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3

Sons and Daughters

 

I look’d about, but found myself alone,

Deserted at my need!  My friends were gone…

Trembling with rage, the strumpet I regard,

Resolv’d to give her guilt the due reward…

Thus while I rave, a gleam of pleasing light

Spread o’er the place; and, shining heav’nly bright,

My mother stood reveal’d before my sight…

She held my hand, the destin’d blow to break;

Then from her rosy lips began to speak:

“My son, from whence this madness, this neglect

Of my commands, and those whom I protect?

Why this unmanly rage?  Recall to mind

Whom you forsake, what pledges leave behind.”

– Aeneas, stayed by his mother, Aphrodite, from killing Helen of Troy,
Virgil’s Aeneid [Translated from original Latin]

 

Little baby, hear my voice

Beside you, O maiden fair

Our young Lady, grow and see

Your land, your true land here

Sun and moon, guide us

To the hour of glory and honour

Little baby, our young Lady

Noble maiden fair

– Ashley Serena featuring Karline, Noble Maiden Fair
[Lyrics by Patrick Neil Doyle; translated from original Scottish Gaelic]

 

“Baz,” Dania brought Barry’s attention back to center, and he noticed he’d absently been wrapping the end of a purple ringlet around his wand, like a pipe cleaner around a pencil.

“Huh?” he asked, head coming up.  He’d been fairly distracted today in general.

“I said, ‘I want you to practice some spells on another person,’” Dania repeated, her eyes narrowed cautiously.

“Should I try it on you?” he asked, a little nervous about trying spells on someone else, instead of on himself or inanimate objects.

“Well…” she was suddenly hesitant and it concerned him, “I was thinking it shouldn’t be on me, because I’m more likely to resist, even without meaning to.  Because, over time and with use of the Fayemark, fairies tend to build up a mild underlying resistance to each other’s spells.  It’s the kind of thing that was useful in the dark ages when there were a lot more feuds between rival fay lines, who were at each other’s throats.  I could probably let the resistance down on purpose, if I tried.  But I really think you need to get used to doing spells on third parties anyway.”

He lowered his eyebrows warily at her, keen on neither third parties, nor the particular third party she was likely to be thinking of, especially, being involved in his magic.  He folded his arms under his bust irritably.  “Mom, please don’t make me do magic on Nick!”

“Sweetheart, it’ll be good practice!” she said, not even pretending that Nick hadn’t been exactly who she had been thinking of.  “It won’t have quite the same effect on your magic, because he’s my fairy godson, not yours.  So it won’t lend the potency to wishes that your actual godchildren’s wishes will, but it’ll get you used to doing magic around other people.”

He raised one of his eyebrows back up skeptically.  “Mom.  It’s Nick.”

She gave him a pleading look, eyes large.  “Honey, I know he’s been a pain about your transformation, but he’s still your brother.  And your powers aren’t going anywhere.  You’re going to have to be okay with him being around when you’re a fairy, because even when you’re powered-down, you’re always a fairy.”

He blew a purple curl out of his eyes, still uncomfortable when she’d insist on stuff like that.

“I’ll keep him in check, alright?” Dania reassured him.

“What if I blow him up or something?” Barry asked dryly.

She gave him a chastising look.

“Not on purpose!” he insisted, although he got a little bit of a smirk on his face.

“You be nice, and I’ll make sure he is,” she insisted.

“Come on, I’m the picture of innocence,” he maintained.  He motioned to his Grape visage sardonically, “Just look at this face.”

“It’s true,” she nodded with mock seriousness, patting his cheek.  “Hard not to trust such a little angel-spawn.”

He squinched up his face, displeased that she’d taken his joke and teased him harder with it.  “You won’t let him mock me?” he required.

“We’ve had a couple of stern talks since your birthday, Nick and I, but no I won’t let him bug you.”

He still didn’t want to, but he understood why she was pushing for it.  And assuming he was truly going to end up stuck with fairy godchildren, he would have to learn how to do magic on people other than himself.  (Not that the magic he’d tried on himself had functioned especially well thus far.)  “Fine,” he relented.

“Here, come with me to get him and explain,” Dania requested, moving in the direction of the stairs, toward where Nick was in the rec room last time Barry had seen him.

“Can’t you just yell for him?” Barry said.

“He was in the middle of a game, and I do try to be sensitive to when you guys can’t just drop the controller in the middle of something,” she explained.

“Well, you do get serious cool-mom points for that,” Barry smiled.  “Can you just get him and bring him down?  Or could you port us up there?”  Barry hadn’t learned how to warp himself to other locations via the Fayemark yet.

Dania looked impatient.  “I don’t like just popping around and startling people, hon.”

“You popped into my room on my birthday!” he pointed out.

“After knocking!” she said.  “You were just super asleep, so you didn’t hear.”

“Something I should have remained, that day,” he said dryly.

“Wouldn’t have kept you from getting pulled out of bed by magic and getting automatically powered-up anyway,” she observed dryly.  “So you should be glad I woke you up early on your birthday.  But why don’t you just want to walk upstairs?!”

He fidgeted.  “I don’t like how Grape hips, heels, and the mini-hoop-skirt feel climbing the stairs,” he admitted with a blush.  “I feel like I’m ringing a bell.”

“Aww,” Dania cooed with affectionate laughter, putting an arm around him.  “A bell?”

He nodded diffidently, moving his Grape hips slightly and feeling again the dramatic swish.

“Okay, ma belle,” she teased in French, winking, “just this time I will port you the super long distance upstairs.”

He smiled with embarrassed gratitude.

She looked down at his hips thoughtfully.  “I don’t think you have hoops.”

“No, I know,” he said, face hot, remembering scoping out his underwear situation in his room just before powering-down the first time.  “It’s just disconcertingly buoyant,” he explained, trying to squash the floof of his skirt with his arms by his side.

She still looked lovingly amused, but took her arm from around his pale shoulders and extended that hand to him instead.  “Shall we take our distant journey?”

“Into hostile lands,” he retorted, taking it.

“I’ll keep him good!” she insisted, making a red portal.

It was a ridiculously short distance to port, since they’d been in the den, and they landed at the top of the stairs with Barry’s room on the right, and the door to the rec room off to the left.  The rec room door stood open, as they often left it, and Nick’s laugh guffawed forth from inside.  Dania walked casually in.

Barry reluctantly followed his mother, not looking forward to retrieving his brother, even less so as he prominently felt the swish of his hips walking behind her.  He was sure his appearance was going to be commented upon, as it had been every time he’d had to be Grape around Nick, which had been intentionally few thus far.

The rec room had served many purposes over the years.  It had been their playroom, starting back when Barry would toddle around and get in trouble for putting toy cars on his baby brother’s face.  All but the most treasured toys (building blocks, cars, a few stuffed animals, and a very well-loved train set) had long since been given away, but the rec room still got plenty of use.  It was lined with bookshelves, which still held everything from little kid picture books, to middle-grade novels, to the encyclopedias about nature, space, dinosaurs, machines, and combustion, that Barry had devoured over and over again.  Dania and Frank were both avid readers, and if there was one thing Frank didn’t mind buying his sons more of, it was books, although Barry certainly tended to take him up on it more often than Nick did.

There was also a rarely-used treadmill and a bunch of comfy seating, but since they’d grown up a bit, the room now centered around the entertainment center with its gaming console.  This is where Nick was often, and currently, affixed.

He had his headset on and was talking into the mic, probably to his online friends.  (Technically it was supposed to be a shared headset, but Barry didn’t particularly enjoy interacting with most of the people he’d met in online games, and so he didn’t use it much.  Nick had sweat so much into the headband anyway, that he’d want to clean it thoroughly if he ever decided to use it again.)

The game Nick was playing was his favorite online first-person shooter, and he was replying to things his teammates said.  “Ohhh, man!  Was… I think there were a couple more in the back there.  A-Hat, you got that one, or you need me and Ex to come help?”  He unloaded his machine gun into the digital enemy, and the pixelated dead man fell backward off the platform, to which Nick snickered.  He jumped his character down to the floor below, to where his target had landed.  He crouched and grabbed his kill’s arm with his own character’s, dragging him to another room.  But the corpse’s head bumped against the virtual walls, the physics engine causing it to bounce humorously.  “Hey Ex,” Nick said into the mic, laughing, “check this out!”

The teammate, whose full handle was “Excriment80085,” came over and the two of them started kicking the body into funny positions.  A third player with the handle “RenegadeBoobies” came in to assist them.

“When we get enough, we gotta lay them all out and spell something again,” Nick determined.

Dania cleared her throat.

Nick turned in surprise, and looked more bewildered to see them both powered-up there.  He clasped a hand over his mic, to keep anyone on the other end from hearing anything, although neither Dania nor Barry said anything.

Barry realized his arms were folded under his bust again, which wasn’t necessarily a stance he wanted to maintain around Nick, even if it seemed to be a natural position for this body shape to take.

“Uhh, guys, actually I gotta go,” Nick said.  “My mom and sister just walked in.”

Barry dropped the arms.  “Hey!”

Nick gave him a quick skeptical smirk, but Barry didn’t want to argue more while he was still connected, and potentially be overheard.

“Yep, sorry,” Nick was answering whatever his friends were saying in his headphones.  “You guys got this though.  Later dudes.”  And he left the round and rotated to face them, lowering his headset.  “What can I do for you ladies?”

Barry’s fists were balled up.  “Don’t call me that over the internet!” he fumed.

Nick rolled his eyes.  “It’s basically true.  Like any of them know whether or not I have a sister.”

“It is not!” Barry said shrilly.

“Guys,” Dania tried to get them to stop, but they weren’t paying attention to her.

“I’m sorry, next time I’ll tell them my brother just came in wearing a skirt,” Nick said with a mocking smile.  “That better?”

“Listen, fart-face–” Barry started in on him.

“Boys!  Stop!!” Dania shouted louder than them to be heard.

They both shut up.

“Does that mean Grape doesn’t have to stop?” Nick muttered under his breath.

Barry pointed angrily at his brother with a small finger while looking at Dania, as if to say, “You see what he’s doing?!?”

“Nicholai, you said you were going to be better,” Dania reminded him with a disappointed glare.

Nick turned away from her, flopping back into the couch, navigating his game menu to look through his armor collection.

“And Baz, you’re going to have to get used to being called ‘girl’ and ‘she’ and ‘sister’ sometimes.  It’s just going to come with the territory,” Dania shrugged at him.

Barry folded his arms again and huffed, which sounded unfortunately teen-girl-pouty.   He really didn’t want to have to accept that terrain.  “Well, he was saying it to get a rise out of me.”

“Yes, which you make all too easy,” Dania observed.

Barry gave her a betrayed look.  As if it shouldn’t bother him, getting called girl-nouns suddenly.

“Anyway, Nick, we’re here to get your help with something,” Dania sighed and went on.  “And I told your brother I’d keep you on your best behavior.  You going to live up to that for me?”

“Never has a bar been set so low,” Barry rolled his eyes.

Nick turned back around to glare at him.  “What do you guys need my help with??”

“I want Barry to practice some spells on another person,” Dania explained, “to get ready for his godchildren.”

Nick’s eyes went a little wide.  “He can’t, like, hurt me, right?”

“Gee, only one way to find out…” Barry muttered ominously.

“No,” Dania corrected impatiently.  “You can just wish for things, like you would from me.  It won’t be official wishes, since you’re not his godson, but he can still practice granting.”

Nick glanced warily between them.  “What would I wish for?  Barry to have fancier hairdos?” he snorted.

“I can do more than that!” Barry shot back, before he realized that didn’t exactly negate Nick’s point.  He had half a mind to storm off and say “forget it,” but he was fairly certain all that would get him was being called “drama queen” by Nick, and an earnest talking-to from Dania, which would land him right back here anyway.

“You wish for plenty of clever and ridiculous things from me all the time;” Dania prodded Nick, trying to ride over their bickering.  “Come stand here by Baz,” she instructed.

Nick made a big show of sighing like the whole thing was a major chore, but as he warily got up and came to stand in the middle of the rec room, facing Barry, the older teen noticed an underlying look of fear on his brother’s face.  It was subtle, just showing up in how Nick tipped his chin in toward his chest, and how his gaze darted nervously around Barry’s strange state.

Barry had no clue why Nick would be acting scared of him, since he’d powered-up and lost probably four or five inches of height and all the meager muscle mass he’d begun with.  Unless he did think Barry could “blow him up” with magic; it was still a humorous thought while Nick was being a pill.

“Good,” Dania encouraged them.  “Now just wish for something officially, but I can reject a wish pretty easily, and then Barry can grant it instead.”

Even besides the matter of a belligerent audience, Barry was worried about the prospect of granting another person’s wish.

Nick seemed to be having a surprisingly difficult time thinking of something to wish for, but before he came up with something, Dania straightened abruptly.

“Oh, I’m getting a call!” she realized suddenly.  She looked off into the distance like she was listening or sensing something.  “Yeah, she probably needs me right away.  I’ll be right back, okay guys?”

“What?!” Barry balked, Grape voice extra high again.  “You can’t just leave me here with him!”

His mother looked impatient.  “I’ll be right back!  Surely you guys can get along for five minutes!  I swear I thought after you guys were past ten years old I wouldn’t need a babysitter anymore.”

“Mom!” Barry whined, dreading being left alone with Nick while powered-up.

She gave him a stern look.  “Grape, I’m being summoned.  It’s important.  I’ll be right back.”

He frowned, but he could tell she was serious, invoking his fairy name at him like that.

“Nick, Barry is in charge until I get back.  If I hear you’ve been trouble, you’re getting more trouble,” Dania told her younger son, equally serious.

Nick lifted his hands offendedly.  “I’m fourteen, Mom.  You don’t have to put somebody ‘in charge’ anymore!”

“You’re thirteen-and-a-half.  Be good,” she said firmly, and then warped away, her red light receding and leaving her offspring to glare at each other.

The silence was awkward, and Barry didn’t like Nick just grumpily staring at him while powered-up.  He sighed.  “Well, you wanna wish for something, or what?”

Nick shrugged a shoulder resentfully.  “I seriously don’t know what to wish for.”

Barry snorted nostalgically.  “Come on, we’ve wished for enough stupid crap over the years; surely you can think of something.”

Nick laughed softly at that too.  “That’s true.”

“Just don’t wish for a monkey in a tutu, like you did for your seventh birthday,” Barry grinned.  “I don’t want to try to grant that.”

Nick looked him up and down.  “I could say ‘you’ve already got that,’ but I’m supposed to be being nice.”

Barry put an annoyed fist on his curved hip, glaring again.

Nick sighed.  “Sorry.  Fine.  I’ll think of something… uhhh…”  He shook his head.  “Soda.  Sure.”

“What kind?” Barry asked tightly.  “… And if you say ‘grape’ I’m gonna ram it down your throat!”

Nick put his hands up defensively.  “Geeze!  Root beer.  Whatever.”

Barry nodded, switching modes from verbal sparring to magic casting.  They were very different frames of mind, and magicking while agitated hadn’t gone well, to date.  He needed his wand in order to magick and the fastest place to get it was from the top of his bodice, although he was very aware of Nick watching him.  He tried to obscure what he was doing with his left hand, as he pulled the wand from his corset-dip with his right.

Nick was watching with raised brows.  “Underwire chafing?”

Barry grumbled wearily at him.  “I had to get my wand out, stupid.”  He held up the retrieved stick for his brother to see.

Despite their awkward dynamic at the moment, Nick looked thoughtful and curious.  “Can… can I touch it?”

For a second, Barry remembered what else Nick had almost touched when he’d been powered-up the first time.  But he supposed letting him touch the wand couldn’t hurt.  “Uh, yeah, I guess so.”  He extended the piece of wood cautiously.

Nick started with poking it with his pointer finger, and then grabbed it experimentally in his fist.

“I have to keep my hand on it, otherwise it’ll disappear if it touches anything, including your hand, I think,” Barry explained why he couldn’t just pass it to him.

“Does it feel magic to you?” Nick asked curiously.

It was an interestingly phrased question and Barry considered for a second.  “Yeah, I mean it’s mine, so it kinda talks to me.”

“Talks to you?” Nick wondered.

Barry nodded uncomfortably.  “I communicate through it, to talk to the Fayemark, I think, and that enables me to do magic.”

“Can you let go, so I can see it disappear?” Nick asked with awe.

“Uh, sure,” Barry shrugged a bare shoulder.  He let go of the wand into Nick’s grasp, and as Barry paid attention to it, he could feel the wand slip back into the Otherworld.  Meanwhile, Nick’s fist closed around empty air.

“Woah!” Nick waved around in the air, like he thought the wand had just gone invisible or something and was still hanging out there somewhere.

“So it’s back in the Fayemark now, the same place Mom goes when she ports,” Barry explained.  “And I can feel it there.  But then I can call it back again.”  He reached into his bodice cup, less covertly this time, and retrieved the wand again.

Nick’s mouth was open.  “Does it poke you, when you pull it out?  In the…”  He was thumbing his own heart region.

Barry frowned, having let his guard down a little bit toward his brother while teaching him about what he’d learned lately.  Now Nick was making it about his girl-shape again.  “No.”

“You sure?  There’s a lot there to poke…”

Barry folded his arms annoyedly again; Nick was the one poking.  “I’m going to make your stupid soda now.  Say ‘I wish’ or whatever.”

Nick looked a little cowed by Barry’s sharp tone.  “I wish for a root beer,” he said obediently.

There wasn’t a special feeling like the one Dania had described from official wishes, but Barry figured that was because, like she’d explained, Nick wasn’t his godchild.  Still, Barry closed his eyes and imagined a can of root beer, as requested, speaking to his wand and feeling the Fayemark flow into it and click.  He swished his wrist absently, the motion really just a way to facilitate his thoughts.

And, as usual, he opened his eyes as he felt the magic flow through his instrument.  Plummy magic gathered in Nick’s hand, to his brief dismay, but in its midst quickly twinkled a normal-looking aluminum soda can, clearly labeled “root beer.”  It had a common brand name, and Barry was a little surprised he’d counterfeited it so easily, since he’d intentionally conjured rather than summoning it.

It looked good, and Barry was proud it had turned out as intended.

“It’s like you synthesized it from the air!!” Nick stared dizzily at the can in his hand.

His shock bewildered Barry in return.  “Uh, yeah.  I mean, it’s the same thing Mom does all the time,” he pointed out with a shrug.

“Yeah, but she didn’t do it, you did it!” Nick marveled, turning the can over in his hand like it was just an illusion.

Barry didn’t fully understand what difference it made.  The soda existed now.  Sure, it was important that he learn so he didn’t mess things up, but did it really matter if Dania made the can or he did?

Although at the same time, he did want to know he’d done it well.  “You gonna try it?”

Nick was still regarding the can like some alien substance in disguise, as if he didn’t fully trust it to be the sugary carbonation it was pretending at.  “Can you make anything?!”

“Uhh,” Barry said again, “probably not.  Like I told Nanna Susan, my magic still does its own thing a lot.  But some categories are easier than others.  Food doesn’t seem too hard, so far.”  He didn’t want to tell Nick the ways in which clothing was still a major obstacle.

Nick kept looking between Barry and the can, like there were major ramifications happening.

“Dude, just drink the soda!” Barry insisted.  “It’s not poison, I swear!”

Nick shook his head.  “That’s not…” he started, then seemed like he didn’t want to talk about it, and popped the can open using the tab, releasing the familiar carbonated hiss.  He sipped at it, eyebrows raising.  “It’s really good!” he admitted, although that almost seemed to scare him too.

“Really??” Barry asked, and in his excitement about succeeding he sounded much more bubbly than intended, himself.

Nick nodded awkwardly.  His eyes darted up and down Barry, who realized he was standing very femininely, his hands clasped together around his wand by his pinched waist, leaning forward brazenly as he’d relaxed, which made his upper softness burst a little more freely.  He cleared his throat, pulling backward.  “So you wanna wish for something else?”

Nick sighed, glancing around the room like he wanted to escape.  “Baz, I don’t know what to wish for!”

“Seriously, I just need practice,” Barry shrugged.  “That’s what Mom wants me to do.  I just need to be ready for godchildren and crap.”

Nick looked surprisingly thoughtful.  “You don’t want godchildren?”

Barry stared at a patch of carpet and shrugged.  “I dunno.”

“I can wish for a soccer ball, I guess,” Nick decided.  “Does that count or do I need to say it right?”

“Since you’re not my godson, it’s like a dress rehearsal I guess,” Barry pointed out.  “Like how you have to stop at the stop signs on a driver’s test, even though there obviously aren’t going to be any other cars on a test parking lot.”

“Will I be in trouble if I make a ‘dress rehearsal’ joke?” Nick wondered.

Barry sighed.  “It’d be one of your mildest, so no, probably not.”

“I don’t actually have a good joke,” Nick admitted, “just pointing out the fact that you’re wearing a dress for the dress rehearsal.”

“Your witticisms astonish me sometimes,” Barry said dryly.

A deep red light appeared beside them then where Dania had left, starting as a small disc, and then growing to around eight feet in diameter.  After a moment Dania reemerged through it.

“Sorry about that, guys!” she said immediately.  “Had a very sad ten-year-old on my hands.  Took longer than I meant to.”  She looked between them and evaluated.  “But you didn’t kill each other, that’s a plus.”

“No,” Barry agreed.  “I made him a soda.  I didn’t screw it up!”

“It’s not even poisonous,” Nick joked too, although he was definitely being quieter than normal.  He took another sip of the soda, like it was a valuable liquid.

Barry didn’t get it.  It wasn’t like he’d never had magicked soda before.  “Although I should have tried turning him into a soda.  I didn’t even think of that until now,” he sighed jokingly, like it was a lost opportunity.

Nick’s head popped up, like for a split second he was afraid Barry was serious.

“Aww, good job!” Dania praised, and Barry suspected she meant them getting along, more than the conjuring of the soda.

“He was just asking for a soccer ball, so I guess I’ll try that too?” Barry said.

Dania encouraged him to keep practicing, so Barry made a soccer ball appear.  He wasn’t sure this time if it was summoned or conjured, so he really hoped he hadn’t accidentally stolen it from somewhere.

If anything, this seemed to awe Nick all the more.  “It’s a professional grade ball!” he breathed.

“It is?” Barry wondered, puffy lips forming an ‘o.’  He hadn’t been aiming for anything particularly fancy; he’d just been trying to make a soccer ball.

Dania kept nudging Barry to grant more things for Nick, although it seemed like the more things Barry would magick, the more Nick clammed back up.

He made beef jerky and a cool breeze, then a marshmallow-gun and a bandana with skulls on it, and finally a popsicle, which was accidentally literally grape-flavored, but by that point Nick was so quiet he didn’t even make fun of Barry for it.

“You’re doing great, hon,” Dania praised Barry, as Nick ate his popsicle silently.  “I’m not so worried about you performing spells for other people now.  There’s some other essentials I want to go over, especially time-limits of course, but I can’t believe how fast your fairy training is going!”

“Oh,” Barry said, not sure how to feel about that, “okay, cool.”

“What do I keep telling you, Baz?” she said proudly, putting her hands on both his soft arms.  “You are going to be a wonderful fairy godmother!”

As usual, Barry wasn’t sure whether he wanted this compliment or not.  “Thanks Mom,” he mumbled.

Nick watched his mother and older sibling very quietly, playing with the purple-dipped popsicle stick remaining in his hand.  “You done needing me?” he asked after a moment.

Dania gave her second son a warm smile, and went to give him a hug too.  “Yes, and thank you, Nicholai.  You’re a good boy!”  She kissed his forehead.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t get mushy on me, Mom,” Nick said, covering up how touched it seemed to make him.

“You can go back to your very violent video game now, if you want,” Dania allowed.

Nick glanced between the TV, Barry and their mother.  “Nah, I’m done for now.  I’ve got summer homework and stuff.”  And he left the rec room abruptly, heading further down the upstairs hall to his own room.

Barry wondered what was up with Nick and his sudden brooding.  Nick wasn’t typically the brooding sort.  But Dania let Barry power-down, and he didn’t think about it much for the rest of the afternoon.

 

However dinner took a sudden awkward turn when Dania changed the conversation from Barry and Frank discussing cool developments in the privatization of space travel.

“So, Barry’s getting really close to being ready!” she brought up excitedly.

“Ready??” Barry asked, shocked if she meant what he thought.  Besides, why would she be bringing that up now?

Frank seemed baffled by the subject change as well, swallowing his bite of dinner roll before speaking.  “For… school?” he wondered.  That was still over a month away.

Dania gave her husband a strange look, like that was a weird thing to assume she meant.  “No, love, to godmother.”

That had been what Barry was wondering if she meant.  “What?!  But you’ve only been teaching me for like two weeks!”

“That’s true, but fairy training and apprenticeship have historically never been very long, before you’re ready to ‘learn on the job,’ and besides you’ve been doing so very well, Baz!” Dania insisted.  “Picking stuff up much faster than I did at sixteen.”

Barry was too bewildered to process that he probably didn’t want to discuss the issue around his dad and Nick.  “You keep saying that, but I’m not sure how you’re comparing.  I’ve messed up spells over and over again.  Like, sure I can make soda and soccer balls, but my transformation spells are a mess!  And you said that was supposed to come easier to our… type of magic…” Barry realized he’d been pulled into an impassioned discussion of his magic at the dinner table and he trailed off.

Frank did appear uncomfortable.  Nick was definitely paying rapt attention.

“Honey, you don’t have a good barometer for these things,” Dania insisted, ignoring Barry suddenly being averse to talking about it.  “I hardly think you should be down on your remarkable magic skills, just because of a few unintentional bikinis on your first day of training!”

Barry’s face flamed.  “Mom!” he chastised under his breath, as if that would magically take back her talking about such mishaps in current company.

Frank had stopped mid-chew, eyebrows going high.

“Sorry sweetheart,” Dania apologized quietly, clearly having slipped up.

“When’s that issue of ‘Dorks Illustrated’ coming out?” Nick wondered, muttering the comment into his milk before sipping it like an alibi.

Barry glared at him and then at his mom, whole face hot.

Dania tried to fix it by moving on, which was probably better than letting the whole table dwell on the image.  “I just mean you’re doing much better than you think and I’d like to try to pack in more lessons, because I really think you’re going to be ready to fairy mother in a couple of weeks.”

He scratched his forehead frustratedly.  Nothing about being a fairy had been part of the plan, and now it was all happening so fast!

“So I know we were just doing lessons on the weekdays before, but I really want to fit in some extra sessions over the weekends,” she suggested strongly.  “I don’t want you to feel like it’s all your time before you go back to school, but if it means you’re more prepared and your lessons are finished sooner, then I think it’s worth it.”

“That assumes being a fairy is ‘worth it,’” Barry muttered as he stabbed his broccoli.

“Grape,” his mother said sternly, and of course his head popped up automatically in response.  He felt betrayed by her using his fairy name in front of everybody.  “I don’t understand why you’re still fighting this.  You do wonderfully at spells, your will is clearly in it when you’re casting!  You ask thoughtful questions, you even get excited when it works well!  I don’t get it.”

Barry knew everything she was saying was true, but he felt angry at her for making it sound like he was a good little fairy girl now.  Why did she insist on talking about it with Frank and Nick there?!  “Sure, we can do weekend lessons.  Whatever,” he muttered, more petulant sounding than he wanted to be.

Dania put her fork down, clearly frustrated with him back.  “Don’t you ‘whatever’ me, young man; I want to know!”

Maybe if I got to stay a young man, I wouldn’t mind being a fairy so much, Barry grumbled in his mind.

“Barry, come on, your mom asked you a question,” Frank backed Dania up and Barry insisted annoyedly in his mind that he had been intending to answer.

Barry exhaled, measuring his breathing.  “Mom, you’re a good teacher.  You make the topic really interesting, and you’re encouraging and stuff,” he said, wanting to reassure her that her teaching wasn’t the problem, because it wasn’t.  “But that doesn’t mean that I magically want to be a fairy godmother!”

Nick made a rimshot noise with his mouth and the table, and Barry frowned; he had not meant to use magic as a pun in this case.

“I mean ‘suddenly and without justification’… just like having this happen to me in the first place,” Barry rectified his statement.

Dania looked both more understanding and disappointed.  She was quiet for a moment, like she was deciding what to say.  “You don’t have to make yourself be excited,” she told him.

“Thank you!” he said firmly, partially to let the whole table know that he was not, thank you very much.  But after saying it for that reason, he realized he really did appreciate her saying that.

“But you’re going to be such a great influence in the lives of your godchildren, and they need the ways you can help, sweetheart,” she said earnestly.  “Magic needs you to be ready.”

He consumed his broccoli in frustration, not really tasting it.

“And I can tell you’re going to go places with this, Barry!” she insisted.  “You are one of the rarest kinds of fay–”

Barry did not want it pointed out that he was in such a small category.

“–and I believe that’s because you were chosen to be a glitter baby.  And it’s no wonder!  You’re a good kid and your magic is strong, already!” she said passionately.

He lifted an eyebrow skeptically at her.  “But it’s just genetics, right?  My maternal genetics are fairy genetics, and Dad’s sperm didn’t make a girl.  That’s why I’m stuck with fairy godmother genes, right?”

“You definitely got a lot of ‘maternal genetics’ then,” Nick commented.

Barry rolled his eyes.  “Genes from your mom’s side, pin-head.”

“You make it sound like I had control over what kind of zygote we made,” Frank commented dryly.

“You’re also making it sound like you wish you’d just been born a girl instead,” Dania said with the barest smirk.

“No!” Barry declared instantly.  “I meant if you guys had had three of us.  I was just saying it doesn’t seem like a matter of ‘picked,’ if it’s just because I happen to be the oldest son of a fairy godmother with no daughters or nieces.”

“But it’s not as common as that,” Dania said.  “Or there’d be a lot more glitter babies.  Besides, you’ll feel what I mean when you’re ready for assignment.  It’s much more special and personal than you’re making it out to be.  There’s a lovely air of Destiny about it.  And I can just tell that your faydom is going to go far.”

Barry had ripped his dinner roll to shreds without noticing.  “Well it’s great to know I’m destined to do amazing things in high heels,” he said sarcastically, rolling his eyes, “whether I want to or not.”

Frank actually chuckled at that, in a way that made Barry feel more comfortable, like maybe Dania was making it sound more fated and intense than it really was.

Nick, surprisingly, didn’t laugh.  He seemed to have gotten very quiet.

Dania was apparently tired of Barry giving her sass, so she gave it back to him.  “Well you already do amazing things while in heels, and you look adorable doing it, and you’re going to do it tomorrow and Sunday.  And next time I’m not porting you upstairs, even if you don’t like your hip-swish.”

He flushed and glared at her for sharing stuff that had been private and personal to their lessons, but her message got across to him loud and clear: if he wasn’t going to act like her fairy-friend outside of lessons, then she had no obligation to be a friend about what happened in their lessons.  She would just be his mentor and his mother, and would not go soft on him anymore, nor was she expected to keep embarrassing things secret.

He sighed; it was fair.  “Yes, ma’am.”

 

Around eleven that evening, Barry was alone in the den, aimlessly flipping channels.  He was aware that he was trying to avoid thinking about fairy things, and he was even aware that it was a waste of time, especially because he seemed unable to truly focus on anything on the TV, be it sitcoms or the social dynamics of tigers in the wild.  But the channel-dance seemed decent at keeping his mind from straying to his ‘destiny’ or whatever.

He landed on a children’s cartoon and despite himself he didn’t change the channel immediately.  There was a cute little girl looking up at a queen or princess character, who was holding a magic wand.

“Wow!” the girl cried squeakily.  “Now all my dreams have come true!”

“That’s right,” the woman said in a melodic voice, “you just had to believe in yourself!”

Barry rolled his eyes, hard.

“Now we can go celebrate!” the girl cheered.  “I can’t wait to go dance with all my friends!”

The queen put her hands on her hips.  “You’re not going to the dance like that, though!”

“What??” the girl cried, like this was a bigger surprise than the story’s (sure to be short-lived and overly-dramatic) conflict had been.

The woman tapped her on the head with her wand and sparkles burst outward, and the girl was in a new outfit, one that was obviously designed to market the show’s accompanying dolls.

The girl looked down at herself and cried out in excitement.  “Now I’m ready to get down, all night!”

And then she and her magical mentor did the same repeated dance animation over and over, laughing for some inexplicable reason, until the scene faded to black and went to credits with the theme song.

Barry rolled his eyes again, pressing the channel button hard.  Stupid crap, he muttered in his head.  Yes, clearly life is all about ‘believing in yourself’ and that’s all you need to ‘make your dreams come true.’  Along with dancing, party dresses, and the power of friendship.

He was especially glad he’d changed the channel, as he hadn’t known his mother had still been in the kitchen, probably working on her laptop, until she came through the archway door in her red nightgown.  Frank often went to bed before eleven and Barry hadn’t noticed that Dania hadn’t yet, even though his parents’ bedroom was off the den, along with Frank’s office and the mudroom that led to the garage.

She was folding her arms, like Barry had noticed she often did when she was wearing pjs.  For the first time ever, he realized she probably did that when she wasn’t wearing a bra before bed.  Since he’d never experienced the desire for protection or modesty in that particular area until recently, he’d never processed before why she might do that.

Although, as she regarded him on the couch coolly, he realized some of her body language was also because she was still frustrated with him after his behavior at dinner.  “Get the lights when you go to bed, okay?” she said in a businesslike tone before heading for her door.

“Mom,” he stopped her with a sigh, muting the television.

She turned back around warily.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

She was listening but still cautious.

“I don’t want to be a pill, about fairy stuff,” he rubbed his forehead.  “It’s just all happening really fast and I feel… railroaded, I guess.  Like someone strapped me into a rollercoaster and I can’t get off.”

She gave him an understanding look.  “I get that, honey.  I know you didn’t pick it and you weren’t expecting it.  But at the same time, I think it picked you.  And despite everything, I think that can be a comforting thought.”

He didn’t understand what she meant by that, but he wanted her to know he cared about her and wasn’t just blowing her off about it.  “I just wanted to let you know that I’m trying, ‘kay?  And that if I’m stuck with this, there’s nobody I’d rather have teach me than you.  And if I have to godmother, I do want to understand how everything works, and not mess it up, and you’re an awesome teacher at that!”

She seemed pensive.  She walked over and looked him in the eye.  “I just think that if you actually let yourself have fun, maybe it wouldn’t be the life-ending chore that you tend to act like it is,” she said firmly, before leaning over to kiss him on the top of the head.

The way she kept her arms folded, even when doing that, Barry was fairly sure confirmed his theory.

“Sure,” he allowed.  “I’ll try.”

“And don’t stay up too late!” she pointed a finger at him, as she went to her room.  “I have a fun one for us tomorrow:  Scrying.”

“Cool,” he tried to be enthusiastic, although there was a sigh in his voice.

She closed the bedroom door behind her and Barry tried and failed to distract himself with the TV a little longer.  He realized that even though he didn’t know the words, he had the little girls’ cartoon theme song stuck in his head.

 

Barry yawned; he hadn’t stayed up too late, but Dania had still insisted on pulling him into her room right after breakfast, and for a Saturday it still felt pretty early.  He was less reluctant to have a weekend lesson after Frank had left for the morning to go run errands, like getting the oil changed in Dania’s car.

“Wait to power-up today,” Dania said to Barry’s surprise, causing him to pause, his wand already out.  “I want to show you how something works, powered-down versus powered-up.”

“Okay,” he shrugged, certainly not going to complain about getting to stay male for longer.

“So, scrying,” she said.  “What do you know about scrying?”

“Hmm,” he considered, “sounds kinda witchy.”

Dania shrugged.  “Eh, ‘witch’ has had many different connotations over the millennia.  Sometimes they’ve been dark fay: banshees, Baba Yaga, ill-intentioned fairies, etc.  Sometimes they’ve been mortals calling on even darker powers.  Oftentimes they’re edgy non-magic kids waving around twigs and lighting candles and pretending that makes them better than other people.  Maybe most infrequently, they’re non-magic people who can still sense the magic in the world and try to communicate with it.  But a lot of times they were just fairies with bad PR.”

He nodded.  “Well, scrying is ‘seeing’ right?”

She nodded too.  “Yes.  The most popular methods are hydromancy (in water) and catoptromancy (in mirrors).  There’s also via smoke, but honestly I forget what that one is called.  Or just a ball of light in the air, but it adds a little unnecessary challenge.  Mirrors, unlike water or smoke, can be enchanted for extended periods of time, and a little Windex goes a long way to seeing a scried image clearly.”

“Right, I think I remember you mentioning that magic mirrors were a real thing,” he recalled.

“Yep.  The most referenced enchanted mirror story in history is of course with ‘Sneewittchen;’ Snow White,” Dania explained casually.  “In reality, a young girl named Gwyneira, with a vain stepmother who, as a queen, had dark fay connections and used them against the poor child whom she was immediately jealous of.  The dark ages really were dark, as much for fay as anyone else.”

“I’m gathering that,” Barry grimaced.

“But it was okay in the end,” Dania smiled.  “She had a group of gnomes, hob-men, take her in, and later the curse on her was broken, although whether or not it was by a kiss, the history is a tad sketchy.  If it was via kiss, it was probably a red spell, otherwise I’d suspect it was yellow.  But in any case, Gwyneira’s stepmother notably used a magic mirror for information, despite not being fay herself.  So I wanted you to see how you can use mine, even when you’re not powered-up.”

“You have a magic mirror?” he asked, having been unaware of this.

“Yes.  So, don’t tell Daddy, but the mirror in my closet is enchanted,” she explained, as he followed her into the small room full of clothes, and she flipped on the light.  (For someone who could create a new outfit at will with magic, she had a rather large amount of clothing on hand, Barry thought.)  “It’s technically listening all the time, which wasn’t really something I wanted to let him know in the aughts, when we got married.  But these days, is that really so different from a smart device anyway?”  She motioned to the large, ornate mirror on the back wall of her closet.

He smirked.  “Does it have a ‘wake word’?”

“Even better:” she smiled, “it has a magic rhyme.”

“Because fairies can’t get enough of those,” he said dryly.

“So it’d be really hard to activate by accident!” she defended.  “But still, while your dad is hardly the ‘NSA is always listening’ type guy, when it comes to magic being overly invasive he’s a little more on edge.  Which I understand, these are powerful tools…”

“Not to be used lightly,” Barry repeated for her with a wink, having lost count of the number of times she’d said it in their lessons lately.

“Indeed,” she agreed.  “Now with this particular mirror, I didn’t enchant this one.  Most fairy godmother spells have a time limit, and are based around godchildren needs, etc.

“Color magic spells, especially blue and yellow, tend to be based on certain… let’s say ‘win conditions.’  Blue is based on merit, and yellow on corollaries.  Blue spells tend to bestow gifts for people showing they are worthy, with teaching tools along the way, while yellow deals good to good and bad to bad.  Yellow has a lot of poetic justice.  Meanwhile, red is a hot mess of emotional triggers, and we love it anyway.

“But while all spells have built in ‘true/false’ conditions, and inherent ways to end them, on the whole fairy godmother spells are less permanent than color magic.  Got it?” she asked.

“I think so?” he hoped, brow furrowed.  He wasn’t sure if it was a disappointment or a relief, that his spells had less permanence than color magic fairies.  “Why don’t ours stick around?”

That made her thoughtful.  “I think it’s because we’re focused on the needs of single individuals, over long periods of time; time is kinda our jam.  And also, because our magic doesn’t center as much on particular attitudes or traits, conditions on our spells don’t either.  But that means that each spell is based around a desire instead, an individual’s will; wishes, desires, hopes and dreams.  That’s important, of course, but it’s also fairly subjective.  And like we’ve discussed, sometimes what godchildren want isn’t automatically what’s best for them.  So we have to mother, and make decisions.”

Barry made a slight face at her explaining to him why he needed to learn to mommy.

“But individuals change, desires change, circumstances change, and a granted wish that may have been good for someone at one point, might not be a little later,” she went on.  “So that makes time limits important.  It’s not good for a person to simply be doted upon and spoiled by magic their whole lives, which would be easy to happen with us popping in and out all of the time.  Time limits are a natural way to say ‘here, you have until this spell is finished to figure out another way to solve this problem yourself.’  Or to say ‘this wish granted gave you a leg up; what are you going to do about it from here?’”

He did like that, the idea that they weren’t supposed to be everyone’s automatic-out of bad situations, just a little boost.

“A blue fay might cast a spell that’s condition is fulfilled when the person proves they’ve learned patience, or to control their temper.  The trial demonstrating merit to a blue spell by the individual it’s cast upon, is called an ‘ordeal.’  So the spellee might complete their final ordeal, and earn the benefits at the end of a blue spell, and then never see the blue fairy again.  Likewise, most yellow spells in history, especially ones that could be deemed ‘curses,’ have happened based on circumstance and a yellow fay witnessing someone who, by justice and karma, was asking for either a blessing or cursing.  And then usually the yellow fay is never heard from again.  Reds play hidden, or not so hidden, matchmaker, and might check in on a relationship they helped to cause, but other than that, they’re done.  Color fairies don’t have assignments.  They don’t have specific godchildren.  They can do what they want, in a lot of ways.”

“Not sure if that seems fair,” he sighed, “compared to getting hauled out on duty every time a kid rhymes.”

She shrugged.  “It is what it is.  There’s a lot of structure, but also a lot of connection, serving the same people over the course of their lives.  And being assigned feels special too, both how that bond feels with a godchild, and being entrusted by the Fayemark, by the Will of Magic itself.”

It was interesting to him that she spoke of the Fayemark like it was intelligent that way.

“In the ancient days, the fairy mothers were the fairy queen’s own handmaidens, her right hand, serving with nobility, honor, and elegance, nurturing and protecting magic and non-magic peoples alike.  To this day, we’re Magic’s handmaidens, at the ready for it to call us where we’re needed; Magic’s fingertips.”

“Mom,” Barry said with a little tired smile, “that’s a cool description, but, like, so girly.  Did the explanation have to be quite that feminine?”

She smiled wryly.  “It’s the type of magic that’s centered around being a girl; what do you want from me?”

He sighed, “To not have it work that way, but you can’t control that, so tell me about magic mirrors.”

“Anyway,” she gave him a look, “all I was getting at is that since we are the consistent element in a godchild’s life, the spells shouldn’t be.  We are a permanent fixture, so our spells are not.”

“That does make sense,” Barry admitted reluctantly.

“Which I just brought up in the first place, to say that this mirror has a blue enchantment on it, so it’s permanent,” she motioned to the gold-rimmed glass against the wall.  “I picked it out in a cute little shop on Muirias, shopping with my mom for my eighteenth birthday; I love this thing.  And it still looks great for being over thirty, huh?”

He nodded, but was feeling a little impatient as she enthused about shopping, tempted to remind her he wasn’t actually a girl, which she should remember extra at the moment, considering he wasn’t even powered-up yet.

“So the activation rhyme is placed by the original fairy, when she casts the spell; they might all be a little different,” Dania put her hands on her hips in front of the mirror.  “‘Spector, spectrum, be my eye, lens don’t lie, reflect true and let me scry.’”  She chanted the rhyme casually to the mirror, and then the reflection of the two of them in the closet fogged up around the edges with a blue mist.  “What do we want to scry?” she asked Barry.

“Uhh… I don’t know,” Barry stumbled over the sudden decision.

“Mm, let’s see how Daddy’s doing with the oil change, huh?” she smiled.  “Just address it as ‘Mirror,’ and ask to see your dad, by name.”

“Okay.”  That felt weird to Barry, but he did as directed.  “Mirror, show me Frank Anderson!”

It wasn’t the same feeling as when magic flowed through him, but Barry thought he felt the Fayemark swell a bit in the room.

The blue mist around the edges of the mirror closed in the vignette, and then reopened like a camera lens.  And there was Frank, driving Dania’s little crimson car, scratching his nose and looking a little bit tired.

“I’m glad this one answers to just ‘Mirror,’” Dania was saying with a laugh.  “My dad’s mom had a magic kettle that would only boil if you called it ‘Lady Copperbottom;’ it was the silliest thing.”

Barry was too distracted by the suddenness and clarity of the image in the mirror to really process her story.  “It’s like a webcam livestream,” he stared at it, “to anywhere?  Without the other person being aware??”

“Well not anywhere;” his mother rectified his statement, “you can either peer into a place you already know of, or you can zone in on a person, but it’s less foggy if you already know where they’re going to be.  And fairies can put up protections to block you.  They say that local fairies in every country have established anti-scrying protections around their central government buildings by now, so you couldn’t go scrying into the Oval Office and lipread or something (not that I’ve tried, of course).  We have blocking runes around our house that I placed when we first moved in.  But I used to check on you at school, in kindergarten, when I was nervous to have you there by yourself all day,” she smiled.

Frank was driving along, oblivious to their gaze.

“It looks like he’s done with the oil change part, but I think he has a few other errands,” Dania commented.

Frank yawned widely.  He was just completely exposed to them watching him.

“This feels so wrong!” Barry cried, stepping backward away from the mirror.

Dania looked confused by his reaction.

“I could spy on girls with this!” he declared, pointing at the image.

That seemed to alarm her in an entirely new way.

“I-I’m not going to!” he insisted quickly.  Right?  He double checked with himself in concern; he wasn’t going to, right?  “But I could!  That’s not okay!”

“Barry, if we have to worry about all the things you could possibly do with magic, yet shouldn’t, we’re going to have a problem,” she frowned at him, hands on her hips again.

“But, but,” he worried, “I’m a teenage guy!  I shouldn’t be trusted with this, right?!”  He pointed accusatorily at the mirror.

“Honey, we trust you with a car, and the internet of all things!” Dania insisted.  “Heck, you could do a lot with a pair of binoculars and a window!”

“Mom!” he protested, scandalized.

“That wasn’t a recommendation,” she rolled her eyes.  “I’m saying there’s already many ways you could do a lot of irresponsible, invasive, and inappropriate things, even before having magic.  But you won’t do those things, right?”

“I…” Barry stammered, worried.  “My friends, with the internet… there’s no way you could trust…”

She looked him in the eye.  “But Magic didn’t pick your friends to be Its handmaiden; it picked you.”

“Mom, calling me a ‘maiden’ doesn’t suddenly change my desire to know what’s going on in girls’ bedrooms!” Barry contended, setting his mouth.

She actually laughed at that, and he was concerned she wasn’t taking this seriously enough.  “Baz, honey, I wasn’t saying that would change.  It’s okay that you like girls.”

Darn right, he thought, tired of how much Nick had questioned that lately.

“I just meant that I trust you, and Magic trusts you,” she emphasized, patting him on the shoulder, taller than hers at the moment.  “And I know you’re very respectful of women, and I don’t think you’d use magic to invade someone’s privacy like that.”

He looked between her and the mirror again.  He didn’t like it, the idea that there was hardly anything stopping something so easily misused, and the fact that he was being entrusted with this power, with no checks or balances.

Could he be trusted?  He did want to be trustworthy and respectful to everyone, especially the opposite (well, usually opposite) gender.  But could he trust himself with such things, given his emotions, desires, and hormones?

“Now go ahead and power-up; I want you to try to enchant a mirror yourself, from scratch,” Dania directed, moving on.  Clearly she trusted him enough to dismiss the topic.  Was that wise or not on her part?

“Okay.”  He complied, but he was still feeling disquieted as he let his body morph, distracted enough to barely notice his hips flaring, or his waistline pinching (although, of course, he could never really ignore his plug becoming an outlet, or his torso sprouting flesh bubbles).

Transformation finished, he squiggled his hips uncomfortably, which he knew wasn’t just about being bell-shaped again.

“Here, let’s not mess with my enchanted mirror,” Dania said, ushering him out of the closet.

His wings bumped the doorframe from side-to-side (he wasn’t tall enough to bump the top), and bent slightly on the way out.

“Spector, spectrum, close your eye; I’ve seen all I want to scry,” Dania casually called over her shoulder and Barry saw the image of his dad disappear, as the mirror went inert and generic-looking again.

She led the way over to her antique vanity instead, the table covered with her variety of cosmetics and jewelry.  The back was another mirror, although much smaller than the one in the closet.

Barry made a mildly dissatisfied face at his Grape-reflection, wings oscillating pensively, he saw.

“So, you’re not trying to make a magic mirror as a permanent object or anything.  I just want you to try and scry via mirror,” Dania clarified.  “I think we’ll go into time limits tomorrow, so don’t worry about that yet.”

“Do I need to say anything?” he asked, thinking of the rhyme she’d used on the other mirror.

“No, just like the other spells you’ve cast, it shouldn’t need a verbal incantation.  Usually casting your own spell just requires your wand and your thoughts, and sometimes a wish, of course.  However interaction with an object someone else has magicked often requires an incantation or rhyme, and that’s easier than penetrating the resistances and barriers around another fay’s spells.”

“So no ‘bibbity-bobbity-boo?’” he asked dryly.

She smiled.  “Well, some fairies like catchphrases, for flair.  Personally I prefer a bit of an elegant wrist-flick, but it’s up to personal preference and what helps you focus.”

He nodded, remembering how Dania never seemed to need to close her eyes when she did a spell, like he did to focus.

“So it’s a little bit challenging, in my experience, but you’ll get the hang of it.  I find I have to connect with my wand first, and then, in turn, connect to the mirror, the location or person you’re scrying, and finally the Fayemark itself, as the bridge to connect all three.  It’s okay if it takes a few tries,” she assured him.

“Maybe I can try a public place,” he hoped aloud, “so I don’t accidentally catch someone in a compromising situation?”

“Good idea,” she said, although her tone was still teasing.

“Um… “ he considered.  He was still tired, so he thought of the coffee shop that some of his school friends frequented; some of his older friends who would be seniors this coming year would even go over there during lunch, even though it was supposed to be a closed campus.  But Barry liked the relaxed atmosphere and wondered if, once he had a car, he’d stop in more often to use their wifi over a fun drink and a doughnut.  “I guess I’ll try to scry The Mocha Moose?”

She just nodded encouragingly and Barry realized he probably was overthinking this.  She hadn’t given him a lot of direction, but he spoke with his wand as he usually did before a spell, asking it to show the shop in the mirror.  Even before he cast, it was like he and the wand connected with something several miles away, like triangulation, honing in on what he’d asked for.  When he felt ready, eyes closed, he fired, swiping his hand forward to point at the vanity mirror.

His own fervor almost made him afraid the spell would break the mirror, but instead the shiny surface went inky with purple fog, obscuring Dania and Grape’s reflections, and dispersing a second later to show the familiar coffee shop with its calming lighting and raw edge wood countertop.

“See?” Dania teased significantly.  “Why am I not shocked you were able to do it on the first try?”

Yeah, until anything embarrassing is remotely involved, he sighed to himself.

Still, he had done it, and he surveyed his scryed image carefully, very glad it wasn’t anything scandalous.  That was really what was happening at the coffee shop, across town from where they were, and he’d made the picture appear here, with no camera besides magic itself!

The barista at the counter was probably in her early twenties, with long brown hair.  She smiled pleasantly at the customer whom she’d just handed a drink.  She had a nice smile.

But Barry did a bit of a double-take, monitoring his own reaction as he looked at the girl again.  That couldn’t be right…  He was feeling a whole lot of nothing… and that was the problem.  Oh god, he worried; why wasn’t she exciting?!  She was a pretty young adult girl who looked really nice.  Who had blown his pilot light out?!  He was watching a girl whom he knew he would usually find hot, and at that moment she just seemed pretty like a tree or a rainbow, or flowers.

What the crap?!  He tried not to show the panic on his face, with his mom right there.  He glanced around the image of the shop, afraid about the alternative.  There was a guy of a similar age ordering a coffee then.  Okay, at least that didn’t seem different.  It was just a dude, there being a dude; no changed feelings.  He was just feeling universally “meh” as far as hotness was concerned, while powered-up.  He didn’t like it, but he supposed he could deal with that.

“You want to try scrying something else?” Dania asked, probably wondering why he was staring so riveted at the moving image of a random coffee shop.

“Um, sure,” he said distractedly.  “I’ll try outside the movie theater.”

“You know, you could do it inside the theater and watch a movie without paying for it,” she winked.  “Real rebel material here.”

He gave her a dry glare.  He pictured the outside of their local movie theater, and then cast upon the mirror again.  The large blocky building appeared into view, crowded since it was a summer Saturday morning.  Barry scanned the movie posters on the side of the building.  There was one for a movie he’d been looking forward to, with Georgia Green, one of his favorite British actresses.  He groaned internally.  Yep, that sealed it; the poster he’d previously thought was a very sexy picture of her just seemed generically nice-looking now.  He really didn’t like it.

“Look, it’s all muggy and sweltering out there,” Dania smiled, pointing to everyone sweating in the hot July sun, “and you conjured this image from the comfort of our air conditioning.”

Yeah, here in comfort, he thought sarcastically, feeling like Grape was a big wet blanket on the feelings he wanted to have.

“So yeah, good job!” Dania enthused.  Her tone picked up on the fact that he’d become subdued.  “It’s not a spell I use very often.  It’s not like I spy on the neighbors or go find movie spoilers or anything scandalous like that,” she winked, “but it’s a handy spell to have.  And honestly I thought you’d think it was cool.”  There was a sigh in her voice, like this was yet another thing she’d tried to share with him about magic which he had been grumpy about.

He didn’t want to be that way.  But both the invasion of the spell, and the sudden slap in his face about feeling numbed out when it came to girls being attractive, were leaving Barry feeling like scrying was not his favorite magic lesson ever.  “Sorry, it’s really cool, Mom,” he said, pointing to the still-magicked mirror.  He was proud of having cast that, even if he didn’t like several ramifications it showed him.  “Did I do good enough at it?”

She gave a scoffing laugh and hugged him around the shoulders.  “Of course, sweetheart!  That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you: you do so awesomely!”

He gave her a shy smile.  He did seem to want to do well.

“Go ahead and truncate the scrying spell, and I have a plan for what I want to do next, a good practice session where you can apply a lot of the spell skills you’ve been learning, okay?” she offered.

“Okay,” he allowed.  He took a final grumpy look at the movie poster, feeling like he didn’t like the reflection he’d found in the mirror’s images, and then felt his scrying spell in the Fayemark and snipped it.  The purple mist around the edges of the vanity mirror filled in over the image, and then the mirror went dormant again.

 

“So, I know you didn’t want to help me cook while powered-up, but–” Dania started.

“Mom, it wasn’t about cooking!” Barry corrected immediately.

“Well, good then,” she replied with a smile, which was not the response he’d anticipated from her.  “Because this really is part of your training, and we might as well make a nice lunch at the same time.  I want you to try your hand at some practical, household magic.”

“Wait, just because I don’t mind helping you cook, doesn’t mean I’m okay standing in the kitchen, doing magic and being powered-up the entire time it takes to make a big meal!” Barry retorted.  “Why can’t we just summon or conjure food anyway?”

“That’s like saying ‘why do we even cook when we can get take-out?’ honey,” Dania said, unamused.

“Take-out costs money; conjuring doesn’t,” he pointed out.

She made a face, like he had her there.  “I… that’s not the point, Baz,” she shook her head.  “You get different benefits from cooking your own meals, and the same is true with cooking with help from magic, rather than conjuring everything.”

He frowned.  Frank would be home any time now.  He really didn’t want to be forced to be Grape or do magic around his dad.

“You can conjure some of the ingredients, but I want you to try and actually cook things, using magic where possible,” she insisted.  “Come on, Bazlet, it’ll be fun!”

He puffed the curls out of his face.

She gave him a lovingly stern look.  “Don’t make me insist you give yourself a magical attitude adjustment again,” she winked.  “I’m sure your ‘cheerful’ spell would put a skip back into your step.”

“Aah!” he laughed with terror.  “Okay, okay, I’ll try to have fun!  Don’t threaten my sanity, please!”

She led the way into the kitchen, Barry venturing very reluctantly out from her bedroom, trying not to feel like he was leaving the bathroom in only a towel.  He knew Dania often powered-up right from the kitchen, but he felt very exposed standing near the windows of the French back doors with wings.  (As if his wings were the most embarrassing part of his transformation, he thought dolefully.)

She powered-up then and quickly set to work.  She absently flicked her wand at the shelf over her desk, and a piece of paper flung itself out of a cookbook, across the room and into her hand, where she caught it.  “I have a tendency to get in a groove, and then I might forget to have you do things,” she smiled, “so I’m going to try my best not to do that.”  She used more magic to smooth the paper down so it lay flat on the island countertop.

He’d seen her cook with magic before, but she often just cooked powered-down, and Barry appreciated the difficulty behind each spell with much more comprehension now.  As a kid growing up around magic, he’d just been used to “Mom makes things appear and fly around.”  It was like learning about how things like aerodynamics and thrust were needed for airplanes, instead of just “I like them and they go whoosh!”

“I’m going to change my outfit,” she explained, before using her wand to do so.  “It’s not like we can really stain our uniforms, but still I don’t like cooking in mine.”  She gave herself a simple white, collared dress with a fancy red apron on top of it.  “Your wardrobe magic needs some of the most work,” she winked.  “Why don’t you go ahead and change too?”

He sighed balefully at her.  She just wasn’t letting him off the hook today, no matter how embarrassing this was likely to be out in the open of the house.  He pursed his lips and focused on asking his wand for an outfit to cook in.

He really wished he’d been more specific, however, when his magic poofed him a stereotypical 1950s light blue housewife dress with a ruffled purple apron on top.  Actually, it was probably more exaggerated than an actual ‘50s dress, with a poofed-out skirt and a lot of his upper-Grapeness on display.

Dania was clearly suppressing a laugh.  “Are you sure you don’t think of cooking as girly, Baz?” she asked wryly.

He put a hand on a hip.  “Well, it’s a little hard not to feel that way when you’re asking me to go all Samantha Stephens in the kitchen, Mom.”

She smiled.  “You can’t see it, but you gave yourself an adorable vintage ponytail to match.”

“Fan-frickin’-tastic,” he grumbled.  “Tell me what to do.”

They went over the recipe together.  She wanted to make a risotto, because it required near-constant stirring; after they measured out the rice and stock, she had Barry work on automating a spoon for the first time.  The spell was fairly straightforward, although in his nervousness it started a little over-vigorous and he had to figure out how to slow it down.  Next she had him chop up onions and mushrooms to go in as well, but insisted on having him levitate and magic the knife, which was terrifying in its own way.

“Once you get good at it, you can automate the knife too,” she informed him.  “I just think that’s a little dicey at the moment.”  She did a rimshot on the counter, so proud of her pun, and Barry laughed despite himself.

She demonstrated with ease having the cheese grater float in the air and the parmesan grate itself into the dish, looking like a snowglobe of deliciousness.

Since it didn’t take long before Barry’s spoon was obediently doing most of the work, Dania set Barry to making brownies too, and he summoned ingredients from around the kitchen and conjured milk into the measuring cup.

But as he went to automate the whisk in the mixing bowl, Dania’s ringtone sang out from her pocket.  “Oh, it’s my mom,” Dania looked down at her phone.  “You’ve got an eye on the risotto, right, Baz?”

“Yeah,” he nodded, and she answered Nanna Susan’s call.

“Hi Mom!” Dania said, leaning back against the counter by the fridge.  “Yep, everything going well.  Yeah, we’re actually having a lesson right now,” she smiled over at Barry.

He started using the whisk manually without thinking, distracted by his grandmother asking about him.

“Baz, use your spells!” Dania reminded him.

“Right!” he said nervously, setting the bowl back on the counter by the sink and magicking the whisk to stir.

“He’s learning so fast, Mom!” Dania enthused over the phone.  “We’ve covered so many of the basics so quickly!”

Barry stared deeply into the dark chocolate cauldron in front of him, feeling his emotions similarly churning.  The praise combined with the railroading feeling were so confusing together.  Did he want them to be complimenting him or not??

There was a tromping sound from the entryway.  Nick.  Great.

“Something smells good!” the thirteen-year-old’s voice preceded him loudly.

“Shut-up, Mom’s on the phone,” Barry told him as he entered.

It was a normal thing for Barry to tell his brother, but apparently coming from Grape’s vocal cords, when it was likely Nick hadn’t expected him to be powered-up at all, threw Nick for a loop.  He stopped and stared at the scene, looking bewildered.

Barry also realized he’d slouched forward onto the counter and the angle showed off more of his décolletage than he’d been aware of.  He straightened abruptly.

“Well, aren’t we looking domestic?” Nick commented, quiet enough to not interrupt Dania, recovering from his fluster by goading.  “Taking the ‘mommy’ part of fairy godmommy to heart, I see.”

Barry rolled his eyes, face hot.

“In that getup you’re ready to have a couple toddlers underfoot while you wait for your husband to bring his briefcase home and tell you what a long day he had, while you rub his feet and give him the paper,” Nick said in his best imitation of a black-and-white TV show father.

After his scrying realizations earlier in the day, Barry was feeling particularly insecure about his ability to be the male in a relationship, and the teasing hit a nerve.

“Baz!  You’re splatting!” Dania paused her conversation, pointing.

“Oh!” he spun around, skirt twirling widely, to see that the whisk was in fact whipping the brownie batter angrily, chocolate blops starting to fling out.  He zapped it quickly to get it to stop, wondering if it had accidentally been tied to his emotions.  He took the opportunity of checking the batter to try and calm his frustrated flush.  Nick was just being dumb again; he didn’t have to let it get to him.

He poured the batter into the pan they’d already greased, back to his brother and mom, tuning back into Dania’s conversation.

“How long was it before you were everaware?  Do you remember?” Dania was asking her mother.  “I didn’t even have to teach him how to retrieve his wand!  Yes!  He felt it and retrieved it, all by himself.  I know!”

Barry put the brownies in the oven with a sigh, very uncomfortable being talked about… while dressed like a vintage pinup model… while Nick was watching and listening, and apparently in a poking mood.

“You remember how hard it was for me to learn to summon objects?” Dania was going on.  “One afternoon, he had it.  Down pat.  And almost everything has been that way.”

Barry watched his risotto spoon as if hypnotized by it.

“Yeah, his one major struggle is wardrobe stuff,” Dania related to Nanna Susan, giving Barry a little smile as he blushed.  “Well I think he makes great outfits, but he doesn’t like them.  Mmhmm, he is great at hair,” Dania grinned, swatting Barry’s ponytail affectionately.

He gave her a soft glare.

“Anyway, at this rate I think we’ll have him off on his own assignments by the end of the month,” Dania said excitedly.

Barry’s insides squirmed, as they did every time he thought about having godchildren.  And it was about halfway through July already!  She kept talking about it like it was so soon!

Nick had settled onto his barstool at the island, Barry noticed.  He was slouching onto the counter too, it just didn’t have the same unwanted effect as Grape’s shape did.  But Nick was looking very broody again.

Dania barely glanced at the risotto and apparently decided it was done, because she flicked her wand and the stove turned off, cell phone still to her ear.  “Baz, brownie timer,” she reminded him.  “Do it with your magic.”

“Right,” he remembered, knocking a few minutes off the time since he’d forgotten to set a timer.  He projected a countdown into the air in purple neon, where it just hung-out there.  He started cleaning up, since he was feeling anxious anyway, and Dania had to remind him twice to use his magic for that too.

Nick was watching the magic timer, mesmerized, Barry noticed.

“Yeah, I’ve told a few fay friends, but word travels fast,” Dania was saying to Nanna Susan.  “I’ve had people come out of the woodwork that I haven’t talked to in twenty years, calling me about it.”

Barry hadn’t had any idea that Dania had told her friends that her son was a ‘glitter baby,’ nor that people were acting like it was such a big deal.  It wasn’t like he blamed Dania for wanting to share, since apparently it was such a fay phenomenon (he internally rolled his eyes), but it was still embarrassing, hearing that he was being gossipped about throughout the fay world for being a freak.

“Well, yeah, certainly!  If you think the Council will want to know, I think absolutely tell your friend,” Dania said with a shrug.  She’d started to play with his ponytail absently.

Council? he wondered.  Like the Fairy Council?

“But anyway, Mom, I gotta go.  We made lunch with magic and he did a good job.  Yep, you too!  Aww, thank you, I’ll tell him!  Love ya, Mom.  Uh huh… Uh huh.  Yep, you too.  Okay bye!”  Dania finished and hung up the call.  “Nanna Susan sends her love to everybody!” she told them both.  She gave Barry a significant smile.  “And she said keep up the good work, Baz and she’s super proud of you!”

“Oh, thanks,” he said quietly.  That did mean a lot, but also felt weird given the topic.

“And it looks like you did great with the cooking spells, sweetheart!” Dania enthused, tasting the dish they’d made.  “Nick, you going to have some?  It does have mushrooms in it.”

“Is it magic-poisoned or anything?” Nick muttered, sounding a little bit bitter.  “Can’t make me puke sparkles or anything, right?”

Dania shook her head at him.  “You have had magicked food your whole life!  What is up with you?”

Nick scowled.  “I’ll definitely have brownies.”

“For being a pest, you don’t get to lick the spoon, though,” Barry said, and it came out more girly-snooty than he meant it to.  But he was feeling hurt by Nick’s jabbing, so he wanted to poke back in the minor ways he felt were available to him.  He put the silicone spatula in his mouth; they’d often fought over it, growing up.

“No, couldn’t rob the world of you looking like a frickin’ Betty Crocker ad,” Nick mumbled.

Barry realized in horror that the utensil in his mouth did rather complete his girlish baking ensemble.  He pulled the spatula down very slowly from his mouth, cheeks like cherries, and abandoned it into the sink.

“Nick, are we being a problem again?” Dania probed.

Nick paused for a long moment.  “No, ma’am.”

“Okay then,” she said, voice still stern.

The magical purple timer reached zero seconds, and a soft chime rang out through the kitchen.

“I don’t even know if I did the sound on purpose,” Barry mused.

“Well, it was very melodic,” Dania smiled.  “Get the brownies out?  They smell done.”

Barry put on potholders, and bent over to get out the brownies.  His skirted butt was up in the air, some kind of petticoat poofing it up in the back, when he heard the back door open and Dania say, “Oh hi honey!  Errands go okay?”

Barry stood up straight and turned nervously, holding a tray of brownies between a set of apple oven mitts, while wearing a swishy blue dress and a ruffly apron, the ties of which brought attention to his sucked-in waist.

“Uhh,” Frank tried to answer his wife’s question, but showed a similar bewilderment to Nick’s, at his older son’s appearance.  “Yeah, went fine.  You guys made lunch?”

“Yeah!” Dania enthused.  “You hungry?  Baz did most of it!”

She was so helpful, he thought sarcastically, trapped there by the brownies in his hands.

“Oh, honey,” she noticed, “you could have levitated them right out of the oven!  You’re supposed to be using your magic when possible!  I want you to move them onto the island that way, even though you already got them out.”

Barry felt like they were all watching him again.  He had to get his wand back out, but he was immensely grateful the apron he’d created had a pocket, so he didn’t have to go boob-spelunking while everyone was looking.  He took the right potholder off between his teeth, grabbed the wand, and levitated the brownies from his left hand and onto the island a few feet away.

“Good job,” Dania nodded.

“It would have taken less effort to walk four feet,” Barry pointed out dryly.

“Again, that wasn’t the point, Baz,” she insisted.  “You’re supposed to be practicing.”

“It’s pretty impressive, kiddo,” Frank said.

Barry realized, besides seeing his power-down once, that was the first that Frank had seen him do magic.  “Thanks,” he mumbled, feeling his wings going in response to his emotions.

“That’s one way to cool the brownies down,” Nick snarked grouchily, as apparently the wing-breeze was wafting over the island.

Barry failed to still them.

“You guys are rather dressed up, for cooking,” Frank commented, giving Dania a kiss and glancing again at Barry’s attire awkwardly.

“When I can choose to wear anything, I might as well wear something I like,” Dania explained her reasoning.

“It was an accident,” Barry mumbled, low enough that he wasn’t sure if Frank actually heard him or not.

“Okay, Baz, I’m hungry,” Dania said.  “Get out some bowls and let’s take it into the dining room.”

Barry took two steps toward the dish cabinet.

“With magic, honey,” she said long-sufferingly.

“Right,” he mumbled again.  He felt very watched as he flicked his wand and the dish cupboard opened with a squeak and he levitated three bowls out and over to his mother.  They wobbled through the air in his nervousness.

Dania caught them.  “And try summoning some spoons right onto the table.”

“Hey, what about me?!” Nick protested.

Dania made a confused expression.  “You can help set the table if you really want to, Nick.”

He gave her a flat look.  “No, I meant he only got three bowls out.”

“You said you didn’t want any!” Barry pointed out, hands on his dented waist.

“Sorry, I guess I need to eat my lunch before I can have dessert, Mommy,” he retorted, looking Barry in the eye.

Barry had already been feeling close to losing it with embarrassment and anxiety, so Nick making fun of his outfit and demeanor again pushed him over the edge.  He’d been about to summon the spoons in the dining room, but instead, with a double-flick of his wrist, he summoned one into the air, and then flung it at Nick’s face.

The aim was actually fairly impressive, and the stainless steel utensil smacked Nick in the middle of the forehead and then fell to the kitchen tile with a clang.

“Ow!” Nick declared, looking shocked and scared, a little red circle appearing on his forehead.

“Barry Franklin!” Dania chastised immediately.

Frank looked stunned and upset too.

Barry was rather aghast himself, that he’d actually done it.  “Sorry, I–  He was–!”  He didn’t know how to finish these sentences aloud.  He keeps making fun of me for looking and acting like a girl, and I just want him to shut up! was the whole thought in his head.

Dania was checking Nick’s red spot, which thankfully already seemed to be disappearing.  The spoon-projectile probably hadn’t hit that hard.  Although Barry couldn’t really blame Nick for being scared when a metal object materialized into the air and then immediately flew at his face.  (He did, however, blame him for being a little turd and asking for it.)

“Barry, I was just telling you this morning how much I trust you and magic trusts you!  You can defy the common laws of nature now; you can’t just use that frivolously!” Dania declared, one hand on her hip, the other on Nick’s shoulder.

Barry was embarrassed and ashamed and so done standing in the kitchen in a dress.  He didn’t meet her eye, tiny hands knitted together.

Dania looked sternly into Nick’s face.  “And you need to start being nice, young man.  Your brother isn’t allowed to use a magic arsenal, but stop inviting the war!”

Nick didn’t meet her eyes either.  “Yes ma’am,” he said with mush-mouth.

“Now can we please eat?!” Dania asked, exasperatedly.  “The food smells so good, and it’s getting cold now!”

“I’ll put the spoons on the table,” Frank declared, giving Dania a smile and going to the utensil drawer.

“But the point–” Dania started debating, since the whole objective had been to have Barry practice his magic.  But mid-sentence she gave up and sighed.  “Okay, thank you, Frank.”

Their father tried to come to the rescue with spoons, and Nick moved grumpily into the dining room.

Dania gave Barry an affectionate but weary look.  “It was impressive magic, honey.  Just don’t use it against your brother.”

“Yes ma’am, sorry,” he said.

“Food smells great,” she said again, giving him a wink, and then she went into the dining room too.

Barry didn’t care if he had permission or not, he powered-down in the kitchen before going to eat.  All three of them looked surprised when he walked in as a boy, but no one said anything as they started in on the risotto.

 

Sunday morning felt tense right away, the house very quiet even though all four of them were up and about by 10am when Barry came down for breakfast.  Nick was already eating cereal.  He looked up but didn’t say anything when Barry came into the room.

Barry didn’t say anything either, getting himself cereal too.  He’d mostly overcome his fear of his own barstool, since powering-up was getting almost routine now, and he took his breakfast over there.  They were sitting in the same configuration as they had been on his birthday, when The Incident had happened.

Nick and Barry had both kept to themselves the afternoon and evening before, and they hadn’t spoken much at all since the spoon scandal.

Nick had eaten all the grain pieces out of his bowl, leaving only the marshmallows, and he stirred them with a desolate sigh.

Barry looked for something innocuous to bring up, so they weren’t just sitting there in silence.  “Soccer go okay yesterday?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah, fine,” Nick shrugged.  He was quiet for a second.  “Brayden was sick, so I played goalie.  Got hit in the face with the ball pretty hard.  A little tired of objects flying at my face at the moment.”

Barry snorted.  “Yeah.  I’m sorry.”

Nick nodded, accepting the apology.  Another long silence.  He searched Barry’s face.  “Sorry I made fun of your dress and stuff,” he mumbled.

Barry was surprised to get an apology back, even a reluctant one.  He wasn’t sure how to feel about Nick putting it that way though.  “I wasn’t trying to wear a dress,” Barry said quietly.  “I was just trying to do magic, and they always seem to go hand-in-hand.”

Nick sighed at him.  “Yeah, but you can still hurl spoons, so apparently it doesn’t get in your way or anything.”

Barry’s brow furrowed, not sure what he meant by that.

Frank came in from the backyard then, wearing a baseball cap and shorts, probably doing some maintenance thing around the house.  “Good morning!” he said cheerily.

“Hey Dad!” Barry agreed with a smile.

“Hey,” Nick said mopily.  Barry really didn’t understand what was up with him; it really didn’t seem like this was just about Barry hitting him with a spoon.

Frank went over to the coffee machine and poured himself another cup from the pot he’d made earlier.

Nick had finished eating his marshmallows and now downed the milk in his bowl.  Barry wasn’t sure how he managed to make even that action melancholy, but he did somehow.

Barry was eating the rest of his own frosted corn flakes.

“Hey, Nicko,” Frank said, coming over and patting his second son’s shoulder, “I have something planned for us this afternoon.”

Nick perked up a little from his inexplicably downtrodden state.  “Yeah?”

“Yep,” Frank nodded, self-satisfaction behind his spectacles.  “I thought we’d go grab lunch and then head over to the speedway and watch training.  It’s been a while; might be the first time we’ve gone all season.”

Barry, who was following the interchange closely, clenched his spoon until his knuckles were white.  Watching car racing had always been their father-and-sons bonding activity… all three of them.

“You know, while the girls are practicing the magic thing,” Frank explained.

Barry froze, spoon still clenched, staring blankly into his remaining cereal milk.

He felt Nick glancing at him nervously.  Clearly, Nick had noticed their father’s slip-up.

“Make sure to wear a cap, okay kiddo?  It’s already blazing out there today,” Frank told him conversationally, apparently not even realizing that he’d said anything out of the ordinary.

“Okay, Dad,” Nick agreed as Frank took his coffee through the den toward his office.  Nick stared at Barry.

Barry said nothing, feeling unable to move.

“I would say ‘burn,’ but I think that would be low for even me right now,” Nick said, watching Barry anxiously.

Barry had a hard time forming words.  “No big deal,” he said, somewhere between sarcasm and a lie.  “Why shouldn’t he uninvite me?  It’s always been our ‘guys’ thing, and apparently I don’t qualify anymore.”  He stood angrily and kicked his stool back toward the bar, picking up his bowl and taking it to the sink.

Nick looked unsure how to respond.  “Dude, that’s probably not what he meant anyway,” he tried.

“No, it’s cool,” Barry nodded with fake surety.  “Now that I’m a ‘girl,’ I should just go shopping with Mom, or to ballet class, and maybe later she can teach me to sew… or breastfeed!”

Nick made a face of both disgust and concern.

“Why would I want to do guy things anymore, anyway?!”  Barry threw away his napkin with a slam of the trash can cabinet door.

“Baz, I really think you’re making this a bigger deal than it really is,” Nick nudged.  “He probably didn’t mean to call you a girl.  Even though, for the record, when we go this afternoon, you’re going to be practicing with Mom, so you probably will be a girl right then.”

Barry folded his arms, not pleased that that made sense.  “So you think I’m being overdramatic… like a girl,” he said flatly.

Nick rolled his eyes.  “I think you’re being overdramatic… like you.”

Barry’s frown deepened.

“If things were back to normal, I might say that your way of getting super intense and grumpy was getting your panties in a wad, but as things stand, I think it’s just your tighty-whities.”

Barry shoved him, although in an odd way he was relieved to see that Nick still thought of him basically the same.

 

Barry wasn’t paying attention.  He was draped over his desk chair backwards, his chin on the backrest, skirt puffed out behind him, seeing if he could get his wand to look like it was wiggling if he moved it back and forth quickly enough.

“Baz, are you even listening?” Dania asked with a sigh.

“Yeah,” he answered immediately, looking at her again, catching his wand quickly.

“Then what did I just say?” she asked, waiting.

“Uh, something about time and the properties of spells,” he attempted.

She tapped her wand on her arm impatiently.  “Barry!  This is important!  You need to understand what kind of restriction to use for what occasion, and you need to be in the habit of intentionally setting a time restriction every time you perform a spell.  Time restrictions are one of the most crucial parts of fairy godmother magic.  Clearly I haven’t told you about Cinderella as a cautionary tale nearly enough!”

“No, sorry, I get it,” he put a hand up.  “I just…” he bit his lip.  “Do I need to be powered-up for this?  I don’t understand why I need boobs to learn Time Theory of Magic.”

“Well, if you had been paying attention, I’d be able to have you practice different time scales yourself soon,” she explained with exasperation.  But then she paused, looking more closely at him.  “You haven’t complained about being powered-up for a lesson in over a week.  What’s wrong?”

“I haven’t?” he asked dryly.  “That’s got to be a new record or something.”

“Why do you think I was keeping track?” she smirked.  “But seriously, what’s up?  You usually really enjoy this type of reasons-behind-things part.”

That was true, Barry thought.  He’d actually been looking forward to understanding the time restrictions on magic more fully; you couldn’t use something you didn’t understand.

“I don’t know,” he answered her question, “it might have something to do with Dad and Nick going to the racetrack.”  He tried to downplay it with his tone.  His mother knew him better than that.

“Oh, Baz, I didn’t know that’s what they were going to do!  We could have rescheduled this lesson; I want to prioritize your lessons, but time with your dad and brother are important too!”

Barry sat back on the chair, fiddling with his wand again.  “I don’t think that would have mattered, Mom; I wasn’t really invited.”

A look of understanding and worry crossed her face.  “Well, that doesn’t sound like your father.”

“It was pretty clear,” Barry told her, Grape-voice flat.

“What did he say?”

“‘Nick, do you want to go for a special afternoon to the racetrack, while the girls do their magic thing?’” Barry said humorlessly.

“Oh…” Dania said, grimacing.  “He said that?”

He nodded somberly.

“So you’re really upset that your father called you a girl, and you want to power-down so you don’t feel like it’s true,” she said insightfully.

He looked away.

“Barry, your dad isn’t the best with people, you know that, right?”

“So?” he asked, feeling suddenly defensive of his father.

“So, he says stupid stuff sometimes.  Stuff that he doesn’t realize comes off that way.”

“Maybe,” Barry shrugged.  He got up from the chair, and flopped back onto his bed instead, purple skirt and curls splaying in every direction, wings pushed flat like a trash bag underneath him.  “That doesn’t explain away him thinking of me as a girl though, or that he specifically wanted to go without me, for the first time in the season.”

Dania sat down in the chair he’d vacated, thoughtfully.

Barry stared at the ceiling.  “I guess it’s just that, with Dad, I always felt like it was okay that I wasn’t super macho or anything,” he explained.  “It was always okay that I wasn’t really built or athletic, because neither was Dad.  I felt like us Anderson men were manly in other ways, like smart, kinda geeky ways.  We got into science, math, video games, and science fiction and stuff, and I felt like those things were manly in their own way.”

“Which, all of those things girls can like too, you know, including the athletic stuff,” his mom pointed out.

He gave her an impatient look.  “I know that, Mom.  I’m not sexist.”  He sighed, looking at his fairy attire.  “I don’t think I was, even before I had sudden-intermittent-female-syndrome.”

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry, I know you aren’t sexist,” Dania apologized.  “I just don’t want you to feel limited in those times when you are female, because it really doesn’t limit you.  Even besides the fact that you have magical powers.”

Barry sighed.  “It’s not that.  Being powered-up really isn’t the worst anymore, besides the outfit maybe.”  He sat up, moving his wings thoughtfully behind him.  “And it is starting to be kinda cool that I have magic.  As I get used to it and stuff.”

She smiled, happy to hear it.

“But what if being a fairy makes people think of me differently, when I’m normal-me?  The people who know about it, I mean.”

“Like your dad?”

He nodded glumly.  “Yeah, like Dad.  I don’t want to be the daughter and granddaughter no one ever had!  I want to be the me I already was.  I want to be one of the guys with Dad and Nick!”

“Baz, they love you.  I don’t think they want to exclude you from being one of the guys,” Dania tried to reassure him.

“Mom, they already did!” Barry cried, Grape-voice going a little shrill.  “They both get so uncomfortable when I’m transformed.  And let’s face it, I was never overpoweringly masculine!”

“Well, now you’re just being mean to yourself,” Dania scolded gently.  “You’ve been on your way to becoming a strong, plenty masculine young man!”

He looked at her skeptically, arms folded under his breasts again.  “Nick keeps treating me like a girl.  Dad keeps looking at me like a stranger!  And then he straight-out called me a girl!  Without a second thought!”  He bit his full lower lip, terrified.  “What if he thinks I’m not really man enough anymore?”

Dania’s red powered-up eyebrows were lowered in concern.  “I don’t think there’s some arbitrary threshold of masculinity that you have to pass in order to be a man.  I don’t think that’s really how it works.”

“You say that, but it definitely feels like frolicking about as a ballerina princess all the time throws me way past the threshold, wherever it was,” Barry persisted grumpily.  “They sure act like it does.”  He made a small fist in his lap.  “It’s not that I think being a girl is a terrible human fate or some crap like that.  It just doesn’t fit me and I feel like no one can see who I am, past it!”

Dania played with her wand, elbows on her knees, as if her wand represented all her many years of experience and she was looking back through the catalog to understand.  “Barry, I’m sorry that fairy mother magic is the only one I have to offer you.  If I’d been a color fairy, statistically speaking, both you and Nick would have gotten that, and you wouldn’t have had to turn into a girl for it at all.”

That brought him up short.  He certainly had never wished Dania not to be a fairy godmother.  She loved it, and it defined so much of her life.  He wouldn’t want her to give that up!  That just didn’t mean that he wanted it too!  “Mom, it’s not your fault and I wouldn’t change that for you!” he tried explaining.

“But,” she went on firmly, “like I said to you before, I don’t think Grape has to be not-Barry.”

He was already looking at her, but his fairy name still drew his focus.

“I have seen throughout my whole life that my magic fits who I am,” she insisted.  “That’s part of the character of magic, that it flows with what we need and who we are; mother magic maybe most of all!  I believe that the Magic knows you and chose you.  It picked Barry Anderson!”

He picked at the tulle hem of his skirt, feeling consternation over all of that.

“Maybe you don’t like purple, but it likes you and it fits you,” Dania said.  “And I don’t know why Magic requires you to turn into a girl to use it, but I don’t think even that has to not-fit you.”

He glowered at that.  “So you think I’m really a girl too.”

She sighed, exasperatedly.  “No, Barry!  I think you’re a complex young man and I think who you are is more than your body shape or outfit.  I think there’s more to being a fairy godmother than powering-up.  I am a fairy godmother, even when I’m powered-down, and so are you.  And if you can be a fairy godmother even when you’re fully a boy, then maybe you can be a boy even when you’re fully a fairy godmother.”

Barry tried to digest that, seeing absolutely no way that it could be true, and yet knowing that his mother usually ended up being right when she got this passionate about things.

“And all three of you guys are just going to have to get over it,” Dania said defiantly.  “Grape is here to stay.”

The name diverted his attention again, and then he scowled down at his fairy appearance, upset that he knew she was right.  “You can’t just pretend it doesn’t make a difference though, Mom.  You can’t just pretend that boys and girls aren’t different, or that the reactions I get won’t be different every time I’m powered-up!”

Barry liked that boys and girls were different!  He liked and enjoyed girls being girls!  He just didn’t want to be stuck on the other side of that great divide!

“I’m not trying to pretend boys and girls are the same,” she shook her head.  “I’m just saying it’s not a stupid difference.”

“What do you mean by that?” he lowered an eyebrow skeptically.

She smiled patiently at him.  “Do you remember when Nick was one, almost two, and I picked out his Halloween costume and he was a bunny, but I didn’t realize how girly the costume looked and all night people asked how old our little girl was?”

Barry laughed, feeling vindicated that it was Nick instead of him (although his female laugh put a bit of a damper on it).  “I remember the costume, but I don’t think I was aware of the reactions to it.  I was just so excited to be Spider-Man!”

Dania laughed too.  “Oh my goodness, you were so excited about that one!  You were so cute.”

He blushed, pleased.

“Well maybe that was an unideal choice on my part, but did it actually make Nick a girl?” Dania prodded.

“…No,” Barry said, seeing what she was trying to say.  “But besides the fact that you picked out the costume and you’re a girl, it was also just an outfit!  Not like…” he motioned to his current shape, “… boobs and…” he thought about other, lower-down changes to his body that he didn’t want to mention, “…things.”

She gave him a wry smile.  “Yes, you have more girl ‘things’ when powered-up.  I’m just saying that I don’t think gender is as simple as ‘girl: pink, boy: blue.’  I think I’ve taught you better than that.”

He sighed again.   “It’s not just about the stupid outfits or how they look on this stupid body shape–”

“Baz,” she scolded, but he finished his sentence anyway.

“Guys and girls think differently, right?  I mean you always seemed to act like they do anyway.  And I think I’ve seen that they do.  I mean otherwise I probably would have had a lot of dates go way better,” he pointed out.

She nodded somberly.  “It seemed very different to me, raising two boys, versus watching my friends’ little girls.”

He bit his lip, terrified.  “What if being a girl so often changes me?!”  He thought of his frightening scrying experiences from the day before.  “Dad and Nick already act like powering-up changes me to be someone else.  I don’t want to change!  I want to be a boy!  I don’t want to be a girl instead, and I really don’t want to not be me!”

She gave him an affectionate and understanding smile.  “Barry, everything I’ve seen about you powered-up shows me that you’re exactly the same you, no matter what shape you are.  My oldest boy has always been sharp as a tack and loved to learn, but often rushes into things passionately and intensely.  And that’s exactly how you are with magic, and that’s why you’re really fun to teach, even if your spells kinda spew out sometimes.  You’re still being my Bazlet, even with ‘things.’”

He exhaled, liking her description of him and hoping she was right.

“I’m sorry that being a male fairy godmother might be a little socially bumpy sometimes,” she said gently, “as people don’t know how to make sense of a boy who turns into a fairy girl, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t sense to be made.”

He screwed his face up at that; it seemed like pure lunacy to him, and he was living it.  “Mom, maybe stop trying to make sense of the supposed decisions of a trippy dreamland dimension.  I’m not sure logic and rationality are at work here.”

“Baz, you’re the one who keeps asking the questions,” she pointed out dryly.  “Why would you ask questions if you didn’t really believe there were answers?”

His purple brow furrowed, looking at his small feet in his high heels; that was really fair.  Barry did want answers; he was just afraid it was naive to believe there were good ones, when it came to hard stuff like this.

“Is that a good enough segue for me to bring this back around to our lesson?” she asked long-sufferingly.  “Although should I be teaching you Time Theory of Magic, if all magic is just a fever dream, according to you?  Maybe there’s no rhyme or reason to it at all.”

“I didn’t say that!” Barry protested, although her tone made him laugh.

“Maybe all physics is just random chance that we happen to get lucky with every time,”  she teased sarcastically.  “Who can even say that it isn’t all chaos that could fall into entropy on a whim, if everything is haphazard and unmeasurable?”

“No, gah!” he laughed, absolutely hating the idea that there weren’t beautiful and glorious patterns to physics, which he loved so much.

“All is Quantum Uncertainty and the only true intelligence is knowing that nothing is knowable!”  She put the back of her hand to her forehead dramatically.

“That’s not even what the Uncertainty Principle is about!” he protested, but took her point.

“Could have fooled me,” she winked.  “You mean you’re not going to soliloquy to me about Quantum Uncertainty and how it justifies your nihilism, like Dad’s friends have done?” she asked with mock-disappointment.

“No, ew!” he replied earnestly, really not wanting to be like a few of Frank’s more pretentious friends, whom he’d seen treat Dania like she was dumb, since she wasn’t pessimistic and depressed like they were.  Sometimes Barry didn’t get how science could make people feel like the world was smaller, instead of bigger, like it always made him feel.  “I’m sorry I questioned fairy physics,” he apologized with a sigh.  “It obviously has consistent patterns and I want to learn them.”

She shrugged smugly.  “It’s up to you if you want your accidental bikinis to go on interminably or not.”

He flushed, laughing.  “Okay, okay, I want to learn!”

“You’re free to not believe in destiny,” Dania concluded, “but you don’t have to believe in physics in order for it to bite you in your cute little fairy butt.”

 

They spent over an hour on the ins and outs of time limits.  The type Dania wanted to be the most sure that Barry had right were specific, fixed time limits–the kind where a spell was set to last five minutes, five hours, or five days, and then end.  Some of the alternatives were event triggers–when a spell would end at nightfall, or when the cock crowed, when the Baron died, or when pigs flew–or unspecified, that would just have to be altered or ended manually.  Transformation spells were the biggest ones to worry about time limits for, while summoned items, and often conjured items would just stay.  Emotional and logistical spells would require time limits too.

It was important to add a time limit intentionally, Dania said, since fairy godmother magic, unlike color magic, usually had a built-in time limit implicitly.  Transformations would end, it was just a matter of when, and if you didn’t add a time limit on purpose, transformations could end at the worst time imaginable.

Dania tended to prefer specific time limits, for control’s sake, although she was rather scathing of Cinderella’s fairy godmother.  “Anyone worth their salt should know that ‘midnight’ is so arbitrary!  She was at a ball!  Her fairy mother almost screwed the whole thing up with something as easily fixed as changing the spell to ‘dawn’ or ‘when she gets home!’”

Barry had heard this soapbox of his mother’s, even before becoming a fairy himself, and he laughed at her intensity on the topic.  “Hey, but you know, since her slippers were the only thing that stuck around after midnight… how much you wanna bet that Cinderella was barefoot before her godmother did all the transformation spells?  Because otherwise her shoes probably would have been morphed instead of conjured, right?”

Dania was taken aback.  “You know I never thought of that!” she smiled proudly at him, seeming pleased to be talking fairy-shop with him.  “I bet you’re totally right!”

He smiled back, feeling a little proud, himself.

She had him try a few different time-scales, both with the initial spells, and with altering a spell after the fact.  It didn’t seem too hard to do intentionally, just a little addendum he’d stick on the end when performing a spell.

He turned his pillow into a giant marshmallow for five minutes, gave himself sandals until Dania clapped her hands (he didn’t intend for them to be high-heel sandals, but they were), turned his earbuds pink (unfortunately easy for him to do) without a time set, and then altered it to just two minutes afterward.

It was actually quite satisfying, seeing the spells end when they were commanded to, like maybe he did have some say in it all.

They were waiting for a ten-minute spell causing his pencil to finish spinning on his desk, discussing some of the ramifications of using the wrong time limits in different cases, when the garage door echoed through the house and Barry’s head came up.

He gave his mother a pleading look.

“Alright, you can go see if you missed anything earth-shattering,” she nodded.

He hesitated.  “And?”

“And you can power-down to do it.  Go on.”

He gave her a large, grateful smile, and released his wand into the air with the instruction to power him down.  The stick did its little dance and he was left once again in his shorts and t-shirt, with his body back to normal.  He tried to adopt nonchalance as he went downstairs.

“Hey,” he nodded to his dad and brother once he entered the den.  “How was it?”

“Aw, Baz, it was so awesome!  You won’t believe who we saw!” Nick effused, looking more excited than he had in weeks.  “Marcus Rogers Jr. was running the course, to get ready for the Indy 200!”

Barry’s mouth hung open, knowing the name well as the son of a racing dynasty and a great racecar driver in his own right.

“And he came and talked to Dad, and to me too!” Nick insisted with smug awe.  “And I totally kept my cool, and he signed my course map!”  He showed off the messy signature on the speedway brochure.

Barry’s heart dropped; he had missed out, left out of the boys’ club.  “Wow,” he said, failing enthusiasm.  “That’s really cool, Nick.”

“He asked me if I wanted to be a racecar driver, and I said nah, I probably wanted to be a soccer player or a rockstar, and he said, ‘Yeah, I wanted to be a rockstar, too.  But I guess this works,’ and he winked at me!” Nick triumphed.  “Like we were bros!”

Barry felt a wave of jealousy.  He’d wanted to be a racecar driver for a long time growing up and could have answered that, although these days he probably wanted to go into something in science.  And was he stuck with ‘fairy girl’ as part of his answer now?

He lowered an eyebrow skeptically at his brother.  “You’re going to be a rockstar?  You don’t even play an instrument.”

“Eh, overrated,” Nick shrugged.  “Josh and I are going to start a band soon anyway.  I’ll figure the music stuff out later.  Have you heard most songs on the radio?  The vibe is the biggest thing you gotta have going for you.”

Frank laughed at that.

“Well, I’m going to go find somewhere to put this in my room!” Nick beamed, holding the signed brochure reverently and bolting for the stairs.

Frank had settled in his big chair with his book and Barry stood there, arms folded, looking at him.

“What is it, Baz?” Frank asked, realizing after a moment that he was being stared at.

“Good thing I didn’t miss anything important, you know, since I wasn’t invited,” Barry fumed quietly.

“Ah,” Frank said, putting his book down with a sigh.  “Yeah, sorry about that, kid.”

Barry shrugged resentfully.  “Doesn’t matter anyway; now that I have a magical tutu, as Nick calls it, I don’t care about cars anymore.”

“What are you talking about?” Frank asked, brow furrowed.

Barry was angry and embarrassed, feeling just as over-dramatic as Nick said he was.  “You know what?  Forget it.”  He waved it away over his shoulder as he headed for the stairs.

“Barry Anderson, stop and talk to me,” Frank told him firmly.

Barry stopped and turned, but didn’t walk back into the room.

“Do you want to know why you weren’t invited today?” Frank prodded him flatly.

“Because you don’t think of me as one of the guys anymore?” Barry said severely.

“What?!  No!” Frank shook his head.

Barry took a few steps back toward his father, cautiously.  “You called me a girl this morning, Dad, when you were asking Nick to go with you.”

“What?  When did I…?”

“You were telling Nick you wanted to go to the racetrack, and you said you would go while ‘the girls are doing the magic thing.’”  It was nice to call him on it, after it had been ringing through Barry’s head all day, and yet talking about it made Barry feel stupid and unwanted again.

“Oh,” Frank blinked.  “I’m sorry, Baz, I didn’t mean to say that.”

Barry wanted to feel vindicated, but he didn’t.  “But you don’t just accidentally say ‘girls’ when you don’t mean it.  You were thinking of me that way!”  His voice cracked in upset.

Frank scratched his forehead.  “Look, Barry, I’m not used to you having magic yet, I’m not.  And I am used to thinking of magic as a girl thing, just because it’s all the experience I have.  Your mom, and her mom and your mom’s cousins and aunts, they’re the only ones that I’ve ever known to have magic.  And that doesn’t make magic a girly thing,” he added quickly, “even if—”

“I have to turn into a girl to get it?” Barry finished for him.

“Yeah,” Frank smiled a little.  “But I don’t think of you as being a girl, okay son?”

Barry gave a small nod.

“I always think of you as my oldest son, even when you’re ‘powered-up’ or whatever… even though that’s still new to me too,” he continued, “so I still don’t know how to handle it just right yet.”

“It’s new to me too, Dad,” Barry reminded him.  “It’s being… hard.”

“And I know that,” Frank agreed.  “But it’s being hard on your brother too.  That’s why I took him today, alone.”

“What?” Barry asked, confused and still grumpy about how Nick had handled everything lately.

“If you had been born a girl, or if you two had a sister, my daughter or daughters would be invited to our regular racing outings,” he pointed out.  “We go without your mom because she’s not interested in racing, not because she’s a girl.”

That made sense, but Barry muttered under his breath, “If I had a sister, I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“But today,” Frank went on, “she wouldn’t be invited, and neither would you, if you didn’t have powers, because today was just a Nick and me day.”

“Why?” Barry asked.

“Because, like I said, your brother is having a hard time, and he’s not coping very well, so I felt like he needed a time set apart for him to feel special.”

“Special?” Barry grouced.  “He hasn’t just had a major overhaul of his entire life, what does he need to be able to cope with?”

“Oh really?” Frank pushed.  “Put yourself in your brother’s shoes.  If he woke up on his birthday and suddenly he had magical powers that you didn’t have, and was the center of attention all the time, how would you feel?”

Barry thought about that, frowning.  “I’d be happy for him if he wanted it, and be there to say ‘that sucks’ if he didn’t!  I wouldn’t constantly be making fun of him for it, like he has!”

Frank considered that.  “Well, I said he wasn’t handling it very well.  You probably would handle it better, if things were reversed, than he has.  But he’s different from you, Baz.  You know he likes the spotlight more than you do.  And he’s always looked up to you.”

“He has a funny way of showing it lately.”

Frank gave him a look.  “What if your ages were reversed too?  You really think if your older brother suddenly was everyone’s favorite because he could magically turn into a beautiful, busty fairy maiden, you wouldn’t have any feelings you felt embarrassed and ashamed of?”

“Does everyone have to mention them?!” Barry protested.  “I think it’s the stupid outfit that makes them look so big.”

“Barry,” Frank repeated, “how would you feel if your brother could suddenly turn into a very attractive fairy girl, and you were just you, pushed to the side?”

“Well, firstly I’d feel weird and creepy if I thought he was hot as a gir—” Barry’s mouth fell open.  “Oh.  Ew!  He thinks I’m…” Barry realized how weirded out he would feel with the same feelings.  “Oh.”  But then he thought of his little brother looking at him that way, again: “Ew!”

“Well, he’s feeling lots of different emotions, I think, way more than he can keep track of at the moment,” Frank said.

“Did you guys talk about me?” Barry asked uncomfortably.

Frank laughed and shook his head.  “No, Baz, we talked about racing, and summer and soccer.  I think it was nice for him to not have the stuff with you be the main topic for a day.”

Barry looked down.  “He should know that I don’t want that attention though, right?”

“Yeah, I think you make that pretty darn clear to everyone,” Frank smiled.  “But that doesn’t change the fact that you are getting all the attention.  And whether you like it or not, magic is a pretty sweet deal that not a lot of people have.  I don’t think Nick wishes he had it instead of you, I think he just wishes he had something that special about him.”

“I wish he had it instead of me,” Barry repeated once again.

“But he doesn’t,” Frank said.  “So I wanted to help him know we can still do special, fun things without it.”

Barry’s face fell again.  “Special fun normal things, for normal guys… without me,” he said.

“Barry, sometimes everyone can’t go to every activity,” Frank reproached.  “I didn’t get to go to that theme park last summer with you guys because I had to work.”

Barry set his mouth.  “I know that, Dad.  I’m sixteen; I understand that you can’t always go to the zoo, not everyone is going to invite you to their birthday party, and sometimes you have to go to school instead of riding the ferris wheel.  I get that concept.”  He made a fist in frustration.  “But you wanted to help Nick feel special by making a special ‘normal guys’ club.”  He swallowed the lump in his throat.  “And I am never going to be a part of that club again.  I’m never going to be ‘normal’… again.”

Frank sighed deeply, seeming to consider that.  “Y’know, sport, maybe you’re making the whole fairy thing too big of a deal.  Maybe you and Nick both are.”

“You think so?” Barry asked, surprised by that direction.

“Yeah,” Frank nodded, seeming encouraged by his own thought.  “It’s not like you won’t go with us to the racetrack next time, kid.”

That was hopeful, and made Barry feel pretty silly for being hurt this time.

“Sure, you can turn into a fairy, like your mom, but that doesn’t have to be all that frequent, if you don’t want it to be,” Frank smiled.

Barry lowered an eyebrow in confusion, that seeming to line up less with his understanding, as his father went on.  “Mom talks about it like a pretty big deal.”  His mind drifted to her talking about fairy godmothers being the fingers of Magic itself, its handmaidens.

“Well, it’s her thing.  Of course it’s important to her,” Frank said.  “But it doesn’t have to be your thing if you don’t want it to be.”

Barry didn’t want it to be his thing… Did he?

“It seems like you have certain obligations to fulfill,” Frank shrugged.  “You’re going to get ‘assignments,’ I guess.  And since it’s being asked of you, it does seem like you owe that to your mother’s heritage.  But it’s kind of like how people define themselves by their job, instead of the things that really matter, like family.  You don’t have to define yourself by this.”

“I don’t?” Barry asked.  His tone couldn’t decide if it was hopeful or not, especially because he secretly thought Frank seemed to define himself by being an accountant, pretty frequently.

“No!” Frank declared, like he was relieved that clearly they’d happened upon the ‘real’ problem, although Barry wasn’t sure.  “You’re not stuck with some life you don’t even want, Barry.”

Barry stood there, perplexed, not sure what to think.  It at least seemed like this was a topic that his parents had diametrically opposing opinions about, and he wasn’t even sure if they were aware of that.

“You don’t have to feel condemned to the life of a glitzy little fairy girl, okay?” Frank said with a smile.

Well that statement walloped Barry in a way he completely wasn’t expecting.  It had been exactly the permission he had wanted, from his father and from the world in general, since his birthday had thrown his life into sparkle-chaos.  All he’d wanted to hear for weeks was that he wasn’t limited to being this dismissable little feminine piece of fluff that ‘destiny,’ as Dania put it, was forcing him into.

So then why, the moment it was out of Frank’s mouth, did Barry feel the most offended and dismissed yet?  He felt like he’d been hit in the face with Nick’s soccer ball.

“Right,” he nodded however, trying to accept the statement as he wanted it, “thanks, Dad.”  He hoped his face wasn’t showing his confounded upset.

Frank nodded, looking more resolved.  “So, I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet a racing celebrity, Baz.  And I’m sorry that Nick is jealous of you being the center of attention.  But you and Nick both need to know that life is still going to go on.  You’re both always going to be my boys, and we’ll go do lots of fun guy stuff together, okay?  Aprons aside,” he winked.

Barry felt embarrassed he was bringing up the specific outfit from the day before, even though he knew it was just a joke, one that was intended to help him feel better, not worse.

“But I’m really sorry that you felt left out, sport,” Frank said sincerely.  “I probably should have told you that I thought Nick needed some special attention.  I should have trusted you to be old enough to understand.”

Barry nodded, trying not to feel numb and confused.  “Yeah, I don’t want him to feel sidelined,” he said.  “I really don’t!”  He was feeling awkward and wanted to ease the tension he was feeling, so he tried a joke that rolled his eyes right along with Frank.  “Can’t believe Nick might have a thing for Her Purpleness though.  I guess that just shows how much it doesn’t seem like me, right?”

“Exactly!” Frank laughed.  He got up from his chair and went to hug his oldest son.  “Next time we’ll just talk about it, okay?”

Barry accepted the hug.  It felt safe and solid, their male torsos leaning against each other like bricks in a wall.  It felt like childhood and home.  But Barry also felt more hopeless than when they started the conversation, and he didn’t really understand why.

He went upstairs, to go back to normal summer Sunday afternoon activities.  Dania was coming out of the guest room across from Nick’s room, toward the end of the upstairs hall, her cleaning caddy in hand.  (Somewhere in the back of his mind, Barry wondered why Dania didn’t just use magic to clean, since she seemed so intent on him learning to do so.)

“Everything okay?” Dania asked, as the last she’d heard Barry was heading down to see how the day at the speedway had gone without him.  He wondered if Nick had shown her his treasured autograph.

“Uh, yeah,” Barry nodded, because he wanted it to be.  “I talked to Dad.”

“Oh yeah?” Dania perked up hopefully.

Barry nodded again.  “You were right, he didn’t want to leave me out,” he tried to smile.

“Aww, yeah, I didn’t think so!” Dania said, relieved.  She ruffled his short hair with her free hand.  “See, you’re always going to be one of the boys, honey.”

“Yeah, thanks Mom,” he nodded a final time, turning to go into his room, the smile falling off his face as he wasn’t facing her anymore.

She started down the stairs behind him.

“I was just being overdramatic,” he mumbled to his bedroom door as he turned the handle to go in, “… like me.”

 

Barry did not power-up on Monday.  Maybe Dania could tell how hard Sunday had been on him, but she did not ask and he certainly did not volunteer.  Weekend lessons had come at a higher price than merely Barry’s time, and he was left raw and confused.

On Tuesday when his mother called him down, Barry went obediently, not a complaint spoken, but his attitude was dark.  He powered-up with the enthusiasm one might have toward unclogging a toilet and barely said a word as Dania had him do a little recap session of spells.  He transformed, summoned, conjured, levitated, and automated the objects she told him to, in turn, with a time limit on each one.  The transformation spells each ended in a girlier or purpler twist than intended, even without her asking him to do any wardrobe spells.

But still, Dania seemed satisfied.  “Well, we’re getting to an exciting stage,” she said with a bit of awe.  “I’ve really taught you most of the basics, and you’ve learned everything so well.”

Again, Barry didn’t say anything.  Part of him was hoping if he just numbed out to the whole thing, he wouldn’t have to handle how torn his emotions felt.

“So I want you to come along with me on my assignments this week, so then you’ll be ready to go out on your own, maybe as soon as next week,” she smiled enthusiastically.

Yeah, he sucked at stoicism, that notion putting him over the edge.  “I don’t want to go out on my own next week!” he whined, his voice a girlish fluster.

“I can’t hold your hand forever with this,” Dania put on her mother-tone.

“I’ve had unwanted girl-powers for less than three weeks;” he reasoned defensively, “I think I’ve adapted pretty quickly.”

She looked disappointed.  “You have adapted really quickly.  But I thought you were getting more okay with your powers, honey.”

He was done talking about it before they’d even started, and just shrugged despondently.

Dania seemed disappointed that he wasn’t having fun with lessons, yet again, especially since they’d even had fun on Sunday after they’d talked about Barry feeling left out.

But she persisted intrepidly anyway.  “Well, regardless, it’s time to transition from lessons about performing magic, to lessons about the logistics of being a fairy godmother.”

She was careening him towards it and he didn’t want to go, strapped with a rocket on his back toward the fairy mother-ship, to be assimilated into the glitter hivemind.  “I didn’t think we’d ever really strayed from ‘how to mommy well,’” he said, failing to suppress all the bitter hopelessness in his tone.

If Dania picked up on his sour despondency, she was choosing to handle it rather than address it head-on today.  “We’ve talked a lot about applications, while you were learning the magical theory, yes,” she said.  “But this is the more active ‘apprenticeship’ part of your training, where you can see what it’s like to grant wishes in-action, out in the field.  Apprenticing with my mom was a huge deal for me to understand how to handle different fairy mothering problems, and to be less nervous my first time out on my own.”

Barry really didn’t think being a butterfly-on-the-wall of a few of Dania’s assignments would miraculously make him not rebel at the idea of being pushed through the labor pains of magical motherhood, but he just stood there with his arms folded, pretending to be stoic again.

“We’re going to be visiting godchildren whom I’ve fairy-mothered for years probably, but yours will be new to finding out about fairies,” Dania reminded him, talking with her hands.  “Just take it easy and explain, ask them to keep us a secret, but you don’t have to go into depth unless they ask, and surprisingly most don’t.  Occasionally you’ll get someone really skeptical about our existence at all.  Once or twice I’ve even gotten a godchild upset that I was in their house.  One was sure she was hallucinating.  But usually if you just stand there being a consistent being of magic for a few minutes, they’ll accept that you’re really a fairy, there to help with whatever problem called you to their side.”

Great, he thought sarcastically; he was going to have to prove he was a fairy girl to people who didn’t know anything about the fay world?  What fun.

“Do you want to practice or anything?” Dania offered with a smile.  “Like roleplay it a little?”

He did not.  He was grumpy imagining having to actually introduce himself to godchildren, when the time finally came that he couldn’t avoid it any longer.

“You mean something like–”  He adopted a sing-songy wide-eyed sarcasm, and held his body like a ditzy dew drop, imitating Grape scathingly.  (Considering he was powered-up into Grape, was “imitating” really the right word?)  “–’Hi, I’m your fairy godmother!’”  He did showy sparkle hands with an over-the-top gasp.  “‘Fairies are real!  I’ll make all your wildest dreams come true!  You want me to do your hair??  I’m good at hair, apparently!’”

“Barry, come on,” Dania insisted, hands on her hips impatiently.  “Do you want them to take you seriously or not?”

Barry gave her a doleful look, dropping the imitation for a flat version of Grape’s voice.  “Mom, I’m dressed like a purple cupcake.  Who is going to take me seriously anyway??”

“Baz, you are not a purple cupcake!” she scolded his self-representation.

He looked down at the magnitude of his voluminous skirt, and then back up at her skeptically, like that was damning evidence on its own.  He lowered the mocking tone to a stage-whisper.  “‘Oh, and I’m also a boy!  Although I’m pretty sure that’s harder to believe than the fairy thing while I look like this!’”

“You keep treating this like you look silly,” she said earnestly.  “You don’t look silly, honey, you look beautiful.”

He scowled.

“You might not feel like it represents who you are, but when we go out there, all that my fairy godchildren are going to see is a lovely young fairy godmother in training, there with me,” Dania reminded him.

Barry folded his arms, considering that with a sigh.  “You’re not going to tell them that I’m… your son?” he asked hesitantly.

Dania smiled softly at him.  “No, sweetheart.  As long as you’re okay with me calling you ‘my daughter’ and ‘she’ while we’re out, I thought it would make things less complicated.”

Barry really didn’t like the sound of either of those, but it was better than complete strangers knowing he was a boy with boobs.  “Yeah, I’d really rather you not tell anyone,” he affirmed.

“And people will respect you, Barry,” she told him seriously, taking his now-thin little hands in hers, and looking seriously into his eyes.  “But it’ll help if you respect yourself first.”  She emphasized this by tapping the end of his nose, which made him scrunch it up.

Barry sighed again, wishing she’d had more convincing arguments against his cupcake assessment.

 

There was a lot of waiting around for Dania to get called, but at least she let him power-down in between.  So Barry finished his summer reading, while avoiding looking like a library poster trying to get little girls to read more by showing that even fairies like to read.  Such a poster would probably have a caption like “Be enchanted by a good book!”

“Ah, there’s the pull,” Dania nodded after a few hours, pulling out her wand gracefully and starting to power-up.  “This’ll be a good one for you to come along for!”

Barry stood, not really knowing what to do.

“Honey, c’mon!” she motioned as her jeans and t-shirt transformed into her elegant, flowy fairy dress.  “You’re not going with me like that!”

“Oh,” he said, flustered, fumbling for his wand in his pocket.

“I’ve accepted the call,” she told him, “I won’t be able to wait long as the pull gets stronger.”

Powering-up wasn’t such a casual affair for him as it was for her, but he didn’t want to keep her waiting, so he tried to do it quickly.  He soon discovered that rushing made everything all the more uncomfortable:  Shrinking to Grape-height felt like pulling muscles in his legs.  He cringed hard against the awkward tenderness of his inguinal area changing directions on fast forward.  His waist compressed like play dough grabbed by a giant hand, and his chest popped out like someone inside his torso was wearing boxing gloves and trying to get out.

In a matter of seconds, his wings parachuted out behind him and he was ready, but winded.

Dania just blinked at him for a second.  “That was really fast!”

“Yeah, I’m kinda regretting it,” he admitted, nursing the side of a sore boob.

“I just meant ‘don’t dawdle,’” she explained, still looking stunned.

“Oh,” he realized. “Well now this is time I could have spent not rushing, so…”

“Right, sorry!” she came back to the present.  “Here hon, let’s go.”  She reached out and took his Grape hand in her own, and the room filled with warm red light.

They ported to a little girl’s bedroom, and Barry realized it was going to be a common occurrence for him to make blind leaps into random, unfamiliar houses.  But Dania was at ease, her high heels landing gracefully between the strewn dolls and stuffed animals on the floor.

Barry felt a little more confused about where to stand, wing hitting a butterfly mobile hanging from the ceiling (which felt a little ironic, his wings making the paper wings spin and flutter).

There was a girl who was probably five or six, with big, thick glasses that made her eyes look hugely magnified.  “Ms. Dayspark!” she cried with a sweet little lisp, rushing to Dania and giving her a hug.  “You came!”

“Well, of course I did, sweetheart!” Dania squeezed her tight.

The girl looked suddenly at Barry, like she’d just noticed him there.  “Who’s that?” she asked nervously.

Barry smiled awkwardly, not sure what to say.

“Patti, this is my daughter, Grape,” Dania said, more comfortable with the phrase than he’d expected.  “I’m teaching her to be a fairy godmother too.”

Barry couldn’t tell if her change in pronouns for him was a relief or a bother.

“Wow,” Patti looked him up and down in awe.

Barry blushed, but smiled.  This was the first person to see him as Grape who didn’t know he was really a boy.  Maybe his mom was right that he’d get more respect than he thought.

“She’s so pretty!” the little girl declared and Barry squirmed.  Was that still respect?  His mother’s attitude toward beauty seemed to think so.

“Isn’t she?” Dania agreed, beaming, and Barry gave her a look.

“There are other fairy godmothers?” Patti asked in amazement.

“Of course, silly,” Dania teased her.  “Don’t you think other people need help too?”

“Yeah,” Patti said, in a way that made Barry think she’d never actually considered it, “but you don’t help everybody?”

“It’s much too big of a job for me to help everyone,” Barry’s mom shook her head.  “That’s why I need to train a helper.”

I thought it was because I turned sixteen and got powers against my will, Barry thought dryly.  All the same, he wanted to be helpful, if he had to be a fairy anyway.

“I wish my mom was a fairy!” Patti declared.

“Now that’s one wish I can’t grant,” Dania explained to her fairy goddaughter.  “Fairies can’t make other fairies.  Unless they have them as babies,” she winked at Barry.

Patti turned in excitement on Barry, “You were a baby fairy?!?”

Barry had to work hard not to make a face, probably being pictured as one of her babydolls, but with wings.  Well, then again baby fairies did exist, they just weren’t fairy godmother babies.

…Except maybe glitter babies.  Maybe he was the closest to a fairy godmother baby one could get.  Fantastic, he thought sarcastically.

“Miss Patti, why did you need me today?” Dania reminded her.

Patti was sad that her best friend was moving away and Dania told her that it was okay to feel sad, and suggested that she wish for something to remind her of their friendship all the time.

Patti wished for it officially, eyes closed adorably with pleading, and Dania granted her wish with a heart-shaped frame on the wall with Patti and her best friend’s picture in it.

This was the first time Barry had seen Dania in action, granting a fairy godmother wish outside of their family.  He found himself impressed with both her mothering about it, taking each wish as an opportunity to teach something, not just grant thoughtlessly, and with the simplicity of solving the problem.  Nothing elaborate was needed, so she’d kept the magic simple, elegant.

Despite not wanting to be a godmother, Barry found himself taking notes.  Maybe she’d had a point, and the apprenticing part was more useful than he’d expected it to be.

“Thank you so very much, Ms. Dayspark!” Patti declared, caressing the photo frame.  “Now I will remember her every day!”

The way she said it reminded Barry of the little girl in the TV show, thanking the royal magic woman for helping her dreams come true, the one he’d rolled his eyes at.  He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that Dania was rather like a tv magical mentor.  And wish-granting didn’t seem quite as eye-rollable in context, with real people with real desires.  Patti was just a little kid, but her relationship with her friend was real and mattered.

“Well you are nice to everybody you meet;” Dania told her, “you’ll meet lots more friends who you’ll love, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be sure to remember this one.  Friends are what it’s all about!”

Barry’s mind balked slightly about his mother literally making the moral of the story ‘the power of friendship.’

She gave him a loving wink, still talking to Patti, although the next phrases were obviously directed at him.  “Including your family.  And even yourself!”

Barry wasn’t entirely sure what all she was trying to poke at in him, with that.

Patti nodded like a wise old lady.  “I like friends.”

Dania smiled and kissed her on the top of the head.  “Okay, sweetheart.  We’re going to go!  You can call me again if you feel sad.”

“Okay, thank you!  Goodbye, Ms. Dayspark!” Patti declared, waving.  “Goodbye, Miss Fairy Daughter!”

Barry realized she was saying goodbye to him.  Her sweetness was adorable and Barry smiled gently, despite his discomfort with these being identifying titles for him.  “Bye, Patti,” he said in a small Grape-voice with a wave, as Dania ported them home.

They landed back in the den and both started to power back down.

“You didn’t say a word!” Dania lowered her brows as they turned brown again.

“I said ‘bye,’” Barry corrected.

She gave him a ‘not what I meant’ look.

He took a big sigh of relief as his body started heading back to normal, which wasn’t just about his waist making room for his normal organ placement.  “What did you want me to say?” he asked, skirt splitting back into cargo shorts, happy to feel the accustomed weight hidden beneath them.

“I don’t know, nothing specific.  I just wanted you to be a part of it,” she said fervently.  “Patti’s a special little girl.”

Barry frowned, disheartened that his quiet had been taken that way.  “She was really cute and sweet!  I was nervous, Mom.”

She was instantly contrite.  “Of course you were.  I’m sorry, Baz.  It was your very first time out on an assignment, of course you were nervous.”

“Yeah, and as a girl!” he reminded her.

“Right, that too,” she acknowledged.

He put his hands in his shorts pockets in thought.  “What did you mean, looking at me when you were talking about being friends with family and yourself?” he wondered.

“Oh,” she said, seeming surprised he was bringing it up as a significant part of the conversation, “well I was thinking a little bit about how I want you and Nick to be able to be friends…”

“I’m trying, for my part!” he declared.

“I know you have been, despite the spoon-flinging.  And it’s a two-way street that Nick hasn’t been holding up his end of very well lately,” she acknowledged.  She got a wistful smile.  “I was also thinking that it’s been really nice for you and me to spend a lot of time lately, and get to be closer friends.  I’ll be sad to see this time go, to be honest.”

Barry was surprised to find how much that had meant to him lately too, despite the reasons for their time spent together.  “I like being friends with you too, Mom,” he smiled softly and she beamed.  He paused.  “We can keep it going, if you don’t make me start going out by myself!” he said with persuasive pleading.

Dania laughed at his attempt.  “Even though that’s tempting, selfishly,” she winked, “that’s the thing about being a mother, whether biological or godmother: sometimes you have to let your children walk alone, even if they’re scared.  Raising people is a complicated job, and it’s scary letting the ones you love walk off into the darkness without you.  But that’s when you hope you’ve done your job well enough and they’ll remember and apply everything you taught them.  And even though you know they might stumble sometimes, you still need to let them be people, be themselves.”

Barry watched her face earnestly, feeling confusing, overwhelmed feelings about all of that: feelings of wanting to be his own person, but not sure what that meant anymore, discomfort about getting a lesson in mothering again, hopeful that Dania wanted him to be an individual, but afraid of messing up too, and afraid of the great beyond that seemed ahead of him whether he wanted it or not.

“I’m in the business of raising friends, people to be their own little universes, their own selves.  If you raise children right, they always stay yours, but they don’t stay children.  They might not always pick what I would, and it’s not my job to get them to make my decisions; it’s my job to help you make your decisions, from the most informed, best version of yourself,” Dania stated firmly.

She put a loving hand on the side of his pensive male face.  “You’re not supposed to fairy mother the way I would.  I just hope that by the time I send you out, you’re ready to do it in your way.”

Barry wasn’t sure how it could be ‘his way’ when he had to transform everything about himself to do it.

“At the end of the day, you are the only person you get to keep with you all the time.  That’s why it’s so important to be your own friend too,” she said.  “And to like and respect yourself.  Only you can make friends with the mirror.  Sometimes scrying our own hearts is the hardest magic of all.”

 

“Seatbelt!” Barry told Nick sternly, putting on his own and turning on the ignition in Dania’s car.

“I was going to!” Nick retorted, strapping himself into the passenger seat.  “I’m not stupid, geeze.  Stop being such a mom.”

Of course Nick was making even that into a fairy godmother jab, Barry thought, unamused.  “You know Dad would have told you to put it on too,” he pointed out.  He started driving in the direction of the grocery store, Dania having sent them with a list.  Barry had offered to go by himself, but she’d pushed for him to take his brother along.  They were probably supposed to bond or something.

Nick changed the radio station.

“Hey, I was listening to that!” Barry protested, flipping it back to the song he liked.  “Mom’s car; driver picks the station.”

“That’s good, I’ll get to listen to what I want when I die,” Nick grumbled overdramatically.

Barry exhaled, wanting to be patient.  After both Frank and Dania had pointed out that Nick was probably acting out due to jealousy, Barry did want to be understanding.  Even if being a male fairy godmother was a stupid thing to be jealous of, he thought.  And Nick had been being really mean and dumb about it.  It was a lot harder to be understanding and patient with someone, when they kept intentionally poking you in your most insecure areas.

“I don’t get why Mom even buys things at the grocery store anyway,” Nick griped.  “Why don’t you guys just poof all our food into being?”

“Could you not, ‘you guys’ me?” Barry requested, setting his mouth.  He was still struggling with feeling like being a part of the fairy-girl-club automatically excluded him from the guys’ club.

At the next stop sign, Barry realized Nick was giving him a long, bitter look.

“What?” Barry questioned, patience slipping.

Nick mimed flipping long hair, making his voice ridiculously high and vapid.  “‘My life as a fairy girl is just so hard!’”

“I’m not a girl!” Barry burst out, making a slightly sharper turn than he meant to.  “And I didn’t ask for the powers, or the godchildren, or the responsibility, or any of it!  And I’m sorry I can’t give it to you, because I would if I could!”

“I don’t want to be a girl either!” Nick said instantly.

“Well, good,” Barry countered frustratedly, “because neither of us can pick that even if we wanted to!”

They both fell grumpily silent for a moment, and Barry’s radio station had gone to commercial.

“Can I change it now?!” Nick fumed.

“God, yes!” Barry agreed.

Nick flipped channels, saving them from the annoying commercial break.  He actually found a decent song.

Barry sighed.  “Dad said we’re making too big a deal of the fairy thing anyway, and he’s probably right,” he informed Nick.  “Like it’s not that big of a deal to us that Mom’s a fairy.  It’s just like a weird side-thing that I am too.  You keep acting like it’s a big deal that I can do magic, but like Mom’s right there to do magic.  It’s just sort of redundant, me doing it too.”

Nick snorted scoffingly.

“What?” Barry asked.

“Mom can drive too,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Barry’s brow furrowed.

“Mom can already drive a car.  Why even get your license?” Nick said.

That brought Barry up short.  “Because I like the freedom of being able to drive on my own and make my own decisions…” he said.

Nick was giving him a dry, expectant look.  “You know, considering everyone treats you like you’re the smart kid, you can be pretty dumb sometimes.”

Barry tried to ignore that commentary.  “You’re trying to say having my own magic is like that?” he asked.

Nick just gave him a ‘no duh’ look.

Barry considered the parallel.  Turning into a male fairy godmother did not feel like the open-road excitement that a driver’s license offered.  “No, this comes with so many more strings attached.  I don’t want to be a mommy!  And there are so many aspects that make me feel like I can’t even be me anymore!  Not to mention having to put up with your bullcrap all the time,” he glared at his brother.

Nick met his gaze flatly, then put his breathy falsetto back on, putting the back of his hand to his head.  “This seatbelt is so uncomfortable with my big boobs!  Maybe I just won’t drive a car at all!”

Barry pressed the radio buttons angrily, fuming at Nick putting it that way… although he couldn’t help but take the point.  Was his magic as big of a privilege as a drivers’ license, with just the regular difficulties that came with any responsibility?  Well, the rules of the road had never made him question who he was as a human being, so there were at least some major differences.  Wait, what was the definition of ‘human’ anyway?  Should his becoming a fairy mean he needed to question his own humanity, let alone if he was guy enough?

Barry thought about his brother’s jeering comment, and about what Frank had said about Nick’s feelings.  He adjusted the rearview mirror.  “You seem to notice a lot about how Grape looks…” he mentioned delicately.

Nick grew tense, but immediately adopted nonchalance.  “Baz, there’s finally one good song on your station, and you’re going to talk over it?!”

Barry snorted and let it go, thinking it probably wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have either.  They’d reached the store anyway.

 

The next morning Dania and Barry went and visited another one of her elementary-age godchildren.  It seemed that Dania, on average, was summoned by her fairy godchildren one to three times a day, although since the calls were at their own discretion, the timing really varied.

“Some of them call me once a week or so, and some of them I’ll only hear from every few years,” she explained when they’d landed back in the den.  “But once you learn how to reject a summons, you can set yourself a bit of a schedule of working hours, and they’ll learn to adapt when they call you.”

“Learn to reject a summons?” that concerned Barry.  “Can you not always reject being summoned?”

“No, not at first,” she admitted.  “The call pulls strongly, summoning you to a godchild’s side, showing you where to go.  But it’s a muscle memory thing you learn to control pretty quickly.  And you can feel things like who is calling and, with practice, things like the urgency behind a call, so you can judge if an assignment needs you right away or if it’s good to make a godchild wait.”

Barry twiddled a purple curl absently, wondering what that felt like, and not liking the idea of being unable to reject a call.

“And it’s up to you if you want to give a godchild the summoning rhyme.  Some cases are really one-and-done,” she explained.  “Someone has a specific need at that moment, so magic summons you to their side, and assigns you to help.  It doesn’t mean that they need recurring visits from you.  And some people you want to help, but that doesn’t mean you want to be on their speed dial, so to speak.”

Barry wasn’t sure if he wanted to help people whom he wouldn’t want to hear from again, but at least it was nice to know he didn’t have to give out his ‘number’ too freely.  At the same time, that was a lot of pressure, judging if people were deserving of additional help.

“I have been summoned back to someone, even without giving them the incantation to call me, before.  He was a bit of a demanding little jerk, but then a few years later he did actually need something, and the Fayemark called me back to him without him doing it intentionally.  But with most of my godchildren, I want them to know how to call me, and I want to see them, not just in times of emergency.”

Okay, at least there was a backup plan, if someone really needed help.  Maybe he’d be stingy with the rhyme, and then the Fayemark could ‘decide’ or whatever.  If it was making him go see godchildren in the first place, let it wait until they really needed him.  He didn’t want the responsibility on him to decide if godchildren should be helped, and he didn’t really trust a bunch of kids to decide when he’d have to go curvy and pop to their aid.

“Do you get tired of being summoned all the time?” Barry asked Dania.

She almost looked confused that that would even be a question.  “Not really,” she said.  “It’s always a new adventure.”  She was pensive for a long second.  “There are days I’m not in the mood; you can’t always be in a good mood.  But that’s not so different from being a regular mom.  I was always glad to have you guys, even on bad days, or when you guys were toddlers and would make a big mess, or elementary schoolers and Nick would get into your stuff and you’d both have meltdowns about it,” Dania laughed nostalgically.

Barry was embarrassed how emotionally charged he’d been all along the way.

“There are days I want to ‘nope’ out of being a mom or a fairy godmother.  But every single time I’ve answered the call, even when I wasn’t in the mood, helping other people has helped me, as much or more than I helped them.  So often granting others’ wishes has granted the wishes of my heart, in ways I didn’t expect.  Magic takes care of its handmaidens, too.”

Barry was too thoughtful about that to know what to say.  Maybe he just wasn’t as good as his mom, not wanting to drop everything when his help was needed.  And he felt pretty skeptical that he could get as much out of helping godchildren as he would be pushed to give.

He was familiar with the feeling of satisfaction that being nice and helping others gave you, and that it made you happy too.  It was why when Dania had sent Barry and Nick down the street to help clean up an old lady’s yard without pay, he hadn’t minded, even though Nick had privately griped.  Helping people was exciting and nice, and gave you feelings of being boss at being human (a term which Barry questioned again in regards to himself and Dania).

But to do that all the time, at the beck and call of desperation?  Besides being stuck as a girl every time…  None of it sounded like what he would have picked to be a big part of his life.  Maybe Dania was just a much better person than he was, let alone a better mother.  …Not that he wanted to be good at being a mother anyway!

“While we’re waiting for my next summons, I think it’s a good time for you to practice porting, yourself,” Dania suggested, bringing Barry out of his thoughts.  “I want you to feel comfortable with it before your first call.  It could be a lot more stressful trying to do it for your first assignment, on a timer.”

“Seems kinda nerve-wracking,” Barry agreed, “moving yourself in and out of existence.”

She laughed at him putting it that way.  “Transportation spells never stop you from existing, Baz.  We just exist outside of natural reality for a moment.  It’s a bit like putting a stitch in space, and that stitch is the Fayemark.”

She came next to him and lifted a ruffled bit of his skirt.  He made a face at her, feeling invaded, until he realized she was trying to show him something.

“See how it’s gathered?” she pointed to a spot on his underskirt.  “A stitch goes in at one place in the fabric, and comes out another, and when the thread gets pulled, it draws the two together.  That’s what our portal spells are like.”

“We make a ruffle in space?” Barry asked with flat humor.

Dania beamed, pleased.  “Yes, exactly.”

“Mom, how do you manage to make something as cool as wormholes girly?!” Barry moaned offendedly.

“Oh, that’s all a wormhole is?” she asked, surprised.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s the basic idea,” he nodded.

“Well, I never knew I made wormholes,” she smiled even wider, looking surprisingly girlish.  “Cool!”

Barry laughed, finding her enthusiasm cute, even if she was unfortunately sticking bows on science!!

“So it’s okay if you’re nervous, honey,” she soothed.  “You can start with short distances.  Just port across the room to begin with.”

He pulled his wand out and nodded with determination.  Porting had always seemed like one of the coolest spells in Dania’s repertoire, even before he’d known it worked essentially like a technicolor wormhole.  He did want to learn this one.

“It’s like taking scrying a step farther,” she explained.  “You feel where you are, you feel the location where you want to go, and feel the Fayemark in between, and connect them.”

“Just across the room?” he double-checked and she nodded encouragingly.

Barry concentrated hard.  Just bending space to his will, no big.

He started talking to his wand about what he wanted to do, and as he did, he felt his current location and shape, so there, not unlike when he’d felt his first dachaigh spell, setting his default swimsuit.  His Grape-shape was made up of so much matter.  (And exposed-feeling nerves, but he tried to ignore those.)  The room was made of matter too, the den carpet, the couch and the TV and bookcase, even the air was full of existent stuff.  And the wand in Barry’s hand was like an insect antenna, assisting him in sensing it all there.  He closed his eyes, breathing in the room.

It was interesting: if someone had had him guess, theoretically, how to make a wormhole, Barry might have considered sci-fi concepts like reality and matter itself being just an illusion, like a computer code that showed you pictures of everyday life, which your neurons processed, but could be bypassed if you just could see the ones and zeros.  And yeah, in some ways, that was true, if he was accurately interpreting what the wand was showing him.  Objects felt “puffy” with space between the atoms, even his own, but they also felt more existent, not less so, probing them with magic.  The objects in the room had unifying magical borders, like magical crayon-drawing outlines, making them each their own unique entity.  Dania’s outline felt much stronger than anything else in the room.  It felt like if you wanted to mess with something magically, you had to knock on its border and ask for permission, maybe not from the object itself, but from magic itself?  Except with Dania, it felt like literally her permission that would need to be asked, although probably not verbally.

So connecting to the spot across the room, by Frank’s office door (Barry glad his dad was at work), Barry felt like the wand was knocking on the door of space, asking permission to violate its edges, to let magic open both a departure and destination point.  He requested, feeling again the full solidity on both ends of the room, and as he did, he felt a blooming feeling, like reality was happy to open up there.  And as it did, magic rushed in to penetrate the hole with a whoosh, spreading it open fully.  The interaction between magic and matter felt rather like…

He gulped, eyes flying open as his face went very hot; he hadn’t intended his mind to go that direction with an analogy!  But he had in actuality created a large, circular, amethyst doorway of light in the middle of the den.

“Oh Baz, it’s beautiful!” Dania clapped.  “Now take it and let’s see if it lands you where you directed!”

“It might not?!” Barry cried worriedly.

Dania hesitated.  “…I’m sure it’ll be fine.  If there was a problem I’d come get you.  But you’re a natural, love.  Just go for it.”

Barry was a lot more nervous after her unsurety, but he had felt the other side of the room strongly.  In fact, he still felt it, connected to the purple stargate still chilling there in the room.  Bracing himself, making an unintentionally high-pitched squeak of fear, Barry dove into his portal.

The pinks, lavenders, golds, and pale blues of the Fayemark swelled all around him like cloudy pillows, making him weightless for a long split-second.  And then a circle of reality opened up on the other side, and he was spit back out on the other end of the den, purple light sparkling around his body before dimming.  But the end portal was slightly above the ground, so Barry dropped like a little fairy rock, skirt poofing around him as his butt hit the floor with a feminine “Oof!”

“See, you did it!” Dania cheered, going to take his Grape-hand and help him to his high heels.

He blinked at her, wide-eyed.  “I want to do it again!”

“Okay!” she laughed, happy that was his reaction.

It was much faster to set up the second time, pointing his wand back toward the kitchen and knocking on the space right in front of him, causing a hole in existence again, which he went through with much more gusto.

It was a neat feeling, transporting under his own magic, different from when he just warped with his mom.  Despite how much he didn’t want to be a fairy godmother, the warm, purple, nebulous magic that swirled all around his body felt like him, and regardless of all the strings that came attached with his powers, Barry liked how that felt.

“Woah!” he cried, putting his arms out to the sides (unintentionally daintily) to steady himself this time, as he took a few steps to a stop on the other side.  His wings fluttered to balance him as well.  “It’s really cool!” he admitted, grinning widely.

Dania shook her head, impressed.  “My fast learner!”

He blushed, fully pleased to be complimented on his wormhole skills.  “I want to go farther with the next one!”  He rushed into the kitchen, barely even minding the tapping of his high heels on the tile floor, or the bobbing of his chest while running.  (Okay, they did bother him, but he was busy bending space!)

“Okay, sure,” Dania laughed at his enthusiasm.

He turned back around from the sink side of the island and looked beyond Dania to the far side of the den again, letting his magic snake the two places together.

Again, he went into one magic pancake, and burst out another, yards and yards away.  “Yes!” he triumphed, getting ready to do it again.

“Oh, here’s a call!” Dania interrupted, head coming up.  “Ah, it’s Terry.”

Barry stopped breathlessly.  “Oh, okay,” he nodded, embarrassed about how much he’d gotten into porting, feeling caught a little with his pants down.  (Or caught with his skirt down?  He didn’t want to think too hard about that.)

“But you’re doing great, love!” she reassured him.  “You’ve really got it!”

He smiled shyly, wanting to succeed at this spell he really enjoyed.  The transportation spells were his favorite, apparently, both flying and porting.

“And it’ll be even more directed when you’re being summoned,” she informed him.  “Just let it bring you to their side.  The magic knows where to go.”

His cool new spell seemed scarier again, imagining it yanking him to the side of a stranger.

“I’m going to have you grant the wish this time, okay?” she beamed proudly at him, taking his hand.  “Like with Nick, it won’t be official, but it’ll still be good practice.”

“Uhh, okay,” he said uncertainly, letting her pull him gently into her own portal.  If granting even Nick’s desires had gone okay, hopefully he could handle one of her little godkid’s wishes.

But when they landed on the other side, in a cluttered home office which looked like it was in an apartment, Barry’s stomach flipped with anxiety.

“Terry” wasn’t an elementary schooler.  He looked around nineteen, maybe, with glasses, sitting in a swivel computer chair.

“Terrance, this is Grape, my daughter,” Dania informed him, putting an arm around Barry’s back, in his wing-bend.  “She’s apprenticing to be a fairy godmother too.”

“Hi,” the young adult guy gave Barry a smile, eyes failing to hide interest, although he was also clearly trying to be polite.  Still, his eyes did a quick down-up scan of Grape’s body.

“Hi,” Barry agreed awkwardly, very humiliated to be checked out as a girl by a stranger, even if he could tell the other guy wasn’t being creepy about it or anything.  Barry knew that he would be checking out a girl wearing what he was wearing, if he were the one in the swivel chair.  He felt the color in his cheeks and even through his nose.

“Terrance has been one of my godsons since he was… how old, Terry, seven or eight?” Dania tried to recall.

“Something like that,” Terrance agreed shyly.  “So that’s how fairies work?  You apprentice and stuff?”

“Yep,” Dania answered, “she got her powers recently, for her sixteenth birthday, so we’ve only gone to see a couple of my godchildren so far.”

Barry really didn’t like how at ease she seemed with the female pronouns regarding him, especially in this situation.

“Oh, well, that’s cool,” Terrance said, like he was struggling to know what to say.  “Sixteen is a fun age.”

Barry wondered why he was saying it that way, and then realized Terrance was probably trying to put the younger teen at arm’s length, reminding himself that the cute girl in front of him was still too young for him to pay attention to.

“Extra fun with powers, I bet,” Terrance added.

Barry resisted snorting with irony.  “It’s been… an adventure, already, to be sure,” he replied diplomatically, keeping his Grape-voice even.

“Well, what wish do you have for us today?” Dania asked Terrance.  “Grape’s going to grant it, for practice.”

Barry’s head jerked around at his fairy name, and he immediately gave her an “oh god, please don’t make me!” look, trying not to ring his bell-hips in his nervousness, his wings a-fluster behind him.

Dania seemed to notice the look, but gave him a “don’t worry, honey, you’re going to do great!” one in return, which he did not appreciate at the moment.

“Uh, yeah,” Terry nodded, seeming shyer at the idea of asking the interesting newcomer to make his wish come true.  “So I’m flying to California tomorrow, to meet up at Comic-Con with some of my online friends.  And I know this is sort of last minute, but they’re all dressing up as a group as characters from Electric Privateer: Betrayer of the Strange, but I couldn’t really afford a very good-looking cosplay, and I’m not really the DIY type.  The other guys do this kind of thing all the time.  This is my first time going to a con, or even to California, and the first time meeting them in person, and I’d really like to be impressive.”  He looked hesitantly between them.  “Is that an okay thing to use magic for?”

Barry rather expected Dania to lovingly tell the young adult guy that that was sweet, but he should impress his friends in other ways–let them see him for his personality, blah blah blah–but to his surprise she just seemed excited.  “That sounds like a great wish, Terry!  You’ll have to show us the specific one you want, since we don’t know the characters.”

But he wanted a costume?  Barry was supposed to perform wardrobe magic on an older guy that was totally checking him out as a girl, when he hadn’t even been able to get wardrobe magic right on himself without it being embarrassing?!  He gave Dania another “please no” look.

“Okay, yeah,” Terrance said hopefully, apparently almost as surprised as Barry that Dania was on board with his plan.  He pulled up a web search for the character, who was also a thin, dark-haired guy like Terry (although obviously more muscular in the anime art style than the guy sitting at his computer).  From the pictures, it was an edgy, dark sort of anime, whereas the ones Nick usually watched were a lot brighter, although still violent and dramatic from the little Barry had seen.

“This is Hamagusa Morumi.  Some of the important details are his blood-red amulet and that he always wears this white gee with red sandals, and the spiky blue epaulets,” Terry pointed out.

Barry started glancing around the room in his panic about needing to perform the spell under the circumstances.  There were lots of anime posters on the wall and figurines on the shelves, including some sexy anime girls, their costumes a sliding scale of revealing.

“Is it okay for Grape to just transform the clothes you’re wearing?” Dania checked logistically.  “And how long do you need the costume for?”

“Uh, yeah, that’s fine,” Terry looked down at his shorts and Rubik’s Cube tee.  “And if it could stay transformed until Monday, that’d be awesome!  I wish for a Hamagusa Morumi cosplay, until I return home on Monday,” he said officially.

Dania smiled expectantly at Barry, clearly not having trouble rejecting the official wish so that he could do it.  When he didn’t move, she nudged, “Okay, love, go ahead and cast.”

He was so going to demand some kind of recompense for this later, he thought grumpily, not even sure what compensation he’d want.  He had to get his wand back out, but there was no way he was going to draw attention to his bodice at the moment, while he was shaped like some of the more provocative 3D figures on the shelf; it took longer, but he drew his wand out through his waistband.

“Make sure your time limit is long enough;” his mother reminded him, “wouldn’t want him to poof back in the middle of a convention.”

“Although I’d probably get some interesting attention for that too, wondering how I did it,” Terrance laughed awkwardly.

Barry shook his wand-wrist like he was trying to wake it up.  Just cast what’s in the picture, he tried to hype himself up, don’t think about how he’s picturing you as a cute, magic fairy girl.  He glanced again at the fan paraphernalia around the room.  Costume from the computer screen, until Monday afternoon, he told his wand, and closed his eyes to try to focus, swiping his wrist forward to cast the spell.

He felt magic flow out through his wand and opened his eyes to watch, but instead of enveloping Terry like it was supposed to, magic puffed around Barry’s own outfit.  It shortened his skirt to mid-thigh and decked out an altered version of his uniform with bows and ruffles, especially a giant bow across his chest and another off the back of his waistband, along with long purple gloves and high-rise boots gracing his arms and legs, while his hair also split into extendedly-long pigtails.  Barry was pretty sure the combination was ‘Anime Magical Girl’.

He gasped, appalled, as that had been so very unintended.  Ahh, not that kind of ‘wish fulfillment!’ Barry screamed in his mind.

Terrance was very unable to hide his checking-out now, eyes very wide behind his glasses.  “Wow.  I mean you’d be a hit at the Con!  You look like you walked right out of Sparkle Yukiko the Mirage Mystic!” he observed.

God, kill me now, Barry cringed, looking down again.

“Oh,” Dania said, looking shocked and worried about him.  “It’s okay, sweetheart.  I think you’re just nervous.”

Gee, I wonder why! Barry thought bitterly.

“Just slow down and give it another shot,” his mother tried to soothe.  At his look of stunned refusal, she amended, “You can take a minute to change back first, if you want.”

“Oh, I wasn’t even sure if it was a mistake,” Terry smiled.

“It was,” Barry stated, trying not to clench his teeth.

“Well, a pretty mistake,” Terry said, obviously trying to be encouraging.

Good description for everything about Grape, Barry thought unhappily, feeling his cheeks burning hot.

Dania looked torn between wanting to make Barry feel better, and probably agreeing with Terry’s evaluation of the stupid outfit.

Well he wanted to get the humiliating situation over with.  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, terrified of producing anything more embarrassing, and transformed his uniform back to ‘normal.’  Honestly, it showed more of his cleavage, so he wasn’t sure it was better, but he didn’t want to look fresh out of a prismatic transformation sequence filled with hearts, stars, and catchphrases (even if that wasn’t far from exactly what he went through every time he transformed).

“Okay, just give me a minute,” he pleaded, closing his eyes.

“Of course, honey, take your time,” Dania assured him.

He was so scared on the second try, even after taking multiple minutes to persuade his wand and to picture the character in detail.  But as he opened his eyes after casting, the magic puffed around Terry, to Barry’s tremendous relief.

Terry stood, agape, in a white karate-ish suit, with ridiculously huge spiky shoulders, red magicky-looking necklace and red sandals.  The spell had even spiked his hair.  “Wow!  It’s perfect!” he enthused.  “Better than I pictured!”

“Great job, sweetheart!” Dania encouraged Barry.

Barry released a held breath.  He’d done it; no more mortifying mishaps.

“Have fun at your con, Terry,” Dania smiled at him.  “But be careful!  You trust the friends you’re going with?”

“Uh, yes ma’am,” he nodded, having a hard time pulling his attention away from the costume.  “They’re going to dig the details!”

“Okay,” she tutted, motherly, going to give him a hug.  “Well you look great!  Get a lot of pictures!  I’ll want to see when you get back.”

“Sure will!” he said excitedly, hugging her back tightly.  When he was finished hugging Barry’s mother, he looked down at the teen fairy girl who had given him the outfit.

Do not, do not, Barry begged in his mind, afraid of Terrance going for a hug with him too.

But, mercifully, Terry seemed too shy for that anyway.  “Thanks, Grape!” he said earnestly, however.  “It’s really epic.”

Barry’s head popped up at his fairy name.  He was glad he’d done the spell and helped, but was so done with this awkward situation.  “Sure,” he nodded, trying to smile although it was more like a grimace.  “It looks…”  Barry froze in the middle of the compliment.  Would it sound attracted back if he finished that sentence?  He didn’t mean it that way.  Was he pathetically insecure for being that worried about coming off gay?  Was ‘gay’ even the right word when he was a girl?  Okay, the time this was taking to think through these thoughts was making it much more awkward than if he’d just finished the sentence.  “It turned out good!” he said instead, finally.

Yeah, pretty sure you just came off like a girl who is too embarrassed to call a guy cute, he groaned inside.

“Thanks,” Terry said again, cheeks a little pink.

Yep, totally came off that way.

“See you soon, Terry,” Dania said, grabbing Barry’s hand to deliver him away from his shame.

Terrance waved at them both, giving Grape an extra smile, as they disappeared.

 

“I expected fairy godchildren to be children!” Barry addressed the topic the moment they got back to the house.

“Oh, you mean age-wise?” Dania replied.  “What gave you that idea?  You’re my fairy godson and you’re sixteen.”

“Yeah, but besides the fact that I’m your actual son–” he noticed how that phrase didn’t fit with the sound of his voice, “–basically–” he sighed, “–I’m still only sixteen.  I don’t think I realized you had adult fairy godchildren!  Although I suppose you said he’d been one since he was a kid.”

“He has, but that doesn’t actually matter, love,” she informed him.  “I have quite a few adult godchildren.  I thought you would have gathered that from lesson examples.  Cinderella wasn’t a child.  Godmother to godchild is a role, rather than an actual age relationship.  I used to have several godchildren older than me, although I have less so now,” she explained.

That made sense; honestly, he noticed he’d had conflicting imagery in his brain on the matter, remembering Dania mentioning adults having fairy godmothers before, and yet he’d always pictured her visiting literal children when she’d talk about it.  “So I could get adult men as godsons, as a teenager??” he worried.  He didn’t like at all the idea of being summoned as a curvy little dolly to the homes of male total strangers, with the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to reject their call!

“Technically, you could, yes,” Dania said, “although fairy godchildren aren’t just randomized, honey.”

“They’re not?” he asked, realizing he’d never considered how fairy godchildren were “assigned” to fairy godmothers in the first place, although Dania had always called it that.

She shook her head adamantly.  “These are precious relationships, designated by the Will of Magic.  The Fayemark creates a special bond with our godchildren, and assigns us based on what each person needs.”

“But not everyone has a fairy godmother,” Barry pointed out.  He’d always known that was true, but he’d never thought about why that was the case.

“That’s right.  And we ask our godchildren to keep us secret,” Dania nodded.

Barry supposed he understood that.  Barry’s paternal grandparents still had no idea that fairies existed, and Frank had always seemed very intent on keeping it from them.  And Barry remembered being in preschool and having Dania lovingly, but exasperatedly, explain that he couldn’t tell his classmates that Mommy was a fairy; he remembered too how frustrating it had been that none of them had believed him anyway.

“I think I see why you don’t tell everyone,” Barry mused, rubbing the netting on one side of his skirt between his fingers without really thinking about it.  “It would be a big world-overturner, everyone knowing and believing in magic.  And you’ve talked about how dangerously people tried to use magic in the dark ages and stuff.  But why do some people get fairy godmothers and a lot don’t?  Sounds like most don’t.”

“Well, I mean, firstly, there’s only so many of us,” she reminded him.  “The fairy population is small, and there’s only so much each of us can take on.”

That seemed like an unsatisfying answer.

“But I happen to believe that Magic picks our assignments very carefully,” Dania said.  “Each time I get a new godchild, it feels like Magic paired us up for a reason.  I mean, the first time, it’s always because of a legitimate need.  But then our ongoing relationship is a special, nurturing connection.”

Barry didn’t like that answer for entirely different reasons, and not just because of the ongoing implicit femininity in the role.  “But that doesn’t seem fair.  Aren’t there lots of people who have needs, and don’t have fairy godmothers?”

Dania tapped a red shoe on the floor.  “Barry, are you going to complain about every decision Magic makes?”

“Mom, I’m really asking!” he insisted, voice high and wobbly.

Given that, she took longer considering her answer.  “I don’t think it’s about what’s ‘fair.’  Fairy mother magic isn’t about what’s fair.  Blue is about merit, Yellow is about justice.  Godmother magic isn’t focused on those things; it’s about individuals.  And not just our godchildren as individuals, us as individuals.  We’re assigned to the places where we fit the most to help, that no one else could do quite like we can.”

Barry drummed lengthened fingernails on the back of his other hand, thinking about Nick’s amazement that he, independently from Dania, was able to do magic.  Barry hadn’t thought it really mattered who was doing magic, if it was getting done anyway, but she was talking like maybe it did matter.

“Assignments are personal, and usually fairly local,” Dania was continuing.  “We stand in our spot, and help where we can, in our way.”

Again, Barry didn’t think it counted as ‘in his way’ if he had to be completely reshaped to go on assignments in the first place, but he didn’t comment that.  “Wait, local?” he asked instead.  “But you can port anywhere!”

“Yes,” she affirmed, “fay mothers are usually assigned within a radius of where they live.  I think it’s one factor in what’s made legends about us so localized.  Other types of fairies and fay tend to serve close to home too, so myths about our different varieties are different all over the world, where we’ve lived and belonged.  It’s not just nymphs who are tied to the Earth.  The locations and cultures we come from are unique and special, and it’s good for us to fairy in the places we love.  In a way, we belong to our locations and the people there, like a flower belongs to the region in which it grows.”

It was not a way Barry was used to thinking, growing up in a modern American culture that liked to either homogenize or compare everyone; he’d felt like either everyone was supposed to get an exactly equal serving of lifeless mush, or you could battle it out for who mattered the most, was worth the most, or deserved to have more given to them.  Those all-too-familiar attitudes had rather made him feel like neither the flower nor the soil really mattered very much.

“Everyone has different lives and situations,” Dania said.  “It isn’t ‘fair’ that we have a house, and food, and aren’t under constant bomb threat, like so many people in the world are, right now.  It isn’t ‘fair’ that you have parents that love you, when so many people don’t,” she winked.

Barry’s eyes were big.  He did know that those statements were accurate.  It made him feel petty for making such a big deal of having to wear high heels (even if he still didn’t want to).

“There are so many people who have needs that I could help.  There’s people all over the world who need help, right now.”  Dania nodded gravely, like she was all-too-aware that this was true.  “But I can’t help them all.  Knowing that, I could give up and help no one; just enjoy my life and my magic, for me.  …Or, I can trust the Will of Magic to assign where is best for me to go, even if I don’t know why sometimes.  I can help Patti.  I can help Terrance, and Emily, and Devon, and Heather.  I can help the individuals who I’m best tailored to help.”

Barry released a nervous little breath.  It was all so daunting.  And he wasn’t so sure he ‘trusted’ in a magic that had turned his life so diametrically upside-down from what he’d wanted, to somehow know what was ‘best’ for him, or for the people it would insist he go ‘mother.’

Maybe Dania had been right that there was a consistent physics to magic, but that didn’t mean it could be trusted to make decisions, to go messing with people’s lives.  Just because he enjoyed feeling the magical outlines of objects and space, and just because his magic felt vaguely Barry-ish, didn’t mean that there was truly any rhyme or reason behind ‘assignments’ or him becoming a fairy godmother in the first place.  He didn’t think he believed that magic had a purposeful design, just because Dania believed it.

He’d help if he had to.  Helping people was good, even without some higher purpose pretending that it was a good thing that an uncontrollable force liked to flip your pubes inside out for no understandable reason, against your will.  Learning the laws of gravity didn’t mean you suddenly trusted it with decisions in your life.  If anything, in science, anomalies usually meant that something had gone wrong, and this was no different; his gender-screw powers were a genetic mistake, nothing more.

It didn’t have to be ‘his thing.’  It wasn’t ‘destined’ to be his thing.  Destiny didn’t have to be his thing.

 

That week Barry went on eleven assignments with Dania, and met eleven strangers while wearing a dress.  None of the other spells Dania asked him to help with went as bad as the one with Terrance, but it was a mixed bag of partial successes and partial failures.  There was a nine-year-old boy who reminded Barry of a younger Nick, who was very skeptical about his conjured MegaMorph lunchbox being purple; Dania fixed it.

There was a tomboyish young teenage girl who wanted a shoe repair on a hard-loved pair of athletic shoes, who was not so pleased when Barry fixed the shoes, but also accidentally turned them pale purple with pink details.  Dania nudged that she, personally, would like the new version of the shoes and, out of respect for her fairy godmother’s opinions it seemed, the girl decided to give them a try.

But food spells went pretty well: pancakes, mashed potatoes, and a salad, for three different godchildren.  (Who asks their fairy godmother for a salad?! Barry questioned this decision.)  And when a small goddaughter of Dania’s asked for her babydoll to be rocked so that she, as the babydoll’s mommy, could go take her nap, Barry did melt inside a bit, and did very well at animating the toy crib for an hour like Dania asked him to.

Dania tried to make a lesson out of every visit, for both the godchild and the apprenticing godmother, even if it was something as simple as “Sometimes it’s good to try new styles!  You don’t want to get boxed in” (about the sneakers), or “Sometimes mommies need nap times too” (to the little napper).  The lessons for Barry tended to be things more like “Honey, take thirty seconds to get a feel for the situation; they’ll wait, I promise,” or “Sometimes people just want a salad; I don’t think that’s a waste of a wish.”

He was trying to learn everything he could though, since the idea of facing any of these situations alone, even with the little kids, was fairly terrifying.

 

Dania didn’t make him apprentice over the weekend, for which Barry was very grateful.  Instead, Frank required the boys to help him with maintenance projects around the house.  Nick was fairly scared of heights, so always asked not to be assigned to go on the roof and help Frank with the gutters, but Barry didn’t mind heights too badly, even though being on the roof in mid-July was baking hot.  Barry and his dad had some nice small-talk while digging leaves from the troughs.

But every time Barry would peer over the side of the roof, he’d think of how it’d feel to jump off with wings, and have his will catch him and help him sail on the breeze.  Or he’d wonder if he could jump into a portal spell off one side of the roof, and have it warp him to the other side of the roof, or safely onto the ground.  But Barry wasn’t keen on letting his dad know he was daydreaming about fairy things, even if it was the least-girly elements of his magic, so he was quick to abandon the thoughts whenever Frank would strike up a conversation about something else.

Nick was raking up the leaves and sticks as they dropped them off the roof, and Barry was pleased to aim well enough to successfully hit Nick on the head with a handful of wet leaves, winning sounds of incomprehensible disgruntled indignation in his general direction, to which Barry just smiled down at his little brother.

 

But his mother woke him up on the early side that next Monday, saying that godchildren tended to call her earlier on Mondays, and she’d like him to be ready.  He felt bleary, but at least Nick wasn’t up and around yet, so when Dania got called just a few minutes after he was done with his cereal, Nick wasn’t there to witness his Grape-up.

Dania seemed subdued as she powered-up.  “She feels pretty upset,” she commented, seeming to feel the summoner.  “Thanks for changing fast,” she gave Barry’s hand a squeeze, before porting them to their new location.

This call was another adult godchild, this one the oldest Barry had visited yet, although she was probably just in her mid-thirties.  She looked pretty underneath her haggard.

She didn’t pay a lot of attention to Barry in her distress, except that she seemed embarrassed to have an additional person there in her messy apartment.  The situation was too rushed for Dania to even introduce them to each other this time.  There was a young child screaming in tantrum in the next room, outside her shut bedroom door.

“Dayspark, I just can’t today!”  The woman was on the verge of crying.  “Wes and I got in a huge fight this morning, and I just can’t get the kids to settle.  And the cat got fleas again, and they’re biting the kids.  And I just can’t keep up with the house to clean everything and…”  She finally lost it and started sobbing, shoulders shaking.

“Okay, okay, Emily,” Dania soothed, going and putting her arms around her.  “It’s going to be okay.  Next time you call me sooner, alright?”

Emily cried in Dania’s arms.  “I didn’t want to… if I can’t do it without a fairy godmother… what if I’m a terrible wife and mom?!”

“Shh, shh, shh, don’t even say that!” Dania shook her long crimson hair.  “You don’t have to feel ashamed for needing help.  Everyone needs help sometimes.  And it’s my job, okay?”

Emily moaned exhaustedly.

Barry cared a lot, but honestly felt very scared of the whole situation.  It all felt very adult and tense, and what if being a fairy godmother suddenly shoved him into loaded situations like this?!  He didn’t know how to help with domestic disputes and frustrated childcare!

“Here’s what we’re going to do:” Dania said calmly, caring but obviously a seasoned pro at stuff like this, “Wish for a soothing calm.  I’m going to place a short-term spell on you to calm your nerves, okay?  And then Grape and I–” she motioned to him and his fairy name drew his attention, “–are going to clean the apartment and calm the kids.  And we’ll even see with an official wish if I can get rid of the fleas, okay?”

The goddaughter took a stuttery breath.  “Okay.”

It took longer than the other assignments they’d been on, but gradually by degrees, things improved around the stressed little apartment.  Emily wished for and was granted an emotion-spell to calm her panic.  Dania and Barry ventured out into the main room, where the twin toddler boys were, one of them screaming.  Dania asked Barry to pick up the upset one, which he did very nervously; the tantruming child kicked Barry in the crotch, and he was unnerved by how little it hurt compared to how it usually would.  He tried to bounce the boy up and down to soothe him, which only sorta worked.  He also found that girl-hips were like baby shelves, and it kept the kid from descending from his hold, which was helpful, although the child felt pretty big in Barry’s shrunken arms.

Meanwhile, Dania went to work cleaning the apartment with magic, things flying around this way and that.  She helped fold laundry and clean the bathroom, and automated the cleaning of the dishes, all with magic.  And with an official wish from Emily, Dania cast deep red sparks in a burst across the whole apartment, to theoretically remove all the fleas.  Barry rather wondered if Dania had killed them, or if there were suddenly a bunch of fleas in the Fayemark or something.

An older child, maybe four years old, came out of a second bedroom, probably in response to the sparks flying in.  He looked scared.  Barry wondered if they’d seen their mother’s fairy godmother before.  Dania was being really blatant this time, he thought.

The toddler in the teen’s arms was not having it anymore and Barry had to put him down.

Dania was still hustling around the apartment, but off-handedly remarked, “Why don’t you conjure him a toy or something?”

“Right!” Barry realized, flustered, still not used to using magic for these things.

“That one is Gabe,” the older brother informed Barry, since the twins were identical.  “He likes my aliens the best.”  The preschooler dashed into the bedroom for a second and re-emerged with a pair of plush aliens, made to look like a male and female, the female alien with heart-shaped eyes and long lashes.  He extended them to his tantruming brother, who started to calm at the favored objects.  “There, Gabey, that’s better, huh?”

Barry was shockingly relieved at the simple kind action of a little older brother, working more efficiently than magic probably would have.  It reminded Barry of being a similar age himself when Nick was a toddler, and wanting so badly to help make the younger boy happy and help his mommy.  He hoped he had been remotely as good of an older brother as this boy seemed to be.

Barry awkwardly plopped to Grape’s bum on the carpet by the three boys.  The non-crying twin blinked wide eyes at him, a snot bubble coming in and out of his nose like a bullfrog throat.

“What do you guys like pretending, with the aliens?” Barry invited, having played quite a bit of space-pretend over the years, himself. 

“We’re space rangers!” the older brother declared.  “They’re cadets, and I’m the space captain!”

Barry grinned, relating to his enthusiasm and making himself the leader in pretend.  He’d tended to be a little bit bossy in pretending with Nick, even if he’d often let his other friends make decisions when they’d play together.

“And we shoot all the bad guy aliens!” the kid said, pointing his bright orange gun at imaginary enemies.  “But these aliens are nice and we protect them!”  He pointed to the toys that the Gabe-twin was holding.

“Cool!” Barry enthused.  “Can I play?” he asked, wanting to help keep them occupied while his mom was busy helping theirs.

The boy looked confused and scratched his eye.  “Yeah…” he hesitated.  “Are you really a fairy?”

Barry squirmed, feeling awkward about it, even with little kids.  “Yeah,” he admitted.

The preschool boy considered that.  “Okay.  You can be the pretty alien princess.”

Great, Barry laughed wearily to himself.  This was not a role he was used to playing in pretend.  “Okay,” he sighed, “tell me what to do.”

So for the next half-hour while Dania finished cleaning their home and soothing their mother, Barry played space princess for the three little sons of her goddaughter.  He was protected from the evil aliens who wanted to “get” him, by the noble little space knight.  He was told a few times that he should “act scared,” and Barry indulged the kid with a few very convincing damsel-in-distress noises.  But when the boy said authoritatively that Barry should get behind him because girls were scared in space, Barry was unamused.  He decided to claim his wand was a gun, said the alien princess knew how to use a blaster, and shot harmless purple sparks at the make-believe enemy, to the boy’s amazement.

“We did it, Princess!” the kid arbitrarily decided after a while.  “We took down their whole base!”

“Yay!” Barry cheered with him, despite the title.  “Great job!” 

“We couldn’t have done it without the help of the cadets!” he declared, trying to pick up one of the twins, who were close to as big as he was, and had mostly gotten into stuff the whole game.  “Hey, can I show you my room?” he changed trains of thought as quickly as four-year-olds were known to do.

But Dania and Emily were coming out of the master bedroom with wrapping-up body language, the apartment looking completely different now in its cleanliness.

“Uh, I might be going home,” Barry told him gently.

“Ah man,” the boy pouted.

“See, I told you we’d take care of it!” Dania was concluding.

“I can’t thank you enough!” Emily was crying with relief, hugging Dania.  She looked apologetically embarrassed over at Barry.  “Both of you.”

Barry nodded diffidently.  He was glad it had been helpful, and her boys were sweet.  He’d reluctantly been having a bit of fun, even though he’d been cast as the helpless alien girl.  He got wobbily to his feet, straightening his floof.  “Bye guys.  Thanks for letting me play,” he told the boys.

The preschooler seemed very disappointed he was leaving.  “Since you went on that mission with us, Princess, you’re ready to be a space cadet too!”

Barry gave him a doleful smile.  “Thanks for the honor, Captain,” he saluted.

The boy gave him an attempted salute back.

As Barry faced the women, he realized they were watching the exchange affectionately.

“Your daughter’s great with kids,” Emily told Dania.

Barry blushed.

“I know,” Dania said proudly.  “I keep telling her that she’s ready to godmother too.”

That statement made Barry grumpy and distracted again, as Dania finished goodbyes and they ported away.

“Thank you so much, Baz,” his mother said gratefully once they were home.  “Your help made a huge difference to Emily, in addition to mine.  And it freed me up to make a big difference!”

As he reflected on it, Barry was uncomfortable with what Dania had done in the apartment.  “You changed the situation so much!” he remarked in awe.

“Yeah, I hope so,” Dania smiled.

“But I…  That’s going to affect their lives, and her husband is going to notice and wonder what happened!  You’re not allowed to change that much, right?!” Barry worried.

“Where is that written?!” Dania debated.  “What would be the point if I never really changed anything?”

“I… yeah.”  That made sense.  “But is it really allowed to change the status quo like that?!”

“There’s not a ‘Prime Directive’ when it comes to fairy mothering, Barry,” she referenced Star Trek.  “What, would you rather just warp in and look pretty?” she gave him a wry smile.

“No!” he protested instantly.  What had he expected?  “…I don’t know,” he said in a small voice.  “I guess I just always got the idea that magic was for little stuff.  That’s how you always talked about it in our lives.”

Dania’s expression grew troubled.  “I didn’t realize I’d made magic seem unimportant.  I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Not unimportant,” he corrected, because he didn’t think that was the impression he’d gotten over the years, “just supposed to keep to itself, I guess.”

“Baz, you were the one who said not doing everything we can as fairies is ‘heartless,’” she reminded him.

Barry fell quiet and worried.  The past few weeks had rather changed which sides of the argument they were on, Barry having gone from thinking “Why don’t you just be good with magic?” and simultaneously thinking Dania was exaggerating how much responsibility it took, to Barry being terrified how magic could be used maliciously, and not wanting magic to be able to affect very much in the real world.

“Fairy mothering takes a lot of problem solving and mature judgment.  Every situation is going to be different!  There aren’t necessarily ‘always/never’ statements, because people need different things at different times.  That’s why it’s so important for the fairy to be ready to handle what comes,” she said.

“But Mom!” Barry cried, pressurized emotions finally bursting out of him in a shrill, panicked girl voice.  “You’ve given me a grand total of less than four weeks to get ready for this!  How the crap am I supposed to be ready to be a frickin’ fairy godmother already?!  I can’t do the spells!  I don’t know how to solve grown-up problems!  I’m not even okay pretending to be a girl!  I can’t be trusted with something I don’t even want!!”  He blinked back frustrated, overwhelmed emotion, feeling the breeze around the room as his wings beat furiously.

Dania’s expression told him she was taking his worries seriously.  She came and took his non-wand hand in both of hers.  “Barry Franklin Anderson,” she said, much more gently than when she usually full-named him, “you may have only known you were a fairy for less than a month now, but I have been teaching you how to be a man your whole life.”

Barry snorted with bitter irony at her putting it that way, eyes starting to swim more unstoppably, feeling like a ‘man’ was the furthest thing from what life was letting him become.

“I know you, and you have the skills, integrity, and maturity to be a powerful and needed fairy godmother.  It doesn’t matter that you’re new to being a fairy or a girl,” she said passionately.  “You are prepared to be a good mini-adult.  Okay?”

This had not been what Barry had wanted when he was excited to be becoming an adult, trusted with manly responsibilities.  Sixteen was so not turning out to be what it was cracked up to be.

“This is your cross to bear, honey,” Dania told him seriously.  “You were picked by Magic.  Not your friends, or Nick, as much as you know I love him just as much as I love you!”  She looked probingly into his eyes.  “Not even your dad.”

Barry’s stomach did unexpected flips at that statement.

“And not even me,” she smiled more softly.  “These are going to be your godchildren, not mine, assigned to you!  Only you can carry this ring to Mount Doom, my love.”

His mouth twisted up, reluctantly liking the Lord of the Rings reference.  Although if Frodo repeatedly had to turn into a hobbit lass for some reason, it’d be a dumb book, he thought.

“Now I see why everyone was mad at Gandalf all the time, always coming with things they didn’t want to hear,” he told her with a pointed sigh.

She beamed at being compared to the literary wizard.  “Well sometimes my sweet hobbits need a little nudge out of the door.”

 

“I believe you’re ready for your Mionn a Draíocht today,” Dania said on Tuesday morning, as soon as Barry powered-up.

“What’s that?” he asked, thinking it sounded like some kind of dragon meeting.  But he was pretty sure dragons were extinct (or at least highly endangered).

“So when a fairy is ready to start going on assignments, they need to declare to Magic that their time has come,” she said, more serious than she often was during their lessons.  “From what I gather, Magic would eventually call upon you either way, but declaring yourself to Magic both lets the Fayemark know it can call upon you, so it’ll begin assigning you, and it’ll sort of affirm your magical signature.”

“‘Affirm your magical signature?’” Barry repeated anxiously.

She nodded.  “It’s hard to explain, but you’ll know it when you feel it.”  She considered.  “Here, let’s have you read about it from the book.”  They were in her bedroom again, and the Compendium of Fae was just in the next room, but she summoned it to herself anyway.  Something about her demeanor on the topic told him that she considered this more private than even his more embarrassing training days.

She flipped to the spot she wanted quickly.  Through his lessons, Barry had come to see that she really didn’t need to reference the book in order to know how her magic worked, and in turn his.  She just liked the pretty, flowery explanations better than her own, and so liked to use it to convey the emotions that she felt like her own words couldn’t.

She handed him the large tome and pointed to where she wanted him to read.  He didn’t argue with reading aloud this time, although he was back to feeling rather doomed about it all.

“‘A privilege reserved for Magic’s Daughters, the Mionn a Draíocht is a young fairy mother’s day to come of age and bloom into womanhood.’”  Barry couldn’t help but give her an unamused look at that phrase, to which Dania shrugged like it was what it was.  “‘As she declares her preparedness to serve as one of the fées marr–’”  He stumbled over the unknown pronunciation.

Dania nodded.  “‘Fées marraines,’” she pronounced it correctly for him.  “It’s just ‘fairy godmothers’ in French.”

“‘–as one of the fées marraines,’” he repeated and continued, “‘along with her true name of fae, she bonds with the Fayemark and is left forever changed.  Tír nAill welcomes her into its bosom as its daughter, and as its serving mother, nursemaid to its babes.  Her magical signature affirmed, the Fayemark shall call upon her to venture forth as a Wish Maiden.’”

Barry frowned.  It sounded so permanent.  And girly.  While somehow managing to stay super vague about the whole thing.  “What if I don’t want to be ‘forever changed?’” he asked.

Dania gave him a long, thoughtful look.  “It just means that it’s special, Baz.  But you’re ready for this, I can tell.”

“It’s not going to get me stuck powered-up or anything, right?” he double-checked warily.  That seemed like the kind of thing magic might try to sneak in the back door, against what he wanted.

“No, honey,” she said firmly.  “Every fairy mother before you, including every glitter baby, has undergone this ritual.  And every glitter baby powers-up and down between female and male.”

“Okay,” he grumbled, feeling fairly resigned to the whole thing.  “So what does the ‘ritual’ entail?  I’ve done very few ‘rituals’ up to this point, and I wasn’t really aiming to.”

“It’s really very simple,” Dania said.  “You just point your wand in the air, and declare your possession of your fairy name.”

“How do I do that?” he questioned.

“Usually you say, ‘I am…’ in my case, Dayspark,” she explained.

He looked flatly at her.  “I hold my wand in the air and declare ‘I am Grape’?”

“Yep,” she agreed.

His flat look continued.  “That doesn’t belong in a Saturday morning girls’ cartoon?”

Dania sighed.  “Baz, I don’t know if there’s much about being a fairy godmother that doesn’t.”

“Fair enough,” he grumbled.

“I think that’s all you need to know,” she said, taking the book back from him and waiting.

He got his wand out.  “So I just put it in the air?  Does it matter if I use one hand or two?” he checked.

“One hand is fine,” Dania nodded him onward.

He couldn’t believe he was doing this, getting ready to do a girly version of some He-Man ritual, owning a name as dumb as “Grape,” while telling Magic he was ready to godmother or whatever.  He tugged up one of his shoulder wisps, although it wasn’t as if they really held anything on anyway.  I guess, let’s do this, he muttered in his mind to his wand. 

It felt awkward sticking his right arm up in the air, like being a know-it-all kid waving a pencil at the teacher to be noticed (not that Barry had entirely avoided being a know-it-all kid over the years).  He thought about how this would look to an outside observer, the boy-turned-purple-girl, standing there in his sparkly, curvy top and billowy little skirt, wand aloft like he was trying to be a magical lightning rod.

“Baz,” Dania said gently, because he still hadn’t said anything, “just do it.”

Barry swallowed uncomfortably, both out of nervousness, and because he was about to make a declaration in a still-foreign voice.  Despite the ridiculous nature of what he was about to do, he wanted to do it well, and have his diminutive vocal chords carry enough gravity.

Finally, he just opened his mouth, and watched his wand’s heaven-bound tip.  “I am Grape!” he declared, in as firm a female voice as he could muster.

Barry wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it was certain he’d expected it from outside of him.  And, yes, he was vaguely aware that that was happening also; as with his initial power-up, his body was lifted up into the air by his own color-characterized magic, in a huge, sparkly burst.  But that seemed inconsequential, compared to what occurred inside of Grape the Fairy Godmother.

 

His mind was carried away, off like a rocket traveling at top speed, utterly out of his control, past Fayemark clouds and colors that kept changing like a hallucinogen kaleidoscope.  It was terrifying at first, like an endless freefall into open space, but as it propelled his mind onward, there were patterns to it.

There were circles and wheels, a cohesiveness to the churn and the chaos.  It was like he felt his pupils dilate to see a whole new universe: suns, stars, and planets swirling in eternal rotations around his head.  His eyes swam with the beauty of it.  Magic touched it all, knew it all, incorporated it all, in every turn.  It was all connected and woven together, like a tapestry of sky-matter, from the tiniest atom to the largest supercluster, strings of power twirling it all in motion.  It was the most exquisite dance, which had been pirouetting throughout all the eons, bound together by magnetic forces caused by power and beauty and love.

And then, from what felt like a million miles away, the vision before him suddenly zoomed back in on a tiny speck in the center, a small purple dot in the middle of an endless cosmos… and the speck was him.  It zoomed further until he was human-sized–fairy-sized–before his own view.

He was instantly transparent in his mind’s eye, both visually and emotionally, nothing about him obscured from Magic’s gaze.  It was hard to tell if Magic saw him as a boy or a girl.  There were elements of both his home and powered-up forms.  The masculinity and solidity were there, but somehow so also was the soft, rounded, open elegance, radiating from his core.  Through Magic’s eye, he saw amethyst light emanating forth from his beingness.  It was prettier than he would have expected, not dissimilar from the nebulaic light all about him.

It felt like his wand.  Like his wand was all through him.  Like, in truth, he was the wand, the stick merely a shadow of the tender, sweet light radiating from his very heart.

And there he was, in context of the whole, of a power that coursed not just through the Other Place, but throughout the fully tangible galaxy and off into the endless stars.

Magic loved him.  He felt it with sudden force, communicated directly into his heart.  It saw him as Its child.  It trusted him and wanted him to hold Its Land within his fingertips, to glow with a piece of Its immortal kingdom, to shine as a benevolent little ambassador of everything bright, beautiful, and good.

He felt like a precious infant held within Its arms, and It wanted him to pass on that devotion, to help others to feel as cradled as he was now.

They were out there, those entrusted into his care, the ones he was to nurture, protect, uplift.  His godchildren.  They were out there in the world, right now, and Magic conveyed their collective significance.  He was to be a beacon they could call on.  He was to give them hope and make them feel safe.  He was to help them become themselves (whatever that meant).

He saw the violet beams, which burst forth from the figure that was him, shooting out like purple threads, weaving together people and time, hopes and dreams.  He was a core gossamer strand in Magic’s aeternitas cloth.  All the strings together made a full and complete picture, but without his piece, it would have a little hole.

His self formed what looked, to his mind’s eye, like a purple rose, starting with a small, budded core, and then spiraling out into a logarithmic golden spiral of petals, which then flared out cosmically, endlessly one with the spiral of galactic arms, Fibonacci-ing off past the stars, with no limit; no end.

The rose-shaped spiral staircase of perpetuity, which was somehow himself, was filled and infused with Magic itself, swelling through his person, charging up like a violet Roman candle, power exploding forth from his every extremity, his every fingertip and toe electrified with St. Elmo’s Fire.  It lit up his head like an eternal tiara, a halo of ultraviolet light.  Even his eyes burned like their blue could be measured in Kelvin.

His hour had come.  Grape, the forever piece of Magic’s sky, couldn’t be stopped or altered.  Magic’s child, a fractal rose of light, a stitch in the design, Its messenger; it was time.

With one final explosion of power, It electrified his whole, and sent him back to Earth.

 

As his mind came back to the present of his mother’s bedroom, Barry had no idea how much time had passed, and couldn’t have said if it was a matter of seconds or eons, although he figured it was more likely a few minutes.  He also found that his eyes and cheeks were drenched, and as his magic put him back down on the floor, he sponged at them with slender little fingers.

He felt too astonished to even be very embarrassed about the tears.  He blinked at Dayspark… er, Dania… his mom.  Her expression was tender and proud.

“‘My god, it’s full of stars,’” he quoted, eyes still feeling saucer-wide.  “If I think of what a Dave Bowman experience that was, maybe the title ‘glitter baby’ isn’t so ridiculous.”

Dania laughed, knowing the sci-fi movie reference.  She came over and took his hands.  He held hers tightly, still feeling jarred.

“It’s pretty incredible, huh?” she smiled gently.

He sniffed and swallowed.  “Yeah,” he said quietly.

“How are we feeling about being a fairy godmother now?” she asked softly.

It took him a moment to answer.  “Chosen… and trusted.  And a little overwhelmed,” he admitted.

Dania nodded understandingly.  “Overwhelmed is okay.”

He stared off at nothing.  “It… It knows me!”

She put a loving hand on the side of his face, which made him look into her bright blue eyes again.  “Yes,” she affirmed.

He felt all the emotions again, of Magic speaking to his heart, and he blinked quickly.  “I don’t know if I’m going to be any good at being a ‘handmaiden,’” he laughed with weary irony, “but I’m sure gonna try.  I don’t want to let It down!”

Dania looked teary now as well.  “Aww, sweetheart,” she cooed, hugging him tight.  He clung back to her, even though his softness hadn’t stopped being weird.  “That’s my boy!”

He snorted with irony, leaning his purple curls on her shoulder.

“Magic may have claimed you as a daughter, but I am so proud to have you as my son!” she declared.

Barry accidentally released a sob, feeling desperate to make both his mother, and Magic, proud of the boy he was, despite a forced hourglass.

Dania squeezed him, then pulled back to look at his face.  Now he was embarrassed that the valve on his waterworks seemed jammed.

“Grape,” she said fondly, and the title didn’t feel discordant; it just belonged to him, “you are fully, and officially a fairy godmother now.”

He nodded silently, feeling it.  No going back now.

“Now you’re ready to be assigned, to very special godchildren of your very own,” she smiled.  “And fhios ag Titania, you’re going to do great!”

He was still feeling really terrified of the godchild part, to be honest, but Magic had impressed upon him the gravity of taking care of them.  “Thanks, Mom,” he said quietly.

“Now you want to power-down and have some lunch?” she smiled.

“Yes!” he declared, shockingly hungry after that emotionally upheaving experience.  “Holy crap, what I’d do for a cheeseburger right now.”

 

The next couple of days were weirdly uneventful and quiet.  Dania gave Barry a couple of follow-up lessons of things she remembered he might need to know, but she was basically acting like his training was completed now.  He was a fairy godmother, officially; her main work was done, it seemed.

“That’s all?” he asked on Wednesday, when she finished explaining that they had to be so careful when it came to recording or photographing magic, or even taking photographs while powered-up, and that it was typically a big no-no for secrecy, one that could land you in big trouble with the Fairy Council and Magical Law Enforcement (MLE), so for the most part it was better to just stay away from.

“Yeah,” Dania shrugged.  “Just don’t record magic, in most scenarios.”

Barry still couldn’t picture a scenario in which he’d want photographic evidence of himself being a girl, so this didn’t seem like a problem.  But he’d meant it as a more meta question; he didn’t know what to expect from here on out.  She hadn’t even had him power-up for the lesson.   “No, I meant, ‘now what?’” he asked, as she seemed finished.

“Now you wait for assignments,” she smiled.  “You’ll feel it when it calls.”

So Barry waited, going back to his usual summer routine.  He felt very confusingly both back to normal, and “forever changed.”  He mowed more lawns and ate more sandwiches, but he also thought about destiny and dachaigh spells, godchildren and what it meant to be “Grape.”

 

That Friday, the day before his first-month-anniversary of receiving his powers, Barry felt very distracted.  Not that being distracted was exactly uncommon for Barry, but this was more than usual.

His wand was loud that day, as he finally finished organizing the garage.  He did think repeatedly that the task would probably be easier with magic; he was getting better at levitating stuff, and could probably figure out how to automate a broom for a little while.  But he wasn’t comfortable bopping around the garage in a tutu, and that would have precluded him from opening the garage door at all.  Besides, he hardly wanted Frank to come home and find him doing his chores that way.

But while he sorted through boxes of tools and cans of paint, dusty toys and Christmas decor, the wand and the Fayemark kept thrumming in the back of his mind.  The wand had been a lot less distracting in the last few weeks, since he’d begun powering-up on a regular basis, like it didn’t need to nag him if it got to touch him often enough.  Although the wand was never out of his awareness, it had just fallen to a quiet constant hum most of the time, which was becoming more comforting over the last month.  But it wouldn’t leave him alone that day, a feeling in the constant peripheral vision of his mind.

Part of him wanted to talk to it like Lassie: “What is it, girl?  Did Timmy fall down the well and get boobs?”  What was it trying to say to him?  It felt almost ominously like something was coming.

He had alerted Magic that he was ready to godmother (as unready as he still felt), so it seemed likely it was just gearing up to send him on his first assignment of his own?  Then again, it wasn’t like he knew what was “likely” when it came to magic.

Barry finished in the garage just after five o’clock, and surveyed his work proudly and tiredly.  Things were labeled and on shelves, and the entire second car-space was clear so Dania’s red sedan had a home again.

Between the money his dad would pay him for this task, and the large chunk from Granny Fleetfoot, he was well on his way to getting a car of his very own.  Just a few more weeks of odd jobs, assuming he could maintain his discipline about fun money.

He thought idly about Dania paying him for dress-up, and how well-paying that had been.  Nope, he dismissed the thought quickly; just because he was a fairy godmother didn’t mean he couldn’t keep dress-up to a minimum.  Even on assignment, he determined, whenever that came; he could get in, get out, minimal embarrassment needed.  Just because he had to wear a skirt didn’t mean he couldn’t keep these things to business.

He went and pulled Dania’s car in, closing the garage behind it.  He schemed proudly to not tell his parents that he’d finished, just let them be pleased when they saw his good work, and went inside and up to his room.

It was a fend-for-yourself evening, as far as food was concerned.  Dania cooked so often there were plenty of leftovers corralled in the fridge, and Friday was commonly date-night for Frank and Dania.  So Barry was looking forward to a whole evening spent alone in his room, venturing down to the kitchen later whenever he got hungry.

He settled in at his computer and went back to reading the online physics magazine he liked.

There was the wand, itching at him.  It seemed to be growing louder, not quieter.

“What?!” he muttered aloud, as if it were a person in the room.  “Stop that!”

But it kept up its Moirai little tune.

It was not only irritating, but a little scary as well.  It made him feel like something tremendous and unknown was coming for him.  Sometimes lately, intermixed with his extreme overwhelm and humiliation, here and there he’d come to feel like he could handle being a fairy, even when he disliked it so much.  And then his Mionn a Draíocht had made it feel like at least he was loved and safe about it.  But this feeling seemed to invert all that.  It felt huge and unnerving, like the Fayemark was watching him like a bug crawling across the pavement.  It was such an uncontrolled experience.

He huddled down into his reading, not sure what to do besides wait it out.

Barry glanced at the computer clock around 5:45; had he really been reading for less than an hour?  He was resting his head on his hand, tucked into himself, feeling like his wand was a little kid kicking the back of his seat repeatedly on an airplane during turbulence.

He sat back in his chair and sighed.  Maybe he should get some food or–

Suddenly there was the strangest sensation, a weird sort of yank from inside and outside of him at the same time.  It felt like his tummy was made of taffy and something had begun to pull it.  It wanted him to transform, and to go somewhere!

This was it, he realized:  His first call, his first assignment!

There was an interesting sort of scent to the magic.  He hadn’t known that a feeling could have a “smell.”  It somehow evoked memories of both a crisp, fresh morning breeze, right after dawn, and a sweet and slightly tart hard candy.

He was so nervous, but didn’t really have time to dwell on it as the magic yanked hard!  He popped up to his feet out of his computer chair, magic wobbling his insides like gelatin in an earthquake.  His body wanted to reorganize, to become a boobed conduit of purple light, a candle of spirit and energy, ready to grant wishes.

It had an urgency not unlike sneezing or going to the bathroom, building up as he fumbled for his wand.  But as he grasped his wand from the Fayemark, it felt like it trilled in his hand, excited to be a part of something.

He let it go and it exploded forth with purple mist, seeming anxious to transform him, which it did on the quick side.  As his wings emerged, the tension in his body was largely relieved, but there was still the yank from the beyond, the candied dawn calling him.

Barry was nervous about trying to port to the right place via summons, and what he’d find on the other side, but he recalled Dania’s words:  “Just let it bring you to their side.  The magic knows where to go.”

He could feel a person there, on the other side of the call.  His magic wanted to go to them, he just had to let it.  He let in the place where the assignment was taking him and used his wand to cut a large purple wheel in the space beside him.

The magic he produced was only minimally purposeful still, but he still felt some control flowing through him as he passed from the full world that contained his bedroom, through the blobby, gaseous non-world of the Fayemark, and back into the world-world again.

He couldn’t see where he was at first, there was too much purple light around, but he could tell he wasn’t on the ground, so he flapped his wings a bit to keep from dropping.  As his light receded, he saw he was in a bedroom, lit by a small warm lamp of its own.  There wasn’t a lot on the walls, just a movie poster and a shelf with knick knacks on it.  The bedspread was a pale green, and on it sat a girl.

She was a teenager, and she was crying.  Suddenly, she glanced around at the purple light still illuminating her room.  Her gaze followed the light back to the floating figure and she gasped.

“Um, hi,” he smiled, landing lightly on her carpet.

She just blinked at him with wide, hazel eyes, looking totally bewildered about why someone was suddenly standing in her room in the midst of her crying.

He supposed he should explain before she got more scared.  “I’m… Grape, “ he said, the first time he’d ever introduced himself that way.  “I’m your fairy godmother.”

She sat up straighter, rubbing her eyes as if he were an optical illusion caused by tears.  “Fairy…?” she stammered with a sniff.  “I didn’t even know fairies were real.”

Despite his previous observation that his interest in girls was painfully minimized while as Grape, this girl was pretty enough that he could tell normal-Barry would think she was very cute.  She had strawberry blonde hair, a round, sweet face and full, pretty hips.  She was wearing a marigold color t-shirt, with a retro smiley-face flower on it, and shorts with a rolled hem, which brought nice emphasis to the thickness of her soft, smooth thighs.  As it was, his Grape-eyes still very much enjoyed looking at her.

“Uh, yeah, they are,” he nodded, realizing he should have asked more questions about how to explain this part, suddenly regretting blowing off Dania’s offer to roleplay the scenario.  “We are, I guess.  Um, but don’t tell anyone, okay?  It’s secret and stuff.”  That sounded sort of dumb, he realized.  This wasn’t at all like he’d pictured this going, however this girl wasn’t at all whom he’d pictured as his fairy clientele.  Honestly, he’d pictured a lot of awkward, clingy people who just couldn’t deal with life by themselves.

“You seem way too young to be a ‘godmother’ to anybody though,” she questioned, seeming more curious than skeptical.

“I’m more like a ‘fairy godsister,’ I guess,” he smiled.

She smiled at that too.  “How old are you?” she asked.

“Sixteen,” he admitted.  “I just got my powers for my birthday, actually.”

“Wow, really?” she cried, excited all of a sudden.  “So you’re my age, basically.  I turn sixteen in the fall!”

“Wow, yeah,” he agreed, trying not to let his thoughts drift to the convenience of them being the same age, since she was so very cute.  He tried to get back onto task.  “So, why were you crying?”

“Oh,” she looked embarrassed, “I’m just new here and I toured my new school today and I’m just scared because I don’t know anyone or have any friends.”

She was a lonely damsel in distress…  He gulped.

“I’m sure someone like you doesn’t have a hard time making friends though,” he encouraged.

She sniffed, face growing downtrodden again.  “You’d think I’d be used to it by now,” she laughed sadly, “but I never really know how to start talking to people.  I’ve moved a lot in the last few years, and I rarely know how to make friends.  But we’re supposed to be here the rest of my time in high school and I want to have close friends!”

She needed a friend.  He tried not to let his gears turn about using her predicament to his social advantage with her.  She was in a vulnerable state, and was already trusting him so easily; he would be a cad to try and use that situation to get close to her, right?

“Which school?” he asked, trying to keep himself focused.

“Athens Grove High School,” she replied.

“That’s…” he started, beaming.  But he couldn’t tell her it was his school, not without it coming up that he was really a boy who went to her school.  “I, uh, some of my other fairy ‘godchildren,’” he put the term in air quotes, “go there!”

“Really?” she said.  “But you don’t, right?”

He wished so badly that he could tell her.

“Um, no, I go to a private fairy school.”  He knew those existed, even if thankfully his mother had no desire to send him away to one.

“Oh, right, that makes sense,” she nodded sadly.  “I mean I’ve never seen anyone with wings at my schools before.”

“I don’t have them all the time,” he admitted, before considering it might be a bad idea.  “I have a normal form too.  Like I said, I just got my powers.”

“Right!  You said that!  So did you not know you were a fairy before?”  She had very large eyes.

That was a tricky question though.  He was trying to lie to her as little as possible.  “Well, my mom is a fairy godmother too, so I always grew up knowing about magic.  It passes from mother to oldest daughter,” he explained, leaving out that it occasionally passed from mother to son, and the fact that he had not known he was going to get magic before his birthday.

“Oh man, I have so many questions!” she exclaimed.  “So you have like a secret identity?  Like a superhero?!”

She was making this whole fairy godmother thing seem way cooler than he’d ever thought.  “Yeah, I guess,” he laughed, “kinda.”

“Right,” she realized, “I didn’t tell you my non-secret identity.  I’m Helena.”

“Helena,” his mouth traced the sound happily.

“And you said your name is ‘Grape,’ like the fruit?” she asked, trying to process that.

“Like the fruit,” he nodded humorlessly, remembering Nick’s euphemistic digs about fruit.

“Do you grant wishes?” she asked.  “Is that what a fairy godmother really does??”

“Yeah,” he nodded, hoping he remembered his training well enough.  “As far as I understand, I can’t do everything, like if you wish to have a different person’s life or something, I can’t do that.  And I can’t make other people into fairies or anything.”  He was pretty sure Dania had mentioned other limitations, but it had been rather vague as to the rules.

“Aw, bummer,” she smiled, like she wasn’t serious, but liked the idea of suddenly turning into a fairy.

If only they could trade that aspect of their lives, he thought dryly.  He’d give her his faydom in a heartbeat.

“But fairy godmothers are especially known for transformation and wardrobe magic, and helping situations go more smoothly, via magic.  Giving people the tools they need to change their own lives for the better.”

Helena “oooh”d at that, and Barry was surprisingly proud of putting it that way; that description didn’t sound ridiculously girly.

“And you grant wishes to do that?” she inquired further and Barry realized he hadn’t answered her original question very well.

“Oh, yeah,” he replied.  “We can do magic even without wishes, but they say a wish from our fairy godchild makes a spell much more powerful, as our wills unite.”  That sounded oddly romantic from his point of view, imagining their two wills united, and he cleared his throat shyly.

“Wow…” she sighed in amazement.  “I wish we could be friends.”

Barry felt an oddly official tug of her making a wish; it flowed into him from the Fayemark and felt the way her summons had ‘smelled.’   “That’s your wish?!” he was shocked.

She nodded emphatically.

“But I don’t even have to do magic for that,” he said, confused.  “I just have to… be friends.”

“Really?  You would like to be friends?” she replied, touched and apparently awed.

“Yeah,” he said, like it was fairly obvious, feeling like spending more time with her had fallen into his lap a little too easily.  “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she seemed surprised too.  “You have a magical, important job to do, and I’m just like… me.”

“I don’t have tons of friends either,” he shrugged, realizing uncomfortably that he had to hide this part of his life from the friends he did have.

She laughed.  “Then it’s not just little old me.”

He shook his head, hair shaking around his face.

She watched it.  “Is your hair always that pretty purple color?”

He felt embarrassed again.  It was one thing for her to think of him like a superhero… quite another to admire Grape’s girly attributes.  “Not normally, no.  It comes with powering-up.  So I guess you could say it is my natural-magic color, heh.”  His laugh was annoyingly pixie-ish at the moment.

“Can I touch it?” she asked, obviously embarrassed too, to be requesting it.

He felt his cheeks warm, wings drawing back shyly.  “I guess so.”

“Here, sit,” she offered, patting the bed beside her.

Barry swallowed, very aware that he was about to sit on a girl’s bed, and suddenly that much more aware that he’d been in her bedroom the whole time.  He sat down beside her, his skirt settling on her bedspread, feeling like it was an oddly intimate moment.  He smiled bashfully, leaning forward so she could reach his hair.

She touched it cautiously at first, but quickly adapted to running her fingers through his ringlets.  “Aw,” she sighed, “it’s like doll hair!  It’s so silky!”

“Thanks,” he blushed, not really sure it was his compliment to accept, and feeling fairly silly about it anyway.

“Is your hair usually like this, the texture and everything, I mean?” she asked, curling it around her pointer finger.

He just shook his head, heart thudding in an exciting, twisty sort of way.

She played with it a little more, then brightened.  “Can you make it longer?  Magically?”

He was caught off guard.  “I don’t know… probably.”

“I was just thinking it would be really fun to try it in a long, purple braid!” she explained, so cheerful and sweet that he thought he might burst.

“Okay,” he agreed immediately, “I’ll try.”  He tried to imagine what she wanted.  “How long?”

She grinned.  “Down past your waist?”

He nodded.  Picturing himself as Grape was still an awkward prospect, but he pulled out his wand and flicked it at his own head again, picturing a long river of lavender coming from his head.  As a warm rush of magic spilled down his back, Helena’s face grew little-girl bubbly.

“Holy crap!” she exclaimed.  “It’s like purple princess hair!!”

“Heh,” Barry laughed very nervously, feelings mixed between happy to have made that look on her face, and mortified that it was by living up to her fairy princess dreams.

“Can I braid it?!” she hiccupped.  “I’m good at braiding!”

He suppressed a sigh.  Who was he kidding; there was no way he was going to tell her ‘no’ at this point.  He nodded.

“Have you tried all the hairstyles ever?  Can you do that with outfits??” she drilled him.  “Can you do that with my hair?!”

“Um, not really; yes, but it’s harder for me, and yes, but not permanently,” he answered the questions in a row.  “Most spells have a time limit.”

“Wow,” she intoned again.  She immediately reached for his hair, but her touch was gentle, despite her enthusiasm.  She parted his tresses into thirds with ease, even with the absurd length, her motions unintentionally massaging his head in the process.

“I’ll have to think about what it’d be fun to try on my hair, if you don’t mind letting me experiment,” she said, and he just shook his head again, not trusting himself to speak in his flush.  “Keep your head still,” she teased.

He did so, but struggled to keep his wings from betraying the somersaults in his tummy.

Before his birthday, he’d never had hair past his chin, and even close to chin-length had been very rare.  He’d certainly never had hair down past his waist before, and her soft, tender hands entwining his locks together brought unimagined degrees of vulnerable relaxation.  He closed his eyes, feeling overwhelmed by how lovely and safe her presence felt.

“Um,” he decided to venture some conversation, afraid of becoming too putty-like between her reassuring hands, “so, where did you move from?”

“Michigan, last,” she answered, “but we only lived there for a year.  It was Wisconsin before that, and Alabama when I was in elementary school.”

“Is your dad in the military?” Barry asked curiously.

“Nope,” Helena shrugged.  “He’s a factory operations consultant.  Fascinating stuff.”  She winked.

Barry almost mentioned his dad being an accountant, but thought better of it, not wanting to give her too many identifying details about his family, since she was going to be at his school.

“My parents both work, and now I’m old enough to take care of myself and since I don’t have any brothers or sisters, I’m alone a lot,” she shrugged.  “Especially while it’s still summer.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her.  That sounded lonely, as an only child with both parents gone all the time.  It made Barry grateful to have Nick… well, almost anyway.

“It’s okay,” she grinned at him, “I have a friend now!”

He laughed at the sweet little girlishness of her statement.

“I mean, assuming you still want to be friends,” she said self-consciously.  “You can still back out, you know!”

“No,” he shook his head, sure he’d wake up from dreaming about her any moment now, “I’m in if you are.”

She just bobbed her head once, pleased.  “There!” she declared triumphantly, slipping the hair tie off her wrist and onto the end of his elephant-trunk-length braid.  She placed it carefully over his bare shoulder so he could behold his own purple plait.  “That was fun, and it looks so elegant on you!”

He ran a small hand over it, impressed by how evenly spaced she’d made each weave.  And she’d turned something that would otherwise feel embarrassing and stupid to Barry, into a reverent sort of experience.  “Thank you,” he said, feeling his cheeks very warm.

“Thanks for letting me play with your magical hair!” she laughed.

“Talking to you about being a fairy is a lot more fun than just being a fairy on my own,” he told her, bewildered by how accurate that statement was.

She looked immediately relieved that she wasn’t getting on his nerves.  “Here, stand up, so I can see!” she instructed, returning the braid between his wings so it hung down his back.

He felt a little flustered doing so, but he stood and turned away from her so she could see the fruits of her labor.  The bottom of the braid came down so far, it brushed his Grape bum through his skirt (not that it was such a difficult feat when he was this short).

“It’s so pretty and purple,” she bubbled over.

Barry glanced back at her face, full of girlish wonder, and wanted to top off her excitement.  “Here, look…”   He had put down his wand at some point, so he had to summon it back via one of his bodice cups, back still to Helena.  Wand in hand, disbelieving he was doing it of his own free will, he shot a spray of magic tumbling over the braid, where he’d told it to leave an enchanted trail of petite violets, woven throughout his hair.

She gasped ecstatically, and he assumed it had worked.  “Holy cow, I’m friends with a fairy!” she breathed.

He didn’t know what to say.  Somehow she was making this fairy curse that life had given him into something special and exciting.  Maybe even hopeful.

Helena stood up, eyes still alight.  He faced her and realized for the first time, now she was standing, that he was a few inches shorter than her except for the tips of his wings…even with Grape’s high heels on.  He tried not to frown at this discovery, looking up into her face.

“Can I give you a hug?” she grinned.

His eyes felt very wide.  He just nodded.

She grabbed and squeezed him, wrapping him in a sisterly hug, arms just under his armpits.  Barry was so glad she couldn’t see his face, having never been hugged by a girl that way before.  Their softness squished against each other.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she declared, releasing him.

He hoped the extreme flush was fading from his cheeks, but he highly doubted it.

“I’m totally squishing your wings, aren’t I?” she worried.

…Yeah, that was what was getting squished.

“No, they’re okay,” he said aloud, moving them gently to demonstrate.

She watched them in awe.

They fluttered more rapidly as he watched her, the beating of his wings matching his heartbeat.

“I guess I should let you go,” she smiled, looking embarrassed.  “This is all just so cool!”

He smiled too.  She thought it was cool.  She thought him being a fairy was cool!  Everything about her felt like a sunrise after a very tiring night.  “Well, you can call me back, when you want to.”

“Really?” she asked.  “I can just call for you and you’ll appear again??”

“Yeah, um, here,” he said.  He realized he’d dropped his wand again, while distracted by her hug.  He fussed around with the waistband of his skirt and extracted it back into the world.

She gaped again at him, as it appeared out of nowhere.

Barry flicked it at his hand, imagining a piece of paper with the summoning rhyme on it.  There was a little stream of violet sparks, and then a paper did appear.  He hadn’t intended it to be purple, which of course it was, but the inscription looked correct when he glanced at it.  As he went to hand it to her, he noticed it shimmered in the light (also unintended), and he thought he smelled a fragrance of fruit and flowers wafting from the small scrap of iridescent cardstock (definitely not intended).  He ignored these features and handed it to her.

“You just have to wish for me with this little rhyme, and I’ll feel it and come,” he smiled.  “I’m supposed to add that I have a life too, so don’t call me all the time… but,” he flushed a bit, “I don’t mind if you call me a lot.”

She held the paper like she was afraid it would fly away, her smile making her cheeks pop.  “I just say this, and you’ll hear me?”

“Well, I’ll feel it summoning me,” he nodded.  “I won’t be able to literally hear you, but I’ll feel you calling.”

“Okay,” she smiled softly at him.  “Can I call you tomorrow, or is that too soon?”

“Yes!” he declared, bursting out too enthusiastically in his hopefulness and she laughed.  “I mean, I’m free to hang out tomorrow, if you want to.”

“Awesome!  I’ll give you a ‘call,’” she held up her piece of paper excitedly.

“Okay,” he echoed dumbly, too pleased to know what else to say.  He supposed that was his cue to go.  “I’ll see you tomorrow then!”

“Bye, friend!” Helena said happily.

“Bye,” he agreed, dazed, giving her a wave with a little hand.

It wasn’t hard to feel his return destination at home, and he cut his way through the Fayemark, watching Helena’s adorable face as he left.

 

The amethyst light had long evaporated from Barry’s bedroom, but he still just stood there, unable to comprehend what had just happened.  He pulled his long braid back around his shoulder, witnessing her gentle affection, mingled with his handiwork of tiny flowers.  And there, on the end, was her hair tie.

It came off the end of the braid easily, letting the hair unravel as he dropped it, but he held the small black elastic band lovingly, like she’d given him a valentine.   He put his thin Grape fingers in the center, and stretched it in and out fondly.  A present, from his lovely, adorable, sweet new friend.  And she was going to call him again, tomorrow!

He set the hair tie reverently on his desk, wanting to be sure it remained even when he transformed, and he watched it as he did so.

So Barry Anderson powered-down, returning to his native maleness.  But for the first time ever, he had a reason to look forward to powering-up.  And she was incredible.

 

2 – Lessons      Barry Home      3 – Sons and Daughters – Extras