A/N: Okay, Allen Schezar, this is it for you for a while. Are you done now? Sorry if this chapter is a bit rushed – I honestly don't know what to do with a storyline that just runs amok with me…

Also: I don't want to do a disservice to Eries to make it sound like she hangs on Allen's everything. But I want it to be clear that she does love him, even if she doesn't fully comprehend it, because she thinks of him before herself.

Criticisms welcome, because this is the chapter I'm most unsure of.

He stopped speaking to me. He stopped…speaking.

Marlene's wedding was days away, and he followed her like…like a Caeli bodyguard. There was no smiling or giggling, or stolen touches. He was three steps behind her, all decorum and "yes your majesty" or "no your majesty" and bowing and…it made me sick. Not sick for me, and my lost chance at love, but sick for him. He kept it hidden well, but from one who had known him so long. I saw the tense set of his shoulders, the way his lips thinned and his brow furrowed when he thought no one was looking.

He was waiting for Marlene outside my Father's chambers, and he looked…worried. I could have kept walking – he was the one that stopped talking, not me.

But as I approached, his head turned to face the source of the sound, and his face fell when he saw me. He implored me to speak to him without saying a word. I couldn't turn him down.

"Allen. What are you doing out here? Where's Marlene?"

He nodded his head towards the closed door.

"What's going on?"

He sighed.

"Allen, sighs and nods are not a conversation. Are you going to talk to me or what?"

He put his hand on my shoulder and turned me away from the long echoing hallways.

"Marlene is talking to your father…about…about us."

I wanted to give him a smart answer, 'there is no 'us'', but my wit was kept in check by his expression. And then I stepped back, and thought that my friend and my sister were stupider than I gave either of them credit for.

"Allen. What do you mean?" I spoke slowly, praying that what I thought he was saying was definitely not what he was saying.

He looked exasperated with me, as though I were the idiot who was telling the King of Asturia that he wanted to marry a Princess of Asturia and to hell with her betrothed Duke of Freid. "Eries, I said exactly what I meant. I said,"

I interrupted him. "I know what you said," I spoke harshly, and shrugged off his hand on my shoulder. "I was just hoping you weren't that stupid."

"We love each other," he started, and I slapped him.

"Idiot! God!" I turned away, my fists clenched at my sides, trying to sort out what to say next. I whirled on him and he flinched, his cheek already pink from my strike. "Allen, you don't really think my Father is going to give up a perfectly nice marriage treaty because some knight loves her, do you? Do you?!" My voice rose in pitch, if not in volume, and there was a little too much sarcasm loaded on the word "knight". But it was too late to play softly. I hadn't made him talk to me, and he hadn't sought me out, and so he was trying to get himself hanged. Exiled, at the very least.

I stared at him, and had a hard time reconciling the smart, chivalrous swordsman, pride of the Caeli, with the sad, stupid case that stood before me. It wasn't working. What I saw was Allen, my best friend (did I still hold him to that title?) and he was completely naïve about the entire situation. All he could think of was that "love would conquer all" or some similar romantic crap. The real world had taken a flying leap out of his perception of reality. I couldn't figure it out.

All the time that I thought I loved him (I couldn't have, right? I couldn't've loved this person who was standing before me…could I?), and I didn't know he had this in him.

I didn't have time to say more, because the door opened, and Marlene started to run out into the hallway, but stopped abruptly when her eyes took me in.

From inside the room, I heard my father's voice.

"Allen Schezar."

Marlene looked petrified, and, not waiting to keep my father waiting, they only exchanged one glance – she shook her head once, and he hung his, and they knew they were defeated.

Marlene didn't speak to me, just inhaled deeply and walked past me, as though I wasn't even there.

# # # # #

The day of the wedding was beautiful, though I could think of at least three people who didn't care.

The last thing I had done was slap him and called him an idiot. He had not sought me out again.

I heard from a handmaiden that he had been found a permanent post, he would be leaving Palas and going to Fort Castelo.

After my sister's departure, I went looking for him. I wanted to apologize, even though I knew there was nothing I had to apologize for. But I wanted him back.

I caught up with him as he handed off a trunk to be loaded onto an airship for his departure.

"Allen."

The other man that took the trunk snickered, and turned away.

"Eries. You shouldn't be here." There was no emotion. His voice was flat.

"Allen, you must know, you…I'm not mad at you, I want…I want us to be friends."

"Knights and princesses are not friends, Princess."

"Allen, what happened with Marlene…" I was going to apologize for taking anyone's side but his. I never tried to understand, all I thought was that he had betrayed my feelings, but if I never let him know those feelings, how could he have betrayed them? He obviously didn't pick up on the constant subtleties, of how I took his hand whenever we walked, and how he was the first person I went to whenever I was happy or sad or…whatever.

But he clearly did not catch my drift this time just as he had not picked up on those little hints. Instead, he said something I did not expect.

"She told you?"

Told me what? Told me what?!

"Allen," I started to ask, and apparently he wanted to confess to someone, because I only had to say his name for him to pour out his secrets, despite keeping so many of them from me for the last few months.

"It was just the one time. Just the once. I…I don't know how she's going to explain to the Duke."

They did something. Just the once. And she was going to have to explain it to the Duke.

Oh god.

And I slapped him again, without even thinking. Tears formed and slid out of the corners of my narrowed eyes.

What could I say?

"Eries."

"No, Allen."

And he did not touch his face, but neither did he seem confused or angry as to why I'd done it. He turned away from me without another word.

And as I watched him walk away, I wasn't angry any more. I was sad. Sad for me, because I was watching the only friend I ever really had turn his back and disappear, but even more sad for him. If he still cared about me at all, he was losing a friend too, and he had most certainly already lost more than that – he had lost the woman he loved.

There was nothing I could say.

And so I was silent, my hands clasped in front of me, a lone princess watching him board the Crusade and head for Fort Castelo.

When we received the announcement, two months later, that my sister was pregnant, I did not even stop to consider it could have been her husband's.

And I wept that night, for my own lost innocence, my own frail romanticism, that never had a chance to stretch its wings. I was sad for my…for Allen, and I was sad for my sister, but for once in my life, I was sad for me. I really let myself wallow in the facts of my wretched life, of my sister who never knew nor cared that I loved my best friend, and my best friend who never knew nor cared to notice that he didn't have to look so far away to find someone to love. I had been right there, and he never even looked in my direction.

# # # # #

Three years later, my sister died, leaving behind a beautiful, precocious blonde-haired blue-eyed boy. I held him while he cried, and his father let him shed precious few tears before telling the boy that he must be strong, that his mother would have wanted him to be strong.

And the boy sniffled, and said "yes Papa", and stood up straight and Mahad dar Fried looked at him with pure pride in his own tear-filled eyes.

And I knew I would never let out the secret, if a secret it was at all.

# # # # #

It was two years more before I felt so confused again, and I welcomed the respite from affairs of the heart. I served on Father's council, obtained a voice where I had had none before.

For once in my life, people really listened to me – instead of waiting for their turn to talk. I was a person, not a shadow, and the middle princess finally stepped into the light.

Until one day, when the light was eclipsed in Asturia by the approach of an airship, a flying fortress.

And the page announced the visitor who had descended from the large ship shaped like a hand.

"Sir, an emissary of the Empire of Zaibach, Strategos Folken."

A/N: I know, finally! How will she reconcile a childhood crush with the man that stands before her? And does he even remember who she is?

Now that this chapter is done, the others are waiting! I just had to settle on a way to wrap up the Allen part of her life as neatly as possible before getting back to our favourite black-cloaked Strategos.