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Apr. 12th, 2004 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonsheenSinfic, part 2. Of the slightly more bizarre variety. Ok, maybe not slightly bizarre so much as it is entirely cracked.
Anyway, enjoy.
If guests ask her when her birthday is, she tells them the fifth of August on a bright sunny day, thank you, and it’s the truth, more or less. She doubts people are often born in the basements of their father’s homes. Or are, in fact ‘back from boarding school’ (as the story goes)at age three--which is also the truth, but she keeps that quiet and modestly covered up, like the birthmark on her leg. These days alchemy is not liable to get one killed, but the open practice of it is unfashionable.
“The nobles do so love their intrigue,” her father explains to her once. Her father being an Alchemist, and (she has it in rather good authority) he is a talented one, and so visitors come several times a month. It’s her duty to greet them, with a curtsy, in the latest dress her father has brought her. Often they comment on what a lovely daughter he has and he agrees, no parent could be more fortunate. She accepts the praise with a demure hand over her lips, but secretly she revels in it. She studies especially hard those nights, in her father’s office, reciting to him passages from books written in the ancient language of Xing, ones not even he has completely familiarity with, though tongues are his gift. Hers as well—and this, she thinks, is fitting. She is, after all, his child. Or at least plays his child, so well and so completely sometimes she can’t imagine being anything else.
When she was seven-- it comes up in conversation sometimes-- he took her to the beach for her birthday. It was wonderful, the smell of the salt air the wind off of the water. She ruined her shoes in the waves. This is a lie. She has never been seven nor has she ever seen a beach—but she’s good at telling it like she has, and when her father looks up and nods, smiling. “Ah, but I forgive you.” Everyone believes it, even her.
It isn’t perfect, though. This comes her attention by pure chance one day, after a visit from associates (associates being different than guests in that her father prefers that she hold as little interaction with them as humanly possible, they are a threat to her in some abstract sense, and it will be a decade before it is explained to her exactly why). Two of them, she catches a glimpse through a crack in the door, and when they’re gone and her father is seated in his favorite chair running his hands through his hair she comes up and asks. Father (she calls him that, always, and it’s more or less the truth) they looked similar.
“Of course,” he explains. “They’re brothers.” He spits out the word. Obviously these are not the better liked of his ‘associates’, so she leaves it at that, but the words themselves leave a question in her head, one she researches thoroughly on her own time. In this manner, she learns the finer points of blood ties, of families, and of her own failings in the matter. Brothers resemble one another and a daughter should look at least a little like her father. Her reflection bears the height of his craftsmanship but none of his features. It’s troubling, she finds. And, one afternoon, when a woman visiting with her husband tells her in obnoxious sincerity that her mother must have been a lovely woman, it is maddening. She has no mother, she wants to shout. She needs no mother. She only smiles and offers more tea, and that night rages in front of her mirror in the room that has been furnished especially for the Alchemist’s child, home from school, to finish her education with her sole parent, oh darling thing.
I am my father’s daughter, she whispers, her voice husky with anger. I am. I am. I /am/.
And when she whispers this her hair is black, nothing like his at all; and when she sobs it her eyes are green, and simply her own. But when she is done they are gold, bright, hot gold, just like his. She starts, and nearly shrieks—it comes as a surprise but, when she combs her fingers through her hair and finds it’s become a few shades lighter under her touch, she can’t say that it’s a wholly unpleasant one.
Anyway, enjoy.
If guests ask her when her birthday is, she tells them the fifth of August on a bright sunny day, thank you, and it’s the truth, more or less. She doubts people are often born in the basements of their father’s homes. Or are, in fact ‘back from boarding school’ (as the story goes)at age three--which is also the truth, but she keeps that quiet and modestly covered up, like the birthmark on her leg. These days alchemy is not liable to get one killed, but the open practice of it is unfashionable.
“The nobles do so love their intrigue,” her father explains to her once. Her father being an Alchemist, and (she has it in rather good authority) he is a talented one, and so visitors come several times a month. It’s her duty to greet them, with a curtsy, in the latest dress her father has brought her. Often they comment on what a lovely daughter he has and he agrees, no parent could be more fortunate. She accepts the praise with a demure hand over her lips, but secretly she revels in it. She studies especially hard those nights, in her father’s office, reciting to him passages from books written in the ancient language of Xing, ones not even he has completely familiarity with, though tongues are his gift. Hers as well—and this, she thinks, is fitting. She is, after all, his child. Or at least plays his child, so well and so completely sometimes she can’t imagine being anything else.
When she was seven-- it comes up in conversation sometimes-- he took her to the beach for her birthday. It was wonderful, the smell of the salt air the wind off of the water. She ruined her shoes in the waves. This is a lie. She has never been seven nor has she ever seen a beach—but she’s good at telling it like she has, and when her father looks up and nods, smiling. “Ah, but I forgive you.” Everyone believes it, even her.
It isn’t perfect, though. This comes her attention by pure chance one day, after a visit from associates (associates being different than guests in that her father prefers that she hold as little interaction with them as humanly possible, they are a threat to her in some abstract sense, and it will be a decade before it is explained to her exactly why). Two of them, she catches a glimpse through a crack in the door, and when they’re gone and her father is seated in his favorite chair running his hands through his hair she comes up and asks. Father (she calls him that, always, and it’s more or less the truth) they looked similar.
“Of course,” he explains. “They’re brothers.” He spits out the word. Obviously these are not the better liked of his ‘associates’, so she leaves it at that, but the words themselves leave a question in her head, one she researches thoroughly on her own time. In this manner, she learns the finer points of blood ties, of families, and of her own failings in the matter. Brothers resemble one another and a daughter should look at least a little like her father. Her reflection bears the height of his craftsmanship but none of his features. It’s troubling, she finds. And, one afternoon, when a woman visiting with her husband tells her in obnoxious sincerity that her mother must have been a lovely woman, it is maddening. She has no mother, she wants to shout. She needs no mother. She only smiles and offers more tea, and that night rages in front of her mirror in the room that has been furnished especially for the Alchemist’s child, home from school, to finish her education with her sole parent, oh darling thing.
I am my father’s daughter, she whispers, her voice husky with anger. I am. I am. I /am/.
And when she whispers this her hair is black, nothing like his at all; and when she sobs it her eyes are green, and simply her own. But when she is done they are gold, bright, hot gold, just like his. She starts, and nearly shrieks—it comes as a surprise but, when she combs her fingers through her hair and finds it’s become a few shades lighter under her touch, she can’t say that it’s a wholly unpleasant one.