Fractured Fairytale
Zhou Mei Ling was the prefect portrait of love, devotion and selflessness (in this life). She loved deeply, her family and life sacred treasures she vowed to cherish and protect. However they were moments. Moments that haunted her.
Fear dogging her, thoughts of "what if..". In quite moments, away from the love, care and affection she had always wanted, darker more sinister emotions whisper. Fear, rage, jealousy and subtle but growing ruthlessness.
As time flowed and passed by, Mei Ling began to lean into these darker emotions, though she would never admit it, even to herself.
Time to time. Little by little, gentle harmless emotions gave way to calculated and measured responses.
She became sharper, more cunning, able and willing to bend morals if it meant security and happiness for hers and her own. Her warmth remained on the surface, hiding a deep dark storm brewed and ready for anything and everything.
This subconscious shift or rift caught and later captured the attention of Huo Jin Chen, a man who had long since dismissed love, affection and feelings as an illusion. A gimmick the weak used to excuse themselves and that the strong played "lip service to" when it suited them. He was/is the definition of void. Empty, hollow and always hungry. A hunger so vast to consumes any and all those around him.
This was until he noticed and later observed Mei Ling. Because it was in her he saw something different - a woman walking in light and shadow. A woman who clung to her ideals but yet carried destruction as a potential next step. She was a paradox. One he saw fit to guide, wield and later possess.
A darkness simmered below the surface, one that mirrored and match his own soul.
Jin Chen admired her willingness to wield her darkness as a weapon, however reluctantly was what made her Prefect. For Jin Chen, it wasn't attraction that led them to each other, it was a twisted sense of destiny. He saw what she could be (a second him) if only she embraced the hunger she suppressed, the darkness she turned away from.
Their connection became a dance. A very dangerous one. Mei Ling, desperate to preserve her family, her life, her paradise, found herself drawn to Jin Chen's promises of power and protection, even as she resisted the darkest parts of herself. Jin Chen, in turn, found his void beginning to fill, - not with love -, but with the idea of consuming someone so beautiful fractured.
Together, they became a testament to how love, fear and ambition can be transformed into something unrecognizable, a tangled mess of light and shadow. Mei Ling's light darkens with her bond to Jin Chen deepening and he, reveled in the chaos and emotions she tired so hard to deny.
In the end, it wasn't love that brought them together but their fractured pieces that reflected, mended and fed into one another.
A haunting darkness, that left unchecked can masquerade as something beautiful.
A fractured Fairytale.