#[ me: i ever wrote out just why alm feels so bad abt the rudolf thing ]

[jasperlion]

A study to big for a man(but an Emperor is no ordinary man) is now his own, within it it containing many a writings and secrets of the man he’d never know. 

Who are you? He asks, knowing he’d get no reply. What were you thinking? Perhaps the letters would offer but a glimpse, and yet Alm felt the knowledge would never truly reach him.

Did you really want me to kill you? Did you relish the thought of your son committing patricide?

His thoughts grow and grow more into accusations laced with venom and hurt, and yet a part of him nags at him. It rings unfair, unfair for a man who could no longer speak for himself. Who could only have his friends speak for him. ‘A mercy’, said Mycen, firm and cold as the Rigelian winter. ‘I don’t know’, offered Massena with apologies and a sad sort of smile.

Hands card through the missives, orders and correspondence. Most is not his own writing, Alm knows, but writing given to him. And yet, with this, he hopes to grow closer still to the father he murdered.

Fingers waver at letters wrapped in a cord, all from Ram. His mind flashes back to the letters he’d see Mycen write until twilight and send out in secret. Letters he stopped sending at the same time that trouble began to brew in the north of Zofia, when Lima IV had first refused Rigel’s plea for food. Eyes rove over the creasing paper, remembering, only just, that he himself had decided to write to Mycen’s mysterious pen pal too. Thank him for writing to his lonely grandfather.

Hah. Haha.

How could he have known?! Why did Mycen let him?

Eyes blur from tears as he grits his teeth, hands gripping the crinkling paper harder and harder still as he struggles with every fiber of his being not to toss them away, to throw them in the hearth and be done with it. No, no, aside from creases of travel and the ones he had just done himself, the letters themselves seemed immaculate and well-kept.

... Aside from circular stains which he chose to ignore out of his own hurt.

He’s angry. He’s hurt. There’s so many emotions running through his body, and yet even as his hands shake from it he sets the bundle down, pushes it aside. He can’t open the lid of that box, not when he feels so...

... He’s not even sure how he feels.

Alm had never known his father, known Rudolf, and yet seeing the man before him upon the parapet had only drawn a longing, a familiarity. Even so, he pushed it away. He himself shoved it aside to do what he must do: what the Deliverance needed him to do, what Zofia demanded... and what his father had wanted. Perhaps this family was indeed full of monsters, monsters who could set aside something so important for the lust of battle. He was one of them, Alm was sure of that now. Giving in to his duty he had drained the life out of his own flesh and blood, and then once more with his cousin. The Royal Sword, wielded only by royalty, had all but ended Rigel’s line by the hands of its inheritor. 

What a farce.

There’s so much blood on his hands, so many people he’s killed. This path lead to nothing but pain on all sides. The path he chose, the path Celica begged him not to take.

And yet, as emotions course through him like flame licking at oil, it is a tired exhale that leaves him as he lets himself fall upon the chair that his father once spent hours on, almost crumpling forth like a useless doll.

He had so many questions that would never be answered, both of his parents and of what life had been like. Of what destiny had stripped him from, of what his father’s plan entailed. Why. Why. WHy. WHY?

In finding his heritage he destroyed it with his own hands. In seeking to bring justice to a man responsible for a war he tore his own country apart. He is lauded as a hero, and yet he can’t help but feel empty, sitting himself on the place his Father meant for him, through the path his Father wanted for him... and yet he doesn’t know WHY.

He doesn’t even know himself. Who he thought he was was stripped from him as a simple question was answered for him, destroying all he was and all he stood for in one fell swoop. He’s not Alm from Ram, grandson of Mycen and leader of the Deliverance. He’s Rigel’s lost prince, he’s the killer of their Emperor, a boy that grew up on a farce, who thought himself a peasant when he was of royal blood, who was kicked by nobility when their heads would have been rolling in court for the same, who thought that in leading the Deliverance he could represent the common man... when he had been none of that. He thought himself not of noble blood, out to prove that anyone could make a difference, when he himself was destined to from the beginning. A sham to his own ideals, a pawn of his father’s making, a horrible cretin of a Rigelian who through war took both countries under his wing without knowing what he was doing.

The room was too big for a man, even if an emperor was more than that. And yet, it felt like the walls closed in, akin to his diminishing self worth as he stared blankly at a pile of well-loved cards.

Cheeks damp and tears rolling, he felt more the boy he was now than he ever had, lost and wearing shoes far too big for him — alone without the guidance of his Father and the gentle words of a Mother he didn’t even know the name of.

What a sad, sad look for a creature that ripped the Gods from this world.                                       It couldn’t be more fitting.