s almost as difficult to find people who don’t want to be found.III.“I would build you whole pantheons,” you said to him, once. He was sleeping, of course, skin hot and breathing even against your chest.It’s not that your worship is private, or hidden. You love to watch him bloom under it: always so happy, so vibrant, the sear-heat of lightning come to life. It’s your own weakness that you can never quite manage to show.You are weak, because you would offer him everything, before he even thought to take it. You are weaker, because you know this, and do it anyway.IV.They are full of life, spilling over. Until they aren’t.The last of them dies, but there are already more. The children, staggering into adulthood on legs that haven’t yet seen a decade, are the hardest.On a suicidally lone food run into the rotting corpse of the supermarket, the one you found who knifed you in the side for a box of half-eaten cereal. He eats like a starving dog when you get him back to camp.The one who slept in the bottom of an abandoned aquifer, skin to skin with the emptiness of it. He jumped when anyone tried to touch him, even with the easy squirming puppylike affection of the dying, who no longer care about distance, or reason, or table manners.The one who was so young, he slept curled up on your chest for the two weeks it took his lungs to stop working.That was the hardest, when your only comfort was picking at the scab of his long-vanished smile. The curve of his soft-rough voice as he teased you.
Even in this place, you still find a way to be papa.
V.Perhaps it would be better, smarter, to hate him. Certainly, it would be the wisest to not think of him at all.(You have never been wise, not when it comes to him.)Still, with the same certainty you know the slow caving collapse of your own body, you know he never would have left you had he been able to foresee this. You are half-surprised he has not found you, in spite of the breadth of the countries between you.It is the pricking thorn you cannot bring yourself to pluck out, this knowledge that no matter his failings, weaknesses, he is the brightest thing you have ever known, and never, ever a coward.He would never have left you, with a collection of near-children and the full weight of their lives squarely on your shoulders. But the water, when it went, went quickly, and he was gone by then.VI.You do not think of him with his own band of children. He would be too reckless with them, and let them drink his blood before he let one of them be harmed.He was never balanced, only unceasing.You do not think of him dead, the crags of his body eroded and those eyes, that mouth, no longer moving.When you do, a fear so strong grips you that you forget what you are doing, and the rabbit gets away. You do not let it happen again.The sun will fall from the sky, first, before he will leave this earth.VII.You do not believe in good or bad anymore. Only hunger, and thirst.Dust.And him. -NOW: February 1st, 2019When Nicke opens his eyes, it has been a year. It can’t have been more than two minutes. He’s on the floor, flat on his back, Mike and Tom bent over him. Tom helps him up, and Nicke sees that Crosby has also crumpled to the ground. He’s hunched over like he’s just taken a puck to the solar plexus. Nicke can relate.“What happened?” Tom hisses, looking around. Nicke follows his eyes, takes stock.Fallon, at the front of the room still, looks exultant. Bitterlight is grinning his sharp-edged smile, and the other fae have similar expressions. Whatever just happened, it was intended.About a third of the room seems to be struggling back to their feet, leaning on companions or animals and looking distinctly the worse for wear. Unsurprisingly, it’s the others from the clearing, from the ceremony, from the other building, the ones with animal companions.“Ah yes,” Fallon says gleefully. Crosby stops clutching his stomach to glare at her. “It seems that some of you are having trouble adjusting to your new powers.” The other fae laugh, as if this is a joke.The Unseelie are the bad ones, Nicke thinks of Mike saying. And then they’re all bad, and you should stay away from them.If only, Nicke thinks grimly.Fallon raises an arm, and the guards start patrolling the room, handing out actual scrolls of fucking parchment, of all things.“Court fae, you and your partners have been given three tasks. Complete them, and you will win back your tithing-locks. Fail them…” Fallon trails off, looking around the room. “Well, I would recommend success, if you want to continue living.”A cold, dead silence follows these words.“Trooping fae,” Bitterlight says, after a moment. “Return to your barracks. Your time will come.”“Does that mean us?” Mike whispers to Tom. Tom shrugs.“One last thing,” Bitterlight says, raising his voice to be heard over the rustling of papers being distributed. “Now that you have entered Fae, you might notice some…ill effects, should you choose to return to the human realm for a prolonged period of time.” Bitterlight looks as if this is delightful fun for all involved, rather than an ominous and annoyingly vague warning. “I would recommend you follow orders, but if you don’t,” he gives an elegant shrug, “well, that makes our decisions a little easier.”A guard approaches them, holding out a scroll. Crosby takes it, and the guard looks at Nicke. “You two are in Blackthorn C,” he says in English. “You can show them?” he asks, turning to an astonished Mike.“Uh,” Mike says. The guard moves on. “They speak English?” he hisses.“Michael,” Nicke says patiently. “There’s an entirely separate magical realm alongside the human world, which is currently falling apart. We’ve just been drafted into some kind of fae army, and found out that we also have magic. The line you draw is that they speak English? English is not so hard to learn.”“Well, when you put it that way,” Mike mutters.“I need to sleep,” Nicke says, running a hand over his eyes. “Do you know where this Blackthorn is?”“Yeah,” Tom says slowly. “We can show you.”There are two buildings in the back of the one they met in, one to the left and one to the right. Conveniently, they are also green and blue.The windows of the blue building are all closed and shuttered, and no one is going in or out. There are no guards outside, although the whole clearing the compound is on is ringed by the same pale trees that Nicke encountered before.Nicke doesn’t even bother with complaining about sharing a room with Crosby. At least there are two beds. Nicke doesn’t particularly like sharing a bed with anyone except Alex, and he definitely isn’t sharing with Sidney fucking Crosby.“You want window?” Crosby asks. Nicke looks down at Mellon, who has put her paws up on the sill and is looking out, ears twitching.“You can take it,” Nicke says, collapsing on the bed closer to the door and starting to unlace his shoes. Tom and Mike hover near the door uncertainly.“We should probably get back to our room,” Tom says, looking at Nicke. Nicke nods, not looking up from his shoes.“I’ll walk you downstairs,” he says casually.Nicke pads down the hall in bare feet, weaving easily through the confusion of people trying to find their rooms, the doors opening and shutting. Tom and Mike trail him back to the bottom floor, and neither of them does anything to indicate surprise when Nicke turns down Ash Hall on the first floor, rather than heading outside.There’s an unlocked door at the end of the hall, same utilitarian bedroom as his and Crosby’s, but empty. Nicke shuts the door after them.“Do you have any way to keep time?” he asks, looking between them. They both shake their heads. “Hm.” Nicke looks out the window at the blue building, thinking. “Is there a curfew?”“Yeah,” Mike says. “Lights go out at a certain point, and the halls get patrolled. In the big building, anyway. As far as I know, no one’s been living here.”“Patrol size?”“Not a lot,” Tom says slowly. “One or two per hall.”“Well,” Nicke looks away from the window, glances between the two of them. “How much noise can you make?”He gets twin grins in response. -Nicke sleeps until they’re called for dinner, asking Crosby not to wake him for lunch. He gets a strange look, but Crosby does what he asks.In spite of the upheaval of the morning, Nicke feels a little better. The buzz in the air, the magic, is not so oppressive now. His body has started to adjust to everything being jarred loose. It didn’t come as a complete surprise, after all. Nicke had felt his senses start to change shortly after the disasters started: massive water loss on the East coast, mountains splitting in the West, creatures coming out of the North Pacific Ocean. And Nicke, just trying to keep the scraps of his team alive, to cope with a world gone suddenly mad, to help as many strangers as he could while struggling to survive.They had ended up in Arkansas by April, the remains who stayed behind for the weeks off, plus those they’d picked up along the way. Few enough, at that point, even before the bloodbath of a New England without water started. Running west seemed smarter, not staying in the knotted scrum fighting over dregs too salty to drink. Was smarter, probably, from what Mike had said. Some of the inland rivers still ran low in their beds, and there was more space to scrabble out a few more months of life in.That first run out of Maryland was when Nicke started to notice the difference, although he couldn’t pinpoint it then. His senses just felt slightly warped, like ragged threads were starting to come off the end of them. At first, he thought it might just be the heat getting to him.Nicke has always trusted his instincts, and feeling them change and evolve had been unnerving, to say the least. It’s easier to accept magic when your whole world has burned down, though, so Nicke just chalked the slight changes up to luck, or some weird quirk of evolution.He gets better at finding water, can tell if food is edible or not, knows things about tracking and trapping that he has no reason to. It’s convenient, mostly, other than a delicate, insistent gnawing at the corner of his mind. A prodding curiosity, coming in like a new tooth.It’s all gotten stronger, the edges sharper, but by far the biggest change was stepping into the fae realm. Nicke closed his eyes on the sharp whirl of a year of chaos, and opened them clearer. He can feel the whispering promise of the trees circling them, the crackle and shift of other magics pressing up against his own. The sore-tooth place in his mind (where he’s started to accept Strelka resides) is plainer, her feelings not pressing in on his own but laying alongside them more neatly. At the moment, it’s mostly the reproof of her unhappiness.Strelka may have decided her duty is to stay, loosely, with Nicke, but that isn’t where her heart is. He can’t blame her, it isn’t where his heart is either.Dinner is quiet, with the sulphuric pop of new magic zipping across the room intermittently. Apparently the big barracks eat separately, so Nicke is glad he took his chance of speaking to Mike and Tom when he could get it. He hasn’t asked Crosby about his magic, and doesn’t particularly care about whatever latent ability it has revealed. Nicke has no idea why the two of them have been paired together, and until he gets more information there’s no point in worrying about it. There are more important enemies to know right now, and Nicke focuses on the guards patrolling the edges of the room, trying to look absorbed in his food.There are six guards, so roughly one for every four of them. Nicke hopes they won’t all be on patrol tonight, but he can’t exactly ask anyone. His guard, the one who slipped him the dictionary, is nowhere to be seen.Nicke presses tentatively outward with his magic, trying to get a feel for the room. One of the guards jerks and looks over at him, and Nicke eases carefully back. “Enjoying dinner,” he asks Crosby.“It’s fine,” Crosby says. The guard looks away, and Nicke lets the conversation drop into silence again.This time, he’s more careful. The guards feel different, magically, than the other humans. Quieter, somehow. It makes it hard to track them around the room when he closes his eyes. Hard, Nicke thinks with a flash of triumph, but not impossible.When they get back to the room for curfew, Nicke lies down and feigns sleep. He lets the dark settle around him, feeling for ripples in the quiet. Crosby’s loud, bright magic at his back is distracting, but Nicke keeps his focus out toward the hall.Guards pass one, two, three times. Night settles fully around the barracks, and the anxious buzz of the building dims as people drop off to sleep.The guards are just entering the hall for the fourth time when chaos erupts. A huge boom echoes around the building, so loud the window shakes with it. Nicke feels the guards pull away, hears running footsteps, and he’s rolled onto the ground and into a crouch before they clear the hall.Nicke creeps downstairs, as quickly and as quietly as he can. The door is open and swinging, and he can see three figures running toward the big building, which is lit up with a greenish fire. Nicke is starting for the blue building when someone grabs his wrist. He wrenches away instinctively, dropping into a crouch and turning, but Crosby hisses in his ear.“It’s me.”“Come on,” Nicke snaps. He doesn’t have time to waste arguing about this. They dart across the grass, fast and light, getting to the blue building just as the door swings open.Whatever Crosby’s flaws, he reacts fast. The two of them duck around the side of the building before the emerging guards can spot them. A little flash of white passes through the grass and slips through the door, before it can swing shut. Nicke taps Crosby’s arm after a moment, jerking his head toward a window in the back corner of the building.The wait, is pressing into Nicke’s brain so loudly that he doesn’t hear Crosby at first.“What are we waiting for?” he hisses a second time.“Shut up,” Nicke breathes. Another minute goes by. A flash of triumph from Strelka, and Nicke’s muscles unclench a little. The window above them starts to slide open, almost silent. Crosby widens his eyes and Nicke can feel his magic change, shift toward the front of his body.He’s considering checking him into the wall, but Malkin drops out of the window and Crosby’s tension just dissipates.More company, Nicke thinks sourly, but then Alex and Strelka are out the window and the five of them are running.“Can’t get near the trees,” Nicke says, dropping down into some scrub brush near the edge of the clearing. “This will have to do.”It’s not really the reunion he hoped for, or even expected. He can barely even look at Alex, the gravity of him so heavy that Nicke can’t feel the distant buzzing of the guards any more, the burn of the magical fire. He can’t even feel Crosby, just the satisfied hum of Strelka and, big and booming across his senses, Alex.“What happened to you two after the ceremony?” Crosby is asking.Nicke looks to Alex and waits. -MEANWHILE: January-February, 2019Sasha has been maddeningly close-lipped over the past few days, after he came back to their hall shaking and swearing under his breath. Zhenya hadn’t gone to rec that day, tired and nauseated from the increasing buzz of magic and unwilling to put up with the presence of so many strangers.He is lying on his bed, trying to focus the vague wavering of his new senses into something remotely useful, when someone bangs into the room next door, kicking loudly at the wall.“You trip?” he calls in Russian. Sasha just swears back at him.A moment later, though, he storms into Zhenya’s room, letting the door bang closed behind him. Zhenya doesn’t bother to sit up.“He’s here,” Sasha says quietly. Zhenya doesn’t ask. There is only ever one ‘he,’ with Sasha.“Isn’t that good?”“I don’t know,” Sasha says, a little pleadingly, as if Zhenya can tell him how to feel.Zhenya sits up. “I complain less, when I see my husband.” Sasha makes a very rude comment about Sidney, which Zhenya politely ignores. “Why are you here, not with him?”“I don’t know,” Sasha says again.It has been a long seven months, trapped in a tiny room with only Sasha for companionship most days. Zhenya doesn’t feel so patient.“He’s Seelie, then? That’s lucky for you,” he says bitterly. Sidney is Unseelie, and kept in the other half of the compound. It’s usually easy enough to pass letters, but seeing each other is rare and difficult. They’ve barely managed it twice in the few weeks Sidney has been here.Sasha looks a little cagey at this comment.“Maybe just new,” he says evasively. Zhenya doesn’t ask. Sasha keeps his secrets, that’s always been the way between them. It probably has to do with the little fox that lurks around the barracks, the one that Zhenya has never seen in human form.“Go bother Nicklas,” Zhenya says, closing his eyes. “I’m tired.”Sasha doesn’t bring up Nicklas again, and then they’re being matched up and moved to new quarters a few days later, and Zhenya has more than domestic dramas to worry about.Being in the fae realm proper is new, and disorienting, for all they’re brought in gradually. Zhenya loses control and transforms the second he steps through the gate. He doesn’t like that it wasn’t purposeful, but being a horse is much less complicated than being a man, in many ways.Besides, Sasha comes through as a vast white bear, and nearly takes an arm off one of the guards besides. Zhenya transforms back more smoothly, and faster, and therefore he is in a good mood. Sasha snaps at him with his big bear teeth, and Zhenya scratches behind his ears.“Change back before we go inside,” he says. “Maybe your husband lets you rip up the bedclothes, but I only share rooms with humans and hockey players.”Sasha snaps at him again, but with human teeth this time. His little fox friend has disappeared, and Nicklas never came down the left hall, and Zhenya would feel sorry for Sasha if he weren’t so busy feeling sorry for himself. Besides, Sasha keeps calling Zhenya’s other form a pony, which is both inaccurate and impolite.Sasha won’t come down for dinner that night. He’s gotten fond of sulking in the year he’s been a captive, and Zhenya feels maybe bad enough for him that he brings him a smuggled out tray, pony chirps or no. The guards have their hands full with a poorly matched mongoose and cobra who are trying to kill each other in the middle of the dining hall, and Zhenya is sneaky.“Eat,” he says, dropping the tray on the bottom of Sasha’s bed. Sasha swears at him again. “You need to stay sharp,” Zhenya says, an old argument. Sasha sulks, and lets himself get soft, and that is not the way to be ready for battle. That has always been Sasha’s weakness, Zhenya thinks. He will fight until he drops when on a line, but does not do well alone. He needs a husband to take care of him, and cubs to protect. Barring that, he gets a Zhenya.Zhenya is not so proud that he cannot acknowledge that having Sasha there is good for him. Zhenya, too, does not do well alone. He needs something to push back against, to keep him keen.“Have you heard anything?” Sasha asks quietly, while he eats.“From Sid? No. I saw the Unseelie being moved this morning, though, while you were trying to run a hole through the carpet.”“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sasha says, around a mouthful of food.“Nothing you can do,” Zhenya says. “Not yet. Your little fox watches him, anyway.” Sasha grunts in acknowledgement, and finishes his dinner.Neither of them sleep that night, which turns out to be for the best.- NOW: February 1st-2nd, 2019Malkin murmurs something about being moved, and animal transformations. Nicke can’t parse it, but Crosby seems unsurprised. Nicke will ask him to explain later. He doesn’t bother with annoyance that Crosby clearly downplayed his own knowledge of the situation. Nicke probably would have as well, if their positions had been reversed.Alex is petting Strelka and not looking at Nicke when he asks, “What your paper say?” His English sounds creaky, as if he hasn’t spoken it for a long time.“Uh,” Crosby wrinkles his forehead, concentrating. “I can’t remember exactly.”“Like you don’t know what Seelie and Unseelie mean, exactly?” Nicke can’t help but chirp. Crosby glares at him, face flickering green in the still-unquenched firelight.“Task, right?” Malkin says.“Yeah,” Crosby says. “Bäckström and I have to find a flower, or something.”Alex and Malkin exchange a look, and Nicke fights down a stab of annoyance. It’s not like Alex likes Malkin better than him. They barely get along most of the time, even if their on-again off-again friendship has been more on than off lately. They’ve been stuck here together for who knows how long. They will probably work fine together, even if neither of them particularly enjoys it.What Nicke knows they’re both thinking, though, is that Alex and Malkin are the least of their worries. Forcing Sidney Crosby and Nicklas Bäckström to work together…well, a frosty and unceasing silence is the incredibly optimistic read of how that will go. Nicke can be fair, he knows the more likely outcome is him murdering Crosby in his sleep, unable to withstand temptation even when the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance. (He can’t decide if it’s insulting or complementary that he thinks Crosby would at least scruple to wake him up, pre-murder.)It’s not just the entire world, though. It’s Alex, too.He narrows his eyes, letting Alex take in his displeasure for a second, Nicke doesn’t appreciate being doubted, and then smooths out his expression.“Easy,” he says. “We can work together.”“Right,” Crosby says, sounding exactly as doubtful as Nicke feels.“Save that for backup plan,” Malkin says, pulling out his own parchment and handing it to Crosby.“You don’t think they’ll notice we’re swapping partners?” Crosby asks, but he sounds more hopeful than anything.“We don’t get caught,” Malkin says confidently. Alex still won’t look at Nicke for more than a few seconds at a time, and Nicke wants to rip something apart with his bare hands.“Fine,” Nicke says, a little snappishly. “We’ll meet you at wherever the departure point is, and then meet back here when we’ve all finished our tasks.”“Fine,” Malkin echos. Crosby hesitates a little, looking rather like he wishes they didn’t have company. Nicke stares him down, and Crosby drops his eyes and nods after a moment.“We should get back before they notice we’re gone,” Crosby says.Nicke doesn’t wait to hear what Malkin has to say to that. He takes off, low and fast through the grass, and doesn’t look back. -NOW: February 2nd, 2019There are strange clothes in big oak trunks in their room in the morning, but Nicke is too relieved at getting out of his absolutely filthy week-old outfit to question it much. A bath would be nice, but fresh clothes will have to do.Breakfast is tense, anxiety zipping around the room. Pairs and trios are hunched over their parchments, or whispering to each other.“Here,” Crosby says quietly, passing Nicke a roll of parchment and a smooth rounded stone under the table. Nicke takes a bite of porridge.“What’s the stone for?”“Lets us talk over distances,” Crosby says. That startles Nicke enough that he looks over at him. Crosby is staring at his bowl and frowning. “Geno and Ovi got them, all the Seelie recruits did, sounds like.”“Should have joined them,” Nicke mutters.“Geno has the other one, so you can reach us if you need to. The command word is,” Crosby carefully writes out a word on the tabletop with his finger. Nicke snorts, and the corner of Crosby’s mouth tilts up a little.”Hockey,” creative, Nicke thinks drily. It’s stupid, but it makes him feel a tiny bit better, nonetheless.His parchment mentions the love-in-idleness flower, with a small drawing, and what looks like a latitude and longitude. There’s no mention of how they’re supposed to get there.“In some ways,” Crosby says slowly, as if he’s still trying to decide whether to tell Nicke anything, “we’ll have it a little easier than the other teams.”It’s barely anything, but Nicke heaves an internal sigh and meets him halfway.“Easier how?”“Well, Unseelie are meant to be better at navigation. We can open our own gates between worlds, and our familiars can help us find things.” Nicke doesn’t point out that they’ve received absolutely no training on how to open gates or navigate, just nods and gestures for Crosby to continue. “The Seelie can shapeshift-” what the fuck, Nicke thinks blankly, “and sometimes control elements, I think.”“Best of both worlds for us then,” he says flatly. He refuses to ask about the shapeshifting thing, about any of it. He’ll just ask Alex.If Alex will even talk to him.Nicke eats the rest of his breakfast in silence.They’re herded out into the clearing twenty minutes later. The big barracks are apparently undamaged, either they were magically repaired or the fire wasn’t as bad as it looked. The Seelie are already spread out across the grass outside.It’s a weird gathering. The Unseelie all have their familiars, which range from inconspicuous like Strelka up through a massive walrus. There are animals among the Seelie as well, which Nicke now thinks from what Crosby said are shapeshifter humans, rather than animal familiars. Alex and Malkin are both human. Nicke doesn’t know if that makes him feel better, or worse.He hates how wrong-footed this all feels: being trapped in a corner he can’t quite fight his way out of, wrestling new abilities and the too-loudness of other people’s magic. He hates that there is still this distance between Nicke and Alex, when they’re finally back together after a year of thinking that maybe they’d die still apart. He hates that Crosby is here, with his stupid intent face and his being one up on Nicke, knowledge-wise.He hates a lot of things, this morning. Strelka sits on his shoulder and gives a little rumbling growl.Soon, comes off her in waves.The sixty or so of them wait around for a bit, before it becomes apparent that this is it. There are no guards showing up, or portals opening. There is just the clearing, and the milling group, and whatever vague tasks they’ve all been set.Nicke strides across the clearing, sharp and impatient, and grabs Alex’s elbow.“Let’s go,” he says, turning Alex’s big body toward the back of the clearing with the slightest pressure of his hand. Nicke has no idea how he’s supposed to open a portal, but he’s sure as fuck not letting Sidney Crosby do it first.He finds a mostly empty spot, close to the trees and bare of rocks. Alex’s bulk is comforting at his back, for all the distance between them. Nicke kneels down at the edge of the circle, pressing his hands into the earth and trying to think. He had seen one of the fae open a portal, just yesterday. He knows, vaguely, many legends about supernatural creatures, and nature, and doors between distant places.Nicke closes his eyes, hands tracing the symbol he saw the guard make yesterday. His brow wrinkles a little.No, not quite right, Nicke thinks. A bit more…like…this…He adjusts the position of his hands, tries again. He can feel himself getting closer to it, the buzzing hum in his veins getting louder. He hears a sharp intake of breath from Alex behind him, and his eyes pop open.A filmy soap-bubble of a door is open in front of him, and Nicke looks to Alex automatically, grinning. Their eyes catch, and tangle, and Nicke feels magic surge in his blood and roar in his ears, louder than a playoff crowd.“We should,” Nicke says, indicating the door. Alex takes a deep breath, nodding and steadying himself.“We go,” Alex says, not looking away from Nicke. Nicke holds out a hand, slow, tentative, and Alex takes it. The warm familiarity of it rakes across Nicke’s soul, and he has to blink a little rapidly, focus on breathing.Together, they step through the portal and the world changes suddenly, again. -THEN: February-March, August, 2018It was a bad time to scatter to the winds, in retrospect.But Nicke knows, like he knows blades against ice, that life moves fast and retrospect is never kind. When strange things started to happen a little over a year ago, it was easy to dismiss them.At the time, it was three weeks off from training, “until things calm down and people stop panicking.” Until people want to leave their houses again. Until the strange reports of rivers drying up and massive creatures coming out of caves die down. Until the whispers about animals with human eyes start to quiet.At the time, Nicke was just eager for space from the black hole of Alex’s presence, fresh off the fastest skid-out-of-control argument they’ve had in years. At the time, everyone running to their own bolt holes seemed fine, wise even. At the time, Nicke thought he had been in the wrong, to scold Alex for leaving.They shouldn’t have split up, none of them, but it’s too late now.Sometimes, it feels like the stupidest thing in the world, to fight with someone because you’re so afraid of losing them. It does, and yet, you do.Fighting with Alex isn’t like fighting with anyone else.Then again, nothing with Alex is like anyone else.It’s like...they can go at each other vicious and hard and it hurts, but in the way getting checked and then digging it out hurts. It hurts like being alive, like fighting for every inch when someone pushes back just as hard. The fierce joy of knowing you can come at someone ugly and low and painful, and they can come at you crushing and exuberant with triumph, and you can still love each other so much and so deep that it roots underneath your bones.It’s not that they need to fight, each other anyway. It’s not even that they need to win, they both prefer that together. It’s just that they are both stubborn, and do not give ground easily, and love that too much about each other to wish things were any different.Nicke had let himself in to Alex’s that afternoon, still unsure of whether he planned to apologize, or just to sit on the couch in Alex’s terrible jeans and drink tea. Nicke had been the one to pick the fight this time, but it was an old one. A fight about hockey, too, which are always the fastest to spiral and hardest to settle.It was nothing, though, a bump of discontent, a few hours to cool off. That’s what Nicke thought, anyway.They both still keep their own houses. Partly for appearance, partly for variety, partly so they each have somewhere to lick their wounds. It’s not real, though, the separation. The houses are both Nicke-and-Alex’s, spilling over with tacky novelty clothing and commemorative pucks and pictures of them, of the team.Nicke lets himself in to Nicke-and-Alex’s, and Alex is packing a suitcase.“What are you doing?” Nicke asks calmly, leaning against the door.“Packing.”“I can see that,” Nicke says, not blunting his annoyance. “I thought we were staying here. It’s just three weeks.”“Things change,” Alex says, still not looking at him.“Ovi,” Nicke says steadily. Alex’s hands pause. “What is this?”A sigh heaves through Alex’s frame, wind in the mountains. “Braden wants me to come with him, back home.”“Okay,” Nicke says. “Why?”“He won’t say.”“Then why are you going?” Nicke says sharply. Alex looks up at him, eyes sad.“He asked me.”“So you’re going to Saskatchewan, in all this?” Nicke waves around the room, not entirely sure what he’s indicating. The fight? The weeks off? The new drought rules and water regulations? The reports of planes disappearing mid-flight?“He asked me,” Alex repeats again, miserable, and Nicke is out of patience with him.“I’ll go with him, then, if someone needs to,” Nicke says, going for his own suitcase.“No. I go. You stay,” Alex says. “Better for team that way.”Nicke wants to protest that there aren’t enough of them left for there to even be a team, not even for a single shift. He doesn’t, Alex knows already. “Fine,” he snaps, turning to go.“Nicky,” Alex pleads, and that jerks him to a stop, like always.“Text me when you get there,” Nicke says, not turning around. He does not like it, he does not agree, but he and Alex skate the same line, always.“Okay,” Alex says, still that soft plea in his voice. Nicke leaves before he can give into it.In the end, it doesn’t matter. They lose cell service, between the time Alex and Braden’s plane takes off and the time it was supposed to land.Nicke hovers around the landlines at Kettler until those go down too, but no one ever calls. The plane landed, that’s all he could get from the airport, and even that took almost two days of being put on hold and endless wait times. Nicke has packed his own suitcase, dug out an old atlas, is ready to take the car and drive up to Canada. He knows, roughly, where Braden is from. He will find it, find them.The first water war breaks out before he can go, and one of them is stabbed to death at a gas station, and Nicke postpones his trip north to get the team out, make sure everyone is safe.Things do not stop, though Nicke has lost hope, by the time a month has gone by, that they will. Water gets scarcer, and people get meaner, and Nicke’s senses start to static out at the edges. Things do not stop, and before Nicke can take a breath it’s been four months, been six months, and the space between his body and Alex’s is still incalculable. It’s been seven months, and Nicke still feels like more than half of him is underground.A part of him, a big part, wants to drop where he stands. He dreads any kind of final confirmation that Alex is gone, knows he will not recover from it, but cannot keep living this half life.But: the children are buried, his duty is discharged, and now he must go. -NOW: February 2nd, 2019 // Capture: February 15, 2018Nicky is cold and distant, and crackling with power, and Sasha loves him so much that his hands shake with it.“You owe me an explanation,” Nicky says, whirling on Sasha the second the portal closes behind them.“What kind of explanation?” Sasha asks slowly, the words strange in his mouth. A year of only Russian and bear grumbles have eroded his English, and having Nicky alive and full of rage in front of him does not help his thoughts to focus.“What…okay,” Nicky says, slowing down, words sharp, “let’s start with this. What happened to Braden?”“I don’t know.”Nicky laughs, a rough, angry sound. “You don’t know? How do you not know?”Sasha shakes his head mutely, too shamed to explain that he had been taken almost the moment they got out of the airport. He and Braden had been separated in the roiling mass of people trying to flee. At first, Sasha hadn’t worried, even when he saw his phone wasn’t working. Braden had told him, carefully, how to get to his parents’ house. Sasha knew where to go, how to get there.He hadn’t worried, but then he’d been halfway down a blind alley and suddenly surrounded by twenty people. Or, what he thought, at the time, were twenty people. Even then Sasha hadn’t panicked; he can take care of himself.He can take care of himself, but not even Alexander Ovechkin can stand alone against twenty fae.“How long have you been here?” Nicky asks, jerking Sasha back to the present.“‘Bout five minutes,” Sasha says, grinning. Nicky huffs, folding his arms.“You can’t just do that, Alex.”“Do what?”“You can’t just…just decide we’re finished fighting and then we’re finished fighting.”“I don’t want to fight,” Sasha says, smile fading a little. Nicky makes a noise of frustration, looking a bit like he wants to shake Sasha. Sasha leans in a little, wishes he would.“What are you keeping from me?” Nicky asks.“Nothing!” Sasha protests. “Nothing to tell!” He wishes this weren’t true, but Braden had told him barely anything and the fae even less.“Nothing to- I had to learn about all this court stuff from Sidney fucking Crosby, Alex! He knows more about,” Nicky gestures wildly, “whatever your powers are than I do!”“How am I supposed to tell when you don’t listen,” Sasha points out. Nicky’s jaw pops, and even Strelka is giving Sasha an unimpressed look.“I’m listening,” Nicky says, getting himself back under control.“You know basics,” Sasha says. “Two courts, Seelie,” he points to himself, “Unseelie,” he points to Nicky. “You have familiars, we have-” he struggles, unsure how to explain the concept of turning into a bear in English.“Crosby said something about shapeshifting?” Nicky says. Sasha nods.“Yes. I bear.”“Of course you are,” Nicky mutters.“Wanna see?” Sasha asks, trying another smile.“Not right now,” Nicky says tiredly. Sasha deflates a little, but Nicky is looking down at the ground and kicking some rocks.The silence settles around them. Strelka twitches her tail a little, watchful.“Maybe later?” Sasha asks, after a moment. He doesn’t know what else to say. No one can sit on a silence like Nicky.“You left,” Nicky says, and Sasha wishes for the silence back. “You- Do you know how many people I’ve buried, this year, Alex?” Sasha shakes his head wordlessly, but Nicky is still not looking at him. “You left, and I had to do it all alone.”Nicky looks up at him, finally, and somehow that is worse than everything else. His eyes burn with condemnation, salt-sharp and searing in all the nasty things Sasha has carved into his own heart over the past year.
Fool. Coward. Waste.
“Where were you?” Nicky whispers, voice cracking, and Sasha can only bow his head. -THEN: August, 2018 Sometimes, Nicke can see all the people who he has let into his heart, who have been ripped away. Sometimes, the trailing roots of connections cross so thick and so fast that he cannot see anything else. No matter how many times he tells himself to stop opening the door, he falls into the same trap, over and over again. Lets himself love, lets himself bleed, lets himself dig graves into his own chest to keep the bodies warm.It is always the young ones and the frightened ones and the ones who burn with endless hunger to survive. They are the easiest to love, the hardest to lose.Nicke was young, once, re-born on ice and the stop-start stop-start of adrenaline and fear, but ten years is a heavy weight, and it slows you down well before it hits you.It’s a problem of boundaries, maybe. You have to connect: with your linemates, with the vets, with the other rookies. You can’t do your job otherwise, not with a team out of sync. You have to learn to read each other, and that is rarely simple and never clean. Distance is safest, but it doesn’t make for good hockey. Nicke will sacrifice a lot for good hockey.So, you dig in and hold on and for a while, and things are good. Things are clicking, you’re a team, you’re winning- enough anyway- and maybe messy is okay. You know they’ll leave eventually, that’s just the way things are. You’re okay with it, prepared for it, you’ll be fine.You’re always fine, but it’s never okay. You become a fixed point, orbited by a stream of stars and planets that spin into and out of your life, and you can’t control any of it. Not the way you love them, not how much, not when they come, not when they leave. Inevitably, you have only the muscle memory of being slammed into with rough joy, and the flutter of an incoming pass in the corner of your eye.That’s the way things are, though, and you don’t want to be selfish. You have your anchor, your left wing, pressed into life with the same gravity that holds you. You can trust, at least, one thing: that the greatest and brightest star on your horizon will never set without you. You may be stuck with a head full of useless discards, with memories of all the time you spent tuning yourself to a now-faded frequency, with old affinities that you can still almost feel like a phantom limb. You may be flooded with new people, new relationships, more and more new and yourself not a wanderer, pinned by the constant awareness that you will be left rather than leaving. You may feel old, now, with all your children out there in the world and you unable to protect them anymore, but this you will survive. You’re still luckier than many.The funny thing is, you never thought you would have to do it alone. Alex is so unceasing, so constant, that you let yourself love him as constantly and unceasingly as you want to. You do not prepare for Alex to go: you do not set up safeguards, or limit intimacies, or keep parts of yourself carefully wrapped away.You have survived so much loss, but even the shadow of this one, the stinking breath of seven months of distance panting at the back of you like a hellhound, has you clutching for scraps of faith.Nicke looks away. Forward.The cave he has been sleeping in is about a day’s hike from the last of the graves. There is a part of Nicke that feels guilt, does not want to stray out of reach, to leave them unremembered. There is part of him that craves that guilt, because it absolves him of the cowardice of waiting here to die. Which is the heavier: the sin of a loss of faith or the final confirmation of solitude?In the end, waiting to die is boring, and Nicke is used to needing eyes in the back of his head. After its all burned down and he is all that's left, Nicke does what he always does. He steps back, breathes, finds the lines, reforms. Centers.Some of them he knows are dead. Some of them he buried himself.Almost as good at digging graves as you are at assists, now, something half-Backy and half-Ovi chirps.Some of them are left, though. They must be, somewhere. They must be, or why is Nicke still alive?Nicke thinks, with that lightning-flash of presentiment he gets sometimes, that in a year he will say, “this, also, was a bad call.”He does not think of Ovi’s bones picked clean, and he looks. Seven months is not so long, in some ways. The muddy bruise of playing-in-sync lingers like the aftereffect of a flash, brighter and sharper with the way his senses read the world now.Starting from the crux of the nearly-spent river, Nicke thinks of North America as one endless sheet of ice, even and neatly divided. He thinks of himself, body sinking into faceoff position with ready familiarity. He looks left. He goes right.He will finish this, one way or another. -NOW: February 2nd, 2019Alex is giving him fucking nothing, and Nicke is too tired to keep pushing. There is a part of him, a very very large part of him, that wants to fight Alex. Fighting Alex is familiar; it has rules and boundaries and ways they put themselves back together. This, Alex hanging back from him like a beaten dog and the buzz of magic and adrenaline fizzing in Nicke’s blood, this he does not know what to do with.Nicke falls back, centers, refocuses. This may be the apocalypse, but he isn’t just going to DROP a rivalry like the Caps and the Pens have. He may be fighting with his husband in the middle of a canyon somewhere and trying to learn magic on the fly, but Nicklas Bäckström will be damned before he lets Sidney Crosby be faster than him.“Let’s just find this stupid flower,” Nicke mutters, handing Alex the parchment. Alex springs into action, as expected. Given a task, he will always work until he completes it. This, at least, feels like solid ground.“This picture. Familiar?” Alex asks Nicke. Nicke shakes his head.“I don’t know the coordinates either, although I’m hoping they’re nearby.”“You think, when you,” Alex vaguely approximates the shape of the sigil with his hands.“Yes,” Nicke says. “I was focusing on the coordinates.”“Nearby then,” Alex says confidently. Nicke doesn’t know if this is based on Alex’s knowledge of Unseelie magic, or Alex’s eternal and unceasing faith in Nicke. Both options make him feel tired, and warm.“I guess we start looking, then,” Nicke says doubtfully. “I become bear and carry.”“No,” Nicke says firmly.“Is faster,” Alex protests.“No,” Nicke says loudly. Alex rolls his eyes, and then a massive white bear is standing in front of Nicke. Nicke swears at him, nastily and in Swedish, just because he can. Alex opens his bear mouth in a wide grin, and he has the same stupid gap in his teeth that he does as a human. “I’m not riding on you,” Nicke says firmly.Alex grumbles a little and nudges Nicke’s hand gently. Nicke sighs and scratches behind his ear. A low, satisfied rumble, almost a purr, starts, in Alex’s chest, and Nicke fights down a swell of fondness. He’s missed him so, so much, and all the confusing half-fights and potential betrayals and all the broken loneliness of the past year just shakes to bits and melts away, in the face of having Alex in front of him again.Nicke sighs and climbs up when Alex crouches down for him. Strelka gives a happy little chirrup, running up to curl around Nicke’s shoulders. Alex gets carefully to his feet, and Nicke digs his hands into Alex’s fur.Alex stands up and full-on roars, loud as hell, and Nicke gives an undignified squawk of surprise.“You fucker,” Nicke laughs. He can practically feel the smug satisfaction rolling off Alex as he starts picking his way slowly down the canyon. “You did that on purpose.”I do everything on purpose, the Alex in Nicke’s head says. Nicke sighs a little, squeezing his knees across Alex’s broad back so he can untangle one of his hands from his fur. He gives Alex’s side a pat.“We’ll figure this out, yeah?” Nicke says. “You and me, Ovi.”Alex presses his nose into Nicke’s hand and snorts, and Nicke holds on.They climb carefully down into the canyon. Alex is right, his strength and balance is even better as a bear, and they move faster than two humans could. Nicke isn’t entirely sure where they’re going, but it isn’t a total mystery either. His magic has gotten quieter, back in the human realm, but not as much as he had half-expected. He can feel a sort of hum, swinging from Nicke and Strelka into Alex and back around again. It pushes them forward, collective magics prodding and seeking through the air.It’s nice, and Nicke feels settled and quiet for the first time since he took off his skates a year ago.The hills roll and sway under Alex’s steady, broad gait, the whole beautifully wild spread of the canyon opening in front of them. Wherever they are, it’s relatively untouched by the devastation the fae have wrought across so much of the human world. It hurts a little, the sparseness of the green of it, the way the wildflowers blanket the undersides of ridges. The grey-brown solidity of rock surges up to meet them, eternal and ageless, and Nicke feels all the wonder of it catch sharp in his throat. An eagle flies overhead, the shadow a brief caress on the back of his neck. Strelka looks up, and then hops down and wanders off on her own.Hunt. Find later, she flicks back to Nicke.Nicke stops looking for the love-in-idleness flower, stops thinking about Crosby and winning, stops being anything but the flow of magic in his veins and the feel of Alex beneath him. He feels almost drunk with it, swaying and dizzy with peace, with clarity. The year falls away, turns back, unravels, and fades from his mind. He sways a little, disoriented, and Alex stops.They’re on a ledge, Nicke thinks vaguely, and he could fall if he leaned forward. He starts to, but Alex rears, not fast, but enough to dump Nicke back off him and into the solid rock.Nicke thinks maybe he loses a little time, because suddenly Alex is not a bear anymore, and he looks afraid.Alex is saying something, low and urgent, but Nicke can only understand his own name. Alex’s hands are on his face, in his hair, and Nicke shivers and leans further into him. Alex feels, always, like a precipice.“Nicky,” Alex says again, pleading, and Nicke struggles to focus, to pull in the rampaging magic leaking out of him in waves. Flowers are blooming around them, purple and white with little yellow hearts. They’re starting to creep up Alex’s thighs, as if he, too, is part of the mountain. Nicke laughs shakily, trying to get them to stop. He has no idea how things spun so suddenly out of control. The flowers don’t listen, and Alex is too focused on Nicke to notice.“Look,” Nicke says finally, cutting Alex off. Alex frowns down at his own legs in confusion, then alarm. The flowers start to thicken, new buds popping and blooming, and Nicke realizes, belatedly, that he isn’t the one doing this. Alex is. “Hej,” he says gently. “Alex. Ovi. Breathe. It’s okay. I’m okay.”Alex looks at him, takes a deep, shuddering breath. The flowers stop, rolling off Alex like a blanket and settling peaceably around them.“You’re okay,” Nicke says softly. Alex’s hands are still on his face, and Nicke tilts in, closer, settling his hands on Alex’s waist.“Found the flowers, I think,” Alex says, and Nicke laughs softly, slipping a hand under his shirt to stroke his skin.“Always good at finding things.”Alex smiles at him a little, tucks one big hand around the back of his neck. “For you, always find goal.”They stare at each other, surrounded by the peace of the canyon. The wind ruffles Alex’s hair softly, and his eyes are bright with happiness and crinkling up at the corners. Nicke can feel himself getting lost again, and he pulls himself back into the present with some effort.“We need to get back,” he says softly. “Meet the others.”“Okay, Backy. We go.” Alex rolls gracefully to his feet, holding out a hand to help Nicke up. Nicke lets Alex pull him, settling Nicke back near the rock of the cliff and placing his big body between Nicke and the ledge.“I’m not going to fall,” Nicke says mildly.“No,” Alex says, “I stop you if you try.”Nicke rolls his eyes, and smiles. Strelka, seeming to sense that they’re ready to go, chirrups and picks her way down to them. Nicke concentrates on the barracks, the circle of trees, the way Alex looked low in the grass and lit up by magical fire. He draws the sigil again, carefully, and a door pops into view.“Getting better,” Alex says admiringly. “Fast.”“Make sure it works, first,” Nicke chides, but his tone is soft.It does work, perfectly, and to Nicke’s smug satisfaction, they’re back a full twenty minutes before Malkin and Crosby.-
THEN: February 16, 2018 // Elsewhere.By the time Braden gets to his parents, it’s past midnight and he’s certain something is wrong.He lets himself in, quiet even though he knows they’ll still be awake. The lights are on in the kitchen. To his surprise, there are three people sitting around the table instead of two. None of them are his parents.Braden pauses for a second in the doorway, then goes to pull out a chair.“I didn’t know you were fae,” Braden says, looking at Kuzy. The other two, Alexander Semin and Marc-André Fleury, don’t come as a surprise. Fleury is alternately admired and hated by the other Cú Sídhe, for giving up his considerable power to live among humans full time. Magic abdication is difficult and complex, especially when you have a lot of it, and Fleury had successfully completed the process before hitting fifteen. As for Semin, well, he’s always been a bit of a law unto himself. Living in the human world as fae with any kind of power is painful, and hard to manage. It requires a close attendance to gate mapping and frequent trips back and forth. Semin is the only one Braden knows who bothers with it.“No powers,” Kuzy says dismissively, as if that makes things simple. It does and it doesn’t. Braden’s own abilities are limited enough that staying indefinitely in the human world isn’t a strain, even though he’s gone through Awakening and manifested his magic fully. He has something of a sense for others with fae blood, but only the particularly powerful. He can’t even pick up on Fleury, in the human world. It doesn’t, because fae blood is never simple.“I think maybe,” Braden says slowly, “we should start at the beginning.”This is the beginning. Braden has never been particularly tuned in to fae politics, especially not since he moved away from the Richard 436 Gate. He knows there’s a gate somewhere near D.C., but not who rules it. His family has a thin but stubborn strand of fae heritage weaving through it, and they swear fealty to the Cú Sídhe, to the rulership of The Circle.The Cú Sídhe are fae: not-Seelie and not-Unseelie. A very long time ago, several wars and redistributions of power and human eons ago, they split from the Courts. The Circle is what passes for fae democracy, Braden supposes, ruled half by bloodlines and half by popular consent. They style themselves underdogs, with new blood and new power. He doesn’t have much patience for their self-righteousness or their dispassionate approach to fae-human relations.This is also the beginning. Braden is happy, as a human, but he knows to look to the fae when the rumblings of strange things on the horizon start. He had hoped, planning the trip out of D.C., that rumblings was all it was. Ripples, inevitable from the way the fae and human realms push up against each other. It seemed a sensible course, when he planned this trip two days ago. It seemed a sensible course twelve hours ago, boarding the flight. Trying to explain that the world is not what it seems is never pleasant, and Braden hadn’t been eager to do so, not for a handful of tremors. He had thought, just a quick trip home. Dip into the fae realm, get a closer feel for what’s going on. There will be time, if something is seriously wrong. Time to explain, to warn, to protect.It feels unutterably foolish, now, to have walked into this with only Alex for backup. Alex, who can’t even feel the weight of his own power yet, who Braden led directly into danger without so much as a warning.“The Unseelie have been opening breaches,” Semin says, and Braden’s heart sinks. Things have gone much farther than he thought, if the Unseelie are violating their treaty with the Seelie, pulling and pushing matter between the human and fae realms.“And The Circle?” Braden asks, without much hope. Fleury’s mouth twists in annoyance.“Doing a lot of nothing, as usual.”Braden drums his fingers on the table, thinks of the hours he spent hunched over the wheel in a rental car. Alex’s magic, even unawakened, is so loud, he had hoped he’d be able to find it.“I think they’re taking people,” Braden says, finally.“What?” Fleury asks sharply. Braden doesn’t look up, tracing his finger over the familiar wood-grain of the kitchen table.“Alex came with me, but he disappeared from the airport.”Braden hears a chair scrape, feels the insistent press of Semin’s magic pull back. It gets a little easier to breathe, with him gone. If Alex is somewhere he can be retrieved, Semin will find him. Braden still does not look up. Kuzy is pacing and Fleury, across from him, is radiating tension.“That,” Fleury sighs heavily, “that is very bad, if they have gone that far.”“No shit,” Kuzy says, all sarcastic amusement.Bad is an understatement. If they have gone that far, the clouds on the horizon are thick with storms. If they have gone that far, war is coming.-NOW: February 2nd, 2019Sasha is smug and self-satisfied, and Zhenya is tired of him. Sid and Bäckström had decided, by a mostly-silent conversation that took place using ample glares and raised eyebrows, that they would claim the first win. It’s smart; the Unseelie are keeping information much more close and secret, so the potential reward for a first place finish is higher there. Zhenya and Sasha are supposed to pretend to return ten minutes later. Unfortunately, this leaves Zhenya stuck behind the barracks for ten minutes, listening to Sasha go on and on about Nicklas.“He opens portals so fast now, Zhenya, just like,” Sasha snaps his fingers as he winds up a long story about the two of them making flowers bloom with the power of their love, or something stupid and sappy like that.“Impressive,” Zhenya says, bored agony clear in every syllable. Sasha has won his bragging rights, by virtue of being faster, but Zhenya is not going to make it easy for him.“What happened with you two?” Sasha asks, and Zhenya narrows his eyes suspiciously.“Why do you ask?”“I can’t ask about a friend?” Sasha says innocently.“Friend,” Zhenya mutters. He shifts, leaning more comfortably against the wall. “I’ll tell you later, maybe. Nights are long. Nothing to do but talk.” Sasha grunts in agreement.“Last time we lived together,” Sasha says, smiling a little slyly, “it didn’t go so well.”Zhenya laughs, in spite of himself. “Fuck you, Sasha.”Sasha tugs him under an arm and musses his hair, pulling away and darting into the barracks before Zhenya can do more than swear at him. -THEN: September, 2018Nicke has been watching the camp for two days, a little irritable at the dearth of food in the surrounding hills. They’ve been picked clean, and the camp is almost certainly dying.Foolish, making camp in a valley, Nicke thinks. At least the inconsistencies of their sentries makes getting water easy. They can’t patrol a whole river at once, even with the way it has shrunken and pulled back from the banks, but Nicke barely has to try to map their movements and slip in around them. That would tell him Tom isn’t here, even if nothing else did. No one from Nicke’s line would be this sloppy.Still, there’s something crawling with familiarity at the base of his spine. A feeling like knowing you’re going straight for tape, even before you shoot. A feeling that keeps him waiting, and watching. -The strike, when it comes, is neater than it needs to be. It pleases Nicke to see it, for all it’s wasted on inferior talent.Conflict between the camps doesn’t have rules, exactly, but it’s been formalized to an extent. There’s been so much death from lack of water that people don’t want to waste the small remainder of life. Camps have captains, and resources, and while leadership and allegiances might shift, there’s a certain expected code of conduct. You don’t do anything to another camp’s water supply. You take care of the remainder left behind after a capture, as much as resources allow. No unnecessary deaths, no unnecessary fighting.There are less than ten people left behind when the camp is captured. They give up easily to a force of six, the camp worn thin from ceaseless patrols and increasing defections. They’re sitting on more water than they need, and that’s a recipe for disaster. Everyone has known this is coming.Five more come into the camp after the transfer of power, leaving a massed force of twenty-one. Tom and T.J. are among them. They move from the valley onto a hill, which makes keeping eyes on the camp more difficult, but not impossible.Nicke isn’t precisely sure what makes him hesitate. He wants the camp to have a little time to settle. He wants to make sure the arrival of another person won’t cause strain. He wants to see the thin threads of teamwork around the camp, to map where they run smooth and where they tangle. All reasons, none of them quite accurate.Partly, he still isn’t sure if this is the smartest decision. Being embedded in a camp gives you a certain amount of safety, for all it means a sacrifice of freedom. Nicke isn’t sure if it’s fair to ask them to leave that behind, for what might be a suicide mission into nothingness.Nicke has known since this whole thing started that, eventually, it will be his job to find Alex. He does not know where Alex is, or how to find him, just that he must.In the end, he decides to see what the others say, let them make their own decision. He’d rather do this with a team, the chances of success are better, but he’ll do it on his own if he needs to. -A branch whips across T.J.’s side. It’s not hard enough to actually do any damage, but it stings sharply and makes him hiss, reaching into his belt for a knife.“Slow reaction. Not paying attention,” a voice says blandly, and T.J. abandons the knife to look over in shock. At his back, Tom has already figured out what’s going on, running at Nicky with a yell of joy that will almost definitely bring more sentries.Nicky rolls his eyes, but lets Tom lift him off the ground in a massive hug.“You’re alive,” Tom says, setting him down with a final squeeze.“Apparently,” Nicky says, shaking T.J.’s hand and then pulling him in for his own hug. Tom is practically wriggling with glee, tucking himself up against Nicky’s side as soon as Nicky releases T.J.. This is probably for the best, as the other two sentries who are running toward the noise slow when they see Tom.“Hello,” Renee says cautiously, sliding her own knife back into its sheath. Nicky’s eyes flick between her and Elijah, assessing them quickly.“This is Nicky,” Tom says. “He was on our team, back at Kettler.” Elijah, who as far as T.J. can tell has no stake in sports of any kind, has already lost interest. He’s looking around, perhaps to make sure there are no other rogue Caps lurking in the underbrush.“You’re both on shift for another hour,” Renee points out.“I can patrol, too,” Nicky says. “I’ve been watching the camp for the last week. I know where your boundaries are.”Elijah is definitely watching Nicky now, and both he and Renee look displeased. Tom laughs, slapping Nicky on the back. Nicky doesn’t flinch.“That’s our Backy,” Tom says proudly.“Were you from the other camp?” Elijah asks.“No.” Nicky says. He doesn’t elaborate. Renee and Elijah look at each other, and T.J. has to stifle a laugh. He’s missed watching Nicky interact with new people. It’s always hilarious.“Well,” Renee looks around the huddle. “Patrol if you want. We’ll talk to the captain at shift change.”Elijah gives the three of them a long, distrustful look before they separate, but doesn’t argue.-Tom keeps up a consistent stream of chatter, telling Nicke about who is in the camp, what he and T.J. have been doing. Nicke gives the occasional nod to show he’s listening, keeping an eye on their surroundings. Between his own extensive observation of the area, the other two sentries, and T.J., an ambush is extremely unlikely, but it’s habit at this point.“And,” Tom says, pausing uncharacteristically. “What about…the others?”Nicke stops walking, looking between the two of them.“The ones who stayed behind are all dead,” he says evenly. “The rest, I don’t know.”Tom looks gutted, and T.J. just manages to croak out. “Ovi?”Nicke’s senses all sharpen, settling suddenly into clarity. “That’s what I need to find out.”-They set out at dawn.It’s not a pleasant parting, but no one can do anything about them choosing to leave the camp. Nicke is not a fool. He stored enough water to last the three of them a week’s journey before he made his approach.Nicke still has the bike he left D.C. on, a bit battered and dirty but still in good condition, and they manage to find two more in an abandoned Wal-Mart in Wichita. Kansas has decent trails along the river, and the bikes make hauling water much easier.It’s funny. They’ve all three picked up walking sticks, somewhere along the way. Nicke’s seen other people with them. They’re practical, after all, when you have to learn to become a nomad. Other people don’t treat their walking sticks the same way hockey players treat them. They keep them neat, sturdy, polished, dangerous. Tended obsessively, rolled through your hands each night to check for nicks and splinters, curved slightly so the balance is just-right.That’s all they really have as they roll into Colorado: three bikes, walking sticks, each other, and the almost empty water containers. The thing is, Nicke is ready for the lack of water. He’s gotten used to it, learned how to adapt. He’s accepted being a little fuzzy from near-dehydration, gotten good at digging and finding near-dead streams, mastered the specific agony of waiting for water to boil over a fire when you’ve been outside in over 40 weather all day.But around the time they should be hitting desert, there’s more water rather than less, huge rushing waterfalls bordered by thick groves of trees, and that’s when Nicke starts to truly worry.This is bigger than he feared.-NOW: February 2nd, 2019 // ElsewhereThe worst thing about being a captive, André thinks, is that it’s boring. He had hoped, after hearing rumors about some kind of big ceremony the day before, that something exciting would happen. Other than a brief announcement about some of the other Seelie being moved to a different barracks though, nothing. Even that wasn’t really a surprise, considering it’s the same people who have magic training during the day instead of jobs. André is a little sad that Ovi isn’t going to be in with them anymore, and he’s really annoyed that Tom and Mike apparently got to see Papa for a bit and didn’t even mention André.Whatever. The point is, things are boring.His job in the…Prison? Camp? Compound? Fae Kidnapping Victims Holding Ground? André doesn’t know what to call it, and T.J. told him to shut up and stop coming up with stupid names for it after “The Extra Large Sin Bin.” Anyway, his job is weaving, which would be kinda cool, except that it’s really repetitive and fae clothing is mostly green and grey. He had tried to sell the idea of putting in some purples or reds something, but his teacher had just stared at him and then shaken her head.T.J. also takes weaving like, really seriously, and is always getting on him and Jakub for throwing bits of fluff into each other's looms or starting debates about other potentially real mythological creatures and whether any of them would value ice hockey skills.They stop for lunch, and André practically runs to the mess hall, ignoring T.J.’s sarcastic comment about looking like he’s on breakaway. Mike and Tom are already there, as expected. André squeezes onto the bench in between them, ignoring Mike’s grunt as he accidentally elbows him in the side.“So?” André asks excitedly.“So?” Tom repeats, taking an obnoxiously large bite of food and then smirk-chewing. André sighs impatiently. At this rate, T.J. and Jakub are going to get there and André won’t be the first to hear all the news.“What happened?” he asks, elbowing Mike in the side again for good measure. Mike tries to start a slap fight, but Jakub’s hand comes out of nowhere and smacks him in the arm.It possibly starts to devolve a little into a bench brawl, but then T.J. shows up and points out that Tom is about to kick his own tray onto the floor and they settle down.“Nothing on our end,” T.J. says, dropping into a seat. “Still haven’t seen any of the people they moved out.”Tom hums a little, frowning thoughtfully. “Do you know if they got assigned tasks?”T.J., André, and Jakub exchange looks.“What kind of…tasks?” André asks.“All the,” Mike turns to Tom, “what did they call them?”“Court fae.”“Right. All the Court fae, the ones who got moved, got these scrolls of parchment and this dude said something about three tasks.”“Well, that doesn’t sound good,” T.J. says.“No shit,” Mike mutters.“Did we seriously just get kidnapped to sit around here weaving?” André complains, flopping slightly on the bench so he’s a little bit in Mike’s and Jakub’s laps. Everyone mostly ignores this in favor of speculation, but Jakub pats his hair a bit which is nice.Fortunately, the Seelie are called to assembly almost immediately after lunch. Assemblies are always interesting because they get to leave the Rowan circle surrounding the barracks and actually see the fae realm properly. Well, they really only get to see the assembly hall, but André has essentially seen three buildings in the past four months so he’ll take what he can get.As usual, they’re lined up and marched over to the blue building. This is the first time André has been in it that there are actually people living there. The Court fae appear to not be invited to the assembly, though, because the line just goes straight down to the basement gate without stopping. It’s quiet upstairs; they might not even be there. André pouts a little at this.The gate is huge: two elaborately carved wooden posts with hunks of different crystals around the base and climbing up the sides. One of the guards told André that it’s actually considered simple for a Seelie gate. Since it only transports them within the fae realm, rather than between realms, it doesn’t need to be made of living wood and the magic required to maintain it is less. André still thinks it’s pretty cool, like something out of a movie, especially when it turns a glowy blue as someone steps through it.They’re shuttled over to the assembly hall, a big outdoor amphitheater type thing with stone benches dropping down into the ground. It’s not full, there aren’t really enough of them for that, so they all cluster toward the front. André sits with T.J. and Jakub and practically vibrates with excitement.“Trooping fae of the Seelie Court,” Calla says, sweeping out onto the raised center stage. André claps a little. Calla is his favorite of the Seelie Strategoi, because she has a flare for drama and isn’t afraid to use fairy dust as body glitter. “Your time has come!” Calla waves her hands around, amping up the crowd. André gives a whoop and Jakub rolls his eyes and elbows him in the side. “A reckoning is at hand! For too long have the Unseelie oppressed us with their tyranny, binding us to magical gates and limiting our power!”Calla starts giving a brief history of The Treaty again, and André tunes out a little. They all had to read The Treaty their first week in The Extra Large Sin Bin, and it was exactly as long and boring as it sounded. Plus, the Swedish translation hadn’t been updated since, like, 1482 or something, and the English version was almost as old. Fae aren’t great at understanding human stuff, and since there are so many rules about how the Seelie can interact with humans André guesses they’re probably even worse than the Unseelie.Anyway, blah blah, a bunch of really old fae killed a bunch of other really old fae and then both sides gave up certain powers and the courts got even more over the top. That is the one part of the whole thing André kind of gets. He may not be able to read Late Old Swedish for shit, but he understands a good rivalry.“It is time to take back our power!” Calla is saying at the front of the room. “It is time! For war!”And, wait, that doesn’t sound too good.“What’s going on?” André whispers to Jakub, but Jakub looks too freaked out to explain.“Training begins tomorrow,” Calla finishes, leaving the stage with a sweep of her long green cloak.“Well, shit,” T.J. says succinctly. -NOW: February 3rd, 2019They get a day off, before the next trial. Nicke isn’t sure, but he thinks its at least partly because not everyone is back yet.He and Crosby have been assured that their performance on the first task had been ‘duly noted,’ whatever that means. The Unseelie are still sharing frustratingly little information about what the purpose of any of this is, or how many of them are expected to survive the trials.Nicke would be grateful for the time to rest and recuperate, but his skin feels itchy and too tight and he hates being so close to Alex and not being able to see him, or touch him. He’d be feeling it anyway, but whatever happened with their magic the day before is definitely making the discontent worse. It’s an incredibly frustrating feeling, like having your shot deflected at the last second over and over again.It’s like every nerve ending in his body is tuned up, trying to catch the frequency of Alex’s magic. He can sense it just out of range, can feel it, almost, at the tips of his fingers, but just when he concentrates and can almost get an emotional read, it slips away.It’s making Nicke snappish, and Strelka is avoiding him ever since he slammed his trunk closed yesterday and nearly took one of his own fingers off.Possibly the worst part of all of it is that Crosby is trying to be helpful, or something. He keeps suggesting Nicke have a bath (there does turn out to be a massive stone tub in the barracks; you have to haul up the water for it yourself but a couple people have figured out how to boil water magically so it’s not half bad), or go for a walk, or read a book.The only place to walk is around the barracks in a circle, and the only book is a copy of Stephenie Meyer’s New Moon that someone found wedged in the back of a linen closet. Nicke does spend a fairly entertaining hour thinking of all the ways he could murder Sidney Crosby and blame it on the fae, so at least Crosby’s suggestions are good for something.He finally gives up and decides to go for a jog some time in the early afternoon. Running in circles is better than nothing. He does try the door of the blue barracks, but it won’t open for him, and Strelka either can’t hear him or isn’t listening to him, so she’s no help.He doesn’t know how Alex stands this, how Alex is just sitting up in that room. Nicke wants to go at the door between them with teeth and claws, press himself up against the glass of the windows. It bubbles under his skin like a slow-burning fury, the need to close the distance between them.It feels like right before they kissed for the first time, that slow simmering roil of tension that winnowed down his self-control until it finally just snapped, one night, until he finally just leaned forward and kissed Alex’s stupid mouth, halfway through an absolutely nonsensical story about karaoke and dog videos.It feels like when they weren’t quite sure it was a good idea to start sleeping together, trying to hold off and ‘see how things go, first.’ Like Alex sitting too close to him in public, pressing their thighs together and playing with the ends of Nicke’s hair. Like after-game celebrations, buzzing with adrenaline and excitement and nothing to pour it into. Like Alex’s eyes that first night, dark and following Nicke’s every move with such intense focus that he’d felt drunk with it, lust rolling like thunderclouds, making the fucking air shiver.Nicke has never liked to be looked at, but he loves the way Alex watches him.It feels like all the endless hunger of the past year has coalesced into the ache of having barely touched his husband’s skin since that last, stupid fight, and Nicke is starting to go a little mad with it.Still, if there is something Nicklas Bäckström knows, it’s how to find patience. He runs, and breathes, and forces his body to wait.All in all, it’s not the worst day off he’s ever had.-NOW: February 6th, 2019Braden thinks he is a fairly patient person, but even he has limits.The debate has gone on for almost a week, now, raging since the Courts’ collective break of faith at Imbolc. The Cú Sídhe have all been absolutely forbidden to act, on penalty of exile, until The Circle has reached a decision. The Cú Sídhe, for all their disdain of the traditions and rules of the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, have almost as many.It is hard not to do anything, not when they finally know where the human captives are being held. The last year has been miserable: endless, exhausting magical work trying to keep the human world functioning, and no news of where all the disappeared are going. The last week has, somehow, been worse.Still, they need to close the breaches if they have any hope of re-stabilizing the human world, and the Cú Sídhe are pretty much the only chance for that, at this point. None of them can risk being stripped of power and exiled, not if they want to help.Braden’s family has never held any power in The Circle, but meetings are open and his Fae is decent, if a little rusty. He watches the endless rounds of arguing: who are potential allies in both courts, can human agencies be any help, what rights do the kidnapped half- and part-fae have and how much responsibility do the Cú Sídhe have to them. There is a lot to decide, and he understands that, but the mass land and water displacements ripping through the human world are killing, have killed, millions of people. The Unseelie should have to answer for that, for using magic so recklessly, even if it was for the cause of trying to minimize their own casualties from the New Seelie Uprising.The Seelie and Unseelie have always fought, and the closeness of their realm to the human one has always been difficult, but things have not been this bad since The Treaty was signed thousands of years ago.Currently, the argument before The Circle is whether they should start approaching the pairs and trios being sent out on trial, to try to recruit them, or not. Fleury is down at the front as the sitting Spring Prince, and doing his best to get a word in as pretty much the only one of them who has lived as human for a significant amount of time. It’s not going well. His title is largely nominal since his magical abdication, and his opinions do not hold as much weight with The Circle as Braden and the others had hoped.Braden sighs, fighting the headache lurking at his temples. Something catches the corner of his eye, a flicker of motion. Kuzy, beckoning to him from the back of the room. Braden gets up and follows, letting the debate rage on unwatched.“What?” Braden asks, keeping his voice low until they’re fully away from the building. The language dance among the four of them is a little complicated, but they’ve settled into comfort zones. Braden and Kuzy usually speak English, less easy to eavesdrop on than Fae. Kuzy and Semin speak Russian with each other, and Semin will occasionally talk to Braden in Fae, or English. Fleury speaks Fae, unless he’s translating for someone. Braden supposes the fact that he avoids most of the other Cú Sídhe in favor of their little squad of human-allied outcasts is revolution enough.“Sema has an idea,” Kuzy says. Braden shoots him a skeptical look. Semin’s last ‘idea’ was a reckless suicide mission that led to Fleury losing voting rights for two weeks in The Circle and left Kuzy with a shattered femur.To be fair, they did stop the Grand Canyon from flooding.“What this time?” Braden asks, bracing himself. Semin comes up with batshit ideas, but he’s by far the most powerful fae Braden has ever met and has done more singlehandedly to close magical breaches than the entire Circle put together.“We should get Nicky and Ovi, on their next trial.”Braden blinks at Kuzy, thinking. On the surface, it’s not a bad plan, not even particularly extreme. Braden himself had spotted them on their first trial, part luck and part that both of their magics feel familiar to him, now that they’ve been Awakened. The only thing that stopped him from speaking to them then and there was concern with The Circle’s reaction. The last thing he needs is to be exiled, then he won’t be able to save anyone.“They would be helpful,” Braden says slowly. “Especially since they’re from different courts, and have clearly figured out enough weaknesses in the court system to find away to work around them. They could probably tell us a lot.”Kuzy nods enthusiastically, smiling, but Braden frowns and shakes his head a little.“I don’t know if it’s a good idea, though. The council is already watching the four of us.”“No problem,” Kuzy says expansively. “Sema will take care of it.”And, oh.“He’s planning to go by himself?” Braden asks, incredulously. Kuzy raises an eyebrow, as if to say, What else? Braden sighs and pinches the base of his nose. “Wait until they,” he jerks a hand over his shoulder to indicate The Circle, “break for the night. We should all be there to talk about this.”“Okay,” Kuzy shrugs carelessly. Braden is not comforted by the easy capitulation. This is a ‘Sema and I have already decided,’ okay, not a ‘I’m listening and I understand,’ okay.Fleury is irritable after a long day of debates and is very little help on Braden’s ‘logic and reason’ campaign.“If he wants to risk his neck, let him,” Fleury says dismissively. He and Semin persist in refusing to speak directly to each other, for reasons Braden doesn’t really understand. Neither of them are rude about it, they just both manage to consistently give the impression that they didn’t quite notice the other is in the room. Semin smiles and pets Myshka, who is sprawled out at his feet and watching them with lazy attention.“See? It’s all decided,” Kuzy says, looking at Braden with a little tilt to his head, ready for argument. Braden taps his fingers on his knee, thinking. He wants to protest, instinct for caution warning that this is a bold and potentially dangerous move, but he’s also impatient with The Circle and the fae in general.“Okay,” Braden says. “Yeah. Let’s go get Ovi and Nicky.”-NOW: February 7th, 2019The hard strike of spring has broken across the closed knuckles of the glacier above them, and the wind carries the groaning of snow starting to melt. Fuck, Nicke has missed ice. For all the urgency of their task, for all the electricity of being near Alex again, of being free, the wildblood feel of having a task to do and just enough space to do it in, he still has to stop. Nicke tilts back his head, closing his eyes and breathing it in, the vague smell of dying winter and the kiss of cold on the thin skin of his eyelids.Alex doesn’t say anything, but Nicke can feel the coiled watchfulness of his regard. He is unsurprised when he opens his eyes after a moment to see Alex staring at him.“You miss it,” Alex says. It’s stating the obvious, perhaps, but it provokes a rush of fondness in Nicke, the familiarity of call-and-response between them. Alex does not deal well in indefinites: he likes things laid out and plain. Honest.“Every day,” Nicke says, and Alex nods like he understands. He does understand, Nicke knows, better than anyone else. Knows what it is to miss something you love so much and can no longer have. Knows what it is for Nicklas Bäckström to yearn.“Me also,” Alex says, finally looking away from Nicke to stare up at the blurring height of snow above them. A smile breaks across his face. “Too bad we not have skates.”Nicke laughs, opens his mouth to say something about magic and possibility, but then something slams into Alex from behind, knocking him forward and rolling him into the slushy grass. It is hard to knock Alex down, but he was not braced and the thing, whatever it is, is invisible and gave no warning.The next few seconds go by very slowly. Strelka, perched on Nicke’s shoulder, screams and lunges down Nicke with quick strides. She’s so angry that it makes Nicke’s head spin with the throb of it. He clenches his teeth, trying to pull his magic into focus, to think. Strelka is almost to Alex when another animal leaps out of nowhere, tackling her and rolling her onto her back. Nicke has the barest instant to cock his wrist, feel the humming of magic at his fingertips, and then Alex starts laughing and time speeds up again.Alexander Semin is sprawled across Alex, who is cupping the back of his neck and pressing their foreheads together, laughing as if this is all the greatest joke he’s heard in ages. The snow leopard who pounced on Strelka is still in a crouch, tail twitching from side to side as it watches her. Strelka, for her part, is puffed up and furious, although she seems to have figured out that Alex isn’t in immediate danger.“Hello, Sema,” Nicke says, moving himself between Strelka and the leopard. She is probably Sema’s familiar, but it does not follow that she is not dangerous.“Nicky!” Sema says, easy smile on his face. He manages to extricate himself from Alex, getting gracefully to his feet. Alex bounces up as well, firing questions in Russian too fast for Nicke to follow much at all. Strelka sidles over to Nicke and bumps against his legs. He picks her up and settles her in his arms.The sulky discontent rolling off her, both at the loss of a chance to defend her beloved and at the indignity of being pounced on, is thick and fog-like. It presses in on Nicke’s own emotions in a way he doesn’t particularly want to think about.Alex settles down enough to switch back to English, eventually. Explanation turns out to be a much more complicated prospect than Nicke had initially assumed. Sema has not just happened upon them by coincidence, nor has he simply been drawn to the area by the nearby gate which Alex and Nicke have been tasked with finding. No, it appears that Sema is there, specifically, because he has sought them out.“The,” Alex frowns a little, repeating something in Russian and waiting for confirmation. “Yes. This group, they are also fae?”“Yes,” Sema pauses, collecting his thoughts. “The Courts are very old, and they fight for long time. Do you know the Treaty?”Nicke shakes his head, but Alex is nodding.“Last time fighting get very bad,” Alex explains, “many fae die, many humans too. The Seelie, they have enough of death. Sign treaty. Both sides give up some magic, make agreement not to fight more. War has not been so serious since then, not until last year.”“The Unseelie break the Treaty,” Sema expands. “Just a little, at first, taking human water and land, for magic. Then Seelie break, also. They start taking people, year ago.”Nicke nods. “You mentioned another group of fae, right? Are they not part of the Courts?”“Some of the fae, they don’t like this war from beginning, or maybe not want to give up power. They leave the courts, start their own ah,” Alex frowns, looking for a word. “Not country, but close.” Nicke nods to show he understands. “Bloodlines are not so important, uh,” Alex makes a crude hand gesture, “with humans, more allowed.” Nicke snorts, rolling his eyes, and Alex grins at him. “These fae, they want to help humans now. Don’t like what’s happening in human realm.”Alex stops after this, looking to Sema for confirmation. Sema looks at Nicke.“And you are working with this group?” Nicke hazards a guess.Sema makes a face, half-agreement and half-disagreement. “They are better than nothing,” he says.“Do you trust them?” Nicke asks. “Do they actually mean to help us?”“Us,” Sema repeats slowly. “Us is big word.” Nicke looks up at the glacier, thinking.He’s right. Us is a big word. Us: Nicke-and-Alex? Us: this line, broken and reforming across time? Us: the captives displaced by the fae war? Us: humanity? Nicke is no longer sure where to draw the boundary of ‘us.’ Nicke has not been sure for a year that he wants to know where that boundary is. He does not want to look under the heavy rock of his own conscience, does not want to face the fact that he will pull for as long as he can for as many as he can save, but in the end, well.He would set the world on fire himself to keep Alex alive for one more moment.“What can we do to help?” Nicke asks.There is more conversation, with each of them giving as much detail as they can remember about their relative factions. Sema tells stories of the four man Cú Sídhe team he has been working with, the breaches between the realm of fae and the human world that they have closed, in sparse and efficient language. He does not look particularly proud, just thoughtful, but Nicke is impressed by the level of power he clearly possesses. He is also relieved to hear Kuzy and Braden are still alive, although he will have words with Braden about dragging Alex into the middle of this unwarned.Strelka is still sulky on Nicke’s lap, and Nicke is perhaps a little sulky himself at losing the precious little time he has alone with Alex, but it feels good. It’s comforting, being a team again. Nicke has, for a long time, had to carry everything, and everyone. The knowledge of Braden and Sema and Kuzy, and even Fleury, pulling for them with the Cú Sídhe is a boost to morale that Nicke can acknowledge he has desperately needed. It isn’t everything, but perhaps with this unexpected assistance from the Cú Sídhe, with the boys back in the Seelie and Unseelie barracks, even with Crosby and Malkin, perhaps they can actually accomplish something.The world has changed, utterly, in the last year, and Nicke knows they cannot undo things, go back to the way things were. For the first time in a year, though, he can see beyond the desperate and immediate present. For the first time in a year, he can let himself hope. -Sema shows them exactly where the gate is on the map they were given for their second task. The sun is starting to sink toward the horizon by the time Nicke opens a gate back to Fae, and they’ve been gone for most of the day even without needing to do any actual searching. Unsurprisingly, Malkin and Crosby beat them back.“What took you so long?” Crosby mutters, and Nicke and Alex slide down in the tall grass next to him and Malkin. All of Nicke’s positive team feelings toward the former Penguins evaporate instantly.“Some things are private between husbands,” he says mildly. Alex snorts out a laugh and buries his face in Nicke’s neck.“Whatever,” Crosby grumbles. “Geno, you and Ovechkin take the win this time.”“Okay,” Alex says. He tugs a little on one of Nicke’s curls. Nicke turns to look at Alex.Alex’s face is very close, and it takes Nicke a few seconds to get his brain back into gear, to recognize that Alex is asking him a silent question.
Do we tell them about the Cú Sídhe?
Nicke pauses, thinking. His instinct is to say no, especially because he still wants to pay Crosby back for lying that first day. That is his emotional reaction. Logically, the more people they can apprise of the situation, the better. The Cú Sídhe have not decided to act, not yet, but according to Sema, a coalition of prisoners from both courts will make their decision much easier. If there is already a fighting force in place, if the cracks in the court system are already there…Nicke sighs internally, gives Alex a nod.“Okay,” Alex says again, soft, right against Nicke’s cheekbone. Alex surges to his feet, holding a hand out for Malkin. “Let’s go claim our win, Zhenya.”Nicke sort of wants to lean into the awkward silence that descends over the two of them once Alex and Malkin leave, but he thinks resolutely of allegiances and the potential to get Alex out of this mess alive.“How did your mission go?” Nicke starts. Polite.“Fine,” Crosby says, suspicious. When Nicke indicates for him to go on, he relaxes into mild wariness. “It wasn’t too difficult. There have been a few groups back already, maybe four?”Nicke hums thoughtfully. “That might be good. If we keep pulling first and second, they’ll be watching us more closely.”“True, but don’t we want that? This is a contest, right?”“Yes.” Nicke looks at Crosby. “Is this the kind of society you want to win in?” Crosby shifts on the grass a little, uncomfortable.“I mean obviously not in an ideal world, no, but we have to work with what we’re given.”“Well,” Nicke props his head up in his hands, watching the sky bleed red and orange. “Or change the rules.”“What does that mean? Did you find something out?” Crosby is sharp now, keen, and Nicke lets himself smile, broad and sharklike.“You could say that, yes.”-NOW: February 7th-8th, 2019Crosby is jittery with energy, eager to move.“We can’t do anything yet,” Nicke says. He’s on his back in his bed, staring up at the ceiling. Crosby is pacing by the window, an anxious Mellon at his heels, and Strelka is sleeping in a ball next to Nicke’s head, nose tucked under her tail.“We should talk to the others,” Crosby argues. “The ones in the big building.”“Tonight?” Nicke says. “No. They’re already in from training for the day. There will be guards all over the barracks.”“There are always guards all over the barracks,” Crosby points out.Nicke tucks an arm behind his head, thinking. So far, gate mapping has had a much faster turnaround time than the various errands they were sent on for the first task. It’s hard to gauge exactly, but from the alternate watches he and Crosby kept until it was too dark outside to see, over two thirds of the Unseelie have come back. It’s unlikely they’ll have a long wait for the next task, so the sooner they can start putting out feelers the better.“Let’s see how many of the Seelie have come back,” Nicke says finally. Crosby nods, happy to have something to do, and pulls out the communication stone. They’ve been juggling them between the four of them, making sure they can all talk no matter how they’re split into pairs. Using them took some getting used to, and Nicke still prefers not to be the one to do it, if possible. The feel of words echoing directly into your brain is not a pleasant one, especially when it’s in the voice of your sort-of former sort-of current rival.“Same on their end,” Crosby says after a minute. “Most people are back by now.” He looks more smug than this information warrants, and Nicke waits. “The guards made an announcement at dinner, though, over there. We’re going to watch training tomorrow.”“That’s good,” Nicke says slowly, although he isn’t entirely sure it is. They won’t necessarily have an opportunity to talk to anyone, and he doesn’t like that he can’t see the logic of it. What purpose could the fae have, pushing them all back together after they’ve been so carefully separated?“We should plan,” Crosby says, sliding the window open.“What are you doing?” Nicke asks, alarmed.“No offense, Bäckström,” Crosby says, throwing a leg out the window, “but I’m seriously tired of looking at your face.”With that, he drops out the window. Nicke flops back on his pillow, groaning, and ignores Strelka’s irritated hiss. “Oh shut up. I hope he breaks a leg.”“Not nice to say out loud,” a voice says from the window, and Nicke shoots back up so fast all the blood rushes to his head.“Alex! What the fuck are you doing?” Nicke hisses, rushing over to tug Alex into the room.“I can’t visit my husband?” Alex says, grinning up at him. They’re half-tumbled on the floor, with Nicke’s back up against the side of Crosby’s bed and Alex sprawled mostly on Nicke’s lap.“You’re going to get caught,” Nicke says, trying to sound stern.“Already caught,” Alex points out, smirking down at Nicke’s hands on his wrists. His face softens a little, though, shyness starting to creep in. “Zhenya and I think, maybe we get away with switch for night.”Nicke forces himself to slow down, actually think about this. They probably will, especially if no one notices in the next ten minutes or so. The fae seem to rely heavily on the fact that their captives either don’t have enough magic to escape the Rowan circle, or have too much magic to return to the human world for more than a short while without getting ill. The Court fae are so used to hating the fae of the other Court that they don’t seem to realize most of the humans they’ve captured don’t care about the rivalry, or even particularly understand it. In spite of supposedly being placed in a Court from bloodlines, none of them have enough context to care about anything in this fight but survival.So yes, maybe, probably, they will get away with a switch for the night, as long as everyone is back in place before breakfast. The thought of having Alex to himself for all that time is a little dizzying.“No one saw you, getting over here?” Nicke says finally. Alex shakes his head. Strelka has come to investigate what on earth they’re doing on the floor, at this point, rubbing her face over Alex’s legs and begging shamelessly to be pet. He indulges her, crooning to her in what Nicke is fairly sure, from tone, is nonsensical baby-talk Russian. She nips his fingers gently after a moment, shaking out her fur and stretching. Then, she hops up onto the windowsill and starts picking her way carefully down the thick stone of the walls.“Go hunt. Keep eye out,” Alex explains. Nicke smiles a little. “What?” Alex asks.“She’s meant to be my familiar.”Alex pouts. “You rather her here than me?”“Much,” Nicke says. “She doesn’t snore.”“I don’t snore!” Alex says, outraged. He tries to sit up, but Nicke tangles his hands in Alex’s hair and holds him down. Alex’s body loosens, settling, but his eyes are blade-sharp on Nicke.“Maybe I forget,” Nicke says softly. “Been a year.”Alex’s throat clicks as he swallows, dry. “Long time.”Nicke nods slowly, fingers brushing through Alex’s hair. Breathes, gathers his courage. “I’ve missed you,” Nicke says, like the last step off a cliff. Alex wraps his hands around Nicke’s wrists, callous-rough and holding like Nicke is spun glass. He pulls them gently free of his hair, brings them to his mouth, brushes his lips over the knuckles of Nicke’s right hand, then left. Nicke inhales shakily, and Alex’s lids slide slowly upward, and then Nicke is surging forward. His teeth click against Alex’s, the angle not quite right, but then Alex presses up against him and their mouths slide together and they’re kissing, finally.Nicke’s head is swimming and his fingertips are buzzing and he’s trying, at least a little, at least at the start, to go slow. He’s trying to keep his hands where they’ve migrated back up to Alex’s hair, keep his lips soft and mouth closed. He’s trying, but Alex makes a broken hitch of a sound and his hands are trembling on Nicke’s waist and the year slams into Nicke all at once.He pushes Alex up against the wall, blocking the jut of the windowsill with his hand, and climbs into his lap. Alex sighs, and opens his mouth, and Nicke grinds down against him, pulls back a little to bite Alex’s lip.“Miss you, too,” Alex says, a little slurred.“Shut up,” Nicke says, kissing him again. It’s messy and wet and he keeps having to pull away a little, trying to do too much (get his hands under Alex’s shirt, suck on the pulse in Alex’s neck, keep up the not-quite-enough steady roll of his hips, breathe) and not doing any of it properly.Alex whines and drops his head back, hands sliding down to grope Nicke’s ass, pull him in closer, tighter. And, well, Nicke can’t resist that kind of offer. He bites down hard over Alex’s collarbone, earning a hoarse shout and another abortive thrust of Alex’s hips.It’s only after Nicke has managed to leave a small constellation of bruises trailing from Alex’s ear all the way down his neck, after the collar of Alex’s shirt is stretched and mangled beyond repair, after Nicke has to stop moving his hips for a few seconds and breathe if he wants this to go on any longer, that it occurs to him they should probably be quiet.“Fuck,” he says, soft and emphatic, and still mostly into Alex’s mouth. Alex moans in agreement, and sucks on Nicke’s tongue, and Nicke forgets about the quiet thing for another minute or so. “Sashka,” he says sternly, keeping a hand on Alex’s chest when he pulls back this time. This has the unintended, but unsurprising, effect of Alex giving a full-body shudder under him, eyes dropping half shut. Nicke gathers the very last splinters of his extremely fragmented patience. “We need to be quiet, okay?”“Quiet,” Alex repeats, eyes dropping down to Nicke’s mouth. “Okay.” Nicke is not entirely sure Alex is listening. He pulls farther back, and Alex gives a truly pathetic whine, big hands sliding down and over Nicke’s thighs.“Come on, get on the bed,” Nicke says. This, at least, earns him some cooperation. He gets Alex up, and manages to stop kissing him long enough to get him naked, and even makes the heroic effort of taking two extra steps to lay Alex out on his own bed rather than Crosby’s.The feel of so much of Alex’s skin against his has Nicke squirming, pressing his face into the side of Alex’s neck and panting. He feels like he’s coming already, long waves of chills rolling from the top of his head down through his spine. It’s so much, so overwhelming, that he just stays there for a little, wrapping his arms around Alex as tightly as he can and breathing in the smoke-salt scent of him.“Okay?” Alex says, voice a low rumble that settles at the bottom of Nicke’s stomach and hooks, a spilling wave of heat. His cock twitches, hard against Alex’s hip. Nicke nods, face still pressed into Alex’s throat, and Alex rolls Nicke onto his back, climbs over him, holds him down.Nicke can’t catch his breath, can’t seem to calm himself down, but Alex is heavy and solid on top of him; Alex feels like the only real thing in the world, right now. Nicke’s hands clutch at Alex’s shoulders, bury themselves in his hair again, and Nicke pulls his head down and kisses him, slow and open and full of all the longing that has kept him alive this year.And then Alex is pressing Nicke’s shoulders back into the bed, kissing down his chest, pausing to bite and suck at one of his nipples, scraping his teeth across Nicke’s belly.“Take care of you,” Alex says, against Nicke’s hip, and Nicke bites down on his own hand so he doesn’t scream.He doesn’t last long after that, less than a minute between the warm wet heat of Alex’s mouth against the head of his cock and the spit-slick slide of Alex’s palm. He would be embarrassed, is a little, but it’s been a year and he’s honestly surprised they made it off the floor.After, Alex curls himself around Nicke, kissing him soft and lazy in spite of the helpless little movements of his hips: desperately trying to be good, to be what Nicke needs. Nicke runs a hand through the mess on his stomach, determinedly not thinking about what a pain it’s going to be to clean up after, and wraps a hand around Alex.Alex freezes, breathing like he’s just come off a bag skate and clenching his eyes shut.“I love you,” Nicke says, one of the few phrases he can manage perfectly in Russian, twisting his hand just right and dropping soft kisses over Alex’s nose and cheekbones. Alex comes with a long slow shudder a few strokes later, tensing all over and then letting out a high, breathy whine as his cock spurts over Nicke’s fist. He comes for ages, swearing and shaking and muttering half-endearments half-curses into Nicke’s shoulder.Nicke leans over enough to grab one of their shirts from the floor, wiping off his hand and stomach. Alex watches him with sleepy eyes, pulling him in close as soon as Nicke settles back onto the bed.“Tired, älskling?” Nicke asks, stealing one more kiss, gentle and soft. Alex hums.“Don’t sleep so good without you,” he says. Nicke smiles at him, a little sadly.“I’m here now.”Alex nods, eyes drooping, and he quickly falls asleep curled in Nicke’s arms. Nicke manages to move him enough to get the blanket over the two of them without waking him.Nicke is tired, too, and should sleep, but the buzz of his magic is settled and happy and what he wants most right now is the persistent, undeniable reminder that Alex is alive and here. The room is dark, but Nicke can see the fan of Alex’s eyelashes and can feel the rise and fall of his chest.I can live on nothing, Nicke thinks, but not without you.-NOW: February 8th, 2019Nicke can’t even be annoyed that Alex wakes him up before dawn, because he does it with an extremely enthusiastic blowjob, and because Nicke loves seeing Alex limned by morning light.“Have to get back,” Alex says after, nuzzling his nose into Nicke’s pulse point. “Crosby back soon.”Nicke groans, thunking his head against the pillow. “Please don’t bring up Sidney Crosby when I’m naked, Alex.”Alex just laughs at him, getting up and starting to dress.“You don’t like your soulmate?” Alex chirps.“Not when he’s being like this,” Nicke grumbles, propping himself on his side so he can watch his husband. Alex gives him a shy little smile, and when Crosby climbs in the window ten minutes later, only a very dexterous blanket grab by Nicke saves him from getting an eyeful.Nicke puts on pants so he can give Alex one last long, slow kiss out the window.“Be careful,” he says, wrapping a hand around the back of Alex’s neck and pressing their foreheads together.“Bye, Backy,” Alex says, grinning at him big and happy and then climbing down the wall far too fast.Crosby maintains a pointed silence until breakfast, which is really just the pleasant cherry on top of everything else.Nicke is a little concerned that only the Seelie are meant to be watching training, but after breakfast they’re herded outside. They don’t get any kind of explanation, as usual. The Seelie are already waiting, in two neat lines, and Nicke very carefully does not look at Alex.To Nicke’s surprise, they are taken down into the basement of the Seelie barracks, where there is apparently a gate. It feels a little unpleasant, going through it, sort of slimy on his skin in a way his own magic is not. The feeling fades quickly, though, and Nicke focuses on finding a seat in the huge amphitheater the gate opens out onto.The trooping fae, both Seelie and Unseelie, are milling around at the bottom of the grounds. They’re dressed in blue and green, respectively, but Nicke is pleased to see they don’t seem particularly aware of these distinctions. Crosby edges up a shoulder, and Nicke follows him down to the very front benches.The Seelie boys manage a decently sneaky sidle over to where Malkin and Alex sit on the other side of the circle, but Mike and Tom are a lost cause, subtlety-wise. Oh well, the guards don’t seem bothered about it.Nicke explains the stuff with Sema and the others as quickly as possible, asking Mike and Tom to spread the word, “But carefully,” Nicke says firmly. “The last thing we need is the Court fae getting word of a brewing revolution.”“Revolution sounds a little dramatic,” Crosby points out.I could break your nose in your sleep Nicke thinks. Across the circle, almost like he can tell, Alex smiles.“Now go,” Nicke says to his boys instead. “Do well today.”“Bye, Papa,” Tom says, cheery and a little too loud. Nicke rolls his eyes.As usual, everything is announced in Fae, but the combatants seem to all understand the rules, and what they’re expected to do.They start off in single combat. From the cheers and boos coming from the crowd of trooping fae, there is some kind of established point system. Nicke can sort of follow it by the end of the third match. They’re short, timed in some way by a guard on the edge of the circle who lets off a red pop of magic to start and stop bouts. Points seem to be accrued by hits, although Nicke has no idea if or how anyone is keeping track of all of it. All five of his boys do well, though, staying nimble and not being drawn in by feints.There’s an archery contest, of all things, next. Most of the group in the ring are clearly novices, and quite a few arrows land well clear of the targets. T.J. and Jakub are toward the middle of the pack. André is positively dismal, but he blows a kiss and waves to Nicke after he shoots, sweeping a bow at the satirical clapping coming from Mike and Tom.They are boys, playing at war, and Nicke is so proud of them his chest bursts with it.Nicke looks across the ring, finding Alex with his eyes. Alex is staring very intently down at the action, and Nicke feels a surge of fondness. They’re who-knows-where and captives and the world they left behind is shittier than it’s ever been, but they have each other here, at least. They have this moment of relative peace, of sitting together and watching practice, almost like being home.Alex, sensing that he’s being watched, looks over. A slow, warm smile curves across his face, and Nicke’s breath catches in his chest. Alex smiles like the sunrise, whole and sweeping and full of joy and possibility, and it never fails to pull Nicke a few more inches down in love. He smiles back, a little shyly, and turns to watch the archery contest again.There is some kind of completely chaotic brawl next, with everyone running at each other and trying to knock the other contestants over. It looks rather fun. T.J. goes careening into a wall off a hit from Tom, nearly tumbling right into the crowd. He shoots Tom a sour look from the bench, but breaks into a reluctant laugh when Mike mimes blowing a whistle and elbows Tom in the side. Unsurprisingly, Tom, Jakub, and André are last. They manage to take Tom down in a ridiculous two-on-one that involves André diving for his legs, missing, accidentally eliminating himself, and then being tripped over as Tom attempts a victory dance.The Court fae who are judging the contests look deeply displeased as they distribute woven crowns of twigs and flowers to the three victors (Jakub, and two other Unseelie fae Nicke doesn’t know). Nicke has the feeling they expected this to be taken more seriously.Welcome to my life, he thinks, entirely unsympathetic.They’re allowed to socialize for almost ten minutes after, presumably as some sort of reward. Nicke gets the sense that they’re all meant to stay in their areas (Seelie Court on one side, Unseelie on the other, trooping fae down in the circle and split across the middle), but no one stops him or Alex from climbing down off the seats and dropping down into the ring.Jakub immediately hops up to Nicke, pointing to his crown and grinning.“Congratulations,” Nicke barely gets out, before André is leaning into his side and chattering away in Swedish.“Where have you been? Did you miss us? What’s the deal with the colors? Do you know how they pick Seelie and Unseelie?” Etc.“Stop hogging papa,” Mike complains, poking André in the ribs. André sticks out his tongue and snuggles further into Nicke’s side. Nicke rolls his eyes.“No hugs for me?” Alex says, pouting a little. André looks as if his very soul is being torn in two: unwilling to give up his current hug but struggling with the deep desire to initiate a second hug.“Go,” Nicke says, unwrapping André and pushing him at Alex. T.J. laughs, and sneaks in to hug Nicke before anyone else can.They’re broken up and sent back to their individual rooms far too quickly. Already, Nicke misses the familiar press of bodies and the sense of calm he gets being surrounded by team. Crosby is a poor substitute.There’s an announcement at dinner that night, in the magically-enhanced Fae that Nicke finds so unpleasant to listen to. Their third tasks will be given shortly, that part is unsurprising and garners little reaction. Bitterlight also lays the vague threats involving ‘tithes’ and ‘inadequate magical performance’ on very thickly, just in case any of them forgot that they are captives at the whim of a capricious and unfathomable group of beings.“The whole Court has its eye on you,” Bitterlight winds up. “The king and queen have been following your progress avidly through my reports. Remember, you fight to win your place among us.”Nicke doesn’t have much appetite to finish his dinner. He can feel the despair and fear of the others crawling over his skin, and he thinks with renewed fervency of Sema and the Cú Sídhe.He will endure this. He will bear them through. He will finish this, and then they will be free.-NOW: February 10th, 2019 // Early morningNicke wakes with a jolt of adrenaline so powerful that he’s rolled out of bed and is on his feet before he’s even fully conscious. He blinks, disoriented in the dim room. Crosby is still asleep, Mellon curled up at the foot of his bed, and Nicke would think he’d just had a bad dream if it wasn’t for Strelka.She’s hissing and scratching at the door, and the overwhelming sense that something, somewhere is wrong sweeps over Nicke like a tidal wave. He can only think of getting to Alex, making sure he’s alright.Nicke slips on his shoes, opening the door quietly. Strelka is off like a shot, and Nicke closes the door gently and then goes after her as fast as he can.It soon becomes apparent that trying to be quiet is futile. There is yelling coming from somewhere down on the bottom floor, getting louder as he runs down the staircase. He keeps going, although his stomach is flipping and twisting and the smell of misfired magic burns against his skin. It’s much worse downstairs; whatever this is, that is where it came from.The sense of wrongness dissipates slightly once he’s out in the open air, but lights are starting to flicker into existence in the big barracks and the Seelie dormitory. Nicke runs, flat out, for the blue building, nearly slamming into someone as they open the door.He is about to shove past, not caring if it’s a guard or just another captive, but Malkin grabs him and yanks him backward.“What’s wrong?” Malkin asks.“I don’t know,” Nicke snaps, trying to get around him. Stupid bastard may be rangy, but he’s nimble.“Where’s Sid?”“Still back there.” Nicke finally manages to duck around Malkin, barreling through two more people who are sleep disheveled and confused looking before he reaches the first long hall. Strelka runs back and forth between Nicke and one of the doors, impatient. When Nicke tries the door, it opens, unlocked. “Alex?” he calls. The room is not bright, moon only half full, but there was only a single lamp lit in the hall and Nicke’s eyes adjust quickly.Alex is lying, still and unmoving, in one of the beds, and Nicke has a brief, eternal few seconds of panic before he starts to stir.“Nicky?” he asks, bewildered and foggy. “What time?”“Just get up,” Nicke says, burrowing through the trunk at the foot of Alex’s bed to find some pants and a shirt. Alex looks confused, but he pulls the clothes on obediently and lets Nicke herd him back toward the door. “I don’t know what’s going on. Some kind of fight at the Unseelie barracks.”There are more people out in the halls this time, some looking frightened or upset and some merely confused. No one seems to know what’s going on, and Nicke has a sudden, almost physical flash of being in a bar, hearing the television announce that the sea level had dropped twenty centimeters overnight, of going from normal life to apocalypse in less than a minute.“We need to get outside,” Nicke mutters to Alex. They can’t stay in the human world for long, but currently hiding there for a few hours seems like the smartest option.When they get downstairs, the doors are barred. People are really starting to panic, now, trying to find furniture and make some kind of amateur battering ram. Nicke finds a back window, but when he gets it open there is something crackling and white barring the way, leaking menace. Whatever it is hisses at him, tries to surge inward, and Nicke slams the window shut on it quickly.“Nicky,” Alex says from behind him, calm. He brings a hand up, warm and steadying on Nicke’s shoulder. Nicke stops, breathes.“Okay. I’ll open a gate. I think I can do that to just get us outside. I don’t want anyone to be stuck in the human world in case-”“Nothing happen to you,” Alex interrupts firmly. Nicke doesn’t argue, just pushes his way back through the crowd and toward the front door of the barracks.“Move,” he yells, slipping around the battering ram. He doesn’t look to see if they comply, Alex will take care of that. Nicke presses his palms against the door, feels the stomach-turning wrongness of the magic on the other side. He moves back a few inches, carefully focusing on the patch of long grass at the back of the clearing. A gate pops open after a second, and people do not wait before they’re shoving their way through.Nicke gets through quickly as well, wanting to make sure things are safe on the other end. The gate tries to close behind him, but he rebalances quickly and funnels a little more power into it. Alex and Strelka come through, then at least ten more, the clearing is starting to get crowded as people huddle up to avoid getting too close to the Rowan trees. Nicke thinks this must be nearly everyone, hopes it is, as holding a portal open for so many people is much more draining than he expected. He has started to brace himself to close the portal, a surge of final effort, when a boom echoes around the them and Nicke’s vision goes white.It’s bad, something seething and maleficent and bitter surges and scalds his magic, and Nicke slams the portal closed as fast as he can.He thinks he can hear screaming but isn’t entirely sure. His senses all feel scraped raw, tingling, like boiling water has been splashed over him. Slowly, he becomes aware that he’s kneeling in the grass, hands buried in the earth, that Alex is at his left shoulder, Strelka to the right. That people are indeed screaming, and running for the trees, and that where the Seelie barracks were, there is only a cruel and flickering afterglow of white light.-Sid is almost the last person out of the Unseelie barracks. He wakes up to doors slamming down the hall, wants to go investigate, but Mellon has crawled partway under his bed and will not come out.He sighs, digs out the last of the dried meat he stole from dinner a few days ago to give her for treats.“Come on, girl. Let’s go!”Mellon twitches her tail and burrows slightly farther under the bed.“Come on,” Sid says, lightly stroking along her back. She curls up into the touch, but doesn’t budge further than that. He’s just considering whether trying to physically move a frightened cheetah is a death wish or not when the door bangs open and Mellon shoots out from under the bed with a hiss. She presses herself against his legs and tucks her ears back, but relaxes slightly when she sees that it’s Geno. “What’s going on out there?” Sidney asks, trying to nudge Mellon toward the door.“Don’t know,” Geno says. “We better go.”“Yeah,” Sid agrees. Between the two of them and the rest of the jerky, they coax Mellon down the stairs and outside. Most of the other Unseelie captives are standing in the center of the clearing, near the front of their barracks. No one seems to know what’s going on, and Sid doesn’t see any of the guards or Court fae. Not at first.The other side of the clearing erupts suddenly into a surge of purple-white flame and the whole grove is lit up.The Seelie and Unseelie Court fae, armored for battle, are locked in combat on the flat expanse of grass in the center of the Rowan circle.-They’ve gotten sort of used to moving in squadrons of seven, and Jakub can see the groups starting to form up as the trooping fae pour out of the barracks. Their weapons are kept locked up and warded outside of training, which he isn’t concerned about until he sees what’s going on outside.The Court fae are in full-tilt battle mode and the Seelie barracks, Jakub sees with a horrified jolt, have evaporated into light.“Come on,” T.J. says, grabbing Jakub’s elbow, “we need to find the others.”-Nicke still can’t hear very well. Alex is talking to him, but the words trip over each other and run together and he can’t make them out. He shakes his head, gently disengaging his elbow from Alex. They need some way to get people out of here, and there is no way Nicke can move everyone. Not with the strain of the first gate and the aftereffects of close contact with whatever destroyed that building.Alex points over at the big building, where the trooping fae are starting to emerge, and Nicke nods.The ring of magic starts to fade from Nicke’s ears as they jog over to the cluster of people, and anyway Crosby is shouting to be heard over the screams.“What happened?”Nicke’s eyes dart around the group quickly: Alex, Strelka, Crosby, Mellon, Malkin, T.J., Mike, Jakub, André, Tom. All there, he notes with relief. They aren’t through the woods by any means, but they’re all together, at least.Alex is looking at Nicke, waiting for an explanation.“Some kind of magical strike,” Nicke says, “I think.”Ready. Brace. Danger slams into him from Strelka, and Nicke yells for everyone to get down. Mellon must be sensing the same thing, whatever it is, because Crosby has dived into Malkin and André and pushed them both to the ground.A circle of bright blue light sweeps over the Rowan trees, spreading out and then striking down as thunder shakes the clearing. Within seconds, the trees are burning. Fuck.“Get people out of there,” Nicke yells, remembering the unconscious, bleeding bodies from the first day with the Unseelie, remembering people trying to flee into the trees. “Gather as many as you can and bring them back here.”The others don’t wait, running off for the trees, and Nicke pauses to take a breath. He’s going to need to open another gate, and hold it. There isn’t another choice at this point. Maybe they can split into groups with a Court Unseelie in each, to lessen the strain. Two is probably smarter, a spare in case the first dies.Overhead, the sky is starting to streak with oily smoke. It drifts across the empty space where the blue barracks were, and Nicke frowns in thought. The building is gone, but it’s possible the basement gate is still there.Nicke stays low, avoiding the dueling pairs of Seelie and Unseelie, the fae and human bodies that litter the ground. He does not look at any of them closely, does not have time to see if they are people he has sat next to at meals, or passed in the hallways. Does not have time to see if they are young, or still clinging to life with bruised and bleeding fingers.A fine layer of ash covers the ground, piling in thick, hot drifts around the echo of the destroyed building. Nicke shovels it out of the way with his hands, ignoring the bite against his skin. The stone door that leads down to the basement is still there, but Nicke has no idea how to open it. There is no handle or pull of any kind, and his magic has no affinity for stone. Nicke looks up, trying to spot one of the Seelie, but the area around him is empty. Nicke realizes with a jolt that the circle of trees is gone, burned away completely. The fire doesn’t appear to have spread any farther, but the dark edges of the world recede in all directions.A quick, sharp burst of panic, and then calm settles over him, the world slowing down and turning razor-sharp. Strelka is about fifty feet away, already running toward him. She has the others, and quite a few more, with her.“Can any of you open this?” Nicke shouts, voice gone a little hoarse from the smoke. Someone toward the front of the pack surges toward him, dropping to her knees and smacking her hands against the stone. The door shivers and then slams open violently, nearly hitting both Nicke and the woman. She apologizes, but Nicke is already partway down the stairs.To his vast relief, the gate is still there, flickering blue in the dim of the basement. He doesn’t need to encourage anyone to go through. They’ve all seen the gate before, and used it.Nicke ticks people off as they go through: T.J., Tom, Jakub, and then Alex is next to him.“Here,” Alex hands him one of the communication stones. “I make sure the rest get through.”The world slips back out of focus, going soft at the edges, and Nicke is back a year, repeating the same fight in reverse. Distantly, he’s aware that people are still streaming past them and through the gate, that the ground outside is starting to shake, that the fraction of sky he can see through the trapdoor is bruised green and ugly.“No. I’m not going without you.”“Someone needs to watch other side,” Alex says. Nicke’s hand shoots out, grabbing a surprised-looking Crosby. His annoying ability to turn up in tight spots, finally coming in handy.“He can watch the other side.”“What?” Crosby says, but he catches the stone as Nicke shoves it at him.“Call us when you’re across. Ask around, see if people are missing.”“Will do,” Crosby says. He and Mellon go through the gate, but Nicke doesn’t notice. Alex is watching him, eyes soft and mouth curving a little in the corner.“Stubborn,” he says.“Don’t fucking forget,” Nicke says, snatching the other stone from Alex. “I’m never letting you leave again,” he adds, poking him in the chest. “You can’t die before our tenth anniversary.”“Already been ten years,” Alex says grinning, jostling him a little. Another old argument.“You can’t count since the day we met, Alex. Since our wedding.”“Just because you stubborn and make me wait, time doesn’t count?”Another boom echos, making the stone door leap into the air. Fortunately it resettles, but Nicke is reminded that they are very much on a time crunch here.“I don’t have time to argue with you right now,” Nicke calls over his shoulder as he runs up the stairs. Behind him, Alex laughs.-The area around the gate is pretty well cleared out. There are too many bodies, but that is a burden that Nicke has borne for a year now. He and Alex find a few people who are unconscious, severely wounded but with magic and life still flickering in them. They carry them down to the gate, bringing them through quickly. Nicke isn’t entirely sure what is happening on the other side, he gives Alex the stone to take the reports from Crosby, but there are people there to attend to the wounded and that’s all he cares about right now.It’s hard to tell what exactly is happening with the fae. The fighting still seems to be relatively close by, if the weather and the feel of magic is anything to go off of, but it’s still full night and the surrounding area, without the trees, is hilly.“That everyone?” Alex asks.“I think so,” Nicke says slowly. He kneels where the edge of the circle used to be, pressing his palms into the earth. He closes his eyes and lets his magic fan outward, feeling for the tug of other fae. Other than Alex at his back and Strelka waiting back by the gate, though, he doesn’t sense anything focused. Just loose, wild magic, careening through the air. It’s distracting, has been pulling vaguely at his attention this entire time.It does not feel as if they can be finished. Nicke realizes he has started to believe, deep in his soul, that he will be hauling bodies until he drops. A part of him is still back in Washington, still digging that first grave with only three scared boys to help him and the rest of the team scattered to the wind.Alex lets him sit for a minute, rests his hands on Nicke’s shoulders and pulls Nicke gently to lean against his legs.“You save a lot, Backy,” Alex says quietly.“Not all of them.”“No one save all of them,” Alex says. “Not even me.”Nicke laughs, reaching back blindly for Alex’s hand. “And who am I to challenge the Great Eight?” he asks sarcastically. Alex cuffs him on the side of the head, so gently it’s almost a caress.“Come on, Nicky,” Alex says. “Let’s go home.”-There is a sort of triage station set up on the other side. Everyone is still adjusting to their powers; even those Court fae who have been captive for close to a year have only been in the fae realm for a little over a week. It isn’t a lot of time to test the boundaries of unknown magic. The trooping fae know a little more, but they are also less powerful and none of them have any kind of healing ability. There are a few captives who were doctors or nurses in a previous life, though, and with the way the world has been this past year most people have some experience with emergency medicine.Nicke leans back against a huge, spreading cedar tree. André, with a burn on his forearm and a tightly wrapped gash in his thigh, is curled up in his lap, half-asleep. Jakub, who is uninjured but unsettled, is tucked between the roots of the tree at Nicke’s side.Tom won’t stop complaining that Mike isn’t stitching him up straight (Mike: “This is the straightest I’ve ever been, shut up.”) T.J. is sulking a little because he didn’t get to fight any of the Court fae, but he does obligingly hold Tom’s head still. Mellon has, rather hilariously in Nicke’s opinion, befriended a gamboling excitable labradoodle. His human companion, who keeps calling Crosby ‘Sandy’ and trying to engage him in a conversation about reality television dating shows, is Nicke’s new favorite person.Malkin is coordinating patient movement, shifting people around as they’re patched up and making sure the medics have what they need. Alex is, in Alex’s fashion, everywhere doing everything at once: growing plants and berries for the healers, boiling vast quantities of water, repurposing extra clothing for bandages, flopping about as a bear to entertain a particularly scared teenager while he’s being stitched up. He’s going to exhaust himself, but that will be easier for Alex to recover from than a year of enforced inaction, so Nicke leaves him be.A crackling comes from the magical gate, and Nicke lurches upward. It feels inexcusably naive, suddenly, that they didn’t try to destroy it, close it in some way. André makes a noise of discontent as he’s rolled, carefully but quickly, onto his side, and Nicke is up and running for the gate before anyone else has had time to react.He is less than five feet away, already scanning the area around the gate for some kind of improvised weapon, when someone comes through.Nicke pulls up abruptly, barely managing to not collide with Braden. Braden blinks a little in surprise, hands coming out to steady Nicke almost automatically. Less than ten seconds later, Kuzy is coming through the gate, and then Myshka, and then a whole torrent of people are pouring out.It is almost bad, for a moment. People are mistrustful, and guarding their wounded, and there is the snap-hum of magic gathering at wrists and at palms. It is almost bad, but then Alex is yelling, “Is okay! Friends!” and barreling in to hug everyone at once, and the tension bleeds out of the grove.“You are a little late to the action,” Nicke says mildly, looking at Braden with a raised eyebrow.“Well,” Braden replies, “I didn’t have to come at all. If you think about it, that means I’m early.”Nicke laughs, pulling Braden in for a hug. “Good to see you.”“You too,” Braden says, softly.“Flower!” Crosby shoots by Nicke, plowing into Fleury for a hug. “What the hell are you doing here, man?”“Ah,” Fleury laughs a little. “It’s a bit of a long story.”“We have time,” Nicke says. He’s ready for some answers. Fleury looks around the clearing appraisingly.“The Circle will make some announcements.” Fleury looks at Nicke. “I think that you are less interested in the official story than in what happens next, no?”Nicke nods. Fleury’s eyes flicker over to a cluster of fae. He looks thoughtful for a moment, then shrugs. “They will not begrudge me a few of you.”The former captives have stayed mostly by the gate, but there isn’t anything to stop them from heading away from the amphitheater and into the forest. They don’t even catch much attention. Some of the fae, The Circle maybe, have started to speak, and people are listening to that.Fleury leads them confidently to a sunny clearing a few hundred yards away. Crosby and Malkin are there, and Nicke and Alex. Jakub and T.J. have stayed behind to listen to The Circle, but André, Mike, and Tom come along to the clearing. Braden has also stayed behind. Kuzy and Sema are waiting in the clearing.“Sweeps are clear,” Kuzy says, when he sees them. “No fighting happening nearby.” Fleury nods.“So what’s The Circle?” Crosby asks. Mellon is eyeing Myshka distrustfully, and Nicke can feel Strelka’s silent amusement.“The Circle is,” Fleury waves a hand, “sort of the governing body of the Cú Sídhe.”“So they’ve decided to act?” Nicke asks.Fleury nods. “I don’t know how much you saw.”“Not a lot,” Crosby says.“Someone destroyed the Seelie barracks,” Nicke says, folding his arms. He trusts Sema, Kuzy, and Braden, but not the Cú Sídhe, and not The Circle. Fleury winces a little.“Things sort of fell apart, yesterday. The Unseelie King was assassinated,” Fleury says. “We,” he pauses a little, “no one expected that.”The timeline is fuzzy, spreading across two realms, both courts, and the sprawl of a little over a year. The Seelie and the Unseelie always fight, but The Treaty kept things subdued for a long time. The Seelie have never liked the terms they agreed to for The Treaty, and this latest revolt was stronger and bloodier than any before.The Unseelie Court, in desperation, began creating larger and larger magical breaches between the human world and the fae: draining resources and pulling latent magic. This had been an unspoken taboo since the fae first went under the hills to flee humans: do not compromise the integrity of the realm we have built. Once that rule was broken, it is easier to break more. Human-Fae bloodlines become more acceptable, and humans are stolen in large numbers to rebuild the fae armies, on both sides. The large-scale awakening of magic causes more disruption, more tension between the realms of fae and human.A fragile peace is reached as both sides scramble to train their armies: a date is agreed upon to awaken the magic of the strongest. The Circle, still debating, whether they should become involved, accept this peace as the final deadline for their decision. Once training is finished and the war commences, they will vote on Cú Sídhe involvement.They all know this, or pieces of this. It is why they were all taken, pawns in a chess match they can only see the corner of.What comes next is less clear.Fleury was woken in the middle of the night, called to an emergency meeting of The Circle. The wails of lament from the Unseelie Court had spread quickly around the realm, reports of a slaughtered king and his family. The Circle has barely gathered when a messenger runs in, reports that war has broken out.No one knows who, exactly, brought the news of the assassination to the training camps. No one knows which of the Unseelie princes or princesses, bent on vengeance, ripped the Seelie barracks from existence. No one knows how many died, because the realm of Fae is large and ever-shifting, and not all left bodies.“The Circle passed an emergency motion to intervene,” Fleury says. “When we got there, it was easy enough to follow your magical trail.” He looks around at them. “You did well, getting people out.”We shouldn’t have had to, Nicke thinks. Kuzy, who has been staring a hole in the ground since Fleury started speaking, knows. Fleury probably knows, too.“What now?” Malkin says. And, that’s the question, isn’t it? Fleury sighs, looking tired.“Now, you have to make a choice. Fae blood, it does not wake or sleep easy. You have all had your magic awakened. It is not simple to go back.”“But it is possible?” Nicke asks, sharply.“Yes,” Fleury nods. “That is what I did. You can give up your magic, return it to the earth. It is not easy, or clean,” he warns. “And you cannot reverse it. You will give up much of your power, much of your access to magic, many of your abilities. The human world will not feel the same. The fae world will not be the same, either.”“You’re fae?” Crosby says, frowning a little. Sema snorts, and Fleury rolls his eyes.“Everyone in this clearing is fae,” Fleury points out.“You only prince,” Sema says, tucking a smile into the corner of his mouth.Crosby stares at Fleury, shocked. “You’re a prince?”Fleury shrugs. “Fae have a lot of princes. I prefer being a goalie, and a husband. They find another prince to bring the spring dew to the flowers. They don’t find another me in the NHL.”“We can go back, though?” Alex asks slowly.“Yes,” Fleury says, “but not the same. You go back different. Especially Court fae. The more power, the harder the change.” He looks around the circle, then glances over at Sema. Sighs. “He can tell you more specifically.”Malkin says something in Russian to Sema, who doesn’t reply. Sema looks around at them all, slow and thoughtful. Sema glances over at Kuzy, jerks his chin at Mike, André, and Tom.“It’s not so hard, for trooping,” Kuzy says. “Fae blood, it just makes the world look a little different. You get used to it. You can feel the gates, probably. You know if you near one. Might be able to identify other fae,” he shrugs. “Depends.”“Can we still turn invisible?” André asks.“You can turn invisible?” Tom says, leaning around Mike to stare at André. André smirks and disappears. This very nearly leads to an attempt by Tom to wrestle an invisible André across Mike’s lap, but Nicke yells at them to settle down and they do.Kuzy is laughing. “Probably near gate. I don’t know. Born with no powers. Gods, they give me enough with hockey skills.”Nicke would chirp him for this, but he can’t really argue.Sema says something in Russian, looking over at Alex and Malkin. After a protracted exchange, Alex glances over at Nicke, then the others.“We lose nature magic, probably. Can maybe still transform, but dangerous.”“Dangerous?” Crosby asks sharply, looking over at Malkin. Malkin glares at Alex.“Not dangerous,” Malkin protests.Nicke hates to side with Crosby on anything, but he definitely does not trust this evaluation. “No transforming, then.”“But being bear is cool,” Alex says, pouting. Nicke rolls his eyes. “Only dangerous if stay an animal too long. Get lost, maybe.”“None of this is convincing me,” Nicke says. He looks over at Sema, dismissing the subject. “What about me and Crosby?” Alex and Malkin start having some kind of whispered debate in Russian that Nicke is choosing to ignore for his own sanity.“No portals anymore,” Sema explains. Nicke nods, he sort of expected that. “You’ll still be able to use the gates, but so can humans. Familiars are kind of,” Sema wiggles his hand. Nicke, almost unconsciously, reaches out for Strelka. Sema laughs, but it’s fond.“They will be fine,” Kuzy says. “Familiars very independent. Don’t really need fae as much as we need them.”Mellon leans against Crosby’s leg, as if she understands and wants to demonstrate her loyalty. Strelka, the absolute traitor, yawns and resettles herself on the grass. Nicke gives her a sour look. She ignores him.“You ask them,” Sema says. “They know.”Crosby immediately kneels down and starts earnestly staring into Mellon’s eyes. Nicke tries to decide if it will be more embarrassing to try and commune with his familiar and be ignored, or make it obvious he is worried about that outcome by not even trying. Fucking Crosby.Staying or going? Nicke thinks at Strelka, sort of glaring in her direction. She looks over at him, blinks once. Then she looks over at Alex.What do you think, you idiot is how Nicke interprets this. He sighs internally. Where the hell is he going to put her? Oh well. He supposes that figuring out how to build an arctic fox habitat without Google won’t be the hardest thing he’s done this year. Not even close.“It will be better if you stay near a gate,” Fleury says. “Easier.”“Is there one in D.C.?” Tom asks. Fleury rolls his eyes.“Of course. Why do you think so many of you Capitals are fae?”Tom shrugs, accepting this. “I guess we go back there, then.”And, well.It’s simple, for all the ways it isn’t simple. Tearing the magic out of your body hurts, and going back to the human realm is dizzying, and the world is still a seething mess of doors that haven’t shut properly and leaking magic.The war goes on. The Cú Sídhe, with those recruits who had chosen to stay behind in the fae realm, work on rebalancing. The rest of them go home.It’s simple, in a way, because Nicke is back in D.C. with the remains of his team, with his husband. He spent a year walking through hell, and the road in front stretches out dark and unknown and dangerous, but his gravity has resettled. That great, bright star is re-oriented on the horizon, and Nicke feels steady even as his senses waver and spark with the burnout of magic.The body, clinging to life, is simple. It wants to survive.The heart, clinging to love, is simple. It wants to hope. -NOW: June 25th, 2019 // EpilogueThey’ve all been living at Kettler, which held up surprisingly well in the intervening year. It’s not necessarily the most practical home, but it has what they need: familiarity and the means to create ice.They still don’t have enough for a team, and they’re all messy and out of practice, but the routine of morning skate, conditioning, training, feels good and familiar. Besides, Crosby and Malkin are back in Pittsburgh. Who knows what will happen, better to stay sharp.Nicky utterly forbade them from having a party, so naturally it’s all been done very sneakily. Braden refused to be an accomplice to either the streamers or the balloons filled with confetti, but he has begrudgingly agreed to keep Nicky out of the way so they can finish setting up. He’ll just need to move out of checking distance when everyone jumps out and yells surprise.Semin, here for a visit from his newly formalized position in The Circle, is obligingly wreaking havoc all over the ice. Nicky doesn’t question where Alex and Kuzy have disappeared to because Semin appears to be everywhere at once, and Braden can just sort of stay in the crease and occasionally block a shot. It’s nice. Relaxing.Mike and Tom sneak off partway through the wildly unbalanced scrimmage, followed by more and more people until it’s just Braden out on the ice with Nicky and Semin.“Lunch,” Semin says brightly, sailing right past Nicky and off the ice. Nicky skates up to the goal, and by the time he’s through the neutral zone Braden can tell the jig is up.“None of you listen to me,” Nicky says, scolding but gentle.“I did tell them to put nine years on the banner, instead of twelve,” Braden says, pulling off his helmet. Nicky does the same, rolling his eyes.“I gave up on winning that argument eight and a half years ago,” he says. “Come on. Let me see what my nightmare husband has cooked up for this anniversary.”Nicky takes in the enormous heart-shaped collage of pictures, as well as the confetti and streamers, with an admirable amount of composure. He even lets Alex feed him cake, although he does insist on taking his skates and pads off first.Tom, who has really leaned into the whole fae blood aesthetic, insists everyone wear flower crowns, “At least for the pictures!”Braden only just manages to not laugh at Nicklas Bäckström in a flower crown and a murderous expression.André, if his faux-innocent expression is anything to go by, is the one who liberally spiked the punch. Jakub is leaning into him and giggling madly, and T.J. is shaking his head in bemusement at both of them. Kuzy has a seemingly endless stash of Christmas crackers, for some reason, and keeps flitting from person to person to pull them. Flashes and bangs echo intermittently around the locker room, and the entire place is starting to smell smoky.Braden smiles, leaning back against his stall.“Any more surprises?” Nicky asks acerbically. Alex grins at him, wide and happy.“Just one,” he says, pulling a sheet off the thing in the corner.“Alex,” Nicky says, his face flickering between amusement, horror, and excitement, “did you steal the fucking Stanley Cup?”“Happy twelve year anniversary!” Alex says. Nicky shakes his head, and pulls Alex in for a kiss.It’s good to be home.