Just another magical crack fic

The Facts

I was waiting for 6:00 am so I could get up, shower, moisturize all my parts, and go to work. I wanted to go to work. I wanted to dive into problems I could actually solve. But I couldn't shake off the conversation I had last night. It was only 4:47 am, so unfortunately I had plenty of time for it to play over and over and over and oh my god...

My plan was to do all my outstanding friend meetings at once for efficiency and clarity. I called the squad together. The shit needed to be aired out before we went any further. In my living room were Annie, Charlie, Jack, Tate, and myself for Intervention Part 2. We considered whether Lana should be here, but Jack decided to call in a babysitting favor to let the adults talk before we subjected her to any of this.

Unfortunately, I neglected to prepare a slide presentation to summarize the investigation I had been doing into the world of pixies, so there were a lot of fits and starts, and even Chivalrous Tate's eyelids began to droop. We put off our relationship conversation from the other day, as Annie had texted shortly after we cleaned up from the earlier "conversation," which got a little derailed with another round. Annie had been along for most of this ride, so she seemed to follow along a little easier than Tate.

I recounted the dramatic series of events over the last few months, beginning with when I first retrieved Lana's tooth and she apparently sunk her hooks into me. The facts, as we understood were these:

Lana and Jack/Shakes are actually pixies who received their magic in an unclear way and "share" magic somehow. This point was notably not clarified or corrected by Jack.

Magic HQ seems kind of pissed about pixies in general. This received an affirmative hmmph from Annie.

Lana's magical tether is *still* on me and we don't know how to get it off or if it's possible.

Lana has possibly been manipulating all of us, or at least me, to draw me into her ideal version of a family. Tate furrowed his brow at this. Mentally, I added the corollary - and somehow I am kind of ok with that part of it, especially the Tate possibly, though forcibly, loving me part. Wait, did we establish whether the love was consensual or not? Tate has been avoiding eye contact so it's hard to telepathically pose this query to him.

Jack/Shakes seems to sense that I am freaking the eff out, especially after learning that Lana seemingly had designs on me before I even realized what was happening.

Charlie seems not to know anything about anything, which isn't unusual, but we're unsure if we should clue him in, or if it would fuck him over completely because he's large but fragile. This was true despite Charlie being seated directly in front of me across the coffee table.

Upon concluding my monologue, Charlie, expectedly, piped up because he's not especially fond of silence. He was less than eloquent but surprisingly accurate. "It doesn't seem like any of this matters very much. I mean, why do you care?" Physically unable to hold myself up at the retort, I sank backward, shell-shocked. The words and feelings kept lapping at the brim of my mouth but nothing would spill out. Luckily Annie came to my rescue.

In her gentlest monotone, Annie responded, "I think Kara is mostly concerned about Lana and her state of mind, given the amount of power she apparently possesses. I think I would also be pretty upset about essentially being manipulated this way." I nodded along, still unable to articulate... well, anything.

Jack was visibly shaking, ready to leap into action to defend Lana. "That's so unfair to say about a child. She doesn't know what she's doing. She's playing house in her mind."

To my aghast, Tate interjected, "Since when does playing house mean taking advantage of people and ruining people's lives?" Ok, that stung. I know we didn't leave things in a great place, but at that comment I was a little unclear if he was defending me (and Charlie, even though he didn't really want it— that would be like Tate) or what happened with Jack or if he was rejecting the spell Lana had put him under with regard to his feelings for me. I pursed my lips a little tighter.

Jack clapped right back, "Since when does someone decide to invade my life and my child's life to satisfy some morbid fucking curiosity and start trouble that nobody needed?" He glared right at me, redirecting his battle tactics. "Nobody asked for this but you, Kara. You are complaining about nothing. Nobody had an issue until you decided there was one. Just because you can't have any kind of relationship with someone without trying to fit it into your worldview doesn't mean that we weren't doing just fine. You just decided everything was too comfortable, so you had to start up a little project to fuck everybody up. You're the adult here. You could have done the adult thing and had a conversation with me, and we could have worked it out. We didn't need all this fucking intrigue."

Cocking my head and full of offense, I scoffed out, "That's not true at all. You showed up randomly in MY LIFE and decided to flaunt everything that MY FRIENDS and I keep sacred and secure. If anything, I was trying to keep your kid from getting burned at the stake or something someday. You yourself blamed her magic for how I was acting because she feels like she needs someone like me to help raise her."

Jack was flushed almost purple with anger. "First of all, you don't have much of a life, and you're barely friends with anyone, present company included. If anything, she did you a favor by giving you a life and friends you didn't even realize you had." Instinctively, I realized that was true for him as well. He paused for a moment to close his eyes and let a deep breath out of his nose before he hissed at me. "But most of fucking all, let me make this unequivocally clear to you. You. Do Not. Have ANY say over what happens with my daughter. I don't care that she likes you, or if she sort of pulled some strings to bring us here." He glanced around the room. Jack's veins started to pop on his forehead, and he was yelling now, almost spitting each word. "She is MY CHILD, she's my FLESH AND BLOOD. You do not have ANY bearing on how I raise her. At all. In any way. Ever. Push out your own goddamn kid and leave mine alone." Jack's shouting died down to a whisper. "Just everybody leave my kid alone." He stood and unceremoniously slipped down the front hall. The door slammed after that, and the rest of us were left in silence.

Charlie flashed his gaze up from the screen in his hand. He set down his phone on the table, presumably having grown bored with his scrolling for the time being, and looked at each of us in turn. He settled back on me, braided his fingers together under his chin, and said, mirthlessly, "Why did you feel the need to fuck up a happy ending?"* For not the first nor the last time that night, my mouth gaped. I steeled my eyes and replied, "There is never really a happy ending."

So here I was, waiting for a respectable hour to extract myself from my lonely bed, when my phone chimed. That's more significant than you would think because my phone was on Do Not Disturb until 6 am. But here I am, being summoned to Magic HQ post-haste, and I can only guess why.

Author's Rant - *Charlie is obviously the best character, and he's the one I like writing the most. The first part of this project I imagined was Charlie's intervention and how he handled it. A lot of Charlie is based on my boy D (who probably knows which characters are modeled after people and which are based on anime characters), but almost as much of his dimension comes from a student teacher I had in 7th grade English named Mr. LaPrad. It's funny how at the time he was an adult in my mind, but he was basically Charlie's age (early or mid 20s) when I knew him. I don't know what happened to him in life, but he was basically all the fun parts of Charlie (but, because he was talking to 12 year olds, without all the swearing - that's all D) as far as his enthusiasm, energy, and dance moves. He was the first openly gay person I ever knew, and thinking about the times and working in schools, especially small-town backwards schools, I hope he was able to do what he wanted to do in life. But he really said this to me (without the swearing) and it felt like he was talking about more than an English assignment. It stuck. I also responded very similarly in context because I was a baby emo little fucker.

I'm a little sorry to make Charlie the "comic relief" in the heavier parts of this story because I wanted to give him depth beyond gay hilarity. I also think his character, being so much younger than the others and having a simpler and more immediate reaction to the adversity that happens in life, would basically be like, cut the bullshit and just embrace the good, bitches. He's not immune to it (remember his intervention?) but his instinct is to see the forest and trudge forward and through. My parents' generation created a bunch of problems, my generation complains about all the problems, and Charlie's generation is like, "There's all these problems, so I may as well go balls deep." I think Mr. LaPrad would be proud of that phrasing.