Little red riding hood

Her breath caught in her chest as he shook her shoulders, staring up at him with wide, terrified eyes and breathing that came in short, panicked breaths. She wished that the blood rushing in her ears would block out what he was saying, but it didn't. She heard every word and they stuck into her mind. For the first time in her life she wished she knew how to fight even a little bit, but it wasn't so that she could get back at him for what he was saying or lash out because of what he was doing, she just wanted to get away from him. She wanted to get away from him and the shame and dread and fear he was feeding into her brain. She couldn't stop looking at her mother's deformed, lifeless head on top of his, the vision of it burning into her brain.

He laid across her more heavily, pressing the air from her lungs and making it even harder for her to breathe, her sobs falling silent as she couldn't draw a deep enough breath in to make much of a sound. His teeth snapping in front of her nose made her squeak and she turned her head away, finally squeezing her eyes closed and welcoming the darkness behind her eyelids as he told her about how she could be prey, how she would be like a tasty rabbit. Like sheltered veal. Soft and unthreatening and easily slain. Even the space behind her eyelids wasn't safe from him. She could still see her mother's skin moving around on top of his wicked, grinning face playing in the darkness, replaying like a sick, twisted movie.

She only looked back up at him when he mentioned how his mother - their mother - had sent him and his siblings to their deaths, but that he had survived. Immediately she silently denied the claim, renewing her kicking and flailing in ernest as she desperately tried to free herself even though it was in vein. There was no way her mother would have done something like that, not a chance! She thought about her mother bringing her a bundle of herbs, praising her for working so hard on her healing, how she had gotten all the pieces of her infirmary crafted, all she had done to promote what was so opposite from everything she had done. She clung to those memories like someone caught in a river of rapids, hanging on to a rock so that they wouldn't get swept away.

She didn't like him mentioning her brothers. How long had he been around? How long had he been watching them? Had one of her brothers encountered him? So many questions ran through her mind, but a deep, instinctual fear wondered if she'd ever get the chance to try and find out the answers. He asked what they thought when they found their mother's skinned body and she froze, her blood running cold as she stared up at him with the harsh realization. He had been in the castle grounds. She had seen her mother be buried. If he had her skin, then he obviously would have had to come to where she was buried to get it. She hadn't been back out to the grave since that day. Had anyone? It was in such a remote part of the grounds, tucked back among some trees... had anyone even noticed?

The feeling of his paw on her cheek made her skin crawl. The mental image of her mother's body skinned and left behind made her stomach churn and the short, shallow breaths she was forced to take because of his weight made her head spin, making her feel as if she couldn't breathe. Everything started to feel distant as he threatened to kill her, inviting her to join her mother's fate as a skin he could wear and keep him warm. The nausea crept up on her, her mind creating the most horrendous images of her mother's rotting body, of this horrible beast of a man pulling her skin free from her body like she was some sort of prized game, of what her face would look like without the skull to support it like her mother's was now atop his head. She turned her head to the side just as her stomach finally had enough and she threw up the contents of her stomach, struggling against him again as she tried to roll on to her side, hovering on the edge of passing out.

Gwynevere | Eilwen