Notes:Written for LiveJournal's 31 Days.
August 17:
As for refined love -- let others claim it.
May God, instead, give me contentment.
Afterword
He can't work out the story. The girl, as often as not, ends up walking into misfortunes he didn't intend, word-traps he hadn't foreseen, taking face and form of someone who wasn't hers to take.
No! he strikes the paper, and his words sharpen in the stripped, lightening room. Irritated, he makes the harsh sounds of a sword. She's a princess, she's looking for her true love, she doesn't want…
But she does want. She wants beauty and grace, and the distant squire who brings her a horse and a chary smile as she rides out on the quest to rescue a prince that is not hers, in the end, to claim. She wants what Fakir wants, and she will not change for his peace.
The inkwell moves like glass beneath his hands; he hears the shatter against the far wall with a certain grim satisfaction before it dawns.
Shadows dip, overflow across the wall as a head emerges from within a pile of blankets. The world doesn't wait for stories; her throat is already showing lines slim as a dancer's, her wings a faint promise of grace. In fairy tales there is always a threshold at which time will no longer yield back the world before the spell, but he is looking for a new spell, not an unmagic, and circumstances may be different.
Drawn from the depths of slumber, half-expectations build a memory before his eyes before he blinks and sees her, all rumpled (feathered) curiosity in the slant of early morning through the window.
"An accident," he says, at which she narrows her eyes meaningfully, and quacks. "There wasn't any ink."
"Qua," she says again.
"Next time," he promises, and feels obliged to add, by helplessness or fury, "I'm sorry."
She answers with finality and a short, loud honk, and proceeds across the floor, up the lined steps he's constructed to his desk. He cannot read anything from her movements: neither sorrow nor disappointment, though it should, he reasons, take longer than a day to reconcile to birdhood again. But then, Duck is nothing like the languages he's learned - he can only guess, and hope.
"A day might be better than nothing," he presses a palm over each eye, elbows jutting against the wood, "but I don't know what I was doing! And the story's gone, now. The girl of the story… she becomes someone else, each time. I can't find her anymore." His hands drop; he glances at her, seeing the sudden impressions warp and change in his eyes. He keeps looking back at her, as if some sudden indecision of the universe will bring the girl of yesterday back, awkward and simple and—
"There'll be other stories," he tells her, with a sudden flush, and makes a note to go down to the market today. Another inkwell, and a dress – white, he thinks, or a dark blue with the heaviness of wine. He won't make that mistake again. "At least we know I can, now."
If he can transform a girl, if he can find what power Drosselmeyer had and how it was used…
"I can change it," he offers, to which she blinks; slow drops of her eyelids, sharp blue hidden by ivory. She's growing into the wide beak, the unyielding curl of feather at the base of her skull. "We're older, now. If you changed your mind from the choice you made before, I could. His laws aren't mine. Princess Tutu doesn't have to vanish in a clap of light."
To alter all the world for her: it's selfish, and like some esoteric signal, calls some stirring of enchantment out of his shadows in a line: a face illumined raptly in certainty at the coarse border of the dark. He writes it, before the ink dries, before he forgets, aware of the silence that hovers between them like a shield.
"You could be the girl again," he says, "Princess Tutu," he pronounces it with the delicate accent of his first language, not the common drawl its original tongue gives it – surprisingly, without mockery, only a promise.
He thinks of Mytho, all translucence, familiar simplicity like a figurine made of glass and ivory, eyes like mirrors yielding back only what you bring. But no, he's changed - breath and color and mortality restored by raven's stolen breath, raven's shattered heart. (They have never visited, though he hears news of them occasionally: the queen with hair glossy as feathers, the king who moves like a ghost, to a melody beneath all hearing. From what he understands, they are happy.)
The part of him that stands, like Drosselmeyer, away and watching, says, that you can write it now means that you are more ink and quill than sword and tragic denouement: more storyteller than knight.
And yet in the end, all he is, is someone who cares for a duck.
Ahiru replies without words as she ascends the last step onto the desk (matchboxes lined closely together, and he remembers suddenly an old story – a dancer made of porcelain and a soldier cast in flames, or perhaps it was only a girl in the snow, burning wishes for warmth), sweeping across his papers to examine the story.
She is too big, now, for the desk; papers snag on the webbing as she crosses, fall from the movements of faint wings. Her feathers stir finely together. He should have known before he asked what she would choose. He should have guessed, but there is a certain comfort, all the same, in putting the promise where it can cast a shadow over his papers.
(The confidence of the selfishness melts away; he feels the loss of power like the hollows of an extended hand emptying of rain.)
New lines come clear, shaping answers in his mind. They are awkward, without spells or guarantees of strength.
"So," Fakir says softly at length, and under her eyes, begins to write again.
.end