Title: The Princess's Smile
Rating: PG
Warnings: Fluff and cuteness.
Summary: The High Senior Wizard of Ceres is a strange youth; he never smiles, never laughs, and never cries. What will it take to break him out of his shell?
Author's Notes: This is a side story to my AU 'verse, The Wizards of Ceres and The Heralds of the White God. It's set in the past, approximately 15 years before the opening of Wizards.

The nursery was small, and crowded with all the paraphernalia necessary to infants; there was hardly room in there for just the two of them, the wet-nurse and Satsuki herself. She had argued, in the months before the birth, against the use of the bigger, more formal receiving room; more appropriate to the august rank of royal heir it might be, but a room that large and stately was impossible to heat properly. Babies didn't need rank and station, but they did need warmth; especially in the first year of life when they were most susceptible to sudden, deadly chills.

When the royal heir had been born a girl, the argument abruptly ended. And when childbed fever had carried the queen mother away forever, the whole palace had been plunged into an unaccustomed gloom and silence. As the palace's senior nursery attendant, she had taken over the new princess, and her arrangements, without opposition.

King Ashura had fallen into a deep gloom since the death of his wife, a depression most unlike him. He had not once come to the nursery, reduced or not, to see his new daughter. Indeed, from what Satsuki had heard from the other palace servants, he had locked himself in his chambers and refused to attend to even the basic matters of state.

Satsuki sat by the window seat, mechanically rocking the sleepy young princess in her arms, and felt the unnatural hush of the usually bustling palace around her. There had been no balls, no parties, no revelry since the night of the queen's death; joyous anticipation had turned to deepest mourning.

All the palace - indeed, all the capital - was caught in a fearful hush, tip-toeing around the tragedy of their queen's death; not daring to disturb their king and invoke his wrath, terrified of what might become of them if the king did not rouse from his melancholy. People spoke in hushed whispers if they chanced to meet at all; most of the nobles stayed to their own quarters, and those required by their duties to be out and about scurried from post to post with their heads down.

Ashura would not even grant audience to his court wizards - the handful of trusted advisors and bright prodigies that had come to be called "Ashura's stable." He would not even suffer the presence of his ward, his brightest and most valued student - and more than any other, that seemed an ill omen for the fate of their country.

She was startled out of her musings by a soft knock on the door to her chamber; she hadn't expected any visitors. Somewhat warily, she rose to her feet, her back protesting the extra weight of the baby as she leaned over and tucked the tiny girl into her elaborately decorated cradle. "Come in," she called as she straightened.

The door swung open, revealing a figure so pale and ethereal that for a witless moment Satsuki wondered if the queen's ghost still haunted the castle, hovering around the daughter she'd only been able to hold for a day. She blinked hard, and the image quickly resolved itself into that of a slender young man in white, with fair skin and hair so light that it almost matched the white robe he wore. The only hints of color on him were the bright blue eyes that regarded her solemnly.

"I came to see the princess," he said softly, his voice quiet and uninflected as always.

"Yes, of course," Satsuki said, brusque tone covering her moment of uneasiness. She turned aside from the door, gesturing for him to come in and backing away towards the window

It was hard to think of Fai has a grown man, although he had recently passed his third decade. He still looked - and felt - like a teenager, with gawky limbs just a little too long for his body, as though he hadn't grown into them yet. Time was gaining on her in this harsh northern climate, but sometimes it seemed like Fai would be a child forever. But perhaps all parents thought that of their children, unwilling to accept the reality of seeing them grow up.

Fai, the king's ward, her first charge as royal nursemaid. Serious and unsmiling, poised and self-contained, he named himself Fai Flowright after the long-disused clan name of King Ashura's family line. None of the court gossip knew quite what to make of Fai's reaction to the queen's death; it was well known that his relationship with the queen had been... strained, at best. They had managed to be polite to each other in public - most of the time - but it was no secret that there was no love lost between them.

Many reasoned that he must be secretly rejoicing to have the queen, his hated rival for the King's affection, out of the way once and for all. There were some even darker whispers that wondered if he had used some magic, some secret potion, to arrange or hurry the queen's childbed death. One particularly imaginative scullery boy had opined in Satsuki's hearing that Fai must have used magic to change the baby's sex to a girl, so that she would prove no rival to him for the throne. After all, if Ashura refused to take another wife, then surely the throne would someday fall to him by default. If any of these rumors had reached Ashura's ears - and he always had an uncanny knowledge of what was going on in the palace - then perhaps it was no wonder that he had banished his ward from his presence.

Satsuki growled under her breath, glowering out the frosted and lead-cased window at the slate roofs of the city beyond. The palace was full of fools; no one who knew Fai could entertain such idiotic notions for more than the instant it took to dismiss them. Satsuki had never known a more gentle man, one more generous with the servants and kind to the working animals of the stable and court. The pain he'd known in his own life, far from making him heartless or cruel, had taught him to be deeply empathetic to the pain of others.

The problem was that if you didn't know Fai, didn't take the time to get past his shy reserve and see the giving heart beneath, then his blank, unchanging, almost cold expression could be quite offputting. He rarely raised his voice, and never smiled; no hint of what he was feeling inside ever showed in his face, or his eyes. His exceptional beauty - combined with his unchanging expression - had led many to compare him to a living marble statue, or a changeling carved out of ice.

Only she - and to some extent Ashura - understood why he was the way he was, and in some ways Satsuki felt keenly responsible for her failure. She knew, intellectually, that it wasn't her fault; that the tragedy and horrific abuse that young Fai had suffered left scars that could never fully heal. She'd seen it before, young boys and girls who'd seen their families die before their eyes and came out the other side blank-face, empty-eyed, unable to laugh or to cry.

She'd done well with Fai, she thought, to bring him out of that, teach him to be mindful of himself and others... teach him the right way to act in company, the right polite things to say and do. But she couldn't fool herself into pretending that she was the expressive, emotive type herself; she never saw the point in smiling when it wasn't necessary, or making a fool of yourself over some passing jest.

Perhaps she should have tried to teach him to smile as well, rewarded him each of the infrequent times that he laughed. Perhaps if she hadn't been so knotted up inside, bitter rage mixing with foggy grief over the loss of her own children that had driven her to the palace to beg a job as a servant. Perhaps if she had tried to be a mother, and not just a caretaker... but it was too late now.

Fai crossed the room on silent footsteps and stood by the cradle, giving her a glance that spoke of silent uncertainty.

"You can look at her," Satsuki allowed, then warned, "But don't try to touch her or pick her up, not unless I say it's all right."

Fai nodded, and knelt beside the cradle, folding his long slender arms across the lip and resting his chin on them. His bright blue eyes reflected fragments of the nursery's low lighting as he stared down at the baby, his expression revealing nothing of his thoughts. The infant princess stared back up at him, making soft uncertain noises to herself as she tried to decide what to make of this large stranger.

After a few minutes, Fai lifted his head, and his gloved hand traced a glowing sigil in the air. It hung there, glowing, before it resolved into a shower of brightly colored bubbles. They floated into the air above the crib, bobbing and bumping each other gently, and Sakura cooed and reached out for the brightly colored globes. As her chubby hand bumped one, they burst into a flutter of brilliantly colored butterflies, which flapped madly for a few seconds before dissolving into glitter.

Sakura gurgled with laughter, thumping her fists and feet against the blankets as she wriggled futilely, trying to reach up towards the shower of lights. She met Fai's bright blue eyes with her own milky, cornflower colored ones, smiling.

Fai's expression didn't change, though, and gradually Sakura's smile faltered; she whimpered, and then her face bunched up and she began to wail. Fai sat backwards, his eyes widening in startlement, and he looked at Satsuki in appeal. "Why is she crying?" he asked. "I didn't do anything to her."

Satsuki sighed and brushed him aside, picking the baby up and bouncing her slightly as she crooned soothingly. "There, there," she reassured the baby, and then said over her shoulder to Fai, "You didn't do anything. That's the problem. You didn't smile."

Fai looked at the baby, and then back at her. "I don't understand," he said. "She's just a baby. Why does she care whether I smile or not?"
Satsuki sighed, and took the baby back to her window seat, gratefully letting her aching bones creak against the support. She wearily rocked Sakura as she thought about how to answer this question. How much interest could any teenage boy - young man - have in the feelings of an infant, let alone a female one?

"Babies are very sensitive, Fai," she said, eventually deciding just to be as honest as she could. There were few enough people she could take to about her craft, after all. "Much more so than you would think. Almost as soon as they're born they know to look into people's faces, and read their expressions. If the people around them smile, they smile. If the people around them cry, they cry."

"But why do they care?" Fai seemed to have trouble coming to grasp with this concept. "She doesn't even know who I am."

Satsuki shook her head, at a loss for how to explain how even the tiniest infant seemed so capable of learning. Sakura's cries were subsiding, and Satsuki creaked to her feet again in order to lay her back down in the crib. The baby's small features were still pinched and anxious, looking up into her face, and Satsuki wished she could summon a smile for the baby, but she seemed to have none left to give.

"Humans need love, from the moment they're born," she said tiredly. "If not from their mother or father, then from someone to take their place - aunts and uncles, grandparents, even an older brother or sister. Children need people to smile at them, to laugh, to love them and care for them, as much as they need food and water and warmth. If they aren't loved, then they will wither and die." Or else, she thought, they live, but they grow up silent and strange, never laughing or crying or feeling happy or sad at all. Like you.

Unexpectedly, Fai's head jerked up at her words, and she saw tears welling up in his cerulean eyes. "But that's horrible!" he cried. "She doesn't have a mother or a - or aunts or grandparents or anyone! What will happen to her if she has no family members to love her?"

"We can hope that her father will come out of his melancholy in time, that he will come to see her and develop the parental bond," Satsuki said, although there was not much hope in her voice. "If he does not - well, we'll just have to see… whether she thrives, or sickens."

"I won't let that happen," Fai said fervently; he pushed past her to the cradle, and taking a determined breath, he reached in and scooped the baby in his arms. He held her awkwardly at first, her fuzzy blanket-wrapped form bulky in his thin arms, as he tried to copy Satsuki's rocking motions. "I won't let anything happen to her, I won't! If she needs smiles and love, then I will give them to her. I will give her whatever she needs to grow up healthy and happy and strong!"

It was on the tip of Satsuki's tongue to snap at him, tell him to put the baby down before he dropped her. She stayed her words, however, watching the infant's reaction as Fai stared into her face, and she returned his gaze with equal intensity. His face was still, empty as always, and Satsuki wondered if he could really do what he promised. "Smile, Fai," she instructed him. "She wants you to smile for her."

Fai smiled.

It was a weak, strained thing at first, barely turning up the corners of his mouth and not reaching his eyes at all. At the sight of it, though, Sakura made a happy sound and reached out to grab her small hand onto his thumb. A wide, toothless grin split her face, and Fai's smile unconsciously widened in return.

It was a start, she decided.

~end.