Stolen Moment

Arianna was still half cackling as she forced her small body to roll over in her plush bed. Her little arms were shaking from that small exertion, and her veins still sang with her constant companion, pain, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, Arianna did not mind at all.

She was breathing. Her lungs were working fine, her heart was pumping, and her muscles were under her command. Her throat did not hurt, she did not smell like a month in the dungeons, no one had her chained up, and she could hear her sister's voice down the hall.

Arianna practically fell from her bed trying to get up, before stumbling the few steps across her small room and throwing open the door to the hallway. Her crazed laughter stumbled to a choked stop, seeing her sister running towards her. Arianna would deny later the hard lump in her throat seeing her beautiful sister uninjured and joyful. Lucia, only slightly larger than Arianna, was sprinting around the corner, her fine clothes in disarray, ribbons coming loose and trailing behind her like banners in a victory parade.

Her birthday dress, Arianna recalled. It was nicer than what Arianna had worn for that birthday; a house robe and a cold cloth on her forehead for her fever.

Even covered in sweat, barely out of her sickbed, neither sister hesitated as they put all they could into getting to the other. Arianna stumbled a few meters out into the hall, and Lucia rammed into her with the speed of a runaway carriage. For the second time in as many minutes, but also the first, the two sisters tumbled to the ground, Arianna flat on her back and Lucia sprawled on top of her.

Ignoring how it stung to fall, Arianna just wrapped her arms tightly around her sister and buried her head in the shoulder of her sister's party dress. Feeling how Arianna shook with joy, Lucia started giggling too. "We did it! You did it! I did it! It was done!" She started babbling, her laughter spilling out between every breath.

Arianna responded with a single "Mhm" of confirmation, her face not turning back to Lucia's to speak.

Recalling that her sister was considerably less healthy than she herself was, Lucia paled and rolled off of her sister, though never letting go. It was in that process that Arianna's face ended up uncovered for a moment and Lucia could see how tightly her eyes were shut, and how she bit her lip to keep quiet. The shaking that Lucia had read as joy was actually-

"Ari, are you crying?" Lucia asked, trying to check to make sure that she had not injured her sister in their collision. "What's wrong?" Lucia silently begged her sister to open her eyes, to talk to her.

Arianna just rolled onto her side to hide her face back in her sister's shoulder and took a deep shaky breath. "You are an idiot!" She managed when she finally opened her mouth to speak, though it came out less as actual criticism and more as her wailing. "You are so stupid! Why did you not just leave me there? Why did you have to get yourself injured for me?" She sobbed and hugged her sister tighter.

Lucia was a little surprised when she replied and her own voice was shaking as though she were going to cry. "I was not going to let you die without me! No way, no how. I- I did not want to lose my only sister to that-" Lucia's lip trembled. "If you do not stop crying, I am going to start crying!" She managed, after taking a deep breath.

Arianna hiccuped, her sobs quieting, but only long enough for a moment. "I am not crying!" she claimed despite a new round of tears springing from her eyes. "You are alive." She whispered as her only acknowledgment of the painful joy that made her weep. This time Lucia joined her.

Turning the corner, having followed a trail of shed ribbons down the halls, stood a boy only four years older than the two girls, flanked by his mother and the head maid. The three of them stopped and stared at the sight before them. Two six-year-old birthday girls, lying in the middle of the hallway, crying their eyes out and hugging each other as though the world would end if they let go.

The two adults stopped in their tracks, while the ten-year-old kept running down the hall, going to check on his sisters. The women followed more slowly, even as the sobs quieted down and the two girls fell silent and they simply held tight to each other. The women looked confused at the tears... whatever had gone on since Lucia had run off must have been notable. The little boy started trying to ask them worriedly about what was wrong, only for them to barely separate enough to pull him into the hug too.

Attempting to separate them was ineffective, so with permission from the Grand Duchess, weak to the sight of a set of golden puppy eyes from the children, her head maid swept up her own daughter and the Duchess's children and carried them together to lay down in Lucia's room, her wind magic carrying part of the burden of the ball of children.

The Grand Duchess trailed behind, signaling to one of the other servants to call for the physician.

+++++

Arianna obligingly stuck her tongue out, giving a side glance to her sister who seemed to be having a hard time not laughing at Ari's obvious annoyance. It was no wonder that when the doctor was finally done rechecking her throat, Arianna returned her tongue to her mouth, just so that she could turn to her sister and stick it out in annoyance.

After a good three-hour hug that had at some point become a nap, the three of them had woken up, under the watchful eye of the family doctor. Theo was passed over as he had not run off and so his mother knew he was alright, so Lucia was checked out first, being given a clean bill of health, before the physician turned to Arianna. Lucia was annoyed that she was getting tested first since her sister was actively ill, but Arianna had just waved off the outrage as she knew from their previous life, it did no good.

Besides, the darker-skinned sister knew that she was still known as relatively quiet and pitiful at this point, and she had no plans to ruin that sympathetic view just yet.

Regardless, the physician had been testing and retesting Arianna for most of an hour at this point. No one seemed to have processed the fact that two six-year-olds should not really be capable of sitting here so calmly for so long when their ten-year-old brother had already gotten bored and asked to go back to his room, nor that the two girls were using different levels of vocabulary than they had been previously. It likely helped that the greatest medical mystery of the ducal family had seemingly just disappeared.

Arianna was weak, certainly, she had spent about half of the last year in bed with a burning fever, but she showed no signs of the fever anymore. She showed no signs of anything unusual anymore. She was a little faint, but she was dehydrated so that made sense. Her muscles shook with fatigue, but she hadn't exercised properly in a year. Her eyes were a little sensitive, but her bedroom was kept dark most of the time so she could try and sleep away her illness. Arianna had gone from extremely mysterious and impossible-to-solve illness to extraordinarily mundane causes and solutions in less than five hours.

Finally, the doctor threw her hands up in acceptance. "Who knows anymore! This child is as healthy as she can be, and good habits and nutrition seem to be all that she needs. My professional opinion; other than the scar on her chest, there is not a single thing that has changed about her that I can find. So if you have gotten experimental surgery or something, you should tell the person who did it that they may have just made medical history."

Seemingly disgruntled at the idea that her employers would have hired someone else to fix the problem, the doctor slammed the lid on her case shut, picked it up, and turned to storm out.

Lucia, who had been drinking a glass of juice while she waited, choked slightly on the fluid. "Scar? On her chest?" She exchanged a glance with her sister before hurrying over to where she sat, Arianna already pulling the neck of her pajama shirt down enough to find what scar the doctor referred to.

There, sitting just under her collarbone, were five hard lines that converged into a roughly torn circle in the middle. Arianna glanced up at the Grand Duchess and headmaid, waiting until they had both followed the doctor out the door to cajole her, before looking at Lucia again. Arianna met her sister's confused eyes and laid her own right hand over the scar. It was a scar made by an adult, but having shrunk to the size of this body, Arianna's fingers fit perfectly in the five lines.

Lucia's eyes shook slightly, even as Ari cleared her throat. "For what it's worth, Lu, I think getting a single scar is a pretty reasonable trade for twenty years." She said softly, her voice cracking on the last word, her sheer astonishment obvious.

The two of them locked eyes before their shoulders started shaking again, this time with laughter. "Twenty damned years!" Lucia gasped, unable to contain her awe. "I thought we might be lucky to be healed, or if time moved, for us to go back an hour!" Sucking in a deep breath she added. "What kind of explosive were you carrying inside your chest with that mana of yours?"

Arianna paused for a second. "I have no clue." She admitted. "I had no clue that it could do something like-" Arianna was suddenly hit with the giggles so hard she nearly fell off the bed she was sitting on. "It must be Emperor Dirtbag's fault!" She cackled. "Even with every dreg of my mana it may not have worked, but that jerk had just filled me up with his mana too!"

Lucia was nearly breathless with the howling of her laughter. "Prince dirtbag." She managed to point out. "Not emperor anymore. Or. Uh. Yet."

The two lay down on their backs, legs hanging over the edge of the bed as reality finally started to set in on them. They were slowly recovering from the hysterics of surviving a near-death experience, or perhaps actual death, which was still unclear, and thinking things through.

The two girls remained silent until their mothers returned, bringing two spare dresses and getting both girls neatened up for the birthday celebration Lucia had run from the preparation for, and everyone had assumed Arianna would be too unwell to go to. The Grand Duke had tried to stop that, but a pointed reminder from his wife that Lucia had only agreed to have a solo party because her 'twin' had been unwell was enough to have him cave; if only to save face with the nobles who were going to be in attendance. He could put up with people seeing his bastard, but he knew it would be a disaster if the birthday celebrant failed to show up to her own party.

The Grand Duchess patted her daughter and stepdaughter on their heads, before setting a flurry of maids on them to get them both freshly bathed and made as lovely as possible. The head maid tried to fret about how she felt it was too much of her to allow the Grand Duchess to do this for Arianna, who was the apple of her mother's eye, but was still the child of the Grand Duke's mistress, but the Grand Duchess had no patience for that.

Grand Duchess Sofia sighed, grabbed the head maid by the chin, and looked her in the eyes. "I do not have time for this discussion, you would do the same for Lucia if our positions were reversed, now can I count on you to organize the corrections of the decorations, or should I call the butler?" Arianna's mother took a deep breath and strength from the only master she respected and nodded.

Turning on her heel, Adette proved that she had earned her position fairly, getting adjustments made to the celebration at a frankly astonishing speed. Lucia and Arianna just watched with genuine admiration as their mothers went their separate ways and got things done with the kind of efficiency that one aspires to.

Finally, the two girls were left alone for a few minutes, having been washed, brushed, and polished, before being sewn into dresses that were slightly too big for either of them. Which is to say one of them would have fit Lucia, but the other would have drowned Arianna, so that was the one Lucia was wearing instead. Both girls knew never to underestimate dedicated servants, but it had still been a little fascinating as the extra fabric seemed to disappear.

Lucia pouted as she then had one of their brother's shirts done up over her dress, a pre-emptive move to prevent her from being able to get this one dirty by rolling on the floor. Arianna was smiling at her sister's predicament, even as she had a humourously oversized napkin tucked into the neck of her dress to keep her from spilling food on it. Lucia had eaten before they had sewn her dress on, but Arianna's body was slow to notice the existence of an appetite.

After being left in peace, the two of them seemed to have reached a moment of uncertainty. There was certainly much to speak of, but they had already covered the most notable topics. That is, they were both alive, they were glad the other was alive, and they both agree they have gone back twenty years in time, to their sixth birthday.

There was a bit of paralysis in both of them. With their emotions more steady, it was less easy to treat each other as though they had not been estranged for as long as they could remember. Certainly, they had both cared some, even in the depths of Arianna's inferiority complex, she had not wished harm on her siblings- but it was a lot of silence that they had to bridge now. Twenty-six years of silence.

Even when the two of them had been close as children, there was still a lot that was left unsaid. They had never been able to openly discuss the differences in how they were treated due to their mothers, never able to share their physical, mental, or emotional struggles. Arianna was too unwell for her to carry her own burdens, let alone help carry Lucia's so she never shared, and that just fed into Arianna thinking Lucia thought she was too good for Arianna. Lucia, of course, just did not want to compare her tiny struggles to Arianna's. When someone was going through constant agony, how could you bring up how badly you stabbed your finger doing embroidery? When the other person was not healthy enough to learn, how could you complain about having to learn subjects you did not want to?

Arianna in particular was quite fretful. Lucia knew about the life of Arianna, since she was often the subject of the greatest scandals or news articles, as the crown princess. Was Arianna supposed to ask after Lucia's life? Was it worse to admit that she had little clue what her siblings had been doing? Would Lucia expect Arianna to have known?

Arianna cleared her throat finally after a moment of silence that hung in the air just a little too long. "What if..." She began, not entirely certain where she was going with her thought either. "What if the prince... did... Not... become the emperor..?" She asked, voice so soft that a strong breeze could steal it away.