Title: Once Upon A Time
Author: Jeanine
Fandom: Boomtown
Pairing: Joel/Teresa
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: NBC owns everything.
Notes: For the LiveJournal MultiFandom1000 "Fairy Tales" challenge posted September 9th 2003.
***
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Teresa. She lived in a house in Los Angeles with her mother and father, and she enjoyed all the things that little girls do; playing with dolls, riding her bike, dressing up for Halloween. Her father was brave and strong, and she knew that he would always be there for her, to take care of her. Her mother would bake her cookies and sit her on her knee and tell her fairy tales, stories about princesses and handsome princes who would always live happily ever after, and Teresa would always cast herself as the princess, and she'd look forward to meeting her handsome prince.
That was Teresa's life as a little girl, a life when she was happy, when she had everything she wanted.
But then when she was eight, her mother got sick and died, and it was just her and her father in the house. And they were happy, eventually, but not as happy as they were, because they both knew that something was missing.
Teresa grew up, grew up beautiful as her father always told her, trained as a paramedic, a job where she would be able to help people, be able to save people's lives. She loved her job, and she was happy, would have been happier were it not for that fact that her father, her big, strong father, wasn't the big strong father that she remembered from her childhood. Instead of him taking care of her, she was taking care of him, and it hurt to remember him how he was, hurt even more to realise that some day, some day soon, she was going to be all alone in the world.
Those were the times that she would wonder if a handsome prince would come along to save her, a knight in shining armour, but she knew that those were only fairy tales, and that fairy tales didn't happen to real people.
Then she met him, her handsome prince.
He wasn't everyone's idea of handsome; she knew that. With shoulders rounded by the weight of the world, and a perpetually careworn face, Joel Stevens would never be cast in the conventional role of Prince Charming. But he was compassionate, with kind eyes and an easy smile, and he made her laugh.
He made her fall for him, and she didn't realise it until she'd already landed.
He was her handsome Prince, but in all the fairy tales that she'd ever heard, handsome Princes weren't supposed to be married, weren't supposed to have kids. Weren't supposed to be so completely in love with their wives that they would never even look at someone else.
Ironically enough though, she wouldn't want him to look at her like that, because if he did, if he were the kind of man who would cheat on his wife, he wouldn't be the kind of man that she could fall for.
But he does look at her that way; she's seen it, even if she knows, and he knows, that he's never going to touch.
So instead they talk, and they laugh, and they play baseball together. Once, he called her beautiful, and she lied to him, told him that they were just friends, tried not to let him see that the words were like a knife to her heart, tried not to burst into tears. She did a pretty good job of it, but that's the closest he's come to admitting that her feelings are his too, and she plays that memory over and over in her dreams at night.
She wishes things could be different for her, for them, that things could be as simple as the fairy tales that she'd heard when she was a child. But she's older now, and wiser, and she knows that life is no fairy tale.
Just like she knows that there's no happy ending for her.