Disclaimer: Vision of Escaflowne isn't mine. Shocking, I know.
Notes: So I'm working on my old fic Torushina again. It had only one chapter left to write, but I felt that the fic as a whole would benefit from a fresh coat of paint. While I do that, and to help me get back into the rhythm of things, I'll be writing little character-focused ficlets, set in the same AU-what-AU (aka movie verse plus Celena). I hope you enjoy them. If not, I'll take complaints in the usual manner. Random comments and constructive critiques are always appreciated! ;)
Summary: Pre-Torushina. Sometimes, Celena can almost fool herself into thinking that she's home. Other times, she knows better.
Celena still counted the doors down the hall to her bedroom. The habit had formed when she had first arrived at the Legranges' country house. Despite the many moons that had since passed, it was a ritual that she had yet to let go of, a quiet reminder not to get too comfortable. That this was not her home. Up the stairs. Left. Then one, two and three.
The doors were all identical and easily mixed—aged snakewood with elegant gold-trimmed panels in finely ornamented Torushinai High Style—and Signora Aldith, the mistress of the house, insisted that they be kept shut at all times. Celena had developed a trick or two to remember which one was hers without need for counting. And if she could memorise the time it took her to walk the hallway, or learn the exact angle in which the light from the ceiling fixtures hit the crystal doorknob, or even which of the Legrange family portraits hung on the opposite wall, then surely someone who had lived their entire lives in that house could do the same.
Yet her door was open and the clothes that she had left folded on top of her bed that morning were strewn across the floor, some with obvious tears.
"Ugh, Dami, not again..."
The Legranges had been close friends of Celena's mother and Dami was their youngest daughter. She would be considered an angelic child, if not for her penchant for going into Celena's room and playing with Celena's things. Celena had given up on trying to keep track of the number of times that she had caught the seven-year-old trying on scarves and dresses in front of the mirror, with Celena's favourite dragonpearl hairpin holding up her dark curls in a poor attempt to replicate the style that Celena favoured and poisoning every canary and small mammal in the area with the stench of too much perfume. More often than not, Celena ended up joining the game. The child's sisterly fascination would have been cute, were it not for the fact that Dami tended not to take very good care of the things that she handled.
Celena turned on her heel and stomped back down the stairs to the sitting room, deriving some satisfaction from the knowledge that her young culprit would hear her coming. The Legranges were away for the day, leaving their two daughters and Celena alone at the house. She was free to make as much noise as she liked. It was the perfect opportunity to ensure that Dami learnt her lesson about entering other people's rooms and leaving them a mess.
The girl's ears would be left ringing after the scolding that Celena had been building up to. Then she would take Dami to the kitchen and see about making some makushi milk sweetshakes for the both of them. After all, there was no point in traumatising the child.
Celena burst through the double doors to find little Dami leaning against her older sister Alis on the loveseat beneath the window.
"Dami! How many times have I asked you not to..."
Celena's voice faded to nothing as she took in the details of the scene before her: Dami, leaning against Alis, chasing shadows across the ceiling with sun rays reflected off of an old tin compass. Books open on the coffee table in front of the two, yellowed pages soaking in spilled tea from a tipped cup and bearing new illustrations, courtesy of Dami's pastels kit.
The sight of it almost made Celena dizzy.
"You little monster! What have you done?!"
Alis's head snapped up at Celena's shout. Dami sprung up to her knees, but her long dress tangled around her legs and tripped her before she could move further. Celena stalked up to her and grabbed her forearm, snatching her father's beaten compass. She inspected it for damage. Fortunately, it was made of sturdier stuff than the books.
The books...
"Celena, dear," Alis called, in far too reasonable a disposition for her current mood. "What's the matter? Why are you so upset?"
The books... Her father's journal and an annotated copy of his essays on the ancient civilizations of Gaea, either one an irreplaceable volume with deep sentimental value. Of all the books that had filled the Schezar estate library, these were the two that Celena had absolutely refused to part with, even as she and her brother Allen had been fleeing the house crumbling on top of their heads during the Black Dragon Clan's first invasion of Torushina.
"Ruined... Both of them, ruined..."
"Those old things? Were they yours?" Alis looked at Dami. Her younger sister was biting her lip, refusing to look up as she squirmed, trying to free herself from Celena's grip. Her guilt was plain. "Dami, you should know better than to take Celena's things. We've talked about this before. But, Celena, there's no need to be so upset. You're welcome to my father's library. There are plenty of other books there."
Celena glanced at the shelves lining the walls of the adjacent room, metrically filled with colour-synchronised bookcovers from floor to ceiling. She had perused them before and knew that they contained hundreds of literary classics of every nation on Gaea. From every teenage girl's favourite romance novel, The Marble Ship by Perot, to the experimental poetic anthologies of the monks of Freid, it was an impressive collection, but one that meant absolutely nothing to Celena. Her passion—like her father's—lay in ancient history and archaeology. She could not count the number of hours that she had spent sitting on Leon Schezar's lap while he read to her from the two books now washed in tea. He had spent a lifetime collating what little was known on the subject and furthering research into it. His journal and his book were the culmination of his life's work. Contrary to what Alis thought, they were not interchangeable with other books.
She shook her head, reminding herself that the Legrange girls could not understand the importance of Leon's old books. Dami and Alis had no way of knowing how much they meant to Celena, personally. Despite her best efforts, however, calm was slipping through her fingers.
"It's not the same thing, Alis. You can't replace... Jeture, Dami! What were you thinking, taking my things like that? Those books weren't yours to play with! How could you?!"
The longer Celena spoke, the harder her grip on the girl's arm got. Dami was on the verge of tears.
"I'm sorry, Cousin Celena... I won't do it again..."
But Celena was beyond listening, shaking the young girl as though to make sure that her words stayed in the child's head once and for all.
"How many times have I told you now? How many times?! Leave my things alone!"
"Cousin..."
"This was all I had of my father! This compass, this journal and his research—that was it and you ruined it!"
"Celena!" Alis stood from the loveseat, ready to make Celena let go of her sister if necessary. "Let go! You're hurting her."
It was like descending back into her body after taking a leave of absence, a feeling that Celena often had when she got carried away. She released Dami to her sister's care with a faint apology. Then she slipped the compass around her neck and grabbed her books before running for the door. All thoughts of sweetshakes and of making it up to Dami afterwards nothing but a hot desert breeze that had come and died unnoticed after shaking loose a few grains of sand.
"I just... don't touch my things again, Dami. Please. They're very important to me."
Sunny afternoons in her father's study, listening to him babble in fragmented ancient dialects from behind his desk, hunched over grainy shadowgraphs. Playing with her father and Allen on the garden after a rainy day, digging for treasures beneath her mother's rose bushes and tracking mud into the sunroom. Walking hand in hand with her mother to the University to have lunch with her father after his morning classes. Reading quietly at the back of the classroom. Playing with old bones in his office. Listening to him describe his latest expedition like a magnificent adventure.
Celena missed him so much. She missed her mother's indulgent smiles and her brother's peeved looks when he did not feel like putting up with her. She missed her home.
But she had none of those things any more. She was alone. Her father was dead, the same as her mother, and Allen was off somewhere she could not reach, having joined the Abaharaki rebels and their fight to defeat the Black Dragon. Her childhood home, if it could still be called such when all the people who had made it so were gone, was a ruin, buried somewhere underneath the giant crane that the Black Dragon had built to pierce through the heart of Torushina. If Celena ever returned there, she doubted that there would be anything left that she recognised.
Until the war ended and her broter returned, all that Celena had was up the stairs, to the left, three doors down, tucked inside a worn travel pack, behind a snakewood door that looked like all the others.
No matter how kind the Legranges had been in welcoming her and no matter how many little tricks Celena devised to make her bedroom her own, the truth remained: this was not her home.