| History
The clock ticked. The mother wailed. The doctor encouraged. And the father sat beside his wife, reluctantly stroking her hand with encouragement. However, his eyes were fixated on the doctor’s expression, awaiting for the moment when he would be the proud father of his heir. Finally, a baby was born. But it was not the son he wanted nor expected, it was a girl. She was screeching the moment she came out, and was a healthy size for a newborn. Her brother that followed? He was tiny. Weighing less than usual and looking… sickly, it did not take long to figure out that there was something wrong. A heart defect. Something that, given more time and proper treatment, they would have been able to fix. But the daughter had come out first, wasting them precious time. 52 minutes after her wonderful brother, Eerikki was born, he passed in his mother’s arms. He was given the valiant name meaning “eternal ruler”, which he would take on with him to heaven. The girl was forgotten about in the couples misery, only coming to their attention when the nursemaid returned with her, swaddled and quiet. On normal, happy occasions, she would be given a name of her fathers choosing, a middle name of her mothers, and lastly, the revered surname Tähti, as tradition mandated. This time, however? Her father stood, brushing off his cloak, and merely saying, “It is winter. Name her Talvikki.” The nursemaid glanced up at him in surprise, but nodded along. They turned to Svetlana, the mother. She was to gift her a fitting second given name, with the Russian “Lada” having been the one picked out prior to the birth. But the woman looked down her nose at her daughter and shook her head, mumbling “You name her.” To their staff. They were then shooed out of the room, shocked. Her second given name ended up being Lumimarja, named after the berries dusted in snow that sat by her bedside. So the sole daughter of the Tähti was named: Talvikki Lumimarja Tähti.
Kikki grew up always trying to please. Her parents hated her for supposedly “killing her brother, their male heir.” And so to make up for it, she worked hard to prove that she could be their heir. She could be everything her brother could have been. She picked up their mother tongue, Finnish, rather quickly, and soon threw herself into learning Russian as well, to please her mother and appeal to her in her native language. This plan fell short when she made a mispronunciation in front of Svetlana, in which she got admonished and never spoke in Russian more than she had to in front of her mother again. Although the couple were an arranged marriage, they got along quite well, having been a union between the successful house of Tähti, which prided themselves on their shipbuilding, selling internationally, and a lesser known Russian pureblooded family line. The two had similar viewpoints, and so rarely fought. What they did disagree on? How to deal with their daughter. She was given top of the notch education: language, etiquette, mathematics, history, and magic. She was taught nothing of the business, nor shipbuilding as a whole. This was her fathers doing, and nothing Kikki did could change it. She learned Norwegian and by extension Swedish, on top of her previous knowledge of Finnish and Russian, as the languages of the majority of their clients. This made no change in Jaakko’s decision, and he instead began to introduce her to other pureblood children that held her “status”. Girls, so that they could become friends and she could surround herself with proper acquaintances, and boys as to possibly form alliances. Svetlana chose to ignore her, refusing to acknowledge her existence outside of formal events in which she must.
Around her tenth birthday, Kikki decided that she’d had enough. Everything she had ever done had either been looked down upon or ignored, in favor of the possibility of a male heir coming along. She continued to excel in her studies, and her parents often heard whispers through their friends of her success, and the splash she would make upon her debut. But it was beginning to become too late to be proud, and it would take more than they wanted to give to get their daughter to trust them again. Upon her invitation to Durmstrang arriving, she tried to quietly take care of the preparations. Although it was a known fact by many, she didn’t want to make a big fuss; her parents didn’t deserve the attention. She left when her parents bade her to and in the family flying carriage accompanied by a caretaker. However, she left not quite feeling like the family that she grew up with and the crest that adorned their carriage were the same. | |
