Challenge: Feathers: Ficlet: Caged Bird

[vkiera]

Title: Caged Bird
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating:G
Word Count: 308
No Content warning
Author Note: Still not writing much, but I tried, tiny baby ficlet. Zagato's POV.

When he met her for the first time, she reminded him of a songbird. Her voice soft and full of melody, her prayers always had a song like quality to them. She would on occasion even sing her prayers, filling the palace with her soaring delicate voice. She smiled more when she did that.

These days her song and smile seemed more painful than anything else, though still beautiful to behold.

Sometimes that made it worse. Kept him up a night even. Thinking more and more about it.

About how their beloved Pillar was a beautiful songbird they’d all placed in a gilded cage.

And she’d gone willingly.

Willingly she’d gone into the cage and each day she beat her wings against the bars and did her best to sing, beat her wings and sang until her voice was horse and her feathers bloodied.

Did Cephiro even know it’d dirtied her feathers so?

Taken a beautiful pure heart and somehow convinced that heart it was unworthy, that it was wrong of her to want to leave her cage. That she had failed them for even letting the momentary thought cross her mind.

No, they had failed her and chained her to a burden that no heart could bear.

Their precious, precious Pillar, able to pray for everyone and everything in Cephrio but herself.

There was a small part of his heart that thought there had to be some way to convince her, that she didn’t have to be in that cage.

She owed this world nothing.

But no, the songbird stayed in her cage, beat her wings against the bars and flung a final prayer to the heavens.

Her final prayer was not a song, but a plea, a plea he heard.

And a plea he granted, just in a way he never intended.

“Emeraude, please be free.”