there’s a human in the storeroom
i saw this this morning and @sssammich made me write it.
There’s a human in the storeroom.
Andrea is never going to shut up about the wards now, Lena thinks, peering at the blonde rummaging through the box of faerie fruit.
There had been a noise, and no one else had heard it - on account of the revelry; with Lillian away at the High Court and Lex in charge there was always a revelry - and Lena had made the stupid mistake of diligently checking the storeroom to see if she needed to call one of the pixies to evict an errant animal, because last time a hedgehog drunk on faerie fruit had eaten one of her favourite books.
Except it’s not a hedgehog, it’s a human, and a human is so much worse than a hedgehog.
Perhaps, Lena thinks, if she just pretends she never saw anything, the human will find their way out of the storeroom and back to the human world, and then it won’t be her problem.
Satisfied with this course of action, Lena turns to leave and runs straight into a much taller and equally annoying roadblock.
“Jack,” Lena hedges. “Why are you here?”
“Lex sent me to look for you since you weren’t at the revelry,” Jack says affably, peering over Lena’s head with interest. “Is that a human in the storeroom?And are they eating the faerie fruit?”
Lena groans.
*****
“She ate the faerie fruit, Lena, you can’t just - ”
Sam makes a wild gesture of frustration.
Andrea prods the prone human - still, to Lena’s dismay, in the storeroom, and now snoring gently - with her foot, an expression of distaste marring her pretty features.
“Lena. Why are you feeding random humans? Is it clean? Does it have fleas?”
“Don’t kick the human, Andy, look how cute it - she? Is it a she? Oh Lena, look at her ears, they’re round, come see - ”
“Jack, stop petting the human, sometimes they bite - ”
“I didn’t feed her, I just heard a noise! She must have broken into the pantry somehow - ”
“I told you the wards weren’t strong enough on the grounds,” Andrea sniffs.
“Look how much she’s eaten! You can’t send her back, Lena, she’ll wander aimlessly in the woods until her shoes are worn and her feet bleed, she might die,” Jack wheedles.
Lena looks to Sam in dismay, just as a younger fae comes crashing into the hallway.
“Ruby,” Sam says severely. “You should be asleep.”
“Is that a human?” Ruby says with interest. “Can we keep her?”
Kara wakes up feeling a little sick. The fruit had been oh so splendid, but now that she thinks about it, eating a full crate may have been...an unwise choice. It's fine, though. It's fine. Totally fine.
She groans a little as she sat up from her spot on the floor, a little embarrassed that she'd slumbered on the ground. In her defense, however, the fruit was so yummy and so filling, she's not surprised she had to take a nap to recover.
As she acquaints herself with her surroundings, her gaze falls on a huddle on the far side of the room. Then, her eyes focus on the profile of the most beautiful woman Kara had ever laid her mortal eyeballs on; a woman with pale white skin and dark hair, bright green eyes that remind Kara a little bit of clear ocean water back in Midvale, and the curve of red lips that Kara just can't really stop staring at.
Around the woman are four others: two women, a man, and a teenager? Kara blinks a few times to make sure her eyes aren't tricking her. Why a child is here is beyond her, but she's not gonna ask questions. She's on her day off, after all.
All too soon, however, she realizes that the huddle are whispering animatedly at each other. Kara tries to eavesdrop, but she can't quite make what they're saying. Italian, maybe? She's not sure. It sounds like Italian.
In any case, she rises to her feet, careful at first, and slowly makes her way towards the huddled group and clears her throat, hoping to let them know that she's awake now.
"Um, buongiorno?" she offers in her best Italian accent, flashing her best smile as the group turns to her in shock. When they don't immediately respond, she clears her throat. She realizes perhaps she's mixing her languages. She tries again. "Hola?"
“Oh, she’s communicating with us,” Jack coos, and Lena hits him. “Lena. Lena. Is that not the most precious thing you’ve ever seen?”
“Is it concussed?” Andrea is asking Sam. “Aren’t those two different human languages?”
“Look,” Lena is protesting. “She’s awake. She’s not dazed, or in thrall, or mesmerised, or enchanted, or anything else, can’t we just, you know, kind of… imply that if she quickly leaves through the nearest exit to the mortal world, we can all forget this ever happened and never speak of it again?”
“What nearest exit?” Andrea retorts. “Lillian closed them all off while she’s at the High Court so your brother can’t lure them to revels, don’t you remember how long it took to get rid of all the humans the last Solstice Lillian was away?”
“In fairness,” Jack offers diplomatically, “it wasn’t their fault Veronica kept enticing them to gamble away pieces of their memory at the - what did they think it was?”
“Tarot readings,” Lena supplies automatically, and then scowls.
“You see,” Jack says triumphantly. “You love humans, Lena, and it’s been so long since we’ve had a changeling - ”
“Changelings are children, Jack, they stay small and malleable and don’t break into the pantry and eat all the faerie fruit,” Andrea sniffs. “How did it get into the storeroom?”
“We could ask?” Ruby says hopefully.
As one, they turn to the blonde woman in the middle of the room.
“Um,” the human says helpfully. “Sprechen sie Deutsch?”
Kara was running out of languages she was familiar with. The only one left in her back pocket is the list of Chinese takeout names that she's memorized, but she feels a little weird using that.
Thankfully, it seems that the people all staring at her like she's grown an extra head have stopped talking with one another. Perhaps she should try one more time--this time in English. After all, it's really the only language she knows. How she thought she could converse with them in broken languages not her own clearly just means that she was not thinking straight.
"Um, hello. My name is K---"
Yet the beautiful woman raised a hand and stopped her, effectively silencing what she was about to say.
"Don't say it," the woman says to her in English, her voice coming out melodic yet firm, a lilt to it that Kara can't quite place. All Kara knows is that she sounds beautiful.
The pressing matter at hand is that she can't speak her assent, so she just nods.
"How did you get in here?"
She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. She frowns and tries again. She gestures to the woman helplessly. The woman rolls her eyes and waves at her, and Kara gasps, a pressure somehow coming off of her throat without realizing.
"Um, thanks. What was the question again?"
The woman with blue-green eyes snickers beside the man while the brown-eyed woman and the teenager only offer her encouraging smiles.
"How did you get in here?"
"I...don't know."
"Think. You're not supposed to be here."
Kara tries not to panic knowing that if she's trespassing somehow that Alex is going to really rip her a new one. She has a tendency to wander, and this time, she may have wandered a little too far. Still, she tries not to let her panic show, so she scratches the back of her head as she quickly rushes through her memories, all of them vague and distant, her mind foggy.
"Well, uh, miss--ma'am," she starts, trying to buy herself some time until flashes of Noonan's and a long hallway appear in her mind. "I was just trying to eat lunch at Noonan's and tried to open the door to their back patio area because it's quieter and I have an article I'm working on, which Snapper will totally get mad at me for if I don't turn it in first thing tomo...rrow." She stops talking when the beautiful woman scowls at her. "Um, anyway, I walked down a long hallway and then opened the door in front of me and now I just...am here? Sorry?"
The group of them fall back into a huddle and resume talking in the language Kara doesn't recognize. Finally, the man turns and offers her a dashing smile and speaks up.
"And you don't remember anything else?" he asks, his voice coming out deep and...British? Kara has to make sense of that one in a little bit.
"No. I mean, it's all kind of fuzzy? I just remember I tried to turn around, but when I looked back, the door I came in was gone."
The teenager's eyes widened and she mutters out 'oh shit' until the taller brunette woman beside her slaps a hand over her mouth. Well, up to this point, Kara didn't immediately think this was an 'oh shit' moment, but maybe now she should.
“Oh shit?” Jack repeats, rolling the words around in his mouth. “Ruby, you didn’t teach me oh shit. You promised you’d teach me all the new things the humans are saying. What does oh shit mean?”
(The human looks a shade more alarmed every time Jack says oh shit, probably because it’s the only thing she understands interspersed in Fae.)
“Come on, Uncle Jack,” Ruby objects. “The last time you went to the mortal world and spoke to a human they were still using thou. That’s a lot of ground to cover.”
“And yet,” Lena says with narrowed eyes, “they were definitely already saying shit.”
“Ah, shit,” Jack sighs resignedly.
“Um,” the human says timidly.
Andrea rolls her eyes and turns to the shelf behind her, pulling a satchet made of leaves - the type that young fae would be given on an outing, full of nuts and berries - from one of the woven baskets.
“Pspspspspspsss,” Andrea says, and drops the satchet into the human’s hands. “Stay. Sit.”
“Andy,” Lena hisses.
“What?” Andrea shrugs. “She’s eaten half a tree worth of faerie fruit, a few berries aren’t going to do her in at this point.”
“Her ears are so round,” Jack is marvelling to Ruby.
“Would you stop with the ears, Jack,” Sam sighs. “No one is buying your distraction from whatever it is that you and Ruby did.”
Lena spares a moment to glance at the human; she has, remarkably, obediently sat down on a nearby crate and is inspecting the leaf satchel and its contents.
“Can’t we keep her?” Jack asks. “Look, she’s so well behaved.”
“What is a Noonan’s,” Sam interrupts. “And why was there a fae passageway there?”
“We were getting Aunt Lena a gift,” Ruby says meekly.
“Not the coffee again?” Sam says in exasperation.
“Honestly, you’d think Lena was the human and those disgusting little beans were the fae fruit,” Andrea muses. “They’re so bitter.”
“You have to grind them and add boiled water,” Lena protests. “You tried the one I made with elderflower nectar and honey and liked it!”
“I didn’t sleep for three days,” Andrea says darkly.
“You’re fae, Andrea - ”
“She gets so cranky without them,” Jack is appealing to Sam. “You know this. Look how argumentative she is!”
“Hey,” Lena protests.
There is a quiet and tentative throat-clearing noise from the crate.
