A/N: I own nothing that you recognise.
Aspiration
She lives in a world of whitewashed timber and pale pink promises, a world where breathing is not merely a necessity, it is life and it is love and it is the heart. She dreams of fairytales and escaping the stained glass windows which romanticise and colour everything that is not to be. She wants peace and fragility and everything she has dreamt of and wanted since her childhood. She wants to be everything she sees in others, everything she sees in Victoire.
Victoire.
Victory.
Victorious.
Empowered.
Immune.
That is what she sees and thus she believes, for in Lucy's world, there is nothing beneath the surface except reverie, and as Victoire has everything, she cannot possibly dream in the same way as her. She cannot dream of knights in gleaming helmets on steeds of elegant black – for that is the way the French dream, and thus the way Lucy must imagine it to be – because her saviour has already found her. Victoire cannot dream because she is complete.
Nightmares come and go for her. They are dreams in reverse. They do not serve to drive her on, they make her think of 'but' and 'but' is forbidden from her vocabulary. 'But' is weakness. 'But' is the first stage of admitting that dreams might not come true, and Lucy knows they must. They must because that is how life is made. It is made of colour first of all, but dreams can be black and white too and so dreams are the consistent, the constant, the always and forever.
He is a constant too. A lingering shadow in the midst of her imagination, he never moves. She could be running through a field and the shaded outline of him beside her will swerve into place. Curled up with a book in the corner of a room where books form the furniture and where light has no source, he will find his way around her, hands on hands and hips and chest and cheeks and legs and everywhere. Trapped in a box, the edges closing in, the corners compressing, he will be there: a disembodied smile flashing before her eyes.
He never hears her scream.
She never lets him.
That would be weak and she cannot be weak for weakness is not forgiven. Weakness is not Victoire. She is not Victoire but she could be and so she must be strong. She must hold her head high and she must run through life like she is running on cloud, past angels and raindrops and stars which stare after her in wonder and pale beside her. She must be strong because when he breaks, when she breaks him – when Victoire breaks him – Lucy must be there to gather the pieces and cradle them in her fingers and settle down to fix them back together.
She does not expect it to happen soon. She does not want it to. She is yet to be perfect. She is yet to be Victoire and even further from surpassing her. So instead, Lucy sets her dreams upon the nightstand for another day, because what is love if not a dream, and what is a dream if not a hope, and what is hope if not the future?
This is not the end.
She will win.
She will be Victoire.
Only…better.
A/N: What did you think? Reviews are