Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of world differentials is that, despite everything that changes, some aspects will still line up between them.

There’s this event, for example, that happened to virtually as many Pavels as it didn’t. At just four years old, the ruthless nature of the wilds demanded he learn to take care of himself and support his family in their day to day actions. He has always been a dutiful child who believes and acts wholeheartedly for what he loves. At the time, no taller than a tree stump and no smarter than a little bee, that had of course been his family. In the deep emerald forests and rough sweeping fields dotted with tall grass that had burnt gold from the sun's furnace-heat, there was precious little else to love but the people around you. 

So even though he was still very quiet and didn’t know very many words, he grew to know about how to handle sharp twigs and dangerous bushes and the disarming of traps. His hands are lined with scarring from these tasks, but the largest one he has is a particular one that rims his index. He’d misaimed a cut with his hand-fashioned knife made of wood and sharpened stone for its blade while trying to skin a deer for its meat - angled it straight down when he should have done it more to an angle, and slashed right into his soft skin. He hadn’t cried, but his father certainly did. 

His father wasn’t an unemotional man, but to see him sob and hold him as Pavel froze in confusion while putting pressure on his dressed wound was enough to provide a discomfort that made his skin crawl. Neither positively nor negatively, ants dragging themselves across grass with their hill unseen - it was merely a reckoning. This is just how life is, isn’t it? To which his father held him even tighter as he whispered, “you deserve more. This is no way to live. You deserve so much more.”

Despite his trailblazing and tracking heritage, he was just a clumsy child with fat fingers he couldn’t control very well and eyes so large one could forgive mistaking them for large roses if they spotted him hiding in a bush, and he was still recovering from that gash when they left the ruins behind. On that migratory journey he received a cut around his ankle from stumbling across a distended rock that stuck out from the ground, and then another frightful laceration when he’d tried to peel an apple for his feverish father and he cut wrong again, unable to see it properly through his tears.

Subsequently, Perland’s veritably artificial environment, with all its edges smoothed down by carpentry and artistic building work, did not provide as many opportunities to irreproachably change someone’s body accidentally. Your average Perlander from birth is less marred by the environment as Pavel is even at equal ages as a result - he has an anklet of scars where a young girl would wear chains of gold. One around his ring finger like he’s already taken by the wilds, as if to explain why he still missed it on occasion when breakfast is provided to him and he doesn’t need to go hunting. More calluses than not on the skin of his hands, having handled wooden instruments long and with force enough that their smoothness grew weary and injured him, like he’d gone and had an argument with a friend who’d slowly begun wavering in their understanding.

This effect was amplified when he stood near other noble children. Plebeians at least had hard work to do - infinitely less dangerous than the trap-laden forests and makeshift tools he’d worked with in the wild maybe, but work nonetheless. Noble children had no such obligations. It was treated as a personal tragedy if a child fell and grazed their knees, for example; a cut, then, was the equivalent of a broken arm; scars were unconscionable, and barely allowed to be spoken of as if they were a curse that could be willed upon a child if their very concept was given too much attention. 

Nobility, after all, prided itself on beauty and unblemished aesthetics, without friction and easy going - as if they were entirely separate from the troubles of the world and never touched by hardships, in their exceptional desire to remain above the plebeians. If someone unpretty were to approach them, it might rub off onto them, as misfortune so tends to. It might even invite some self-reflection. 

Naturally, he stood out, cloaked in them as he was. Other children stared at him when he would walk down the street, and parents would glance away before hurriedly pulling their gawking children along behind them. They were all across his cheeks, down his neck, and clothes only helped so much; to cover them entirely, he would have to wear a mask, which would have only continued making him stand out. The entire point, of course, was looking as pretty as a lodged diamond and honourable as the irrefutable and inescapable laws that turned said carbon into it - if he couldn’t show his face, what would be the point?

His adoptive father was a kindly old man who was well-enough regarded but also seemed to take a certain pride in assisting children from worse off families, and Pavel was his latest and likely most in depth endeavour to that end. Even he would look a little too hard sometimes, his eyes pausing for much too long on the ones lashing his cheeks or that stretched across his shoulders. It was no secret Pavel was an adopted child, of course, but he was regarded less as a child and more perhaps like a novelty. Oh, how strange his hair feels, compared to their son’s smooth and well-trimmed hair. How cut up his skin looks, compared to their daughter’s flawless features that glimmer like cascading glitter catching chandelier lights. How quiet his voice is, compared to their child’s burgeoning confidence and adorable tantrums.

What a strange little thing, they’d say, even though he was a boy, or at least, that’s what he’d thought, and then they’d instruct their children to go play elsewhere as they spoke to Pavel’s new father and resoundingly ignored him. The only time they’d look at him then was to glance down at him with a cringe ghosting their features, as if to make sure he wasn’t getting nearer to touch their fine dresses with his marred body and awkward fingers.

Pavel only ever looked down, wondering if the ground they were standing on would morph to dirt and make him feel a bit more comfortable in his skin again. A fish out of water, he’d think - being a fish was fine. You just had to be in water, because that’s where it functioned best and felt most comfortable. But put a fish in a suit and ask it to walk around, and all it would do is flounder and cry. 

Of course, there was no going back - the only dirt Pavel could reach anymore was that which covered his real father’s corpse, or the perfectly portioned set that would line the garden beds outside so the tamed flowers outside could grow into their show blooms - so one day, after he had been alienated enough to the point where he was struggling to eat and so homesick he might have accepted that patch of dirt, that new father of his had proposed something else: to fashion those trusty scales into legs.

His curiosity over the scarring of Violet’s left eye is therefore merely informative, precisely because he doesn’t care to hide them. Pavel’s met plenty of people who have fought hard and hurt harder in his work, and many of them still choose to cover their scars. Partially, of course, because it often leads to awkward conversations in the shallow world of nobility, but ‘military’ and ‘nobility’ tend to be not just oxymorons, but acting alpha and omega of language - the nobility’s lack of inclination to fight nor even work was not limited only to children - and so this doesn’t typically come up. There is also, of course, the common perception that showing them risks broadcasting one’s vulnerability. 

Violet is not only nobility and so should know to hide them, but is also a military man, and should therefore also know the implications of having had his life threatened before and showing there has been a time in his life where he had been weak. In Pavel’s ever-rational mind, there is no good reason why scars - even smaller ones, and so particularly ones as prominent as Violet’s - shouldn’t be hidden away. 

Knowing him however, Violet will not part with the information very easily, so he goes over his head. Pavel does not know this, naturally, but these people do not differ much in their base principles to their otherworldly counterparts - hence, despite her lofty ambitions and success on this cap of the etheric plane, the queen is affable and amicable when it comes to Violet.

When he asks her eyes fall shut as if falling into a sweet recollection and she smiles gently, letting her head fall askew so her long hair tumbles down her shoulder almost girlishly; she doesn’t say anything initially, so he expects a tale of overly-saccharine courtship and duels fought for her hand that went wrong, but still hold a special place in her heart as all memories of hardship do when living in their fought-for dreams.

Then she says, “it was a disagreement. Between the two of us. He stood still for it,” like how the beloved wives of military men would talk about them as they wait patiently and wistfully for them at home. Staring out a window and sighing in unison with enough frequency that they become the daily winds that bluster the skirts and hairs of those passing by. As if a hint of pride and wistfulness about her, missing him, wanting him back from the disastrous outside world and tasks that called him away from her side. He doesn’t really know what to think, if he’s honest.

“May I ask what of?” He is not expecting a response when he asks, but nor is he especially caring for one. After all, he has watched her for years - he knows she is a manipulator. It is difficult to trust her body language, harder still her words. 

She cocks her head as she replies, expression growing pained. “He… has always been an anxious child. Did you know of him and the House he belonged to?”

“Yes,” says Pavel. “It used to not be looked upon favourably. I remember he and his family were often ignored. My father and aunt would tell me often to not make eye contact.”

“You were adopted, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “My biological father passed away during our journey to immigrate here from the wilds. Only I made it.”

“My condolences,” she replies. “I know travelling to here from outside the Perland territory is difficult. Your father must have loved you, to have been willing to brave it.”

Then he must have died a happy man, Pavel thinks quietly, in a rickety hospital bed in a clinical room, all of which alone provided infinitely more safety to Pavel than his arms around him ever did back in the wilds.

“Yes,” says Pavel. “He did. I appreciate that he wanted things to be better for me so despite the tragedy, I have done what I could with it.”

“But he was good to you? Your adoptive father.”

He nods shortly. “He looked after me, and taught me many things that put me in the position to succeed as I have done. What he taught me happened to include that the Harrison’s were not a family to so much as acknowledge lest they taint my image, and so I didn’t.”

“And the worst thing a noble can have is a poor image.” Pavel nods again. Of course, he knows this intimately. Slowly, she trails a finger across her desk as she sighs, a full body motion that slumps her shoulders. “Yet that still puts it kinder than the reality. At least you simply ignored him. His experiences left him a great many of things, but of particular note was that he was disillusioned. He came to believe Perland was an unworthwhile place for him. And yet, despite agreeing change had to happen, he disliked how I handled it… he’s a very funny sort of boy.”

“I see,” says Pavel. The woeful tone in her voice puts him off. He doesn’t much like when she pretends to have a heart. 

“He gets lost all the time,” she tells Pavel, looking back up at him with a fond smile on her face that is very clearly not directed at him. “In his own head, in me. In everything. He’s conscientious, always quick to concern himself with the details of a scenario, but it means he wavers. Even from his most stable of paths that all he needs do is follow,” she adds in a more frustrated tone. “After all, when you think so deeply on everything, there will always be good points to be made by every side possible.”

“Are you thinking of something specific, ma’am?”

“I am, actually,” she says, her voice going cold. “The reasoning for the council ceaselessly maintaining what preceded our generation, and then the generation before them, was to keep our city and politics stable considering the difficulties past our borders. That seems decent, doesn’t it? Even though it has left our populace starving and frightened and angry in its reality.”

“While I can understand that,” he lies. “I am left to wonder about the validity of Vi- Sir Harrison as your closest compatriot, if he is weak.”

A flash of freeze - the blizzard is directed to him suddenly. “Mind yourself, Commander. I did not call him weak.”

“My apologies, ma’am,” he’s quick to say, expression unchanging.

“Stand down.” She sighs, shaking her head. “I assure you, his loyalty - once secured - is astonishing. And so,” she continues. Her fingers lace together in front of her thoughtful expression. “In service of that, I offered him a reminder. Should he get lost again… he simply needs to look at himself. He knows where he will need to be.” Her Majesty chuckles, here. “And the wound never healed quite right. It’s a large set of scars.”

Something awful heavy settles in his chest when she laughs - he’s heard her laugh before and they all have an edge of malice to it, but this feels less an edge and more thoroughly suffused with it, like tea that’s gone a solid green from overstraining its leaves. 

“Our heads do tend to betray us, don’t they?” she says sadly. “But I was happy to help. He’s an old friend. He’s helped me plenty before, and friends help one another. It’s the least I could do to assuage his fears.”

“What were those?” he asks.

“No one wants to be alone,” is her reply, as she glances out of the window, to the crowd of people milling below. “Even if they think they want to be… it’s far from ideal. There is so infinitely little a person can do on their own.”

Part of him feels as though he is being directly addressed with this statement; perhaps she still sees that child shaking in his skin, merely wearing a hand-me-down white suit that’s too big for him. Nonetheless, he maintains his cool gaze and stares straight at her.

“In particular,” she sounds less as if she’s speaking to him now and more as though she is simply speaking aloud and he happens to be in the room. “If your intent is to be witnessed, if you are alone, you’re merely motioning to no one. It,” she says, miming the slice across her eye. “Was my promise to him. I will look at you forever.” It lingers in the air once she says, sticking to him even as he leaves like the heavy press of cigarette smoke into his silk suit.

What a romance! It’s enough to make him almost wistful. No such promises line his skin, after all. Still, it’s better that way - not everyone can have a whirling line that connects them with another, and not everyone can be as individually immense as the two of them to be worth having such a connection.

Violet, then, does this funny thing wherein he seems uncomfortable with her presence despite his supposed immense loyalty.

Maybe that isn’t odd, either. People don’t need to like you to be submissive towards you. “It has nothing to do with whether you are liked,” Her Majesty tells him when he quietly inquires. “But at the same time, being disliked raises your chances of being harmed in retaliation. In making yourself liked by another, you open yourself up to being harmed by someone who doesn’t like that that person likes you. People are not solely autonomous, much as we wish for it to be - the interconnected nature of humanity has its ways of complicating pretty much anything we’d like to do.”

He thinks of the various ways of being hurt. He thinks of Violet’s very small back, struggling against the very big and many whispers. “Hence you tell them what they want to hear,” he says, already knowing her reasoning.

“To an extent. That is unfortunately what defines politics - deceit, and the conceit towards your particular lie being better than the hundreds of others. Being in this position means I have lied more and better than the others.”

Today she is drinking a light cup of tea that smells distantly sweet, coloured a saturated brown, and is freshly steaming as she holds it up. She’s the type to do so with a pinky out - a trait she shares with Violet as Pavel has long-since noticed, and as the steam brushes around her face she lets her eyes fall shut, serene as summer nights in the countryside. 

“This is especially true when the intent is change and, further, betterment,” she mumbles over the rim of her teacup, swishing it around lightly. She has offered nothing to Pavel, who stays standing with his back straight before her desk, arms tucked behind his back. “You lived through this. The people above us were decrepit, already a foot in the grave. They didn’t see reality anymore - they’d spent too long in their heavens above the common people. It is what comes about when what has been defined for millennia is taken for granted. Divine intersection,” she continues with her voice low. “We were ushered into this society with what exists around us. Humans had no part in it. This is merely the way it is meant to be; changing it is tantamount to sacrilege, and so dissatisfaction is irrelevant. This is the only way it could ever be. Hence, the status quo we have followed for hundreds of years.”

“So the Citylord position-”

“-Was a microcosm of our weaker forefathers.” She sips lightly, letting her words stew in the same way the leaves do having settled at the bottom of her cup. “Therefore, I removed it upon my ascension.”

Despite her casual teatime she is speaking to him in the same tone as she would address the blood cells of the city that wait patiently for her morning address. Her voice is deep and smooth, elegant control in the way she enunciates. Each word precision chosen and spoken for maximum impact on the lash line scenery of one's ever-shifting heart, an ideologue meant to move more than to rationalise. He thinks this is why she needs to fall back on theories and gesturing to what once was rather than what she could do, but he’s not one to put less stock in the birth of power, otherwise he would be degrading his adoptive father’s work and kindness, and degrading him is the last thing he would let himself do. No, his issue was never Perland’s bloodline in its inherencies, merely its subpar execution.

“There are those who might view being a Queen as more regressive than a politician,” Pavel points out, as carefully as he can.

She looks at him over the rim of his cup with blunted eyes, or maybe merely sheathed. “When the point is that we have worsened rather than improved in recent generations, I would not think it is inherently negative to retrace our steps.”

"Was that the intention behind your speech from last month to the nobility worried by your aggression towards Aakhen, wherein you informed them the talks continued despite the skirmishes?” 

“Yes, precisely,” she smiles, eyes glittering. While he knows others are taken with this expression, he doesn’t find it very impressive. Her eyes are a bland topaz - he’s seen this colour much nicer, elsewhere. Butter for breakfast pastries, daisies lining the ground, Violet’s oddly soft glare as they bicker, etc. “Knowing when to falsify reality and then gesture to it is an important part of building relationships in this business. You must have done it once or twice yourself, Commander.”

“I suppose I did exaggerate my swordsmanship skills when I initially applied to the military,” he says lightly.

“Though I never lied to Violet,” she tells him. Her voice is nearly excessively gentle, as if a careful whisper straight into his head mid-embrace. “There was never any reason to. He has never been wrong, after all… merely confused.”

“Then does it not concern you he seems awkward towards you?”

The corners of her lips curl, and she laces her fingers between one another. As if there was an ounce of delicacy in her, she rests her chin on the webbing they create. “When you grow up surrounded by discomfort and hate, it is difficult to demonstrate affection appropriately. He dislikes that I care for him; that I touch him to the extent I do.”

“I’m surprised that doesn’t put you off,” he says.

She shakes her head, smiling fondly again. “It would be cruel. Just because he isn’t sure how to handle it doesn’t mean I ought to reject him. Rather, all the more reason to show it to him, no? If the only way he will understand is by being forced upon, then I will speak his language. Understanding his needs - everyone’s needs - is part of leading, as well," she says.

To juxtapose with the relative diluteness of Her Majesty’s glory is, of course, her shadow. Violet seems an approximation of her after years of their incessant connection, but there are indications to him that perhaps the assimilation process has not been completed entirely successfully - as if he is not a perfect trace of her and her affection, and instead a crude rendition with scribbly lines and flawed colours by someone who couldn’t quite capture who she was because his shape was just a little too different to hers. It’s hard to perfectly overlay a circle on an oval, even though they’re both shapes drawn with a single curving line.

Though of course, it’s not fair to say that - when the point is that assimilation, the highlighting of his personality from pre-consumption days would be more a return to form for him. Still, there’s likely no point in attempting to separate them. Life and people are rarely so cleanly cut when compounding experiences change one's self. Pavel is only who he is now because of who he was beforehand. Violet, similarly, may not have been the same had he been adored and not isolated when a child. It’s very simple at the heart of it, so complicating it is irrelevant! It would be like trying to separate out flour and eggs in the midst of a baking, or trying to take the blue out from a painted canvas. The act of creating necessitates a base, which requires further work, until eventually someone is whole. Is that not love in itself - to provide yet another layer upon this holy formation called a person?

Indeed, one such example of the circle failing to catch the oval - he suggests this to Violet one night in the midst of keeping him company as he finishes off the strategy document for their upcoming sortie, only half joking, and Violet reacts by throwing his ink pot at the wall with enough force that he can hear its collision in his bones.

“You do not say that,” he all but commands, in a deep and angry voice. “You do not say that to me.”

Pavel only spares a curious glance at the tragic ink pot; it’s shattered entirely, the ink hurriedly squirming away from the debris to meet with the leg of his chair. “I had suspected speaking only with her would give me a skewed representation of things, but I was not expecting such a gratuitous reaction,” he hums.

“You’ve been talking to her?” Violet snarls, leaning forward across the table. “About what? About me?”

“About many things,” Pavel tells him, vaguely. “You came up, inevitably, as you tend to when it comes to matters with her. She seems fond of you.”

Violet frowns and turns away, shaking his head. Without the inkpot to work anymore he is left to furiously tap his finger on the desk, glaring straight ahead. “Her definition of fondness isn’t typical.”

“You kissed her, didn’t you?”

“She kissed me.”

“And you say it isn’t typical?” He snorts with a smirk. “Though I don’t think she’s the type to take a king, if that’s what you’ve been after.”

He glances at Pavel, somehow managing to find an even deeper frown dredged up from somewhere in the utter miasma of his internal workings. Appropriately to something that had likely been wrenched out of his stomach acid, he looks disgusted. “Are you a gossip now, Commander? Do you have nothing better to do?”

“You must understand I’ve been curious,” says Pavel, tapping at his eye. Violet narrows his eyes as he does. “You wear it proudly. I can see why considering who it’s from, but if I had something like that, I wouldn’t want to parade it around.”

“I do this because I have to,” he replies, pursing his lips distastefully.

“Well, dare I ask - what is it like being her favourite? It seems a little daunting.”

He glares at him out of the corner of his eyes. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Not many people have the opportunity to talk to not only the Captain of her Royal Guard, but also her pet. Is it not enough for me to simply say I’m curious?”

Another example, a gap in the single line - “Do not,” Violet tells him, controlling his voice as well as one might successfully control a snake by attempting to poke it in the direction they want it to go with a stick. “Call me that.”

“Her treasure, then, perhaps? She does like parading you around. You’re always next to her during her speeches.”

“As are you.”

“Only of late,” says Pavel, cocking his head with a smirk. “You see, being by her side tends to suggest recognition and capability. You’re very impressive for that.”

Violet shakes his head, clicking his teeth. “I was merely where I was meant to be for this to happen at the time,” he says, oddly distant. “I am no better than anyone else to have deserved this. It could have been anyone else.”

“But it wasn’t anyone else,” Pavel points out. “It was you.”

He pauses, looking absently out the window, drumming his fingers on the table. 

Pavel frowns, watching him. “What, is it not satisfying?”

Violet gives a harsh sigh, his head dropping between his arms. With a hot glance he says, “the tabloids might appreciate this, but you can be assured you will be out of a job if you go running to them. I don’t enjoy collaborating with people who are more concerned with the monetization of talk,” sounding very tired by the idea of it. 

“Tabloids would likely pay me more than this position ever would, so that’s far from a threat. Still,” Pavel tells him, bringing a curled finger just under his lip as he grins brightly over at him. “I’ll remember it. I’m sure you’d hate to have your favourite strategist and consultant fired just before tomorrow’s sortie seeking the Flame Heart.”

He doesn’t say anything initially, his eyes instead drawing quietly downwards. Then: “you have one, too.”

“Pardon?”

“A scar,” Violet points out. His eyes are focused on the skin between his fingers - where his knife had sliced him a lifetime ago. 

“This is older than this position. Back before I had been adopted,” Pavel tells him, tucking his finger back under his chin in disinterest. “I cut myself trying to skin an animal.”

Violet looks at him, expression a little bit too neutral for it to not be obvious he’s trying to hide that he’s in awe. “The wilds?”

“Yes, though I don’t feel much of a connection with it anymore. I was young when we left. I’ve spent more of my life in Perland than I have there.”

“For someone who lived in the wilds,” Violet says, giving him a short glance around. “You have less scarring than I’d expect.”

“My father helped me hide most of them,” Pavel tells him. “We used makeup at first to hide the ones around my face, and then healing treatments to remove them as much as possible when I was old enough. That combined with a little foundation makes them hard to see, no? You can’t tell I’ve got scars right across my cheeks.”

“Because of the nobility?”

“Yes,” says Pavel, and his heart feels painful when he says, “they’re horrible, aren’t they? Those… people .”

He spits that last word out - he found it was difficult to say. “Your mask is slipping, pretty,” Violet mumbles. 

“I doubt you of all people could blame me,” Pavel mutters. Violet doesn’t reply, but Pavel knows he’s thinking about the same thing as he is - the stares, the glances, the disgust. The sense of being lesser than; as if he were no different to what coated his father. As if he could be smeared across his coffin, too.

“Then what about that one? Why’s that still there?” Violet soon asks, cocking his head in the direction of the one on his hand.

Pavel returns his easy grin across his lips. “Though I don’t think the tabloids will pay more than the Captain of the Royal Guard’s salary."

“God forbid I ask for myself,” says Violet with an almost-impressively dour roll of his eyes.

“I’ll tell you if you tell me, then. Fair, isn’t it?”

“Are you incapable of doing anything without getting something in return?”

“Lest I give what little I have away and have nothing else,” says Pavel. “This is my most interesting story, you know! I’m a normal nobleman at heart, so I’ve not got much else that’d be entertaining to talk about. Unlike you, with your incredible stories of being found drunk in ditches.”

“Idiot. None of it was entertaining,” Violet mutters under his breath. He sounds so annoyed it makes Pavel laugh. “My point is they’re not unique to me. Do you go around asking everyone where they got a pimple from?”

“I obtained mine through the wilds,” Pavel chuckles. “And of course, through various sorties. Both contexts have an inevitable violence to them.”

“I’ve been in plenty of sorties,” Violet says, almost as if he’s pouting. 

“So, why wouldn’t I be curious? I’m interested in your conquests and war deeds - even your failures sound entertaining to hear about. I’ve followed your career closely.”

“Really?” he smirks, a smugness coming about him. Pavel rolls his eyes, already somewhat regretting what he’d said so casually. “Captured your mind, did I? I suppose it’s been a bit unconventional in my case.”

“Well, most people would have died in your position. And yet, here you are, now one of the most powerful people in Perland,” says Pavel. The words sound a little bitter coming out of his mouth. “For, what - the grand achievement of having an interest taken in them? Impressive is the word I’d use, but certainly not everyone.”

“You were worthless scum from the north-east who would have died had you not been adopted,” says Violet simply. “I fail to see how we’re different in that regard.”

He lets the insult wash over him, partially because he's well-aware of the similarity. “In any case,” Pavel continues. “I knew asking would lead to you at the very least ignoring me, let alone attempting to rip my mouth off for daring to. You aren’t much of an open book, at least willingly.”

He turns away again as he says, “I wouldn’t have done that.”

This time, Pavel is left mildly speechless. When he finds his words, even they come out uneven from surprise. “I’ve watched you do it before, so I thought…”

“There’s a differing factor between that case and this,” Violet murmurs. He doesn’t turn back, but his eyes find him regardless. Blinding yellow between the abnormal thin of his narrow eyes. A perfect yellow core for a bloom, surrounded by pale white petals and perfect lashes. “Should I consider otherwise? I can still kick you out and demand you return to your quarters.”

“No,” Pavel tells him. Only later will he recognise the obnoxious earnestness with which he said this being why Violet’s lips quirk upwards. “I… suppose I’m honoured. Not many people fulfil your criteria, I would guess.”

“To some extent, as am I,” says Violet. “That that little child from the halls who looked at me like I was the prettiest thing in the world even though everyone told him not to would still find me so all these years later. That he followed me all this time, even though he was a perfectly cleaned-up noble boy who could do much better. Am I still to your taste or did the more innocent aesthetic and yet wide eyes appeal to you more?”

He shrugs, feigning disinterest. “Without one the other wouldn’t exist. I’m not one to play favourites, regardless.”

“Someone who didn’t have a favourite wouldn’t be up by candlelight,” Violet merely mumbles.

He raises his palms with a huff, curling his lip in annoyance. “oh, go on then, you’ve caught me. I happen to respect you, even if I find you an insufferable person on casual terms. Better cuff me.”

“Leave you to starve hung up on the prison’s fucking walls, maybe.”

“Will you visit?” Pavel chirps sweetly.

Instead of replying verbally, Violet this time flings his feathered pen at him. There’s no force behind it, but the tip gets right on his thigh and quickly leaks the remaining ink into a splodgy pile into Pavel’s trousers, to his annoyance. 

“You did stare a lot,” Violet murmurs, training his gaze on Pavel as he fusses about the pen, tucking his head on his palm. “At me. At us. Were you too scared to walk up to us?”

He tosses the pen behind him, not looking back to see where it lands. “At some point the rumours became borderline impressive,” Pavel replies tiredly. “Talks of homebrew Witchaven-based curses on your family, that your parents had died from a plague and you were immune to it but nonetheless a carrier.”

“You were a naive child to believe any of that,” Violet snorts. “People just didn’t want to upset the balance. Anything they said other than that was just pretending it was something other than what it was with the hopes that it would lessen their guilt.”

“I believed it all, but I still pitied you.”

Rather than get angry as he’d predicted, Violet just sighs, which has its way of dissipating a fair bit of the tension in the air between them. “That doesn’t make you better than them.”

Something about that twists his stomach into knots - of course, he knew that, but it still makes him feel terrible to hear it. It annoys him enough to say, “if the only measure of a good person is to have helped you, then no one here is any good besides her.”

He hears Violet hum, his eyes falling shut. “Yes,” he replies, sounding very distant. “I’m selfish like that. Everyone’s awful but her.”

“Even though she did that to you,” Pavel mutters as he crosses his arms petulantly.

Violet just shrugs, not bothering to look back at him to demonstrate any sort of interest in continuing down this conversation. “I had it coming.”

It’s not a surprising thing for him to say, considering the circumstances of the scarring. “Why’d it happen, anyway?” Pavel asks. 

“I didn’t realise you cared so much about me,” he asks with a side eye. “You don’t have to make up for things. I no longer need your help.”

“I’m not making up for anything. I don’t think I made any mistakes,” Pavel says in a furious hiss, now leaning forward in his seat as he glares at him. “And anyway, bold of you to say you don’t need my help when that sortie from last week would never have worked out if I hadn’t assisted you.”

Violet glances at him out of the corner of his eyes, frowning. “You ran ahead of me without my request.”

He throws his hands out saying, “because you were staying behind! You would have missed your chance! Have you never heard of efficiency, man?”

“That would have been it, I suppose,” Violet tells him suddenly as his head cocks and he rests it in his palm. “Similar tone. That one, there. I think she was frustrated with me. She always said she wanted to help me grow. I suppose she viewed it as me throwing her support back in her face.” 

“You have always been her little shadow.”

“It was nebulous, when I was a child,” Violet says, returning his gaze outside. “My parents were so happy to see me with a potential-future Citylord, or at least with someone from such a high status family…”

“So you stood still.” Pavel is surprised at how weak his voice is when he speaks.

His eyes fall shut again, as if he’s looking to sleep. An appropriately tired expression comes across him. “She always just wanted to help me. That was why she was angry, I think. She tried so hard to help me from myself. I am,” he says, almost stilted, as if he’s practised these words a thousand times before. “Thankful to her. Without her, I’m not sure where I’d be. Continuing deliberating on things that don’t matter.”

Slowly, Pavel asks, “what doesn’t matter to you, Violet?”

Even slower, his mouth forming the words before he speaks them, Violet says, “what’s right and what’s wrong. As long as she’s there…”

He doesn’t look once at him - staring evenly at the sky, perhaps fucking picturing her in front of his eyes. Lovesick, smitten idiot. Pavel is angry enough that he can feel he’s shaking. The source of this anger is three-pronged (himself, him, her ) and yet vague enough that he can deny plausibility to himself for just a little longer so he grips the ink-dirtied patch of his trousers and stares heat holes into his cheek, letting himself wonder why he’s so damn mad at him for following the path, even though that’s what everyone outside does and he doesn’t feel a thing for them.

And yet Violet sounds miserable when he asks, “what did she tell you? What did she say to you about my scars? I suppose she told you I was happy.”

“No, I think she understands that you weren’t. She took it as a positive, though,” Pavel whispers, noticing he’s lost his heart when it ceases beating - finding it right at the base of his too-thin throat, explaining why he suddenly feels as if he can’t breathe. His heart has always been too big, he cares too much. That’s why he does what he does, of course.

Violet exhales loudly out of his nose, nostrils flaring like a tired bull. “You mustn’t call it a rebellion,” he murmurs, lifting himself from his seat to step in front of him. “Though I assure you, she will likely consider it an example of such.” 

He bends his back, brings his palms to Pavel’s cheeks and runs his thumbs over their bones. A fluttery sensation settles in his chest, and Pavel shifts his legs to carefully ground himself against it. They just so happen to catch him between them, limbs tied up as if they had any tenderness about them for sweet nothings.

In the same tight voice he might use to breathe rapidly, bodies sliding between each other, Violet tells him about how when he’d first returned to her with his hair smoothed over his scarred eye and bowing his head, she had stepped forward to him, then reached down to grab him by the roots of his fringe.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t only the scars that made him feel somewhat alienated from his fellow nobility, perfect as they were. There came plenty of situations even after they had started hiding his scars in which a prospective auntie or uncle had leant down to ask him sweetly if he liked it here, and Pavel would always freeze up. He never really knew what to say because he was a silly fish and they were all very pretty people, he’d think. 

In more adult terms, he was a small child who clung desperately to someone who would just be a stranger if his father was still alive, if he was even drawing breath himself to be able to call him such. He didn’t know how to brush his hair or hold his cutlery and yes, he had scars sprinkled all over him, like the ugly blots of bright rust on smooth silver, and every event had different lighting so sometimes the make up wouldn’t quite work out properly and only make him look even stranger.  

“Like wildflowers in a meadow,” his adoptive father would kindly correct him. The distinction seemed meaningless to him, but he’d nodded anyway. “Good boy. I know you’re frightened.”

They’d gone to the events anyway. Pavel had asked why one day as they walked from the estate to the week’s location because he really didn’t like them, and his father had simply said they were something they had to do, brushing a bit of his scraggly fringe out from where it hung limply over his eyes. 

He’d asked why they had to do it again, because he wasn’t very good at ambiguity. In the wilds, ambiguity got you hurt because you hadn’t made absolutely sure what that glint in the bush was before you walked right into a bear trap someone else had laid, or sick because you hadn’t done your due diligence and checked the berries you’d picked and eaten only to find they were a very similar but poisonous variant of one you’d meant to pick. 

His father had only smiled at his daringness then. Pavel himself was, of course, oblivious to the immense faux pas he’d committed - he was only asking a question, having gone from a realm that required them into a realm that had built itself off the back of blind acceptance. “Simply because, son,” his father had said, again. “It’s the way it always has been.”

Pavel had cocked his head, thinking it over in his head. Still he had more questions, precocious as he was. “Is that good?”

“We’re alive, aren’t we?” he’d said carefully. “And that’s very good. I made a promise to your father, and I mean to keep it.”

“Would I die if I didn’t come to these?” Pavel had asked, very alarmed.

“Perhaps not,” his father had said, stopping suddenly to lean down and fix his little purple bowtie. Given to him because it matched his eyes, said a doting auntie. “But in a manner of speaking, it may make you wish you were.”

“That’s kind of scary,” Pavel had said, curling his brows in not very vague dissatisfaction.

“Your father did not make the choice he did for you to simply languish alone in a dark corner of the room,” he’d said, moving his hand from his bow tie to gently pat his head. “He did it because you deserved better than that. I want you to be at home here, and these events - these people - are an important aspect to that. You have to be nice to them. Your days of mere survival are behind you - in Perland, everyone deserves to live. Don’t forget that.”

“Thank you,” Pavel had said. Later, he would come to wonder if he meant it.

“Good boy. Now remember - don’t touch your face. We don’t want your makeup spoiling.”

Leaning back up, his father had gently pulled him along to encourage him to begin walking again. He had done, with his excessively short legs and deeply worried brow.

“Think of it as a garden,” his father had said. “And all these people are flowers. You like those, right? You love visiting the garden when you’re done studying.”

It hadn’t made the events much better, but he’d done so anyway. As the gold had cascaded into vision and the lights had started dancing before his eyes, he’d done his best to look around and substitute them appropriately. A bed of tulips here; cosmos there. To his left were patches of bramble who laughed shrilly and so would certainly hurt to approach, and somewhere to his right milling around were quickly-growing ivy roots that couldn’t seem to stop moving. Flecks of the light that bounced off all their fine jewels glimmering like ladybugs, and the marble beneath them steady as any forest ground. 

Unfortunately, all it had done was make him feel terribly homesick as usual. His small fingers still in his father’s hands as he began to mingle, he was left to feel incredibly at odds with his environment. Plucked away. Wild roses now cared for in a million-Gold vase. He ought to be grateful for his new skin, but something about it at the time had only made him feel worse. His scars spoke to his previous life and they were always there, under the light brushes of makeup that hid them; he could change how he thought and spoke, but what could he do about what lined him? He was accepted thanks to his adoption, but didn’t that only mean without it he would have been left to rot? He was feeling a lot, but he wasn’t sure if he could say ‘happy’ was among those things.

Perfect instincts honed after years of life or death; he’d heard muttering somewhere behind him, and glanced over. Two women chatting, and the subject of it not far enough away to not hear them - and so likely was why he looked so upset as he, too, held his father’s hand and shied away from the gazes that were quickly piling up on him.

Even at his young age, Violet had an uncanny ability to capture gazes, whether or not he wanted to. From the two girls came more murmuring a little ways out, until a ripple of unkind talk surrounded him and the done-up adults standing with him. Even though the mother looked so pretty, the father so handsome, and their son so small, they were regarded as if they’d walked in covered in the stench of garbage and piss. Even Pavel’s father had noticed the growing attention, and had glanced away from his conversation to narrow his eyes at the three of them.

To Pavel had come song. His very blood had been humming a long-lost tune. He didn’t know who this person was, but he’d felt familiar anyway.

“Pardon,” Pavel had asked. “Who is that?”

Unmoved by his song, his father had said nothing; he’d simply shook his head and looked away to continue talking.

But perhaps he hadn’t heard him, Pavel had thought. He’d tugged at his hand again and asked, his heart thumping so loud it was in his ears. So he’d spoken again, this time a little louder, because surely at the rate it was going everyone could hear his heart and needed the extra volume: “Um, excuse me - who is that?”

“No one, son,” his father had said. “Stop looking at them.”

He’d blinked in surprise. “Why?” he’d asked, looking up at him with hurt eyes. 

“Because, son,” was all his father had said.

“But why?”

“Son,” his father had mumbled, the edges of his voice creeping into anger. “Be quiet.”

He hadn’t so much as squeezed his hand, and yet Pavel had felt as though he’d grabbed him by the throat. His breath had felt weak. His knees jittered. His father had only ever been kind and supportive towards him until now and Pavel was far from an ungracious boy, so the sudden twist of his character was enough to make Pavel go quiet - if not out of respect and belief in what he was saying, in sheer surprise.

Even still, Pavel had still thought to look out of the corner of his eyes, because he had still been in the habit of following his instincts and they were screaming at him to keep looking; another rose, another rose bloomed right there. His head was a bright purple, and his eyes were sad and terrified. Wouldn’t it be nice to know his name? Wouldn’t it be nice to cry together? After all, Pavel was sad and terrified, too.

But his father had squeezed his hand at that precise moment, making his heart leap. It is, of course, hard to sing when breath doesn’t come to you; he didn’t turn around, in the end. With wide eyes, Pavel had glanced back to his father, who did not so much as glance back at him.

When he’d turned back again, Violet and his parents had gone.

“Fled,” his father corrected him that night as he gently smoothed his duvet over him. “They’re bad people, so they have to flee.”

Carefully, Pavel had asked, “did they do something bad?”

“A long, long time ago,” his father had said. “These things, they stick to you."

"Like that flu thing I caught?"

"Yes, exactly. Clever boy! So simply stay away, and you’ll be safe.”

He’d thought it was meant to calm him down - that they weren’t deranged murderers who would hunt him down and eat his bones - but it only made his scars hurt under the blanket. “Is that part of being home?” Pavel had asked.

“Of course,” his father had said kindly. “You did this too, back in the wilds. You protected your home from terrible things. Why did you do that?”

“To keep people safe.”

His father had given him a wide smile, gently moving to pat his head. “That’s exactly right. That’s what I’m doing. Those people - they’re dangerous for you. You’ll do as I say, won’t you? You’ll stay away from them?”

The image of him standing there, small and silent, had popped up in his mind’s eye, unbidden. He’d wondered if he had looked similar to him when he had first walked into one of these halls. He’d thought to himself that he much would have appreciated a real friend, one who would see his scars and say, ‘I understand. I’m not right for here, either.’

But the problem was that he’d owed it to his father from his life before. He’d worked very hard to get him here, and he disliked the idea of acting as though he wasn’t grateful to be alive when he was dead, even if he was unsure of the specifics. If he was going to throw his effort back into his face, perhaps he should have been the one who died while his father lived, was what his nightmares said.

“It’s how we survive here, Pavel,” his father had finally said. “Those above do not look down. We only ever look up.”

He had said it with such solemness that it felt as though he was truly loved by this father of his, to be capable of making him so upset and serious when it came to matters of his not mere survival, but comfort. It was then, Pavel would think, that he grew to truly consider himself his son - how could he not, when he clearly cared so much about him? He’d like to be a good son, he’d think then.

“Where are we looking?” Pavel had asked.

“To the heavens,” his father told him, tucking him in. “The gods are there, settled amongst the stars, and they are best appreciated with a smile.”

“Will they help me?” Pavel had asked, lonely as he was.

He hadn’t said anything for a long time - just looked at him, quietly and almost with an air of reluctance about him. “No,” he’d finally said on a tired voice. “As I said, those above must not look down,” and before fear could take Pavel’s heart he’d continued to say, “but I will, with all my heart.”

That very next event, as he was counting chrysanthemums and lilies and pansies, when he’d sprung up again looking just as shy and put out by the whispers and murmurs and mutters and mumbles, Pavel had not looked. He had focused instead on the curve of his father’s hand in his, and made himself wonder if he would ever grow into it, even as the talk turned sour and air pungent.

“Good boy,” his father had mumbled under his breath as the unwanted family walked out. Once they’d left, the hall had returned to its loud and boisterous enthusiasm and excitement and chatter and laughter, as if nothing had ever happened. 

A deep fear had taken him - around him, the people morphed into something much uglier, much more horrible. It only made it more alarming that they could hide it so quickly, returning to how they had been before the family had walked in. Like wolves who could walk upright and talk; bears who could smile without showing their teeth. At least in the wilds, the killing intent was obvious. He’d felt as though he needed to conceal himself in turn lest they turn their attention on him, different as he was, and so he’d hidden deeper into his father who welcomed him under the long of his coat tails.

“That could have been me,” Pavel had mumbled to his father later that night, still terrified. “My scars - are they really so bad? They got me so much attention. Is that why we’re hiding them?”

His father had nodded without so much as a word to comfort him. “But it won’t be,” he’d gone on to insist gently, running his palm across his head again, watching Pavels eyes squeeze shut in mere recollection. “I promise. They’re already forgiving and forgetting, with how hard you’re working to cover up. Didn’t Uncle Barrow even compliment you today? You’re doing very well.”

“Thank you,” Pavel had said, even though it had all felt terribly hollow. 

So next time, he hadn’t looked. He’d listened and he’d ached, but whatever he had done, however he had felt - he hadn’t looked up. He did the same the next time, and then the next. You deserve better, in his mind. Again and again. Despite his resolve, it had been deeply frightening, like knowing a starving snake was around the corner. He’d missed his father - his real one - with all his heart. 

Then one day, the muttering stopped as quickly as fizz in wine glasses go flat.

One day, there had been two pairs pairs of small feet walking through the crowd, rather than just the one. One pair had walked brisk and with confidence, while the other had clearly been being tugged along. 

The first thing he had noted was her hair; a dusty pink, barely the colour of blush, pulled back in a neat ponytail trail and resting at the back of her head. Behind her, the boy with purple hair was so much smaller as he stumbled along with hair that looked as if it had barely been brushed that it looked as though her hair was more of a curtain that he ducked behind, his wide eyes swivelling in their sockets from left to right in terror so physical Pavel had been able to see it in his shoulders.

He’d looked, then. Taken him all in. His small body; his quaking limbs. The way the light seemed to follow him like he was something so gorgeous to Pavel, even though the intent was only to humiliate him.

Seen her, and felt nothing but a brashness in his heart. If she had just so happened to trip, maybe he would have laughed a little.

“Um,” Pavel had mumbled up to his father. “Who is that? Should we- should we tell her?” he'd added at the end, a little hesitantly.

“No,” his father had said, quick as thunder, rumbling in his chest like a storm. “That’s the decision she made.”

“I’d thought she’d have wanted to be in the running for Citylord,” Pavel had heard his father’s conversational compatriot mumble. “To get involved with the Harrison’s…” 

“Nobility is constraining,” his father had said. “Perhaps this is her way of rebelling. I suppose there’s only so much a parent can do.”

“Still…”

Pavel had lost track of the rest of the conversation from there. Surely he would be forgiven for looking during the ruckus caused. The people had parted like stalks and stems of an overgrown patch does when walked through for him and it had been just so easy to follow him. 

From half the hall away, he’d sensed he was being looked at - the boy had looked over, and found Pavel’s eyes. 

His father had still held his hand tightly. His father had been rotting in a shallow grave. Pavel had stood there, trying desperately to fit in. He wasn’t being looked at, but he wasn’t being laughed at, either. 

A wolf lowering its ears and growling; pulling your fingers away with a yelp when you touch fire; crying when you watch your son cut himself; looking away when you meet eyes with something gruesome and feeling sick. Those instincts had saved him countless times in the wilds, but he wasn't in the wilds anymore.

They mustn’t approach you and get mud on your very pretty petticoat, newly gifted from your third uncle, who had sneered silently at him not even last week when he spotted that ugly scarring across his yet-rounded cheek.

It had only a second before the boy glanced away, before Pavel could look back up. And then, horrible and ungrateful child that he had been, he had looked. He had looked. He’d seen him turn to his side so he could smile softly up at the girl, who held his hand tightly the entire time they walked. He had looked until he saw him when he closed his eyes, like burning the sun there. He had felt like crying, and so he did when he was back at his estate in his incredibly soft bed and in his silk pyjamas and with his arms wrapped around a very big teddy bear, gifted to him on his adoption day. He felt so terribly alone that he didn’t even feel as though he was in his body - he felt as though he was really lying across the ground, too far away from something even he couldn’t really understand.

As he’d wailed, his father had held his body tight. He’d simply said, “it’s okay; it’s okay. You’re home now,” again and again. 

Her nails, Violet says. They felt familiar as they scratched his scalp first. He realised that twinge of pain, the sharp sensation of her holding his hand when they were younger had been a similar kind of hurt, and it felt almost wistful to feel it again. Maybe it almost made him a little happy to feel it again.

The indent of her nails had always lasted for days afterwards. Born out of the same thing, he suspects. 

“I suppose you think of me as rather brutish, Commander,” she’d breathed. In the relative darkness of the evening night spilling through the window between them, her face was dark yet her eyes glinted a sharpened yellow like this room were a small artificial night sky and she bore stars across her. “Lacking dignity in my actions.”

“I have no issues with it,” Pavel’d lied. “At some stage, all pretences must be abandoned. When the sinkhole opens up faster than one can fill it in, no one can be faulted for simply electing to do the drastic and moving away.” Of course, when the cause of said ravaging hole is what is moving away…  

“Is that so?” she’d asked. “You’ve seemed awfully frustrated lately. I had suspected it was something I said.”

“Not at all, ma’am. It’s a privilege to speak with you on these equal terms. I am thankful,” he’d told her again. 

She’d smiled gently at him, letting her body relax outwards a bit. “Good. You’re a smart man, so I thought you’d understand. I would like to ask you something else, now that we’ve spent some time discussing each other. What else do you think makes a good leader, besides understanding?”

“I would say confidence, as I aspire to be for my men. Without the skills and personal belief in myself to demonstrate I am worth trusting the opinion and experience of, there is no point in my leadership.”

She’d cocked her head, wincing a little in heavy thought. “Yes, but you are not viewing it right. Let us think deeper. I will try it like this, Commander - there is a little plant, spending its life trampled upon. Its roots are weak, and its leaves are horribly disfigured and withered. When it’s sunny, it gets no warmth because around it are towering sunflowers that catch the rays first. When it rains, the rain doesn’t fall upon it because the sunflowers are so much bigger, and their roots claiming the dirt so very selfishly, and so it’s forced to cry if it wants enough moisture to survive. What would you do if you saw this little plant?”

“I suppose I’d water it, ma’am,” he’d lied.

“Precisely,” she’d said, delightedly. “As any leader should. So many storybooks and narratives point to an idea of a figure of confidence who can guide people, but who allows you to be so? It’s rather egotistical to imagine yourself as someone superior, let alone to act as such. Ergo, in the act of softening our children, I would suggest fairy tales fail to tell our children that the uplifting of another as an image necessitates the reduction of others as their backdrop. It’s as if they’re frightened of gesturing to them the reality of what it means to be a leader - of anyone of a higher status, really. Because to be higher means there is a lower, and I suspect the thinking is that no child would be satisfied to think of themselves as thus.”

“Most armies are not built off fairy tales, I would think, ma’am,” Pavel had said, feeling a brow quirk in vague frustration.

“True, but our armies are built off our children,” she’d replied, surprisingly simply, as if the answer were obvious. “Adults are not born as adults; they come from the little ones. I will continue. You look so carefully after this little plant. Give it water just for it - find out the perfect amount of sugar to give it as food so it eventually finds it in itself to grow to look a little healthier. Perhaps you’re even a little coddling of it. Its blooms are a wonderful shade, and it even manages to stand up a little. But it’s still not standing up straight - you ask it, and it’s because it says it’s frightened. So you pick it up and move it - away from all those other flowers who scare it and take from it, you bury it somewhere closer to you, gently smoothing the dirt for it.”

“Are you allowed to do that?” Pavel had asked.

“There’s nothing stopping you from doing anything but the voices of others. And if they can’t talk, why not?” she’d said thoughtfully. “You keep looking after it. That little plant. That sweet thing destined to die. You made the decision to claim it - incredible that fate can be buffered so easily, isn’t it? Maybe, at some point, there is no difference between how it feels to stroke its petals and touch your own skin, because you have spent so long with this little thing. You have given up playtime to water it, and spent dinners away from your family to eat with it. Roots curl in the same way as the veins inside you do, and sometimes you mix them up. You feel just as energised in the sun as that little darling does. At some point, you look at it, and you see yourself. But it never stood upright. Not once. That poor little thing just kept on cowering in fear. What would you do, Commander?”

He’d thought about it, ignoring his immediate answer to suggest tearing it up. “I would question why I am putting so much thought and effort into this single flower.”

“Because it’s yours,” she’d told him, frightfully earnest. “You should look after what’s yours. Sharpen your pencils, make your beds, till your fields. Answer my question.”

“I suppose,” he’d said slowly. “There’s still something making it afraid.”

“Correct,” she’d told him. A gust of wind had blown through the room from the open window and startled a curtain into movement; it had created a lash of darkness across her expression, right over her left eye. “A good leader knows to recognise the limiting factors of what is around them. By catering to them, even the shyest person can become a most powerful asset. It is a more involved process than many think, to be a leader. It isn’t merely about showing off. You need things to show off. Weapons are as good as the people who wield them, and people are as good as the weapons they can have.”

Unsaid but heard anyway: they are the same thing. Objects and subjects. To be wielded.

“Have you any limiting factors, ma’am?” Pavel had asked, wondering if that darkness had caught his eyes too.

“None,” she’d told him, with a smirk that edges on knowing. “That’s part of the confidence that you so aptly pointed to - by guiding, you can mould them into the perfect state, just for you. Isn’t that awfully selfish? Not only do you decide who lives and who dies, you even decide what they look like.”

“And if they don’t want to be guided?”

She’d huffed a little noise under her breath, her eyes falling shut. “Everyone is guided in some form,” she’d told him. “Biochemistry, outer obligation, societal pulls. Choices are not made in isolation. All you need to do is find those and tug on them a little. All people are connected, after all, just as all bugs and leaves and animals are.”

He’d thought to ask, “what guides you, ma’am?”

She’d smiled and retorted, “what guides the moon across the night sky?”

“Obligation, I guess… you are a Perlutia.”

“No,” she’d said. “Love for the sun, and assisting in its creation of the day. I simply want to make things a little better, just as the moon simply wants to ring in night for the sun to get some rest.”

Wearing compassion slung across her like a wolf wears the skin of a herd of sheep and walks through. Pavel had longingly paused, and then said, “I was under the impression you were critical of the noble class, but they’re the ones I would say would want the most.”

“Not true,” she’d told him. “Such a response betrays your disconnection with the populace, sir. I told you, understanding needs is a part of guidance. I recommend mingling with them more. They have many things they want, too. They are motivated by claiming those things for their families, for their pets - even for themselves. What differentiates nobility want from plebeian want? Violet would say the morality. It’s less principled to want to be able to eat a slice of cake, compared to wanting a meal at all.”

“I would say the same,” Pavel had replied.

“But plebians want those things, too,” she’d said, gently cocking her head to the side. A bang of platinum blond falls across her face, framing it like the pale ridges of a picture frame. “They want to eat cake, too. They want to be able to take holidays out of Perland. They want to be able to lounge around and indulge instead of breaking their backs working. They want to love life too, rather than merely live it. Wanting ever more than you have is a virtue of humanity, not a sin.”

“Needs and wants are not the same,” Pavel had mumbled.

“When one need is fulfilled, a subsequent want becomes a need,” she’d replied. “People are never satisfied. This, I believe, is a wonderful thing. Dinner is not enough; dessert is wanted, as well. Not merely by nobility, but by plebeians as well. Isn’t that grand? They are united in their hunger for better.”

There had been an air of laziness about her as she pulled herself up from her chair and walked around the side, without much rush about it. She’d kept her eyes on him as he looked back at her, smiling oddly serenely in return of his hawkish look. When she had stopped it was right in front of him, making him need to slightly crane his neck to keep looking at her as she kept her hands tucked behind her. 

“It’s how you know you’re alive, Commander,” she’d continued on a mere whisper, looking down on him. “Wanting something becomes needing it, and learning to claim it is a task that encourages growth in an individual. New skills, new words, new people, with the aim of obtaining something. People grow aimless without goals. Indeed, stasis - what we have been locked in for generations at the behest of those who preceded me -  isn’t what should be aspired to. We should all want things. What do you want, Commander?”

She’d asked in a low, nearly predatory voice. Despite her lack of volume compared to the noises of Perland outside he could hear her perfectly while the noises around him grew oddly muffled, as if a blanket had been thrown around them. “Nothing, ma’am.”

“Nothing at all?” she’d said slowly, leaning in close. “Forget about Father for a moment.”

His heart had been thumping. He’d had the distinct sensation of wanting to be ill. “No,” he’d breathed. “I am satisfied.”

“His feelings aren’t yours, you know.”

“Of course they are,” he’d said. “He gave them to me.” He must guard them with his soul. He has always been a diligent boy.

He’d dropped his gaze between them, an almost anxious note about him, and therefore missed the way she’d looked at him. Eyes immaculate with predation; the flashing of teeth upon seeing a limp.

“Let me ask you something else,” she’d said quietly, just above her breath. “That flower - say you watched it never stand up. But eventually, more flowers stood around it. As is the way of things - things will never stay empty. Seeds blustering in the wind, like people in carriages… you never quite understood why, but those flowers would begin praising it. It and you. It’s grown so nicely - it’s very pretty, they said. You should have been happy - those are your veins in the dirt now, your yellow-coloured heart holding its pretty petals aloft - but instead, all you felt was frustration. Why, Commander?” she’d breathed. “Why would you feel that way?”

A sinking feeling had begun drawing his guts downwards. “I don’t know, ma’am,” he’d lied.

“Because, Commander,” she’d told him. “It was my little flower. Just like they were my fingers that pricked on the thorns. My nails that grew disgusting from dirt. My knees and socks that needed to be washed. My little flower to enjoy the sight of. Who were they to offer us praise?”

This time, he’d said nothing. For perhaps the first time since beginning his machinations, he’d been afraid, but it didn’t feel as though what he was afraid of was standing in front of him.

“Ma’am,” he’d asked, his heart tight, evacuated from his chest. Somewhere else in him, hammering hard throughout his veins, so it could no longer be called a heart at all. “Why did you step in? What did Violet offer you?”

Gently, her head had fallen to the side as she grew lost in thought, thinking on her answer. Soon she’d replied, in a smoky, nostalgic voice that sounds like a vignette filter over older days: “He is inspirational to me. The first person I had ever seen to help, as the Citylord hopeful. That means a lot, you know. He was the very start of it all for me.”

Pavel had thought of it himself - the very first leaping of his heart when he’d seen him, as small and shy as he was. He had been so quiet until then, barely solid on the language still, and it was the first time he’d wanted to say the first word anyway. 

“In some ways, I feel he is the perfect little spot of Perland, wrapped up in one person. Dedicated but hurt; trampled upon but spirited. Broken but strong,” she’d said, her eyes falling shut fondly. “The perfect subject. He was so very ugly, and yet so very precious. Precisely what I think of my lovely Perland, or maybe I only think of it as such because of him. Maybe there’s no telling anymore. It’s been such a long time since we met.”

Underneath her, a wonderfully sculpted weapon wielded in both offence and defence, love and hate. Two sides of the same sword, person and not, all at once. It had been such an incredible achievement to fashion him out of nothing.

Pavel’s heart, meanwhile, had been sick with quakes, his cheeks burning with fever. His very veins were furious, and he’d been thoroughly disgusted with what he’d heart. “So it was nothing?” he’d managed, only barely stopping himself from spitting the words.

“Nothing,” she’d replied on a smile. “Nothing but himself, and that’s all I wanted. Just like how the walls around our city offer me nothing. Just like how you offer me nothing. I merely have the love within me that isn’t happy with merely letting the things I love walk off a cliff - we all deserve better. You and them and me.”

“Was it that love that killed the council?” Pavel had dared to ask, angry as he was.

Her expression had twisted; a sharp, violent smile that found the sides of her jaw and thinned her eyes. “Of course it was. I love Violet, and he loves me,” she’d said through those much-too-wide lips, sounding like she didn’t even believe it herself. 

Sentience or lack thereof notwithstanding, hierarchy and existence - survival within that thin cut out of life’s definition thrust upon you (slave, plebeian, Commander, etc) - only gloriously subsist off pre-existing guidance. That knowledge provides a gentle path to be followed, well-trodden and knowable as other members of your species have followed en masse before you ever thought to arrive - no different, maybe, to the way a leash feels around a tamed wolf turned lap dog. In both ways, a hierarchy is proven. The top of the triangle, the holder of the leash; the bottom of the triangle, the one who is leashed. 

To that end, a healthy biosphere is filled with that steady hierarchy that ingratiates itself to the same lives over and over again. Bakers giving birth to children who take over the business. Noblewomen who give their dresses to their daughters. The same species live in the same area at the same time. 

After years of being locked in this cycle, he has grown to think of it like this, having felt so lonely when ignored by the nobility for being so different to them: loneliness is merely a feeling adjacent to that control, feeling a distance from the others who fulfil these well-walked paths when you don’t and would rather instead find the edges to slip into. It’s a way to keep you steady and away from those edges - keep you in line, never knowing anything else to feel the excitement of revolt because you are always stable and looking on ahead where the others diligently walk and stumble and fall for you - so that is why he will never let himself feel that keen edge again.

It hurts when pulled back by your neck, but it will be done because if enough people stray too far, eventually the grass grows back. The novelty of the unpathed, the eternal splitting off from the pack, a siren song to only the most confident of individuals who are willing to defy the normalcy of those who came before - when the mound built up from years of walking elsewhere then dwindles from increased unexpected foot travel and no longer exists to stand atop, who benefits? Certainly not those who grew to learn how to balance themselves on the peak.

Those leashes are tight; chains even tighter, physical or otherwise. With but a single dragging of her arms forward, from anywhere, he will rush towards her, or maybe she doesn’t even need to do a thing anymore. She’s already torn through him and settled, like steadying bone seated in the midst of muscle, or maybe he doesn’t even have bones anymore - every one of them, every blink and even every thought, brought to the conclusion she has made. 

Maybe that's kindness, too. If you know better, maybe there’s nothing wrong with helping someone who could be so much more but fails to reach their heights. Maybe…

“A branding, it is,” says Violet quietly. His head hangs and Pavel loses his eyes, but not the feeling they provide. “She accepted the crown, and I accepted this.”

It’s as if he hopes if he tightens himself enough that he will be able to become nothing, and take the scars with him. Mutual destruction and in the absence of him, the most gentle of revenges on her possible. If I can’t have me, neither can you. 

“I know what I said, but I’d still have preferred a ring,” he whispers. “If it were to speak to who I belonged to, I would want anything but this. Anything , besides this. I looked in the mirror, and I saw her. No matter how far I ran. She was there, in the mirror. In my skin.”

The recreation of a skeletal structure. Seeing her wherever he goes. His muscle becoming the wrapping of red fibre across white marrow like the pale arms she would use to embrace him, keep him still even as he attempts to struggle and deviate. Red ribbons across a present - this is yours now, this body I have remade. Treat it well; I will return to it, I want to see it. I want to see my artwork. Unholy creativity, to etch your image into another. Skin exists to keep the blood from mixing; provides a very thin and discrete category to differentiate how inconsequentially similar people are underneath what they are. 

Yet even his fundamental makeup reminds him of her now, the biological intricacies of healing after a wound a traitor to desperate individuality. The blood still flows under the skin, and he still sees perfectly with the wounded eye, as if his body agreed with it. Everything betrays him, in servitude to her.

His skin is merely for the sake of protest - if she could have it her way, he would be ripped from that, too. With him, she is aiming for the same thing as she is with this city. Recreation, a violation of the sacred indices of people into something new. Gods are no more, buried above as the council is below; the divine doctrine usurped, new scriptures to be formed and buried between the bricks of this city, the connective flesh of the people who exist here.

After all, he and they, those who complimented the flower - everyone here, in this blasted world - are all the same damn thing. 

Pavel’s throat has gone dry; swallowing does little to ease it. He licks his lips and with the movement of his jaw finds his mouth is quivering in something undeterminable to him. His heart is hammering, and his cheeks are frightfully warm. 

“May I,” Pavel says, his voice having dropped to a whisper at some unrecognisable point.

Violet looks back up, initially confused - and then he sees Pavel’s eyes trained on his. Surprisingly quickly he nods, almost shy, his eyes finding some interest in the way Pavel’s light hair curls inward and along the flat of his ear as he glances away again.  

His gorgeous eyes, his exquisite form, the firm of his hands as they rest on Pavel’s thighs, all eliciting a quake in his body as if in their presence, he is nothing but that scared little child finding innovative ways to fail peeling an apple again. He's almost rasping as he leans in.

And then those scars - he sees the way they’re slightly more leathery to the smooth of Violet’s skin, the way they’re coloured a muted tan tone that doesn’t quite match the pearl surrounding it. The way they’re far too perfectly sliced into his skin, far from the raggedy wounds of tools made from rock and snapped back twigs. It’s like feeling ill once you’ve been told what you thought was dirt that you were happily sitting on was really hardened shit. All beauty spoiled by the equivalent sensation of flowers growing out the bile of an unturned stomach. A towering natural oak tree filled with unrecognisable dribbling gore. Watching warm summer evenings turn cool from atop a putrid and protesting pile of rot… a variety of expressions, all prose to tell a simple feeling he’s maybe a little hesitant to tell in straight words. 

He keeps his touch soft - drawing his hands down his eye in a straight line, vaguely making out the straight line of his scarring. There is the occasional webbing of new and old at the edges of the injury where his skin had reunited in the aftermath of the attack, but otherwise all things considered it is an incredibly clean cut. A slight tension to the skin where it connects, like it wasn’t quite the ideal size - should the cut have been smaller? Bigger? Should it never have happened at all, or should she have taken even more for herself so explicitly? As if her acts are made prettier if she personally demonstrates some restraint. Even as her heels disappear into the volume of blood right underneath her that drips from her jaw right down from her chin like water down broad leaves in the aftermath of rain. 

Violet almost whimpers as he makes his first touch, drawing a slight away as his entire body cringes. He’s too close to escape and back out though, and he seems to know that. Legs intertwined in the same fashion as bricks and honeysuckle, only differentiated by the fact that he’s wearing black silk and Pavel is wearing loose cream. 

“Are you frightened?” Pavel murmurs.

“Not,” says Violet slowly. “Especially. It’s… uncomfortable. I don’t like it.”

“Because it’s me?”

A pause, here. “No,” says Violet. “That’s what makes it okay,” he says, and it feels like fingers down his spine, their tips idling across every ridge and bump. Threading the space between his bones with the same delicacy as fiddling with ribbon. Wrapping silk around him, dulling the senses to an odd and fluffy feeling like his synapses can’t get through, the opposite of his brain informing his decisions. Now acting on pure instinct, machiavellian thoughts put to the side, in the way he wants simply to touch him.

When Pavel’s nails graze it, Violet ghosts a start of his shoulders again, his lips curling sour. Still he doesn’t say anything, even as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “At least I could take a ring off,” Violet murmurs instead, his eyes carefully watching Pavel’s expression. “Put it right on my desk when I go to sleep. I could go out for the night, and no one would know.”

“Likely why she selected otherwise,” Pavel replies. “How did you react?”

Violet looks at him with an odd glance. “Why do you ask me?”

“I want to know,” Pavel says, angling his head upwards, lips parted hungrily. “She seems to think of you as different to what you are.”

He snorts, his expression souring “It was consensual. That much wasn’t a lie. She has the right of it,” Violet tells him, already pushing his face gently into Pavel’s hands again, urging him to continue his touches.

It is thoroughly unconvincing. When Pavel says, “in the same vein as a human, or when you call it such after a cow walks into the slaughter pen to be butchered?” it’s a bit harsher than he meant it, but not by much.

For a moment, it looks as if Violet would find his way out from between them. His eyes narrow to a tremendous anger, and his lips go trapeze taut. 

And yet, all he says is, “such a distinction is hard to make in this life.” Quietly, his mouth barely moving, like a cat slinking through the alleyways at night to avoid the people’s footfall and lifeline of the city around it. As if to not be heard or seen by anyone who might be listening over and across the city’s horizon, or peering through the window with one vicious eye pressed up against it. 

“So you admit there is potential fault to her,” Pavel murmurs, tracing shapes around his scarring again. Despite himself, Violet gently cocks his head, eases into the motion, all while glaring at him from under his fringe. 

Violet’s eyes fall shut. “No,” he immediately says. “I wouldn’t.” 

“She said you used to. Feel that way, I mean.”

"Used to,” Violet points out, melancholic at best, sorrowful at worst.

Pavel hums, dissatisfied. The heat between them feels sweltering, frustratingly so. He dislikes the sense of a third breath and yet this heat can’t have been made by only two. The back of his neck, vaguely dotted with sweat - hovering over him just a head taller, and exhaling much slower than the two of them. She isn’t worried about Violet, so why would she strain herself? They breathe like revolutionaries and soldiers battling wildly right outside her door; she breathes as if fussing away steam from her afternoon tea on the other side. Waiting for it to blow over. His loyalty is once in a generation - if, of course, only looking at him as a human. Consider him a dog, and it’s much more typical.

He thumbs the bottom of Violet’s lip - watches with a lazy glance back to his eyes when Violet stares, but does not snap. 

Gently, like a dormouse’s footsteps, his thumb sweeping across his lips. He presses down, somewhere in the middle, nail close as if on hasty standby; enjoys the way he feels it part way and not fight back here, too. Violet’s body appears to trend towards submission, and he’s even light about the way his fingers curl into the loose of his trousers, how his palms press into his thighs for stability. He was made to be owned, he thinks, but not entirely in his own voice. Breathing heavier on the back of his damp neck, but not because she’s worried. Breathing heavier in his chest, and not because he’s not excited. There’s no need for sympathy - this is good for him. He thinks too much, so make him stop thinking.

I love him, so I’ll do this for him. I love Perland, so I’ll do this for you all…

The same motion as a tense grip around the throat, a kiss on the lips, tongue down your throat. Violet smoulders a look into him, candlefire burning. Pavel brings his palms down his jaw, and holds his face steady. When he brings him closer inwards, it’s as hot as frenzied breathing in fury, as if she’s stepped forward, finally seeing something she dislikes. 

Violet’s lips quirk upwards. “Will you?” Normally his voice sounds lashing, but he sounds gentler here - maybe a little entertained.

“Why don’t you tell me?” Pavel says, and watches his amusement falter; watches him fail, eyes falling and shoulders rounding.

Slowly, Violet says, “all those years ago… when we were so small. When you stared after me… why did you never approach me? I… would have liked it. A friend.”

His stomach rolls like angry waves. “You had one in her, no?”

“I don’t,” he says, swallowing, shivering. “I don’t think we were friends.”

“Lovers, then?”

This time, he fails to so much as react, as if he’s gotten stuck trying to comprehend his words. Eventually when he speaks, it’s not relevant - at least, not strictly. “You give me the same look even now. So distant, but so wanting. What do you want from me? My position? My body? I have nothing to give you anymore.”

She took it all, he says in as many words. Pavel tightens his hold across his face, and the points where his fingers sink into his cheeks turn crimson in begging for mercy as they struggle for oxygen. He thinks the right, virtuous answer would be ‘nothing’, but he has long since abandoned virtue.

“Were you so afraid of me?” Violet says, in the quietest voice he thinks he has ever heard. In the voice he thinks he would have spoken in, all those years ago, if only he’d said hello.

“I was newly adopted,” Pavel tells him. “You asked me about the scar on my hand. My father - my real one - decided we had to leave the wilds when I received it. It was like something just… flipped in his head. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it because of that.”

Violet nods at him without a word. Of course he understands. He’s the only one who ever could hope to understand Pavel. For better or worse, they were fished from the same pond and stared down the same snickering humans when they struggled to walk. 

“My deceased father wanted me to live,” Pavel continues quietly. “And my adoptive father told me the best way to live was to stay quiet - out of sight, to not bring attention to yourself. The less they have to talk about regarding yourself, the safer and better your life would be.”

At that, Violet sighs, long and miserable. “Your father was a smart man,” he says, almost mournfully.

The most tentative he’s ever spoken: barely above a whisper, Pavel says, “it was enough to make me want to get to know you. To see the kind of person you really were.”

Violet looks at him with soft eyes, unjudging - or perhaps, that isn’t the right way to word it. He is judging, and simply choosing mercy instead of justice. He laughs weakly, in wild disbelief. “That’s counterproductive,” he manages.

“But I was scared, too,” he continues. “I’d never seen such bright lights. I’d never heard so many voices, or so tight in my clothes. And yet, when I saw you, so frightened and out of place… I thought I recognised you.”

I thought I saw myself. For just a bit, we were the same. Gently, Violet closes his eyes, takes a shuddering breath in. “It could have been you,” he breathes, an odd peace about him and then says, “if it was… maybe it would have been better.”

Because the trees are restless, whispering amongst themselves when he will come back to their edges to peer past when he was so close to stepping in and away from the path. The roses are growing in the bushes; come see, come see. Why won’t he see?

Does he need to be pulled in? By the throat, a leash in Pavel’s hands and effort straining in his arms.

“Maybe,” is all Pavel finds he can say. With him at his side, flowing through him, the spirit of Perland’s cruelty blunted in its own way. Otherworldly evidence that everything could be alright, if only the right people found each other sooner. 

Was it worth it, Father?

Am I happy like this?

“I don’t know myself without her. Not anymore,” Violet finally whispers to him, in place of a real answer, or maybe this is the best answer he can give. “Do you… do you think that’s love?”

At some point, there is nowhere to return to once everything is too taken on by what has touched it. One day, a home will be invaded by the moths and the rot and the crawling ivy, and it will not be your home anymore; one day, a heart will be invaded by the settling still of magnanimous individuals who consume your mind, and it will not be your heart anymore; one day, he will be filled with her thoughts, and it won’t be his mind anymore.

A white canvas disappears under the paint. The baby skin is lost to the scars. The dirt is changed forever by the new body that decomposes into it.

If there is no way to go back, let’s just go forward, Pavel thinks, his mouth half-hung slackjaw, and wonders if it would heal better if he tore through his eye with his nails. 

“Because I have thought it too, on occasion,” she’d told him in as many worlds as she didn’t. “What would have happened had you stepped in all those years ago?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Pavel had lied, heart aching, though not tenderly.

“Have you ever wondered about the concept of alternate realities? I think of them frequently. In as many worlds as I’ve succeeded, there may be just as many as I’ve failed. I wonder how many of the latter lined up with you befriending little Violet as well? Indeed, I wonder if I’d be so motivated without him; perhaps even those failures even coincide with his success. If it weren’t for him, would I even want it?”

“... I fail to see what my presence could have done to benefit him,” Pavel had told her warily, narrowing his eyes.

“You really don’t?” she cocked her head, looking at him. Part of her expression had made his skin feel transparent, as though she were looking directly at the webbing of his veins underneath his pale flesh. “I see it, you know. The way he’s changed… even just a little, with you around. He’s got just a bit more energy when he speaks to you. A bit more life to him.”

He’d awkwardly shifted between his feet, forced to bring his eyes down from embarrassment. “That’s, um, nice.”

“I think you’re good for him,” she’d told him. Had he been less off kilter, less unsure of his own footing for just a second, he’d have noticed that she said it in the same way a butcher implies a lamb is a good animal that serves him well, with all the implications coming with it. “I couldn’t doubt otherwise, considering how much he talks about you.”

“What… does he say?” Pavel had asked, in mild - honest - wonder.

“That you are an incredibly annoying individual,” she’d said. “Every other day, he tells me of your latest bickering. He makes faces I haven’t seen in years before, speaks in tones I thought he’d lost in his throat when his parents passed. He likes it - talking about you. It’s something he’s enthusiastic about. I haven’t seen him enthusiastic in years, and yet your latest tease or fight can easily take up an entire dinner conversation.”

“I feel as if we get along poorly,” had been all Pavel could say, blushing wildly despite himself.

“Rather, very few people are able to speak the way you do to him and get to do it again and again. He’s not had many friends,” she’d said in a lower voice. “Only me, you see, and much as I would like to, I cannot dedicate every waking moment to him. When I can’t, he is alone. That’s a difficult place to be. But a similar place to you, no?”

Hesitant, Pavel had nodded. “Prior to having met him,” he’d said quietly. “I would say I had no confidants.”

“I take it you trust him?”

“A-as a coworker must,” he’d told her with an askew glance, hoping he wasn’t coming across as put out. “But I admit… It has been nice to finally speak to him. I don’t think I’d call it an exaggeration to imply he’s hung over my life.”

“Really, now?” she’d said with a chuckle. “Yes… he is everyone’s shadow, here in Perland.”

Pavel had nodded shortly. “They were warnings,” he’d mumbled. “My father and auntie would give them, too. So when, despite everything, you befriended him and I’d see the two of you walking together…”

“You were jealous,” she’d finished on his behalf. It hadn’t been what he was going to say, but as soon as she’d said it, the word he’d meant to use dissipated in his mouth, going back down his throat with the saliva suddenly flooding him, forcing him to swallow. To be resolute. To never go back. To see the trees for the forest, the roses for the path. He was looking at himself in those ugly yellow eyes of hers, and he could only think ruefully that if this was what she was always looking at, that he must have been worth pitying, too. 

Thinking, I wanted to be his friend, too.

Thinking, I wanted to help him, too.

No, it wasn’t a matter of ‘too’. He wanted it outright. He wanted to run up to her and tear her hair out, scream in her face to leave him alone and that she was an idiot for doing this - didn’t she know it was important to be good, and to stay away from him? 

That interloper. Monster. Decrying the natural order of things. If she were willing to do this and still call herself that, she must have thought she still looked gorgeous through mud, even though Violet looked so disgusting his father told him to not so much as look at him. That she was at the very top, and those on top mustn’t look below - let alone pull others up.

How dare she reach down and mingle amongst and take him, when she was at the top? Throwing Father’s belief about how he loved Pavel and protected in his face, even when Pavel had worked so hard to accept them. How dare she look down when they had all grown up taught to only ever look up?

Thinking, I wanted to hurt him.

“You’re a bad son, aren’t you?” she’d dropped her voice to a subtone.

He had shakily said, “I had made a decision to continue honourably representing my father and his House. I was not in the position to do anything about it,” knowing it wasn’t really the truth.

She’d cocked her head slowly, almost regarding him as if he were an idiot. “Yet it bothers you. Even though Father wanted the best for you, you resent that he stopped you. You could have been friends.”

If it had been him - if she had just stayed where she was meant to be - maybe they could have been. He’d thought maybe he’d have been happy to have simply had someone who understood him, over an entire room of small talk and face lit under by malice. For just that single second, he’d wondered if that was what home was, maybe he didn’t want to be home.

He’d swallowed hard enough it hurt his throat. “That isn’t what I wanted,” he managed to say.

“You could have kissed him.” Her nod had come smugly, deeply pleased with herself, revving up laughter to spit in his face. She’d said, “you could have been me,” and it had felt like it connected with him, as if the veins under his skin had finally found his heart and rushed blood through. 

As if in mourning: “Yes, ma’am,” he did not lie.

“When I pulled, you could have pulled back.” Like fighting over a wishbone on a holiday roast - the one who claims the bigger piece has their dreams come true. Bellies and minds full from having feasted on him prior. He didn’t need to think; he didn’t even need to be a person, just like how a city doesn’t need to be built of bricks. All it needs is to know its place. One queen to hundreds of people to innumerable bricks. A city can be flesh and blood, too; a city can be kissed, as well. Brick upon concrete upon brick upon blood - is that not a holy formation, as well?

“Yes, ma’am,” he did not lie.

“It should be you,” she had told him, rising from her seat, gesturing with her hands out from her chest to the room, past the window, into the mountains. “Who owns him. Who should get to so much as blink and have him at your side. You should own him, and all of this. Because you deserve it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he did not lie.

Saying, you’re just like me. Filthy rat. “But you know, I deserve it too, you know,” she’d told him gleefully. “We all do. In the end, there is only one difference between me and you and any one of the people outside, Commander. What is it? Can you tell me?”

He opens his mouth, and only feels the nostalgic sense of wanting to cry wash over him for it. Singing a song from so long ago, a tritone down: It’s that Violet is hers; not mine, or anyone else’s. 

“Look at you,” she’d whispered. “Oh, God, Pavel - what would your darling fathers say? They’d be very disappointed in their precious little son. "Ungrateful and foolish - not as all like they taught you. Throwing it all away! They worked so hard to protect you!” 

His scars had ached terribly as if left out in the rain, cold steeping in and making it hurt. Growth as motivated by shed tears, for the goal of…

Chipping a statue. Painting a picture. Telling a lie. A mistake, so you remake it. Things can be better; they should be better. Her fingers spread across him like smearing a new duvet after soiling the old one. Metamorphosis from an already-split cocoon, a snowy owl rising from phoenix's ashes. To be loved is to be changed, and she loves everything she owns so much.

“Thief,” she’d whispered. “Meaning to take my property.”

To be loved is to be changed is to be a traitor to nature and it has sat steadily in his blood the second they stepped their feet out of their nomadic tribe for better, changed from mere inhabitants to greedy demanders. His biological father trampled on the path, knocked the trees down, all because he loved him too much to let him be nothing more than fodder for the cycle of life and death the nomads grew up adherent to; his adoptive father guided him gently, gestured to honour and protecting him with the exact same goal of keeping him safe for as long as he possibly could.

He was a product of love at every single step, all to abandon the path and hover on the outskirts of destiny. He has been a traitor from the start, before he ever thought to defy her. He could never be forgiven for his transgressions - but he doesn’t need forgiveness, does he? He’s loved so very much, and deserves even more.

That was all that needed to happen for him to ascend past it all. One queen to one traitor. It could have been his; it still can be. 

He wonders what life would have been for him, if they had simply stayed put in the wilds. If he hadn’t been cared about. He and her are the exact same usurpers of fate, transcending the mould. No, it isn’t enough that he’s safe - it never was. His want has always been a need, there has been no differentiation. ‘I want’ and ‘I need’ are the exact same statement. 

Was it that love that killed his father, too?

God, will it be that love that will kill him, too?

“The confidence of leadership is the confidence to intrude on someone’s natural state,” she’d grinned. “I told you - it’s to understand needs, and then to say that you know better than what comes to them instinctively. Do you, Commander? What do you know?”

“I know that you are a murderer!” he’d finally snapped. “That you slaughtered your sisters for your position! That you were not destined for this - that you stole it when you did not deserve it! Who are you to tell me what to do? To tell any of us?”

“I am your Queen,” she’d simply said, barely holding back laughter. 

“Then it could have been anyone,” Pavel had hissed back, just barely able to stop himself from lunging at her as he did. “If it wasn’t destiny, then it was simply luck. You are nothing special at all. Get off your high horse, you bitch.”

“But it wasn’t anyone, was it?” she’d practically giggled, her smile crescent wide and slicing across her face. “It was me.”

He awakens with a start, and finds Violet’s bed conspicuously absent of him. Heart lost again somewhere. Maybe laid limply across the floor, trampled on when Violet had woken up and swung his legs over the side of the mattress to get up and walk away. The space beside him is cold already when he sweeps his hand over it, suggesting he has long since left and let Pavel sleep further. 

That makes sense, he thinks, not in his own voice. He’s got another room, better suited for him.

He feels as though he needs to apologise to his fathers, but isn’t wholly sure why. Vaguely, the reasoning makes itself known when he enters Her Majesty’s office for a briefing, and already finds Violet there, leaning in close to read a report she has sprawled across her table. She is a mere fraction away from him and their faces are angled towards the same point. Their breaths mingle, smelling of shared breakfast and broken bread and poured teas. If they lent forward, their lips would touch. 

When she notices her doors opening, she looks up at Pavel with a light movement of her eyes swirling upwards, as if loath to move from their position of intimate eminence.  

And then, she gives him a knowing look. Despicable lips cocked upwards; eyes narrowed in the same fashion as when they are half-lidded from intense pleasure. What do you want, Commander?

Hence, it’s nothing special. Nothing special at all, to own it all. Anyone could do it; better people could do it. Better people should do it. Perland deserves better, and so does he.

Lonely little thing you are.

“Was it really all because of him?” he asks her, when Violet leaves to prepare for the Flame Heart sortie.

A skeleton of gentleness; natural knives growing between abandoned bones. A body no longer needed when living in another. She says, “it was because of all of you,” and it sounds like the voice she would have used years ago, too. Unfortunately, he is past sick of walking melancholy.

He’s breathing heavy under his breath as he bullets down the estate hallway. Heart in his mouth, bile in his throat. His skin is warm and his fury washes over him like he’d just found a plunderer rummaging through his pantry. His food to eat, to flourish and feast on. Intruding on his territory, so they have it coming if he whips his pistol out because it’s his. His, his, his.

If the only way he will understand is by being forced upon…

God, please, thinks Pavel, watching him from behind as Violet leads the sortie’s vanguard, his shoulders uneven. Then let him feel force. 

He thumbs his gun in the same motion he did his lips, craving to trace a posy of roses born from a bullet kissing his skin, a fairy’s circle set in skin, to grant a wish amidst their giggles. Touched by love, changed by it - to change in turn. 

The thought of it makes his heart sing, for the first time in a long, long time and unbeknownst to him, he is truly smiling behind the barrel of his gun as Violet makes the order to split their forces.

“Behind me will be safest,” she’d told Violet, many years ago, when he was young and she was older but not yet old enough. “You’re a head shorter, so if you just stay behind, no one will notice you.”

He was barely able to keep his breathing steady, a hand tightly gripping his shirt and the other being held just as tightly by her. In her hands his quivered, so she’d make sure to hold onto him and drag him along if she had to. “Father,” he’d whispered, which in itself was an achievement - he could speak now, instead of being reduced to a panicking mess of limbs and wide eyes that couldn’t stand up straight without shaking. “He’ll be disappointed if I do that, though… Mother, too…”

She’d turned to him, frowning, but he got the sense it wasn’t directed at him. “Violet,” she’d said, very careful, staring into his eyes. It was an oddly intimidating feeling, the kind of feeling that very clearly betrayed that the girl in front of him really was destined to be their leader, but he wasn’t much of anything at all, so he tried to look away only for her to take him by the chin and force him to meet her eyes. “It only needs to be done. It doesn’t need to be perfect. As long as you’re here with me, they’ll benefit and that should help them. So just hold my hand.”

“O-okay,” he’d stammered, sounding not at all sure of it.

“I’ll introduce you, so as long as you say hello and bow when I do, it won’t be a problem if you keep hiding. If that’s what you want to do, you can, okay?"

He’d nodded this time, a short and shy jerk of his head. “But what if they look at you… funny, or something? They do it all the time,” he’d added in a quiet voice.

“It doesn’t matter,” she’d told him firmly, tightening her grip around his hand. His eyes jumped down in a distant kind of fear, but with just another tilting of his head he was back looking at her. They were very large, as if the purple of his pupils were a diluted globule of paint a too-large white canvas. “Do you hear me? They’ll want to ally themselves with me one way or another. Being seen with you isn’t even a temporary setback. It means nothing to me.”

“Are you sure, Lilias?” He had been breathing rapidly, legs uneven and shoulders hunched. “That’s- I don’t know if you can take this back. I appreciate it, I really do, but…”

Her expression had softened - eyes rounding at their edges and a gentle smile across her lips. In front of her had been a boy a whole head shorter than her, holding onto her as tight as he possibly could with his very small hands. He was looking a bit dishevelled from tossing and turning all night, and he hadn’t smiled once since they’d met in the morning to walk into the hall together. To her, he was very sweet indeed, because he reminded her a lot of herself in those excessively large family dinners, watching nice things go to worse and less deserving people than herself. 

“You want this, don’t you?” she’d asked. “To be viewed better and not laughed at all the time.”

He’d looked a thousand times smaller when he’d nodded without a word.

“Violet,” she’d told him gently, leaning down to meet him at eye level. “You deserve this, okay? You deserve to be in that hall, too. You’re a Perlander nobleman, after all. Just like I deserve to be Citylord, because I’m a Perlutia. And I’m going to be the best Citylord Perland’s ever seen, so you’re going to be a shining example of what it means to be a nobleman.”

This time when he’d looked away cringing, she didn’t force him to look back. “I don’t feel like one, though…”

“You feel like dirt on someone’s shoes,” she’d said, and then pulled him into a cuddle, resting her chin on his head. “That’s okay. Worse comes to worst, you can be the dirt on my shoes. You can be there when I’m Citylord, too. Right underneath me. How’s that?”

“Um…“

“Your Mother and Father will love that, I’m sure,” she’d told him, rustling her cheek into his hair. Feeling his shoulders rise gently, the way in her arms he takes a sharp inhale that makes his chest feel out the rest of the space between them. “Say, wanna know a secret? There’s no bigger honour for a nobleman than to be so favoured by the Citylord. All of these people?” She’d dropped her voice to a whisper, barely to be heard if she hadn’t put her mouth right up to his ear. “They’re already less nobility than you are. They just don’t know it, because they all think they’re God’s gift to the city.”

She’d heard him breathe, “i-is that really true? Mother and Father always said because our House was so disliked…”

“Our mothers and fathers aren’t always right, Violet,” she’d chuckled. “Otherwise, we’d never have any work to do. This would always be the bestest, most wonderful place in the world. But it’s had its problems lately - you know that, right? You study so very much, and all - so… my mother and father can’t be right, ‘cuz they’re the ones who did this. Do you get what I mean?”

“What did my mother and father do?” he’d asked, sounding horrified. 

Holding him just a little tighter, she’d said, “nothing special. It’s something everyone did. Which is why I don’t want you to blame yourself anymore.”

He’d glanced away, furrowing his brows cautiously. “I don’t know if I can do that…”

“Then when you can’t, just believe in me,” she’d told him, releasing him so she could look at his terrified eyes. When she smiled at him, a ghost of a smile came across him. “And use that to keep trying. Okay?"

He’d paused, still keeping his eyes away from her. Finally, she’d angled his expression back to - making sure he’d see her, as he thought whatever he was thinking. Sounding yet unsure of it, Violet had managed to say, “... if you’re certain,” but that was fine - he wasn’t a very sure person, not yet. 

“I’m certain,” she’d smiled.

“Promise?”

“I promise. I’ll keep an eye on you, so don’t be afraid.”

Nibbling the bottom of his lip he’d said, “okay,” and then when she’d tugged him forward he’d followed, shaking legs and anxious eyes and all. But the thing about being a leader is you need confidence, she’d always thought - confidence in yourself, which leads to confidence in the people around you. After all, no one wants to surround themselves with people who can’t be trusted, and to build the best relationships, they should be mutual. She will give him this and more to maintain him later, just how you bring new coats of paint over brick walls so they will continue to look pretty, and just how you feed a cat so it will purr on your lap later. 

He did well at that event, bowing when he should and chirping a hello when he should, which is all one needed when they were being essentially exhibited. Scattered looks of dissatisfaction followed them when she made it clear that they were here together, but there is only so long one can outwardly demonstrate their dislike of someone’s choices before they begin losing favour, and no one had wanted to lose favour with a member of the Citylord’s lineage.

Perhaps predictably, the exact opposite begun to happen - he would stop needing to be introduced during that event, as people would begin including him in their initial greetings. Someone complimented his hastily-brushed hair, enjoying the slightly wild and exotic look it gave him in a room full of smoothened-down and blunt people and aesthetics. For the first time in months, someone besides her or his parents touched him, and it was to redo his little tie that had fallen askew with how much he’d been fiddling and fidgeting with it. From afar, a small boy with silver hair had looked right at him with the kind of longingness a twin might give a long-lost other half they were too afraid to approach, before scattering once Violet had caught his gaze. A noblewoman had even approached her with a very extravagant present, inevitably to curry her approval - only to even surprise her by giving Violet a very small and evidently last-second obtained pastry, from a stall down the street that a likely now very exhausted servant had made a dash for. As he tentatively reached out to take it from the smiling noblewoman’s hands, Lilias had a strange feeling curling in her stomach that had made her want to bat it out of the noblewoman’s hands, or maybe just eat it herself.

“You see, darling?” she’d mumbled anyway, squeezing his hand again as she watched him cautiously nibble at the treat. He’d winced, glancing down to their hands, but he hadn’t said anything. “Leave it to me. I’ll make it all better.” Or maybe, she’d think later, she said it because of all that. “Next time… next time, shall we brush your hair beforehand?”

He nodded, gentle as a breeze across cheeks. He still didn’t stand up straight.