my future headstone (fate: the winx saga | farah/rosalind)

[fiachairecht]

my future headstone. fate: the winx saga, farah/rosalind. farah's magic in rosalind's hands, over the course of a post-mission debrief. 2k words, rated m. for hogwartstoalexandria in traumaexchange 2023.

Dynamic - slowly realizing the object of your loyalty is a terrible person (and staying anyway)
Magic - Character's Powers Out Of Control After Traumatic Event

By the time Farah was pulled from the flames, the burning air had scorched her vocal chords beyond any semblance of functionality. Her fatigues were fused to her skin from the hips down, her gloves had been abandoned, and the first medic to see her lifted what remained of the veil Farah had knotted over her face and told Rosalind there was a better than even chance her eyes were beyond saving.

She learned that part later, from Rosalind herself as she penciled on Farah's eyeliner before dinner. In the moment all she knew — all she thought she knew — was that there was light: flickering, violent, neutral light that was nothing like the fire that had consumed the empty village halls. Five fingtertips lodged like ice along the half-circle of her collarbone, though she couldn't reach up to pry them away.

And then—

By morning, Farah's memories were gone.

**

She wasn't sure what had woken her, at first. Dawn had broken over camp, but the full light of morning had yet to fully pierce the tent. Her whole body felt heavy, weighted down by the same grey film that sheened over her vision.

"Drink."

Only then did Farah realise than part of the weight belonged to the rim of a metal flask pressed against her lip by a gloved hand. Rosalind's voice, Rosalind's hand. She opened her mouth obligingly, and drank — she thought she drank. Where there should be sensation there was only a numbness, spreading across her throat and reaching down towards her heart with a speed and familiarity so like—

Farah choked and jerked upwards, the remnants of the water spilling down her front as her lips formed words that refused to be spoken. Light bloomed behind her eyes, her vision fading in and out in monochrome along with her desire to panic. There in the grey, gone in the white. Just like the heartbeat she could feel hammering in her throat, see pounding in Rosalind's wrist.

"Oh." And then the flask was gone, and Rosalind was tilting Farah's head gently back so their eyes met. Your voice might take some time to come back, she said, and the soft murmur of Rosalind's voice in her mind eased the panic that had been threatening to build in Farah's chest. You did so well last night, but your body was too weak to take the full healing.

Rosalind had never called her weak before. Rosalind had never said she had done so well before. Even in her mind, words were hard to piece together, too slow to coalesce into a response, and all Farah found herself thinking was, I'm sorry. She didn't necessarily mean to project the thought, but Rosalind had never needed people to project in order to know exactly what they meant.

A lantern guttered out, the flame leaping from the exhausted wick to the back of Farah's hand where it lay on the thin scratchy camp-bed sheet. The light of it spread down her fingers like rays of sunlight slanting through a barred window, but she felt nothing, as if it were a conjured flame and not one she'd watched move. She thought about trying to scream, but Rosalind didn't seem to have noticed anything.

Her eyes burned, scorched dry by the light still throbbing in her temples.

Don't be sorry. Rosalind sounded more impatient than anything, every inch the battlefield commander and, yes, that was how it should be. Farah blinked, and the light faded, and she could no longer see her hand. Take this. 

Rosalind was turning away. Rosalind's gloved fingers were spreading something thick and sweet across Farah's tongue. Rosalind was—

Farah was asleep again.

**

In her dream, it was a wave that swept over the village, except when Farah kicked herself to the surface and swam out towards the rise of the hill in the distance, she swam right into her old room in Alfea where she had gossiped with Luna and strategised with Marisa and touched herself to thoughts of Rosalind, and the waters followed. They lifted her up towards the ceiling, crashed her against the stone, and in the reverberations at the back of her skull something was shaking loose. A memory, a word: Rosalind turning away, the sweep of her blonde hair lit by the torches that the water couldn't drown.

Again, and again, and again she hit the wall, and with each bone that cracked she saw Rosalind turn away, the image stuttering like scratched film. Smiling, always smiling.

Farah opened her mouth to say, don't leave me, but the only thing that passed her lips were tiny bubbles of air, floating up towards a freedom that terrified Farah more than any Burned One ever had.

"Don't worry," Rosalind said, and only then did it occur to Farah that she couldn't hear anything else. "I trust you."

The door that closed behind her didn't have a knob, just a tangle of silver chain and a pendant that Farah knew had her name etched in neat straight lines. She couldn't tell if she was crying.

**

Farah woke to the quiet of a world just starting to come back to life. It wasn't until Rosalind had started sending her out into the field that she had learned to appreciate the difference between quiet and silence, and with that appreciation came a curl of fear around her throat, because the longer she spent putting off opening her eyes, the surer she was that inside the canvas walls it was the silence of the grave that held court.

Broken, as always, by the faint sound of Rosalind's breath, a rise and fall she felt in the warp and weft of magic that surrounded them more profoundly than she heard or processed with any part of her body.

She reached out for Rosalind's mind, and felt it open easily before her. What did I do, before I ended up here?

Rosalind's hand lands on her abdomen, the shadow of the gesture visible behind the thin, aching skin of Farah's eyelids. Everything I asked. And more. You always were able to do more.

She could try to speak. She could try to open her eyes. Everything was so, so bright, and in the light that didn't dim even when she flung an arm over her face, every ache and pain in Farah's body seemed to be given a new life. The light slid under her bones like Rosalind's fist had once slid into her cunt, and it splintered Farah just the same: all pleasure, all pain. Nowhere near as natural.

What am I doing now?

If she opened her eyes, she would know. If she opened her eyes, she would see the light spilling from the cracks forced into her skin, all the places magic exited and Rosalind entered.

To be a fairy, Rosalind had once said while she held Farah's head to her breast and urged her to bite, was to see the marks magic left on the world as they were being made and to know they could never be unmade, only changed.

Unspoken, then: We are going to change the world.

Farah had bitten down, because Rosalind had asked, and her mouth had filled up with more blood than it should have been physically possible to draw, because Rosalind always gave that sort of gift, and Farah didn't remember the rest of that night but she thought both of them might have been unhappy, neither of them unsatisfied. Luna had been newly crowned, and Rosalind had left the next morning to meet with her, and for weeks every time Farah saw water run clear and blue her stomach turned.

She would rather that than now. Rosalind voice was silent in her mind, only the memory of pride lingering. Rosalind's shadow was turning away, rippling like something cast over a lake and only half-glimpsed from below. Grey was creeping up on the edges of the light as Rosalind began to close herself back off.

Unspoken, now: Don't go. 

The knot of magic in Farah's throat tightened, trembled in an echo of her clenched fists.

I did it for you. Don't you want to see?

The rushing in her ears could be the waves, could be her own blood. Rosalind's shadow stood, immobile.

"You're not in control," Rosalind said. Aloud, spoken where others could hear, it almost sounded like a lie, except the rush was waves, because Farah could feel them surging over her body, soaking her skin beneath the nightclothes. Rosalind's hand was moving. "I should—"

Stay. She'd never begged Rosalind for anything before, not without prompting and not outside of sex, and whether it was that or the surge of raw power she couldn't claw back from the word that made Rosalind hesitate with her hand outstretched to pull back the tent's opening, Farah couldn't say.

I did it for you. You have to see. She didn't recognise the desperation in her own voice, strange and muffled from depths she had never looked at too closely.

The light dimmed further, and this time it was a relief, Light waning as Mind waxed, both blanketed under Water, the first transition she had felt since that unknown time before. And then: something else, following, easing the flow. Rosalind's mind, as familiar as the pitiless direction of her hand.

You're not in control, she repeated. Yet.

When Farah opened her eyes, all she could see was the blue of Rosalind's gaze, rising up to swallow her just like the waters. Power collected under her tongue, as formless and all-consuming as the burning sensation that washed over her body every time she moved.

I am, Rosalind murmured, and for the first time, it felt like a gift.

But Farah was asleep again before she knew whether that was a good thing.

**

Every inch of her was earth, while she slept. The thick loam blanketing her in its embrace soothed her aching eyes, and it was only then she realised what she'd been missing, what she had once had before the pain. The soil was redolent with life, moving over her and expanding within her chest until she felt she would burst with it.

Farah ran her tongue over the rough grit of dirt behind her teeth, so different from anything she had felt before, and breathed.

She could see more easily in the dark than she could remember seeing in — it didn't matter. Roots crawled from her fingertips and even buried it was a trivial thing to turn her head and trace their path into the deep where they mingled with— where they were— where the blooms—

It didn't matter. Her roots were tangled with the same twisted life that sprouted from Rosalind's hands, so intertwined she could no longer tell where one started and the other ended.

She pulled back, and drew Rosalind closer. Rosalind pulled, and Farah's body moved of its own accord.

Is it real? Even dreaming, fear kept her lips sealed.

It will be. Rosalind matches her thought for thought.

But I trust you.

But, and.

The dream faded.

**

Leaves were scattered across Farah's chest, unseasonably red and crisp but so visible she thought, for a moment, that she was still dreaming. But when she reached for one her fingers slipped through to land cold against her own skin — they were the fragments, not her.

"There you are," Rosalind murmured. Her hand, too, was solid, and when she reached out to brush Farah's brittle hair away from her face, dirt cascaded to the sheets below. Farah waited for something else, you're finally awake or the healing's finally taken or maybe even something that would tell her what had happened.

"Did—" Her throat was dry. Rosalind cupped her cheek in one soft hand, the supple leather molding itself to Farah's skin. "Did I—" It might have been an hour or a week since she first woke, but words were still just as hard to grasp.

Don't.

Rosalind kissed her, nearly chaste in the moment of contact — and under her skin something rippled, feeling the pull of the earth in Rosalind's lips. You're still not in control.

Farah's lips parted, and when Rosalind's tongue slipped inside her mouth she tasted only the sharp electric tang of magic, working its way in alongside. Her own, and.

And this time she knew: it was a comfort.

And she would have to live with that.