A Beautiful Butterfly
Rating: PG/K+
Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Friendship
Summary: Olivia is generally regarded as being too young for most things. This month, she intends to challenge that.
Author's Note: My brain hurts. It's like a broken car-engine that's chugging out smog as it dies.
Disclaimer: I don't own Rule of Rose. It belongs to Atlus Games.
[-]
The only reason Olivia isn't among the truly wretched of their ranks is because of Susan.
Olivia is too little to find and retrieve the monthly gifts on her own. It's not unusual at all for her to have trouble understanding what the task is, many times. And so it is Susan who takes it upon herself to, each and every month from the time Olivia arrives, to find two of each item and deliver them to the club for herself and on Olivia's behalf.
On the scale of nuisances to the club, Olivia is a few steps above Amanda and Jennifer despite her frequent tantrums and wailing. She knows enough about the order in the group not to directly defy the older girls in any significant way, and is too easily distracted to remain troublesome for long even if she does, and so their ire for her is only occasional. What's more, most everyone assumes that eventually she'll fall in line as she grows older.
Olivia is of no real consequence, and neither is Susan. There's no rule that says that members can't find the gifts for one another, and so no one makes an issue of the unspoken arrangement between the two. Because the gifts get in and on time every month, they are content that her contribution is being made.
At first, Olivia is somewhat oblivious to the idea that she is required to do anything. She is still young enough that while she respects the power of the older girls, she doesn't especially care about what they want unless it benefits her in some way (be it through direct reward or the avoidance of punishment). As no one has pulled her aside and stated that she needs to do this or suffer these consequences, the very concept of the monthly gift is unknown to her at best.
Until one day it isn't.
The gift of the month is three round stones- the rounder, the better. What the Princess of the Rose intends to do with them (if anything) is uncertain, but it's not their place to question it. Olivia is perched on the swing in the yard as Susan scans the ground for satisfactory rocks, tossing away the ones deemed imperfect.
Olivia is getting older, smarter, and her counting is starting to improve. She fixates on numbers and counts to certain amounts ad nauseam, to the annoyance of everyone around her. Though she cannot read, she has recognized the number three scrawled on the paper detailing this month's gift- and she sees that Susan has found not three, but four stones.
"One, two, three- no. Four. Too many, Susan."
Susan sighs, almost sickened at the sound of numbers from the smaller girl's mouth by now. "I need six."
"No, three. The paper had a three on it. I know what a three is now."
"Yes, but it's three stones to be found for each person, so I need six." This leap of math is a little too much for Olivia to process. She hops off the swing, frowning, and Susan can sense a temper-tantrum brewing. Olivia's patience is virtually nonexistent, and since she's gone so long without a cry Susan knows that it will be an explosion far more inconveniencing than the counting.
"Hmf-"
"I'm getting three stones for you," Susan says quickly, "And three for me. One, two, three, one, two, three, four, five, six." She hastily drags over two unsuitable stones for the sake of making her point. "Three plus three- six." Susan is only two years older than Olivia, but knows addition and subtraction well enough thanks to Meg.
Olivia stares critically at the six rocks before her. Susan assumes that she's trying to work this out in her head, until she opens her mouth and says, "What do you mean for me?"
Susan blinks. "We have to each get three round stones for this month's gift. I'm getting three to give them for myself, and three for your gift."
Olivia frowns. "Why are you getting them?"
"Because you're too little to find them yourself in time!"
"I am not!" Olivia shrieks, stomps her foot and then runs off bawling. Susan sighs moodily and knows that Olivia will be fine by dinner. She goes back to collecting the stones without thinking on it too much longer.
[-]
Olivia is not fine, and Olivia does not forget.
She does not quite still grasp the concept of the monthly gift, but much better understands that she is, once again, being dubbed "too little" to do something by one of the older girls. It is a frequent irritation, with her being the youngest child at the orphanage.
And so when the next month around they are told that the gift is to be a butterfly, the words "gift" and "find" make Olivia perk up and take notice. Last month Susan called her too little to find stones- but surely she can find a butterfly, a pretty thing to offer as a gift and show Susan how big she really is.
She hunts. She looks high and low, in the house and in the garden, everywhere for a beautiful butterfly. Frustration comes quickly when she finds the task to be harder than she thought it would be: For some reason, the butterflies are just not flying today, and that surely means that they won't be flying tomorrow, or the day after, and that she will fail to find the gift of the month. Once again, she will be too little.
After an hour of searching, Olivia goes back into the house and shuts herself into the lounge to pout in private. The window is open, and a gentle breeze teases the curtains. She's not supposed to be there; Mr. Hoffman has forbidden the children to enter, as it's supposed to be the room he interviews potential adoptive parents in. No one ever comes, though, and so the children don't see much of a point in keeping it untouched.
Olivia does not cry, nor scream, nor wail. That's pointless when alone, when there's no one there to hear it. Instead she pouts, plopping down onto the chair and glaring at the vase of roses on the table before her. She thinks she might like to smash that vase, rip the petals off the flowers and leave them scattered around the room. Breaking things makes her happy sometimes- or at the very least, calms her down.
No butterfly, never a butterfly, and now she'll have to listen to Susan call her a baby, call her little, and Olivia is so angry that she thinks she might start to cry for real, the little sniffly sobs that usually only came at night when she thought about her daddy-
Olivia freezes.
On the table in front of her, on a flower, on one of the roses she was just thinking about destroying, is a butterfly.
It's not a huge butterfly, but not a tiny one either. Its wings are black and orange and brown and have smudges and dots. It is a pretty butterfly. It may even be a beautiful one; beautiful enough to satisfy the other girls.
An older child might have wondered at their luck, pondered how such serendipity could occur; Olivia is not so contemplative, though. A butterfly is a butterfly, it is there, and she can catch it now and finally be regarded as a big girl. She is neither capable nor concerned with pondering at her fortune.
Olivia tenses, and then lunges.
[-]
Susan recognizes Olivia's wail immediately.
It does not inspire any particular panic or concern in her. She simply sighs and trots off to see what's upsetting Olivia before the older children get snippy over the noise. Or, worse yet, Martha or Mr. Hoffman; the latter would punish, the former might be inclined to spanking.
The possibility of that grows stronger when Susan realizes that the howling is coming from the lounge, and knows she'll have to drag Olivia someplace else before someone comes along and finds her there. Upon opening the door and looking inside, she sees a vase on the floor, water and roses everywhere, though fortunately that seems to be the worst of the damage.
Olivia is kneeling under the window, bawling her heart out- and it seems, at least to Susan, that the tears are genuine for once.
"What's the matter now?" She sighs, picking up the vase and stuffing the flowers haphazardly back into it so that it won't be obvious if anyone comes in that they've been disturbed. "What's got you upset?"
Olivia doesn't answer, doesn't even look at or acknowledge her, and so Susan has to maneuver around the table to see her face. Once she does, she finds the source of Olivia's distress.
On the floor is a butterfly- a dead butterfly. Its wings have been crushed badly from little hands that grasped too tightly. It doesn't take a great deal of deduction to figure out what this butterfly's purpose was to be and why Olivia is losing her head over it.
Olivia does not speak, and whether that is because she is too upset to or simply feels that the scene speaks for itself is not clear. Whatever the case, Susan knows she has to calm her down again at any cost.
"We can fix it. Or not. They didn't say it had to be alive." Olivia chokes out an incoherent string of words, and Susan is able to pick out a word that sounds like "beautiful".
Ah, right: A beautiful butterfly.
Olivia keeps right on crying, and Susan quietly creeps from the room.
[-]
Olivia keeps bawling. Her failure is painful, and she kicks the stair in frustration as she ascends to the second floor. Eleanor passes by her, but she simply raises an eyebrow, says nothing, and goes on her way.
Olivia goes to the dormitory room, finds her bunk and flops down on it so that she can continue her mourning.
But when her face hits the pillow, the top of her forehead touches something distinctly not cloth. She lifts her head, sniffling, and has to blink away tears to really see what's been left on her pillow. When they clear, she is shocked.
It is a butterfly!
Not a real one- it's small and made of paper, but it has rainbow wings that aren't crinkled or crumpled or ripped! Most importantly, it is a beautiful butterfly, and one that she's found herself! Susan didn't have to find it for her at all!
Olivia's sniffles turn to delighted giggles, and she doesn't really put much time into wondering who made it and why they left it.
[-]
Susan sighs from where she's watching at the door.
Well, they never said that it had to be a real butterfly, now did they?
-End