TIMING: Current LOCATION: Fable Blades PARTIES: Owen ( @bladesandtrades ) & Siobhan ( @banisheed ) SUMMARY: Owen and Siobhan make a deal. CONTENT WARNING: some references to past emotional abuse (vague)
The fact that Owen was slightly more used to fae now, was forced to work with them closely on a regular basis, did absolutely fucking nothing to stem his worry about this thing he had planned. Planned was generous, actually, Owen had more so stumbled into this situation because he was a fucking idiot that now needed to clean up the mess he had accidentally made for himself two fucking years ago. Working with fae didn’t mean that he was regularly exposed to their fucking tricks, thankfully, and other than the run in with the tricky faun in the woods and then the deal made with Siobhan, Owen had been lucky. Also cautious, after Siobhan, the fae that he was now willingly walking into another deal with.
Well, maybe. He hadn’t fully excluded the possibility of slicing her head clean off since that would also do in keeping her quiet. But Owen had learned some new things about fae these last few months, including that they were, in all scenarios, slippery fucking bastards. There was no chance in hell he was letting this insane woman, fae or not, get the drop on him.
To his advantage, she had agreed to meet him at Fable Blades. Owen had made sure to keep all projectiles out of easy reach, leaving the only blades on display the ones practically dripping with iron, both regular and cold. It definitely bothered him not knowing what sort of vermin Siobhan was but maybe this meeting might reveal some things. Owen would hate to waste a valuable dispellate for nothing.
He was waiting in front of the store’s counter when the fae arrived, her disgustingly smug features immediately putting Owen on edge, his crossed arms crossing even tighter across his chest. “I’m not agreeing to any deal unless the terms are clear and I say I’m happy with them, got it?” Owen greeted, voice deadpan. “And don’t fucking touch anything.”
—
Siobhan adored Owen: he was pathetic, and she liked that in a man. Unlike Emilio, Owen had a sense of humor. Emilio’s sense of humor had died just like he did—which was a joke he would never laugh at. Sure, Owen had tried to stab her, but Emilio actually did. She was still recovering, emotionally and physically. It’d really hurt her that it wasn’t a fun stabbing; she’d never had an unfun stabbing before. Except for— Except for— “Fuck!” Siobhan snapped her hand back, shaking it out. The old scar across her palm looked a little red. She stared at the door handle then she leaned over, peering into the glass at Owen’s smug, gangly body. “Blessed Mother smite that bastard.” In less religious terms: die. Siobhan didn’t like Owen anymore.
She slipped her gloves on and stepped inside, hissing. “Your door bit me.” But her sour mood was undone by the glorious sight of various pointy things. Some people called them weapons, at that moment, Siobhan thought of them as future-pins inside her future-pincushion Owen. She grinned. “As your best friend, do I get a discount?” She leaned over the display when Owen’s annoying prattle interrupted her. He went on and and on and on and then ‘don’t fucking touch anything’. Siobhan turned to look at him as she spat on the display glass. “I didn’t touch it,” she said.
“You’re not going to say ‘hello’?” She straightened herself out, tugging her jacket into place. “Ask me how my day was? Apologize for this hostile environment?”
—
A small blessing in this raging dumpster fire of a situation, watching the fae jerk her hand away from the door and glare in Owen’s direction. “Oh no, I forgot to warn you about that?” he asked, barely bothering to feign innocence they both knew was nonexistent. Sadly, Siobhan’s displeasure didn’t seem to last long, her unnerving eyes starting to roam the walls with an obvious appreciation. “I wouldn’t sell you a fucking butter knife even if you scooped out your own heart as payment,” he informed her with a smile that didn’t come close to reaching his eyes, which tracked Siobhan’s every single movement. Obviously and with good reason, he didn’t trust the bitch.
His eyes narrowed further when she spat on the display like a petulant child, jaw clenching as Owen scraped at the bottom of his reserve patience. There hadn’t even been a lot of it present to begin with, not for this fae in particular. “You’re disgusting,” Owen told her plainly, dispelling the thought of how easy it would be to cross the distance between them, carve out her tongue with cold iron, see her try to spit on his things after that. A deep inhale, a reminder that trying to stab a fae of unknown origin was an easy way to get into trouble, maybe even of the ‘dead hunter’ kind.
“This is me being courteous. Let’s get to the point so I don’t have to spend longer than necessary looking at you.”
—
“How do you expect to make money with that attitude?” she asked. “No wonder you dress like…” Siobhan dropped her eyes to his shoes, making a show of panning up his body with a practiced look of fashion-based contempt. “...that.” There wasn’t anything wrong with the way he was dressed, but there didn’t need to be anything wrong with it for her to find something wrong. Whatever this skill was, if it could be called a skill at all, she’d named it after her mother. “Disgusting? I prefer ‘eccentric’.”
Siobhan’s smile twitched; Owen was tightening up like a coil under pressure. She could get him to spring at her; he’d always had the wind-up nature of a toy. Find the key on his back and turn and turn and turn. Maybe that was what that old vampire lover of his had liked. In the park, when she’d bound him into sharing the truth about all his murders, he’d mentioned killing for her. She thought it was romantic. No one ever killed for her sake, she was always doing her own killing. Except for now. Owen was going to kill Flappin’ Flann for her. He would prove that she was still someone worth doing the impossible for.
…By virtue of being so annoying that he simply had no choice. Siobhan was starting to think this wouldn’t help her self esteem as much as she dreamed it would. She pulled the wanted poster of Flappin’ Flann out of her pocket and slid it on the counter, around her spit. “Animal tracking wasn’t on my fae curriculum, too busy with learning how to be better than everyone else,” she said. “That’s where you come in. You find it. Then I scr—” She snapped her mouth shut. “Handle it. Then you kill it. Then I take the reward. Then we live happily ever after. I’m seeing two kids and an adorable shih-tzu in our future.”
—
Owen’s skin prickled as the fae’s disapproving gaze looked him over, which was a stark reminder of how much he disliked the woman, never one to shy away from any sort of once over, appreciative or not. It might have had more to do with the fact of how much she might see, considering the information she knew. Sure, she only spoke of disagreeing with the way he dressed (which was bullshit, Owen knew he looked damn sharp) but he wondered what other disapproving thoughts went through that insane head. Not that he cared. One day he’d drive a knife through it and then it wouldn’t matter what had or hadn’t passed through that fucked up mind. “Oh no, are all fae born without taste? That’s so sad.”
Siobhan wasn’t just eccentric, she was strange in all the worst ways and, Owen had to regularly remind himself, dangerous. She hadn’t really done him any physical harm up until this point but that day back in the park, her blade pressed against his pulse point, Owen had seen the willingness to maim reflected clearly in her eyes. Not just a willingness but a longing. A familiarity with the process.
With a weary sigh, Owen shuffled half a step away from Siobhan, looking at the poster she had brought along. A shitty picture of a shitty creature that Owen still didn’t quite believe was real (there were so many bullshit fucking cryptids in this town). Sure, tracking had been a part of Owen’s curriculum, both for the human kind of hunting and the more violent kind, but that still didn’t mean he liked where this was heading. Especially not when Siobhan cut herself off from saying something, receiving a very suspicious look from Owen. He knew better than to try and get a straight answer from her. Hopefully, she’d slip up again. As soon as he knew what flavor of manipulative bastard he was dealing with… “I’d rather kill myself than get a shih-tzu,” Owen deadpanned, not even touching the joking notion of having kids with this fae with a ten foot pole.
“Say you’re not full of shit and this thing actually exists. I kill it. We still haven’t talked about your end of the deal. I was thinking you let me take your head clean off in exchange but we can workshop it.”
—
“How would you know?” she asked. “Do you know other fae? I thought I was the only fae in your life.” Siobhan tried to pout; every time she brought her lips down, they pulled back up. “Well, don’t let me stop you.” She shook her head. “But you’d look so cute with a tiny dog.” She was picturing it. “Honestly, it would suit you. Could you imagine a little chihuahua curled up under your arm?” She could. Her gaze—previously full of disdain—was transformed into a look of glittering imagination. She could see it all: white tank top (important), tiny adopted dog with one eye (it needed to be a sad one) in one hand, bloody knife in the other hand. Now that she was looking at him, in fact, those sunken cheeks were really quite attractive; almost like a corpse. Now if only he was actually one…
Siobhan tilted her head. “We have to hope The 3 Daggers isn’t full of shit. Although, I’m sure it is.” She’d never been, but lurking around Gatlin Fields when she’d lived there had revealed the bar’s identity to her. What could be more tempting to a fae than a place they weren’t allowed to enter? She’d found the poster in the trash outside, in a moment she would not like to recount to Owen. Enough rumors linked together to tell her that Flappin’ Flann was still very much alive and the bounty still very much existed. She didn’t know why the poster had been thrown out—if it was from a hunter who asked for a copy only to realize it was futile, or if the one posted inside had gotten so old it needed to be replaced—but now she had it and now she wanted Flappin’ Flann.
Imagining herself walking into the bar with Flappin’ Flann’s head over her shoulders made her smile. What could be more alluring than an impossibility? Or several, all stacked up? The bar, Owen, Flann, her? Siobhan loved a narrative. “I’ll never speak to you again: not in person, not online, not in letters. Silent as bone.” If she needed to speak to Owen again, she’d have to use an intermediary, but why would she ever need that? What she stood to gain was greater than whatever annoying Owen could give her. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
—
Oh, Owen knew other fae, out of necessity more so than longing - he’d cut ties with the more casual encounters when his life had started to consist mostly of hanging around with the undead, finding that to be enough non-human exposure. How would Siobhan feel about that fact, if she knew that his intimate encounters didn’t just apply to the things he’d been raised to kill but also her species. His curiosity was obviously not enough to reveal that information to her, Siobhan already had way too much knowledge on him without Owen willingly providing more. “I know all sorts of people, if they can be beneficial to me.”
SIobhan was eyeing him again and it made his skin crawl just the same as before, even if her gaze was less judgemental now and more… well, harder to fucking read. Fucking fae and their chaos. “Keep your deranged little chihuahua fantasies in your pants,” Owen huffed, turning his attention back to the crumpled poster that had seen better days. Where the hell had she even gotten this? Stolen it off another hunter? By force? Not that Owen could pass judgement on wounding other hunters. “Most of them are definitely full of shit but the bounties usually check out,” he sighed, wondered if a hunter or two got the hiccups. Carefully, Owen folded up the worn paper, sliding it into an inside pocket of his jacket.
With a grimace, Owen turned his attention back to the fae who was smiling. His chest constricted - anything that brought Siobhan glee had to mean trouble for him. No backing out now. His eyes narrowed and his ears perked as the drafts to a deal were laid out before him. Almost good enough. “And the shit you know about me so far? That doesn’t go any further.” A pause. “Has it gone any further?” The possibility that she might have run her mouth before this, had been given more than a year to go wild with the most intimate details of his sordid past, hadn’t properly crossed Owen’s mind before now. He’d meant to deal with this woman soon after their first meeting but thanks to another bitch in his life, had gotten a bit preoccupied.
—
There was something different about Owen, it was unmistakable. The rust was washed off of him. Unbound by the chain of a fae bind, free from a forced vulnerability, inside the safety of a place he knew, Owen was different. Siobhan was proud of him. She’d only met him that one time, but still, it was like watching a dirty child grow up into a washed adult. Yet, which one was more Owen? This man here or the man-full-of-smoke that she’d met? How could one weigh versions of the same person? Which one made Owen more real? If she peeled this Owen back, would she find the other one boiling underneath him? And what did you get when you peeled that one back?
What he said—that he knew all sorts of people if they were beneficial—nearly made Siobhan laugh. She thought about his vampire ex, and all the things he said he did for her. The Owen she knew—briefly, like a knife whipping through the air—wouldn’t know a benefit if it choked him. She let him have it; for all she knew, maybe he was right. Maybe he’d really turned those tables around and now he was the one that people did things for. Or was he still scrambling around like a dog looking for a leash? She supposed that he’d never tell her. The mystery of Owen would have to die.
But Siobhan didn’t want to let it go. “Why, Owen, would I blab around town about your most intimate secrets? Would I tell people that you spent—what was it? Months? Years?—as a poor, little guard dog? Owen, I don’t kiss and tell.” Which was mostly true; Siobhan revered honesty. Owen might’ve been bound to her to expose his secrets but Siobhan respected how deeply it’d hurt him to do it. Even someone like her had lines she would never cross; even someone like her had values and morals and okay, at least partially she hadn’t said anything because it was more fun not to. Siobhan wasn’t interested in simple undoings; any feckless ne'er-do-well could break something, only deft hands could dismantle. Owen knew that. After all, it’d happened to him.
To be skilled at this, one had to respect what they were doing; one had to understand it. Siobhan knew how much that information hurt Owen, Siobhan saw how much he hated sharing it with her, Siobhan knew that it was infinitely more dangerous for him to never know what she planned on doing with his secrets (nothing at all) or if she’d already released them (she hadn’t and wouldn’t). She smiled; Owen thought so lowly of her that she wouldn’t even have to lie about it. “Your secrets are completely safe with me! Have I given you cause not to trust me? I am a fae after all: lying isn’t fun for the digestive system. Oh, but I suppose that means that maybe if someone asked… Maybe I could’ve…” Siobhan waved her hand. “I’m sure it’s fine. Do we need this to be a part of our wonderful, friendly deal?”
—
It seemed a pointless thing, these attempts at proving… something to a fae Owen barely knew from a crowd of fucking leprechauns. What did it matter that an insane, tricky fae like SIobhan thought of him, even if piecces of it might be based off the most delicate of truths? No matter that someone so chaotic and unpredictable was one of only four people in possession of the knowledge that Owen Lundkvist had, at one point, had a heart. She seemed so morbidly interested in it, too, or maybe just in the discomfort she managed to evoke in him by pulling at those strings again and again. Never speaking to Siobhan again, about this or anything else, couldn’t come soon enough.
His jaw was set as she yammered on, so fucking theatrical and for what? Her words wouldn’t have been any less infuriating if she just spoke like a normal person - Emilio’s jabs about Owen’s metaphorical leash had hit hard enough and those had been very straight to the point. At least Siobhan’s words were slightly more dull, not sharpened by the knowledge of the last year. Oh, she definitely would have enjoyed being in the know about that, too, Owen was sure. To learn that he’d not escaped his unwilling position as a guard dog without a very steep price, all of it laced with pain and humiliation. A small blessing, one that provided him with just enough relief not to decapitate Siobhan where she stood (or die trying). “I’m not gonna pretend to know how that cesspool you call a brain works,” he bit back, going for nonchalance and failing quite spectacularly. Resisting the urge for murder was about all the composure he could muster under siege from Siobhan’s one woman show.
“You seem like a masochist, probably like the pain of lying,” Owen argued, finally cracking under the pressure of her game and rounding the counter to put some space between them, find something to do with his hands. He picked up the blade he’d been assessing before her arrival, a curved knife with an intricately carved wood handle, not an iron one but one that would be just as satisfying to drive between her ribs anyway. Letting the light glint off it, Owen gave himself a beat to think this over. It didn’t seem like he was entering a deal that would come back to fuck him completely dry and unprepped but again, this was only his second deal with a fae ever and the first one hadn’t been great.
“Yes,” he finally decided, resting the tip of the knife on the counter between them, trying to read from Siobhan’s eyes whether or not this was somehow all a plan to screw with him. They were entirely undecipherable. “You don’t talk to me again, at all, by any means about anything. You don’t talk about me or the shit you know about me to anyone. If I kill this… Flan creature for you.” His throat felt tight, probably a sign that this was a bad idea but Owen was too far in it now, too riled up by Siobhan’s taunting that she might just let his dirty little secrets slip if she felt like it.
—
“That makes two of us: I don’t know how my brain works either,” Siobhan said, even if she thought calling it a “cesspool” was a little harsh. It was more like a bog, one of the old and stinky ones. She smiled, she really couldn’t stop smiling at him. This was all just so lovely; who didn’t love a plan that went according to…well, the plan. Not that she had a real plan for this part, exactly. Still. Owen wasn’t stabbing her, and maybe he was calling her a bitch only once or twice in his head. She assumed that was an upgrade from their first meeting. “Masochist?” She touched her chest. “Me?” Siobhan considered it as though he wasn’t just trying to annoy her. She supposed that she did sometimes seek out pain; it wasn’t her fault it so often followed fun. “Coming from the king of masochists, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Then she frowned. Then she couldn’t stop frowning. The plan was not going according to the nonexistent plan. “By any means?” She didn’t like that. It used the fae no-no words: you didn’t make a promise with any or all or every or always or never. Those sorts of things almost always got tangled up later on. Siobhan knew better but her eyes were stuck on the knife. Owen didn’t like her. Owen was cautious. Owen would know if she tried to wiggle out of the words with some creative synonyms. Perhaps I am a masochist, she thought.
“I won’t talk to you again, by any means, and I won’t talk about you, to anyone, if you kill Flappin’ Flann—while I watch—and leave the body for me.” Siobhan pulled her glove off and held her hand out. “Deal? No, it does not count if you shake my hand with the pointy end of your knife there.”
—
At least she was willing to admit her insanity - was that better? Looking the problem so blatantly in the eye and continuing to let it fester? Owen was quick to banish the thought, definitely not because he wasn’t willing to admit to his own madness and subsequently face it. Hypocrisy truly was an artform. “That must be because it doesn’t,” Owen sniped but it all felt a bit pointless with the bitch smiling so genuinely back at him. Even the endless and quite frankly, aimless insults thrown back and forth between him and Emilio felt more satisfying than this, and those really weren’t all that satisfying as they dragged on. His eyes narrowed at Siobhan’s new title for him - he really fucking disliked it when the fae had a point. “The closest you’re going to get to one.”
Finally, a shift. Owen had rarely been so fucking pleased to see another person’s displeasure painted so clearly across their face. Like a funhouse mirror, the second Siobhan’s smile dropped, his lips quirked upwards. Maybe she was faking it, playing up how little she wanted this deal for his benefit but… well, she really had been honest with him up until now, brutally so. Not to say that Owen believed anything that left her mouth but, gun to his head, he would have been inclined to label it as truth rather than lies. So the way she was carefully mulling this deal over, hesitant much like Owen had been, made the slayer feel more at ease. It probably shouldn’t have but it did anyway.
He’d never listened so intently to a couple of sentences in his goddamn lives as when Siobhan regurgitated the details of their deal back to him, looking for any hidden meaning, an intonation that might fuck him over. Chet would have been proud, maybe even Eve, aside from the obvious misstep of making a deal with a fae in the first place. It was simple, no room for fine print or tricks. If Owen managed to kill this creature that maybe probably existed, he would never have to worry about this wretched creature holding out her hand to him again.
The knife clattered to the counter and Owen accepted her hand, grasping it with more force than was entirely necessary because the handshake in and of itself was unnecessary to the deal, so why not use it to inflict pain. Even if it had practically been established that Siobhan enjoyed it and fuck, she really was in his damn head. “Deal.” Yanking his hand away, making a show of wiping it against his jeans, Owen jerked his head towards the door. “Get the fuck out of here. I’ll let you know when I’m ready for the hunt.”
—
Owen’s hand wasn’t soft but she’d expected that; he was a man of hard edges. She thought of those optical illusions stairs, the sort that lead down and down and in on themselves and down and around impossibly for infinity; all straight lines, corners and right-angle turns. A jumble of points leading somewhere her eyes could never follow. Siobhan wondered if someone ever had managed to follow Owen’s pointy stairs all the way down; she was feeling romantic. Perhaps it was Owen’s hand crushing hers like walnut and the imprint of his calluses that the grip gave her. Or maybe it was thinking of his old vampire lover—the mystery Owen would never let her solve. Or, instead, it was simply the sort of mood she’d been in this year. Fae magic flicked between them, a kick in her chest that fluttered away without ceremony—magic never felt like much to her—and she mourned what could have been a long and fruitful antagonist relationship.
Now that Owen—someone she had never given more than a passing thought to—could potentially go away from her, she wanted to keep him. Siobhan hated this habit of her mind: to desire suddenly what was being denied. She wanted him to ask her to say, as though he would, and it was the fact that he wouldn’t that she wanted it all the more. She wanted to be his friend, because he hated her, and because she liked that. She’d wanted this deal and now she wanted to put it all away. Siobhan liked to collect impossibilities.
“Don’t miss me too much!” Siobhan turned and waved at him, blowing him a kiss. “Don’t—” Siobhan hissed; whatever charming retort she had planned (and it would’ve been very charming, thank you) died in her throat. “Your door bit me again!” she called out as it swung closed behind her. “Get rid of the stupid iron!” she said. She pulled on her gloves and walked away, unconvinced that Owen had heard her and convinced that he wasn’t listening, anyway.
