A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes (Cinderella)

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Giselle loved spending time outdoors! It was perfectly lovely! And today was just so lovely! The sun was out and the day was warm. Giselle was sitting out in the courtyard by the fountain and she had called to her animals friends and they were flocked around her now. They were all such happy little creatures. The squirrels all chattered together and blue jay rested on her shoulder. Other birds hopped around on the grass beside her. A couple of chipmunks were chasing each other by her feet.

There was a book in Giselle’s lap and a fawn was curled up right next to her side, the mother standing close by. Giselle was reading aloud to her friends. It was a story about a princess of course! And a daring prince had saved her from a most ferocious dragon. But then there was an ogre! And it had tried to eat the princess, but the prince had saved her again. And then they went home to be married! “And they lived happily ever after. The end,” Giselle sighed happily, closing the book. “That was quite a lovely story. I do so love stories about princesses and princes coming to their rescue. They really are-oh!” Giselle looked down at the chipmunks by her feet. They had been playing but now it was turning into quite the little fight. “Oh, do stop fighting,” Giselle pleaded.

But they kept fighting and then a couple of the other animals got in on the action too. A bird and a squirrel and then they were fighting and then there was a loud ripping of fabric. Then everyone stopped fighting. “Oh dear,” Giselle cried. “My new dress is ripped and I don’t have a needle or thread. This really is quite a predicament.”

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Cinderella was just walking past a window when she heard a commotion from outside, and glanced out to see what was going on down in the balcony. When she saw a girl surrounded by animals, she suddenly felt a pang of homesickness for Jaque and Gus, and all her other animal friends. Leaning forward a little to hear what was happening, she caught Giselle's exclamation of horror at her ripped dress, and gasped herself - how truly terrible!

Moving away from the window, she rushed quickly down the stairs and out into the courtyard.

"Excuse me!" She called "Oh, excuse me!"

Coming to a halt, she smiled sweetly, rummaging through her bag.

"Oh I couldn't help but overhear your predicament, and I simply had to help! Imagine," she glanced down at the animals "Fighting so much you did damage to somebody's dress, shame on you."
Pulling her hand out of her bag with a flourish, she held a needle and thread towards Giselle.

"Is this what you need?"

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Giselle really wasn’t sure what she was going to do! She had just made this dress and she hoped it wouldn’t be ruined. That would be awful. Simply awful. She was really quite disappointed in her animal friends. They were usually so well behaved. There must have been something in the air today that was making them act very strange. They didn’t usually act like this.

She was about to scold her friends when another girl called out. Well she seemed very nice. And she was very pretty too. Giselle smiled at her. The girl wanted to help her. How very kind! How very kind indeed! And she spoke to animals too! Oh, maybe she came from a place where there were talking animals too! Wouldn’t that be just lovely!

“Oh, thank you very much,” she said brightly, taking the offered needle and thread. “How very kind of you of you to help. I must say, the people are so very friendly here. I’m Giselle, from Andalasia.” She quickly went about threading the needle and began stitching her dress. “These are all of my animal friends. Please join us. I just finished reading a most lovely story about a princess and her prince. But I’m really not sure what got into my friends. They don’t usually act like this. They are usually all very well behaved.” She looked up from her sewing to address the animals. “You’re all going to behave for our guest now, aren’t you?”

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"It's very nice to meet you, to meet you all." Cinderella said happily, smiling brightly at all of the animals as well as Giselle "My name is Cinderella. Your story sounds just wonderful, I'm sorry I missed it."

She hesitated for a moment, but reasoned that the other girl seemed friendly enough and she could definitely do with some friends here, so she took a seat beside Giselle and held a hand out to coax one of the little birds onto her fingers.

"Well hello there," She smiled sweetly to the creature before looking back at Giselle "I've found I miss my animal friends from home just terribly, it's nice to see the animals here are just as friendly."

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Giselle smiled back at Cinderella. “Yes, it was a wonderful story. You’ll have to borrow it sometime,” she offered, because really, who wouldn’t want to read a story about a damsel in distress and her prince and true love? It was all just so wonderful that Giselle really felt that no one would be able to resist.

She was finishing sewing as Cinderella was talking about her own animal friends. “Oh, yes, the animals here are lovely,” Giselle replied. “They really are so very kind. I find that they quite enjoy human company. Though I’m afraid the animals here don’t talk like my animal friends do back home.” Giselle did find it a little strange that they talk, but she was slowly getting used to it.

Giselle knotted the thread on her dress. Well, her dress was good as new! She handed the needle and thread back to Cinderella. “Thank you very much for the needle and thread. That was so very kind of you. And it is quite a good idea to carry it with you. How very convenient.”

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"Oh I will!" Cinderella agreed happily. Where somebody else might have been mocking Giselle's enthusiasm, Cinderella was meeting it head-on, just as thrilled about the idea as the other girl, and her thoughts just the same, who wouldn't want to read such a story?

"Yours talked as well!?" If you'd thought it wasn't possible for her to look more joyous, you would be wrong, because that news just made her ecstatic - she hadn't expected to find someone with so much in common with her! It was almost like Giselle had been designed to be just like her! "It is sort of lonely here without Gus and Jacque and all my other little friends to talk to, but at least I get to meet lovely people like you to make up for it!" She smiled sweetly, of course utterly serious, not that Giselle seemed like the type of person to even suspect otherwise.

"Oh, it is, isn't it? I got used to it because, well, there was always so much to be done, and running back and forth to fetch a needle when something needed mending was just so bothersome."

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Giselle was simply delighted to hear that Cinderella’s animal friends also talked! She had begun to think that she was the only one. Bartok had told her that animals didn’t talk here, which really was quite a shame and other people she had met had given her such strange looks for talking to animals as if they could talk back. But it wasn’t strange when she wasn’t the only one.

“Oh, how very kind of you to say,” she told Cinderella, finding the other girl quite lovely and deciding on the spot that they were friends. “I do understand how lonely it can be. My very best friend Pip is back at home and I do miss him quite terribly, but I have just found the most wonderful human friends here that it does make up for it a little bit. And making friends is really quite easy. Why even just now we’ve become friends!” For Giselle, making friends was easy, but mostly because, like now, she decided almost instantly who she would be friends with.

“Oh, well it sounds like you do quite a bit of sewing then. It must be much easier to do the mending when you have a needle and thread nearby,” Giselle said, nodding. “I sew quite a bit myself, though it really isn’t the same without my mice and rabbit friends.”

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Had Cinderella been anyone else, she might have reacted awkwardly at the pronouncement that they were friends, but luckily for Giselle, she thought in exactly the same way, and had also already decided that, if not friends already, they simply must become so.

"Absolutely!" She agreed happily, beaming at Giselle "Even if I do miss them terribly, I am so very glad to have come here if it means making such wonderful friends so quickly."

"It is very different without friends to help," she agreed "Although I only have them to help when I'm doing my own sewing, there's a lot of work to be done in the house that I simply can't have them help with, just in case Lucifer gets them - my stepmother's cat, oh he's just the meanest thing!"

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Giselle was really quite glad to have met Cinderella. She was just so very nice and quite lovely and she had animals friends too! They were so very much alike really. It was so nice to have a friend that she had so much in common with. Making friends really wasn’t all that hard when there were such lovely people to be friends with like Bartok or Alyss or Cinderella.

But Giselle was very concerned for Cinderella’s friends. How very terrible to have to worry about her stepmother’s cat. How very terrible indeed. She pressed a hand to her heart. “Oh, how very dreadful for your poor friends,” Giselle cried. Her animal friends had never really had any problems like that, though on occasion they did have to run from an ogre, but that wasn’t very often, thank goodness. But mean cats were really just terrible.

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"It really is," Cinderella agreed, glad to have found someone so understanding - there were plenty of people who would find it incredibly strange that she was complaining about a cat that actually caught mice, but Jacque and Gus were definitely not vermin, they were her friends! "It's such a pity that he has to be so mean, I'm sure they could be the best of friends if he would just stop trying to eat them."
Yes, she was entirely serious.

"I hope your friends don't have to deal with anything so dreadful?" She asked, not wanting the conversation to be all about her when her new friend was clearly just as interesting.

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Giselle completely understood. She would feel just so terrible if her friend, the owl, decided to just eat Pip! That would be just so terrible. Pip might be just a chipmunk, but he wasn’t just any chipmunk. He was a very special chipmunk and Giselle’s very best friend. “Oh, I quite agree,” she told her new friend, nodding emphatically. “You never know how well you would get along with someone if you just stopped fighting or trying to eat someone.” Giselle was also absolutely serious.

“Well my friends all live in the forest together and I’m quite sure that they don’t have any problems. Although there is the occasional ogre. But my forest friends are very good at getting themselves out of trouble.” In fact, they were often very good at getting her out of trouble too.

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"An ogre?" Cinderella's eyes grew very big and wide "How thrilling! And probably very scary I'd imagine?" She corrected herself. New things were just so fascinating, and hearing that Giselle's friends had faced off ogres was just the most exciting thing she'd heard all week, especially since she wasn't too worried that any of them had gotten hurt, from the way Giselle mentioned it.

"My friends seem very good at getting out of trouble as well," Cinderella nodded in agreement, though she had to admit they had quite the knack for getting into it first, especially Gus... "It makes me worry about them much less, which is nice."

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“Oh yes,” Giselle replied quite seriously. “Ogres are quite scary. In fact one chased me right out of my house the other day. He wanted to eat me! But I was very lucky. My Edward came along and saved me!” she cried happily. And really was quite the most joyous thing that had ever happened to her, being chased by that awful ogre, because if that hadn’t happened then she probably would have never met Edward and she would never have known true love. And true love was the very best thing in the whole world.

“Oh, that is very nice,” Giselle agreed, because she felt the very same way. “It is very nice to not have to worry. I don’t worry about my forest friends at all because my very best friend Pip is with them and all of the other animals look up to him. I’m sure they’re doing quite alright without me.”

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"Oh!" Cinderella almost swooned at the romance of it all. Chased out of her house by an ogre, but saved at the last minute by her true love!
Of course Giselle hadn't actually said that Edward was her true love, but the way she'd said 'my' hinted at it, plus Cinderella just liked to embellish the story in her mind to make it all the more wonderful.

"Is Edward here with you?" She asked, hoping he was, since that would be perfectly romantic - she couldn't really say why his presence here would be all that more romantic than him being anywhere else, but she had been carried away by the story and so she was a little more excitable than perhaps she ought to be.

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Cinderella was quite right about the true love part, even though Giselle hadn’t come right out and said it. She was practically glowing at the mere mention of Edward, so how anyone couldn’t think that Edward was her one true love was beyond her. She did love to talk about him so because this was true love after all. And true love was the most wonderful thing in the whole world! Why, even true love’s first kiss was the most powerful thing in the world. It was magic!

“No, Edward isn’t here,” Giselle told Cinderella a little sadly and with a sigh. But then she clasped her hands in front of her heart in a very hopeful way. “But I’m sure he’ll come for me. You see, he doesn’t know for sure where I am. We were supposed to be married but on the day of our wedding a mean old hag pushed me down a well and somehow I ended up here.” She smiled at her new friend. “But I’m quite certain he’s looking for me. And he’ll find me and then we’ll go back to Andalasia and get married and share true love’s kiss and live happily ever after.” She sighed romantically. “I do hope Edward comes soon.”