Author Note: For those who are reading this for the first time, Isolde was born with a cleft lip deformity that was later sown up in an atrocious way. The character names that were given by Tangled the Series have also been added to my UotC universe. Don't be fooled, however. Tangled the Series on its own, which is blatantly a canon-divergent retcon of the Tangledverse, is not canon to UotC...especially not with its grating misinterpretations of almost everything in the Tangled film, specifically Eugene Fitzherbert. Post-Tangled fics are better than whatever that is struggling to be.
༺[*]༻
"I don't think of all the misery,
but of the beauty that still remains."
―Anne Frank
He never looks at himself on Rapunzel's birthday. He had been working so long and hard to become a whole him, to finally wipe the fog from his reflection and see a man worthwhile. That man shattered after Rapunzel's bloodshot eyes drifted shut on December 23rd. Left in his shaking arms were two pounds of fatherhood, the bloody ending of his ever after, and an entire lifetime of "Why?" soaking his pillowcase. His only sunrise in this kingdom of brimstone was her:
"My little sunshine..."
The smile his tears brined on the first day they met still honeys his memory on warworn mornings. He remembers how soft her amphibian fingers felt as they curled around his pinkie, how itty-bitty and unbelievably beautiful they were as they gripped for dear life. And when she smiled at him for the very first time, the slit in her lip smiled at him, too. Love had dripped from his eyes and splashed on her cheek, leaving an Orion's Belt of tears in the shape of hope. This single drop of sunlight he cradled was proof of Rapunzel's immortality; he thereupon vowed to lay down his pain and pick up his strength for Princess Isolde of Corona.
Yet the shadow of death laid down with his sundrop every night that he laid down with her, and he had to fight to keep her light agleam. Hope prevailed with the help of Queen Elsa. Alas, doom still loomed in the shape of the Southern Isles. Alliances broke; invasion nighed. Both his reputation and his selfdom collapsed.
Day by day, Corona's throne room was renovated into a dungeon that gyved his sanity. Night by night, his daughter's laughter was all that crayoned his dull world.
His promise to always be her knight in shining armor had been enameled with a song in the afterglow of one special sunset: "Now you're here, and suddenly, I know...if you're here, it's crystal clear, I'm where I'm meant to gooo~..."
During his bittersweet solo, Isolde's pink face smiled up at him from her cocoon of golden blankets. He remembers her hands reaching for his beard and feeling the dampness inside. He remembers wiping his tears off her grin as he rocked her in her mother's favorite knitting chair. To say that he had felt Rapunzel's arms in the sun rays erewhile is the truth. Isolde felt them everlastingly.
Today, he is still drinking his daughter in like honey lemon tea on a warworn morning. He tries to make out the shape of her future as he stares at her profile against the sunrise blonding her face. To the heavens her mother, grandparents, and both unborn and stillborn siblings have winged, defeathering a childhood that he cannot rewrite for her. The deepest hole in her heart is carved into the shape of Rapunzel, and it is a hole that his tales will never fill, yet the heart itself is expanding like a star with every moonrise that silvers the sea. On some nights, its luminosity outshines the Big Dipper's.
"Does I haf' Mommy's smile, Daddy?"
"Right down to the very dimples."
For all this light, time has forced him to accept that his daughter's health will never be what he prayed for it to become. The blessing he can press his lips against is her grip on life. Her self-esteem seems not as lean as it was years before, and she no longer claws up the scar that punctuates her mouth with a semicolon. She calls it a gravure of her survival and an embossment of her strength. One carver of inspiration, according to her artwork, is a platinum blonde queen.
Eugene's moist thoughts guide his gaze to a life-sized mural guarding Isolde's bed. The ladylike subject is bowered by frost flowers and Stargazer lilies that intertwine. Between her hands hovers a heart made of sunlight. Loops and whorls curl her hair and gown into filigree, echoing the shape of her winter magic. She smiles at her admirer with closed eyes and ruby cheeks.
'...Elsa,' Eugene's mind whispers, breathing life into his memory of their evolution as husband and wife.
The shape of their matrimony had been gargoyleish at birth. What looked then like a hideous explosion of watercolors is now a handsome portrait of remarriage and redemption, but the first brushstroke to hit the canvas had not been the color of love. Famine, war, debt, and parliaments had mortared them up in a prison tower called "Marriage of Convenience." The story of how he died was thus rewritten by the same men who had signed off on their incarceration:
To Thy PUSSIANT and BENIGN King of Corona,
I, Baldor Håakonsson, have chosen to reassign myself to the task of reading and responding to your final letter of address on Queen Elsa's behalf. Her Majesty is at present weathering episodic ailments that were caused by poor self-maintenance and paraphysical disorders. Your last two epistles indicate that these relapses can be attributed to her snow bees expending the last of her energy. To calm your spirit, the savioress whom you so esteem has not held audience with personages in five weeks. I must still beseech you to respect the fact that her duties beyond you and her own weal hamper her ability to write letters with a steady hand, so please do not chastise her further.
The hearsay concerning your regicide in connection with the resurgence of the Southern Isles has quieted. King Palmar, however, suspiciously withdrew his offer to assist Arendelle Kingdom in these times of nationwide need. Our taxes are grossly inflated by our enmeshment with warworn Corona, limiting Arendelle's capacity to be supportive without compensation. Fate alone cannot guarantee a future for your kingdom, and to go on as you are would be nocuous to both your reign and our expenditures. The Storting of Arendelle has petitioned to ensure joint futurition with a proposal that you will read at the foot of this letter.
As of the hour, Her Majesty is in her sister's care, who is also experiencing hardships of her own in relation to the undisclosed likelihood of her infertility. These odds have gone unaccepted by her optimism, and while they sting her consort's ego in comparison, he hypocritically harbors no special predilection for children. Come what may, their union stunts Arendelle's line of succession. Perhaps Your Majesty's unearthed noble blood allowed Corona to endow you with the erstwhile king's trust assets by virtue of the Crown Matrimonial, but Norden countries thrive on political alliances. Arendelle's constitution restricts our prince and princess to a morganatic arrangement that underlines the unfortunate nothing his name brings to the marriage; therefore, the matter of male preference primogeniture falls to Queen Elsa.
༺๑۩8۩๑༻
We the Delegations of the STORTING & PEOPLE'S COUNCIL,
in order to
unify foreign diplomatic and defense policies,
provide economic equality,
and birth the Furturition of Our kingdoms under one Crown,
have signed the following petition for marriage between
Queen Elsa of ARENDELLE and King Eugene of CORONA
The delegations have severally agreed and resolved to concur in measures as might best strengthen and secure the internal interests of Arendelle and Corona after a drumfire of warworn months. Although such laws have been amended by our polities because the Oath of Ruth is eld, our societies covenant that if a woman dies having no children in her marriage, her kinswoman may marry the widower and let him go inside her to raise up offspring for her. If a woman dies leaving young children behind in her marriage, her kinswoman may marry the widower and raise up her offspring for her. This marriage between Queen Elsa and King Eugene, united with the prospective marriage between the Storting of Arendelle and the People's Council of Corona, will reward the contract between Rapunzel and Eugene Fitzherbert with prosperity and posterity. A dispensation of incestuous affinity laws will be granted in acknowledgement of our just and reasonable cause.
[༺๑۩❆۩๑༻]
Signed, on behalf of the Storting, by
Magnus Lagabøte (Chairman)
Kolbein Stoltenberg (Deputy Chairman)
Baldor Håakonsson (Prime Minister)
[༺๑۩✸۩๑༻]
Signed, on behalf of the People's Council, by
Sigwalt Liebermann (High Councillor)
Matthias Steiner (Deputy H. Councillor)
Hänel Constantine (First Lord)
From Arendelle,
XVIII of May, 1850
The Prime Minister of Arendelle,
Baldor Håakonsson
All had been a nightmare cosigned by these evils. Eugene's memory of Elsa veiled and gowned on the altar, hoisting her chin with the bravery of a prisoner facing her guillotine in the name of honor, still pains him today. Her value for duty dwarfed his. Their marriage, which for so many was a lifeline, promised a future that she, without uttering a word towards her own tearful suffering, felt she must yield to, but nothing in his blood told him that he could survive such a death sentence. Owing gratitude failed to change what darkened his heart: this icy personification of the leg iron that would enchain him till death do them part was not whom he wanted to cede his life to.
Eugene went on to shamelessly christen Elsa a brumal replacement of Rapunzel's sunlight. She was brumal, she was whey-faced, and she was a subzero symbol of how cold his life had grown after Rapunzel's death. Whatever warmth and troth he found her capable of in the past meant nothing on that altar. His hysteria was too great. He could only breathe through this, he swore on all fours, if love spared them, and in that, he had faith.
How in equal parts ironic and frightful that the wider her fragile petals opened without politicial skulduggery honeycombing their marriage, the deeper she seeped inside of him like the cool water he needed after years spent in a desert with scorpions.
"Relying on what little information I have about your past, I understand that you lost your parents before finding two outstanding ones in Rapunzel's. I'm very familiar with that loss and how it shapes your way of thinking; I'm also familiar with the fear of letting in and letting go because of it. I only began healing when I decided to let love in again. The cold never bothered me just as I'm sure you thought it never bothered you in your former life, but what I truly needed after all those long years alone was warmth, and I strongly believe that you still need the same," Elsa had written to him in a letter that he would find more than four years too late.
The timing was just right, she'd argued. Elsa's deathless empathy, in its purest shape, came to embody the tenderness of a palm on his tearstained cheek, and the palm itself, to his greatest surprise, never gave him frostbite. It took on the personality of a breeze that kissed his skin with the healing effect her cryotherapeutic spells bring injured men, fountaining his consciousness into the clouds. For only a few seconds under his eyelids, he was aerified by her touch. She spoke, in due time, after believing their platonic bond to be secure and safe, of being solarized by his.
The two began to help each other mourn Rapunzel in healthier ways than either had embraced before their union. Writing letters to her, and then setting them free with lanterns, were the nights when they felt closest to one another and Rapunzel. Elsa unpacked the muddy baggage that Eugene had dropped onto her rug by loving her with him, even if that meant crying with him. Every teardrop that fell from Elsa's eye and bled through his vest thickened a connection that felt vital to their healing. The connection, at first, had been their love for Rapunzel, and trying in no small measure to love themselves in a society that did not collectively love them.
The orphan in Eugene canted until he could lay his heaviest secrets on Elsa's shoulder. She nursed his trust with featherlight strokes and petal-soft whispers, giving him the protection that his childhood had never ensured. By sunrise, he was finally able to close his eyes and fall asleep against her warmth. She would tell him that she wanted him to feel that warmth because he had neither felt nor met it prior to Rapunzel's passing. She wanted him to know that she understood how hard it was to remain an open door after being taught from youth to keep it shut, to misthink that, "I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything" is somehow a survivable slave code, and to have the world inside you grind to a halt after its axis dies.
Elsa understood, that when your parents don't walk back through the front door after a thunderstorm, you feel like you are, and therefore expect to be, facing society alone thenceforward. She understood why finding some corner of the world where he could be "rested and alone" made him assume that both his past and his trauma would magically disappear. She understood how impossible it was to trade freedom for a kingdom with the hope that others would forgive him for who he used to be, as well as who he will never become. She understood how terrifying it felt to be crowned in a chapel pewed with conspirators and assassins.
Elsa knew how heavy a mask weighed, how unbreathable it felt, and why he once preferred suffocation to oxygen. She understood, above all else, what it meant to suddenly become an adult before you were ever truly a kid, and then realize, within the blizzard of an unforeseen breakthrough, how desperately you need to take care of the kid in you. He never fully learned how to care for "Eugene Fitzherbert" as Prince Eugene. He learned how to love "love" again by loving Rapunzel as hard as he could even when he had feared that she stopped loving him as hard as she could.
"But have you ever taken the time to love yourself as hard as you can?" his father-in-law once asked him.
Eugene's answer, in so many stammers, had been no.
"You can not depend on Rapunzel to make you whole. She's trying to overcome her own challenges and find her own peace of mind as Corona's future queen. Don't make her responsible for yours. She'll suffocate."
"Suffocate" had been his golden word choice. "She'll suffocate." Eugene felt like he wanted to die after hearing that, but die he didn't. He left to find and love his allness for Rapunzel. "Eugene" hadn't been his dedicatee, but he couldn't see the boomerang coming until Rapunzel left in a bloody nightgown and a serene smile. Ripped open by the aftershock, "Eugene Fitzherbert" was declared dead, and "King Eugene of Corona" was swiftly enthroned on his bones.
Incomplete molecules of "Flynn Rider" materialized in place of "Eugene Fitzherbert" to help him survive his own death, but it never helped. King Eugene was a silhouette of his father-in-law's expectations, Flynn wasn't compatible with whom he needed to be for Corona, and Eugene's corpse was begging for oxygen, which he drew from Isolde's sunglow.
Elsa, like Rapunzel's father, challenged him to become his own oxygen. "Start building yourself up into a person you can love again," she imparted, "but you have to do it for yourself this time. Otherwise, you'll never find true happiness."
Eugene sat on her words throughout their marriage. Her wisdom had fruited from her own mistakes and, of course, the fact that she was still paying for them. Still coping with setbacks. Still gauging her worth on adequacy and inadequacy ― on how much of herself she was giving to everyone else. But she was trying.
"Because for the first time, I finally know how to try..."
...And he couldn't help but smile at her profile in the moonrise as he watched her try. Watched her hug her allness. Watched her inculcate the importance of selfhood into Isolde's childhood by giving her a sunrise to stand in. He saw Elsa surpass her sister's ebullience by miles, the caged bird she freed having had that much more pent-up vibrancy and passion screaming to be expressed. This once dour duckling grew the wings of a shimmering swan after her eternal winter...and it made him feel...hopeful.
Unlike Eugene Fitzherbert, Elsa never needed to plagiarize someone else's extraordinaire to become a show-stopper with some serious swagger. She just was, all along. The confidence that charmed him was not ironclad, but the vulnerability that gowned her at night revived the man in him who had once made a career out of comforting distressed ladies. Without ever catching the resemblance, he spoke to her in the caressing style that Rapunzel used to curl up against on nights when he would try to kiss away her fear of becoming queen.
The night that Elsa's gaze finally reciprocated the embrace Eugene's offered, a smile broke open across her face like clouds parting to reveal starlight, and he smiled back, feeling warmer than an oven on the inside. Elsa, in his opinion, had always liked herself, which put her ahead of him in this marathon for "self-love." Perhaps she had not liked what she did or became at the hands of her own hands, but there was no way that smug smirk she made while doing fancy handwork could appear out of thin air if she'd always hated herself. Enwomaned with the wisdom and grace of her parents before her, Elsa enjoyed being a lady of her own flashy design far too much.
The matriarch enjoyed flexing her blunt opinions as a queen with her own mind. She enjoyed sculpting her crown into a polyhedron of liberal ideas and egalitarianism. She enjoyed stomping snowflakes into the ground and summoning mega ice castles that blew Eugene's hair back. She enjoyed knocking the wind out of his glass ego with her dry comebacks. She enjoyed her disconcerting habit of keying into the anxiety he buries whenever he's gotten into a bind, which not unseldom resulted in her freezing all his escape routes.
Elsa enjoyed being Elsa.
In turn, Eugene began to like what "Elsa" looks like. He began to commend her prodigious book smarts, despite its unpopularity with most men from her class. He began to treasure her humility and selfless lean, despite telling her how an uptick in selfishness would actually be healthy for her. He began to savor volleying repartees with her in multiple languages, despite losing rounds whenever she acted like a guileless imp who was incapable of naughtiness. He began to prize her mild and rational temperament, despite not always being down for her more spontaneous outlets (he makes an awful ice-skating partner, and Miss Thing is a tugger).
He grew into his affection for her stubbornness, regardless of how many times it burned him up. He grew into respecting her percipience, specifically because she wouldn't let him pull any wool over her eyes (or so he tells her). He enjoyed collaborating with her for Corona and Arendelle, even if they didn't always see eye to eye. He fancied her sophistication, even though he had a hard time keeping Flynn's vanity out of that reason. He cherished her womanlike purity, which encastled a coffer of innocence that made his trunk of experience all the more useful.
He found her chocolate fetish ridiculously adorable, so long as she wasn't putting her paws on his fudge cakes. He found the agitated twitch her eyelid always made during some uppity dignitary's speech thoroughly amusing. He thought her "dance moves" looked laughably cute whenever she leafed through paperwork with a ballad on her tongue, performing a graceful heel turn there or a lingering step here. He immediately liked the way she spiffed up his outfits with her own razzle-dazzle. He was never a fan of winter, but he became a fan of whatever she made with it, as well as however she wore it.
He learned to enjoy the fact that there was always something new to learn about her, permitting him to thumb through pages of fresh content over the years like a book that never ended. Her mystique had much in common with buried treasure. Flynn Rider affiliated this with the appeal of an unattainable jewel, but Eugene Fitzherbert simply admired her sparkle from the half-open vault. Both egos overloved the way she crossed her bare legs like a fancy œuvre d'art as she worked, or how the bend of her arm, when raising a wineglass to her red pucker, was as perfect as the curve of an expensive candelabrum's branch. Both hated the way her lipstick endowed her smirk with a sheen that could've distracted them from saving their own lives in a snowstorm.
And those sleek curves, glacéed with undeniable sex appeal, were quite something. Flynn was a defender of Elsa's right to look foxy wherever she sailed. He mowed down any man who protested against her freedom to dress as she liked because he believed that a woman's body was her own business. After all, Elsa's garbs flaunted nothing more than a need to celebrate the parts of herself that society had hemmed in, and Flynn, having been the one to rip the stitches that kept Eugene hemmed into Corona's class structure, was fully behind that. The rogue couldn't have been more smitten with such rebellion.
Elsa is the master of her own womanhood, the queen of her own muliebrity, and no man captains her.
"Learn to give yourself credit where credit is due, because like I said before, you are one amazing woman."
It is no exaggeration to call the two-edged queen Eugene's little savioress on top of the superficial hang-ups he'd tried to iron out of Flynn. Many a battle, he would find Elsa risking her life for all that her cousin had bequeathed to her, including him. He would find himself blubbering against her dress about how afraid he'd been of never seeing her again when those risks greatened. Said paranoia had little to do with feeling responsible for her because she was Rapunzel's blood. Suddenly no longer just the Snow Queen, his wife's cousin, his affine, or even his debt, Elsa had grown into a whole person before Eugene's dewy eyes, and with every inch that they grew into themselves, their bond outgrew the boxes that once defined the lines between them.
"Elsa, I don't care if you have powers or if you can't keep saving my life with them anymore. All I care about is you," he'd confessed to a magicless, brunette-haired Elsa once upon a time. "The only thing I've been looking at this whole time is you."
He loved with her. He loves her. What he may love more than her is seeing her love herself. He also loves her capacity to love deeply, the endless enlargement of her great, once suppressed ― and once misguided ― heart that had probably been waiting, desperately waiting, to love "love" since she was a girl. On her best days, as she looked heavenwards with the moonrise impearling her gown, she held the timeless beauty of a fairy tale.
What he never loved was the hurricane it took for him to accept this earthquake after its seisms had overwhelmed him. He had to flail. He had to drown. He had to die. He had to lose her, and he still hasn't finished crying about that. He had to find Rapunzel at the end of the darkest tunnel and take her guidance into his arms, because he didn't know how much longer he could keep hating himself.
The answers he seemingly died to earn enriched him, and Eugene Fitzherbert's haggard walk towards inner peace commenced with Rapunzel's rays hugging him from behind. The cobbled road to the portal of his own light has not ended, but his limp lessens the more he walks. The ache is thawing. Hope is flowering. He's almost living again.
"Mommy would wanna see you happy..."
Eugene's feet sink off Isolde's bed to hover over the mural that swallows the floor. Bowered by frost flowers and Stargazer lilies, Elsa and Rapunzel are dovetailed into a folk dance among applauders from Corona's town square. Eugene is a smiling face in the crowd.
"Mommy picked Elsa out for us..."
Eugene smiles tightly as his burning nostrils throb, nudging the teardrop in the corner of his eye with his center finger.
One of Elsa's letters echos in his dome, "If by some heartwarming chance that you are still reading, I must add for your sake that finding healing by opening up to whomever you choose to find warmth in again doesn't mean that your wounds will magically disappear, but it does mean that those wounds won't bleed as much anymore. Once you've discovered that, you'll start to see that suffering does have a counterbalance down the line. You'll find that the people whom you called your life are still living through you. Most of all, you'll begin to understand that storms don't last forever. Getting out of bed in the morning is the first step to seeing all the love that life still has to offer."
She was right, and he's still coping with this. Eugene Fitzherbert, in his almost-whole state, is still adjusting to the fact that Rapunzel's life and death are immense parts of who he is. He is still adjusting to the fact that loving the shape of himself is a fight that he must win if he wants to live. But he has adjusted to the fact that loving one person doesn't detract from his love for another.
He has adjusted to the fact that love is not a scale with points, or a battle over whom he loves more, because to create one is to misunderstand love's true shape. He has yet to adjust to the fact that intimacy with someone new will be hard for a very long time. He may never adjust to the fact that he will always, always miss Rapunzel's head on his chest.
"Mommy said she never left..."
No matter how many years pass, Rapunzel's rays will always be everywhere. She is the shape of Corona. She is the shape of what his life became. She is the shape of Isolde's very soul. She is infinite.
However, memories made with Elsa are also everywhere. She is the shape of the union between Corona and Arendelle. She is the shape of what his life is becoming. She is the shape of Isolde's very future. She is iridescent.
The trick was becoming content with that intertwinement, and later smiling at the filigree it had formed.
"..." Eugene's smile broadens. Tears climb his eyelashes. He blinks them dry.
"What do you think we look like to Isolde?"
"Judging by her murals, I'd say, "filigree.""
Careful hands draw the blankets over Isolde's body and pull off the ringlets feathering her smile. Love drips from her father's eyes and splashes against her temple, leaving an Orion's Belt of tears in the shape of happiness. Eugene kisses the constellation without kissing it away. He stands up to cherish her for being his opportunity to raise a child the way his parents could never raise him. The sunrise carries his feet out of his daughter's room and into his wife's.
Elsa is bundled in sunlight with her head pillowed by her curls. One shoulder is bent around the shape of the sun. His gaze wanders down the curve of her nape and splays across the wings of her back while she breathes lightly. Two of his favorite features on her body are her shoulders. She once hid these shoulders under suede layers and layers of insecurities on coronation day, and even then, he wondered what held them up.
These shoulders have borne the weight of unimaginable responsibilities. They have borne the weight of isolation, loss, fear, hate, betrayal, death, and other people's lives, despite so many of their attempts to end hers. They have borne the weight of him. These shoulders are pillars despite her minimization of their durability, and they still make him breathless when she bares their porcelain to the world without shame.
"Just don't forget that mine are also here for you to stand on."
"..."
"Deal?"
"...It's a deal."
Peeling his feet out of his slippers, Eugene slips underneath Elsa's sheets to join her in the sunbath. His weight causes her to shift and wiggle, but the only body part that turns is her head. Her unpurpled eyelids don't lift. Her unpainted lips stand open.
Eugene's soft blinks grow slower. His lips walk on her wings to cross the road from her nape to her cheek.
"Mmm~..." Elsa's body smiles.
Eugene can feel her body smiling by feeling her toes curl against his shins. The pink lips that petal her mouth curl into the smile of a kitten having its chin tickled. As her adorkable face turns toward him, his thumb strokes that smile. Elsa hoists her eyelids at half-mast to bare her heart to Eugene. Like sunlight shining through blue shards of glass, her orbs reflect the daybreak in his.
Without blinking or speaking, Elsa brushes the curtain out of Eugene's eyes and tucks it behind his ear. She touches the corner of his jaw with her fingertips. Then she caresses. Shrinks the distance between their noses. Closes her eyes.
Eugene sits his lips between hers. One of them moans from being turned into water, but he doesn't know who. Elsa's hand snakes under the back of his hair to bring him closer so that she can melt deeper. Lips slip and grip, suckling from bottom to top, and top to bottom, drinking the sun out of the morning. The sensation of her fingers flowing down his arm is more seductive than anything flirtatious.
"Am I corrupting you?" Elsa teases in her feline tone, the delivery almost shy around the edges.
"Yeah, I..."―smack―"...I-I might be"―smack―"might be in need of..."―smack―"holy water, or"―smack―"Father Niemöller"―smack―"and, and quite possibly..." Frowning, Eugene keeps his eyes shut for a moment. He shakes his head. "...I lost my train of thought."
"Perfect."
Eugene's mouth sings from her laughing against his kiss. As they pull back, their lips peel off like pages coming apart: slow, lingering, moist. One of them moans, and he's embarrassed to realize that it's him. A final smack breaks the spell's bind for good, but he's left shuddering at the feeling of "Elsa" still glistening on his lips. With a slow swirl of the tongue, he licks the trail and snatches it in, saving it, tasting it.
Eugene opens his pleading eyes to her with his lips tucked under his teeth. Elsa smiles at him, sleepy-eyed and Rudolph-nosed. She lowers his chin to seat a kiss between his eyes instead of his lips. It feels nice. Right.
Eugene takes her love into his arms and tucks his face into the curve of it. Her hands rest on the wings in his back, pressing him against it. He draws in a breath. Inhaling her. Inhaling them.
A piece of his heart is carved into the shape of Elsa, and it is a masterpiece that he will forever treasure.
"Did Rapunzel paint this one, too?"
"Yes. She did. She spent every sunrise painting it until it was finally finished. I never saw her more proud of a mural than she was of that one."
"...It's beautiful."
"It most certainly is."
Author Note
This was an unplanned installment, so I don't really know if it's as decent as the first drabble, especially since "subtle" doesn't define it. If Indentured is absolutely never finished because my Disney interest wanes, then at the very least, there's *this* alternative development to read. Perhaps this is therefore a "contingency" fic. Parts hearken back to "Stranger Than You Dreamt It" and "Indentured" itself.