A/N: Penny deserves more fluff. So I had to write some more fluff.
It's not like she's read in the storybooks, the dog-eared, tattered ones that she'd always murmur aloud to Rufus while she perched on her bed and the afternoon sunlight spilled through the window. The families described in the storybooks are saccharine and syrupy, and her new family isn't like that. Not quite. Mum has a habit of swearing under her breath when she's lost her keys, and Dad has a fierce way of scowling that always makes Penny white-faced and stammering (although whenever he sees this, he always apologises).
The first week after she's adopted, Penny scarcely knows up from down. Her teddy bear is the only constant, his back lovingly sewn by the matron at the orphanage after the devil's eye has been removed. She never puts him down, and the one time her mother tries to take him away to be cleaned, Penny screams at the top of her lungs and ends up hiding in her closet for forty minutes until Mum crouches down outside the door and explains that if Penny wants to keep Teddy, Penny isn't going to lose him.
"Promise?" Penny tearfully lisps, and her new mother nods. Her eyes are warm and brown and nothing like Medusa's overly-painted ones, glinting with false concern as fake and tawdry as the jewelry she wore.
It is two months before Penny stops having nightmares every night, stops waking up with a scream dying on her lips and her father bursting through the door, terrifying the little girl even more as she struggles free of the wisps that haunt her, the snap of the crocodiles' teeth against her skin, Medusa's eyes burning through her, and always the water, rising up around her, threatening to choke her, drown her. She can't take baths unless the water is only a few inches deep, which makes bathing a challenge.
"I'm sorry," she apologises over and over as Mum helps scrub her with a washcloth, Teddy presiding from the counter by the sink. He doesn't like to get wet.
"It's okay, honey," Mother says, as she brushes wet hair out of Penny's face and tucks it behind her ears, her smile as kind as she can make it. "I understand."
But Penny's not so sure and sometimes when she's cleaned and brushed and tucked into bed, she thinks about running away again, just to run, to give her parents a chance to have a better child, a better orphan who's prettier and smarter and doesn't hide in the corner every time someone raises their voice the tiniest bit.
"Have faith," Rufus always told her, but Rufus isn't here, and Penny doesn't know what to do. She wishes Bernard and Bianca could come back, but they're probably off rescuing some other child like they rescued her.
You helped rescue yourself, her teddy seems to remind her, but Penny only blushes and digs the toe of her shoe into the floorboards.
It's a slow process, painfully slow, but her mum and dad are as patient with her as they are with the puppy they get her next Christmas, and finally, Penny can smile, knowing that maybe, just maybe, Rufus is right.
Things really do turn out all right.