Hi people of the TLC fandom! I know we're all waiting very patiently for Fairest so here's a little something to help with the wait. Basically, I reread Cress and my feelings were going a bit haywire. This story is a three-shot and the first one is about Kaider! Chapter two and chapter three will be Cresswell and Wolflet respectively. Cheers!

Kai made another circuit around the spaceship, earning a curious look from Cress, a rather indifferent gaze from Wolf and a blind stare from Captain Thorne. Darla the ship hummed obligingly underneath his feet and Iko the escort-droid still refused to be seen until all her wiring was safely back inside her system. On his third round around the cockpit, Cress pocked her head out the door. She looked starkly different from the first time he had seen her, just the day before. She had abandoned the large poufy dress she had been wearing and traded it for a set of military uniform that hung limply from her small frame.

"Your Majesty?" she asked hesitantly. "Is something wrong?"

Kai halted mid-step and gave Cress a very unconvincing smile. "No, everything's alright, thank you."

He had relatively gotten used to the odd collection of the ship's residents but still, there was a distance between him and them that came with the territory of being the emperor. He didn't exactly know how to talk to them considering one of them was a thief he had ordered to be contained explicitly and another one was a human-wolf hybrid who had been programmed specially to kill.

Cress gave him an unconvinced nod of the head and was about to head back to her seat beside the blind Captain when Kai suddenly stopped her. "Umm…there is one thing." he said, suddenly unsure. "Would you happen to know where Cinder is?"

Cress blinked at him with her large eyes before her lips curved in a barely suppressed grin. "You should check the Control Room." she said, smiling at him kindly. "I think you'll find her there."

"Thanks." he said, returning her smile. Suffice to say, after Cinder, Cress was the one members of the crew that he hadn't been instantly opposed to.

"My pleasure." she said, giving him a mock curtsey and disappearing back inside the cockpit.

It didn't take much time to locate the Control Room and he chided himself when he found himself stopping just outside the door, his heartbeat suddenly accelerating in his chest. Inhaling a quick breath, he turned the doorknob and entered the barely lit room that thrummed with the loud roaring of the ship's engine. Crouched conspicuously in a dark corner was a slim figure, knees tucked to her chest, her head resting tiredly on her arms. He had seen how much the attack on Farafrah had affected her and even though she had gathered the crew a few hours ago to coordinate a plan, he knew that she was still shaken up.

Cinder looked up when he entered and then immediately stood up, hastily composing her expression that seemed to border somewhat between devastated and miserable. His heart crumpled and he took a few hesitant steps forwards, suddenly not sure why he was there in the first place. He realized, belatedly, that the urge to go see her was entirely based on his need to just be around her and nothing else.

"A bit loud, don't you think?" he asked as she came over to stand with him at the door. "What are you doing in here?"

She gave him a tired smile, still on the shy side with her head tilted slightly downwards, hands almost perpetually wringing together. He was still surprising himself with how much he liked her, all metal and human and Lunar. "I like the noise." she said, stepping out of the room and closing the door behind them. "It helps me not think."

They stood in the dimly lit hallway, his eyes judging her warily, trying to interpret her mood. "Couldn't you do that with your netfeed?" he asked curiously. "Create a loud static noise or something?"

"Yeah." She screwed her nose in a way that he found absolutely adorable. "But then the noise would be in my brain instead of my ears."

If he thought too much about it, he would wonder if there was a difference but for now her words made sense. He nodded emphatically and they both walked a little further down the hallway. The pallid lighting shown down on her and illuminated the circles underneath her eyes and he noticed for the first time how tired she looked. Her shoulders sagged as if burdened by actual physical weight and her brown eyes, that had haunted his dreams for so long, looked faded and dull, lacking their normal glint of sarcasm. He realized that the way she looked right now must have been what he looked like when he was still the acting emperor, burdened by things so far out of his control that it was only a matter of time before he crumbled underneath the his responsibilities.

"Hey," he said unsurely, "Are you alright?"

She started a little as if she had forgotten that he was beside her in the first place and then glanced up at him. "Yes. Just a bit tired, is all.

Kai rubbed his neck, "You sure look like it."

She gave him a wry smile, "Planning to dethrone a queen would do that to you."

His lips lifted in a smile, an action that almost seemed entirely new considering how many times he had smiled in the past year. And even when he had smiled, it had mostly been in her presence anyway. He had thought that her lying to him and kidnapping him and being an international criminal would have changed things but apparently not.

"Can I ask you something?" she said suddenly, biting worriedly on her lower lip. In a silent agreement, they started to walk along the constricted hallway, shoulder to shoulder, and he nodded in affirmation. The words poured out of her rapidly like whatever she wanted to talk about, she had been thinking about it for a long time. "How…how did you do it? You know, rule an entire country? Having the fate of billions of people resting on your shoulders?"

It wasn't exactly the question he had been expecting but he couldn't say that he was surprised. For the first time in his life, someone understood what it was like to be in his place. To hold the lives of billions of peoples in his bare hands, to see thousands of his own people parish and be able to do absolutely nothing about it. He felt that respite again, that tugged at his chest and freed him a little, the respite of sharing his burden with someone else. Someone who understood.

"It's never been easy." he said, taking a long sigh and loosening the collar of his shirt. He was still wearing his clothes form yesterday and he couldn't say that he was too fond of them. "Knowing that my each and every decision would affect billions of people. But I was trained to be the emperor since I was a toddler. I knew that one day the Commonwealth would be mine to rule." He paused a little. A small crack opened up in the deluge of feelings he usually kept to himself and all his thoughts threatened to come pouring out all at once. He contained them with a little difficulty. "I just didn't expect the day to come so soon, you know? And have to deal with Levana on top of it."

She nodded, looking at her feet instead on him, deep in thought. "But how do you know?" she asked, "How do you know that what you were doing is right for your people? That somebody isn't going to suffer just because you took a left instead of a right?"

"I don't." he said simply. "Of course I had an entire board of advisors to answer to but I never exactly knew that what I was doing was the right thing. One thing I've learned during the time I've been emperor is that you've got to trust your instincts and go with it."

She nodded again, still somewhere else inside her head. He crumbled a little from the inside when his mind drifted back to the attacks spreading across Earth, Levana's inhuman army skittering to every corner of the globe and sucking the land dry like leaches. And then his attention drifted back to Cinder. To Princess Selene. He had first started to like her because she was so true and normal but she had never been normal to begin with, had she?

"Well, at least I don't have a board of advisors to answer to." she said, giving him a lopsided smile, like she was trying to make light of her situation. "But I still have my trusty crew."

"And you have good instincts." he said, despite himself. "Even if it involves putting your trust on a walking time bomb and an international thief."

She seemed amused by his comment. "Do my good instincts involve breaking out of prison and kidnapping the emperor?"

He winced, reaching a hand to rub the back of his neck. "I guess not. But considering the fact that I might have been married to Levana right now if it weren't for you, I'm willing to give you that one."

"So you finally agree then." she said, looking pleased. "That kidnapping you was the right way to go about it."

"It might have helped to mention that you were the lost princess before you drugged me." he said. "I would have been a much more compliant hostage then." He wasn't entirely sure if he still approved of the kidnapping but as long as there was even the slightest hope of defeating Levana without marrying her, he was all for it.

She smirked. "Where would have been the fun in that?"

He chuckled lightly and realized that both of them had stopped walking, leaning against one of the walls of the hallway instead. She slid against the wall and settled on the cool floor of the spaceship. He didn't think twice before taking a seat beside her, leaning his head back and feeling slight vibrations of the engine through the walls. He hesitated and then said, "Don't doubt yourself, okay? Every person on this ship is willing to follow your led." His throat was a little dry when he said, "Including me."

His words seemed to have much the same effect of her. "An emperor willing to follow a princess." she mumbled, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear -a nervous tick, he had noticed. "You're changing the lines of hierarchy."

"I've always considered myself a revolutionary." he joked with a small smile. After all that had been happening on Earth, it felt good to just sit with her and talk and pretend for a moment that everything was normal. He relaxed against the wall a little more and turned his face in her direction. "I mean it, you know. I know I wasn't too keen on your idea before but I'm willing to do everything I can if you think this will work. For my people." He paused, weighing his words. "And yours."

She stiffened at his words like somebody had dumped a bucket of ice over her head. "They're not my people." she said quickly, referring to the Lunars, the majority of whom still had no idea she even existed. Then, she wilted in front of his eyes. "I might be Lunar but they'll never be my people."

"Of course they will be." he reassured her, even though his own doubts were tinkling in through the walls of his brain. When he saw the despondency in her expression, he had an almost insatiable urge to reach forwards and touch some part of her, her hair, her hands. "Once they know who you are, that you're still alive, they will do everything to restore to the rightful line of succession."

"I don't want to be a queen, Kai." she said, the words rushing out of her in one quick release. She looked at him with guilt and remorse and shame, as if her confession somehow negated the purpose of their whole mission. "Even if this somehow works, I don't want to stay on Luna, I don't want to rule a country." Her face crumpled, brown eyes looking at him almost imploringly. "I wasn't raised to be a ruler, not like you anyway. All I ever wanted was to be free and now I'm fighting for the most binding role of all."

Her eyes flickered to her lap and her hand trembled slightly. The metal one remained unnaturally composed even as a small shudder passed through the rest of her body. She lowered her head and strands of hair fell across her face, hiding her profile from him. He let the words hang between them for a while before he reached forward and took her metal hand, silently slipping his fingers through hers. She started, as if she was about to retract her hand on instinct but he held on to it, tugging on it until she met his eyes. The little shyness he had remaining completely evaporated in the wake of her words. "You don't have to fight for Luna." he told her seriously, rubbing a thumb across the cool metal of her hand. "You can fight for Earth, you can fight to rid this world of Levana. You can fight for your friends."

She nodded, swallowed the lump in her throat and then said, "You know the day I crashed your ball to warn you about Levana?" He nodded and she swallowed again. "I was going to run away that day. I had been working on a car; I found it in a scrapyard –a leftover from the second era. I fixed it until it was working and I was going to run away that night, maybe out of the country. Africa, Europe, who knows? But then, I got Cress's message and I knew that I had to warn you, that I had to do something." She shook her head a little. "I know I would probably make the same choice all over again but I can't help but wonder..."

He felt a burning sensation at his throat and a brighter, more scorching one at his heart. He had never known what she had sacrificed to help him that day. If she hadn't come to warn him, she would probably somewhere far away right now, living a relatively harmless life, free from everything the world had thrown at her from such an early age. And he would be stuck deep inside Levana's poisonous clutches, probably still endangering the entirety of the Earthen Union.

As he looked at her and she waited a little nervously for an answer, he realized that he had never liked her because of her normality anyway. It was something else; he couldn't pinpoint it exactly, maybe it was just a combination of everything about her, maybe it was one specific thing. But he knew with a sudden clarity that he never should have doubted her. Never should have looked at her and felt anything but what he was feeling right now. He squeezed her hand –as much as he could squeeze a metal hand anyway- and said, earnestly, "I'm glad you decided to not go."

She smiled, true and sincere. "Me too. Even though I faced criminal charges. And was labelled one of the most dangerous fugitives on the Earth. And had the military chase me to another continent."

"Not my fault." he said even though he was smiling too. He tugged her closer and the distance between them halved. He felt a delicious tingle running through his spine at their close proximity.

"It's kind of flattering now that you think about it." she said. "And I already have a reputation. It might as well prove useful one of these days."

"One of these days." he echoed. He couldn't help himself after that. He leaned over, cupped her face in his hands and pressed his lips against hers. This kiss wasn't like their previous ones. One had been a desperate attempt on Cinder's part to dissuade Levana. The second had been ruined about the horrible news about the attack on Earth. For once, he wanted to kiss her without premise, without interruption. And he did just that, his lips moving against hers slowly, tasting, touching, exploring something that hadn't gotten a chance to be explored before. She sucked in a small breath before her arms circled his neck and her hands entangled themselves in his hair; he pulled her closer until she was practically in his lap. He liked how she felt; how her kisses were almost timid, how her metal hand felt against his scalp, how the world seemed to dissolve around them, like the galaxies surrounding their spaceship were exploding and imploding and dissolving into stardust.

When they parted, he didn't let her move away, taking the time instead to observe her more closely. Some part of his mind still couldn't believe that it was her sitting in front of him right now. For so long, she had been a ghost; a tantalizing shimmering mirage that wandered in his dreams and floated in his days like a perpetual shadow. Her mysteries had haunted him for weeks until he had begun to piece her together puzzle by puzzle, all the while praying and hoping that she somehow managed to escape the entirety of the country's military that he had set on her tracks.

Realizing that he had been staring at her a bit too long, he entangled his hand with hers again, bringing her hand to his lips and pressing a kiss on the smooth metal. She had been observing him too, her eyes flickering all over his face and then flashing downwards when their gaze met. He rubbed a thumb along her cheekbone, "Cinder," he said slowly, "I know I was surprised when you told me that you were Selene, but I want you to know that I'm really glad that it's you." She looked up, brown eyes open and inviting. His thumb drifted to her jaw, gently outlining the slope. "If anybody can do this; if anybody can overthrow Levana, it's you."

"Not me." she said softly. "Us. I brought you here for a reason, remember?"

"Us." he said, turning the words inside his head. Something coursed through his veins, a conviction so strong that for a moment he believed that anything was possible, like they could actually pull this off, like they could actually succeed. "Us." he repeated again, "I like that thought."

She smiled, large and toothy and real. "Me too."

Hope you liked it. Chapter two will be uploaded in the next couple of days :) Review please!