Gonna Make You Believe In Me

The unicorn!Mike fic. Mike is a unicorn—an actual unicorn that happens to be walking around looking like a human—and Kevin is really, really bad at pretty much everything about being a maiden, but is really good at being persistent. Frank is totally certain that his boyfriend is an actual vampire, Greta is a kitchen witch, and everyone sucks at life. Also there’s some porn, because I apparently can’t write fic without somebody getting laid, even (especially) when it’s about unicorns.

Notes:

Title from Sleeper Agent’s All Wave and No Goodbye. Ian and Greta are inexplicably siblings, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. I hated making the person who’s the villain the villain, because they’re one of my most favorite members of bandom ever, but it was the only person who fit the situation, so I gave in and cried sad little tears over having to do it.
Infinite thanks to my majestic betas, skinofreality and it-mightbe-love, without whom I would never finish ANYTHING. They dare me into the most insane things, and then they wave pompoms and stay up all night so that I actually get stuff done.

Work Text:

“So, so, okay, I have this theory—“ Frank says.

“Oh god—“

“—that my boyfriend is a vampire.”

Mike squints at him. “I’m going to deeply regret asking questions about this, aren’t I?”

Frank nods solemnly. “Oh man, definitely.” He leans in conspiratorially, sly grin sneaking over his face. “Okay, okay, no, look, seriously, he’s so fucking pale—“

“He’s just white, dude, I don’t know what sort of magical tan you’re expecting him to have that isn’t out of a bottle,” Mike points out reasonably.

Frank, however, is Frank, and plows right the fuck on without paying the slightest bit of attention. “—and he doesn’t go to church—“

“I’m pretty sure he just likes sleeping in on Sunday mornings.”

“—and he never comes in unless I invite him first—“

“He could just be really fucking polite, you know.”

“—and he never eats more than he has to, seriously, he didn’t get seconds at dinner last night.”

Mike gives Frank his best unimpressed face. “He’s a gay dude, Frank, fuck, he probably just doesn’t want to get fat.”

Frank arches an eyebrow right back at Mike’s unimpressed face and adds, “It was the lasagna your ma sent over, man.”

Mike’s unimpressed face falters, just a little, and he’s forced to admit, “Okay, that is fucking weird.”

“So, okay,” Frank says, hopping up onto the bathroom counter, “I need to, like, arm myself against the forces of darkness, here.”

Mike arches an eyebrow and otherwise fails to respond at all, continuing to apply a thick smear of eyeliner.

“Like, okay, if he’s a vampire, there has to be, like, concrete proof before I confront him,” Frank reasons, tapping a finger against his lower lip. “Like—“

“You do realize that, on the incredible off chance that he actually is a vampire, he’s likely to just eat you if you catch him at it, and the only sane course of action is to dump his ass and run like hell, right?” Mike smudges the liner below his eye, making it smoky. It occurs to Mike, now and again, that the eyeliner probably doesn’t help with how often people try to pick on him, but he fucking likes it. They can fucking blame Frank for attacking him with it in the first place in the eighth grade.

Frank pouts at him. “Dude, like I’m going to miss my chance to interact with the supernatural. Shut up and help me, motherfucker.” He kicks his heels against the cabinet below the counter. “Like I was saying, there has to be concrete proof. Like, right, there are things vampires can’t do, like eat garlic or touch crosses and shit.” His eyes light up, and he looks a little manic when he says, “Shit, man, I should totally get a cross.”

Mike looks away from the mirror to make a face at Frank. “Didn’t you just have some huge ass fight with your mom about how you’re an atheist or some shit now?”

Frank waves a hand, like the fight had been negligible or something, like it hadn’t involved him being grounded or forced to explain, in excruciating detail, the reasons he was leaving the church to every fucking member of his family. “So?”

“So,” Mike argues, “your mom isn’t going to look at you funny if you’re walking around in a cross all of a sudden? She’ll be all like, Oh, Frankie, you’ve found your faith again!”

Frank pulls a face at Mike’s imitation (which is totally spot on, whatever) of Frank’s mom and shrugs. “Ehhhh. I’ll wear it under my shirt or something.”

Mike rolls his eyes and kindly doesn’t point out that then Way isn’t likely to see it, either. “Right, okay, whatever. So you’re going to eat a fuckton of garlic and wear a cross?”

Frank bobs his head. “Yeah, yeah, and like, try to lure him out into sunshiney daytime activities and shit, and when he says no, right, I’ll be all, Oh, man, Gerard, why don’t you like the sun? and he’ll be caught, motherfucker, it’ll be great.”

Mike bangs his head a couple times against the mirror, just in case he’s actually asleep and Frank is a representation of the completely retarded side of his subconscious. He doesn’t wake up, though, so it seems unlikely. “Awesome.” He turns on the tap and runs a damp hand through his hair in lieu of actually brushing it. Squinting at himself, he frowns a little, but everything looks pretty much normal.

Frank snorts, looking at him. “Didn’t you just wash your face, like, ten minutes ago?”

Mike groans inwardly. “Yeah.”

Frank pokes at Mike’s cheekbone, then looks at his fingertip. “How the fuck are you covered in glitter already?”

Mike sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “We’ve gone over this, dude. I’m a unicorn.”

Frank snickers and punches him in the arm. “Right, right. Okay, seriously, you’ll come with me after school to get a cross, right? Where do you even buy that shit? I don’t wanna brave all the religiosity by my lonesome atheist-self. I think they can smell lack of godliness.”

Mike rolls his eyes, but shrugs. “Yeah, yeah. I’m in.”

Frank grins and does a mini fist pump. “Fuck yes, dude. I’m totally dating a vampire. You’ll see.”

Mike nods, keeping his face as straight as possible. “Oh yeah. Definitely.”

[[Kevin is, without any question at all, the most beautiful boy Mike has ever met.

He was the most beautiful when Mike was a child sitting in the backseat, and Kevin was the sweet, awkward, poodle-haired best friend of Mike’s older brother, Bill.

He was the most beautiful when Mike’s older brother ran away with Mike’s own best friend, Gabe, to go find themselves in Oregon or Minnesota or possibly Vermont, when Kevin and Travis, Bill’s other best friend, stayed behind and pulled Mike out of his month of unwashed self-pity.

He was the most beautiful when he was fifteen and Mike was thirteen, just starting to think about the correlation between beautiful things and having beautiful things. His hands were the first hands Mike had dreams about, followed shortly by dreams about the curve of his mouth, the line of his throat, the tightness of his jeans over his thighs.

He was the most beautiful when he sweetly, awkwardly asked Mike out in Mike’s freshman year. He was no less beautiful when Mike bit right through his lip and declined. If anything, he was more so, just to make it hurt.

There was never a unicorn born who could regret. Mike does it, anyway. ]]

Mike will admit, Gerard Way is one weird motherfucker. He’s all moon-faced and hunched and scraggly. He’s got weirdly sharp edges for such a squishy-looking dude, like if anyone gets too close he might just snap and stab them or something. Mike isn’t going to go so far as to call him a vampire or anything, but the dude could totally be some sort of basement-dwelling demon that feeds on caffeine alone.

Way gets all soft, though, around Frank, like all his sharp edges melt away, and supernatural fairytale or not, the part of Mike that aches from having seen too much bad shit in the world eases, just a little, to see it. Mike kind of wants to slap Frank upside the head and tell him to shut the fuck up about vampires and just enjoy the dude that gets all smiley for him, but telling Frank no always just makes him go at something harder, so Mike leaves it alone. Well, as alone as Frank lets him leave it, which means that he ends up trailing after a creepily enthusiastic Frank in the Christian bookstore after school.

“Dude, dude, should I get, like, a fancy one?”

Mike looks at the array of weirdly intricate crosses and just feels sort of vaguely uncomfortable. “Does it ever occur to these people that they’re a blood and pain cult, wearing an instrument of torture around like it isn’t weird at all?”

Frank snorts. “That’s what I told my ma. We should get married and adopt a bunch of gay atheist babies and see if we can give her a heart attack or something.”

Mike twitches. “You’re kind of not my type, man.”

“Right, virgins only and all that, right?” Frank teases, sniggering a little. Like he isn’t a virgin. Mike is really, really certain that Frank is, in fact, as pure as the driven snow in the sexual department.

Mike shrugs. “Pretty much.” He yanks a plain-ish silvery cross off the display at random and tows Frank to the counter. “Come on, man, this place creeps me the fuck out.”

[[The first time Mike talks to him, Kevin folds himself up to sit in the tiny car, ripped knees of his jeans pushed up almost to his chin. He’s a couple years younger than Bill, but he doesn’t even look that old, all Bambi eyes and full mouth. Mike is only thirteen.

“Hey, there,” Kevin says, pushing his curls back from his face and smiling softly at Mike. “You’re Bill’s little brother.”

“Hi," Mike says, beaming at him. “I am. I’m a unicorn.”

Kevin doesn’t laugh, like people tend to, doesn’t shrug it off, like Mike is used to. Instead, his smile softens, just a little, and he says solemnly, “I like unicorns.” His voice strikes something familiar in all the bones in Mike’s hands, wrists, sternum, singing like rain on glass and sleep-filled murmurs in the dark between people who don’t have to speak out loud.

Before Mike can say anything else, Bill is banging the car door open and hopping back in, flinging a grease-stained bag of bagels and pastries into Kevin’s lap and slamming the door shut. “We are so fucking late, oh my god.”

Kevin snickers, resting his head on his folded arms, which are, in turn, settled on his knees. Winking at Mike, he says, “I dunno, Bill, are you sure we shouldn’t stop for something else? Like, a sorry-I’m-late-cause-I-was-getting-you-a-sorry-I-haven’t-called-in-forever-present-present?”

Bill fixes Kevin with a death glower and throws the car into drive. “You are the worst fucking kind of helpful, Jonas.”

Kevin grins, smile eating his whole face and making his eyes crinkle. “I know.”

Mike echoes the smile without quite meaning to. ]]

“So, okay,” Kevin says, in the middle of June before Mike’s Junior year, shifting a little, almost nervously. “Here’s the thing. I’m going away.”

Mike breathes in through his nose and tries not to twitch, keeping his hands still in his lap. It’s not like he doesn’t know. Kevin graduated almost a month ago, and summer is not, unfortunately, an indefinite period of time. “Yeah.” He lets the couch swallow him up a little.

Kevin crouches down, hands on his knees, to look Mike in the eye. “I’m not—this isn’t going to go away just because I’m not looking at you every other day.” He looks away, mouth a serious line. Mike forgets, usually, that Kevin is supposed to be older than him, but when Kevin’s mouth goes tight like that, all Mike can think is that in terms of years, Kevin is still just a kid, and Mike would give nearly anything to not make him look so fucking old.

Mike narrows his eyes. “We have so, so fucking been over this, Jonas.”

Kevin beams at him. “Don’t I know it.” He flicks the tip of Mike’s nose with his finger, and Mike, in his infinite magnanimousness, refrains from biting Kevin’s fucking finger off in retaliation. “See, the thing is, okay, I get that you have…reservations.” His eyes flick away, just for a second, and he adds, a little less confident, a little more softly, “And you’re not the only one, okay?”

Mike feels nausea gathering in the bottom of his gut, sickly and cold. “Yeah?”

Kevin’s long fingers dance over Mike’s knuckles, tapping out a not-quite rhythm, and Kevin looks anywhere but at Mike’s face when he says, “Yeah. But that doesn’t mean I’m not holding out for you, anyway.”

Mike swallows, pretends that it doesn’t catch in his throat, and his eyes flick to the gleam of silver on Kevin’s hand. Kevin means it literally, has said it and meant it from day one, and while that barely means anything in modern society, to Mike, it means pretty fucking much everything.

Kevin twists the thin metallic band on his ring finger, seeing Mike’s gaze, and he smiles wryly. Mike knows he’s telling his parents that it’s a religious commitment, that it’s a reaffirmation of his fucking faith or something, that he’s doing it to be a good example to his brothers. Mike isn’t sure why that makes him as nauseous as it does. He tells Mike that same lie, too, actually, but Mike knows why Kevin wears it.

Which is why he shoves Kevin’s hand away and says, voice rough like gravel, “Stop fucking waiting, asshole.” He pushes harder than he means to, though, and Kevin overbalances, landing on his ass on the carpet, blinking up at Mike like he’s something brand new.

When Mike stands up, starts to leave, Kevin’s hand catches at the leg of his jeans, and two fingers slip into Mike’s back pocket. “Call me,” he says, voice soft, rueful half smile tilting his mouth. “Please, Mike? Just. Call?”

Mike closes his eyes against the sick feeling in his stomach and gets the fuck out of dodge.

“Hey, hey, okay, so, so, Gee, we’re going to the shore tomorrow after school,” Frank says, mouth twitching in a hilarious way that Mike suspects is Frank’s version of a poker face. “You should totally come.”

Way makes a face—well, Way’s version of a face, which mostly consists of a quirked eyebrow and the slight downward curve of his mouth. “You know I can’t.”

Frank shoots Mike a not-at-all-subtle conspiratorial look, and says in a creepily innocent voice vaguely reminiscent of a demon-possessed twelve year old girl, “Oh?”

Way shifts uncomfortably. “I have class until six thirty. And I’m not really big on, like. Sun.”

Frank’s eyes widen comically, and Mike manfully resists the urge to slap him until he stops looking like a cartoon. “Man, that’s too bad,” Mike says, covering Frank’s awkward silence. “We should chill afterwards or something.”

Way’s lips twitch up into his basement-dwelling-motherfucker version of a smile. “I’ll bring pizza. Or something.”

Frank waggles his eyebrows at Mike and says, “Extra garlic?”

Way looks mildly ill, but says, “Sure, yeah.”

Mike tries very, very hard not to react to Frank’s crestfallen expression, but can’t resist kicking him in the ankle.

Frank, in line with his apparent new quest to be the most painfully irritating jackass ever, doesn’t even do Mike the kindness of wincing.

[[A thousand miles ago, an eon away, steeped in moonlight and ocean-soaked air, Mike was something magic, something incredible, magnificent.

When the world got too real around him, when the broken cries of too many slaughtered forests and leveled mountains got too loud, when the world ran out of room for anything not made by the hands of men, Mike’s magic started to slip away. It went slowly at first, slow enough that a lot of it vanished before Mike even took notice. It took over a hundred years of no one looking for him, no one coming to him in greed or desperation or kindness before he realized that the sound of his magic had grown too quiet for the world to hear, too faint to call anyone to him, even if he tries. ]]

[[When Mike is newly encased in his human skin, newly wearing the miracle of, Oh thank god, they said he was never going to wake up!, of, We have our baby boy back!, he’s quiet, figuring out the mechanics, the tricks to keeping his magic hidden behind flesh and bone and the strange science of facial expressions. When he figures out the way to shape words with his mouth, not just his thoughts, the very first thing he does is tell someone the truth.

To his new skin’s stepbrother, Bill, he says solemnly, “I’m not the brother you had before. I’m a unicorn.”

Bill squints at him for a moment, then shrugs. “Kay.” He reaches out one big hand—he’s not that much older than Mike’s body, but the five year difference is enough that Bill’s twelve-year-old hands dwarf Mike’s features—and ruffles Mike’s hair. “Whatever you say.”

Mike nods, solemn, and goes back to streaking lines of colored wax across paper in what he supposes are probably age-appropriate chaotic shapes. ]]

[[Bill doesn’t actually believe Mike until Mike is eleven, and Bill, in a fit of big-brotherly affection, lets him tag along to a high school party.

Mike doesn’t really know what to do with himself—he’s worn this skin long enough that he knows how to work it, but there’s nothing he can do to keep the magic from spilling out of his pores; a small human body just isn’t big enough to hold the magic of an entire unicorn. The result, a thin sheen of what Mike has been told over and over is an absolutely faggoty amount of glitter, is perfectly fine with Mike, but it seems that some of the other boys at the party find it offensive.

Which, apparently, is why Mike ends up backed against the side of the house by four Seniors, throwing not-especially-clever jeers about Mike’s theoretical sexual orientation (Mike doesn’t have sex, he’s not sure how he can orient something he doesn’t have) and race (he’s not a fairy, he explains patiently, and then slightly less patiently, he’s a unicorn, fairies don’t sweat glitter), with Bill nowhere in sight.

Mike sees him, finally, over the shoulder of the shortest of the Seniors, right before one of the others throws the first punch, a fist straight into the meat of Mike’s gut. Bill’s face is a blur of horror, tinged with fear, and for a moment, Mike is more upset by Bill’s distress than his own. And then the pain, along with the second and third punches, hits.

Bill is moving forward, spindly arm drawn back, but Mike’s magic doesn’t wait for Bill to help before it knocks the boys flat with a backlash of his own pain. This leaves Bill barreling across the grass, arm thrusting forward in a punch with nothing to hit.

“The fuck?” he says, fist meeting air, blinking around him. The boys are on the ground, sprawled awkwardly, covered in a thick dusting of glitter, and Bill’s left sneaker is half on the sleeve of the one who threw the first punch. “What the even—the fuck just happened?”

Mike blinks owlishly at him, honestly confused. “They hit me,” he explains patiently, holding still so the magic can seep back under his skin.

Bill nods slowly, eyes almost completely round. “Right,” he agrees slowly, “but now they’re on the ground.”

Mike shrugs. “They hit me.”

“Yeah, I got that. But how did they end up—how did you do that?” He jerks his head at the tangle of unconscious boys shimmering in the grass.

Mike spares a moment to wonder if his brother is possibly mentally deficient. “I told you,” he says, cocking his head, “I’m a unicorn.”

Bill swallows, visibly composing himself. “Right,” he says again, “okay. I—yeah.” ]]

[[When Mike says his first curse word, he’s twelve, and Bill is proud that he cackles and rubs his hands together like a super villain. Mike promptly punches him in the shoulder, because Bill might be rubbing off on him a little too much. ]]

[[When Mike starts high school, Kevin is a Junior. They don’t have any classes together, and Bill has already graduated, so Mike doesn’t try to join Kevin’s table at lunch, just finds a quiet corner of the library and eats his bag lunch with his knees drawn up to his chest. He wishes his jeans had holes in them for him to pick at, but his mom insisted on buying him new ones for his first day, so these are perfectly intact and still sort of uncomfortable. He feels jittery from the day so far, from the herds of people crowding him and yelling around him and always, always pressed too close.

Kevin shows up fifteen minutes into the lunch period, sandwich in hand, and settles on the floor beside Mike. “Hey,” he says, taking a bite of tuna-and-cucumber on wheat and waving his fingers at Mike in greeting.

Mike blinks at him for a minute. “Hey.” His hair is kind of shaggy—not, as she thinks, to annoy his mother, but because it gives him something to hide behind—and it’s maybe a little bit tangled, too, and for the first time, Mike is a little self-conscious about it. “What’re you doing here?”

Kevin looks genuinely confused. “Eating…lunch?” He’s got big eyes, warm brown, and Mike is sort of startled to see himself in them. He doesn’t usually look at human faces for long enough to remember that their eyes reflect everything. Kevin’s face tightens a little, suddenly uncomfortable. “Am—do you not want me here?”

Mike isn’t even sure how he’s supposed to respond to that. He’s spent all day trying to find the right seats between the right people, people who won’t make him shy away, skittish, or make his skin crawl with wrongness; has spent all day trying not to bump the wrong people in the hall, and mostly, he wants to crawl away and never have to talk to anyone again. “No,” he says, startling himself by speaking, “no, I want you here.”

The grin on Kevin’s face is soft and satisfied and a little shy. “Cool, then. Wanna trade chips?”

Mike pretends that this whole thing doesn’t make his molecules buzz strangely and holds out his Doritos. “Sure.” ]]

When Mike finds it, months later, his blood runs cold for what has to be a solid minute. He finds it in the back pocket of his most worn-out jeans while he’s looking for his lighter, fumbling to light an illicit cigarette so he can smoke it out the window and hope his mom doesn’t notice the smell.

It’s thin, maybe a dozen strands, twisted together into a braid and looped into a circle, like a bracelet. The fibers shine softly silver, finer than any thread, and the whole thing is barely a whisper over his fingers. Nonetheless, it’s sickeningly familiar, a texture he’s never felt with human hands, but one he couldn’t forget if his life depended on it.

It shimmers like water against the skin of his wrist when Mike puts it on, each strand flowing into the next, sunlight and moonlight and the gleam of stars on a smile, singing his own song back to him in a new language.

“Fucking hell, Kevin,” he breathes, turning his wrist over, running careful fingertips along the loop.

When he remembers where he is, when and who he is, Mike fumbles his cell open and texts, how long ago?

It’s barely a minute before the phone chimes Kevin’s reply— when bill left. that morning, when you fell asleep on me.

Mike remembers that day. It involved an inordinate amount of unmanly crying that Kevin walked in on, and ended with them sitting on Mike’s couch, watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Mike’s head on Kevin’s thigh, face still damp while he drifted into exhausted sleep, Kevin’s hand carding gently through his hair.

That’s—that means five years. Five years of Mike being a complete and total ass, while Kevin knew, knew every fucking thing, and never exposed him, no matter how nasty Mike got.

did you really think i'd use it against you? Kevin texts, almost ten minutes later, while Mike is still too frozen to say anything.

When Kevin picks up after the first ring, Mike says, in one, soft breath, “I didn’t want to give you the opportunity to make me lose my faith in you, okay? I kind of really fucking needed it. I’m not—people aren’t good all that often, okay, and you were, and I just fucking couldn’t afford to lose that.”

Kevin is quiet for a minute. Finally, he says, “And now?”

Mike shrugs, and then remembers that Kevin can’t see it. “Now, I mean.” He stops, takes a breath, feels it rattle into and out of his lungs too slowly. It’s at these times, in these weird, still moments, that he remembers that this body doesn’t quite fit, that it’s decaying all around him, and he has to fight to breathe through the sudden, paralyzing claustrophobia. “I mean, you could—when you come home next, we could—we could see.”

Mike hears Kevin actually stop breathing. When he eventually manages a, “Yeah?” it comes out in a sandpaper croak.

Mike swallows against the apparently totally unnecessary fear and says, “Yeah.”

He can almost hear Kevin’s grin.

[[Kevin has always been awkward, tangled in himself in limb and thought alike. When he meets Mike, he’s fifteen, and Mike is Bill’s kid brother in the backseat, barely thirteen. He’s scruffy, with greasy brown shag falling over his eyes and dirty, torn jeans that are just a little bit too long, like maybe they’d been Bill’s first. Behind the dark, dirty fringe, Mike has big, liquid black eyes that eat the light instead of reflecting it, deep and solemn.

Kevin only has to look at him for half a second to know that he’s magical, magical in a whole different way than the church claims to be magical. It takes another quarter second for Kevin to fall in love.

“Hey,” he makes himself say. “You’re Bill’s little brother.”

Mike nods, smile tugging his mouth up at the corners. “Hi. I am,” he says, voice too deep, too melodic for a kid, and, “I’m a unicorn.”

Of course he is. After that, there’s really no going back. ]]

[[After that, Kevin can hear Mike’s song singing under his skin, buzzing through nerve endings, twisting around bones and making his own marrow hum in harmony. It wakes him up in the mornings, chiming through his arteries; it soothes him to sleep at night, keeping him warm as he drifts off. It gets louder whenever Mike is around, like a pet excited to see its owner, and when Mike is close enough to touch, Kevin’s skin tingles with electric music, loud enough that he’s amazed that he’s the only one hearing it.

When, nearly half a year after Kevin meets him for the first time, Mike starts his first year of high school, Kevin completely fails to take a single note all day because the song is so loud he can barely hear anything else. He could, maybe, if he tried, if he clears his head and really, really focuses, but the song is better than anything else he’s ever heard, and he’s had six months already to fall in love with it; statistics and anatomy and third year English have no chance of competing. He gets through the first half of the day by thinking of lunch, when he can sit close enough to Mike that maybe, maybe, the song will get loud enough that Mike will hear Kevin’s bones singing along.

When Kevin hits the cafeteria, though, Mike is nowhere to be seen, so Kevin goes to his usual table and sits with Joe and his not-exactly-friends to wait for him.

A quarter of an hour into the period, Mike is still missing, and the song is subdued, barely a lullaby, so Kevin knows he’s not even in the room.

It’s not even really something he decides—before he really knows it, Kevin’s sandwich is in his hand, chips and can of soda tucked under his arm, and he’s wandering the halls, playing hot-or-cold with the melody, listening and following until it’s at its loudest.

He finds Mike in the library, huddled in a corner between stacks, gnawing on a sandwich in silence. The quiet is nice—Kevin can hear the song without having to filter out anyone else’s noise.

“Hey,” he says, dropping to the ground and unwrapping his tuna-and-cucumber sandwich and waving hello.

Mike peers at him through his hair and furrows his eyebrows. “Hey,” he says slowly, like he’s confused. “What’re you doing here?”

“I’m… eating?” Kevin feels suddenly, painfully awkward. It occurs to him, for the first time, that maybe, right, maybe everyone hears Mike’s magic singing to them, that maybe everyone just clings to Mike so they can hear better, never leaves him alone, and that Kevin is nothing special. That maybe, to him, Mike is anything but just Bill’s little brother, but to Mike, Kevin is nothing more than his big brother’s awkward, weird friend who looks at him funny, and maybe, maybe, Mike doesn’t want him around at all. Ignoring the tight pain in his gut, Kevin makes himself ask, “Am—do you not want me here?”

Mike looks briefly conflicted, but after a moment, his face clears like clouds drawing back in the face of the sun, and one side of his mouth twitches up and he’s saying, “No—no, I want you here.”

Relief tastes vaguely metallic as it surges up in Kevin’s throat. “Cool,” he breathes, feeling his face crack with an involuntary grin. “Wanna trade chips?”

Mike still looks sort of bemused, but he shrugs one shoulder, too cool for a kid, and says, “Sure.”]]

“I don’t actually think it works like that,” Mike says, raising an eyebrow. “Isn’t it just that, like, once you invite them in, they can come in whenever?”

Frank makes a face. “I dunno. But he asks every time, it’s fucking weird. No one is that polite, dude. He asked last night while we were making out against the door, okay, who the fuck stops making out to ask if they can come in?”

Okay, admittedly, that’s slightly weird. But it’s only slightly weird. Mike shrugs, in lieu of encouraging any more of Frank’s batshit insanity.

Frank doesn’t really need the encouragement, though, and just keeps right the fuck on. “And, like, okay, no, it’s fucked up, I have never seen him in sunlight.”

Mike grins. “Afraid he’s gonna sparkle?”

“Uh,” Frank says, arching an eyebrow, “have you looked at yourself lately, manfriend?”

Mike glances down at the dusting of glitter on his arms. “Fair point,” he concedes.

Frank sniggers. “Have you considered the possibility that you’re a vampire?” He waggles his eyebrows. “I could add you to my vampire harem.” He pauses, looking creepily considering. “That actually sounds like the plot for either a bad sci fi TV movie or one of my ma’s romance novels.”

Mike rolls his eyes. “Unicorn, okay, unicorn. Not vampire.” It’s taken a few years, and he gets that no one takes him seriously when he says it, but he’s not about to stop saying it. He doesn’t want one of those fucked up, melodramatic scenes when all the friends and relatives are like, Oh no, how could you have spent so long lying to us?! Mike wants to be able to tell everyone to fuck off and mind their own goddamn business without having to deal with the guilt of having kept anything secret.

Frank waggles his eyebrows again. He’s starting to remind Mike of Gabe or Bill, actually, all hyperactive and sort of endearingly sleazy. “Maybe that’s just what you want me to think. You’re, like, throwing me off the scent or something.”

“Oh,” Mike says, keeping his face as straight as possible, “yeah, no, you’re totally right. That’s definitely it.”

Mike is then forced to slap Frank in the back of the head in response to Frank’s victorious fist pump. It’s not as satisfying as it should be, but then, that’s only because Mike really just wants to gore him with his face horn. Just a little. Not enough to, like, kill him. Just maybe maul him a little.

Mauling. Mauling sounds nice.

It occurs to Mike, sometimes, that he’s maybe been wearing this human skin for a little too long, that it’s starting to actually change him a little. That’s an annoying thing to think about, so he just slaps Frank in the head again to shake it off. It’s not any more satisfying than the first time.

[[When Kevin hangs out with Joe on New Year’s after an entire semester without a call from Mike, he makes himself pick up the phone. When Kevin wakes up the morning after and, for the first time in years, doesn’t hear Mike’s song under his skin, he figures that it’s because he’s been too far away from Mike for too long, that Mike not answering the phone was just the nail in the coffin. ]]

Kevin knows something is wrong as soon as he gets out of the car. Mike is standing a good ten feet away, hugging himself, and there’s none of the hopeful happiness on his face that Kevin had heard in his voice over the phone.

“What’s wrong?”

Mike is just staring at him, eyes wide and hurt, mouth a tight, trembling line. He looks, inexplicably, like he might cry. Kevin doesn’t know what it’s about, but he wants to find whoever the heck is responsible and punch them a few times in the face—which, okay, would probably end in disaster, because Kevin isn’t great at violence, Nick can kick his butt, but Kevin still has the urge.

“Mike,” he starts, going closer, but Mike is backing away, towards the stoop of his house, tripping a little over his own feet.

“Don’t,” Mike bites out, voice tight. “Just, fucking—don’t.” His hands are in front of him, like he’s defending himself against who-knows-what.

Kevin is maybe more than a little confused. “What—Mike, seriously, what’s going on, what’s wrong?”

Mike’s nostrils are flared, and there’s white showing all the way around the edges of his eyes. “You said—“ he cuts off, sucking in air, and backs his way up the first couple stairs to the door. He looks—he looks terrified, and Kevin still has no idea what’s going on or what to do about it, so he just keeps moving forward, hands outstretched in entreaty. “You said you’d wait for me,” Mike finishes, voice cracking on the last word.

Kevin stops dead, feet suddenly leaden. “Oh,” he says, feeling abruptly, painfully cold, and looks down at the white space on his left hand where his promise ring used to be. “Oh.”

“I was gone for a year,” Kevin says softly, not bothering to lift his head up. He doesn’t really want to see the expression on Mike’s face.

Mike makes a noise in his throat, but doesn’t actually say anything other than, “I know.”

Kevin digs his teeth into his lip, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I—I gave it to you, and I waited, I waited a year, Mike, and you never called, not once, not ever, not at all. Not til now.”

Kevin hears Mike shifting a little, cloth brushing against cloth in the uncomfortable silence. “I was—fuck, Kevin, I was scared.”

All the breath swoops out of Kevin’s lungs. He feels suddenly, horribly tired, and real sentences are too much work, so he just says, “Yeah.”

The silence hovers, buzzing against Kevin’s skin, and he listens, listens so hard his head starts to hurt, but there’s nothing but the electric hum of no music at all.

“It didn’t mean anything,” Kevin murmurs, more to remind himself than to tell Mike. “It wasn’t—I was out with Joe, and he was drinking and he kept threatening to call you if I didn’t, so I called you and it was Christmas and there was—you didn’t call back, and I was just—“ He stops, exhales, closes his eyes. “Lonely.” She had been pretty, in a bland sort of way, with bright eyes and an easy smile and soft curves that fit Kevin’s hands perfectly but felt all wrong.

Mike sounds strained and ragged and hollowed out when he says, curled over himself, head pressed to his knees, “If things were different, I would tell you it wouldn’t matter to me.” He sucks in a sharp breath, too loud. “It wouldn’t. You’re—it wouldn’t matter. But I don’t—I’m not—I don’t know that we can do anything to fix this. You—Kevin, you know what I am.”

Kevin smiles bitterly, jaw tight. “Yeah.” He swallows, makes himself actually look at Mike, really look at him, at the way he gleams in the low light of the lingering afternoon, the way he’s too still to be quite real—the things that force Kevin to remember why this is Kevin’s fault, not Mike’s, and that he needs to suck it up and find a way to deal with it. “Yeah, I know.”

Kevin likes clichés, so when he decides, at three forty two in the morning on a Tuesday, that this is dumb and he’s not going to give up on Mike because of one stupid bylaw of unicorn magic, he throws a hoodie on over his Little Mermaid pajama pants, shoves his feet into his chucks without bothering to lace them, and walks down the street to throw pebbles at Mike’s window.

It takes twenty minutes before the window opens and a fluffy-headed, heavy-lidded, pissed-as-all-get-out-looking Mike sticks his head out. “If you could fuck off, that would be awesome, cause I’m trying to do this thing that people do, where they sleep.”

Kevin crosses his arms. “Yeah, no. Don’t make me, like, climb your tree and jump onto your roof and stuff. I’m not actually that athletic, and you’d just end up having to drive me to the hospital.”

Mike rolls his eyes. “I don’t even drive, jackass.”

“Well, see, stop being a butthead, and you won’t have to go through the trouble of being arrested for driving me to the hospital without a license.” Kevin grins at him, forcing his mouth to remember how smiles work. It maybe comes out a little forced, a little too close to razor-edged, but he’ll take what he can get. “Come outside?”

Mike is silent for a minute, mouth in a tight line. Finally, when Kevin is debating saying something else, he says, “I don’t actually think I can make myself get that close.”

Kevin ignores the way his chest tightens. “Then I’ll come to you. Tree-climbing. Roof. Hospital.”

Mike looks torn. “I can’t—Kevin, if you get any closer, I’m gonna fucking bolt.” Kevin wants to argue, means to argue, but Mike shakes his head. “It’s not—that’s not a threat, okay? I just fucking can’t, okay, I can’t not run now. It’s not voluntary.” A little angrier, a little more helpless, “Can’t you just fucking go? I can’t change this, okay, I can’t make it not have happened, and I sure as hell can’t change what I am. Just—seriously, why won’t you just make this easy on yourself and leave it the fuck alone?”

Kevin swallows against the kerosene taste on his tongue. Quietly, low enough that Mike can pretend not to hear if he wants to, Kevin says, “I kinda don’t think I can let it go.”

Mike closes his eyes, corner of his mouth trembling a little. “You are such a fucking asshole, you know that?” It’s not angry—rather, it hovers somewhere between proud and relieved.

Kevin forces the corners of his mouth to turn up, manages something like a smile. “My brothers have mentioned that, yeah. I maintain that it’s part of my charm.”

Mike coughs on a watery laugh. “Sure.”

Mike is leaving school on a Tuesday, keeping his elbows out, trying to give himself a little more space in the crush of frenzied humanity, when a hand lands on his shoulder.

He jerks around, more annoyed than startled, and blinks into thick-lashed eyes. “Uh,” he says, trying to place the guy’s face.

The guy grins, sweet and boyish, with an honest-to-fucking-god dimple tucked into one cheek. “Hey,” he says, ducking his head and palming the back of his neck a little awkwardly. “I’m, uh, I’m Tom? Conrad?” He laughs, even more awkwardly than the way he’s standing, and adds, “And you’re Mike.”

Mike looks him over, takes in the too-tight torn jeans and faded Smiths shirt, the blond hair swept over one eye like some fucking emo kid, the uncomfortable line of the guy’s shoulders, the soft shine of innocence under his skin. “Yeah,” he agrees, making himself relax a little. “So?”

Tom’s cheeks are a little pink, and he looks just over Mike’s shoulder when he says, “I—I was wondering if maybe, right, if maybe you wanna go, I dunno, see a movie or something, this weekend?” He bites his lip, eyes flicking to Mike’s face and then away again.

Mike’s chest feels tight. “Like a date?” he asks, voice maybe a little more gruff than he means it to be.

Tom clears his throat. “Well, I mean—yeah.”

“I—“ Mike stops, hesitating. He thinks of where he wants to be this weekend, who he wants to go to the movies with, and his ribs feel too tight with exactly how huge that want is. It wasn’t half so bad when he was telling himself that Kevin couldn’t know, that it was too fucking big of a risk, but now there’s this fucked up echo of crushed hope and all the wrong things, and Mike just kind of wants to go batshit and punch something until it cries. Instead, he jams his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels, shakes his hair out of his eyes and says, making himself smile a little, “Yeah, okay.”

Tom’s face splits with a huge grin, bright and so fucking happy that it makes Mike want to punch himself. “Cool. Saturday?”

Mike ignores the bitterness clinging to the back of his tongue and shrugs, says, “Sure.”

Tom beams even harder, if that’s possible. He yanks a marker out of his book bag, scrawling a series of numbers out on a scrap of paper and handing it to Mike. “Awesome. Here’s my number—text me, yeah? I can pick you up, if you want?”

“Sure,” Mike says again. “Sounds—“ he stops, makes himself look at Tom’s face and smile back, “—good.”

“You should woo him,” Joe says, after Kevin spends three solid hours wailing about the woe that is his existence without actually explaining anything, because, while he trusts his brothers, he thinks that Mike probably wouldn’t want them to know that he’s a unicorn.

Nick smacks Joe on the back of the head and says, firmly, “Ignore him, that’s ridiculous. No one woos anyone anymore.”

Joe nods along when Nick glares at him, but the second Nick looks away, Joe mouths, Woo, and waggles his eyebrows a lot.

Mike is apparently a fucking terrible as shit judge of people. Really, Mike should stick with the normal unicorn rule of “people are shit, don’t fucking go anywhere near them.”

He only realizes this, of course, after Tom has him duct taped to a chair in his kitchen. Which, okay, the duct tape would be annoying and all, but it’s topped with a long stretch of really annoyingly magical rope, which, okay, is just fucking cheating. Douchey blond dudes in skinny jeans are not supposed to be armed with magic rope.

“I tricked you,” Tom points out gleefully, flicking his hair out of his eyes. “You’re a unicorn, and I tricked you.”

Mike rolls his eyes. “No shit, Sherlock. Am I supposed to, like, congratulate your or something?”

Tom pouts. “Oh, come on, you’re a magic thing, I should get some sort of begrudging respect for pulling one over on you or something.” He taps the huge-ass kitchen knife he’s holding against the leg of his jeans. “I feel like some sort of comic book villain, this is kickass.”

“Oh, well then,” Mike says blandly, “good on you. You win, hoorah. You get points in the big book of shitty villainy.”

Tom waves the knife at him, chastising. “Hey, hey, be nice. I’m the one with the big stabbing implement, here.”

Mike eyes the blade, thinks about how nice it would be if he could gore this motherfucker right through the kidney. “Are you planning to stab me with it?”

Tom’s creepy-ass grin falters a little. “Well, kind of, yeah.”

“Because…?” Mike raises his eyebrows and waits. “Did I, like, run over your dog or something? Cause, you know, I don’t even have a car.”

“You’re a unicorn,” Tom says simply, echoing the same matter-of-fact tone that Mike has been using to tell everyone what he is for the last decade and a half. Mike wants to punch him in the throat. “There’s, like, magic and shit that can be done with basically all of your insides. What kind of dumbass doesn’t take advantage of that?”

Mike’s lip curls up a little, and he can’t quite make himself suppress the growl that rises in his throat. “Does it occur to you that there’s a reason that most people don’t just have a fuckton of unicorn innards lying around?”

Tom shrugs. “There aren’t really enough of you for it to be common, dude. Didn’t you all, like, run into the sea or some shit?” He spins the blade against the tip of his finger, as relaxed as can be.

Mike narrows his eyes. “That’s not why. And no, we didn’t fucking run into the sea, jackass, who the fuck is like, hey, this looks like a good day to run into the motherfucking sea and vanish from the earth?”

Tom doesn’t look bothered in the least. “Whatever. You have magic insides, I want them. Which brings us to the stabby part. I feel like we should get on with that before one of your inevitable Scooby gang shows up and saves the day or something.”

Mike doesn’t have a Scooby gang. Which, okay, he should maybe work on, because if he did, he could be stalling Tom and waiting for them to burst through the door and save his stupid ass. The closest thing he ever had to a Scooby gang was Bill and Gabe and Travis and Kevin, and Bill and Gabe gone, Travis graduated and doesn’t know Mike’s a unicorn, and Kevin has been politely-as-fuck keeping his distance since Mike can’t, yknow, touch him or get near him or even really interact with him at all because he’s a goddamn unicorn. Frank is Mike’s only other friend, and Frank thinks his boyfriend is a vampire, so he’s not likely to be terribly helpful in the problem-solving area. Mike really needs more awesome friends. “Stabbing,” he agrees, pretty calmly, actually, which he feels like he probably deserves points for, “you go ahead with that.”

“That’s really nice of you and all,” Tom says, smiling tightly, “but you’re kind of not actually useful while you’re human.”

Mike beams. “I know,” he says cheerfully, “it’s really very unfortunate.”

Tom grins right the fuck back, which is pretty goddamn unsettling, really. “Change,” he says, all iron and sunshine.

“Hmmm,” Mike says, pursing his lips and pretending to think about it, “I don’t actually think I will, thanks.” And if he adds, “Douchecanoe,” under his breath, well, whatever.

Tom sighs, all insincere remorse, and says, “Well, I guess I’m just going to make it too uncomfortable for you to stay human, then, aren’t I?”

Mike sets his jaw. “Fucking try me, motherfucker.”

Kevin knocks on the door hesitantly.

“Yo,” a voice on the other side says, irritated. “Who the fuck is it?”

Normally, Kevin would scold the person—who is clearly Frank—for unnecessary obscenity towards people calling on him, but now, Mike is missing, has been missing for over a day, and his mom doesn’t know why he isn’t back yet, either. “It’s Kevin,” he says, instead of the don’t curse at strangers, dummy, that’s on his tongue. “Kevin Jonas.”

The door opens, and Frank Iero is glaring up at him from the other side of the doorstep. “You’re a brave motherfucker, coming here after leaving Mike like that,” he says, crossing tattooed arms over his chest. Kevin has no idea how someone ends up with that many tattoos before they’re eighteen.

“Yeah,” Kevin says absently, trying to think of the best way to say I think Mike is kidnapped without saying exactly that. But Frank is staring at him reproachfully, so he wings it. “Uh, so, I’m freaking out,” he starts, and Frank snorts. “Because,” he goes on, putting on his best I-am-your-older-brother-and-also-taller-than-you-and-I-have-sideburns-so-you-better-watch-yourself face that he uses on Nick and Joe. It doesn’t work any better with Frank than it does with his brothers. “Because Mike is missing, he has been gone since yesterday.”

Frank rolls his eyes. “Needy, much? He probably just fucked off for a day, shit.” He goes to shut the door, snorting again.

Kevin angles himself so Frank can’t close the door without crushing him. Frank looks like he’s maybe considering it, so Kevin says, “Mike is a unicorn.”

Frank makes a face at him. “Yeah, he’s given me the speech, I know.”

“No,” Kevin says, looking Frank dead in the eyes, even though Frank is actually sort of scary, because this is Mike, this is important, “he’s actually a unicorn.”

Frank looks at him for a beat, and Kevin stares him down, trying to look both earnest and really, really desperate, and it must work, because Frank’s brow furrows, and he says, “Wait, seriously?”

“Seriously,” Kevin insists.

“Oh.” Frank nods, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Right.” He still looks like he’s having trouble with this, so Kevin reminds him,

“And he’s missing. And I can’t go rescue him because I’m not a virgin.” And he doesn’t mean to go off on this, but, “And really, someone having slept with someone totally shouldn’t be the determining factor for purity, okay, because there are some seriously good people who have a lot of sex! Not me,” he adds hastily, “I only had a tiny bit of sex, and it was mostly an accident, but there are also virgins who are terrible people, okay, have you met most children? Children are violent! I am not a violent child.” Kevin stops himself, panting, and glares at Frank. “What are you waiting for? Rescuing needs to be happening now.”

Frank blinks at him for a second, then swings the door wide and walks down the hall, saying over his shoulder, “Right, okay, let me just call my boyfriend.”

Kevin sucks in a breath and lets it out, squaring his shoulders, and follows him.

“Look,” Frank says into the phone, cupping his hand around the mouthpiece so that Kevin, who is out in the living room, won’t hear him. “Look, Gee, I get that you’re secretive and whatever, but if there’s something I should know, now is the time to tell me.”

Gerard is silent for a moment. “Uh,” he says, and then, “I…suck at guitar hero?”

Frank huffs a laugh, then remembers how serious this is. “I knew that, jackass,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Seriously, if there are any dark secrets you want to tell me right now, I am totally down for that.”

Gerard snorts. “What, like my love of the Spice Girls?”

“No way, you do not love the Spice Girls,” Frank gasps, aghast, then shakes himself. “No, Gee, seriously, now is the time to tell me about that whole creature of the night thing, okay?”

“Uh,” Gerard says. “Frankie, you already knew I liked horror movies. You’ve seen my art.”

Frank nods, then remembers that Gerard can’t see him. “Yeah, no, I mean—Gerard, it’s okay, I know you’re a vampire.”

There’s a long, long pause, and Gerard says, a little uncertainly, “I mean, I know I’m pale, Frankie, but you don’t have to be mean about it.”

“No, Gee, seriously, okay, I know.”

Gerard actually sounds a little irritated when he says, “Know what, Frankie?”

“That you’re a vampire. You don’t go out in the sun, you don’t eat garlic, you don’t go to church—“

“Frank,” Gerard interrupts, voice totally flat. “I’m not a vampire, what the even fuck.”

Frank pauses, because he’d swear that Gerard is being serious. “Really?” he asks, just to make sure. “Like, seriously?”

“Seriously, asshole,” Gerard says, obviously very put out—whether because Frank thought he was a vampire or because he isn’t one is anybody’s guess. “Is that the only reason you called me?”

Frank is about to say yes when he remembers that, no, actually, he called because Mike is apparently actually a unicorn and also kidnapped. “Are you sure you’re not a vampire?” Frank asks, a little bit desperately this time, because vampire powers would be super useful in the face of a kidnapped unicorn. Gerard could, like, sniff out Mike’s whereabouts or something. Gerard just growls in irritation, so Frank just keeps going. “Because, okay, it’s not that farfetched, you know? Because Mike is a for-reals unicorn, now, or something—“

“What, seriously, Frankie, what—“

“No, shut up, seriously, listen. He’s a for serious unicorn and he’s kidnapped and his not-boyfriend is here, but Kevin can’t rescue him because he’s a slut, or something, I don’t know, I’m not really clear on the protocol, but we’re virgins—don’t fucking argue, I have had conversations about this with Mikey, you cannot even fool me, motherfucker—and we need to go fucking rescue him or something, and vampire powers would be really, really useful for this, okay—“

“Frankie,” Gerard says, but he doesn’t sound as mad. “Frankie, tell me where to meet you.”

Frank sucks in a breath. “Hang on.” Cracking the door to the living room, he leans out and shouts, “Jonas! Do we have any idea where the fuck he is?”

Kevin shuffles over. “His mom says he went to hang out with some guy named Tom yesterday,” he says, voice tight, like maybe Mike’s ma had said something other than “hang out.”

“Right,” Frank says, then stops as something occurs to him. “Wait, Tom Conrad?” There’s a sinking feeling in his stomach.

Kevin nods. “I think that’s what she said. I was kind of in a hurry, but—yeah. That’s it. Why?”

Frank groans, and ignores Gerard’s curious noise on the other line for a minute. “He was a friend of Bill’s, fucking ages ago,” he says, finally, rubbing his hand over his face tiredly. “Like, they were really close for a while, but they had some kind of falling out, and Tom is—Tom is kind of creepy.”

“Great,” Kevin says flatly, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Yeah,” Frank agrees, stomach knotting up. “Me and Gee should maybe go rescue the fuck out of him, like. Now.”

“Frankie, seriously,” Gerard says, sounding actually worried now. “Where do I meet you?”

Frank thinks about it. “Pretty sure his house is on the corner of Fifth and Jackson. Meet me there?”

“Ten minutes,” Gerard promises, and hangs up without another word.

Frank has an awesome boyfriend, even if he isn’t a vampire.

Frank is really not big enough to kick down a door. Frank is a tiny-ass motherfucker, with little-person legs and little-person arms and he’s not technically a midget or anything, but he kind of suspects that he should’ve eaten his vegetables instead of feeding them to the dogs under the table, because he stands at a whopping really-goddamn-short, and that is really not useful in rescue situations.

“It would be really useful right now if you had supernatural vampire strength,” Frank points out helpfully, arms crossed, while Gerard eyes the outside door to Tom Conrad’s garage.

Gerard slants a look at him and says, just as helpfully, “It would be really useful right now if you would shut the fuck up, Frankie, Christ.”

Frank doesn’t give him the satisfaction of pouting, just says, “Fine, fine, just kick down the fucking door, Jesus.”

Gerard pinches the bridge of his nose and takes a breath. “Does it occur to you that maybe I’m not actually some sort of rabid man-beast that you can just aim at stuff and say, Kill, Rover? Or that I have no manly strength whatsoever? I’m like a head taller than you. And fat.”

Frank does actually pout, then. “Oh, come on. Surely there’s some sort of secret power in there. I’m expecting you to, like, be all Batman and swoop in to save the day. Cause you’re my knight in shining armor or some shit, I don’t know.”

Gerard makes a face. “I’m letting this whole vampire thing slide because Mike is kidnapped and could theoretically be dying right now and I have door that needs to be kicked down with my imaginary powers of manly vampire awesomness, but for future reference, I don’t have powers of manly vampire awesomeness, Frank.” Then, still sort of frowning, he kicks at the door.

“Oh, for the love of god,” Frank says, rolling his eyes, and barrels straight at the door.

When he bounces off, Gerard catches him. “Frank,” he says wryly, “you also lack powers of manly vampire awesomeness.” He rubs a hand through his hopelessly greasy hair and says, thoughtfully, “But I might have something at the house. Tell Kevin to meet us there?”

Kevin is not a fan of violence. He’s not a pacifist, exactly, he’s just never been very muscular, and that kind of puts him at a disadvantage when it comes to physical altercations. He has three younger brothers, and they could all probably beat him up. Even Frankie. Especially Frankie, actually. Unless it’s a fight over food or the TV; then Kevin is pretty ninja.

He really wants to rip out Tom’s kneecaps and feed them to him, though, so he thinks he’s maybe going to put in the effort, just this once.

“Gerard isn’t a vampire, so he can’t kick Tom’s door in. And we’re going to need weapons or something,” Frank points out.

Kevin ignores the vampire bit for the sake of his sanity and expedience. “I have, uh. I have a baseball bat.” He thinks about it some more. “Well, okay, I might have a baseball bat. Somewhere. Maybe. Joe might. A wiffle bat, at least. I think.”

Gerard stands up and shuffles to the closet. He yanks the door open, revealing a wide array of shovels, ropes, bats, and, wow, what might actually be a flamethrower. At least, it has a piece of duct tape on it that says, in red sharpie, Gerard’s Flamethrower Mark Four. “I’ve got some stuff,” he says, all cool, like it’s no big deal.

Frank, eyes owl-wide and full of awe, reaches for the flamethrower without hesitation. Gerard slaps his hand away.

“You get a bat,” Gerard says, his eyebrow daring Frank to argue.

Frank sticks out his lower lip, giving Gerard the big puppy eyes, but doesn’t argue when Gerard hands him an aluminum bat. “Fine,” he grouses, test-swinging it a little. “Why do you even have all this?”

Gerard shrugs. “It’s actually mostly my brother’s.” He gestures vaguely at the closet. “Mom made him play baseball as a kid, and the rest… I don’t know, it’s Mikey. Mikey has weird stuff. His boyfriend is an ancient Viking god,” he adds, like that explains everything. “I mean, I think. Possibly literally.”

Frank doesn’t look satisfied, but he clearly decides to let it go in favor of rescuing Mike, which is good, because Kevin is kind of really wound up, and might just go off and punch him or cry if Frank messes around for too long.

Kevin looks at Gerard, waiting. Gerard hesitates, a fleeting look of concern crossing his features. “I’d give you the flamethrower—“ he starts, but Kevin shakes his head.

“No idea how to use it,” he says, shrugging, and reaches past Gerard for another bat, this one made of reassuringly solid wood. “This should be okay.”

Gerard snorts, rubbing a hand through his hair. “The flamethrower is kind of high-profile,” he says slowly, like he’s considering. “Like, I mean, we’d get in, and he’d be fucking terrified, but we’d also probably end up burning his house down while we’re inside it. And the cops would probably show.”

Kevin thinks about the advantage of an actual weapon versus the fact that it’ll mean the cops will probably show up. “Something else, then,” he says, finally.

Gerard doesn’t deliberate, just grabs a long-handled shovel, throws a loop of rope over his shoulder, and says, “Let’s go.”

Kevin is possibly the least physically coordinated person out of everyone he knows. He can’t hit a baseball even if you pay him; he can barely throw his trash into the trashcan from a foot away.

Nonetheless, Tom’s legs are a bigger target than a baseball, and when Kevin catches him in the backs of the knees, Tom goes down with a thud. Tom scrambles halfway up, and Kevin whacks him hard across the shoulders and says, “Do not even mess with me, jerk.” Not looking away from him for a second, Kevin says, “Frank, get Mike.”

Frank says, “I can watch Tom while you get him out,” even as he crosses to Mike and starts to saw through the duct tape with his pocket knife.

“Can’t,” Kevin says, eyes still pinning Tom to the floor. “Unicorn things.”

Frank makes a frustrated noise, but doesn’t argue. “Gerard, come lift him.”

Gerard hauls Mike out of the chair, huffing and red-faced, lifting Mike to his chest like a princess. “You know,” he says to Kevin, all polite conversation, “if you just knocked him out, you wouldn’t have to watch the fucker.”

Kevin shrugs. “No,” he says, smiling tightly, “I want him awake. We need to have a conversation.”

Tom’s eyes narrow behind the flop of his hair, but he doesn’t say a word.

“Get Mike out of here,” Kevin says. “I’ve got this.” He shakes his hair out of his eyes, swiping his free hand over his forehead to keep the sweat from running into his eyes.

Frank looks torn, gnawing his lip. “I would,” he says, a little awkwardly, “but you can’t beat the shit out of the dude, you realize?”

Kevin will not hesitate to punch Frank if Frank tries to take this away from him. “He kidnapped Mike—“

“—To harvest his magical unicorn specialness, I know,” Frank interrupts. He moves forward, hand out reassuringly. “And I want to kick his ass, too, but if shagging someone isn’t what’s important to being innocent, like you were saying? Then something else has to be. And I don’t think violent revenge counts as innocent in anybody’s book, dude.”

Kevin grits his teeth. “It doesn’t matter, okay, I already can’t get near him.”

Frank’s hand closes over his arm, squeezing. “Yeah, no. It’s not worth fucking up any chance you have, man.”

Kevin means to argue with that, but he’s interrupted by a loud thud, and he jerks away from Frank to see Gerard standing over an unconscious Tom.

“Boot,” Gerard explains, shaking his hair out of his eyes, “to the head. Problem-solving. Can we leave now?”

Kevin isn’t sure he’s going to be able to make it through the day without sticking something sharp into Tom’s squishable insides, but he makes do for now by just being extra rough with the rope when he ties him up. Jaw still tight, Kevin throws the other end of the rope to Frank, and together, they lift Tom off the floor and follow Gerard out the door.

“Okay, look,” Kevin says, sitting backwards on the chair in Gerard’s room, narrowing his eyes at Tom. “We’re going to talk about what just happened.”

Tom rolls his eyes. “Sure we are, sweetness.”

Kevin grits his teeth. “I really think that I would be totally okay with killing people if the people in question were you,” he says, gripping the back of the chair until his knuckles are white. “Seriously,” he says, turning to Gerard, who is lounging against the doorframe, chain smoking, “I think I’m going to actually attack him if he keeps looking so smarmy.”

Gerard looks at Tom thoughtfully for a moment before taking a last drag of his cigarette and flicking it at Tom. Tom jerks away, but the cherry still burns a hole in the thigh of his jeans before it goes out. Kevin lets himself feel satisfied for a second before he remembers that he needs to be thinking pure thoughts, or something.

“I think—“ he clears his throat, cheeks burning. “I think maybe I’m not going to be able to do this,” he admits, ducking his head. “Gerard, I—“

Gerard shakes his head. “I don’t know what you were hoping to get out of him, anyway.”

Tom is still sneering at him from the bed. “Anything,” Kevin says, a little helplessly. “Anything to make me feel less—“

“Useless?” Tom puts in snidely.

Gerard shoots him a look. “I still have like eight cigarettes in here. And a flamethrower that may or may not kill us all. Don’t get mouthy.” Turning to Kevin, he says, voice gentle, “I maybe know a guy who can just—handle this.”

“Like, kill him?” Kevin asks, voice a little wobbly at the thought, despite everything.

Gerard shrugs. “Probably not. Bert does… most likely other bad things, but not—if you want that, I think Frankie is pissed enough that if I let him in here, he’d get the job done. But Bert is used to dealing with—with weird shit. Out of the ordinary shit.”

Kevin chokes on a watery laugh. “Just—just get him away from here. From me.”

Gerard nods, pulling out another cigarette and lighting up. “Go check on your man,” he says, jerking his head at the door. “I’ll make some calls.”

Kevin swallows hard and does what he’s told, resisting the urge to go back and stab Tom repeatedly in the face with a pencil.

“So,” Mike says.

Kevin nods. “Yep.”

Mike looks him over. “I feel like kind of a dumbass.”

“Well,” Kevin agrees, “you did kind of get kidnapped by a tiny, baby-faced blonde dude.”

Mike pulls a face. “Gee, thanks.”

“I’m just telling you what you already know,” Kevin says sweetly, ducking his head so Mike won’t see his grin. “I mean, I’m not pointing out how emasculating that must be.”

Mike’s scowl deepens. “I’m a unicorn. I’m covered in glitter every day. I think I’m past being emasculated by now.”

“Still can’t touch you, can I?” Kevin asks abruptly. The urge to grab Mike and hold on, make sure he’s still all there, is so strong that it physically hurts.

Mike’s eyes are hooded, and he’s staring at his hands. “I—no.”

Kevin swallows back the disappointment and forces himself to shrug, to nod. “Didn’t think so.”

Mike’s voice is uncharacteristically small when he says, “Sorry. I’d—I’d feel better, if you could.”

Kevin’s isn’t any bigger when he says, “So would I.”

The thing about Kevin is, he’s not really good about giving up. He has three brothers, and that means fighting for the last cookie, the first pancake, the remote, and he’s the oldest, not to mention the tallest, so the only time he loses is when he lets someone else win just to be nice.

So he thinks about what it’s like to be scared, what it’s like to feel alone and stuck that way. He’s been that, he’s spent dozens of nights in his dorm, curled up in his bed with his music turned up too loud, wondering what had happened to the things he’d wanted. He’s spent even more nights like that since he’s been back, since—since Mike.

He thinks about what helps, thinks about his brothers’ persistent nagging to get out of the house, the way they show up with things that they know will draw Kevin out. He thinks that maybe, just maybe, that Joe is right, that wooing someone—even in a friendship way—helps. Showing them that you know them, that you care—it’s not a magical fix-all, but it’s a start. It’s more than Kevin has right now.

Kevin decides that the best way to start is with a systematic assault on Mike’s mailbox.

On the first day, Kevin leaves an envelope with a collection of sparkly unicorn stickers inside.

On the second day, it’s a pair of fuzzy pink unicorn socks that Kevin is kind of disturbed are available in adult sizes.

On the third day, it’s a plastic gumball machine ring and a note that says, unicorns are sort of like magpies, right? Shiny stuff? Right? I’m going with yes.

On the fourth day, he leaves a My First Makeup lip gloss in the shape of a unicorn head.

On the fifth, it’s a Lisa Frank pencil case with Markie the obnoxiously rainbow-colored unicorn on it.

On the sixth, it’s an actually sort of classy silver pin in the shape of a unicorn head. Kevin kind of has to resist keeping it for himself.

On the seventh day, it’s a white and pink unicorn Beanie Baby that Kevin has liberally doused in craft glitter.

On the eighth day, it’s a little girls’ black tee with a velvet unicorn design in an awesomely lurid shade of purple.

On the ninth day, Mike is on the stoop when Kevin arrives, knees drawn up to his chest, wearing the shirt from the day before. It’s too small, riding up a little at the sides, clinging to his arms, but Kevin is absolutely not going to complain. What might be a familiar unicorn sock is peeking out in the gap between his shoe and the ripped up hem of his jeans.

“Hey,” Kevin says, surreptitiously tucking the unicorn-patterned umbrella behind his back.

Mike looks like he’s torn between laughter and tears. “What the fuck is this?”

Kevin shrugs, looking just over Mike’s shoulder so he doesn’t have to meet Mike’s eyes when he says, “I’m, uh. I’m wooing you.”

Mike blinks at him for a long, long moment, and then dissolves into a fit of maybe-actually-hysterical laughter on the stoop.

Kevin probably shouldn’t find that encouraging, but he sort of does. While Mike is occupied with hiccups and tears of laughter, Kevin quietly opens the mailbox, setting the umbrella as inside it as it will go, and strolls off down the street, hands in his pockets, fighting not to go back and press his advantage.

He lets himself smile, though, just a tiny bit.

Kevin runs out of weird unicorn stuff to buy, so he starts to make his own.

He discovers, pretty much immediately after starting, that he is absolutely not an artist. Art is not his forte. He has, actually, utterly no skill at it at all.

He refuses, however, to let that stop him, and relentlessly churns out pieces of absolutely terrible unicorn art.

The first one is sort of cheating, since it’s one of those five dollar velvet unicorn posters from Wal-Mart.

After that, though, he starts on his own. Mostly, he cuts the fronts off old birthday cards and draws unicorns into the pictures with whiteout and sharpie. When he runs out of cards to maul, he turns to all the magazines that get sent to his house even when he doesn’t subscribe to them. When he has a respectably-sized stack of violated Women’s Day and Cosmo and National Geographic and birthday cards, he starts his assault on Mike’s house.

He sticks the pages under every door, smiling politely at Mike’s mom whenever she catches him. She just raises an eyebrow and leaves him to it, though, so Kevin grins to himself and starts papering the windows with them. When he runs out of places on the house, he starts to hang them in the trees edging the lawn, and when he runs out of room on those, he just fills up the mailbox and starts chucking them onto the roof in the hopes of getting some down the chimney. He doubts any of those actually make it down the chimney, but what the heck, a man can dream.

Eventually, Kevin leaves Mike’s house looking like the victim of an eight-year-old girl’s Halloween prank and goes home to plot what on earth else he’s going to do.

After that, it’s a mixtape. Well, okay, a mixed CD. It’s almost the same thing.

There are a surprisingly large number of songs about unicorns. Kevin hates most of them, but some are weirdly catchy, and he ends up keeping the playlist on his iPod even after he burns the CD to give to Mike.

There’s a note in Mike’s mailbox with Kevin’s name on it when he gets there to deliver the wobbly-looking marzipan unicorn that he’d stayed up until four in the morning making.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here, it says, scrawled out crookedly on the page.

Kevin hesitates before he writes back at the bottom, Wooing.

That’s not it, exactly, not even close to it, but the point is that he’s sure unicorn magic isn’t stupid, that it’s incredible. It can tell that he’s had sex, so it must be able to tell other things, too. Kevin believes, okay, Kevin believes in unicorn magic. Believes that it had to have come from somewhere, and things like that are just evolution like anything else, that it comes into being to protect itself. Mike’s magic comes from a time when virginity meant purity, when it meant a modicum of innocent intention; Kevin comes from a time when twelve year olds are wearing eyeliner and water bras, when whether or not you’ve taken advantage of someone yet has nothing to do with whether or not you would, given the opportunity.

Kevin believes in unicorn magic. And he’s trying, trying as hard as he can, to tell it that virginity has nothing to do with innocence, that loving someone with your whole heart is the most innocent thing in the world and that whether or not someone is capable of that has nothing to do with whether or not they’ve slept with someone else.

So he writes, Wooing, tucks the note underneath the box containing the unicorn, and leaves it at that, hopes that Mike’s magic understands, even if Mike himself doesn’t.

Mike is waiting on the stoop again, looking annoyed, when Kevin brings by his paint-by-numbers fake-stained-glass lamp.

“What the fuck do you even want from me?” Mike demands, throwing his hands in the air in frustration.

Kevin just looks wounded. “I just want you to want something from me.” That’s not it, not close to it, but Kevin doesn’t think Mike would really appreciate the long explanation, either.

“How can you—,” Mike says, looking incredulous. “Like it’s nothing, like it’s—how can you act like it’s just that easy?”

Kevin shrugs. “It is that easy,” he says simply. “There’s that line, right, in The Last Unicorn—“

Mike scowls at him. “I swear to fucking god, if you quote Prince fucking Lir at me, I will punch you in the throat.”

Kevin beams at him. “Yeah, but you knew what I was gonna say.”

Mike’s cheeks flush pink. “Shut up,” he grouses, looking anywhere but at Kevin’s face.

Kevin’s grin just won’t quit. “Yeah,” he agrees, feeling all the scattered pieces in him settling into their proper place, “you know, though.”

One side of Mike’s mouth quirks up, like it’s totally against his will, and Mike mutters, still sounding totally put out, “Yeah, yeah, me too.”

Kevin isn’t the most brilliant person to ever walk the earth, but that mostly means that he’s spent his entire life learning how to find the information he needs to keep up.

The books of unicorn lore are generally unhelpful, mostly talking about purity—which really doesn’t do Kevin much good at this point, thanks—but there are tiny mentions of things that could be helpful, little snippets of things that would be interesting, maybe even useful, if the writers would just finish talking about them.

One motif keeps cropping up, though, and Kevin isn’t exactly sure how it works, since none of the books actually reference it in more detail than, “A maiden has one,” and “It helps her catch the unicorn.”

Kevin seizes on the idea, vague as it is, and runs with it.

“So, okay, so wait,” Frank says, eyes narrowed. “You want to give him a bridle?”

“A magic golden bridle,” Kevin confirms, pointing to the entry in the book.

Frank does not look impressed. “I think he’s just gonna punch you for implying that he’s like, a beast of burden or something, dude.”

Kevin beams. “If he can get close enough to punch me, then it’ll have worked.”

Frank groans.

Witches and gypsies are not, actually, easy to find in suburban New Jersey. When Kevin finally tracks one down, she’s a round-faced girl with long gold curls and a sweet smile.

“Hi,” she says, patting the blanket she’s sitting on. “Have a seat.”

Kevin is deeply skeptical about this, but he checks, regardless, “You’re the witch?”

She narrows her eyes. “I’m Greta. People who call me anything other than my name are beaten to death with cheese graters.”

That’s actually sort of weirdly reassuring. It sounds sort of witchy, in a violent-and-not-actually-magical sort of way. “Okay,” he agrees, settling down on the blanket, tucking his knees up to his chest. “Well, I’m here to talk to you about a magic bridle.”

She raises an eyebrow. “I… see,” she says slowly, biting her lip. “I don’t normally do, uh. Magic bridles.”

Kevin hesitates, because this is Mike, this is a big deal, and telling someone is a big deal, but then again, this is Mike, and a big deal, and Kevin has spent over a month trying to find someone that can actually be called a witch, not a high school sort-of-wiccan reading Silver Raven Wolf and thinking she knows how to cast spells, and he’s not backing down now. Rolling back his sleeve, he holds out his wrist, displaying the loop of gossamer silver strands.

Greta leans forward and peers at it, eyebrows almost to her hairline. “Oh,” she says finally, a smile tugging a one side of her mouth. “I see.” She tuts, then, like an honest-to-god school marm, leaning back and settling her skirts around her, and says, “You don’t want a magic bridle, you want a golden bridle.”

“A magic golden bridle,” Kevin clarifies.

She shakes her head. “They’re not magic. They’re just gold. You have to do the magic yourself.” She tucks a stray curl back behind her ear. “Unicorns can only be captured by a virgin with a golden bridle.”

“He was captured before,” Kevin says staunchly. “And there was definitely not a golden bridle.”

She shrugs. “The bridle part is sort of secondary. It can just be a gold rope, really, as long as it’s the right kind of magic and a virgin.” She looks at him more closely then, cocking her head, and says slowly, “But thaaat’s gonna be kind of a problem for you, isn’t it?”

Kevin ignores the blush that floods his cheeks. “A little,” he admits begrudgingly.

She drums her fingers on her knee for a minute, gnawing her lip. “I don’t know that, technically, it has to be a virgin that captures the unicorn with the bridle. But the spell has to be cast by one.”

He looks her over, eyeing the amount of cleavage she’s showing skeptically, and says, “Well, I have no idea where we’re going to find a magical virgin.”

She makes a face at him. “Are you implying something?” she asks, dangerously sweet.

Kevin smiles guilelessly. “Definitely not.”

Her nostrils flare with what he hopes is suppressed amusement, not rage, and she says, “Douche. I have a little brother who definitely hasn’t rounded second base yet. We could probably walk him through the spell.”

Kevin pretends that he’s not so hopeful that he might choke on it, makes himself say, all nonchalant, “Cool.”

Greta isn’t buying it for a minute, though, and smacks him hard on the shoulder. “Shut the fuck up and come buy me a cup of coffee, asshole.”

Greta is actually sort of cool, although Kevin is absolutely certain that if she and Joe are ever in the same room together, the universe will just crack down the middle and fold in on itself out of sheer fear for its own wellbeing.

“So, okay, why do you want to catch a unicorn?” she asks conversationally over her cup of vastly overpriced coffee. “They’re not like Pokémon, you know.”

Kevin snorts, surprising himself, and ends up with hot coffee in his nose. Hacking, he chokes out, “I’m aware, thanks.”

She smirks. “Aware, but not graceful.”

He glowers at her. “Thank you,” he says sourly. “You’re so helpful.”

Greta’s smirk widens. “I’ve been told,” she says, perfectly agreeable. “Now tell me your unicorn story, bitch, come on. Why are you hunting a unicorn?”

“I’m not hunting,” Kevin protests, affronted, “I’m wooing.”

Greta’s eyebrow goes up to her hairline. “Oh?”

Kevin sighs, suddenly tired, and rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “Well,” he starts, then swallows his words as he realizes that he’s never actually said it, never actually explained it to anyone. “His name is Mike,” he tries, because that seems like the easiest part, like it’s maybe something he can start with.

Her smirk cracks into a real smile, and she says, like she’s trying hard not to laugh, “Mike, the unicorn. Majestic, that is. Okay.”

Kevin levels a glare at her. “Yes, okay, Mike. The unicorn.” He takes a deep breath, gathering up the words, but before he can actually say anything, her eyes go round, and she says, all hushed and awed,

“Holy shit, you’re in love with a unicorn.”

Kevin squinches his eyes shut, says, barely an exhale, “Yeah.”

Greta bursts out laughing like a hyena. “Oh god,” she says, wheezing, between bursts of laughter, “you are my favorite. Oh god.”

Kevin just groans and drops his head into his hands. “Shut up.”

She doesn’t let up, though, just keeps cackling—seriously, just like Joe, it’s sort of terrifying—and says, utterly gleeful, “This is going to be the highlight of my magic resume, dude. Does he actually look like a horse? Are you trying to bang a horse?”

Kevin isn’t sure whether he wants to kill her or himself first. “No,” he says firmly, looking up at her from his hands, despairing. “He looks like a boy, okay, like a very pretty boy, and I’m not trying to bang him, dear god.”

She sobers a little, fighting for a straight face, and pats his hand kindly. “Of course not, dear,” she says consolingly. “Definitely not.” And then she ruins it by bursting back into hysterical giggles.

Kevin forgoes his hands and just lets his head hit the coffee-stained tabletop with a thud. “Thanks,” he says morosely to the table, “this is exactly what I needed.”

Greta’s apartment is tiny and smells like a cross between a health food store and a forest after rain. It looks like a library—every wall is lined with shelves—and maybe sort of like a bizarre hunting lodge. There are skulls and bones hung on the ends of the shelves and on the ceiling, all painted in bright colors and detailed with what are, upon closer inspection, very fine lace patterns. There’s a dream catcher woven between a deer skull’s antlers, a set of wind chimes hanging from the nasal cavity of a bear skull, a cascading waterfall of broken glass and shells strung down in a fine curtain from what looks like a spine from some big animal.

“Your apartment is weird,” Kevin says, stepping forward to get a closer look at the spine—painted a delicate cranberry color overlaid with white lace designs like flowers. It’s simultaneously really girly and really creepy, which, actually, seems to be the impression Greta herself is going for. “What’s with the bones?”

Greta shrugs. “I think they’re pretty.” She gestures at a ribcage, some of the ribs broken off, that has intricate thread weavings strung through the empty spaces. “Some of them are spells.”

“For what?” he asks, sticking his hands in his back pockets so he can resist the urge to touch everything. Look with your eyes, not with your hands, his mom always told him as a kid. That seems like more of a good idea in a witch’s apartment than it did when he was six and she was talking about cake.

“Me, mostly,” Greta says, pulling out one of the banged-up wooden chairs at the tiny table and sitting in it. “Protection spells, that kind of thing. Some are for my friends, too.”

The idea of Greta having friends—the idea that she goes grocery shopping, that she goes out to eat, that she reads books and watches television like anyone else—is sort of disconcerting. “Right,” he says, for lack of anything else to say. Leaving the spine alone, Kevin takes the other chair, a wicker monstrosity that looks about as old as his grandmother. “So, your brother—“

“Is on his way,” Greta says, looking amused. “He’s fourteen, it’s not like he can drive here. He has to wait for my mom to get off work.”

Kevin squints at her. “How old even are you?”

She grins, all teeth, and says, “Twenty.”

She’s only a year older than him. She’s a witch, and actual, honest-to-god witch, and she’s twenty. Honestly curious, Kevin asks, “Is your mom a witch, too?”

Greta hesitates, drumming her fingers on the scratched up tabletop. “Not exactly,” she says slowly. “It’s more like—most women can do a little bit of magic. Mom just… does it better than most people. She doesn’t do big things, but she says rhymes for health over whatever she’s cooking, sews protection into anything she makes, that kind of thing.” She shrugs a shoulder. “And it works.”

Kevin tugs on his lip with his teeth. “So then, what do you do? How are you a witch?”

She arches one fine, golden eyebrow. “Most people ask that before they try to get me to do magic for them, you know.”

Kevin shrugs.

Making a face, she sighs and says, “Ugh, fine.” She taps the table with two fingers and mutters something under her breath that sounds sort of like, “pain in the ass,” but might also be Latin or something, and then does a motion that looks suspiciously like jazz hands.

“Uh,” Kevin says, when nothing happens.

Greta rolls her eyes at him and flicks a curl out of her eyes. “Look in your front left pocket.”

A little skeptical, Kevin lifts up off the chair a little so he can dig two fingers into the sort of terrifyingly tight pocket of his jeans. There’s probably a reason that girl pants are for girls, but Kevin has skinny legs and he likes the way they look. He’s going to blame Joe and Bill for introducing him to them, and maybe Nick, just for not stopping them in time.

To his surprise, there’s a tiny, folded piece of pink paper, barely two inches across while it’s folded up. Cautious now, Kevin peels apart the edges, unfolding it.

A tiny, barely-inch-tall humanoid figure made of what looks like glitter is standing on the middle of the crease, arms folded, scowling. Kevin peers at it, nearly dropping the paper in shock when a tiny version of Mike’s face glowers up at him.

“What the heck?” Kevin asks. If his eye is twitching a little, it’s totally not his fault. If his eye is twitching, it is definitely a thing that can be blamed on Greta. “What—“

Greta flicks her finger at the paper, and the little glitter figure collapses in on itself until it’s just a pile of sparkling dust in the center of the page. “It’s a spell to show what you want from me. I normally do it to my clients when they ask for things—just to make sure that’s all they’re after, you know.” She waggles her eyebrows a little. “I guess you’re on the up and up. Or, well, that you’re being honest. Not that I was worried, I mean, you look like a poodle. I’m still not sure how good of an idea it is to try to catch a unicorn—“

“Woo,” Kevin corrects, glowering at her. “I’m trying to woo a unicorn. Who, for your information, wants to be wooed. Is totally up for wooing. My wooing is not frowned upon. My wooing, is in fact, looked upon favorably, okay. With favor.”

Greta doesn’t say anything, just raises both eyebrows in a gesture that says, loud and clear, That’s nice, dear. Greta has really mouthy eyebrows.

Kevin pinches the bridge of his nose and forces himself to breathe. He’s going to turn into a grouchy old person any day now. “Just. It’s not like I’m trying to kidnap him or something, okay? I’m not, like, a unicorn rapist.”

Greta’s eyebrows lower slightly, and the corners of her mouth twitch up. “I hadn’t intended to imply that you were a, uh, unicorn rapist.”

Kevin shoves a hand through his curls, pushing them back from his face, and sniffs delicately. “Good, then.”

Greta spends the two hours they wait for her brother going through her bookshelves, looking for, “This book, I know it’s here somewhere—it’s, like, green and gold?—it’s got unicorn lore and stuff in it. And a rhyme about the creation of a golden bridle.”

She finds it, eventually, letting out a triumphant, “Woot!” It’s a tiny, leather-bound book, barely a half inch thick, forest green with gold-edged pages. It doesn’t have a title, just a stylized unicorn embossed in gold on the front. It looks surprisingly legit, really.

“Where do you even get that sort of thing?” Kevin asks, peering over her shoulder while she leafs through the pages. “Like, do you go on Amazon and search, what, unicorn magic books?”

Greta doesn’t look up, just keeps turning the worn pages, leaning over the table so her gold curls brush the wood. “Nooo,” she says slowly, running her finger down a page. “I don’t—I don’t actually know where I’d get one if I were looking for one. I just… acquire them. With magic, things just sort of find their way to you.”

Kevin digests that, nibbling on his lip a little. “So when you get something, you know you’re eventually going to need it?”

Greta shrugs. “Or that I’ll meet someone and feel like I should give it to them, and they’ll need it. I dunno. It’s like… stuff finds its way to where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, however it needs to.” She thumbs another few pages ahead, brow delicately furrowed. “What kind of unicorn is he?”

Kevin blinks. “There are different kinds?”

Greta shrugs. “I guess. Like, there’s an Asian kind, and they’re sort of… reptilian-y? Look, here.” She points to a black and white sketch of an animal, a four-legged body with a lizard’s neck and a not-quite horse’s face, one jagged horn protruding from its face. The lettering below it says, neatly, but clearly hand-written, ki’rin.

“Uh,” Kevin says, frowning thoughtfully, “He’s mostly Italian? I think? I might be wrong.”

Greta puts her face in her hands. “Oh,” she says, with a long-suffering exhale, “You’re very helpful.”

Kevin shrugs. “I’m just saying, he’s probably not the Asian one.”

Greta snorts. “Okay, okay, fair enough.” She turns the page, and then another, bypassing other sketches of potential types, things that look like pygmy deer, like thin-legged giraffes, like horned lions, until she lands on a page that just says, The Hunt. “Here we go,” she says, running her finger down the page as she reads over it.

Kevin feels a little nauseous, looking at the sketch of a bow and arrow below the title. “Right. Okay.”

The information is cursory, but it’s enough, and there’s a rhyme, written out in both English and what Greta says is Latin. Kevin doesn’t read it, doesn’t really want to know what it says, but Greta hums a tune under her breath as she looks the page over.

“I think,” she says, twisting a strand of her hair over her finger as she reads, “that if I have my brother recite this—yeah, yeah, okay, but—hmm.” She leans over the page again, and Kevin doesn’t even try to follow what she’s saying, since she seems to mostly be talking to herself.

Eventually, Kevin leaves her to it, goes to peruse her bookshelves. A large number of the books are just normal books, novels and history books, books of poetry or old folk songs. There are some, though, here and there, that sort of… suck in the light from around them, absorbing it, eating it, so they sit in quiet pools of shadow, thick as dust. Those mostly don’t have titles, just designs on the spines. Some are blank entirely, just bound in thick leather or canvas that seems to almost breathe.

“Those are the magic ones,” Greta says, unnecessarily.

Kevin smiles a little, almost against his will, and says, “I can tell.” They’re magic like Mike is magic, unassuming in the way they change the air around them, making the dust motes in the air almost glitter.

Greta makes a noise of assent, but otherwise leaves him to it.

Kevin pulls the nearest one off the shelf, a thicker book bound in unmarked brown leather, and leafs through it. It’s all hand-lettered, like the unicorn book, with hand-drawn illustrations here and there. It looks like a cookbook, with recipes for different pies and casseroles, pastas and soups, which seems kind of weird, considering that it hums against Kevin’s skin with a not-quite-silent song—not like Mike’s song, the song he misses so much that his bones ache, but a song all the same. “Why do you have a magic cookbook?” he asks, curious, as he turns to a page with a recipe for barbeque tofu.

“Oh, it’s mine,” Greta says, absently, not looking up from the unicorn book. “That’s my favorite kind of magic.”

Kevin turns the page, finding a recipe for something called Santa Fe Stew. “But—“

Greta looks up, one side of her mouth turned up in a sort of patiently amused smile. “Cooking,” she says matter-of-factly, “is just magic for hungry people.”

Kevin doesn’t even try to argue with that, just sits down on the floor, knees tucked under him, and keeps turning the pages. The illustrations jump out at him, carefully inked images of vegetables, fruits, layer cakes. “Did you draw these?”

“Yep,” she says, still poring over the unicorn volume. “I’m an art student, actually.”

Kevin runs a finger over a carefully detailed line drawing of a lamb pie. “That’s actually not that surprising.”

She laughs a little. “I’m going to take that as a compliment and assume that you just don’t know many art students, and therefore are unfamiliar with how obnoxious they all are.”

Kevin knows plenty of art students, and is definitely familiar with how obnoxious they all are. Greta is obnoxious, but she’s not obnoxious like an art student. Mostly, she’s obnoxious like the sister Kevin’s never had, smiling at him like she knows all his secrets without having to ask. Or like she’s quite seriously considering gutting him with a coffee mug and then making a latte from his entrails. “Go with that, yeah,” he says, grinning to himself.

She sticks her tongue out at him without looking way from the book. “Watch it, buster, I have magic powers.”

Greta’s brother is really annoying. He keeps asking really weird questions every five seconds, stuff like, Is it just unicorns, or do you try to bang horses, too? and Why do you think he likes you? Isn’t that kind of gay? Kevin only doesn’t smack him because he needs the kid’s stupid mystical virgin powers.

Greta punches him now and again, mystical virgin powers or not. “If you don’t shut the fuck up,” she warns him, “I’m going to sew your mouth shut with magic thread.”

Her brother—whose name is apparently Ian—makes a face. “Yeah, right. Mom would yell.”

Greta arches her eyebrow in a way more terrifying way than she does when she’s talking to Kevin and says, “I’m twenty, bitch, I don’t answer to mom.”

Ian is apparently immune to Greta’s scary eyebrows, because he just rolls his eyes and says, “Can we get on with it? I have better things to do today than make magic rope for mansluts who want to bang ponies, dude.”

Kevin grits his teeth and sits on his hands so that he won’t yank Ian’s poofy hair right out of his scalp.

Greta purses her lips and smacks the back of Ian’s head. “Be nice, asshole. You don’t want mom to find out about the grade you have in History, do you?”

Ian makes a face and grumbles, “Fine,” but is comparatively quiet after that.

Greta nods and shoots Kevin a tiny, satisfied smirk. “Okay, so. Golden bridle.” She claps her hands and looks, for a moment, like one of those creepily enthusiastic kindergarten teachers. “Let’s get to it, bitches.”

Kevin is terrible at making thread. His is not an artistic soul. Spinning thread is not his life skill. Much like drawing, except that he’s even worse at spinning.

“You’re really bad at that,” Ian points out helpfully, eying the lumps all along Kevin’s thread.

Kevin glowers at him. “Thank you. I hadn’t noticed.”

Greta sniggers. “It’s fine, it’s fine. It doesn’t matter if it’s lumpy. It has gold wire in it, it’s not gonna break.”

Basically, the process involves Kevin sort of stop-and-go pedaling on a rickety-as-heck looking spinning wheel, making clumps of undyed silk twist messily around a strand of gold wire. “How long does this have to be, again?” he asks, sort of helplessly.

Greta covers her mouth with a hand, smothering giggles. “About forty feet. We’re going to double it over.”

“It’s not so bad,” Ian says, patting Kevin on the shoulder. “At least you don’t have to make, like, a net.”

Kevin just grumbles and resumes his awkward pedaling.

The finished rope is ugly as sin. It’s a double twist of lumpy off-white silk, shot through with a glint of gold here and there.

“This really doesn’t look like magic,” Kevin points out, digging his teeth into his lower lip. “Like, really doesn’t look like magic.” It looks like a really thin length of intestine.

Greta snatches it out of his hands, looping it over her hand until it’s a neat coil. “It’s not magic, retard,” she says, rolling her eyes. “That’s the whole point. It’s not magic until No-Sex McGee here does his mystical virgin bit.” She jerks her head at Ian. “Which, by the way, it’s about time for.”

Ian makes a face. “Do I really have to?”

Greta levels a frown at him. “Yes. Douche.” She grabs Ian’s hands, unceremoniously pressing the palms together, like he’s praying, and loops the cord around them, hooking it over his thumbs. “You remember, right, with Latin, how you pronounce—“

“—The V’s like W’s, yeah, yeah, I know,” Ian grouses, rolling his eyes. “Just give me the spell already.”

Greta makes a face, but takes the book off the table and cracks it open to the bookmarked page, holding it up so Ian can see the words. “Good?” she asks.

Ian shrugs. “Sure.”

Greta lets go of the book and it stays right where it is, hovering in midair in front of Ian’s face. She leaves it there and goes back to the table, getting a candle and a lighter.

“What, you can’t make fire?” Kevin asks, frowning.

Greta shrugs and gives him a sort of half smile. “Why would I, when I have a perfectly good lighter?”

Kevin opens his mouth, but Ian shakes his head. “Don’t even try to make her make sense,” he says, snorting. “She just does stuff to be weird.”

Greta’s eyes narrow, but she doesn’t argue. “Kevin, go wait by the table. We don’t want you accidentally getting your manwhore cooties on it or anything.”

Kevin doesn’t even bother to argue with the label, just rolls his eyes and goes.

The spell goes quickly. Greta lights the candle and holds it under the coil of rope, which starts to burn as Ians begins to read out the Latin—surprisingly fluidly for a fourteen year old who doesn’t actually speak Latin—and presses his palms together. The rope burns blue-white, but the fire doesn’t seem to touch Ian’s skin, and when he stops reciting, the flames die down until there’s just a smoldering light, crawling along the wire. Greta says something, then, a soft, sibilant syllable under her breath, and the light stops crawling, grows dim, until, instead of lumpy thread, the wire is wrapped in a softly gleaming strand of something not quite there, not quite definable, that just barely glows in the low light of the apartment.

“Woah,” Ian says, eyeing it. “Cool.”

Kevin kind of has to agree.

Mike is on the stoop again when Kevin arrives this time. He’s not hunched over, which is good, but his spine is stiff, and he looks sort of involuntarily wary, head up, nostrils flared, eyes a little too wide.

“Hey,” Kevin says, wiggling his fingers in a sort of awkward way.

Mike makes a face at him. “I don’t think this is going to do much good.”

Kevin shrugs. “You’re out here, talking to me. That looks like good to me.”

Mike snorts, but doesn’t argue. “What is it this time?”

Kevin hesitates, but pulls the box out of his back pocket. He doesn’t really let himself think about it, just says, “I’m gonna come leave it at the bottom of the steps, kay?”

Mike flinches a little. “I don’t—I dunno if I can stay.”

“You can,” Kevin says, shaking his head. “Just—you know me, you know I’m not going to go farther than I say I will. Just to the bottom of the steps. You’re at the top. Stand up, if it’ll make you feel better—grab the doorknob. If I do anything other than leave the box, go inside and lock the door, okay?”

Mike hesitates, but after a moment, starts to shakily gather his legs under him. “You’re kind of a dick, have I mentioned that?”

Kevin beams unabashedly. “Often and without hesitation.”

Mike doesn’t actually agree, but he braces himself against the door, hand on the knob, and waits.

Kevin is half tempted to draw it out, to make Mike actually invite him closer, but the likelihood is really just that Mike would get annoyed and maybe throw stuff at him. So, sucking in a deep breath, Kevin moves forward slowly, keeping his hands up and in front of him, box tucked against his right palm.

As Kevin gets closer, Mike starts to shake, a little, and Kevin thinks, for a moment, that maybe this won’t work at all.

Deciding to ignore the fear, Kevin distracts Mike, instead, asks, “How do you go to high school? I think there are maybe a total of four virgins in that place. I mean, that’s why my parents tried to homeschool me for so long.”

Mike snorts. “It’s different. They’re not—they’re not close to me, they’re not trying to be, they haven’t ever been.”

“So they’re not dangerous,” Kevin agrees, digesting that. “They haven’t—if there’s no interest, there’s no threat?”

Mike shrugs with palpably forced nonchalance. “Sure.”

Kevin is nearly to the end of the concrete walkway, nearly to the first cream-colored step. Mike is still there, hand on the doorknob occasionally twitching, but he hasn’t run yet, and that’s something. Totally something.

Kevin has probably never moved this slowly in his life, but Mike’s whole body still jerks when Kevin crouches down, leaning just far enough forward to set the tiny box on the lowest step.

“See?” he tells Mike, holding his palms up, outstretched before him, showing that they’re empty of unicorn-harming devices.

Mike lets out a shuddery breath. “Yeah,” he says, mouth twitching up in the faint shadow of a smile. “I see.”

Not quite a bridle, the note says.

Mike looks at the contents of the box, biting his lip. “You’re a fucking asshole,” he tells the contents and/or Kevin. Even if Kevin is several houses away and definitely can’t hear him, Mike thinks it’s necessary to point out, anyway.

It’s a long piece of fine gold rope, as thin as embroidery thread, gleaming in a slightly unreal sort of way. It’s incredibly simple, really, and sort of painfully complicated. Kevin is a dick. An inventive, insane, possibly amazing, complete dick.

Mike feels the magic singing out of it, as loud and strong as the sea, entreating him, warm and gorgeous and so fucking dangerous, a thousand times more dangerous than drowning.

Mike wants to just write a note back, wants to ask Kevin if he has any fucking clue what he’s doing, what this means, but Mike is pretty fucking positive that if Kevin didn’t know what it meant, he wouldn’t know to do it in the first place.

Carefully not letting the coil of rope touch his skin, Mike picks up the box, closes his eyes, and breathes in. The air tastes strangely metallic, like ozone and pennies and the scratch of silver on skin.

Clenching his eyes shut tightly, Mike lets the breath out of his lungs and bursts through his skin.

Kevin wakes up to a loud bang against his window and a whole lot of light.

Stumbling out of bed, bleary and flooded with adrenaline, he makes his way to the window and wrenches back the curtain.

Mike is standing outside on four long, blue-silver legs, braced like he wants to run. He doesn’t look at all like a horse, really; he’s all deer-legged and swan-necked and lion-tailed, gleaming like distant light underwater, like the sheen of rain on the road under dim streetlights, like Saint Elmo’s Fire seen through a hundred panes of glass. The horn on his head spirals out and up, a twisted curve of frosted glass, of indigo and silver shell, of broken mirror reflecting back the color of the night, sharp and solid and not quite opaque, not quite visible to the human world.

Kevin opens the window.

Mike glares at him, scowl somehow even more fitting without the human features in the way. There’s a box, a very familiar jewelry box, clenched between strangely sharp-looking teeth. Every single line of his body is saying to Kevin, You are a total jackass.

Kevin beams so hard that a muscle in his jaw twinges. “Duh.”

Mike drops the box with an enormous lack of dignity into the grass. If he had eyebrows, Kevin would swear that they’d be arched in a challenge.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kevin grouses, grinning despite his tone, “I’m coming.” He hikes up the bottoms of his pajama pants, swinging one leg over the window sill, then the other, and dropping out onto the grass. The muscles in Mike’s legs jump when Kevin hits the ground with a thud, but he holds perfectly still otherwise.

Mike looks deliberately from Kevin to the box and back again, eyes narrowed.

Kevin has to try really hard not to laugh a little hysterically as he crouches down, picking up the box. He tries not to let his voice shake when he admits, “I’m not actually sure if this is you telling me to go away and take my stupid things with me, or if it’s you asking me to put it on you myself.”

Mike wavers in place a little, head high. Then, slow, so slow, motion still bizarrely fluid and totally unreal, he lowers his head until his nose is against the grass at Kevin’s feet.

Kevin swallows, throat tight. “I don’t—Mike, are you sure?”

Mike raises his head just enough that Kevin can see the look of utter exasperation in his too-dark-to-be-quite-real eyes. Now, Mike’s eyes say, now is when you fucking ask if I’m sure?

Kevin chokes on a laugh. “Good point.” Hands trembling, he lifts the lid on the box and doesn’t bother to tuck it underneath, just lets it fall to the ground. “The, uh, the mythology wasn’t exactly—“ Kevin bites his lip, steadies his voice a little. “Wasn’t exactly clear on this, uh. This bit.”

Mike looks at him, completely deadpan and long-suffering. All the muscles in his legs are still twitching, quivering with a tightly-reined urge to run. Kevin should probably get his shit together and do something.

“Right,” Kevin agrees, taking a deep breath. “If fifteenth century virgin maidens can figure it out, I should do okay.”

Mike waits, long neck curved over itself in a way that no real animal could ever quite manage.

The cord is weirdly warm against Kevin’s fingers when he takes the coil out of the box. “Has anyone ever told you that magic rope is kind of hard to make when you aren’t magical?” he asks, as lightly as he can manage. “I had to find this witch, and—it was complicated. A fourteen year old virgin with big hair made fun of me a lot.”

Mike snorts, rolling his eyes, and then shifts backwards a little, not quite balking, when Kevin moves forward.

Kevin looks at him for a minute. “You okay?” He reaches out a hand, a comfort, just like he would to human-y Mike, just a touch to the shoulder without the desire to do anything more than comfort.

Mike jerks under his hand, a sharp shudder underwater, shifting the quicksilver skin under Kevin’s fingertips. Mike doesn’t have a horse’s coat; rather, it’s soft skin, like the curve of paleness inside an elbow, behind a knee, below an ear. It shifts from silver to iridescent indigo under the warmth of Kevin’s fingertips, fading to periwinkle around the outside of his hand, like an inverted infrared image of the contact.

“You’re fine,” Kevin murmurs, leaning in and pressing his forehead to the base of Mike’s neck, letting his eyes slip shut as he breathes out. “You’re fine,” he says again, more of a promise than a statement of current events. “Everything’s fine.” The cord is still coiled against his other palm, the one he’s not touching Mike with, and he keeps that thumb hooked into his back pocket, away from Mike’s skin. “See? I’m touching you, you’re still here, maybe we don’t need—“

Mike’s skin ripples like water when he shakes his head, movement a little frantic.

Kevin swallows and nods against Mike’s neck. “Yeah,” he agrees, mostly resigned about it now, “alright.”

Kevin loops the cord around Mike’s neck once, the gold leaving a thin band of indigo contact-shadow spreading out from it. Then twice, then a third time, until the end of the rope is in his palm. Carefully, as precisely as he can, Kevin ties the two ends around each other, leaning in and laying his cheek against the side of Mike’s throat so he can reach.

As soon as Kevin tugs the knot tight, all the tension in Mike’s body falls away in one fluid exhalation, and Kevin is left with glitter-dusted human shoulders under his hands.

Mike looks up at him through scraggly bangs and smiles a little ironically. “Hey,” he says softly, almost sleepily, eyelids hanging heavy. The cord is looped around his throat, hanging in five loops now instead of three, and the knot is nowhere to be seen.

Kevin lets himself smile, finally, a real smile, the soft kind that isn’t meant to hide a single thing. “Hey.”

Mike’s smile widens into something less guarded, and he leans in, lets his head drop to rest on Kevin’s shoulder. Kevin can feel the upward curve of Mike’s lips against his skin.

Kevin tightens his arms, tugging Mike closer, and hooks his chin over the top of Mike’s head. “I’ve got you,” he says, squeezing a little.

Mike’s smile widens against’ Kevin’s shoulder, and he huffs a small laugh. “I noticed.”

Kevin snorts. “I didn’t actually mean that you’re mine, okay, I meant that I—“

“But I kind of am,” Mike interrupts, turning his head so that his cheek is against Kevin’s shoulder, and he’s speaking into the curve of Kevin’s neck. “That’s kind of the point.”

Mike doesn’t sound like it’s a bad thing, like he minds, so Kevin just squeezes him briefly tighter and says, “Not half as much as I’m yours.” He leans up, then, his face really, really, close, and—

Mike’s mouth tastes like cold water and sugar, lips brushing softly over Kevin’s. Kevin’s breath catches in his throat, and for a moment, he can’t quite breathe. A tiny chime wakes up under Kevin’s skin, humming like running water, getting louder and more vibrant with every second, and Kevin is struck dumb with how much he missed Mike’s song under his skin.

And then Mike is nipping at Kevin’s lower lip, tongue brushing across it in the wake of his teeth, and Kevin’s mouth is opening on a whimper, and Mike is reeling him in, fingers winding through Kevin’s curls, tilting his head for him, and Kevin lets his eyes flutter shut, lets Mike finally, finally pull him in and under.

They spend half the night lying in the grass of the back yard, curled over one another, relishing the fact that they can actually touch now. They trade soft kisses back and forth, murmuring about nothing in the quiet of the night. And then, somehow, it’s more than that, and Mike is rolling over onto Kevin, pinning him in the grass, mouth suddenly demanding, hungry, and Kevin arches up into it. He’s panting hard when Mike’s lips slide away from his, moving down the side of his throat as he murmurs soundless words into Kevin’s skin.

Kevin shudders hard, hips jerking up, as Mike’s teeth close around the curve of his neck. “Mike,” he says, hands clenching and unclenching futilely in the fabric of Mike’s shirt. “Mike, seriously, we should really—we should really go inside.”

“Your brothers are inside,” Mike points out, mouthing along Kevin’s neck. “And your parents. My house has parents, too.” He sucks a bruise into the skin below Kevin’s ear, humming against his skin. “I was kind of hoping that this would be loud enough that being inside would be a bad idea.”

Kevin is forced to concede the point, and tries not to think very hard past that, because he’s not sure he’d be able to remember how to work his hands. Not like they’re doing so great as it is. “I’m wearing Little Mermaid pajamas,” he points out instead.

Mike hums again and kisses his way across Kevin’s jaw, leaning in to lick into his mouth, and for a minute, Kevin is lost completely, clinging to Mike like he’s drowning. “We could fix that,” Mike murmurs against his lips, grinning into the kiss.

Kevin’s stomach jolts pleasantly, an electric shock going up his spine as Mike’s fingers dance over the buttons on the front of Kevin’s shirt. “Out here?” he asks, tipping his head back so Mike can get to his throat again.

“Out here,” Mike confirms, nipping at Kevin’s throat, licking a long line from his clavicle to his jaw. Kevin didn’t know he had this many nerves in his neck.

Mike’s head dips down to kiss him again, settling his weight onto Kevin as he goes, and Kevin’s hips arch up into the contact, a desperate noise ripping its way out of his throat as Mike’s rock back down against them.

“Thought you’d done this before,” Mike teases, pulling back, but there’s something uncertain in his tone. It’s too soon to be funny.

Kevin’s cheeks burn. “Not—not like I wanted. Not with you.” He bites his lip over the awkwardness, tilts his hips up so they’re flush against Mike’s.

Mike bites at his mouth, a little rough, claiming, and his hips are merciless this time, grinding down against Kevin’s. Kevin’s pajamas are too tight, straining at the front, and Kevin’s not even sure where to go from here, but Mike seems to have it covered. Mike sits back, straddling Kevin’s thighs, and Kevin takes a second to just—breathe, just look up and take him in. Mike looks back, smile playing around his mouth, and says, “What do you want?”

Kevin looks into Mike’s eyes, wide and dark, absorbing the soft light, and says, “Anything,” and means it.

Mike bites his lip, a tiny bit unsure, and for the first time, Kevin is reminded of weeks ago, of Mike sitting on his stoop in the ridiculous unicorn shirt, uncertain and afraid. Kevin’s hands find their way to Mike’s hips, steadying him, grounding him, thumbs digging into the curve of the bone, rubbing back and forth. Mike shudders, breathing going ragged. Kevin’s mouth goes dry.

“That’s, uh—“ Mike clears his throat, reaching down so his hands cover Kevin’s, lacing their fingers together. “You should do that.”

“Do what?” Kevin asks, a little dazed, mouth half numb. He drags their twined hands up, under Mike’s shirt, skating his fingers over the line of Mike’s ribs, the smooth curve of his back.

Mike’s eyes flutter shut, and his voice is all gravel and rough edges when he says, “Just. Touch me?”

Kevin squeezes his eyes shut against the rush of dizziness, opening them when he can breathe properly again. “Yeah,” he says, throat tight, “yeah, I—“ He pulls his hands back around, smoothing his palms down the flat plane of Mike’s stomach, tracing around the waistband of his jeans, dipping just under it. He can feel the flutter of his heartbeat in the pads of his thumbs, beating hard against Mike’s skin. He swallows. “Can I--?”

Mike nods, eyes wide and liquid, hair falling over his face as he ducks his head. “Anything.” He grinds down a little, just enough to remind Kevin of how frustrating his pajama pants are, and then backs off, waiting.

The button of Mike’s jeans pops easily, the zipper sliding down with the hiss of teeth parting, and he’s arching into the palm Kevin presses against him through his boxers, a soft noise slipping out of his mouth. Kevin’s hand flexes involuntarily, a tiny muscle spasm, and Mike’s hips are jerking forward, following the motion. Kevin has to blink for a moment just to clear the want from his eyes, and by the time he can see again, Mike is leaning down over him, lifting his hips up so he can wriggle out of his jeans. He tugs his shirt off over his head, his hair flopping ridiculously in its wake, and settles back down over Kevin in nothing but boxers that look like they might be red. His cock is pressing into the curve of Kevin’s thigh, and Kevin shifts his hips so it’s pressing against his own instead, exhaling shakily.

“Pajamas,” Kevin complains, nose wrinkling, as Mike’s hips shift restlessly.

Mike snorts, just a little, and rolls off him so Kevin can push them down, kicking them off. Mike studies him for a second before dragging his briefs down after them, and Kevin jolts at the shock of cold, then covers his face in a flood of sheer embarrassment.

Mike’s hand around him startles him enough that his hand leaves his face, joining his other one to twist fistfuls of grass. “Holy crap,” Kevin breathes, hips twitching up to meet Mike’s hands.

Mike looks at him for a long, long moment, and then he’s leaning down, eyes never leaving Kevin’s, to lick a broad stripe up the length of Kevin’s cock.

Kevin’s breath is dragging in his lungs, burning, and then Mike’s mouth is sinking down over him, unbelievably hot and wet, and Kevin’s hands leave the grass to cling to Mike’s hair, holding on for dear life. “Mike, I—“ his voice catches as Mike’s tongue rasps over the head, and just like that, he’s coming, hips bucking up desperately, hands clenching hard, and Mike’s hand comes up to squeeze his hip, holding him down.

Mike rocks back on his haunches, looking pleased with himself, a streak of white at the corner of his lips. Kevin tries to stop panting, tries to remember what it’s like to have hands and legs that move. It takes a minute.

“That was right?” Mike asks, looking entirely too smug for it to be a real question.

Kevin’s face burns. “Shut up and come here.”

Mike grins at him and goes, leaning down over Kevin, licking into his mouth. His tongue tastes salty, a little bitter, and Kevin’s gut goes tight with a sense of mine.

Kevin works his hand past the elastic of Mike’s boxers, swallowing Mike’s groan as he gets his hand around him. Mike’s cock is warmer than the rest of him, velvet-smooth and hard in Kevin’s hand. Mike does most of the work for him, hips shuddering back and forth, moving him in Kevin’s grip as he pants harshly into Kevin’s mouth. It doesn’t take long, and when Mike comes, he doubles over, burying his face in Kevin’s shoulder and digging his teeth in to muffle the sound he makes, trembling.

After, when they’ve wriggled back into clothes—mostly the wrong ones, and only haphazardly buttoned and tied—Kevin curls around Mike, leg thrown over Mike’s, arms tucked tightly around his waist.

“Somebody’s going to find us in the morning,” Kevin points out sleepily as Mike smoothes his hair back from his face.

“Mmm,” Mike agrees, equally hazy sounding. “I hope it’s Frank. Bitch needs an education.”

Kevin means to point out that that doesn’t even make sense, Frank doesn’t even live here, means to point out that it’s probably going to be Joe, god, but Mike’s fingers are rubbing gentle circles into his scalp, and he can’t bring himself to care as he drifts into sleep.

Joe is the one to find them in the morning, but it’s not as bad as it could be. He wakes them up with a loud whoop and a triumphant shout of, “Fuck yes, Nicholas Jonas, wooing is the shit!”

Nick following him out is a little more embarrassing, but Mike just glowers at them both until they get bored and go away, and Kevin tucks his face back into the warmth of Mike’s chest and decides that he isn’t moving until he starts to get gray hairs. Or gets hungry.

“Love you,” he murmurs against Mike’s chest, burrowing close.

“No shit,” Mike says, huffing out a laugh. “I love you, too.”

END

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