Fairytale
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters depicted herewithin, which, I must add, is a very cool word, whether it is a real one or not. :o)
Summary: "But she could never quite shake the feeling that they were forgetting to tell her something." Sort of a companion piece to "Enough". Although not really.
Her childhood was a pleasant one, filled with everything wholesome and happy and ridiculous and heartbreaking and humiliating that every child should experience.
She played with both dolls and trucks before deciding she liked the trucks better – that is, on days when she didn't prefer the dolls; she climbed trees and promptly fell out to the horror of her mother watching from the living room window, although she was on her feet and preparing to climb back up before her mother could even cross the room to phone an ambulance; she roamed the neighbourhood by day with the other children on the street and turned up far too late to a half-frantic lecture from her mother and a solemn expression but twinkling eyes from her father who remembered his own childhood far too well to lose his head over a disappearance of only a day; she learned just how far it was safe to go in her never-ending quest to annoy John, two years older than her and very studious and a little over-serious; she huffed in annoyance as Michael, the youngest and far more mischievous than either John or Wendy, picked up pointers and employed them mercilessly against her.
Some days, she almost wishes she could see them again, despite declaring tearfully at least twice a week when she was too young to know better, that she wasn't going to be their sister anymore – that she was "divorcing" them. Now that she must keep her family believing that she no longer exists – was dead long ago – she thinks it would be nice to talk to them again and tell them that she never really meant it.
It didn't really surprise her when she learned that life is not a fairytale.
As a little girl, it had always seemed a little suspicious to her that everything turned out happily-ever-after for every very pretty girl who had a hard life, and unhappily-ever-after for every ugly person who made their lives hard.
She knew plenty of pretty girls who had no happily-ever-after. And plenty of ugly girls with no unhappily-ever-after. She even knew ugly people who were good and pretty people who were bad.
Still, she was a romantic at heart long before she could have spelled the word, and she hoped wistfully that maybe she was wrong, and the fairytales were true. She read the fairytales, and her mother read her the fairytales, and she giggled where she was supposed to and sighed dreamily when the prince kissed the beggar-maid to make her his princess and stuck her tongue out at her brothers when they laughed at her "silly girl-stories".
But she could never quite shake the feeling that they were forgetting to tell her something.
There was nothing of the fairytale the day she met him, and stood awkwardly in front of his desk for ten minutes, waiting for him to look up at her a second time, long enough to assign his new assistant some work.
Still, despite the fact that he was no handsome, gallant prince, neither gallant nor even particularly handsome, and she was certainly no downtrodden beauty with a world of potential, and love at first sight is only for these esteemed classes, she knew, or thinks looking back on it that she began to be dimly aware, from the moment he stood up from his desk and gave her an apologetic smile and then a warm handshake, that she would spend the rest of her life loving him with the fierce loyalty that was both a strength and a weakness to both of them.
There was nothing of the fairytale the day she found herself falling too easily into the sort of thinking that neglected the safety of the individual for the greater good, the sort that always made her skin crawl and turned their lofty and honourable goals into something very ugly that bore no resemblance to what she dedicated her life to. It began to occur to her then that they might be on the wrong side of the fairytale – the villains. And everyone knew what happened to villains.
But then, as they left at the end of the meeting held to discuss what to do with a recovering woman's kidnapped child until he was old enough to fulfill a role that he was too young to understand and would be given no option of rejecting when he was old enough, Joker instructed her kindly to take the afternoon off, because he saw the dark shadows under her eyes and in her eyes and the slight tremble in her hands when fact began to connect with fact in her mind and she began to understand that what they were working toward was perhaps flawed in some very important way.
She wondered dimly as she stumbled out to her car, already rewriting reality to better suit her and turning the nauseous feeling of guilt into a touch of flu, if they could really be the villains.
True villains weren't so kind and considerate, even to other villains.
True villains didn't do what they did "for the good of humanity", either. They caused pain just to cause pain, not because a small sacrifice of one person's happiness was necessary for the greater good.
And true villains really didn't wonder, insides twisting into painful knots, if they were maybe doing the wrong thing and just didn't know it yet.
And the belief of years in Happily-Ever-Afters for everyone who deserved them began to slip. Because even if they weren't the villains in her mind, or in any of their minds, they were the villains in someone's.
There was nothing of the fairytale when he berated her, following the execution of Operation Fahrenheit 451, for drawing a weapon and firing on Agent Paper to make the point all the more clearly that resisting was not going to help.
Despite her protests that she hadn't been told not to, that he himself had told her to do whatever necessary to detain the young woman and retrieve the stolen book, he only said, looking frightfully disappointed, that he would have thought that friendship, even past friendship, meant more to her than that.
There was a little bit of the fairytale when he held her and brushed away the tears that she couldn't quite choke back, tears at the disgust in his tone, and tears at the fact that he could so easily change his words to make her the cruel and heartless one for carrying out his orders with a swiftness and efficiency that was the product of loyalty to what they are all working together towards, and tears for the pain that she had inflicted on a friend, traitor or not.
There was a little bit of the fairytale when he told her that she was right, and had been perfectly within bounds, and that Agent Paper couldn't expect any further kindness or lenience. He told her that he was proud of her because she was able to remember that when he had forgotten it, and he thanked her because she had reminded him and he wouldn't forget again. It didn't matter that the words rang hollow to her, because he believed them, and he wasn't angry with her anymore.
There was a little bit of the fairytale; only a little bit.
She put her book down long ago, and now she is just watching him.
She never cared much for reading -at least, when compared to those around her, who needed it like air
She much prefers to watch him read. She loves his expression when he's become engrossed in a book; peaceful and intent. She would wish that she could make him look like that, but she has stopped wishing things like that a long time ago. Now she is content to watch the sunlight, somehow seeming cold and brittle from the chill air outside, fall through the window and dance softly off pale hair and in ice-green eyes, and the hand curled up slightly and resting at his chin.
There has been nothing of the fairytale in it the whole way along.
There has also been nothing of the modified version of the fairytale she believed in as a still-childlike young woman who had just really fallen in love for the first time – because naturally, nothing before this time ever really counted when she looks back on it.
But that's okay, because somehow, it's even better than she had imagined, because it's real, and it's him, and it's her that he directs those fond, if absent, smiles at when he looks up briefly from whatever he's working on to catch her still watching him.
And it's a love that's grown out of admiration and years of trust built up working toward the cause that, in the end, has brought and kept all of them together.
She has stopped wondering uneasily if they can possibly come to any good end, if their actions will necessarily catch up with them if they are stopped, or if the success of what they are trying to do will prove punishment enough.
She has stopped wondering wistfully if he would be utterly inconsolable if she left suddenly and without reason, because she hasn't, and she won't because this is her cause too, and he appreciates her when she's here, no matter what may happen when she isn't.
And, for now, that is enough.
End Notes: Yick. Disjointed and weird. I think I tried to include a lot of unrelated thoughts, but they didn't really fit together in any coherent way.
It was kind of like writing an English paper:o)
And I'm not sure if this English paper has a faulty premise or not. I can't decide if the relatively mature character that Wendy has become by ROD TV would have been able by adulthood to utterly disregard the fairytales that my muse insisted she had drilled into her head from early childhood. Darn those muses… :o)
All in all, I think I insistently write Wendy as far more innocent and naïve than she really is. Probably more than she ever was, and especially more than she is by this point.
Oh, well. It was fun to write, if intrinsically flawed. :o)