Title: Heartstone
Fandom: Box of Stones - Benjamin Francis Leftwich (Song)
Rating: G
Length: 1650 words
Content notes: Supernatural shenanigans.
Author notes: An attempt at figuring out why this song is called Box of Stones, and how it relates to the video for this song. (I'm gearing up for Jukebox Fest, can you tell?)
Summary: Every year, Ben brings the lady of the woods an apple, and every year, he gets something in return.


Ben threw himself on the mossy ground, exhausted from hours of walking. He could hear his older brother trudge on, then stop as he noticed he was no longer being followed.
“Come on!”

Ben looked up and saw his brother some twenty yards ahead of him.
“I can’t,” he yelled, “I need to sit down for a while.”

“Fine.” His brother sat down where he had been standing and made no move towards Ben. Ben didn't dislike his older brother, exactly, but thought that his brother's being fourteen years to Ben's ten put Ben at a disadvantage that his brother chose to overlook.

Ben hoisted his backpack off his shoulder and reached inside. There was an apple in there somewhere, sweet and ripe. He’d picked it from the tree behind their house himself, this morning.

His hand found the apple, but as he drew it out, he got stuck in the rucksack’s opening. He pulled – too fast – and next thing he knew the apple was rolling downhill. He scrambled to catch it, following it as it went down. It came to a halt more suddenly than he’d expected.
It had come to a halt against a hand. The hand was attached to a person.
Ben picked the apple up gingerly, then looked at the hand. He couldn’t see the rest of the body very well. He nudged it with his foot.

“Are you sleeping?” His voice sounded strange to himself. He was just about to call out for his brother when the hand moved and in the next second, a small girl was sitting in front of him.
She had long, brown hair, interwoven with daisies and dandelions, and her dress looked like it had been made out of leaves of grass. She laid a finger on her lips and whispered, “Shhh.”

Ben nodded. The girl held the apple in her hand and bit into it. As she chewed, her expression transformed into one of pure joy.

“Hey, that’s mine!” Ben said as she was about to take a second bite. The girl cocked her head.
“We can share it, though, I suppose.”

The girl nodded at this and took a few more bites of the apple before handing the remaining half back to him. Ben took it from her and started eating greedily.

“Do you have another?”

Ben swallowed. “I only took this one today. They’re from our apple tree. My dad grows them. It’s down there.”

He pointed a finger at the farm house in the distance.

“It’s half a day away. I could bring you one the next time we come this way.”

“Will you come this way in a year’s time?”

Ben grinned. “Sure!”

The girl threw her head back and emitted a sound like rain on soft grass. It took Ben a while to realise that she was laughing.

“Take this, then, and come back in a year’s time with one of your father’s apples.”

She pressed an object into Ben’s hand – a flat,black stone. Ben looked at the stone.
“Thank – ”

The girl had vanished.

***

Ben stood at the edge of the lake, the stone in his hand. True, it had been a gift, but it was also a stone, and its shape practically begged to be skipped over the surface of a body of water.

Ben took a deep breath, raised his arm, and threw the stone so that it sailed across the lake.
The stone skipped away from him, then changed its path into a circular motion and came all the way back to lie at his feet.

Ben threw the stone again, in a different direction.

The stone drew a smaller circle this time, but sure enough, it landed at his feet again.
Ben picked it up and put it in his pocket. He drew himself up to the full four inches of his height, and in that moment, he knew he would keep his promise to the strange girl and bring her another apple in a year’s time.

***

He started keeping them in a box under his bed after the second year. Between ordinary round pebbles and slightly less ordinary amethyst and obsidian, there were her improbable gifts. One was translucent and made books easier to read for him when he swiped it across a page. One, he still sometimes held in his hand as he was going to sleep, because it made him dream of calm green landscapes and he always woke up refreshed after using it.

There was one that she had given him when he had told her he was moving away for a while, to go to school in the city, which warmed up of its own accord once he touched them and which he kept in his pockets all through the city winter.

Many of them had taken him months to figure out.

***

He was fourteen the first time she held his hand. He had offered her the apple, as always, and she had taken it, then held on to his hand, raised it to her lips, and pressed a kiss against it. He’d felt his breath hitch in his throat.

She giggled, and for an instant, he saw her as he had first seen her – a small girl, maybe eight years old, with long brown hair and a dress made of grass.

The vision tugged at his heart in a way he did not care to examine closely.

“Is that your true face?” he asked before he could think better of it. He regretted the questions as soon as it had left his lips.

“Truth is such a human concept, don’t you think?” She did not seem upset by the question, which reassured him.

“I meant no offense,” he said, breath hitched in his throat.

She winked. “I know.”

Some questions, he knew now, were off limits.

Her mouth, as he was soon to discover, was not.

She gave him a red stone that evening that glowed when he touched it, so he could find his way home.

***

Naturally, over the course of the years, he had come to learn of all the warnings against dealings with the fair folk, but all warnings had come too late for him.
He had given his promise when he’d been unaware of such things.

***

This was the spot. As every year, he had brought a ripe apple; a red jewel from the orchard in his father’s yard. And like every year, he now cut it in half with his pocketknife and placed one half on the moss in front of him.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she was there in front of him, with the other half of the apple in her hand. She grinned at him broadly and he could feel his heart beating faster.

She bit into the apple and leaned forward, reaching for his hand. She raised it to her lips and pressed a gentle kiss into his knuckles. He exhaled and bit his lip, then leaned forward and kissed her.

“It’s so good to see you.”

“Your apples are very sweet. You know I’d always come for them.” She threw her head back in peals of laughter that sounded like drops of rain on soft grass.

“Yes, the orchard is lovely this year. How is your garden?”

It was a ritual by this time; a game they had been playing for as long as he could remember. She’d played it with others before him, he realised, and would probably keep playing it long after he was dead and gone.

“It’s beautiful. The bees have made it all nice especially for you.”

“I see,” he said, running his fingers through the moss and grass within his reach. She shuddered as he did so, like she could feel his touch in her body. Her connection to the place was still a mystery to him. He had tried to ask her, once, when he had been very young, but she had made it unmistakably clear that there were things she just did not talk about.

“And – I have something for you.”

The stone in his palm shimmered in different iridescent colours in the sun. He inclined his head towards her.
“Thank you, my lady,” he said.

***

He had parted from her so many times before, but he found that time and repetition did not make this easier.

***

He felt strangely empty when he got home, unsettled without being able to put a finger on precisely what was wrong. His heart ached in a strange and persistent way that he had not felt before.

He’d always known that part of it lived on that small patch of moss, out on that hill, but he had never really felt it before.

He sighed and told himself that he would get over it, that sometimes he just got like this without a clear reason. He took a shower and then lay on the bed in his pyjamas and idly turned the stone over in his hands. He looked through it, touched it to various objects in his room – a book, the mirror, his bedside table – but nothing happened.

Finally, he put it over his heart, because there were worse things to do to it.

“That was quick,” she said. He could see his bedroom door through her.

“You’re not real, are you?”

She sighed. “Depends who’s asking.”

“I’m asking.”

She sat down on the bed next to him. He reached for her hand, but he couldn’t feel her.

“You’re not enthralled, Ben.”

He sat up.

“You come here every year out of your own free will. Out of your own choice.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t understand what that means.”

She exhaled. “It means you don’t have to. Your heart is free, has always been. It’s never been mine to command.”

He was silent for a long while. She couldn’t meet his gaze. Finally, he spoke.

“It was always mine to give away.”

She leaned over and pressed her lips to his.

This time, he felt it.