Work Text:
From birth, a duty was imposed on Roseanne Olivia Park. Something people could realize only from hearing her name, something her father prepared her since she was a four-year-old and her mother was told she could not have any more kids. A duty her mother remembered if she got half a step out of line.
Roseanne was born to be the next Queen of Australia– the first since Australian Commonwealth (Burgoise) Independence. Her role came with the need to become used to playing a part, a manufactured and well-thought piece, with beautifully executed acting, real enough even to herself as she survived the role of the pure, perfect princess training to become a powerful Queen.
She was born with the sole purpose of growing up, becoming a Queen, having a child, and living up to that image until her death.
It was simple, right? Learn all the skills needed to take care of her family’s public image, talk to the right people, get a handsome nobleman and have a child with him while taking care of the international image of her country.
It should be natural for a Queen.
But it was not.
She suddenly was almost 18 and slowly going mad as the pressure build up in her bones, with her parents and the Church looking down on her obvious disinterest, her mother pressuring her to marry one of the Landlords’ sons, to be prepared for her role as her father’s illness took over his mind.
Roseanne spent her days after the beginning of World War III longing for a normal life. She had spent her weeks wishing they would have mercy on her and make her get out of the country instead of making her stay inside the castle for “safety reasons”. She didn't need years of extra torture.
Because that's what it was: torture.
Torture because she would have to slowly watch her mother's health decline as her addiction to alcohol and opium worsened by the day, especially when she was forced to live with her father every single day until his early onset Alzheimer’s worsened by the day and made him more and more dedicated to the church.
Torture because she would think about the disappointment she was in the long sleepless nights; because she was born with the tendency to uncertainty and fear whether she could endure a traditional marriage and love her husband or risk being killed by her servants for whom she loved; because all she was surrounded with would be her mother's addictions and her father's rambling about how the church had been right all along.
She always felt like her life was a big question mark.
Would she need to hide for life like Edward II from England, or could she have a normal life like the other Queens?
Would she give in to her parents' views, or could she ever develop her own?
Could she be forgiven for not helping publicly people like her, the ones she knew were rejected from all parts of society?
Could she take off the scars her mother made on her with the scars she carefully crafted herself?
Did she even matter?
Why was her mother always spying on her things any fucking time she turned her back for more than a few minutes?
Even after Roseanne told her father she would not partake in her conversations where he rambled good things about the church, why was the King still trying to make her live up to what she didn’t believe even between the walls of the castle, far from the public’s eyes?
Why was she not heard?
Why couldn't she just be gone?
Why couldn't she be sent anywhere out of there?
Why was her father so attached to the religion, even as his memory faded by the day?
Why had she believed it?
Why her?
And Roseanne would always push it aside at first. She numbed it out by either refusing anything her mother still tried to make her eat or devouring everything on sight. Whether she would change destroying her skin where she hoped she would never show anyone to this, it was always open to change.
Roseanne missed the feeling of control she had every time she destroyed herself a little more.
But now, with the war closer and closer to an end, she was desperate.
She still needed to endure at least a fucking year in hell. She needed to play her part because that's what she was born to do.
She was born with the original sin, but she did not know why was she paying for all of her lives.
Because being prohibited from being herself was the worst mental torture she had been forced to endure.