A Fairy Affair at a Faire

"For the rest of your life," he assured her. "And I hope you'll remember it fondly."

"It's been strange and disturbing and even scary at times," said Alessandra. "I don't think I ever would've tired some of that stuff in the real-- I mean, in my world... But I'm glad I did... Yeah, I think I will remember it fondly... Even the troll."

"Sleep now, my child," the king whispered. "You have my leave to return to your world. But that can wait until tomorrow." Sleep took her not long afterwards.

Alessandra knew she was uncomfortable before she woke up. She was certain of that much.

It was chilly and something was poking into her ribs and her thigh and her skin felt scratchy. She opened her eyes to find herself lying on dry brown leaves and stones.

When she sat up, there were bits of leaf and twig in her hair and stuck to her face. Looking around, she realized that she had passed out inside the ring of white toadstools speckled with red. There was an empty picnic table several yards away, and from the cool of the air it felt like early morning. The whole world seemed dull and washed out in the thin morning light.

The fairy dress costume had ridden up over her bare butt and she tugged it back down.

With a shock of recollection, her time in Fairyland came back to her. Alessandra remembered it all—the faun, the king, the troll, and the most amazing sex of her life—all in vivid detail, as if it had actually happened.

"Oh, fuck..." she groaned. "What the hell was in that drink?"

It must have been a hallucination. Alessandra laid a hand across her belly and she knew that she'd been violated. She could feel it inside. She had been drugged and raped in the woods behind the Faire. That was the only explanation that made any kind of sense to her at all.

She felt very foolish for accepting the drink from the man in the faded kilt and supposed she must have imagined him as the troll in her intoxicated state. But she didn't want to think about that too much. The revelation was so horrible that it was easier to cling to her amazing dream.

There were things a girl was supposed to do when this sort of thing happened, things Alessandra had been taught since middle school. But before she started doing any of them, she decided that she just wanted to go home.

She walked up through the empty beer garden and looked for her abandoned bag. The next few hours would be so much easier if she could just find her cell phone, but as she feared, her bag was nowhere to be found. Just as Alessandra was giving up her search, the shuttered windows above the bar began to open.

"Oh, hey," said a barmaid in a tightly laced bodice who spotted Alessandra, "We're not actually open quite yet."

"That's ok," Alessandra said, trying her best to smile. "I left my bag here last night. Do you guys have like, a lost-and-found or a security office or something?"

The barmaid in the tightly laced bodice directed Alessandra to the festival office up behind the ticket windows.

As Alessandra left the open air tavern, she ran her fingers between the bronze horns and down the nose of the laughing faun statue standing out front. She smiled wistfully. It had been a lovely dream or hallucination or whatever it was, and she was glad to have that memory instead of the truth about what must have really happened.

All around the plaza, food stalls were opening and setting up for the day. The Faire patrons had only just begun to filter in, and the plaza seemed very different to Alessandra without the crowd that had filled it yesterday.

She wondered what her friends had done when she had not shown up to meet them last night, how they had freaked out and how they had worried. She wondered what she should tell Greg, or if she even wanted to see him again. She sniffled back tears, determined to keep it together until she got home.

Alessandra made her way against the flow of incoming traffic, remembering that the barmaid in the tightly laced bodice had told her to turn right at the acrobats' stage. She didn't remember seeing an acrobats' stage when she was wandering with her friends yesterday and wished she had so they could have watched the show. But the barmaid in the tightly laced bodice had said she couldn't miss it.

When Alessandra looked up to find her bearings, she was surprised to spot Leslie and Quinn through the crowd.

They must have come back today to look for her. Alessandra felt grateful and ashamed and relieved and mortified all at the same time. She almost called out to her friends, but she didn't know what to say. She almost called out again, but then she realized something was not quite right.

Leslie had a wide-eyed infant slung across her front in a child carrier, and Quinn had cut her long, long hair back to her shoulders. Why would Leslie come back to the Renaissance Faire with someone's baby the day after Alessandra had disappeared? Why would Quinn take the time to cut her hair that same night?

For a moment Alessandra's eyes met Quinn's and Alessandra saw surprise and confusion flash across Quinn's face. But before either of them could think too much about it, Leslie grabbed Quinn's arm and pulled her off on some detour and Quinn didn't look back.

"Wasn't them," decided Alessandra. "Just a couple of chicks who kinda look the same."

She turned right at the acrobats' stage and found her way back to the front gate and a building mocked up like a half-timbered cottage with a sign over the door that read "Office."

Waiting next to the door was another familiar, but unexpected, face. "Mom!?" Alessandra cried.

"Alice!" Her mother ran up and embraced her daughter, held her tightly, and stroked her hair. "Oh Alice, I am so happy to see you again, sweetheart. Are you okay?"

"Yeah," sniffed Alessandra, "Yeah, I'm fine, but what are you doing here? Did... did the police call you or something?"

"Yes they did. Your friends got worried when you didn't turn up by the time the Faire closed for the night."

"Did they find my bag?" Alessandra sniffled, unable to hold back her tears any longer. "I left my bag and... Oh god, Mom, I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."

"Oh, sweetheart." Her mom wrapped her in another hug. "It's okay. It's okay. You don't need to worry about that. Everything is ok now."

"No, it's not, mom... I screwed up," Alessandra wept. "I messed everything up really, really bad."

"Alice, listen to me," said her mom, holding Alessandra at arm's length and looking her in the eye. "You didn't mess anything up. Everything's fine now."

"No, it's not. Mom, I think I was raped last night," Alessandra said, just to get it out there, just to make her mother aware of the gravity of the situation.

Her mother's face darkened into a frown. "Ok," said her mom and she took a moment to think about what Alessandra had just said, to give it the consideration it deserved. "Do you remember what happened?"

"No," confessed Alessandra, "I think they drugged me. I had a weird dream or a hallucination or something."

Her mother's face brightened and her shoulders relaxed visibly and she sighed with relief, much to Alessandra's dismay.

"I had planned to tell you this once we got home," her mother said, "but I guess you need to hear it now. It won't be easy, but I'm your mother, so please give me the benefit of the doubt...

"It was not a dream."

"No, Mom--"

"Fairyland is real, Alice. You were there."

Alessandra's mouth fell open. How could her mother possibly know about the intensely realistic dream she had had last night?

"What!? No, Mom, that's... That's impossible," Alessandra protested. It occurred to her that she might be dreaming still.

Her mother took a folded newspaper from her purse and handed it to Alessandra.

"Look at the date, sweetie. You disappeared seven years ago today. You have been gone for exactly seven years," her mother said slowly, enunciating the words carefully.

"No." Alessandra was stunned. The date on the paper had to be a misprint. "No, it was just last night..."

But Alessandra thought about how different the food plaza looked, and how there was a whole stage where there hadn't been one before, and about how much older Leslie and Quinn looked.

"Alice, I'm here waiting for you this morning, because I knew this would be the day you came back from Fairyland. I know that because... the same thing happened to me," her mother confessed, "on Midsummer's Day twenty-seven years ago."

Alessandra's mouth fell open again. "You... You've been there too? It's all real?"

"It's all real," her mother assured her. "I've been there. I've seen the king and his hall and the dragon and everything."

It was almost too much for Alessandra to take in. Fairyland was easy to believe in when you were standing there in the middle of it surrounded by the vivid magic and the bright mirth, but here in this subdued and mundane world, it was all just so hard to grasp.

"But..." Alessandra tried to wrap her head around the idea of her mother in the Summer Court of the Fairy King, "then that means that you... Ew! Mom!"

Her mother shrugged with a little smile.

"When the police called and told me your friends had reported you missing, I told them not to worry," she said to Alessandra. "I told them you'd met your father at the Faire and you'd gone to spend time with him."

"Really? My father is a... is from Fairyland?" Alessandra asked, her discomfort suddenly diminished by her curiosity. "Who... Who is he?"

"I don't know," her mother confessed. "Would you?"

"Mom! Ew!" Alessandra was suddenly very uncomfortable again.

"We're Changelings, Alice," her mother explained gently. "We belong to two worlds with two very different sets of values. Our family always has, going back for generations. Your Gran brought me to America after I was born, hoping to break the curse. Obviously it didn't."

"I guess not," agreed Alessandra, although the idea of her Gran in Fairyland was mortifying.

"It doesn't have to be a curse, though," her mother continued. "We have the opportunity to enjoy the best of both worlds on our own terms... That's why I started you on birth control when you were still in high school."

"So what happens now?" Alessandra asked, recalling how very uncomfortable that talk had made her all those years ago.

"Now, I take you home and you get to decide what kind of life you want to have from here," said her mother.

"You mean I can go back to Fairyland?" Alessandra asked. "Any time I want?"

"Well, not any time," her mother said, putting arm around her daughter and steering her towards the Renaissance Faire exit. "Only at certain times. And I would never want to go back in the winter, but that's up to you. When the time is right, I'll teach you how to find your way back."

Alessandra and her mother strolled out to the parking field together and they both lived very happily ever after.

The End

• Blind_Justice for cracking the whip when I needed it
• electricblue66 for pumping the brakes when I needed it
• Erinaceous for proofreading so thoroughly when I needed it most
• and ChloeTzang for organizing the 2021 Literotica Geek Pride Story Event