Chapter Text
“Hey, get up already,” Lilith blinks awake, peering over to see a guard looking through the peephole in her bedroom door, only being able to see their fingers and visor peeking through. She crawls her way out of her bed as she hears the guard slowly crank open the door to her bedroom holding a small child-sized silky white dress and drops it on the bed. The guard hesitantly approaches Lilith, helping her out of her pink nightgown and into the white dress. As she stares at herself blankly in the mirror, the guard leaves the bedroom, leaving Lilith alone.
The guard comes back holding a small amount of mushy food and scrapes it into a small bowl on the floor. Lilith turns her head to look at the bowl, and back at the guard, staring at the symbols on the side of their helmet. After filling Lilith’s food bowl, the guard catches her gaze.
“What the hell are you lookin’ at?-” -she rips her eyes away from them to her feet- “-It’s bad enough I have to sit here standing outside your room to keep your sorry ass from leavin’, the fact I have to look at your face at all makes me wanna jump out’a that damn window,” gesturing to the barred up window behind them.
“Whatever, I’m just glad my shift is rotating-” - the guard starts to walk back to the door- “-get too loud and I’ll kick your ass, got that?” they exclaim, not turning to look at Lilith as they leave, turning around to wind the door lever, causing it to creak and slam shut. Once locked in, Lilith looks around her room, examining the walls that curve at the ceiling and their plains-like mural; with green pointy grass and white flowers that cascade to a light blue sky with white downy clouds.
She doesn’t know how much time passes before she notices her stomach growling at her to eat. She walks to her food bowl and kneels down, picking up her food bowl of mushy canned food and brings it to her face, scrunching her nose as she eats face-first into her bowl, getting the mush all over her face when she hears two guards talking outside her door. Although she can not properly hear what they are saying, she can make out that they’re swapping positions. If only the peephole was two feet shorter and didn’t open inwards.
Suddenly the door starts to open, revealing a guard with curved-back horns and a long red cape, hiding her lack-of-wings the lesser guards all have. Lilith likes the Commander, they’ve always been the nicest to her and sometimes sneaks behind her mother’s back to give Lilith some outside food from parties or sometimes homemade food leftover, she’s still a bit wary of them since they report directly to Lilith’s mother. However, she is grateful to the Commander, they still taught her how to read and write when no one else would, and they spent the most time directly taking care of her instead of standing outside guarding her room like the others.
Perhaps it’s a matter of rank, higher-ups get more ‘dangerous’ positions, but even before they were the commander, they stuck around quite a lot. Strange. “Lady Lilith, it’s time,” she perks up, Lilith knows that ‘time’ is when she is able to go outside without immediate supervision. Which is another privilege that only the Commander grants to her. Lilith gets up and lightly jogs towards the Commander, meeting them halfway as they wipe her face clean with a handkerchief.
They walk out of her room together towards the window next to where the guards stand post – which is directly to the right to the entrance to her room – glancing at the lever in the wall that the guards use to open and close the door to her bedroom. The Commander prepares the rope that they grabbed in the closet opposite to the guard post and opens the window as Lilith looks on in excitement. This is her favourite bi-weekly activity afterall. “Ready?” Lilith nods as the Commander lowers the rope down the side of the building until the rope stops just before it hits the ground. She then climbs down the rope, giving the Commander the okay to pull away and close the window as she walks towards her favourite spot. The flowery patch of grass highlighted by the sun sits in wait for her arrival as she takes off her flats and sits in the middle. Turning her back to the woods that hide the gates to the outside that she’ll only experience through the bars of the gates that confine her to the castle.
After gazing and toying with the daisies in her hands, Lilith then stands up and walks towards the gates, she is frequently told by the Commander to stay away from the woods as the thorns that hug the trees and bushes often go untouched by the guards and gardeners. Despite these warnings she has managed to find a route that brings her to the gates without a single scratch or scrape on her, even without her flats on. Once at the gate, she sticks the flowers in her hair as she leans into the gate, attempting to perhaps stick her head between the bars.
Suddenly she whips her head around at the sound of the bell that the Commander rings informing her to return to her room. She solemnly obliges as she drags her feet away from the gates, speed-walking back to the Commander, almost forgetting to grab her shoes in the process, watching the rope get closer and closer, and climbing back up the rope and jogging back into her room, hearing the door creak and slam behind her. She hopes that maybe she can do that again.