Your Guardian Angel
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"…I will never let you fall.
I'll stand up with you forever.
I'll be there for you through it all
even if saving you sends me to Heaven…"
- "Your Guardian Angel" - Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
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It was well past nightfall when she finally got away, fingertips tingling from lack of blood flow and wrists mildly sore. Her long lavender locks were a mess, falling out of the partial up do and her cheeks were lightly dusted with dirt. It would be enough to break most woman graced with her beauty and comfortable lifestyle. But not her, so was the mind and body of a warrior within her since long ago.
Battle-callused hands rubbed her face. To a casual observer, it looked as though she hadn't slept in days - which she hadn't; shadows framing deep, glazed, violet eyes, wrinkles where there hadn't been before, a usually straight-backed body hunched over, even only slightly so.
Her heels clicking against the metal high-rise, a reverberating tik, tik, tik, seemed to be the only sound in the night. The cars made no deep rumbles or blaring honks, even the distant flames of Hadron Blasters and regular gunfire erupted in silent explosions. Men and women, old before their time, disappeared like the snuffing of a candle, without so much as a gentle hiss. It was as though the world had stopped breathing. And the princess discovered that so too had she.
Her hands touched cool metal as she leaned precariously over a bar with Eleven streets intersecting below in a sparkling labyrinth of Britannian inspired tailor shops and cafés and offices. From among the royal blue of velvet-sky, dappled by diamond-stars and planetoids, her eyes caught a spark. A burst of pink - the cotton candy shade of dear Euphie's undulating tresses - that rather than imploding into itself and vanishing, a momentary flash of memory and solace, the spark grew from a translucent marble to a blinding sun among them.
Throwing her arms up across her face to protect her sensitive eyes, Cornelia's fair ears pricked up of their own accord. Carried by an gentle wind, a single voice - a wish - echoed through the stillness, encircling her heart like a frozen claw.
"Princess…Please live on…"
He went on still farther, and all was so quiet that a breath could be heard, and at last he came to the tower, and opened the door into the little room where briar-rose was sleeping.
There she lay, so beautiful that he could not turn his eyes away, and he stooped down and gave her a kiss. But as soon as he kissed her, briar-rose opened her eyes and awoke, and looked at him quite sweetly.
"Live…"
And if anyone was watching the fearsome princess, they would have witnessed something rare indeed: the flower that bloomed in the desert, as tears, silent as the night, rolled down her cheeks.
. fin.
Disclaimer: Cornelia and Guilford belong to Sunrise. Italic text from the Brothers Grimm's "Sleeping Beauty".