A Curse Upon Thee 3-1

「おはようございます。七時になりました。京都の朝、今朝は少し冷たい雨になっています。」

Japanese tore through the thin cotton of the covers in a quick clip of syllables, some guy talking about the weather.

「京都市内の気温は十五度、午後には雨も上がる見込みです。」

For some ungodly reason, the dickhead on the morning radio was cheerful about it too, way too loud and way too peppy for whatever time it was in the morning. As if he wasn’t living on an open gate to Hell, his voice rode fast and high atop a little chiming upbeat loop of music that seemed to come stock with the morning radio in this country.

「通勤、通学のみなさん、足元にはお気をつけくださいね。

それでは今日も一日、元気にいきましょう。続いては朝の一曲――」

Biting down on a groan, Finn didn’t even bother to track the words, choosing instead to push his face further into the pillow. Despite that, bits and pieces still forced themselves into the waking part of his brain, something about… the rain letting up in the Kansai region or something… It didn’t help that a woman’s voice had decided to laugh at whatever the guy said next, like it was actually that funny in the first place—

The alarm clock went off right next to his ear a second later, joining in on the assault on his sleep with a shrill screech that only made his headache worse.

Ohhhh, come on.

A half-scarred arm slid out from under the blanket, eyes shut as he swatted blind in the general direction of the noise desperate for a snooze button. It took fifteen seconds too many for him to catch the edge of it, too-hard of a slap knocking it further away before he finally found the button he was hunting for somewhere on the ninth try. 

Silence came like a blessing, Finn sighing as his face sunk deeper into the pillow. Before he could even fully settle in again, his eyes snapped open — Huh? 

— as something moved against his back.

Not the blanket. Not his own leg. 

Something warm and breathing that chose to tuck itself tight against his spine. “Motherf-!”

Finn threw himself backward, half the futon almost coming with him as he kicked the blankets off him. His scramble caught the cloth around his calves, bare back sliding across the floor until his skull met the wall with a crack he felt in his jaw.

The thin plaster gave a little sound — a tock — that echoed in his skull and rattled down his spine, another aborted — “-uck me!” — curse slipping free as a hand gripped the back of his head. 

Finn forced one eye open, the other still shut as he bit down on another string of curses.

Green-gold blinked back at him from the center of his vacated futon. You…

Laying on her stomach, her slender body pooled up in his blankets was the current bane of his existence. Managing to outdo any over-eager morning radio host without even trying, it was almost easy to believe she was as angelic as she looked, especially with her violet hair forming a mussed halo around her pale face. “Bad dream?”

Unfortunately, the smile pulling at her mouth belonged to a demon. 

"...what have I told you…" Finn got out as he sat up, drywall easing the mostly-healed burn scars stretching up his spine. “A half dozen times…” A flat glare leveled at the girl currently sharing the living room with him, he forced out a sigh with his words. "...about getting in my futon?"

"Mmm." Mal Igna tilted her head, actually seeming like she was pondering the question. “I’m not sure actually.”

…I bet.

She sat up the rest of the way, Finn’s stolen white tee slipping off one pale shoulder as she stretched an arm over her head. "Refresh my memory."

 "Not to." His hands planted themselves on the floor, knuckles first as Finn found himself mimicking a gorilla — in stance, if not build. “Ever.”

"Oh." Full lips pursed, she tapped a single purple-painted fingernail against them. "That does sound a little familiar."

“Does it?” Finn tilted his head in the opposite direction. "Does it, really?"

"It rings a bell, yes."

He dragged both hands down his face and then back up through his hair, thick locks somehow still smooth and untangled after a rough night of tossing and turning. A groan slipped free, the sound almost drowning out the noise Mal let out; something halfway between a giggle and a bird.

"We're not in the hotel anymore, Mal." A half-week of that had been hell, especially when all the money he’d gotten to pay for it came from a theft that he couldn’t really make himself feel all that sorry for. “You have your own room.”

Finn dropped his hand to jab a thumb at the sliding shōji separating the tiny main room from the even smaller private sleeping space. “Hell, I gave you the room, because I’m nice. Because I’m generous. Because-”

“Because you got tired of trying not to look when I cha~anged.”

“I-” Finn forced himself to swallow a mouthful of nothing, eye twitching as Mal bobbed her head from side to side with another giggle. “Because I have a lot of good reasons.”

He breathed in low and slow. “So why is it that every single morning I wake up a—"

"I get cold, Finny." A pout aimed itself his way, that full bottom lip jutting out further as Mal widened her big eyes his way. 

On purpose.

He knew she was doing it on purpose, as much as she denied it. Running low on magic and still using it for puppy eyes. He wouldn’t have expected anything less.

"Mal…” He refused to give her an inch. Another long breath left his nose, Finn grabbing the wall as he rose up to his feet. A second later, he was staring down at her. “You have blankets."

"Yours are warmer."

"They're the same blankets, Mal.” He knew that because he bought them himself and Mal knew that because she was there. “Same store. Same day. And off the same shelf.”

“Yeah, but those don’t come with a cursed little heating blanket.”

His left eye twitched.

Mal just smiled at him.

…goddamnit. Finn let out a long breath through his nose and shok his head, rubbing at his stomach where half-scarred skin still pulled tight over his ribs. He looked back at Mal, ready to argue the point some more…

Only for him to notice she wasn't looking at his face anymore. Huh?

He followed the path of her eyes, quickly realizing they had gone somewhere south of his chest and stayed there, head tilted a little bit more than normal.

Finn looked down, staring at his bare bottom half in nothing but a pair of white briefs and his body’s normal morning reaction.

…Goddamnit.

“You know what?” He didn’t even bother to flinch or cover up. Doing either of those meant admitting he was embarrassed and that meant giving the fairy girl a win. "...I'm gonna go use the bathroom."

Back turned on Mal, Finn’s feet thudded against the floor as he walked away.

"Are you making me breakfast?" Her voice called after him. "Boku wa peko-peko da yo. Truly, I am wasting away."

He didn't bother to dignify that with anything but a grunt, Finn already halfway across the whole apartment in two simple steps; white shirt picked up off the floor and slid over his head.

Really, there wasn’t much of it to cross, and calling it an apartment…

Well, that was already being generous.

The room he’d had at Granny’s had almost as much square footage, and this place was just another shoebox in a concrete block somewhere in the Kyoto sprawl. One real bedroom with a door — that belonging to Mal, even though she didn’t use it for anything more than a simple closet — a cramped main room that turned into his bedroom after hours when the futon came out. The tiny little kitchen wasn’t bad, though, given neither of them knew how to cook and the bathroom was barely large enough to turn around in.

…not the worst, though. Finn kicked his blanket aside, his futon eating up most of the floor anyway; the low little table shoved against the wall every night and pulled back out every morning. Could always be worse.

He wasn’t exactly sure how, though.

Finn sighed as he tucked his elbow in on the way past the TV — a fat-backed little Sony CRT sitting on a milk crate. The whole place was cheap enough, given the money they had to work with, and the only reason they were’t sleeping on wet cardboard in an alleyway was because of the fact that he’d stumbled on how to make actual money before the third day was over and done with.

Stumbled being the word. 

The bathroom door swung shut behind him as Finn stepped in. With a sigh, he dropped the toilet lid down, and sat down on it.

For a while, he just stared at the door, elbows on his knees as he took in the silence of the windowless little box; exhaust fan rattling off above his head.

There was a little sticker on the door sitting around waist height, some cartoon frog holding a toothbrush that was half-peeled off. God, I miss that fucking forest.

He might have only been there two weeks but he honestly felt like he would have taken that medieval Narnia hell over this. Sleeping in mud, eating whatever Mulan and Snow put an arrow through, the ogres — overbuilt uglified bands of roaming Shreks with tree-sized clubs; all of that was so much less stressful than living in the nineties.

And he actually liked Japan.

Hell, he missed it.

Just not this Japan.

At least in the woods, the problems came at you with a face on. 

Something wanted to eat you, you punched it. Something wanted your compass, you took it back. Somebody ‘betrayed’ you, you found out about it pretty damn quickly, usually while being locked in a cage.

Here?

Here they needed money, which took time to get legally, or police to avoid when you got it illegally. Food also cost money, which they had to spend time to get. Somewhere to sleep on top of that, which also cost money.

And of course, new clothes, which cost more money.

Especially because Mal had discovered shopping.

…pain in my fucking ass. Finn sucked in a low breath.

It was something of a miracle he had an ID card in his pants pocket he had no memory of getting, something that probably dropped on him — like the scroll and his necklace and his fantasy outfit and his Slaughter Demon — something that had just shown up on him at some point.

The card said he was a person — that he could drive, that he fucking existed — and every place he’d taken it to had simply nodded and handed it back. Weirdly enough, not a single one of them had ever even bothered to ask him why a foreign kid with a face full of scar tissue had documents that clean.

Finn had stopped asking too, roughly around day four not eager to go around kicking a gift horse in the mouth.

Or however the saying went.

It didn’t help that Mal barely understood any of it.

Hell, it took a conversation to get the fairy girl to understand she couldn’t simply walk into a shop and take what she wanted. It was weird enough she could speak Japanese without actually speaking Japanese, something Finn had chalked up to fairy stuff. 

Even still, two weeks of anime later…

Well, the anime showed everytime she spoke it now.

Hovering over their heads, though, was the simple fact that they were stuck in all of this mess with no idea on the horizon of how to get out of it.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

TWO WEEKS AGO

Freezing rain fell in heavy sheets, a kick up from the droplets that had been beating on his head for the last few minutes. The only thing even keeping him from being fully drenched right now was the water bouncing off the metal awning overhead.

Finn sat with his back against cream-colored tiles, cold pulling the heat right out of him as he sat ten feet away across the alley from a sleeping fairy princess splayed up against a door. He didn’t bother to wake her up, just sitting there with the smell of hot grease and garbage. By the time those fingers finally twitched and those sparkling eyes cracked open, Finn had a solid fifteen minutes to get properly angry again.

“Good morning, starshine.” The grin he wore was fake but it was fueled by all the irritation he’d built up. “The earth says hello.” 

The girl blinked against the rain, a frown pulling against her mouth as she sat up slow. Dark purple leather squeaked against the wet as she pushed up on her elbows, green eyes staring around at everything new and confusing that was stacked around her in the alley.
ab
“...where?”

Finn spat another wad of blood onto the ground in front of him. "Japan."

"...that is not a word." A cough forced its way out, green-gold gaze narrowed on Finn. “And why does this… this air… it tastes like poison.”

"Japan isn’t a word. It’s a country. Well…" He'd pushed himself further up the tile, frowning harder at his own phrasing. "I guess it technically is a word but, more than that, it’s a world. A whole different one. Not your forest and definitely not Storybrooke. We’ve got a bit of a problem here and that’s pretty much it."

She'd blinked at that for a good long moment. “And this is my concern why, exactly? You had best fix it.”

“Fix it? How?” Finn blinked back at her, a scoff escaping him. “Why me?”

“Was it not you who dragged us here, pretty boy?” One hand came up to peel wet hair off her cheek. "I had a plan and a portal and a very good exit, and then a boy who smells like a hearth fire decide—"

"You betrayed us!"

"I betrayed Cora." A finger came up, Mal shaking her head. "Do be precise. My betrayal was to the witch. I was never truly with you. I defeated the heart-ripping bitch, which — if you think about it for even a little — makes me the hero of that particular story. You are welcome, by the way."

"You-!” Finn’s hands flew up. “You had Mulan tied up with a—"

"Briefly."

"Briefly?" He grit his teeth, already on his feet as rain poured down on him. “You had a hostage!”

“I had leverage!” Green eyes flashed in the dim light of the alley. “By the flames, you are thick as Cora said! I had control of the situation! And your little dragon is fine.” Mal forced out a breath before looking back at Finn. “Probably.”

“Probably?!”

Those green eyes rolled. "Also, tackling someone into an open portal. What’s wrong with you?”

“Yeah, well…” Finn clicked his tongue, adrenaline fading as he leaned back against the tiled wall again. He could feel the road this was going down, and he was pretty sure neither of them were going to give an inch. “Whoopty-fuckin-doo, doll, you’re stuck in this mess either way. In the gutter, with me; no portal, no compass, no nothing. Suck it up.”

“Or… And stay with me here.” Mal tilted her chin up. “I am the daughter of Maleficent. I’ll find my own way if needs must. You’re just a pretty face with magic and muscle. You can stay here if you’re going to have an attitude.”

“Stay h-”

Before Finn could finish, green light had already gathered across her fingers as she brought her fingers together—

Snap!

—and nothing happened.

Both of them had stared at the flame over her palm, the thing about the size of a birthday candle and the color of Simpsons-grade toxic waste. It guttered sideways in the drizzle as Mal blinked at her own hand, a frown deep on her face.

Fingers came together again and a second snap only made the flame flicker, the thing nearly going out completely.

The fairy girl looked back at him.

"...oh."

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

“Finn?”

Knuckles hit the bathroom door, pulling Finn out of his thoughts.

"Finn?"

Blue eyes slid shut, Finn fighting a pounding headache at the sound of his own name.

That was the thing about Mal, though. She was the problem — the biggest working example of it and he was stuck with her. 

Here.

For who knew how long..

And, annoying as it was to have to even admit this, it was his fucking fault they were both stuck here. Tackling someone through an open portal without a compass and without any idea where the thing even went… 

Turned out that wasn't much of a plan. Who knew?

Also, it’s not like he could get rid of her.

Even if he still wanted her dead, it’s not like he could just neck her and leave her corpse in some Kyoto alley. That wasn’t a thing he would do, especially when the police might suspect a blood-covered gaijin with a dagger running around Japan. 

No matter what else she'd pulled, the fairy girl was stranded because he'd dragged her through that hole in the world.

The knock came again, harder. “Finnyyyyy…”

He bit backa  sigh. "...yes, Mal?"

"Your phone thingy is beeping." A huff sounded out, Mal’s breath right up against the door. "I think it’s that ugly girl again.”

Finn closed his eyes. Of course it is.

"I'll get ready."