Hello. I tend not to write fanfiction. When I read it, I lean towards the LOTR genre. However, In High school, we do not study LOTR. We study William Goldman's The Princess Bride. And, occasionally, we are required to write assignments about it. Therefore, while TPB and it's contents, characters, people, places etc. belong to Simon S. Morgenstern, c/o William Goldman, and I am merely splashing in their Olympic-sized swimming pool, any lawsuits, questions, flames, rants, and other undesirable yrch-filth may be directed to the [City's name censored for anonymity] Board of Education, in hope that they will discover who is at the bottom of this assignment, and fire him for encouraging copyright infringement. My ELA 20-1 teacher's name is [censored] and his e-mail is [censored]@[censored]. Please send him grief, care of [author's name censored].
Yes, dears, there is a book. Quite a marvellous book. If you think you laughed in the movie, you have not read the book. This being a Bookfic, no disclaimer is made towards the good folk at whatever film company owns TPB.
That being said, this is really really geared towards the book readers. If you are a non-bookreader, or if you have not finished the book, I make no apologies for spoilers, although there are none. Suffice it to say, there is no "If you want I can fly" crap in the book. There is no reunion scene. There is a note from Morgenstern claiming that, although his wife was terribly disappointed in the lack of a reunion scene, "Each of God's beings, from the lowliest up, is entitled to at least a few moments of genuine privacy."* Enough background. I pity the non-bookreaders who will not understand the jokes.
In Answer to Many, Many Letters to Urban del Rey
Down, down.
Tossed and spinning, crashing, torn, out of all control, she rolled and twisted and plunged, cartwheeling towards what was left of her beloved…**
The fall took quite some time. Despite the exponential rate at which gravity increases the speed of a fall, it seemed to Buttercup that the closer she came to the floor of the ravine and the weakly calling figure that lay there, the longer the seconds seemed to stretch. (This was after gravity, but before exponents, hence the illogical nature of the fall.) Finally, she seemed to be slowing, as the steep walls of the ravine levelled out to form the narrow slate floor. Finally she would be able to reach her Westley, be able to—
"Oof!"
Buttercup collided headfirst with a stone slab that protruded from the rocky face of the valley, and came to an abrupt halt. Momentarily dazed, she lay still, trying to calm the frantic beating of her heart.
"Buttercup! Buttercup!"
It was someone's voice, calling her name in a frantic tone. Who was it? Why was his voice so familiar? Buttercup could not remember. Why did the very sound of it make her heart beat faster, undoing all of the work her strained nervous system had done in calming it? What was she doing lying here against a boulder in a ravine, with a man wearing black and with eyes the colour of the sea after a storm scrambling towards her on his hands and perfect knees—
"Westley!" Buttercup sat bolt upright, not noticing the stabs of pain that shot through her head at the sudden action. What was pain? There was her Westley, returned to her through some means unfathomable from the grave, and if the grave were no bar for their love, then why should a little pain like a thousand stoneworkers building a thousand marble edifices inside her skull stop her from going to him? So Buttercup said to herself, as she unsuccessfully tried to lurch to her feet. With a cry, Buttercup stumbled, her legs ensnared in the tangles of her ripped and stained riding dress, tripped over the offending boulder that stood between her and her beloved, and tumbled head over heels once more, just as a final blow to her pride, wasn't it just fantastic that after all of the primping and preening and figure-fixing that she had done for Westley he would finally see her again as this awkward and unlovely wreck, and it just went to show that she should have spent less time fixing her hair and her skin and her waist and spent more time fixing her sense of coordination, and hit the ground again with a hollow THUMP, followed by an ominous CRACK, and a final scream as she collapsed through a hidden trap-door behind the twice-cursed boulder. All went dark.
"Buttercup, beloved, are you alright? Where are you? Buttercup, answer me!" Westley's tone had become, if it were possible, even more frantic than before. By the scrabbling sounds that drifted down into the dark pit where she found herself, Buttercup guessed that he was moving toward her even faster. Buttercup wasn't too sure about this, however, since there was a loud ringing in her ears, and a sound like a lot of liquid rushing somewhere. Distractedly, she wondered if she had perhaps cracked her head open on a stone or something, and that the rushing was the sound of her blood leaving her body. It was a little disconcerting to think so casually about what must surely mean her own death, if it was indeed blood that she was hearing, but then she supposed that it was not a terribly insane thing to think familiarly about something so close to her as her own blood. When Westley dropped down into the pit beside her, anxiously inquiring whether she could hear or see anything, she told him as much. In the pale light of the early dawn that filtered into the hole where he crouched over her crumpled body, she thought she saw him grimace a little, and mutter concussion under his breath.
"What was that, Westley dearest? I thought I saw you frown and mutter something, but I didn't quite catch it. It's not like you to be so cross, although I suppose I don't know very well what is like you or not, since you've been dead these last three years; that may have changed you a little, I don't know. Tell me about yourself, love. I'm really very curious--"
Westley cut her off with a little smile and a blissfully perfect finger on her lips, relieved that her mind was apparently uninjured from her mishaps. "Later, beloved; now is not the time. I think we must find a way to get you, my perfect, unflawed and thousand-times-over beautiful darling, out of this cellar."
Buttercup glanced around in surprise, as if just noticing the shelves and barrels stacked about her in the strange pit. As Westley gingerly helped her to her feet, she noticed that her hasty descent through the trap-door had been broken by a large pile of sacks piled below the entrance, apparently in case of such an eventuality that some unhappy soul- such as herself- should tumble through it unawares.
"But, Westley, sweet, what is this place? Why is there a cellar here in the middle of the Guilderian wilderness?" Buttercup was very confused.
"Your guess is as good as mine, love, although if I were to hazard a guess-" and here Westley reached over to one of the shelves, never loosening his supporting grip around her waist, and brushed the dust off one of the kegs stored thereon "- I would think that this is a drop point for the rum smugglers. From the looks of things, however, it looks like they've not been here for a while. But that doesn't matter. Here, darling, let me carry you up this ladder."
Westley hardly needed to have asked, since he had swept Buttercup into his arms as he said it. Buttercup, however, did not mind, since the unmerited bliss of being in his arms had temporarily relieved her overwhelmed mind of any other thought.
It was not until they had emerged into the growing light and Westley set Buttercup down that she fully realised the reality of the situation. When all of a sudden, his loving, protective arms were no longer encircling her, she felt the loss so profoundly that she burst into tears and, turning, threw herself into his arms once again.
"You—you're-Westley-I-I-h-how-when-where-d-dead," she stammered, her tears of joy that he was there, that he wasn't dead, and her sobs of anguish that he should ever leave again, interfering with her voice as she tried to speak of three years' grief and love and pain and joy all at once. Shuddering with the intensity of the emotions that she had kept pent up in her heart for far too long, Buttercup somehow found it to be dreadfully important that Westley understand one thing: "I love you, I love you, oh, Westley, you must believe that I love you, for me there is only you, never mind what I said about ignoring emotion, I never ignored loving you, I never stopped, you must believe me, please, do not be angry with me for despairing, for getting engaged, I love only you, I told you the truth earlier, I don't love Humperdinck, who could? I love only you, my beloved Westley, my only-"
Buttercup was indeed preoccupied with her own emotions, for all that she thought she was thinking only of her beloved Westley, who had closed his arms around his lover the instant that she had turned back into them, for she quite failed to notice the tears that had sprung to his own eyes as she did so. His tears were falling like rain upon the crown of her head as she mumbled her confession of love into his black-clad chest. She had scarcely paused to take a breath throughout her whole tirade, which faintly impressed Westley, who knew by now (how could he miss it?) that her feelings were indeed very, very strong, but had not quite realised how long-winded she could be about them. He found it equally impressive that she could say so much to him, and while all of it was undoubtedly true, she was really only saying the same thing over and over again, and yet every word that she spoke, every I love you that passed her lips only served to deepen the love he felt for her in return.
It is therefore to Buttercup's credit that she managed to say so much in so short a time, since it was only a very few seconds between the moment that she began her outburst and the moment that Westley silenced her with a kiss.
(At this point, it really does become nobody else's business to read more of this reunion scene. Any others who wish to know more no doubt have already decided for themselves what happened, and only wish to see more in order to be proven right, even when they are proven wrong, in which case they will no doubt blame the discrepancy on me, and claim that that explains it.)
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* TPB, pg 170, Del Rey 25th Anniversary paperback
** TPB, pg 162, Del Rey 25th Anniversary paperback
Here follows the obligatory finishing A/N
:The actual assignment was to write the reunion scene, which was to have plausibly covered approxiamately 15 minutes in length, and to include the following stipulations:
Westley weeps Buttercup weeps Someone gets a concussion They fall through the secret trap door at the floor of the ravine Westley compliments Buttercup's beauty The word "my" is not to be used more than 3 times.Now, no more apologies for the non-bookreaders. However, please excuse my extensive author's notes. I am somewhat biased against those who think that the movie has it all. You Have No Idea.
~Hiro