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I loved this thing I saw lol

ITS PRIDE MONTH BABY, WOO

Hope y'all have are safe

Don't forget there are ppl who support you just the way you are.

If your still having trouble figuring yourself out, it's ok

You have all the time in the world to figure yourself out

It's final here!!!

Chapter Three: Window Washing and Wishing

Julius had always been deathly afraid of heights. When he was little, he never joined his brothers in climbing trees or leaning over bridges to watch the Seine slip by below. Even glancing up at the towering spires of the cathedrals they walked past was enough to turn his stomach.

So it was with horror that day that he read the first entry on the daily list of janitorial tasks Pete had tacked to the door of their quarters: Clean Hall windows inside and out.

No, please, no, he thought helplessly, sitting down heavily on the bed and putting his face in his hands.

“What’s wrong, Jules?” Oswald asked from the table in the corner. He and Mickey sat with two cups of coffee and a stack of crepes that they were busy tucking away. “Did Pete give us stable cleaning again?”

“Worse,” Julius groaned, the list crumpled up in his fist. “We have to clean the windows today. Inside and out.”

“Ah,” Oswald said, furrowing his eyebrows. “Well, that’s unfortunate.”

“He KNOWS I hate heights!” Julius cried in despair. “He’s doing this on purpose!”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Mickey said thoughtfully, cupping his coffee mug in two hands.

Julius felt dread pulsing in his stomach, threatening to upend the crepes he had eaten. Meanwhile Oswald tapped the side of his mug, thinking. “Maybe you can work on the ground windows by yourself?” he offered. “Then me and Mickey can do the higher floors.”

“He’d think I was trying to slack off,” Julius muttered, then clutched his upset stomach. “I’m gonna be sick.”

“Oh!” Mickey said brightly. “If you do get sick, hen he’ll think you're ill and you can lie in bed while we clean.”

“That’s a non-factor in Pete’s mind,” Oswald countered. “Remember last winter when we all had the flu? We still had to scrub floors for three hours.”

“Oh yeah…” Mickey paused. “Shoot. Well, maybe we can blindfold Julius, so he doesn’t see the ground from up high?”

“Then he can’t see what he’s cleaning, doofus. Maybe we could get a dummy of Julius and make Pete think he’s cleaning with us, and he can sneak off and work on something else.”

As they started shooting more hare-brained ideas back and forth, Julius smiled slightly in spite of himself and set the list down on his bed. “No, I can do this, guys. I’ll be fine. We’ll need all three of us to get everything done on time, anyways. If Pete wants to give me chores I hate, fine. I’ll just… stomach my way through it.”

He stood up, handed them the list, and started gathering tools from the corner cupboard to keep his hands busy. Mickey stuffed another crepe in his mouth while he read it through. His ears drooped at the massive list:

-polish furniture in the ballroom

-clean and polish the floors of the throne room

-shovel gravel on the garden paths

-set up rat traps in the cellars

-scrub ballroom stairs

-clean all the fireplace grates and chimney

-replace leaking water pipes in the basement

And that was just the first side of the paper, he realized, flipping it around and seeing another long list on the back.

“Does he think we can freeze time?” Oswald exclaimed in shock, reading the list over Mickey’s shoulder. “We can’t do all this in a day! And some of these aren’t even our duty,” he noticed indignantly, pointing to a task that read -clean musketeer capes in storage. “We’re not maids!”

“I suppose all the maids and court servants must be busy with the coronation preparations,” Mickey reasoned, although he too was frowning at the list. “We’re going to have to skip dinner and maybe supper to get this done… We should probably grab some food to bring with us.” He stood and stretched, then grabbed his musketeer hat and put it on.

Julius held out a bucket and rag to each of them. “Guess we’d better get started, then? If we hurry, we can fix those pipes before we start on the windows.” He was mostly successful at keeping the shakiness out of his legs. Mickey nodded in agreement.

Oswald sighed and gulped down the last of his coffee, then picked up his bucket and rag and followed his brothers out the door. It’s going to be a long one, he thought.

~~~~~~

The morning went by much too quickly for Julius’s liking, and as much as he tried to cherish the moments spent soaking wet and wrestling with pipes in the basement, before he knew it they were headed outside to begin the window cleaning. Mickey and Oswald chatted aimlessly as they walked ahead, letting Julius lag behind them. 

It frustrated the cat how easily heights filled him with terror. He wasn’t entirely sure what had borne the fear inside him- It was just the thought of being so high up in the air with nothing underneath him, falling and plummeting forever, dropping like a rock through the sky to the ground with the wind rushing by and everything so far below and nothing to catch him or save him— He shook his head furiously, heart thumping wildly in his throat. Thinking like that isn’t going to help you, Julius! Just bite the bullet and get through it. You’re just going to wash some windows 50 feet in the air. It’s not that bad. Steeling his nerves, he jogged ahead to catch up with Mickey and Oswald as they reached the shed.

The suspended scaffolding system used to maintain the higher floors of the palace was nothing more than a few rickety wooden boards lashed together with twine, two pulleys strung with frayed rope on either side, and a couple of loosely nailed-in iron railings, all of which lay cobbled together and largely unused in a shed outside the Great Hall. It was, in Oswald’s humble opinion, the worst feat of engineering in the entire world. I wonder what it would take to convince Pete to let me fix it, he thought offhandedly as they carried it around to the front and began attaching the ropes to the pulleys. 

Julius took a minute to pull himself together as he gathered the supplies and lifted them onto the platform next to a couple of dusty empty crates. You’ll be fine, it’s going to be fine, he chanted desperately in his head as Mickey and Oswald started tugging at the ropes to lift the scaffolding into the air. The courtyard fell slowly but surely away from under him, and he felt his insides once again lurching as if trying to escape his abdomen. He clutched the bag of food they had brought along with trembling hands.

“Alright, first window,” Oswald announced as he and Mickey stopped tugging and tied the ropes into place. Julius swallowed hard and tore his gaze away from the ground twenty feet below to start work on scrubbing the windows. It was slow work, but gradually the grime and muck disappeared under the determined scrubbing of the three brothers. For a while they worked in silence, save for the squeak of wet cloth on glass and the occasional splash from the water bucket; after a while, Mickey broke stillness with a small sigh. 

“This is going to take all day,” he said despairingly. 

Oswald rubbed at a spot on the window and shrugged. “Maybe, but all we can do is just keep working at it. We’re almost done with this floor, at least.”

“But we have the whole rest of the list to finish on top of this,” Mickey replied, wringing out his rag anxiously. “And Captain Pete wanted all of it finished today!”

“Honestly, Mick, Pete has to know we can’t do all that in one day. If we have to push some of those tasks into tomorrow, then we’ll do that,” said Julius resignedly. “And he’ll just have to deal with it.”

“But he’d think we weren’t trying hard enough. He’d think we’re incompetent, or… or lazy.” The small mouse dipped his rag back in the bucket with a quiet sploosh. “It’s just… I guess I want Cap’n Pete to see me as a hard worker. I want him to think I’m trying my best.”

Julius frowned. “You are a hard worker, Mick. I’ve told you that.”

“But… he doesn’t think I am,” Mickey sighed. “We try so hard every day and he still doesn’t take us seriously. And if he doesn’t think we’re hard workers, if he doesn’t think we can work together, then he won’t... I mean, we have a bad track record, but couldn’t he change his mind? Couldn’t he just see we really want to be musketeers?”

So that’s what this is all about, Julius realized. That’s what was bothering him this morning too, I bet. He shifted from one foot to the other uncomfortably; what could he say? He wanted nothing more than to reassure him and Oswald that of course Pete would make them musketeers, but that would just be lying. The last thing he planned on doing was sugarcoating anything for his brothers; at the same time, he didn’t want to voice his real doubts. His doubts about whether they should be musketeers at all, whether it would really ever work out for them. No, that would just discourage Mickey further. The best option, then, was uneasy silence. 

“Well… I think there’s a chance,” Oswald pitched in, hands on his hips. “I mean– Pete’s not an easy one to persuade, and it’s not like he’s ever presented the opportunity to us in the past five years, and he likes reminding us about how much he loathes us every chance he gets,  but…” he shrugged. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, so we might as well keep trying and keep hoping, right?” 

He grinned and twirled his rag jauntily, and Mickey smiled back gratefully. “Anyways, whether we’re musketeers or janitors, I don’t see the hurt in working hard. That doesn’t mean we need to bust a gut doing an impossible amount of jobs in one day, though. Let’s just take it slow.” Mickey nodded, looking relieved.

Julius sighed quietly. “Well,” he said, examining the windows one more time. “If we’re done on this level, then we’d better get to the next floor.” Mickey jumped up quickly and ran to the first pulley, Oswald heading to the other. Julius, suddenly remembering they were suspended in midair, swallowed hard and busied himself with the buckets. 

The platform had started to rise shakily, when suddenly there was a creak of doors opening below and the sound of crunching boots and chatting filled the air. Mickey gasped in excitement, straining to see down to the ground while pulling on the rope. “The musketeers are coming out to drill!” Oswald leaned over the rail to watch, his eyes glowing.

“Keep going up,” Julius reminded them, staring at the sky now, and Mickey gave an absent tug on the rope in reply. The musketeers had formed into rows and were listening to orders commanded by the hulking figure of Captain Pete. Soon the chinking of steel on steel filled the air as the musketeers sparred together. Mickey and Oswald were entranced, following every move, window cleaning forgotten. Sensing no movement, Julius tore his gaze away from the clouds to see his brothers leaning over as far as they could to watch. “Can we go UP?” he demanded impatiently. Startled, Mickey gave the rope a hard tug- too hard, it turned out.

The mossy old ropes in Mickey’s hands, unused to the sudden stress, groaned their last and snapped. Julius barely had time to yell in fright before the entire end of the platform swung downward, throwing him over the side. Oswald was the luckiest- his grip on the ropes gave him enough support to stay in place. Mickey, however, was thrown stomach-first against the railing, punching all the air out of his lungs.

In a moment of panic he gasped painfully, blinking stars out of his eyes as his feet found traction on the wood. The ground swung back and forth below, a blur of stone and gravel. A frayed rope swung through the air, snapped in half. The sounds of training below had been replaced with shouts as the musketeers stopped drilling, although their attention barely registered in Mickey’s mind.

“Are you okay?” Oswald asked, his voice panicked. “Where’s Julius-?”

A puffed up white tail appeared over the edge, followed by the terrified face of Julius as he scrabbled at the railing. “HELP-!” he yowled, terrified. Mickey jumped out to grab his hand, attempting to haul his brother back up onto the platform with much yelling and clawing and wild thrashing (mostly from Julius). Oswald, clinging to the other rope at the top, started to feel it straining and snapping under his fingers. He barely had time to close his eyes with a heavy sigh before another loud SNAP pierced the air, completely severing the ropes holding up the lift.

For a few comical seconds, they hung in the air- three brothers, a rickety platform, and a sudsy soap bucket. Then those seconds ended, and the only thing Mickey and Oswald could hear was jumbled yelling and wind whistling by as the earth rushed up towards them like a giant stone fist ready to punch their brains out.

~~~~~~

“Are they dead?” “Sacre bleu… “It was those janitor boys again, of course." "Really? I thought the Captain already fired them." “How on earth did they do this…?” “I don’t see any movement.”

A crowd of musketeers surrounded the pile of wood and rope that lay in the courtyard, muttering and staring in shock. Dust swirled about underneath polished brown boots and swishing blue capes, and a few musketeers shook their heads, used to the shenanigans of those janitor brothers.

A small mouse, his head and shoulders poking out underneath a rotted board, blinked his eyes open blearily and looked around, dazed and disoriented. Through a raging headache he vaguely heard a booming voice commanding musketeers out of the way, not quite registering as a hulking figure made his way forward to stand, seething, over the wreckage. It wasn’t until a large, meaty hand shot out and grabbed him by the arm, yanking him free from the rubble with a swift tug that he came to and realized the dire situation they were in.

Dangling in the air by his arm, staring into the cold glaring eyes of Captain Pete, Mickey swallowed hard and smiled nervously. “Morning, Captain. I, uh, guess you might be a little upset…?” Upset wasn’t quite the word for what the snarling captain was. More like collasally, tremendously, completely pissed off. Mickey barely had time to mutter a prayer to Mère Marie before he was being dragged off across the courtyard under the glaring sun to an unknown, but almost certainly painful, fate.

____

A/N: GOD, FINALLY I'M DONE WITH CH 3!! I'm literally so sorry it took so long to post, I've had so much happening in my life and then of course writer's block hit... anyways, I plan on releasing chapters WAY more frequently now! Also sorry there was no illustration this time- more technical difficulties :( Anyways thanks for reading!!

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welcome back gangle !

Lol

So uh, I got this twisted au I wanna do. But I can't draw so I just did the design on their original PNG's 😃

I'm sorry, come again? ✨

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