o1. Fairy Tales
When she was a child she heard only the echoes and stray whispers of what romance might have been. Listening quietly around corners, she'd hold her breath to steal bits of whatever stories she could-- aristocrats swooning over glossy skinned men setting them free from their petty lives and loveless marriages, or young maids in the halls sighing for a prince with a glass slipper who'd only ever met them in dreams.
Fifteen years blink by and her face has stopped changing for good, but her heart is wiser and wearier and knows that the gilded pages of fairy tale loves and happily-ever-afters she shows Alice are just as contrived as salvation by harlequin novel heroes or inconvenient slippers. She realizes now that love, for her, is a cruel reality found through ten years of impassive amethyst eyes watching flaxen-haired princes and dukes flaunt their prospects and pull roses from their sleeves to no avail. She'd come to loath them all, after a decade—for not one yet could clear her thoughts of a ragged clown who had never let any prospect shine though his garnet eye or roses sprout from his palm, and she herself still couldn't explain how such a man had stolen her heart like another pastel from her candy dish without ever seeming to know it.
A/N: I haven't been able to write for a while now, so I'm making a slow and unskilled attempt at starting up again. Concrit and comments are loved.
Disclaimer: Pandora Hearts and its lovely characters belong to Mochizuki Jun.