"Well, this is a disaster," DG said to her reflection. She plucked at the material at her waist despondently. "I thought we were cool, Ramona!"
The older woman shrugged helplessly. "Sorry, Your Highness, this is what was specified. I just do what I'm asked."
DG sighed and slumped even more, but unluckily for her, Ramona's sewing was high-quality and the seams held. They held so tight, in fact, that DG worried she'd never get out of the lacy, mint green monstrosity she was encased in. It had a high neckline and puffed short sleeves, like the dresses she sort of remembered wearing as a child, before she was sent to the Other Side. Overall she couldn't imagine looking much worse. She grabbed a fistful of hair in each hand and as her handmaids entered the room she moaned and pulled her hair across her face.
"Don't look at me, I'm hideous!"
Sarah tutted at her sympathetically, but DG was almost sure she saw Deidre roll her eyes. "Can you guys help?" DG implored. "Can you do my hair like you did last time and try to balance out this horror show?"
Deidre shook her head. "Sorry, DG, we were told to go with a more traditional style this time."
DG narrowed her eyes. "Et tu, Deidre?"
Deidre just looked confused and as DG sat down with a huff and muttered, "Betrayal is all around me..."
Sarah brought her a cool compress for her eyes and DG sent herself to her happy place, which was a beautiful waterfall where she had a picnic with Glitch, Raw, Az and Cain, and sometimes Cain didn't wear a shirt. It must have been an extension of her magic that this place felt so real to her, and when Sarah removed the compress from her eyes it was as if she'd been physically yanked back from a different location.
Sarah smiled kindly at her disoriented charge. "Okay, DG, all that's left is your makeup. Then you'll be ready to dance the night away!"
"Is that a joke?" DG said. She pouted out her lower lip as Sarah put on her mascara and Deidre laced her into a pair of ugly black ankle boots.
"Done!" Sarah said with a flourish, and DG blinked.
"What do you mean, done?" she asked. "Usually it takes forever."
Sarah fidgeted but looked her right in the eye when she said, "This time we were told not to use all your usual paints."
DG rubbed the space between her eyes and heaved a sigh. "Okay. Thanks for trying, guys. See ya."
It was as close as she would come to outright dismissing them, but they got the idea and slipped quietly from the room. DG took three centering breaths and stood up slowly. She approached her vanity mirror and couldn't keep her jaw from dropping.
"Yup," she said finally. "Disaster."
Her face was completely bare of makeup except for the mascara, which had lengthened her eyelashes to ridiculous, doll-like proportions. The makeup wasn't as bad as the shoes, which weren't as bad as the dress, but nothing compared to the abomination that was her hair. It was curled into tight, stiff ringlets that were suspended around her face and made her look like her etiquette teacher's poodle. She'd never worn eye makeup in Kansas, and mostly left her hair alone, and now she felt justified in her belief that less was more. Less wasn't fancy or sexy, but more led to the frightening vision in her vanity mirror.
Sarah had left the mascara on the vanity and DG edged closer to it. Surely if the dress had an accident, she couldn't be blamed? She'd already laid extensive groundwork proving to her family that she was a klutz. "The perfect con," she breathed out as her hand stretched out toward the viscous black makeup.
"What are you doing?"
With a shriek she whipped around, and one of the longer ringlets swung with what felt like intentional malice right into her eye. She swore and clutched a hand to her eye, and although all her instincts were telling her to hide, she remained rooted to the spot. Cain was staring at her like she had six heads and she immediately felt like crying.
"So this is your penance?" he asked. "Can't say it's really you."
She looked miserably back at him with her good eye. "I look like a china doll, and not in a good way. In like a, live in a grown man's secret basement room kind of way."
He was still taking her in, peering around to see the giant bow at the back of her waist. She saw his lips press into a thin line, and she dropped her hand and gasped.
"Are you laughing at me?"
"Sorry, kid," he said. "You're making it hard not to."
"Oh sure, blame the victim. Like this was my idea," she said. "I try to avoid attracting every pedo in the kingdom if I can help it, thank you very much."
"Bet you learned your lesson, though," he said.
She huffed a huge sigh and swiveled in her chair to face the mirror again. There were two stress-induced spots of pink high on her cheeks, enhancing her doll-like looks.
"I look stupid," she said. He nodded mildly. "One dress! One slightly more mature dress and I end up trussed up like the girl from Small Wonder. I mean, I thought I looked good." She couldn't help glancing his way to see if he agreed.
"I don't think it was a question of you looking attractive, Princess." He reached out and gave one of her curls a tug. It sprung firmly back up into place.
"Maybe it should be," she snapped back. "I know my parents secretly want to get me married off. They should have let me stay at that party, if they want a new son so badly."
Upset at the thought of being handed to a stick-up-his-butt royal, and dizzy with the pleasant tingling in her scalp from where Cain had pulled her hair, she stood and tried to move as regally into the bathroom as she could. Her undergarments didn't make it easy and she had to grab handfuls of her skirt to speed up.
In the bathroom, she sank down onto the edge of her tub and collected herself. Even through all the product in her hair, Cain's fingers on her hair made her imagine what it would feel like to have him move his fingers freely through her normal, wavy and unencumbered hair. She shivered.
Some days when he looked at her, she thought maybe he felt the way she did; that despite how utterly strange it was, he harbored the same intense attraction to her that she felt for him. But then the other days came, the ones when he got to witness her in all her awkwardness and discomfort, or when she'd feel herself slip and she knew her face showed him exactly how much he meant to her, and he'd look back at her just as stoically as ever. On those days she'd wonder why she kept torturing herself with those thoughts.
Maybe in the end this hideous ensemble was a blessing. Cain would never be able to look at her without remembering this, and nothing would ever happen. The men in the court would feel the same way, and she could live out her days in peace as a spinster. She looked to the ceiling to keep the tears in her eyes from falling.
If she'd known a month earlier she'd be in this mess, she would have done things differently. She would have still begged to choose her own dress for her coming out ball, but she would have brought Az with her for a second opinion. In reality, Cain had blanched at the idea of a lengthy shopping trip and had left her in the hands of the one other person he trusted to keep her safe.
Glitch had cheerfully approved everything she tried on, and it didn't occur to her until much later that his mind might have been elsewhere the entire time. He also didn't seem to recognize that she had girl parts, so it made sense that he saw no problem with the dress she'd chosen and the way it did little to hide those girl parts.
With a rush of shame, she remembered the confusion on her friend's face when her parents rushed her out of the ballroom immediately after she made her entrance. Her heart had sunk to the bottom of her chest when she saw how upset he was, even lower than it did when her parents voiced their extreme disapproval. She'd embarrassed their family, they said. How could she have thought the dress she had on was appropriate?
"I didn't think about whether it was princess-worthy," she tried to explain. "I put it on and it made me feel beautiful. Like, you know, a woman. I thought that was what this party meant."
It was the wrong choice, they said, and next time image consultants would be there to ensure the right message got across. The right message, apparently, was that she was five years old. She couldn't see how this was much better, but what did she know? She'd hidden the trouble-starting slinky gunmetal gown inside a long woolen coat in the back of her armoire and resigned herself to the humiliation she'd brought on herself.
"Kid?" Cain's voice came through the door.
She didn't answer, but grabbed some tissue and dabbed it beneath her eyes to make sure no tears escaped. She straightened up and walked out to join him.
"This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever worn," she told him. "And I once worked as an elf at the mall."
"It's not forever," he said. She couldn't help but feel he was downplaying her situation. "You don't have to be downstairs for a while yet. Do you need anything?"
"If I did, I wouldn't send you for it," she said.
He made a non-committal noise and reached a hand out to her face. She froze, but he just wiped at something under her eye.
"You had a smudge in your lashpaint," he said.
She giggled in spite of herself. "Lashpaint."
"What?"
"It's called mascara, Cain," she said.
He frowned. "I'm pretty sure it's called lashpaint. Why would it be called mascara?"
"Because, it-" she stopped, perplexed. "Fine, we'll call it lashpaint. Leave me alone."
She went back to the vanity and took a deep breath. She frowned at her reflection and poked at her hair, but it didn't move. "What did they use, glue?" she asked. In a fit of pique she grabbed her hairbrush and started tearing it through her curls.
"Stop that," Cain said. "It looks painful."
"It is," she said, gritting her teeth as the brush made another pass.
"Hey," he said, taking the brush from her. "You're making it worse."
"Not possible. Give it back." She grabbed for it but he held it out of her reach and then tucked the brush into his belt, just next to his gun, and for one wild second she thought about reaching to retrieve it, but the thought of her hands on his belt spun her thoughts deliriously down another path and her eyes went a little glassy.
"Can you just sit and behave?" he asked. "I don't want to deliver you in worse shape than you're already in." She gave him her meanest face but he seemed unimpressed.
She tried running her fingers through her hair a few times, but gave up after a few attempts. One side of her head was covered with tight curls still, and the other was mussed and frizzed beyond repair, the curls yanked out of formation and sticking straight out to the side with ludicrous volume.
"Maybe I should go get your girls to come fix you," Cain said.
"I really wish you wouldn't," she said in a small voice, and miraculously, he dropped it.
She started fussing with the sundry objects on her vanity and changed the subject.
"You never told me how your day was," she said. "How did the meeting with the Wonky guy go?"
"Win-Kie," he said, and she mumbled "Whatever." He shrugged. "It was fine. Nothing much to report, but we're keeping an eye on the border."
"And after that you came straight here," she said.
"Yes. Why?"
"Just thinking it's pretty unfair you get to wear your normal clothes to this stupid thing and I look like Nellie Oleson."
"I'm not a princess," he said. "I'm your guard, and I'm not there to look pretty."
"Neither am I, apparently," she shot back. She bit her lip and met his eye in the mirror.
"I heard that Charity woman is going to be there tonight," she said, trying to sound nonchalant as she picked up a crystal perfume bottle and atomizer. "Gonna ask her to dance?"
He shrugged again. "Maybe."
It was totally involuntary. Her muscles revolted against her and her hand tightened into a fist, the problem being that the atomizer was in that hand, and her wide eyes were sprayed with a strong mist of eau de parfum, and there was silence for a beat before her agonized shrieking filled the room.
Cain was cursing but she couldn't make out the exact words over her own yells. He grabbed her by the shoulders and hurried her to the bathroom, depositing her over the sink. She reached out blindly for the nozzles, throwing water up at her face with abandon.
"What the hell is in that stuff?" she cried. "It burns!"
Eventually she reached out and felt for a towel, pressing it against her face as the pain in her eyes slowly started to abate.
"Cain?" she said, voice muffled. "Are you still in here?"
"Yeah, I'm here."
She pulled the towel away and blinked, trying to work the perfume out. He was staring at her, and she stared back owlishly as her vision cleared. It was quiet, until he burst out with a startling peal of laughter. Stunned, she blinked even more rapidly, and he laughed harder.
She turned to look in the mirror and gasped. She had huge black runs of mascara down her cheeks, her eyes were bright red, and her hair hadn't been helped by the water. She gaped at herself, trying to form words, and finally let out a shocked laugh, which set Cain off again.
"I'm glad I amuse you," she got out, and he wiped at his eyes, still laughing.
"Ah, kid," he said when he'd calmed down. He took three steps to close the space between them, and she stopped breathing. His hands were on her waist, his own face red from laughter and stretched in a smile.
She thought he'd caught her off-guard when he laughed at her, but he blew that surprise out of the water when he leaned down to press his lips firmly against hers. She felt like her brain had short-circuited, and for several seconds she couldn't move. Then it hit her that this was Cain and he was kissing her, and that this was Cain kissing her, and she reached out to grab hold of his duster. She kissed him back fervently, until he pulled away to look at her, smiling still.
"What- why-?" DG struggled to string her words together. "I'm...confused."
"I guess I was too, darlin." Cain tucked the unraveled side of her hair behind her ear. "But right now you look like someone who might have escaped from the mental ward at Central City Hospital, and I still wanted to kiss you. Took that as a sign."
She stared at him with an open mouth. He chucked her under her chin, and her mouth closed with a snap.
"You wanted to kiss me before?" she finally managed.
"For a long time," he said. "When you came out at your party with that dress cut down to there I about suffered heart failure."
She beamed at him. "You liked it?"
"Liked is not the right word."
Laughing, she curled a fist around the lapel of his duster. "You liked that better than this getup though, right? Because otherwise I'd be a little nervous."
He rolled his eyes. "It's not your best look, kiddo, but I'd take your worst over someone else's best any day of the cycle."
She looked at him with her heart in her throat and blurted out, "I don't want you to dance with anyone else."
"I don't want to dance with anyone but you," he told her seriously. "And I hate seeing you with suitors."
She felt like she could collapse with relief and joy as she kissed him again with fervor. He'd just folded her into his arms when her mother's voice reached them from her main chamber. She broke away from him with wide eyes and he pushed her gently in the direction of the door.
"Oh, my," the queen said with wide eyes when she saw her daughter. She sighed and shook her head.
"We'll say you've taken ill," she said, and swept out of the room again. "Enjoy your evening off, my angel," she called as she left, and DG felt the elation of reprieve.
"Oh Wyatt," she sing-songed. "It turns out I have some free time this evening. Would you care to spend it with me?"
He appeared in the doorway to the bathroom with a sly smile on his face and she grinned back giddily.
"Seems I've suddenly got the evening off as well," he said. "I'm sure we can find something to pass the time."
Struck with a sudden urge, she ran at him and jumped into his arms. He caught her easily and her legs wrapped around his waist even with all her fluffy fabric in the way.
"Can we burn my dress?" she asked hopefully.
He grinned. "It would be an honor to help dispose of this threat to the kingdom." He reached out and tugged at her sleeve, hard enough that it tore at the seam.
DG gasped and tightened her hold on him. "I've literally never found you more attractive than I do right now." He laughed and gave the other sleeve the same treatment. As she fake-swooned and called him her hero, she couldn't help but think that no matter what outfits she faced in the future, she'd bear them all with a smile as long as she had her Tin Man there to help her destroy them later.
A/N: I hope you enjoyed my first Tin Man story! I enjoyed writing it, even though (disclaimer) none of the characters belong to me.