#flashfic

It did not rain. Not at home in the desert where the small boy had always lived.   The sun was unrelenting, the air blistering as sand went on in waves away from his Grandfather’s palace.

Home was a hard place - the sort of place where life earned the right to continue.  And the boy – though he was small – earned it daily.  The boy did not fight the desert.  He matched it – reflected it.

It so happened that one day, when he was alone with his wife at supper after a long day of work, Seliph asked the question “Muirne, what do you think I am?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“When you see me, do you see me as Isaachian or Grannvalian?” he clarified.

The conversation between them took place in the Isaachian language rather than Grannvalian. Seliph limited himself to Grannvalian as much as possible in public, but behind closed doors when he was alone with one of his childhood friends, he preferred to speak Isaachian, if only to prevent eavesdropping.

“What kind of question is that?” Muirne responded with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t think of that. I see you as Seliph,” she said. “What makes you ask that?”

“I…sometimes, I feel that I’m pretending to be Grannvalian. I know that I am supposed to be their emperor, but I wasn’t born here. I didn’t even see Grannvale until three years ago,” he explained. “Today, I had to catch myself because I almost mispronounced a word. My accent almost came out.”

Of course, Seliph was taught Grannvalian primarily by Edain and Oifey, same as the other children at Tirnanog. He had a fluent command of the language, but in reality had primarily spoken Isaachian when growing up. At least it mean that there was no rural accent to worry about — his Grannvalian sounded posh and formal — but he also wasn’t as natural with the language as someone who grew up in the country.

“Do you think they noticed?” Muirne asked. 

“Most likely not,” Seliph responded. 

“Sometimes I feel that I don’t fit in too. I know I don’t fit in because I’m an Isaachian living in Grannvale. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t survive here,” Muirne added. “But we have to pretend to fit in to make it. If they didn’t notice, then it doesn’t matter much.”

“You’re right…” Seliph trailed off. “Say, when you met me for the first time, what did you think I was?”

“I didn’t think much about that. I guess that you looked Grannvalian,” Muirne answered. “It wasn’t important to me. You weren’t the only Grannvalian there.”

“A Grannvalian that was born in Agustria to a Verdanian mother,” Seliph said. “Though now I know that my mother wasn’t even fully Verdanian. Her father was the Crown Prince of Grannvale and her mother was from the Maerists who didn’t originally come from Verdane either. That’s why she is said to have looked different from other Verdanians.”

“Do you think that she thought much of that?” Muirne asked.

“I imagine that the village that she grew up in was all she knew until she met my father. She probably knew she was different because of the entire ‘you must not entangle yourself with a man’ business, but I don’t know if she worried about being different from the others,” Seliph said. “Shannan did tell me that she had a harder time adjusting once she left the forest and married my father, but he only realized that after he grew up.”

“I wish I could talk to her. I feel like she would understand how I feel,” Muirne mentioned.

“A day barely passes without mourning my parents…” Seliph said. 

“I’m glad that Mother is still around, at least…But anyway, try not to worry too much about this. Nobody who matters should care about where you grew up or what you looked like,” she encouraged. “If nothing else, I don’t care and Julia doesn’t care.”

warnings: references to sex, swearing, brief body horror, b slur used affectionately

"Sis, can I ask you a question?" Hortensia asked with a mischievous smile on her face.

Her elder sister sighed. "Ask away," she said, not knowing what plans Hortensia had.

"Can you say the numbers after five in order?" Hortensia asked.

"Six, seven, eight, nine," Ivy said. "What numbers do you even want?"

The younger sister could hardly contain her laughter as she pressed something on her phone. "That's all I needed!" she exclaimed as she ran off.

"I don't like the sound of that..." Ivy mumbled to herself.

Later that day, Ivy was having dinner with her friends as she was apt to do. This time, she was accompanied by Kagetsu and Zelkov since the Solmese were out doing some kind of party or something idk.

Kagetsu's face turned white when he was scrolling through his phone. "Ivy," he said, "when did you get infected with TikTok brainrot?"

"When did I what?" she asked.

"Why did you get into the 6-7 meme?" Kagetsu asked.

"The what?"

"Isn't this you?" Kagetsu then played a clip which showed Ivy saying "six-seven" aloud.

"What is the meaning of this...?" she asked with a shocked expression on her face.

"I believe that the children denote this to be 'brainrot'," Zelkov explained.

"No, but what does six seven mean? Why did Hortensia trick me into saying it?"

"It is the kind of humor that is *esoteric*. There is no *meaning* to it besides being funny."

"Oh, Hortensia....!"

The next day, Ivy happened to pass by Timerra as she was going to class. And Timerra leaned over to Ivy and said to her: "six-seven." 

Ivy's face flushed red with embarrassment. "My sister tricked me into saying that! I don't even know what it means," she clarified while Timerra laughed out loud.

"It means nothing," Timerra said.

"Nothing? There's no hidden, inappropriate meaning?" Ivy said.

"Nope! Just good ol' brainrot," Timerra answered.

"What is this brainrot? Zelkov mentioned it last night."

"You have to use TikTok and find out," Timerra piped in.

"I am not using that app!" 

"Says the person who said six-seven."

"I'm never going to be able to get past this, will I?" Ivy said to herself, exasperated.

After lunch, Ivy found her way to the lawn (which lawn? it doesn't matter) somewhere out on the campus. She decided to sit down and stare off into the distance. Unfortunately for her, somebody noticed her. At first it seemed that someone was talking to her but she couldn't make out the words. She kept staring until she realized who it was.

"Is something the matter, Ivy?" Alfred asked.

"Huh?" She turned around to see him behind her, and their friend Diamant not too far behind. "Nothing's wrong. I lost my dignity, but everything's okay. Please, go on to what you were going to do with Diamant."

"Clearly there's something wrong," Alfred said. "Do you want to share?"

Ivy sighed and looked down. "It's that stupid brainrot thing," she muttered.

"Oh, that? Céline showed me the clip today before we went to school. I rolled my eyes when I heard it. It didn't seem like something you would say."

"It wasn't. Hortensia tricked me into saying those numbers...those cursed numbers."

"It's just a silly video. We'll all forget about it eventually. Right?" Alfred said.

"Brainrot is certainly not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of you," Diamant added. 

Ivy put her head down. “Go away,” she said to her friends.

Alfred and Diamant looked at each other and shrugged. “Okay! Have a good day,” Alfred said.

Ivy felt herself weighed down as she went to class, then went home. She couldn’t even put in a good amount of studying. No matter: Ivy was going to go to bed early and hide away under the blankets, away from a world where saying something as a simple as a set of numbers would cause people to laugh at her.

When Ivy woke up, her phone had a lot of notifications. She decided to ignore them though, rather choosing to drag herself through her morning routine to class. After her first class, she ran into Timerra, Alfred, and Diamant. She saw that they were laughing at something while looking at their phones. Ivy turned red.

“I’m never going to be remembered for anything else, will I?” Ivy wondered aloud to herself.

The three turned around. Timerra jumped when she saw that Ivy was there. “Oh, Ivy! Didn’t see you there. How are you? Did you see the video your dad made?”

“What video?” Ivy asked.

Timerra opened up a video on her phone and showed it to Ivy. It was a campaign video for Ivy’s father. In it, he was doing some sort of juggling dance while saying “six seven days left until the election” or something like that. 

“Is this about me?!” Ivy asked with horror in her voice.

“About you? How would it be about you?” Timerra asked.

“B-because of the thing that Hortensia tricked me into,” Ivy said.

“Pfft. Not at all,” Timerra said. “Honestly, I would have forgotten about it if you didn’t bring it up.”

“But then why did I have so many text messages this morning?”

“We were making fun of your father,” Alfred clarified.

Ivy opened her phone and read through the messages: all of them were about her father’s campaign video, not about hers. She couldn’t help but have a small smile at Zelkov sending “I’m sorry that you have a cringe father” into the group chat she had with him and Kagetsu.

“So, that means that everyone will be focused on my father now, right?”

“Yep,” Alfred, Diamant, and Timerra said in unison.

Ivy entered the room to see a sinister smile on her mother’s face. “Come in, Ivy,” she said to her.

Despite being the Queen now, Ivy still curtsied to her mother. “I hope you are well,” she said to her.

Her mother stood from her seat and walked to Ivy. “Let me see the baby,” she said.

Ivy obliged and gave Holly, still an infant, to her mother. She barely even showed any affection to the baby, only examining her before returning Holly to Ivy.

“I’m so glad that she doesn’t look Brodian,” Ivy's mother said. “She would look very ugly with red hair.”

Ivy bit down on her tongue and held Holly tighter. She tried to focus on her baby daughter rather than what her mother was saying before she said something that she regretted.

“I’m so proud of you, Ivy. You’ve shown a lot of tenacity in doing this to Brodia,” Mother added.

“Brodia matters little. Holly’s well-being is what matters to me. I want her to grow up healthy,” Ivy said as she rocked Holly back and forth.

“You do need her healthy, yes. Then you can use her to extract more value from Brodia. Hahahahaha,” she laughed, “I never imagined that my daughter could have held so much power over Brodia’s king in this way.”

“No, no, no. I don’t want to do that to Diamant. He needs to see his daughter healthy,” Ivy muttered to herself.

“What’s that? Are you letting yourself have fond feelings for him?” Mother hissed.

Somehow, Ivy found the strength to look her in the face and confess her true feelings. “I love him.”

Her mother’s face darkened, her adulation turned into disgust. “Ivy, you know what I’ve told you before. Men are disposable! You cannot allow them to own any piece of you. Or else you are worthless…”

-+-

Ivy woke up in a cold sweat, breathing rapidly in and out, her heart fluttering.

She realized that she was in her bed in the palace of Elusia. Holly was not in the room. No longer an infant, she now resided in her own room, being only two years old. Mother was long dead, having been interred in the crypt many years ago. She was no longer around to lecture Ivy on how to arrange her life.

And Diamant was hundreds of miles away in his own castle, far removed from the daily life of his daughter and her mother.

Anxiety came back to Ivy. She didn’t worry about whether she was worthless — after all, Mother was long dead and no person would dare call her worthless. What she worried about was whether Mother was right — if she was weak to fall in love with Diamant, if she was weak to stay in love with him after bearing their child even though he could provide little support. She wondered if it was right to see him as her love and not just a fool to extract value from, much needed agreements and funding to rebuild her country. And did he even see her as his love? His words certainly indicated as such, but his distance not so much, notwithstanding the impracticality of a foreign king regularly visiting Elusia.

But if she saw Diamant as an object, would she not see Holly the same way, a collateral to hold over his head? But Ivy could barely entertain the thought of this. Even before Holly was born, Ivy rebuffed any suggestion to send her off as if she were disposable. And ever since that moment when she held Holly in her arms for the first time and was overwhelmed with love for her, Ivy felt obligated to give all she could for her. So Mother’s way was wrong. Holly was not an object but Ivy’s precious, irreplaceable daughter, and Diamant was not a fool but the love of Ivy’s life. No person or thing could get in the way, not careful advisors nor weighty anxieties nor disgruntled retainers nor extended distance nor inconvenient realities.

Certainly not Mother, not even when she was still alive in Ivy’s dreams.

But this was too much thinking for Ivy. She sighed, laid back, crossed her arms over her chest, and tried to close her eyes and get to sleep. Staying up at night was not going to do good for Holly; she needed her mother to be well-rested. Even if her mother was never well-rested, she would try her best for the same reason that she tried her best at every other duty she had.

Sheer ridiculousness in flashfic form. I was going for silly and landed at unbearably schmoopy. Oops. For @twinkboimler! Via an idea from @calliecat93.