Above All

-Forty-

Balloon drifts lonely

Treasure trove lost in the rain

Drinks shared eagerly

Layton:

"I'm not the kind of woman your mother is looking for you in a partner. I'm simply the PR. You're probably going to end up with Inyene. That's how life goes sometimes."

I was the kind of person who in life, if I had desired anything, I received it. It has always been like that since I was born. People admired me, people envied me, people wanted to be me.

All of that simply because I was the Crown Prince of Idizia. It was hard to filter people out like that, nearly impossible. People wore their deception like the jewelry on their wrists and body... hidden in plain sight. At first, I had wanted to perhaps change people's perception of me, as a kid I had sought out what I thought would be true friends, but that never worked; so, I withdrew into myself only seeking out comfort when it was my brother or my grandad. Then he passed... and suddenly things weren't worth putting effort into anymore.

I never had much of a "close" relationship with my mother, she had always been quite cold... reserved most of the time while I was in her presence; we never got to do the things that normal children did with their parents due to her extensive Empress duties and my father well, he always took me for a royal disappointment, our conversations were very few in between.

I did find myself for the next two weeks unfortunately having to tag with my mother and sister out of the country to Morocco and Lichtenstein for diplomatic duties so we were away from the palace for quite some time; I think it did me well to take some distance from Amani for the time being as we didn't necessarily leave on the best of notes after having a conversation about her pending promotion at her company back in Canada.

The fact of the matter was that I didn't want her to leave. If someone had told me a few months ago that she was eventually going to leave to continue her work elsewhere, I would have shrugged my shoulders indifferent about the situation; but things were different.

I had fallen in love with her.

When I looked into her eyes, I saw a future with her. My attempts at adopting Yame only further my want now to settle down and have a family. And I very much wanted her to be a part of that, but I had two obstacles I had to essentially jump over in order to find complete peace.

One, she herself needed to fall in love with me. But I wasn't going to rush her into something like that, I knew things like that needed time; I was an example of this myself. I didn't want to be the cause of her pushing away from me because I "coerced" her into feeling the same way as I did. I would allow her to come to terms with that on her own.

Two, I had to somehow find a way to convince my mother than Amani was a better match for me than Inyene. That was the biggest hurdle we were facing; my mother wanted me to be with a noble woman, but the woman I had happened to fall for was instead our PR; although not noble, she comes from an upstanding and very wealthy family as Amani had detailed to me before. She's shown me pictures of her parents and her doing various things from being on vacations at their different villas or throughout her school graduations, all of the kinds of pictures one kept on their phone.

She always beamed in every photo she took with them, I wondered to myself if I even had a photo with my own parents where I was happy and enjoying myself?

Regardless, I felt I had to do something. So, while on the diplomatic trip, I refrained from texting or calling her despite almost caving several times; I must've looked like some sort of drug-addict staring at my phone in an attempt to not to reach for it. I just did my best to focus and follow the rules as I was expected to.