Hi guys! It's me again. I have just figured out how to edit the files I upload (how stupid of me though), and therefore I'm trying to edit the format of the fic, since I find it hard to read with all the paragraphs sticking together so close. (I don't know if it looks any different on the phone, but on PC it looks ridiculous).

Anyway, thank you for those who gave me reviews. I am trying my best to both improve my vocabulary and my writing with this, and since lately I have embedded myself with classic novels, it might have affected my writing style. I hope that for the better though.


Disclaimer: I do not own Winx Club.

Chapter 7

"Hey, the courteous gentleman over there."

Stella calls out to Joseph, who is now sitting at a small table at the entrance of the annex. Night has fallen, and she sometimes catches him dozing out due to lack of sleep. She cannot blame him though, even she herself feels sleepy, but yet the agitation keeps her wide awake.

"What?" He growls with subtle annoyance.

"Why don't you sleep for a while? I will guard the place for you." She speaks with a mellow tone. "Come on, this place is very comfortable. I even have a bed."

True, though odd enough, she has a bed with a fuzzy blanket behind the palisade. She does not know if it was the Countess who felt somewhat affinity for her that she left this warm thing, or if it was a mistake that someone thought this is actually the place for some guest to sleep. Although it seems to serve as a prison, the place looks ostentatious enough to be considered a guest room.

"Dream on."

Joseph replies, his tone sounds stiffer than the first time she saw him. Part of the reason probably is because he does not have anything left to hide anymore, with her being behind the palisade. The rest of it might be the sleepiness he is suffering.

He moves aloft to get the keys, and stuffs them in his pocket as if he fears her potential artifice.

"You are prostrate, man." She still refuses to give in. "Look at those bags under your eyes, how could you endure such horrible things?"

"Same to you. Your face looks very ugly right now, and if you do not shut up, I swear to make it uglier."

Someone is not in the mood, she figures. Finding it futile to say anything further, she sits down, back to the palisade and starts knocking slightly on a small rock.

Her soporific sparse knocking sounds make him even more frustrated.

"Stop it, or you won't even know what clemency is, woman. I can use vehemence anytime, and believe me, you would not want to find out how strong I am."

"Oh how scary." She mumbles, nearly mocking him. "Even though you say that, it sounds fly-by-night. What a man of words…"

"What's your problems?"

He snaps back, obviously irritated. It was not her initiatives to make him inimical, but she has always been good at provoking people, even if she did not mean to.

"Don't be so sophomoric, it's just a joke." She shrugs, looking at him with a disinterested veneer, hiding the slight amusement.

"The sophomoric one is you!" He stands up abruptly, knocking the poor chair over. "Would you stop that attitude? Where has your serene self gone? Is this how a princess supposed to behave?"

"Too late for you to realize that." She replies articulately, not hiding anything from him as well. She did not intend to hide, it was just the mood had not been good for her father's illness. But having been imprisoned for several hours, the obstinacy is crawling back.

She does not want to sound too much a protean person, so she avoids saying anything else.

"Women." He murmurs, annoyance has not once left his voice ever since she spoke up. "Fractious creatures. They see men as pellucid so easily, yet hide themselves so carefully."

"Do you feel like a dolt?" She grins, causing him to snicker lightly with sarcasm.

"Not a chance, when a girl is being captured by me."

He has his point, though now she has known that the efforts were purloined since he did not really do anything. But such matter is venial to her right now. They could debate about it, and no wins are guaranteed.

"Hey." She speaks after a few minutes of silence.

"What?"

"I'm bored." She replies with dispassion. "Do something."

Joseph – now leaning against the wall – raises his eyebrow with a disbelieving look. Did this girl just commandhim to do something? From where has she got this mettle?

"Don't be ridiculous." He coldly replies, not letting her puerile attitude to get too carried away. "This is a prison, may I remind you, not an asylum or a playground."

"Are you always this staid?" She places her hands in front of her chest, resting her forehead on the palisade while staring at him.

"Are you always this verbose?" He mimics her tone in return.

"…No."

He raises his eyebrow again, but this time to prove that she is an idiot to ask such question. The ambience once again falls into silence, though this time Stella seems to be pensive, as if she is really taking his words to heart.

"Tell me about your past."

He looks at her, opens his mouth about to speak up, but pauses for some seconds.

"It's an insipid past." He answers, putting the chair back to where it used to be, albeit not sitting down.

"Can't be more insipid than what I am doing now." She rolls her eyes, using a tone as if he is some kindergarten kid. "Come on, don't be shy. Consider it as a prison talk."

"What the hell is a prison talk?" He asks, churlishly but not as brusque as before. Somehow, talking to her has assuaged him, as well as the exhaustion.

"You know, what is said in a prison, stay in the prison." She says matter-of-factly.

Joseph lets out an unintended chuckle. "You have just made that up."

"Stop digressing and start the damn story."

She orders, but this time he does not oppose, except that he demands to hear her story first, with the reason that it would be peerless if one gets to hear about the other's past, but not getting anything back.

"I am a princess, coddled in the arms of my parents ever since I was young. I grow up, still a princess." She replies, partly with veracity. "End of story."

The mercenary sits still for a moment, as if waiting for something more.

"Wow." He finally speaks up, realizing that she is not planning to open her mouth anymore. "You didn't go so assiduous in your story, did you?"

He receives a simple nod in return.

"If that's the case, then I am a man, born somewhere in this universe."

The frown on the princess's face shows that she is not satisfied with that inscrutable answer, either.

"How ascetic." She complains.

A wide grin spreads on his face triumphantly. "It is by no means specious though."

Only a small 'hmph' in return, as she turns away, leaning her back against the cold palisade. He also does not speak anything else.

It has been from the start that her plan is to distract this guy. She knows her friends will come to rescue her for sure, they have never failed to do that. And Brandon, too. She wonders what he is doing right now, knowing that she is out of sight. Would he come to rescue her like a knight rescuing a princess? Will she be like the heroine in the fairy tales?

How sarcasm it is, for this is a fairy tales in some way – she is a fairy after all. It's just that she has always been the one fighting against the antagonists. She does not feel like a girly princess who is waiting for the prince at all. Sometimes she even wishes all of her fortitude vanish away.

Joseph's voice interrupts her attempts to collate all the needed characteristics of a mainstream heroine.

"Okay. Let's leave the joke, and get serious." He makes it sound like he is in coercion, but she can still spot some excitement and curiosity in it."I will tell you about my past, with complete veracity, and no spurious craps. But you will do the same."

She is not sure how far this will go, but since her past seems not to be furtive in any means, so she has no reason to refuse.

"Go for it. But it's a prison talk."

"Whatever." He laughs blithely, before starting his so-called insipid past story. "I was born in penury, in a small village not near from here."

"Whereee issss itttt?" Stella drawls, stating her obvious curiosity, which is demanding to heed a more percipient story.

"Far down the South." He shakes his head before continuing. "It was near a quagmire…"

"Wait, our kingdom has a quagmire?"

Irritated at being interrupted again, Joseph rolls his eyes. "Yes, it has several quagmires, if you not know. Now would you just-?"

"Okay, sorry. I will shut up."

Still pausing for a few more minutes to make sure that she will not stop him again, Joseph looks at the princess. She does not know that there are quagmires in the kingdom? She's the princess! How is she not able to grab the whole geography of her own kingdom? Is she that spoiled?

As for Stella, she is surprised at the fact that her kingdom has quagmires. She has not been back in the palace for long, ever since she is accepted to Alfea. Fighting and battling takes up much of her time, she hasn't any time to pay attention to anything else.

She will definitely go on a tour after this.

"Continue, Mr. I-don't-want-to-be-interrupted." She urges, realizing the silence has been too long.

"Right, sorry. As I was saying, I grew up in a small village near a quagmire, down in the South, where there is hardly anything to eat or drink. You can still sometimes get water from the wells, but it's scarce, and therefore every time I went, I always quaffed as fast as possible. Others would beat me up if they found out how much I drank.

"My father was a dotard, and a drunkard. He would spend the whole day betting and drinking, and would come back in vertigo at the end of the day, and our family would be hearing his vilification for the rest of the night."

"What about your mother?" Stella speaks up. Not that she intends to interrupt him, but his speed of giving out information makes her so impatient.

"Oh, she's worse." He puts on a sad smile. "She was the most dogmatic woman in the world. Everything in the house revolves around her. She would make me and my brother go out the field and plough all day, and we would be under her surveillance for the whole day. She would not leave out a single furrow, and would punish us if we make any mistake."

"Gosh…" Stella gasped. Of course a princess like her, despite how much she has been on battle, would not know the suffering of the poor. "How old were you back then?"

"10. My brother was 6. We were both pretty much docile and pusillanimous back then. It's not like if we put up an insurgent we would come out safe and sound. And we did not want to be addressed as ingrate, either."

A subtle pain hits her chest. She cannot imagine how harsh it would have been to have such a mother taking care of you. She might not have been some child who was immerged in the love of both her father and her mother, but at least her mother was kind to her. How pejorative it must have been to the poor children who did not receive enough passion from their parents!

"The situation was exasperating back then." He continues. "I have come to adopt a severe hatred towards women, and my brother suddenly had this pyromania."

"I didn't know you used to be a misogynist." She responds. "But what is this pyromania?"

"The continuous urge to start a fire." Stella looks at him with disbelief. "It does exist. It was due to stress at such a young age that he had it. The consequences were not pretty."

She swallows hard as he mentioned the consequences. His eyes turns into darker shades. Tries her best to keep her voice normal, she asks, nearly fears to hear the answer. "What …did he do?"

"Burning our house… was not enough. The fire was put out, but no one knew what caused the fire. They should have found out. At least before he started aiming for the whole village…"

"No…"

"It was the perdition of my village. The only vestige now is black ashes with sluggish complex from the quagmire. Everyone died."

He lowers his voice at the end of the sentence, regarding the sorrow for the people who have surrounded him. His family was not a happy one, but she guesses his mutual feelings still lingered inside him.

"I'm sorry." She replies, somewhat colloquially to the one who should be now considered her enemy. However, at the moment, there is no place for antagonism in the ambience.

"Don't be." Joseph shakes his head, bringing his body to the floor, as his feet has been attenuated with all the pain in the past. Remains sitting, he asks. "Are you able to continue listening?"

Realizing that she has shown too much emotions on her face, and most of them is probably fright, Stella snaps back peremptorily.

"I command you to continue whatever you are trying to finish. Don't underestimate a princess. She has great enduring abilities. And she is a great listener, too."

He chuckles, doubting how many percent of truth there is in her words with such personalities that he has witnessed. But indeed, she has been a great listener tonight. He just needs someone to share his pain.

"I was the only one survive. At that time, I was going to another village, trying to escape from the drunken father and the cruel mother. However, I was still naïve at that time, and could not find my ways to survive. So I came back, just to find the whole village on fire. I immediately understand what has happened.

"My brother is no longer to come back alive to vindicate, but I'm pretty sure that was what happened. Not his fault, though. He was just a child.

"From that point, being homeless and alone, I slowly mired into crimes. I met with bad people, stole for food and drink, clothes also. I wandered from village to village, not knowing where to stop. I needed not a place to stop anyway. No one needed me anyway. I was fine the way I was."

"Is there anything auspicious for you in the whole story that you are going to tell?" Stella interrupts him, but considering the time that she has not, she still feels that it is within her courtesy.

"Why?" He asks in return. "Are you going to stop me if I say no?"

"Is there?"

"No."

"Okay, you can continue." She answers, stifling the depression inside. Damn, if only she had not heard such a sad life, she would not be feeling so down right now. And what's with the sympathy? How is she supposed to fight against him when she gets out of this?

Speaking of which, she has totally forgotten about the time. What time is it? Is it morning? Is it still night? Curse the annex for being underground, that she would not be able to distinguish day from night. Last time she only found out due to the guy over there mumbling about his dinner time.

Meanwhile, Joseph finds it completely drivel for her to ask such intermittent question. But since nothing can create more quandary than the current dilemma, he continues anyway.

The whole annex falls into silence again before he begins to speak up. Stella sits still as a statue. She might be too tired and exhausted to move, or it is truly her characteristics to be so serene. Her beauty – he would not deny it, tired of misrepresentation to himself – along with the whole prison things, puts up such a quaint yet sad vignette. Nevertheless, he finds it droll enough to satisfy him that the heroine's fate is now being commandeered by him.

"At first, my peripatetic life did me little favor. Having been a compliant pawn to my mother, I could not handle the new life so suddenly. Though I would always claim that I need not a place to settle down, deep down in my heart, I know I wanted it. And I struggled hard. I felt lonely, I felt morose. The more properties I stole from people, the more stolid I was to the mundane world. Nothing satisfied me. Everywhere I looked, I found little attraction. Life is peripheral to me at that time, so much that I often wondered why God even let me survive through that fire incident." He is almost droning, perpetuating her to wonder if it is because he was trying to stifle the pain, or if it is because his heart has already turned stone.

Joseph shifts his gaze away from the torch on the wall, and looks at her, drollness in his eyes almost glittering.

"Sorry for being a querulous ass, keep rambling about myself."

She blinks at the quirk towards himself about being garrulous. Surely he has done quite a lot of talking, but what's wrong with that? She believes that everyone has the right to mourn over their sadness and austere, even if it means hours and hours talking nonstop.

Or he is just feeling a bit awkward now that he has told something that reveals the weak side of him.

"A concise story would be boring anyway." She replies, albeit not directly at whether he was truly querulous or not. "Banal craps would have developed some kind of aversion anyway."

"Why?"

"It would sound fake, don't you think?" She sits down on the furry bed, waving her hand in the air. "You would have sounded as if you are trying to dupe me with your imaginary sad life. Most people don't have it that way. They would either be in your father's position, or in some random tenant of the village who know only of mocking others."

"That's a bit vitriolic." He smirks, not sure if it is due to her compliment of him being veracious or just a strident comment right from a royalty was already enough to conciliate his rancor. He was not in good terms with the villagers after all. "Is it how a princess should talk about her commoners? It would be pernicious to you if people hear it, you know?"

"I could care less about what people think." She hisses. "Lazy ignorant fools, gamboling all day, abandoning work and their families. And when it comes to garnering tithe, they would not succumb and take their responsibilities, but start forming ramifications and talking nonsense, making vociferous riots just to receive whipping. What injustice? The only injustice thing here is their inveterate dependence!"

Putting his hand under his chin, Joseph still remains his posture. He has started to enjoy this argument, though it shows the irascible side of the princess when talking about her people. "You are not talking about everyone, I suppose?"

"No, but the main component of society. Women and children should deserve better than those drunkards."

He nods in approval. Perhaps questioning her authority in leading the country has somehow stoked whatever passion that she has towards the people, either it be rooted in her alone or passed down by her father the King, but he feels she would make a great queen. Unlike Countess Cassandra.

The Countess, who he is working for. The one who has commanded him to capture this intrepid and strident yet invidiously beautiful princess that he is speaking so casually to. He wonders if what he is doing is right, and if he should really be doing this at the moment. But then again, nothing in his life has ever seemed to go right, so he decided to act perfunctory towards the questions in his mind. What momentous right now is he keeps the princess in sight, and that she is not to escape from the annex. Other than that, what he does in the time being should not matter.

"What about you?" He raises question, trying to balk his thoughts to wander any further. "You have not told me fully about yourself yet, have you?"

"How persistent of you." Stella complains. The distance between her and him – which Stella has created as if to quarantine her gaunt countenance resulted from sleepless nights - prevents him from seeing the wide grin on her face.

"Hey, an eye for an eye." He shrugs. "There should be no intransigence in this, now that I have told you everything about me."

"Was that everything? Sounds like half a story to me."

"One's life is interminable, princess." He replies, hands over his hip, not really happy about the fact that she still keeps her part shut. "Now you will spill the beans, or I make it my quarry for the next few hours of me staying here with you. You already know how persistent I can be."

Stella pauses for a moment, dwelling the entire place with complete silence again, before she vivifies it with the germinal tone of a child.

"I am a persnickety princess, living in voluminous place with garish jewelries that you could never dream of." She blinks her eye, as innocent as an angel, before her giggles betrayed her own acting.

"Get serious, princess." Joseph rolls his eyes. "Stop ranting, and say something stupefying to me. We both know you are more than whatever you have just tried to garble."

Not that she wants to go against her words and be treated as perjury or whatever, but she would not fancy seeing his sympathy towards her, or anyone else's.

Though she does feel somewhat guilty for the sadness in her eyes during his story earlier.

"Don't try to ignite my ire, princess." He speaks up, tapping his feet impatiently at the floor. She has been silent again for too long.

"Sorry." She replies as soon as she realizes the situation. Although he keeps goading her, she cannot seem to find any germane words to put it. "I… My mother left since I was very young."

"The queen?" Joseph raises his eyebrow, not at all grated by her slow speed of talking.

She simply nods her head, a few strands of her blonde hair falls over her forehead, making it harder for him to see her expression.

"She left, just like that." Stella continues, her voice sounds distant. It sounds sad, but he finds her even more personable this way. "No one ever told me why. I never asked. I don't want to know. I don't need to know. My mother has effaced every of her belongings from this palace, or was she forced to, but none of that matters. Knowing more would only befuddle me. I have decided to take over the throne no matter what, there's no need to be confounded by trivial things."

That is no trivial thing, he thought. Being away from your mother should never be a trivial thing. He bets she cried a lot. She is just afraid to admit it, that she waived the pain, gave in to society and put on a mask.

Just look at how she wanes from the King's illness, he could already imagine her back then.

"It's okay to talk. What's said in the prison, remains in the prison after all." He continues to encourage her. Not that he is trying to raze every single piece of her heart open, but he finds himself unable to tear his gaze away from the princess. Something wrong has gotten to him.

She balks for a while, before starting to confess everything. Mostly everything. How miserable a child she was, or how much she missed her mother, and how she often cried out in her mother's parlor, hoping that she would come back. And how the Countess started coming and creeping into her life, along with her contradictory daughter, whom she can never get along with. How her father was an effigy of her life, but he has disappointed her so many times. Myriads of effusive emotions. Her bastion seems to have broken down, to let all that she has endured until now.

However, refusing to let emotion get the better of her, Stella congeals her heart and finishes with a joke:

"And somehow she gets trapped in a lame prison with a stolid guard. How unfair life could be, what does egalitarianism even mean, if a princess cannot have at least some handsome man to guard her?"

"Well sorry to have disappointed you." Joseph puts up a grin, disbelieved at the fact that she waved away the burden so fast. "But your prince is not here for you."

"Then I shall wait." She declares. "Now that I have finished talking, my stomach feels empty. Could you fetch…"

"Here." He throws an apple to her even before she finishes her sentence. He was not sure why he did that, but his hands moved on their own accord. It must have been the little righteousness left in his heart that decide to, since he cannot stand starving a lady to death.

"You are quite mutinous, aren't you?" She asks, questioningly catches the apple with her palm. "This could be considered perjury to the Countess now that you are feeding the prisoner, you know?"

"Give me back the food then." He demands, hands already reached out.

"No way."

The princess replies, biting her first bite into the apple, feeling its sweet juice drip over her taste bud. Oh how she missed this sensation. It has been days since she can eat something so delicious, for the previous days she could only focus on work and mourning over her father. But now, she feels somewhat relaxed in the cell, which makes no sense to her at all. Stupefied, she takes another bite, unable to stop herself. So this is what they call starving.

"Eat slowly, you voracious princess. You will choke at this speed."

Joseph warns her, and lets out a chuckle after he hears an annoyed and almost audible 'shut up'. The moon has only reached over the top of the mountains. The night is going to be long. Not like he wishes it not to be though.