What Could Have Been
Sometimes, Cassiopeia allowed herself to be lost in the fantasies of what could have been. She would close her eyes and imagine what would be different, how it would be different. She pictured her father, his rare smile of pride, her mother, whom she had never met, with hair as red as Kat's but eyes like the midday sky. She wondered if her father would have been happy, had her mother not died during childbirth. She thought that, perhaps, her father would have smiled more often, laughed more easily.
She missed the way the wrinkles by his eyes would shift as his grin widened, the sound of his laughter like a running brook, steady and warm. She wondered if it had sounded brighter when her mother had still been alive.
She wondered whether their father would have chosen a different path, if he would have stayed loyal to Noxus until his dying breath. She wondered if her mother would have let him.
It was as inevitable as the sun's rising that, while lost in the maybes of never, Cassiopeia's thoughts would turn to the east. There, in the dry, arid deserts of Shurima, was where she found herself lost in the most. She could imagine the heat baking her skin as clearly as if it had been only yesterday. As though it hadn't been years since she had last walked upon those magical, horrible sands.
She often wondered if she should have stepped foot in that ancient land. With a sigh, Cassiopeia would allow herself to fall just a little deeper into the sea of lost possibility, of opportunities foregone and forgotten. She drank deep from the depths of regret, and wondered why she drove a blade into a woman's heart, why she had laughed as the light of trust left those bright, clear blue eyes. She wondered if she should have plunged into the darkness headlong, without stopping to see who she would leave behind. If this new skin, forged in the blood of another and the venom of cursed magic, was a fair exchange for what she had lost.
There was no changing the past. She knew—oh, she knew. Indulging this train of thought was useless, unnecessary. If she were to turn back time, she wouldn't change her actions. She would choose this path again, regardless of the what-if's that would haunt her.
But sometimes, sometimes, the what could have been was so enticing, so alluring, she couldn't help but wonder, if only for a few moments, if she should have.