EDIT: Author's Note: Rewritten, much shorter. Series of drabble and one-shots linked chronologically by a thread.
Unattainable Perfection
Dreams are something that Fionna dismisses easily. Alternate worlds of illogical fallacies, deepest desires and darkest fears in a mix of colours, shapes and lights. She never pays attention to the cryptic messages that litter her dreams. Never bothers to try and decipher the symbolism.
Fionna feels lost in a way that one feels when they take the same route everyday to the same place. She knows every rock, every tree, and every blade of grass. Yet lately the route seems unfamiliar. Nothing has changed, but she increasingly feels the weight of uncertainty concerning the world she inhabits. Sometimes along their journeys she would do a double take, feeling watched, or forgetting that a tree had been there where she thought there was none before. She is starting to feel as though elements of her mixed dreams are creeping into her waking life, changing the world before her. Sometimes she pinches herself to see if she really is awake.
Silence has become a common feature of their daily walks to the kingdom when the dirt halts abruptly to a path of stone and towering walls. Bright pastel colours blinding her vision as she walks into its radiance. Everything aligned, symmetrical. She glances up at the towering castle before her, chiselled excellence. She wondered how long it took to build, the painstaking hours of ensuring everything was precise. She does not make the connection between the perfection of the grounds and that of her adoration. She has not yet realised the destruction that idealised flawlessness can create.
When she sees him, her heart flutters and her cheeks stain red, limbs trembling inside while she forces herself to outwardly remain calm and stoic. All she can see is the blinding perfection of his face, his eyes, his hair. His immaculate gestures and impeccable grooming. His spotless smile. She allows the tenalto of his voice sweep her away, declarations and promises she does not really listen to. In awe of his precise grammar and diction. Rendered speechless by his smooth articulation. He is romance and flowers, refined courtly love and elegant chivalry. He is unattainable perfection. A prince from a fairy tale, the ideal she so desperately thinks she wants, needs.
When he treats her like a friend, she is both honoured and devastated. When he offers her a chance to walk by his side as an equal, and not a lover, she is both grateful and frustrated, longing for something that she cannot have. Wishing for something she cannot give. As she strides beside him, she takes note of her overtly masculine appearance, her choice for function over fashion, her less than feminine gestures.
She is worldly, beyond the constraints of traditional gender. But she does not realise this yet. She can see only that which is laid out in tales of love, serving as her lone guides in her post-apocalyptic world ruled by monarchies. And it tells her that she is not enough just as she is.