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thebethewing · 2 years ago

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So good

Are you still taking asks from the Pliny the Elders posts? More on Cindy's faerie godmother, either her response to the wedding or the other godmothers' responses to what she's done in the story itself?

For anyone not familiar with Cindy, here’s the masterpost!!

Sorry this has been sitting in my drafts a while. If you guys want to read other Cindy-matic Universe stuff you can check out Smoky Tea and Ball’s in Your Court!

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"So. Out of juice, huh?" A scraggly old fairy with drought-browned foxtails for hair chewed at her pipe as Hazel hugged her knees, huddled against the roots of the Mother Tree. Hazel said nothing. She barely heard her. God, she really had just thrown that kid into the deep end. And what would happen after? Memory spell or not, they ran from the freakin' cops, that wasn't something that just went away. Granted sometimes it did if you pulled it off the right way, but for legal reasons neither Hazel nor the author could go into that. Quiet. Focus. Just breathe. Magic adapts to its environment and if you're a ball of furious nerves regretfully stumbling through the events of the previous hours, you're stuck with nervous wreck magic, which sucks.

"Hey--Orphan Tears. I'm talking to you," The scraggly fairy spoke up again. Hazel missed that part as well. Or at least mixed it up with the memory of Cindy asking if she should cry on the tree more.

"Oh I get it, you barely squeak by on your ass into Godmother Rank and suddenly you're too good for the rest of us--too good for old Foxtail--but it's not like the good fairies'll ever think you're one of them anyhow. Old Foxtail hears what they say about you. Lemme tell ya, once you switch from sourin' milk to sparkles, something takes root in you--those of us with the rot and the earth, that's magic that can be trusted, that's--"

"Wh--?" Hazel glanced up, "Oh. You were talking to me."

"Fucking hell--it's always the same with you young lot--a few hours in the human world and you leave half your wits there," Foxtail flopped back against the Mother Tree, "Yes, I'm talking to you."

"Sorry, I just..." Hazel's brow crinkled and she turned her gaze upward to the lattice of branches-that-were-also-roots that wove about the high underground ceiling of Faerie, "It's... harder than I thought it would be... I-I scared the shit out of her when I first showed up, and--and I think I helped her, but if she gets in trouble because of me...." Hazel felt at her horns, grimacing, before exhaling.

“Sounds like you really care about this one,” Foxtail rested her chin on her knuckles.

“Enough to use up all my juice,” Hazel snorted.

“God, humans are so much simpler when you’re just... threatening to kill a priest if he don’t ask the dying old man he’s performing last rites for if you’ll get into heaven on judgment day,” Foxtail huffed.

“They really are...” Hazel sighed. She perked up slightly. “Will we--?”

“Oh no, we won’t. Not really our bag, as it were,” Foxtail shrugged, “Good for scaring priests though.”

“Mm,” Hazel turned her gaze forward.

“It’s interesting, what you’re doing, I’ll give you that,” Foxtail took this opportunity to finally light her pipe and the scent of burning ground-up children’s teeth drifted around the base of the Mother Tree, “Shakes things up down here, for sure.”

“I’m not doing it to shake things up--”

“I know, why d’you think I call you ‘Orphan Tears’ anyway? Of course you’re stuck to that human--but you know you’re going to outlive her. So long as that tree of yours is up. But humans are always trouble--we have the godmothers to try and keep things all...” Foxtail huffed smoke out through her pointed teeth, “Diplomatic, but mark me, mortals are trouble. And if any of us good neighbors is going to prove that...”

“Mm...” Hazel readjusted herself to a cross-legged position, resigning herself to letting Foxtail rant some more. It was a comfort, in its own bitter, brittle way. Being born from a tree, and not the Mother Tree at that, she didn’t really have a concept of family--not a lot of common fairies like her did--but she had seen how some humans interacted with each other. They were flawed beings stuck together, and just having to deal with that, and somehow down the line not wanting to let each other go... she could understand something like that with Foxtail. But then Hazel perked up at a melodious, almost chiming sound. Fae armor didn’t thud and clink like human metals, it sang.

“Godmother Hazel?” two fairies in semi-armored livery loomed over her. She didn’t quite catch which one spoke. The first instinct was to run, but Hazel knew in the state she was in, it wasn’t like she could get far.

“...I am she,” Hazel looked up from furrowed brows with the traditional response.

“The Reverend Godmother would like a word,” said the other liveried guard.

“Oi! She hasn’t done anything wrong, you pigs! She helped her human just like you lot swear you do!” Foxtail piped up.

“It’s fine,” Hazel stood up. It was that moment when exhaustion gives you a second sucker punch because you let your body think it was in a recharge mode (and to be fair, it was), but still she stepped away from the Mother Tree with a short exhale. “Take me to her.”

Both guards pivoted to either side of her, and each stiffly hooked their arm under hers before they took off with a light thrum of dragonfly wings.

“Don’t you worry, Orphan Tears!” Foxtail hollered after her, “It’s our nature to get in over our heads--on scales them mortals can barely dream of!”

“God, that stinks--” muttered one of the guards.

“We’ve got to do something about the children’s teeth problem,” said the other guard.

Hazel briefly considered saying “She’s not hurting anyone” or “it’s one of the only ceremonies humans have with the lower Folk” but held her tongue. Grumpily hanging in the grip of two fairy guards was far from a position to soapbox. Fucking wings. All fairies who had wings thought they were a big fucking deal, but they were largely redundant--between the stealth with which they could move, and pretty much any fairies’ standard bag of tricks, and zipping around with pixie dust or bubbles or between reflective surfaces, wings were more about status (and status quo) than anything. But gods knew the godmothers loved their theater.

Hazel was ushered into a large hexagonal office. Reverend Godmother Mailse pivoted towards her, her features as high and smooth and slightly gnarled as teak driftwood, with sea glass green eyes and silver hair cropped short to high, frothy waves.

“Hazel. So glad you could join us--Tea?”

Hazel was unceremoniously plomped down to her feet and rocked on her heels slightly. A large moth in a waistcoat and frilly collar leaned toward her with a platter of tea and pastries. Hazel took an almond tart and chewed it while not breaking eye contact. “Can I ask what the purpose of this meeting is, Reverend Godmother?”

“We can’t tell you how... encouraging, all your progress in our little experiment has been,” Reverend Godmother Mailse clasped her hands together.

“Uh huh...” Hazel’s voice was only slightly distorted by a mouth full of slightly-too-dry pastry. Oh boy, they were calling it ‘the experiment’ again. A couple weeks ago it was being crowed about as a ‘diplomatic venture,’ and now we were back to ‘experiment.’

“It’s just... I’ve been informed you gifted your human charge something... permanent,” Reverend Mother Mailse’s hands went from clasping to that little jerky forward-steepling-fingers gesture.

“We’re fairies. We give gifts all the time,” Hazel shrugged, still chewing.

“In the old days! With the old kingdoms! And--and I recognize that it was very old magic that brought you to us,”

“Pure-hearted Orphan Tears,” Hazel said, with just the right amount of ‘Fuck you I know what I’m doing’ energy even if, in this moment, she very much didn’t because she still didn’t really see what she did wrong.

“It’s just... when we give humans gifts that are... permanent, that tends to... disrupt things,” Reverend Godmother Mailse was pacing back and forth.

Hazel scoffed. “They’re shoes. They’re not going to disrupt things.”

“Shoes?” Mailse’s silver eyelashes fluttered.

“Shoes. I mean I learned enough of our history not to give her a sword--I. mean I think giving her a sword would have probably freaked her out--I mean if I had given her a sword, it obviously wouldn’t be a permanent sword, it would just ffft away after I helped her kill her stepfamily, but you guys are all like ‘oh nooooo Fairy Godmothers don’t straight-up murder people’ and I’d be like ‘I’m not killing them, I’m letting her kill them,’ but then that’s probably against the rules somehow too or something. But anyway, I could tell she wasn’t up for killing anyone, and like... all she really wanted was to get to that party.”

Mailse was staring blankly at Hazel then. Her lips parted for a few seconds, then she closed them, she opened her mouth again, squinting a little, closed it again, then paced away from Hazel.

“That’s--I--Shoes?” she said, pivoting towards Hazel again.

“Shoes for the party,” said Hazel, “And I made them permanent so... she’d have something to remember the party by. The kid--she... she gets scared a lot. The people with her tell her she’s stupid and crazy all the time. I thought... if she has a happy memory, it should be one thing that people can’t tell her she’s stupid and crazy for.”

“I see...” the Reverend Godmother looked thoughtful at this.

“And look--it’s a nice shoe, but there’s no real glamour about it. The most magic I put into it were the defenses!”

“D-defenses?”

“Well, yeah, obviously--they’re her shoes, and her stepfamily stole a whole bunch of her shit, so I figured I’d make it so they couldn’t steal the shoes!”

“Go on...” Reverend Godmother Mailse said slowly.

Hazel had the feeling this was setting up for some kind of trap, but at the same time, she knew how all the winged fairies looked at her anyway, so if she was going to make an ass of herself, she had made peace with that concept a long time ago. “Look, the shoes just fit her, okay? They don’t fit anyone else. And maybe there’s a slight deterrent on the stepfamily putting them on. Maybe. That’s really the only magic on them. The shoes are just.. not going to fit anyone else. And that’s not a big deal! All the humans have their shoes custom-made, anyway! Or y’know they cobble them down to whatever size! What are they going to do... come up with some kind of... standardization for foot size? What kind of fucking weirdo would do that?”

“Mm...” Reverend Godmother Mailse was nodding as if what Hazel was saying was very reasonable, but there was a hard crinkle in her brow.

“What?” said Hazel. But then a memory flashed back to her. Poor Cindy, all sniffling, curled up in the middle of the road, rats and lizards and an old-as-balls farm dog loping around her, all covered in pumpkin guts. “I lost one of the slippers... I’m sorry.” And the poor fucking kid just looked so scared in that moment, like Hazel was going to hurt her for fucking up even though it wasn’t like she had a whole lot of control in that context, not to mention the fact that she might be fucking concussed from the pumpkin crash--god, why hadn’t she explained more things to her?! “...What happened?” it was finally at the point where Hazel couldn’t meet the Reverend Godmother’s eyes.

The Reverend godmother looked... honestly just a little too apologetic in that moment. This wasn’t really a smug expression from her, more like the look you get from your DM when you roll a Nat 1 on a saving throw and they know you’re really attached to your half-elf bard.

“Hazel... there really hasn’t been anyone like you in Faerie in a very long time,” was all she said.

“That is not fucking answering what I’m asking,” every muscle in Hazel’s body was tensed. She suddenly lunged forward and seized the Reverend Godmother by her arms, “IS MY KID FUCKING SAFE!?”

There was an audible drawing of swords and spears behind her and Hazel immediately realized her emotional reaction well-outpaced her current physical abilities. There was a moment of freezing like, no, she couldn’t let go, not until she knew, but then she felt a thin-fingered gentle hand smoothing her hair behind her horns. The sound of metal behind her seemed to slacken and Hazel’s eyes flicked upward.

“She’s safe for now,” said the Reverend Godmother, looking down at her, “But the situation is still developing.”

“‘Still developing?’” Hazel scoffed, “The hell is that supposed to mean?”

The Reverend Godmother glanced up from her and gestured at her guards and they briskly walked out, before quickly returning, wings thrumming, with what appeared to be a large mirror, but it didn’t reflect so much as look like dark, murky water. The reverend godmother passed a hand in front of it, and its plane rippled to reveal the blinding daylight of the mortal world.

“Hear ye, hear ye!” A town crier was yelling, “Whosoever fits the shoe in question, is the prince’s intended bride!” before unfurling a scroll which featured the fucking shoe Hazel gave Cindy.

Hazel’s mouth was hanging open. “Ah--” Hazel made a sound and turned to the Reverend Mother, “Okay so---” she sharply inhaled through her nostrils, “I didn’t glamour her--okay? I didn’t. I mean, I gave her a nice outfit, but like, there’s a memory charm on the outfit--that’s the whole thing--the whole thing was no one was supposed to remember her--I mean yeah, people can remember what she said--I wanted her to have a chance to tell the stepfamily to go fuck themselves, alright, and they wouldn’t forget that they got told to go fuck themselves, alright? HOW THE FUCK WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW HE’D STILL BE IN LOVE WITH HER!?”

“...because truth sticks in the mind far longer than anything else...” the Reverend Godmother didn’t turn away from the mirror, “And those pure of heart speak as true as they can.”

Hazel’s mouth drew to a thin line. “Look--you... you can’t punish me just because I couldn’t know she could be that good of a person! That’s not--you know what I am! You know I’m--I’m--” the words came so close to Hazel’s teeth but she bit them back. She knew what she was, but there was also a furious part of her that would never give those with wings the satisfaction.

“Did you think I brought you here to punish you?” the Reverend Godmother glanced toward her.

“I MEAN YOU HAD THE FUCKING NARC GUARDS DRAG ME IN,” Hazel threw up her hands.

“I brought you here because... for the first time in a very long time, I’m not sure what will happen next,” the reverend godmother chuckled, “I... I don’t think you’re a bad fairy, Hazel.”

“I’m literally Unseelie,” Hazel folded her arms in a huff.

“You were made from tears. From pain. It’s very easy to think that pain is purely bad--but it’s not. Pain tells us when something is wrong. Pain tells us that things should not be the way they are. Pain can be punishment, that’s true, but I think--more often than that, pain is the absence of justice and kindness and love...You were born from tears of grief and loneliness, Hazel. You think you are pain, but in fact, you are love. And fury. And justice.”

Hazel’s met her eyes and was pressing her lips together hard, arms still folded, though it was clear those words had shaken her.

“I didn’t bring you here because I thought you must be punished,” said the Reverend Godmother.

“Right, ‘Fairy Godmothers aren’t about punishment,’” Hazel rolled her eyes.

“It’s true,” said the Reverend Godmother, “I mean we can decommission you and you can go right back to turning butter rancid, if that’s what you think is better for you.”

Hazel was silent, not looking at her.

“But the actual reason I brought you here was, I don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s been a very long time since we’ve interfered in human affairs to this extent. But I think if anything goes wrong, I can trust you to put it right.”

Hazel blinked.

“Don’t get me wrong, you’ve disrupted... probably a lot of human politics--but it wouldn’t be very true to our roots if we didn’t do that, would it?”

Hazel’s eyebrows raised and she glanced up at the Reverend Godmother then.

“Like I said,” said the Reverend Godmother, “There hasn’t been anyone like you in Faerie in a very long time.”

Hazel blinked a few times. “C-could I get that tea, now? And can I sit down?”

The Reverend Godmother smiled.

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