It's so difficult being nineteen. You're too young for anyone to take you seriously, or to make decisions for yourself, but you're old enough to take responsibility for your actions, and to take on a good amount of work around the household, to top it off. Or, at least, this was Amelia Derins' point of view.
In actuality, her point of view consisted of the eastern gardens below her bedrooms' (or one of her bedrooms') arching windows. She could just pick out the lightest of the flowers in the fading sunset, until they dissolved into the shady blues of the twilight. She sighed as her favorite white roses faded from sight. She loved the color white. It seemed so pure, so immaculate and untainted by the scars of time; those wounds that could, when provoked, delve into the most innocent of hearts, and with such infuriating ease. Ami had learned this lesson the hardest way anyone with so much love in them could; by seeing it corrupt someone else.
That someone else was her sister, or rather, half sister, Jezebel Pouncell-Derin. Amelia's mother died soon after her birth. Her father, Jacob Derin, remarried to the woman he loved when he was fifteen, Ezra Pouncell, who already had a daughter of four. Amelia never contradicted him in his choice of partnership, but she realized it to be incredibly distasteful when she was old enough to understand the situation. She was right.
Her father died when Ami was three, leaving her unofficially an orphan, and officially miserable. She and Jezebel (whom she playfully referred to as Jesse) grew up under Madame Pouncell's reign of chaos. Ami watched as the saddened and disgustingly naive woman neglected her daughter entirely, and forgot that Ami ever existed. Ami did not mind, she liked being alone, as there was no one worth being around except the friendly servants and the animals on the premises. Jesse, however, was unusually spoiled and kept feeding into her mother for attention, day after day prying her for "pretty things" as she called them (she was only seven at the time). Ezra finally went hysterical, screaming at Jesse and calling her an "ugly runt" and all sorts of undesirable names. Jesse quickly got over her shock and screeched right back, calling her a "horrible mother" and a "prissy whore", and other such names. Ami could only imagine where Jezebel learned them from. Ami sat at the top of the entry staircase, clutching her pale doll, Noelle, and listening for what she knew was coming soon. SMACK! Ami shut her eyes at the sound of Ezra's book hit Jesse square on the jaw, wincing at the sound of her half-sisters' stammered sobs.
"M-mommy! Mommy!" the small girl wept in terror. It was then that an unfazed Ezra told her, in an icily cool tone, "I am not your 'mommy'." As Jesse's big blue eyes widened she tripped over her words, "B-but, but, no. No." She shook her head, her black hair falling out of its neat little braid, short bangs swaying, and whispered a barely heard "No." The soft reply came in one harsh, cold word. "Yes."
Ami strained her ears so hard that they hurt. She had crawled down to the bottom steps in an effort to eavesdrop. When she heard Ezra's answer she clasped a small, pale hand over her mouth to smother a small cry, trapping the noise that would give her away and break the crucial moment. What if Ezra was just using a figure of speech, what if she didn't mean it? She knew in that moment that if the breath she needed to give was brought into the world, that could seal Jesse's fate, it could stab any chance of reconciliation between her and her supposed un-mother. So, uncomfortable as it was, she did not draw air, waiting silently for someone to speak.
"Your mother," Ezra continued, annunciating the word 'mother' as if this were an etiquette lesson rather than a crisis, "…is dead, and has been since two months after your birth, exactly." She paused and watched the tears silently roll down Jesse's pretty pink cheeks. Ezra gave her a bored look and continued, unemotionally, "I could arrange for a servant to show you her tombstone, if you'd like."
At this Jesse whimpered loudly and the tears flowed readily, as if they had been waiting for realization to come around. She buried her face in her hands and turned around, running blindly for the stairs. She made it up the first three and tripped, falling hard on her stomach. Still crying, she looked up, coming face to face with the small, delicate features of Ami, who also had small tears running down her face. Neither spoke for half a second, then Ami tried to mouth, "I'm sorry", but she never got the chance. Jesse's eyes narrowed and she jumped to her feet, hands balled into fists at her sides. She ran up the rest of the stairs, turned a corner and was gone, off to cower in a lonely corner of the castle where she could mourn in peace.
She was never the same after that day, in fact she seemed to get worse. The next day she acted as if nothing had ever happened, putting a sickly sweet smile on her face as she skipped down the stairs to breakfast.
Ami knew something was terribly wrong, but said nothing. She always chose to say nothing, because whenever she tried to speak either Jesse or Ezra would cut her off or tell her rudely to "go play". When she didn't move, a glare would follow, and the petite brunette never wanted to see what would come after that.
And then one day, not many months later, Ezra disappeared. No one seemed to know where she could have gotten off too without anyone noticing, but Ami saw that Jesse carried a rather smug expression on her face that she revealed only amongst her many stuffed teddy bears. Ami had followed her around that day, trying to work out what had happened. She slid Jesse's bedroom door open just slightly, and put her ear up to the crack. She heard Jesse talking to her bears in a soft voice, whispering "She's gone, now. All gone. And she will never be coming back."
Ami sucked in a sharp breath. Her innocent mind had not led to the conclusions that it now inhabited. She shut the door and looked at the ground, lost in contemplation. No, she would never do something like that. That's just…awful. She couldn't have-
She stopped in mid thought; she thought she heard something. She opened the door a bit again. Was that-? Was Jesse humming something? She pressed her ear up hard against the crack, concentrating.
"Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead…"
This is my first fanfic, and I know it sucks, so please don't flame me! Read and review! (oh I don't own Beauty and the beast, or what will become something like it...)