title: the fair folk

summary: they are beautiful, they are enchanting and they are ethereal, but remember - fairies are not kind.

an: I've been dying to do this since gen vi came out. this is just a loose interpretation of fairy folklore with pokémon.


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Part One

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changeling

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The gardevoir loves Master, she really does, but if there is something or someone she loves more, it is the babe. The son has such soft cheeks and a beautiful smile, with eyes that will rival the sky in their clear blue and break more than a fair share of hearts.

The world is a cruel place, and they will eventually break him, break his heart and his beautiful, innocent smile and his fantastically blue eyes. They will rob him of his innocence, rape him with the cruel weapons of reality until he is forever lost to that soft glow of infant innocence.

Master does not realize the tragedy this will be. He has plans for his son, plans to surround him with strict tutors that will beat politics into his head at young ages before sending him into prestigious schools where he will be taught the value of cold money, and then have him take over the empire of lies and blood as an adult.

Master does not see the tragedy, and she will not let such a travesty happen.

She picks him up, wrapping loving arms around him, and then pulls with her mind to leave the walls of the house. She lays him in the cradle of nature, lined with flowers brought from flabébé herds and scented with aromatisse feathers. She leans in, kisses the babe's forehead and blesses him.

But she cannot simply take. To simply take would be robbery, and she is no thief.

She must give something in exchange.

From a different cradle she picks up a ralts, with red eyes and bloodless skin. Holding the fairy babe to her heart, she teleports back to the mansion and drifts into the baby room. She places the ralts into the crib the human baby used to occupy, and wraps the blankets still impregnated with the soft baby smell around the ralts. "Perhaps you'll sweeten him up," she suggests, and the baby ralts lets out a baby-like cry closer to that of a human's.

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kelpie

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"Be careful of the deeper part of the lake," his mother warns him as she unpacks the sausages onto the barbeque grill, but Jamie isn't quite listening to her cautious words. He sees the lake's water, seemingly never-ending, so blue and so cool to his heated eyes. He pokes a toe in, shivers in delight at the chilled temperature, and dives in recklessly as only a child could.

The water's cold is a shock to his body, but soon he is used to it, and then the water is pleasant. He swims, kicking and wading in a manner similar to a four-legged animal rather than a boy who has taken expensive swimming lessons.

Something bumps against his leg and he yelps as blue bumps come up next to his head. He relaxes at the sight of a cute face and a friendly smile. His grin widens when he realizes what this Pokémon is. "You're an azumarill!" he exclaims.

The water rabbit chirps happily, and splashes him lightly with its round-ended tail. Jamie laughs and they have fun, splashing each other with harmless water.

He becomes so engrossed in the splashing game and chasing the water sprite to retaliate he doesn't realize that his legs haven't touched the bottom of the lake until he has been kicking at the water to stay afloat for a good minute. "I should head back," he says.

The azumarill's ears droop, and Jamie feels bad. The pokémon just wants to have fun. "We could play closer to shore," he suggests.

The water type does better, and offers him the use of its floating tail. Holding onto the round orb, Jamie finds it easier to float. "Hey, thanks," he says as they drift. He doesn't see the shore getting farther and farther, his mother's figure growing to the size of a toothpick, and then a thumbnail. This is fun, the water like cool silk sliding around his body. The world is quiet here.

The azumarill smiles at him, and then the round tail is pulled away from his loose fingers. Jamie sputters at the loss of his flotation support, screams and flails, but something below pulls him under and then his lungs fill up oh-so-quickly with the lake's water, tasting of silt and dirt and fish and slime. Suddenly the water is not so harmless, and suddenly Jamie feels cold.

Something cold and strong grips around his neck, and he sees the azumarill's head rise into his line of vision, eclipsing the sunlight filtered by the lake water completely. The arms grip with more power than would ever be associated with such spindly looking blue arms, and Jamie blacks out.

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futakuchi-onna

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The cave's walls are lined with glittering stones. Worthless quartz of poor quality, but the penumbrae of the cave hides the imperfections, and the shadows embellish until the cave is half-lit with jewels of priceless value, all the hues of the Great Stag's antlers present and set in the dull stone walls.

A man wanders through the cave, searching for a particular jewel that can bring out mystical powers of pokémon in the hopes of becoming rich. The cave is known to house many mysterious spirits, whose presence illuminates the moss growing in its winding fairy paths.

Whispers of leather wings on the ceilings, of bone helmets shining white in the dim shadowed corners remind him that there are powerful creatures present, watching his struggling search for a stone. His own pokémon, a pangoro with a burly face, keeps away the rock types with the threat of a viciously swung fist while he searches.

After hours of wandering the networks of shimmering crystals, his tired eyes finally find their quarry in the midst of what looks like an empty nest. It's an orb, like all the papers exclaiming over mega evolution's wonder states, and it has a shine within it that might come not from its surroundings, but within.

He doesn't much care to wax out poetry for the beauty of a rock. All he cares is just how much money it will make him.

Just as he is about to pocket the rock, he hears a yell from behind. He spins around, but his pangoro was left watching guard from behind the corner, and it sounds like something got the jump on the tough dark and fighting type rather than the other way around.

He approaches the bend in the shining crystal walls of the cave, and turns it to find his pangoro lying on the ground, knocked unconscious or killed.

Instantly he tenses. Anything that can knock out a pangoro can certainly take on a human, especially a defenceless one.

When something brushes against his leg he nearly screams as he jumps and looks down.

There is a small creature, and he sighs in relief that it is not an onix or rhyhorn, both notoriously territorial. It looks like a little girl, almost, with a petite body and pretty face. Like a child, it points at the orb still in his hands and tips its head to the side, ever so slightly. It is a fairy, but its name he doesn't remember.

And of course the fairy would look to the special stone in his hand. Fairies are attracted to beauty much like insects are attracted to the sweetness of honey.

"I'll just take this, if you don't mind," he says, holding up the orb that shines so in his hands. The stone is warm to his palm, and he would swear upon his mother's grave that the stone is the provider of the heat to his hand rather than the other way around.

The child-creature – mawile, he remembers somewhere in the depths of his mind – tilts its head, this time to the other side.

"Thank you," he says, and stands up. Mawile, he is pretty sure, are just fairies. As far as he knows there is nothing too harmful about them, and the innocent appearance the little creature sports only reinforces his beliefs.

Except something knocked out his pangoro, a tall, bulky creature who can take hits and retaliate with crushing fists. Something defeated the fighter at its own game.

He doesn't remember this until the mawile turns around, and he is met with the last sight of his life – a great, big, gaping jaw of steel fangs lined with sweet-smelling drool like how the walls of the cave are lined with glittering stones.

He screams, much like his pangoro did earlier on when the fairy roughhoused him in the callous way of the Fair Folk until the great fighter was battered to death. The sound is cut off abruptly in the cave, replaced by sickening crunches and tearing noises as the small, deceitful fairy feeds. None of the other spirits come to invest, and the quartz glitters.

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púca

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"Don't pull on the ribbons," the mother says absentmindedly, repeating what her mother told her back in the days when she was a young girl who was endlessly fascinated with the satin-smooth, cream-pink ribbons that would flutter in the wind like the sash of a princess.

The girl ignores her, of course, but she's busy pinning up laundry and the stories of blank, blue eyed creatures that can fell dragons are just stories. The sylveon is just an eeveelution, a pretty pink one at that. He's harmless, but they're rare, coveted and make great pets.

Her daughter roughly strokes the feelers again. The sylveon struggles to get out of the small human's grip without clawing and breaking the child's skin because he is a trained pokémon and he understands that sometimes young humans will be stupid and annoying, but even he can only take so much. He was once wild, once running amongst petals kissed by fairies before a trainer caught and changed him into a fairy himself before selling him into domestic life.

He was never born as a fey but he has become one, and the spirits do not appreciate those who touch them unnecessarily. A handful of times are accidents – anymore and it is an insult.

When the girl screams the mother drops the clothing she tries to pin onto the line. It is a white button-up shirt, the kind that stains too easily and irritates her to dry, but she does not care, not when her daughter howls so painfully, making sounds no child should ever make.

She runs to where she left her child, and finds her daughter with two hands clutched tight around her eyes as she lets loose guttural sounds of pain. When she finally pries the fingers and palms away, she recoils from the sight of eyes dazzled by fairy lights into blindness, staring unseeingly in the direction of another pair of sightless eyes of a cruel baby blue.

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