There is love in our bodies and it holds us together;

[akingmuststand]

Characters: Schneizel el Britannia, Cornelia li Britannia, Valeria
Location: The town hall
Time: 3rd of August, early morning
Brief Summary: After Cornelia's survival has been ensured by Myhrta, her brother remains reluctant to leave her side. Valeria tags along. But it so happens that the white prince has a lot to answer for.
Rating: PG-13

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[akingmuststand]

He followed the Turk's line of sight, knowing already where it would take his gaze. He watched Cornelia for a moment, watched the steady rise and fall of his sister's chest and felt some odd feeling of relief. It was detached as so much pertaining to this was - at first, something he was willing to attribute to simple timing. While he'd anticipated this, while he'd planned for it, expecting it to happen, it had not happened to him yet. He had not snapped his fingers to rid himself of the obstacle his sister would become. He had not met her protests with a mask of simple, unwavering apathy.

But he was a sharper, more calculating man than that, and he knew himself better than to think it would change if he had been there long enough for that single finger snap. It would still be stifled, not necessary bottled, but handled and dealt with in some delicate and meticulous part of his mind, the better to process it. Letting it into the forefront would surely be a far more difficult thing - he was far removed from his own humanity, perhaps. That was the result both of his upbringing and his self-sculpture to fit the appropriate place. To fulfil the necessary plans. But it was there.

And there was no one more aware of it than him.

His eyebrows furrowed for a moment as he gazed on in his sister's direction. Lost in thought, a reverie of careful judgement, he'd been looking without seeing, as if looking through sheets of frosted glass at the scene before him. But he would not allow such - he was to look, and he was to see.

(There was no one more aware of his sacrifices than him, either, even if he was entirely unrepentent.)

It was, he supposed, the very least that he owed her. He could not give her apologies, lies as they would be - and he doubted she would thank him for seeing her in this state, she who was always so keen to hide any breath of weakness - but he felt as though he should take in the sight. Commit it to memory. It was a form of penetance, perhaps, even if he would not take it back, would not have done things differently. His own skewed form of honour, neither noble nor prideful but there all the same.

He loved her, in truth - that had always been the case, always would be. She was the closest of his siblings, in age and all else. And time grieved him, and what had to be done grieved him, but it was just that - what had to be done.

Were he a lesser man, without that honour, he may have bemoaned his place, his path. Oh, that he could do nothing else, that he was a slave to this inexorable swing of the pendulum. But he accepted his choice in it, accepted that this was his own free will. She lay there of his own free will.

He turned to face Valeria, not just with a tilt of the head, but with a step. His full attention. He smiled, and it was earnest, if a little more wan than usual. "Please, Valeria, do not undermine what you've done for myself and for her this night. She is safe now," he said, and the white prince's voice bubbled up into one of his little chuckles, some parallel to small talk made at a soiree, "we have nothing to mourn!"

(Except there was much to be mourned, by him and in him, but that was not yet for Valeria's reckoning.)

"I must request, however, that you excuse us, Valeria, for a little while," he said, sounding almost apologetic. "The situation will doubtlessly be a disorientating one. I would like to speak with her when she wakes, and I believe it would be better done alone."