Air and Stars
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They all want the same thing.

There are days, spent in fog and fleeting dreams, where even the Fairest of Them All loses hope. There are days when it seems time doesn't matter, will never matter, no matter how much of it they have. She knows, locked in an alive-dead in between, this is a lie, that time and light and goodness matter. That her kindness is a gift, even as their hearts and minds become quiet battlefields. Even as her sweetness becomes a weapon and staying aware is a fight she doesn't always win, she knows someday things will be different. She doesn't believe it every day, but it's better than facing the darkness alone. Yes, even the Princesses of Heart have nightmares.

She dreams of frightening things from time to time. She has known her fill of fear and learned to conquer it, but not every battle promises victory. How many times can a princess be brought back to life? In times when hope is scarce and her sadness dire, she holds onto the memories of seven little men, those who believed in her before. Those who fought for her. She dreams of the song that she sang over her wishing well. Songs of love bring springs of hope, just as the memories of those who have loved her. They do not stay, they do not linger. Songs fade. Her well, where her difficult life did not seem so unbearable, is but a ghost of something that may have never existed.

Snow White dreams of her prince as well, her once upon a time prince. Like everything else, she can't be certain he was ever hers.

She wonders about that prince, wonders if she dreamed him up to ease her own aching loneliness, if perhaps those seven men were were simply seven wishes for something better. Perhaps things like poisoned apples, red as any blood, a family found in the home of seven men and a handsome, loving prince are merely lies, specters, nightmares, dreams. Or maybe they are real, and she must fight to keep them.

How can she be sure? How can anyone, anywhere be sure when such darkness exists?

The truth, hidden beneath the devastation of her nightmares, is too broken to piece together.

She knows fear, a fear even greater than trees with ghostly limbs pulling at her in the heart of a darkened forest, the brush of death not long eluded. But, then again, is that fear even real or is it just another nightmare?

The memories that used to be so clear and vivid are now cracked and faded. Vanishing, almost gone.

She is afraid.

She's become frail. Her skin is snow more than ever, her heart hangs in the balance between dreams and nightmares, reality and make-believe.

The Fairest of Them All's heart is breaking, because perhaps there was never a prince or a family of little men to begin with. Perhaps that love was a dream, perhaps it was a nightmare. Perhaps it was never anything at all.

After all, it is the beautiful things that break most easily.

She's terribly unsure of what's to come.

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She doesn't want to be alone. No prince, no friends, no love. There is just the old gate, somehow real but not, that keeps her locked away. She has known the feeling before, but it is different now, it is so final.

Wealth and prestige mean nothing to Cinderella. It is treasures like friends and her loyal prince that keep her truly happy, truly alive. Without them, she cannot be the same. She is only beginning to understand that a life without them is no life at all, and that is the danger. The forgetting, the hopelessness.

In the faded halls of her mind, no songs exist, no reasons to have faith ring true in a melody. A voice deep within herself, perhaps the last of herself she knows to be true, cries out, Please don't leave me here alone. What is worst of all, and there is so much darkness to judge by, is that no one hears. It echoes back with an empty cry.

It is hard to remember time in such a place, but when she seems to grasp it, midnight gives her strength. And on such days when the image of a slipper made of glass appears to her, she doesn't feel quite so alone. She can't seem to remember why the shoe is important, but it is. It is magic. Even in such places, magic can exist. And if magic can exist, why can't anything else?

And there is also the hair and eyes, both dark, and somehow so dear and familiar she aches with longing. Some days she can even catch bits of song, but only on good ones, if days even exist in the in between. A song of dreams and wishes, goodness and kindness. She wants for that song, and she wants for that man. She dreams of his arms around her, can almost catch the whisper of his name. Real or not? The goodness disperses like a fog, and it is hard to believe that anything so good and so lovely could have ever been hers.

When Cinderella dreams, is that really the wish her heart makes? Or the cunning delusions of a nightmare?

Her hope dies a little bit more.

Her glass slipper looks more like plastic every day.

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She's been here before, in the place of dreams and nightmares, a realm of lonely quiet. But somehow things are different, in a way that she cannot name. In a way that frightens her. She's locked within living nightmares, where magic and fairy's gifts are of no use to anyone.

It's inevitable and futile, all of it.

The land is barren and desolate, but there are dreams among the nightmares, seeded with fleeting memories of times spent in happiness. Times the nightmares don't want her to remember. When she remembers, the darkness comes faster.

Aurora is afraid, they all are afraid. But even fear has light to see by.

She sees visions of dragons and of small fairies, three of them, blue and pink and green. Thinking of them, believing in them, she feels something like love. She dreams of her prince too, and of her family, all parts of it. It is a gift to remember anything about them at all, but as they go as quickly as they've come, she must remember what a small gift it is.

She's terrified of change, but things can never stay as they were before. The dreams are gone.

Her memories, if indeed they are real, seldom return, and she is thrust unwilling into the thing she is most afraid of.

Change.

Her world of in between brings new nightmares, new fears, new waves to beat at hope and recognition. Perhaps she is better off, having known this place before. Or perhaps it only makes her that much weaker. She knows what is to come. She knows that hope has little to offer. She doesn't know much more than that.

Once upon a time, all there's left to do is sleep.

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It's cold, and that's something she may never grow accustomed to.

Her home, what she can remember of it, is a blazing star. It is warm and bright and beautiful, and so different from everything she knows now. The racket and chaos around her is neither bright nor loud. It slithers over her as quietly as a serpent's slow poison and does not let her go. When she feels the pull of it, it is already too late. Nightmares and confusion and doubt. Like Agrabah, the darkness is unyielding. Unrelenting. Unafraid.

She doesn't know if her home will be there if she wakes up. She hopes she is awake to see it some day, to see that believing in something was right. Was good. That hope is a small concession, a very cautious victory. Was it even real, any of it? To hope that it is gives her strength when so little else can.

She sees her life as it was, dreams about it through a foggy lens that is not to be trusted. She sees a boy and so much more. She sees a sheltered life transformed into adventure and love and friendship. When she awakens again to the in between and to thoughts so scrambled by doubt, she could cry from all her misery. Rescued from one sheltered life just to be trapped within another.

A princess? Is she really? A princess is meant to be kind and brave and strong. Perhaps it was just another lie. There are so many, it is hard to understand what is true and real.

It's awfully cold when one is alone.

There are some days, many if she is honest with herself, when she cannot afford to hope. But then there are others when she discovers something within herself that was lost. A memory, a thought, a piece of herself that is truer than anything she's known in so long. Something she cannot deny, something the darkness cannot snatch away from her grasp.

But she is still afraid, most of all that those she loves are not hers at all. That they belong to someone else or do not exist at all.

She may never know. Everything around her is sand, delicate and moved by the slightest push from the wind. The most important things mores so, memories of the past blown away by one huff of breath.

She misses her star and the boy who taught her everything about love. She misses her home. She is warm when she thinks of these things, and warmth is something that feels like hope, like a miracle.

But as most things do, Jasmine's precious memories become unrecognizable.

There's an eclipse today, it seems.

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She's just a child.

She's trapped in a place bursting full with more madness than all the lunacy wound tightly into two Wonderlands. The deep reaches of her mind and heart, so hard to reach into, taunt her with ridiculous illusions and notions that never were and will never be.

Shadows haunt her, nightmares come. There is no order to the horrors, no pattern, no way to understand anything at all.

She needs a way home, a road. She needs the memories to make sense. She needs to understand what is real and what are lies dressed to seem true.

But what Alice does understand is that her memories and her dreams were never real. They are just reminders, painful ones, of things that she'll never have. People she'll never know beyond the ghost of a dream. Even though she's only a child, she is sensible about this. In this place, she must be. She won't be fooled by the illusions and the fleeting promises that beg to be believed. It is best to see the nightmare land for what it is.

Afternoons sipping tea and reading novels with a kitten, orange-red as an unripened tomato, are only faint yesterdays. Glimmers and lies. It is her imagination at work, and she cannot believe in anything anymore. It is safer not to. It is better to accept what's become of her.

She can hear that rabbit now, scurrying ahead in worry, crying, "I'm late, I'm late, I'm late! Not time to say 'Hello', goodbye, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!"

He was a dream, of course, but every now and again she hears a voice that isn't hers, remembers something that almost feels real.

Even so, she's only a little girl. But these nightmares have made her wiser and warier than she ought to be, and she passed by what should have been hers. Childish delights, quelled by visions of darkness and fears made real. Perfectly nonsensical fears. Fear is the only thing that feels real anymore.

She's simply grown up too fast.

Wonderland, the false dream world with the rabbit and the creatures and that mad, mad queen, haunts her from time to time. But she finds the shadows move a little slower when she refuses the company of dreams and memories and lies that sometimes feel true.

With the nightmares and the truth and the false hanging in a tenuous balance, she lost hope and childhood long ago. It's all a little too much, even when one is being sensible about such things.

She holds onto only one truth. That hare, real or not, was right. Her childhood is gone, vanished into smoke when she wasn't even looking.

There is no time to say anything, not hello, not goodbye. She's late, she's late.

She's late.

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Long ago, she used to believe.

Even when the princesses in her books faced tragedy and darkness, in their struggles shined a gentle kind of hope. Even in the darkest of nights, there was reason to believe. But not even she could imagine such a horrible stretch of emptiness. She had known her share of being alone, but with the feel of a book in her hand, she never truly believed herself alone. She did not know such an aching bareness could belong to anyone, anywhere.

Her voice, her mind, her dreams grow still.

When this all began, when she was still mostly whole, she made herself a promise. To never forget the Beast, to never forget the petals falling from an enchanted rose. It was her story, and she promised to remember it, to hold her place in it like a bookmark. She can still hear broken echoes of that vow, bouncing around in nightmares and in fearful whispers.

Belle, it calls. Then, like all things here do, it fades into nothing.

Still, she has a spirit most the girls are left without. Blessings in this time are few, but this is one she can feel as every lie comes to haunt her. But she does not cry out for help, even as small pieces of her memory are turned against her. Being awake is not the same as being safe; remaining unbroken is not the same as being whole. To cry for help would give the darkness a piece of herself, one she is unwilling to give.

She remains quiet in her defiance, shivering at the emptiness of it all.

She feels what the others feel. The pain and loneliness, the disenchantment. She feels the loss at knowing her adventures, her dreams, everything, are gone or never existed at all. But more than the others, she knows what it is to be alive in this darkness. Her mind is clear; it is not a hopeful place, but her thoughts are not muddled by the soot of the darkness. She despairs, but she knows there is hope, even if she doesn't feel it.

In the clearest of times, she can remember her friends. Strange friends... a tea pot, a clock and a candelabra of all the things. There are others, of course, but among them there is a memory more beloved than the others. She thinks of Beast and all he became to her, his hidden and complicated kindness. His begrudging compassion and fierceness. He is so dear to her, but in a place so void of anything, his memory is not an easy one to bear.

Yet her hope is not lost, will not ever be lost. Despite the nightmares and the visions of darkness, she can still dream. She can still yearn and hope for better things, even in times when it seems they cannot ever be true. Her hope is a delicate one, but it burns through her.

Even in a land of nightmares, she is a dreamer.

Yet not all dreams are good ones, and the last of the petals begin to fall.

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She's different than the others.

She isn't a princess or in love with a prince or even a young girl from a strange world. She is caught between adolescence and adulthood, and even if there is darkness around her, there is more hope than anything.

She doesn't dream of castles or princes or magic. Her tiny island home and her dearest friends, those are her treasures. But as different as each one is from the next, Kairi knows how very afraid they all are. She knows that each is haunted by an intimate fear, even with hearts as pure as the water lapping against her island's shores.

Everyone is afraid of something, even when one is a princess in one sense or another.

The tight walls refuse to release her, anchoring her to a world that is neither real nor unreal. It is something quite in between dimensions. It is a frightening place to behold.

She did not know she could be afraid of so many things. She did know to fear the darkness, or the cold or even the uncertainty in her own memories. She did not know these things, but she has come to learn them. Yet she has also come to understand the nature of them.

She is afraid as they all are, but she is also fierce. Like an island current, a part of her is storming. It does not accept the lies and the pretense of misery. There is more to this. She may not be a princess at all, but her heart is strong. All of their hearts are strong, even when it seems impossible to believe.

She knows it will not always be like this, and will fight until she can see the truth of it realized.

But some days it seems like it may take forever. A forever where magic and midnights and dreams may or may not exist, where these beautiful things are like feathers picked up by the wind. Just like air and stars, gone before the truth of them can ever be known.

They must fight to keep the the friends and the magic and the beauty. It is theirs to keep, even when it all seems lost. It is theirs to believe in.

The girl with the hope and the heart and the light – not quite a child, not quite grown – begins to see a light.

A beautiful, true light and a key...

"Kairi, wake up!"

She's won't awaken. Not just yet.

"Kairi, you lazy bum."

That dream again – the dream they all dream.

Yes, even when the Princesses of Heart have nightmares, they have dreams as well.

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Note: updated and re-written March, 2015. Inspired by Maaya Sakamoto's song of the same name.