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Cosmo and Wanda had been retired for a long time. After their work was done with their last godchild they had decided it was time for something else. Timmy Turner had been a doozy of a godchild, and despite the caveats of their time with him they had come to love him as their own son. Really, they’d gotten more attached to him than perhaps any of their past assignments in their long, long stint as godparents. Retiring was as much a vacation as it was a way to cope.
They’d spent many many happy years together exploring all their ability to travel through time had to offer. The world was their oyster. But eventually that had lost its charm, and they began to miss their job bit by bit. They decided to try something new. See how humans lived. On more than one occasion they’d disguised themselves as humans and it always seemed to go...less than ideal. So why not actually get a good taste for human life.
They’d been living in Dimmadelphia, the rather recently developed metropolis outside of Dimmsdale, for about of year in a modest apartment building. Their old neighbor had been some old fogey who had most likely moved to get away from the fairly odd couple, and left an opening for a new family to move in.
When that happened everything seemed to suddenly move so fast. Wanda had been first to take notice of the ten year old girl. Hazel was cute and spunky, how could Wanda not. A millennia old instinct flared inside her as she zeroed in on the girl. But she reminded herself very firmly, this was just her neighbor. She did her best to focus on the family as a whole.
And then the incident in the hallway had occurred. Hazel was at her breaking point from her move and the pressure her family put on her to be mature about everything, she was lashing out and breaking down and something so strong, so instinctively natural burned in Cosmo and Wanda brighter than ever. ‘THIS KID NEEDS US’ was so obvious it might as well have been a giant neon sign hanging over Hazel’s head.
“Oh Cosmo, should we?” Wanda couldn’t finish the sentence amidst her teary eyed excitement.
Her husband tried to finish it for her “Come out of retiremen-” but his own teary eyed sentiment was interrupted by Hazel making a break for the door so she could run away from home. That burning instinct took over once again as Cosmo and Wanda gave chase, losing Hazel and watching her sail out the door and straight for an oncoming bus.
Or so it seemed for a moment.
“This ain’t a real bus, kid. It’s a prop” The driver explained to a distraught Hazel, who thought this was her ticket to the airport. “And I’m no bus driver, I’m an actor.”
Wanda was watching them, but not hearing a word as her heart wrenched. That man. It had been 10,000 years since they’d last met to Cosmo and Wanda, and a scant 30 years had passed in the human world between then and where they were now. She hadn’t really been thinking when she’d picked the time, and her heart had picked the place. As close to her last home as it would safely allow. So here she was, the victim of her subconscious choices, staring down the grown up Timmy Turner from her spot on the apartment building step.
She wanted to reach out to him. How badly she wanted to reach out to him. Say something, anything. He was right there, she would know him no matter how much time passed. But just as she’d had to do with Denzel Crocker every day of Timmy’s elementary school career, she had to force herself to separate the adult person before her from the kid she’d raised.
It didn’t help at all when her husband caught on too. “Hey Wanda, doesn’t that guy kinda remind you of-” he started before she cut him off with a sigh.
“It is Timmy, Cosmo. Seems he’s an actor now. That’s good for him.” They’d raised a lot of kids. They’d completed a lot of jobs. And as per the rules every single one of those kids had forgotten the existence of fairies at the end of it. There was no going back, ever. There was no reaching out. They’d known this when they took the job.
So they watched, in a quiet, odd moment as Timmy drove the fake bus down the block. And they watched as Hazel stormed back up the street to their stoop. And then Hazel said ‘I wish’ and suddenly Timmy didn’t matter anymore. Their bodies physically couldn’t stand not granting. It wasn’t official yet but their fates were sealed the moment Hazel had entered that apartment building. And someday all too soon Hazel would forget too. But duty bound to the good of the child before them Cosmo and Wanda couldn’t care less. They had one job in this world and one job alone. A shared purpose. They were fairy godparents.