The Unfortunate Marriage of a Brier Bush and a Dinner Jacket

a/n: Don't remember these kids? Read Beginnings.

Chester tore through the marsh, brambles snagging on every available snatch of fabric. He told his mother lace wasn't masculine enough for him. In fact, all this lace was downright dangerous. It was going to get him killed.
He glanced over his shoulder, gasping for breath. It was definitely still after him. A gigantic, slimy, vine-trailing, moaning, hideous beast. He had only been looking for Twitch. His throat snatched at what oxygen it could find in the air as he realized that the...swamp thing had been lurking just outside Twitch's hollow. Had the beast ensnared him, too? He attempted to put on an extra burst of speed, but only succeeded in nearly falling down a steep embankment and tearing off an entire sleeve of his dinner jacket. He winced. He would pay for that later, probably with a thrashing from his father.
The swamp monster was still after him. He could hear it crashing around just behind him. Chester put his hand to his side, trying to quell the pains issuing from the stitch growing there. He absolutely couldn't run any farther, and if he couldn't run, then he would have to fight.
He scrambled down the embankment, pressing himself into the mud. Above him, the swamp monster came to a lurching halt, vines dangling over the ledge. It snuffled about, trying to find Chester. Chester squeezed his eyes shut, reached for a vine (it was slimy, and cold, and foul-smelling) and pulled. With a mucusy roar, the entire monster came tumbling off the ledge into the sticky river mud. Chester gave a loud yell, and pitched himself onto the swamp monster, fully intending to destroy it before it could choke him to death. He sank a punch into what he judged to be roughly the middle of the beast, and was nearly blinded by a rush of sparks.
He tumbled backward, eyes narrowed from both the sparks and the revelation that came with them. He had seen sparks like these before. On an impulse, he grabbed the largest looking vine he saw and gave a hefty tug. All at once, the vines and swamp mud fell away, revealing a wheezing Twitch, his entire body tinted a dark forest green.
"Got you good!" he croaked triumphantly, laughter creeping into his voice. "I knew you'd scamper!"
Chester drew himself up to his full, not-inconsiderable height (he was ten-years-old, after all). "Gentlemen of note do not scamper," he said haughtily, "I was merely luring you away to an opportune location for an ambush."
"Shyah, of course." Twitch pointed at Chester's jacketless arm. "Was the sleeve supposed to be a directional marker?"
Chester snatched at the sleeve where it dangled on a brier bush and examined the frayed ends ruefully. "I suppose that's all it's good for now," he said.
"Oh, c'mon! Y'look dashing! Like those shipwrecked pirate thingamajiggers you're always going on about."
Chester looked a little more cheerful. "At least my skin isn't green," he said.
"Wot? What's wrong with green? Green is a very healthy color."
"How long are you going to be like that?"
Twitch shrugged. "I dunno. A week, maybe. Whydja ask? You too good to spend time with green people?"
A look of pure mischief spread across Chester's face. "I was just thinking that I know the best way to scare some of the maids at the House..."

Beginnings

Chester was bored.
So bored, in fact, that one day he did something explicitly forbidden.
He followed the will-'o-the-wisps through the bogs. Nevermind what his mother and the servants said about danger and death. He was the son of a lord of England: the supernatural couldn't touch him. It wouldn't dare.
Twitch was irate.
So irate, in fact, that he merely lay in the leafy shade of a fern when he woke up, and he stewed. He had been banished, and without even a proper trial. They didn't even have the decency to make him a proper changeling, for he hadn't been placed in a home with a family. He was well and truly stuck.
This was how Chester found Twitch, lying on his back with his feet in the air, blowing angry sparks like an old man blows smoke rings. This was how a partnership was born, one that would result in more than a few blown-up objects and lost parental hairs.
This was how a friendship between a human boy and a fairy outcast began.