.

༺.❆.༻

"Illegitimate." According to the shouter, he had been umbilically attached to that word since birth. "You're illegitimate."

"What?"

"Invalid."

"Ah."

"A freak accident."

"Well—"

"A waste of flesh."

"And you don't belong."

"..."

"I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I believe you've mistaken me for someone else—"

"Don't you get tired of being called 'Fitzherbert' when you know the name is synonymous with 'unwanted'?"

A circle of laughter filled the garden. She felt her own hair rising at the insults.

"Don't you ever get tired of watching the kids with normal families play?"

She passed this huddle of commotion every afternoon on her way to the library, stopping to witness the classism orchestrated by the page boys. In the beginning, she didn't understand why he was disregarded after the utterance of his last name. She originally concluded that his lack of friendships had something to do with being poor or orphaned — and perhaps the fact that his "apprenticeship" involved the most disagreeable duties in the servant halls, but the poor and the orphaned did not accept Eugene Fitzherbert either. He was equally sidestepped by the high-nosed Lady in Waiting — shunned by the ex-courtiers of her father's court — and likened to a "pitiful sob story" by the tutting maids, yet he was not handicapped or deformed. Yes, he was a misfit by social position, which was bound to attract judgment, but there was nothing on his skin — nothing on his face — nothing frosting his hands — that prefaced any external oddities or warranted such bad reactions.

His physical aesthetic and normal genetic makeup should have granted him the companionship of at least one coequal. Instead, the hall boy read books alone, rubbing the very subjects he serviced the wrong way with theatrical one-liners whenever they told him to shine their boots.

"Do you quite like being a shoe-shiner, then? Do you fancy scrubbing the dirt off your own back as hard as you scrub the sludge off our shoes?"

The loaded bigotry in the sentences made her want to run. Never should any kingdom comprise of the highborns treating the underprivileged like lesser-than's by shaming them for a birth they couldn't control.

(i would have been treated lower than anyone)

"What does it feel like to say, 'Hi, I'm illegitimate' when people ask for your name? When governors, traders, masters, and lords pull out your papers?" The words became inaudible when they cornered him against the stone walls, but she could make out their results even from the hedges.

The pauper lacked machismo — all signs of muscle meat, really — and defended his hind with a brains over brawns attitude that only infuriated the page boys he vied.

"Oy, you! You know you're nothing but a stray dog!"

The cry shocked her. The Page of Honour had gotten a hold of the weasel, roughed him up, and asked his posse to search him for any belongings, stolen or otherwise. Once they found a storybook with what appeared to be his name scribbled on the back, they cheered, "Eugene, the illegitimate son of a scoundrel named Herbert!" and then proceeded to make fun of the background he came from as the dirty little orphan boy. After the charade ended, they flung his book — the one and only thing he owned — into the mud.

"Hey!" His signature savviness, the one that made him seem carelessly untroubled by anything, was now destroyed. He didn't try to coo "Gentlemen, gentlemen!" as they closed in around him. Like a stray dog with his tail between his legs, he looked at their towering shadows with fear.

"It's an awful last name for a poor boy like yourself; it tells you exactly where you come from: dirt."

(this was the certificated reminder that you were born inferior)

"St—..." Her voice would not come up or out, too dried by the guilt of making her own oversimplifications of his circumstances.

"Orphans do not have a normal upbringing," Papa would say, having hoped to make her know something of the world. "They do not have a normal household, a normal childhood, a normal family life, or even a normal stroll out into the city." They were sheltered — by all means like crammed, frightened hens in a coop due to the traumatic separation from their families, and by having no biological parents to protect them, they were thereby branded illegitimate persons to locals by default. She would later ask her father what it meant to be a Fitz, and he told her that modern society stamped the prefix onto children born to an unmarried woman. Such stigmatized children were unacknowledged by their fathers in the gentry and immediately enrolled into orphanages with poverty shackled to their futures, thus the suffix which followed "Fitz" was the assumed father's name; for Eugene, that was, "Herbert."

Her father contended that the presence of "Fitz" made itself more than a name tag on an orphan's collar; in the economic world, it was a birthmark of shame. A product of disgrace. Ostracism. An— "illegitimate human being." The presence of "Fitz" literally tagged him as, "Eugene, the illegitimate son of Herbert" before all.

(...and all you had was your name)

She chewed on her pigtail.

"Here, we've given a Fitz child an opportunity to work," Father had sworn.

Arendelle imported Coronan orphans every summer on behalf of the Treaty of Våler, and Eugene had been one of many assigned to Arendelle Castle. Papa said that although "the Fitz child" had fewer resources than other orphans, Corona was giving him a special trade.

— "Don't you have any friends?"

— "Nope."

— "Why not?"

— "Simple: they'd drag me down!"

How many times a day did he lie to her back then?

"Get your book, poor boy; it's getting dirty."

With her geometry books hugged against her ribs, she tried to fathom how it would feel to be burdened by what — at first — appeared to be letters.

A name.

A social idea.

An extension and identification of who you are.

Constructs.

Labels.

Big yet small.

Petty yet persuasive.

(ones your parents, destiny, and society chose for you...)

What daughters of power they had to bring self-esteem to the ground.

(your self-image to the ground...)

The word "poor." The word "orphan." The word "illegitimacy." The ingredients behind, "Eugene Fitzherbert."

(are not what make you)

Yet there was no hiding it from the public under some flimsy fabric of defense. His parents, people whom he'd never met, were not available to give protection or concern. They did not hand him a single tool, sword, or shield and say, "just conceal it; just put on a show." He was doing it all by himself. Theatrical one-liners. Boastful quotes of another's glorified status. Of what he was not.

"Someday, I'll be just like him ― straight out of all the fairytales. I'll have my own castle, with my own future, and live far, far away ― as close to the sun as possible!"

(and run away from a damaged, undesired child)

His parents could not lock the gates and close the shutters to "help" him pretend that the harsh world could not touch him or discriminate against his birth ― that the deprivation and deterioration of his environment did not turn his childhood into his prison. He had to grow up fast and become a man without any tutoring.

(you were umbilically attached to destitution)

Yet still he said: "I'll test the limits and break through."

She looked at the boys coaxing him to remember that he was less than.

"Aren't you mad that your parents left you at an orphanage?"

"Aren't you mad that your parents never came back for you?"

"Aren't you mad that your parents didn't love you because you weren't good enough?"

"Stop it!"

The boys dispersed like vultures leaving their dinner. She entered the garden with her hands folded in front of her and anger on her brow; the princess was a perfect statue of queenliness and severity, but the baby fat around her cheeks was swollen with more annoyance than they could hold, making her look like the child she was. The pages didn't stammer out their excuses upon her intervention; they straightened up and kept their heads bowed out of respect. Her mouth squirmed and somersaulted as she stared at their scalps. Although she did not have the power of the Crown to expel them, an injunction was issued: she would tell her father of their dishonorable conduct, and request that they scrub boots, empty chamber pots, urine pots, or any other number of pots with the boy.

Sweat rolled down their throats; they looked from one face to another before lowering their eyes to the ground. Eugene was unharmed, but he still trembled from where he sat with his arms over his head, only peeking out from the crook of his elbow when he heard her boots crunch the grass. Channeling the statesmanship of her father, she ordered the pages to return the servant to his feet at once. He clambered up with the help of halfhearted arms, swaying off balance as he tried to wrap his head around the scene. The pages were dismissed, but the pauper didn't watch them leave.

He studied the princess as his little heart palpitated with confusion, and perhaps a little terror also. She watched the straight lines of his eyebrows draw forward, the clenching of his jaw, the vein beating in his neck. His lips moved to the shaky words: "You saw."

Her emotions were all squished together in front of her face now, and her wide-set eyes―virtually half-shut―were topped with a frown.

"That." Pause. "All that."

She flinched. There was some kind of pain behind his response, some kind of utter silliness, because he was implying that he was ashamed. Not ashamed that his origins had been dragged through the mud, but ashamed that she'd seen and heard it.

(the prologue to the downer sob-story)

She bent down, touching the fallen book on the floor, and affectionately picked it up, extracting clumps of mud with her handkerchief. The inside of the smudged pages read:

❍༻༺༻༺0༻༺༻༺❍

The Tales of

/E/u/g/e/n/e/ F/i/t/z/h/e/r/b/e/r/t/

Flynn Rider

❍༻༺༻༺0༻༺༻༺❍

Bless him. His handwriting was still this terrible.

(i wonder how much paper you've wasted crossing out your name)

Her thumb brushed over the paper's fold, touching the scraggly letters of his birth name. He could slather it with ten bottles of white-out if he wanted, but it would still drip behind him like the slime of a snail when he walked into the room. Into the world. Into the masquerade ball of adulthood. Maybe it was better to carve out one's own little place in some parallel universe after all. One where sob-stories end with "My Happily Ever After."

(...somewhere far, far away)

She gazed at the front cover of the man who'd been born a phoenix, and, with a little resignation, held the book out to the pauper without looking him in the eye. He accepted it hesitantly, rocking on the balls of his feet, and batted away unshed tears with the heel of his palm. He tried to focus on reviving his saga by removing his focus on her―

"'Herbert' means illustrious warrior."

Eyes blinking, he stared back at her with the shocked, desperate stare of a person who wanted to hear something a second, third, and fourth time.

"Papa―..." She paused. Stationing her voice. Looking down at her restless phalanges. "Papa said 'Herbert' means illustrious warrior." Her words grew timider. Quieter. Ebbing away. "And Eugene―"

"And Eugene?"

She gave him a pointed look, before recovering from his brazen earnestness. "...And 'Eugene' means ...noble.'"

The tension in his forehead started to unwind. The light danced in his eyes as he looked to his fingers, playing and twiddling with the thumbs, trying to twitch out the bashfulness hitching up the corner of his mouth. As he held his tongue to his tooth, he was only capable of a contemplative, "Noble, huh...?" There was the blossoming of a sad, lopsided smile, but it was still a smile.

She trailed her wet eyes along the floor before returning them to him.

The child lowered himself onto the grass with an exhausted little plop. A tired "Ah!" sighed out of him before he crossed his legs and dried the book cover with the end of his shirt. "Then what does 'Elsa' mean?"

Her voice was guardedly soft-spoken, but she answered with a childlike openness, "Noble."

The look on his face after she said that ignited the boyish foolishness in him.

She almost retracted the statement with a self-conscious, "Papa said—," but he already began scoffing.

The boy ducked a half-sigh, half-snort behind his wrist—disguising a moment of laughter—and faced her again with laughing eyes. "If this is the foreshadowing of a comedy, then I have to give kudos to the playwright."

...She smiled, shaking her head and laughing with her shoulders instead of her mouth, before looking down at her gloves. Only smiling, as it were, at the utter ridiculousness of his smile.

(a tragic comedy for years to come)