Fic - Promises

[dolevalan]

Title: Promises
Fandom/original: Original
Rating: G
A/N: rougen's prompt was "null and void." A little, introspective drabble.



A contract. That was exactly what they had always wanted to avoid. A promise. Something that could have been broken. Not smashed, in hot anger, or shattered in cold friction. But something that could be dully stamped null and void, when it was done. And she’d expected it to end, one way or another. One of them would ride off one day, and just never return.

It hadn’t happened. And eventually, without quite noticing, she stopped expecting that end. It was nothing in particular that changed the atmosphere between them… it was, as many things with them were, understood without being said.

Still. Her name was still Evans, the ranch was still his alone in deed, and there was no legality of any sort.

Now, watching her children… she wondered if they were as well served by that absence as she’d been.

Stella had loved orderly things ever since she was small. She was forever intrigued with how things worked and why, her deft little hands quick to pull a clock apart, and almost as quick to put it back. A solemn child, like Anya herself, but with her father’s wicked sense of irony. Stella, of the entire family, would have been good at promises, at oaths sworn solemnly and notarized. But observing, from her parents, not to expect them…

… she chosen a rogue of a man, not so different from Ambrose in some ways. But they’d made one another no promises, and when his child resurfaced, there was no promise to break. Everything that was unspoken so easily ignored. And Stella had returned to the orderly lines of a life empty of everything but work.

Anya knew that life. It was not what she wanted, for her daughter, with Ambrose’s smile.

Nicolas had always been the less bold, in some ways, but the wilder. He was always for dueling and hunting, running footraces and swimming. As he got older, he did learn other sort of hunts, ones that involved parties and champagne, but his flirtations were never serious. To Anya’s knowledge, the serving girl was the only one he’d bedded, back as little more than a boy. He certainly felt no compulsion to promise much of anything, though, to any of his companions. He’d learned to leave a backdoor in any relationship, and now…

…now he had two children, one of whom he habitually ignored. One of their mothers he had left flatly, the other he seemed to be addicted to in some fashion, but he seemed to be able to shed his feelings for either of them like an unneeded overcoat on a summer’s day. Not only was he able to, he was eager to. Lovers were to be used and discarded when no longer convenient. It was what he’d learned. The past didn’t matter. Only what he wanted this instant.

She had never prepared to be a mother. When Ambrose decided to keep the twins, she’d agreed. And she’d thought their love would be enough. But what they hadn’t taught their children was that love was a promise of its own, even if no formal words, no solemn papers made the deal final. And a promise broken can cut just as sharply, even if the words forever go unsaid.

Comments

[rougen.livejournal.com]

Oh... love.
We should boycott. >.