My "My Fiance is in Love with My Little Sister" hot take is that Soleil (at least, the Soleil who outwardly appears to love Silvia and detest Ilya) never actually wanted to marry Silvia. I could write a whole essay on their relationship.
cw (chapter specific): threats of violence, assault, parents talking horribly about their children
summary: Mothers of us, be kind to the fathers on whom we rely.
word count: 4.0k
Claude watched your mother fall to the floor but threw himself down with her all the same. He gripped her by her shoulders, as though the truth he had scoured this house for was only awaiting his anger to draw back from the void as her life slipped away. He called into the hall for help but he sounded not frightened or even desperate but commanding, like his superiors. Like the men who trained him when he was just a child, trying to wield more from his pathetic body than he was willing to give. He knelt on the floor with your mother’s body as she gurgled blood and his grasp never faltered. He looked into the dark, waning pits of her eyes and tried to conjure the answers she’d die with.
Like everything, it was no use.
Your father, having stumbled upon a baffling scene that should have tried the endless patience he held for the lord, still questioned Claude with a gentleness that sickened him. “Was there anything unusual before this?” Your mother lay, already dead, in her bed with the two of them standing at the foot of it. And though he hated your mother with a fervor that begged him to crush her bones under his heel, what angered him more was the fact that the reverence had not ended when he had every reason to believe that Claude had a hand in his wife’s death. The falseness of all of it threatened to overwhelm him.
He allowed it.
He grabbed your father by the collar of his shirt, the man’s body even neglected to flinch immediately, he was that far removed from the harm Claude could do. “Unusual is the entirety of this farce.”
“My Lord–” Your father began, fear only just beginning to darken the edges of his eyes.
“You will tell me what you know of a certain princess and knight I read about in a frivolous story sitting on your shelf.” Claude’s grip did not relax, he flexed his fingers, yearning to curl them around your father’s neck.
Your father’s face betrayed an instant recognition but he held himself aloft from it. “Lord Claude, we all act impulsively when life challenges us this way but let you not sully your own reputation with violence against your family.”
A frenzied and crazed laugh slipped from Claude’s lips and he bared his teeth in some odd approximation of a grin. He could not believe the audacity of it. He was so tired of normal. So sick of it that he could let himself die right then. Still, he pressed on, willing the information from your father’s body as he had done to prisoners before. “Diana’s mother. Who is she?”
Your father’s eyes went flat as though he’d recoiled in on himself for protection, already having decided defending himself was not an option. “That…why do you wish to know?” He had stopped pretending there was nothing to know.
“Does she hold it over you, father-in-law?” Claude sneered. “Does Diana use her magic to keep you in her thrall?”
A spark of something ignited and your father was dragged back from the depths of memory. “Diana uses nothing, know of nothing, my lord. Is that truly not apparent to you?” He wrenched himself from Claude’s grip suddenly, holding out his arms in a gesture that signified that he’d tread carefully. Claude allowed him to step back, believing his explanation to follow. “Can you not see her perfect innocence in this? She is above the madness she was born amidst.”
Claude had given him every chance to speak sense, the tips of his fingers were growing cold and numb. The acrid stench of her blood on his clothes and his hands grew difficult to even breathe through, it was everywhere, traces of blood were everywhere in this house. And still he might add more. He unsheathed his sword partially from his belt to which your father did not flinch. “My Lord, I need only know what becomes of Diana, what of her and your child if you act this way.”
What becomes of them? Claude laughed again, the world ebbing with flashes of blurred daylight as he felt himself descend with each gasped breath. He was greeting the pits of madness, he could feel it. Reality was disintegrating again. “I’ll leave here and kill them both now if I don’t have my answers.”
Your father’s expression turned to shock, as though he believed…as though he truly believed in what was sold to him by a self which had retreated. Claude— not the one with a grotesque and near calculable perfection in his single-mindedness, but the one who had been buried underneath, was the only thing left behind to speak but your father did not know him. He could not comprehend that there had ever been a part of him that could not only feel apathy toward Diana but one which could actively hated her. Claude thought placidly that he was soon to sink, collapsed under the weight of this dichotomy and the madness it inspired. “Diana’s mother, the princess.” Your father stared with a sort of wonder into Claude’s eyes, trying to weigh how to proceed in a conversation with a once tamed and now feral animal. “She is gone now, you must have heard it even if before you did not know her significance.”
Somewhere in his memory, he felt around for a name he’d heard but it was difficult, for all of time and thought revolved around this agony. And reality had scarcely moved with the stability it had before, it bisected so that he was of two minds and of two lives at once. Still, he managed to draw a whisper from the depths of his lives. A princess of Siodonna who had been her elder sister’s heir, had succumbed to an unknown illness. The kingdom’s future was uncertain and as his father-in-law and his country at large had ties to them, it had been their concern too. That princess, the immaterial one who had no face and name in face of the consuming thing thoroughly within and without his mind. Nothing had any definition that was not given by Diana’s gaze and Diana treated your mother as her own, the only mother she would ever know. He’d had no reason to care. “She was a mage? She crafted this…” He realized he didn’t know how to describe what it was he was afflicted by. Especially to someone like your father, who seemed like he’d have willingly given in to a life of toil for Diana’s love were he in Claude’s place. “This life.”
“I know little of her work, or I– I knew little. She cast some spell on our princess, perhaps it is so that she gave her this life with you.” Your father compulsively smoothed his clothes out, rearranging himself where Claude had disheveled his neat appearance. “If it is true then…forgive me, Lord Claude but I do not see it as a bad thing. I can’t understand why you would. Is it not a good thing?” He smoothed the lapels of his shirt with a quivering smile. “Something was given to you, Lord Claude, by ordinance of magic that is so very rare in this world. Should you not treasure it?”
Claude could have lunged for him again. Instead, though, he drew his sword in warning. Your father, undeterred, only smiled. “My Lord…No matter what, Diana is a gift to you, whether the princess’ or god’s. Why do you only pretend to scorn her now? Is it out of guilt for her elder sister? She made her own bed, she made it easy for fate to find its way between you. In your love with Diana, she was just happenstance, don’t you think? Wasn’t it always going to be that you two would find a way?”
Another frisson of light and reality rearranged again. Claude was kneeling on your father’s chest with one hand around the man’s throat and the other holding his sword above the man’s head as though he were keen to put it right through his eye.
“My Lord, what is going on?” Felix appeared in the doorway, a hand on his sword which stayed sheathed despite Claude obviously meaning to hurt your father. His voice didn’t sound panicked as it should, he sounded truly conflicted. His eyes flitted from him to your father again and again, his gaze tense but tinged in something akin to…amusement. Yes, it would make sense that he’d be amused by. If Felix hated Claude then he must surely had a father who’d been treating you poorly far before. Perhaps he was debating letting both of them kill each other.
“You may go,” your father replied, placidly. He was panting and clearly a bit afraid but he spoke calmly. “Do not intrude on us, Lord Claude and I were caught in a misunderstanding.”
Felix raised an eyebrow but did not disobey, turning on his heels and closing the door behind him with a click, his pride as a knight long forgotten. Claude would have killed him without a second thought had anything interrupted them, he was tied to a singular desire that was the only thing holding him to earth. Whether it be your father, your knight or his very own child, he’d not let anything stop him. If he did, this life would yet again be nothing but wasted time and wasted agony. He looked down at your father. “I don’t care at all if your mother was a brazen courtesan who let your father knock you about like a disobedient dog if it meant that she could let other men fuck her for position. I don’t care if you feel nothing when you see your wife cold and dead. The cruelty you visit upon your first daughter, that will be repaid. I will see it repaid.” The voice that came out of him was guttural like the call of animal. “But not before I know who put this story to paper. You say you know little of her work but it seems that someone must. Who are they?”
“Lord Claude, pardon me, but if you could find someone to give you what answers you wish to hear…what would it change?” He huffed, struggling to breath under Claude’s weight. “She was never my daughter, that girl. I never felt like her father, she…she was more omen than a child. She was born from me and the misery ever above me. I don’t know who she most took after. If you believe there was a spell that compelled you toward my little princess, then it must have been intended as a blessing for you as much as her. There’s no reason for lies, My Lord, there’s no one here to pity anymore. You could never have loved that girl, it might have been enough for her just to do her duties to you but she was so vicious, so hateful. She has never been innocent a day in her life, always had to be reminded of herself. It would have compounded your misery, that I know, Lord Claude. Believe that I know my own blood even if she has never been held in my arms as a daughter.”
A punch landed on your father’s nose, Claude could feel a part of the bone split. He wished for his gauntlet, wished for the pleasure and ease of watching your father’s face turn into a grotesque portrait of his own viciousness in moments. “I’m not you.” The words came out in a rhythm, like the warning song of a bird of prey.
Your father, with blood all over his face and still gushing from his nose, smiled and revealed the blood on his teeth as well. He was fully crying then, gasping little breaths and squeezing his eyes shut. “No…you’re not me. You have had a fate…that I…might have died for.”
“I will have my way. I must have my way. If not, I will take from you the last shred of that princess you so loved. I will kill them both.”
Your father’s eyes popped open, red with blood and terrified. This time, he had no reason to believed that Claude could be swayed from the boundary of anger and a will to see bloodshed done. He took a long and trembling breath in through his mouth, madness defeated under the weigh of Claude’s own. “I saw the book long ago, I’d heard…whispers about it. I bought it from…a common woman’s bookstore, the author called himself…Lucas, I wanted to know…who could know our story so intimately and who could dare publish it but I…I went to where the woman said he’d last lived and he was not there, in fact…it looked like no one had lived there in some time.”
“Where?”
“Right here in this county, I could not believe…across the road from where that shabby little theater is.”
A noise sounded at the door a woman’s voice muffled, sounding pleading against the voice of Felix, giving her what sounded like short and rather curt answers. Your father’s head whipped toward the noise and for the first time, he struggled underneath Claude. “My Lord, I ask that you not let my daughter see this. Whatever you feel for her, she has done nothing wrong.” Claude hesitantly climbed off of him, having gained the answers he’d sought. It had little to do with sparing Diana and more to do with the fact that he could move forward, finally. Claude swung open the door and barged past both Felix and his frantic wife with their daughter in tow, sucking at her thumb. He might not have even noticed there was still blood on his hands if he did not see it in he way their expressions mirrored each other as he walked past. Though their daughter took after Diana most in the first place, fear made them doppelgangers, the sight of him rid his wife’s face of the mature and practiced expression she wore. She looked as young as when they first met.
He pushed past.
“Claude! Oh my god, are you hurt?” She followed after him, letting go of her daughter’s hand trying to stop him from proceeding. “What happened?” She stood in front of him. “Where are you going.
“I’m leaving.” He started to walk around her but Diana put her arms out, moving with him.
“Don’t,” He warned. It was a bit laughable that she was using her body as a shield to keep him from walking away because she presumed he’d not harm her to pass. All the while, the harm he did to her would be negligible in his mind, one drop of her fair, precious blood in a sea of viscera.
“Don’t what? Don’t stop you from leaving when you’re covered in blood?” She cried. “What is wrong with you? Talk to me, please. They’re saying my mother is dead and you…you were there with her. No one will tell me what’s going on.”
“Yes, I was there.” He affirmed easily. A little smile rose at the corners of his lips. “Forgive me, I should be the one to tell you what has been going on.”
She was not soothed but she relaxed somewhat, her gaze growing expectant. She reached out for his arm, perhaps trying to console whatever it was she saw in his expression and the blood drying on his clothes. He took her by the shoulders instead, unable to keep his grip gentle when he had the object of so many miseries between his fingers. His daughter called for him but her voice had simply become part of the chorus of little voices lost to deaths behind him. He did not know her voice from the ones he dreamed of, the voice of the colicky little infant he’d left behind. “Everything in this house has always been for your sake, Diana. Everyone has lived just to give you more but no one paid the price like your sister did. Did you not see that? Or perhaps did you think it was her duty, to be expected that she should survive off of scraps just so that you could have more.”
Diana’s brow furrowed, she did not look nearly as afraid of him as she should have been. She did not approach him with nearly as much caution. “What?”
“Your mother devoted her life to caring for you. Promised to you. Your father holds you like a relic of the past, a keepsake of your mother. But while we’re at it, let’s speak of your mother. They never spoke to you about her, did they? I’ll be the one who does, after all, I am your savior. It is the least I can do.” He stared down at her. “Your mother was poisoning you to keep you inside the house, safe and sound. Did you know? No, of course not, this woman was a slave to your care. What could you think to do other than swallow up her lies?”
“Poisoning me? Claude, you’re not making sense, you’re hurting me.”
“Everything does,” He said simply. “Everything hurts you. Save for the pleasure of your actions. The fallout hurts you, the secret hurts you but never the act. Only how it looks. Did you ever consider your own sister when you spent your days throwing yourself at me?” It wasn’t fair to speak to her of these things as though he had no part in it but what had ever been fair about any of his lives? She could shoulder her share of it. He’d make her. “If it were her, you’d have never forgotten but that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s you so it’s acceptable, you, the poor, sick little darling. Maybe you felt like you deserved it even if you felt a bit sorry, you always came back to that fact. Your mother gave you the chance to excuse yourself this way, maybe you’d have been glad all along to know what she was doing. Maybe it would give you reason to be saved, reason greater than your sister’s.”
Your father came out of the room, blotting his nose with a soaked handkerchief. Diana looked over Claude’s shoulder in horror, letting out a gasp. “Lord Claude. Please. Leave her be.” He was swaying on his feet a bit but Felix did not offer his arm.
Claude paid him no mind. “Your mother was a mage, beloved by your miserable father. I read it in your mother’s diary, it’s still in her room if you wish to read every word your mother inspired. She put a spell on you but your magic was also great, did you know that? Or did you cast this spell on me by sheer will?” He paused, waiting to hear her answer, as though she would give one. He had not realized until then that he wanted her to. He wanted her to have known.
“Let go of me! Don’t do this in front of your daughter, you’re frightening her!”
His fingers flexed, grasping her tighter. “Tell me. Is this love the doing of all that wasted magic buried in a weak body?”
“I truly don’t know what you’re talking about, Claude, please. I love you.” She pleaded, teary eyed. Her tears…for some reason inspired a burning hatred, one that was painful to hold. Tears. She hadn’t earned the right to tears, not for you and certainly not for herself. Their daughter had begun to cry, mirroring her mother. Diana gently called to the girl, trying to calm her while terrified herself. The crying of their child brought him back, reality merged again and he was hearing the cries from a cradle rocked by the wind, this time the hollow between her screams filled by the comfort of a mother she did not have. It enraged him.
“I don’t love you, Diana. More than that, I hate you. More than I ever thought one could hate. This feeling, the misery of laying with you knowing that you reek of the deaths that follow after you…I’d rather kill myself than bear it even once more. You sicken me and I sicken myself for having ever…fallen into you like this.” It came out in a desperate tone, a breathless ramble. “The child with my blood might as well have been born only of you for how little I feel for it. Her birth brought me no joy, because every time I look at her, I think of the child that your sister might have had with me. I love your sister. I love her down to her bones, down to the hollow space in my life that she’s left. You have…again you have stolen it…”
Belatedly, caution entered her gaze. “Claude…” her voice broke. “You don’t mean any of this. You’re ill. You’ve made yourself ill. You need rest.”
He laughed humorlessly. “I’ve never meant anything I’ve said to you until now. You think this is madness and maybe it is! But that doesn’t mean it isn’t me.” He let go of her. “All of it is falsehood and you know it. It was falsehood that benefitted you so you could live with it well enough but no more. I cannot live this way.” He forced himself to leave the anger there, it was of no consequence now, his anger did nothing to save you and was becoming rather indulgent. Only his next pursuit could provide any hope of helping you. And he’d not be tempted from that path for a belated revenge.
Diana went to their daughter and held her, tucking the girl’s teary face into her shoulder as Claude pressed forward, walking down the hall. Your father came over to comfort the two, setting a hand on her shoulder and murmuring assurances which she ignored. “Where do you intend to run?" Diana, who simply could not leave things be called out to him. “Your home is here, your family is here. Whatever you feel now for me…I truly don’t understand what you feel you’ve discovered here but I know that you have always had your regrets and I’m sorry for that. I always sought to be happy with you. But even if I have failed, it isn’t for you to abandon us now of all times. I didn’t kill my sister, I didn’t make her run away. I’m now without my mother and without my sister and you would have me lose you?” She rose to her feet, cautiously, the only sound in the hall being their daughter’s sniffling and the swish of her silk skirts. “Stay. Let a doctor see you.”
Claude looked back at her for a moment. Diana’s gaze held his with fragile hope. She was beautiful in the dull, grey light from the window. Her tears glittered on her cheeks, her white dress was smeared with her father’s blood. It reminded him of you. How many lives you’d spent kneeling at the altar of his sins, waiting for him and still waiting at the end. The innocence of your disbelief worn on your sleeve.
But on Diana, such a look was a profoundly cruel farce. A reminder of just how unearned the tragedy in her eyes was. He felt glad to leave her. He hoped that just once, she’d be made to wait for a husband who would not come, to cling to a promise she knew was already broken, even if in the end he knew it would not matter. Memory is what makes tragedy. For all that happened, the agony is in remembering.
“You’ve never been a wife to me, this has never been a family,” He said it softly, not for her benefit, but because he felt reality begin to waver and his mind become such a fragile and uncertain place. “You have always felt like a trial from god and that child…a shadow of something long gone born only to compound my misery. All of this to punish me.”
Reality melted again, reformed around a memory of you begging him not to leave without you. He knew it wasn't real and still it had been hard to make his way out into the dark without turning back.
cw (chapter specific): pregnancy and childbirth, infidelity, death, suicide, disassociation
summary: for a change of perspective, let's give voice to another, forgotten to a higher will. if it was only a dream, why did it feel so real?
word count: 3.6k
Reverie was a rare thing to be spoken aloud in the life of a knight. To dream greater, or even just different than one’s own position was one thing, to speak it was another. That was why when Felix awoke with a start, covered in sweat and panting, he said nothing to explain himself to his comrade across the room. That was why his comrade knew not to ask at all, pretending to still be asleep in bed.
He trembled in bed, frozen and curled into himself, longing for a moment. Just one moment to grab hold of the world gradually before the tumult of it hit him all at once again.
He did not receive it.
Felix dressed in the dark, his hands moving deftly even without his mind’s cooperation. His body had been trained into an automaton, he ought to have been more pleased with that than he was, it had saved him a few times before. But it did make the lingering, vague horror of his dreams that much more concrete. He was inside the dream, the dream inside himself and yet he could not remember what it was about. He could not draw a single image from this dream, though he’d had it several times over, he was sure. He remembered the familiar infantile feeling of vulnerability which he woke with each time. He woke each time as a newborn, grasping for sense of the earth. He woke only with a single memory, the feeling of grasping the pommel of his sword so tightly that its shape was impressed into his hand.
More oft in dreams did he wield his sword than in reality. He waited outside his lady’s door, his sword on his hip and his eyes routinely moving about the hall every few moments. The knight of an ordinary lady was not so valiant a title, he could admit, it was hardly a danger that most young knights wish to defend from. Even so, Felix took his position seriously. He held his position with as much preciseness as he had the very first day he’d been chosen. Sooner would he forget his mother’s name than he’d forget that day, he way his hands trembled when he took his lady’s hand to kiss. Her eyes looking down at him steadfastly. He thought she was so queenly then. He’d made the grievous mistake of telling one of the superior knights that he’d thought so and he’d been met with laughter and a biting jab. “The lady is no queen, if you ever live to set your sorry eyes on her majesty, you’ll look back at this moment and be embarrassed for comparing tavern ale to champagne.”
He’d been embarrassed for saying such a flowery thing. That was when he’d learned to hold his tongue around the older knights. Swarthy, they were, restless with the lives of relative inaction they led. As he grew into his new position, he came to reconcile with the fact that young knights came bright as the swords they swung and then sometimes decayed into what the elder knights were instead of aging into the kind of men he’d looked up to as a squire. It was no matter as long as they did their jobs, even if it did bother him. Despite his embarrassment, however, he still held to the sentiment. He didn’t need to set eyes on the queen, all the better that he didn’t. He wasn’t a knight for glittering gold armor, nor for illustrious titles, to him it was true that you were queen. He hadn’t meant it in terms of jewels, not even in beauty or wealth, though you had plenty of each. He had only meant that when his lips touched your skin and his eyes lifted to meet yours as he gave his oath– he’d felt that you were an ill-fated, gentle queen of old and he your nameless, honorless knight.
You came out of the bedroom on a wisp of spring laden air, dressed darkly in sanguine red. Poorly hidden behind your queenly mask, an air of jubilance. His eyes stayed on you, heedless of how he looked. He had been right to stare but at the time, he had not known it. He had not known it would be the last time he’d ever see you look so happy.
Lord Claude, always the enigma. Felix remembered the first time he’d guarded the door while the two of you spoke in the drawing room. The young master proved rather dull and dreary, in his opinion, but you were obviously enamored with him. He’d never seen a woman in love before you and he was certain he’d never again with how incomparably you wore the glow of love. It almost overshadowed the weakness that lay beneath, the rot beneath the bright red flesh of a ripened apple. That was why he stood at your side, so stupidly pleased and hopeful, despite his distaste. It was for you to have something of your own. The mansion and everything in it belonged to Lady Diana, but if you could become a marchioness, you would be your own. You would have escaped and taken refuge in a love you had always been worthy of. And surely the Lord Claude– much beloved by you, would reward your efforts twofold.
The more that he saw you give yourself away to be worthy of being a marchioness, the more he prayed. Later on, he would have assumed his role long enough to realize that though he was your knight, it was implicitly decided by the unspoken rules of decency in society that his role was to protect you from an outsider, a thief, a bandit. He was not to protect you from the Lord Claude. But that was not now, he was a green young knight yet, whose head still danced with fond thoughts of the muted glory in serving such a lady. Of the place he would take at your side as you managed to lift yourself to the position you deserved. So much hope had been leaned on the idea that your marriage to Claude would be your salvation that it was perhaps destined to fail. Too much hope had yet to do Felix any good at all.
Felix’s stomach churned when Claude reached over to brush a petal from Diana’s hair. The indignation of it was one thing, the guilt was another. He should have trusted Claude much less than you had, he realized. It was your prerogative to be romantic, his to be weary. Now, he was reeling with undue humiliation, unable to think of how to spare you this, all because he’d refused to see.
The decay from there fell especially quick to his eyes. There was no offsetting the fatigue in your features, the pain subtly adding an odd flinch to your otherwise graceful and measured gait. Each time Claude decided to grace the manor with his presence, you looked entirely drained. You looked stunned like he had been as a young squire returning to his quarters from a particularly mean spirited day of sword training. It was as though Claude had sunk his fangs into your skin with every word, seeking a boastful memory of the sanguine dress you’d worn when he’d first drawn the warmth from your skin.
Come the late night after that he had gone to Diana instead of visiting you at all, he crawled into bed eagerly, forgetting why he had dreaded sleep so to begin with. It is such a dangerous thing as a knight, to forget. You are full of spite and fear without target, the whole world an uncoordinated dance of precarious steps. You walk into traps of your own making and you do not realize because you have not learned to fear yourself properly.
The dream melded seamlessly with reality, never was it fanciful. It ended as it began, in feasibility. A dream had no master nor cunning, it simply was. Still, it felt as though this dream was predatory with the ability and thought to lure him carefully. This dream always began the same way, with him at the tea party, a memory which did not weather with time. This dream, if he were to indulge the belief of it being somewhat sentient, seemed to play with the fact that he thought of it every time he saw Claude’s face.
It was a clever thing.
This time something had been taken from you, thieved from your pockets rather than wrenched from your hands. The news of Diana’s poor health sent Claude scattering from the house as though driven out with a sword at his back. It was as though he saw no reason to hide his affair. Or rather, the urgency of Diana’s impending death made his love for her flare to heights that couldn’t be hidden. That he’d no will to hide. The latter was somehow more infuriating than anything. To think that a lord who had you and knew you, could truly love another far better.
While your husband rode for Diana, you sat in the drawing room waiting for a carriage to be prepared. Felix assumed there would be some manufactured problem with the carriage at Claude’s behest just so that he could have that much more time with the young lady. If such had truly been the case, he needn’t have bothered trying to delay you any further, his insolence had a more than serviceable job of it. By the time Felix entered the room to check on you, you were laid on the floor in a heap and barely breathing.
He could not keep grief from erupting from his lips when he saw you. He was at your side in an instant, scooping you into his arms as he would a child as he called to the servants outside to fetch the doctor. He brought you to bed, not being advised against moving you by the wide eyed servants he passed by and subconsciously thinking that it’d be best for you to wake up in bed rather than discarded carelessly in the drawing room where you still waited to receive your husband. In retrospect, as he stood outside your door with the doctor inside, he’d realized that the wariness of the servant might have been due more to his oddly frantic and personal grief on behalf of his lady rather than their master’s apathy. But in that moment he couldn’t have cared less for decorum, he almost hadn’t left the room when the doctor dismissed the servants. He always forgot himself when it came to you.
The doctor came out of the room looking troubled, he’d always been a somewhat fragile looking man as Felix saw him and it gave him the courage to pry. “Is the lady alright?” He asked quickly before the doctor could turn down the hall.
The man’s face sagged with immediate exhaustion at the question. “…Keep the mistress in your thoughts, she’s with child.”
Felix’s stomach dropped. His hopes were that you’d just fainted from stress and the only necessary treatment was enforced relaxation. From the way the doctor seemed to age in a moment just from him asking how you were, this child was not cause for much happiness.
In the months that followed, Felix kept his gaze trained on you steadily, not knowing what he should anticipate from your condition. He saw you in decline as Claude was nowhere to be found. In the early days of your pregnancy, he’d returned in a haste to get back to work. He’d forced you to reveal your pregnancy from the foyer because he wouldn’t spare a moment for you and after that, his reaction…he had the audacity to look bereaved. Bereaved that his wife had only done what was asked of her. What they were married for.
Felix felt such misery at your position. He felt the growing lethargy of your movements and the claustrophobia of being confined to your room. Through none of it could he comfort you and Claude was unwilling even though it was practically his only duty to you. What he felt was more pressing than that was being at Diana’s side as she slowly, much too slowly, faded away. But it was as though she never actually would. She was never going to die and return your husband to you. Even if she wilted mercifully, her ghost would haunt Claude who’d force everyone else to pretend that she still lived. Her memory would be the plague that replaced the one she enacted in life. He feared you’d never be free of this and it was a shameful feeling that he tried to shake off at every turn.
Days passed monotonously without him ever seeing you, the only sign of life being the servants who entered and exited your bedroom, bearing things like medicine and the scant amount of food you could keep down. Until one arrived with a note bearing Claude’s sigil.
Felix had been fool enough to believe this was some comfort to you, some belated and lazy excuse, no doubt but a comfort nonetheless. Something that would display the barest semblance of care for you might have put some manner of relief in your heart.
It was never to be.
Whatever Claude sent seemed to add ten sleepless to your body for how slowly, painstakingly you moved as if carefully dancing around the exhaustion would keep it from catching up to you. And you flinched as you moved down the stairs, the weight of the duty placed upon you threatened to drag you downward from your still somewhat graceful gait. It was a bleak sight to his eyes, the way your grace and the need for it had not faltered even now. It was as though just like the woman he loved so very much, he’d taken the ability to haunt a place while still living.
He summoned you to his side while you were like this, it made the already grating hatred he fostered inside become an unbearable hurt. A hopelessness that made him wish for Claude to die, to suffer, to hurt as you did. But he knew it wouldn’t be. He was born with too much to hurt like you did. When Felix offered you his hand, he ‘d tried to convey all that he felt for you as his lady in that gesture, for he could do nothing else to show his…what was it that he felt? Something more than affection, surely. What he wanted to convey was more than a knight was able to offer his lady. It was something less like what Claude might have felt for you and more than it, too. It was surpassing, a life’s wish.
He felt as though a conduit for your experience as the carriage rocked along, it was a curious thing. He felt hurt as you stepped into the carriage, as the horses began to race down the path. The pain was dynamic, flitting about his whole body and grief held fast to him.
Through dim halls he followed you to Diana’s room. The acrid, sickly sweet smell of medicine steeped in the air made him hold his breath as stood outside the door. He could not hear Diana’s voice well, it was a thin whisper, true to her condition. He could not even hear your own voice. What was occurring between you unsaid? Still, he found himself cooling down to a resoluteness as he observed the indignity of all you endured. Your parents had not even bothered to care that you were pregnant, your husband was horrified and probably sent for you in hopes of your miscarriage. Claude was a selfish, romantic fool. He’d surely have sacrificed legacy for the girl who laid in bed dying. So die. He thought. Die quickly, before Claude can have what he wants of my lady.
How easily such gruesome thoughts came to him did not inspire any fear nor shame. He was no longer a green knight.
Claude accosted you when you returned. Not even having yet sit with the thought that your husband had risked your health and safety for the whims of a dying, useless girl, he decided to grace you with anger. He demanded to know what you’d said to her. Of all things to say to the pregnant wife you left confined and isolated. His hand met the pommel of his sword with a loose grasp as he looked on with the thought that he’d meet his end right after he killed Claude if he were to move. He thought on his own death with pragmatism.
“That child you’re carrying…is it even mine?” Claude’s remark made him see red and yet he had to stay his hand. You fell to the floor in front of him as he scrambled forward to hold you. It was as though Claude had struck you with only his words and Felix had been helpless to stop him. All he’d been waiting for was a step in your direction. He would have unsheathed his sword in a second. He hadn’t expected this. Yet Claude’s cruelty had taken such a clever form. He hadn’t needed to lay a hand on you, something that would warrant Felix to step before you. He knew exactly how to harm you and his child.
He’d carried your body, soft and feverish, to your bedroom. Time and time again you had done this dance, it seemed. Only then did he become vaguely aware of how familiar it felt to pick you up from the floor.
The doctor came again and left without pretense of hope.
There had been nothing he could do to protect you from the harm Claude had done to you and Felix did believe that what your husband had told you was done for this very effect. If that weak, limp, useless lady could not live, neither could you and the child which might be a thorn in her side in her last days of living. He hated himself for this. He was a coward for not taking Claude’s head off the second he took his position against you that night. For letting him go back to Diana after what he’d said.
The next months passed in uncertainty. Though, in retrospect, Felix might have found that he was the only one uncertain of the outcome. Or at least, the only one pretending to be. He heard your cries through the door as you gave birth with much difficulty. He shifted his weight, chills running down his spine. The screams were bloodcurdling and at times, he accidentally let out a muffled sound of anguish behind his hand at them. It was a violent ordeal, he could smell the blood from outside the door and on the wind as servants whisked in and out of the room carrying towels heavy with blood.
At last, he heard the cry of a child but the room was lacking your voice which he awaited eagerly. He waited to find relief in your voice, cooing to the newborn but he never did. Finally, he simply entered the room, dispensing with propriety. What he saw began to dissolve the corners of reality, leaving him somewhat detached, watching from outside himself. The blood leaked out from under your body off of the sheets and down to the floor, you lay motionless in the center of it, your hair and nightgown wet with sweat.
“My lady?” He called, wishing he could steal the foolish words back as soon as they came out.
“The madame has passed,” the doctor said, wiping the blood from his hands with a blank look on his face as the midwives about him tended to the child and began to discard the ruined towels.
He needed nothing more for the world to turn to seafoam beneath him.
The next time he resurfaced, he didn’t even know what day it was, what he had been in the middle of doing. He only knew he’d been outside your door though you were probably hours dead. A dog at his master’s feet. He’d gone feral, ready to tear the flesh from Claude’s body in a moment’s notice, he took his sword in hand hastily. Somehow, he knew that Claude was inside though he could not remember seeing him enter. It was strange, as though the integrity of reality was dissolving with each blink.
He entered the room without tact or stealth, his singular goal to kill the man who had harmed you so. Even if it wouldn’t bring you back, there was a sense of desperation to the act, as though you could benefit from his act of retribution. But when he entered the room, which seemed desaturated and alive, moving with each breath of his— he found Claude in a pool of blood, his and your own, next to the bed. The sight enraged him so much, the audacity of it, the strange juxtaposition of his death here and his actions before. The stolen chance of bringing you vengeance turned the shards of glass from his shattered persona of knighthood turned inward, bleeding only him.
He could only stare at the hateful scene before him with grief before him as something drew him outward further, the horror of the world becoming mush around him, crumbling in on itself. It happened quickly, that he was drawn from what he believed was his body. The transition was seamless and sudden.
He startled awake. The darkness of his room seeming like a void, an end, for a moment before he remembered himself. It was slowly that he realized he’d been consumed by a dream, that all the grief he’d woken with was not real. The slurry of memories running through his mind melted together, evaporated as he tried to collect them. Dread settled deep in his stomach even as his false reality turned to dust in his hands.
He was left only with the hollow feeling, that of a horror endured and buried.
Saw this whole write up about how alucard secretly had feelings for sypha and was jealous of trevor like he didn’t have a stiffy for the man from the first meeting PLEASE…and then they went on bashing him for not being super in tune with sypha’s needs in wake of having finally recovered after a literal year from a near fatal attack by his father and having little time to mourn his dead mother like be so fr “sypha needed cuddles in trevor’s stinky blanket, not compliments about how well she reads, she called him a cold well because she’s not getting anything back from this man who’s days off recovering from a brush from death by the father he’s loved all his life >:(” well alucard needed ativan and his family alive and not trying to kill him so I can’t really fault him for not being in the place to get super intimate with sypha in this hypothetical au where he had a super sad unrequited crush on her and her alone and totally totally only saw trevor as a rival and definitely didn’t desire him carnally as well. And then they were supposedly analyzing body language (incorrectly) just so that they could dunk on alucard in favor of their ship. That really pissed me off like please can you guys just go watch the vampire diaries for the corny love triangle shit yall want, there’s a reason the least insufferable people in the fandom are selfshippers and trephacards.
catching feelings? no, i wouldn’t do a thing like that, that’s for sure!
summary: a lil drabble about alucard getting all the (mostly) consequenceless comfort sex he deserves
pairing: alucard x gn afab reader
cw: post season 3, unprotected medieval sex, fingering, somnophilia, unresolved feelings, dubcon if you squint, cumming untouched♥️ masturbation, voyeurism
You were a…friend of Alucard’s. A friendly traveler who’d stayed with him a number of days while waiting out a storm and passing through the area. He was glad for the company but you were very forward about how attractive you found him. Not that he saw this as an issue on its own but it was just… he didn’t know if he should entertain your advances or not, he knew he was attracted to you but he figured it best not to open himself up to anything.
At least, that was the plan. Adrian had tried very hard not to let his cock do his character assessments for him but it happened quite naturally anyway. He had a good feeling about you, he justified. He wasn’t looking for what wasn’t there this time either. You were just a casual traveler who happened to enjoy wine, pretty men and sex, he gathered. You didn’t seem to have many more ambitions to your meeting, you didn’t put on some choreographed seduction. You didn’t know anything about magic, couldn’t have given a fuck about the Belmont hold if he paid you and were only vaguely concerned at the shabby state of the castle you’d be sleeping in. It happened easily after seeing these things, his mind (and cock) justified sleeping with you by rattling them through his brain each time he saw you bend to pick up a book or bring your lips to a glass of wine.
He’d heard you touching yourself doors down from him in the guest bedroom. He could tell you were muffling your moans into a pillow but his keen vampiric hearing would not allow him not to be tortured by it. He shuddered, trying to make himself stop listening, go back to reading his book but his cock won out the war against his brain and he drifted down to your room, opening the door.
You looked up, surprised but he could see he was not at all unwelcome. He swallowed hard at the sight of you half dressed and panting, looking over your shoulder at him. You beckoned him into bed and he wasted no time. He had your legs open, nightgown pushed up under your chin in an instant as he played with your wet cunt which to him was now the best sensation on earth. He managed to retain enough restrain to ask “Is that alright?” as he slid the first finger in even knowing from the way your body bowed and twitched that it was definitely more than alright. He waited for your breathless “yes…I’m alright” for him to slip in another finger…and then another, not giving you any time to acclimate. He leaned in to kiss you instinctively and you responded, the two of you not letting up on your tongues slipping into each other mouths, strings of spit dribbling messily across your chins as he fingered you a bit sloppily. It was hard for him to focus hearing your moans, when he heard a sound he liked, he pressed the spot again and again with a fervor that left your body trembling, with you gasping against his kiss.
Suddenly overwhelmed and clearly close to cumming, you pushed yourself from him, desperately panting “wait, wait.” Clearly wanting to savor the moment just a little more before you came, it registered to him that he had only been at this for about three minutes and already you were at the brink. Adrian gathered you back into his arms firmly, arousal making him bold. “It’s alright, just a little more,” he murmured in that lovely voice of his that went straight to your cunt. You whimpered, taking it until you reached the edge again and strained in his arms, desperate to stretch this moment. You were never one to cum quickly, when you touched yourself, you edged for that purpose—for extending that pleasure, perhaps exceeding it depending on how long you denied yourself. Your body flexed and resisted his hold both from how intense the sensation was and because you wanted to feel it for as long as possible but his quick hands always set you back into the position he needed you to be in so that he could reach that spot inside that drove you insane. Each harsh thrust of his fingers whited your vision and you could do nothing to hold back your own orgasm which came so strongly that you clung to Adrian, your hands gripping his arm so tightly you might’ve worried about bruising that pretty pale skin of his, burying your face in his neck and biting him to contain your sounds.
Adrian came untouched at the bite. You didn’t realize it over your own groaning at first but you heard his gasp and moan and felt the roll of his hips against your backside which felt a bit damp. “Gods,” he groaned, his hands gripping you so tightly you knew he was bruising you. It was all so overwhelming, your pleasure, the touch of another person, the smell of your arousal and the vulnerability. He wasn’t thinking about pleasing his own cock then, all he’d be thinking of was the wet, warm, silken squeeze of your cunt and he’d just…been overwhelmed by the time you bit him. It was such a brazen gesture but the pain, combined with the throb of his cock and the pride he felt at making you a twitching mess culminated in him not even realizing he had been steadily making a mess of himself with precum.
“Fuck,” was all you could say when all was done and you two laid in the damp sheets trying to calm down. It was especially intense for Adrian who had gone so long without sex. It was such a comfort, even though he hadn’t gotten to fuck you properly, that he could have cried. So much touch after years of cold was euphoric and a little sad for him.
The next morning, you woke to him eating you out which you welcomed gladly. He was desperately sucking at your clit as he seemed to purr. Then it was finally, properly fucking you when he was sure he could handle more than a few seconds inside you without coming. Then it was having you on every surface possible. It was sex for comfort on a ridiculous scale. It was so indescribably good to have someone in the castle that was usually full of trauma and good memories turned tragic because of how badly they held up. Whenever he felt lonely, he was on his knees, whenever he was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what his life had become so quickly, he was fucking you into the bed so hard part of it broke and left it lopsided.
Though, finally, the stormy weather cleared and it was safe for you to move on and you made it clear you did intend to move on which he tried very hard to respect instead of distracting you for another few days with sex. He realized when you were gone that he’d quickly have become addicted to fucking you if you stayed, the castle was filled with unquiet ghosts and he never knew just how much comfort he could take in sex. He would have buried his cock inside you every time some horridly depressing thought came to mind and he’d never deal with anything. That was why it was for the better you were only passing through, you were just too addictive for a person seeking comfort.
You did double back to the castle every once in a blue moon, though. For which he was immensely grateful. Your sparing presence was a healthy enough balance, he figured. It was hard to think logically when he had his mouth on you, honestly. He was grateful to you, for not giving him the chance to fall in love with you, to need more than you were willing to give. But honestly, sometimes, in the quiet of night as he heard the soft whistle of the wind blowing through the castle, he did wish you’d let him know you better. He wished you’d be more than friendly.
But it was all foolishness and loneliness talking. This set up was for the better. He could totally just have casual sex and spend time with you when you were in the area and mend your clothes when they got ripped and…cook your favorite dessert which he had to go to several villages to procure the ingredients for and…fill your satchel with food, medicine and a map and…ask about the family members you were visiting all without making too much of it. Totally.
cw (chapter specific): child neglect, very vaguely implied forced prostitution, death, abuse, poisoning, suicide, mentions of pregnancy and child birth, arranged marriage, infidelity
pairing: claude x fem!reader
summary: we take a brief intermission from claude's suffering to examine what the fuck is wrong with reader's family
author's note: me and my husband we're sticking together🎵
Claude lingered around your parents’ manor like a ghost after you died. In the middle of the night, every night, he found his way to your bedroom, standing at the foot of the bed you’d died in, remembering the shape your body formed in the sheets. The room still smelled of your blood and sweat, though the room had been cleaned up by the maids as soon as your body was taken out of the room. Your absence was starker than your presence. After the funeral, Diana expressed that she wanted to go home, heavily implying she would leave if he came with her but Claude was no longer beholden to her wants. He had no reason to care whether she came or went.
He was wielding grief as the knife he held up to cut deeper into himself in hope that if he only suffered enough, his hands would wash clean of your blood. But in the end, he had already decided to live, if only because he could do nothing else. Morbid thoughts plagued him, swirling around his head like unquiet spirits begging him to give in. He thought perhaps he should cause his own ruination and this time, live with it. He thought he should make for certain that both of your houses are set aflame and collapsing on top of the lot of you, to bury and burn your sycophant parents, his helplessly selfish wife and even his own child. He thought that nothing should be spared from complicity. He knew not anymore if he truly believed that it would save you, or if this was what some divine terror was willing him to do even still, but he began to long for punishment. It became catharsis, the thought of being punished.
He roamed through the house you grew up in, searching for any trace of you that survived, as if some inkling of you would help him to save what had already been lost too many times. Even so, it was automatic for him at this point, no longer even really a choice. He had no direction, only frantic need pulling him toward the doomed task. He was trying to get to the dregs of a goblet of wine which never ran dry, he kept drinking until he was sick but never satisfied, never finished.
Your parents’ manor was an eerie place, he’d always thought. Wind blew in from an opened window in the hall and the house seemed to breathe, and its hollow bones creaked softly. Despite her gentle ultimatum, Diana could not actually follow up on it, she must have known that but she believed better of him at the time and thought that everywhere she went, he would follow her like a lovestruck teenager again. There were things to be done at manor that she could not neglect as its lady even he chose to neglect his own duties. She had come into her own as a marchioness, no longer the shy and unassuming lady that lay in bed sick day in and day out. She would not leave the territory without management though he knew she desperately wanted him to come back home. She seemed dazed to return home without her husband for that purpose, for the lament of a sister she had infinitely more right to grieve so egregiously. Even after all those years, the silly girl was only just beginning to grow aware of the disparity of marriage.
Somehow he felt it was hard for her to reconcile that she wasn’t a precious young lady anymore. Even as he was mired in a pool of half catatonic grief, she dared ask him to leave with her because she truly expected he would do so if she did. Had she not grown out of the habit of expecting others to be near worshiped no matter what that her parents instilled her? He remembered how she was after your funeral, when he was sitting in the dark of a guest room. She had come to him, tried to hold him, to kiss him; believing all this would be a comfort and not a further indignity. She’d had arrogance enough to look hurt as he pulled her from him and recoiled from her touch. She must have still believed she was the cure to all ills because she was once more in a house where she was always treated as though she truly were.
He found his way to the library where you’d spent much of your life, if Felix’s word was truth. He brushed his fingers along the spines of the books, looking for the one that he left his missive in, the one Diana read and did not want understand. He searched through the categories of books that contained subjects you three would have studied together as he could not remember which particular book it was, but even after pulling all the books and flipping through the pages, he couldn't find the letter. He wondered if you had ever even set eyes on it once before Diana got to. Had it been your catalyst to run away? Had you read the note and understood that the effort of trying to be happy at his side was a fool’s errand? Was he again the cause of your downfall?
As he gave himself to thought of you, he continued looking through your family’s collection of books. It was all fairly standard and even a bit utilitarian, lacking any of the fanciful novels so beloved by many young nobles. He assumed if there were any, they’d be in Diana’s room because they’d be bought for and read by her alone. But there was something that struck him as he roamed around the shelves, his eyes scanning aimlessly for a book that looked as if it had been perhaps been misshelved. It was subtly tucked into the highest shelf but it still stood out to him eventually among droll guides, needlework books and encyclopedias emblazon with gold lettering. It was hastily bound looking more like a journal and it was worn, unlike the rich and well maintained leather of the other books and it was small, leaving a wide gap between the top of the shelf and the top of the book. Its spine did not read a title.
When he pulled the book, he understood what it was. Its title read “The Princess and The Knight,” signifying it was some common, tawdry romance novella. Still, he began to read it, the absurdity of its place in a house so heavy and serious intriguing him. Could this book have belonged to you? Could it have been an escape for you who was locked firmly out of girlhood when you were only just betrothed? When he’d read the title, his mind flashed with the memory of your face as Felix’s body fell into the dirt in front of you. He remembered how fiercely Felix had protected you even in this life. The rage and grief in his voice when he came for retribution. Though he knew you were ever dutiful and if there was love between you and Felix, it was never more than courtly, maybe you had seen this book and it had reminded you of some place where it could be more.
The story revolved around the love affair of a princess from a bloodline with an affinity for magic fleeing her country at wartime and being assigned a knight from the neighboring kingdom she sought refuge in. The two began a passionate and sanguine love affair in secret, all while living under of the tension of war and the threat of both of them losing everything to their love. But when the war was won, thanks in part to the wits of the two characters, and peace spread over the kingdom, she and her knight were able to be wed and live happily ever after. He had been searching for you in the pages, interpreting the knight and the princess, looking for traces of a love you might have had once. He had been looking for you so closely in every word that he hadn’t realized the grander scale of things until the end; when he flipped over the last page to read the epilogue, on the blank side of the page he saw a sketch.
The drawing was finely, intricately done in ink and resembled…Diana. The owner of this book had drawn Diana so vividly, yet there were a few differences in the likenesses of the two. This woman had long spools of curly hair spilling over her shoulders and a mole near her gently smiling lips. She was older than Diana must have been when the book was written. She looked like the heroine that had been described in the novel. For some reason, he found himself fixated not in awe or admiration but in mind numbing shock. He could feel the love that went into each stroke of the pen and a knot formed in his stomach the longer he stared. It was uncanny in a house like this, to find anything that should mark vulnerability or simple folly. He recalled an occasion where your father had gifted her a portrait he’d made of her and their daughter. Though two different mediums, the style looked so similar. From what Claude saw, it seemed that your father seldom made art of anyone but Diana. Your father surely had not been so passionate about a throwaway romance that he had ignored his bias and poured so much love into an image of the heroine.
The only one who could be so brazen as to have a romance novel among his books wherein which they lovingly drew an almost intimate image of a woman, worn with the spine slightly bent from being handled so many times— not even properly hidden away, would be your father. Your father who paraded his illegitimate child, born from a mistress. The revelation gave him pause. What did Claude truly know about Diana? He couldn’t remember having ever asked her if she’d known her mother because she so resolutely accepted the countess as her only mother. But this woman sketched onto the page of a well loved romance, was this her mother? She looked as if she could be. Portraits of Diana hung in exposed parts of the house, he did not seem to care that the custom of having an illegitimate child was to have them separate from one’s “official” family, to not love a child born of one’s own lust so openly. Even if one had a particular love of their mistress and child, he would simply put them up in a nice mansion close enough for him to come and go but your father had your mother raising his illegitimate child. He celebrated her birthdays lavishly and even allowed her to go to the academy. He absolutely refused to hide her, to show shame in her. So why was this woman Claude presumed to be Diana’s mother who was clearly beloved by him even now, shut up in the back of a romance novella?
A thought occurred to him then, that perhaps the otherworldly force pulling him into Diana, entangling him in her was not otherworldly at all. Perhaps it had not originated in him alone as some primordial curse formed around him before there even was a him. He thought of just how besotted he was with Diana the first time he met her in each life, how the greater part of him felt foreign. He thought of your mother’s unusually devoted love for a child that wasn’t her’s, a product of her husband’s disloyalty. Something inside him thought that the answer lay at Diana’s feet. In her very blood, he was convinced, was the answer.
Such a tenderly written romance, signed with a carefully drawn illustration of the woman who could be Diana’s mother. The part of “The Princess and The Knight” which struck him so was the bit about the princess possessing capacity for magic. It was not mentioned much nor utilized greatly in the plot but it made an impression. Magic users had decreased over the years, their powers waning until they were unheard of entirely. To anyone else who read the novella, it must have given the story to a bit of fantasy but to Claude, it was almost uncanny. He could not take it for an unassuming romance. To him, the story hid some truth under its veneer, for it was no coincidence that the princess resembled Diana so and that it ended up under the same roof as her, worn with years of eager hands flipping back over the pages. The princess’ power was never described in detail but if she were based on a real woman, then perhaps she had something to do with his situation.
He might’ve gone to Diana right then for answers but he feared his body might be taken over again at any time. He did not want to see her, did not want to feel the familiar paralysis of affection reaching up through his body. He did not want to see himself bed her again while the memory stood frozen in his eyes. Each time he saw her after he’d been set free, he’d worried that it would happen again. That his body would betray his mind and he’d never find anything of substance to end the cycle of misery the two of you shared. And he was committed to the task of trying, even if he could never succeed. He was ready to succumb to the greater sense of careworn madness he found in you.
He decided to explore the unattended corners of your home further, thinking there would be— must be more. If ever Diana’s mother had lived here, someone left a trace that he intended to find. He might’ve asked your father directly but as much as he was a lickspittle, something told him that your father would be afflicted by the same paralysis of mind that he had when he belonged to Diana. Unable to share the love he held for her but unable to hide it either, culminating in a pathetic sort of half-baked defensiveness. He wasn’t likely to get anything out of that, even you hadn’t been able to get anything out of him when he was like that. Worse still, he might try to cover up all that he kept that ever indicated Diana’s mother had lived there once, that she had a name and a face. And then what?
No, it was better this way. Better to find it all before he got the chance to hide any of it.
Your parents were still in the house, seemingly without intention of asking him when he was going to leave but there was still a bit of anxiety in the air when they entered the room. He could tell that they very much wished for him to return to their daughter and make her happy again as she was destined to be. It was awkward that their son-in-law had a longer bereavement than your sister did. But still being the cowardly sycophants they were, they could not ask him to leave for her sake—only “encourage” him by tossing out little updates on Diana. “Diana and our grandchild miss you very much,” “Diana takes ill so easily when she works so hard, we should hope you’ll be well enough to go back to her soon,” “Diana sends her love and wants you to know she’s there for your sake.”
Claude wouldn’t care if Diana’s life hung by a thread and he was all that could spare her, frankly and he brushed off all responsibility in favor of giving himself to his task. It was shameless, he knew, but he’d given up everything inside of the barren, hollow shell of his self to save you. It was a task that had already and would yet again supersede death, birth and the enveloping void he fell backward into each time his life was ended. He waited until they inevitably visited Diana, likely to calm her worries with lukewarm supplications about his grief, to go searching in the other parts of the house uninhibited. For, even if the servants were to tell their lord and lady, he’d already have looked through every corner he intended before they’d have a chance to move things around to better hide them.
He started with Diana’s old room. When he walked in, he was surprised to find it was left exactly as childish as it had been when she was only a young miss. Just the scent of the air turned his stomach, heavy and cloying with a pungent smell of medicine that was still sitting on her night stand in a small white bottle. He frowned as something fell clumsily into place. It hit him like the stray sour note of a violin. He recognized the bottle. Where did he last see this bottle?
For how preoccupied he was with the revelation taking slow form, he did not realize that Felix had entered the room until he heard the distinctive sound of a sword unsheathed. He did not turn.
“Felix.”
“Lord Claude,” Felix acknowledged, his voice struggling to keep its softness. “I might’ve known you’d be here. You truly cannot help yourself, it’s like a sickness.”
“Yes, it is very much like that,” Claude agreed easily. “But I’m not here for what you imagine I am.”
“I’m not so sure it matters, my lord.” Felix’s voice was flat.
“Nor am I. But I need you to let me live just as long as it takes for me to make sense of this.”
Felix went quiet for a moment but nothing about the situation made Claude think it was because the knight was going to hesitate. On the contrary, he was sure that his sword would swing just as neatly. “Do you know where I found my lady chained up, my lord? There are places, you know, that they bring women who had no other place to turn. You must know. You were at her side every night when we brought her back, you saw what toll it took. You saw what had been done.” Felix took a shallow breath. “You’re asking me to spare you so that you can make sense of whatever it is your farce of a marriage is built on? When my lady was given no such pardon? I know you’re the head of your house now, honored knight of the crown and you must think yourself above your treatment of others but I assure you, this will be the last time you ever assume so.”
Claude held still, his voice firm even as fear raged through his body. It was not fear for his life or of Felix’s wrath, it was the fear of failing, yet again, to make any movement in saving you. “I know how you think of me, Felix. I know that I have failed my wife. I know that I deserve to die here and now but even so, I can’t.”
“That is no problem, I’ll do it for you.”
Claude smiled joylessly to himself at the devout knight’s words. How could you have been judged so harshly in that life for wanting to run away with him when he so clearly had a loyalty akin to love for you? “You don’t understand. You cannot possibly. But answer me this, do you know who Diana’s mother is?”
The question puzzled Felix but he stood resolutely, ready at any moment to fell Claude’s head. “Everyone else in this household has care for Lady Diana. My duty was to serve my lady, I was the only one and I did not ever lapse. You’re asking the wrong person.”
“Felix, I do not ask for my wife’s sake. I know how this will sound but I’m trying to find out just what exactly it is that Diana holds over me and everyone else. I’m trying to figure out what exactly she is. You have seen it, haven’t you? The disparity between how people treat my wife and how they treat your lady. Do you think it natural to love a daughter born from an affair more than one’s own?”
He heard Felix laugh bitterly. “You believe her to be a succubus? Is that your excuse?”
“No. I believe her to be something worse.” Claude laughed as well, though his was more hysterical than anything. “She rules everything, Felix. Even in death. No, especially so in death. I have lived this life many times. I have died and returned back to the day that I first met her at the tea party. And when I do, I am taken over by her. It feels like love at first, it really does. But then intrusion. And then a curse. It is a cycle of death and resurrection, for myself and for the lady.”
Felix was silent and Claude continued on. “In one such life, she ran away with you, you know. It was raining the night we found you two. You were holed up in some abandoned cottage out there in the countryside, the one with the patches of white clover in the yard and a missing shingle on the roof.”
“What are you saying?” Felix’s voice wavered with near disbelief at the picture he painted but he held firm.
“My knights killed you where you stood and took the lady back to my manor. Your betrothed visited her. She had asked to speak to the woman who had been responsible for your death. She told me you two had planned to get married once the lady and I were finally married and settled in. She could not even mourn you properly because you were compelled to run away with the lady and killed.”
It is clear that Felix still thought Claude had lost his mind but what shocked him was the truth seeded into his madness. How could he have known the intimate arrangements of their betrothal and marriage when even their families had not known the cause for delay? This was not knowledge he could send an errand boy to fetch him nor an illusion he couldn’t hope to keep up, this was lived. It was memory.
“What does that have to do with Diana?” Diana was more likely a seductress than a sorceress in Felix’s opinion. Such a thing as a time loop, how could a girl so weak and childish create something like it?
Claude turned slightly, slowly toward him. “I don’t know yet myself. That is what I seek to find out. So that I can perhaps end it, for the lady at least. I don’t need anything Felix, not Diana, not my child, not my house. All I need and want is for the lady to stop suffering. I only beg you not to hinder me. When the time comes, I swear I will die on my own.”
Felix had no idea what to make of it all. Much of what Claude said seemed stilted, frantic and half thought. Yet he could not help but feel there was a certain sincerity to be had even in the worthlessness of Claude’s promise. And in any case, he was not entirely unfamiliar with the concept that Claude explained but all that it implied, he was not ready to believe. He sheathed his sword again finally and Claude turned to face him with the medicine bottle in hand. “Have you any idea why this would be in Diana’s room? It’s medicine that the lady took before.”
Felix’s eyes widened slightly in surprise. “It’s used to treat severe infection. It’s not supposed to be used by just anyone who gets ill. Lady Diana should not have needed that medicine, it would take effect like poison if not administered to someone battling a harsh infection. The doctor sent one of the servants to fetch it in town.”
“Yes, but this bottle is dusty, it’s mostly emptied out and the liquid inside it has congealed. It’s been sitting here for years. The medicine inside is aromatic. It has a distinct smell, doesn’t it? The lady’s room still reeks of it even with the windows opened up. Every time I went into Diana’s room when we were young, I smelled it, I tasted it. That means she was not only taking medicine she did not need but taking it regularly.” Claude said aloud, more to himself than to Felix who had bristled at the way he implied he and Diana were. “Was she…ever even sick?”
“Of course she was. Perhaps madame gave her the wrong medicine. She would not have poisoned herself, far be it from me to defend her but she did not desire to be sick. She seemed to envy the lady for her health, as she saw it.”
“…it was the lady’s mother who administered this medicine?” Claude questioned as new pieces fell together in his mind.
“I only know that the madame came to Lady Diana before bed to give her medicine. I do not know that it was that medicine, I did not see it.” Felix paused. “What is the significance, my lord?” He asked, annoyance creeping into his tone at the extensive talk of Diana.
“I intend to find out.”
He had wished to creep into the madame’s bedroom quickly and easily but the door was locked so they’d needed to fetch the key. Claude was shocked at the amount of sway he had over the servants of a house he was not a part of for the head maid simply handed over the key when he asked for it, albeit hesitantly as though she thought she might be scolded for doing so. When he took in the room, it was tidy and rather plain by aristocracy standards. The room seemed to have a chill about it, there was a draft somewhere that made it feel colder than the other rooms.
He began to pick carefully through her things, looking in every corner of the room for anything hidden. It was all mundane, droll and typical until he reached the last drawer of a dresser that was locked. Sure enough, nine bottles of unopened medicine neatly lined into rows of three. When he tried to pull the drawer out all the way and see what more he could find, it was caught on something that had been pressed against the top. Claude reached in to feel for it and pulled down what looked to be a simple leather bound, worn and yellowing journal.
Immediately he began to read. He was a bit startled at himself when he realized that he was eager to read the contents of his mother-in-law’s mind. He wanted to know how she saw you. How she justified treating you the way she did to uplift a child that was not her’s. A pitiful part of him just wanted there to be reason. He wanted cause for the rift in the relationship. He needed to believe there was a because to your suffering.
But what he read was not as he suspected. In neat, small lettering on the first page, it chronicled her life back to when she had been perhaps 19 years old but it was dated some ten years later. A reflection on her younger self written seemingly less as a journal and more a memoir.
“The princess had always been so gracious a mistress that even her tasks sounded like gifts.
When it was her time to return to her duties in her own kingdom, she resigned to it with great grace. However, she understood that the opposite would be true of her beloved knight. This fragile man only smiled in her company, protected her with wild fervor and once told her that he felt divinely guided to her. That to him, she was the symbol of god’s forgiveness and in serving her, loving her, he saw his life’s purpose. Oh, the princess lamented to me how dark a life her knight had lived, how the blood he shed as a knight haunted him with guilt. How his father had been of a violent sort in his efforts to transform his only living child into a knight of some worth to bring more prestige to their house and in his efforts to vent his own turmoil over his wife taking up with men of far more money, status and legacy than he. Her knight resembled his mother and so became the target of the ire he could not give his wife for the great protection being a mistress to such men afforded her. His mother knew what his father did, she did not care so long as it were not her. My heart came to soften for him too, the more she told me.
He had been a quiet man, shy and quite unknowingly sweet for his reputation as a ruthlessly skilled knight. He opened up to my princess like a flower toward the sun. He loved her so madly that she knew even though it was inevitable, he never intended to be where he could not protect her and stand at her side. The princess feared that their duties as princess and heir to a county respectively would give way to the knight’s devotion. She feared he’d kill himself trying to reunite with her or simply deteriorate under the burden of his own isolation but her own life was dedicated to more than just one person. It was her nation, her home of people waiting to see her return that she could not abandon. So in her stead, she asked me to stay in the kingdom and marry him. To give him a countess and to keep watch of him for anything he might do to interfere in both their duties.
It was a great honor she had given me entrusting someone so precious to me and given me a title higher than that I had been born with, I still feel that way now but I was foolish then and I did not understand the nature of what I was being asked to do. Nor would I until after it was already done.
You see (and it does, still pain me to even write such a silly thing), I did, at the time believe that I would become close to my husband. I viewed it as a matter of course, for I was far from a home I could never return to and he had no one. We were, for each other, the last traces of the princess. Though I could never think to hope for the kind of love that he gave to the princess, I believed that commonality could be nurtured into love or kinship. I wished for someone to turn to as my heart was sinking faster than a stone the longer I spent from my home. I believed it would happen. I believed he would become someone to lean on.
Though the first months of our marriage were cold, I managed to coax him into trying to have children as was our duty. I saw this as progress both in the way of our relationship as well as keeping him from the princess. I viewed even our coldness then as a sign of something beginning. It was only once, afterward, I think he worked very hard so that I would not ask him to do it again. But even so, I found that I was with child soon. I was a stupid girl then, I believed a child was what we needed to grow closer. I brought this news to him with a smile, I must have looked like an idiot.
My husband’s expression, I can never forget it. He was horrified at this revelation. He looked at me as though I’d announced a death. He looked at me as though I had wounded him. Then his beautiful eyes sparkled with unshed tears and his expression reverted to a weak, helpless smile as he said all the right things in his wavering voice.
It was then that I realized he would never love me. He was horrified at having a child with me, it was sheer terror and dread on his face when I told him. Perhaps he thought that I would not become pregnant at all, he would have preferred it that way. I hadn’t the relationship with him to truly comfort him, to know intimately what he feared about my child. I was useless in that way.
Through the following months, my apprehension was near unbearable. I kept feeling my stomach sink in dread, I kept waking up thinking that I would be home. I kept thinking that I had done something irreparable but I could think of nothing which was actually within my control. Therefore, when I finally gave birth, my relief that it was done with was greater than my joy. But that was alright with me because I had intended to deal with things in my own way."
From there, she went on to describe her rigid attention to being a diligent countess for a few droll pages. But at last, Claude came to another thing of significance. Your father had been summoned to court for political matters regarding the civil unrest which had not been quelled with the end of the war. Your mother could not follow him and leave a newborn alone so she had no choice but to simply trust in your father. She would come to regret that.
"My princess appeared like a bolt out of the blue months later. She was dressed as a peasant and had a somewhat bashful smile on her lips. Although I had missed her, all that I could think in seeing her was, "She should not be here."
But we brought her to the study so that presumably, she would tell us why she had returned when she had surely sworn that she could not. She took off her cloak and then I understood without her needing to tell me. I saw a little bump on her otherwise thin body and I was overcome. When my husband had returned to court, he had not been officially permitted to see my princess but they had met anyway and she was now with child. She had waited until she was just about to start beginning to show in order to take leave from court on the pretense of recovering from illness at her villa in the countryside.
I had been given the task of minding him but I had clearly failed. I should have gone with him no matter what. I should have taken the chance and left my child so that I could have prevented this. But my princess looked at me as faultless and took my hands in hers to assure me that she regretted nothing. She comforted my husband who apparently also knew nothing about this pregnancy until then. She knew his fears like the back of her hand, she knew exactly how to soothe them as I hadn't. He did not even have to speak. She simply knew.
Until then, I had not known that my husband dreaded having children for fear they would be cursed and afflicted with the same moral decay that his own parents had; and because he feared that having a child would bring the same thing out of him. Even if I had known, the princess was the perfect one to comfort him. She asked him if he believed a child born of her could be wicked and of course, he said no. She spun such sugary images of their child together for him with her eyes shining with joy. She told him that their child was special, that she did not fear him becoming a parent like his own because their child would change everything about being a father for him. It surely helped that my princess was glowing as she said such things, that the excitement radiating off of her grew stronger with each passing moment. He could not deny her, could not bring himself to contradict her words because he would always believe in her even if he did not believe in himself.
It went unsaid that the princess would be entrusting the child to the both of us. I had much apprehension about taking care of two babies rather than one and the secrets to be kept piling up above me but I could not complain, it had been my job for years to make everything work. I could not stop then when my princess needed me most. In any case, her presence in the manor brought life to a place that had become so eerie to me. She was the only flame in the dark and we were huddled around her, trying to preserve an ounce of warmth within ourselves. She was joyful through her pregnancy, she could not stop talking about the baby she was to have. The more she chattered, the more excited I became too as though I had any right to be. This was true of my husband too, who tentatively felt the kicks of his child and smiled, genuinely smiled as the princess did. I could see that he loved that child.
She slept in the master bedroom with him, after he left each day, I went in to help her get ready for the day. It was though I was still her maid and I suppose I wanted to be, would rather be that than a wife. But I could not bring myself to complain. I was not unlike my husband, I viewed my duties to the princess as somewhat sacred. I was as honored as I was anxious to raise the child.
On the day Diana was born, my husband was at my princess' side the entire time, as though he could protect her as her knight again. I could only marvel at him. When I had given birth, he stood at the foot of the bed stiffly and asked me what I intended to name our daughter, if I was alright and then told me that if I needed anything to have the butler prepare it at once. After Diana was born, my princess was still beautiful, perhaps even more so in her vulnerability. She held the most beautiful baby I had ever seen, close to her chest as my husband looked down at the both of them with sheer joy. It was as though all the happiness in the world existed between those three. My Diana had been born out of love and so it was easy to love her.
I left my own daughter to the maids in favor of caring for Diana when the princess rested. Her little ruby eyes and her head of soft blonde hair captivated me. Each coo or cry had my focus in a fraction of a second.
I had not yet considered the greater implications of her birth until my princess brought it to me. Diana had been born with an inordinate affinity for magic. The princess, as a member of the royal family had the capacity of a mage, it was kept secret through the death of magic that through her bloodline were those capable of miracles. I only knew after years of my proximity to the princess. This child, born in the time of civil unrest, when the queen had not yet been blessed with a child and the civil war had still bitterly divided the houses, was capable of being seen as a potential figurehead that could be used as a pawn in a new round of rebellion.
It was for me and my husband to put her above all things. Above even our own child. That, to me, went without saying for I did love Diana as my own daughter. But the princess knew that anything could happen and she used all of the strength of her magic to cast a spell over her that would be held with Diana's own great magic. My princess nearly expended all her energy to do so. Magic, she had once told me, was seen as a weak form of power because it relied so greatly upon emotion. It was the transformation of want into will. I knew not the details of the spell which bound my mistress' daughter. All my princess said was that her precious Diana would live happily, that for all the odds against her, she still had odds in her favor."
Claude felt numb as he turned the pages. He was in shock, suddenly the environment of the room felt too harsh and stimulating but he was glued to the journal. He could not dare stop reading it no matter what truths arose. So he flipped the page and read every single entry even as his hands trembled.
From then on, it was Diana, Diana, Diana. With each entry, she recorded a measurement which he assumed was the amount of medicine administered and her symptoms. She fretted over whether it was right to give her more or to give her less. She wrote about denying Diana's requests to go outside, to go to the theatre, to do much of anything besides stay in bed. It chilled him to the bone but more than that, perplexed him. He was staring at a page where your mother had seemed to write sloppily, hurried and anxious when he heard a voice.
"Lord Claude?" It was your mother, standing in the doorway.
He looked slowly up at her, at a loss for words and unable to reconcile the cold mother she was to you with her joy at being Diana's proxy mother. Unable, still, to understand why she was poisoning the daughter she loved so much.
"My lord, you should not be in here," she said softly but in her blank expression, it was apparent that she knew what he was there for. "It will look strange to others, for you to do something like this."
"You poisoned Diana," He was keenly aware of how delicately she was trying to dance around this subject but he was unwilling to indulge her.
Your mother did not even blink. "You must understand me, Lord Claude. Please understand."
"What is there to understand? You neglect your own daughter and fawn over your husband's illegitimate daughter only to poison her."
Your mother shook her head slowly as if she could not believe what he was implying. "I love that girl," she said, moving deeper into the room and shutting the door behind her. "Diana is my little princess. She is my only daughter."
A rush of rage ran up his body, carrying an unbearable desire to hurt her. "She's not your daughter at all. She's the daughter of a woman far more beloved than you."
But your mother could only smile helplessly. "Yes, but even so, she is my daughter in heart. You must trust me when I say that Diana was hopeless before."
"Hopeless?" His brow furrowed and a cold feeling creeped up his back, extinguishing his fury and replacing it with a kind of fear for the woman in front of him. "She wasn't hopeless, she was able to wed me, to live happily." He said it not as a defense of her but as an accusation.
"That poor girl. In the first place, she already had a weak constitution, because her magic was stronger than her body but it was the perfect excuse to keep inside and away from the eyes of those who would want to hurt her. But it was my eldest daughter who kept planting false hope in her. She even sent Diana before my husband to beg him to let her go to the academy because she knew very well he could not say no to her." There was venom in her voice, a sneer on her face. Claude rose to stand slowly, not knowing what he was going to do.
"He cannot say no to Diana because he loves her so, no, he loves her mother so," she sighed. "All the other one did was cause troubles. Diana had already given up but she roused such hope in the girl, false hope, cruel hope. If she had not been able to marry you...I do not know how we would have protected her. If my daughter was still alive, everything would be ruined. It was you who saved her, my lord. That is why I beg of you, don't judge me. You know that Diana is special. You must know."
"I did not want to save her, she did not need to be saved."
She remained with that pitiful smile on her face. "My husband is weak to her. He will...he will never forgive what I've done to our- his little princess. He won't understand. He will think that I have killed my princess. You know, he almost sees them as one in the same." She reached onto her desk, picking up a letter opener. "Diana will be hurt if she knows. I ask that you let the girl live her life believing as I told her. She deserves that much. I let her believe what I did because it was in her best interest. Please take care of her."
Before he could react, your mother plunged the sharp end of the letter opener into her throat.
#thinking about reader and her mom especially in this chapter…like they’re the true definition of that “mother and daughter existing as wretched mirrors” quote
hihi bbyyy thank u for the new chapter, fed us so well. I wanted to ask what went through claude’s head when he was reading the diary how readers dad wasn't there for readers birth byt for dianas. Someehow its so similar when he wasnt their for readers child. But for Diana's son he was. What do you think he thought he was sort of similar to readers dad?
Honestly, he was mostly just in shock and desperate to find out as much as possible as quick as possible so the comparisons have yet to really hit him. Those moments are parallels though and the two characters (by this i mean curse!claude not regular claude) are quite alike. There’s also the pregnancy reveal scenes where they act similarly.
They do maintain some differences though as reader’s dad was at least never abusive to reader’s mom and at least pretended to care about her wellbeing after birth. The bar is still in hell, though.
someone asked on ao3 if reader’s mother was also under the influence of a spell and I wanted to share my answer here too just in case anyone wants to know more about this fucked up family
“There’s definitely layers to the magic as we’ll see later but to answer one question: no, reader’s mom isn’t having the whole Claude experience. She just loved the princess, having served her for much of her young life and been through literal war with her but she ends up unfortunately realizing just how wide the separation between who both of them are and what they’re able to do after the princess has her marry reader’s dad. Reader’s mom is desperate to be even adjacent to the love the princess both gives and receives. The princess has all that reader’s mom wanted for herself but instead of jealousy, her dissatisfaction only adds to her devotion and her sacrificing her own sense of self to be, ultimately, what she sees as as being close to the princess.
It really doesn’t help that she had admiration for reader’s dad and hopes for their marriage only for her to realize that he is very much a one woman man who had an affair with the princess who is and would remain the only woman he loved. She has to reconcile basically still being a servant/secondary to the princess even in a situation she thought she could end up making her own life out of. Instead of rebelling or refusing to play along, she chooses to kinda indulge in the delusion that being what the princess desires of her, caring for her child more than her own is close enough to having what the princess does.
Serving the princess, being loyal to her, is kinda her way of being close to her and also making some purpose out of the massive mistake that was her marriage to reader’s dad. She views Diana as the child that she wanted to have for herself, a child who is loved and celebrated and born from love. That is also why she feels the way she does about reader.”
cw (chapter specific): child neglect, very vaguely implied forced prostitution, death, abuse, poisoning, suicide, mentions of pregnancy and childbirth, arranged marriage, infidelity
pairing: claude x fem!reader
summary: we take a brief intermission from claude's suffering to examine what the fuck is wrong with reader's family
author's note: me and my husband we're sticking together🎵
Claude lingered around your parents’ manor like a ghost after you died. In the middle of the night, every night, he found his way to your bedroom, standing at the foot of the bed you’d died in, remembering the shape your body formed in the sheets. The room still smelled of your blood and sweat, though the room had been cleaned up by the maids as soon as your body was taken out of the room. Your absence was starker than your presence. After the funeral, Diana expressed that she wanted to go home, heavily implying she would leave if he came with her but Claude was no longer beholden to her wants. He had no reason to care whether she came or went.
He was wielding grief as the knife he held up to cut deeper into himself in hope that if he only suffered enough, his hands would wash clean of your blood. But in the end, he had already decided to live, if only because he could do nothing else. Morbid thoughts plagued him, swirling around his head like unquiet spirits begging him to give in. He thought perhaps he should cause his own ruination and this time, live with it. He thought he should make for certain that both of your houses are set aflame and collapsing on top of the lot of you, to bury and burn your sycophant parents, his helplessly selfish wife and even his own child. He thought that nothing should be spared from complicity. He knew not anymore if he truly believed that it would save you, or if this was what some divine terror was willing him to do even still, but he began to long for punishment. It became catharsis, the thought of being punished.
He roamed through the house you grew up in, searching for any trace of you that survived, as if some inkling of you would help him to save what had already been lost too many times. Even so, it was automatic for him at this point, no longer even really a choice. He had no direction, only frantic need pulling him toward the doomed task. He was trying to get to the dregs of a goblet of wine which never ran dry, he kept drinking until he was sick but never satisfied, never finished.
Your parents’ manor was an eerie place, he’d always thought. Wind blew in from an opened window in the hall and the house seemed to breathe, and its hollow bones creaked softly. Despite her gentle ultimatum, Diana could not actually follow up on it, she must have known that but she believed better of him at the time and thought that everywhere she went, he would follow her like a lovestruck teenager again. There were things to be done at manor that she could not neglect as its lady even if he chose to neglect his own duties. She had come into her own as a marchioness, no longer the shy and unassuming lady that lay in bed sick day in and day out. She would not leave the territory without management though he knew she desperately wanted him to come back home. She seemed dazed to return home without her husband for that purpose, for the lament of a sister she had infinitely more right to grieve so egregiously. Even after all those years, the silly girl was only just beginning to grow aware of the disparity of marriage.
Somehow he felt it was hard for her to reconcile that she wasn’t a precious young lady anymore. Even as he was mired in a pool of half catatonic grief, she dared ask him to leave with her because she truly expected he would do so if she did. Had she not grown out of the habit of expecting to be near worshiped no matter what that her parents instilled her? He remembered how she was after your funeral, when he was sitting in the dark of a guest room. She had come to him, tried to hold him, to kiss him; believing all this would be a comfort and not a further indignity. She’d had arrogance enough to look hurt as he pulled her from him and recoiled from her touch. She must have still believed she was the cure to all ills because she was once more in a house where she was always treated as though she truly were.
He found his way to the library where you’d spent much of your life, if Felix’s word was truth. He brushed his fingers along the spines of the books, looking for the one that he left his missive in, the one Diana read and did not want understand. He searched through the categories of books that contained subjects you three would have studied together as he could not remember which particular book it was, but even after pulling all the books and flipping through the pages, he couldn't find the letter. He wondered if you had ever even set eyes on it once before Diana got to. Had it been your catalyst to run away? Had you read the note and understood that the effort of trying to be happy at his side was a fool’s errand? Was he again the cause of your downfall?
As he gave himself to thought of you, he continued looking through your family’s collection of books. It was all fairly standard and even a bit utilitarian, lacking any of the fanciful novels so beloved by many young nobles. He assumed if there were any, they’d be in Diana’s room because they’d be bought for and read by her alone. But there was something that struck him as he roamed around the shelves, his eyes scanning aimlessly for a book that looked as if it had been perhaps been misshelved. It was subtly tucked into the highest shelf but it still stood out to him eventually among droll guides, needlework books and encyclopedias emblazon with gold lettering. It was hastily bound looking more like a journal and it was worn, unlike the rich and well maintained leather of the other books and it was small, leaving a wide gap between the top of the shelf and the top of the book. Its spine did not read a title.
When he pulled the book, he understood what it was. Its title read “The Princess and The Knight,” signifying it was some common, tawdry romance novella. Still, he began to read it, the absurdity of its place in a house so heavy and serious intriguing him. Could this book have belonged to you? Could it have been an escape for you who was locked firmly out of girlhood when you were only just betrothed? When he’d read the title, his mind flashed with the memory of your face as Felix’s body fell into the dirt in front of you. He remembered how fiercely Felix had protected you even in this life. The rage and grief in his voice when he came for retribution. Though he knew you were ever dutiful and if there was love between you and Felix, it was never more than courtly, maybe you had seen this book and it had reminded you of some place where it could be more.
The story revolved around the love affair of a princess from a bloodline with an affinity for magic fleeing her country at wartime and being assigned a knight from the neighboring kingdom she sought refuge in. The two began a passionate and sanguine love affair in secret, all while living under of the tension of war and the threat of both of them losing everything to their love. But when the war was won, thanks in part to the wits of the two characters, and peace spread over the kingdom, she and her knight were able to be wed and live happily ever after. He had been searching for you in the pages, interpreting the knight and the princess, looking for traces of a love you might have had once. He had been looking for you so closely in every word that he hadn’t realized the grander scale of things until the end; when he flipped over the last page to read the epilogue, on the blank side of the page he saw a sketch.
The drawing was finely, intricately done in ink and resembled…Diana. The owner of this book had drawn Diana so vividly, yet there were a few differences in the likenesses of the two. This woman had long spools of curly hair spilling over her shoulders and a mole near her gently smiling lips. She was older than Diana must have been when the book was written. She looked like the heroine that had been described in the novel. For some reason, he found himself fixated not in awe or admiration but in mind numbing shock. He could feel the love that went into each stroke of the pen and a knot formed in his stomach the longer he stared. It was uncanny in a house like this, to find anything that should mark vulnerability or simple folly. He recalled an occasion where your father had gifted her a portrait he’d made of her and their daughter. Though two different mediums, the style looked so similar. From what Claude saw, it seemed that your father seldom made art of anyone but Diana. Your father surely had not been so passionate about a throwaway romance that he had ignored his bias and poured so much love into an image of the heroine.
The only one who could be so brazen as to have a romance novel among his books wherein which they lovingly drew an almost intimate image of a woman, worn with the spine slightly bent from being handled so many times— not even properly hidden away, would be your father. Your father who paraded his illegitimate child, born from a mistress. The revelation gave him pause. What did Claude truly know about Diana? He couldn’t remember having ever asked her if she’d known her mother because she so resolutely accepted the countess as her only mother. But this woman sketched onto the page of a well loved romance, was this her mother? She looked as if she could be. Portraits of Diana hung in exposed parts of the house, he did not seem to care that the custom of having an illegitimate child was to have them separate from one’s “official” family, to not love a child born of one’s own lust so openly. Even if one had a particular love of their mistress and child, he would simply put them up in a nice mansion close enough for him to come and go but your father had your mother raising his illegitimate child. He celebrated her birthdays lavishly and even allowed her to go to the academy. He absolutely refused to hide her, to show shame in her. So why was this woman Claude presumed to be Diana’s mother who was clearly beloved by him even now, shut up in the back of a romance novella?
A thought occurred to him then, that perhaps the otherworldly force pulling him into Diana, entangling him in her was not otherworldly at all. Perhaps it had not originated in him alone as some primordial curse formed around him before there even was a him. He thought of just how besotted he was with Diana the first time he met her in each life, how the greater part of him felt foreign. He thought of your mother’s unusually devoted love for a child that wasn’t her’s, a product of her husband’s disloyalty. Something inside him thought that the answer lay at Diana’s feet. In her very blood, he was convinced, was the answer.
Such a tenderly written romance, signed with a carefully drawn illustration of the woman who could be Diana’s mother. The part of “The Princess and The Knight” which struck him so was the bit about the princess possessing capacity for magic. It was not mentioned much nor utilized greatly in the plot but it made an impression. Magic users had decreased over the years, their powers waning until they were unheard of entirely. To anyone else who read the novella, it must have given the story to a bit of fantasy but to Claude, it was almost uncanny. He could not take it for an unassuming romance. To him, the story hid some truth under its veneer, for it was no coincidence that the princess resembled Diana so and that it ended up under the same roof as her, worn with years of eager hands flipping back over the pages. The princess’ power was never described in detail but if she were based on a real woman, then perhaps she had something to do with his situation.
He might’ve gone to Diana right then for answers but he feared his body might be taken over again at any time. He did not want to see her, did not want to feel the familiar paralysis of affection reaching up through his body. He did not want to see himself bed her again while the memory stood frozen in his eyes. Each time he saw her after he’d been set free, he’d worried that it would happen again. That his body would betray his mind and he’d never find anything of substance to end the cycle of misery the two of you shared. And he was committed to the task of trying, even if he could never succeed. He was ready to succumb to the greater sense of careworn madness he found in you.
He decided to explore the unattended corners of your home further, thinking there would be— must be more. If ever Diana’s mother had lived here, someone left a trace that he intended to find. He might’ve asked your father directly but as much as he was a lickspittle, something told him that your father would be afflicted by the same paralysis of mind that he had when he belonged to Diana. Unable to share the love he held for her but unable to hide it either, culminating in a pathetic sort of half-baked defensiveness. He wasn’t likely to get anything out of that, even you hadn’t been able to get anything out of him when he was like that. Worse still, he might try to cover up all that he kept that ever indicated Diana’s mother had lived there once, that she had a name and a face. And then what?
No, it was better this way. Better to find it all before he got the chance to hide any of it.
Your parents were still in the house, seemingly without intention of asking him when he was going to leave but there was still a bit of anxiety in the air when they entered the room. He could tell that they very much wished for him to return to their daughter and make her happy again as she was destined to be. It was awkward that their son-in-law had a longer bereavement than your sister did. But still being the cowardly sycophants they were, they could not ask him to leave for her sake—only “encourage” him by tossing out little updates on Diana. “Diana and our grandchild miss you very much,” “Diana takes ill so easily when she works so hard, we should hope you’ll be well enough to go back to her soon,” “Diana sends her love and wants you to know she’s there for your sake.”
Claude wouldn’t care if Diana’s life hung by a thread and he was all that could spare her, frankly and he brushed off all responsibility in favor of giving himself to his task. It was shameless, he knew, but he’d given up everything inside of the barren, hollow shell of his self to save you. It was a task that had already and would yet again supersede death, birth and the enveloping void he fell backward into each time his life was ended. He waited until they inevitably visited Diana, likely to calm her worries with lukewarm supplications about his grief, to go searching in the other parts of the house uninhibited. For, even if the servants were to tell their lord and lady, he’d already have looked through every corner he intended before they’d have a chance to move things around to better hide them.
He started with Diana’s old room. When he walked in, he was surprised to find it was left exactly as childish as it had been when she was only a young miss. Just the scent of the air turned his stomach, heavy and cloying with a pungent smell of medicine that was still sitting on her night stand in a small white bottle. He frowned as something fell clumsily into place. It hit him like the stray sour note of a violin. He recognized the bottle. Where did he last see this bottle?
For how preoccupied he was with the revelation taking slow form, he did not realize that Felix had entered the room until he heard the distinctive sound of a sword unsheathed. He did not turn.
“Felix.”
“Lord Claude,” Felix acknowledged, his voice struggling to keep its softness. “I might’ve known you’d be here. You truly cannot help yourself, it’s like a sickness.”
“Yes, it is very much like that,” Claude agreed easily. “But I’m not here for what you imagine I am.”
“I’m not so sure it matters, my lord.” Felix’s voice was flat.
“Nor am I. But I need you to let me live just as long as it takes for me to make sense of this.”
Felix went quiet for a moment but nothing about the situation made Claude think it was because the knight was going to hesitate. On the contrary, he was sure that his sword would swing just as neatly. “Do you know where I found my lady chained up, my lord? There are places, you know, that they bring women who had no other place to turn. You must know. You were at her side every night when we brought her back, you saw what toll it took. You saw what had been done.” Felix took a shallow breath. “You’re asking me to spare you so that you can make sense of whatever it is your farce of a marriage is built on? When my lady was given no such pardon? I know you’re the head of your house now, honored knight of the crown and you must think yourself above your treatment of others but I assure you, this will be the last time you ever assume so.”
Claude held still, his voice firm even as fear raged through his body. It was not fear for his life or of Felix’s wrath, it was the fear of failing, yet again, to make any movement in saving you. “I know how you think of me, Felix. I know that I have failed my wife. I know that I deserve to die here and now but even so, I can’t.”
“That is no problem, I’ll do it for you.”
Claude smiled joylessly to himself at the devout knight’s words. How could you have been judged so harshly in that life for wanting to run away with him when he so clearly had a loyalty akin to love for you? “You don’t understand. You cannot possibly. But answer me this, do you know who Diana’s mother is?”
The question puzzled Felix but he stood resolutely, ready at any moment to fell Claude’s head. “Everyone else in this household has care for Lady Diana. My duty was to serve my lady, I was the only one and I did not ever lapse. You’re asking the wrong person.”
“Felix, I do not ask for my wife’s sake. I know how this will sound but I’m trying to find out just what exactly it is that Diana holds over me and everyone else. I’m trying to figure out what exactly she is. You have seen it, haven’t you? The disparity between how people treat my wife and how they treat your lady. Do you think it natural to love a daughter born from an affair more than one’s own?”
He heard Felix laugh bitterly. “You believe her to be a succubus? Is that your excuse?”
“No. I believe her to be something worse.” Claude laughed as well, though his was more hysterical than anything. “She rules everything, Felix. Even in death. No, especially so in death. I have lived this life many times. I have died and returned back to the day that I first met her at the tea party. And when I do, I am taken over by her. It feels like love at first, it really does. But then intrusion. And then a curse. It is a cycle of death and resurrection, for myself and for the lady.”
Felix was silent and Claude continued on. “In one such life, she ran away with you, you know. It was raining the night we found you two. You were holed up in some abandoned cottage out there in the countryside, the one with the patches of white clover in the yard and a missing shingle on the roof.”
“What are you saying?” Felix’s voice wavered with near disbelief at the picture he painted but he held firm.
“My knights killed you where you stood and took the lady back to my manor. Your betrothed visited her. She had asked to speak to the woman who had been responsible for your death. She told me you two had planned to get married once the lady and I were finally married and settled in. She could not even mourn you properly because you were compelled to run away with the lady and killed.”
It is clear that Felix still thought Claude had lost his mind but what shocked him was the truth seeded into his madness. How could he have known the intimate arrangements of their betrothal and marriage when even their families had not known the cause for delay? This was not knowledge he could send an errand boy to fetch him nor an illusion he couldn’t hope to keep up, this was lived. It was memory.
“What does that have to do with Diana?” Diana was more likely a seductress than a sorceress in Felix’s opinion. Such a thing as a time loop, how could a girl so weak and childish create something like it?
Claude turned slightly, slowly toward him. “I don’t know yet myself. That is what I seek to find out. So that I can perhaps end it, for the lady at least. I don’t need anything Felix, not Diana, not my child, not my house. All I need and want is for the lady to stop suffering. I only beg you not to hinder me. When the time comes, I swear I will die on my own.”
Felix had no idea what to make of it all. Much of what Claude said seemed stilted, frantic and half thought. Yet he could not help but feel there was a certain sincerity to be had even in the worthlessness of Claude’s promise. And in any case, he was not entirely unfamiliar with the concept that Claude explained but all that it implied, he was not ready to believe. He sheathed his sword again finally and Claude turned to face him with the medicine bottle in hand. “Have you any idea why this would be in Diana’s room? It’s medicine that the lady took before.”
Felix’s eyes widened slightly in surprise. “It’s used to treat severe infection. It’s not supposed to be used by just anyone who gets ill. Lady Diana should not have needed that medicine, it would take effect like poison if not administered to someone battling a harsh infection. The doctor sent one of the servants to fetch it in town.”
“Yes, but this bottle is dusty, it’s mostly emptied out and the liquid inside it has congealed. It’s been sitting here for years. The medicine inside is aromatic. It has a distinct smell, doesn’t it? The lady’s room still reeks of it even with the windows opened up. Every time I went into Diana’s room when we were young, I smelled it, I tasted it. That means she was not only taking medicine she did not need but taking it regularly.” Claude said aloud, more to himself than to Felix who had bristled at the way he implied he and Diana were. “Was she…ever even sick?”
“Of course she was. Perhaps madame gave her the wrong medicine. She would not have poisoned herself, far be it from me to defend her but she did not desire to be sick. She seemed to envy the lady for her health, as she saw it.”
“…it was the lady’s mother who administered this medicine?” Claude questioned as new pieces fell together in his mind.
“I only know that the madame came to Lady Diana before bed to give her medicine. I do not know that it was that medicine, I did not see it.” Felix paused. “What is the significance, my lord?” He asked, annoyance creeping into his tone at the extensive talk of Diana.
“I intend to find out.”
He had wished to creep into the madame’s bedroom quickly and easily but the door was locked so they’d needed to fetch the key. Claude was shocked at the amount of sway he had over the servants of a house he was not a part of for the head maid simply handed over the key when he asked for it, albeit hesitantly as though she thought she might be scolded for doing so. When he took in the room, it was tidy and rather plain by aristocracy standards. The room seemed to have a chill about it, there was a draft somewhere that made it feel colder than the other rooms.
He began to pick carefully through her things, looking in every corner of the room for anything hidden. It was all mundane, droll and typical until he reached the last drawer of a dresser that was locked. Sure enough, nine bottles of unopened medicine neatly lined into rows of three. When he tried to pull the drawer out all the way and see what more he could find, it was caught on something that had been pressed against the top. Claude reached in to feel for it and pulled down what looked to be a simple leather bound, worn and yellowing journal.
Immediately he began to read. He was a bit startled at himself when he realized that he was eager to read the contents of his mother-in-law’s mind. He wanted to know how she saw you. How she justified treating you the way she did to uplift a child that was not her’s. A pitiful part of him just wanted there to be reason. He wanted cause for the rift in the relationship. He needed to believe there was a because to your suffering.
But what he read was not as he suspected. In neat, small lettering on the first page, it chronicled her life back to when she had been perhaps 19 years old but it was dated some ten years later. A reflection on her younger self written seemingly less as a journal and more a memoir.
“The princess had always been so gracious a mistress that even her tasks sounded like gifts.
When it was her time to return to her duties in her own kingdom, she resigned to it with great grace. However, she understood that the opposite would be true of her beloved knight. This fragile man only smiled in her company, protected her with wild fervor and once told her that he felt divinely guided to her. That to him, she was the symbol of god’s forgiveness and in serving her, loving her, he saw his life’s purpose. Oh, the princess lamented to me how dark a life her knight had lived, how the blood he shed as a knight haunted him with guilt. How his father had been of a violent sort in his efforts to transform his only living child into a knight of some worth to bring more prestige to their house and in his efforts to vent his own turmoil over his wife taking up with men of far more money, status and legacy than he. Her knight resembled his mother and so became the target of the ire he could not give his wife for the great protection being a mistress to such men afforded her. His mother knew what his father did, she did not care so long as it were not her. My heart came to soften for him too, the more she told me.
He had been a quiet man, shy and quite unknowingly sweet for his reputation as a ruthlessly skilled knight. He opened up to my princess like a flower toward the sun. He loved her so madly that she knew even though it was inevitable, he never intended to be where he could not protect her and stand at her side. The princess feared that their duties as princess and heir to a county respectively would give way to the knight’s devotion. She feared he’d kill himself trying to reunite with her or simply deteriorate under the burden of his own isolation but her own life was dedicated to more than just one person. It was her nation, her home of people waiting to see her return that she could not abandon. So in her stead, she asked me to stay in the kingdom and marry him. To give him a countess and to keep watch of him for anything he might do to interfere in both their duties.
It was a great honor she had given me entrusting someone so precious to me and given me a title higher than that I had been born with, I still feel that way now but I was foolish then and I did not understand the nature of what I was being asked to do. Nor would I until after it was already done.
You see (and it does, still pain me to even write such a silly thing), I did, at the time believe that I would become close to my husband. I viewed it as a matter of course, for I was far from a home I could never return to and he had no one. We were, for each other, the last traces of the princess. Though I could never think to hope for the kind of love that he gave to the princess, I believed that commonality could be nurtured into love or kinship. I wished for someone to turn to as my heart was sinking faster than a stone the longer I spent from my home. I believed it would happen. I believed he would become someone to lean on.
Though the first months of our marriage were cold, I managed to coax him into trying to have children as was our duty. I saw this as progress both in the way of our relationship as well as keeping him from the princess. I viewed even our coldness then as a sign of something beginning. It was only once, afterward, I think he worked very hard so that I would not ask him to do it again. But even so, I found that I was with child soon. I was a stupid girl then, I believed a child was what we needed to grow closer. I brought this news to him with a smile, I must have looked like an idiot.
My husband’s expression, I can never forget it. He was horrified at this revelation. He looked at me as though I’d announced a death. He looked at me as though I had wounded him. Then his beautiful eyes sparkled with unshed tears and his expression reverted to a weak, helpless smile as he said all the right things in his wavering voice.
It was then that I realized he would never love me. He was horrified at having a child with me, it was sheer terror and dread on his face when I told him. Perhaps he thought that I would not become pregnant at all, he would have preferred it that way. I hadn’t the relationship with him to truly comfort him, to know intimately what he feared about my child. I was useless in that way.
Through the following months, my apprehension was near unbearable. I kept feeling my stomach sink in dread, I kept waking up thinking that I would be home. I kept thinking that I had done something irreparable but I could think of nothing which was actually within my control. Therefore, when I finally gave birth, my relief that it was done with was greater than my joy. But that was alright with me because I had intended to deal with things in my own way."
From there, she went on to describe her rigid attention to being a diligent countess for a few droll pages. But at last, Claude came to another thing of significance. Your father had been summoned to court for political matters regarding the civil unrest which had not been quelled with the end of the war. Your mother could not follow him and leave a newborn alone so she had no choice but to simply trust in your father. She would come to regret that.
"My princess appeared like a bolt out of the blue months later. She was dressed as a peasant and had a somewhat bashful smile on her lips. Although I had missed her, all that I could think in seeing her was, "She should not be here."
But we brought her to the study so that presumably, she would tell us why she had returned when she had surely sworn that she could not. She took off her cloak and then I understood without her needing to tell me. I saw a little bump on her otherwise thin body and I was overcome. When my husband had returned to court, he had not been officially permitted to see my princess but they had met anyway and she was now with child. She had waited until she was just about to start beginning to show in order to take leave from court on the pretense of recovering from illness at her villa in the countryside.
I had been given the task of minding him but I had clearly failed. I should have gone with him no matter what. I should have taken the chance and left my child so that I could have prevented this. But my princess looked at me as faultless and took my hands in hers to assure me that she regretted nothing. She comforted my husband who apparently also knew nothing about this pregnancy until then. She knew his fears like the back of her hand, she knew exactly how to soothe them as I hadn't. He did not even have to speak. She simply knew.
Until then, I had not known that my husband dreaded having children for fear they would be cursed and afflicted with the same moral decay that his own parents had; and because he feared that having a child would bring the same thing out of him. Even if I had known, the princess was the perfect one to comfort him. She asked him if he believed a child born of her could be wicked and of course, he said no. She spun such sugary images of their child together for him with her eyes shining with joy. She told him that their child was special, that she did not fear him becoming a parent like his own because their child would change everything about being a father for him. It surely helped that my princess was glowing as she said such things, that the excitement radiating off of her grew stronger with each passing moment. He could not deny her, could not bring himself to contradict her words because he would always believe in her even if he did not believe in himself.
It went unsaid that the princess would be entrusting the child to the both of us. I had much apprehension about taking care of two babies rather than one and the secrets to be kept piling up above me but I could not complain, it had been my job for years to make everything work. I could not stop then when my princess needed me most. In any case, her presence in the manor brought life to a place that had become so eerie to me. She was the only flame in the dark and we were huddled around her, trying to preserve an ounce of warmth within ourselves. She was joyful through her pregnancy, she could not stop talking about the baby she was to have. The more she chattered, the more excited I became too as though I had any right to be. This was true of my husband too, who tentatively felt the kicks of his child and smiled, genuinely smiled as the princess did. I could see that he loved that child.
She slept in the master bedroom with him, after he left each day, I went in to help her get ready for the day. It was though I was still her maid and I suppose I wanted to be, would rather be that than a wife. But I could not bring myself to complain. I was not unlike my husband, I viewed my duties to the princess as somewhat sacred. I was as honored as I was anxious to raise the child.
On the day Diana was born, my husband was at my princess' side the entire time, as though he could protect her as her knight again. I could only marvel at him. When I had given birth, he stood at the foot of the bed stiffly and asked me what I intended to name our daughter, if I was alright and then told me that if I needed anything to have the butler prepare it at once. After Diana was born, my princess was still beautiful, perhaps even more so in her vulnerability. She held the most beautiful baby I had ever seen, close to her chest as my husband looked down at the both of them with sheer joy. It was as though all the happiness in the world existed between those three. My Diana had been born out of love and so it was easy to love her.
I left my own daughter to the maids in favor of caring for Diana when the princess rested. Her little ruby eyes and her head of soft blonde hair captivated me. Each coo or cry had my focus in a fraction of a second.
I had not yet considered the greater implications of her birth until my princess brought it to me. Diana had been born with an inordinate affinity for magic. The princess, as a member of the royal family had the capacity of a mage, it was kept secret through the death of magic that through her bloodline were those capable of miracles. I only knew after years of my proximity to the princess. This child, born in the time of civil unrest, when the queen had not yet been blessed with a child and the civil war had still bitterly divided the houses, was capable of being seen as a potential figurehead that could be used as a pawn in a new round of rebellion.
It was for me and my husband to put her above all things. Above even our own child. That, to me, went without saying for I did love Diana as my own daughter. But the princess knew that anything could happen and she used all of the strength of her magic to cast a spell over her that would be held with Diana's own great magic. My princess nearly expended all her energy to do so. Magic, she had once told me, was seen as a weak form of power because it relied so greatly upon emotion. It was the transformation of want into will. I knew not the details of the spell which bound my mistress' daughter. All my princess said was that her precious Diana would live happily, that for all the odds against her, she still had odds in her favor."
Claude felt numb as he turned the pages. He was in shock, suddenly the environment of the room felt too harsh and stimulating but he was glued to the journal. He could not dare stop reading it no matter what truths arose. So he flipped the page and read every single entry even as his hands trembled.
From then on, it was Diana, Diana, Diana. With each entry, she recorded a measurement which he assumed was the amount of medicine administered and her symptoms. She fretted over whether it was right to give her more or to give her less. She wrote about denying Diana's requests to go outside, to go to the theatre, to do much of anything besides stay in bed. It chilled him to the bone but more than that, perplexed him. He was staring at a page where your mother had seemed to write sloppily, hurried and anxious when he heard a voice.
"Lord Claude?" It was your mother, standing in the doorway.
He looked slowly up at her, at a loss for words and unable to reconcile the cold mother she was to you with her joy at being Diana's proxy mother. Unable, still, to understand why she was poisoning the daughter she loved so much.
"My lord, you should not be in here," she said softly but in her blank expression, it was apparent that she knew what he was there for. "It will look strange to others, for you to do something like this."
"You poisoned Diana," He was keenly aware of how delicately she was trying to dance around this subject but he was unwilling to indulge her.
Your mother did not even blink. "You must understand me, Lord Claude. Please understand."
"What is there to understand? You neglect your own daughter and fawn over your husband's illegitimate daughter only to poison her."
Your mother shook her head slowly as if she could not believe what he was implying. "I love that girl," she said, moving deeper into the room and shutting the door behind her. "Diana is my little princess. She is my only daughter."
A rush of rage ran up his body, carrying an unbearable desire to hurt her. "She's not your daughter at all. She's the daughter of a woman far more beloved than you."
But your mother could only smile helplessly. "Yes, but even so, she is my daughter in heart. You must trust me when I say that Diana was hopeless before."
"Hopeless?" His brow furrowed and a cold feeling creeped up his back, extinguishing his fury and replacing it with a kind of fear for the woman in front of him. "She wasn't hopeless, she was able to wed me, to live happily." He said it not as a defense of her but as an accusation.
"That poor girl. In the first place, she already had a weak constitution, because her magic was stronger than her body but it was the perfect excuse to keep inside and away from the eyes of those who would want to hurt her. But it was my eldest daughter who kept planting false hope in her. She even sent Diana before my husband to beg him to let her go to the academy because she knew very well he could not say no to her." There was venom in her voice, a sneer on her face. Claude rose to stand slowly, not knowing what he was going to do.
"He cannot say no to Diana because he loves her so, no, he loves her mother so," she sighed. "All the other one did was cause troubles. Diana had already given up but she roused such hope in the girl, false hope, cruel hope. If she had not been able to marry you...I do not know how we would have protected her. If my daughter was still alive, everything would be ruined. It was you who saved her, my lord. That is why I beg of you, don't judge me. You know that Diana is special. You must know."
"I did not want to save her, she did not need to be saved."
She remained with that pitiful smile on her face. "My husband is weak to her. He will...he will never forgive what I've done to our- his little princess. He won't understand. He will think that I have killed my princess. You know, he almost sees them as one in the same." She reached onto her desk, picking up a letter opener. "Diana will be hurt if she knows. I ask that you let the girl live her life believing as I told her. She deserves that much. I let her believe what I did because it was in her best interest. Please take care of her."
Before he could react, your mother plunged the sharp end of the letter opener into her throat.
"Author saint siren:- after writing a heartbreaking, mind-numbing, jawclenching, tear striking ,toe curling, head banging , bedroom filled with tears, existential crisising , angst filled fanfic of the year award worth story"
thank you, it’s always been my aim to write work that causes great emotional suffering!
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