A/N: Written for the

Diversity Writing Challenge, d83 - write an AU
WIXOSS bingo, the non-flash version, #035 - Ruko/Mayu
The Sinnoh League Challenge - general version, Route 201 pt 2 - write about an intangible thing that doesn't strictly belong to a character

Summer Fairies in the Long Winter Gloom

People can't get in or out of rooms with no doors and just a window far out of reach, but other things can. Like ghosts but ghosts are scary things: bodiless voices and she doesn't want them. They're scary. But the fairy godmother could sneak in through the walls as well, and she was Cinderella waiting eagerly for her.

Fairy godmother would be flying in the sky outside, looking for the smoke from lonely smoulders and swooping down into her room with no doors and no windows: no way in or out. But the fairy godmother was magic. She could make a door where no door existed, a window that could look further than outside the world and wings on her bare back where her thin dress straps slipped off.

Fairy godmother would come in and play with her and whisk her away from this prison-like room and banish the ghosts that lurked outside as well.

.

Fairies didn't like dark places by definition but she wasn't a typical fairy. She loved the sun but she didn't mind the dark either and she'd flitter between the two. That made her less blind than other fairies, she thought. It also made her less pure, if one listened to them.

She didn't care what others said for the most part. Her mother was the exception. Always the exception. But her grandmother said she herself and not her mother or the other fairies knew best what was right, and her brother thought she was happier now that she was listening to herself a little more.

Which meant she had cared, once upon a time. She was glad she'd met people to move away from that.

And it all began with a white spirit, funnily enough. A strange white spirit, to be sure, that only made mewls like a cat and sounds like a bell.

She called her Tama because of the bell.

.

The fairy godmother didn't come, at first. So she tried to dream one up: magic that would light up her room and she did - but then it was too bright and she needed something pitch black to tailor it. And somewhere along the line she imagined them as the angels on her right and left shoulders instead of the fairy godmother and they had only one purpose: to keep her happy.

So she created the white spirit and the black spirit and she didn't realise she'd had that power all along.

Maybe she'd created the ghosts as well.

Maybe she could create the fairy godmother as well.

And maybe these spirits of hers could get rid of the ghosts outside the door as well.

.

She and Tama had fun. They played together. Fought other creatures and grew stronger together and it was so much fun fighting alongside Tama.

It was also fun spending time with Tama otherwise, and the friends she'd made as a result of having met her.

But sometimes, Tama lurked near the mansion near the library - and then there was an incident and she realised why.

Fairies always fled from the smell of death and it was strong - so strong - in that place, and so suddenly too. Something else. And Tama leads her right to it because she's not like other fairies and she can stomach that.

Some even go so far as to say she enjoys it. And she does in a way. It stirs something different in her. It's somewhat intoxicating. It makes her restless in a way the perfect world doesn't allow but she already knew she didn't fit into the perfect world. She was searching for a world that better fit her.

And why did she feel it was lurking behind that black cloud.

And then she met her. The black spirit.

And she watched white and black clash and it was glorious.

.

The outside was suddenly silent, suddenly gone. She wondered if the black spirit had swallowed it up entirely and was now building it anew - but then there was the sound of clashes and the flashing of light that somehow crept through her sealed walls and she watched them, as if the changing colours and changing sounds would be enough to tell her the entire tale.

Who was fighting? Why were they fighting? Did the white and black spirits finally show their differences when deciding the shape of the new world? Or did the fairy godmother finally come and they were afraid they'd be blotted out of existence since the were the failures, the first…

And maybe they would. Or maybe they wouldn't. It all depended on how the world looked like outside when she was taken there.

.

The fighting was beautiful at first - white and black sparks - until they tried to blot each other from existence. Then it was sad. And finally she intervened herself and she could do it because she was a fairy and she had her own powers, her own skills:

And black and white came together to make grey, and she made a grey spirit that other fairies would abhor - but she thought there was a balance there that others lost, and she liked it, she liked her. And the dark space opened up.

And then the spirit led her into a room with no windows and no doors and she saw another black and white that needed to come together into grey.

'Are you the fairy godmother?' the girl inside asked, voice hoarse.

'I'm a fairy,' the fairy replied. 'But I'm not a mother. I'll be a friend instead. What's your name?'

A friend… That sounded wondrous, maybe, to a girl who'd been alone all her life and had had to make her spirits and her friends. But the image of the fairy in her room drew her up, made her shine, made her look a little less gloomy and dark.

'I'm Mayu,' she said. 'I've been here all my life.'

'I'm Ruko,' the fairy replied. 'Come; I'll take you out.'

And she didn't know how quite yet, but she'd made it into a locked room without the key and without a window or door - so she'd make it out as well.

There were no gaps in a wall of black, but when it turned grey, like before, it would reveal the door.