Fairytale

Chapter Two: A Whole Package

┌── •✧• ──┐

She is dangerous when she is hurt. She can easily destroy everything around her, but she doesn't. Instead she destroys herself.

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Camilla, forever pragmatic, quashes any hope he has of them coming out in the open. She never agreed to it in the first place, but he had held out some faint (desperate and according to Anne, delusional) hope. Diana's pregnancy has closed that door, forever.

Maybe only for the time being, he tries to tell himself, but it is not a lie he still believes.

"I'm perfectly fine carrying on as we have been," she tells him, as if this is supposed to be some great balm and consolation for him.

They are living a lie, their marriages are both charades, he keeps reminding her over and over again, but Camilla never gets worked up about it, like he does. She isn't the type of woman that got worked up about anything.

One of the many ways in which she's not like his wife.

"Aren't you at all bothered about Andrew?"

His entire life has been defined by duality—the Prince of Wales on one side, Charles on the other—but for whatever reason, Camilla is far better at reconciling the two lives they're both living.

"Oh, yes—I was, once." He knew that full-well. Hadn't that been why she took up with him in the first place? As a ploy to make Andrew jealous—it hadn't even worked. The only one who'd ever been jealous between the three of them was him.

"I've got used to it, and anyway, it would be rather hypocritical to stay angry with him now. Andrew's not fussed about you and I."

He's never understood this—also, since when was hypocrisy a barrier to anything in this depressing situation? It certainly has no bearing on his feelings.

(Andrew and I aren't like you and Diana.)

"Are you bothered about your wife being unfaithful?"

That brief moment when he thought it wasn't his had been a sharp stab to the stomach, but that was about the child, not—the other thing.

He's not going to tell her that—but Camilla seems to know without being told.

"Your problem, darling," she tells him, sadly. "Is that you want it all the way, the whole package, everything."

Doesn't everyone, he asks her, naively.

"I mean—with only one of us." She sets down the cup of tea. "You'll never have it, and until you accept that—you'll be wretched."

To add insult to this wound, she actually has the temerity to advocate for Diana, to wish her well. Camilla knows about the ember (she knows everything) and she is hopeful that old wish of his will come true. She desires his happiness—even when it's not shared with her.

Charles decides he doesn't want it to be a girl.

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Diana tells him as soon as she knows, voice trembling with barely-concealed excitement. She's got the paper from the doctor with all the information on it, and she hands it to him like a grammar-school child who is proud of a high mark.