Chapter Text
When they were little, Fern wondered if they’d been adopted.
Maybe he’d been flown into the palace on some stray gust of wind, carried in like dandelions scattered to pieces, and had settled soft into his parents arms. Maybe they loved him so much they had to keep him.
Maybe he wasn’t really prince, but rather child to farmers or fishers, teachers or tinkerers, musicians or mailmen (anyone but royalty).
After all, he was forever too sickly to be prince—unnaturally pale wings, gaunt features, pallid complexion. They were nothing next to his parents (a little seed, carried off into wind, slight against flowers looming far above).
Sometimes, he thought, it was better thinking his parents had chosen him, rather than knowing how they were burdened by such a child as he.
All the same, as Fern grew older, further into their crown (further into their sickness), he knew these childish fantasies wouldn’t last him. There were too many similarities, from mother to father to child. There were too many reasons for parents pushed past their breaking point to let their weed of a child float away back to whence he came, rather than caring for him all the same.
It was easy enough to see, once the fog of childhood had lifted.
Suddenly, there were little traces of their parents everywhere they looked. In their eyes, in their gait, in themself.
In their hair, even.
When they were little enough that blossoming lollybells still had him sneezing like a field mouse, he’d always dreamed of traipse across the puddles born of springtime rain, dreamed of frolicking and fluttering and flying in the sparkle of the water thrown about in their dance.
He never got the chance.
(‘Getting wet will only have you more sickly,’ his mother would say, the worry lighting her eyes an all-consuming flame. ‘You ought to keep your hair dry, little one.’)
(They’d never much liked being called little.)
Then again, after Mother had died and Father had nearly followed in his grief, after Fern had been banished into some faraway realm so, so very wrong, after they’d been shut away into torrents of water everywhere, everywhere, an endless downpour, the feeling of drowning, search for sanctuary growing ever-desperate—
After everything, it isn’t something he dreams of, anymore.
Sometimes, when they’re alone in his cave, lying on their side and dully noting the glowworm-painted cavern, he remembers her voice. (‘Neat,’ she would say, soft, ‘and orderly, love. Keep it short, and keep it dry. It’s what’s best, Fern. It’ll keep you safe.’)
He tangles curse-coated fingers through dirty hair (drenched, messy, long with time) and he sobs.
It’s green, now, and filthy. It’s the color of overgrown weeds and forests come first spring after flame; it’s the color of shame.
His mother’s is—was—gentle auburn, they think. It was leaves fallen come autumn, warm bread dusted in sugar, and a place to call home.
His father’s is the deep brown of stolid oak, of soil too-soft after rainfall, of bitter regret that burrows deep inside until every part of Fern aches of it.
Fern’s, when they’d thought about it years before, was everything of the two of them. All Mother’s gentle chestnut, all Father’s sturdy mahogany. Whatever Fern may have lacked, this was enough to know he belonged (to his parents, and to himself).
And then it was gone.
Ripped away, as if it had never been. As if it had never mattered.
Replaced with some strange, disgusting substitute (like duckweed, he thinks, or mold).
Fern shivers on the cavern floor, clenching desperately at tainted hair with tainted grasp, feeling the prick of his mother’s crown against fingertips and doing his best to forget it.
(‘You look just like your mother,’ members of the court world tell him, when he was small, and Fern would preen, delighted with the attention.)
Now, all he looks like is a blight shunted from one realm to another, banished and forgotten.
Fern digs curse-coated fingers deep into their scalp and closes their eyes.