With Dirt and Roses
Title: With Dirt and Roses
Fandom: fate/zero / fate/stay night
Characters: Waver Velvet
Pairings: none
Genre: gen
Word Count: 2,496
Rating: PG
Warnings: Depressing as hell.
Summary: Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
Notes: none
Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
You were not born a lord; there is no blue blood that runs in your veins. When you were a child, you did not live in large, beautiful houses with servants and chandeliers and ceilings so high that they echoed. When you were a child, you lived in a small salt-caked house by the sea, and the windows were drafty and doors squeaked and your trousers had holes in the knees, but you were young and didn’t care about things like money. And maybe your parents didn’t care, either, because even if they didn’t have much, they seemed happy with what they had.
You were happy and they were happy and that, of course, meant that it couldn’t last for very long, because even though you were a weak line, you were magi, and magi and misfortune always walked hand-in-hand.
You stood in front of their graves on a rainy November morning, dressed all in somber black, and the world suddenly seemed so large and gaping and you were always so, so small. You did not cry, because boys were not supposed to shed tears, but stood and clutched the two roses they gave you, your hands shaking so hard that the petals were dropping. You dropped them onto the tops of the coffins that held your parents side by side when they lowered them into the earth, and you stood there, a small and silent figure in the downpour, while everyone else dispersed like mist behind you.
A little old bird of a hand had taken yours, a friend of your mother’s, the old grandmotherly spinster who lived a little way down the street from you, and she led you away from those open holes. And it was a good thing she had, because your young mind, when faced with the stark and terrifying expanse of the future ahead of you and no comforting, caring hands to guide you through it, had thought that maybe you should go lie in those holes with them and let them cover you with dirt and roses, too.
You left those graves behind you; the kindly old woman took you home, to that little salt-caked house that was so empty now, and you changed out of your funeral clothes and into clean ones and started packing your things. Your uncle came to fetch you the next afternoon, and he allowed you to bring whatever you could fit in two little suitcases. In them, you’d crammed your father’s books in between your clothes and shoes, and between the pages-page 34 and 35-you’d slipped a picture of them. From the slightly yellowed photograph paper, your mother had smiled out at you with that pretty, crooked smile of hers, and your father was holding her hand and, together, they were perfect.
Your uncle was your father’s brother, and you met him for the first time that afternoon. He was like your father in superficial qualities only; he had brown hair like your father, and the same chin, and blue eyes, but you knew that your father’s eyes had always been gentle and warm and never hated you, and your uncle’s eyes didn’t hate you either-your uncle’s eyes did not see enough there to hate. Your uncle’s eyes could not be bothered to waste time in hating you.
You and he rode the train up to Sheffield, because he lived a little way outside the city, and even though you were a child you knew that once the train left the gate, you would not be coming back to your little salt-caked house by the sea, because it wasn’t yours anymore. Ms. Henderson had come to see you off, her little bird hands gently touching your hair and your cheek, telling you to be a good boy, and before you left she took your face in her wizened hands and pressed a dry and shaky kiss to your forehead. She smelled like powder and tea and the salt spray of the ocean, and you never saw her again.
(You came back when you were fourteen, a little while after the school year had started and you had a long weekend, and her house was filled with strange people who you didn’t recognize and she was down in the graveyard three plots over from your parents. You put flowers on her grave, too-yellow carnations, because you thought that she would have liked them.)
The train ride to Sheffield was long, and you sat quietly across from your uncle and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, staring at your hands as they lay folded in your lap. You did not know how to speak to him. You did not think that he cared to speak to you, and maybe it was better that way.
Your uncle did not want a child; he was an eternal bachelor, and children to him were a mystery that he could not unravel with usual methods of study. You were this strange and small little stranger in his house, and even after you had unpacked your things and settled into the guest room that was now your bedroom, you still felt like you did not belong. These walls were not yours, these floors were not yours, and for weeks you couldn’t sleep because outside your window there were trees that scraped the glass and you couldn’t hear the hiss and roar of the sea. The air was wrong, saltless and still, and your uncle did not seem to understand that your dull eyes were due to sleeplessness, not childish inattention.
He sent you to an all-boys’ school in the country, and you do not now think that he did so out of malice; you knew later that he thought it would be best for you to learn amongst your peers, but at the time you thought that he was inflicting some kind of punishment on you for the sin of being your father’s son. When you went to school you were, and always would be, that strange and awkward boy who always was too smart and too shy and too scrawny, and no one wanted to talk to you, so you never talked to anyone else. When you were very young, you could read and ignore their taunts and names; when you were older, you bore their torment of a more physical kind, but even when they hurt you, you did not let them see you cry. Some part of you knew that you did not want to give them that kind of satisfaction, and you did not want them to know that their words and thrown rocks could do more than just draw blood.
In self-defense, you became unapproachable. You told yourself that you did not need or even want them to like you or accept you; you told yourself this until even you believed it. You told yourself that they were jealous of you (maybe some of them were) and that they didn’t understand you (and some probably didn’t), and who cared about them if they were stupid enough to call you names?
Those years were long and lonely, and, like a true magus, the only company you kept was with your father’s books, learning every bit of information you could from them. By the time you were fourteen, you knew them all back to front and side to side.
In one of those books there was a name of a man who taught at a place called the Clock Tower in London, a wonderful place where they taught any person who was versed enough in magecraft to enter it, and for the first time since you buried your parents, you felt hope.
You devoured everything you could find about the Clock Tower with the voraciousness of a starved man; when you felt that you were ready, you finally, finally screwed up the courage to write a letter to the man your father knew, asking him how you might apply to get into this incredible place. You wanted to be there with every young, tense fiber of your being; you wanted to be there so badly, because it seemed like the only place in the world where you would belong. You wouldn’t be strange in the Clock Tower, you wouldn’t be that weird little boy who read too much, you would be one of them , and that meant more to you than anything in the world.
When you finally were allowed to come and present yourself to the heads of the departments, you found that it wasn’t at all what you had been expecting. You thought that you would be drilled on your knowledge and that all they would want to hear about was what you knew; instead, they asked you about your heritage like you were selling them a racehorse. You felt like you were being weighed and measured to a scale that was fixed and determined before your birth, and, through no fault of your own, you were being found wanting.
They did eventually ask what you knew, and then you were so anxious to impress them that you may have overdone it-they didn’t seem to understand that when you said you read a book, you really read it. Not in the way that everyone around you seemed to do, where they would inexplicably forget two-thirds of what they had learned from it. When you read, you remembered everything; every quote, every fact, every figure, all of it imprinted into your brain to be recalled at will. You don’t think that this alone impressed them, because if they wanted something that could regurgitate the facts, they would have bought a calculator, but you think they were impressed enough on some level at the fact that you really understood everything that you were saying. You like to think that they saw potential in you, but you really think that it was just that they thought you were interesting and unusual, but not too unusual, like an odd species of fish that they wanted to keep in a tank so that they could watch it and be amused. You didn’t care much, either, because the gates to your Paradise were finally open to you, and you knew so certainly in your heart that you would soon prove yourself to them.
You’d never been more wrong about anything in your life.
You were the top of your class, but every other student looked down on you. You knew you were brilliant, but all of your professors treated you as though you were an idiot, incapable of grasping the things they lectured on. They barely deigned to let you into the library.
Your teacher tore the manuscript of your thesis paper to pieces right before your eyes.
You were punished with disdain and contempt for the sin of being born to a family with a magical heritage of only three generations.
When the opportunity arose, you washed your hands of the Clock Tower and the hypocrites inside it. If you could not prove your worth through words and logic, then you decided that you would do it by deed instead; you would prove it through cunning and determination and maybe blood if you had to. You could do it. You had to do it. Failure was not an option and never had been.
And then you summoned Rider.
He mistook your cowardice for bravery and annoyed you with his loudness and his rudeness and the way he was always so goddamn confident, and you hated him for his effortless self-assurance and you hated yourself more for the fact that you knew you couldn’t really hate him. But he stood before all the things you feared and said that he was proud to be your Servant, and those words had made your heart skip half a dozen beats; no one had ever been proud of you before, because no one had ever claimed you as their own before.
In some way, you loved him. You stood next to him in his chariot, you endured his teasing and his playful claps that left marks on your shoulder, his stupid games and his stupid loud voice and the stupid, stupid way he made your heart burn in your chest when his eyes looked at you with pride. He was your king, and you thought that perhaps he always had been, and you just hadn’t known it yet. And even if you denied ever having the words for it-you knew you’d never have the right words for the way he broke down your defenses like the walls of Persepolis- you loved him with every piece of your starved heart.
You loved him when he sat on the back of his noble horse, a mighty and untouchable figure, his muscles tense in anticipation of battle and his face lit with the promise of glory. You loved him when he rode against his undefeatable foe, knowing that he rode not just for himself, but also for you.
You loved him when he died, and every moment after.
…
Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
If the years had taught you anything, it was the art of burying-you buried the past, you buried the things you loved, you buried your hope and now you only thought it was fitting that you buried yourself. You took whatever it was of yourself that was Waver Velvet and put him to sleep in some deep and untouchable place, and you covered him with dirt and roses.
You didn’t know if you could ever wake him back up again.
You thought it probably didn’t matter. Who did he have to wake up for?
…
Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
When you look in the mirror, you see no traces of the person named Waver Velvet; there is only Lord El-Melloi. Some part of you looks at that cold, composed face and wants to scream itself raw, if only for the sake of feeling anything at all, anything but this dispassionate precision and coldness and sterile perfection.
You do not.
You feel nothing.
…
Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
You laid your life out like a roadmap, all twisting lines of pain and suffering and loss and gain, examined all the routes you took and the things that tore pieces out of you like bread, you put your misery on one side of the scales and weighed it against those feather-light moments of joy-
And you realize that out of twenty-nine years, you can count on one hand the days of true happiness that you can remember, and you set them against the mountain of days of suffering and you aren’t sure if they’ll balance out in the end. You think you should feel angry or sad or resentful or perhaps regretful, but all you can feel is
so
tired.
Fandom: fate/zero / fate/stay night
Characters: Waver Velvet
Pairings: none
Genre: gen
Word Count: 2,496
Rating: PG
Warnings: Depressing as hell.
Summary: Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
Notes: none
Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
You were not born a lord; there is no blue blood that runs in your veins. When you were a child, you did not live in large, beautiful houses with servants and chandeliers and ceilings so high that they echoed. When you were a child, you lived in a small salt-caked house by the sea, and the windows were drafty and doors squeaked and your trousers had holes in the knees, but you were young and didn’t care about things like money. And maybe your parents didn’t care, either, because even if they didn’t have much, they seemed happy with what they had.
You were happy and they were happy and that, of course, meant that it couldn’t last for very long, because even though you were a weak line, you were magi, and magi and misfortune always walked hand-in-hand.
You stood in front of their graves on a rainy November morning, dressed all in somber black, and the world suddenly seemed so large and gaping and you were always so, so small. You did not cry, because boys were not supposed to shed tears, but stood and clutched the two roses they gave you, your hands shaking so hard that the petals were dropping. You dropped them onto the tops of the coffins that held your parents side by side when they lowered them into the earth, and you stood there, a small and silent figure in the downpour, while everyone else dispersed like mist behind you.
A little old bird of a hand had taken yours, a friend of your mother’s, the old grandmotherly spinster who lived a little way down the street from you, and she led you away from those open holes. And it was a good thing she had, because your young mind, when faced with the stark and terrifying expanse of the future ahead of you and no comforting, caring hands to guide you through it, had thought that maybe you should go lie in those holes with them and let them cover you with dirt and roses, too.
You left those graves behind you; the kindly old woman took you home, to that little salt-caked house that was so empty now, and you changed out of your funeral clothes and into clean ones and started packing your things. Your uncle came to fetch you the next afternoon, and he allowed you to bring whatever you could fit in two little suitcases. In them, you’d crammed your father’s books in between your clothes and shoes, and between the pages-page 34 and 35-you’d slipped a picture of them. From the slightly yellowed photograph paper, your mother had smiled out at you with that pretty, crooked smile of hers, and your father was holding her hand and, together, they were perfect.
Your uncle was your father’s brother, and you met him for the first time that afternoon. He was like your father in superficial qualities only; he had brown hair like your father, and the same chin, and blue eyes, but you knew that your father’s eyes had always been gentle and warm and never hated you, and your uncle’s eyes didn’t hate you either-your uncle’s eyes did not see enough there to hate. Your uncle’s eyes could not be bothered to waste time in hating you.
You and he rode the train up to Sheffield, because he lived a little way outside the city, and even though you were a child you knew that once the train left the gate, you would not be coming back to your little salt-caked house by the sea, because it wasn’t yours anymore. Ms. Henderson had come to see you off, her little bird hands gently touching your hair and your cheek, telling you to be a good boy, and before you left she took your face in her wizened hands and pressed a dry and shaky kiss to your forehead. She smelled like powder and tea and the salt spray of the ocean, and you never saw her again.
(You came back when you were fourteen, a little while after the school year had started and you had a long weekend, and her house was filled with strange people who you didn’t recognize and she was down in the graveyard three plots over from your parents. You put flowers on her grave, too-yellow carnations, because you thought that she would have liked them.)
The train ride to Sheffield was long, and you sat quietly across from your uncle and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, staring at your hands as they lay folded in your lap. You did not know how to speak to him. You did not think that he cared to speak to you, and maybe it was better that way.
Your uncle did not want a child; he was an eternal bachelor, and children to him were a mystery that he could not unravel with usual methods of study. You were this strange and small little stranger in his house, and even after you had unpacked your things and settled into the guest room that was now your bedroom, you still felt like you did not belong. These walls were not yours, these floors were not yours, and for weeks you couldn’t sleep because outside your window there were trees that scraped the glass and you couldn’t hear the hiss and roar of the sea. The air was wrong, saltless and still, and your uncle did not seem to understand that your dull eyes were due to sleeplessness, not childish inattention.
He sent you to an all-boys’ school in the country, and you do not now think that he did so out of malice; you knew later that he thought it would be best for you to learn amongst your peers, but at the time you thought that he was inflicting some kind of punishment on you for the sin of being your father’s son. When you went to school you were, and always would be, that strange and awkward boy who always was too smart and too shy and too scrawny, and no one wanted to talk to you, so you never talked to anyone else. When you were very young, you could read and ignore their taunts and names; when you were older, you bore their torment of a more physical kind, but even when they hurt you, you did not let them see you cry. Some part of you knew that you did not want to give them that kind of satisfaction, and you did not want them to know that their words and thrown rocks could do more than just draw blood.
In self-defense, you became unapproachable. You told yourself that you did not need or even want them to like you or accept you; you told yourself this until even you believed it. You told yourself that they were jealous of you (maybe some of them were) and that they didn’t understand you (and some probably didn’t), and who cared about them if they were stupid enough to call you names?
Those years were long and lonely, and, like a true magus, the only company you kept was with your father’s books, learning every bit of information you could from them. By the time you were fourteen, you knew them all back to front and side to side.
In one of those books there was a name of a man who taught at a place called the Clock Tower in London, a wonderful place where they taught any person who was versed enough in magecraft to enter it, and for the first time since you buried your parents, you felt hope.
You devoured everything you could find about the Clock Tower with the voraciousness of a starved man; when you felt that you were ready, you finally, finally screwed up the courage to write a letter to the man your father knew, asking him how you might apply to get into this incredible place. You wanted to be there with every young, tense fiber of your being; you wanted to be there so badly, because it seemed like the only place in the world where you would belong. You wouldn’t be strange in the Clock Tower, you wouldn’t be that weird little boy who read too much, you would be one of them , and that meant more to you than anything in the world.
When you finally were allowed to come and present yourself to the heads of the departments, you found that it wasn’t at all what you had been expecting. You thought that you would be drilled on your knowledge and that all they would want to hear about was what you knew; instead, they asked you about your heritage like you were selling them a racehorse. You felt like you were being weighed and measured to a scale that was fixed and determined before your birth, and, through no fault of your own, you were being found wanting.
They did eventually ask what you knew, and then you were so anxious to impress them that you may have overdone it-they didn’t seem to understand that when you said you read a book, you really read it. Not in the way that everyone around you seemed to do, where they would inexplicably forget two-thirds of what they had learned from it. When you read, you remembered everything; every quote, every fact, every figure, all of it imprinted into your brain to be recalled at will. You don’t think that this alone impressed them, because if they wanted something that could regurgitate the facts, they would have bought a calculator, but you think they were impressed enough on some level at the fact that you really understood everything that you were saying. You like to think that they saw potential in you, but you really think that it was just that they thought you were interesting and unusual, but not too unusual, like an odd species of fish that they wanted to keep in a tank so that they could watch it and be amused. You didn’t care much, either, because the gates to your Paradise were finally open to you, and you knew so certainly in your heart that you would soon prove yourself to them.
You’d never been more wrong about anything in your life.
You were the top of your class, but every other student looked down on you. You knew you were brilliant, but all of your professors treated you as though you were an idiot, incapable of grasping the things they lectured on. They barely deigned to let you into the library.
Your teacher tore the manuscript of your thesis paper to pieces right before your eyes.
You were punished with disdain and contempt for the sin of being born to a family with a magical heritage of only three generations.
When the opportunity arose, you washed your hands of the Clock Tower and the hypocrites inside it. If you could not prove your worth through words and logic, then you decided that you would do it by deed instead; you would prove it through cunning and determination and maybe blood if you had to. You could do it. You had to do it. Failure was not an option and never had been.
And then you summoned Rider.
He mistook your cowardice for bravery and annoyed you with his loudness and his rudeness and the way he was always so goddamn confident, and you hated him for his effortless self-assurance and you hated yourself more for the fact that you knew you couldn’t really hate him. But he stood before all the things you feared and said that he was proud to be your Servant, and those words had made your heart skip half a dozen beats; no one had ever been proud of you before, because no one had ever claimed you as their own before.
In some way, you loved him. You stood next to him in his chariot, you endured his teasing and his playful claps that left marks on your shoulder, his stupid games and his stupid loud voice and the stupid, stupid way he made your heart burn in your chest when his eyes looked at you with pride. He was your king, and you thought that perhaps he always had been, and you just hadn’t known it yet. And even if you denied ever having the words for it-you knew you’d never have the right words for the way he broke down your defenses like the walls of Persepolis- you loved him with every piece of your starved heart.
You loved him when he sat on the back of his noble horse, a mighty and untouchable figure, his muscles tense in anticipation of battle and his face lit with the promise of glory. You loved him when he rode against his undefeatable foe, knowing that he rode not just for himself, but also for you.
You loved him when he died, and every moment after.
…
Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
If the years had taught you anything, it was the art of burying-you buried the past, you buried the things you loved, you buried your hope and now you only thought it was fitting that you buried yourself. You took whatever it was of yourself that was Waver Velvet and put him to sleep in some deep and untouchable place, and you covered him with dirt and roses.
You didn’t know if you could ever wake him back up again.
You thought it probably didn’t matter. Who did he have to wake up for?
…
Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
When you look in the mirror, you see no traces of the person named Waver Velvet; there is only Lord El-Melloi. Some part of you looks at that cold, composed face and wants to scream itself raw, if only for the sake of feeling anything at all, anything but this dispassionate precision and coldness and sterile perfection.
You do not.
You feel nothing.
…
Your name is Lord El-Melloi II.
You laid your life out like a roadmap, all twisting lines of pain and suffering and loss and gain, examined all the routes you took and the things that tore pieces out of you like bread, you put your misery on one side of the scales and weighed it against those feather-light moments of joy-
And you realize that out of twenty-nine years, you can count on one hand the days of true happiness that you can remember, and you set them against the mountain of days of suffering and you aren’t sure if they’ll balance out in the end. You think you should feel angry or sad or resentful or perhaps regretful, but all you can feel is
so
tired.