.

"The danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions,
that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness."

― Sylvia Plath

༺ ❆ . ✸ ༻

To say Eugene was an eyeful would've been putting it lightly. His floor-length cloak, however highly it would have been praised in the royal fashion magazines, reminded Anna of a suede onyx rug that belonged in a hunter's cabin. Held together by two gold chains, its capelet wings flared out with the bushy fur of some poor critter pelting them. The emerald pommel on his gold-plated scabbard flattered the rubies gleaming from the merlons in his coronet. On the lung of his grey doublet was a small sun brooch, and beside it blinked King Frederic's sun medallion; the latter's blue quartz crystals and Larimar stones vaunted ornamental excess that had always come under fire for being "tackily over-the-top" to foreign noblemen, but Anna found it gorgeous.

It sharply smote her that Eugene was just as. His handsome face, apricot skin, and silky hair made him everything a Camelot reader would envision a king to be.

Her inner voice sputtered that a vision this majestic could've been a mirage caused by the drought in her mouth, so she addressed him to make sure he was real, "Eug...Eugene?"

The dazzler brightened his expression by doing four very Eugene things: widening his eyes, grinning with closed lips, cocking his head, and then opening his arms like a cousin who was popular with children. "In the flesh."

Joy expanded in her chest with the rapidity of helium filling a balloon. Had she been a more perceptive woman like her sister, Anna would've seen his mask for what it was, but her emotions transcended her wit. She lifted her dress above her toes to dart between the colonnades of bowing men and throw her arms around Eugene.

"Woah-ho-ho!" Eugene flapped his arms as their bodies swayed back and forth. He regained balance by placing his foot on the ground and holding her shoulders. "Woah there, little Robertson..." The thirty-eight year old king peeled her off after giving her a great big squeeze. "Easy." His pink lips stretched into a shy smile that dimpled his cheeks with arrows. "I still need those lungs later for the politicians," he warmly murmured.

Tittering, Anna rubbed her snout with her wrist before sniffling and beaming up at him with teary eyes. "You're finally here! You're really here! Oh, Elsa and I-I were so worried! We thought you weren't coming and then you―..." She held him back by the forearms to blink at him. "...You look amazing."

Nowhere on his visage were there marks of a man who had been lanced by rebels, famine, or age. Dried blood from an obvious fight encrusted the cut on his eyebrow as well as the slit on his mouth, but not a single wrinkle or pore ruined his complexion.

"...A little too amazing."

"I look ridiculous," he amended, self-consciously tugging on his capelet.

"No ― I mean ― well, sort of ― but that's not what I meant! You look, like, weirdly no different than you did at Elsa's coronation ten years ago." Anna wasn't phrasing it as a compliment so much as she was calling it an oddity.

"I was forced to shave on our way here."

It dawned on her that he was trying to broom her off the topic with his humor. Her supposition was substantiated by his behavior when he rerouted his eyes to the Coronan soldier beside him. Their visual communication was loaded with unmown tension that implied this scene was only the continuation of a standoff.

"You and I will readdress this in Corona," Eugene sorted. "You're dismissed." His order was remarkably cold.

The tail of the man's handlebar mustache twitched in acknowledgement of that coldness. His face responded to it by turning redder and puffier than an overcooked sausage in boiling water. With a grunt and a bow, he took to his heel and exited the castle.

Anna suppressed a yeesh. "What was that about?"

"Just my lack of knowledge that he was going to be 'volunteering' here under the decree of a certain First Lord while I was blacked out," Eugene crossly recapitulated.

"Oh, that's right! How's your head?" She touched it.

"Um...eheh..." Eugene careened to the left. "It's ― a lot better than what I'm sure you've heard,"―he closed his hand around her fingers and untangled them from his hair―"but, of course, Constantine assumed the task of telling Arendelle the opposite." Her relative nudged his head in the direction of the stout man, who, like the other rubberneckers, were bemused by Anna not greeting the king's diplomats one by one as protocol required.

Anna dialed her voice down to match Eugene's volume as she asked, "So then, you didn't have a bad fall or...?"

"Not one that would keep me off my ship for a week or five." Eugene moved his interest to the double staircase behind her. When his attention finally returned to her face, he gripped her shoulders and leaned closer, stooping down a tad to level their gazes. "Anna," he began with the grimmest tone she had ever heard from him, "I need to talk to your sister alone."

The cadge made her blood harden into calcium.

"Where can I find her right now?" By the sound of it, he wasn't asking because he wanted a family reunion. He had a bone to pick.

"Elsa's exhausted," Anna snubbed, removing his hands and stepping back. "Unless you want to see her to talk about how she's doing, it wouldn't be wise to start tanking her with politics."

Elsa's spine was split down the middle like a lightning-struck tree from carrying miseries he hadn't been here to shoulder. Anna didn't need Eugene blitzing her while she was limping; she needed him to pillow her head with something soft.

Eugene pulled her aside to make his intentions clear. "Anna, believe me, I get that, but Elsa and I need to have a serious talk about more than just politics―"

A whimper stopped their duologue from snowballing into an argument. Anna looked at the pretty blonde woman with the bundle in her arms. She was pursuing her lips against the cub's ear to shush and soothe his or her moans until they droned into sleepy sighs.

"Hold on a second." With his hand sliding off the small of Anna's back, Eugene deserted her to check on the tot. "Is she alright?"

The childminder blushed. "Aroused by the hullabaloo, but not awake, Your Majesty. That, or she's faking dreams again."

Eugene didn't requite her conspicuous crush by doing anything soppy, but the picture of them hovering over the child was one Anna associated with memories of her own mother and father. The parental love on the girl's face as she stroked what was hidden under that blanket didn't dispel the preconception tightening Anna's belly. Her heart curled up like paper being eaten by a flame when she saw Eugene smile at her. Eugene's life with Elsa wasn't going to be roses and romance, but to do what he was doing before Elsa was even down the aisle yet―

"Your Highness," Eugene announced, "this"―he cradled the codling and brought it to her like a dignified pharaoh with his newborn heir―"is the love of my life..."

Anna was about to dropkick him.

"Isolde."

Blink blink blink. Anna squeezed her cheeks and dragged a gasp into her lungs. "Rapunzel's Isolde! ...Bah ― wait, b―but I thought―...sick Isolde? The Isolde you wouldn't let get near a ship?!"

"She's in better shape than she was a year ago," he explained, parking next to her with the tot's head tucked into the bend of his arm. "And after the way Corona reacted to the treaty, well..." Eugene moved his forlorn eyes to Anna, which were crowned with a frown. "I was at the end of my rope as far as options were concerned..."

The princess was a statue. Rapunzel had been weakened by failed pregnancies prior to her passing during childbirth, but her last delivery had blessed Eugene with one child―a resuscitated child―a sick child―an allegedly "non-able-bodied child who could never continue the line of succession"―whose feeble life had been treated like a top secret government record neither cousin could access. Word that the girl would meet her mother in Heaven was what had prompted Elsa to console Eugene in 1846 despite their nonexistent relationship. Unable to sail to him directly, Anna could remember how little her sister had slept and eaten before she dragged her pen through the tears patting her letter. They had been tears of regret for having let her crown and uncle curtail her opportunities to see her relatives―for having to put it on Anna to fill her seat at their banquets―for "not having done enough to get to know Eugene outside of Rapunzel"―but the fault, Anna felt, was Eugene's.

Either Eugene had been too insouciant to invest into anything with Elsa past polite birthday cards, or he was always halfway across the globe "negotiating" for their uncle to prove his worth to him. Rapunzel, in her own right, had grown distant after losing children, enabling Eugene to do the same. King Frederic had been no better after an icy accident had expanded the rift between Elsa and their paranoid uncle. Rapunzel's funeral had forced Elsa to break the toxic cycle by docking in Corona. Tragically, Eugene had been bedridden from what they later learned to be poison instead of the "self-starvation, depression, and fever" headlined by the King's Council, so Elsa had been limited to funding the Lying in State ceremony and composing an eulogy without his participation.

Anna clearly recalled the beginning of Elsa's letter to Eugene about the event:

"To Your Majesty the King,

May Heaven keep you from bane, and grant me the courage I will one day need to tell you more than I am able to write tonight. I have been holding your hand since you last fell asleep after watching you battle a fever of 105°F. You opened your eyes, once, and smiled at me like I was the sun, but you thought I was someone I wasn't ― someone whom you genuinely wanted to see. Someone we both long to, if only for a fleeting moment in a vision or dream. I wanted so much to let you live in that dream for a little while that I stroked your face as you whispered her name. You squeezed my fingers with such love and relief that I wish I could have made it real for you.

Against my own volition, I am by several encumbrances obliged to leave the apartments of your palace at first light, but I could not do so without fulfilling two very important promises. One of those promises is to watch over you tonight until the time comes for our separation. The other is making you aware of what has happened to my sister and I while we have been quartered in your chambers. Much of what I am about to report may upset you. I can't guarantee that you will read all of it, but I am imploring you to have mercy on us after you've read the ninth passage."

To make matters worse, Eugene's council and Isolde's conditions had made seeing the little munchkin impossible during their stay in Corona. It was only after their departure that Elsa and Anna had received a letter from Eugene with the following elucidation:

"Corona's parliament has a practice in place called, 'Care of King During Illness.' This statute basically allows the King's Council to act 'in my best interests' without my consent. The parliament therefore chose to appoint my First Lord (or in your country, the 'Prime Minister') to ward the kingdom as the 'Guardian of the Crown,' so while I fell into the role of 'suffering from a life-threatening illness,' he fell into the role of calling the shots. In accordance, I was suspended from my royal functions two days before you docked.

You're probably asking yourself how in the world I managed to fit the description above when I wasn't on my deathbed in the first place. By the time I could actually cough out a sentence, I was asking every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the room that very same question. Cannonballs of 'misinformation' — or should I say 'a spectacularly orchestrated lie,' and props to the maestro for flawlessly conducting it — were fired back and forth between the foreign physician and my council about the probability of me not only being mortician ready in a month's time, but too mentally unwell to take the throne even if I did survive the outcome of my, 'chronic depression and self-starvation.'

Whatever disbelief you have, please feel free to shout it to the top of your lungs right this very minute. Do keep in mind that none of this was formally pedaled out to the masses because no one wanted to 'break more hearts' on what should have been the day of celebration for my wife's life. But I'm here to tell you, loud and clear, that what you heard is false. It's a lie that I wasn't eating because of chronic depression. It's a lie that I 'withdrew from society,' and as long as I have something to say about it, it'll never be true that I would ever even touch the idea of ending my own life.

Rapunzel and I did not dance around what could've happened as a result of how sick this pregnancy was making her. Attempting to have another baby for the last time wasn't something I wanted to do at all, but my wife had a different dream, and I had to honor that dream. She openly acknowledged our midwife's warnings and talked with me about what I should do if anything ever happened. Or at least we tried to talk about it, and we tried to talk about it as rationally as we possibly could. But I swore to Rapunzel, that if this day actually came, then I would be strong for our little us and her heart.

Rapunzel's heart in this context is Corona, along with the canvas of dreams that she had been saving for it. Going back on that promise wouldn't just make me out to be a liar and a hypocrite. It would make everything we promised each other go to rack and ruin. I don't have any choice but to be a pillar for Corona — for my wife, for her parents, for my beautiful baby girl — and I can't be that pillar by shutting down or walking off a bridge. Neither of those evacuation options are options.

Everyone in Corona has been destroyed by this; I'm not the only one who's had the biggest piece of them die, but I'm the only one who needs to be the buttress that holds everyone else together. Me — not anyone else — just me, and only me. Doing the opposite of that isn't what Rapunzel and my parents would've wanted. According to a dream I had, they haven't left my side by any means, so I know what they expect, and they expect me to be the man whom Frederic taught me to be. I would never betray them because I'm in pain; that, Your Majesty, would be selfish.

What wasn't a lie was my fever, but like everything else that's been blown out of proportion, it was because my body was fighting poison. Heavy, consistent doses of poison being served to me on a platter each and every day like corn on a cob. The mastermind behind the scenes did a terrific job. He did the absolute best in the business, because he managed to avoid the whole 'Who poisoned the king?' fiasco. This maestro set it up to look like the king was killing himself.

I found out yesterday that one of the envoys you spoke of happened to be the so-called poisoner in question. The envoy I'm referring to is King Kasimir's muscle, a sovereign who also happens to be the ninth brother in that flea-infested Southern Isles litter. Apparently he and the foreign physician had been in cahoots with one another, which is almost too obvious of a decoy, logically speaking. King Kasimir and his brothers denied any knowledge, made an inhumane spectacle of the man's execution, and wrote an open apology today. Until I can dig up more dirt, I have no choice but to accept it, but I'm going to keep my eyes open; there's always some kind of kraken crawling out of that kingdom's swamp.

I regret to tell you that I don't remember opening my eyes to find my wife's in yours. I neither recall the feeling of you holding my hand nor mine holding yours, but I can recall that I didn't order anyone to keep you and Anna away from me or Isolde. I had no idea any of this was happening. That so-called poisoner I mentioned had hired a forger to study my handwriting astoundingly well. Banning you was an issue that Constantine and our High Councillor took into their own hands, and based on what you've written, they took it way too far.

Did Isolde have complications that we didn't want anyone exploiting while the whole world's eyes were on Corona's half-empty throne room? Yes, in fact, she did. Because my little girl was born prematurely, she's been under an intensive care system for low immune tolerance. During her first five days of life, she wouldn't even open her eyes. After the sixth, she caught an infection from her wet nurse's milk. There are still mornings where she'll suddenly stop breathing for ten seconds, so we've been trying to look for more adequate ways to help her ever since.

Due to all of the above, there were plenty of concerns that I had in the beginning. Unless it was me, I did only want her nurses to be around her, but after I was 'incapacitated,' some of my concerns were laid on thick by my council, as not once did I ever say, 'Make sure you treat Princess Anna and Queen Elsa like assassins when they get here.' Never in a million years would I sic an order like that on my own wife's cousins. Everyone who was involved in dressing it up to look like I would received their fair share of consequences, I can tell you that much. As of right now, I'm trying to figure out what the next step is for my daughter."

But now the drawbridge was being lowered. Isolde's health issues had made up a bite-sized fraction of why Eugene abstained from sailing to Arendelle, so to behold her today was to behold a once elusive fairy. Anna pressed her hands against her heart and leaned in to cherish Corona's unicorn. "She's beau-tiful..." The sheet swaddling the child stopped at her mouth, but Anna could see just enough to make her heart sing opera.

Stringy hair several palettes darker than her own mantled Isolde's head, giving it a red chestnut glow. Anna started to pull the blanket down because she wanted to see more of her, but Eugene caught her wrist.

"Let's go upstairs first," he suggested. "She'll be more comfortable in a less crowded room."

It was not very long after his supplication that there occurred the first of many headaches Eugene would have in Arendelle. As a precursor to the introductions hand-balled between herself and his commissioners, Anna entreated her servants to show them to their apartments without wasting another verb. In the blink of an eye, Anna grabbed him by the wrist, babbled something about there being no time to lose, and then yanked him off his heels. It took Eugene twelve seconds to grasp that he had been abducted by the ragamuffin in all of ten.

"I cannot WAIT for Elsa to see you two! Our rooms are up here, so you'll be down the hall from us!"

"Would you mind considering possibly slowing DOWN?! Because I'm getting an awful wave of motion sickness back here!" Eugene choked out. He watched the bottom of her dress bob up the stairs as she dragged him to his bedchamber like a yo-yo ball with a scissor-proof string.

"Just a hundred more ta' go!"

"A hundred?! How do you get downstairs day in and day out without having a stroke?!"

"Exercise! It's good for you!"

Once they hit the fourth floor, the entire hallway felt like it was jogging up and down. Anna broke her run to jiggle the handle of a door before shoving the latter open with her shoulder. "This is your room — well, your temporary room since — y'know — but Elsa decorated it herself! She wanted you to feel completely comfortable, so she replaced the original paint with Corona's warmer colors. Do you...like it?"

He graded it even though he was seeing triple. Aesthetically, it appealed to the ego in him that was avaricious. Jacobean furniture was well furbished and nicely placed, complete with chair-back settees, beige walls, cornice moulding, ogee millwork, and a massive four-poster oak bed curtained by silk drapes. Ideologically, it sickened the ego in him that was as averse to lodging in Arendelle as it was to kissing its queen. "It's..." Eugene saw Gunnel's silhouette scooting into the corner of his eye and looked at her plaintively.

The nursemaid was patting Isolde's back in the hallway while Arendelle's porters moved his luggage into the boudoir. All at once, something blurry and white dashed behind her and vanished behind the other wall. Eugene leaned back with bulging eyes to peek over the candleholders blocking his view.

"Eugene?"

His head snapped around to Anna. "Huh?"

"Um, dooo you like it?" His owl eyes were clearly creeping her out.

"Oh, um — yes, of course," he shared, smiling back at Anna weakly. "It's...perfect, actually...but I'm...uh..." He looked back at the hallway. "A little daunted by the, uh—"

"Oh, oh, oh!" Anna bounced from foot to foot. "And there's a crib right here!" She pointed out the canopy toddler bed abutting his bedstead. "It's Baltic Birch wood, the best of the best!" Anna linked her fingers together behind her back, smiling bashfully. "Elsa and I made it back when she was trying to get you to come live with us. Of course, you said no, which didn't go over well with her, but we decided to build this and keep everything in here just in case."

Passing his hallucination off on enervation, Eugene paid attention to what Anna was showing him. "Where is it again?"

"Right there, y'big goof! It's a good thing we didn't take it apart, seeing how you didn't tell us you were bringing her for the wedding and all." Anna's irritation over his aloof antics in the past year was buried under her twinkly voice.

"Unintentionally." Eugene shook the wood to test its durability before performing a cursory inspection from top to bottom. A blue snowflake was painted on the headboard with a yellow sun below it. "It's, uh...really something. I can't thank you girls enough," he said with discomfort, "but Isolde is going to be sleeping with me while we're here."

"Oh..." Anna's face dropped. She tried to pick it back up with a smile. "Well, that makes sense! Gotta get 'er used to the new environment and everything, right?"

"Right." Eugene smiled back. This time, Anna read the fine print on his face that said the smile was bogus.

Gunnel curtsied to Anna before walking past Eugene to set Isolde down on his mattress.

Eugene snatched off his coronet and placed it on the lamp table with a clink. The removal of his "royal halo" was the removal of his majesty. Now, he was just Eugene, a widowed relative who was round-shouldered and downtrodden, not the invincible king with the unscalable stature and straight back. "And just to let you know,"—he squeezed his eyelids like the eyes behind them were throbbing with pain—"the rest of the People's Council will probably be here at midnight, so there's more of us coming."

"I'll keep that in mind." Anna cleared her throat. "And, just to extend an invite, we usually eat dinner at six, but it's already seven, so...I can push it to eight, if you want? You must be starving, after all!"

"We're fine, actually. We ate something just before we docked. This is around Izzy's bedtime, anyway."

"Oh...well, okay." His rejection made her think he had some weird idea that Arendelle Castle's food wasn't safe, but his energy made her feel like it wouldn't be a good idea to press him the way she normally would.

"Are you okay?" he queried, sensing the schism in her conscience's cathedral.

"Huh? Oh! Yeah, I'm perfectly fine! It's just...well, you're...finally here! After years of not being here, you're FINALLY here! And you're...marrying my sister." Anna twisted her fingers. "Going to take a while to wrap my head around that." Such bosh wasn't what she was going to follow the confession up with, but it was too late to be candid.

The atmosphere was awkward, if not smothered by the things they wouldn't say, such as their mutual distaste for the contract that had brought him here. Telling him about the rioters and hidden guns in Corona was a forgotten tibit in this conjuncture's rear view mirror.

"Well...then that makes two of us." Because Eugene's back was glaring at her, she couldn't see the face he was making. His half-lighthearted, half-heavyweight reply, however, encouraged her to leave the conversation on the carpet.

"So, what was it you wanted to save for upstairs?" Anna traveled to his region of the room.

Gunnel glanced at Eugene worriedly.

Eugene didn't glance at her. The light in his pupils trembled under the moonlight waterfalling from the bedroom's balcony as he stared at Anna. "You have to promise me first that you won't make a sound."

She was getting irritated again. "Okay, okay! I'll be as quiet as a mouse."

Exhaling, Eugene gathered the bottom of the blanket into his fist and pulled. The cover slithered down Isolde's face and over the knolls of her shoulders. In seconds, Anna's excitement fizzled out and transmuted into something closer to horror. The tissue of the child's lip made a split in the gums that curved like a fishhook. Horrendous indications of where the margins had been sutured and scarified by a cautery made it look worse. The stitches hadn't done the job of closing the fissure more than it did marring the folds and causing an ugly shortening of the lip.

Anna removed her palms from her hanging mouth. "...What happened to her?"

"The people in Corona call it the 'harelip' curse," Eugene's told her with his deeper cadence echoing in the bedchamber.

Anna's head ticked until her wet gaze anchored on his profile.

Staring down at Isolde, distressed, broken, and afraid, was a king she did not meet in the foyer. The cancer in his eyes was unbearable to watch spread throughout his heart. "I've never...read a living record of anyone like her because kids with this, based on what I found, were either ridiculed, thought to have had supernatural powers that caused them to be removed from society altogether, or gotten rid of on the spot. People who did terrible things like that called it a means of removing evil omens and preserving the 'safety' of their villages. Other babies didn't live longer than a month because they couldn't be fed properly."

Anna was close to weeping.

Eugene's finger whisked away the moist curl that was flattened against Isolde's chin. "Dr. Waldus and Dr. Ingul, on the other hand, told me it was called notched mouth medically, and that it's just a birth defect, but because of the harelip superstition, a lot of people prefer to think an omen has something to do with it. The existence of so-called 'sorcery' has already been proven to the world, after all. I was lucky enough to end up finding a foreign surgeon in Corona who had written a book about harelips. He explained that it would be better to operate on Isolde when she was older, but...obviously, the scar didn't disappear like he said it would, and now she's stuck with the proof..."

Anna's soul flew back into her mouth. She slurped in the breath she was holding and caterwauled, "But why didn't you say anything about this to Elsa while she was writing to you?"

Eugene put the conversation on hiatus to sit on the bed and sigh, dangling his folded hands between his splayed legs. "I was...threatened, for lack of a better word..." His thumbs parted from the zipper his fingers made. "Threatened to not say anything on paper that was too explicit..."

Despite the fact that Eugene did look tortured by the burden of keeping Isolde's secret, Anna stuck to her guns: "You still should've told her! Elsa would've protected you—"

"Anna, your sister couldn't even protect herself, let alone set foot in Corona." He put his hand on his knee and talked with the other one. "I couldn't depend on her to rescue me from what was going on in my own council room before the invasion happened. Her 'assistance' had a limit." It was hard to understand whether Eugene was talking out of spite, reason, or a combination of both.

Anna waterboarded him with objections, "You could've depended on her after! The conspirators in your court were rooted out, weren't they? Elsa's been trying to contact you for a year ever since then!"

The knot crinkling Eugene's nose unwrinkled. "..."

Anna recoiled. "...Wait, are you...saying you didn't get a letter from her for a whole year?"

Now Eugene was staring at her with a more intense look than before. "I never got anything from your sister after her prime minister sent me a 'petition for marriage' that my council and hers drafted up behind my back. But apparently Elsa—..."

"Apparently Elsa what?"

"..." Eugene's jaw locked up as his eyebrows locked in, and whatever he had wanted to say was elided by his better judgment. "Apparently, Elsa and I have a lot to talk about. If you'd be willing to tell her that I want to see her tonight," he pleaded, "I think both of us would have a better shot at making tomorrow less...miserable."