Summary: Denzel Crocker is due to take a training seminar before he can start his brand new job: teaching kids at Spellementary School. Poof and Foop give him the basics before he starts.

Characters: Crocker, Girlfriend, Poof, Foop, Gary, Nonna Serena

Rating: T

Prerequisites: "Solo," "Loyalty," "This Is a Box," and "Trying Too Hard" (I also recommend the episodes "Bad Heir Day," "Spellementary School," and "Timmy's Secret Wish")

A/N - Trigger warning: Opening scene is a trauma-induced flashback nightmare. It shows the aftereffects of someone who was tormented via yoo-doo doll. All damage people take (including the yoo-doo doll) is canon-typical on-screen violence, but because our target today is a human instead of a fairy, the situation is a little darker. No blood, but if you're sensitive, you may want to skip the italicized opening section. Also, there's a lot of self-reflection and grieving towards the end. So enjoy!

Posted: June 23rd, 2023

32. Looking Back (End of Season 10 - "Dimmsdale Daze" is the only canon episode left after)

Friday June 25th, 2004

Year of Fire, Autumn of the Thawed Calendar

Buxaplenty's fairy is dying and Cabrera is screaming. Denzel didn't see what the buff, soul-crushing, and almost certainly SKULL-crushing Head Fairy did to him. Only that the hallway lights are blazing in and out of focus, humming with the threat of a power overload, and Gary is screaming above the crackled lightning. As Denzel sprints away, those screams turn to pleading sobs.

"No, no! Please, no! Don't put me in there!"

And then his cries melt into nothing at all.

Gary Cabrera is dead. Or if he's not dead back there, he got totally wrecked. May as well have attended the Dimmsdale Demolition Derby. Think of it! Fairy World's most wanted before they even knew he wanted them! Out like a snuffed candle! It's both gruesome and poetic. Horrifically cruel and terribly effective.

Denzel doesn't stop running. Oh, CENSORED nope.

"Wake up, you paycheck-booster!" he demands of the unconscious fairy in his arms, but even lightly slapping the muscular fairy's cheek isn't enough to rouse him. He's not dead. Can't be. Fairies… don't… die.

But Magnifico's head lolls to one side, his eyes - once filled with hope and starlight - lie open. Staring at nothing. Denzel skids around the next corner, fairy clamped to his chest with one hand and a lifted butterfly net in the other. No one stops him within those first two seconds. Gary stays silent down the hall, the lights no longer flickering overhead. The silence scrapes like a rusty razor down his skin.

Fairies and cherubs are in a crisis at the end of the hall. He only needs to make it halfway there, then veer left into the control room. He can make it. There's no other choice. Denzel inhales and plows forward. His shoes smack against the floor. Someone - far away - shouts in a high-pitched cloudland accent, like they've been sanity-deprived for far too long and have to let somebody know. Denzel lashes his butterfly net. He's not anywhere near them. It's just a threat.

"Magnifico, up and at 'em! Or I'll give you an F for FAILURE OF A FAIRY!"

The fairy's black hair streams against his arm. It tore loose from its ponytail long ago. Denzel suspects it must have been magic, not a hair tie, that kept those strands in place. What was it Gary said about blue magic? It's classified as "correction magic," though also associated with reluctance, irritation, rashness, and stress.

Here's the important part- items, spells, and hexes created out of blue will always shut down when a fairy falls asleep. Evidently, passing out counts as sleep just as well.

Purple magic undoes itself upon a fairy's death. It's emotion that picks the color of magic, not mere desire… So what did Magnifico use on his hair? He doesn't feel dead, but he isn't breathing. Not uncommon for creatures who soak in magic instead of oxygen to survive… but still.

How did this happen? Buxaplenty was watching the cameras! Everyone is at the Fairy World Games! No one knew they were coming, no one should have found them here… Denzel glances up at the lights as they buzz and snarl again. He puffs his cheeks like a gerbil and scampers like a mouse. Ooh, this is not as fun as he thought it would be when dancing a compass across his blueprints. His lungs might just give out on him right here and now. He's kept in decent shape as he's grown older, never taking any risk that a fairy might outrun him someday, but that doesn't mean he's not exhausted. The weight of it all is dragging down his eyelids. And his hunch.

There! Fairy World Archives' not-so-secret security room! It's even labeled that way! Metal nameplate on the door! Only one small guard has rushed fast enough to make it. Denzel smashes the butterfly net down on his head to take him out of commission. The fairy SCREAMS! Unimportant. Pathetic, really- it's good fun to be so feared.

Half the buildings in Fairy World don't even have proper doors, but this one does. Denzel kicks it open as hard as he can. Ka-BAM! Double scream. The door's wood is magical, but crumples like a napkin in the face of a furious human heel. He broke it like a beetle shell.

Is Buxaplenty here? Still breathing? It feels so wrong to save the immortal fairy and leave the human child behind to die, isn't it? Not only that, but he badly wants to know if Buxaplenty totally went and stabbed them in the back. Is he sitting at the cameras with the fairy cops and-?

… Oh.

The sound of the door bashing against the wall echoes down the hallway. It isn't returned by a shriek of alarm as Buxaplenty whips around in his swivel chair. In fact, Buxaplenty doesn't say anything. The kid lies slumped over at the control panel. Not moving. His green eyes are pinned open, like his fairy's, but they're unseeing. His breaths hiss short and fast.

He doesn't react to the door.

He doesn't react to Denzel or to the frozen fairy in his arms.

He… he looks like he's in shock. Total, utter shock, and suddenly Magnifico passing out makes a lot more sense. Their appendixes are still linked. The fairy can feel his godchild's pain. Denzel feels a twitch in the back of his neck. He jumps his eyes from the slumped-over Buxaplenty to the toy on the floor. "Toy."

It's there and undeniable. The battered yoo-doo doll - blond and broken - stares at the ceiling with the same frozen expression now stitched across the boy's face. Buxaplenty is twisted at the desk, clutching his shoulder. He's shaking.

The doll on the floor does not have an arm. Yeah, that would do it, wouldn't it? Who wrecked him like this? Denzel stands there by the kicked-in door, gawking, as icy fingers creep across his skin. Oh… He might know now why Harrington's communicator cut off when she screamed. His heart lurches in his chest, swinging like a pendulum. His grandfather would have done swell with a ticker like that inside his clock.

"B… Buxaplenty?"

Ding-dong!

"I am not!" Denzel screams, bolting up in bed. Hhh- hhh- He scrambles for his glasses. His hand bangs the nightstand and bends with a twist. He knocks his water glass to the floor with a crash. Hhh- hhh…

… Hhh…

No one is screaming and no one is dead. He's in his own room. It's a small, dimly lit room above the garage at his mother's house. The walls are pale, dull, and scratched up. Scribbled notes and faded photos of fairy godparents cover every wall, along with maps, blueprints, and thick loops of red string. Denzel stares at those hanging threads, trying to click the memories in his mind. There are no ripped-up dolls on the floor.

He, for one, is alive and well.

"Mrrroww?"

Two pointed ears - pink and hairless - lift above the lumps in his bedcovers. A skinny pink cat rises on her dainty, shaking feet. She stretches. Her bare skin ripples in the dark. The tag on her collar jingles twice. Tiny white talons pull at his blanket.

I'm home…

Denzel hones in on the lanky feline. On her crooked whiskers, worn-down toe beans, and the small dark patch near her neck that was shaped like the state of Idaho. He claws his fingers into the stained sheets of his bed. His knees jab up like crooked wizard towers. His head pounds, some tiny troll inside his ear banging a spoon against a brass pan, but he breathes. He keeps on breathing. He keeps himself grounded.

"Mew?"

"Oh, Girlfriend…" Denzel pulls her into his arms, burying his nose in the wrinkles of her neck skin. "You won't let wild Fairies kill me, will you? Who would you have left to feed and love you then?"

She butted her head against his cheek. Her skin felt warm against his, almost like velvet. She lifted her paws in clear request for belly scratches.

"Kevin, my dear prune? He is a good boy."

"Mew~"

Ding-dong!

Oh… Right. The door. Denzel scowls. Girlfriend twists in his grip, glaring at the door as though she's a little 5-year-old princess playing tea party and she's about to be rudely interrupted by an uninvited guest. Actually, that sums the day right up, doesn't it?

He needs to get out of bed. The door's for him. Those blurry pictures on the wall haunt all his waking moments. They sink their hooks in him. He fights with great heaves of his chest, with every salty sweatdrop down the wrinkles in his cursed, older-than-his-44-years skin, to push the memories and screams away. He can still recall the funny looks the other shoppers in line gave him when they saw how much red yarn filled his shopping basket. He's heard their whispers. He'll never live down their mockery.

He breathes. Here he is, safe at home. Girlfriend doesn't leave his arms, and it would be a crime to disturb her peace. Denzel rubs his thumb beside her ear. He does love this frisky feline, even though she's a ragged little thing and her claws have long since scarred the inside of his door. She always comes back to him. No one's ever done that for him before, really… No one's ever looked at him with love shining in their eyes the way his old cat does. Well. One person, maybe, but that was a long time ago. Miss Idaho. A road not taken. Nearly married her, until she turned out to be too high-maintenance for a fairy hunter to keep around. She demanded he give the hobby up. As if he ever could.

Knock knock knock knock!

The thuds are enough to offend Girlfriend's delicate ears. She oozes from his arms, falling like sand in an hourglass to the floor below. The laundry beside his bed is now soaked from spilled water. Well, those clothes were dirty anyway, so… technically, they've gotten cleaner. That isn't his problem anyway- Mother will gather it up and get it all done. At least he didn't wake with his bed nailed to the ceiling today. Denzel holds his hand against his chest, fighting back the wingbeats of a heart that's getting far too old for nightmares like this.

Focus. Who rang that bell? He throws a glance at the clock, blurry red numbers dancing on the edge of sleeping in. Where are his-?

There. Denzel shoves the glasses on his face with one finger. The arms jab his skin- almost jab his eyes. He uses the sides of his head to pry open the folded second arm. The clock sticks stubbornly to its belief that the early hours of the morning have arrived. Well, whoever's at the door can get impatient and barge in any second now… on their own time.

Ding-dong!

Denzel launches out of bed, snags his foot in the twisted sheets, slams on the floorboards, and lies in wincing silence while cursing his aching back.

"Hh… hhh…"

The bell. The door. Denzel scrambles across the floor like a spider. He gets back to his feet in a roll. Just to be safe, he snatches up a half-functional ray gun he's long been tinkering with on the way over. When dealing with magic, it never hurts to cover your tail. See, the front doorbell is for Mother, but the doorbell installed at his own door - up the stairs to the room above the garage - is only meant for him. Foop and Dark Laser are its most frequent users, but sometimes he gets nervous students showing up for Saturday detention. Well, not so much anymore. Sometimes he even has real visitors, but he told that to Mother once and she swore he'd dreamed that part up.

Today's the day. He is out of here. That is today, right? Has the glittering pink school bus arrived to pick up him? Maybe. But the magical school board will ditch him if they sense an opening. They devour weakness and it's delicious to them all. It's morning. Early. Stupid fairies and stupid fairy time zones. As Denzel stumbles to his feet again, it all floods back to him.

1 - He's due for his first Fairy Magic 101 training session today. A seminar.

2 - He gets to break out his new spiralbound notebook and gel pens for this

3 - Teaching is a community service assignment. Not everyone is happy about it.

4 - The Fairy Council have offered just one chance. One slip-up and it's a memory wipe and bus ticket back to Dimmsdale to fend for himself. Won't even get his old job back.

So, don't sweat it. Should be the best morning of his life, completely surrounded by FAIRIES as they instruct him at last in the magic of their world. And if the Fairy Council thinks they can barge in and tear that away from him the morning of, they'd best reconsider their options. Ha! Heeheha!

He'll kill them if they try.

Blast it, he's a wreck. His green pajamas are only half buttoned. Too bad; he can't be bothered. There's no time- he's got shoes to drive up Council members' butts. Wrenching open the door, Denzel snarls - rabid like a wolf - and jabs his ray gun at…

"Oh." His arm droops. He eases up on the trigger. The ray gun's power lights trickle from electric blue down to silent black. His fingers loosen from the doorknob. "It's just you."

D.J. McBabyface.

A little purple puffball floats out there above the outdoor stairway that leads up to his room. Smiling. The kid is squishy. Round, like a soccer ball or balloon. Definitely not human. His wings flutter with the beat of a xylophone. When Denzel lowers the weapon, the boy grins and tips his crown at him… like some sort of classy gentleman greeting a lady on the street a hundred and fifty years ago. Completely unfazed by the ray gun, by the way. And he's almost within grabbing distance. Almost.

"Good morning, Mr. Crocker! Today's the day!" Then his eyes land on the cat loitering behind Denzel's leg. His smile falters. "Uh… It's 'Girlfriend,' right?"

"Mrrow."

"Okay, yeah. I thought so."

Denzel takes a breath to remind himself how many people would flay him alive if he touched one hair on that little brownnosers' head. His friend Foop is merely one of them… He slides his eyes away, focusing in on his shaking hands.

He cannot touch the purple fairy. He needs to win the Fairy Council over. 44 is too young to retire, time freeze notwithstanding. He's exhausted. Physically AND emotionally!

His fingers twitch. Before him are two cakes. One is tall, topped with pink swirls of frosting and gold coins dripping down the sides. The decorative topper is a fairy beneath a butterfly net. Enough cash to retire at 44, swell to worldwide popularity, become the leading expert in all things FAIRIES, never be called "crazy" or "crackpot" again…

The other cake is a lifetime of lesson prep and grading papers, all while keeping his hands off the children. Which sounds horrible when he puts it that way, but it's a terrible temptation when each and every one of them is some kind of FAIRY!

Going back to Dimmsdale empty handed would be insanity. He'll never get his old job back. It's almost tempting nonetheless… He wouldn't have to face Turner's cheeky attitude and failing grades anymore. That pain in his neck is off to middle school now…

He'd be empty-hearted turning back.

The floating puffball, who'd tipped his crown to Girlfriend too, tucks it back into place above his head. It bobs like an apple in a barrel. Or like a heart in a vat of scalding acid. "Did you sleep well, Mr. Crocker? I'm really glad you didn't shoot me in the face with that nifty blaster you've got there."

His high-pitched voice sounds like it was ripped straight from a Weird Owl movie… For now, at least. Hm. Denzel squints. Last time they'd crossed paths, the kid was still struggling with his own identity. He'll probably skip between half a dozen voices within the hour. Denzel, eyes in slits, stares back at him without blinking. You know the look- it's not exactly glaring, but far from jumping out of his socks with joy.

His finger curls against the trigger of his ray again. It would be easy… but he forces himself to keep it down by his side. This is not the place for violence. Not in front of Girlfriend. And not against a kid. Horrible move for a tenured teacher to pull.

Remember… His life and health are tied to Foop's.

"I'm on time for class," he tells D.J., ignoring his pajamas and uncombed hair. You know, this claim might be more convincing if he hadn't worn a mostly clean shirt and tie to work every day for the last 60 years. Denzel takes real pride in his clothing: the one part of his appearance he has full control over in spite of the ever-present Crocker family curse. Even the little purple fairy has come to expect a certain cleanliness of him. It shows right on his face.

(Idiot. His name isn't Denzel Junior. This puffball isn't D.J. He's a kid. A fairy kid. His name is Poof Nebula Fairywinkle. He carries the other half of Foop's soul. He knows Foop.)

Poof chuckles into his fist. "Heh heh. I guess even teachers can oversleep on a school day sometimes, huh?"

"HA! Or maybe that's just what I want you to think! Heed my words, Fairywinkle: don't flit about assuming anything, or you'll make an asZZZZ-!?"

He breaks off at the sudden clank of footsteps on metal stairs. He whips his head. A teenage boy with fiery spikes of ginger hair comes meandering up the steps. Purple hoodie. A disposable cup from Doug Dimmadome's Dimmadonuts and Coffee in his hand and a bulky cardboard box under one arm. Denzel jerks up the ray gun again, yelping and trying to shove D.J. behind him. Girlfriend zips under his computer desk and cowers among the wires. D.J. (No, it's Poof- POOF! He always has to remind himself of that) flings his arms up defensively.

"Hey, hey! Whoa there, Mr. Crocker! Not my call, okay? He's just a rental. Principal Wildermore said I had to bring an escort!"

"A dead one?" Denzel snaps back. He doesn't drop his weapon.

The redheaded teenager - He was 17 over and over and over, so is he 18 or 19 now? - climbs the steps with jerky twitches of his shoulders. When he hears Denzel's growl, he pauses to glance up. Those seafoam green eyes don't… look like a dead man's eyes. And it seems like he still has all his limbs. The kid forces out a smile, then lifts his hand to give an awkward (but genuine) little wave.

Denzel does not smile back. Under his other arm, like he said, the teen carries a cumbersome cardboard box. Its sides have been gift-wrapped with green and gold paper, but it's missing a lid. Popsicle sticks and tangles of ribbons bloom over the top. Denzel can trace a trail of streamers and golden glitter down the driveway and along the sidewalk with his eyes. Is that the kid's intention? Is he leading someone to the door?

Would a ghost drink pumpkin spice lattes?

He's back…

"Happy Heritage Week, Mr. Crocker," calls the boy. Stupidly glittery, cheerful boy. His hair spikes have gotten longer, the purple hoodie is new, but other than that, he looks exactly the same way he did when he was alive. Bouncing up the last few steps to the landing, the child adds brightly, "Poof said you've been looking for diorama stuff. Since he needed an escort anyway, I thought I'd swing by and share my glue and construction paper! It's a hodge-podge, but I'm sure you and your class can put it to good use."

It's been a year since the last time he saw Gary. A whole year and he hasn't heard a word.

He stands there like a person… A living, breathing person. Not a ghost. His eyes would be glowing if he'd become one of those, and his edges likely would be too. His ginger hair seems much too natural to have been dyed from deathly white and it sticks up straight the way a wig never would. Yep. That's Gary's style. His pink sneakers have worn down visibly from years of use. Even with the breeze blowing south, he smells like sweat and spicy food. Definitely a real person. Denzel shuts his eyes. Then he opens them again.

"Wait. Whoa, whoa, hang on!" He tilts his glasses slightly down. He'd blurred them with his fingertips, but the boy is close enough now - standing out there with D.J. (Poof) that Denzel can actually see him just as clearly without his lenses anyway. "C… Cabrera? You're still alive? You butted heads with the toughest fairy in the universe, and you're still alive? I thought you were DEAD!"

Gary looks baffled, his eyes popping. "They didn't tell you? Oh! I should have called to let you know." Brief pause. "I don't have your phone number anymore, do I?"

He can still hear the boy's screams of agony in his ears. The light bulbs flickering, threatening to burst as lightning sang across the room. His panic when the Head Fairy threatened to stuff him inside a knock-off genie lamp. The desperate pleas bubbling out of Buxaplenty's askew headset while Buxaplenty himself lay sprawled, hyperventilating, on the security desk with his broken yoo-doo doll on the floor. Was it all part of a nightmare? Or had he been lying awake all morning, spread-eagle and sweaty on his bed, replaying memories over and over until he went insane?

"Please, please! Jorgen, it wasn't their fault! I'm the mastermind behind this! Let them go, pound me with your giant fists, but don't put me in there! Please! I'll do anything you want!"

He can still hear every sobbed-out word. Yet the once "Happy Peppy" Gary stands across from him, silent, holding the cardboard box against his side. Holding that stupid latte. It's not steaming through the tiny hole in the lid and in the back of his head, Denzel wonders how long ago he bought it. Did he chat with Poof so long, it lost its heat on the way over? That makes no sense. The kid's part genie, you know. Can't he just snap his fingers to warm it up?

Denzel can see bags clinging beneath the teen's eyes. He looks exhausted, but no more than he would if he were out there taking college courses. He should be, at his age. In a world that had never experienced a frozen timestream, he would have been 67 by now. Maybe 68.

He doesn't look it. He's wearing a royal purple hoodie. He looks like any redheaded boy who might walk the streets of Dimmsdale. Always has been. Gary is just so… unassuming in streetwear. How hilarious. He doesn't look at all like a kid who sold out the magical world on a dull and gray dinner platter. And for what? The lost, unwanted memories for some ex-girlfriend who'd had her mind wiped of his existence, or something like that? He never did understand the whole story. It had nuance. She ran off and married someone else, didn't she? Was she 18? Maybe that wasn't her. Either way, Denzel can't help but notice that blonde little tagalong of his isn't on his arm today.

Buxaplenty won't have anyone on his arm anytime soon. Is that insensitive? Yeah. He won't say that aloud.

"I just mean-" Denzel swears softly (not really swearing, though, because D.J. - Poof - is right there and teaching by example matters) and gives his head a shake. With a grunt, he swings around on his good foot and stumbles back inside his room. He drops the ray gun atop his battered printer, next to his computer (Cyan ink low, magenta threatening to follow suit- Girlfriend jumps at the noise). "My memory is failing me in my old age. Didn't you die? It was all over the news. Wasn't there lightning? I sure hope there was lightning. Lightning is dramatic and blazes with all-encompassing power. The ideal punishment for the perfect crime!"

"Well-"

Denzel chuckles dryly, shoving fingers through his scraggly hair. "Oh, I can see it all now. You, framed in brilliant zappies, squealing in agony! That's one for the album, all right. Maybe not the Christmas cards. Do kids even send Christmas cards anymore these days? Me, I'm a traditionalist at heart. Mother and I already have ours printed; we snapped a good one this year with Kevin and his dad. Never hurts to prepare for Christmas in July, though it did sap most the printer ink. Do you want one, Fairywinkle? I'll need your dorm number."

"I sure don't!" Poof says cheerily.

"Hh," Denzel murmurs, fiddling with the printer. He taps the display, then boots up the computer. It whirrs with an upset stomach. He shakes the mouse across the desk. When he checks back, Gary's gaze has fallen to his shoulder. Hmph. You know, a wardrobe change can do wonders for a young man. Once, back when their paths were crossing every single week, Cabrera usually wore a pink sweater vest. Even after Leadly bought out the Learnatorium, Gary kept that pretty princess getup like he thought it meant something. It used to fit tightly to his skin. Pink bowtie, too.

His silhouette isn't prim and proper anymore. Today, he's wearing a purple sweatshirt several sizes too baggy for his scrawny frame. Maybe that's the point, since the thick hoodie makes the wide curves of his hips a little less obvious. Yeah. Denzel can relate. They're both witches, he and the kid… one descended from a pressyne, the other from a genie. They're heading up to a school full of magical creatures. Carefully covering up the visible aspects of your body that give you away makes a little sense.

Then again, it's the male FAIRIES that give birth… Maybe we'll blend right in.

Well. Apart from his hair. Gary's bright orange locks bristle along his head like a trim lawn of grass, and all the Fairies like to touch it. Denzel's seen him accept hugs before, but… he looks like a dead man walking, if not completely dead inside. Poof tries to shut the door to Denzel's room, even though the bedroom lights are still off. Gary blocks it with his foot, holding it firmly open.

Gary still wears white capris, the way he always has. They don't fully cover his legs. A monitor bearing seven colored stars blinks gently at his ankle. Denzel has a matching monitor around his own. Maybe the kid isn't dead, and maybe he looks like an everyday Dimmsdale citizen… but that's long behind him, in the same way Denzel's days of teaching elementary ended abruptly a few weeks ago. Fairy World will hold new adventures for them both. Neither of them can turn back time.

But the Fairy Council will chuck both of them aside if given half the chance.

Self-consciously, the boy braces his box of glitter and ribbons against his knee and tugs on his rumpled sleeve. He draws it all the way down to his wrist. Denzel catches sight of a bright red stripe curling like a scar along his hand. "Well, yes," Gary says. "The part with the lightning hurt just a bitty bit."

Perhaps he shouldn't have made light of Gary's injury. Denzel hadn't seen it, so in a way, it only seemed half real. But then… when nights are dark and cold, it sometimes feels like Gary got off easy after that failed venture down in the depths of the Fairy World Archives. Gary still has both his arms. And he wasn't the one who sat huddled on the floor, holding that sobbing child and unconscious fairy to his chest.

It's a wake-up call actually, as an adult, when a child who's just lost his arm cries not for his mommy or his daddy, but "Juandissimo!" over and over until the name burns a canyon in your mind. That stuck with him, you know. Slapped a bit of sense in his head. Because that was when it clicked. The moment Denzel knew the Buxaplentys wouldn't even ask their son what happened to his arm.

It changed him. Not even he was too old, evidently. Denzel didn't like admitting to that, but it was true. That scuffle at the Archives building morphed him into something he didn't recognize. So when his half-sister Denise had called home to practically beg if he and Mother could look after her son Kevin for a few weeks while she planned her wedding, Denzel had said yes without hesitation. Maybe he'd never had kids himself… but that doesn't mean he can't play a role in his young nephew's life. If that had been Kevin's yoo-doo doll with its body on one side of the room, arm on the other…

If those FAIRIES ever lay a wand on Kevin…

He fell in love with Kevin from Day 1. Right from the moment the shy, awkward little boy first stepped inside the Crocker household. Sure, he spends hours curled up by himself like he's dead inside and claims he can hear the house trying to communicate with him via creepy phone calls and writing in spills or steam, but he's a real, breathing kid with dreams viable for crushing. He wears a shark tooth on a necklace beneath his shirt, night and day. Top-notch. He plays with a soldering iron. Builds robots. Obsesses over cyborgs. He loves his mommy as much as Denzel does… even though he chokes up talking about her, turning bitter and evasive over the new step-father and step-sister on the horizon. Deep down, he knows that Kevin sees the beauty in Denise that sometimes, his half-sister hadn't even seen in herself. Kevin wants to grow up and become a dentist. Even Girlfriend likes him, and she normally hates everyone except for him and Mother. She doesn't even like Foop.

No one is allowed to harm a hair on Kevin's head. It's his and Denise's job to scar the boy while keeping him sheltered from the rest of the harsh and unforgiving world. The first fairy to touch him is dead. For real, this time. The Fairy Council can do with him what they will when he's done.

Poof flutters over and braces his tiny hands against Gary's shoulder. He glances at the door, then shifts his attention back on them both. His meaning flickers through loud and clear: Hey guys? I thought we got together to talk about me.

"But you almost drowned, right?" Denzel kicks the nearest laundry pile under his bed, yanking at the frilly bed skirt Mother had made for him decades ago to cover it. He's being stupid. He's being petty. He doesn't know why he needs an answer to this question. It's a distraction. He just needs to know Gary was raked across the coals like the rest of them. It's awful; his chest feels like it's aflame. Maybe he isn't over the trauma of the Last Grand Hurrah as much as he thought he was. And he needs to know that Gary suffered. It will make the rest of this month easier to stomach. "I heard you drowned. Three different sources can't all be wrong. With your affiliation with fire, it was perfectly fitting to imagine you underwater. Ha! In my business, we call that irony. Not dramatic irony, but situational irony. Remember that; mixing them up is a one-way ticket to an F!"

"Mm… Almost drowned. Among other things. It was not a good day. But I'm, ah, faring better than Remy, though!" Gary's lips twist into something like a tight smile, despite the sympathetic tears now prickling at the backs of his eyes. He forces out a giggle. It crinkles like breaking glass. His palm tightens to his cheek. "But I mean, that's only to be expected, right? Resilience is a well-honed skill of mine. Ohh, goodness… Oh dear. Yes. If you asked me to be honest and direct, I'd be forced to tell you that day was only sort-of okay. I'm glad it's behind us now. Not one of my finest hours in life."

Remy. That was it. He'd forgotten Buxaplenty's given name.

Denzel… hesitates. He can see that dark red scar on the back of Gary's hand again. It's jagged, like a nibble left by lightning. Worse than any scratch marks Girlfriend's ever left on him.

That selfish need to compare "war stories" dissipates within a moment. He checks with Poof and then the floor. Then he simply turns his back. Oh, right… The stupid printer ran out of paper last night. Still, there is some good news: a hefty stack of pop quizzes now rests on its upper tray. The bad news? Not enough. Denzel snatches them out, then crouches to search under his desk for something else he can feed in. It'll be okay if the rest of his students' quizzes are printed on newspapers, probably. After all, he's saving trees this way. Hm. With a few mouse clicks, he adjusts the text color from black to teal. Perfect.

"Poor kid, Buxaplenty," he mutters in Gary's semi-direction, prodding the keyboard. "Had him as a student for a few months when he first transitioned to public school. Kevin went over for a playdate a while ago, or at least he wanted to. Maybe I stopped him. Maybe I didn't. I know I definitely stopped someone in this household from having a joy-filled day last spring." Denzel scowls at the printer, having just remembered it only prints in black. His old printer was a beauty, never failing in its bright red Fs. He needs to save his teacher's salary for a new one. Stupid.

Oh well… Gray text on recycled newspaper it is, then. His students can deal. Although, maybe he can scrounge up a few magazines too. Black print on color…

The printer shudders only three papers in. Drat. Out of newspapers to recycle, and half a dozen quizzes left to go. Denzel's shoulders tense with half-repressed disdain. He shoves his thoughts away from Remy Buxaplenty, away from his missing arm, away from the vain and muscular Spanish-speaking fairy godparent the boy selfishly keeps under his possession (no matter how often Denzel tried persuading him to sell). Girlfriend, still hiding in the computer wires, peers up at him in light concern. Her legs are shaking.

The printer beeps. Curses. Denzel gives up on shoving magazines through its feeder. Muttering, he snatches up a pad of dark blue sticky notes and fumbles around for a pen. Blue pen. Fine. A few of his unlucky students will just have to take their quizzes this way, then. He scribbles down the one question he can remember off the top of his brain, jots a different one on the second recycled paper, then jerks up his head. Oh! He still has visitors! They drop by so rarely, he'd completely forgotten… all wrapped up in his own little world. That Gary kid (Or is he 20 now? Not sure; should probably ask) stands near his bed, prodding one of the origami flowers in his craft box with a fingertip.

"D.J.! … What was I doing again?"

Denzel Junior (Poof) gestures towards the dirty laundry on the floor with a flourish. "Getting dressed so we can go. And you know you won't have students until late July, right?"

"What?" The question pops out without a thought. He's been on auto-pilot.

"We gotta go. We've only got, like, six minutes now to get you to your Fairy Magic 101 crash course and I still haven't had my scheduled argument with Foop today. Sorry. Do you want us to step outside for a sec?"

Right. He's still wearing his bright green pajamas. The feel like silk despite their status as a cheap imitation. He needs to get dressed. It's time to go. That all makes sense. The pad of sticky notes drops in the stack with all the other quizzes. Denzel gives a grunt, trying to remember how many kids he'd been assigned this year… 23 or 32. Maybe it was 14. Could've been 41. You know, he should write this down. He rips a new note off the pad.

"Well, what are you looking at me for? You've got a magic baby toy. You could shake it around and magic me right into my clothes, with my hair all brushed just the way I like it, too."

"Sure." Poof pulls his purple rattle out from somewhere-or-other behind him and gives it a shake. The shivering sound of rice, bells, and beads slices through the air. In a puff of white dust, Denzel finds himself suddenly dressed: shirt ironed, tie tied, shoes shined. Even the smudges on his glasses have been neatly wiped away. Denzel blinks and lifts his head. Oh. Poof hadn't cut corners; a pot of fresh coffee now hovered in the air beside him, along with a mug that Denzel could have sworn he'd left under his desk with the rest of his dirty dishes. The coffee pours inside the mug, then poofs away in a soft cloud. Girlfriend hisses from her hiding spot. The smug fairy blows flakes of dust from the top of his rattle, then sheathes it behind him again.

"Suck-up," Denzel mutters. He drops his attention back to his sticky notes.

"Everyone's a critic," Poof sighs. He flops on his back, one arm dramatically thrown across his forehead, and starts tapping his toes. He looks like a cell phone emoji with chubby baby legs.

Gary curls his finger in Poof's single purple hair, because he's definitely the kind of person who would do that and hold a craft box and a latte at the same time. "How go the lesson preparations?" he asks, without much enthusiasm.

"Not good," Denzel grunts back. Glory glory, the lesson plans… Now, that's a topic he could ramble on about for an hour. He drops his pen with a clatter and starts pacing between the printer and his door. Why can't Gary ever shut it when he steps inside? There's a gash along the bottom. It leaks in the cold wind, even in the sticky summer. He always does this, you know. He won't shut doors if he thinks he doesn't need to. Stupid claustrophobic genie boy. "Ridiculous. Inconceivable. Spellementary's so thick with red tape, they won't even let me teach magic for the first six months. What's even the point? I've been reviewing my assignments day and night. The course objectives require two weeks of arts and crafts per trimester. Nothing I can do about that. These dioramas are going to be so much less entertaining for me to grade now that I've been told they must be completed in class rather than assigned for homework. I can already hear their whiny baby voices be begging me for help. And, I still have to find a guest speaker for our unit on witches in September. Jorgen's really been riding my hump about it; something about the new emergency curriculum they're rolling out. Probably unbiased and unslanted, pathetic…"

Denzel stops. Swiveling on his heel, he fixes Gary with a withering gargoyle stare. Gary blinks. He looks down at Poof, then back at Denzel. Then he lays one finger to his chest.

"Um… Are you asking me to be your guest speaker?"

"Uh-oh." Poof sits up again, wrinkling his nose. "Captain Gushgush is on the case. Set sail for Positivity Island. Here comes the happy crashing plane. Pewwww…"

Gary sighs. "Hey, that's not very nice, Poof. Remember when we talked about being supportive?"

"No, it's okay! Positivity Island supports everyone. Especially the people on that crashing plane."

"Can you just do it?" Denzel blurts, bouncing his knees. "And with a deal like that, I'll even throw in the chance to watch my nephew Kevin for the weekend!"

Gary steps back, lifting one arm in protest. "But I don't really know much about-"

"Then it's agreed!" He snaps up Gary's hand in both his own and shakes it up and down. Gary's eyes roll like ocean waves around his sockets. "I'll pencil you in for September 30th. You'll have an hour, plus ten minutes afterward to take any questions the students' tiny brains manage to think up. I'd prepare a slideshow if I were you. Although you'll have to bring your own slideshow projector. And be sure to use a magic-to-electricity conversion cord when you plug it in."

"What… I… don't…"

Before Gary can formulate a convincing protest to wiggle out of that assignment, Poof's rattle starts to beep and flash a light behind him. He draws it out again and tosses an apologetic look Denzel's way. "Sorry- Can we wrap this up? Foop says my nonna is waiting for us. Can someone here make a wish? That would really help me out right now."

Denzel says nothing, pretending to pull a few more papers together while also downing his steaming coffee. But when there's no response from Gary, he glances over. Gary just stands like a coat rack, his hands shoved in the pocket of his baggy purple hoodie. Denzel scoffs. "He means you, firecracker. He's looking for a young soul to bum energy off. His baby rattle rations him and getting to Fairy World takes a whole lot of energy."

Gary tips his head. "Oh. I can't mind-sync with you, Poof. My appendix was removed when I was eight."

Poof sighs. "Never mind; I'll pick up the check. But you guys both owe me a snack from the vending machine, poof poof."

He shakes his purple rattle. A haze of golden sparks swirls from the rounded tip and envelops him, Denzel, and Gary in a glittery cloud. Denzel holds his breath. Small pops like BB gun pellets or little spiked bubbles race up and down his arms. His body tugs itself into the air, stretching his legs and torso in the process. He can feel himself dissolving. Melting, almost, like a caterpillar inside a chrysalis. Boy, this is about to be a long con of a murder scheme if Poof and Gary have been plotting behind his back to get him killed!

But he doesn't die. He doesn't drop into a giant bucket of acid. Not even into lava. His shoes smack down on the solid brick of a walking path. Someone nearby gasps and floats aside. Denzel lifts his head, shooing the cloud of dust around him off with big waves of his arms. He's standing before a tall school building with shiny black walls and a pointed roof. A square blue baby gawks back at the three of them, clutching a notebook in his hands.

"Crocker!"

Foop?

Two figures float above the bricks. One is an adult - female - with bright purple hair. Obviously dyed… Denzel has seen weird Fairy genetics firsthand in Cosmo's grass-green hair and Poof's single lavender curl, but the color this woman's wearing takes it so much farther. She's a lot shorter than he is. Fairies typically are, apart from Jorgen or the Fairy Council. Even the Head Pixie would sooner pass as a child than an adult if you couldn't see his white hair or the wrinkles on his face. There is something so incredibly off-putting about an irritated old man who only comes up to your chest (hunch or no hunch). When he can help it, Denzel doesn't go anywhere now without animal crackers. It's not the Pixies' species weakness - that would be alphabet soup - but you'd be surprised how often you can catch a pixie in a butterfly net once you've thrown a handful of animal crackers in their face. That's how he met Finley, actually… Long story behind that one.

Beside the purple-haired woman is Foop. The child isn't wearing the sleek shoes of his school uniform. His opposable toes grip a sandwich in one foot. They're lighter in color than the rest of his body. It's unclear how the genetics work between ancient races and modern fauna, but Foop is part Mexican free-tailed bat. The white toes are a dead giveaway. Growing up, Denzel's half-sister Denise had burned every bat fact she knew into his head. Oh, he's dying to introduce Foop to her when he brings Kevin back to Peachfield for her wedding… Denise is a vampire hunter. She'll do a full-on double-take if she ever spies an anti-fairy in the flesh. Maybe she'll whip out her canvas and capture his likeness in paint. That would be great!

I wouldn't mind the chance to see her smile again.

He hasn't seen his estranged half-sister since Denise and Elliot Buxaplenty ran off together a dozen years ago, riding down the railroad. She was young. Barely 18. Didn't even have a video screen she could use to chat with him when she called and asked if he and Mother could take in her little boy for a semester while she wrapped up plans for her marriage to Marvin Oakes…

Does Kevin know he's a Buxaplenty? He's almost certain this came up once before. Yes, that sounds about right. Remy had been… underwhelmed when the Crocker family invited him over for brunch with his cousin, to say the least. Yes, that sounds right. That's what they did. They had a meal.

What was he saying?

"Foop! Bestie!" Denzel stretches out his arm to slap a high-five from the little mustached baby. Foop returns it with a look of prim disdain, still floating above the path, though his eyes confess his hidden enthusiasm. Foop has always been a peculiar creature. He doesn't look anything like the traditional faefolk you read about from the old days. With his blue skin, bat-like ears, and the purple freckles across his cheeks, he would never pass as human… though his human-like facial features (mustache included) and the black curl of hair on his head don't belong on any wild animal either.

Foop is just a toddler. Four months younger than Poof, in fact. He sometimes struggles with his onesie zipper when he needs to duck inside the potty. Denzel glimpsed his bare stomach once, which was… an experience of its own. If he had to pass as any animal, Foop might have a better chance at claiming he's a mutant biped armadillo than a bat. His front is thick with tangled belly fluff. Every other part of his skin is carefully crafted of hard, armor-like pieces called scutes, which Foop told him once will harden once he finally sheds his blubbery exoskeleton. Apparently, every place the scutes cover makes him immune to magical blasts, and Foop waxed on for about ten minutes about how fascinating it would be to study whether or not that level of coverage is genetic. Hearing that conversation, though it discussed the magic of FAIRIES, was a lot less fun than it sounded.

The existence of an exoskeleton raises even more questions that Denzel will likely never find an answer to, and he pretends (as he always does) to be all right with that. Such a shame for cryptozoologists everywhere… Privately, he still wants to poke Foop in the belly to see if touching him in the one place not protected by tiny scutes would knock him flat on his back, but he's also way too unwilling to risk his reputation at Spellementary before he begins. They might not like him touching children.

New school. Fresh slate. He doesn't even have to wear a bag on his head this time.

To be precise, Foop is an anti-fairy… A young one still encased (for now) in a blubbery square exterior. His sharp corners leave him looking like a casino die from Hell. Poof's exoskeleton is easier to believe- he's soft and rounded, giving him the ability to bounce should he fall from the clouds to Earth and easily (Denzel can only assume) crawl inside the stomach pouches of his parents back when he was a newborn who still needed to nurse. See, that at least makes some form of sense! Not like the square…

Denzel has often questioned the nature of his friend's cube-like shape, wondering rather absentmindedly if Foop's once-pregnant parent had experienced an aggressively painful labor when he was born. But, well… No matter how innocent the question or how scientific your college major, that isn't exactly the sort of thing you should bring up amidst polite company. His friend's awkward shape is just one of those things, like that nagging question of whether it was Foop's mother or his father who gave birth to him, that only dissection on an exam table will likely give him the answer to. For Foop's sake, he will refrain. As a friend.

(Some part of him feels chained up in the dark recesses of his mind, using a foot to scratch behind one ear, sitting up to beg for the chance to step inside a Fairy hospital, browse a Fairy anatomy book, hold one of the squirming naked creatures down against a cold table under bright white lighting… The answers to a lifetime of questions boil an arm's length away… )

Exhausting. Miserable. How cruel of the Fairy Council to sentence him here where the source of a lifelong hyperfixation abounds. It's this type of thing that keeps him restless late at night. Even describing his old habits as "tossing and turning in bed with questions unanswered" would be incorrect. He always stays up if he's planning to work, and he's usually pacing back and forth to study the notes on his walls while doing it. Pens, papers, 70 libraries, hours upon hours of pouring over musty books… random sample tests, double-blind studies… Bits of insect, marsupial, armadillo, bat… Utterly bewildering!

Forget the wands and wings or their little floating crowns. You could write an entire paper on their stomach pouches alone. Fairies carry those gashes in their skin from sternum to hip, like mutant sugar gliders crossed with jack o' lanterns.

A younger Denzel would be frothing at the mouth to be in his shoes right here, butterfly net in hand. Imagine! All the facts laid out before him! It turns out that Fairies are built almost exactly the way he always proposed to his peers… Oh, how they laughed at him back then. The nerve to even suggest that such a hodge-podge of a creature could be real, how preposterous you would have to be to suggest such a small, winged, human-like creature carting a baby for miles through the air on their own whirring wings alone (no matter how lightweight the child), and how absurd to imply that a fairy might keep half their organs in their heads. So what? His peers held even less proof as to the existence of FAIRIES than he did, and still they mocked him for hypothesizing their anatomy in the extensive way he had.

But who's laughing now? There's a witch to one side of him, a baby fairy on his shoulder, and an anti-fairy between him and a magical elementary school for toddler cryptids. Sure, he may not have been hired to teach here by choice, sentenced instead to pay off community service by "exercising his own talents" under the Fairy Council's strict supervision, but…

The water in the drinking fountains is free, and up here in outer space, it ought to be a grand improvement over the years of lukewarm temperatures I've always been obliged to endure before.

"It's good to see you, Crocker," Foop says, keeping his greeting short. Denzel realizes a second later that he's never really seen the kid wearing a school uniform before. Maybe once or twice, but he certainly looks more like a properly pompous heir to his father's throne in that outfit than in his usual pajamas. Huh. Who could've guessed it's clothes that make the man?

And he doesn't look at all like like some leaf-clad, mushroom-loving little fey.

Denzel turns then, scanning his eyes across the purple-haired fairy. She's full-blooded. No question about that. Or more specifically, she bears a striking resemblance to most of the FAIRIES that Denzel has managed to glimpse over the years. You know the type: big heads, elastic skin, eyes that glow in the dark, and little golden crowns which float above their heads. Yada yada. She's one of those. Nothing like the short, nubby old man he nabbed in a net years ago…

Denzel shakes the hand of the purple-haired fairy then. Her left one, since that's the one she offers. She introduces herself as Serena Fairywinkle. So… She comes out to be Poof's grandmother, then? He'd called her Nonna. That's Italian. Is there an Italy in the cloudlands?

Foop floats out of the way to give him room. Crocker steps aside when the handshake is done and Gary moves forward to greet Serena himself. The anti-fairy's little blue nose wrinkles up.

"Hello, Clarice… I mean Gary. And for the record, I'm only coming along to your training seminar so I might prove to Poof that his notes lack a substantial amount of- OH, that is DISGUSTING!" Foop whips away from Gary so fast, he almost swaps personalities. His wingbeats pick up speed. "I wish I could unsee that! All Midsummer Week, no one has been able to scare me, and yet in the course of two seconds, you've discovered my only weakness: human teenage males who drink pumpkin spice lattes unironically! And in the middle of summer, you heathen!"

"… What?"

Foop drops to the brick-laid path, flinging a dramatic arm over his eyes. His other hand gropes towards the flickering sun. It peers over the edge of the floating space rock where the school building sits. "The mainstream! It burns my cruel, black heart! Go on without me."

"NO!" Denzel throws back his head, fingers clawing at the sky. "My bestie! And it wasn't even at my own hands!"

Poof crouches down to (apparently) check Foop's pulse. Foop drifts his limp palm across his counterpart's cheek. Ridiculous! Anti-Fairies don't have hearts! … Do they?

"Poof, if I don't make it…"

Denzel stands there, his own heart thumping, while Serena stares down at her grandson (sons plural?) in a mystified way. Foop drags his hand down Poof's face to the red tie around his neck.

"… tell my father…"

Poof leans in, straining his ears. Closer… closer…

"… he sucks."

Then his little blue hand slips to his chest. His eyes slowly close. His chest lies still. He doesn't move again. Poof bows his head, clasping Foop's frail hand against his chest. "We'll always have the Hocus Poconos… Rest now, you weird, weird little prince."

Denzel whirls on Gary. "What did you do?"

Gary glances at the disposable cup in his hand. Then he points to its label. "Uh, this is cashew milk. Pumpkin spice lattes, while delightful and fun, are out of season."

"Oh." Foop braces his hands to the bricks to push himself up again, looking more than a little disappointed to not be dying. "Well… Try learning magic sometime. You can grow all the pumpkins you could ever dream of! And spices too… though I'm not sure where they come from. Do most of them grow on trees?"

Nobody answers him, though Poof pats his shoulder in a lame attempt at dusting him off and gives his counterpart a thumbs up. Serena smiles shyly up at Gary (Tall, looming freakazoid child that he is), then at Denzel. She tucks a curl of hair behind one ear. "Well, thank you ever so much for joining us this morning! Denzel Crocker, if you would kindly follow Poof and myself inside to my Fairy Magic 101 class. Foop, you're with Gary in Magical Children: The Basics."

Both Poof and Foop break out in chatter, but Foop's whine cuts through the loudest. He flings both hands towards Gary. "So Poof gets to spend all day with Denzel Crocker, and I'm left to babysit the brain-melting personification of unskippable video ads? How is THAT fair?"

"Magical Children has mosquito cookies and free peppermint candies," Serena wheedles. She smiles at them both, but while Foop's expression turns thoughtful, Poof's mouth drops open.

"WHAT! That's totally unfair, poof poof! Do we get any snacks?"

"… Mosquito cookies?" Denzel repeats. Poof looks upset, his lower lip sticking out. It doesn't make sense… If he really wants a treat, why not just wave the stupid rattle around for that? Fairy powers are limitless. A fairy can make 2 + 2 equal fish. Or, well, anything!

But when he asks, Poof shakes his head. "If I tried to just poof up a snack, it would taste like dust to me."

Huh. "Can you teleport a snack here from another location?"

Poof just looks at him. Confused. "I don't know where the snacks are. And besides, my parents have wards around our castle to prevent outside magic from reaching it. I'd never get through that, let alone the blockers around my dad's snack cupboard. A magic guard dog spell would totally sniff me out and try to bite my butt."

Castle?

They don't get any mosquito cookies. There's a plate of strawberries waiting for them when Serena escorts both him and Poof inside the classroom. Denzel tries to keep a skip in his step, ignoring all the weird looks. Still, he stops walking when he gets there. There's only one fairy sitting in the room, right in front. Several rows of chairs stand behind her. The only other guest is a leprechaun. Heads turn, necks craning. Their voices mumble back and forth. Denzel stares back at them, barely registering when Poof swipes a handful of strawberries from the refreshment table. The child holds them up for him to take. What, too cheap to spring for a full charcuterie?

"What's going on?" the fairy demands, spittle flying. She's an older woman with curly pink hair, standing now with a notebook clamped to her chest. Her face is thick with wrinkles. She wears horn-rimmed glasses on her nose. Denzel has just enough time to wonder why on earth an elderly fairy would need to take a class on the basics of magic when the male leprechaun pipes up.

"He's human!"

"And he has a tracker anklet!"

"You're a fairy," Denzel tells the pink-haired woman, feet twitching. His body longs to twist in the air… but he holds his ground. Serena lifts her hands, palms forward, and tries to soothe her other students: He's here under supervision, the Fairy Council approved him, to no avail. The leprechaun grabs his shillelagh and the fairy clings to her crown. Serena stares forward as they shove past, hurrying from the room together. Just like that, they disappear.

Then, like a doll pulled by a string, she rotates around and smiles at Denzel. "Well! Shall we begin? I'm Serena. I teach the youth one zodiac cycle above your class, and I for one am looking forward to meeting a new face. Virginia so badly needs the break… She hasn't taken one since her sister's wedding, and even then it was only for a day. Having you on the team should be a delight."

"Hmm… Well, I'm not exactly known for being a team player, but if there are FAIRIES here, I'll give it a shot!"

This is how Denzel Quincy Crocker, age 44 in years and 94 in life experiences, finds himself crammed in a tiny school desk that not even a human child could love. Poof has the seat next to him, notebook and pens aligned primly on his desk. Oh. So he was one of those kids. A Chloe Carmichael… an A.J. Breen (That kid's full first name is Archimedes Jr. for a reason). When Denzel glances over, Poof smiles up at him the same way he had the first time Denzel found the baby in his house on his birthday many years ago.

He still thinks about that day with D.J. It was his birthday. May 13th. One of the happiest days of his entirely miserable adult life.

How quickly time flies by… and how incredibly slowly, too. What a strange place for their paths to cross again. A school for fairy children. Denzel's eyes wander to the ceiling. He never would have guessed. To think that Fairy World has a functioning society like the human world, right down to its nitty-gritty education system. Perhaps there are some limits to fairy magic after all. They must not be able to poof up smarter brains.

Good to note.

He hunches over his open notebook like a schoolkid, gripping his pen. That shriveled heart inside his chest pumps loudly on his skin. As a kid, Denzel had often worried himself sick over the first day of a new school year. It wasn't so bad in his childhood. The bullies only showed up once he turned eleven. Did fairy kids ever deal with bullying, or was the threat of magic enough to keep all attempts of cruelty at bay?

Foop had told him that on his first day of classes, all his lunchmates hurled food at his head for telling a "really bad knock-knock joke." He'd repeated the joke for Denzel upon request and Denzel could see why it hadn't gone over well, but how peculiar that none of his teachers had even stepped in.

We let the children here sort things out for themselves? And the bell at the end of the day wipes the slate clean, repairing any damage done to the classroom or papers knocked on the floor in the process? This is my kind of job!

Focus. Bring your game face, Denzel…

He tries to keep his wiggles on the downlow. Serena uses her wand to guide a piece of chalk across the board. It squeaks softly, but doesn't shriek. The angle is simply too perfect. "Fairy magic is really quite simple to explain once you boil it down to its essence… In ancient times, our ancestors were once able to channel magic directly from the energy field all around us." She adds a stick figure (complete with wings and crown) and marks out circles on the board like ripples in a pond. "Today, the Big Wand in Fairy World draws in the raw magic of the universe, filters it, cleans it, and distributes it out again in a usable state. We use wands to channel magic in a much more effective way than our ancestors ever could."

"That sounds like a downgrade," Denzel observes, scribbling the notes down anyway. "What possible benefit could there be in evolving away your ability to use magic?"

"Great question, Denzel!" Serena poofs a small piece of peppermint candy in the air above his desk. It falls with a clatter. "The modern world has been plagued with pollution for generations. When magic grows unstable and impossible to harness, we call it 'stinky magic.'"

With that, she marks another few symbols on the blackboard with her levitating piece of chalk. "We Fairies don't breathe with lungs like humans do. We maintain a constant connection to the energy field through a series of invisible 'straws' which connect the energy field directly to our core. In your species, red blood cells carry oxygen to the heart. In ours, 'breathing lines' must always remain in contact with the energy field or else we lose our magic. Without a direct connection to the energy field or to another person whose energy we've synced with, our bodies will weaken and die. The Big Wand keeps our airways pure, much the same way you wouldn't like some fellow to come along and squeeze your neck so you can no longer breathe."

"So you can kill a fairy," Denzel notes down. He'd already suspected a few different methods… killing them with non-magical objects, most notably. But it's always fascinating to hear a pinch of extra information. You never know if you might need it later.

"We can sync to other people?" Poof asks, raising his hand. A stripe of confusion lit across his face. Serena looks at him, blank for two seconds, before her face darkens like a plum.

"Um… forget I even brought that up. You'll understand that when you're older."

Awkward! Denzel glances at the peppermint candy on his desk, then slips it over to Poof. Poof practically tears the wrapping off, wolfing it down in a gulp. Geez. Didn't his mother ever feed him?

"Breathing lines are often called 'lines' for short. If they snap, they flail about… like the tentacles of an injured kraken." Serena demonstrates this with scribbles on the board. That floating piece of chalk is certainly earning its keep. "A Fairy grows a new line every 11,250 years. However, Fairy babies are born with no lines at all. If those lines aren't tied into their soul within the first few hours of birth, the baby won't survive. Lines can come from any donor, but are normally tied in by the father while he views the world in field-sight."

"I have donor lines," Poof says, doodling between the blue lines of his notebook paper. He's drawing chubby circles, gifting them with crowns and wings like his own. "I got kidnapped right after I was born."

"Kidnapped? Is that common? Don't your magical Fairy hospitals have some kind of safeguards in place?" Denzel pauses then. Recalculating where he is and who he's speaking to. "Or… was this a changeling sort of thing?"

Never had it occurred to him that Timmy's fairy godparents might have taken a changeling.

Never had he wondered what his own fairies might have considered doing to him.

Serena skims forward, shushing the conversation there before Poof can respond. "Oh, that was such a long time ago… Most of the subspecies don't take changelings anymore. Though, do be sensitive on the subject when you're teaching… There's one student in your new class who's a changeling."

"Yeah," Poof pipes up. "Sammy Sweetsparkle! He's one of the huldufólk. He's my roommate at the dorms."

"Well, yes," says Serena, taking great interest in the cap of her wand. "Sammy is a sweet child, from what I've seen of him… Very bright, but never accept any food he offers you. You'll find all this in his file."

Sweetsparkle. The name is familiar. Denzel's pretty sure he saw that kid when he was up here at Spellementary trying to pass himself off as Mr. Wilcox Sacklunch, substitute teacher. Serena turns back to the board, using her wand to direct the magic chalk to add another drawing. Poof leans over, raising a hand to his mouth conspiratorially.

"The Head Pixie gave me my lines personally. He doesn't even do that for his younger pixies nowadays; he kind of had to stop years ago or else he'd give them all away and croak. The pixies do this signature braiding pattern when they tie in breathing lines, so everyone says I 'breathe like a pixie now. Boy, my mama was MAD, and my dad was just hurt that he didn't get the chance to have that ceremony with me, but… Hey, at least I'm alive. And no longer kidnapped, so like… BONUS!"

"I sometimes wonder if Mother would have reported me kidnapped if I'd ever been abducted as a baby," Denzel begins, but Serena taps the blackboard with her wand to bring their attention back to the front of class. Oh, he's been there before. Idly, he watches Poof lick at the inside of his peppermint candy wrapper.

"Now, the magic we fairies use isn't at all like a witch's magic… Witch magic is alive, sometimes befriended, but never truly tamed. It even has a parasitic form that can fester and overtake a witch who doesn't know how to keep it restrained."

"Oh, I know all about parasitic witch magic," Denzel mutters. Poof shoots him a curious sideways glance, which Denzel ignores. You don't become an expert in the field of cryptozoology without familiarizing yourself with the 1st and 2nd Creature Wars. It wasn't until his sophomore year of college that Denzel put two and two together when it finally clicked that he himself could possibly be a witch. Not exactly the sort of thing you expect to realize one day in history class, though it seemed stupid obvious when he started poking around his family tree and found the Bitterroots in his ancestry. That had been an awkward several semesters. Not to mention an awkward conversation with his mom when he'd gained enough nerve to ask if he had any other half-siblings.

He hunches over his notebook. Perfectly magic-combed hair flops into his face. He scribbles the name Susanne with his pen, then draws a T cross. He writes Ray across from her and scrawls their son Elmer underneath. He's long been familiar with the Janssen family. Grew up alongside Susanne, you know - she was only a year younger, lived down the street, sat beside each other on the bus all through elementary, middle, and high school - so he got to witness firsthand what happened to her after puberty. Her stony, bitter attitude blossomed into that of a girl who chased pink and rainbows and kittens of all shapes and sizes. She never was the same. Oddly enough, that change wasn't the result of FAIRY GODPARENTS in her life… though he's certain her older sister had one assigned for at least three or four months. He whiffed them. It's why he hung around Susanne so much in the first place.

"Witch" is the word the Fairies bestow upon any hybrid magical creature who has one magical parent and one who lacks magic entirely. Denzel absorbed what he could about witches in school, fascinated by the records of their existence and infuriated by the lack of quality resources on their magic. Gary filled in the gaps while they spent 45 years in partnership. The kid had been plucked up by Pixies after the car accident that killed his dad. They'd run a DNA test on him at the age of 8, noticed an extra chromosome that declared him XYZ, and told him outright what he was. Oh, what Denzel wouldn't have done to get that kind of confirmation when he was a child… but alas.

Witch magic is hereditary, but the more generations between you and the magical creature who crossed into your family, the more dangerous witch magic can become. If Denzel's calculations are correct (and he has faith they are), then he's an unlucky 13 jumps away from the unknown ancestor in his own line. That puts his nephew Kevin at 14. But only 6 generations separate Gary from his genie ancestor. That leaves the redhead with 1.56% of her magic in his veins, which is way more than anything Denzel ever got. The kid may not have the same level of untapped power that an actual genie does, but he can still create and destroy matter around him while snapping his fingers. Denzel's seen him do it. He's met the clones. That was a weird lemonade party, even before Foop and Vicky wandered in.

Magic comes in a variety of forms. Sometimes the witch controls the magic, but if left unchecked, magic can easily consume the witch. Denzel prodded Gary about it once and got the final confirmation he needed to peg Susanne and Elmer down for what they were. There's genie blood in both of them, but they're much farther removed from their unknown ancestor than Gary is. Cold magic festers in their line. It's predatory. Parasitic. It fed on Susanne's childhood personality until it overtook her body completely. As far as Denzel can tell, at this rate, Elmer's due for the same fate in a few more years…

"And I'm just glad I've got mine mostly under control," Gary had muttered, shivering when Denzel pointed the Janssen's out once on a trip to the grocery store for mushroom soup. "You're definitely right about the Janssens. H.P. and Mr. Sanderson basically told me horror stories growing up so I wouldn't slack off in practicing my magic. I'm old enough now to know I'm not even removed enough from Crimsona for it to be a threat to me, but I'm an M-class witch and my magic is hard enough to keep in line. I can't imagine my life if it were parasitic instead. Geez louise. Poor Elmer. I wish there was something I could do."

Denzel had slapped him on the back for that, making Gary yelp. "Well, once we have the FAIRIES in our hands, you can fix it any way you want! Just keep that in mind."

Such an odd family, and while he's grateful for Susanne's constant presence in his life - her general weirdness there to remind him why he shouldn't give up his fairy-hunting beliefs - Denzel can't help but think the same. He struggled for years wondering whether he himself was a witch and what it might mean for him if he were, up until Gary came along and slapped the answer down like a finger snap. "Oh, you're Pressyne-descended. On your mother's side, of course. You can float. The Pixies told me."

Because of course the Pixies would just tell him that.

Oh, what would I do without Cabrera and his magical library of a brain in my life? It's a semi-sarcastic thought… but partly true. Gary spoon-fed him a lot of answers he never would have put together on his own. Apart from regular arguments and how horribly the heist itself went, he's been the perfect partner in crime.

He has no idea if Susanne has told Elmer what will happen when puberty hits, and he almost doesn't want to know. Young Elmer Janssen never has been a "cool" kid at Dimmsdale Elementary. He collects stamps, makes crafts out of scrap materials, and has a temper on him that pushes all but his closest friends away. But he's also friendly, inquisitive, and studies hard. Lingers behind a lot to ask "just one more thing" about the day's discussion before he hurries after his friends. Often gets Cs or even Bs on his exams, and his essays always look fantastic. Denzel will miss him if his sentient witch magic takes control and mind goes the same way his mother's did. Won't miss him much, but it'll be awkward to say the least. The Janssens still live down the street from him. Elmer trick-or-treats at his house every year. Yeah, that's not gonna go well much longer.

Ah, never mind. That was his old class of students in his old life. He's teaching at Spellementary now. Witch kids, if there are any, will be educated here. The chances of another kid with wildly untamed magic crossing his path is statistically unlikely. Or so he's been told.

Serena waits a moment for Denzel to jot down his notes, then breezes on. "Starpiece magic is far more predictable… but that's no guarantee it's easier to manipulate. Magical abilities are for the most part genetic. Every Fairy is born with a core - the organ that powers their life source - as well as their magic pool: or, the maximum amount of magic they and their counterparts can ever channel at one time." The purple-haired fairy bobs over then, tapping her nail on the edge of Poof's desk. "Purebred Fairies have the largest magic pools, and there's pure blood in Poof's line, on his paternal grandmother's side. Even at his young age, he's a very powerful fairy baby… and one that I'm delighted to call my grandson."

Poof beams modestly at the praise. Denzel glances over his notes - the handwriting so scribbled he can barely even read it - and raises his hand. And he's 10 years old again, for just a moment. Just as inquisitive as A.J., Sanjay, and Elmer.

Oh, if 10-year-old Denzel could see him now.

"I wrote a paper once arguing that Fairies have limited room in their chest for organs. So I might ask, how true is that and what exactly is 'the core?'"

"Correct. Both drakes and damsels - male and female Fairies, respectively - have stomach pouches for carrying and nursing their young. The core is our life-giving organ, and you would find it in our head chambers. Which," she adds, casting a meaningful look Poof's way, "I don't feel comfortable demonstrating here and now… but once we do have you caught up on all you need to know regarding Fairy magic, I'll ask our school nurse Nevada if he might meet with you privately so you can ask him anything regarding Fairy anatomy you've ever wanted to know."

"It's that easy?" His smile is glued on, using pain. "I think I might like Nevada already!"

Serena points her wand to the board again, where her floating chalk has drawn a circle (colored in) surrounded by two uncolored rings. "As I mentioned, magic is hereditary. A child will receive a magic pool somewhere in size between that of his mother's and father's, though the exact size may vary between siblings. A firstborn will always have more magic than their siblings. Up to two layers of magic can wrap themselves around the core. If the child is the father's firstborn, they'll receive one extra layer, and if the child is their mother's, they'll receive two."

Poof's head snaps up like a spring. His hand jolts after it. "But it's okay if they don't… right?"

His question seems to catch Serena off guard. "Uh. Well, there's nothing wrong with not having the layers. Younger siblings can be equally as healthy as the firstborn. The extra magic is simply a small benefit the first receives."

"Um, what happens if you're a firstborn who doesn't have extra core layers?"

"Then that person isn't actually a firstborn."

"… What? Are there any exceptions?"

"To the firstborn bonus? I don't believe there are any. At least, I've never heard of one."

Denzel keeps his head low, scratching out notes, until the silence between the two fairies drags on way too long. Uhh… He looks up again. Poof stares back at his grandmother, shock bleeding his face out to white. She hovers at the front of the room wearing the same look of confusion that Denzel himself might have shown to dancing chipmunks on a ceiling fan.

"That's… not true," Poof croaks back. His voice wavers on a string. He drops his head to the desk, wrapping his stubby arms around his head. Um.

A wingbeat later, the classroom door bangs open. "Nonna!" Foop howls. Serena jolts, and Foop jabs a chubby finger back the way he'd come. "I can't stand another sappy second with those ooey-gooey parents-to-be! They only want to coo over me as an authentic anti-fairy baby and backed me into a corner trying to pinch my cheeks! Gary had to hold me over his head to shoo them back! … Also, the instructor told me I had to leave unless I had my parents' permission to watch a video on Fairy childbirth. Which I DON'T! I lived through it once, and once was scarring enough. My mother's womb didn't even have air conditioning! Or dental!"

If Poof had looked as pale as chalk while staring at the board, that's nothing compared to Serena now. All the color drains from her face, and Denzel twitches his nose in sympathy of whatever Gary was going through. Granted… this was the same kid whose genie blood heightened his sense of smell to the point that every time he and Denzel went shopping together, he'd hand a chocolate bar to every girl he sensed experiencing monthly pains, and he found nothing weird about that. Fairy childbirth might not squick him out so much.

"My apprenticeship research was on fairy anatomy," he says, rising from his chair. "I was just about to ask if there was something I could still learn, you know-"

"You stay here," Serena cuts in, grabbing Foop by the shoulders. She shoves him in front of Denzel, wingbeats erratic. "Both my grandchildren are very bright students. They'll get you through the basics while I sit with Gary. His seminar is only half as long as yours, so I should be back in an hour." So saying, Serena twirls her wand. A multi-page packet - stapled - with a long list of key terms and checkboxes poofs into existence above their heads. "Go right down the list, luvs. I'll have my wand screen set to keep an eye on you. Room 105. Poof straight over if you need me for anything. All right?"

"Poof?" Poof tries to ask around the strawberry in his mouth. His cheeks have puffed like a chipmunk and he had three more berries in each tiny hand. Foop rolls his eyes, but keeps floating with a large enough bob that Denzel could tell he didn't really mind this new arrangement. Serena kisses both boys on the cheek in farewell, then lifts her wand and poofs away. Foop wastes no time. His arms flash into the air.

"Boys' night!"

Poof gulps down his strawberry like a snake with an unhinged jaw. "It's like, 7 AM."

"Hmph! Not in the time zone I just came from. Crocker, you would not believe what a week I've had at home! My mother has been listening to bad covers of Kidz Bop songs nonstop and my father gave me the most disappointed look I've ever seen in my life, all because I asked why the oldest human in the world seems to lose their title every couple years. I want to know who's murdering them all!"

Hm. Denzel presses his fingers against his mouth, looking Foop up and down and trying to process his words before he voices them. He likes Foop. Foop is one of his two besties and has been ever since that day they met in the Hocus Poconos and Denzel discovered the existence of Anti-Fairies for the very first time. But, well… Every now and then, Foop says things like this that serve as a plain reminder of his child-like innocence. Sometimes, his best friend is just really hecking stupid.

"So, uhh…" Poof pulls down the floating stack of paper and flips through the first two pages. "Where do you want to start?"

Foop waves off the need for notes with a scoff. "Fairies… You would want to teach him the dull and boring facts about where magic comes from instead of the juicy meat of what we can do to mortals, wouldn't you? Here's one of the first things my parents taught me: don't ever give the fae something you can't afford to lose."

"Oh, that's a good one," Poof says, nodding his agreement. A long-held thought shot through Denzel's brain with the speed of a leaping squirrel.

"Does that include names?"

"Yes," both children answer instantly, and Foop accents this statement with another roll of his eyes. The back of his chubby little hand rubs at the kiss mark Serena left on his cheek. "Seriously, not even in parts. It doesn't matter if you give us your middle name ninety-nine years after your first or if you give it that same day… It's still your name. And this goes for every identity marker you have, you know. Locker combinations, social security numbers, past lifetimes-"

"Online usernames," Poof chimes in.

"Right. Keep it secret, stupid." Foop crosses his arms, leaning back in the air like a frumpy blue casino die. "But even if you accidentally email a file of all your names to every Fairy in this quadrant of the universe, you're safe as long as you don't speak them verbally. Fae are conduits of the energy field. Until you announce one of those names aloud or write it in the pages of Da Rules Herself, the Universe can't see it."

Poof… glances sideways. "I hadn't heard that."

"Anti-Fairies," Foop goes on, giving an exaggerated wave of his hand, "actually take grand precautions against this. At birth, we're given several names which we're taught to split our identity between. These include our 'anti-names,' chosen for us by out counterparts, as well as a private name selected by our parents, a last name that's inherited, and all of us carry a name in the Anti-Fairy language Vatajasa as well. Those names are more difficult for Fairies to pronounce or remember. We also closely guard the names and identities of our past lives. And we have a fifth name, which we only learn from a sacred book when we're adults. It's so much harder for the Fairies to play their tricks on you that way."

Poof shrugs. "Can't argue with that. And my granddad's family calls me something different than my grandma's family do. It's just safer that way, you know?"

"I have a sixth name in Genie," Foop adds, boasting with a puffed-up chest. Well, if you can say that about little square babies. "And alternate names for other parts of myself… I'm a prince. It comes with the territory."

"Fascinating," Denzel murmurs, writing down every word. He'd read a lot about this in his own research of fey and faefolk over the years, but hearing it from the mouth of one…

This was something new altogether. Something he only ever could have dreamed of. He absorbs the feel of the thin, low-oxygen air on his liver-spotted skin. He eyes the juice left behind on Poof's gooey strawberry tops. He listens to the soft click of Foop picking one claw against his fangs.

Foop floats back then, taking his first look at the instructions Serena left behind, and Poof swaps in to take the lead.

"We don't like gifts… especially not surprise gifts. No one likes to be in debt, so if you really have to give a gift, at least tell us what the price is upfront… Like, 'Hey, maybe you can drop by tomorrow and repair the latch on my fence, or tell a hilarious story at my party next week' or whatever. Seriously, just… ask for something. It's not hard."

Foop laughs, his square body bobbing. "You can give me gifts! Call me the odd one out if you must, but I actually like my birthday."

"I thought your birthday was the spring cleaning holiday."

"So?"

Denzel cocks his head. "How does this sort of thing work with fairy godparents? Doesn't granting wishes land a child in your debt? Does it lead to screams of twisted agony?"

"That's different," Poof protests, his cheeks turning as red as the strawberries. "There are reasons why fairy godparents are only assigned to children in need… My parents are godparents because they want to help people, and they're willing to take the risk of offensive words in order to do that."

"I vote twisted agony," Foop puts in, rolling his eyes. "It's that stupid 'Thank you, thank you' culture that binds godparents to a child in the first place. To acknowledge that someone has done a nice thing for you - and thanking them to their face - places you in their debt. Sass and backtalk can turn the tables against you, and fast. What Poof said. Da Rules are a contract that outlines very specific etiquette about our culture and the laws are strict for a reason."

Poof stares at his feet. "Yeah… I hate to say it, but human adults can be pretty selfish. It's one thing to help kids, and land yourself in a kid's debt for a little while… but it's really, really dangerous to let adults bind us to their whims. Adults can get greedy, can turn on us… and a lot of humans turn greedy and want to trade our lives for money, or they end up under extreme stress and depression while trying to keep us from their significant other. It's why no matter what, even if you're the kindest and most secretive godkid in the world… you have to cut ties with Fairy World when you turn 18."

An awkward pause falls between them. Denzel stares at his notes, scowling at the places his hand smeared the damp ink. Foop rubs behind his neck, claws noisy against his scutes.

"You, Remy, and Gary are exceptions, you know… Two of you are witches pulled in for hundreds of years worth of community service. Remy was adopted."

Those inky smudges melt into a blur. Denzel picks at one of the scratches Girlfriend's claws left on his fingers days or week ago. "You know… Timmy Turner froze time for 50 years. I was there in Fairy Court to see all that unfold." His memories are horribly sporadic, but he'd developed a partial immunity to forget-a-cin after a ridiculous amount of repeated uses. The Head Fairy gave up mind-wiping him years ago, and even told him to his face. "Those are your parents who are assigned to him… Is he getting adopted too?"

"No," says Poof. He fidgets in the air. "Remy was a special case… and even then it's dangerous. Juandissimo has had two godkids die under his watch before. Remy's sort of, you know… a Buxaplenty, and he's going to grow up to wield a lot of influence in the community. Like Doug Dimmadome. ASPRA and the Fairy Council takes things like that into account, because it's really dangerous to let very rich and influential adults run around being miserable. The Council also reviewed his records, and the difference in his happiness levels as a friendless kid alone in the mansion all day compared to how happy he was with Juandissimo around was, like… Foop, what's the word for important and noticeable research results?"

"Over-the-top statistically significant."

"ASPRA?" Denzel asks.

"Amity Safety and Protective Recall Agency. It's the godparent program. But yeah… Remy was a special case. And then that whole thing happened with his arm, so…" Poof takes a breath then. Or at least, he draws in a little air. There's no telling where that goes if fairies don't have lungs. "The point is, Timmy… can't stay with us forever. That Secret Wish he made to freeze time was a really big deal and it had a lot of adverse effects on a lot of people, especially his parents. Like… Just one example, but he piled on entire decades of childrearing, over and over on their heads. It started to burn them out, then wear them down to complete exhaustion. That's a lot of mental stress to put them under, especially when they had their own dreams they wanted to follow after he moved out."

"Hmm… And stealing Turner away to Fairy World and erasing the memories of his parents would be…?"

"Morally wrong," Poof says flatly.

"And impractical," Foop adds. He slaps his ba-ba a few times against his hand. "He has friends, you know. And enemies, and school bullies, and classmates who would remember him, and all the kids who've ever seen him in the hallway or interacted him in some way, even if they only passed each other while searching for seats at the Pirates stadium… There would be far too many memories to erase, and the changeling fees are insane in this economy."

"Didn't think that would stop a magical fairy," Denzel mutters into his hand.

Poof claps his hand on Foop's cheek and shoves him aside. "Also, there's no oxygen in the majority of the cloudlands, and poofing creatures down to Earth several times a day just so they can breathe can get exhausting." Poof shrugs. "I mean, my parents would love to adopt Timmy if ASPRA and the Council would let them. And I'd love to have him as my godbrother for the rest of his life. It hurts really bad whenever I think about how I'll probably be up here at school when he says good-bye. But it's really for the best if we start weaning him off magic… Timmy is the only godkid to ever make over a million wishes. That's insane. The whole Turner family is dangerously oversaturated with fairy dust. It'll be at least ten or fifteen years before it would even be safe for us to talk about adoption, and by that point, well… he'll probably be 28 and living a stable adult life or whatever. He might even be married and have his own kids. It would just be weird then. He wouldn't need us anymore."

"Believe me, Fairywinkle… I'm 44 and I absolutely don't have my life together."

Poof… searches for words, groping for them vaguely with his eyes. His fingers clutch the handle of his rattle like it's some sort of lifeline and he's walking the beams of the highest construction site in the world. "I know Timmy will be okay, though… whatever happens. The Council will keep an eye on him for the rest of his life and my parents might get permission to give him back his memories when he's older, but, like… it'd be real dangerous, especially for him. I don't know. My mom and dad are looking into it all the time, trying to figure out if there are any shortcuts, but the Fairy Council really just wants them to go 'hands off' for a decade so we can evaluate the real damage and start cleaning up the magical side effects. We're allowed to stay a few more years, but… it's going to be hard to say good-bye."

Denzel holds no sympathy for the pudgy fairy child. None for the godparents either… especially each time he remembers that Cosmo and Wanda were once his fairies, too. That was a long time ago. 32 years or 82 depending on the way you chose to calculate it. They didn't care enough to say anything to him.

Evidently, Foop shares his sentiment (or lack thereof). He loudly rustles through his papers again, then points to a random instruction, floating forward. Change of subject. "Here's something we can chat about! Never take food from the huldufólk."

"Poof did mention that."

"Oh… Well, then here's a new one: Never drink from running water anywhere except the source."

"Never play games with the Anti-Fairies, because they always change the rules."

"Games shouldn't need rules!" Foop cries out, throwing his hands in the air. "Life itself is all rules, rules, rules! Who holds you to that same standard just to enjoy a game? I'd rather drown in mud. You may as well chain a newborn in Abracatraz."

"Yeah, well, I think those are all good basics to start with… I might poof over to check on Nonna and see what she thinks the most important points are. No, wait!" Poof grabs Denzel's shoulder, yanking him back. "Never, and I mean NEVER answer your phone above the clouds. Magic is dangerous. All sorts of creatures can manipulate the signal or cast a curse on you."

"Well…" Denzel scrunches his brows together. "I never understood all the hoity-toity etiquette rules. It's all sort of rude to humans. Refusing food, refusing gifts, not giving our names? With an infinite lifespan, how do you get by without offending one another?"

Foop jabs his thumb at his chest. "Be born royal. Works great, except for the bashing biases of the press."

"Uhhh," says Poof, sort of humming the word between his teeth. "I mean, we do fight… Like, a lot. We just kind of work it out, I guess. Sometimes with wands, sometimes with our hands." He shrugs. "But you humans wouldn't want to get involved in a fae fight… With or without magic. Anti-Fairies study combat magic, but Fairies fight with teeth and fists."

"Why the split?" It captivates him… He's fascinated by the thought. Little winged creatures casting their wands aside to whale on one another? There could be good money in that. He envisions high-pitched voices, tiny fluttering bodies, and little nippy teeth.

"Well, Fairies are typically built bigger and more physically powerful than Anti-Fairies are. We're taught to use our physical strength in combat. The common stereotype is that Fairy culture leans into brawn and Anti-Fairy culture leans into brains. Anti-Fairies developed their magical tactics so they could fight back magically in a close combat scuffle against a Fairy. So you see why Fairies, who are strong enough to take big attacks and keep coming, would focus their training on long-range magic instead of close combat magic."

Foop holds out his ba-ba, shaking it around so the purple liquid inside sloshes loudly. "There's more to combat magic than just flat-out fighting, you know. Combat magic is all about technique, luck, and creativity. It's used in charms, hexes, and healing."

Poof gives a nod. "Yeah! Most Anti-Fairies prefer combat magic. It's a slow variety, usually taking time to plan out and set up, but the results are often better in the end. Most Fairies, though, hone their abilities in essential magic." Poof floats forward, shaking his rattle. The rice and beads or whatever else is in there clatter around and two small figurines appear in his hand. He sets them down at opposite sides of Denzel's desk. One is a figure of himself. The other is a figure of Foop. Both stand across from each other, rattle and ba-ba drawn. "Essential magic is all about spontaneity, experience, and power. This is what we use for stuff like poofing and transforming objects. That's my specialty. We like to be able to poof up the right thing at the right time in the right place on the first try. No mistakes, and no pain for any living creatures we summon. That's what essential magic is all about."

Denzel plucks up the Poof figurine and squeezes it a few times in his hands. Cathartic, but… It doesn't offer the same maniacal thrill as grabbing hold of a fairy in the flesh. "Hmm. Why the extra names? Why not call them Fairy magic and Anti-Fairy magic?"

"Well, just because this is the stereotype, it doesn't mean every Fairy and Anti-Fairy specialize in the variety of magic you would expect them to because of the culture they were raised in. That's racist."

Denzel grunts without comment. Foop snorts and Poof tilts his head.

"It's like this." He waves his rattle over the desk again. This time, a pale green apple pops into view with a puff of dust. "I'm learning how to poof things from one place to another. Even if I'm in a third place! If I keep up my studies, then someday I'll be able to close my eyes and actually see locations I want to poof to, before I try poofing there. It takes a lot and a lot of training to do that. These are both things that are great for fairy godparents. But Foop won't be able to do either of those things, at least not at my pace, because he's learning charms and hexes first. He's on a different track of study."

It's a lot… A lot. Denzel tries to keep up in his notes, but his middle-aged bladder is starting to take a toll on him. He really should have gone before he left the house. Not that it would have mattered. Poof blathers on anyway, oblivious, while Foop drifts across the classroom like he's looking for candy or books to steal off the shelves.

"Charms can increase your abilities like your speed or strength and give you an edge in a fight. Or, they can heal you if you're hurt. Foop always says he decided to go into this field because he can feel it every time I give myself a papercut, but I think he probably just wants to beat me up."

"Don't give me a reason to," Foop grumps, kicking the teacher's abandoned desk. Denzel scribbles this down anyway, not trying to hold back his snort.

"Now that, I would pay to see."

Poof smirks back and slides the two figurines closer together on the desk. "Hexes are, like… little traps placed on objects that only activate when someone triggers them later. Those are things that I might never get around to studying unless I want to spend more time in school. I don't. My mama studied hexes and I'll never get over the betrayal I felt when I found out there's one on our fridge door handle that turns your appetite off from everything except healthy snacks… The thing is, every focus follows the rules of a single magic system. They're just different. They're all very deep and take centuries upon centuries to totally master. Like, even if you learn how to make a hex, it takes ages before you can develop it in a way so it won't be undone by bacteria, water, counter-spells, or just the decay of time. Things like that. And you don't want your hex to wash off and infect something else. This all takes a lot of schooling. Most Fairies don't bother learning more than three specializations because that's, like, a lot of school. Most people stick with one or two."

Denzel's eyelids flutter. Heavy. Gooey. "So it's like a major in college."

"I don't know what that is, but you sound enthusiastic, so yes. Heh heh." Poof pats his rattle against his open palm. "I'm going to be a godparent like my parents someday. Foop and I even signed up for the Fairy Council's new 'Make a Godfriend' program next zodiac cycle. We're taking after-school classes every year 'til it starts, and then we're gonna be partners!"

"Ugh," groans Foop, rolling his eyes. Denzel twists in his too-small chair to see the anti-fairy holding a strawberry. He waves it at them both. "For the record, I had nothing to do with this. My father is vicariously living through me. The Fairy Council is in a panic over high turnover rates for godparents, so they're pushing propaganda even on Spellementary kids. My parents won't stop talking about how it's 'such a good opportunity for me' and claiming the Fairies are about to 'throw in the towel at the annual bake-off' any day now."

"Annual bake-off?"

"The Godfriend program is really competitive," Poof assures Denzel, who stares back at him with lifted eyebrows. This didn't answer the bake-off question.

"Mmhm."

"You okay? You look tired."

Sigh. One that isn't helped by Poof's head tilt of sympathy.

"Is it too much? You know, the average lifespan of a single modern fairy is a million years. Our species has existed since the dawn of your planet. Fairy World is just one of the fae colonies in the universe. You're not going to be able to learn everything in one sitting."

"Just keep me on the basics," Denzel growls back, gripping his pen again. He's here for two hours. There's a follow-up to this seminar tomorrow and a third the day after that, all before they start letting him supervise some of the older kids on the playground. He suffered through college once. Both Harvard and Dimmsdale University, actually. He knows perfectly well how easily you can slip and tumble and fall behind if you don't stay on the ball.

The Fairy Council caught him red-handed in the Archives building and didn't hurl him back down to Earth. They offered him the chance at community service by teaching real Fairy children at a real Fairy school. He'll be darned if he lets this opportunity slip like spilled milk between his fingers. He'll guzzle it. Drown in it.

Hey, he and Gary could have been shoveling trash in Fairy World's dump instead.

"The basics?" The little fairy's eyes widen owlishly, but he nods. He sets the rattle on the desk. Denzel's eyes flash down to it. Foop's reaction is instantaneous. The kid practically dives across the classroom to snatch up the rattle, push Poof back to the blackboard, and hand it to him with an annoyed grunt. Poof, oblivious, keeps using his empty hands for his demonstration. He holds one hand flat and walks the fingers of the other down his palm. "All right… Let's talk about the magic lines that encircle your planet. I believe you humans call them 'ley lines' these days, but once upon a time, they were known as 'fairy paths.' There's a good reason for that."

"Skip that bit," Denzel cuts in. Poof blinks. Denzel shakes his head so hard, his glasses nearly fly off. "I've been studying FAIRIES ever since I was a boy; what do you take me for? Of course I know about the ley lines."

"Fine then. You teach us." Poof flutters back, reaching behind him for some chalk for the board. "I'll draw."

This doesn't go over well with Foop, who immediately zips up to his counterpart and starts prodding him with his ba-ba. "Give over! I want to draw! You got to draw last time!"

Denzel untangles himself from his tiny chair, nearly tripping to the floor. Both kids, each with their fingers in each other's clothes or mouth, look at him in surprise. He swipes the chalk away. "I'll draw, thank you. Let's not forget who the teacher is here." The children float apart and he starts marking up the blackboard. The chalk dust sheds like powdered sugar from his fingers. It squeaks as he etches out wavy horizontal lines. "Houses can't be built on ley lines. They invoke the wrath and curses of the FAIRIES, ultimately resulting in the homeowner's self-destruction."

"That's right." Poof… actually seems a little surprised by his answer. Maybe even impressed, which makes Denzel smile a little in the back of his throat. The fairy bobs up to his shoulder. "Energy has to flow freely through the universe. The Anti-Fairies know this better than anyone. All paths of magic take up space. That means they either push against each other like thorns, they repel each other completely, or they weave together in harmony according to the ways they fit together in the Fae zodiac."

"Which is important!" Foop insists, jabbing his finger at the chalkboard. "The element of Love is neutral. But to get the most mileage out of your magic, memorizing the yellow bonds on the zodiac would be your friend. Fire to Sky, Water to Soil, Breath to Leaves."

"And negative to ground," Denzel finishes, but both children look at him as though he's just suggested he pin them face-down in the water fountains. Well. They can't all be zingers.

Poof shakes his rattle, pulling the attention back on him. "A lot of Da Rules that forbid oddly specific things, like poofing up brand new electric cars, exist because they force conflicting types of magic to merge in bad ways, and this tangles the energy field in knots. No flow, no energy. No energy, no magic. No magic, no blood, and no blood, no breath. Co-existing with Fairies is easy, actually. Just don't build things that stop us from breathing and we won't have to chase you off your farm."

The old stories do make a little more sense when he puts it that way. Denzel scrutinizes the blackboard, tongue in cheek. How strange to think that just a few weeks ago, back in May, he'd been teaching human children for what could very well be the last time. He'd known for months the Fairy Council would return to seek repayment for his crimes. Now his future is a pink and sparkly one, coated with dust and accented with the petty squabbles of two counterparts who can't decide which one of them has the cooler shoes.

Denzel glances down at the small piece of chalk in his hand. It doesn't look like much at all. Sure, it glitters faintly gold, but there's no other indication that it belongs in this wild, magical world.

He doesn't know what to say. What to do. 82 years he's spent chasing Fairies, searching in vain to fill that empty void that losing Cosmo and Wanda left in his heart so long ago. He hardly remembers them. Blurry thoughts. Bright flashes. Pink and green parrots in his room.

They have a kid now.

It's cold, isn't it? Their lives kept moving forward even when his came tumbling down. He has nothing to show for the past 80 years but a battered two-bit room above his mother's two-bit garage… and a hairless cat named Girlfriend who nibbles on his hands.

He squeezes the chalk until it grinds dust in the crevices of his fingers. Well, sure… His life may be a joke, but wouldn't 10-year-old Denzel kill to see him now? Surrounded by FAIRIES! He always knew they exist!

It's been a long time in coming. But he might be moving out of Mother's place sooner than he thinks. Sure, it won't be easy to say good-bye to the Crocker Cave, but he won't need its levers, traps, and trackers anymore. If he can stay clean, stay off hunting FAIRIES for a year, the Fairy Council are granting him corporate housing. His own place! … On temporary terms, of course, which means he can be kicked out of at any moment the Council decides he's violated the conditions of their agreement. But that shouldn't be any concern. He attended years of therapy with Dr. Fancyfree. He managed himself mostly well during his brief stint as Mr. Wilcox Sacklunch.

He can keep himself in line for this. Moving out before his mother's death. Good job… Good house… Waking up beside his beloved hairless cat every morning for the rest of her life…

10-year-old Denzel Crocker would want this for him.

He wants to want this for himself. Even if it makes his stomach drop and his heart circle around like a vortex in his chest.

He's still standing at the blackboard when Serena comes to check on him a few minutes later. Gary tails behind her, looking eerily nonchalant for a teenage boy who just sat through a gruesome video on Fairy childbirth. Or maybe the birthing process isn't so gruesome if you're magic. Who knows. While Serena checks with Poof on Foop on how far they made it down her lesson plan, Gary walks right up to him.

"So," he says, though Denzel doesn't even glance at him. Gary folds his arms behind his back and tries to make sense of the gibberish on the blackboard. After a moment of this, he exhales. "Nuts, isn't it? Fairy World… We're really here. And the Fairy Council was serious about our community service. They're even letting us have rooms with oxygen pumps! This excites me!"

Denzel says nothing. Gary smiles pitifully and tries another tactic.

"M-maybe we can do our lunches together. It'll be just like old times, down in the Crocker Cave."

Denzel says nothing.

"I guess that for you, not much is changing… You'll still take attendance and post the grades, only you'll be using the Fairies' system instead of what we had on Earth. They call it digi-verse, right?" Gary puts his hands together, then drags them apart like he's finger-painting a rainbow in the air. "Spellementary School's highly experienced school teacher and a brand new RA! You could write a whole series about that!"

"… I feel nothing."

Gary's smile dips. Denzel finally rotates to face him, but fixing his stare on Gary's seafoam-green eyes is like gazing straight into a black hole. He keeps his voice low, hardly hearing Poof and Foop scrambling over each other to explain themselves to their nonna. Denzel spreads his arms.

"Well… Here I am. Prisoner of Fairy World. Living the dream. I can move out of Mother's home a year from now, if I'm ready for it. I don't even have to pay taxes up here… But this doesn't cure me of those 84 years of torment and disgrace I went through while I busted my buttocks, trying to make them pay and show them all the realities of… FAIRY GODPARENTS!"

Gary's eyes flicker to the floor. He still wears pink sneakers, even though they don't match the purple sweatshirt he threw on. Poor, stupidly empathetic kid… Those innocent eyes fill up with genie-hot tears. He grips his elbow, bunching up the fabric. It's unconscious. He doesn't seem to notice - or at least he doesn't care - if rubbing his arm up and down that way shows flashes of the lightning scar down his hand.

And then the maniac starts to laugh.

"I guess so, yeah! It's freakin' messed up, isn't it? That 10-year-old me would be disgusted to see what I've become?" Gary's fingers curl into his cheek, clawing up his skin, and he blinks rapid tears away as they start dripping down his face. Denzel stares back at him, never really good with the whole comforting crying children thing (let alone comforting teenage boys) and Gary shakes his head. "Betty knew the consequences of giving up her memories! She was okay with it! She didn't want to go on! She gave up on the Pixies a really long time ago. Why, after everything I've done, can I still not just let it go?"

He's 17 going on 68.

And then he's flat-out bawling. Foop, Poof, and Serena whip their heads around. Gary grabs his chest, leaning over like he might hurl. What? Denzel snaps to his senses then, shooing them off with a request (a demand) for "five minutes alone." The kids look confused, but Serena poofs them away without a word. Gary's spiky red hair is too short to need holding back from his mouth if he's sick, so Denzel just grabs his shoulders to see if he's stable on two feet. Gary heaves nervous breaths, but stays standing and doesn't toss his cookies. Thank goodness. Sounds disgusting.

"He… Jorgen put me under a box… He knew I couldn't get out of there. St-stupid genie blood… I'm not even a real genie, but it didn't stop him from poking fun at me or threatening me like that… He knows I'm crazy claustrophobic. Why am I s-s-still so upset about that? My punishment wasn't so bad. Not even the lightning. I'm doing better than R-R-Remy…"

"Are you going to be sick? Do you need a paper bag? … FYI, I wouldn't recommend asking one of the Fairies to change into one. I can imagine they'd take offense at that. Here- use the trash can. It's probably some magical teleportation portal like the toilets up here anyway."

Gary shakes his head, still clutching his stomach as Denzel tries to pull him across the classroom to the garbage. He wipes his snotty nose on the back of his sleeve, still jittering. "I shouldn't be here… I just don't know what to do anymore. I feel like I'm a victim here. Is that wrong? Like, does that make me a narcissist? I feel awful dodging blame, but I feel like I've been tormented. I really feel like this is the worst thing to ever happen to me, and I'm in pieces. I can't keep going. I don't know who to talk to. Flappy's gone. Ed Leadly pried the Learnatorium out from under us-"

"Hey, slow down, Cabrera," Denzel tells him, awkwardly trying to force the kid to stand up straight. His own heart rattles inside his chest like a jar of jellybeans. Gary's eyes pierce through him, listless and sort of lifeless. He's not totally crying. Maybe just a little, right at the bottom curves of his eyes, but there's more going on inside his head. He balls up his fists, pressing them to his chest and rubbing up and down like he wants to scratch his heart with sharpened knuckles. Does that help?

I can't help him.

"I'm grieving," Gary babbles, "and I can't finish grieving because things just keep happening to me and make it impossible to just- just get my feet under me again. I'm in so much pain. SO much pain. I wake up with anxiety every day. I want to move on. I don't know how to keep going, because I feel like I have no control over my life and the bad things just keep stacking against me. I'm stuck. They say 'time heals all wounds,' s-so how do I skip forward in time? Can I just be an adult already? Can I just get over this, stop thinking about this- I don't want to ruminate on this, I just want to live in a world where I don't feel like everyone hates me and wants to tear me apart." His eyes well up with tears, which cling against his eyelash tips. "If time heals all wounds, why didn't it heal me? Timmy Turner froze time for 50 years, and I'm still grieving. I've been grieving for so long. I have no hope. No future."

"Life doesn't end after high school! You're a witch! Magic in your fingertips! Extended lifespan! You've got a whole 500 years ahead of you!"

Gary's fingernails bite into his cheeks. His nails are perfect- squared off, never chipped, white and bright and clean along the outer edge. His hands are rough from working with his motorcycle and 50 years of tech in the dump, the Crocker Cave, the Learnatorium, and wherever else he spends his time. He pulls his fingers down his face. "I feel like a victim. I keep telling myself that she's the one who broke our 10-year friendship, but I just- I just can't stop thinking about what I'd do differently if I'd known those would be the last days I had with her. I guess the signs were there for weeks, but I just didn't see it. At the time, it felt like it came out of nowhere. I just had no idea. Everything's out of my control." His eyes latch onto Denzel's. His face, normally so warm in color, grows a little more fiery when he flushes. It blends against his freckles. "I'm s-sorry. You've heard all this before. Well, I'm not that sorry. It's so hard. Nobody understands. I have no one to talk to."

Denzel blinks at him, saying nothing. Empty words of reassurance try to fasten together in his head. He was good at this. Once. At being a 'people person.' That Denzel was buried a long time ago, crushed under mountains of agony and denial and stress. Gary's lip quivers. His eyes dart away.

"I just keep talking in circles… You've already heard this."

"That's never stopped me from oversharing with you before."

Gary sort of stalls then, clutching his cheeks. His breathing rocks his body. He sways a little between his heels and toes. "It's just hard. It's so hard. My trust is broken. I feel like a shattered person. I don't have a support group. I've got Talon, but Kenny hates me. Betty and Pete left for Brightburg. I'm just talking in circles."

Denzel shrugs. "Eh, I've got nowhere to be 'til lunch. I can talk for hours about FAIRY GODPARENTS. You're grieving, kid. I've been there before." He doesn't have sympathy. At least, he isn't sure. The sympathetic part of him perished from pitchfork wounds and social agony when he was only 10. But he has a point of reference. That's almost the same thing.

"I always thought Betty and I would go to college together… I shouldn't be here in the cloudlands wearing a tracking monitor on my ankle… I still can't believe I'm in hot water with the Fairy Council! And Sanderson's not coming to save me this time. He warned me about all of this, you know? Going off the rails? He never liked my motorcycle. I'm a bad kid, I'm such a dummy, full of bull, creepy and clingy, I have nowhere to go, no one who cares, and I'm never getting out of here… I still feel like I'm a victim. But I feel awful. It's just- It's so improbable that so many people would be so cruel to me? Am I the problem? I feel like nothing I did warranted all of this."

He listens. Not speaking. There's nothing to contribute. Nothing to say. Comforting isn't in his nature. Not anymore. Gary rubs his arms up and down, bowing his head.

"I'm never getting out of here, I'm never getting out, and Jorgen wants to put me in a box again and shelve me like a toy… I heard him say so to his wife. He's going to box me up like an action figure and plop me on a shelf just because he can. And if he gets his way, the Fairy Council will just leave me with him." Gary jolts his head and clamps his fingers in Denzel's shirt. "Don't let them forget about me! You know how Fairies are! We're replaceable to them! The Pixies left Kenny alone taking orders in Burger World for years! And he kept aging, he kept aging when Timmy Turner froze the planet…"

Timmy Turner. Denzel's nose wrinkles, teeth clenching. He pulls Gary's hands from his collar. "Sit down, you little firecracker! Keep your soppy tears to yourself. You'll burn holes through my shirt."

Gary melts like slime through Denzel's hands, slumping into one of the tiny children's desks. He covers his face. That doesn't do anything for his shaking. "I-isn't it awful?" he chokes out between his fingers. "I pulled a whole heist… We planned it for years, got all the materials together, did all of that… And for what? It didn't fix this! I'm still hurting. And poor Remy lost an arm because of me."

"Oh, come on. You didn't pull apart his yoo-doo doll."

"He shouldn't have been there. Why couldn't Juandissimo just let me go? He hasn't been my grandma's fairy in ages. I barely saw her. He didn't have to get involved. I'm not important to him. This is all my fault. At least, there are things I could have done differently. I have no control. No one to talk to."

Denzel… does not have a response for any of this. But something flickers. A small, weak part of him is 10 years old again… flooded with altruism and the love of seeing smiles on other kids' little faces. Still, a larger part of him stays cold. Distant. Pulling away.

He's conflicted. Confused. Gary wipes his face again.

"This is crazy! At 17, getting in trouble with the law should mean getting marched home to my parents, maybe with a few months of juvenile detention after that. But I haven't seen my mom or stepdad in 50 years. The Pixies killed my dad when I was 8 so they could get to me, and my mom… my mom… She doesn't even care about me! Like, H.P. didn't even bother taking her out, because he knew she wouldn't be any threat to Sanderson adopting me if she thought I died in the car crash that got my dad. I just wanted to get through it… They kept telling us, over and over, that it would all be worth it in the end, that we just had to be good and we'd get our reward once Fairy World was in their hands… but they threw us aside as soon as it all went south. Betty lost her magical memories when she quit, Flappy left us for his parents, I don't have the Pixies' support anymore… There's a hole in my heart. I can't get back on my feet, because stuff keeps happening that knocks me down over and over, and I feel like I'm being stabbed. I know a lot of first-aid, but I can't just bandage this pain away."

Oh. The heart beating in his chest is a fluttering one. It stretches out invisible fingers to Gary, and Denzel glances at his feet. His relationship with his own mother is complicated, but not for the reasons that Gary's ties with his own were sliced instead of cut. Denzel's heard the bits and pieces over the years, back when Mother brought snacks down to the Crocker Cave and Gary stared at the plate with wistful longing in his eyes. He can't get the story straight out of Gary, but it's enough for Denzel to remember how lucky he is to be on on positive terms with his own mother.

And Denzel would throw himself in front of a bus for his half-sister Denise without a heartbeat of hesitation. He'd pay her way through college if he could afford it, welcome her home with a fond embrace, and those were the sorts of feelings Gary had developed towards Betty over the years.

Denzel can still remember being 32 years old, nibbling on a piece of toast, watching wide-eyed as his Mother made frantic calls to all the neighbors, teachers, and contacts she could think of. Denise had disappeared. It caught them all off guard, though looking back, they should have seen the signs. Denise was always outdoorsy. Always barefoot (A trait she'd passed down to Kevin, who can't stand socks after a certain time of evening). She and Elliot were sweet on each other since middle school, both loved painting, neither happy at home, and they wanted to see the world. The Crockers didn't have enough money for travel, but Elliot, even as the 10th of 11 siblings, had access to the Buxaplenty family accounts. From what Kevin had said, they'd made it four months before his parents cut them off, and six before Denise realized she was pregnant.

So why didn't she come back to us?

The day after Denise left, he and Mother swung by the Buxaplenty mansion. Didn't get invited in, didn't get many answers, though one of the sympathetic gardeners finally admitted that he'd seen Elliot and Denise take off running down to the rail station with backpacks and duffel bags slapping against their legs.

Denzel remembers all of it, every breath of cold air in his lungs. He'd just started his first teaching gig, still a bit wounded from his break-up with Geraldine (An unexpected but very welcome rebound after Miss Idaho… even if Geraldine had ended things over the same fairy-hunting reason). Mother wept and howled on the daily, totally convinced that Denise had either fled to Canada to find Uncle Albert (who denied all of it) or else she'd been run over by a train.

And the guilt that had flooded Denzel's mind for weeks, months, and years after losing her had been bad.

Did I baby her too much? Did she think me crazy? Was I holding her back? Was it jealousy? Did she not like Mother's gruel?

You know, losing his fairy godparents was only one stepping stone in the path that sent him spiraling. Losing Denise hurt so much worse. When he thinks back to when he was 10, almost 11, they're mostly hazy, happy memories that explode in disaster on March 15th. He grieved that day for years, not always knowing why, though he'd always suspected it had something to do with FAIRIES. But he could tolerate the other days- March 14th, March 16th; both weren't half as bad.

Losing Denise hurt all around the calendar. Christmas. Her birthday. The start of summer break. His birthday, the day her father (Mother's boyfriend) left them high and dry… Oh, so much forget-a-cin had been pumped into his system that March 15th could only hurt him once a year with the vague memories of godparents he'd only lived with for a few short months, but to lose a half-sister of 18 years had been agony. And they never heard from her again. Up until, a dozen years later, she called to ask if he and Mother could look after Kevin for a month or two. Sweet, beautiful, perfect nephew Kevin, who looked more like his mommy at that age than he'd ever know.

"A month or two" had turned into three, then four, and then from May to December when Denise had a bad fall on a spelunking trip and landed herself in the hospital. Throughout his early months in Dimmsdale, Kevin had been seriously PO'd at his mother for planning a wedding to a man he didn't care for - forcing a step-sister into Kevin's life on top of it - but Denzel knew he was as full of anxiety as the rest of them over whether or not she'd recover. Kevin tossed and turned some nights, moaning and flopping his arms, and Denzel knew that because on the nights he fared the worst, Girlfriend would sleep in Kevin's room instead of his.

Denise had disappeared 12 years ago, almost 13. But he'd still chuck himself across the road to tackle her out of the way of a speeding bus. He'd saved neighborhood kids when he was 10 and he'd do it in a heartbeat for his favorite only half-sister. That's non-negotiable.

But it wasn't really 12 years ago. Was it? 12… plus 50… equals…

… It's been a really long time since he's hugged Denise. Told her that he loves her. Screw Timmy Turner, actually.

Denise hadn't used face cam when she called to ask about Kevin. And she wouldn't share her address, and Kevin was evasive about it like he thought his relatives might drag him back there while he was still fuming over the upcoming wedding.

Cabrera spent 10 years with that blonde girl he made a surrogate sister of, maybe five more after that once the calendar froze. And he didn't have parents to turn to with his grief. He had me.

Denzel hadn't planned a 45-year partnership with a spunky 17-year-old "gymnast turned nanny turned hopelessly desperate ex-employee of Pixies Inc." What sane person ever does? They hadn't always gotten along - exchanging shouts and venom was far too common when too many cooks tried building weird gadgets and portals to Fairy World in the basement - but Denzel wouldn't have made half the progress on his Fairy-hunting plans if Gary hadn't been there to help out with the tech. Denzel drew up the blueprints and devised all the theories, but Gary had insane connectionss in the magical world that Denzel never would have guessed. His knowledge ran beyond the guests of honor at a Pixie wedding, deeper than the huldufólk of Iceland, past the fairies intertwined with Buxaplenty and Harrington, a skip and a jump across Unwish Island, and he made bartering with unicorns look like a breeze. They'd once taken a joyride to catch up with Dark Laser in Las Vegas before his ship could take off, and that was totally the last time Denzel ever let Gary drive the Unsuspecting Van. Apparently Gary also carpooled with an alien once to chase down a living shopping center on a distant planet, but that's a whole story in its own.

Half of what lived down in the Crocker Cave never would have happened without Gary's thumbs in the pie. Better yet: when he was around, Denzel didn't even need to risk himself as the first test subject of their plans! Gary would do it for free!

Who could have planned all that? 18 years of showing his blueprints to Denise (while she was learning to read and draw) had lit a firecracker in him that never went out. And Denzel hadn't been ready for the gut-punch he got the first time he turned around to find the redheaded teenager bracing his arms against a table, tracing his finger over dozens of complex measurements and moving his lips as he read every word. Gary had looked exhausted then with his eyelids sunken, the spikes in his hair drooping in his eyes. He hadn't been wearing his pink vest, but some lightweight T-shirt with Kansas Pride scrawled across the front and random colors that Denzel couldn't ascertain the meaning of. Screwdrivers and wrenches lined the table by his hands, and the way Gary adjusted his position - bringing his clenched hands to his mouth and bracing his elbows on the table instead, frowning hard at those blueprints - made it all so real then.

Realer than real. Because for the first time since Denise… someone had believed in his life's work. And that had never happened before.

It stole Denzel's breath away. While Gary paged through stacks of blueprints, Denzel's leaping heart felt like it belonged to a plucky adolescent boy again, like he'd never screwed up his life in college, never broken off his old happy relationships, never shamed his mother, never lost his half-sister…

And no one could have prepared him for that. For the beauty of fleeting youth. He'd quickly looked away from Gary, coughing and tapping his fingers against his coffee mug. Something deep down inside of him had squirmed that day. Looking back on it, maybe it was the frozen timestream that had messed with his mind, but occasionally… Denzel remembered the cheery life he had lived with his fairies when he was 10 years old. One of kindness and friendship, the life of a perfect son, a child all of Dimmsdale loved…

Working with Gary was almost like having friends again.

Are they friends? Were they ever? HA! You wouldn't think so if you ever saw the way they fought. Gary played up his sunny disposition when out shopping, especially in the presence of younger kids, but he could be pretty bitter and snappy after hours of exhausting after-school work in the Crocker Cave. Honestly, he'd probably call Denzel his "partner in crime" at best. They weren't friends. Not the way he's friends with Foop and Dark Laser nowadays.

But maybe… maybe… A very, very small voice inside of Denzel's head would scream at him to rush into the road and tackle Gary out of the way, too, if a honking bus ever sped towards him while he looked the other way.

Not a big voice, mind. Don't get all goopy and sappy on him now. The kid's just as loony as he is, and after what the Head Pixie and Foop's dad did to him growing up, or the way the Head Fairy lashed out in the Archives building (not to mention the Fairy Council's fury), it'll be a miracle if Cabrera grows up to be half the well-adjusted adult that Denzel is, most probably.

I like him.

Whoa. The words are sudden. They whack him here, now, in the dinky Spellementary School classroom. Why now, and not before? He can't quite scrape together a reason why. Nothing's really changed. Honestly, he hasn't seen the kid in a year. Kind of thought he died.

But it's fascinating, the thoughts that are spinning inside him now. Gary's more than an acquaintance he only crosses paths with in the teacher's lounge, like Mrs. Davenport or Mr. Birkenbake. More commitment than his tense interactions with Geraldine. Er, Principal Waxelplax. Less commitment than he'd thrown into looking after Denzel Junior as his son. Poof, he means.

He feels something for Gary Cabrera… that same cautious tick he gets in his chest when he looks down at his nephew. In all the building anticipation of portals to Fairy World, the fury that had struck them both when Kenny's interference destroyed their progress, the wild thrill of stepping into the cloudlands, the anxiety over what they had planned, the shock of Remy's lost arm… perhaps he'd never really noticed. But it's there, and he can feel it now when he stares at the back of the redheaded boy's neck.

Gary was his Kevin before he even knew who Kevin was.

Oh.

And what are you supposed to do with knowledge like that?

Gary is still leaning over the tiny plastic garbage can, his arms wrapped around his stomach. He hasn't tossed his cookies yet, but looks queasy and teary-eyed, mumbling about how he doesn't want to be sucked into a genie lamp or boxed up on a toy shelf.

"You didn't deserve what the Pixies did to you," is what Denzel finally says. Gary's whimpers die away. The boy lifts his face, blinking through his pain, stunned and confused and distraught all at the same time. Denzel moves in front of him, keeping one hand firmly planted on the kid's shoulder. "You are a victim of abuse. I mean, you were 8 when they took you in. I know I was a lost soul when I was 8. They molded you, abused you, manipulated you for more than 10 years… and they never had plans to love you. What they did is stupendously, astronomically messed up."

… As messed up, in fact, as ripping two loving fairy godparents away from a miserable child who shouldn't have lost them at all.

The details are blurry. All he remembers is another boy's voice revealing Cosmo and Wanda to the world on that terrible March 15th back when he was 10. Outside his control. No chance to defend himself. The Head Fairy practically bashed him over the head with the forget-a-cin container until he blacked out. An angry mob chased him down the street, brandishing torches and pitchforks and screaming his name. He ended up bruised and scratched by the end of it, his clothing torn in the bushes he'd run through while taking shortcuts to his house… The Head Fairy didn't even poof him home. And he never got to say good-bye to his fairy family.

That was pretty messed up too.

But Fairy World won't acknowledge that. The Head Fairy has never even said sorry. Not unless he erased the memory afterwards, anyway. And Cosmo and Wanda haven't said a word about his past those times their paths have crossed. He can see the guilt written in Wanda's eyes, because she won't look at him when he clocks her, disguised as a pink pin on Timmy Turner's backpack or as an eraser in his hand or a reusable water bottle by the soccer field. She won't look at him. Does Gary's friend treat him the same way since running off to Brightburg with her boyfriend? Hm.

Gary stares through him, his eyes focused on something nonexistent on the other side of the classroom. "I… I should call my mom. It's been a long time. Can I borrow your phone, Crocker? She has my number blocked."

His own mother wants nothing to do with him. It's unthinkable. At least when the world came crashing down, Denzel had his own mother to coddle and soothe him in his pain. She only wanted the best for him, even when she could barely offer it. She bobbed with him through all the ups and downs, never hesitating to open the door for her post-graduate son to come limping home after cohabiting with Geraldine hadn't worked out. His life crumbled, but she was there. There are times he believes whole-heartedly that Dolores-Day Crocker is the most patient woman in the world.

"That's not going to help," he says to Gary (as bluntly and as gently as he simultaneously can). "Elaine's a nutjob, and not in the sensible 'can be reasoned with' way like yours truly." Elaine. The woman doesn't deserve to be called "Gary's mom," even in his head. Just the thought of her heats his face. He doubles down. "You told me years ago not to let you do that again. Calling her up's about to be a one-way ticket to Shattered-Heartsville."

"But-"

"Let's do something else for lunch. We could hijack the school bus and take it for a joyride 'til we find something good to eat. We can go for rump roast! Or chicken cordon bleu!" Those are Poof and Foop's favorite foods. "But we can't go for pancakes. Girlfriend goes wild for maple syrup, and she'd be so jealous if she finds I took you out instead of her. She expects a certain je ne sais quoi from her #1."

Gary chokes out a laugh, wet and spluttery. It's weak and pathetic. Doesn't really seem like he's laughing. He doesn't smile. He shakes his head, over and over, as Denzel pitches a second crazed idea about fleeing from Spellementary School's floating island, then a third, and then a fourth. He even throws out a fifth idea out, and that's Gary's breaking point before he's wheezing, covering his face again. They're not the happiest wheezes, but he's forcing himself to breathe. He isn't spiraling anymore.

When Serena returns to check on them a few minutes later, Gary straightens up, wiping his face. He asks if they can eat hot pockets in the teacher's lounge. Denzel raises his hand, announcing loudly that he seconds this decision. Poof begs for dinosaur nuggets while Foop launches into a rant about how star nuggets are far superior.

And for now… that's enough. They're hurting. Still grieving after 50 years. Or more than that for some. Their scars are still raw, but they have each other. They have Spellementary School. How quaint. The highly experienced teacher and the brand new RA. You know, Gary had a point. It sounds like you really could write a solid story arc about that.

They'll be okay for now.