Chapter Text
You’d been working in Castle Dimitrescu for several months now, but it hadn’t gotten easier.
You were hired as a fill-in for when there weren’t enough staff around to pick up a shift or a random task needed doing at the behest of House Dimitrescu. Yours was a pleasurable job, being able to avoid the monotony of going through the same motions each day. You felt as much when listening to your coworkers complain about having to clean the winery for the fifth time that week, or serve tea to snobbish lords for hours on end. However, the lack of a concrete role to fill meant that your schedule wasn’t consistent-- it could change at a moment's notice. You worked odd shift hours, never knowing what a day might bring. Sometimes, you were able to see the positive in the spontaneity. Other times, it left you wrapped in a haze of dread.
Yesterday afternoon, during your break time, another maid asked you to cover her shift. You’d made up your mind to say no almost immediately. You hated the outfit it required you to wear. Unlike most of the other positions around the castle, there was a strict dress code for women who served. All of them wore the same, black dress with a white apron, lace surrounding the edges. Each time you were required to put in on your stomach turned. But that way your coworker begged, it was impossible to deny her. The look in her eye told you that it was important and that alone outweighed the personal discomfort you would feel for the eight hours in uniform.
So when you awoke in the morning, that familiar dread settled in, wedging its way into your sleep-filled brain. You pulled the yellowing sheet over your head, curling yourself into your pillow with a groan.
This was what made it so hard about working at Castle Dimitrescu-- you had to be someone you didn’t feel you were.
There were so many layers to the situation, but you knew it went beyond having to act as a servant to women who were above you in the caste system. It was annoying to constantly have to be polite, orderly, not take up time or space but that was what you had been hired for. This thing you were dealing with was something else entirely.
You didn’t have a word for it yet, but you knew the feeling almost as well as you knew yourself. It was a part of you that was so painfully easy to ignore when you lived in the village. Sure, you received your fair share of awkward or angry reactions from other villagers, direct at your choice of attire but in the end, no one said anything. They preferred to keep to themselves, holding their business close to their own inner circle.
You couldn’t ignore it here. Not when the maid’s dress was laid out on the wooden chair beside your bed, waiting to be adorned. Not when the other servants addressed you as miss, or when the Dimitrescu daughters referred to you as a “delicious-looking maiden”. Not when you had to interact with hundreds of other people, who never thought beyond what they saw, who thought of you exactly as they saw you.
It wasn’t right. The thought made you want to jump out of your own skin somehow. You felt trapped in the present moment, not being able to picture a way to reach peace within yourself. It hurt-- a desperate, gnawing feeling.
You sat up in your cot, stretched your arms above your head. The servant’s quarters were quiet at this time of the morning. Another perk of being on your schedule, you got to sleep in a bit. You leaned over toward the small nightstand next to you where a book bound in leather sat. You untied the string that held it closed, opening it up to the next blank page you found. Inside the drawer of the table, you pulled out a piece of graphite and began to scribble away hastily on the paper.
There weren’t many ways to cope with your feelings in Castle Dimitrescu. Therapists were a laughable concept. You had coworkers, but they were just that, coworkers. You were certain that if this was the outside world, you’d have nothing to relate to. You didn’t feel comfortable opening up to them about much of anything, except maybe the occasional, terrible occurrence with one of the Dimitrescus. You weren’t in touch with family, but they would be the last to comfort you about feelings like these. Alcohol (or Mother Miranda forbit, drugs) wasn’t allowed unless someone stole a few ingredients to whip together an alcoholic base, hiding it away while it fermented. The punishment of being caught inebriated was not worth the drunken state of pleasure one might find.
That left you with one option, and that was journaling. You’d grown to love it over your time in the castle. It was the one time you could be honest, saying whatever came to mind no matter how impolite or crude it might be. It felt so good, for a moment, to just be human in the privacy of your pages.
You had just finished writing a second paragraph when a sound pulled you back into reality. The fluttering of wings caught your ear. In the silence, it was quite distinct, but you still struggled to hear it clearly. Suddenly, the sound amplified tenfold and a cloud of black dots came bursting through the entrance to the servant’s quarters. The swarm of flies, you realized, was heading right for your cot. It circled you for a few spirals, the flapping sound morphing into a sickening laugh. Your stomach sank as a woman materialized behind you, her head coming to rest on your shoulder.
“And what do we have here? Are you sneaking in books?” She laughed into your ear, causing you to flinch. Heels clicked on the concrete floor as the woman came to stand at your side. You moved the fingers tightly gripping your journal, attempting to close it, to shield the pages from her.
“Daniela, please,” you said desperately. “It’s private.”
“That’s Miss Daniela to you, maiden .” She spit the last word out like it was derogatory, which only pushed the feeling of hurt deeper into your chest. “Give me that!”
She was much quicker than you, no doubt due to her genetic makeup. She snatched the journal from your hands. You reached out to her, almost falling out of your cot as you grasped to retrieve it but she took a couple steps back. You watched as her eyes moved in lines, reading the page, her grin growing exponentially as she continued deeper into the thoughts you had written down.
“Oh, this is incredibly juicy,” Daniela said. She cackled wickedly, flipping to one of the previous pages.
“Stop,” you cried out. The rage inside of you was building, threatening to spill hot tears down your cheeks. You knew you couldn’t act out of turn or you’d be punished. At this point, you didn’t know what was worse.
Daniela rolled her eyes. “Ugh, so dramatic.”
The youngest Dimitrescu daughter casually launched the journal out of her hand. It landed on the floor with a dull thud, the pages bent, split open down the middle in a random part. You flinched under your sheet, eager to pick it up but she held a hand up. You stopped, still as a statue in your current position. It seems your brain hadn’t quite caught up yet, the words leaving your mouth before you could hold them back, too.
“Please don’t tell anyone what you read.”
Daniela grinned at you, her eyes squinting deviously to meet yours in a stare. You averted your gaze immediately.
“Thank you for entertaining me, maiden.” She fluttered away in her swarm, cackling through the doorway. The door itself swung with the force of her passing by, shutting it coincidentally as she left.
When the sound of her filtered away beyond your hearing capabilities, you scrambled off your cot to retrieve the discarded journal. You frowned at the newly formed imperfection caused by Daniela, turning it in your hands over and over, examining each part. You closed it, wrapped the strap unnecessarily tight, and threw it back into the drawer.
Standing in the empty servant’s quarters, a pit began to settle in your stomach. It twisted and turned as you thought about Daniela knowing how you felt. The anger within you was being replaced with an overwhelming feeling of shame.
Your eyes slowly moved to look at the maid’s dress, still draped across the chair. It made you sick, but you needed to push it down. Just one more day, you told yourself. When the shift was over, you could return to your casual clothes, the ones that felt most comfortable to you. Everything would be alright, then.
You stripped out of your sleep wear, just a simple cloth shirt and shorts. The stiff fabric of the dress hugged your body, suffocating you. You smoothed down the wrinkles, tying the apron around your waist.
There was a mirror in the corner of the room. Most of the time, people fought to use it. The crowd seemed everpresent, all the servants shoving each other to get a glimpse of their own reflection. It was the only time everyone was truly able to see what they looked like to the outside world. You didn’t use the mirror like the other maids did. You tried to avoid looking at any reflective surface, if you were being honest with yourself. Now more than ever, you needed to see.
As you drifted closer, the entirety of your being came into view. Though it was difficult, you gazed at the reflection in the mirror.
The dress was pretty, objectively. Maybe, you would think it looked pretty on your body, if you didn’t feel so disconnected from it.
You frowned at the sight of your silhouette, the dress pulling tightly around the curve of your hips. If only they were a little more flat. You pressed down on the bone, willing them to sink down into your skin, molding to the shape your palms designed them to be.
You didn’t necessarily hate yourself. There were certain features you had that you liked; the color of your eyes, the texture of your hair, the way your smile lit up your face. You just wished that bodies didn’t provide so much context in the grand scheme of society.
You pulled yourself from the mirror and your musing, reluctantly. You were probably late to your shift after being harassed by Daniela, but you couldn’t find it in yourself to care. It was her fault and you might blame her, if prompted to explain yourself to any supervisor or even the Lady herself.
You collected your bag, which contained a few items you might need throughout the day and headed to leave. You turned one last time to gaze at the mirror, then at the nightstand where your journal sat to be hopefully untouched by any Dimitrescu hands.
The more you thought about the subject, perhaps, a sick part of you was relieved. Daniela hadn’t called you any truly derogatory names, didn’t cut you with her sickle, or kill you on the spot. She had just tormented you as she would any other time.
As you walked through the threshold and out into the hallway, a spark of hope flickered inside you. Perhaps, there was acceptance to be found in the marble walls of Castle Dimitrescu, even in the small, torturous ways.