Summary:
Bellona longs to fulfill her demanding mother's expectations, and become the bloody war-wreaking incarnation she's named for. If only her irritating twin brother would stop hogging the spotlight as heir... Ah, well, 'accidents' can always be arranged, can't they? [Fem!Bel] [AU] [Semi-SI]
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Disclaimer:
I don't own KHR! or the cover picture.
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Reviews:
Thank you, 'Theta-McBride', for your review. It was actually originally a picture of Fem!Squalo and Fem!Belphegor together. :]
Thank you, 'Caterina', for your review. Sorry, but probably not. It sounds too close to Catalina. xp Plus, would Bel really have many friends… like, at all?
Thank you, 'awesome', for your review. I'm glad that you like it!
Thank you, '0Oo The River Witch oO0', for your review. I'm really grateful for the suggestion; it does fit better. :]
Thank you, VanillaMilkshake18', for your review. Yup, correct!~
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Quotes:
"Silence is golden, and duct tape is silver. So to change silver into gold, all you have to do is duct tape someone's mouth shut. Simple, see?" - Anonymous
"I both made the knife-fighting team, and I got cut. If only love were so easy to understand." -Jarod Kintz
"A weapon is only as good as it's wielder." - Anonymous
"As long as I hold it as long as I use it, the knife lives, lives in order to take life, but it has to be commanded, it has to have me to tell it to kill, and it wants to, it wants to plunge and thrust and cut and stab and gouge, but I have to want it to as well, my will has to join with its will. I'm the one who allows it and I'm the one responsible." - Patrick Ness
Eventually, of course, as the twins matured, they begin much more violent and malicious warfare, er, squabbles, with the excuse of sibling rivalry.
Extreme sibling rivalry.
(And no, that's not a reference to a certain boxer in Namimori, Japan.)
(... Seriously, it's not.)
(No, really, why don't you believe me?)
At age 2, they had studiously learnt their respective caretaker's home language, in order to better fluently curse each other out.
At age 3, they had diligently practiced the skills of lying and misleading, in order to better flawlessly frame each other for petty (or not so petty) crime.
At age 4, they had laboriously picked up on gardening and cooking lessons, in order to better trick each other into ingesting personally crafted poisons.
At age 5, they had fervently refined the art of weaponry and hand-to-hand-combat, in order to better throttle and slash each other with cutlery.
But for now, at age 1, Bellona and Rasiel are content to simply sit in their seats, assigned directly across each other, and glare silently (invisibly, too, on account their hair covering their eyes and all), viciously stabbing their food and exchanging mental threats through their 'twin telepathy.'
'Look at that stupid hair of yours, I can't believe you're related to me,'' Bellona furiously thinks, murderously trying to shred up her 'gourmet infant formula', which is really just overpriced mush, in her (not-so-humble) opinion.
(Because who's ever heard of humble royalty?
It's an oxymoron, as anyone who has met royalty very well knows.)
'Hah, but I'm heir, no matter what your mother says. It's already been confirmed. And you don't even have the Veles name, plus you're a girl; how can you possibly rule Sangevechi?'
'I will knife you one day. It will be with a rusty knife, but I will drag it smoothly through your stomach, and I hope so very much that you will remain conscious enough to see your organs spill out like a collapsed piñata.'
'You… you...' Rasiel searches around in his head for the worst insults he knows, and strings them together; that is to say, the insults he remembers his father heaping upon the eternally waif-like servants scurrying around their half of the Castle. 'You inferior weakling idiot!'
'Childish yблюдок [bastard],' is her spitefully derisive reply, having the unnatural advantage of the strange dreams and instinctively remembered not-learned knowledge, which is most helpful in supplying retorts.
She could've added something more eloquent or subtle as a needling dig under his identical skin, but concise and clear packs more of punch between immaturely-developed, hotheaded children.
Which, well, she also is.
And Rasiel probably doesn't know the snatches of Russian Catalina oft mutters around her, and as they're monozygotic twins, the chances of him actually being a bastard are essentially nonexistent.
Also nonexistent is her actually caring about any of that.
Some part of her and he just automatically bristles when brushing against each other's presence, on edge, conflict carved into their cores.
They are destined to be either mortal enemies, it appears, or antagonistic rivals.
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Okay…
… so maybe there isn't really a 'twin telepathy', but still.
Even without any special ESP powers, their malevolent intentions and heavy dislike towards each other are evident, or at least, evident enough to take notice of after a half-hour of oppressive silence and malevolent plate-stabbing.
It is probably why their sire and dam hasten to separate them, before a messy scandal roiling in politicking can erupt because of the heir and heiress attempting to strangle each other with the tablecloth, under the intently watchful gazes of the born-bred backstabbers and betrayers and beguilers all nicely lined up in their seats.
The last Sangevechi king was Alexandru's father, King Sorin, who had been firm allies and genial friends with Lord Iosif, Catalina's uncle.
That was how the marriage agreement had come into being.
And there, in the Royal Castle's official dining room, at the sturdy wooden relic serving as bearer of all centerpieces, was where the plot to assassinate King Sorin had been concocted, right under the straight nose of the King himself.
Many terrible and great and terribly great things have been orchestrated by powerful people sitting around a meal together.
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Ushering her daughter away from the dining table as soon as possible after being alerted of the increasingly dark aura wreathing the two siblings, Catalina scans the room with wary eyes.
She originally plans to introduce Bellona to a 'friend'; a publicized party with mutual cease-fires on all sides is the perfect place to meet, if only she can find her 'friend,' who she isn't certain will come in the first place.
A publicized party is the perfect place to muck things up grandly, but oh, well.
Catalina holds many virtues and many more sins, one of the former being her utter lack of hesitance to take risks she judges a fair trade-off for the possible rewards reaped.
"Oy! Alley Cat, are you scraping by okay? Still alive and kickin', I see. Funny, I would've thought that you'd have knocked off that hubby of yours by now. All bark and no bite, killer kitty-cat?" someone calls in Russian across the room, drawing nearer, their rough, husky voice easily casting over the heads of the milling, gently murmuring crowd.
Having hurriedly throwing up a hasty sound-barrier illusion the moment she hears the first 'Oy', the Queen twitches with minor irritation at the rest of the words her 'friend' spews, but nonetheless plasters on a purposely unconvincing smile and tiredly moves to greet the speaker.
"Yes, yes I am still alive and kicking, Алина. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't refer to me by that moniker; I am a Queen now, and such fanciful nicknames are out of line. And you know very well why I can't 'knock off' Alexandru. Everyone would naturally suspect me, and the power vacuum would invite anarchy. Which is the exact same reason why he hasn't 'knocked off' me yet, so it goes both ways, see?"
Alina of the Giegue Famiglia laughs: a raspy, grating chuckle, like uneven boulders replacing cogs, groaningly pushing past, repeating in each rotation.
It is made all the more grating to Catalina by the clear scorn she detects, sprinkled in like nails hammered into the boulders, scoring shallow gouges into the already rocky surfaces.
She then bends down to examine Bellona assessingly, with the ease of practice from evaluating new recruits.
Both are evaluated, after all, with the same clinical categorization as one might evaluate a calf they intend to squeeze every drop of profit out of.
Most of those new recruits end up dead or dying after a month in the brutal training of the Giegue, so getting attached right from the start is a bad decision, if only in terms of psychological disadvantage.
The harsh wintry terrain of their native Russia helps filter out some of the weaker ones, too.
For in the Giegue, they have one motto, and one motto only: The cunning survive, but the fierce will thrive.)
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Bell stares curiously up at the heavily scarred face of the strange woman her mother had just earlier answered, tilting her head, absently noting the butterfly-whisper of her bangs slipping slightly back, not enough to show her eyes, but enough to brush the very edges of the rounded tips of her ears.
And by 'heavily scarred', she means that there is barely a square centimeter of skin where a slash, laceration, burn, acid mark, or other injury reminder isn't glaringly present.
The clearly Russian woman possesses pale skin, a lithe frame, and a chin-length bob of blond hair, as well as a crooked nose, probably from a brutal and bloody break that later failed to heal properly.
Dark grey eyes, almost black, stare right back at her, with an unspoken dare to make the first move.
Bellona has long since learned to read her mother, a skill that is more a survival trait than anything else, honed by ruffled incidents when she was more of a snit than her usual simmering resentments and grudges.
Judging by the obviously fake smile on her face, and the way she'd answered with reprimands and an uneasy sort of mixed angry fear and respect, her mother knows the woman well, but doesn't want to be publicly associated with her as being on good terms.
She also isn't on privately good terms, either, since her subconscious reaction includes anger and fear; the respect is affirmed by the woman's uncaring and almost sneering nonverbal response, like she knows that her mother dislikes her but doesn't dare to act on that dislike.
Which is... important, because that means the woman is basically untouchable by her mother, through the option of overpowering her, or having something potentially very devastating against her.
Or both.
Her mother has been the pinnacle of strength for her so far, as the strongest influence on her life, and to find someone intimidated by her, no, to find someone that can intimidate her, is astonishing.
An astonishing calm that unfurls over her, focusing her mind and all the carefulness remembered (but not-learned), nudged by the push of cautioncautioncaution from the Voice.
Behind her, Bell can feel her mother shifting, with a rustle of silks, from her ivory-and-cream pearl-beaded latticework gown that drapes over her striking curves in all the casually flattering ways possible, but she makes no further move to stop the confrontation, so Bellona assumes that it has a reassuringly certain prediction of ending up okay.
She takes the dare, the boldness perhaps an inheritance of her mother's personal willingness to take risks.
"Are you strong, Miss Stranger? You look strong," she chooses to start off with as her first move, using the Romanian her mother mainly practices with her, confiding those sentences with the innocently solemn honesty that was so typical of children, flattery a notion picked up from the not-learned remembrances.
So typical, and therefore, typically expected of children.
Because children are stupid, right?
Because children ask probing questions without any intention behind them, right?
Because children are just curious, and therefore perfectly harmless, right?
Especially a one-year-old in a cute haircut with delicate features and adorably scaled-down clothes, precocious though she may be said to be.
The stranger (Alina, is it?) doesn't so much as blink, to her credit.
In answer, she merely tilts her head slightly in turn and scrutinizes Bell even more closely.
"What makes you say that?" Alina queries, switching over to match her Romanian.
Her voice, Bell observes with a diligent ear for detail, is gravelly, surprisingly deep, and rather hoarse.
That, she decides, is most likely from the multitudes of faded cuts around Alina's neck.
"You have lotsa scars, Мiss Stranger, and lots of muscles, too. You also just… seem powerful. Kinda like Mother. Mother's really pretty and doesn't look strong, but she definitely feels strong. I mean, you also look pretty, just not as much as Mother. Oh, and she can do that cool trick with the purple fire. Can you do that too, Мiss Stranger?" she continues 'innocently,' linking in another series of leaps in logic, partly what feels like a mind that's just so fluid and slick and fast to grasp, partly more not-learned remembrances of identifying clues, partly connected by dream-mentions of puzzle-games and Sudoku and crosswords all spread out over her starched white sheets, the only entertainment she's allowed as her visions fails and her bones hollow out, only to be replaced each day with larger and larger amounts of what feels like heavy lead weighing her stick-thin body downdowndown-
Alina throws back her head and suddenly laughs again, sounding quite guttural in Bell's perception, breaking her out of her vivid replay.
Straightening up, she abruptly ruffles Bell's blond hair, with a clearly unfamiliar motion that would've seemed awkward on anyone else, if it hasn't been for Alina's borderline-arrogant well of self-confidence, and turns to Bell's mother, still hanging minorly behind.
"Smart little thing you've got there, eh, Alley Cat? And no matter if you're Queen of a country or the trash under someone's feet, you'll stay as Alley Cat, our little killer kitty-cat, to the me and the Giegue."
Her eyes harden coldly in reminder, glinting like the sharpened edge of a flintstone crusted over with harshly jagged ice crystals.
"Once you're in the Cosa Nostra, you're not getting out. Even after death, the Cosa Nostra have a claim on your children, and your children's children, and your children's children's children. It never ends, Alley Cat, and trying to cut ties only works one way.
"You can't forget history, you know, and the Volkovs have had a very long history with the Giegue and the other Russian Famiglias. Royalty always need their 'cleaners' to pick up after 'em and finish their dirty work, don'tcha realize?
"This kiddo of yours has got some promise, though. I might just swing by sometime and teach 'er a thing or two. What's your name, brat?"
Bell blinks upon being addressed, having been meticulously committing every bit of the conversation (which she actually mostly understands, except for words her mother and servants have never used, and which have never appeared in the advanced books she sneaks, because she is a genius, and she does remember everything) to memory for musing over at a later date, and then scowls, indignant despite all the 'propriety' and 'keeping calm' lessons her mother has preached to her.
Here is where her natural pride and nurtured aggression will cost her in the future, unless she manages to lid her temper tighter.
"I'm not a brat! I'm Bellona Volkov!"
Smirking, a rather gruesome sight when one factors in all of the old scars that are required to to stretch tightly over her face in order to achieve said action, Alina crouches down again and grabs the sides of Bell's head with her hands.
The sensation of rugged calluses against her soft porcelain skin is an intensely new and foreign, but not necessarily unwelcomed, one.
"Oh, yeah? Bellona, Bellona, Bellona... a Roman goddess of sorts, I believe? My, my, and with a last name like yours. Well, I'm no Мiss Stranger, neither. Call me Алина, with the proper inflections. And you'll stay a brat until I say otherwise, brat."
Alina pauses and focuses intently, zeroing in on where she quite accurately estimates Bel's eyes will be, gauging the distance through ease of prior experience.
Her tone, when she next speaks, is considerably less teasingly light.
"Tell me, little bell; what makes you angry? What makes you want to live? Where is... your will?"
Bell needs no time to think of an answer.
She answers promptly, with a vehement, vicious, curling snarl.
"Seeing the infuriating face of my brother makes me want to stab him until he can't move anymore. He stole the position of heiress from me, and father's just as bad; mother says so. I want to live until I can be satisfied with their deaths, preferably by my hand, but I'm not picky. If mother wants the pleasure of doing it herself, I'd yield, of course."
(Funnily enough, Bell never seems to realize how odd it is that she has such a huge hatred of her brother and father, and yet adores her mother above all else.
A lie undiscovered is a truth. A series of lies undiscovered in a reality.
It also never strikes her that the thought of saying anything other than the complete and utter truth hasn't ever crossed her mind when answering Alina.
Speaking softly with a big stick is alright, but better would be speaking coaxingly with a sharp understanding of what makes people 'tick.')
Giving another sharply macabre grin, Alina stands up and slips a cool piece of metallic something into Bell's hand, prying open the reflexively drawn pudgy fists with surprisingly gentleness.
"Now aren't you just a bloodthirsty little kitten? Like mother, like daughter. And every little kitten needs to sharpen their baby claws, don't they? Don't worry; I plan on sticking around in your future to hone your fangs and see what comes of it all. I am your крестная мать, after all. Let's see if I can train another killer kitty-cat, hmm, Catalina?"
Without further goodbye, Alina saunters off, parting the crowd with nothing more than her sheer presence, and disappearing easily in spite of that.
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Catalina frowns deeply at the antics of her reluctant childhood 'friend', and tightens her grip on Bellona's shoulders, before rapidly loosening both her fingers and her frown.
'No creases or frown lines, remember,' she chides herself. 'Illusions can only hide so much for so long, darling.'
Speaking of illusions…
After lifting the sound barrier illusion, Catalina steers her daughter through the mingling masses, showing off the newly recognized princess, all the while thinking so ferociously that the concentrated irritation, though not physically shown, may as well be tangible in the air nonetheless.
"That irritating Алина never does change, does she? First time I see her in years, and she just declares herself as Bellona's godmother, for St. Daniel's sake! What am I to do? Go and change the records simply to cater to her whims? Well, it's not like I can do anything else. And her interest in my daughter is worrying… Bellona's going to be Queen after me, and that's that. But if she gets dragged into that whole messy affair of the Cosa Nostra, and indeed she very much might, considering Алина's position, her possible influence, and her worryingly strange sense of humor…"
Bellona is quiet, obediently moving as she directs, stepping gracefully like she's trained her.
Except.
She's a bit...
Too quiet.
Glancing down, Catalina finds her daughter's attention wholly absorbed into whatever it is that that wretched, infuriating, may-she-be-bitten-by-snakes-and-devoured-by-the-wolves-of-Fenrir Giegue woman has gifted to her.
She stifles a flinch.
The blond child, the oddly clever and quick-to-catch-on child, is running thin, spidery fingers over a curved and serrated blade, the handle fitting just right in her small hands, a tiny throwing knife becoming a perfectly-sized dagger for her size, gazing enraptured at the weapon with unnervingly fascinated eyes.
Catalina would've been even more despairing if she could hear Bellona's thoughts right then.
'… So sharp… to be strong, huh…'
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