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Gemma Hudson was fifteen years old. There was probably some stretch of the imagination by which it could be considered acceptable for her to be wandering the park in search of fairies on a warm spring day, even if it was a remote stretch indeed.

Far less forgivable was Laney Sutton, who so happened to be on the self-same quest, except that in her case, she was undertaking it at age twenty-one. By twenty-one, most people with any degree of tethering to reality had given up on their aspirations of discovering tiny, magical people living in trees and potentially fluttering about on dragonfly wings.

Laney's counselor had warned her against this kind of behavior, against 'retreating from reality when the world was too stressful' -- but recent weeks had proven too much for Laney's fledgling attempts at developing 'healthier' coping mechanisms. The world was trying to kill her. Using strange weapons and stranger monsters. For no good reason. In light of the extremity of the circumstances, she'd sought temporary refuge in deluded optimism.

An optimistic outlook demanded she consider her newfound magical other life in the most positive of lights; living in a magical world meant monsters trying to kill her, sure, but didn't it also mean, well, living in a magical world? The kind of world that might have dragons and unicorns and mischievous fairies? After all, if talking cats weren't beyond the pale of reason, who was to say that fairies weren't just as real?

In pursuit of this far-fetched goal, she was currently wandering around, peeking in the knotholes of trees, holding a teeny tiny bouquet of four-leaf clovers. That was when she spotted Gemma, standing beneath a tree looking dreamy-eyed.

"You look like a believer," she said, approaching with a open smile. "Have you seen any of the fair folk about, by any chance?"

"Oh, wow," Laney commented, taking in Gemma's collection of jewelry and trinkets to offer the fae. "You came really prepared."

She held out her free hand. "I'm Laney. Hi!"

All her life, Laney had sought the unseen. On her own, it was magic and mythical creatures; it was destiny, or divinity, or true love. With Tara this had expanded, or maybe refined, to the unproven: aliens, dark matter, faster-than-light spaceships. All her life, she'd looked for something to believe in -- maybe for lack of ability to believe in herself, but maybe also to give her purpose.

It had been easier, as a child, when faith was enough. When the mere act of believing was sufficient on its own to feed the soul. Now she had certainty, and she had to decide what to do with the things she'd seen and had had proven to her. Now the universe expected useless Laney Sutton, once-frivolous dreamer, to act. To make something of herself.

It was too hard to keep that up all the time, all of a sudden, when she hadn't spent most of her life doing it at all. It was hard enough when she picked up the distaff and went out to be a knight-hopeful; whenever she settled back into her skin, it was all she could do not to just crawl into bed all the time and shut out the world, to award herself hours and hours of reprieve for each hour she put in. She wished she could go back to the witless believing of before, and how fulfilling it had seemed at the time.

So here she was, playing nostalgic games. It was a balm on her soul, if a temporary one.

"I wasn't planning a fairy hunt today originally," she admitted. "I just came to escape from... people wanting me to do things. It's such a nice day, you know? But I found some four-leaf clovers, and I used to make these little fairy bouquets all the time, and it occured to me that... I never stopped believing. I just stopped looking. And that's just silly! The world's got so much more in it than most people see. Don't you think so?"

Laney considered admitting to Gemma that her name was not actually "Laney," or even "Elaine" as she sometimes claimed. She felt guilty getting credit for its being a pretty name when her actual name was, well, Landscape. This would've required admitting her parents had named her Landscape, though, and that was something she avoided with strangers as much as possible. It usually brought the conversation too far around to the subject of her parents themselves and what they were like -- something that quickly turned awkward once they realized Laney had a strained relationship with her family. She preferred to let people think she was an anomalous person who'd materialized out of thin air one day, having no family or baggage or material concerns.

Laney wished that were true, too, sort of. She wished she didn't feel obligated to love a family that wanted her to be someone else. She wished she really didn't have any attachments. (Except Tara, of course.)

Gemma sounded like she had similar frustrations, living in a world that was trying to shape her in its own ideal image. People just ask for so much. That was true, wasn't it. They didn't think they asked for much, but all the same -- the way people talked to you, or the looks they gave you when you did something weird or you didn't go along with their social behaviors or you failed to take an interest in the TV shows they liked or care about fashion or about getting new stainless steel kitchen appliances -- people asked a lot. They asked you to be someone they could easily put away into a simplistic box and easily interact with.

Sometimes fairies just seemed -- friendlier.

"They're so rare. Like, I've never once found a single one in my backyard in all the years I looked. But I read somewhere that they're a genetic mutation probably, and when you find one you can usually find more in the same place. There's this one clover patch in this park where they grow, I can get like eight or ten in one shot. But that started years ago -- the mutation could've spread since then, if that's how that works. You want to look for more? We could figure out a wish that we could split."

It was nice to meet someone who didn't ask her to be anyone but the person she was already being, doing what she was already doing. It was nice to be able to offer the same thing in return, too.

Things had been awkward with Tara lately. She put on a bright face, but Laney could tell she was feeling strained. This knighthood thing wasn't going over well with her, and Laney suspected she was still beating herself up over it despite Laney's assurances that Laney becoming a knight was not Tara's fault.

It was a relief to be with someone she wasn't worrying about.

Laney thought about what she knew about magic. She knew a lot now, actually -- she knew what she could do, and what she couldn't do, and how there were limits on how much magic a person could have and how often they could use it and how much choice they had about the consequences of it. Magic was actually pretty stiffly regulated.

"Of course it does!" she said, injecting just a shade more positivity into her voice than the statement made her feel, deep down. I mean, you have to figure it does, otherwisewhy doesn't everyone just wish for more wishes, and if they did, it's like, I think we would've noticed by now, so no way is that allowed!"

She led the way through the park, into a narrow copse of trees off the main path where the sunlight dappled the clover on the ground beneath their careful feet, painting the ground in thousands of sparkling patches of gold, as though someone had thrown down a fortune in coins around them.

"I guess -- if I was a fairy and could just do magic whenever I wanted, I guess I'd get bored, maybe -- so maybe it's just that the fairies make up their own rules about magic to make it all more fun for them. I think . . . I think I'd make all the humans sing me a song before I granted them a wish. I don't know, something ridiculous and funny like that."

She pointed to a patch of clover near a wide oak tree and sat alongside it, running her fingers gently over the little green leaves and white flowers. "Or I'd make them all swear not to teach anyone to ask the question, 'So, what's new with you?' ever again. You know what I mean?"

Laney smiled, delighted. "If I was tiny, like a fairy . . . I'd make a bed and pillows out of pussywillow buds, I always thought they were so soft. And I'd train a field mouse to be my faithful hound. Mice can do tricks, right? So I could get it to fetch me things. Oh, or maybe a squirrel, maybe that'd be better. I could pay it in acorns."

She rifled her way gently through the clover underhand, looking for the mutated four-leaf sprigs. "Do you go to school, Gemma?" she asked, trying to get a better sense of her new companion as a person, rather than just a friendly stranger. Gemma was younger than she was -- she could tell that much -- but Laney thought she seemed a little lonely. Maybe she was homeschooled. Maybe she was just misunderstood.

Laney nodded. That didn't sound like much of a home life.

"I never had any siblings," she demurred. "I was sort of my parents' accidental responsibility. I think babies must have been a fashionable accessory when they decided to keep me." Her therapist said it was good to talk about these things. Laney wondered if talking about them to absolute strangers really counted -- but then, she didn't really have many other people in her life who weren't absolute strangers except her parents and Tara. She had a pathetically small life.

"But I probably wouldn't have been what you'd call a good role model, anyway," she confided with a grin. "Some stuff happened, and I never finished out high school." She shrugged. "Now my parents basically sigh and wring their hands at me over the dinner table and think I'm, like, an albatross." Laney was pretty sure they'd have kicked her out by now, except that luckily for her she'd been in a coma for a year, so now they felt too guilty to send her away like they wanted. Or maybe they were just too worried about what the Joneses would think.

Her fingers found and isolated a single four-leaf clover among the masses. "Oh, here we go," she said, pointing. "This looks like a good spot."

Gemma reminded Laney of herself from some younger time -- before she'd become kind of mopey and unhappy. She liked to hope she'd been more fun to be around back then, like Gemma, but who knew. Maybe she would've been better off if she'd been sent to a strict reform school, too.

Gemma's enthusiasm was infectious. That, and Laney was delighted by the prospect of having made something like a friend, even if that friend was several years her junior. She tucked her own clover into her hair and made room for Gemma.

"Absolutely! This city may not always be in great shape, but do you notice how this park always stays so nice? Nothing bad happens here -- it's special, don't you think?" She wrapped her hands around her knees, looking up through the trees at the way the sky turned a delicate pink. "I like to come here whenever I need a boost. It feels like nothing can ever go wrong here."