IAG & Coffeelatte Updates.
Growing up, Nanao had been an avid believer of fairy tales.
Quiet but not shy, hardworking but not naturally skilled, she didn’t relate much to many of the princesses - some painfully shy and others worrisomely boisterous, but all with a heart of gold and a gorgeous voice to match delicate sensibilities. They could shoot arrows and sing beautifully and some even wielded swords and led countries to victories; there was not much room for personal identification in the world of fairy tales for soft-spoken, diligent and rather average Nanao, but there was something in them that caught her heart, anyway.
Despite the achingly chauvinistic attitude of it all and the horrible, horrible gender roles it enforced on the princesses, they still all ended up so unfailingly happy. Perhaps it was archaic and stupid that young women had to sit around for princes to come whisk them off their feet, and perhaps they turned women into personas of petty jealousy and misplaced anger in the female villains they portrayed, but all fairy tales, nonetheless, ended in happily ever after.
And that’s all anyone ever wants, isn’t it?
Somehow along the way, such fairy tales had engraved a deep subconscious idea that, despite all odds, she’d get her happy ending, too. It’s silly and stupid and trifling, and she really ought to know better considering the kind of world they lived in- happiness is bought not magically given, darling, and that white steed the prince is riding is in fact a purebred stallion that won last year’s derby race -but Nanao had somehow thought that things would work out, in a way.
She doesn’t even know what she was expecting. But Suzuki Nanao, aged twenty one and certainly a young adult capable of knowing full well the realities of the world, had been taught to believe that happily ever after was hers (the movies said so, didn’t they, and her parents had always told her that the world was hers if she so desired).
Suzuki Nanao, at age twenty one, comes to the bleak, heart-wrenching realization that the world her parents offered to her on a silver platter did not hold the one thing she wanted above all.
“I can’t,” she begins, lips dry and voice subdued and her voice sounds foreign, a lot like a far, distant sound to her own ears, “I can’t do this.” Her pale finger grips the chiffon of her lovely, lovely dress, and her lower lip is trembling when she says: “I thought I could, but I can’t.”
“I’m sorry.” And when Keigo looks at her in response to her words, there’s apprehension and a darkness in his eyes, as though he knows what she’s sorry for, but he desperately doesn’t want her to say it- “I think I love you,” she says.
It’s funny, she thinks, because those three words had held such magic in the fairy tales. When she says it, it sounds a lot like a resignation, a lot like a quiet, frightened confession, a lot like a goodbye.
A quiet, barely-there laugh - hysterical and heartbroken - escapes her lips. “I can’t do this, because I’m in love with you.”
They had never told her that she could have the world, but only the world they’d designed for her.
