So apparently I like to pair famous ladies with their beaus' fathers... I did not know this about myself. Anyway, I noticed there was a sad lack of fanfiction involving Aladdin's irresistibly sexy father, Cassim, so I decided to correct this in the most controversial way possible. Enjoy!
01
Pandemonium had not been a part of the wedding plans. Knowing Genie, Jasmine had certainly prepared for her fair share of loud impersonations and expository tangents, but she would have never expected to see wedding guests fleeing in the wake of rampaging elephants on what was meant to be the happiest day of her life. And if one somehow managed to avoid a run-in with the panicked pachyderms, in was inevitable that one would find one's wallet and jewels liberated by one of the party-crashers.
Separated from her intended, and from the rest of her friends in all the chaos, Jasmine pushed herself quickly up against a column to avoid being trampled; she was dismayed to find that, when she looked up, flecks of plaster rained down upon her like snow, and that a total and complete collapse of the structure was only delayed by the intervention of one very elastic Genie.
"You all right down there, princess?" Genie called down, wheezing with the effort it took to hold the ceiling together.
"I'm all right, Genie!" she called back, as she tried to keep her voice controlled with mixed results. "Are you?"
"I'm a bit tied-up at the moment," the other admitted—and indeed, he had woven his arms in and around each other so many times he had succeeded in tangling himself into quite a knot. "Looks like those yoga classes have paid off!"
Jasmine pursed her lips as she dragged her eyes away, narrowing them in an attempt to focus on the scene before her. She would have to despair about her ruined wedding later; right now, she needed to concentrate on evacuating the guests... although admittedly, the guests were doing a pretty good job of evacuating themselves.
"They fight like demons!" Fazuhl cried, his clothes inexplicably hanging off him in ribbons.
"Worse than demons; these are the Forty Thieves!" Hakim shouted, in an equal state of awkward disrobe. As the two guards retreated, Jasmine cast her eyes upward once more in astonishment.
"The Forty Thieves?" she repeated. Now it was Genie's turn to narrow his eyes as they hunted the room.
"Really? I get thirty-nine," he amended. In the same instant, Jasmine caught a surreptitious movement out the corner of her eye, and turned her head just in time to catch sight of a darkly-robed figure skirting into the next room. Wordlessly, she pulled her ruined veil off as she made for the same room with purpose. She did not require the other's stealth; the cacophony was enough to fill ten wedding pavilions, much less disguise the slippered footfalls of one seething young woman.
The antechamber had been set aside for wedding gifts. Rather than ransack the horde, the thieves had evidently preferred to terrorize the guests, although most of the gifts had been overturned and now lay in more than one piece. These were of no concern to Jasmine, however; her business was with the cowled man clothed in dark meridian blue currently sifting through the refuse.
"Where is it... where is it..." she could hear him muttering to himself, and her temper flared hotly in her chest; he could have waited until after the wedding to steal whatever it was he was after. What was another exorbitant gift worth to her when a lifetime of true love was right within her grasp? Jasmine snatched up a golden bust of Bast without looking and advanced upon the man, prepared to club him across the back of the head and (hopefully) knock him out with a minimal amount of bloodshed (although a little blood wouldn't hurt); at the last instant, the man's head snapped up infinitesimally, and he whirled to catch her wrist just as her arm arced downward.
"Let me go," Jasmine hissed venomously, her kohl-rimmed eyes narrowing to dangerous slits. Even in the heat of their exchange, the princess' voice retained a quality of command that was hard to comfortably ignore. Still, the cloaked man, upon identifying that his assailant was a woman (if not the jilted bride herself), pushed her arm backward as he rose to his feet with every effort not to twist it. He applied enough pressure that she was forced to release the statue, and the clatter it made upon hitting the floor was barely discernible in the din from the other room.
"I'd rather not," the man responded honestly. Now that he was standing, his presence was undeniable—while he was not as large as some of the other thieves, he seemed almost to impose upon the entire room, and his voice had a resonant quality, one that welled up from deep within his chest, that Jasmine had never encountered before. It arrested her almost as surely as his calloused fingers arrested her wrist.
"Pardon our intrusion, princess," he rumbled. "I'm afraid you won't find us on the guest list."
"Is that what this is to you? Sport? Some sort of joke?" Jasmine demanded, wrenching her wrist from unresisting fingers. "Innocent people are being hurt because of you!"
"That won't happen," the man replied confidently, turning from her in a way that implied he found her less than threatening, and in a way she found completely insulting.
"How can you be so sure?" she exclaimed; and then noticing his continued search, "Just what is it you're after?"
"A token, really. A trifle," he said absently. With his back turned to her once more, Jasmine seized upon a sudden opportunity; she grasped the back of his cowl and pulled, as hard as she could, unraveling the fabric and revealing the face beneath. The man turned, startled, and Jasmine took a step backward in equal startlement. All of her anger ebbed and died momentarily in that moment, for the face that stared back at her seemed almost familiar, somehow... but she knew she was not amiss in thinking that she had never been confronted by it before this moment. She certainly would have remembered, for it was the most uncontestedly handsome face she had ever laid eyes upon, and her heart began to race as she took it in: a proud, square jawline sharp enough to cleave an enemy in twain; a tanned complexion and a bolt of gray through the raven's-wing black hair that lent his rugged features a distinguished air; the dark, soulful eyes framed by thick, expressive eyebrows, staring at her now in impatient amusement. It was the eyes that drew her in, more powerfully than the voice had; those eyes were so familiar to her, and yet so utterly alien, as if they concealed a thousand and one secrets buried deeper than the Cave of Wonders, just daring her to attempt to unearth them...
And there was kindness there, too—more kindness than she had anticipated to find, for she had anticipated none at all. But she also saw the spark of a zeal, a hunger, that was enough to make her heart tremble. She knew in that moment that he could be nothing less than the King of Thieves, but what could a man such as this possibly want? There was a plenitude of gold around them, certainly, but it must be something more than that... and the sudden, appraising look in his eyes made her uneasy as to the nature of that something.
"Whatever it is you want, you have my full permission to take it," Jasmine stated, in an effort to reassert some control over the situation, and herself. Alarmingly, the man stepped to her as if he had been given invitation to do so; the movement drew him away from the treasure and much, much closer to her, which to Jasmine hardly made any sense at all, but she found herself unable to puzzle over it for very long when the incline of his neck and the broadness of his shoulders were now ranged so closely before her. She tilted her head upward in astonishment before she could master the impulse; another tremor rocked her as her eyes met his, finding their unplumbed depths fully fixed upon her. There was barely any room left to breath between the two of them; they were already closer than any embrace had ever put her in proximity to Aladdin.
"Seeing as our time here has been cut short," the King of Thieves said quietly, his eyes flickering away only once to assess something past her left shoulder, "and seeing as I've been given permission..."
He caught her chin up in his fingers, meeting her eyes intensely, and there was little Jasmine could do as he stole the one thing from her she had least expected: a kiss. He slanted his mouth over hers as their lips met in a shocking union. The gesture implied a conquest; a minor, stolen victory in the face of defeat, but something about the way the man kissed her also implied a helpless compulsion, and it was this quality of honesty that nearly brought the iron-willed beauty to her knees. She understood without being told that in that moment, she was all this man—this King of Thieves—desired, and surely he was a man of many desires to have long ago taken up the insatiable mantle of a criminal mastermind. What began as a kiss between enemies transformed the moment she allowed her eyes to fall closed, either in resistance or submission; her delicate hands alighted on his arms, to encourage them or to stave them off; her body was as conflicted as her heart was in that moment, but both allowed the man's effrontery to persist. Perhaps sensing an opportunity in her confliction, the King of Thieves shifted closer, and what he had obviously intended to be a fleeting kiss deepened to something more, something devastating, and just as Jasmine felt herself about to yield totally, a shockwave that had nothing to do with the man's touch rippled through them both. The King of Thieves disengaged, his eyes rounding in horror at something that would remain unseen by her until he flung her from him.
Jasmine hit the ground indelicately, cushioning herself with her forearms, as a massive gray elephant stampeded by, scattering what remained of the gifts. She pulled herself into a sitting position, grimacing with the effort, as she saw the King of Thieves leap up onto the animal's heaving flank and in the same instant that he successfully grasped the saddleblanket.
"Farewell, princess! May your next wedding be marginally more successful than this one!" he called. Beneath her dusky complexion, Jasmine could feel herself blushing hotly at what had just transpired between them, although the blush quickly escalated to one of anger. How dare he! The arrogant, boorish, sand-infested—
"Jasmine!" Aladdin's voice cracked loudly somewhere behind her, and Jasmine turned just as her husband-to-be slid to her on already soiled pant legs and secured her in his arms. Jasmine allowed herself to be swept up in the embrace, willing her body to react as powerfully as it had moments before, and deeply shaken when it did not. "If anything had happened to you, I—I don't know what I would have—"
The princess placed a soothing hand on the back of his neck, her face tucked close to his, but all the while her eyes stared worriedly over his shoulder.
"He didn't find what he wanted," she reassured him. If only she could reassure herself of the same.