deadfinch

Title: Tag
Fandom: Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Characters & relationships: Aurora/Maleficent, background Aurora/Phillip
Rating: T
Word count: 2,672
Summary: Aurora looks for her monster.

On a December afternoon all the trees crouched together for warmth. It didn't matter which December afternoon this was—perhaps it was all of them. They did this somehow without pulling their roots up; they leaned, white-out in that stark winter, nearly floating. There was a cottage in a glade and the trees all leaned together on its outskirts, gossiping and rubbing branches and enjoying their purlieu.

Aurora—she was still calling herself "Briar Rose", back then—thought these must be the oldest trees in the entire world. For one they'd stood on the edge of her glade for as long as she was alive and they were the tallest things she'd ever seen. For two their backs creaked when they bent over and all along their branches were these arthritic knobs. And these trees were wild! When the wind blew and tickled their flanks they howled with laughter. They rattled their leaves and told unbelievable stories. They were everything to her: climbing gyms on her adventurous days and shade-givers on her lazy ones. Wind-cover in a cold December.

Everything lived in that forest. Note the emphasis: not that everything lived in that forest, but that everything in that forest lived. Trees and wind and winter. Reason unbound from minds. When Aurora sang the wind would bend its pitch to her, and when she was tired and hungry after a long day of playing, bushes berried, seasons be damned, where no berries had ever been born before. As a girl she had no reason to think that this was strange. She had three aunts who could not cook or sew in the middle of nothing, where all her life they had remained unbothered by all mankind... and yet she never once questioned how they fed and clothed her. This is one of childhood's peculiarities. Aurora was blessed with curiosity for all but the most fundamental of things.

Everything lived in that forest, even the air, and the air had eyes. Aurora walked the forest—again, it didn't matter what day it was, because every day Aurora was walking—and all the while she had those eyes on her back, a pin between her shoulder blades. If she spun around fast enough sometimes she could catch them blinking at her. Enduring yellow, all-knowing except for one very important thing: a puzzle so maddening that kept it up day and night without rest. Aurora didn't know what the puzzle was—all of this was only an impression. Only once or twice did Aurora actually manage to glimpse those eyes. Whatever they belonged to, it desperately wanted to reach out and touch her. She'd have touched it back, if it tried. That's another of childhood's peculiarities. Children are used to being watched. The well-cared-for among them never expect the watcher to be malevolent.

♠

Things changed immeasurably when she became a princess. Then she was Briar Rose—now she is Aurora. In some sense she was always Aurora, and she will, in a different sense, always be Briar Rose, but the names make the prettiest before and after. It was the make-it-pink, make-it-blue of identities. A fairy waved her wand and in a burst of glitter she became Stefan's child, and a crown became heavy on her head.

When she was Briar Rose, she loved the night, and sleeping—that's where dreams were had. She hates them now that she's Aurora. She does everything she can to will the day longer. She is living sunshine; the fey magic that gilts her skin gives her some power, and sometimes, if she's desperate enough, she thinks she makes the sunset last a few minutes longer. Nevertheless night comes—timid of nothing except the approach of summer, and even then only a little—and with it sleep, and with that, nightmares, even with True Love's Kiss for a warden. True Love's Kiss is no remedy when the affliction is just regular sleep.

Here Aurora is now, jerking her way out of another bad dream. Phillip hooks a hard arm around her middle. He squishes his cheek to the bend of her neck and tickles her with his end-of-day whiskers. He whispers something half-lost, protective and senseless. It helps a little. But a dragon-slayer is no remedy either; Aurora is unenthused about the slaying of anything.

Aurora hates sleep because she dreams of the forest, empty. Nothing watches her from the canopy, the shifting formless vault. No yellow-gleaming eyes anywhere. No snap of the bark. Trees that don't gossip or lean.

Once upon a time, she opened her eyes and Phillip was standing over her. Her lips were wet and warm and slack enough to let a little cool on her tongue. And she was happy! True Love's Kiss had woken her and Phillip had been her prince all along. Then everyone else woke, too: scullery maids, stableboys and their horses, parents she never knew. She'd never felt like she was missing a family but she was nevertheless delighted to have one. Everything woke except the eyes in the air. Aurora couldn't even feel that they were sleeping—they were limper than a rabbit with a fox upon its neck. The trees didn't lean anymore, either. Wind zipped between their splaying legs and chilled her.

Phillip informed her that they had a party to get to. She leaned on him as they walked down the stairs; out the window she saw the great form of a dragon. It already smelt decaying, and being such a big thing Aurora could smell its decay from all the way up there. Its tongue lolled like a parody of deadness. And its yellow eyes stared out, unseeing. Aurora knew instantly that this was it. The eyes in the air. She guessed it was a good thing that it had never touched her. She was grateful to Phillip and all the danger he faced saving her from its curse. Still, this was her first brush with a death that was not nature and she didn't like it even a little bit. She wondered if anyone had bothered talking to the thing. It was pointless to speculate. The fight was irremediably won.

Morning sweeps dreams aside and Phillip takes Aurora out walking. She goes protestless even though she doesn't like being in her parents' forest. It's as dead and empty as the forest in her dreams. She'll never know if it was alive once—if the eyes in the air and the aliveness of the forest were the same thing. She would ask Phillip but she fears his senses are not distinguished enough to know.

"What ails you, my plum?" Phillip asks. She's been quiet all morning. Quiet is not one of Aurora's characteristics. And he knows how she twists and tosses in the night. He thinks there's a monster in her dreams and he thinks it's his job to slay it.

She doesn't say, "I feel your murder when we're out here, Phillip. I don't blame you for what you had to do to save me, but I feel it—the snuffed stillness of it—and it scares me like a ghost story."

She stops by a cherry tree, instead, and rests her aching back against it. The tree doesn't arc its branches to embrace her. Phillip misunderstands her tiredness for coquette. He presses himself to her gently, and she rises to her tip-toes and cups his cheeks and kisses him. They smile against one another. He has a wide mouth, with dry lips. Made for talking sweet. Firm sword hands, reserved for dragons. His bigness excites her. She is safe beside him. She has a vision; not oracular, just an imagine spot, an extrapolation: she will be very old when she dies, warmed by the faithful hands of her faceless future children. Every plague on Earth will pass over her.

"Don't worry about me, love," she says to him, taking her hands back and letting them dangle on either side of her. "Nothing can touch me, as long as you're here."

♠

She hasn't been to the forest since she was barely sixteen. Forests, yes, but not the. Her's and Flora's and Fauna's and Merryweather's. Berry-picking and trees that were old women and dreamworld secrets divulged to owls who lived to meddle in your personal affairs. People smile at her indulgently whenever she tells stories about it: dances, bluebirds with agendas, inanimate conversations-generously, they think she has an active imagination. But things were different in the forest. She trusts her childhood memory where most people have learned that they shouldn't. Everything lived in the forest. Every fiber was a warp or weft in some magnificent tapestry woven by fey.

She hasn't been because she hasn't asked. What could she claim to want out in that unstomped wilderness, anyway? The castle's acreage is safer. But when her father takes ill and Phillip becomes her keeper, she curls a few strands of his hair around her finger one morning and, with a courage not as common to her now as it was before she became a princess, says, "I'm going to ride today. I'll wear my old hoddengray so no one recognizes me. I'll be back by nightfall—you know I know the way."

Phillip never denies her anything. For this, he doesn't even have the impulse. What better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than riding? He knows there are no dragons left in that forest. The sword that slew it lives somewhere in the armory, blood flaking off the edge, every now and then a line scraped for tonic or elixir by the royal apothecaire.

Aurora takes Samson. They're riding from sunrise and at the forest's edge by the cusp of noon. Aurora knows when because some horizon is crossed and the air changes. Vervain and after-rain. Elderberry bushes shaking in a sudden gust. Waving her hello.

Throstles chirp. Squirrels perk their ears. An owl swoops silently just at the edge of sight. There are eyes everywhere, invisible but penetrating. Aurora wishes she came earlier because her lungs fill and her heart pounds with the lead weight of a miracle, and she thinks of all the needlessly fitful nights she could have been spared if only she'd known. You came back.

The eyes don't stay fixed on her back anymore. They blink and then turn away, disinterested; what monster cares about an uncursed princess? Aurora tries not to be hurt by this but the tears well up against her best efforts. She was a friendless child. She puts too much much of herself into every flimsy connection. She shakes her head and hugs her shoulders. She taps her foot to the beat of a birdsong. Birdsong is never choppy in the forest. In the forest, robins chirp in 4/4.

"But perhaps it's my turn to follow you," Aurora says aloud. The trees shiver like static's been sent up their spines. They like the idea. Forests love a chase. Foxes and rabbits. That's what a forest is for: facilitating rabbit chases. Weaving strong branches around each other so pollies can build their nests somewhere gale-safe. Hanging wisteria curtains and laying out soft patches of clover beneath them so humans can have a little bit of privacy when they're making love. Death and birth and all of life's middle inches.

Aurora rides Samson out to the cliffside where she and Phillip held each other for the first time. She combs her fingers through his mane as she disembarks him and the bushes leave him a whole pile of berries to eat. She takes her shoes off and leaves them tied on a tree. She wiggles her calloused toes on the grass. She was worried that her met pads had become soft with disuse but when she steps on a rock she is happy to find that her feet aren't excessively tender.

The eyes blink, curious. They turn away and hide again. Her monster won't make this game easy on her. But it is playing. This monster loves a trick. That was the whole thing: the tongue lolling and the glassy-eyed dragon. It left as mischievously as it came, playing dead.

♠

The monster only runs her around for a few hours before lets her get wise to its trail. The trees lean in so tightly where Aurora is searching that it's like dusk has puddled in an otherwise unbroken distance of mid-afternoon. When she squeezes through them their branches savor to brush and touch her. This is expected. Aurora was an only child and then a princess after that, so everything in her life up to now has confirmed that she is exceedingly special.

Her monster is doing nothing unusual when Aurora arrives. It—she—lazes on a patch of clover. Black mothlets scatter from her shoulders and frenzy as Aurora approaches. They are attracted to light.

"So," Aurora says, "I suppose it's my turn to put you to sleep."

Her monster looks tired, like Aurora is the ghost and she is the one just trying to enjoy a pleasant afternoon in the forest. She says, "Your fairy god-aunts won your stolen life back for you. Now live it and leave me be; I won't sit around just you hear you boasting."

"That's not very sportsmanly. What's the incentive to chase if nothing happens when I catch you?"

"'Catch' is a generous word."

Her monster chooses this moment to stand. She is long. A polecat in a cloak. It's a form you paint—such twists of light and shadow—and Aurora would paint it if she knew how. She doesn't know how to do much beside rule countries and pick berries and bake birthday cakes and gossip with trees and sing. She's big in a different way than Phillip but it excites Aurora all the same. She didn't know what she wanted when she went riding that morning; now she knows what she wants exactly. Eyes reach out to touch her on a weightless December afternoon.

"It'd be an awful nasty thing to do to you, anyway," Aurora says. "No True Love in the wings to wake you. Unless—?"

"There's nobody here but you, princess, so unless that's a service that you, lover of all living things, feel personally qualified to provide..."

Aurora legitimately thinks about it. "I've just met you, but that didn't exactly matter the the first time, did it? Sing a bar with me—maybe then I'll know."

Her monster smiles. Good. Aurora was trying to get a laugh out of her, but this'll do, too. "Odd girl."

"Odder monster. You've had a princess in reach all afternoon and all you've done is play hide-and-seek."

Maleficent smiles curls. "Some of us like to play with our food."

For a moment Aurora really thinks she's about to be eaten. She has an argument on her lips about how she really wouldn't taste very good—gamey, not enough fat, terrible marbling—when Maleficent strides toward her. Liquid hips and shifting fabrics—a serpent in the garden. A hand snakes out and pinches her, forcefully, around the chin, forcing her to look up—

Aurora isn't scared. She lives in a world where good always triumphs over evil. "Did you ever find the answer to that puzzle?"

"Yes."

"What was it?"

"How to catch the hidden princess. Her god-aunts didn't make it easy on me."

"What should I call you? No one ever told me."

"Maleficent."

Oh, Aurora loves that—it's the perfect name for a monster. "You're it," she says.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means now it's my turn to run again, and your turn to chase after me."

"And what do I get when I catch you this time?"

She's not imagining it when the trees all lean in, eager. Aurora isn't shy about pleasure. Nevertheless, she feels like she's swallowed her own heart when she says, "I don't know—but there's a soft patch of clover behind you. Maybe it'll take more than a kiss to wake me."