Disclaimer: Extraordinarily not mine.
A/N: Written for the 178th challenge over at KH Drabble, the prompt of which was 'passion', although this is the extended, non-drabble version of my entry. Set pre-canon. Reviews exceedingly welcome!
All or Nothing
© Scribbler, March 2009.
Maleficent's never been one for doing things by halves. She's an all-or-nothing girl; a real throw-the-whole-of-yourself-into-it, what's-the-point-of-holding-back? sort, who can't understand anyone who talks big but thinks small.
"You'll come a cropper if you're not more circumspect," Ansem says. He always surveys his young student like an interesting magical principle he can't completely fathom. Lord Ansem views the world in terms of facts and discoveries, and moves from one to the next like a hummingbird testing the nectar of a thousand flowers in its attempt to find the perfect fit for its tastes.
Maleficent feels like one of his projects, sometimes.
"Circumspect? You expect me to sit around all day just reading about magic when I should be using my powers?" She's always shouting while he just sits there, saying nothing and being infuriating.
In time she will learn the power of not raising your voice, not lashing out wildly, and not showing your hand before you're ready, but at sixteen she can no more stop her personality bubbling over than she can stop breathing.
"Even fairies need to learn the basics."
"Then maybe I don't want to be a fairy!"
Ansem levels a severe look at her. He's always reprimanding her for something or other. He doesn't like it when others question him or try to go their own way. one day, she thinks, he's going to 'come a cropper' himself by underestimating what others can dream and get up to while he's busy trying to make them fit into his own boxes. "We are what we are, Maleficent. We are what we're born to be, and nothing can ever change that."
She scowls and flits from the room. "We'll see."
It's a conversation they've had a thousand times before, but they only conduct it a handful more before she finally grows so tired of his dusty library and her mapped-out future she flits right out the gates. Let him teach someone else, she thinks. He may be 'wise', but she's the first of her kind born here in centuries, and she was born for more than this. Ansem and Radiant Garden crowd her like vines trying to choke a single rare rose. She has lofty ideas of her own capabilities, and her daydreams don't involve servitude while waiting for the Faerie Dell to vomit up someone to take her place at court so she can do what she actually wants.
Even at sixteen, a stone's throw from her crib of petals, Maleficent isn't willing to bow and scrape to others.
"I won't follow," she snarls, casting aside her leaf-dress and pixie-dust. They're light as air and heavy as shackles. "Nobody can tell me what to do."
She breaks the rules. She always has done, but now she smashes them, just as she smashes her way free of Radiant Garden and through its gummi shield. She finds a place in another world; one where her talents are valued and people respect her – until they don't. A place where a fairy who wants to be more can make a name for herself – until that name becomes 'witch'.
Her teenage temper tantrums are allowed to continue unchecked. Nobody has the courage to try making her grow up – not even the three interfering old biddies, who see what she is and try to make her wear yellow to match their pink, blue and green. They don't understand – can't understand her impulse to chafe against the restraints of others – and try to cajole her into this world's template of a fairy until she removes herself entirely from their prying and meddling. She shuts herself away and makes herself look as different as she can, eager to distance and recreate herself from the ashes of her old life. Eventually they use what they've learned from their mistakes with her to raise a princess as a gentle pauper, even though she's also sixteen and special.
Maleficent twists her magic to change her shape and size, employs other fairies to steal artefacts that channel her powers in different, darker ways, and carries nothing but the tint of her skin as a reminder of her past. She learns, masters and controls her powers in ways Ansem could never have dreamed. Sometimes she thinks of going back across the void to show him what she has become. Sometimes she dreams of casting him out of his own castle and making him watch her crush his precious court with its precious status quo, but she's enjoying herself in this world to give up her place here.
At first she revels in the fear. She's powerful. She's the most powerful. Even the king and queen fear her. Like many before her, in countless worlds, she confuses fear with respect and only comes a cropper when she finally realises that her talents have isolated her. Her powers have become bars and her reputation is her prison. She looks down from the tower that she demanded be built for her and realises that even though she is a woman, a leader, an idol, she is still following. There's no whiff of pixie-dust about her, but she is what other people say – witch-witch-witch. Her black robes contain her as chokingly as her leaf-dress, and she descends on the christening of the new princess with fiery punishment in her heart, searching for some reason to rebuke and attack the people who should be her subjects but are only her new jailers in their own way.
Sixteen years later, the wings bound down under her robes try to flutter away like trapped birds as she demolishes the kingdom. She surveys the sleeping princess, the smouldering remains of a castle and a handsome prince around them.
At the end, straining against the pull of the spinning-wheel and staring at her punisher with frightened blue eyes, the girl couldn't understand why Maleficent hates her so. But then she's always been so content with her lot. Briar Rose or Aurora, she has always let the world manipulate her without taking a stand of her own. She has never made a decision of her own and actually acted on it. Maleficent thought there might be hope for her when she met her young man for the first time and promised him her heart, but the girl didn't fight for him or her right to happiness. She just let the tiresome old biddies dictate to her again. The princess is an everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-wash, once-upon-a-dream kind of girl who has probably never had a hormonal screaming fit in her life.
Yellow eyes blossom in the flickering fire-glow, crawling from the ribcage of a noble steed and beneath a sword that would've defeated Maleficent if she hadn't cast those stupid godmothers through the gummi shield. Grasping black fingers jitter around her, called by the darkness and bitterness that swamp her heart like her thorny forest swamps the kingdom, sticking the sleeping people full of barbs and drinking their blood like a hummingbird drinking nectar.
Once again a new beginning unfolds in Maleficent's mind.
She's an all-or-nothing person, after all – which means she takes it all and leaves nothing, whatever world she migrates to.
Fin.