holding up horizons with her hands

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/879615.

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category: F/F
Fandom: Disney Princesses, Aladdin (1992), Tangled (2010)
Relationship: Rapunzel/Jasmine
Language: English
Stats: Published: 2013-07-11 Words: 1,390 Chapters: 1/1

holding up horizons with her hands

by theviolonist

Summary

Her man loved her, you're made to understand—a selfish love, a thief's love, and he stole
her away from her kingdom when he got bored of palaces and made her a bandit.

What if it was her? you do not ask. What if she was the one who got bored and left?

Your husband is not a bad man.

—but he loves you without constancy, like something beautiful that's gone in a flash. He has no
tenderness for the wife who languishes in deep sofas with books too thick for him, just like you
have none for the boy who plays at being king.

Your husband is not a bad man. When your father died he became the Sultan and you retreated
back into your chambers, resigned to forever thirst for the freedom you only got a fleeting taste of.

Now you watch the days wash away from your balcony, thinking of precipitation to push back the
boredom that threatens to swallow you every time you open a heavy eyelid.

"He loves you so much," says a bright-eyed servant as she pours your bath one afternoon. "I wish
someone would love me like that."

And you think: does he? And you think: am I such a bad woman, that I care for him so very little?

You plunge your head under the soft-scented water; submerged, you dream of being a mermaid.

What he meant when he said he'd show you the world was that you'd whir over your country and
survey it from above, drunk on wind and freshly-collected rain.

It was only when you stumbled back on the balcony that you realized you'd been cheated, but by
then it was already too late. You kissed your prince and went back to your travel books.

One day they bring in a dirty girl who refuses to bow her head. The room dwarfs her, but she's
holding her chin high, fierce even though she looks like a child with her big eyes and small frame.

You don't hear what they charge her with, only that her companion died when they took her. She
looks up at you and your hand stills on the arm of your throne, then squeezes so hard you bear the
hexagonal mark of a ruby in your palm for a week.

"Give her to me," you ask your husband. "For a servant."

He nods; he doesn't like killing. He's afraid of death, and somewhere you despise him for that, too.

The girl bites your hand when you try to get her to come along, accusing you of killing her
beloved. She snarls and spits like a savage. You shrug; you know they're all like that in the land
she comes from.

You hold her chin in your hand, the metal of your rings hard against her cheeks. "What is your
name?"

"Killer," she growls at your face, and they to take her away so she can't hurt you, her hands
grabbing for you as though your body was the last barrier between her and the land of the dead.

It simmers under your skin; no one ever refuses you.

"Rapunzel," she says after three months at your service, as she brings you a platter of figs. Her
accent hurts your ears. She's bad-mannered and strange-looking, but you favor her over all the
others.

You tear the red core of the fig with your teeth.

"Rapunzel", you repeat, and you understand, from the way it fizzles on the tongue, that hers is a
witch's name—that she is, or used to be, an enchantress.

She takes a fig from your platter, pops it whole in her mouth. "You have to tell me yours now."

"You know," you say with a sharp smile.

She nods. "Yes. Tell me."

You sigh; you recline on your seat, letting laughter stream of your lips in pearls of gold. "Jasmine,"
you say at last, after so long you would believe her lost in the darkness, were her eyes not still fixed
on you, jewel green.

Her man loved her, you're made to understand—a selfish love, a thief's love, and he stole her away
from her kingdom when he got bored of palaces and made her a bandit. All that, the kitchen maid
tells you, her voice low and vaguely awed.
What if it was her? you do not ask. What if she was the one who got bored and left?

You do not ask, but sometimes when the night crushes your city you go outside and watch as
everything becomes red; you breathe and you think of her, of her thighs squeezing a horse's flanks,
her throat hoarse from yelling the name of freedom.

But she tells you herself, Rapunzel. She slips into your bath one night you insisted to be alone, and
you do not look, except you do—because her body is white and her hair wasn't always dark, she's
lithe and agile like a cat, like someone who learned how to survive.

"Did you love him?" you ask; you've always been a romantic, though less than your husband
because you know the ways of men. "Your boy."

She laughs, showing teeth. "Love is not a final thing," she tells you. She disappears under the water
and you're forced to watch as her back ripples and she swims, stark over the multicolored tiles.

She shakes her hair like a dog when she resurfaces. "It doesn't only happen once."

You might've expected her lips, the roughness of her skin and the sweetness of her tongue. You
didn't.

(She whispers it in the hollow of your neck: what love does to wreck you, how he fell in a splash of
red heroism, what the markets of Jasmine's city look like, unruly and messy with tinsel and heady
spices; cross-legged and naked on your bed, you think her your very own Schehezerda.)

When her hands touch you you want to ask: what treasures did you steal with those hands? Who
did you love before me?

But you don't, because you can't talk with her skin near; instead you stutter, you sing, full to
bursting with the delicate moans you used to keep only for long lonely nights.

But she, her eyes twinkling, talks— "Jasmine," in your mouth, and she consumes you.

Sometimes when you lay on your back it seems to you that you've seen all there is to see; that the
world is finite, and what the books told you were only dreams, the imaginings of insane men
locked into tight dark houses.

She gives you a faith you didn't know you held, fervent and almost dark, traces on the back of your
knees the road she travelled with her companion and bites off your lips her 'I love you's in different
tongues.

"We'll run away," she tells you, her voice like a locket. You want and fear to open it: poison, a
picture, of the wind of deserts?

Prove it, you reply in fevered dreams, looking down at her with dark, commanding eyes.
You are a princess. Your father told you that from your very infancy, bent over your gilded cradle:
with the unbound love of a father, he said you would have anything you desired.

But don't go down to the market, Jasmine; don't talk to strange men and don't climb over your
balcony. You can have everything you want, as long as it can come to you in cages and packages,
borne on the backs of men you want to follow back out the gates.

Rapunzel was only once formidable: when she stood on the bars, that night, and told you to jump.

"It's not that high," she said, crowned from behind by the night's few fires. "You just have to be
careful."

And you were afraid, but— "What do you have to lose?"

The tiger was sprawled on the red tiles. He opened a golden eye and looked at you, as you took off
your bracelets and set them on the ground; looked, too, when Rapunzel's hands closed tight on your
hips and brought you against her chest.

"Come along," she murmured. Her voice was soft like foods she could not know before she met
you, like turkish delights.

Jasmine, you jumped.

You steal a horse.

Her hair whips the night, and you feel yourself become an adventuress. In the next town over you
shed your rich fabrics and you buy a kilij, to protect yourself against your husband's men.

Rapunzel slides a finger over the blade and makes you taste her blood.

"For practice," she grins, but you can barely hear her over the sound of your thumping heart.

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