Chapter Text
The sun was just cresting the horizon when Laios finally lifted his head from his desk. Light streamed inside in squares, the mullions and muntins of the windows dividing the sunrise into crosshatched panels on the floor and directly into his eyes. Morning already?
Every inch of the long mahogany slab was covered with papers bearing pencil sketches of floor plans and mock-up landscapes and stuffed or fiberglass monsters, all meticulously labeled, even when the drawings themselves got sloppy. Laios sat up. There was a page still stuck to his face, glued on by drool. He peeled it off with a grimace.
He had no idea what time he’d actually fallen asleep. He was lucky he fell asleep at all. After Kabru visited him yesterday, he could hardly keep track of all the monster museum ideas that popped into his head. He could barely get one on paper before he thought of another, then another, and more still. He was determined to document every thought, no matter how small, because he would be so mad at himself if he forgot any of them. He had a tendency to forget his good ideas when he didn’t write them down.
So he’d spent the night drawing and writing like a madman. He’d sketched until he was so tired he felt drunk. Laios blinked and rubbed his eyes. From the looks of the papers immediately in front of him, when he passed out he’d been in the middle of planning a wall that showed different aquatic monsters and the depth of water they occupied. Kelpies, mermaids and bladefish were near the surface in the epipelagic zone, mermen in the mesopelagic zone, krakens and leviathans in the bathypelagic zone. A pretty basic list. His renderings weren’t very impressive, either. He’d reduced all of their anatomy to the bare minimum. The mermaids and mermen he’d only differentiated by strata and caudal fin/fluke orientation. He didn’t even try with the bladefish. They weren’t much more than X marks.
The later the hour, the more frantic his thoughts and his drawings had become. He hadn’t been able to stop himself — or he couldn’t let himself stop. He had to focus on his museum ideas completely, because the second he let his mind wander —
He was so, so tired.
Laios wiped at the crusted, dried spit trapped in his stubble. He dragged himself to the bathroom, pissed, threw off his clothes, then turned on the sink, getting the water as frigid as he could before splashing it on his face.
He stuck his head under the faucet, letting the cold water pour over the sides of his head. A few droplets slid behind his neck and down his back. He shuddered.
Now he was just half awake and cold. Water couldn’t replace sleep. Well, it was worth a shot.
He cut the faucet off and examined himself in the mirror.
He looked pretty rough. It didn’t help that his whole head was dripping wet. The purple rings around his eyes were sunken and darker than usual. Of course he had to stay up all night right when those Sadena diplomats finally managed to dock their boats. Last time he looked this bad before a big meeting, Marcille forced him to wear makeup.
This sucks, he thought.
What a winning mindset for the day.
Get it together.
Laios turned on his shower to a temperature just shy of boiling. He curled up into a ball in the tub and let the water burn his skin. Then he cut that off too, covered himself in soap and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed his loofa into his reddened skin.
What was wrong with him? This day was no different than any other. Yesterday wasn’t any different than the day before. Tomorrow would be more of the same.
He was in a bad mood because he was tired. That was all.
It’s going to be fine. I can make a good impression. It’s not that hard. I learned how to do that.
He had to walk with his back straight like he was balancing books. He had to say the same recited greetings he had a million times. He had to sit on the throne and let Yaad do the talking and do his best to look like he was paying attention. He had to at least try to actually pay attention. At least he had prepared in advance for this crowd, since they were supposed to be here a few days ago. If he didn’t have a good answer prepared, Kabru would save his ass, like he always did.
Laios winced.
He lathered more soap on his body and made a second pass with the loofa.
The first step to making a good impression is not smelling like a corpse.
He turned the shower ice cold and rinsed himself off.
Laios had some time to spare before he had to put on a show, so he called for breakfast. He’d have enough time to digest a little. I can’t even fart around those people.
He might not care what some diplomat thought of him, but it mattered for everyone else. He had to come off as a normal and trustworthy guy with a fully functioning frontal lobe so that Melini could have a steady supply of iron ore for tension bolts and anvils. Yaad said there had been reliable iron mines somewhere on the continent, but they hadn’t found them yet. They had a general idea of where they might be, but they were still working on mineral surveys. They’d only recently finished getting new maps. The Golden City had been just that — it had a bit of countryside, but that group of perma-children had been confined to a few square miles for the past thousand years. There was a lot that had changed in the surrounding landscape in that time, and the castle had a lot of records, but they didn’t keep track of everything. Would’ve been nice if they did. The more self-sufficient Melini was, the fewer songs and dances he’d have to do to import resources.
Laios thanked the butler when his breakfast arrived. When he removed the cloche, a veritable feast greeted him. Eggs with runny yolks, crisp bacon, fried ham with curled edges, potatoes and peppers, toast points, clotted cream and fruit preserves…
His stomach growled.
These are options. I’m not supposed to eat all of this.
It felt like there were a lot of things he wasn’t supposed to do anymore.
Not like it would satisfy me anyway.
Laios dragged a hand over his face.
Lighten up.
He gathered his sketches in a pile and pushed them towards the wall to make room for his plate. They didn’t need to be organized right now, but he didn’t want to crumple any of them, either.
Laios sorted through his files to find his report for the visit. He smeared yolk over his toasts and flipped through the pages as he ate.
After the first half-dozen near identical descriptions of iron ore deposits throughout Sadena’s city-state, he let the words all blur together. Laios stopped taking in new information, and let the letters float around in a jumble. He tried to imagine what it would look like to someone who couldn't read Common. He pretended the pages were just drawings, full of unevenly spaced little designs that occasionally repeated, rendered in smooth black pen strokes. If he didn’t understand it, it would be pleasant to look at.
Kabru has really nice handwriting.
Laios skipped ahead to the last page, where he left his signature. He traced the lines with his finger. He liked that he could write his name in one clean motion, with all the letters connected. Laios had seen him sign his name plenty of times before. He twisted the pen nib at different angles to make the lines thinner and thicker, then added a tasteful flourish at the bottom. Kabru had designed his own royal signature for him. He’d managed to get pretty good at it, but he thought his name always looked better when Kabru wrote it. Laios still asked Kabru to sign for him sometimes, if the document was important and nobody had to witness him sign it himself.
I miss him.
A clot of yolk dropped on the page. Laios swiped a finger over the spot and licked it off.
He remembered the way Kabru tapped a finger under his chin —
The same spot as a Red Dragon’s inverse scale.
Laios frowned.
He’s right. I don’t know what I’m so worried about. I wanted to work on my pellet, so I did. That was my choice. I still saw him every day. I’ll see him in an hour.
Laios wanted to see him, and he was going to see him. He saw him yesterday. He’d see him again tomorrow.
What was an extra hour, two hours, three hours or more with him at the end of the day?
Not like it meant that much to me. Not like I noticed. Not like I cared.
The King clenched his jaw.
Why did he feel so…
So…
Tired. I feel tired. I’m tired. That’s all.
Introductions went okay.
Laios didn’t mind the discussions about logistics — where and when and how often trade exchanges were to be made, for which grades of metals, and in which form they were delivered — that stuff was fine. He liked looking at trade as a broader system. There was the harvest of a raw material, the processing of that material into useable forms, the division of those forms into quantities and shapes appropriate for transport, the labor involved at every level of the supply chain… He followed all of that. He had his own opinions, and he felt qualified enough to ask questions, make suggestions, and weigh considerations about that sort of thing.
He was not great with the money part. As far as he was concerned, all costs now fell under the categories of “worth it” and “not worth it,” and neither of those amounts could be measured within any predictable range. If he was totally honest, the ins and outs of the royal finances were a mystery to him. Laios could predict the things that impacted a cost, but not what those actual changes in costs would be. They had actuaries for that sort of thing. A lot of these negotiations were on a ten-year, fifteen-year, twenty-year timeline, while the kingdom itself was only in its infancy. Initially he was much more concerned about how the hell they could afford to do much of anything, even with the impressive coffers they inherited, but Yaad had waved off his worries. Laios would be more inclined to trust Yaad’s reassurances if he didn’t go ballistic about the most (seemingly) insignificant expenses in these meetings, but Laios was pretty sure most of his diatribes were just for show. When Yaad hit his stride, Laios let him do his thing.
Laios was currently letting Yaad do his thing with an equally spirited dwarf from Sadena’s treasury department. Laios had filled about a half-page with notes so far, mostly of keywords logged to keep himself on track with the subjects of discussion. Under the notes he’d been slowly, and hopefully subtly, drawing more sketches with museum ideas. This time he was rendering the catalyst itself. He’d started with the body of a giant owl, its tarsi and talons extended in front of its body, poised to catch prey. On the other side of the page, he worked on the prey: a swarm of skeletal rats. Some perched or crawled over their nest, some attempted to flee, some stood paralyzed in horror — or as paralyzed in horror as Laios could convey in pencil. In his estimation, he’d done a pretty good job.
The King glanced to his right. Kabru stood next to him, straight as a board, with his hands folded neatly behind his back.
Laios tapped the end of his pencil against the page to get his attention. He hoped it communicated his question. What do you think?
Kabru looked down at the page and back to the cast of negotiators.
He wasn’t going to say anything about it in the middle of a meeting. Laios had still hoped he would anyway. He didn’t like it when Laios tried to digress too far off topic during these things, but Kabru usually liked his drawings, and this one was based on his idea, after all. He wanted to know if his rendition aligned with what Kabru pictured.
It would be nice to know he got something right.
It’s not professional to draw rat skeletons during trade negotiations.
Laios darkened the shadows on one of the rats.
Kabru spoke the second the last diplomat left the room.
“Your Highness, may I keep you for a moment?”
He didn’t sound thrilled. Laios hoped he wasn’t mad he was drawing in the meeting. He did that pretty often.
He should probably hold his rat thoughts for now, then. Laios still wanted his opinion. He’d prefer that opinion wasn’t filtered through a lecture.
“Sure. What is it?”
Kabru inhaled, then pinched his nose. “Please understand that this isn’t meant to embarrass you, but… I could smell you down the hallway before I could even lay eyes on you this morning. Did you spill an entire bottle of cologne on yourself?”
Ouch. Laios frowned. “You don’t like it? You helped me pick it out.”
“This is not about the scent itself. It smells very nice when you apply it properly. And I know you know how to apply cologne, because you have before without issue. So what was the problem today?”
“Well…” Laios doodled circles in the corner of his paper. “I thought it would cover up the formaldehyde…”
“Your Majesty,” Kabru said, “I told you nobody else would ever notice. I’m surprised that Yaad ever had the chance to pick up on it, let alone that he cared enough to mention it. You clean up just fine. Now you’ve just overcorrected, and everyone can smell you within a fifty yard radius. You put on so much cologne I’m going to start smelling like it. Again, it’s not the scent itself that’s the issue, it’s the strength of it. If you’re really that concerned, just put on cologne the same way you always have.”
“I thought I might just smell like formaldehyde and cologne if I did the normal amount.” Laios pressed his pencil harder into the paper. The lines were dark and shiny and indenting the page.
“Did you even have time to play with your pellet this morning? You don’t smell like formaldehyde when you don’t get yourself covered in it. And so what if you did? Who cares? I don’t know why this is bothering you so much — ”
“Because I don’t want you to think I smell bad!”
The tip of the pencil snapped off.
Laios froze.
He didn’t want anyone to think he smelled, but Kabru made such a point yesterday that he was the only one who noticed he smelled all the time. He was mortified that Kabru had just quietly accepted he smelled bad, every day for an entire month, and Yaad had to be the one to tell him. Laios didn’t want Kabru to think he smelled bad. He knew that when he put on cologne this morning. That was specifically why he put on cologne this morning. And yet here he was, getting a different complaint from him that he smelled bad — or smelled wrong, at least.
He didn’t want Kabru to think he smelled bad. There was nothing wrong with that!
But saying it out loud… it sounded different. Off, somehow. Maybe his phrasing? No, there wasn’t any clearer way to put it.
His face was getting hot. Laios just kept his pencil pressed to the page. It was all the worse that Kabru wasn’t saying anything at all.
Laios didn’t want Kabru to think he smelled bad. Kabru, specifically. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. But turning the thought over again and again, he felt so…
So…
Weird.
Why did that feel so weird? Of course he didn’t want to smell bad! He didn’t want anyone to think he smelled bad!
But…
Nobody wants to smell bad. That’s not weird.
“Um…” Laios lifted the pencil, and peeked up towards him.
Kabru wasn’t even looking in his direction. He was standing the same way he always did when he stood next to him at the throne, staring at the far window with an unreadable look on his face. At least he wasn’t pinching his nose anymore. “I appreciate the sentiment. You’re very thoughtful. Just don’t overdo it.”
Laios pressed his lips together and scribbled with his pencil, smearing the graphite marks around with a hollow section of wood more than anything else.
This wasn’t a big deal. He knew that. He didn’t know why he was reacting like this. It shouldn’t feel so…
He should say something, anything. “Um…”
“Now get up, please. You have other places to be.”
Laios stood, a little hunched, and rubbed the back of his neck. Oh great, he was sweating, too.
“In a half hour you’ll be expected to meet with the head diplomat and his wife for lunch. If you’re worried about the cologne, it’s fixable. Just go and wipe yourself off with a damp cloth — ”
“Do you want to hang out tonight?”
Oh, come on. Seriously?
Kabru blinked, a half second longer than usual.
Shit.
He’s annoyed, he thought. Again. That was how he rolled his eyes when he didn’t want to make it obvious.
Am I really that needy?
“I didn’t mean to cut you off, sorry, just, you didn’t end up coming over last night, so I was hoping…”
“It’s fine,” he said. Kabru patted his arm and squeezed it lightly. “It’s alright. But I think I’ll be reviewing notes from today’s visit with the Prime Minister. It might go late.” He smiled. “My apologies.”
“No, that’s fine, but, um. Shouldn’t you be talking to me about the same thing later?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll have a report for you by tomorrow morning. I’ll try to keep it short.”
“That’s not…” Laios stopped. He wasn’t winning any awards for how today was going. He shouldn’t push his luck. He could take the hint. “Yeah, okay. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Kabru sighed. He stepped a little closer and adjusted his collar. It was just a light tug. He dropped his voice to a whisper. The way he always talked to him next to the throne. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “It’s been one day, Laios.”
It was the same as always, the same tone of voice as always, Laios reminded himself. It wasn’t even that special when Kabru said his name. Kabru wasn’t doing anything different.
Why didn’t it feel the same?
Laios felt lightheaded.
Because I’m tired, he told himself. I’m tired. That’s why.
Laios couldn’t actually feel any warmth radiating from him. He was close, but not that close. He was just imagining it.
Breathe.
Kabru pulled his hands away from his collar, and Laios felt one thumbnail just barely skim across the side of his neck. Laios nearly jumped out of his skin.
Kabru snapped his gaze up to meet his.
His eyes were so blue.
So hypnotically blue.
Laios’s eyes slid down his face —
The door opened. Laios jumped, again.
“There you are!” Marcille called, “I was just looking — ” She paused, closed the door behind her, and marched up their way. “Just what are you two doing in here?”
“Nothing!” Laios all but shouted.
“It sure doesn’t — ” She paused again, halfway into the room. She sniffed audibly, once, and then a second time. Marcille closed the distance to the two of them. She scrunched up her nose. “Okay, which one of you put on way, waaaaayyy to much cologne?”
Laios looked to Kabru. Kabru slowly shook his head.
Laios groaned. “Is it really that bad?”
After Laios successfully reduced most of the offensive amount of cologne he’d originally applied, he proceeded to lunch with the head diplomat on schedule, with Kabru in tow.
Gottfried (dwarves didn’t have royalty and mostly eschewed titles) was a portly and deep-voiced man who seemed much less invested in the outcome of this diplomatic visit than his subordinates. He was much more interested in touring the landscape outside of the city, where monsters roamed. He hoped to drag along their diplomatic mission for a few extra days so he could go vanquish a mid-sized monster or two in Melini’s countryside. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he’d never been an adventurer, but he was an avid big-game hunter in his homeland, and fancied himself a head mount of some sort of monster to hang along his collections of bears, wolves, and moose. In other travels abroad, he’d secured himself musk oxen, wildebeests, hippos, and he hadn’t been able to resist mentioning he’d felled a lion, one of Melini’s national symbols. He seemed to think his trophies were analogous to Laios’s taxidermy studies of monsters. The King did not agree, but nodded along anyway as the diplomat regaled him with hunting stories. Unfortunately but expectedly, Gottfried had never bothered to stuff his own beheaded creatures, and didn’t have any tips to offer him. His wife seated beside him was quiet and pleasant and seventy years younger than him.
All the while, Laios tried to ignore the stress that simmered in the back of his mind. He hated that instead of joining him for lunch at these things, Kabru hovered beside and slightly behind him instead, as if he was a too eager waiter trying to clear his plate and not a member of his cabinet. This was another recurring argument between them. Laios had his doubts Kabru ate anything at all if he didn’t witness it himself, and it frustrated him to no end that he was expected to sit and eat in front of him while Kabru just stood there. Visits like this were mostly intended to be social. Laios understood the concern for his aptitude in the area, but for the most part he didn’t need much help for casual conversation. Besides, even if he did, Kabru could coach him while sitting next to him, with a meal in front of him. He couldn’t decide if it was worse that the existing arrangement made him look like he needed a chaperone or that it looked demeaning for Kabru. Kabru always insisted neither of those things were true, but Laios was unconvinced.
Laios bobbed his leg under the table.
Another new layer of stress was that he felt compelled to look in his direction. Beyond the chastisement about his cologne, they hadn’t spoken much at all today. Kabru wasn’t entirely absent from the current conversation, but he only spoke when spoken to. Laios knew he wasn’t supposed to direct conversation Kabru's way, which only annoyed him more. Because why was he supposed to act like Kabru wasn’t even there? He didn't like excluding him, for appearances or for any other reason. Kabru probably (definitely) knew far more about the hunting practices in Eastern continent than he did, but for some reason he wasn’t supposed to explicitly say that. Under these conditions, Kabru didn’t have a chance to speak very often, and Laios therefore didn’t have many excuses to look over at him. When Laios was on the throne, glancing in Kabru’s direction was usually a cue that he wanted to say something to him. That wasn’t entirely different from this situation, but when he wasn’t expected to engage Kabru in conversation while lunching with someone else (again, a problem easily solved if Kabru would just deign himself to sit next to him) it was just awkward.
“Object permanence is a development in cognition that takes place in early childhood which allows us to recognize that an object exists when it is not in our field of vision.” Kabru had originally explained that after a joke about a distrustful group of foreign traders lacking object permanence failed to land. “You’d think a signed, sealed promissory note and payment in grain, from silos they’ve personally seen, shipped on schedule, would be enough reassurance they haven’t been swindled, yet they send so many pigeons we may have a hybrid brood by next month...”
Laios just wanted to look at him. He bit his cheek.
I’m not a baby. I know he’s there.
He still felt a little childish, though.
He’s right there. He’s not going anywhere. We still have more meetings together this afternoon.
Was this going to become just another one of those itchy sensations Laios felt around him? Those strange compulsions he had to rehash the same arguments and repeat the same banter, over and over and over?
At least the other ones had some sort of catalyst he could identify, usually spurred on by something Kabru did. In those cases he at least wanted to say something to him.
Now he just wanted to look at him because he wanted to look at him. And he was there, next to him, within reach. And he hadn’t seen him enough lately, his presence was comforting, and Kabru was nice to look at.
And hopefully, if Kabru lingered at the edge of his line of sight, he’d get the chance to have a full conversation with him in the near future.
At least he shouldn’t be bothered by the overpowering cologne anymore. He was less likely to make faces or pinch his nose.
He was still embarrassed about that.
And Laios could admit it hurt his feelings a little, coming from him.
Why is this bothering me so much?
That’s what Kabru asked him. And it was a good question. He was disappointed that Marcille also thought he reeked, but it didn’t feel the same. He didn’t get the same twinge in his chest when she scrunched up her nose at him.
So what’s the difference?
It was gross to smell bad. He didn’t want anyone to think he was gross.
But it was also…
What else?
Smelling bad was gross, but it was also…
Unattractive?
So? He didn’t really care if he was attractive, for the most part.
Do I not want him to think I’m unattractive?
Was that true?
Of course I don’t want him to think I’m unattractive.
He certainly didn’t want to be ugly. He didn’t want anyone to think he was ugly, but…
Laios hoped he wasn’t unattractive to Kabru more, comparatively, than he hoped most people didn’t find him unattractive.
He did not want Kabru, specifically, to find him unattractive.
Or put another way…
Do I want him to think I’m attractive?
That felt like a wholly different question.
Why? He was just undoing the double negative. It shouldn’t feel different, but it did.
Because it’s an affirmative desire?
It wasn’t exactly passive to not want something, either. Wanting something usually meant you didn’t want something else. Marcille used to want her hair neatly and artfully arranged, and so she hadn’t wanted her hair to look messy. It was the same thing, in a way.
Laios passed a quick glance in Kabru’s direction. Barely enough to see him at all. Not enough to admire his features. All it did was confirm he was still there.
It wasn’t enough to satisfy him.
He knew before he looked that it wouldn’t.
So what would?
Laios bobbed his knee faster.
Do I want him to think I’m attractive?
He thought Kabru was attractive. Why wouldn’t he want Kabru to feel the same?
Because it feels weird.
Why?
He thought a lot of his friends were attractive. He wasn’t really worried if they felt the same way. He didn’t need to be attractive to his friends. They were friends with him anyway.
If it didn’t matter if a friend thought he was unattractive, then it didn’t matter if a friend thought he was attractive, either, right?
If Kabru thought he was attractive, it wouldn’t change anything between them.
Would it?
Laios’s mind wandered.
He thought of the way Kabru smiled with him, laughed with him, listened to him, and occasionally yelled at him.
He thought of the way Kabru always did little things for him — work things, of course, but also non-work things. Kabru ordered feeding schedules for stray dogs near the castle he’d been sneaking scraps to, sent slices of cheesecake to his room when he was noticeably miserable, ensured that no matter the occasion that the musicians always played a tavern song he knew by heart.
He thought of the late nights they’d spent together, where Laios punctuated his sentences with yawns, but kept talking anyway, because he’d rather spend time with Kabru than sleep. Kabru would get this certain look about him — his face in his hand, his cheek slightly squished against it, lips curled up on one side, eyes heavily lidded, fighting his own slumber…
He thought about how he’d had the rare privilege of seeing that look nestled next to him in bed, only a few times, only after much coaxing, never for long. He thought about how nicely Kabru’s black curls contrasted against the white pillowcase.
He thought of the way it felt when his thumb skimmed his throat.
And he thought of the way his voice sounded when he said
LAIOS!
Laios!
Laios.
Laios…
Laios……
Laios…………
Laios………………
His ears were ringing.
How do I want him to say it?
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
I need to stop thinking about this.
He could try thinking about something else, but he was almost too tired to try and fight it. What else would he even think about? He’d written down so many monster museum ideas already. Even if he wanted to try to think of any more now, he wouldn’t be able to write them down. He was presently in the middle of a meal, so he wasn’t so eager to think of his next one. He’d had enough of thinking about smelting and global trade today, and his lunch guest was happy to drone uninterrupted about his fox hunts last winter, freeing him of any requirement of actually engaging in kingly duties for the moment. But he still couldn’t leave.
He could try to distract himself by looking anywhere in the room except the one place he wanted to look.
He was trapped.
Fine.
He wanted Kabru to think he was attractive.
In what way?
As far as he knew, there weren’t a lot of ways to find someone attractive.
Physically attractive?
Well, that’s usually what he meant when he thought of someone as attractive.
Finding someone attractive in the first place was a relative thing. Someone was attractive when they were more attractive than other people.
So he wanted Kabru to think he was more physically attractive than…
Who?
Most people?
Everyone else?
That was unrealistic. Laios didn’t think he was much of anything special to look at.
Kabru was a catch. He could find someone better looking.
Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?
Better looking for what?
Better looking for…
To… physically…
As in…
…
Quiet, breathless, in quick succession:
Laios,
Laios,
Laios —
His leg jerked under the table.
Oh, f —
He bit his cheek, nearly enough to draw blood. Hopefully the pain would help.
I really, really need to stop thinking about this.
He looked over at Kabru again. Long enough for him to notice this time.
Kabru raised his eyebrows slightly, in a silent ‘do you want something?’
Laios turned away and shoveled a forkful of lunch into his mouth.
Laios tapped at the glass jar in his cabinet.
Falin’s first trip away from Melini lasted three agonizing months. Even with the best navigation, maps, and weather predictions money could buy, there were times Falin received his letters weeks late, and a few times he never received hers at all. Marcille had no interest in helping the two of them make fairies for personal reasons, but Falin had done well growing spirits in school, so they gave it a try. They’d gotten the forms to set before her next trip, and by the time Falin returned from that voyage, the little homunculi pair were almost finished growing. It only took forty weeks and a daily ration of Laios’s blood.
The portable communication was convenient for Falin, who was rarely in the same region for more than a month at a time. Laios didn’t really need to take his fairy much of anywhere, so he made it a little terrarium. It didn’t need to eat (he’d tried feeding it once, and it immediately threw up), drink, breathe, or defecate, since it was sustained by mana alone. It wasn’t a living creature at all, but it looked enough like one, and enough like Falin, that he felt awful about the idea of leaving it alone all day with no place of its own.
The fairy sat curled in a pile of moss at the center, as though mimicking a deep sleep. “Falin,” he said, tapping on the glass again, a little more emphatically this time. “Hey. Falin. Wake up.”
Its face frowned, and the fairy yawned and stretched its arms and legs, then slowly sat up, rubbing its little golden eyes. “Mm?” it said, then stifled another yawn. It flew up to the opening at the top of the terrarium and rested at the lip of the glass, still blinking away sleep. “Brother..? What time is it there?”
“Late,” he said. “Past midnight. What time is it where you are?”
“Early. Not dawn yet.”
“Sorry.”
“S’okay,” said Falin, through the fairy, in a smaller imitation of her own voice.
Laios held out his hand and let the fairy crawl into it. He carried it to his bed and sat down as it rearranged itself to perch on the edge of his fingers.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“What? No, no… not… not really,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Why are you still up this late?”
“I can’t sleep. I’ve been, um, thinking.”
“About what?”
Laios leaned back to look at the canopy of his bed. “I don’t really know, honestly. Maybe nothing.”
“Okay. Do you just wanna talk?”
“Yeah, sort of.” He blinked, and followed the lines of the heavy red velvet to the center - a gold painted plaster version of the Winged Lion sigil. The bed came like that. It was a strange feeling, waking up in the morning and falling asleep looking at it, but he’d never bothered to change it. When he first moved into the royal apartments, he thought it was kind of funny. In some way, he thought it would be a good reminder of what his priorities should be in life. Now he just thought it was kind of annoying.
He was glad whoever made the thing never painted eyes on it. It was creepy enough as is.
“Laios?”
He blinked and shook his head. “Hi, sorry. I just…”
On one hand, he didn’t really want to say much at all. He mostly wanted her company. On the other hand, he couldn’t really talk to anyone else about his thoughts. It would be bad enough to voice it in the castle at all. It felt like it was its own living thing, between the ghosts, the seemingly endless network of hallways, and the Winged Lion symbols. He didn’t want anyone here, living or undead, to actually hear him say anything about it. But he trusted Falin completely, and he didn’t see any ghosts hanging around right now. “Can I ask you something weird?”
“Sure!” she said. The fairy kicked its feet over the edge of his hand.
He cleared his throat. “How did you know when you wanted to kiss Marcille?”
“Hmm…” It moved its head left and right, as if thinking. “I dunno!”
“You don’t know?” That didn’t make sense. “But you did, eventually.”
“Yup!” she said.
“So…” Laios furrowed his brow. “If you didn’t know if you wanted to, why did you kiss her?”
“Oh, well I wanted to kiss her for a while. All the time!”
That made even less sense. “You… wanted to kiss her for a while, but you didn’t know when you wanted to?”
“Kind of!”
“I don’t really understand what you mean.”
“Well, I guess the first time I wanted to kiss her was when we were in school. I remember we were sitting in this little spot in a field of clover, and I was really hungry. My stomach growled, and she offered me a snack. I didn’t know she had brought a snack with her at all. I was so happy!”
Laios frowned. “I don’t… I still don’t know if I get it.”
“Hm,” she said. The fairy’s eyes peeked open a little wider. “I guess what I mean is there are a lot of reasons you might want to kiss someone.”
“Like… what sort of reasons?”
“Like when someone makes you happy, or if you’re saying hello or goodbye. Parents kiss their children — ”
“Our parents didn’t.”
“Our parents aren’t everyone’s parents.”
“Okay,” he said. “So what’s your point?”
“That there’s not one meaning for wanting to kiss someone!”
“Yeah, but… Hm.” He clenched his jaw and rubbed at his temple. “So… sure. But all of them are sorta — for all of those things, they’re, I guess… showing… affection?” he said. “Is that it?”
“Well, sure.”
“So you wanted to kiss Marcille when she brought you a snack when you were little, but when you got older, you wanted to kiss her because you were, um — ” He made a face. “Because you liked her?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I guess that’s what I’m asking, then. How could you tell the difference? How did you figure out that you wanted to kiss her because you liked her?”
“I mean, I’d still want to kiss her for the other reasons too.” The fairy kicked its legs and tapped its tiny fingers. “I guess the difference was more that I used to want to kiss her in one moment, but after the moment ended, I didn’t think about it again. But then I started wanting to kiss her all the time. It was less that I wanted to kiss her because I liked her, but more that I liked her, so I wanted to kiss her.”
“Um, okay.”
“It might be easier to say that I used to know why I wanted to kiss her when I wanted to kiss her, but then I just started to want to kiss her because she was Marcille. So now everything makes me want to kiss her, even if I can’t explain why. I just do!”
Laios tilted his head back up to the Winged Lion. It understood a lot about human wanting and desire, even those feelings he couldn’t verbalize or didn’t want to acknowledge. That was kind of its whole thing. It wasn’t perfect at it, but… right about now, he kind of wished it could explain to him how he felt.
Kabru was also really good with that sort of thing.
Laios felt a blush creep up the back of his neck. He swallowed. “When you say you want to kiss her all the time… what does that feel like?”
“How does it feel?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to kiss her when she’s not here. Because I’ve kissed her before, I think about what it’s like to kiss her, and I look forward to kissing her again. I miss her every day. I wonder what she’s doing, or how she’s feeling. I think about what she looks like, what she smells like. I wonder if she’s still taking care of her hair — ”
“She is, by the way.”
“Good!”
Laios could understand why she was wondering about those things, considering Falin was off-continent, probably swaying below deck in a hammock a few miles from any shoreline, far from her fiancée. Of course Falin missed Marcille. That was a dramatically different situation than his. Kabru was only a few hallways away.
But he had been wondering. He’d spent all of last night trying not to think about him. He’d spent all of today trying not to think about him and thinking about him anyway. He’d spent all of tonight actually thinking about him. He’d been up all night wondering if Kabru was being honest with him when he said he wasn’t avoiding him. He’d been wondering what Kabru was doing with his nights instead. He’d been wondering if Kabru was thinking about him at all. He’d been wondering if he should buy a different cologne —
“Laios?”
“Sorry, sorry, I’m just… I’m thinking. I think this is helping, a little.”
Falin hummed. “So who are you thinking about kissing?”
“Um…” Laios looked up at the Winged Lion, then back to the fairy. “Nobody.”
“I could probably help you sort out how you feel a little more if you tell me.”
“Nobody. I was just curious.”
“Then what made you ask?”
“Um…”
“Do you want me to guess?”
“No. Wait, do you have a guess?”
The fairy nodded. “Uh-huh.”
He didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all. “I don’t really — ”
“Do you remember when you said you’d volunteer to marry Shuro, if I didn’t?”
“Huh? Hey!” Laios pulled the fairy closer to his face. “That wasn’t — that wasn’t anything like this. That was… hypothetical. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, for one thing, I used to think he liked me more than he actually liked me… and considering he said he’d never come back to Melini… that wouldn’t have really worked out anyway.”
“Would you have wanted to marry any of our friends, or did you just want to marry him?”
“I… I liked spending time with, uh, everyone, so…” He cleared his throat. “But Shuro, I mean, I would get to live in a nice house somewhere far away. He was royalty after all…”
“You’re royalty now. And you have your own castle.”
“Yeah. That’s true, I guess.”
“Mm-hm. What else did you like about him?”
“I liked a lot of things about him! He was a nice guy, and he was foreign, so he knew a lot of stuff about other places, he could speak other languages, he was super smart… he was really polite… and patient… he was, um… uh…” This description sounded a little familiar. “He was really good with the… with his sword.” Fuck.
“Uh-huh.”
Fuck. “Um…”
“When you thought about marrying Shuro, did you think about what it would be like to kiss him?”
“No! No, I mean, I thought we might have to do it one time as part of the, uh, getting married process, but I didn’t think about it in, like, any detail…”
He had thought more than once that it would be nice to marry Kabru. Laios had even told him so. It would save him the trouble of finding someone else to marry, and he already liked Kabru — as a friend! They were good friends. A lot of people liked Kabru. Lots of people would want to marry him. He would be nice to marry. That was a completely normal and unoriginal opinion that didn’t mean anything at all.
“Did you think about what would happen after you got married?”
“Not… not really? We’d live together is all… I would have… I would see him all the time…”
He already kinda lived with Kabru, didn’t he? But it’s not like they had the same bedroom - well, Falin and Marcille had their own bedrooms here. But they weren’t married yet. And married people lived together in a house by themselves, and shared a bedroom, didn’t they? This was a big castle and it had too many other people also living there. But Shuro lived in a big house, with servants and stuff, so if Laios married him, he assumed he would live with Shuro and with his servants. They had staff here, so… it was actually sort of like that. He didn’t think Yaad would ever let him move out of the castle, anyway. If Yaad made Laios marry someone they would presumably both stay in the castle.
So, yeah, if he married Kabru, their lives probably wouldn’t be that different. At least as far as their living arrangements were concerned.
But he and Kabru didn’t act like they were married, right? That was different. His parents never showed any affection to one another, so being married didn’t have to be affectionate at all, it was more of a legal issue than anything else. Honestly, Laios was pretty sure he liked Kabru more than either one of his parents liked the other. And Kabru liked him well enough, as far as he knew. But when he imagined what married people should act like…
Yeah, you would probably expect a married couple to kiss. And that sort of thing.
And they didn’t do that.
“Um… Falin?”
The fairy yawned. “It’s almost time for me to get up. You should try going to sleep for now.”
That wasn’t going to happen. His heartbeat was through the roof just sitting here. “Can I talk to you later?”
“Mm-hmm, yup. Just give me a little while longer…”
Laios walked over and placed the fairy back onto its little moss pile. It turned on its side and curled up again, just like how he found it. He watched it for a minute, expecting to see its chest rising and falling, before he remembered fairies didn’t breathe.
Laios returned to his bed. He stared back at the Winged Lion.
Do I want to kiss Kabru?
That first time, he was so thrilled with Kabru's monster museum idea that, well...
He had definitely thought about it.
And then he kept thinking about it.
He hadn’t been thinking about kissing him, exactly, but he’d been preoccupied with not thinking about how he thought about kissing him.
Wasn’t that kind of the same thing?
No, it wasn’t, right? Because if he was thinking about kissing him, he’d…
He’d be imagining himself doing that. He couldn’t really picture that happening.
Mainly because he couldn’t imagine Kabru wanting to kiss him at all.
When he first thought about it, he was in ratty old clothes, stinking of formaldehyde, next to a pile of maybe-monster remains. Laios probably wouldn’t want to kiss himself either under those circumstances, and he liked monsters.
Laios didn’t have a gauge on his own physical attractiveness. He hadn’t really thought about it much before this afternoon. He considered himself average, and evaluating the attractiveness of any one of his features in too much detail sounded like a very uncomfortable endeavor. Every person had unique tastes anyway, so comparing himself to some ideal wouldn’t tell him what traits Kabru found physically appealing. Meanwhile, as far as Laios could tell, everyone who had ever laid eyes on him found Kabru physically appealing.
He didn’t have much of a real education. He’d spent some time in school as a kid, before he joined the army. He could do basic math. He knew the Earth revolved around the sun. He learned to read at home when he was little, and his monster knowledge was almost entirely from pleasure reading and dungeon experience. He wasn’t stupid, but he knew he wasn’t a genius, either. He had his areas of expertise —
Enough knowledge to fill a museum. Kabru said that, hadn’t he? That was a very nice compliment.
But anyway, he wasn’t nearly as smart as Kabru. Kabru had a proper education from his noble mother, a canary leader, at that. No surprise it was hard to keep up with him intellectually when he could prattle on for hours about cultural eccentricities of world regions Laios had never even heard of. And people actually wanted to listen when Kabru talked. From his experience, people usually wanted him to shut up. Things were a little different now that he was important, because fewer people actually told him to shut up.
Laios thought of himself as a nice person, even if he was awkward. Every once in a while, he’d find out that people completely misread his attempts to be nice. Laios knew that even the people who liked him thought he was weird. It was hard for him to get through to people. Kabru never had that issue.
He was King of Melini and all, but that was in major part from Kabru’s help. Laios didn’t put too much stock in that. Aside from using his title too often and acting uptight in front of the rest of the court, Kabru didn’t treat him much differently as king than he did before he was king. Laios preferred it that way.
He did ultimately defeat the Winged Lion, he thought, staring up at its sigil, but that required a LOT of help from a LOT of people, Kabru included.
But Laios was the one who ate the Lion’s hunger. And now Kabru wouldn’t have to worry about an Utaya-scale disaster again. That counted as a point in his favor.
For what it was worth, Kabru had said he wanted to be his friend, and they were friends now. He said he was interested in the way Laios thought about things.
But that didn’t mean he’d be interested in kissing him.
Laios ran a hand through his hair and sighed. The eyeless Winged Lion looked down at him.
Do I want to kiss Kabru right now?
Because that was what Falin was getting at, right? It was one thing to think about kissing someone in the moment, but it was different to want to kiss someone, um… intermittently? Consistently? Frequently? For the same reason, that reason being…
That thought might be a little more advanced than what he was trying to figure out right now. He should figure out whether he wanted to kiss him first.
While the actual methods and practices of kissing seemed a little complicated, the standard sort of kissing seemed pretty straightforward: you put your lips together with someone else’s, and that’s it.
Could he imagine doing that? He’d never kissed anyone before. You’d have to put your faces pretty close together for that. My nose is kinda big. Would it get in the way?
He closed his eyes and summoned an image of Kabru’s face. As a bit of an indulgence, he pictured him smiling. Laios liked his smile a lot.
Oh yeah, Kabru also had a nose. Laios guessed you had to pick a side to put your nose on, because he wasn’t sure if it would work if he put his nose directly in front of Kabru’s nose. Was there a standard side to put your nose on, like a handshake? You put out your right hand for a handshake. So maybe if he put his face to the right…
When Laios first thought about kissing him, he imagined it in part because his hands wouldn’t have to be involved. But thinking about it now, it would be kinda weird to not do anything with his hands, right? What are you supposed to do with your hands when you kiss someone? If he was sitting down, he guessed he could just lean forward. But if he was standing up, he probably shouldn’t just leave his hands at his side, right? He could touch his arm, or his waist, or something. Maybe his shoulder?
All of that made sense as part of the mechanics, but when he thought about doing it —
He tried to update his imagination a bit. They could be sitting next to each other. In this vision, he pictured himself wearing a clean set of regular clothes, and he didn’t smell bad. They could still be in the same spot as before, when he first thought about kissing him, only in this scenario he wasn’t in the middle of working on his owl pellet, so there wasn’t anything on the desk that would gross him out. And nothing else in the room smelled bad either.
So, right. They’d just sit there, and he’d lean in towards Kabru, and Kabru would… just be okay with that? They’d gotten up close and personal before. Kabru had to get pretty close to his face to whisper to him all the time. At first he thought feeling his breath on his ear throughout the day was odd, but now he just thought it tickled. His breath always came out in warm light puffs when he spoke, and his breath never smelled bad.
Oh yeah. Also in this vision Laios had brushed his teeth like, three times in a row, and his breath did not smell bad at all.
And also… and also…
He wanted Kabru to want to kiss him, too. But he couldn't really imagine any set of circumstances where that would be true.
And wasn’t it gross to think about kissing Kabru if Kabru didn’t want to kiss him?
On one hand, he felt like this was gross. It was betraying his trust to imagine him doing something he didn’t want to, wasn’t it? But this was just a thought experiment, right? He was just trying to figure out if he wanted to kiss Kabru…
Okay, so in this scenario, Kabru was totally all right with Laios trying to kiss him to see if he wanted to kiss him. That sounded a little more reasonable. Kabru didn’t have to want to kiss him, he’d just be fine with letting Laios try to kiss him. For the purposes of this thought experiment.
Okay. Okay. So he would just lean in, turn his face to the right, and maybe he’d, um, set one hand on his shoulder, and hold his own knee with his other hand for balance. That seemed like a functional stance that would not be super awkward. All he’d have to do is get closer, and closer, and he’d feel Kabru breathing against his lips, and then he’d just… just…
Kabru would look at him and he’d —
Laios felt his stomach flip. His hands were clammy just thinking about it. Here in reality, he was fucking terrified. Kabru was nice, so nice, but even he had his limits. What would he do if he found out Laios was thinking of him like this? Kabru could practically read minds. If he realized that Laios… that he was…
What? Fantasizing about kissing him?
Alright, he thought, looking at the Winged Lion. So maybe I do want to kiss him.
But if he did, he probably wouldn’t make any progress if he was too afraid to even imagine it. Laios groaned. How embarrassing. He was almost thirty! Most people his age had a lot of kissing experience, and he panicked just thinking about it.
Was he just going to sit there and try to come up with reasons why Kabru, the real actual Kabru he had to see every day, would be okay with Laios even thinking about kissing him?
In what world —
Oh, wait. Now that he thought about it —
Maybe he didn’t have to come up with any unlikely scenarios himself, after all.
And if he wasn’t the one inventing them, he didn’t have to feel bad about it.
Laios shot over to his desk, and pulled open the bottom left drawer.
That purplish journal was sitting there right where he’d left it.
This is probably a bad idea, he thought.
Laios pulled back the cover.