Once For Heather. The following is the humble account of an event that happened once upon a time. Once upon a time - Audrey loved those words and learned to say them in every language that she'd learned. To her, they heralded the beginning of an untold number of adventures. Beneath her chic exterior and worldly pretenses, she still loved fairy tales the best. Once upon a time, they were all she read; later, she abandoned them for boys and perfume and designer names. He changed all that, though Audrey never would admit it. She found herself poring through Vogue and Cosmo, Glamour and Harpers Bazaar, searching for the editorials that made her think of all those childhood tales, cutting the pictures and rearranging them into a freakish, dazzling array of beautiful narratives. Scrapbooks overflowed with her strange collages, hidden from sight lest they ruin the impeccably maintained design of her room. That was another thing - her room. Her trademark blacks and whites melded slowly into icy blues and strange designs that seemed to come from even stranger depths. She had it redone every month or two, claiming that the shade just wasn't right for what she'd hoped to achieve, and one way or another she charmed the expenses away. It really wasn't the money that mattered, anyhow. In time, the designers she hired to bring her visions to life began to ask her to replicate her strange ideas for their other clients, and Audrey smiled a gracious smile and gave them something simpler, less dangerous, to pass to fad-hungry socialites like her distant mother. The money all went back into "the project," as she called it. She didn't speak to Jenny anymore; she simply didn't have the words to even try. How could she ever explain the dreams? They'd begun not long after the whole mess ended, after Jenny promised to dream him elsewhere. How carelessly she'd broken that promise when swept up in a whirlwind of college, career and Tommy; how carelessly she'd thrown that all-consuming passion to the wayside. Audrey was not such a silly little girl, so terrified of something more than herself - and so she remembered, and she dreamt, and in so dreaming found she too was being dreamt to strange new worlds by him. She found him far away at first, and try as she might, she'd always wake before she reached him. And then, once upon a time, when the frustration threatened to consume her waking hours, she finally began to see the patterns that divided them, the delicate whirls of stardust cutting their worlds in two. Each night a new schematic was revealed, and each day Audrey's precision eye for design traced the swirling magic in her mind onto paper. Dream to paper, paper to wall - the process was endless and tiresome. Even her permissive father began to question Audrey's suddenly growing fickleness in decor, and when he refused to pay another dime, she demanded higher quotes for the use of her captivating interior designs to pay the cost. Each diagram she brought from the dream world meant another step across the void - was he coming closer to her world or was she fast approaching his? It no longer mattered. Though Audrey tried, she never figured out what those strange schematics were, where they might hold their origins. Complicated runes, perhaps...or perhaps something even older and long since lost to time, save in that strange place where worlds intersect. She didn't remember when it was they first began to speak. It was strange to think of courtship in this manner, where fancy dresses and flirtations become useless and all of Audrey's customary sensual weaponry is dulled. They were left with nothing to do but speak - of anything and everything, of trivialities and world problems, of heated arguments and sweet seductions. They spoke of things that had been and things they wanted for the future. She spoke in every tongue she knew, and he replied in lilting dialects that seemed impossible to remember upon waking. Sometimes they didn't even speak with words - a glance had become every bit as eloquent and meaningful. A world without shadows... What a silly idea. In Audrey's secret dream of ancient magic (was it really hers?), even the shadows were something to see. And how their shadows twisted, undulating and rippling under the strange, scintillating light of that dream, reaching for each other against all possible laws of physics in a reflection of their desire. On the night their shadows finally mingled, Audrey woke exhausted, sweaty, her fingertips and lips still tingling faintly. That was the morning that Audrey concluded for certain that she was the one stepping forward while Julian stood still. It was also the morning she realized how happy such a conclusion made her. Once upon a time, the housekeeper wandered into Audrey's room to find her missing. None of her things had been touched, her car was in its spot and nobody remembered seeing her leave. There was no note, no signs of struggle - no sign of her ever again. Only two curiosities remained to hint as to her fate: the first, a wet paintbrush sitting by the last design, covered with a shade of blue never seen before or after; the second, a small, delicate penknife with a ruddy stain at its tip. Eventually the painters were sent for and the room was coated with several shades of white until the blue no longer bled through. She crossed the distance and embraced him, the paintbrush falling from her hand as she stepped forward. Heated whispers turned to searing kisses that would wipe all memory of her prior life from existence just as his had once been wiped, and not even the other shadows could protest their strange, unlikely union in that place. When they had finished, all the fairy tales in all the world seemed suddenly bland and saccharine by comparison, and that was fine as well. Audrey concluded that it was far more agreeable to both their natures to write their own wild tales, and so they set off into the tangle of worlds before them to see what they could see. They had many adventures together and, perhaps, they even lived happily ever after. END. Back to the main page. Disclaimer: the characters, fictional settings, and universes created by L. J. Smith are copyright © Lisa J. Smith, Daniel Weiss Associates, Inc. and their affiliates. This fan-created site, along with the stories it houses, means no infringement upon any trademark, copyright, or other legal binding. 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