His hand trails slowly down your arm, fingers brushing against the skin like a painters touch, his own magic leaving faint trails of orange in his wake that eventually fade from sight. You still feel them though, settling into you with an oddly comforting gesture. Music is played softly by unseen hands from the harp in the corner of the room and only serves to lull you into a deeper state of bliss. Inside this room, away from the frigid cold of the northern lands outside, it is easy to lose yourself to sensations.

Idris himself seems to be in a rare state of relaxation; his body is not tense and taut, he isn't mumbling out loud about the thousands of things that need to be done, and you have yet to be disrupted by any attendants knocking on the door to request his presence.

You press your face further into the crook between his neck and shoulder at this thought; it's so rare to have him to yourself these days. Albeit, a lack of quality time is what you expected considering who Idris is, but still.

It's rather lonely.

His fingers slow to a stop on your arm and you feel him turn his head ever so slightly. You feel the rise and fall of his chest as a slow sigh escapes from him, and then moments later his hand comes to rest on the back of your head, holding you closer than before. He, too, is aware of the rarity of this time—and just how limited it truly is.

The meadow where they meet is a realm that should not exist. It stands still and silent, like a worn painting, with heavy mists hanging in the air and flowers that hide unsaturated beneath the veil. When they meet, it’s as though they’re breaking some sacred spell that this realm has rested in for centuries. Loud voices will shatter the air and the mist will part as two bodies run through it. The one at the front is always the boy with coiled raven hair followed by the boy with two sharp horns and hair like flames—a stark splash of color in the melancholic landscape. They’re from two different lives—one, who comes from a place of good grace, and the other, whom the world would rather not exist.

But here, in this strange place of in-between, these differences have no stand.

“It is the borderlands again, you know,” the raven boy hums, dragging a stick across the ground and causing several stones to overturn. “I overheard my father talking about tensions rising.”

In response, the boy with horns sits back on a grassy hill and lets out a low sigh. “Tensions are always rising. There is never a day that goes by where there isn’t a possibility of an overflow.”

The raven boy ceases his disturbance and instead stabs the stick into the soil until only half of it remains visible to the naked eye. He stares down at it for a moment before straightening up, brushing his hands on his pants, and collapsing down next to his companion. “What do you think will happen when it does? Overflow, I mean. You don’t think it’ll go too far—right?”

When he looks to his companion with wide brown eyes—eyes that are devoid of the hardness that reality offers—the other boy does not meet his gaze. He instead looks out over at the meadow, at the way the mist curls up into the air, at how nothing but their breathing can be heard in this moment, and presses his lips into a thin line. He already knows what an overflow will entail. An overflow will cause the mounting hatred that has been present between their kinds to reach a breaking point, where it’ll rush out like a shattered dam and drown anyone that gets in its way—regardless of innocence or not.

An overflow will equal an inevitable end, both to the peace, and possibly to the friendship that means so much to him right now. He doesn’t want to think of this. He doesn’t want to have this conversation just yet. In this realm—their realm—the troubles of the Otherworld remain beyond the misty veil that they hide in. That’s what the veil is for, after all. To conceal them both from the reality that they’re caught in.

“Beithir.” He tests the raven boys name on his tongue; he’s said it a thousand times by now, but each of those thousand times has been as significant to him as the first. His closest friend—his only friend—and the individual who could also be his greatest loss. “Beithir.”

He tilts his head slightly and finally brings himself to look over to his friend, who’s watching him with a glimmer of amusement in his gaze. “You know, I think your name fits into my mouth much better than my own ever has. Like I was born to speak it.”

Beithir laughs at this—a musical sound that’s always brought peace to any listener's ears—and bumps his shoulder against his friends. “If you intend to steal my name, then I hope you’re prepared to lose yours.”

He then leans close with a mischievous grin. “Idris. Idris, Idris, Idris! I’ll keep saying your name until the whole world knows that it belongs to me and me alone, now.”

A faint smile appears on Idris’ face as he watches his friend chant his name to the absent audience around them. It is inevitable that they will need to leave this place. They will need to depart back into the night, back to their respective Courts, where they will only be able to communicate through messages sent in secrecy. They will resume being Prince’s once more. But in the meantime—in this brief, peaceful moment—they’re just Beithir and Idris.