queen-of-france asked: "More than a second/ When reading the newspaper/ I felt the war/ I felt her exposed position/ I saw myself in the picture/ And I/ I took a cab there to hold her/ I took a plane there to feel what she felt/ You make me like charity/ Instead of paying enough taxes" - The Knife, "You Make Me Like Charity"

“It’s not going to hurt,” Fey said, defensively. Victoria forced a smile.

“I bet you tell that to all the people you possess.”

“I’m just curious,” the girl said, and Victoria smiled. Of course she’s curious. It was a virtue, curiosity in a faerie. It was something to be cultivated, nurtured, (extorted).

“You think you still have time to change class?” Victoria didn’t really need the answer, but it was something to say as the young blonde girl moved around the room. Of course Fey could change class. If she actually showed her true ability, control, craftsmanship, if Fey actually let people see what she’s capable of, she’d have no trouble rocketing from the bottom of the Ambassadors to the top of the Elites. It would happen overnight, and it would come as effortlessly to her as everything else does. (Everything, it seems, except being sub-par. Victoria could see the strain her friend was under, trying to rein herself and her magic in. It was work to not be as good as she naturally was, far more work than it would be to be better than everyone else. Everyone else.)

“Why are you frowning?” Victoria shook the expression away and Fey went on. “A year is a long time, Tori. I just…I know why I’m an Ambassador, why I want to be one, I just want to see.”

“See what?” One year old Elites did everything an eighty years old Elite would. There was no learning curve for the class after school. There was success or death.

“See if I’m right.”

—-

A week later, when Victoria came back so Fey could lift the enchantment, could stop living through her, they didn’t speak until it was all done and the magic dispersed.

“Well, were you?” was all Victoria asked, quietly. She could see the answer on Fey’s face already, and the silence only confirmed it.

A year later, Fey graduated as a barely mediocre Ambassador. Victoria didn’t attend the graduation, and never bothered to congratulate Fey on working so hard to achieve so little.

queen-of-france asked: "Count to five and shut your eyes/ You'll find that everything's still there/ A little slower, less alive/ And I've got lizards in my hair/ Still I chew my daily bread/ I cannot let go of my thread/ You still scream inside my head/ All the things I should have said/ Never said, never say/ And the cat ripped out my tongue/ The vulture swooped and stole my eyes/ I'm scavenging crumbs/ in the kingdom of the flies" - The Legendary Pink Dots, "Kingdom of the Flies"

Fey thought a homecoming was supposed to be a party. Some kind of happy occasion, with a welcome banner and smiling old friends. (She’d forgotten, for a moment, that her only friend wasn’t one anymore, that the only person she spent time with was off waging war somewhere, following orders somewhere, being loyal somewhere.)

Instead her homecoming was a chilled meal and a cautious smile from her father, a cool look of pity from her mother. She accepted both, and returned neither. She asked about old family friends and received strained, false replies after cautious looks. They asked how long she would stay and they said it the way she thought they would, they said it leading her to leave, leading her to take the terrible magic elsewhere, away from here. Faeries aren’t welcome anywhere, least of all in this house. But they were her parents, and all the snide remarks her mother has mumbled and whispered over the years against the school and the teachers and Madame Organ herself, all of them didn’t matter.

She was their little girl, and though she’d never admit it, she believed every mark, always. Believed it growing up and now knowing, for sure, that she agrees with them. She agrees she should have hidden. She should have ran away, denied her birthright, her birth-enslavement, hidden and lived in a small villiage which doesn’t like magic, doesn’t like faeries, hidden and lived free and happy and unbroken.

But it was too late, far too late.

Faeries aren’t welcome here.

queen-of-france asked: "Ankles crossed like fair Victoria/ for the glory of the empire/ kneels examining the floor/ Retreats on cushions/leaves you staring at a mirror/ that's all cracks and curves on all sides" - The Legendary Pink Dots, "Inside"

The cruelest things we do, we do to ourselves. It was strange for a faerie to adopt this saying, this philosophy, given that their entire race was based on and thrived on cruelty, their entire being was a self-proclaimed ascention to divinity by proving they were the strongest, the cruelest, and no one dared challenge them. But Fey didn’t think herself a god, and she couldn’t think herself a human; if she was really lucky, sometimes she could close her eyes and think herself a person (albeit a broken one). She saved all her cruelty for herself.

She’d look in the mirror and wave a hand, and her reflection would morph and change until it was Victoria staring back. Not Victoria’s angular face or short haircut, not her high cheek bones or small, almond eyes, but the way she extended her neck to look taller or the way she set her shoulders back, walking around like a bird trying to impress the others in the flock, walking like that and having it work. Fey looked in the mirror and Victoria’s mannerisms stared back at her through her own face. That small hint of a smile, the way she tilted her head up so you could see the underside of her chin, the way she moved herself to constantly be looking down on you.

Fey stared at what she should have been. A faerie. A warrior. A cruel creation, so far removed from nature’s original design that they’re barely recognizable anymore. They walked in human bodies with faerie wings of pure magic behind them, they walked and almost blended in, almost looked like a normal person, almost looked decent.

But on the inside, they were all like this reflection. All, except her.