BOYS TURNED GODS date: december 29th, year 1 location: the grand palace time: 8 a.m. availability: @viktorlantsov
Boys will be boys, or so Anton had always heard.
As it was, there was nothing boy-like, nothing so childish or frivolous about his morning thus far. He’d awoken at some ungodly hour, too wound up by the situation with the Shu’s army to really get a decent nights sleep; though, to be fair, Anton had never much been one for sleeping. There were too many precious moments in day to fill, to many things to do to waste them on shut eyes. He’d always preferred to make use of dawn’s rays for reading paperwork, for moving pawns on a table to develop a potential strategy.
At some point after the sun had broken over the distant horizon, sending gentle waves of sunlight through his bedroom, Anton had grown weary of the words and the work and left to seek out other, more entertaining forms of passing the time. Instead he found Viktor’s bedroom door left ajar, allowing full sight of the spectacle taking place: his brother on a platform, standing above all of the servants in the room ( one seemed to be making the bed, another arranging his morning meal out in some peculiarly pleasing design, and not one but two flitting about his person, taking measurements and adding pins where some flaw was detected ).
Anton leans lightly against the doorframe, somehow seeming aloof and calm despise the chaos going on beyond palace walls, beyond the uncomfortable safety of Os Alta, and his chest rises and falls with the weight of an exaggerated sigh, as thought he is tired by the sight he now beholds: Viktor Lantsov, wearing his uniform. Or, well, not Anton’s exactly, but one custom fitted to his brothers shoulders. Still though, a uniform that Anton had been wearing for years, for what felt like decades. A uniform that had become as much a part of his soul as the Lantsov blood in his veins was.
Boys would be boys, and boys were petty, hostile little things, made all the worse by the Lantsov brothers status not as mere boys, but gods -- children made divine.
“Little brother,” he says, using techniques he had long ago learned from repeated years of belittling by an elder brother. There’s an arrogant twist to his lips at the playful antagonism, his mouth somewhere caught between bored hunger and an immutable need to prove himself better than everyone -- including Viktor. “Trying to fill shoes bigger than your own again, I see.”
Boys would be boys.