CURSEGRANTED
it pains ella, to see him struggle like this. she can’t imagine the confusion it must face him with, to know that someone has tried to harm you for so long, and yet still feel a sense of familial duty to them - still love them. char’s heart is bigger than edgar ever deserved. she rises then, moves towards him and sinks down before him, close enough to touch, close enough to run her thumb gently across the line between his brows, as though she can smooth it out.
❛ i’m sorry, for making you think of it. ❜ though perhaps he needs to ; perhaps he needs to examine the feeling he has in opposition to the things edgar has done. then again, perhaps it isn’t ella’s place to decide what char should and shouldn’t do when it comes to his relationship with edgar. besides, she only really saw the tail end of it, when things were hostile and awful. she knows nothing, truly, of what edgar was like when char was a child. ❛ do they feel like two different people? the man who raised you and the man you knew later? ❜
he’s grateful for her proximity, grateful to be near and to have ella with him, to not have to go through with this on his own. he can’t imagine what life might be like, having to rule the kingdom without someone as steadfast and concerned with justice as ella. furthermore, he can’t imagine what might have happened had the kingdom fallen into his uncle’s hands, due to char’s own untimely death.
but he can’t think of that. he can’t dwell in possibilities that did not come to fruition. “i suppose i’ve seen glimpses of his true nature as i was growing up.” char is the one to finally bridge the distance between them, light fingers ghosting over the ella’s collarbone, brushing the chain to her mother’s necklace. “it’s much easier to try and believe it was something like grief that could have turned him into such a man, but what he did to -- to my father.” char pitches his eyes down. “it was jealousy that turned him into a monster. greed. he was unfit for this crown, for any crown.”
