Title: desperate
rating: T for cursing and sexual references
Summary: when she was a senior she indoctrinated a janitor and lead the deadliest war-coven in the universe out of her college dorm. The short and tragic life of the leader of the Trix coven. [icy character study]
a/n: when did I publish Winx last? Or fanfic at all? Like last year? WOW. I've just kinda gotten back into the fandom after a while away and I felt like doing a little on Icy. She was always my favorite Trix member and one of my favorite characters. I might turn this into a three-shot with the other two Trix members if I get enough material to do so. Drop me a review and let me know what you think of this because a) I haven't written anything in a while and b) I'm not sure how well I like this. Thanks!
When they were first-years, they had no friends.
The other students laugh behind their backs, she knows. Because their clothes are cheap and they have barely any stuff. Their textbooks are early editions and the covers are falling off. They don't have phones. They don't have families.
We did, she wants to scream at them. We had family who would make you shake with fear or envy. We are royalty.
Of course, saying that would ruin everything.
When she was twelve she went by the name Icy Nistor, in an apartment on Magix with her cousins Stormy and Darcy, and Darcy's mother Aunt Rodika.
Her real name was Icy Zelisa. But she hadn't been called that since she was five and Aunt Rodkia had taken them to live in the worst part of the capitol, where they stayed up late at night listening to the people around them fight and scream and pound on the walls.
They were at school when Aunt Rodika was arrested during a police raid on a bar thought to be a meeting place for blood magicians. (It was.) When they discovered that Aunt Rodika was using a fake name, they looked further into her. When they discovered that she was a war criminal thought dead, she was taken away for trial.
The girls came home to an empty apartment, only found out what had happened when it was on the news that night. Icy didn't cry, but her cousins did, and she didn't tell them to pull themselves together even though she thought witches shouldn't cry, because she knew it would be pointless. But it wasn't as though they would ever see Rodika again, she thought. To do so would just expose them. It would be pointless. It would be as though Rodika had saved them from Grim for nothing. Rodika was nothing to them anymore, and now they had to look out for themselves.
Magix police found out Rodika lived with three children and came back to get them that same night: the first time that Darcy, sitting with her cousins on the floor of her mother's closet, wrapped the three of them in shadows, hid them completely.
The witch next door was a sympathizer with the coven, so she gave them a ride to a group home, where she told the front desk that their mother had abandoned them.
The man at the desk asked for names.
They couldn't use the names Rodika had given them anymore, so she stared unblinking at the social worker and said, "Icy Matei. These are my sisters."
But she knew her real name.
They were (she was) almost caught when she was eighteen. Just once.
The other students had stopped making fun of them and started looking up to them as it became more obvious that the three were the best pupils. And Icy knew how to control her classmates well enough. Witches had always needed an iron fist, the bitches.
So they had a lot to lose when, while summoning their Wisperian crystals, which they had only recently found a spell to access, Madame Zarathustra opened their bedroom door.
Immediately the spell died in their mouths and the energy faded away. Madame Zarathustra stood, arms crossed, looking furious, demanding to know why she felt the energy of not only dark magic but Ancestral magic. Icy felt her hands shaking as she blurted a lie, something about trying to draw on past witches for energy, pretending to be a naive student unaware of her actions. She wasn't sure the woman would believe her or not. She wasn't dumb. But there was nothing to link them to the Trix on paper, and there was no reason not to take her at her word...
When Zarathustra wrote them all detentions and left with only a short lecture, she collapsed onto her bed in relief, snapping at Stormy that it had been her job to put the shield around the room but not in a tone that was too upset.
They were just now getting started. They couldn't be stopped now. They were taking back what was theirs.
When she was fourteen she read through the application for Cloud Tower, sitting cross legged on a bottom bunk, a blanket over her head so that no one could spy on her. The sound of children crying and yelling was everywhere, all the time. There was no privacy and no peace. It never, ever, ever ended. She was ready to strangle them all. Strangle them. Suffocate them. Smother them. Just be quiet.
She was disgusted by her every possession, her every surrounding, the bottles of nail polish she shoplifted from cheap stores, the white cinderblock walls with sticky handprints, the half-broken school supplies and worn-out clothing. The shifty, edgy crowd they hung out with, who did gutless, illegal things and fought with people they didn't like. It all reeked of desperation, of hopelessness. She was a nothing, an orphan, both a refugee and a war criminal by birth. She would never be anything more.
And she knew, she knew, she could do better. Her mother Zelis had harnessed the power of Wisperian crystals and Ancestral forces and dark arts and blood magic and whatever else she needed to lead the most powerful coven in the universe. And Icy knew she had power—it boiled cold in her blood and danced just behind her eyes and buzzed at the back of her throat. Sometimes she felt she might go insane from all the magic she couldn't use, and she was sure her sisters felt the same way. She had to hide. They all had to hide what they should have been proud of. At Cloud Tower, they'd be prodigies, not problems.
But Cloud Tower was the best school in the dimension. They accepted less than two percent of their applicants. Royalty attended Cloud Tower. Orphan girls who didn't pay for nail polish did not attend Cloud Tower.
And yet they were so much more than that—so much greater than any princess. The Trix had once ruled nearly the whole universe. Icy was heiress to that glory and it needed to be restored.
"What's that?" Darcy asked as she crawled into bed next to her. Her voice was faint over the noise of the house, and all at once, Icy was sure.
"We are getting out of here," she said, through gritted teeth, feeling as though determination had turned her blood to venom and her bones to steel. "We are never coming back."
When she was a senior witch at Cloud Tower, she indoctrinated a ogre janitor and ran the deadliest coven in the universe out of a dorm room.
And she was impressed with herself.
But in a way she hated it because it was insulting. This was not what they were meant for. This was not what she was meant for. This was still hiding, and quiet, and small-scale. This was still scrappy and...and desperate, again. No matter where she went she was desperate, her situation was desperate, and she was so fucking tired of desperation.
It was that summer, the one before their senior year when they had four years of education and secret conferring with dark magics, that they began to shift from learning to acting. They had learned enough already—Icy knew she was more powerful than nearly anyone at the school, maybe even more powerful than Headmistress Griffin. She learned not just from her teachers but from the witches that had come before her; her powers weren't just the result of her coven blood but from tapping into Ancestral and black magic as an...extracurricular activity.
Now they could begin really putting things into motion, taking up where they had left off years ago after Sparx. Icy had decided to forgo the organizational woes of expanding the group. It was too risky and the payoff was minimal at best. The problem with the Trix coven of the past was that it had fought the Dragon Fire, and that was the most powerful force in the universe. Even in her history lessons it was said that the Ancestrals had never stood much of a chance when it came down to brute force. (Aunt Rodika all those years ago had called those remarks revisionist, but still.)
Why conquer something when you can tame it? Instead of beating it into submission, make it work for you? Another mistake of the past that Icy had seen a solution to, a mistake she would right this time. Her mother's leadership had defeated all the more minor obstacles and then stuck against the greatest one. Icy determined to do it the opposite way: once the Dragon was out of the way everything else would fall like it was nothing, and with the Dragon Fire behind them...
They started their research, their preparation—it all seemed oddly easier than expected, perhaps because this was the moment she'd waited for for so long. Everything seemed like it was falling into place, even if it also felt like she was spinning way out of control.
She was the leader of the Trix, and she was everything she had ever known she could be.
They don't think she's powerful, they don't think she is a threat, but they don't even know who she really is.
Valtor was a fucking trip.
It's pretty hard living in a world where everyone around you is offensively stupid and sometimes Icy wondered if it had driven her crazy. She felt like she lived half her life inside her head. She wondered if other people had thoughts at all—mostly unlikely, based on their actions. Darcy had her moments but are also had some equally ridiculous ones. Stormy was also okay but Dragon, could she be a moron sometimes.
Darkar was an idiot. Everyone was an idiot but the fact that he outmatched them in power and that sometimes he was so easy to use and sometimes he was so hard to use...she hated Darkar.
("He tricked you," Darcy smirked one day a long time later, after Omega, her lip curled up in disgust. "He double crossed you and you were the one who wanted to do that." "He tricked all of us," Icy said, and Darcy shook her head, suddenly serious, with a glare. "It's your job to make sure that doesn't happen to us.")
She hated Darkar. He was an fool.
But Valtor, as soon as she met him, saw him, she thought, 'this could be an equal to me.' He had the ambitions and the capabilities to achieve them. There was potential there.
And there was potential, because he was a fucking sociopath, and if she could go back and do it again she would've left the bastard as an ice sculpture.
She will admit that she got somewhat...distracted.
She didn't love him, but then, she didn't love anyone. That was a weakness she really just didn't need. She had been infatuated, she could now admit that. She thought that they understood each other, that he was the only one who could understand her. He reminded her of the coven at its best and most powerful time, as though she had what was rightfully hers, as though she hadn't been cheated out of all that she had been. She felt powerful—he made her feel powerful. When she was with him she felt like they were going to win.
He was a monster, though. Not that she was judging—some of the things he did she looked back on with a sort of grudging respect. He played them all against each other, sometimes to get something but more often because it was fun to watch. There was truly nothing inside him but ambition—she thought that about herself. But there was something different, something completely empty and dark, about Valtor. It was even a little scary to her, and she took the 'ice queen' descriptor as a point of pride.
(Yes, they had sex a few times. The whole thing was strictly without feelings on both parts, which was why she didn't care when he said Bloom once.
Well, she wasn't offended, and they never talked about it, but she did think it was kinda fucking weird.
Also weird was that later she found out that she was hitting her former headmistress' leftovers, and it stopped pretty quickly after that.)
Eventually she came to her senses. She didn't need someone to understand her. She could cut out the middleman and understand herself. What she needed was to get things done—what they all needed was to get things done. He wasn't strong enough, wasn't useful anymore, and they dropped him. She honestly didn't care when she walked away. He was getting to be a coward, getting to be desperate and that demon form was disgusting looking.
When she was thirteen and still considered a new addition to the group home, she almost killed a boy for touching her sister.
She was never a pretty girl, growing up. She was too blonde to have eyelashes, her large, dark-ringed eyes dwarfing her small, pale face. She looked perpetually tired. But Darcy had always been pretty, and now that they were growing up other people were beginning to notice, especially boys.
Icy didn't care at all. It wasn't something that mattered to her, the fact that men called out at Darcy as they walked down the street, adults liked her better. But one night as they stood in the dinner line, one of the louder boys walked past and slapped her ass, to the hollers and laughter of his friends.
Darcy snapped something at him as he continued away, looking somewhat shaken nevertheless. Icy felt everything in her become replaced with rage. She bent the fork in her hands. She wanted to break something. It encapsulated the humiliation of their situation: a boy, fearlessly harassing her sister in the disgusting place where they lived. Harassing a daughter of the Trix coven. If he knew who they were he would never...
She stepped out of the line. "What the hell was that?"
A couple people called "ooh," from the corners of the room.
The boy shrugged, laughing, called out some inconsequential response about her being jealous.
She stabbed him in the arm with her fork.
She had never done anything so impulsive before, although she'd always wanted to. It went straight in like cutting into a piece of meat, one tine pinning the hem of his t-shirt sleeve into his flesh, and stood there for a moment in surprise at herself.
He screamed in pain and swung at her, and coming back to her senses she dodged his arm and kicked him in the knees, grabbing him by the back of his hair and smashing his head into the tray station. He stumbled and fell to the ground; she knelt too, raking at his face with her nails, trying to satisfy the rage burning inside of her. His friends, who had at first laughed, had scattered. Everyone was starting to run—out of her way, out of the room. He struggled, trying to whisper some attack spell or push her off but while small, she was vicious and started slamming his head against the floor.
It was then that the overseers, called by the cook who hated dealing with the kids himself, grabbed her by the arms and ripped her off him. She didn't let go and a tuft of his hair came off in her left hand. The boy didn't get up. His eyes were closed. Icy wondered remorselessly if she'd killed him. He should be dead. The only thing wrong about that was that she'd get in trouble. His skin was under her fingernails.
They took the boy away and gave her a good lecture later, but they weren't prepared to do anything and they all knew it. They had only been at the home for a few months, but after that, half the place—even the caretakers—didn't talk to her out of fear and the other half called her a psycho bitch.
It didn't lead to a big sisterly bonding moment, but they didn't really have big sisterly bonding moments. Darcy was annoyed that she'd done it and Stormy was annoyed that she hadn't done it herself.
Icy felt nothing about it. It didn't change anything.
Here is a secret that she never told her sisters.
Every moment she possessed the Dragon Fire was agony.
When fighting, she could ignore it, even exalt in it, in the sign of her victory. It gave her an extra fury on the battlefield.
But off it she felt like she was going to die.
Sometimes she really thought she was going to die, die right on the ground, killed by the thing she had spent her life seeking, killed when they were finally beginning to succeed. Her teachers at Cloud Tower had always warned against mixing radically different magic, and she supposed ice powers enhanced with dark magic didn't react well to the most powerful light and fire magic in the universe.
But who really cared? No one, she told herself. Light and dark were mostly social constructs. The Dragon Fire was power, raw power, and it was worth every breath and heartbeat feeling like rotting and burning at the same time.
The very first moment she met Bloom, stumbling down an alley with all the subtlety of a drunk horse, she honestly hadn't thought anything of it. Not anything. It wasn't just them who pranked the Alfea fairies; it was something all Cloud Tower girls did. Icy probably wouldn't have bothered with it much if earning the witches' admiration wasn't important to their end plan, if she didn't have a reputation to uphold. Fairies just weren't relevant unless they started trying to kill you, another mistake of her mother's she was correcting.
Even when she sees them all together it's just kind of funny. Icy's good at sensing power: social, magical, physical. Stormy mutters to her as they go back to their dorms that she didn't think the little fairies would be that strong, and Icy thinks to herself that this is why she is the coven leader and not Stormy: Stormy is careless, and she underestimates. She is strong and ruthless but not meticulous like Icy.
Let the Alfea kids have magic, she says, it doesn't matter for the long run.
Of course she's biting back her words when the fucking Winx Club start intervening in their plans, but that's also fine in a way. Instead of focusing on an already-frozen planet, on long dead fairies and witches, on the people who used to be a problem for the Trix, Icy now knows who is in her way. That's half the battle, right?
When she was a little older than five, her planet was destroyed and her mother died.
There was no point in her childhood when she didn't know she was meant to be the next leader of the Trix, no point when she wasn't entwined with dark magic like it was a nanny. Their Magix apartment was covered with Trix contraband; there were forbidden spellbooks in the linen closets and a bookcase over a pantry where Aunt Rodika and her friends went to talk sometimes (the kids weren't allowed in.)
But before that she grew up at first living in a dark stone castle on Grim, of which her memories were incomplete: the embroidered rug on the floor of her room, the taste of bread in the Great Hall, the sound of a scolding by the coven nursemaid, how the brightness of her mother's Wisperian Crystal stung her eyes in the shadowy rooms.
The Company of Light just about razed the planet to dust soon after the Ancestrals were defeated. She didn't remember the days before that nighttime attack, but she imagined everyone had been expecting it since news of the Ancestrals broke, and that they were ready, but it wasn't enough.
Sometimes when they talked about the War in school, she let her mind wander, imagined her mother pacing the floors, frustrated, resigned, scared, knowing the final attack would come but helpless to stop it or know when. She imagined herself, sitting under a table with Darcy and Stormy, who at that point were still her cousins. She wondered if they had known something was going to happen from the worried looks on the adults' faces, the whispers and the tears the members of the coven must have indulged in as they realized they were waiting for their death. After all, the Company of Light would find them wherever they went. She wondered if she had been afraid.
But all she actually remembered was being woken up in the middle of the night by Rodika, and being pulled out of bed, told to put on her shoes but that there wasn't enough time to get dressed. She remembered Rodika using one of the few secure portals left to take them to Magix.
Icy wasn't very sad when she heard that her mother had died, even when she was little. She didn't really know her mother at all and saw her about as much as she saw her aunts, or the coven nursemaids. When she got older, the thought of the coven and her mother preparing for death was the closest to romantic she ever got—dying for the coven in pursuit of power. She didn't exactly love the coven—it was more of a tool than a thing to love—but she loved power. Her mother and that generation of witches had made too many mistakes, and there was some justice in those mistakes catching up to them. She wouldn't do the same. This time they'd be better.
Icy had only ever seen her mother in an old photograph of Aunt Rodika's. She never saw it again after leaving the apartment, but she remembered it well: their mothers as teenagers, still students experimenting with blood magic, a decade before their children were born. They all grinned into the camera, holding out their forearms, each of which bore a single, bleeding cut. Blood dripped down their pale arms and into their outstretched palms.
We'll be better than that, she thought every time she looked at the picture. We won't be beat up and humiliated.
She does not always like her sisters. In fact she can't say if she likes them more often than not.
But she knows them and they know her. Stormy is always stomping up the stairs and slamming doors, even when she's not mad (though she's usually mad). Darcy never makes a sound and you don't notice her til she's behind you. She loves to startle people, it makes her smile. Stormy will watch whatever sports game is on and get irrationally invested in the outcome. When Darcy is getting a guy, whether for business or pleasure, she likes to change her interests to match his for a few days.
Her sisters are the only ones who know that she actually reads a lot. Spell books, magical theory books, history books. Sometimes she even reads something fictional, if she wants to take her mind off the shit probably happening around her.
They're not ideal. She finds Darcy too lazy and Stormy too zealous. They're all too competitive. And they're always bitching, especially at her.
Still, they only have one another. It's not like there's love there, but there is blood—blood of the most powerful magical dynasty this millennium—
and you can only trust family anyway.
The fact that she—all of them—are just hurtling faster and faster towards their deaths is something she refuses to think about.
But she knows it. Refuses to believe it, of course, because she's arrogant. She's always known she was arrogant. She has ripped herself apart a thousand times because lack of self-awareness was how their coven was destroyed years ago. It still doesn't seem to help. Nothing seems to help.
At times the feeling is like being stuck on a car that's rolling down a hill, or a runaway craft streaking through the sky. She can't control it even though every day she swears she can. She can't stop it. She can't get off. She will take what is hers or die trying.
She is so tired of losing.
Is it going to work? Is anything going to work? She keeps saying yes, eventually, once we are powerful enough—once we find the right spell, summon the right spirit, find the stronger ally—
She will not allow herself to acknowledge any other idea, but it's started to seem like just prolonging the inevitable even to her. Sometimes she wonders if she should just see how many of the Winx she could take down with her and cut her losses, but it's not just herself she has to think about. It's not even her sisters. It's the whole coven, its past and its future.
She is the sum of millienia of cruel deals and blood magic and dark powers and endless lust for power, and she can't fucking do it—
When she is twenty four, she is imprisoned for the last time.
She spends her days sitting in a cylindrical room approximately six steps across, with bares across the ceiling exactly two inches taller than she is. Above the bars there is black nothingness. They've cut off her hair, yet they let her eat with a knife and fork, because they know she has no chance of escape. There is no one to talk to here except herself. She knows they are watching her.
She has no powers, and she doesn't recognize herself without an ice-cold feeling in her chest and strength at her fingertips. She hates this. She hates herself. She does not cry because that is not how she hates; she claws at herself with nails cut so short they barely brush her skin. She wants to rip her skin off. They never turn the lights off here.
Where is the peace? She had thought that if anything, the fact that she could never try again would bring her a measure of peace. The fact that she could stop trying. Maybe for once in her life she could stop being desperate and just be.
There is no peace. Peace does not exist for her. She is desperate to rip off her skin, chew through her own heart, anything to end this meaningless, humiliating existence. Where are her sisters? She hates them. She misses them. Where are they? She hates them. She doesn't even understand how to live without her power. She misses them. She is her power. She is her power. Her head is empty and quiet and she has to get out has to get out has to get out
She is so much more than this. She cannot stay here—will not stay here. With all the tools they have left her, it's like they wanted her to escape. Did they want her to do it? It doesn't matter now.
On the morning of her twenty fifth birthday, she hangs herself.