Princess and the Popstar

Can you tell them what you saw in me?

Sophie Elizabeth Foster-Ruewen had been having the absolute worst time of it. After rushing to her room and sobbing her heart out until about one in the morning, her soulmate decided it would be a perfect time to start coming up with really sad songs, and to finish that one super-sad one they'd been working on since forever.

So that was fantastic. She stayed up, most of the night, a mix of sadness, a sick feeling in her gut, and singing, keeping her awake.

And some part of her was worried for her soulmate. Everything they sang, that night, was aching, hollow, and sad. It crushed something inside of her even more than everything was already being crushed.

Double crush, double smash, double pain. She was a soda can, mashed beneath the foot of an adorable, handsome, wonderful, lying, scheming wonderful, amazing, lovely, horrible, cruel, awful boy.

She got a grand total of two hours of sleep(which wasn't the least she'd ever lived on, but it was pretty low. There had been far too many nights where she'd never been able to sleep at all. But she got two hours. Don't get her wrong. That's an achievement.), after her soulmate finally stopped singing their sad songs, and she was able to drop off.

She was dragged out of bed by Biana, who told her she had a million things to do, but when Sophie burst into tears, Biana had slowed down completely, whatever rant she'd been seconds from spiralling into fading, like the light behind her eyes when she noticed that Sophie was falling apart.

"Whoa, Soph, you okay?"

Sophie had shaken her head, tears flicking to the ground.

"Okay," Biana said, softly, quietly, the same way she'd always said it, when Sophie actually admitted to not being okay, "Come here." The girl's tanned, scarred arms opened and Sophie sank into her hug. "Do you wanna talk about it?"

Sophie made a dismissive noise. "Not really."

"Okay," Biana said.

The silence stretched between them like a fraying thread.

"I loved him, Biana," she whispered, into her friend's shoulder, after a good three minutes of trying to sort out her own emotions. "I really did."

"Who?"

"Legacy. Keefe. Him. I loved him."

Biana was quiet. "I knew that," she said, softly, and Sophie jerked her gaze up to her best friend's face, jaw dropping.

"What? How? I've done nothing but hate him--"

"You've always thought he was attractive. Your hatred of him was far too convenient, almost like you were covering up for something else. You blush whenever you look at him. But... what happened?"

"He loved me," she said, softly, "I thought."

Biana nodded, once again unsurprised, and Sophie didn't know how that surprised her at this point. Biana was too perceptive for her own good. "I thought he did, too, Soph. Why is there any doubt?"

Sophie's emotions tumbled out of her mouth in a broken string of nonsense. "He's a liar, Bee, that's all he does, he was lying to me. He acted like he loved me but he never loved me at all, never cared about me, all he wanted was what I could give him, the publicity and the credit and the story of "The Princess and The Popstar," and he doesn't care about me, or how my reputation will collapse, and how the council will take that as a perfect reason to declare me unfit to rule, and I can't--" She sniffed, heavily. He was breaking apart everything, he just wanted to use me."

Biana was quiet. Sophie knew that she had to be thinking about how much that sounded like something her mind had made up. Sure enough, Biana came at her with the anxiety-solving question. "Who told you that?"