The Elf King materialized beside Sebastian’s car, sliding out of sunbeams and glittering dust-motes to become blond hair, earnest mismatched eyes, tall height, swirling purple coat. “Sebastian --”

Sunlight glinted hard and hot from the Ford Escort’s roof. Sebastian flinched. And tried not to know everything he knew, everything he wanted to know, in his bones, in his heart, which whispered about magic and dramatic appearances and the way nobody’d been standing next to the car a second ago. “Please go away.”

“The Adamantine Sword is somewhere in your world.”

“I’m not playing this game with you --”

“Neither am I, with you.” Those familiar eyes, blue and green, held Sebastian’s gaze; pleaded, with sudden vulnerability, “The Perilous Realm needs the Sword. For strength, for certainty. The Sword is here. And my senses are not ... what they would be, at home. Not in this world, with all your constructions and iron and metals. I need you.”

“Right now I need to go inspect the Patchman family roof. Unless you’d like to come along, move.”

The Elf King looked at him, across the summer heat and the flat blue paint of the car and all the years that opened and stretched and gaped brutally wide. “You know who I am. You named me Eirian, once.”

That name, that memory, hung in the air like floating crystals, like white silk in a ballroom, like a first clumsy dance together, Sebastian and the young beautiful King of the Elves, the night of celebration and desertion. They’d saved the Perilous Realm; they’d stopped the Hunger; they’d bandaged each other with shaking hands in fiery rain; and that night had been the night of joy.

Sebastian remembered his own heart beating, then: the way it’d felt, pounding in his chest, as Ri had taken his hand -- healed, no longer wounded -- on the staircase, in full view of the Fairy Court. He remembered the radiant expectation in Ri’s face, in those eyes, when asking him to stay.

He’d nearly said yes. He’d wanted to.

He’d thought of his father, then: exhausted, baffled, struggling to understand a shy fantasy-obsessed fifteen-year-old son, while they were both grieving and shouting and sobbing inside, when Sebastian had lost a mother and Toby Barrett the love of his life, in a viciously impersonal cold hospital room amid murmurs of cancer and aggressive spreading and finally only silence.

He’d thought of that, standing on the iridescent pearl steps, dressed in silk and radiance, with a young king who was smiling at him equally shyly and offering him a world.

They had saved one world. They’d protected one realm. They’d healed the hollow places. And if he’d stayed, if he’d never gone back, if his father had come home after a long grey day to an empty house, to a missing son --

He said now, under the unforgiving sunshine, “You said that portals are difficult. That there’s a cost, each time.”

Eirian said nothing, but nodded a fraction. He still had tiny crystals, or moon-drops, in those ridiculous long eyelashes. Sebastian had imagined a beautiful elf-prince, once, and might’ve dreamed him into existence, over-the-top and decadent as every fantasy.

“Was there a cost, this time?”

Ri looked away, at the flat black of the parking lot, and said nothing.

“What did you give up?”

Ri looked up again. “You’ve decided I’m real?”

“What the fuck,” Sebastian said, and leaned against his car for a moment, head buried in both arms, and just breathed; and then admitted, without emerging, “Yes, you’re real, I knew it when you showed up, no one else is you.”

A ripple of brocade, a tap of boots, a sudden sweetness, a scent like night-drenched lakes and dark berries and wild forests: Ri must’ve moved. One hand touched Sebastian’s shoulder, lightly.

“I’d say go away,” Sebastian muttered, “but you won’t.”

Ri took the hand away. Sebastian’s shoulder instantly missed the touch. “I will if you ask again.”

That was honest, as honest as any words they’d ever spoken in a freezing cave or at the edge of a growling black Hunger-void. Sebastian turned to find him. “You and I -- hang on, what -- the coat, the boots, the -- the eyelashes --”

Eirian lifted a shoulder, let it drop. “I want to come with you. On your quest to examine a roof. If you will allow that.”

The fantastical coat had dwindled and dulled. So had the boots, no longer knee-length and detailed. Ri had not copied Sebastian’s khakis and polo, but had turned the clinging trousers into jeans, and the billowing ruffled shirt into a simple white shirt, still soft and flowy but unremarkable by nineteen-eighties fashion standards. The coat remained purple, but more muted, in human-person proportions, and he’d lost all the magical gold glitter and crystals in the hair, though that hair stayed loose and shaggy and blond.

He looked, in short, like a fashion model or rock star: glamorous, gorgeous, but very human.

He still looked like someone Sebastian would’ve never had a chance with. Someone made for dreams and quests and impossibilities, standing next to a plain Ford Escort belonging to an insurance adjustor with a pen responsibly clipped into a shirt-pocket.