Headnote:
This is a continuation of "My Dearest Cousin" for teens and up.
༺ ✸ ༻
It was not every sunrise that a notorious thief found himself tying the knot with a beloved princess, but the first blush of August 18th was dovetailed with connubial bliss in the Chapel of Corona. Ruddy cheeks and curly wigs swarmed the ribboned pews under the arcade. The sun grinned against plumed helmets that winked with its reflection from the nave. Eugene Fitzherbert stood on the altar with a nutcracker's fineness, nervous yet over the moon about ending his life to begin theirs. Daughters, young and old, ginger and brunette, some wearing wealth and others wearing hardship, flapped their mothers' skirts to get them to feast their eyes upon the narthex.
There, in the sunbathed entrance, smiled the equator of Eugene's world. He held back happy tears as adoration filled his chest with love anew. His soulmate was gowned in sunlight and silk as pure as her own heart, which was a raiment he loved more than silk itself. Her brave hands held a waterfall of Stargazer and Easter lilies. On her hazel head flashed the burnished fate that had brought them together.
Like the tiara of sunshine she always was in his blue sky, she curled her arm around her father's and floated down the aisle with grace, inspiring the canaries in Eugene's rib cage to sing hymeneals. Never had she appeared more majestic than when she flowed from the vestibule and into the chapel's holy kernel; those who enskied her were amazed to watch her beauty shine outwards like the halo she wore. Upon her ascension to the altar, the princess turned and faced her best friend.
Eugene's heart sprouted wings. He had to readjust his grip on his wrist to stop both hands from flinging back her veil and drawing her into a kiss that said:
"From the very first moment that I laid eyes on you as you enchanted a whole kingdom with your magic, I knew that I had found my best friend and my new dream. I have fallen in love with you over, and over, and over since that moment. You're the strongest and most positive person I've ever met, if not the most noble person I've ever met. Even in the darkest times, you thrive like a magic golden flower. With you, I feel appreciated and accepted for who I really am.
You've shown me what living really means and what type of man I can be, as well as the type of man I want to become for myself and our little us...or us-es. Your arms aren't just my favorite place to be on Earth, they're the warmest home I've ever had. You're my better half, my hero, the very sunshine that feeds me Vitamin D and serotonin, and I still can't believe that I'm actually getting to marry you, Rapunzel. I promise to be loyal to you, to uplift and support you, to guide and challenge you, to protect and pamper you, to annoy and comfort you, and to love every inch of you with every inch of me."
A smile touched the lips behind the lace veil. Tears smiled behind Eugene's eyes. To keep the waterworks at bay, he rehearsed the vows in his head as he poured his love into her concealed countenance.
"Dearly Beloved," the bishop hummed, "we are gathered here today to celebrate the joining of Elsa and Eugene in marriage."
A dolly-zoom effect pulled the background away from Eugene and homed in on his face. His small pupils jumped to the bishop. "What?"
The bishop went on like the script for this scene had already been rewritten: "To Your feet thy fealty brings, redeemed, reborn, and transformed―"
Eugene breathlessly looked back at his wife-to-be. "Rapunzel...?!" The hands he had been fettering were freed from their clasp to ruck up her veil. "Ra-pun-zel―...!"
Underneath the lifted lace hung Queen Elsa's head.
"―two outlaws who have rinsed themselves of their crimes through their indentureship to Your kingdoms," the bishop finished.
Eugene's fingers fell open, staggering back, shaking. Elsa's eyelashes, which were glued together by tears, feathered cheeks that held the same hue rosing her lips and eyelids. The rest of her was whiter than death. Inch by inch, Rapunzel's impostor hoisted her chin with the bravery of a shipwrecked prisoner facing her punishment in the name of honor. Then she hoisted her lids at half-mast to bare her misery to Eugene.
(―Bah-dump ―)
...This isn't happening…
Oxygen stopped being pipelined to Eugene's brain. The voice trapped inside his skull told him to breathebreathebreathe you have to breatheeugene, to get―the―heck out of here and find Rapunzel, but his limbs didn't belong to him anymore. A power beyond his own authority in the kingdom of his bones had colonized them, and there was no escaping it.
...Th-Th-This can't actually―
Saliva was peeled off Elsa's lips by her parting them, but a whimper tumbled out of her mouth in speech's place. Her chest rose with her breath as her gaze slumped to Eugene's throat. His eyes echoed the movement, finding themselves gorging on what was unmistakably a hangman's knot.
―be HAPPENING!
Eugene could neither articulate his terror nor move his body to do away with the nemesis. The only muscles he could command were the six in his eyeballs that piloted his panic to the hand holding the end of the rope.
"Let's get this over with, Rider."
...H'wha...?!
The Captain of the Guard's mustache smiled at him from the bottom of the altar. In next to nothing, Eugene was gagged and bound from behind by two Coronan soldiers.
"Mmrph!" Eugene's tongue pushed back against the gag's bite, his throat bobbing with trapped oxygen. "H-Hmph!" Tears that had once been born from happiness now blinded his vision with fear.
Wh-Why is this...h-happen'ning...?
Double images floated together and drifted apart in a distorted dance, seesawing.
Rap-pun...zel...Rapunzel, where...where are you, Rapunzel?!
Elsa's response to Eugene's sedation was hyperventilation.
Elsa...El-Elsa, please...! I'm begging you! Y-You hafta help me!
There was no objection, no rescue, no succor provided by her at all ― just some powerless display of submission to the injustice that rendered her even more useless to him than he.
Wh-Why aren't you h-helping me...?! Why aren't any of you helping me?!
The bishop turned to the silent audience with a breezy smile. "Who giveth this monster to be married to this thief?"
"I," baaed a character Eugene had never heard before.
He searched, stretching the blood vessels in his eyes as he did, and landed on King Agnarr's face. The skin of a man who had died at sea enfleshed the monarch; his lips were so blue as to be purple, and his fingertips were so purple as to be red. Pea crabs and algae necklaced his pruny throat. A thin trail of sea foam bubbled up from the corner of his closed lips and ran down the side of his chin, pitter-patting against his shoe in a sudsy rope of spit. Eugene hollered against his own teeth, but much like the bishop, the king was bespelled by the ceremony and little else.
"After a drumfire of unfortunate events," the bishop crooned, "the Kingdom of Corona was ravaged by the Great Famine and the Bovi Fever in 1847."
―Eighteen...?! Wh-What're you―
"The lives of those who fell at the hands of the Southern Isles will forever remain in our hearts."
―Are you out of your mind?! Everyone's right here!
"Henceforth, a union has been negotiated between the delegations of Corona and Arendelle to reinstate Corona and forestall enemy invasion."
Darnnit, I...I can't keep my eyes open much longer...
Eugene weepingly looked for deliverance in Rapunzel's parents. The sternness that annealed their visages augured a wicked fate. Corona's once fine people, who were no longer healthy or merry neither in body nor heart, looked upon his suffering without ruth. All they projected was the callosity of bystanders who were inured to public executions. Eugene's eyelids clamped shut, pressing tears against the hoods until they were able to escape down his goatee.
"In 1846, Queen Rapunzel closed her eyes for the very last time."
Bloodshot eyes jumped open. Lungs shrank. Grey matter eroded.
...Rapunzel...
"Her Late Majesty suffered child loss during her season as Crown Princess."
―No, th-that's...that's a l-lie! She's―
"In 1846, pregnancy complications compromised her last expectancy to a degree in correspondence with her late mother's―"
―You're LYING! That never happened! We're not even MARRIED yet―
"―during her coregency with King Eugene, but it was childbirth that ultimately took her life."
―She wouldn't―...she'd n-never...
He was sobbing now, sobbing even though he was the only one who could hear it.
Rapunzel wouldn't leave me here all alone...
"In acknowledgment of Arendelle's just and reasonable cause, the Bishop of Arendelle has granted a dispensation of affinity laws in favor of the Oath of Ruth. The oath allows the societies of Arendelle and Corona to covenant that if a woman passes away without children in her marriage, her kinswoman may marry the widower and raise up offspring for her. If a woman leaves young children behind in her marriage, her kinswoman may marry the widower and raise up her offspring for her."
Air turned into arsine with each evil verse that obliterated whatever was left of Eugene.
"Collaterally, the marriage between Princess Anna and her consort is a morganatic union, in which neither the spouse who entered with nothing nor any of his children will chair Arendelle. Queen Elsa is therefore obligated to fulfill her responsibilities in favor of the Storting's statutes."
Eugene's chest felt hard as if it was filling up with grout and tar. He didn't expect or want to keep the topic flowing in this direction. He wanted to escape the responsibility of living. He wanted his wife. According to the damp, fluttering eyelashes of Queen Elsa, who all but kept her head forward like a celestial priestess, the supporting actress in this nightmare was fighting the same desire, if not the very iceberg in her throat.
"The Arendelle crocus will be dimidiated with the Corona sun on the Union flag. Should Her Majesty leave us during childbirth, then unlike in Old Corona, King Eugene will be appointed regent. This conjugality between Queen Elsa of Arendelle and King Eugene of Corona, united with the prospective conjugality between the Storting and the People's Council, will reward the contract between Rapunzel and Eugene Fitzherbert with preservation, prosperity, and posterity."
Trembling and crying without sound, Eugene transferred his waterlogged attention to Elsa's hands. The infamous death-dealers were sealed inside iron gibbets that struck him with nausea. Where the lilies went alongside his true love was foregrounded on his catalog of concerns when he noticed the hand holding Elsa's chains.
"Elsa is preferable, of course."
...But it can't be...
The arm of Prince Hans tugged, snapping the chains straight.
Elsa's side hit his chest with an―"Oof!"―following the impact.
Hans wrestled her face still by hollowing her cheeks with his pointer and his thumb. He grinned at the sound of her grunts. His nose wandered down the path that trailed from Elsa's temple vein to her throbbing eyelid. The smirk on his mouth tickled her eyelash as he purred, "Wouldn't you agree, Flynn Rider?" When the moment came for him to smile at Eugene, Hans's face took on the features of every last one of his terrible brothers.
A familiar feeling hit Eugene right in the throat ― a feeling that screamed he had always hated this family and would sooner see them persecuted than redeemed in the nave of any church. Eugene wriggled madly inside the dungeon of his skeleton, but his ivory bars refused to rattle. With the docility of a circus animal, Elsa did nothing except hide inside the refuge behind her eyelids until Hans unhanded her for good.
With the blissfulness of a blind officiant, the bishop did nothing to acknowledge the carnival of madness except continue forth in his own merry little way: "No matter what challenges you face, you will now face them together, and no matter how much you suffer, you will now suffer together."
Hans and King Agnarr shared the duty of unclasping Elsa's gibbets, both removing each with the polite smiles of relatives meeting each other for the first time.
The bishop's bible closed with the sound of a death knell. "You may kiss the bride."
Funeral music wailed from a rather ominous organ. The player wasn't facing Eugene, but Eugene knew by memory that the melody was not one of Hook Hand's études. Elsa, who was also crying without sound, stepped forward in her lace bridal gown to deliver the coup de grâce. She freed Eugene of his binds to push the noose up and over his head, making his hair point at the ceiling. His legs shook as the rope slithered into a pile on the floor.
Don't do this...
Eugene couldn't tell if he was gazing into her eyes; the canvas they peered out of was fuzzy and misshapen behind the pall of tears soaking his beard, but he could feel her icy fingernails stripping his wet forelock off his cheek.
You don't have to do this...!
He could feel her cupping his jaw and smearing away the tears under his eyes with her thumbs.
El-Elsa...
He could feel the mucus that cottoned his nostrils skating down the groove of his mouth and settling inside its cleft. Elsa inched closer, holding his eyes like a breath. His head ticked, lips bobbing in an attempt to beg. Her consciousness rolled shut as her mouth pressed against his the way snow would press against the earth. Frost percolated through her kiss and crawled across his heart with the sting of one hundred needles heated by fire.
The atmosphere around Eugene bent into an altar of icicles jutting from the belly of Elsa's ice castle. He wept louder, feeling the air in his lungs crystallize into snowflakes.
Elsa pulled away with such slowness that the queen did not seem to be the queen anymore. "Once to numb you from the cold," she whispered, breath pluming out of her mouth in a chilly fog that curled under Eugene's eyes. Her center finger reached up and traced the vein pulsating on his temple. "Another to make you forget..."
Eugene felt the pressure of her jaws bearing down on him again. He could feel every sharp blade of rime on his teeth, every fang of ice that chandeliered his mouth, and every drop of salt leaving his eye. Elsa's hands squeezed his face as she inhaled both his soul and his identity. Cold palms dropped from his face to his torso before pressing flat against his stomach, but he didn't have the sobriety to be alarmed. The painful sensation of rime growing on his arteries was numbing his bloodstream at lightning speed.
And then his sense of self slipped.
Waned.
He didn't have a name or a past. The letters of Rapunzel's name grew foggier, the pronunciation of it unfathomable. The R went first; then the a and the p, the u and the n, the z, the e...the l...until there was nothing left. Nothing but a snowflake blinking in the dark like a star, where a quasar of its sisters awaited him. The quasar opened under his feet, widening from the center to reveal the mouth of a black hole.
And he...
F
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.
―THUD―
"Your Majesty...?!"
"Your Majesty!"
"Can you hear me, Your Majesty?!"
"Wake up, Your Majesty!"
"Your Majesty, please open your eyes!"
With a deep suction from his lungs, Eugene opened his flying eyes to the pages hovering over him with a chandelier haloing their heads. Sweat beaded his nose. Gloved hands patted his face over and over.
From a pair of blurry lips spat, "It's time for the Royal Assent Ceremony, Your Majesty!"
Chapter Notes:
"Indentured (Union of the Crowns)" was born from a one-shot that I wrote for a prompt challenge in 2015 under *Otherwise-Uncolonized. What was originally just a response to a writing prompt morphed into a spontaneous story over time. The politics and laws were unique to the universe because I valued my freedom, but the union was modeled after the Union of the Crowns between Castile and Aragon, England's unions with Scotland, and the contract between Mary I of England and Philip II of Spain. Although I deleted the series in 2020, *Beta Gyre and *MiraNova23 saved its life for me.
Now I plan to republish my beloved as it was with minor edits. The storyboard parallels the atmosphere in Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" era in many respects, but there is lightness.