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Damen spreads a bloody spring. The Regent dies choked up on his own obsessions. Laurent walks among the trees. Or, Laurent is dead. Not yet gone.

#fuck it *horrors your lamen*#i love ghost stories what can i say #mind the warnings though #captive prince #laurent #damen #damen x laurent #my fanfic

ninicaise

"why don't we see laurent's schemes in kings rising? why does he act so helpless, like a puppet?" idk maybe because laurent & damen are no longer friends for the entire first half of kings rising so laurent is back to being completely alone and after prince's gambit he has no idea what to do without damen beside him. maybe bc laurent is not actually the domino master of the series. the regent is. maybe bc laurent is (canonically) behind in the game and the only reason he ever had a chance of winning is literally bc not him nor his uncle can ever predict wtf damen is going to do next. this is textual btw i am not making shit up. just as the "captive prince" is both damen and laurent, the "prince's gambit" is both laurent's and damen's gambit.

rainydaydecaf

SO TRUE. SO FUCKING TRUE.

We joke about Laurent being a 5D chess master but he only started to become that because HE WAS UP AGAINST HIS UNCLE, THE INVENTOR OF 5D CHESS

Remember that quote about Auguste and Laurent and sword fighting? “Laurent tried to be as good as Auguste, but you only have to be half as good as Auguste to be ten times better than everyone else”

THAT’S LAURENT AND HIS UNCLE

And I would argue that Laurent is better than his uncle simply because he’s better at pivoting. The Regent is good at foreseeing multiple outcomes and laying long-term groundwork and backup plans to take advantage of every iteration he can think of, but he does not do well with handling the unpredictable nature of people (also, he’s a monster that doesn’t understand true love and loyalty, blah blah).

Laurent, on the other hand… when things go wrong, Laurent can adapt and improvise. He can take in new information, add it to what he already knows, estimate how the people around him will react, and then he executes New Plan Number 546. And Laurent is just as shocked as everyone else when the new plan works, but he’s very, very good at pretending he had it under control the whole time. Because that unnerves people. It makes them hesitate and capitulate to what looks like Laurent’s superior intellect.

Except for Damen. Neither the Regent nor Laurent have ever been able to understand or predict Damen. Certainly neither of them expected Damen to still choose Laurent after the whipping and the degradation in the capital.

But that’s what happened. And Laurent is not one to let go of an advantage.

quelmdn

🩸

(...guess which scene it is 🫢)

eepy

hello gongeous. are u interested in committing a double suicide

#lamen in kings rising

frogdisco2021

Thinking about how Damen does not even begin to comprehend the absolute life-altering trauma he caused Laurent by killing Auguste until like halfway through Prince's Gambit. Thinking about how their mutual dehumanization of each other led Damen to see Laurent as incapable of love or affection for anyone, he never even considers that Laurent loved his brother and was shattered by his death, never shows a shred of sympathy, his first assumption was that Laurent resented Auguste for being the golden child/crowned prince, and it's only when Paschal looks at him like he's crazy and says "no, he loved him." that he begins to realize the Laurent he's been experiencing is one that in many ways *he helped create* and that the purest form of Laurent was a sweet, shy little boy who loved his brother without a cruel bone in his body, he never wanted power or glory or anything, all he wanted was his big brother, and Damen killed that version of Laurent when he killed Auguste.

I think that is in part how Damen begins to come to forgive Laurent, or at the very least to begin to sympathize with him, realizing that in a fucked up kind of way, everything Laurent does to him, while still totally being first and foremost Laurent's responsibility and moral failures to atone for, is partially a consequence of his own actions, that he helped turn Laurent into the tangled ball of pulsating yearning in the shape of a man that he is.

I think realizing how wrong he'd been about the kind of man Laurent was, was what began his journey to coming to terms with the kind of man he, Damen, was at the beginning of the story. When he first meets Laurent he thinks he has him pinned and describes him as arrogant, self-absorbed, self-serving, spoilt, and "raised to overestimate his own worth", which in hindsight is definitely meant to be projection because those are all ways that Damen himself could be described at the beginning of the story, something he basically admits to at the end of Kings Rising when he reflects on the version of himself that existed before he was imprisoned.

lucky-clover-gazette

laurent: this is it. i am giving my life, surrendering to my unjust execution, so that my comrades may stand a chance at victory. i will die the weaker man i've always been, disgraced in front of my countrymen, robbed of my royal title and pride. unloved. misunderstood. and undefended.

damen:

frogdisco2021

Laurent is such an emotionally repressed cunt he's like "nooooooo I didn't melt under the ministrations of the first man to ever touch me gently I was totally just faking it cause I'm such a master manipulator and I'm playing 5D chess with everyone including God himself I am NOT horny for this swarthy thicc thighed grass fed Italian adonis and I'm definitely not aroused by the fact he can rip metal grates out of walls with his bare hands. I am so not in love with the man that killed my brother it's crazy, you would not believe how not in love I am right now. Don't look at me I'll fucking kill you."