Disclaimer: Sleeping Beauty belongs to Disney and its respective artists. The fic's storyline is my creation.
Genre/Story type: Serious.
Rating: R
Series: Sleeping Beauty
Pairing: guards/Prince Philip
Short Notes: Rape, mild torture, mental torment. You remember the scene where the guards hogtied Prince Philip at the cottage under Maleficient's supervision? You had to have dirty thoughts at the suggestions of that. D Please. Enjoy ♥ Do not post this fic anywhere without my permission. PS-- intended for the mile-long pole challenge, although it's way overdue. ;
Thank yous: MOrgan and Hauntress for their interest. ) And Jenn for watching her DVD copy of Sleeping Beauty while I was over and inspiring this. ;P

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Knees locked apart, Prince Philip jerked up in a rigid arch at the stabbing intrusion of flesh in his flesh, throat rising with a scream silenced by the very agony stopping his throat. The chill stones were hot against his skinned shins and palms as the greedy horde of grunting beasts rocked his body with their motion and touched him in places no one should have touched.

Bruises bloomed against his ashen skin under a map of open wounds. Chest heaving from nausea and pain, Philip squirmed clumsily, trying to curl into a protective ball and shuddered violently as the monsters denied him, yanking him open and holding him pinned. Shock blanketed his senses as his mind blanked from repulsion, swollen with confusion.

He stared sightlessly at the dim outline of firelight outlining the black door of his sepulcher. When it slid open with a heavy click, Philip only looked at the open escape with incomprehension and then with an echo of angry fear at the shadow that appeared behind it.

Philip watched the fairy-- the witch-- drift into his cell of hell through a haze of shock.

He knew her. Once upon a dream. But while his mind smiled when he met Rose, his mind stilled when he met Maleficent. I know you, his mind whispers. You're certain. As the darkness that held the stars in the sky, the decay in an age of glory, and the inevitable death of all.

Yet she ends his torment with a tilt of her staff and banishes his demons with a curl of her lips. "Come, my pets," she invites indulgently. "You'll miss the celebration."

The swarm of malicious grotesque beasts stilled, considering, before they lifted from his bleeding body in a crowd of static, misting toward the witch. The foul cloud wavered around her warily, before streaming past her in a buzzing cacophony.

As they past her, noise fell silent, dark faded to gloom, and malice shifted to spite. Even nearly blind from pain and crippled with shame, Philip's mind could not shy from attending to the witch. Every last survival instinct he possessed coerced it, sluggishly struggling toward alarm as the extinguished torches silently caught with green hellfire.

Maleficient was no way a woman fair.

Hair, fury dark and coal black, wound in upswept lank coils, shaping the harsh spirals of crowning horns. Her feline eyes, jaundiced with subtle chilling hunger, were inhuman. Deeper than soulrending fears. Impenetrable as stone. The color of insanity.

Eerie shadows hollowed the angular planes of her countenance, carving her features in a mask of white jade. Her pupils were burnt out tunnels of endless hell. Her lips were a crimson wound. To look upon her face was to behold the sinister seductiveness of despair.

She was anything but a sun-touched diamond, yet hers was a beauty that cut. Through the heart to the bone. She was what she was and horrifyingly beautiful as it.

Philip tensed as the specter cloaked in shadowy violet and haunting ebony slid toward him with serpentine grace. The only sound from her passage came from the snaking tails of her hem which slithered behind her in sibilant whispers. Darkness surged and swirled about her feet. She was seeped in shadows and her nature flowed from her form in amorphous ambiance. Her presence stifled. Her existence unsettled.

But what terrified him was the slow smile that twisted her face. Under the amber gleam of predatory eyes, it was not vemonous so much as burning cold. She smiled like she knew everything he never wanted known. All his filthy faults, his darkest desires, and his shameful secrets. Throat raw from denial and limbs leaden with fear, Philip could only shiver before her, supline with want of mercy yet still from inbred strength.

Austere as a high priest, Maleficient lifted a thin, spidery hand to her high collar before splaying her crimson-tipped fingers over the glimmering orb on her staff. The full dags of her sleeves draped along her thin arms like tattered wings. Scintillating, the sphere sent glints of green drifting between the folds and fall of her trailing robes.

The molten undertow of magic that swelled ravaged him in an inverse rape. Philip's spine wrenched as scouring force overpowered, overwhelmed, and consumed him. Scrawling bruises dwindled and the latticework of wounds sealed. Shock and confusion burst and tore from him. As the burning pain tripled, quadrupled, the prince buckled in a mindless scream.

Senses overloaded, Philip could barely hear the warped echoes of the witch's amused laughter as the pain faded like it'd never been. Clearing the dark splotches from his vision, Philip looked up in time to catch Maleficient languidly wave a hand at him in benediction. The fire along the wall churned from green to red and gold.

Philip flinched, skin crawling as filth sloughed from him and the tatters of his clothes wove themselves anew. Weakly raising a hand to grasp at his mended sleeve, he hunched inward, head lowering in abject humility.

The almost kindness was unspeakable cruelty. Philip had never heard of the witch possessing the power to erase as well as the power to create all evil, but used like this, it was unsurprising. The combination of benevolence and torture fractured the stubborn defiance bolstering Philip's heart like nothing else she could've done, pulling him one crack closer to breaking. To banish the marks of atrocity, to dismiss the scars of suffering, as trifles was heartless inhumanity.

As if regarding one of her minions, Maleficient's smile turned indulgent at the revulsion in Philip's sickened eyes. Resting her hands back on her staff, she turned from him.

Her outline was stark, as if burned upon the wall. When the torchlight flickered upon the closed door, she was gone.