Chapter Text
Serval is 5, and she loves her baby brother to pieces. She adores him. Whatever free time she has, she goes to play with him. She chases him around, plays as the big bad dragon he has to defeat to save Princess Mittens the Lion; sometimes she's a knight alongside him, and Mittens is the enemy they both have to battle. (Mittens being their cat).
Everything had been so boring before Gepard could play with her, she hardly saw him when he was doing boring baby things like leaning how to move, but now her free time passes quickly, because Geppie adores her just as much as she adores him.
Serval's heart beats rapidly in time with the vibrations of her feet hitting the pavement they run on. Running and jumping, she gets her brother in a headlock and tickles him silly. He can't even retaliate, and she only stops when their mother calls after them to settle down, but Mother is smiling as she does so.
Geppie looks up at her, pouting angrily, and Serval just laughs, declaring, "You'll never be able to defeat me!"
Serval is 7, and not nearly as carefree as she should be.
She thinks she can pinpoint exactly when things got stricter, when Father got colder and started pushing them non-stop. It was after one of those meetings with the elder Landau's... At dinnertime, he was grave, quiet, unlike usual. And then he was never the same.
Or perhaps it had been a building feeling, tension under the surface that she was too young to pay attention too. Serval can't remember, cannot recall, but now those carefree days spent playing with her brother seem distant too. These days they're both busy with responsibilities, learning things like a Landau should, her father said. She has very little free time, and what free time she does have can't be spent doing something so unproper as horseplaying with her brother.
Serval doesn't feel that it's unproper, but her father does. Her mother thinks they should grow up too, even if she doesn't outwardly say it, Serval can sense the disapproving looks-- so she doesn't put up any resistance. It feels like she hasn't talked to Geppie in a while now.
Living as a Landau isn't easy, she's come to learn. There are many expectations on her shoulders, ones that she already feels so heavily at only seven and one-twelfth years old. She has to start learning how to play the piano for her eighth birthday gala because her mother and father want her to impress the crowd. "It's a proper talent for all ladies to learn," her mother had said.
Serval doesn't want to. She really, really doesn't care about proper behavior and what other high society girls do, but it's not her place to refuse; it's not like a Landau to go somewhere kicking and screaming, so she meets with the piano teacher without much fuss.
And then after all her huffiness, she goes and falls in love with the piano-- the noises it makes, the chords and the crescendos, they're so breathtaking.
Music. She loves it, its loudness.
Because she is quiet and proper, but her mind echoes with static feedback every day, high pitched screeching thoughts caught inescapably in the Larsen effect.
On the outside, she is blank, but on the inside, she sings. She should not speak her mind, so she thinks about everything instead. It's probably because she's only ever been able to voice her true thoughts in her own head that she starts getting tired of it all already, still barely a kid.
Music allows her to say that which she's left unsaid these past couple years. It makes things a little more bearable, allows an escape for the feedback buzzing constantly in her mind.
Serval is 9, and she has a baby sister now. Lynx.
Serval loves her just like she loves Gepard, but she hardly sees Lynx, she's so much younger. There's so much to do, and so little time to do it; she hardly even sees Gepard at breakfast, and even then they can only exchange simple pleasantries with their father sitting at the head of the table, watching.
Serval frequently feels like a prisoner in this house, a slave to time and to her father's words.
Her smiles are plastered on, her heart is pained, but she's pristine on the outside. She feels like a doll, smile on sale and face on display; a doll with delicate hands, unblinking eyes, rounded ears, and an unmoving mouth.
When she was even younger and allowed to have simple fears, she used to believe that her dolls might be listening, that they might move in the night, but she was never afraid that they would whisper to her while she slept. A doll's mouth is sealed, never even designed to speak. There's no possibility of it.
Serval feels the same.
The first lesson she was taught was to watch her words: your tongue is a gun, your words a bullet; keep your safety on before you shoot yourself in the foot.
Keep silent as you're corrected. If you're not spoken to, don't speak. Don't address servants so casually. Keep your mouth shut, focus on practicing cursive and the history of Belobog, don't pay the kids playing outside any mind. You have high expectations on your shoulders, there is no time to play, no time for silly fantasies.
But against all expectations laid out for her by her father and the elders, her mother still selfishly calls her a pretty princess under the sleepy cover of night-- as if Serval could ever be anything other than a Landau-- and reads her the tale of a princess cursed to touch a spindle and fall into an endless sleep, until she is rescued by true love's kiss-- Serval thinks this princess a doll too.
Never once has Serval thought of herself as a princess, not once when she used to play make-believe with Gepard, never once when her mother read her stories. But now, Serval thinks that they might be alike. They're both blonde, stunning, nobility, trapped-- the cursed princess' whole story is her being doomed to an inescapable fate; despite all her efforts, there's nothing she can do but fall into an eternal slumber and wait for someone else to save her. She is trapped.
Serval voices this out loud, once. It's one of the first and last times she shares some of her inner thoughts with her mother. Mother looks pained, and just pats Serval's head.
Serval is 10, and absolutely done.
She's done.
Her piano teacher forces her to learn pretty ballads, soft classics, all the kinds of songs that people at fancy parties like. That music is interesting in its own right, but Serval prefers more energetic tunes. Her mother always praises her for practicing the piano even in her free time, but the truth is that Serval isn't practicing the pieces she's assigned-- she's composing her own music, making up lyrics, replicating rock and roll songs that she'd found collecting dust in their library, resting on a thing called a "Record Player."
At her birthday celebration last year, and the year before that, she'd played the stuffy music. All her relatives and other important rich people her father knew had clapped and she'd curtsied and said little else other than, "thank you," and "thank you very much." But now, she's done. It's my birthday anyways, she thinks, a little bit of childishness still left in her finally breaking out from where it's been locked away all this time, I should get to do what I want.
And so begins her first ever official rebellion. She'd done little things like staying up too late, sneaking into the kitchens to get the servants to make food for her, or eating dessert before dinner. But... nothing of this magnitude, nothing that has held this weight before; nothing where she's screamed with all her heart in defiance, nothing that has actually mattered.
It is glorious.
What starts off as a slurred sonata transitions abruptly into dazzling rock, catching the attention of everyone in the room. She hits the piano keys with a passion, she takes her foot off the hold and softly pedals and hits notes fast and sharp; the world is her stage, her fingers sweat from the knowledge of what she's doing, she feels the rhythm within her and for the first time is truly happy with her performance. It still has a distinctly piano sound to it, but it's wholly her's. Serval's. Serval's music. Serval's expression.
When she finishes her piece, she looks up and the crowd is whispering. Her mother looks stricken. Gepard's mouth is agape. Lynx's smile is sliding off her small but chubby face, but just due to confusion. Her father keeps smiling, but a vein bulges on his neck.
Serval gets up off the piano bench and heads for the exit on autopilot, not having planned what she'd do next. She flips her hair as she descends, and walks into the crowd. It parts around her.
Serval went up on that stage seen as a proper princess, and now walks down as a misfortunate mortal. She could never have the same authentic properness or genuineness of that princess cursed to prick her finger on a spindle, even if they do share the same fate.
She's 11, and she is fuel to a fire.
Her dad hates her, hates her like those disasters called "forest fires" that used to happen before the Eternal Freeze-- trees lit up by a single camp fire and burning, burning, burning-- nothing can be done as everything is set ablaze.
No matter what her mother tries to falteringly convince her of, no matter what her brother tries to convince himself of, she knows her dad hates her.
She's never perfect. She's never good enough. She's a porcelain doll, broken apart and sealed together again, the cracks emphasized and flaunted to the world. Serval likes the cracks, but her father despises them.
He yells and complains, never once praises her anymore, not since she stopped acting like a doll, and through the air, the porcelain vase goes flying.
Gepard is crying. He's trying not to, but he's crying, not used to being yelled at; it only makes things worse, another imperfection to pick at. Serval is crying too, but just because she's so so angry. She feels that burning forest fire within her, too.
Perhaps the vase was meant to hit, perhaps it was not, but he throws it and it flies with the force of a thousand fiery suns and lands to the side of them. She stands in front of her brother, shielding him with her body, arms wide open, angry tears blurring her vision until she can't tell whether or not she's staring down her father or a monster.
Gepard had just mentioned wanting to go to the Underworld. An unrealistic notion, for sure, but not one that warrants... this.
Her mother picks up the broken pieces of the porcelain vase on the floor with a shaky smile, and a maid comes over.
"Please let me take care of that for you, Madam Landau."
"Oh, yes... Thank you," her mother replies absentmindedly, and gets up from the floor, still looking at the pieces. Serval stands by Gepard's side silently, clutching his rigid arm. It's silent.
There's a damp spot on her mother's dress from where she was kneeling on the ground. Serval stares at it, focuses hard on it so she can't see her normally strong mother's crumbling expression, until she can mistake the trembling of Gepard's arm for her own clenched hand, and, unbidden, anger rushes back. Her eyes wet again as she just stares at that water-soaked fabric, the sound of porcelain clinking in the background. Who in their right mind would throw--?!
--Serval breathes. In... Out. She'd already shed her angry tears, she doesn't need to do so again. She hasn't been hit.
But something in her whispers: yet.
Serval wants out. She has to get out of here, take Gepard with her too.
She's 14, and she is going, going, gone.
The first chance she has at leaving, she takes. She's worked so hard to get into this prestigious school, and the commute would be a lot better if she could just live at the dorms, she told her mother. "Don't you want me to go there? It's where the previous master engineers have gone, it's where several Architects learned. They have the best of the best there!" I want to get away, is what she didn't say. And so her mother talked to her father, and he agreed.
She stares out the cable car window, luggage at her feet, watching the new sights she's never seen. She hardly ever left the Landau Estate, not with everything she ever needed being provided by servants-- everything is foreign.
She sort of misses the estate already, with all the overwhelming things around her-- not all of it, just her mother, just Lynx, just Gepard.
She'd talked to him when she first started making these plans to leave. It was either this school or getting an apartment somewhere-- she wanted to say with her siblings. But Gepard talked some sense into her. Where would she get the money? How would she take care of an only six year old Lynx? He declined her halfway thought through plan.
She hates to admit it, but he was right, so she settles on going to Belobog Academy and dorming there; she tries not to feel like she's abndoning them.
She hugged him hard before she left, Lynx too.
Even before he called out her half-baked plan, Serval hadn't really been expecting him to accept. He's a perfect vase, more perfect than her; he's all smooth, perfect pottery and fillial piety-- he's just doing what he must, he's made his choice.
And there lies the difference between the two of them. Some people bend, some people break. She's the latter, the ugly shattered one. And Gepard bends-- he bows. Bending is admirable in its own right, Serval just hates to do it. Not to him, her father, never again. She'd bent so much she just snapped and shattered, slamming against the glass around her.
At one point, before the eternal freeze, there were places called zoos. They held different animals in manufactured environments behind glass walls. They were there to just live out their days and be looked at, on display.
In one of the first history textbooks she'd read when she was kid, there was a primary source, a zoo pamphlet scaled down to fit in an image box. There she found her name printed on the flier, and Gepard's, and Lynx's.
"Serval," her father had named her, after the big cats that have since gone extinct on this planet. "Serval, an animal with the strength and might worthy of a Landau."
Serval can't see it yet. But she wants to be strong on her own. She'll fight for it if she has too, after all, she's still a Landau-- strong, prideful, greater-bound-- despite everything. She's still Serval, despite everything.
She rests her head on the cable car's window, and hums a rock and roll song to herself as the mechanical wonder she's only ever read about carries her further and further away from her cage.