Prompt Post #3

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FILL: Head All Unkilter 2/?

[(Anonymous)]

ii.

Once upon a time, The Leanansidhe finds a blind thirteen year old changeling as he cons a businessman on the streets of New York. The businessman is handsome with thick black hair and he’s wearing a gleaming gold watch, an impeccable suit and lines around his brows etched from years of a cruel scowl. A mortal who uses others, one The Leanansidhe could see striking a bargain with, who could be useful to her until he’s not and she unravels him piece by piece.

The Leanansidhe watches as the little changeling picks the man’s pocket, but not with some sleight of hand, though nimble fingers indicate the potential to do otherwise. The blind little boy smiles, spins sugar with a meek voice, weaving a subtle glamour with every nervous gesture and brave but teary tremor. The businessman has his mouth open, scathing words on his tongue, before he suddenly blinks and swallows. He sways as if pushed by wind and then hands over a thick stack of cash, eyebrows knitted in puzzlement.

“Is this enough? I have more.”

The changeling touches the man’s wrist, ignoring the money.

“I couldn’t take it—"

“No, it’s the least I could do. Please—"

“Thank you, you’re so kind, I just wanted someone to listen—"

“Please, take it, I want you to, I want to feel like I’m helping—"

“Well I could take a small amount, for dinner and some shoes, but not all of it—"

The businessman only adds more bills to the stack. The boy takes it, removes his glasses to show tears welling in his unseeing eyes, and hugs the man. The businessman seems to crumple in on himself, appearing for a moment as small on the outside as he is on the inside. He grasps the boy, almost lifting him off his feet, and thanks the blind changeling for taking his money.

The man earnestly guides the boy to an ice cream stand, wanting to please him, and the boy graciously accepts the cone the man buys for him, blushing and manfully wiping at his eyes. When the businessman leaves, the boy throws his cone away, uneaten.

Changelings are uninteresting and weak. A blight on her kind. Their pain an old, worn story of being caught between two worlds. But she found him, and she doesn’t believe in coincidence. She ties her shadows to his. She follows him.

“You’re interesting, for a changeling,” The Leanansidhe greets him finally at the close of day after watching him effortlessly scale the side of a building. The sunset is almost tangible, bringing a chill wind into the city. The Winter Solstice is just a month away and already she feels her power waxing with a familiar mania.

The boy lives on a roof above the end of an alley. His roof juts against two slightly taller buildings, creating a nook that is sheltered from the both the weather and prying eyes. He has a nest of flat cardboard and two thick blankets. He has three small boxes, two stacked to the side to serve as a chair, one hidden for safekeeping underneath his nest of blankets. In this one he puts the money next to a well-worn rosary, and from one of the other boxes he takes an apple which he bites into with mechanical obligation.

“I’m not sure what you are yet,” the boy responds, the juice of the apple sparkling on his full lips. “It’s impossible, but you can’t be human.” His sunglasses are off, his eyes a plain brown and yet she’s only seen eyes as captivating among other members of the Courts. She reaches out and runs her fingers over his eyes to test for a glamour, giggling when his eyelashes tickle her.

“Your hair,” she murmurs as she runs her hand through it, smiling when he leans searchingly into her touch. Only a lonely little boy, beneath all of the mystique. “It’s rare for a changeling to have human-colored hair. Or,” she admits, “be blind.” She rests her hand against his throat and feels his pulse, fluttering like a young bird in a cage.

The little boy reaches up, earnest. The last of the sun bounces off of the corner of his hideout and his glassy eyes seem to draw in all of the light. He smells of apple, which reminds her of cider and home. Amused, she leans down at his unspoken request, lets his hand run through her long, curly red hair.

“A changeling?” He asks, voice soft and sweet and broken. She in her turn leans into his touch when his fingers dance across her face, cup her cheekbones. She sighs when he runs a thumb where her jaw softens to her throat and neck.

“The offspring of a fairy and a human. Your fairy sire must be quite interesting. Do you know who it is?”

He fails to cover a flash of confusion. She frowns, wary. “You don’t know what you are.” Her soft touch at his shoulder becomes deadly as she grips his throat, squeezing until his breath cuts off with a high whine. “You don’t know of what I speak.” She bares her teeth at him, angry and insulted that he gained knowledge, power, from her without her consent. The boy gasps futilely, dropping his apple. It rolls slowly until it bumps cool and wet against her bare heel.

He doesn’t fight her, doesn’t grip her arm and claw at her skin. His eyes look up to her, missing her face by half an inch. His face isn’t contorted into a plea, his pretty lips don’t move in silent begging. Maybe something’s broken in him like it is in her, but he doesn’t even have the decency to be afraid.

She lets him go and laughs heartily over his choking gasps. “You conned information out of me!”

“You’re a…fairy,” he guesses, testing the word. “It’s crazy but you have to be. Your heart sounds different. Slower, almost silent like… stone. Like—like snow falling on concrete.”

She tilts her head, thinking that his lips are so full and pretty, and he so fragile and small, it puts her in the mind of ducklings and little breakable duckling bones. “Tell me your name, and then speak of what else is different about me.”

His ignorance of his heritage is obvious when he freely gives her his name, Matthew Murdock, and she savors how the power of his name expands within her. Then he tells her what his other senses see about her. He tells her about the burning smell of clean ice, a song in the air that makes him weep but he couldn’t begin to describe, hair as soft as spider webs, skin as smooth as bone, eyelashes like insect legs, a voice as wide and beautiful as the blue sky—or what he remembers of a blue sky, anyway.

She teaches him how to put his words in a song. How to focus his will into his words. By the end of the long night the power woven into his song about her is palpable magic.

Twice she finds him, the second time only one month later. She is on a short errand for her Queen, but she looked for him in the streets for two days, thinking him dead when she didn’t see the flash of his pale skin and the glint of his glasses. On the eve of her parting she indulges her curiosity and stops by his hideout to find him half-naked and bloody, rank with infection and fever.

The Leanansidhe has found the changeling twice, and she believes in nurturing an investment. So she sits in his cramped nook and pulls his little fragile duckling bones onto her lap. She surrounds him with her hair, a thread of winter, a stitch of shadow and a touch of the moon. She sings to him, the song he created for her on the long night of their first meeting.

In the morning he is healed enough to wake and live through the rest of winter, if he be wise, but she is long gone.

She finds Matthew a third time in the spring. He’s taller, still thin but winter-blessed with whipcord strength. He’s even more charming, and she wonders why he doesn’t have New York eating out of his hand—or feeding him by hand. She frowns to consider that he may lack ambition, which means her future manipulation might be more difficult.

But she can’t deny how he shines bright with better bright beneath amongst the dirge of humans, like a ruby in the sun, incarnadine and unmistakable. But she is The Leanansidhe, she knows the hearts of men, and she can see the shadows on Matthew’s are already long and deep.

She finds him in Central Park, far away from his neighborhood, a place she’s amused to find out is called Hell’s Kitchen. There’s a festival, bright colors and the smell of grease and sugar. There’s even a maypole with colorful, elegant ribbons. Shouting. Laughter. She stops by to regard the curiosity, like viewing an ugly reptile through glass. She thinks of festivals from not too long ago, ones that used to spring up around a hanging or a beheading. Now there’s face painting and balloon animals.

Matthew is a wisp of wind, a flicker in the corner of an eye, hair flying about his head, shining like sun dappling on a lake’s surface. He’s casing the crowd, selecting his victims with careful ease, appearing at the elbows of anyone who seems like they might be morally reprehensible to his standard (or maybe some abstract human standard, not that she knows or cares what standard that currently is). She wonders if moral reprehensibility is among the things Matthew can hear or smell.

He stumbles into one man, picks a money clip while he drops his cane. The man chokes on a curse while Matthew tearily apologizes. As soon as the man looks away Matthew pirouettes, plucking a flower from a nearby stand before stumbling into a severe-looking woman. She takes longer, five minutes and a heart-wrenching, sickening smile. Matthew offers her a flower, the woman offers him a stack of folded-up bills. Then he’s off again, choosing his marks while singing under his breath.

—Catch and carry.
Ash and Ember.
Elderberry.

An aging man, eyes hardened, dressed in a stifling pinstripe suit too hot for the day.

Fallow farrow.
Ash and oak.

Another man, bulky shoulders and blood shot eyes who’s shadowing a young woman and her daughter. Matthew doesn’t pause to encounter him. Just takes his wallet, pocketing meager, wadded bills before handing the rest over to a police officer and worriedly claiming to have heard some nefarious plan to hurt a woman from the owner of the wallet.

Bide and borrow.
Chimney smoke.

Barrel. Barley—

“Who taught you that?” She asks him, suddenly in his path so he has to skid to a stop to avoid crashing into her. If he’s surprised he doesn’t show it. She pouts, feeling a little robbed.

He debates his words for long minutes. He’d gleaned from their first meeting, in between all of the questions she left unanswered, the potency of words and now he deals and hoards his with miser jealousy, which is quite amusing when juxtaposed with his painfully horrendous lying prowess. As a result, Matthew works with half-truths and evasions, just like a fairy. Eventually, he decides he can part with a full and honest answer to her question.

“I just know it. I think someone I knew used to sing it, but it must have been forever ago because I don’t remember them at all. Only the song.” He hums the rest and she hums with him, her heart swelling to hear the notes of the old, old song sung in the clear, piping voice of a youth.

He must have heard it from his fairy parent. The Leanansidhe wasn’t the least interested in who that was before, and told Matthew as much when he asked. But now she finds herself intrigued with the mystery.

Before they part the third time, she spies him slipping into an aging building in his neighborhood. St. Agnes’s Orphanage. He leaves the stuffed animals he stole from the festival on the beds of the really young children while they sleep. He deposits most of the cash he picked up into the donation box.

Her little changeling is ambitious after all. And a foolish, bleeding heart. But she could work and shape those things.

Her undertaking in New York for her fair, dread Queen lasts another two years. The Leanansidhe drifts in and out of the city as her business demands, but her blind changeling finds her each time she lets him (and once or twice when she didn’t intend to). He follows her, quite like a little duckling, everywhere from the seedy underground to high-class galas and parties.

At each place he grifts into, her little duckling usually manages to swindle the most despicable men and women he can find with nothing more than charisma and a self-deprecating smile. Only once she witnesses it backfire on him and watches as Matthew is hauled away into a dark alley by three men. Watches from the window above when he breaks their grip and avoids their hands, spinning around them and pointing at each one while she wonders if “Magpole, maypole,” is sliding off his tongue in his youthful, honeyed voice. He leaves them without harming them, easily shimmying up a nearby fire escape and disappearing amongst the maze of roof tops.

There is one time when a throng of street boys corner Matthew. His shelter is just above him but he doesn’t run to it, doesn’t reveal it. It takes long, long minutes before the boys land a blow hard enough to knock Matthew to the ground. One rears back, kicks him in the face, bloodies teeth and sweet lips. Matthew cries out, not in pain or fear but in rage and The Leanansidhe delights to see something other than a bone snap in her duckling.

Quicker than thought, Matthew reaches out and breaks the kicker’s leg. Before the other boys even realize what’s happening, her duckling is back on his feet and breaking another boy’s nose. He dislocates the last one’s shoulder. Their tears are mixing into the filth of the alley when Matthew returns to the kicker, who’s dazed with pain, and deliberately breaks the older boy’s jaw with bloodied knuckles.

After the boys are gone, she dances around her duckling, clapping excitedly at the gratuitous violence, at the revenge. She grips his broken hand in hers, digging her thumb between grinding duckling bones. He winces but continues to tilt his face to her with an absence of fear.

“My little duckling,” she says out loud for the first time, naming and claiming him. She’d found him three times, she’d saved him from Death. She found him when he’d been cast aside. Taught him the power of things when no one else saw what he could be. He belongs to her. Not to Death. Not to humans. Not to himself.

Finders, keepers.

She presses her lips against his hand, whispers a word and bends her will, healing him with magic just to see the look of awe and devotion brighten his features.