onlythebranch | (no subject)

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amalthea

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The past month has been really fucking weird.

There's a lot of shit that's gone on, shit that's changed and Sweeney isn't sure what the fuck he's supposed to do with it about half the time. The other half of the time, he's pushing down the fact that he's actually really goddamn happy, and just doing whatever the hell he wants to do. He'd meant it when he told Spike he's a shitty boyfriend, but at least there's a thing now, something that's happening, something they've acknowledged, even if they don't talk about it a whole hell of a lot.

So he's in a good fucking mood as he heads down the street, a cigarette smoldering between his lips. He takes in a drag, then lets smoke puff out the side of his mouth. Plenty of people here don't like when he smokes, but he sure as fuck isn't about to let that stop him. He's not giving it up, not after all this time.

Amalthea is hard to miss in Darrow, something about those big eyes and long hair, and when he catches sight of her, Sweeney moves in her direction. He doesn't have the same sort of abilities a lot of magical folk here seem to have, he can't fucking sense feelings or shit like that, and he thinks she kind of always looks a little bit sad. The eyes, probably. But he still feels like he ought to check.

"Alright there, lass?" he asks, still smoking, blowing it into the air and away from her.

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She'd felt him before she saw him: a strange bright spark amid dozens of humans. He wasn't like her, but he wasn't unlike her, either. More akin to Biffy, she supposed, than to she and Magnus. Still, she liked knowing that Sweeney was around, and, even if it was sad, that no one seemed to notice that he was more than he seemed, too.

She was arranging flowers in buckets outside the flower shop, but her heart wasn't in it. She didn't know what to do with the strange, hollow feeling in her. She'd only felt an echo of it before, and now it felt like her entire person might cave in.

"Molly was here," she said quietly, as if that might mean anything to him. "And now she's gone."

He hasn't the slightest clue who Molly might be, but the words still stab a cold little sliver of fear into him, even if he'll not admit to it. All these years, he's kept himself apart from others because people die and he'd gotten bloody sick of watching it. It's worked, as far as excuses go. It's always worked. No one can argue that he doesn't die and others do.

Except that argument doesn't work with Spike. Loss does, though. That argument still fucking works, even if he's not tried to make it. It's stupid and he knows it's stupid, but he still ignores it best he can until moments like this when he can't ignore it any longer.

"That's shit, darlin'," he answers. "I'm sorry."

Amalthea nodded - it was shit - but something still felt... off. "She went back home," she murmured. "To the incompetent magician and wherever it is they will go together. And I'm still here, far from my forest."

Cabeswater, for all its cooperation, could no more be hers than she could belong to it. She was too real, and if she stayed there, she knew her magic would eventually seep into the forest, which already had its own. And so she was here, trapped in more ways than one.

"I don't-- I don't like feeling so touched by everything. What is a mortal to me?"

But she missed Molly.

Mad Sweeny laughs, although there's nothing cruel in the sound, and he rolls his eyes up toward the sky. What she's just said has been the summary of his entire life since the day he set foot in Darrow and while he does his best to fight it tooth and nail, it's a losing battle. And not only for him, it seems.

"Everything," he answers a moment later, looking down at Amalthea again. "Aren't they everything? Isn't everything we do as immortals for the people like them?"

With just about anyone else, he would deny it. He'd claim he's never done a goddamn thing for mortals, but anyone who knows anything about leprechauns would know it's bullshit. Everything he does, everything he is, it's based on what he can give to them and what they give back to him.

"No," she answers, looking almost incredulous for all that she feels pained. "Perhaps it is different for gods, but I am no such thing."

No mortal has ever left an offering to her, or if they did, it made no difference to her one way or the other. She does not need their prayers to survive, nor does she need their belief to exist. Even if they cannot see her - only a pretty white mare - it makes no difference to her beyond inconvenience.

And if she does something for mortals, it is from a fickle desire to be noticed and praised rather than any sort of need for survival. She is the only real part of this story, Schmendrick once said. Maybe this was what he meant.

"So then why's it hurt so much?" he asks. He's goading her a little, though his voice is still gentle enough. "If they're meaningless, then this'd be meaningless, too."

So they're not meaningless. At least, this one hadn't been. Sweeney isn't a god either, but he lets that slide by, because he supposes he's closer to god than whatever she is, at least in terms of the give and take they share with the people who worship and believe in them.

"And it ain't," he says. "Can see that plain as day in those big doe eyes of yours."

For a moment she can't answer. Does it hurt? It must. She hasn't felt this way about many things, but she feels it now. She frowns and looks down at a bundle of tuber roses.

"I feel it so close, like this," she murmurs, frowning as she makes herself sit down on the bench outside of the shop. She looks up at Sweeney. She isn't human; she isn't supposed to be human. She knows some things start that way - bits of folklore, spirits, gods. Maybe Sweeney started that way. He'd been a bird once, she remembered him saying that. He knew what it felt like to be trapped in a body not his own.

"Molly wasn't afraid to touch me," she recounts quietly. "She yelled at me, when we first met, and she cried. She said, how dare you come to me now, when I am this!"

Mad Sweeney sits besides her, long arms draped over his knees.

Like this, she says and Sweeney has to figure she means this body, this form, this whole fucking existence. It's not quite what he's felt, he's not sure he can ever explain what it's like, being part of something and separate from it all at the same time.

"So she came here, found someone she recognized, and was pissed about it?" he asks. He's not getting the whole story here, but that's what grief does to a person, makes the entire thing surrounding their grief a little bit confused.

Amalthea shakes her head a bit: she's all muddled, she's recounting it wrong. "No," she manages. "No, when we met back in our world. She was-- upset. She said she'd wanted to see a unicorn when she was innocent and new, but I was the first she'd ever seen."

And Molly was not young, or innocent, or new when Amalthea met her.

"I think-- she was sad to see me here. Trapped like this. She was so angry with Schmendrick when he changed me into a girl. I think she was mad at Darrow for doing it, too."

Seems a bit picky to him, trying to put a specific time when one sees a bloody unicorn, but he doesn't say it. At this point, he figures it doesn't matter. This Molly is gone, after all, he doesn't need to be a dick about it.

"C'mon," he says. "Are you workin' or can I buy you a drink?"

He'll be fucked if he knows if a unicorn can get drunk, but a thing like this tends to call for the burn of alcohol if nothing else. It won't fix a damn thing, but at least it's something.

"I think I want a drink. Just let me tell them I'm going."

She's been distracted all day, and Elsa even offered to let her go home if she wanted to. Until now, she's had no better place to be. She hops up and disappears inside, just for a breath, before she reappears.

"I like elderflower liquor, and thinks like that," she advises, if that might help Sweeney choose the bar. "Have you found the hidden place yet?"

The bar that people without magic can't see at all.

"Yeah, I've seen it," he says, although his mouth twists distastefully. "Never been inside, though. That where you wanna go?"

He hates that sort of shit. It reminds him of Wednesday and all his god bullshit, being separate and above and better. That's not to Sweeney's tastes, he's been around too long and has been too involved with people for him to think of magic as being that important.

But if that's what she wants, he'll go. Give it a chance. He'd once said every bar in a city deserves at least one chance.

Amalthea wrinkles her noose a bit, then shakes her head. "No," she answers. "The woman at the bar is-- hm." She makes a vaguely dismissive gesture; she's content to follow Sweeney where he goes.

"She tries to know me," she says after a moment. "To sort out what I am. I don't think I like it."

The woman knows she must be magic, if she can get into the bar, but Amalthea remains a curiosity beyond that. She doesn't like being a curiosity.

"Best not to be stared at when you feel like shit to begin with," he agrees, then heads down the street toward a pub instead of a typical bar. The place he has in mind is small and dark and relatively quiet, the sort of place where people go to talk instead of party.

Sweeney's not always a great talker, but he's not the one in pain today. He doesn't have to say a damn word, he just has to be there and try not to be a complete asshole.

"Not sure I like the idea of it," he admits. "The fuck do magic folk need a special place to drink for? We're already different, we gotta deepen that divide further?"

"I thought it might be nice to be known, at least somewhere," she admits. "But it doesn't work that way."

She could count on one hand the number of people that know what they're looking at when they see her. Most of them were fellow immortals or had experienced strange magic before. People that knew she was something extraordinary, even if they can't put a finger on what that might be.

She likes the pub they step into: it's quiet and dark and warm, and somehow that all feels like what she needs.

"No, it don't," he agrees. There are countless people who know what he is, he has no problem telling them, but at the same time, it doesn't mean they understand him. Or what he can do. For the most part, Sweeney knows he doesn't even understand the extent of his magic. He doesn't know where it comes from, it just does.

"Find a booth," he tells her. "I'll get us somethin' to drink."

He remembers what she'd said about what she likes and he doubts they've got any of that shit here, but he'll try to find her something similar.

"Gin is also good," she says to Sweeney before she flits off to find then somewhere to sit. She's small and bright amid the dim light and crowd. It isn't hard to find a spot, though, a booth tucked into a corner.

She watches people from there, her strange eyes luminous. She worries, often, that she will forget herself in the droves of humanity here, but so far, with some help, she has managed to hold onto her otherness, and it makes itself known in the strange little things about her: her eyes and her stillness most of all.

He returns a few minutes later with a glass of whiskey for himself and some kind of gin drink for her, one made with lavender and who the fuck knows what else, but somehow seeming like the sort of thing she'll like.

"You look like a big eyed statue," he says when he sits down again. He's not sure if he could be that still even if he tried. The years he spent as a soldier are so long in the past that he's not sure if he'd still be capable of recalling all those skills he'd been taught by his father and the other men around him.

"You tryin' to freak people out or is that just a fun bonus?" he asks with a grin, nudging her drink toward her.

"I don't notice that I'm doing it," she admits as she accepts her drink. Amalthea takes a small sip and nods her approval. She likes the botanical taste of it, and she knows there's lavender in there.

"Does it bother you?" she asked. "Even knowing what I am?"

Maybe it gave her away too much, or maybe that she was human-but-not was the troubling part. She didn't know.

"Nah," he says with a shake of his head. "Spent too much with things weirder than you t'be much bothered by it."

Anansi, for one, with all his eyes and the stories he insists on telling. Then there's the Jinn, who'd probably have a fucking field day to see Sweeney in Darrow, especially after that whole speech to Salim-not-Salim about getting his back door kicked in. Not like he's ever pretended he doesn't also like it, but he'd been a prick about it, too.

"Anyone ever tell you it bothers them?" he asks curiously.

"Yes," she answers with a faint shrug. She takes another, longer sip from her glass. Carbonation tickles her nose and she likes it. "I stand too still, I stare too much or too intensely. Or there's something odd about me. Sometimes I just go to work in the green house and let Matthias and Elsa handle the people that come in."

She considers a moment, then adds: "People find it strange that I eat flowers, too."

"Dunno why, half the fuckin' hipsters in this place spend their lives huffing lavender oil and all kinds of shit," he answers, snorting out a laugh. "How's that any different from eating them?"

It's different, he knows it is, but even still, he thinks he has a pretty good point. People jump on all kinds of bandwagons and they're just about as strange as someone eating the damn flowers.

"Nothin' wrong with bein' odd," he says. "It's what we are."

Amalthea considers her drink and Sweeney's philosophy.

"We have always been in the world," she says after a while, though whether she's talking about unicorns or mythical creatures in general is hard to say. "We fit more than anything else."

He thinks the opposite is true, that having been of the world for such a long time means they're out of touch with it, separate in ways no one else can really begin to comprehend. It's interesting to him, how even immortal beings think differently about their state.

But maybe it's that he's loved mortals before. Watched them die.

"You ever love anyone?" he asks. "Someone who wouldn't be around for as long as you?"

Something in her expression glazes over for a moment after he asks. Amalthea brushes her fingers over the cold glass and slowly comes back.

"Lir," she answers. "I never felt that sort of thing before I was human. He was a prince and I fell in love with him. I begged to stay human because I knew I would not love him as a unicorn. Not the same way I could as a mortal girl."

She looks up at the leprechaun. "I told the magician that I wanted to grow old and die, too, if that was his fate. But Lir, being a hero, knew that was not how the story is supposed to end."

"And so he died and you didn't?" he asks. Maybe this Lir never died, not before she ended up in Darrow, but that's not how the story really would have ended, just like Lir seemed to know. Things like Sweeney and Amalthea don't die, they just exist forever as people forget about them and move on from their legends.

Both of them, at least in his world, would have survived on Lucky Charms and little girls' backpacks, but it wouldn't have been the same.

"Most of the time, watchin' them, I'm sure it's the opposite," he says. "That we don't fit at all. This is their world now."

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