Work Text:
“Have you not thought to consider that maybe this is good-?”
"-My brother is gone.”
Red's words fall short as she freezes. She was such a fucking idiot. She hadn't even considered-
“Do you have any idea what it felt like to ask my mother where her own son was and be met with nothing? Just–” Chloe's lip starts to tremble– “zero recognition of the boy who was raised alongside me my entire life?”
Red’s chest thunders under the weight of the words. The girl hadn’t even mentioned it until now. The conversation she’d shared with Cinderella was brief, but from across the courtyard, Red was too busy.
Preoccupied, aghast with the discovery of her own new, bright and bubbly family member, too reflective of her mother’s younger self.
“Chloe…”
But she carries on. “There's just… a massive hole where he should be and no one but me knows how godsdamned empty it feels.” Her hand raises to tug at the roots of her blue curls, and she shakes her head, shutting her eyes with the motion. “Red, you… You may have gained a beautiful sister b-” She chokes on her words, and they come out broken. “But what about me?
Red's heart splinters.
“I lost my- I lost him.”
While Chloe's heart is in a million fragments scattered across the ocean of time.
“He's gone, and he doesn't exist in anyone else's mind but mine and I feel like I'm going insane and every- every second I feel like I'm going to forget what he looks like, or how his voice sounds-”
Her tears begin to fall freely now.
“Red, I-” Chloe hisses in through her teeth. “I don't know how much longer I can take living like this. Living without him.”
Fuck–Red's panic starts to rise at the utter hopelessness that just shouldn't belong in the mouth of a girl like Chloe. Fates, what are they supposed to do?
“It's wrong,” Chloe shakes her head, teary eyes pleading in Red's direction. “It's just so wrong.”
Red doesn’t know what to do in the moment after she crosses the space between them and holds the princess falling apart before her. After she tries to comfort her (and she's never comforted anyone in her life), stroking her back, whispering in her ear reassurances she hopes mean something to the girl.
Her certainty that she'd built little by little so far into this timeline fractures.
Because they couldn't just pick and choose which parts of this world to have.
It was either all or nothing.
But despite it all, Red doesn’t think she can trade a world for one without her newfound sister.
♤
She really didn't mean to do it.
Because things were lovely and true – They'd returned to an Auradon without the tyrannic hands of the Queen of Hearts choking the kingdom's neck. No, instead, Bridget was good and kind. Her mother was alive.
They were safe.
But then the arms Red had leapt into were not sleeved with blue, not accompanied, decked with silver, diamond-coated gloves, and could never hold her as tight as Chloe could.
(That boy could be wished away too, maybe. Chloe doesn't believe a man like him–or any man at all, for that matter–deserves her Wonderland rebel.)
Things weren't actually lovely and true, because despite their endless trials–
Her brother was still gone.
The rest of the world was all too content living in something stitched together from missing pieces.
So when the man shrouded in purple smoke, and a menacing, almost ridiculous tophat approached her, she couldn't resist.
Chloe, without hesitating, had looked him in the eyes and said, ‘Yes.’
The marks of the blown-up vault still scorched her left hand. They were nothing to mind compared to the golden pocketwatch in her right.
♤
It smells of smoke. It's hazardous in these parts, mixed with the fragrances of the exotic Wonderland flora in all their bizarre, Wondrous glory.
Her senses are dulled.
They might be attuned to the toxic gas leaking from the stomata of the endless brambles, the walled, towering hedges she is surrounded by. Trapped helpless in one of hundreds of her now dear kingdom's mazes.
Red is just trying to make sense of the scene playing before her.
The Cendrillon princess, bloodslicked sword in hand. It drips lazily from the tip, dark against the grass. Her cerulean curls are darkened into an almost midnight kind of blue, matted at the ends, and when she lifts her head, her gaze lands on Red.
Her breath catches. “…Chloe?”
There's something in the knight's eyes- a rage that is so…not Chloe.
Red steps forward, merely a pawn on a chessboard “Hey-”
No recognition shines in the pooled irises of jet-black, almost bloodshot, in the dim of the maze. Chloe's voice comes cold as she raises her sword. Calculated in such a way that not even a strategist of the War of Roses could compare.
“Stay back.”
Her voice is level, controlled. Almost bored.
Red’s stomach drops.
Because in the back of her mind, a scythe flashes as a chilling voice of the same tone orders it to fall.
“Princess,” she takes a step forward before she can stop herself. “It’s me.”
“I know who you are.”
Red swallows as smoke curls in her lungs. “Then look at me.”
“I am. Just stay back.” Chloe’s grip tightens on the hilt. “I'm warning you.”
Red feels it, the fracture in that beating thing in her chest, and hates herself for considering which side of this might have hurt more.
Hers, or Chloe's?
Does it even beat for the princess’s true identity in this moment, let alone for Red?
“Chloe, we can still fix this,” Red says, though she doesn’t know if that’s true. She doesn’t know if it was ever true. “You don’t have to–”
“Fix it?” Chloe laughs softly, no humour lilting her tone. “This is me– fixing it.”
Red’s pulse stutters.
“Don't bother trying to hide it,” Chloe continues, stepping closer. “You’re content,” she accuses.
Red feels heat crawl up her neck. “I never–”
“You are.”
And that was the worst part.
Because she had been.
Though she'd seen it in the seams. She felt the wrongness when Bridget smiled too easily, and the clocks in Wonderland ticked on time instead of four minutes early. When memories between her and Pink would not and could never align.
When something inside the world felt… ripped right out and stuffed with cotton in place of flesh.
She had let it be.
Because for the first time in her life, she had a mother who was kind. For the first time in her life, she had a sister (nevermind the boy), she had a family.
“I wasn’t going to lose them,” Red whispers before she can stop herself.
Chloe stills. Because what of hers?
There it is, the Fates laugh. The truth.
Red had merely turned the other way, too enticed by the love newly built from forfeit time.
“So I was?” Chloe asks quietly.
The maze feels smaller. The air thinner.
Red shakes her head. “That’s not what I meant–”
“But it’s what you chose.”
The blade rises. Red sees it before it moves – the angle of Chloe’s wrist, the shift of her weight. Efficient and precise.
Why? She asks the gods.
“Chlo… please-”
She swings.
“Chloe!” The desperation in her plea scrapes painfully at her throat. The heartbreak in it feels so strange yet all too familiar. “Please, just look at me!”
Red doesn’t reach for a weapon. Her arms, hesitant, try to ward her off.
So the blade catches, bites through skin with a sickening warmth. Pain blooms bright and immediate, but it isn’t what makes Red cry out in anguish.
The world stops, just for a moment, once the blood falls from her hand and into the ground like an offering.
And in Chloe's eyes, something flickers. Her torturous, mindmelded resolve seems to splinter as she lowers her sword.
And there.
There shines a sprout of sudden awareness.
There comes the consciousness.
A skeleton key twisting into an iron lock.
“R-Red-?”
Relief floods Red as she steps forward timidly, hand clamped over the oozing wound in her other.
“Chlo-”
Before her feet can tread a metre more, purple smoke begins to coil at the girl's ankles.
What?
No–
No, not again–
Chloe’s face shifts from confusion to horror in a heartbeat as the cloud at her feet darkens. “No–wait–”
Red lunges forward, ignoring the fire in her palms. “Chloe!”
For one suspended second, Red sees it all over Chloe’s expression: A mask breaking, stripped away to reveal guilt, unprecedented fear, regret.
Underneath it all, something deeper.
Familiari- no.
Lov-
But then the smoke swallows her whole, like a storm draped over her as if it were a curtain of linen.
The space where she'd stood is empty.
The maze is silent.
Red’s hands throb. Blood drips uselessly onto poisoned grass.
She stares at the place Chloe vanished, chest heaving.
And Red screams.
♤
Whether the fight deems quick, ruthless or plain mad, Chloe doesn't know.
Bloodstains mark her cuffs, she's sure. They fleck her black leather boots, the ones her love thieved for her some time ago. There's a rather large one across her abdomen, a medium-sized one on her right thigh.
She isn't specifically aware of where or who they all come from. But by the pain flaring all over her body, seeping into her marrow, she can assume a large portion of the blood is her own.
It all just dulls into one singular ache, holding her captive and numb.
But then… then what she feels is warm hands caressing her scalp, running through her curled cerulean locks, she doesn’t know whether they are still matted with crimson.
And then, a voice–ever soft and as sweet as killerbee honey.
“Princess in Wonderland,
How do you get to Wonderland?
Over the hill or under land
Or just behind the tree?”
Oh, how lovely is that timbre, velvety, rich, guiding Chloe over the fitful bouts of slumber she tries to fight through. Her breaths come shallow and tears down her throat.
She can't move.
It's exhaustion, no doubt. Sinking her very bones to feel as if they'd sink right through the mattress.
Dragged down by the weight of her remorse and her own irrevocable unforgiveness. The shame stings in her chest and tugs the strings of her heart, and part of her wants it to pull it right out of her chest.
It seems a worthy punishment, she thinks. For the organ to be ripped from her and given to a more deserving candidate, one whose bloodstained hands at least tried to wash the grime off.
She doesn't remember the smoke dissipating. The sudden shift in the atmosphere when some clock in the world struck twelve.
She doesn’t remember the spell lifting, because the bars still felt like they'd remained, as if their evil had melded into her collarbone and stuck out of her skin like a jutting bone.
She doesn’t remember the fall.
Just the cry from her love once a blade had swung.
Her blade.
“When clouds go rolling by
They roll away and leave the sky
Where is the land beyond the eye
That people cannot see
Where can it be?”
She remembers the bead dripping onto the blades of grass underneath their feet, and how that singular drop of crimson had felt, to Chloe, so, so much more valuable than any other in her midst.
A gentle finger starts swiping the bridge of her nose, and Chloe doesn't deserve it.
“Where do stars go?
Where is the crescent moon?
They must be somewhere in the sunny afternoon.”
She doesn't deserve Red.
Her eyes drift open the slightest, taking every bit of her strength to do so. And through the thin sliver she sees through her lowered lids, she sees sheened eyes and a trembling red lip, though you'd never know of the immense sadness lingering there with how gentle Red's song floats into Chloe's ears.
“Princess in Wonderland
Where is the path to Wonderland?
Over the hill or here or there
I wonder where…”
Gods, what has she done?