Mahogany and Teakwood

Chapter 4: Rosemary

all i wanted was

to see your smile break out

For as long as Virgil could remember, he'd experienced music as color: streaks and blobs and ripples of it. As a child in Arcadia, faery pipes and violins had fascinated him with their shimmering golds and sweet, sharp greens and languid, heady burgundies.

As he grew older, Virgil learned that his experience was not universal, not amongst ordinary humans, nor changelings, nor even faeries. Even before he'd left Arcadia, he'd half-convinced himself that his "color hearing" was the product of too much exposure to magic and an over-active imagination. Only his best friend Patton, a fellow thrall who'd disappeared into the Hedge long before Virgil escaped, had ever believed it was real.

The song he painted now was called "Unbreakable", the month was November, and Virgil was slowly settling into his mundane new life.

One week before Virgil's first day of classes, Logan presented him with a cold, bear-shaped moonstone that hung on a woven chain, and rested against Virgil's chest like a cold, crystalline knot. As "Unbreakable" blasted in his headphones, and he worked a palette knife across a color-smeared canvas, he caressed the pendant with his other hand. The cool tingly magic helped him concentrate.

Acrylic tubes and paint-smeared paper towels, which Virgil used to wipe his palette knife every few strokes, littered his desk. Although the paints were his, the desktop easel had been a gift from his reserved housemate, as was the stack of blank canvases he'd found in his room after he told Logan he planned to major in art.

The canvas he worked was a riot of color and movement, golds and reds veined with dark green, swooping and swirling over the white expanse. Head nodding to the beat, Virgil added a few globs of yellow ochre and scraped the color into a previous red swath with firm, careful strokes.

"Unbreakable" ended.

He restarted the song, letting the opening notes wash over him again, and stepped back to critique his work.

Deep red, then a soft dark golden voice that flows like so, then all those light, airy beats of yellow strings, blue-green interlude, building into a wash of vermilion...he was so wrapped up in the experience that he didn't hear the door to his room open.

A gentle tap on his shoulder nearly made him leap out of his skin. He cursed fluently in Faery.

"Logan!" he gasped when his mind reverted to English and yanked out an earbud. "Skulking redcaps, warn a dude next time."

"Apologies." Logan looked utterly nonplussed at the threat. "I had no idea you spoke Faery so well."

"It's called swearing, trollface, and only when people freaking sneak up on me."

Most changelings developed a decent grasp of the faery language in Arcadia; it was useful for communicating with solitary Fae who'd had no exposure to humanity, or changelings taken from other countries.

(You never spoke it in front of a Court Fae, though, unless you wanted to lose your tongue.)

"I tried knocking, but you must not have heard me," Logan went on. "I wished to inform you that I am going out to walk Nicodemus. I should be gone no longer than half an hour. Unless you would like to accompany us?"

Virgil smiled, a little bitterly, and gestured at the painting. "Nah, I want to finish this."

Every night, Logan made this offer.

Every night, Virgil refused.

It wasn't that Virgil didn't want to spend time with Logan—and Nic, as the sweet-faced dog was growing on him. He did. He really, really did. He wanted it too much, and that was exactly the problem. He already found Logan unbearably attractive; he didn't dare let his clingy heart get more attached.