My blood buckled in my chest. I felt a cold, hard stone in the pit of my stomach, and the ground shaking from underneath my feet. The world seemed to spin all around me.
"H-h-h," I tried desperately to form words, "How come?"
Calahan gave a rueful, wry look, his ice-blue eyes glittering as if taken back in time.
"Your brother, Prince Edward. He's king of Andalasia right now, not Narissa, and a royal line goes through children, not siblings. The next ruler will be his child-"
"Though let's hope that never happens," he replied with a troubled and disturbed shake of his head.
"Not you," he finished.
My dark eyes welled up with tears.
"How could I not have known this?," I sobbed.
Now Calahan looked just as miserable as I was at the moment.
"Because villain families are like dandelions-fleeting and toxic," he whispered. "Blood ties are unrelated to love where we come from."
Tears filled his chilling ice-blue eyes, and a single one ran down his cheek.
I touched the milky skin of his cheek to wipe his tear, and a warm, burning sensation blazed through me. I could feel myself and the air obtaining a sudden heat.
His eyes widened, and his mouth opened to speak, but no words came out.
Somehow this intimate, sudden contact made everything worse. He turned away from me, blinking back tears. "We're made for all the wrong reasons," he whispered with a single sob.
"Calahan...my entire life I had believed that one day I would be queen. That one fact was sometimes all that got me through the day. Maybe I was lying to myself, but I clung to it like a sacred truth passed along generations, or a king's ransom of treasure that was coveted by pirates, or Fairy Godmother's wand. It's a part of who I am!"
He turned slowly to look into my glittering eyes.
"Every day when crowds knocked me to the ground, I told myself, and them, that one day they would have to make way. Every day when my mother called me worthless, I told myself that one day I would be her superior. But I believed her! I honestly believed her for so long, and the one thing that changed that was my position as future queen!
And now, if what you're saying is correct, you mean that Narissa was right, that I am of no importance or power, as I believed, but truly am worthless?"
I let out a cry to shake the earth, shivering violently before collapsing into Calahan's arms.
"Gone is the high-maintenance, stately, and power-hungry princess, replaced with a vulnerable, ridiculed child. It only makes me want to protect you," Calahan said sweetly- sort of, "It's not what you are, Clarissa. It's what you have the power in you to do."
"I have the power in me to do a whole heck of a lot. That's the problem!," I wailed in desperate resignation.
After that, we were both silent in each other's arms for the rest of the period, and I could feel my sadness carry that of his and vice versa.
I began to feel a deep-seated affinity for Calahan Frollo.
Every single one of my relationships with anyone else was equal parts argument, sadness, and joy. With Calahan, I could be the wicked, baneful queen. I could say and do all the things I feel overwhelming guilt for, be the villain I'm scared of becoming, and he wouldn't care. He would accept me exactly the way I am.
In fact, thinking back, he already has.
All my sadness, all my guilt, would be accepted and even help us reach a point of sympathy and intimacy.
But it's not the happy ending I dreamt of back on the Isle.
Not even close.