Édouard awoke early. He always did, long before she would. [break][break]
He looked down at the sleeping woman who was his wife, and his coal-black stare lingered, too long, on the purple bruise flowering on her bare shoulder. She might compare it to one of her anemones, those pale windflowers that myths and legends said were born from the tears of the goddess of love, or so she had told him, once.[break][break]
"You are not your father," she'd said that day.[break][break]
A pointless story, really. He wasn't sure why he was thinking of it now.[break][break]
The world outside his home made more sense. The glittering skyscraper of Bortiforte Industries provided a sleek, modern welcome to a man who felt shackled by the bonds of tradition. He despised his familial home, and all its ostentacious trappings of wealth and prestige. [break][break]
Men like him were expected to keep up appearances, to keep their standing in Kalosian nobility.[break][break]
Not that Kalos had ever welcomed him. Not without him earning every shred of respect with blood, sweat, and tears, transforming the metalworking enterprise of his father into something that could turn iron and steel into gold.[break][break]
His mother's battlefield had been the ballrooms he despised. Here, he fought his foes in the world of industry, relishing in crushing rivals beneath his heel. Spoiled bastards all, with silver spoons and silver tongues, coddled and pampered into assuming the world would embrace them for being born with the right blood.[break][break]
His father had ensured that
he would not have any such misgivings about the world.[break][break]
"No son of mine will be called a fool."[break][break]
"No son of mine will not earn his way in this world, himself."[break][break]
"No son of mine will be weak."
[break]
In his office, he surrounded himself with monitors and screens, fingers a steady percussion against the clacking of keyboards. Alone, he found a solace he couldn't find with others.[break][break]
To his face, they called him brilliant.
A visionary. Behind closed doors, where they suspected he couldn't hear them, they called him calculating, opportunistic, and unreadable.[break][break]
He frightened them.[break][break]
He'd gotten used to it, he supposed. He frightened a lot of people.[break][break]
"I don't think people know you, not really. You've never frightened me."
[break]
Even her, in the end.[break][break]
Conference meetings were dull affairs. The people he hired were another resource. Another tool. Like any knife, once they dulled, they were replaced with something better, brighter, and sharper. [break][break]
It kept his standards high, forcing those below him to aim higher to please him.[break][break]
Kalos was a lazy, idle region, prone to indulging in excess. Such expectations were necessary, to spur progress forward.[break][break]
People attempted to cheat their way ahead, of course. Cutting corners irritated him. Sloppy work offended him. Whether people attempted to do so by rushing their work or seeking to flatter him, the result was the same: a plummeting of his personal regard for them.[break][break]
Still, sometimes he indulged, letting his ego get this superficial boost from eager yes-men, or women who thought they could maneuver their way into his favor from his bed. Those benefits were residual, at best, because the experiences were lacking in any real fulfillment. Fleeting things provided fleeting rewards, like all transactions.[break][break]
"Are you always so distrusting of others? Surely the world isn't that unkind?"
[break]
People were disappointing. Always.[break][break]
His mother had laughed at him, the day she'd met his bride-to-be. The Bortiforte matriarch had shaken her head, unable to contain her cackling amusement as the younger woman departed.
"Your father is rolling over in his grave. You can enjoy a distraction, Édouard, but marrying one is another matter. You're shackled to that child now, Arceus help you both."[break][break]
He had silenced his mother with a voice that echoed the very man she had invoked against him, one whom had once cowed that proud woman with but a single glance. Neither wanted to invite the attentions of that ghost, but here they were, living in the lingering shadow of his expectations nonetheless.[break][break]
"You are not your father."
[break]
He wondered, sometimes.[break][break]
When he arrived home, he avoided the gardens. Scent was tied to memory, he'd read once. The fragrance of her flowers, faint as it was, brought to mind several such daydreams that he tried to suppress now. It was foolishness that he'd indulged in out of a desire for... what, exactly? [break][break]
Something that didn't exist.[break][break]
Something that he'd humiliated himself by looking for in the first place.[break][break]
The longer he avoided her, the more difficult seeing her was. Dinner had become a painful routine. The questions she asked annoyed him for their banality.[break][break]
"How was work?"[break]
"Did you have a nice day?"[break]
"Are you feeling all right?"
[break]
His mother had called her a child. Day by day, begrudgingly, he was beginning to view his wife in the same way. Fairly or unfairly, she seemed like one. She begged for scraps of his attention with those wide, guileless eyes, desperate for him to give some validation he felt incapable of providing her. [break][break]
It was... pathetic. More pathetic even than the women who nakedly pursued him for his wealth and station. At least he understood
their desires for the shallow motives they were. There could even be some
cunning in them to explain their origin. Such ambition could be respected, to some degree.[break][break]
This pining? This groveling? [break][break]
It sickened him.[break][break]
Whatever attraction he'd felt for his wife seemed to belong to another place and time. Unfair, perhaps. He'd been the one to drag her down into the depths of his unhappiness, pulling her into a life she had no business being part of. That glaring reality had made itself known every time he brought her into the public sphere, where she stood out like a sore thumb among his peers.[break][break]
At best, they thought her amusing and pretty, a bauble that might look good on a powerful man's arm. At worst, they thought him a fool for choosing her in the first place. [break][break]
He deserved a woman that equaled his intellect, after all, and this child of nineteen was not that.[break][break]
How could she be? He had set her up for failure, by indicating otherwise.[break][break]
This was itself a form of kindness, he told himself, as he pushed her away from him with cruel words and the promise of crueler actions. Every step she took to try and bring herself closer to him, the more he punished her for taking it. She would learn, he told himself. She would learn that it was better to embrace the distance between them and live separate, parallel lives, without disgracing one another.[break][break]
"You are not your father."
[break]
Nor had he married his mother.[break][break]
He expected a hardness to manifest in his wife, over time. She would eventually understand her duties and perform them, at last, as someone of her station ought to. It was not the life she wanted, but his life was not what he had wanted, either. At least he could protect her from the cruel, mocking laughter outside these walls by keeping here safe inside. At least he could teach her to armor herself, even if he was her enemy in doing so.[break][break]
Instead, she seemed determined to reveal that same damnable vulnerability over and over, as if this might somehow sway him back into the land of fantasy he'd met her in.[break][break]
She didn't understand how much he resented her for luring him there in the first place.[break][break]
"You are not your father."
[break]
Had that been the moment he'd chosen to embrace the lie?[break][break]
He remembered, even now, the way she had tenderly mapped out every scar on his skin with gentle hands. She had listened patiently and without judgment to confessions he sorely regretted ever speaking aloud, of dark nights and harsh words and fists that said things those words couldn't. There had been a guard built up in him, a fortress that had lasted for decades, and yet she had scaled it in what felt like moments.[break][break]
"No son of mine will be weak."
[break]
She made him weak, and how he
loathed her for that.[break][break]
She made him look foolish.[break][break]
She made him into a laughingstock, undoing his decades of work with each insipid word she spoke aloud.[break][break]
"You are not your father."
[break]
And he'd never forgive her for turning him into the man he least wanted to be.