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"Milliard?"
The room was dark and cold. Outside the lights were bright and the tropical trees swayed in the breeze, but if he just looked hard enough he could imagine the snow that had fallen for every Christmas that he could remember. Every Christmas there had been snow. But not this one.
"Milliard? Oh. There you are."
A voice at his side and a small hand grasping his arm. "Come on! The guests are expecting you! You don't want to be a loner tonight...come on, Milliard! For the sake of our kingdom, if nothing else."
"Your kingdom," he correctly automatically, moving away from her hand.
He felt, more than saw, her blink.
"What?"
"It's your kingdom," he repeated. "Not mine."
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When he finally looked at her she had her hands on her hips, staring at him. Even in the moonlight he was struck by how beautiful she had become. All these years he'd kept imagining her as a little girl, the laughing little girl in the crumpled photo he kept with him always, the only reminder he'd had of who he was. His baby sister…
She'd been an unopened bud, an untapped well of potential. She should have been firstborn. She would have brought honor to the family.
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"Really, Milliard, what's gotten into you tonight?"
"Can't I be alone for a little while?"
She heaved a sigh, flipped a strand of golden hair back over her shoulder. "You've been alone for years. Now come on."
He said nothing.
"It's Christmas, Milliard."
"And?"
She blinked at him. "Didn't you ever celebrate Christmas?"
He shrugged, staring out at the landscape below the window, lit with spotlights, the moonlight almost lost amidst the lamps and garden lights and the laughter of guest milling about the grounds.
"I was a cadet without a home, at the Academy," he said. The wine glass in his hand suddenly felt very heavy but there was no table to put it down. He ran a finger through the slippery condensation. "And Treize Khushrenada didn't celebrate Christmas."
"Oh," she said quietly. She didn't sound taken aback, as he realized he had hoped she would be. She just sounded…thoughtful.
"Relena, go back to your party."
"Why? If you're going to be stubborn-"
"Why do anything?" he said out loud, feeling the condensation bead and slip down the side of the glass onto the stem and then onto the wide disk at the bottom. He could hear the Christmas music outside drifting in, too loud and cheerful. His hand tightened on the glass.
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"Oneesan?"
There was something in her voice that made him look at her, standing by the window in her silver silk dress, gloved hands clasped to her breast and looking so much older and younger than her seventeen years all at once. The look in her eyes…he remembered when she had looked at him like that once, so long ago, with the eyes of a child.
My baby sister…
He didn't know what to make of the woman who stood before him now
"What is it?"
He didn't mean his voice to come out so harsh, but it slipped. For some reason he felt like he was about to lose control of the conversation.
"Why did you come back?"
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Slowly, he turned to look at her. She had her head cocked to one side uncertainly, and the expression on her face was one of more than mere curiosity.
"I don't understand," he said stiffly.
"Why did you come back? I won't ask how, because I know you won't tell me. We thought you were dead…and when you showed up…Why did you choose to come back to the Cinq Kingdom…when…when there…"
"When there were so many better places I could have gone?"
Her silence told him he had guessed correctly.
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He raised the glass to his lips and took a sip. The smooth wine tasted bitter on his tongue. "I didn't want to come back. I wasn't planning to."
"So why-?"
"I don't know," he interrupted her, turning his back, staring fiercely into the darkness, as if his gaze could break the shadows that shrouded the room where the lighting from the rose gardens below could not reach. "Don't ask me these things."
"I'm your sister! I have-"
"The right to know?" He whirled, glaring at her again. He rarely ever lost his temper, and he was losing it tonight. It was a not a good sign.
"Milliard-"
"You may be my sister, but that does not give you the right to know!"
He had shocked her. It was about time, he thought bitterly, taking another sip of the equally bitter wine. Outside, the Christmas carols reverberated through the night. Garishly loud. He would have to go downstairs to ask them to turn the volume down. Another inconvenience, and he hated inconveniences.
"I have every right to know!" she finally sputtered, glaring at him. "I-"
"You know nothing about me," he interrupted again. "You don't know the boy I was, or the man I have become. Everything you think you know about me is part of the illusion that was created to be me when my kingdom was destroyed. Do you remember, Relena?"
Her eyes were huge in the darkness.
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"Do you remember the fire? Do you remember our family and the destruction that was committed before eyes? We were children. At least you were young enough…you've forgotten."
"What does this have to do…Milliard! Stop it! You're my brother!"
"I'm your brother. That doesn't make me anything but that. I share your blood and that is the extent of our relationship."
"But-"
"What did they teach you when you were a child, Relena?" His lip twisted. "Did they teach you about family? About the ties of blood? About love? Listen to me, my dear sister…there is no such thing as family ties. Family ties are forged at a price, and that price was too high for me to pay."
When he turned to look at her once more, she was staring steadfastly out the window, but her stunned, stiff stance told him everything. It was admirable and tragic at the same time, how they had at once cultivated and killed the potential she'd had in her. The flower of the Peacecrafts, planted in errant soil, blooming amidst thorns.
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"Relena."
"No," she said.
Softly this time, he spoke.. Quietly. Calmly. "And until you understand that, we remain strangers."
He saw the tears glimmer in her eyes. She used to cry as a child, all the time, at everything. He never bullied her, but she'd cry to get what she wanted. The nurses would come running when she bawled and swoop her up in their arms, turning their stern faces towards him and demand to know what he had done this time.
It was always his fault, of course. Never hers. The angel child.
Baby sister.
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"Milliard," she whispered. "Milliard."
"Could you…" he said, then stopped. Changed his mind. "Could you go ask them to turn down the radio, Relena?"
Relena.
The tears were running down her cheeks now and she didn't move for a long moment, frozen in moonlight. And then she left the room, her dress rustling behind her like the rustle of dried flower petals in the wind when the change of seasons left the stems empty and bare.
A moment later, the music turned off, leaving an eerie silence. He couldn't even hear the voices from the garden. He raised the wine glass, discovered it was empty.
Christmas. He had no use for Christmas parties. He had no use for Christmas in general, had no use for a holiday borrowed from Western culture and filled with warm talk of holiday cheer and gift giving and friendship and family and love.
He'd had a sister once. He wondered what happened to her.
He had thought…
He had hoped…
The wine glass slipped from his grasp and fell to the floor in a shower of silver droplets and broken glass spraying out in a fountain and a tinkle of tiny shards, like the last glory of a flower.
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Lo! How a Rose e'er Blooming
By: Gerald Tarrant and Quicksilver
A fascinating exploration of the Relena/Milliard sibling relationship based around the Christmas song- takes place the Christmas after the Eve Wars.
Rated: Fiction K+ - English - Drama/Angst - Relena P., Zechs M. - Words: 1,620 - Reviews: 6 - Favs: 3 - Published: 5/23/2001 - id: 292545
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Full 3/4 1/2 Expand Tighten