…..

Once Upon a Spaceship

Chapter One

…...

"It was dark at night when they awoke, and Hansel comforted Gretel and said, "Wait, when the moon comes up I will be able to see the crumbs of bread that I scattered, and they will show us the way back home."

...…

Cinder lay awake, staring at the metal beams that supported Winter's bunk as the Rampion's engine hummed softly in the background. She could see Ryu's tail hanging over the edge of Winter's bed, swishing gently in his sleep. The arctic wolf spent most of his time waiting faithfully by her cousin's side, and sleep was no exception. Cinder smiled to herself, turning sideways so her cheek rested on her pillow. It had been a long, sleepless night, but at least Winter and Ryu would be well rested.

She pulled up the information on their destination to review one more time. They would be landing on Adelheid in approximately 36 hours, which didn't leave much more room for preparations. At least this would be an easy stop: dinner with the royal family, tour the palace and capital city, meet with the export committee a few times, then leave. The crew would be back on the Rampion in less than a week's time, and then it would be off to the next planet. Rinse and repeat about 80 more times, and then Cinder could finally go home to New Beijing and pretend none of this had ever happened.

Well, that was what she hoped, anyways. It was hard to tell what her grandfather, King Marrok, was planning. Up until a few months ago, Cinder had been under the impression that she was no longer the heir to the Luna's throne. Her... disfigurement after the accident was at odds with Lunar society's emphasis on vanity, and no one had been more embarrassed by her new status as a cyborg than her grandparents. Which is probably why her mother, the once-doting Crown Princess Channary, had shipped her off to live with her Earthen father without a second thought. Cinder could count on her metal hand the number of times she had spoken to her mother since that day; the only time she had even seen her in person in the past five years had been at Channary's wedding.

Cinder rubbed the exhaustion from her eyes, sighing deeply. She had long since given up on sleeping tonight. There was just too much on her mind. Most of the night had been spent fighting the urge to wake up Iko, just to talk to someone who understood, but she knew better than to interrupt her charge cycle. Occasionally she would pull up articles on Adelheid's thriving sugarcane industry or play some reruns of Nightmare Island between tossing and turning, but otherwise she had spent the night staring at Winter's mattress through the metal beams and letting herself be consumed with worry.

There really was no point trying to fall asleep anymore. Her alarm would go off in 45 minutes (15 minutes earlier than the previous day, as prescribed to the entire crew for the past two weeks to gently adjust themselves into the timezone of Adelheide's capital city), so she decided she may as well cut her losses and start the day. She could always take a nap that afternoon after comming Peony. She quietly snuck out of her bunk and changed into an old t-shirt and cargo pants, saving her more regal attire for once they landed. Her hair was brushed and pulled back into a ponytail, and a grease-stained pair of gloves completed the ensemble. After all, there were still certain members of the crew who didn't realize she was a cyborg, and the glamour blockers her father made sure the crew was equipped with before leaving meant that she couldn't just glamour away her imperfections.

"Darla?" she asked, closing the door quietly behind her.

No response.

The ship's primary AI must have been disabled, which meant at least one of her crewmates were awake as well. Not a problem, this just meant their secondary AI would be active instead. Which was the preferred scenario anyways.

"Little Cress?"

This time, the response from the nearest speaker was instantaneous.

"Yes, your highness?"

Cinder slipped into the bathroom to wash her face. "What's the status report?"

"No problems detected. No urgent messages. Approved audio files sent to King Marrok. Unapproved recordings have been deleted and removed from Darla's file system. Arriving on Adelheid tomorrow evening at 1503 Adjusted Rampion Time. Will that be all, Your Highness?"

Cinder sighed in relief as she finished rinsing her face. "That's all, Little Cress. Thank you."

"Understood."

After finishing her morning routine, Cinder stepped out into the hallway in search of her crewmates. Scarlet usually woke up the earliest, but she probably wouldn't be awake for another 20 minutes or so. Iko would still be charging, and she knew Winter was still asleep. There was no way Thorne would be up this early. If Jacin or Wolf were awake, they probably wouldn't have messed with the AIs. Since Darla's daily audio files had been sent in, that probably meant Cress was awake, though. She would probably be in the cockpit, unless she was still in the room she shared with Scarlet, curled up on the top bunk as she worked. Good. She needed to talk to the ship's resident programmer.

As she approached the cockpit, she immediately spotted Cress Erland's trademark long, honey colored tresses draped over the copilot's chair. Cinder smiled, willing herself to look less tired than she felt.

"Hey, Cress," she yawned. "About Darla-"

Cinder froze in her tracks, noticing for the first time that Cress wasn't alone. Suddenly, she was very, very awake. Her retina display was all too keen to point this out, displaying long strings of text regarding her spike in blood pressure and rising heart rate. She dismissed the notifications quickly.

"Kai," she said politely, forcing a smile. "Sorry, I didn't see you there."

"Oh, Cinder! I, um... good morning."

He was still in his pajamas, hair somehow even more unkempt than usual, and looking very un-princely. He had probably just woken up. He seemed pretty embarrassed about Cinder seeing him like that. She thought it was cute, though she would never admit it out loud. Or to herself, for that matter.

Cress spun her chair around to face Cinder. "Is something wrong with Darla?"

Cinder shook her head, doing her best to forget her betrothed was there.

"I just wanted to make sure my grandfather doesn't realize we've been tampering with her programming. The timing of the Letumosis outbreak at home has me worried about it."

Cress frowned, tapping a few buttons on her portscreen. "He shouldn't suspect anything. We've still been mimicking her programming even though we've disabled most of the spyware. I'm sure he planted the outbreak for a reason, but I don't think it was our fault. Dad says they still have plenty of the antidote back home, though! And last night he said your sister was starting to feel a lot better!"

She let out a breath she didn't know she was holding in. Although Cinder had probably talked to Peony just as recently as Cress had talked to Dr. Erland, it did make her feel better to have the doctor's opinion. It had only been a year since her grandfather had started releasing the antidote to the Earthens, but in that time the virus had begun to mutate in ways the Lunar scientists had never anticipated when they created Letumosis. As such, there had been cases where the antidote wasn't fully effective, or didn't work at all. The lab-engineered virus made Cinder's stomach churn to think about anyways, but now that her precious stepsister was the one in danger...

King Marrok would be lucky to escape unscathed the next time he saw his granddaughter.

...

It wasn't that Cinder hated being Lunar royalty. It had its perks at times. When she was living on Earth, be it in Los Angeles or most recently New Beijing, she had even found herself missing her old life. Sure, she loved her father and the bond they had developed tinkering away in his workshop, and she especially loved being able to live with her sisters (well, Iko and Peony, anyways; she could take or leave Pearl even on a good day), but she had spent the first eleven years of her life being told that she would one day take the Lunar throne and the desire for her birthright wasn't so easily taken away.

Cinder did, however, have a problem with the other members of the monarchy. She wasn't one to sugarcoat the very pressing issues with her maternal family. They sucked. Majorly. Queen Janali was vain and conceited, being more concerned with parties and living a lavish life of luxury than the needs of her people. Crown Princess Channary was only concerned with her various love affairs and had stopped caring about her daughter after she was no longer little and cute (and willing to blindly follow her mother's every suggestion, of course), shipping her off to her old fling the moment she became inconvenient. Princess Levana was a conniving backstabber, and was the reason Cinder had to become a cyborg in the first place (not that she would ever face repercussions for this, as she had slowly become the king's favorite over the years). And then there was King Marrok. The king somehow had the worst qualities of the rest of their family and more, all rolled up into one terrible mess of a person. He was directly responsible for the largest act of bio-terrorism unknown to mankind, manipulated other planetary leaders for his own gain and twisted sense of amusement, gave the royal scientists free reign to conduct any number of human rights violations in the name of scientific advancement (the special operative wolf soldier on the Rampion's crew being one such victim of this), changed mistresses as frequently as his clothing, turned a blind eye to his thaumaturges' massive abuses of power, and, possibly the worst of all in Cinder's opinion, had driven roughly 95% of Luna's population into severe poverty.

Over the past few years, Cinder had slowly come to the realization that her grandfather was a terrible ruler who never should have taken the throne, and his puppeteering of the Earthen Nations was perhaps the most annoying evidence of such. Particularly because it was the reason why she was stuck on the Rampion instead of being at home where she belonged, helping her father with his inventions or working on her own quickly-growing business at her mechanics booth.

Perhaps she should've expected this, though. After all, Princess Cinder-Selene Channary Janali Linh Blackburn of Luna's betrothal to Prince Kaito of the Eastern Commonwealth had been a cornerstone of her grandfather signing (though not necessarily upholding) the Treaty of Bremen. It had probably been naive of her to assume that being hidden away on Earth like an unwanted piece of furniture would render their betrothal void. And now that the prince was old enough for the Eastern Commonwealth's traditional coming of age intergalactic diplomacy voyage, of course his fiancee would be expected to tag along.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, that expectation had served as a Trojan horse for King Marrok to dig his grimy claws into the voyage. Most of the crew had even been hand-picked by King Marrok himself, leaving his childhood friend Cress as the only crew member that Prince Kai had any real say in choosing. King Marrok had also fought Emperor Rikan on the trip's itinerary every chance he could, prioritizing planetary colonies that were beneficial to Luna over ones that were beneficial to the Commonwealth. Furthermore, it was glaringly obvious that the king had the audacity to install spyware onto the ship's AI program. Over all, Cinder was disappointed but not surprised that her grandfather had chosen to turn the expedition into an opportunity to be a massive thorn in everyone's side.

So in turn, she retaliated with a Thorne of her own.

"What does Adelheid do for Luna, exactly?" asked the Rampion's captain as he passed Cinder her wrench.

Cinder took the wrench from Thorne, carefully tightening the bolts of Scarlet's personal podship's storage hatch. The hatch's locking mechanism had been faulty for quite some time, and the door kept partially creaking open mid-flight. The crew hadn't had any need to transport cargo in the hatch yet since they had another podship at their disposal, but Cinder knew it was only a matter of time and had decided she would rather fix the problem before a need could arise. At any rate, it was a good excuse to avoid another awkward interaction with her betrothed, who she still wasn't sure how to feel about.

"They plant sugarcane, mostly," Cinder said, ignoring the information that flickered in front of her vision the moment Thorne asked the question. She already knew most of it from her late night research, anyways, and any details she didn't know were probably beyond the scope of her best friend's interest. "The planet's climate is basically made for it, so it's their main resource. Most of their buildings use concrete they've made from it."

Thorne grinned mischievously. "Houses made from sugar, huh? Sounds-"

"Don't even think about it," Cinder warned, cutting him off mid-sentence. "It's basically the same as normal concrete. You can't eat it. Do you want to break your teeth?"

Thorne held up his hands in mock surrender. Cinder rolled her eyes and got back to work.

It had been Thorne's idea for Cinder to create her own list of ridiculous conditions for joining the crew. Specifically, it had been his suggestion while she was visiting him during his prison sentence for stealing the very ship they were currently aboard. She had been halfway through ranting to him about how much she didn't want to play into whatever King Marrok was planning when Thorne had the brilliant idea for Cinder to be as outlandish as possible with her own demands in hopes of Emperor Rikan proceeding without her (thus leaving Luna out of the equation entirely). So naturally, she started by demanding that intergalactic felon Carswell Thorne be given a full pardon from the Commonwealth and be made captain of the expedition. King Marrok was furious. Maybe even a bit humiliated. In a fuming rage he had pulled her aside after the meeting with a long-winded list of questions:

Why was she so insistent on bringing a known criminal on a highly important diplomatic mission? Because they were best friends. Obviously.

How in the name of Cyprus Blackburn did she meet a criminal, let alone befriend one? Her paternal family moved to the American Republic for a couple of years after her father's bio-electric security system took off. Thorne lived down the street. Obviously he hadn't committed any crimes yet when they were twelve and fourteen, unless the secret gambling ring he set up during lunch counted for anything (it didn't).

And you trust him? Of course. He was more than capable of being on the crew. In fact, she couldn't think of anyone better suited for the job (the telltale orange light of her lie detector popped up before she could even say that last bit- Cinder would rather staple her left ear to a maglev than spend one minute on a ship piloted by Thorne, but what her grandfather didn't know wouldn't hurt him).

Cinder didn't necessarily enjoy admitting that Thorne had been right, but she was more than willing to admit that her grandfather's reaction had been hilarious. It was even better once her request for Thorne to be the captain of their crew was reluctantly granted by the emperor. From that point on, the two of them continued to throw out any request they could think of. Some were bigger, such as getting the Rampion as their ship, while other demands were smaller, such as putting a minimum thread count on the bedsheets in the bunks. It was somewhere around the time that Boots, Thorne's android cat, had been formally declared the crew's "official ambassa-purr" that they realized their plan to get kicked out of the diplomatic mission wasn't going to work, but at least they had made King Marrok very, very angry in the process.

"So why is the candy concrete important?" Thorne asked.

Cinder sighed, turning her attention to the hatch's locking mechanism. "I'm pretty sure it isn't. Grandfather is going to pretend it's a valuable resource for Lunar infrastructure or something, but really it's because the new queen has Lunar ancestry. No gift, though. She's like Scarlet."

"Think he wants to dissect her brain, too?"

Cinder considered this for a moment. "Maybe. If he can get away with it."

Scarlet, Cinder's childhood friend and the crew's main pilot, was the granddaughter of royal physician Dr. Logan Benoit-Tanner and Michelle Benoit-Tanner, one of the first Earthen ambassadors to Luna. Her father was born neither gifted nor a shell, and Scarlet had followed suit. There were a lot of unusual things about Scarlet, things that had the majority of King Marrok's royal scientists dying to run experiments on her, but fortunately her grand-mère and grand-père had always stood firm on protecting her. Cinder was reasonably certain the king had threatened her with a scalpel to convince her to join the crew. Scarlet didn't exactly deny it when she asked.

Winter, who was curled up in the corner with Ryu by her side and Boots in her lap, tilted her head. "If the wolf soldiers won't listen to the queen like they do for Scarlet-friend, would Grandfather still want to hurt her?"

Cinder grimaced. She hadn't considered Scarlet's other... abnormality.

"No, you have a point. The second we leave Adelheid, I'm probably going to get a call from him asking if Wolf acted weird around Queen Gertrud," Cinder sighed. "I mean, he won't be that direct about it, but we're definitely going to have to be careful about which audio files we let Darla send him."

"You're sure you don't want to turn the ship around and start organizing a coup?" Thorne said, tone devoid of his normal teasing. It hadn't been the first time they had this conversation, and it probably wouldn't be the last either.

Cinder shook her head. "I wish. But if we took out the king, my mother would be next in line for the throne."

Thorne's face hardened in disgust. "Fair enough."

"Besides," she said quietly. "It's Luna. They'd never accept a cyborg as queen."

…..

Footnotes:

Welcome to the AU where everything is just slightly different, thus making everything different. Most of the inspiration came from my impression of what the series was about before I actually read it (i.e. there's just a dash more Star Trek/Voltron/Guardians of the Galaxy vibes, more planets than just Earth and Luna, more time on the ship, more time with the whole crew together, etc.). And, of course, we have more fairy tale adaptations, because where would we be without those?

Adelheid: named for Adelheid Wette, who was the librettist for the 1893 Hansel and Gretel opera. I've used lots of references to the opera intentionally as a nod to Cress's love of opera, since she'll have a decent-sized role in the resolution of the Hansel and Gretel subplot.

Garan as Cinder's biological father/Cinder's full name: This was my best attempt at mashing her two families and two names together. I wasn't sure if I should still put Linh at the beginning or stick it with her other surname at the end since we're dealing with naming conventions from two different cultures, but I figured since it was her full Lunar name specifically it would go with her other surname. She still just went by Linh Cinder when she was on earth and wasn't advertising her identity. Adri knew, of course, but she still wasn't thrilled by Cinder's existence (being royalty does not erase being a Lunar and a Cyborg, in her eyes, and the general Earthen populace just sees the princess as another Blackburn to fear anyways; teenage girls especially aren't thrilled about her). Adri just had to be more subtle about her mistreatment with Garan still around.

Betrothed Kaider: Channary's comment about arranging a marriage in Fairest inspired this one. It's a different dynamic to explore, and it adds to the tension between Luna and the Commonwealth. It also made for a good excuse to get them both on the crew in this context.

Cress's last name/friendship with Kai: King Marrok and Queen Janali living = no excuse for the mandatory shell "infanticide", but there's still discrimination against the shells, and thus a voluntary shell "infanticide" that Cress's mother was pushing for. Dr. Erland fled Luna with Cress when she was young and still changed his name. And hers. As far as anyone on Earth knows, Crescent is just a nickname rather than the other way around. Emperor Rikan is the only one who really knows the full story, since Dr. Erland offered him what little insider information he had on King Marrok's schemes as a bargaining chip for being on staff at the palace.

Thorne's age: We're using the fake ID headcanon here since I'm not touching the fandom discourse with a 10 foot pole.

Scarlet: I had to give Logan and Michelle a happier ending than they got in canon proper because I'm a softie. As for that wolf soldier thing? Let's just say it's a surprise tool that can hurt us later.

Queen Gertrud: Named for Hansel and Gretel's mother in the aforementioned 1893 opera. Gertrud from the opera is a much softer character than Hansel and Gretel's stepmother is usually portrayed as, so the contrast almost feels odd since I'm playing the character straight here. But since most adaptations leave the character nameless, I didn't have much to work with.