Chapter Text

Chapter One

The smell of calla lilies drifted across him in the morning air, a pleasant but not inexpensive smell that had to be imported from another land.

Strange.

His vision was the next sense to awaken to the unfamiliar. His eyes opened to a tall marble ceiling, rich tapestries flung across it and restrained with golden cord.

What? Where am I?

Suddenly, his consciousness hit him like a ton of bricks.

WHERE AM I?!

Aladdin shot straight up in horror. Something stirred beside him. He felt the fine silk blankets brush over him, and he turned his head to see her, almost awakened by his panic. She was impossibly beautiful. Her flawless and smooth skin hosted a peacefully content face, eyelashes hiding what he could only guess were eyes that could bring him to his knees, and long thick hair lovely enough to make even the finest satin bow to it. The way the soft morning light hit her was comforting and familiar, but completely foreign at the same time.

Who was she? Why was he here? What did he do? His mind raced for reasons he didn’t want to name.

“He went that way!” a gravelly voice threatened from the hall. A voice he knew. A voice attached to a man who wanted him dead.

The woman stirred again, not quite waking.

He had to get out of there. NOW.

With a delicate mix of panic and caution, he slipped out of the bed to put on his clothes but found nothing. The room was so immaculate, it seemed impossible his rags could have ever even existed in there. He ran to the balcony to get his bearings. Before him was a manicured garden, preluding a sprawling city that he recognized immediately.

He was in the palace.

The balcony structure was smooth, curved, and dangerously far from the nearest ledge or tree. He’d have to escape through the inside.

He made his way to the bedroom door, nearly tripping over a tiger.

A TIGER?!

Slowly opening the door to the hall, he saw that the coast was clear. In someone else’s silk pajama bottoms, Aladdin deftly navigated the halls that he didn’t remember learning. His legs carried him to the servants’ quarters where he nabbed a modest tunic from a laundry cart. He threw it over himself as he ran to the stable doors.

Aladdin paused a moment. How bad is this? Do I steal a horse and leave Agrabah? Or do I climb that wall and hope they forget about me?

“Close the gates! Let no one escape!” Rasoul called from too-close.

Option two!

Aladdin climbed around the horses, jumping over their stall walls one by one, and made his way up a support beam onto the roof. In a split second, he analyzed the distance between him and the palace wall and took the leap, grasping a protruding brick, and climbing to the top. Once at the top he slid down the wall’s exterior. The moment his bare feet hit the ground on the other side, it was like he had glided into a different world.

The world he knew.

The streets of Agrabah.