.
༺.❆.༻
―"Fear will be your enemy."
❅ (but you urged that life, reality, and one's existence, were entirely what you imagined them to be; that is the great prerogative of existentialists)
❄ .
❆ .
❄ .
. ❆
❄ .
She still remembered the first time she saw him fly.
(like a reincarnated Icarus, you never learned how to soar, but you tried to flap)
He slithered between the walls of the courtyard with a stolen locket and dashed towards the closed gates, his entire form transforming into a lightning streak across the field. Half of her heart had wanted to break through her teeth and scream for Kai, while the other half pumped with the desire to see this through to the very end.
―"The past will be in the past, and I'm never going back."
She balled up the hem of her dress with whitening knuckles, watching from her balcony like a domesticated owl watching a falcon.
―"I'll test the limits and break through."
Adrenaline, which had been sleeping in her system for years, stormed up with a thunderclap.
―"I'll rise like the break of dawn."
She stared at the boy with an overwhelmingly powerful desire to move her legs.
―"and catapult off cloud nine."
Yet it angered her that he could do it now. He could escape without being stopped or dragged down. The teenager had no prohibitions or priorities to chain him to the floor at all, none but the conditions of being illegitimate, orphaned, and impoverished, but if he ran fast enough ― if he shed his dead skin cells and traded them for feathers ― he could be as wing-footed as he liked.
(but you had other shackles I couldn't see)
Before he could touch the exit with his outstretched fingers (you never should have flown this high), he was snatched off his heels by a guard, and her first instinct was to swallow the blood pulping her teeth. The consequence of biting her bottom lip had flayed skin from the muscle, so she immediately reclined to pressing a handkerchief against her mouth with a fizzing hiss.
"You again, is it? The Fitzherbert of the halls."
The scene below her feet ended with Kai's arrival. Refusing to bother the king with the hall boy's antics, Kai saw to his isolation with a flick of the wrist and a dismissal of the guards.
(Daedalus said the point is to fly neither too low nor too high, but you made the mistake of aiming for the sun)
The keys to Eugene's "penitentiary" were jingled and snatched as Kai strolled out of the hallway with a whistle behind him. The pauper was often escorted to solitary confinement for acting out or running away from his quarters in the servant halls. Kai, when spoken to, called the isolation a form of juvy. The boy called it pitch black. Cold. Gloomy. A strange, alienating place with only a keyhole of sunlight to peek through.
She'd pass the door on her way to her own "correctional facility," turn an ear to hear him picking the knob with unconventional utensils, and feel her stomach grow nauseous. His grunts echoed in the foreground of her mind, but it was really not so much of the boy that she was seeing when she studied the door. She saw her spirit split from her body and approach it with a shaky hand, fingers hovering over the latch to the prison of another trapped person. A raging person. A screaming girl. An abominable, black-haired ice princess.
(hateful of what her father had done, had told her to do, had asked her to become)
Waiting on the other side of that door would not be a compromising, sacrificial Aphrodite with angel hair, but an angry girl with blacker locks and uglier features.
(that perfect girl is gone)
The girl's chants were constantly spilling through the hinges of Eugene's door like a cobra's whenever Elsa passed it:
"Restriction ― restriction ― restriction. Standing frozen in the life you've chosen."
She dreamt about the cackling face in her mind at night; this distorted, hideous goblin pounding into the wood with fistfuls of wrath. Her shuddering soul begged to let her out――"Be a good girl, darling," her father's words resounded, grounding her conscience. "Be a good girl for your father and mother."
(be the good girl you always have to be)
She rolled over and faced the ineluctable fact that she could never contradict her father's rules and let that pitiably neglected child out. 'You can never break character.' But the more she heard the deranged voice behind, "that perfect girl is gone" warring with, "be the good girl you always have to be," the more she felt her ice storm brew in her lungs. In her duty to pay service to a submissive yet passionless regimen, she only increased billowing passions by ignoring the desires of the alter-ego thundering inside of her.
(conceal it; don't feel it)
She wished on the stars behind the thunderclouds to not have needs ― to be metallic and ripple-less like the frozen lakes in the north. Whereas Anna overindulged in the liberties of a butterfly, she had to worm into her goody, dutiful, ol'-reliable-daughter shoes and put shackles on in the morning with her clothes.
(all for my own catalytic good, though)
"Do you think those gloves will be enough? What if the magic shoots right through them?"
―Her hands did not glacier a single windowsill since the gloves, but her mother still excelled in her role as the neurotic parent, constantly blaring her own crippling doubts and fears while she hovered around her like a hummingbird.
"They'll help."
―Papa was her only anchor; the overworked therapist with textbook solutions for parapsychological problems.
(but this tunnel vision was turning out all wrong)
For her, it was so incredibly easy to lose herself to the character she played when she believed her burdens expected such a character out of her. To suppress her natural spontaneity as a child was taxing on her psyche every single day.
"You'll be fine, Elsa," Papa would say. "As long as you try to conceal it and don't feel it."
Everything would've been better if Papa simply told her that their lives would have rest if she was not only emotionless, but fearless. Level-headed and "all together," like him. That to measure every word with a teaspoon and fake normalcy with better efficiency would "benefit her" in all aspects of life, which was a lesson that extended past indoor blizzards. Unfortunately, he was too loving to be honest.
(too kind to say that I wasn't born to make choices)
For all her back-breaking, she didn't act out or tell her parents where their rules could go; she accepted her condition and smiled sheepishly as the shadow of the gates closed on her sweaty face.
(you can't break character, Papa said; you have to yield to your circumstances; live a life with nothing for yourself; bend your back and just hope it doesn't snap)
And it was here where the thorns of resentment grew into barbs against her nervous, goody-two-shoes heart.
"Kai, that boy has abandoned his station again."
To leave the library and see her boot-shining "illegitimate" trying to "break out" like a wild card fed up with his childhood felt like a manifestation of her own conviction. The lad was conscienceless, (a lacking trait of mine which apparently dragged me down in your eyes), but his brain was constantly spinning with new ways to reconstruct life as he had it.
He was not waiting ― sorrowfully, stoically waiting ― for the clouds to break open, thaw his ice cave, and show him the sun. His almond eyes were flashing with the rays, forever hot with a rebellious passion that was far from hopelessness.
―"I've never been good at just standing still," he'd brag.
Flapping off the ground of the courtyard to leave that spurned orphan in the dust was his only motivation because nothingness was a preoccupation he couldn't live for.
―"But I've got my own reasons for that, Princess."
She recalled the time he said he saw what poor people became, and hated it because orphans had no family to even know when or if they passed away as a result of poverty and homelessness. A child with "Fitz" stamping them was neglected by society as is; trade masters refused to give them apprenticeship or estate to keep their own social statuses untainted and churches overlooked them, so if illegitimate children had that little rights, then he didn't want a kicked-around life of fading on a cold backstreet while people purposely stepped over him.
―"There isn't gonna be any place for me here to belong, so I'm making my own, and that'll be that."
She would watch his failed escapes for the sport of it now. With an hypnotized face, she would spectate the tragedy of someone else being confined for not wanting to be restrained to the pitiful disadvantages brought on by their birth. She'd almost leave the balcony feeling relieved through a transference of negative, pent-up energy, provoking him a little each time to run away ― to get into trouble ― to anger his supervisors ― to tell them to "lay off."
(to turn away and slam the door)
She projected all her guiltiest feelings onto him as he repeated this activity with the defiance she simply couldn't.
(and never go back)
The word "can't" wasn't in his DNA. If it was, then he didn't understand the definition or what it would be doing in his blood-work to begin with. He ran on some dreamer's will of, "I believe [that I can be free]."
(and remade into someone better)
...She then wondered if he'd get along with that girl. The ambitious, headstrong goblin who wanted to run away from home. He'd probably argue in opposition that he "didn't have a home," but as far as she was concerned, neither did she. Only a jailhouse. Not an orphanage or a servant hold where rats slept with her, but a jailhouse all the same.
(but that didn't stop you from rattling the bars of mine)
"So there's this story―"
"You're not supposed to be here!"
"Oh no?" His smirks would always laugh for him. "What's this? Are you saying that we can't see each other anymore?"
She gaped at him from where she stood like a sweaty, pigeon-toed victim on the scene of a burglary. With her shoulders hiked up to her neck and her geometry book to her chin, her body was perpetually trembling from some frightful vision of her father lecturing her for allowing a servant boy to casually plant himself on the balcony of her tutor's study. "You're not ― supposed ― to be here," she rasped through her teeth. "Go away!" She shooed him with her free hand the way a maid might shoo a bird.
"Just hear me out!" His hands went up in defense, but his expression was full of jest.
The expressions on her reddening, chubby face ― chubby enough to hold chocolate like squirrel nuts, he'd pester ― went through a series of aerobics before she stamped her foot down and hissed: "No!"
"Ah-ah-ah!" He wagged his finger. "Behave, Princess. You'll have to take my word on this, because it's definitely something you'll want to hear," he brokered before digging into a worn satchel.
He always ended cliff-hangers like these with that suspenseful, 'there's something better than your worries' tone, tickling that immature, childish part of her that she had to push back against.
Compared to herself, he'd grown into a pretty little man-child of sixteen, though no less book-bound and eccentric. She, as a princess, had been flowering into a young lady of higher decorum ― or a freckled Mother Hen as he called her, planted on the soil of her father's "passive-aggressive oppression" like a sacred rose that couldn't grow past the fence. In his words, the need to utilize her own agency, which was a need he stereotyped everyone to have, would forever remain "stitched inside gloves" that caused her to, "sarcifice her happiness for others like a tragic, misunderstood heroine."
(and what I would've given to make you stop believing that I was one of your storybook characters)
His parody of her life was an abridged one. Although he never knew why her father shackled her magic to the cotton cuffs, he'd tell her he knew how her plot would end just by looking at the devices. She would somehow, "save the world from a deadly foe with her super-powers," and struggle with good vs. evil after a true love subplot. The "rock bottom" that she'll hit will pave way to her resolution, and "the recovered, voiceless girl will become a songtress." Until then, the heroine will be stuck in the storyline of, "attempting to avoid the darker sea of a subconscious mind that threatens to undo her."
(and somehow you laughably broke down more than Papa)
"Now, I know it's here SOME-where~..." He dangled his leg from the balcony with his foot swinging back and forth. The pages of a sorceress novel were thumbed through until he came to a bookmark. "Ahhh~, here it is. Now, listen to this." The servant shimmied down into his "seat" to let her know that she should brace herself. "The Snow Queen," he narrated dramaturgically. "By Hans~ Christian Andersen."
A groundswell of perplexity upsurged. The spoken text did stun her, and her ears were opening their canals to the size of saucers, but she already knew the famous title. According to her father, the goddess of the story was so allegedly heartless, so freezingly cold and inhuman, that she retched at the thought of sharing any ties with her.
"I'm not like her," she said with blind rebuke, seeing nothing but her distaste for the unstated correlation that her hall boy was making between herself and this Mephistopheles. "Now please," the girl whispered softly before making a "scoot" gesture with her hand, "Go away!"
He glanced at her with a bright, sure, easy face that was quite unaccusing, but still selfishly engrossed in his discovery like a fanboy finding science fiction. "Maybe not, but there could be a connection."
Her expression went flat.
He felt her glare almost electrocute the hairs on his arms. "What I mean is ― someone's reimagined you before."
"She's not real," she upbraided.
"But you are," he leveled with emollience.
The pause that spaced their words apart was more ambivalent than comforting, because Eugene still looked at her like her existence was on par with fictional goddesses.
On one hand, his rationale was too strong to not occasionally bumble over the entire phenomenon; on the other, the part in him that was still a child was constantly researching her origins via storybook and Norse mythology, which he felt emboldened to share with her with the seriousness of a detective.
He turned to her now and said intelligently, "It's Mr. Anderson you should put your magnifying glass on, not the Snow Queen."
The pause this time almost felt staged by him for dramatic effect, but he didn't give her a moment to wring the nerves out of her fingers. The door to the study had been pushed open too soon, and he'd flown from the balcony like a professionally rehearsed stage actor. When her tutor entered the room, she tripped around and ironed her dress.
"Fitzherbert! What in the world―?!"
She winced at the yell outside, and opened one eye to look up at her teacher.
The man's face was redder than a baboon's bottom. "Was that―...boy rummaging through my book shelves, Your Highness?"
Her fingers wormed in their clasp. She steeled her face and went on to explain that she had only been in the room for a little more than three minutes, and would therefore have no knowledge of a larcenist infiltrating his property.
"Strange, then..." He stroked his beard. "If it is not him, then I could swear that a hall boy has been robbing me of my sagas, and the Fitz is the only hall boy who reads. Fitz-orphans are usually no good, you know."
She nodded. She pressed her gloved nails into the curve of her palms, but she nodded. This was a scarce, hair-splitting dodge of the scythe for her, but Eugene, who was the culprit of her rotten break, did not escape so easily. Whether she was an eyewitness of the episode or not, she was certain that he'd been caught by none other than Kai in the gardens.
"Well," her tutor hesitated, "we'll come to it in the morning, but keep your eyes open for any reaching hands."
She nodded smilingly, before chewing on the head of her pencil when he resigned to chalking the board. A flashback of the moment before drifted back to her in a pearly white vignette:
―"The Snow Queen, by Hans~ Christian Andersen."
―"She's not real."
―"But you are."
―"It's Mr. Anderson you should put your magnifying glass on, not the Snow Queen."
...She shook her head and tried not to think of it again. He was book-bound and eccentric, and clues or directions about her life could not be found in fairytales. Like him, she used to idolize the "once upon a time's" her parents read to her as a toddler; never the unrealistic romances, but the adventure novels ― the tales of the brave queen who slewed dragons. Her Majesty was as much of Elsa's self-insert as Flynnigan Rider was for Eugene, but she realized too late that she had nothing in common with her ― was not a brave heiress who could slay dragons, or even her own monsters, according to what the trolls had told her. Reality thwarted her possibilities of ever becoming one.
Yet Eugene was not the man Flynnigan Rider was, either, and he clung to him for that exact reason.
...She frowned at the worksheet in front of her, only perking up to adjust her posture when she heard her tutor.
"Teaching quadratic formulas are often like teaching gymnastics to children," he droned. "But I trust that you'll reach the end of this labyrinth after one walkthrough, Your Highness. Had you not been born a princess, I daresay you would've been an architect."
She nodded in acceptance of his conditions and his compliment, big-eyed and beaming.
She may have fancied the brave queen from her childhood, but she now loved geometry for separate reasons. The numbers were better (safer) than the words, silver-linings, and symbolisms found on the wafer-thin pages of storybooks. Her tutor proved that math provided the safety net of being certain, and she knew that each time she solved an equation, the sum would never be uncertain, impossible, or apocryphal. This was the gulf between the mathematican and the symbol-lover: he inhaled storybooks to find guidance; she binged on geometry books to solve problems.
―"M'lady, imagination has no circumference," Eugene would ape, gracefully yanking the rug from underneath her. "'Cuz I can reimagine myself as anything."
He'd argue that words were better than numbers because they gave the arms and legs needed to make one's personal vision manifest. They could not only redefine meanings, character traits, fates, and storylines; they allowed a person to use their own mind to create a world through independent thought.
―"Like you're chasing after something," he'd say about reading. "Like if you just keep going, there'll be something even better."
A well-timed punctuation mark could keep the ever-after's in place, because the end of a book always secured the safety net of never being uncertain. Like math, there was no, "What now?" to think about after "The End."
―"...But after the story's over, it's over." And according to his eyes, he'd feel even worse than before he had dug his papercut thumbs into a book, because he wanted that certainty back all day, every day.
She curled her bottom lip under her teeth, slowing her pencil. 'Was there any gulf at all?'
After hours spent in confinement, the storyteller was let out without dinner that evening. With gulfs and numbers and words and safety-nets on her mind, she took a food platter and saw him at the bottom of a stairwell in the dankest corner of the castle. He was tearing off a piece of stolen bread with his teeth as he glared flatly at the wall, alone and friendless. At first glance, his frail and unprotected body looked sickeningly thin, demanding that he needed nutrients bread couldn't give. He suddenly folded his arms, shivering from the chill of the cold winter weather.
She wished that she could donate better clothing to replace his browning shirt and short sleeves, but those decisions were reinforced by the Crown. How could her father make those calls for servants who never even crossed his line of sight, however?
(but you never asked for warmth and you never wanted pity)
Eugene paused to blink at the girl holding a tray of food from the top stair of the cellar he'd chosen to hide in. Her eyes looked detached, like a fish's, wet and gleaming in their underbellies with red veins, but she didn't say a word. She simply placed the tray down in front of him, nudging it once with a scrape against the floor, and stood up to leave.
"Thank you."
Her foot paused on the first step.
"...Really," he blubbered, weak from captivity.
She pinched her fingertips, half-turning to brush a lock of hair behind her ear, and faced him with a sheepish smile. He blinked languidly before looking away to scrub his face with his arm, hoping to scrub off his vulnerable expression.
(you didn't know there was nothing wrong with sympathy)
A quiet goodnight was bade by her. A mumbled goodnight was bade by him, and then she returned to her quarters. The next day ended with the same predicament, but this time, his response was uncharacteristically sombre:
"How do you picture yourself?"
Her shaking foot paused on the second step.
Was this another one of his head games? Was he planning to bite at her "overprivileged" status?
Head pounding with delirium, she turned and looked over her shoulder. A longer pause would've been seen as impolite, so she granted him the whole of her attention and practiced smiling even though her eyebrows were frowning. "I'm sorry,"―a shake of the head; a squint of the eyes―"but I don't understand."
Without looking at her, he crammed a grape into his mouth with the heel of his thumb. His eyes were more removed than she initially thought, but the beds were sunken down by gray circles, so she understood that this was the fever of malnutrition speaking. "As in, how do you imagine yourself when you're older?"
As her father told her.
(will-less)
"...What would you want to be?" she redirected, accidentally abandoning all decorum after her impulsive, hatable thoughts.
"Fearless," he replied, having picked up on a whisper that even roaches couldn't hear.
The phrase did not necessarily floor her because their different plays on the word did not include blizzards and frozen family members at the absence of it. However, she'd long understood the kindred feeling behind it. Though he said his piece with a prideful boast, she could see in his face that he wanted to burn his umbilical cord's attachment to any of the dark, insecure mentalities spawned by his childhood, and through such obliteration of struggle and trauma, rise from the ashes as an invincible, untouchable phoenix no one could break, sadden, minimize, or pity. They wouldn't have the power to do it; life and identity would be in his hands. Perhaps this was not a supernatural ointment, but...an emotional one.
The boy suddenly made a silly smile ― as if smiling kept her from reading between these clear lines ― and turned to his tray.
She didn't quite understand his blindness to what he was; he already appeared quite fearless, strong, and invincible. From what she understood, he was driven to break away because everything around him kept telling him that he couldn't, which was braver than she could be.
(but was the 'carefree, unbeholden individualist' actually carefree or was i looking at an illusionist?)
"Thanks...again," he repeated, seemingly embarrassed by his own position. "For...giving me something to eat."
"...You're welcome."
But the question "How do you picture yourself?" simmered like a flame lit to a piece of paper. She disappeared to her room, feeling the spraying revelation that he cut open. She knew that he made a hobby out of telling the younger, baby orphans in the servant halls to be all that they might wildly picture themselves to be, but she thought it over-idealistic. His motto for them was, "this is the good part about being a person and not a dog or a cat nature makes for one type of life: you get to find a new dream."
The more likable side of his go-getter personality nudged those boys to think that they didn't have to accept the broken childhoods into which they were born. A human given right, by his opinion, included living according to their own vision, being independent, and deciding to choose their fate no matter what God had set up for them. That fanciful existentialism made his "little brothers" feel like their fantasies were capable of coming true with the tools of "find a new dream and change the scenery" confidence alone, a silliness she never chewed on until now.
―"What would you want to be?"
She scribbled her answer to herself on paper in her bedroom, trying to draw the dimensions of human anatomy with geometric shapes, only to stop when she realized she didn't know how to fill in the details with freeform lines. Applying technicality to the art only seemed to mock her lack of agency, and that angered her. She knew her brain had pictured a head-and-shoulders-above-the-mountains woman, sashaying and bellowing over the sunrise with clenched, triumphant fists.
'Fearless.' With that goddess's lion-hearted, indomitable essence foaming from her pores. The need to be acquainted with her ran so deep that she thought it might end her.
...But her hands couldn't give her arms and legs. She couldn't even begin the soul of her eyes or the personality of her mouth.
Would it be smiling or smirking?
Snarling or sneering?
The sketcher turned to her mirror for inspiration, seeing her reflection look back at her, but she didn't like the face behind the glass. She didn't like what the eyes coveted, the lips which were twisted into a grimace, and it was impossible to stop seeing those horrid deformities. Impossible to stop seeing the frozen fractals of an abominable, black-haired girl, with corrupted needs and ugly features, thrashing, raving, desperate to escape.
(i didn't have a face)
'But you can not break character.'
(which one?)
The following weeks welcomed more starved evenings for Eugene, but now, she did not descend. There was no living through him anymore; he'd fallen into a lifeless, isolated routine that matched her own. When his arms grew too thin and feeble to scrub hallway floors, she all but dropped a tray in front of him.
"You shouldn't keep trying to run away."
The food that was supposed to be entering his mouth slopped into his lap as he paused. He slowly rotated his head and showed her the face of someone who'd just missed a joke. "Come again?"
Her opening line had not been harsh; her tiny feet could not yet fill the shoes of a tyrant. She simply gave him a tired, drawn face, surely not one as marred and bony as his, but one that aimed to release and project misplaced hopelessness. "Kai will put you back in solitary confinement tomorrow."
Silence. Then, a witty catchphrase: "Let 'em try." He closed his eyes indignantly and snorted his food, chewing with enthusiasm. "I'll be the best hurricane they've ever seen. Doors and gates won't stop me." His surety was completely out of touch with reality. His eyes wore pockets of broken blood vessels, his faded shirt sank with the concavity of his chest, and his wrists were mottled with fingerprints where strong hands had manhandled him.
(a man made out of stardust and hurricane-weather could've slipped through cracks and flown out with the breeze, but you were still breaking nails and skin trying to scratch the doors open)
Ire exploded in her ears, and while it was an unsettling thing to feel, she felt her eardrums beat with it. "Why can't you just accept it?"
The brown ran out of Eugene's face faster than air from a punctured bag. She had planned a lecture, but wasn't quite sure what to think of the fact that she had allowed herself to become so thoroughly tainted by her own feelings. The silence in the present moment was more vicious than silence itself, and her diaphragm closed shut on her.
(i could feel the wax melting from your wings)
The exposure to this side of him made her feel as though she had just crushed the dreams of a flapping bird with her shiny, gold boot, and she immediately felt sick for having turned his ambition into powder.
(i defeathered you)
She watched the carefree teenager turn rigid. Quiet the way a foe is sometimes quiet. She made a few small sounds of an apologetic nature, but not a single croak made it past her lips.
Then, without word, he leaned forward on both knees and elbows, arranged his folded hands in front of him, and stared up into her eyes with hard, determined, searching ones of his own. "Princess...I refuse to accept this."
(...and i always spurned the fact that this was why i liked you)
She dropped her gaze and shook her head with a bobbing mouth, palming her nose with the heel of it before calming the frenzy in her hands. "That wasn't...I didn't meant to say―...I didn't mean them..." whispered she, half-fainted from what felt like dizziness.
(i didn't mean to graze your skin with more mean words)
With a shake of the head, he smiled through what looked like heartache, widening the laugh lines around his mouth from ear to ear, before regressing his face into a frown. "I didn't 'endure' all this and come all this way for words like 'just accept it.' I've got a different set of vowels than you do." But his expression burned with an unsaid lecture: "At least I tried to fly; when did you?"
Her oxygen thinned, yet she stood inert.
"Are you comfortable curled up at the back of your sob-story, or do you want to get up?"
...The space between her eyebrows closed, and with a twitch of pain, the nerves laced in her forehead broke into jitters.
This breed of silence was heart-crushing, inevitably giving her enough time to wonder when and how their roles got switched. She was not herself within these minutes, and he knew that. She was neither herself ― which he knew to be the intimate, serene girl he'd petted in the library ― nor the withdrawn adolescent named Princess Elsa. She was a nameless entity drifting along the clouds of some netherworld, a walking mist of white unable to take her own form, and utterly haunted by that. Through this one stare, the porcelain doll had shown him the bottom of her icicle ribs.
Now his face was all apology and weak bones and dirt smeared on his cheeks. "Prin―"
"Where would you run...?"
There was a moment of crickets.
"...P...Pardon?"
She silently slid over to the end of the bottom step, sat down after folding her dress under her legs, and closed her thighs against her hands as a tear dropped off her throat. Strangely and blankly she ran her gaze all over him, with the eyes of a child submerged in sleep, lost at sea, rolling over the tides of her subconscious mind, if she dare sail it. "...Where...would you run...?"
The muscles in his face softened for her. She supposed that he wanted to sit a hot hand on her cold fingers, babble an apology, laugh nervously about a joke to take the devastation away, negotiate a bargain for something to make it up, or promise to scrub her bedroom floors twice a morning, but he supposed those actions couldn't bandaid the wound he had opened.
He went on watching her, eyes flying up and down her face, before looking away and thumbing his nose to keep it from growing wet. "Ahh...let's see...where ― would I ― run...?" He drummed his fingers against his knee with dimples pocking his chin as he imitated a serious brooder.
Although another tear fell from her eyelash, she continued to sit like a mannequin in a store.
"Is...'anywhere' a certifiable answer?" he laughed self-consciously, rubbing across his eyelids with an index finger to peek up at her.
Something was ghosting in and out of her eyes like sea creatures underwater, but she looked down before she could have him know it, and churned her fingers like a person who was suffering from claustrophobia. "...Where's 'anywhere'?"
"I guess ― well ― you know, anywhere..." Becoming more self-conscious and uncertain than before, he dropped the back of his head against the wall behind him, eyes chasing his feelings. "Any 'anywhere'..." When something seemingly funny graced his mind, he closed those eyes and bit his lip with a relaxed, soporific expression, coming to terms with his heart after two skipped beats. He released his lip to murmur, "Anywhere but nowhere."
(you were a child of Neptune ― an in-between dream state of oblivion reaching for infinity)
She blinked at his mouth, frowning, and then looked at his eyelids.
He opened one at her, giving a mock face of solemnity, before curling his lips into a smile. "So I can be, 'tanned, rested, and alone.'"
...She made a half-sigh, half-snort to substitute a laugh, tucking hair behind her ear as she wheezed it out. She wiped her swollen nose as another tear splattered on her lap like a fallen fairy. "You're incorrigible."
(i was Pluto ― the blue-gray child furthest from the sun)
His shoulders laughed up and down, pitifully at best, while a warmer smile seesawed up on his face. She forced a smile back, and then looked down. The tears reflecting off her corneas a while ago had little to do with what was between them. He knew he was more of the carrot ― the pathway opening her up and exposing her to the open air.
"Say..." A cup of water clattered against the tray as he set it down and faced her with his entire body. He proceeded to cross his legs and hold onto the toes of his shoes, craning his face into her to whisper behind the back of his hand, "Wanna stage a rather scandalous skedaddle?"
...Her face closed like a gate locking him out.
"Now, hold on! Let me ease your conscience―"
―"A 'rather scandalous skedaddle'?" she repeated, more critical of the grammar than it's impossible-to-understand meaning.
He raised an eyebrow and swished his finger back and forth, giving her all his playfulness. "Exactly right, Princess, but ― hold on, hold on, now don't make that face ― just allow me to ask one, tiny, question before you shoot me down."
The princess continued to wait with her lips puckered into an involuntary pout.
She could see the mocking, "Daaawww~" written all over his face, but he did not voice it. Instead, he added, "And then you'll never have to listen to me blabber again for the next twenty years of your life."
An eyebrow shot up. He cocked his head, eyes big and bright, and wagged both of his. Her pursed lips fought a smile.
He watched her with one narrowed, probing eye as a smirk spread across his cheeks. "So do you have any tangible aspirations, Princess?"
Elsa flinched. Her legs crushed against the hands wedged between her knees.
For a moment, the pauper probably wondered if she'd even heard him at all, as she had not blinked or moved, but this was possibly the longest conversation she'd ever had with him.
"My aspirations?"
"Sure!" he drawled. "Dreams, HOPES, wishlists,"―he animated his speech by getting to his feet and swinging around the pilaster to end up on her side of the stairwell. When he leaned into her to face some invisible horizon, he fanned his fingers out like a blooming flower. "Your absolute greatest ― and I mean GREATEST ― longings in the whole wide world."
She curled away from him the more he invaded her space with his zest, lips once again quivering from the nervous chuckle she didn't want to let loose, but he was standing far too close, his eyes reaching too far in, so she stood and scooted up to another step. "And why would I want to tell you that?"
"Because whatever you say in here, nothing bad will happen, so someone might as well know, right?"
She stared at some distant thought of her own, evidently still resisting a smile, and then turned away to shut her eyes and hide her expression from him, exhaling rather impatiently, "Oh, I don't know―"
"C'man, 'COURSE you do."
The child and the cynic in her escaped through her teeth, only letting a breath of a laugh bounce through her shoulders. She sighed and shook her head at the ground, smiling pitifully at her gloved hands. "It doesn't matter." She covered one with the other. "Papa―"
"Eh, right. The, uh, overprotective father who tells you your entire destiny is to be coached on a crown. But what do you do after you've snored through an afternoon lesson on politics? Return to your room and then...? What comes next?" He followed the movement of her head when she broke eye contact to look forward.
'...I look out the window.' Her cheek ticked. The eyelashes fluttering again. The sogginess coming back. When she looked down, he needed nothing more than that. Why did she allow herself to sound so upset about those circumstances, like she wished she could be someone else tonight by being where she wasn't supposed to be? They both came here to forget and face something, but the girl's drawbridge had dropped open ― accidentally, maybe, yet enough for him to crawl in.
"You help me get out of here, and I help you get what you want," he baited. His eyes all but suffused the following word in sunlight: "Freedom."
...The restrained look on her face after he said that motivated him to shovel even deeper.
"Let's put our heads together," he bribed with an extra creamy voice. "You're smart. You have access to doors I can't open. You can smile real pretty and get the keys from guards I can't. We can take a long boat ― get as far away from the gates as we can ― make a beeline for Yggdrasil, and vamoose! We've flown the coop. After we reach the mountains, we'll shake hands and go about our own lives."
The princess kept glaring at him, but he saw something growing on her eye ― a twinkling light, a ripple of water rising from the pupil, while her body looked frightened with whatever her heart felt.
He drew himself into her, voice alive and sudden, requesting that she be his dovetail: "Don't think about the math we can't solve. Think of this like reading a story: this is just you closing your eyes and feeling something larger than the trenches in your life."
Tears were blinked out of her eyes. Scared tears. Desperate tears. Imagination obliterated of its circumference, his dialect and clever imagery brought a picture of what-if's into still-frame. It provided the arms and legs to make her personal vision manifest, permitting her to imagine a world of independent will―
"Nothing will happen except what you want to happen, Princess."
―and it was terrible to watch him, with his sunny eyes, and sky-fevered face, as his silver tongue made her chords vibrate to terrifying pulses.
"We'll both be stepping on soil we want." He ticked his head, grinning. "You won't have to worry about anyone making you feel bad, weak, or as low as the dirt. No gloves, no doors...no right, no wrong, no rules, no appellations, compromises, gates, or criticizers...just free."
...What was this meteorite in her stomach?
"So what's your choice?"
She sat motionless, lips parted and eyes racing across his.
("What's your choice?")
All of the feelings laming her body ― all of the captivity followed by half a dynasty of watching birds through windows ― screamed for those liberties, and Eugene provided a longboat to open, free waters. He knew that her real self ― raw, reformed, removed from the castle, deprived of stuffy wardrobes, and dancing to the music of her own heartbeat ― begged to be uncensored just this once.
"We'll part ways as unlikely friends. Sound edible?"
Having said that, the better sense in her which would never simply "go away" became aware of the fact that he was trying to sway, tear, and undo the obligations her father gave her with his uncanny ability to exploit her brain. He read her out loud, telling her that he could see what she wanted ― how rebelling against the rectitude of her parents was a healthy part of growing up ― that something was a form of rejection ― and all these other psychological breakdowns. His face was lit up with stupid effect, and all at once, she hated it.
(why were you trying to con an impressionable child?)
"Be honest ― about everything, everything you're thinking and feeling at the same time."
And so she was: "I have a responsibility; you don't."
He flinched at her compliant, matter-of-factly statement, and the stupid sun in his eyes finally set.
(i wasn't born to make choices)
Though she was more than aware that her phrase was merely coming from the mouth of someone being held hostage by someone else's thoughts. Her reaction was a recital of her father's points ― lines she had rehearsed in the mirror with muscle-memory until they became the marrow that supported her bones ― and she could hear the sound of her heartbeats clashing with her own vocal chords. Unfortunately, Eugene's antennas could, too.
"I wasn't asking the king." He examined the girl in front of him with frantic pupils that wouldn't stay in one spot, determined to see this ploy through to the very end. "And I'm not asking Princess Elsa; I'm asking Elsa."
"Her answer would be the same as theirs," she persisted. Her voice was rocky with confusion, angry at him for undoing every lock on the privy chambers in her mind, and angry at herself for knowing his idea of her was accurate.
"What would you rather be?" he milked. "A supernova, or a dying star?"
...Cripes did he know how to work it.
(the point is to fly neither too low or too high, but to follow the path of flight)
The glow of accomplishment was almost shining off his greasy face, but there was something a little more to his assiduity. He smiled with the thrusting of his hand, waiting for her to take it and give his dirty palm a shake. She stared at the lines on it. "What'd you say, Princess? Partners?"
She didn't say anything; the blank wall of her face didn't move; the cracked ice in her eyes didn't melt. He turned his palm over, opening it, waiting for her hand to meet his. It never did.
"...Princess?"
She glanced to the side with melancholy, deciding that he was harmless, titillative, and foolish, and could not be reviled when she'd seen him as a decoy herself, but there was no partnership to be had between them. Her fear of making wrong decisions and failing her family was larger than any resentment or ambition to be freed from it.
"...Elsa?" He withered now.
Her reply came low, soft, and final: "Goodnight, Eugene..."
The effect worked: he deflated. The princess could see by the look on his face that he was trying to think, but there was not a single ripple in her psyche, nor loose screw, for him to put a crowbar under and jimmy out. She stood with the solemnity of her decision, dusted her blue dress, and picked up his tray. Eugene looked away and massaged the rim of his ear, smiling and blinking like a blind, emotional child who'd just been left out in the rain. The bruises under his eyes looked worse than before.
She dabbed the sweat on her forehead with the side of her wrist to disguise any sympathetic unrest, most of which she disliked herself for having at all. For all his tricks and gambits, there was no doubting that he had the power (or was it a lack of self-esteem?) to think he had nothing to lose by being as extraordinary of a character as he could be, because he didn't. Nothing beside him to look at him real soft, nothing beside him to hug him and tell him he was fine the way he was, he was accepted, and didn't have to run away to get something. What he did have had been taken from him a long time ago. She shivered once, though came no closer to his sunken shoulders.
When his eyes leveled with hers, they were so horrifically vague that she had to look away. There had been no ambition in them, no light of battle, no jest, no foolish aspirations ― just a defeated boy on the edge of surrender.
(i accidentally showed you how to fall from the sun)
But he quickly turned and wiped his sleepless, baggy eyes, taking no less than ten seconds to slip back into his old skin and sigh theatrically, "Welp, I had a feeling you'd act like this. There's no removing the statue of Aphrodite from her obelisk without ten men, after all."
The easy shrug of his shoulders seemed to say that nothing weighed on his heart, that she should react with offense or dismiss him without looking deeper, but she knew all too well that his emotions had taken him seawards. All that remained to do now was to close her mouth, forbid return, and leave him to grope the floors for what scraps of dignity he had left.
(you were not made out of stardust)
She walked down the hallway to her room, passing through clearings bright with sunlight and dark with shadow. After a while, the lines began forming themselves into a perfect pattern of bars on her face.
(This was why you were not a bird)
Tears burned the whites of her eyes as she marched faster.
(This was why you were just a boy)
She locked her bedroom door and chained the gap with erratic hands, sinking down the paint.
(but...)
― "Are you comfortable curled up at the back of your sob-story, or do you want to get up?"
She broke down between her knees like a mountain crumbling on the shoulders of her own virtues.
―"What's your choice?"
The reflection in the mirror that always waited stared back at her. Thrashing, raving, and desperate to escape.
―"Frozen in the life you've chosen."
Though a little ways to the right, lied a sketch of empty circles and lines. Incomplete. Stillborn. Unable to take organic form.
―"How do you picture yourself?"
She smeared snot and tears across her mouth.
―"As in, how do you imagine yourself when you're older?"
The girl wobbled forward, picked up the old sketch, and looked for a face among the eraser marks.
―"What would you want to be?"
She placed it on the floor and bent over it, raising a shaky hand armed with her pencil.
―"M'lady, imagination has no circumference. I can reimagine myself as anything."
Tears splotched the paper. The pencil dragged through them.
―"If you just keep going, there'll be something even better."
Her hand lifted.
―"How do you―"
―"Fear will be your enemy."
"―picture yourself?"
She pressed her tongue to the corner of her mouth, and held up her work.
'...Fearless.'
With hair like the feathers of a phoenix, dress crystallized in a constellation of stars, and eyes burning like a breaking dawn.
(this is how I picture myself)
'My invincible me.'
(this is who i reimagine myself to be)
A tear slipped past her smile.
(...my new dream)
She wrapped her arms around the woman and hugged her to her heart.
―"Don't think about the math we can't solve. Think of this like reading a story: this is you just closing your eyes and feeling something larger than the trenches in your life."
(...and here i'll stay...one day)
❄ .
❆ .
❄ .
. ❆
❄ . (i'd forgotten that Pluto was the planet of rebirth and transformation)