A/N: This fic is for the Can We Talk? forum's January challenge, Before the Beginning. The title is pretty self-explanatory: Write about the life of a fandom's characters before the events in the fandom's canon start. It must also contain at least one allusion to an important role the characters play in the original work. Each of the three chapters in this story contains one allusion.
For the challenge participants who are not familiar with A Bug's Life: This chapter's allusion is that in the movie, Dot has trouble flying because her wings are too weak. Towards the end, she is attacked by a particularly frightening grasshopper named Thumper, who scares her so much, she falls off a cliff. Naturally, she tries really hard to fly and saves herself.
Please R&R!
The most important skill for a young princess whose destiny was to one day take over her mother's role as queen to learn is leadership. And the best way to teach a young princess about leadership is to set her up with the task that teaches an uncountable number of children worldwide about being a leader: babysitting her younger siblings.
And yes, this truth does apply to young ant princesses. Take six-months-and-eighteen-days-old (equal to eleven ant years) Princess Atta. She was now at the age that the Queen of Ant Island felt comfortable with leaving three-ant-year-old Dot in her care. And thus began Atta's royal training in leadership.
Atta didn't consider it training at the time. Her mother actually made a point not to use the word in association with the babysitting around her. Atta already had constant examinations on the history and customs of Ant Island and the Queen didn't want to risk a meltdown by letting her suspect that looking after Dot was really just more work. And Atta actually looked forward to spending time with her little sister, since Dot was already very smart and curious for her age but was still cute and fun to play with, making avoiding the "training" label even easier.
The one difference that most separated the babysitting from all of Atta's other training was that she would occasionally be interrupted by non-royals.
One afternoon, Atta and Dot were playing tag in a clearing near the tree in the center of Ant Island. Dot was It, and, of course, being only three years old, could not catch up with her sister. That is, until Atta saw a certain young harvester ant innocently walking down the clearing and stopped running. Dot finally caught up to Atta and tagged her. She clapped and squealed, "I got you!" but Atta was too busy rolling her eyes to notice.
The kid heard Dot shouting and looked in their direction. "Princess!" he shouted when he saw Atta, grinning. He started running in her direction — or at least tried to, because the yellow flower he was holding was really weighing him down.
"Hi, Flik," Atta said flatly when he finally reached them. "What's the flower for?"
"It's actually a dandelion! And it was the only one that I could find that was still yellow." Flik paused, interpreting the blank look on Atta's face as confusion. "You know, like how all of the other dandelions are all white and puffy now?"
"Yeah. That's fantastic," Atta replied unenthusiastically.
"Would you, um, would you like it?" Flik asked, struggling for words. "I thought that you might."
"Sure . . . " Atta said with a touch of sarcasm that Flik really didn't register.
"Great, then! Here you go!" He held the dandelion out for Atta to take, which she reluctantly did. He stood there awkwardly for a few seconds, possibly waiting for Atta to start up a conversation. When he realized that she wasn't going to, he waved half-heartedly, uttered a nervous, "Bye, Princess," and ran off.
Dot watched this whole exchange with a look of wonder in her eyes. When the boy was gone, she turned to her sister and asked, "That was Flik?"
Atta nodded. "Yeah, that was Flik. He really likes me. A lot."
Dot thought for a few seconds, then said, "He has a creepy crush on you."
Atta was shocked at her little sister. "Dot! Where did you learn that from?"
"You said that to Mama one time."
"Well," Atta said as she picked her sister up, "sometimes I say things that aren't very nice. Don't repeat anything I say if you've never heard it before anymore, okay?"
"Okay," Dot said. Then she yawned, "I'm tired."
"Do you want to go back to the anthill to go to sleep?" Atta said. Dot nodded. "Okay, then. I'll fly us back. It'll be faster." She really wasn't supposed to carry her sister around while flying, but that didn't stop her from lifting her small wings from her back and slowly floating off the ground with Dot in tow.
Dot relaxed and lay her head down in her sister's arms. "I like how you can fly," she whispered.
"Well, you know what? You'll be able to fly someday, too," Atta said.
"But I don't have wings!"
"They'll grow in, I promise."
"Maybe they won't. Maybe I'll never fly. Or I'll be a bad flyer and I'll fall down."
"Oh, Dot, don't think like that. Queen ants' wings always grow in. And even if you have a hard time flying, one day you'll really need to fly and then you will fly, no problem."
"Oh." Dot closed her eyes and fell asleep just as Atta landed at the mouth of the anthill.
Atta brought her to the royal family's sleeping quarters and tucked her into the crib that the head carpenter ant had fashioned from twigs that had fallen from the big tree. "Goodnight, Dot," she whispered. Then, she headed to the anthill's schoolroom for her big history examination. Oh, how she hated training!
A/N: And thus concludes chapter one. Three more to go!