The Selection (Troyler AU)

♔Part XLVI♔

Jesus I suck at updating but the good news is I brought my D in English up to an A so suck my ass.

Also I lied Coming Down is 1000000000% my favorite Halsey song.

Also I finally got into P!ATD (I really love Nicotine).

Also this is the longest I've gone without updating lol sorry but I'm the top of my AP Human Geography class so s u c k  i t (I got student of the month for this class what even??¿?¿¿¿?)

One Month Later

Tyler POV

Carrie Fletcher of Carolina, Five
Emma Blackery of Zuni, Five
Jenna Mourey of Sota, Four
Bethany Mota of Clermont, Two
Lisa Schwartz of Tammins, Two
Ingrid Nilsen of Hundson, Two

They were all that was left.

After that night that I finally summoned the courage to talk to Troye, I'd accepted my fate of getting married to one of the girls in the Selection.  I knew that some day, one of them would be walking down the aisle to meet me - someone I'd known for a only a few months, yet still felt like a complete stranger, due to the complete lack of communication I'd managed to keep up with any of them - and the time before that happening was running out.  I wanted to make it last as long as I could, wanted to hold on to what remaining freedom I had left.   

But I knew, in the back of my mind, that my mother had a point: why keep so many girls around, if I was never going to even like them, let alone have the desire to marry them? 

I didn't want to plant any false hope.  While I doubted that the majority of them were seriously interested in me, they all still believed that they were here because I might happen to fall in love with them one day; and even if they didn't particularly care about that, they might've still been interested in spending their life in the Palace, ultimately becoming Queen.

To be perfectly honest, I would've sent each and every one of them home right then, if I could've.  It wasn't fair to any of them if I kept stringing them along on the hopes of something that'll never happen.  They deserved so much better than a man who'll never love them the way they want to be loved, and I hated myself for ever agreeing to the Selection to begin with.

I couldn't send them all home, obviously; but I could, however, narrow it down to the Elite.

The Elite was a term that described the final ten contestants on the Selection.  It's a word that's been around for as long as I could remember, but I never really imagined that there'd come a day where I'd decide my own Elite members.  The Elite were often considered borderline royalty, and even if they didn't end up winning the Selection, they always went on to marry other dignitaries and become well-known across the nation.  In fact, some Elite members from when my mother was in the Selection are still featured in interviews and articles to this day, having started families with presidents of the Provinces - or, in the case of Hannah's mother, another member of the Elite, a Royal Advisor.

Instead of ten, however, I'd ended up cutting it down to six. 

I made that choice for a lot of reasons, actually, the first of which being that there was no use in keeping so many girls around that I'll never grow to care about the way I'm supposed to.  Besides that, though, there was the threat of the rebel attacks (which had been surprisingly quiet lately, despite the northern rebels having a habit of infiltrating the Palace every few weeks or so); the fact that I really didn't know most of the other girls; and the fact that pushing myself towards the end of the Selection would keep me away from Troye, - and, more importantly, keep Troye away from any potential harm I could bring him.