Piece of Past

Charles is a man of the past, Lucia concludes, one day.

When she and her mother meet him, he is mourning the death of his parents. The meeting is little more than coincidence, he had been badgered into coming to a ball, and the two women had been invited by a broad man with an eyepatch. Charles and Lucia's mother, Marianne, take an immediate liking to each other, visible by how their eyes keep returning and how they keep meeting for dances together.

Lucia is mature, and Charles doesn't appeal to her (far too old and in need of special care), so she keeps her distance and allows him to court her mother. She doesn't let jealousy that he is taking up her mother's time eat at her.

(The only time she's truly lost her temper was with the daughter of a servant that dared be more beautiful and exuberant than her, happily frolicking through her mother's house. She pushed the girl down a set of stairs with rock ground at the end. Still today the girl was blind for hitting her head too hard, crippled for breaking and healing her legs wrong, and crying bitter tears for lost chances while cursing Lucia's name.)

So Lucia lets her mother go, doesn't mind when the woman spends her days with the man, watching as more and more they become absorbed in each other, forgetting all else. She doesn't let the feeling of being pushed aside overwhelm her, instead taking care of the work her mother more and more forgets.

Charles and Marianne marry, and by then, Lucia is holding up the business of the family on her own. Her mother and now step-father forget to ask about her.

When her mother dies, she cries at the funeral, then steels herself to continue the work, that has now doubled with Charles' share.

She doesn't mind, she tells to friends and distant family that ask, He's still mourning.

Her marriage proposals have doubled as well, but she ignores all in favor of business save for one; a blond nobleman, respectful, playful, and gentle, tall and blue-eyed. He regularly visits, sometimes to ask for her hand again, sometimes merely to tell her how his life goes. She doesn't actually mind him.

Lucia only realizes how much Charles lives in the past when, one day, she returns from a walk and a terrible encounter with a man (crazed green eyes, dirty brown hair, vicious smile and cruel hands, cackling about revenge for ruining his life when she's never met him before) and tries, with deep breaths, to talk to her step-father, if only to find a little solace.

He refuses to meet her, and when she forces her way to him, dress ripped and shaking, he gives her a cold glare.

"You shame the memory of your mother."

Something in her wilts. Marianne has been dead for years now, and Lucia, though no longer mourning, still keeps her mother's memory close to her heart.

She leaves Charles to his mourning, unable to remember her mother without feeling shame well up, and never again seeks him for any reason. The work she buries herself in numbs the rest of her feelings.

The next time the blond nobleman returns, the only one to insist in courting her, she feels as if he's noticed the change. She tells him then that she doesn't love him, probably never will, and will never be intimate with him. He doesn't actually care.

"We could stay friends."

Lucia marries him two weeks later, leaving the house and Charles behind, alone. She lives contentedly while taking care of her husband's business.

She never has any children.

M.S.: As someone who takes reincarnation and karma as facts of life, I have taken to relating present situations to possible pasts. The hardships endured now free one of the commited sins from then. Take this as you will.

This is also an excerpt I could not fit into any sort of background story, nothing connected to something else, merely something I one day thought up and related to canon.