[Puck/Meghan Chase] - [Iron Fey] - [The Rogue's Unmasking]
Title: The Rogue's Unmasking
Fandom: Iron Fey
Character/Pairing: Puck/Meghan Chase
Prompt List: Sin and Salvation
Prompt: Rose Cross
Rating: PG13 (some swearing)
Word Count: 2555
Author's Notes: Been a while! But still going strong. ;D
Summary: Puck shows Meghan who he truly is.
"You remember that you did say 'try me.'" Puck whispered, almost loud enough for Meghan to hear as she sobbed into his chest. "There are always consequences to challenges like that, princess, and they're rarely pretty ones."
Sacrifice was just another part of the game. She didn't know it, but he'd been a player on this board longer than he'd care to admit. Faeries got trapped into revealing things, secrets they wanted kept secret; it just happened when you dealt with humans. The only thing was, sometimes you didn't know what you were giving up until it was too late to stop.
Meghan certainly hadn't known that she would see a doppelganger skitter across Ethan's bedroom floor like a carnivorous insect, or that her bid for her little brother to act normally again and convince her that he really wasn't a changeling would
backfire like this, in bites on her leg and an attack from under the bed. Puck couldn't say that he was surprised. Changelings were a nasty lot, especially when newly installed, and he had dealt with them enough
to know that getting rid of them quickly was often the best way of handling them.
But hey, you know what they say, right? Knowledge always carried a price tag, and often a steep one.
Any trickster could tell you that. Between telling Meghan who he was and was not, his course should be obvious. So why, in the name of every lacy undergarment that Titania owned, was he teetering on the edge of this
decision, on the verge of making the same slanted choice between knowledge and bliss that Meghan had made less than an hour before, the consequences already before him (girl in tears, guardian fey disobeying powerful liege, the list went on), wasn't he at least wise enough just to leave it alone?
Especially since it had made her end up like this, sobbing into his shoulder for what felt like an eternity of
moments and small, snuffling sounds. How many times had this happened already? First at her school, then with her shock at what had happened to Ethan and her mother, and now this.
He'd never wanted her to cry.
Puck's hands covered Meghan's still-shaking shoulders, smoothed the sheets of silvery-blond hair back from her face and behind her ears as much as he could. "You've been through a whole lot," he murmured and then held her back, a rueful smile creeping over his lips, "but, in true best friend fashion, I'm going to ask you to go through a little more for my sake, okay?"
Meghan backed away, her brow furrowed, eyes dark and questioning. She looked almost afraid. Puck grinned. Yeah, fear was right. He would have been a little disappointed in her if she didn't see this coming, and fear was most definitely the correct response when a Puck was concerned.
But it wasn't like he wasn't nervous, too. This could be an error of blindness or the most brilliant move he'd ever
make, but he would never know unless he took the chance. And Robin Goodfellow was never one to balk from testing his luck. Not with this much riding on it.
"What do you know about me?" He said quietly, his green eyes dancing with an odd intensity. "Think about it, Meghan. What do you really know about me, about who I am?"
They stared at each other for a while, each on the edge of a precipice.
His shirt still bore the wet, apostrophe-shaped spots from where Meghan's face had been pressed into it, after she'd gone back into Ethan's room by herself. Wearing her tear marks, he felt like a signpost for weakness, for the one comfortable place left to her in an increasingly uncertain world. Meghan had held onto him like she was drowning, like he was the last remnant of her normal life, the final rock of sanity left for her as the earth crumbled all around her.
And here he was, casting her off into thin air, forcing her to either fall or fly.
"Not much, right? You don't see me unless it's here, or at school, or when we meet up somewhere. You've never been to my house, or met my parents, and you've never asked to. Remember?" His voice was edgy and a strange electricity crackled through him. Meghan might be scared, might be shaking her head, but he was a rush of energy, deceit and artifice fall away from him even as he peeled back his glamour. "You've known all along that there was something more to me, something not quite right,
but you never asked any questions. Now I want you to ask."
She didn't want to, he could tell. Meghan had backed up against the hallway wall, her mouth open and her chest rising a falling with quick breaths. She was like a sparrow caught indoors, drying its mouth out and anxious to get out even though all the windows were shut. It hurt him to see her like this, knowing that it was him doing it to her.
Why? Maybe it was just something that he couldn't give up, the wildness. He wasn't supposed to be safe; he definitely wasn't supposed to be the kind of faery you came to in your darkest moments and cried on. Or, at least, the Puck that he had been wasn't that kind of faery. He was the guy that made mortals' lives more difficult for no reason at all beyond personal
enjoyment and he tricked the highest and mightiest of fey royalty because he liked the thrill of wondering if he could get away with it.That was what a Puck did.
That was what he did.
Meghan had to know that. Only now, there was a significant part of him wanting to cut it out, leave her her silly misconceptions and battered thoughts. But when that part grappled with the side of him desperate for his sixteen-year-charade to end, it faltered.
"I have to know." He said in a low voice.
"What?" Meghan's hands gone white as she gripped the wall, as though it would steady her, provide her some stability now. Puck shook his head, stepping closer to her even though she trembled.
What indeed. "Well, how about this, princess: could you really see a prankster for what he really was? And would you even want to still be with him afterwards, once all his secrets were out?" He whispered, tucking a shivering blond wisp of hair behind her ear.
Meghan swallowed and he could see her throat tremble. He knew that she wouldn't be able to answer, not with words anyway, and his time was growing short. The glamour was unwinding.
Something knocked at the door downstairs,begging to be let in, and Puck begged himself to let it through, shivering in anticipation of the change. It had been so long since he'd let anyone in, let alone wanted to.
"Can you handle what I am, princess? Can you even begin to?"
Her lips were forming into something, maybe words, maybe a scream, but he never found out what. Any reply she might have made was stolen with her breath in the moment that Puck let go, let the exhilaration rip through
him, felt the beating of bird's wings tear at him like a second heartbeat.
Distantly, the door downstairs flew open and a swarm of ravens circled him, as enthralled by him as he was them. Black feathers
danced along the woodwork, caressed the walls and ceiling of the hallway, got caught in all the light fixtures and blotted the ceilings lights out, melted in and out of him like an ancient song. This was frenzy, he knew; his eyes closed with a sigh of release, and when that one speck of brilliant green vanished, his irises lost to the shudder of wings and dark bodies, he left no trace of himself behind, just a whirl of ravens racing to the door and that black, downy fluff that binds feather stem to bird.
He heard Meghan calling his name, the one she'd always called him by, but he was far beyond an answer.
Maybe if he chased her gasp far enough on the wind he rode out the door, he'd find out what she'd been about to say- if, maybe this half-fey, half-human slip of a girl could see him as he truly was.
-o-
Sacrifices
were a game of give and take. They were a lot like contracts, when he
thought about it, except they were a lot less beyond anyone's, faery or
mortal's, ability to control. Maybe that was why he was fascinated by
them. Humans, the threat of losing something precious, all of it.
The
stairs were the same as they had always been when he came over to visit
Meghan. Still wood, still creaky in some places, especially the fifth
and eleventh steps, with that sharp nick in the banister that had been
there ever since he'd convinced Meghan to ride down the stairs with him
on her stuffed animals, and they'd crashed. Now, covered with a layer of
dark feathers, they looked as though they'd been caught in a snowstorm,
that a strange, inverse winter had descended on the Chase home, and he
was a lone figure slogging through it.
He reached the top of the
landing and looked around. She wasn't there anymore, but he hadn't
expected her to be. Rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, Puck
sighed. It could have been gentler- he could have been gentler about it.
But
it was done. Meghan had to know what she was getting into, and if she
was serious about going into Faery to rescue her brother, then he'd be
damned if he didn't send her in with full knowledge of who he was. She
had to get used to this, even if it was brutal and shattering, he'd
rather that he be the one telling her what she was up against, what she
had to deal with, rather than she face it in the Nevernever unprepared.
Puck
closed his eyes, reaching out with a small, flowering strand of
glamour, something comforting but with a memory of pain at first touch,
maybe a rose branching towards her. Slowly, he approached her room and
paused before the door.
This might be the moment where she tells
him that she never wants to see him again. That, despite what she said
earlier, she doesn't want his help, doesn't want to go after her brother
after all, doesn't want anything to do with him, would rather that he
kindly leave the mistwine at the threshold and run out of her life
forever.
His hands gripped the doorframe before he knew it,
steadying himself, his forehead resting against the closed door. His
breaths came softly, warmth on the wood. It's oak, reassuring and clam,
steadfast, a place of rest and safety.
He knocked on the door
once, twice, then opened it. A Puck can sometimes be very out of place,
too, and that is perhaps one of his biggest secrets. Sometimes, no
matter what gallery of smiles he has in stock, he has no idea what to
say, what to do.
Especially not now, not when Meghan Chase, the girl he initially disliked and now would and had
risked everything for, looked up at him from under her coverlets, her
eyes red-rimmed and her face streaked with tears. And it was he would
had put them there.
Puck wasn't quite sure what made him do it.
Probably something human he'd picked up somewhere, something he caught
on a late night made-for-TV movie that he watched with Meghan maybe, or
just an action and reaction pair that he'd seen played out enough to
mimic.
He sat on the bed, held her, still wrapped up in her
comforters and shaking, pulled her close to him and rested his head
against hers, as though to say: there are many things that are lost to
you and many still to come, but this will never be one of them.
-o-
Puck
laughed, feeling the glamour kick into him like a deluge on parched
land. A part of him reeled, crowed out that never again was he going to
the mortal realm, taking himself out of Faery and denying himself this
for that long. This rush of power was too much not to want to lose
himself in it again, go crazy with all of it pulsing through his veins.
Cocking
his head, he shrugged out of his mortal clothes and into something more
appropriate for visiting Faery. If he was going to parade through
Arcadia with Meghan Chase, he might as well piss Oberon off as little as
possible. He had a feeling in his gut that he had already pushed his
luck too far.
Meghan's eyes went wide when she caught sight of
him, her best friend's trademark smirk echoed in a slightly different
face, his piercing green eyes dancing with merriment and the hint of a
joke.
"Well, what do you think, princess?" Puck struck a pose, the
same that he'd used to make Meghan laugh for years, achingly familiar.
"You saw the raw me, but this is more like how I am normally. You know,
when I'm not tailing you through school and stuff." He winked.
Was
it just him, or did Meghan's cheeks look a little flushed? Puck felt
his heart speed up a little bit, still holding onto his playful smile,
giving no sign that something she'd done had affected him. Being a Puck
meant keeping some things secret.
"You look..." Meghan paused, all the right words escaping her. "Right, I think. Like this is where you belong. You always did seem a little too perfect for school, Robbie." She laughed at the end, as though recalling a fond memory. "I think some girls wondered why you always hung out with someone like me."
Puck smiled to himself, a little impressed at humans' abilities to see through some masks and not through others. "Then they clearly weren't looking at you the right way, princess." He said softly.
"What, Robbie?"
He shook his head, the smile remaining but faded. He wouldn't allow himself to rush this. Not yet, not after he'd waited so long. He could keep a secret a little longer.
"Actually, princess," he swept into an elaborate bow, "Robbie's more a nickname of mine. You can just call me Puck."
Some things were still secrets. But, though it still unnerved him, he was finding that he wanted her to know more and more of them.
Fandom: Iron Fey
Character/Pairing: Puck/Meghan Chase
Prompt List: Sin and Salvation
Prompt: Rose Cross
Rating: PG13 (some swearing)
Word Count: 2555
Author's Notes: Been a while! But still going strong. ;D
Summary: Puck shows Meghan who he truly is.
"You remember that you did say 'try me.'" Puck whispered, almost loud enough for Meghan to hear as she sobbed into his chest. "There are always consequences to challenges like that, princess, and they're rarely pretty ones."
Sacrifice was just another part of the game. She didn't know it, but he'd been a player on this board longer than he'd care to admit. Faeries got trapped into revealing things, secrets they wanted kept secret; it just happened when you dealt with humans. The only thing was, sometimes you didn't know what you were giving up until it was too late to stop.
Meghan certainly hadn't known that she would see a doppelganger skitter across Ethan's bedroom floor like a carnivorous insect, or that her bid for her little brother to act normally again and convince her that he really wasn't a changeling would
backfire like this, in bites on her leg and an attack from under the bed. Puck couldn't say that he was surprised. Changelings were a nasty lot, especially when newly installed, and he had dealt with them enough
to know that getting rid of them quickly was often the best way of handling them.
But hey, you know what they say, right? Knowledge always carried a price tag, and often a steep one.
Any trickster could tell you that. Between telling Meghan who he was and was not, his course should be obvious. So why, in the name of every lacy undergarment that Titania owned, was he teetering on the edge of this
decision, on the verge of making the same slanted choice between knowledge and bliss that Meghan had made less than an hour before, the consequences already before him (girl in tears, guardian fey disobeying powerful liege, the list went on), wasn't he at least wise enough just to leave it alone?
Especially since it had made her end up like this, sobbing into his shoulder for what felt like an eternity of
moments and small, snuffling sounds. How many times had this happened already? First at her school, then with her shock at what had happened to Ethan and her mother, and now this.
He'd never wanted her to cry.
Puck's hands covered Meghan's still-shaking shoulders, smoothed the sheets of silvery-blond hair back from her face and behind her ears as much as he could. "You've been through a whole lot," he murmured and then held her back, a rueful smile creeping over his lips, "but, in true best friend fashion, I'm going to ask you to go through a little more for my sake, okay?"
Meghan backed away, her brow furrowed, eyes dark and questioning. She looked almost afraid. Puck grinned. Yeah, fear was right. He would have been a little disappointed in her if she didn't see this coming, and fear was most definitely the correct response when a Puck was concerned.
But it wasn't like he wasn't nervous, too. This could be an error of blindness or the most brilliant move he'd ever
make, but he would never know unless he took the chance. And Robin Goodfellow was never one to balk from testing his luck. Not with this much riding on it.
"What do you know about me?" He said quietly, his green eyes dancing with an odd intensity. "Think about it, Meghan. What do you really know about me, about who I am?"
They stared at each other for a while, each on the edge of a precipice.
His shirt still bore the wet, apostrophe-shaped spots from where Meghan's face had been pressed into it, after she'd gone back into Ethan's room by herself. Wearing her tear marks, he felt like a signpost for weakness, for the one comfortable place left to her in an increasingly uncertain world. Meghan had held onto him like she was drowning, like he was the last remnant of her normal life, the final rock of sanity left for her as the earth crumbled all around her.
And here he was, casting her off into thin air, forcing her to either fall or fly.
"Not much, right? You don't see me unless it's here, or at school, or when we meet up somewhere. You've never been to my house, or met my parents, and you've never asked to. Remember?" His voice was edgy and a strange electricity crackled through him. Meghan might be scared, might be shaking her head, but he was a rush of energy, deceit and artifice fall away from him even as he peeled back his glamour. "You've known all along that there was something more to me, something not quite right,
but you never asked any questions. Now I want you to ask."
She didn't want to, he could tell. Meghan had backed up against the hallway wall, her mouth open and her chest rising a falling with quick breaths. She was like a sparrow caught indoors, drying its mouth out and anxious to get out even though all the windows were shut. It hurt him to see her like this, knowing that it was him doing it to her.
Why? Maybe it was just something that he couldn't give up, the wildness. He wasn't supposed to be safe; he definitely wasn't supposed to be the kind of faery you came to in your darkest moments and cried on. Or, at least, the Puck that he had been wasn't that kind of faery. He was the guy that made mortals' lives more difficult for no reason at all beyond personal
enjoyment and he tricked the highest and mightiest of fey royalty because he liked the thrill of wondering if he could get away with it.That was what a Puck did.
That was what he did.
Meghan had to know that. Only now, there was a significant part of him wanting to cut it out, leave her her silly misconceptions and battered thoughts. But when that part grappled with the side of him desperate for his sixteen-year-charade to end, it faltered.
"I have to know." He said in a low voice.
"What?" Meghan's hands gone white as she gripped the wall, as though it would steady her, provide her some stability now. Puck shook his head, stepping closer to her even though she trembled.
What indeed. "Well, how about this, princess: could you really see a prankster for what he really was? And would you even want to still be with him afterwards, once all his secrets were out?" He whispered, tucking a shivering blond wisp of hair behind her ear.
Meghan swallowed and he could see her throat tremble. He knew that she wouldn't be able to answer, not with words anyway, and his time was growing short. The glamour was unwinding.
Something knocked at the door downstairs,begging to be let in, and Puck begged himself to let it through, shivering in anticipation of the change. It had been so long since he'd let anyone in, let alone wanted to.
"Can you handle what I am, princess? Can you even begin to?"
Her lips were forming into something, maybe words, maybe a scream, but he never found out what. Any reply she might have made was stolen with her breath in the moment that Puck let go, let the exhilaration rip through
him, felt the beating of bird's wings tear at him like a second heartbeat.
Distantly, the door downstairs flew open and a swarm of ravens circled him, as enthralled by him as he was them. Black feathers
danced along the woodwork, caressed the walls and ceiling of the hallway, got caught in all the light fixtures and blotted the ceilings lights out, melted in and out of him like an ancient song. This was frenzy, he knew; his eyes closed with a sigh of release, and when that one speck of brilliant green vanished, his irises lost to the shudder of wings and dark bodies, he left no trace of himself behind, just a whirl of ravens racing to the door and that black, downy fluff that binds feather stem to bird.
He heard Meghan calling his name, the one she'd always called him by, but he was far beyond an answer.
Maybe if he chased her gasp far enough on the wind he rode out the door, he'd find out what she'd been about to say- if, maybe this half-fey, half-human slip of a girl could see him as he truly was.
-o-
Sacrifices
were a game of give and take. They were a lot like contracts, when he
thought about it, except they were a lot less beyond anyone's, faery or
mortal's, ability to control. Maybe that was why he was fascinated by
them. Humans, the threat of losing something precious, all of it.
The
stairs were the same as they had always been when he came over to visit
Meghan. Still wood, still creaky in some places, especially the fifth
and eleventh steps, with that sharp nick in the banister that had been
there ever since he'd convinced Meghan to ride down the stairs with him
on her stuffed animals, and they'd crashed. Now, covered with a layer of
dark feathers, they looked as though they'd been caught in a snowstorm,
that a strange, inverse winter had descended on the Chase home, and he
was a lone figure slogging through it.
He reached the top of the
landing and looked around. She wasn't there anymore, but he hadn't
expected her to be. Rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, Puck
sighed. It could have been gentler- he could have been gentler about it.
But
it was done. Meghan had to know what she was getting into, and if she
was serious about going into Faery to rescue her brother, then he'd be
damned if he didn't send her in with full knowledge of who he was. She
had to get used to this, even if it was brutal and shattering, he'd
rather that he be the one telling her what she was up against, what she
had to deal with, rather than she face it in the Nevernever unprepared.
Puck
closed his eyes, reaching out with a small, flowering strand of
glamour, something comforting but with a memory of pain at first touch,
maybe a rose branching towards her. Slowly, he approached her room and
paused before the door.
This might be the moment where she tells
him that she never wants to see him again. That, despite what she said
earlier, she doesn't want his help, doesn't want to go after her brother
after all, doesn't want anything to do with him, would rather that he
kindly leave the mistwine at the threshold and run out of her life
forever.
His hands gripped the doorframe before he knew it,
steadying himself, his forehead resting against the closed door. His
breaths came softly, warmth on the wood. It's oak, reassuring and clam,
steadfast, a place of rest and safety.
He knocked on the door
once, twice, then opened it. A Puck can sometimes be very out of place,
too, and that is perhaps one of his biggest secrets. Sometimes, no
matter what gallery of smiles he has in stock, he has no idea what to
say, what to do.
Especially not now, not when Meghan Chase, the girl he initially disliked and now would and had
risked everything for, looked up at him from under her coverlets, her
eyes red-rimmed and her face streaked with tears. And it was he would
had put them there.
Puck wasn't quite sure what made him do it.
Probably something human he'd picked up somewhere, something he caught
on a late night made-for-TV movie that he watched with Meghan maybe, or
just an action and reaction pair that he'd seen played out enough to
mimic.
He sat on the bed, held her, still wrapped up in her
comforters and shaking, pulled her close to him and rested his head
against hers, as though to say: there are many things that are lost to
you and many still to come, but this will never be one of them.
-o-
Puck
laughed, feeling the glamour kick into him like a deluge on parched
land. A part of him reeled, crowed out that never again was he going to
the mortal realm, taking himself out of Faery and denying himself this
for that long. This rush of power was too much not to want to lose
himself in it again, go crazy with all of it pulsing through his veins.
Cocking
his head, he shrugged out of his mortal clothes and into something more
appropriate for visiting Faery. If he was going to parade through
Arcadia with Meghan Chase, he might as well piss Oberon off as little as
possible. He had a feeling in his gut that he had already pushed his
luck too far.
Meghan's eyes went wide when she caught sight of
him, her best friend's trademark smirk echoed in a slightly different
face, his piercing green eyes dancing with merriment and the hint of a
joke.
"Well, what do you think, princess?" Puck struck a pose, the
same that he'd used to make Meghan laugh for years, achingly familiar.
"You saw the raw me, but this is more like how I am normally. You know,
when I'm not tailing you through school and stuff." He winked.
Was
it just him, or did Meghan's cheeks look a little flushed? Puck felt
his heart speed up a little bit, still holding onto his playful smile,
giving no sign that something she'd done had affected him. Being a Puck
meant keeping some things secret.
"You look..." Meghan paused, all the right words escaping her. "Right, I think. Like this is where you belong. You always did seem a little too perfect for school, Robbie." She laughed at the end, as though recalling a fond memory. "I think some girls wondered why you always hung out with someone like me."
Puck smiled to himself, a little impressed at humans' abilities to see through some masks and not through others. "Then they clearly weren't looking at you the right way, princess." He said softly.
"What, Robbie?"
He shook his head, the smile remaining but faded. He wouldn't allow himself to rush this. Not yet, not after he'd waited so long. He could keep a secret a little longer.
"Actually, princess," he swept into an elaborate bow, "Robbie's more a nickname of mine. You can just call me Puck."
Some things were still secrets. But, though it still unnerved him, he was finding that he wanted her to know more and more of them.