A/N-
Hey guys, new here on but happy to be here! I'm still stumbling through the format/uploading system, so please excuse any typos or the like.
Sudade will be written in an experimental vignette style; some chapters will inevitably be way shorter than others, but I hope you'll enjoy reading either way! I'm just posting as I write, and with school and stuff my upload schedule will be very staggered - I am just writing for fun though, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't prod me too much!
Don't forget to leave a review if you have something to say,
and without further ado...
—ACT ONE—
• sun kissed dreams •
i — • not to be forgotten •
Once upon a time, a mere week before the turn of a new year, a little girl, bought up in the sanctum of privilege and nobility but bought down by the trappings of society and the tenets of expectation skewed from her favour, is abandoned to an orphanage far removed from the life she has led so far. A place that promises pain, hard work, and cold threadbare nights, but a place that to her instead resembles something more akin to adventure, freedom, and a chance to live. A chance, the quivering bud of a daffodil she cradled to her chest with small, delicately cupped hands, the bloom watered with her tears and given life by the radiance of her smiles.
The little girl, only seven years of age, is led to a dark lonely room at the end of a narrow corridor by a woman—a woman cruel in that her heart felt no pity or even tolerance for those under her wing—and told to share with a solemn boy with dark fluffy hair, unforgiving patrician features, and piercing eyes of a brown just shy of dark crimson.
(how improper, the little girl's mind whispers to her, giddiness at the very thought of disobedience curling into the odd colour of her eyes and chasing away the cloying traces of abandonment, if only for a little while)
And then the door slams shut behind the woman—the matron of the orphanage she would soon come to wrinkle her nose at the very thought of—with nothing more than a barked order of obedience to the silent boy and the shuttering rattle of a door frame. Still glaring at her, the boy narrows his eyes, and if looks could indeed kill then she would doubtlessly be dead thrice over. His dissatisfied expression is menacing and mean, a look that would in his future make followers quail and innocents beg, not that either of the two know it yet.
No. As it is, she thinks it nothing but odd, but perhaps this is the equivalent of men like her father and his friends turning their noses up at the poor—perhaps this is how the impoverished treat those who choose to dine like kings while they freeze in cots made of hackneyed sheets and flimsy frames.
Her fingers fidget with the lacy fringes of her pale yellow dress as the silence drags on like claws on a chalkboard—her dress the one possession she'd been allowed to bring and the last thing her mother had left for her before she died (died and left her just like father did except worse)—before she straightens up.
"My name is Anastasia Aurelia Moore-Emrys," The little girl introduces herself, just as she'd been taught. Confident, and yet hesitant just as well, as evidenced by the near imperceptible tremor in her hand as she sticks it boldly up to the boy—horribly inappropriate for her status ("do you know who you are, Anastasia? You're a girl. Now stop this ridiculousness or-") -but she does it anyway because nobody's here to tell.
And even if they did tell, the quiet parts of her mind seized, nobody would be there to care anyway. Not for an orphan, an orphan like her—(the label made all the more worse by the fact that it was false).
"Although, I suppose I can finally get rid of the Moore part, now." She tries, falteringly, when the boy's eyes drop to her hand and he just sneers at her, turning, back facing her. "Keep your things on your side of the room." He snaps, never mind the fact that she has no such things to speak of.
Her hand drops to her side and for a moment her heart just sinks—because this boy is just like every other boy in the world, it seems. Just like her father.
But then the walls of her heart harden once more, like patina over brass she has learnt to turn her head and smile with a mask of perfect marble, and just watch me rise, Anastasia Aurelia Emrys thinks to him, raw and determined.
But even as she sits on the springy bed that is no doubt to be hers for the near future, she knows that as much as it was hard to rise as the daughter of a strict nobleman who has only ever wanted a son instead of the daughter he got, it must be even harder to rise as an orphaned girl, disgraced and disowned.
And she knows better than to reach for the dreams of a younger Anastasia, who'd clutched so desperately to her rose-tinted glasses and made dozens upon dozens of frivolous excuses for her father, all the while drowning beneath a pit of quicksand made of cloying fears and futile wishes. Of an Anastasia who would delude herself into believing that her father would ever return for his one daughter. For even if he had just the one, she was a daughter nonetheless.
So yes, it will be hard to grow, to flourish, to rise.
She will, though. Whether the world likes it or not.
(father, why?)
The girl is one of those noblemen's daughters. So poorly abandoned to a life of depravity after being born into a life of wealth, Tom wagers with a scoff on his tongue.
She is pretty enough—prettier than the other girls at the orphanage—he admits. for he is hardly blind. The hand was odd, but an asinine optimism flitters in and out of her oddly purple eyes, and he has no doubt that a week in and she would be whinging about everything from the cold nights and the terrible food compared to what she'd been obliviously blessed with.
That was fine. So long as she learnt to stay away from him, just like all the others did.
