✨Caught in the Crossfire-FTRS One-Shots ✨

Celeste-First Friend, First Enemy

Celeste Moor had always been content. She was a quiet, shy girl, with long, ice-blond hair and chocolate brown eyes. She attended a trade school for aspiring seamstresses, a difficult position for her to obtain-her parents were fallow farmers. Sewing was what she really loved to do-it brought her and her family of four joy to have a useful skill she could use to benefit them. She sewed her mother farming aprons, her father working gloves, and her younger brother blankets to keep him warm. And though she never had friends, though she was often bullied, though she worked hard and got little to show for it, she was content.

At least, until her brother contracted crelia. 

The disease had been floating around the village for a few weeks-talk of family members too weak to work, rumors that the royal court was doing its best to get the illness under control. Hypothesis that it had come from Cloud City, when first Rumpelstiltskin returned to Enchantasia from it. Few had died yet, but there was still no effective treatment anyone knew of. 

She'd been at trade school, working diligently to finish the seam on a beanie she'd been making for her brother. The bell rung, and Celeste stuffed the little green hat into the pocket of her shorts and ran. She had to run, outpacing the older, ruder, harsher kids when she could. They never liked her much.

And she ran right into her brother's best friend, Hippolyta. "There you are!" Hippolyta gasped. "They told me to find you. You have to come, right now!"

"What?" Celeste asked breathlessly. 

"It's Thomas, Lessie. He's...he's got crelia."

Celeste never would have known how fast she could run.

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Celeste's younger brother, Thomas, was only nine years old. He attended farming trade school. The teachers said he'd been working studiously on his planting schedule when he suddenly buckled over in his chair and held his stomach, his face turning a frightening blue.

Celeste's parents never made enough. They were farmers by parentage, not by choice. They'd been raised growers, and though it was not their strong point, they got on all right, making just enough to support their little family. But they didn't make nearly enough to treat such a terrible illness. 

Celeste sat at his bedside, feeding him what little she could, keeping her warm, trying her best not to catch the disease. It only manifested in one out of three Enchantasians come in contact with the virus, and so far it seemed she was an exception. It seemed brutally unfair for him to catch it and not her. 

It got worse.

She abandoned trade school for the time, working diligently to keep him healthy. He got weaker, she got worried. 

She knew they could never get him what he needed this way.

There was only one way.

___________________________________________

Like anything, thievery takes practice, and Celeste had had none. The first offense was her first attempt-a golden pin fastened to the purse of a low-level royal in the village. The pompous little prince and his friends had caught her attempt easily, dragging her into the police office. Pete had written her a first offense. She knew of many her age who'd gotten first offenses, less who'd gotten more. She'd need to be more careful.

When the second offense rolled around, she'd successfully stolen a pouch of eight gold coins and an emerald headband she'd found abandoned in a flower shop. The headband got her thirteen coins, and with that load, she only needed around five more to purchase her brother's medicine. She'd been caught trying to swipe a royal academy teacher chaperone's silver fountain pen.