Gabriella: A Queer Cinderella Story

Chapter 1: Sing Sweet Nightingale

As the sun rose from behind the tired attic windowsill, an angry cry resounded throughout the Beaumont family manor. Gabriel knew the sound of his stepbrother's impatient howl anywhere.

"Oh no," Gabriel whispered to himself as he began to claw his way out of the prickly sandpaper-like blanket that was wrapped around his legs. He was late again.

Gabriel raced to his rickety dresser and threw on a pair of pants and a wrinkled gray button-up that had probably been white once. He grabbed his shopping basket, his coin allotment for the week, and glanced at himself in the mirror to make sure he wasn't bleeding or anything. He looked absolutely terrible, but functional enough.

"Coming, sir!" he yelled in the general direction of the door as he tripped over his own shoe and fell flat on his face. Dammit, now he had to look in the mirror all over again. He looked. Still no blood! Good to go.

Gabriel was then faced with his first dilemma of the day as he picked up the shoe that had just gotten the better of him. Should he tie his shoes or not? He had to climb down the attic ladder to get to the second floor of the manor, then the stairs from there to get to the foyer. If he decided not to tie his shoes and managed to successfully navigate his morning obstacle course, he would save roughly thirty seconds on his arrival to the foyer, which would make his stepbrother roughly thirty seconds less enraged by his own impatience.

After mulling it over for no more than a second, Gabriel decided, screw it. It couldn't make this morning much worse.

But, as it turns out, it could.

The ladder proved to be a much more difficult opponent than he had anticipated since his shoes were half a size too large for his strangely small feet. Because of this, his left shoe took a swan dive off his heel and shot toward the second-floor railing. It then proceeded to fall to the foyer by inertia, and then ended its awesome performance by knocking the head of the house right in the spot where she'd most like to put her crown, if she had one.

"GABRIEL!" A different voice that made the hairs on Gabriel's butt cheeks stand on end resounded from the exact spot the shoe had accomplished its Olympic feat. "Get down here, THIS INSTANT!"

Gabriel intended to do that, he really did, but after descending the attic ladder and stumbling after his rogue shoe, the stairs proved to be too much of a challenge. He tripped over his right shoe this time, the partner in crime to his left. He took a tumble down the stairs as a result, dropping his basket and bag of coins and landing face first into the torso of one of his stepbrothers. The nastier one, at that.

There was a brief moment where Gabriel made eye contact with said victim of his clumsiness. He saw the wrath of a thousand suns in those deadly auburn eyes and knew his time on this earthly plane would be ending posthaste. Well, at least if he was dead, he wouldn't have to do all the laundry anymore.

Due to the force of Gabriel's fall, he and his stepbrother tumbled into the center of the foyer with a resounding crash, nearly knocking one of the more expensive vases of the house off its pedestal, which would have shattered if his stepmother hadn't been there to steady it in that moment.

Gabriel hadn't been stationary for more than a second before his collar was being pulled taught and the back of his head slammed once again against the floor. The lavish faux-fur rug beneath him ended up cradling his head a little bit though. He had always felt that that rug clashed a little too brightly with the rest of the furnishings in the foyer, and this softness still wasn't enough to make up for it in his opinion.

"You are so DEAD!" The stepbrother that was holding his collar and nearly choking him growled. His gloomy dark blond hair shielded the malice in his eyes, but Gabriel still couldn't help but let out a pathetic little squeak in response.