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Part 2 of Zine Pieces
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2024-05-13
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1,994
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Come Away, O Human Child!

Summary:

Beware, the people of the small seaside town tell travelers. If you travel through the forest, keep a wary eye out for children who are no such thing, because if you draw their interest, they will try to keep you. One has a scar and one has a face of freckles, and neither is a friend to man.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For as long as Sabo can remember, he has felt out of place in his parents’ house.

Notes:

Title from the poem The Stolen Child by W.B. Yeats.

Originally written for Legends of the Sea: A One Piece Mythology Zine

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Beware, the people of the small seaside town tell travelers. If you travel through the forest, keep a wary eye out for children who are no such thing, because if you draw their interest, they will try to keep you. One has a scar and one has a face of freckles, and neither is a friend to man.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

For as long as Sabo can remember, he has felt out of place in his parents’ house.

 

He’s never been able to put a finger on why , exactly. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t really understand the logic behind the rules they give him to follow. There’s never any explanation for why he’s supposed to be quiet and not ask questions, or why he’s only allowed to study the things they approve of, or why some people are worthy of being praised and others scorned. The rules simply are , and Sabo chafes at their restrictions. He doesn’t know what the problem is.

 

Sabo is only five years old the first time someone implies the problem is him .

 

“I swear, you were put on this earth specifically to vex me,” his mother sneers as he stands in the front hall, muddy to the knees from where he’d chased a frog through its pond. “Look at you; it’s as if my son has been changed out and a grubby little thing put in his place.”

 

It’s unfair, he thinks, but he’s not stupid . He knows what she’d been implying with her words. Everyone in town knew what a changeling was, and that’s why it’s such a stupid accusation. Surely he’d know if he were some sort of faerie creature from under the hills. All the stories said that they were conniving, wicked creatures made to fool decent folk, full of tricks and eager to steal people away to their halls. Well, Sabo didn’t feel very wicked, and by this point in his life he’s already not sure that he’d go out of his way to call his parents ‘good,’ so he chalks the accusation up to harsh words and goes to sleep.

 

But after that the words start to come more frequently.

 

“ Wicked child ,” they’d hiss. “ Unbiddable, wild thing. ”

 

Sabo knows that he is not the child his parents had hoped he’d be.

 

That child would have been studious and polite, clean and refined, with a “yes, ma’am” or a “no, sir” the only response to a question or request. And as much as Sabo had tried to be that in the beginning, as he grew older his tongue ran away with him too many times. He got caught talking to too many undesirable people, and—worst of all—he embarrassed his parents in public. His parents clearly wanted him to be a different person than he was, and it was a person Sabo did not want to become.

 

And always, always his inevitable punishments came with the claim that he was some sort of replacement, their golden son having surely been spirited away at some point in the past. Because what else could explain the suffering this creature was bringing to them?

 

It was always strange to hear them call him so, when otherwise his parents scoffed at superstitions. No iron graced the lintels of their door frames and no prayers were said to ward off evil. No cups of milk or plates of bread and honey were left out to appease any small creatures who might be lurking, intent on mischief.

 

But changelings were real, apparently. And the rest of the town agreed with them.

 

“Pay them no mind,” the blacksmith says one afternoon, when Sabo has dawdled to watch the man pull nails in his forge. “As fine and fair a child as you are, they should be more worried about you being snatched away rather than worrying at how different you are from them. It’s not like the faeries to pass up a golden-haired child such as yourself given the chance.”

 

For all that the words are meant to make him feel better, Sabo knows why he hasn’t been taken. Faeries only took those who were dearly wanted and loved, who were paid too much attention by proud family members and their community. Sabo, neglected and scorned at home as he was, had probably never been deemed worthy of notice, if there were something out there to notice him at all.

 

Outside the town walls—well, that was a different story.

 

Sabo had taken to spending as much of his time as possible exploring the fields and forest outside of town. It was the sort of place that called to his curiosity and sense of adventure, a dark and mysterious place that promised the excitement he could never get at home. But more than that, it was neutral. The forest just was , in a way that let Sabo feel like he could breathe.

 

He meets two other boys in the forest, with wild hair and wilder eyes, and they are nothing like the people Sabo knows from town, and an eternity away from the people his parents are. They find the rules Sabo has been taught to live by even stranger than he does himself, and ask him why he bothers to follow them at all. When Sabo can’t give them a good response, they laugh, and tell him he’s wasting his time.

 

One night, in a bid to make their day’s adventures stretch just a bit further, Sabo asks for them to come back to town with him. Tells them that he could smuggle them in through his window, and offers to share the warm eiderdown blankets and soft pillows in his room. He tries enticing his friends–whom he knows love a good meal–with the idea of a midnight snack snuck out of the kitchens, consequences in the morning be damned.

 

But the younger one just smiles wide, all his teeth on display, and tells him they aren’t welcome in the town. The older one tells him his hospitality does him credit, but similarly refuses. They don’t offer any other words of explanation.

 

Walking back into town at sunset, Sabo tries not to think too hard about the great iron bands wrapped around the sturdy wood that makes up the gates, there to ward off a very particular sort of intruder. He’s not sure he’s ready to unpack the thoughts percolating in the back of his head.

 

He doesn’t ask again.

 

The days continue like that, with Sabo sneaking out to meet his friends. His parents have become weirdly content to ignore his transgressions lately, but he chalks it up to the fact that so long as he’s out of sight of the townsfolk, then he can’t be present to embarrass them. He considers it the best compromise he will get—at least until he’s old enough to leave this place for good—until the day he realizes that he should have been paying much closer attention to their indifference.

 

The boy who is sitting at Sabo’s place at the table when he returns from the forest one evening is spindly thin and has a wicked grin, and he never leaves. Sabo’s parents claim that he is their new son, an unfortunate waif from a good family that needed a new place to thrive, and Sabo would have been content with that, were that all that he was.

 

Stelly is everything his parents wanted. His words are always exactly the things they want to hear, in exactly the deferential tones they expect. He never asks the questions Sabo gets punished for, and can do no wrong as far as he can tell.  And Sabo would have been fine with that; less attention on him means he’s punished less for imagined slights.

 

But every so often, when he’s returned home for the evening, he’ll feel a prickle on the back of his neck, and turn to see Stelly watching him with a look on his face Sabo can only describe as scheming.

 

“Why do you keep going back?” his friends in the woods ask one day. He’s never learned their names, and they’ve never offered them. “Why do you stay in a place you aren’t wanted?”

 

Sabo doesn’t have a good answer for them. “Where else would I go?” he counters, and receives a pair of wide grins in return.

 

“Come with us,” they say, and he wants to. Oh, he wants to. But Sabo knows now what that would mean. What sort of choice he’d be making, and how irrevocable it would likely be. He’d thought instead of waiting until the age of his majority and catching a berth on a sailing ship, a ticket to anywhere but here. But that would mean waiting for many years more, and if he’s honest, he’s not sure how long he can keep doing this. 

 

Still, it’s nice to actually be wanted for once.

 

“I’ll think about it,” he hedges, and that answer seems to be acceptable to them.

 

“Don’t think too long,” the younger one says, unblinking eyes staring up at him. “I don’t think you have much time left.”

 

Sabo trudges home later with those ominous words in his ears, turning his choices over and over in his head. What does it say that he thinks he might be better off–freer, happier and wanted–among people he is sure are not human at all?

 

He’s so distracted that he doesn’t notice his family waiting for him just inside the front door, not until his father has grabbed him.

 

“Stelly saw you in the company of two wild children,” his father hisses, grip tight around his collar. Sabo doesn’t need to be a genius to understand what he’s implying. “How long have you been fooling us? How young was he, when you took his place? Or perhaps you’re just a cradle robber, and we never got the chance to know our son at all.”

 

Sabo tries to protest. He’s not some faerie creature, he tries to say, but his words fall on deaf ears. His father shakes him so hard he begins to see stars, and he can see his mother with a comforting arm around Stelly’s shoulder. Stelly, who is grinning with nothing so much as satisfaction, and Sabo realizes quite suddenly that he’s been set up.

 

And there it was, he supposed. There was a changeling in the house, though not of the fae sort. Sabo had been well and truly replaced by someone who’d arrived on their doorstep offering to be the things he never could. And now he was trying to make sure the competition never had a chance to win that position back.

 

As if he even wanted it at this point.

 

“We have coddled and succored you for too long,” his father says, marching over to the fireplace with one hand still tight around Sabo’s neck. “And I know a surefire way to drive evil little creatures like you out of the homes of good folk.” He raises his free hand, and Sabo can see a poker there, wicked pointed tip red-hot. “Iron. And fire.” 

 

Sabo can see what his intentions are long before the poker meets the flesh above his eye, and then everything is pain and screaming.

 

He doesn’t remember the grip on his collar loosening, or the weak way he manages to scramble to his feet. He doesn’t remember the flight back to the forest at all. But he does remember an offer to take him in, and he knows who it was who put the brand to his face.

 

The choice doesn’t seem hard at all anymore.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Beware, the people of the small seaside town tell travelers. If you travel through the forest, keep a wary eye out for children who are no such thing, because if you draw their interest, they will try to keep you. One has a scar, one has a face of freckles…

 

…and one has hair of gold.

Notes:

I have a tumblr here: hyperbolicreverie. Feel free to come yell at me, ask questions about what I'm writing--or anything else, and generally watch me try and remember how social media works.

Also many thanks to the lovely people over at the One Piece Writing and Worldbuilding Discord Server, whom I can always trust will enable the heck out of whatever ideas I think of.

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