A/N: Media is how I imagine Vasi to look. 

'There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.' - Maya Angelou

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Vasilisa stared at the pale fingers on her left hand for an uncharacteristically long time.

Vasi didn't like to sit still. The fact made her a very bad swan most of the time, as drifting across a lake during the day bored her, as swans were wont to do. But there was only around a half hour until dawn, and Vasi's spell would claim her once more, taking away the slender hands and the long limbs. She'd feel herself become small, webbed and necked as a swan once more.

She swallowed. She'd already left Sig on the pretence of returning home, as she did every morning. It had never seemed out of the ordinary before, and what Sig thought of her, she could only imagine. Most respectable girls didn't spend their nights wandering by lake shores, but then again, she could only imagine the sorts of girls Sig had spent time with. Certainly not ones that roamed out of their beds before dawn. But this time, telling Sig she was leaving, he had offered to walk with her. Almost presumptively, as though she would say yes. As though if not this time, then the next time, he would meet her family. He would see what sort of girl he'd asked an audience with.

Alone.

She wanted to curse Marya for letting it happen, letting him catch her alone, because she knew her friend had to be in on the secret. Marya had been mysteriously absent all evening, absent in a way that would have worried her if Sig hadn't been so obvious.

Siegfried, Prince of Illychia— their Sig— had proposed.

Vasi wanted to wring her hands in the lunacy of it. He'd brought wine tonight, and a beautiful silk blanket, and sat them beneath the wooded stars. Vasi had begun to realise, then, that something was up: no Marya, no laughter. A mood so sharp it would cut through the waters of the lake she was chained to.

He'd given this speech. Vasilisa hadn't known where to look, and being only the two of them, she could only look at him. At his eyes, following her too closely, too confident, with a desperation for a connection to her. Snatches of the speech still caught her ears, even as she tried hard not to listen.

'Your beauty captured me the moment I laid eyes upon you.'

Captured, he'd said. Like he had any idea what it was like to be unable to leave a place.

'I love you, Vasilisa.' He said it earnestly. Like he had any idea what love was.

Vasilisa's response had frozen at that point. Because how can you deny someone feels something? She couldn't, no matter how ludicrous Sig sounded, as though he thought they had been plucked from the constellations and written for one another. She couldn't deny that he felt he loved her, even when he knew nothing about her.

The Prince? Marrying a swan? She had chuckled, and then realised her mistake: the trembling of his hands. The way his eyes stopped meeting hers.

She took the proposal as only half serious, and truly hurt his feelings.

But that wasn't the worst part. For taking him half seriously, Vasi could be forgiven, one day. With a sincere apology. But that wasn't all that she'd done. The worst part came next.

Vasi's knuckles whitened as she clenched her skirt, borrowed from Marya. Oh, Marya. If Sig wanted real beauty, he only need look for the gentle soul that was her dearest friend.

Marya. Poor, sweet Marya. Vasi leaned forward, placed her head in her hands, and tried not to weep. She had known the day Sig arrived that Marya was besotted with him, with his mannerisms and his talk of wanting to be a different sort of king. Weeks had since gone by, and Vasi had never mentioned to Sig about Marya.

There had never seemed the right moment. The three were always together, and Vasi was always joking and laughing and never in the mood for a serious conversation. Not like Sig or Marya, who could endlessly chat politics or debate righteousness whilst Marya would skim stones across the water and yawn. The trio were an odd combination; Vasi's wildness, and her love of a gamble and risk and energy, Marya's stoic quiet. Her peace, her ability to blend in with nature better than Vasi, who had never felt a true part of the lake. And Sig: the undisputed leader, the one who came up with grand ideas, who made terrible jokes and teased Marya senseless. Sig, who would one day rule a kingdom, and Marya, who was supposed to one day take it back from him, if Aloysius was believed.

And Vasi, for all that she didn't fit in with the lake, hadn't felt she quite fitted in with her friends' story, either. In her romantic tale, it was Marya and Sig; because, she knew, one day there would come a change, and the two would be driven apart. Like in the novels Marya brought her from town, she and Sig would be on opposite, warring sides, and maybe love was the only thing to unite them.

And, in the middle, Vasilisa. The loyal friend to both. Maybe the only other connection between the two, other than love— if she wasn't chained to a lake.

Vasi didn't think Marya loved Sig, not yet, because Vasi's idea of love was something so ironic she'd never told anyone. She'd left the two alone, knowing that things couldn't stay this way forever, and any meddling on her part would never do any good. And now it was too late; she hadn't seen Marya since she'd watched her and Sig fade into the darkness together yesterday, intent on a conversation.

She had thought that conversation had been about the two of them. Not her.

What had Sig said? 'I have Marya's blessing, too.'

She tried to shut out his voice, gentle and kind, and her friend. Not her lover.

'Do you hesitate because I am a prince?' Her memory of Sig swirled over and over, repeating that important question.

Vasi did wring her hands this time, hating herself, hating the scratch marks she'd left down her arms in her despair after Sig had left. Because she'd been weak, she'd been feeling guilty that he was asking her and not Marya, and because she didn't want to ruin their friendship.

'Yes,' she agreed. If Sig had not been so relieved, perhaps he might have noticed the eagerness, how she jumped to his own suggestion.

Sig had given her the ring, promising her with it that he would protect her. It didn't matter that he was a prince, and she a village girl. As long as they loved one another...

He had been so happy as he pulled out the ring, placing it on her finger. And it was truly a delicate and beautiful thing: a slim band of white and silver, carved and studded with what was probably an expensive heirloom jewel of pink. Vasi had told herself, in that moment, to clear up the confusion. To tell the prince of the kingdom that had banned magic that she herself was a magic being, created from a swan, and only ever a swan. To tell the boy who was her friend that she didn't love him, and she didn't want to marry him.

But a small voice had said, what if. What if this boy can find you a cure? What if he can rid you of your curse, the way his father rid the kingdom of magic?

Vasi had stayed silent. Plastered a tentative smile onto her lips. And let him kiss her, whilst she felt dead inside, a rotting plant curling up.

As the sun began to rise over the mountains in the distance, Vasi cried for the first time in her life.

She cried because she'd never told her friends her dreams. Sig and Marya were quite adamant that their trio would never change, and Marya was particularly sensitive, as if she pretended that they could go on living in that nightly escapade forever. Even when Sig became King, even when Marya had to go and...do whatever it was Aloysius expected of her. Even if Sig never found out about Marya's magic, or Vasi's true form.

They'd never actually asked what she wanted, even though she would have told them, immediately.

I want to leave this place.

Vasi didn't want to seem ungrateful. Marya was her wonderful friend, and she knew that Aloysius taught her in the magic he deemed appropriate; violent and powerful offensive spells that couldn't allow a prisoner to walk free. But Vasi had inherited the traits of a swan without realising. She was wild so that she didn't want to stay in this one place, yet romantic enough to have a swan's ideal of choosing one mate for the whole of her life.

One person, she promised. One person, the swan to my own.

In her mind, she couldn't possibly accept Sig, even if she had been free of the spell, and he hadn't been prince of a kingdom. She hadn't seen any of Illychia, nor of the world beyond it. She hadn't met any men aside from Sig and Aloysius, nor any girls aside from Marya. She hadn't left the vicinity of the lake in her life, ever. And it was stifling.

Again, she wished that Sig had asked Marya. Marya was the ideal Queen; gentle, kind, and a pacifist. She and Sig were very alike. Vasi thought going off to war sounded infinitely more exciting than a life by the lake, yet Marya could sit for hours among the still nature, meditating and reading, and would rather have chained herself to a rock than condone fighting.

But the ring glinted on her, Vasi's, finger. And somewhere, in the distance, Sig was probably telling Marya about her acceptance.

What was worse, beyond the chuckle and the disbelief and the acceptance despite it all— was that, for a selfish second, Vasi saw it all play out.

Marya would go to the ends of Illychia to free her, even if it meant never having Sig. She'd want to free her friend to live with Sig. But if Vasi spoke up now, then for a while, the trio would be stilted. Maybe Sig would go off to war. Maybe Marya would want to help him. But she didn't think her matter of leaving the lake would be quite as important as war or Aloysius's demands.

Vasi didn't bother to wipe away her tears in the same way she hadn't bothered to correct Sig.

When dawn came, she was glad for the change that took her, dropping the ring to the ground at her newly webbed feet.

She hid it from her sight amongst the rocks by the shore.