Ω — "Your father sounds like somebody I would get along with." She answered softly, with the smile to go with it. She could have also made a comment on how having the chickens for dinner the following nights and the eggs for breakfast in the mornings had made her happy though perhaps that was a dark. Or in her opinion it was, at the very least. "You, on the other hand, don’t seem to hold such a belief? Or do you just choose not to practice it as vigorously as he had?" Malvolio did, after all, seem more inclined to snark at those around him and provide slightly humorous truths rather than indulge a person’s good mood.
"Maybe so, at the very least I can leave my chambers without them." The door had a latch on the inside, but not on the outside to prevent people from coming in uninvited or without keys such as the ones her handmaidens and the Queen herself possessed. It was an attribute of all the royal bedchambers in the palace that was mostly likely added due to the possibility to surprise attacks from neighboring kingdoms. "Fortunately I do not have to stand through their dressing me — that is a skill I learnt on my own.” Snow White stated, pinching the bridge of her nose and sighing tiredly before starting to pull hairpins and ribbons from her hair until there was a small pile of gold and red silk on her desk and her hair cascaded down her back and framed her face like a dark curtain.
Rising from the desk, she proceeded to retrieve a nightgown from her armoire (a gift Aidan’s mother had given her when she was younger, hand carved and sent to the castle by ship from Tabor) and draping it over the top of a divider before stepping behind it as she unlaced the bodice of her dress. “When I imagined getting married it didn’t involve monarchs from across the sea coming to witness it, nor did I picture a parade.” She admitted as velvet and satin gathered at her feet, followed by a cotton gown before she took the nightgown “A simply ceremony at Maricwater was probably the grandest of my ideas.”
The Queen might have withheld information on Anthony less than an hour beforehand, though now she felt that perhaps it was appropriate “Anthony certainly liked the idea. He wasn’t one for extravagance — we grew up together in the city when my mother was still a seamstress. His father was a huntsman, a profession he later adopted as well after my mother, sister and I came here.” And now she stepped out from behind the divider, dressed for bed and brushing her hair and standing by the fire, looking into it as if it were some kind of way for her to see her own past as she retold it “When my mother died, he was there for me, and my sister. Not Aidan. When my sister was sent away by Kristoff, he was there again. He was even Callista’s first attempt at murdering me — she asked him to commit the deed without realizing our prior experiences — he helped me escape.”
If the Queen’s affections for her now absent huntsman were unclear before, the tone of her voice and the fact that she was so focused on the story would have certainly given it away.
"I imagine that if my mother had never married the King,
my sister would still be here and tomorrow may have
very well been our wedding day instead…”
"I've seldom met anyone who didn't get along with him--he was just that sort of person." A rather surreal thing to say, given that it had been quite some time since Malvolio had last given any thought to Helios, or Luce, or anyone aside from Lo that he'd known prior to becoming what he now was. It seemed...removed from him. As though they were someone else's memories entirely, and in a way, he supposed they were. "I don't hold to it quite as steadfastly as he might have liked. Perhaps I'm just not as good a person." No perhaps about it--solid fact, not something he'd lie about in a hurry. It wasn't hard to be less than the most genuinely kind person he'd ever encountered.
"I can't imagine the benefits of having someone to do everything for you--which is saying something, given my predisposition to...inertia." Possibly the most ridiculous, over the top way of stating that he was downright lazy at times that he had ever uttered out loud, but the brief smile tugging at his lips hinted it was all in jest. "Especially when that person is meant to be a leader--I'm not sure I'd trust someone who cannot even dress themselves to run a country."
Of course, all manner of teasing fell away rather quickly. It was beginning to become the norm between the two of them, to switch between the most inconsequential and the most serious topics rapidly enough for it almost to be worrying. Most of what she said wasn't anything he hadn't heard before--or hadn't guessed based on what he had seen. At least in his company, she had made no secret of her reluctance to be married to Aidan ( who he still didn't know the first thing about, and quite honestly, wasn't sure he really wanted to ). "Life seldom turns out the way we want it to--our expectations are often so far removed from what the world actually has to offer."
Equally so, he had made no secret of his thoughts on the matter--that if you were to spend the rest of your life with someone, it should be of your own choosing. Especially given that both of them were mortal. To him, it seemed like they had no time at all for such mistakes and political agendas clouding the reality of what life ought to be for them. "I'm sorry it had to be this way." And he was. While he couldn't claim to be some great believer in love and all its supposed power, no one deserved to be stuck in what was essentially a binding contract with soneone they scarcely cared for. Especially not when she so clearly had someone else in mind. Aidan quite clearly didn't know anything about Anthony--which wasn't all that far fetched, really, not when Aidan was seldom present except for formalities. For a moment, Malvolio found himself wondering if the two of them knew the first things about one another beside what resided on the surface.
If he had any sense of what was considered proper...well, he wouldn't have been there to begin with, but he decidedly would have departed by then. Instead, he merely cast her a fleeting glance, noting how lost within her own thoughts she seemed. "In another world, it probably is. Unfortunately, we must live in this one, as disappointing as it tends to be."
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