Headnote: For those who are reading this for the first time, Isolde was born with a cleft lip deformity that was later sewn up atrociously.

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"I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that remains."

―Anne Frank

He never looked at himself on Rapunzel's birthdays. He had been working so long and hard to become a whole him, to finally wipe the fog from his reflection and see someone worthwhile. That man shattered after Rapunzel's hollow eyes drifted shut on December 23rd. Left behind in his shaking arms had been two pounds of fatherhood, the ending of his ever after, and an entire lifetime of "Why?" soaking his pillowcases. His only sunrise in this kingdom of brimstone had been her.

"My little sunshine..."

The smile his tears had salted on the first day they met still honeyed his memories on his loneliest mornings. He remembered how soft her amphibian fingers had felt as they curled around his pinky, how itty-bitty and unbelievably beautiful they had looked as they gripped for dear life. And when she had smiled at him for the very first time, the slit in her lip had smiled at him, too. Love had dripped from his eyes and splashed on her cheek, leaving an Orion's Belt of tears in the shape of hope. This single drop of sunlight in his arms had been proof of Rapunzel's immortality; he thereupon had vowed to lay down his pain and pick up his strength for the preservation of his wife.

Yet the shadow of death had laid down with his sun-drop every night that he laid down with her, and he had to fight to keep her light agleam. He had won those fights with the help of Elsa's fidelity. Nevertheless, doom had still loomed. Alliances had been broken. Trust had thinned, and his crown had become an anvil on his head.

Day by day, Corona's throne room had been renovated into a dungeon that gyved his sanity, but night by night, his daughter's love had crayoned his whole world.

"Does I haf' Mommy's smile, Daddy...?"

"Right down to the very dimples."

His promise to always be her knight in shining armor had been enameled with a song that he had sung in the afterglow of one special sunset: "Now you're here, and suddenly, I know..." He had wiped his tears off her smile as he rocked her in Rapunzel's favorite knitting chair, having felt his wife's arms in the sun's rays. "If you're here, it's crystal clear, I'm where I'm meant to gooo~..."

Several warworn years later, he was still drinking her in like honey lemon tea on his loneliest mornings. He tried to make out the shape of her future as he stared at her profile in the sunrise that blonded her face. To the heavens her mother, grandparents, and unborn siblings had winged, defeathering her childhood. The deepest hole in her heart was carved into the shape of Rapunzel, and it was a hole that his tales would never fill, but the heart itself was expanding like a star with every moonrise that silvered the sea. On some nights, its luminosity outshined the Big Dipper's.

For all this light, time had forced him to accept that his prayers would never improve his daughter's health. What he could worship was her stronger grip on life. Her self-esteem was not as lean, and she no longer clawed up the scar that punctuated her lip with a semicolon. She had called her cicatrix a gravure of her survival and an embossment of her strength. One carver of inspiration, according to her artwork, was Elsa.

Eugene looked at the life-sized mural that guarded Isolde's bed. Bowered by frost flowers, the subject's pastel hands cradled a pink heart as she smiled with closed eyes and ruby cheeks from the bedroom's wall. Loops and whorls curled her hair and gown into filigree, mimicking the shape of her magic.

Eugene's smile fell. 'Elsa,' his mind whispered, remembering the gargoylish shape that their wedlock had taken.

What had once been an unsightly explosion of watercolors was now a handsome portrait that told a story about remarriage and rebirth, but the first brushstroke to hit the canvas had not been the color of love. Famine, disease, debt, war, male-preference primogeniture, and parliaments had mortared them up in a prison tower called "Marriage of Convenience" after Corona's collapse.

"We the Delegations of the Storting & People's Council, in order to unify foreign diplomatic and defense policies, provide economic equality, and birth the Furturition of Our kingdoms under one Crown, have signed the following petition for marriage between Queen Elsa of Arendelle and King Eugene of Corona," the petition had screamed in Eugene's trembling hands. "The delegations have severally agreed and resolved to concur in measures as might best strengthen and secure the internal interests of Arendelle and Corona. Under the Oath of Ruth, our societies 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 the woman leaves young children behind in her marriage, her kinswoman may marry the widower and raise up her offspring for her. This marriage between Queen Elsa and King Eugene, united with the prospective marriage between the Storting of Arendelle and the People's Council of Corona, will reward the contract between Rapunzel and Eugene Fitzherbert with prosperity and posterity."

The Foreign Marriage Act had added, "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. 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. 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."

All had been a nightmare. On the altar, veiled and gowned, Elsa had hoisted her chin with the bravery of a shipwrecked prisoner facing her punishment in the name of honor, but nothing in his heart had told him that he would survive such a death sentence. He had gone on to shamelessly call Elsa a brumal replacement of Rapunzel's sunlight, if not an icy personification of the leg iron that would enchain him till death do them part. His councilmen had made failed attempts to browbeat him into spending time with her beyond banquets and royal tours, but what had softened him was her relationship with Isolde and the trials she had faced as a "harelip child" in a prejudiced world. He remembered how lonesome Elsa's hands had looked to him as he discussed Isolde's challenges with her, how vulnerable she had sounded when she recounted what her father had done to her in response to fear.

The wider that Elsa's fragile petals had opened without political skullduggery honeycombing their marriage, the deeper she had seeped inside of him like the cool water he needed after years spent in a desert with scorpions.

"The part of me that understands the part of you that has fought with years of being afraid to be yourself wants to commend you on how much you've sacrificed for Rapunzel and her parents. It was you, Eugene, who made them whole again by having the courage to open your heart. If it hadn't been for your bravery, they would have lived out the rest of their days without sunlight. Thank you, from the very bottom of my heart, for all that you've done in the name of true love. You truly are a hero whom Corona is still in need of.

Relying on what little information I have about your past, I understand that you lost your parents before finding two outstanding ones in Rapunzel's. I'm very familiar with that loss and how it shapes your way of thinking; I'm also familiar with the fear of letting in and letting go because of it," Elsa had written to him in a letter that he would find more than four years too late.

The timing had been just right, she would argue. Elsa's deathless empathy, in its purest shape, had come to embody the tenderness of a palm on his tear-stained cheek, and the palm itself, to his greatest surprise, had never given him frostbite. It had taken on the personality of a breeze that kissed his skin with the healing effect her cryotherapeutic spells had brought injured men, fountaining his consciousness into the clouds. For only a few seconds under his eyelids, he had been aerified by her touch. She had spoken, in due time, after believing their platonic bond to be secure and safe, of being solarized by his.

The two had begun to help each other mourn Rapunzel in healthier ways than either had embraced before their union. Writing letters and setting them free with sky lanterns had been the nights when they felt closest to her and one another. Elsa had made it her mission to unpack the muddy baggage that Eugene had dropped onto her rug by loving her with him, even if that meant crying with him. Every teardrop that had fallen from her eye and bled through his vest watered a connection that felt vital to their healing. The connection, at first, had been their love for Rapunzel, and trying in no small measure to love themselves in a society that did not collectively love them.

The orphan in Eugene had tilted until he could lay his heaviest secrets on Elsa's shoulder. She had nursed his trust with featherlight strokes and petal-soft whispers, giving him the protection that his childhood had never promised. By sunrise, he had finally been able to close his eyes and fall asleep against her warmth. She would tell him that she wanted him to feel that warmth because he had neither felt nor met it before Rapunzel's passing. She had wanted him to know that she understood how hard it was to remain an open door after being taught from youth to keep it shut, to think that, "I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything" was somehow a survivable slave code, and to have the world inside you grind to a halt after the death of its axis.

Elsa had understood that when your parents didn't walk back through the front door after a thunderstorm, you felt like you were, and therefore expected to be, facing society alone henceforward. She had understood why finding some corner of the world where he could be "rested and alone" had made him assume that both his past and his trauma would magically disappear. She had understood how impossible it was to trade freedom for a kingdom with the hope that others would forgive him for who he used to be, as well as who he would never become. She had understood how terrifying it felt to be crowned in a chapel filled with conspirators and assassins.

Elsa knew how heavy a mask weighed, how unbreathable it was, and why he had once preferred suffocation to oxygen. She had understood, above all else, what it meant to suddenly become an adult before ever truly being a child, and then to realize, within the blizzard of an unforeseen breakthrough, how desperately you needed to take care of the child within you. He had never fully learned how to care for "Eugene Fitzherbert" as Prince Eugene. He had learned how to love "love" again by loving Rapunzel as hard as he could even when he feared that she had stopped loving him as hard as she could.

"But have you ever taken the time to love yourself as hard as you can?" his father-in-law had once asked him.

Eugene's answer, in so many stammers, had been no.

"You cannot depend on Rapunzel to make you whole. She's trying to overcome her own challenges and find her own peace of mind as Corona's future queen. Don't make her responsible for yours. She'll suffocate."

"Suffocate" had been his golden word choice. "She'll suffocate." Eugene had felt like he wanted to die after hearing that, but die he hadn't. He had left to find and love his allness for Rapunzel. "Eugene" hadn't been his dedicatee, but he couldn't see the boomerang coming until Rapunzel had left him in a wet nightgown and a serene smile. Ripped open by the aftershock, "Eugene Fitzherbert" had been declared dead, and the widowed "King Eugene of Corona" had been swiftly enthroned on his bones.

Incomplete molecules of "Flynn Rider" had materialized in place of "Eugene Fitzherbert" to help him survive his own death, but it never helped. King Eugene had been a silhouette of his father-in-law's expectations, Flynn hadn't been compatible with who he needed to be for Corona, and Eugene's buried body had been begging for oxygen, which it had drawn from Isolde's sunglow.

Elsa, like Rapunzel's father, had challenged him to become his own oxygen. "Start building yourself up into a person you can love again," she had imparted, "but you have to do it for yourself this time. Otherwise, you'll never find true happiness."

Eugene had sat on her words throughout their marriage. Her wisdom had fruited from her own mistakes and, of course, the fact that she was still paying for them. Still coping with setbacks. Still gauging her worth on adequacy and inadequacy―on how much of herself she had been giving to everyone else. But she had been trying.

"Because for the first time, I finally know how to try..."

...And he couldn't help but smile at her profile in the moonrise as he watched her try. Watched her hug her allness. Watched her inculcate the importance of selfhood into Isolde's childhood by giving her a sunrise to stand in. He had seen Elsa surpass her sister's ebullience by miles, the caged bird she freed having had that much more pent-up vibrancy and passion screaming to be expressed. This once dour duckling had grown the wings of a shimmering swan after her eternal winter...and it had made him feel...hopeful.

Yet unlike Eugene Fitzherbert, Elsa had never needed to plagiarize someone else's extraordinaire to become a show-stopper. She just was, all along. The confidence that had charmed him was not ironclad, but the vulnerability that had gowned her at night revived the man in him who had once made a career out of comforting distressed ladies. Without ever catching the resemblance, he had spoken to her in the caressing style that Rapunzel used to curl up against on nights when he would try to kiss away her fear of becoming queen. On the night that Elsa's gaze had finally reciprocated the embrace Eugene's offered, a smile had broken open across her face like clouds parting to reveal starlight, and he had smiled back, feeling warmer than an oven on the inside.

Elsa, in his opinion, had always liked herself, which put her ahead of him in this marathon for "self-love." Perhaps she had not liked what she had done or become at the hands of her own hands, but there was no way that smug smirk she made while doing fancy handwork could have appeared out of thin air if she'd always hated herself. Enwomaned with the wisdom and grace of her parents before her, Elsa had enjoyed being a lady of her own flashy design far too much. To this day, the matriarch enjoyed flexing her blunt opinions as a queen with her own mind. She enjoyed sculpting her crown into a polyhedron of liberal ideas and egalitarianism.

Elsa enjoyed stomping snowflakes into the ground and summoning ice castles that blew Eugene's hair back. She enjoyed knocking the wind out of his glass ego with her dry comebacks. She loved her disconcerting habit of keying into the anxiety he buried whenever he'd gotten into a bind, which not unseldom resulted in her freezing all of his escape routes.

Elsa enjoyed being Elsa.

In turn, Eugene had begun to like what "Elsa" looked like. He had begun to commend her prodigious book smarts, despite its unpopularity with most men from her class. He had begun to treasure her humility and selfless lean, despite telling her how an uptick in selfishness would have actually been healthy for her. He had begun to savor volleying repartees with her in multiple languages, despite losing rounds whenever she had acted like a guileless imp who was incapable of naughtiness. He had begun to prize her mild and rational temperament, despite not always being down for her more spontaneous outlets (he made an awful ice skating partner, and Miss Thing was a tugger).

He had grown into his affection for her stubbornness regardless of how many times it had burned him up. He had grown into respecting her percipience, specifically because she hadn't allowed him to pull any wool over her eyes (or so he had told her). He had enjoyed collaborating with her for Corona and Arendelle even if they hadn't always seen eye to eye. He had found himself fancying her sophistication even though he still had a hard time keeping Flynn's vanity out of that reason. He had found his heart cherishing her womanlike purity, which encastled a coffer of innocence that made his trunk of experience all the more useful.

He had found her obsession with chocolate ridiculously adorable, so long as she hadn't been putting her paws on his fudge cakes. He had found the agitated twitch her eyelid always made during some uppity dignitary's speech thoroughly amusing. He had found her "dance moves" laughably adorable whenever she would leaf through paperwork with a ballad on her tongue, performing a graceful heel turn there or a lingering step here. He had immediately liked the way she would spiff up his outfits with her own razzle-dazzle. He had never been a fan of winter, but he had become a fan of whatever she would make with it, as well as however she would wear it.

He had learned to enjoy the fact that there was always something new to learn about her, permitting him to thumb through pages of fresh content over the years like a book that never ended. Her mystique had much in common with buried treasure. Flynn Rider had affiliated this with the appeal of an unattainable jewel, but Eugene Fitzherbert had simply admired her sparkle from the half-open vault. Both egos still overloved the way she crossed her bare legs like a fancy œuvre d'art as she worked, or how the bend of her arm, when raising a wineglass to her red pucker, was as perfect as the curve of an expensive candelabrum's branch. Both still hated the way her lipstick endowed her smirk with a sheen that could've distracted them from saving their own lives.

And that sleek dress, glacéed with undeniable allure, was still quite something. Flynn had been a defender of Elsa's right to look foxy wherever she sailed. He would mow down any man who protested against her freedom to dress as she liked because he believed that a woman's wardrobe was her own business. After all, Elsa's garbs flaunted nothing more than a need to celebrate the parts of herself that society had hemmed in, and Flynn, having been the one to rip the stitches that once kept Eugene hemmed into Corona's class structure, had been fully behind that. The rogue couldn't have been more smitten with such rebellion.

Elsa was the master of her own womanhood, the queen of her own muliebrity, and no man captained her.

"Learn to give yourself credit where credit is due, because like I said before, you are one amazing woman."

It was no exaggeration to call the double-edged queen Eugene's little savioress overall. In many a battle, he would find Elsa risking her life for all that her cousin had bequeathed to her, including him. He would find himself blubbering against her dress about how afraid he'd been of never seeing her again when those risks had greatened. Said paranoia had little to do with feeling responsible for her because she was Rapunzel's blood. Suddenly no longer just the Snow Queen, his wife's cousin, his affine, or even his debt, Elsa had grown into a whole person before Eugene's dewy eyes, and with every inch that they had grown into themselves, their bond had outgrown the boxes that once defined the lines between them.

"Elsa, I don't care if you have powers or if you can't keep saving my life with them anymore. All I care about is you," he'd confessed to a magic-less, brunette-haired Elsa once upon a time. "The only thing I've been looking at this whole time is you."

He had fallen in love with her. He loved her. What he may have loved more than her was seeing her love herself. He also loved her capacity to love deeply, the endless enlargement of her great, once suppressed―and misguided―heart that had probably been waiting, desperately waiting, to love "love" since she was a girl. On her best days, as she looked heavenwards with the moonrise impearling her gown, she held the timeless beauty of a fairy tale.

What he never loved was the hurricane it had taken for him to accept this earthquake after his feelings had overwhelmed him. He had to flail. He had to drown. He had to die. He had to lose her, and he still hadn't finished crying about that.

He had to find Rapunzel at the end of the darkest tunnel and take her guidance into his arms because he didn't know how much longer he could keep hating himself. The answers he had died to earn enriched him, and Eugene Fitzherbert's haggard walk towards inner peace had commenced with Rapunzel's rays hugging him from behind. The cobbled road to the portal of his own light had not ended, but his limp lessened the more he walked. The ache was thawing. Hope was flowering.

He was almost living again.

"Mommy would wanna see you happy..."

Eugene's feet sank off Isolde's bed to hover over the mural that swallowed the floor. Bowered by frost flowers and Stargazer lilies, Elsa and Rapunzel were dovetailed into a folk dance among applauders from Corona's town square. Eugene was a smiling face in the crowd.

"Mommy picked Elsa out for us..."

Eugene smiled tightly as his burning nostrils throbbed, nudging the teardrop in the corner of his eye with his center finger.

One of Elsa's past letters echoed in his dome, "If by some heartwarming chance you are still reading my letter, I must add for your sake that finding healing by opening up to whomever you choose to find warmth in doesn't mean that your wounds will magically disappear, but it does mean that those wounds won't bleed as much anymore. Once you've discovered that, you'll start to see that suffering does have a counterbalance down the line. You'll find that the people whom you called your life are still living through you. Most of all, you'll begin to understand that storms don't last forever. Getting out of bed in the morning is the first step to seeing all the love that life still has to offer."

She was right, and he was still coping with this. Eugene Fitzherbert, in his almost-whole state, was still adjusting to the fact that Rapunzel's life and death were immense parts of who he was. He was still adjusting to the fact that loving the shape of himself was a fight that he had to win if he wanted to live. Yet he had adjusted to the fact that loving one person didn't detract from his love for another.

He had adjusted to the fact that love was not a scale with points or a battle over whom he loved more because to create one was to misunderstand love's true shape. He had yet to adjust to the fact that marriage with someone new would be hard for a very long time. He may never be able to adjust to the fact that he will always, always miss Rapunzel's head on his chest.

"Mommy said she never left..."

No matter how many years passed, Rapunzel's rays would always be everywhere. She was the shape of Corona. She was the shape of what his life had become. She was the shape of Isolde's very soul. She was infinite.

However, memories made with Elsa were also everywhere. She was the shape of the union between Corona and Arendelle. She was the shape of what his life was becoming. She was the shape of Isolde's very future. She was iridescent.

The trick was becoming content with that intertwinement, and later smiling at the filigree it had formed.

"..." Eugene's smile broadened as he stared at the mural of him hugging Elsa. Tears climbed his eyelashes. He blinked them dry.

"What do you think we look like to Isolde?"

"Judging by her murals, I'd say, 'filigree.'"

Careful hands drew the blankets over Isolde's body and pulled off the ringlets feathering her smile. Love dripped from her father's eyes and splashed against her temple, leaving an Orion's Belt of tears in the shape of joy. Eugene kissed the constellation without kissing it away. He stood up to cherish her for being his opportunity to raise a child the way his parents had never raised him. The sunrise carried his feet out of his daughter's room and into his second wife's.

Elsa was bundled in sunlight with her head pillowed by her hair. One shoulder was bent around the shape of the sun. His gaze wandered down the curve of her nape and splayed across the wings of her back while she breathed lightly. Two of his favorite features on her were her shoulders. She had once hidden those shoulders under suede layers and layers of insecurities on coronation day, and even then, he had wondered what held them up.

Those shoulders have borne the weight of unimaginable responsibilities. They have borne the weight of isolation, loss, fear, hate, betrayal, death, and other people's lives, despite so many of their attempts to end hers. They have borne the weight of him. Those shoulders were pillars despite her minimization of their durability, and they still made him breathless when she bared their porcelain to the world without shame.

"Just don't forget that mine are also here for you to stand on."

"..."

"Deal?"

"...It's a deal."

Peeling his feet out of his slippers, Eugene slipped underneath Elsa's sheets to join her in the sunbath. His weight caused her to shift and wiggle, but the only body part that turned was her head. Her unpurpled eyelids didn't lift. Her unpainted lips stood open.

Eugene's soft blinks grew slower. His lips walked on her wings to cross the road from her nape to her cheek.

"Mmm~..." Elsa's body smiled.

Eugene could feel her body smiling by feeling her toes curl against his shins. The pink lips that petaled her mouth curled into the smile of a kitten having its chin tickled. As her adorkable face turned toward him, his thumb stroked her smile. Elsa hoisted her eyelids at half-mast to bare her heart to Eugene. Like sunlight shining through blue shards of glass, her eyes reflected the daybreak in his.

Without blinking or speaking, Elsa brushed the hair out of Eugene's face and tucked it behind his ear. She touched the corner of his jaw with her fingertips. Then she caressed. Shrank the distance between their noses. Closed her eyes.

Eugene leaned in to allow his lips to sit between hers. One of them sighed from being turned into water, but he didn't know who. Elsa's hand snaked under the back of his hair to bring him closer so that she could melt deeper. The sensation of her fingers flowing down his arm was more spine-tingling than anything flirtatious.

"Am I corrupting you?" Elsa teased in her feline tone, the delivery almost shy around the edges.

"Yeah, I..."―smack―"...I-I might be"―smack―"might be in need of..."―smack―"holy water, or"―smack―"Father Niemöller"―smack―"and, and quite possibly..." Frowning, Eugene kept his eyes shut for a moment. He shook his head. "...I lost my train of thought."

"Perfect."

Eugene's mouth sang from her laughing against his kiss. A final smack broke the spell's bind for good. As she pulled back, one of them sighed, and he was embarrassed to realize that it was him. Eugene opened his pleading eyes to her with his lips tucked under his teeth, silently begging for more kisses. Elsa smiled at him, sleepy-eyed and Rudolph-nosed.

She lowered his chin to seat a kiss between his eyes instead of his lips. It felt nice. Right. Eugene took her love into his arms and tucked his face into the curve of it. Her hands rested on the wings in his back, pressing him against that love.

Eugene drew in a breath. Inhaling her. Inhaling them. A piece of his heart was carved into the shape of Elsa, and it was a masterpiece that he would forever treasure.

"Did Rapunzel paint this one, too?"

"Yes. She did. She spent every sunrise painting it until it was finally finished. I never saw her more proud of a mural than she was of that one."

"...It's beautiful."

"It most certainly is."