Manipulative: in defense of blister

This is my first fanfic-well, more of a vignette, but you get the idea. All content belongs to DragonSage1331.
They called her by many names. Princess. Sister. Queen. Leader. SandWing. And others that were far less polite.
But the one name she craved was the one she never heard.
Daughter.
Her mother treated Burn with respect. Oasis respected power, and Burn had almost too much of it. Blaze was treated with acceptance. Their mother knew she did not have the grit to be royalty, nor would she push her into something she could not achieve. but as a daughter she would suffice.
But Blister? Blister only ever got her venom.
Not from her tail, no. Oasis was a SandWing, but she preferred to strike with the poison from her mouth before raising her barb. And she saw Blister's ambition as a very real threat, regardless of whether it was or not.
It wasn't, she wanted to scream. I know what I want and will work to get it, is that so bad? But her mother didn't listen. She never listened.
For years, she was treated not as a dragonet, but as a rival. The guards always gave her suspicious looks when she roamed the palace. Whenever her siblings got in trouble, they quickly learned to blame her. Word spread about the princess with black diamonds, none of it good.
As she grew older, the hypocrisy began to grate at her. Her mother was not without any ambition. She had married Char as a concession to public demand, yet granted him none of the power she possessed. Palm, her brother's lover, had been harshly punished by her for the possibility of challengers. Even the rooms of treasure she had came from war. To the victor go the spoils.
Why, then, was her ambition demonized? She wouldn't kill her mother. It would prove her to be what Oasis claimed she was. Most of it was logic, anyway. Blaze didn't want to be queen, and was hardly suited for the role even if she was. A single challenger, and she would be gone. Burn had the power to be queen, certainly, but not the temper. Diplomacy was not a strength of hers, and you can only fight so much before you lose.
There was one flicker of emotion, though, in her thoughts. She didn't want either of them to be queen.
Not because she wanted the role. The public, already leery of her, would likely grow to hate her. She had seen the flaws in the system. How being a ruler forced you to make hard choices. How you were blamed for everything that went wrong. How it had turned her mother against her, based on a future that may not even be true. 
She didn't want that for either of her sisters.
But they wouldn't see her reasoning, when she told them. They called her mad, power-hungry, and manipulative. Then, of course, they ran to Oasis.
Oasis did not take it well. Framing it as a challenge, she fought her daughter then and there, aiming to kill even as Blister screamed and cried. She yielded in the end, unwilling to die at her mother's talons.
They laughed at her, then. Why would she challenge her so early? Didn't she know she would lose? 
Ambitious. Such a simple quality, and yet it had brought her nothing but trouble.
She listened for sympathetic ears, kind words, and found none. Her mother had tried to murder her based on a falsehood, and the general public thought nothing of it except that the upstart had it coming.
She didn't want to kill her mother, that was true. But to lead her into a situation where her pride would get her killed was an entirely different matter.
They called her a monster for shedding no tears when Oasis died. Why was she the monster in a world where mothers killed their daughters and daughters killed their mothers? She knew of other queens of long ago, ones that had killed their daughters to keep their power. Not in a formal challenge, but under the cover of night, through proxy and gold paid to unsavory folk.
She knew that Burn could kill her mother in a fair fight. She knew that Oasis would not allow that. She didn't allow Blister's nascent ambition, why would she let Burn grow to be a credible threat? And Blaze. Poor, sweet Blaze, who would never stand a chance if Oasis grew tired of being a mother to her.
There was only a chance that that would happen, but it was one she could not, would not, let happen.
Then the cries for a new queen came. Burn led the charge, claiming that they could not trust Blister and that Blaze was unqualified.
She let out her rage then. They could not understand why she had to take the throne. They could not trust what their own sister told them. They just wanted the power that had turned their mother from a parent into a tyrant.
They would follow in her mother's steps, and she had to stop that. Whatever it took.
Category:Fanfictions (Completed)
Category:Fanfictions
Category:Fanfictions (Canon)
Category:Content (DragonSage1331)