The Seven Pieces of a Feuilleton

Chapter 1

(originally started on ffn on 5/24/21, put onto ao3 on 7/31/21.)

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Seven Pieces plays with canon, in which everything that happened up until Dylan's season five intervention still occurred. The plot changed when Bren flew in for the intervention, finished out the year in London and then returned to the 90210 in the beginning of the sixth season. Take that, seasons nine and ten.

SP is loosely based on the 2002 film, Sweet Home Alabama.

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Proudly displayed from the window of a corner shop for as long as any local could recall or the stories shared across generations could detail, an exquisite Venetian mask encased in silk wrappings beckoned a certain expectation upon its acquisition. Etiquette dictated that it be worn amongst lords and ladies in a masquerade which outshone the societal parties of old, igniting the remaining columns of whose readership consisted solely of those boasting a lengthy heritage.

In Paris of the early twenty-first century, however, the vintage mask settled for a beautiful gathering of the city's wealthier residents, many of whom hailed from other areas of the continent and grabbed any excuse for a grandiloquent event.

She walked in on the arm of a man whose personal checking account made the Royal Family across the Channel look like commoners and cheapened the materialistic purchases of Hollywood A-listers. He possessed more royal blood than the sitting queen through both his maternal and paternal lines, though he would never hold the throne of the United Kingdom himself - a fact for which he was most grateful, content instead to work as a medical professional.

His patients paid him in succulent meals, understanding that a man set to inherit billions hardly needed a paycheck of his own. Though he often wished for one nevertheless to live off his career rather than his family fortune, he knew accepting pay would minimize the checks of his colleagues and therefore went without so that they would not.

Most were drawn in by his checkbook; she, however, had first been enamored with his eyes, then his smile and then his abs, in that exact order. She had always been attracted to men with warm brown eyes, but his were different - the color of history, perhaps, of tree bark which withstood centuries of attempted felling.

As an outsider who worked her way upward, she had truly been unaware of his status until the gossip of her castmates shared his precise standing in aristocracy. One castmate, a student to an almost fluent level of the language of money, remained shocked that he had chosen her. A few others were quick to confess to their jealousy that she successfully snagged who they insisted stood amongst the eligible bachelors of not only the continent, but of the entire world.

Stating that she cared far more about his heart than his wallet proved futile, for no one believed her motives to be that pure - though they assuredly were. She herself cared little for money, knowing firsthand the full extent of damage it often caused. She earned a significant salary on her own accord and hardly needed financial support from him, even if her payday did pale in comparison to his birthright.

Their relationship of two and a half years became the talk of French elites, English nobility and, strangely, Thai monarchs - largely due to the show's fanbase oddly acquired in Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines. By the evening of the Parisian masquerade, they dominated the headlines and could rarely dine in public without a camera pushed in front of their equally genetically blessed faces. She often found herself torn over whether she appreciated the attention or wished for the normalcy she still carried when she first escaped to the captivating city, before she'd auditioned twice for the series, improved her French skills, auditioned a third time and thereafter secured the role coveted by millions.