Her room was a bright shade of pink and seemed to be drowning in toys and stuffed animals, most of which was also pink. The only thing that didn't resemble the unnaturally bright shade was a small stuffed brown bear with a yellow bow tied around it's neck that often sat on her bed – her very first gift from her parents from just after she was born.
Kai leads his daughter to her bed and she flings herself onto it, quickly scrambling to get under the – pink – blankets. She tucks her brown bear into her side and looks up at him with her hands curled at her chin and her wide eyes patiently waiting for him to sit down and begin.
Bedtime stories with Tara. His favourite time of the day.
Kai balances himself on the edge of his daughter's bed, wiggling a little to get comfortable and make her laugh, and asks kindly, "What story will I be telling tonight?"
"Can you tell me the story of the princess and the prince tonight, daddy?" Tara squeaks out in a small voice. Every night when she asks Kai for a story, she always does so in a tiny voice that he can barely hear. Kai had asked her once why she was so afraid to ask him to tell her a story, and she had replied that she was afraid he wouldn't know the story and because of that she wouldn't get to hear the story she wanted. The Emperor of the Eastern Commonwealth had then proceeded to spend every spare minute he had reading every children's story he could get his hands on.
"Which princess and prince would that be, sweetie?"
Tara says a little more loudly than her previous sentence— and sounding very proud of herself— "I don't think you will know this prince and princess because we learnt about them in school today!"
Kai visibly panics for a moment, but reins it in so he looks calm on the outside. He's never not known a bedtime story for Tara, whether is be about dragons and knights and princesses locked in towers, or mermaids in underwater kingdoms, or even that really weird one about a girl who falls down a hole and into another world. He has always known the bedtime stories that she wants him to tell. But what happens if he doesn't know this one? Will Tara stop wanting him to tell her bedtime stories?
It turns out that his worry is for nothing, because she answers, "Princess Selene and Prince Kaito!"
Kai is… shocked. No other way to put it. He's shocked that they actually teach children stories about him and Cinder. He's shocked that his daughter thinks it's a fictional story. He's shocked that his daughter actually wants him to tell her a story about her mother and her father, and shocked that she clearly doesn't know that it's about her mother and father. Kai wants to laugh when he says, "I actually know that story very well."
He claps his hands and rubs them together in small circles. "You ready?" Tara nods her head vigorously. "Okay." Kai takes a big dramatic breath, full of a deliberate whooshing of air and laughter in the back of his throat, drawing out the anticipation just a little.
"Daddy!"
He laughs, and starts with, "Once upon a time—"
"No it wasn't," Tara immediately cuts him off. "Our teacher said it was twenty years ago, not once upon a time." Twenty-two years, Kai mentally corrected, but who was counting?
"Twenty years ago," Kai begins the story again, emphasizing his words to show the change and appeasing his daughter in the process. "There was a young prince who lived in a big palace – and he was looking for a princess. But the problem was that she had disappeared as a child and no one knew where she was. The prince searched near and far, but Princess Selene could be found nowhere.
"But on one fateful day he met a girl. She was a mechanic and she was covered from head to toe dust and dirt, and she had a smudge of grease right—" Kai leaned forward a touched a finger to Tara's forehead, and she giggled "—here."
"That sounds kind of like mama!" Tara said as if she'd discovered the world's biggest secret.
"It does," Kai agreed wryly. "When the girl met the prince she was shy. She stumbled a little when she bowed, and she was doing her best to act as formal and polite as possible, and it made him smile. After their first meeting, he kept running into the girl everywhere, and he grew to like her a lot. So much that he asked her to the ball. But she said no."
"My teacher told me today that when the prince asked the princess to the ball and the princess said yes. My teacher never said anything about a girl either," Tara huffs.
"That's because your teacher doesn't have all the information – and remember, the prince doesn't know where princess Selene is yet. The prince kept trying to ask the girl to the ball, but she always refused. But when the time for the ball arrived the girl did go to the ball."
"She did?"
"Yes. But she had come to warn Prince Kaito of the evil queen's plans."
Tara's eyes brightened. "The evil queen from the moon?"
"That's right. But it was too late and the evil queen escaped back to the moon. The evil queen had also discovered where Princess Selene was hiding, and wanted to stop her from reaching the prince, but she couldn't.
"Princess Selene found Prince Kaito, and the prince discovered that the girl who he had asked to the ball was really the princess who was hiding from the evil queen. The prince decided that he would help the princess get to the moon so she could help all the people on Luna gain back their freedom from the evil queen. Once the princess was on the moon, she was able defeated the evil queen with a lot of help from all her friends and began to restore peace and safety to all those who lived on the moon."
"But my teacher said that the evil queen was difficult to defeat and that the princess had to be clever and deceptive, and she had to do it all alone, and—"
"Who's telling the story, missy?" Kai crows. He wiggled his fingers threateningly above her, and Tara eyes widened knowingly. Kai leaped and began tickling her to a chorus of 'no, daddy!' and 'please!'.
The door squeaked open behind them, and Kai heard Cinder call above their daughter's squealing and his laughter, "What is going on in here?"
"Just trying to tell our daughter the fictional story of Prince Kaito and Princess Selene," he says, making sure that she knows not to give away the fact that this specific bedtime story is not made-up. "But our cheeky little daughter here keeps butting in with details she learned in school today." He pauses in his tickling for a moment to let Cinder absorb that information.
"School?" she asks faintly. Cinder shakes her head a bit then declares in a louder voice. "I know this story, too. How about I finish it off for us?"
Glad for the reprieve from her father's tickling, Tara agreed enthusiastically. Cinder approaches the bed, her cyborg foot falling heavier and making a soft thud on the carpet every other step. She gently nudges Kai over so that she can sit next to him. Kai wraps an arm tightly around Cinder's waist and places a gently kiss in her hair before returning his attention back to their daughter. "We were just at the part where Princess Selene defeated the evil queen, weren't we, Tara?" Kai says.
"Yeah," Tara says, then quickly adds before Cinder can start telling the story. "Princess Selene is so cool, mama! I wish she was real and she could tell me the story, too!"
Kai talks to his daughter, but his words are aimed at Cinder; "Even if she isn't real, sweetie, she was a hero who risked what little she had to save thousands of people she didn't even know. She was brave, and smart, and she loved with her whole heart. Don't ever forget that."
Cinder clears her throat. "Okay, um, the princess defeated the evil queen."
"On the moon," Tara chimes in.
"On the moon," Cinder agrees. In a somber voice, she says, "But the prince had to leave soon after to be with his people, and the princess couldn't go with him because she had to be with her people."
Tara chews nervously on her bottom lip. "What happened?"
Cinder smiles a little sadly at her daughter. "Well, for a while they couldn't be together. They were busy trying to make everything better for their people and everyone in the world that it was a long time before they found their way back to each other. But, when everything had settled down, and Princess Selene was no longer needed on the moon, she found her way back to her prince.
"They loved each other very much – even after all the time they spent apart – and because of that they had a big wedding so the whole world could see and share their love, too. They started a family by having a baby girl and a baby boy, who loved very much—" Cinder leaned forward and kissed Tara on the forehead — " and they were a very happy family."
Kai threw his arms to the in a grand gesture. "And they all lived happily ever after! The end."
Tara mouth stretched into a wide O when she yawned. "I like that story better than the one our teacher told us. Can you tell me it again tomorrow night, daddy?"
"Sure, sweetie," Kai says, and leans forward to kiss his daughter's forehead, too. "Tomorrow night. Sweet dreams, Tara."
"Sweet dreams, Tara," Cinder echoes lovingly. She picks up Kai's hand in a loose hold and leads him to the bedroom door. "We'll so you in the morning, baby," she whispers into the room as she slowly swings the door closed.
The door closes with a soft click behind them and Cinder draws in a deep breath. "Oh my stars," she whispers to the air.
"I know, right?" Kai says to her with a laugh. "When she first asked me, she was all 'I'm pretty sure you won't know this story, daddy'." Kai laughs again and this time Cinder laughs with him.
"How much did you have to censor it to make the story kid-appropriate?"
"So much." Kai surrounds Cinder with his arms and presses her into a wall, nuzzling his nose into her loose hair. His lips begin to trace trails down the side of her, making his way to her lips. Between kisses he says, "All of the most important details to the story of Princess Selene and Prince Kaito did not make it into tonight's retelling of their story."
Cinder gasps in a breath. "Maybe one day we'll tell her everything that happened. The truth."
A loud crying startles the two apart. Kai takes a moment to get himself under control, watching as Cinder leans her head back against the wall in an effort to catch her breath. "Maybe one day we'll tell our son, too." Cinder pushes off the wall and begins to make her way towards the crying.
"That will be one hell of a day." Kai says, following close behind Cinder. "How do we explain to our children that you were the world's most wanted fugitive when you were sixteen and that you once kidnapped me as to stop my getting married to your aunt… and, well, all the other stuff that came after that?"
"It will be very confusing, I'm sure," Cinder says amusingly. "We can just bury all that stuff with stories of all the trouble their Uncle Thorne has gotten into during the time he spent with us."
Kai nods and smiles. "We can even invite the whole Rampion crew down when we do it, and Thorne can help with the taking our kids' minds off of our really weird love story."
"If that's what you want to call it," Cinder says over her shoulder as she walks into their son's room. She picks up the toddler boy from his bed and rocks him gently, making calming sounds to stop his crying. She grins at Kai and mouths, "I love you" and Kai feels his heart swell with love for his family.
He's never been happier in his life.
A/N: to see why i chose the name Tara as Cinder and Kai's daughter's name ( www. goddess gift goddess- myths/ goddess_ tara_ white. htm ) (without spaces). I have no idea if any of that stuff is actually right, but the things listed on that website kind of appealed to me as something Cinder and Kai would want for their child after everything they've been through.
I'm told that Tara is a goddess of peace (buddhism i think), but also that another version of a goddess named Tara is associated with Kuan Yin, the great Chinese goddess of compassion, which linked back to Kai's culture in a way. The whole point of picking a name of a goddess was also to link that back to Cinder's birth name Selene, who was the greek goddess of the moon.