author's note: fwip. alois has a fiancée now. this is the prologue to a collection of vignettes; cielois, claudexalois, sebbyxciel, sebbyxclaude, cielxlizzie, aloisxlizzie, aloisxhannah, hannahxclaude, everything. XD
Sometimes there are things you have to know better than to ask.
The young Earl of Trancy had a fiancée. The match was made in secret, by his butler, of all people, after Alois had inherited the estate. She was a quiet girl; rarely said a word even when spoken to, and she never could make eye contact.
She was much darker in appearance than her fiancé; her hair and eyes were almost the same color, a deep shade of mahogany, very close to black. She was small, and lighter than most. He would entertain guests, and she would slip along the walls as if a ghost, with the phantasmagoric air her frailty lent her.
She never interrupted his reveries.
Her fiancé was better at playing the piano than he was at anything else. She would listen to him practice through the walls for hours on end, every other day or so. He never allowed anyone in his music room, not even Claude.
Sometimes he sang while he played. Sometimes he screamed.
Once he asked her to sit and listen while he played. It had been a bright, sunny day, and he had ordered all the windows covered up. Hannah was bleeding when she led the girl to his room. The woman and her master's fiancée never spoke, but there was a mutual understanding and a melancholy between them which never asked for more than glances.
He played something with an energy marked by anger first, a very long piece, then segued into something he later told her he had written himself. As he played his work, he cried; the tone was funereal.
She chose her words carefully when he took her to his bedroom afterwards. She listened, heart aching, to his stream of consciousness, and held him as if her arms could protect him. It was a futile gesture; the boy and the girl both knew the world was waiting at the door with vicious hunger, and would devour them both.
She did love him, she knew that much. He was an angel; not fallen so much as thrown down from Heaven with his wings ripped away from him.
She couldn't hate Claude. She only dreaded the inevitable and watched. She sang her fiancé to sleep when he ordered the demon to leave, listened and cried with him and held him until the hysteria ended and his breathing had slowed enough for her to slip out his door. She was always there when the demon's obedience wasn't enough, to be his mother, his sister, his lover, his slave.
He never told her much. She was the last resort of his desolation and desperation. What he told her was shattered-glass strands of what he felt, wanted, needed. He told her things that only his sleepless, watery eyes could say to anyone else.
He never knew her grief; when they spoke he was never really lucid enough, not where they were. His mind was somewhere else. He only knew, the mornings after, that she had been weeping; he would pull her away from the breakfast-table every time with a violence of movement for the benefit of either his servants or his pride. Sometimes he would would whisper his apologies through lips brushed against her face; sometimes he would tell her not to be pathetic, she was his and his things had to be beautiful. Never broken or dirty.
She feared for him.
She pieced together his past from mentions he made when he talked to her, from his fears, and from what he said in his nightmares while he slept. She knew the terms of his contract with Claude because he had told her.
It wasn't that she didn't understand; she knew why he had, rationally and emotionally. She was only ever afraid of his destruction.
She never wanted anything more than for him to have always had fantasies instead of nightmares, and aspirations other than revenge.
But a close second was the wish that she could save him.