Oneira

Title: Once Upon a Cliché.
Author: Shaded Mazoku.
Email: herukatto@hotmail.com.
Part: 1/1.
Disclaimer: Well, it’s mostly mine…
Warnings: Clichés and molestation by trolls.
Rating: PG-13 for mentions of buggery and molestation.
Summary: Why Sha should never write fairytales, or “let’s put the fairy in fairytales!”
Fandom: Original

*

Once upon a time, there was a man who lived alone in a cottage in the woods with his two sons. Like so many men in such tales, he was a widower, and like most widowers in these tales, he remarried, believing that his sons needed a mother. He definitely needed a wife, at least.

I’d like to say that she was a cruel and mean bitch that mistreated her stepsons, like stepmothers in fairytales usually do, but she didn’t even think about it. She was a sweet and gentle woman who doted upon the boys (at least when she made it out of the bedroom, her husband had been a widower for a long time). She had no children of her own, and was delighted to not only have found a husband but children as well.

Likewise, I’d like to say that the sons were kind and obedient young men who did everything they were told and were as sweet and friendly as the day was long, but if I did, I’d be lying. The oldest of the two sons was handsome, but quite lazy and not really interested in being a honest worker like his father, being of the opinion that honest work was for wimps and that if you wanted to become rich, you had to cheat a little.

The younger son was… …Well, I’d say he was a strapping young lad, the very image of his father as a youth, but the truth was that he was a complete and utter pretty-boy and probably closer resembled his mother. That is, if his mother had ever traipsed around in an oversized, loose shirt and too-short shorts.

Like every fairytale youth, the two brothers wanted to go out in to the world and try their luck. Actually, the elder wanted to try some “get rich quick” schemes and the younger wanted to get “molested” by handsome men. But they didn’t tell their father that.

Eventually (they had to wait for a day with decent weather, because the younger brother refused to travel if it meant getting his pretty blouse all dirty), the two brothers set out into the world to seek their fortune.

After a while, they came to a split in the road. It didn’t have a sign reading “this way for fortune, this way for ‘molestation’”, but it might as well have. The two brothers talked it over, and agreed to split up.

The elder brother wandered to the right, and eventually arrived at a port city, with a bustling life. Being a very resourceful young man, it didn’t take him long to set up a stall selling nymph’s hair talismans (which were really knots made from hair he’d spent several nights combing from the manes and tails of the horses in the stable connected to the inn he was staying at), and his charming manners made him very popular with the local and visiting ladies.

Once he’d earned enough money, he bought a small building and opened a store selling various rare “magical” items and curiosities. By the time a year had passed, he’d become one of the richest men in town, just by selling fake items.

Of course, rich men have other worries, and one day, he came home from a long night out on the town to find his house full of pirates. They had heard about his fortune and had decided to claim it for themselves. The older brother hurriedly explained that he wasn’t really a rich man, that it was all money earned by scams. The pirates, liking what they heard, carried him off to sea.

He did complain (quite loudly) at first, but after having been persuasively buggered by the (clichéd handsome and rugged) pirate captain on every available horizontal surface on the ship, and quite a few of the vertical ones, he got used to, and even rather fond, of his new position as resident conman-slash-captain’s bed-warmer.

The younger brother, on the left path, came further into the land, and eventually ended up getting lost in a forest, though he spent quite a while hanging around towns first, learning the ways of making men do everything for him by making them think him an innocent waif in distress.

Right now, he was in distress (and though decidedly waifish in stature, there wasn’t an innocent cell on his body) though, cornered against a big tree by a pair of large trolls, one of which was groping him. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had washed off some of the moss on his hands.

When the younger brother was about to test if a knee in the crotch worked on trolls, a tall man in shiny armour came bursting out of the woods astride a white horse (looking so clichéd that even the trolls had to raise an eyebrow), dispatching the trolls with an oversized sword. The younger brother gave him a (much practiced) “my hero!” look, and was promptly scooped up on the horse and carried off.

To the younger brother’s delight, the knight in (too) shiny armour was a prince. To his further delight, he was of the “hot as hell and stupid as a rock” variant of princes, and wasn’t capable of telling the difference between a princess and a pretty-boy in a blouse stolen from his stepmother. His parents could tell, but they’d given up on anyone marrying a prince as stupid as their son, so they said nothing. Thus, the younger boy became a princess. His first order was replacing all of the guards with handsome soldiers (for the days when his husband was too stupid to be screwing his “wife”).

And both brothers lived happily ever after.