This is Girl speaking. I detest what I am about to show you.
PART 1: The Shadow
Little Rabbit sits across The Shadow at the dinner table. As a newborn, before she had opened her eyes, she mistook his horns, gnarled like branches, for the antlers of a deer. She reached for them with both her hands, just pure instinct. And, just like that, her faith was written, and with it, she died before she lived. This day, the birth of afterlife, is said to have been the first morning of snow, but also the first night of spring. She does not know which to be true. Her comatose body was taken to the basement before she got the chance to feel… the sprinkles of ice… or pollen… on skin untouched.
She does, however, remember the sunlight, stroking her ever so slightly, and then letting go.
His slender, tall figure rises above her, as he reaches for the finest of red wines, contained in a teapot. He pours her a glass, and she sips, just a few drops, but enough to paralyze her tongue. A slow nod. At least the rest of her is still intact. She could have whimpered, a beg to be treated gently, but she gave in all her power to him a long time ago and her cries can so easily overpower her.
He lost his speech before he took her, reason unbeknownst to her, so she learned to observe… the force, the shifts, the sounds of his movements. And she responded accordingly, or at least she tried to, froze in the heat of his temper and defrosted his everlasting winters. Still, it seemed like no matter how much of her she drained, his cup was never filled. So, she knows her drink is not a mean for negotiation, nor conversation.
It is punishment. That is all it is.
Little Rabbit must have really pissed him off this time.
He slings the glass onto the wall, scarlet tears dripping down the floor and a ringing in her ear. His lengthy fingers are drenched in ink, the very same her wrists are daubed in, covering the marks underneath. It is all too familiar. Little Rabbit knows this won’t end well. It never does.
However, this time, her fear is stronger than the last, not submitting to its limits. A vision. He will take it too far, go beyond the finish. There is something in his eyes, the ones he so often hides. It is not that they are dark, nor are they empty. They are actually quite beautiful, more now than ever. A light in them, reminding her of the above, the place she was taken from, what she yearns for so deeply. But unlike her first and only day, she sees the withering, that they are not whitened by snowfalls in July, by lilies in a wasteland or any other testament made by the living, but by extinction. Shrieks in celebration, silenced by a bright, shining…
The very last thing she saw before…
She reaches for napkins to clean up the mess, but accidentally tips over the teapot on the way, its very last drops hitting the floor and making a permanent stain.
That is all it took. One moment of inconsideration, for the hand to go for her throat.
She got no choice. It is just pure instinct.
Little Rabbit jumps, feet and hands on the table, and then she starts to sprint, focus directed at the door on the other side of the room. She stumbles in rotten apples, stomps on freshly baked goods, shoves off a prey’s pearly ribbon. The Shadow, however, picks it back up before it snaps, wraps it around her neck, and pulls her back to her place. She uses all her little might to keep pushing forward, bites when she cannot scream. The entirety of her body, her hands, her face, her legs, sinks into the transience of his, fuses with it, obscures in it, but still, she refuses to give in, not as long as there are parts of her independent of him.
So, forced down, cheek pressed against the wooden surface, she spits in the soil of his roses, puts a thorn in his hand, and claw her weight out of his grip. And to the door, she flees, strings torn and pearls on the ground.
He chargers towards her, but the light inside him is burning, eradicating him. A reached-out hand, a plea for her to be taken with him. However, she does not stay behind, does not want to see someone deprived of color, to know the inscriptions ink cannot erase.
She just runs. Pieces of his flesh spreading through her wounds like a sickness. The terror of his unspoken words rushing through her head, competing with her legs. The light. It will go out, turn to the darkness eventually, and then there will only be one. One, all-encompassing shadow, infesting every corner.
He is not gone. He never will be.
PART 2: The Knight
Little Rabbit keeps going. Out the door and up the stairs she turns, each step steeper than the last. And the walls… like waves in the ocean, they are constantly changing, heading for collapse, closing in on her. There is no telling what they contain, but she sees the shapes of… the shadows of… hands are making their way through, grasping for her hair. The reeking of death, it follows her even when she dodges. She stumbles, bumps into nosings, trips over beaten limbs, until she is on all four, dragging herself upwards while her legs are sliding downwards. Only desperation can save her, but she is not desperate enough, got no clue what she will fight for after instinct lose its effect. How can she, when the basement is all she has ever known, when she cannot even trace the details of her own shadow---
A light appears, but this time it is dim enough to not blind her, and it is warm, not like the sunlight, but warm nonetheless. She looks up and sees the figure of a broad-shouldered… a… a silhouette shaped by day instead of night, framed in by the doorcase. She does not know his face, and yet, by the nature she never saw bloom, she reaches for him, longs for his touch.
Meanwhile he, he raises a sword over her head, and with no regard, he strikes.
She flinches, squints her eyes, hoping he will get over with it quick, but… nothing happens. Or… something does certainly happen, just not what she expected. A pile of blood rinses over her, followed by a body twice her size. She feels the pressure of a weight not hers, of hands that feel up her chest, then her throat, each breath she inhales shorter than the last. This time, it only lasts for a few seconds though, because the body is pushed off her in an instant by an outside force. A wolf-like being is lying beside her, only that he is dead, and she is… she is somewhere in-between, outside and inside.
A forest. She looks ahead, and finds that on the other side, is a forest, but one which is always set at dawn, and one without view to the sky.
“Are you alright?” she is asked.
A slow nod is all she can muster, as she tries to sit up, but does not have the strength to regain her composure. Everything past her, the hole she crawled out of, is starting to turn hazy, and she feels somewhat embarrassed, struggling to remember what all the fighting was for. She is still here, still unharmed, and yet, she is not.
“I am the knight of the middle-ground, but most just call me knight,” he continues, this time holding out his hand to help her up. An offer for a touch of nature.
Hesitantly she accepts. He gets her back on her feet, and that is the first time she gets a proper look at him. His inside concealed by a helmet and an armor, shining so brightly, beautiful even when faceless. The silver coating… it makes her reminiscent of a lake during midnight sun, although she has no actual way of remembering such thing.
The Knight is drawn aback, too. Her porcelain skin, dirt between its cracks. Her lips so soft even if deepened by bitemarks. Then there is her fragile build, somehow carrying the force of a million hands, the ones which squeezed every inch of her. Yet, her eyes, appear unaware, a widening stare with a hint of naivety, unbelonging to this world. Her pupils, dilating and following the sound of a hoarse bird, its wings leaving their reflection soon after. Almost as if she was blind up until now, he thinks, and finds it a tragedy, a miraculous one.
From that point on, he knows that he has been cursed. Whether it was she who did it, or something in the air he took in, he does not know, but his heart… growing, aching, and there is only one thing which can shrink its longing. The urge. He needs to fill the urge. To shelter her, keep her from harm, treasure the mystery she contains, before she breaks.
After all, what will this place turn to if it starts to know her?
So, before Little Rabbit gets the chance to crouch down and feel the moss, he picks her up. Head hanging low and body frozen, she is carried away. She does not protest, does not even realize that is an option, something The Knight takes as a sign of trust, the seed of undying loyalty.
Little Rabbit watches as they pass a pack of creatures of similar size as herself. They are jumping and running alongside a river in a manner she finds confusing. One gets a splash in her face, and another has his earlobe pecked at. Yet, there is no cry of distress. Instead, they make the strangest of noise, constantly catching their own breath while also somehow smiling, almost as if the hypoxic state is making them euphoric.
“They are playing,” The Knight tells her.
“Playing…” Little Rabbit mumbles to herself, wondering at what point a stroke is deep enough for a cut. In the same moment, the smallest one falls behind and in her impatience, has her hand bruised by a sharp-edged pebble. She starts to weep so dearly, holding up her palm as proof of her suffering. The others turn around, and rush back urgently. The tallest wets a piece of moss and apply it to the wound, while the broadest one brushes her hair and wipes her tears until there are none left.
“They stopped playing,” she says, and The Knight nods.
A little while later, they pass a golden gate. Its lock is tied together by flower roots, and on the other side there is just pitch blackness. Rabbit asks where it leads, but The Knight just keeps moving.
Little Rabbit feels an increasing anxiety, as they move into the deeper, darker corners of the forest. She is observant, alerted towards each tree’s shade and if it moves under an unmoving sun. There is some flickering here and there, caused by leaves which only obey the wind’s rules. This causes her great perplexity. Sometimes she is so sure that she sees a shadow leaping quicker than the speed of air. She squeezes The Knight’s shoulder extra hard when this happens.
“Do not worry. We will be there soon, and you will only have peaceful dawns then.”
Soon thereafter they do reach the destination point, the very end of the forest. Little Rabbit is put before a throne, carved into the oldest tree, high above the ordinary, ground leveled life. The birthplace of a king, once served by The Knight.
“This will be your home now, and I will protect you.”
Once again, Little Rabbit does not protest, does not even hesitate this time. The throne is grander and much prettier than the hard wooden chair she used to sit at by the dinner table. And here, she can stay all day, listen in on the birds, watch the little creatures play and wait for flowers to grow. Any lurking shadow, he will burn out. She can finally lay back, be an observer who do not suffer consequence, see all the things she was deprived from at birth. Her and her tree, standing still forever, having no reason to run. This is certainly the right choice, her only choice, to make.
And so, that is how she spends the time ahead, placed at her throne, and with The Knight at her side. They keep conversation long, and she gains an appreciation for all there is to learn from words alone, the way they can tie two together. To know another person's mind, she finds it exciting, and to have it handed over to her so easily as well, without her having to make guesses. He talks about all his adventures, all that he saw before her, dragons he defeated and damsels he caused great distress, and sometimes, she feels ashamed knowing that she does not have much to offer in return. Whenever she does pick out a memory, something to make his to remember, it often ends with him looking away, turning to silence, and the air gets cooler. He gets awfully sad thereafter, and his sadness taunts her conscience. So, after a while, she stops trying and accepts that her existence was held by nothingness before him. She washes off the ink on her skin and smears her shades of blue with the purest of white.
He rewards her with a gentle pat when she shows him how clean she has gotten, and she points with pride at her wrists and palms, lines and veins smoothened out so that there are no trails to follow.
With time, it gets easier to let go of her own world and get sucked into his, to imagine herself, sailing beyond borders and saving the day just like he has. The places he describes are so full of humor and light that sometimes she cannot help but grasp for air and feel ecstatic, so static, from the lack of it. At last, she can say that she relates to the little creatures she saw playing, and she is sure she can go on like this forever.
However, she knows his silver-sealed eyes, that they have a tendency to react as if they see terror ahead of her. Sometimes he gets distracted by outer forces, the snapping of a twig or the rustling of leaves. He stops stroking her cheeks and offers no patience for jokes then. He will tell her to stay put, and she will always do as told, worries what threats might be out there if it makes even him shudder. He is never reckless, makes sure to approach dangers slowly and that his right hand is on the sword’s handle. Most of the time he returns with no blood on his left. But it does happen, the spillage of blood. These dawns he seems to be heavier than when he left, armor faintly tarnished and blade duller. She never sees what goes down beyond the thickets and the shadows, but he tells her that it is ruthless out there, that wolves are hiding in her blind spots.
And she believes him, got no reason not to. She is just relieved whenever he is back at her side. She gets so anxious when she is alone, when there is no one to keep her safe. She rarely sleeps for this reason. The visions in her dreams are so cruel and she is defenseless against them, got no power to drive them away. Only when she is shaken awake, does she escape.
Though one dawn, air warmer than it has ever been since Little Rabbit’s arrival, she gets the strangest feeling that he is acting slightly different. He keeps fiddling with her hair and gets tensed up whenever she turns away. Their conversations are not the same either. Something, even the gentlest of breezes, often gets in the way, disrupts the flow before she gets a say, chops up all her thoughts until they turn nonsensical. Worst of all, he always looks over his shoulders whenever she mentions the river, the one where she saw the little creatures play.
“I would like to go there soon, to run,” she says, imagining how the water will sparkle.
“Uh-huh…” he answers, focused on a fig tree, its branch reaching down to a thornless rose, “did that tree always look like that?”
“I do not know,” Little Rabbit replies with genuine curiosity, “maybe the fig tree sees something in the rose that it longs for.”
“Like what?” he asks, hand resting on the hilt of his sword.
“Perhaps… a touch which does not sting. It, the tree I mean, might even not want the rose itself, but confuses itself with it, does not know the borders of where its own roots ends, and another’s begins…” she feels a spark enlighten within herself the more she talks, to feel her ideas stream through her consciousness and to hear them out loud. “I have actually never eaten a fig before. Does it burn like a thorn in your side?”
“It tastes like nothing special,” he replies.
“Well, maybe if I got to try one then…”
“I said it tastes like nothing special,” he repeats himself, cutting her short, demonstrating that the talk is over, hand grabbing the hilt now.
Little Rabbit, however, has learned to ignore certain observations in her hibernation: “But….”
To this, The Knight does not reply. Instead, he walks down, to the fig tree, and cuts off its rose. He does not bring it to her, does not even look at it, but drops it in the dirt, where it will rot, far enough so that the tree cannot get to it in time.
Upon his return, his shadow grows bigger, darker. A chill goes down Little Rabbit’s spine as she watches the petal on the tip of his blade. He does not take it off, does not care to. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. She feels herself weep, but her eyes are dry. Never has she felt weaker, and for the first time she starts to wonder if she ever truly left the basement.
The dawns go by, without a single word passing between them. Only the wind is reminding them that their silence is not heard by the rest, that the river will still run. They are the only ones standing still. Little Rabbit, leaned against a throne once just a tree, wonders if she should clean herself up once more, if that will make it all easier, to no longer have her current form be recognizable.
Then she thinks back to when she first escaped the place she believed she would be forever tied to. A bird was soaring high above her, and for the first time, she thought she would be free, that she would know both winters and springs. She imagined herself aging, her skin turning to wrinkles, marking all her changes, and that she would not become any less for it, that life does not have to leave one’s body as it grows up. Knowing there could be more beyond a fate she had no control of, that gave her hope, that even the unliving could live.
Yet, here she is, not knowing the sweetness of a fig, the splash from a river, nor the buzzing of a bee. She is still on the outside, still not interacting with the life she could have been granted.
The Knight’s mind is distant. There is no telling what he thinks.
And that is when it happens. The little creature, the smallest one of them, appears from the shadows. She looks a little bit taller than when Little Rabbit first saw her, and her hand appear to have been healed by now. She is shy in her movements, takes a good look at Little Rabbit, while her gaze merely passes The Knight. She is carrying something in her mouth, a berry-bearing plant of some sort. Little Rabbit tilts her head in wonder, and the little creature tilts her head back in similar wonder. To this, The Knight picks up the petal from his blade and holds it up for them both to see.
“Drop everything you are holding,” he demands.
The little creature does as she is told, although her face appears to be disappointed: “It is just a gift I brought with.”
“For what purpose?” he asks.
She redirects her attention back to Little Rabbit: “Is it true that you are the being who escaped the below?”
Little Rabbit nods her head slowly but is unsure if she is telling the truth, if she got the right to claim such feat.
“Can you please tell me how?” desperation is striking the little creature’s face, one bigger than what her body can contain, and she takes a step closer. Little Rabbit, without thinking, reaches out her hand for hers, reducing the gap between them, even if it is just by a little.
The Knight takes one step closer too and puts himself in front of Little Rabbit: “It is time for you to go now.”
“She just wants some help,” Little Rabbit tries to defend, but her voice has turned so weak.
“You do not know her true intentions. She carried berries, poisonous ones!” The Knight snaps at her.
“Please…” The Little creature begs and falls to the ground.
“How do you kno—”
“I just know! Why would it be anything else?” He asks in his fury, and when Little Rabbit does not answer, he keeps on rambling: “It is not like you are a part of this forest, like you have a place here. You did not even exist until I took you in, but do not let that fool you. To the river, the flowers, and the creatures who were born here, you are still just as dead as you were when I found you. You only matter, are only loved, because I know you, because I gave you purpose.”
Little Rabbit still does not say anything, does not know how. Reality takes shape in his words, in his image, so how can she ever argue against him? And it is true, that he is all she got now, the only one who knows the ways she has been rotting in a body so persistent on moving. Beyond his eyes, she has already turned to dirt and only flowers already torn know her scent.
Only he saved her. Only he gave her a place she could rot in peace and still be cared for, still be acknowledged. It is more than what she deserves.
Little Rabbit turns to the little creature, still pleading and still just as small. It is a face she has seen so often, not in The Shadow nor in The Knight, but in her own reflection. The fear which can overpower one’s entire existence. They came from the same stream, was then sent out to run and a rabbit they became. The only difference is that the little creature’s fate is still unbound. She is not decaying, not alone. She still has a pack to rely on. She still knows how to play, even when she falls.
They are not the same.
“I… I can still help her. I need to…” Little Rabbit stutters, this time standing up from the throne, and she feels quite strange when she realizes that she was never rooted to it, that it was never even made for her.
The Knight reacts instantly, turns around and stand guard so that she cannot pass: “You are to stay where you are. You will hurt yourself if not.”
Little Rabbit does not sit back down.
“I do not want you to get hurt,” he raises his voice, while readying himself to pull up his sword.
Still, she does not sit down. Instead, she closes in on him with one step.
“Why are you not listening?” the anxiety in his voice is rising, “you will get hurt, do you hear me?”
She hears him, but his threats have no effect. If she gets hurt, if a blade impales her heart today, so be it. Her life has already been given. All she cares about, is to free the little creature and take her place, lay beside the thornless rose and watch as her long gone potential heads towards daylight. So, when The Knight draws his sword and directs it at her, the very thing he had pledged to never do, she feels no fear. There is nothing holding her back. She finds an opening, jumps through it, and starts to run.
The next thing Little Rabbit knows, her hands are covered in blood, holding a beating heart, soon to turn cold. The little creature looks up at her, clings to her. Her body so light, and yet the whole forestland is impacted by the weight of her fall. It is felt in the moss drying up, the wind turning still and the river tasting of salt. She does not scream nor beg, does not expect to be saved. But the panic in her eyes, the grasping for air, reveals that she wants to be, she wants so deeply for this to not be her end. There is nothing peaceful about it. Little Rabbit tries to stop the bleeding, to make the wounds her own, so that when Death arrives, she will confuse them and take her instead.
But Death is not blind. She never reaches for the wrong ones. So, when the little creature takes in her last breath, and smiles ever so slightly, it is clear. In her last moments, she just wanted a thing to laugh about, to play with the hands which have both held and dropped her, but her eyes will forever be locked in terror.
Little Rabbit’s whole body starts to shake as she bursts out in cries, so desperate for the past to be undone: “How could you?! You killed her, you killed her, you killed her!”
The voice behind her is faint, and only parts of the speech make way to her clouded mind, as she mostly just hears her own sobs: “I did not mean to… I thought… She was… You were going to get hurt… This only happened because of you, because you wouldn’t listen. You killed her too!”
Little Rabbit wants to deny it, to yell that he is wrong, but she can’t, not when she… Beneath all her attempts to clean herself up, her skin is still covered by marks in the shape of another person’s fingerprints, and now her fingerprints are... on her. She can feel The Shadow’s grip on her shoulders, and in her own fists, she recognizes his power. She looks at her wrists, purple and green spilling out of the veins’ borders, but they have hints of red too, traces of a creature so pure, one which will now succumb to filth. The heart of the forest will go with her. Dawn will turn to night. It is weighing her down, this sin that goes deeper than ink, drying up her lungs but granting her just enough air to live with what she has done.
He might have drawn the sword, but she… she… it all happened so fast.
All she wanted was to help, but she only brought suffering. She acted, and not without consequence. The loss of countless souls will be carried on her back, and she is not the one to take them to flowers on the first day of snow, but to eternal darkness where they will burn until the flames turn cold. Anything she touches, meets her very fate, and she has already touched so much, the earth, the tree, her savior, her friend…
Her body is not a statement of the cruelty she has endured, but proof of her own cruel nature.
She cannot bear it. It is too much.
Little Rabbit starts to run, the only thing she has ever known how to do. The Knight yells after her, but she does not turn around. She reaches the river and runs alongside it. It screeches to her all its sorrows. She feels the urge to jump in, to be taken by its stream and go against it so that she can be torn apart, slit open, relive the violence. A tree falls over and blocks her way. She jumps over it and lands in a bed of flowers withering just as they were about to bloom. She expected the crows to cry over their tumbled home, but there is just one left humming, one so frail that it is at its last ballad.
Only the leaves stay the same, following her, leaving shadows in the ground, and reminding her of what she is.
She keeps seeing her, the little creature, running the places she once ran, where she should be running right now. It is not fair. It is not fair. It is not fair. It is not fair. It is not fair.
She feels herself losing touch with the ground beneath her, or maybe… she thinks maybe she already is beneath the ground, dug deep under, and it is this body, the one that was never hers to begin with, which is turning foreign. She starts picking her skin, pulls the roots of her hair, and then of the forest. She wants out. She wants to get back.
It is in this state she collapses, in front of the golden gate, right where she started, only that the gate is now open, and on the other side, there is a light, shining ever so brightly. The sun, she feels it now, but this time it is not letting her go.
The light is closing in on her, her vision is darkening, her memories are…
“Birds…”
PART 3: The Angel
The first thing Little Rabbit feels when she wakes up, is the ache, a pair of nails hammered in right under her shoulder blades. She is kneeling, too weak to get up, and her hands are clutching onto land so parched with nothing good to hold. The sun is hitting her face, blocking her vision. Around her, there is chatters amongst a dozen beings, as well as rumble from a waterfall, something which could put her dried mouth or swollen knees to ease. No one seems to do anything to help, though. They all just observe.
“Where am I?” Little Rabbit asks, her voice thin.
“Look up, child,” a soothing voice asks of her.
“But it is too bright—” she says, immediately answered by a shadow casted over her.
“Open up, see what is in front of you,” the voice asks again.
And in front of her, beholds the most beautiful being, one standing so tall with his wings spread out in the sun. At first, she thinks it must be a bird, but then she sees his face, and eyes so deep that they must have witnessed a time before the stars, before anyone could even dream of being amongst the sky. An angel is what he is, and in his feathers, she sees the trails of every being ever lived, all except from her.
The Angel crouches down and touches her face gently. Little Rabbit does not flinch. She does not fear him at all: “Are you hurt?”
“Just a little,” she answers, head still lying in his palm, so soft that she somewhat forgets about her own hardened skin breaking.
“You have travelled far, haven’t you?” he sighs, and signals to someone behind her to come help.
A womanly angel sits down besides Little Rabbit. She starts washing her wounds with clean, cooling water and hums a familiar tune from a distant memory Little Rabbit struggles a great deal to place, but one which brings her comfort.
“Do not hide away. Show us where you are hurting and we will take the hurt away,” The Angel tells her, while lifting her chin up to face him, get lost in him. He smiles at her, and she smiles back, feels the warmth in her heart from having her injuries cared for instead of averted from. She opens both her fists, showing her palm lines of dried-up blood. He nods, still with a smile maintained, and then he turns her to the other angel.
She, the other angel, puts her hand on hers, and Little Rabbit watches in wonder as star-shaped freckles move alongside veins lighting up the way to her meager exterior, sucking up all which was broken by touch. From her skin, a dark liquid with a tint of ocean blue trickles down Little Rabbit’s cracks and gaps, getting to her bones but not to her heart.
“There is still something you hide from us, isn’t there, child?” The Angel asks, turning Little Rabbit back to him, and telling the other angel to leave them be.
“What… what do you mean?” Little Rabbit asks disordered.
The Angel puts his fingers on her cheek again, and then pulls them down to her neck, tapping it in pace with a beating pulse: “We just want to help you, to take away your suffering.”
“However, you can only enter our realm once you are free from your earthly burdens. I can see you come unfinished, that you bear sorrows in your heart which have made your life incomplete.”
Little Rabbit feels the ache return to her, and she squints her eyes, clutches her arm as she tries to ignore the images of the creature, of her motionless body sinking deeper and deeper to the dirt below: “My life is incomplete because I have never had one at all. I was taken from the mortal world, and above my head, a new one grew, but it was never mine to be a part of.”
The Angel presses his fingers harder against her skin, and his smile has turned into something much more sinister as he says: “Ah, how ironic is it then that you, a thing which never lived, has strived for survival all this time. You are one to run, are you not?”
Little Rabbit’s eyes shut open at the last remark: “How did you---”
“Now, will you be so kind and be honest with us? I would hate to see you go, when you have the chance of an eternity so bright.”
As he says that, grass and flowers start to grow from the parched ground beneath her, and… snow… snow falling from the sky and into her hair.
And she cries when she realizes that it is cold, that it hurts when it hits her face, that it does not sooth her burns or calm her mind, that it was nothing like what she has imagined.
“There, there…” The Angel whispers, patting her head and wiping off the snowflakes.
“I… I killed her!” she bursts out in her sobs, and then she keeps on crying uncontrollably, asking herself the question of where her soul has gone.
“Who?” The Angel asks, still patting, still brushing her hair clean.
“I do not even know her name, but I did, I let The Knight…”
“The Knight?”
“He was the one who drew the sword.”
“Is that so?” The Angel wipes her tears, waits until there are none left.
Little Rabbit expects The Angel to banish her, punish her, but he still looks at her, with the same smile as before. She is helped back at her feet, and he holds her hands tight, keeps her under his wings: “You are impure, it is true, but some cleaning up can certainly undo that.”
“How?” Little Rabbit is barely able to utter the word, barely able to understand how her wickedness can ever be cleansed, not when it cannot bring back innocence lost in the middle-ground.
“For centuries we have mapped out constellations for beings of the below to seek guidance in, and they still get lost. You, however, are not of the below.”
The Angel shows Little Rabbit the way to a mirror, one big enough to frame in all of her. She is smaller than how she remembers. Her eyes are a whole lot wider too, yet they appear primitive, lack depth, something which insults her a bit when considering all she has been through. She touches her skin and wonders how all the overused descriptions of its discolored damage never made her any more complex, never made her sentience superior from the rest. She never lived, never had any friends, never learned the meaning of love or the taste of fig, so how could she ever have evolved?
“What is this for?” She asks, trying to make herself sound proud of what she sees, when in reality she just breaks once more.
The Angel places a crown of thorn on her head and then lowers both of his hands to her shoulders, pressing them down so that she feels the weight of the sin she will carry.
He grins: “Judgement Day.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I cannot grant you the answers but put your worries to rest dearest. You will know what to do soon enough.”
Little Rabbit does not feel at rest, not at all. In her reflection, she sees a collection of pieces worth unloving, all the cracks and scratches in glass coming in pristine. And behind her, is Him, a darkness given form, yet one that exists everywhere. He is grinning at her, waiting for her. His touch is all she has known, all she has been known by, and she feels it in everything she does. Even now, now that she should be just seeing her, but all she sees is what he saw at the end of the dinner table. The squinting, the flinching, the silence, and then the running. Her face has been sculpted by it. She only exists in the name of it, these acts of survival, these seeds of faith in afterlife. Then she sees what he stole. The laughter, the playing, and then the running. The little creature she would have been if she had not reached for him that day.
But it would have all ended the same either way, by the cut of a blade made to protect.
She sees it now, how scared she must have looked all those times.
And then she hits.
What happens next is a bit distorted.
What one can say is that Little Rabbit went back to The Knight with bleeding hands that day. She showed him the shards and how deep they cut. Technically, she never accused anyone, at least not verbally. She did, however, shake her head in distress whenever he would ask what had happened, and then turn away, facing the basement. She knew the inference he would make from that, and yet, she did nothing to stop him from heading downwards with the torch that would burn him to ashes. She tried telling herself that it very well might have been The Shadow who had hurt her, that he would so often break a glass and turn it against her, that she would dread the fine wine for this very reason. But no matter how hard she tried to shift the blame, to change the story, she could not escape the truth, what she knew.
She knew what she had done, and that she had done it to herself.
Because she and The Shadow were inseparable. Always had been, despite how much she had tried to outrun him.
As she watched The Knight go, she removed all the shards, sucked up the blood she had lost and licked her wounds clean, until the traces of her violence were erased.
And if anyone were to find the truth and ask Little Rabbit why she did it, why she went limping with legs perfectly capable of running, she would have no answer. It was like The Angel had said, that she would know what to do, but he never promised her the relief of understanding it. She tried to explain it to herself many times out loud, practiced it.
"We were just playing."
It only made her better at arguing against herself, got her lost in the many voices telling her different stories. Some details were neglected, while others were added, all to soothe her inner turmoil. She looked for an outer force to blame, proof that she had been driven by impulses and duties forced upon her. If only she had something she could deattach from, some way to keep at least one part of her still clean, but it was all tarnished, and it was all her. In the end, the narrative lost its meaning and the only true answer she had, was that she was scared, a wounded kit who, despite of everything, still desired to be caressed, protected from her own evils.
"The evil outgrew me, though. The Knight was the first one I looked for, the only one I wanted to clean my wounds, and yet I also wanted to see him wounded, to punish him for taking away the little creature I could have been," she whispered to herself one night, and felt deeply ashamed, prayed that she would forget this version by the morning.
Some time after, although she can not pinpoint exactly how long time after, Little Rabbit was brought to bear witness for The Knight’s conviction, in the Court of Angels. He had murdered The Shadow, and she had washed herself clean long ago, had nothing but the petal he impaled to show for his character. In the end, the slaughter was found to be without reason, that he had been infected with a germ made from only his own flesh. He was ordered to remove his helmet, and so he knelt and did as told. A bright, shining light, sentenced to succumb to the shadows, to be chained to the basement and follow the path of the one he drove out, until the end. He had cried for mercy, to be let free from his torture, and Little Rabbit had felt immense guilt in this moment, reached out for his hand in hopes that her touch for once would heal. Her heart still called for him, was somehow still tied to the hands which had both held and dropped her. And she just wished, so deeply wished, for one last conversation with him.
Her wish would just be that though, a wish.
Because he screamed of full force and lost himself to his tears,
Until a mere voiceless shadow he became.
The Court of Angels grinned wide, as The Knight was taken away, and as The Angel was brought to the front. He declared that judgement had been carried out, and that so begins everything from what has been erased, a seed sowed from the last petal to wither. It had marked a celebration, one worthy of dance, laughter and wine. Little Rabbit, however, had just stayed still, remained her position in the witness stand, and watched as the trails on The Angel's wing, little by little, faded away.
Now, at the tale’s end and beginning, Little Rabbit is floating in a lake under midnight sun. It is the place she spends most of her time, the only place she can be a mind not festered by a body that was never hers. She does think about it quite often, the old bird she saw that day, how it left so soon. She thinks less about all which happened after, hopes to soon forget so that she can be reborn, see the world from eyes untouched and let them be deepened as the rest of her shrinks.
She lays down her head by the corner of the lake, takes in the smell of the lilies which bloomed under tomorrow’s moon. And as she does, she gets the faintest idea that a snowflake just landed on her nose. A voice is calling above her, turning her to the sun. She thinks it must be The Angel, that he has heard her prayers and has come to grant her wish.
She opens her eyes ever so slightly, in front of her a pair of horns, but they can easily be mistaken for the antlers of a deer in this light.
And so, she reaches out for them with both her hands.
How can she not? It is just pure instinct.