Chapter 4: Changes
Marinette headed inside, tears leaking from her eyes no matter how hard she tried to stop them.
"Now, now, you mustn't cry," she heard, making her look up. It was Lila.
"Yes, stepmother," she said, wiping her eyes.
"You needn't call me that," her stepmother told her. Marinette hoped that Mrs. Rossi didn't want her to call her "mother," there was no way she could do that yet.
"Madam will do!" Her stepmother finished. That wasn't what she was expecting, but oh, well.
Suddenly, there came yelling voices headed towards them from the stepsisters' new rooms.
"There isn't room for me in all of your clothes!" She heard as the two girls passed by them.
"Then make yourself smaller!" Came the angry retort.
Marinette's stepmother looked amused. "Chloé and Sabrina have always shared a room. I think they're finding their sleeping quarters rather... confining. Such dear, affectionate girls..."
Marinette suddenly had an idea. "Well, my bedroom is the biggest besides yours and father's, perhaps they'd to share it?"
"What a good girl you are!" Her stepmother replied, looking delighted.
"Well, I can sleep in the-" she started.
"The attic!" Mrs. Rossi interrupted.
"The attic?" Marinette asked, confused... and a little worried. Was her earlier impression of her stepfamily correct- but no, she wouldn't assume things, there was probably a perfectly good reason?
"Only temporarily, of course, while I have all the other rooms redecorated," she replied airily. Marinette was even more concerned now. Her stepmother had never even suggested redecorating to her father, let all me asked his permission to do it.
"It'll be so cozy up there, and you'll be able to get away from all the fuss and bother down here," her stepmother continued. "It would be even more cozy if you took all this-" she was told as she was handed the tray of sewing supplies that she had been using, which had belonged to her mother- "up there with you."
Marinette was shocked. How rude! Yet she could tell she had been dismissed, so she took the tray and headed up to the attic.
Marinette looked around the attic. It was... roomy, and there was (mostly half-destroyed) furniture up there... she set an empty bed-frame upright and covered it with an old, dusty rug to use as a mattress. She found a chair that was mostly intact and picked it up.
"Oh!" She exclaimed. Under the chair, her four hamster friends had been eating scraps of food.
"So this is where you take refuge!" She said to them. Hamsters were good listeners, even if they weren't too great at talking. "Me too, it seems," she finished.
Marinette looked around again, and thought that it was actually rather nice, with the big windows and the sunbeams playing across the walls...
"Yes," she decided. "How perfectly pleasant. No cats..." she said, looking at the hamsters (who had been being terrorized by Lila's cat Lucifer).
"And no stepsisters," Marinette finished, smiling as she shut the door.
A/N: I know that this week I haven't been updating as much, but it's sort of complicated... blame it on my mom. On to reviews!
Potato: Ya I know, I have two sisters and a brother. A bit of a nightmare sometimes... hehehe! I think it's sort of weird how in the movie it seems like everyone already knows that the father is going to die, I was sort of trying to tone that down a bit. Ya, Hawkmoth being a stepsister would be ridiculous (utterly ridiculous)!