Run Faerie Far Away, Pt 1
Jason barely paid him any mind, for he was too busy falling to his knees beside his fallen basket. The nuts and berries had spilled across the grass and, as much as he wanted to simply scoop them all back up, a good portion had passed over a line of mushrooms. A round line of mushrooms, flowers, and shiny rocks. One might even call it a ring.
The fourth rule danced around in his mind’s eye:
4) Do not step into any mushroom rings.
Or: Jason does not want to go home. Because he does not want to go home, all of the local faerie decide that they are adopting him.
Hey everyone! Heads up! This story is pretty dark. Because Jason in general is pretty dark. I tried to keep it relatively tame and preferred to reference everything rather than outright stating it… but if you are sensitive to anything to do with child abuse or suicidal ideation I'm begging you to skip this one. Your mental health should come first!
Jason Todd was eleven years old, and he didn’t want to go home.
There was no one there for him, anyways. His mom was in the hospital again and his dad was ‘working’ to try and afford the hospital bills. He should be with his mom, he knew, but he couldn’t stand to see her so frail. He was alone. He was alone and hungry and tired, and he knew the other people in the city would stop being quite so generous soon. Once the novelty of his mother’s sickness wore off, once he stopped reminding them of that old story about a kid who had gone to the fae and traded his parents’ health for his own freedom. Once he stopped being ‘innocent’, when he would be forced to steal food. When he would become ‘just like his dad’.
He wasn’t a pessimist, he was a realist.
Which was why, as he walked along the outskirts of the town, his fingers trailing along the iron chain-link fence that had been constructed long before he was born, he quietly considered his options.
Winter was coming. Even now, the cold metal nipped at the tips of his fingers. He wasn’t sure their pity would last all that long. Especially since the townsfolk tended to hole up in their homes until the snow melted, and it was very easy to put things that were out of sight out of mind.
His eyes fell upon a gap under the fence. A particularly stubborn animal had managed to wriggle itself inside the village. He toed the hole with his shoe, wondering how long the gap had been there without getting patched.
He knew that the fence wasn’t really there to keep the fae out like the townsfolk always claimed. They also claimed that there were faerie that had wings, so he had doubts that they would really be stopped by some walls…
No, the fence was there to stop people from getting out.
Apparently, one of the nearby faerie had kidnapped two kids around a hundred years ago, and they didn’t want to allow it to happen again. Jason wasn’t sure if he believed it, he thought it was convenient that anyone that might have known the kids were long dead, but it lined up well enough with what he’d been told that he opted to, at the very least, try and be safe.
But, really, it wasn’t like there was anyone to miss him if it went wrong. His mom might die. His dad would probably be happy to have one less mouth to feed.
Not that his dad was really doing that nowadays. It was kind of the whole reason Jason was there.
He took a deep breath to steady himself.
And then he started clambering up the fence. It creaked with every shift of his foot, but he reached the top in less than a minute. He didn’t bother with getting down safely. Instead, he simply jumped down. It sent a flare of pain up his ankles, but he didn’t bother to check on them as he rushed for the nearby bushes. With luck, anyone that noticed – if anyone had noticed – would just assume that all of the sounds were an animal trying to sneak in.
He slowly meandered through the woods, a basket hanging from the crook of his arm. He’d need to find some wildflowers, nuts, and fruits that he could try and preserve. Nuts would last the longest naturally, but he wasn’t sure how that would be nutritionally. Finding a couple of animals would be good too, even if the food wouldn’t last all that long…
And, yes, he knew that he might just encounter a fae. He knew the stories, had listened to the people of his town prattle on about the dangers of a child-napping creature that would surely think of a boy without parents at home as an opportunity. But he had decided that, if he ended up taken away, then at least the fae would probably feed him. He would take whatever win he could get at this point.
He still wasn’t prepared to find a path. It was thin, now. Nature was reclaiming it, plants spilling out into it and attempting to root themselves in what had once been hard-packed soil.
Jason walked along it, picking everything that didn’t look too good. He was sure it all tasted amazing, but he wasn’t all that interested in getting picked up by the fae. He would much rather do the picking, thank you very much.
At one point, he found a small bird digging for worms in the dirt, but it fluttered off before he could even think about trying to catch it.
He sighed lightly, squinting up through the leaves to find out where the sun was in the sky, even if there was really no reason to get home before dark, and then frowned to himself.
There was a birdhouse up there, in the leaves. Painted in bright red, yellow, and green. The paint looked new, despite the fact that it was very clear that no one had come in this direction in quite a while. He walked towards it, his eyes narrowed, and found himself in a clearing that he was sure hadn’t been there before.
Jason went still. The birdhouse still hung from the tree, perfectly innocent where it was nestled in the branches, but it was no longer his main concern.
“What’re you doing out here?” An impossibly gentle voice said off to his side. It was the verbal equivalent of a feather, floating on the breeze and light where it brushed past his ears. Goosebumps raised on his skin. “Oh, you’re foraging?”
So, Jason, in a moment of brilliance, spun around and chucked his basket at the sound. It had been a frail-sounding voice, so perhaps it would work.
Or, perhaps not. Perhaps, the being would duck away with far too much grace for something as large as them.
“Whoops,” the thing said, seeming largely unconcerned. He stood in black pants and a pale blue shirt with a, frankly, illegally low collar. It wasn’t a terrible color combination, but when combined with the golden jewelry hanging from his wrists and neck and the red streaking their hair, it was a little strange to look at.
Not that that was, really, where Jason was looking.
“Why do you have socks on your back?” Said Jason, who figured that he was already screwed. No need to be polite at this point.
The fae gave him a blank stare, his smile dropping for just a moment, and then he turned his head to look behind himself. They snickered as they realized what, exactly, he was talking about. “Oh. The feathers on my wings haven’t fully grown in yet and my dad is making me wear these to make sure they don’t get cold.”
Jason nodded slowly, as if that made sense. Maybe it did, he didn’t know, nor did he care. He had just come to a horrible realization:
“Fuck!”
“Hey, language!” The fae, who didn’t look much older than him – fourteen or fifteen, max – but could have been centuries old for all he knew, channeled their inner parent.
Jason barely paid him any mind, for he was too busy falling to his knees beside his fallen basket. The nuts and berries had spilled across the grass and, as much as he wanted to simply scoop them all back up, a good portion had passed over a line of mushrooms. A round line of mushrooms, flowers, and shiny rocks. One might even call it a ring.
The fourth rule danced around in his mind’s eye:
4) Do not step into any mushroom rings.
The rule was deceptively vague, and he didn’t want to chance it. He didn’t want to reach inside it, and even if he did he was pretty sure that them falling into the ring would probably count as an offering to the faerie that owned it. No one was stupid enough to try and steal from the fae, and they certainly knew better than to take back a gift that had been promised to them, accidentally or not.
And, all that considered, he wasn’t even sure whether it now counted as fae food or not.
He groaned a little and ran a hand through his hair, his eyes flicking upwards again to try and gauge the time. He could come back tomorrow, he knew, but he also knew that every time he ventured into the woods was tempting fate. He could get spotted by someone from the town and confined to his house until his assumed ‘enchantment with the fae’ wore off, or he could encounter a different fae – one that wasn’t content to simply watch him like an interesting bug that they had found while poking around in the dirt.
Speaking of the fae, they came to kneel behind him in the grass. Jason might have worried about stains on the being's pants but, with the way the breeze passed over them without so much as ruffling his hair, Jason had already begun to suspect that the fae was simply immune to all possible imperfections.
Outside of his clashing colors. But, who knows, perhaps the style was simply different in the other world.
The fae began to gather all of the stuff on the inside of the faerie ring, dragging the wide assortment to rest beside the basket.
Jason frowned suspiciously at it all. “Does that count as faerie food now?”
He got another blank stare, and now Jason began to think that they looked a little bit like a bird, with eyes that were just a little too wide and a head twisted to look at him at an angle it shouldn’t have been able to reach… but perhaps that was just because he knew that the fae had wings hidden beneath those strange socks of theirs and could now only think of him as birdlike.
“I don’t know,” the faerie said, finally, their lips pressing into a thin line as they thought it over. “I’m sure Oracle would know, but I don’t want to bother her…” He shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose I can find you something else. Maybe some meat would be more filling…?”
Jason jolted, jumping to his feet and backing away, his hands up in a kind of surrender. “That’s not necessary. I’m not supposed to make a deal with a faerie.”
“This isn’t a Deal,” they began, and the word sounded strange upon its tongue, far heavier than everything else he had said so far. “It’s a Gift. Or a replacement, I suppose.”
Jason shook his head rapidly. “I – uh – I appreciate it, but I simply cannot accept.”
“How about this,” the fae began, his eyebrows tugging upwards in apparent distress (or, at least, a very convincing facsimile of it), though Jason couldn’t imagine why he would be distressed. “If you beat me in a game of chess, I’ll help you out. Games aren’t deals, they actually give you a chance to win.”
Jason thought this over. He had heard a few tales of changelings. No one ever seemed to come to a consensus on what, exactly they were. One of the townsfolk insisted that they were children that the fae may bestow upon someone who couldn’t have children of their own. Others said they were what happened when faeries and humans bore a child together. Another person liked to claim that they were baby fae, forced into the hands of an unaware human family to raise until adulthood – and that the two children that had been taken oh-so-long ago were just changelings that had gone back to their real family.
But one particular version stuck out in his mind: stories where a faerie would create a child that was perfectly identical to someone else’s, put them both in a crib, and then force the parent(s) to try and pick out which one was theirs. It was a game meant to be impossible, meant to torture the humans with a choice that would leave them second-guessing their decision for the rest of their lives, but it was winnable. A 50/50 shot.
“What do you get if you win?”
The faerie seemed to think it over for a moment.
He broke into a wide smile. “I’ve always wanted a little brother.”
And, if Jason were less wary of the faerie in front of him, or perhaps more wary as he might have paid more attention to the exact verbiage, he would have noticed that the fae had never actually answered the question. They had stated a fact – that they had always wanted a little brother – but had not stated what they would do if they won. For he had no real intentions of doing so, this was all just a roundabout way of getting out of the debt they had accidentally found their way into.
But alas, the faerie had opted to play into the exact stereotype that Jason had assumed they would behave like, and therefore the boy did not notice. He was left to consider his options.
… and, well, he had gone into the woods fully aware of the fact that he might get stolen away. At least being the faerie’s ‘brother’ was a nicer fate than the one he’d had in mind.
There was just one problem:
“I mean… I know the rules, but I’ve never actually played chess before,” Jason admitted, shuffling awkwardly on his feet.
“Neither have I!” They said cheerfully.
“Sorry?”
For just a second, the fae’s head jerked upwards and they met his eyes, and Jason knew instantly that he had made a mistake of some kind. Though he couldn’t see it, he could feel something pull taut between them, a connection accidentally formed.
“Apology accepted,” the fae said simply, and the tension snapped with so much force that Jason stumbled.
A chair swept him off his feet before he could do it to himself.
A chessboard popped into being in front of him, carved into a large treestump that simply hadn’t been there before, and the faerie settled down opposite him.
The faerie smiled. “Would you like to play?”
Jason decided that faerie are insane. He had already been told this before, by the townsfolk, several times over, but he has just decided for himself.
“Sure,” he said after a few moments’ consideration.
“Great! So, what does this piece do?” The fae said, pointing at the king.
Needless to say, Jason ended up winning.
It was a long, arduous battle. Not because it was particularly hard to win, but because the fae – who insisted Jason should call him ‘Robin’ even if that didn’t at all feel like a formal enough way to address an otherworldly being – made Jason actually teach him how to play. Something about how it ‘made things more fair if he knew how things moved’, as if anything about this was fair… outside of Robin, who was fair folk.
And, indeed, he had a very fair temper about losing, getting to his feet, and smiling gracefully. Wings, still bound in dark blue fabric, arched over his head as he stretched out. “I would offer to catch a deer since that would feed you for longer, but I fear you wouldn’t be able to take it home…” He hummed thoughtfully. “Maybe a couple of rabbits would be better…?”
The faerie didn’t even wait for a response. He simply scooped up the basket and disappeared into the brush with a vague yell that he would be back soon.
However, when a being lives much longer than a human, ‘soon’ becomes somewhat hard to judge. Jason squinted up at the sun, sinking rapidly on the horizon, and he wondered whether it was worth it to wait. Would it be seen as rude to leave now? Probably. And, besides, the faerie had his entire basket, and Jason didn’t want to let this day become a total waste.
So, he sighed and busied himself. Played a few rounds of chess against no one. Inspected the chessboard carved into a tree trunk that looked as if it would become a permanent addition to the clearing.
Nightime began to fall.
And Jason noticed looking up at the starry sky in dismay… that there was a tiny lantern hidden amongst the branches of a nearby tree. It wasn’t particularly interesting to look at, there wasn’t even a flame flickering inside of it, and yet the way the glass shimmered beneath the moon caught his attention. He slowly made his way across the clearing, careful to give the ring of mushrooms a wide berth, until he reached the tree with the hidden appliance.
He glanced back the way the fae had disappeared, but the night was just as still as it was a few moments prior, and so he started to climb.
It didn’t take long to reach it. It wasn’t particularly high up in the tree, hanging from a sturdy branch close to the bottom. He pulled himself up onto the branch and straddled it, making sure not to let himself fall as he leaned forward until his face was mere inches away from the lantern.
He drummed his fingers against the glass, and was pleased when it flickered to life, giving off a faint glow. Maybe he should have thought this weird, as he didn’t notice any oil or lightbulb inside, but he was merely a kid and he had never known a lantern that didn’t light up when prompted.
He started to lean closer, trying to figure out how exactly it fastened to the branch so he could get it off –.
“Hello?”
He slipped right off the branch.
Or, he almost did.
A hand caught him by the back of his shirt before he could plummet to the ground, and his head jerked around to look at his savior.
A girl looked down at him, smiling bemusedly. It was a gap-toothed smile, but even then it was strangely perfect-looking. As if the gap was simply supposed to be there. He was more concerned about the dark green scales that were dotted across her face like freckles, though, if he was going to be honest.
“You called?”
He fell.
The world span as he raced towards the ground, branches almost seeming to run away from him. The dirt was weirdly plush, though, and he didn’t end up scraping his arms like he was supposed to.
It still didn’t feel great.
Jason groaned and rested his head in the strange, soft dirt.
“Whoops,” the faerie began, and Jason couldn’t help but be reminded of Robin. Maybe they had transed their gender (or whatever it was called)? Faerie could probably do that. But then he watched them start to climb down, and noticed that they had not legs but a tail, and quickly changed his mind. Maybe they just knew each other.
She slithered over to him, the long, deep green tail poking out from beneath her pale yellow sundress working hard to get close as fast as possible. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” he said, the word leaving him as more of a wheeze than anything else. She raised an eyebrow at him skeptically, but he pretended not to notice. “Just wanna… lay here for a bit.”
She snickered quietly and, after a few moments where she seemed to mull it over, came to lay beside him. “So, let me guess, you didn’t actually mean to summon me?”
“Nope.”
“What were you doing with my lantern, then?”
Jason grimaced. “Well… I didn’t know it belonged to a fae…”
She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. Her eyebrows knit for a couple of seconds before tugging upwards in surprise. A grin split across her face. “Oh.”
“Yeah. ‘Oh’. Are you going to smite me? Because I’m about to get food from some other faerie and I don’t know whether he’ll be happy if you kill me before that happens.”
“I wouldn’t be pleased, no,” Robin’s chipper voice said, and Jason really wanted these faeries to stop surprising him. “But Oracle would never do that, anyways.”
“You don’t know that for sure. I could kill people in my spare time. You wouldn’t know.”
Robin snickered. “But I do.”
So, Jason was right, then, they were close in some way. Maybe siblings? They didn’t look alike in the slightest… but, honestly, Jason was pretty sure he’d be strangely disappointed if faerie family dynamics worked the exact same as those of humans. If families looked somewhat like each other in the way any normal human family might, it would be boring. No, Jason thought they should all be their own brand of strange looking. Or, perhaps, they should all look alike to an unnatural degree, like watching two mirror images of each other.
Robin jolted him from his staring by setting a basket by Jason. It was practically overflowing with food, and Jason had a strong suspicion that the only thing stopping it all from spilling out was magic.
Not that that was really what he cared about.
Jason licked his lips. The food looked good. Far better than the scraps he would get from the pitying townspeople – who he appreciated, of course, he liked not dying of starvation, but he didn’t think it was rude to point out that this was much better than any person’s leftovers. He had never seen better berries, and the three rabbits that the faerie had caught looked fatter than anything he had ever seen before.
He glanced at the faerie. “It’s… not fae food, right? Just to check?” He asked, trying to keep the hopeful, almost pleading note out of his voice.
“Nah, faerie food is better than this,” Oracle said. She reached past Jason to take a berry and pop it into her mouth. Her nose scrunched just slightly. “God, how did I use to eat this stuff?”
Jason frowned at her and took a berry of his own. He glanced at Robin to confirm that it was safe before shoving the cranberry in his mouth. It was tart, as all good cranberries were, and he breathed out a contented sigh. It was amazing. If all it took was gambling away his freedom to the faerie every day to get food like this, he might just keep coming back to test his luck.
He wondered how good fae food had to be for Oracle to act as if it was some kind of mild torture to eat something as good as this.
Out of habit more than anything, he turned and offered one to Robin. Which was a little silly, considering they were the one to find them, and he surely could have eaten some if he wanted, but Robin just shrugged and held up his hands.
“Eating human food is weird,” he said.
Jason raised his eyebrows.
“It doesn’t… fill you,” Oracle offered. “If either of us really wanted, we could eat that entire basket and not feel it.”
Jason’s eyes widened and he dragged it closer to himself, much to the pair’s amusement.
“Don’t worry,” Robin said, dropping beside Jason. “We’re not going to. No reason to, y’know?”
Jason squinted with a joking kind of suspiciousness. “I’m not taking any chances.”
The faerie sputtered. “I literally can’t lie!”
Jason stuck out his tongue at him.
Oracle snorted at Robin’s offended expression.
And then he sighed and got to his feet, hoisting up the basket of food with a little more difficulty than he would like to admit to. “I should get going home. It’s already dark enough…” He glanced up and grimaced. Somehow, even more time had passed while he had been sitting there, and now the moon was hanging in almost the exact middle of the sky.
If his father got home before him…
The man probably wouldn’t, he knew, but if he did and Jason wasn’t there… he shivered, and it wasn’t at all due to the cold.
Robin and Oracle jumped to their feet immediately. Or, well, Robin jumped to their feet, Oracle simply twisted to slither on her tail once more.
“We’ll go with you,” Oracle offered.
Jason grimaced. He didn’t want to lead faerie to his house. They seemed nice, but he could not let them know he didn’t have a family at the moment. He didn’t put much stock in the rumors and stories and fairytales that spread through the village like a famine, but he wasn’t stupid. The village elders had those rules for a reason. Just because he was willing to break the rules when desperate didn’t mean that he was going to be purposefully idiotic.
“I’ll be fine. I have a knife.” He pulled out the old dagger for emphasis. The color of it was dull, despite the moonlight spilling down over it, but that didn’t change the fact that it was sharp.
Neither of the faeries seemed impressed.
But, after a simple glance at each other, they both backed off.
Jason sent them a grateful smile. “Goodbye.”
They waved wordlessly.
And Jason never noticed the faerie flying overhead as he trekked through the woods, making sure he got home safely.
~
Jason’s mom recovered. It was the biggest health scare she’d had yet, and Jason had begged her to stop using because every hospital visit lasted longer and he wasn’t sure she could pull off another miracle. The doctors weren’t faerie, couldn’t do anything if she ever went too far, and the thought was terrifying.
She told him she would stop.
She lied.
Jason had come home one day to find his mother curled up on the floor, unmoving. The rest of the day passed in a blur, as did much of the next month, but he would never forget the glassy way her eyes had looked.
He didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want to go home. His father was a wreck, working longer ‘shifts’ (Jason didn’t know why they kept up the charade, he knew better than anyone else that his father’s work was anything but innocent), and when he was home he was angrier than Jason had ever seen him. And there was no one else for him to take it out on anymore.
Just Jason.
Jason had stared at the hole in the fence, at the barely-there path into the woods, for hours. He had sat in the snow until he stopped shivering, his face pressed against the cold wiring until he was pretty sure he would have freeze burns carving their way over his cheek for the rest of his life.
He didn’t know if ‘Dick Grayson’ had ever been a real person, but he understood him now nonetheless.
He wanted his mom back. So bad.
He wanted to see her again.
He just didn’t want to be here, alone, anymore.
His eyes drifted shut.
A hand rested on his shoulder and he looked up to find a woman. Jason blinked at her with frost-crusted lashes. He was sure he had never seen a woman with such deep brown skin before, nor with such vibrant green eyes. She smiled at him, and it was just a little too perfect for it to be anything other than unsettling. Something in the back of his head was blaring warnings, but he was so tired.
“Let’s get you home,” she said, her voice dripping with an accent he didn’t recognize and a kind of warmth he hadn’t experienced in what felt like years.
“I don’t want to,” he said, his voice choked.
“You don’t want to die here, do you?” She asked.
Jason couldn’t bring himself to lie, even to something that he was pretty sure was a hallucination.
Her expression fell. Distantly, he felt bad for making her sad, but it was all so far away, like he wasn’t even really in his own body, just watching from afar as something happened to what was once him.
She sighed and pressed a warm hand to his cheek. He leaned into the touch. Her hand was much softer than the fence had been.
And then he pulled back. “‘M tired,” he said.
“Then how about you go to bed?” She tried.
He might have given her a dirty look if he had the energy to. She was misinterpreting what he said on purpose.
She gave a quiet chuckle, but there wasn’t much humor to be found in it. “Well then, why not?”
“Don’ wanna go h’me,” Jason slurred.
“But you’re not against dying,” she said, more to herself than anything. It wasn’t a question, and yet Jason nodded regardless. She winced. “Well… why?”
He gave her a mildly incredulous look. Was she going to try and debate him out of this? “They’ll be h’ppy ‘en I go. Le’st now ‘m choosin’ it m’self.”
She seemed to think it over for a minute.
“Well, why make them happy? Do you really want to help them, when they’re so awful to you? Why not stay alive to spite them?”
Jason considered this. He liked the idea of spiting people. It was fun to not be on the receiving end sometimes. Hazily, he nodded, feeling just a little bit more like himself.
She smiled and pressed a kiss to the top of his head.
The next morning, he woke up in bed. Tucked in, though he knew his dad would never do such a thing and his mother never could again. Had he done that to himself, somehow?
He remembered the day before, the mysterious woman and the halfhearted attempt he had made to let go. Jason wasn’t quite sure whether it had been a dream, a hallucination, or something more, but as he mulled over the short conversation in his mind, he decided that he still agreed with the decision that he had come to.
He was choosing to live.
If only to prove that he could.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pt2
All Fae-n And Games Masterlist
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