Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of this work of fiction. I am not writing this for any profit, monetary or otherwise.

A/N: Please forgive me for any errors. I started writing this a week or so ago, for the fan_flashworks prompt, apple. I was swamped with papers to grade (literally hundreds, and that is not an exaggeration; my students would say that it serves me right for giving them the work in the first place). This is a fairy tale, with magic, an evil queen who is also a step-mother (my step-mother is wonderful), a mirror, brave mice, and not so brave servants. We see things through the queen's eyes, rather than Danny and Steve's. Slash fairy tale style, mild-mannered and fluffy.

Danny eyed the apple that the elderly woman held out to him with skepticism before reaching for it and plucking it out of her gnarled hand. The apple looked delicious, and would surely help assuage his hunger. He'd never seen the old woman before, though, and the warnings about talking to strangers from his seven caretakers rang like a clarion in his mind.

"I'm sorry," he said, even as he rubbed the apple against the front of his shirt, polishing it. "I -"

"You're not supposed to talk to strangers are you, dear?" the old woman asked, voice soft. She gave him a gap-toothed smile, and placed her bony hand on his, pushing the apple he was trying to hand back to her toward his chest.

"Keep it, child," she said. "I'm not a stranger. I'm an old, foolish woman who has nothing but herself left in this world. Be a good lad and let a foolish old woman spoil you."

Danny offered the old woman a shy smile, and, with only a half-guilty thought for his seven caretakers brought the apple up to his mouth. Savoring the sweet smell, Danny took a bite from the apple, blue eyes opening wide at the almost sickly sweet taste of it. It was a warning, as was the elderly woman's knowing smirk. The warning came too late for him, though. Danny knew that the second his teeth had sunk into the now rotting and blackened apple. He knew everything one second too late, and could only think an apology to the seven men who'd taken him in when he'd been abandoned in the woods by a one of his step-mother's servants as a young child.

The apple fell from Danny's suddenly lax fingers, and he blinked at the old woman, mouth opening on a question that he'd never be able to ask as he crumpled to the earth. It was the old woman who bent down - fingers no longer crooked and bone thin, but almost youthful, face no longer covered with wrinkles, but smooth as the lies that she'd told - to pet Danny's hair, almost lovingly, and close his eyes for him, locking him in an eternal darkness.

"I was not a stranger, son," the woman whispered, and Danny recognized her voice as that of his step-mother. "Sometimes it's not the strangers you need to watch out for, Danny boy, but those you know."

Betrayal stung his heart, but soon even that faded away as the poison from the apple worked its way through his blood and into his heart, stealing its beat and blacking his thoughts out into nothing. He felt lips, warmer and softer than they should be, on his own. A parting kiss that stole his last breath. He'd known, even as a child, that his step-mother had never loved him, but he'd never thought her capable of this kind of cruelty.

Danny slept.

The earth turned. The sun and the moon flirted in the sky above him. The seasons changed. The animals kept an anxious vigil around the glass tomb that Danny's seven caretakers had built for him. They could not bear the thought of burying him beneath the cold, hard dirt so unlike the warmth that he'd brought into their lives, even as he'd given them more gray hairs with some of his escapades.

Danny's step-mother flourished in her castle, lonely though she was, her magical mirror the only companion she'd speak to, and that only to ask who was the fairest in the land. As long as the mirror parroted her name back, everything was fine, and the lonely queen deluded herself into believing that she was satisfied, and had a full, happy life.

"Majesty," one of her servants said, bowing low to the ground, careful not to look at her directly lest he be the newest object of her wrath. Objects of her wrath met untimely deaths that were as creative as they were painful. He was already risking her temper by daring to enter the castle unbidden.

"Servant," the queen said, and the man rose, though he kept his gaze locked on the stone floor. "Why is it that you've seen fit to disturb my peace?"

She raised an eyebrow, and examined her fingernails. They were coated in a crimson paint that complemented her creamy complexion perfectly.

The servant swallowed, and took a deep breath. "There's news of a prince traveling through our lands. According to one of the villagers, he's seeking to marry someone of great beauty, kindness and worth. He's seeking to have the hand of the fairest of the land, my queen."

"And naturally your first thought was of me," the queen said, narrowing her eyes at the coward, knowing that the servant trembling before her had begged not to be sent into the castle and had only come because he'd drawn the short straw. Spineless as the rest of them, the man was only a few inches away from groveling at her feet.

All of her servants were cowards at heart. None of them was worthy of her counsel. Not one of them had been brave enough to end the pathetic life of her dead husband's son. She'd had to do it herself. Never trust a man to do a woman's work. She'd learned that long ago.

"N-naturally, y-your majesty," the coward said, bowing deeply.

The queen waved her hand in dismissal. "Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention, you may leave."

Rather than trusting her useless servants to the task of finding the, no doubt charming and handsome, prince, the queen turned toward her faithful mirror. "Mirror, pray tell, who is this young prince wandering my lands in search of false love?"

The mirror blinked and then shimmered as its magic was awakened. Faceless, the mirror peered out at her, and there was the hint of a faint smile. If the queen had bothered to look a little closer, she would have likened the 'look' the mirror gave her to a knowing smirk. Had she known anything of the mirror's past, worry would have gripped her heart. She, however, knew nothing about anything other than her own selfish desires, and what the mirror had done for her time and time again, which was keep her from growing old, and help her maintain her power over whatever she put her hand to. Whatever it is that she wanted, the mirror granted. It was powerless to resist the orders she gave it, though it could, of course, and often did, tweak things toward its own favor, and toward the queen's inevitable end. It had done the same with the one who had called upon it before this queen.

The mirror did not speak, instead the surface seemed to blur in a manner not unlike ripples on a lake, and then sharpen as it revealed a green copse in which the sun shone brightly. The prince, a devilishly handsome young man with dark hair and bluish green eyes that seemed to sparkle in the sun's light, stood by his equally handsome steed. The horse was strong and powerful, and its mane flowed in the gentle breeze as it stood faithfully by its master.

The queen moved closer to the mirror as though it would bring her nearer the young man who appeared to be staring intently at something just beneath her line of vision. Her breath caught in her throat as she imagined having that piercing gaze ever upon her for eternity, or as long as the mirror could keep them alive.

Much like the prized enchanted mirror which she'd stolen from someone who was much uglier, and less in need of it than herself, she knew that she needed this prince, whoever he was, for herself. Whatever held the young man's interest would no doubt pale in comparison to what she could offer him. Fame. Fortune. Beauty. The very lands that she ruled with an iron fist that could squeeze blood from a rock if she so willed it.

Of course, once he was hers, the young prince would bend to her will, and cater to her whims, and it would be she who would have control of his lands. But first she'd have to lure him away from whatever it was that he was looking at in the forest.

"What is that?" the queen asked, stabbing a finger at the mirror, pointing toward the strange object lying in the middle of the woods. "Show me."

"As you wish," the mirror sang in a voice that had faded into something like a whisper of suggestion after centuries of use. It was neither male nor female, apparition nor witchcraft, here nor there. It simply was, and the queen felt, rather than heard, the words in the depths of her soul.

She shivered, the ghost of her latest dead husband raking blunt fingernails down her spine in a mockery of their one act of lovemaking before she'd poisoned him. It had been a disaster. She'd laughed. He'd wept. Little Daniel had slept through it all. The castle's walls were thick. They'd grown over with vines now. All brackish and dead. No living flower had graced the castle's walls since the late king's untimely death.

If the man had borne a daughter, Daniella perhaps, then the queen could have molded the little vixen into something worthwhile - a mirror image of herself, though far less beautiful. Daniel had been born a boy, though, and she had no use for boys, save for the lies they could tell her about herself, and Daniel had never lied. It was one of many faults that she'd discovered in him.

Daniel had been a willful child, insisting on being called by his silly nickname, Danny, rather than his given name, and refusing to get past his grief over his father's death. Inconsolable, he'd cried for weeks on end. It had grated on her nerves, and made her uncomfortable. Nothing she'd done to soothe the brat had worked.

No trinket from a foreign land had given him pause in his grief. No look at pretty baubles in the mirror had distracted him. No scolding, or spanking at the heavy hand of a servant, had worked on the boy.

He'd kept moaning after his father, even once going so far as to accuse her at having had a hand in his death. It had been her own hand, sharp as a whip, which had left a mark on his cheek, rather than that of a servant's, and the boy had simply stopped speaking after that. Instead, he'd taken to casting her accusatory glances, and blinking tears from his eyes whenever he caught her looking at him. It had been insufferable. Living with the boy was suffocating.

In the end, she'd done the only thing that a woman in her position could have - sent him off with one of the servants who'd been instructed to kill the boy (quickly so he felt no pain). Except the idiot hadn't killed the boy, he'd secreted him away, and lead him to a forest which put him on the path of seven little bachelors who took the boy in, and raised him as though he was their own. It was ridiculous.

That servant had not survived his return to the castle. His bones had been picked clean by vultures and crows. Moss and lichen-covered, the bones now gave testimony of the queen's true nature, though few happened upon them where they lay, half-submerged in the swamp that sat on the very edge of the land she'd inherited upon the king's death.

The mirror's aspect shifted, the silvery countenance wavering for what felt to the queen like an eternity before it finally gave way to a solid picture of a beauty that had transcended death itself.

There, in the middle of the gilded forest, lying within a glass casket upon a stone whiter than the queen's linen, was Daniel. He looked to be asleep, cheeks ruddy, lips pink as though touched with a woman's rouge, hair and skin kissed golden by the sun.

She remembered, then, her foolish act of kissing the boy as he breathed his last, and knew, even as she denied it, that it had been a fatal mistake on her part. She'd given the boy, not death, with that parting kiss, but an eternal sleep, which could, with another kiss, be ended.

Hands folded, one upon the other over his chest, Daniel clutched a single, white rose. A thorn had embedded the pad of his left thumb, and there was a bead of blood that had welled up there. It gleamed like a ruby in the sun-lit copse.

The prince stood, as if mesmerized, beside the glass sepulcher, reading a plaque that the queen knew must have been placed there by those seven shifty men. Men she should have had killed when she'd dealt with her step-son.

The fairest of the land? The queen read the prince's lips as they moved. The mirror held nothing back from the queen's gaze.

The tips of his glove-less fingers traced the words that had been etched in the plaque. The prince's gorgeous eyes followed the movements of his fingertips before landing and lingering on Daniel's face, which had been frozen in a countenance of peace. It almost looked as though death had caught him mid-laugh, his lips were quirked upward, and his eyes were crinkled at the edges. He was, indeed, beautiful. The queen could admit that. Could even admit to having sent him away more for his inner beauty, which had far surpassed that of her outer, than because he'd refused to stop mourning his father's death. Eventually, he would have stopped crying, would have stopped accusing her, but he'd never have ceased to be beautiful.

Fingernails digging half-moons into the palms of her hands, teeth ground together so tightly that it was a wonder her jaw didn't lock itself in place, the queen let out a strangled sound that sent the mice roaming her floors looking for even the tiniest of breadcrumbs scurrying for cover.

The mirror continued, uncaring, to show the queen what she'd asked to see, though it was wholly aware of her discomfort, of the way her heart was beating far too quickly within her chest, of the way her veins were turning black and visible in her neck, and her face, her true nature showing forth from underneath skin which had always appeared to be breathtakingly beautiful.

Her beauty had only ever been skin deep, and that only the work of the mirror which reflected her as she wanted to be seen.

The queen was not beautiful. She'd never been beautiful. It was merely a trick of the light, and the magic of the mirror which kept her innermost self from leaking forth to the surface. She was, in truth, and ugly, ugly woman who cared only for herself.

It was the mirror that had kept her alive for years longer than it should have. The mirror, which told her she was beautiful, and only at her command. The mirror which had guided her to this very place, at this very time, to witness this very thing. It was the mirror, and not she, who had the upper hand now.

The queen clutched at her chest, unable to turn away as the mirror showed her what was happening in the golden-lit copse that was too many miles away for her to have even the faintest hope of stopping, of stilling the prince's hand from moving the glass of the casket aside, bending his face toward lips that were too pink to belong to a dead man.

There was a kiss. The prince's lips parted, his eyes closed, leaving the queen's heart throbbing in the absence of stormy blue-green that she'd coveted for herself the second she saw it.

Lips met lips, and the sun shone brighter, making Daniel's skin glow, surrounding him with a halo of light that was blinding in its intensity.

The queen's vision dimmed. The mirror flashed her an image of the sun, and there was pain like that of being ripped asunder by a pack of wild dogs - the fate that had met the servant who'd failed to kill Daniel so many years ago, not long after the boy had reached his tenth birthday.

In agony, the queen cried out, her voice echoing a thousand times the pain that she'd visited upon others - Daniel's father, and the servant hadn't been the only ones she'd killed. It had started, first, with her mother, queen before her, owner of the damning mirror. It had been passed down from one generation to the next, always with bloodshed, always in deceit. Never had the mirror been owned by someone who possessed true beauty that ran far beneath the skin, to the very heart and soul of a person. The mirror had only ever known ugliness and wickedness, though it had always longed for better.

The queen fell to her knees, and the mirror watched, even as it showed her Daniel's awakening, the white rose turned red, the prince sticking the young man's bloodied thumb into his mouth and sucking it clean.

The mirror was merciless as it further showed the queen, writhing in agony on the cold, hard brick floor of her sitting room, glimpses of the future. The bravest mice ventured forth from their hiding places, and watched, their noses twitching nervously in the air as they felt the magic build to a crescendo around them. It made their very hair stand up, and their hearts beat a little quicker.

Helpless, the queen watched a future she'd never live to see play out before her.

Daniel taking the throne alongside his prince, turned king, both of them ruling, side-by-side, as King and King, taking Daniel's father's lands, and merging them with those of this mysterious prince's.

Daniel a father, laughing as he bounced a little boy, with a head of golden curls, on his knee while a little girl sat at his feet, lovely, heart-shaped face upturned toward her father's voice. She had dark hair, like Daniel's father's had been once upon a time, and the queen's heart choked her as it throbbed painfully in her chest.

The prince, she could read his name, 'Steven,' on Daniel's lips, being welcomed home by his loving partner after a long journey. The queen felt the burn of the welcome home kiss on her own lips, and raised trembling fingers to touch them, hissing at the scorching pain that the touch had left on the tips of her fingers.

She felt cold, and hollow, and still the mirror continued to show her, at an ever increasing speed, what she'd never get to witness in the flesh.

The mirror showed her the seven bachelors visiting their adopted son - the child she'd rejected - bestowing him with gifts of flowers and vegetables from their own humble gardens, not caring that he had plenty of his own now, and was a grown man, fussing over him like they'd done when he was younger.

She watched with a sense of awe as the sternest of the seven approached Steven and gave him some kind of talking to that made the young king blush, and incline his head in acknowledgement, his eyes seeking out Daniel's for something that made him smile and murmur something in response to the stern little man who stood in front of him with his hands on his hips. Whatever Steven had said, the queen hadn't been able to read his lips, made the stern little man smile and relax his stance.

The mirror flashed scene after scene before the queen's eyes, almost seeming to delight as she grew weaker and weaker with the seeing.

The mice, gaining confidence in their ability to approach the wicked woman and her lauded mirror, crept close enough to the queen to be able to touch the hem of her dress, though they didn't dare. Not yet.

Something was happening. They felt it in their bones, and knew in their tiny hearts that, save for their physical size, were bigger than that of the queen's in their capacity to love and care for someone other than themselves, that life in the castle would never be the same again.

They watched the happy scenes, too, as the mirror cruelly held the aging, dying queen's gaze. Her beauty was fading, though some would argue that it had never really been there to begin with, that it had only ever been a mirage cast about her person by the magical mirror.

The final scene played out before the queen's waning vision, and the mice watched in curious wonder, noses twitching in the swirling magic that tied the queen to the mirror.

Daniel and Steven had grown old together, and were entertaining their grandchildren in their gardens, stealing kisses, and loving caresses when they thought no one was looking. The boy with the golden curls was older. He looked like his father. The dark haired girl held onto a young man's hand, swinging it with a careless grace that made the queen's heart ache. She had her father's laugh, eyes crinkling at the edges.

The mirror images stopped as suddenly as they'd begun, and the queen watched, drawing in her last breath, as the prince, Steven, pulled Daniel from the white stone slab and helped him to his feet. He was taller than Daniel by at least a foot, but the queen, in the only unselfish thought that she'd ever had, thought they looked good together. She let her final breath out, smiling as Steven pulled Daniel to himself and kissed him, Daniel's body molding to Steven's, and Steven's to his.

The mirror lost its ethereal light when the queen's heart stopped, the final thud signalling an end to the magic which had tied the mirror to her family line. She was the last of the women who held power over the enchanted mirror, and now, at last, it could finally rest, and it was happy in its rest, knowing that what it had shown the queen about the future was just the beginning of what awaited the castle, and the lands which had fallen into darkness when the queen had taken over after the king had died.

The mice gathered around their fallen mistress, the bravest of them daring to touch her face, ice-cold in death, and nod to the others that, yes, she was really gone, and there was nothing more to fear in being caught. None of them would be skinned, or boiled alive. None of them would have to search out food in fear. They could roam the castle, and its grounds, as freely as the cats would allow, as it should be. The mice scattered and spread the good news as quick as they could, and the animals awaited the arrival of their new princes who would soon be crowned kings.

Years later, the mirror would be called to life once again, but it would shine a different light, reveal a new story. One far less tragic, but no less exciting and entertaining as that of Daniel and his charming prince, the fall of the queen who, but for the sake of one last kiss, would have lived forever.