triplets

Part 8

How dare they exclude you? The bastards!

Why would they exclude you? They must hate you...

For Penelope, an additional thought crept up from the very corners of her being and grasped her heart viciously.

This is the natural state of things.

Penelope was all too used to being excluded, although if you were to ask her where that experience birthed from she'd be unlikely to have a proper answer.

The sense of helplessness paralized the righteous indignation and even the sinking sadness. It caused her frown to freeze on her face and her spine to straighten.

She had no intention to bow her head meekly in order to gain the approval of others. It would be a different matter if her life was on the line but that wasn't the case, was it? There was no monstrous beast consuming her guts and there was no pitiless rain staccato with the screams of everyone dying around her.

She wouldn't die if she was hated and thus, it didn't matter that she was hated.

This catastrophizing didn't really help her current situation which, contrary to her expectation, had nothing at all to do with hatred or even a desire to exclude her.

Her brothers had in fact been in an ongoing debate about just how to include her. Cale thought that it was only ethical to help her remember things rather than living in the fog of confusion and having an unpleasant surprise like he had. Roksu thought that it was far too risky to attempt to elicit her past memories. For starters, they had very little idea about what her life had been like or how her death had impacted her. If done indelicately, they could stir up trauma. Cale argued that the trauma was coming, indelicately or not, and it was better that she ripped off the bandaid now. The debate had gone on in various iterations of that circle for enough time to really create some insecurity for their younger sister.

It couldn't really be blamed on the ignorance of youth. Rather it was the ignorance of two men who had their heads stuck too far up their own asses to see the situation right in front of them. When one treats a person as a problem to solve, inevitably the person will feel less like a person and more like a problem.

Penelope refused the role though. She could be quite stubborn like that. She wasn't about to accept being anyone's problem and so, on the day that she reached her limit of watching her brothers secretively whisper to one another, she turned around and walked in the opposite direction.

If they had no need of her, then she had no need of them. No, beyond that, she'd never had any need for them. Penelope walked with her own pride propelling her steps as she put more and more distance between herself and her near constant companions for the past four years.

She was capable enough to manage on her own. She was far more used to managing on her own anyway. Solitude wasn't pleasant but it was better than exclusion.

The only problem was that Penelope was only focused on putting distance between herself and her brothers, not on better concepts like a destination or a goal. She wasn't as familiar with the estate in the capital as she was with the one in the Henituse territory and she definitely wasn't as familiar with the capital itself.

It was a failure of complacency that allowed the four year old to slip out of the estate without anyone taking notice. She was, after all, always with her brothers and the three of them never got up to much mischief. If you were to spot one of them plodding around all on their own then it was a near certainty that they were on their way to meet with the other two and the three of them would be peacefully safe within the confines of the estate.

No one questioned the confidently walking child and no one wondered where she might be going. The guards didn't even see her go past, a short head of unruly red hair was so far below eye level and they'd been conversing with one another to pass the time.