#saerus

Being sealed away, muted from the sighs and rumbles of the living earth around you, has forced you to pay attention to many things you otherwise would simply ignore.

The sound of stumbling footsteps, the light shifting of stone when the temperature changes, the taste of the air when rainwater soaks the ground your room was buried in. All of it, you had to pay attention to, for you had no way to spend your time otherwise.

Not with these chains on your wrists keeping you within this room. The King truly wants to narrow your world to just this room, to meld your time with his as he hides away from the dangers of the outside. As though your presence was enough to keep them at bay.

Well, he’s not quite wrong. But you hold no ability to banish the demons of the mind.

You shifted in your bed then sat up when you heard a tumbling before a heavy thud. The door to your room was fumbled open.

The young prince has come to visit you again. His form was solid, less a mountain and more a crafted column.

Saerus smelled of war.

The drops slipping through his hair told you their stories in little, quick bursts.

Night. Crickets in grass. Wind through lush trees. Leaves speckled in fire. Spears through running legs. The smell of iron and mud. A beast in armor. It howls in victory. It howls for mercy.

A battle lost. Another failure. It was a cloak that somehow suited him.

Saerus limped through your door, then collapsed right against the leg of your bed. He tore off his armor with shaking fingers. All you could do was watch and be lost in memories.

Aindres always had a glow to him. Not divine radiance, but you remember telling him, back before any of this, that it was as though he was kissed by the sun itself. Gold hair in gentle curls, gold eyes that sharped their focus, and a smile that belonged under a golden crown.

His son carried none of that. His hair was flat, a muddy brown made darker with rain. His eyes were sharp but were always lost in the fog of his mind.

You don’t think you’ve ever seen him smile. A crown would be no different than a jester’s hat on him.

When the last piece of armor was tossed to the floor, Saerus crawled over, large form made small. He buried his head in his arms, resting against the bed.

His body trembled. The weight of grief was too much for him.

You took one of the many blankets that were gifted to you and placed it over his shoulders. He twitched and looked up.

You blocked his sight with your hands. You don’t wish to see hope in his eyes. You don’t want to see any similarities between them.

“Rest.”

That battle, the one that haunts him behind his eyes, the seeps into the cracks of white stone walls as distant noise just at the edge of his hearing, was the final one he would ever be in. At least, he would hope for such a thing.

To call this entrapment would imply he was here against his will, and to an extent it would be right. One battle wasn’t enough, neither was ten, neither was fifty. One hundred would surely be enough to afford one word of praise from his father’s lips, so to be cut short brought endless frustration.

And yet, this predicament, when Saerus donned his armor to venture out, if only to bring back any evidence of Aindres’s fallen army for a proper burial, was when Saerus saw his father at his happiest, as he looped around back, as though a dizzy mouse in an endless maze.

Insanity lies not in senseless repetition but in the repeating of what won’t change, in beating your hopes to a pulp by doing the same thing over and over.

Saerus nearly vomited when he saw the golden gates once more, mocking him with it’s beautiful glint as the stars stared a heavy weight on him. The cold bit at him, and only then did he venture back inside, skin itchy with the need to do something, to feel anything be it a caressing hand or a knife plunging into his back.

The next morning, Saerus and his father sit in silence. He can’t eat his food, no matter how varied the display before him. Too much clinking from his nerve damaged hands would surely drive his father’s smile away.

The wine he drank stained Aindres’s lips red.

“Is it not lovely,” his father put his drink down, looking at him with richly gold eyes that shine with a brilliant fantasy, “to be leashed so?”

“Leashed, Father?” There were rocks in his voice, tumbling through the airy tone of Aindres. Quiet down. I don’t wish to hear you.

Aindres flourished a hand out, to the custom carved walls and the food made by expert hand before tapping on the table. “Yes, leashed. Chained to a pole while we wag our tails at the one we love most. I came upon the idea to limit ourselves to just here only yesterday.”

Will he cast into hellfire if Saerus ever admitted to the jealousy he felt at the bruises on his father’s neck? Would he be chained up and flogged for daring to desire what he knows cannot be his? How disgusting he was. A failure of a prince, much less a son.

“I’ve angered them, quite terribly,” the remorse clouded his eyes, but the affection kept them soft, “surely they’ll be happy to have a palace at their disposal?”

And Saerus does not speak, for he knows his voice will shiver if he does so. But even so, he doesn’t have to. If there was a mirror, he would see all the thoughts in him laid bare. The twitch in his fingers, the quickening of his breath, his jumping irises. All of him was excited, all of his was filled with dread.

Reader is the kind of deity to keep this reactions close to their heart. They don't lash out, they don't coo, they don't beg. They more resemble a statue most days, but even then the King and Saerus are in awe at your presence.

So in awe that they fear ever touching you, no matter how much they want to. They'd much rather take care of their desires by themselves. They don't want to taint, so they keep your room decorated, lavish, and your chains clean.

But the Reader does lash out, at least verbally, in the pristine way, cutting down to the truth of the matter. Though that didn't do much, as both the King and Prince are self destructive masochists. The King would never let them out, but the Prince?

Well, he's easier to manipulate.

So, yeah the Reader does see that he's a victim of the King, otherwise, they would not be able to convince him to free them. However, they do recognize that the Prince only wanted them by his side for his own selfish reasons, even though he doesn't recognize them as selfish.