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Unfilial Creatures

Chapter 5

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

The sea beyond the shore roughens with the advent of autumn.

Sieghild finds it soothing to watch the waves. Sometimes, if she stands out there long enough, an optical illusion occurs: it's the sea that's standing still, while the island is drifting, unmoored.

The days slip through her fingers. The leaves on the trees turn from green to yellow seemingly between one glance and the next. She sleeps the day away and wakes with night always closer on the horizon than she expected. She, too, has begun to experience the blurry twilight of exile.

It’s only in the greenhouse that the sense of unreality abates.

Hubert waits to go down with her these days, in an unspoken understanding. She helps him with the work on Lady Varley’s plants—with her superior strength and youthful joints, she can carry the pots two at a time. 

This corner of the compound is a secluded one, tucked away beyond the storehouses, and the plants, when replaced on the shelves along the glass, form a very adequate privacy screen.

It takes three days between the petals unfurling and falling from the stem. The charming little berries they reveal reach their full size only in the third week, and then are stubbornly slow to change color. It gives her something to look forward to. Heaven knows such things are thin on the ground.

The plants flower in a steady succession rather than all at once; buds are still opening on some of the specimens. She rather delights in the continued opportunity to play fairy godmother, dispensing offspring with waves of her magic wand—or rather, paintbrush—with pollen for fairy dust. Maybe this is what passes for maternal instinct in her. She contentedly tallies each new berry in the journal.

It’s on one such occasion that he asks, suddenly, “Do you truly hate her so much?”

Sieghild abruptly looks up from her work. 

Goddess forfend, his face is all serious. A laugh escapes her, a laugh with an edge. 

"Ten years since you were Minister of the Imperial Household, yet you still see enemies of the Emperor in every shadow. Is that what you’ve thought of me all this time?"

He gestures sharply at her handiwork, her notes. “You are capable of contentment and honest work. Your nature is not an irredeemable one. Could any lesser fixation drive you a thousand miles to such madness?”

“Perhaps I’ve simply long harbored an unspeakable passion for the illustrious Marquis Vestra,” Sieghild says, letting her gaze fall on the red bite mark peeking from his collar.

“Don’t be absurd,” he snaps. “I can see that I’m your game, not your prize.”

“Oh?” Her fingertips venture along the path her gaze had traced.

The tendons rise under her fingers. “You’re trying to distract me,” he grits out.

“Am I?”

He takes her wrist and pulls her hand off him. She marvels that all these years later something of the Emperor’s hound can still be roused. He says, with infuriating doggedness, “You have everything you could want in Enbarr. And you threw it all away for this sordid farce.”

“Everything I could want?” 

No good can come of this conversation, yet she finds herself pulled in anyway. “Everything I could want? The one thing I want, I can never have.

“Here's a childhood story for you. You wouldn’t know it; it’s after your time. When I was fifteen, I got it in my head that I wanted to attend Garreg Mach Officers Academy like my mother before me. They've changed to purely examination-based admissions since your time—there would be no help from my parentage—and I was never the most talented at academics. But the determination consumed me. I dreamed of it. I would become a student at an even younger age than my mother had, become an officer of her Empire. I threw myself into my studies, history and classics and magic theory. I trained with the axe until my hands bled.

"And then one afternoon dear Uncle Ferdinand took time out of his busy day to invite me to tea. He was very awkward about it, poor man. He said he'd heard of my sudden enthusiasm for my studies. He asked, delicately, if I'd had much contact with my father's side of the family lately. If they'd said anything to me. He asked me how I felt about my current status at court. I was young and stupid enough that I didn't realize what he was going for at first. And then it struck me—he wanted to know if I'd gotten myself involved in some rebellious plot. That was his first association, upon hearing I took a sudden interest in the military arts."

She laughs bitterly. "We finished our tea. I never touched an axe again. I learned, that day, that the best way to serve my mother's memory is not to serve. My grubby Hresvelg-Gerth paws must not besmirch my mother's meritocracy."

"There are other sources of purpose in the world than the Empire," he insists. "Could you content yourself with nothing else?"

"Could you?" she counters. "Could you content yourself with any tedious path? Could you be just another noble, inconsequential and spoiled rotten—"

One moment he'd been holding her wrist; the next, his back hits the shelves behind him, violently, as if flung by heaven's thunder. A pot tips and explodes at his feet.

He's staring at her, his face utterly bloodless.

Right then, Sieghild realizes two things.

The first:

Hubert von Vestra had never thought of her as his daughter. Likely he had never thought of her as any father's daughter; she is Edelgard's, and that subsumes all other claims.

The second:

Somehow, in the words she spoke, he has seen just what father's daughter she is.

He's shaking. He tries to speak; no words come out. Like something hunted, he turns and makes for the door—

Sieghild slams into him.

"No, you don't," she snarls.

He never could have stood a chance, not even if both he and she were ten years younger. She bears the Crest of Seiros, the last one in the world. Once, it would've made her either a commander or a commodity; in her mother's Empire, she uses it to overpower an old man. Ink spills and papers scatter as she shoves him down on the table.

"How dare you," she says. How dare you run.

"Sieghild, I'm your father—"

"And?" Her fingers tighten around his wrists. She wants to hurt him. "You knew from the day I was conceived that this was a possibility. At any point you could have acted upon it; you never did, not in all the long years. At court, I recall you speaking to me perhaps twice. The Prime Minister was more of a father to me than you were."

"The political situation at the time—"

"Of course. Perhaps you didn't want to fuel rumors of my bastardy. Perhaps you thought distance would make it easier if you had to kill me to clear the succession. You would've killed me if it became necessary; I know you would have."

She leans in. "Because you and Edelgard von Hresvelg had a daughter of the soul, and her name is Adrestia. I am the child of your bodies, a lesser form of incest."

And she kisses him, plundering and vicious, like a wolf descending into the viscera of its prey. She makes him choke on her; when she lifts away she tastes blood.

The sight of his pale face fills her with hate. She wants to do worse, but then she'd have to keep touching him. Revulsion swells. She pulls away and spits over her shoulder.

Small victories: she gets to be the one to walk away.

Notes:

I had that research tab open to the Hubert-Edelgard C support transcription for literal months.

It took me over a year to get to the reveal. Lies down.