#also thank you to ben and puff and yarra for listening to my lily apologism

[pinkestlittlebutterfly]

Recently we’ve had lots of reasons to look at the relationship that Lily had with the Alicein family over the centuries he spent with them, because it becomes obvious now that it wasn’t all peace and happiness and maybe never even one built on love in the first place. And I’ve been thinking a lot about this interaction from somewhere in volume three:

Specifically in relation to what we learned about Lily in chapter 136. 

And I know that Lily’s pocket money is a silly, one-off joke made very early on in the series, and that maybe all it wants to say is that Lily is bad at managing money, and that it’s probably not meant to be put parallel to this scene. But that won’t stop me. 

Because the jokes Servamp tells are rarely entirely random; and Lily’s pocket money might just as well be one of the many tiny hints we get as to what’s behind the facade of the little vampire paradise Lily built in the safety of Alicein mansion. He’s not allowed access to the family money, and there’s secrets in the mansion that even he holds no key to. Misono teaches Mahiru that a Servamp’s purpose is to fight despite how much his own Servamp dislikes it, and Mikado presides over an organisation famously riddled with people hating Lily’s kind, and maybe, when Misono threw all those books, it was a little more than a slapstick gag. There is a rift between Lily and the core family, one that’s not entirely Lily’s doing, and might have been there for a very long time. 

I don’t necessarily think that the Alicein were bad to Lily, or that he was miserable in his place by their side. But I find it striking that if you think about Lily then and Lily now, you find that he never really left the place he was in at the very beginning; never really reached a point at which he could stand on his own. He is no employee earning a wage but a Servamp bound to an Eve; and he struck a deal that demands him wholly and completely and allows for possession; that demands not only his time and workforce but control over him and his power and body. But he’s not treated as an equal in return; he gets pocket money rather than access to the family’s wealth because the actual reward he traded himself away for was safety for his children. As far as we know, at least. 

There is so much we have not seen yet, about how the pact between Lily and the Alicein came to be, and how they felt about each other for all those centuries, and I hope canon will explore this at least a little in the chapters that are left before it ends. What we do know is the secluded little kingdom in which they ended up in, and how much it trapped and hurt Misono – and maybe, though he was one of its architects, it wasn’t the most healthy place for Lily to be in either. And maybe, what Misono needs to do to end the chess game and foil his plans is simply to take him away; because he learned to leave and stand on his own and perhaps, it’s time for Lily to do the same.