Perfect Little Picture
By Asteria
Disclaimer: I own neither the characters, nor the setting.
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Once upon a time there was a woman who grew up believing with all her heart in fairy tales. She studied science and became a doctor, but she never lost her belief. Rationality could not shake her of her conviction in Prince Charming and Happily Ever After. She fell in love and thought she had found her fairy tale ending.
And then things started to fall apart.
Her man died and her son was born, both in quick succession. But her faith in fairy tales was not shaken. Perhaps this was not yet her ending, but the beginning. The Princess (in which role she naturally saw herself) always had a challenge to face before her story could end. Her challenge was a love that ended too soon, and the resulting son who couldn't function.
So she stopped looking for Prince Charming and poured her efforts into her son, who, in spite of his differences or because of them, she loved more than she'd thought it was possible to love another person.
Of course, once she stopped looking, she found Prince Charming, for such is the way of things. He was everything she could have hoped for: handsome, brilliant, charming, and he loved her son. He loved her. So they married and she waited for her Happily Ever After.
But it was not to be.
Prince Charming was a believer in rationality. His rational mind, one of the things for which she loved him, could not accept the idea of Happily Ever After. To him, it was naïve to think that Happily Ever Afters could occur, and because of this he could not fit into her image, the image she carried in her heart, of the Princess and her Prince Charming forever in harmony.
And so she parted ways with Prince Charming and they lived for a time at opposite ends of the world. The distance gave her time to think, but it also made her unable to see how the separation hurt Prince Charming. So she did not consider his perspective in her calculations, and she decided to leave him forever. She concluded that she had been mistaken; that he was not Prince Charming, he was just another challenge to be borne.
So once again she stopped looking for love, and once again she was blindsided. This man was no Prince Charming, though; he, were life truly a fairy tale, would be the Virtuous Woodsman, noble in spirit if not by birth. It was then that she remembered the Rule of Three: the third of anything- third son, third suitor, third adventurer, third princess- would always succeed where the two before had failed. And so she pursued her Virtuous Woodsman, though she moved slowly, having moved too quickly in the past.
And once more, the situation changed. Prince Charming returned.
To her very great surprise, she found herself torn between the two. In his absence, she had forgotten everything about Prince Charming that she had ever loved and remembered only that which she had hated. But his return brought with it a flood of good memories and strong emotions. One day she took Prince Charming in her arms to prevent him shattering into a million pieces; the next she held the Virtuous Woodsman to keep them both from freezing. And she could not decide, could not decide, could not decide…
The End
… For Now