Work Text:
Esmeralda took a deep breath and asked the one question she’d been most afraid to ask. “Who is your mother?”
Claudine hesitated, looking lost. “I...I do not know her name.”
“But do you remember her?” Esmeralda pressed. “What did-what did your father call her?”
“Nothing,” Claudine said matter-of-factly. The girl seemed incapable of lying, but also had a very odd way of thinking.
Like Quasimodo.
Esmeralda flinched.
Phoebus took over. “Do you-is she-where is she now?”
Claudine’s eyes darkened in fear. “She is burning in the flames. Her soul will burn evermore.”
Esmeralda felt sick. “Is that what he told you?” she whispered.
“Those who throw away the gift of life are consigned to the flames forever,” Claudine explained.
“What-” Phoebus started.
Esmeralda felt cold, as though her blood had turned to ice, yet she could still her the roar of the fire from more than two decades before. She felt like she might throw up. “You’re saying she took her own life,” she whispered.
Phoebus stilled.
Claudine nodded. “She jumped out the highest window.”
Esmeralda felt like she’d been dealt a physical blow; she staggered backward, and Phoebus caught her before she could fall, supporting her as she wept.
Esmeralda finally regained enough control of herself to ask the girl, “But you don’t remember her name? Who was she?” She knew it was unfair, but she was desperate for the identity of this unknown woman. “What did she look like?”
Claudine thought about it. “She had dark hair. Like mine. When she fell it went up like this.” She swept up her hair and let it fall back to her shoulders.
“You mean-you saw her? You actually saw her fall?” Phoebus asked with an intensity that masked his horror.
Claudine nodded again, her eyes deep and sorrowful and confused, and Esmeralda could almost see the small child of a decade earlier, four or five or six, running to a window as a faceless woman looked back once and let herself fall.
“She looked like you,” Claudine told Esmeralda thoughtfully.
Esmeralda buried her face in her hands.