Chapter Text
Red's room was dark.
Deliberately.
Black stone and crimson drapes and candlelight kept low because her mother believed brightness was a luxury for people who hadn't learned to be afraid of what hid in the shadows.
Red had stopped being afraid of the dark around age nine.
She'd had to.
There hadn't been room left over for it once she'd started being afraid of other things instead.
She lay on top of the covers, still in her day clothes, staring at the canopy above her bed and trying, with the same grim determination, to simply go to sleep.
It didn't work.
She closed her eyes.
sun on water, golden light, a white flower tucked behind an ear
Her eyes snapped open.
The canopy.
The candle guttering low on the nightstand. Real. Present. Hers.
She closed her eyes again, breathing slow. One. Two.
a laugh, low and surprised, a hand closing warm around hers
Open.
Ceiling. Candle. Shadows in the corners that were only shadows, nothing else, nothing waiting in them.
She sat up, pressed the heels of her hands hard against her eyes until color bloomed behind them, and told herself enough. That's enough. Sleep. Now.
She lay back down.
"say it again"
"it doesn't stop"
Her eyes flew open a third time, and she was breathing harder now, the room too warm suddenly, too close, the candlelight throwing shapes across the black stone that kept almost resolving into things she didn't want them to resolve into.
She sat up properly this time, swung her legs off the bed, pressed her bare feet flat against the cold floor.
Cold was real, cold she could trust, cold didn't come from anywhere but here.
She stood. Paced. Three steps to the window, three steps back, the same worn path her feet had traced a hundred restless nights before this one.
golden light
Stone floor. Black stone. Her room.
a hand on her jaw
Cold air through the window, cracked an inch. Real.
"I'll say it every day if you need me to"
Her own reflection, dim and warped in the dark window glass. Her own face. Not the other one. Hers.
The room tilted.
It happened without warning, the way it sometimes did when the visions came on hardest.
Not a gentle slide into memory but a lurch, violent, disorienting, the floor seeming to drop a half-inch beneath her even though she hadn't moved, and Red grabbed for the windowsill with both hands, knuckles white, heart suddenly slamming too hard and too fast against her ribs.
Not now. Not now. Please, not now.
candlelight, gold light, gold light
stone floor, black stone, black stone
The two kept bleeding into each other faster now, overlapping instead of alternating, gold warmth and black cold smearing together at the edges until Red couldn't entirely tell which floor she was standing on, which air she was breathing, and her breath started coming in short, ragged pulls that weren't doing anything to steady her, only feeding the spiral faster.
Chloe's laugh
her own room, spinning
a flower, white, small, tucked behind an ear
the candle flame guttering, doubling, tripling in her vision
"it doesn't stop, Chloe, not this, not us"
can't breathe, can't breathe, the walls are too close
She slid down against the wall beneath the window because her legs had simply stopped being willing to hold her, knees drawn up, hands fisted hard in her own hair.
She was shaking now, properly shaking, the way she never let herself shake in front of anyone, ever- not Chester, not Maddox, not even alone usually, but there was no controlling it now, the visions coming faster and thinner between each other like a held breath finally giving out.
Fight it.
Fight it.
You always fight it.
You are not weak.
You do not get to be weak.
But something had changed. Something wrong threading through the gold-warm memory that hadn't been there before, a sourness at the edges like milk gone bad, and for the first time since the visions had started, months and months ago now, they stopped being purely soft.
the ocean, gold
a shout, distant, furious, in a voice she almost recognized as her own
Chloe's hand in hers
glass, somewhere, cracking, a sound like ice breaking on a lake
her own room, spinning, spinning
flashes of light, white-hot, wrong, wrong, wrong
Chloe's face, but older, harder
afraid
"No," Red said out loud, to no one, to the empty room, her voice cracking on the single syllable. "No, no, stop, stop—"
The room went black.
It wasn't sleep.
It wasn't quite fainting, either, though her body had gone slack against the wall the way a fainted body might, head lolling, hands finally loosening out of her own hair.
It was simply that the vision, having spent months only ever taking pieces of her attention, finally reached in and took the rest of it.
She was in another place.
In another time.
The room around her now was small, windowless, lit by a single low lantern swinging faintly on its chain, throwing more shadow than light. Stone walls, older than the castle she knew, damp in the corners, the kind of room that was not meant to be found.
And across from her, close enough to touch, stood Chloe.
Not the girl from the cliffside.
Older. Not old, not yet, but the kind of older that had lines starting at the corners of tired eyes, a face that had spent decades doing hard things and had the weight of it settled permanently into its bones.
Her blue hair had gone lighter at the temples, and it was matted at one side with something dark that had dried there. There was a long, ugly gash across her forearm, hastily bound in a strip of torn cloth already soaking through, and she was breathing like every breath hurt.
Red's own body - this older, unfamiliar body she was borrowing - ached everywhere at once.
Her lip was split.
Someone, hurriedly, had wrapped her ribs too tight, and every breath pulled sharp and wrong against the binding.
They had clearly just come from something. Neither of them said what.
Neither of them was smiling.
"How long…" Chloe said. Not a full question. Her voice had aged too, gone lower, and it shook, just slightly.
"Not long enough." Red's own voice, coming out of a mouth that felt both hers and not, thin and strained. "They'll know where we went. They'll know why."
"Let them know." Chloe pressed a hand to her side, wincing, and didn't finish the thought.
"You don't mean that."
"No." A short, humorless breath, almost a laugh, entirely without joy in it. "I don't. Say something to make me mean it."
"There's nothing to say." Red's hand went to her own ribs, pressing hard, like she could hold something in by force alone. "There's only this. Now. Before we lose the nerve, or -" She didn't finish either.
Between them, filling most of the small room, stood the thing they'd come for.
It was enormous.
Taller than either of them by a head at least, wide as a doorway, framed in blackened metal worked with a pattern neither of them looked at too closely, because looking at it too closely made the eye slide sideways in a way that hurt. It did not reflect the room. It reflected nothing at all, an oval of glass so dark it seemed to pull the low lantern light toward it instead of catching it.
"Once it's done," Chloe said, "it's done. There's no taking it back after."
"I know."
"Whatever happens because of it—"
"I know, princess." Sharper than she meant it, fear dressed up as impatience. Red's hand closed around the haft of something leaning against the wall beside her, and even through the dream-thick haze of the vision, some part of her understood it was not an ordinary weapon.
It was definitely Wonderland-forged, dark iron worked through with a pattern that seemed to shift when she wasn't looking at it directly, humming low and wrong against her palm like it knew what it was about to be used for. "I know what it costs. I've known since we started. Ask me again, and I might not be able to do it."
"Then I won't ask again."
A long silence. Somewhere above them, muffled through stone, something distant crashed. Shouting, maybe, or something worse, and both of them flinched toward the sound before catching themselves.
"They'll call it something terrible," Chloe said, quieter now, almost to herself. "What we're about to do."
"Let them call it whatever they need to." Red hefted the weapon, her tone set into something grim and unsteady all at once, courage and terror occupying the same small space. "I'd rather they hate us for this than thank us for the alternative."
"And if we're wrong?"
"Then we were wrong together. That has to be worth something." Red's voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. "It has to be."
Chloe didn't answer that. She only reached up, both hands trembling now without any pretense of hiding it, and gripped the edge of the heavy cover draped over the towering frame.
"Now," she said. Barely a whisper. "Before I think about this any longer than I already have."
She pulled the cover away. It fell in a heap at their feet, and the mirror stood fully revealed between them, vast and black and silent, and for one suspended, terrible second neither of them moved at all.
No version of tonight ended without doing this.
Red raised the axe.
The vision broke like the glass it was about to depict, shattering outward in a burst of white noise and light, the small stone room tearing apart at the edges into static, and Red was falling, or the floor was falling, or she had simply stopped existing anywhere at all for one long, formless moment -
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She came back to herself gasping, on the floor of her own room, cold stone beneath her instead of old stone walls, candle guttered out entirely at some point, the room now lit only by pale moonlight through the cracked window. Her whole body ached like she actually swung something heavy. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to press them flat against the floor to make them stop.
Real, she told herself. This is real. That was - whatever that was. That's over now.
But it wasn't like the others.
The others had felt like something stolen from her, sweet and aching and impossibly sad.
This one sat in her chest like a stone, cold and heavy and full of a dread she couldn't name, because for the first time the vision hadn't just shown her what she'd lost.
It had shown her what she'd done. What both of them had done, together, deliberate and afraid and certain all at once.
We broke it. We're the ones who broke it.
She didn't move from the floor for a long time. She simply lay there in the moonlight, staring up at the same canopy she'd been staring at hours before, waiting for her heartbeat to slow, waiting for the shaking to stop, waiting for some part of this to start making sense.
It didn't.
Miles away, in a bedroom with sheer blue curtains and a window that faced the wrong ocean, Chloe Charming shot upright in bed with a gasp that tore itself out of her chest like something physical, drenched in cold sweat, heart hammering hard enough that she could feel it in her throat.
For one long, terrible moment she didn't know where she was.
The room swam - dark stone, an axe, a mirror with no reflection - before it resolved, slowly, into her own familiar walls, her own bed, moonlight falling in through her own window in long silver bars across the floor.
"Oh," she said out loud, to no one, her voice thin and unsteady in the dark. "Oh, no."
She pressed a hand flat against her chest, as if she could physically hold her heart in place, and stared at nothing, replaying it.
We broke it. The thought arrived whole, certain, terrifying in its clarity.
We're the ones who broke the mirror. It wasn't an accident, and it wasn't someone else. It was us.
She sat there for a long time, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around them, staring at the same moon that was, at that exact moment, throwing the same pale light across a girl in Wonderland doing precisely the same thing.