Theodora's perspective of the events pre-canon, during, and after. A/N: I was unsatisfied with Theodora's place in the film, but also felt like Kunis played her deftly in the beginning. How pure is Theodora, really?
Innocent.
And wasn't it easier that way?
(With Evanora and Glinda slinking out doors
their lips bruising each other's skin
their hands always clasping, carressing,
lingering skin on skin.
Causing an ache in her)
And she stayed innocent, childlike, believing.
She practiced in the mirror, her wide-eyed stare, letting her dark hair cascade gently down one shoulder, peering up beneath, behind, always slightly hidden - always large and round, pools of brown in her pale face, asking, seeking, searching.
Glinda made a pet of her. Always. Shouting, "Theodoora!" down the corridors of the Emerald Palace. Like one calls a misplaced puppy. Sometimes, "Theo, Theo, Theeoo!" as if she were a stray cat that needed coaxing in from out of the rain. Always she came, skipping out of her room with a bound, as if just waiting for the call from the Princess and her knight (that sister who was darkness and whiteness and contrasts and crackling always with energy and strength and sensuality, who picked her up like a china doll and pet her so smoothly and told her faerie tales and Theodora would sink into her warmth, pressing her small cheek against that proud neck and drink and drink from the sparkling energy that surrounded her) and they would play such games! Always fighting Theodora's bashfulness, always teasing her into their elaborate worship of princesses and dragons and knights and sorcerers and Ever After.
(As they grew older, their games grew
darker and Theodora grew fierce with longing
with envy
with fire
and they played her like a harp,
these two - one black and white a forest in the winter,
one flaxen and warm a field of wheat made flesh,
and she hid behind her innocence
behind their ignorance
as her body heated and ached for their
touch.
Always their touch.
Always these three.)
When Glinda ran into exile and all that was left was the crackling green energy of her dark sister, and the fermenting bright fire of her own, she sunk further into that only shield available to her. With Evanora in her bed, wrapped around her, their skin dancing against each other's skin, (always not enough, always missing something, always compensating for the one that was not there), she lay with her eyes wide open - unseeing, unknowing. So safe and warm for her sister to wrap her body around.
She whispered tales of a wizard in her sister's ear.
She clung to her childhood, she sank into her sister's arms the innocent one, the incorruptible one, the girl living in a faerie tale.
While underneath a simmering current spread and spread and threaten to eat her whole.
Wandering was easiest. Wandering about, the lost girl in the woods, it was so simple - too perfect. With her perfect red hat and her bright, wide eyes. She walked in a land of the lost and forgotten - she played the part so well.
They pitied her. She saw, as she ducked her head and blushed in the court of her fierce panther, her sister. Reigning with a broken heart bleeding and empty and rubbed raw with each passing day.
(She heard, in her dreams, the lonely sound
her sister on the terrace
screaming down at her lover
"But it's what you said you wanted!"
And a yellow-haired woman peering up with
a smile
"Yes. I know."
The screams of that broken heart
echoed within the walls of her
own empty shell of a body
kept pure by deliberate omission
kept safe through obsessive
innocence.)
While wandering it was easiest to play the part, to be the younger sister in the shadow of a monster in a country ripped to shreds. It was where she could look with wide-eyed terror at the flying terrors her sister unleashed (her playmates as a child, they would never harm her, most knew her more intimately than any human in the City of her youth), gasp anew at each troubled village, gather children to her and comfort them (while inside she laughed and laughed, a cackle that did not befit her round, unscarred face). While wandering she practiced the art of wonder, slowing and deepening her speech, smiling softly and slowly like a flower opening its petals, walking delicately and softly.
When she met him, standing knee deep in water that could rip the very flesh from her bones, she saw him for what he truly was. She saw in his sparkling eyes the words of a man dependent on weak women falling heels first into the promises he was sure to never keep. She saw how easily it would be to ply from him what she wanted.
And it was.
And it was worth all the years of waiting and practicing.
It was worth all the years of performing.
He would be the undoing of her façade.
He would set her free.
The deft tilt of her head, the deliberate way she let her hair down at night in front of the fire, the rough catch in her voice as she admitted to him all her insecurities and fears; he practically leaped at the chance to dance with her. To capture her innocence with his hands and mouth and words. To work his magic upon her body and make it spring to life.
Fool.
There was a moment of fear. A small one.
When he was buried deep inside her and she was full of his musk and his manhood and she delighted in leaving little scratch marks down his back (as if he had the strength to bring her pleasure, as if his body was the first hers had ever known), she clung to him, terrified for an instant that her fire would burn them both to dust.
Oh how she had wanted to burn and burn and burn. All wrapped around him. Taking him into her heat and keeping him there forever.
Not for the sake of him. He was merely a means to an end.
And how easy it was to terrify him with talk of Ever After.
Poor boy had never stood a chance against Theodora.
"You lied to me!"
She screeched at her sister, her mighty sister, who tricked her into killing her own heart.
She was ready. She was tired of playing the part.
She ached to be free of this armor that clung about her. That kept the world from seeing her flames.
(Trick.
A trick is the thing, a charade, a game
Theo played it best.
She cursed the ground, she cursed his
name. She cursed the girl with the
golden hair.
She tricked them all.
They pitied her
her broken heart
that poor sweet girl with the gentle heart
now a monster.
Fools.)
Later, when the smoke had cleared, when her true face shown dark and green and she no longer was forced to hide behind fear and stories and an innocence that never was, she took him inside her in the night, next to his bright bride and whispered in his ear tales of the greatness he could be, twining her long green fingers between those of her sister's lover.
Then bit her softly on the nipple, tasting that sweet flesh, lapping up blood like the cat they once made her, and slunk into the night - a shadow. Always a shadow.
A shadow of the girl they thought she once was.
Later, when her sister's beauty was found again in a pair of silver shoes, brighter and more stunning than the glamour undone by the gem cracked in Glinda's hand; they lay together as she always wanted. Sneaking away to drag Glinda away from her palace and her good man and they cavorted in the darkness together. Grasping, seeking, burning, biting, tearing. They were raw in each other's arms, they knew now boundaries, they took only pain and pleasure and nothing was soft and everything hurt.
It was the way it was supposed to be.
She knew.
She knew the way she knew the stars in the sky like the palm of her hand, the truth of their places.
Glinda in her palace with her immortal man, playing forever the golden child.
Evanora in her little country, with her beauty and her passion.
Theodora in her stronghold, with her fire always burning steady.
These three. Together, twisting together in the moonlight. Sometimes with him between them, their presence forgotten in the morning, their magic fogging his mind. Mostly just these three. Or those two. Or these two. But always a collision of gold and white and black and green.
A collidiscope of power and hunger.
These three.
Innocent to the last.
Free in the end.