you can only remember (what you want to forget) - T - 2.5K
Ramil/Paytai - Episode 4 Coda/Deleted Scene
“Your highness, you shouldn’t be the one to do this,” Paytai softly chides, a familiar refrain. “It’s beneath you.”
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In the aftermath of Ramil's stunt and his father's rage, Ramil tends to Paytai.
Read on AO3 ~*~
The duality of skin has always amazed Ramil. No one tells you that a whip can leave clothing perfectly intact and leave the skin beneath with bruises, welts, and places where the skin has literally popped open. Then it heals, raised and stronger somehow. Frankly, Ramil is surprised that there are still places on Paytai’s back where the skin will still pop open under clothing rather than just a myriad of welts and bruises.
But here they are, red and raw with trails of blood weeping down Paytai’s back.
The feeling of sick begins to rise in his throat, and the tremor in his hands won’t stop. Ramil closes his eyes and forces a deep breath in through his nose and curses internally about how unsteady it is. He should be better than this, stronger at least. Ramil certainly isn’t the one who was beaten.
“Your highness, you shouldn’t be the one to do this,” Paytai softly chides, a familiar refrain. “It’s beneath you.”
His eyes snap open; they're still in Paytai’s room that holds all the signifiers of a man of Paytai’s station and nothing truly visible of the man Paytai is. They’ve never known anything besides the opulence of his father’s palace, with the brocade walls and ornate furniture. There are hints of Paytai’s choices, if you know what to look for, a rose from Prince Khanin’s coronation drying on a shelf, a rapier that Paytai took to be repaired months ago that remains. There’s a framed photo of the parents that gave him over to the Bhuchongpisut family and seemingly never looked back. He wonders if the land and additional title they received in exchange for their son’s life was worth it to them.
Ramil forces his attention back to the situation at hand. The silver tray beside him is set up the way it always is: a silver bowl with fresh water in one corner, green cloths freshly laundered and carefully folded, to their right a bundle of antiseptic swabs, further right still sit two pots of salve: one for bruises and one for open wounds, and then finally bandages and a fever patch.
Twenty years. It’s been twenty years since the first time his father made Ramil stand and watch as he beat Paytai. When he was little he wondered if it would ever get easier. Somehow, for Ramil, it’s only ever gotten worse.
The crack of the whip is still a shock every time. And now Paytai doesn’t cry like he used to, somehow holding back the pain. His hands aren’t even shaking as he sits between Ramil’s thighs and carefully launders his blouse in his own bowl of water, a drying rack to his left, in an attempt to keep the blood from setting.
“You’re my responsibility,” Ramil snaps, the imperiousness a replacement for his impotence.
And it’s a lie. Paytai has been responsible for Ramil their whole lives.
Ramil is however responsible for the damage done to Paytai. It is, as his father likes to remind him, entirely his fault Paytai is like this. So he clenches his jaw, takes his shaking hands and picks up a clean cloth and dips it into the warm water. He slides a long, gentle stroke down Paytai’s back, listening for any hint of pain. The only thing he hears is the soft sluicing of water as Paytai continues with his task.
So Ramil continues with his own. Gently wiping away the blood, leaving the bowl of fresh water tinged with pink.
The first time his father had deemed them old enough and the infraction serious enough to warrant the bullwhip, Ramil had wailed in concert with Paytai demanding that someone, anyone, help him. When the nurse had apologetically said they were forbidden from helping as this was Ramil’s punishment, he had ordered her to bring him the proper materials and tell him what he needed to do.
This is his karma.
“How did you envision this ending, your highness?” Paytai asks, as he sets the blouse aside on the rack and begins working on his undershirt.
Even now, Ramil doesn’t think he ever envisioned the ending. Not really. He knew what he wanted them to feel: lost, alone, helpless, terrified.
“You weren’t supposed to be home!” Ramil snaps, instead of answering, because the only thing he could actually envision as the end was this. And how he might avoid it.
“He would have just picked someone else,” Paytai reasons. Before Ramil can point out that was his hope, Paytai whispers, ”or waited.”
The ill feeling comes back. Ramil forces it back down while opening an antiseptic swab with more force than is necessary, and the swab nearly flies out of his hands. Clenching it and his jaw, Ramil narrows his eyes and starts on the first wound.
“What were you thinking?”
“Clearly, I wasn’t,” Ramil grinds out.
It’s a familiar question and again the answer is always the same. He’s been called thoughtless his whole life. Any time Ramil attempts to try to think how his father might, what his father would expect, it always ends the same.
There’s a loud hissing sound and a splash. Ramil pulls back as if burned. He hadn’t even realized how hard he was cleaning the wounds.
A hand covers his own, and Paytai is looking at him with those dark eyes. “Talk to me.”
The request is softer and kinder than Ramil deserves. Feelings threaten to choke him and Ramil breaks eye contact.
“Turn around,” he orders, forcing the feelings away. “You know the longer we wait the worse the chance of scarring will be. I had the doctors at the medical center work on a new formula.”
“P’Ramil,” Paytai says, dropping the formality required of their divergent ranks.
And to that, Ramil has no defenses. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath and lets it out. When he opens his eyes, Paytai is still looking up at him with a love Ramil has never deserved.
“Turn around, please,” Ramil asks, gentling his voice from a command to a request.
Paytai gives him a nod and turns back around, but doesn’t pick up his washing. Instead he pillows his chin on his knees. The price of Paytai’s acquiescence is of course that Ramil also complies.
Ramil forces himself to be gentle as he resumes cleaning the open wounds. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just…”
The rage is still there, simmering under the surface. It’s not even that Khanin’s arrival means that there are more ways for him to fail to live up to his father’s expectations and no guarantee of the Bhuchongpisut family reascending to the throne.
“He was raised outside of Emmaly with no idea of his station, or decorum, or proper etiquette, and everyone thinks the sun shines out of his fucking ass.”
“You’re jealous,” Paytai translates.
And why the hell wouldn’t he be?! He’d spent the entirety of Prince Khanin’s coronation dance, as he had the dozens of official events that had come before, watching for any glimpse of Paytai. And then not only had Khanin dared to grab Charan but they had stayed in that damn embrace forever. As if they belonged together, center of attention.
And then—
“I can’t even brush up against you in public and they got a whole damn publicity campaign after that fucking dance?!” Ramil asks, trashing the last of the swabs. It falls softly and not with the clatter he had wanted.
The unfairness threatens to choke him. Ramil would give anything to dance with Paytai, except the one thing it would likely cost them—their ability to be together. If he had embarrassed his father on such a large scale, Ramil doesn’t know how his father would choose to torture him: would he just send Paytai away? Kill him and make Ramil watch? Or just go to his favorite long-term punishment of spacing the whippings out every three days so that Paytai would just start to heal before reopening the wounds. Sometimes he would lock them in separate rooms, afterward. His father particularly enjoyed leaving Paytai in a room with cameras so Ramil could see him but couldn’t get to him.
Ramil picks up the fresh pot of salve and begins to carefully apply the new formula to the wounds across Paytai’s back.
“Prince Khanin wasn’t raised as royalty,” Paytai reminds him, ”He doesn’t understand.”
“That’s not what bothers me!” Ramil yells, knowing he’d pointed out Khanin’s naivitate moments ago. “It doesn’t matter if he understands or not. It matters that he is allowed. That it was encouraged by the palace. That he is praised and called benevolent and kind and warm.”
When Ramil was young, he used to think it would have been better if he was the prince who had died. He could never be the son his father wants, no matter how hard he tries. Ramil had been certain that Prince Khanin would have been a good prince, one that made his father proud, the right sort of child to ensure his father’s legacy. The world might have been better off if Ramil had been the one to die, as he’d never been quite right as a prince of a royal house of Emmaly. Besides, Father considered Uncle Tharin soft. Chances were a child raised by Prince Tharin would have been given the grace to be a child.
Now faced with the reality of Prince Khanin, Ramil hates it even more. Because they’re the same, Khanin and him. Except Khanin is free. He’s allowed to be loud and himself and touch a man that he shouldn’t and he shines when he walks into a room. And Ramil is aware that he is considered cold and remote, but what could he have been if he didn’t have to be exactly what his father expects at all times?
“That’s not his highness’s fault,” Paytai reminds him, generous to a fault.
“I know.”
“It’s not yours, either,” Paytai adds.
Ramil drops his hand from Paytai’s back.
“Do you know what I would do to be able to dance with you in public? To hold your hand? To add food to your plate at a formal dinner? To merely be allowed to stand side by side rather than have you remain a foot behind?”
“But I can’t. There’s nothing I can do that won’t end up…here.”
With a whip in his father’s hands landing across Paytai’s back. In this room that Ramil sneaks to through the servant’s passages with the fresh wounds and scars crossing Paytai’s back. This space is the only place they have to actually spend time together out of the surveillance of his father. And while Ramil tests the boundaries of what his father knows of and doesn’t speak on, he knows that if his father felt publicly humiliated it would be a different story.
Nothing he can do that doesn’t end with fresh scars across Paytai’s back. He’s tried to be the son who wasn’t a disappointment. To be someone who his father saw as worthy and spare Paytai the pain of bearing the weight of Ramil’s failures.
“It’s not fair,” he grumbles mostly to himself.
“It was never going to be.”
And just like that the rage he’d banked down to embers rages into a full fire again. Paytai’s words are true. Their lives were never going to be fair. But oh, watching Prince Khanin be offered even the illusion of choosing his fate when Ramil has known for years he will have to marry the wife of his father’s choosing, someone in whom Ramil will have no real interest or care in, and betray Paytai to bring fresh heirs to the Bhuchongpisut line.
“How the hell can you be so damn accepting? Aren’t you furious?”
Ramil swallows the rage down every day, so much that it threatens to choke him. But the rage has become what he lives on. It sustains him in the moments he thinks about giving up. He cannot give up before his father dies and Ramil is able to spit on his grave.
“What should I do?” Paytai snaps back, turning his head to look at Ramil. “Rage about the room? Lose people in caves in a fit of pique?”
“Maybe!”
Paytai sniffs before turning his head back. His voice turns remote as he says, “You’ve got that quite covered for us, then.”
The rage gives way to shame again, in this endless cycle Ramil is impotent to escape.
“I’m sorry. I’m no good at any of it.”
Not at being the Bhuchongpusit heir. Not at finding clever ways to outflank his enemies. Not at being able to envision the end from the beginning. Not at preventing the inevitable future for himself and Paytai.
“You’re good at plenty of things, your highness. You just let your emotions get the better of you.” Paytai leaves off the word <i>again</i> but Ramil still hears it.
“Sometimes,” Ramil says, picking up the bandages to begin the final phase of tending to Paytai’s back. “I think my father would have preferred you as an heir to me.”
“No, your highness, I’m still the wrong sort entirely.” His voice has taken on a hint of amusement that Ramil has no idea where Paytai has pulled that emotion from.
“Phi,” Ramil insists, brain snagging on an entirely different problem in that sentence. “In here it should be phi.”
“Unless you’re cross with me and then it’s always your highness.”
“You really should leave.” Ramil does not add: me, this castle, the kingdom.
The bandages cover the wounds that will soon become scars, but it doesn't cover what has happened. Instead it’s another reminder of what is and what has always been.
“There’s nowhere for me to go, phi. I’m just as trapped as you are.” Which hurts even more. Ramil can never be certain if Paytai would actually stay with him if they were to be freed. “I just wish you wouldn’t swipe at anything that reminds you we’re in this cage.”
“I really thought you would be out of town. That this one wouldn’t touch you.”
Paytai’s head sags further onto his knees as a shiver begins to take over his body. “I came back when I realized Prince Khanin would be staying with us. I knew how you felt,” Paytai slurs, voice becoming heavy with sleep. “I didn’t want you to have to face his royal highness and Charan alone.”
Paytai remains better than Ramil in every way, and Ramil will never actually deserve to have this man by his side.
Ramil places the last bandage and cups his hands under Paytai’s elbows to support his companion to his feet. “The fever is starting to set in. Let’s get you into bed.”
The familiar cadence of wrapping Ramil in his night clothes, handing him some paracetamol, and putting a fever patch across his forehead take no time at all. He’s pliable now as Ramil ushers him under the covers. Paytai whines as Ramil steps away to ready himself for sleep. When he crawls under the covers, Paytai finds his way into Ramil’s arms in a way that belies how tired and vulnerable he is at the moment. Ramil cannot hold him back, though, for fear of touching the wounds he’s just dressed.
And in the dark of a lower bedroom, Ramil stares at the ceiling while Paytai shivers, and dreams of a world where they win, just once.