Disclaimer: I own nothing.
"Mama, tell me a story," the boy said.
His mother sat down. "What kind of story?"
"About a bad man! One you've never told me before."
"A bad man? Why do you want to hear about someone who's bad?"
"Because bad people are scary and kill lots of people!"
"That's not a good thing!" his mother said with a little smile. "But not everyone who's bad kills lots of people."
"Really?"
"I know a story that I've never told you," she said. The boy clapped. "But it's not about a man, it's about a woman."
"Women aren't evil, only men go evil," the boy said matter-of-factly.
His mother shook her head. "A woman can do anything a man can."
"Except hunt and do work and—"
"Now son!" she chided, no longer smiling. She was a kind person, his mother, but she had anger problems that never completely went away from her youth. "If you say more things like that, you won't be hearing any story."
"Sorry mother," the boy said.
"This is the story of a woman named Berenice."
"Was she pretty?" the boy asked.
His mother's face turned sad. "No, honey, she wasn't. And that was exactly the problem. Berenice Gothel was a disappointment from birth. Born to a great sorceress, Morana Gothel, Berenice was born without magic and as she grew up, they found that she was not attractive either, with dull and frizzy black hair, muddy eyes, and uneven features. Her mother tried to teach her magic all her life, but nothing ever worked. Somehow, in a long line of sorceresses, Berenice had been born powerless.
"And after so long of Morana telling her daughter that she was worthless, that she needed beauty or power to amount to anything, Berenice began to believe it. Even her name meant "true image", so her mother said that if she was ugly on the outside, that meant she was ugly on the inside too."
"That's horrible. I don't like her mother."
"Neither to I, honey. So, by the time Berenice was sixteen, she hated herself. She knew she would amount to nothing and nobody would ever love her… but then she fell in love."
Berenice was in town when she saw him for the first time. He had dark hair that almost fell into his moss green eyes. Everything about him was of perfect proportion and at that exact moment, he was smiling to the woman who was selling him a big bundle of rapunzel lettuce.
Berenice walked up to the stand while the man was still there. "Hello, do you have any more rapunzel?" she asked, careful not to look at the man.
"Oh, Berenice, I'm sorry dear, James bought my whole stock," she said, gesturing to the man beside her. Berenice turned to him and acted as if she had only just seen him.
"Oh, hello there. What are you going to make with that?" she asked.
And he looked her up and down, rolled his eyes, and walked away without a word. Berenice was crushed. She turned to the shopkeeper, whom she knew fairly well. "Just some turnips, please," she said dejectedly.
"Don't worry about James. He's not a very nice boy," the shopkeeper said.
"Easy for you to say. You're beautiful," Berenice said.
The shopkeeper looked at her disapprovingly. "Now don't you say things like that, dear. You're wonderful just as you are."
"Right, thanks," Berenice mumbled, taking the turnips and returning to her home. She made dinner and set the table and sat with her mother to eat. They were halfway through their meal before she spoke.
"What do I do to get a man, mother?" she asked.
Her mother looked at her down her nose. "Don't look like a hag, for starters," she suggested. Then she smiled. "Oh, you know I'm only joking," she said. But Berenice knew she wasn't joking because she was never joking when she said those types of things.
"Can magic make you prettier?" Berenice inquired.
"Sure, if you're able to do magic."
"I must have it in me somewhere, mother. You have it."
Her mother said nothing, but looked like she had bit into a lemon, like she often did when she thought of her daughter's lack of power.
"Well, I'm done," her mother said, pushing the plate away and going to her room. Berenice sighed and did the dishes, then went over to her mother's potion books. She had looked through the whole bookshelf countless times—because someone who could not do magic could still brew a potion—looking for a potion that would unlock her magic. She had never seen anything like it, or anything to make a person beautiful. Then a book on the top shelf caught her eye. It was called Moste Dreadful Potions and her mother told her never to touch it. She had never even seen her mother open it, now that she thought about it. She took it out and realized it had a lock. Luckily for Berenice, she was good with such things. She ran to her room before her mother would notice and picked the lock with a pin in her room. Then she skimmed through the pages, each spell more dangerous or difficult than the next.
And then she found exactly what she needed.
A potion to trade appearances with someone else. It warned, however, that a person that has magical abilities shouldn't use the potion because they might lose their powers.
It was too good to be true. She smiled down at the book and got to work. The potion had a lot of difficult ingredients and took a long time to stew, but it didn't matter to Berenice. She would take as long as she needed to.
It was a year before the potion was ready. All that needed to happen was that she and the person she was trading with needed to drink the potion at the same time, and then they had to have physical contact.
It was easy enough to put the potion into that night's dinner. It almost looked like a soup anyway, so she just poured it into two bowls. Her mother sat down to eat and barely looked down at it before she took a spoonful and stuck it in her mouth. Berenice quickly took one too and grabbed her mother's forearm.
They both screamed and fell from their chairs, writhing in pain on the floor for a few minutes.
Then, Berenice stood as her mother still sat coughing on the floor and ran to the mirror. She smiled. She was now the spitting image of her mother, with shining black curly hair, light blue eyes, and the perfect body. She smiled to herself, and then turned to the heap that was her mother on the floor.
She stood and had shabby hair and muddy eyes and uneven features. Berenice smiled wider.
Her mother stumbled over to the mirror and covered her face with her hands.
"What have you done?" she screeched.
"Made myself beautiful. It's what you always wanted, mother."
"Berenice—"
"That's not my name anymore! James might recognize it, after all," Berenice said.
"What is your name then?" her mother asked mockingly. She wasn't nearly as menacing now that she was short and unattractive. When Berenice didn't answer, she said, "I'll just change us back with magic."
"The potion took your magic."
Her eyes widened, and she tried to make something appear in her hand. When it didn't work, she cried, "You hag!"
"Actually, you're the hag now."
"Change us back!"
"No, I don't think I will," Berenice said. She looked out the window of the tower in which she and her mother lived. Her mother didn't like company, so they lived out in the woods.
Right now, living in a tower that high was working very well for Berenice.
"Mother, come here," Berenice said. Maybe it was her new commanding voice that did it, but her mother came forward and stood next to her at the window.
And Berenice didn't have a moment's hesitation before shoving her mother out the window.
Her mother deserved it, she told herself immediately. She had been cruel to Berenice her whole life. And plus, she was in the way. What if she went telling the whole town about the switch? She couldn't risk keeping her around; it was a necessary evil.
Berenice went down the stairs and outside to burn her mother's body, but the body was gone when she came down. Even so, she was sure her mother died from the impact, so she didn't think about it too much. She was too excited about her newfound beauty to care. She went back up to the tower and cleaned it up. Now that her mother was gone, she didn't really want to live there. The place had always felt so much like a prison to her. She would keep it a secret, so she might use it if she needed it later in life, but move somewhere else.
She didn't really have very many possessions, but she took them in a sack into town. She would stay in an inn until she found somewhere to live.
But as soon as she came into town, she saw James shopping, again buying rapunzel. He really liked that stuff, it seemed.
Berenice approached the stand and almost said hello to the shopkeeper before she realized that her mother never went into town. Nobody would recognize her.
"Your finest rapunzel, please," Berenice said.
"Sorry ma'am, I'm afraid this is all there is," she said as she handed it to James. James looked over to Berenice and his eyes widened.
"You can have some of mine," he said.
"No, that's quite alright," she replied.
"Then at least let me have you for dinner," he said.
Berenice smiled. "But you don't even know me."
"My name is James. And you?"
She realized that she still couldn't go by Berenice. She refused to go by her mother's name… "Madame Gothel," she said.
"Nice you meet you, madame," he said, taking her hand and kissing it. Together they took the bundles of rapunzel lettuce and walked off into the sunset.
"That's it?" the boy asked.
"No, that's not it."
"But they're already together!"
"Will you let me finish?"
The boy sighed. "Okay…"
"So, as I was saying. The two of them had dinner and in no time, the two had fallen in love and planned to be married."
"But she had to change what she looked like to make him love her. He doesn't love her for who she is."
"No, it doesn't seem that way, does it?"
"I don't like him much either."
"Are you going to let me finish, or are you too tired?"
"No, no, finish!"
"Okay," she said. "So, as I was saying, they got married and ate rapunzel often in celebration of it being the way they met. They always said that if they had a daughter, they would name her after the lettuce, but Madame Gothel was not capable of having children, so they never could. They were happy for a long time, though Madame Gothel was always paranoid that her mother was watching her. Nature took its natural course and, as always happened, they grew older and Madame Gothel was devastated that her beauty was diminishing, so she started looking for ways to regain it. She was in the town library when she saw a book about a magical golden flower made from a drop of sunlight, which could heal wounds and create youth. Once she read of it, she became obsessed with looking for it.
"And, against all odds, she found it, and just in time too, because she was almost to the end of her days. It was on a cliff at the edge of the ocean…"
She looked at the flower hungrily, a grin finding her lips for the first time in weeks. The way it was glowing gold in the moonlight, it had to be the magic flower! But, how to make it work?
She could stew the flower into tea, but then it would only be a limited amount. She had the keep it alive in order to use it forever, to keep her young and beautiful for the rest of time.
She couldn't use magic herself, but since the flower had magic properties itself, it should have been able to do the magic for her, shouldn't it?
She sat there the whole night, thinking of what to say, when a song came to her. It almost seemed like it was surrounding her, like it was a soft voice in the wind and in the ruffle of the trees. It sounded somewhat familiar… almost like her mother. She ignored that frightening thought.
"Flower gleam and glow, let your power shine,
make the clock reverse, bring back what once was mine.
Heal what has been hurt, change the Fate's design,
save what has been lost, bring back what once was mine,
what once was mine."
The flower glowed gold and she felt her youth returning to her. She took a mirror out of her bag and looked in it, screaming with delight. It was as if she had gone back to the day that she took the appearance of her wretched mother! She laughed out loud, looking at her hair that was black again, her tight young skin. She ran home—she had not run in a long time—and went to her husband.
"James!" she yelled. He had been sleeping, so she shook him awake. When he woke and saw Madame Gothel, he yelled in fright and jumped off the bed, thinking she was a ghost. "James, it's me!"
He stared at her, and then came forward, looking at her face closely. He seemed to realize that this was what his wife had looked like decades earlier. "How?" he finally asked.
"I found the flower, James. I sang a song to it and it worked! Come, I'll take you there." She started tugging his wrist, but he pulled it out of her grasp. "We could wait until morning, if you want," she said.
"I don't want to be young," James said.
Mother Gothel gaped at him. "What?"
"Honey, I've lived a lifetime with you and I am happy with that. I'm not with you because of your beauty. That doesn't matter to me."
Accidentally, Mother Gothel let loose a sarcastic laugh.
"What?" he said defensively.
"The first time I tried to speak to you, you turned from me because I was ugly."
"You've never been ugly, dear," he said.
"No, I was, at one point. And I tried to ask you what you were buying rapunzel for and you scoffed at me. So I made myself beautiful so you would love me."
He was staring at her, almost seeming to be deciding whether she was kidding.
"It doesn't matter," she said quickly, "the point is, we can be young again and live a thousand lifetimes being beautiful!"
He started to back away, looking frightened. "No matter how young we look, it will not erase the years we've lived. We'll become bitter. Please, give the youth back."
"Give—give it back!" she screeched in disbelief. In her fury, she hit him over the head with the book on her side table. She hadn't realized how much stronger she was than him now in her youth—she had always been far older than him—so he fell over from the force of the hit and knocked his head on the bed post, a loud cracking noise sounding in the room as he fell to the ground. "James?" she said, falling beside him. "James!" But that was when she saw the blood.
She stood, looking down at him with wide eyes. He was dying.
And instead of running into town to get a physician, she watched as he emptied.
It didn't matter, she told herself immediately. She had loved him, sure, but if he refused to become young then they couldn't truly be together. Plus, he was in the way. What if he went telling the whole town about the flower? She couldn't risk keeping him around; it was a necessary evil.
She packed up any of the things she needed and left that night, deciding to move to a house closer to the magic flower. She considered moving back to her mother's tower, but there were too many bad memories there, so she didn't.
And so that night Madame Gothel disappeared and went to the next kingdom to live closer to her only love: the flower that would keep her young forever.
"Wow," the son said.
"And the legend says that she still lives in that kingdom centuries later, keeping herself young with that magic golden flower."
"It's a true story?" the son asked.
The mother smiled. "Anything is possible."
"Hey, mama, Madame Gothel's mom had the same name as you."
The smile that met her lips was different than the others, a cruel light entering her eyes and twisting her already uneven features. "Yes, it's odd, isn't it?"
Thanks for reading! Please review!
If you like Disney stories, I have a story about Hades from Hercules you might like. =]