NOTE: This was an English assignment. We had to "modernize" (screw up, basically ^_^) a fairy tale, and trust me, this is really screwed-up. It's a parody-retelling of Sleeping Beauty. Originally, it wasn't meant to have anything to do with Lily and James, but I was struck by sudden inspiration at 3 in the morning, so here it is--- an extremely odd L/J story.
Second NOTE: To those of you who like George Bush, I'm sorry, but I immensely dislike him, so that's why his stupidity is a bit exaggerated here. And to my kindred spirits who hate George Bush, I didn't want to associate Lily with him, but I had to! **cries tearfully**
Well, here it goes… **Also, I OWN this plot, Amazing, isn't it?**
Operation Doorways
Once upon a time, a little girl was born to Laura and George W. Bush during his presidency in the United States of America. She was dubbed Lily Rose Bush, and her flaming red hair, sparkling green eyes, and gleeful cooing and baby talk were the joys of everyone in the White House.
Gifts and notes of congratulations flooded in, and President Bush, being a very "busy" person, let his personal secretary handle them. However, one particular note sent the First Family into a crazed frenzy. Authored by none other than the infamous Al-Qaeda, it read:
When she reaches twenty-one years of age
Your beloved daughter shall live no more,
Everything shall be set to rights and evil will reign,
Once she sets foot through the evil door!
At first, they paid no attention to it, thinking Osama bin Laden had once again relapsed into another delirious state of insanity. However, one night, President Bush had a nightmare. In it, his beloved red-haired daughter had walked through a doorway and had been torn to pieces by what looked suspiciously like her other jealous siblings. Of course, he couldn't recognize his other children, and thought that the evil spirits living in the doorway had devoured her.
He shot up from his bed, clutching his blanket and whimpering for his mommy. In a hideously mismatched suit, he ran out to find his vice-president, Dick Cheney, at three in the morning. Mrs. Bush was still in bed dreaming about ice cream.
At five o'clock that very same morning, President Bush announced to the entire United States of America via sleepy-looking cameramen that he wanted all the doors in every single architectural piece of work banned. Some people thought he was sleepwalking— there was justification for that from his looks. Soon enough, though, their opinions changed to that his daddy, the former President Bush, had dropped him on his head repeatedly as a baby, and that the symptoms were just catching up to him. The President ordered everyone to use windows as a means of entry and exit instead, and that anyone caught having anything resembling a door on their property was to be thrown in jail and all their property demolished.
Once the cameramen and journalists had all departed, a myriad of bewildered looks on their faces, President Bush retired to have his morning coffee and donuts.
He was about to take his first bite of a scrumptious jelly donut when suddenly, the Head of the CIA came flying into the room, panting. "I heard— about— evil doorways— no use— windows— like doors—" he gasped in between sucking gigantic amounts of air into his lungs. Like the president, his clothes were mismatched and in a ridiculous state of disarray. The media would have a field day if they saw both distinguished members of the government looking like something the cat dragged in.
The president delicately lay down his donut and wiped his mouth, even though there was nothing on it. "What was that, Bob?"
"I said that banning doors wouldn't do any good. Windows are much too similar to doors. Besides, the public already thinks you've finally gone mad. I just passed a senator from Connecticut, Lieberman, I think, who was muttering about the Bush family curse, and saying that you were dropped on your head as a baby." Privately, the director agreed, but he couldn't voice his opinion, of course. Maybe that explained all the dents and bald spots on the president's head.
George Bush shrugged. "Maybe I was dropped on my head, I don't know, but what I do know is that by the power vested in me as the President of the United States, I have banned the doors in this country, and the plebeians will follow my orders or accept the dire consequences."
With that, George Bush returned to slurping his coffee and shoving the glazed donuts into his mouth, leaving his harried wife to wipe the sticky crumbs off his ugly orange suit.
Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden, having heard the decree issued by the President of the United States, cackled maliciously. "Doors or no doors, the red-haired witch will die!"
The next day, the president took it upon himself to pay a visit to his dear friend Bob in his office. With a triumphant kind of satisfaction, he noted that the immensely disgruntled CIA agents were banging their heads on the window frames as they tried to get from one room to the other. Not that he hadn't, but that was beside the point.
"Well, Bob, what of the evil prophecy now?" George Bush crowed happily once he had made it through the window without tripping, a major feat that he had practiced for three hours the day before. "What now?" He guffawed loudly, causing the director to wince.
"I hate to say it, George, but it's no use."
"WHAT? HOW DARE YOU CONTRADICT ME!"
"Whoa! Will you let me at least finish? It's no use, because all Al-Qaeda needs is a frame of some sort, window or door, it doesn't matter. I don't know what they have in mind, but it's gotta be pretty bad."
"Well, what do I do, then? Make the plebeians use tunnels? Actually, that's not such a bad—"
"No, no, no," the director hastily interrupted. "You must give us Lily, and we will take her away and hide her somewhere until her twenty-first birthday has passed. Right now, we are in the process of contacting our friends in England. We will pass her to the hands of the agents there, and they will take care of her until she is grown up. Once she is safely past her twenty-first birthday, she can return to the United States."
"Can we trust the English? Them and their bloody tea parties and—" He sighed. "I see I have no choice. Anything is better than my darling getting torn up by evil spirits in a doorway."
The two men shook hands, George Bush left, and the director of the CIA was notified that a Mr. Charles Bond and his wife Elizabeth in England had been secured for the job. Operation Doorways had just commenced.
The lonely years passed, and the White House was drowned in a constant state of gloom. Everyone tried to imagine what mischief the little redhead would be causing in England in the care of the retired English agents. The media gleefully announced that the president could be heard muttering in his sleep, "I hope those bloody agents don't teach her to handle machine guns."
However, Lily was far from sad. She was as disgusted as a teenager could possibly be because Elizabeth Bond was trying to shove chicken liver down her throat.
"Gross! Chicken liver! What's it supposed to do, make me grow wings and fly?"
Over Lily's head, Elizabeth shared a half-exasperated, half-sympathetic look with her husband and replied, "Ariel, you will eat the chicken liver, or you won't be dismissed from the table. Shame on you. You're all of twenty years old, going on twenty-one, and I still have to feed you." Once Lily had set foot on English soil, she had become Ariel Bond, the orphaned niece of Charles and Elizabeth. No one other than the English agents knew that she was really the daughter of George Bush.
Normally, neither Charles nor Elizabeth would have touched that brown, lumpy mass with anything less than a ten-foot pole. But lo and behold, the almighty Yankees had forced them to. Mr. I'm-the-Director-of-the-CIA had informed them that chicken liver had been discovered to hold "protective powers," so shipments of the gooey organs were made weekly to England to be fed to Lily, AKA Ariel, every weekend or whenever she was home from college. She had just recently graduated from Oxford University with a B.A. that month.
Holding her nose, Ariel quickly gulped the liver and followed it down with half a glass of water. She wrinkled her nose at the taste, stood up and brought her plate to the sink, then grabbed her backpack and raced out the door, calling, "Bye! I'll be back for supper!" The sun shone brightly as she hopped into her red Porsche and drove down to the beach.
Ariel was strolling around on the sand, looking for shells, when she suddenly bumped into a person in front of her. "Oh, I'm sorry!" she gasped, raising her head to look at the person.
It was love at first sight, she with him and he with her. They gazed, mesmerized, into each other's eyes for several moments. There was something familiar about him, Ariel thought, but she couldn't place the face with a name.
As luck would have it, he was none other than Prince James, heir to the throne of England. Seeing that the captivating young red-haired nymph didn't recognize him, he took advantage of the situation and introduced himself only as James— he had enough of being called "Your Highness" at the palace. The name was common enough, and Ariel's memory was bad enough, that by the end of the day, they still knew each other only as James and Ariel. As the sun set in the background, the love-struck couple parted reluctantly and agreed to meet at the same place the next day.
Ariel returned home with a happy heart, thinking only of James and his messy black hair and brown eyes. She walked into the house, whistling, but stopped abruptly when she saw the presents and birthday cake on the table. "But my birthday's not until tomorrow!" she cried, confused and not a little bit hurt that Charles and Elizabeth had remembered wrong.
The couple looked at each other, and finally Charles sighed. "Ariel, we have something we need to tell you…"
The next morning, with a heavy heart and tears glimmering in her eyes, Ariel, or rather, Lily Bush, was placed on a Lear jet heading back to the United States. Her FBI escorts must have thought that they were tears of happiness, but they weren't. She could not forget Charles and Elizabeth waving goodbye at the airport, or James, the handsome young man she had met at the beach. She would give anything to be there with him this evening, but it was not to be. She didn't want to go back to a seemingly foreign country, to a family she had never known.
The President and his family met her at the airport, and she obediently hugged everyone like a good daughter and pasted a fake, happy expression on her face. Inwardly, though, she already felt homesick.
They held a party for her at the White House, and the President introduced her to everyone as "my daughter, Lily Rose." However, she quickly grew tired of the fake, political smiles and the insincere compliments, so she pleaded a headache and slipped away.
She was walking down the corridor when she heard a set of footsteps coming from the opposite direction. Lily groaned, thinking it was another one of the hundreds of senators and representatives.
"The bathrooms, dearie? This way, follow me." A dark-haired woman with a slight accent grabbed her arm and propelled her towards a beautiful, gilded doorway at the end of the hallway, without even asking whether she needed to use the bathroom or not. Sighing, Lily gave in, and decided to walk alongside the woman instead of being mercilessly dragged across the floor. Before they reached the doorway, the lady stopped. "Through the doorway, the third door on the right." She then walked away, leaving Lily alone. Lily did not see her evil smile.
Sighing resignedly, she decided that she needed to use the bathrooms, or the toilet, as she was more accustomed to saying, after all. Upon stepping foot through the doorway, she felt strange sensations pulse through her body, and then she collapsed into a deep sleep on the floor. Little did she know that the years of being force-fed chicken liver had paid off— some of the radiation had been reflected instead of fully absorbed, so Lily was in a state of unconscious sleep instead of death.
A strange, dark-haired lady was seen sprinting through the halls and disappearing into a cab, and Lily Bush was missing. The FBI agents put two and two together and realized something was wrong. Quickly, they fanned out and searched all the rooms. One agent found Lily lying on the floor, minute wisps rising from her body. He checked her pulse, and managed to yell to his partner, "Call the bloody English! It's radiation! We need their lasers!" before the slightly weakened radiation waves that had reflected off the chicken liver were absorbed into his body, causing him to fall into a deep sleep as well.
His partner was able to put a quick call through to his director, the head of the FBI, who then called Bob, the director of the CIA, who then called the English, before the radiation sent him to sleep.
The radiation was on the loose.
Several hours later (NOTE: England is about 7 hours ahead of the USA), Prince James was still waiting on the beach for Ariel to appear. Hours passed, but he still stubbornly refused to believe that his one true love had stood him up. James had asked a friend if he knew who she was, and had learned that she lived nearby. He was about to go to her house when a dark-haired woman suddenly tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned to look at her, she whispered, "Your Ariel is not who you think she is. She is Lily Bush, the daughter of the President of the United States. You will never see her again, for she is to die, as are you!" The lady then pressed a chloroformed rag to his face, knocking him unconscious, and called for her cohorts to help carry him away.
The next morning, Prince James awoke and found himself in the back seat of a car, traveling to who-knows-where. Still a bit groggy from the chloroform, he shut his eyes and willed his head to clear up. Amazingly, The Powers That Be chose to be on his side, and his head did. The odd sensations in his head then made sense, and he realized his captors were talking. Putting bits and pieces together, he came up with the entire situation, covering everything about Lily Bush AKA Ariel Bond to the radiation plan. He shifted around, and felt something digging into his ribs— his laser gun! James almost whooped with joy. His captors hadn't bothered to pat him down. Haha. Now he could free himself, contact The Agency, and travel to the USA to find his true love, who had better still be alive after having eaten all that chicken liver.
Meanwhile, the radiation had spread throughout the continental United States, and the whole country was asleep.
Five hours later, an exhausted yet elated Prince James found himself on the doorstep of what supposedly was Ariel Bond's home, provided that his friend hadn't lied. He raised his hand to knock when the door suddenly swung open. James found himself face to face with a tall man in his fifties, who had a hand on the butt of a laser gun— Charles Bond. He, unlike Ariel, recognized the heir, and invited him in.
Prince James's tale spilled out of him, and some confusion became resolved as both sides told their stories. Charles Bond made a call to his former boss while his wife dug out their equipment, and two hours later, they, along with twenty other agents, were on their way to the USA wearing laser shields and wielding heavy laser guns.
The jet landed, and everyone made their way to the White House. It was eerie, for not a single soul was awake— not even the birds that normally sang so cheerily outside. The members of Congress, the White House aides, and the FBI agents were all slumped on the floor in an unconscious sleep.
The English agents raced to the source, their laser shields humming as they deflected the radiation waves. Bit by bit, the laser guns chipped away at the radiation waves until some of the victims began to awaken and moan.
Prince James knelt by the side of his ladylove, sporadically shooting laser beams into various parts of her body to try to waken her. Suddenly she made an odd choking noise, and her face began to turn red.
The sound drew the attention of Charles and his wife, and they hurried over. They were still wondering what was on earth was happening when Lily's face began to turn a mottled purple. The couple understood at the same time, and together they shouted, "Your Highness, she's choking! She can't breathe! Give her mouth-to-mouth or she'll die!"
Hesitantly, James bent over and placed his mouth on hers. After a couple breaths, Lily opened her emerald-colored eyes and stared up into James's worried, loving brown ones.
Around them, noises could be heard as everyone began to wake up— the senators, the waiters, the White House aides, and even President George Bush himself, who was currently slumped across the food table.
Lily married Prince James, and they lived happily ever after.
Epilogue:
The radiation interfered with Lily's pregnancy, so their first and only son, Harry, was born with an odd, lightning-shaped scar on his forehead and rather strange abilities.