Title: Once Upon a Dream

Author: Digimon Empress Yaten (de yaten)

Notes: Ooo, boy. Probably my last Axel/Disney World for a while, unless something comes to me in the meantime, because I'm working on a series of things. Feel free to suggest a world, princess, prince, etc, in a review, since I'm wanting to try some other than the major Princesses.

Warnings: Implied Axel/Roxas, maybe Axel/Aurora if you squint? Nothing big. Dark.

Disclaimer: Don't own Kingdom Hearts, Disney, or their respective characters.


Axel watches the eternally sleeping girl on the bed, and sighs.

"You know, I've got all the luck – I never get here when you're awake."

She is silent, but he knows why, and wants to smile at the thought but doesn't care to pretend at a smile on this particular night.

He does, however, want to lean down and kiss her, if only because he knows he shouldn't. He knows it would mean that she would awaken to someone other than her Prince Charming, her Beloved, her One True Love. That just wouldn't do.

Although, Axel couldn't help but wonder why she was so smitten with a prince she had only spent a few brief moments with, prancing and dancing and who-knows-what-else in the forest.

(Some day, Axel will know why, because it will only take one night with Roxas upon a Clocktower, watching the perpetual Twilight sun slink downwards, for him to become hooked on the boy.)

He wants the prince to come now, because he (like she must be) is tired of waiting, tired of visiting the dreary time-frozen castle again and again, only to find the Sleeping Beauty still locked in her tower and Prince Charming still battling demons somewhere far far away.

"What if he doesn't come?" He says, sitting next to her on the bed, disturbing the eternally perfect sheets. "Have you even thought of that? Or…" he whispers, leaning too close above her simply because he can, "have you given up all hope of rescue?"

It is then that she smiles, faint and invisible to all but those who cannot really smile, and Axel slaps the offending face. A red print shows briefly on the spellbound cheek (pale, very pale, almost to Death but not quite, not sickly gray but soft white) before Axel disappears into the darkness.