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rainbowfic2013-08-23 12:27 pm
kay_brooke) wrote in rainbowfic2013-08-23 12:27 pm
Adamant #2, Tango Pink #6
Name: kay_brooke
Story: The Myrrosta
Colors: Adamant #2 (magic girdle), Tango Pink #6 (minuet)
Styles/Supplies: Graffiti
Word Count: 366
Rating/Warnings: PG-13; no standard warnings apply
Summary: Hopina on happiness.
Notes: Lint Roll answer forbookblather, who asked: Hopina, are you happy?
“Are you happy?” Atro asked her one night, his uncomfortably warm arm wrapped tightly across her belly, his long hair loose and hanging down, tickling her shoulder in an unpleasant way that made her want to slap at it like it was a persistent insect.
Happiness. What a ridiculous notion. What did it even mean? “Happiness,” people said, as if it was the pinnacle of all feeling and experience, as if it could even be obtained. The fools in the streets wearing their happiness as a sash, as if they could convert everyone around them if they spoke of it often enough and loudly enough.
“Happiness,” people said, and behind their own walls was still starvation and dead children and pestilence and the ever-hanging threat of war. Even the nobles on their lush estates hid the dirt and blood and illness and sorrow of every person’s existence behind their gilded doors and talked about happiness.
Happiness meant nothing. There was contentment. There was comfort. There was duty and honor and the love one felt toward one’s children. There were sunny days and days when no one was sick, days when no one was being maimed in bloody battles, days when it was enough simply to sit in the orchard and listen to the harpist while blossoms rained lazily from the trees.
Some days there was happiness, yes. But pure happiness was an insulting concept. Hopina’s life was not what she had envisioned. In some ways it was worse--she had always thought, for instance, that her relatively low status among the nobility meant that she might be permitted to marry for love--within reason, of course. But in some ways it was better--she was the wife of the emperor, all the world’s comforts available at her whim. Her children would grow to rule in their father’s place, and that was quite a legacy for a woman who had grown up between two worlds, reviled by the upper nobility and the commoners alike.
“Hopina?” Atro asked, looking concerned. His grip in her tightened, as if that might make her give him the answer he wanted.
She was ever the dutiful wife, so she said, “Of course I’m happy.”
kay_brookeStory: The Myrrosta
Colors: Adamant #2 (magic girdle), Tango Pink #6 (minuet)
Styles/Supplies: Graffiti
Word Count: 366
Rating/Warnings: PG-13; no standard warnings apply
Summary: Hopina on happiness.
Notes: Lint Roll answer for
bookblather, who asked: Hopina, are you happy?“Are you happy?” Atro asked her one night, his uncomfortably warm arm wrapped tightly across her belly, his long hair loose and hanging down, tickling her shoulder in an unpleasant way that made her want to slap at it like it was a persistent insect.
Happiness. What a ridiculous notion. What did it even mean? “Happiness,” people said, as if it was the pinnacle of all feeling and experience, as if it could even be obtained. The fools in the streets wearing their happiness as a sash, as if they could convert everyone around them if they spoke of it often enough and loudly enough.
“Happiness,” people said, and behind their own walls was still starvation and dead children and pestilence and the ever-hanging threat of war. Even the nobles on their lush estates hid the dirt and blood and illness and sorrow of every person’s existence behind their gilded doors and talked about happiness.
Happiness meant nothing. There was contentment. There was comfort. There was duty and honor and the love one felt toward one’s children. There were sunny days and days when no one was sick, days when no one was being maimed in bloody battles, days when it was enough simply to sit in the orchard and listen to the harpist while blossoms rained lazily from the trees.
Some days there was happiness, yes. But pure happiness was an insulting concept. Hopina’s life was not what she had envisioned. In some ways it was worse--she had always thought, for instance, that her relatively low status among the nobility meant that she might be permitted to marry for love--within reason, of course. But in some ways it was better--she was the wife of the emperor, all the world’s comforts available at her whim. Her children would grow to rule in their father’s place, and that was quite a legacy for a woman who had grown up between two worlds, reviled by the upper nobility and the commoners alike.
“Hopina?” Atro asked, looking concerned. His grip in her tightened, as if that might make her give him the answer he wanted.
She was ever the dutiful wife, so she said, “Of course I’m happy.”