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.
