Original Story of Angst (suprised? no? thought not)
~~~
Look, see, there she sits. She is alone, and that is not common for her kind. Her powdery brown wings are open, flat as she tries to soak in the sunrise. She should go now, hide now, sleep now. She is not allowed in the day, she is a night-thing, a dark thing, a secret thing. She is not a pretty-thing, not a day-thing, not a happy-thing. Her wings flutter restlessly - hide now, sleep now, stay just a little longer, now can wait, she can just glimpse that sliver of bright white blinding happiness-
She is grabbed, long fingers around her wrist, not for you, never for you, you are a night-thing, too powdery brown dark for the day. Go now, hide now, sleep now. You are slave. You wouldn’t want the brightness to see your tears, wouldn’t want the happiness to cry for you. It would cry if it saw you, all sad powder brown. Let the pretty ones, the bright ones with colour and variety and individuality and happiness, let Them see the brightness, let them dance on the flowers and with each other and enjoy the midsummer ball which you should have helped prepare, should have, should. Should know your place. Not to see the brightness - not to be seen. And anyway, couldn’t have the prince, never the prince, see or pity or love a night-thing, slave, moth.
She flees to her hiding place, her sleeping place, her home. It is small, nothing there, just a hole and darkness and silence. One day, one day she’ll sneak out, but for now the darkness pulls her, darkness weaves her into sleep where there is the brightness and the colour she only ever sees in dreams. Her muted world is forgotten and there are no greys, no blacks, no ugly useless boring browns in her mind.
~~~
The prince looks around with a great degree of boredom. The court Ladies have put great effort into making their wings sparkle and glitter for him, each trying to outdo the others with colour and decoration and he wonders how some of them don’t just fall over backwards. Everything is so formal, so fake, so colourful and misleading. There nothing but insincerity and formality and no emotion how could there be no everything was so pride and envy and hate. He takes a deep breath and calms his mind. He is expected to choose a bride soon, and the closer the deadline draws, the more extravagant the Fae court becomes. He slips away without being noticed, his black-and-electric-blue wings making it slightly easier to hide in the shadows.
He is tired of everyone being so shallow and materialistic. He is sick of propriety and long words and duties and society. He wants to be someone other than The Prince. He wants to have greater value than a title he did not even earn. He does not want to marry some random Butterfly Lady who will not love him, not know him, not understand him. He wants, he wants, he does not even know what he wants except to get away. But now that he is away from the society and propriety and whatever other ‘-iety’ he may have forgotten, he is unsure. And he is still being formal and civilised and hadn’t he wanted to be more spontaneous and emotional and - Oh Gods, the sun is setting and the colour has already begun to bleach from the sky in the east.
He shrinks back against the tree trunk, huge and imposing all of a sudden where it had been freedom before. He wants to go back, but he wants to be free, but it’s dark now and surely they were looking for him?
~~~
Look, see, there she flies. She should be cleaning, should be, should. But she is still alone, always alone - that is uncommon. Stick together, have to stay together. She has no friends they don’t understand she doesn’t care for the false lights, the muted bleached fake lights, the night-brightness or the big-people-lights. She is safe from those, no flame will eat her ensnare her but she wants the brightness wants the - colour. There. She sees it so suddenly, quick-stop-turn. Darting forwards she tries to, but now it hides, scared. She moved too fast too fast.
“Wait!”
She has not spoken in so long not aloud not to others. She is silent, they think she can’t think she doesn’t understand. She understands too well too well too deeply. Her voice is soft too soft but pretty she likes it it breaks the ever-silence.
“You are a Butterfly.” She knows they are real of course they are real, who else would eat the food they make or gather pollen for them? But she has never seen no one has ever seen and now here in front of her - “You are a day-thing. You don’t belong here.” I don’t belong here she doesn’t say can’t say - day-thing will cry, she is too ugly powdery brown sad.
“And you are a moth,” he says, with apparently equal awe. The silent, secret servants he’s never before seen. She is beautiful, simple, elegant brown and her wings are slightly dusted with a matt powder. She fits with this dark, colourless world so seamlessly that she could disappear and nothing would change at all. That unimportance is intriguing - she has no obligation, no rules, no formalities. There are no games or lies in her world; everything is grey and simple. Then he feels a tentative warm hand on his wings. Can’t do that in his world, can’t touch wings - sensitive and emotional and intimate and she just touches without even asking. No one has ever - he decides he likes it so warm. And she can’t know better.
“It is better, far better than I dreamed,” she murmurs softly, her voice hoarse and unused and unwanted and breaking silence that has become beautiful because it is in His presence. She has met a day-thing, touched a day-thing. His wings are bright and pretty and colour and she wants to stare until her eyes water because it is so different to anything she has ever - bright bright blue.
“What is?” he asks, bewildered. She stares at his wings, and he stares at her. There are not many tales about moths in the Court - far better rumours and anyway, they’re only servants, only slaves, not important. He’d never considered them once, never thought that they were just like Butterflies, just the same, could be beautiful. She was beautiful. Even ignoring colour entirely she was beautiful, any Butterfly Lady would be jealous. And her colour! Such pale, pale skin and such sad brown wings.
“The colour,” she says. “I never see colour, there is no colour in the night-world. That is why you do not belong here, but you can come with me and I can hide you.” She is honest, always honest, doesn’t know the colour of lies. She does not speak again, simply takes his hand and flies, innocent like a child, but silent and sad like no child.
“Why,” he asks as they draw to a different tree, her tree, maybe. “Why can’t you come to the day-world to see colour?”
“Not allowed,” she answers, softly softly. In here, in here, you’ll be safe, no one will try to destroy your colour. “It is dangerous for colour in the night-world, but not for not-colour in the day-world. It is the brightness, you see, the day-brightness. We are too sad powder brown for the light.”
The prince looked around the empty room, dark room, secret hiding place. And then he looked at her, still clearly visible in the silver colourless night-brightness. “But colour is not so great anyway,” he told her after deciphering her words. She spoke in a round-about, simplistic way, as if she were trying to make herself understood with a limited vocabulary. She had a very simple, child-logic way of stating things. “Colour is lies and false and not what it seems. Colour is forcing someone to do something they don’t want to.”
“You are the prince,” she says after a moment. Although she seems simple, she is very clever, very sharp and she had heard of the blue blue prince. “They are forcing you to marry.”
“Yes.”
“That is not nice.”
“No. No, it’s not.”
“You said that colour is forcing you to do something? Not-colour is not so different then. Not colour is preventing you to do something.”
From doing something, he thinks, mildly irritated. And then he realises that those are more rules, silly rules, he understands her anyway. She has lots of emotion, he sees. More than those empty, silly Butterfly girls at court. Silly things, so ditzy and shallow. She is not - she is regret and desire and compassion and a kind of trusting blind love and, above all else, sadness. He thinks he might love her simply because she has depth and emotion and no posture at all, look at her holding her wings out flat and not even ashamed of it. He holds his together, up, from force of habit but he wishes he could see her pale, white skin and soft brown eyes and warm brown hair and gentle brown wings held out flat every moment of his life from now on. But she is moth and he is Butterfly and anyway, she can’t come into the light and he can’t stay in the darkness. But maybe for one day, she could come, as payment for his one night.
“You could come with me into the day, just for tomorrow,” he says, trying to think where he can take her, what he can show her, the colours that he ignores that she will delight in. “I can show you the day, because you protected me.”
She looks frightened for a moment, and he loves that she doesn’t try to hide it.
“It will be secret?” she asks, her murmur nothing more than the softest whisper now. He loves that her voice is gentle and low, not high and shrill.
“Yes.” He loves that he does not need to say any more, that she understands, that she is not shy to take his hand.
“Then, while we are in the night, I can show you the far-lights.”
The prince doesn’t allow his confusion to show, and loves that she can see it anyway. She pulls him out of her Spartan home and begins to drag him upwards enthusiastically, towards the highest leaves, where he doesn’t often go for fear of birds. She doesn’t seem afraid - and she doesn’t hide her emotions - so he sees no reason to fear. As they weave through the dark, vaguely green shadows of the canopy, a great stretch of black begins to draw closer. As they break free, he forgets to breath. Above him, around him, is a dome of darkness, speckled with bright speckles of light that sparkle better than any pixie dust ever would.
“I thought you’d love it,” she says. She is watching him, remembering. He’ll leave her soon although he said he’d show her so she’d finally get to see but then he’d go. He had to. He is the Prince and she is a moth and although he seems desperate afraid trapped she is not the one to free him. She can see that colour for him is a cage chains not stopping him from but forcing him to. His skin is golden colour and his eyes the same blue as his wings and that hair, a bright yellow so similar to the day-brightness that she wishes she could keep just a strand as a reminder. But she can’t no never. So she watches him to remember, watches his awe and amazement. He is a burst of colour in her world life and she doesn’t know how she will live go on back in the darkness when he has left her.
They marvel in each other and the sky and the world until the colour begins to creep into the east. Neither is tired although neither has slept.
“I know just what I want to show you first!” the Prince tells her as the day-brightness finally clears the horizon. He turns to her but she is staring, not breathing, staring at the colour around her. She turns to him, wordlessly, and then gestures around in amazement. He takes a moment to follow her eyes, not seeing anything particularly amazing. He wants to show her the waterfalls, where rainbows dance through the air. He was to show her the flower fields, where millions of colours dance brightly in the wind. He wants to show her, wants to, but she can’t move yet. She must see something he doesn’t. And then he looks again. The sky is a pure, piercing blue that stretches on unhindered, fading to a slight grey in the west. Splotches and stretches of purest white are scattered across it moving slowly, flying higher than any fairy could go. From the treetop they can see the forest canopy, a thousand shades of green stretching away from them. She’s never seen colour, not the blue sky nor the green leaves nor even something as simple and overlooked as white. He lets her sit for a few more moments before pulling her hand, pulling her under. Birds are out in full force today, and he’ll have to protect her. “Come.”
She follows in awe, trailing behind as he shows her fruits and flowers and animals and things she never dreamed could be so pretty during the day. The world is so bright that her eyes strain but keep looking keep looking, soon it will be over. The day-world is filled with her soft gasps and exclamations at each new thing she is shown, the world holds no end of wonder for her. And he is holding her hand and they fly and the world is wonderful colour warmth light. It is too good too perfect too fragile to be true, and look, look, the grey not-colour is beginning to seep in the east, even as the west is filled with glorious reds and oranges and purples that break her heart. She stares, stares, stares and he holds her as her world returns to shadow.
~~~
He is gone now, lost now, sleeping now and she should sleep too but he is gone and she is here and now she can’t see. The brightness, the colour of the world has blinded her and she stared to long and she should have stayed, should have, should. Even her glimpses before were too much, but now she stayed for too long, defiled the light with her sad powder brown darkness and as punishment she can’t see. Not even the half-world, the shadows, the greys browns blacks remain. Her tears run down her cheeks and her eyes burn with them and with memories but her vision isn’t blurred not blurred no vision left. She curls up now, cold now, alone now again. She slips into sleep and dreams in vivid colour in vivid love of the prince and the colours, and the flowers, and the waterfall-rainbows, and the paradise she was given for one day, one day, now lost forever. No colour, no not-colour, no light at all. She’s been banished from light, sent away forever, bad girl, stupid silly girl, worthless ugly girl, pathetic brown moth. She hides in her dreams doesn’t need to wake doesn’t need to eat or drink needs nothing now but the colour in her dreams. Why do they become enchanted by the night-brightness by the light who needs light anyway? To fake and false and lies they are spellbound. But she doesn’t want light never light the darkness is fine because she has seen colour now, colour always, but never again to see.
~~~
When he finds her again it is too late. He had intended, had intended to defy the court and the law and his parents and marry her, marry his beautiful moth girl but now it is too late. He pulls her from her dreams - why is she sleeping she should be awake should be should - but she runs her fingers across his wings his face and smiles and it is too late. She is blinded blinded blind and it is all his fault but even so it is too late. She has slept too long, not eaten in too long and she is fading away. The worst part and best part is that no one will notice it doesn’t matter. She can disappear and no one will care - no one should care - this is what she meant. The day-world should not notice her passing, she should be nameless faceless forgotten, only Butterflies should be mourned, fake in death as they were in life. But now he has noticed and now a day-thing, pretty-thing, fake-thing will notice and cry and be changed by her. Not supposed to. Not intended.
~~~
When he returns the next night she is gone, he knew she would be, gone, lost, dead. Nothing remains but powder brown dust that she collapsed into at the end and three long strands of powder brown hair. He plaits them together keeps them together and winds the thin insubstantial rope around his wrist. Then he leaves, not crying can’t cry she wouldn’t want him to he’s not supposed to and now, touching the brown string around his wrist, he chooses a Butterfly Lady who seems a little kinder a little more sincere a little more emotional than the rest. It is not her wings that catch his eye, all pretty white and pink but her eyes, honey brown. Not like hers, not soft, too golden, too much colour but still brown and ugly they all whisper but he thinks beautiful. He is the king now, they perform the ceremony and as the sun sets it begins to rain.
Not even powder remains of her now.
~~~