For Friendly Anon’s commissioned prompt, half of the story, after Up Shit Creek (LJ)

Fae Apoc has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.

Pyry found being their mother’s fair-haired boy – literally; all his hair had turned from sandy to golden-blonde when he Changed – nearly as uncomfortable as he’d found being the family’s whipping boy, and twice as strange.

His newfound power was, at the very least, a mixed blessing: he could turn any sort of used or rotten food back into fresh food, but that meant he spent a lot of time around shit, and his mother was suddenly bringing back the concept of the outhouse.

The human members of the family hadn’t been too happy with being guinea pigs for his new power, testing the food he horned, but they’d done it (what choice did they have? No more than he did), and it appeared that what he poked was, indeed, nutritious and healthful, and fine to eat, as long as you didn’t think about where it had been an hour ago. Pyry wasn’t entirely sure that it ought to work but so far, it seemed like it was.

Worse than spending even more time around shit, worse than the weird way the family was treating him, was his mother’s sudden insistence on finding him both a Mentor (which he was a bit old for) and, as if it was an immediate need now-now-now, a mate.

Yet even worse – if there could be an even worse, and there seemed to be a never-ending list of them – was that his mother, Svad, and Abasta still refused to let him go monster-hunting with the family. Indeed, despite his age, they seemed determined to treat him like some newly-fledged change-child. It was maddening, humiliating, and just about unbearable.

The advantage was, if there was one, that until they got him a Mentor, they didn’t know what to do with him, and the family, large as it was, only made so much manure. Pyry slipped out of the house between bouts of horn-poking, determined that he was going to do something, anything, other than sit around turning shit into apples.

He made it into the city with no problems. Of course, he’d driven into the city a thousand times before with no issue, but considering the way the family was reacting, they expected him to get abducted, murdered, and then raped every time he left the property. For his horn. Which nine-tenths of the population couldn’t see and would never be able to.

He had some money in his pocket, the family credit card in his wallet, and a chip on his shoulder when he reached the city. He parked the truck near his favorite bar, the one with the redheaded dancer on Wednesday nights, wished he had a hat that covered the horn on his forehead, and headed in for a few drinks.

As with his whole life these days, the moment he relaxed, everything went to feces in a bucket.

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