Happy Ever After (ver. 2.0)

chapter one

Fairy tales— in which the damsel in distress is usually a princess and the knight in shining armour is a handsome prince (because this is a heteronormative world) with great hair and a greater personality. Sir Handsome Prince rescues the distressed princess, this happens and then that happens, and then they kiss and have a wonderful white wedding and boom, happy ending.

Skai's always wished that she lived in a fairy tale, because number one: being a princess would've been awesome, and number two: fairy tales have dragons.

When she was a little girl and she'd been banished (read: sent to her room without pudding because she'd more than likely caused trouble for her parents) to her bedroom, she'd often sit by the window and wish and wish for her prince charming to come and rescue her from the confinements of the four walls that surrounded her.

But she's no longer a little girl, and she's long since grown out of being sent to her room without pudding and pouting about it. That doesn't change the fact that she still wishes that her life was a fairy tale.

Because, you see, in fairy tales, there'd merely be dragons and horrendous-looking witches that try to ruin the princess' life by kidnapping her and locking her away in some tower isolated in the middle of goddamn nowhere, which the prince will find anyway because he's probably got some built-in Princess Detection GPS embedded in him, or something. Following which, the prince materialises out of thin air and then he fights and defeats whatever obstacles he face (the witches and the dragon), and then he saves her.

Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom— and they lived happily ever after. The end.

Skai wishes all her life problems started and ended with dragons and witches. 

But the matter of fact is that fairy tales aren't real and dragons don't exist and she's living this life because this is reality and the real world where monsters aren't green with pimply and oversized noses.

And yeah, she knows that she's still lucky and that there are far more people who are in worse situations than she's in, but it doesn't change the fact that it all sucks.

For starters, there's the fact that she hasn't got her mother anymore. There's also the fact that the only reason that that's so is because of Skai.

Skai's mother lost her mind, see. She's no longer Skai's mother, or Charles' wife. She's turned into a shell of a person, one who is currently, in this precise moment, sitting in the corner of a small room, away from everyone else, states away.

She's only states away because Charles had decided that they needed a fresh start, and really, Skai understood why he wanted to move, so she sucked it up and said goodbye to her friends and moved from Maryland to Maine with her father. At the time, Skai hadn't had anything against the place (and really, she still doesn't), but it was far from where her mother was, and she'd still wanted to visit her, but her father had all but shot her a look that only a parent can give their child.

So Skai had wisely decided to not mention it again, half because of the look, and half because of how she knew that it was her fault that her mother's lost her damn mind in the first place.

Skai isn't human, see.

Not fully, anyway. 

She's part human and part... whatever the hell the other part is. An Elemental, dad says, but she doesn't even know what the fuck that is, so the name didn't clarify anything further.

She was confused and alone and thinking that she'd been possessed by a demon when it happened, because she'd woken up one day and was suddenly able to do... things. Classic superhero origin story, but less cool when it's actually happening to you.