"I feel stupid." Jules groaned as he stared at his reflection. It was Christmas Eve, and Emma had insisted that the Los Angeles Institute hold a party – a fancy dress party. Emma rounded the doorway and stepped inside Julian's room. God, she looked beautiful. Her golden hair was pinned up high on her head, and she was dressed elegantly in a midnight-blue ball gown that drifted gently over her slender frame, clinging to and accentuating her every curve without looking obscene.
"Aww," she said, breaking Julian out of his daze, "you look cute!"
He looked down at himself, then back up at beautiful Emma and scoffed, "ha. Yeah, right. How come you got to dress like some movie star and I'm stuck in this bloody snowman costume." Emma burst in to a fit of giggles that rung in Julian's ears like peeling bells.
"Hey, you agreed to these costumes!"
"No, I didn't. You told me that we were having this party – that I'm not going to enjoy by the way – and you told me it was fancy dress, and you told me that we were going as Disney characters from Frozen. You know I've never seen it, and you know I wouldn't have bothered to look it up. Is there any way we can change?" Julian's eyes begged Emma to find another costume, to find a way for him to placate her need to party without him getting embarrassed.
Emma rolled her eyes. "I have a back-up, but only one, okay?"
Julian sighed with relief. "Go get it then!"
As Emma left the room, Julian tried to figure out how to get out of said stupid snowman costume and was successful only when Emma returned and helped him to reach the zipper on the back and pull it off until he was stood only in his tights (yet another part of the ridiculous Olaf costume Emma had put together). Turning around, he saw how Emma had managed to change their costumes. From somewhere, she had produced a delicate tiara that now sat atop her head, making her look every bit the princess she was pretending to be, and had also found an outfit that made Julian's eyes widen reflexively, due to sheer brightness of colour. Before him was a pair of crimson trousers, a yellow jacket, complete with epaulets, and a golden crown. He sighed inwardly in despair – but at least this character was human. But then Emma's choice of characters dawned on him and he groaned again– Cinderella and Prince Charming. A couple. Brilliant. It wasn't as if everybody didn't already suspect they were dating. It wasn't as if Julian didn't secretly wish that their suspicions were correct.
Poor Julian Blackthorn had been slowly falling in love with his best friend, Emma Carstairs, ever since the Dark War. Thankfully, both of their families had survived the bloodshed, and thus both resided within the Los Angeles Institute. There was a time when Julian had considered asking Emma to be his parabatai, but on remembering the laws surrounding parabatai, namely that they were not allowed to fall in love, and because of his infallible – albeit unrealistic – hope that one day Emma would feel the same way he did, he never asked, and instead became parabatai with his older brother, Mark. Years later, a visitor to the institute named Christina had befriended Emma particularly, and had thus stayed on at the institute way past the end of her yearlong placement and had become parabatai with Emma mere months later. So the path was clear for them to be together – if only Emma didn't see him as nothing more or less than her best friend since childhood.
There we go folks! First chapter of my newest story - been working on this one a while, just never uploaded it til now. Leave a review and let me know what you think!
-KitKat xx