Chapter Text
They say you can only play faerie bride once. Like a lot of things that the fae say you could call it a truth mixed with lies or a falsehood seasoned with a little honesty, depending on your taste. I'm October Daye, and as I’m the result of my mother deciding she wanted to run off to play house with a mortal husband, I think I have a right to have an opinion on it. There are plenty of people who think I believe I have a lot more rights than I really do, which is just one of many reasons I’m not popular in certain circles. On the bad days, I feel like one of those circles is made up of the people who know me.
Just going by the definition accepted in Faerie, you could say that people play faerie bride over and over to the extent that maybe we could come up with a few new names. It really just means any time that one of us – though who’s part of that ‘us’ really depends on who’s talking – takes up a role in the mortal world. The Summerlands are pressed too close to it for most to resist visiting at least on occasion, and most grown purebloods look around the right age to excuse oddities by being a new kid on a college campus. If it's the right kind of college. Or being a new arrival in the right sort of city. San Francisco can by the right kind of city. But the type of faerie bride you imagine from stories?
My mom's never forgiven me for taking her from the husband and home she loved and stranding her in the Summerlands with a daughter who could never be good enough, but she’s not unique. Most fae have long memories, and don’t believe in letting go. That the Changeling's Choice is the one thing that came to me young might mean that she was cut-off from that life earlier than she wanted, but 'as long as she wanted' would've always ended with my dad's death. Purebloods don't like to acknowledge death, even though they scorn changelings and humans for their mortality. After they've experienced the loss of loving and losing a human once, I think they'd stay away. They have forever to mourn.
I don’t have forever, but I was planning on spending a lifetime with Cliff – with Cliff and our daughter. I knew I’d outlive Cliff – even a changeling can live for centuries – and most likely Gillian too when as she seemed just as thinblooded as I both hoped and feared, but I would’ve been there until the end. We would’ve had a life together. I would visit their graves as I visited my father’s, a place I never saw my mom. I couldn’t build a life in faerie, but I thought I was mortal enough for this. Then Simon Torquill turned me into a fish for fourteen years. I don’t remember those years. Everyone I was forced to leave behind remembers, and fourteen years in the mortal world is a lot to remember. It’s countless moments I’ve lost.
Sometimes it almost felt like I was back where I started when I first left the Summerlands: in the place between where neither world cares for you. I’d gone to the mortal world because I thought I could be my own person there in a way I couldn’t in Faerie. No, it almost felt like I was back where I was right before I met Cliff, when I realized that I had walked myself into another trap – but that girl had no idea what she could lose. That’s why she could never truly turn her back on Faerie. I can’t forget. I can’t forget that I had the chance to get to know the little girl my baby was growing into ripped away from me. I can’t forget the fear that I’ll never get the chance to know the teenager she became while I was gone.
And then there are the moments when I can’t forget not because of the nightmares or the aching loss but because I was sitting at a table with my former boyfriend’s boyfriend in a coffee shop that hadn’t existed when I went into the pond.
It was seven AM when good little changelings should be in bed, but I couldn’t exactly explain that I worked nights not because that was all I could get but because Daoine Sidhe are meant to go to sleep when dawn’s rosy fingers finished stripping us of magic to remind us of the dangers of the world. I couldn’t ask if Gillian found it hard to get up for reasons that went beyond being a normal teenager. I was drinking my third unreasonably priced coffee because I wanted to ask more than anything.
The first time I met Robin Beckett he looked just as shocked as you might expect someone would look at the sight of a woman who’d vanished fourteen years before only to stagger back to the family that he was now part of without any good answer to where and why she was gone. I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to him at the time, but I’d seen that he’d recovered pretty quickly. On short acquaintance, I can’t guess what else would count as drastic enough to shock him. Except for that first moment when he’d just stood staring, he seemed to take everything in stride. But then, he wasn’t the one who’d been abandoned. Maybe that’s why he was watching me drink the third cup in what looked like mild fascination while neither Cliff nor Gillian were interested in making contact.
I wished Cliff was there. I wished Gillian was there more than I’d ever wanted anything before. And I’d spent a lot of long nights dreaming of my dad or of the days my mom had loved me. If I told myself that it was because I was a realist, then I could say it was because there was a chance Gillian would forgive me. It felt more far fetched then the dreams of a dead man. My father died never knowing that I’d gotten a chance to grow up.
Instead, I had Robin sitting across from me, still on his first cup. I took the chance to really look at him, even if he wasn’t the face I wanted. His hair was a rich brown with undertones of red that came out during the summer. His eyes were a bright blue that made even the blue of my human disguise look washed out. He’s the sort of guy who’s handsome in photographs but is even better looking in person. A lifetime around fullblood Daoine Sidhe has left me with a lot of examples of astonishing good looks, but it didn’t blind me to them.
I didn’t know why Robin had called me. I had grudgingly called him back. I have nothing to hold against him, and even less reason to do so. I should be grateful. He’d been there for Cliff. He’d been there for Gillian. He’d arranged for the meeting with no suggestion that he noticed my tone was less than charming.
I’ve managed to let down a lot of people over the years. So it’s almost impressive that there’s no faster way to make me feel like a bad person for feeling any sense of unfairness knowing that part of the reason Gillian didn’t want to talk to me was because I was the mother who’d left and he was the man who’d been like a father to her and yet the law would lean to me rather than him. That’s one thing faerie has over the mortal world, but she didn’t know that, and she wouldn’t benefit from it. There were moments I resented him as the symbol of everything I’d lost. If I really wanted to, I could probably recreate that feeling if I went and walked around Shadow Hills for a while to soak in guilt there.
“Cliff said you liked coffee,” Robin said. His voice was light and amused, with an accent from somewhere in New England.
I tried my best to smile at him. “You haven’t seen anything else.” I could hear it fall flat, but he didn’t let things fall into the awkward silence I would’ve. He seemed to like to put people at their ease. It’s not something I’ve been noted to be good at.
“Not yet. I’m sorry for having woken you. I understand that you work nights. But…” he paused, taking a moment to select his words. “I thought I should say hello.” He didn’t say ‘when I’m not standing at the edge of an awkward attempt at some sort of reunion’. I thought he might have, if he knew me better. I’d heard him laughing with Cliff. I’d seen how Gillian had turned into him when he put his arm around her shoulder.
“Why?” I asked, with a suspicion that I’d earned fairly over my life, and which I probably wasn’t directing fairly. But not being careful enough had already cost me fourteen years. It cost me the people he loved.
He looked at me steadily, even as he sorted sugar packets into neat piles. “You’re Gillian’s mother. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything. But Gilly gets to choose what it could mean, at least for her. I don’t know you, but I hope you can understand why that means I’d want to know you.”
I paused. He had every right to tell me to fuck off and never try to get near them again. He could have been politely waiting for us to have a moment to meet. I would have had every right to hate him for it, but it was what I expected. Or maybe it was what I thought I deserved.
“I’d like to get to know her dad.” I didn’t want the man who loved her to be a stranger to me. I couldn’t turn back the years, but we still had time.
You can only play faerie bride once, but in the light of the sun I thought that I might have a second chance. They’ll write ‘she should’ve known better’ on my tombstone. If I get one this time around.