OOC--Drabble
Just trying to work myself out of a bit of a funk. Don't mind me.
The Masters were gone. Dimo didn't need reminding. It would be nice to think that some day, they might return, or that an heir would be found. The family would be returned to their former position of power, the Castle would be fixed, and things could go back to normal.
He knew that they never would. There had been only one heir to the Heterodynes, and that heir was as dead as the Castle now. The future looked as gray and bleak as the weather today. They'd be searching forever, though they knew full well that their task was both fruitless and thankless. But at least the others could be proud of their loyalty to the family, and the promise that they'd all made to be faithful to their dying breaths wouldn't be broken.
The drizzle became more of a downpour, sheets of rain coming down from the sky fast and hard. The ones who'd stayed behind with Baron could be proud, he thought, but it was only his small band of Jagerkin, and the others like them, who knew what loyalty and sacrifice really meant. You didn't complain. You did what had to be done, because if you didn't, no one else would. And if that meant roaming the whole of Europa for years to come, without relief or hope of finding what you were looking for, you did it anyway. A promise was a promise, and even if things looked hopeless, you, at least, were faithful to the memory of the Master. Even if that's all that the family would ever be again, you were faithful, by God.
He grimly stood his guard through the rain, drenched but not noticing. They had given him everything that he had. It was the least that he could do to give some of it back. He felt an odd mixture of pride and respect for the Heterodyne family, bordering on but not quite love. It was a melancholy mixture now, like what the last straggling survivors of a battalion would feel after everyone else had been reduced to so many corpses littering the battlefield, but the unit's colors were still flying haggard in the wind. You had very little to show for the effort that you put in, but at least that effort was yours. It wasn't wasted, so long as it meant something to you. Even if no one else in the world understood.
And maybe one day, there'd be something to gain from it. In the meantime, there was the rain, and little else.