[Puck/Meghan Chase] - [Iron Fey] - [The Rogue's Ball]
Title: The Rogue's Ball
Fandom: Iron Fey
Character/Pairing: Puck/Meghan Chase
Prompt List: Wanderlust
Prompt: Crossroads
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2524
Author's Notes: A collection of small scenes, hopefully connected.
Summary: Puck wants decisive action, but is unfortunately blocked.
Everyone was at a crossroads of some kind. And at Arcadia, the palace of crossing paths and crossed loyalties (let alone monarchs), all roads met at it dangerous intersection.
The palace of the Summer Fey was in rare form tonight. While parties and over-the-top celebrations tended to be something of a regular occurrence, it was this time of the year that everyone really went all out for. The opportunity to show off to visiting rivals, after all, tended to inspire some degree of competence spirit even in the long slog of immortality.
The Hedge was hung with garlands, and every archway was enshrined with greenery and ribbons made of spun spidersilk and woven leaves. Across the ballroom floor, servants were already hurrying trays of delicacies into position and primping tablecloths and finely sculpted centerpieces on the tree-formed slabs that made their tables. To a casual observer, Arcadia would be getting ready for a grand feast. To an insider, though, as Puck was, it was just another skirmish between nations, another attempt by one side to wrest control, favor, opinion to their side.
It was amazing how long he'd been away from this and hadn't missed it one bit.
Humans, though less cunning, were just that: less devious, less caught up in rituals where both sides walked the edge of a knife for the sake of tradition and self-aggrandizement. Humans liked change.
And Robin Goodfellow was beginning to wonder whether he was so very different.
But, it wasn't his night to be making any moves on that count, let alone any moves at all. Puck made himself comfortable on the armrest of Oberon's throne, his raven wings tucked sullenly close, avoiding the bars of his cage carefully. Though not iron, they were still strongly enchanted with enough Summer magic to make even him delirious if he got too close.
The Erlking was doing everything that he could to make sure that his right-hand man and chief jester did not enjoy this. Although, Puck had to admit, not many people in Arcadia were enjoying much of anything since he and Meghan had gotten back.
For instance, there was a certain Summer Queen who took particular umbrage at it.
"Husband," Titania said with deadly composure, resplendent in her golden-green gown as she occupied the throne adjacent to Oberon's. "Though we must suffer Lady Mab and her court," she said this last word with a sneer, "I am pleased at least that the half-breed will not be in attendance."
Though lithe and slim as a shoot of grass, Oberon still had an unmistakable aura of power around him. His hand stopped tapping the armrest near Puck's cage as he watched the preparations, a sudden frisson of stillness shook the air. Even the motion of him arching a brow seemed to send small waves, disturbances of power through the air, as though he were a giant walking amongst ants. When he did speak, it was with the same heaviness and candor that Titania had, but with a sting at the tail, the threat that she had tried to make but that only he could deliver:
"While I am glad to have given you pleasure," he paused, perhaps for irony or for emphasis, "I would remind you that my affairs are just that: mine. Take care, wife, it would do you well not to meddle with them."
Titania's lips were pressed white with fury but she made no reply. Rolling his too-green eyes, a gesture comical even for a bird, Puck scratched at the floor of his cage. No, no one was going to have a good time at this party. It would be the same old routine: angry kings and queens, dirty looks and tricks from both courts, fights, dancing, someone getting out of hand and getting turned into an animal. All in a night's work.
You'd think that with all this conflict, something interesting would happen.
-o-
His heart beat like a wardrum, an anapest trapped in a horse's chest. His breath came fast and then faster, even though his lungs were strong enough to handle it, his back strong enough to bear the weight of the girl who clung to him desperately, he knew the truth of their situation even before the first of the ice arrows whizzed dangerously close to Meghan's head.
They would not be able to outrun a wild hunt. Especially not one led by Ash.
He wanted to tell her something, anything really, that would make her understand that he didn't think of her as unimportant, as just another piece of luggage that he transported from place to place at the beck and call of Oberon. There had been others like that- it was Faery, what could anyone expect? - but she was not one of them.
Meghan gasped and clung tighter as a barrage shuddered into the trees they passed, sending ice creeping through the trunks like arms reaching out, trying to grab at them. "Robbie, you've got to go faster!"
Of course he did. Everyone was always telling him that he had to be quick, act fast. And he was. No one was faster than Robin Goodfellow.
Ash's hounds bayed and leapt at him from the dark spaces between the trees, their mouths wide and hungry, eager to be the one to bring down the horse and its rider for their master. Puck cursed them, reminded himself to save up something particularly nasty for His Royal Frostiness later. Just when you think that things can't get any worse, you could always count on Ash to make you truly appreciate kelpies.
Puck snorted and raced faster, ears keenly aware that the hounds were gaining, that there was another horse behind them being urged steadily closer and closer, a horse that carried a deadly rider...
Meghan kept calling out to him, either asking him to go faster or yelling at him to avoid arrows a little better. Strange though it seemed, she didn't seem as afraid. Maybe this was more the kind of danger that she was expecting. Real, swords-and-arrows, in-your-face danger, not the latent horse-in-water variety. Maybe it was easier for her to cope.
That was why he hoped that she could cope, could maybe understand that he had his reasons when he suddenly pulled to a stop, sending her careening into the wyldwood with her built-up momentum sending her far away from the chase. He didn't like taking chances with her, never had.
The dogs nipped at his legs, but a powerful kick sent them scrambling just long enough for Puck to begin the chase anew, in a different direction than the one he'd jettisoned Meghan in.
His lungs felt like he'd swallowed fire and that the embers of his meal were wending their way through his body, setting every tendon ablaze. His muscles ached, but he raced on, deeper and deeper into the forest, ice whizzing past him with each gallop.
Meghan's chances in the wyldwood were slim. But her chances with him would have been nonexistent.
And Robin Goodfellow always played the odds.
-o-
"You can't be serious."
Puck wore his trademark lopsided grin and had his hands spaded in his pockets, looking every bit like the reliable best friend and wing man to royalty. His stance was easy, and for someone who had just been chased out of the wyldwood, escaped wheezingly into Summer territory, and then been frog-marched by a trio of Oberon's lackeys to the deserted hallway via Arcadia's Hedge, he was looking infuriating confident.
In truth, he was fairly nervous. 'Fell and wrath' meant serious business when crossed. And boy, if there was ever an in-between place between obeying and disobeying, he was in it.
Oberon's gaze narrowed and Puck felt the warning prickle of lightning on his skin. "Do not insult me, Goodfellow. I have requested of you small tasks, and each one you have failed to perform."
Puck felt this was categorically unfair. "Actually, your highness, I guarded her for, oh, what was it? Sixteen years!" The smile was fled, now the darker, feral side was rearing its head, leering at his king. "I have done everything you asked to keep her safe. Under my watch, she has been able to lead a mostly normal life, without interference. Now, since you told me I was relieved of my duties, I find she has been made to work in the kitchens and earlier, thanks to your paragon of a wife, turned into a deer."
He let the words and implication linger, a slight growl curling the penultimate 'r'.
The air between the jester and the king was deathly still, as though every bit of movement had been sucked out of it in the tension between the two sides. Both were caught between choices, and Puck knew that the king had yet to decide just how important Meghan Chase was to him. Given what he knew about Oberon, this could take time. And time was something that they didn't have.
"Look," Puck began again, wary, calmer now, "I know you need to think and I know it's a surprise. But she's here now, and you're the only one who can protect her. If you don't do something, she will not last long."
Oberon considered him the same way he considered the humans lost in rapture to the dances led by his courtiers: cool, with a detached blend of condescension and disgust. "You have been a worthy guardian, Robin Goodfellow. But while your advice is sound and is given as though to a friend," Puck felt his hopes droop as Oberon's eyes flashed, "you must remember who is lord here, who the liege and who the servant."
Puck swallowed, mind working furiously to circumvent what he knew would come. "You don't understand-"
But Oberon's magic reached him before he could complete the sentence.
"No." Oberon's voice shook the branches of the hallway. "I do not think that you understand." He held out his arm and the raven that stood in the place of Puck flew onto his arm as though summoned by an invisible pull. "Perhaps it would be in your best interests to remember your place, Goodfellow, however many centuries must pass before you do."
-o-
Meghan Chase was no expert at goblin evasion, but having escaped that particular brush with the wilder aspects of Faery without harm, she seemed bolder for the experience. She was still soaked, dirty, and exhausted from the near-constant march that the cait sith had enforced, but the promise of getting closer to Ethan and to finding out answers at last kept her moving forward.
Even still, her pace wasn't fast enough for a certain member of her party.
"Come along, human. This tardiness is enough to almost make me feel sorry for your Puck."
Meghan sighed, huffing and puffing along as best she could. It had been a long walk for anyone, especially someone who had been accosted and almost eaten by a team of goblins. But she needed something else to focus on other than that memory. Ethan, maybe. Or...
"Why do you keep calling him 'my' Puck? Isn't there only one of him?"
Grimalkin turned his head back to look at her with an expression of supreme frustration. "You can be unfortunately dim." He shook his head as he continued to keep a brisk pace well ahead of Meghan. "You have survived where many of your kind have perished, yet you fail to see the simplest things dancing in front of you. I suppose I must chalk it up to the inexcusable stupidity of humans."
Meghan had her mouth open, ready to take issue with that, when the grand gates of Arcadia sprang into view and she could say no more.
-o-
Sometimes, the raven would visit just before she woke up.
Oberon's magic was the magic of Summer and of daylight; in the nighttime it was weakest and while it did not weaken enough to break or falter, if one knew the right way to wriggle, it could be made a little more flexible.
The kitchen of Sara Skinflayer was a mess of fluid and meat-most of it belonging to the food, some not- and each dish seemed to leave some token of its passage on the stained, grease-dotted floor. When the raven looked down to get his bearings, sometimes he could see the shape of his bird-body reflected back up at him from the oil on the stone tiles. Gingerly lifting his parcel of bread and a few slices of cheese- not so much a difficult but unwieldy load- he fluttered towards the pantry, where a girl with blond hair had wrapped herself in bags of crushed grains to sleep.
Sometimes, the raven would set down his wrapped package of food and watch the girl, as though expecting her to wake up. For a few minutes, both of them were alike, stuck in-between where they were and where they needed to be. But she never woke up when he was there, not before daylight returned and the bird was long gone, back to a lonely cage on a lonelier throne.
-o-
It should not have come as a surprise, Puck rationalized, as the dance wore on. Weird things always happened at crossroads.
But who would have thought that the half-blood daughter of the Summer King and the third Prince of Winter would be dancing together on a night like this one? Even the moss on the dance floor seemed to carry them on lightened steps, as though the whole room were spinning with them as its delirious center.
Black wings beat at the cage, but it did him no good. All those years of protecting her, watching out for her, making sure that her dumb classmates and her well-meaning but forgetful family didn't hurt her, everything that he had done seemed like it had no weight, no ounce of matter. He had, after all, been acting on orders.
But orders didn't explain why he wished he had a mouth that could scowl or a body that could whisk her out of ice boy's arms. Orders, Oberon's instructions and wrath, all of that certainly didn't begin to cover why his avian heart raced when he'd first seen her in that dress, or how every hollow bone in him had quaked when her eyes at last met his and mouthed a single, haunted word.
Puck.
Fandom: Iron Fey
Character/Pairing: Puck/Meghan Chase
Prompt List: Wanderlust
Prompt: Crossroads
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2524
Author's Notes: A collection of small scenes, hopefully connected.
Summary: Puck wants decisive action, but is unfortunately blocked.
Everyone was at a crossroads of some kind. And at Arcadia, the palace of crossing paths and crossed loyalties (let alone monarchs), all roads met at it dangerous intersection.
The palace of the Summer Fey was in rare form tonight. While parties and over-the-top celebrations tended to be something of a regular occurrence, it was this time of the year that everyone really went all out for. The opportunity to show off to visiting rivals, after all, tended to inspire some degree of competence spirit even in the long slog of immortality.
The Hedge was hung with garlands, and every archway was enshrined with greenery and ribbons made of spun spidersilk and woven leaves. Across the ballroom floor, servants were already hurrying trays of delicacies into position and primping tablecloths and finely sculpted centerpieces on the tree-formed slabs that made their tables. To a casual observer, Arcadia would be getting ready for a grand feast. To an insider, though, as Puck was, it was just another skirmish between nations, another attempt by one side to wrest control, favor, opinion to their side.
It was amazing how long he'd been away from this and hadn't missed it one bit.
Humans, though less cunning, were just that: less devious, less caught up in rituals where both sides walked the edge of a knife for the sake of tradition and self-aggrandizement. Humans liked change.
And Robin Goodfellow was beginning to wonder whether he was so very different.
But, it wasn't his night to be making any moves on that count, let alone any moves at all. Puck made himself comfortable on the armrest of Oberon's throne, his raven wings tucked sullenly close, avoiding the bars of his cage carefully. Though not iron, they were still strongly enchanted with enough Summer magic to make even him delirious if he got too close.
The Erlking was doing everything that he could to make sure that his right-hand man and chief jester did not enjoy this. Although, Puck had to admit, not many people in Arcadia were enjoying much of anything since he and Meghan had gotten back.
For instance, there was a certain Summer Queen who took particular umbrage at it.
"Husband," Titania said with deadly composure, resplendent in her golden-green gown as she occupied the throne adjacent to Oberon's. "Though we must suffer Lady Mab and her court," she said this last word with a sneer, "I am pleased at least that the half-breed will not be in attendance."
Though lithe and slim as a shoot of grass, Oberon still had an unmistakable aura of power around him. His hand stopped tapping the armrest near Puck's cage as he watched the preparations, a sudden frisson of stillness shook the air. Even the motion of him arching a brow seemed to send small waves, disturbances of power through the air, as though he were a giant walking amongst ants. When he did speak, it was with the same heaviness and candor that Titania had, but with a sting at the tail, the threat that she had tried to make but that only he could deliver:
"While I am glad to have given you pleasure," he paused, perhaps for irony or for emphasis, "I would remind you that my affairs are just that: mine. Take care, wife, it would do you well not to meddle with them."
Titania's lips were pressed white with fury but she made no reply. Rolling his too-green eyes, a gesture comical even for a bird, Puck scratched at the floor of his cage. No, no one was going to have a good time at this party. It would be the same old routine: angry kings and queens, dirty looks and tricks from both courts, fights, dancing, someone getting out of hand and getting turned into an animal. All in a night's work.
You'd think that with all this conflict, something interesting would happen.
-o-
His heart beat like a wardrum, an anapest trapped in a horse's chest. His breath came fast and then faster, even though his lungs were strong enough to handle it, his back strong enough to bear the weight of the girl who clung to him desperately, he knew the truth of their situation even before the first of the ice arrows whizzed dangerously close to Meghan's head.
They would not be able to outrun a wild hunt. Especially not one led by Ash.
He wanted to tell her something, anything really, that would make her understand that he didn't think of her as unimportant, as just another piece of luggage that he transported from place to place at the beck and call of Oberon. There had been others like that- it was Faery, what could anyone expect? - but she was not one of them.
Meghan gasped and clung tighter as a barrage shuddered into the trees they passed, sending ice creeping through the trunks like arms reaching out, trying to grab at them. "Robbie, you've got to go faster!"
Of course he did. Everyone was always telling him that he had to be quick, act fast. And he was. No one was faster than Robin Goodfellow.
Ash's hounds bayed and leapt at him from the dark spaces between the trees, their mouths wide and hungry, eager to be the one to bring down the horse and its rider for their master. Puck cursed them, reminded himself to save up something particularly nasty for His Royal Frostiness later. Just when you think that things can't get any worse, you could always count on Ash to make you truly appreciate kelpies.
Puck snorted and raced faster, ears keenly aware that the hounds were gaining, that there was another horse behind them being urged steadily closer and closer, a horse that carried a deadly rider...
Meghan kept calling out to him, either asking him to go faster or yelling at him to avoid arrows a little better. Strange though it seemed, she didn't seem as afraid. Maybe this was more the kind of danger that she was expecting. Real, swords-and-arrows, in-your-face danger, not the latent horse-in-water variety. Maybe it was easier for her to cope.
That was why he hoped that she could cope, could maybe understand that he had his reasons when he suddenly pulled to a stop, sending her careening into the wyldwood with her built-up momentum sending her far away from the chase. He didn't like taking chances with her, never had.
The dogs nipped at his legs, but a powerful kick sent them scrambling just long enough for Puck to begin the chase anew, in a different direction than the one he'd jettisoned Meghan in.
His lungs felt like he'd swallowed fire and that the embers of his meal were wending their way through his body, setting every tendon ablaze. His muscles ached, but he raced on, deeper and deeper into the forest, ice whizzing past him with each gallop.
Meghan's chances in the wyldwood were slim. But her chances with him would have been nonexistent.
And Robin Goodfellow always played the odds.
-o-
"You can't be serious."
Puck wore his trademark lopsided grin and had his hands spaded in his pockets, looking every bit like the reliable best friend and wing man to royalty. His stance was easy, and for someone who had just been chased out of the wyldwood, escaped wheezingly into Summer territory, and then been frog-marched by a trio of Oberon's lackeys to the deserted hallway via Arcadia's Hedge, he was looking infuriating confident.
In truth, he was fairly nervous. 'Fell and wrath' meant serious business when crossed. And boy, if there was ever an in-between place between obeying and disobeying, he was in it.
Oberon's gaze narrowed and Puck felt the warning prickle of lightning on his skin. "Do not insult me, Goodfellow. I have requested of you small tasks, and each one you have failed to perform."
Puck felt this was categorically unfair. "Actually, your highness, I guarded her for, oh, what was it? Sixteen years!" The smile was fled, now the darker, feral side was rearing its head, leering at his king. "I have done everything you asked to keep her safe. Under my watch, she has been able to lead a mostly normal life, without interference. Now, since you told me I was relieved of my duties, I find she has been made to work in the kitchens and earlier, thanks to your paragon of a wife, turned into a deer."
He let the words and implication linger, a slight growl curling the penultimate 'r'.
The air between the jester and the king was deathly still, as though every bit of movement had been sucked out of it in the tension between the two sides. Both were caught between choices, and Puck knew that the king had yet to decide just how important Meghan Chase was to him. Given what he knew about Oberon, this could take time. And time was something that they didn't have.
"Look," Puck began again, wary, calmer now, "I know you need to think and I know it's a surprise. But she's here now, and you're the only one who can protect her. If you don't do something, she will not last long."
Oberon considered him the same way he considered the humans lost in rapture to the dances led by his courtiers: cool, with a detached blend of condescension and disgust. "You have been a worthy guardian, Robin Goodfellow. But while your advice is sound and is given as though to a friend," Puck felt his hopes droop as Oberon's eyes flashed, "you must remember who is lord here, who the liege and who the servant."
Puck swallowed, mind working furiously to circumvent what he knew would come. "You don't understand-"
But Oberon's magic reached him before he could complete the sentence.
"No." Oberon's voice shook the branches of the hallway. "I do not think that you understand." He held out his arm and the raven that stood in the place of Puck flew onto his arm as though summoned by an invisible pull. "Perhaps it would be in your best interests to remember your place, Goodfellow, however many centuries must pass before you do."
-o-
Meghan Chase was no expert at goblin evasion, but having escaped that particular brush with the wilder aspects of Faery without harm, she seemed bolder for the experience. She was still soaked, dirty, and exhausted from the near-constant march that the cait sith had enforced, but the promise of getting closer to Ethan and to finding out answers at last kept her moving forward.
Even still, her pace wasn't fast enough for a certain member of her party.
"Come along, human. This tardiness is enough to almost make me feel sorry for your Puck."
Meghan sighed, huffing and puffing along as best she could. It had been a long walk for anyone, especially someone who had been accosted and almost eaten by a team of goblins. But she needed something else to focus on other than that memory. Ethan, maybe. Or...
"Why do you keep calling him 'my' Puck? Isn't there only one of him?"
Grimalkin turned his head back to look at her with an expression of supreme frustration. "You can be unfortunately dim." He shook his head as he continued to keep a brisk pace well ahead of Meghan. "You have survived where many of your kind have perished, yet you fail to see the simplest things dancing in front of you. I suppose I must chalk it up to the inexcusable stupidity of humans."
Meghan had her mouth open, ready to take issue with that, when the grand gates of Arcadia sprang into view and she could say no more.
-o-
Sometimes, the raven would visit just before she woke up.
Oberon's magic was the magic of Summer and of daylight; in the nighttime it was weakest and while it did not weaken enough to break or falter, if one knew the right way to wriggle, it could be made a little more flexible.
The kitchen of Sara Skinflayer was a mess of fluid and meat-most of it belonging to the food, some not- and each dish seemed to leave some token of its passage on the stained, grease-dotted floor. When the raven looked down to get his bearings, sometimes he could see the shape of his bird-body reflected back up at him from the oil on the stone tiles. Gingerly lifting his parcel of bread and a few slices of cheese- not so much a difficult but unwieldy load- he fluttered towards the pantry, where a girl with blond hair had wrapped herself in bags of crushed grains to sleep.
Sometimes, the raven would set down his wrapped package of food and watch the girl, as though expecting her to wake up. For a few minutes, both of them were alike, stuck in-between where they were and where they needed to be. But she never woke up when he was there, not before daylight returned and the bird was long gone, back to a lonely cage on a lonelier throne.
-o-
It should not have come as a surprise, Puck rationalized, as the dance wore on. Weird things always happened at crossroads.
But who would have thought that the half-blood daughter of the Summer King and the third Prince of Winter would be dancing together on a night like this one? Even the moss on the dance floor seemed to carry them on lightened steps, as though the whole room were spinning with them as its delirious center.
Black wings beat at the cage, but it did him no good. All those years of protecting her, watching out for her, making sure that her dumb classmates and her well-meaning but forgetful family didn't hurt her, everything that he had done seemed like it had no weight, no ounce of matter. He had, after all, been acting on orders.
But orders didn't explain why he wished he had a mouth that could scowl or a body that could whisk her out of ice boy's arms. Orders, Oberon's instructions and wrath, all of that certainly didn't begin to cover why his avian heart raced when he'd first seen her in that dress, or how every hollow bone in him had quaked when her eyes at last met his and mouthed a single, haunted word.
Puck.