Kels

capri double drabble | damen/laurent | 200 words

“LAURENT!”

How foolish could one man be? He’s nearly blinded by rage—both at the assailant and the stupidly clever prince.

Kneeling at Laurent’s side, he lifts him into his arms a bit helplessly, praying that he can move him without changing the lodging of the arrow. The last thing they need is for the tip to break off in him, or to puncture anything vital.

“Don’t—” Laurent gasps out the one word before falling silent.

“Don’t what? What is it, sweetheart?”

“Don’t,” he pauses, air whistling out through his gritted teeth, “tell Jord.”

Damen can admit that he’s well and truly lost now. “What?”

“Back then—when Auguste—” He stops. “Jord told my brother to never let me near a battle. Said I’d do something stupid to save his life.” He shakes his head, almost pouting. “I’d hate to inflate his ego this way.”

Despite the feelings of guilt that turn his stomach, Damen huffs in bemusement, dropping a kiss on Laurent’s hair.

“I think Jord will have a few choice words for you that take precedence over ‘I told you so’.”

Laurent chokes out a laugh, leaning the weight of his head on Damen’s chest. “Then you don’t know Jord.”

capri double drabble | damen/laurent | 200 words

“I speak your language better than you speak mine, sweetheart.”

The words were ill-advised—a clear and potentially fatal error. He had just been so perplexed. The younger prince of Vere was said to be scholarly, a sharp mind and dillegent learner.

Damen recalled his own efforts in learning Veretian. The hours spent with his tutor as a child. The days spent refining his knowledge since Marlas should they become needed—or should he find himself tumbling a Veretian or two.

He thought, with a small sting of delirious disappointment, that it wouldn’t be this particular Veretian.

The prince’s grasp of the Akielon language was somehow underwhelming.

The blow from the handler that followed, less so.

*

“I want you to fuck me so hard I don’t remember my name. I want to feel your cock for days when I ride, and then do it all again.”

It wasn’t the words that registered surprise—his husband has always had a filthy mouth on him—but the near-perfect accent.

“Where did you learn to say that?”

“Well, Nikandros has been teaching me—”

“Stop there. Nikandros would sooner kill himself, you, and then me—in that order—than teach you that.”

A stare off ensued, brown against blue.

“Pallas.”

TW: referenced canonical CSA, grooming, gaslighting

prompt from anon ask: Regent x Laurent with Laurent getting rejected by his uncle

The rest of my microfics are side-eyeing me real hard at this 600-word monstrosity. I posted it to AO3 as well in case anyone would rather read it there.

“What?”

He knows his voice sounds small. Not as small as it once had, now laced with the faint natural breakage from age. But Uncle couldn’t be telling him what he thought he was, it was— it was unthinkable.

“A pet, Laurent. It will be expected of you.” His voice is sharp-edged, his eyes more still. They don’t even linger on his form, on the thighs he’d once stroked soothingly as he whispered reassurances after the deaths of Father and Auguste. On the curve of his waist that Uncle had thumbed over as he consoled him the night Laurent had lost everything.

“Why would I need a pet?” I feel like a pet. “I don’t want one.” He doesn’t care for ownership. He never even wanted Vere, never knew to expect it as the spare. All he clings to are the scraps of what his life was before Marlas—having someone who loves him. If he had been watching, he would have seen the indulgent looks and touches from Uncle slip through his fingers like sand. He hadn’t wanted to, because ignorance was bliss and bliss was a rare commodity to him.

“But what will you—” He isn’t sure how to ask it.

“You’ve already grown up so much in these last two years.” Uncle’s voice is cloying now, seeping into Laurent as he absorbs his meaning. “Surely you didn’t expect to share a bed with your uncle all your life. It’s,” he pauses, his eyes drilling into Laurent’s as he nocks the final proverbial arrow and fires with an archer’s precision, “a perversion I should never have indulged for so long.”

But you wanted this, he wants to scream. He wants to throw every filthy word murmured lovingly into his ear as he laid belly down on the bed, biting the pillow to muffle his cries, back at his uncle.

“And who will suck your cock then?” he asks, biting his lip to the point of drawing blood to stem the tremble. “When you’re not at Fortaine, of course.”

Laurent recalled the evenings at the southern fort, the intertwined feelings of confusion and relief when his uncle would crawl into bed late, curling around his slight form possessively but without expectation. He recalled the doe-eyed boy, Aimeric, only a year or two his junior, and the way his eyes had tracked Uncle at meals—the way his eyes narrowed any time that Uncle’s hand had slid to Laurent’s shoulder or back.

“You only prove why I should have stopped this sooner,” Uncle says, his tone one of bored exasperation. “You’re no longer the sweet boy I knew.”

He stands from the bed, moving to pass Laurent and only briefly pausing to tilt his chin up. “You’re to be king in six short years. Get a pet to indulge your verbal lashings. All I ever did was be kind to you. Don’t punish me for it.”

Uncle walks away, leaving deafening silence and a million questions in his wake.

If what Uncle gave him was kindness, Laurent would embody calculated cruelty. He would cry tonight, and never be deceived again.

*

”He’s promised. He’s not going to give me up.”

It’s not Nicaise sitting with him now. The tumble of brown curls softened to waves of buttery gold, the unyielding sapphire of his eyes melted to shimmering ocean water. The same face and frame, set in a taut ball of hope and fear and childish ignorance.

I understand why you believe that. Please protect yourself.

“It’s just you and me now, Laurent. I’ll always protect you.”