Work Text:
As everyone knew, Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria, was in the habit of waking up obscenely early in the morning, when many of his wealthier subjects were still celebrating the night away in ballrooms or brothels of the imperial city, and going to his office to do the paperwork.
Some people thought it showed he was alarmingly devoted to his work, some thought it was a nice contrast to the court and nobility who never missed a chance to commit frivolity, or to the wife he had who hated doing anything for the empire she was the Empress of.
Franz Joseph simply thought it was his duty. There was so much to do. The work to do for the realm never ended. He wanted all the best for his country and for his subjects, so he could not rest peacefully when there was so much to do. And he wanted Sisi to have a respectable husband, their children to have a respectable father. Even if she lately hadn’t seemed to think much of his kind of respectability, he felt sure in his heart that she would rather come home to him if he was as good an Emperor as he could be. She was home with him now, wasn’t she? He had to be doing something right.
This morning, though, he was rather less eager to rise from his bed to his duty than normally. Yet eagerness had little to do with it, and here he was. But he had slept unusually poorly that night, perhaps due to the concerns raised by the conversations he had had with Sisi last night. She was unhappy, he knew it, and he did not understand what he could do about it. He had done his best to give her all he could, all she could possibly hope to need.
His mind felt clouded by heavy sleep as he made his way to the desk, and although his room had been lit according to his orders, letters of the papers he placed in front of him seemed to dance before his eyes.
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, but instead of waking him up, it made him see things that weren’t there. For suddenly there seemed to be a man standing right in front of him, where nobody had been before.
He closed his eyes and opened them again, but the man was still there. Franz Joseph knew he hadn’t seen him in all his life. There was something very strange about him. Surely nobody would dress like that... look quite like that... smirk at him quite like that.
“So you see me,” the stranger said.
“I do,” Franz Joseph acknowledged, for what else was there to say? “Who are you and what are you doing here? It is not time for my reception yet.”
“Oh, I don’t have any petitions or such things for you... Your Majesty.” The stranger smirked again. “I merely thought to test a theory.”
“If you do not immediately announce who you are, I shall have to call my guards,” said Franz Joseph, remembering he was the Emperor and had some duties to take care of himself. He did not feel afraid, though. He wondered if he should have.
“Oh, if I wanted you dead, you would already be dead, trust me.” The stranger sat down on a chair reserved for his visitors. “Well, they really speak the truth when they say your office is quite Spartan. But at least you have chosen to decorate it beautifully.” Franz Joseph saw the stranger’s eyes flicker to the portrait of Sisi that was hanging above his desk. Feeling instantly protective of his wife, he stepped in front of the painting to shield it from those prying eyes.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded again, standing tall and proud, giving the stranger his fiercest gaze. It did not seem to bother the man.
“As I said, I’m merely testing a theory. It is said that only the dying and the mad can see me. But you are most certainly alive and will be a good while yet, and everyone in your realm says you are the very epitome of sanity and rationality. And yet here you are, seeing me. Perhaps it says what I have always suspected. Too much method can also be madness.”
“What do you mean?”
“What sane person rises up at this hour to devote his time to paperwork when everybody else is either sleeping, or spending some well chosen time in parties and brothels? What is it but madness, to have a wife like yours and yet refuse to follow her to her dreams as she asks you to accompany her, rather making yourself the highest clerk of the mighty Habsburg Empire?”
Franz Joseph felt his jaws clench. Somewhere inside him, a storm was brewing, but he ordered it to keep still. “My life is none of your concern.”
“Yet it is, strangely much. You have no idea how much your empire is going to affect mine.” The stranger sighed, and the smirk was placed by a moment of gloominess before it turned into a darker kind of smile.
“Yours?” Franz Joseph stared at him blankly. He could not be in the presence of another Emperor. He knew all the emperors and kings of the known realms. At least by picture, if nothing else. None of them resembled this stranger even faintly, not even Elisabeth’s mad cousin Ludwig.
“Yes, mine. I command an empire far more powerful than yours - and you, too, will see it one day.”
“I don’t think so,” Franz Joseph said dryly. This reminded him of Sisi’s descriptions of her visits to madhouses. But who had let an inhabitant of such a place into his study?
“Think so or not, you shall. But meanwhile, do think about it: is this extreme sanity of yours only a way to cover up madness?”
“I do not understand you,” Franz Joseph said expressionlessly.
“Perhaps in time you shall. Has there been a Habsburg or a Wittelsbach who is not mad?” The stranger laughed. “In you, it simply takes a different form. Well, my time is up, I think. Do you have any words of greeting to your eldest daughter?”
For an instant Franz Joseph thought of little Sophie. Then he remembered she was dead, and Gisela was his eldest daughter now. “Are you threatening my children?” he asked, anger surfacing.
He heard the footsteps then. He turned his head, to see a guard standing on his doorstep, looking blankly ahead, as if not seeing the stranger. Well, Franz Joseph had no desire to see more of the stranger, and he opened his mouth to tell the guard to escort him away. “Please...” he began. Then he had a strange sensation and stopped, and as he turned his head back, he saw that the stranger was gone.
But at the opposite door, Sisi was standing. She was clad in her white morning robe, her hair undone, the very picture of loveliness. But she looked deadly pale, as if she had seen a frightful apparition, and she leaned against the doorframe.
“Please see to my wife, she is not well,” Franz Joseph finished his order to his guard.
As the guard escorted Sisi to the chair where the stranger had been seated, Franz Joseph felt uneasy. There was no sight whatsoever of the visitor, and yet Franz Joseph could not have just hallucinated him... could he?
But Sisi concerned him more. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you ill?” Secretly, he hoped suddenly it might be because she was with another child.
But she only shook her head. “No, it’s nothing, nothing... I only... I thought I saw a ghost. But it's nothing.”
“A ghost of what?”
“Of...” she bit her lip. “Of the dead. Hush, let us not speak any more of it. It was only a dream. Just... let me stay here, so I will feel better.”
“Yes.” He nodded, suddenly eager and happy that she wished to stay with him to feel better. “Only a dream.”
Then he seized his paperwork eagerly and began to browse it as if their lives depended on it.