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“Alright, the rich people can have this one,” Timmy says, his feet landing on the front stoop of his house in a puff of magic. “Skiing is fun.”
“Especially in low gravity!” Cosmo agrees, disguised as a fish-shaped keychain on his backpack strap.
“Doing it on Pluto was a great idea,” Timmy concurs, shaking the snow out of his hair. “Thanks for suggesting it, Wanda!”
Wanda, also a fish keychain, preens at the compliment. “Oh, it was nothing. Glad you had fun, sport!”
Poof gurgles happily from his spot as an extra bead on Wanda’s chain. He looks like a little baby fish, and it’s kinda super cute, so Timmy flicks it gently, letting it sway.
While he’s still a baby who doesn’t know what’s going on most of the time, Poof loves motion. It’s no surprise that skiing was a big hit with him, too. Though, based on the fresh peals of giggling from the keychain swing, he seems to be experiencing the exact same level of excitement just being a plastic bead.
“Mom and Dad are out of town for the annual vacuum convention and Vicky has the Portuguese Donkey Flu, which means we have the whole house to ourselves tonight!” Timmy gushes, unlocking the front door and shoving inside. “I’m thinking Flaming Hot Greedos and four different kinds of soda for dinner, then—“
He flicks on the lightswitch and freezes in his tracks. The light is already on. Sitting at the kitchen table is a blonde woman in a pantsuit, glancing up at him from behind a pair of cat-eye glasses.
For a moment, she just stares at him with a flat expression, and Timmy stares back. Weirdly, his instincts kick in like he’s confronting a T-Rex, and he starts to believe that if he just doesn’t move, maybe she’ll go away.
Then she clicks her pen closed with a sigh and places it down on the notepad in front of her.
“I do hope you’re Timmy Turner,” the woman says.
And like that, the spell is broken.
“STRANGER DANGER!” Timmy yells, ditching his backpack at the door and leaping for the block of kitchen knives on the counter.
With the precision of a practiced serial murderer, the woman heartlessly steps between him and the weapons cache, cutting off his only means of defense. Timmy cusses (distantly, Wanda lets out an offended gasp) and pivots towards the landline hanging on the wall behind him.
Thinking fast, this woman clearly isn’t a magical danger— she hasn’t looked at his fairies once, and dresses too normal to be an alien— so he punches ‘911’ into the numpad and shouts:
“I wish the police were outside my house right now!”
~☆~ POOF! ~☆~
So, the police turn out to be absolutely no help. Timmy can’t even pretend to be shocked. Every adult he’s ever met has been stupid at best or downright malicious at worst, and cops are just more of those same adults but with guns.
He kinda hoped they’d at least, like, remove the strange woman from his kitchen. But no. They’re friends with her. Or, at least, they knew her name and full-on laughed in Timmy’s face when he asked them to arrest her for breaking and entering.
“Miss Tilly here has a key and your file, kiddo,” one of the cops says with a smile, patting his head condescendingly.
Timmy scowls and swats the hand away. Only Cosmo and Wanda are allowed to call him “kiddo.” Not some stupid adult whose partner cop is helping himself to a sandwich from the fridge. (Those were his lunches for the week! His fairies helped him meal prep because no one was supposed to be in the house to steal them!)
“She shouldn’t have a key,” Timmy insists. “I don’t know this lady! And what do you mean, ’my file?’”
“The city gave me a copy of the key,” this Miss Tilly says. Timmy shoots her a death glare. “Because this is my seventh failed attempt to establish contact with your parents.”
Timmy scoffs. “Well, they’re out of town for the week. No, they didn’t leave a number to call, no, I don’t know when they’ll be back, yes, I will let them know you came by. Please leave now.”
“Maybe slow down with the usual spiel, kiddo,” Wanda whispers in his ear. At some point his fairies transformed into fruit flies so that they could stay on him without being obvious. “I think this woman might be—”
“So you’re here alone, without supervision?” Miss Tilly asks, eyes snapping to him like a hawk spotting prey. She starts writing in a notepad without looking at it.
Uh oh. Timmy doesn’t love that.
“I have a babysitter coming,” he lies quickly.
“You do? What time? Can I have their contact information?”
Shit. This is the most any adult has ever cared about his life. He hates it!
“I don’t—“ Timmy stammers, trying to figure out the best answer for damage control. “She should be here any minute! I don’t have her number, she just lives down the street, so there’s no need—”
The woman immediately stands, throwing the papers and notebook into her suitcase with a click. She snatches Timmy by the wrist and starts dragging him out the door.
“Take me to her house,” Miss Tilly orders.
“I wish Vicky was cured from her stupid flu,” Timmy whispers into his shoulder as the woman hauls him up Vicky’s driveway.
~☆~ DONKEY DON’T! ~☆~
This sucks. Making him use a wish to help Vicky in some way. Eugh. The moment he doesn’t need her anymore, he’s going to wish her sick again. Worse than before, too.
Miss Tilly rings the doorbell. A visibly shaking and sweating man answers the door by pulling it open just as far as an interior chain lock allows.
“H-Hello?” He asks.
“Good evening, I’m Miss Tilly from the Dimmsdale CPS. Can I please ask your daughter a few questions?”
“Oh no,” Cosmo and Wanda whisper on his shoulder.
“What? What’s CPS stand for?” Timmy whispers back.
“M-my-?” The man who is probably Vicky’s dad stammers. “My daughter! Yes! O-one moment!”
The door slams shut very quickly. There’s a sound of commotion inside. Hushed, urgent voices.
After several awkward seconds— during which Wanda very suspiciously does not answer Timmy’s question— the door opens again, all the way this time.
The man appears in full, haggard and pale, shoving his daughter out the door like he’s passing off a brick of C4 to the bomb squad. Except it’s not Vicky pushed out onto the stoop, it’s Tootie.
“Hurry, go with the nice lady!” Her dad urges. “This is your chance! Before V-Vi— she wakes up.”
Timmy has no fucking clue what’s happening. Based on her appearance, Tootie doesn’t either. Tootie already looks pretty unfortunate on the best of days, but she’s in her pajamas at six in the afternoon, gleaming in the sun with a nasty sheen of cold sweat, her hair rumpled with terrible bedhead that can only form from drool and snot hardening it that way. She’s clearly got the same Portuguese Donkey Flu that was keeping Vicky from torturing him today.
“Wha?” Tootie asks, swaying like she’s about to pass out. The fact that she hasn’t yet noticed Timmy, of all people, is a real testament to how sick she must be.
“Go with her, Tootie! She’s CPS! You can escape! Quickly!”
“Excuse me,” Miss Tilly says, clearly unhappy. “I believe you misunderstand my reason for visiting, Mr. …?”
“Think that girl’s gonna keel over?” Cosmo asks from Timmy’s shoulder.
As if on cue, Tootie faints. Timmy reflexively catches her.
Then he realizes he’s touching Cootie Tootie, who is oozing snot out of literally every orifice right now. So he immediately drops her onto the pavement.
“Timmy!” Wanda scolds.
“Now she has a fever and brain damage,” Cosmo reports. “Baaad day for the hypothalamus.”
“Please, just take my daughter and get away, quickly!” Vicky’s dad begs. He’s still going back and forth with Miss Tilly.
“Okay! What the hell is going ON?!” Timmy shouts, so unbelievably done with this whole thing. Right now, he should be sitting on the couch watching Crash Nebula and mixing every canned soda in the house into one big jug while licking Greedo dust off his hands. Not standing on Vicky’s porch catching nasty diseases from Tootie!
”Now now, precious child. Mind your language, please.”
A new sickly sweet voice freezes his body in pure, animalistic fear. He can’t move. Can’t breathe.
This is what it feels like to face down a T-Rex. Nothing to do but hold your breath to prolong the inevitable moment when she notices you. Still as a statue, with full painful understanding that you are going to die experiencing a world of agony first, as a cold-blooded creature rends the flesh from your bones.
“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, ma’am,” Vicky says, stepping out from behind her dad. She’s smiling so sweetly with her fake-ass demure teen girl facade. “My whole family is terribly sick right now, I’ve been tending to them the very best I can.” She places a hand over her heart in a pitiful pose. “I hope you won’t lend too much credence to anything they might have said or done, they really should stay in bed.”
She says the last bit with just a touch of her usual venom. Both her dad and Timmy flinch at the tone.
Miss Tilly, of course, doesn’t seem to notice, blindly relieved to be talking to someone cordial and put-together for the first time all conversation.
That’s how it is, with Vicky. She operates in adults’ blindspots with terrifying precision. None of them even suspect that she could be pure, psychotic evil just outside their field of view.
But Timmy knows. The bruises under his shirt, the burns on his arms, the dog bites on his legs, the lacerations on his back from the fucking bull whip she got online last month. All the injuries that his fairies heal over for him just so he can roll out of bed in the morning and watch his parents pay her for it, with 20% gratuity.
So, instead of noticing that anything is wrong, Miss Tilly smiles and nods and asks Vicky for a moment of her time, as Tootie’s dad peels his unconscious daughter off the pavement and slinks back into the hell house.
Miss Tilly asks Vicky several questions. The disturbing thing is that the questions slowly morph from being about Timmy’s parents to being about Timmy. His schedule, his living conditions, his well-being—
“Have you noticed any unexplained injuries on Timmy?”
“Now that you mention it,” Vicky says, bringing a hand to her cheek in faux concern. “Oh dear, yes, a few injuries I wrote off as casualties of roughhousing with his friends. But some of them looked… well, intentional. And like they might scar…”
Of course they were intentional! She carved her name into his back with a switchblade!
Timmy oscillates between paralyzed fear and simmering rage while Vicky uses her fake concern as a guise to misaccredit all the major injuries she’s given him over the past few years. Cosmo and Wanda take turns physically cowering behind each other and Poof.
Once the conversation finally finishes, Vicky smiles down at him with a truly vile, wicked grin.
“I’m actually supposed to babysit the little guy tonight, I just got caught up taking care of my family. I’ll take him off your hands now, if you have places to be…”
“Ah, no,” Miss Tilly interrupts. Timmy’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Please, take care of your sick loved ones. I’ll be taking Timmy tonight.”
His blood freezes in his veins.
“Oh? So soon?” Vicky asks, feigning sadness. The glint in her eyes is unbearably smug.
“Yes, well, it’s a more serious case than I thought.”
“Guys,” Timmy whispers to his fairies, feeling nauseous, “what does CPS stand for?”
“…Child… Protective Services…”
What!? Bullshit! There’s never been an adult in Dimmsdale that cared about protecting children! They’re not allowed to start now, when he finally got to enjoy some good ol’ wholesome neglect instead of active abuse!
“I wish Vicky had the Portuguese Donkey Flu again,” Timmy whispers, too horrified to even enjoy it. “…And also Canadian Chicken Pox.” (Alright, maybe not too horrified.)
~☆~ DONKEY DO, POX TOO! ~☆~
Before Miss Tilly even finishes saying goodbye, Vicky breaks out into hives and pox, then starts hacking up a lung.
“Woah,” Timmy murmurs, impressed by the efficiency.
Miss Tilly immediately grabs Timmy by the shoulders and yanks him away.
“Wait!” Vicky croaks, crawling towards them like a zombie. “Make sure… the Turners pay me… for the week…”
Miss Tilly does not reply, she’s already halfway down the street, carrying Timmy like a baby on her hip.
“Nope, we are not bringing whatever that is to the boarding house,” she mutters. Timmy starts kicking and squirming, trying to escape her grasp. He’s ten years old! He’s not going to be carried! What if someone from school sees this!? But this lady doesn’t even seem phased, still muttering under her breath. “The place is already a cesspit without a disease going around.”
That just makes Timmy struggle harder.
Miss Tilly ignores him, tapping the Bluetooth on her opposite ear.
“Hi, Edward, it’s Tilly. Prep a new cot. Yeah, real shitshow, he can’t wait.”
“I can wait!” Timmy insists, craning his neck in an attempt to shout into the Bluetooth. “I’m fine!”
“Uh huh. Yeah,” she says into the phone, ignoring him. “No, it’s necessary. I’m holding the kid now, Eddy, his back is a Jackson Polluck of scar tissue.”
“Let go of me!” Timmy insists, struggling with renewed vigor. He’s not going anywhere with this lady!
The lady takes him all the way to Dimmadelphia proper. It’s a full two-hour drive.
“I have school tomorrow!” Timmy insists from the backseat. If there’s one thing that overrides all adults’ motivation, it’s forcing him to be miserable in school.
“There’s tutoring at the boarding house,” Miss Tilly dismisses, turning up the radio. “You won’t be going to your usual school for a few weeks. Depending on where you end up, you might not— Well, no need to worry about that now.”
WHAT?
“Guys, this is bad!” Timmy whispers into his fishbowl.
Miss Tilly had given him a single crummy backpack and twenty minutes to pack it with “anything portable and non-perishable that you couldn’t stand to lose for a few months.” Luckily, living under threat of Vicky for several years means he already had an emergency bag packed, and so he just grabbed that, a few key items, and his fish bowl. Because even if his fairies can tag along in any disguise, he’s not going to leave their house behind if he can help it.
The lady didn’t seem thrilled about him bringing an open two-gallon fishbowl into the backseat of her car, but she was also basically kidnapping him, so she’ll have to get over it.
“W-well, hey, sport, chin up! Maybe it won’t be so terrible!” Wanda tries.
“Yeah, no more Vicky, no more Mr. Crocker, no more getting your face pounded into the lockers for lunch money you don’t have,” Cosmo lists.
“Exactly!” Wanda agrees, clearly grateful for the support.
“No more Chester and AJ!” Timmy fires back. “No more sleeping in my own bed, or Crimson Chin collection, or playing video games, or having a house!”
“We grabbed your GameKid!” Wanda hedges. “That’s a video game, right?”
He does not have the patience to once again explain the difference between console and handheld gaming.
“No more parents!” Timmy insists. “This lady is kidnapping me! I’m not an orphan, I have parents who love me!”
Sure they’re… somewhat absent, but they’re just busy! They still love him. Leaving him alone now and then doesn’t change that. Right?
Cosmo and Wanda exchange a loaded glance that Timmy chooses to ignore.
“Of course you’re not an orphan, squirt,” Wanda soothes. “But, y’know, these programs aren’t just for orphans…”
“I’ve seen Annie! I’m going to have to wake up early and sing to try to get adopted!” Timmy insists. “I can’t get adopted if I have parents!”
“With your voice, I don’t think you have to worry about that happening,” Cosmo comments.
Wanda sighs. “It’s not exactly like the movies, you know. Give it a chance, maybe it won’t be so bad. You might even make friends!”
Timmy scoffs. “I have friends. I don’t want new ones. Not like we’d have anything in common, anyway; I have alive parents, who love me!”
Cosmo and Wanda exchange another glance that is harder to ignore the second time.
“Well, squirt, you might be surprised. Cosmo and I have had a few different godchildren in the system over the years. Jorgen’s assignment algorithm tends to… pick out kids in these situations.”
It takes Timmy a long moment to figure out what she’s hinting at.
“Are you saying I might meet more kids with fairies?”
“No, because it would be against Da Rules to reveal if another child has a fairy godparent,” Wanda says, making intense eye contact with him. “So I’m not saying that at all.”
Cosmo tilts his fish body, clearly confused. “But you just said–”
“I’m not saying that at all!” Wanda repeats, slapping a fin over his mouth.
Timmy doesn’t respond. Instead he gets quiet, processing the information.
The only other kid with fairies that he’s ever met was Remy Buxaplenty, and that was… disastrous, to say the least. Just a real shitshow all around.
But what would it be like to meet a kid with fairies who isn’t a total snob and a jerk? Who isn’t trying to actively get Timmy’s fairies taken away? Would they actually want to be his friend? Maybe they could talk about their favorite wishes, or bond over close-calls of magic gone awry. Maybe one of them also has an insane fairy-hunting teacher, and they can exchange tips. Maybe it’d be nice to just… brag about how much he loves his fairies. They’re really the best thing in his life, and he’s not even allowed to tell anyone about them– like how Wanda is really good at helping him with his homework, and Cosmo always helps him pull pranks when he’s bored, and how Poof turns his jars of baby food into sea urchins when he doesn't like the flavor. (Cosmo falls for it every time).
If he had a friend with fairies, he could actually introduce them to someone without lying. He can say “this is Cosmo and Wanda and Poof, and they’re my fairy godparents!” and he could learn about the other kid’s godparent, too, and tell them they seem really cool but secretly believe that they couldn’t possibly be as cool as his own.
For the rest of the car ride, Timmy doesn't protest anymore. Instead, he stares silently out the window as the sleepy streets of Dimmsdale gradually metastasize into the looming skyscrapers of Dimmadelphia.