Disclaimer: Aladdin is the property of D*sney, and I claim nothing but my own silly ideas.
Chapter 1
Of Silence and Scepters
That night, after Aladdin and Jasmine said their formal goodbye in the foyer, and their decidedly less than formal goodbyes on her balcony, Jasmine found her thoughts circling around a disturbing, but all too familiar subject.
The heat of dinner and all it's implications had left her as she ascended to her rooms that evening. The cool marble of the palace walls had absorbed every injustice, leaving only the heavy lump in her throat from earlier and a sense of cold loneliness that she was only beginning to understand. Even Aladdin's amorous caresses could not dispel the heaviness she felt. With icy guilt in her heart, she had turned him away after only a few minutes of his company.
Upon his departure, she retired to her rooms without sealing the heavy drapes behind her. She opted instead to dispel the light from her vanity lamp and let the pale moonlight bathe the room in sharp monotone. Even in the stark light of the moon, she could still make out half of her round face reflected in the mirror's surface. She leaned in to inspect the woman she saw there. There was nothing on her face in the night that did not show itself during the day. But only this light could reveal the secrets her eyes hid from her heart.
There was a sadness in her that Jasmine could name, even if she didn't want to. Her affection for Aladdin was beginning to fail and she feared its root cause more than the inevitable end she saw on the horizon. Many would suspect it's death from their nearly insurmountable socio-economic differences, but the weapon that had destroyed their paradise was actually a tool of her own making.
The Princess in the mirror narrowed her eyes as Jasmine remembered the thrill on Aladdin's face when her father had allowed him to correct a royal error, and then step into the conversation like… and here the wet gleam of tears appeared on the other princess' face… like an equal. The pressure in her throat was growing, but the serene woman in the mirror remained completely still as silent tears fell from her eyes.
She knew that this poison, this jealousy, was something she had crafted during the long seasons of her youth, before Aladdin had been anything more than a faceless suitor in her future life. Jasmine knew its bitterness would not make her a man. Just as she knew that if she left him, she would encounter the same problem with any suitor she chose to be her husband.
She allowed the tears to make their slow track down her face for a few more moments before she walked to her washbasin to retrieve the towel she found there. As Jasmine removed the evidence of her sorrow and the rest of her make-up she began considering the incident involving Mozenrath.
The lump in her throat spread downwards in a warm wave of anger. But for all of her fury, she could not deny one simple fact: It had felt good to be challenged like that. She had worried for Aladdin of course, her affection for him was sincere (if a little bit strained), but she had paid more attention to the challenge he'd presented to her mind than the pang of loss in her heart. His disparaging comments had only fueled the fire of her temper. It was the determination to see that look of shock on his face, to see the defeated look of a man who has completely underestimated his enemy that had driven her to the edge of her father's kingdom.
She returned the cloth to it's resting place with more vigor than was strictly necessary and let down her hair. Her thoughts circled on the Sorcerer as she viciously attacked her locks with a thin comb. Her rhythm raced with the beat of her heart as she allowed herself to recall the enemy whose defeat had been at her hands.
'…Dainty, spoiled, WEAK!'
His voice echoed in her head as she pulled the comb through the dark tempest of her hair until a brittle crack rang out against the silent walls and cleared her mind. With some considerable effort she removed her hands from the tangled mess she had created, and looked upon the broken comb that lay cradled in the palm of her hand.
Jasmine laid the casualty of her anger gently on the vanity. She tried to recall whom it had been a gift from, before giving up without much concern. With a huff of childish frustration she ran her fingers into her scalp and fluffed her hair four or five times before removing her day wear and sliding into the softer material of her sleep clothes.
As she lay down she decided that it made no difference if he was to be released. He had lost. To her. Period. And releasing him from his stony prison did not tarnish that victory, no matter what her heart felt. She would pity neither him nor herself. And she would most certainly not be afraid of his petty retribution.
Even with this thought, however, the same icy trickle of fear from earlier began to drip from the base of her skull.
Her last thoughts before sleep were of his black eyes, widened with terror and outrage as she released him from her grasp into the path of his own weapon, but her dreams were filled with his cruelties that echoed and magnified down the hallway of her insecurities.
"Good Morning Genie" she called out brightly as the blue vapors of the jinn's arrival parted to reveal his solid form. She quickly closed the books she'd been attending to prior to his arrival to give him her full attention.
Not that anything could have possibly distracted her from the sight he made, for as soon as she announced her greeting, he had conjured a desk and a wand of some kind and appeared garbed what could only be described as the ugliest patterned cloth the princess had ever laid eyes upon in her entire pastel covered life. She laughed as he raised her father's standard behind him and yelled into the stick…
"GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORNING Princess!"
There were a few moments of loud, pulsing music before another cloud of blue smoke revealed the Genie in his usual garb. He seemed totally unperturbed that his joke had just flown high over her head. His demeanor was quickly tailored to display as much non-chalance as a blue supernatural creature can show in the normal domestic scene that was the princess' private inspected his nails thoughtfully while stating in an even, questioning voice,
"So Al tells me that the Wunderkind is to be released."
She remained quiet for a moment too long and watched the ear closest to her expand until the jinn's earring was the size of her vanity mirror while he waited for her reaction and grew extra fingers to examine over the long pause.
"It's true," she sighed, her spine curving uncharacteristically in defeat as she turned to the latticed window," I spoke with my father again this morning, but he says there's nothing for it. If Destane still, um, lived, no one would question the absurdity of forging an alliance, but since Mozenrath is relatively unknown and has managed to unite what was mainly a collection of warring territories, his advisors think that releasing him might be the key to finally gaining peace between the seven deserts."
"…And opening some rather lucrative trade routes to the north." She heard him mumble over her shoulder.
She turned to see the Genie hovering over the books on her desk contemplatively. He looked up and met her gaze for a moment before hopping onto the desk with a graceful bounce and flashing a sunny smile that said 'please continue'.
"And apparently our testimony is not enough to convince everyone that he's actually nothing but a destructive force out to reduce us all to shambling Mamluks. I'd like to know when kidnapping stopped being considered a crime and became a 'personal inconvenience'." She let out a a large huff as she recalled this comment from her earlier conversation with the new head viser.
His ten-thousand watt smile dimmed at the end of her statement but did not vanish completely as he held one of the books aloft "I see you've already started looking into solutions for this particular problem, but magical theory is a difficult thing to grasp…" he demonstrated by turning the book into sand that seeped through his hands, and then solidified it again between his thick fingers" … simply by reading."
"Exactly." She stated in a finalizing tone that only someone with her royal breeding could have achieved. "I was hoping you would have some insight as to how we might be able to, if not contain, limit his capacity for harm."
Genie flipped through the book silently for a moment before speaking in the most serious tone she'd heard from him all week. "What do you know about mortals that are able to use magic?"
Jasmine returned to her chair and thought silently for a moment before humming in a way that said she was stretching for an answer. The princess was suddenly startled to see small, blue-skinned replicas of all their mortal magical opponents begin to parade across the desk in front of her while posing and wearing ribbons from their shoulders that displayed their names across them. She watched as genie appeared as a small man in a suit who claimed that they would all be demonstrating their talents for the title of 'Miss Agrebah'. Jasmine let out a very un-princess-like snort before giggling like mad at the look of mortification that crossed Jafar's tiny blue features.
Ten minutes later, as she watched that same Jafar hypnotize a small Iago and make him tango across the stage, the answer hit her.
"The staff!" she exclaimed loudly, making the miniature ex-viser huff with indignation at the interruption and return to his place in line without lifting the spell from the still spinning Iago.
"They all require some magical object to manipulate their power through!" She cried again as genie placed a small crown on the parrot's head and the contestants disappeared in a cloud of moans and blue smoke.
"Very good Princess. As far as I can figure, Mozie gets all his power from here…"
Genie abruptly appeared as full sized Lord of Black Sand that towered over her while extending his right arm to her scrutiny. She found herself unable to examine the gauntlet as she let out a small half-breath and realized this was the closest she'd ever been to the sorcerer. Well, closest excluding that time she had kicked him in his smug mouth. Genie's eye's widened perceptively as she approached and leaned up to look into his face. The pale, smoothness of his countenance was only magnified by the confused expression the doppelganger was wearing. It made him look so…
"… So young," she mused aloud. And Jasmine might have continued her observation, if she hadn't noticed the pointed ears that were plainly visible through the folds of his headdress and the uncomfortable thumb twiddling that had begun in the center of his chest.
She shook herself lightly, and stepped away to examine the glove. Her voice was small when she finally replied.
"It seems like nothing at all, just normal leather."
Genie was immediately himself again without smoke or sound effects, and Jasmine suddenly felt very ashamed of her behavior. She drew her gaze up to his ageless eyes with an apology on her lips that died when she reached her destination. She could practically feel the millennia of knowledge that was contained within his vaporous form.
"Jasmine," he said softly, "curiosity is a disease of the young. I'm not going to lecture you on the dangers that can be associated with this affliction but know that should you develop some fascination with the Sorcerer Mozenrath the consequences, for you, will be disastrous."
Jasmine felt very uncomfortable with ambiguity contained in that statement. She knew that Genie would do anything for Aladdin, the boy that had freed him from a hundred lifetimes of servitude. But she was struck by the distinct impression that if the situation he described did come to pass, Mozenrath would not be the only danger. She reached for her spirit and steeled it before she crumbled and told the jinn every single one of her late night musings over the status of her relationship with Aladdin.
"I assure you that I was simply surprised. In my mind he is so similar to Jafar that I expected him to be…" she waved her hand in a meaningless gesture in front of her face that wound down slowly before she completed her thought, "older."
Genie smiled at her in a comforting way that dispelled her earlier worries and put an arm around her thin shoulders. "Of course you were kiddo! Why, if old Jafar had popped up out of nowhere in front of me, I'd have probably gawked for a minute too."
She smiled up at him and hugged him back in the reassuring way of old friends reconciled. "So, how can we limit the power of the glove?" she offered.
"Hm…" the jinn replied, and floated back to the desk to peruse some of her reading material while twisting the small loop in his beard around his fingers far more times than should have been possible considering it's length.
"I don't think that's going to be an easy question to answer, Princess," he said after some minutes. She returned from her examination of the room's only potted plant to find him staring down at a map of the seven deserts. He traced one blue finger over the border between Mozenrath's domain and her father's Kingdom and frowned deeply.
"I assume that Al mentioned my theory about our little buddy's homeland, right?" Jasmine nodded in affirmation before Genie moved his had away to reveal the border undulating and pushing further out from the sorcerer's citadel in every conceivable direction.
"If my theory is correct, and Jafar Jr. is the only thing holding that place together, then our question isn't 'How?' but 'If?' limiting his power is even possible considering the circumstances." Genie said this in the quick, resigned way of someone who dislikes giving bad news, but the knowledge was no easier for either of them to bear. They stood side by side, leaning heavily on her already over-burdened desk, as Jasmine contemplated how such a lovely weather could be just outside her window, and feel so far away at the same time.
Jasmine was about to ask if they should consider replacing the "royal pain" as ruler of The Black Sand, when Genie jumped up beside her and shouted a loud "EUREKA!" that left her ear drums clattering in surprise.
She gave the blue 'Whooping' creature circling her ceiling another thirty seconds before calmly asking for an explanation, which he was more than willing to provide.
He leaned down conspiratorially in yet another outfit made of the horrid fabric, complete with headgear this time, she noted absently.
"The plan is simple, first we offer something that Mister Magic Collector won't be able to refuse as a peace offering, and second…" his voice dropped even lower as he explained the second part of the plan, "we use it to spy on him. Think about it! Then we'll know how much power he needs just to run his kingdom and then we can look into limiting his potential for worldwide domination."
Jasmine reeled in confusion. "Okay, Genie, I'll buy that spying on Mozenrath would probably be a safe course of action no matter what. But how are we going to get the most paranoid sorcerer in the world to accept this gift and trust that it's not a ploy that should be destroyed?"
At this the jinn's smile became as sly as Iago's. "By giving him something that he wants very, very badly and that we want to get rid of even more. Mozie loves power. And it just so happens that a certain guy who used to live here had the same obsession AND left all of his stuff behind."
Jasmine questioned the wisdom of giving the sorcerer any more tools that could help him subdue Agrabah's defenses. But there was one item… she smiled up at Genie as the connections formed in her mind.
"I don't suppose that broken scepter has any power left in it…"
"Nope!" the jinn replied with vigor, "Not that Little Lord Nasty knows anything about that. He was probably still scrubbing out Daddy's cauldrons when we defeated Jafar."
The princess sighed heavily, running her fingers through the roots of her hair in a soothing gesture before meeting turning and heading for the door.
"It's not the best course of action, but we don't have many options at this point. I'll go advise my father of our solution." She was halfway between the closing doors before she jerked back with "And give Aladdin my lo-" but the jinn had already vanished in his customary manner of blue smoke.
A/N- Hello again. This chapter is a little bi-polar on purpose, but I hope it wasn't too disjointed. I was trying to illustrate the difference between Jasmine's daily life and her private thoughts. I've always felt that night time is when the things you avoid thinking about all day long start swirling around and demanding your attention. Plus Genie is just so much fun to write. Give me a shout out if anybody's reading this! I'd love to hear your thoughts!