Title: A Queen's Kingdom
Author: Kat Lee
Fandom: Cinderella
Character/Pairing: Cinderella, OFC, mentioned Charming/Cinderella, Gus, Jacques
Rating: PG/K+
Challenge/Prompt: fan_flashworks 198: Glass and fffc All Amnesty: r11.11: Mother
Warning(s): None
Word Count: 1,889
Date Written: Either the 28 or 30 (I can't remember and failed to make note of it) July 2017
Summary:
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters within belong to Disney, not the author, and are used without permission.





“Did it hurt?” her daughter asks one day, looking at the shoes their kingdom thinks started it all.

Her mother frowns in confusion. “Did what hurt, sweetheart?” she asks in return.

“Walking on them,” her little Princess answers, staring at the shoes in their display case. “Dancing in them.”

Cinderella laughs. “Why would you ask something like that?”

“Well, they’re made of glass, aren’t they?”


She kneels beside her daughter and ruffles her blonde hair. “Yes, they are,” she answers softly, already beginning to comb her child’s hair back into place, “but no, they didn’t hurt.”

“But they’re glass. Glass cuts.”

“Glass does cut, and it does hurt, but the shoes were made of no ordinary glass. They’re magic.”

“Is that why you were able to win Daddy’s heart?”

“Winning your daddy’s heart had nothing to do with those slippers.”

“It didn’t?”

“No, and it would not have kept me from doing so if they had hurt my feet. They only helped me reach him.”

The girl frowns. “I don’t understand.”

“You know the story -- “ Cinderella starts.

She nods enthusiastically. “The whole kingdom knows the story!”

“No,” Cinderella corrects gently, “they know the story as it has been told to them. Few understand what really happened or everything it meant for me to be able to dance with your father and him to fall in love with me. It’s nothing unusual for a girl to fall in love with royalty, but it is for that royalty to love her back.”

“But Daddy does love you!”

“Yes, he does, but if it had not been for those shoes and for our Fairy Godmother, I never would have reached him. I never would have been able to get close to him. Our love never would have had a chance to grow, or even begin.”

“She’s my Fairy Godmother too?” the young Princess asks breathlessly.

“Oh, yes,” Cinderella enthuses. “It’s a tradition, you see. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was my Mother’s Fairy Godmother and her mother’s before her and her mother’s before then going all the way back to three hundred years.”

“Really? Wow! That’s a long time!”

Cinderella nods. “It is, and she will be with our family for a longer time still to come. She will be there for you when you need her the most. She will help you take care of our kingdom when the time comes just as she helped me and my kingdom -- “

The girl frowns. “But you didn’t have a kingdom -- “

Cinderella smiles. “Yes,” she says gently, “I did. I didn’t quite understand everything at the time. It’s only been in looking back that I’ve realized how much depended on that one magical night and the ball at which I met your father face to face for the first time.”

“But you were poor! You were -- “

“Abused? Mistreated? Yes, but I still had a kingdom.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was a small kingdom, a kingdom began with only two humans. Oh, I wish you could have known your grandparents! But if you had, I never would have met your father. Things always happen for a reason, even if they are too painful to see through to that reason at the time.”

“Mom!”

“I know. You don’t understand. One day, you will.” She adjusts her daughter’s dress as she tries to find a way to help her understand now. “My kingdom, such as it was when that magical night arrived where our Godmother came to me and helped me to take the next step toward becoming a true Queen, consisted of a dog, a horse, many mice, and myself.”

“You can’t have a kingdom with only one person in it!”

“Animals are people too, and yes, you can have a kingdom with only one human being in it -- or even none. The number of humans doesn’t make a kingdom.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Then what does?”

Cinderella pats her daughter’s face. The little girl is adorable, especially when her face scrunches so tight in her struggle to understand a new concept. “A kingdom is made up of living beings -- rather it’s humans or animals doesn’t matter -- who live together and rely on one another. I didn’t understand it then. I couldn’t see pass my own pain. But every kind and gentle soul who had been left behind in that place after my Father passed from this world was relying on me.”

She looks across the ground as Jacques and Gus come running. “Ooo!” Gus exclaims happily. “Cinderelly telling a story!”

Her daughter smiles at the mice and, unlike every other girl in Cinderella’s new kingdom, doesn’t shriek when they climb up her dress. Instead she cups her hands and lets them climb up onto her palms. All three look expectantly to the Queen.

Cinderella smiles at two of her oldest friends and gently continues, “I couldn’t see pass what my stepmother was doing to me, how she and your aunts treated me during that horrible time. I knew I had to take care of the animals -- I couldn’t just let them die --, and I knew they were my only friends, but I didn’t understand anything more than that at the time. I didn’t understand that if I were to stop being kind to them, if I were to stop feeding them, they would perish. The thought of not doing so simply never came into my mind. I didn’t understand just how greatly they depended on me until the time to go to my new life with your father arrived.”

“When it got time to leave my home, I realized I could not go alone. I could not simply step away from my only friends, from the beings who had been there for me every time my stepmother had made me cry, from the people who had helped me up every time she’d beaten me down. If I’d left them there, they would have perished. I brought them with me here to the castle, and despite the protests of everybody else other than your father, who was patient and understanding with me but still did not understand, I kept them with me.”

“I was already Queen of my own kingdom, you see, even if it was but a tiny one. When your father and I married, that kingdom grew, but it still wasn’t until I came to know some of our people in the village that I truly realized just where we were coming from or why my escape from the brutal treatment of my stepmother to the palace did not only save me but the others as well. Each woman is the Queen of her own kingdom.”

“I’m a Queen?”

Cinderella smiles kindly. “Not yet, sweetheart. You’re still a child. But when you become a woman, yes, you will be Queen. You will have lives who depend on you for their very survival. Perhaps not Gus and Jacques here, but at the very least, their children or grandchildren. And, in your case, my dear, you will have many, many more for you will have both your own immediate kingdom -- the same kingdom, or family, you would have if you had not been born a royal -- and the kingdom at large over which your father and I now rule.”

The little gulps. “That’s a lot,” she breathes.

“Yes,” Cinderella nods in agreement, “it is, but as long as you let your heart guide everything you do, you’ll do just fine. I always let my heart dictate my actions. That’s why I never thought about not being there for Gus, Jacques, Duke, or any of the other animals. They were kind to me -- they were the only kindness I knew after your grandfather passed --, and so I, naturally, was kind to them.”

“Cindyrella kind to everybody!” Gus bubbles.

“Yes,” Cinderella admits, stroking him with a single finger, “but part of the reason why I am is because of the kindness you two and the others first showed me. I shudder to think what I might have become if I never known your kindness for I certainly received none at the hands of my stepmother and stepsisters.”

“You would have still been kind,” Jacques squeaks.

“Yes, you would have, Momma,” the little Princess insists for the thought of her lovely and loving mother ever being cruel is something she can not even imagine. Her mother is the kindest, gentlest, most loving, giving, and wonderful woman in the whole world! And although the little girl’s thoughts are definitely bias, the mice couldn’t agree more.

Cinderella smiles, but her expression is a little shaken for she can not be as sure as they are about the woman she would have become if she had not had the friends she had had while growing up. “I’m glad you all think so -- “

“Gus knows so, Cinderelly!”

“Be that as it may,” the Queen says gently, “I still do not wish to imagine my life without you and our other friends in it. I was still desperate to escape that life, though, to escape my stepmother’s cruelty, and to be honest, my child, if the glass slippers had cut my feet, I still would have danced in them until they bled and even after. I was that desperate to escape her, and if I had known then what I have since come to understand, I would have danced all the harder.”

“I do love your father, but I am so lucky that we love each other. I would have taken his hand in an instant regardless simply to have escaped my life then, and I do not want to think about what I would have become or what would have happened to my friends, to the people who were depending on me, my kingdom at the time.”

“So that’s what a kingdom is?” her Princess asks. “People, rather humans or animals, who depend on each other and love one another?”


Cinderella beams down upon her daughter. “Ask somebody else, and you’ll get a different answer,” she tells her, “but that’s always been the meaning to me.”

“Cinderelly always been our Princess!” Gus gushes. “Now she Queen, and you our Princess!”

The little girl laughs and pets the mice. “I promise to do the best I can for us all,” she vows.

Cinderella wraps her daughter and their mice friends into a big, loving hug. “That’s all any of us can ever do,” she tells her, “is the best we can, and as long as our heart tells us that we are doing the best we can, we will not go wrong.” She kisses her daughter’s head. “You’ll be a wonderful Queen when your time comes,” she tells her, but nonetheless, she hopes that time doesn’t come for a long, long time down the road of life. She’s in no hurry to give up her own kingdom, after all, which now consists of her husband and daughter, all the animals it did before and countless more, and more humans, too, than she’d ever thought would be in her little kingdom. And she continues to rule them all as she did her first kingdom -- with her heart, love, and kindness. The people and the animals have never known a better or kinder Queen, and they cherish every moment of her love.


The End