"I'll scout ahead. Wait for my signal," Fiona instructed Brogan.
Fiona split off from the main contingent and slipped up the side of the hill towards the ruined fortress. She spied Brogan taking cover behind a tree. Her soul thrilled; this is it. Her legs carried her up the steep hillside unbidden; they were as excited as she was to reach the ruins at the top.
This is it.
I'm going to get to that wall, look over, and see that little rat coming. This is the day. The moment. Finally we'll have him! Fiona's ogrid strength made travel over the rough terrain effortless; her months of practice made her silent. Her line of sight cleared the stone wall, the scene unfolding before her like a curtain revealing a play.
The valley looked just as it had the last five times she'd scouted it. Rumpel's squadron approached with a dull, regular rhythm counted out by the lanterns swinging in the distance. He traveled exactly as she had foreseen it, exactly as she had shown it to her lieutenants in the war room. Every ogre was ready, seeing what she had told them to anticipate.
She pulled in one deep, controlled breath to clear her mind. Everything was going according to plan. There remained only a single decision: when. A single dimension of judgment. Too soon and Rumpel might escape out the back; too late and her warriors might not make an effective formation. Complete focus. She eyeballed the ambush point, estimated Rumpel was maybe a minute away. She began a countdown in her head. Sixty … fifty-nine ...
"S'quite a view from up here!" came a voice, rupturing the silence.
Bog dam it. Of course he'd show up here. Fiona's eyes widened, appalled. "What are you doing!? Get back in position!" she demanded, waving him off. She squinted into the dark at the road that would soon deliver her quarry.
"You need to know, once and for all, who I really am," Shrek insisted, punctuating each word.
"You," she tipped her head towards him, eyes and ears fixed on the road, "are going to ruin everything."
"Ruin everything!? Actually, I'm gonna fix everything. The ogres, Rumple, your curse!"
Fiona's heart stopped. This clown situation just got real. It commanded her entire attention.
Fiona unsheathed her dagger with a wicked ring and flash of moonlight. It was at Shrek's neck before he knew what had happened. "How do you know about my curse!?"
"Okay, okay! Please! Fiona! Just … hear me out. I can explain everything."
Fiona slammed Shrek to the ground, left elbow to his throat. Even discounting the dagger in her right hand, she had complete control over the number of heartbeats he had remaining; a quick adjustment of her elbow would cut off the blood to his brain. The glinting dagger she held up into his field of view to be certain that he understood the situation.
"Listen! I don't know who you are, or how you know about my curse, but if any of these ogres find out that I'm a—"
"A beautiful princess?" Shrek offered with a conspiratorial grin.
"That is not who I am. Not anymore." Fiona was knocked way off balance.
"Look, I know ye'r upset, an' I—"
"You don't know anything about me." Fiona reoriented her mind, and repositioned her body back to controlling this rogue factor. Her sphere of attention shrunk to a one-ogre radius around her knife.
"I know everything about you!" Shrek answered, his face frustrated. "I know you sing so beautifully that birds explode!"
"Big deal!" Fiona challenged, dagger still at the ready. Odd; the threat kept him physically controlled, but didn't seem to deter his confidence even a little.
"I know that when ye sign your name, you put a heart over the i!"
"So what!?" Fiona was exasperated. Some agent could have figured that out by digging through her old trash. This situation, like the others involving this guy today, was just nonsensical.
"I know that when you see a shooting star, you cross your fingers on both hands, scrunch up your nose, and you make a wish."
This knowledge was different. Fiona had renounced wishing on stars when she abandoned the tower. How could anybody know that? The fight drained out of Fiona like water from a bathtub. The revelation was so bizarre that she had to reevaluate her opponent. She stepped back involuntarily.
Shrek pushed himself up to fill in the space between them. "I know that you don't like the covers wrapped around yer feet." He pushed himself up to standing and encroached a step or two into her space. "And I know that ye sleep by candlelight because every time you close your eyes, yer afraid yer gonna wake up back in that tower!"
Fiona's jaw slackened, her eyes bulged agog. Her heartbeat rang in her ears. Her mental gears had ground to a stop.
"But most importantly Fiona," Shrek gulped, retrenching his confidence. "I know that the reason you turn human every day..." He paused, evidently groping at how to say this next bit.
Fiona listened raptly. An eyebrow raised. This question. If he wanted to cut right to her heart, he could not think of a better question to pose. She'd spent so many hours pondering this question.
"...is because you've never been kissed... well..."
A kiss. There it was again. He paused awkwardly, unsure.
"...by me."
Fiona's blood ran cold. No, hot. Whatever it was, the sensation was intense. His words had finally gotten to her mind and peeled back a defensive layer. Suddenly that unfamiliar sensation, that inexplicable connection was back again. In his eyes. Her mistrust melted away; her heart could see that he was genuine.
Shrek held out his palms, inviting.
Fiona took a huge leap, and placed her hands in his.
His thumbs closed gently over her hands. A shiver ran up her arms and down her spine.
Fiona slammed him to the ground. Confusion swirled in her mind and crossed her countenance.
"Heh! You move fast!" Shrek smiled. Music twittered up from the clearing below. It was so out-of-place! It popped her bubble of focus and she recalled where she was.
"Huh! It's not me … doing the moving..." Fiona said, eyebrows knotted in concern. She lofted Shrek off the ground into a dance step. A seizure ripped through her muscles, bizarrely rhythmic convulsions.
"WHY IS THIS HAPPENING!?" she shouted in frustration as the two cavorted down the hillside trail. How she avoided face planting on the boulders was an unsolved mystery.
"Love!?" Shrek answered optimistically.
"No! I'm being forced to dance!"
"By love!" His joy was irrepressible.
"No! I can't stop myself!" Her head was strapped in for a ride on a body that looked like her own but felt utterly alien. If they were her legs, they'd do her bidding. Moments ago she'd reluctantly opened her heart, and now suddenly she lost control over her very body. If this was love, she'd like nothing to do with it, thank you very much.
The pair tangoed down the hill into a clearing full of dancing ogres; weaving between them, a lithe man in a black cape danced, flute to his lips. When he saw the two of them, he pranced out towards them and drew them in with his music.
Their coordinated feet sashayed into a moonlit clearing where rows of ogres busted a move in perfect synchronization. "Oh no! It's the Piper!" That explains the involuntary dancing, she thought, which was a much better situation than a peculiar side effect of love.
No wait! Gaaah! She spotted Brogan grimacing as he fought the coercion. The entire army is here, under his control! We've been decoyed! Completely hookwinked!
"I can't believe I let this happen!" Fiona shouted in frustration, swinging around under Shrek's lead. Well, under Piper's lead. "And it's all because of you!" If you hadn't distracted me at the lookout, I might have spotted the decoy and called off the ambush!
"If you had just let me kiss you!" Shrek answered, pulling Fiona through a flip into the splits.
"WHAT!?" Fiona looked up at him. How could he even think about a kiss as the solution to this problem!? "You're insaaaane!" she exclaimed as he spun her over his head. The music reached a crescendo. Fiona shrieked as Shrek hurled her into the sky, five times his own height. Her organs rose in her throat and her eyes bugged out as gravity lost its grip on her body.
Shrek caught her with effortless certainty. The Piper cut the music with a bridge, redirecting the ogres into a march back up the trail his decoy carriage had arrived on. The ogres marched in synchrony, dancing, pointing in a conga line.
The situation was absurd. Fiona's mind raced, trying to figure out her next move. Infuriatingly, every next physical move wasn't hers to decide. How could a marionette hope to make a plan?
To pile balderdash on nonsense, Fiona and Shrek were suddenly upended into a donkey cart, rattling down the hill away from the Piper's organized chaos. Their eyes bulged in helplessness, their arms still executing perfectly synchronized dance moves, as the cart and cargo careened across the meadow and down a hillside.
"Puss and Donkey to the rescue!" announced the … donkey!? Yeah that was weird. The donkey looked back at her. "We saved the day!" he congratulated himself. She was just barely regaining control of her body, realizing that Puss was, indeed, driving the cart.
Driving the cart would suggest that the cart had a direction, but at most that direction was "away from the Piper," not towards anywhere in particular. Not a second after the donkey announced his victory, the cart leaped over a mound, sending every occupant tumbling through free space, screaming.
That same nauseating sensation of free fall she'd felt moments ago in the dance was back, but now no dance partner was below her. She braced for impact on the other side of whatever hillock had sent them airborne, but the free fall continued.
And continued. Spinning through space left her vision a blur, until she snapped her head around to capture a stable snapshot – and saw that they had careened off a cliff. The good news is that I probably won't feel it when I die, she thought.
Water engulfed her, collapsing her world from the echoing canyon to the dull nothing of pressure on her ears. The chilled river water shocked her body.
Fiona struck head and shoulders first; had her head been tilted just a bit farther back, the force would have snapped her neck, killing her before her toes got wet. As it was, the impact of the water on her head instinctively told her her orientation. She struck out with her hands, rerouting her inertia away from descent, back towards the surface.
Desperately she wanted to suck in a deep breath of air; she'd nearly emptied her lungs on the scream in her descent. She forced herself to exhale farther; a coughing fit would probably also kill her right now. She kicked her legs, burning what oxygen remained in her body in a bid to reach the surface sooner.
She erupted through the surface and gasped, sucking a massive breath spritzed with an aerosol of river water that had the misfortune of dripping off her lip during the ferocious inhale.
Not dead. That was a surprise.
The river current was moving pretty fast. She looked around her and saw that all four creatures had resurfaced, spluttering.
Puss cat-paddled and gasped, nearly in a panic. He was drifting towards one of many snags in the river. Fiona kicked over to him and hoisted him by the scruff. "You're floating, Puss. Calm down." Puss promptly embedded his claws in her hair, riding her head like a raft. Fiona leaned back to stay buoyant, which prompted Puss to dig in a little deeper until he found skin. Fiona scowled into the night sky.
A plank of shattered farm cart drifted within reach. Fiona deposited the soggy feline in the center, rolled over, and used the plank as a kick board. Thus stabilized, she retrieved a lantern bobbing in the water and paddled herself and the cat to a narrow bank carved out of the canyon wall.
As she waded out of the water, she saw Shrek had already climbed free; he was disentangling the donkey from its harness. Puss waddled over towards the donkey and plopped down exhausted.
Fiona gathered her belongings. The lantern hadn't taken on enough water to displace its oil; a flint that was still rolled into her belt sparked it back to life. She was frustrated to find her sword had not survived the fall. Better she'd broken it than the other way around! She looked up and saw Shrek trying to re-fit his brace. He caught her eye, extended his arm and gave a pleading little smile.
Like that moment when he caught my heart three hours ago, she thought. And now look what you've done with it, you idiot. She shot an exaggerated sigh and explicitly ignored him.
She didn't have much other than what was strapped to her body; once everything was in order, if a bit soggy, she stood up and got on her way. It wasn't at all clear where her way was. But the ogres had all been marched away, and it was her fault. She'd lost her army, but the mission hadn't changed: free all ogres.
"STOP!" Shrek commanded. "Where are you going!?" He sounded out of patience. The feeling was mutual.
"To save my friends."
Shrek followed right behind. "How? By getting yourself killed!?"
Yeah. No question. "If that's what it takes," she snapped. How could he even ask? She dug her toes into the mud to find purchase as she climbed the steep bank up to a bridge.
Shrek called over his shoulder, "Puss, say something!"
It all clicked. He'd wheedled into her heart by "proving" he knew all about her. But that was all a ruse, and not even a terribly clever one. It was, however, hard to believe Puss would sell her out, when he'd long ago passed by the opportunity to dispatch her for Rumpel. "PUSS!?"
"L-l-let me explain..." he protested.
"So that's how you knew so much about me!" Fiona turned away from Shrek in disgust.
"Fiona, wait!" Shrek scrambled up the hill, leapt the stone wall, and intercepted her trajectory. He spread his hands out in her path signaling stop. "Kiss me!"
"WHAT!?" Fiona demanded, more objection than inquiry.
"It's the only way to save your friends!" He would say literally anything to claim me. Fiona was disgusted.
"Get outta my way." She elbowed past.
"Ye used t'believe that a single kiss could solve everything!"
Fiona stopped in her tracks. Know all about me, do you? You have no idea what I went through to cure myself of that foolishness. Back when I thought a single kiss could solve anything, I was heartbroken, abandoned, left for dead. And here you're trying to use it on me?
She swiveled on her heel. She was furious. She marched up to him.
She stared at his face. What she was contemplating didn't make a great deal of sense, but calculating, careful Fiona had taken a back seat to pure anger. She'd give him that kiss, alright. Sure as heck wasn't going to be True Love's Kiss. And at this point, if his ridiculous badgering ended up turning her human, who was left to care? It's not like her mission depended on having ogre allies anymore. Have your damned kiss.
She grabbed him by the vest and yanked him to herself, smashing her lips to his.
Her first kiss.
Decades she'd daydreamed of her Prince Charming's tender lips caressing her own, her heart aflutter; how shocked past Fiona would be to witness this moment. She hated everything about it. She hated the ogre she was kissing. She hated the reason she was kissing him. She hated his big bulbous lips, she hated that five seconds ago she thought this would be okay.
Seconds passed. The smell of stale onions, tooth decay. Wet slobber on her chin. Fiona pressed the lovestruck ogre away from her and stepped back. He was dizzy, clearly not expecting to have achieved his victory. I hope you're finally satisfied. She glowered at him.
Shrek was waiting for something.
Fiona smeared his saliva off her face, disgusted with him. Disgusted with herself.
Shrek glanced around anxiously. "I don't understand," he said quizzically. Then, more emphatically, "This doesn't make any sense! True Love's kiss was supposed to fix everything," he demanded, as though robbed. Wow, he really believed it. She'd thought he was just trying to manipulate her with her own fairy tale.
Now she kind of felt sorry for him. A little. "Yeah, you know what, that's what they told me too," she spat. "True love didn't get me out of that tower. I did. I saved myself."
Shrek looked down, plaintive, remorseful.
"Don't you get it!? It's all just a big fairy tale!"
"Fiona, don't say that! It does exist!"
"How would you know!? Did you grow up locked away in a dragon's keep? Did you live all alone in a miserable tower? Did you cry yourself to sleep every night, waiting for a true love that never came!" she charged, the answers obvious. She stared him down.
For Grimm's sake. It had taken so long, so much emotional fortitude, for Fiona to finally put that deeply-ingrained fantasy to bed, and somehow now she was expected to help out this guy? And somehow his fantasy demanded her participation? Go park yourself in your own tower; we'll see you in a decade.
"—but—" he choked on his thoughts. His face was a mix of confusion and desperation. "—but I'm your true love!"
Wow. He's been reading so many fairy tales on the john that he has mistaken himself for the hero.
"Then where were you when I needed you." Fiona incriminated, her eyes drilling into him. Again, all statement, no question. Everything was screwed up. If he wanted to be the hero, he'd blown his opportunity; he sure couldn't save the day now.
Fiona turned away from Shrek, disappointment and contempt twisting her features. She gathered her lantern and set her eyes on the onion domes of Rumpel's gaudy stronghold. One foot in front of the other.