Snakes and Lattes (Jurdan mortal world au)

Of Pigeons, Peaches and Poisons

And that's how they found the film.

Jude can't remember what scene they landed on, only that it earned a mimed squeal from her mother.

'You're going to love this one.' Eva had told her. 'It's right up your alley.'

It wasn't.

Jude remembered hating much of the film. It was a similar flavour of nonsense to that of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It's just a montage of flickering images when she recalls it now.

A tunnel of speaking hands moving in unsettling synchronization to form faces. A beautiful bedroom secretly composed of filthy trash. A party of bird people with beaks and teeth who decapitated each other for fun. Such visions were par for the course in Faerieland, but to a sheltered suburban six-year-old they were the stuff of nightmares.

One scene in particular managed to leave a more visceral impression than the others. It had not been horrific at all. Not at first, anyway.

The masquerade ball.

It opened with a dreamy swell of synthesised music. It hypnotised with sumptuous visions of shimmering folk swirling along the dancefloor. Amid all this, the heroine pursued a handsome goblin king who smirked at her between the dancers, resplendent in his bejewelled jacket and his sweeps of dark eyeshadow.

Jude remembered the way he taunted the heroine with his crooked smile. The way he spun her. Sung to her. Promised her the sun and moon, then threw in the stars for good measure. The heroine herself looked like an entirely different creature in her puffs of pearlescent tulle. Less a mortal girl, more a faerie queen. She stared up at her king as though he were made of purest magic.

The scene was perfect. Romantic. Wrong.

Like all nice dreams you never want to wake from, it came to a swift end. The whole thing burst like a glass bubble; a trick revealed.

Faerie fruit.

A bite of a perfect sunset-hued peach had poisoned the heroine, causing her to fall under a sleeping curse. She hadn't attended a ball at all; it had all been a glamoured dream. She had come dangerously close to failing her quest, though. All for the mere idea of a pretty king with even prettier promises.

As for the peach, it was revealed to be rotten to the core, writhing with maggots. There was an unmistakable note of premonition in that image.

Jude remembered her mother asking, 'Would you have eaten the fruit?'

To which she had hastily replied, 'Never! I would make the goblin king eat it instead.'

Jude was a terribly severe six-year-old.

'Clever,' Eva had said, something in her voice suggesting her mind had wandered to places far beyond the film. 'Clever Jude. Smarter than her mommy.'

That scene and its maggoty moral remained with Jude long after her mother's passing. She preserved the image of the peach, harbouring it like a protective geas upon her heart as she grew among all manner of dangerous, charming creatures. For a time, she felt sure that no beautiful faerie boy would ever lure her beyond her ability to burst the bubble and shatter the dream.

Not without a fight, at least.

That was how she found the stoicity in herself to rebuff Locke as he had swept her along the dancefloor, so very much like that handsome goblin king. She had not fluttered her lashes at him while he wooed her with words as rotten of core as the poisoned peach. She had instead promised him an eye for an eye, a hurt for a hurt.

Locke could choke on the damn sun, moon and stars.

Problem was, that little triumph made her cocky. It made her think she was immune to beautiful faerie boys when...