A/N: This prologue serves as the opening for my newest multi-chapter fic. The first official chapter will be posted soon! I do post this story with the slight warning that it is going to be unlike the things I've written in the past. I'll be a Cobert fan always and forever but I am interested in exploring facets of their story that I have perhaps ignored in other work because I enjoy fluff so much. SO, I shall just say that this story will not be a fluff-fest, nor will it necessarily go in the direction my other work has always gone. But I do still hope very much that you all enjoy it.

A thin layer of dust encased the tables, desks, and various other surfaces throughout the house. The books now, too, had begun to collect dust in silent protestation of their neglect. The library had been empty for over three weeks, the drawing room besting it by several days—it having been empty for nearly four weeks. The windows, usually bright and freshly washed, were dulling and the curtains framing them had frozen in place, not used to remaining still for so very long. The halls were silent and when the odd person happened down one accidentally, the floorboards creaked in agony.

The dining room remained dark, upon strict orders that it was not to be used or entered. The back hallways and other rooms unluckily crafted with no windows had also been shrouded in black for weeks. The house mourned its losses in silent chaos. It mourned what once was and what should have been.

The staff deemed unnecessary had been released weeks before. One by one they slipped silently from the heaping wreckage that had once been so beautiful. They disappeared, leaving the house to fend for itself. Those who remained had no discernable purpose. The butler ambled around the property like a ghost tending to its graveyard, looking for someone, anyone really, to care for. And the housekeeper tried for much the same until the silence became too much to bear. She, too, packed a suitcase and departed sometime in the dull grey mist of days and evenings that all seemed to pack together and form one indiscernible ever-present night.

A dog barked every so often, in vain, for effect. The sound reverberated through the walls and down the hallways, falling upon deaf and long departed ears. A bark, it appeared, was wasted if no one were there to hear it. Soon those noises stopped as well, leaving in their wake only the sound of the butler's shined black shoes tapping up the stairs and down the stairs with painful regularity—once in the morning and once at night. He passed the empty rooms and tried to ignore the quiet whispers of what had been. He ignored the dusty books and shelves, for he had no choice; they were his orders and he would follow them. He walked by the woman's sweater resting on the hall table as if it did not pain him to do so. The sweater, looking as if it awaited its owner's return, had been in that exact location for a month without so much as an inch of movement. And he passed, too, by the bedroom door that remained locked, willing himself so desperately to ignore the rhythmic clinking of ice in a glass coupled with the disturbing sounds of a man who had once been someone great.

But, as is the nature of such cyclical things as life, one morning the house awoke to the slam of a door—the front door, in fact. The house it seemed, having been without its mistress for over a month, was now without a master as well.