A funeral march for the passing of gods - Shadow And Bone- Nikolai Lantsov/OC

Moth to the flame

Athena remembered being a child forced into war, a child turned into a political weapon, with her innocent eyes and naïve face. She remembered the advances of nobles, the glares of her father, the web of intrigues she was obliged to tangle herself into. She remembers being young and small, unprotected and uncared for, she remembers being forced into submission. Her father lent her services to nobles, from helping with their receding hairlines, to delivering babies or building lakes, making ice sculptures, being a servant to the powerful and arrogant. She remembers the scorn of some, the perverted thirst of others, she remembers being a child thrown into the depth of intrigues and schemes, no one to shield her, no one to shelter her other than herself.

Athena learned to be her own spade and shield, to be her own prince charming galloping on a white horse. She learned to stage a scene, to make herself small when she needed it or to stand high and mighty above them all. She learned pretense on her own, she learned to build an armor over her softest part and defy all expectations when it was convenient for her. She learned not to believe in the flattery or kindness of others. After all, Athena loved Ivan because of his ruthlessness, not despite of it. She appreciated his honesty, his ability to tell the ugly truth and his will to defeat and defy her, despite her parentage, despite her reputation. She loved him because they shared a similar cruelty, cold and calculated, born from mistreatment and quiet rage. She loved to have a mirror of her heart, a soul that could read her eyes and not point out her mascaraed. She loved having someone to share her loneliness with.

To know they have never told those words to each other, to know the regret sipping in her heart. Athena would drink herself senseless on the worst of days, drink until she would actually believe she saw Ivan and Fedyor discussing in the corner of her room, with Fedyor laying in Iva's lap, gazing loving at his spouse. Drink until she forgot who she was and who she has lost. In the quiet of her chambers with no one to disturb her, to witness her inadequacy, she let her nightmares take shape, walk around her cluttered desk. She allowed herself floods of tears over all her emptiness and despair. She allowed herself tears dedicated to her own heart, cruel and icy and so desperately alone. She would cry and no one would be there to know it, not Ivan with his gentle touch or Fedyor with his kind words.

Because the word could not possibly be privy to her suffering while it was the cause of it too. Because Athena never learned how to stop acting. She couldn't help it, despite the knowing look in Nikolai's eyes, despite Genya's kindness or David's bluntness, she could not do it. To be vulnerable was foolish, it was weakness. Her pain was dressed into cruelty and bejeweled with composure, each inch of her skin covered in steal and poise.

She remembers being young and stupid, so excruciatingly foolish, naïve in asking her fathers for crumbles of who her mother was. She was five years old and punished for feeling the lack of a true parent in her life, she was a child that learned early on that wanting was an excuse for being chastised. Athena grew up with scars, grew up learning how to hide them, grew up without knowing anything about her mother other than the fact she was foolish enough to love a man so selfish and greedy as her father. She grew up with longing in her heart for someone that was never there. She grew up on her own, surrounded by anatomy books and chemistry manuals to explain the changes she felt in her skin, to understand her own body outside its small science.

Athena was a child without parents among many orphans and abandoned children, among children taken from loving families and sold for their gifts. She was one among many. That did not change the tragedy of it all. The tragedy of maturing without guidance, without any kindness of kin. Athena grew up with resentment in her heart, for her father's cruelty and her mother's foolishness, for their lack of care. She grew up listening to Botnik telling her she had nothing of her mother's fiery temper and rushed action, but all her grace. She grew up with her old teachers tutting over her proficiency as an inheritance from her talented mother. She grew up with crumbles of her maternal heritage, of tales of a redheaded woman that bewitched the darkling and brought out his wraith with the twist of her mouth. She grew up and learned to defy and quiet the many comparisons, the troublesome whispers, the stories of who her mother was.