It was in a name

Ada is staring out the window. It’s one of her favorite past times, the one she
finds herself returning to over and over again. Of course, it’s one of the only
past times one can have, locked in a small, barren room with a cot, desk, toilet
area, and fucking window, but she likes to have her little hobbies.

In about an hour, she’ll start her second hobby–flushing the toilet over and over
and over just to hear something in the concrete and steel room.

Exciting times.

It’s a Tuesday according to the long list of scratch marks on the window pane. She
keeps track in sevens, over and over, seven tally marks in seven rows. Sometimes,
when they take her out for recreational time, she comes back to find her hard work
painted over, smoothed over, erased. On those days she gets a warning and a little
less supper.

No one trusts witches with too many sevens. She’d love to tell them how they’re
looking for the wrong number with her–not that type of witch–but that would involve
talking. Talking used to be her favorite hobby, even over flushing the toilet, but
she’d given it all up for him.

She’s given up a lot of things for him. Willingly, even. She can feel the curse
under her skin bubbling with each little thing, roiling and pushing, desperate to
get out. She’s already fed it her name, her voice, that little hiccup at the end of
her laugh, and a few other bits and bobs from her own personality. Personalities
are easy to re-grow, easy to fit around broken parts of her heart, she doesn’t need
them.

She thinks that’s why the curse isn’t quite ready yet. Everything she’s given it is
replaceable. She’s already calling herself Ada, desperate to hold onto some form of
identity within these four walls. It’s another thing she could sacrifice, but she
already knows that’s not what the curse really wants.

It’s taken Ada two years of this–sitting and staring and flushing–to get the timing
right. Her final sacrifice will be nothing without the right circumstances. The
right phase of the moon.

The right visitor.

It wouldn’t have taken so long if she were a normal prison. A human one with guards
all up and down the halls, minds open and easy to influence with the spare bit of
sugar they give her for her coffee. Hell, it would have taken her mere hours if
they’d put her out in the yard to exercise, bare earth under her bare feet. She
misses the feel of the earth, rumbling through her soles. It’s been a long two
years without her oldest companion.

The waiting is almost over.

Ada doesn’t turn when the door opens. The scent of magic fills the room, spicy and
a little tart. It’s not a human mage’s smell, not one of the undead, not one of the
moon’s sons or daughters.

The fair folk have been running this little private prison for centuries. They’ve,
unfortunately, gotten rather good at it. Ada discovered that the first two times
she tried to escape, tried to attack, tried to sneak away.

No one gets out of underhill if the fae forbid it, not even the ones carried in
kicking and screaming. He hadn’t been able to trick her into walking in of her own
free will. That is the only reason her plan has any chance of working.

“Miss?”

At last, she turns. The curse is practically salivating under her skin, teeth
forming and disappearing under her bones, but she knows her guard won’t be able to
sense it. She’d sacrificed her sense of taste for secrecy, a trade well done even
if everything she ate was now as bland as her concrete walls.

The being in the doorway is named Dan. She hates that their name is Dan. It’s so
normal. So pedestrian. She hasn’t yet–after two years– been able to make fun of
someone named Dan. Why doesn’t she make fun of something besides their name?

Because the guards of underhill have no faces, of course.

The being drifts in the doorway, smooth skin over where mouth and nose should grow.
Their forehead wrinkles as they sway, side to side, side to side. Testing the
currents of energy in the room, making sure she hasn’t gotten up to anything too
nefarious in the long hours of solitude. “You have a visitor.”

You never visit me, she wants to complain. Maybe fluff up her limp and greasy hair,
flutter her eyelashes. I thought we had something special, Dan.

This vow of silence? Really has stunted the witty repartee she could have been
having with Dan all these months. She likes to think that he understands anyway.

She unfolds herself from the window sill. Her feet are coated in magic–fae spells–
and the cold from the concrete doesn’t bother her through it. Nothing, actually,
can touch her skin through the glamour, which means that she can’t pull the
intrinsic magic from the very foundations of this place. She’s a Maximum Security
type of girl.

She follows Dan out of her little room and into another world. Where her walls are
bland and boring, the hallways almost hurts with how much is going on. She focuses
on her feet so that her eyes don’t water at the baroque crown molding. It’s a lot.

Dan doesn’t notice–no eyes–and sways his way down the hall. There are big, ornate
doors to either side of them, some glowing and others encased in ice. All sorts of
creatures are kept here (at cost) and they’ve found ways to contain everything from
mermaids to vampires to little, harmless witches like her.

The curse barks out a laugh. Nice.

Thanks, she whispers back. She’s really going to miss it when it’s gone.

The hall ends, flaring into a ballroom, just as ornate and decorated as everything
else. It’s warm and glowing, crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. It looks
like something out of a fairy tale which is…unfortunate. There’s not really any
happy endings for witches in fairy tales.

Meh. She works with what she has.

You should probably look at him, her curse whispers to her. It sounds amused.
You’ve seen the chandeliers before.

I’m building the moment, she snarls at it, eyes watching the way the containment
spells spin and weave around the chandeliers. Really settling into the scene.

Never mind, she can’t wait to sink this thing right into his very bones.
She lets her eyes finally get dragged to the man sitting at the only table in the
room. It’s magnetic, the pull she feels towards him, electrifying even through her
anger. He’s like…he’s like the sun to her, so filled with life and warmth.

She’s been burned quite badly.

Romeo’s lip quirks, eyes soft and sad. “Hello, Juliet.”

The world stops turning.

—————————————————————————-

There’s a ballroom much more human in her past. Her family is well off, but it
takes time and dedication to build the sort of opulence they crave. They’ve only
just moved, you see, so the first Witches Ball they throw takes place on a wide,
empty floor with only a few paintings of their ancestors to liven up the walls.

She sees Romeo socializing with a few of his friends directly under the portrait of
her great-great-grandmother. Katherine. Burned at the stake.

In hindsight, she should have known.

In reality, she should have studied the witch clans a little longer, learned her
names and history a little better. If she had, she would never have met the eyes of
a Montague with the blatant interest she did.

She would have never followed him outside under the full moon.

(Or maybe she would have.)

But she did and they fell in love. He called her the sun, she fluttered her
eyelashes, and they brewed up a storm of a relationship together. Hand in hand.

She was ready to fight, you know, when the war came. She knew her sins by then,
knew who she whispered poetry to in the dead of night, but she also knew that love
is a more powerful magic than her family was trying to get her to protect.

She really, really thought Romeo agreed with her.

She went to him with her own war in her heart, ready to turn against her own coven
to protect the way their souls twined around the other. She went to him with her
hands open, her eyes open, and she asked him to join her. To make something new
with her where they could be together.

Romeo asked her to run away with him instead.

Another sin? She did.

———————————————————–

“The war is over,” Romeo says. There are new scars on his hands, his forearms, his
face. Splashes of mottled skin from spell backlash, lines from blades, a few dots
and divots here and there from punctures. The last two years have not been kind to
him.

Tough. The last two years have been hell for her.

She doesn’t ask about her family. Even if she had her voice, she wouldn’t have
needed to. She felt each of their deaths like a broken bone, here in her little
prison, unable to feed them the magics her family had entrusted her with. Without
the heir to the family legacy, they never had a chance against the Montagues.

Not when they still had fucking Romeo.

“I–I tried to spare them,” he says. His voice breaks and his hands twist together
on the white tablecloth. “But the Capulets were proud and did not accept the mercy
I offered them.”

Mercy? The curse asks. It’s not familiar with the word.

Doesn’t matter, she replies.

“I know–I know that you will never forgive me,” Romeo says. There’s agony in his
eyes as he faces his nightmare. He’s the head of his family, strong and powerful,
but he’s lost something greater. “I don’t think I can forgive myself. But I’m not
sorry that I saved your life. I need you to believe that, Juliet. This wasn’t about
the war, bringing you here. It was about saving you.”

She believed that until she felt the first death.

————————————————

He takes her to the woods, weaving his way deeper and deeper into the dense
foliage. She’s in her family’s finery and stumbles when rocks catch at her heels.
They don’t slow. They don’t stop.

“We can have a family,” she says, trying to ease the sting of leaving hers behind.
“Just you and me.”

“Anything you want,” Romeo says. His voice sounds funny in the gloom. Before she
can ask, he stops short. “Here. I think it’s here.”

She watches as he steps aside, gesturing for her to go ahead. There’s a path ahead,
a little beaten one that looks like it was made by something with hooves too large
for this world.

Across it, just ahead, are blue mushrooms.

Everything in Juliet stops. Her blood quits roaring in her ears. Her magic stills
in her bones. She stops breathing.

“Juliet?” Romeo asks. Nervous. There’s sweat on his upper lip. He extends his hand.
“Sweetheart?”

She stares at him. “Romeo,” she says. “Do you think that I can’t recognize a fae
ring when I see one?”

His expression crumbles. He’d certainly hoped so.

She fights and breaks at the same time. That’s probably why he wins.

—————————————————————————————–

So Romeo is across the table now, two years later, asking her to forgive him for
saving her. He’s not asking for her forgiveness for killing her family, not really.
He’s asking her to run away with him again, just like before, with nothing but her
skin and her bones and her magic.
She places her hand, palm up on the table. Romeo’s breath stills in his lungs. His
hand reaches out, trembling, stops. Curls in on itself.

“Juliet?” His lip trembles and he searches her eyes. He’s projecting, he has to be,
because if he were really seeing her, there wouldn’t be relief breaking across his
face. He’s seeing what he wants to see in the blankness of her eyes.

He’s seeing salvation where there isn’t any.

He reaches out and takes her hand.

The curse lunges.

She feels it leaving her like her soul is leaving her. There’s a vacuum and a pop
and then burning. Romeo’s mouth slams open in a soundless scream and she watches as
her curse ripples under his skin, slipping into his bones, sinking its teeth into
his soul.

Taking his voice.

“My name is Ada,” she tells him as tears begin to roll down his cheeks. “I gave up
my name the day I broke my vows to my family. To the ones I owed my fealty to.”

It takes effort to rip her hand from his, but it’s only physical. The curse is
already wrapped around him. His eyes are horrified on her. On the changes happening
to her face. Her body. Similar ones are happening to him.

She stares at this new Juliet, shaking and sobbing across the table. Mute. Pretty.
Gullible. She cursed him with a fate not his own. The poor fate of Juliet.

“I’m going to tear down everything you’ve fought for these past two years,” she
tells him. She takes a step away from the table. The spells don’t stop her when she
crosses the boundary into the common area. She’s Romeo now. “And I will laugh while
I do it.”

She turns on her heel and leaves to kill a Witch Clan.