Archive of Our Own ^beta

There have been many times in raising the princess that Lilian York has cried. Raising the princess means seeing her at her lowest. 

It’s not easy to watch, Lilian thinks. Because she wants to hope. She wants so badly for the memory of Lady Diana, who had been a free bird that touched every soul in range, to at least be worth something. More than this. More than this for the daughter that she gave her life to bring into this world. More than this for the young child whose innocence was nearly strangled out of her as a babe, leaving a half-wraith behind. 

That half had slid quickly into rarely anything else. Most days after she had turned six or so, she stopped allowing herself to be a child. She rarely did, eventually shedding even the pretense she put up for the other maids.

Lily saw it for what it was. At first the fighting dying throes of childhood and eventually a procedural mask for the sake of stoppering the constant flow of gloom. That too, discarded hopelessly in their dying home.

Now the young girl is a rare flash, a momentary glimpse of the girl she will never have the power to be. Now  when the princess allows herself to play and draw and plead oh so cutely for chocolates and sweets it fills Lily with roaring and overwhelming waves of relief and grief. Because she knows it is short lived. She knows that any moment the bubble will pop and Athy will gloomily retreat into herself and wait. And wait. And wait. For an end.

And it makes Lily want with a greed borne of love. She wants this child to be able to be a child in full. Not this half-adult whose youth is choked out by the expectations of death, who has no hope laid out for the rest of her life. A child in a palace who regards herself a prisoner on death row. Who could fathom such a thing?!

Athanasia is a lovely girl, too. Buried under all of this is a fragile and gentle soul who no longer recognizes what it is to be loved, who gives too much of herself even as she dies inside. And now she’s watching the noose loop round and round and none of it matters. Does nobody else see her lips turning blue? 

Of course they don’t, something in Lily snarls. Because they don’t care enough to look long enough and they don’t care enough to do anything about it if they did.

Her heart is a coarse, knotted rope by now, thornily guarding her charge. Lily knows that Athanasia doesn’t understand what it means to be loved. She knows that, try as she does to give the girl a happy childhood, there are too many pieces missing and this is what it created. Still, Lily loves this girl hopes that someday the princess will understand what that means.

There is a wild, animal part of Lilian that sees this young girl as her own. And it wants to snarl and snap and bite at all these outsiders who dare touch and hurt her. But there is nobody there for her to unleash that tightly coiled rage on. So it simmers under skin, tightly restrained but always there and ready. Sometimes loving someone is being angry for them when they’ve accepted their pain. 

Lily dares the world to try and touch this child, her child. She will rip that person to shreds with her bare hands.

There have been many times in raising the princess that Lilian York has cried. But she remembers quite clearly the first time she did in front of the princess herself.

It was a sunny afternoon, and the princess was seven.

It was sunny and cheerful and they both knew that the seven year old princess, like all seven year olds, would want to play more than anything else. The sun was shining and the air lovely and sweet and carrying the scent of flowers from the well-kept palaces.

The visit of Felix Robain had made a steady decline a rapid one: For the past two days, she had been… well… in one of those moods. The air crackled with unseen and arcane power as she surveilled the palace like a woman watching the sun die. Her soul so deeply buried under her eyes that one would need a shovel to bring it forward. 

The princess had always walked like she knew the fate of everyone in the room but yet with the poorly hidden unsteadiness of an unwilling prophet. She acts like she thinks she is calm and awaiting the day she returns to dust, but too often she wonders aloud about the nature thereof. It’s a restlessness in the shape of tranquility. Too easily mistaken and unnoticed even by the girl herself. But Lilian sees it. She sees how the princess constantly walks like a tightrope artist, like her steps are on a crumbling edge. Even if the girl herself does not, even if she thinks she’s confident in the steps towards falling. Lily knows otherwise.

Because, after all, living things want to do just that.

So it’s unnatural in their already established abnormality. To see the princess truly serene, especially when she’s also like… this. 

(Hannah and Ces used to call it ghostlike when they thought they were out of earshot. Lilian recalls the startled and amused laughter it had earned from the princess when she first heard it.

“Dramatic irony, I suppose,” the princess had said with an old woman’s cadence in the uncanny voice of a child. “It’s very fitting, after all.”

Athanasia had been all of five years old, that day.

Lilian still, years later, cannot comprehend the meaning in such a sentence in a way that doesn’t make her chest burn with grief and rage.

That day, in the privacy of her rooms, Lilian fantasized about storming into the palace and finding that oh so beloved emperor, grabbing him by his hair and yanking. Yanking his head right off his neck with a loud tearing noise. Let the room fill with the rich smell of iron and stain that perfect, spotless white floor with the blood he dares to share with the child he has tormented so. She’d kick it across the room like the toys the princess never allows herself to play with. Or maybe she would wrap a rope around his neck and see if his lips turn a matching blue to the princess’. Will he struggle? She wants to watch. She still dreams of plunging her hands into his chest like claws and tearing out his shriveled, empty, ugly heart. Wet, hot flesh under her nails and blood in her teeth. She would brandish that truth before the heartless man. Look, she would demand, look at your cruel heart that never had room for anyone but yourself. Look at that heart that killed Lady Diana. Look at that heart that’s killing the child you made with her.

That day, in the privacy of her rooms, Lilian cried for hours and begged heaven to make some sense of why this girl suffers the way she must.

That day, in the privacy of her rooms, Lilian raged and cursed at the world and the heavens and any other power that is, because of how it reduces her child to a living corpse.)

But now, surely, the princess has found a true sense of peace. Like a woman who knows exactly when and how the world will end. It scares Lilian, and she makes sure to keep an eye on her lest she do something irreversible. But Athanasia is as steady as a person awaiting inevitable sunrise. 

And it was on that day that Lilian York broke, too many hairline fractures to call a single piece whole anymore.  

The weather is wonderful and Athy is seven and here she is, buried in lesson-books on war strategy meant for someone twice her age. Lily is completely and utterly disgusted. She works herself ragged and that man who created her doesn’t even deign to acknowledge this near-miraculous genius?

“You study very hard, princess,” Lily says with worry, making the girl stop for snacks and water. She thinks that she may be the only person in this world who truly comprehends that the princess is a child. Not yet ten summers.

The princess looks up at her like she doesn’t understand the realities of the life she leads, like Lily cannot understand what she has been trying and miserably failing to shield the princess from since the beginning. It’s a failure that stings with shame, but the princess, thankfully, does not hate her for it.

“There are only two ends to the relationship between me and His Majesty,” Athanasia states primly, like she is reciting lessons for a tutor. “Either he dies first and I end up dealing with the affairs of this empire without any support, and must prove myself quickly to avoid civil wars and coups, or he finally gets himself together and just kills me.”

It’s so plainly spoken. Inevitable truth and expected constants. This girl carries too much pain and weight, crushing any dreams into fine powder dust, and all Lilian wishes she could do was make it so that it wasn’t so. That this girl could dream, could live carefreely. 

Lily wants to cry. It guts her. It tears her open. This is her charge, the child she risked everything for and loves so dearly. The words burn at Lilian’s ears when they enter.

It’s almost irritated in the way Athy says it. Like she’s disappointed that she isn’t already dead. Like she has nothing in her life to make it worth living as long as she had. Spite at most.

Lilian wants to be angry at the flippant, blasé way the girl says it but she can’t.

She can’t be angry at Athy for detaching herself from everything. Not when the only alternative is to start screaming and never, ever stop. To scream and let your lungs fill with blood to remind you that at least you’re alive for as long as you are. Scratch off the skin that makes you human and forces you to acheacheache—

“Princess—“

“And even though I’m aware it will be the latter, I’m expected to expect the former,” Athanasia says. Her eyes trail off to an unknown but fixed point in the distance, a habit she had never shed from childhood, and grimaces. “I suppose I’m either going to be right or pleasantly surprised.”

Something unnamable and powerful wracks Lily’s body like tremors. Is it grief or rage or misery or sorrow or any other shade of feeling she could put a name to? She can’t even tell you the hue anymore!

It’s bitterly hopeless, the way they act. Like they’re driving a carriage towards a cliff and pretending it’s a meadow in the distance. But still! But still—

“Lily?!” The princess is on her feet, across the room in seconds. And only then does Lilian York realize that she lost her composure. She’s crying in front of someone she should be hiding from the sadness of the world, even though she knows that as a shield she’s as good as using a colander for an umbrella. With frantic hands, the princess anxiously tries and stops. It’s a series of jerking, aborted motions. Lilian throws her composure back on and shoves the pain to join the rest in the little box in the corner of her mind.

“It’s okay, I’m sorry you shouldn’t have to see thi—“

“I… won’t speak that way, anymore,” the princess tries, her voice a sudden rasp. “If it hurts you.”

Because of course that would be her first choice. This silly, silly kindhearted girl. For all the books she reads she cannot understand that Lily hurts for her.

“Please,” Lily embraces. “Be as bitter as you like with me. I would rather hear everything than leave you with nobody to hear you at all.”

The princess looks at her with uncomprehending eyes, reassessing her. Lily lets her. 

“How about you come with me and get some sun, hm? We can get you some chocolate,” Lily offers. “Your books will still be here tomorrow.”

Quietly, the princess pushes the book to the edge of the table, bookmarking it with a leaf. Lily hopes it stains the page, marks this moment with something real.

If trees fall with nobody to hear them, nobody ever knows if it made any noise at all. If nothing else, Lilian will make sure that someone hears. If nothing else, she will give her life for this child.