Disclaimer: I don't own the story….Richelle Mead does. It's awesome though!
Chapter 4: Blindsided
Dimitri POV
Fighting. It was something I was perpetually used to.
Ever since I was a young child, my parents constantly fought and bickered around me. If you hadn't been living in the kingdom for very long, or if you had just started working in the castle, it didn't take long to find out or to be able to tell that they absolutely despised each other. Before my mother got forced into an arranged marriage with my father, she was in a relationship with a man I heard she truly loved and never got over. I don't really know if the man ever got over her completely either.
It didn't matter how many years went by, or how long they were married, my parents still managed to loathe each other. However, since my parents were the king and queen, they would not divorce. Often times, at night, I could hear my mother screaming at my father to divorce her and to let her go, but he wouldn't. He always gave her the reason that because he was king, divorcing his wife would make him look bad, so he said made her stay. Sometimes, I wondered if my father wouldn't divorce my mother because he loved her and wanted her to stay, if she had to much pride to admit it, if he was keeping her there as an obligation, or just because he hated her and wanted to make her suffer. Sometimes, I just thought he was too selfish to tell her cared and loved her. At least, in my mind, that is what I liked to imagine.
Sometimes, in rare occasions, it seemed like my father was making an effort towards my mother. Those minor attempts at repairing their relationship would usually cease after a few weeks though. He usually got tired of his efforts going nowhere with her. After all, their relationship had always been rocky and tumultuous, how could they manage to change it after all those years? How could something that stemmed from hate suddenly turn to love? Their relationship was dysfunctional and beyond repair and I always tried to dissect it and rationalize it in my head.
Although, I can remember one time vividly, the time my mother almost got free. It happened to be a day that my father was gone from the castle. He had to attend to business in the outskirts of the kingdom, something that he usually didn't involved himself with. People speculated that he was meeting a woman that he had had relations with in the past. My father didn't try to dispel the rumors, or hide it, but he also didn't deny it either. There was also whispers around the castle that my father was trying to get a rise out of my mother, to make her furious. At that point, I had decided that my father had definitely given up on my mother. It didn't stop him from trying to get certain reactions out of her though. What he didn't seem to take into consideration was how little she really cared of his whereabouts, and what he did at that point anymore. She would walk around the castle as if nothing had happened and maintained her daily duties as queen. The way my mother acted so non-chalant of the matter seemed to affect my father's emotions more than it did her. After several attempts to see if he could get a rise out of her, and those attempts failed, he started to take even lengthier trips. He came back so little and so infrequently that she slowly started to formulate an escape.
When my mother left during the night, no one was surprised. However, no one knew what her exact plans were, except for her head maid that had been her confidant for years. My father tortured her maid for a few days before she let my mother's plans slip and where she was heading. One thing that truly baffled everyone in the kingdom and castle was that she left me behind. Everyone expected her to take me with her, and so did I. I secretly told myself that I was confident that she would too. Sometimes when I get lost in thought, I think about it. I try and wrap my mind around it and try to understand why she would leave me there with him. Why wouldn't she take me with her? .
It wasn't long after my mother's maid told him where she was heading that my father found her and forced her back. She tried to run, she even abandoned her original plans, but in the end she couldn't out maneuver him. I'm not sure if he brought her back because of his reputation, because he didn't want her to think he left a simple woman out fool him, or that he was expected to as king. Since he was king, that meant no one went unpunished, not even the queen. He made sure of that.
I think that's where my trusting issues first began. After my mother left me, and I had a hard time understanding why she would leave me behind that that changed me in some ways. My personality started to shape shift and warp. I was force-fed by my father, people around me, by her initial plans to think she didn't care about me, and I put a wall up. Someday, I would be future king, and I couldn't let these type of things get to me. I needed to be strong; I couldn't let the betrayal of my own mother get to me. My mother was also changed the day he brought her back.
I heard she had succeeded in finding her old love from before my father and they were planning to run away together. He worked just outside the castle so that was where he was going to wait for her. He was just beyond the castle walls. She wasn't even close to making it to him. As soon as she was caught, and pulled away from him, he was killed right on the spot. My father made she saw it before she was turned away and put in the carriage to come back.
My mother became pretty much hollow after that point. She would sit in her room in the chair and would stare out the window with a vacant expression. If I was given permission to see her, she'd look right through me as if she didn't know me anymore. My father didn't visit her after she came back to the castle because he was disgusted with her. If there had ever been love in his heart for her, it quickly dissipated. The day he caught her definitely reinforced it to him that she didn't love him.
The people around the castle whispered that my father had finally won the battle. He had succeeded in trapping her. She couldn't escape. Also, because my mother refused to eat, she became incredibly thin in a short amount of time. It wasn't too long after that that she died. I wasn't permitted to go to the funeral. In fact, my father didn't attend the funeral either. He stayed upstairs in his bedroom. I heard that he had a woman up there with him, but it's something that I never managed to get confirmed or denied by him. He wouldn't tell me the truth. One of the servants swears she heard him laughing with someone.
For me, though, my mother's funeral was one of the worst days. As much as I loathed her for what she did to me, I also couldn't stop loving her deep inside my heart. As much as I wanted to hate her, I also wanted to remember her. I felt somewhat guilty with the way I had carried myself around her, even though she had abandoned me, didn't recognize me, and I couldn't get over that. I told myself that I was glad that my father told me I couldn't go, but on the day of her funeral, my opinion changed. I think my father knew it would too. My father had told the guards not to let me in. I can just remember standing there pounding my fists into their armor covered chests as they held me back telling me orders that my father gave them. At the time, I thought my father was a cruel man. He apparently had much distain for the woman that he was once married to, that he wouldn't even let his son say his final good byes to his mother at her funeral.
After her funeral, my father quickly made sure that I continued my training as prince, and it was pretty much like she had never existed. No one around the castle was permitted to speak of her because my father had made it forbidden. She became the forgotten queen that no one dared speak about.
As the years went by, my memories of her were slowly fading away, and my father began looking for a new queen. As much as I disliked my father and thought he had monstrous, cruel traits, I also saw him in a new light. I focused on how he was as a king. Although he was a strong, feared leader, he was also somehow loved. He was a confident, unwavering leader to our people. My personality started to shift into certain aspects of my father. I kept and molded the traits that I wanted to copy from him, and discarded the rest that I didn't need. I would resemble him, but I would never be like him. I told myself that over and over. I heard people whispering that I had an icy personality like he did. It didn't bother me what the people were saying. I knew I was nothing like him.
For one, I would never trap a woman that didn't love me into marriage. I would never force her into living a life of hate and contempt. To me, I couldn't fathom forcing someone to marry me, just to fight and bicker all the time. I had gotten enough of fighting just witnessing it and seeing it from my parents. Fighting with someone does not mean or prove that it's love. Usually, fighting just tears people apart. There will never be two people that can coexist in a world of fighting and eventually turn into love. That is why when my father suggested an arranged marriage to me when I was eligible, I turned it down as soon as I could. It still baffled me that my father would try to force something on me that didn't work out for him. He had been in the same situation before, too. You would think he knew better.
My decision caused an uproar with the council and the kingdom. It even made some people question my father's authority as king. Even I couldn't even believe that he allowed it, and I constantly even believed that he had something planned up his sleeve on the matter. I was still determined to forge my own path, and to be a different king. I wouldn't be like my father, and I would choose a wife out of love as long as I had time. She would choose me because she loved me, she would stay with me because she wanted to, and not because she was forced to. She wouldn't suffer and she wouldn't be a prisoner with no rights in her own home. She would have the life that my mother should have gotten as queen.
After a few more years of planning and preparing, my father took me outside of the castle to tell me that he was going to make me king. I had been wondering for a few months when he would decide to tell me. People that been speculating and gossiping about it for months. My father was getting older, and I had been of age to be king for a few years. Although, I had been ready to be king for a while, and the people on the council were telling him it was time for him to give up the throne, I just waited until he was ready to pass it on to me. I think my father was just trying to ride out being in the spotlight and being in absolute control for as long as he could. It was one of the few times in my life that learning extended patience managed to help me in a situation.
Even though my father gave me the throne, and I was made king, he still warned me of the councils plans of my future upcoming marriage. That wasn't the first time the council had tried to plan something behind our backs. I never told my father about their plans to try and get him to step down from the throne. I managed to convince them to let him rule because I knew he had been planning on making me king.
While my father was still in power, the council had managed to pass a new rule about marriage in the kingdom. By the end of the first year of being king or queen, if the king or queen are still not married, a marriage will be arranged for them by the council's choice that will help to benefit the kingdom positively. I always thought that the council passed that on my behalf because of the decision I had made a few years in the past. They must have thought that arranged marriages always help to benefit the kingdom over any, but apparently, they didn't keep in mind how difficult my parents marriage was to control and keep track of. I don't think anything positive came out of it for the kingdom either.
After my father told me about the new rule regarding arranged marriages, I didn't think too much of it. After all, I had a whole year, and I wasn't worried about it. I worried about more pressing things that were going on with the kingdom. And although I didn't think too much about what my father had told me at the time, as the months were passing, I sometimes found myself thinking about it when I was laying in my bed at night about to go to sleep. The thought and idea of it plagued my mind, and haunted me. Time was slipping through my fingers quicker than I originally thought, and soon I would be trapped too. Just like my father, and just like my mother.
Then everything in my life shifted and changed the moment I saw her laying in the alley. It was by pure luck that I had happened to be along with my guards when we found her, but when we did, she was laying on the ground vulnerable and unmoving. One of my guards even left his position by my side to see if she was breathing. After he found her pulse and made sure she was alive, I felt myself let out a breath of relief. I had never witnessed very much poverty outside of the castle, even though I knew it existed. It was something that I was trying to reduce on a daily basis, but it was a struggle. He managed to get her in a relaxed position, and then he motioned me over to come see her. Back then, I was a bit surprisedand taken back that he asked me to come over and attend to her because I didn't know what I could do to help in the situation. And yet, I still felt my feet moving towards him as if they had a mind of their own. She was drawing me to her, and she wasn't even awake.
To this day, I wouldn't have thought anything of the situation, but now I believe everything happens for a reason. Even though her face was covered in mud, her hair streaked with grime, to me, she was beautiful beyond words. Her eyes were closed like she was in agony and she was fighting a battle in her subconscious that she wasn't winning. Somehow it was as if she could tell I was staring at her and suddenly her eyes snapped open with the most hate filled look I had seen in years. The last time I had seen that look filled with anger was when my father had been shooting it at me over my mother years and years ago. It was a look I couldn't forget. She didn't even know me, and yet her eyes were completely focused on me, and no one else. Her fury and hatred was focused only on me and it was practically radiating off her. She didn't even try to hide it.
In those single moments that she had been awake, she had managed to blindside me, mesmerize me, astound me, and captivate me. I made a decision that I would have her no matter the costs, or who I had to become. I had been telling myself for years I wouldn't be like my father, that I wouldn't trap anyone, and I wouldn't force them to love me. They wouldn't be like my mother. She was different though. She was not my mother.
After a few moments of her being awake, she passed out just as we had seen first seen her laying there.
"Take her to the carriage, and be careful. She is coming back with us to the castle," I commanded my guards.
I knew I was selfish, I knew that I was wrong, but somehow I knew she was the one. After everything that had happened, it just felt right for her to be with me. I could feel it. I just had to make her believe it too.
A/N: I finally got a chapter up in Dimitri's perspective. Sorry that it took me so long to upload this chapter to this time, but I was busy with school. School is starting, but I'll write a few more chapters and hopefully get them up soon. Also, Lissa will not be cut out of the story. She is important in the books, so she is important (to me) to include her. Have a great weekend everyone! ^_^
