A/N:

Sky: Holy crap it's been a while. Sorry XD I've just been so busy, and to be honest, I didn't like the 8th book. Puck redeemed it a bit, but overall, it just annoyed me. There were a few scenes I wanted to work with, but the rest had to be glossed because I couldn't do a scene every time Puck was adorable. So here's part one :3 (I don't know if it's gonna be a two-part or a three-part for all of book 8. We'll see when I wake up.

Also if you like Avatar: The Last Airbender and you're fond of the Freedom Fighters, I'm working on a story for them too :3 mmm Longshot/Bee. My obsession pairing. Anyway, hope this doesn't suck, inspiration struck at 3 AM and wouldn't stfu. ^^

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Musings of a King

Chapter Nine: Snowball

Part One: Wife is a Fancy Word for 'Slave'

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Have you ever had a situation snowball out of your control, so tantalizingly within your reach, only to plummet out of your grasp at the very last second? That's pretty much where I was. Having officially said 'screw it' to fighting my growing affection for a certain blonde Grimm with a wicked right hook, I'd had to study (yes, ME, STUDY.) this whole marriage business.

Finding out that a wife's duty included obey… It was like Christmas morning all over again. Wife was just a fancy word for slave. And what could be more awesome than having Grimm as my slave?

So I'd gone with it. I was already along for the puberty ride, so why not? And girls, don't they like that mushy romantic crap? I mean, I'd let Grimm wake me up, I followed her to make sure she didn't get into trouble, and then we'd ended up, as usual, in some kind of mess. Seriously, Grimm needs to wear a bell or something. I need more preparation for her shenanigans.

But back to the point. You'd think Grimm would have been happy for me to accept my fate. Accept that somehow, she tricks me into marrying her and becoming a… urgh… a husband. But no, the minute I accept it and start talking about our wedding, she freaks out. I think at this point, the Marshmallow wants us to get married more. Of course, she was always kinda like that, but c'mon. The kid's messed up in the head. She has rainbow vision or something.

So I figured it had to be my attitude. Future Husbands couldn't go around calling their betrothed names like 'ugly'. And I couldn't call her Grimm anymore, at least not to her face. So I'd done the manly duty of picking out petnames, and I'd tried them out. Go figure, she seemed to hate all of those too. So clearly, being nice had done me no good, but being cruel wasn't helping either. Maybe being slightly mean would work?

I mean, I still saved her life whenever she needed it, and boy does she always need it, but the emotional crap? Well, calling her sweet-honey-lovey-cakes was probably just gonna piss her off, so I'd laughed at her. Looking back, I should have probably been a bit nicer to her while she'd been crying. She'd been scared and confused, and quite frankly, she wasn't the Sabrina Grimm I knew best. She was supposed to be able to take charge and keep us in line, but she wasn't doing that.

Forget her tricking me into marrying her—how was I supposed to get her to want to marry me? None of it made sense. We didn't like each other. She seemed to outright hate me. What could possibly happen that could cause a wedding?

Well, the snowball kept rolling. Finding Mirror had sucked. The third brat thought the guy was his daddy, and despite my valiant efforts, I wound up getting my ass handed to me. Despite the outright creepiness of it all, I was still willing to fight. Grimm—Sabrina—Sugarlips—whatever I was calling her, even if she was mad at me, was still mine to protect. If the Marshmallow hadn't told her to hand the kid over, I'd have had to fight through everyone in the room most likely. But I would have done it.

Lately, I found out there were few things on the list of 'what I wouldn't do for Sabrina Grimm'. It's pretty annoying when I think about it, but as I said. Snowball. I didn't stop this baby from rolling down the hill, and by this point, the damn thing would knock me over if I tried to stop it. And probably take me with it. Slamming me into the ground and burying me all along the way.

So there we were, marching along in another stupid story. She'd already fainted once since giving back her brother, so I had an extra eye on her. She'd seemed even more upset when Lampwick had left us, but I didn't expect her to suddenly collapse in sobs. That wasn't like her at all. What was I supposed to do for her?

"Sabrina!" The Marshmallow of course, was the first person to try and help her sister.

"What did I do, Daphne? I gave him back to Mirror!"

Right. She hadn't just surrendered her brother to the villain—she'd actually gotten her brother in her arms and felt what it was like to rescue him. And then she'd handed him right back. It must have felt like ground zero. Like we'd made no progress. I tried not to cringe.

"I told you to! We had no choice."

"How could I do that?"

Jeez. She wasn't even listening to her sister. I clenched my jaw at the sight of her distress. I always hated seeing her in distress. Being nice, being mean, being cruel, joking—none of it worked for her when she got like this. At least not in this wretched book.

"He was going to let people die," The Marshmallow's voice was soft. Trying to convince Sabrina.

"What if we don't get him back?" Sabrina sounded soft now too.

Sabrina… so I was back to that now, was I? Fine. I moved just a little closer, looking down at her. "We will get him back. I will make sure of it."

She turned and looked up at me, and for a moment, I thought she was going to tell me where to shove it. The look in her eyes changed from 'grrr I will bite you' to some kind of bewildered confusion. Okay, reassurance was definitely the way to go in this crappy place.

"You sacrificed him for us all, including me. I will repay that debt. No harm will come to your brother. The Trickster King makes his vow," I told her seriously. Promises were very serious to my kind, and damn it, if Sabrina wanted her brother safe, I was going to make her brother safe. I wasn't sure how yet, but I liked to figure things out as I went. It worked for me.

"You're not alone here, Sabrina," The Marshmallow added. "We're here. We're a team. And we all would have done the same thing. You heard the Editor. Mirror's story is off-limits. He can't get into it, so whatever he has planned for Carmine can't be done anyway."

Sabrina and I shared a moment of mutual 'the crap?' the touching moment gone. I broke it first.

"Carmine?"

"Fine, Baby X is his name! Are you two happy?" Seeing the Marshmallow huff like that brought a grin to my face. More than that, it made Sabrina laugh. I could feel the grin getting wider and I didn't care about stopping it.

"Baby X is worse than Carmine."

I joined the Marshmallow in a laugh. Sabrina had a point. Baby X? Sometimes, I wondered if the Marshmallow thought in sparkly sticker form. Ask her a question, and her brain opened like a giant sticker book. Maybe rainbows popped out of it. And sunshine. And puppies.

Pushing the thought back with a snicker, I turned back to Sabrina. She certainly looked like she was in higher spirits. I had to keep it going—stop her from dwelling.

"All right, enough of the boo-hoo faces." Sabrina's boo-hoo face mainly. I hated that expression on her. "Let's get back to work. There will be plenty of time for personal disappointments when we get married."

"It sounds charming," Sabrina's voice was dry. "But that's also why I would never marry you no matter what!"

Huh. What did it take? Maybe I needed to remind her that neither of us seemed to have a choice in the matter.

"Sorry," I chuckled as I spoke, unable to help myself from grinning at her expression. "Fate has us forever intertwined."

She rolled her eyes and turned back to her sister to ignore me. "Daphne, you said you've read this story. Fill us in on what we're missing."

"I know that eventually Pinocchio turns into a donkey. Then he gets sold to the circus. Then his owner tries to drown him in the ocean—"

"That's nice! What kind of children's story is this?"

Didn't she ever learn. Fairytales weren't children's stories. They were more like horror stories half the time. The creepiest pictures even made it into my scrapbook—a book that I never wanted Sabrina to see, mind you. While the majority happened to be filled with awesome illustrations of monsters chewing on human bones or creepy old hags casting spells, or whatever other horrors you could find in a fairytale… well, recently, I'd started collecting pictures. At first, the pictures had documented my awesome pranks. I had some great ones of Sabrina with her hair all wild. She looked like she'd come out of a Dragonball Z episode.

Then I'd gone on to collect pictures of the other great things I'd done. Soon enough, the pictures hadn't had anything to do with pranks at all. I just had pictures of the Grimms. Of Sabrina. And somehow, most of them made it into my book. I tried telling myself it was in case she got herself killed—I'd want to remember how fun it was to annoy her. But now that I accepted the whole wedding thing, I knew I'd need the pictures for sentimental crap.

Maybe I'd just make a Sabrina scrapbook and keep it separate from my current one. She'd probably take offense to having her picture in a book reserved for the creepiest and grossest things I'd ever documented.

I wasn't really paying attention to them at this point, just nodding and following along. I had my own thoughts to deal with.

First and foremost—if I didn't really want to marry Sabrina, and she didn't want to marry me, how did we even end up getting married? The only explanation was that one of us had to be lying, but it wasn't me. Couldn't be me. No way it could be me. It had to be her. Of course she wanted me. She couldn't hide it. Haha. Yeah! It was her.

She was lying, she wanted me, and I was gonna get a brand new slave out of it. Win-win situation, right?

Of course! There was no way it could turn out badly for me. She was a liar, I was accepting my fate, and in the end, it would be marriage.

Or maybe I was lying, and I tricked her into the marriage to get my slave? No, it was an honor to serve me. I didn't need to trick her. I couldn't be the one lying.

…Or maybe we both were.

Well, crap. The snowball was picking up speed.

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A/N:

Sky:

Well, I'm tired as hell and I didn't even check for typos XD I'm sorry, but if I don't post it now, I dunno when I will. I have my Birthday tomorrow and then I go back to work. Bleh. I'll be focusing more on my Avatar story and the one-shots, but I have the next chapter of MoaK planned. As much as I hate having to reread the 8th book to get these scenes…