Disclaimer: Blood + characters don't belong to me. Also, 3 lines belong to T.S. Elliot, and we all know I wasn't the one who started the whole concept of fairytales. So don't sue, if you please.
Rating: T for teenage angst-ing.
Summary: Once upon a time, two sisters met, and all the world burned and bled.
Once, Upon A Time
There is a voice.
A song.
A memory of something missing.
From a tower, Rapunzel throws down a rose to her own image.
For freedom, she sings.
Her other self, the one with eyes the color of fire and young hearts in love, hears her and comes. Driven by something older than memory, something deeper than blood and bone, she hears her and comes.
The petals peal away as the rose drifts down, from aged stone to frozen ground.
The Siren sings.
She hears her and comes. Her footsteps echo hollowly off the walls, haunting her heartbeats as she climbs, up and up and up the spiral stairs. When she has reached the sky at the end of the world, there is a door.
The song is wordless and tuneless and someone is screaming it into her blood.
Metal chains and thorn vines wind around its handles like snakes; roses and thorns crawl over the dead wood of the door and almost completely obscure that slight glint of metal. It catches her eye and she prises the half-hidden lock from beneath the vines, its form weighing heavy and cold between her hands.
Everything here is ice, reflecting the sky.
Freedom, it whispers in her ear, achingly, like an old infection.
She slides in the key and it turns, oddly smooth, with a faint click. Rust and rot falls to the floor in a small cloud.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
But the handle does not turn and the hinges will not move when she leans against it. The song is endless in her head; she is desperate and there is nothing more haunting than an existence without a name.
(It could have been her.)
She pushes harder till the splinters pierce her palm and the vines tear to pieces (she does not pause to wonder why they do so, so obediently); the door, lumbering, opens.
For freedom.
It is a prison, in the top of the tower, by the sky at the end of the world.
Mirror mirror, on the wall.
She stares at her own image, and red eyes meet blue.
Mirror mirror-
Hurried hands reach through blackened bars and fire freezes as it collides with immortality.
We are the fairest, of them all.
That fallen rose is the exact, frozen blue of her eyes, and as such, nature itself condemns it.
Sleeping Beauty awakens.
Here, everything is ice, reflecting the sky.
With ebony hair; -
As the world goes out in flames, and hellfires -
and snow-white hands
burn all to blackened cinders
Thy fair beauty wakes, by a kiss -
the red, red roses -
with thy sister's blood, upon thy lips.
bleed, to blue.