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jormiwillinghamTitle: Of Trolls, Witches, and Fairy Princesses
Author: 'mi
Fandom: 10th Kingdom/Charmed
Characters/Pairing: Piper, Radish
Rating: PG/K+
Challenge/Prompt: I'm pretty sure this was supposed to also hit on some kind of crossover challenge for the month, but I don't remember which comm... Help?
Word Count: 3,000
Warnings: None
Summary: Piper's holiday baking is interrupted.
Disclaimer: All characters within belong to their rightful owners, not the author, and are used without permission.
Piper couldn't help smiling as she listened to the coffee pot gurgling. Her sisters would be up soon, and boy, were they going to be surprised! She herself was surprised, in all honesty; it had been a long time since she'd last had a baking attack and an even longer time since she'd been able to spend hours alone in the kitchen without being interrupted by one of her well-meaning family or, worse by far, a Demon. This almost felt like she was about to set some kind of record, going these many hours without an attack or a plea from the Elders to put their lives on hold to save the world for the umpteenth time.
She stood with a piping hot tray of fresh cupcakes in her hands and simply let the aromas of the kitchen wrap around her. Her brown eyes slid closed in delight, and she positively beamed. Her kitchen had not seemed this alive and bustling . . . well, since Grams had passed, leaving them to discover their powers and their destinies, whether they wanted them or not. Ginger, cocoa, sugar, flour, coffee, cinnamon, lemon, and a hundred other sweet scents wrapped around her, and Piper felt more at home, and at ease, than she had in years.
Then, of course, was when it happened. She knew they were there a split second before the guttural voices exploded in her kitchen. She dropped the cupcakes onto her oven, turned swiftly, and started exploding monsters left and right. These weren't the normal Demons, but dear God, was there ever enough of them! Too many, really. She was just beginning to consider yelling up at her sisters, who seemed oblivious to the noise, when an axe swung pass her head.
She blinked, exploded two more of the towering, ugly beings dressed in black leather and medieval garb, and yanked at the weapon's handle. "THAT WAS TOO DAMN CLOSE TO MY STOVE!" Of course it would be the next appliance they would lose in a heated, Supernatural battle, all because she was finally getting to enjoy it again. Her anger made it easy for her to whip the axe out, but the impact sent her spinning. She sliced through three necks before the blade embedded in the wall on the other side of her oven. "DAMN IT!" she screamed, knowing her family had to be hearing the fight now. "COME ON, SISTERS! I NEED YOU!"
"NO, YOU DON'T," a booming voice disagreed from somewhere behind her. "YOU'VE KILLED MORE THAN ENOUGH OF MY CHILDERN AS IT IS!"
Piper turned, and a head rolled underneath her boot. Emptied, black eyes looked up at her from a face filled with a monstrously huge nose. She shuddered and kicked it away. "DON'T KICK MY SON!"
"Hum, he is kinda dead already," Piper said, feeling a strange twinge of guilt. "He shouldn't have attacked me."
"It's the only way to get you Witches' attention."
Piper frowned, her hands still raised. Her fingers flexed. She should probably just explode this guy instead of talking to him. With a sudden jerk, she realized that he was wearing a crown. "These . . . " she spoke slowly, " . . . are all your children?" No others had rushed her yet. Had she killed all his children? Dread inched into her, making her blood feeling icy.
Before the King could answer, noises that sounded like pigs slurping up and squealing over slop took both their attention away from the fight at hand. Three Trolls, one with black skin, one with white, and one with dark purple, were rapidly gobbling down Piper's haunted house cake. All the decorations she had intricately set onto the frosting earlier were smeared everywhere. Brittle candies meant to represent bones were even crunching underneath their boots as they continued to gobble Piper's creation.
The guys -- or, at least, she thought they were guys -- pushed their sister away from the cake. She snorted and screeched in anger, picked up two pumpkin pies, and slammed them down on each of their heads. She picked up a third pie and slammed it onto her own face. As graham pieces of the crust fell away, Piper could see the female Troll rapidly licking the pie filling and whipped cream topping off of her ugly face. She shuddered and looked back at the Troll King, who actually looked rather repulsed as well.
"Well," he coughed with no small amount of embarrassment, "they are all my children, in one way or another."
Piper looked around her at the mess her kitchen had become. She'd had so many cakes, cupcakes, cookies, and pies all ready . . . for what, she didn't quite know, but they had all been finished. There were three more trays of cupcakes beginning to burn in the oven, which seemed remarkably untouched, but Piper wasn't about to turn her back to be able to rescue her cupcakes. "Pity the mothers," she remarked -- and was taken aback by how greatly the Troll King's face fell. He was far from handsome, though not as ugly as his children, but he was clearly heartbroken.
Turning her attention back onto the King, Piper took a little pity on him and froze his three remaining children rather than exploding them. "Are there any more coming?" she questioned, inching backward toward her stove.
"No." He sniffed, and she could swear he could see tears beading in his dark eyes. "I knew this was a mistake. You Witches are all the same: you just want to kill us!"
"You attacked me!" Piper exclaimed, her tone bordering on a shriek of disbelief.
"No, we entered your kitchen unbidden through yonder portal." He pointed toward the living room. Piper groaned. She really was going to have to do something about these portals that kept popping magically open in the grandfather clock. She loved that old cock. It was a family heirloom, which was why they had had it fixed so many thousands of times, but it was going to have to stop.
"I know you're not trying to tell me you didn't mean to attack me." She jerked a thumb toward the axe still embedded in her wall.
"I did want them to take you hostage," he admitted, sniffing, "but only so's I could talk to you."
Piper's jovial mood was shot to as many, messy smithereens as the pies his last three children had devoured. She could scarcely believe this! Of course Halloween's approach had meant there had to be impending, Supernatural doom, but she most certainly had never expected to be attacked in her own home and then have the attacker claim he'd only wanted to talk to her -- and after she'd nearly wiped out his entire clan of Trollspawn!
A head hit her boot, snapping a shudder from Piper before she could stop herself. She glanced toward the door. Dear Gods, her sisters could sleep through any damn thing when they'd been out all night! Instead of kicking the head away, she moved this one more gently with her foot. "You really expect me to believe you only wanted to talk to me?"
"Of course I don't expect you to believe it. That's why I wanted them to take you hostage first: so you'd have to listen to me." His giant ears wiggled on either side of his dark, ugly head. "Nobody ever believes a Troll. Nobody ever wants to talk to a Troll, or let a Troll talk."
Piper's eyes grew wide and round with shock as a tear actually dropped down his grizzled face. Either he was speaking the truth, or . . . or he was a really great actor . . . She somehow doubted he had the intelligence to be a convincing Broadway star. "How about this?" she suggested casually. "You stay where you are, don't move an inch, while I get my cupcakes out of my oven."
"What's a cupcake?" he asked, blinking big eyes.
Dumbfounded, Piper pointed at the tray behind her.
"Little cakes?" He grinned, and suddenly looked like a little boy. He sniffled even as his grin grew, revealing sharp, deadly fangs. "Neat."
"They're usually decorated with frosting, but for Halloween, I like to do frosting, spider rings, candy corn, things like that. I did do tiny sugar skulls once." She pointed at a tray of cupcakes that had miraculously gone untouched and sported gummy spiders and bat rings for their final decorative touches. She gave herself a mental shake. Why on Earth was she explaining baking and decorating for the holiday to a Troll, especially one whose small army of children had just tried to kill her?! Maybe he had ordered them to take her hostage, but they had clearly had other intentions. There was no way that axe had not been headed for her head!
"But any way," she spoke slowly, carefully, eyeing him warily the entire time, "you stay there. Don't move a muscle. I'll get my cupcakes. If you do move, I explode your kids." She jerked her head toward the three remaining, younger Trolls. "If you don't move, and you agree to send them home without any further attacks, I'll unfreeze them after."
He nodded slowly. She'd be damned if, a second later, she didn't hear him softly "ooh" as she opened her oven door and removed the last trays of cupcakes. There were a little extra brown around the edges but, for the most part, seemed okay. She hadn't known what she was going to do with all the foods she'd been baking that morning, but it didn't really matter now. All that was left were a few trays of cupcakes, and it wouldn't take her sisters long to devour them once they finally did get up and start moving around for the day.
She turned back to face him again as soon as she'd placed the cupcakes safely on top of the stove. She was no less surprised to see that he'd held true to his word and not tried to move a single inch closer while her back had been turned. "Now," she questioned him, looking boldly up at him from her relatively meager height of five foot two inches, "are we going to send your kids home?"
"I guess we can. I didn't really want them to come on this trip. They're idiots." He looked at the three heads around her feet and wondered if she'd let him pick them up later. He was tired of leaving his children all over battlefields. It would be nice to actually get to give these a proper burial. Trolls weren't the monsters all other species thought they were. Surely he deserved to at least be able to bury his children like a good father. "Looks like these others were too, because you were right. They were outright attacking you." He snorted. "Thinking they could take a Charmed One."
Piper arched an eyebrow at him but carefully sidestepped around him and the heads of his children. "I guess you can have them carry their siblings home if you want to or . . . " She almost looked a little embarrassed. " . . . what's left of them any way . . . "
"Thank you," he responded with surprising humility.
Piper's other eyebrow rose in silent question, but true to her word, she unfroze the three, who immediately continued to gobble down her pies, oblivious that they had been frozen at all. "Burly! Blabberwort! Bluebell!" He called to each of his children in time, but only the girl lifted her head at all.
A cherry fell onto her nose. She opened her mouth and tried to reach it with her tongue. She not only missed, but the tilt of her head sent the cherry shooting over to her brothers, who both tried to grab it out of the air with their mouths and ended up butting heads instead. They fell to the ground and rolled in shattered pie pans, whipped cream, pumpkin, graham crackers, and bits of their exploded brethren. Piper couldn't stop the laughter that exploded from within her. Maybe the Trolls weren't as harmful as they had seemed after all, and perhaps, just perhaps, there was a small bit of truth in their father and King.
The King walked over to his children. He somehow managed to snatch all three up by their shirt collars. Piper wasn't sure how he managed it, but she was quite certain he'd had plenty of experience doing so. He slammed their heads together as he hollered at them, "STOP ACTING LIKE BUFFOONS! YOU'RE EMBARRASSING ME!"
"Sorry, Dad," they each muttered in their own ways, rubbing their heads.
"They started it," the girl said, pointing at her brothers.
"Did not!"
"Did too!"
The King shook his head; his big, pointed ears trembled. "You all embarrass me," he muttered angrily, but aloud, he screeched, "I DON'T CARE WHO STARTED IT! I'M GOING TO FINISH IT IF YOU DON'T STOP IT ALL RIGHT NOW!"
Piper smiled; she'd often heard Grams give such a warning when she, Prue, and Phoebe had been growing up. She somehow doubted that even the three of them with all the problems they'd put their dear grandmother through had ever come close to being as much of a handful as the Troll King's children clearly were to him. The poor man was a suffering father!
"Yes, Dad," the purple-skinned one spoke. He nodded obligingly, already on his feet, as his brother and sister scrambled to stand on theirs.
"Take your siblings and leave," he ordered, his ears and bulbous nose twitching.
"Where . . . " The tallest of the three looked around them. He sniffed the air for his siblings' scents and looked even more confused. "Where are they?"
The King pointed at the three heads beside Piper. "LEAVE THE WITCH UNTOUCHED," he barked, "OR YOU'LL ANSWER TO ME!"
"But -- "
"I DON'T CARE! DO AS I SAY OR JOIN YOUR SIBLINGS!"
One by one, they filed pass Piper, lifted a head, and walked away, but every one of them shot her a furious look. She'd had to deal with children before and had often pissed employees off, but Troll children were a bit of a new experience, especially grown Troll children who still acted worse than many of the four year-olds she'd known.
When they were alone, Piper hesitantly offered, "Sh-Should I offer you a cup of coffee or . . . or something?" His children had attacked her, but clearly, this man had problems!
"I . . . " His ears wiggled, and he lowered his gaze in shame. "I've clearly caused you too much trouble already. I . . . I'm not even sure I should ask you what I came to ask you."
Piper eyed him. She was far too filled with curiosity now to just let him go. "Ask me," she said. She waved a hand around her kitchen and her destroyed, sugary concoctions. "Tell me what this was all about."
"I just wanted to ask you . . . You're the fabled Charmed One who ended up loving and marrying a White Lighter, right? And isn't your sister dating a Demon?"
Piper opened her mouth to respond with Phoebe wasn't the first one to date a Demon and probably wouldn't be the last, but she closed her lips instead. After a moment, she just answered curiously, "Yyyes."
"How did you . . . beat the species barriers? How did you catch your Angel, as it were?"
Piper stared at him in shock. "You're in love," she observed, her shock still growing.
Again tears dropped from the King's big, dark eyes. He nodded slowly, uncertain rather he could trust her but certain that he was. "With a Fairy Princess," he admitted.
It was his turn to be shocked when Piper burst into a wide grin. "Well, my story with my Angel is a bit of a long one, but I've got time if you've got time."
"Y-Yeah. Sure." He watched uncertainly as Piper bustled around the kitchen for a moment, fixing a tray of cupcakes and mugs of coffee for them each. She only came to a stop when she had the impromptu brunch prepared and was looking at her kitchen, where there was no longer a clean spot to sit. "Maybe we should go to the living room," she said and led the way, no longer afraid to turn her back to the Troll King.
Radish followed slowly and then blinked down at her in surprise when she gave him a cupcake after arranging everything on a little table in the living room. "You're . . . giving me one of these little cakes?" he asked to which she just nodded, smiled, and shrugged her shoulders.
"Sure."
Her laughter caught in her throat when he popped the entire thing, paper wrapper included, into his mouth. His eyes grew big as he chewed. She prepared to duck for when the paper hit his taste buds and he inevitably spat it out. "THIS IS THE BEST THING I'VE EVER EATEN!" he bellowed, his ears wiggling with delight.
She laughed. "Have another," she said, handing him a second cupcake, "but maybe without the paper this time."
He blinked down at her. "What's paper?"
She unwrapped the cupcake, then handed it to him, and delighted in watching his expressions of delight as he chewed. This Halloween was going to be another to remember, she realized, but maybe this time, it wouldn't be because of the Supernatural elements or, at least, not the bad ones. She needed to bake more, she realized in the next second, and save what she could of what she'd already made. This time, she had a real purpose: she was going to take trick-or-treating to the next realm, to the Fairy and Troll realm, and yes, if she at all could, she was going to help this King catch his Princess.
The End
Author: 'mi
Fandom: 10th Kingdom/Charmed
Characters/Pairing: Piper, Radish
Rating: PG/K+
Challenge/Prompt: I'm pretty sure this was supposed to also hit on some kind of crossover challenge for the month, but I don't remember which comm... Help?
Word Count: 3,000
Warnings: None
Summary: Piper's holiday baking is interrupted.
Disclaimer: All characters within belong to their rightful owners, not the author, and are used without permission.
Piper couldn't help smiling as she listened to the coffee pot gurgling. Her sisters would be up soon, and boy, were they going to be surprised! She herself was surprised, in all honesty; it had been a long time since she'd last had a baking attack and an even longer time since she'd been able to spend hours alone in the kitchen without being interrupted by one of her well-meaning family or, worse by far, a Demon. This almost felt like she was about to set some kind of record, going these many hours without an attack or a plea from the Elders to put their lives on hold to save the world for the umpteenth time.
She stood with a piping hot tray of fresh cupcakes in her hands and simply let the aromas of the kitchen wrap around her. Her brown eyes slid closed in delight, and she positively beamed. Her kitchen had not seemed this alive and bustling . . . well, since Grams had passed, leaving them to discover their powers and their destinies, whether they wanted them or not. Ginger, cocoa, sugar, flour, coffee, cinnamon, lemon, and a hundred other sweet scents wrapped around her, and Piper felt more at home, and at ease, than she had in years.
Then, of course, was when it happened. She knew they were there a split second before the guttural voices exploded in her kitchen. She dropped the cupcakes onto her oven, turned swiftly, and started exploding monsters left and right. These weren't the normal Demons, but dear God, was there ever enough of them! Too many, really. She was just beginning to consider yelling up at her sisters, who seemed oblivious to the noise, when an axe swung pass her head.
She blinked, exploded two more of the towering, ugly beings dressed in black leather and medieval garb, and yanked at the weapon's handle. "THAT WAS TOO DAMN CLOSE TO MY STOVE!" Of course it would be the next appliance they would lose in a heated, Supernatural battle, all because she was finally getting to enjoy it again. Her anger made it easy for her to whip the axe out, but the impact sent her spinning. She sliced through three necks before the blade embedded in the wall on the other side of her oven. "DAMN IT!" she screamed, knowing her family had to be hearing the fight now. "COME ON, SISTERS! I NEED YOU!"
"NO, YOU DON'T," a booming voice disagreed from somewhere behind her. "YOU'VE KILLED MORE THAN ENOUGH OF MY CHILDERN AS IT IS!"
Piper turned, and a head rolled underneath her boot. Emptied, black eyes looked up at her from a face filled with a monstrously huge nose. She shuddered and kicked it away. "DON'T KICK MY SON!"
"Hum, he is kinda dead already," Piper said, feeling a strange twinge of guilt. "He shouldn't have attacked me."
"It's the only way to get you Witches' attention."
Piper frowned, her hands still raised. Her fingers flexed. She should probably just explode this guy instead of talking to him. With a sudden jerk, she realized that he was wearing a crown. "These . . . " she spoke slowly, " . . . are all your children?" No others had rushed her yet. Had she killed all his children? Dread inched into her, making her blood feeling icy.
Before the King could answer, noises that sounded like pigs slurping up and squealing over slop took both their attention away from the fight at hand. Three Trolls, one with black skin, one with white, and one with dark purple, were rapidly gobbling down Piper's haunted house cake. All the decorations she had intricately set onto the frosting earlier were smeared everywhere. Brittle candies meant to represent bones were even crunching underneath their boots as they continued to gobble Piper's creation.
The guys -- or, at least, she thought they were guys -- pushed their sister away from the cake. She snorted and screeched in anger, picked up two pumpkin pies, and slammed them down on each of their heads. She picked up a third pie and slammed it onto her own face. As graham pieces of the crust fell away, Piper could see the female Troll rapidly licking the pie filling and whipped cream topping off of her ugly face. She shuddered and looked back at the Troll King, who actually looked rather repulsed as well.
"Well," he coughed with no small amount of embarrassment, "they are all my children, in one way or another."
Piper looked around her at the mess her kitchen had become. She'd had so many cakes, cupcakes, cookies, and pies all ready . . . for what, she didn't quite know, but they had all been finished. There were three more trays of cupcakes beginning to burn in the oven, which seemed remarkably untouched, but Piper wasn't about to turn her back to be able to rescue her cupcakes. "Pity the mothers," she remarked -- and was taken aback by how greatly the Troll King's face fell. He was far from handsome, though not as ugly as his children, but he was clearly heartbroken.
Turning her attention back onto the King, Piper took a little pity on him and froze his three remaining children rather than exploding them. "Are there any more coming?" she questioned, inching backward toward her stove.
"No." He sniffed, and she could swear he could see tears beading in his dark eyes. "I knew this was a mistake. You Witches are all the same: you just want to kill us!"
"You attacked me!" Piper exclaimed, her tone bordering on a shriek of disbelief.
"No, we entered your kitchen unbidden through yonder portal." He pointed toward the living room. Piper groaned. She really was going to have to do something about these portals that kept popping magically open in the grandfather clock. She loved that old cock. It was a family heirloom, which was why they had had it fixed so many thousands of times, but it was going to have to stop.
"I know you're not trying to tell me you didn't mean to attack me." She jerked a thumb toward the axe still embedded in her wall.
"I did want them to take you hostage," he admitted, sniffing, "but only so's I could talk to you."
Piper's jovial mood was shot to as many, messy smithereens as the pies his last three children had devoured. She could scarcely believe this! Of course Halloween's approach had meant there had to be impending, Supernatural doom, but she most certainly had never expected to be attacked in her own home and then have the attacker claim he'd only wanted to talk to her -- and after she'd nearly wiped out his entire clan of Trollspawn!
A head hit her boot, snapping a shudder from Piper before she could stop herself. She glanced toward the door. Dear Gods, her sisters could sleep through any damn thing when they'd been out all night! Instead of kicking the head away, she moved this one more gently with her foot. "You really expect me to believe you only wanted to talk to me?"
"Of course I don't expect you to believe it. That's why I wanted them to take you hostage first: so you'd have to listen to me." His giant ears wiggled on either side of his dark, ugly head. "Nobody ever believes a Troll. Nobody ever wants to talk to a Troll, or let a Troll talk."
Piper's eyes grew wide and round with shock as a tear actually dropped down his grizzled face. Either he was speaking the truth, or . . . or he was a really great actor . . . She somehow doubted he had the intelligence to be a convincing Broadway star. "How about this?" she suggested casually. "You stay where you are, don't move an inch, while I get my cupcakes out of my oven."
"What's a cupcake?" he asked, blinking big eyes.
Dumbfounded, Piper pointed at the tray behind her.
"Little cakes?" He grinned, and suddenly looked like a little boy. He sniffled even as his grin grew, revealing sharp, deadly fangs. "Neat."
"They're usually decorated with frosting, but for Halloween, I like to do frosting, spider rings, candy corn, things like that. I did do tiny sugar skulls once." She pointed at a tray of cupcakes that had miraculously gone untouched and sported gummy spiders and bat rings for their final decorative touches. She gave herself a mental shake. Why on Earth was she explaining baking and decorating for the holiday to a Troll, especially one whose small army of children had just tried to kill her?! Maybe he had ordered them to take her hostage, but they had clearly had other intentions. There was no way that axe had not been headed for her head!
"But any way," she spoke slowly, carefully, eyeing him warily the entire time, "you stay there. Don't move a muscle. I'll get my cupcakes. If you do move, I explode your kids." She jerked her head toward the three remaining, younger Trolls. "If you don't move, and you agree to send them home without any further attacks, I'll unfreeze them after."
He nodded slowly. She'd be damned if, a second later, she didn't hear him softly "ooh" as she opened her oven door and removed the last trays of cupcakes. There were a little extra brown around the edges but, for the most part, seemed okay. She hadn't known what she was going to do with all the foods she'd been baking that morning, but it didn't really matter now. All that was left were a few trays of cupcakes, and it wouldn't take her sisters long to devour them once they finally did get up and start moving around for the day.
She turned back to face him again as soon as she'd placed the cupcakes safely on top of the stove. She was no less surprised to see that he'd held true to his word and not tried to move a single inch closer while her back had been turned. "Now," she questioned him, looking boldly up at him from her relatively meager height of five foot two inches, "are we going to send your kids home?"
"I guess we can. I didn't really want them to come on this trip. They're idiots." He looked at the three heads around her feet and wondered if she'd let him pick them up later. He was tired of leaving his children all over battlefields. It would be nice to actually get to give these a proper burial. Trolls weren't the monsters all other species thought they were. Surely he deserved to at least be able to bury his children like a good father. "Looks like these others were too, because you were right. They were outright attacking you." He snorted. "Thinking they could take a Charmed One."
Piper arched an eyebrow at him but carefully sidestepped around him and the heads of his children. "I guess you can have them carry their siblings home if you want to or . . . " She almost looked a little embarrassed. " . . . what's left of them any way . . . "
"Thank you," he responded with surprising humility.
Piper's other eyebrow rose in silent question, but true to her word, she unfroze the three, who immediately continued to gobble down her pies, oblivious that they had been frozen at all. "Burly! Blabberwort! Bluebell!" He called to each of his children in time, but only the girl lifted her head at all.
A cherry fell onto her nose. She opened her mouth and tried to reach it with her tongue. She not only missed, but the tilt of her head sent the cherry shooting over to her brothers, who both tried to grab it out of the air with their mouths and ended up butting heads instead. They fell to the ground and rolled in shattered pie pans, whipped cream, pumpkin, graham crackers, and bits of their exploded brethren. Piper couldn't stop the laughter that exploded from within her. Maybe the Trolls weren't as harmful as they had seemed after all, and perhaps, just perhaps, there was a small bit of truth in their father and King.
The King walked over to his children. He somehow managed to snatch all three up by their shirt collars. Piper wasn't sure how he managed it, but she was quite certain he'd had plenty of experience doing so. He slammed their heads together as he hollered at them, "STOP ACTING LIKE BUFFOONS! YOU'RE EMBARRASSING ME!"
"Sorry, Dad," they each muttered in their own ways, rubbing their heads.
"They started it," the girl said, pointing at her brothers.
"Did not!"
"Did too!"
The King shook his head; his big, pointed ears trembled. "You all embarrass me," he muttered angrily, but aloud, he screeched, "I DON'T CARE WHO STARTED IT! I'M GOING TO FINISH IT IF YOU DON'T STOP IT ALL RIGHT NOW!"
Piper smiled; she'd often heard Grams give such a warning when she, Prue, and Phoebe had been growing up. She somehow doubted that even the three of them with all the problems they'd put their dear grandmother through had ever come close to being as much of a handful as the Troll King's children clearly were to him. The poor man was a suffering father!
"Yes, Dad," the purple-skinned one spoke. He nodded obligingly, already on his feet, as his brother and sister scrambled to stand on theirs.
"Take your siblings and leave," he ordered, his ears and bulbous nose twitching.
"Where . . . " The tallest of the three looked around them. He sniffed the air for his siblings' scents and looked even more confused. "Where are they?"
The King pointed at the three heads beside Piper. "LEAVE THE WITCH UNTOUCHED," he barked, "OR YOU'LL ANSWER TO ME!"
"But -- "
"I DON'T CARE! DO AS I SAY OR JOIN YOUR SIBLINGS!"
One by one, they filed pass Piper, lifted a head, and walked away, but every one of them shot her a furious look. She'd had to deal with children before and had often pissed employees off, but Troll children were a bit of a new experience, especially grown Troll children who still acted worse than many of the four year-olds she'd known.
When they were alone, Piper hesitantly offered, "Sh-Should I offer you a cup of coffee or . . . or something?" His children had attacked her, but clearly, this man had problems!
"I . . . " His ears wiggled, and he lowered his gaze in shame. "I've clearly caused you too much trouble already. I . . . I'm not even sure I should ask you what I came to ask you."
Piper eyed him. She was far too filled with curiosity now to just let him go. "Ask me," she said. She waved a hand around her kitchen and her destroyed, sugary concoctions. "Tell me what this was all about."
"I just wanted to ask you . . . You're the fabled Charmed One who ended up loving and marrying a White Lighter, right? And isn't your sister dating a Demon?"
Piper opened her mouth to respond with Phoebe wasn't the first one to date a Demon and probably wouldn't be the last, but she closed her lips instead. After a moment, she just answered curiously, "Yyyes."
"How did you . . . beat the species barriers? How did you catch your Angel, as it were?"
Piper stared at him in shock. "You're in love," she observed, her shock still growing.
Again tears dropped from the King's big, dark eyes. He nodded slowly, uncertain rather he could trust her but certain that he was. "With a Fairy Princess," he admitted.
It was his turn to be shocked when Piper burst into a wide grin. "Well, my story with my Angel is a bit of a long one, but I've got time if you've got time."
"Y-Yeah. Sure." He watched uncertainly as Piper bustled around the kitchen for a moment, fixing a tray of cupcakes and mugs of coffee for them each. She only came to a stop when she had the impromptu brunch prepared and was looking at her kitchen, where there was no longer a clean spot to sit. "Maybe we should go to the living room," she said and led the way, no longer afraid to turn her back to the Troll King.
Radish followed slowly and then blinked down at her in surprise when she gave him a cupcake after arranging everything on a little table in the living room. "You're . . . giving me one of these little cakes?" he asked to which she just nodded, smiled, and shrugged her shoulders.
"Sure."
Her laughter caught in her throat when he popped the entire thing, paper wrapper included, into his mouth. His eyes grew big as he chewed. She prepared to duck for when the paper hit his taste buds and he inevitably spat it out. "THIS IS THE BEST THING I'VE EVER EATEN!" he bellowed, his ears wiggling with delight.
She laughed. "Have another," she said, handing him a second cupcake, "but maybe without the paper this time."
He blinked down at her. "What's paper?"
She unwrapped the cupcake, then handed it to him, and delighted in watching his expressions of delight as he chewed. This Halloween was going to be another to remember, she realized, but maybe this time, it wouldn't be because of the Supernatural elements or, at least, not the bad ones. She needed to bake more, she realized in the next second, and save what she could of what she'd already made. This time, she had a real purpose: she was going to take trick-or-treating to the next realm, to the Fairy and Troll realm, and yes, if she at all could, she was going to help this King catch his Princess.
The End
