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"The real metric by which we can gauge the authenticity of love
is not how close we want to be,
how merged and intermingled,
but how far we can stand apart and still be together."

―Frank Tallis

Midnight found Elsa at Eugene's bedroom door. Exhaling anxiety and inhaling courage, she beseeched the heavens above the chandeliered ceiling to give her strength. Around she turned, unclasping her anxious hands to knock on the embossed sun emblem with one. Her anxiety rose when she saw the ceramic door knob rotate. Bravery promoted her gaze to the door's opener.

The widening gap revealed Eugene's kind face in the soft blue darkness. "Elsa," he whispered, short-winded from surprise. His relief was audible.

Eugene's uncompromising kindness rekindled in her heart a familiar flame of shame, and candled within that shame, thoughts of insignificance. Elsa tried to remind herself that she was deserving of his kindness.

Eugene went to her, overtaken by emotion. "Elsa, I―"

Elsa's hand went up by instinct, the closed fingers trembling within. Eugene stopped, heavyhearted and confused. Although she had persuaded herself to believe that she was deserving of his kindness, she knew that she must earn his forgiveness.

Elsa slipped her hand back inside its sister's grip and looked up at him. "I owe you an apology," she stated as if she was her own parent.

Eugene closed his mouth slowly, blinking with understanding in his eyes.

The words that stepped out of Elsa's mouth were not clumsy, but they wobbled like the legs of a newborn fawn: "I didn't mean to be so distant tonight..."

"I just...made you feel like you weren't wanted by me," Eugene finished for her, changing the apology into a smite against him, "and haven't been wanted by me more times than when you were sure that you were."

Shock dewed Elsa's eyes, glistening from the corners of them. Her sightline shifted from being of her closed hands to being of her husband. Eugene gazed at her like a puppy who was desperate for love, shelter, and a hug. He stepped closer. She beheld him.

Boot spurs were heard at the end of the hallway, pulling Elsa out of the moment and into the present. She and Eugene studied the hunchbacked shadow spidering up the wall. A body made of flesh and blood slugged around the corner with a torch in its hand. Upon seeing Their Majesties, the identified guardsman clicked his heels together and saluted them. His address was ungainly, as inelegant as his interference, but neither throne bearer crucified him.

Somewhere between enquiring about the wellness of his night and his constitution, Eugene asked the man how "the wife and kids" were doing, addressing him by first name to denounce classism. The man's reply was styled formally. Elsa wished him a safe night and good health, blessing his family with the same. He accepted her corsage of kindness with his fancy.

On the patroller's way back to the corridor whence he came, Eugene lowered his face to whisper longingly to Elsa's profile, "Come inside with me."

Elsa's eyes widened by a fraction. She touched the front of her sky blue peignoir, debating.

"Elsa?" Eugene's hope for rapprochement petered out. "Is...that alright?"

Elsa closed the petals of her sheer robe's collar. She finally turned her head to him. "I think it would be better if we slept separately tonight."

"Elsa, I just want to talk about what happened for only a moment."

Elsa mellowed. Concentrated communication had always been their linchpin. She nodded in approval. Needing nothing more than her body language, Eugene honored her assent by stepping aside. He waited for the entire length of her sparkling sheer train to slither inside his room before closing the door behind her.

Elsa's slippered feet wrinkled the sun rugging Eugene's floor. Shadows and moonlight walked across her face in a pattern of bars. Aglitter with ice crystals from curl to gown, she drifted into the glade of moon-glow produced by his window. His bookcase called to her. Between a star map and a mounted globe, she spotted the scintillating cover of an adventure novel that had been sleeping on his Davenport desk for days.

The female protagonist whom Elsa touched was embowered in frost flowers and Stargazer lilies that intertwined. Between her hands hovered a heart made of sunlight. Loops and whorls curled her hair and gown into filigree, echoing the shape of her winter magic. She smiled at her admirer with closed eyes and ruby cheeks. Elsa smiled back.

Elsa's palm balanced the book by the spine as she opened its adventure to the first page. She turned to Eugene without tearing her attention off the heart-warmer. "You never were able to find a sequel for her, were you?" she bittersweetly dredged up.

Eugene nervously pressed on the skin between his thumb and his forefinger. His posture perked up, but Elsa knew by the music of his voice that his buoyancy was an act. "Actually"―he presented his bookshelf to her like a showcaser―"I've got a whole odyssey lined up for the next saga to come. Of course," he added behind the back of his hand, "an author never leaks his own spoilers. "

Elsa's eye roll was sweetened by her smile. Pages fluttered as she opened the book wider for Eugene to see all of the illustrations of her. After turning her head back to him, she cocked her eyebrow and flavored her teasing remark with a smirk, "Not even to his muse?"

Eugene took her chin. "Especially...not to his muse."

Elsa's slow blink was followed by a weak smile. Shyly, her smile fell to the novel, whose face she had pressed against her heart. The smile died like a rose as the silence watered her shame. She didn't initiate eye contact with Eugene when she lamented, "I really ruined tonight, didn't I?" The sight of Eugene's hand peeling hers off the novel's spine moved her not.

"Elsa, you?" Eugene paused to heat her knuckles with a kiss and then stroked their porcelain crowns with a caress that was as loving as his gaze. "Couldn't have ruined tonight if you tried." A hint of hamming lit his eyes as they rolled over her shimmery appearance. "Especially not in this stelliferous ensemble."

Elsa remained uncharmed, if not inconsolable. She was wound too tightly around herself to be pried open by Eugene's persuasions.

Eugene, taking note of such, decided to meet her on her level: "I'm the one responsible for ruining tonight."

This, Elsa wasn't quick to combat, but she drummed up one million pardons in her head―"Eugene, you needed more time to yourself; it's not my place to be selfish; I apologize for putting us both in this position from the beginning"―and immediately, she was left with stomping on the brakes to stop her thoughts from bicycling into a dangerous direction. She reminded herself, before she could bike down the rabbit hole and break her ankle, that they could never crawl back to how and who they once were to one another. She reminded herself that Rapunzel had begged her to fight for love instead of run, because―

"I swear to you that Eugene needs this, Elsa."

"I had it all planned out," Elsa suddenly heard Eugene mourning. He was sitting on the edge of his upholstered bed with his wrists dangling off his knees. "The scented candles, the Lerkekåsa wine...the rose petals on the floor, and...the ceramic strawberry bowls sitting next to the chocolate fondue for dessert," he just about whimpered.

Elsa managed a sympathetic smile. She took her place beside him to listen.

The face that Eugene gave her belonged to a man who was just discovering his own clockwork. "But I wasn't there...my head, it...just wasn't in it..."

Elsa's mind altered "head" to "heart."

Sensing her distance, Eugene panicked. "And I, I owed it to you to be there, Elsa. I did." Squeezing the folded hands on her lap was his way of keeping her soul there with him, in the room. "I wanted to be. I thought I was. And I had already spent weeks upon weeks upon weeks building us up to that one, perfect moment in time that...turned out to be...not so perfect because of me."

Elsa's heart went out to Eugene. He was so preoccupied with the magnification of his self-reproach that he forgot that she loved him.

Eugene retracted, and she missed the warmth from his sunset hands. More time was taken before he could speak again. "I should've just talked to you before I tried to make up for checking out tonight," he realized at long last. "You've been through a lot with me, and I wanted to prove in any way that I could that it hasn't all been in vain. Doing 'us' things―doing them with you, I want that back."

Like a cloud, Elsa's cool hand rested on his warm knuckles, creating the perfect temperature. "Eugene..."

He raised his head, gazing back at her like a puppy who was desperate for love, shelter, and a hug.

Ever the soft speaker, Elsa tried to explain to him that she understood, and always had, "If you know you're not ready for something, there's no reason to pretend with me that you are. I don't need rose petals and scented candles to feel closer to you for a night," she leveled. "Romance isn't the end-all-be-all of our time together."

"Well, no...it's...sort of in the contract," Eugene lightly jested. "Of course, not that I don't enjoy being with you," he amended. Lovesickness dripped into that amendment. "I enjoy every moment that I'm allowed to have with you, Elsa."

She chose to say that she believed him even though he was choosing to look at their relationship through tunnel vision.

"And I wanted..." Eugene couldn't find his voice anymore. He was lost in her face.

Elsa hoped that her expression prompted him to continue.

He did so by sighing dramatically. "I just wanted to make tonight last both of us throughout the months. That's all it really boils down to."

A breathy laugh bubbled up from Elsa's chest.

Eugene blinked cluelessly. "What's so side-splitting, if you don't mind my asking?"

Elsa cleared her throat to share, "Speaking of that..."

"Ah-huh?"

Elsa shut her eyes tightly before cracking one open for him. "'I want you to imagine me smooching you to death while Minister Solberg is talking your ears off?'" Though she was smiling, her entire expression embodied a cringe.

Recognition flooded Eugene's as his mouth opened like a Koi fish's. He made a round of attempts to close it, but they came with his face trying to find a comfortable position in his palm. "Um! About that...that was, um..."

"A bit much for me."

Eugene tucked his hands under his armpits. "I was just, t'ah...exercising a little bit of creative tongue verse, so to speak! Was tryna spice things up a bit till I got back in the picture frame, which, to my knowledge, has officially been shattered and burned."

"I never said I loathed it," Elsa confessed, not wanting to restrict his nonphysical outlets.

Eugene sucked in his lips before releasing them with a pop. "Yooou...didn't?" His response implied that he had a hard time believing her.

"Just..." Elsa searched for the words. "Give me a warning, next time, please? So that I'm not...stuck in my study, subjected to―"

"Envoys with impeccable timing. Got it."

They both smiled at each other before looking down at their hands. His fidgeted. Hers laid still.

"..."

"..."

"So," Eugene recommenced, "you and PDA, huh?"

"...Eu-gene, we're not 'smooching to death' in the Council Chamber," Elsa dryly canceled.

"Why not? It'll be a bonding moment! One for the books. A little adventure; a little―"

"You've completely lost your mind, haven't you?"

Eugene chuckled. "I was joking, Your Royal Majesty." He slapped his thighs and stood up, lighting a candelabrum on his fireplace mantel.

One of Elsa's eyebrows climbed higher than the other when he faced her with a different demeanor.

"But, t'ah...there is something that I have in mind for us before the night comes to its inevitable end."

Elsa showed caution. "What's that?"

Eugene wagged his eyebrows.

"..."

"..."

"That was perfect," the next hour heard Elsa sighing.

"Mm." Eugene nodded. "Mm-HM." He gulped down his pastry and licked his lips. "Oh yeah. That hit the spot."

"Was it good?"

"Good? It was spec-TAC-ular!"

"Wasn't it?" Elsa breathlessly agreed.

They cleared the glass-domed pastry platter on Eugene's one-legged table, not leaving a single crumb behind. The silence that bred from two bellies full of satisfaction was pleasant. Elsa dabbed the corners of her smile with a napkin while Eugene relaxed on his bed with his fingers laced across his stomach.

"Would it be too much to ask for you to stay here with me tonight?" Eugene murmured to the ceiling, unsure of the sensibility in his request.

In the background blurred by his peripheral vision, Elsa was shedding her sheer robe.

Eugene kept babbling to the ceiling, "We could...just hold each other, or..."

Elsa draped her robe across his chair and peeled her feet out of her slippers.

"I could lie here and...just stare at you all night...in a totally non-creepy fashion. Okay, so that sounded a little if not highly creepy, but you get my point, right?" Eugene stopped talking once he felt the bed sink and shift. He turned his head, lifting it off the mattress to stare at Elsa lying beside him with love curled on her lips. "Oh." He rolled over and propped his head up with his hand to drink her in like mulled wine. "Ello, dawling. Fancy meeting"―he tapered off when she touched his lips with the bridges of her smile―"you here..."

Elsa quieted Eugene with a kiss that was closed and peaceful. Before he was no more, she pulled away and stroked the bib of hair on his chin with her fingertips. She watched the candlelight bob against his face, gingering his complexion and setting his soft pupils on fire. Unlike other nights tinted blue by the memory of Rapunzel, he didn't look down at her hands and stroke the bridges with his raisiny thumbs as he reeled off an appreciation speech. He didn't tell her through a spate of stammers that he was beyond grateful for her commitment to him even though he had, "never been an expert at keeping people."

Eugene held Elsa with his eyes as his palm made a warm home for her cheek. He rubbed the baby fat marshmallowing that cheek with his thumb. She kept his hand in place for a kiss that said she'd miss him very much. Pressing his hand against her lips was like pressing the sun against her mouth. His lips found rest on Elsa's forehead for a spell; then her eyebrow, puckering harder.

Strong arms came around her and drew her into him. She could feel his heavy sigh tingling her scalp due to his nose being deep in her hair. He was desperate to cling to this moment in time because nothing for them lasted forever. Elsa helped Eugene dream a little by reciprocating his embrace.

This small action was all it took to lull him to sleep. She broke away to lie on her back and frown at the ceiling, making a bed for Eugene's cheek with her chest. Perhaps she could have been more honest by admitting that she still wanted to be alone tonight. Perhaps she could have confessed that she was still, rather clumsily, learning how to love and be loved by him.

Perhaps this moment was enough.