cruel fairytale

HISTORY.

Abigail Abbott. The youngest child and the apple of her family’s eyes. Quaint and always on her best behaviour, Abby was the perfect image of the youngest child most families wished they had. So far from their neighbour’s brat; far from the rascal who often caused havoc in their neighbourhood’s park; as long as Abigail was in the company of her sisters, she was the perfect balance of mischief and discipline. So to wake up one morning with a missing sister — without even as much as a goodbye — it completely ruined the person that Abby was until Lindy’s disappearance. She’d failed to find the letter Lindy left for her, displaced from its post underneath her pillow because of an entire night of moving head and limbs, and Abby spent the following years of her life resenting her eldest sister for abandoning her. Gone were the seemingly permanent smile on her face, the bounce in her steps, and the pleasant aura that seemed to surround her no matter which hour of the day. Abby withdrew from her parents’ invitation to go to the beach (“just like old times, Abby.”); withdrew from coming near the water; withdrew from everything that reminded her so much of her sister. Abby grew to hate the beach, the salty scent of the air, the calming ( — maddening ) noise of the waves against the sand, and whilst she knew it was unreasonable for her to do so, Abby somehow knew that the sea was one of the reasons why her sister left; the one who took her sister away from her.

Abby, however, did not change drastically. She was still the nicest child to her parents, still obeyed their wishes as long as they were within reason; still a loving sister to Ginny and treated her just the same up to the day the latter had to move to the other side of the country after her wedding day. It was bittersweet, knowing that she lost yet another sister, but — at least, Ginny said her goodbyes before she left, right? At least, Abby was given the time to prepare herself; to slowly accept the fact that she will be the only Abbott child in their home from then on. So unlike Lindy who just up and left without a word. Abby was unprepared, just as she was unprepared to see a small box containing two papers from one of Ginny’s drawers. Abby knew she shouldn’t have touched her sister’s things – those letters could have been from her sister’s husband from when they were still in the stage of courting – but staring at one of them, browned by age, made her fingers itch and twitch. She knew she had to touch it - to read it.

And when she did, Abby was breathless in her rage, regret, confusion, and longing. Lindy hadn’t left without a word. Though, yes, she was still furious for being abandoned, if Abby had known about the letter’s existence, she would have tried to understand — she would have understood. The discovery of the letter began Abby’s further snooping, resulting in her finding her sister’s journal, which contained so much to know about the supernatural world. Of course, like most people, she found it quite hard to believe that even her sister had succumbed to the idea that there were creatures built differently than humans. But Lindy had always been fascinated by the sea, wasn’t she? She’s always been drawn to it, and if there was an explanation to that, whatever her sister wrote was something that she would accept as a fact.

Thus began Abby’s travels away from home. She’d intended on following her sister’s track, pick up the little crumbs of her sister’s presence in places her friends have pointed at, and within a year, that was all Abby did until she met a man who claimed to have seen the transitioning of her sister into a creature capable of living underwater. He’d been convincing — spoke so kindly and sympathetically for her, saying things of him being in the same boat as her before when he lost a relative to the temptations of the supernatural realm. it didn’t take long until Abby was doing whatever it was that he asked of her to do in exchange for her sister’s whereabouts. All she had to do was participate in an experiment, an endeavour to find a cure for an incurable sickness for a particular species (what it was, they never said). A small part of Abby knew that it was suspicious, but she’d been too eager to find out where her sister was that she took whatever it was inside the cup in one swallowing.

It was all a blur after that. Her vision was swaying; her ears felt as though there were cotton balls shoved into them, and she was falling… falling deep into something she couldn’t quite tell until there was just nothing. It felt so much like sinking into the deep water; fear enveloped her, she panicked and tried to swim back up to the surface, but it was an inevitable force that kept her from floating. For a second, she feared that she would die not knowing where her sister was, but she was waking up; she was opening her eyes and she was seeing things — hearing things more than she ever did before. She was being led to a group of individuals groaning and clawing for anything they could grab, hunger and desperation evident in the way they glanced at … food. Abby’s mouth began watering at that point, and it was then that she felt the pain in her stomach, the gnawing feeling in her gums as her mouth parted on instinct.

Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood.

And she was drinking plenty of crimson liquid, thick and delicious against her tongue and taste buds from a neck of a crying woman. But she was not sympathetic. All she knew was that she needed to drink to survive, to live and find her sister, but mostly, to survive. And the man; the man, who fooled her into thinking that it was for a good cause, had turned out to be a dictator who was out to eradicate the werewolves from life itself. Brainwashed into thinking that he had done her a favour by giving her a lifetime of chances to find her sister, Abby trained and served as one of their hunters for so many years, to use their necks as sources of food as soon as they saw one within the vicinity. All the while, she held her sister’s journal dearly in her arms, against her heart, still hoping for that day to come when she would finally be able to be free from her responsibilities, so she could focus on finding her sister.

And that day would eventually come. When it did, Abby had been in the middle of patrolling the area when war broke between her clan and the pack of a neighbouring town. Abby, herself, hated to shorten the story of the very first war she’d taken part of, but it had been quick — relatively quick. The alpha of the werewolves had been prepared for every possible drawback and aggressive with each success. Perhaps, if it wasn’t for her clutching her sister’s journal tightly against her chest, Abby would have been one of those who were staked to death. The alpha, while cruel and headstrong in his eagerness to make a message (to remove the ‘bad’ vampires), had also been sympathetic for her case after giving her the chance to beg for her life. After a promise of never stepping into their lands and advocating for peace between vampires and werewolves, Abby was allowed to go and start a new life. Somehow, even after years of being with what she once called her clan, Abby was more than happy to get up and never look back as she began her search for her sister once more.

PERSONALITY.