Oneshots, imagines, and ideas, oh my! *discontinued*

Movie Night - Corpse Bride Imagine

Note: If you haven't seen the movie 'The Corpse Bride', don't worry, you don't really have to of to understand this :) Movie night is still alive and well, remember?

Request for: EmiLovesMusic

Warnings: PG! SAFE FOR THE YOUTHS AT LAST!

Movie Night: Corpse Bride

Is it possible for the dead to walk among the living?

How many times had this question been asked? At least twice for every person on earth, surely. The answer to this question was unclear, but perhaps it was the wrong question. It is far more likely for someone long dead to masquerade as alive than it is for someone still breathing to chat amongst the dead.

Y/n had, for a while. How she had come to be alive and yet doomed was unclear--vaguely horrifying memories of a decomposed corpse chasing her in the forest came to mind--but that hardly mattered to the lost souls of the underground. They were just interesting in the new incident that was occurring around town.

Apparently, twenty or so years before Y/n was even born, a nervous little twitch had become engaged to a dead girl through a series of small misadventures. His name, she learned, Victor Van Dort. His tale isn't so important, however it is interesting as she had grown up in a tall house quite near one Victor Van Dort and his wife Victoria. Now, she left it up to coincidence and not fate that the neighbor of the live-man-walking came into a position much like his own.

It was far more crucial for her to hear about the object of Victor's short stint in the afterlife--Emily. Emily was a young murdered bride who had once found herself engaged to Victor through a misunderstanding, and after a dramatic sequence, found herself released. The quirky characters around the afterlife had simply referred to her fate as 'released', and she didn't press on this because she assumed they didn't exactly know what happened to her.

This was interesting because everyone was treating her like a reincarnation of the murdered girl, though she had no recollection of living or dying as anyone other than Y/n L/n. They didn't bother her but seemed insistent--she was Emily. The wedding dress she was wearing didn't exactly help.

Perhaps it would be important to elaborate on how Y/n really  ended up where she was. Her situation further paralleled that of her supposed predecessors, as she was dashing away from an arranged marriage at the time of her...near-demise.

Then

When Y/n dashed from the wedding chapel in a flurry, she hadn't expected it to be so difficult to run in a wedding gown. If her mother hadn't insisted that no one follow her, she'd of probably been caught and chained to the alter.  She wasn't quite sure what she was running from, as she quite liked the boy she was to marry. Her sudden panic likely stemmed from the fact that she didn't feel at all prepared to take on any wifely duties.

She had grown up well-off and her new mate was well off, so the idea of working didn't really bother her. They were young, and so there was absolutely no rush to have children--so what was it? While she panted and ran blindly into the woods surrounding her town, she helplessly tried to identify the stressor so that she could soothe herself and turn around.

Suddenly, as the town disappeared behind her and she became enclosed by woods, she began to curse herself for requesting a night-time wedding. She had done so to avoid a long, tedious reception, but it came back to strike her in the cheek after all.

She began to slow only as her breath burned her lungs, and her feet were suddenly aching from the vicious heels she'd stepped into hours earlier. Her fiancee was probably standing in the chapel, slumped like a kicked dog. She didn't mourn over this fact for more than a second, and she highly doubted she'd ever lose any sleep over it. She walked for a while, unsure of a destination but positive she'd get somewhere. After a bit of time passed, she began to notice something like a shadow creeping in the corner of her eye. 

Now

The rest, I suppose, is history. Though she retained the general look of a tattered bride, she was perplexed by the comparison as Emily had been dead and she was very much alive. The residents of the afterlife paid this fact no mind, seemingly set in their ideas to the point of deafness. Y/n simply ignored anyone who spoke to her like she was Emily, and gently corrected anyone who called her by the wrong name. Not because there wasn't some degree of relevance in wondering why she was so similar to this long-gone legend, but because she'd already tossed it over and over in her mind to the point of insanity, with no conclusive answers.

'Life' wasn't so bad in the land of the dead, and Y/n was there for an unmeasurable amount of time. She hadn't realized how long she'd been there until one day she was interrupted by quiet clapping while playing the piano. She turned, expecting to see a friend she'd come to know--only to be met with her old neighbor, looking suspiciously rejuvenated. He wasn't any younger but he seemed more..lively...aside from the fact that his pale skin had turned a shade of indigo.

"Y/n? What on earth are you doing here?"

She stood, rather surprised to see him.

"I think the better question is what are you doing here? Was there an accident?"
"There is no accident in dying of old age, however I do believe your circumstance is the curious bit."

"I don't understand--you're barely fifty, and perfectly healthy! How is Mrs. Van Dort?"
"I get the strangest sense that she'll be here soon." He brushed her off. "I don't think you realize, but It's been decades since you left that young man at the alter."

"Surely, you must be joking!"

"I'm afraid not." He approached her carefully, and she noticed he was quite spry and not at all feeble as he was becoming when last she saw him. "You haven't changed a bit."

"That's because I don't feel as though it's been very long." She frowned, tapping her chin with her pointer finger. "Could this have anything to do with the notion that I'm a reincarnation of Emily?"

"Emily?" His eyes scanned her appearance, and he considered it for a moment. "I do see how they could confuse you with her. However it's quite clear that you're alive, not dead. It is clear, isn't it?"

"When I first found myself here, I found many ears pressed over the spot where my heart rests. I was informed that it's quite beating."

He gave her another concerned look, prompting an airy laugh and a subject change.

"How is Victoria?"
"Quite well, aside from the fact that we were both on our deathbed."
"I'm so sorry."
"I only resent the fact that I had to die first. Otherwise, there was nothing to be done."

~~~~

They spoke for a while, until he decided to go reconnect with people he'd known years and years ago. She stayed in the piano room, now brightly lit and excitedly tapping away at the keys. She was well into Fur Elise when he fully exited the room.

In the pub of the land of the dead, everyone was waiting patiently for Victor to come back. When he finally did, the unasked question they all had for him hung in the air. With hopeful eyes, they watched as he lifted his head, paused--and then he shook it. Immediately the mood deflated, and a tangible sense of sadness filled the bar. Victor sat near a young man who had begun shaking as sobs tore through his figure, and he patted him on the back.

"Next time, surely. She'll remember eventually."

The young man started taking deep breaths as his elder gave him a comforting nod. This filled him with a renewed vigor--she'd remember eventually.

In the barriers of his own mind, Victor's intuition told him that Y/n would never really remember the accident that had taken the lives of her and her husband of two years. No one really knew why one day she acted as though it was a surprise that she was dead. She'd been in the afterlife with her lover for a good time when she fell into a dissociative fugue, and so whenever someone accidentally forgot that they couldn't treat her like they knew her, they'd call her 'Emily', and they used Victor's first love as a scapegoat often. It worked well, as the couple was on their way to a costume ball the night of the accident. With a child on the way they'd decided to relive their lives as newlyweds, and they went as bride and groom once more.