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Chapter Text

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He never looked at her on Rapunzel's birthdays. She was used to staring at his back in the dark, trying to make out the shape of his pain from her tear-stained pillow. The deepest hole in his heart was carved into the shape of Rapunzel, and it was a hole that she would never fill. Her interest, therefore, lay not in the filling, but in the healing, and if not the healing, then leastways the trying. Gone were her uncle, aunt, and beloved cousin, but the beloveds whom she had not lost were two children and a wife. 

Tonight, she tried to caress the back of his head with her compassion. She tried to drag syrupy strands off his moist eyelids to stroke his temple with her understanding. She tried to slide her hand up his wrist to fill in the blanks between his fingers with, "You're not alone." No matter how careful she was not to break him, he stayed curled up on his side like a child sleeping in the snow. The tears began to rain harder, drizzling down his cheeks and brining her wrist with their salt water; the depressions in his pillow began to sink deeper, molding themselves into the shape of his crying face.

Despair dropped from her eyes and splashed on his cheek, leaving an Orion's Belt of tears in the shape of grief. She pressed her cheek against his temple and curled around him until he was wearing her like armor. Sometimes, he'd roll over and fit himself inside her life. At other times, he'd sob until he was breathless from breaking his bones. Most of the time, he wouldn’t stay to see the sunrise bronze the kingdom. She had to swim through blankets that were still warm from his body heat and stroll down by the docks, where she'd find him placing primroses on the moon-kissed sea from his gondola.

"This place is important, isn't it?"

"Yeah," he once said with a congested little breath. "Very much."

This place was their place.

Their special memory.

Their seascape for new beginnings and star-kissed dreams of ever after.

This place was their outer space to relive a cosmic moment that was forever frozen in time, untarnished by her. She used to be afraid that one day he would refuse to eat in the mornings, only using oxygen to croak about how much she looked like her when the sun hit her face just right, how miserably the pink blossoms in her braid reminded him of that night with the floating lights, or how strongly he'd prefer it if her voice sounded breathy instead of shaky when she sang. She used to wait for him to insist that if she smiled "humongously" wide, he could blot out the rest of her and pretend that she was made of sun rays instead of snowflakes. She used to pray for him to find love in the honey-blonde servant who loved him because she swore that he would never find it in their marriage of convenience. She used to tell herself that she must have been an evil little substitute―this insignificant stand-in who embodied rime instead of sunshine.

Today, she told herself that she was the cool water he needed after years spent in a desert with scorpions that had taken the shape of politicians. She reminded herself that she was the cryotherapy he sought after years spent asunder in a queenless kingdom with famine and disease. She knew that she was a woman whose warmth from within could thaw others from without because she was more than sleet and folded hands. He had told her that once: 

"I never wanted Rapunzel to feel like I defined her by her hair, powers, or tiara for that reason; she doesn't need magic or tiaras to make her special. It takes the 'human' part away, or more importantly, the 'Rapunzel' part. The next time someone comes along who isn't interested in you because of your powers, your crown, or their definition of 'perfection,' you'll know that he's the better option because he won't be treating you like the only thing you're made out of is magic. To that guy, you'll also have cells, organs, and blood running through your veins. You'll just be 'Elsa.'" 

To her, he was just Eugene. No longer her cousin's widower, her affine, her inheritance, or even her obligation, the grinner with the chocolate fondue hair had outgrown the boxes that once defined them. He had become a whole person without classification or circumference, but he also became transparent. She had told him once upon a time that she was certain―positively sure―that he had lived his life in isolation until Rapunzel's frying pan banged against his bars. She had been sure that he had made a deal with himself to remain smirking until he could no longer feel how it hurt to know that no one cared to peer deeper than his untainted skin, where a miner might find him trapped inside his childhood, alone and afraid of what it meant to be himself.

She was still sure because he still did not like to have what was left of his cakey mask peeled back by "snollygosters." She intuited his need to withdraw into his safe place, which—as unbreathable as it sounded—was not nearly as small and unpeopled as it used to be. He came off upbeat and charismatic when he tolerated nobility, so honey-spoken and gratingly pithy if he forgot that glib speech was Flynn's shield, not Eugene's. Alas, some defense mechanisms were irreversible for repenters like themselves. Yet he was sensitive and would grant the type of kindness that actually meant something if the grantee was short on kindnesses.

He was a champion for the unseen society―the poor and the orphaned society―and loved children like he was their universal uncle. He was a riverhead of experience that seasoned her fishbowl world with the unheard and the untaught. He was hungry for literature and had appointed himself to the "Office of Broadening Her Majesty's Horizons with Underrepresented Authors," whom she'd wagoned into her schoolhouses erelong. He supported her work in civil rights, foster care, children's disability programs, penology, and criminal recidivism because he understood what she understood. He could network with the gift of gab that she lacked, could chart his own stars on the map of politics if prospects weren't shining brightly enough in his spyglass, and dared to read her emotions with the perspicacity of a weather forecaster.

He did not, unlike most men of the epoch, try to conquer and colonize her. His charm, patience, and ease, goldened with balanced perspectives on bigger pictures and a motto to make lemonade out of lemons, sometimes soothed her micro-thinking mind half as well as his foot rubs did. He had sacrificed himself and died in so very many ways for love, but what she loved was his love for Rapunzel and the family she had given him. She loved his capacity to love deeply―the endless enlargement of a once unused and misguided heart that had been waiting―desperately waiting―to love someone since he was a boy. She had wanted his heart to let the world rush in―even if that meant being broken in―and become enveloped by not only its love, but his love for himself.

She had wanted him to allow that love to fill and expand him as she had by loving Anna and life's allness. On his best days, as he looked heavenwards with the sunrise haloing his crown, he held the timeless beauty of a king. These were eleven of Eugene's strengths. It was when he was alone with his thoughts on his worst days that those strengths decayed. She stayed away on the night that belonged to Rapunzel, and he stayed adrift.

Closer to dawn, he reopened, inch by inch, letting a slit of sunlight fall onto her face as his door widened. Gradually, he stepped out of his own shadow. A trembling touch on his knuckles unfolded into a firm squeeze on his hand, and then, she pulled. Shadows and sunlight walked across their wrists in a pattern of bars as she guided him down the corridor and through another open door. Together, they walked across the grass of Rapunzel's burial ground.

Her marble effigy had been carved with a smile that slept between the effigies of her parents, for a smile was what she had left the world in. Eugene rested a bouquet of yellow lilies on Rapunzel's heart and took a breath to hold back his tears. She conjured her own bouquet of frost lilies and placed them by Rapunzel's head with care.

"..."

"..."

Eugene's hand found the road back to hers. She reciprocated his grip as the wind stung their eyes.

"I love you." 

"I love you, too."

Rapunzel continued to smile at them. Eugene looked at Elsa when she looked at him. They both smiled at each other with the warmth of the breaking dawn before smiling at Rapunzel. Eugene sighed, trembling. Elsa squeezed his hand tighter. 

A different man greeted Elsa at midnight with one of those warm hugs she loved, trembling less this time than the nights before. She never meant to sigh, but her breath, which was always much hotter than the average person's under this insolation, blew against his hair. Between their bellies burned a sun enwombed by his soul, and it was a sun that always made her entrails pulpier than it made her magic. Try as she might to stay awake, she never did.

Eugene's fingertips left her back to span across her shoulders, go down her arms, and squeeze her elbows. It took him peeling her off his sun-warm body for Elsa to open her eyes and decrypt the message in his. "Thank you." He smiled. "For always waiting for me, even though I don't have the most trackable lunar phase cycle," his eyes added.

Her eyes lit up like fireflies as they smiled at every part of his face. Sand-warm fingers crept up her nape and pulled her braid off her shoulder, resting it on her back.

Elsa looked down, still smiling. "I made a promise." She looked up at Eugene once she could, but her eyes were wearing tears, and her lips were wearing his eyes. "In good times and in bad, in sickness and in health..."

"I will love you and honor you all the days of―my―life," someone trolled. 

Elsa and Eugene parted to find the soloist.

Olaf stood in the doorway with his clasped hands swaying from side to side. His giggle was a fat man's giggle as he squealed, "I love that part!"

"Oh―laf..." Their duet featured one tone that was tearfully laughing from endearment and another that was drawling from exhaustion.