The bars pulled away from the cage and Gilbert removed his sore eyes from their position on the floor.
There were two guards, but the hunger in his stomach obscured his vision. The entire world felt like the edges were scraped away and the former servant was in the center of a snow globe.
The only stark detail was the cold.
They fed him but they didn't feed him much.
"Gilbert, The Queen wants to talk to you. Come with us."
His reaction time was made slower due to the starvation and the boredom. There was still that loose crust around his eyes that was like unpleasant breading gunk. Before Gilbert answered anything, he picked a chunk of it from his tear duct and stared in half-hearted disbelief. Because you could never really be sure what was a hallucination and what wasn't anymore.
They pulled him upstairs and sat him in the royal couple's bedroom, where Elizaveta was kept beneath a pile of blankets. And she looked at him. She looked at him the way she always looked at him. With those vibrant, clear, crystal green eyes that were now backed with a haze of melancholy.
When she laid eyes on him, that melancholy grew like a fungus at the corners of her potted-plant heart.
"Oh, Gilbert." Her voice was malnourished from silence. "You've lost so much weight."
"Really? I haven't noticed." He leaned down at the side of her bed and met her in the center with a kind stare. "They don't let me have a mirror." Despite it all, he smiled at her. "You look like hell too, Queen Elizaveta. Don't tell me that you're unhappy."
"Oh Gilbert—" The woman said it again. "I can't apologize enough for—"
"I know." A pause. "I know."
And maybe, just maybe, if Gilbert was more selfish and The Queen was any healthier the former servant would have been angry. But even looking at her face only once took it all out of his stomach like swallowing bleach. The only salvation left of her was stuck between those goddess lashes. Besides that, her face had thinned. And her hair lost its color and shine. Her cheekbones protruded as much as her boney hips and her once olive-toned flesh lost every pigment for a paper white hue.
Much like his own hair.
Taking in her image that way, Gilbert couldn't punish her with sharp words and rage.
She was killing herself enough already.
So like an idiot, he didn't conceal even an ounce of his sympathy and then the woman took his hand with tears rolling down her cheeks.
"Why don't you hate me? You should hate me. You should hate me even more than everyone else hates me."
"Elizaveta, don't be ridiculous. I can't hate you. I like you too much to hate you."
The small chokes broke into sobs and Gilbert clutched her hand tighter.
"Gilbert—"
"You know, all this unhappiness is what's making you sick. Maybe no one else gets it. I don't know who else King Roderich is talking to. But your heart is too important to be so soaked up in misery like this."
The Queen didn't say anything else. She just kept crying.
"I'm not angry at you."
Weeping and choking.
"I don't think The King's all that angry at you either."
Sobbing.
"So you should just let it go."
Then there was moment when Elizaveta tried to stop the overload of emotion form scarring up her face. She was putting the brakes on something that didn't have any reason to cease. The fact was it was all too late. The damn thing was already rolling down hill at maximum velocity and trying to slow it down was both unreasonable and insane.
"I mean, so what? You went missing for a while. In a few months, no one's even going to care. And I bet, even though The King was wicked pissed off, this whole experience has made him realize how much he loves you. Come on, Queenie. Look at the positives."
The woman caught her breath.
And then she spit up a white rose, coded in red blood. It landed on the clean and expensive sheets of her bed.
"I wish you were angry at me. Even if you hated me, I would deserve it." The back of her hand took the tangled sorrow away. "Either way, I don't think I have much time left. I don't know what to do. I can feel my body giving up. And I—"
But her words faltered, and from another branch new buds of speculation began.
"I guess I just want to thank you. You're good, Gilbert. Despite the outcome I'm glad I got to have an adventure with you. I hope Roderich lets you out soon. I'll be sure he at least feeds you more."
Then there was a short time when the morning light came in through the cold window, and it shined like glitter from heaven on the cool marble floor. Through it, there was a stillness that seemed to absolve Elizaveta of her thorny emotions. Something in her face burnt away some of the pain and her fragile arm—the same one that killed that mother fucking squid—regained a bit of that bronze colored strength.
There wasn't a need to say it. It bounced around between them like static between wires.
Elizaveta sat up and kissed her servant on the cheek. In her resolution she said: "I'm sorry, Gilbert. I wish I had more time to spend with you. You're mostly all good. I can see it just by looking at you."
"Thanks, Elizaveta. You're mostly all good too."
They sat together a long time, until The Queen went to sleep out of apnea and the guards came back and dragged Gilbert to the dungeon.