Disney Villains Ward

Chapter 3: Seasick

Ch3

"'Cruela DeVille, Cruela DeVille...'" Maleficent sang under her breath, trying to concentrate on painting the landscape of her castle.

"Would you stop singing that stupid song, already?" Cruela fumed, her head snapping up from the hunched position she'd adopted to see the lines of her painting more clearly.

"It's got a nice tune. 'If she doesn't scare you, no evil thing will...'"

"Mal!"

This was supposed to be relaxing. One of the many activities at the prison was Arts&Crafts, in which anything anyone does is to relax the minds of the inmates. For the last few days, they'd been painting the landscapes of their old homes, which proved to not be as relaxing as was previously hoped for. It kept bringing up memories of past experiences and their lives before they were put in this... this hole. That, and some people were getting frustrated that they couldn't paint very well (and others because they couldn't hold the brushes without opposable thumbs).

Across the room, Mary could be heard trying to coax Ursula to not just paint her paper blue.

"That's all it is to me anymore," she'd say in a melancholy-filled daze. "Just the deep blue, now."

The pair pondered on this.

"She's really getting bad." Cruela mumbled into her painting.

"She really is quite homesick," said Maleficent. "Just the other day, she was playing poker with Hook, Hades, and Jafar, and she just slumped off to her cell afterward and didn't come back out until someone finally forced her to come here for some recreation. They say she was acting completely normal. She must've been bottling up a lot of feelings."

"Homesick? Don't you mean seasick?" Cruela rasped a laugh and then another one and another until it turned into a fit of laughter and then a fit of coughing.

"We keep telling you to get off those cigarettes of yours, but do you ever listen to us? No... And that was an awful joke, if you were wondering," Maleficent commented curtly, without even looking away from her art work.

They worked in silence for the moments to follow. Cruela bottled up her rage at Maleficent, and Maleficent thought about how Cruela would've loved living in a castle like hers. Despite what they showed on the outside, underneath they both had completely secret personalities. They both thought about the feelings of others--perhaps too much--but in their own separate ways. Cruela cared too much of what others thought of her appearance and the image she put out for the world to see. Maleficent was always on the outside looking in and longed to let people into her personal life, but was too afraid they'd reject her (this, being part of the reason for her "tantrum" when she wasn't invited to baby Aurora's birth celebration).

"They're coming along nicely, ladies!" Mary chirped, popping up behind the two.

Neither one answered.

"Hmm..." Mary stuttered, trying to carry the sentences into a conversation, "Maleficent, your castle looks marvelous in this painting."

At this, the sorceress's expression altered itself from that of an office employee who was nearly halfway through a pile of tedious paper work to an intrigued child, ready to hear more.

"Oh? Why, thank you, dear. In its day, it was a true beauty. Now, it is barely more than a pile of rubble and dust." Her eyes turned glossy in deep memory.

"We'll, it sure looks like a true beauty here. I love the way you played with the colors on the sky. Now, Cruela." She turned toward the turtle-shaped woman to her right. "Maybe if you lean back a little, you could see the whole picture at once, and it would be more to scale."

As she pulled Cruela ever so slightly back by gripping the furry shoulders of a faux-puppy jacket, she was thrown back by the force of an arm crashing into her face. Cruela stood over her, a mountain looming over a schoolhouse.

"Don't you dare touch me, you dirty little brat! This is my painting, and I'll paint it how I want! Are we clear?"

"Cruela," Mary tried to reason reason with the woman, the little volume she had wavering as she shut her eyes in fear.

"Are we clear?"

"Yes, yes, we're clear...! Cruela?" She opened her eyes to see a disappearing cloud of green magic. "Thank goodness," she sighed. 

By now, Cruela was locked up in her cell, probably lying on her bed of fur coats (that's one wonderful thing for the prisoners here. They get to choose what their beds are made of, but some choose more wisely than others).

"I've been meaning to tell her she needs to get glasses anyway," Maleficent sighed, already turning back to her painting.

Though she was still breathing like she'd just run a marathon, Mary was up off the floor by the time the magic had fully disappeared. How could the prisoners listen to her advice about staying stable if she couldn't even do that herself? She brushed herself off and went on to the next person, forgetting the incident by the time she got there.

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Cruela's loosing it. Must be homesick, Ursula thought to herself. Everyone around her was lashing out, desperate for attention, when all she really wanted was to crawl back into her cave (her cell being the closest thing) and never come out again. Was it too much to ask to be left to sit with her eels, give herself makeovers, and give young merpeople the chance to fall in love (with a few costs here and there) in peace? She had to live here while her home gathered algae, and that's not something she could ever be okay with.

Moments ago, Mary had come by, trying to get her to paint her cave, instead of the endless ocean, but she just couldn't bring herself to it. Wasn't it bad enough that she had to live with the memory of a place that she could never return to, and now they wanted her to recreate the actual image?

"We'll, if you're going to just paint the ocean, at least add some sand or something," Mary had suggested.

She didn't get it, though. To Ursula, the ocean wasn't just sand and water and a few sea shells here and there. The ocean was a living, breathing thing. It sighed and cried with her. It laughed with her and held her tight and carried all her troubles away in its currents. It kept her alive. Now she had to wear this water suit to keep her alive. How does that even compare?

Mary would never understand or appreciate the ocean half as much as Ursula knew she should. With it's rolling waves and great majesty, how could she even fathom painting sand over its beautiful, blue body? How could she ever?

Three more minutes, and her time was up. She could finally go back to her cell and just sleep the day away.

Two more minutes.

One more minute.

Time to go.

There.

Asleep.

Dreaming about her lovely deep blue sea.

Dreaming about a life lost.

Dreaming.

Longing.

Hoping.