To Marry a Monster Ch. 01-03

Author's Note: Some general housekeeping before we get started.

1. CONTENT WARNING for mentions of SA, self-harm, mental illness, etc. I don't describe anything and this is NOT a noncon story, these topics are just mentioned as things characters have gone through. But if mentions of these topics are upsetting for you, I totally understand.
2. I'm back! :D I've missed you guys so much. I'm not going to commit to a posting schedule right now because I am working full time and I don't wanna overwhelm myself, but I've got so many fun projects in progress for you guys.
3. This is going to be a relatively short (maybe a dozen or so chapters) smutty romantasy story. There's no hanky panky yet (I know, boo hiss) but it's coming (teehee) and I hope you'll find the wait worth it.

Enjoy. <3

Chapter One

As I sit at my vanity, my mother runs the bristle brush through my long blonde hair methodically, ignoring the fact that the fine strands have been tangle-free for several minutes now. The soft sound of each pass is near deafening. The woman that many call my twin focuses on the nonexistent task that she's busied herself with, either unable or unwilling to meet my gaze in the gold-framed mirror in front of us.

I'd bet my life on the latter.

Our home is bustling with preparations for the spring festival tomorrow. Given that each of our cities are built on top of mountains, the winters can be harsh in the kingdom of Solaria. I live in Solaria's capital, rather uncreatively named Solaria City. Being the home of the royal family, we hold the vast majority of our festivities here. Air nymphs from all cities glide here in the week preceding the festival, filling the already cramped capital far past capacity. Because of this limited space, to travel here you either need money or a family that already lives in the capital. Those two things usually come hand in hand.

My family is wealthy, not the wealthiest by any means, but wealthy enough that my life will always be decided for me.

The news had come in the form of a letter, the parchment now lying open in front of my mother and I, the broken red seal reminding me of blood against the whiteness of the paper and the white marble of my vanity.

Mother seems to float everywhere she goes, even more so than others of our kind. Father likes to joke about the fact that I got my mother's beauty, but his grace, or lack thereof. Truth be told, I've always struggled to see my parents as a married couple. Father clearly loves her. He dotes on her as best he can, but my mother makes it as clear as possible that she never has and never will love my father--short of making a public decree of the fact. Truthfully, most assume that I'm my mother's servant when they first see us together. Our lack of resemblance in gait, stature, or confidence makes our technical identicality invisible without careful inspection. For as long as I can remember, I have felt like my mother's ugly shadow.

My mother had glided into my living quarters with her usual grace as she dismissed my handmaiden, Penelope, with her usual aloof tone. Penelope had given me a carefully concealed sideways glance, but we both knew the answer to the question she was silently asking me.

There are very few individuals alive who can tell my mother no, and neither of us is one of them.

I'd read the letter three times, the sound of my usually composed mother's impatient bare foot tapping against my polished marble floors acting as a metronome to the panic that was quickly building inside of me. After the third read, I'd opened my hand and let the parchment fall lazily onto my vanity, sinking into the cushioned stool in front of it as my mother sighed and took hold of my hair.

"Honestly, Celestia, you act as though you've been sentenced to death," her melodic voice is barely louder than my hair, but she still manages to coat each consonant and vowel with ire. "You've been proposed to by one of the finest bachelors in all of Solaria, second only to the Prince, of course," she drags the brush through my hair slightly harsher to punctuate the statement, the movement so rough compared to her previous gentleness that it almost hurts, even without resistance. "But you likely would have been chosen by him instead, had you not ruined yourself."

My gaze drops to the hands that rest limp in my lap. The feint white rows of scars on my forearms are so old and faded that I might have stopped noticing them by now if I weren't constantly reminded of them by those around me.

"All things considered," my mother sighs as she finally places the brush back on my vanity, her yellow eyes that are identical to mine burning into me like cruel molten gold, "you should be grateful that Caelus, or any male, proposed to you at all."

Caelus is the heir of the wealthiest non-royal family in all of Solaria. He's as handsome as any other, I don't believe I've ever met an air nymph that was difficult to look at, but the rumors surrounding him are anything but pretty. Rumors that I'm all too familiar with.

I somehow manage to keep my expression blank, void of the anger that's bubbling up within me, but I cannot keep my eyes from watering or my voice from trembling as I respond to my mother barely above a whisper, "You're asking me to marry a monster."

A soft smile tugs at the corners of her mouth as she cups my cheeks in her hands, gently wiping away my tears with her thumbs and planting a kiss on the top of my head.

"I'm not asking you to do anything, Celestia." My mother pets my hair before turning away from me, the sound of her white chiffon skirts swishing against the floor filling the silence as I watch her go through my vanity mirror. When she reaches the grand archway that leads into the hall, she rests a hand against it as she turns to look at me, giving me the sweetest smile I've ever seen from her.

"I'm telling you."

Chapter Two

I was on my eighth year and I'd just started my first day of school. Up until that point, I hadn't had many interactions with kids my age. I've always been an only child. My mother and father had been trying for so long that the healers said it was a miracle that they had any children at all. They never let me out of their sight much because of that. Until that point, it had made me feel like something precious. Something that deserved protection.

Now I felt like little more than a fragile and expensive piece of pottery.

Classes were out for a brief recess and I was sitting under a nearby tree, watching the other children playing a game of tag. I dug pieces of grass out of the ground one by one, tearing them into confetti before releasing them to the wind. I told myself that I didn't want to make friends anyway. I liked the quiet. I liked having my own space. It was the only way of living that I had ever known.

"What'cha doin'?"

Her voice always reminded me of windchimes, seeming to rise and fall in both volume and pitch without reason. I always told her she should join a choir with a voice like that, and she'd always just laugh and say that she should be queen as well.

I shrugged at the then-strange girl, marveling briefly at how plain and dingy her clothes looked. Everyone wears white in Solaria. I had only ever been around wealthy people, so I had only ever seen clothes that were crisp and clean. But her clothes were more of an off-white, the first time I had seen such a color, and I almost asked her why her handmaiden hadn't washed them for her. Instead, I just shrugged at her question.

She tilted her head full of wild honey-brown curls at me, clasping both of her hands behind her back as she rocked slightly on her toes, "You don't talk much, do ya?"

I shook my head in response, feeling rude and embarrassed by my lack of speaking, but any words that I could say seemed to tear themselves apart and fly off into the wind before I could form them.

"Well, I don't mind." She plopped herself down next to me and plucked a piece of grass out of the ground before mimicking my process of plant mutilation, "Momma always says that I talk enough for two."

It's funny honestly, how the best friendships form in the oddest ways. How such a simple interaction could form a lifelong bond.

Artemisia and I were inseparable after that. I always felt bad growing up because I felt like I held her back from making other friends. I'd often encourage her at recess to go play with some of the other kids for a change and argue that she didn't need to isolate herself completely from the others.

She'd always argue that those other kids weren't her friends, I was.

So we spent most of our childhood together beneath trees. I never went anywhere without my sketchbook, so I would often draw with Artemisia's chatter as background noise. Sometimes I drew her, but she was overflowing with so much energy that she could never stay still long enough for a proper portrait. Most of the time I'd do quick sketches of her on the center of the page, the rushed nature of the doodles likely capturing her likeness more accurately than a proper portrait would have anyway, and I'd surround those sketches with flowers, clouds, or whatever creatures that happened to be close by that day.

Artemisia should have been a storyteller. To some, she might come off as a bit of a habitual liar, but it was easy to tell the difference between reality and fiction within her stories. She'd get this far-off look in her eyes as if she were somewhere far away living the life she described, and she was only speaking to try and ground those fantasies into reality somehow. I knew she wasn't secretly a princess, or a spy for the demon nation, or a merfolk in disguise-- she was just a poor air nymph girl with an imagination that couldn't fit inside of her head. If things had been different, I would have bet my life on Artemisia's ability to become a world-famous author.

I picked up drawing because my imagination was nowhere near powerful enough to provide a proper escape for myself. So I drew to distract myself from the sadness I felt. Instead of escaping into my mind, I used art as a way to protect myself from it.

By the time I was twelve, it was very clear that something wasn't quite right with me. Other than the more obvious problem of my anti-social tendencies, I was also a strangely sad child. My father would always ask me at dinner why I looked so sad that day, and I would shrug. He would ask what I was sad about, and I would say, "I don't feel sad about anything, I just feel sad."

My mother would always mumble under her breath some variant of, "To be sad over nothing... what a waste of time."

I don't know what possessed me to harm myself for the first time. It was this strange, seemingly meaningless impulse. When my mother found out, I had no answers to any of her questions.

"How could you do this to yourself, Celestia? What made you do this to our family, Celestia? Why did you do this to me, Celestia?"

At first, she seemed more horrified than anything else, maybe even a bit concerned for me. But as the self-harm continued, her anger quickly won out. Since then, in her mind, my sadness has always been an attack on her.

The healers called it a sickness of the soul. I saw the veins in my mother's neck nearly burst when they said there was no real cure for it. They encouraged me to keep drawing, to keep busy, and to try and talk through my feelings as much as possible with someone I trusted.

So Penelope began to sleep on a cot on my bedroom floor each night, typically keeping herself up with either a book or some knitting until I fell asleep myself. I was able to kick the habit by the time I was fourteen, mostly due to Penelope dedicating every ounce of her free time to protecting me from myself.

But in my mother's eyes, the damage had already been done.

The sadness never really went away. It became a shadow. A ghost that seems to always be at my heels, that could easily swallow me whole if I lost track of myself. I'm not cured, and I'm terrified that I might spend the rest of my life running without ever truly seeing what's in front of me. That I will always be too focused on that monster breathing down my neck to ever find a light at the end of any tunnel I might find myself in.

One day when Artemisia and I were both teenagers, she was strangely quiet as we sat beneath our tree, and the foreignness of the scratching of my charcoal being the only audible sound drove me to speak for once. I looked over to find her lying out on her back, staring up at the sky with a pleasant but weirdly calm look on her face.

"What'cha doin'?" I mimicked my best friend's little catchphrase, earning myself one of her bright, infectious smiles.

"Oh, just thinking," she sighed as she stretched out her limbs, rolling over onto her stomach and resting on her elbows as she began our favored activity of grass torture.

I returned to my sketch, and decided to draw the clouds that Artemisia had been looking at, always being fascinated by whatever it was that she found fascinating.

With a teasing little smile on my face, I continued my impression of my best friend as I practically sang to her, "What'cha thinkin' bout?"

That earned me a fit of giggles and I couldn't help but grin back at her, always feeling quite proud of myself whenever I managed to make Artemisia laugh.

"I was thinking that souls are kinda like trees, you know?"

I scrunched my eyebrows together as I gave her a doubtful sideways glance, "No, I don't, but I have a feeling you're going to tell me why."

She rolled her eyes, but once Artemisia gets started, there's really no stopping her.

She gestured vaguely at the tree in front of her as she said, "Like this tree, for instance. There's a big ole rock trapped in the space where the trunk once split to grow around it." She paused there as if that statement should have cleared up her metaphor for me, but when I just sat in amused silence, she sighed, "I don't think that the bad things that have happened to us ever really go away. Everybody's always carrying rocks around, but I also think that we can keep on growing despite them. So we're kind of like trees, growing around the rocks in our lives, doing what we have to to reach the sun."

I snorted at her at the time, rolling my eyes as I returned to my work. "That's quite philosophical of you."

She scoffed as she smacked my arm. "You know, I'm quite smart when I want to be."

"Sure, sure." I winked at her before turning myself around to face our willow tree as well, turning to a blank page of my sketchbook as I found myself suddenly inspired to draw our little arbor haven.

I never really talked to Artemisia about what I was going through. There's no doubt in my mind that she would have listened, that she would have done anything it took to be there for me, and part of me wishes now that I had opened up to her more back then. But every time that I saw Artemisia with her off-white clothes and her always slightly bony hands, the guilt ate me alive. I felt like I didn't have any right to be so sad, like all of my comforts were wasted on me when I couldn't even fully appreciate them. Every night I had to fight off this nagging cacophony of self-deprecating thoughts at the edges of my mind. I believed down to my very bones that it should have been me who was poor instead of Artemisia.

That guilt multiplied when we were both seventeen.

It was around noon, a normal and mundane day like any other when Penelope came running into my room in a panicked frenzy.

"Tia, come now," she desperately gulped down air, leaning against my door frame for a brief moment of rest, "it's Artemisia."

I glided faster than I ever had to my best friend's house while my human handmaid ran on the ground below me. I got there first, and I can't decide whether or not I'm grateful for that in hindsight.

Her house was silent when I walked through the front door, which was strange enough as it was. Artemisia had five brothers and sisters, and their house was always filled with the beautiful and loving chaos of a large, happy family. The house that day felt like one large ghost, and when I called out into that silence, the flat answer of Artemisia's mother sounded so foreign I barely recognized it. My hands shook as I walked to my best friend's room, my knees nearly giving way beneath me at what I saw as I walked through the doorway.

Artemisia was on the floor with her mother sitting behind her, arms wrapped around the daughter who looked nothing like my best friend. Her eyes were wide and staring into nothingness, as if she were looking into a separate dimension entirely and was horrified by what she found there. Her usually beautiful hair was disheveled and knotted, and it looked like large chunks of it had been pulled out. She was covered in scratches and had what looked like blood under her nails, and her right eye was swollen and beginning to turn purple.

"Artemisia...?" My voice was shaky and hollow as my best friend slowly looked up at me, and we both started to cry at the very same time as I sank to my knees in front of her. I wrapped my arms around her below her mother's, and we both held her tight as Artemisia began to scream.

I stayed there that night for the first time in my life, Penelope promising that she would get my mother to agree to it, and urging me not to worry about it. However she managed to do that, I'm not sure, but at the time I couldn't bring myself to care enough to think too hard about it.

For the first time in our friendship, I was the one doing all of the talking.

"They'll catch him, Artemisia. They'll arrest him, Artemisia. Things will get better with time, Artemisia."

But every small comfort that I had to offer her sounded shallow and meaningless the second they left my mouth. Partially because I knew that nothing I could say or do could make any of it better, and partially because we both knew that all of my meaningless comforts were fantasies, ones that Artemisia could not truly escape to.

The next day we sat below our favorite weeping willow on the edge of town, but neither of us spoke for once, and I didn't bring my sketchbook with me. We both sat in that suffocating silence with our backs resting against the tree trunk, ripping blades of grass between our fingers until about a foot of the ground between us was bald. When Artemisia finally spoke, the flatness of her low tone cut through the silence between us as if it were soft butter.

"I had the strangest reoccurring nightmare as a child," her gaze was completely blank as she stared at everything and yet nothing in front of her, "I was sitting in a dark void space with a pregnant woman I didn't recognize in front of me. She would smile at me and wave, and then I would realize I couldn't move. Then she'd reach over, dig both of her hands into my stomach, and rip out my insides. And all I could do was sit there, horrified, and watch." Artemisia paused while she tore another blade of grass from the ground, her eyes never wavering from burning a hole through whatever she was looking at. "That nightmare has haunted me all my life, and I've never understood why, but I think that I do now. Death is as easy as it is inevitable, and it's not all that scary when you think about it. I don't think I've ever been afraid to die. No, I'm afraid--" Artemisia swallowed, taking in a deep and shaky breath before continuing, "--I'm afraid to keep on living. That I might live a hundred years, and still see that monster's face every time I close my eyes. That he'll always be there lurking in the shadows; smiling at me, taunting me, forever reminding me of the day he ripped me apart from the inside--and all I could do was sit there, horrified, and watch."

...

I heard the news less than a week later. My mother glided into my room with her usual grace, barely bothering to make herself look even slightly somber as she told me that Artemisia had fallen to her death from her balcony. For the first few minutes of my new reality, I felt enraged, like the rage was doing everything it could to take up every space inside of me, to not leave any room for the inevitable soul-crushing sadness.