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She's a four-year-old girl, and people (especially her Dad) insist she's a boy.
Not that she isn't sometimes. She is. But not today! Today she's a girl. And Dad keeps saying that's not true, that God made her body perfect and she shouldn't second-guess God's plan for her. God made her a boy, so she's supposed to be a boy. And on the one hand that kinda makes sense. God doesn't make mistakes, right? So if she were really a girl sometimes, then she'd... what? Her body would change, she guesses. But on the other hand, she knows she's a girl. She's a girl with a peepee, that's obvious. She'd prefer not having a peepee when she's a girl, but it's not the worst thing ever. And if God doesn't make mistakes, God also didn't make her feel like a girl sometimes on accident, right? It must be part of His (because God is always a He, even though God made everyone, boys and girls, in His image, he's always a He, Dad says) plan.
She tells Dad that, today, and Dad gets angry, and yells at her, and she doesn't know why he's yelling. It makes sense to her! But he won't explain why she's wrong, he's just yelling, Dad's so mean, she hates him, and she's not crying, shut up, you're crying!
And now Mum's coming and she's talking to Dad, and that usually makes Dad stop yelling and go away but he won't stop now and Sadde's angry and afraid and hurt and she's running away. A part of her thinks that it doesn't make much sense to run away, the park is pretty open and she can't really hide anywhere, and she'll have to go back because she'll get hungry (not now, though, she just ate a sandwich).
So she runs until she finds some bushes where she can hide, and she hides there, and she doesn't cry, and she spends a long time not crying. Mum and Dad don't come after her, though, and after she's done not crying she doesn't wipe her eyes and her nose, and she comes out the other way of the bushes she was hiding in.
And she's pretty sure that's not the park.
And then: book, and throwing small things through the location of the gate every half hour until it settles or eight hours pass, whichever happens first, with pauses for nomming on the food she brought.
Yellow's estimate of his travel time was either not quite accurate or the other fairy is slower.
But eventually Yellow comes back. Looks like he's alone.
Her voice, however, comes from a somewhat hidden corner over there: "Stop!"
Yellow falls out of the air. There is a soft thumping noise.
She doesn't come out from wherever she's hiding, even though the sound may make it very obvious where she is.
Yellow does not answer her. Maybe it's because he was told to stop and the only order he's received since then was permission to breathe.
"I am not good at this, answer all my questions honestly and with all details you believe I might find relevant, where's Promise?"
"Here I think -"
"Here and invisible and if you're incompetent I strongly recommend for your own long-term benefit you let me go now. If you rescind my orders immediately I won't try to take Yellow or come after you later."
"My own long-term benefit is not what's at stake here, I take it Yellow didn't tell you anything, I rescind all orders given to you by any masters other than me, he told me you were Thorn's vassal, do you have any advice for trying to rescue someone else from him?"
"Wait for Thorn to get bored and get rid of them. Failing that, if it's a mortal, plan to sneak in, kill them, and then kill yourself."
By then she has reached the spot where they are, and she slumps onto the ground. "That's not an acceptable solution." She shakes her head and—" You've guessed, I suppose, but I have your name," she sighs. "I meant to pretend I'd been captured by Yellow to try to figure you out because I need help and he said you were too smart to be fooled by that so I asked him to bring you here." She hugs her legs and buries her face in her knees.
She recovers a little and says, "You may speak freely, but don't lie to me," without raising her head.
"You suck at this. Yellow's mediocre. I'm good but I hate you and you're not good enough to use me. Thorn's better, if he took a mortal friend of yours he probably already has your name, and if I were a fraction as sadistic as he is I would trade you all the intel I've got for my freedom but instead I'm telling you stay the fuck away."
"He didn't take my friend he took my mother, not that a fairy would even know what that means." Sigh. "Order me not to lie to you. Either of you."
"I can't order you," Promise says at the same time as Yellow says, "Don't lie to us."
"Okay, maybe now we can establish some measure of—of trust." She shakes her head. "My mother was captured by Thorn. We had plans, they involved me learning how to do this, how to craft good orders—later, but that was probably not a good idea in hindsight. I guess I was cocky, thought I'd be able to make this work on my own, but I am demonstrably not as good as I'd thought." She shakes her head again. "I don't wanna keep you, I don't wanna keep anyone, this system is terrible and I want to burn it to the ground, but you're a fairy and apparently good enough at this that you'd be useful. And I need to learn."
"Thorn caught me," says Promise. "I'm good because I learned from the best. If you don't want to keep me don't keep me. Don't enslave a stranger because you think she might be useful."
"And the alternative is, what? Let my mother be tortured to death by a sadistic fairy?" She grabs a small rock and throws it through the spot where the gate is, it's been a couple of hours.
"...no. No I don't. But I think she'd rather he not have her, either, and I'm—" She shakes her head yet again. "I'm tired. I'm upset. I'm not in the best headspace to craft orders, I should've figured that out from the start and—waited. I dunno, maybe not, I wouldn't know where she was if I had waited." Sigh.
"You don't have to act like an evil fairy. Even fairies don't have to do that. If you don't want to keep me, don't keep me."
She winces. "But then I'll have nothing. Not even information. I don't wanna—I don't want to do anything, with either of you, I just want information, enough of it that I can—do it alone, somehow. It wouldn't be right of me to ask either of you to, to go up against Thorn. So I won't. All I want is enough information that I can—use my comparative advantage, I guess."
"Anything else, then. Because if I just rescind your orders—or, maybe, ask you how to best phrase that so that Yellow can't take you again—you'll fly away and I'll be alone here and have no way of saving my mother."