One True Queen: A Wings of Fire fanfiction

28.

Content warning: kidnapping and drugging of a child, tense and emotional situations, political conflict, violations of free will, intense self-loathing and guilt at the end, Eclipse experiences something that could be read as dissociation, also Sharp-eyes is in this one so be warned

Eclipse

My room has been stripped bare. Shelves smashed to piles of firewood, my easel nowhere to be found, canvases ripped to shreds, canopy bed soaked with water, the delicate lace now muddy. Only the pink walls remain—which is good because I spent ages on those. (Although the closer I look, the more the original mural shows through.)

I look away, curling into myself. "It's gone," I whisper. "It's all gone."

"Oh, honey. We can fix this. It's not as bad as it looks, see?" Dad picks up a shard of my porcelain vase off the floor—the one I painted with Nebula on a lazy afternoon, with a delicate pattern of daisies and tulips. In his palms, it magically reforms—but it's not quite a match to the original; the pattern too uniform and the colour just slightly off. It's probably hard to replicate something he's probably never looked that hard at.

"Oh. Thanks." I force a smile.

"No, something is wrong," he says with a sigh. "Come on. What is it?"

"No, no, no, it's fine." I laugh nervously. "Really."

What does he want? Does he want me to actually say the truth, or does he think the truth is something else, or does he—

"I just don't want to fix it right now, okay?!" I blurt. "I'm just—I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the world. And I know you're trying your best and it's really sweet but right now, I just... kind of hate everything." I say that last part so quiet, I'm amazed he hears it at all.

Dad shrugs. "All right. Then... let's break things. Do you wanna break things? Here, I'll go first." He glares at the vase. "This is all your fault, you stupid vase! Look at you! Don't even have flowers in you, that's so dumb! I bet it took you, like, five minutes to shatter when the flood hit! Take that!" He smashes it against the floor with all his might, grinning as it shatters on the floor.

A smile tugs at my mouth—no matter how hard I try to stomp it down.

"Here. Your turn." Dad tosses me a plank of wood that used to be my shelf. "You'll feel way better when you're done, I promise."

"I feel kinda mean..." I admit.

"Eclipse, it's a board of wood. I promise it doesn't care."

"I hate you!" I say, very quietly. "You—you stupid piece of wood. I bet you used to be, like, a super ugly tree, and then you fell really easy and then they made you into a shelf, like a nerd! Ha!" I try to do my best Trailblazer impression. "And you were, like, really hard to... make into a shelf! I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!" With a burst of unexpected fury, I throw it to the ground. Dad picks it up, holding it in front of me.

"Yes! Yes! You show it who's in charge! Come on, hit it!" He cheers. Tears streaming down my cheeks, I punch it again and again until it cracks into two pieces on the floor. I tell it its mom is ugly (another insult I learned from Trailblazer), that it's worse than Queen Snowfox, that I wish it were dead, that the entire flood was its fault until my throat hurts from screaming, and I've got nothing left.

I blink, gasping for breath. "Did I... did I just do that?"

"Yep. You did," Dad shoots me a grin. "Don't you feel, like, a thousand times better now?"