Shiawase no imi wa tabun kokoro no kazu dake atte
Dakedo sore ja oosugite
Miushinau bokura

Rurutia - Lost Butterfly

So you wander down this path known as life and wonder what drives you, what pulls you down the winding faded roads. What is it that motivates you? What keeps you moving forward – keeps you living? Inconsistencies, pain, death, love, birth, they're there, everywhere on the path of life. Volatile, painful, inescapable but mixed with happiness, ecstasy, and acceptance, life is undefined.

The war is over now
I feel like coming home

Stop. Look. Remember. The feelings are old, worn, tattered remnants of their former glory. Once she believed herself in love with him. Once she could pretend that life was glorious. Once she was innocent, once she was a child. Time moves forward, it pauses for no one, not even the great lord of the western lands. She stared at the one who took her place, who banished her from his side and wanted to loathe her, hate her physical beauty, hate the delicate silks she wore, hate her intelligence but she was unable to. She'd changed from who she once was but she knew that the other female was not to blame for his disinterest. The replacement would find out soon that nothing was concrete, his regard was not permanent, and once she served her purpose her role would change. If she believed he loved her, if she was naïve as she once was then she would live blissfully ignorance. No, the replacement would fade from his existence just as she had, just as they all would.

He loved her not.

He loved his firstborn not.

Her son, her beautiful, beautiful child, the child that she did not love.

He loved none.

Marriage, it was a union, the merging of two to produce powerful heirs, strong blood, good genes, and lineage were all that mattered.

She was younger than him, centuries younger; he'd been of age when she was but a child. She fancied herself in love with him, he was handsome, terribly beautiful, and she adored him. Where he went she followed, a humble servant before him. As she aged she became more graceful, as she aged he changed before her unseeing eyes. She loved him; she truly loved him with all that she was.

He cared not.

There was a time when she believed he cared, in his own special way.

He protected her.

He tolerated her.

Thus she had believed until the callous truth was revealed to her.

Protection was not love.

Tolerance was not love.

Still she had not seen what others saw clearly.

Duty and obligation, hints at affection for something that he grew accustomed to but did not love, never love.

Perhaps infatuation, but never love.

She came of age and his attentions changed.

More concern, different looks in his golden eyes and she mistook them for love.

More the fool she.

The first was painful; he was neither gentle nor brutal.

He was what he was, dispassionate or maybe she simply didn't understand his passion.

She conceived the following summer and she died a bit inside.

He no longer approached her, confined to a different home in a different part of his lands.

He refused to see her, refused to speak, refused to love.

But he had never loved her.

She lost the naïve hope that he loved her, even a small amount.

She lost the light in her eyes, the softness of her smile, the caring nature within her.

She was what he made her. A softer, smaller, more broken reflection of him.

The child was born. A son, an heir, an heir soon to be disowned.

He was his father's son, temperament and physique almost exactly the same.

Perhaps she was to blame for the temperament.

She never showed him love, couldn't love what destroyed the last bit of his regard.

She turned to watch the ceremony again. She was beautiful, strong, and wise, she would produce the heir he desired. What would become of her, of their son, of her purpose? It mattered not to him, his vassal informed her of their Lord's desires, and as she stared at the small retainer she wondered if it was indeed pity in his eyes. She nearly laughed at the change in him, never had he shown an interest in her well-being, never.

She understood, accepted her fate, her purpose had been served, and now she was to be discarded like some broken tool. Her son, their son, the child, helpless toddler she knew not of his fate and she felt the twinge of maternal love stir within her, she would believe that he would live a full life even if it was not to be.

Ceremony finished the Lord and his new Lady stood prepared to retire for the night, she was to leave after they retired nothing to be taken with her. No comb, nor garment, she would be provided for at her new home. Home, it was such a foreign word to her now. Nothing was home if it did not contain his presence, but she had no choice.

Forgone, left behind, and as the carriage moved forward in the night something within her fell off its shelf and broke where it had been tucked away for years, she began to sob. Sob for what she once was and never would be again, tears for the son who would never know affection, cries for the one who stripped her of her gentleness, and she cried at the fate of the one who replaced her. The carriage continued to move, forward, farther and farther from the home she wanted to share with him, away from the one who molded her into who she was, away from the one who would suffer the most from her departure. It is always the innocent that truly suffer, he was innocent, and he would follow the same path as his parents. He would never find love. He might not even live through the night.

The carriage slowed as dawn approached, her tears long since dried. She knew what was to come at dawn. She had been a fool, foolish, foolish child to believe that it would work. Now it was too late to wonder the what-ifs, too late to wish for change. The noose was tied around her neck, a noose of her own design, a noose she willingly wrapped around her neck, and she was ready to hang.

The first time she saw him she found him beautiful and they had returned to where she began her life with him, there it began and there it would end.

She looked around her, not much had changed. Old gnarled trunks reaching far into the sky arms outstretched and waiting for an embrace never to be felt, leaves dancing in the breeze tempted to fall of their branches and bath the earth. The ground was dark and brown, grass worn away in places from all the feet that walked and packed the earth, centuries of feet, and her feet had once walked here before, small dirty feet.

Dew coated the grass, the scent of moist earth reached her nose and she wondered what he smelled when he walked while the dew was fresh, what her son would smell when he wandered through the dew.

She kneeled down on the ground, waiting. She accepted her fate, she failed her lord, she did not provide him the heir he desired, she tempted him, tainted his reputation and for that she would be punished. Before she breathed her last she prayed that he would be allowed to live, knowing that he wouldn't.

For a hanyou would never be a suitable heir.

There are probably as many meanings for happiness as there are hearts
But we have too much
So we lose sight of it

Rurutia - Lost Butterfly