a/n: At first this was just a one-off, super-short drabble that wouldn't leave me alone until I posted it. Then it kind of grew another head and turned into a two-parter. Now it just keeps growing more heads. Still, I hope you enjoy. :)

I n s o m n i a

"And yet tonight she dreams of wooden swords and window ledges, of evergreens and snow in winter."

She doesn't sleep at night these days. Nobody knows who she is at night because she becomes invisible, a shadow in the dark, so nobody knows that the harsh smudges around her eyes aren't just make-up willingly applied. She's never been good with night-time, because the night likes to be her tormentor. It keeps her awake with plaguing thoughts only ever drawn out in the blackness of the sightless night. She doesn't sleep at night these days. Not until she becomes so exhausted that she falls dead to the world, only kept asleep by the sheer overwhelming physical need for rest.

Tonight is one such night.

She dreams of him sometimes. Not sometimes. Too often. She hates it, but she cannot keep her mind free of him when she does not have the rigid control of wakefulness. Her sleeping mind forgets that she hates him, forgets who she is now. Sometimes it's hard to keep the mask in place.. It's hard to keep pretending, keep crushing the shards of light inside her that insist on surviving, even though she's tried to incinerate them over and over so she doesn't have to feel it, feel the sickening twist of guilt and doubt and disgust at the sorry scattered ash she's made of her life.

All the beautiful things she ever had become dust, and the dust becomes darkness like a mire sucking at her being, dragging her into the suffocating depths of sin. She is, she thinks, what happens when the thorn-bush overruns the wild rose.

And yet tonight she dreams of wooden swords and window ledges, of evergreens and snow in winter. Just for now there're sips of wine and sweet music, and rustling silk on a polished dance floor, and there's a prince in red and gold who laughs like nothing can ever touch him, like arrows would bounce off him and swords would fall before they ever reached his delicate flesh. Just for now she's a princess, and her green blue eyes never flash bronze.

But then someone panics and the fragile cup falls from the royal table. Scarlet wine runs like blood across the stone floor and the cup lies broken alone.

She knows she won't sleep again tonight.