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saint-siren · 6 months

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A World For Her Alone | Ptolemaea

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

cw (chapter specific): pregnancy, childbirth, dubcon, death, the aftermath of severe abuse, slavery, derealization (?), the general ennui of noble marriage

pairing: claude x fem!reader

summary: Men! Don't they always think of "the one that got away"?

author's note: Girlfail Barbie and Catholic guilt ken or whatever the kids are saying idk.

When he returned to life again, he was haunted by a fervor to change things. He was a desperate animal caught in a trap, biting his own limb in a bid to escape. He’d languished too long in the inevitable misery that befell him again and again and again. This time, he told himself again, it would be different. He considered readying a horse to come and warn you about this thing that had overtaken him but there were obvious flaws in the plan such as; what if he saw Diana and was besotted again before he had the chance to tell you everything? Even if he succeeded what was he to say to you? What would you be able to do that you had not already attempted? How could you break this hold? What would your knowledge of his predicament mean against something that felt so primordial, something that compelled him to kill you?

What measure could be taken to change this? The last few minutes before he would have to bring himself to truly live this life, he spent at his desk, resigned to writing a missive.

For some reason, this life’s distinctions were more prominent. Firstly, it felt like reality was itself melting, sliding off its center to be remolded around him in the blink of an eye like candle wax. There were times where he forgot that his body wasn’t his own, that he identified with that darkness that puppeteered his body with grotesque ease. Things in that life had an unreal quality to them as if a fever dream he’d soon wake from. The horror of this life was softer, it was brighter, sweeter. He no longer begged for mercy, he only phased into the void that had become him deeper and deeper until he could no longer claim the pain he experienced as his own. He fell in love with Diana again, everything was wrong but he gave himself to the faltering, glitching reality that provided his distraction.

Had he only imagined it or had you become close with your sister in this life? It was unthinkable to him that you would, remembering all the pain she had caused you, still seem to love and look after her. It was a gesture that horrified him, the depths of your magnanimity, your forgiveness were hard for him to handle. Where was the rage you were due? Where was the lady he’d known before? Where had that livid and mournful glint in your eyes, like the silver pommel of the kitchen knife he’d nearly stabbed you with, that had appeared the life after your daughter had been born? Its sudden disappearance was an omen, he was convinced. Now, your eyes were soft as a saint’s, it was a sweet look of righteous suffering. Yours was the look of a martyr.

He was too late to save you, that look told him as much. You were a woman going to into the flame, worn and deprived of her fight; of the vicious urge for retribution. You were the dregs of a woman, bent to the shape of the realities you’d inhabited. Bent partial to Diana. This peace between sisters had come at a cost he would only live to know in your next life.

You tutored Diana, persistently, pushing her to learn more always. You two spent a great deal at each other’s sides and Claude was aware that even though in previous lives, you’d suffered criticism for not being close enough with your sister; now you were seen as an overbearing older sister pushing her poor, helpless little sister to always do more. He could not really grasp at reality strong enough to muster more outrage at the world which now seemed to be a mindless chorus, for their hypocrisy. Curiously, though, his greater self was pleased at your conduct and ignored the slanderous chatter. The darkness was sated by your concern for your sister and it thanked you by not making efforts to exclude you, he was still flirting with Diana quite openly, to be sure, but it was much less careless. It felt more as if the two of them were not hiding, not rebelliously defying, but expressing themselves easily before you, knowing that your bite had gone soft, your eyes like that of the rest of their world; understanding how important Diana was.

As the date of your wedding approached, something bad was going to happen. He felt it or perhaps he heard it whispered in the static of a reality which was falling down on top of him all the time. It sat in the pit of his stomach, an anxious ache that never soothed, a wound he could feel festering even when the rush of love for Diana flooded his careworn mind.

Days before your wedding, he was informed that you’d run away. A strange sort of grief did come over him by way of his false heart, his greater self almost seemed to mourn you. To him, and the distinction between his two selves in that moment had never been clearer, it felt as though you’d betrayed him. You’d made him care for you, if only in the slightest and most shallow way possible and then you vanished. You promised to marry him, to make a good wife to him, marchioness to his people and mother to his children. You smiled in his face each time you met and spoke to him with clear affection but you abandoned the future the two of you had painstakingly prepared with years of effort. Like he was nothing. Like the unspoken understanding, the ease that had been built was nothing at all. It disoriented this vast, arrogant creature, it felt to this monstrous part of him like trickery, like deprivation.

His true self knew that this was not the bad thing he’d anticipated. If it were, the seed of anxiety planted in his mind would have finally given way to the deeper misery he knew was to follow and set him free of his fearful, agonizing waiting. But he was still wound tightly, still waiting for the other shoe to drop. You running away from him was not the bad thing; what fate would make you pay for it, was. He had seen this part before, he knew it ended in blood. So he hoped, at least, you got to run quite far before it did. Before reality closed around its status quo again.

Out of obligation and the longtime investment made from his family to yours, he needed to marry a lady of your house. Since you were gone, it fell to Diana to fulfill this duty. This life, Diana had been educated suitably enough to be a marchioness, for theirs not to be an ill-fated marriage for the territory. Claude realized that this must have been by design, it was your insistent effort that led to her being educated so efficiently. He’d heard talk of you seeming to bully her with how much you pushed her to learn. This was your design. You had always planned to run and leave the two of them to what the fates clearly wanted to happen. Although it was an ache in his chest that you were gone, the more pressing feeling was a forlorn emptiness at the fact that he knew how it would end and he could do nothing to stop it.

On the day he married Diana, it was bright and cloudless, surely indicative of the sort of marriage he was to have with her. Her cheeks were flushed with the enduring surprise of being able to marry him but also with surpassing happiness. But did he only hallucinate a crow flying swiftly across the pale morning sky, casting a shadow on them briefly? He could not know. He retained little of his wedding to Diana. After all, it was a frightening thing, this end. This thing he’d been fighting for so long had caught up to him, it had won, or it would in time. It felt like he was further trapped in a labyrinth where before he could at least the see the sky above, now he was completely hidden in the belly of the beast with no end in sight. Everything was Diana. Everything always would be.

The defiling of his will and dignity would be ritual, it would dutiful and nightly. It would loving and soft. It would give him the very precious heirs his people counted on him to provide. It would make a mother of Diana, something she had so desperately wanted as he recalled. In time, he was sure to soften to the ordeal, his despair would only be monotonous, dull, unable to rip open any wounds due to the scar tissue of all his lives prior. This was marriage, he kept telling himself. This was marriage.

Even so, a peculiar thing did happen: Claude had a group of his knights search for you for as long as fiscally reasonable. For two years, he had his knights span out following possible traces of your existence. It was not his own will, his own words that left his mouth but it was so different from everything this thing that puppeteered him had done before. It had showed you sparse concern even when it was in regards to his heir, the thing that should have come before anything. But now, he found that he demanded his knights search for your whereabouts with ease long after your family gave up the pretense. He did so not out of a fervent desire for revenge, the fury of one who had been robbed of something, it was done out of a sort of grief. A sort of desperation to hold to a woman who disappeared into thin air, to reach through the distance and claim the answers you denied.

Claude’s marriage to Diana in the meantime, was not as he imagined the fates would have it be. Of course there was love and affection, of course there was even a constructed desire within him and of course he suffered it inwardly. But there was something that haunted both of them too, a ghost slipped between them always. A ghost who functioned like a scary story for children, whose name being spoken accidentally was just enough to breathe life back into her, just enough to allow her to haunt them. At first, Diana told him that perhaps you had someone you ran away to be with and even his body in the cold hands of his greater self, rejected the notion. He wondered what could ever have given her such an idea, that a woman so meek and truly devoted would have been having an affair. Even that time you left with your knight he didn’t truly believe there was anything between you, it was a desperate measure to escape just like this time. He almost seemed to recoil from her when she spoke of it, it was nothing more than a subtle shift in the air, in his expression but for the first time, Diana seemed to have noticed it even if she did not acknowledge it with words. The message was clear from his expression, the change in tone and the sudden tepidness between them; your escape was to be a sore subject.

It changed the dynamic between them a bit but being married had also done that well enough. Diana was a marchioness who had a certain countenance to keep up, work to do and places to go. She was no longer the vulnerable, tender, helplessly ill girl who begged him to be her reason for continuing on. She now had purpose of her own. None of this displeased his greater self too severely but it did change things between them. No longer were they truly knight and princess. They lived in the real world now as Marquis and Marchioness. It was not like it was with you but it was…changed. A sense of duty settled within her, he got the feeling. She walked with her head higher, her emotions that were once vibrant and expressive on her face were dimmed to a polite mask of a half smile. It was bizarre to see her so grown up.

The ritual degrading practice of lovingly bedding the wife who shouldn’t have been his, seemed to have an odd effect on him this time around. Where before he was able to separate himself, he felt this time he fell deeper into the reality of his situation the longer he was married to Diana. Each time he lay back onto the bed, skin tacky with both their sweat, he was able to physically feel the horror that came with the long line of years that would stretch out between them. Each time he returned to reality enough to feel the result of having just been inside her, he was hit with dread as if time could never dull it. Where before he could only consider the implications of the freshly committed betrayal of you and of his own mind, now he could see a greater picture being painted. This was to be his life from then on, laying back onto his side of the bed with a relieved sigh and cuddling her close speaking of children to be born. While inside, he ceaselessly clawed at the walls, a mad prisoner no longer considering freedom an option, desiring death.

And in those moments, he also thought of you. He thought of where you’d gone. A long time had passed and a long time would pass before you’d see him again. He wondered whether you were living happily somewhere, could it be? Could it really not be that you were somewhere happily living even if just until the blade swinging deftly above your head finally fell? He was the most desperate of men and he imagined it as if a fairytale, a lullaby to take him into a fitful sleep before he would wake and live a life circling around the very tarnishment of both your souls.

At some point he had slipped somewhere. His manner with Diana, although loving to be sure, was whetted to a slight sharpness. It was a strange nuance that he had only realized after years of marriage passed by with him gone inward to your memory. A chill had come to the marquisate that no fire would warm. It started in a small way, in your name slipping out every so often when he spoke of Diana whilst she was not in his presence. It was forgivable, no one spoke ill. But…it progressed to thoughts of you that were shared with his greater mind. A peculiar thing that shook him free of the derealization that came with this sort of monotony in misery. He realized that his thoughts came in one stream, instead of parallel and distinctive. He realized that above his own heart aching, the one that beat for Diana stung for…for something he had once and now could have no more.

Diana seemed to know. Your ghost was no longer benign, you were an active member of the household. Everyday, at some point as he and Diana spoke, he got the sense that she wanted to broach a topic but couldn’t, out of some fear that even speaking of it would harden it to truth. Some insecurity she desperately wanted him to soothe was instead locked away, tamed in fear that it could only be confirmed. It was as if mentioning you at all was a taboo. Claude parsed the difference between this Diana and the ones who came before when he was about the enter the library but heard voices.

“Madame, is it really okay to leave things like this?,” sounded the voice of one of Diana’s servants. The woman had a habit of forming such inappropriate bonds, the two became friends when Diana entered the marquisate as its new mistress. She would have known such a friendship would be unseemly but even so, it was hard for a woman such as Diana to live as a marchioness, beneath a mask as all noblewomen did, without someone she needn’t bother using it with. Claude had not been able to deny her that much.

Claude had paused in the hall when he heard the voice of Diana. He knew why he’d done so, for once, his minds were in tentative agreement. He had come there to think, to be alone with your memory. That day was the anniversary of your disappearance and he wanted to ask the definitive question again and again, until he could put it to rest for the next time. Diana could not be there for his mourning, he did not want her there, more than that. His still heart did love Diana very much, such had not changed, but this time, you were not so easily forgotten. A stain on his heart that should not be there…he knew his wife would see it in his demeanor, his brooding expression and no matter how many times she’d tried to ignore the poignance of the date, it always revealed itself to be stark and imposing.

Diana replied to the servant in a rather genuine tone, “He is a wonderful husband. He has done nothing worthy of reproach.”

Something kept him listening, he could not parse what because his greater self was too busy considering the words that had been, were being and would be spoken between the two women.

“It is…unseemly, for a married man to cling so much to a memory.” The maid sounded as if she wanted to use a word more derogatory than just “unseemly,”

“It cannot be helped,” Diana sighed. “She was his fiancee for much of his life, of course he is still devastated, compared to how long they’ve known each other, the wound is still fresh.”

“Even so, he has you, Madame. Why does he sulk and think of a woman who left him, ran out on him days before their wedding when he has a woman who has loved him faithfully?”

“Don’t ever speak that way, Maude. She is my sister, she is not some random noble you can insult carelessly,” Diana said, with as much sharpness as her voice could carry. “In any case…it is not so simple.”

“Forgive me for speaking out of turn but I fail to understand why it is not simple.”

“It cannot be simple. He is grieving. He and I wed so soon after, before he was able to gather his bearings, even. He may love me more than he ever loved my sister but it is still a loss of something I cannot replace. Who I am as his wife is entwined with that grief as a matter of course, it is simply the star our marriage fell under.”

“Have you ever considered confronting the lord, Madame? Forgive me again for saying so, but I just…after what you found, I don’t believe this is as it seems.”

He could hear the weak smile in Diana’s voice, the suddenly infused lightheartedness. “Oh, I could never do that. Then he’d known I was poking my nose where I shouldn’t have been and even so, I still don’t completely understand what it could mean. Whether a confession or something else, I don’t understand what his intentions were. I…I’m comfortable with never understanding if it means I never have the chance of finding a more unsettling thought beneath.”

“Madame…,” The maid’s voice sounded helpless and full of pity which struck an odd chord within him. A hatefulness unearned, small and weak to be sure but definitely present. At the same time, his heart sunk. He knew all at once exactly what she’d found, what gave her this wariness aside from his small actions. A fractured piece of reality appeared again as if it had never been missing, with the seamlessness of a dream. The letter…it seemed worlds away, it genuinely shocked him to hear what he thought was a reference to it. It hit him as if he’d heard her casually mention she’d been killed a few times over. And there was that pinprick of anger toward her for even knowing about such a thing, from both parts of him for different reasons. For telling her maid and garnering pity that should by rights go to the lost sister whose family had not even looked for her for longer than a month. In his greater self’s mind, for tainting the relief he was capable of feeling when he looked to her even more than it already had been with this. He could not even remember what he’d said but he knew it was something she should not know, it felt so viscerally wrong for her to have read words meant for your eyes. And undoubtedly, though he knew not what words he wrote, he cursed his love her in some manner.

But he took a deep breath and walked away before she could find him eavesdropping and bring it up to him. Something had….changed, he felt. Irreparably so. There was a certain synchrony between his two selves in a way there had never been before and something between he and Diana had shifted because of it. More noticeably this time, there was distance.

Diana found that she was pregnant with their first child soon after and there was as much apprehension in him as there was joy. Reality glitched all the time for him during the pregnancy, memories of you, of her, of previous lives intruded on his senses. Something about her being with child frightened him. His vision was often intercut with visions of the past, of your body, slowly seeping blood and still warm while the wails of your daughter fell on deaf ears. He heard Diana’s anguished crying, giving birth to a son who wasn’t certain to live. This foreboding and regret did not extend to his greater self who found other reasons to feel a note of fear at the thought of having a child with Diana. There was a desperation in that part of him, to make things right again, to make them what they’d been before when they were only illicit, courtly lovers. And even still, he knew it would not be. He could pray as much as he liked, he knew that for however loved and wanting this child would be, he would still be reminded of a future he’d lost with you.

Why was he still so concerned about you when you were not the woman he loved? He could not shut the door on your memory not matter how much he wanted to. Was it as Diana said? Was it because he’d known you so longer? He couldn’t think so. It was not like him to be sentimental because of time. Perhaps, he thought, it could be because of how you behaved in the year before you ran away. You treated Diana with a special kindness, you turned a blind eye to the obvious love between them and you ran away just short of your own wedding knowing that she’d…she’d had to marry him in your stead…You had done it on purpose. You had primed her to wed him, you knew what they had and you made it possible by abandoning your whole life. That revelation filled him with some unknown mixture of feelings that he could not stand. It was always to be a thorn in his heart, he would always remember who he owed this life to. And how could he be happy with that as he should be? How could he be happy not knowing why you allowed it to be and where you had gone now? How could you grant such an act of selflessness and disappear? You clearly didn’t want to be found. Why?

The more he thought of you, the more ennui he felt with his life with Diana. Their marriage was haunted by the shadow of your sacrifice. The day his child was born, a daughter, it was a night just like the one where your parents informed him you’d run away. Again his apprehension surpassed his joy when Diana went into labor, he’d paced anxiously outside in the hall listening to her sounds of pain while he looked out the window at the moon which hung in the sky like a being in its own right, watching him apathetically. He tried to get your memory out of his system before his daughter came into the world. He just…he just wished for that moment to be theirs alone. When their daughter was born, healthy and crying loudly from the terrible newness of the world, Diana held her to her chest, crying soft tears of her own at the newness of motherhood. Although his happiness was great, it was edged in something that could not be ignored, something which he felt tainted the moment in some way. He thought again on the night you disappeared and again asked himself where you could be, what you could be doing, did you have children of your own now? Somehow, he hoped you did. It would hurt him badly to know you had children with another man, love or no love between he and you, but he still wanted you to have that much. But that wasn’t the thought that truly cemented the fact that he and Diana would never have a moment that belonged to them again. It was actually the fact that when he first set eyes on his daughter, he looked for your face in hers.

He was glad Diana had been looking down at their daughter at that moment, perhaps if she’d looked up just then, she’d have caught a glimpse of that yearning in his eyes. He cried and thanked her for giving him a child, making him a father and it was genuine gratitude but the tears, the tears were for what was lost and what was left of you which endured. And inside, he dwelled in anguish because what remained of his true self was further broken, disillusioned by the fact that this child that he so pitifully wanted to avoid, had been born. She would live, her name written in his family registry, raised with careful hands and more love than most. She would live well and your child, he one who knew she’d lost you and had the only sensible reaction to it, her name was yet unknown.

As the years passed, Claude and Diana settled into life as parents. He realized that what Diana expected of him as a father simply didn’t come naturally, he was not an overtly affectionate person in general for anyone but Diana. This did not compute to her, and of course it didn’t, with her having your parents excessive favor and then with the underlying hair thin cracks in their marriage. She required his gestures to be grander, she required more assurance of his love. So, he got more comfortable with it for her sake, he made his affection more theatrical for her, though it felt more like wearing a different mask more than it felt like actually changing who he was. He didn’t exactly know how to be a father, his own wasn’t much of an example, he felt awkward and clumsy with it on his own but he knew how to emulate with the best of them. As was necessary for life as an aristocrat. This had the inadvertent effect of raising his daughter feeling less personal, less of a bond. It felt more like everything else in his life as a nobleman did, false and procedural. And there was the fact that both his selves were reminded of you when they looked at her, inevitably, even if only for a split second each time. One side reminded of what once was and one side reminded of what could have been.

Luckily, the child was much like her mother and did not comprehend the difference. She was young yet, and still he feared she would not go to him, that she’d cry and fuss in his arms, rejecting him instinctively. Sometimes, Claude felt worried that one day when she was older, she’d look to him for comfort, so he would put forth his best image but she’d see something in him that would tell her how false he was. But it never happened, the child slept easy in his arms and though Diana pouted a bit, she was amused her daughter was a daddy’s girl just as she was. Everything was alright, especially compared to some very frigid noble marriages he’d hear gossip about before. It seemed that the two of them had reached a mutual, unspoken agreement. They’d never talk about what they lacked, they’d take consolation in what they had managed to keep even if it wasn’t what it used to be.

They went on like that. The time passed quickly, reality seemed to melt, not with hard glitches but the lines blurred together. It got to the point where he felt that the date of your disappearance was not years past but minutes ago. He felt as though he were in the night trailing after you, shouting your name just as much as he felt like an ordinary father with the wife he coveted for so long. His body vibrated with a dull hum and at night when he laid beside Diana to sleep, lights flashed beneath his eyelids as if a candle were lit before him. He would come home and hold his daughter in his arms and still feel as though his breath would come out in a puff from the cold, feel as though something had only just been taken. Every so often the child he held felt foreign to him. He could not even recognize which side of him the feeling belonged to, he was not sure it mattered now. Perhaps this was the real end. Maybe you’d gotten away happily and it was his punishment this time to never feel what he should even when he had what he wanted. He could accept that much, he thought with more peace than he deserved in the delusion.

Of course it was when he accepted the idea of living without you that he came back. A messenger was sent, hesitant to relay the information that Felix and a few of his comrades had been tracking your whereabouts independently from the orders of your parents. You’d been found, barely alive, trapped in an establishment of very ill repute, worked as a slave.

This news was enough to devastate and selfishly relieve him. You were alive. You had been worked nearly to death. You were supposed to have lived well enough, perhaps a simple, rustic life as a merchant’s wife with children born of love always at your skirts. “Will she live?” His voice broke.

The messenger shook his head. “We don’t know, my lord. We only know that the count and countess are receiving her soon.”

Claude almost didn’t bother telling Diana, rushing to find a servant to have a horse prepared so that he could ride there and see you for himself. Until he was met with Diana who entered the room, seeing her family’s sigil on the sleeve of the messenger and he had to tell her. Yes, that was right…It was Diana who’d lost more than he had when you left. Of course it was necessary to tell her first. Somehow, it disappointed him to not be able to see you alone. To know that inevitably, Diana would want to see you and she’d bring along their daughter whom she couldn’t be without. All manner of frenzied feelings were passing through his greater self but prominently, there was a distinct, selfish desire to see you again. A thought that perhaps it would fix everything that has been wrong with him since you ran away. And concurrently ran the sharp anguish of his inner self which had awakened from its comfortable misery. Again in this life, you had suffered for his sake. He could not seem to stop stealing your life again and again and again. What had been done to you? What had you suffered while he raised a child that wasn’t yours? Deprived of your status and kept as a slave; oh, the image his mind had painted from what he knew of such things from his knighthood was a grotesque one. You, who had already been stripped of everything several times over, deprived even of the safety in your noble status. The only thing that made being born to such a family as yours, tied to such a fate as his more bearable, that you’d not be subject to all the cruelties of the world, only the ones he could inflict.

Diana’s eyes grew large and clouded over as he told her what news had arrived. He stiffened at this, hypocritically suspicious of her concern. He felt a pinprick of annoyance at her, remembering now, the time she’d suggested you’d have been the type to run away with a lover. He felt the briefest urge to shame her, he hoped for a second that she’d remember it too as he had and be ashamed. It faded quickly and it stung but he couldn’t be bothered to scold himself for it. The more important issue at hand was your life. Diana spluttered, “My sister has been found? Where is she now?” She, perhaps not the most dutiful sister, did show at least this much love for you. In her eyes, he could see the resolve to see you again despite a slight troubled look in them. She was ready to go wherever you had. Claude’s careworn, lovesick heart softened some and instead of answering her, he simply called out to a passing servant to ready the carriage, for they were going to the manor of his in-laws right away.

Diana woke up their daughter from her nap and the three of them made their way your parents’ manor where they awaited your return after so many years. Your parents tried to take pains to greet him formally, to reach for their grandchild but he waved them off rudely. “Where is she?”

Your mother flinched, pulling away, embarrassed to have been snubbed so brashly by him. “She’s being brought here by the knights, they’ve not yet arrived but they should return shortly.”

Diana’s brow furrowed at her mother’s disposition. Something about the situation had apparently unsettled her but she said nothing in regards to it. Claude had the urge to tell her, “Look closely at the woman you know to be your mother, does she look worried at all about your sister? Look at your father, too. Does he seem as you imagine we would if we located the dying body of our daughter after she’d been missing nearly a decade?” He wanted her to see them as they were even if it were too late for it to matter. He wanted her to see who favored her, what sort of people loved her, a wretched murderer, a philanderer, a careless woman. He wanted her to wonder what it said about her that she’d be loved by them.

You arrived shortly as your parents probably prayed so that they’d not have to deal with more questions and the suspicious look in their only true daughter’s eyes, the disillusionment. Felix brought you up your old bedroom, he’d gone up to have the servants ready it for your arrival, overseeing their work anxiously to make sure it was made comfortable enough for a woman of an unknown level of severe illness and injury. Diana had wanted to follow him up to help but he’d, gently as he was capable of in such a situation, had her wait downstairs under some thin guise in relation to their daughter. He’d not wanted to be around them then, as the time grew nearer to seeing you again.

When Felix brought you upstairs, he stood at attention from the corner where he sat anxiously looking about your room. You had large bruises up and down your body, you were filthy with blood caked under your nails and on the side of your head clinging to brittle hair, you were bandaged here and there in haste. He made a small sound of anguish and surprise, for it was one thing to be told you were near death, another thing to see it, smell it, feel it radiate off of your body. You were decaying even as you drew breath. Felix’s gaze lifted to Claude unabashedly hateful for a moment as he realized he was in the room but quickly flickered back down to you. Claude pulled back the covers on the bed for Felix to set you down and called for the doctor in a voice that betrayed a stifled sob.

The doctor did as he could for you under the somber watch of Claude but even so, you remained unconscious. He didn’t leave your side, praying for you to open your eyes at least, even if just briefly. Even if just to damn him. Even if you were doomed as the doctor seemed to believe. He’d said you were almost certain to die, that it was a matter of making you comfortable, an offense which had gotten him a verbal lashing from Claude even though he knew it was most likely the truth. Diana hesitated to bring their daughter up the room, knowing your body’s fragile condition and the very apparent air of death that surrounded had already frightened her, she came to see you later when she put their daughter down.

She loomed over your body, trying to find somewhere to touch you, to let you know she was here with you but everywhere was marred and she drew her hand back with a horrified look from seeing you up close, teary eyed. A strange marriage of anger, pity and love did come over him when he saw that. He wanted her to leave him be with you, he wanted to condemn her for even wanting to see you when the reason you were dying was because you made a sacrifice for your sake. But how could he? They were both guilty of the same sin, same measure. Their union was only made possible through their selfish brandishing of their love so how could he turn his back on her so belatedly? How could he deny her for this when he’d been the one to gain the most from their union? For shame or for pride, she was his wife. They were too closely entwined for him to become a hypocrite just now. Though, that hardly meant he wanted to see her healthy, well and with their child while the woman who was deprived of everything lay dying.

He sent Diana from the room, again under the guise of their daughter, “assuring” her that he’d stay at your side all night. Diana’s expression shifted slightly, revealing a hint of the girl she used to be, unpolished and genuine, unable to help showing all her emotions on her face. She looked…wounded but he must have looked very devastated because when he turned to face her fully, her expression slackened slightly and she did not argue. She only sighed and said, “I hope you won’t make yourself ill doing that. I’ll be in my old room, send for me straight away if you feel tired or unwell at all. I love you.” She said her ‘I love you’ like a plea, like she was near begging for his reassurance again. But Claude was simply not in the frame of mind to be declaring his love her even as it still ruled him. He simply nodded at her and looked back at you. Diana stayed still for a few seconds, he felt her eyes on him, felt that he’d hurt her in his denial. Then, she left the room swiftly.

A day later, his whole body hurt, he had not slept and his mind had gone numb. He could no longer consider very much of the future, he waded through the past. “I wonder…” he began in a tone loud enough to hear through the door. “Are you still out there?”

Felix entered the room. He’d been guarding your door since you returned home. He had not left or giving up the task to another knight for long enough to sleep. He had stood there obstinately without saying a word as if he’d never stopped being your knight. “You called for me, My Lord?” His voice was flat and very hardly concealing a certain amount of disdain.

“You searched for my- for the lady independently, if I understand correctly.”

“Indeed,” Felix answered simply.

“Diana and I owe you our gratitude for doing so, for not giving up on her so easily.”

“Oh, I could not abide you being in debt to me, Lord Claude. All that I did, I did for the lady’s sake alone.” A clear message in that, Claude’s lips almost curled into a bitter smile.

“Very good. You may rest now, the lady is in no further danger.”

“I’m afraid I would hardly be a knight if I were only devoted to looking after her when I felt there were further dangers imminent, My Lord.”

“What is it that you’re concerned about? I am at her side, a knight in my own right. I will not leave her.”

Felix only smiled, a hateful, spiteful smile. “Nor will I, My Lord. I hope you understand.”

Oh, Claude understood. Both the voices inside did, in their own manner. An odd similarity had struck between them, as close as they ever had been to being as one. “Very well,” He sighed, unduly frustrated. “You may return.” He did not even know why he’d desired for Felix to leave so much. Was it that he wanted, even if only once, to be the man who put himself aside for you? Was it that Felix’s very existence condemned his own, with his above dutiful knightly devotion to you contrasting the easy manner in which Claude had been willing to trade you for Diana? He felt guilt when he heard that it was Felix who’d found you, who’d never stopped looking and then an ounce of envy. He knew it was arrogant but if there was nothing else he could do to make up for what had been done, he wanted to be the one who rescued you.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, realizing there was no grand redemption for what had been done just as there was nothing that could ever fill the hole of your absence. He had left you to die as he wed the love of his life and made a very beloved child with her. He had taken your sacrifice into his hands easily and enjoyed a peaceful life because of it without even being able to imagine that you’d never get the same. His obliviousness to how you must have been seeing he and Diana, pushed you into thinking you needed to sacrifice for their sakes or else simply needed to escape a marriage to a man who loved your little sister. You were responsible for all that he had now. And what would he do if you never again opened your eyes? What would he do if you went to your grave thinking you meant so little to him that he’d not even done the smallest thing for you?

Fortunately, your condition had gotten slightly better by the next evening. You had brief bouts of consciousness after a long stretch of unresponsiveness. You had a fever and the doctor was doing all he could with his remedies to break it but it didn’t seem to be working. There was only so much that could be done with your body in such a condition. There was hardly anything that could be administered to you to rid you of any pain though the doctor mentioned there was a chance you weren’t feeling anything at all for you did not attempt to speak when you woke and slipped quite easily back out of consciousness. A prospect which was morbidly comforting. If you were to die, all the better for you to do so peacefully. But because the chance that you were indeed suffering from the high fever wreaking havoc on your body, he gently laid a cool cloth against your forehead.

Seconds later, your eyes opened, slowly blinking as your lips parted in an attempt to take air into your lungs more easily. He pulled his hand away as soon as he saw your eyes open, as if he’d been caught doing something unseemly. Your chest rose and fell rapidly as you returned to consciousness, your eyes bleary and hollow. You gazed at him as if seeing past him, as if seeing the figments of him that had failed you before. The cowardly part of him that lay hidden behind worthless flesh wanted simply to tell you that…well, he didn’t actually know what he should say if he were given the chance. At one time, he imagined he’d tell you he loved you but what use was his love to you anymore? In every life he had loved and in every life someone bled for it. What comfort could it possibly bring? As much comfort as a curse which grows into you with time. The constance of misfortune and the certainty that it would become both of you, that was his love.

It hardly mattered what he wanted to say anyway. His was not the voice that left his lips, it was mimicry from a force that had grown oddly similar to him in this life. “I remember the day they told me you’d run away…all this time, I have thought of that day.” He did not flinch at the words that came from his lips, for once; the fever had probably made you too delirious to understand him.

“Every moment I had to myself, I asked why you left. Diana told me you probably had somebody. But somehow I didn’t believe that, to my perspective, you really weren’t like that. So why? Why did you leave and why did I look for you even after…” He paused, finding himself so overly emotional talking to a woman that couldn’t even hear him, who was probably in a waking dream more than in her old bedroom with her old fiancé. He must be a stranger to her now. So why was he pouring out the things he would not even confess to his wife as if you were responsible? As if you could answer to the melancholy he already knew very well the source of. His two selves still had the obvious rift between them even as his greater self morphed more into a pale approximation of what his true self used to be. They were two jagged shards of a vase knocked from your dining table. This unearthly force that had taken him over, which had control over him still, was a creature yet unknown to him. He would do well to remember that much.

“Even now I am denied the reason why.” Even so, he had spent too many lives with the greater voice inside that ran thousands of thoughts through his very being not to feel as though he understood something about it when it spoke through him then. “When I should have rejoiced, when I should have been glad, always, always, it was you, like an ghost in my periphery.”

“Now you’re back and it feels like the end,” He spoke the words prophetically, it was the end. You were dipping back into unconsciousness again. “This isn’t the way I’m supposed to feel,” He said, tucking your blanket up to your chin, sending you off for what he felt would be the final time. He felt it, he knew it. His chest welled up with that feeling again, the dread he felt the day you’d run away. This time, he wondered what would happen if he stayed here in the version of reality he’d grown accustomed to. Would it free you if he stayed in the version of the world which had what the greater self sought to carry out? If he gave in to a will greater than his own?

At some point during the night, your fever broke and when it did, he found himself freed. His body delivered back to him at a very strange point this time. Never had there been a moment where you’d been alive that he’d also been able to speak freely. It felt like an anomaly, a shared fever dream or the view of earth from his first life the day before he met Diana. In any case, he didn’t feel very much about his own autonomy being returned to him, time enough to consider it later and the rest of his life to mourn. That morning, all he wanted to do was stay at your side, as himself through and through. He knew you were not on the same earthly plane as he was anymore even if you were not yet dead. You would not hear what he’d say, nor see what he’d do or feel his presence. Even so, he took your hand in his and he spoke.

“I have loved you for each and every one of our lives. I am sorry,” He drew in a breath. “Don’t forgive me. I will always be sorry. I am sorry for whatever this is, this part of myself so sharply cleaved out of me every time that I cannot stop killing you. I know it means nothing but I have never spoken it and I must. If this is not the real end, in our next life, kill me yourself. It must end. It must end with my blood, how long can we– how long can we suffer this way? There must be something, there must be something…” His speech, intended to be cathartic in some way, broke off and descended into inarticulate blubbering, his tears dripping onto your hand. He could speak no more then. Could stand the sound of his voice begging the empty air no longer.

He stayed at your side until the very end. Until he could no longer feel your pulse, the beats of your heart slow and faint. He could swear he felt the moment of your death as deeply as he felt the reach of this primordial thing that seemed to take more of him than he could have imagined there was with each life.

tags: @kage-tobiuo@kreishin @rosephantomhive@yeahdrarry@splaterparty0-0 @dear-dairiesss @qluvrv @hafsuhhh @eissaaaa @ayolk @doan-19 @fourcefulcupid@ariachaos@cerisearan@irisspade@yaesflorist@jcrml@xiaosprettygf@yevenly@amaris08atoshi012022 @obsessed-with-a-fictional-man @softbummiee@cassanderasblog @waka-babe @bananatwirl@s1mp69 @mitsuyamistress @hottiewifeyyyy @reiko69 @syyyy4ever @pinkpastel-l @dododododooosworld @gwyneveire @mvoonxlightv @noisyenthusiastface @gwyneveire

#claude x reader #wmmap x reader #claude de alger x reader #claude de alger obelia x reader

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