Writte for Otorisosa-kan's July Prompt Challenge. This month's challenge was that the story had to be about a first kiss (lips, cheek, whatever). Apparently I can't even make that into a happy story. Whoops. Outsider POVish.
Also, a little extra warning needed on this one: there is a slight allusion to sexual abuse here. It's not something I'm comfortable writing about, nor will I ever be, but I think by the end you'll understand why it was included.
Storybook Kisses
She first tastes the red flame of evil when she is six, and she does not know what it means. After all, Daddy is supposed to be Superman.
She holds the covers up to her chin and prays for an angel, whispering promises of being better and trying harder, if only someone will come to take her away. No one comes.
She reads storybooks in the back room of the library where the stuffed animals are, wrapped in the arms of a giant teddy bear. When Mom and Dad come to find her, she walks slowly but obediently out the door. She does not forget the smoky scent of safety, nor does she forget the stories she reads and repeats inside her head. Most talk of princes, brave knights who storm the castle and find their bride, rescuing them from dragons that rear their ugly heads and shoot red flame from their gaping mouths. This is a fire she recognizes, that same red heat that burned her first when she was six, the one that burns still inside the caged walls of her life. It gives off a different smell than the library; bitter and sharp against her nostrils. It makes her eyes water.
But the stories say that someone will come; that one day she will be free of the monsters if she just holds on.
And so Abbie holds on.
She is fourteen when someone finally comes, but it is not her Prince Charming as she imagined him to be. Instead, it is a young girl with blonde hair that tumbles past her shoulders and curls around her face. They sit on the red swings in the backyard of a house that has never been home, and Abbie tells her story. She tells of dragons and of the grisly fires that rob her of oxygen, make it impossible to breathe or survive here much longer. And the girl beside her nods her head and understands.
"I can take care of them for you," she says, a smile pulling softly at her lips. There is a crease in the middle of her forehead, a hollowed-out indent that shouldn't belong to a face so young. "And it won't even cost you. For ten whole years."
"Yes," Abbie says. She watches the little girl's eyes turn red as they sit together on the swings, and she says yes. Abbie knows that color, for it is the same one that is painted behind the backs of her own eyes, and it is the same one she sees when she walks between the walls of the house she lives in. And she will fight fire with fire.
The blonde girl with the flames in her eyes leans in close, her breath tickling at Abbie's lips. Abbie had always imagined her first kiss would be with her prince, but he isn't here. And he isn't coming.
She will have to save herself.
She barely notices when the girl leaves, only moments after their lips touch. She closes her eyes and she pumps her legs, back and forth, back and forth. She feels the wind on her face and swings higher, letting her head fall back against empty air, an unfamiliar laugh caught between her teeth.
The next day, when the car that her parents were driving in goes up in flames, she cannot hide that laugh. She smells the smoky aftertaste of a cozy library on a Sunday afternoon, and she understands the duality of the fires of her life. There is happy kind of warmth in this new day, a heat that never comes close enough to scorch her skin. This is the light she wants to live with, a soft blue flame to go with the vicious red. She renames herself after both of those flames. The first is a word that echoes beauty, a blue reflection of her salvation. The second is destruction, a reminder of the evil she is capable of.
She uses many more names as the years pass, but this will always be her truest form, the reality of what hides behind precious jewels and diamonds that feel almost as cold as the lips of the demon that was her first kiss. She can never forget the taste, though she tries her hardest to keep it locked away for the ten short years she has left.
And when they are over and the clock has chimed its last, she can see that familiar blaze of red sparking up behind her eyes again. The tears she cries do nothing to extinguish the flames of the fate she must endure, now and forever.
Her name is Bela Talbot, and she is beautiful destruction.
A/N: I googled the meaning of "Talbot" and got "messenger of destruction" which is totally fitting, I think. I always thought Bela's story was terribly tragic, so naturally I had to write about it. Please leave your thoughts, and thanks for reading!