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puzzlepromptsTitle: My Cinderella
Author: Kat Lee
Fandom: Original/Cinderella
Character/Pairing: Cinderella, Gus, Jacques, Suzy, OCs
Rating: PG-13/T
Challenge/Prompt:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
puzzleprompts: May 2018: ALL Categories:
Power Hour: Friendship
Creature Feature: Magic User
Sports & Rec: Meditation
The Classifieds: Sensei and Karate
Mother Nature: Fire
Geology Rocks: Crystal
Random Object: Jewellry
Random Descriptor: Complicated
Warning(s): Fairytale!AU
Word Count: 8,615
Date Written: 17 July 2018
Summary:
Disclaimer: This one's mine!
She growled, a sound of annoyance she’d picked up from one of her few friends in the harsh world. If it was good enough for the ancient, mystical animal beside her, it was surely good enough for her, a lowly girl who spent hours every day scrubbing floors and chimneys. She was good for little else after all, or so she was constantly reminded whenever she was at the house that was supposed to be her home. It was supposed to be her home -- it had been when her father had been alive --, but lately, the forest around her seemed more and more welcoming, more and more an actual place where she could rest, relax, and just herself be. But not today.
“I just can’t do it today!” she cried in frustration. “Not when I know that woman’s mouth is going to fly open -- “
“CINDERELLA!”
“ -- at any moment,” she finished, grumbling. She was over a mile from the manor, and yet she could hear her stepmother’s booming voice as if she towered above her currently. She groaned and opened her blue eyes, a look of utter defeat flashing over her lovely face. “I’d better go.”
“Very well,” the dragon said and nudged her scaley nose gently against Cinderella’s palm. “But remember this, my Cinthia, when you let that woman intrude on your every thought, to alter your opinions, and to affect your very desires, you are allowing her to win.”
“She’s already won.”
“She will not have by tomorrow.” The dragon’s long tail swished, striking against the remains of a blackberry bush. “Remember your dream, my little Princess. Remember what is to come tonight and to follow tomorrow.”
A smile crept across Cinthia’s face, growing bigger and bigger until it made her positively beam. “That’s right,” she spoke excitedly. “When the Prince falls in love with me rather than her daughters, I’ll be free of her at last!”
“Yes, you will.” The dragon nuzzled her palm again. “Now go before her fury is ignited. Go, but be sure you return to me this evening before the ball.”
“Yes, Celestia, I will.” She rubbed her nose, then raced down the hillside. Her stepmother may have been able to stop her from meditating this morning, one of the few practices that actually brought her peace these days, but very soon she would be unable to stop her from doing anything she placed. Very soon, Cinthia would be free!
She was practically skipping by the time she reached the mansion. Her stepmother scowled darkly down at her from the steps. “Honestly, Cinderella, where have you been for so long this morning, and why do you look so happy? Wipe that grin off your face, girl; you look ugly enough when you’re not smiling. What do you have to smile about anyway? None of your work has been done! Where have you been?” she asked again. When Cinderella didn’t answer, she demanded, “Well?”
Cinderella jumped to answer then, not having dared to risk interrupting her stepmother while she had been scolding her. She knew what trouble she could fall in by doing so; her tongue still wore the scars from her stepmother’s cruel punishments. “I went to pick berries for breakfast,” she said. “I thought you and my sisters -- “
“Your stepsisters, girl. You’ll never be as good as they are!”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” She curtsied.
“You went to pick berries, eh?” her stepmother questioned, arching a slender, dark brow at Cinderella.
“Yes, ma’am. I -- “ Cinderella stopped, only then realizing that she had forgotten to pick up the basket in her rush to answer her stepmother.
“A likely story,” her stepmother sniffed disdainfully, “seeing as to how I see no berries in your hands or arms or even a basket.”
“I forgot the basket,” Cinderella spoke quickly and apologetically. “I can go back to fetch it.”
“Nonsense. I know when you’re lying to me, Cinderella. You’re starting off early wanting your lashes this morning, aren’t you, girl? Well, you’re lucky today’s a busy day. I don’t have time to waste on the likes of you this morning. We have to prepare for the Prince’s ball this evening. He’s likely to come calling tomorrow, so I want this whole house scrubbed. I want to be able to see my reflection in every spot of it top to bottom. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am.” She curstied again and dared not look her stepmother in the eye. She had preparations of her own to make, after all, and it would do her no good to let her stepmother know of her plans. The sooner her stepmother discovered that she was also intending to attend the ball, the sooner she would find a way to stop her.
“Now since you’re running behind, I’ll expect breakfast served in my room in ten minutes, fifteen for the girls.”
Cinderella kept her head humbly bowed. “Yes, ma’am.”
“What are you waiting for, girl? Every minute you’re late adds another lashing onto the flogging you’ll receive tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Keeping her head down low, Cinderella rushed past her stepmother. The old woman turned on the stairs and reached out swiftly, snaking the cat of nine tails out from the puffy sleeves of her nightgown and striking Cinderella in the rear as she hurried by her. “That,” she remarked as Cinderella bit down on her bottom lip to keep from crying aloud, “is a reminder. Every minute you’re late, Cinderella -- “
“Yes, ma’am. I know. Another lashing.” She forced down the tears that threatened to rise into her baby blue eyes and hurried to see about their breakfast, all the time reminding herself that this was the very last day she’d have to adhere to her stepmother and her cruelty. Her own breakfast this morning would be a cup of water and the crust she cut off her stepsisters’ toast. Her stomach rumbled at the thought, but she had no time to feel sorry for herself. Today was an important day after all.
The hours sped swiftly by, and it seemed that the more Cinderella did, the more she had yet to do. The manor was huge with at least three dozen rooms that were hardly ever used. Today, however, her stepmother insisted that the whole mansion must be scrubbed, and Cinderella knew better than to leave those empty rooms untouched. The last time she had dared to do so and had been caught, she had been locked inside the room for three whole weeks until her stepmother had finally tired of her daughters’ poor attempts at making breakfast. Of course then Cinderella had been accused of making them all go hungry and having to fend for themselves by forcing her stepmother to punish her.
“I’d like to see her punished just once,” Cinderella muttered underneath her breath as she scrubbed the muddy pawprints her stepmother’s cat seemed to have purposefully left behind him. She didn’t really mean that, though, she thought a second later, feeling a tad guilty. She didn’t really want harm to befall her stepmother or stepsisters. She didn’t like to see any living being harmed. She just wanted to be free, -- and she soon would be! Cinderella scrubbed at the reminder and scrubbed harder.
Just then, a mouse ran up to her from the part of the floor she had already cleaned and dried. He hopped onto her hand, scurried up her arm, and clambered onto her shoulder. He was panting hard by the time he reached her ear. “Cinderelly excited about today?” he asked eagerly.
“Hush, Gus Gus,” she whispered back, smiling. “Of course I’m excited.” She cast a glance around them. “Even if I’m never going to get done with my chores in time to make preparations for myself.”
“Don’t worry about that, Cinderelly,” the mouse squeaked. “We have it under control, and we’re going to help you get this place clean again too!”
“How are you going to do that,” she asked, “without getting caught?”
“Oh, look!” suddenly sounded the snide voice of her elder stepsister. “Cinderella’s talking to herself again!”
Gus Gus squeaked and leapt into Cinderella’s kerchief. Trembling, he wound himself up into her blonde hair and around her ear and did his best to make himself invisible.
Her sister sniggered. “Of course she is, Drizella. It’s not like she has any friends!” Anastasia’s laughter sounded much more like a snorting pig.
Cinderella stole a glance up into the side of her kerchief into which Gus had jumped. She couldn’t see the mouse, but she knew he could see her and the tiny grin into which the corners of her mouth turned up at the sound of Anastasia’s laughter.
“I am so going to win the Prince tonight!” Drizella exclaimed. She was grinning wide and completely oblivious to Cinderella’s smile. “All he has to do is hear you laugh one time!”
Anastasia’s puffy face fell into a deep frown. “That is so not true!”
“Yes, it is! No man wants to marry a pig!”
“Doesn’t that count you out immediately? You’re as big as one!”
“Ah! I don’t believe you said that!”
“Believe it, sister, and know it’s true!”
“No, it’s not!” Drizella screeched. “And you’ll take it back right now!” She slapped Anastasia.
“No, I won’t!”
Cinderella sighed and calmly went back to scrubbing the floor as the two fought, slapping each other back and forth. They skidded across the freshly clean floor, exchanging slaps, until suddenly they knocked into her bucket of suds and sent it flying across the room. “CINDERELLA!” her stepmother’s voice boomed from the doorway. “WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?!” she demanded. “THIS IS NOT HOW YOU CLEAN A ROOM!”
“I’m sorry, stepmother. I was just cleaning, and Anastasia and Drizella -- “
“ARE YOU BLAMING MY GIRLS, MY PERFECT, BEAUTIFUL GIRLS?! OH, YOU ARE A HORRIBLE CHILD! I AM SO GLAD YOUR FATHER DID NOT LIVE TO SEE THE WRETCHED CREATURE YOU HAVE BECOME!”
Cinderella kept her face down. Her hand clenched her sponge, wringing the water out of it. Gus Gus hugged her ear and whispered into it, “Don’t listen to her, Cinderelly. We all know she’s full of lies. They the horrible ones.”
She closed her eyes as tears welled up inside of her. Gus was right: They were the horrible ones, and she would be free of them soon! She only had to make it through one more day with them!
“Oh, she’s going to cry now!” Anastasia and Drizella snickered.
Cinderella’s cheeks burned as she felt them pointing at her and heard their snide laughter. They both sounded like snorting pigs, but the ugliness of their laughter did her very little good. It didn’t ease her pain and heartache at all. “I’m sorry, stepmother,” she said, forcing her words to come out calmly and continuing to keep her eyes tightly closed.
“You should be! Clean up this mess at once and then wash your filthy hands so you can prepare dinner for us!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Make sure it’s light too. We can’t afford to eat too much tonight. We need to spend the night in the ballroom, not sleeping.” She cast angry glances at her daughters who hushed immediately. “Now, you two come into the foyer with me and let me see your curties and hear how you are going to win the Prince tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they chorused.
Cinderella waited until they were all three gone before letting the tension whoosh from her body. Her hands fell down onto the wet floor, the sponge making a splash. “Those two will never win the Prince,” she whispered. “They’re much too mean!” She had heard stories about the Prince and his kindness and knew, without meeting him, that he had to be a good man. He would see right through her stepsisters, her stepmother, their cruelty, and their designs to get rich by marrying him.
A tiny shiver swept through her as she wondered fearfully, for the first time, if he would see through her as well. All her plans of freedom hinged on making him fall in love with her tonight. “I’m never going to get done in time,” she whispered forlornly. But that didn’t matter. She would simply convince her stepmother that she would stay up all night if that was what it took to clean the house to please her. She’d never know she was also planning on attending the ball until she showed up there tonight, and by that time . . . Well, if she didn’t earn her freedom tonight, whatever happened tomorrow or the next day didn’t matter. She’d rather be dead than continue in this life with her stepmother’s cruel tyranny.
Gus Gus scampered down her arm and jumped onto her hand which still held the sponge. “That’s okay, Cinderelly,” he told her cheerfully. Using all his strength, he lifted one of her fingers up off of the sponge and then the next. “We’ll get it done!” She lifted her hand from the palm, as he seemed to want it moved, and then watched as he climbed onto the sponge and sailed away across the room, cleaning the floor as he went. “We’ll get it done!” he called back to her again.
Perhaps they would get it done, she thought, rising and going to wash so she could prepare dinner. After all her friends were the very reason why she was going to be able to attend the ball tonight. They were the ones who had found the pieces of cloth to sew together the beautiful gown down in the basement, hidden away from the rest of her family. They were the ones who had labored so tirelessly to make her dreams come true while Cinderella herself had spent every day and night adhering to her stepmother’s commands. She would never have been able to attend the ball without them! “Just think, Gus Gus,” she whispered, smiling. “Tomorrow we’ll be free from this awful place forever more!”
The mouse grinned back at her as he kept moving across the floor on top of the soapy sponge. “That’s right, Cinderelly! We all live fat and happy starting tomorrow!” They both started to whistle as Cinderella headed for her next task, snatching her stepmother’s cat up off of the floor as she went and depositing him outside where he could not hurt her rodent friends, and Gus Gus continued working on the floor.
The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. Cinderella was careful stay out from under the feet of her stepmother and stepsisters as they prepared for the coming ball, but it was harder to keep her own self from dwelling on the idea of what was to come that very night. After six years of living as her stepmother’s slave, she was to be freed this very evening! She should perhaps feel sorry for the Prince -- everybody wanted something from him after all --, but she was prepared to give him everything and anything a husband could possibly desire in exchange for freedom for herself and her friends. She would woo him this night, and she would win him and their freedom!
Thinking about it made it difficult for her to refrain from bursting into song and made it difficult to be still even when her stepmother was reprimanding her for not getting more done that evening. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get more done, stepmother,” she spoke humbly as her stepmother closed another door, moved to another room, and opened it.
They both gaped inside of it as the floor sparkled up at them. Cinderella knew she hadn’t made it to that room, but obviously her friends had and had cleaned it well with their tiny paws and beaks. “I did do what I’ve been able to, and I don’t plan on going to bed anytime soon.” It wasn’t a complete lie. Cinderella hated liers like her stepmother and stepsisters and had no tolerance for telling fibs. She would rather tell a harsh truth than an outright fib any day, but she had to be careful with what she told her stepmother. After all, her stepmother could still learn that she planned on going to the ball. She could still stop her and destroy her dreams of freedom once and for all.
“See that you don’t,” her stepmother told her, pulling back from the room and shutting the door. She didn’t say one word about how the floor and walls had positively shined, but Cinderella had not heard a kind word come out of her mouth for seven years, long before her father had become mysteriously ill. She still suspected the woman had found a way to kill him without anyone knowing, but no matter how hard she had tried, Cinderella had never found any proof. If she had, perhaps she could have wished her stepmother ill, but as it was, she simply wanted to be free from her and allowed to live her own life as she chose to live it.
“Remember, Cinderella, every inch that isn’t cleaned -- “
“ -- is another lashing tomorrow. Yes, ma’am, I know.”
“And see that Lucifer is well fed this evening. There’s just enough milk left from the cow this morning for his dinner.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Cinderella knew better than to speak a word about her own dinner. The last time she had dared to ask her stepmother what she was to eat when the cupboards were bare of food other than that which was intended for the rest of her family and the cat, she had been forced to eat the ashes from the fireplace. Her stepmother and stepsisters had had a fine time laughing at her as she had licked them up with her stepmother’s boot pressed against the back of her head. No more, she thought, her dirtied fingers curling at her sides. No more!
“Just think, Cinderella,” Anastasia said, sneering as her stepmother and stepsisters climbed aboard her father’s coach, “when you see us again, you can address us as your Royal Highnesses!” She gloated.
“I hope tonight brings you happiness,” she said and tried with all her heart to mean the words. After all she did want them to be happy, just no longer at her own expense. Once she could no longer see the coach, Cinderella raced back into the house and up to her room in the attic. There she wasted no time in removing the soiled rags from her body and scrubbing her own skin and hair as hard as she could underneath the slowly pouring collection of rainwater she kept for her own showers. She was not allowed to use the bathing chambers inside the house, but collecting rain water and using it had always worked well for her.
As she stepped from her makeshift shower, two little, bluebirds met her with a towel. It was an old towel, one of the last items she had left from her father. Her stepmother did not know she had it or it would never have been able to stay in her possession. The birds helped her to dry, and then as Cinderella turned, other birds opened the doors of her mother’s wardrobe.
Cinderella gasped aloud for the dress they had all worked together to design was genuinely beautiful. Once dry, she raced to her wardrobe and gingerly touched the material. It was soft, gave way underneath the barest touch of her fingertips, and could be told by noone that it had come from pieces of fabric her animal friends had found and that one little, female mouse in particular had sewn delicately together.
“Cinderelly like it?” one of the mice asked.
“Of course she likes it!” The sewer bopped the male who’d just spoken in the head with the side of the needle, which was bigger than them both.
“You even found jewelry,” Cinderella spoke in awe, touching the string of pearls that set just before the dress on the sewing dummy. “How on Earth did you do this?” she puzzled aloud.
“You said it before yourself, Cinderelly,” the little female spoke up again. “You taught us that. You are our best friend. You taught us to speak. You taught me to sew. You’ve given us so much,” Suzy continued humbly. “This was the least we could do for you.”
“It’s not over yet,” Cinderella spoke with firm conviction. “After tonight, we’ll all be free.”
Suzy looked at her dearest friend, then away again just in time to catch one of the male mice watching the naked, human girl. She bopped him with her needle. “Avert eyes!” she cried.
For some reason, Cinderella couldn’t help laughing. It had been such a long, hard time for so many years, but their struggle was almost over. Soon, very soon, it would be over. They would be free. The birds worked together to lift her dress from the dummy, and Cinderella held her arms up and over her head. It took her friends but scant moments to dress her, and then she turned slowly before her cracked mirror. “Now you can look,” Suzy told the males.
Gus Gus gasped in delight and clapped his tiny hands together. Jacques beamed, his whiskers twitching. “Cinderelly beautiful!” he exclaimed proudly.
“Cinderella’s always been beautiful,” Suzy told them. “It’s the beauty of the heart inside the person that makes them beautiful, not the skin. Now, Cinderelly, you have a ball to get to!”
“Not yet,” Cinderella told them. “First I have a friend to meet, and all of you are coming with me.”
“But, Cinderelly -- “
“No ‘but’s,” Cinderella spoke firmly. “This is my last night here, and so it is yours too. I’m not leaving without you. When I’m free, you will be too.”
Suzy sniffled, but no one noticed the tears in the female mouse’s eyes. She already knew the answers Cinderella needed did not all lay with the Prince. Taking them with her would endanger her own chances at happiness, but Gus and Jacques had already climbed up her body and were sitting proudly atop her shoulder. “I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer, Suzy,” Cinderella announced, holding her hand down in front of her as the other mice continued to climb up her body and find hiding places along her beautiful dress.
Suzy sighed. “Very well,” she said and thought of putting down her needle. She almost had when she decided she may yet need it one day and snatched it up along with her as Cinderella picked her up. She put her on her shoulder with Gus and Jacques, and the lot of them headed out together.
It never took them long to reach Celestia’s hiding place in the woods surrounding the house, but when they were almost there a figure dressed in dark clothes leapt down at them. “Excuse me,” Cinderella spoke politely, trying to edge pass the stranger. He placed himself directly into her path, making strange motions with his hands as though he intended to fight her.
She blinked up at him. “What,” she questioned, “are you doing?”
“I think he wants a fight,” Gus spoke from her shoulder.
“I’ll give him a fight!” Jacques announced, punching the air and spinning around on Cinderella’s shoulder.
“Nobody is fighting,” Cinderella told him and reached up, grasping his tiny shoulders gently, just in time to steady him and keep him from falling off of her shoulder.
“That is quite correct,” a deep voice suddenly spoke. Cinderella, the mice, and the stranger all looked up to see their mighty dragon friend looking down at them. “No one is fighting anyone here tonight. Lee, this is the friend I about whom told you.”
“Hardly a friend.” The boy lifted the mask from his face but sneered at Cinderella, a look close to hatred gleaming in his dark eyes. “She kept you from coming to be with me.”
“Excuse me?” Cinderella asked.
The boy didn’t back down. His head tilted as though daring her to deny him again and caused his single braid to swing behind his back. “You kept her from coming to be with me,” he repeated.
“First, children,” the dragon said, shifting her wings uncomfortably, “I am not choosing favorites, and you are not fighting me. Secondly, my wing has just finished healing. I have not been able to fly, Lee. That is why I did not return to you; Cinderella had nothing to do with it except that she saved me from the hunter who tried to kill me and patched my wing. Without her kindness, I would still be unable to fly at best. At worst, I would be dead.”
Lee’s eyes dropped to Cinderella’s bare feet. Her toes were just barely poking out from underneath the hem of her beautiful dress, and the boy couldn’t hide his surprise at seeing them. “You have no shoes?” he questioned.
“You really have forgotten your manners, haven’t you?”
Startled, the boy’s head snapped back up. The dragon laughed, her great, booming voice shaking the trees around them and the ground beneath their feet. “My Cinderella,” she said, shaking all over with mirth. “You have forgotten yours as well, haven’t you? You choose your words carefully all day long, but let Lee here rattle you and you forget your manners as well.”
Cinderella blushed. She lowered her head and then her body as she curtsied. “My apologies, Your Greatness.”
“Oh, don’t start that now!” The dragon roared this time with laughter.
“Careful,” Lee warned her. “Remember the forest in Thailand.”
“I have much better control over my powers now, son, than I did then.”
“Son?!” Cinderella’s eyes shot wide. She looked back and forth between the two. “Surely you are not -- “
“No, of course not!” Still the great dragon laughed.
“But she is like a mother to me,” Lee said. “A Fairy Godmother, if you will. I know you Americans enjoy such stories.”
Cinderella harrumphed quietly underneath her breath. “They’re hardly real,” she remarked, but then she looked with greater interest at Lee. “So . . . Your parents are gone too?”
He nodded. “I never knew them,” he admitted. “They were killed by robbers in the forest. My mother had evidently hidden me so well that they did not find me, but Celestia did.”
“It is always with great remorse that I look back at that time.”
Cinderella cracked a grin. “Is he that much of a pain?”
“No, of course not! I only regret that I had not come across him sooner, with enough time to save his mother and father, much as I regret not having been able to save your mother.”
Cinderella’s mouth dropped open. Her eyes grew wide again, and the mice squeaked with urgency. “You never told me you knew my mother!”
“She saved me too,” the dragon admitted, “a long time ago.” Her wings shifted on her great back. “I suppose it is true what they say: like mother, like daughter, and we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes as the generations above us if we do not learn from our own history.”
Cinderella frowned. “What mistake would that be?”
“I begged your father not to remarry. I told him I could help raise you.”
“I don’t remember you -- “
“He wanted you to have a normal life, a normal childhood. Ha! That certainly did not happen with your stepmother! I will never call that woman Lady Tremaine,” the dragon confided in her friends. “I knew the first Lady Tremaine, the real Lady Tremaine. She was a true blessing to all who knew her. Had she lived, you never would have wanted for anything, Cynthia, nor would I. She was a great lady with great powers and a kind heart.”
“Powers?” Cinderella breathed shakily.
“Why, yes, of course. How do you think you came to be able to talk to the animals?”
“I . . . “ Cinderella stopped. She blinked. “I never really thought about it,” she answered honestly. “I just listen with my heart, and I can hear them.”
“Besides,” Suzy squeaked, scampering down Cinderella’s shoulder to peer closer at the dragon, “she taught us how to talk.”
The dragon laughed so hard this time that the trees bent as though trying to touch their very roots. “HA! HA! HA! No! No, dear one, she did not teach you to speak! You still speak your own language. It only happens that she can understand you, much as she can understand the dog, the horse, and even the cat if she were of a mind to make friends with Lucifer.”
Cinderella eyed the dragon almost as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but Celestia looked pointedly down her long, scaley nose at little Suzy instead. “Tell me, mouse. You do not speak with the birds, do you?”
Suzy was dumbfounded. She gazed in disbelief at the dragon, but at last she had to admit, “We . . . We do not talk with words, no. But then,” she added quickly, “there is no need to talk with words. We understand each other well.”
“But not each other’s language. Cinderella is like myself, and like her mother. I have taught Lee the most valuable language of complete communication as well. We can hear any language and immediately understand it as though it were our own. Likewise we can make all others around us understand what we wish them to know. Cinderella speaks English, Lee Chinese, and I myself a language that has been dead longer than all of you have been alive put together. You can understand us only because we wish you to do so. We can understand each other for the same reason. But if I was to say something that I wished only Lee to understand, the rest of you would not be able to know what I said unless one of us chose to say it.” She then spoke words in a foreign language.
The mice squeaked in confusion. Cinderella peered at her. “What did you say?”
“It is not important.” The dragon shook her head, which was the size of a small boulder. “I only wished to make a point, and I believe I have made it.”
“I have so many questions now!” Cinderella exclaimed, still wide-eyed. “Not the least of which is if you knew my mother as you say you did, how could I ever have forgotten you?”
“Because I made you, dear child. It was your father’s wish that you lead a normal life. You could not do that talking to animals and being friends with dragons, so I cast a spell and caused you to forget that you ever knew me or communicated with animals or knew anything of the real world around you save that which is popularly acknowledged by your own species. Had your new stepmother proven to be the woman she convinced your father she was, you never would have received your powers, but as it was, when you most needed friendship, you discovered that you held the ability to communicate with all those around you, especially those who were the most downtrodden.”
Cinderella’s mouth was hanging wide open. The dragon waited patiently for her to speak, but when she only continued to stare, mouth silent and agape, she gently spoke, “You must go now, Cinderella, if you wish to attain that future you seek.”
“I do not wish to go!” Suzy squeaked in a hurry. “I wish to stay here!”
“She can’t go like that,” the boy said.
“Suzy, you can’t stay here! We’re all going!”
“No, my child, we are not all going.” The dragon pressed her snout to Cinderella’s forehead. “The next step on your path is one upon which I can not accompany you.”
“And neither can I,” Suzy squeaked insistently. She waved her needle at the other mice. “You shouldn’t either!”
“Don’t say things like that, Suzy!” Cinderella sniffed, tears welling in her blue eyes. “If you do not wish to come with us to the palace, then I suppose that must be your decision! But the others are free to come with me as they wish!”
“We go with Cinderelly,” Gus and Jacques said determinedly. They folded their tiny arms in front of their furry chests. Gus raised his head, lifting his nose into the air, while Jacques stuck out his tongue at Suzy. “Nothing take us from our Cinderelly!” Gus insisted.
The dragon spoke again in a foreign tongue. Lee looked sad for a moment as did Suzy. “Very well,” the little mouse spoke, nodding, and hopped off of Cinderella’s arm and onto the dragon’s head.
“What did she say?” Cinderella demanded.
“It is not of importance,” the dragon replied, her powerful tail again striking what was left of the blueberry bush, “at least not now. What is of importance is that you make this date for which you have striven so hard ever since you learned the Prince was to have a ball to find his new Queen.” She locked eyes with the daughter of the woman who had first saved her, the girl who had saved her as well. “I only hope,” she said sincerely, “that it is all that you wish it to be.”
“But you can’t go that way,” the boy spoke again.
Cinderella looked at Lee. “You keep saying that,” she asked, “but what is wrong with the way I am dressed?”
“There is nothing wrong with the dress. It’s beautiful! But everyone will know you do not belong the moment they see your bare feet.” He hurried over to the stash of items behind their dragon friend and the scraggly bush. He dug there for a moment before retrieving a brown, leather pouch and rushing back over to Cinderella. He opened the pouch and took out shoes unlike anything Cinderella or her mouse friends had seen before. They gasped audibly.
“What is that?!” Cinderella cried.
“What does it look like?” Lee retorted. “They’re shoes, but they’re special shoes!”
“I’d say! They look like crystal!”
“They’re not crystal,” he told her, “but they are made of glass.”
“Glass? Won’t they hurt my feet?”
“No. The glass is magical. It will not cut you, and it will not shatter under your weight or any other. It will, however, lead you to your rightful destiny.” She smiled. If there was something coy in that smile, Cinderella did not notice, but Suzy and Lee both did.
“Will they fit?” Cinderella asked, hesitantly raising one foot.
“They will fit their wearer,” the dragon replied, “whatever their size as long as they are pure of heart. Cinderella, you have never hated anyone. Even with all that your stepmother has done, you still do not wish her harm.”
“No, I . . . Papa did not raise me to hate.”
“He did good while he lived. I only wish he would have lived longer.”
“Me, too,” Cinderella whispered, tears again brimming in her eyes.
Lee knelt before her and slipped the first shoe onto her foot. Cinderella gasped in surprise as it tingled and then warmed her foot. He slid the other onto her other foot. “There,” he said, smiling up at her.
For the first time, she noticed that he did look rather handsome when he smiled. He had a dark complexion, not like the night that was settling in around them but more like a strong, dark cocoa. Perhaps he could be a pleasant young man if one was to get to know him, but she had another, completely different, and far better man who she intended to get to know this night.
“You’re ready,” Lee said.
“Go, my Cinderella, to the dance.”
“Do I simply . . . walk there?” Cinderella asked. She had not considered this moment until just now.
“You do have a point. You must arrive in style or they will all question how you came to be there.”
She rolled her body together, her nose touching her snout, and then suddenly disappeared altogether. “Celestia!” Cinderella cried. There was a popping noise, and where the dragon had been before, a coach suddenly appeared. Its outside seemed made of glittering emeralds while, inside the coach, it was lined with rich velvet.
Lee jumped onto the box seat. “Ill drive you,” he said simply, as though he’d seen Celestia turn into a coach a thousand times before.
The trip to the palace seemed as swift as a whirlwind, but Cinderella’s mind whirled even faster. She had a thousand questions on this, the very night she’d thought would end all her questions and her problems. Caught in all her memories of everything her friend had confided to her this evening, Cinderella hesitated when Lee opened her door.
“Go!” he snapped impatiently. She blinked up at him, her eyes large and doelike. He looked away, muttering, “This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She nodded and squared her shoulders beneath her new, and only real, dress. “Yes, it is.” His hand felt warm in hers as she descended down the steps. She hesitated agai when she stepped off onto the final pathway into the palace. “Will I ever see you again?” she asked, and though she looked at Lee, she meant the question for both him and the dragon who was her carriage and, like Lee, had turned into a sort of Fairy Godmother for her when she had needed the advice and kindness of an elder the most in her life.
“That depends,” he said irritably.
“On what?” she asked.
He smiled, but his smile lacked warmth and seemed somehow sad. “On rather or not you want to.”
“Oh, but I do!”
“We shall see, Your Ladyship, after you have danced with the Prince.” He swung back up into the box seat and cracked the reins over the horses who had once been mice. “They will come back to me, won’t they?” she whispered, but it was too late even as she saw Suzy waving goodbye at her from the carriage’s window.
“Cinderelly scared?” Gus whispered into her ear.
“No,” she said defiantly. “We have planned this for months. We know what this night will mean for all of us. This is the right pathway.” Holding herself up as high and elegantly as she could, Cinderella started down the path to the palace while Gus and Jacques quickly hid beneath her skirt.
She didn’t slip into the palace unnoticed. Women and men alike whispered about her as they gazed on her beauty. The Prince was dancing with some woman she didn’t know when he saw her. He released the other woman’s hand, staring at her with his mouth and eyes both widened, and quickly closed in on the most beautiful woman he’d seen all night.
“May I have this dance?” he asked from behind her. She turned, having not yet spotted him in the crowd of wealthy people all dressed very fine and staring at and whispering about her. Her mouth dropped open in shock at the realization that the Prince had not only found her first but had come to her. She’d thought she would have to find a way to earn a dance with him, but here he was asking her to dance!
Beneath her dress, Jacques scraped her flesh gently with his tiny claws, reminding her that she had a very important role to fulfill. Cinderella blushed and shut her mouth. “Why, yes, of course.” She curtised before giving the Prince her hand. She felt like lightheaded as he bowed to her before taking her hand. “Isn’t everyone here to dance with the Prince?”
He grinned cheekily. “Everyone wants a piece of me, but I think I may have found the one lady here whose beauty is a perfect match to my own.”
Cinderella’s mouth almost fell open again, but then she reminded herself that the Prince would certainly know he was handsome. He’d undoubtedly been told that thousands of times over the years, being complimented as many times, if not more, than she had been scolded, chastised, called “ugly”, and otherwise backhanded by her stepmother and stepsisters. Her fear and surprise left her as he whirled her across the dance floor. She lost track of the time but noted that the song to which they danced changed several times.
He was gazingly happily into her eyes. She had won the night; she had won his hand! “I think,” he spoke softly, “it may be about time to call the ball to an end. I would like to see you again tomorrow and the next day -- “
Her heart raced, pounding so loudly in her ears that she could not hear him, but she did hear the cruel, cold voice that suddenly cut into their conversation. “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but I fear there has been a deception.”
It felt like her entire body, from the top of her head through to the tips of her toes, had suddenly been filled with ice water. She trembled. Tears welled in her eyes as the Prince ceased dancing with her and turned, one hand still holding to hers to face none other than her stepmother.
“It is her!” Anastasia cried out in disbelief.
“And those are my pearls!” Grizella exclaimed. She snatched at the necklace. Its fine string broke, and pearls scattered across the floor.
“GUARDS!” the Prince bellowed, stepping in between Cinderella and her stepsister.
Cinderella stared, watching in stunned, silent disbelief as the Prince prepared to defend her. “You’d better have a good explanation for this, Lady Tremaine -- “
Cinderella found her voice to whisper, “She’s not Lady Tremaine.” It was only after she had spoken the words aloud that she heard the echo of them herself and realized what she had said. “My Mother was Lady Tremaine. I am -- “
“YOU INSOLENT CHILD!” her stepmother screeched, raising her hand.
Cinderella winced, closing her eyes. Freedom had been so close, but now it seemed so far away. Again it seemed impossible.
“GUARDS, ARREST THIS WOMAN!” the Prince bellowed. Cinderella peeked through tightly-slitted eyes and opened her blue eyes wider at the sight of the Prince tightly holding her stepmother’s wrist in his strong hand. “YOU WILL NOT HURT THIS WOMAN! SHE IS TO BE MY WIFE!”
“But, my Lord, she is but a commoner!”
“WHAT?!” All the color drained from the Prince’s handsome face. He released Cinderella’s hand and her stepmother’s wrist.
Cinderella tried to find her voice again, but all she could do was watch through wide, teary eyes as her stepmother persisted, “A filthy, common, peasant girl who cleans our chimneys! That’s how she got her name: Cinderella!”
Tears began to streak down Cinderella’s cheeks. She threw her hands up over her ears as all the times she’d heard that awful name bellowed over her years that had been supposed to be spent as a child growing into becoming a lady roared in her mind.
“I would ask you if this is true,” the Prince said, turning to face her, “but I can see that it is.” His voice and expression had completely changed.
Screams went up at the banquet tables. “MICE!”
“MICE!”
“MICE!”
“THE PALACE HAS MICE!”
“Oh, no! Gus?! Jacques?!” Cinderella felt of her dress before the entire palace -- staff, royalty, and visitors alike -- but could find no sign of her little friends.
Her stepmother sneered. “She even brought her pets with her. Filthy beasts! I should have locked you up when I had the chance instead of allowing you to do something worthwhile with your miserable life!”
“Guard, what are you doing?” the Prince snapped as the first guard arrived and latched on to Cinderella’s stepmother.
“Release me, you fool!” her stepmother demanded.
“Your Majesty?” asked the confused guard.
“Do as she says! Arrest that one!” He pointed at Cinderella. “She’s the traitor!”
“Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” Cinderella cried out as she raced, pushing and shoving through the crowd. She reached the table just in time to spot Jacques trying his best to pull Gus away from an entire sculpture made of different kinds of cheeses. Fat, little Gus Gus grabbed as much cheese as he could just as Cinderella swept both mice into her arms.
She kept running, but every exit was blocked by the guards. The crowd of people with whom she could never truly belong gaped at her. They stared and laughed, and their laughter sounded every bit as cruel as her stepmother’s and stepsisters’ ever had. “Perhaps you could just let her go, Your Majesty?” she could hear her stepmother suggesting. “She is little more than a filthy rodent herself.”
“She dared impersonate royalty,” the Prince returned. “I almost married her for God’s sake!”
“CELESTIA!” Cinderella screamed out in desperation. “CELESTIA!” There was no hope the dragon would hear her, but suddenly guards screamed. Cinderella turned, Gus and Jacques held tightly in her hands, and saw her dragon friend flying into the palace. She knocked through the guards barring the entrance way. People screamed and fled. The Prince drew the nearest guard’s sword and charged at the dragon.
“CELESTIA, WATCH OUT!” Cinderella could barely see for the tears streaming down her face, but she could see the men rushing at her friend, all their swords raised. She had brought into danger. She had saved the dragon. Her mother had saved the dragon. And yet was she to die because she dared to answer the call of her friend?! Had she led Celestia to her death?! “NO! NO! NO!”
“SHUT UP AND START FIGHTING!”
The thundering, commanding voice surprised her as it broke through Cinderella’s building hysteria. She turned and saw Lee on the floor between her and Celestia, fighting off the guards. The chopping motions he moved his hands in quickly left the guards without weapons and just as quickly knocked them away from their friend. “COME ON, CINDERELLA! MOVE! OR DO YOU WANT TO BE CLEANING CHIMNEYS FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?!”
Cinderella ran. She stumbled and left a shoe behind her but never looked back.
“You’re not going anywhere.” Her stepmother suddenly blocked her path. She sneered down at her. “You’re mine. You were part of the deal for marrying that selfish sonofabitch who was your father.”
Cinderella had never hit anyone in her life, but she did that night. She struck her stepmother with all the force of all the blows she’d wanted to give her over the years but never had. The older woman quickly fell out of her pathway. Drizella and Anastasia screamed and wailed as they caught their mother. Grizella left Anastasia to tend with her and bolted after Cinderella, but right about the time she could have caught her, Cinderella and Celestia reached each other.
Drizella’s eyes shot to a size larger than dinner plates. She paled and shook from head to toe. She screamed, thinking that Cinderella always had picked the strangest friends but being unable to say so, or say anything for that matter. Cinderella grabbed one of Celestia’s front legs and swung up onto her back. As they passed Lee, she reached a hand down for him. Lee grabbed it hurriedly, and then together, Jacques, Gus, and Suzy all huddling together between Cinderella’s body and the dragon’s, they took to the air.
“I usually don’t breathe fire around humans any longer,” Celestia remarked, “but I think I’ll make an exception tonight.”
Cinderella’s stepmother was just getting to her feet when Celestia let loose a single firebolt. It soared straight at the supposed Lady Tremaine and singed all her hair off of her head at once. “You are no Lady Tremaine,” the dragon intoned, then soared higher as the Prince’s sword just missed the end of her tail.
She belched fire this time, blowing a huge hole out of the roof of the palace, and soared through it, leaving all the other humans, their prejudiced ways, narrow minds far beneath them. Cinderella was breathing hard and still trembling as she stretched out over Celestia’s long neck. Her mind and heart both pounded. She was only vaguely aware of Lee’s gentle hand stroking her back as her new friend tried to offer her some comfort and soothe her.
“What do I do now?!” she breathed, sobbing against Celestia’s scales. “What do I do now?! I can’t go back there!”
“No,” the dragon answered her without looking back. “You do not what you were always meant to do, Cinderella.”
“What is that?!”
“You become Lady Cynthia Tremaine. You become your father’s daughter, your mother’s daughter.”
“And you stay our Cinderelly,” Suzy added, stroking her human friend’s trembling cheek with her little paw.
“You stay you,” Jacques explained.
“But you be free now. Really free,” Gus told her. “No Princey to answer to!” He shook his head.
Cinderella was stunned. Slowly her tears subsided. Her breathing became gradual, more normal. Her heartbeat was still calming as she soared with her friends just underneath the stars, which, for the first time since she’d been a little girl looking up at them with her father, seemed to be smiling down upon them. They were right: She didn’t have to go back to Lady Tremaine. She didn’t have to go back to the family who hated her and used her, to the family who’d never really been her family. Her family was right here, and freedom and independence was hers.
She never would have been free if she had married the Prince, Cinderella realized. She would have always had to answer to him. She would have had to become the woman he wanted her to be, the woman the kingdom expected him to marry, and despite the tales she’d heard of him, he wasn’t at all what she’d thought he would be. He was quite the conceited, little bastard after all.
She would never have been happy married to him, and she would not have been allowed to keep her mice friends. They would have been hunted down at the palace just as surely as Lucifer had always tried to do to them. The humans who had discovered them on the banquet table had made that much clear quite readily. They weren’t welcome at the palace, and neither was she if she was to be at all true to herself.
“I am free,” she whispered, hearing the truth in her words and relishing it. She smiled, and the smile slowly filled her whole face. “I am free!” she repeated. “I AM FREE!”
“YES, YOU ARE!” Celestia answered, roaring and swooping in a circle among the clouds. “WE ALL ARE!”
Freedom was a complicated thing, Cinderella realized as she settled in for the journey. She didn’t know where Celestia would take them, but it didn’t really matter. She had her friends; she had all the family she had left. They would find happiness. They already had really, just as she had at last found freedom. Freedom was a complicated thing. Marrying the Prince would have simply been exchanging one cage for another, but now here she was, truly and completely free, entirely able to be her own person, whoever and whatever she chose to be, at long last.
She shouted for joy as Celestia soared upwards. She didn’t know where the dragon was taking them, and it honestly didn’t matter. She felt Lee’s arms around her. Gus, Jacques, Suzy, and a dozen other mice were settling in for the journey between her body and Celestia’s neck. They were free; they were all free! And for the first time since she’d been a little girl, long before she’d lost her father or her mother, life was a beautiful thing. Anything was possible, including the ability they now all had together to live happily ever after.
The End
Author: Kat Lee
Fandom: Original/Cinderella
Character/Pairing: Cinderella, Gus, Jacques, Suzy, OCs
Rating: PG-13/T
Challenge/Prompt:
puzzleprompts: May 2018: ALL Categories: Power Hour: Friendship
Creature Feature: Magic User
Sports & Rec: Meditation
The Classifieds: Sensei and Karate
Mother Nature: Fire
Geology Rocks: Crystal
Random Object: Jewellry
Random Descriptor: Complicated
Warning(s): Fairytale!AU
Word Count: 8,615
Date Written: 17 July 2018
Summary:
Disclaimer: This one's mine!
She growled, a sound of annoyance she’d picked up from one of her few friends in the harsh world. If it was good enough for the ancient, mystical animal beside her, it was surely good enough for her, a lowly girl who spent hours every day scrubbing floors and chimneys. She was good for little else after all, or so she was constantly reminded whenever she was at the house that was supposed to be her home. It was supposed to be her home -- it had been when her father had been alive --, but lately, the forest around her seemed more and more welcoming, more and more an actual place where she could rest, relax, and just herself be. But not today.
“I just can’t do it today!” she cried in frustration. “Not when I know that woman’s mouth is going to fly open -- “
“CINDERELLA!”
“ -- at any moment,” she finished, grumbling. She was over a mile from the manor, and yet she could hear her stepmother’s booming voice as if she towered above her currently. She groaned and opened her blue eyes, a look of utter defeat flashing over her lovely face. “I’d better go.”
“Very well,” the dragon said and nudged her scaley nose gently against Cinderella’s palm. “But remember this, my Cinthia, when you let that woman intrude on your every thought, to alter your opinions, and to affect your very desires, you are allowing her to win.”
“She’s already won.”
“She will not have by tomorrow.” The dragon’s long tail swished, striking against the remains of a blackberry bush. “Remember your dream, my little Princess. Remember what is to come tonight and to follow tomorrow.”
A smile crept across Cinthia’s face, growing bigger and bigger until it made her positively beam. “That’s right,” she spoke excitedly. “When the Prince falls in love with me rather than her daughters, I’ll be free of her at last!”
“Yes, you will.” The dragon nuzzled her palm again. “Now go before her fury is ignited. Go, but be sure you return to me this evening before the ball.”
“Yes, Celestia, I will.” She rubbed her nose, then raced down the hillside. Her stepmother may have been able to stop her from meditating this morning, one of the few practices that actually brought her peace these days, but very soon she would be unable to stop her from doing anything she placed. Very soon, Cinthia would be free!
She was practically skipping by the time she reached the mansion. Her stepmother scowled darkly down at her from the steps. “Honestly, Cinderella, where have you been for so long this morning, and why do you look so happy? Wipe that grin off your face, girl; you look ugly enough when you’re not smiling. What do you have to smile about anyway? None of your work has been done! Where have you been?” she asked again. When Cinderella didn’t answer, she demanded, “Well?”
Cinderella jumped to answer then, not having dared to risk interrupting her stepmother while she had been scolding her. She knew what trouble she could fall in by doing so; her tongue still wore the scars from her stepmother’s cruel punishments. “I went to pick berries for breakfast,” she said. “I thought you and my sisters -- “
“Your stepsisters, girl. You’ll never be as good as they are!”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” She curtsied.
“You went to pick berries, eh?” her stepmother questioned, arching a slender, dark brow at Cinderella.
“Yes, ma’am. I -- “ Cinderella stopped, only then realizing that she had forgotten to pick up the basket in her rush to answer her stepmother.
“A likely story,” her stepmother sniffed disdainfully, “seeing as to how I see no berries in your hands or arms or even a basket.”
“I forgot the basket,” Cinderella spoke quickly and apologetically. “I can go back to fetch it.”
“Nonsense. I know when you’re lying to me, Cinderella. You’re starting off early wanting your lashes this morning, aren’t you, girl? Well, you’re lucky today’s a busy day. I don’t have time to waste on the likes of you this morning. We have to prepare for the Prince’s ball this evening. He’s likely to come calling tomorrow, so I want this whole house scrubbed. I want to be able to see my reflection in every spot of it top to bottom. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am.” She curstied again and dared not look her stepmother in the eye. She had preparations of her own to make, after all, and it would do her no good to let her stepmother know of her plans. The sooner her stepmother discovered that she was also intending to attend the ball, the sooner she would find a way to stop her.
“Now since you’re running behind, I’ll expect breakfast served in my room in ten minutes, fifteen for the girls.”
Cinderella kept her head humbly bowed. “Yes, ma’am.”
“What are you waiting for, girl? Every minute you’re late adds another lashing onto the flogging you’ll receive tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Keeping her head down low, Cinderella rushed past her stepmother. The old woman turned on the stairs and reached out swiftly, snaking the cat of nine tails out from the puffy sleeves of her nightgown and striking Cinderella in the rear as she hurried by her. “That,” she remarked as Cinderella bit down on her bottom lip to keep from crying aloud, “is a reminder. Every minute you’re late, Cinderella -- “
“Yes, ma’am. I know. Another lashing.” She forced down the tears that threatened to rise into her baby blue eyes and hurried to see about their breakfast, all the time reminding herself that this was the very last day she’d have to adhere to her stepmother and her cruelty. Her own breakfast this morning would be a cup of water and the crust she cut off her stepsisters’ toast. Her stomach rumbled at the thought, but she had no time to feel sorry for herself. Today was an important day after all.
The hours sped swiftly by, and it seemed that the more Cinderella did, the more she had yet to do. The manor was huge with at least three dozen rooms that were hardly ever used. Today, however, her stepmother insisted that the whole mansion must be scrubbed, and Cinderella knew better than to leave those empty rooms untouched. The last time she had dared to do so and had been caught, she had been locked inside the room for three whole weeks until her stepmother had finally tired of her daughters’ poor attempts at making breakfast. Of course then Cinderella had been accused of making them all go hungry and having to fend for themselves by forcing her stepmother to punish her.
“I’d like to see her punished just once,” Cinderella muttered underneath her breath as she scrubbed the muddy pawprints her stepmother’s cat seemed to have purposefully left behind him. She didn’t really mean that, though, she thought a second later, feeling a tad guilty. She didn’t really want harm to befall her stepmother or stepsisters. She didn’t like to see any living being harmed. She just wanted to be free, -- and she soon would be! Cinderella scrubbed at the reminder and scrubbed harder.
Just then, a mouse ran up to her from the part of the floor she had already cleaned and dried. He hopped onto her hand, scurried up her arm, and clambered onto her shoulder. He was panting hard by the time he reached her ear. “Cinderelly excited about today?” he asked eagerly.
“Hush, Gus Gus,” she whispered back, smiling. “Of course I’m excited.” She cast a glance around them. “Even if I’m never going to get done with my chores in time to make preparations for myself.”
“Don’t worry about that, Cinderelly,” the mouse squeaked. “We have it under control, and we’re going to help you get this place clean again too!”
“How are you going to do that,” she asked, “without getting caught?”
“Oh, look!” suddenly sounded the snide voice of her elder stepsister. “Cinderella’s talking to herself again!”
Gus Gus squeaked and leapt into Cinderella’s kerchief. Trembling, he wound himself up into her blonde hair and around her ear and did his best to make himself invisible.
Her sister sniggered. “Of course she is, Drizella. It’s not like she has any friends!” Anastasia’s laughter sounded much more like a snorting pig.
Cinderella stole a glance up into the side of her kerchief into which Gus had jumped. She couldn’t see the mouse, but she knew he could see her and the tiny grin into which the corners of her mouth turned up at the sound of Anastasia’s laughter.
“I am so going to win the Prince tonight!” Drizella exclaimed. She was grinning wide and completely oblivious to Cinderella’s smile. “All he has to do is hear you laugh one time!”
Anastasia’s puffy face fell into a deep frown. “That is so not true!”
“Yes, it is! No man wants to marry a pig!”
“Doesn’t that count you out immediately? You’re as big as one!”
“Ah! I don’t believe you said that!”
“Believe it, sister, and know it’s true!”
“No, it’s not!” Drizella screeched. “And you’ll take it back right now!” She slapped Anastasia.
“No, I won’t!”
Cinderella sighed and calmly went back to scrubbing the floor as the two fought, slapping each other back and forth. They skidded across the freshly clean floor, exchanging slaps, until suddenly they knocked into her bucket of suds and sent it flying across the room. “CINDERELLA!” her stepmother’s voice boomed from the doorway. “WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?!” she demanded. “THIS IS NOT HOW YOU CLEAN A ROOM!”
“I’m sorry, stepmother. I was just cleaning, and Anastasia and Drizella -- “
“ARE YOU BLAMING MY GIRLS, MY PERFECT, BEAUTIFUL GIRLS?! OH, YOU ARE A HORRIBLE CHILD! I AM SO GLAD YOUR FATHER DID NOT LIVE TO SEE THE WRETCHED CREATURE YOU HAVE BECOME!”
Cinderella kept her face down. Her hand clenched her sponge, wringing the water out of it. Gus Gus hugged her ear and whispered into it, “Don’t listen to her, Cinderelly. We all know she’s full of lies. They the horrible ones.”
She closed her eyes as tears welled up inside of her. Gus was right: They were the horrible ones, and she would be free of them soon! She only had to make it through one more day with them!
“Oh, she’s going to cry now!” Anastasia and Drizella snickered.
Cinderella’s cheeks burned as she felt them pointing at her and heard their snide laughter. They both sounded like snorting pigs, but the ugliness of their laughter did her very little good. It didn’t ease her pain and heartache at all. “I’m sorry, stepmother,” she said, forcing her words to come out calmly and continuing to keep her eyes tightly closed.
“You should be! Clean up this mess at once and then wash your filthy hands so you can prepare dinner for us!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Make sure it’s light too. We can’t afford to eat too much tonight. We need to spend the night in the ballroom, not sleeping.” She cast angry glances at her daughters who hushed immediately. “Now, you two come into the foyer with me and let me see your curties and hear how you are going to win the Prince tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they chorused.
Cinderella waited until they were all three gone before letting the tension whoosh from her body. Her hands fell down onto the wet floor, the sponge making a splash. “Those two will never win the Prince,” she whispered. “They’re much too mean!” She had heard stories about the Prince and his kindness and knew, without meeting him, that he had to be a good man. He would see right through her stepsisters, her stepmother, their cruelty, and their designs to get rich by marrying him.
A tiny shiver swept through her as she wondered fearfully, for the first time, if he would see through her as well. All her plans of freedom hinged on making him fall in love with her tonight. “I’m never going to get done in time,” she whispered forlornly. But that didn’t matter. She would simply convince her stepmother that she would stay up all night if that was what it took to clean the house to please her. She’d never know she was also planning on attending the ball until she showed up there tonight, and by that time . . . Well, if she didn’t earn her freedom tonight, whatever happened tomorrow or the next day didn’t matter. She’d rather be dead than continue in this life with her stepmother’s cruel tyranny.
Gus Gus scampered down her arm and jumped onto her hand which still held the sponge. “That’s okay, Cinderelly,” he told her cheerfully. Using all his strength, he lifted one of her fingers up off of the sponge and then the next. “We’ll get it done!” She lifted her hand from the palm, as he seemed to want it moved, and then watched as he climbed onto the sponge and sailed away across the room, cleaning the floor as he went. “We’ll get it done!” he called back to her again.
Perhaps they would get it done, she thought, rising and going to wash so she could prepare dinner. After all her friends were the very reason why she was going to be able to attend the ball tonight. They were the ones who had found the pieces of cloth to sew together the beautiful gown down in the basement, hidden away from the rest of her family. They were the ones who had labored so tirelessly to make her dreams come true while Cinderella herself had spent every day and night adhering to her stepmother’s commands. She would never have been able to attend the ball without them! “Just think, Gus Gus,” she whispered, smiling. “Tomorrow we’ll be free from this awful place forever more!”
The mouse grinned back at her as he kept moving across the floor on top of the soapy sponge. “That’s right, Cinderelly! We all live fat and happy starting tomorrow!” They both started to whistle as Cinderella headed for her next task, snatching her stepmother’s cat up off of the floor as she went and depositing him outside where he could not hurt her rodent friends, and Gus Gus continued working on the floor.
The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. Cinderella was careful stay out from under the feet of her stepmother and stepsisters as they prepared for the coming ball, but it was harder to keep her own self from dwelling on the idea of what was to come that very night. After six years of living as her stepmother’s slave, she was to be freed this very evening! She should perhaps feel sorry for the Prince -- everybody wanted something from him after all --, but she was prepared to give him everything and anything a husband could possibly desire in exchange for freedom for herself and her friends. She would woo him this night, and she would win him and their freedom!
Thinking about it made it difficult for her to refrain from bursting into song and made it difficult to be still even when her stepmother was reprimanding her for not getting more done that evening. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get more done, stepmother,” she spoke humbly as her stepmother closed another door, moved to another room, and opened it.
They both gaped inside of it as the floor sparkled up at them. Cinderella knew she hadn’t made it to that room, but obviously her friends had and had cleaned it well with their tiny paws and beaks. “I did do what I’ve been able to, and I don’t plan on going to bed anytime soon.” It wasn’t a complete lie. Cinderella hated liers like her stepmother and stepsisters and had no tolerance for telling fibs. She would rather tell a harsh truth than an outright fib any day, but she had to be careful with what she told her stepmother. After all, her stepmother could still learn that she planned on going to the ball. She could still stop her and destroy her dreams of freedom once and for all.
“See that you don’t,” her stepmother told her, pulling back from the room and shutting the door. She didn’t say one word about how the floor and walls had positively shined, but Cinderella had not heard a kind word come out of her mouth for seven years, long before her father had become mysteriously ill. She still suspected the woman had found a way to kill him without anyone knowing, but no matter how hard she had tried, Cinderella had never found any proof. If she had, perhaps she could have wished her stepmother ill, but as it was, she simply wanted to be free from her and allowed to live her own life as she chose to live it.
“Remember, Cinderella, every inch that isn’t cleaned -- “
“ -- is another lashing tomorrow. Yes, ma’am, I know.”
“And see that Lucifer is well fed this evening. There’s just enough milk left from the cow this morning for his dinner.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Cinderella knew better than to speak a word about her own dinner. The last time she had dared to ask her stepmother what she was to eat when the cupboards were bare of food other than that which was intended for the rest of her family and the cat, she had been forced to eat the ashes from the fireplace. Her stepmother and stepsisters had had a fine time laughing at her as she had licked them up with her stepmother’s boot pressed against the back of her head. No more, she thought, her dirtied fingers curling at her sides. No more!
“Just think, Cinderella,” Anastasia said, sneering as her stepmother and stepsisters climbed aboard her father’s coach, “when you see us again, you can address us as your Royal Highnesses!” She gloated.
“I hope tonight brings you happiness,” she said and tried with all her heart to mean the words. After all she did want them to be happy, just no longer at her own expense. Once she could no longer see the coach, Cinderella raced back into the house and up to her room in the attic. There she wasted no time in removing the soiled rags from her body and scrubbing her own skin and hair as hard as she could underneath the slowly pouring collection of rainwater she kept for her own showers. She was not allowed to use the bathing chambers inside the house, but collecting rain water and using it had always worked well for her.
As she stepped from her makeshift shower, two little, bluebirds met her with a towel. It was an old towel, one of the last items she had left from her father. Her stepmother did not know she had it or it would never have been able to stay in her possession. The birds helped her to dry, and then as Cinderella turned, other birds opened the doors of her mother’s wardrobe.
Cinderella gasped aloud for the dress they had all worked together to design was genuinely beautiful. Once dry, she raced to her wardrobe and gingerly touched the material. It was soft, gave way underneath the barest touch of her fingertips, and could be told by noone that it had come from pieces of fabric her animal friends had found and that one little, female mouse in particular had sewn delicately together.
“Cinderelly like it?” one of the mice asked.
“Of course she likes it!” The sewer bopped the male who’d just spoken in the head with the side of the needle, which was bigger than them both.
“You even found jewelry,” Cinderella spoke in awe, touching the string of pearls that set just before the dress on the sewing dummy. “How on Earth did you do this?” she puzzled aloud.
“You said it before yourself, Cinderelly,” the little female spoke up again. “You taught us that. You are our best friend. You taught us to speak. You taught me to sew. You’ve given us so much,” Suzy continued humbly. “This was the least we could do for you.”
“It’s not over yet,” Cinderella spoke with firm conviction. “After tonight, we’ll all be free.”
Suzy looked at her dearest friend, then away again just in time to catch one of the male mice watching the naked, human girl. She bopped him with her needle. “Avert eyes!” she cried.
For some reason, Cinderella couldn’t help laughing. It had been such a long, hard time for so many years, but their struggle was almost over. Soon, very soon, it would be over. They would be free. The birds worked together to lift her dress from the dummy, and Cinderella held her arms up and over her head. It took her friends but scant moments to dress her, and then she turned slowly before her cracked mirror. “Now you can look,” Suzy told the males.
Gus Gus gasped in delight and clapped his tiny hands together. Jacques beamed, his whiskers twitching. “Cinderelly beautiful!” he exclaimed proudly.
“Cinderella’s always been beautiful,” Suzy told them. “It’s the beauty of the heart inside the person that makes them beautiful, not the skin. Now, Cinderelly, you have a ball to get to!”
“Not yet,” Cinderella told them. “First I have a friend to meet, and all of you are coming with me.”
“But, Cinderelly -- “
“No ‘but’s,” Cinderella spoke firmly. “This is my last night here, and so it is yours too. I’m not leaving without you. When I’m free, you will be too.”
Suzy sniffled, but no one noticed the tears in the female mouse’s eyes. She already knew the answers Cinderella needed did not all lay with the Prince. Taking them with her would endanger her own chances at happiness, but Gus and Jacques had already climbed up her body and were sitting proudly atop her shoulder. “I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer, Suzy,” Cinderella announced, holding her hand down in front of her as the other mice continued to climb up her body and find hiding places along her beautiful dress.
Suzy sighed. “Very well,” she said and thought of putting down her needle. She almost had when she decided she may yet need it one day and snatched it up along with her as Cinderella picked her up. She put her on her shoulder with Gus and Jacques, and the lot of them headed out together.
It never took them long to reach Celestia’s hiding place in the woods surrounding the house, but when they were almost there a figure dressed in dark clothes leapt down at them. “Excuse me,” Cinderella spoke politely, trying to edge pass the stranger. He placed himself directly into her path, making strange motions with his hands as though he intended to fight her.
She blinked up at him. “What,” she questioned, “are you doing?”
“I think he wants a fight,” Gus spoke from her shoulder.
“I’ll give him a fight!” Jacques announced, punching the air and spinning around on Cinderella’s shoulder.
“Nobody is fighting,” Cinderella told him and reached up, grasping his tiny shoulders gently, just in time to steady him and keep him from falling off of her shoulder.
“That is quite correct,” a deep voice suddenly spoke. Cinderella, the mice, and the stranger all looked up to see their mighty dragon friend looking down at them. “No one is fighting anyone here tonight. Lee, this is the friend I about whom told you.”
“Hardly a friend.” The boy lifted the mask from his face but sneered at Cinderella, a look close to hatred gleaming in his dark eyes. “She kept you from coming to be with me.”
“Excuse me?” Cinderella asked.
The boy didn’t back down. His head tilted as though daring her to deny him again and caused his single braid to swing behind his back. “You kept her from coming to be with me,” he repeated.
“First, children,” the dragon said, shifting her wings uncomfortably, “I am not choosing favorites, and you are not fighting me. Secondly, my wing has just finished healing. I have not been able to fly, Lee. That is why I did not return to you; Cinderella had nothing to do with it except that she saved me from the hunter who tried to kill me and patched my wing. Without her kindness, I would still be unable to fly at best. At worst, I would be dead.”
Lee’s eyes dropped to Cinderella’s bare feet. Her toes were just barely poking out from underneath the hem of her beautiful dress, and the boy couldn’t hide his surprise at seeing them. “You have no shoes?” he questioned.
“You really have forgotten your manners, haven’t you?”
Startled, the boy’s head snapped back up. The dragon laughed, her great, booming voice shaking the trees around them and the ground beneath their feet. “My Cinderella,” she said, shaking all over with mirth. “You have forgotten yours as well, haven’t you? You choose your words carefully all day long, but let Lee here rattle you and you forget your manners as well.”
Cinderella blushed. She lowered her head and then her body as she curtsied. “My apologies, Your Greatness.”
“Oh, don’t start that now!” The dragon roared this time with laughter.
“Careful,” Lee warned her. “Remember the forest in Thailand.”
“I have much better control over my powers now, son, than I did then.”
“Son?!” Cinderella’s eyes shot wide. She looked back and forth between the two. “Surely you are not -- “
“No, of course not!” Still the great dragon laughed.
“But she is like a mother to me,” Lee said. “A Fairy Godmother, if you will. I know you Americans enjoy such stories.”
Cinderella harrumphed quietly underneath her breath. “They’re hardly real,” she remarked, but then she looked with greater interest at Lee. “So . . . Your parents are gone too?”
He nodded. “I never knew them,” he admitted. “They were killed by robbers in the forest. My mother had evidently hidden me so well that they did not find me, but Celestia did.”
“It is always with great remorse that I look back at that time.”
Cinderella cracked a grin. “Is he that much of a pain?”
“No, of course not! I only regret that I had not come across him sooner, with enough time to save his mother and father, much as I regret not having been able to save your mother.”
Cinderella’s mouth dropped open. Her eyes grew wide again, and the mice squeaked with urgency. “You never told me you knew my mother!”
“She saved me too,” the dragon admitted, “a long time ago.” Her wings shifted on her great back. “I suppose it is true what they say: like mother, like daughter, and we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes as the generations above us if we do not learn from our own history.”
Cinderella frowned. “What mistake would that be?”
“I begged your father not to remarry. I told him I could help raise you.”
“I don’t remember you -- “
“He wanted you to have a normal life, a normal childhood. Ha! That certainly did not happen with your stepmother! I will never call that woman Lady Tremaine,” the dragon confided in her friends. “I knew the first Lady Tremaine, the real Lady Tremaine. She was a true blessing to all who knew her. Had she lived, you never would have wanted for anything, Cynthia, nor would I. She was a great lady with great powers and a kind heart.”
“Powers?” Cinderella breathed shakily.
“Why, yes, of course. How do you think you came to be able to talk to the animals?”
“I . . . “ Cinderella stopped. She blinked. “I never really thought about it,” she answered honestly. “I just listen with my heart, and I can hear them.”
“Besides,” Suzy squeaked, scampering down Cinderella’s shoulder to peer closer at the dragon, “she taught us how to talk.”
The dragon laughed so hard this time that the trees bent as though trying to touch their very roots. “HA! HA! HA! No! No, dear one, she did not teach you to speak! You still speak your own language. It only happens that she can understand you, much as she can understand the dog, the horse, and even the cat if she were of a mind to make friends with Lucifer.”
Cinderella eyed the dragon almost as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but Celestia looked pointedly down her long, scaley nose at little Suzy instead. “Tell me, mouse. You do not speak with the birds, do you?”
Suzy was dumbfounded. She gazed in disbelief at the dragon, but at last she had to admit, “We . . . We do not talk with words, no. But then,” she added quickly, “there is no need to talk with words. We understand each other well.”
“But not each other’s language. Cinderella is like myself, and like her mother. I have taught Lee the most valuable language of complete communication as well. We can hear any language and immediately understand it as though it were our own. Likewise we can make all others around us understand what we wish them to know. Cinderella speaks English, Lee Chinese, and I myself a language that has been dead longer than all of you have been alive put together. You can understand us only because we wish you to do so. We can understand each other for the same reason. But if I was to say something that I wished only Lee to understand, the rest of you would not be able to know what I said unless one of us chose to say it.” She then spoke words in a foreign language.
The mice squeaked in confusion. Cinderella peered at her. “What did you say?”
“It is not important.” The dragon shook her head, which was the size of a small boulder. “I only wished to make a point, and I believe I have made it.”
“I have so many questions now!” Cinderella exclaimed, still wide-eyed. “Not the least of which is if you knew my mother as you say you did, how could I ever have forgotten you?”
“Because I made you, dear child. It was your father’s wish that you lead a normal life. You could not do that talking to animals and being friends with dragons, so I cast a spell and caused you to forget that you ever knew me or communicated with animals or knew anything of the real world around you save that which is popularly acknowledged by your own species. Had your new stepmother proven to be the woman she convinced your father she was, you never would have received your powers, but as it was, when you most needed friendship, you discovered that you held the ability to communicate with all those around you, especially those who were the most downtrodden.”
Cinderella’s mouth was hanging wide open. The dragon waited patiently for her to speak, but when she only continued to stare, mouth silent and agape, she gently spoke, “You must go now, Cinderella, if you wish to attain that future you seek.”
“I do not wish to go!” Suzy squeaked in a hurry. “I wish to stay here!”
“She can’t go like that,” the boy said.
“Suzy, you can’t stay here! We’re all going!”
“No, my child, we are not all going.” The dragon pressed her snout to Cinderella’s forehead. “The next step on your path is one upon which I can not accompany you.”
“And neither can I,” Suzy squeaked insistently. She waved her needle at the other mice. “You shouldn’t either!”
“Don’t say things like that, Suzy!” Cinderella sniffed, tears welling in her blue eyes. “If you do not wish to come with us to the palace, then I suppose that must be your decision! But the others are free to come with me as they wish!”
“We go with Cinderelly,” Gus and Jacques said determinedly. They folded their tiny arms in front of their furry chests. Gus raised his head, lifting his nose into the air, while Jacques stuck out his tongue at Suzy. “Nothing take us from our Cinderelly!” Gus insisted.
The dragon spoke again in a foreign tongue. Lee looked sad for a moment as did Suzy. “Very well,” the little mouse spoke, nodding, and hopped off of Cinderella’s arm and onto the dragon’s head.
“What did she say?” Cinderella demanded.
“It is not of importance,” the dragon replied, her powerful tail again striking what was left of the blueberry bush, “at least not now. What is of importance is that you make this date for which you have striven so hard ever since you learned the Prince was to have a ball to find his new Queen.” She locked eyes with the daughter of the woman who had first saved her, the girl who had saved her as well. “I only hope,” she said sincerely, “that it is all that you wish it to be.”
“But you can’t go that way,” the boy spoke again.
Cinderella looked at Lee. “You keep saying that,” she asked, “but what is wrong with the way I am dressed?”
“There is nothing wrong with the dress. It’s beautiful! But everyone will know you do not belong the moment they see your bare feet.” He hurried over to the stash of items behind their dragon friend and the scraggly bush. He dug there for a moment before retrieving a brown, leather pouch and rushing back over to Cinderella. He opened the pouch and took out shoes unlike anything Cinderella or her mouse friends had seen before. They gasped audibly.
“What is that?!” Cinderella cried.
“What does it look like?” Lee retorted. “They’re shoes, but they’re special shoes!”
“I’d say! They look like crystal!”
“They’re not crystal,” he told her, “but they are made of glass.”
“Glass? Won’t they hurt my feet?”
“No. The glass is magical. It will not cut you, and it will not shatter under your weight or any other. It will, however, lead you to your rightful destiny.” She smiled. If there was something coy in that smile, Cinderella did not notice, but Suzy and Lee both did.
“Will they fit?” Cinderella asked, hesitantly raising one foot.
“They will fit their wearer,” the dragon replied, “whatever their size as long as they are pure of heart. Cinderella, you have never hated anyone. Even with all that your stepmother has done, you still do not wish her harm.”
“No, I . . . Papa did not raise me to hate.”
“He did good while he lived. I only wish he would have lived longer.”
“Me, too,” Cinderella whispered, tears again brimming in her eyes.
Lee knelt before her and slipped the first shoe onto her foot. Cinderella gasped in surprise as it tingled and then warmed her foot. He slid the other onto her other foot. “There,” he said, smiling up at her.
For the first time, she noticed that he did look rather handsome when he smiled. He had a dark complexion, not like the night that was settling in around them but more like a strong, dark cocoa. Perhaps he could be a pleasant young man if one was to get to know him, but she had another, completely different, and far better man who she intended to get to know this night.
“You’re ready,” Lee said.
“Go, my Cinderella, to the dance.”
“Do I simply . . . walk there?” Cinderella asked. She had not considered this moment until just now.
“You do have a point. You must arrive in style or they will all question how you came to be there.”
She rolled her body together, her nose touching her snout, and then suddenly disappeared altogether. “Celestia!” Cinderella cried. There was a popping noise, and where the dragon had been before, a coach suddenly appeared. Its outside seemed made of glittering emeralds while, inside the coach, it was lined with rich velvet.
Lee jumped onto the box seat. “Ill drive you,” he said simply, as though he’d seen Celestia turn into a coach a thousand times before.
The trip to the palace seemed as swift as a whirlwind, but Cinderella’s mind whirled even faster. She had a thousand questions on this, the very night she’d thought would end all her questions and her problems. Caught in all her memories of everything her friend had confided to her this evening, Cinderella hesitated when Lee opened her door.
“Go!” he snapped impatiently. She blinked up at him, her eyes large and doelike. He looked away, muttering, “This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She nodded and squared her shoulders beneath her new, and only real, dress. “Yes, it is.” His hand felt warm in hers as she descended down the steps. She hesitated agai when she stepped off onto the final pathway into the palace. “Will I ever see you again?” she asked, and though she looked at Lee, she meant the question for both him and the dragon who was her carriage and, like Lee, had turned into a sort of Fairy Godmother for her when she had needed the advice and kindness of an elder the most in her life.
“That depends,” he said irritably.
“On what?” she asked.
He smiled, but his smile lacked warmth and seemed somehow sad. “On rather or not you want to.”
“Oh, but I do!”
“We shall see, Your Ladyship, after you have danced with the Prince.” He swung back up into the box seat and cracked the reins over the horses who had once been mice. “They will come back to me, won’t they?” she whispered, but it was too late even as she saw Suzy waving goodbye at her from the carriage’s window.
“Cinderelly scared?” Gus whispered into her ear.
“No,” she said defiantly. “We have planned this for months. We know what this night will mean for all of us. This is the right pathway.” Holding herself up as high and elegantly as she could, Cinderella started down the path to the palace while Gus and Jacques quickly hid beneath her skirt.
She didn’t slip into the palace unnoticed. Women and men alike whispered about her as they gazed on her beauty. The Prince was dancing with some woman she didn’t know when he saw her. He released the other woman’s hand, staring at her with his mouth and eyes both widened, and quickly closed in on the most beautiful woman he’d seen all night.
“May I have this dance?” he asked from behind her. She turned, having not yet spotted him in the crowd of wealthy people all dressed very fine and staring at and whispering about her. Her mouth dropped open in shock at the realization that the Prince had not only found her first but had come to her. She’d thought she would have to find a way to earn a dance with him, but here he was asking her to dance!
Beneath her dress, Jacques scraped her flesh gently with his tiny claws, reminding her that she had a very important role to fulfill. Cinderella blushed and shut her mouth. “Why, yes, of course.” She curtised before giving the Prince her hand. She felt like lightheaded as he bowed to her before taking her hand. “Isn’t everyone here to dance with the Prince?”
He grinned cheekily. “Everyone wants a piece of me, but I think I may have found the one lady here whose beauty is a perfect match to my own.”
Cinderella’s mouth almost fell open again, but then she reminded herself that the Prince would certainly know he was handsome. He’d undoubtedly been told that thousands of times over the years, being complimented as many times, if not more, than she had been scolded, chastised, called “ugly”, and otherwise backhanded by her stepmother and stepsisters. Her fear and surprise left her as he whirled her across the dance floor. She lost track of the time but noted that the song to which they danced changed several times.
He was gazingly happily into her eyes. She had won the night; she had won his hand! “I think,” he spoke softly, “it may be about time to call the ball to an end. I would like to see you again tomorrow and the next day -- “
Her heart raced, pounding so loudly in her ears that she could not hear him, but she did hear the cruel, cold voice that suddenly cut into their conversation. “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but I fear there has been a deception.”
It felt like her entire body, from the top of her head through to the tips of her toes, had suddenly been filled with ice water. She trembled. Tears welled in her eyes as the Prince ceased dancing with her and turned, one hand still holding to hers to face none other than her stepmother.
“It is her!” Anastasia cried out in disbelief.
“And those are my pearls!” Grizella exclaimed. She snatched at the necklace. Its fine string broke, and pearls scattered across the floor.
“GUARDS!” the Prince bellowed, stepping in between Cinderella and her stepsister.
Cinderella stared, watching in stunned, silent disbelief as the Prince prepared to defend her. “You’d better have a good explanation for this, Lady Tremaine -- “
Cinderella found her voice to whisper, “She’s not Lady Tremaine.” It was only after she had spoken the words aloud that she heard the echo of them herself and realized what she had said. “My Mother was Lady Tremaine. I am -- “
“YOU INSOLENT CHILD!” her stepmother screeched, raising her hand.
Cinderella winced, closing her eyes. Freedom had been so close, but now it seemed so far away. Again it seemed impossible.
“GUARDS, ARREST THIS WOMAN!” the Prince bellowed. Cinderella peeked through tightly-slitted eyes and opened her blue eyes wider at the sight of the Prince tightly holding her stepmother’s wrist in his strong hand. “YOU WILL NOT HURT THIS WOMAN! SHE IS TO BE MY WIFE!”
“But, my Lord, she is but a commoner!”
“WHAT?!” All the color drained from the Prince’s handsome face. He released Cinderella’s hand and her stepmother’s wrist.
Cinderella tried to find her voice again, but all she could do was watch through wide, teary eyes as her stepmother persisted, “A filthy, common, peasant girl who cleans our chimneys! That’s how she got her name: Cinderella!”
Tears began to streak down Cinderella’s cheeks. She threw her hands up over her ears as all the times she’d heard that awful name bellowed over her years that had been supposed to be spent as a child growing into becoming a lady roared in her mind.
“I would ask you if this is true,” the Prince said, turning to face her, “but I can see that it is.” His voice and expression had completely changed.
Screams went up at the banquet tables. “MICE!”
“MICE!”
“MICE!”
“THE PALACE HAS MICE!”
“Oh, no! Gus?! Jacques?!” Cinderella felt of her dress before the entire palace -- staff, royalty, and visitors alike -- but could find no sign of her little friends.
Her stepmother sneered. “She even brought her pets with her. Filthy beasts! I should have locked you up when I had the chance instead of allowing you to do something worthwhile with your miserable life!”
“Guard, what are you doing?” the Prince snapped as the first guard arrived and latched on to Cinderella’s stepmother.
“Release me, you fool!” her stepmother demanded.
“Your Majesty?” asked the confused guard.
“Do as she says! Arrest that one!” He pointed at Cinderella. “She’s the traitor!”
“Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” Cinderella cried out as she raced, pushing and shoving through the crowd. She reached the table just in time to spot Jacques trying his best to pull Gus away from an entire sculpture made of different kinds of cheeses. Fat, little Gus Gus grabbed as much cheese as he could just as Cinderella swept both mice into her arms.
She kept running, but every exit was blocked by the guards. The crowd of people with whom she could never truly belong gaped at her. They stared and laughed, and their laughter sounded every bit as cruel as her stepmother’s and stepsisters’ ever had. “Perhaps you could just let her go, Your Majesty?” she could hear her stepmother suggesting. “She is little more than a filthy rodent herself.”
“She dared impersonate royalty,” the Prince returned. “I almost married her for God’s sake!”
“CELESTIA!” Cinderella screamed out in desperation. “CELESTIA!” There was no hope the dragon would hear her, but suddenly guards screamed. Cinderella turned, Gus and Jacques held tightly in her hands, and saw her dragon friend flying into the palace. She knocked through the guards barring the entrance way. People screamed and fled. The Prince drew the nearest guard’s sword and charged at the dragon.
“CELESTIA, WATCH OUT!” Cinderella could barely see for the tears streaming down her face, but she could see the men rushing at her friend, all their swords raised. She had brought into danger. She had saved the dragon. Her mother had saved the dragon. And yet was she to die because she dared to answer the call of her friend?! Had she led Celestia to her death?! “NO! NO! NO!”
“SHUT UP AND START FIGHTING!”
The thundering, commanding voice surprised her as it broke through Cinderella’s building hysteria. She turned and saw Lee on the floor between her and Celestia, fighting off the guards. The chopping motions he moved his hands in quickly left the guards without weapons and just as quickly knocked them away from their friend. “COME ON, CINDERELLA! MOVE! OR DO YOU WANT TO BE CLEANING CHIMNEYS FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?!”
Cinderella ran. She stumbled and left a shoe behind her but never looked back.
“You’re not going anywhere.” Her stepmother suddenly blocked her path. She sneered down at her. “You’re mine. You were part of the deal for marrying that selfish sonofabitch who was your father.”
Cinderella had never hit anyone in her life, but she did that night. She struck her stepmother with all the force of all the blows she’d wanted to give her over the years but never had. The older woman quickly fell out of her pathway. Drizella and Anastasia screamed and wailed as they caught their mother. Grizella left Anastasia to tend with her and bolted after Cinderella, but right about the time she could have caught her, Cinderella and Celestia reached each other.
Drizella’s eyes shot to a size larger than dinner plates. She paled and shook from head to toe. She screamed, thinking that Cinderella always had picked the strangest friends but being unable to say so, or say anything for that matter. Cinderella grabbed one of Celestia’s front legs and swung up onto her back. As they passed Lee, she reached a hand down for him. Lee grabbed it hurriedly, and then together, Jacques, Gus, and Suzy all huddling together between Cinderella’s body and the dragon’s, they took to the air.
“I usually don’t breathe fire around humans any longer,” Celestia remarked, “but I think I’ll make an exception tonight.”
Cinderella’s stepmother was just getting to her feet when Celestia let loose a single firebolt. It soared straight at the supposed Lady Tremaine and singed all her hair off of her head at once. “You are no Lady Tremaine,” the dragon intoned, then soared higher as the Prince’s sword just missed the end of her tail.
She belched fire this time, blowing a huge hole out of the roof of the palace, and soared through it, leaving all the other humans, their prejudiced ways, narrow minds far beneath them. Cinderella was breathing hard and still trembling as she stretched out over Celestia’s long neck. Her mind and heart both pounded. She was only vaguely aware of Lee’s gentle hand stroking her back as her new friend tried to offer her some comfort and soothe her.
“What do I do now?!” she breathed, sobbing against Celestia’s scales. “What do I do now?! I can’t go back there!”
“No,” the dragon answered her without looking back. “You do not what you were always meant to do, Cinderella.”
“What is that?!”
“You become Lady Cynthia Tremaine. You become your father’s daughter, your mother’s daughter.”
“And you stay our Cinderelly,” Suzy added, stroking her human friend’s trembling cheek with her little paw.
“You stay you,” Jacques explained.
“But you be free now. Really free,” Gus told her. “No Princey to answer to!” He shook his head.
Cinderella was stunned. Slowly her tears subsided. Her breathing became gradual, more normal. Her heartbeat was still calming as she soared with her friends just underneath the stars, which, for the first time since she’d been a little girl looking up at them with her father, seemed to be smiling down upon them. They were right: She didn’t have to go back to Lady Tremaine. She didn’t have to go back to the family who hated her and used her, to the family who’d never really been her family. Her family was right here, and freedom and independence was hers.
She never would have been free if she had married the Prince, Cinderella realized. She would have always had to answer to him. She would have had to become the woman he wanted her to be, the woman the kingdom expected him to marry, and despite the tales she’d heard of him, he wasn’t at all what she’d thought he would be. He was quite the conceited, little bastard after all.
She would never have been happy married to him, and she would not have been allowed to keep her mice friends. They would have been hunted down at the palace just as surely as Lucifer had always tried to do to them. The humans who had discovered them on the banquet table had made that much clear quite readily. They weren’t welcome at the palace, and neither was she if she was to be at all true to herself.
“I am free,” she whispered, hearing the truth in her words and relishing it. She smiled, and the smile slowly filled her whole face. “I am free!” she repeated. “I AM FREE!”
“YES, YOU ARE!” Celestia answered, roaring and swooping in a circle among the clouds. “WE ALL ARE!”
Freedom was a complicated thing, Cinderella realized as she settled in for the journey. She didn’t know where Celestia would take them, but it didn’t really matter. She had her friends; she had all the family she had left. They would find happiness. They already had really, just as she had at last found freedom. Freedom was a complicated thing. Marrying the Prince would have simply been exchanging one cage for another, but now here she was, truly and completely free, entirely able to be her own person, whoever and whatever she chose to be, at long last.
She shouted for joy as Celestia soared upwards. She didn’t know where the dragon was taking them, and it honestly didn’t matter. She felt Lee’s arms around her. Gus, Jacques, Suzy, and a dozen other mice were settling in for the journey between her body and Celestia’s neck. They were free; they were all free! And for the first time since she’d been a little girl, long before she’d lost her father or her mother, life was a beautiful thing. Anything was possible, including the ability they now all had together to live happily ever after.
The End
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Date: 2018-08-02 03:24 am (UTC)I'm finally getting caught up over here, and will read this soon. Thanks for making something for us again!
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Date: 2018-08-02 12:46 pm (UTC)