Healing Hearts

Past Scars

NOTE: Will contain dark themes, references to injury, and some language. Maria would not usually do the things in this story, but loss can definitely ruin anyone. This will have a happy ending, as indicated in the tags!

Prologue

(Lord Louis Mountbatten POV)

Being a British royal, I once thought, was one of the heaviest burdens a human being could ever bear. The Great War before certainly tested us at every point. Our hearts. Our minds. Our souls. All of our very beings. And the older institutions and ways had fallen, leaving us drifting into an uncertain future. Those that survived were only relics of a long passed era of refined glamour and conduct... Broken relics.

I had watched my countrymen die in ways that no human being should experience.

Being eviscerated by an artillery shell.

Burning alive from firebombs.

Bleeding British red from lead shot and drifting within frigid blue waters of the English Channel.

And I had watched the Great War kill the spirit of ones dear to me.

The one I had met all those years ago during Nicholas the Second's 1908 visit to Cowes also came to me alive, but not living. She had come to me as a shattered husk of her former, light-spirited self upon her transfer to England. She was the only one allowed to leave Russia. Her cornflower blue eyes no longer shone, but had dimmed. Her once rosy cheeks were pale, and often streaked with bleeding tears. It seemed like some cruel mockery of what should have been between us before.

But I never relented in helping my darling "Lady Mary", who once went by a different title. She once had a family. She once had it all.

The Russian Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna Romanova. She was my crush turned love. But I had long since accepted the agonizing reality. My dear Maria had been damaged from the Revolution, left numb and in the darkest of despair. Behind a thick shell perhaps rested a sad young lady, waiting to find the light again.

I would visit her every two weeks to bequeath her gifts or converse with her.

Someday, I hoped that she would open her heart again. To gain life through love. The greatest gift to mankind from Almighty God.

She had once loved and lost it all. I could not allow her to go. Not this time.

July 17, 1919

Osborne House, England, Great Britain

"We have arrived, milord," the chauffeur said.

"Very well, Mister Branson. I shall retrieve my things from the trunk."

I stepped out of the black 1910 Rolls Royce, seeing the Osborne House once again. In its outward appearance, the former royal residence resembled the Romanov Livadia Palace. I had never visited that particular palace, but I had seen it in photographs by the Russian royals before they had been liquidated by the Reds. For certain photographs with Maria within them, I had kept them. Countless nights spent looking at them, wondering if I would see her again.

The Osborne House stood majestic (yet homely) amongst the sunlit green English coastal forests. Pale yellowish sandstone and white marble blended together into an Italian Renaissance styled structure like the old estates of Italian nobles. Soaring arches, windowed walls, and a Florentine Tower rose above my head. Here, a great relative of ours, Queen Victoria, had found residence during many summers.