kh_drabble | Challenge [095]

Challenge: [095] Poison
Title: To Wake Her
Word Count: 546
Spoilers/Warnings: None.
Notes: Hi guys, I'm back ♥ Had a bunny that I just couldn't shake. Rather,

crimsoncookie fed me one, and it just tasted so good (and I ate it up, fluffy tail and all).

“I’ve come to wake the Princess.”

“The Princess cannot be woken. She is dead.”

“She’s only sleeping. I’ve come to wake her.”

The sagacious dwarf fills the doorway well for someone of such small stature, his kindly face embittered with a furrowed brow and deep, dragging frown. “No one is allowed to see her. Now leave.”

As he moves to shut the door, The Prince thrusts his fist between it and the wooden frame, blocking its closure. “I know what I’m doing. Move.”

He pushes his way through the door and strides directly into the tiny house, leaving the flustered dwarf sputtering at the door.

Soon they’re all around him:

“What are you doing here?”

“He can’t be here!”

“Get out!”

“Leave us alone!”

“Go back where you came from!”

“Don’t let him near Snow White!”

The Prince ignores their pleas; he doesn’t hear them. He only hears the echo of his boots against the wood – until it falls away and he’s out in the glen, face to face with a glass coffin and his Princess asleep inside.

The dwarves fall suddenly quiet, huddled like frightened animals in the doorway behind him. The clearing is still. When the Prince steps forward, a dwarf breaks the group, flying at his calf with a strangled grunt and fists covered in fabric too long for his arms. The Prince hardly pauses, just long enough to shake the dwarf away into the grass with a quick jerk of his leg. His eyes, dark and stormy as an ocean, are fixed upon the coffin – so intensely that he does not notice the creatures that have gathered at the clearing’s outskirts, a collection of forest animals all staring at him with black eyes.

As soon as he reaches it, presses a gloved hand to its lid, he sees her, the porcelain doll inside. She can’t be more than fourteen, though she looks even younger. Pale face, pale hands, pale eyelids over eyes closed to the gathering dark above them: to the Prince, it’s like looking in a mirror – except for her striking red lips, red as an apple, as an apple dipped in blood.

He lifts the lid.

He knows what he must do; his orders were clear. The Princess must be woken. But now, staring down at a thing so young and pale and vulnerable, he suddenly doesn’t know what to do with his hands, or his legs, or the hair shifting stubborn into his eyes. The dwarves are watching; the woods are watching. In his chest, he can feel his heart pounding fast and dark and, staying his panicking breath, he lowers himself, slowly, to the porcelain princess –

and Riku gives her his first kiss.

Slowly, she opens her eyes.

They’re blue.

He blinks.

No – no. Brown. They’re brown.

Quickly, Snow White begins to breathe, little stunned gasps of air that whisper over Riku’s cheeks. Her chest, barely defined, rises up to his and back again, up and down with hesitant life. She’s staring at him with large bewildered eyes; behind them, he can see the birth of tears. “Are… are you my prince?”

He swallows, and for the first time tastes the poison in his mouth. “No.”

And with a burst of black, they’re gone.