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It was a pickup game where Neil got caught.
He probably wasn't being as careful as he should have been. After all, Columbia should have been safely outside of sidhe territory. The south outside of Atlanta was mostly swamp dragons and shifters, and Columbia was too small a city for sidhe egos. Still, his mother would probably have scruffed him just for thinking about it, even if he told himself that it wasn't like he was going to stay put.
Neil never stayed put.
The people playing exy in the park had been short one for even teams, but it looked like they were pretty good at it. Neil watched for a minute before pulling on one of his favorite faces, nondescript hair and dark eyes, the last face his mother had given him before she died.
It was only a minute or so of letting himself be seen watching them before one of the women called to him. "You want to play? We could use another."
There was a mumbled chorus of opinions of him from the others that Neil mostly ignored. The only person whose gaze he couldn't break was the short blonde man playing goalie on one side, in front of the weather-shredded net.
Neil couldn't guess what the goalie was seeing, but he told himself it didn't matter. Instead he grabbed the spare stick leaning against the wall and stepped in.
The court lit up with magic as Neil crossed the threshold, magic shivering through him. It was all he could do to keep his shape the way he wanted it as everything around him dissolved into true sight. The court transformed from the poorly-maintained public court to one that looked almost professional- acrylic-crystal walls replaced the concrete blocks and the pockmarked asphalt floor was now smooth and freshly painted laminate. Neil whistled.
"Yeah, it's not bad," the woman who'd invited him in said. Her hair was cropped short, doing nothing to hide the pointed ears of silver-grey fur that stood alert on her head. "You can put your ears out, it's gotta be hell holding everything down in here."
It was true that Neil could still feel the true sight magic tugging at him, but he shook his head. "I… don't really like to change in public."
The goalie rolled his eyes at Neil's reaction. Pale orange ears poked up out of his hair too, and with a quick glance Neil could see all of the others had shifter markings.
The rest of them shrugged and another woman with long blonde hair and matching golden ears told them to get on with it, so Neil squared up with his borrowed racket.
The game was probably the most fun Neil had had in ages. The skill level varied but nobody was less than good at it. The others bickered and teased and bit, but Neil could feel the goalie's eyes digging into him from behind the whole time.
They'd just called it for the evening when Neil realized the goalie wasn't the only one watching him.
The newcomer– or had he always been there and Neil just hadn't noticed?– was standing a few inches off the sidewalk like he'd frozen there, mid-step, to watch. He looked more like an anatomy exercise than a person, all strong, gently curved lines with pointed ears poking out of his inky hair. His eyes were green as the park's grass, intense. A ring of tiny mushrooms encircled his feet.
Neil knew then he was in trouble. A nest of shifters was one thing, but this man was something else altogether. Well, man was not exactly the word, was it? Neil marked the points of his ears, the glint in his eyes, the way magic slid across him like body glitter, not quite visible but never invisible, either.
What the fuck was a sidhe lordling doing in Columbia? Neil wondered and waited for the sidhe to speak.
When Neil got tired of waiting, he nodded his head to him. "Your majesty, is it?" Behind him, the goalie snorted. Neil could feel his brain spinning overtime, trying to identify why the man looked and felt familiar, but it wasn't coming to him.
"Fuck off, Andrew," the sidhe snapped at the goalie behind Neil. He ignored the title. "You're playing in my court when you haven't introduced yourself, hm? Bold of you, traveler. Who are you?"
"I'm on a court," Neil gestured broadly at the public exy court. "I don't know the owner, but I was invited. Consider me presenting myself. You may call me Neil. Since when is there a faerie court here anyway?"
He made a face like he could taste the sarcasm and didn't care for it. "Smartass. Dan may have invited you but you're still in my space," he answered, his arms crossed.
He might have had half a foot or more on Neil but that wasn't going to dissuade him. "What do you want me to do about it, princeling?"
"I'm not a prince," he snapped. "This is my court, and if anything, I'm the Queen of it. I'm called Kevin Day. Show yourself properly, Neil."
Kevin Day. He hadn't thought he'd hear the name again outside of a sports broadcast, definitely not since he'd heard third-hand about his exile from the Baltimore court.
Before he could decide what to do, Neil felt the true sight magic push at him again, harder this time, but he was already drowning in the recognition of the name. Fuck, how did this happen? He tried to pull his thoughts together. He couldn't resist forever, so he either needed to run or give them an answer so Kevin stopped pushing.
Settling on an answer, Neil shook off some of the borrowed face, letting his hair redden as his ears unfolded. He let one and only one of his tails unfurl behind him for good measure. The goalie, Andrew, came up from behind and fell into place beside Kevin, looking Neil over.
"You're a fox?" Andrew asked it like it was a challenge. And it was, to Neil, but not the way the other man thought.
"Something like that," Neil answered in a tone that said sarcastic or maybe coy, but not quite lying. Because he wasn't quite lying.
There was a conversation going on around Neil that he didn't know how to read. Kevin was looking from Dan to Andrew, meeting the eyes of each of the shifters, then looking back at Neil like he wasn't sure what he was looking at. "Okay. You're staying."
"Looks like you're part of the pack." A done deal, not a decision Neil got to make. That should have made him want to run all the more, but Kevin was right here, suddenly in reach again. Neil didn't know how he felt about that yet. He wanted to figure it out before he ran.
He didn't look at Kevin, refused to give anything away. "It's that simple? He says stay, and I'm expected to stay?"
Andrew shrugged. "Kevin wants you, and I like keeping Kevin happy."
So it wasn't just about foxes. That was a kind of relief, that Neil wouldn't exactly be the odd one out, pretending to be something he wasn't any more than he already did.
Then the content of the words hit him. "He wants me?" Neil couldn't stop himself from looking over then, taking in the tall, awkwardly elegant sidhe again. "What if I don't want to stay?"
Andrew scoffed. "If he shows emotion at all, he wants you. It means you're worth noticing. And Kevin gets what he wants."
Neil stiffened at that, not sure what to think. He remembered the courts his father brought him to in Baltimore, both of them - the exy court he'd thrown himself onto, with the pretty sidhe boy he'd fallen a little in love with, and the fae court his mother dragged him out of using every scrap of trickster magic she could summon.
"There's no place for kitsune in a court," she'd told him over and over. He'd never been entirely sure if she meant the sidhe court or the exy court, if she meant herself or him or both. While she was there, moving them between cities without strong a fae presence, in countries where it was land wights or shifters that watched the otherworld, it was easier to believe her. Once she was gone, however…
The court drew him back. Neil had stumbled into the court that was both, ruled by Queen Kevin of the Day.
Oh, Kevin Day might be in exile, but his profile still hid the beautiful boy Neil had been taken with, and the sidhe court of Baltimore was no more done with Kevin than it was with Neil.
Neil knew he should run. His mother, if she could see his choices, would never forgive him.
He stayed anyway.
"Just for now," he told himself, but it didn't matter. He stayed.