Work Text:
He takes the girl in because she’s a good mechanic and because he needs someone to manage the shop when he’s away on other business.
It doesn’t hurt that it means someone else can handle the customers. Everyone’s happier when Zee can stay far away from that aspect of the business.
That’s it. Those are his reasons, and that’s the end of it.
That is, of course, the truth. He is fae, and he cannot lie. Those are the reasons he hired her.
The reason she becomes his is because, two years after they meet, he sees her shift, and he realizes that she is a piece of this land that has been all but devoured, and that the leeches would yet be happy to consume. He is a contrary being, and he takes pleasure in choosing this battle.
That is also true.
(And if he has always had a weakness for the beings on the fringes, those outcast by others or by choice because their society grated less than others, that was no one’s business but his own.)
(And if she is only a few years older than his child would have been, and small for her age - )
(That is definitely no one’s business but his own.)
In his youth, he hunted those who annoyed him, and he let his weapons drink their blood.
He does not regret it. He changes somewhat; mellows, as magic shrinks and compatriots become fewer.
Mellows, somewhat, that is.
He does not regret it.
He does not regret it until it softens him enough that when the Grey Lords say to go and find a woman to have children with that he decides not to choose this battle and goes to find a woman to marry.
(“They didn’t say you had to marry her,” Uncle Mike reminds him, eyebrow raised.)
(“When I do a thing, I do a thing properly,” he snaps back, and that’s the end of it.)
(He ignores the way Uncle Mike is smiling.)
And then –
It matters more than he had thought.
She matters more than he had thought.
It is a greater weakness than he has ever had. He does not regret it. He cannot regret it.
He tells her the truth but tells it slant. She deserves to know what he is.
He will not torment her with the exact nature of it.
It works.
It works until his enemies whisper terrible truths into his pregnant wife’s mind.
And she knows, by his own admission, that fae do not lie.
She promises she is still his.
Fae do not lie.
But humans do.
When the sun rises, she is gone.
He never stops looking for her. He ignores the whispers, the titters, the lurid speculation on what he will do when he finds her.
If he finds her.
He will find her.
And in the meantime, he has Mercedes to handle things at the shops when he goes hunting.
Mercedes, and, apparently, this.
“He’s helping,” Mercedes says, wiping her hands on an oil cloth. She jerks her head at the garage and closes the office door behind her before she’ll say more. “Look, he’s only picking up a few hours here and there, and I’m paying him out of my own paycheck.”
Zee is still staring at the door, frowning. “There’s something about him . . . “
She grimaces. “Technically, he’s probably too young to be working as much as he is, but I’d have to check the regulations. He’s still in school, though, so it’s . . . probably fine?” Her own unconventional upbringing rears its head.
Zee waves this away irritably. The current scruples of mortals are not the issue. His frown intensifies. “Why bother with him in the first place?”
She shrugs, shoulders tight. “An extra pair of hands never hurts.” She flings the oil cloth over her shoulder too casually. “And he’s had a rough go of it with his family. I think he needs something stable in his life.”
Ah.
“You are soft,” he tells her.
She opens her mouth.
“You should not be paying him with your own funds. That is my responsibility, and I will not be usurped in my own shop.”
A smile steals across her fault. “Oh, and I’m soft?”
“You are a marshmallow,” he says, pleased when he finds the newfangled word he wants without stumbling. Cars are easy. Sugary overpackaged foods are less so. “What’s the name of the brat I’m adding to my payroll?”
He doesn’t blink when she tells him the boy’s name is Tad.
She wants to stop running. She wants to call him and give him a chance to explain himself.
She wants to.
But the man she wants to call is Zee, and she is no longer sure that man is real at all. She does not know Sieboldt Adelbertsmiter, but the things she hears do not encourage her to trust him.
She wants to call him anyway.
But if there is one thing she has learned while she runs, it is that the fae demand perfection from their children.
And so few of their children with mortals meet their standards for perfection.
She is running for two.
So she keeps running.
Mercedes keeps him updated on the boy’s situation as she pries his secrets out of him. The boy’s mother is six months dead from cancer. The boy’s father is out of the picture. The boy’s foster home is inadequate but not cruel.
“I do not know why you keep telling me these things,” he snaps as he pushes himself out from under the car he has just finished tinkering with.
Mercedes considers this. “Do you want me to stop?” she asks with entirely too much innocence.
He grumbles wordlessly.
Her smile widens.
He scowls. “Babble whatever you want. Just bring more of those brownies of yours in.”
A small figure ducks under the garage door. “Brownies?” the boy asks hopefully.
“Tomorrow,” Mercedes promises, finally digging out the wrench she was looking for. “How you doing, kid?”
He shrugs. His hair has grown too long again, and it flops over into his eyes.
Zee’s hands itch. He ignores it.
The boy is already disappearing back into the shop, presumably to grab cleaning supplies. As he should.
Only it appears the boy is not their only new arrival.
Zee’s eyes narrow as he watches the boy all but trip over himself to back away from the trio of too-sharp, too-pretty arrivals.
He knows them. He knows them all too well.
They had been true warriors once. Followers of Lugh and worthy of a proper fight.
They have become yapping dogs now. Arrogant dogs, if they dare show their faces here.
Mercedes straightens. Her hands go the edge of her shirt, teasing it up just in case. “Friends of yours?”
He snarls.
Their leader – Zee will not grace with him a name – raises his hands in mock placation. “Now, now. We just came to express our condolences. We heard your prey died before you could catch up with her. Or were you involved in that after all?”
One of the others turns to look at Tad. “At least you found your spawn,” she laughs. The sound grates across Zee’s nerves. “Is he worth keeping, do you think?”
For a single moment, Zee is perfectly calm.
Then Sieboldt Adelbertsmiter is in motion.
It has been too long since blood flowed under his hands.
It feels good to change that.
They have some power, of course. But they are less than what they were, and they have chosen to face him in his shop where he is surrounded by metal that answers to his call and only weakens them.
They are fools. Vicious, gossiping fools.
He wishes they’d died slower.
They yet have friends that he will find. Them, he will kill slower.
He is fae. And fae do not lie.
Only two fall to his hands. When he turns to look for the third, he sees the boy standing over her with a crowbar.
Or what was a crowbar. It has sharpened in his hands.
Mercedes’ clothes lie in a pool on the floor. He is relieved to see there is blood on her muzzle.
His boy is too young for his first blood.
His boy, who is now backing away from him.
Mercedes, wary, paces between them.
“I’ll go,” his boy says. His knuckles are white around the creaking metal in his hands. “I won’t bother you again.”
He is not letting the boy leave his sight for the next century.
“Your mother,” he says.
Your prey died before you could catch up with her.
Mercedes telling him Tad’s mother died of cancer.
All consuming grief threatens to subsume him.
He wants strong drink.
He wants more blood.
He wants someone to pay, and those who already have are not enough.
“What was your mother’s name?” He barely recognizes his own voice.
Tad tells him.
Zee’s world reconfigures itself. Grief crashes against wonder, and everything within him trembles.
Someone must die for this, he thinks again.
His foot nudges a corpse.
More must die for this.
The boy’s shoulders are as hunched as the Greek’s Atlas. “She knew what was coming,” he says. There are tears in his eyes, but his grip on his weapon never wavers. “She wanted to see if it would be safe here.”
Safe.
Mercedes’ eyes have suddenly intensified. They look up at Zee almost pleadingly.
Zee has many enemies. He has never given anyone much doubt that he is capable of making himself entirely safe from them.
The boy reads something into his incomprehension that isn’t there. His shoulders are tighter than ever, but he is spitting now. “I don’t care,” he says. “I don’t care if I’m good enough for you. I was good enough for her, and she was better than you’ll ever be.”
“Truth,” Zee says, and the word hurts his throat.
His eyes drink in the sight of this boy. This miracle.
His child.
The boy has not yet hit puberty. His heritage may yet sprout in ways others would deem unsightly.
But Zee has never cared for his people’s standards of anything.
And this is his son. All that is left in this world of her, and infinitely precious in his own right.
“That does not change the fact,” he adds, “that even from my eyes, you are entirely perfect.”
And the fey, as everyone knows, do not lie.