Arianna's eyes flare open, her heart firing and misfiring, taking its panic out on her own ribs. And for a second she can still feel the stone beneath her, the shackles around her ankles, can still hear his voice, feel the weight of his gaze.
The world behind his eyes then was so cold then: all hate and no hope. So different from the world she lived in. She didn't want that world to infect her own view.
She clenches her fingers into the sheets.
It wasn't a dream. That much she doesn't have to question; at some point in a twisted history, it was real.
How the scene of the boy who smiled and laughed, helping Cassandra with her chores, making the library gleam for little recompense, and the scene of the boy who created a metal monster as a diversion, wrapped chains around her ankles, and teased death and amber before her eyes, could both exist in the same timeline...How the same boy who created machines and compounds to forge solutions, could turn around and use them to manufacture problems, could be played by the same actor, that the only thing that had changed was time...and, at the very end, the same voice that once laughed, and spoke so happily of alchemy and friendship in these castle halls could scream no and I'll make you proud from a prison cart...she doesn't understand. It all seems like some sick joke, played with a trick of the light.
The Queen tosses her legs over the side of the bed, pushing back her hair, careful not to wake Frederic, whose chest is rising and falling to the rhythm of uninterrupted sleep.
This isn't the first time. That is, it isn't the first time her mind parroted and parodied her memories as nightmares.
She tiptoes up to the door and slowly turns the knob, glancing back at Frederic to be sure he doesn't wake, and quietly shuts it behind her.
She needs to walk the halls, clear her mind; if she lays back down to sleep now, her heart won't be able to stop its war march.
She knows from experience.
The castle halls are quiet, doused in a blue-violet tinge, spilling through the windows. She steps up to one of these panes, sighing to the night sky speckled with stars.
The same stars she and Willow chased the sunrise under. The same stars she kissed Frederic under. The same stars, worlds she and Rapunzel gazed at, charted together, asking each other what was out there.
The same sky he kidnapped her under.
The same sky. The same boy. The same queen. The only difference is time.
Time is a funny thing, isn't it? Likes to play pranks. Heals things. Makes you forget things too. Bad things, yes, but also good things; makes you forget what you lost...and consequently less grateful for what you have. And sometimes it only makes the bad things worse, when your mind won't let go of them.
She glances down the hall—the same hall she had met that chipper voice and those eyes so full, so accepting of sunlight.
The same hall he captured her in.
She recognizes too, it's the same window she was looking through that day, down upon the town square, watching those she loved be attacked by a beast of the alchemist's making. The same window at which he threw sleep into her face.
He looked so different that night. He wasn't the cute little boy with the gloves, and the apron, and the stripe in his hair, and the glint in his eye. This was a masked criminal in a large, dark coat, which hid weaponry. No boyish twinkle in that blue this time; now the goggles glowed green, like a demon, no soul or sunlight behind them. His raccoon wasn't the only one he morphed into a monster that night.
ESTÁS LEYENDO
Stolen Sunlight
FanficArianna never thought she'd find herself afraid of a fourteen-year-old boy, but the events of Secret of the Sundrop won't seem to leave her. She needs to talk to Varian in prison. Not for his sake...but for her own.
