Title: Swans
Fandom: Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake
Rating: PG
Length: 307 words
Summary: The Girlfriend goes to the municipal pond

The Prince’s one-time Girlfriend sat down on the park bench and looked out across the pond.  She’d known, almost from the beginning, that their relationship wasn’t genuine.  But the Prince had wanted someone to act as a buffer between him and all the eminently eligible princesses.  And she’d been happy to play along and get to do things she’d never have had the opportunity to do otherwise.  And he was kind and gentle; she could have done a lot worse.

She watched as the swans crossed the pond, serenely paddling their aristocratic way, scattering the ducks as they did so.  She hadn’t understood the Prince’s sudden obsession with swans, but then nobody had.  She wasn’t fond of swans.  They were beautiful, but only at a distance.  She had to admit that close to she found them rather frightening.  She grimaced, maybe they were a symbol of madness, beautiful to contemplate but dangerous and unpredictable.

She didn’t understand his behaviour to the man everyone referred to as the Stranger.  Even so, she would never have reacted as the Queen and her followers had, by incarcerating the Prince.  He had needed help and they had simply removed him from sight and left him alone with his fears. 

But that was one thing the Girlfriend would not reproach herself for.  Maybe she could have responded better to the Prince, but she wasn’t guilty of his death.  She had known she wouldn’t be able to go to the funeral, so she had come to the pond to perform her own act of remembrance.

Standing up, she slid the ring the Prince had given her off her finger, and hurled it far into the lake.  She watched as one of the swans dived down in the spot where the ring had landed.  Then she waited, but the swan did not surface again.