Author's note: First, I'd like to thank ThreeOranges for being my beta-reader. Much obliged.

Second, it has been awhile since I came here but hey I missed doing this, that, and the genius of Libba Bray drove me to it.

I have a (somewhat faint) idea where I'm going with this, don't you worry...

I plan to have this in all sorts of point of views, not just by the main quartet themselves but small characters too. I'm open into doing all sorts of parings and when I mean all sorts of pairings, I really do mean all sorts of pairings—in other words, straight and slash pairings.

You've been warned...

Disclaimer: I don't own "A great and terrible beauty" trilogy and I shan't ever will but in my fantasies where Johnny Depp is my husband.
"Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace" Eugene O'Neill
Chapter 1-Fairy tale

"I hate the queen," I confide in Felicity. "In Snow White, I mean..." I add quickly.

It is a Sunday today, a day where everyone has the chance to relax into the lazy afternoon to their hearts' content. Felicity and I are down by the water; we wear over our foreheads little flowers laced into crowns.

"Really?" Felicity replies nonchalantly, "I would've thought you'd hate Snow White instead..." She leans over me then and blows white dandelion all over my face.

"Fee!" I cry, sitting up and swatting the white particles away from my
face.

Felicity merely smiles without a care, and tosses away the now-bare stalk of green stem. She lies back, supine, across the grass. She yawns, and with her hair left loose and wild - more a warm gold than its usual near-white in the sun - she reminds me of a lioness. Rather fitting really...

"What do you mean, you thought I'd hate Snow White more?" I ask her, rather huffily.

Felicity still has a smile on her face as she closes her eyes, "Well, doesn't Snow White gain her prince rather easily? I mean she just sleeps through the second half of the story, and then he comes along, and 'happily ever after' all around." She snorts. "She doesn't do a thing and yet gets her precious prince!"

"Well, there is that..." I admit, and snatch at a dandelion off the ground. I pluck at its gold petals. "But the queen is who really gets to me! She's such a fool!"

"Oh?" Felicity opens one gray eye at me, raises an eyebrow, and I realize I am plucking at the petals in a rather vicious pace. Heat pools into my cheeks and I stop, embarrassed.

"How is she such a fool, Pip?"

I don't know if she is serious or merely mocking me, but I answer anyway. "Because she wants — wants! - to be the most beautiful," I tell Fee,"She just doesn't get it! She doesn't get that in being the most beautiful, you are the most sad; how it brings in the the terrible -" I make a face,"It only serves her right into dying into what she tries to get. Fool."

I pluck off the last of the petals and angrily cast it away. "I can only wish the heroine herself gets into that same fate." Even I can hear the bitterness coloring my tone, it feels black in my mouth.

Felicity scoffs derisively, "If you can call her a heroine - she and every other girl in every fairy tale you hear."

"And all just so beautiful and too stupid to realize the terrible outcome of that," I am left with but the naked stalk of stem in my hand and I fling it to the lake where it lands and floats on the surface, lightly rippling all around itself. Rippled chaos all around it. "I hate fairy tales."

"And yet you seem to be so enchanted by them," Felicity looks me over, eyes playful, but I see in them the hard challenge as well. She wants me to respond. "If you want"- she reaches for a dark ringlet, twines it around her fingers like you would a leash to a dog- "we can make you a potion to make you the 'Plainest of them all', what do you say?"

"I think not!" I say, nose in the air.

She smirks and releases my hair. She folds her arms behind her head as she gazes up at the sky without another word to me. Typical Fee.

I sat back to watch the sky as well on the support of the heels of my palms.

I hate fairy tales but I need them, the way I need to look at a mirror and look away all at once. If you take away the tales, and the pretty looks, who do you see? Who? Who is Pippa?

Am I really such a weakling to want to avoid that?

Author's Note: Pippa comes off as a romantic in the book and I always thought it'd be interesting that of all people, she'd be the most cynical of them. She probably does view them that way just because it comes too close to home and yet...it doesn't, at least not quite. Pippa would definitely have a love-hate vibe toward them.

As for Felicity, I smile at the thought of what she probably thinks of fairy tales. They've very anti-Felicity, when you think about it. At least when it comes what she stands for.

Read. Review. And above all, critique greatly desired...