Affair in Blue: Part 1-5
Affair in Blue: Part 1-5
Rating: G-PG-13
Warnings: Incesty leanings
Pairings: Eventual Roger/Cythera/Jonathan
Summary: Roger was a man of great expectations, but he suffered a singular weakness for the forbidden.
Notes: Written for treanz's 10 Malorie's Peak Prompts request.
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Part One: Prompt #30 - Eyes
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Cythera remembered the days she spent at the convent, dreaming about the magic of court. Standing below the woven rose netting and the long falls of silk, it was everything she imagined. Except, in her dreams, she was dancing with the most handsome young man in the room. Their eyes met, brightness to light, and it was love. It was a little girl’s hope, she knew, and it would have faded easily into the back of her mind if Delia hadn’t stolen it from her.
As Prince Jonathan lead her on the dance floor for the third time that dance, Cythera shook her head. She laughed quietly at her own ridiculousness. It was good Delia caught his eyes, every girl deserved to be a princess for one night. It just might be Delia’s fate to be that lucky girl for the rest of her life. There were other men in the world.
“A dance?” An elegant hand appeared next to her.
Cythera turned, captured by vibrant blue eyes. She felt the oddest sensation that nature planned for those eyes to be endless dark like the night sky. Instead, they glittered like stars.
“Thank you,” She accepted with a distracted curtsy. “I am Lady Cythera-”
“Of Elden. I know.” He smiled with the barest flash of teeth, as if he had a secret to keep. “I take it upon myself to note the of ladies of quality.” He bowed over their hands, “I am Duke Roger of Conte.”
As he led her out onto the floor, Cythera glanced over her shoulder at the dancing princess and decided that tonight, perhaps, Delia could keep her crown.
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Part Two: Prompt #44 - Rejection
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Jonathan was used to seeing pretty girls. He was the prince; every pretty girl in the kingdom introduced herself to him. Usually, they were utterly forgettable in their fine features. It took an extra light to catch his attention - Something very few girls managed, no matter how lovely.
Delia was the latest exception, but as the social season continued, he was beginning to notice someone else. Cythera was bright, all golden hair and flushed skin. She didn’t have a hard edge on her body. In her soft rose gown, she radiated summer comfort in the cool evening, but Jon had always preferred winter’s beautiful chill.
Roger, it seemed, did not.
That’s honestly what it came down to, in the end. Roger was not a dallying man. He never wasted his time on the lesser nobles that filled the ballroom, instead keeping his socializing to the powerful and purposeful. If he had interest in Cythera, she was more than scattered sunlight in a crowded room.
For once, when Raoul elbowed his way between he and Delia, Jonathan let him have her. She flashed him a dismayed smile, but his mind was elsewhere as he watched his cousin dance.
What was so stunning about Cythera of Elden that merited Roger’s attention? She was nice enough, Jon remembered, and had a pleasant laugh, but there was nothing particular about her. Delia had fire and wit, she was graceful and seductive, but still a riveting challenge. Elden was… remarkably unremarkable. Precisely the sort of girl Jon expected his mother to choose for him.
Was that it? Was Roger finally selecting a bride? For a long moment, Jon felt nothing but a deep burning spite for Cythera of Elden. When Jon realized he was, of all things, jealous of his cousin’s attention, he chided himself harshly. He wasn’t a child and for all Roger always had time for him, Jon was not more important than Roger’s happiness.
Determined to accept this change for whatever it would bring, Jon turned away and eased between Raoul and Delia with a shark’s grin.
When he lay in his bed that evening, Delia’s smell still on his sheets, Jonathan couldn’t stop the stab of fear that one day soon, Roger’s study would be locked when he knocked.
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Part Three: Prompt #47 - Forbidden
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Roger was a man of great expectations, for which he facilitated with precise calculations. The dove of Elden was a charming young woman with few flaws and overwhelming virtues; precisely the sort of woman to threaten Delia’s sense of entitlement. His busy little bee was beginning to buzz too close to the sun for his tastes. It was time Roger reminded her that Delia was only as worthy as he allowed.
When he plucked Cythera out of the crowd, he knew his actions were noted by many important eyes. Delia, of course, would see his favor as a threat to her future crown. The young men of court would look upon the pleasantly forgettable young woman with a new consideration, which was entirely unnecessary, but an undeniable effect of which Roger had no need to mitigate. His uncle and his waning wife, perhaps the most important audience for the evening’s affair, would begin to speak of Roger in terms of a family, children, a grand quickening to the world of noble completion. It was time, after all, that Roger separated himself from the young stallions of court and presented himself as a man of honor and tradition.
Jonathan’s interest had been a pleasant addition to Delia’s discomfort, but as the evening continued, Roger began to notice something rather odd about his little cousin’s jealous gaze; it held little affection for the blond beauty.
Roger was a man of great expectations, but he suffered a singular weakness for the forbidden. And there was nothing more forbidden to him than Jonathan.
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Part Four: Prompt #48 - Avoid
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Cythera was young and inexperienced. She knew that her dreams of courtship and the realities would be different, perhaps by degrees unimaginable, but there was something off about Roger’s interest in her. He was perfectly cordial, charmingly attentive, and his gifts were both lovely and expensive, but there was something in the way his eyes roamed during their conversations that set her skin crawling.
His eyes where what first attracted her, but the more she felt their gaze, the more she realized that star bright veil was, perhaps, a dangerous façade. His charm was allure, but cold. Too perfect, perhaps, for her to find it sincere, much like the gifts that turned the other girls green with envy. Each one was precisely the sort of exaggerated declaration little girls dream about when they have no ideas about love.
Her parents would be furious if they knew what she had planned, but for all her ignorance, Cythera was no fool. Too many women married men when their instincts said otherwise and it never turned out for the best. Roger had done nothing to offend her, so she would have to make her disinterest clear in other ways.
After she sent her maid with a missive excusing herself from a walk in the garden due to a terrible faintness, Cythera made herself convincing. She loosed her hair, hung her gown back in her closet, and wrapped herself in her favorite simple lilac dressing gown instead, settling on her settee with a book of the latest court poetry.
It was a gift from a young man who wasn’t a duke, bless him.
And that, Cythera decided, was a grand beginning to a perfect day.
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Part Five: Prompt #28 - Freedom
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As Emerille, her maid, bustled in with yet another collection of carefully clipped and arranged roses to set along the wall of her sitting room, Cythera admitted she might have a problem. At first, her grand scheme to hide away from Roger’s attentions under the shade of her delicate constitution worked swimmingly. He sent notes of concern; she had Emerille write a politely generic reply without so much as Cythera’s signature and sent it by the grubbiest kitchen boy Emerille could find. Roger’s invitations waned and Cythera could taste her freedom like the bright autumn chill.
Then the flowers arrived.
The first were from Roger, as was only expected; large but tasteful gifts often accompanied by soothing teas or luxurious soaps. A few followed from polite well-wishers that were small and unassuming in their idle sincerity. Cythera kept those in her bedroom while Roger’s gifts stayed well away in her sun room. However, in a matter of days, her rooms were suddenly drowning in a deluge of pollen and petals as suitor after suitor sent extravagant arrangements hiding torturous poetry that often slipped the border of maudlin into disturbingly morbid. Cythera had very little interest in speaking with Lord Vandwill of Casperin Townie, not least because pickling her eyes would not keep their beauty in the troubling event of her death, no matter what romantic tale told him so.
Setting her embroidery on her seat, Cythera shared a helpless sigh with Emerille and press her fingers to her temples.
“You’ll have to return to society eventually, miss,” Emerille, who obviously delighted in Cythera’s exasperation, noted with realistic logic. Cythera did not appreciate her sensibilities at that very moment. Emerille quirked a smile, “Unless her ladyship is planning to die. In which case, I hope you’d be willing to bequeath me that lovely bag of bath salts Gregory of Heldross sent you. They’re all the way from Tyra.”
“Really,” Cythera perked, “I don’t remember seeing those.”
“I kept them for myself,” Emerille plucked the throw blanket off the floor where Cythera has kicked it early that afternoon. As she snapped the wrinkles out of the warm weave, Emerille added, “It’s hardly like you’re lacking pretty things.”
A knock came at the door. Cythera abandoned her hard learned manners and groaned, throwing herself back on the settee. As Emerille opened the door and graciously thanked whomever from whichever for whatever, Cythera smothered herself with a velvet pillow.
“If you’re finished with that,” Emerille moved with sharp professionalism, “I suggest you put this beast out on the balcony with all the others too large to stash under your vanity.”
“I’m rather certain,” Cythera pouted with determined childishness she usually prided herself on overcoming, “I pay you to do that.”
With a laughed, Emerille sloppily dropped the heavy vase of towering ferns in her lap, completely unrepentant when water sloshed over Cythera’s dressing grown. “You mother pays me to keep you in good health and fine presentation, milady. Something which requires fresh air, even in winter. Now go,” Emerille took the velvet pillow away, “and take that with you.”
With resigned compliance, Cythera left her warm perch and braved the bitter winter weather in naught but her night clothes. She danced on her chilled toes, chiding herself severely for forgoing her slippers. To make matters worse, tucked under the delicate wicker bench was her favorite book. She’d been searching for weeks. It was an illustrated collection of the Great Tales, from ‘Miola and the Great Mother’ to ‘The Crooked God’s Caper’; but now the lovely pictures were weather worn and the cover showed signs of mildew.
Setting the heavy arrangement on the banister, Cythera gather her dressing gown and took a deep breath before she dove to the ground. The cold press of stone down her body chilled her instantly, but she tarried not a moment before bouncing back to her feet. Only, her exuberance was a mite much. With a dread that stilled even her chattering teeth, Cythera heard a resounding crash in the courtyard below.
She turned to peek over the edge as Emerille came out to see the commotion.
“Oh my,” Emerille tsked, “Baron Julesie will be most hurt by your rejection.”
With a fretful squeak, Cythera agreed. She pressed her hands over her lips, trying to push down her tittering panic. She liked Baron Julesie - he was a considerate man with a stable countenance. Cythera just couldn’t live with herself if he thought she rebuked his, of all the attentions paid to her.
In a fit of pique, or possibly mad brilliance, Cythera rushed back into her rooms, fetched a collection of small floral arrangements, and dashed back to the balcony. Then she tossed them over the edge without ceremony. As the last crashed on the snow covered cobbles, silence echoed.
Appalled, Cythera glanced at her maid. Emerille gapped back. They stared at one another for a long, frozen moment before Cythera broke under the ridiculousness of it all and started to giggle.
“Well,” Emerille huffed in mock severity, “I hope you’re ready to finish what you started, your ladyship. We can’t have four young men thinking they’ve been rejected for some unimaginable offense.” Her brown eyes twinkled devilishly as she said, “Best toss the lot of them to be fair.”
With matching grins, the pair took off, racing to find the largest, ugliest arrangements to dump first. As the stack on the balcony grew, Emerille began collecting the more useless trinkets Cythera had been gifted as well: a hideous ceramic duck, a pair of chilling spoons, and a small collection of terrible published poem. When Emerille added the lovely velvet pillow to the pile, Cythera object: “I rather enjoy that.”
“It came with the Tuff Daisies,” Emerille nodded to a rather carnivorous arrangement of white flowers. “From the chap wanting your dead eyeballs.”
“Oh,” Cythera wilted, taking the pillow. She was torn between fondness and disgust. Finally, she set it on the wicker bench and promised Emerille, “I’m thinking about it.”
Then, Cythera lifted the first arrangement high over her head and released a long, shaky breath and let it fall. The sensation was completely different. The deliberate destruction was invigorating. It was enthralling. It was positively dizzying.
She dropped another.
With a laugh, Cythera threw herself into her work, hurling one hideous arrangement after another. She was so enraptured by her work, she didn’t hear the door to her rooms open, or the alarmed voice until Roger slid open her balcony door.
Startled, Cythera spun and hurled the ugly ceramic duck at his head. She watched it move with deadly accuracy, covering her mouth in horror. Luckily, the duke was quick on his feet and dodged before she had to explain murdering a member of the royal family with a cheap statuary of a fowl.
He watched it crash against the far wall. When Roger turned back, his face was twisted in indignant disbelief. Cythera stared. Roger was stunned silent, but he cocked his head and furrowed his brow and Cythera knew it would be only a moment before he collected himself enough to speak. As he raised a finger and opened his mouth, Cythera sealed her humiliation by resorting to the basest of social escapes.
She feigned a faint.
May all the gods bless Emerille, because her maid tarried not a moment falling into dramatic hysterics and throwing the duke out of her rooms with exclamations about scandals and shock. “What would her mother say,” Cythera heard her berating the man as she hurried him out the door, “an unmarried man like yourself showing up in her rooms unannounced without a proper chaperone! You’ll be the ruin of her, see if you won’t!”
Cythera lay still until the hall door snicked shut, then she shot up, clutching her head. “Ow,” She whimpered, rubbing her forehead piteously.
“Up with you, then,” Emerille sighed, helping her to her feet and inspecting Cythera’s throbbing head. “that was the most graceless tumble I’ve ever seen a lady make, but it served you well enough. At least this beauty will make it convincing.” Pulling her inside, Emerille set Cythera in one of the stiff-back wooden chairs tucked in the corner and dug out some salve. “You’re going to have a goose egg on your head by morning.”
Cythera gave her a rueful smile and shrugged. Her freedom had been fun while it lasted. At the very least, Cythera decided, she wouldn’t be worrying about Roger’s interests any longer.
But, the next morning, Alex, Roger’s solemn squire, arrived with another gift. Cythera opened it with trepidation, finding a solid leather bound book with little decoration. The sleek scroll lettering spelled ‘Theatric for the Dedicated Thespian: Techniques and Physicality for the Stage’.
Inside the front cover, Cythera found a short note: [i]Might I suggest practicing your landing? - Roger[/i]
After a moment’s hesitance, Cythera pulled out her writing desk and turned the note over to add her reply: As any true performer knows, an actress must be willing to suffer for her art. It adds realism. I apologize for the duck. - Cythera
"Emerille," She called. "Would you deliver this to Duke Roger, please?" Cythera pursed her lips and added with a considering tilt of her head, "Personally."
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