Work Text:
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
You were the youngest of the Peg’asi children, the youngest of eleven children. All that had been expected of you was that you stayed trapped in your little wing of the palace, that you kept up with your studies--and excelled because Peg’asi children could not be failures--and that you kept your mouth shut. If you weren’t King Fenris or his heir to the throne, no one cared about your opinion. No one cared about what you wanted. No one cared about you.
Your parents certainly didn’t. Sometimes you wondered if King Fenris even remembered your name. You could count the amount of times you’d been in the same room as him on one hand. You wondered if you mother, Lucrezia, even thought anything of you after you were born. The Solar Queen was known for her beauty and her vanity, and you wondered what you looked like in her eyes. You wondered if she even ever thought about you.
You doubted it, though. You were, after all, the youngest and the least important.
You would think with so many siblings, you would never feel lonely. And yet, and yet. Your siblings were all busy with their own things, and while you all cared for one another, you weren’t close. You and the rest of your siblings were too busy living in blissful ignorance in your separate wings of the palace. Maybe there was something about the Peg’asi upbringing that made it hard for all of you to connect and grow close?
(Maybe it was you?)
Regardless, you’d long since given up on bonding with your siblings… except for Nerissa.
Nerissa was the only person you had in that enormous and lonely palace, when she actually had free time to spend with you. You had so many siblings, but it was Nerissa you were closest with, the eldest and most important, the heir to the throne. You were her favorite. You were the youngest, the least important, but in her eyes--you were more. She was the one person who loved you within that prison you called a home. Nerissa was your hero; she was beautiful and kind and she cared so deeply about everyone--you knew she would be an amazing queen. You were there when she would mention ideas of how to improve things for the people, and you were there when she came back frustrated when your father would once again ignore her. She wanted to change things, she had ambitions and goals, and part of you wanted to be like her.
But you were the youngest, what good could you do?
Out of the countless people within the palace, Nerissa was the only person who really knew you. She was the only person who cared about you, who listened to you, who spent time with you. She might have been the only person to ever really love you.
Until Vexx came along. Lieutenant Vexx Serif, your own personal Royal Guard, with his charming smirk and friendly green eyes. And suddenly you had a friend, someone who cared about you that wasn’t Nerissa. All of a sudden, you weren’t as lonely because even when Nerissa was busy, you had Vexx by your side.
You’d never felt so free before, until you met Vexx. Until you both snuck out of the palace and you finally were able to see outside the walls, to walk around the city, to see how the people lived. Vexx had opened the doors to a whole new world for you, and you loved him for it. Loved the man who was sworn to you, and who asked for nothing but that you be his in return. Loved the man who would sneak through the palace with you, and let you experience things you would normally never be allowed to. You loved the man who let you live, for the first time in your life.
You loved him so much, you were devastated when one day, he didn’t return to your side. You wondered about him and yearned so much to see him that you left your brother’s wedding early to search for him.
How ironic, that Vexx had unintentionally saved your life, but intentionally destroyed it all the same. It was because of him that you were still alive, still alive to run into him again and see those beloved green eyes look impossibly cold as they glared at you.
It shook you to the core, how twisted his expression was as he looked at you. How could someone who had once been so soft and sweet with you stare at you with such disdain, speak to you with such fury and hate practically dripping from their tone? How could he look you in the eyes and feel nothing? Only cruelly laughing as he explained how it was your fault your family was dead, as he spat that he had never truly cared about you.
Your first friend, your first something, the man who had taught you how to really live.
The man who had snuck you out of the palace for the first time so you could actually see the city. The man who had laughed with you and teased you as you both snuck your way through the palace, the man with his delighted grin and bright eyes at your wonderment at escaping your cage for the first time. The man who told you about places you could only dream about and promised to take you to them, to run away with you. The man who had helped you sneak into a masquerade because he thought you deserved that chance to dress up and have a good time despite being the youngest royal child. The man who had touched you so gently, spoken to you so softly when he asked if you were his.
The man who was the first person aside from Nerissa that made you feel like you were important. The first person aside from Nerissa that made you feel like you had worth, that your life mattered, that you mattered.
How could the same person have betrayed you? Used you? Played a hand in taking everything away from you?
...But in the end, it was your fault, wasn’t it? You were the one who had foolishly trusted him, believed all the sweet things he had said to you. You, the youngest Peg’asi, the sheltered and naive little royal, the least important. You really thought someone else could love you.
And now your family was dead, because of you. Murdered in cold blood while you were out searching with pathetic desperation for the traitor you had fallen for. Your family was dead. Nerissa was--
Nerissa. To think that all you had left of her was the music box she had loved.
Your heart ached, your eyes stung, you could barely think, barely breathe past the anguish squeezing the air from your lungs. You couldn’t speak, not when Calderon found you, and not when he and Bash brought you back to the ship.
You felt like you were a million miles away when you finally spoke up. When you managed to choke the words out about who you really were while smothering down the circling thoughts about how everything was your fault--your family was dead because of you, this was all your fault, you did this, and now you had no one left --
You were alone in the world, you realized. The last surviving Peg’asi, the youngest child. Nerissa, the only person in your family who had really loved you, was dead because of you. And Vexx, the only friend you had ever had, had betrayed you. You had no one, and it was your fault.
Now that the crew knew who you were, things were different. Because you were a Peg’asi. You were a part of the royal family that had ruled for generations. You were a part of the royal family that had hurt so many people, even if you didn’t personally have a hand in it.
The name Peg’asi would forever hang over you, and being the last one alive gave it and you a new type of worth. You were the last Peg’asi and the sole heir to the throne, and there was unimaginable power that came with that because you had the potential to change things that you had never had before. You were the last Peg’asi that Zovack was desperately searching for, and that made you valuable as something to be given to him in order to escape a bounty. You were the last Peg’asi, and the last person left of the family that had ruined the lives of countless people, including June.
How jarring it was, to realize you probably wouldn’t have been saved if your identity had been known. Vexx was the reason you’d escaped the massacre, but June was the reason you were still alive. And yet, if he had known who you truly were… something in you shattered at the thought. At the truth that you couldn’t escape. You understood where he was coming from, but it still hurt to know that the first person on the ship to show you kindness now had trouble just looking you in the eye.
It hurt to know that everything had changed because of what you remembered. That everything had changed because of you.
You were a Peg’asi, and you were the last. Out of fifteen family members, only you had survived, the youngest of them all. Now you were the only person alive with a right to the throne, because your family had died due to your own naivety.
...Why had you survived? Why was it you, out of all of them?
There had once been eleven Peg’asi children, and now there was one. The youngest, and the least important, suddenly the most important. You were never meant to rule.
It was never supposed to be like this.