p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"emThe thirteenth day/em, he thinks to himself, the idea itself bewildering and even somewhat emchallenging/em in his mind. emAnd here, the courtyard lies in tatters./em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The attack upon the monarchy scarcely a fortnight before is barely alive in his mind; the memory wavers feebly, and he struggles to remember how it even mounted initially, spiralling into chaos with such frightening speed and haste. He's always been wary enough that exchanged insinuations and whisperings are heeded easily, ya style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4); color: #337287; zoom: 1; box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold;" href=" art/Ruin-Netherlands-x-Reader-490198527?q=gallery%3ACountryXReader%2F33309796qo=2#" name="_GoBack"/aet the fall was probably more imminent than he ever bothered considering, always being the sort that did precious more than carry on in his own life diligently and apathetically, bluntly stating all the affairs of his own world. He prefers to dedicate his life and interests to the maintenance of his own wellbeing, yet sustains a permanent solemnity that is contained, but doesn't hesitate to make itself known to those who think it in their ability and interests to interfere. Those who knew him then and now know him often exclusively by that trait, but it is not a mental condition that preserves it, regardless. It is merely his visage./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It's hardly easy to stomach the thought of how rapidly things have turned on their heads - one minute there exists what seems to be an irrevocable seat of power, a divine righteousness, a controlling figurehead over the nation, and barely a fortnight later, he can hardly see the roofs because of the lingering smoke stirring thickly about the city. He's never been the sort that will easily and willingly devote himself to some aspiring, yet hopeless cause when there's so much more to be done and cared for in the realm of simplicity alone – yet perhaps if only he had paid more than a passing moment's glance to the voices of the marketplace, interrupting the droning chatter of barter, he may have become more aware to the overall disgruntled and hungry thoughts of those he associates with so commonly. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"They've been suppressed and starved for long enough, it seems, that revolution and such idealisms as rebellion and the spilling of blood have grown to be acceptable, to be something taken eagerly, and that few any longer conceal their hatred when they come upon the chance to speak their opinions and have them be considered worth more than a satisfactory contribution for the democrats./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Lars stands, nonetheless, with no particular opinion on such matters, unknowing even of where his allegiances lie. He's always gotten on easily enough, thinking little of anything not central to his own existence. It's all happened far too quickly, everything being too reckless and grotesque for his minding. He has the simplest inkling of truly how oppressive, how demeaning the rule had been, but to the extent that the people will avidly welcome such a bloody revolution is something entirely beyond him, and even beyond his care./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The only thing he can manage to truly settle on is the conclusion that, for the sake of his own wellbeing and future in a strangely converted and altered world, he must go on with a resolute state of mind. He has to reject any sort of shock, or surprise that it all has gone so entirely wrong. Even in the midst of radical change, in the midst of calamity, he cannot allow himself to hesitate and simply stare at the ruins of the palace, wondering desperately to himself how the emhell/em it ever could have happened. Perhaps, although, he's numbed by it all, entirely deprived of feeling because of how little he's beginning to think he actually knows. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It all stabs at his mind; ceaseless and excessively irritating, it consumes him, even without granting him the willing mind to be invested within it. Until these pitiful days he'd always withheld assuring mantras of 'it will never happen here' and 'the city lies in balance'. It's an innate, internal promise, something he's invested himself in ementirely/em until this wretched day when he stumbles up the palace steps, halting at every sound of movement and staring vacantly at the ruins of gutted chambers and withered gardens, fingers at the clean folds of his scarf. How can the army have been so powerless, so easily dominated? How can it be that the city so suddenly belongs to the people, and to emhim/em?/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Just emwho/em has God rightfully betrayed and forgotten?/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Glancing about himself, he barely catches sight of silhouettes darting here and there; rebellious fugitives with knives in their fingers and hoods over their heads, smoke clings to their clothing and marks them as rebels as easily as blood might have done. He's clueless as to whether or not he ought to join them, to lay aside his individuality and mingle with their sort if he wishes to avoid future persecutions, as he sees them. After all, in such a scenario, how long can it be, before the ones that do not entirely hand their lives to a greater good will be hunted and condemned? Part of him churns to consider it, finding himself irked at the entire idea, and he tries to ostracise and isolate the thought to the deepest crevices of his mind in hope it will be forgotten quickly. There's far too much to be done without the idle distractions of disturbed thinking, and other mindless observations./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Hurriedly, he attempts to collect himself, continuing to mount the reddened steps with an odd sort of emhesitation/em lingering in his gait, his usually purposeful stride, his thinking constantly interrupted by the slight widening of his eyes and his continual scrutinising of the place. He stumbles here and there over an unnoticed crack in the ground, or a pile of rubble lying strewn across the stone, and wanders on with the slight limp still ever present. Whilst his lips are set into a thin, considering line, his hands tremble beneath his coat, and he subconsciously buries them deeper in the dark folds. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"One of the most vividly striking and paining elements of the entire experience is the knowledge of emfear/em, overcoming him, albeit slightly, for the first time in years. He should know nothing of fear, and of its implications, always having cared very little for it. It has no true meaning in his head, or only sort of definition or proper acknowledgement./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"All he wants to understand is himself./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He barely understands why it is that he's not yet fled, and why he hasn't made himself scarce within the constraints of the city walls. He doesn't know whether or not he'll be mistaken for some sort of guard or allegiant to the king, and quickly killed with a blow to the skull. It's all become irrelevant, all dissolved into the same problematic throb at the base of his thinking, that odd place where also resides a hundred other increasingly eminsignificant/em concerns – his garden, his neighbours. Food. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Laying eyes on the cadavers of buildings, still weeping glass and mortar, has the same effect as it has for the last day, which is even stranger to him when he's accustomed to forgetting about things entirely, and then simply moving on. There's no way for Lars even to contemplate the fact he hasn't paused his steady climbing of the palace steps and why he hasn't properly looked back for even a second to look upon the wreckage. This part of the city is desolate, ridden of all living creatures, having been raided days ago with the metal of the roof and the countless decorations melted for weaponry. Perhaps it's a good thing he's never set foot in the palace, for the rooms are nothing but filth and dust, now, and if he did know the place well there'd be no chance he could identify it, with the carpet frayed and all the fittings ripped from their niches in the ceilings and walls to be crushed into the floors. There is no delusion of grandeur, here, but rather a mere emabsence/em of it, and the architecture quite evidently has no hope of easily regaining its dignity except as a future ruin, one which will be considered the location of tragedy because so much blood has been spilled and nobody is perfectly clear on emwhy/em./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It's as if some miraculous force is the only thing persuading him to keep walking, to venture into a place as lonely and dangerous as anywhere, in a city painted by smoke. The only moments in which he blinks are the ones to drive the sting from his eyes and be able to see clearly through the thickness of the air, and focus again upon the large oak doors, unceremoniously hanging from their hinges and appearing as damaged as anything else he's seen so far. Feeling his way along the outside walls, hands no longer quavering, there's still a distinct sense of wariness to enter the palace, even now; he pauses for a time at the threshold, staring, groping for the doorframe uncertainly. Perhaps it is that the ghost of the deceased king still observes each flit of his eyes and crease of his brow as he wanders into the interior of the palace at last, just as he watches every other unfortunate that has come and looted, having thrust themselves into the recklessness of the revolution. Regarding the king, it's an odd sort of patriotism or even merely loyalty that loiters in his heart for him to consider it, evidently./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"A low hum reverberates from his throat, eyes rising slowly to the decrepit ceiling, now smattered with mould tucked defiantly into the corners. Blood is smeared along the walls, thick and hideous, the scent nearly unbearable as Lars makes his way through the barren halls, once gilded with fortune; it's all been stripped away by now. For hours he wanders, aimless and mindless in his endeavours, entirely oblivious to the chaotic matters of the outside world and exactly why it is that he's trailing through the palace, at all, when it's hardly more than a fresh ruin, heavy with the sort of feeling that he associates with vacated hospitals and freezing cold. The only warmth in his entire body or even within the entire domain of the place seems to stem from his suddenly fervent heart, persistent against his rib cage and irritating him to no small extent. He has no reason to feel anything quite beyond indifference; he has no reason to trade his austere, grave mannerisms for those of fitful anxiety, which is in itself something entirely foreign. What reason does he have to be within the clutches of anything emremotely/em akin to apprehension? To any normal person he's sure the feeling would feel more welcomed, more natural, but he's accustomed to concealing such things enough that it emdisturbs/em him. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He doesn't realise night has fallen until the open cracks in the ceiling pronounce it clearly, and he allows himself to turn away entirely from the charred wallpaper and broken wreckage of porcelain and gold to gaze at it, questioning himself as to how long it's been since he's looked upon it properly, considering the widespread glint of the stars. For some otherworldly reason he'd been so absorbed in his odd scrutiny of the palace's remains that the rapid descent of night has not struck him immediately, nor the orange glow of dusk against his flesh. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He does not navigate his escape in this moment, however, but rather does the most natural thing his mind can settle upon; he makes his certain way through the corridors until he finds the already largely looted kitchens, lining his pockets with all the food he can find, seizing multiple slices of salted meat in the backs of cupboards apparently forgotten by the rebels. He eats in utter silence, still not murmuring a single outward thought when he finally settles on a strange prospect in the middle of one of the pastries, stopping momentarily to consider it. Can it be such a emregrettable/emthought for him to seek solitude in the palace? The shops in the streets below are the ones cleared of goods and having been broken into weeks ago, with the revolutionaries forming themselves into little groups intent upon gathering what goods they can and collecting plentiful stocks of food. They will not bother or find him here, and if they do, they will undoubtedly do no more than urge him for food and clear out once more, won't they? /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It is the most probable eventuality that strikes him, and so he adopts it./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"What is the only thing to drive him from all such thoughts and questionings is a very strange, distant crack of wood, coupled by a distinct scurrying and almost emhuman/em cry. Instinctively getting to his feet in response, he wipes down his hands, glancing about himself, then treads softly through the doorway, hand clenched upon the frame, peering out into the blackness. All has fallen silent once more, but he knows full well that his understanding is not mistaken./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Unable to stem his curiosity, he deserts his temporary eating place and ventures along the hall, staring into the thick, black depths of each room as he passes them by; but still, it barely takes ten minutes of observant wandering for him to pinpoint the single room that is certainly not the same as he recalls it when he passed by before in search of food. The doorway has caved in terribly, and the four poster bed smashed in half, strewn with wood and dust with soft clouds lingering around the sheets and collapsed ceiling. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"His first instinct is to believe the place to have simply buckled naturally, due to already inflicted damage and wear, but then he abruptly recalls the resounding cry he heard so clearly, and concludes that either a very strange sounding animal or otherwise a human being has been somehow caught in the wreckage, fool that they are; perhaps it is that they are a revolutionary also scavenging. Eyes flitting back and forth along the line of broken debris, he steps through the doorway, spine pressing to the wall, before looking back to the floor in hopes of seeing some sort of human form./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He considers himself almost somehow fortunate to immediately locate the body, and he lifts his feet to go closer toward them through the rubble, only for them to gradually stir before his very eyes, hands beginning to mindlessly clutch at the wreckage./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Knowing full well that a corpse would not be capable of such a thing and that resurrection is much beyond human capacity, he stoops to watch them more closely, his curiosity quite uncharacteristic and seemingly only brought on from restlessness and perhaps the faintest yearning for human company. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Unsurprisingly, the gradually more wary and involved movements their limbs portray and the dim light of their eyes in the darkness startles him, for even they are apparently emterrified/em at the appearance of him inside their room, frightened as a deer might be at the introduction of lamplight into their eyes, bearing over them in a sort of unspoken inquisitiveness. Their reaction utterly bewilders Lars as they press themselves hurriedly to the mounds of torn, reddened bedsheets and matchwood behind them, allowing the wreck to splinter them further as half their body remains buried beneath the remains of what may once have been a bed of some description or form. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Their bloodied hands scrape against wooden floors and their eyes are glazed with what appears to be a strange combination of apprehension and lethargy, their movements all fitful worriment and an incomprehensible trepidation (Lars still doesn't understand why it is that they look at him the way they do). Eying them slowly and observantly, once more entirely unfazed and unaffected by their probably very emnatural/em reaction to his abrupt appearance, he sees how their leg is trapped firmly beneath a fallen beam, and how their face and hands are coated thickly in blood, as though someone had very unkindly and unsteadily slashed a sword toward them and not quite done the job properly. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Perhaps it's a slight feeling of pity or untainted curiosity that overpowers him, moving him oddly in the same moment of realisation, but he allows himself a good few moments of staring upon them, critical, until he can rightfully conclude that, judging by their clothing, they are emnot/em a revolutionary, like every other wretched soul in the god-forsaken city. This revelation alone is one that brings him to crease his brow and be suddenly overcome with an undisputed sense of internal questioning and perplexity. There's no true part or fragment of him that quite understands why it is that they are here, then, without such a purpose as the intention of bloodshed and other cruel, dehumanising pastimes, despite his relative intelligence and usual quaint ability to be able to understand all that is occurring about him. He considers for a moment that the dust is affecting him, or that the baffling, horrific events that have unfolded over this last fortnight have suddenly and terribly taken their hold of him and are finally unleashing their effect, and that he's far more susceptible to them than he may have ever once dared thought./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"There's a tangible sort of silence between them, unbroken now by the usual scurrying of insects beneath the fallen wood heap or birds in the far distance, nor the far off shouts of the village children; not Lars', nor even the stranger's own breathing seems to break the increasingly uncomfortable silence efficiently, and so they resort to stares, with one being far more complacent in manner than the other. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Yet then she begins gradually to speak, to exercise her voice, uttering a low, hoarse sentence that very nearly catches Lars off guard and causes him to halt in his tracks entirely. For the oddest reason, he's withheld no expectations of her being able to even speak at all in her current state, all bloodied limbs and ice-ridden veins./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Are you here to murder, then?"/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He doesn't answer, for a time, for once unsure as to how he will. He doesn't know whose side he's really on anymore. But, realistically speaking, he has no reason to despise her, no reason to wish her dead – she has never intimately wronged him, and while he does not immediately recognise her as the dead king's wife, he wonders whether he should be obliged to pity her. After all, she seems to do nothing but emexpect/emdeath, like she has been dreading it for hours on end, thinking of nothing else./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""No," he replies shortly, resuming his thorough analysis of her person, folding his arms neatly. "I don't have a reason to do that."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"For whatever unspeakable and unobvious reason, the colour still drains from her face and she still clings to her assumed state of terrified limbo. "You wouldn't lie to me, would you?"/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Not unless I knew that by doing so I would gain something. I do not know who you are, although, and so I have no reason to consider not telling the truth."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""I have seen no other eyes except those of revolutionaries in far too many days, even if it has been from only beyond the window..." she murmurs, her distraction torn repeatedly between his face and the bloodied hangings along the walls, and there seems a distinctly worrying lack of feeling in how she speaks, quite as though she has abandoned the willingness to speak emphatically and in a way that will motivate her people, her husband. The wives of royalty, after all, are often the most able to insert their words into governance, and have a play with the matters of politics. She truly has fallen from grace to be in the state she is now, trapped and injured beneath a bedframe, questioning whether or not her life truly is in the hands of the man before her, whom she has never laid eyes upon before and likely never will again, if aid arrives and she can escape quick enough. By now, although, both eventualities seem empitifully/em unlikely./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Well, I have seen none these last few hours. I have no friends in these times."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""You are the lucky one."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Even the grunt he gives seems hoarse, made gravelly by both the smoke in the air and also that which he continues to pour into his lungs, and is tempted to do even now if it will slow his thinking. "I am not caught beneath a bed. But I would not care if you escaped here alive. I also would not care if you died. My life won't be any different, and the revolutionaries will save themselves time searching for your body if they believe you died in the fire."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The way in which the woman's face changes in the moment he speaks tells him two very particular things – the first is that the statement has left her utterly incredulous, and the second is that it is perhaps the most peculiar and confronting thing that she has ever heard. "It wouldn't matter to you if I lived? Is that what you are telling me?"/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""I thought I made it clear. You'll have to be over the wall quick, though, so it's no use staying under that bed when the revolutionaries have probably already heard us talking."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Her eyes appear to have filled with tears, all of a sudden, and she makes the feeblest effort to rise from her hiding place. "You must know that all these things you are saying make me believe you are the Lord in flesh."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""You'd be mistaken if you ever believed that."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Would you... help me to the wall, then? I will make for the border. I do not need much."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"At this moment in time, he doesn't fully comprehend the weight of his situation, his agreement, his good will toward a woman who certainly ought to have already died; he doesn't understand what he is doing when he agrees, when he pulls the meat from his pockets and places it in a bag along with preserved fish and bread; he doesn't know why it makes no difference to him whatsoever to help her over the high garden wall at the southern end of the palace's grounds, giving her a stick to lean against to support her wounded legs as she pulls herself toward the border kilometres away. It is only later that he vaguely thinks he is selfish for not having gone by her side, but there is nothing to disallow him from keeping his own interests at heart. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Most of all, he doesn't know why he's vaguely saddened to see her lurched back to the castle courtyard, tied down to the black of the scaffold and be beheaded before the swarming rebels, just as wretched as she was the day he first saw her hidden beneath the bed, but with a definite sense of pride and composure about her that he realises he emtruly/em finds admirable./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The attack upon the monarchy scarcely a fortnight before is barely alive in his mind; the memory wavers feebly, and he struggles to remember how it even mounted initially, spiralling into chaos with such frightening speed and haste. He's always been wary enough that exchanged insinuations and whisperings are heeded easily, ya style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4); color: #337287; zoom: 1; box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold;" href=" art/Ruin-Netherlands-x-Reader-490198527?q=gallery%3ACountryXReader%2F33309796qo=2#" name="_GoBack"/aet the fall was probably more imminent than he ever bothered considering, always being the sort that did precious more than carry on in his own life diligently and apathetically, bluntly stating all the affairs of his own world. He prefers to dedicate his life and interests to the maintenance of his own wellbeing, yet sustains a permanent solemnity that is contained, but doesn't hesitate to make itself known to those who think it in their ability and interests to interfere. Those who knew him then and now know him often exclusively by that trait, but it is not a mental condition that preserves it, regardless. It is merely his visage./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It's hardly easy to stomach the thought of how rapidly things have turned on their heads - one minute there exists what seems to be an irrevocable seat of power, a divine righteousness, a controlling figurehead over the nation, and barely a fortnight later, he can hardly see the roofs because of the lingering smoke stirring thickly about the city. He's never been the sort that will easily and willingly devote himself to some aspiring, yet hopeless cause when there's so much more to be done and cared for in the realm of simplicity alone – yet perhaps if only he had paid more than a passing moment's glance to the voices of the marketplace, interrupting the droning chatter of barter, he may have become more aware to the overall disgruntled and hungry thoughts of those he associates with so commonly. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"They've been suppressed and starved for long enough, it seems, that revolution and such idealisms as rebellion and the spilling of blood have grown to be acceptable, to be something taken eagerly, and that few any longer conceal their hatred when they come upon the chance to speak their opinions and have them be considered worth more than a satisfactory contribution for the democrats./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Lars stands, nonetheless, with no particular opinion on such matters, unknowing even of where his allegiances lie. He's always gotten on easily enough, thinking little of anything not central to his own existence. It's all happened far too quickly, everything being too reckless and grotesque for his minding. He has the simplest inkling of truly how oppressive, how demeaning the rule had been, but to the extent that the people will avidly welcome such a bloody revolution is something entirely beyond him, and even beyond his care./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The only thing he can manage to truly settle on is the conclusion that, for the sake of his own wellbeing and future in a strangely converted and altered world, he must go on with a resolute state of mind. He has to reject any sort of shock, or surprise that it all has gone so entirely wrong. Even in the midst of radical change, in the midst of calamity, he cannot allow himself to hesitate and simply stare at the ruins of the palace, wondering desperately to himself how the emhell/em it ever could have happened. Perhaps, although, he's numbed by it all, entirely deprived of feeling because of how little he's beginning to think he actually knows. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It all stabs at his mind; ceaseless and excessively irritating, it consumes him, even without granting him the willing mind to be invested within it. Until these pitiful days he'd always withheld assuring mantras of 'it will never happen here' and 'the city lies in balance'. It's an innate, internal promise, something he's invested himself in ementirely/em until this wretched day when he stumbles up the palace steps, halting at every sound of movement and staring vacantly at the ruins of gutted chambers and withered gardens, fingers at the clean folds of his scarf. How can the army have been so powerless, so easily dominated? How can it be that the city so suddenly belongs to the people, and to emhim/em?/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Just emwho/em has God rightfully betrayed and forgotten?/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Glancing about himself, he barely catches sight of silhouettes darting here and there; rebellious fugitives with knives in their fingers and hoods over their heads, smoke clings to their clothing and marks them as rebels as easily as blood might have done. He's clueless as to whether or not he ought to join them, to lay aside his individuality and mingle with their sort if he wishes to avoid future persecutions, as he sees them. After all, in such a scenario, how long can it be, before the ones that do not entirely hand their lives to a greater good will be hunted and condemned? Part of him churns to consider it, finding himself irked at the entire idea, and he tries to ostracise and isolate the thought to the deepest crevices of his mind in hope it will be forgotten quickly. There's far too much to be done without the idle distractions of disturbed thinking, and other mindless observations./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Hurriedly, he attempts to collect himself, continuing to mount the reddened steps with an odd sort of emhesitation/em lingering in his gait, his usually purposeful stride, his thinking constantly interrupted by the slight widening of his eyes and his continual scrutinising of the place. He stumbles here and there over an unnoticed crack in the ground, or a pile of rubble lying strewn across the stone, and wanders on with the slight limp still ever present. Whilst his lips are set into a thin, considering line, his hands tremble beneath his coat, and he subconsciously buries them deeper in the dark folds. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"One of the most vividly striking and paining elements of the entire experience is the knowledge of emfear/em, overcoming him, albeit slightly, for the first time in years. He should know nothing of fear, and of its implications, always having cared very little for it. It has no true meaning in his head, or only sort of definition or proper acknowledgement./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"All he wants to understand is himself./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He barely understands why it is that he's not yet fled, and why he hasn't made himself scarce within the constraints of the city walls. He doesn't know whether or not he'll be mistaken for some sort of guard or allegiant to the king, and quickly killed with a blow to the skull. It's all become irrelevant, all dissolved into the same problematic throb at the base of his thinking, that odd place where also resides a hundred other increasingly eminsignificant/em concerns – his garden, his neighbours. Food. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Laying eyes on the cadavers of buildings, still weeping glass and mortar, has the same effect as it has for the last day, which is even stranger to him when he's accustomed to forgetting about things entirely, and then simply moving on. There's no way for Lars even to contemplate the fact he hasn't paused his steady climbing of the palace steps and why he hasn't properly looked back for even a second to look upon the wreckage. This part of the city is desolate, ridden of all living creatures, having been raided days ago with the metal of the roof and the countless decorations melted for weaponry. Perhaps it's a good thing he's never set foot in the palace, for the rooms are nothing but filth and dust, now, and if he did know the place well there'd be no chance he could identify it, with the carpet frayed and all the fittings ripped from their niches in the ceilings and walls to be crushed into the floors. There is no delusion of grandeur, here, but rather a mere emabsence/em of it, and the architecture quite evidently has no hope of easily regaining its dignity except as a future ruin, one which will be considered the location of tragedy because so much blood has been spilled and nobody is perfectly clear on emwhy/em./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It's as if some miraculous force is the only thing persuading him to keep walking, to venture into a place as lonely and dangerous as anywhere, in a city painted by smoke. The only moments in which he blinks are the ones to drive the sting from his eyes and be able to see clearly through the thickness of the air, and focus again upon the large oak doors, unceremoniously hanging from their hinges and appearing as damaged as anything else he's seen so far. Feeling his way along the outside walls, hands no longer quavering, there's still a distinct sense of wariness to enter the palace, even now; he pauses for a time at the threshold, staring, groping for the doorframe uncertainly. Perhaps it is that the ghost of the deceased king still observes each flit of his eyes and crease of his brow as he wanders into the interior of the palace at last, just as he watches every other unfortunate that has come and looted, having thrust themselves into the recklessness of the revolution. Regarding the king, it's an odd sort of patriotism or even merely loyalty that loiters in his heart for him to consider it, evidently./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"A low hum reverberates from his throat, eyes rising slowly to the decrepit ceiling, now smattered with mould tucked defiantly into the corners. Blood is smeared along the walls, thick and hideous, the scent nearly unbearable as Lars makes his way through the barren halls, once gilded with fortune; it's all been stripped away by now. For hours he wanders, aimless and mindless in his endeavours, entirely oblivious to the chaotic matters of the outside world and exactly why it is that he's trailing through the palace, at all, when it's hardly more than a fresh ruin, heavy with the sort of feeling that he associates with vacated hospitals and freezing cold. The only warmth in his entire body or even within the entire domain of the place seems to stem from his suddenly fervent heart, persistent against his rib cage and irritating him to no small extent. He has no reason to feel anything quite beyond indifference; he has no reason to trade his austere, grave mannerisms for those of fitful anxiety, which is in itself something entirely foreign. What reason does he have to be within the clutches of anything emremotely/em akin to apprehension? To any normal person he's sure the feeling would feel more welcomed, more natural, but he's accustomed to concealing such things enough that it emdisturbs/em him. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He doesn't realise night has fallen until the open cracks in the ceiling pronounce it clearly, and he allows himself to turn away entirely from the charred wallpaper and broken wreckage of porcelain and gold to gaze at it, questioning himself as to how long it's been since he's looked upon it properly, considering the widespread glint of the stars. For some otherworldly reason he'd been so absorbed in his odd scrutiny of the palace's remains that the rapid descent of night has not struck him immediately, nor the orange glow of dusk against his flesh. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He does not navigate his escape in this moment, however, but rather does the most natural thing his mind can settle upon; he makes his certain way through the corridors until he finds the already largely looted kitchens, lining his pockets with all the food he can find, seizing multiple slices of salted meat in the backs of cupboards apparently forgotten by the rebels. He eats in utter silence, still not murmuring a single outward thought when he finally settles on a strange prospect in the middle of one of the pastries, stopping momentarily to consider it. Can it be such a emregrettable/emthought for him to seek solitude in the palace? The shops in the streets below are the ones cleared of goods and having been broken into weeks ago, with the revolutionaries forming themselves into little groups intent upon gathering what goods they can and collecting plentiful stocks of food. They will not bother or find him here, and if they do, they will undoubtedly do no more than urge him for food and clear out once more, won't they? /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It is the most probable eventuality that strikes him, and so he adopts it./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"What is the only thing to drive him from all such thoughts and questionings is a very strange, distant crack of wood, coupled by a distinct scurrying and almost emhuman/em cry. Instinctively getting to his feet in response, he wipes down his hands, glancing about himself, then treads softly through the doorway, hand clenched upon the frame, peering out into the blackness. All has fallen silent once more, but he knows full well that his understanding is not mistaken./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Unable to stem his curiosity, he deserts his temporary eating place and ventures along the hall, staring into the thick, black depths of each room as he passes them by; but still, it barely takes ten minutes of observant wandering for him to pinpoint the single room that is certainly not the same as he recalls it when he passed by before in search of food. The doorway has caved in terribly, and the four poster bed smashed in half, strewn with wood and dust with soft clouds lingering around the sheets and collapsed ceiling. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"His first instinct is to believe the place to have simply buckled naturally, due to already inflicted damage and wear, but then he abruptly recalls the resounding cry he heard so clearly, and concludes that either a very strange sounding animal or otherwise a human being has been somehow caught in the wreckage, fool that they are; perhaps it is that they are a revolutionary also scavenging. Eyes flitting back and forth along the line of broken debris, he steps through the doorway, spine pressing to the wall, before looking back to the floor in hopes of seeing some sort of human form./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He considers himself almost somehow fortunate to immediately locate the body, and he lifts his feet to go closer toward them through the rubble, only for them to gradually stir before his very eyes, hands beginning to mindlessly clutch at the wreckage./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Knowing full well that a corpse would not be capable of such a thing and that resurrection is much beyond human capacity, he stoops to watch them more closely, his curiosity quite uncharacteristic and seemingly only brought on from restlessness and perhaps the faintest yearning for human company. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Unsurprisingly, the gradually more wary and involved movements their limbs portray and the dim light of their eyes in the darkness startles him, for even they are apparently emterrified/em at the appearance of him inside their room, frightened as a deer might be at the introduction of lamplight into their eyes, bearing over them in a sort of unspoken inquisitiveness. Their reaction utterly bewilders Lars as they press themselves hurriedly to the mounds of torn, reddened bedsheets and matchwood behind them, allowing the wreck to splinter them further as half their body remains buried beneath the remains of what may once have been a bed of some description or form. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Their bloodied hands scrape against wooden floors and their eyes are glazed with what appears to be a strange combination of apprehension and lethargy, their movements all fitful worriment and an incomprehensible trepidation (Lars still doesn't understand why it is that they look at him the way they do). Eying them slowly and observantly, once more entirely unfazed and unaffected by their probably very emnatural/em reaction to his abrupt appearance, he sees how their leg is trapped firmly beneath a fallen beam, and how their face and hands are coated thickly in blood, as though someone had very unkindly and unsteadily slashed a sword toward them and not quite done the job properly. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Perhaps it's a slight feeling of pity or untainted curiosity that overpowers him, moving him oddly in the same moment of realisation, but he allows himself a good few moments of staring upon them, critical, until he can rightfully conclude that, judging by their clothing, they are emnot/em a revolutionary, like every other wretched soul in the god-forsaken city. This revelation alone is one that brings him to crease his brow and be suddenly overcome with an undisputed sense of internal questioning and perplexity. There's no true part or fragment of him that quite understands why it is that they are here, then, without such a purpose as the intention of bloodshed and other cruel, dehumanising pastimes, despite his relative intelligence and usual quaint ability to be able to understand all that is occurring about him. He considers for a moment that the dust is affecting him, or that the baffling, horrific events that have unfolded over this last fortnight have suddenly and terribly taken their hold of him and are finally unleashing their effect, and that he's far more susceptible to them than he may have ever once dared thought./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"There's a tangible sort of silence between them, unbroken now by the usual scurrying of insects beneath the fallen wood heap or birds in the far distance, nor the far off shouts of the village children; not Lars', nor even the stranger's own breathing seems to break the increasingly uncomfortable silence efficiently, and so they resort to stares, with one being far more complacent in manner than the other. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Yet then she begins gradually to speak, to exercise her voice, uttering a low, hoarse sentence that very nearly catches Lars off guard and causes him to halt in his tracks entirely. For the oddest reason, he's withheld no expectations of her being able to even speak at all in her current state, all bloodied limbs and ice-ridden veins./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Are you here to murder, then?"/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He doesn't answer, for a time, for once unsure as to how he will. He doesn't know whose side he's really on anymore. But, realistically speaking, he has no reason to despise her, no reason to wish her dead – she has never intimately wronged him, and while he does not immediately recognise her as the dead king's wife, he wonders whether he should be obliged to pity her. After all, she seems to do nothing but emexpect/emdeath, like she has been dreading it for hours on end, thinking of nothing else./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""No," he replies shortly, resuming his thorough analysis of her person, folding his arms neatly. "I don't have a reason to do that."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"For whatever unspeakable and unobvious reason, the colour still drains from her face and she still clings to her assumed state of terrified limbo. "You wouldn't lie to me, would you?"/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Not unless I knew that by doing so I would gain something. I do not know who you are, although, and so I have no reason to consider not telling the truth."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""I have seen no other eyes except those of revolutionaries in far too many days, even if it has been from only beyond the window..." she murmurs, her distraction torn repeatedly between his face and the bloodied hangings along the walls, and there seems a distinctly worrying lack of feeling in how she speaks, quite as though she has abandoned the willingness to speak emphatically and in a way that will motivate her people, her husband. The wives of royalty, after all, are often the most able to insert their words into governance, and have a play with the matters of politics. She truly has fallen from grace to be in the state she is now, trapped and injured beneath a bedframe, questioning whether or not her life truly is in the hands of the man before her, whom she has never laid eyes upon before and likely never will again, if aid arrives and she can escape quick enough. By now, although, both eventualities seem empitifully/em unlikely./p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Well, I have seen none these last few hours. I have no friends in these times."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""You are the lucky one."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Even the grunt he gives seems hoarse, made gravelly by both the smoke in the air and also that which he continues to pour into his lungs, and is tempted to do even now if it will slow his thinking. "I am not caught beneath a bed. But I would not care if you escaped here alive. I also would not care if you died. My life won't be any different, and the revolutionaries will save themselves time searching for your body if they believe you died in the fire."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The way in which the woman's face changes in the moment he speaks tells him two very particular things – the first is that the statement has left her utterly incredulous, and the second is that it is perhaps the most peculiar and confronting thing that she has ever heard. "It wouldn't matter to you if I lived? Is that what you are telling me?"/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""I thought I made it clear. You'll have to be over the wall quick, though, so it's no use staying under that bed when the revolutionaries have probably already heard us talking."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Her eyes appear to have filled with tears, all of a sudden, and she makes the feeblest effort to rise from her hiding place. "You must know that all these things you are saying make me believe you are the Lord in flesh."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""You'd be mistaken if you ever believed that."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Would you... help me to the wall, then? I will make for the border. I do not need much."/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"At this moment in time, he doesn't fully comprehend the weight of his situation, his agreement, his good will toward a woman who certainly ought to have already died; he doesn't understand what he is doing when he agrees, when he pulls the meat from his pockets and places it in a bag along with preserved fish and bread; he doesn't know why it makes no difference to him whatsoever to help her over the high garden wall at the southern end of the palace's grounds, giving her a stick to lean against to support her wounded legs as she pulls herself toward the border kilometres away. It is only later that he vaguely thinks he is selfish for not having gone by her side, but there is nothing to disallow him from keeping his own interests at heart. /p
p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Most of all, he doesn't know why he's vaguely saddened to see her lurched back to the castle courtyard, tied down to the black of the scaffold and be beheaded before the swarming rebels, just as wretched as she was the day he first saw her hidden beneath the bed, but with a definite sense of pride and composure about her that he realises he emtruly/em finds admirable./p