pick up the pieces of my heart
Witches don’t have a heart.
MAINS. prince!Serim & witch!female reader
TROPES. fantasy au, dark fairytale vibes, angst
WARNINGS. emotional manipulation, skinship, blood, disease and death mentioned, ambiguous ending
WORDS. 1.3k
NOTES. i cannot get marionette out of my head. @restlessmaknae surprise?
“Was any of it real?” Serim asked foolishly hopeful, and oh it sounded so tragic from his lips.
You didn’t look at him, you couldn’t. You kept your eyes on the line of thorny roses curling around the tower’s window and the setting Sun painting the world beyond it red.
“Of course not,” you scoffed like somebody scolding a child for their naivety but your words tasted bitter in your mouth, they tasted like a lie.
“I don’t believe you,” Serim said, his voice hoarse and hurt but he refused to show it. “Unless you look at me when you say it.”
It was a silly ultimate as if you had anything to prove to him. As if the fact that you had him alone and at your mercy wasn’t enough. As if you couldn’t rip his heart out with your bare hands if you wanted to. He had no royal guard coming to his rescue now after all.
Princes and their self-assurance, you tsked, thinking he knew you better. Thinking you were still the innocent maid who cut her finger in his study. Thinking you wouldn’t have the heart to hurt him. That’s where he was wrong: you didn’t have a heart to begin with, you had given it away in exchange for power, for revenge and the last of your innocence had died when the king had closed off your village at the first signs of a plague.
“Don’t,” you snapped sharply when you heard the prince take a step.
He couldn’t leave. Not because you locked him in but it was a prison anyhow. The window from so high up was a death sentence and while the door to the staircase leading down was open, he would have been stupid to try. You made sure of it when you poisoned his bloodstream and tied his soul to this very place. The moment he tried to leave the tower, his heart would squeeze and fail him.
But he was even more stupid because he didn’t attempt an escape, no, he moved closer to you and that, somehow, was even worse because you remembered how it felt to have his gentle touch on you.
Candle light was flickering beside you when you lifted your gaze and looked at him. He was every bit of the prince he was born to be: lush dark locks falling elegantly over his forehead, soft features, warm brown eyes, broad shoulders filling out the expensive wine-colored suit he wore, the symbols of the kingdom sewn over the fabric and the material of his heart. He was the prince of people, kind and good. Too bad his father was a monster.
The truth was Prince Serim had lived in a golden cage his whole life.
There was a rumour whispered from mouth to mouth under the night sky that the midwife had told the king a prophecy just when his son had been born. She had said that dark days would befall on the kingdom the day the boy would leave the court. Then the queen had died, the king locked up his own son and years later, those unfortunate days the gossip promised became your goal once you coughed up the last of blackened blood of your lungs as you left your burning village behind.
It was ill-fated, really, the prince and you. It was his father’s fault that you had lost everything and everybody who had ever mattered to you, it was his fault that you cut a piece of your heart out and sealed your emotions, closing them deep inside a corner nobody would look for. If it wasn’t for him your hands wouldn’t have been crimson with blood and death, veins running black with forbidden magic coursing through them.
You had sworn to take revenge and you were willing to pay any price to show the king what it felt like: losing somebody you cared for. If you had just killed the crown prince, the sole heir to the throne, the king would have ordered a witch hunt, one so grand scale it chased you to hell and back. You weren’t afraid of death, you were almost friends after all, but you wanted the royal family to suffer more. You wanted to prolong their torture just how you had to watch the people you loved slowly die of either disease or starvation or the fire the king ordered to cleanse the ground. You wanted the kingdom to burn through and through.
You thought the prince being alive would have given you leverage and it would have given the king hope you could trample upon. What was a kingdom’s future without its heir and what did it say about its king if he couldn’t even protect his own son? You wanted to watch the monarchy crumble to dust. You wanted the king to beg you to spare them.
So the plan was easy: you had sneaked into the palace, disguising yourself as a maid, pouring small doses of your magic potion into the prince’s tea every morning. You had no plans to get close to him, you didn’t need to because if magic compromised his heart enough he would have followed you like a marionette anyways, but one day you cut your finger on a rose thorn while arranging the flowers in the vase of the prince’s study and Serim made such a fuss about it. He held your calloused hand in his soft ones, cleaning the wound like it meant something.
Over time what started out as a few polite exchanged words turned into whispered confessions about his heavy responsibilities and duties and as much of your loss as you could tell him. What started as stolen glances turned into brushing hands over silverware.
His fingers were dirty with leaked out black ink the first time he kissed you. Gently like you could break and oh how sweet revenge tasted when you scooped out the pomegranate seeds and fed them to the prince, licking the fruit’s bleeding redness from your fingers once you stained his lips with your dark magic.
You almost changed your mind then. Your hand trembled as you tipped the glass and more potion poured into his tea before flushing it down the drain. You told yourself maybe it was even better. Having the prince’s heart in the palm of your hands was a crueller revenge than you had originally planned. That if the prince chose you, a lowly maid, a witch, over his crown, over his family, it was enough.
But then Princess Amala came.
It was wrong and selfish and vile but if you couldn’t have him, you didn’t want anybody else to have him either. If the king wanted to take him away from you too, you wouldn’t let him.
So while Serim was busy convincing you that he had no idea about the royal wedding, you finished what you had started: you kissed him hard enough to draw blood and bonded the last of his soul to a place only you knew. With the promise of freedom, the prince followed you out of the palace, through the woods, to a tower covered in roses. He was still delirious when he fainted into the silk sheets when magic drained out of you.
When he woke with a start, gasping for air and clenching his hand over his heart, you knew what he felt. Dark magic always left an empty hole in one’s heart like a wound that would fester forever. So really, you couldn’t understand why he still looked at you like that instead of disgust. Like you hung the moon and the stars when now he knew what you were and what you had done.
“Please, Y/N. Please,” he pleaded, eyes glassy and bruised lips trembling, and the lie you should have told him was choking you.
Witches didn’t have a heart and yet, yours broke for him.
END NOTES. i had the idea of writing a villainess girl & damsel in distress guy dynamic for a while now so here it is. also if you noticed the hades & persephone reference, kudos to you!
title and inspiration from marionette obviously
header picture from spring rhapsody
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