The Royal Scandal | Prince William |

Rise From Your Ashes

A single spotlight illuminates where she stands, the world black and endless beyond the reaches of the light. She's standing on a stage, but can only see to the edge where it then dips and dives into a never ending pit.

"Again Miss Webber."

Jaclyn snaps to attention, seeing her old ballet director Ms. Lewis off to the side. Her expression is shrewd and cast in lingering shadows. Her lips don't move from her sneer as the music starts. The tempo is languid with hanging phrases, and a daunting undertone, and Jaclyn knows immediately what it is.

The Dying Swan variation.

Her legs take over before her mind can comprehend what she's doing. Not only is she walking, but dancing, and the movement completes her soul. Her arms become wings extending from her back, thrumming with a life of their own, and her feet flutter across the stage in pointe shoes she hasn't looked at in eight years.

She falls over and recovers, moving to the elongated string chorus while the piano sings consistently short notes in the background. She runs legs extending with the breath of freedom, and her back leg comes up to kick her head in a dramatic attitude. Jaclyn holds the pose perfectly atop her toes, but falters as her back fractures with an obnoxious crack. She feels everything in her fissure, ripping in two halves, but her body keeps going.

She keeps dancing.

A flower of blood unfurls across her stomach, seeping it's greedy grasp into the white satin costume. She floats into another arabesque, gritting her teeth through the pain of her stomach being splayed in half. She does it again and again curious about the feeling erupting through her.

She bourrées backwards, her feet tapping furiously at the floor, and oh how she's missed this sound, but when she looks down blood trickles down her tights in thin rivers, and collect at her shoes. The stage itself is smeared with her blood, and suddenly dancing is harder. Breathing is harder.

What were false fluttering wings seconds ago, now tremble and quake as her feet become erratic. She's heaving, fighting to escape her own lungs. The augmented liquid is everywhere. Ripe in her nose. Slick between her legs. A varnish across the floor.

"What are you doing?"

Jaclyn falters, but her feet won't let her come down from pointe, as she looks up desperately into Ms. Lewis's eyes.

"I'm tired-"

"You're weak."

Ms. Lewis steps closer and Jaclyn is trembling now, her arms moving of their own desperate accord like they can pull her from this. "What kind of swan are you, Jackie?"

"What?" She gasps, falling into a deep lunge with her hands braced on the floor. Now her untouched skin gathers her blood like a rite of passage. "What- What do you mean?"

But Ms. Lewis only repeats her question.

Gaze locked on the stains surrounding her, she fights with her foggy head. Swan... Swan... Who has performed dying swan? Anna Pavlova. Maya Plisetskaya. Uliana Lopatinka. Svetlana Zakharova. What do they all have in common?

Her heads spinning, sitting in her own damnation, and it hits her. She's supposed to be in the hospital. Her last memory is William's panicked face, his necessary words, and then the world is black.

Dying swans all just fade. They beautifully die putting a nice little period at the end of their story. It feels conclusive for her, even in their coat of arms she is the swan to William's lion. For years she's been called fragile and meek and demure, but she can feel something stirring under her skin.