Something occurred to me while I was replying to the reviews: No one has flamed this. (yet.) As a matter of fact, this pairing seems somewhat popular in this section. I can only assume that this is because of the fact that Doris has a female name, looks somewhat female, has long hair, and wears a dress. This does not say much for the intelligence of the flamers. For all we know, Doris could have male genitalia beneath that purple dress, and her breasts could have been Godmother-generated.

Just a thought.

TrudiRose: I was aiming for a NAMBLA joke there. . . I should've mentioned this in an author note at the end of the chapter, but it was really Northern Annual Masked BalL Association. I just didn't know how to communicate the fact that one of the 'L's was capitalized without looking like one of those people who capitalizes every other letter. Yes, I know about NAMBLA. I first heard about it on South Park, (which is where I learn about most things that are going on in the world. Sad, really.) and then did some investigating to see if they were BSing. Sadly, they weren't. And sadly, a lot of fics on fanfiction dot net qualify for NAMBLA. And I'm curious: Is there a NAWGLA?

Also thanks to Moonjava and FreddyPussGal.

Notes: From this point on, I'm going to refer to Doris as a 'she' to make things easier for everyone. And I wrote it to the older Now That's What I Call Music! CDs, if that makes any difference.


Hopeless
As my dream dies
As the time flies
Love a lost illusion
If I Can't Love Her (Beauty and the Beast: The Broadway Musical)

Chapter Three: Love a Lost Illusion

Doris stared helplessly at Charming's retreating back as he ran up the stairs. She was too far back in the crowd to catch him, and even if she could, she didn't know what she would do. Grabbing him and kissing the hell out of him didn't seem to be an option; he would just slither out. Where could he possibly be going, though? His mother was–oh, that's right. His mother was dead. Poor boy.

She turned back to the music and began dancing with an amused and vindicated-looking Prince Shrek.

"You couldn' catch him?" asked Fiona's husband.

Doris shook her head sadly. "No. I will, though. You know where he might've gone?" She asked the ogre hopefully.

"No idea. If you're lucky, he might show up at that place you work, righ'?"

"Maybe. He only came if his mother was there, though."

"He'll show up again, uh, Miss," Shrek said consolingly.

"I hope so."

§

She trudged through the wet streets gloomily, head down and hood up. It had been three days since the ball, and she'd seen neither flawless hide nor golden hair of Prince Charming. She was beginning to think that she was never going to find her Prince, and she had work in the morning. She'd searched all of the grander hotels of the city on her time off, and couldn't find any trace of him. NAMBLA was well on its way, and she'd never find him in that crush. It was raining, now, in Far Far Away, matching her current mood. She couldn't give up, though. He had to surface some time, and when he did. . .

She had a sudden, wonderful vision of herself being swept off her feet by a certain golden-haired knight, and riding away with him into the sunset.

Suddenly her attention was caught by a gaggle of girls fighting for turns to peek in through a hole in the wood siding of a tavern on the other side of the street. Curious, she crossed the rapidly flooding street, carefully avoiding the deeper puddles where the cobblestones were missing, and bypassed the girls entirely in favor of the tavern's door, which was bound to be a lot drier than the scanty overhang that the girls were huddled under. She paused at the entrance and looked up at the wooden sign.

The Blue Light Tavern.

Without bothering to push back the hood of her cloak, she shrugged and pushed open the door to reveal a nearly entirely female patronage of the large tavern. The few males in the room were all at tables in a single corner, and the rest of the tables were occupied by women. The lone woman on the small stage was dancing in iron slippers and wincing every time she stepped down, but she was not the cause of the filled room. A single table in the far corner was the focus of all the female attention in the room, and he didn't look as if her were happy about it. Prince Charming himself sat in the table in the corner, looking like a cornered rabbit. He kept glancing around nervously at the girls (who would occasionally swoon if his gaze passed over them) and then his gaze lit upon Doris. He reached out a hand and beckoned her over, causing nearly all of the attention in the room to switch to her. Keeping her hood up, she crossed the room in long strides and reached his table in a few moments, wondering why he wanted her to come to him if he had run away from her at the Ball. Rising hope let her think that maybe he wanted to apologize for running at the ball, and then they would ride off into the sunset together.

The second she reached him, however, everything became clear.

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her down beside him. "Good, you're here."

Confused, she adjusted herself in the seat and made to pull down the hood of her cloak. His hand on her wrist stopped her. "Don't. Mysteriousness will make them keep their distance, and that's your job. What is your fee?"

Oh. He thought she was a bodyguard. Content to let the ruse stand, she pulled herself closer to the table and folded her arms across her chest. Unsure of what pose looked most menacing, she settled for folding her arms across her chest and pulling the hood forward.

He repeated the question about her fee, and instead of answering, which could give her identity away, she used the opportunity to reach under the table, skim across his thigh and grab his beltpouch. She swiftly untied it with one hand and dropped it on the table, counting out an amount equal to her highest tip, which she figured was enough to pay for a bodyguard. When she looked back up at him, he looked surprised.

"That's not a lot," he said slowly. "Are you sure?"

She nodded, and relief suffused his face. Then she turned her attention back to the watching girls. During their little altercation, one young woman had apparently got up the courage to approach the table.

"Um, sir?" she asked shyly. "Would you happen to be Prince Charming?"

Charming nodded hesitantly, and her thin face blossomed into a smile. "Well, sir, I'm the President of the Prince Charming fan—"

When Charming's face drained of color and turned a deathly shade of gray, Doris abruptly stood up and interposed herself between the girl and Charming. Without saying anything, she glared down at the girl, menace written in every line of her cloaked body, and pointed at the door, making her message clear. The apparently timid girl suddenly grew a backbone and stepped up to face the trial-by-Stepsister.

"And who would you be?" she asked boldly, trying to see up past the shadows in Doris's hood, challenge clear in her baby blue eyes.

Unable to figure out any way of telling the girl off without giving away her identity, Doris leaned her head down so that the extra length of the hood draped around the girl's head, effectively blinding her, and the sides of the hood reached her thin shoulders.

Doris leaned in to the girl's ear and whispered raggedly, "I'm his bodyguard, and if you don't watch yourself, I may be guarding your body instead." She breathed heavily into the girl's ear, and the tip of her tongue just touched the earlobe.

With a startled shriek, the girl leapt back out of the concealing hood and dashed to the door, casting back only a single terrified glance before running into the rain.

Without looking at the rest of the room, Doris sat back down, catching Charming's astonished glance and the appraising glares of the rest of the room.

"That was impressive," he whispered to her after he'd taken a long draught of his wine. "How did you—" Still playing the part, she cut him off with a fierce glance that he obviously felt even through the muffling fabric of the hood. She wished that she could have silenced him off with a kiss, but that was not an option at the moment.

A burly man briefly appeared at the door, stared at Charming and Doris for a moment, then shrugged and left. Doris could only assume that he was the bodyguard who Charming had originally hired.

After an hour and no more encounters, the stage was empty–the woman on stage had joined the throngs at the table–and the estrogen-charged air in the room seemed to be growing thick. Apparently the message had circulated that this was indeed the teenage idol Prince Charming. Charming stood up. "I can't take any more of this," he muttered. "Even that room is better than this."

He gestured haughtily at Doris. "Come on."

They stood up and started moving along the wall to a hallway leading away from the room. A small group of girls hesitantly moved to block their exit, but Doris ruthlessly pushed her way through, dragging Charming in her wake. They turned the corner and dashed down the hallway. When they reached the end, they stopped, and Doris turned around to see a score of large girls creeping down the hallway like a pack of jackals circling in for the kill. Small, easily intimidatable girls Doris could handle, but multiple girls that were larger than both her and Charming were another story. Charming was hastily fumbling at his belt for a key, but couldn't seem to get it off his belt. Doris made a 'hurry up' motion with her hand, and he finally got it and unlocked the door. He opened it and dragged her inside behind him, locking the door firmly and pushing the draw bar into place. Heavy pounding ensued on the door, but stopped after a few minutes as Charming and Doris held their breaths on the other side of a pile of baggage and furniture that served as an ineffective secondary wall of defense. When it had been silent for more than a minute, Charming sighed and slumped down onto the bed, giving a pointed look at Doris.

She took the hint and sat down with her back against the wall, nervously adjusting her hood. Charming was going to find out and kick her out; she just knew it. He stared at her from his position on the bed.

"You can take the cloak off, now," he said.

Doris shook her head.

"I'm ordering you to take your hood off," he commanded.

Taking a risk, Doris lowered her voice and tried to make her accent go away. "You won't like what you see," she warned him.

"I–are you wearing purple?" he asked suddenly.

Doris shook her head. She was wearing a dark blue dress that was the same pattern as the purple, only made of suede, not velvet.

Charming sounded relieved. "Good. Leave it on, then. Let me tell you; the other night I was simply attacked by this woman wearing a purple dress! She was kind of pretty–oh, not as pretty as me, of course! More handsome than anything–but she just pounced on me and tried to kiss me!" While Doris rejoiced at this admission, Charming made a noise of disgust and flipped his hair around. "I can understand that I'm very good looking, and a lot of women want to go out with me, however, I only court Princesses." He looked so smug that Doris wanted to smack him and then kiss him, but she only said, "Oh."

"Oh? Is that all you can say?" Charming asked incredulously. "I was almost a King! I would have been, except Fiona chose an ogre over me. An ogre. Can you believe that?"

Doris settled for a shrug. Prince Shrek had seemed pretty nice to her, both when he was in her bar and when she'd run into him at the Ball. Charming was not at all like she had thought him to be. He seemed like he was rude, careless, and very conceited. What if she had fallen in love with an image. . . . When she had served him at the Poison Apple, though, he had been polite, and had flashed that grin that made her want to swoon. . . .

"Good," he said again.

"How long do you plan on keeping me?" Doris asked, trying to sound casual.

"Oh, a few days," Charming remarked absently. "Maybe after that, but certainly until I leave town to find a Princess. You wouldn't happen to know where I can find one, would you?"

Doris shook her head, then paused. There was always her pen-pal, Lucy. . . Lucy might not be a Princess, but she was certainly a Queen. And so young–certainly Charming's tastes didn't run to the barely nubile age.

"Across the ocean, there is a Queen," Doris offered hesitantly.

Charming perked up. "Queen?"

"A Queen of Narnia. . . ."

He sighed. "What is this 'Narnia' thing? The barman mentioned it, but what is it?"

"A country across the ocean. My penpal told me all about it."

He remarked scornfully, "and I supposed your penpal is this Queen Lucy?"

"Yes."

"How old is she?"

Doris admitted that she didn't know; her contact with Lucy had only gone so far as to the Queen asking about the world that something she would only refer to as 'Aslan's country' was apparently a part of. She'd sent out a missive asking for knowledge and had found a perfectly willing pen friend in Doris.

"She rules when the High King is away, though," Doris said. "He goes to Archenland, sometimes. . . ."

Suddenly Charming looked interested. "Does Archenland have Princesses?"

"I suppose so," Doris admitted with that nasty sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that usually happens when you just know something is going to go wrong.

He flashed a brightly charming grin onto her. "Then let's go find me a Princess!"