#The White-Haired Girl | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

connan-l · 2 years ago

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Meandering Souls - Day 3: Door 3 - In the Shadows

Fandom: The House in Fata Morgana

Rating: Teen and Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Relationship: Giselle & The White-Haired Girl, Giselle/The White-Haired Girl

Summary: Until their souls cross path once more in the boundless sphere of fate.

Michelle tries to know more about the mysterious head maid of the manor.

[A collection of unrelated one-shots for the @fata10thanni prompts:

Day 1: Door 1 - Mirror

Day 2: Door 2 - Gardening and Botany

Day 3: Door 3 - In the Shadows]

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Link on Archive of Our Own

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Notes: So fun fact, I’ve actually been wanting to write a one-shot similar to this one focused on Door 3!Michelle and the Maid, so I actually struggled writing this one because I didn’t want to use much of my initials ideas I had for the OS lol.

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The first time she’d met her, her face had been one of utter despair.

It had been very brief, but Michelle had distinctly seen it and couldn’t manage to forget it; it was welded into her mind, carved into her eyes. Even Jacopo, not the most astute when it came to the feelings of others, had clearly noticed her stricken expression with the way she felt him tense to her side.

Michelle couldn’t wrap her mind around why. She’d never met the woman before, she was sure of it, and all she had done was smile at her and greet her in the most polite way she could.

Her shaken expression had quickly disappeared before her face went back to a neutral one, buried under a facade of placidity, but Michelle could still plainly see the shine of pain glinting in her beautiful jade eyes.

She kept replaying the scene in her mind — trying to find the slightest details that could explain such a reaction; what Michelle could have possibly done to wrong her this much, but nothing came.

The oddity about this woman didn’t stop there, though.

When she decided to ask more about her, Jacopo simply gave her a bewildered look, as if that was a ridiculous thing to want to know.

“She’s just a maid,” he said. “All I know is that she was here at the manor before I even came.”

He didn’t know where she came from, didn’t know who she’d worked for before — he didn’t even know her name, in fact. Michelle felt completely flabbergasted at this, and asked him how he could not even want to know such basic things about his own employees. He just shrugged.

“She is just a maid.”

Apparently, to Jacopo, as long as she was doing her job nothing else mattered — and doing her job, she was particularly good at it.

Not a single servant worked as efficiently and meticulously as her, and half the time, Michelle thought she almost looked like a marionette who was being manipulated by a puppeteer from the shadows.

Maria also shared Jacopo’s thoughts. When Michelle asked her about the head maid, she had just laughed and waved her hand in a dismissive way; “She’s just some creepy lady, leave her be.”

She probably should have headed their advices. The servants of the house were only employees, and there was no need for the masters to take an interest in their personal lives. Surely, if the woman had never said a word to anyone about herself, not even her name, then it was because she didn’t want to — and getting intrusive about it against her wish would be quite rude.

But somehow, Michelle couldn’t just leave her be.

She found herself oddly captivated by her.

Her eyes followed the Maid around whenever she caught sight of her in a corridor, or when she would come to serves tea. Whenever their gazes crossed, the woman would smile at her, but her face was blank, her eyes empty. It made Michelle’s heart aches.

This woman made her uncomfortable, but more than anything she made her sad.

She could tell, behind the walls of placidity she hid behind, that she was in a lot of pain — and, for a reason Michelle couldn’t explain, she felt that somehow this was her fault.

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She woke up in the middle of the night when a thunderous noise broke into her room.

Cold and water violently spread throughout the bedchambers, and Michelle looked around with surprise. She realized all of this was coming from the window, which had brutally opened upon the strength of the storm raging outside; the wind and rain were so powerful it had forcibly unlocked it and made the curtains wildly flapping around.

Michelle instantly stood up and ran to the window; her long white hair flying all around her, getting wet and sticking to her skin because of the rain. She tried to get it closed as quickly as she could, but the wind was so violent that her frail arms could barely manages to grasp each sides.

Suddenly, a firmer, stronger hand seized the window from behind her.

“Let it go, Madam. You are going to hurt yourself.”

Michelle jumped in surprised, inadvertently doing as she was told, and realizing the person who’d just spoken to her was the black-haired maid. She hadn’t even heard her enter her room, though she supposed it wasn’t that surprising given how noisy the tempest was.

Despite her surprise, she actually listened to her and stepped aside, while the Maid cleared off the curtains and bravely faced the animated window with unyielding hands. It took her only a couple of seconds before being able to close it tightly and put a bar to keep it that way, under Michelle’s impressed eyes.

“Wow, you’re a lot stronger than you look!” She couldn’t help but exclaim in awe, and then felt herself blushing a little because of how childish she sounded.

The Maid didn’t seem to mind as she put the curtains back in place, and then turned towards her. She silently scrutinized her in a way that made Michelle blush even more, so she looked away.

“U-Um…”

“At the risk of sounding rude, Madam… you are all wet and disheveled. I believe it would be preferable for you to change clothes and dry your hair before going back to bed.”

“H-Huh? Oh, right…!”

Michelle was, indeed, quite ‘wet and disheveled’ — and it was putting it mildly. Her nightgown was not exactly drenched but pretty humid, and her long hair was all soaked and messy around her face and shoulders, sticking to her frame. She must have looked quite awful. Thank goodness her husband wasn’t around to behold such a sight.

Before she could say any more, the other woman turned around, headed towards her wardrobe, and in a handful of seconds she was already handing her a new gown. She asked her if she needed any help putting the dress on, but Michelle quickly refused; even though she was used to servants helping her out since she was a child, she’d never liked letting others doing simple tasks for her like that. So the Maid let her do as she pleased, but stayed in the room while she undressed, only turning her back to her to give her some intimacy — which, for some reason, made Michelle’s stomach tie into knots. She didn’t know why, but the other woman’s presence somehow rendered her very anxious.

Once she was done, she smiled at her, almost about to say that everything was fine now and she could go, but then she noticed a comb in the woman’s hand.

“You might not let me help dress you, but please at least allow me to rearrange your hair a little.”

Michelle’s first instinct was to tell her it wasn’t necessary. She was going back to bed, after all — so her hair was going to end up a mess either way. But somehow she felt unable to open her mouth once her eyes crossed the Maid’s.

There was something odd, in her gaze. Something almost begging.Yearning.

Michelle’s lip trembled; she looked away, then nodded, unable to sustain the other’s eyes.

Soon she found herself sitting in front of her mirror as the Maid was slowly, gently combing her humid white hair. Michelle couldn’t help but vaguely ponder how strange of a situation this was; here she was, in the middle of the night, getting pampered by the unsettling nameless head maid of the mansion while a tempest was hollering outside.

A part of her almost felt like she was doing something taboo or forbidden, like cheating on her husband.

The Maid delicately threaded her fingers into the strands, as if making sure she wouldn’t forget a single knot, and the gesture was so tender that something in Michelle’s chest broke like glass.

She was handling her like something terribly precious; a treasured doll, a cherished daughter. A lover.

Somehow, somewhere, the whole thing felt upsettingly familiar. As she looked up into the mirror, she had a strange feeling of déjà vu; and in the light of a thunder, she thought she almost saw the silhouette of a younger version of herself, all dressed up in a beautiful, old-fashioned golden and white dress.

She blinked, and the vision was gone, but the hundreds contradictory feelings filling her chest and clogging up her throat stayed.

“You, um,” she tried — she needed to speak, to break the silence, otherwise she felt like she was going to suffocate. “—Uh, what, what are you doing here at this time? I mean, it’s so late… were you not sleeping?”

For a long time, the Maid stayed quiet, and Michelle almost thought she was not going to answer her.

“I never sleep,” she finally said. “So usually, I am doing rounds in the manor. But then I heard noises in your room, and I got worried.”

“O-Oh… Is that so?”

Admittedly, she did often look tired, with her skin almost as pale as Michelle’s and her big black circles under her eyes. Still, hearing her say she had been worried about her sounded… nice.

“I apologize if I worried you…”

“Don’t. I am only doing my duty.”

“I know… But still, thank you. Not a lot of people… have been very kind to me before.”

For a brief moment, Michelle felt the comb still in her hair; but by the time she got to lift her head and look at the other woman in the mirror, any trace of surprise or shock had disappeared and she was back to doing her task.

“I-I mean, my parents were very nice to me. And now, well… I have Maria. She told me we were friends.” She laughed a little. “I’ve never had any friends before, you know? I might have been… quite lonely in my previous home. And then, of course, there’s my husband—”

She was pretty sure she felt the comb stop yet again, but she was so caught up in her own feelings that she couldn’t bring herself to get distracted by it.

She wasn’t sure why she felt so talkative all of a sudden, opening up to this strange woman she knew nothing about.

But for as unsettling as she could — there was something about her… that felt weirdly comfortable, too.

“Well… he has been… acting a little strangely towards me lately. Like he’s… avoiding me…”

Her hands tightened on her on thighs, and she barely noticed the deep breath the Maid took from behind her.

“Would you… Would you have some advice to spare? I… I’m afraid of losing him, and… I mean, I’m sorry if that is rude of me, but I heard some of the servants gossip about you… maybe being married—”

Her question was brusquely cut by a vivid pain that made her shriek. Something — someone — had abruptly pulled on her hair, in such a brutal way that had unmistakably meant to hurt, and Michelle jumped from her chair and turned around.

The black-haired, green-eyed woman stood there, in front of her, but in the darkness she was unable to gauge her expression. Only her jade eyes were shining under the candle and the moonlight; something so deeply intense and full of resentment that Michelle’s throat and heart dried up instantly.

In the Maid’s right hand was dandling a few of her white strands that she had clearly torn up from her head.

They stared at each other in silence, and then Michelle felt something she’d never felt for this woman until now: fear. In this instant, for a brief, terrifying second, she was certain she was about to kill her; in some strange hallucination, she could almost feel her cold hands around her throat, pressing and pressing her trachea until nothing of her was left.

But the Maid did nothing of the sort. Instead, she lowered her hands, and the intensity of her eyes diminished until it was back to her normal, perfectly neutral stance.

“If you want advice,” she said, voice eerily cold. “Then I can give one. Do not trust in love too much, Madam.”

With some strength she didn’t know she possessed, Michelle was able to open up her mouth, even though the entirety of her body was trembling. Because she felt that the Maid was telling her what Maria had recently started rambling about; you’re too good for that guy. Leave him! With your looks, you’ll have no trouble finding a new one who’ll treat you like a princess!

“But I love him.”

She said it out loud, a little desperately, a little like a prayer.

The maid didn’t budge. Her expression was of stone.

“Sometimes, love is not worth it.”

And then she simply turned around, with the comb and the hair and the candle, closing the door behind her.

Michelle stood there, all alone, in the dark — and for some reason she couldn’t fathom, tears rolled down her face.