#amern

She wanted to create and destroy with a stroke of her brush. She wanted to harm and to heal, to pour her feelings and emotions onto a canvas using shades of blue, purple, black. She wanted paint stuck under her nails, not mittens covering her fingers. She preferred red staining her hair as opposed to glitter in her too-tight ponytail.

Feyre didn’t want to follow after her sisters. She didn’t want to skate. Yet, whenever she tried to push away, her mother pushed back.

Their mother was never a skater or an athlete in any sense. She never had the pleasure or privilege to partake in such things growing up. Therefore, she wanted what all mothers did; to give her daughters the life she never had.

Money was tight. Their mother took on two jobs while their father worked long hours to support them. Feyre could remember lying awake at night, listening to her father argue that skating was taking up too much of their money. But their mother never backed down, even if, on those nights, seven-year-old Feyre wished she did.

Looking back, as an older woman, Feyre wished she’d been better. She wished she’d given her mother that joy by willing stepping on the ice. She wished she could take back all the pouts, the resisting, the arguments. If she has understood then how much time, energy and money their mother had to give for a sport she wanted her daughters to love, she would have been better.

If she’d known that her mother wouldn’t be around long enough to see her youngest actually fall in love with the sport…

“Figure skaters are artists. Their brushes are the blades, the canvas is the ice, and their hearts form the picture. Skate your picture, Feyre.”

From the moment her mother took her last breath, Feyre promised to do just that.

She poured everything she had into honouring her mothers dying wish. She dropped out of high school, took on three jobs while their father turned to the bottle to deal with his grief. She became the caretaker and provider for the family. She made sure the Archeron sisters continued to step onto the ice every season.

But there was one thing missing. A phantom that followed her around day and night. A passion that never came. A loneliness that never left.

The passion that Nesta and Elain had for skating, the love their mother desperately wanted to bestow upon her daughter, it never came. She just did want she had to do it get by. 

Until one early morning practice. It was a rainy Saturday, the start of the season. Feyre was standing on the ice before Couch Alis, waiting to meet her new partner, when he showed up. When he came charging into her life, grabbing her hand and whisking her off her bladed feet.

He wasn't her first partner, but he was the one who made her feel something. Less lonely. More loved.

He was the one who started her story.