Elody does not want the Sword of Truth, but that’s ok. She’s dying anyway.
Gerard almost gets it. I would like for you to have a chance to tell your story this time. Of course, that’s what she wants too. That’s why she left the castle walls and ran into the woods as a child, not knowing her first experience of freedom would tie her to a different fate. That’s why she fought wars alongside nameless, ruthless knights instead of a prince who would rather put on a superficial show of sword forms. That’s why she attacked The Authors instead of spilling the ink. Those were choices she made, and was proud to make, even if destiny controlled the consequences of them.
And then a fucking sword broke up with her husband.
“Because you said you cared about me but didn’t love me—”
“I didn’t say that!”
She yelled at Gerard in battle because if they were going to be on different sides, if they were going to die as alone as she’d felt for years, Elody could not have something else speak to her feelings. She could not have both her story and her response to it be beyond her control.
As they ride Death towards the shadows, Elody grasps the sword in her hand. She taps her fingers against it, a tic stolen from Gerard when he’d hold her hand. He almost gets it, but he’s still giving her a sword, a castle, when all she really wants is him.
Elody had always rebelled against her story. She had always challenged what others deemed was the truth. What would she write in her book, to make it all worth it?
Once upon a time, there was a princess who preferred the woods to a castle. And she had a friend.
Pages and ink fly around them. She will get a blank page, and she will not be alone on it. For now, it’s a relief to be riding Death, supported by the gentle way the wolf carries them. Elody gets to end this story with something other than happily ever after. She gets to end it with her truth.
“I do love you.”
“I love you too.”
The Sword of Truth glows. It’s reflecting Elody’s aura.
Once upon a time there were six people. In another story, they would have been heroes. Not in this one, though. This one doesn’t need heroes. This one is kind and gentle. It teaches it‘s lessons through ink rather than blood.
Which is why those six people barely even meet. Heroes need villains to fight. And this story does it‘s best to avoid the latter. By keeping the heroes apart.
And because of that, Rosamund awakes not next to her found family, but instead in a warm bed. Briars recede as she opens her eyes. There is no prince, no true love‘s kiss. No one can explain how she woke up on her own and caused the kingdom to be set free from the dark forces that had send it to sleep some two odd years ago. But no one really cares. They‘re free, and that‘s all that matters.
Rosamund spends her days in peace and quiet, or goes on adventures on her own. After a while she knows the woods like the back of her hand. She‘s drawn to them without knowing why. But after a while she realises that the reason doesn‘t matter. It‘s home. And she‘s free.
When she meets the Princess Elody and the Prince Gerard at a ball held in her castle, she doesn‘t recognise the handsome prince. And he doesn‘t recognise her. But they get along from the first moment they lay eyes on each other.
Rosamund soon learns from Gerard that he and Elody are no longer married. They are still friends and like to attend these balls together, but he is much more inclined to see the world and go on adventures on his own. Rosamund nods and smiles. She knows that feeling intimately. Gerard tells her about his travels around the world, one more unbelievable than the last.
He claims to have met a talking cat once, who could turn a millers son into a king and got up to all kinds of shenanigans. Puss in Boots never stays in one spot for too long, instead enjoys wreaking havoc in a new village every few weeks.
Pinocchio still gets cursed, but his father doesn‘t die. Instead, they fight together to find a way to make him a real boy again. Even though both of them have no idea what that is supposed to mean. And when they finally succeed and Pinocchio is human again, they feel the exact same way about each other. Only now it is much easier for Pinocchio to give his father a big hug.
After their adventures, Pinocchio ventures the villages around his home and soon stumbles upon a storyteller.
He is old and kind and spends his evenings and most of his nights telling stories to the kids of the different villages. To them, he is only known as Mother Goose. Sometimes he will tell the stories of heroes and dragons, sometimes of magic and ink. And on rare occasions, he will even talk about his loving husband and his son Jack, who has caused at least as much ruckus as the ominous puss in boots.
A lot of the children come and go as they please, but two of them listen to every single one of Mother Goose‘s stories. A teenage boy and a teenage girl in a red cape.
She is a wild one, Mother Goose can tell, and when she leaves the villages at night to go back home to her family, she goes alone with a lantern and a little axe in her hands. She is afraid of nothing and proud of how she can beat almost any other teen in the villages in a race. But every now and then she gets quiet and stares off into the distance. As if she were listening to words that only she can hear. No, not words. Howls.
They all life their lives unburdened by the sacrifices they had to make to get here. Unchanged and unaltered by the adventure they went on.
But there is something at the edges of their consciousness. Something sharp and painful. Like pages, locked away behind a giant and indestructible briar wall.
And every now and then they catch a glimpse of what lies beneath. A group of people that shouldn’t have met, but did so nonetheless.
A princess with a bow made of briars.
A storyteller with a magical book.
A little cat with boots and daggers.
A wooden puppet that had once been a boy.
A prince, more frog than human.
And a little girl, who bears the mark of death.
An adventure to save not only their stories, but all of them.
Memories that feel no different than a dream. But they are real. Maybe even a little more real than the six would have liked them to be. But no matter how hard they try to hold onto those memories, without fail, they fade into a bright shade of orange.
Maybe it‘s for the best that they don‘t remember the pain they endured. Maybe it‘s for the worse that they forgot the unlikely family they found in the times of shadows. In the end, who can really tell?
In the grey rainy night, Ylfa slid close to Rosamund and whispered, "Are you worried about the soot getting in your dress, Rosamund?"
Rosamund looked down, surprised. "Oh, not at all. It's already a bit ruined, anyhow. I had to cut the bottom of it."
She hiked up the mass of skirt in her lap until she could take the end of her dress in her hand, showing the edge to Ylfa. It was frayed and worn, stained in parts. It no longer had the golden border Rosamund remembered gleaming in the half-light when she woke up.
"Oh." Ylfa frowned. "I didn't notice, it's still so long. Why'd you have to cut it?"
"Well, the end of it was meant to trail behind me. Lots of court dresses have a trailing edge. But what sweeps elegantly across marble or stone is very cumbersome when you're trying to live in the woods, it turns out."
Ylfa hummed. "That makes sense."
For a moment they sat in silence as the rain poured down and the men below grunted and sighed over their labor. A strange melancholy feeling came over Rosamund as she thought about her dress and all that came before it. She did not miss the dresses, really, but recalling the handmaidens who once dressed her and her mother cooing over darling patterns made the rain even colder.
Rosamund could not quite tell which life the memories came from.
In a bid to rid herself of the sudden doldrums, she found herself leaning towards Ylfa and saying, "If we ever stop by my kingdom, I should go fetch you one of my old dresses. Some of them should fit--there was a dark red dress I know I wore when I was around your size, perhaps that."
Ylfa straightened up at once at that, her eyes wide under her dark hood. "I could have a princess dress? Really?"
Rosamund suppressed a laugh. "Yes, if I can get it. You'd look lovely."
Looking so pleased she didn't seem to know what to do, Ylfa beamed up at her. Rosamund found herself reaching out to smooth out a crease in her hood by some pure instinct. Ylfa barely seemed to notice, most certainly due to all the times Mother Goose fussed with her hair or her clothing.
Just as Rosamund thought that the conversation was done for the moment, Ylfa looked at her curiously and said, "What was your kingdom like?"
Rosamund hummed and resisted the urge to say utterly consumed. "Before I fell asleep? Beautiful. We have a large swath of forest, and a lot of flowers. I couldn't leave the castle often, much less the capital, but I remember it as clean and bustling."
Ylfa nodded along, clearly wanting more.
She gave it to her. "I believe the people were happy. Very often, my mother and father would have anyone with complaints come to them on certain days, and when they aired their grievances my father would tell them if he could help or not. If he could, he'd go about ordering this or that scribe to set about mailing the right people to fix things. My mother held balls and charities to entertain."
"So they were good?" asked Ylfa.
Rosamund hesitated. There was a distance, a look in their eyes when they spent time with her that when she was younger she could not understand. It had left her sullen, sometimes. Now, having lived these two lives, she understood perfectly what had plagued them. Fear. Fear and sorrow. After all, how could they be sure their daughter really would merely fall asleep?
It made a cold comfort to the girl Rosamund remembered being. Distance was easy for children to spot, and hard for them to forgive. Still, she knew she loved them dearly.
She remembered breaking into houses for food, finding slumbering bodies slumped over tables and laying on the ground. In neither life had she gone to her parents' bedchambers when she descended from her sleeping tower.
She could not be sure of what she'd see, she supposed. In that way, they were much the same.
"They always tried their best," Rosamund told Ylfa.
"That's good," Ylfa said.
"Yes, it is, isn't it?" Rosamund replied.
They sat in the comfortable silence of the rain. Rosamund did not think of when her kingdom would wake, or what she must do to wake it. There was already too much being done.
Listen if nobody’s written a fic for Neverafter where The Stepmother must work for Baba Yaga for a month and a day or something for her wold-altering knowledge and it’s a little gay and a little scary then I’m gonna have to do it my damn self.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cinderella/Rosamund du Prix
Characters: Rosamund du Prix, Cinderella (Dimension 20)
Additional Tags: Fluff, First Kiss, Post-Canon, Speed Dating, fyre festival references?, Don't Ask, Campaign 14: Neverafter (Dimension 20), Angst, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, rosamund du prix's speed dating adventures, ships that are canon TO ME, no beta we die like thumbelina
Summary:
Rosamund sighed and dropped her head onto the table in front of her. So far she hadn’t met anyone she felt drawn to or even anyone she could stand talking to for three minutes.
“This is the fucking worst,” she murmured into the mahogany.
Above her, she heard a nervous laugh, “That bad, huh?”
Rosamund picked her head up to stare daggers at her newest date but was quickly overcome with surprise. Standing before her in a gorgeous blue suit with a rose affixed to the lapel was none other than Cinderella.
-------------------------------------
Speed dating isn't exactly panning out as Sleeping Beauty hoped.
