Disclaimer: I don't own Fee, or any other characters from either A Great and Terrible Beauty or Rebel Angels. They are Libba Bray's creation, no matter how much I wish they were my own, or that I was one of them. Sigh.
Thank you to all my reviewers, and thank you to MaddyCat2000 for telling me that my first edition of my third chapter was terrible. I needed that!
I never get what I really want. Power. The Great Gemma Doyle gets all of it. None left for me.
I never had the power to stop my father from doing what he did. It wasn't his fault. It was mine. But at least I knew he loved me. If he hadn't loved me, why would he do those things? He had to have cherished some part of me, even if it was only the feeling of my pale freezing skin beneath his fingers.
I never had the power to get my mother to listen to me. She just wanted to go to parties, to frolic in the lies that are spun and woven at a grand ball. She just wanted to flirt her fears away, and when they caught up with her, she left. Some mother. Now she had Polly to pretend to care about.
I never had the power to keep Pippa alive. It was only Gemma, and what did she do? She left my best friend, my sister to die in a river of another world. She never cared about us, she only cared for herself and what her powers could get her. Now if Pip is corrupted, it's all her fault. Every single thing that happened is her fault.
If I had power, I could have stopped it. If that sacrifice had worked… If. That is what my whole life is made up of. If my father had loved me, if my mother hadn't gone away, if Polly hadn't come, if I had power, if Pippa hadn't died, if nobody had seen through our lie about Ann, if that stupid sacrifice had only worked.
As Gemma had warned us, if that sacrifice had worked, I would be bound to a dark spirit. Even if that were so, I would still have some power. I could have been a Queen of the Winterlands.
Queen Felicity.
Queen Strength.
But no, the All-Powerful Gemma Doyle had to stop us.
But the Huntress lied to us anyway. So maybe it wouldn't have worked after all, even if she hadn't lied.
I don't know what I am saying.
I don't want to ride on someone else's magic, I want my own. But I am too old. I wish I could turn back time, go back to my sixteenth birthday, and have a vision. What a life that would be.
I would have the power to do what I wanted. Maybe I would have been the one to bind the Temple. Maybe I would have been Most High.
My life has been made up of wants, wishes, ifs, and maybes. I have never gotten what I really wanted.
All I wanted was some power. But that's too much to ask, isn't it?