Disclaimer: I don't own The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 'Sindarin' belongs to the late JRR Tolkien.
A/N: A re-post of a older, deleted story. I want to know if I should restart it. So... please review if you want more!
It all began the day Riff Raff (a servant) found a small child wandering around in the palace gardens. The poor creature wore a tattered outfit made of a terribly gray cloth. She looked quite frightened. So frightened, in fact, that Riff pitied her.
"What do you want?" he asked sullenly.
Right now he was supposed to be trimming the garden's hedges, and didn't want to stop working. The Queen – Agneta Ming-Fel – would send her fiendish son Alfher Ming-Fel after Riff if his tasks weren't done in time. And Riff just wanted to go home to see his seamstress sister Magenta as soon as possible!
"Want help. Lost!" the child said softly.
"Where are your parents?" Riff asked.
"Gone away. Away forever."
Riff didn't know what to do. So, he just went back to work and hoped that the child would leave him alone.
That didn't exactly go as planned.
She didn't really bother him any more. Instead, she just stared at him with those piercing green eyes of hers. Though that made Riff a bit uncomfortable he was glad she'd at least stopped talking.
Those eyes reminded him of the Queen's. Very… demanding. Like she could be in charge of everything. He supposed that the child's miserable life meant she needed to be responsible. For a child so young she sure acted mature.
Once he'd finished with the hedges, Riff packed up his gardening supplies. He'd already done all his other work at that point. So he began to walk home. That, of course, took a while.
Hopefully Magenta wouldn't be working by the time I get there, he thought to himself.
As Riff left his job, a certain young woman sat in her 'proper' bedroom thinking.
She wanted a child. Of course, that was impossible. They'd done that special surgery the day Queen Agneta picked out the poor woman's job and 'new' name. Now it was physically impossible for her to have a child. The Queen didn't want a bunch of half-noble bastards running around.
If only she hadn't been forced to work here! It wasn't just annoying, like the menial work her genius brother did. No… this job of hers hurt half the time, made everyone look down upon her, and forced her to be polite to the prince and –worse – Lord Dominus De Lordy. Nobody was a 'seamstress' (as the upper class calls such women) by choice.
At least it paid her late father's debts.
Suddenly, she heard a knocking at the door. At first this worried her. Customers rarely showed up in the evening, for some reason.
Then she heard the lovely sound of her brother shout: "I'm home!"
That brought a wonderful grin to her face. Riff never did anything to her that hurt. Of course, he sometimes did do her. But only when she wanted to, obviously. The one upside to be unable to bear children was that she couldn't accidentally have an inbred baby. Inbreeding was dangerous and could cause dreadful birth defects. She couldn't bear the idea of something as sad as a sick child…
Riff Raff walked into her room, looking rather grim. This wasn't too odd. Ever since they'd begun work here he'd been rather unhappy. His auburn hair had turned a stark grayish color and become rather stringy. Odd things like that often happened to a Transylvanian under stress. They were a very emotional species.
"Did something happen at work?" Magenta asked him.
"This random child started following me around saying that she's lost. Apparently she so lost that she just had to follow me home," he replied darkly.
"Where is she?"
That's when the child entered the room. Right away, Magenta pitied her. The poor thing wore rags and had an air of sorrow about it. Almost as if someone had wanted her to be pitied and dressed her just so that
"Who are you?" Magenta asked.
"I'm lost," the child replied. "Mama is dead."
"Who was she?"
"Palace servant girl. She gave me the letter and the necklace as she died," the child explained.
"What's your name?" Riff asked, before his sister could ask about the letter and the necklace.
"Gwenn."
This surprised the both of them. 'Gwenn' meant 'girl' in an out-of-date language, known as Sindarin, used in formal documents and such. Usually only the upper class spoke it. Since they'd once been middle class merchants who'd catered to the upper class, Magenta and Riff knew a bit of that language.
Who'd be cruel enough to name a child 'girl'?
"Show me that letter, Gwenn," Magenta said.
And so, she did.
Magenta quickly tore open the envelope. At that point her brother – who thought the whole affair to be rather silly – left the room to begin cooking dinner.
The letter read, in Sindarin:
To the Person(s) who found Gwenn:
My name is Lena. I am – well, I was – lady in waiting to a noblewoman of the court for many years. Her husband and I had an affair, of which this child is the result. Long story short: I'm very sick at the time of this writing and this child needs a place to stay. Her name is Estella, though she answers to 'Gwenn'. By the time you read this I'll be dead.
Please care for Gwenn.
"How dreary," Magenta muttered.
Though it all seemed like something out of a cliché-ridden novel, she couldn't help but pity the girl just enough to let her stay there. It wouldn't do for the child to wander around alone like this. And Mags really did want a daughter.
What a coincidence! Too much of a coincidence, in fact, but nobody noticed this.
Over the next few days Gwenn began a more and more familiar with her new life. Meanwhile, Riff and Mags were getting used to her presence. Most days Riff took her to work and she helped out here and there. Nobody really noticed the extra helper since nobody really noticed servants in the first place.
After work they'd return to the apartment. They technically lived in the palace, since the entire capital city was within the palace walls. Of course, they lived in an apartment in the servant's quarters. If one of Magenta's 'clients' was around they'd wait in the living room for a while. Despite being no older than six, Gwenn seemed to understand what was going on.
Magenta began to suspect that the girl's mother had been one of the less lucky seamstresses who hung around spaceports waiting for lonely spacepilots. How else would she be so nonchalant about it all?
As the years went by, of course, Gwenn seemed to have forgotten life before the flat in the palace where she lived with Magenta and Riff Raff. She called the former 'Mama' and the latter 'Papa'. Though such nicknames didn't really make sense to Riff, he put up with it.
Anyway, he liked teaching Gwenn. The older she got, the more curious she got. And, before they'd gone into debt, Riff was a star student in his school. So he kept his cleverness in practice by explaining various scientific theories and complex mathematics to the girl. He wasn't sure how much she actually understood, of course. At least it gave him something to think about when doing mindless work.
On evenings when she wasn't 'working', Magenta taught Gwenn how to read in both the everyday language and Sindarin.
By the time she was 12, the child knew more than most children her age. This wasn't a bad thing, though. Gwenn liked learning. And she often snuck books out of the palace's impressive library when they were dusting there.
One day, she found a book so interesting that she didn't really bother to hide while reading it. She just stood there mesmerized. It happened to be a fantastical story – in Sindarin – about an adventurer.
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