Chapter Text
You’re drowning.
You’re completely suspended underwater, like bricks are tied to your arms and legs with long strings that keep you afloat. The feeling of water in your lungs is usually considered an unpleasant feeling, but you’ve found comfort in how heavy it makes you feel. You don’t like breathing in nothing from day to day, it makes you feel like you’re not really living your days, but rather, letting time pass you by.
And the water…you love the water. You love how incessantly cold it is, how it sucks you beneath it, how you need to use all of your strength possible to pull up and out of it. You like how you don’t have to be sucked under, not if you took swimming lessons and had a will to live. It’s not like anyone is holding you under there. You have free will.
Now you do, at least.
You have free will emotionally. Physically, two hands have gripped your shoulders and yanked you out of the bath water, leaving you coughing and sputtering. Your eyes are still squeezed shut as the hands move from your shoulders to your face and the back of your hair.
“Your highness!” Karoline finally gripped your cheeks and shook you. So dramatic.
You sighed and slowly opened your eyes, glaring at your maid.
“I was trying to take a bath,” you said matter-of-factly.
“You were drowning yourself!”
Your eyes narrowed, “Don’t be so dramatic would you Karoline? You worry far too much.”
But you knew exactly why she worried about you. She had known you since before you were born. She was your mother maid before yours, and she was passed down to you like a piece of clothing. It felt offensive to you, honestly, to have someone care for you hand and foot. It was a shame that such a belief was a part of your label as the ‘overly political and rebellious princess of Austria.’ What a shame for the poor Emperor and Emperess to be raising a daughter who is so ungrateful of her privilege! How can she go out into the public and shame her family for their overinsesent need to engage in war!
You don’t know why your father wanted you to be so involved in the war. You spent a lot of time theorizing that he hoped it would shapen you up, make you realize that he was a good guy. The funny thing was, ever since that war, you felt even stronger about your political and social beliefs. And your dislike for your parents.
“I worry for you m’lady–”
“Please just call me by my name.”
“Your highness…”
You whipped your wet head toward her, but didn’t interrupt her. There was no point. She spent her life addressing powerful people and that wasn’t going to change.
Karoliine continued when she realized you were going to let her speak, “Ever since the war ended, you’ve retreated within yourself. Your parents worry for you.”
“Is that so? Did they tell them that themselves?”
“Yes, but–”
“You can tell them that if they were so worried about me, they wouldn’t have sent their only daughter off to be a spy in a war that they started. You can tell them that if they’re so worried, they would have tried to find me when I got caught–”
“We did try and find you.”
You glanced up at your mother, standing in your bathroom doorway. Your mother entered your space a lot more since the war despite your displeasure. You were a grown woman, 24 years old, and your mother, the Emperess of Austria, was trying to make sure you weren’t screwing up the family name too bad.
“I’ll excuse myself,” Karoline scurried out of the room as if she wasn’t more of a mother to you than your own. When it was just you and your mother, you groaned and slipped back into the water, keeping your head above water this time.
“It’s inappropriate to be entering your daughter's lavatory. I’m not a child.”
She ignored you, “Karoline tells me she’s caught you trying to hurt yourself.”
You scoffed, “And when has Karoline ever not been dramatic.”
You didn’t realie how close your mother had gotten. Her thin, skeletal hand, gripped the back of your neck and pulled you up right. There was no point in fighting her, really. You could use your words to tear her down, but physically, fighting the Emperess would land you in prison, even if said Emperess was your mother. She took a soft towel and wrapped it around you.
“You’re shivering.”
“Because I am cold.”
She looked you in the eyes for a moment and sighed before grabbing a second towel.
“Is that why you’ve been hurting yourself? Do you think we left you to be tortured?”
“Mother, does it look like I’ve been hurting myself?” you asked. Some of the wounds from your kidnapping were still there. You had some bruises that were starting to fade on your stomach and ribs and scars from where they drew blood to try and get you to talk. But those wounds were assessed once they found you. There were no new ones.
“You’ve been more…reckless. In your behavior,” she took your shoulders and brought you to your own bedroom and sat you on your bed.
“Are you going to dress me like a child?”
She ignored you again, entering your dressing room.
“Your father is very upset about your behavior.”
“I’m sure he is. That’s why he hasn’t spoken to me in weeks, right?”
Silence. Your mother didn’t know her way through your dressing room, because that was typically reserved for Karoline.
“I do not know why Karoline does not put you in this dress more often. It is lovely on you.”
She walked out holding the most atrocious dress you had ever seen in your life.
“Karoline has a sense of beauty. Mother.” You said, almost derogatory. She stared at you flat lipped, like you were just another stranger she saw on the street.
“Put this on. Your father wants to speak to you.”
You fuss at the sleeves as your mother steadies the bodice from behind. Today’s dress is simple enough for the household–soft muslin in a muted dove gray with a narrow waist and a skirt meant for walking the gardens rather than riding in carriages. It’s not a very appealing dress for you. The color makes you look deceased and it gives no framing. Your mother tugs the lacing just so, murmuring small instructions about posture and temper. She was always more of a teacher than a mother.
You can not stop thinking about your fathers words to you almost two years ago before everything changed
. “You are not the heir,” he had said, as if that fact excused sending you where your brother, Adonis could not go–he was implicitly placing your life somewhere beneath obligation and convenience. How are you supposed to go back like nothing happened? Like your father didn’t look you in the eye and say that your life was less valuable than your brothers because of the order in which you were born? You were expected to do your duty as a princess and be the perfect daughter, but you didn’t even feel like their daughter anymore. You were just some stranger floating around the castle grounds, with no opportunity to work, no opportunity for an education, and your love would be decided for you.
You stared into the mirror in front of you as you began to get dressed in your second identity. You didn’t feel like yourself in these clothes. You didn’t feel like yourself when your hair was piled up to the top of your head. You didn’t feel like yourself bedazzled in jewels at parties. The only time you truely felt like a real person was when you were stripped of all of that…like in the bath.
Karoline walked back in silently to do your hair, and your mother sat on a seat in the corner. The walking dress she chose for you was grey with black lacing. You hated how modest it made you look. If she was going to put you in a costume, she could have at least chosen one that made you look better.
“You should smile more often. No man will court you with a scowl.”
Karoline tugged hard on your hair and you winced with a slight yelp accompanying it.
“Sorry your highness…almost done.”
You closed your eyes, “One day I am going to lose all of my hair from it being pulled all of the time. What would you prefer, mother? Explaining a dead daughter to the public or explaining a princess without hair?”
Your mother gave a heartless laugh and dragged her thumbs over her bare nails. Despite it being a casual day with no large events occurring, she was always dressed up. You couldn’t imagine being the Queen. You could barely deal with the public moulding of yourself as a princess, and even then, people would always care more about what your mother did than what you did. She never spoke to you about if she liked her life, no. That would be taboo. But sometimes when you and her locked eyes, you saw a flash of pain. What kind of pain? You might never know. Maybe pain that she married into this family. Pain that she lost any freedom she may have had by marrying your mother. Pain that she’s breeding her daughter into a life that she hates.
You follow your mother through a corridor that smells of beeswax and smoked leather, the servants’ murmurs meaning nothing to you anymore. No one had any shame anymore. Not even your parents who neglected to silence the servants gossip. No one saw that you did what you were ordered to by your father and saved your country by not revealing any secrets. No one saw that you were a female spy and even more so, an imperial spy. They saw the aftermath. They saw a girl that failed her job and almost got herself killed.
Your legs move because they must, but your mind moves in a thicker, greasier kind of motion, like something trapped under oil. You pass under tapestries that depict hunts and treaties, images of whole huntsmen on whole horses who look impossibly uncomplicated compared to the mess you are. Your mother’s hand is at the small of your back, the way the court has taught her to handle scandal. She speaks in that clipped, rehearsed voice emperesses learn for diplomacy. “Do not snap at your father the way you snap at me,” “He will be less forgiving of this barbaric behavior,” “If you don’t get your act together your father will not forgive you.”
It is easier for her to make you perform grief than to admit she failed to know the shape of your nights.
You don’t pay much attention to any of the servants or guards who bustle around you. Except for him.
He is stationed just outside one of the side doors, a shadow folded into the architecture as if the palace had been built to hold him. Marcus stands with the discipline of a man who has spent years shaping his body into obedience, with shoulders like an anvil, spine a column, boots planted as if the floor were his anchor. His uniform matched all of the other guards in the castle–he should have blended in with the rest of them. But the red jacket was so fiery and loud next to his dark brown, doe like eyes that you often caught watching you as you walked down the corridors. The dark gold tassels were a similar color to his own hair, which had bits of silver in it now. Silver and Gold. Two opposites. Perhaps that is why he stands out so much. He’s the opposite of the rest of the guards. But that does not make him worse, persay. You don’t know much about him beyond that he was the Chief General of the Austrian army for many years before being nearly fatally injured. Despite the castle having it’s own channels for news, you enjoyed getting the newspaper to hear about what was going on amongst the rest of the Austrian people. It was then how you learned about Marcus’s injury.
He is not at parade rest, but there is an attention about him that feels like a held breath. He does not step forward or bow. He simply watches with a face that is almost always in reserve.
Marcus Acacius, the king’s chosen. The court spoke of his loyalty the way they spoke of taxes: necessary and unavoidable. You do not know why your father invited him to his imperial guard after he recovered from his injuries. In fact, you don’t know much of why your father does anything. But the mystery that surrounded Marcus made each day more worth living, to try and come up with different stories in your brain about where he came from, his family, his injury, his time in the war.
He is younger than you expected and older than you admitted. Many of his wounds are not public in his clothing, but he has a scar that runs like a punctuation mark from the edge of his brow to the center of his cheek. Something about that scar makes your breath rewire itself. You have a very similarly placed one from your own torture during the war. How similar can two very different people be? A rugged, older, former military general and a younger princess both sharing a physical wound…you wondered if he noticed your scar. You wondered if he thought about what happened to you in captivity.
You find your eyes traversing him up and down. It is a physical cataloging as detailed and ordinary as counting the buttons on a coat: the line of his jaw, the slope of his throat where you imagine a pulse, the way his coat falls at his hips, the hint of a shoulder muscle when he shifts his weight. You imagine what those muscles look like under the coat. You chastise yourself for the warmth that blooms low in your stomach. You are a princess; you have been trained to look nothing like the kinds of want that tighten your ribs.
Marcus’s eyes find you once, twice, and there is no smile there, only an observation that is serious and almost tender, as if he is taking inventory of what is present and what is broken. He offers no words. He never has in the several years that he’s worked in the castle. Not a greeting, not a courtesy, not even the indifferent murmurs guards afford royalty. Sometimes you catch him watching you from the periphery of court–you have catalogued his absences the way you catalogue the scars you hide in your skirts with a private, persistent interest.
Why doesn’t he speak? You find yoursewlf asking that every time you walk by him. Is he ignorant of court niceties? Too proud? Bound by oaths that forbid fraternizing? Or is he simply a man who keeps the mechanizations of his mouth in reserve for pain and commands, the way a smith reserves his best hammer for the iron that will not yield? You imagine the latter– a man composed of restraint, carved not by upbringing but by necessity.
Your mother’s voice washes over you and you have to pull yourself from the private study of his profile.
“Your father would like to speak to you about your…” she paused and looked you up and down, “Your condition.”
You moistened your lips and couldn’t help but smile at the stupidity.
“Condition…right. You say it like I have a touch of consumption.”
She smacked your arm as hard as a frail woman like herself could.
“Perhaps you do. Maybe it will clear your brain of it’s delusions.”
You keep your head high and let her guide you into the council chamber where the emperor awaits, the arrangement already tidy in his mind the way a general shapes a battle.
It’s been expected of you since before you could remember to call your father ‘King.’ Even ‘sir’ would suffice. Your mother let you get away with calling her ‘mother’ but you understood her more than your father. You knew a handful of things about him, because it wasn’t classy for an Emperor to overshare with his daughter, especially if his daughter would not be taking over the crown when he died. Your brother probably knew more about him than you did. You knew three things.
- His name is Damian Franz Joseph III after his grandfather and great grandfather.
- He is not widely liked by his people, but he’s respected for his work and policies.
- He does not love you.
The Emperor receives you in a room paneled in dark walnut, the map of the empire spread on the table like a story told in borders. His face is a ledger of fatigue and obligation, like you are merely in his way.
He made a ‘tsk’ sound and put out his cigarette. He looked you up and down like he hadn’t seen you in a long time.
“Whatever are we going to do with you?”
You knew better than to be snippy with your father the way you were with your mother. He walked closer to you and continued to look you up and down as you stood upright, hands in front of you.
He grabbed your chin tightly between his meat-like hands and forced your gaze up to him. That was why you didn’t talk back. He preferred to get physical unlike your mother. You winced in the pain of his grip and met his eyes.
“This was a question. I expect an answer.”
“I do not not know sir.”
He stared daggers into your soul before dropping your face.
“It is a shame I have to even resort to this. You could have behaved like every other princess from every other country, but no. I seem to have been cursed with the most difficult child on the planet. I often wonder what demon I made mad in a past life to have to deal with a child like you now.”
He circled back to his map of the empire and braced himself on the table.
“You will be watched,” he says plainly, the sentence clipped like a command. “No more unsupervised excursions. No unaccounted visitors. The captain has selected a man to remain near you at all times. This is for the crown’s security and for your own.”
You taste amusement and fury and the small resignation that you have no control over this. You look toward the doorway expecting to see the steward re-enter with formalities, and instead the doors swing open and Marcus steps in–not as a herald but simply into the room. He carries no fanfare. He’s going to be watching you?
Your jaw dropped right as the Emperor began to speak.
“Marcus has agreed to watch over you until you can prove yourself ready to carry out your imperial duties. He will not leave your side until I tell him to leave. And he will report every…single..thing….back to me,” he paused, “you are excused.”
You storm down the corridor with fists clenched in your skirts, the gray muslin of the fabric hissing over polished floors. You hate everything about your home– the smell of beeswax, the chill in the stone, the tapestries that show lives so whole and uncomplicated. Everything in this palace is a mockery to the people that have died at the hands of your family. Behind you, Marcus’s steps follow. Of course they do. He’ll do anything your father says to do. It’s pathetic. It’s…it’s sad.
You spin halfway toward him once you reach your bed chambers, your voice pitched too sharp, too loud, but you cannot stop it.
“He caused this!” you choke out. “Do you know what it is to wake and feel hands that aren’t there? To bleed in dreams and wake with your nails in your own skin? He gave me this. He sent me where my brother would not go because I was worth less. Because I was not the heir. Because my life is currency to be spent and forgotten.”
Marcus says nothing. His silence is like a blade, and you cannot stand it. You close the distance, jabbing your finger at his chest. “And now he sets you upon me. Like a dog at my heels. Like I cannot be trusted to walk from my bed to my chamber without collapsing. What are you going to do, Acacius? Follow me about like a shadow and never say a word?”
You shove him. The heel of your hand meets the solid wall of his chest, and he does not move. You shove again, harder, but his boots are anchored to the marble as if the earth itself holds him upright. He’s so big, like a stone wall. “Say something!” you snarl, shoving and shoving until your palms sting. “Do you not see what he has done to me? Do you not see there is nothing left?!”
His face stays maddeningly unreadable. It infuriates you. Your arms tremble from the force of it, from the futility, and the sob bursts out before you can swallow it. You stagger back until your knees hit the bed, and you collapse, the skirts wrapping around you like chains.
You bow your head into your hands, and the tears come, “I should have died there,” you whisper into the cracks between sobs. “It would have been better if I had died. Everyone thinks it anyway. That I came back wrong. That I am a failure of a daughter, of a princess. He was right…I am cursed.”
You hear him breathe, low and steady, the way soldiers breathe when the battlefield goes quiet. You know he’s still standing there, watching you with those dark, fathomless eyes. It makes your skin burn. His silence is not indifference. It is something else, something heavier, something that makes your stomach twist.
You drag your hands down your face, eyes red , and find him still rooted there, his profile outlined by the lamplight. You want to strike him again just to make him react to you, to make him feel you. You want him to grab your wrists, to pin you down, to prove he is alive.
“You stand there like stone,” you whisper, your voice shaking. “But you are watching me. I know you are. Why do you look at me like that? As if I am something worth keeping alive?”
You half rise, half stumble toward him, close enough that you can see the faint line of the scar on his cheek, the flecks of silver in his hair. You want to reach out and trace the line of the scar to see if it is the same texture as yours.
He does not move. He does not touch you. You collapse back onto the bed curling in on yourself, shivering in the dress that feels like a cage on your body. And Marcus stands over you, unmoving, as though he can keep you alive by watching you, as though his heart is breaking in the quiet, as though if he dared to reach for you, he would not stop.