#( god i hope not FKGHJDFS )

[gatheredfates]

Alaice - Distraught

CONTENT WARNINGS: Alaice's story deals in dark/mature themes surrounding toxic relationships, domestic violence and my personal interpretation of a woman's place in Ishgardian high society. Please do not read/scroll now if you're under eighteen or if these topics are personally triggering. The abuse is primarily emotional/mental, but there is also a mention of martial rape. I choose to be transparent because I believe in tagging/warning were appropriate, but I'm firmly of the opinion people must be responsible for the kinds of media they choose to engage with. Curate your spaces appropriately.

when is a monster not a monster? oh, when you love it.

Tight fingers wove around a bunch of forget-me-nots, flecks of azure in the grey. Ahead, a weary band of onlookers watched the procession while the stony eyes of The Fury bored, an irony both in material and stare. It wasn’t the kind of wedding Alaice had envisioned for herself; a tiny gathering, a closed ceremony, the absence of her father on her arm.

'It would not do to wait for a spring wedding,' he explained on the first ask, and who was she to deny? The duties of her House weighed heavy since her parent's death (little more than babe, to loose them so quickly - what a tragedy!) and the tender promise of protection nursed to love as she confided to the handsome man now called her fiancé. He knew better, of course, master of his house for a ten-year, how to conduct her affairs in a most delicate manner. It would not bode well for her to attempt to navigate the bureaucracies on her own; the paperwork, the proprieties — she was ill prepared for it! No, he would care for it out of his adoration for her. She need only pledge her love for him and he would make it so.

Sensible. Pragmatic. It was no gayly court and gaggles of gossip, but she would be safe. Her mother had prepared her thusly before she died; the second-nature braid was originally by her hand. The spattering of snowberries and frosted evergreen haloed around her head only furthered the picturesque portrait of bridely innocence on her ascension to the altar.

Past the threshold of virtue. Out of the furnace and into the fire.

He looked at her and she swore to herself none of it mattered. Not the awkward assembly of acquaintances, the Halonic choir singing a chorus closer to a requiem, or the rush-job priest that better suited such a lament. The man on her left loosened his hold and relinquished her to her soon-to-be husband, as if he had any ownership over her in the first place.

Draeir smiled. His mouth were a gate of shiny white teeth, an ivory fortress where she loomed in enamel prisons lashed by his cold word. She smiled back so sweetly, barely containing her excitement, ignorant to the grip that was two ilms too tight on her fingers or the way he pulled her to him with contained force.

She stumbled. He caught her in turn. A moment's panic escaped her mouth, regained in an instant, and she apologised for her mistake.

"You won't do it again," he answered her, and she took it for gentility.

You will know better than to do it again.

The choir lolled into silence.

a beast can never unlearn its nature.

A posy of periwinkles decayed by the windowsill, overlooking the drab gardens flanked by an ever-constant pattering of snow. They had been a gift on his return, a placation for the girl resting chin-first by the ledge, and placed on the mantle to gather dust. That was how she felt most days, now — a painting, perhaps a statue at best. Something to revisit when he pleased, brushed down and realigned.

Sometimes, when he were being generous, he would trot her out to the crowds he entertained — watched with those hawk-like eyes how she curtsied and smiled at their jokes.

"Such a pretty thing, Draeir, how lucky you must be!" The women remarked, dripping poison from the corner of their lips to be bestowed upon their husbands who stared too long. She felt the uncomfortable flip in the pit of her stomach, intensified when they turned away to talk business and pleasure and his hand would seize hers from behind, pulling her to his side.

"Darling," he cooed, his voice dropping so low as to make the others believe they were merely conversing. Then came the hissed "Feeding their egotism is not your job."

Which did he want — her absence or her presence? If she kept to herself he'd stumble into their room wine-drunk and longing, clawing for her company and absconding her for her avoidance. If she stayed by him and submitted to his whims, a toe out of line spurred his ire.

"You are my WIFE." The specks of spittle were like stains on her skin, no matter how much she tried to wipe them off, and the desperate cries for his redemption could not strip the varnish from the bed that creaked from the weight of them. It hadn't occurred to her then to wish for them to crack; to fling them, body and bloody, to the floor.

It hadn't occurred to her to fight back.

How was this love when she was hysterical? How was this love when he looked at her with rage?

Draier grabbed her face and demanded her silence. He kissed her. He bit her. He tore her from the inside out, wringing her out like a crone's cloth, and left her in tatters at the bedside.

When she finally rose, barely registering what time had passed, she bundled the sheets dappled by blood and retrieved her clothes from the floor. She barely registered handing them to her maid, only that she asked they all be burned.

Rotting flowers on a mantle, elegantly framed. Holy work, the church claimed.

Tell me then, father, why I feel so unclean?

Is it nature or is it nurture?

In her dreams, her daughter wrapped her fingers around her throat.

"A sapling cannot be saved from the seed," She said, pretty lips spreading to a bloodied smile that poured down her chin to the spear of ice lodged between her breastbone. When Alaice screamed and tried to tear her hands away, Alyna only pressed her weight harder upon the weapon until she could no longer swallow the blood.

Her complexion. Her father's hair. Eyes of clear ice and steel grey looking at her vapidly. He looked like that when he died, too; the hard lines in his face smoothing to a eerie stillness as he slumped forward on the rime, steam rising from his rapidly cooling body.

She should have been horrified. Yet, when she dropped to her knees in front of him, all she could feel was relief.

Nature made him cruel. Nurture made her desperate. What would be the fate for their babe?

She woke the way a person stepped onto thin ice — cold and all at once. It was as if she suddenly remembered how to breathe, gulping down air instead of frozen water as her chest heaved and the blanket tangled around her legs was crisp and patched with snow.

To her left her daughter cried, but it was only on her third inhale that her mother registered it with fright and turned to scoop her up.

Alaice pressed her to her breast, icy cold. Alyna didn't seem to mind. In the stillness of the night, she was still a babe — not an apparition to be feared or an inevitability to supress.

"I can't tell you if evil is born or made," she recalled the witch telling her. They were alone one night, Elandervier having been coaxed by the promise of wine and relatively silent company. But, as she swirled the red in her hooked fingers, she sighed and looked to Alaice in full. Her mouth moved as if she wanted to say something. Instead, she busied herself with her cup.

She wondered what she might have said if she pressed. In truth, maybe it was better she didn't know at all.

Instead, she grounded herself with the feeling of her weight connecting with the wooden floorboards and the way her daughter wriggled in her arms. Alaice soothed her with a coo and a kiss to the crown of her head, straying to the window were dried lavender was plucked from the vase and offered as peacekeeping.

She had no way of knowing the horrors of the world. In this moment, she was safe.

That had to be good enough.

#｡･ﾟﾟ･ — 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫 : alaice #i'm not tagging el because she only features once but she IS here #anyway hi i feel rusty but i got the main gist of what i wanted here sooo #watch me not write for another six months #( god i hope not FKGHJDFS ) #my writing #｡･ﾟﾟ･ — sea answers things