Bizarrely enough, this started its life as an angsty vignette based on Scouting For Girls' song 'This Ain't A Love Song, This Is Goodbye', but with a little help from some period drama I'm busy enjoying it became fairytale-esque fluff. Oh well - I hope you enjoy it just the same!
Bad Romance
They will become legend in the way that all such oddities do – in the way that you read another version of a familiar fairytale simply to discover its new ending. Theirs is another version of that selfsame, familiar fairytale: a fairytale where the princess takes it upon herself to choose, and chooses right; in the way that not all princes and knights and witches and dragons are exactly what they pretend to be. There is a price to pay for each stolen moment of sunshine, a price upon the head of every player.
There is a chessboard, and there is the game.
Perhaps it is a cautionary tale – look before you leap, and before you lie. Perhaps it is a book which is abandoned by the child because it does not follow the correct pattern, and then picked up again by the adult who has come to realise that life does not always run by rote. Children cannot see into treacherous minds and empty marriages, and this is why they dream.
She dreamed, so often and for so long, of princes and palaces and no prices to pay. She dreamed of true love and trust and kinship and friendship and all we are taught is virtuous. She kept fairytales, dozens of them, arranged in neatly bound rows by order of preference. She had them read aloud until she could read, and then read them herself; she lost herself in a perfect world where truth and solidarity and kindness and gentility are all that is expected of princesses (and where princesses are creatures who would never be ruthless and cruel in order to get what they want).
He can't remember the tales, only the characters, and only where he fitted in: vizier, magician, jester, advisor – the princess too far beyond his reach for any sleight of hand. He is sometimes the villain, sneaking and sly, wanting what he can't have but coveting it nonetheless. He read those stories like they were dirty; like they were the magazines on the top shelf (out of his reach like the princess, and yet somehow so much more accessible). He hid the books, burnt them, never gave them back and let his heart grow harder than frost.
They're having one of those moments that doesn't happen in fairytales because a kiss to awaken a beauty is the last event that has any meaning before those glossy, golden letters spell 'The End'. No one talks about the kiss which awakens the dragon, the temptress, the kiss which brings them here, looking at one another underneath the sheets like they're those children who threw the books away.
"We're not a love story, are we?" She asks quietly, her tone not cutting but somehow peaceful; at peace with the question.
"No," he replies truthfully, watching her watching him watching her. "But then, none of the best stories ever are."
Fin.