#development tbd

October drifted in perpetuity and with it came all of his ghosts.

He’d long ago thought he’d grown used to solitude, to isolation. His mother could not stand to linger in the palace in Bern that felt so much like the late king, not with five children aged five and under. And so she packed up her heartache and her grief and all of his siblings for Geneva, to the first home they’d shared when their love was as young as they were. Maximilian stayed behind and the rooms that once echoed with the laughter of his  family rang now with silence. It was somehow louder.

Back then, the loneliness was overwhelming. The halls were somehow longer than he remembered, doors leading  to strange places they had not before, and occasionally the lonesomeness was so heavy it felt as if everyone of his ancestors were suddenly peering over his shoulder only to vanish the moment he glanced behind him.

Almost 25 years later, and the days lingered like a bitter taste on his tongue. Solitude felt so vast now, the rooms he shared with her so small, the ghosts more like ill omens than silent spectors. They barely spoke. He hated how much he missed the sound of her voice. He hated the way her words still burned doubt into his mind, how paranoia had twisted it into something like betrayal and sunk its claws deep.

Rationally, he knew she’d kept worse things from him, that they’d said worse things to each other before - both too stubborn, clever enough to know exactly where to aim and just cruel enough to shoot. But this wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t just some other argument. Foolishly, perhaps, he’d thought she would support him, not just in private, but where it mattered. That even though they’d sworn the alliance was for power and politics only, two years and two children meant something more.

He blamed his grief for that bit of sentimentality, but somehow it did not explain the soul deep ache when he thought of it.

It had taken a few days for him to sort through all his anger, to divide up each separate part and name it so as to claim its power. The way she’d so stubbornly clung to and defended a woman who would never see her as anything more than a pawn, and how she seemed so utterly convinced in the rightness of this. He’d meant what he said, that she’d confused neglect for respect, but only with time did he realize he’d once done the same.

Anger and solitude poisoned his mind, sharpening stress into something like paranoia and the ghosts closed in tighter. The cruel possibilities he’d flung out to wound her now haunted him instead. What if her mother chose to support her brother and the German he’d married, what if she had been secretly all along? And his wife, in her absolute need to be utterly perfect in the eyes of her mother, what would she do to gain the approval and respect of that woman? What would she say? Which of his secrets had she already offered for a taste of approval?

He hated this fear the most in those moments it overtook his rational mind. But he stopped telling her things.

So he withdrew into himself, hiding in plain sight with only his ghosts for company. He grew colder and crueler, his anger festering into spite in some attempt to numb the ache whenever he thought about her. This time felt different, because it was - the precipice off which they might fall, the spark that could burn it all down.

But not yet.

This he knew for certain when they reached for each other every night. Honesty had always been easiest in the dark, in that pocket world that belonged to them only. He’d always found truth in touch. And so he pressed his questions into her skin and she offered her truth in every breath, his name a half prayer on her lips banishing all of his ghosts.