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Faybelle and Briar’s love was damned. From the moment they were both born, they’d had a curse placed on them almost as bad as the curse Faybelle would one day place on Briar. The curse of their story.
Breaking their fable meant breaking with every single thing that kept Ever After scared. Breaking their story meant that they would be forever shunned by most of society. Their parents would despise them. They would have a target on their backs for however long it took until Ever After realized that people weren’t their parents, and that you couldn’t plan someone’s life out in a storybook. Things didn’t work when they were pre-scripted. You couldn’t anticipate things like how good it felt when the two young lovers were dancing close together, pressed into one another’s arms and just… complete.
It wasn’t like they were the first ones to have done it. But if they decided to do it, to say hex with their story and run off, they wouldn’t be like the others. Neither of them were shy or concerned with secrecy. They would flaunt their love for everyone to scorn if they wanted to. There would be no pretending to be normal. Briar would not fake her sleep. They would just live how they wanted to. But it would be hard. Hard for Faybelle, who’d been raised to be a shadow of her mother. Raised to forever have that seed of hatred buried inside of her, even if she ran away with Briar and tried to tamp it down. And hard for Briar, who said she didn’t want the life of a princess but had still grown up in a lifestyle of luxury that she would lose entirely. And neither of them wanted to lose their family’s love.
So, they were damned. Damned if they did it, ran away and suffered the consequences, and damned if they didn’t and Faybelle had to torture Briar by riding her of her world: casting her into a century long slumber. Neither option was good. Neither was a perfect solution.