Title: cinderellie
Author: Digimon Empress Yaten (de yaten)
Notes: Giftfic for the khrequest community on livejournal. Roxas + Cinderella. Reviews are welcome, especially if you favorite.
Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts or its characters, I don't claim to own them.
He is calm, almost neutral, and his eyes are scanning her with what she recognizes as disdain - something quite familiar to her, whether from stepmother or stepsister or from Duchess So-and-So when the Prince had introduced his new bride to the highborn woman.
Finally, after a minute or maybe even a few, he says: "This is disappointing. You're not a princess at all."
"Oh?" She asks, even though she meant to say "get out of my bedroom or I'm calling the guard." She meant to say that a while ago, actually, when this strange boy glided in through her window ("Peter Pan?" she had said, half in a dream) and held her at ... well, key point.
He is short and young, very young - still on the cusp of childhood, she thinks. And yet she still feels the crackle of danger surrounding him, a thick air that weighs down heavily on her chest. Someone as dangerous as this boy didn't have a need for false bravado or show of muscle or anger - he was danger, plain and simple.
But, oh, that question was asked a while ago and he is back to scanning her up and down up and down and -- finally, again, after what seems like ages, he speaks.
"Princesses," he says, voice flat and ever calm, "are supposed to have soft hands and drink from little teacups and wear lace up to their ears."
She wants to laugh and say that someone has been reading too many fairy-tales for their own good, because—
"You're none of those things. It's—It's your hands." He pauses, and she examines her hands almost instinctively. "They're calloused, used." She shakes her head, no, they are no princess hands, but it's not her... "Why? Why are you a princess?"
"Why?" She mimics, and she might be imagining that his hand tightens on his strange weapon.
"Tell me. I want to know."
"I, well, I..." she doesn't know where to begin - her father's death? her stepmother? the talking mice?
Finally, and though there's a little birdie in the back of her head telling her this is a bad move, she tiptoes backwards until she is sitting on her soft silk-sheeted bed. She folds her hands together and takes a deep breath.
"Once upon a time, there was a girl named Cinderella..."
--
"What sort of princess," he asks, as soon as the Happily Ever After has been had, "is friends with talking mice and rides in a coach made from a pumpkin?"
She only smiles, genuine because he hasn't hurt her so why not? and says, "This sort of princess, I suppose." She laughs, light. "And that pumpkin coach carried me to my dreams!"
He didn't fall asleep during the story, although she doesn't think that very strange, after all:
Bedtime stories were only tiring for children who had spent the day pretending at piracy and dragon slaying, and he might have been an almost-child, but there is nothing pretend about the way he carelessly speaks to her of Heartless (she knew of those, she said) and Hearts (hers was stolen, once) and the way that people sometimes made an "O" face when their heart was ripped out.
But he politely waits until her story is finished before speaking to her of Darkness and Nobodies and how he doesn't remember anything from Before but it-doesn't-bother-me-at-all-to-not-remember-you-know. She nods and smiles, of course it doesn't.
He stands then, weapon still at his side, and turns to leave.
She stands then, and again there's that little birdie pecking at her brain, but she says it anyway: "What sort of prince helps the dragon to steal people's hearts?"
He doesn't turn as she thought he would, he only leaps onto the windowsill and mutters, "This kind of prince, I suppose," before leaping into Nothingness.
The next day, she receives word that all the pumpkins in the kingdom have been smashed to pieces.