Warning for a sort-of death.
Holding the sobbing form in her hands, she sighed, willing her own tears back, her feathers drooping under the emotional strain and she felt herself descending, and decided to just allow her body to fall slowly, legs folding under her until she was fully sat on the floor, cradling the tiny life-form to her chest.
How she hated this.
It wasn't even their fault, but hers; they had taken an element of her and grown with it, until they reached a level of maturity she required of them – like every mini-fairy, a feather of her own self. But she was not perfect. Underneath the happiness and the determination, she too had those underlying emotions, sorrow, anger, fear, hate. They were relatively weak within her, diluted by the good emotions she surrounded herself with, but the mini-fairies had no such chance. Occasionally, one or two of them would take the wrong element of her, the part of her that would always be grieving for her parents' deaths, or the anger at those who had hunted her, the fear of not being believed in and losing believers: they would take those elements of her, the parts she no more deny than her good parts, but hid, and they would grow with it, evolving within the mini-fairy like poison spreading within their small bodies, until they were consumed.
She couldn't let them suffer that. She couldn't just let them live with her sorrow, or hatred. She had to… but that didn't mean that she didn't hate doing it. It was awful, snuffing out a life, a part of herself, reabsorbing that life-form because of no fault of their own.
"I'm sorry…" she whispered, gently kissing the tiny fairy on the forehead, and closed her eyes against the overwhelmingly vulnerable gaze directed at her now. She had tried so many times to save them, to purge them of her toxic emotions, but it was no use. She couldn't remove what they had made their own, and it broke her heart, especially the ones who took the sadness from her. The ones who took the anger and hatred were the worst to deal with, but she could almost tell herself it was alright, as they tended to cause trouble to the other fairies in their rage. She was protecting the peace of the other inhabitants of the Tooth Palace, and she tried to make it fast, as though she was merely putting them at ease. The sad ones were always the hardest to find. They tended to hide in their rooms with nothing to comfort them but their sorrows, and she hated to think how long this one had been suffering alone before this.
Opening her eyes, she smiled the best she could, softly smoothing the fairy's feather with her thumb, tidying the ruffles and bent quills that hadn't been taken care of.
"Ssssh. It's alright, you can sleep easy." She hugged the form, now beginning to relax slightly, to her neck, and rocked slightly, humming a soothing lullaby that she did not know the words to anymore, lost in time, even to her memory, and remained like that for several minutes. They had done nothing to deserve this fate, so the least she could give them was some love in their final minutes, to make up for the injustice they'd been dealt. They may have sprouted from her, but they grew into their own being, mostly separate from her, and as their mother, the best she could do was attempt to ease their pain.
Once she felt the mini-fairy fall still, sleeping soundly, she closed her eyes, tears forming, and willed the soul back to her, feeling her sadness grow briefly as it was re-incorporated into herself. The weight in her hands grew to almost nothing, and with one last despondent breath, she opened her hands, finding, like always, a single minute feather, faintly shimmering indigo in the light. Watching it for a moment, she fluttered her wings, carrying herself out of her private room and up, up until she was high above the Tooth Palace, a hive of activity below her, and she gazed into the wind.
"May you forever be in peace." She stated, releasing the feather and watching it tumble, caught on the winds and eternally free, and she liked to think it was what they wished, to be free of everything. "May the winds take you to the place you belong." Because even though she had absorbed their emotion, their soul, their being was not hers, and to her, that was a death. Every death deserved her respect, and though it was her duty, and she understood it was right to end their suffering, it never brought her any comfort.
I'm having a lot of 'what-if' thoughts about Rise of the Guardians. What if Tooth created the mini-fairies, but they grew with whatever element of her they took, which she has no control over? Everyone has some deep down feelings, and Tooth would have to deal with the fairies that inadvertently took the worst parts of herself. In splitting off, they are no longer completely a part of her, but they are innately linked, so it always hurts her to see them in pain.
I was thinking this because Baby Tooth doesn't seem to be exactly the same character as Tooth, but they are similar.
Also, if any of this is wrong, it's because I haven't read the books. This will be remedied once the post finally brings my order.