1 – Birthday      Barry Home      3 – Sons and Daughters

2 – Lessons – Extras

2

Lessons

 

No man ever steps in the same river twice.
For it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

– Heraclitus [Translated from original Greek]

And since we know that dreams are dead
And life turns plans upon their head
I will plan to be a bum
So I just might become someone!

– twenty one pilots, House of Gold

 

Barry woke up grumpy, although he didn’t immediately remember why.  Something about his birthday, and bad dreams about fairies and breasts…

His eyes flew open and he threw off the covers to look at his body.  The air rushed out of him as he saw it was normal.  He was himself, and male and not sparkly or magical or any of that!  He was still bleary; had it been a dream?  It had felt too real, and yet so surreal at the same time.

He checked his phone.  It was the day after his birthday.  That was certainly a strike against hoping it had all just been some kind of pre-birthday anxiety dream.

Yeah, the more he thought about it, the more he seemed to remember about the day before.  He groaned in frustration shoving his face back into the pillow, wishing he could go back to a week ago, where everything was normal, and he didn’t have a fairy name, and he’d never experienced having wings, or a wand… or girl body parts.  Life hadn’t been perfect, but he’d had a handle on it!

Wait, he thought, sitting up.  He’d felt something… when he’d listed his wand in his mind.  There it was again.  It felt like when you could tell someone was looking at you.  Or when you were a kid and would spin around with your eyes closed, but could still tell when you got close to the furniture.  It was like a spacial awareness, but for something not even in the room.  Like being able to feel your toes… if they weren’t attached to your feet.

What had he done with his wand the day before?  He’d clung to it intensely, all morning long, as it felt like his one way home to his maleness, his ruby slippers back from a nightmarish Oz.  Eh, he didn’t like that the metaphor he’d thought of involved high heels.  He’d used the wand to power-down, obviously, but then he had wanted to forget the whole thing, as much as humanly possible.  He hadn’t had much success; despite a birthday evening of cake and video games, nothing had been able to fully distract him from feeling like the future that his birthday had been supposed to represent, was instead being yanked from his grasp.

Anyway, he’d set it down somewhere; probably on his computer desk, beside the mirror where he’d watched himself power-down?  He didn’t see it over there.  There was the awareness sensation again, but it was hard to place.

Where did his mother’s wand go when she powered-down, he wondered.  He knew she didn’t keep it in her purse or anything, and yet it was always handy when she needed to power-up.  It was one of those things he was sure she’d explained over the years, like all fairy logistics.  But none of it had felt pertinent, to be honest, prior to getting sucked off a barstool by magic, and being forced into a bodice, corset, thing.  (He wasn’t sure what to call it.)

When she would power-down, she’d usually stick her wand in her pocket, or even in her sleeve, where it would just sort of vanish, he recalled, in very similar fashion to when she’d warp away somewhere, via magic.  She’d teleported him places before—it was one of the best things about her powers—but it’d been a long time.  There was some fairy name for the place where a fairy went, when they teleported.  He vaguely remembered being taught that was where objects came and went from, when his mom made them appear and disappear, but the whole thing felt like trying to remember chemistry vocabulary in the middle of summer break.

He tried picturing the wand, the wood stained with low-saturation soft purple.  As he did, he felt it yet again, a tinkling bell in the back of his mind, tied to the wand.  He closed his eyes, so intrigued despite himself, honing in on the feeling.  He knew where it was… the wand.  It felt distant, in a place outside of regular space and time; a misty, pink sort of place.  But the wand itself felt so tangible, ready and waiting for him.  It was like he could grab it, from the marbled sherbet clouds it drifted amongst, and it was even hopeful he would.

It just needed an avenue, a pathway, into his hand.  Clothing?  He wasn’t sure how he knew that if he reached into his clothes somewhere, it would work as a conduit to pull his wand from that strange other place where he could sense it, but that seemed to be what it was telling him.

Not really believing it would work, Barry reached into the sleeve of his sleep t-shirt, willing the wand to him.  He was completely shocked when he felt his fingertips wrap around the thin rod, which he extracted into reality.  Definitely not a dream, he thought, gaping at the purple stick in his hand.  Such a strange, tangible tie to the whole world which was now a part of his life, whether he wanted it to be or not.

There was a knock on one of his doors, and Barry dropped the wand in surprise.  “Um,” he said aloud, looking down to where he’d dropped the wand, but not finding it on the bedspread where it should have been.  He rifled through the covers briefly, but couldn’t find it anywhere.  He sensed it back where he’d pulled it from, that not-place.  Weird.  “Yeah?” he finally called to the knocker.

The door opened to the bathroom that connected his room and Nick’s, Jack-and-Jill style, and Nick looked at him in bed.

“What?” Barry asked when Nick didn’t say anything.

“I’m just kinda surprised not to find you wearing a nightgown or something, ‘Grape,’” Nick replied with a smirk.

Apparently there was no question in Nick’s mind if the day before had really occurred.

“What do you want, Nick?” Barry asked flatly.

“Mom said if we’re going to get to my soccer practice on time, we should get to the DMV soon, in case it takes a while, and so you’re not rushed doing the drivers’ course.”

Right, his license, Barry realized.  It was surreal in its own way that he’d forgotten.  It’d been the only thing on his mind when he’d woken up the day before.  “Okay.  I gotta shower, but I should be ready in like half an hour or so.”

“I don’t know why you even need a license anymore,” Nick poked further, “now you can just become a pretty little butterfly at will.”

“I don’t know why you need a brain, you don’t get very much use out of that,” Barry retaliated.  He didn’t think it was an especially good comeback, but it was the most obvious one and he was too tired for anything clever, this morning.

Nick glared at him, and Barry was surprised his childish insult had been remotely effective.  “She also said she made more bacon that you can eat on your way out.”

Barry appreciated that thoughtfulness from Dania, and wondered if his mom was trying to make up for the roughness of his birthday morning.

“Although, you can always leave it for me,” Nick left him with a final taunt while closing the door, using a mocking sing-song, “y’know, if you’re watching your girlish figure.”

 

Barry buckled his seatbelt and checked the car’s mirrors, before turning the key in the ignition.  Hopefully, if his test went well this afternoon, he’d be able to do this without his mother in the passenger seat.  And without Nick in the back, which would be a welcome relief.

“You’re going to do great on the test, honey,” Dania smiled, watching him go through the routine.  “You’ve been such a fast learner with your permit.  You’re a really great driver now.”

He gave her a tired but genuine smile.  “Thanks Mom.”  He put the car in reverse, and turned to look out the back windshield, backing the car out of the driveway, and then started off in the direction she’d pointed the GPS.

“Makes me excited to start magic lessons with you!” she beamed.  “I bet you’ll be such a good student!”

Barry glowered at the road, and fussed with the air conditioning.  Maybe if he didn’t reply, she’d stop talking about it.

“It’s good you have a summer birthday,” she went on anyway, “because it’d be harder to take time out for lessons, if you were back in school.”

Barry noticed he was accelerating the car in agitation, and purposefully slowed down.  Stuff like that wouldn’t fly with a test proctor in the passenger seat.

“This way, we can have a lesson almost every day, and you can learn to use your powers really quickly!” she enthused.

Barry exhaled frustratedly, glancing at Nick in the rearview mirror.  His brother was obviously paying close attention, while pretending to be casual about it.

“Mom, I don’t even want to be a fairy,” Barry said tightly.  “I certainly don’t want to spend every day of the rest of my summer break learning to be a fairy.”

He could tell she was hurt by his ongoing attitude about it.  “Think of it in lieu of a summer job, Baz,” she tried.

“I’d rather have a summer job,” he said.  “I’d get paid for that, and I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have to do it in heels.”

Nick snorted from the backseat and Barry regretted handing him ammo for mocking him.

“I know the uniform is uncomfortable for you, sweetheart,” Dania said, trying to be understanding, “but you’ll get used to it.”

‘Used to’ wearing a tutu and heels was something he definitely didn’t want to become.

“Then, won’t it be cool learning magic?” she smiled hopefully at him.  “Sky’s the limit!”

He didn’t answer, under the pretense of focusing on where the GPS was saying to turn.

“I’ll teach you about the ins and outs of wish granting, and time limits, and summoning etiquette and…” she listed off her lesson plan with excitement.

Feeling like he was gonna pop, Barry pushed the radio button in the middle of her speaking, and a current rock song played over the car speakers.  He looked at the traffic across the median, ignoring her gaze that was obviously on him.

“Subtle, Baz,” Nick commented sarcastically from the back.

Dania sighed at her older son.  “You can blow me off for now,” she said, and he glanced at her determined blue eyes, “but Monday is your first fairy godmother lesson, and that’s final.”

 

True to his birthday wish, the DMV wasn’t crowded, and the driving test went well, as Dania had predicted.  Barry came to full-and-complete stops, over-checked his mirrors, and even did okay on parallel parking.  His driver’s license picture was awkward looking, but better than the one on his permit from a year before, so at least it was an improvement.  As they went back out to the car, Barry looked thoughtfully down at the card with his photo and full name, which he’d longed for since he’d been a preteen.  He should have been elated, but he just… wasn’t.

“Baz, look at me!” Dania caught his attention.

He looked up in surprise, in time for her to snap a photo of him on her phone.

“Gotta get a pic of our new racer,” she beamed.  She checked the image.  “Oh, it’s a cute one.  Honey, you’re looking so grown-up.”

Despite himself, he leaned in to look.  He almost wondered if they were looking at the same picture.  The teenager in the photo looked stunned, and not just because his mother was catching him candidly.  He looked like someone who had been shown a vision of the awful fate of the universe, and wasn’t happy about it.

They got back into the car and Barry sat thoughtfully for a moment, as Dania talked to Nick about the logistics of his soccer practice.  He flipped his license over in his hand, pulling out his wallet to stick it inside.

He’d anticipated the personalized piece of plastic he now held, as the symbol of so many things: of freedom to go anywhere he wanted and do anything he wanted, of control over his own destiny, and maybe most of all, as a rite of passage into manhood.  But becoming a fairy, it seemed, negated each of those things, to the point that he had no idea what lay in store, and felt like a driver’s license barely dented his hopelessness.  Magic had taken all control and destiny from him, stripped him of freedom, and made part of him irreversibly female on a whim.

So much for rites of passage.

 

For the next two and a half days, things were fairly back to normal, and Barry was almost able to forget about the whole fairy thing.  Almost.

Normal summer activities resumed.  Barry had gotten a new racing video game for his birthday, so he played it some on his own, and some with Nick.  Barry mowed the lawn and emptied the dishwasher.  He did a little bit of his required summer reading for school.  He ate multiple sandwiches.  He didn’t have a problem with having an “average” life with average things in it.

But there were a couple times, while Barry was nearby, that Dania was summoned by her fairy godchildren.  That wasn’t unusual for the Anderson household.  All his life, Barry had frequently watched his mother get a far away look in her eye, smile, and inform her family she had a “call” she had to take.  Since her immediate family knew her secret, she would typically just power-up wherever she was, before zapping away through a burst of crimson light.

The weekend after his birthday, she didn’t bring attention to her fairy summons, nor did she prod Barry about it.  He just happened to be around, or walk in the room several times when she was called away.  He didn’t want to think about it, but he really couldn’t resist watching more attentively than before; now that he had felt himself power-up; now that he knew his fate was tied to magic.

Likewise, his wand proved itself loud, making his fayhood more difficult to forget.  It reminded him of a silly little girl, humming nonsense tunes in the back of his mind.  It seemed oddly, inanimately affectionate toward him, which was strange considering how much he didn’t reciprocate the feeling.

Since it was distracting him anyway, Barry did experiment a few more times with the wand over the weekend.  He wasn’t in a hurry to try magic, but it was interesting and intriguing being able to pull a piece of wood out of his sleeve, like a rabbit out of a hat.  And even more fascinating was how when it dropped and hit the ground, it would just vanish!  Not just the ground; when it fell and hit any solid that wasn’t his own hand, it seemed.

He knew his mother would be overjoyed to answer his questions about where the wand went when it left his presence, and why, but he was trying to minimize her enthusiasm about him being a fairy, as much as he could.

And the third and most frustrating reason he couldn’t forget that he was suddenly a fairy, was because Nick refused to forget he’d suddenly become a fairy.

Barry didn’t know what Dania had said when she’d given Nick his talking-to, but it had reduced his comments about Barry’s condition… while their parents were around.  When it was just Barry and Nick alone, the topic was still fair game, it seemed.  And Barry was not about to go bring up the topic with Dania, and risk another impassioned argument about why being a fairy was good for him.

It wasn’t as constant as it had been the first day with Nick, especially since Barry was powered-down, and back to his normal larger brother size and shape.  It was just little digs here and there over the weekend.

When a very pink evening TV commercial came on advertising some silly sparkly fashion doll, Nick looked over immediately at him.  “Maybe they have big girl sizes of the same outfit!” Nick said in a mock-excited voice.  “You can hope!  Although you can probably just make your own with magic now anyway.”  Barry had the remote and changed the channel abruptly, glowering.

When Barry kicked his brother’s butt in a round of virtual racing, Nick muttered, “I guess girls can be good at video games after all.”  Which, Barry hoped Nick was only joking when it came to real girls, and didn’t actually believe that girls couldn’t be good at video games, because that was just dumb, in Barry’s opinion.  But it probably attested to how thoroughly Barry had beaten him, so that was gratifying.

And then, when one of Nick’s chores on Saturday was bringing down all the dirty laundry and putting everyone’s clean laundry in their rooms, he discovered a new way to poke at Barry, who came to find Dania’s bra on the top of his laundry pile.  He tried to deprive Nick of the satisfaction of knowing how much it bothered him, by silently putting the strange garment back where it belonged (trying not to notice that it probably wouldn’t have fit his Grape shape anyway).

But objects continued to appear over the rest of Saturday and Sunday.  Purple nail polish on his bedside table, a tube of lipstick by his side of the double sink he and Nick shared, a tampon in his backpack.

Barry knew if he complained to his mom, she’d put a stop to it (and probably be quite grumpy that Nick kept pilfering her very personal items in order to sneakily get to his brother), but Barry didn’t want the conversations that would accompany such tattling.  Bringing it up with her would mean facing his own feelings about being associated with girlness and feminine objects, and he didn’t know how he felt about the topic, other than “upset and displeased.”

Lastly, on Monday morning, Nick was back at the kitchen island when Barry came in, eating the brand of cereal so sugar-encrusted that Nick was the only one in the family who could stand it.

Barry went about making himself a bagel with butter and cinnamon instead, not paying a lot of attention to Nick as he did; this was fairly customary, although he felt Nick watching him, which granted wasn’t unusual either.

After Barry had gotten some orange juice and finished dressing his toasted bagel, he stood across the island from Nick, and bit into it without sitting down.  If he was being honest, he intentionally hadn’t sat on his most-frequented barstool since his birthday morning, the memories of getting forcefully removed from it still too fresh and unnerving at the moment.

“Where’s Mom?” Barry wondered aloud.

Nick looked meaningfully at him.  “She’s out on assignment.”  It was the more official term Dania used for being fairy-summoned by a godchild.

Barry did not like the direction this was headed, if Nick was trying to spur the conversation toward Dania’s assignments, in relation to him.

Barry just nodded, drinking his juice with a forced air of casualness.

Nick hardly paused before taking the conversation that way.  “Soon that’ll be you out there!” he said with mock-adoration.  “Widdle sparkle-baby granting wishes, all by herself!!”

Barry didn’t know which bothered him the most: that Nick was making him think about his future as a fairy, that he’d blatantly just called him a female pronoun, or that he’d done it all in a condescending baby voice again.

Barry pretended his breakfast was the most fascinating thing ever, willfully staring at the reddish specks of spice sprinkled on the buttered bread-product, and biting into it again.

When he had no rejoinder, Nick just poked farther.  “Mom gets called all the time.  You’ll probably get to be a mommy-princess every single day!”

Barry had used a paper towel as a napkin, and he crushed it up in his palm, trying not to let Nick know how well the goading was working.  He finished drinking his orange juice, trying to finish eating and exit the kitchen as soon as possible.

“I’m surprised you went for the orange juice,” Nick changed tack, which was suspicious.  Barry continued to act like he was ignoring him.  “When you know we have grape juice right?”

It was completely involuntary.  Barry might as well have heard a scream or a siren, with the speed that his head came up, at his “name” being mentioned.

“Ha!” Nick gloried in his discovery.  “It does work when you’re less sparkly!  And even when it’s not, like, as a name!”

This was news to Barry too; horrific news, if Nick knew this weakness.

“We’ll have to put grape popsicles on the grocery list for Mom to get, and grape candy.  Remember the grape cold medicine we took as kids?” Nick said in quick succession, and Barry was unable to stop reacting like someone was calling to him.

“Leave me alone, you little bug smear!” Barry burst out finally, tempted to put his dishes in the sink so hard that they’d shatter, but he just clanked them loudly in there instead.

Nick looked almost relieved to have poked hard enough to get Barry to say something.  He gave his older brother a satisfied smirk.  “Sure thing, your Grapeness.”

 

Barry was fed up, and holed up in his room for a few hours, trying to avoid encountering anything related to magic, or wands, or fairy godmothers, or femininity, or his infuriating little brother.

But the knock on his bedroom door came too soon, in the early afternoon.  It was either Dania or Nick, he knew, since Frank was at work, but Barry didn’t particularly want to answer the door for either of those options.

When he delayed replying, Dania’s voice came through the door, “Barry, honey, are you awake in there?”

“Yeah,” he admitted reluctantly, sitting right by the door at his desk.

“Can I come in?” she asked gently.

“Sure,” he sighed resignedly.  He hadn’t forgotten her proclamation that today would be his first fairy godmother lesson.  He assumed that was why she had come.

She leaned into his room and considered his dour expression thoughtfully.  “Come on, grumpy.  It’s time.”

“Time?” he played dumb, with the last ditch hope she meant something else.

“For your first magic lesson,” she nodded.  “We’ll have more space to spread out in my room.” 

He knew he wasn’t getting out of it, but he still moved very slowly to follow her, clicking out of the tab he had open on his desktop, and slowly getting up with a sigh.

“Can we skip the funeral dirge please, Baz?” she teased him dryly.

“I didn’t say anything,” he pointed out.

She smiled wryly at him.  “Indeed.  I’m sorry, you are the picture of cooperation.”

Despite feeling a bit like he was going to face a gender firing squad, Barry liked his mother teasing him; it made the whole thing feel less sinister and more casual.

He followed her down to her room, where she pushed the door mostly shut, pulled her wand out and immediately started to power-up.

“Alright,” she said, smiling, not distracted by her clothes transforming, “time for your first power-up on your own!”

Barry didn’t move.  “Oh, I just thought you could tell me what to do and I could take notes for later, maybe have you demonstrate so I can see stuff in action.”

She gave him a look similar to when he was trying to delay his homework for video games.  “It won’t be the same as you trying things yourself.  There are a lot of things that just won’t make sense unless you can feel the magic working inside you!”

Barry grumbled inwardly.  He had been hoping to “power-up” as infrequently as possible.  “Could we do it later or something?”

“Barry Franklin Anderson, you are not going to put this off any longer!  You are going to get called out on your own assignments, probably in a matter of weeks, and you don’t know word one about being a fairy godmother!”  She wasn’t about to take no for an answer.

He moped there quietly for a moment, trying to think of anything else he could pull and coming up short. 

“Baz,” she took his hand and got him to look at her, “one thing you can’t magically do, is make yourself not a fairy godmother.  I’m sorry you’re upset about it, but it’s time to face the music.  I want you to be prepared so you don’t get hurt.”

He kicked at the carpet with one foot, resignedly.  “Hurt?” he asked.  Embarrassed beyond decency, maybe, but hurt?

“You’re going to be going out there as a young, attractive,–”

His mouth contorted.

“–doe-eyed, noob of a fairy godmother,” she said frankly.  “If you’re not careful, people will milk your magic for all it’s worth.  You’ll promise things you shouldn’t, change things for people who need to learn from their mistakes… there are so many ways for a young fairy to be manipulated into doing something she… or he, I guess, shouldn’t.”

“Really?” he asked, scared by that description.

She nodded sagely.

As if he wasn’t worried enough about his new predicament, that sounded positively terrifying to Barry.  “Okay, okay, fine,” he relented.

“Good,” she said, relieved.  “Now, your wand will have returned to the Fayemark, after you powered-down on your birthday.”

The Fayemark!  That was what that weird floaty place was called!  Now that she said it, he remembered the word.

He felt the wand there again, and noticed what a large place it was, although in many ways it was without physical space or boundaries.  He absently reached for the wand in his denim shorts pocket.

“If you just imagine your wand, you should be able to feel it magically, there in the Fayemark.  Wrap your will around it, and bring it to you,” Dania was continuing.  “Can you feel it?”

But Barry already had the wand in his hand.  “Oh, uh yeah,” he said, showing her.

Dania’s now-red eyebrows shot up in surprise.  “You already figured out how to call it?!”

“Uh, yeah, I guess?  It was being annoying, so I played around with grabbing it, the past couple of days,” he shrugged, surprised it was a big deal.

“Annoying?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he nodded, feeling oddly shy describing the awareness of his wand.  “On Friday I started noticing it when I thought about the wand.”  He wasn’t comfortable calling it his wand out loud.  “It’s like it’s always there, wanting me to grab it.  So I kinda felt where it was and grabbed it?  I dunno.”

Dania was still looking like she didn’t know what to do with this information.  “If I remember right, it was months before I was everaware of the Fayemark.  That seems really impressive, honey.”

That was a compliment about him doing magic.  Barry wasn’t sure how to respond to that.  He decided to ask more about the Fayemark instead.  “It feels weird in there.  Like falling up or something.”

She smiled.  “That’s a good description.  ‘Tír nAill,’ or ‘The Other Land’ the Celts called it.  It’s been called the Fayemark for a few hundred years.  It’s where all fay magic comes from.  Really all being a fairy is, is being able to access and tap into that other place.”

That was a cooler explanation than Barry had been ready for.  He fiddled with the wand in his hand, her description making him feel a little bit like it could be a sword instead of a lollipop.

“Okay, but you ready now?” she grinned.

He frowned; the manly part of magic was over now.  “Do I do the same thing as when I powered-down, just backwards?” he asked curtly.

“Essentially, yes,” she said.  “Powering-up is the most basic of fay mother spells, without a lot of control involved, so I don’t think you’ll have a problem.  Especially if you’ve been communicating with your wand already.”

Barry wasn’t fond of her describing his wand-summoning experiments as if he’d been having a secret tryst with the thing.  But he concentrated on getting it to do what he wanted again.  Because it made focusing easier, he closed his eyes again, nudging the thrumming inside the wood with his consciousness.  Power-up? he asked it, hesitantly.

The feeling clicked again, and he opened his eyes as the wand rose and hovered there in the air.  He watched it with the feeling of going over a roller coaster drop, as it came and swarmed him again, in purple mist.

It changed him much faster than the first time, rotating around his body quickly from his shoes up, and it didn’t feel the need to lift him off the ground.  In a spray of magic purple glitter, Grape’s high heels and thin legs appeared, followed by his mini ballgown and the discomfiting sensation of his maleness flipping inside of him.  As the magic nipped in his middle and formed and filled out his bodice, he naturally arched his arms up over his head, letting them stretch up and thin out.

His mother beamed.  “I love the addition of the ballerina arms!  They really add to the flair of your transformation!”

Barry was in the middle of being splashed in the face with magic, but he still managed a glare.  Finally his lavender tresses settled around his bare shoulders, he felt his vocal chords constrict, and his wings popped out of his back.

“That’s not why I did it!” he insisted when it was finished, voice much lighter and rounder than his usual, though no less grumpy.  “It was just less uncomfortable to get out of its way.”

“Ah, you mean if your arms are out of the way of your chest coming in,” Dania nodded perceptively.

Barry squirmed, folding his arms over said chest.  “Are we going to learn some magic, or are you going to discuss my chest all day?”

“With the size of it, I’m surprised anyone can discuss anything else while you’re in Fairy-Princess-mode,” Nick burst through the cracked door into their parents’ bedroom, tone jeering, eyeing Barry’s transformation.

“Get out, moron!” Barry yelled, frustrated again with how whiny and girlish his voice sounded.  “See Mom?!  This is why I didn’t want to do this!”

“Nicholai Robert, go take out the garbage, right now!” their mother insisted, shoving her second son back toward the open door.

“Maybe if I go dance around in a tutu, Mom will let me skip out on chores too,” Nick taunted Barry over his shoulder, before allowing himself to be shunted out the door.

She closed it behind him and turned to face her oldest usually-son.

Barry could feel that his expression was pouty, his fuller-than-normal lower lip sticking out.

“I’ll have a discussion with him later,” Dania reassured him, “but for now you can’t let him get to you.”

“He’s been constantly ragging on me all weekend!” Barry moaned.  “This sucks for me, why is he being a buttface about it?!”

Dania glanced in the direction of the door, thinking.  “Honestly,” she said quietly, “I think he might be jealous that his already very cool older brother got magical powers for his birthday.”

“That’s dumb!  I hate this!” Barry declared, though the idea of his brother finding him worthy of jealousy was flattering.  “What is there to be jealous of?!”

“Baz,” his mother sighed patiently, “most people think magic powers are pretty cool, even if it means a little occasional shapeshifting.”

“A ‘little’ shapeshifting seems to be in the eye of the beholder,” Barry groused, looking down at his full bust.  “No chance of pawning this whole thing off on him, is there?  It would still fulfill the whole generational stupidity.”

Dania smiled sadly at him.  “Oldest grandson, I’m afraid, if there isn’t a granddaughter available.”

“I’ve never hated being the oldest child so much in my life,” he grumbled.

“Are you ready for some training, finally?” she nudged.

Barry looked at the door with disdain, nervous of Nick coming back and heckling him again.

“You wanna go somewhere else?” she asked, understandingly.

“I don’t want to go out anywhere like this!” Barry cried, suddenly realizing how much more embarrassing that would be than just having his younger brother bother him about being in girl-mode.

She laughed.  “Don’t worry, I know a place where we can work by ourselves.”  She held out a hand to him.  “C’mon.”

He took it tentatively, not used to having smaller hands than hers.  From her wand extruded a wide wheel of scarlet fire, a round red doorway into elsewhere, which she pulled Barry through.  It was swift, and not entirely unfamiliar.  But unlike transporting as a child, this time in between their origin and their destination, Barry caught a glimpse of the otherworld, which they used as a connector between the two.  Like he’d felt while sensing his wand, it was bright, and pastel and endlessly vast, and warm like his mother’s magic.  It was only a split second, but just that whirl of color and light left him reeling.

But then they were back on solid ground, and suddenly he was blinking in the bright sunshine of a warm summer beach.  There were palm trees in one direction, and ocean as far as could be seen the other way.  Barry probably should have been amazed that his mom had taken them instantly from landlocked mid-America to a tropical paradise, but he’d seen her do that sort of thing before, and his mind was still a little blown from witnessing the Fayemark.

“It’s like kaleidoscope clouds!” he was saying, still tripping out with the numinousness of it.

Dania laughed at his expression and description, but before Barry could go on, he was distracted by his wand doing something.  It puffed purple at him, like it was coughing up a hairball of magic, and then as it finished, his fairy uniform began to shift and morph again.  Except it was going the wrong direction of what he would want!

He yelped as his already uncomfortably revealing dress began to shrink and shift.  The top and bottom split ways, exposing his narrowed tummy.  His skirt sucked up into itself until only the stretchy underwear part remained, and his top only maintained enough coverage to cradle his torso water balloons.

“No, no, no, no!  Stop!!” he yelled down at it, as if that would somehow get his clothes to stop disappearing.

It did stop, but not before he was only left with three triangles of fabric, two on top and one on the bottom.  He was wearing a pastel purple bikini!  No, all the no!

“It’s just your clothing is auto-adapting to your circumstances,” Dania noted in a teacher-like manner.

“That’s a thing??” he decried.  “Why is this a thing?!”

“Well, it’s trying to help you,” she told him, chagrined on magic’s behalf.  “Think of it like magic training wheels.  It’s trying to adapt for you, so you don’t have to learn to do spells for every situation first.”

“Why does it have to adapt into this?!” he demanded, pointing.  “And if you say ‘uniform,’ I swear I’m going to blow a gasket!”

“Well, I could change the default setting for you, to be a little more…” she eyed the swimwear thoughtfully, “… more.”

“Okay,” Barry nodded emphatically, sort of wondering why she wasn’t doing it yet.

“But maybe that should be your first lesson instead,” she smiled a proud mom smile.  “It’ll give you incentive.”

That was certainly true, Barry grumbled.  Being on a beach wearing, essentially, a few washcloths was hardly his idea of an ideal magic lesson.

“But first, why don’t we work on getting your hair out of your face?” she smiled.

“Why does there have to be a ‘first’?” he moaned.  “What if someone comes?!”

“Barry, hun, we’re on an island in the middle of nowhere.  If I thought anyone would come, we wouldn’t have our wings out.  Put up your hair, sweetheart.”

He scooped the purple ringlets up in both hands, the way he’d seen people begin ponytails.

“Uh uh uh,” Dania corrected, “with your magic, please.”

Barry dropped the hair with a small sound of annoyance.  “How?”

“Well, get your wand back out, silly.  You can’t magick without that.”

Barry realized he’d probably dropped it when his clothes had started vanishing.  He reached out to sense it like before.  It was back in the Fayemark again, and like before the only way to reach it was in his clothing… which he was wearing a lot less of now.  Cringing, trying forcefully to ignore how smooth and squishy his exposed flesh was there, he reached two fingers into his bikini cup and extracted the wand back into the world.

His mother was smirking, just a little.  “Alright, now fairy magic has a lot to do with wills and learning to use and tweak with both your own will and the will and desires of your fairy-godchildren.”

Barry actually thought that sounded pretty cool, although it sounded fairly difficult too, and that couldn’t be good news.

“Spells are a complicated mixture of the literal request, the fairy’s subconscious thoughts, impressions and desires, the fairy-godchild’s thoughts and desires, and magic’s own sense of flair and extrapolation about the environment in which the spell is cast,” she went on.  “While I am very grateful that we don’t have to be accurate down to the detail about the ins and outs of the spell results we want, sometimes magic fills in the blanks in ways we don’t prefer, and a fairy can spend her whole life learning how to manage magic effectively, and getting it to behave the way she—or, excuse me, he—wants it to.”

Barry had never realized the complexity his mother needed to understand in order to do the magic she always had.  He was both impressed and daunted.  And yet, it was beginning to poke at him that maybe this magic stuff was more bad-A than he had thought.

All that considered, he just nodded.

“So you and your wand are partners in your magic.  You have to talk to it, persuade it to your point of view.  So starting with your hairdo: start by simply telling it that you want the hair out of your face.”

This is where it got harder, Barry thought.  He liked the theory and logistics she’d been describing, but actually putting them into practice seemed more difficult.  Even more so with his body all weird and not his own shape.  Still, he focused hard on the wand.  It seemed happy to interact with him, even though its conscious intelligence seemed very limited.

He pointed the tip of it at his own head, closing his eyes in nervous concentration.  Put my hair up, he willed toward the small, periwinkle piece of wood.

He opened his eyes in time to be shot in the face with warm purple sparks, and feel the hair lift off his neck.

“Wow!” Dania gasped, beaming.  “You did that so naturally!  On your first try, too!”

“What?” Barry wondered.  “What did I do?”

“Here,” she flicked her own wand and a mirror appeared in her hand.  She handed it to him.

Barry blanched.  He had done it, alright; his hair was done up high on his head, with little pooling tendrils hanging down from it, and tucked into the hair tie in a little ring was a handful of delicate, miniature lavender roses.

“Aww,” his mother cooed, bouncing his purple curls, “it’s so pretty!”

“Why did it come out like that?!” he complained.  “I didn’t picture it that way!”

“Really?” she asked, surprised. “But it’s—”

“‘So pretty.’  I heard you,” he groused.

She gave him a look, but let it go and answered his question.  “Well, there could be any number of reasons why your magic would interpret your request that way.  It could be that it was extrapolating from your surroundings, like the swimsuit did, but when it does that, it’s likely to draw from your own understanding of the circumstances.”

“My own…” he started.  “Then why on earth is it giving me all this girly crap?!”

She snorted.  “Either because that’s how you think of girls—which, remind me to talk to you about your view on women’s swimwear later, young man!”

He flushed.  Oops, that could explain the abbreviated nature of his current outfit.  He laughed uncomfortably.

“Or because it somehow reflects part of who you are, in some way,” she went on.

Yeah, Barry still wasn’t a fan of that theory.  “Like the purple,” he grumbled.

“Yes, like the purple,” she smiled.

“But you’re not claiming that this demonry,” he pointed at the bikini, “can’t be changed, right?”

“Nope,” she said, “it might be set as the automatic default, but it’s still just a regular outfit.”

There was nothing regular about the current condition of his torso or its attire, but he didn’t bother to say that aloud.  “But I can change it to whatever I want?” he asked.

“Whatever you can convince your magic to do, yeah,” she nodded.  “I mean, I would advise against changing it to a boy’s swimsuit, for a couple obvious reasons.”

He cringed at the idea of not wearing a top at all, at the moment.  “Well, I figured I couldn’t just pull one out of my drawer or anything.”

He looked at his wand irritatedly.  This was so ridiculous, he thought.  Here he had magic and what was he doing with it?  Trying to give himself a less painfully girly and revealing swimsuit.  He requested one, waving the wand for good measure.

Magic spurted from the wand tip again, as he watched it this time.  It immediately made his bikini a dark purple instead, and he hoped for a split second that that was a good sign… until the hip straps turned into thin strings of rhinestones and his undersized swim top grew jewels and pearls like tree bark, all across its rounded surfaces.  He sparkled in the tropical sun like someone had stuck two oversized Faberge eggs to his torso.

“Not better!” he yelled down at it.

Dania was failing not to laugh now.  “It’s very glitzy, love.”

He scowled.  “So not what I was aiming for!”

“I figured,” she said.  “But, come on, slow down and focus.  You can probably get it how you want, if you take time to really discuss it with your wand.”

He glared at the thin enemy in his hand.  It was logical that slowing down and communicating with the malicious piece of wood could be effective at getting it to obey him.  But he would rather have given it the silent treatment, with how it was mocking him thus.

But it was about getting it to align with his will, she’d said, persuading it to his point of view.  Fine, he could do that; he could parlay with the obstinate little scepter.

He closed his eyes yet again, trying to decelerate his mind and heart despite the constant feelings of panic that accompanied this form.  The wind brushed at his exposed skin everywhere.  But he could do this, he determined.  It wouldn’t beat him!

He had probably been too vague before, he realized.  What did he even want it to do anyway??  If he was being forced to wear a female swimsuit, what would be the least disgraceful one he could imagine having to wear?

It took him another moment, but he finally decided on something practical, like something a female Olympic swimmer might wear.  Something to cover the important bits and be hydrodynamic.  If it was supposed to be made for water, then it should be oriented around that.  Why the crap would anyone swim with disco ball bosoms?!

He’d probably stood there, eyes shut, for a few minutes now, but Dania waited patiently as he argued with himself and the wand.

Finally he released the stale air from his lungs and murmured to the wand, Give me something like this, and pictured a plain black unitard-type one-piece women’s swimsuit.

He felt the spell hit him, and he opened his eyes to see.  The bedazzled bikini morphed away its sparkles.  Barry was incredibly relieved to watch it stretch and solidify around his broadened hips, and the top run like purple paint to meet the bottom, as they were mercifully reunited again.

However, it chose to remain purple, and along the higher bustline it rippled with an emerald green spandex ruffle, covered in a mermaid scale print.

“Look who managed to cover up their tummy!” Dania teased proudly.

“Who knew it was such a Herculean task,” Barry grumbled.  He tugged at the ruffle.  “This wasn’t as specified.  Although, to be fair, I was fixating on the water element, so maybe in crazy-girly-world that means mermaid.”

Dania was smiling.  “I like the side-fins,” she pointed.

“What?”  His gaze returned to his hips and he frowned to discover the high-cut leg holes were also graced with green scaly ruffles that fluffed out to the sides, evoking a mermaid tail and making his haunches look more protuberant.  “Fantastic,” he said sarcastically, placing his hands on his waist above them.

“So, wording is important, but it’s not the only thing your magic will take into account,” she explained.  “Even your conscious thoughts at the time of the spell are only one factor in the result.  When your mind is stuck somewhere, your spells will likely be too.”

Hmm, he hadn’t realized he was in so little control of his own thoughts.

“But that’s much better, right?” she pointed to the swimsuit.

“Yeah,” he acknowledged, realizing that even more than the silliness of the bathing suit, he was feeling disappointed he hadn’t been able to do it right, even after focusing so carefully.  “Can I try it one more time?”

“Of course, sweetheart,” she said, surprised.  “You can try it as many times as you want!  It’s your magic.”

Huh.  Strange.

It was getting easier to connect with the wand each time.  Not that he’d had trouble hearing it, but he had had trouble knowing how to speak back.  With each spell he seemed more connected to it, which was a disconcerting thing, but it made performing those spells easier.  Although clearly that didn’t mean he got what he wanted from the dumb thing.

Barry tried three more bathing suits before he was comparatively satisfied.  The first was a midnight purple one-piece, but the v-neck took a plunge, making him gasp.  Nope, nope!  The second was a soft violet, and tried to rectify the problem with the first by sewing up the bust with corset-y lacing, so it looked like provocative shoelaces criss-crossing over him.  He was very unamused with magic’s obsession with him having cleavage.

He was starting to wonder if he should have stuck with the mermaid one, since he seemed unable to get the magic to follow him.  At least that one looked like the “big girl” version of a young girl’s swimsuit, instead of the other four thus far, which had more closely resembled the beach section of a lingerie catalog.  Gah.

But then he tried one last time.  Slowing his breathing, and trying to rid his cluttered mind of other thoughts, Barry asked his wand, almost begging, Please just give me something simple, like this.  He pictured the athletic suit again.

He was afraid to look, but it really wasn’t bad, having experienced a plethora of alternatives.  It was yet again purple—he seemed unable to avoid that—but it was a generic-looking, solid purple women’s one-piece bathing suit.  He hadn’t entirely escaped his new torso-cleft showing, but this swimsuit had a simple double scallop that did its job of supporting and obscuring reasonably well.

“Is that what you pictured, honey?” Dania asked hopefully.

“It’s… close enough,” he shrugged.

“Well it’s very tasteful and flattering,” she assured him.

There she went again, calling him pretty.  “What else did you want me to try?” he changed the subject.

“Did you want to set this one as the default, for water situations?” she reminded him.  “At the moment it’s just a spell you’d have to recreate each time.”

“Right!  Yeah,” he remembered.  He would definitely prefer not to have to do this again.  Ever.

“So default spells, or ‘Dachaigh spells’ as they’ve been called, are like your home-base spells.  Magic, especially fay mother magic, likes to establish a pattern that it can come back to, with minimal changes.  And we can change these… assuming it doesn’t reflect ourselves too closely.  The more signature a spell is, the more it reflects us, the harder it’ll be to change,” Dania explained.  “Or our fairy godchildren, for that matter.  Things that are just a part of who someone is, are harder to change, while more cosmetic changes like hair or outfits are no big deal to change.  Although most of the time it’s not a problem if we can’t change everything; it just adds a little of our own flavor to what we magick.  And it’s not like those deeper parts of people should really be changed anyway.”

Barry was unconsciously folding his arms under his bust. “‘Things that are just a part of who someone is’?  Like say their gender or body shape?” he asked dully.

She gave him a long look, clearly seeing the hole in her own justification.  “Honey, selfness is complex, as is the Will of Magic itself, which often differs from our own wills.  I don’t always understand why magic is ‘fitting’ or why it interprets our wills the way it does… but I know it’s consistent.  All I can do is try to teach you what I know from experience.”

He made a face but nodded.  “I know it’s not your fault, Mom.”

“Thank you,” she told him sincerely.  “And I’m not saying that it’s impossible to change a lot of spells that reflect us, or whomever we’re casting on, it’ll just be much more difficult; take much more power and control.”

Barry didn’t like it, but it made a degree of sense.

“And like I said on your birthday, our uniforms are our most central Dachaigh spell, the ultimate home base, hand-in-hand with our fairy names.  My uniform has changed in little ways over the years.  My hair is longer, and so is my skirt,” she ran a hand over her silky-smooth crimson hair which always lengthened with her power-up, and gestured to her swishy deep red skirt, which was shorter in the front than the back, “and my sleeves were much more 80s when I first turned sixteen.  But all-in-all, it’s been an enduring reflection of me over the years.”

Barry sighed breathily, far from wanting anything about this shape or any clothing it had worn to be befitting or routine.

“But it’s not hard for me to change a swimsuit default,” she flicked her wand at herself, and her satiny fairy dress morphed into a scarlet one-piece swimsuit with a stripe of small checkerboard holes across her ribcage.  Her skirt didn’t entirely absorb into the suit, and instead swirled into a red and black floral sarong-skirt tied around her hips.  She put her hands out in tada.

The irony was not lost on Barry that he was feeling envious of his mother’s swimsuit, but he found himself jealous of both her being more covered than he was, and her obvious ease and control over her own appearance.

“Nice,” he complimented her with polite enthusiasm.

“Okay, now you go,” she instructed.  “Usually, when setting the default is effective, the instructions are fairly straightforward.  Dachaigh spells tend to respond to wording as simple as ‘This,’ while focusing on the element you want to be concreted as the default.”

It seemed strange to Barry that setting something up as a default sounded easier than getting a one-off spell to do what he wanted, but that was at least the way she was describing it.  “That’s it?”

She shrugged.  “Magic is both bewilderingly complicated and simple at the same time.  Don’t know what else to tell ya.”

“Okay,” he acknowledged.  He held his wand up again, with both hands this time, pointing it toward the heavens.  He concentrated on the swimsuit he already had on, and the beach context and murmured, This, in his mind.

There was that recurrent click-feeling that he’d gotten every time he’d performed a spell, but this time instead of getting zapped with magic, it just sorta radiated warmth up his arms.  “Was that it?” he asked, confused.

“Oh, did you do it already?” she smiled.  “Then probably.”

“But there wasn’t even any visible magic or anything,” he pointed out, confused.

“Magic isn’t always big, sparkly external fanfare, honey,” she laughed.

Barry furrowed his purple brows.  “That has not been my experience to date,” he observed.

She laughed at that.  “Well, what about summoning your wand?  That’s magic and it’s entirely invisible.  Try feeling the spell you just performed and if it connected with the Fayemark and changed the default.”

Hmm, that was a good point.  He reached out and probed the other place with his mind, eyes closed again.  The wand in his hand hummed loudly as he did, but without literal vibrations.  He knew that the otherworld wasn’t there around him on the beach, but it still felt like it swirled about him and into his hands and wings, which whispered against the sea breeze.

He prodded around in the Fayemark for the default bathing suit spell he’d tried, not exactly sure how he was doing it.  The result left him not positive, but the swimsuit did feel more there on his current body, more solid somehow.  He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, considering it was tugging on a very female-shaped crotch, but it probably meant he’d succeeded, so that was worth something.

“I think it worked,” he said aloud.

“Good job, love!” she encouraged.  “I thought so.”

“Can we do something not clothing-related next?” he asked.

“Sure,” she nodded.  “You want to take a break from spells and try some flying?”

Barry stood there dumbly for a moment.  “Right, I can fly??”

“Higher than someone on pixie dust,” she smirked.  “You have wings, honey.”

“I… yeah,” he acknowledged, looking back at them.  “I guess I was just thinking of them as annoyingly cosmetic.”  He returned his gaze to her.  “I never really remember you flying!  More than hovering, I mean.  You do that a lot.”

“Well, I think hovering is pretty impressive on its own,” she pointed out.  “Have you ever hovered of your own volition before?”

“…No,” he said, cowed.

“I don’t want to knock stuff over in the house,” she shrugged practically, “and it’d be conspicuous around town.  So I don’t get a lot of chances to fly around.  But when I go out for ‘jogs’ I’ll come somewhere isolated like this and get some flying in.”

This was another aspect of his mom’s life he felt like he’d been very unaware of.

“But I’m a decent aerobatrix,” she continued, “I flew competitively in the junior league as a teenager.”

Barry made his already enlarged eyes wider.  “There’s flying racing?!  With wings, I mean?”

She laughed at his reaction.  “Well, now I see what I should have led with last week.  As soon as there’s a racing sport involved, you’re in?”

“Hey, I didn’t say that,” he said, raising a hand.  “It’s just cool to hear you did fairy racing and that that’s a thing.  I didn’t know that about you.”

“You could certainly join the league once you get the hang of it, sweetheart,” she encouraged.

“Mom,” he said flatly, “I don’t play sports when I’m normal.  I’m certainly not going to start when I look like this.”

“Suit yourself,” she shrugged it off.

“How do I fly though?” he asked, because just because he didn’t want to fly as a girl in front of other people didn’t mean he didn’t want to learn to fly.

“Okay,” she smiled, happy to go back into teaching mode, “so we’re not birds, right?  Or even butterflies, although the wing resemblance is more similar.  Magic-assisted flight isn’t based solely on aerodynamics.  That’s why our wings aren’t merged with our arms, and our wingspans aren’t the size of gliders.”

“Okay,” he nodded quickly, excited she was bringing physics into it, even if fay flight “disobeyed” its rules.

“The movement of your wings is basically a rudder for your flight, not what gives you lift,” she said, turning her wings toward him, and fluttering them gently, while watching him over her shoulder.

He nodded briskly again, trying to internalize for an intimidating new skill.

“Magic courses through your wings, similar to your wand, but less focused,” she continued.  As she moved them, he noticed her wings shimmered with a subtle red light he had previously thought was just part of their translucent ruddy coloring.  “It’s that wing magic that keeps us elevated, even without incessant flapping.  Small little rhythmic wing beats are enough to keep you from descending once you’re in the air.  And a little swift fluttering can get you up there in the first place.  You’re not trying to lift your own body weight with the movement of your wings; that’s what the magic is for.”

He looked over his own pale, soft shoulder at the glimmery, sheer, purple airfoils attached to his back.  “Okay,” he repeated.

She nodded now, turning so she was facing him.  “I’ll show you, then you try.”  She adopted a ballerina-type pose, with her feet close together and her toes pointed outward, and her arms curved down by her sides for balance.  Her wings moved gently at first, then sped up to an elegant swift flap.  With it, she rose into the air, looking quite pleased with herself.  “Was that slow enough for you to see?” she asked, slowing her wings to a metronome type rhythm which kept her in the air like a prettier helicopter.

Barry realized his mouth was hanging open.  “Wow,” he admitted.

She smiled, satisfied with that reaction.  “And then, once you get the hang of it, you can move in any direction you want!”  She demonstrated, strafing back and forth while turning around, her feet staying level in the air.  And then she swooped in an infinity symbol, body horizontal and crimson locks whooshing out behind her.  Finally she came back up to center and put her arms into the air like a gymnast dismounting.  “Tada!”

“That’s really cool,” he said honestly.  “I can’t believe I don’t remember seeing you fly before.  And you look really pretty doing it, Mom.”

His mother looked flattered and shy.  “Aww, thank you, Baz!”  She landed in front of him.  “Okay, love, now your turn!”

He shifted nervously.  He wanted to try this more than the other spells in question so far, but it was still strange and unnerving, the idea of the foreign objects on his back causing him to defy gravity.  Still, they hadn’t been difficult to move, thus far.

He watched his wings and moved them tentatively.  It felt a bit like swinging large fans.  Despite his dislike of their delicate, feminine appearance, it felt exciting to move them, to feel them swish and interact with the air around him.

“Good,” Dania encouraged, “good fluttering.  But see, they can move without you lifting off.  The lift comes from the magic in the wings, so you have to use your will, like you do with your wand.”

Barry’s wings paused as he hesitated.  Alright, just like when he’d powered-down or up, or when he’d put his hair up.  Except hopefully his wings couldn’t take his request and make it girly to the enth degree.

It would have been hard to describe how he did it, sort of like picturing himself being made of helium, but he communicated with his wings and they responded.  And suddenly, along with a swift, anxious flutter behind him, his small bare feet were lifted off the sand.

“Oh!” he cried unintentionally, feeling a little scared and out of control, up off the ground.

“That’s right,” his mother soothed, “you’ve got it, honey.”

He rose quickly, as his wings were flapping quickly out of fear.  He felt twin muscles, deep within his back, working hard, but it wasn’t very intentional; more like a twitch than anything.  He was a good ten feet in the air now, and afraid he could come crashing back down to the earth, although that fear seemed to be driving him higher.

“Okay, okay, slow it down,” Dania told him, rising up herself to meet him.

Barry took a deep breath and worked hard to slow the beating of his wings, closing his eyes.

“Good,” she told him in a very gentle voice, like calming a baby.  “Just take a minute; slow down, feel your body in the air.”

Eyes still shut, he felt the air whipping around his bare limbs, and swishing around his neck.  He felt the currents pushing and pulling against the fanning of his wings, and how his body bobbed in the air like a cork in water.  Actually, swimming was much more how he should think of it, he realized.  Air and water weren’t so different when you had wings to help you stay afloat.

He opened his eyes again.  There was still a little bit of acrophobia, being this high in the air without any sort of platform beneath him, but it was also pretty darn cool.  He was slowly getting the hang of how much flapping equated how much vertical ascent, versus how much just kept him from sinking toward the ground.

“Perfect,” Dania encouraged again.  “Okay, you want to try a twirl in the air with me?”

That sounded like a girly move, to Barry, but he reminded himself that airplanes spinning were not especially feminine.  This didn’t have to be a girly activity.  It had racing, it was cool.  “Sure,” he said aloud.

“Your wings can be used for intricacies of flight, for turning, etc., but honestly that takes some getting used to, not moving them in unison.  So it’s probably easier to use your arms and legs to steer, in the meantime.  As it is, I still use my arms and legs to help me steer, a lot.”

He experimented with moving his right arm to one side, and it did rotate him slightly to the left.

“It’s a little bit of a dance,” she went on, nodding.  “You’re using your magic, and the flapping of your wings as leverage.  Push against that.”

“Kinda like swimming in the air?” he asked.

“Mmhmm,” she agreed.  “The air resists differently, but that’s the overall concept, yes.  Ready to try with me?”

He nodded.

“One, two, three!” she counted.

On three he swished his arms and legs like he was pushing off an unseen wall.  And his wings obeyed, working hard to give him leverage, and he and Dania both twirled in the air at the same time.

He gasp-laughed, filled with adrenaline.

“Look at you!” Dania declared proudly.

Barry did it again on his own, feeling the thrill of being completely buoyant in midair, and being able to pilot himself on the currents of the wind.  “Woah!”  He tried flying in a horizontal circle, and that worked, so he tried a forward loop, and then a somersault.  He was being able to do it!  And it was fun!

“So I’ve found the one good thing about being a fairy,” he laughed, spiralling around.  “This is actually pretty awesome.”

He was worried his negativity about faydom would make her irritated with him, but when he looked she was watching him fondly.  “Aww, wee féileacán,” she murmured at him.  “You’re very graceful.”

That brought him up short, in the air.  He could tell she was just genuinely feeling affection toward him, watching him dance with the breeze, but her reaction suddenly made him picture himself from the outside, and his airborne euphoria felt drastically dampened.

He wasn’t a cool, streamlined airplane.  He was a squishy little blob of purple cotton candy, held in the air by jittery little flower petals, tossed upon the drafts.  He sank a bit in the air, his altitude mirroring his change in mood.

“You okay?” she asked worriedly.

“Uh, yeah,” he shrugged it off.  “Just getting a little tired.  I’m gonna land?”

Dania still seemed concerned about him. “Of course, hon.  Go ahead and take a break.”

It didn’t prove difficult to land gently, small feet reaching the ground one at a time.  He looked back at his wings again, watching them open and close slowly.  He didn’t know how to feel about them right now.  As instruments of flight, they were awesome… as a part of his body?  They felt like they indentured him to an image he didn’t want to fulfill.

Dania landed a few feet from him.  “I could probably use a break too.”  She pulled her wand out from a fold in her wrap skirt, and magicked a pair of glass soda bottles, handing one to him, and he thanked her.  His was cream soda, which she knew he liked, and hers was purple.  Grape soda, he thought grumpily, thinking of Nick’s jabbing that morning.

He sat down on the sand, sticking his toes in a pile of grains.  He realized his toenails were painted lavender.  Of course they were, he rolled his eyes.  The warmth of the sun-baked beach felt odd on his bare, hairless thighs.

“Mom?” he asked thoughtfully, looking up at her between sips of his soda.

“Yes, love?”

“You seem really excited about me being…”

“A glitter baby?” she finished for him with a smile.

He grimaced at the title.  “I was going to say a fairy… or a girl.”

“But you’re not a girl, Baz, at least not all the time.”

“Yeah, but you seem really excited when I am,” he pulled his girl knees up under his chin.  “Do you like spending time with me better when I’m in,” he grumbled, “‘fairy-princess-mode’?”

She gave him a motherly look. “Bazzy, it’s a big deal getting you to hang out with me at all.  Do you have any idea what a feat of Mom-genuity it is when I find a way to spend time with my teenage boys without them whining and coming up with excuses not to spend time with me??”

Barry smirked.

She sat down beside him in the sand, her magical sarong flaring out nicely to one side.  She put an arm around his thin shoulders. “I just like to be around you and get to teach you something special to me, sweetheart.”

He leaned on her shoulder, touched by that.

Her hand around his shoulders began fiddling with his hair again.

He looked skeptically up at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Mom, you won’t stop playing with my hair.  And I see you giggling when I have to do something girly, and you get really passionate about my transformation.  Come on, it’s not just because you want to spend more time with me or because you love magic!”

Dania sighed.  “Okay, fine.  I don’t have any daughters, and you know what?  I have always been happy having only sons.  I was even fine knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to pass on my magic.  But now I have the chance, it feels special and exciting, the prospect of passing along my magic and teaching you what I know.  Fairy culture can put too much emphasis on family lines sometimes, but even so, it feels like part of me is getting passed along to you, and that’s really significant to me.”

He understood why that was special to her… even if he would have preferred not to be the recipient of this particular heirloom.  He felt like the heir of a mafia dynasty, being told that the whole crime ring was his, when really all he wanted to do was go be a musician.  It might be a hyperbolic analogy, comparing magic to someone holding his life at gunpoint, but he felt equally coerced.  Although that was the wrong type of godparent, he supposed.

“But while I don’t ever wish you’d been born a girl instead, it’s not terrible for me to enjoy you being in a surrogate daughter position, right?” she smiled nervously.  “It’s been really fun to enjoy girl-category things with someone for a change.”

He’d never thought much about his mom not getting to do girl-stuff, on account of her being in a house of all boys.  Surely that didn’t make it his job to fill-in though?  Or “fill out,” his brain made an undesired joke.

“And on top of all that, I am still a girl, and when you’re powered-up you are like a giant doll!  A ridiculously adorable life-size doll!”

“Technically, you could make a doll come to life if you wanted, right?” he asked.  He’d finished drinking his soda and he used the bottom of the bottle to dig absently in the sand.

“Honey, that’s blue magic,” Dania told him, significantly.  “And not to be messed around with anyway.  Blue magic has the power to create life where there wasn’t one, but for obvious reasons that’s sketchy to do with humanoid beings.  Even blue fairies can’t just go Pygmalion-ing right and left.”

“Was Pygmalion a blue sprite?” he asked, only vaguely remembering the legend in question.

“No, but his desire was granted by a blue fay.  Fell in love with his own statue; whole big thing,” she rolled her eyes.  “So it’s not to be taken any lighter than normal powers of procreation,” she gave him a motherly stern look, as if he’d been considering impregnating the first girl he happened upon.

As if that was on his mind right now, with girl parts of his own, he grumbled internally.  “Couldn’t you have fun with an actual girl or an actual doll instead?” Barry brought the topic back around.  “You know, without me having to be involved?”

Her face grew pouty.  “I just told you, you are the closest thing to a daughter I am ever going to get.  Plus you cannot seem to fathom how cute you are.”

He fiddled with the neckline of his one-piece.  “You keep mentioning me being ‘cute’ or ‘pretty’ or ‘attractive’ this way.”  He felt himself frowning puffily again.  “I don’t want to be a cute girl.”

She gave him a sidelong look.  “Would you rather be an unattractive girl?”

“No,” he said immediately, then considered it.  “Maybe.  I don’t know.”

“Baz, you’re just a cute girl because you’re usually a cute boy, okay?” she reassured him, lovingly.  “You’re just a good looking kid, all around.”

Barry felt like that was supposed to make it better, but didn’t.  “But it’s different, Mom!  Being a good looking guy means being all strong and confident, and solid in yourself,” he imitated a male voice and the result was laughable.  “While being attractive as a girl means being dainty and soft and,” he imitated a damsel and made a swooning sound, falling backward into the sand with a hand dramatically against his forehead.

That imitation was unfortunately more fitting, and Dania giggled at him.  “Well, that’s descriptive.”

Barry sat back up, not enjoying the strange weight on his torso when he leaned back anyway.  “I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean!  I don’t want to be vulnerable that way.  Especially not to…” he trailed off, uncomfortably.

“Men?” she finished his sentence for him, quietly.

He looked away at the ocean, not wanting to talk about it, even if he had been the one to bring it up.

“I’m sorry, honey.  I sincerely don’t want being a fairy to be torture for you,” she sighed, thankfully diverting the topic somewhat.   “And I do understand that it’s such a jarring experience, your body changes, etc.  I’ve just never heard of a glitter baby taking issue with what they were before!  I’m genuinely surprised it’s upset you so much.”

“Right, they’re usually okay with it?” he asked, not sure if they were the freaks or he was.

“Proud even,” she shrugged.  “I only met Uncle Larry, and he was more of a goofball about it, but from what I’ve heard of the others, it tends to be kind of a status symbol.”

Barry didn’t understand that at all.  How could something as strange and embarrassing as being a “glitter baby” be considered a status symbol?!  At best he thought it could be a ridiculous party trick.

“It’s even sort of a status symbol to get to see a glitter baby transformation,” Dania emphasized.

“What?!” Barry scoffed, thinking that was especially stupid.

“Yeah, from what I’ve heard, having fay connections enough to get to see one transform in person is the kind of thing you brag about,” she affirmed.

So it was a hoity-toity, ridiculous party trick.  Great.

“Well maybe turning into girls makes them feel fancy, but it makes me feel dumb and embarrassed,” he insisted.

She gave him a long-suffering look.  “All I’m saying is that I expected you to be surprised.  I didn’t expect you to hate it.”

He felt guilty disappointing her about something she was so thrilled about.  “The flying was cool,” he admitted, and she smiled appreciatively.

“What about the Fayemark?” she asked hopefully.

“The Fayemark is trippy!” he declared.  “But yes, also pretty cool.”

She liked that response.  “Am I allowed to be excited enough for the both of us?” she teased.

“I don’t think I could stop you from being excited, even if I wanted to,” he said.  “So, sure.”

She glanced around, thinking.  Then she smiled at him with giddy, mischievous enthusiasm, coming to her knees in the sand.

“What?” he asked warily.

“Well, I was thinking, I’m a little rusty on my wardrobe magic…” she said, bouncing up and down.

“Oh no,” he moaned.  She’d done wardrobe magic on him before, for special occasions, but those had always put him in a suit or given him a snazzy haircut.  He didn’t think he’d come out so masculinely unscathed this time, if all her reactions to his powered-up form were any indication.

“Just five minutes?” she begged.

“And why would I submit myself to this?” he questioned.

“Because it’s only five minutes, and no one will see you here,” she smiled hopefully.

He gave her a flat look.  “You’ll see me.”

She thought for a moment.  “I’ll give you extra gas and date money.”

“Bribery Mom?” he said dryly.  “This is what you’re stooping to, in order to use my body for your own amusement?”

She nodded with a big self-satisfied smile.

He was actually tempted; he’d blown through his chore allowance lately.  The question was, was five minutes of humiliation to please his mother worth the offer of extra play funds?

“How much are we talking?” he asked with a smirk, finding the situation humorous despite it being at his expense.

She considered.  “Fifteen bucks?”

He raised an eyebrow, doing the dollars-per-hour math in his head.  He sighed.  “Fine!  But just five minutes and no one hears of it, ever!”

She clapped her hands and got to her feet, reaching down to help him up.  “Yay!  I haven’t gotten to play magical dress up with anyone in ages!”  She immediately made a wide, full-length mirror appear.

The fact that he was going to have to see her transformations of him already made this a worse idea than he was thinking.  He didn’t like seeing the stranger in the mirror; didn’t like that she moved with him and made his faces, and he definitely didn’t like seeing her curves sway with him.  Seeing his reflection in whatever styles Dania decided to subject him to could only make those factors worse, he was fairly certain.

“Hmm,” she tapped her wand to her chin, probably trying to get the most bang for her buck.

He stood there awkwardly in Grape’s swimsuit, waiting.

After a moment, with a flourish, she brandished her wand at him.  The red sparks transformed his outfit again, a peachy pink skirt swishing forth from his hips, with an ivory rose pattern sprinkled across the fabric.  It stopped around mid-calf, and the top of the bathing suit was transformed into a blousey white camisole, with little peach bows tied up on the shoulders.

He looked at his reflection which looked sourly back at him.  It wasn’t that he couldn’t appreciate the intrinsically pretty nature of the outfit and how skirts emphasized the flow of an hourglass figure.  He just didn’t want to have that flowy, hourglassy figure himself.

Dania, however, was surveying him happily.  “I’m pleased with how the circle skirt turned out!  I love that fabric.”

He picked up the skirt with one hand; it was super drapey.

She gave him a wry smile.  “I couldn’t get you to do a little twirl for me, so I can see the skirt in action?”

He gave her an incredulous look, folding his arms.  “Not part of our arrangement.”

She hesitated, getting that mischievous look on her face again, then shot a beam of magic that sent a whoosh of air up under his skirt, swirling it around his hips in a circle, like a parachute. 

“Mom!” he protested, pushing the skirt back toward his legs, while she looked smug.

“You could do it yourself, if you wanted,” she shrugged primly, magically adding a few white flowers to his hair and then admiring the effect again.

But after a moment enjoying that look on him, she zapped him again, this time to a black, apron-type dress, almost like overalls but with a skirt and ruffled shoulders.  And underneath he wore a blue and white striped top with a rounded collar.  There was lace peeking out beneath the bottom of the skirt, probably part of the garment underneath making the top skirt poof up.  He also wore knee high socks and rounded doll shoes, with straps across his arches.

“Really?” he asked dryly.

“What?” she asked.  “I thought this would be better than the last one.  It’s the kind of thing that was in style when I was a little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl!” he insisted, remembering Nick’s babydoll comment, and afraid as he looked in the mirror he looked like just that.

“I meant it was in style with older girls when I was little,” she corrected.  “Look, it has pockets!” she pointed out, like that fixed everything.

Still, her next selection made him think he shouldn’t have complained so much about the last one.  It was a long, upscale gown that tied behind his neck, locking-and-loading his chest in place, and which transitioned in a gradient from a pale purple, just pinker than his hair, at the top of the dress, to a pastel blue at the hem.  She’d straightened out his curls, which made his hair longer, and it looked like a purple shampoo commercial, getting picked up lightly by the beach breeze, which floated the light fabric of the skirt around also.

He’d been given tall heels too, which had ties up his legs, and with the spikes on his heels he was starting to sink into the sand.  He moved around, trying to resist falling over.

“Oop, sorry,” she said, obviously apologizing for his lack of balance, not her taste in clothing for him.  She made a small wooden platform appear beneath his feet, steadying him.  “Better?” she asked.

“Marginally,” he agreed, still letting his body language profess his displeasure.

She ignored his opinion of the outfit and closed one eye, like something was missing, then she shot him in the face with magic, making him flinch.  As the smoke cleared, his feminine features were made more prominent with instant cosmetics, eyes bordered with eyeliner and purple eyeshadow, lashes made longer, and full mouth a deep red.

He touched his lips as he might a bloody nose, fingers coming back equally red and sticky.  “Oh, come on!  Makeup?!”

Dania put her hands on her hips.  “My five minutes, remember?  You’re getting paid, now be a good model.”

He tossed the hair off his shoulder in irritation, which looked unintentionally fitting with the diva nature of his current outfit and Dania grinned.

“Good boy,” she winked at him, and his red lips protruded poutily as she teased him with the noun.  “Okay, a couple more,” she said, flicking her wand casually.

The next one was shorter, and still a dress, because apparently that was the most amusing thing to put him in.  This one was cutesier, a deep eggplant purple with puffy white sleeves and a large bow at his neckline.  There were bows along the hem too, by his knees.  His hair was curly again, but she’d put it up into a high ponytail, tendrils spiraling out of the top like falling firecrackers.  He was still stuck in makeup, this time with baby pink lips.

Barry just watched his mother dolefully, hoping if he didn’t commentate she’d be finished sooner.

She came and stood behind him, appreciating her work on her young, unwilling model, bouncing his curls again.

He rolled his eyes to the side, trying not to watch himself in the mirror, as they really did look like fairy mother and daughter.

“And now the pièce de résistance,” she beamed, swirling her wand around his head as scarlet magic cascaded over his body, then stepped in front of him to see what she’d done.

With that introduction, he was curious in spite of himself.  He looked down and saw a sea of white fabric, silver beading and spaghetti straps.  Confused, he looked up at the mirror.

The girl version of him there looked older, closer to twenty, between a fancier hairdo and adult looking makeup; more like a woman, and that freaked him out enough.  But he knew the bright white dress he had on, from photos.  It was Dania’s wedding dress.

Barry’s head swirled with panicked thoughts about his future, and attraction, and implications…  He instinctively took a few steps backwards, away from the terrifying reflection, and tripped off the back of the wooden platform, falling flat on his back and wings with a yelp.

“Oh, my goodness!” Dania flew to his side with concern.  “Baz, are you okay?”

He sat up in the sand, not meeting her gaze, embarrassed, upset, but mostly physically intact.  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, though the quaver in his voice gave away that he wasn’t.

“I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  We’re all done, okay?” she said guiltily.

“Whatever,” he mumbled.

She landed on her knees in front of him on the sand and took his hands.  “No, really honey, I’m sorry.  I was just being silly, and then suddenly it wasn’t silly.”

His lower lip trembled and he looked into her eyes.  “I’m not you.”

She looked slapped.  “Oh, Barry, sweetheart, is that what you think?  That I just want you to be a fairy because I want you to be like me?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Oh, honey, no no no,” she said, wrapping her arms around him, where he felt very small again.  “I just want you to be Barry, okay?  You’re the best at being Barry.”  It was the kind of thing she’d say to them back when they were children and he wanted to be soothed by it, but he looked down at his bridal form and felt as far from himself as he knew how to feel.  “I just don’t think Grape has to be not-Barry, love,” his mother emphasized.

He looked down again, and back up at her pointedly.

“I’ll admit the wedding dress was a bit over the top,” she looked embarrassed herself.  She sighed.  “You’re just cute, and I was having fun, and I got a little carried away.  I’m sorry.  But I sincerely don’t want you to try to be more like me.  I’m proud of you being you.  Including as a fairy godmother.  You picked up on things so fast today.”

He could tell how much she meant it and he was even secretly a bit pleased she thought he was doing well.  “Sorry I got your dress all dirty,” he mumbled.

Dania laughed, surprised.  “It’s fine.  It’s just a replica anyway.  I didn’t summon the real thing just to play around.”  She examined his torso.  “I’d probably have to magically tailor the real thing if it was going to fit your measurements anyway.”

“Mommm!” he balked, covering his bust protectively.

“I was just observing, practically speaking!” she defended.  “I wasn’t trying to get you to wear it!”

He groaned, putting a hand over his eyes.  “Can I power-down yet?”

She looked tired.  “Yeah, let’s go home.  You’ve more than earned your fifteen bucks.”

“My prostitution money?” he grumbled, getting to his feet with difficulty.

“Oh, come on,” she chided, hands on her hips again, “I kept you a lot more tasteful than anything your magic’s done so far.”

He considered that.  “Well, you’re not wrong,” he muttered.

“You want to transform yourself back to your uniform?  And then we’ll warp back?”

“Want to” was relative.  He really didn’t want to wear his uniform any more today, but he was even more done wearing his mother’s wedding gown, like a dowry-wielding fay heiress.

But it proved simple to return to his first fairy dress, which, as much as he abhorred it, felt safer and more comfortable than anything else he’d had to wear that day.

“Good job,” she told him, still looking proud.  She magicked away the mirror, platform and soda bottles, leaving the beach clear again.  “You wanna fly a bit before we go home?”

Again, the desire to feel the sensation of flight barely outweighed the embarrassment of looking like a dandelion seed on the breeze.  He nodded and she waited patiently.

It was much easier the second time he took off, and he rose up like a maple helicopter seed snatched by the wind.

The air was soothing.  It didn’t care what he was shaped like, only that he could use his wind-rudders to resist it.

He did a few aerial somersaults, before sighing and coming back down to earth, where he was still a petite, purple puff of a fairy girl.

Dania was smiling fondly at him again.  “You really are so elegant at that.”

“Yeah yeah, I know; regular balle-frickin-rina.”

“It means you’re good at it,” she reminded him.

He internalized that reluctantly.  Flying was exciting, and something he could imagine actually enjoying getting good at, as opposed to everything else fairy-related.

Dania reached out and took his hand.  “Ready to go home?”

He nodded adamantly.

She manifested the scarlet disc of light again, and pulled Barry through with her.

This time he got a good look at the Fayemark.  It was like halos of celestial pastel clouds, nebulae of endless color and light.  And more disconcerting than the expanse or the vibrancy, was that to Barry, it felt like home.  It called to him, like he belonged there… like it loved him.

They landed back in Dania and Frank’s bedroom and Barry rubbed at one of his eyes.  “Colors made my eyes water,” he explained quickly, lest she mistake his motion for crying.

“It is quite bright,” she agreed tenderly, although something in her tone made him wonder if she didn’t believe his excuse.

“I can power-down now?” he checked.

She nodded.  “Yes.  You did great today.  Very successful first lesson, in my book.”

He used the waistband of his skirt to retrieve his wand back into the world.  It was a tight fit, which made it a struggle to get the wand out, but he preferred that to digging around in his cleavage again.

Dania and Barry both powered-down, and it was more than relieving to be himself again, and not be wearing anything flowy, skimpy, or poofy, for the first time in a few hours.

He rubbed at a pectoral, pleased with its pancake-resemblance.

“You want to help me with dinner?” Dania smiled hopefully.

He knew her request lined up with what she’d said earlier, about just wanting to spend time with him, no matter what form he was in.  But Barry felt emotionally (and somewhat physically) exhausted after their lesson.

“Is it okay if I don’t?  I just want to go spend some guy time in my room, if that’s alright?” he requested.  “Not that cooking is girly,” he clarified, “I just…”

“It’s fine, hon,” she told him.

“Thanks,” he said, relieved.  “Nick won’t think you’re just letting me ‘skip out on chores?’”

“I need to go talk to him anyway,” she sighed, shaking her head.  “You’ve already earned your fifteen dollars.”

“Which we’re not going to talk about how I earned fifteen dollars, now we’re home, right?” he reminded her intensely.

She snorted.  “Not a word.”

He started for the door.

“Baz, honey, thank you,” she said, making him stop, mid-exit.  “You’re really fun to teach.”

He gave her a smile.  “You’re a really good teacher, Mom, despite my abhorrence of the subject being taught.”

She looked reassured and flattered.  “Okay, enjoy your guy-time.  I’ll go talk to your brother.”

Barry was almost out the door, when he paused.  “Oh, um, Mom?  Thought you’d want to know,” he said, trusting her more now, and maybe feeling a little vengeful too, “Nick totally snitched one of your bras and put it with my clothes.”

“He what?!” Dania exploded.

Barry shrugged a shoulder, just being the messenger, then ducked out of her room.  He wasn’t even to the stairs yet when he heard her yell, “Nicholai Robert Anderson, get down here now!”

 

It was nice relaxing by himself in his room, and Barry did feel reluctantly proud of learning new skills, even if he was unimpressed with his own ability to masculine-ize any of his own magic.

After about half an hour of sitting at his computer however, his forehead began to itch, and grow mildly uncomfortable.  It wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation, as he was a pale boy of European descent; sunburns were not uncommon for him.

Right, he had been out in the tropics for multiple hours, without sunblock.  Being a fairy didn’t magically dissuade the sun, he guessed?  He was surprised Dania hadn’t preempted his need for UV protection.

He leaned over to the mirror on the back of his door.  Yep, his lower forehead, cheeks and the tip of his nose were bright pink.  He wasn’t dangerously burnt, just enough to make it distracting.  Oh well, his Mom probably had something to apply to it later; likely both magic and non-magic methods of soothing a burn.

He went back to what he was reading online, casually running his short fingernails across the itch on his head.

Maybe thirty seconds later, he realized he was reaching his hand into his t-shirt neck to scratch his shoulder, which was having the same sensation.  The skin was hot to the touch.  His back was itchy too, as was the top of his sternum.

He froze, hand scratching just beneath the neckline of his shirt.  Uh oh, he realized.

Already dreading what he was going to find, Barry yanked off his loose blue t-shirt, and groaned.  He popped up to stand in front of the mirror.

Sure enough, like someone had taken a stencil and pink spray paint to his torso, he had a crisp swimsuit tan, which had morphed with him.  It formed a heart shape, a couple of inches above his male nipples.  He had pale lines over his shoulders, where his straps had been, but his back had a giant, burned V.

He carefully poked his legs through his shorts.  As was to be expected, they were burned too.  That irked him; he had never burned his thighs before in his life!  They’d probably never seen the sunlight after he was done toddling around the backyard in a diaper.  They did feel extra tender like they were unfamiliar with such a searing.

He pulled down his shorts and pulled up the legs of his boxers, surveying the damage.  They were lobster-y.  He could tell it was the same deal on his backside.  The back of his thighs were burned, while his butt was sure to be moon-pale still.

He exhaled angrily, glaring at the ridiculous outline of a woman’s swim top branded onto his skin.  He put his shirt back on over, trying to be gentle on the reddest parts of the burn — the area below his clavicle looked like someone had shaded a pair of 3D spheres in two dimensions, with hot pink colored pencils, the parts that had been closest to the sun while he was rounded, getting the most direct sun.

It wasn’t long before Dania called them down for dinner.  He went down quickly, finding it hard to focus with the sunburn anyway.

“Hey, Dad’ll be home in a couple of minutes,” she said when he entered the kitchen.  “You mind putting the bread and trivets out on the table for me?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said.

She looked at him and paused.  “Ooh, honey, you got burned!” she noticed immediately, cringing empathetically.

“Yeah,” he affirmed flatly.

“I should have magicked you some sunscreen, sweetheart.  I’m sorry, I didn’t think about it!  Is it just your face, or did your shoulders get it too?”

Barry sighed, glancing around to make sure his brother or dad weren’t about to enter the kitchen.  Wordlessly, he lifted his shirt, up to his neck.

Laughter burst from Dania’s nose, and continued as he turned to show his back to her too.  “Oh, love, I’m so sorry!” she said, although she was still cracking up.  She struggled to get her giggling under control.

Barry pulled his shirt back down with another sigh.

“We’ll fix it after dinner, okay?” she reassured him, mostly calmed down, although she was still wiping laughing-tears from her eyes.  “Until then… keep your shirt on!”  Her idiomatic joke pushed her over the edge again, and she doubled over with her hand over her mouth.

Barry watched her humor dryly.  “I’m going to put the bread on the table now,” he dismissed himself, shaking his head.

“Don’t forget the trivets,” she reminded him, still trying to rein in her laughter, “so we don’t burn ourselves… Or our chicken breasts!”  The double entendres were too much for her, and she devolved into giggles again.

It took Barry a second to get it, and he was already headed into the dining room, but he whirled back around.  “Mom!!”

 

Barry pulled back into the driveway in Dania’s crimson sedan.  He’d only been driving by himself a few times, but he already loved it.  He’d volunteered to run some errands for Dania—returning a few unwanted items to stores, grabbing a list of things she’d forgotten on her last trip to the grocery store, filling up her car with gas—just as an excuse to be out on his own for the afternoon.  He wanted to earn up for his own car and take it out on dates and on his own errands, but taking his mom’s car out by himself was a welcome relief as it was, from being cooped up in the house and being pushed to talk about fairy stuff all the time.

He turned off his favorite radio station and then the car, spinning the keychain around his pointer finger as he got out.  One of the chores Frank had offered to pay him for was cleaning out the garage before he went back to school, so Dania’s car would have room to park again.  He’d have to do that, both because he’d put it off and it was halfway through the summer now, and because he was more anxious to save for a car now that he could drive alone.  But for now he parked her car in the driveway, and headed in the front door, humming the song last on the radio that was stuck in his head.

As soon as Barry opened the door, air-conditioning rushing over him, he could hear more voices than were typical in the house, older women’s voices.  Almost immediately, he heard his name from further in the house.

Dania came quickly out from the kitchen archway, gunning for him.  She was powered-up, which was unexpected in the middle of the afternoon.  “Hey Baz,” she said, sounding ominously guilty-perky.

“Hey,” he said warily.

“Glad you’re back, sweetheart,” Dania said.  She lowered her voice, but maintained the nervous-cheerfulness.  “So Nanna Susan just arrived.”

“Oh,” Barry replied, not quite sure how this information matched with his mother’s current demeanor.

“And I don’t know if you remember her mother, Granny Fleetfoot?” Dania asked him, the lines around her eyes gaining definition.  “Your great-grandmother?”

“Kinda,” he replied honestly.  He’d heard her name mentioned, and vaguely remembered meeting an exceedingly old lady when he was a child.  They didn’t spend a lot of time with Dania’s extended family beyond her parents and older brothers, and Barry had gained the impression over the years, through family reunions, etc., that some of her family was snootily uninterested in spending time with the less-magical relatives.  Therefore, Barry had been uninterested right back.  Although now, he realized, he didn’t fit into that category anymore.

“Well she wanted to come too,” Dania gave him an anxious smile, “so they’re in the den.”

“For what?” Barry asked, obtusely.

Dania paused, looking surprised he didn’t understand.  “To see your transformation, honey.”

Barry’s eyebrows shot up.  “What?  No!” he whispered in distress.

“Baz,” Dania whispered, “I know you’re shy about it, but please?  They’re very excited for you and your powers are very special to the family.”

“I don’t think ‘shy’ is the word I’d use, Mom,” he scowled.  “You’re really going to put me on the spot to power-up in front of someone I hardly know?!”

“I’m sorry,” she told him sincerely, “they popped over, I didn’t have any notice.”  He could tell she was being put on the spot almost as much as he was.  “Granny is very old and determined, but she’s the head of the whole family.  Can you please be nice and respectful?”

“Since when did being respectful require me to change into a girl in front of old ladies?” Barry retorted.

She sighed impatiently at him, opening her mouth to say something else.  But Nanna Susan’s voice echoed through the kitchen, originating in the den, “Dane?”

“We’ll be right there, Mom,” Dania put the smile back into her voice.  “Please Barry?” she requested, heading back toward them.

He made no secret that he didn’t want to do this, but followed her obediently, to her obvious relief.

“Sorry about that!” Dania started speaking to them before she was even through the kitchen.  “He just got home.”

Barry moved much slower, approaching the whole situation with dogged apprehension and taking time to put Dania’s keys away on her desk.

“It’s okay, love,” Barry could tell it was his grandmother’s voice, even though he couldn’t see her around the corner yet.  “We’re just excited, is all.”

Dania was now standing in front of the wall-mounted TV, across from the den’s couch, and as he came closer he watched her nodding.  “That’s what I was telling him, Mom.”

Nanna Susan, an elegant elderly woman who looked maybe 70, although Barry knew she was much older than that, was positioned on the couch, and was currently setting a glass of soda with ice carefully on a coaster on the coffee table.  Her hair was in a long silver braid and she regarded her only daughter with her traditional collected intensity.  “I just really cannot believe we have a glitter baby in the family,” she enthused.

Beyond Susan, Nick was perched grouchily on the end of the couch.

The less familiar woman, sitting in Frank’s large, squishy recliner, looked practically petrified with old age, her face set with deep wrinkles that bespoke eras of unpleasant facial expressions.  Barry didn’t know how old fairies could get, although he knew it was much longer than the average regular human lifespan, but they usually aged much slower as well, after reaching adulthood.  For a fay woman to get bulldog-esque wrinkles, Barry assumed she must be a multi-centenarian.  She wore dark robes that made Barry think she belonged in some children’s book, cursing people.

“I don’t think you fathom how rare this is, Dayspark!” Granny shook her ancient finger at his mother.  “There is by no means any guarantee!  Some family lines just,” she smacked her old froggy lips, “run out.”

“Oh, no, I do understand, Granny,” Dania reassured her soothingly.  “I feel so honored.”

“Come now,” the matriarch rode over her, “I want to see the child’s—Grape was it?—transformation.”

“Grape is his fairy name, yes,” Dania agreed, glancing over at Barry’s forbidding look with an expression of guilt on her face.  “But it’s Barry, my oldest of course.”

Granny waved her hand dismissively.  “I’m here to see your glitter baby, am I not?”

“Of course, Granny, but–”

“But nothing, Dayspark!  Bring the child forward, or I’ll start thinking you made the whole thing up!”

Dania was clearly trying to keep her cool, but she motioned for Barry.  Reluctantly, he stepped around the large armchair and into the piercing gaze of the old woman who sat inscrutably in it.

“I wasn’t sure if your children would be able to make anything of themselves, Dayspark.  Never was much for boy children.”

Barry’s mother looked fairly livid.  “As true as that may be for you, Granny, we were already very proud of Barry, and his brother Nick.”

Their Nanna Susan seemed to be aware of her daughter’s emotional state and quickly spoke up before Dania could make a fuss.  “Oh, come on, let’s see it then, Barry,” she smiled encouragingly at him, “we’re all waiting!”

If his grandmother hadn’t used his usual name, Barry suspected his mother wouldn’t have backed down, but as it was, she clamped her mouth shut with a “we’re going to talk about this later” glare at her own mother.  Then she mirrored Susan’s encouragement with a smile of her own.

He certainly wasn’t a fan of transforming with everyone watching, but that was why they were there—to stare at him getting all girly.  No really odd pressure or anything, he grumbled sardonically inside.

“Okay,” he mumbled, reaching into his pocket for his wand.  He released it into the air in front of him and it began its little dance.

As much as he would prefer not to, Barry assumed that if there was ever a time to put on a show of transformation, now would be that time.  The magic seemed to think so too, acting all the more sparkly and billowy than ever.  And as he rose off the ground, Barry let the sparks carry him into more of a dance than the last time.  His skirt fell open like a flower blooming and he was sure to play up his “ballerina arms,” hoping to win points, as little as he respected this woman.

As the magic finished with his face, they all clapped excitedly.  Except Nick, of course.  Why did he have to be there anyway?! Barry grumped embarrassedly, though his pensive smile didn’t waver.

“Magnificent!” Granny clapped so hard she began wheezing.  Nanna Susan checked on her in concern, but the old woman waved her away.  “I haven’t seen a glitter baby transform in ages, but yours was much more precious than I remember!”

Barry was unable to keep all hints of sarcasm from his Grape voice, “Thank you, ma’am.”

Nanna Susan looked much more calmly thrilled as well.  “Oh, Barry, darling, it was a treat!”

He gave his grandmother a more genuine smile.

“Come, come, let us have a look!” the matriarch declared, motioning him closer.

He didn’t really seem to have a choice, although he hadn’t known they were going to scrutinize him after transformation too.  He shouldn’t really have been surprised though.  He stepped closer to both his grandmothers.

“Aw, Dane,” Susan looked meaningfully at his mom, standing to get a closer look at Barry, “I always said daughters of yours would be beautiful!”

Barry felt his cheeks burn.

“Mother is right;” she emphasized, tapping him on the end of this smaller nose, “absolutely precious!”

He ducked his head, so embarrassed.

“And chesty too,” she winked at him, looking pointedly at his bodice.  “An diwvronn na yw bras-oberys!”

“Mom!” Dania reprimanded as Barry wanted to disappear.  “That’s still your grandson you’re talking about!”

“Sorry, Baz,” Susan put her hands up.  “It’s just that I don’t have any genetic granddaughters, remember?  Which is what puts you in this situation, of course.  But I have a right to be curious, certainly?”

“Have you learned any magic yet, little one?” Granny asked, eyes scrutinizing.

Barry balked internally at being called “little one,” but the subject change from his “preciousness” was still welcome.  “I’ve only had one lesson so far,” he answered.  “…ma’am,” he added, figuring he probably should.

“Oh, but he’s a natural!” Dania perked up immediately.  “Does every task with such grace and ease, magically speaking.”

Barry felt a little shy about her compliment now, pleased that she thought he was doing so well.

“Show them that thing that you did on the beach!” Dania nudged him softly on the arm.

“Which one?” he asked, fidgeting his wings uncomfortably as he remembered his swimsuits and the outfits she’d tried on him at the beach.

“When you put your hair up,” she reminded him and he unconsciously released his tight breath.  But then Barry remembered how girly the hairdo had been and didn’t know if he was really okay demonstrating that either.  But this didn’t exactly seem up to him.

“Right,” he said half-heartedly.  He fiddled with his wand for a moment, then with a sigh, shot himself in the face with magic again.  He muttered Put my hair up again to the wand in his mind, and pictured the same hairstyle again, assuming it would be the same.

The way Granny gasped when the magic cleared the air, Barry wondered for a second if he’d accidentally made himself bald.  But no such luck, he realized, as Dania declared, “Oh sweetheart!  It’s even better than last time!”

“My goodness, he can’t have learned that after just one lesson,” Nanna Susan scoffed admiringly, stepping close again to touch Barry’s hair.  “The intricacy is breathtaking!”

Barry was less able to suppress his “tired of this” look by the minute.  “I didn’t mean to make it intricate,” he said, a little more forcefully than was probably polite.  “I’m not exactly in control of it, it just seems to do its own thing sometimes.”

“Do you want to see, hun?” Dania asked, still smiling proudly at him.

“Not really,” he said truthfully.

But she poofed him a hand mirror again and extended it to him.  He set his mouth and took it from her, getting grumpier by the minute.  The annoyed girl in the mirror looked like she might be a bridesmaid, with the elaborate purple hairdo she had.  His bun had complex loops and woven strands, and part of the hair was sectioned off and left down in big, soft curls.  In addition to the perfect little ring of miniature lavender roses around the bun, varying sizes of purple roses were woven throughout the style, culminating in a large rose along his hairline.  It was totally ridiculous, and not what he had been picturing at all.  It was like for his every magic thought and attempt, his magic decided to amplify the girliness to a power of ten.

“That is advanced wardrobe magic right there!” Susan beamed.  “You seem to have a gift, love.”

“Can I go?” Nick asked their mom, tight around the mouth, eyeing Barry’s hair with distaste.

“Please do,” Barry retorted, and in his embarrassment it came out harsher than he meant it to.

Nick glared at him, looking hurt.  “I didn’t know that this was mostly going to be a fashion show of Barry’s pageant looks,” he muttered, heading for the door.

Barry flushed and wished he could just go hide in his room.  Why did he have to do this anyway?

“Hey, Nicky,” Nanna Susan called her younger grandson back over with a loving sternness; a lot like when they were kids and didn’t want to help their grandfather clean out the attic.

Nick stopped immediately, looking caught.

“Come here, love, I want to talk to you,” she said, motioning him over.

He walked like there were anchors attached to his feet, but came to stand with their grandma.  She put her arm around him.

“Nicky, I want to impress upon you how important this is, not just for Barry, but for all of us as a family,” she went on, gesturing to Barry like he was a heritage museum display.  Barry wasn’t a fan of this arrangement, but stood still there anyway.  “A glitter baby is not only a fascinating and rare display of fairy mother magic, but it’s a second chance for a family line that would otherwise just end.  If it wasn’t for this amazing thing with Barry, your mother’s magic would just end with her.  This is a very special opportunity that matters very much to your mother, yes, but also to Granny and me, our magic carrying on this way.”

“Your magic,” Granny corrected.  “I have other granddaughters with daughters who are fairies, Susan.”

“Right,” Nanna Susan acknowledged.  “Thank you, Mother.  The point is that it deserves your respect, sweetheart.  Can you do that for me?”

Nick looked cowed and impressed, if not exactly comfortable, although Barry could tell Nick wanted to please their grandmother.  “Right,” he mumbled.  “Okay Nanna.”

“Good boy,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.

“May I power-down now?” Barry asked his mother and grandmother, anxious to be alone and male as soon as possible.

“Yes, I think that’s fine, sweetheart,” Dania answered, gratitude in her eyes.

“What’s going on?” Granny asked, clearly hard of hearing.

“He’s going to power-down, Mother,” Susan said louder.

“Well, then take me home and make me some tea, Sue,” the old lady said, looking smaller and weaker all of a sudden.  “Powering-up is the exciting part.”

Nanna Susan nodded, unsurprised.  “Alright Mother, that’s fine.”  While Dania helped the ancient woman up out of the easy chair, Susan gave Nick another hug, then came over to hug Barry.  She put her hands on either side of his round face, looking into his eyes.  Barry worked hard not to squirm with the close proximity in his current form.  “We’re very excited, Baz.  And I can’t wait to see where your magic takes you, considering what you can do already!”

“Thanks, Nanna,” Barry said, his girl voice a little extra squeaky with discomfort.

She gave him a big kiss on the forehead, then took one more look at him.  She scrunched her nose up like she was looking at an infant and nudged his chin with one finger.  “I swear, you just couldn’t be cuter!”

As soon as she turned to help Granny, Barry released his eyeroll.  If one more woman called him “cute,” “precious,” or “adorable” today, he was going to berserk on them.

“Ah, almost forgot,” Granny said, “give this to the child.”  She pulled an envelope from the depths of her nondescript clothing layers and handed it to Dania.

“To…” Dania hesitated, confused.

“Grape,” Granny said, not bothering to look at Barry as she gripped Nanna Susan’s arm, ready to go.

“Oh, thank you, Granny,” Dania said, looking at Barry in surprise.  Apparently Granny Fleetfoot didn’t give out presents very often, because Dania lifted her eyebrows meaningfully at him.

“Bye love, call you soon,” Susan told Dania, patting her on the arm, before she and Granny disappeared in a puff of Nanna Susan’s trademark deep blue-green magic.

“How come Nanna doesn’t need to power-up to transport them back?” Barry realized, momentarily distracted from the fact that he hadn’t powered-down yet.

“Nanna has a direct portal set up to our house,” Dania said absently, paying more attention to the envelope in her hand.  “She just uses a token she keeps in her purse.  It’s like fairy speed-dial.”  She looked up from the envelope to Barry.  “Remember, we had one set up for her house when you guys were little, in case of emergency, when your dad and I were out of town.  We kept it in the medicine cabinet.”

“Right,” Barry remembered.

“The problem is that then you have no excuse when your fairy mother keeps asking why you don’t just pop over all the time,” Dania smirked.  “But here, now I’m dying to know what Granny gave you.”  She handed Barry the envelope.

Nick, who was slouching on the armrest of the couch, seemed to be watching its opening carefully.

Barry slit the side of the envelope with a magically manicured fingernail and slipped out the only thing inside: a check.  When he saw the number, written in shaky old script, his jaw dropped.  “F-f-fifteen hundred dollars!” his words came out like a chirp.

Dania put her hand over her mouth.  “No!”

Barry showed her the check as proof.

His mother stared, stunned at the number.  “That’s about half of what she gave your father and me when we got married!” she emphasized.  “Granny has a fortune, but she only gives any of it away for things she deems particularly large.  Or to her favorites.”

Barry just blinked.  “I can put that toward a car!”

Dania nodded in agreement.  “You’ll have to send her a thank you letter!”

Barry nodded, not really comprehending.  If going through tutu hell helped him get a car, maybe it was a little more worth it.

Nick hadn’t said anything.  He suddenly got up and left the room and a moment later he could be heard stomping up the stairs to his room.

Barry exchanged a worried look with his mom.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Dania said with a motherly sad smile.

So Barry was left alone with his large check.  He felt guilty about Nick.  He hadn’t really done anything to earn the money, and it wasn’t like Granny Fleetfoot was exactly sending out big checks to all her great-grandchildren.  Barry had never gotten one from her before.  But in another way, he did kind of feel like it was payment for “damages” caused to his life by being a fairy.  Maybe.

Well, in any case, he was going to use it to help save for his car!  He glanced around to make sure he was alone still, and then fluttered his wings so he lifted off the living room carpet, and flew around in a small excited circle.  Sometimes putting up with things paid off!

 

On Wednesday, Barry didn’t make as much of a fuss when Dania beckoned him down for his second lesson.  Although he decided that trying to get away from Nick’s sourpuss attitude wasn’t worth dealing with women’s swimwear and sunburns, so he relented to learning in his parents’ bedroom, with the door secured, instead of leaving the house.  Nick had mostly been pouting in his room since their grandmothers had come the day before, anyway; about Barry’s check was all he could figure.

It was Barry’s fourth time transforming into Grape, and while he still didn’t like it, by any stretch of the imagination, the literal sensation of transformation was growing less frightening.

“So we’ve worked with transformations,” Dania reviewed, unintentionally segueing from his thoughts, “which is anything that is pre-existing, which then is magicked to be like something else.  Transformation is the bread and butter of fairy mother magic, especially appearance transformations, which is what we played with most in your first lesson.”

Barry didn’t like how girly that emphasis seemed, but made no such comment.

“But it also includes turning objects into other objects.  Anything with a ‘morph,’ so to speak,” Dania went on explaining.  “However, that’s only one category of the magic we can do.  There’s also summoning spells—which are what they sound like, summoning an existing object from somewhere else—and conjuring spells, which create an object from scratch.”

Barry was much more intrigued about that.  “Wait, so a lot of the stuff you make is out of thin air?!”

“Not air, honey;” she said, shaking her head, “made with the Fayemark, out of substance it gathers.”

“It gathers substance?  Like from stuff left in there?” he wondered in awe.  “Or like from other places?  Does it follow mass conservation laws?”

“I… I don’t know, Baz,” Dania replied with a little defensiveness.  “Magic figures it out, okay?”

He didn’t want to put her on the spot.  They’d just gone from discussing sparkly makeover accessorizing magic, to harnessing the substance of the universe itself to spawn things at will; there was no question which one Barry wanted to ask questions about.

“To be honest, sometimes I don’t even know if I’ve just done a summoning spell or a conjuring one.  The Fayemark and my magic unite, along with my will, and my fairy godchild’s if applicable, and I feel the object arriving to me, through the Fayemark.  Sometimes I can tell if it existed elsewhere, but sometimes I just can’t.”

Hmm, that was interesting, Barry thought.

“Although, from what I’ve noticed over the years, when it comes to fay mother magic, transformation is often the easiest, as long as you’re not trying to change the individual nature of something too badly, or for too long.  If you’re not subverting the individuality of a person or an object, then transformation is easier than asking the Fayemark for something that isn’t there with you.  And strangely, sometimes creating something from scratch can be easier than your magic locating an existing object and bringing it to you.  Especially when it comes to simple, inanimate objects.  And especially considering you do have to be cognizant of who you might be taking an object from; you don’t want to accidentally be shoplifting.”

Barry lifted his eyebrows.  “That can happen??”

She nodded seriously, but didn’t seem worried.  “Usually fairy magic is good at figuring out a non-intrusive way to get something.  Unlike some sects of jinn, from what I’ve heard.”

“Gin?” he asked.

“Genies; Middle Eastern fay,” Dania pointed out.  “They use the Fayemark too, but differently than we do.  They tend to have very strict cultures, and the way they interact with magic flows right along with that; very sharp magic laws and very unbending magic councils.  But overall they’re loving, peaceful peoples.  There are a few intense sects however that will really try to screw over their Sīdīs (their temporary masters) with literalism; monkey’s paw-esque, very dangerous.”

Barry just nodded, feeling like that was a lot of cultural information she’d thrown at him quite quickly and emphatically.

She shrugged to herself.  “Then again, pixies often try and screw people too, but that’s not out of any sort of cultural morality… they’re just little jerks sometimes.”

Barry grinned at her honesty about it.

“Fairies ourselves used to have a darker reputation, though since the days of the Titanian Renaissance, we’ve been largely Seelie,” Dania went on, and after a point he wondered if she was mostly talking to herself.

“Am I supposed to know these words?” Barry asked.  “Titanian, like the ship or like the Greek mythology guys?”

Dania laughed.  “No, like Titania, honey.  By far the most beloved fairy queen in our history; came to the throne in the 1300s, if memory serves.”

“Right,” Barry shrugged, feeling embarrassed he hadn’t remembered, considering that made a lot more sense in context, and he’d heard enough about Queen Titania over the years, both from popular folklore and real fairies.  And both Dania and Nanna Susan liked exclamations with her name in them.

Dania went on with her history lesson.  “She reigned for hundreds of years, and heralded an exceptional new era of fay-human relations, despite plenty of antagonism from superstitious and power-hungry mortals in the Middle Ages.  She even rallied her peoples to step in and intercede during the Black Death, to help where magic could, rather than just leaving mortals to their fate.  Fairies have historically kept to ourselves, often too much.  And especially after having our people repeatedly maligned and even slaughtered at times, the fay weren’t especially inclined to help.”

Barry’s eyes were wide.  “Didn’t the Black Plague kill like… tens of millions of people?!”

“Yes…” Dania agreed, but looked confused as to why his Grape voice had suddenly gone squeaky with alarm.

“And they could have fixed it, but they didn’t?!” Barry demanded, appalled.

“Woah, woah, no.” Dania corrected flatly.  “We can’t just undo illness or halt decay.  You’ve had plenty enough colds and tummy aches growing up; you should know that.  Sometimes we can ease pain and slow aging in others, and the Fayemark working through us makes us stronger and slower-aging naturally.  But illness and decay are natural parts of life, honey.  Fay tenets honor and respect death and afterlife, as much as life and birth.”

“That seems a little bit ‘easy for you to say’ when you live at least twice as long as everyone else,” Barry pointed out, frowning.

“‘Us,’” Dania said, arms folded.

“What?” Barry asked.

“Easy for us to say, when we live longer,” she looked at him probingly.

“Oh,” Barry shuffled awkwardly.  He wasn’t used to including himself with fairies.

“But anyway,” she went on, a little cooly, “they couldn’t just fix the Black Death, but I believe they soothed where they could, provided food, etc.  And Titania strove to raise fay, especially fairies, to a higher standard, one that sought to do right by non-magic people, and be benevolent caregivers, instead of the wrathful, chaotic nature spirits we’d been too commonly known to be before.  ‘Seelie’ versus ‘Unseelie’ are the Scottish terms; benevolent versus antagonistic fay.”

“Sorry, Mom.  I know you’ve always done everything you can for people,” Barry said.  “It just seems kinda heartless to be able to fix things and not do it.  But it makes sense if they couldn’t, to just help where they could.”

Dania was silent for a moment, slipping her wand through her hands like a violin bow.  “Barry, love, I think you’ll often find that with magic, the limits aren’t primarily surrounding what you’re able to do, but instead what you should do.  There are limits on our capabilities, plenty of them.  And yet we can’t become complacent and let the Will of Magic take the responsibility from us.  Having magic is about making decisions, just like anything about becoming an adult.  Sure, it takes a lot of practice and self-control to get good at magic, and have it do what you want.  But the responsibility doesn’t end there.  We can’t just believe that if we’re able to do something with magic, that automatically makes it right.  Just like decisions we make with our hands, or muscles, or voice; just because you have the ability to lift, touch, punch or soliloquy, doesn’t mean you always should.”

Barry felt the weight of her words heavy on his bare shoulders.  As if he didn’t already have enough reasons to be overwhelmed and displeased with being a fairy.  This sounded like so much responsibility.

Dania reached and took his small hands into hers, bringing their four hands and two wands to center in the middle between them, so they were both holding both, her dark cherry colored stick together with his faintly blue-purple one.  Her expressive bright blue eyes met his seriously.  “We have a duty to do our best to make people’s lives better, namely our fairy godchildren.  That doesn’t mean we necessarily give people what they want.  We give people what is best for them.  There’s a major difference.”

Her impassioned directive was obviously important, and Barry wanted to help people—he did!  He was just feeling way in over his head.  “But how do you even know what that is??  ‘What’s best,’ I mean.  Who are we to say?!”

She gave him a soft smile, and her expression seemed relieved that he was finally getting it.  Barry didn’t know what he was getting, or if he was actually getting it.

“Sometimes all you can do is your best, honey,” she told him.  “You weigh options, you care, and you try.  And it’s okay to have fun and each wish isn’t the end of the world.  But you just never forget that each wish granted is still a choice on your part.  A choice with real and lasting effects.”

He gave a single head bob in affirmation.

She squeezed his hands.  “You want to try some summoning now?” she smiled, dropping the gravity of the conversation.

“I’m not going to accidentally steal the Declaration of Independence or something?” he wondered worriedly.

She gave him a wry smile.  “See, lasting effects!  So let’s not try and summon the Declaration of Independence as your first summoning spell, okay?” she winked.

 

Despite Dania’s statement that transformation spells tended to be easier for fairy godmothers than summoning or conjuring, Barry found the simple objects he practiced making appear jarringly easy compared to trying to get the stupid swimsuit to do what he wanted it to.  When he reached for a battery he’d left on his desk, or a snack-size bag of chips from the pantry, they were just there, like his wand, to grab through the Fayemark, and in turn they appeared in his hand amidst purple mist.  Sure, he and Dania were still in the house this time, so that wasn’t a very long distance… but a few weeks before he wouldn’t have been able to make an object across the room twitch without touching it.  It was a really cool feeling, almost as exciting as flying had been.

Conjuring was… harder; a lot more like transformation had been for him.  Shockingly, it wasn’t due to the fact that, like Dania, he had no idea where the atoms were coming from as he made a few small objects appear in his hand, deliberately not from preexisting places.  But he still couldn’t make them not be Grape-flavored, so to speak, no matter what he conjured.

He tried to conjure a small wooden box; it was white, covered in a pattern of small purple flowers.  He tried to conjure a bar of soap (it was hard for him to come up with ideas of things to conjure, on the spot); it turned out both lavender scented and colored.  He tried to conjure a marble; it looked like it had a small, purple glitter galaxy within it (that one was actually very pretty and he was more proud of it than the other items).

“You’ve done incredible, honey!” Dania reassured him.  “100% of the things you’ve magicked have shown up, and been in the right category!”

He was still frowning at his little pile of purple things.  It wasn’t as upsetting as ending up in a revealing outfit, but it was still frustrating.  Why couldn’t he just get it to do what he said, like with the battery??

 

Thursday marked the Fourth of July, and a week of Barry having powers.  The whole fairy thing was kind of the opposite of “Independence” in his mind, especially from his British Isles ancestry, but since it was a holiday he did get the day off from fairy lessons.  He enjoyed way too many hot dogs and hamburgers at a neighborhood barbeque, and after the past few days of periodic thunderstorms, he was glad it was nice enough weather to swim (with Dania’s help, his sunburn had completely faded, thankfully), and attend a big fireworks show.  Although Barry was a little pyrotechnicked-out too, after the week he’d had.

But it was back to lessons, first thing on Friday, and all the weekdays the next week.  Dania hadn’t been kidding about trying to fit as many magic lessons in as possible, since he wasn’t in school.

She covered the basics of magical repair on Friday; “Repair spells are often more permanent than our other transformation spells, since they’re returning objects to their original, home states.  The difference isn’t whether the end result is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ it’s whether the state was pre-established as being an attribute of the thing being transformed.  If you knocked over a vase, and I repaired it with magic, that would be likely to stick.  If I gave Nick orthodontia, which he’s probably going to need at some point, I could keep renewing the spell, but it wouldn’t be permanent.”  Barry successfully fixed a model car he’d accidentally stepped on at one point in his bedroom.  Then she poofed him a skirt and magically ripped it a few inches up the side; he spent half an hour accidentally ripping it further and further up his leg with magic, until he was finally able to settle down his embarrassment and seal the rip back up.

On Monday, she explained some of the ins and outs of emotion spells, which she said were almost always temporary.  “We can evoke emotion, in a more subtle way usually than red fairy spells, but it can still be immensely potent.  These are very high-octane spells that you don’t want to use offhand.  We can’t permanently change someone’s emotion or opinion, but the results are very real, in the moment.  It’s like giving someone a chemical, like a sedative or an aphrodisiac; adrenaline or endorphins.  We can brighten (or dampen) someone’s mood, even help them forget about something for a while.  But it’s not permanent.  And many a fairy has gotten themselves into a bad spot by giving a godchild emotions that they later experience withdrawals from.  Emotions are addictive.  And you don’t want to become someone’s happy-mood crack dealer, where they’re summoning you whenever they’re desperate to feel a high again.  So most of the time, I would recommend trying to help your godchildren be happy in less fleeting ways.  Problem solving to fix their circumstances, rather than just giving them a fay energy drink, so to speak.”

This category of magic scared Barry.  He had experienced the spells she was discussing, once in a while over the years.  She’d helped perk him up here and there, when he’d asked for it.  But Barry really didn’t like his emotions or thoughts being messed with.  It made him feel like it was hard to control himself, which already felt like a large feat sometimes with the way his mind and heart liked to dramatically run all over the place.  He didn’t even like being on heavy cold medicine or painkillers, because he didn’t like how it took control over his thoughts and cognisance.

And there’d been the time he’d had requested magic bean coffee, when he was going to be too tired for a much-anticipated date, with a girl he’d had a bit of a crush on since middle school; he’d had a sip too much and he could barely get his mouth to stop moving, mind and emotions in utter overdrive.  She’d been completely unimpressed and they hadn’t gone out again.  That had been a last straw for Barry, into, “This is a category of magic I will no longer wish for.”

And so the idea of granting other people’s emotion-altering wishes seemed fairly horrifying to Barry.  All the more so if they were going to be addicts, knocking down his door to get another hit.

Add to that magic insisting on changing his body shape all the time, and it being so difficult for him to get a handle on the most embarrassing spells, Barry was feeling quite grumpy at the idea of magic taking away someone’s ability to control themselves.

Dania seemed aware of how reluctant he was to try these types of spells, and although they went over the theory for a long time, she only required him to try one of this type, on himself.  As it was, though, he didn’t like how that one went.

He’d thought “cheerful” was a fairly safe instruction for his wand to perform, and he definitely felt immediately perked up after his magic completed its task.  In fact “perky” was an accurate description for the sing-songy cadence his Grape voice unintentionally took on, and he felt lots of desire to smile.

“Well, it obviously worked!” he said enthusiastically.  “So, yay!  I did it!”

Dania lowered one brow.  “Yeah, it did…  Considering I’ve been trying so hard to get you to be excited about being a fairy, you smiling that way, this suddenly, is oddly disconcerting.”

“You know what’s funny?” he chirped.  “I can even tell that how I’m acting right now is going to really bug me later.  But at the moment, I don’t even care!”

She snorted, brow still furrowed.  “Yeah, how effective your own spell is being on yourself is worrying me.  Let’s go ahead and end it.”

“How do I do that!” he exclaimed, blinking wide eyes, voice bubbling over.

She looked both more amused and more worried by the moment.  “We’ll go into more when we cover time limits, which I obviously didn’t have you place on this spell.  With the object spells you’ve done so far, it defaults to just being a one-off spell, that gets left in the state you set it to until you perform a new spell; or eventually with morphs, it would probably wear off and puff back at some point.”

He nodded encouragingly at her.

“With this spell, it’s in an ongoing state; it has unintentional parameters, because you didn’t know how to set them intentionally.  But since it’s your own spell, and you’re here and powered-up to change it, you can either alter or end it.  Usually you can alter or end your own spells, whereas we can only alter other fairies’ spells, and then sometimes only a little bit.  But that’s a whole Briar Rose topic we’ll get into later.”

He gasped positively.  “Like Sleeping Beauty?!”

She sighed pityingly at him.  “Yes, honey, like sleeping beauty.  (Prime example of fairies in the Middle Ages getting petty and niggling.)  But let’s focus, so we can get your spell off of you, okay?”

“Okay!” he grinned.

“Just use your wand to feel your spell, as it’s connected to the Fayemark; and as you wrap your understanding around it, you can truncate it.  It’s like clipping the end of a string.”

He nodded enthusiastically again, excited to try it and to please her.  He lifted his wand and closed his eyes contentedly.  He gently touched the Fayemark with his mind, glad to notice it was easy to find his active spell.  It was a little nebulous and felt a bit like overly sweet candy.  But he wrapped his will around it and pinched.

Boom.  He frowned.

“And… you ended it?” she checked, obviously watching his facial expression.

He folded his arms, grumpiness back in full force.  “I don’t like those ones.”

She shrugged.  “See what I meant about endorphins?  But it’s good for you to have a little practice with spells like that, and know how to end them, in any case.”

But Barry swore to himself that he was done with any mood or mind-altering spells, especially on himself.

 

For the rest of Monday’s lesson, she let him try object levitation, which was a lot more fun, and Barry got a ball to bounce without physically touching it.  So on Tuesday they played catch with an eggplant he’d conjured (yes, the trend of purple items was still strong), tossing it back and forth with just their wands, while Dania explained how magic could influence logistics, like the DMV, without mind-controlling anyone.

Wednesday was a short lesson, but she taught him how to make simple images appear with his magic, things like words in the air, the time, or pictures from a magazine.  They looked like holograms and it was fun doodling in purple neon.

Thursday, Barry relented to going back out to the beach for lessons, Dania remembering sunscreen for them both this time.  His swimsuit default spell had apparently worked, because when his magic auto-adapted, the plain purple swimsuit was back.  That was certainly better than the bikinis he’d experienced showing back up.  And it was nice to fly again, out in the free open space of the solitary island.

Being back on the same beach made him reflective, though, about how much had happened in exactly two weeks since his birthday.  It felt like it had been much longer.  And he wasn’t sure what he was feeling about being a fairy.  He still didn’t want it, but the dislike had numbed out some, over a jam-packed two weeks.

Dania was a good teacher, and he liked her explaining stuff.  When his magic would listen to him, it was even kinda exciting sometimes.  He didn’t protest or even complain lately when she’d invite him for lessons, and he’d stopped rolling his eyes when she would explain her plan for the next one.

Turning into a girl was still strange and unnerving, and it was still a relief every time he’d power-down to feel his proportions return back to normal, along with his eye-line (being shrunk repeatedly was immensely jarring) and center of gravity.  But it was no longer a constant state of surreal panic like it had been on his birthday, and for a lot of his first lessons.  As silly as it was, his voice was one of the things that continually bothered him the most.  It was like when your voice changed with a bad cold and sounded weird with every sound you made, only the inverse in pitch.  He didn’t forget the body shape either, and it still felt overly exposed everywhere.

But Barry had read about “Sensory Adaptation” and how the brain slowly tuned out being aware of wearing a watch, or how you could forget you were wearing clothes or had something on your face.  In some ways, Grape was like that.  Abruptly being girl-shaped was uncomfortable and disturbing… but having spent hours at a time that way, it became a little more like wearing a goofy hat that you forgot you were wearing until someone gave you a weird look.

His mother treated him mostly the same powered-up as powered-down, besides giving him the occasional skirt or dress or playing with his voluminous curls, so he mostly felt like his goofy-Grape-hat was ignored when it was just the two of them.  And while he could ignore the Grape-aspect of magic, magic wasn’t so bad.

Dania had conjured a bucket and with it they’d made the most basic dump sandcastle, with the instruction for him to transform it how he wished.

Barry had always liked sand and how something so messy and nebulous could be turned into fancy structures, or even glass, given the right situation.  Building a regular sandcastle was fun on its own, but making something more substantial via magic seemed cool and exciting.

He sat beside the primitive tower butterfly-style on the tide-packed sand.  He closed his eyes, picturing what he hoped to achieve: a miniature version of the castle pictured in his medieval architecture book growing up, that illustrated all the names of castle parts, from “buttresses” (which Nick had spent an entire day repeating as a six-year-old) to “arrow slits.”  The book had been a favorite of Barry’s, and he had the castle images committed well to memory.

Barry worked hard to slow himself down, picturing it in detail, with its strong stone towers capped with parapets and its portcullis in the front.  He felt the gentle beach breeze on his wings and bare legs, but actively ignored them, absently gripping and re-gripping his wand, talking to it about his desires for the castle.

Finally, he deemed it time and murmured a simple, Make the castle like this, with the image in his mind, flicking his wand toward the crumbly sand dump.

He opened his eyes as he felt magic flow outward.  The purple burst twirled around the loose, wet sand and, before Barry’s eyes, it solidified, becoming dense sandstone, forming mini versions of the four towers of the keep in his memory, with battlements and even a little tiny gatehouse!  It was just like he pictured, except teeny and sand-colored, but it was perfect!

He turned and looked up at Dania proudly.  “Hey, that’s not too bad, huh?” he said.  Considering this was one of his more masculine achievements with magic, his excited voice sounded annoyingly bubblegummy.

“Honey, that’s beautiful!” Dania was smiling affectionately at him.  “Your magic always adds so much intricacy!”

This spell did not seem to hold the same objective as when she’d had him do wardrobe magic.  “Well, I’d rather make an intricate castle than intricate hair,” he informed her, rolling his eyes.

“It’s impressive either way, sweetheart,” she reminded him.

He tipped his head to one side and then the other, hair bouncing off of his shoulder, regarding the carved stone details and itty-bitty merlons.  He especially loved the lattice work on the non-functional portcullis gate.  It needed a moat, he thought, to protect it from rampaging crab marauders.  He swirled his wand around the miniature fortress again, and his magic dug a ditch.  Another spell and water sprung up from the water table just below, and filled it.  There, now it was ready to shoot toothpick-sized arrows at seagulls trying to attack their mini princess or something.

He felt silly about how much he liked the petite structure.  And it had come together so easily.  “Some stuff isn’t too hard to transform or make,” he said aloud.  “I don’t know why the clothes stuff was so hard, especially because that’s like fairy godmothers’ thing, right?”

“Yes, but all the clothes you’ve made were lovely, Baz, just not what you wanted,” she informed him.

He looked skeptically up at her again.  “I don’t think the point is how ‘adorbs’ a spell result is,” he made his voice sarcastically vapid and chirpy, which again was disconcertingly easy.

She gave him a patient smirk.  “Honey, we’re in the ballgown industry; that kinda is the point.”

He frowned.  If he was stuck with fairy godmother magic, did it always have to be so girly?!  Sure, that was apparently why it demanded he be curvy to do literally anything with magic, but why couldn’t he make magic cool?!  “But I want to get it to do what I say!” he said frustratedly.  “And besides, it isn’t just about wardrobe magic, right??  What about being ‘Seelie’ and problem-solving instead of giving people magic-emotion-drugs, and all that other stuff you’ve talked about recently?  What do sparkle bikinis have to do with that stuff?!”

She looked pensive and sighed.  Over her shoulder, she casually made a large mound of sand, then zapped it again so it formed an ornate throne out of sand-adobe.  She perched herself upon it.  Barry thought she looked like an elegant island queen, sitting there.  “Okay, so you’ve had magic for two weeks, right?” she said.

That seemed like a subject change to Barry, and he didn’t want to be knocked off topic, unsatisfied with “ballgowns” being the reason why fairy godmothers existed, especially if he had no choice but to be one.

“And today we’ve been doing a lot of review stuff.  You flew, and you’ve been trying transformation again, recapping with levitation, etc., right?” she continued.

“Yeah, but I want to know what it all has to do with—” he started insisting.

She gave him an impatient look.  “I’m getting there, Barry,” she said firmly.

He truncated his sentence and waited for her to go on.

“So we’ve been focusing on the fundamentals of different spell types, and sure I’ve given you a little context along the way.  But we haven’t been focusing on the point.”

“Which is what?” he asked the obvious question.

“Wishes,” she answered simply.  “Everything we do is focused on our fairy godchildren.  They are the point.  Now, because you don’t have godchildren yet, you can’t feel what it’s like to have something wished for, officially, yet.  It’s a really special experience.  However, one of the main reasons control over your magic is so important, is because you have to be responsible for the results of your wish granting.  We’ve talked about that some.  But another key ingredient is that it can be hard to not grant a wish.”

There she went, making him scared of it again.  “What do you mean, ‘hard?’”

“Like your clothing auto-adapting,” she pointed out.  “Your magic can do things without your conscious direction.  And wishes are strong.”

He chewed on a puffy lower lip thoughtfully.  His mom had always been able to refuse to grant the silly things he and Nick wished for.  He’d never realized that was comforting, her being in control of her magic, and him not having to be responsible with his wishes.  Were the dumb wishes hard for her to reject??  If so, he’d never known or been able to tell.

“Now, because your magic is centrally created by your own will, mixed then of course with your godchild’s will, it’s all still your desire to cast a spell that determines whether or not it gets cast,” she told him.  “Your godchild couldn’t be casting this spell for themselves, right?  So therefore you, and your desires are the gate that determines if a spell gets cast or not.”

“Hey, hey, wait a minute,” Barry protested, pointing a finger that he was used to being more hefty, sternly at her, “I had no desire to power-up the first time, and certainly no desire to wear bikinis!”

“Your initial power-up is different,” she waved that one away.  “That’s Magic’s will, not yours, bestowing your powers upon you in the first place, that then you are allowed to use as you see fit.”

“And the swimsuits?” he pressed.

“Your desire to cast a spell, or grant a wish, is what determines if a spell happens,” Dania tried to clarify.  “Whether the results of that spell are what you want or not, is an entire extra layer of control.”

His brow furrowed in confusion.

“Hmm,” she murmured, clearly trying to help him understand.  “Okay, let’s say magic is like water, alright?  And it’s sprinkled all through everything.  Everyone has a little bit of magic.”

“They do?” Barry asked, surprised.

“Mmhmm,” she nodded.  “Yeah, it’s inside of everything a bit, especially people.”

Barry’s mouth hung open, never remembering having heard that.

“But just like your body is made up of a lot of water, but that doesn’t mean you can make a squirt gun out of your kidneys—” she tried.

His eyes narrowed, completely baffled where she was going with this now.  “Mom.  This is a weird analogy.”

She narrowed her eyes back at him, seeming a little confused where she had been going, herself.  “My point was merely that a body of water is very different from plants, animals, and people having water inside of them.  And in that same way, being fay is different than magic being through everyone.”

“We’re bodies of water?” he tried to follow.

“Yes!” she agreed.  “Fay are bodies of water.  And I would say fairies, maybe most of all, are rivers.  Flowing channels of magic.  While the Fayemark itself would be the grandest sea,” she pointed out at the ocean, crashing onto the beach’s shore.  Then she moved her wand and a wavy stream of her dark red magic appeared in the air, flowing from her wand-tip.  “Rivers have lots of attributes to their water flow, right?  You have the speed of the currents, how fast and powerful the flow is,” she made her magic-stream flow swiftly forth, like she’d turned the faucet up full-blast.  “That’s like our will at its core, and it affects how powerful our magic is.  As far as I can tell, your river is very speedy, love,” she smiled at him.

Barry’s eyes widened, not expecting her to apply it back directly to him that way.  “It is?” he squeaked.

“Mmhmm,” she nodded, “you seem to have a lot of raw power.  Just little things I’m picking up on, like how quickly you felt your wand in the Fayemark, or how rich each of your spells turns out.”

He blushed, wrapping his arms around his girl-knees.  He kinda liked the idea of his magic being naturally speedy and powerful, although it was a conflicted sort of feeling.

“Magic ‘speed’ like that is potent, but that doesn’t mean it’s controlled,”  she went on, and his mouth hung open unintentionally; so that was his problem!  “A fast-moving river is harder to dam,” she smiled, “or even redirect.  And another aspect of a river’s flow is direction.”  She focused on her wand again, and the squiggly line changed course a few times to demonstrate.  “And even within that category, there’s so many factors that change a river’s direction.  There’s banks and trees, rain and erosion.  There’s rocks and rapids in the river itself.  There’s gravity, and some rivers even have tides with the moon, if they’re connected closely enough to the ocean.  From without or within, so many things can affect the path of a river.”

“But don’t the big rivers stay mostly in the same place?  Like the Mississippi, or Ohio?” he wondered.  He wasn’t sure why, but the idea that something as constant as a river could just cease to be the same entity, because of rain, erosion, or rocks, instantly upset him.

She smiled.  “Yep, overall.  Rivers are consistent.  The Ohio is always the same river.  And yet all the water molecules are always different.  It’s never going to be the same water, nor is it ever going to splash down the same rapid, the same exact way twice, no matter how many times water falls down the same rocks.  Water is gorgeous and complex that way.  Like everything you love about physics, right?”

He gave a very demure nod, small chin bobbing on his knees.  He did love physics, and that made him shy, but more than that, his mind was swirling with what defined a river in the first place.

“There are fundamental aspects to a river that make it continually the same, and yet, like the song goes, ‘you never step in the same river twice.  The water’s always changing, always flowing,’” she quoted.

“I don’t know how you made this Pocahontas and the Ship of Theseus at the same time, but it’s impressive,” Barry snarked, half to himself.  The things she was saying seemed to have ramifications about what defined human selfness, not just river selfness, and he was certainly feeling squirmy on that topic.

She laughed.  “That was not my intention.  I didn’t mean to go all Greek-philosophy on you, I’m just trying to explain how magic works.  And while the big ditch filled with water is essentially the same across eras of time, the day-to-day of a river is going to be changing constantly.  And while the fairy might be largely the same vessel for magic across the eras of their life, the magic that runs through and out of that fairy is always going to be changing, based on the circumstances.  Just like if you’re trying to ford a river, every time you do it, it might be a completely different experience:  How high’s the water against the banks?  How fast are the currents?  Did a tree fall across your path?  The circumstance of a spell is going to be different every single time.”

Barry nodded, concentrating to be sure he understood, especially when her unintended implications were distracting him.

“It’s great that you have a powerful, speedy river,” she emphasized.  “That’s something that can’t be replaced, and comes, as I understand it, from the strength of your will itself.”

Was she saying he had a strong will?  Okay, cool, he guessed.  He wasn’t exactly sure what that meant.

“But if you can’t learn to harness a river, then it can’t do you much good, can it?” she winked.  “Whether it’s with a boat or a fishing net, a floodplain for crops or a hydroelectric dam, if you can’t harness it, then it’s just a pretty, powerful thing that might sweep you away if you’re not careful.  If you don’t control the river, then it will control you,” she finished seriously.

That was the most terrifying and yet bad-A thing Barry had ever heard, and he just stared at her with his mouth open, still.

“So the point is wishes,” she brought it back around.  “The reason I’m trying to teach you everything as fast as I can, is so you’re prepared to grant wishes to help your fairy godchildren with their individual lives and needs, effectively.  Sometimes granting wishes is going to be about helping a godchild with food, or meeting a deadline, or confidence… but sometimes a ballgown is what the doctor ordered.”  She shrugged.  “It’s good to help a godchild to help themselves, and oftentimes, believe it or not, a cute outfit is exactly how to do that.”

Barry was very thoughtful about that being the purpose of their magic, and he just watched the sea breeze make ripples in his moat for a moment.

“But godchildren both increase the power of spells—the speed—while also factoring into the difficulty of control—the directionality of the river,” Dania continued.  “Their will combined with our own, brings an additional potency to spells that we might never have by ourselves.  But at the same time, their wills and desires are running in their very own direction.  But despite that, the spell still activates based on your willingness to perform it.  When a wish is made officially, it’s up to you to be ready to grant it, or not.  And if you’re going to grant it, you need to be ready to alter the parameters of the spell on the fly.  Otherwise it’ll go with the subconscious implications, or the literal wording of the wish or spell.  Or both; often both.”

“If my track record so far has anything to say about that, it doesn’t bode well,” he made a face. “How do you control your magic so well?  You reject granting dumb spells from Nick and me all the time!”

She laughed.  “Less so than I used to.  I actually miss you guys making silly requests sometimes,” she said nostalgically.  “You’re so practical these days.”

He blushed a bit at that.  “And Nick?” he wondered.

“… I miss you making silly requests,” she corrected her previous statement and they both laughed.

“But really,” he said earnestly, “you can do all your spells so smoothly.  I know you keep saying that I do good at it, but it’s so rarely what I’m picturing.”

“Well, for one, sweetheart, I’ve been doing this for over thirty years,” she winked.  “That’s a lot of practice.”

“Sometimes I still forget how old you are,” Barry remarked.

“Good,” she teased.  “Let’s hope Daddy forgets too.  Since he wasn’t even five when I got my powers.”

Barry grinned.  “Does it bug him?  You being secretly older?”

“Occasionally.  Bugged him a lot when we were dating and I first told him that I was really thirty-one already, and he’d just turned twenty.  But now I don’t think he minds having a slow-aging wife,” she winked.  “And he was a mature and studious twenty.”

It was a funny mental image, picturing Frank seeming like barely more than a teenager to her at the time.  “Cougar,” Barry smirked, and she just nodded proudly.

“But I’ve come an awfully long way with my magic over the course of thirty-four years, honey,” she emphasized.  “I made plenty of mistakes as I learned, too!”

“Like what?” he wondered.

“Try a couple more spells while I tell you some tales,” she smiled self-deprecatingly.

“Okay,” he agreed, getting to his small Grape feet, eager to hear that he wasn’t the only one to mess things up.

She suggested he try transforming his outfit again, and he was scared, but as she entertained him with antics about some of her early spells gone awry, he actually found his transformation spells going a little better.

According to her stories, she tended to magick things a little too much what she wanted as a teenager, and not what her godchildren wanted.

“Oh man,” she was relating, as Barry tried to give himself something other than a swimsuit or a skirt, “I had a teenage godson.  And one time he asked for a suit, for a job interview.  And I was only a couple of months out from sixteen; this was the mid-eighties.  And I pictured the suit that I would want for a job interview at the time.”  She sighed, embarrassed and nostalgic.  “I gave him a suit, but it was bright red, covered in sequins.  Go raibh maith agat Titania, that it was actually a man’s shape!”

Barry laughed, imagining a mini-Dania glamming up a boy godson by mistake. Apparently he hadn’t been her only unwilling victim over the years.

Meanwhile, Barry’s spell ended up in a plain lavender t-shirt—definitely more tight than he wanted, but no cleavage!—and a pair of cream-colored short shorts—not as intended, but not a skirt either.  It felt like progress, even though it was ridiculous that that was progress.  It took him a moment to realize he’d given himself purple pigtails, which were very unintentional, but one victory at a time.

“So what’d you do?” Barry asked of Dania’s tale.

“Well I was very embarrassed,” she said.  “I knew that wasn’t what he’d been asking for at all, and he was upset with me.  But I felt like I couldn’t admit that I’d made a mistake.  I was his fairy godmother; I was supposed to be flawless, I thought.”  She shook her head.  “My mom always seemed perfect at magic, and I saw how her godchildren looked up to her.  So I pretended that I meant to do that.”  She rolled her eyes at herself. 

“Oh no!” he laughed.

She nodded, cringing at her young self.  “Didn’t matter how much he complained that it wasn’t what he wanted for the job interview; I kept maintaining that that was what was in style, and they’d love it.  I think I half-convinced myself by the end that it was better, even though I knew full well that I hadn’t meant to do it that way.”

Barry shook his head, pigtails swinging, picturing a young, silly Dania pretending that a red sequin suit was the best option for her poor godson’s interview.  “Did he go to it that way??” Barry wondered, thinking how traumatic that would be for Barry in his shoes.

“He did!” Dania sighed, and Barry groaned empathetically.  She paused, smirking.  “But you know what?  He got the job.”

“What?!” Barry balked, Grape voice extra high.  “No!  You’re kidding!!”

She shook her head again.  “Nope.  I don’t even remember what the job was, but it was the 80s, so I guess no accounting for taste.  The next time he summoned me, he thanked me so much for making him wear the stupid thing.  But I realized then how badly it could have gone, and that it would have been my fault.  I felt like I’d just cheated.  So while I was nodding that of course I knew what I was doing,” she nodded sarcastically, rolling her eyes at little Dania, “I promised myself that I was not going to be so reckless with wishes anymore, and that I’d admit when I messed up, and fix a spell before I left, every time.”

Well that was an example of why she was so adamant about being responsible with magic, he thought.

She told a few more stories, rapidfire, while Barry tried a few more outfits.

She had tried to clean someone’s house, and she’d accidentally transformed the litter box into a box of scarves, and she couldn’t get it to morph back.  The cat did its business on the scarves.

She had misunderstood how early personal computers worked, and accidentally broke one while trying to magically help with someone’s computer program.

She had used bad wording on an insomniac godchild, which resulted in the girl falling asleep wherever she was, as soon as the sun set, until Dania could fix it.

And Barry laughed.  It was some of the most relaxed he’d felt since his birthday, just listening to Dania’s silly, funny stories, and seeing that magic was hard; he wasn’t just terrible at it.

He didn’t even care too badly when he accidentally gave himself pink flip-flops.  And when he managed to give himself a tight pair of women’s skinny blue jeans and purple sneakers, he positively beamed.  “Look, Mom!” he bubbled.  “I made pants!!”  Sure, they’d come with a tight purple tank top, but they were still blue jeans!

Her face lit up for him.  “Great job, Baz!” she said unironically, and he felt proud.

He tried to transform his tank top to be something a little more androgynous, and got a bright purple tee that said “Tada!” with a graphic of a confetti popper across his bosoms.

Dania giggled at the shirt.

“I’ll keep practicing with tops,” he grumbled at himself.

“You’ve done great, sweetheart,” she assured him.  “You want to go home before your sunscreen wears off?” she winked.

He nodded with a smirk, glad to prevent that from happening again.  They got ready to leave and Barry transformed back into his uniform, which was always easy to do.

Bye, sandcastle, he thought, a little sadly.  “Is it okay I leave it here?” he wondered, not really having the heart to destroy it.

“Yeah, it’s fine, honey,” she smiled fondly.  “If someone did happen upon it, it’s just like a pixie relic or something.  We could put a ring of shells or mushrooms around it and really get people talkin’.”

So he watched his little fortress he had made himself, proudly, as he went to take his Mom’s hand to port back.

“Oh, I just remembered another anecdote,” Dania said, swinging his petite hand affectionately.  “I struggled with sizing for some reason,” she laughed, remembering, making her red portal as she told the story.  “And my godson was maybe three years old, and he wanted a toy dump truck.”  She pulled Barry through the Fayemark with her, still talking.

He glanced at the bewildering colors as usual, but it mostly felt safe today, though he absently squeezed Dania’s hand tighter.

“I conjured him a little truck, like matchbox size, but he wanted one to carry stuff around in,” Dania went on as they landed lightly on the carpet in the den.  “So I tried to make the one I’d just conjured bigger…”  She sighed.  “It was the size of a king-size bed!  Broke all the other toys in his room and the floor started creaking like it was going to fall through to the downstairs!  And he still cried when I transformed it back so I could repair everything!”

“Holy crap!” Barry laughed honestly, the most genuine he’d heard Grape’s laugh yet.  It echoed through the downstairs.

“I was just glad it didn’t go crashing down onto his parents’ TV!” Dania laughed too.  “Shockingly, I’ve managed to never blow up or otherwise destroy anyone’s house.”

“Well that sounds like a feat, from what I can tell,” Barry grinned, putting his hands casually on his augmented hips.

“Sounds like the lessons are going well,” Frank’s voice entered the den before him, and Barry whirled toward his dad’s office doorway, skirt twirling with him, wings suddenly flapping with distress.  He felt mortified getting caught being so relaxed in a female state.  He suddenly was all too aware of his goofy-Grape-hat again.

“Oh, Frank,” Dania said, equally surprised but not upset about her husband’s appearance, “I didn’t realize you were home yet, honey.”

“Finished a little early.”  He was obviously trying to remain casual, and not let his focus linger too long on Barry’s powered-up state, although this was only the second time he’d seen it.  Fairy topics had come up a few times around the dinner table since his birthday, but Barry had been intentionally avoiding being around his father while as Grape.

Barry realized he was wringing his wand in his hands.

“Yeah, it’s been going good,” Dania answered Frank’s question, running a hand over Barry’s hair affectionately.  It was a gesture she did often, yet a lot more embarrassing when he was purple Curly Locks.  “Today we learned about magical control and some of the things that can go wrong if we’re not in control, huh?”

Barry just nodded mutely.

“He’s picking up stuff really quickly,” Dania told Frank proudly.  “His magic is potent.”

Barry couldn’t decide if he wanted his dad to know he was pretty good at magic or not.  “Thanks Mom,” he said in a mousy girl voice.

“Great,” Frank said, like it was the polite thing to say, although he was almost as squirmy as Barry was.

There was an awkward silence.

“I’m going to go power-down?” Barry checked with Dania, looking forward to getting out of the situation.

“Sure,” she nodded.  He was about to bolt, when she stopped him.  “Oh, wait!  Dad hasn’t seen you transform at all yet!”

Barry and Frank exchanged a nervous look.  “Right…” Barry said.

Frank was trying to smile encouragingly at him, but the result was slightly pitying.

Well Barry certainly didn’t want to stand there any longer than necessary, and he probably couldn’t forestall his father seeing, forever.  At least his wand was already out, so he didn’t have to go digging around between his boobs for it.

He released his wand, resignedly, for the power-down.  As his body stretched and rectangled, he watched Frank’s reactions carefully.

Frank was chewing his bottom lip, brows lowered so they hid behind his glasses.  His expression was mostly unreadable, although he was watching attentively.

As uncomfortable as this was, Barry figured watching his power-down was much easier to digest than his power-up would have been, so he was reluctantly grateful for that.  Although there was a strange moment in the middle where his top half was mostly male, but he still sported his puffy tutu on feminine hips, with silky little legs.  Frank made a bit of a befuddled face at that part. 

Once his feet were freed from his purple pumps, Barry waited for his father to say something.

Frank cleared his throat.  “Wow that’s… cool, kiddo.”

“Probably not the word I’d use for it, but thanks,” Barry sighed tiredly, glad his voice was less embarrassing now.

“Well, I mean, the transformation is… somethin’,” Frank nodded.  It was like he was actively trying to say something positive and encouraging, and “somethin’” was the best he could find without lying.  “It’s like you can morph into an entirely different person.  That’s quite remarkable.”

That statement stung for some reason, and Barry wasn’t sure why; he could tell his father was legitimately attempting to compliment him.

“You should really see him power-up though, Frank,” Dania enthused.  “That part is even more exciting to watch, in my opinion.”

“Feels weird, the morphing,” Barry stated.  “I don’t like it.”

Dania was making a disappointed face.

“I’m sure I’ll get to see, at some point,” Frank said.  “We don’t have to push him into it now, Dane.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Barry said appreciatively.

“Okay,” Dania sighed.  “You guys hungry?”

“Yes, definitely,” Frank smiled.

Barry just nodded, chewing his lower lip again, which was back to its regular size.

“I’m in the mood to cook without magic this evening,” she said, starting her own power-down, “but sometime I’ll have to have Barry help me conjure up dinner.”

He felt like she was trying to make inside jokes with him, or to remind both him and Frank that he wasn’t getting out of being a fairy, even when he tried to escape into normalcy.  It made him grumpy.  “What, I’m not even allowed to be myself in the evenings now?” he retorted.  He could tell it wasn’t nice to his mom after they’d just been having fun together, but he felt the need to shut down the idea that he would want to be a fairy in his leisure time.

Dania did look hurt.  “I didn’t mean it that way, honey,” she said.  “I just thought you’d want to show off what you’ve learned, sometime.”

“Mom, showing off being a fairy is as low on my priority list as something can get,” he informed her.  “I’ll keep helping with dinner like a normal kid, okay?” he tried to say firmly, aware he was making his voice lower than was natural.

“Okay, Baz, I’m sorry,” she said.  “Not trying to be pushy.”

Now she was apologizing to him, and he felt bad.  “Do you need manual help with it tonight?” he offered.

She shook her head, like she was trying to get over the hurt.  “I’ve got it.  You guys can relax together while you wait.  You haven’t had much time with Dad lately.”

“Okay,” Barry agreed, although he was a little concerned that hanging out with Frank after his transformation would be more awkward than usual.

Frank was settling down in his chair and flipping through channels.

“But it’s not because I don’t want to help!” Barry insisted to his mom, trying to make up for pushing her away.

“I know, Baz,” Dania smiled sadly at him.  “You worked hard today.”  She reached out and squeezed his now larger hand.  “I liked your sandcastle, wee prionsa,” she said quietly.

She’d used the phrase enough over the years that he knew it meant “little prince.”  He stared after her as she released his hand and went to the kitchen.

Was he letting her down?  But he did want to assert his right to be Barry, despite being coerced to learn magic so godchildren couldn’t take advantage of him, and no one would come banging down his door for magic happy drugs… and so he could be Seelie, and try to do what was best for people.  And so he could control his fast, messy river of magic.

Barry went and plopped down on the couch, on the end near Frank’s chair.  His dad had found a nature documentary on one of the science channels, and Barry always enjoyed watching those with his dad.  The camera panned across sweeping vistas as the narrator described things about the mountains and ecosystems.  But as it followed a wide river, swollen with rain, Barry thought about Pocahontas and Theseus’s ship.

He remembered Dania’s words on his first day of lessons, as she hugged him while he wore a bridal gown of all things:  “I just want you to be Barry, okay?  You’re the best at being Barry.  I just don’t think Grape has to be not-Barry, love.”

He realized the river song, from Pocahontas, was stuck in his head now:

The thing I like most about rivers is
You can’t step in the same river twice;
The water’s always changing, always flowing.
But people, I guess, can’t live like that;
We all must pay a price.
To be safe, we lose our chance of ever knowing
What’s around the riverbend…

Barry didn’t have a problem having an average life, with average things in it.  But average didn’t seem to be the course his river was determined to head.  And he barely had enough control to make pants.

He’d sat on the couch watching the nature show and thinking for about five minutes before he realized he was still holding his wand, the little purple stick humming like they were the best of friends.

 

1 – Birthday      Barry Home      3 – Sons and Daughters

2 – Lessons – Extras