(Sorry About Dresden)
(Chapter IV)(Fairy Tales Tell Tales)

Examining Neely's back, Dresden sighed silently and bit his bottom lip with worry; He felt helpless against her attempt to disappear. A permanent curve hunched her shoulders and her impossibly white hair gathered in each crook of bone and skin to outline its slope, like she were carrying the literal weight of her sadness.

Filled with uncertainty, he marveled at the thin barrier between himself and his fears.

Some twisted sense of irony reminded him that their despair was his last hope — she was his last hope — but his faith was waning. It had only taken her moments to wish to disappear, to attempt to simply escape her life. The shock of her words, of how easily she had committed to them, paralyzed him. Had the Willow not interfered —

A weight in his stomach tried to touch his toes as it pressed against his insides with a sickening heaviness. He reminded himself that it would be hypocritical to judge her for her attempted wish, but part of him couldn't help but cling to resentment.

Then again, she was unaware of the consequences her wish would have had on him. While he genuinely wanted to save her from such a fate, his motivation was far from selfless. His future was so intricately tied to hers that it would be impossible for him to have acted solely for the good of her interests or entirely for his own.

He took a deep breath and tried to convince himself that just as their despair was tied to one another, so would be their happiness — if they could manage to find it.

"Why are you so unhappy, Neely?" Dresden wondered aloud, realizing that he knew almost nothing about the girl in front of him, that all his actions were based on a single assumption about her.

From the first moment he had seen her from the boat — the very particles of his body reshaped and drawn to her by some unfathomable instinct — he had known one impractical fact about her. He gambled that it was worth trusting his intuition; he had always known what she was.

"I wouldn't know how to begin to explain that to you," she replied, interrupting his wandering thoughts. Numbness softened her voice, as if his question had injected it with Novocain. “But I can try and show you, if you're curious."

"I just want to know why you would make such a pessimistic wish instead of one that could," pausing to take a deep breath, he stepped forward to stand at her side and smile an attempt at reassurance, "maybe fix something for you."

"Fixing one problem wouldn't help the others." The retort came automatically, her expression distant despite the eye-contact between them. Retrieving her small messenger bag from the ground, she tucked the ticket inside with her sketchbook and slung it across her shoulders. She reached for his hand and wrapped her fingers around his wrist, tugging him along with her.

Dresden followed along, wondering what she had to show him in the middle of the night. "Where are we going?"

Veering left to follow a winding sidewalk, heading away from the lake and back towards the asphalt streets of the city beyond the park, Neely just shook her head for a moment, "Home isn't the right word, but that’s what other people would call it."

The streetlamps flickered above them as they passed by the sleeping houses, the muddled yellow glow of suburbia graying out the night sky and the stars that lit the lake. The silence of the neighborhood was familiar to Neely; its occupants were quiet people who appreciated other quiet people — they got along quite well with her in that respect, even if they were more than a little unsettled by her grayscale appearance.

Stopping in front of a nondescript two story house, Neely turned her attention to Dresden. She tilted her head as her fingers twitched softly at her side, as if a math equation ran through her mind. Reaching up to run her fingertips across the rise of his cheekbone, testing her hypothesis against his skin, she nodded in approval. "I'm sure they won't," she muttered to herself, the left corner of her mouth tugging down with uncertainty.

"What?" he asked, unable to connect the dots between her thoughts and her actions.

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise, as if she had somehow forgotten he was there. "Oh." Fumbling with an explanation, her shoulders slumped a little further. "My parents — I was trying to think of an excuse for you in case they're still awake, but I realized it wouldn't matter because they won't be able to see you."

"How—" His jaw dropped a little at her conclusion; that wasn’t the answer he'd been expecting. "How do you know that?"

She shrugged; impossibilities like this were common in her life and rarely fazed her anymore. "No one at the lake could see you — no one else so much as glanced in your direction, despite the way you flailed around — so that must mean I'm the only one who can, right? Although, that provides more evidence for you being a figment of my imagination than it does for you being," examining his confusion at her logic, she began to second-guess her theory, "invisible."

What if he was simply a product of her imagination? Impossible things occurred in her life on a daily basis, but they were never things that gave her the potential for happiness — that was her definition of impossible.

He looked like the thought of invisibility had never occurred to him and that made her nervous. He was The Messenger; he would know the laws of his own existence far better than she. If she were the only one who could see him, he would know — he would be aware of his own invisibility and he wouldn’t look so surprised.

"I'm not imaginary," he stated firmly, as if trying to reassure himself as well as Neely.

"Then," chewing her bottom lip, she searched for evidence to support his statement, wanting something she could believe in, "can other people see you?"

"I have no idea; I hadn't realized they might not be able to," he answered hesitantly. "This is new for me too."

Neely stood dumbstruck for a moment. "What do you mean?"

He laughed a little and scratched at a spot behind his ear. "I mean," amusement laced his tone, realizing she had preconceptions that he actually knew what he was doing, "I've never done this before. You're the first," he trailed off momentarily, having no idea what to call their situation, "wish I've passed along."

Silence ran circles between them, playing Cat's Cradle with the threads of tension strung between their bodies.

Dresden's words increased Neely's nervousness. She had considered him something more than human, a demigod or all-knowing genie of fate, and it diminished her confidence to think that he was perhaps as uncertain about his existence as she was.

Realizing that they couldn't avoid answering these questions forever, she grabbed him by the wrist once more and led him into the house.

The main floor was incredibly still, confirming Neely's hopes; neither of her parents had waited up for her. Tugging Dresden through the entryway, she took a right through the first doorway to a flight of stairs.

Dresden marveled as the wood that had been such a rich brown at the bottom stair progressively faded to gray with each upward step they took. Glancing around, he realized the kitschy flowered wallpaper was fading as well. All color disappeared as they approached the second floor.

The stairs led directly to a heavy wooden door; the last breath of color that flickered under its frame inched away at their arrival. Neely paused and made a face at the grayed-yellow walls, blowing a puff of air at it and frowning as it scattered and fled.

Dresden's jaw dropped as she opened the door and flicked on the light.

Her room was entirely black and white, the flawless grayscale contents looking like an antique photograph until she walked in and broke the illusion. The lack of color was something he could have anticipated; he would have been more shocked to find pink carpet and rainbow bed sheets. But none his musings about what would be behind that door had prepared him for her walls.

Perfectly white at their base, she had drawn an entire world on them with charcoal and graphite.

"Amazing," he whispered in awe, entering the room and turning in circles to examine every detail.

Shrugging off her bag and closing the door behind him, Neely looked melancholy at his appreciation. "I started them years ago," she explained, preempting his inevitable questions, "the day color abandoned me and I realized I didn't have a place in the world anymore. Suddenly I was disconnected from everything around me. I looked like a pencil drawing wandering around in a colorful painting and knowing I didn't belong. So," she picked up a piece of vine charcoal from the desk next to her and rolled it between her fingers, watching the black pigments fill the notches of her fingerprints, "I drew a world I could belong to."

Catching a flicker of movement across the wall, Dresden inhaled sharply with surprise. The graphite leaves of the trees drawn in front of him shimmered, twitching as if a slight breeze ruffled them. Reaching up to trace his fingertips across their line-work and investigate the phenomenon, his hand passed through what should have been the barrier of the wall and into Neely's drawing.

Wide eyed and speechless, he moved his hand back and forth across what should have been the wall's barrier.

"Of all the impossible things we've experienced since I saved you from drowning," despite her consistently bleak expression, there was a playfully teasing tone in Neely's voice, "walking willows and copper-haired boys aging years in moments, this," she gave him a push from behind, his entire body stumbling forward into the world of the wall drawings, "is what causes disbelief for you?"

Jaw dropped, he closed and reopened his eyes as if expecting everything to look different at a moment’s notice. Running his hands through his hair, he spastically rubbed his palms across its blackness and mussed it up, throwing his head back with a sudden bout of laughter. Grabbing onto a limb of the nearest tree, he pulled himself up into it, gleefully climbing through its branches. "You drew your own world, Neely." Swatting leaves away, he peeked down at her as he spoke. "You're phenomenal."

The corner of her mouth twitched, trying to form an expression Neely couldn't identify.

Stepping into the drawing with him, she kicked off her sandals and grabbed onto a low-hanging branch to help pull herself up. Her toes gripped the bark of the trunk as she walked her lower body up its side.

Offering his hand, Dresden helped her into the boughs, grinning wildly as the breeze stirred once more and attempted to weave Neely's long white hair into the branches.

"Everyone needs a place to escape to," she explained, appraising him with a glint of mischief in her eyes as her fingers twitched, plotting, against the stick of charcoal still gripped within her hands. She drew the tip across the space above his upper lip and snorted with amusement. "You look like the clichéd villain from a melodrama," she teased, twirling the tip of his newly acquired moustache between her fingertips.

His smile faltered.

As amazing as this world she had drawn for herself was, her reasons for creating it were anything but. The reality of the beautiful fiction surrounding them was that she had been ostracized by the rest of the world and this was a coping mechanism. Neely's life was so miserable she needed to draw herself a new one.

The ticket could do more than give her an escape — it could fix her problems. Yet, he was selfishly trying to influence her, not only preventing her from wishing to disappear, but harboring hope that she might sacrifice the chance to save herself for him.

Villain wasn't an inaccurate word for how he saw himself.

"Thank you."

Her unexpected words broke his thoughts, awkwardness overcoming him as he weighed his intentions against her genuineness. "For what?"

"At the lake, when I was trying to decide on a wish," she bit her lip and avoided eye contact as she remembered how he had reacted to her original attempt, "one of them was to be an artist. It's true that I draw because I prefer imaginary realities to my current one, but," setting aside the memories, she met his eyes, lost once more in their impossible clarity, "I love it. Even if I didn't need it to escape, I would still draw and aspire towards a life as an artist. So it means a lot to me when someone appreciates something I've created."

Dresden smiled softly. Despite his own pessimistic thoughts, he knew that even if he felt like a villain in her melodrama, he still had a chance at being cast in the role of the hero.

Reaching forward, he untangled a few strands of her hair the wind had twisted into the tree's branches. "What are you trying to escape from?"

"I'll show you tomorrow." She sighed evasively, smoothing down her hair and staring awkwardly at her toes.

Silence fell between them and Dresden wondered if he dared press for a proper answer. Deciding against it, he resigned to twiddling his thumbs and wondering where the breeze was coming from.

Perhaps she knew how to draw the wind.

Lifting her head, Neely's stretched her back and yawned. Laughing to himself at how the right side of her mouth opened wider than the left, Dresden prodded her in the ticklish spot between her ribs to gain her attention. "I think it's your bedtime," he whispered teasingly.

She nodded and rubbed her eyes, her body suddenly realizing how late it was. Dropping down from the tree, she left the drawing and padded back into the main part of her room, her feet leaving a trail of charcoal footprints behind her.

Examining his hands, Dresden realized he was also covered in evidence that they had been climbing through a drawing, black pigments smeared across his skin and clothing.

Pulling a white nightgown from her dresser, Neely paused at the door to her adjoining bathroom and turned to look back at him. "Will you read me a bedtime story?"

He laughed lightly, nodding, before he jumped down from the tree and wandered to her bookshelf. She continued into the bathroom to change while he rifled through her book titles.

The spines were cracked from frequent use, making the titles printed across them close to illegible. It took him a few moments to make sense of the broken letters, but realization dawned on him by the time she re-entered the room. "They're all fairy tales, aren't they?"

"People read stories to experience things they can't have themselves," she explained, turning on a soft lamplight so she could switch off the overhead one. Climbing into bed, she gestured impatiently for him to choose a story. "I like fairy tales because everyone lives happily ever after."

Except the villains, he reminded himself bitterly, wondering what his role in her story would turn out to be.

Theorizing that her favorite book would be the one that appeared to be the most read, he chose one with a tattered cloth cover that clung to its pages by mere threads. Wandering over to sit beside her in the glow of the lamplight, he flipped to the first page and took a deep breath.

"Once upon a time..."

(Author's Note: So, thanks to my awesome-tastic new beta, effervescent-sentiments, not only is this chapter much improved from what it would have otherwise been, but all three of the previous chapters have been edited as well. Most of the changes are fairly small, so you won't really be out of the loop if you don't re-read them, but there are a couple new bits of interesting information about Dresden added towards the end of chapter three. Just fyi.

Chapter five is already in progress and since end-of-the-school-year activities and edits for the previous chapters are finished, the next update should be up much more quickly. I'm pretty excited for chapter five; the remaining characters will be introduced (AND OMG YOU SHOULD BE REALLY EXCITED ABOUT THEM) and you'll learn some important things about Neely.

Anywho. Please review so I don't feel like I'm talking to myself, y/y? ILY.

—A Perfect Sonnet)

(Many Thanks To: Musickk Darling, aferdeity, HALEYY . and Evvie for reviewing and of course my fabulous beta effervescent-sentiments.)

(A Pre-Made Review For The Lazy)

HOLLA.

'Grats on finding a beta - especially such a gloriously awesome-tastic one. Here's to hoping she whips you into shape so you actually finish this story, mkay? Speaking of the story: Neely's room was really (fill in the blank) and I'm supah curious about what's going to happen with (fill in the blank). I kindasorta hated when (fill in the blank) though. Also, you should know, every chapter I (fill in the blank) Dresden more.

Go update fast nao, kk?
(Your name here)