Title: ciao bell[e] arrivederci
Summary: The lady unravels before him.
Note: I woke up in the middle of the early morning and I read an article about the multi-civilization, multi-millennial existence of Cinderella stories and I kinda just went back to sleep determined to write alt!fairy tales. So here's number one.
The magic expires with much less glamour than it had at birth, un-knitting diamond choker into roped pebble.
Ella hears the bells clang, a sound that winds into her and strangles her eardrums, and knows what is coming. Her jaw becomes marble stiff. She knows the prince can feel the tension hold her captive because his arm curls around her. His strokes - never deviating from socially appropriate - burrow through skin and up into her lower ribs.
If he knew, if he knew -
She can hear her stepsisters and Lady Tremaine laugh at the worn dress they'd graciously descended to gift upon her and it is a cowbell in her ears. A rattle crackles in her lungs.
Each step out from his embrace brings her closer to the ground, feet sinking through glass until she was stepping across the smooth granite of the palace deck. Her souls ache for her soles to take the stairs at a sprint; surely whatever god out there, the one that handed her - chucked her, really - into her station, would forgive her for showing her holey underwear to royalty.
- dear Cinderella, hold my hat!
Ella moves towards the fountains, knowing her feet are taking turns, both wheedling for speed and scolding the selfish one that wants to go again at the same time. She can run, she supposes, but she's survived scorn. What is left to throw at her?
"Where are you going?"
She half-turns towards the prince. As they'd danced across the expanse of his father's palace, her heart had wings and had flown high past the clouds - she'd thought she'd been possessed by the Wicked Stepmother's shoes, she couldn't stop and had been ready to dance to her death. It was insanity.
Now, her wings are burning, falling. She'd wanted too much and had mistaken the sun for a wishing star. Now, the sun is a thief and her heart is packed away in concrete shoes, held over a vat of boiling oil and pain.
"Nowhere."
Sometimes, Ella thinks that is the only place her stepfamily has left to her, that tiny room in the farthest part of the manner, so she gets there fast. They are, of course, never so gracious as to visit.
She can feel his steps, small earthquakes underfoot, so she knows when he sees the satin unfurling into rags that drip around her thighs.
To his credit, he doesn't back away. He just stops. The prince stops with his stare bullying the back of her head.
In response, the jeweled band that had held her hair in its neat chignon through hours upon hours of dancing and laughter retreats in as dignified a manner as any. Her bun sags under the useless weight of package string, but she ignores it. She stares out at a grand excuse for a backyard - the water shooting out of what must be a marble porpoise in green flashes, the shadow of a blasé nude mermaid, and every extravagance she knew too little to dream about - and pretends she isn't being undressed.
"I don't understand."
A tightrope walker can cross her laughter, the way it sticks inside her ribs. Ella holds her head high; after all, what does she have to be ashamed of. "I wished, I wished," she says. "My fairy godmother offered me a way out of my circumstances, offered to give me what was mine by right for the night."
He shifts his weight from side to side, as uncomfortable as he'd seemed on the ballroom platform, taking every eligible hand in the kingdom underneath his lips. "What?" he pauses. "What are your circumstances?"
Ella turns around, both feet decisively against this. She'd wanted him to not care. She'd wanted him to overlook -
They look each other in the eyes. He's stopped shifting, but she's taken it up. She's trying to be brave and gather the strands together in her palm, but it is so very hard. She had been brave, once, she thinks, but it's so hard once one gets used to keeping one's head down. Summers fighting to keep her head above water had become years of just floating, staring at the sky.
"I wear them," Ella says. She holds her chin higher, tries not to look over his head.
She's standing in front of her new stepmother again, two snickering shadows behind her skirt, and it is the last time she asked the question that has burrowed itself into every joint of her body. Over the laughter and sneers in her mind, the birds tittering sleepily in the pine trees surrounding the myriads of fountains, and the water spouts themselves, she hears the wistful line again and again and again. She is a maid standing in poor excuses for clothes that the palace maids would never be caught dead in and dares to hope for a different answer.
Can you love me even if I'm not of your own?