Chapter Text
When Twoflower left his insurance business to take an extended vacation, he had no idea the decision would lead to the throne. It was nonsensical, and yet there he was. The eve of his coronation. The last day as a mere citizen.
“Father?”
His older daughter, Pretty Butterfly, appeared at the door of his study. Her voice was serious, but still musical. Like a flute is to a harp. It reminded him of her mother. Twoflower turned in his chair. “Yes?”
“Are you ready?”
He pouted and turned back to his desk. The surface was covered in scrolls and parchments – all the wisdom of emperors from generations before. Most of them were terrible people, and a lot of them talked about conquest and power for power’s sake. In the middle, bound in paper, his own book sat open, one of the few copies of “What I did on my Holidays” to survive its initial print run. Twoflower folded it closed and paused to pat his name on the cover. “The world is pretty amazing, isn’t it?”
Butterfly’s voice steeled more. “It can be.”
“It is,” he said, this time as fact. “I’ve seen it. I can state it as point of experience.”
“Yes, but forgive me for saying, but your filter on the world has a certain rosiness.”
“You say that as if it were bad.”
“I meant it to sound gentle.”
Twoflower tapped his thumb against the binding. The clock on the table ticked. “Then I’ll turn the question. You ask me if I’m ready. Do you think I’m ready?”
“We have been essentially running this empire for a while already. A changing of title shouldn’t matter.”
“Hmm.” Twoflower stilled his hand. “I think it can if I want it to.”
Butterfly paused. He felt her candor shift. “Explain.”
“As vizier my job was to enforce the will of the reigning emperor.” Twoflower rose, his ceremonial robe falling in blocked folds around his feet. “Now I am the emperor. I get to enforce my will. I get to live where I want to live.”
Butterfly bit her lip. Her hardened tone hid worry her eyes could not. “You’re going away?”
He softened. “No. I’m making my first decision. This empire was the same for ages and ages before Cohen. And Cohen came in by rite of conquest, which is not me by a long shot. I’m going to be an emperor like our people have never seen before. Not ever. And I’m going to be the last one.”
She tensed. “The last?”
“I’m dismantling it,” he grinned. “Rebuild it from the ground up. I’ll do all this robe and ceremony for the peoples’ sake but they’re going to find out pretty fast that that kind of thing is going to end. I’m going to be the kind of emperor I want to be, and I’m going to make our country the kind of place I want to live in.”
“People aren’t going to like that,” Butterfly said.
“Some won’t, but a lot will!” Twoflower insisted. “There’s so much in this world we could benefit from. New viewpoints, new ideas, economy, fraternity, magic, technology, everything! It won’t all fit in our imperial mold, but it’s all worth looking at and I’m excited about it! It’s going to be amazing.”
He reached for her and she closed the distance between them. He let his hands rest on her bare shoulders.
“You are a bold leader, my dear,” Twoflower cooed at her. “But you’re a woman as well. The way the empire stands you’e not considered an heir unless you marry and we cannot have that. Let’s make a world you can be proud of. I’d like you to help.”
She blushed. “Really?”
“Like you said, we’ve been running this country together already.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “What do you say?”
She smiled, looking even more like her mother than before. “I say we should get you to your coronation, or else it doesn’t count.”
“We’ll do it then.” He tucked the copy of “What I did” in the folds of his robes so that it pressed against his heart. “Let’s go.”
