magix

Being a year behind in her studies meant that the roommates who Roxy had spent the first few years of her moderately successful Alfea career with had graduated without her, and so when the new school year had started a few months ago she had met the new group of girls populating the suite. Chance, not choice, had roomed them all together, and while Roxy thought they were nice girls and good suitemates, they didn't have too much in common.

Roxy knew they probably didn't need some random, failing Earth girl as a roommate, so even though they weren't close, she was grateful to them for putting up with her.

"Hey Roxy, do you think Wizgiz would grade my essay earlier if I turn it in now?" Her roommate, Indigo of Popularis, looked over from her bed to where Roxy sat on her own. "My parents say they're cutting me off if I don't get up to a B in his class, and without some fortuitous timing, I'm not gonna recover by midterms, which means I'm not going to Solaria for break."

Roxy could never remember if Indigo was the fairy of writing or of words, only that she sometimes used random swaths of vocabulary that went over her head. She was pale with electric blue eyes and a pen always behind her ear. Roxy wondered if Indigo remembered what had happened with Tecna of Zenith almost four years ago. She wouldn't have been a student then, since she was two years below Roxy, but perhaps she had heard about it...

Roxy decided not to say anything about it. "Uh, maybe. He's pretty cool about that kind of thing."

"I just know I'm going to fail Palladium's midterm. I swore I would never go back in the reality chamber after freshman year!" Indigo ran her hands through her short, dark hair in frustration. "But...I guess that's what we get. I really thought...well, you would have at least gotten it by now. Not to be mean."

"I understand," said Roxy dully. Any student who was close to graduation without her Enchantix had to take extra classes with Palladium and Faragonda, and Palladium's midterm involved a single person exam in the reality chamber Roxy had barely made it through with the group project freshman year. To say she was worried would be an understatement.

Well, okay, she wasn't worried. It was more like she was distantly aware of her inevitable failure. She knew it should be a big deal. She knew it should really matter. It did really matter. She couldn't not graduate. There was literally nothing else left for her.

Her phone pinged. Oh, right! Brandon was picking her up. He was probably outside and she hadn't even—

No, the text was from her dad. Hey kiddo. Do you know when your break is yet? Jake and Della are gonna visit with the kids.

Roxy put her phone in her bag. So her father's cousin and his wife were coming to visit for Christmas. And they would bring their kids, a bunch of rambunctious but well meaning little ruffians between the ages of twelve and seven. The house would probably be loud, and people would be laughing. Her dad liked Uncle Jake. He was an accountant by trade and a mechanic as a hobby and they talked about motorcycles and W-2 filing forms together. They would bring out the Christmas tree. The kids would make them get up early that on Christmas morning and open presents from Santa.

She did not want to see her dad and think about what she had done to him.

She did not want to see Uncle Mike or Aunt Della or his kids and laughingly say "it's a lot of work, but I'm having a good time! Lots of essays" when they asked her how she was doing in that fancy Canadian boarding school she had gotten into. She did not want to think about how they thought she was having a good time. She did not want to think of how happy she had been on Earth because then she would have to to think about the past three years.

Her phone pinged again and she cautiously took it back out, swiping her father's text off the screen to deal with later.

Finally, Brandon's text of I'm outside. She wasn't thinking about this right now. She grabbed a couple of other things to put into her bag. "I'll see you later."

"See you!" Indigo said amicably without looking up from her notepad, and Roxy hurried out into the courtyard.

Roxy and Brandon had gone to lunch, and had planned to watch a movie after, but Brandon got a call saying that he needed to come back to Redfountain in an hour so instead they went to his apartment to hang out.

Roxy hadn't been there many times before. Their casual thing had only really started at the end of last year, because they were already hanging out all the time. Initially Riven and Musa had always tagged along since they were the only of his friends who were still in Magix but they had started doing it less lately, and Roxy had come back early from summer break because summer kind of sucked now—all her friends from Earth were busy doing adult things and standing behind the hostess stand at her dad's bar made her think of the times when it had been fun to help him and they had felt like a team. And how they weren't that anymore, and her dad barely even knew that. Maybe he did. Sometimes he asked her "are you okay, Roxy?" or "what's wrong?" And the only words she had to answer with were "I'm fine."

She kind of wished someone would ask again. Anyone. Just say, "are you sure?"

But what would she even say to that? "I'm fine." Again. And they've already asked once and you've got nothing to say because you don't have any words, so could you stop being so whiny, Roxy, for once, and so fucking selfish, and just get on with your fucking life? This is all your fault.

Brandon was nice, and upbeat, and funny, and being with him on a date made Roxy feel refreshingly normal, like maybe she hadn't wasted literal years of her life being absolutely miserable, and they both liked dogs.

And on the Bad Night, he had wrapped his cape around her shoulders.

It had been raining, and she had been screaming and screaming, and Bloom was holding her tightly, more to restrain her than to comfort her, because she had beat the ground until a sharp rock had made her hand bleed. She couldn't feel the pain but she could see the blood dripping on her arm. And Bloom kept saying something that Roxy couldn't remember, something to try and make her calm down, and Roxy could barely hear over her own screaming until her breath caught in her throat and she started coughing and crying. And she had shivered from the cold as Bloom cautiously loosened her grip, and Brandon had quietly said, "here," and wrapped his cape around her shoulders. And she hadn't realized how cold she had been until it wasn't raining on her anymore. And now she was sobbing into Bloom's shoulder, saying, "my mom, my mom, my mom," and then a bunch of nonsense that even she couldn't understand.

She wasn't sure how long she stayed like that because after that things were more of a blur. Her crystal clear memory of the worst of the Bad Night got spotty after that. She vaguely remembered hearing herself stop crying as though she were outside her body. She had walked, or had someone carried her to the palace? She remembered hearing people talking around her but it was like she was lying down and they were talking above her head. She couldn't make out their words. And eventually it was morning. She couldn't remember sleeping, but she also couldn't remember not sleeping.

Morning was not better. Nothing was better ever again. That was when she had cut her hair off, in the blended together days and nights after the Bad Night.

So now Roxy had short hair and she and Brandon were dating.

She wasn't exactly sure what they were supposed to do when they just hung out. When they had lunch or they were with other people that was one thing, but sometimes she suspected that it was only Brandon's easy charm which kept things from feeling completely awkward whenever it was just the two of them. But thank goodness he knew how to carry a conversation most of the time.

But at the moment Brandon was getting them both water, so Roxy just sat on his couch and glanced at him behind her, head in his refrigerator, and then looked back, and had nothing to say so she picked up the remote and turned on the television. She didn't really know how to change channels on Magix remotes; most technology was like that here, and the things that were vaguely familiar were the most frustrating. So she just let it play to whatever it had been left on—an Eraklyonian news station, she saw by the logo in the corner. Something about a state visit being held at the royal palace. King Erendor and Queen Samara flashed across the screen unsmilingly. Brandon came in and glanced at the display with a frown.

"That reminds me I need to call my dad about visiting during break. Where are you going this summer?"

She had been thinking about that a lot recently. At least during midterm break she could stay in her dorm. But regardless of whether or not she graduated from Alfea this summer, she wouldn't have it as a place to come back early to or stay late at. The idea of spending all summer in Gardenia made her distantly sad. "Bloom said her apartment in Eraklyon is going to be empty most of the summer and I'm welcome to stay the whole time." It was out of pity, Roxy knew, but she also knew that Bloom was the only other person in the universe who might almost understand how she felt about visiting home.

Of course, they weren't the same. It wasn't Bloom's fault her parents were dead and her Earth parents understood everything she was.

After a minute she realized that that meant they were going to be on the same planet next summer and she leapt to justify it. "It's just the thing that made the most sense to me at the time. I mean, I don't really know what I'll be doing next summer anyway. We don't have to—" she broke it off. What had she been going to say? We don't have to see each other? Wow, she was a terrible girlfriend. "I know you have that clinic back here for the first month." Brandon's break didn't start until Redfountain summer classes ended.

He nodded. It didn't seem like he had noticed the awkwardness of her phrasing and her tone.

The news anchor intoned, "joining them but not representing a sovereign body will be Princess Bloom of Sparx, Prince Sky of Eraklyon, the Sage of Eirene—"

Brandon shut the TV off and then it was quiet.

"So how was Aisha's party?" He asked her finally, and her mind raced with positive words to describe it.

"...it was fun. We had fun. We learned this card game called Primevist. I didn't really get it. Musa and Riven got in a fight and then we all went to bed."

"Ha, that sounds about right," said Brandon, almost smiling.

Roxy looked at him, and then the wall, and back to him. "And Musa and Aisha said some stuff about the Omega Dimension."

His expression didn't change. "Oh, yeah? What about?"

"That you guys had a friend that died there."

He still didn't look upset like Aisha had. "Yeah. It's not something they like to talk about. But it's been in the news a lot recently, on everybody's mind."

Except Roxy's, because Roxy didn't watch the news, because most of her still thought of Magix as an insane, Alice in Wonderland type place she was visiting for a second, and Earth was her real home, no matter how much that wasn't really true anymore. At least, Earth wasn't her real home. But Magix wasn't really either.

"I'm kind of surprised I didn't know about it," she said hesitantly.

Brandon shrugged. "I mean, there wasn't really time to bring it up when we first met you," he said reasonably. "And then there was no reason to, like, sit you down and have a serious talk. It wasn't really...relevant to you. We weren't trying to keep it a secret."

"I know," said Roxy, but that didn't mean anything to her. That didn't help her understand anything. That didn't get the image of that girl out of her mind. So even though Brandon had looked away as though thinking of another conversation topic, she said, "Aisha said that Timmy still thinks she's alive. In Omega."

Now Brandon's lips tightened for a second and she knew that this was what wore on him. "Yeah, he does. But he's wrong. He just can't accept that. I think it's part grief and part being used to being the smartest guy in the room. Now he thinks he's never wrong." There was just a touch of annoyance in his tone, but his eyes were sadder than anything else.

Roxy knew she should leave it alone now. She knew everything she needed to exist in their world; now she would never bring up a sensitive topic accidentally or reference something unthinkingly. This was all that was necessary to know.

But she felt like she couldn't bring herself to quit it. Distantly she remembered shopping trips with Earth friends where she would spend all of her allowance on thing after thing despite her resolution to save the rest of her money, and this felt like that. "But didn't they send search parties?"

Brandon gave a deep, very tired sigh. Roxy knew she was spending his patience faster than she ever had wasted her allowance. "Yeah. Aside from us going seven times, Magix lead three searches. Well, four, technically, but the fourth one was to collect the bodies of the third search party. After that, they decided to call it off."

"But no one ever found her body."

"Yeah. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes you don't find the body. People always want to think that means that someone's alive, and usually it doesn't. They found her blood in the snow!"

"Enough to kill her?" Immediately after she said it she realized she hadn't considered her words at all. She was just blurting out her thoughts now as soon as she got them.

"Enough to make it pretty hard to get out of there. I don't want to talk about this anymore. Look at this, Roxy." He ran his hand lightly over the dark scar down his arm. "This is the best they could do with it, even with healing magic. I got that the fourth time we went down there. And I still went back down there twice because we said that if she was alive, we were going to find her."

"I thought you got hurt fighting an icewraith," Roxy said in a low voice. It wasn't a terrible scar, at least, not now as she looked at it. He had mentioned the icewraith to her last year. His tone had been almost joking, like it was a misadventure. Now it rung in her ears like a half-lie.

"I did," he said flatly. "In the Omega Dimension. Five Specialists, five Enchantix fairies, and we barely made it out alive. And Tecna was alone."

Then he turned away, and was quiet for a long time.

She felt regret, mixed with an awful satisfaction, lodge itself into a lump at the very back of her throat. She shouldn't have said anything. She couldn't be entirely sorry because she had to know. But she knew she should be. "I'm sorry," she said, haltingly, her voice sounding strange and small in the silence. "I shouldn't have brought it up."

Brandon still didn't say anything. She felt guilt settle into her whole being.

Finally he nodded. "I know. It's fine. It's fine."

"I'm gonna head out," Roxy said quietly.

"Okay," he said. "I'll call you later."

"Sounds good," she said and left immediately.

imperial palace

eraklyon

Amidst the pain of losing one of your friends and the arguably worse pain of losing the rest of them even when they're right there, close enough to touch, and sending Valtor back to whatever hell fairies are supposed to believe in where he belonged, Bloom also got called to Faragonda's office one afternoon and told that she had been officially recognized as the daughter of Oritel and Meryem, claimant to the throne of Sparx. She had not known this was something you had to apply for. But Stella and Tecna had. Stella had mentioned it nonchalantly to her one day at the beginning of the year and Bloom hadn't really understood and forgotten about it. Tecna had compiled and sent the files to the required governments and lawyers. Then the two of them hadn't mentioned it again, caught up with the shitstorm Valtor had ignited, and in the aftermath she supposed Stella had forgotten.

And now, months later, when she was beginning to get used to how things were, and stopped passing papers back to empty desks and wondering, just for a second, why the simple sounds of her roommates going about their lives sounded so different, there was a letter from whoever was minding her Sparx parents' estate. They believed her. (How could they not? Who else had the Dragon? But whatever.) She was now officially the princess of a hunk of ice and snow, and a handful of scattered people who had moved away sometime before the planet had been destroyed.

And it turned out her parents had been pretty rich. So she also had more money than she could ever need, hooray!

So when Sky had said that she should stay on Eraklyon with him, she hadn't really had any better ideas for what to do with her time. You can't guard a thing that's already dead, so there's not much point to being guardian fairy of Sparx. Same with ruling when you have no subjects and no habitable planet. So she had got an apartment on Eraklyon, and (likely after Sky had bothered her about it) Samara unenthusiastically offered her a place in the Eraklyonian Royal Household. What that meant, essentially, was that she helped plan balls and dinners and stuff.

She did this in tandem with Princess Zinaide, who was Sky's older cousin, Samara's favorite niece, and who seemed to resent Bloom for existing. Samara did too, but she was slightly more clever in her backhanded compliments. Princess Zinaide (who had never told Bloom to just call her Zinaide in the three years Bloom had known her) seemed to resent Bloom for not having grown up with all the rules and etiquette that had been impressed upon her, and she expressed this resentment in a kind of cold, malicious groveling. At least once a day Princess Zinaide managed to embarrass her with her bowing and scraping, all while speaking to Bloom like she was a particularly stupid child.

Today, Zinaide was getting on her nerves even worse than usual as they went over the final preparations for the state dinner being held tomorrow night. Bloom frowned at the cross-outs on the seating arrangements which she had already gotten approved by Samara. "What's this?" She asked, glancing across the large marble table they were working at over to Zinaide. "I thought I was sitting next to Sky and General Deren."

"I had to change it," said Zinaide nonchalantly. "The Queen of Kast is coming now. She changed the dates for her royal progress."

Bloom scowled. "If the queen of Kast is there I don't want to go." Kast was a witch planet with a shady history, and she didn't want to have to make smalltalk with Queen Sorokina all night. Maybe she could just stay behind the scenes.

"Well, you don't have a choice," snapped Zinaide. "You're representing Eraklyon and Sparx."

"Kast is a terrible planet—dark magic, threats of war. She was one of the people who voted to destroy the Omega Dimension. I don't know why she was even invited."

"I thought you wanted that place destroyed," Zinaide said, sounding uninterested. "Well, you'll have to put that aside for just one evening and get along with her. She's important and volatile and it's vital we make a good impression now that she's become queen. And she specifically mentioned she was excited to meet with you."

"Why would she do that?"

"Honestly?" Zinaide frowned. "I do not know. But I expect it has something to do with your planet. Kast was aligned with the Ancestresses in the war, you know. It was a discreet thing, not official, but everyone knows. She might rub it in your face—she's not a kind person. Unfortunate, but you'll have to deal with it for the sake of diplomacy."

"Yeah, I'm not doing that."

"Not doing what?"

She and Zinaide both turned around to see Sky coming into the study, a smile on his face. She couldn't help but be happy to see him, regardless of the frustration that was welling up inside her now. He came to stand next to her and put an arm around her as he looked down at the seating. "Hey, I thought we were sitting with Deren."

Bloom looked significantly at Zinaide, but she didn't seem troubled. "Sorokina of Kast said that she wanted to meet Bloom, so Her Majesty changed the seating this morning."

Sky made a face and pulled her closer. "That's too bad. But I'm sure you'll still do great."

"I was just telling Princess Zinaide that I'm not going to the dinner if the Queen of Kast is going to be there."

Now Sky's expression was of concern. "Uh, why?"

"Because she supports the Ancestresses, for one? And because everyone knows Kast is a terrible place that spouts dark magic and intimidates its neighbors. And I heard she poisoned her brother so she could be queen."

Sky winced. "I mean, it's likely. But if you don't go to the dinner it's going to send a bad message. She'll be insulted."

"She should be insulted," Bloom replied. At some point Sky had let her go, or she had stepped away from him, and now she was standing facing him. "She's doing bad things to people."

"Okay, I get that she's horrible, but I really don't understand why we can't just deal with it for one night." Sky glanced away with some annoyance, and that always set something off in her. She wasn't sure if it was desperation to prove her point or indignation that he thought she was wrong, but she could already feel her mouth speeding ahead of her brain.

"Listening to people I don't like is one thing. But I'm not going to let her think that's an alright way to treat people! It's morally wrong."

"It's morally wrong to do something that will only benefit our people? It's a dinner, Bloom, and it's to celebrate peace."

"They're your people, Sky," she muttered, and he tossed his hands in the air. Now he was angry.

"As you so often remind me."

"It doesn't even matter if I'm there or not. No one cares about the princess of a dead planet, except for some witch queen who just wants to torture me." She wasn't actually important. Nothing she did actually mattered anymore. She was just like a doll. Dolls could miss one dinner.

"My mother is going to care, Bloom, because all of this stuff that you do just confirms to her that you're not prepared to be queen, which—"

The words stung more than they should have, probably because he was right. "What the hell is 'all of this stuff', Sky?"

"I don't want to get into it right now, that's not the point. The point is—"

"I think the point is that you agree with her!" It wasn't like Bloom didn't. But knowing that Sky probably thought the same things about her as she did about herself...hurt. In a stupid, unnecessary way.

"Would you let me finish, please? Would you just let me finish one sentence? I don't agree with her. But you know that if you don't go, there's gonna be someone sitting next to me who you wouldn't want there, and I'm sorry, I'm not going to blame myself for that."

Bloom felt her thoughts stop cold. "Are you talking about her?"

"I am talking about literally anyone my mother has thrown at me since I said I planned to marry you. Yes, that includes Diaspro. Don't be mad at me about it, just know that that's what going to happen and I don't need you freaking out about it! Don't go. She will. And—"

"Is that really what you're going to say? Are you really going to threaten me with her? And then you say that I'm going to freak out, which is just...preempting my freak out, so now of course I'm going to be upset, because I'm a person and I get upset...!"

Sky wasn't yelling at her. His voice was forceful and projecting, not uncontrolled. And somehow that made her feel worse. He was using his prince voice on her. "I'm not threatening you with anything. Which you might realize if you let me finish one fucking sentence! Whenever she is at a party or even mentioned in conversation, you lose your mind. And I've come to accept that you're just never going to let it go, but that means—"

"I'm not talking about this anymore! I'm not talking about this anymore." She couldn't stand to be having this conversation—this fight—anymore, because the feeling of knowing she was messing everything up and yet not being able to stop it was making her sick, and she had to be away from everything.

Without waiting for a reply she turned and headed for the room she had at the palace. As she hurried down the hall she heard Princess Ziniade's voice carry from the room she had just left.

"She's upset again. Oh, dear. Well, if she's not going I'll talk to Her Majesty about rearranging some things."

Bloom stifled a very bad word and didn't even slam her bedroom door. Instead she threw herself on her bed and screamed into her pillow until her whole throat hurt.

*updates literally twice in two years*

*hits people with a 5000 word chapter*

sorry guys i'm a mess. i think i update more regularly when i have huge, future-affecting projects to work on because then i can ignore them and do this instead. hope you guys enjoy.