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"Patience is not simply the ability to wait.
It's about how we behave while we're waiting."

―Joyce Meyer

He never looked away from her on his birthdays. She was used to wearing his gaze on her smile while she read to Isolde under the stars in his eyes. Gone were their ministers, banquets, papers, and politics tonight, but the priority that had not decamped was their attention to Isolde. Adventuring in bedtime fables was how they appeased the princess who sunned their marriage. Sleep would often reach her eyes before Elsa could reach "The End," and then Elsa would shelve the fairy tale to kiss its princess goodnight.

When Elsa pulled back this time, she found Eugene smiling at her with love curled on his lips. She had stopped looking away from that love by smiling back instead of down. His hand found her hand across the small knees that separated them. Together, their hands drew the blankets over those knees. They pulled off the curls tickling the sleeper's smile and tucked Sir Jorgenbjorgen under her arm.

Elsa planted a kiss on the back of her ear. Eugene planted another on top of her scalp. Both stood up to cherish their redheaded opportunity to raise a child with the self-esteem that their parents had never been able to raise them with. Isolde rolled over, tugging the blankets with her, and happily nuzzled Sir Jorgenbjorgen's chest. Elsa blew out her candles with the swoosh of her magical hand; Eugene closed the bedroom door behind them with the carefulness of his.

Elsa's hand touched the point on Isolde's door where Corona's golden sun rays held the arms of Arendelle's golden crocus. Her heart sighed under her other hand as she hoped for these star-kissed nights to always be even though she knew that Isolde was outgrowing them by the inch. She looked to the sun-drop's father for comfort, but he was looking at her like it was the first and last time that he would ever see the crystals in her hair or the blue sky in her eyes.

Elsa's hand made a soft bed for his cheek. "Eugene, what's wrong?" the question trembled off her lips as a half-laugh to keep him from reading it as alarm, which would only trigger him to dulcify her.

Eugene's smile told a lie before his tongue did. "Nothing." He blinked wistfully. "It's nothing. I was just..."

Elsa was patient.

Eugene's shoulders sank. His eyes were wet windows into the truth, yet still, he lied with the loveliest of smiles, "Taking you in..."

Elsa's smile lied about believing him. She looked down at his beard bluely, stroking the bib of hair with her fingertips. Eugene held her hand in place for a kiss that said he missed her despite her having never left. Cupping his breath inside her palm was like cupping sunshine in winter. Her smile now, no matter how bittersweet, was genuine.

Elsa turned Eugene's face towards hers. She used her opposite hand to run the back of her fingers through his fringe, stroking it away from his eyelashes without disrupting its freedom to be untamed. He took his time with opening his eyes. The stars in their night sky flashed and flickered. She searched those constellations for the reason behind his mood.

"Your...expertise wouldn't lie in...freezing time by any chance, would it?" Eugene joked under his breath.

Fear, Elsa pinpointed. He was afraid of losing what he thought was a perfect moment in time. Lose it they may, but that was a lesson he had to learn. "Happily ever after" was the man-made ending of a fairy tale. Real life was capricious. What they could hold onto was the knowledge that they had loved once upon a wrinkle in time.

Elsa hung her gaze on Eugene's yellow sash. It was a gaze that was as wistful as his had been. "Nothing is meant to last forever," she started, too unromantically pragmatic for her own good.

Eugene bent his knees so that he was looking into her eyes playfully. "But we can always dream, can't we?" he proposed, trying to ginger them up.

The faint sound that Elsa made was a hybrid of a sigh and a snort. She closed her eyes and turned her head, smiling from nothing more than endearment for him, as well as an ounce of pity.

Eugene drew her back to him by the chin, but her eyes didn't open until he asked with a tinge of desperation, "Maybe...just a little?"

Elsa smiled at the curve of his lips. Every beating vein in her heart told her that she needed to tell him for the purpose of circling them back to what was important: "I love you very, very much, Eugene." Then she remembered that it was better to express her feelings than it was to verbalize them. Elsa rested her eyelashes on her rosy cheeks and craned her neck, her face smooth with love. Her smile hovered in front of his mouth.

Eugene lightly puckered his lips against that smile, caressing the back of Elsa's hair as he did. His kiss was closed and peaceful. She leaned into his warm caress by cocking her head, content to feel his sun-glow bleeding through her bone marrow and goldening her heart. Such heliotherapy from the Magic Golden Flower could only be described as an astral projection that fountained her into the sun. Before she was no more, she pulled back and released a hot plume of breath against his throat.

Elsa's forehead found rest on Eugene's cheek for a spell. Her face was dewy and red from an onrushing fever that soothed her instead of burning her. Her fingers trembled down his bobbing chest to settle on the location of his old knife wound, where vestigial sun-glow still flowered. Through telepathy, its residual energy planted in her mind a heartbreaking image of Eugene's death at the hands of Gothel. Elsa whimpered as her startled fingers gripped his doublet.

Elsa felt beefy lips moving against her bangs as her name fell into her hair like a secret. The sound of it was so deep and seismic that it made goosebumps stand on her skin.

Eugene's thumb rubbed her knuckles. "Elsa, listen to me..."

Elsa peeled her sticky forehead off his jowl to gaze into his face with runny eyes.

Eugene's touch traveled up her arms to hold shoulders that were petite enough to be swallowed by his palms. "I love you." The side of his finger caught a teardrop under her eye. His hand made a soft bed for her cheek while his thumb cleaned up the wetness glistening on her face. "And I swear to you that I'll make up all those nights you spent alone if you'll allow me to."

Shame infested and skewed Elsa's perception of what he was saying. On cue, she believed that she was to blame for having made him feel guilty. She hastened to amend these familiar thoughts by telling herself as lovingly as she could that this was not about her. This was about him and his journey to finding his comfort zone within their marriage, which she could not take responsibility for. Headlocked by two different perspectives, she was only vaguely aware of him elevating her chin to tell her:

"That's a promise that I intend to keep."

It was a loaded promise, as it had always been, but she knew what it meant despite her request for him to retract it. She knew that he yearned to chocolate their nights with the romance July and August had eaten even if she did not need more than a chess game, banter, and two mouthfuls of laughter between sips of cider. She also knew that tonight wouldn't be the night. Tonight would be for staring at the canopy that skied her bed while the moon fed on her face. It would be for breathing in the memory of Eau de Cologne while the wearer was holding audience with Red the Piratress in his study.

Then that wearer would see Elsa off to Arendelle at first light, where their marriage would be reduced to perfumed letters for the weeks to come. They would write at length about "Project Smile," and how popular Isolde was among the organization's disabled children. They would debate at length about the fertilization of their colonies on Motunui Island and her sister holms. They would discuss the merits and demerits of upcoming state dinners with little verve. What she had neither expected nor calendared were the instructions she received from his latest letter, wherein he asked her to entertain an image of him smooching her in the Council Chamber while her ministers yammered.

Other instructions were written that made her blush, and among them was a mortifying mandate that Elsa could not read back to herself without holding her hot throat. Her flustered mind projected an apparition of Eugene standing over her from behind with his palms on her desk as she digested his letter. She visualized him kissing her hair―

"Your Majesty?"

Elsa's gasp was companioned by a thump. She held her throbbing shin and hissed in pain, peeling an eye open to grunt at her accursed desk.

"Is...everything alright, Your Majesty?" Kai inquired behind her study's door.

"A-Ah...!" Elsa scrambled to get herself together. "Ahem. Yes." Papers crackled. Drawers groaned. "Everything's perfect!"

When the night came for romance behind the doors of their private mansion in Corona's countryside, Elsa knew it was too soon. She knew because Eugene tripped over his shoes when he was trying to present her with a rose. She knew because he dropped his fork accidentally when he was trying to introduce a piece of shrimp to her awkwardly opening mouth. She knew because he almost set himself on fire when he tried to snuff out their candles. She knew because his sigh was deep when the room had grown dark after the last candle had been blown out by her.

She knew because his lips roamed the kingdom of her face with an absent heart. His affection for her sank like a ship that couldn't sail due to a crack in the hull. Elsa's confidence drowned the more he attempted to fix the atmosphere. When her discomfort grew too great, he finally pulled away to explain that no part of her was at fault; he simply had too much cargo on his mind. He promised that he would recompense her with a romantic evening in Arendelle, but she answered by retreating to her room to stare at the canopy that skied her bed.

There was no deepening of their marriage that night. Apologies and reassurances fell on deaf ears. To bed they went, empty yet full in body and mind. Elsa laid curled up on her side, having rejected Eugene's need to embrace her from behind by staying as still as cold water in those sun-warm arms. She couldn't be moved to let go when her pessimism was on top of her; habit wired her to shut down for self-preservation, the pearl inside the clam having been evermore vulnerable to her ocean's ebbs and flows.

Eugene tried to pet the side of her throat with his remorse. He tried to drag moonlit strands off her purple eyelids to breathe against her temple, "I'm sorry, Elsa; I truly am." No matter how careful he was not to rip her paper skin, she stayed curled up on her side like a child sleeping in the snow.

Elsa told him quietly, with the softest, most apologetic tone she could muster, that she wanted to be alone. At the same amount of time it would take for an earthbound bee to die, Eugene peeled off her body and laid on his back. He stared at the canopy that skied her bed, letting the moon feed on his face. She felt the bed seesaw as he maneuvered around to sit on the edge of it. His sigh was louder than her heartbreak.

Picking up his nightshirt, he stood on his bare feet and faced her gowned back. He reminded her that he loved her, and proved as much by respecting her space. She was so preoccupied with the magnification of her self-reproach that she missed her chance to remind him that she loved him, too.

Footnote:

In this universe, the Magic Golden Flower was using all of its energy to keep Eugene's soul attached to his body. It could not heal anyone else, but it did have a special bond with Elsa's powers beyond what CMA showed.