The garden was the only place in her husband's home where Elisabeth belonged. [break][break]

Her Beautifly flitted from flower to flower, proboscis probing the centre of the roses that flourished in abundance. She offered a shy sort of half-smile at the butterfly, pulling her shawl closer about herself before she resumed digging. The sweat drenched her brow as she did so, stinging her eyes.[break][break]

It was so blisteringly hot this time of year.[break][break]

"I can feel your gaze piercing through my back, Mr. Langevin."[break][break]

The bodyguard behind her stiffened at her soft words, though they contained no true offense in them. Something shifted in his expression, though what it was Elisabeth missed entirely, engrossed as she was in her work.[break][break]

"Simon," he corrected. "There's no need for you to be formal with me, Countess."[break][break]

"And yet here you are, dressing me up in titles." The laughter in her words faded with a frown as her gloved hands considered the weed she had uprooted. It was a pretty thing, for all the insidiousness of its purpose. "Mm. Countess still takes some getting used to. It makes me think of my mother-in-law, not me."[break][break]

"It suits you," was his polite reply.[break][break]

"Do you think so?" Another laugh, dry in its humor, preceded her next words: "Perhaps you should call me Elisa, Simon. Everyone in Camphrier Town used to, and no one here does. I miss feeling familiar with someone."[break][break]

It had been a flippant suggestion, a flirtatious one even, though she hadn't meant it in that way. Not intentionally, at least. Subconsciously, who could say?[break][break]

Loneliness clung to her like a perfume, its fragrance as tangible as that of any of her flowers.[break][break]

"...Elisa, then." Another pause inserted itself, one that spoke volumes in its hesitation. "Shall I take your shawl for you?" he offered gently. "The heat must make it unpleasant."[break][break]

Her shoulders hunched, breath catching in her throat at his suggestion; Elisabeth fumbled with words she couldn't form, as if her tongue had become something alien to her. [break][break]

He took her silence as permission, and a hand touched her arm. Anxiously, Elisabeth's fingers dug into the cashmere, pulling it tighter about herself as she crawled away from him into the rose bushes.[break][break]

"Please don't," she whispered, her eyes begging him to stop.[break][break]

Simon knew, as well as she did, what damning evidence he might find if he removed this barrier between them.[break][break]

He'd known the monster she'd married far longer than she had.[break][break]

The offending hand retracted, and with it, the bodyguard's voice tightened with sudden formality. "Very well, Countess. Don't let me disturb you."[break][break]

"...Thank you."[break][break]

She lost herself to the tending of her roses in the ensuing silence. [break][break]

They didn't speak again for hours and hours.

"Lady Bortiforte. A rare pleasure to meet a woman of your reputation." [break][break]

The reporter smiled at her, the gleam of his teeth blinding, as he leaned across the table to look at her. His hair was startlingly gold, like Simon Langevin's had been. [break][break]

The similarity to that man unnerved her. [break][break]

"You seem nervous," the reporter said, his voice honeyed and sweet. "Don't be."[break][break]

Elisabeth's shallow breathing betrayed her anxiety, as did the way her eyes couldn't seem to focus on him, not directly. Like vines, her arms wrapped about herself, attempting to steady her posture.[break][break]

"I don't have much time," she said finally. "I, um... He notices, if I've been gone too long."[break][break]

"So your letters suggested," was the man's breezy response. The sound of papers being turned over rustled audibly, as did the scritch of a pen's scrawling. "Now, then. Your allegations regarding your husband are quite serious, if true."[break][break]


"I'm aware." A pause, then an exhale through clenched teeth. "And they are."[break][break]


"Bortiforte Industries is, as you know, quite the large corporation. It affects a not-insignificant amount of the Kalosian upper class, never mind the wealth of knowledge stored in its current research projects. The man at the helm is its sparkling leader, and your words would damn him truly and utterly. As a reporter, I have to be... thoughtful... in how I handle such a delicate subject matter."[break][break]


"Of course," was her muted reply. Fingers worried at the fabric of her skirt, lost and aimless. "I... I just don't know what else to do."[break][break]


"May I ask some questions about you, if you don't mind?"[break][break]

She blinked, utterly startled. "Me?" [break][break]

He laughed, as if charmed by the frankness of her surprise. "Yes, you. Just a few things, here and there. For example, I don't believe I'm familiar with your level of education. A degree in botany, wasn't it?"[break][break]


Something like shame colored her face as she turned away. "...I never finished it, to speak truthfully." [break][break]


"Ah," he said, as if sympathizing. "It must be isolating to be uneducated, next to such an illustrious figure as your husband."[break][break]


"Do you think so?" Elisabeth said, uncertain. "I have always kept myself well-read."[break][break]


Doubt began to prickle at the back of her mind, but she attempted to ignore it. She'd given up too much of herself to get this interview. She'd failed at too many other things.[break][break]


Desperation pushed her onward.[break][break]


"A woman of your means is rarely as solitary as yourself. What, may I ask, do you do to spend the time?"[break][break]


"It's not my choice to live in solitude," she protested, before he raised a hand in affable surrender.[break][break]


"Ah, of course, I don't mean to offend. I merely wondered how you spend your days." He grinned at her, blue eyes dazzling as they focused in on her. Studying her every feature as if ascertaining something unsaid. "You mentioned reading. What else?"[break][break]


What else? "I suppose I garden," she answered, confused. "I'm sorry, I don't see how this is relevant."[break][break]


"I need to have the audience sympathize with you, Lady Bortiforte. I need them to understand who it is that you are, if they are to turn on your husband for who he is."[break][break]


For the first time, she glanced up at him, a hardness in her gaze. "Do I need to be a perfect victim, in order to achieve that?"[break][break]


"I would be lying if I said it doesn't help," he said easily, unbothered by the shift in her expression. If anything, it seemed to entertain him. "I'll let you in on a secret, Lady Bortiforte. I may be a reporter, but I'm also a storyteller. And the better story I spin, the better received your news will be."[break][break]


"I wish you didn't have to write about me at all," she murmured, lowering her head. [break][break]


"People are fascinated by you, actually. A mysterious woman married to one of the rising stars of Kalos. It's got all the makings of an excellent scandal, if you'll pardon my saying so."[break][break]


Elisabeth opened her mouth, then closed it, before finally saying with some irritation, "You're a very blunt man."[break][break]


"I find it helps in my profession," he said, amused as he returned his pen to paper. "Now, then. Do you have any friends? Any close family?"[break][break]


"No friends, really. None I can name at present, at least." At the mention of family, she glanced away. "And I'd rather not involve my family. This will devastate them."[break][break]

Again he laughed, completely endeared by her naivete. "Oh, there's no avoiding that. Once this goes into the papers, I'm afraid you can't hide from anyone anymore, Lady Bortiforte. You'll be all anyone is talking about for a little while, at least."[break][break]


The nauseating truth of that statement settled in the pit of her stomach. "Is that really the price I have to pay?"[break][break]


"To be heard? Yes. That's your deal with the devil, Elisabeth." [break][break]


He reached over the desk, taking her trembling hand in his. She flinched at the unexpected contact of his skin on hers, her eyes meeting his with alarm as his smile brightened.[break][break]


"Trust me," he said, in that way only liars could make words sing with angelic sincerity.[break][break]


And she, fool that she was, believed him.

The rain had been pouring for so long now, Elisabeth couldn't remember the last time sunlight or moonlight had broken through her window. [break][break]

"Leave me," she hissed without turning her head to view the woman who had arrived. A frigidity had entered her posture and tone alike, one that sent the maid scurrying as quickly as she had come.[break][break]

Whatever food the servant had left clattered on the floor gracelessly, a necessary evil that Elisabeth hadn't partaken in for some time.[break][break]

Hunger didn't bother her, not really. Elisabeth could manage without it for long enough. It was thirst that truly paralyzed you.[break][break]

Without thinking, Elisabeth unlatched the window and let the spray of water hit her in the face. The wind caught her unbrushed hair, tangling in on itself with the storm's force of movement.[break][break]
The water felt bracing. It felt like being alive.[break][break]

Her Roselia stood beside her, soaking in the rain with a grace and poise that her mistress lacked in this moment. The faint scent of AROMATHERAPY wafted from the flowery Pokemon, the one thing that seemed to soothe the pale woman whose clothes had not been changed for many nights.[break][break]

"Everyone thinks I'm insane, Prim," she whispered, turning to the Roselia. "Maybe I am now. I don't know. I can't say I feel all that sane, in this moment."[break][break]

As she gripped the windowsill, her knuckles blanched white, and a low laugh left her lips.[break][break]

"But if that's what he wants me to be, I can do that, too. I tried being the good wife. I tried being the quiet wife." Her mouth quivered, her upper lip curling upwards into a snarl as she rose to her feet. "Perhaps what he wants from me is to be exactly what he tells people I am."[break][break]

The entirety of her room was a ruin. The portraits that had hung on the walls been thrown to the floor, their frames battered and images torn. The sheets of her bed had been tossed aside; the pillows ripped asunder; the dresser drawers taken and upturned inside out; the mirror cracked.[break][break]

She'd destroyed all that and more.[break][break]

Everything she could touch with her bare hands.[break][break]

What do I have left to lose?[break][break]

What fear was there of falling to be had? She barely had a life to mourn.[break][break]

"Lisa." Her husband's voice arrested her from the doorway, cold and sharp in its insistence. "Get back."[break][break]

Instead, she placed one foot on the windowsill, swaying unsteadily as the rain beat down on her. Elisabeth glanced behind her over her shoulder, grinning so wildly it put the crescent moon to shame. [break][break]

"Are you concerned for me, Édouard?" she asked, and the words carried on the wind with strange, manic laughter. "You never know what insane women will do."[break][break]

She had no intention of jumping, but he didn't know that.[break][break]

He didn't deserve to know that.[break][break]

"It'd be easier if I did leave like this, wouldn't it? Everyone would pity you, wouldn't they? That would be a nice news story. How you bravely soldier on without me."[break][break]

The garden was not far from her bedroom, in truth. He had given her this place because of the view it afforded her of the roses outside, the precious blooms she had laboured over for so long now it felt like an unending sea of days, of petals, of thorns that pricked fingers until they bled.[break][break]

There would be worse places to threaten to fall, she supposed, and he had no reason to think she wouldn't.[break][break]

Her parents had died.[break][break]

Her friendships had withered and died on their stems.[break][break]

The entirety of the region thought her wild, insane, so fragile she had to be held tight to keep from breaking.[break][break]

"It'd be so poetic. I'm surprised you don't push me from these heights yourself."[break][break]

"This may shock you," came his slow, patient, and irritable reply, "but your isolation is for your own good. Be reasonable. What would you do, Lisa, if you reentered society? You have no skills or education to commend yourself. You have no family. And the press, as you now well know, are vultures."[break][break]

He exhaled here, his voice becoming softer: "Be grateful the story paints you as a victim, rather than something cunning or cruel. You can recover from this, in time. If you behave."[break][break]

Another laugh shuddered through her, this one somehow starker than the last. "Of course! I'm so very grateful, Édouard! How protected I feel, in this moment, as all of Kalos believes mine are the ramblings of a deranged housewife."[break][break]

The way he looked at her in this moment spoke of something she'd never seen of before in him.[break][break]

What was it, exactly? Disbelief? Confusion? Regret?[break][break]

Or, no, something far more harrowing, perhaps?[break][break]

"You forced my hand, Lisa. You contacted that reporter and put the entirety of my business at risk. Hate me all you want for what I had to do, but it was your actions that brought us here. This was the kindest possible conclusion."[break][break]

"Oh, yes," she agreed blandly, waving the long sleeve of her nightgown. "All of this is my fault. It is always, somehow, my doing. How powerful I must seem to you, in my little corner of existence, wrecking and ruining all your grand plans at every turn."[break][break]

His voice darkened with impatience, no longer willing to entertain her. "Get down, before I make you."[break][break]

"Édouard. Oh, Édouard!" She repeated his name almost tenderly as she called to him from the window, her lashes lowered as she giggled. "You do care."[break][break]

It was unsettling, how quickly she fell into this new role. The mad wife, locked away in the manor.[break][break]

How oddly empowering it felt.[break][break]

Elisabeth descended back into the wreckage of her bedroom unhurriedly: her hair tangled and snarled by the touch of wind and water, her clothes damp, her plastered smile speaking of something that had long been pushed past its breaking point.[break][break]

"We'll have fun, won't we?" she murmured, walking towards him to place a wet hand on his cheek. "You and I. Unhinged. Unstable. Broken. Just as you wanted, mon amour."[break][break]

When he shuddered at her touch, she took pleasure in every moment. She could hold onto those shreds of satisfaction for hours, days, months. However long she needed to sustain herself upon it.[break][break]

Living with hunger was nothing, when you could feed yourself so well.

Many nights, Elisabeth could find her husband here, working late hours in his office at a computer that she was forbidden to touch in his absence. His glare darkened as his focus turned away from the screen to the woman who lingered in his doorway like some ghostly waif. [break][break]

Her hands knotted and unknotted restlessly, fidgeting with the hem of her nightgown as she waited for him to notice her. When he did, her hands froze in their agitated movement, arrested in place by his stare.[break][break]

"Lisa." The greeting was terse and dismissive with disinterest. "You want something."[break][break]

"It's late, Édouard." Her heartbeat quickened like the fluttering of some timid bird caught in flight. When had it started, this fear? The anxiety that gripped her every time she approached him, desperate for even a moment of his attention? "...Are you coming to bed?"[break][break]

The disinterest shifted to irritation as his eyes flickered back to his screen. "Is this worth interrupting me?"[break][break]

The words came out clumsy, embarrassed: "I don't know." She brushed back a strand of her hair, biting her lip as her gaze shyly turned to the floor. "I worry about you, sometimes." Her admission was a whisper, soft with unspoken admonishment. "Does that upset you?"[break][break]

A pressure built in her chest as she awaited his reply, each breath shallow and constricted as it fought its way through her lungs.[break][break]

He was a tall man, but when seated, this was not always an obvious thing. Yet when Édouard arose, gazing down at her as he lorded over the screens that contained his life's true love and ambition, something in Elisabeth shrank in reply. [break][break]

"Do I look upset, Lisa?" he asked finally. [break][break]

"I don't know," she repeated uselessly. "I can't tell anymore."[break][break]

So many nights alone in bed, Elisabeth raced through every possible memory she could bring to mind, seeking in vain for the first domino in the chain of them that led to this insufferable coldness he harbored towards her.[break][break]

What had she done to deserve this? Surely it had been something. If only she could find that one thing and undo it, and then they could go back to how they were before. That foolish hope warmed her like the light of a single candle, its flame barely kept alight in the midst of all the raging winds that sought to extinguish it with the despair of his silence.[break][break]

The way he looked at her, this young wife he had chosen despite the warnings of his family and his peers, was with something akin to disgust and pity alike.[break][break]

"...You can be such a child sometimes."[break][break]

When he approached her, his hand extended to caress her cheek, she flinched. The reflex was immediate and instinctive: her shoulders hunched, eyes widening, as she pulled back from him as if yanked by a string. Her hands pressed against her chest, feeling the pulse of her heartbeat become something erratic and frantic.[break][break]

"I'm sorry," Elisabeth whispered as he stood there, silently dumbfounded by her reaction. "I'm sorry."[break][break]

For what? She didn't know. She never knew.[break][break]

If she knew, perhaps he wouldn't...[break][break]

"You're right. It's late." Abruptly he turned on his heel, his back to her as he moved to depart. "Turn out the light."[break][break]

Love made her slow in learning this lesson: that the more he broke her down, the less she'd ever be enough for him.[break][break]

In the end, she'd become someone unrecognizable to them both.

Elisabeth had rehearsed her words over and over in front of her bedroom mirror, until the tremor in her voice gained a sort of practised, forced calm. Her eyes had stared back at her when she did, hollow and lightless; her cheeks were sallow; the faint smile on her lips seemed moments from breaking. [break][break]

In such a short time, she'd been reduced to something so fragile. Or perhaps, she'd simply never been pushed so close to shattering.[break][break]

When Elisabeth placed her wedding ring on her husband's desk, the silence that fell between them was deafening. She stood there, like some inanimate mannequin, awaiting the inevitable reply that formed in the rage of his glower as he picked up the sparkling object, staring up at her with intense scrutiny.[break][break]

"What is the meaning of this?"[break][break]

"We aren't happy. I don't think we ever will be. So I'm giving you the chance to find happiness elsewhere."[break][break]

Again, the iron curtain of his silence answered her, the gears of his mind turning with the ring that he held in his palm.[break][break]

"Is that all?" he said at last, as if bored with the mundane nature of her explanation.[break][break]

She wrapped her arms around herself, the way he gazed upon her like that of a spider seizing up the state of the fly entangled in its web. "...What do you mean, is that all? It's the truth. You don't love me anymore."[break][break]

"People marry for lesser reasons than love, Lisa. You certainly did."[break][break]

The casual way he struck her with that dagger rooted her in place, the color draining from her face at the cruelty of his statement.[break][break]

"I suppose now that your father's winery is no longer bankrupt, you have no more use for me," he continued, holding the ring up to the light so that it glittered. "Or perhaps you've found someone else to warm your bed. Where are you finding your happiness now, Lisa? I wonder."[break][break]

"You don't know what you're saying, Édouard," she insisted, and he laughed -- a low, rumbling sound deep in his chest, dark in its dry amusement.[break][break]

"You had me fooled, I will admit. The way you pursued me with such innocence and naivete. How did I not see through it then? You were no different than anyone else. Pursuing power. Pursuing wealth. Wringing me dry of affection, while running to another man's bed."[break][break]

His coal-black eyes cut to hers, assessing her reaction. In this time, in the sincerity of her youth, she didn't know how to mask herself from him. Every wound he'd inflicted upon her was laid bare and naked before him.[break][break]

"How can you say that?" Elisabeth whispered, voice breaking. "You know I would never..."[break][break]

"You would never do what? Entrap me in a marriage where if you depart, you seize a significant part of my wealth and my legacy from me, while expressing no curiosity in my life's ambitions?"[break][break]

The ring turned and danced in the light, the flames etched into its sides gleaming with newfound illumination.[break][break]

"You would never do what, Lisa? Deny me your bedroom, while you lead on some young fool who I, in my desire to protect you, assigned as your bodyguard in my employ?"[break][break]

The ruby at the wedding band's centre pulsed blood-red in his palm, the iron-silver of its sides reminiscent of a blade as he held her gaze, never letting her eyes leave his.[break][break]

"Tell me, my wife. Which of us is the one unhappy here? Who, exactly, has made a mockery of our marriage?"[break][break]

Her fingers traced unseen scars beneath her sleeves, left confused and inarticulate as she attempted to find words to retort as readily as he had.[break][break]

He could hurt her, and had hurt her many times, but she still quietly feared hurting him. His hold on her spirit remained too great.[break][break]

"I just want us to be happy," she admitted at last, as if ashamed by this simple truth.[break][break]

"You want to be selfish," he corrected with full confidence. "If you wanted to remedy things between us, you'd stay. You'd voice your concerns to me so that we could work through them with one another."[break][break]

In a voice so small and meek it was barely audible, she murmured at last, "What if they can't be fixed? What if we just stay broken?"[break][break]

Where his words harmed her, the ones she managed to speak had no visible effect upon him; her husband shrugged, as if he had long had this thought, and determined it not worth his consideration.[break][break]

"Then this is the life you've chosen, Lisa. Make peace with it sooner rather than later. Do you think this is the result that I wanted, when you and I exchanged our vows? A wife who crawls into my room on hand and knee and begs to leave my side?"[break][break]

When he placed the ring back on the surface of the table, it was the throwing down of a gauntlet between them.[break][break]

"People like us do not get to be so fickle. We do not get to regret. We simply adapt. If you're unhappy, learn how to be happy again. Your lack of ability to do so is not my responsibility."[break][break]

He'd decided the conversation had ended, there. It was evident in the way he returned to the papers that had consumed him, as if he had swatted away a fly that had dared to distract him from more pressing matters for a little while.[break][break]

This dismissal at last awakened some indignation in her, sparking to life a tiny bit of defiance that spurred her to finally speak.[break][break]

"I can change my mind, if I want to," she protested, but even now, the statement came out like a question, a begging of his affirmation that this truth remained so. "Just like you changed yours."[break][break]

When you stopped loving me. When you started hurting me.[break][break]

When you taught me to fear you.[break][break]

He sighed, and with it came a slow, drawn-out irritation, one that whispered of the threat of waning patience.[break][break]

"Yes, Lisa, I am well aware of what an impressionable and dramatic creature you are. But Bortifortes do not yield. You were aware of that when you married me."[break][break]

"Still, I--"[break][break]

This time, annoyance gave way to anger as his voice crackled with lightning-hot fury, thunderous with incredulity as he bellowed:[break][break]

"You act as if you do not somehow benefit from this mutual arrangement! As if you do not get to exist in a life of idyllic pleasure, wanting for nothing, you and your idiotic family's every need cared for and met! How many people in the world can live as you live? You, who are uneducated, unemployed, unskilled, and of no value to anyone save me for whatever damnable affection I still harbor towards you. You spoiled, ungrateful child."[break][break]

In some ways, the raising of his voice was worse than the raising of his hands against her. The flogging of her pride pained her more than any lashing blow he had ever struck against her, lingered longer than any scar he'd left on her skin. Tears welled in her eyes, which she blinked but failed to hold back as they fell down her cheeks.[break][break]

When he had gotten the chastised result he desired from her, his voice lowered once more, becoming still as the eye of the storm.[break][break]

"I do not want to hear of this matter again. Next time, I will not be so patient with you."[break][break]

The ring found its way back to her bedroom long after she'd fled him, tidily returned on a serving tray with the dinner she'd refused to take with him. The silver of its band spoke of the forges of this family that she had chosen, the flame-wrought ruby at its heart beating like the very flames of progress that he'd fed her happiness to, in order to keep it alive. [break][break]

When next he saw her, the unspoken resignation to his commands was visible, glittering with acceptance on her left hand.

The paper in her hands fluttered in the wind, clutched close as Elisabeth's eyes darted back and forth to read the motel signs. Standing in this parking lot, its neon lights searing against the sky, the young woman felt every bit the frightened, rain-soaked runaway that she was. [break][break]

When she approached the door numbered 5, her heartbeat became so loud it threatened to burst. Raw purple bruises stung on her knuckles, their marks freshly blossoming on her skin as she knocked.[break][break]

Elisabeth stood here and waited, desperate for an answer to a prayer that she wasn't sure would come.[break][break]

She had never thought she would see Simon Langevin again: his golden hair, the gentle jade light of his eyes, the way that his height never threatened her despite its vastness over her. [break][break]

She never thought she could long to see someone so desperately, as she longed to see him now.[break][break]

The bodyguard had been kind to her when others had not. He had listened when others offered her nothing but a wall of silence and disdain. He had been a friend in a cold, unfeeling place where few cared to be.[break][break]

Simon had begged her to leave with him, and she had refused him.[break][break]

How afraid she had once been of becoming the adulteress her husband had accused her of being, with this younger and kinder man.[break][break]

How terrified she was of becoming someone unkind.[break][break]

Guilt was something decided by the eye of the beholder, however, and her friendship was damning enough in the eyes of many. Elisabeth's husband had served as her judge, jury, and executioner; her body bore the full brunt of his verdict, and no pleas of innocence had spared her from that punishment. [break][break]

Why hadn't she left him sooner? Why hadn't she taken that exit, when Simon first gave it to her?[break][break]

"Elisa?" came the young man's soft, disbelieving voice from the doorway, and she burst into tears of relief.[break][break]

The confession tumbled out in a flood of panic as Elisabeth found voice to give to the ways that her husband had wronged her. It was the first and last time she would ever dare to speak so openly of the atrocities she'd borne. [break][break]

She'd learn that lesson here and now, whether she wanted to or not.[break][break]

When he took her into his arms, she accepted his embrace for whatever comfort it offered. She had been starved of such warmth too long to have the willpower to deny him.[break][break]

She had nowhere else to go. She had no one else to turn to.[break][break]

Simon stroked her long blonde hair, patient and caring as he nodded, waiting until at last her voice grew hoarse and the tears dried on her cheeks. When she relented into his arms with exhaustion, he whispered dark words into her ear that would never leave her:[break][break]

"If you're going to be punished for the sin, Elisabeth, you might as well become a sinner."

[break]

She froze when he kissed her, immobile as a statue in the sudden vise of his arms. Confusion washed over her in waves, her own feelings conflicted and scattered as her world, again, shifted under her feet. [break][break]

Had she loved Simon back, too? Had she wanted this, all those days when he had looked at her like she was the sun itself? Had she considered what it might mean to him, for her to arrive as she had here?[break][break]

What signals had she given him, exactly? How many had been intentional? Escape had consumed her thoughts so completely, she didn't know.[break][break]

"Simon," Elisabeth pleaded, and he pulled away, looking at her intently. The touch of his hand on her cheek was so gentle it startled her. With this small caress, what little resistance remained in her melted away, the ache of her own loneliness now so profound she could no longer ignore its call.[break][break]

She kissed Simon back, for reasons she herself didn't fully understand.[break][break]

"You deserve to know what it means to be loved," he said in reply, and those words would forever haunt her, too.[break][break]

Quietly, Elisabeth had yearned for this: to be loved by someone with such exquisite tenderness, to be gazed upon with open adoration, and to be held and cherished as someone precious again. [break][break]

When he said he loved her, she believed him wholly and completely.[break][break]

When he said she was safe with him, she trusted him.[break][break]

Tangled in bedsheets under the cover of darkness, the sound of a knock on the door brought the sleeping girl to her senses. She hadn't heard Simon get up in the night, making a call to a man who had not long ago stripped him of his job, his reputation, and his pride.[break][break]

When her husband entered the room, a terror that Elisabeth had never known gripped her by the throat, and she shrank back against the wall as Simon laughed. He laughed, and the cruelty in that sound rang loudly in her ears -- the spite of a scorned man, whose bitterness and resentment towards the woman who had rejected him had been masked in pretty lies and feigned affections.[break][break]

"You made your bed, Elisa," were his parting words to her. "Now lie in it."[break][break]

And for the following decade, she would.

This new bedroom in his home was her own. [break][break]

To her disbelief, this self-imposed exile had resulted in no initial protest from her husband; he had become so cold to her that her presence by his side was negligible, she suspected, to his mind. [break][break]

His absence, on the other hand, afforded her a quiet relief in the night. [break][break]

Elisabeth curled up in the centre of her bed and buried her face in her pillows, furling in upon herself like a rosebud. She felt childlike, too small to fill up the vast space she had managed to steal away for herself. [break][break]

She had thought she would find freedom in it, but an ache settled in her chest instead. [break][break]

A hand traced the empty side of the mattress beside her, drawing the outline of an invisible man with her fingertips. Strange, that she missed him. He had wronged her too much to deserve her pity. [break][break]

The bruises flowering on her bare skin were a persistent reminder of that fact. [break][break]

Elisabeth closed her eyes and dared to think of other things. Forbidden things. The way his voice had once spoken to her in such hushed tones, as if trusting her with secrets he'd share with no other. His large hands running through her hair, tender in their caress. How he had promised her that her family would safe. [break][break]

The way he had once made her feel safe, and loved. [break][break]

When had that changed? What about them had changed, to find themselves where they were now? [break][break]

A knock rapped sharply against her door, and she stirred, turning to glance its way. Wariness steeled her as she tiptoed barefoot across the floor, leaning against the shut door as she asked, "Yes?" [break][break]

Even in the silence that stretched in the minutes that followed, she knew. [break][break]

She knew it was him. [break][break]

The barrier between them was enough to soften his words when he finally spoke, but not to deafen her against hearing them. [break][break]

"Is it what you want, Lisa?" he said at last. He didn't mean the room that she'd asked him for; her choice was limited in that regard, always. Everything here, in this manor, was ultimately his. [break][break]

Even her. [break][break]

"It's what I think is best," she answered quietly. [break][break]

What was so difficult was the way in which he was both so frighteningly oppressive and yet, peculiarly, vulnerable and weak in so many other ways. She could hear the sigh that escaped him, something defeated and resigned as he accepted her unwanted reply. [break][break]

"I see." [break][break]

He cared, Elisabeth realized with some surprise. He cared that she had rejected him in this way, despite how casually he had rejected her in so many others. [break][break]

"I understand this has been hard for you," he said suddenly. "This isn't the life you thought you would live. I accept some of that fault is mine. We both had false notions of how this would unfold." [break][break]

A hand found itself in her golden hair, fidgeting restlessly as she listened, unsure how to reply to this unexpected peace offering. In her silence, he chose to speak for her. [break][break]

"I am not an easy man to love. I know this." [break][break]

The wedding band turned and twisted over in her fingers, its silver gleam reflecting moonbeams from the open window. [break][break]

"I am not a kind man. I know you want me to be, but I am not. I am cold, and I can be cruel. I am quick to anger, and prone to jealousy. I am not blind to my faults." [break][break]

A stifling pause inserted itself here, its tension thick and suffocating, before an exhale released it. [break][break]

"I am not blind to the way I've hurt you." [break][break]

"Why are you here, Édouard?" Elisabeth murmured at last. "What is it you want from me?" Her arms wound around herself, willing her hands to hold anything except the doorknob that separated them between thin, flimsy walls. [break][break]

"Open the door, Lisa," he begged, the neediness in his voice making his demand known. "Let me make this right." [break][break]

Her nails buried themselves into the skin of her arms, refusing to unlatch from her sides. If this was what she'd wanted him to say, then why did it seem such a hollow victory to hear it now? [break][break]

Why should she have to forgive him? Why was it always her forgiving him? She was so weary of accepting his apologies, only for everything to stay the same. [break][break]

"I'm very tired," she murmured in response. "I think it's best we both go to bed." [break][break]

"Lisa. Lisa. Lisa." Each time he sweetly said her name only to receive no answer, his patience began to wear and thin. "Lisa." A plea that had first been wheedling and caring slowly grew more and more irate with each silent dismissal. "Lisa!" When persuasion failed, intimidation snarled its way into his words. "Lisa!" A fist banged against the wood of the locked door as he shouted, the knob shaking uselessly to and fro. "LISA!"[break][break]

Elisabeth stared at the door, numb with shock, as he continued to raise his voice in fury and frustration. [break][break]

She watched this last bastion of safety rattle on its hinges, the wood withstanding blows that she feared might have found purchase elsewhere otherwise. Frozen in the moonlight, she stared transfixed at this spectacle that, by now, should have become painfully familiar: the transformation of him from a man into a monster. [break][break]

To think she'd almost believed him, all over again. [break][break]

Did she want to be fooled that badly? [break][break]

"Goodnight, Édouard," Elisabeth whispered as she retreated back to her bed. This time, she didn't allow herself to imagine a past that suggested a happier future than the one she had found herself in. [break][break]

The ceaseless banging at the door insisted she couldn't pretend, even if she wanted to.

It was long past midnight when Édouard returned home. Elisabeth lingered in the shadows of his bedroom like the very Misdreavus that secretly haunted her own, a retreat where she slept most nights apart from him.[break][break]

When her husband darkened the entryway and saw her trespassing here, all of his posture went still. "You're awake," he said finally, instead of what his eyes asked: You're here. Why?

"I don't sleep well," was her dismissive reply, examining her nails. "I haven't since coming here. You know that."[break][break]

How faint it was, the scent of that lilac perfume. Were it not for how attuned she was to such aromas, Elisabeth might have missed it entirely.[break][break]

"How was the opera?" she asked instead, in a way that suggested she already knew the answer. It sounded like an accusation, because it was one.[break][break]

The way he looked at her conveyed no remorse for his indiscretion. No shame. Instead, he seemed possessed of a sort of wariness. As if he was assessing her strange mood and unable to determine what, exactly, it was.[break][break]

"I'm surprised that topic interests you," he said at last, "considering you declined your own invitation."[break][break]

"Fine, then," she said, reclining against the wall with a shrug. A slyness rang in her rephrased question: "How was she?"[break][break]

Dark laughter rumbled in his chest, the audacity of her question evoking equal parts bewilderment and frustration. "Is this jealousy, Lisa? No, you think too little of me for that."[break][break]

Something in his voice betrayed a desire to know otherwise, though. He sought some validation she'd long denied him.[break][break]

"No, go on. What was she like?" Elisabeth prodded instead, crossing her arms. The taste of wine was still there on her lips, and its headiness emboldened her. "Tell me. Do you have a type? Ingenues, perhaps?"[break][break]

"Is that what you think I want?" Steps crossed the distance between them, heavy with implication. "What of you? You were the first to break that vow between us."[break][break]

"How long will that sin damn me, I wonder? It's been years." Elisabeth scoffed, rolling her eyes. Poison dripped from her lips as she sneered, "You know that you've ruined me for good men, Édouard. I make no secret of that."[break][break]

The slit of her gown lengthened as she leaned back against the wall, and the burn scars on her thigh deliberately unveiled themselves with the motion. She held his gaze, defiant; she wanted him to see what he had made her into, how he had left his own twisted marks on her for other eyes to witness forevermore.[break][break]

When her husband's gaze lowered to the wounds he had fashioned on her own skin, no apology answered her. The sins committed between them piled up in the silence that followed before he broke it with casual dismissal.[break][break]

"You’ve never thought of me as a good man, have you? So perhaps that distinction doesn't matter to me."[break][break]

"No? I think you like to pretend you're not the monster you are," Elisabeth retorted with a sharp laugh. Spite hung over her like a second shadow, shrouding her with the simmer of its envious glower. "Tell me, do they throw themselves at you now? You poor creature, shackled in the bonds of matrimony to a slobbering lunatic. How nice it must be to hide in uncomplicated, sympathetic arms."[break][break]

What was the harm in being honest with him? What more could her husband possibly do to her that he had not already done?[break][break]

He had imprisoned her and told the press that she was losing her mind.[break][break]

"Do you think I hide from you?" he asked, and with that, he moved as if to touch her. She flinched at his approach, shrinking back like a furled violet as her shoulders hunched against the wall. At this, his expression darkened as he stood before her, mere inches apart. "No, Lisa. You are the one who hides from me. Because you know what I am."[break][break]

The very scars she had exposed revealed that truth.[break][break]

"And do you even see what I am, now?" she hissed, the words strung with something that veered between rage and petulance. "You don't, do you? All the ways that you've broken me to your satisfaction, only to discard me?"[break][break]

She tried not to think about this, the ways in which she had warped into someone that no one with kind hands could hold. That had been true long before any flames had engulfed her.[break][break]

For a long time, he stared at her, regarding the fury that burned in her glare with wonder. At such close proximity, she could spit at him if she wanted to. Elisabeth considered that possibility for a moment, fantasizing about what reaction that might invoke in him. It was at this moment, as the image entered her mind, that he suddenly laughed.[break][break]

"Merde. You are jealous."[break][break]

His disbelief and evident pleasure in the discovery incensed her, and she turned as if to leave. This time when he reached for her, the reaction to his touch was magnetic -- an inevitable collision, like that of lightning striking the sea. He pulled her into him, hands possessively snaking across the scarred flesh of her thigh as he drew her into his hateful orbit. It was a dance she had fallen into with him so many other times before, on so many other lonely, miserable nights, just like this one.[break][break]

She hated him. She loved him. She hated that she loved him. She loved the way they hated one another. At some point, the two had become one and the same. [break][break]

Part of her just wanted to feel something, anything at all, even if it was the devil's hands on her skin.

Georgiana Fiorelli entered the Bortiforte Manor with all the silent dignity of a foreign queen, her proud carriage causing the frantic servants to disperse at her unexpected arrival in her daughter's distant, dark new home. [break][break]

The blonde woman cast a dispassionate gaze over the dim-lit surroundings, finding nothing of interest as she raised her voice again: "I'm here to see my daughter. Where is the lady of the house?"[break][break]

Not the Dowager Countess. What brief meetings she'd had with the vile creature who had become Elisabeth's mother-in-law made shivers run up and down Gigi's spine.[break][break]

Yet it was neither Elisabeth nor the Dowager that was brought before her, but instead, Édouard. Her son-in-law glowered at this intruder on his domain, his own surpassing height lording over the woman whom had oh-so-begrudgingly given him her blessing to marry her only child.[break][break]

And though his eyes revealed his displeasure, the deceptive calm in his greeting did nothing to echo it in kind.[break][break]

"Baroness. What an unexpected pleasure. I would have thought a woman of your station would have given us the courtesy of due notice of your arrival. You'll have to forgive the state of our guest chambers."[break][break]

She'd caught him off-guard, then. Good. A pleased smile creased her lips.[break][break]

"Nothing to forgive, of course," Georgiana reassured him coolly. "I am grateful you're able to receive me at all. It has been too long since I have seen you both."[break][break]

Since the winery had plummeted into financial ruin. [break][break]

Since Francis, her beloved husband, had taken ill.[break][break]

Since her daughter had stopped answering her phone calls, and stopped penning her letters.[break][break]

Since she'd begun to hear things that frightened her about how her daughter lived.[break][break]

"Where is Elisa?" Georgiana asked, staring into his coal-black eyes with an intensity that seemed at odds with the polite tenor of her voice. [break][break]

He hesitated. For only a moment, but enough that she noticed, seizing the detail with the ravenous hunger of one starved for information. [break][break]

"She has been under the weather as of late," he offered at last.[break][break]

"Then all the better that I am here," Georgiana said brightly, linking her arm in his. Her grip was tight, almost demanding. "Mothers are needed most in times like this, don't you think?"[break][break]

"As you say," came his cautious, guarded reply. "Very well, then."[break][break]

She let him guide her like this by the elbow, buoyed by his station in the household as she glided past the manor staff. All the while, she glanced about herself, examining every shadow for the daughter she knew was hidden here, somewhere, just out of her sight and her care.[break][break]

"Who is tending to your husband in your absence, Baroness?" Édouard asked abruptly. "Last we spoke, he seemed in a poor state. Naturally I have done what I can to assure he is in the best of care, but, there are limits to modern medicine."[break][break]

For all the concerned words he spoke, Georgiana recognized them for the unspoken accusation they were. So she smiled, and parried back in kind.[break][break]

"You are kind to worry so about your father-in-law, Édouard. Why, you should both visit us in Camphrier Town. I'm sure seeing Elisa would brighten his day like nothing else in the world."[break][break]

He was the obstacle. Georgiana couldn't pinpoint how, or why, but she knew: this man was the reason her daughter would no longer speak to her. This man was the reason when she last heard her daughter promise that she was fine and well, it sounded like she was trying to prove her happiness to herself, even as she insisted on it aloud.[break][break]

"Alas that my work keeps me eternally busy, Baroness. I have attempted to get Lisa to visit you herself, but you know how she is. The doting type."[break][break]

How the man lied with such ease. Georgiana could recognize that fork-tongue for what it was, no matter how sweetly he flattered with his fox-like smile.[break][break]

"You could release her, I think, if you reassured her you could spare her for a few days," she said mildly. The shift in his posture at her choice of words was subtle, but with her arm linked with his, she felt it: the way he turned rigid, as if sensing that she knew something she shouldn't.[break][break]

Although Georgiana didn't, not really, in any true way. Yet mothers had their own intuition about their children. Mothers who loved as deeply as she loved, at least.[break][break]

When finally she came upon the daughter she so desperately wanted to see, Georgiana's heart plummeted.[break][break]

The girl in the garden barely resembled the young bride that Georgiana had watched exchange earnest vows with the man next to her. There was a smallness to her, the defeated air of someone who wished to shrink into the earth itself and let it swallow her up completely.[break][break]

This version of Elisabeth was perilously thin, the clothes on her body trying in vain to fit her as they once did. Dark circles sat beneath her eyes, drawn there as if from lack of sleep, as she focused on the flowers in front of her with steady hands.[break][break]

"Elisa?" Georgiana called out, and her daughter froze in place, eyes widening as if disbelieving the voice she'd heard for what it was. [break][break]

When the young woman glanced up to see her mother, something in her expression brightened with amazement and relief, only to dwindle at the sight of the man beside her. The warmth subdued behind something wary, and the instinct to run across the gardens was visibly suppressed as Elisabeth walked, calmly and slowly, towards the mother she had not seen in months.[break][break]

"Hello, Mother," she said softly, though her pleading eyes said what her words could not: I missed you.[break][break]

How it ached at Georgiana's heart to see her daughter like this. [break][break]

All pretense was thrown to the side as she broke away from Édouard's hold to embrace her daughter, clutching her so close, Georgiana swore to herself she would never let her go again.[break][break]

Her daughter had never felt so fragile.[break][break]

"Would you mind giving us a moment alone?" Georgiana asked her son-in-law sweetly, sensing the way he tensed up at the request. "I'm certain you have much to do, being as busy as you say you are."[break][break]

His smile was cold in its perfectly manicured politeness. "What kind of monster would I be, leaving my mother-in-law to fend for herself?"[break][break]

Georgiana resolved to hold her daughter's hand tight, pulling Elisabeth by her side as she said, "Very well. Then we can begin with dinner, can't we?"[break][break]

They did. And never had Gigi experienced such a silent, stark affair between a supposed family of people.[break][break]

Elisabeth said nothing at all as she sat beside her mother. Her head was bowed low, offering furtive glances at her mother between mouthfuls of food as if checking that she had not imagined her presence here. Her daughter reminded her of a bird, Georgiana realized suddenly: timid and hesitant in her movements, as if she might fly away at any moment.[break][break]

When she found her moment to talk to her daughter alone, Georgiana seized it.[break][break]

The work that ruled her son-in-law ultimately proved his undoing, calling him away to some affair he couldn't postpone. The fury in his gaze as he made to depart satisfied Georgiana immensely; even though she didn't imagine herself a hateful woman, she'd never despised anyone so much as she did this man who had singlehandedly kept her child from her.[break][break]

"Elisa," she said, gathering her daughter close in the gardens that cloistered them from prying eyes, "whatever hold that man has on you, it's imagined. You can leave. You can come home with me."[break][break]

Something like hope dared to flicker in the young woman's eyes, before it dimmed as quickly as it came. Slowly, uncertainly, Elisabeth lowered her mute defenses to ask: "How is Father doing?"[break][break]

"He's sick, my love, but he would be overjoyed to see you. He talks of little else."[break][break]

This reassurance did nothing to assuage the uncertainty in her daughter's gaze. "Is the money helping? Is he getting good care?"[break][break]

Georgiana's grip on her daughter's hands tightened, fierce in its protective grasp; Gigi could feel her slipping already. It terrified her.[break][break]

"You are not responsible for our financial stability, Elisa. We are adults. We made our own choices. Your life is yours to live."[break][break]

Georgiana Fiorelli would live in debt a thousand times over, if she could drag her daughter back home again.[break][break]

Elisabeth's eyes turned away to the flowers that bloomed all around them. It was the one place in the manor where the young woman seemed at ease, or at least, less afraid.[break][break]

"I grow Galarian roses here," Elisabeth said instead, ignoring the sentiment entirely. "They make me think of home, sometimes. The pink ones especially. Your favorite."[break][break]

"Is it just the money, then?" Georgiana insisted. She wouldn't let go of this topic. She couldn't. "Are you only here to offer us some stability? My darling girl, how little you understand how much we love you. If we lose the estate, we lose the estate. It means little."[break][break]

"He's not a bad man." The admission came out softly, murmured as a rose was taken into her hands. Elisabeth turned the thorned stem over in her hands, careful not to let it prick her skin. "He can be cold, I know. And seem unkind. But we are happy in our own way."[break][break]

Her daughter didn't lie in the same way that her son-in-law did. The way that Elisabeth lied frightened Georgiana Fiorelli far, far more. [break][break]

For as obvious as each and every falsehood was, the woman speaking them aloud appeared to believe every word that left her lips as gospel.[break][break]

"I apologize that you came at a bad time," Elisabeth continued, her voice almost pleading. "We've been... in an argument of sorts. It's my fault, really. It usually is."[break][break]

Georgiana had thought Édouard would be her opponent here, but the reality was something far more sinister.[break][break]

How could you reach into someone's mind and defeat the enemy that haunted them from within?[break][break]

"You are a kind-hearted person, Elisa, but I fear sometimes your kindness is misplaced. Not everyone has good intentions." A lesson Georgiana regretted not instilling in her daughter sooner. "If he loves you, if you're happy, then why does he frighten you so much?"[break][break]

"He doesn't frighten me."[break][break]

But he did. The naked surprise and shame on her daughter's face said it clear as day.[break][break]

"Why did you stop calling me?" Georgiana's voice was not accusing, but gentle and coaxing. "Why did you stop writing letters? Elisa, how I worry for you in this silence. It is not like you. And when I see how you live, I worry all the more."[break][break]

"I am still learning how to live here. It's all very new," she said -- defensively, Georgiana realized with some surprise. "I'm doing many things wrong, I know. But I promise you I'm trying, I am trying my hardest."[break][break]

Her reply was loving and tender: "I wasn't attacking you, my love. You haven't done anything wrong."[break][break]

"But that's not true!" Elisabeth blurted out suddenly, whatever barrier that had prevented her from voicing her unhappiness cracking at last. Her hands flung up to cover her eyes, unable to stop herself from crumbling before a woman who she so desperately didn't want to worry, didn't want to concern, didn't want to frighten. "I've... It's my fault. It's my fault. I can do better. He deserves better. It's all my fault."[break][break]

What sins did she imagine herself to be guilty of? Georgiana couldn't fathom it. Nonplussed, she gave up on words that seemed determined to fail her, instead comforting her daughter with the safety of her arms. She stroked her hair, then began to hum softly -- the bars of a lullaby that Elisabeth had not heard in years. [break][break]

The song soothed Elisabeth, as it always had. For a moment, she felt like a child again, curled up in her mother's arms.[break][break]

"I just want you happy, Elisabeth," Georgiana said finally, taking her daughter's chin in her hands. The baroness wiped away fresh tears with care, her voice patient. "Do you understand? If you ever feel alone here, I want you to remember I am waiting for you. That I love you. That your father loves you. That nothing else matters in the world, save for that truth."[break][break]

To think that cruel man had weaponized this very love against her, taking the family she cherished and used it as a bargaining chip in negotiation.[break][break]

It infuriated Georgiana to heights she couldn't express, this helplessness.[break][break]

"Je t'aime, maman."[break][break]

"Je t'aime aussi, ma fleur."[break][break]

It was here, as Georgiana looked at the flowers blossoming all around her, that an idea suddenly took hold of her. She pulled away to meet Elisabeth's gaze, saying with a quiet intensity:[break][break]

"Do you remember our mornings together in the garden? I'd ask you to tell me what you were feeling through flowers. And we'd trade them back and forth, like a game."[break][break]

It felt unlikely to succeed, this plan. But Georgiana was running out of time. She was running out of ways to make her daughter see the escape she'd blinded herself to.[break][break]

"If you can't talk to me. If you can't write to me. Maybe you can send me flowers. Maybe they can say the things your words can't."[break][break]

It was not a victory, this compromise. It was not the ending she wanted for her daughter. It was not the confession she'd hoped to hear, the surrender into her arms that Georgiana had desperately hoped would be the resolution of her visit.[break][break]

Georgiana couldn't spare many more visits at all. Francis was sicker than she could let Elisabeth know. She feared it would make Édouard's power over her all the greater, for the knowing of it.[break][break]

Still, when Elisabeth offered a slight, halting nod of her head in assent, something in Georgiana dared to dream of a happier ending than whatever it was that her daughter had married into.[break][break]

Had Georgiana Fiorelli lived longer, perhaps that dream might have been realized. Fate could be cruel, in that way.

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]

[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]

[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]

[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]

[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]

[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]

[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]

[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]

[break]

And he'd never forgive her for turning him into the man he least wanted to be.

The lock on the bedroom door was nothing to the HEX her Misdreavus performed, giggling as she phased into invisibility once more. This secret of Elisabeth's had already paid dividends, causing misfortune whenever spiteful whims took hold of her. [break][break]

Like now, for example.[break][break]

The mad wife of Lord Bortiforte descended the stairwell dressed in blood-red, masked in sequins glittering with ruby and gold. Her husband's masquerade gave her an anonymity she was so often denied, and she slipped in among the higher echelons of Kalos with all the grace of an unseen shadow.[break][break]

"Enchanté," she said with a thin smile as she met her target at the back of the ballroom. Lilac perfume drew her towards the poor fool, like an Ariados summoned by the fly causing ripples to shudder through its web. "Do you mind if I join you?"[break][break]

A hesitant nod answered her. The young woman wasn't terribly older than Elisabeth herself had been, when she met her husband at an event much like this one. This girl was pale-haired, doe-eyed, nervous:[break][break]

An amusing imitation of the woman that her husband had fallen for almost a decade ago.[break][break]

Wine was fetched and poured, generously offered from the mad woman of Bortiforte Manor to the ingenue that had infiltrated the fortress that served as her own prison. Dancing bodies reveled in this room that Elisabeth knew so well, she could close her eyes and navigate it perfectly. Isolation did strange things to the mind.[break][break]

Her mind had supposedly left her a long time ago.[break][break]

"You can't seem to keep your eyes off him," Elisabeth commented, gesturing to the figure that she, too, would recognize no matter what mask he wore. She'd unmasked the monster beneath that façade far too many times to be fooled by whatever charisma he feigned now. "Is he perhaps your paramour this evening?"[break][break]

A coy, sly smile hid Elisabeth's true thoughts from view as the girl blushed in answer, looking away. "Oh, no. He's the master of the house, that's all," the girl said, but only because she was expected to. The red flush on her skin said a different story, as did the way she anxiously distracted herself with her drink.[break][break]

"Marriage hasn't stopped anyone from pursuing true love in high society, last I heard," came her snide retort. Elisabeth watched as the stranger's wine-stained lips left an imprint upon the glass, and her smile only widened. "And you know what they say about his wife. Everyone's talking about it."[break][break]

It wouldn't take much bait. Not after even that tiny, harmless dose of Roselia poison had been ingested. Its truth serum properties would take effect sooner rather than later, make her feel a bit worse for wear, then eventually wear off.[break][break]

She'd practised on herself and the maids enough to know.[break][break]

"I feel sorry for him," the girl said, looking at him with open longing. "He seems to be under so much pressure at all times, and to be carrying the burden of loving someone who doesn't have the presence of mind to truly love you back... It's tragic, isn't it?"[break][break]

"Oh, yes. Very," she replied drily. "I can only imagine how painful such isolation must be."[break][break]

Her own grip on her glass tightened, knuckles blanching, even as her pleasant demeanor never faltered.[break][break]

"She sounds horribly cruel to him, too. The things she says and does... It's barbaric. I have to imagine she's not well."[break][break]

Elisabeth shrugged. "Oh? I find many people in our circles can be cruel. Most intend to be, in fact."[break][break]

"What she accused him of is unspeakable," the girl continued, her vision unfocusing. The poison had its other effects, too, and Elisabeth did nothing to ease her pain, even as the antidote weighed itself down in her purse. "I can't believe she would have tried to slander him in that way, only for his money. It's so... selfish?"[break][break]

"Do you think he isn't?" Whatever affability had been in her previous statements had flattened. "Selfish, I mean."[break][break]

"I think he's misunderstood," the girl said at length.[break][break]

Unable to contain her disbelief, Elisabeth laughed, and that shrill sound finally attracted attention from the other partygoers. She saw the shadowy figure approaching her even as she began to stand, her eyes never leaving him even as she continued to speak.[break][break]

"Powerful men always are," she said, and something in the words became a snarl. "Anything bad that happens to them is a misunderstanding. Unhappy married men like him are always the result of bitter, conniving wives. That's the story we're told in places like this one. That's the truth they'd have you believe."[break][break]

"Lisa," a masculine voice interrupted, emanating a profound irritation.[break][break]

As the man approached his wife and mistress side-by-side, Elisabeth met his fury with a bright, unwavering smile. "Time for me to go already, Édouard? Oh, but Little Lilac and I were getting along so nicely," she said, taking his extended arm in hers as she pressed a kiss to his cheek. It was a symbolic action more than anything else; neither she nor he derived any pleasure from the contact.[break][break]

"You weren't well enough to attend this event," he repeated firmly. Or in other words: We both know you won't behave. [break][break]

Why should she? What benefit had being the good wife ever given her?[break][break]

"People are staring, Édouard," she said instead, pulling him towards the centre of the ballroom with a wild grin. "Don't you want to dance? Wouldn't that quiet them down a bit? I still remember how to play along, if you do."[break][break]

The awkwardness and embarrassment on the other girl's face as the two departed gave Elisabeth a sick, sadistic pleasure. Good, she thought to herself. Suffer now, instead of later. All that man does is create suffering.[break][break]

The pair fell into step with one another as if ten years hadn't passed between their first dance and now. It was mechanical, rote: a tradition that both had been trained into, though back then, only one of them had ever enjoyed it.[break][break]

Now, neither of them did.[break][break]

"Enjoying my replacement?" Elisabeth asked, fluttering her eyelashes up at him. "She seems very docile. And very gullible."[break][break]

His head dipped lower to whisper in her ear, his voice betraying his agitation: "You have chosen a poor day to war with me, Lisa. This event is significant."[break][break]

She feigned a gasp of shock and delight. "Oh? Proclaiming your everlasting love before the world? Édouard, dare I ask, are you becoming sentimental?"[break][break]

When he spun her close to him, it was covetously close -- as if he wanted to strangle her right here, in front of everyone present. Half of her hoped he would. [break][break]

It would affirm her own sanity.[break][break]

"I am running for office," he hissed in a voice so low she could only hear him due to his suffocating proximity. "Do not test me, Lisa. Not in front of the most powerful and wealthy donors in all of Kalos."[break][break]

All the pettiness that had fueled her taunting evaporated before this new knowledge, the challenging glint in her eyes dimming to be replaced with another emotion he would recognize.[break][break]

Fear.[break][break]

"You can't," she said, looking up at him as the terror faded and was replaced with something harder. Something hateful. "You can't do that."[break][break]

Hadn't she suffered enough indignities? Hadn't she been under enough scrutiny, as a CEO's mad and uncontrollable wife?[break][break]

What would those vultures do to her as a politician's better half? What little privacy and freedom she'd achieved seemed to diminish before her very eyes, vanishing into nothingness as the future unfolded before her.[break][break]

Her protests met nothing but the wall of his laughter. "You have no power over me, Lisa," he sneered as he twirled her away from him, knowing she would return back, as she always did, into his waiting arms. "You know that."[break][break]

He always underestimated her, no matter what she said or did.

The Simon Langevin incident ultimately served as the fulcrum on which their marriage pivoted. [break][break]

This was what her husband and her mother-in-law believed: Elisabeth's forced return in its aftermath, newly labeled as an ungrateful and unfaithful adulteress, had finally broken her spirit.[break][break]

Where before Elisabeth was an open book, unable to hide the slightest shift in mood, a hardness had now settled in her, shimmering like some invisible barrier that kept her thoughts hidden from view. Idle conversation had long been abandoned at the dinner table, and longing glances that used to betray the pang of unrequited feelings were now nonexistent.[break][break]


She was quiet. Stoic, even. Polite. Subdued. All the emotion had drained out of her, replaced with something numb and unfeeling.[break][break]


Almost overnight, she had become the woman her husband had hoped she'd eventually turn into: the model wife for a man of his station, only speaking when spoken to, impeccably mannered and poised. [break][break]


He'd told her once to learn how to live without love, and to find her own happiness. She'd ultimately forsaken both instead.[break][break]


This severance between her heart, body, and mind was rewarded with new freedoms. The less she acted like a person with her own thoughts and feelings, the more they trusted her to interact with strangers and to perform her wifely duties at corporate and high-society events alike. She gained a reputation of being beautiful and cold, shying away from attempts at conversation to stand alone and untouchable; she knew better now than to trust others to sympathize with her plight.[break][break]


His family thought they'd tamed her.[break][break]


When her husband warmed to her again, he learned the chilling depths of her own icy indifference. She would play the role he'd asked of her, like a good actress, but her door remained closed to him; she'd support him in the public eye, like he'd asked of her, but she'd shun him like a stranger in the halls of her own home.[break][break]


This time, it was her turn to reject him.[break][break]


They trusted her enough one night to host a dinner in her husband's absence. The primary man involved was one that Édouard complained about often when drinking: someone uppity at work, someone who enjoyed disagreeing with him for the sake of it. [break][break]


He was decent enough to look at, Elisabeth supposed, though nothing about him was particularly compelling: unmarried -- married to his work, really -- and utterly abysmal at conversation. The way his furtive glances towards her indicated his interest made choosing him among her husband's cronies easy. Years later, she'd remember neither his face nor his name.[break][break]


The first time she'd broken her marriage vows, it had been out of desperation and a misplaced craving for affection. [break][break]


The second time, it was pure spite.[break][break]


Her husband hadn't always been so rough with her, so cold, or so uncaring; there was a time that he, too, had held her the way Simon Langevin had, the night of his inevitable betrayal. Those two men had taught her a painful lesson: [break][break]

To be loved was to be lied to.

[break][break]


Her body became a new battleground to wage war against her husband, and her self-defense in this war was to become someone uncaring. She half-expected she wouldn't be able to go through with this decision, but the sheer vastness of her spite ensured otherwise. It had swallowed her up entirely, stifling and strangling whatever flowering vestiges of romance had weakened her with anxious self-doubts and pining for a man she now knew was not worth loving.[break][break]


The tryst was brief, really. She was a means to an end, just like he was, and the transaction concluded with that in mind. It was simpler, she decided, as she rolled out of bed and gathered her clothes. If you knew you were being used, then being used didn't hurt the same way.[break][break]


It became predictable theater, instead.[break][break]


As this man turned to leave her bedroom, Elisabeth ensured he took the hall with security cameras. She lingered there in the corridor, letting their lens take in the resulting state of her indiscretion, glancing up with a small, self-satisfied smile at the absent man she knew would revisit the footage later.[break][break]


She wanted him to know.[break][break]


She wanted him to realize, in some small way, he still didn't own her.[break][break]


He'd labeled her an adulteress long before she'd ever betrayed him. Becoming one felt inevitable, in the end.

Company events were often the more tolerable obligations to attend, if only because work was a more genuine tie to another person than lineage and bloodlines. [break][break]

High-society parties, on the other hand, were exhausting.[break][break]

When other women approached her in a flurry of excitable compliments, Elisabeth steeled herself with a feigned smile. There was no time she could remember where her peers in the Kalosian upper-class had treated her with genuine enthusiasm, and this time was no different, just a different variant of the same.[break][break]

Before, she'd been seemingly beneath their notice due to her family's declining status. Now, they resented her for holding a place and station through marriage that didn't belong to her.[break][break]

Although they pretended otherwise.[break][break]

"Lisa, you and your husband should tour with us in Galar," one prattled on, the invitation slipped in between bragging about how beautiful her own summer had been in the region. "You could convince him, surely?"[break][break]

"You must be so proud of him," another gushed, the envy in her voice unmistakable. "I hear the business has doubled in size this year? It's so impressive."[break][break]

"Some of it is due to you, I'm sure," another simpered. "I'm sure he's very grateful to you."[break][break]

It was amusing, somewhat. The transparent jealousy others had for the nightmare that was her life.[break][break]

Forced repetition had armed her against this warfare in a way her sheltered childhood had not. Indifference likewise proved a powerful shield against gossips and backstabbers alike.[break][break]

"I cannot take credit for any of my husband's accolades," she replied, her smile one that reflected a humility she did not feel. "If you'd like to direct them to the man himself, by all means. I'm sure he'd be glad to hear. Speaking of, you'll have to excuse me."[break][break]

As Elisabeth turned her back on them, she could already hear the audible descent into viciousness, harsh whispers confirming the hissing of Sevipers for what it was. It used to invoke such painful insecurity in her, but now, it just resulted in mild, half-hearted entertainment.[break][break]

Without meaning to, she soon found herself beside the only other person she knew in this place.[break][break]

"Is your current company so lacking?" her husband asked, turning to her with faint surprise.[break][break]

"You're the only person who hates being here as much as I do," was her cool reply as she crossed her arms. "If we're to be honest, you probably hate it more."[break][break]

His booming laughter came out genuine, tinged with curiosity. "What did they say to you?"[break][break]

"La flatterie que vous recevez des gens qui veulent quelque chose," she muttered bitterly in Kalosian.[break][break]

"So the same as any other event." He lowered his drink and turned to her, expression thoughtful. "Do you want to leave? We're in Lumiose City. There's plenty else to do."[break][break]

Moments like this, the lie felt real: the one where they pretended to be a typical married couple of the aristocracy. If she didn't know better, she'd believe it herself.[break][break]

Some days, she even wanted to.[break][break]

"All right," she said carefully, eyes narrowed at him with suspicion. "Such as what? You're not one for dancing or crowds."[break][break]

He didn't answer, instead extending an arm for her to take. She wordlessly did, aware of the eyes watching them both as they departed. Playing along was her half of the social contract, and she knew to perform it in public.[break][break]

His resulting decision left her stunned. [break][break]

Defying all her expectations, a humble foodstall selling Lumiose Galettes within view of the Prism Tower was his destination. He bought the traditional Kalosian dessert for them both and motioned for her to join him on one of the nearby benches to rest. Flowers bloomed in the nearby boxes of surrounding shops, their colors evoking a familiarity that made her homesick for Camphrier Town.[break][break]

"These were my favorite part of Lumiose City as a kid," he said unprompted, holding up the Galette. "The staff would take me here while my parents conducted business." It was more than he normally said aloud about himself, and the pause that sat here seemed to suggest an end to his thoughts. Then, with a short laugh, he added: "I don't think they knew what else to do with me."[break][break]

For awhile, Elisabeth simply ate her dessert in silence.[break][break]

There was a time this kind of admission would have been something precious to her. A small part of that woman lived in her still, although it was a quieter echo of what it once was. That side of who she was no longer ruled her the way it used to.[break][break]

"My mother had a recipe for baking Galettes," she said at length, treading cautiously. Her eyes glanced up to meet his. "I still remember how."[break][break]

An implication was read from the statement, but not one she felt comfortable stating aloud. That time for kindness had already passed between them, replaced by ground razed for fresh conflict.[break][break]

"Lisa."[break][break]

She froze at the gentle way he said her name, her heartbeat becoming something frightened and anxious. This fear wasn't the same that had transfixed her in the stormy first year or so of their marriage. It was a wariness, one that feared a shift in the predictable dynamic she had accepted between them.[break][break]

"How long are we going to do this?" he asked, something between exasperation and earnestness in his tone alike.[break][break]

The more time passed, it became so easy to forget all the ways in which he had humiliated her, degraded her, betrayed her, and wronged her. She had to force herself to remember that pain, to hold onto those dark memories like a tiny flame to keep the spite within her warm and fed.[break][break]

It was why she acted out as she did, desecrating their wedding vows to remind herself of the terrible anger that could take hold of him the moment she didn't play along with the life he wanted her to live.[break][break]

She didn't want to forget. She didn't want to be that weak with him again.[break][break]

She didn't want him to be able to hurt her, the way he once did.[break][break]

"We can't go back to what we were," Elisabeth said finally, standing up. "If that's what you want from me, you'll be waiting a long time."[break][break]

His hand took hers as she rose, and she felt her resolve falter, ever so slightly. Some weakness in her still longed for the false happiness he promised her, still wanted to believe some better ending here was possible.[break][break]

"We don't have to go back," he said, firm in his insistence. "I'm asking if we can move forward."[break][break]

Months later, she'd hate him for this. She'd loathe the way she let his little childhood story worm its way into her heart, a shared hotel room becoming the excuse she needed to lose herself to the fantasy he'd dangled before her.[break][break]

She became colder, crueler, meaner to push him away in the aftermath, furious at the consequences that silently revealed themselves in her body all too soon after.[break][break]

Fate wasn't as cruel as it could have been. The repercussions of bearing his heir never came to fruition.[break][break]

No child would ever be born to prove the love between them existed at all.