ᴡᴍᴍᴀᴘ: ᴏɴᴇꜱʜᴏᴛꜱ

Farewells.

TW//suicide, please don't read if uncomfortable!

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Athanasia de Alger Obelia is a quiet baby.

Lilian, Hannah and Ces are all concerned, the other maids as well as they fuss over the princess. They don't know that their charge is gripped with the complicated emotions that threatened to consume her alive as she lay there with her gem eyes and yet, her heart beat again. 

And again. 

And again. 

But it shouldn't be. 

Why did she have to go through this pain again? Athanasia turns her head, leaning against the soft blankets and sleeps. Perhaps it will take her quickly, perhaps she'll pass on with the chill.

Yet, she grows up, never a fussy baby, nor a fussy child. Only asking for the barest necessities even as the palace maids object to her saying so, procuring her the best of things, asking her if she likes chocolate or golden toys, but Athanasia never smiles. 

One day, with the sun shining, she's encouraged to take a walk as they clean the palace from top to bottom, and she's dazed as she stands near the same bushes as she did before. 

As she touches the stems with prickly green leaves, the sound of the lake lapping at the ground behind her, she remembers how she first came across her father that time. 

Darkness presses down upon her heart as she crushes a leaf between her small fingers. 

He'll never love you. He will only love Jennette. He doesn't care about you, or your wellbeing. You're nothing to him. 

You're worthless. Useless. You'll die again in a few years, what is the point?

Turning around, the thoughts still not leaving her, as her eyes land upon white robes with golden embroidery, and she feels a sinking pit in her stomach as she trails her gaze up to see her father before her. 

But she was not nine this time, not yet, and Claude knows the child in front of him is Diana's. His daughter.

Her Obelian eyes gaze into his own as he tilts his head, looking at the small child before him with the eyes that were the same as his, yet indifferent.

They were a dull gem blue, as if all life had been sucked out of her gaze, shadows under her eyes, and he can feel a slight chill on his spine even with the sun at his back. 

Why did his child, so young, have such a gaze as if she had gone through the entirety of life already? 

They're peculiar, and he's somehow reminded of himself in his younger years, and he beckons Felix over, his gaze still on the child as he tells him to take her back to the palace. 

Felix carries her in his arms, but Claude watches as the two leave, standing there in the garden as the gaze of the child doesn't leave his mind. They seemed haunted somehow, and oddly enough, it disturbed him a bit.

When Felix reaches the Ruby Palace, Lilian and the others are frantic, searching for her, and when they spot her in the arms of his majesty's personal guard, Duke Felix, their expressions harden. 

Lilian curtsies, the others following as she carefully takes Athanasia back into her arms, and with a tone as cold as the ice upon the lake, she thanks him as she closes the doors in his surprised face. 

Yet again, they're surprised at the way Felix returns the next day. "His majesty has requested her highness to join him for tea." 

Athanasia thinks this isn't how it went before, her heart giving a little thump, and then she shoves that foreign emotion back down again, that hope that had long been gone.