#char: bérénice ciar | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

doriwrites · 3 years

Text

hello, hi, i am back? with a little treat (lol). here, have an excerpt of draconian (if you can tell it was supposed to be a harry potter fic... no you don’t)!!!! meet lucifer, a girl on a mission!!!!!

She's four when mom tells her— "You are cursed, mon amour."

At first, she wonders it that why I remember hands crushing my throat until there’s nothing left to crush but just as quick comes the no, Lucius says those are just nightmares. So, she doesn’t understand, and when she asks mom what does that mean? mom doesn’t say, because mom likes to do things by halves. Grand-père says it’s because mom’s french, but she doesn’t understand that either.

When she goes and asks him what’s a curse? grand-père says, “Something bad that seldom happens to the bad people,” she doesn’t know what seldom means but she thinks she understands the rest of it, so she asks am I a curse? “Ah!” he belly laughs, “Luce, Lucy, my darling Lucifer,” he sings, “You, you are something good that seldom happens to the people at all!” Maybe it’s because he’s french and does things by halves too, or because he’s an adult and they speak in riddles like the sphinx in that story she always falls asleep in the middle of, but she doesn’t understand.

She seeks father next and finds him in the sunroom overlooking the gardens, a book in one hand and a glass of not-water in the other. He’s the one who told her what doing things by halves means and he always says the things he means like you look absolutely splendid, wife or Bérénice, my love, I’ve never hated anyone quite the way I hate your father so when she asks him why am I cursed? she’s surprised when he only answers with, “You spoke with your mother,” and needs prompting for more. At length (after three whys and two hows), he gives the drink a longing look, sighs a long breath, and relents, “You’ll find that most things happen for good or bad reasons. And, sometimes, they happen for no reason at all. Your… circumstances are no fault of your own, nor was it your mother’s before you or her mother’s before her.” He stops there, and she doesn’t understand anything.

Finally, she decides Lucius is the only one she can trust to answer all her questions. He’s not an adult and only half-french, that has to count for something. He’s in his room, lights off, sprawled over his bed, experimenting on a spell with the wand he prefers to call a sceptre because wand is an umbrella term for wooden magical conduit, damnit! There’s a bird-shaped golden light, winking in and out of existence near the ceiling. She chases it with her eyes until she trips over her own feet, breaking Lucius’ concentration and plunging the room in complete darkness. She hurries to the bed and burries half of herself in the cover and the other half in Lucius’ side. When she asks him what’s a curse? and am I a curse? and why am I cursed? he huffs a little laugh and whispers in a language she doesn’t know until the bird appears again. “A curse is a malignant spell— a bad one, meant to hurt whomever it is for,” he says quietly, “Yours is a blood one. It means you got it from mom, who got it from grand-mère, who got it from her own mother. It also means you are not the curse. It’s in you, not you, do you understand that?”

She thinks she does. “What the curse?”

“I don’t know, mom doesn’t like to talk about it, I think.”

The bird flies around the room and bathes Lucius in gold and she wants to say sometimes, I remember dying and sometimes, I remember you being a bad person but most of all she wants to tell him when I remember you being a bad person, I'm never there to stop you. She swallows the tightening of her throat, bites down the wobble of her lip and blinks away the burn in her eyes instead. She keeps watching the bird, nestled next to her golden brother.

It happens in dreams. The remembering. When she dies, unknown yet familiar hands around her neck and a blurred face above her own, she thinks I know you. She wakes from these dreams sweaty, throat and heart aching, and a lingering why on her tongue. She even threw up once, and had to clean everything up without telling anyone. She hates these dreams, but she hates those about Lucius more.

He’s a bad person, doing bad things to good people, but worst of all, he’s a bad father. There’s a boy who looks like the both of them, dark hair and dark eyes in a pale face, crying alone at night in the room that is Lucius’ now, and having a hard time breathing sometimes, when no one’s looking. There’s also a little girl with bright green eyes, who always looks too serious and too frowny for all the baby fat on her face. She looks like her mother, who’s pretty and elegant and has a nice smile, when she does smile. She doesn’t remember their names, but she remembers their love for eachother. Gentle and quiet, like the afternoon she spends in grand-père’s private library where he reads and she draws.

While Lucius is never mean to this remembered family, he is never nice either. He always mutters to his wife that things aren’t working out as planned or this thorn needs to be removed from my side and other things she doesn’t understand but knows mean trouble. He mostly ignores the boy and the girl and when he doesn’t, he’s screaming about you are a Ciar and you do not grovel, you do not bow and you do not beg! From those dreams, she wakes with a start, when Lucius is hit with a fire spell she doesn’t know the name of. She cries herself back to sleep every time.

She meets (for the fourth time, but the first she won’t forget) mom’s side of the family on a bright summer day. Grand-père is here, as he always is everywhere, and speaks very animatedly to his gaggle of grandchildren. There’s ten, she counted! She doesn’t remember all of their names but knows half of them are french. When mom introduces aunt Céleste, my dearest sister, her brain itches. When aunt Céleste introduces her daughter, Olga, she feels like she’s missing something important.

She promptly forgets about it when she’s introduced to all her french-named cousins. Isaure and Isnel are twins, like uncle Auguste and uncle Damien, the latter of which is their father. She gets really confused when she meets Anastase and Anastasie, another pair of twins, but uncle Auguste’s. She mixes their names all afternoon. Then, uncle Auguste introduces her to his other children, Armantine, Aimée and Annick and she thinks weird names and oh, Annick is very pretty. Mom's dead sister’s son, Balthazar, is the youngest of them all. He doesn’t talk and doesn’t walk but he’s very cute.

Finally, she meets Olga’s brother, Stanislav. He’s not very nice. “Get away from me, demon.” Aunt Céleste gasps softly, Olga looks down, and his father, a very tall man with a very strange smile, grabs the back of his shirt, “What? Isn’t she just like mother and Olga? Isn’t she a—” His father’s very big hand covers his mouth and she’s left wondering am I a what?

She ponders the question while the adults give Stanislav a very secretive talk. She watches aunt Céleste and mom not being a part of it and looking very pale, Olga huddled in her mother’s side, looking equally meek, when it hits her. She gasps and runs to them, “Are we demons? Is that the curse? Why are we cursed? I don’t—”

Mom hisses and very harshly says, “Not now.”

“But—”

“Lucifer.”

“Mom.”

“Lucifer.”

She goes to a corner of the room and pouts for all she’s worth. Lucius gives her soft looks from across the room and she spies Olga side-eyeing her from under aunt Céleste’s arm. She spends the rest of the day speaking gibberish with little Balthazar and admiring Annick from afar.

When they’re leaving and the adults are busy goodbye-ing, Olga hugs her quickly and whispers, “You don’t have to worry about anything for now. You haven’t had your first shift yet.”

On the drive home, when she’s interrupted every time she starts a what’s the cu— she burns holes in the back of mom’s head. Father gives her sympathetic looks through the rear-view mirror, and Lucius stares out the window, a funny look on his face. Grand-père, sat between the two of them, leans in after the fifth nudge. She whispers what’s the curse? followed by a what is a shift?

He smiles and his eyes shine when he looks at her, “Didn’t I tell you this story before? About the princess, the tower and the dragon?” She shakes her head. What’s a dragon?

“Papa,” mom says, a sharp look on her face.

“Sorry, sorry,” he mumbles. Mom turns back around and talks to father about how Céleste doesn’t look well and her good-for-nothing husband should put a leash on Stanislav before muttering about insolent little— Grand-père leans back in again and murmurs, “Sometimes, the princess and the dragon are one and the same. And the tower, the princess built herself.”

That night, and many nights after that, she dreams about her french-named cousins. Anastase is never there, though. Not when Annick fires spells after spells at people begging her to stop! please, stop! or when Isaure and Isnel bow so low she’s afraid they’ll break their backs. He’s not there when Armantine sneaks in and out a dark street and Aimée spends her days locked into a dark room. He’s not there either, when Anastasie always looks over her shoulder, face drawn and a worried frown between her brows, or when she cries and rages this is your fault! this is your fault! yours yours yours at the mirror.

She sees Lucius sometimes, standing still behind Annick or by Armantine’s side or, worst of all, next to Isaure and Isnel, bowing so very low. But he never comforts Anastasie and he never comes for Aimée.

She doesn’t dream about Olga, nor aunt Céleste or mom or dad or grand-père or any adults she knows. She doesn’t dream about Stanislav. But sometimes, she’d dream about soft and toothy-smiled Balthazar. He’s pretty and way older, and she only knows it’s him because she hears a man’s voice says Balthazar when he’s inside a house or out in the gardens or in what looks like a castle or a museum or everywhere. A soft Balthazar, a wondering Balthazar, a sung Balthazar, every kind of Balthazar. And she likes those dreams best.

But she can never get it out of her head, how she's never in any of them.

She’s in grand-père’s private library. He reads and she draws near the fireplace. A tower, a princess and, “What’s a dragon?” she asks.

He looks up from his book, “Well. Picture a snake, but enormous. Bigger than this house. It has legs, sometimes two, sometimes four. But most extraordinary, it has wings! Ah! And it breathes fire! Can you believe that?”

“Not really…”

He laughs a little, “Well, well. You must, because these creatures do exist. They exist everywhere and are of every kind! They hoard everything they hold dear, be it riches, knowledge, stories, and even friends!”

“What does it have to do with the princess and the tower?”

He looks about the room suspiciously, as if to make sure mom wasn’t hiding in a corner, ready to jump in and hisses at them to stop talking about it! “This story has been told countless times, in countless ways. But what remains is this: in the highest tower of the biggest castle lives a princess. In this very same tower also lives a dragon who protects the princess from anyone who’d want to steal her away. Until the day it doesn’t, because someone, be it a prince or a witch, wants the princess for themselves and kills the dragon for it.” He sighs a long breath and looks into the fire, “Oftentimes, the princess is very happy to be free and marries the prince. But there’s those stories… the ones where the princess, mad with grief at the loss of her only friend, kills the prince in turn.”

“I don’t like this story. Any version of it.”

“Oh?”

“Why does the princess have to be all alone in the tower and why does the dragon have to watch her and doesn’t she have a family and doesn’t it have one as well? And why does she have to marry the prince? That’s yucky. And didn’t you say the other day that the princess and the dragon are the same—”

“That’s not exactly what I—”

“Because then if the dragon dies the princess dies with it—”

“Oh dear,” he conjures his small notebook and the pen that goes with it, “No metaphor for the children,” he writes,”I ought to know that by now…”

“And what’s the curse?”

“Ah.” He conjures all his things away and fidgets on his seat a bit. “Luce, Lucy, my darling Lucifer.” He looks at her for a long moment. Then, “You are the dragon.”

She doesn’t know if he’s still talking in riddles but she doesn’t like it one bit so she screams and runs away to cry it off in her room. Minutes or hours later, a book appears on her bed. She thinks the cover reads draconian curses.

Now that she knows what a dragon is and what it looks like, she dreams about them, too. There’s one with Lucius sometimes, and he talks to it for long periods of time and the dragon never eats him. Then, she notices it’s because the dragon is shackled and has something like a muzzle around its mouth. Still, Lucius talks to it for hours and the dragon listens.

She hides the book under her bed and asks anyone who’ll listen to teach her how to read. She already has a tutor, Miss Maz, but it’s the summer and she hasn’t seen her for a while now. So, she sits in the sunroom with father and he reads out loud about po-li-tics and magical laws and she doesn’t understand half of what he’s saying, but her eyes follow diligently the finger he glides under the words. She asks mom to help her decipher the story books they read together before bed and it’s a long and hard process where she stumbles over every letter, but she’s getting better by the day. Lucius takes his role very seriously and says you can’t learn how to read if you don’t know how to write the words and after some serious thinking he gasps do you even know your alphabet? She discovers she’s right-handed and soon knows how to spell three letters words. Grand-père hands her a book called And There Was Fire and there’s the princess, the tower and the dragon. Mom finds her trying to read it once and throws the book right into the fireplace with a wave of her hand before storming out of the library. She’s ready to cry when grand-père flies it right back at her. It looks a little black on the cover and a little funny on the pages but she can still read it. She hoards the burnt book under the bed, with the one called draconian curses, and makes sure mom never finds out.

She has really bad dreams about her death again. Hands that crush and make a hurt so deep inside her chest she wakes and doesn’t know how to breathe anymore. On the fifteenth of August, she throws up again. She’s shaking and sweaty and she cries for a long time before sneaking into the bathroom and showering by herself. When everything is as clean as it should be, she crawls into Lucius’ room and into his bed.

She dreams about him and fire spells and shackled dragons. She dreams about Annick cursing people and Isnel and Isaure kissing someone’s feet. She dreams about Armantine going into a seedy looking shop and Aimée never being allowed out of her cage. She dreams about Anastasie looking longingly down from a window high above the ground. But she doesn’t dream about Anastase or Olga or Stanislav or any of the adults. She doesn’t dream about herself.

But she also dreams her favorite dreams. The ones about Balthazar and the boy who never ceases to call him. In of them Balthazar says I know how to end this and he smiles toothy and bright. In others he wonders was this all for nothing? and it’s sad because he is, too, but the voice is always there, comforting. I don’t care it says, or I’ll be with you until the very end, Balthazar and she wakes from those dreams with something a little bit looser in her heart. This’ll all be over soon.

#oh dear #that's that #yeah so it was a hp fic and then it wasn't but i couldn't change lucius' name bc it goes well with lucifer thanks for coming to my ted talk #also is she a seer or is this an isekai/portal fantasy kind of thing?#haha..... if only i knew #im honestly going with the isekai thing rn #and!!! finally urban fantasy where i can put french people!!!! fufufufufu!!!!#anYWAY #wip: draconian #char: lucifer ciar #char: lucius ciar #char: grand-père #char: bérénice ciar #and co...#dori writes

7 notes · View notes