Episode 26 - Loyalty

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The holiday season for me has always been… Well, difficult to understand. The magical atmosphere and appeal of it all just flew right over my head. But then I thought more about it, and I realized that I was missing a critical component of it all: family. The appeal of familial connection and interaction is a pretty important ingredient in that rosy coating that goes over all holiday traditions. But that is also something that has been in incredibly short supply for me. If there was every any at all.

(Sigh) It wasn’t all bad, I should say. My mom had her moments. My dad had his moments, also, but everything with him was just… Well, it was more understandable. That was his sister, they shared parents, and there I was sticking around with mine long past the point it was reasonable. It would have been a bit hypocritical for me to get on his case. If he wasn’t dead, then… who knows, maybe I would still be there, by his side, helping him when I really didn’t need to or when I really didn’t owe anything to him. 

And yeah, controversial statement, I get it, but he really didn’t do that much for me on a fundamental level. There was food in the house, yes, but oftentimes I had to prepare it myself even when I still couldn’t see over the counter or reach the oven knobs without standing on a chair. They were behind the burners, up against the wall, and I thank whatever deity kept me from falling forward onto the burners, really, because that probably should have happened and it could have been bad. And a roof over your head is far from a secure dwelling place considering who else was there and--and what we all knew had happened, even if we couldn’t say it. 

There were times when my aunt didn’t live with us, though, so I guess that’s technically something. Maybe adding all those days up, and I had about a year of a safe home my dad’s hard work provided. So not nothing but certainly not the eighteen years I’m legally owed. Also it’s not enough by my personal standards because I spent so much of that time waiting for the shoe to drop, waiting for an unspecified it to happen and for her to come back to us. Anticipation was still horrible, even if it meant I was physically safe. 

No, it didn’t even mean that. 

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Okay, look, I’ve lost this plot more than a little bit. Back to my initial point, as it were. I’ve always defined my relationship with my father through the ongoing betrayal that I knew and he knew was happening. And as far as I’m still concerned, there’s no detail or unspoken promise or assurance that could change my mind about that. He essentially betrayed me. Sure, family is family, but some family members matter more than others. You have to triage it, right? Or that’s what I always thought. But it makes sense. If your baby is crying in the other room, you should probably go check on them before you ask your partner about their day at work, even if they are visibly upset. One has the ability to self-regulate. And the other doesn’t.

For my aunt and I, well, one had the ability to leave the home and face the consequences of their mistakes at any time. The other one did not. I was a lot more helpless and in need than my aunt ever was. But that just didn’t seem to matter. 

To my mom, it was somewhat conditional, I guess, and her inconsistency gave our relationship a chance.

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The princess’s pregnancy promised to bring quite the scandal. Not just to her but to the royal family, if not the kingdom as a whole. 

Under certain circumstances it could have been brushed away. If there was already an established engagement, as an example, it could be said that there was a secret ceremony prior to that moment. A ceremony that had been kept secret, for the sake of the kingdom, for the sake of the security of the kingdom, specifically. That certainly was a compelling enough reason to justify a measure as drastic as a secret wedding and for that wedding to remain entirely unmentioned until a child came about. Arguments to that end could easily be made, particularly with the death of the general’s daughter so fresh in everyone’s memory. There was a bit of instability built into that moment, and imaginary threats against the throne could easily be devised and offered the added benefit of being a reason to strengthen the power of the king and tighten up the various circles of nobility. In fact, if played right, the king could use this as an excuse to finally execute a few of those pesky political rivals. But that was a far flung dream. There had been no announced suitor and no prospect of one, certainly not now, not now that the princess was pregnant and refused to divulge the name of the child’s father. She did say that she knew it, but she could not. She knew it would mean the death of him, and that was something she could not bear to risk. 

But on the other hand, she was safe, right? As princess, she was safe. On the other hand, she had done worse. Far worse in fact, to the daughter of a beloved general, a friend of her father’s. And that young woman was her brother’s initial bride. That was her victim, and she was gone. The princess had done that, and it seemed as if people knew. And yet, there were no consequences for it. She hadn’t been punished, sent away, or--worse yet--executed for what she had done. 

Taking the life of a future queen had to be worse than… creating one without a ring on her finger as a sort of permission slip. What sin was that, truly, the princess wanted to ask, but it seemed as if this were not its own sin. Rather, this was a secondary sin attached to the one she had already committed. 

She wasn’t sure what it was she had done, but seemingly being alive brought many people great displeasure.

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My mom knew about my relationship with the GiftedDuckling. And I don’t mean that she knew that I had an online friend who was old enough to have an established profession. Somehow, I don’t think that would have bothered her anywhere near as much as it could have. Or should have. My mom did not understand the internet. She just knew that this person was physically unable to take her child, and I had enough fear and insecurity in my blood to not go out to her, so whatever, it works. It should not have worked, but it did. To her, it did, so I could have actually been along my merry way.

But no, my mom’s knowledge of the situation with the GiftedDuckling did not end there. It was actually much worse than that. She found out that this person was encouraging my writing in a veiled and coated way. She knew that this woman was prompting me to get at something, using words that circled the issue or even approached it when she felt more daring. My mom found the stories that was a thinly veiled retelling of the nightmare I was living in. It wasn’t evidence to any of the many crimes that had been committed under our many roofs, but it validated the concerns of people who already inclined to be suspicious of us. It fueled fires that didn’t need to be fueled, my dad might have said, if he was the one who found it. 

You know, I--I don’t want to think too much more about what would have happened if he had been the one to find out. Maybe I would have more reason to actually dislike him. You know, but it wasn’t him. It was Mom.

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The pregnancy was a secret--for now. Only those in the royal family knew and some of the ladies-in-waiting to the princess--those who could be trusted to recognize the validity of a ‘on pain of death’ threat. But it couldn’t stay that way for long. The secret would come out. The princess would have to be sent away. Or--better yet--those things could be done in reserve order. The princess could be sent to a nunnery long before her stomach shows, never to return.

That’s what the queen was hoping for. In some ways, the banishment of her daughter had always been her hope, and it seemed so possible now. The king simply had to order it, and it seemed likely that he would. At her behest. After all, what was a royal family without honor? Honor that the princess had given up. 

The queen would walk through palace hallways smirking, and though no one would mention it to her, it did not go unnoticed. The prince’s new bride--now duchess in her own right--was a person who noticed and was the most disgusted by it. 

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My mom frequently had periods of time when she was earnestly trying to get her degree. But none of them ever lasted longer than a semester if that. My mom would do her best to make it to the end, but I’m telling you it did not always happen. I would get so angry and resentful about it. It just seemed hypocritically. She would push me so hard for school stuff. Not even failure or even less than ideal success was not an option to me. I had to be the best. I had to get top marks or whatever the equivalent was in everything I tried. I had to be outstanding and amazing and undeterred. I wasn’t allowed to give up no matter how hard I was struggling, but she was free to throw in the towel whenever it suited her? Seemed fair, right?

And goodness knows, I have tried to tell her how much that bothered me. Both in and out of the presence of various counselors, but nothing I say ever sticks with her. She kept saying that I couldn’t blame her for being frustrated when she couldn’t get the computer to do what she wanted it to do. That’s what it was. She was just so frustrated. She didn’t know how to do anything and couldn’t seem to learn. To which I would always point out that I had tried dozens upon dozens of times to teach her, but with that ole habit of not listening to me so thoroughly established, I don’t think that statement lands the way she means it to. 

She would do her homework on the computer in my room, usually almost breaking it and then yelling at me when she couldn’t get what she wanted done, when she couldn’t do the simplest thing in a word processor, which once again I had told her a thousand times how to do. 

This always devolved into yelling. Because that’s how she taught me to do things. I learned by watching her, not to invoke the meme because this is serious after all. I would yell at her, and she would yell back, never realizing that I was just replicating her style of so-called teaching. 

More often than not, I would have to step away from her to cool off after a couple minutes of this. And by cool off I mean cry, which would take a while. While I was gone, that’s when she would put in some honest effort to figure it out. Because of her pride in this conflict. Not for me. Not because I was genuinely hurt by her not listening. Yet again. All of that was irrelevant to her. 

It was one of those days that she was fooling around that she ended up pulling up the chat log between me and the GiftedDuckling

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The duchess had utterly charmed the prince. He did not understand her, and in many ways he did not… love her romantically. But he admired her. He thought she was a treasure worth replicating in children, but there were things about her that he found odd. 

“Can’t you speak with your father?” she asked him, repeatedly when they were alone. “For your sister. He is king. He can find some way to fix this.”

“She won’t say who the father is. If she would, he could force a marriage,” he would point out, making it seem like his sister’s fault. 

But the duchess did not believe it was so simple, and she wanted the prince to understand that, to understand what it meant to be a woman in the world and how perilous of a position it was, even for a princess, but she doubted she could ever do that. 

“Would you ever give up on our daughter?” she asked instead. “If she found herself with child, alone, and scared in a place as unforgiving as this, would you surrender her to the wolves?”

Though he could not explain why, the prince knew he would not. He said nothing, only reaching out to place a hand on his wife’s stomach, a stomach whose occupancy was currently unsettled. 

“If I am,” the duchess said, “I believe I will have a girl.”

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Now this was partially my fault. I shouldn’t have kept that on my desktop. I shouldn’t have kept it around at all, but I couldn’t help it. I needed that chatlog or comfort, for a reminder that there was light outside of this tunnel, even if I couldn’t go for it just yet. But that just meant that my mom could pull it up. Accidentally or not isn’t the point. But once it was up, she had no qualms about reading through it. Which she did. And it wasn’t a more damning section than any other one, but they were all bad. Consistently.

I found her reading it when I came back into the room. Anger fled from my body, and the blood fled from my face. I was pale, cold, shaking. I didn’t know what to do. This was something of a worse case scenario. Someone in the family had found out I had this outlet, and now it was going to be brutally ripped away from me. If I was lucky, there would be no more than yelling and screaming. No physical assaults, which I had always known to be a possibility. Sure, there were the proverbial neighbors and whatever they were thinking to stop such from getting too bad, but it could still get pretty bad. And I was dreading that.

At first, my mom didn’t say anything, and then she said, “We cannot tell your father about this.”

And that was that. ‘That’ being a whole lot of things I did not understand.

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The queen was beside herself when her husband told her his decision, told her of the narrative he had spun to explain away the sudden child and all the pieces he had at his disposal.. There had been a loyal lieutenant who had died, a cleric with a drinking problem who could be persuaded to forge paperwork, the need created by the death of the prince’s first bride, and a princess willing to go along with that version of the plan. The rumors would be started. Then the announcement would be made once that all felt more normal. And once all of that was done, this new reality would be set in stone, and the princess would continue to live in the castle. None of it the queen could understand. The queen would not understand it. Certainly the king would have sided with her, would have been loyal to her. But it turned out there was a lot about loyalty she did not understand. 

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Aishi Online is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, edited, produced, and performed by MJ Bailey. With music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. If you like the show please consider leaving a review or posting about it on a website that might not be around in five years. Make the post vague and somewhat mysterious but still compelling if you want. Up to you.

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