Summary: Bloom never asked to live forever. She never wanted to.
Disclaimer: I do not own Winx Club.
Dedication: Kikurukina Bal Des'cagel, who inspired this with Verboten.
Thank You: SPY46, Kikurukina Bal Des'cagel and Robert Teague, whose advice and commentary on the original was invaluable to the revision.
Shout Outs: Darev, Chibi, Wolfy, Kiku, RT, Aethelia, PrayerSenshi, steph19steph, MusicFlowsWithin, barlowgirlfan16
Author's Note: Notes on all of my stories can be found on my homepage, StillsAndPhotographs(dot)webs(dot)com.
Who Wants To Live Forever?
It all began with glory. Each battle was fought with the passion and exuberance of youth. Each foe defeated was a triumph.
It was like a fairy tale had come to life. The ordinary Earth girl discovered she was a fairy, whose powers stemmed from the Great Dragon, the creator of the universe. She met her prince and her birth parents. She vanquished her enemies and reclaimed her kingdom. All that was left was her ride into the sunset, and her happily ever after.
But darkness is simply the absence of light, and it soon became apparent that evil sprung into being wherever the Keeper of the Flame could not be. She put down the Army of Decay while Lord Darkar plotted to retrieve the ultimate power from the realm of Realix. Imprisoning the three Trix witches on Omega provided Baltor the very allies he needed to make his escape. The wizards of the Black Circle attacked the last fairy on Earth, in Bloom's own hometown.
It was always something new and terrible. She was always on the defensive. She saved the universe from destruction and woke up the next morning with another disaster on her plate.
The Trix reappeared with stronger allies, again and again and again. Bloom was afraid of the tenacity they displayed, and the determination that accompanied their desperation. Finally, she realized she had to end their enchanted arms race, once and for all. She held life in her hands and snuffed it out, like some screaming, pleading candle. Three sisters. Three candles. Three hazy trails of smoke. Three years of nightmares. She was only twenty-seven.
She began to worry. Stella had discovered her first gray hair, but Bloom was still carded when she went out for drinks. She did not look a day older than twenty.
Daphne was a calming presence in her younger sister's troubling dreams, but guardianship of the Crystal Lake of Magix had passed to the nymph Naomi, and Daphne had passed on to her next life. Bloom mourned the loss of her sister, her protector, her guide amidst all the chaos. Daphne had always seemed a step ahead of Bloom, a patient and loving hand with an eye toward what the future held. Her direction would have been invaluable…but she was gone.
She watched her friends and her children and her grandchildren grow old around her, acquiring fine lines and liver spots. She never thought she would be grateful to see just one gray hair on her own head, but it never appeared.
Professor Faragonda, in her seemingly-infinite wisdom, was nearly as clueless to the phenomenon as Bloom herself. The venerable woman could only hazard a guess – the fairy's soul was bonded to her power, the eternal Flame of the Great Dragon. Perhaps the bond was indissoluble, and the immortal power she contained had made her likewise everlasting.
The former headmistress passed away two months later, and Bloom felt a stab of some emotion she identified many, many years later as jealousy.
She watched her husband aging beside her, until he looked more like her father. Then she watched his life slip from his eyes as rebel ammunition pierced his chest six times. She held his hand in her white knuckles as the last of her guides, her partner in this crazy world, left her behind. She begged Sky to take her with him.
Her fairy tale had become a horror story and she just wanted to get out.
She started a scrapbook with her king's obituary. Later, she added her friends', her children's, her grandchildren's. She had a recurring nightmare that her great-grandchildren finally added the eulogy for Queen Bloom of Sparks, and closed the book forever – it wasn't the dream that frightened her so badly, but the desolation that overtook her when she awoke in the morning, one-hundred and fifty years old, stuck forever behind a child's mask.
She tried to kill herself. But her wrists healed too quickly, the gun never fired, the pills passed through her harmlessly, and her wings caught her before she ever hit the ground. She cursed the Dragon with ever fiber of her being. She was the first and only human vessel for His power. It had not transfered to her children. It was bonded to her, and her alone – if she died, the Flame would be lost evermore. She had no doubt the divine being played some part in her survival, for His own depended upon it.
She spent a decade locked in the underbelly of Cloud Tower, studying the darkest of the Dark Arts. She infected herself with plagues and viruses and every magical malady she could find. She invoked the curses placed on ancient artifacts. She cast a spell to forcibly rip the Dragon's Flame from her body. If it worked, her immortal tether to this Hell would be severed, and she would die, instantly.
She emerged from the depths of the witch academy pale and gaunt, but still alive.
Emperors and monarchs from every realm called her whenever the yin-yang of good and evil fell too far out of alignment. Her powers had only grown in three hundred years. She aimed one tiny fireball at a wizard experimenting with necromancy, and leveled the forest around him. She recalled the jungle-like growth, older even than she was, with just a word.
She resisted the urge to recall the necromancer the same way, just to mow him down again. How could he possibly think it was okay to disturb those who had passed on? How could he bring them back to this seventh circle when they had finally escaped it all? Death was too easy an end for him, and not for the first time, she marveled that she could sentence any other in existence to the only end she longed for, the end that eluded her.
She obliterated whole galaxies and brought them back, just to see if she could. "A god am I," she muttered bitterly. She remembered the questions that nonbelievers had asked on Earth: "Can God create a sandwich so big He can't eat it?" Bloom wondered if she could conjure an ocean so deep she would drown in it. Probably not.
Her mind was a whirl of four-hundred-seven years, two months and sixteen days of memories, anger, hatred, fear and fire.
She would kill to die.
The End.