Fresh Air

Darcy stretched cattishly as his lecture finished, flexing his cramped fingers as he yawned very visibly in the middle of the theatre. His shirt became untucked as he did so, at which he grumbled as the room began to fill up with the chatter of exiting students. Placing his various items of stationary into his satchel, he contemplated what he'd do with the remainder of the day, as his classes were now officially over. Homework, in all likelihood, was the frustrating answer. As much as dad had tried to talk him out of double-majoring he'd decided to do it anyway. He thought back to his friends from back home, with whom he'd had even less contact than he'd anticipated upon arriving here. Only a couple of them would understand his pain, but he wasn't really able to divulge much about what things were like here to those back home. The bizarreness of it all still stymied him sometimes. He was, after all, a bumpkin.

Sidling out of the row, and shouldering his backpack he was off, once he'd tucked his pristine white shirt back into his trousers. With a flick of the hair he'd exited the lecture theatre, brain still buzzing with whatever new epsilon-over-two proof they'd been exercising that day in analysis class. Several clicks of his boots had him at the central fountain. He stood, watching the water tumble and spill from the spout to the pool below, reminded of the appropriately named 'fairy glen' back home. Noticing a boot-buckle was loose, he bent over to do it back up, in the process losing a biro tucked behind his ear which clattered to the floor, and rolling about a metre or so away.

Darcy cursed quietly to himself as he noticed the loss of his pen, and the errant strands of hair its bid for freedom had released. The newcomer was quick to grab it though. The sudden movement startled Darcy who twitched with surprised and fumbled his buckle. Vigorously finishing the task at hand, he straightened up returning to his full height several inches taller than Marcus, wavy hair slightly dishevelled and pulled out of its low ponytail.

He studied the new boy carefully. He looked vaguely familiar. His accent placed him as being from somewhere in the home counties, which made Darcy slightly wary. He had inherited both the Tylwyth Teg and the Welshman's inherent distrust of Englishmen, or "Saeson" as they were known in his language. Darcy suddenly placed him as being another of the freshers in his Maths classes.

"Yeah that's mine cheers." Darcy said, his accent almost certain to sound more scouse than Welsh to the uninitiated. When Marcus introduced himself, Darcy extended a strong hand for shaking, and offered a smile. "Well met Marcus, I'm Darcy" he said, trilling his 'r'.

"You were just in first year analysis too, hmm?" he asked by way of initiating conversation as his new friend looked a little shy.

Marcus accepted Darcy's proffered hand with his own, which Darcy shook firmly with a solid grip. Darcy responded to Marcus's blasé attitude with a raised eyebrow. That meant one of two things; the man was a genius, or the man was an idiot. Darcy decided that he was best off holding judgement until he knew him better. All the same, he didn't think it was particularly wise to not pay attention during analysis like that, it was a pretty difficult subject. All the same, Marcus seemed pretty easygoing, so maybe he knew what he was doing or didn't care about his grades.

"You're a braver man than I." Darcy laughed airily, withdrawing his hand, and removing his foot from the fountain where it had been resting post-buckling. "I stop looking for a second in that class and I totally lose my place. I can follow all the proofs they show me... But I'll be damned if I can actually come up with one on my own." there was a certain creative aspect to it, Darcy found, that he struggled to grasp. "So you're British too, then?" he asked with the intention of finding out more about what exactly his new friend was. Perhaps they were quite similar.

Darcy clicked his tongue. He figured finding patterns was good enough now in first year but one day they'd start getting non-bookwork questions and he figured he'd be in trouble if he hadn't exercised his brain into a lean, mean proof-solving machine. Maybe Marcus had a knack for it that he didn't though; it was the kind of thing that some people certainly did. Everyone else- they had to work.

Cambridge, eh? Darcy had a friend studying natural sciences who had matriculated at King's College there. He had a certain set of preconceived notions about that kind of place that made him bristle instantly. He frowned slightly, but tried not to make his prejudice too obvious. His upbringing aside, Cambridge, Hull, Aberystwyth- it didn't really matter where someone was from in human terms. Not to a fairy, at least.

"Llanbediodyn." he answered. The "ll" sound- a soft, voiceless hiss, was unheard of outside of Welsh and some scandinavian languages; it was one that saeson typically struggled with. "That was where I grew up. But I'm actually a changeling. So I'm from the fairy world, but I got swapped out for my "dad"'s kid." Darcy mimed the quotes with a wry smile. The 'real' Darcy was also at least half fairy; of the two of them Queen Mab had wanted to keep Carwyn's birth son, so the two were swapped.

"What about you, I take it having blue hair isn't the only thing that makes you special enough to be here?" He asked, sitting down at the fountain.

"Close enough." Darcy laughed. "It's in Snowdonia. Tiny, tucked away and remote." He couldn't think of any other recognisable frame of reference nearby. Dinas Emrys, possibly. Bangor. "And surprisingly, not really. I kind of always knew, and his own son was half-fairy anyway. One of those old lady-of-the-lake type deals, y'know?" that was common everywhere in British mythology, Marcus would know King Arthur if nothing else. Having said that, if he loved books then maybe he'd actually be fairly well versed in mythology.

When Marcus said that he could pull things out of books though, it made Darcy start. What an odd but wonderful power. Darcy felt like magic, or at least the magic he used, was largely enigmatic and mystical and he wasn't entirely sure how it worked. More mystic than pragmatic. But if he had the right books... Marcus could do anything! A bunch of questions ran through his head. What was the minimum requirement for book? Would an e-book count? Could you write your own books? But there was one question that burned brighter than all the others, and it was the first that leapt to his tongue.

"So your hair came out of a book!?" He exclaimed.