Chioniphobia

Triangles

Grim knows her brother is beautiful.

It isn't a bias on her part: it's an objective fact, that her brother is a wonder. He is kind and soft and warm and golden, all the potential that humanity has for good personified. He is ambition, but not set in the unforgiving shape of goals. He is imagination, but not bogged down by anxieties or fears. Sandy is beautiful.

Pitch is beautiful as well, although he is as different from her brother as obsidian is from gold. His ambition is cold and bitter and sharp, the sort of sharp like a scalpel you don't notice cutting into you until you've bled out. He can be charming; after all, he's had centuries to perfect his mask of civility.

But just a few nicks to his ego, a couple bumps and bruises to his pride, and the mask cracks.

What's underneath is cruel and harsh and raw and monstrous, but it is beautiful as well. There's an allure in danger, and what is underneath is dangerous.

Grim is dangerous too, but she holds none of the seductive mystery that her fellow dark spirit possesses. She is sharp, yes, sharp and jagged, a broken knife, a rough-edged saw. If her brother is gold and Pitch obsidian, she is lead. Plain, dull, ever-present, kept away from whenever possible. Grim is not beautiful.

In appearance, Grim isn't certain whether her brother or her friend qualify as traditionally beautiful. Her brother is round and friendly, with a wide smile and kind eyes: the look of a person you can trust, regardless of your standards of beauty. Pitch is lean, predatory, crooked-toothed and ragged-nailed, long and flowing, as if he were made to fit his robes instead of the other way around. Unnerving to the eye, but perhaps not entirely unpleasant.

Grim is lean also, and predatory, arguably more so than her companion. Her teeth are small and pointed, triangles in a trim line, each identical to the next, all perfectly even. Unnaturally even. Shark's teeth in a human-seeming mouth. Her face is more human, but that arguably makes it worse: there's less excuse for why her face looks so wrong. Too angular, too pointed, too pale. Of all her features, she likes her eyes best: dark with a bit of light. Not unlike her nature, or maybe her nature is not unlike her eyes.

Her brother floats. He soars, and when she had wings she tried to emulate that. Graceful glides and swoops, sometimes letting the wind carry her, other times turning and tilting to sail one direction or another. If anything has ever been beautiful about her, Grim likes to think it was her flying. It certainly wasn't her wings, however much she misses them. Great clumsy raggedy things, when they weren't holding her aloft in the air. Always getting caught or tangled, shedding feathers no matter how carefully she groomed, dragging in the dirt of the ground or the dust of various floors.

Pitch slinks, and when she lost her wings she strove to imitate his movement instead. A regal, straight-backed stride, a casual slouch, a lazy, uncaring stroll. Silken, fluid, as if he were liquid shadow.

Before, when she wasn't using her wings, Grim scrambled. She skittered around on awkward, scrawny limbs, fingers clutching and scrabbling for purchase, elbows and knees sticking out at odd angles, crouching and curling into herself whenever she dared stay still. Like a rat, or a spider, or any other pest seeking to make itself as unnoticed as possible.

She'd been looking in the mirror, a few months after That Incident with Bunny, a ribbon with a red pendant tied 'round her throat. She'd a tube of lipstick in her hand (Molten Ruby, the label said) and had applied the makeup with a few cautious, neat swipes.

Grim had stood back and studied her reflection. She'd been wearing her red dress, though it had been greatly altered from the gown she'd worn to the prince's party all those years ago. The hem no longer brushed the floor, but the tops of her knees. The necklace had remained exactly the same, and she had as well. She hadn't worn lipstick at the party, but the bright crimson was striking, well suited to the vivid color of her outfit.

(On someone else, her mind whispered, this might even look pretty)

The colors were nice. She admired the colors. Black and white and red, like a fairytale princess awaiting a kiss from her prince to wake her.

(The princess in the story was fair, fairest in all the land)

Her hair looked nice. She'd always been moderately content with her hair. It was nice enough hair, and long enough that she could do whatever she pleased with it. That night she'd left it flowing, free of braid or bun, spilling down her back like ink.

(Your hair is passable, but you?)

(Ugly)

Chains wrapped around the mirror. She pulled, the links of metal chafing her palms, and it broke, shards of glass scattering around her feet.

She stood there for a long time, triangles of glass arrayed around her, reflecting red and black and white. She'd still been standing there when her brother had arrived.

He flew in through the window on one of his clouds, signing as he did so. (Where were you? I was looking for you at the party but I didn't see you. No one else did either. What happened? Did you leave early? Did you-)

He broke off, seeing the mirror shattered on the floor.

(You're bleeding.)

She laughed. (I can't be bleeding. I don't have blood, remember?)

He pointed, but she didn't need to look to know that there was black, beading, pooling, dripping from a dozen tiny nicks and cuts on her ankles.

(It's not blood,) she signed again.

(What happened?)

She laughed again, but what came out of her mouth sounded more like a sob.

(Wasn't in the mood to party.)

She laughed/sobbed, and suddenly her brother's arms were around her.

They sank to the floor together, her tears wetting his soft, golden shoulder, black not-blood pouring in rivulets from new gashes cut by triangles of glass.