Discover Top Posts Tagged with #king!gojo

The Oath | royal!gojo x knight!reader | chapter 2

You are a lady knight bound by a strict codex. Satoru Gojo is a reckless, untouchable prince who wants nothing more than to see you break. Guarding him was supposed to be a walking death sentence. The court expected you to fail; Satoru expected you to be easily charmed and just as easily forgotten. But what begins as mutual contempt soon erodes into something forbidden, something unspoken. Forced to shadow his every move, the walls between you crack. But in a world ruled by oaths and duty, when the truth is forced into the open, the true legend won't be the throne or your resolve of steel, it will be the devastating price you were both willing to pay for a choice of your own.

pairing: prince/king!gojo x knight!reader

warnings: 18+ (mdni!!), explicit sexual content, afab!reader, fantasy kingdom au, knight!reader, prince/king!gojo, heavy angst, slow burn, enemies to lovers, forced proximity, secret relationship, forbidden love, extreme power imbalance, systemic sexism and internalized misogyny, classism, toxic family dynamics, self-sacrificial reader, emotional repression, graphic depictions of violence, war themes, blood and gore, grief/character death (secondary characters), mutual pining, mutual stubbornness, both are bad at feelings, eventual bittersweet happy ending

more tags to be added!

word count: 9k+

fic masterpost | previous chapter | next chapter

The corridor outside the court lady's chambers was cold in the particular way things got after midnight, laced with the day's exhaustion, the kind that left you just counting down the time before you could finally lay in your own bloody bed. Even the torches seemed to burn smaller, conserving themselves for morning, yet here you were.

You'd counted the exits twice already. Two — the door you stood beside, and a window on the far wall, second floor, drop survivable but not pleasant. You'd noted the wine service hours ago, watched the same attendant carry the same tray in, nothing switched, nothing lingering longer than it should. You knew the layout of this wing by now better than you probably knew your own quarters. Six months of this particular lady, give or take, though the names changed often enough that you'd stopped bothering to remember most of them. Though, you thought, since they didn't bother to learn your name, you'd be petty enough not to learn theirs. But you were genuinely losing track at times.

None of it would matter if someone actually wanted him dead. You knew that too. But knowing it didn't change what you did with the hours — you ran the sweep anyway, every time, because the one night you didn't would be the one night it mattered, and you weren't going to be the reason this post claimed another fucking name. The post was yours now, and you meant to keep it long enough that the court would finally be forced to learn that you took the duty seriously along with it.

The door opened a little after three. Three in the morning.

He came out half-dressed, shirt open, hair worse than usual, that particular looseness in his shoulders that told you exactly what kind of night it had been before he had to say a single word. He noticed you immediately — you were always exactly where he expected you to be, which seemed to amuse and irritate him in roughly equal measure depending on his mood.

Tonight, apparently, amusement won. The night had seemed to be a success, after all.

"Still here." He tsked. Stretching, completely unbothered, like the corridor was a mere extension of whatever room he'd just left. "What, you thought she was gonna murder me mid-thrust?"

"It's my job to be here, Your Highness."

"It's stupid is what it is." He tugged his shirt closed, lazy, not actually bothering with the buttons. "Nobody's poisoning me. Nobody's smuggling a blade in her—" he paused, smirked, clearly pleased with wherever the sentence had been about to go. "Ease off. She was just trying to suck my dick, not assassinate me."

You'd heard versions of this sentence enough times now that it should have landed soft, worn smooth by repetition. The crude language usually ranged from one profanity to another, the royal seemingly unbothered by how openly he said it — it should have gone in one ear and out the other by now.

It didn't, tonight. Something about it caught — sharper, closer to the surface than it usually sat — and you had to actually stop yourself before the words got too away from you.

"With respect," you said, voice level, head bowing slightly — the prince was still easily irritable even in good spirits — "I'd rather be wrong about nothing happening than right about something I didn't catch."

He blinked. Like the answer had cost more effort than he'd expected to provoke.

"Riveting," he said, after a beat too long. "Truly. I'll sleep well knowing you're out here protecting me from the lady's devastating bedroom skills."

You opened your mouth, almost drawing breath to spend it on another subtle argument. Oh, how you wanted to tell the princeling off — how badly you'd wanted it these past many weeks. Quite a record, for someone of your composure of steel, to have it repeatedly cracked by the prince without him even maliciously trying.

But you said nothing. It wasn't worth it. You bit your tongue instead and kept your eyes pinned to his terribly fastened hose, not wanting to — not desiring to — meet his gleeful blue eyes. You'd learned, years deep into a life built on saying nothing, that silence cost you less than the alternative.

He huffed — something between a laugh and a dismissal — and wandered off down the corridor toward his own chambers, not bothering to check if you followed.

You followed. You always did.

He didn't speak again for the rest of the walk, which was its own small mercy. You kept a polite distance behind him, watching the back of his half-buttoned shirt and the loose, unhurried way he moved through the corridors. The heels of his boots tap tap tapped the stone in a lazy, repetitive cadence as if he were entirely drunk on his own easiness. It was a castle that belonged to him in every sense except the one that actually mattered tonight: the sense where someone had to walk behind him, making sure he made it to his own bed alive.

Not that you were being overtly paranoid about him getting assassinated left and right, but you could never really know. Not with the way the political landscape had been looking recently.

Every careless walk cost something, and you'd rather not sleep than let that something happen. The door to his chambers shut a few minutes later. You exchanged glances with the guards positioned outside it that night and went off to your own.

How you hated the way he seemingly never cared about anything — every encounter easily forgotten, or simply never cared about enough for him to think about it properly, sensibly, in the first place.

And yet you weren't quite sure why you were still thinking about it.

This became a routine. Naturally.

It wasn't just the late-night rendezvous. It wasn't just standing around in this particular irritating stillness, waiting for the prince to be properly indulged.

It was everything.

There was the morning on the archery range, weeks back now, when he'd insisted on shooting while still half-drunk from the night before, laughing every time he missed, treating his own wavering aim like the funniest thing in the realm.

You'd worn a gambeson that day — the new one, lighter, freshly gifted and delivered by the seamstress.

He'd had a goblet of wine balanced on the fence post, sipping between shots like the range was a dinner party rather than weapons practice, and you'd told him, more than once, that drinking and loose arrows didn't mix well in any kingdom you'd ever served in. He'd told you, more than once, that you worried like an old woman, and that as far as he knew, you'd only ever lived in his kingdom. Touché.

You'd stood close enough to step between him and any stray nonsense — a startled horse, an overeager squire wandering into the wrong line of fire — closer than protocol technically required, because half-drunk princes with bows in their hands were exactly the kind of risk nobody else in this castle seemed to take seriously except you.

One particularly bad shot finally went wide — badly wide, clattering off the target stand entirely — and sent him stumbling back a step in surprise at his own failure, elbow catching the fence post clean, and the goblet went down with him. Wine arced through the air in a long, dark ribbon and caught you both — him across the chest, you and your brand new garment as well.

He stared at the mess of red staining his shirt for a second. Then at you.

He'd noticed you hovering and called out, loud enough for the watching guards to hear, that you looked more sour than the wine did, then started laughing. You hadn't found that especially funny either.

Or the council sessions — or rather, the ones he even bothered to attend — where he'd spent the entire two hours doodling something in the margin of a report nobody had asked him to annotate, sighing loud enough twice that the treasury minister visibly lost his place mid-sentence.

You'd stood behind his chair the whole time, feeling every eye in the room slide toward you for half a second, like you were somehow responsible for keeping a grown man interested in his own kingdom's finances.

That day you were particularly opinionated — well, in your own head at least — about how, why, and for what bloody reason the advisory would look at you like you were his fucking babysitter and not his guard. But then again, if every twenty-year-old heir acted the way Gojo did, the kingdoms were about to have some collective internal issues incoming.

The nights he tried to leave the castle grounds entirely weren't exactly rare either. One particular night, after a skirmish broke out near the capital between some merchant convoys a fortnight back, he decided to properly leave again — past the outer wall, past the last checkpoint, the kind of disappearing that would have taken him somewhere you genuinely couldn't have followed in time if something had gone wrong.

You'd caught him at the gatehouse, breathless, having sprinted the length of two corridors and a courtyard to do it, and you'd had to practically beg him to come back inside. The ever-amused prince had only half-listened, until you, at your wit's end, threatened to call the guards.

There was the afternoon he'd lost you on purpose — probably bitter from you tailing behind more than usual — properly lost you, not the usual half-hearted wandering. He'd slipped through a servant's passage you must have forgotten, timing it for the exact moment your attention had legitimately split between him and a courier trying to hand you a message.

Ten minutes. Ten minutes of cold, climbing dread, running the wing twice, your mind already constructing the worst version of events before you'd found him in the kitchens, charming a baker out of a tray of pastries, utterly unaware that you'd spent those ten minutes rehearsing how you were going to explain his death to his father.

He'd laughed when he saw your face. "Relax," he'd said, mouth full. "M'right here."

You hadn't found it funny. You still didn't, months later, the memory surfacing at inconvenient times like a bruise you kept forgetting to stop pressing.

The accumulated weight of his attempts to fluster you — a comment here, a look there, the particular smirk he wore when he thought he'd finally found the thing that would crack you.

He hadn't, not really, not in any way he could see. You'd gotten good at giving him nothing. Flat replies. Bowed head. Unreadable face. Which, quite frankly, made you wonder what would happen if you eventually did crack. Would he stop being so cruel, or would he retaliate tenfold?

Most days.

Though, to his grace, there were also the quiet ones — stretches where neither of you spoke more than required, maybe less, where hostility had stopped being something either of you performed and had just become the weather you both idled in. Those days were almost a relief, in their own exhausting way. At least silence didn't require you to keep proving anything.

You were so tired.

Not the kind of tired sleep fixed. The other kind.

The new girl's name was, well, you didn't remember — she'd introduced herself too quietly the first time. She was young, barely past her training year by the look of her, hands moving over the wardrobe with careful precision.

You stood near the door, not quite posted, not quite at ease — the in-between stance you were forced to use when you were technically on duty but the duty in question was watching someone else do theirs.

"She seems competent enough," Gojo said, not quietly, not exactly to you either — the way he said most things when he wanted an audience without admitting he wanted one. He was sprawled in the lavish chair by the window, one boot off, the other still half-laced, watching the young attendant refold something she'd already folded twice.

"She's merely nervous," you said. "That's different from incompetent."

"Mm." He didn't sound convinced.

The girl's hands slipped on the next fold — a small thing, fabric catching wrong, nothing that really mattered — and she flushed, glancing toward both of you like she expected to be reprimanded for it.

"It's fine," you told her, before the prince could say anything else. "Take your time."

She nodded, quick, grateful, and went back to it with slightly steadier hands.

Gojo watched the exchange with the lazy attention he reserved for things that hardly amused him.

"See, that's the trick," he said, swinging his half-laced boot idly. "Be a little useless, a little sweet about it, and everyone falls over themselves being nice to you." He glanced at you, deliberate, the corner of his mouth already curling. "You should try it sometime. Might do you some good, old woman."

You'd heard it before. Dozens of times by now, easy, the shape of it almost blunt from overuse — old woman, like your competence was a costume you'd put on specifically to annoy him. Like a mere three years older had turned you into an ancient crone, hated by everyone. You'd learned quickly that no matter how well, how strictly you followed the codex, how restlessly you did your own job, it would never be enough for him. Treating you like some fanatic, following him around. Well, apparently you might as well be.

Today, something in you didn't bow either. The drawer was overflowing with the shit he kept doing, and one small, tiny thing escaped your composure.

"Funny," you said, before you'd fully decided to say anything at all, "that you'd rather I flinch and fumble like she does than do the job I swore would keep you alive."

The words just stumbled out of your mouth. But by the look of it, the prince seemed rather delighted than irritated.

His eyebrows went up, slow, something sharpening behind his cunning eyes. "Careful."

"I'm only being honest, Your Highness." Your voice was level, but only barely. "Isn't that what I swore as well?"

That landed somewhere — you watched it land, the brief flicker of him recalculating, the realization that you'd just turned his own jab into a quote from his own oath ceremony, and for a second he didn't have a ready answer for it. That was certainly new.

"Don't get smart with me."

"I'm only doing my job," you said, sharper this time.

The room stilled for a moment.

Gojo sat forward, boot forgotten, and for a long moment you genuinely didn't know what was about to happen — whether he'd laugh it off, snap back harder, or whether the careful composure was about to detonate in front of a terrified attendant who'd picked the worst possible day to start this job.

"...Right," he said eventually, voice quieter than you'd ever heard it. He looked back toward her instead of you — she was very studiously staring at the floor now. "Carry on, then."

You felt the heat climbing up your neck.

"Apologies, Your Highness." Your voice clipped back into its usual careful register, the mask sliding into place with visible effort. "That was out of line."

He didn't answer. And for the very first time, it was you who had the last word.

It was the king who told you — well, told the prince, obviously — not the council. He called the two of you in alone, which should have told you everything about how seriously this needed to be taken, given how rarely the king bothered with anyone below ministerial rank directly.

"The delegation from the North-east arrives in a week," he said, plain, tired in the way he always seemed lately. "I expect both of you prepared. This dinner matters more than most things you've sat through, Satoru. I need you sharp."

"I'm always sharp," Gojo said, already halfway to the door before his father had finished the sentence.

"Satoru."

"I heard you, father. Delegation. ‘Suppose it has something to do with the peace treaty, no? A week from now. Sharp." He didn't slow down. "Now, allow me. I've got sparring in twenty minutes."

The king's expression didn't change, exactly, but something in it settled into the specific weariness you'd started recognizing — not anger, just the tired acceptance of a father who'd stopped expecting his son to behave differently and had long since redirected that hope elsewhere.

Toward you, mostly, you'd come to understand, whether either of you had ever said so out loud. But unlike others, perhaps because he understood the actual cost of it, he didn't expect you to correct his own son — that was beyond what you could do. What anyone could apparently do. Though the hopeful, almost pleading expectation in his eyes told you enough of what you were supposed to be doing, at all times.

You found him in the training yard twenty minutes later, exactly as promised, sword already in hand, working through forms with a focus he never seemed to manage for anything that actually required it.

"You heard your father," you said, no preamble.

"Clever girl, yes, I indeed heard him. I'm not deaf." He didn't break stride, blade cutting clean arcs through the morning air. "Doesn't mean I need a week to prepare for a bloody dinner."

"This isn't just dinner. You know that." You crossed your arms, watching him work. "You almost started a war with a stray comment at the harvest banquet. With people who actually like us."

"That's an exaggeration. I merely shared a humorous jab at the fürst's expense. To lighten the mood a little. Those old geezers didn't know how to have fun—"

You expected him to follow up, to call you old, ancient even, just like he always did, seemingly bothered by you being older than him. But it weirdly didn't come this time around.

"Is it." You held his gaze when he finally glanced over, surprised, maybe, at the lack of careful deference in your voice. "Because I'd rather not find out what an exaggeration looks like with people who don't."

He stopped mid-form — a bad one, on top of that — sword lowering slightly, something crossing his face that wasn't quite an annoyance, closer to genuine consideration, which was rarer from him than you'd ever admit out loud.

"You're getting uncharacteristically bold," he said, not unkindly. Almost curious about it, the corner of his mouth twitching as if he'd found a new game to play.

"I'm only following orders," you said. "There's a difference, Your Highness."

He huffed something that might have been a laugh, shook his head, and went back to his spar — but slower this time, more deliberate, and you let yourself believe, for a moment, that you'd actually gotten something through.

The entire week passed strangely, expectant and dreadful in a way.

The prince spent most of it deciding what to wear.

You found this out the hard way — passing his chambers on the second afternoon to find no fewer than six outfits laid across every available surface, the tailor wringing his hands over collar styles while Gojo held two near-identical doublets up to the wistful, sunny light, debating their merits with the gravity of a man choosing a battle strategy.

"This one says competent," he announced, to nobody in particular, "and this one says competent but approachable. Which message do we want?"

"The council materials," you said, from the doorway. "Have you actually read them?"

"I glanced."

"Glancing isn't reading, Your Highness."

"It's reading-adjacent, knight." He held up a third doublet. "What about this one. Does this say 'I respect the sovereignty of your nation' or does this say 'I am, regrettably, a very handsome man and there's nothing to be done about it'?"

You didn't dignify that with an answer. You'd tried, twice now, to find someone — anyone — who could give you something more useful than the thin briefing you'd already memorized.

The minister of foreign affairs had been too busy. His deputy had assumed, politely but firmly, that someone in your position would already know the relevant protocols. Nobody seemed to consider that knights coming from less fortunate social and political standings weren't taught this at all. Nobody seemed to consider that you needed teaching at all — some quick diplomatic briefing to show what was allowed and what wasn't, to point out a few important social cues — but it was all to no avail.

So you'd read the same three pages of formal guidance over and over until the words lost their original meaning, and told yourself, convinced yourself, that it would have to be enough.

It did not feel like enough, and it still didn't, even days later, when the delegation's banners finally appeared above the eastern road — a deep, regal green you didn't recognize against gold thread that caught the morning light in a way that felt almost deliberately impressive, visible from the upper courtyard long before the actual procession came into view.

You stood posted among the king's knights and the queen's, your place at the edge of their formation rather than fully inside it. You'd gotten used to this kind of alone. The autumn morning's chill only solidified it further. Surrounded by people who had each other — partners, rotations, someone to perhaps share a meaningless joke with during the long wait — while you had only yourself, your sword, and your thinning patience for your dear princeling.

"Didn't think you'd still be standing here," one of the king's knights said, low, beside you. You recognized him vaguely — one of the three from your very first day, the one who'd let himself have the crude joke at your expense, all those years and lifetimes ago, it felt like.

"Did you think I'd have quit?"

"Thought you'd be dead or disgraced, if I'm honest." He didn't say it unkindly. More like an old joke he was revising in real time. "No offense."

"None taken." You smiled weakly — not sad, nor offended, but rather taking in what it meant, and why it meant so much to you right now.

He grunted something close enough to approval, and didn't say anything else, but he also didn't make the joke you'd half-braced for, and that, you'd learned, was its own kind of compliment in a place like this. Nobody was laughing at your expense this morning. Nobody had, in longer than you could easily remember.

You let yourself feel something close to pride about that, standing there in the cold morning air, watching the delegation's procession wind up through the gates.

By evening, the foreign delegation had been settled into their guest wing, the formalities of welcome completed, and the castle had shifted into an expectant hush.

You found Gojo in his chambers an hour before the dinner was due to begin, finally dressed — the competent-but-approachable doublet had won, apparently — and looking, for once, genuinely nervous underneath the performed ease.

"You look like you're about to be executed," he said, catching your expression in the mirror's reflection rather than turning around.

"I look focused," you deflected, tentatively and subconsciously fixing the sash draped over your breastplate, like a reminder that it was still there, easing your own nerves in the process.

"You look like someone who's about to ruin my evening with excessive vigilance again." He adjusted his collar one final time, then turned to face you properly, something almost like amusement flickering across his face, though it didn't quite reach his eyes. He stopped in front of you, glancing down — at you, and at your gloved hand still resting on the sash. "Relax. It's just a dinner. With new, important people, but a dinner no less."

You didn't answer that. You weren't sure, yet, whether he was right.

The dining hall was smaller than the main, ceremonial receiving one — more intimate, by the castle's standards, which still meant a ceiling high enough to swallow most of the candlelight before it reached the corners, long tables set with more silver than you'd ever seen assembled in one place, the whole room lavishly arranged with a precision that told you everything had been considered. Flower arrangements, decorative, season- and occasion-appropriate. Even the number of servants and attendants seemed measured against some careful line between enough and too much.

The seating wasn't random either, of course. You'd watched the steward agonize over the chart for two full days — who sat beside whom, who faced whom across the table, who was close enough to the head to matter, and who was positioned, deliberately, just far enough to signal something you didn't fully understand.

You knew the shape of it, if not the texture. A war once, a big one, costly at that, decades back — so long ago that only the grandparents might have remembered its end — the kind that left its scars not on stone but on the way people still chose their words around each other, careful, measured, the particular caution of those who remembered exactly what carelessness had cost. The war was not won, not lost, on either side, and the peace that followed had been built less on trust than on exhaustion — two kingdoms too tired of bleeding to keep finding reasons to bleed — and it had held, somehow, for longer than anyone had likely dared to hope.

But a treaty built on truce rather than stability tends not to hold up, and the border regions knew it best. Skirmishes, trade cutoffs, land disputes, all poisoning the fragile relationship — enough that your king had been cautious enough to invite the representatives, the royal family, and its retinue together, if only to remind everyone that the peace was still strong, still holding.

You understood, in the bloodless way theory let you understand anything, that tonight was a kind of test — that the people seated so politely across this table carried something far older and heavier than themselves, generations of grief worn quiet beneath good manners, watching to see whether your kingdoms had learned anything in the years since, or simply forgotten how to bleed.

You stood behind Gojo's chair, naturally, hands loose at your sides, eyes doing the sweep they always did — except tonight your eyes kept finding things they had no category for.

A delegate's hand resting a half-second too long on the stem of his crystal glass. A pause in conversation that might have meant nothing or might have meant everything. The particular stillness of the older courtiers, the ones who might have remembered, you'd been told, what this peace had actually cost, wearing their pleasant expressions like something stitched on rather than felt.

You could read a blade from across a hall. You were beginning to understand, with a kind of cold, creeping dread, that you could not read this.

The king and queen exchanged very tight smiles, trying to hold a pleasant, if pointed, conversation about the minor incidents recurring along the border, growing more frequent by the season. Toasts were raised to everlasting peace, though the atmosphere bore little resemblance to any other court celebration you'd stood through. Gojo squirmed in his seat in front of you, the weight of more eyes than usual settled on him this evening, you could tell — not just the ordinary expectations and obligations owed to the crown.

The first course came and went without incident. Soup, something pale and delicately spiced, by the smell perhaps of mushrooms, served in silence broken only by the careful murmur of small talk — weather, the journey, the quality of the wine. You let yourself exhale, fractionally, somewhere around the second course, watching the prince make easy, charming conversation with the delegate seated nearest him, the kind of performance he was good at when he actually bothered to try.

The senior official — older, decorated, his bearing the particular quiet authority of someone who'd actually commanded soldiers rather than inherited the right to — had been quiet through most of it, watching more than speaking, deciding where to spend his words.

He spoke for the first time properly somewhere around the third course.

"Tell me, Your Highness," he said, mild, setting down his fork with deliberate care, "how does your kingdom structure its militia? I confess I find the variations between our nations fascinating."

"Ranks, divisions, the usual." Gojo waved a hand, unbothered, still riding the ease of the evening so far. "Boring bureaucratic stuff, honestly. You'd fall asleep before I finished."

"Humor me."

The prince obliged, lazily, sketching the shape of it — the militia's structure, the personal guard system, nothing especially detailed, nothing that should have mattered. Leading a seemingly pleasant conversation, which was quite a record for him.

"And the heir's personal protection," the official said, when Gojo finished, quirking his head. "How is that arranged?"

"One guard. Always has been." Gojo gestured, vague, toward you, without quite looking at you, the lace trim of his shirt catching in the air as he moved. "Tradition. Or law. Honestly I've stopped caring which."

The official's gaze moved to you for the first time, direct, assessing, and you held it the way you held everything — flat, correct, giving nothing away, though something in your chest had gone very still.

"Interesting," the official said.

Nothing else, for a moment. The conversation moved on, briefly, toward the trade routes, toward something safely, seemingly diplomatic, and you let yourself believe the official's interest had simply been curiosity, satisfied and moved past.

But dear, bloody lord, you were wrong. He returned to it two courses later, unhurried, like the thought had been turning over in his head the entire meal.

"Forgive my curiosity returning," he said, to Gojo, though his eyes flicked toward you again, briefly. "Your guard. She is — unusual, is she not? I don't believe I've seen the like in any court I've visited."

"She's good at her job," Gojo said, shorter this time, something tightening in his voice that hadn't been there before. He was getting annoyed at the persistence, you could tell as well.

"I don't doubt it." The official's tone stayed mild, almost gentle, which made it worse somehow than open hostility would have. "Though I confess, in my homeland, the thought would simply never arise. Women do not serve in our forces at all. The idea of one standing between the heir and a blade—" he paused, considering, "—it raises questions, I think. About priorities. About judgment."

The table's conversation thinned, several smaller exchanges trailing off as attention shifted, drawn by the particular gravity of a sentence that had just landed somewhere very dangerous.

You felt Gojo go rigid, the air seeming to cool around him, the sudden coiled stillness of someone about to do something he hadn't fully decided on yet.

"My judgment," Gojo said, voice still even, though the edge underneath it had sharpened considerably, "put the most capable person available in that position. If your homeland's judgment excludes half its population from ever being considered, I'm not sure that's the flex you think it is."

A ripple moved down the table — not shock exactly, something quieter, the recalibration of several people simultaneously deciding how concerned to be. The official's expression didn't change. That stillness again, the kind that read as offense precisely because nothing else moved. Gojo's eyes flickered toward you, chilling and short, perhaps to check that you were still there.

"Son." The king's voice, low, from further down the table. A small parental warning, nothing more, not yet sharp enough to actually cut through.

Gojo didn't appear to hear it.

"Forgive me," the official said, unhurried, "I meant no offense to the lady's competence. Only to the wisdom of placing your kingdom's most valuable asset — yourself — in hands that, by every tradition I've ever known, would be considered insufficient for the task. One wonders what message it sends. About readiness. About the seriousness with which your father's kingdom approaches its own defense."

That landed somewhere worse than the first comment had. It was supposed to, you had a feeling.

You watched Gojo's jaw set, watched something flicker behind his eyes that you recognized, distantly, from every council session he'd ever sat through bored and resentful, the specific fury of someone being told, again, that he wasn't being taken seriously.

"You're questioning my readiness," he said, voice dropping into something far colder now, "based on who I chose to stand behind my chair?"

"I'm questioning the wisdom of the choice, Your Highness. Not the person. There's a difference."

"Is there." Gojo's hand had curled, loose, around the stem of his own glass, the lace trim of his embroidered sleeve fisting in the process. "Because it sounds, from where I'm sitting, like you're telling me I don't know how to pick competent people. That I'm — what, careless? Reckless? Unfit to be making decisions about my own protection?"

"I made no such accusation."

"You didn't have to. You just spent the last two minutes implying it very politely."

"Satoru." The king spoke again, sharper this time, a real edge to it now. The entire room seemed unsure whether to bristle with amusement or hold its breath at the unseemly severity of the moment.

The prince's gaze flicked toward his father — and something in his expression hardened even further, as though being corrected in front of everyone was its own fresh insult layered on top of the first.

"I'm having a conversation," he said, not quite looking at the king, voice tight. "I'm allowed to have conversations at my own table."

"Your Highness." One of the council members — older, smooth-voiced, the kind of assessing tone used to manage exactly this sort of moment — leaned forward slightly. "Perhaps we might return to the matter of the trade routes. I believe there were several points still to—"

"I'm not finished," he snapped, turning on him now, a new target, fresh offense layering onto the old. "Don't manage me at my own table like I'm a child who needs redirecting."

"I only meant—"

"I know what you meant." His voice had risen now, properly risen, the careful register completely abandoned. "Everyone in this room seems very interested in managing me tonight. First him—" a sharp gesture toward the foreign official, "—questioning my judgment, n' now you, trying to herd me back into line like I can't be trusted to finish my own sentences."

"Satoru, that's enough." The king's voice had real authority in it now, the kind that should have stopped anyone. It did not apply to his own son, unfortunately.

"It's not enough until someone explains to me why my choices are apparently up for public debate at my own dinner table."

The room had gone properly quiet now, silent with a real weight to it, every eye at the table tracking the unraveling with a fascinated horror. The prince glared at everybody in the room, mere seconds, it seemed, from sending everybody — including the foreign king and queen — to damning hell.

Your pulse was climbing. This wasn't a blade. This wasn't a poisoned cup or a hidden weapon or anything your training had a category for. This was a prince, your prince, coming apart in real time over wounded pride — something he was supposed to let slide, something that had been a direct jab at you that he'd taken personally instead — in front of the exact people whose good opinion currently stood between your kingdom and something much worse than a mere awkward dinner.

You didn't know what to do. You genuinely, for one long, terrifying second, didn't know what you were allowed to do.

Your frantic eyes found the king's across the table. He held your gaze and gave the smallest possible nod. Permission, or something close enough to it.

You moved.

Your hand landed softly on Gojo's shoulder, firm, and he barely registered it at first, still talking, voice still rising, words spilling faster than you could fully track. You tightened your grip and leaned down, close enough that only he could hear.

"Your Highness. Stop."

He didn't.

"—and frankly," he was saying, to the table, to the official, to everyone and no one at this point, "if competence is the issue, I'd love to see exactly how many of your soldiers she could put down without breaking a sweat, since apparently that's the metric we're—"

Oh, for the heavens' sake. He was like a horse without reins, and he needed to stop before he accidentally, bloody well started a war. You straightened instead, voice pitched now to carry, flat and commanding, enough to steal every eye in the room toward you.

"Your Highness," you repeated. Sharp. Final. "It is enough — defending women's place in the army for the evening."

The table went silent. Properly silent, this time. Not out of amusement, not out of some unspoken dare. You could feel it pressing against your skin from every direction at once.

Gojo stopped talking. Well — at least that worked.

But the words were already loose in the candlelit air, hanging there, slowly swirling toward the ceiling, mingling with the candle smoke as the hall seemed to fall darker, shadows closing in as everyone now openly stared. Naming the exact thing everyone had spent the whole dinner so carefully not naming outright.

The official's expression shifted from something merely offended into something far colder — something that read less like de-escalation and more like confirmation of every doubt he'd just spent twenty minutes implying.

You'd stopped the prince, yes. But in the process, you weren't entirely sure you hadn't just made everything much worse.

After a few damning moments — the prince's chest rising to say something vile again — the king's dismissal landed like a stone.

"Leave us," he said, low, absolute, the kind of voice that didn't invite argument. "Now."

And for one terrible second you thought your prince might actually respond — might say the one thing that would make tonight unrecoverable instead of merely disastrous — but something in his father's expression must have miraculously reached him, finally, because he shoved his chair back instead, the legs scraping loud against the stone floor, and turned without another word to anyone at the table.

Without any further looks or aimed apologies — which you weren't sure the delegation wouldn't take offense to regardless — he just walked.

You closed your eyes and prayed to the heavens for this evening to be salvageable. You skidded into a trot to catch up to the prince, head bowed as you silently excused the prince's abrupt absence.

The corridors were quiet at this hour, the castle having collectively decided to be somewhere else entirely, and his footsteps were fast enough that you had to half-run to keep pace — the formal fabric of your ceremonial wear catching uselessly between your knees, your sword bumping against your hip with every too-quick stride, the sash across your breastplate shifting in a way that felt, tonight, faintly absurd. You'd stood in that hall wearing it like a statement. Now you were nearly running through a corridor trying not to trip over yourself.

Servants flattened against the walls as he passed. None of them made eye contact, immediately knowing not to provoke an already fired-up prince by, unfortunately, their mere existence.

"Your Highness." Low. Careful. Testing whether he was going to let you say anything at all.

He didn't slow down. Nor did he turn his head.

You tried again, slightly sharper. "The dinner—"

Bloody nothing. His back, the set of his shoulders, the rigidness. All aimed to not to acknowledge you at all.

You kept pace. The corridor stretched ahead, torchlight wavering as if it didn't want to be caught in the prince's wrath either. The silence between you was the loudest thing in it.

He turned the corner. You turned it with him.

His chambers were at the end of the next corridor, the guards at his door already visible. You thought about having to dismiss them. With Gojo's sour and sudden appearance, they would have questions — unspoken ones, but still. And you would have to take the blame for the prince's inability to hold his temper. Like you always had to, even if it wasn't your job to manage him. You thought about all the other things you'd had to go through, all the things he'd put you through.

You thought of the drawer, overflowing. Overflowing.

The guards, seeing you approaching, abandoned their posts and started walking in the opposite direction — not even waiting until you were fully by his chambers. Already sensing the foul atmosphere swirling alongside you.

But before the prince could disappear, upset, behind his carved doors, you had to talk to him. You had to let the steam out. You were just as upset as him, even if for completely different reasons. You'd had to embarrass him, embarrass the realm by having to stop him before he made everything worse — because he never knew when to stop indulging himself.

"You never listen," you said, to his back, sharper than anything you'd allowed yourself in a corridor this open, the words as venomous as your expression. "His Majesty tried to stop you twice — twice — and you kept going."

He stopped mid-stride as if something had caught him, and when he turned around his face was — not what you'd expected. Not the usual displeasure you'd gotten used to. This was something rawer than that, something that hadn't had time to arrange itself into anything manageable, the full weight of the evening sitting visibly on his features with nothing regal left to cover it. You had never seen him looking like this. His eyes holding thousands of words.

He grabbed your wrist — not rough, not gentle, somewhere in between — and turned back toward his door without a word, pulling you with him.

"Your High—"

The door opened. You were through it before you'd finished his title. It swung shut behind you both, the latch clicking into place, and the sound of it — small, final, private — seemed to change the quality of the air in the room entirely.

The public silence broke.

You stood where you'd landed — just inside the threshold, back nearly against the wood, still slightly breathless from the corridor, from the half-run, from the words left open, from the particular shock of his hand on your wrist.

First time he'd ever touched you. First time in months of proximity, months of standing close enough to step between him and a blade, that his hand had actually made contact with yours.

He'd let go like the leather had burned him.

You knew the layout of his room well enough to navigate it in the dark. But tonight it felt like somewhere else entirely, the familiar space pressing differently, the candlelight doing something strange with the shadows, the door shut behind you in a way that felt different from every time before.

Gojo turned on you instantly, the last shred of his performed, lazy elegance entirely gone.

"Shut the fuck up," he snarled, his voice vibrating with a raw, unmanaged fury before you had even drawn breath to speak. "Just shut your mouth for once."

You stared at him, your chest heaving, the sheer venom of it freezing you to the spot.

"Why can't you keep your tongue behind your bloody teeth?" he demanded, stepping aggressively into your space, using his demanding height to force you to tilt your chin up. "It is always 'Your Highness' this, and 'Your Highness' that, dripping with that exact, unbearable condescension. You had absolutely no right to put your hands on me in there! You had no right to tell me to stop!"

You should have swallowed it. Years of brutal discipline dictated that you drop your eyes, bow your head, and let his temper burn itself out against your silence. But the sheer, blinding injustice of it caught in your throat like bile. You had just risked your title, your family's name, and your very life to drag him back from the edge of a political cliff — and yet he was screaming at you over a bruised ego. The iron-clad mask you had oh so carefully maintained since the day you knelt and swore on your oath fractured into a million jagged pieces.

"I just saved your kingdom from your own bloody stupidity," you spat back, giving him back the very furious eyes he was staring down at you with. Your voice dripping with an open, venomous contempt you had never allowed yourself to use.

Something ugly flashed across his face. He turned away — sharp, sudden — and crossed to the far end of the room, toward the window, hands moving like they needed somewhere to be. Like the prince didn't know what to do with himself. The distance between you opened. You felt it like a change in pressure.

The window was dark, the castle grounds barely visible beyond the warped frame — torchlight on the outer walls, the world outside carrying on without you. Covered by blissful ignorance while this room was silently falling apart.

He stood with his back partially turned, and your eyes darted across the room in his absence and caught the desk. Books everywhere, open, left wherever he'd been reading last. And in the middle of them, the council materials from the week's preparation. Untouched. Spine still stiff. Not a single page turned. Merely glanced at.

"I should have you on your knees right now," he said, his voice dropping, still at the window. "Do you understand that? I'm being merciful by not demanding it. You are a mere guard dog. You stand behind my chair and you stay there."

Your hands fisted at your sides as his words cut deeper with each syllable. The prince always had a way with words, one way or another.

"Then find a better dog," you said. "Because the last two you had died because you couldn't be bothered to act like a prince. They bled for your carelessness. So forgive me if I don't trust you to hold the leash."

He flinched. Microscopic — a tightening of the jaw, something hitting somewhere unhealed — and the room went briefly still before he turned back toward you completely, the candlelight catching the white of his hair, his shadow long on the wall. Imposing. A warning.

He didn't retreat. The prince never did. He bared his teeth like a predator changing its strategy instead, and crossed back toward you — stopping somewhere in the middle of the room, close enough that the distance between you had collapsed again, close enough that you could see the specific anger in his eyes, the kind that knew exactly where to aim.

"You think you're my equal because they pinned some expensive silk to your hip?" His gaze dropped to the cape-skirt. The wavering golden light caught the embroidery, the crest at the hem, the snowy white of it against the steel, and you felt it the way you'd felt it at the fitting room, at the ceremony, at every moment since — looked at before anything else, always looked at first.

"Look at what they make you wear. Do you think they give skirts to real soldiers? They bolted that to your waist to remind every single person in this castle exactly what you are before you even open your mouth."

He stepped closer, his voice dropping into a cruel, mocking sneer.

"You think they see a knight when they look at you? They only see a lesser-house girl playing dress-up. Your opinion means absolutely nothing to the men who rule this world. You were put in that hall to be a pretty, expendable shield — not an aristocrat, not someone who should even be allowed to speak about state matters."

You wanted to rip it off. The cape-skirt, the sash, all of it — tear it free and throw it at him, let it land on his expensive doublet and his bruised pride and his absolute certainty about what you were and weren't allowed to be. You wanted to stomp on it. You wanted to make him understand that the thing he was weaponizing was the same thing the institution had put on you without asking, for exactly the same reason. So everyone always knew. So no one ever forgot.

You didn't move.

"Because no one ever taught me the rules!" you yelled.

The sudden volume cracked through the room — louder than you'd intended, louder than you'd allowed yourself, reverberating off the books and the ceiling and the window frame and the weapons on the table he'd never properly racked, all the small details of the room suddenly very present, very close, the familiar space closing in from every direction.

You couldn't stop it. The sheer, suffocating exhaustion, the sleepless nights, the terror of the dining hall — it all boiled over, stripping your composure down past the knight, past the oath, past the mask you'd been wearing since the day you knelt on cold stone and meant every word.

"No one ever—" you started, your voice breaking.

You snapped your mouth shut.

The rest of it — thought to ask if you had what you needed for this, whether you were drowning or managing, whether anyone had set you up to succeed, whether you were worth the trouble of seeing properly — lodged in your throat like broken glass. You swallowed it. Hard. It was more than you could allow yourself. More than he could ever comprehend.

The room went very quiet. The candlelight dimming as if by the stillness of the air. The bed in your peripheral vision — the attendants hadn't gotten to it yet, they rarely did, the prince unmade it quickly enough afterward anyway. The strange domesticity of it, something you had never allowed yourself to dwell on and did not want to allow yourself to dwell on, sitting strangely in the middle of all of this.

Gojo stared at you. The furious momentum of the argument had stuttered — the raw break in your voice catching him off guard; after all, it was the first time you had allowed yourself any emotion other than that annoying stoicism in front of him. Something shifted behind his expression that wasn't the anger or the wounded pride.

"No one ever what?" he demanded, stepping into the sudden quiet. One step closer. "Go on. Say it. The truth, knight."

You clamped your jaw. A direct order from the crown. Yet you refused it outright. Not tonight. Not now. Not to him. You were ashamed of even thinking those words, and you would rather swallow a thousand blades than admit them out loud for the prince to play with.

"No," you said, your voice shaking, weaponizing the pain and redirecting it directly at his chest. "It doesn't matter."

Because you couldn't stop yourself. Because it was what he deserved.

"You are a spoiled aristocrat! Rich and blessed enough to never have to care about the consequences! I have to bleed for your mistakes! My life, my family's name — I risk everything to babysit a man who treats his own safety like a tavern joke!"

He crossed away again — back toward the window, the full length of the room opening between you — and the distance felt vast, enormous, the space measured in something that had nothing to do with feet. The candle on his desk, the fast one, was nearly spent, the flame burning lower than the others, the light in that corner dimming fractionally.

"Everyone already paints me as the villain before I've done anything!" he fired back, his own voice cracking with a bitter, defensive desperation. "You think I asked for the prophecy, the expectations, or any of it?"

"The system is what benefits you." Your voice quieter register, yet sharper. "Benefits all of you. You can afford to lose your temper because the system will absorb it. It will blame someone else, smooth it over, find a ready explanation. I don't have that. Everything that went wrong tonight will land on me, and you knew it. You knew it and you kept going anyway. Costing me far more than venomous stares the next morning."

The room went dead silent.

Him at the window. You at the door. The full distance of the room between you, and everything that had been said filling it — all of it suddenly very visible, very specific, witness to everything neither of you could take back.

He went completely still. The fiery, wounded anger drained from his face, replaced by something colder. More precise.

"You think you're here because you earned it?" His voice flat. Empty. The candlelight and the shadows making his otherwise regal features more severe, more haunting. "You think anyone looked at you and decided you were worthy of protecting the crown?"

Your breath hitched.

"You were simply the only woman in the barracks when the council wanted to manufacture an apparently very amusing punishment for me," he said, delivering each word slowly, deliberately, aimed. Aimed at your pride, at your entire purpose. "That is the only reason you are standing in my chambers. You weren't a strategic choice. You were a deliberate insult."

He leaned in slightly despite the distance, his eyes hollow and freezing, his voice a vile whisper in the charged air between you.

"You are the joke," he said. "N' I'm the punchbag."

The silence that followed was total.

The fast candle on his desk guttered — the flame bending sideways, nearly going out before it steadied — and the light shifted briefly, throwing new shadows across the far wall, the room the same as it had always been and entirely changed.

You didn't scream. You didn't slap him. You didn't cry. Though you wanted to. He had worn you thin — not only tonight, but across the long months of being his shadow. His mere guard dog.

The confirmation landed square in your chest — the suspicion you'd carried for months, examined now and found to be exactly what you'd feared — and your composure did not shatter. Well, did not shatter any further, that was. It went cold and still, the fury draining out and leaving behind something that felt like nothing but wasn't. Though you were surprised by the deliberate phrasing — the prince landing a jab at himself while driving it straight into your very guarded, very fragile underbelly. And it bled.

"Understood."

One word. Coming out clipped. Devoid of everything. You had nothing left, yet still words to spend — but you chose to be the bigger person. You were always the bigger person. More words could be costly, while his were mere ventilation. Your head could be on the block tomorrow while he laughed it off. You couldn't afford anything. The prince was there for the stupidity, as you had apparently so diplomatically put it on the record.

Gojo blinked. Something flickered through his expression. He opened his mouth.

You didn't give him the chance.

"I will take my post, Your Highness."

You turned on your heel. You crossed the room — the few strides you had unknowingly made into it, away from the door — and you felt each step taking three times as long as it should, the distance playing with you, trying to trap you in.

Your hand found the door handle and you pulled it open and stepped through, pulling it shut behind you with a quiet, damning click that cost you more restraint than anything else in the last ten minutes.

His attendants were waiting in the corridor outside. Three of them — the young girl among them — eyes carefully averted, expressions arranged into the blankness of people who have heard something they'd rather not. Pretending otherwise.

You walked past them. You could feel your cheeks heating and you wanted to tell them off, the boldness the prince had surgically riled up in you not yet willing to settle back into the depths of your soul where it belonged.

You took your post.

The unsettling feeling had nowhere to go. The drawer had spilled open, yet ended fuller than before. The night stretched ahead of you, long and quiet and entirely without resolution, and you stood in it the way you stood through everything — chin up, eyes forward, giving the corridor nothing it hadn't already taken.

Your heart wouldn't slow down though.

Loud and relentless and entirely indifferent to everything you'd decided to perform, beating like it hadn't gotten the message yet that the fight was over.

As you kept replaying his dreadful words, leaving his mouth like a death sentence. You'd known, somewhere. You'd always known, somewhere. The suspicion had lived in the back of your mind since the letter arrived with the ink still smeared, since your commander said the position was yours if you wanted it and your family had already been notified, since the first time you'd walked into a room and watched people's eyes move straight past you to him.

You'd just never let yourself finish the thought. Protecting your peace, your pride, and your dream — the change you wanted to happen.

Now he'd finished it for you. You stood in the dark with it. Full of fury and unexplainable sadness. And the night very long.

── Dividers from pxrce-lain and seulzitos!

#king!gojo

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#king!gojo