CW: a seizure, discussion of drugs.
Coming out onto the street behind the Babadock Restaurant, Cade let loose an echoing whistle and it drew a white yellow cab to them, a female goblin sitting in a booster seat behind the wheel. Opening the back door, Cade let Simon, the human sidhe-seer, go in first, waiting for him to scoot over before he folded his long, slender torso in half and slid inside as well. Speaking in Gaelic, Cade gave the driver an address in eastside, a particularly derelict part of Vestal.
"This shouldn't take too long," Cade said to Simon. "Depends on how much of a fuss King is making. Don't feel threatened. If ye think of something, offer it up. Ye might get grief fer bein' human but I'm sure you're familiar with that. You can take it.
"The Harvest Man is... He's a big deal, yeah? A very powerful sidhe, even makes Holmgren nervous. He's a type of boogeyman, which is the highest ranking boggart, and their magic is all about the dreaming and fear. So, just keep yer cool, act respectful but confident. Ye belong with me, alright? Ye belong at the table. Oh also, don't look in his eyes."
"Be polite, let you know if I hear lies, speak up if I think of something, " Simon repeated with a dutiful nod. "And don't meet the Harvest Man's eyes. Don't act like prey."
That reality hung in the air between them a moment longer before the cab finally came to a stop and Cade paid the goblin lass up front. Leading the way out of the cab into the mid afternoon daylight, the fiery glanced with a predator's wary confidence at the street, grinning as he entered a building that looked like it should have been condemned.
It was a bar. A bar that shouldn't even count as a reasonable establishment anymore. Inside, things were slanting at bad angles, wood supports rotting and brick and stucco on the walls crumbling, breaking apart. It reeked of vomit and piss right inside the door and although there was no sign of such in the vicinity, the floor was sticky.
The lighting was dim and anemic, the few lights sallow and almost orange, lightbulbs stuttering in their fixtures. There were fae here but they were a sad and sorry crowd. At the bar there were 3 rowdy sidhe who were laughing boisterously, sloppily drunk. Cade motioned at the bar for a couple of beers and got a pitcher of urine yellow, foamy shite, with four dirty glasses.
Through the gloom of the place, Cade found the back table King Rat had staked out for them. Nothing in this place went together, so, the booth was the only booth with a circular table and a half-ring bench seat, the cushions with tears and stuffing exploding out of them and dark stains in dubious arse shapes upon the puke orange pleather. It was obvious why the far darrig had chosen it though. Up against the wall right across from the table, crowding the corner was a plain, 2-door wardrobe. It fit with the rest of the place in that it didn't fit and looked like it had faced several curbside rejections and pickups before finally ending up in this place.
King Rat was either smoking so hard or had been here long enough to fill the space above the table with yellow furze weed smoke, smelling sickly sweet and bitter at the same time. He was probably no taller than Cade at 6'3" but his very slender appearance and skinny legs made him look gangly and freakishly long.
He had pointed ears and on the seat beside him gleamed an oily, fleshy tail, thick at the base and going to a long, skinny point. The only real clue to his fae-ness. He had a skunk striped black beard, thick framing his chin and jawline, and he had a pale white mohawk. Wearing a thick leather jacket, grimy grey pants splattered and congealed with stains, the far darrig looked like a cross between a homeless man and a rockstar. Especially with the thousands of pewter rings dominating both hands.
Staying close to the fiery, Simon kept his hands to himself, not wanting to touch much of anything as they approached the booth and the Fae that must have been King Rat. There was a definite feral sort of rattiness to the Fae sitting there, smoking a vile sort of weed that immediately made Simon regret his earlier sandwich.
Yet as they approached, Simon took stock of King Rat with a sweep of his eyes and a scan of his brain. And again, he recoiled silently as a shiver of disgust went through him. The Fae felt like rot and sickness, disease and filth, as if he farted STDs and would gleefully infect everything good and clean in this world.
"Cade," King Rat said with a salacious smile, yellow smoke seeping through his yellow and green teeth. "I thought he might send you to help me out with this."
"Aye," Cade said, setting down the beer pitcher and glasses. "By the by, this is Morgan. He's the new lad on the crew."
"Pretty pretty," King murmured on a drawl. "How's his ass taste?"
"Focus, please," Cade huffed a laugh. He hadn't sat down yet, stepping over to the creaky, splintered wardrobe. "Have ye opened the forgotten pass, yet?"
He asked the question as he answered it himself, opening the doors and revealing the wardrobe was empty. Even by the sick, orange lamplight, they could see into the depths of the old piece of furniture and other than some stray child's scribbles against the inside of the doors, there was nothing hanging in it.
"No, I didn't," King said with a defensive clip to his tone, pouring himself a beer from the pitcher. "I didn't want to risk him getting here early and having to sit here alone with him while I waited for you and Holmgren."
Cade clicked his tongue, annoyed but still a little amused as he took off his pinstripe suit jacket. Taking a bent and rickety looking hanger down, Cade put the jacket on it and promptly hung it up in the closet. "Simon. King. Come on, now. We're not going to get this shite solved unless he comes. So..."
He made a motion at them both and after a moment, King Rat made a surly growl and jerked his own leather jacket off, tossing it rudely to the fiery, who hung it up. Simon's grey suit coat too came off with nary a complaint and got hung up in the closet. It looked a little plain and ridiculous, the three jackets hanging in the closet, very barebones to the point that the back wall of the wardrobe could still be seen between them. Even still, Cade seemed satisfied, closing both doors as best he could as the right didn't quite set into the frame as snug as it might have once upon a time.
Coming to sit at the booth, Cade poured him and Simon both drinks from the pitcher.
"Can I tell you about this now?" King Rat asked in rude impatience. He was wearing a very loose tanktop now that showed off his emaciated arms, both covered in tattoos, his left arm littered with 70 bats, from the back of his hand all the way up to the shoulder. An antler or a tree snaked up the entire length of that arm, so, some of the bats roosted and some were in flight between the "branches".
"Ye don't want to wait fer HM to arrive?" Cade asked with a smirk.
Even if the place had been clean, Simon wouldn't have drank the beer, but the human let his fingers grasp the glass genu, turning it back and forth while he let his eyes wander over King Rat, and then back to Cade again with a little shake of his head.
"Can't hurt to at least hear the story," he offered as he gave the fiery a look.
If they were here to work, then Simon wanted to work. He didn't want to spend longer in this dive bar than absolutely necessary.
"What do you and the Harvest Man have to fight about, anyway? Territory? Goods? From what I understand, it's not smart to fuck around with him."
"Exactly," King Rat said, thrusting his cigarette hand for emphasis, glad in his ire to have anybody on his side, forgetting that he didn't really know the human. "As for the fight itself, it's about pricing and product. And dignity and fucking respect. You know? That pussy Hat Man is ripping me off!"
King didn't get much farther in his rant when the wardrobe seductively opened its doors. Despite the orange lights that stood above the table and the piece of furniture, the interior could no longer be seen. The three coats had become an instrument of obscurity, the depths of the little closet and all around the hanging fabric steeped in a void of darkness. The light above the table flickered with a soft, buzzing tinkling as a voice echoed out of the wardrobe.
"Come now dour little rat man... speak honestly and tell us how you really feel."
It was a shifting, layered voice. A deep man's voice, scratching and gravelled, like a grandfather with a little one on his knee, telling tales in an even, patient tempo. And then it was the dulcet tones of a matronly woman, calm and soothing, honey warm, telling a child to go back to bed, all was well with the night world. Mother and father dancing through each word, both present yet also one or the other heard at different stress points.
As the boogeyman emerged from the darkness within the wardrobe, Cade reached out to touch Simon's arm. It was a protective gesture, a reminder because he could see the way Simon's body language reacted to seeing the movement of that figure from the corner of his eyes. It was a primal urge to look and Cade was suddenly, acutely aware of the danger he was putting the human into. There wasn't much the fiery could do to dissuade a predator as big and overwhelming as the Harvest Man.
The Harvest Man wore a black top hat with a wide brim and a black overcoat that disguised the true nature of his form, other than broad shoulders. However as he stepped into the light above the table and took a seat next to Cade, his hat and coat seemed to morph and move with colors of shadowy dark brown and muddy blue-grey. Taking off his hat and setting it on the table, his black wiry mop of hair seemed to do the same thing, dreamily swirling with auburn browns and lightening to autumn hay yellow.
The creature had no eyebrows, eyes large in his head, deranged and sleepless. Yet if one were to describe him, it would be the smile that dominated his face. There were no muscles or skin in the corners, the grin eternally open up into the cheeks, exposing all the teeth in the mouth all at once. And they seemed a shifting crazed mass of tiles and slivers, fighting for presence in their rows, hard to say whether there were simply top teeth and bottom teeth, or if there was actually mid rows 3 and 4 wedged in there. It was unpleasant to look at, hurting the mind to try to make sense of it, to count the rows or find the line between them where the mouth opened and words came out. And not least of all disturbing was the way the grey-green tongue came out occasionally to swipe across the teeth to lick them, which he did frequently from the moment he sat down.
King Rat seemed undaunted, glaring at the monster with undisguised bitterness and rivalry. "I'm telling the truth! You're trying to take me for a ride, asshole!" Looking across the table at Cade and Simon, King Rat jerked and gestured at the Harvest Man, imploring them to see the unfairness. "First, he's ass-blasting me on the prices for the dream swill he harvests. Second, he's not pushing my product AT ALL."
"I have a right to set prices for my own product."
"Aye, ye do," Cade said, taking a swig of the foamy beer. "That's in the agreement, so, we're not gonna bother with that. Harvest Man and the bugbears collect the dreams and they can sell them for what they want." King Rat scoffed in offense over that, so disgruntled as he sat back in his seat. "What about King's drugs? Is it true? Are ye not selling them?"
Cade almost looked into Harvest Man's eyes when the boogeyman turned his face to leer at the fiery and had to jerk his gaze away, a stab of anxiety causing his large, moth-like wings to twitch.
"We try to sell them. they're not popular with anyone other than pixies. tis not my fault if it won't move with my clients."
"BULLSHIT! That's bullshit!" King Rat burst out, livid and loud as he banged a fist on the tabletop. "Anybody can get high on pixie dust and sugar spice! It's manufactured to appeal to pixies, yes, but other people can get a good high from them. You're just not selling it right! You're not even trying! Because you think you're better than me! You think you're hot shit!"
A chalky white hand with brittle fingernails motioned in appeal to Cade and the fiery tried to focus on the limb rather than give in to the urge to meet the being's gaze.
"cocaine has worse risk factors but my customers report it as better than the extreme sugar crash and hallucinations that come from pixie drugs. their higher metabolic rate is designed to keep them stable when the drugs wear off. other beings simply aren't built for it."
"Bullshit! They're stoner drugs akin to shrooms or a party drug like LSD," King argued. "If you're selling them as a cocaine substitute, then you're doing it wrong, asswipe!"
"if they don't buy what can i do?"
From the first subtle creek of the wardrobe opening Simon was on high alert, all his senses acutely aware. A primal sort of rush ran through him, the same fear he had felt as a child in a silent room where shadows twisted and dominated, and nails clicked across worn wood.
The entire world seemed to darken, the air suddenly cold and Simon's nerves aching as the hair along his neck stood up. Staring wide eyed at the glass in front of him, the human watched the movement of a figure in the dirty reflection, while everything in his body screamed at him to leave.
Not leave, run. Fast and hard. To never look back and to never stop.
Don't act like prey. Don't act like prey. Don't act like prey.
...i remember you...
He tried. He stayed seated. He didn't move around. But his anxiety was spiking at 100, his heart rate racing, pounding straight out of his chest, and the human was trembling ever so slightly in fear, the human wished he could wail when the Harvest Man took his seat.
...simon morgan...
But there was one small advantage to his terror. Simon's world had shrunk down to a single objective in the presence of the Harvest Man: survival, preferably with his sanity in fact but even that was negotiable right now. And he was thinking very fast, wanting this meeting over as swiftly as possible. So as the two Otherworldly criminals argued, Simon was tightening his grip upon his glass and kept his head down, and spoke in a rapid tumble of words strained with the anxiety and fear wafting off of him like perfume.
sweet...so sweet....
"Let Rat bring his own dealers in to sell the drugs. He sets his prices just like Harvest Man, neither of them interfere with each other. Each of you know your business. Harvest Man's is in the bedroom, and Rat's is in the street."
He had to look up. The very idea made him feel ill, but Simon had to look up. It took a moment to steel himself, but when he did, his wide, terrified eyes focused only on King Rat, desperately trying not to see the Harvest Man from the corner of his eye.
look at me, boy...
It might have been funny if Simon's voice wasn't quavering, or if he had the wherewithal to follow the joke through, but all he wanted now was to end the meeting.
look at me.
I don't want to.... Please...
"Please...." the human panted, his voice hardly a whisper as he felt a distant screaming rising in the back of his skull, a child's scream, that was echoing and becoming a mother's broken wail.
you were marked
He was trembling in his seat, head to toe every muscle held in tension, head to toe every inch of him shaking. The only reason his chin didn't wibble was because he clenched his jaw so tight it ached and left him feeling a little light headed.
Shut up...
such a vibrant mind...
Stop it.
white coats, comforting daily injections, soft padded rooms
Stop it!
I visited you more than your own blood.
"SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!"
The words erupted from Simon in a sudden anguished cry as the human stood up so quickly his rotting chair fell over behind him and cracked upon the ground. He was moving without a thought, his hand reaching for his gun, the weight comforting and heavy in his hand as he pointed it towards the Harvest Man and sighted down the barrel. He squeezed the trigger but the waking nightmare took hold as the gun clicked dry and empty and Simon saw the Harvest Man's face.
The wailing was getting louder, drowning him in the anguish and pain that accompanied it as he stared into that indescribable face of terror, the Harvest Man's form shifting and contorting with cracking, jerking movements as he filled Simon's vision. The gun slipped from his hand, falling to clatter uselessly as a child's toy onto the ground, and Simon's eyes rolled back as he spasmed, teeth gritting tight.
But all of that, never happened. Simon never got to draw his weapon, pantomiming firing at the powerful boggart, terror clear in his eyes as he mimed holding the gun. In an instant he was caught between wakefulness and dreaming, locked in a nightmare more clear and real than any he had had in youth. And his mother's sobbing cries were deafening him as his brain decided, nope, not dealing with this.
Pressure was exploding inside of his skull as he pitched backwards, entire body stiff and bowed. His skull struck the ground first, propping him up for a moment in an arch over the sticky, rotten floor, and spittle foamed thick at the corners of his mouth, soon to be tinged red with blood. He spasmed, hands curling into claws that hovered at the base of his neck and tore into expensive cloth, his body flopping like a fish and long legs twitching and kicking. All the while locked in his mind, Simon's brain attempted a hard reset, blanking out utterly in an attempt to drown out the screams as his eyes rolled back, heart beating fast and thready as if it might stop at any moment.
But this wasn't the typical seizure. This was utterly violent, his entire body rejecting the sight of the Harvest Man, every spasm and contortion knocking into furniture as Simon's face went ashy, his lips taking on a purplish hue as blood rushed to his vital organs.
It was hideous, frightening, and chaotic.
And poor Simon wasn't even aware of it, or much of anything as he spasmed on the filthy ground.
The sudden explosion of shouting from Simon, his abrupt standing from the table, and pointing an invisible gun at the Harvest Man had Cade bubbling up with overwhelming laughter. King Rat joined him too, because it was just so outlandish and immediately, both Unseelie knew what had happened.
Simon was an idiot.
He'd looked at the most powerful predator seated at the table when he'd been specifically warned not to. And it was actually kind of brilliant watching the human submit to the dream, falling victim to the alluring powers that surrounded the boogeyman in an aura.
However, Cade stopped laughing when Simon hit his head. Well, it took him a moment. Because the lad flopping back onto the ground like a fish flopping on the deck, was pretty hilarious as an image. Cade lost sound as he laughed so hard, nothing but air was wheezing from his esophagus. Behind him, seated in the booth, King Rat flopped over on his side on the bench, hooting and bellowing away, long, skinny legs wiggling as he held his middle and laughed.
Cade's laughter slowed to a stuttering stop as he looked down at the human, realizing by the grimacing, purple face and the froth at the corners of his mouth, that this was more serious than he'd thought. Even still, Harvest Man was quicker than Cade, getting up from the booth seat and crouching over Simon before the fiery could really process what was going on. And when he saw the thick syringe pulled from the boogeyman's jacket, Cade was up, putting a hand on the monster's shoulder.
"Stop! Don't. Please... Don't harvest from him..." Cade said, his voice growing quiet, trying to affect respect as Harvest Man turned to leer at him with unreadable predatory hunger. Those eyes made Cade flinch in reflex, focusing on the teeth instead, watching as grey-green tongue swept out several times to clean rickety layered teeth of bloody, inky drool.
Honestly, he didn't know if Harvest Man plundering Simon's nightmares right now would hurt him or not. But he knew for a fact that Harvest Man didn't give a shite if he hurt the human and wouldn't stop even if it did. So, Cade wasn't going to take a chance on an Unseelie he didn't trust. Especially as he was now terrified that he'd accidentally broken his boss's newest pretty thing.
Without argument, Harvest Man got up and left the human laying and quaking upon the floor and Cade jumped down from his seat to crouch beside Simon. Cade was not a medical expert, especially on human anatomy, so, it was truly frightening, the gruesome visage Simon had on and for once in his immortal life, he felt helpless. Running a slender hand over Simon's forehead and hair, tapping the lad's cheek in encouragement, the fiery cooed at him, said his name, tried to get him to rouse in some way.
"C'mon, lad, please be okay... Daddy's goin' to feckin' throttle me..." he muttered under his breath worriedly.
King Rat had calmed the intensity of his laughing fit and was standing beside the table still chortling in much amusement. "Wow! Gotta say, entertainment is definitely something we gotta make a regular thing of at these get togethers. I'm not even mad anymore."
Cade looked over his shoulder at the two other sidhe, trying to exert some authority over the situation.
"You'll not touch him. He's a member of the crew. I'll not let ye do anything to him while he's defenseless. He's... suffering... Having some sort of health issue. I don't know how to help him. What did ye do to him?"
The last was asked of Harvest Man but the menacing fae simply shrugged broad shoulders and spoke through his forever grin.
"he's very scared. that's all. i wasn't even aware of him really..."
"He told ye ta shut up. You were inside his head," Cade forcefully reprimanded him.
Harvest Man waited a beat and then itched his stringy, wiry blonde hair with a chalky white finger.
"well some part of me is always turned on. if i preyed on him, i promise, 'twas not intentional."
Cade didn't know how much he believed that. Especially with how readily Harvest Man got up with a syringe to pull Simon's nightmares out of him. It could have simply been an opportunistic impulse or a planned attempt to capture the human's essence.