capri microfic ficlet | laurent/regent | 600 words
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.
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.”
