Clelia gently placed the glass of milk in the corner of the reception room, an operation that wasn't made any easier by her elaborate wedding gown, nor by the crowd of guests staring at her with bated breath as she did so.

A little galvanised by the power she seemingly held over her audience, she firmly ordered, "From now on, all of you refrain from looking towards this corner."

The silence that followed protracted a little too long for comfort, so she walked back toward Damian, the groom, the only person in the room she had met only twice before, instead of never.

She adjusted her big round glasses and cleared her throat. "Music?"

As the musicians started playing a waltz, the tall boy in front of her elegantly extended his big hand and tried asking, "Shall we da…"

"I said no looking towards the corner," Clelia bellowed, interrupting him and pointing her finger at a middle aged lady standing besides a table.

The woman defeatedly pointed her eyes downwards, hiding her arms behind her back, like a child being reprimanded by her teacher.

The boy in front of her tilted his head a little. "Alright, let's try that again. Shall we dance?"

Clelia's head sank a little in between her shoulders as she took his hand. "Sorry about that. The lutin are quite timid, they won't take the milk if they think they're being observed."

"Timid you say?" He chuckled. "Didn't they just pour anchovy paste in the shoes of some of the guests?"

"And they did so without being noticed, did they not?" She pointedly remarked.

"Fair enough." He conceded.

Damian tried grabbing her by the waist, to which she instinctively retracted.

"Is everything fine?" He asked.

She looked around them and saw that every couple was dancing with the man holding the woman by the waist and the woman holding her hand on the man's shoulder.

"I'm sorry." She hesitantly placed her hand on his shoulder, "this is the first time I danced a human dance."

As he grabbed her by the waist, she nervously adjusted the veil of her pointy hat.

"Follow my lead then." He winked with his grey eyes.

She tried keeping up with him, her eyes glued on the ground to observe his feet moving, which, once again, was not made easier by her wedding gown.

He chuckled. "Hey, careful, you might gouge my eyes with your hat if you keep your head down like that."

Without missing a beat, she asked, "How am I supposed to follow you if I can't see where you put your feet?"

"Come on, the steps are not complicated. Just keep doing what you're doing now, but eyes on me instead."

Clelia tried obeying, but every one of her muscles felt stiff. She tried replicating the few steps she had been following up until then, while following both Damian and the music, but she was still somewhat busy understanding how she felt about being touched like that, especially by a boy, a human boy no less, and one that was much more handsome than she had anticipated before meeting him.

He was very different from the wispy and willowy faerie boys she had grown up with, but at the same time he was a far cry from the boorish image of human men that all other fairies in her life had always painted to her. He was tall, with wide shoulders and solid arms, but he kept his back straight and chin up, his dark hair in order and his face clean shaven. He looked sturdy, yet distinguished, elegant even. His clothes were made out of some thick and yet smooth black fabric, extremely finely woven. Some sort of soft and thin white scarf wrapped around his neck and then went down his chest and into the dark suit. A small grey gem, the same colour as his eyes, was pinned on the dainty little knot keeping the scarf in place, right where the neck meets the chest. Being raised in the Arania gens she knew all about fabrics and cloths, and there was no doubt that what he was wearing was really high quality. Yet, despite her knowledge, she wasn't quite sure she could pinpoint the exact material of his clothes: was it cotton? Perhaps, but even if that were to be the case it definitely had been prepared through some process she had never seen before.

When the music ended, she let out a sigh of relief. "I hope I didn't embarrass you too much in front of your family with my poor dancing."

"Well, you didn't step on my feet," he shrugged, "which may not be much, but it still makes you not the worse dancing partner I had to date."

She would have snickered a little to that, but she was still extremely stiff both from the dancing as well as from how taxing the day had been up until that point.

She sneaked a glance toward the corner where she had left the milk earlier.

"What?" He asked her.

"Looks like they got our offering." She adjusted her glasses again. "For a little while, our guests should be free from worrying about lutin pranks."

Her newly wed husband looked her in the eyes and said, "You look truly exhausted. Do you want to go and have a seat? Right now we're no longer the centre of all the attention, so you may be able to find a few minutes to breathe a little."

"You don't have to ask me twice."

Being able to finally rest on a chair in a corner was a godsend for Clelia. Damian had been stolen by some cousin, but having a little time to herself wasn't unwelcome at all, even if everyone else but him were strangers to her. Well, not like she knew him very well either. And, in any case, the crowd of humans around her felt in some ways less intimidating than her own family. For one, she had soon realised just how on guard most of them seemed to be about her. She was, after all, probably the first fairy they had ever seen in their lives. She was well aware that she did not impose the same level of authority as her mother did, but she also knew that humans were wary of faerie creatures in general, and even in their ignorance humans definitely respected the famed power of noble fairies, such as her.

Then again, the reason why her mother had decided that Clelia could be pawned off to some lowly human was that she was, by far, the weakest fairy of her gens, but there was no need for any of the humans to know any of that, was there?

She hadn't been alone with her thoughts even for a full minute before a towering woman decided to sit besides her.

"Hello and welcome, miss… well, I guess Mrs Neumann, since you married little Damian."

The woman's age was difficult to pin down: she could easily pass for someone in her thirties, but Clelia wouldn't have been too shocked if she turned out to be fifty. She had an elegant dress of a soft shade of red and a wide extravagant hat with long feathers of matching colour. Of the same red, she also wore extremely long sleeves separated from her dress. One detail that captured Clelia's attention was that the woman's long eyelashes seemed to shimmer a little, as if there were tiny dew droplets trapped in between them.

"Um, thank you, miss…"

The tall figure, way taller than even Damian was, giggled. "Oh sweetie, you don't need to be so formal with me, call me auntie Lucia."

"You're, uh… Damian's aunt?"

"Indeed, indeed," aunt Lucia chirped enthusiastically, "on his mother's side. Can I call you by name too?"

Clelia was a little taken aback by the level of familiarity that the woman was showing to her, but felt that she couldn't say no. "I'm Clelia."

"Hmm, what a pretty name you have", cooed the apparition in red. "So, Clelia, can you tell me a little about the ceremony today?"

"The… ceremony?"

"Yes, the vows, the rite, the wedding. If I absolutely must share a tiny secret with you, sweetie, I am a little upset that I didn't get to be at the ceremony of my beloved nephew's wedding." Aunt Lucia emoted every word as if she had been an overly enthusiastic actor giving their life's performance on stage.

"Unfortunately," the dramatic woman continued, "it seems that your family didn't want anyone outside of the two betrothed and their parents."

Clelia fidgeted with the bridge of her glasses. "That's customary for a traditional faerie wedding: the feast after the vows have been exchanged is public and usually involves everyone willing to participate, but the actual ceremony is an intimate affair."

"Hmm, is that so? My my, your kind lives so close to us, and yet we barely know each other, it seems. Isn't that such a shame?"

Caressing the temples of her glasses, Clelia nodded, staring at the ground. Was "auntie" Lucia ever going to leave her alone for a moment? She really desperately wanted some breathing room, but the tall woman didn't seem to have any intention of leaving.

"Hmm? You seem to touch your glasses a lot, sweetie. To be absolutely honest with you, I did not think fairies wore glasses at all."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Clelia's hands snapped off of her glasses and settled on her lap instead. "We… usually don't. These were… a present."

The young fairy expected aunt Lucia to resume interrogating her, but, to her surprise, she didn't. At first, the stiffness in her shoulders lightened up a bit and she breathed a little easier. However, as the silence protracted, Clelia's uneasiness started building up again: she hadn't been looking in the woman's direction for a while, but she had the distinct impression that she, on the other hand, had been staring at her. Her shoulders tensed up again and each breath seemed to bring in less and less air. Against her better judgement, she glanced toward the woman sitting besides her.

As soon as Clelia's gaze met aunt Lucia's, the latter gave her a big warm smile. However, for just an instant, the fairy had been able to see her true expression, before she had been able to change it: her grey eyes, almost identical to Damian's, had been indeed staring at her, with an impenetrable coldness that contrasted heavily with the sappy warmth she had been showing not a few moments prior. She felt something crawling on the back of her neck: that cold stare reminded Clelia of her own mother.

***

Damian swiftly downed a full glass of Prosecco. He didn't usually drink alcohol, he much preferred keeping a cool head, but that day was seriously testing his ability to keep sane and he hoped the sweet white wine would help him, somehow. He put the glass back on the table. It did absolutely nothing, except sending a light shiver through the back of his neck, and, perhaps, making it a little easier to ignore his cousin Umberto's chattering.

He was a married man. Married. As in, he now had a wife. A wife. Of course, it had been in planning for quite a while and he had been aware of it all along; in fact he had taken active part in the negotiations at some points. But, for some reason, only now it really felt, well, real. He had only a few months prior graduated from school and now he was married.

He had taken a carriage ride all the way to that shrine in the forest where the traditional faerie wedding, the one that was negotiated with the mother of the bride, took place, and on the ride back the seat on his side was occupied by that girl, that girl that was now his wife. That's the first time it actually all felt real. Before that, the concept that he was going to get married was nothing more than a subject of conversation, ink on documents at most. But, on that carriage, despite the fact that technically it wasn't the first time they had met, it really sunk in the fact that a living, breathing, thinking, feeling girl was now supposed to be his life partner. Not just any girl either, an actual fairy. Of course, that had been part of the plans, part of his own plans too, but…

"… In any case, man, they really dumped the runt of the litter on you, huh?"

His musings were interrupted by this one sentence in Umberto's endless gabble. He responded to it quite in the same way he did all the other rhetorical questions in his cousin's word flood: by politely smiling and nodding. But, unlike all the other such questions, he was unable to completely ignore that one sentence. Because, well, that one felt true.

The image and prestige of the fairies: that was the whole point behind his father wanting to organise that wedding in the first place. In the last few years, it had become somewhat fashionable for industrialists, such as his father, to set their sons up with a fairy. Powerful, beautiful creatures, with a mystical aura to them. They appeared in all sorts of tales, and in the picture books they were depicted as tall, gorgeous, and elegant beings, dressed like dames from a bygone era, sometimes with a long magic wand.

The month prior, him and his older brother had been given audience in the castle of his soon-to-be bride's family and there they met her mother, the famed Lausenna the fay. Suffice it to say, they both felt that she lived up to the legend. Then, they met Clelia.

Clelia was… cute. She was cute quite in the same way that some of Damian's former classmates, the ones he had gone to school with up until a few months prior, could have been described. In other words, when saying that she wasn't the kind of beauty they were expecting from a fairy, he didn't mean that she was ugly or anything, she was just… mundane. And she was also quite small. Not in the sense that she was especially short, he had known shorter women and girls, nor that she was excessively skinny. No, she just had a small frame: small shoulders, small waist, small hips. She was perhaps a couple of years younger than him and absolutely looked like it. In other words, instead of a fairy she resembled more… just some kid in the the same age bracket as him.

That fact made things very difficult for Damian.

He poured himself another glass of wine, but stopped just before drinking. He had noticed aunt Lucia sitting right besides his bride. He put the glass down, excused himself from his cousin and took off towards them without giving it a second thought. He knew the best way to deal with his aunt: giving her a taste of her own medicine.

He put on the biggest smile he could muster. "Hi, auntie, I can see that you're getting along with the bride."

"Oh, Damian!" Sang his aunt. "You found yourself such a cute little wifey…" Damian had to seriously restrain himself from shuddering in disgust hearing that phrase.

"Indeed," he interrupted, "and it is now time for the two of us to… go take a commemorative stroll."

Aunt Lucia raised a brow. "Commemorative stroll, dearie?"

"Yes, it's, uh… apparently a tradition in faerie weddings for the bride and groom to take some time off during the reception, to let the emotions of the day sink in. We will be back in time for dinner, of course."

Aunt Lucia adjusted one of the long feathers in her huge hat. "Ah, but can't you wait just until I got to know her a little better? I'd like to learn more about…"

"I have to insist, auntie," he interrupted again, "for you see…"

Uttered calmly, one single word made both Damian and his aunt stop in their tracks. "Enough."

Both turned to face Clelia. Her gaze was calm, focused, intense, and the air around her almost seemed to tremble like it does around a flame. She had spoken quietly, and yet her tone carried with it some kind of powerful pressure, stronger than any amount of shouting.

The fairy's focused expression turned into a polite smile. "It has been truly nice to meet you, aunt Lucia, but my husband requires my presence, and I shall respond to his request."

"…Very well. Then, I wish you two a nice… stroll." Responded the woman, still visibly shaken by Clelia's display of power.

"Commemorative stroll, huh?" Asked Clelia as they stepped on the bridge over the green pond.

Looking at her now, she once again resembled a regular girl their age, but Damian couldn't completely shake off the wariness caused by her little trick a few minutes earlier.

"I didn't know about that faerie tradition myself," she continued.

"Of course you didn't, I just made it up. You seemed in trouble and so I found some excuse to get you out of it." He cleared his throat, trying to find the courage to go to the next step in his program. "Plus, I would appreciate a little quiet time, away from the crowd and our respective families, to get to know you a little better."

Clelia fiddled with the frame of her glasses. "I guess this really is the first time we get to speak with one another away from anyone else."

He nodded. "So, I know it's a little strange to ask only after it's all done, but how do you feel about this marriage?"

She leaned on the banister, staring at the still water beneath them. "I feel… fine. To be quite blunt, the idea of me being married feels strange. But, at the same time, I'm not nearly as afraid as I thought I might be."

"I see…"

They remained silent for a little while. And yet, despite the fact that he couldn't think of anything else to say right away, for some reason Damian did not feel awkward, and Clelia seemed pretty relaxed too. A dragonfly floated in front of her and, for the briefest instant, he thought he saw sorrow in her eyes.

"Ah!" She suddenly turned toward him. "I just remembered that I didn't give you my wedding present yet."

Damian tilted his head. "Wedding present?"

"Yes," she nodded enthusiastically, "to reciprocate. I'm very grateful for the glasses you and your mother bought to me the second time we met, so, in these two weeks that passed between then and now, I've been working on something to give back."

She pinched and pulled a thread in her wedding gown, which somehow came off without damaging the beautiful dress. The string danced and swirled in the air for a few moments, then it solidified in Clelia's hand, becoming a magic wand. There it was, right in front of him: the entire reason why Damian had accepted to go along with the whole idea of marrying a fairy long before meeting Clelia.

She lightly touched his head with it, but had to stretch her arm to do it due to the fact that he was almost a full head taller than her. "It's not much, but I will grant you a small boon. Do you have any trouble sleeping, like suffering nightmares or not being able to fall asleep? Or maybe certain kinds of food upset your stomach? Or any other kind of small everyday inconvenience such as those?"

"Aside from having to deal every day with my brothers and cousins you mean?" He deadpanned.

She chuckled. "Be serious, please."

He shook his head. "I can't think of anything right now."

"Oh." She lowered her wand, which turned back into a thread and floated back in her gown. "Well, if anything comes up do let me know, please."

"I sure will."

Then she went back to leaning on the banister and he followed suit. Another gentle silence fell between them for a few moments. When she started toying with the frame of her glasses again, he found his chance to ask something he had been wondering for a while: it reminded him of the first time he met her. It was extremely obvious just how visually impaired she was, since she always squinted her eyes and had visible trouble following what was happening around her.

"Say, Clelia, why does a fairy need glasses anyway? Isn't it possible to correct eyesight with magic?"

"It is but…" her gaze turned somewhat gloom. "You see, not all fairies can do everything with magic, our families tend to specialise each in one area of spell-crafting. I… I was never able to negotiate a favour from a fairy capable of dealing with eyesight."

"Well, couldn't your mother arrange something for you? Isn't she very influential?"

Clelia sighed, but didn't respond. Damian knew better than to insist.

***

As the silence protracted, Clelia started feeling a little guilty over not giving a full answer, but at the same time she didn't think it was wise to reveal how much of a failure her family considered her to be. And yet, she felt like she needed to open up to him somewhat. After all, all he ever did until then was showing her nothing but kindness, and all she had been able to reciprocate with was… what, offering to stop some nightmares? How pathetic. And it was all the more pathetic in light of the true reason why she enthusiastically accepted the plans for the marriage long before even meeting Damian. Even though she didn't know him yet and didn't know if she could fully trust him, she still felt like he deserved better.

"You know," she started, without even considering what she was going to say next, "when you and your mother brought me and my chaperone into town, I though it was just to show me around the place I would be living in after the marriage. But then we went to that… opto-something, and he started trying lenses on me. I… I simply could not believe just how much these little objects would be capable of improving my eyesight. I saw, for the first time in my life, the world around me with absolute clarity. I really, really cannot put into words how I felt back then, I was…" she realised she was welling up and her voice was cracking up a bit,"…completely speechless." She moved away her glasses a little to wipe away a tear that was forming. "I was astonished that you humans managed to achieve something like that without having to use magic. I… cannot express just how grateful I am for this gift that you gave me. I swear, I will try my best to do something to return this little miracle."

She turned away from him, sniffling and trying to calm down, since she really didn't want to look that way in front of him. His hand materialised in front of her, offering a handkerchief. She thanked him and accepted. What was wrong with her? She had long outgrown her crybaby phase, why was just recalling that moment in the glass shop enough to make her burst like that? Could it be that the exhaustion from the rest of the day, as well as the long stressful days of preparation before, were also taking their toll?

"It's alright," she heard his voice tell her, "I certainly didn't give you those glasses to expect something in exchange. However, if you still feel the need to return the favour, you'll have plenty of time to come up with something. After all, we are married now."

A tiny hint of guilt poked her chest. It was true, she did have time, but not quite as much as he seemed to think. After all, the reason why she happily went along with the whole idea of marrying a human in the first place was to get out of her mother's castle; and then, as soon as she could, to flee as far away from her family as possible, with or without her new consort.