My True Love Hath My Heart - part two
Here is the second part
Summary: Brian heartless? Maybe there's a reason &
Warnings: Very definitely AU, and of course a sprinkling of the supernatural as is fitting for an Irish story. I have borrowed bits from the tales of Tam Lyn, and of the Snow Queen, and thrown in some Irish myths of the Tuatha De Danann, the Shining Ones, for good measure. However, I have molded each of these to my own purpose, so purists, beware.
Notes: This starts immediately after the guys get back from New York (ep 110). In the flower display at Molly’s party there’s a cutout pumpkin face, so I’m assuming that her party was just before Halloween (which in 2000 fell on a Tuesday).
There are many love spells for Halloween, apparently dating from when Samhain was the beginning of the New Year. The one included is a mix of several, although I made up the chant which is pure nonsense.
Ó Cionnaoith is the Gaelic form for the name from which ‘Kinney’ is derived. The family motto is ‘Truth is always great’, which has nothing to do with the fic, but which I throw in because it seems particularly apt for Brian.
(LJ is playing tricks and won't let me post it in a single post, so it will be in two parts.)
My True Love Hath My Heart - part two
During the next few days, Justin had vague dreamlike flashes of his conversation with Aine. He came to believe that he had, in fact, dreamt it, especially as Daphne, to whom he recounted his “dream”, clearly had no memory of it.
Parts of the conversation were very clouded, and he couldn’t remember exactly what had been said. But three things he remembered clearly enough.
There was a reason that Brian shied away from the very idea of love.
Something dreadful threatened Brian, something cold and horrible.
And, this most importantly, the only way that Brian could be saved was for Justin to hang on. No matter how hard or how often Brian tried to throw him away, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how much of a selfish asshole Brian appeared at times, if he was to be saved from whatever it was that threatened him he needed Justin to believe in him, and to hold on.
Justin knew that if he told anyone about these thoughts, these memories, they would tell him it had been just a dream and he should forget it. But Justin knew somehow that it was more.
Whenever he found himself doubting, he would finger the crystal that he kept always with him - in his pocket by day, under his pillow at night. For some reason it seemed to make him feel closer to Brian. He didn’t know where the crystal had come from, but it seemed to call to him, draw him in some way. Often, without remembering how it got there, he would find it clutched in his hand. It always felt warm to the touch. Especially when Brian was near.
He had seen Brian only at the diner over the last few days, and always with the other guys. Justin was finding that his work at the diner on top of school was tiring; and Deb had gone into in full mother mode, hovering over him to make sure that all his homework got done, so he had had no play time. He knew that the guys were probably hitting the bars and clubs as usual at night, but he’d had no opportunity to join them. And he was a little afraid that he wouldn’t have been welcome.
Brian had seemed to be distant in some way, not just with him, but with all of them. The others didn’t seem to notice, or at least, he’d heard no comments, but Justin’s deep awareness of the man had him feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Combined with the ominous warnings from his dream, Justin was worried, but didn’t quite know what to do.
At the moment Brian was treating him more like a rather pesky younger brother than as any sort of lover, or even a trick, and was allowing no opening or opportunity for Justin to worm his way back into his bed, even for a night. Justin didn’t think that turning up at the loft was unannounced was going to achieve anything except to give Brian another opportunity to send him away. And the chances were the man wouldn’t be home anyway.
But tonight Brian was throwing a surprise birthday party for Michael, and while Justin wasn’t actually sure that he’d been invited, Deb and Vic were going so he had every intention of being there. He knew that probably meant that he’d have to watch Brian trick. Watch him with not just one other guy, but likely a whole bunch of them.
But that was part of it. That was the holding on part. And Justin could do that. His family knew how persistent he could be. Brian, he resolved, was about to find out.
*****
Justin watched as one by one all Brian’s so called friends spat venom at him and left. He felt very confused. He didn’t understand at all what had happened tonight. To begin with, he didn’t fully grasp what had gone on between Michael and that woman. He knew that everyone thought Brian had behaved like an asshole, but he didn’t understand what Brian had done. Or why everyone thought it was so terrible. Most of all, he didn’t understand why everyone had blamed Brian for the whole incident.
From what he could understand, it was Michael who had lied to the woman and led her on. What Brian had done was to out him on it. Not very nice, perhaps, but if the situation had been reversed Justin had no doubt that everyone would have held Brian accountable for creating the mess in the first place by letting the girl think he was not only straight, but interested in her. But no one seemed to be holding Michael in any way to blame. They’d all just turned on Brian. And so viciously.
There was something just not right about their reactions, something very odd and unsettling. Justin couldn’t help but feel that the sense of threat that had come to him from his “dream” had something to do with it. Which meant that what he had to do was to hold on. Stay by his side and clearly on his side without triggering Brian’s rejection mechanisms and making Brian push him away. He would need to be very cool and very careful.
So when Brian, giving off his strongest ‘I don’t need anybody, I don’t believe in love’ vibe, turned to him with a harsh “Well? Aren’t you going to make your big exit too?”, Justin was ready for him.
“No. You’re going to need someone to help you clean up this mess,” he said.
He fought to remain detached and made no attempt to move into Brian’s physical space, although he longed to offer any comfort that he could. It hurt him to look at Brian. The man’s pain was an almost palpable force.
*****
It was a force which the dark being Domnu absorbed with malicious glee. She was an age old emptiness; an abyss of cold darkness with an eternal and unquenchable hunger for destruction and revenge. Centuries ago, as men measure time, the man’s ancestors had fought against her people, fought with the despised ones who had vanquished them. Long ages had she sought revenge. The heir to the Ó Cionnaoith was but her latest victim, and his slow demise, his slide into darkness had been years in the making. Now, it was nearing the end. Let him and those who loved him feel her power and fear it.
For days she fed off the man’s misery. Her powers were not what they once had been when men had quaked before her, but they were sufficient to cloud the minds of those around her victim and keep him isolated.
Except for the fair haired boy. But even he served her purpose. Although in some ways he alleviated the Ó Cionnaoith’s misery, the contrast between the comfort he represented and the appalling loneliness when he was not there worked only to increase the man’s unhappiness. And the boy was powerless to address its main cause. The little dark haired one (so like her original worshippers) hated him. He would never allow himself to be influenced by one he saw as a rival, least of all where the Ó Cionnaoith was concerned.
Then abruptly the flood of pain which Domnu fed from so greedily dried up. To her outrage, she realized that the dark haired one had once again opened his heart to the heir of the Ó Cionnaoith. Her victim’s misery had all but evaporated, as he dared to allow once more the love of his friends to comfort the aching hollow in his breast.
Cold and implacable, Domnu plotted. When the opportunity came, she was ready.
The young man was greedy and cunning and ambitious. It took only the slightest nudge to persuade him to seduce the one the mortals named Brian. And then to turn on him.
Once more her victim was isolated; this time at risk of losing everything he had worked so hard to achieve.
Once more it was the fair haired boy who saved him.
Aware now that the powers loosed by the birth of his son and the advent of this pesky child were creating a risk of loss (and she never lightly suffered loss) Domnu’s malevolence once more found a way to poison the tiny seeds of hope they’d planted in the man’s struggling soul.
This time, however, the attack took a more subtle form. Already she had fostered the rift between the mother of the Ó Cionnaoith heir and her partner. Now she took the mother’s desire to care and provide for her son and twisted it to her own purpose. Sever the bond between the Ó Cionnaoith and his son, and his son’s mother, turn it into bitterness and resentment, and his resistance to her would be so much the weaker. Another father she found for the boy, a man the blonde woman would put in the Ó Cionnaoith’s place in her life, and in her son’s. Although the Ó Cionnaoith railed against his supplanter, his opposition served merely to cement the woman’s determination.
To Domnu’s fury, she found the young one stepping once more between the man and his despair; between her desire for destruction, whetted especially against this one who came of a line long hated, and her victim.
Now the focus of her malevolence became the growing bond between this importunate child and the Ó Cionnaoith.
If the boy could be manipulated into turning his back on the life he desired, then not only would he be removed from the Ó Cionnaoith’s life, but the man would come to despise him, and to despise himself for believing in him. There was already bitterness and anger between the boy’s parents, a little push, and their marriage could be brought crashing to destruction. Then if the boy could be made to blame himself …
Meanwhile his father’s illness should keep the Ó Cionnaoith occupied, and if the father’s fear and anger at this own fate could be directed at his son, so much the better. Stinging from his own father’s harshness he would have even less respect for the boy’s choice.
Relentless in her greed and malice, Domnu worked her will.
Only to find herself foiled once again. This time by a combination of the fair haired boy’s integrity of spirit, her victim’s growing strength to fight her, and, to her fury, by some remnant of desire buried deep within the father to be reconciled to his son. This last outraged her most of all. The father, at least, had long been hers.
The father’s death, with the dark memories that it conjured in her victim, and the boy’s absorption in his problems with the dark girl gave her some time.
Delicately she wove her web of spite. A word here, a look there. All aimed at pushing the Ó Cionnaoith to rebel against his growing attachment to the boy. Turning her attention to the boy, she felt for ways to take the hurt he was so good at concealing, at shrugging away. Subtly, she twisted it just a little, to the desire to give the inflictor of that hurt a taste of how it felt.
It wouldn’t need much. One instance, one blow to the man’s pride, and she knew the Ó Cionnaoith would abandon him. And the pain that abandonment would cause would be very very sweet to her.
Patient now, she awaited her opportunity, and when it came, she pushed hard. The Ó Cionnaoith was already shying away from his friends’ belief that he now had a partner. And the boy was hurt and ready to push a little to try to fight for his place in the man’s life. A small nudge, encouraging the use of this word, rather than that, and then a tweak to the strange one’s impulse to help the boy and it was done.
She writhed in pleasure at her victim’s pain as he watched his fair haired boy strut shamelessly before so many and then steal his own selected paramour for the evening. Jealousy, hurt pride and real loss coalesced into a river of pain which flowed from the man in a torrent. Now, now, you are mine, Domnu rejoiced, believing that the Ó Cionnaoith would never forgive this affront.
Yet next morning it took only a few words from the boy to ease the hurt and not simply repair, but strengthen the bond between them.
Domnu began to recognize in the fair haired one a true threat to the success of her plans for the absolute destruction of her victim. Dark anger swirled through the world around her victim and his protector. Ugly thoughts formed in minds prone to them, and at St James Academy, violence simmered.
Domnu watched, gaining strength from the man’s increasing fear as his birthday approached. He remembered nothing of their bargain, but some instinct in him recoiled as his birthdays accumulated, somehow knowing that each led him closer to his doom. She waxed fat with dark joy as he tried unavailingly to escape his fears.
Then another opportunity presented even greater possibilities to her malice. Instead of removing this one or that from the circle of those whose love kept the Ó Cionnaoith from succumbing to her completely, she would take the opportunity to remove the Ó Cionnaoith from them. Transplanted from the place where he had friends and family, he would be lost and alone; he would be in pain and unable to admit it. In that state, he would be more than ready to renounce the heart he’d somehow clung to so stubbornly.
And the opportunity was so easy to arrange, and so seductive to him. He was proud, he was ambitious, and he was scared. His ever strengthening bond with the boy was calling his heart back to him, but with that came all the old horrors, the pain and fear he had tried so desperately to renounce. At one and the same time he was reaching toward the bond, and recoiling fiercely from it. Presented with an opportunity to escape his dilemma, he seized on it avidly. Once the offer had been made, he was unable to resist pursuing it.
But something went wrong. All the pieces had been ready to fall into place, and something had gone very wrong. In the interview, when it was clear what his hearers had wished him to say, for some reason the Ó Cionnaoith refused to oblige. He had stubbornly held to his own opinions and they had sensed the steel in him, sensed that this was a man who would not lightly or easily stray from his own path, his own beliefs, and they had been frightened. So they had veered away, settled for someone with less talent, but who would be more easily influenced to do things their way.
Domnu raged impotently, unable to understand how or why this had happened.
It must be something the boy had done, but what?
Although things immediately around her victim she could see or sense very clearly, whenever apart from him, the boy’s thoughts and actions were hidden from her. But one thing about him was very clear.
He had to be banished from the Ó Cionnaoith’s life.
Filled with cold rage, Domnu now plotted not against that bond, but against the very life of the one she recognized at last as her enemy.
He must not be allowed to continue to wield this influence over the Ó Cionnaoith. Thus far, she had been unsuccessful in breaking the bond between them. Therefore, the simplest thing to do was to break the boy. And in the pain of his loss, the Ó Cionnaoith would surely renounce his heart to her forever.
*****
While Brian was on the phone, Justin managed to slip the crystal from the pocket in Brian’s briefcase where he had hidden it just before Brian had flown out to New York for his interview. He had no idea why he’d done that, except that the sense of threat that he’d felt around Brian had somehow grown ever since the New York thing had come up and he’d … he’d sent it with him for luck. That was all.
Except that somehow it was more than that. He’d sent the crystal with him because he couldn’t go himself. It was as if it ensured that Brian took some small piece of Justin’s love with him, even if he didn’t know it.
Well, he took all of Justin’s love. He also took something of Justin. Something tangible and real, even if it was only a small piece of rock.
Justin fought back the tears that threatened each time the thought of being parted from Brian came into his mind. He would not let them get to him. He just had to enjoy every day that they had together, that was all.
He wished he could think of a way to persuade Brian to come to the Prom with him. He knew it was unlikely, but it would make the evening perfect for him. It would somehow validate all the pain he had gone through during this school year. It would say to everyone, “See, this is what I am. And who I am. And I’m proud and happy to be a gay man. And you can all get fucked if you don’t like it.”
But Brian wasn’t going, and he was going with Daph, just like some closeted little queer who was afraid to admit who he was.
He sighed.
Well, first there was Brian’s birthday to get through. He knew what Lindz and the others were planning. He wasn’t at all sure it was a good idea, but they’d all known Brian a lot longer than he had, so he guessed that it would be okay. They were including him anyway, as if they finally admitted, even Michael, that he had a right to be part of Brian’s life, that he had a place there.
Maybe it would be alright. Maybe Brian would like it that they’d gone to so much trouble. Maybe he’d even think it was a little funny. Even if he never admitted it. Which he wouldn’t. He’d just growl and snarl and be Brian. But that was okay. He just needed to know that even while they were teasing him, it meant that they cared, that they loved him.
Except of course, that it went terribly wrong.
They weren’t to know that the direction their ideas for a celebration had taken was influenced by a being full of hate and anger and a cold yearning for destruction. They weren’t to know that Brian hadn’t got his much vaunted chance to move to New York. Nor could they sense the avalanche of despair that was hurtling down upon their friend. Only Justin sensed it, felt it, but couldn’t think of any way to help. The more he tried to press close to Brian, the harder the man pushed him away.
For Brian, the loss of what he saw as his chance to remake his life, his inchoate fears about his increasing age, the knowledge that Michael was leaving and moving across the country and that his beautiful boy was growing up, graduating, about to start college and move on with his own life, all these things fed his daily growing despair. The insensitive nature of his surprise birthday ‘celebration’ acted like salt and vinegar in the open wound of his pain.
He was not, and had never been a weakling. Faced, as he saw it, with the need not only to end his own pain, but to set free the ones he loved, Michael, his friend; Gus, his son, and Justin, his … something, from the dark shadow he seemed to cast over their lives, he decided on his course of action. He would celebrate his birthday in his own fashion. He would experience one last forbidden thrill, and in doing so would put an end once and for all to the misery of his life. At the same time he would free Michael to become one with David, Gus to grow up without ever having known the sad mess who was his father, and Justin … Justin would be free to find all the love and warmth and joy that he deserved, and that Brian could never give him.
This was not at all in Domnu’s plan. While she reveled in the man’s pain, she could not allow him this escape. In the clarity which would come after death, he would see the horror of the bargain he had made. If he died too soon, before the three times seven years were done, he would have the chance even after death to reclaim his heart and she would lose the greater victory, the one which would bind him to her for eternity. Leaving it as long as she dared to wring every possible drop from the man’s agony of mind, and soul, she sent the little dark one (whose unappeased lust and jealousy left him prone to her suggestions) to ‘save’ him.
That his shock and hurt and anger caused him to reveal the shallowness of his understanding and thus cause the Ó Cionnaoith further pain was, of course, all to the good.
“You’re Brian Kinney, for fuck’s sake!”
The words rang in Brian’s head. They had been meant as a compliment. They had been meant to comfort and console him. Instead, they had revealed to Brian how little his friend knew him. How much the surface Brian seemed to satisfy him. And there was more to him than that. Surely he wasn’t just that … that figure, that legend. Surely there was something of himself there somewhere.
Afterwards, although he asked himself the question over and over, Brian could never say why he decided to go to the Prom.
But some part of the explanation at least lay in Michael’s words and the effect they’d had on him. Tired of the pain and the dark confusion he’d instinctively turned to the greatest source of light and comfort in his life. Justin’s warmth, his strength, and most of all his belief in Brian, his belief that something in Brian made him worth fighting for, drew the man like a magnet. Only once before in his life had he known that feeling. He could hardly remember it now, but once when he had been a child there had been someone who had made him feel the way Justin made him feel sometimes. Feel that he was worth something. Feel that he was worth loving. Feel that he was able to love.
“I thought I’d recapture my lost youth.”
The words were about him. The words were about Justin. The words were about them.
The cold emptiness that was Domnu roiled with ecstatic malice. This was better, far better than she had planned.
Already the violence was brewing in her instrument. His hatred and fear of the young one were about to erupt in bloodshed. And now the man would not only be a witness, he would take upon himself the blame for triggering that violence. Always now he would blame himself for the boy’s death, not knowing that his presence had lent little or nothing to the loathing and self-loathing that already filled the dark mind.
Domnu rejoiced, at least as far as her cold and empty natured allowed. In her greed for pain, however, she over-reached herself.
Instead of letting him wait till the man had driven from the garage, she nudged her pawn into action. She wanted the Ó Cionnaoith to see. Wanted him to hear. Wanted the image of the boy’s blood soaked body to be ever in his mind, forever banning him from any further chance of love.
And Aine saw her chance and took it.
For a few brief moments the two lovers had found a real union of their spirits, and in the aftermath of that, Aine, once goddess of all such unions, found it possible to reach the man’s mind. A nudge, and he cast a glance in the mirror. He was too late to prevent the blow, but he reacted in time to call a warning; in time to prevent the blow from being fatal; in time to thwart the worst of Domnu’s plans and save his lover’s life.
But the blow severed Aine’s fragile connection to Brian, rocking in horrified agony over the unconscious body of this boy who’d trusted him, who’d believed in him, and whom he’d failed to save and protect. Aine ached for him, but was unable to help him. Not directly.
She put forth all her power and poured it into a healing blessing on the boy who’d fought so fiercely and so bravely to save his beloved. Even if he didn’t understand, or recognize, the battle that he fought. Her own anger came to her aid now and strengthened her. She had been prepared to do what she could to aid the man called Brian; he came of a line long loyal to her and to her race and there were age long bonds of trust and love and duty between them. It was fitting that she and her kin should offer him what aid and protection they could. The fair boy had held no such place in their regard, but his true and selfless love had touched Aine deeply, and his courage and integrity had earned the respect of all of them. Besides, he was an artist, a creator of beauty, and all such were held in honor by her race. For his own sake now, she felt deep fury that Domnu had dared to stretch out the hand of destruction over him.
Aine exerted her will and the darkness surrounding the boy receded. Gradually, he came back again to the world. Damaged, weakened and in pain of body mind and body, but alive.
That battle won, although not without cost, Aine turned her attention once more to Brian. And found some thin shadow of a link still there for her to work through. At first she didn’t understand how this could be. The tentative link forged in the parking garage had, beyond mistaking, been broken. Then she felt this new link pulse faintly as the man reached into his pocket and played with something there. The crystal! It had fallen from the boy’s pocket as they had lifted him into the ambulance, and the man had picked it up. It was with him still, and all unconscious, he would finger it, binding himself once more to Justin, and through Justin, to her.
Through it she was able to keep the man from entirely repudiating his relationship with the boy. She was able to overcome at least some of the pain and crippling guilt that assailed him. Enough at least to allow him to visit the boy secretly, although he was unable to face him, burdened as he was by the conviction that it was his doing that Justin lay in that hospital bed.
Then Justin came home from the hospital and sought him out. Tentatively, Brian began to put some of his guilt behind him, to overcome his own pain and fears to help his young lover.
Aine still sought to send healing to the boy. It was obvious to her, as to Brian, that Justin faced a long and difficult path back to health. He would need all the aid that Brian could give him. He would need Brian’s love. Now, Aine recognized, was the time that Brian must demand the return of his heart. Not for his own sake, but for Justin’s. But how could she persuade him, how could she make him see what he must do, when he had no memory of the dread bargain he had made?
She watched, and waited, and her chance came. Brian staggered home one night, drunk and exhausted after a visit to Justin at his mother’s house and fell asleep on the bed without removing even his shoes.
The crystal rested in his pocket. The scarf stained in Justin’s blood was round his neck. Using the power these two talismans gave her Aine came to him in his dreams. She showed him what he had done. She showed him what Justin needed. She showed him what he must do now.
But to her astonishment and despair, he refused.
Justin, he believed, was better off without him in his life.
Sensing Aine’s despair and frustration, Domnu coldly rejoiced. Scorn echoed through the hollow of her being. Did her enemy believe she was so easily defeated? Did she still not recognize the power Domnu wielded, not just over the man, but over those to whom he represented something to be feared and loathed?
How easy it had been to spur the mother to lash out at him!
How easy to shape her words so that they fell like lashes of fire on the unhealed wounds left by his own belief in his guilt. How easy to whisper to the despair in his heart that Justin’s mother was right. That Justin would be safe and well if it had not been for him. That Justin’s life would be better, far better without him in it.
Now it was just a matter of time.
After this the Ó Cionnaoith would not again allow himself to become close to any being. His own integrity and honor would prevent it. For their own sakes, he would keep himself removed from all those influences that sought to undo what she had wrought in him, and in less than two year’s time, he would be hers.
The boy she now discounted. Sick, crippled in both mind and body, he was no longer any threat to her. His one attempt to contact the man again had left him in so much pain that she was almost sated for a time, and he would make no further attempt. His pain served a delicious relish on her triumph, but she took no other regard of him.
Ironically, it was the boy’s mother, who, having once thrust the man so fiercely from her son’s life, now called him back into it.
Still Domnu felt no great concern, smugly confident now of her eventual victory.
The boy was confused, his mind darkened. Even now that he was back where he had longed to be, there was little joy in it for him. In its stead, there was pain, and doubt and self-disgust. His damaged mind held no memory at all, now, of his meeting with Aine. Only somewhere a vague instinct that no matter what Brian did, he must hold on, he must not let Brian thrust him away.
But little by little that instinct was fading, as Brian twisted and turned, fighting blindly against the ties that bound him to his lover. Not knowing why he was fighting, or what he was trying to achieve, but urged on always by the fears and doubts that Domnu, knowing all his weaknesses, could so easily plant into his brain. Pride, fear, jealousy, all of them worked within Brian, and under their influence he took on monstrous forms. Justin struggled to hold Brian’s true form in his heart and his mind, but he was still ill, tired, often in pain and full of self doubt. His weakness delighted Domnu’s malice, as she stalked ever closer to claiming her prey.
The crystal that might have helped them both lay forgotten, discarded in a drawer in the desk. Lacking any connection with either of them, its powers were receding.
Justin fought the darkness, as well as he was able. But his spirit was clouded, and his weapons not wisely chosen. His demands for romance, for the outward trappings of a love affair, only exacerbated the man’s unbelief in the reality of the love Justin professed to feel for him. Brian’s lack of response further fed Justin’s own self doubt and frustration.
Then, just when they were at their weakest and most vulnerable point, Justin went to a concert and met a dark eyed musician who seemed the very embodiment of the romance that his confused and badly abraded heart craved.
From that point, his break up with Brian, though protracted, was inevitable.
Filled with malicious glee, Domnu played with both of them; taunting, teasing, watching them, even now, trying to reach out for each other, only to find pain and emptiness as their reward. Excruciatingly, all hope of the happiness that the boy had seemed to represent was flayed from the man’s heart. By the time the boy turned and walked from the party with his new lover, Domnu knew the battle was over. The Ó Cionnaoith was hers. She could turn her attention now to seeking new prey.
*****
“I hope you get what you want.”
The words echoed in Justin’s heart and throughout the spirit realm.
Aine heard them and they gave her renewed hope. All was not yet lost. Against all odds Brian was still clinging with some unguessed strength of purpose to his bond with the one who had loved him. Who perhaps loved him still.
Domnu heard them and raged for a space, but the fair haired one’s apparent dismissal of the words and what they might mean, and the pain that dismissal caused her victim appeased her. Let him thrash a while longer. It would make no difference in the end and meanwhile, his pain was sweet to her insatiable appetite for destruction.
Her malicious nature was delighted when the Ó Cionnaoith finally succumbed to his pain and fury and assaulted the small dark one. Not only did his guilt and self-loathing feed her spite, but the revulsion he faced from those who supposedly loved him sent him into a new fury of self hatred. That she had some hand in triggering and increasing that revulsion, blinding his friends to the reality of what had happened so that they saw him as some sort of monster rather than as the wounded and betrayed soul that he was, merely added to her satisfaction.
The fact that even after that incident the Ó Cionnaoith still insisted on paying the young man’s school fees neither disturbed nor surprised her. If he were not a good man, a man of honor, then the prize of his soul would be so much less worth the winning.
*****
Unpacking the computer, Justin found in the bottom of the box a small crystal which looked vaguely familiar. Unusually, the crystal seemed warm to his touch, although Ethan didn’t agree, saying it just felt like any other piece of rock. Without thinking much of it, Justin dropped it on the table nearby. It became a habit with him to play with it between his fingers while he worked. For some reason, with the mouse in one hand and the crystal in the other, ideas seemed to flow more smoothly. His art especially seemed to come to life much more easily. He was sure that it helped him design the poster for the Carnivale so quickly. And for some reason it makes him feel closer to Brian than he had since long before they broke up.
*****
This time Domnu neither discounted nor underestimated the threat the fair haired one represented. She moved swiftly, seeking within the Ó Cionnaoith’s circle those whose inner darkness made them useful tools. Of course. His family. All of them. The young one was easiest to use, and his youth offered the opportunity for an attack of a particularly damaging kind. If all went well, and the boy was believed, the Ó Cionnaoith would spend the last few months before his thirty second birthday in prison. By the time his birthday came around he would be only too glad to be rid of the burden of any feeling.
The vicious shrewishness of his sister, and the vitriol of his mother added a particularly savory sauce to the dish Domnu’s malice had prepared.
She was furious but not surprised that the fair haired one once more intervened.
She refused to allow this to disturb her plans.
She tempted the young one’s lover to betrayal, believing that if his faith in love were overthrown, then he would be less able to help the Ó Cionnaoith and less of a threat to her.
Meanwhile, she used her influence over the Ó Cionnaoith to fuel his ego, his ambition, his pride. And threw him into the path of a man named Stockwell.
*****
Packing up his computer to move from Ethan’s apartment to Daphne’s, Justin slipped the crystal into his pocket. Through the days that followed, somehow he found its surprising warmth comforting. He felt lost and disoriented, trying to find it in himself to grieve or at least be angry over his break up with Ethan, but more and more Ethan slipped away from him, the time with him seeming less and less real, and his thoughts turned again and again to Brian.
Aine was delighted and relieved. Knowing that time was running short, she poured what power she had into the crystal, finding a useful and resourceful ally in the dark girl. It took little effort to influence her encouragement of Justin in his desire to reunite with his lover. Aine feared, though, that the young one would face a long battle with the man’s fear and his pride, and time was not their friend. In a few weeks the man’s birthday would be past, and all hope lost.
Aine was overjoyed and Domnu furious and outraged when contrary to both their expectations, the man, almost without a struggle, accepted his lover back into his bed and into his life.
Domnu was still confident, however. There was little time left now, and the Ó Cionnaoith was well tangled in the web she had woven for him. All his friends were becoming increasingly appalled by his alliance with a man they hated and despised, and the more they railed at him, the more obstinately he clung to his determination to make the most of what he could get from his connection with Stockwell and his power.
No matter that the fair one was back in his life for now. That wouldn’t last long once the Ó Cionnaoith’s birthday was past, and his heart truly lost into her darkness forever. And meanwhile, it would seem that even his lover’s charms couldn’t work to switch the man’s allegiance from the one who threatened to corrupt his very soul.
Gloatingly Domnu watched as the weeks passed and the man’s doom crept ever closer.
Even when he began to wriggle off the hook she’d planted firmly in him, she didn’t worry. She had other traps to spring.
He joined the fair haired one in sticking up posters. She laughed and led Stockwell to the loft.
The loss of his job hit him hard, as she had known it would. So much of his sense of himself had been tied up with it, and with it gone, he felt lost and betrayed.
As always when scared and confused he turned to sex and drugs to dull the fear and pain. More, more! Domnu encouraged.
It seemed that the whole of his home as filled with naked rutting men. And he was lost away from himself in the midst of it all. While his young lover was nowhere in sight. This, she gloated, this will end it.
But next morning when the fair one appeared he seemed totally unfazed by his lover’s overnight activities. He was far more interested in what the man had to tell him of that other fair haired boy who had been murdered.
Domnu brooded and plotted. A nudge to the policeman here, planting fears for the loss of his hard earned pension, a nudge to the Ó Cionnaoith’s pride, triggering his stubborn refusal to be bested, and the stage was set for him to sell his young one to the murderer. That would be an action for which neither of them would be able to forgive themselves or each other, and it would spell the end of any trust between them.
But it was never put to the test.
Domnu played however, on the backlash the Ó Cionnaoith felt when he realized he’d driven a man to suicide. Weaved into it the realization of what could have happened to his sweet young lover. Or even to that other boy. Emphasized that it would have been at his instigation. And waved the increasing power and ugliness of the man he had come to hate in his face.
If she could work on that self-loathing, then it alone would form a barrier that he would lack the power to cross. It would not hold forever, but it didn’t have to. His birthday now was only a few weeks away. And when Stockwell won the election, his friends would not be backward in pouring on the blame. They would become her best allies. In the face of his own self-disgust and their contempt, his main thought would be to withdraw, to protect himself, and his lover, by cutting the ties between them. And Stockwell would win. As would she.
*****
Tired of the battle involved in trying to hand out election leaflets to indifferent queens who had no interest in anything except where their next fuck was coming from, Justin decided to take a break. He found himself outside the bookshop where he’d had his confrontation with Bellweather and wondered if searching the shelves would yield any ideas for a present for Brian’s upcoming birthday.
He wandered along the aisles of books, idly fingering the ever-present crystal in his pocket, when a title caught his eye.
“My True Love Hath My Heart”.
Suddenly, the air around him seemed to tighten. Without thought, he picked up the book.
“An Anthology of Gay Love Poems”, he read on the cover.
He let the book fall open in his hands, trying to ignore the ringing in his ears, and the sudden intense stillness which seemed to have fallen over everything.
“My true love hath my heart, and I have his …”
Even as he read the line, the world seemed to reel around him. Brian had his heart, that was true? But did he have Brian’s?
“You seek to win the heart of a man who no longer has one.”
With a rush Aine’s words came back to him. All of them. The whole story.
The bargain Brian had made on his eleventh birthday.
The thrice seven years he had in which to claim back his heart.
The fact that his thirty second birthday was next month.
For a moment Justin felt like screaming in sheer terror. He had no doubt at all that what he’d seen and heard that night in Frick Park had been real. If he couldn’t find the way to persuade Brian to confront this dark goddess and demand back his heart he would lose him. Worse, Brian would be lost to all love, all happiness forever. Banished into the cold darkness of the abyss.
Justin vowed he would never let that happen. Never.
But he knew Brian. There was no way Brian was ever going to believe this fairy story.
Well, okay … so he had to find a way to …
And then suddenly, clearly, Justin knew what he had to do.
He was sure it would work.
He just wasn’t sure about what the after effects would be.
Well, he’d have to worry about that later.
First things first. And the first thing was to find Brian and persuade him that if he was looking for a public place in which to have sex, there was a rather nice little clearing in Frick Park, just across the road from the cemetery.
****
Brian thought he was crazy, and complained about the cold, and threatened him with dire consequences if he got mud on his Prada boots, or if beetles crawled into sensitive places. Justin coaxed and cajoled and teased him about becoming conservative in his old age and finally managed that night to lure him into Frick Park.
It took a little while to find the clearing where he and Daph had tried the ritual and cast their spell. But as he moved into the circle of rowan trees he felt the crystal in his breast pocket grow warmer even than usual; he could feel its heat over his heart. And somehow, although he couldn’t see her, he was sure that Aine was close by and would help him if she could.
He had Brian here, now he just had to get him to stay and not to question what he was doing while he tried to summon the dark one.
“Daph and I came here once,” he said suddenly.
Brian cocked an eyebrow at him as he looked around for somewhere they could be reasonably comfortable.
“It was Halloween. We were trying to cast a spell.”
“Did it work?” Brian asked lazily, finally settling for propping his back up against the sturdiest of the trees. Justin came to him and kissed him.
“Oh, yes,” he breathed.
“What was the spell?” Brian asked, a little intrigued despite himself.
“I was trying to win your heart,” Justin replied, his own heart hammering.
Brian gave a choke of half-nervous laughter. Something in this conversation was making him very uncomfortable.
“So you reckon it worked then?” he said, half affronted.
“Well, sort of,” Justin said. He was going to explain, to try this one time to make Brian believe him, here where Aine’s influence might be able to help him. But he didn’t get the chance.
Out of nowhere a storm came hurtling down on them. Rain and hail beat at them and the wind almost ripped the clothes from their bodies.
“Fuck!” Brian exclaimed, his words swallowed up in the chaos around them.
With a thrill of pure terror Justin realized that he didn’t have to persuade Brian to help him summon Domnu. Domnu was already here. She had taken the initiative and brought the storm down on them to drive them away. .
He tried to speak, but his voice refused to work, apparently frozen in his throat. Brian had taken his arm and was trying to drag him towards the exit to the park. Justin fought him off and dragged the crystal from his pocket. Clutching it tightly in his fist he shouted in a voice suddenly clear and fearless, “I am here to claim Brian Kinney’s heart. The bargain is ended. I demand that you give it back.”
There was a burst of sound that could have been the wind screaming in the trees, or could have been shrill cold laughter.
But the voice inside his head was unmistakable. It shivered with age old spite and made his skin crawl.
“You cannot do that. He has to claim it for himself.”
As the voice screamed across his nerves leaving them raw and exposed, he glanced at Brian and realized his lover had heard it also. Gradually into Brian’s face crept some level of comprehension. He looked ghastly. Like a man trapped in a life-long nightmare, who has been paralyzed by fear, and now is too afraid even to try to wake up.
Justin gripped the crystal more firmly and moved towards him.
The wind howled, and seemed to try to beat him back.
“He must claim it back,” The voice repeated, full of gloating malice. “And you will find that he will never do that.”
Justin’s head came up. “I can claim it. It belongs to me now.”
The wind howled more fiercely, but the voice was silent, seemingly struck dumb with sudden doubt.
“My true love hath my heart,” Justin quoted confidently.
“And …
“… I …
“… have …
“… his!”
He had to fight to get the words out over the ever increasing fury of the storm, but they rang out clear and proud. He turned to his lover, his beloved.
“Isn’t that right, Brian?”
Freezing cold.
Darkness.
No air. No joy. No love.
Pain. Only pain.
But out of it, a tortured whisper:
“Yes.”
At last his hand found Brian’s. The man clasped his fingers and said again, more strongly, “Yes.”
The thunder cracked right over head, and sleet speared at them, whipped on by the wind. He pushed the crystal into the hand holding Brian’s so that it was clasped there between their palms.
And for the third time, making the charm, Brian said clearly, “Yes.”
For one instant the heavens seem to split apart, and then abruptly the storm died. Their ears ringing with the sudden silence they looked around the clearing. All was still, the grass was damp only from the evening air. There was no sign that the storm had ever been.
Hand in hand in the radiant light of the full moon the lovers stared at each other.
“Well, are we going to do this, or not?” Brian demanded. “I didn’t let you drag me out here just to freeze my ass off. If I’m going to lose my balls from cold, it had better be in a good cause.”
Justin shook his head. Surely that hadn’t been why they had come here.
Had it?
“What, you don’t want to now?”
“Let’s go home,” the younger man said. “Brian … let’s just go home.”
Brian shrugged, truth to tell not sorry to leave the park. There was something weird about the place. Not that he’d ever tell Justin that.
“Okay. Fine by me. But you owe me a blow job.”
“Are you kidding me? You haven’t paid me all the ones I earned the other night yet.”
Wrangling amicably, and still hand in hand, they made their way back to the car.
That night it seemed to Justin that his always skilful lover was somehow more tender, more … loving, than he’d ever been. Long after they were both sated, they lay kissing lazily and talking.
Nothing of any great import. Justin told Brian about a love poem he’d found that day, written by a guy over four hundred years ago for another guy.
Brian told him that he needed to get up early in the morning. There was someone he had to see about an ad.
“A job?” Justin asked.
“Sort of,” his love replied. “Although I don’t think it will earn me a lot of money.”
*****
That night they sleep very soundly, very deeply. And in sleep Aine’s blessing brushes them both. They stir a little and twine themselves more closely in each other’s arms. On the bedside table, Justin’s crystal glows softly.
In the outer darkness, Domnu wails in bitter frustration, but, her victim lost, her power wanes. She goes back to her centuries of brooding. Someday, another chance will come. The Ó Cionnaoith are not the only heirs of the Tuatha De Danann, and eternity is long.
Finis
*The poem quoted is by Sir Philip Sydney (1554 1586)
My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange, one for another given:
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,
There never was a better bargain driven:
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
His heart in me keeps him and me in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and feelings guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was his own,
I cherish his because in me it bides:
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
.
Summary: Brian heartless? Maybe there's a reason &
Warnings: Very definitely AU, and of course a sprinkling of the supernatural as is fitting for an Irish story. I have borrowed bits from the tales of Tam Lyn, and of the Snow Queen, and thrown in some Irish myths of the Tuatha De Danann, the Shining Ones, for good measure. However, I have molded each of these to my own purpose, so purists, beware.
Notes: This starts immediately after the guys get back from New York (ep 110). In the flower display at Molly’s party there’s a cutout pumpkin face, so I’m assuming that her party was just before Halloween (which in 2000 fell on a Tuesday).
There are many love spells for Halloween, apparently dating from when Samhain was the beginning of the New Year. The one included is a mix of several, although I made up the chant which is pure nonsense.
Ó Cionnaoith is the Gaelic form for the name from which ‘Kinney’ is derived. The family motto is ‘Truth is always great’, which has nothing to do with the fic, but which I throw in because it seems particularly apt for Brian.
(LJ is playing tricks and won't let me post it in a single post, so it will be in two parts.)
My True Love Hath My Heart - part two
During the next few days, Justin had vague dreamlike flashes of his conversation with Aine. He came to believe that he had, in fact, dreamt it, especially as Daphne, to whom he recounted his “dream”, clearly had no memory of it.
Parts of the conversation were very clouded, and he couldn’t remember exactly what had been said. But three things he remembered clearly enough.
There was a reason that Brian shied away from the very idea of love.
Something dreadful threatened Brian, something cold and horrible.
And, this most importantly, the only way that Brian could be saved was for Justin to hang on. No matter how hard or how often Brian tried to throw him away, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how much of a selfish asshole Brian appeared at times, if he was to be saved from whatever it was that threatened him he needed Justin to believe in him, and to hold on.
Justin knew that if he told anyone about these thoughts, these memories, they would tell him it had been just a dream and he should forget it. But Justin knew somehow that it was more.
Whenever he found himself doubting, he would finger the crystal that he kept always with him - in his pocket by day, under his pillow at night. For some reason it seemed to make him feel closer to Brian. He didn’t know where the crystal had come from, but it seemed to call to him, draw him in some way. Often, without remembering how it got there, he would find it clutched in his hand. It always felt warm to the touch. Especially when Brian was near.
He had seen Brian only at the diner over the last few days, and always with the other guys. Justin was finding that his work at the diner on top of school was tiring; and Deb had gone into in full mother mode, hovering over him to make sure that all his homework got done, so he had had no play time. He knew that the guys were probably hitting the bars and clubs as usual at night, but he’d had no opportunity to join them. And he was a little afraid that he wouldn’t have been welcome.
Brian had seemed to be distant in some way, not just with him, but with all of them. The others didn’t seem to notice, or at least, he’d heard no comments, but Justin’s deep awareness of the man had him feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Combined with the ominous warnings from his dream, Justin was worried, but didn’t quite know what to do.
At the moment Brian was treating him more like a rather pesky younger brother than as any sort of lover, or even a trick, and was allowing no opening or opportunity for Justin to worm his way back into his bed, even for a night. Justin didn’t think that turning up at the loft was unannounced was going to achieve anything except to give Brian another opportunity to send him away. And the chances were the man wouldn’t be home anyway.
But tonight Brian was throwing a surprise birthday party for Michael, and while Justin wasn’t actually sure that he’d been invited, Deb and Vic were going so he had every intention of being there. He knew that probably meant that he’d have to watch Brian trick. Watch him with not just one other guy, but likely a whole bunch of them.
But that was part of it. That was the holding on part. And Justin could do that. His family knew how persistent he could be. Brian, he resolved, was about to find out.
*****
Justin watched as one by one all Brian’s so called friends spat venom at him and left. He felt very confused. He didn’t understand at all what had happened tonight. To begin with, he didn’t fully grasp what had gone on between Michael and that woman. He knew that everyone thought Brian had behaved like an asshole, but he didn’t understand what Brian had done. Or why everyone thought it was so terrible. Most of all, he didn’t understand why everyone had blamed Brian for the whole incident.
From what he could understand, it was Michael who had lied to the woman and led her on. What Brian had done was to out him on it. Not very nice, perhaps, but if the situation had been reversed Justin had no doubt that everyone would have held Brian accountable for creating the mess in the first place by letting the girl think he was not only straight, but interested in her. But no one seemed to be holding Michael in any way to blame. They’d all just turned on Brian. And so viciously.
There was something just not right about their reactions, something very odd and unsettling. Justin couldn’t help but feel that the sense of threat that had come to him from his “dream” had something to do with it. Which meant that what he had to do was to hold on. Stay by his side and clearly on his side without triggering Brian’s rejection mechanisms and making Brian push him away. He would need to be very cool and very careful.
So when Brian, giving off his strongest ‘I don’t need anybody, I don’t believe in love’ vibe, turned to him with a harsh “Well? Aren’t you going to make your big exit too?”, Justin was ready for him.
“No. You’re going to need someone to help you clean up this mess,” he said.
He fought to remain detached and made no attempt to move into Brian’s physical space, although he longed to offer any comfort that he could. It hurt him to look at Brian. The man’s pain was an almost palpable force.
*****
It was a force which the dark being Domnu absorbed with malicious glee. She was an age old emptiness; an abyss of cold darkness with an eternal and unquenchable hunger for destruction and revenge. Centuries ago, as men measure time, the man’s ancestors had fought against her people, fought with the despised ones who had vanquished them. Long ages had she sought revenge. The heir to the Ó Cionnaoith was but her latest victim, and his slow demise, his slide into darkness had been years in the making. Now, it was nearing the end. Let him and those who loved him feel her power and fear it.
For days she fed off the man’s misery. Her powers were not what they once had been when men had quaked before her, but they were sufficient to cloud the minds of those around her victim and keep him isolated.
Except for the fair haired boy. But even he served her purpose. Although in some ways he alleviated the Ó Cionnaoith’s misery, the contrast between the comfort he represented and the appalling loneliness when he was not there worked only to increase the man’s unhappiness. And the boy was powerless to address its main cause. The little dark haired one (so like her original worshippers) hated him. He would never allow himself to be influenced by one he saw as a rival, least of all where the Ó Cionnaoith was concerned.
Then abruptly the flood of pain which Domnu fed from so greedily dried up. To her outrage, she realized that the dark haired one had once again opened his heart to the heir of the Ó Cionnaoith. Her victim’s misery had all but evaporated, as he dared to allow once more the love of his friends to comfort the aching hollow in his breast.
Cold and implacable, Domnu plotted. When the opportunity came, she was ready.
The young man was greedy and cunning and ambitious. It took only the slightest nudge to persuade him to seduce the one the mortals named Brian. And then to turn on him.
Once more her victim was isolated; this time at risk of losing everything he had worked so hard to achieve.
Once more it was the fair haired boy who saved him.
Aware now that the powers loosed by the birth of his son and the advent of this pesky child were creating a risk of loss (and she never lightly suffered loss) Domnu’s malevolence once more found a way to poison the tiny seeds of hope they’d planted in the man’s struggling soul.
This time, however, the attack took a more subtle form. Already she had fostered the rift between the mother of the Ó Cionnaoith heir and her partner. Now she took the mother’s desire to care and provide for her son and twisted it to her own purpose. Sever the bond between the Ó Cionnaoith and his son, and his son’s mother, turn it into bitterness and resentment, and his resistance to her would be so much the weaker. Another father she found for the boy, a man the blonde woman would put in the Ó Cionnaoith’s place in her life, and in her son’s. Although the Ó Cionnaoith railed against his supplanter, his opposition served merely to cement the woman’s determination.
To Domnu’s fury, she found the young one stepping once more between the man and his despair; between her desire for destruction, whetted especially against this one who came of a line long hated, and her victim.
Now the focus of her malevolence became the growing bond between this importunate child and the Ó Cionnaoith.
If the boy could be manipulated into turning his back on the life he desired, then not only would he be removed from the Ó Cionnaoith’s life, but the man would come to despise him, and to despise himself for believing in him. There was already bitterness and anger between the boy’s parents, a little push, and their marriage could be brought crashing to destruction. Then if the boy could be made to blame himself …
Meanwhile his father’s illness should keep the Ó Cionnaoith occupied, and if the father’s fear and anger at this own fate could be directed at his son, so much the better. Stinging from his own father’s harshness he would have even less respect for the boy’s choice.
Relentless in her greed and malice, Domnu worked her will.
Only to find herself foiled once again. This time by a combination of the fair haired boy’s integrity of spirit, her victim’s growing strength to fight her, and, to her fury, by some remnant of desire buried deep within the father to be reconciled to his son. This last outraged her most of all. The father, at least, had long been hers.
The father’s death, with the dark memories that it conjured in her victim, and the boy’s absorption in his problems with the dark girl gave her some time.
Delicately she wove her web of spite. A word here, a look there. All aimed at pushing the Ó Cionnaoith to rebel against his growing attachment to the boy. Turning her attention to the boy, she felt for ways to take the hurt he was so good at concealing, at shrugging away. Subtly, she twisted it just a little, to the desire to give the inflictor of that hurt a taste of how it felt.
It wouldn’t need much. One instance, one blow to the man’s pride, and she knew the Ó Cionnaoith would abandon him. And the pain that abandonment would cause would be very very sweet to her.
Patient now, she awaited her opportunity, and when it came, she pushed hard. The Ó Cionnaoith was already shying away from his friends’ belief that he now had a partner. And the boy was hurt and ready to push a little to try to fight for his place in the man’s life. A small nudge, encouraging the use of this word, rather than that, and then a tweak to the strange one’s impulse to help the boy and it was done.
She writhed in pleasure at her victim’s pain as he watched his fair haired boy strut shamelessly before so many and then steal his own selected paramour for the evening. Jealousy, hurt pride and real loss coalesced into a river of pain which flowed from the man in a torrent. Now, now, you are mine, Domnu rejoiced, believing that the Ó Cionnaoith would never forgive this affront.
Yet next morning it took only a few words from the boy to ease the hurt and not simply repair, but strengthen the bond between them.
Domnu began to recognize in the fair haired one a true threat to the success of her plans for the absolute destruction of her victim. Dark anger swirled through the world around her victim and his protector. Ugly thoughts formed in minds prone to them, and at St James Academy, violence simmered.
Domnu watched, gaining strength from the man’s increasing fear as his birthday approached. He remembered nothing of their bargain, but some instinct in him recoiled as his birthdays accumulated, somehow knowing that each led him closer to his doom. She waxed fat with dark joy as he tried unavailingly to escape his fears.
Then another opportunity presented even greater possibilities to her malice. Instead of removing this one or that from the circle of those whose love kept the Ó Cionnaoith from succumbing to her completely, she would take the opportunity to remove the Ó Cionnaoith from them. Transplanted from the place where he had friends and family, he would be lost and alone; he would be in pain and unable to admit it. In that state, he would be more than ready to renounce the heart he’d somehow clung to so stubbornly.
And the opportunity was so easy to arrange, and so seductive to him. He was proud, he was ambitious, and he was scared. His ever strengthening bond with the boy was calling his heart back to him, but with that came all the old horrors, the pain and fear he had tried so desperately to renounce. At one and the same time he was reaching toward the bond, and recoiling fiercely from it. Presented with an opportunity to escape his dilemma, he seized on it avidly. Once the offer had been made, he was unable to resist pursuing it.
But something went wrong. All the pieces had been ready to fall into place, and something had gone very wrong. In the interview, when it was clear what his hearers had wished him to say, for some reason the Ó Cionnaoith refused to oblige. He had stubbornly held to his own opinions and they had sensed the steel in him, sensed that this was a man who would not lightly or easily stray from his own path, his own beliefs, and they had been frightened. So they had veered away, settled for someone with less talent, but who would be more easily influenced to do things their way.
Domnu raged impotently, unable to understand how or why this had happened.
It must be something the boy had done, but what?
Although things immediately around her victim she could see or sense very clearly, whenever apart from him, the boy’s thoughts and actions were hidden from her. But one thing about him was very clear.
He had to be banished from the Ó Cionnaoith’s life.
Filled with cold rage, Domnu now plotted not against that bond, but against the very life of the one she recognized at last as her enemy.
He must not be allowed to continue to wield this influence over the Ó Cionnaoith. Thus far, she had been unsuccessful in breaking the bond between them. Therefore, the simplest thing to do was to break the boy. And in the pain of his loss, the Ó Cionnaoith would surely renounce his heart to her forever.
*****
While Brian was on the phone, Justin managed to slip the crystal from the pocket in Brian’s briefcase where he had hidden it just before Brian had flown out to New York for his interview. He had no idea why he’d done that, except that the sense of threat that he’d felt around Brian had somehow grown ever since the New York thing had come up and he’d … he’d sent it with him for luck. That was all.
Except that somehow it was more than that. He’d sent the crystal with him because he couldn’t go himself. It was as if it ensured that Brian took some small piece of Justin’s love with him, even if he didn’t know it.
Well, he took all of Justin’s love. He also took something of Justin. Something tangible and real, even if it was only a small piece of rock.
Justin fought back the tears that threatened each time the thought of being parted from Brian came into his mind. He would not let them get to him. He just had to enjoy every day that they had together, that was all.
He wished he could think of a way to persuade Brian to come to the Prom with him. He knew it was unlikely, but it would make the evening perfect for him. It would somehow validate all the pain he had gone through during this school year. It would say to everyone, “See, this is what I am. And who I am. And I’m proud and happy to be a gay man. And you can all get fucked if you don’t like it.”
But Brian wasn’t going, and he was going with Daph, just like some closeted little queer who was afraid to admit who he was.
He sighed.
Well, first there was Brian’s birthday to get through. He knew what Lindz and the others were planning. He wasn’t at all sure it was a good idea, but they’d all known Brian a lot longer than he had, so he guessed that it would be okay. They were including him anyway, as if they finally admitted, even Michael, that he had a right to be part of Brian’s life, that he had a place there.
Maybe it would be alright. Maybe Brian would like it that they’d gone to so much trouble. Maybe he’d even think it was a little funny. Even if he never admitted it. Which he wouldn’t. He’d just growl and snarl and be Brian. But that was okay. He just needed to know that even while they were teasing him, it meant that they cared, that they loved him.
Except of course, that it went terribly wrong.
They weren’t to know that the direction their ideas for a celebration had taken was influenced by a being full of hate and anger and a cold yearning for destruction. They weren’t to know that Brian hadn’t got his much vaunted chance to move to New York. Nor could they sense the avalanche of despair that was hurtling down upon their friend. Only Justin sensed it, felt it, but couldn’t think of any way to help. The more he tried to press close to Brian, the harder the man pushed him away.
For Brian, the loss of what he saw as his chance to remake his life, his inchoate fears about his increasing age, the knowledge that Michael was leaving and moving across the country and that his beautiful boy was growing up, graduating, about to start college and move on with his own life, all these things fed his daily growing despair. The insensitive nature of his surprise birthday ‘celebration’ acted like salt and vinegar in the open wound of his pain.
He was not, and had never been a weakling. Faced, as he saw it, with the need not only to end his own pain, but to set free the ones he loved, Michael, his friend; Gus, his son, and Justin, his … something, from the dark shadow he seemed to cast over their lives, he decided on his course of action. He would celebrate his birthday in his own fashion. He would experience one last forbidden thrill, and in doing so would put an end once and for all to the misery of his life. At the same time he would free Michael to become one with David, Gus to grow up without ever having known the sad mess who was his father, and Justin … Justin would be free to find all the love and warmth and joy that he deserved, and that Brian could never give him.
This was not at all in Domnu’s plan. While she reveled in the man’s pain, she could not allow him this escape. In the clarity which would come after death, he would see the horror of the bargain he had made. If he died too soon, before the three times seven years were done, he would have the chance even after death to reclaim his heart and she would lose the greater victory, the one which would bind him to her for eternity. Leaving it as long as she dared to wring every possible drop from the man’s agony of mind, and soul, she sent the little dark one (whose unappeased lust and jealousy left him prone to her suggestions) to ‘save’ him.
That his shock and hurt and anger caused him to reveal the shallowness of his understanding and thus cause the Ó Cionnaoith further pain was, of course, all to the good.
“You’re Brian Kinney, for fuck’s sake!”
The words rang in Brian’s head. They had been meant as a compliment. They had been meant to comfort and console him. Instead, they had revealed to Brian how little his friend knew him. How much the surface Brian seemed to satisfy him. And there was more to him than that. Surely he wasn’t just that … that figure, that legend. Surely there was something of himself there somewhere.
Afterwards, although he asked himself the question over and over, Brian could never say why he decided to go to the Prom.
But some part of the explanation at least lay in Michael’s words and the effect they’d had on him. Tired of the pain and the dark confusion he’d instinctively turned to the greatest source of light and comfort in his life. Justin’s warmth, his strength, and most of all his belief in Brian, his belief that something in Brian made him worth fighting for, drew the man like a magnet. Only once before in his life had he known that feeling. He could hardly remember it now, but once when he had been a child there had been someone who had made him feel the way Justin made him feel sometimes. Feel that he was worth something. Feel that he was worth loving. Feel that he was able to love.
“I thought I’d recapture my lost youth.”
The words were about him. The words were about Justin. The words were about them.
The cold emptiness that was Domnu roiled with ecstatic malice. This was better, far better than she had planned.
Already the violence was brewing in her instrument. His hatred and fear of the young one were about to erupt in bloodshed. And now the man would not only be a witness, he would take upon himself the blame for triggering that violence. Always now he would blame himself for the boy’s death, not knowing that his presence had lent little or nothing to the loathing and self-loathing that already filled the dark mind.
Domnu rejoiced, at least as far as her cold and empty natured allowed. In her greed for pain, however, she over-reached herself.
Instead of letting him wait till the man had driven from the garage, she nudged her pawn into action. She wanted the Ó Cionnaoith to see. Wanted him to hear. Wanted the image of the boy’s blood soaked body to be ever in his mind, forever banning him from any further chance of love.
And Aine saw her chance and took it.
For a few brief moments the two lovers had found a real union of their spirits, and in the aftermath of that, Aine, once goddess of all such unions, found it possible to reach the man’s mind. A nudge, and he cast a glance in the mirror. He was too late to prevent the blow, but he reacted in time to call a warning; in time to prevent the blow from being fatal; in time to thwart the worst of Domnu’s plans and save his lover’s life.
But the blow severed Aine’s fragile connection to Brian, rocking in horrified agony over the unconscious body of this boy who’d trusted him, who’d believed in him, and whom he’d failed to save and protect. Aine ached for him, but was unable to help him. Not directly.
She put forth all her power and poured it into a healing blessing on the boy who’d fought so fiercely and so bravely to save his beloved. Even if he didn’t understand, or recognize, the battle that he fought. Her own anger came to her aid now and strengthened her. She had been prepared to do what she could to aid the man called Brian; he came of a line long loyal to her and to her race and there were age long bonds of trust and love and duty between them. It was fitting that she and her kin should offer him what aid and protection they could. The fair boy had held no such place in their regard, but his true and selfless love had touched Aine deeply, and his courage and integrity had earned the respect of all of them. Besides, he was an artist, a creator of beauty, and all such were held in honor by her race. For his own sake now, she felt deep fury that Domnu had dared to stretch out the hand of destruction over him.
Aine exerted her will and the darkness surrounding the boy receded. Gradually, he came back again to the world. Damaged, weakened and in pain of body mind and body, but alive.
That battle won, although not without cost, Aine turned her attention once more to Brian. And found some thin shadow of a link still there for her to work through. At first she didn’t understand how this could be. The tentative link forged in the parking garage had, beyond mistaking, been broken. Then she felt this new link pulse faintly as the man reached into his pocket and played with something there. The crystal! It had fallen from the boy’s pocket as they had lifted him into the ambulance, and the man had picked it up. It was with him still, and all unconscious, he would finger it, binding himself once more to Justin, and through Justin, to her.
Through it she was able to keep the man from entirely repudiating his relationship with the boy. She was able to overcome at least some of the pain and crippling guilt that assailed him. Enough at least to allow him to visit the boy secretly, although he was unable to face him, burdened as he was by the conviction that it was his doing that Justin lay in that hospital bed.
Then Justin came home from the hospital and sought him out. Tentatively, Brian began to put some of his guilt behind him, to overcome his own pain and fears to help his young lover.
Aine still sought to send healing to the boy. It was obvious to her, as to Brian, that Justin faced a long and difficult path back to health. He would need all the aid that Brian could give him. He would need Brian’s love. Now, Aine recognized, was the time that Brian must demand the return of his heart. Not for his own sake, but for Justin’s. But how could she persuade him, how could she make him see what he must do, when he had no memory of the dread bargain he had made?
She watched, and waited, and her chance came. Brian staggered home one night, drunk and exhausted after a visit to Justin at his mother’s house and fell asleep on the bed without removing even his shoes.
The crystal rested in his pocket. The scarf stained in Justin’s blood was round his neck. Using the power these two talismans gave her Aine came to him in his dreams. She showed him what he had done. She showed him what Justin needed. She showed him what he must do now.
But to her astonishment and despair, he refused.
Justin, he believed, was better off without him in his life.
Sensing Aine’s despair and frustration, Domnu coldly rejoiced. Scorn echoed through the hollow of her being. Did her enemy believe she was so easily defeated? Did she still not recognize the power Domnu wielded, not just over the man, but over those to whom he represented something to be feared and loathed?
How easy it had been to spur the mother to lash out at him!
How easy to shape her words so that they fell like lashes of fire on the unhealed wounds left by his own belief in his guilt. How easy to whisper to the despair in his heart that Justin’s mother was right. That Justin would be safe and well if it had not been for him. That Justin’s life would be better, far better without him in it.
Now it was just a matter of time.
After this the Ó Cionnaoith would not again allow himself to become close to any being. His own integrity and honor would prevent it. For their own sakes, he would keep himself removed from all those influences that sought to undo what she had wrought in him, and in less than two year’s time, he would be hers.
The boy she now discounted. Sick, crippled in both mind and body, he was no longer any threat to her. His one attempt to contact the man again had left him in so much pain that she was almost sated for a time, and he would make no further attempt. His pain served a delicious relish on her triumph, but she took no other regard of him.
Ironically, it was the boy’s mother, who, having once thrust the man so fiercely from her son’s life, now called him back into it.
Still Domnu felt no great concern, smugly confident now of her eventual victory.
The boy was confused, his mind darkened. Even now that he was back where he had longed to be, there was little joy in it for him. In its stead, there was pain, and doubt and self-disgust. His damaged mind held no memory at all, now, of his meeting with Aine. Only somewhere a vague instinct that no matter what Brian did, he must hold on, he must not let Brian thrust him away.
But little by little that instinct was fading, as Brian twisted and turned, fighting blindly against the ties that bound him to his lover. Not knowing why he was fighting, or what he was trying to achieve, but urged on always by the fears and doubts that Domnu, knowing all his weaknesses, could so easily plant into his brain. Pride, fear, jealousy, all of them worked within Brian, and under their influence he took on monstrous forms. Justin struggled to hold Brian’s true form in his heart and his mind, but he was still ill, tired, often in pain and full of self doubt. His weakness delighted Domnu’s malice, as she stalked ever closer to claiming her prey.
The crystal that might have helped them both lay forgotten, discarded in a drawer in the desk. Lacking any connection with either of them, its powers were receding.
Justin fought the darkness, as well as he was able. But his spirit was clouded, and his weapons not wisely chosen. His demands for romance, for the outward trappings of a love affair, only exacerbated the man’s unbelief in the reality of the love Justin professed to feel for him. Brian’s lack of response further fed Justin’s own self doubt and frustration.
Then, just when they were at their weakest and most vulnerable point, Justin went to a concert and met a dark eyed musician who seemed the very embodiment of the romance that his confused and badly abraded heart craved.
From that point, his break up with Brian, though protracted, was inevitable.
Filled with malicious glee, Domnu played with both of them; taunting, teasing, watching them, even now, trying to reach out for each other, only to find pain and emptiness as their reward. Excruciatingly, all hope of the happiness that the boy had seemed to represent was flayed from the man’s heart. By the time the boy turned and walked from the party with his new lover, Domnu knew the battle was over. The Ó Cionnaoith was hers. She could turn her attention now to seeking new prey.
*****
“I hope you get what you want.”
The words echoed in Justin’s heart and throughout the spirit realm.
Aine heard them and they gave her renewed hope. All was not yet lost. Against all odds Brian was still clinging with some unguessed strength of purpose to his bond with the one who had loved him. Who perhaps loved him still.
Domnu heard them and raged for a space, but the fair haired one’s apparent dismissal of the words and what they might mean, and the pain that dismissal caused her victim appeased her. Let him thrash a while longer. It would make no difference in the end and meanwhile, his pain was sweet to her insatiable appetite for destruction.
Her malicious nature was delighted when the Ó Cionnaoith finally succumbed to his pain and fury and assaulted the small dark one. Not only did his guilt and self-loathing feed her spite, but the revulsion he faced from those who supposedly loved him sent him into a new fury of self hatred. That she had some hand in triggering and increasing that revulsion, blinding his friends to the reality of what had happened so that they saw him as some sort of monster rather than as the wounded and betrayed soul that he was, merely added to her satisfaction.
The fact that even after that incident the Ó Cionnaoith still insisted on paying the young man’s school fees neither disturbed nor surprised her. If he were not a good man, a man of honor, then the prize of his soul would be so much less worth the winning.
*****
Unpacking the computer, Justin found in the bottom of the box a small crystal which looked vaguely familiar. Unusually, the crystal seemed warm to his touch, although Ethan didn’t agree, saying it just felt like any other piece of rock. Without thinking much of it, Justin dropped it on the table nearby. It became a habit with him to play with it between his fingers while he worked. For some reason, with the mouse in one hand and the crystal in the other, ideas seemed to flow more smoothly. His art especially seemed to come to life much more easily. He was sure that it helped him design the poster for the Carnivale so quickly. And for some reason it makes him feel closer to Brian than he had since long before they broke up.
*****
This time Domnu neither discounted nor underestimated the threat the fair haired one represented. She moved swiftly, seeking within the Ó Cionnaoith’s circle those whose inner darkness made them useful tools. Of course. His family. All of them. The young one was easiest to use, and his youth offered the opportunity for an attack of a particularly damaging kind. If all went well, and the boy was believed, the Ó Cionnaoith would spend the last few months before his thirty second birthday in prison. By the time his birthday came around he would be only too glad to be rid of the burden of any feeling.
The vicious shrewishness of his sister, and the vitriol of his mother added a particularly savory sauce to the dish Domnu’s malice had prepared.
She was furious but not surprised that the fair haired one once more intervened.
She refused to allow this to disturb her plans.
She tempted the young one’s lover to betrayal, believing that if his faith in love were overthrown, then he would be less able to help the Ó Cionnaoith and less of a threat to her.
Meanwhile, she used her influence over the Ó Cionnaoith to fuel his ego, his ambition, his pride. And threw him into the path of a man named Stockwell.
*****
Packing up his computer to move from Ethan’s apartment to Daphne’s, Justin slipped the crystal into his pocket. Through the days that followed, somehow he found its surprising warmth comforting. He felt lost and disoriented, trying to find it in himself to grieve or at least be angry over his break up with Ethan, but more and more Ethan slipped away from him, the time with him seeming less and less real, and his thoughts turned again and again to Brian.
Aine was delighted and relieved. Knowing that time was running short, she poured what power she had into the crystal, finding a useful and resourceful ally in the dark girl. It took little effort to influence her encouragement of Justin in his desire to reunite with his lover. Aine feared, though, that the young one would face a long battle with the man’s fear and his pride, and time was not their friend. In a few weeks the man’s birthday would be past, and all hope lost.
Aine was overjoyed and Domnu furious and outraged when contrary to both their expectations, the man, almost without a struggle, accepted his lover back into his bed and into his life.
Domnu was still confident, however. There was little time left now, and the Ó Cionnaoith was well tangled in the web she had woven for him. All his friends were becoming increasingly appalled by his alliance with a man they hated and despised, and the more they railed at him, the more obstinately he clung to his determination to make the most of what he could get from his connection with Stockwell and his power.
No matter that the fair one was back in his life for now. That wouldn’t last long once the Ó Cionnaoith’s birthday was past, and his heart truly lost into her darkness forever. And meanwhile, it would seem that even his lover’s charms couldn’t work to switch the man’s allegiance from the one who threatened to corrupt his very soul.
Gloatingly Domnu watched as the weeks passed and the man’s doom crept ever closer.
Even when he began to wriggle off the hook she’d planted firmly in him, she didn’t worry. She had other traps to spring.
He joined the fair haired one in sticking up posters. She laughed and led Stockwell to the loft.
The loss of his job hit him hard, as she had known it would. So much of his sense of himself had been tied up with it, and with it gone, he felt lost and betrayed.
As always when scared and confused he turned to sex and drugs to dull the fear and pain. More, more! Domnu encouraged.
It seemed that the whole of his home as filled with naked rutting men. And he was lost away from himself in the midst of it all. While his young lover was nowhere in sight. This, she gloated, this will end it.
But next morning when the fair one appeared he seemed totally unfazed by his lover’s overnight activities. He was far more interested in what the man had to tell him of that other fair haired boy who had been murdered.
Domnu brooded and plotted. A nudge to the policeman here, planting fears for the loss of his hard earned pension, a nudge to the Ó Cionnaoith’s pride, triggering his stubborn refusal to be bested, and the stage was set for him to sell his young one to the murderer. That would be an action for which neither of them would be able to forgive themselves or each other, and it would spell the end of any trust between them.
But it was never put to the test.
Domnu played however, on the backlash the Ó Cionnaoith felt when he realized he’d driven a man to suicide. Weaved into it the realization of what could have happened to his sweet young lover. Or even to that other boy. Emphasized that it would have been at his instigation. And waved the increasing power and ugliness of the man he had come to hate in his face.
If she could work on that self-loathing, then it alone would form a barrier that he would lack the power to cross. It would not hold forever, but it didn’t have to. His birthday now was only a few weeks away. And when Stockwell won the election, his friends would not be backward in pouring on the blame. They would become her best allies. In the face of his own self-disgust and their contempt, his main thought would be to withdraw, to protect himself, and his lover, by cutting the ties between them. And Stockwell would win. As would she.
*****
Tired of the battle involved in trying to hand out election leaflets to indifferent queens who had no interest in anything except where their next fuck was coming from, Justin decided to take a break. He found himself outside the bookshop where he’d had his confrontation with Bellweather and wondered if searching the shelves would yield any ideas for a present for Brian’s upcoming birthday.
He wandered along the aisles of books, idly fingering the ever-present crystal in his pocket, when a title caught his eye.
“My True Love Hath My Heart”.
Suddenly, the air around him seemed to tighten. Without thought, he picked up the book.
“An Anthology of Gay Love Poems”, he read on the cover.
He let the book fall open in his hands, trying to ignore the ringing in his ears, and the sudden intense stillness which seemed to have fallen over everything.
“My true love hath my heart, and I have his …”
Even as he read the line, the world seemed to reel around him. Brian had his heart, that was true? But did he have Brian’s?
“You seek to win the heart of a man who no longer has one.”
With a rush Aine’s words came back to him. All of them. The whole story.
The bargain Brian had made on his eleventh birthday.
The thrice seven years he had in which to claim back his heart.
The fact that his thirty second birthday was next month.
For a moment Justin felt like screaming in sheer terror. He had no doubt at all that what he’d seen and heard that night in Frick Park had been real. If he couldn’t find the way to persuade Brian to confront this dark goddess and demand back his heart he would lose him. Worse, Brian would be lost to all love, all happiness forever. Banished into the cold darkness of the abyss.
Justin vowed he would never let that happen. Never.
But he knew Brian. There was no way Brian was ever going to believe this fairy story.
Well, okay … so he had to find a way to …
And then suddenly, clearly, Justin knew what he had to do.
He was sure it would work.
He just wasn’t sure about what the after effects would be.
Well, he’d have to worry about that later.
First things first. And the first thing was to find Brian and persuade him that if he was looking for a public place in which to have sex, there was a rather nice little clearing in Frick Park, just across the road from the cemetery.
****
Brian thought he was crazy, and complained about the cold, and threatened him with dire consequences if he got mud on his Prada boots, or if beetles crawled into sensitive places. Justin coaxed and cajoled and teased him about becoming conservative in his old age and finally managed that night to lure him into Frick Park.
It took a little while to find the clearing where he and Daph had tried the ritual and cast their spell. But as he moved into the circle of rowan trees he felt the crystal in his breast pocket grow warmer even than usual; he could feel its heat over his heart. And somehow, although he couldn’t see her, he was sure that Aine was close by and would help him if she could.
He had Brian here, now he just had to get him to stay and not to question what he was doing while he tried to summon the dark one.
“Daph and I came here once,” he said suddenly.
Brian cocked an eyebrow at him as he looked around for somewhere they could be reasonably comfortable.
“It was Halloween. We were trying to cast a spell.”
“Did it work?” Brian asked lazily, finally settling for propping his back up against the sturdiest of the trees. Justin came to him and kissed him.
“Oh, yes,” he breathed.
“What was the spell?” Brian asked, a little intrigued despite himself.
“I was trying to win your heart,” Justin replied, his own heart hammering.
Brian gave a choke of half-nervous laughter. Something in this conversation was making him very uncomfortable.
“So you reckon it worked then?” he said, half affronted.
“Well, sort of,” Justin said. He was going to explain, to try this one time to make Brian believe him, here where Aine’s influence might be able to help him. But he didn’t get the chance.
Out of nowhere a storm came hurtling down on them. Rain and hail beat at them and the wind almost ripped the clothes from their bodies.
“Fuck!” Brian exclaimed, his words swallowed up in the chaos around them.
With a thrill of pure terror Justin realized that he didn’t have to persuade Brian to help him summon Domnu. Domnu was already here. She had taken the initiative and brought the storm down on them to drive them away. .
He tried to speak, but his voice refused to work, apparently frozen in his throat. Brian had taken his arm and was trying to drag him towards the exit to the park. Justin fought him off and dragged the crystal from his pocket. Clutching it tightly in his fist he shouted in a voice suddenly clear and fearless, “I am here to claim Brian Kinney’s heart. The bargain is ended. I demand that you give it back.”
There was a burst of sound that could have been the wind screaming in the trees, or could have been shrill cold laughter.
But the voice inside his head was unmistakable. It shivered with age old spite and made his skin crawl.
“You cannot do that. He has to claim it for himself.”
As the voice screamed across his nerves leaving them raw and exposed, he glanced at Brian and realized his lover had heard it also. Gradually into Brian’s face crept some level of comprehension. He looked ghastly. Like a man trapped in a life-long nightmare, who has been paralyzed by fear, and now is too afraid even to try to wake up.
Justin gripped the crystal more firmly and moved towards him.
The wind howled, and seemed to try to beat him back.
“He must claim it back,” The voice repeated, full of gloating malice. “And you will find that he will never do that.”
Justin’s head came up. “I can claim it. It belongs to me now.”
The wind howled more fiercely, but the voice was silent, seemingly struck dumb with sudden doubt.
“My true love hath my heart,” Justin quoted confidently.
“And …
“… I …
“… have …
“… his!”
He had to fight to get the words out over the ever increasing fury of the storm, but they rang out clear and proud. He turned to his lover, his beloved.
“Isn’t that right, Brian?”
Freezing cold.
Darkness.
No air. No joy. No love.
Pain. Only pain.
But out of it, a tortured whisper:
“Yes.”
At last his hand found Brian’s. The man clasped his fingers and said again, more strongly, “Yes.”
The thunder cracked right over head, and sleet speared at them, whipped on by the wind. He pushed the crystal into the hand holding Brian’s so that it was clasped there between their palms.
And for the third time, making the charm, Brian said clearly, “Yes.”
For one instant the heavens seem to split apart, and then abruptly the storm died. Their ears ringing with the sudden silence they looked around the clearing. All was still, the grass was damp only from the evening air. There was no sign that the storm had ever been.
Hand in hand in the radiant light of the full moon the lovers stared at each other.
“Well, are we going to do this, or not?” Brian demanded. “I didn’t let you drag me out here just to freeze my ass off. If I’m going to lose my balls from cold, it had better be in a good cause.”
Justin shook his head. Surely that hadn’t been why they had come here.
Had it?
“What, you don’t want to now?”
“Let’s go home,” the younger man said. “Brian … let’s just go home.”
Brian shrugged, truth to tell not sorry to leave the park. There was something weird about the place. Not that he’d ever tell Justin that.
“Okay. Fine by me. But you owe me a blow job.”
“Are you kidding me? You haven’t paid me all the ones I earned the other night yet.”
Wrangling amicably, and still hand in hand, they made their way back to the car.
That night it seemed to Justin that his always skilful lover was somehow more tender, more … loving, than he’d ever been. Long after they were both sated, they lay kissing lazily and talking.
Nothing of any great import. Justin told Brian about a love poem he’d found that day, written by a guy over four hundred years ago for another guy.
Brian told him that he needed to get up early in the morning. There was someone he had to see about an ad.
“A job?” Justin asked.
“Sort of,” his love replied. “Although I don’t think it will earn me a lot of money.”
*****
That night they sleep very soundly, very deeply. And in sleep Aine’s blessing brushes them both. They stir a little and twine themselves more closely in each other’s arms. On the bedside table, Justin’s crystal glows softly.
In the outer darkness, Domnu wails in bitter frustration, but, her victim lost, her power wanes. She goes back to her centuries of brooding. Someday, another chance will come. The Ó Cionnaoith are not the only heirs of the Tuatha De Danann, and eternity is long.
Finis
*The poem quoted is by Sir Philip Sydney (1554 1586)
My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange, one for another given:
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,
There never was a better bargain driven:
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
His heart in me keeps him and me in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and feelings guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was his own,
I cherish his because in me it bides:
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
.