here is a frankly bizarre and rather morbid (but very short!) fic i wrote a while back wherein feferi is a magical girl with #mind control powers. also there's #death #suicide #alcohol #violence and #blood !! you're welcome
You are the daughter of a vengeful God, and you have learned to wear a great deal of lipstick when performing your miracles.
When you're twelve years old an ugly boy about your age comes in with his teeth clenched, wringing his sweaty hands. You pour him a glass of water but his funny hands shake and break it. He tells you he's worried he has no place in your mother's empire, which is stupid because you can tell who his father was just by looking at his hook-shaped nose. "You'll go plenty far," you reassure him, and you pull out a pair of scissors. "You've just got to get out of his shadow!" The boy blinks up at you like he's stupid enough to think you don't know who he is, and you nod in the direction of his long stringy hair. "You'll sweat less when you don't have that to worry about."
He crinkles his nose and stutters an apology and sure enough, all the water in him is on his skin. His mouth is like a desert and his broken teeth feel funny against yours: funny bad, not funny good. You help him cut off his dorky locks and when you make him try his bow and arrow again, he hits the target dead center every time-- three perfect holes in the center of your mom's best china cabinet. His hands are shaking when he thanks you, and he drinks three glasses of water on his way out. "Not milk," you instruct him, "people will tell stories if you spill that on your face."
When you're thirteen, the consort's boy tells you you need a boyfriend but you're pretty sure he means he needs a girlfriend. "I've got to change my clothes," you say and while he turns around and counts to a hundred you undergo an amazing transformation-- from one pink outfit into another-- with no wand to speak of but enough imagined music to impress an entire orchestra. He says ninety-nine just as you tap him on the shoulder and he sputters around and opens his mouth to wax moronic about your stunning beauty. He's taller than you so you step on his toes and bite his lips and when he stops kissing you his eyes have fallen and he leaves your quarters as soon as you lift a finger, staggering and sniffling and punch drunk with the weight of his first rejection.
The next time you see the boy he isn't punch drunk, he's just drunk, and you fling his fruity pink drink out of his hand hard enough it breaks on the carpet. "It needs more lime juice," you tell him, and you suck on his mouth until he stops wibbling. All it takes is a peck, after all, and next thing you know you're free of him but for the stench of his carcass hanging from your willow tree.
When you're fourteen there's an earthquake and most of the servants end up buried under the bookshelves. You close your eyes and cover your ears and scream for all you're worth; you run in a thousand useless directions until your muscles swirl and burn. Even you aren't stupid enough to think you can stop a bookshelf from squashing you whole just by flapping your lips at it.
But in the end, nothing hits you, and your spine remains intact. When you peel one eyelid open you can see two bookcases staring each other face to face, respective corners inches from collision but frozen into place. Neither one of them pays the laws of physics any heed, and they're both glowing and buzzing and shifting, red-blue-red-blue and in and out of focus. A glance around the room reveals a boy with pupilless eyes and hair like a haystack of crow's feathers. Blood dribbles from his nose and saliva from his chin, and his teeth are bared, chest pushed forward-- he calls to mind a warrior until you see his frail heaving chest, and then you imagine his little baby bones snapping like stale pretzels. He's got hands raised up like claws a foot ahead of his face, and he's squatting and clenching like he's trying to take a dump in the woods.
It's just you and him in the room, because everyone else is dead, or squabbling so pathetically they may as well be. It's a nameless massacre and you and he are as gods, protected from this mortal pedantry. In three quick strides, mercifully languid to balance out his quaking, the distance between the boy and you is swallowed in a pile of sawdust and broken glass. You can feel the tendrils of your dress coiling around you of their own accord, but the dress has never been wrong before so without further consultation you kiss him to say you're grateful. It isn't an instruction, not a command or a twisting of wills-- it's a thank you; a token, a story, and a seal every bit as official as your mother's branding fork. The lines of his face soften into relief, and you can hear furniture clattering to your every side.
By the time you release him you're fully a witch, and you can see him shuddering for a brand new reason. "Thanks!" you chirp, with a flash of your teeth, and glide back the way you came. Your feet sting and crunch and bleed with broken glass, and as you exit you can hear a final bookshelf clatter and snap his spine in two. Pity, your mother would have said, he would have been a lovely bit of machinery. What she doesn't understand is that this is a mercy killing-- a thank you note for a boy who saved your life.
When you're fifteen you go sailing, but you're sick of it five miles out of home. Instead you hitch the boat up onto the muddiest shore you can find-- wild with grass so long and sharp it slices your bare legs where your tingly stupidfingers didn't already in the shower this morning. This is you on level with the rest of your kind, you'll say if they press you on it; you are merely mingling with the commoners, like every princess ought to once in a while. Your mother will spit in your face, as she's the only one whose lips you don't own, but the rest will bow and nod and wipe away their tears of gratitude.
With that in mind you march your little self straight into the brush just south of the river bank. It's a joke of a forest, but rips your muddy skirt to shreds like a champion. It gives a justification to your need to shred things apart: all these tatters clogging your stride across branches and mud and tiny bugs, it just won't do. You stare down with an animal's glee at the growing pile of pink fabric on the floor-- perfectly constructed bows and satin and lace ruined beyond repair with gray browns and grass greens. This is what you think of your place in the kingdom.
Your arms grow so tired they burn with lactic acid and when you look up there's a boy across the clearing, looking at you with predator's eyes and a smile as lazy as a dog. Within seconds you have trapped him in a handshake. "My name is Feferi Peixes," you say, eyes like glittering saucers. "I am the princess and this is me on level with the rest of my kind."
The boy frowns and his grip on your hand goes lax. Now he is cracking his strong wiry knuckles, looking at you with suspicion from under the brim of his hat. "And what ain't you on level with the rest of your kind, sister?"
You frown and tell him to check his grammar; he snorts and tells you to check your privilege. A beat of silence passes, and then you tell him he's right. "I'm not different from anybody else!" you giggle, as a dress you never will destroy curls around your feet in gentle licks. "I'm just lucky."
And you kiss him, and you pat him on the head, and he tells you he was wrong, your kind really ain't so bad. "That's racist," you chide, and he bites his lip like a scolded dog.