A/N: Well, I'd like to apologize beforehand to the readers of this story if it is terrible. It is currently 3.45 a.m. and I am getting very, very sleepy. I was supposed to write a very different story than this one, but somehow, this came out and I sincerely hope that you enjoy it. And remember, R&R. And even if you want to flame me, it's fine. (=

I suppose everyone wants a happily-ever-after. And, by all means, most did get it. But there are some who don't. Amidst the tales of damsels in distress and knights in shining armour upon white steeds coming to their rescue, there were a handful of people whose happy endings had been slowly but surely pried away from their hands. In many ways, having one's dreams taken away right under one's nose is a lot more painful, but at least, before it disappeared out of sight, one would be able to see it coming.

I hadn't had such a thing. There was no warning. Not even the slightest hint that something had gone wrong. I had heard no word of his falling in love with her, and he hadn't given me any indication that he didn't intend to seek my hand. But, of course, he had gone and done all these things. In that one night in which I had taken ill, that one night when I couldn't make it to a ball, he had met a woman and had fallen in love.

BAH! I wished them only the worst in this life.

Well, no. That wasn't true. The girl really had no idea that I had been in the picture before her, so it wasn't fair for me to blame her for all the pain I've felt—for all the pain that I was still feeling. So, the proper sentence would be that I wished him the worst in life. I hoped that he would feel all the misery he'd caused me. I hoped that the slicing pain he'd planted in my heart would materialize in his. I hoped that when he closed his eyes to succumb to slumber, the only face he'd see was mine, and not that of his future wife. I wanted him to remember me for the rest of his life and every time he thought of my name, he would feel the hurt of a thousand heartbreaks.

I've seen him with her before. She looked so happy strolling along the path in the gardens, her hand in his, her eyes shining with delight and pleasure as she bestowed upon him a dazzling smile. I remember thinking of how she was the one who had taken away my happy ending. She'd been the one to rip my dreams out of my hands and smashed them to smithereens, effectively making my heart crumble, rather like the way a mirror would crumble were someone to strike it with a rock.

However, if all this had happened under different circumstances, I would have found it achingly funny because before any of this, I'd thought of the term 'broken-hearted' as ridiculous and all the maids working for my household as a lot of idiots who were simply too stupid and uneducated to know that a heart could not be broken. The heart was an organ that had muscles to hold it in place. The heart was the organ that pumped blood through our veins and kept us alive. If one's heart were to be broken, one would surely die on the spot.

I hadn't known what they'd gone through then. I didn't understand just how empty one would feel when one lost something important. My father was the only important thing in my life that I had lost and because of that, I often thought myself the only one worthy in this world of sadness. I'd thought that the praises one would receive for staying strong were only meant for me and not a single other living soul could claim a praise for themselves because, surely—oh, surely!—none of them had ever felt the brand of pain that I'd had to suffer. Only, I was a mere child when my dear papa left. I could hardly remember him.

It hadn't occurred to me—not once—that a broken heart might be harder to recover from than any disease. Death may not be imminent in the event of heartbreak, but one would most certainly wish for it.

And that was exactly what I wanted now. Death. For it to come and claim me as its own, dragging me, kicking and screaming, into a darkness where I would have other things to deal with other than a breaking heart. But Death would not come.

Death would not come.

Death would not come.

What did come, as I laid on the floor in the pitch black that was my room, staring at what I presumed was a wall, was memories of him. Of Raphe. He was the one man who could make me fall into a sad, sobbing heap on the floor. He was the only being in this world that could turn me into something lesser than a silly girl who fancied herself in love, who fancied herself the moon. He had been the one to throw all the love I'd given to him back in my face and forced me to acknowledge the existence of heartbreak, and yet he was only thing I could think of. Raphe. And the woman he was about to marry, the blonde beauty he'd fallen hopelessly in love over the course of one night, over the course of a waltz during the ball—she probably didn't even know his name. Raphe would mean nothing to her. Raphe would disappear, be forgotten. Raphe would not exist. Only Charming would.

Raphe would not hold her in his arms when she broke down and cried. Raphe would not kiss her good night before they retired to their rooms. Raphe would be a non-person. Raphe would simply be the shadow of Charming. And at that moment, as all these realizations dawned upon me, I felt a pang of hurt which I had not expected because, not only had I lost my love, I would also lose Raphe, the one I loved, the one that I'd—

Light.

My vision was filled with light for at least five seconds, blinding me, when I felt someone wrap his fingers around my upper arm. To be honest, I had not the slightest idea whether the person was of the male or female variety, but something about him—or her—felt familiar. And right after that thought was another one. He had gotten to me much, much faster than what was possible. Even though my room had been shrouded in darkness, he found his way to me rather quickly. He must know my room well enough to avoid the gigantic table I'd had only a few feet away from the door.

Raphe, my mind whispered.

Alas, it wasn't Raphe. It was my uncle. I recognized his wedding band when I turned to my left to look at the hand that had grabbed me. I looked up at him, watching as his brow creased with frustration, his lips moving, forming words of insistence—insistence of my leaving the house for a ride or a walk or, in his own words, "Whatever it is that women do."

He steered me towards the stairs, his fingers like vicious, enchanted vines around my upper arm which refused to let go. And I, feeling as confused as…well, as the most confused person in the world at his sudden outburst and immediate taking of action, removed my gaze from his face back down to his hand where I once again so the golden band around his fourth finger. Uncle had been a constant presence in my life, filling in the gap where my father should have been, and in all the time he's spent with me, I have never seen him without his wedding band. The fourth finger on his left hand might as well have been a synonym for wedding band.

He had been happy, I suppose. Or rather, happier. Comparative. Because Uncle had always been happy. It's just that I've always thought him happier when Aunt had been alive. I hadn't been born yet when she passed on, but mama said that after her death, he had been engulfed in a restricting sadness, one that made sure whatever happiness he'd felt when he'd had her never came back.

We stopped suddenly, and my eyes followed every move he made as he deposited me in front of the stairwell and proceeded to open the doors. "I insist, my dear, that you leave this house for a little bit. You need to clear your mind."

Uncle had been the only one to know of my love affair with Raphe. He had been the one to shoot Raphe a deadly look when he came to escort me to our first ball together and he had been the one to glare daggers at him when he'd tried to kiss me in our garden.

He started to come towards me again, ready to take my upper arm once more and push me out the door, and I said, "Uncle? Why does love hurt?"

He froze and, half a second later, took a step back as if he'd walked into a brick wall. His eyes searched my face. "Love doesn't hurt." His reply was finally heard after what seemed like an eternity of silence. And then, as if just realizing the importance of his previous sentence, he stated it again, more firmly this time. "Love does not hurt." His boots made clicking noises as he moved forward, every step he took taking him closer to my person and when he was close enough, he took my hand in his. "Love does not hurt, child. Love is what makes the world whole."

And I felt like breaking my hand free of his grasp and beating my fists against his chest until he felt the same pain that I did. Those four words—love does not hurt—were more hurtful than anything I've ever felt before and after Raphe massacred my heart. My chest felt like it was about to be torn open from the inside. Love does not hurt?

Of course it did! Love had made me give myself—heart and soul and everything—to Raphe and it had made me miserable. How could love not hurt when it was the very thing that was feeding me all this pain?

Then, before I knew what I was doing, my legs took me out through the doors—and right into the arms of another world of pain.

"Anne," he said into my hair as his arms wrapped around me, and this time, when my mind whispered his name, I knew it wasn't wrong. It truly was him. It was Raphe. I would recognize his voice anywhere.

For a moment, the heartbreak was replaced by joy. Something had stirred hope within my heart and it was now making an appearance, its wings fluttering soothingly against the heart that had been so wounded. Perhaps he had come to tell me about the ghastly mistake he's made, leaving me to my pain as he had. Perhaps he had come to ask me for my hand in marriage, and when I shook my head and refused to accept, he would pull away from me and look at me with his beautiful blue eyes and tell me that he had broken off his engagement to Cinderella, trying his hardest to convince me that it was me he was in love with, that it was me he wanted to spend the rest of his life loving.

He pulled away from me, his hand moving to the side of my face where a stray lock of hair had escaped the chignon I'd put it in earlier that day and tucking it behind my ear, his eyes looking into mine so tenderly. My heart was screaming, "He must love me! He simply must! He wouldn't look at me in such a way if he weren't."

"I've made a terrible mistake, Anne," he said, taking my hand in his, leading me to the garden where he'd tried—and failed—to kiss me. "And we need to talk. In the wake of everything that I've done, I realize that you wouldn't want to, but we simply must."

I followed him like a lost puppy, too lost in my own mind to even form a thought on what I was doing. I felt the soft grass underneath my silk slippers before I saw the garden, my once broken heart already beginning to mend.

"Listen to me, Anne. You are far too important for me to lose," he began, his eyes still looking into my own. "I've thought about everything we've gone through, about how happy I had been with you, and I don't want to let that go. I don't want to let you go. We could stay together."

I smiled. This was when he would propose marriage to me and apologize at least a hundred times for being such an idiot and causing me so much pain. This would be when he rekindled our romance, promising a lifetime of happiness and love—"You could be my mistress."

And just like that, the joy that I had woven around myself had been hacked through by a sword-wielding pain with a vengeance. I felt all the sadness crashing back into my being and it was all I could do not to fall onto the ground as I had in my room when I'd found out about his engagement.

His mistress. He wanted me to be his mistress. I knew it was wrong, but a small voice in the back of my mind was asking me what was so wrong about it. I had been in love with this man for as long as I could remember and not a minute ago, I had been imagining our life together. Now, he was presenting me with a way to make those imaginings come true. We could be together and I would be happy. What was so wrong with wanting to be happy?

It was then that I realized how right Uncle was. Love does not hurt. Love never did hurt. It was people who did—so I smiled at him, at Raphe. I smiled at the man who had given me happiness and taken it away. I smiled at the man who had obliterated my dreams, and I wished him the best with his marriage and as he rode away, out of my home, I watched.

I don't think the pain would ever go away. In fact, I didn't want it to. That pain that was making a home inside my heart was a reminder that I had loved someone with every shred of my being and that I had been loved back. But, ultimately, that someone had hurt me and the love that I had felt for him was the only comfort I'd be able to find.