War Prize Reader watched the king return beneath a sky bruised purple by smoke and dying fire. Blood darkened the edges of his armor, fresh and old alike, and every soldier in the camp seemed to shrink beneath the weight of his presence. Uraume removed the ruined plates from his shoulders while General Nanami delivered reports from the front, and then, as though dragged by fate itself, Sukuna’s gaze settled upon you.
War Prize Reader stood chained to a weathered post at the center of the command tent, wrists bound in iron and clothes stained with mud, ash, and battle. Your hair hung in tangled waves around your face, catching stray lantern light like threads of gold among ruin, and your eyes remained impossibly calm despite the circumstances. “Is she a whore?” Sukuna asked without ceremony, his voice carrying the exhaustion of war and the cruelty of a king who had forgotten mercy.
War Prize Reader heard Nanami answer with a shrug. “Taken from enemy territory. Beautiful enough to earn coin, dangerous enough to warrant caution.” Sukuna’s eyes traveled over you once before a smirk touched his mouth. “Rather pretty for a bed warmer,” he murmured, and though the soldiers laughed, something unreadable lingered in his stare.
War Prize Reader should have looked away. Instead, you met his gaze directly, silent and unyielding, while the storm rattled against the canvas walls. Something flickered across the king’s face then…a brief irritation at finding no fear where fear should have lived and he waved dismissively. “Leave her here.”
War Prize Reader became another object inside his war tent, another trophy gathered from conquered lands. Yet every evening his attention drifted toward you despite himself, finding your quiet figure arranging maps, replacing extinguished candles, or mending torn banners with scraps of cloth scavenged from camp. The king who commanded thousands discovered he disliked entering a room that did not contain you.
War Prize Reader learned the rhythm of Sukuna’s temper before anyone else. You knew which reports would sour his mood, which generals would test his patience, and which victories would leave him strangely restless. While advisers argued over strategy around the campfire, your fingers would smooth loose strands of hair from his brow, and somehow the monstrous king listened longer before reaching for violence.
War Prize Reader decorated the bleak military encampment with small stolen comforts. Candles appeared where darkness had gathered, carved trinkets emerged from discarded wood, and strips of crimson ribbon found their way around sword hilts before battle. Sukuna mocked every gesture publicly, yet none of your gifts were ever discarded.
War Prize Reader listened as soldiers began whispering. They spoke of the king who demanded your presence during councils, the king who searched for you after every battle, the king who stared too long whenever you laughed. They did not notice how carefully you listened to troop movements, supply routes, and battle plans hidden inside those same conversations.
War Prize Reader quickly became the most dangerous distraction in the king’s encampment, though nobody would have been foolish enough to say so aloud. The men who marched beneath Sukuna’s banners noticed how his temper burned less fiercely when you occupied the same space, how reports that once might have ended with bloodshed now received only a cold glare and a dismissive wave. Entire evenings passed with commanders waiting for decisions while the king listened to your quiet observations instead. It was a strange thing to witness a conqueror feared across continents finding solace in a captive taken from enemy lands.
War Prize Reader sat beside countless campfires while strategy meetings unfolded deep into the night. Maps covered every available surface, generals argued over troop movements, and messengers arrived carrying news soaked in mud and blood, yet Sukuna always seemed aware of where you were. Even while discussing war, his gaze would drift toward your figure curled beneath blankets near the flames. The habit became so obvious that seasoned veterans eventually stopped pretending not to notice.
War Prize Reader learned very quickly that Sukuna’s patience was a resource more valuable than gold. Commanders measured every word around him, servants avoided lingering in his presence, and even trusted advisers rarely risked challenging his opinions. Yet somehow you existed beyond those rules. You could question his reasoning, interrupt his thoughts, or speak when others remained silent, and the king merely regarded you with amused irritation instead of anger.
War Prize Reader often found the king waiting within the command tent after returning from battle, armor discarded carelessly beside his chair while the sounds of the camp echoed beyond the canvas walls. The burden of conquest never truly left him; it lingered in every scar, every exhausted breath, every casualty report stacked across his table. Yet whenever you entered, something in him visibly relaxed. The tension remained, but it no longer seemed unbearable.
War Prize Reader witnessed moments that few others ever saw. There were nights when devastating reports arrived from distant battlefields, when supply caravans vanished and offensives collapsed beneath enemy resistance. Those evenings darkened the king’s mood enough to silence entire gatherings. Yet your presence often interrupted the spiral, drawing his attention away from frustration long enough for reason to return.
War Prize Reader became the center of endless whispers drifting between soldiers after sunset. Some believed you had enchanted the king somehow. Others claimed Sukuna merely enjoyed having something beautiful amid endless violence and ruin. Whatever explanation they chose, nobody could deny the truth standing before them: the king searched for you instinctively whenever he entered a room.
War Prize Reader discovered that victory celebrations changed as the months passed. In earlier years, Sukuna had surrounded himself with trophies, entertainers, and endless reminders of conquest. Now he often abandoned those festivities entirely, choosing instead to remain inside the command tent while distant celebrations echoed through the camp. More often than not, those evenings ended with him fucking you rough while the rest of the world faded away.
War Prize Reader slowly began noticing the loneliness hidden beneath Sukuna’s arrogance. Power had isolated him long before you arrived, separating him from ordinary companionship through fear and reputation. Every person who approached him wanted something…favor, protection, promotion, survival. Yet with you, conversations existed without agendas, and that unfamiliar comfort became something he found himself seeking again and again.
War Prize Reader became the calm at the center of a kingdom built upon warfare. Whenever Sukuna prepared to ride into battle, his eyes lingered upon you before turning toward the horizon. Whenever he returned victorious, he searched the camp until he found your familiar silhouette waiting among the lantern light. And though neither captor nor captive ever spoke openly about what was forming between them, the entire encampment could see it growing stronger with every passing season.
War Prize Reader carried secrets beneath every smile. Each report overheard inside the command tent found its way beyond camp boundaries, delivered through hidden channels to General Suguru and, eventually, to Satoru Gojo himself. Every kindness Sukuna offered became another weapon placed into your hands.
War Prize Reader hated him some days. You hated the villages burned beneath his banners, hated the fear his armies carried, hated the ease with which he spoke of conquest. Yet there were evenings when he returned wounded from battle and allowed only you near enough to remove the blood from his skin, and hatred became something far more dangerous.
War Prize Reader almost forgot the mission. Almost. There were moments when Sukuna spoke of the future instead of war, moments when his hand lingered against yours while discussing the kingdom awaiting his return. In those rare seconds, the monster disappeared, leaving behind only a lonely king imagining a life he had never been allowed to want.
War Prize Reader sent the final piece of intelligence three nights before the decisive battle. Enemy forces moved precisely where Sukuna least expected them to be, striking supply lines and surrounding divisions with terrifying accuracy. The trap closed because you had drawn its shape yourself.
War Prize Reader watched the empire begin to crumble. Messengers arrived breathless. Generals vanished into emergency councils. Victory, once certain, slipped through Sukuna’s fingers like sand through a clenched fist. For the first time since your capture, fear entered the camp.
War Prize Reader disappeared before dawn.
War Prize Reader left behind only an extinguished candle, a crimson ribbon, and a command tent that felt unbearably empty. Sukuna returned to gather what remained of his forces, already preparing for retreat toward his homeland, and found your sleeping furs untouched. He stood there for a long time, staring at the space where you should have been.
War Prize Reader was nowhere to be found. Not among prisoners. Not among refugees. Not among the dead.
War Prize Reader became the final betrayal, became the answer, and the reason he lost.
And as realization settled like poison beneath his ribs, Sukuna closed his eyes and finally understood that the war had not been stolen by Gojo’s armies. It had been stolen by the beautiful captive he had allowed into his heart, the spy he had mistaken for something precious, the woman who vanished carrying every secret he had ever trusted her with.
Silver king Gojo who sees his new bride for the first time when she is bathing before the wedding ceremony and gets sick. She’s nothing more than a child who had barely learned the ways of the world and was now to be married to him. He feared he would corrupt her
Silver King Gojo who’s known for being so ruthless and cruel that it shocks people to see he has such a delicate woman for a wife. What shocks them more is seeing Gojo swoon so hard for you that he would make a fool of himself if you asked him too.
Silver King Gojo who lays in bed and watches his wife sleep just to learn the details of your face without scaring you off.
Silver King Gojo who is the sweetest love maker because he doesn’t want to hurt his little fawn. The first time you initiate intimacy he asks you if you’re doing this for him or you.
Silver King Gojo who comforts you after a hard day and you pull away from his shoulder. “I want to be stronger, I feel like such a nuisance to you.”
He kisses your eyelids, smoothing your hair from where it has stuck to your wet skin. “You never have to be strong around me, I am your husband. My job is to be strong for you; however, that does not make you a nuisance.
King!Satoru never knew how to share. He's always gotten what he wanted when he demanded it. From women to jewels, this man received what he spoke of no matter what. Emperors from neighboring lands were intimidated by the spontaneous king. He's been known to act quite ruthlessly to those he deems lowly.
King!Satoru has never had a problem taking what he wanted. Especially when it came to a woman who caught his eye. So when Satoru had found you under the rubble and debris left behind by your fallen kingdom, he expected you to run into his arms and thank him. Instead, you ran into his arms and slapped him across the face. He was, for once in a long time, stunned. So much so that he didn't retaliate immediately. If it weren't for his guards, you might have taken his distraction as ample opportunity to attack even more.
King!Satoru immediately instructed his men to take you with them on their return home. You had a spark that no other woman has ever been brave enough to ignite within him. Satoru made sure the guards weren't too rough as they guided you into his castle. He quickly made haste to his room so he could change into comfortable robes and perhaps find some clothing you could change into. After all, your clothes had been tattered and dirtied as the buildings burned and crumpled to the ground around you.
King!Satoru was angry when he learned that his guards had put you in the dungeon. That's no place for a lady under his eye. He ordered some maids to prepare a room for you, and he traversed down to the dungeon and got you himself. Afterward, he wouldn't let anyone touch you or be alone with you again. Although, Satoru quickly realized he made a mistake giving you your own room. Luckily, it was right down the hall from his, unluckily you attempted to sneak out every night. Satoru would always sense when you had left bed, and he made quick haste of catching you before you could escape.
King!Satoru is in a panic when he lazily opens your bedroom door 3 hours after the full moon rose high in the sky, expecting to find you picking at the window locks, only to see your bedroom completely empty. He doesn't waste a moment more as he grabs his sword and shoes before running through the halls of his castle. He should have invested in stronger metal locks for his castle doors. Satoru is about to call out for his guards to prepare to search the grounds when he pauses mid-stride and takes a step back so he's looking into the kitchen. There you were, minding your sweet business as you prepared yourself a warm plate of food. Satoru would have sworn that a kitchen was no place for a lady of your position, but then he saw you doing something so mundane as cooking yourself a meal, and he melted.
King!Satoru doesn't interrupt your time and decides to turn around and go back to his room instead. He almost kicks his feet like a young girl when he hears you walk past his bedroom door to go back to your room. You had stopped trying to escape.
King!Satoru notices the relationship between the both of you growing stronger after that night. He saw you in a different light. You weren't just a woman he had won and brought back as a trophy. You meant a great deal to him. You were the sweet and normal he needed in his life. A bond formed between you both, for better or worse, and you quickly grew fond of the King. You ignored the whispers about your relationship with him, choosing not to acknowledge your growing feelings.
King!Satoru grew extremely protective of you in the past few months you had been with him. There was a voice in the back of his head constantly telling him that you were the one. For whatever reason, he just KNEW it.
You learn quickly that once you've gotten Satoru attached to you, he doesn't let go. He's clingy and needy, constantly protective and possessive, and he is the snarkiest man you've ever met. He's strong, too. You realize just how strong he is as you stand on the balcony of the castle, looking over the training grounds, and watch how easy it is for him to take down men one after another. The clench of your thighs tells you just how fast your feelings for him are developing. And, of course, Satoru notices too.
King!Satoru becomes much bolder around you after he catches on. He constantly flirted with you and made a great show of charming you. Despite his grand gestures and confident demeanor, he was a little nervous he was coming off too strong. Were your eye rolls fond or serious? Should he take a step back and stop being so flirtatious? Oh! Oh, you just..kissed his cheek. Annd~ he's melted into a puddle on the ground.
King!Satoru saw himself as a spontaneous and energetic man, and he loved himself a good ball. The women and men dressed so formally, dancing together and having their fun. And what made it better was that you were by his side now. This was your first royal gathering, thanks to your position by his side. He provided you with a beautiful gown, made sure it was your favorite color, and reassured you that you looked absolutely stunning. And, God's above, you did look gorgeous. Satoru tried not to stare too long at your exposed skin and kept his gaze on the hundreds of royal and wealthy in his ballroom.
King!Satoru kept his arm around your waist all night. But he couldn't believe his ears as you asked to dance. You didn't know a thing about dancing but.. they made it look easy, so why not? As soon as Satoru stepped on the marble flooring with you, a pit formed in your stomach. Your feet were uncoordinated as you stared down at your and Satorus feet. He kept one hand on your waist and the other in yours. The softness in his eyes, the love in his smile, it never went away as he watched you. Not when you stepped on his feet or even trip over your own heel.
King!Satoru would have thought by now that people knew not to mess with his precious woman. But all royals are dumb, except for him, of course. He glanced as he heard snickers from a few men, staring at your attempt at waltzing. Satorus blue gaze fell back down at you, and now he could feel the tremble in your hands travel up his wrist. His heart ached to see you so embarrassed, still trying to waltz with him. Satoru gently stepped forward, bringing your chests together, the linked hands expanded arm length out, and his grip on your waist moved to the small of your back. You could feel his cheek against your temple and his hot breath against your ear.
When he had asked you if you wanted them all dead, you merely thought it a joke. But he didn't snicker or laugh. His grip never loosened on you. Your weak smile faded as it sunk in that he was not playing a bad joke. You pulled back enough just to look at him and shook your head softly. He searched your gaze and sighed, gently breaking the link between your hands and cupping your face in his hands. Your cheeks flushed, and you placed your hands on his chest to steady your racing thoughts. Surely, he wasn't going to kiss you in the midst of this ball for everyone to see, right? Matter a fact, he was about to. If it weren't for the music ending and clapping erupting around the room.
King!Satoru knew you pulled away from nervousness and fluster, not shame or fear, but he just couldn't help himself from feeling irritated. He should have just pulled you in, no hesitation. Your lips looked so soft, and he just wanted to kiss them until your blood stained his lips. And, for sure, he shouldn't have tried such a thing in front of a ballroom of royalty. Such idiotic bastards don't deserve to see you so vulnerable and soft, needy, and desperate. Only him. Only Satoru is allowed to see you as such. But he was close to disregarding his own ball and whisking you away to the side.
Instead, King!Satoru waits patiently for the ball to end. But he's not so patient to escort all the guests out. No, he allows his guards that pleasure as Satoru gladly guides you out of the ballroom. Your laughter echoes off the walls of the castle as he carries you to his chambers. He's been craving your touch for months, yearning for a mere taste on his tongue, but your laughter was worth more than any stained sheet or tinted purity. Satoru takes his time, gently exploring your body and making you his. You didn't mind. Your body and soul lost to ecstacy the entire night until the morning came.
King!Satoru couldn't thank God above enough, relentlessly thanking him for letting Satoru raid your home. Satoru lays on his satin sheets, holding you against his bare chest as you softly snore on top of him. He just watches you and thanks anyone who may listen that he's such a spoiled man. Without his ruthless reputation, he wouldn't have pocketed this sweet treasure in his arms, and she wouldn't have pocketed his heart in return.
Summary: You hadn't seen Gojo in a month. That was more than enough time to grow crazy. You went to the places he frequented and lashed out at people who tried to help. You needed to move on but you were content with missing him for the rest of your life.
Warnings: Really really angsty, most definitely not proofread, swearing, potentially OOC Shoko and Yuji,
A/N: It was 10pm and I like to act out songs as story ideas and at the crux of the song, I realized something beautiful I could do to the story. You are going to love it.
Ever since you could remember, you had been cursed to always remember faces and names. This was great when you were meeting new people. Not so great when you were trying to forget your boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend, Gojo Satoru. To be fair, he was pretty unforgettable.
Even on the day you first met him. You two had come up together in the same class. He may have been the Strongest but you were quite powerful by any merit, not just your own. Seeing as you had gone on all those missions together, endured Geto's optimism together, and suffered through laps only assigned because of Gojo together, you had grown pretty close.
It was amazing in the beginning and it never stopped being amazing. He was a gentleman: loving, sweet, kind. He was also Gojo: Annoying, entitled, endearing. He was yet to propose but you may as well have been married, with his class becoming your kids. You had been so settled with him that you retired from the School. You assumed it was going well but assumptions were not truths.
You were walking through downtown, looking at shops you and him liked to frequent. As you peered through the window of his favourite cafe, the only one that served his strawberry matcha with chocolate drizzled on top, you noticed piqued white hair and had to step inside.
You couldn't find him but the waiting side was hard to see from the till. With a receipt for a hot chocolate in hand, you made your way over to the serving station. There you were met with nobody but a teen boy with bleached hair. You threw out the drink as you made your way out of the store.
You knew you had seen his face. It was there. It was real. Blinking away your frustrated tears, you hurried down the street, now sick of the crowds and world. Sick of the shopping spree you decided to go on to make yourself feel better.
As you walked through an alley that could cut through to your neighbourhood, you saw a black uniform wearing boy with pink hair. Craning your neck and blinking to be sure, you could confirm he was actually walking perpendicular to you. You ran to the other end of the alley and, instead of going right to go home, went left.
"Yuji! Yuji!"
"Huh?" He turned and then smiled.
You knew that smile. That sorry smile people gave you after someone died or you lost an heirloom or you went through a breakup. That smile you kept seeing from everybody who had heard about Gojo's venture away from you, towards supposed greener grass.
"Hey, nice to see you." He said with a wave.
He bowed as he did when he first met you. The action caught you off guard as you tried to remember the last time he was so formal, so adherent towards etiquette rules both you and Gojo had always ignored.
"Hey, what are you doing in this neighbourhood?" To be frank, a part of you was curious, seeing as you resided here.
"Just a minor haunting."
"Is Gojo around?"
Yuji cocked his head a bit but smiled nonetheless. "No, not now. You know that–" He paused, as if he was trying to remember his lines. "He'd rather not see you now."
You pursed your lips. "Well, I'd like to see him now."
Yuji scratched his neck. "I don't know if that's a good idea."
You blinked, genuinely just blinked at him. "Yuji–"
"Maybe you should go home. Get some rest." He frowned slightly. He was worried now. Worried for you. That hurt your heart in a different way than how it was hurting right now. Anger was easiest to acknowledge than heartache so you chose that instead.
"I thought you were better than that. I thought that you had a spine but you're just a puppet, repeating whatever phony garbage he's feeding you." You sneered before turning in your heel and stomping back home.
Rest? What did you know about rest? Sleep rarely came easy on normal days, let alone now that your love wasn't home anymore. The pillows were losing his scent, his coffee mug, that matched yours, was collecting dust, his closet untouched during this whole process.
These forgotten items were just another scrap of proof to you. Proof that he was coming back. Who would leave a house, a relationship, but leave their stuff behind? Nobody who truly meant to stay gone.
Opening the glass cabinet doors, you grabbed a wine glass and carried it with you to the fridge to grab the bottle of wine you had opened the night before. The door bell disrupted you from pouring properly, the noise spooking you, prompting you to spill. You sighed, bumped the fridge door closed with your hip and walked over to your front door to reveal Shoko standing behind it.
"Shoko, I'm not doing this today."
"Tough luck, because I am." She pushed past you and took off her shoes, placing them next to a pair of loafers Gojo had always hated. Loafers you knew he was going to wear one day, once he came back to you. "You didn't show up to our meeting today."
"It's not a meeting. It's some screwed play that you expect me to act in so that everybody feels comfortable." You turned and walked over to your kitchen, closing the cabinet you left open earlier.
"It's been a month. You need to move on." Shoko sat at your table like nothing was wrong. Like everything was normal. That pissed you off.
"I have five months until it becomes pathological." You muttered to the lip of your wine glass before taking a sip. Spotting the spill of red wine in your counter, you lowered your glass with a huff and went to grab your paper towel.
"Do you plan to hit six months and then cancel your free trial of grief?"
"No, Shoko, I don't plan to cancel anything except for that stupid event. And even so, I refuse to grieve somebody who is still alive!" The counter took the brunt of your anger as you scrubbed the liquid away. Still, you felt eyes on you. "Don't look at me like that."
"How else am I supposed to look at you?"
"Well, don't look at me like I'm a crazy person. He still loves me. He told me he would always love me, no matter what." You swung your palm into your chest as you defended your point.
"People change. Plans change. Life is unpredictable. This job is unpredictable."
"Don't talk to me about probability or predictability. Don't tell he's not coming home. Why would he leave his clothes in our closet, his, his, his shoes in the front foyer, his mugs in our cupboards? Why would he do that if he wasn't coming home!" It wasn't a question you needed answered, seeing as you knew the answer. But it helped prove your point so you dredged up questions you asked yourself a month ago.
"I know he once loved you. But you need to accept that he does not love you anymore. He physically cannot love you anymore."
You laughed incredulously at her words as your face settled into a scowl. "This is why I didn't go to your stupid rehearsal. This is why I'm not going tomorrow. I don't care what you think." You fought hard to keep your voice steady and your eyes dry. "He didn't leave you, he left me. But I know he is coming back."
Shoko sighed and took a step back. "I'm gonna pick you tomorrow at 9am, okay? Remember, wear all black."
You watched her leave, eyes trailing behind her with your head stuck facing at the wall she was standing in front of. You finished your glass, chugging it, ignoring the drops that trailed down your face, and slammed it down as hard as one could with a wine glass. You finished the bottle that night as you scrolled through pictures for you and Gojo.
The next day, Shoko showed up at 8:54. As angry as you were, you had humoured her by dressing up in a black gown that covered everything. She didn't say much on the drive there but handed you an accessory that you clipped into place.
As she talked with some man you had met before, you spotted white hair entering a room. Your prep room. You followed it, not even saying goodbye, as you sped down the hallways. Slamming open the door, you saw him in your prep room, clear as day, for the first time a month.
"Gojo,"
"Love, you need to calm down."
"No, don't say that. I get it, we had issues. It's okay, we can work through them, together." You reached for his hand as you looked up at him. He moved it out of your grasp. You tried not to let it show how much that had hurt you.
"You can't still be doing this. Not today."
"Doing what, trying to fix our relationship?" You crossed your arms, going on the back foot.
"There's no relationship anymore. Look, I think I should go or you should go."
"This is my prep room, Gojo. That you entered."
"I thought it was mine. The name on the door thought so too."
You turned, opened the door with narrowed eyes and read the name that cemented your mistake. Gojo's Viewing Preparation Room. Still, you fought, though now anger was the thing driving you, not love.
"So what? It's your room? It's our life. And you're just throwing it away!"
"I'm not doing this. Not today. You're clearly hurting. You need rest. You need to take a break." You could swear you felt his hands on your shoulder and they felt so goddamn real as you shrugged them off.
You changed tactics. "You want me to say you won? You won. Just come back to me. Love me again."
"You're not listening."
"You're the only one for me! Just listen to me!"
"No, you ha–"
"Stop it! Stop and listen! Think this through! Just wait."
"It's time for you to leave."
"I retired for you because I loved you so much. You are the only thing in my life. You made it so that I only had you and now you're trying to leave. No deal, Gojo!"
"It's time to start the ceremony now. You speak first!"
"I am going to miss you for the rest of my life!"
"You have to go!"
"Where do I go from here? Where, Satoru? You left me! I'm supposed to figure it out myself! No fucking chance!" You cried. You screamed at him, banging on what you believed to be his chest. Tears had clogged your vision. You wailed, trying to catch your breath and figure out what to say. "I-I-I REFUSE THAT!"
"You have to–"
"NO!" You stepped closer. "I have a house for us to live! We will be a family. We will have kids! I will give you kids, as many as you want, if you stay!"
"Honey–"
"Don't find another woman or fall in love with someone else. You can only be mine. I only want you to be mine!" Your voice began to crack as tears blurred your vision. Still, you could see the white haired man clearly. "Please don't be a lesson or a story with a moral at the end. Please, just love me! Please just stay!
"I will wait for you! Go on every mission they send you on! Live your life! Travel! I don't care! I will wait and wait and wait here in this spot! I will stand in front of the door and wait for you to come back home! I will wait even if the city is burning down. Even if the apocalypse happens."
"Baby–"
"I WILL WAIT AND WAIT AND WAIT AND LIVE ON WHAT WE WERE!"
Your voice gave out after that and so did your knees. You fell fowards, just barely catching yourself with your arms. In your hysterics, you had knocked over a picture. The same one they had outside. You clutched it in your hands.
"How could I forget your pretty face?" You choked out through your sobs. Shoko knocked on the door from outside.
"Are you ready?" She asked. You calmed a fraction, happy she hadn't heard you bear your soul.
You stood, smoothed your dress, and wiped your tears. You clipped on a veil and took a deep breath. Opening the door with a smile, you nodded to Shoko. The lectern didn't seem so bad once you were behind it. You looked out at the crowd, all dressed in black. The world had seemed to get the message, seeing as it was cloudy outside.
"I'd like to thank you for coming..." You took in a sharp breath and worked hard to stop your tears from spilling over. In that moment you wondered to yourself if he was thinking of you up in heaven. You begged him to think of you. "To Gojo Satoru's funeral."
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: 11k+
fic masterpost | previous chapter | next chapter
The last fourteen days had been, in every measurable sense, your own personal hell.
It seemed the prince had lost whatever remaining sense of self-preservation he possessed during that explosive fight in his chambers — a fight neither of you had spoken of since. In truth, you didn't speak at all anymore. Not beyond murderous glances and the occasional patronizing scoff from the man himself. Your communication had entirely reverted to you acting as his silent tail. You were too cautious — perhaps even too scared of striking the match again — to open your mouth, while he remained visibly agitated by any minuscule change in the quiet choreography the two of you had learned over your months of service.
Instead of addressing the silence, the prince lashed out at anyone, at any bloody given time.
A morning breakfast with his mother: he sent away three trembling attendants simply because they failed to deliver a perfectly boiled egg. A fencing spar in the courtyard with one of the king's knights: he dislocated the man's shoulder with a brutal, uncalled-for strike that had absolutely nothing to do with training. A tutoring session with the deputy of education: he threw a heavy, leather-bound encyclopedia right past the poor man's head, the spine cracking against the stone wall, making everyone in the room flinch except the person who'd thrown it.
This was the shape of the chill between you. The cruelty dialed up to a suffocating degree — an ugly displacement of anger going everywhere and nowhere. The prince visibly lost, his pride still not fully recovered, unable to process what had happened between you, unable to process anything. And you were forced to stand there, jaw locked, acting as the silent witness to all of it.
Which brought you to tonight. Or rather, this morning.
The corridor outside the court lady's chambers was freezing in the particular, settling way stone gets when the night has overstayed its welcome. You had been standing in the dark for hours. Again. Quite frequently lately — to the point that the nightly babysitting had to be partly redelegated to a few trusted soldiers who were used to guarding his chambers on the nights you had the courtesy of actually sleeping.
The torches had burned down to spitting embers, and a pale, unforgiving grey was beginning to creep through the narrow window at the far end of the hall. Dawn.
He usually left before the sun rose. The fact that he hadn't was a deviation from the pattern — a pattern he hated but still abided by. It made you nervous, a paranoia that had nothing to do with exhaustion, or perhaps it had everything to do with it. You tried to think about his demeanors and endeavors less than strictly necessary. He was a steady path toward an early grave and you were running out of patience for the journey.
You waited another ten minutes, watching the light shift against the dust motes. Nothing. No movement. No sound from beyond the oak.
You stepped forward, the leather of your boots loud in the empty corridor, and raised your hand.
Your knuckles struck the wood. Three sharp raps. The sound felt absurdly loud at this ungodly hour, a violent intrusion into whatever he was doing, but you were past caring about that. If he was dead, you needed to know.
A long moment passed.
The latch finally clicked. The door swung inward just a fraction, but it wasn't the prince who answered it.
The court lady stood in the narrow gap, clutching a sheer silk sheet to her chest. Her hair was a tangled mess, her skin flushed in the specific, heated way that confirmed the prince was certainly not asleep. She blinked at you — fully armed, exhausted, and silently furious — caught completely off guard by the sight of you waiting outside her apartment. Definitely not an expected development in her delightful evening, pardon, morning.
"Is he alive?" you asked. Flat. Devoid of any polite preamble or tact.
She stammered, her flush deepening rapidly down her neck. "He is — yes. He is very vigorous, actually. We were just resting. In between—"
"Good," you said, cutting off whatever intimate detail she was about to spill. These people were apparently far too comfortable sharing their explicit thoughts here and there — and you'd always thought it was just the prince who lacked any ounce of dignity.
You turned around, presenting your back to the door, and resumed your post.
The door clicked shut behind you. Hurried. Embarrassed.
When he finally emerged a half hour later, his eyes found you immediately. His expression went entirely blank — not the lazy contempt you'd become fluent in, something flatter than that, something that had stopped bothering to perform. He didn't speak. You didn't speak. Just as you were both newly used to.
He made a quiet, dismissive sound in the back of his throat and stepped out into the corridor. You fell into step behind him, watching the back of his unbuttoned shirt — keeping your distance, this time walking perhaps a little further back than required, perhaps out of pettiness, or perhaps because you could feel the trailing scent of the court lady's rose perfume drifting off him.
The day had only just begun.
And it always followed the same shape. Him moving through the castle like something with a low-grade fever — present in body, absent in every other sense. Deliberately, maybe. You had stopped caring about the reason. It was the restlessness of someone who had too much energy and nowhere clean to put it.
The silence between you had settled into something almost structural by now, like a wall neither of you had officially agreed to build but both of you were maintaining with quiet, stubborn diligence.
He was invited everywhere. And more so after the argument — as if fate had a cruel idea of how to punish you even further. It was the particular cruelty of his position: the court kept extending its invitations regardless of whether he deserved them, regardless of what he'd done to the last room he'd been placed in, because he was the heir, and the heir's presence at your gathering meant proximity to the crown. It meant social optics.
You attended everything he attended. You stood behind every chair he sat in. You watched every room recalibrate itself around him, feeling the secondhand embarrassment of his ruthless, childish behavior — behavior he had oh so enjoyed displaying ever since you'd closed that door behind you. But you had to stand through all of it. You weren't regretting the fight. You were regretting losing your composure. Regretting that the prince had lost his. And this was the outcome — a chasm wide between you, further from each other than you had ever been, no acknowledgment from either side. Petulant, both of you. In your own specific, stubborn ways.
You said nothing. You couldn't. Wouldn't. Shouldn't. You only filed everything, and the drawer's wood had stopped splintering and started simply — giving.
You accompanied the prince to Lord Geto's gathering. A small thing, by the court's standards. A private affair in Geto's receiving rooms. Twenty people, perhaps less, the kind of number that suggested intimacy rather than spectacle.
You'd stood your post near the door as the room filled, keeping your distance out of particular distaste rather than duty, watching the usual choreography of courtiers arranging themselves into their preferred proximities, noting exits, noting faces, noting the way people danced around each other.
He'd been fine for the first hour. Relatively. Fine, in his current definition of the word, which meant he was drinking at a pace that concerned you mildly rather than acutely, and directing his restlessness at Lord Geto's wine collection rather than at any specific person in the room. You'd watched him work through two glasses and then a third, his high-neck tie getting progressively looser, the stiffness in his shoulders disappearing by degrees, the performed ease of the early evening giving way to something less managed and more genuine — genuine in the way he was always genuine, which was to say that it stopped being a performance and started being a problem.
Somewhere around the fourth glass, the room had gotten warm.
The courtiers had been inside perhaps too long, the air becoming a bit suffocating, the candles adding their own heat to the press of bodies and conversation, someone eventually gravitating toward the tall glass doors at the far end of the room and pushing one open.
The cold air came in like a relief. And the prince gravitated toward the open door like a moth to a lamp.
The balcony was narrow and stone-flagged and entirely unfit for a late autumn evening, the kind of outdoor space that existed more as architectural detail than functional use once the season turned. The cold hit immediately. Three or four men had drifted out with him, enough to constitute a small audience, not enough to constitute a crowd. Someone had thought to bring their wine. Someone else had not thought to bring a coat. The prince on the loose, and his garments apparently on the loose too — the neck tie long forgotten, his jerkin abandoned somewhere inside Lord Geto's apartment.
He was leaning against the railing.
Not thinking about the physics of his own body, one elbow hooked over the stone, his weight distributed with the careless confidence of someone in thoroughly mindless spirits. The courtiers around him were laughing at something, the easy performed laughter in the presence of the heir. He was not particularly cold, or if he was, he had decided not to be — which with him amounted to the same thing.
You were cold. Very cold. Your ensemble had not accounted for possible outdoor outings — a short pourpoint being entirely insufficient for this particular brand of late autumn cruelty. For this bloody weather, you would have done anything for a cloak like the wiser gentlemen around you.
The autumn air found every gap in your garment as if it had been waiting for the opportunity.
The prince, apparently, took the opportunity as well — leaning further over the railing, as though whatever he was watching on the ground below would become much much clearer the closer he got to it. The courtiers hadn't noticed. Why would they, when the prince was onto his average shenanigans. They were laughing still, someone making a comment about the view, the capital visible in the grey-gold late afternoon light below the castle walls.
"Your Highness." Low. You had to — even if you had no desire to speak to him right now. The warning register, the one that under normal circumstances at least made him slow down.
He didn't look at you. Of course he didn't.
"Your Highness." Slightly sharper.
Nothing. His back, the set of his shoulders, he heard you perfectly clear and decided that your voice was not, at this moment, something he was going to acknowledge. The same ignoring he'd been deploying for two weeks, except now there was a railing between him and a significant drop, and the wine had been doing its lazy work for the better part of an hour.
Not only did he choose to ignore you — he deliberately leaned further, shouting something to the other men, launching into what seemed to be a tale about one of his recent late-night endeavours. During the very detailed and very obscene explanation, the prince decided that merely leaning on the railing wouldn't suffice, and hopped up to sit on it instead — apparently unbothered by the four floors of open air between him and the cobblestoned ground below.
You tracked every micromovement. Things were about to go sideways. Or more accurately, down.
The prince was swaying, leaning back as he laughed and depicted his crude story. Then a particularly unfriendly gust of cold wind swept across the balcony — his wine glass slipping from his grip, disappearing over the edge with a faint, distant shatter! below — and his balance went with it. He grabbed for the railing, missed the angle, his weight tipping the wrong direction.
You were already moving.
Your hands found him — one gripping his arm, the other catching the fabric at his back, pulling, your whole weight redirecting his, which proved quite a task given his height and weight, all while attempting to look even remotely dignified about it.
He stumbled off the railing and into you rather than over it, the momentum of the intervention leaving him closer than either of you had planned, his shoulder against yours, his face turned toward yours for one disorienting second as he found his footing.
The rose perfume hit you right in your face.
Still on him. From this morning, or last night, from whenever it had been — the court lady's particular scent, warm and floral and entirely wrong for a cold stone balcony in late autumn, drifting off his skin in the small space between you. You almost skidded to a halt — from the inexplicable shock of it, perhaps, or the involuntary intimacy of your hands on him, his body against yours, the cold and the balcony and the near-miss all happening at once.
You stepped back. Restored the distance.
His face — you caught it in the half-second before he arranged it into something else. Something unguarded there. Something that sat closer to surprise than anything else, and underneath the surprise something else entirely — something that landed in your peripheral vision before you could look at it directly, something that made the air between you feel less like unwanted cold and more like something unwantedly warmer.
He looked away. The courtiers were watching now — all of them, the easy laughter suspended, the audience that had been performing enjoyment of his company now performing something closer to genuine attention.
He smiled. The particular smile that had nothing warm in it — the one he reached for when he needed to reframe something quickly.
"Careful," he said — to you, to the courtiers, to the balcony, to no one specifically — gesturing vaguely in your direction. "She gets protective. Can't have me enjoying myself too close to a ledge." A beat. The smile sharpening. "Although—" his eyes moving to you briefly, having decided to say something he knew would land badly, "—perhaps she just wanted an excuse to put her hands on me. Can't say I blame her, really. Must be rather dull, all that watching and nothing more."
The men went quiet. Then a small wave of the laughter that had started to build dying somewhere in the middle of itself, two or three people exchanging the uncomfortable glances of those who had watched something cross a line.
You stood frozen to the spot, your mouth with it. The cold was very present again. A different cold. The stone very solid under your feet. The rose perfume still faintly in the air between where he was standing and where you were standing, which was further than it had been mere seconds ago.
Your face did something.
You felt it happen, felt it slip almost — the involuntary expression arriving before the discipline caught it. Not hurt, not anger — something without a clean name, something that lasted perhaps one second, unexplained but present, before your conscious mind smoothed it over.
The joke hung in the cold air a moment longer. Then one of the courtiers said something, redirecting, and the gathering reconstituted around the new conversation.
You stood in it. The heir stood in it. The world stilled weirdly, and your ears were ringing. The disrespect — the sheer disrespect. The prince had never dared to go this far. Yes, he had been crude in your presence, calling you prudish when no one was listening. But this was the first time he had made you into a joke like this. A public spectacle. Reduced to something worse than discardable. Worse than the ladies he fancied to spend his time with. The women he dragged into his bed at least knew what transaction they were making. You had sworn an oath of steel and blood, only to be turned into a cheap parlor joke for an audience full of men who hadn't earned a fraction of your discipline.
The prince only tsked and marched back inside, determined, it seemed, to make you regret even thinking about touching him with your practically peasant hands. He drank, and drank, and drank — until he couldn't remember how he got back to his chambers. He suspected, of course, it was your doing. But the mere thought of you made him so angry that he didn't dwell on it.
It was around dawn when he woke — if he had slept at all. His head was trying to split open, and he mildly regretted the damage he'd done to Lord Geto's outstanding wine collection. Though he was glad he'd slept at all, because the prince hadn't been sleeping well anymore.
Which was quite new. Or not new exactly, in that sense. He had never been particularly devoted to sleep, had always treated it as a mere interruption rather than a necessity, the nights too useful for other things to be spent unconscious. But this was different from that.
He got up before the sun had risen. The guards in front of his chambers were dozing in a deep corner alcove on the other side of the hallway, and he almost chuckled. You were really the only one who took the job seriously — but then he immediately found that thought insolent, since thinking about you was proving particularly irritating.
He tiptoed through the corridors. The training yard was empty at this hour, which was the point. Nobody to perform for, just the cold stone under his boots and the air swallowed by the dense, blue-grey mist of the late night bleeding to the early morning. He enjoyed being alone when the castle was still asleep, when he could be simply Satoru and not the prince.
He was three sets in when his mind circled back to the balcony.
Not consciously — not with any intention, as far as he knew. The thought arrived uninvited and specific, bypassing whatever he usually deemed worth thinking about. The unexplainable feeling of your eyes on him. He'd gotten used to it, or at least thought he had — but not really, not yet. It was unsettling and somehow comforting at once, which was extremely confusing, and you were the only person who had ever managed to do both simultaneously. Even when he was angry, upset, reckless, acting downright stupid, you were always right there. And the thought of it made him angrier still.
Your hands on him. The grip of them, more certain than he'd expected, yet cautious — almost careful. Womanly, in a way he hadn't anticipated and hadn't had time to process before you'd stepped back and restored the correct distance.
He'd been about to think something — the word forming somewhere in the back of his throat — and the word had been old.
It didn't arrive.
He stopped mid-form. Stood there with the practice sword lowered, staring at nothing. Stood there a moment longer than made any sense, and he hated it. The prince never hesitated. The prince never thought of others.
Then he resumed the form. Faster than before. More aggressive. Harder. The blade cutting arcs through the cold air, striking the practice post with a crack that echoed off the high stone walls.
It was supposed to feel good. He'd come out to the freezing cold — the mornings getting already unforgivably chilly — to clear his head. Instead he felt more frustrated, more irritated. That was supposed to be the rule of it, the established architecture of his entire life: someone stepped out of line, he put them back in it, and the resulting rush of arrogant satisfaction smoothed over whatever irritation had provoked him in the first place.
It hadn't worked. The satisfaction hadn't arrived. The lazy dismissals, the pulled rank, the public humiliation — none of it was landing the way it was supposed to. Instead, he was simply left with the grating, suffocating feeling of swinging at empty air.
He struck the post again. The shock of the impact traveled up his forearms, biting into his wrists.
It didn't mean anything. He was tired. He hadn't slept properly in two weeks, and his mind was doing the inconvenient things it sometimes did when left without enough rest.
He stopped. Wrists burning from the brute force of it.
The castle remained quiet. The sky above the walls was the particular dark blue of almost-dawn, not quite committed to becoming morning yet, the first birds somewhere distant and unconvincing. His breath made small clouds in the cold.
Why did he care.
You had been out of line. The loop began to run, familiar and defensive, keeping time with his footwork. You had put your hands on him. You had embarrassed him at the dinner in front of his father. You had lectured him in his own chambers like he was a child who needed redirecting. The fight was your fault. The chill was your fault. Him thinking about you was your fault. Everything, yet nothing.
He spun, driving the blunt point of the sword into the padded wood.
The loop failed. It just — stopped catching.
Because Satoru knew the institutional channels of the castle better than he pretended to. He knew exactly what was building somewhere behind these walls, in some office, behind some closed door. He knew the reprimand was coming. And worse — he knew exactly what was on the list.
His failures. Every single one of them. And you were going to have to stand there and absorb the consequences for them, because the system would never demand that he pay for his own mess. Because that was apparently what you deserved, for the crime of intertwining your oath with the heir's recklessness.
He dropped the sword. It clattered against the stone.
So why did he fucking care. Why did it suddenly feel so wrong — someone being punished for the shit he'd done. Something that had never particularly bothered him before arriving as a specific, named wrongness in his chest, with no category to shove it, hide it, in.
He dragged a hand through his hair, chest heaving, the cold air burning his lungs. The image of your face on the balcony surfaced uninvited — the way the mask had slipped for one fraction of a second, revealing something raw and unnamed, before smoothing back into the perfect, impenetrable composure he found so infuriating. And behind that image, the ghost of the fight in his chambers. The freezing deadness in your voice. He couldn't locate what he felt about that coldness, or why he felt anything about it at all. And the inability to locate it — the sheer lack of a category for what was happening in his own chest — was infinitely more infuriating than the fight itself.
The trailing scent of rose perfume caught in his memory. Or was it peony, or jasmine? It didn't matter. Floral things, under his nose almost nightly.
It felt hollow. The encounters had all felt hollow lately. He was chasing the same warmth he always had, but the bodies moving in the dark had started to feel thin, useless — like he was trying to warm his hands over a painted fire.
He didn't know why.
He picked the wooden sword back up. Squared his shoulders. And swung it against the muddy stone wall instead until it splintered, splintered.
He stood in the wreckage of it. The broken wood scattered across the packed earth, the freezing air settling back into the yard now that the violent movement had stopped, his chest heaving with exertion. The sky was committing, finally, to early morning. The dark blue giving way to an unforgiving, pale grey that suggested the castle would be waking soon.
Why did he care?
He felt hollow. That was new. Or not new, exactly—but newly undeniable. He was chasing something. He had always been chasing something. He just hadn't particularly examined what it was, or why the chase had started feeling like it was leading him to rooms he had already emptied.
The shape of an answer hovered at the edge of that thought. He didn't follow it. Didn't dare to—
Somewhere above the walls, a bird called. Then another. The specific sounds of a castle beginning to move drifted down into the courtyard—a heavy iron door shutting somewhere, the distant echo of footsteps, voices greeting each other, the tranquil silence breaking as the world started demanding things of him again.
He dropped the broken hilt of the sword into the mud. He would have to go back inside. He would have to put the mask back on and be the prince again. He would have to walk past your post. You would be there. The question would come with him, because it had nowhere else to go.
He came back the way he'd left — through the servants' corridor, the one that avoided the main hall, the one he'd been using since he was twelve. Mud was on his boots, trailing behind him like an unwanted witness.
He passed a few early-rising servants on his way back, though none of them found it odd. Or rather, no one dared to question the heir stalking through passages forbidden to him.
He turned the final corner to his wing and stopped.
You were there. Coming from the opposite direction, arriving in the early morning gloom to resume your post, ready to shadow him through another day.
The alcove at the far end of the corridor was visible between you. The night guards were folded into their corner—deeply, peacefully asleep. Their vigil apparently concluded sometime around the third hour and not resumed since.
He watched your eyes find them. Mild, annoyed amusement threatened his features. He wanted to say something—something purposefully aggravating, something to rile you up this early in the morning just to watch your jaw tighten as you produced one of your careful, infuriating deflections.
Your Highness, something something, always something. How he hated hearing it. All the bloody time, that title, sitting in your mouth like something you'd decided he deserved rather than something you actually meant. Hated the insincerity laced in your tone.
He turned his head when you turned to look at him. You were annoyed, tired — but too prideful, perhaps, to call the prince out on his secret late-night, or early-morning, outing. You noticed the mud trailing from his boots and didn't press further. Was he in one piece, standing in front of you? Then that was enough.
His expression did nothing. Or he kept it doing nothing.
He reached his door first, while you were preoccupied waking the guards and delivering what he imagined would be a very quiet, very venomous lecture. The door closed between you. The cold morning resumed.
An attendant ran him a bath. He dressed. Breakfast arrived. He sat with it, not particularly eating, the tea doing far more work than the food. It was an unassuming, ordinary morning—the exact shape of thousands that had come before it. Lonely. Cold. Irritating, and not even in the way mornings usually were.
"Your Highness." The king's secretary, at the door. “His Majesty requested your presence once breakfast was concluded.”
Satoru gestured vaguely, signaling he wouldn't be finishing the meal anyway. The attendant whisked the barely-touched plate away.
His father wanted to see him. This did not happen often—or rather, it happened more frequently lately, perhaps because he was finally of age, or perhaps simply because of his recent behavior. He had stopped caring which. At least the King was carving out precious time for his precious son.
When he opened the door, you were waiting. You fell into step behind him without a single word, and the secretary led you both down the winding corridors toward the royal wing.
The King's private study. Satoru could hear it before they even reached the doors. Shouting. Arguing. The King's voice, raised in fury. A council member’s frantic stammer. The Queen Consort's icy interjections. Satoru felt a cold spike of dread lodge itself in his throat.
Beside him, he felt you go rigid. You hadn't heard the King so riled up before, and the sheer volume of the hostility bleeding through the wood made the sudden halt in front of the doors almost a relief for you. The secretary gestured for you to take your post outside in the hall.
Satoru stared at the handle for one second longer than necessary—registering the temperature of the room beyond it, frantically beginning to assemble whatever "fine" version of himself was going to walk through it.
He pushed the door open, leaving you behind in the quiet corridor, and stepped into a morning that was apparently faaar from finished.
The king was standing. And his father almost never stood during these conversations. He was standing now, one hand planted on the mahogany table, a piece of parchment in the other.
The council member—the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Satoru noted—was positioned near the window with the body language of someone who had been trying to make himself smaller for the past several minutes and hadn't quite managed it.
His mother, the Queen, stood slightly apart from both of them. Watching.
The king turned the moment the door opened.
The anger redirected instantly, locking onto its actual target with a physical force that made the air in the room feel suffocatingly thin.
"There he is," the king said. His voice was a whip-crack in the quiet. He threw the parchment onto the table. It slid across the polished wood, stopping inches from Gojo. "Written, formal documentation of your profound, unmitigated stupidity."
Gojo looked at the letter. It carried a broken foreign seal, dark green threaded with gold. Oh. He didn't pick it up. Didn’t dare to.
His eyebrows furrowed as he scanned the folded parchment. His father leaned over the other side of the table, every pair of eyes in the room studying his incoming reaction. For a fraction of a second, the prince was profoundly confused.
"Father?"
"Do you have any concept of what you have done?" the king demanded, stepping around the table, his usual exhaustion finally burning away into barely contained rage. "This isn't a tavern brawl, Satoru. This is the fragile architecture of a peace treaty that took decades to build. And you treat it like a theater put on for your personal amusement. You treat the crown like a toy. You never learn!"
"It was a dinner," Gojo defended, his voice arriving light, attempting to grasp the familiar rhythm of deflection. "The man was insulting the integrity of our—"
"The man was testing us, and you failed." The king cut the air with his hand, silencing him. "You let your bruised pride dictate state policy. You let a bruised ego push us toward something we cannot afford."
The king stopped. He looked at his son, and the anger suddenly grew older, heavier, dragging a ghost into the room between them.
"How much more blood must this crown spend to subsidize your arrogance?" the king asked, his voice dropping into a lethal, quiet register. "We have already buried countless people because of your inability to look past your own entertainment. Must I bury a kingdom along with them?"
"That’s absolutely, entirely beside the point. That—"
The breath caught in Gojo’s throat.
The reference was unnamed, brief, and entirely devastating. It hit the raw, still-unprocessed wound buried at the very bottom of Gojo’s chest, striking it with such precision that the lazy smile completely shattered off his face.
"You insolent child! You are of age. You should be ready to take over state matters, yet you treat absolutely nothing as important!" his father continued, the volume rising again. He lifted the letter briefly before slamming it back down on the table with more force than the gesture required. "They wrote it down. Formally. Diplomatically worded, which is its own specific insult. They were polite enough to make clear exactly how displeased they are without giving us anything to formally object to. Do you understand what that means? It means we have to respond in kind. It means we have to craft a diplomatic reply to a diplomatic complaint about my son's behavior at a dinner that was supposed to demonstrate that this kingdom takes its alliances seriously."
"I do take it seriously!" Gojo fired back, his voice cracking with a defensive, desperate petulance he hadn't intended to show. "But forgive me if I refuse to look past the fact that some lowly delegate from their stagnant kingdom allowed himself to openly disrespect the heir! That hardly screams taking an alliance seriously—"
"That is quite enough."
The Queen Consort stepped forward from the shadows of the hearth. The violent heat of the king’s fury was instantly snuffed out by her intervention. She did not step in to protect her son and Satoru knew it, that’s why goosebumps risen under his garments. She stepped in because the emotional display was no longer operationally useful.
"The courier leaves for the North-east at noon," she said, her voice a steady, rhythmic metronome of damage control, addressing the trembling minister. "You will draft a formal response. You will express the crown’s profound regret for the misunderstanding. You will not apologize for the prince directly—that admits fault."
She paused, her gaze flicking to the broken seal on the table.
"You will instead assure them that the personnel outside the royal family will be remanded for formal disciplinary action. It offers the delegation their pound of flesh without compromising the crown's dignity. Frame the remainder of the incident as an unfortunate translation of provincial humor. Include a concession on the silver tariffs they requested last quarter. That will placate them."
"Y-yes, Your Grace," the minister stammered, bowing frantically, clutching his ledgers to his chest. "Immediately."
The temperature in the room plummeted. The prince stood rigid near the table, taking his mother’s orders in. The dread—was it even dread? Perhaps just a sickening, hollow anticipation—that had been pooling in his stomach all morning finally crystallized into something hard and sharp.
They were going to punish you. For the one thing that had stopped the dinner from devolving into a full-scale catastrophe, for the very intervention his own father had silently authorized. And they were doing it simply because it was politically convenient.
He tried to perform "fine." He tried to summon his usual uncaring arrogance because it was all he knew, but his gut was telling him to halt. Something was warning him that this was far from over. The realization that you were going to get the short end of the stick felt like ash in his throat. You deserved it, he tried to tell himself. You had embarrassed him. You had overstepped. Yet, you didn't deserve this, and the prince couldn't have been more confused by his own sickening revulsion.
Satoru looked at his father, breathing heavily by the table, jaw locked. He looked at his mother, adjusting the cuffs of her sleeves, her face a mask of perfect composure.
They did not look at each other.
They had not spoken to each other warmly, or even directly, since he had walked in. Hell, he couldn't remember the last time they ever did. Their distinct registers were always aimed at the same problem, at their only son, but neither of them looked at Gojo as a person.
It was a loveless architecture. A household built on necessity and maintained through separate quarters. He was the only child, a singular miracle achieved only because they had endured each other just long enough to secure the succession, and never touched each other again.
The Queen Consort turned slightly, her eyes sweeping over the scattered papers on the wide table.
"Furthermore, his public standing requires a permanent anchor," she said. She floated the words into the space between them, an aside addressed to the institution rather than to the king or her son. "This volatility is a liability we can no longer afford to spin as youthful charm. The delegation’s letter makes that painfully clear. It is time we revisited the Western correspondence, husband."
Gojo stopped breathing. His throat involuntarily tightened, his eyes fixing blindly on the map spread across the center of his father’s table.
"A formal arrangement there," his mother continued, casually sorting a stack of ledgers with her precise, manicured fingers, "will signal immediate stability to the border lords. It will prove he is finally bound to his duties in a way he cannot simply walk away from. I will begin drafting the preliminary inquiries soon."
She didn't ask. Why would she, anyway? She made the bartering of his entire future sound like a practical solution to a minor tax deficit.
Gojo went entirely quiet. He stared at the broken green wax on the table. He didn't argue, nor did he scoff. The quiet was its own damning non-response, a complete failure of the rebellious prince who usually fought any attempt to cage him.
His mother took the silence as non-resistance—a small, surprising, fight-less win—and moved on.
"You are dismissed, Minister," the king said, turning his back to the room to face the window.
The foreign minister bowed low and fled, pulling the door open with desperate speed. The prince turned on his heel, moving to follow the man out, suffocating in the sterile air of the study.
"Stay." Command from his father froze him in place. The door clicked shut behind the minister.
The family reality of it sat in the deafening silence. Three people, bound by blood and a crown, but never love.
The rest of the day passed. Then the morning of the next.
Satoru carried the knowledge in his chest like a swallowed stone. He watched you resume your post outside his doors, fall into step behind him, and perform your duty the way you always did, the way you were expected.
The sick, hollow feeling in his gut only metastasized.
The summons finally arrived mid-afternoon. He was in the lower archives, supposedly reviewing a regional treaty as a punishment his father had handed down, while actually doing nothing but staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes. You were standing by the doors.
Footsteps echoed on the flagstones. A courier from the militia arrived, flanked by a young, broad-shouldered knight wearing the crest of the royal guard.
The courier stopped in front of you, offering a sharp, procedural salute.
"My lady," he said, his voice loud across the quiet archives. "Your presence is requested by the Commander in his primary office. Immediately. This knight will assume the prince's detail until your return."
You measured him, a flicker of confusion carefully suppressed before you nodded. The Commander rarely requested your presence, let alone in his private office. Usually, he spoke to you in fleeting corridor passes, or at gatherings where you felt confident enough that the prince wouldn’t face any imposed or self-imposed danger in your brief absence.
"Understood."
At the archive table, Satoru went completely still. The replacement knight stepped forward, ready to take your place by the door.
Satoru looked at the substitute guard, and a violent, irrational surge of territorial irritation flared over the sickening dread in his stomach. He wasn't going to sit in this dusty room with a stranger while you were dragged off to the slaughterhouse his mother had built for you.
But it wasn't just guilt that made him stand up. It was a darker, uglier impulse—a sick, petty anticipation churning beneath the guilt. He wanted to see it. He hated himself for the morbid curiosity, but he couldn't look away. He had spent months trying to crack your perfect, stupid composure and failed.
Now, the full weight of the crown and the militia was about to come crashing down on your head. Would you finally break? Would you scream? Would you beg? He wanted to see what happened when the unshakeable knight was finally forced to bleed.
Satoru snapped the treaty book shut. The sound echoed like a gunshot.
"I fear there is no need," the prince sang out as he strolled towards you. "I'm finished here. And I believe I'll take a walk to the militia wing myself. I'd hate to be left out, seeing as whatever you want with my knight undoubtedly concerns me."
The courier hesitated, exchanging an uncertain glance with the other man. "Your Highness, the Commander requested a private audience with—"
"I don't particularly care what the Commander requested," Satoru interrupted, a saccharine grin plastered across his face as he stepped past them into the corridor. He didn't look at you. "Come along, knight. Let's not keep my father's attack dogs waiting."
You didn't argue. Beneath the faint embarrassment and creeping nerves, a small, treacherous part of you was almost thankful for the prince’s relentless nosiness into matters he clearly had no business dealing with.
The walk to the militia wing was suffocating. The silence between you was loud with the phantom weight of the impending reprimand.
Satoru kept his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his gaze fixed straight ahead. He tried to look aloof, amused even, looking like this was some silly game to play, yet he could feel the familiar, rigid presence of you trailing at his back. He knew exactly what was on the list sitting on the Commander's desk, and what was lodged like broken glass in his own throat.
His failures. Wearing your name.
You arrived at the doors of the Commander’s office. The guards stationed outside pulled them open immediately, expecting you, but visibly faltered when the heir strolled in first.
Satoru didn't ask for permission to enter. The Commander, sitting behind a massive desk stacked with ledgers, paused. He looked at Satoru, then at you, clearly displeased by the prince's uninvited presence but lacking the political authority to order the heir out of the room.
"Your Highness," the Commander faltered as the prince stopped by the edge of his table, one hand on his hip, deploying a very sweet, very fake smile. An immovable spectator.
"Commander. I assume this was terribly important, dragging my knight all the way to your private office?"
You stepped up to the center of the room. You stood at perfect attention, your chin high, your hands clasped loosely behind your back, watching the exchange confused. Both men knew exactly what was about to unfold. You were the only one in the room stepping blindly onto the block.
"This is an internal disciplinary matter, Your Highness," the Commander said, his voice stiff.
"And she is my guard," Satoru replied, his smile not quite reaching his eyes. "Proceed."
The Commander didn't argue. He didn't rise to the bait — he knew the prince and his antics, after all. The sheer lack of emotion on the older man's face did exactly what Satoru's father's anger had done earlier that week. It sucked the oxygen straight out of the room.
You stood dead still in the center of the office, your hands clasped so tightly behind your back that the leather of your gauntlets creaked.
The Commander folded his hands on the desk. "Do you have even a remote understanding of why you were summoned here?"
You kept your chin perfectly level, though the question sent a cold spike of uncertainty through your chest. "No, sir," you answered, your voice crisp and completely steady. "I believe I was withheld that information."
"Clearly," the Commander murmured.
His gaze shifted briefly to the prince, who was now openly watching him as though daring him to stop. Satoru hated himself for even thinking about, let alone committing to, coming here with you. Why hadn't he stayed in the archives, reading that maddening document until his eyes bled? It would surely hurt less than this. He couldn't bring himself to look at you — he didn't even know what his own face was doing, whether it would betray horror or the sick, petulant satisfaction he'd been chasing earlier.
The older man took his sweet time. He reached for the vellum folder resting at the center of his desk, unspooling the string tying it closed. The scratch of stiff paper was the only sound in the suffocating silence.
"You were summoned because there were... some concerns," he droned.
You scowled, the first visible crack in your armor. "Pardon—"
"A disciplinary hearing has been convened under the direct authorization of the Crown," the Commander interrupted, his voice flat, dropping the first anvil into the room.
Satoru's confidence, his presumed upper hand, evaporated. The Crown. His mother did really push on, committing to her exceptional constitutional cruelty. This wasn't a militia squabble he could bully his way out of. This was a royal decree.
He could feel your eyes searching his, yet he couldn't bring himself to meet them. Were you composed? Were you pleading?
You felt your heart drop straight into your stomach. Disciplinary hearing? The Commander opened the folder. He didn't look at you with pity, or even with contempt. The sympathetic look, he spared you, from the oath-taking long gone.
"For the past several months, you were granted a position of unprecedented privilege for a lesser-house... lady," the Commander said, deliberately pausing before the title, stripping the word 'knight' from the room completely. "It was the expectation of the council that you would manage the physical and political security of the heir. Yet, you have failed."
Satoru ground his teeth. Both of them knew that you were far from failing. You did everything more diligently than anyone in this bloody castle even managed to think about. Sleepless nights, frantic chasing, tolerating everyone's insolence with nerves of steel. This was far from failing, and no matter how much the prince could dislike you, despise you and your icy composure, he could never call you incompetent. He would rather let himself be called a fool.
"Watch your bloody mouth, Commander," Satoru snapped, his voice ringing sharp and dangerous in the small office. He pushed off the table, stepping forward. "She’s still my knight and I don’t condone to—"
"And here we have the crux of the issue," the Commander interrupted smoothly.
He didn't look at the prince. He looked directly at you.
"See?" He gestured vaguely in Satoru's direction without taking his eyes off your face. "His temper. His lack of discipline. His blatant disregard for protocol in a formal hearing. This is exactly what you were appointed to manage, and your utter mismanagement is playing out in real time, making a mockery of this office."
Satoru froze mid-step.
"Every time he lashes out," the Commander continued, a mercifully even drone of destruction, "he simply provides further evidence of your incompetence."
Satoru's jaw snapped shut. His throat seized.
The trap sprang closed around him, barbed and absolute. He couldn't speak. If he shouted, if he threw his weight around, if he demanded this to stop—he was only feeding the set argument. He was the evidence of your supposed failure. His arrogance wasn't a shield anymore. It was the weapon they were using to execute you.
The color drained from your face.
For the first time in his entire privileged life, the prince was utterly, structurally paralyzed. He stepped back, the sick, hollow feeling consuming him entirely.
Satisfied with the sudden, dead silence from the heir, the Commander looked down at the parchment again.
And he started naming, listing each of the oversteps, each of the failures you supposedly caused—deliberately or by mistake, no one really asked. Dismissing your months of agonizing effort with a single wave of his hand.
"Your tenure thus far has been a profound, continuous embarrassment to this institution. You have failed to manage the physical security of the heir, and worse, you have actively mismanaged the crown's diplomatic standing."
Satoru’s jaw clenched. Mismanaged. You were the only one managing anything at all.
"Consequently, the consequence will be aimed at the only thing you lesser-house appointments seem to understand," the Commander continued, his eyes cold and flat. "The invitation previously extended to your family for the upcoming Winter Gala is officially revoked. They will not be granted access to the palace."
The air vanished from your lungs. The Winter Gala. One of the four seasonal events your parents had access to the lower court for. The thing your family had sacrificed everything to secure.
"Furthermore," the Commander leaned forward, far from stopping,"consider this your sole warning. If you appear before my desk for a disciplinary hearing again, your family will be permanently barred from the royal court. Your bloodline will be sent back to the provincial garrison, in disgrace, forever."
The room went dead silent. The stone floor felt as though it had dropped out from beneath your boots.
"To formally mark this citation," the Commander said, his voice cruelly bureaucratic and nothing more, "you will kneel. You will surrender your sword to this desk until tomorrow morning as a warning."
Your sword. Your pride, your right hand. Gone, for a day, just to serve a point. This was deeply humiliating. Deeply unsettling. Deeply cruel.
The shadows violently shifted.
"Don't you dare," Satoru snarled. The arrogant prince was gone — the voice that cracked through the room was lethal, his boots hitting the stone as he closed the distance. "She is a sworn knight. You will not make her—"
"Take one more step, Your Highness," the Commander warned, tone icy calm, "and I will summon the guards and mandate the lash. Right here. Right now."
Satoru froze.
"Intervene again, Your Highness, and you will be the reason she bleeds for it."
Satoru's breath caught in his throat. The trap was absolute. If he fought, you paid the physical price.
With shaking hands you unbuckled your scabbard without looking up, your eyes fixed on the ground. The leather groaned in the suffocating quiet. You stepped forward, placed the steel on the Commander's desk, and stepped right back.
And then, with your jaw locked so tight it trembled, you sank to your knees on the cold stone floor.
"I accept the censure of this office," you recited, forcing the words past the glass in your throat, refusing to beg. "I swear on my title, on my oath, these failures will not be repeated." Your voice was a hollow, broken rasp. Your fists tightened on your knees.
The Commander sat back, visibly satisfied with the private humiliation, a faint gleam in his eyes as he looked down at your sword on his desk.
What is a knight without her sword?
You asked yourself the same question — and perhaps that was why a single tear spilled over your lower lash line. It tracked silently down your cheek, catching the light from the window. You didn't wipe it away. You just willed it to slip down quickly, before anyone noticed.
Satoru stared at you. The gap between his own uselessness and what the system did to you effortlessly felt awful, devastating. Yet he had achieved exactly what he wanted, hadn't he? The system had finally done what he hadn't been able to for so long, breaking you. And break you did — silently weeping on the cold stone, right in front of the Commander, stripped of your pride, of your sword.
After a few suffocating seconds, satisfied, he dismissed you. You pushed yourself off the floor. Your knees ached from the stone. The desk looked impossibly wide, your sword sitting across it like a dead thing.
"The guard outside will escort His Highness back to his wing," the Commander said, shuffling the vellum folder away. He didn't look at you. "You are dismissed for the day. Plenty of time to amend your mistakes in your chambers."
You didn't answer. You turned and walked out of the office after the prince.
And the walk back to the royal wing was a different kind of suffocating. The knight trailed awkwardly behind the prince, his armor clanking lightly, a replacement piece slotted into a machine that didn't care whose face was under the helmet. You walked three paces behind him. Unarmed. Disgraced. Restless. Even if dismissed, the prince was still yours—your responsibility, your oath. You wouldn’t trust him with someone else, let alone a stranger who did not carry the weight of your duty.
When you reached the prince's chambers, the guard moved to take the primary position by the frame.
You stepped directly into his space.
"My lady," he started, confused. "The Commander said—"
"I don't care what the Commander said," you interrupted. Your voice shaky, yet entirely dead, devoid of inflection, devoid of anything at all. "My oath was sworn to the prince. Not to a piece of steel. Step aside."
The knight faltered, looking toward the heir for an order.
Satoru stood by the open door, frozen. He looked at the other man—a polished, functioning cog in the very machine that had just auctioned away his future and stripped you of your pride. The sight of the man made Satoru physically sick. He was surprised you stood your ground, and perhaps, buried beneath the sickness, he felt relieved.
"Get out of my sight," Satoru said softly, almost inaudibly. "Before I have you stationed at the northernmost border by nightfall."
The knight bowed frantically and hurried down the corridor.
Satoru looked at you. You were staring straight ahead at the wood of the door, your eyes hollow, tear-streaked cheeks faintly flushed, your hands empty, your jaw still locked in that agonizing, trembling discipline. It was a marvelous, yet suffocating sight. Seeing your face transformed into something so raw and unfamiliar ripped a hole straight through his chest.
He couldn't speak. There were no words in any language that could bridge the chasm of what he had just watched happen to you. He felt sick, exhausted, and foremost confused. Threatening to feel something he didn’t want to feel, not now, not ever.
He stepped into his chambers and shut the door, leaving you standing guard outside in the cold.
Satoru stood in the center of his massive, lavishly appointed room. He was alone. The silence wasn't angry anymore. It was absolute — the deafening, crushing silence of a cage snapping shut.
He decided, in a rare, fleeting moment of quiet concession, that he would not leave these rooms again today. He would spare you the humiliation of trailing behind him without your blade. He would give you the grace of simply standing by a closed door.
He stripped off his doublet, tossing it carelessly over the back of a velvet armchair. He walked to his desk. He sat down. He pulled a thick volume of regional histories toward himself — an attempt at normalcy, an attempt to force his brain into the familiar, detached rhythm of ignoring his problems.
But the room wouldn't let him.
The afternoon light bleeding through the tall, arched windows was a bruised, sickly grey. The fire crackling in the stone hearth felt entirely too hot, the heat pressing against his skin like a physical weight. He stared at the open pages of the book, but the ink blurred into meaningless shapes — not out of inattention, but rather a complete inability to anchor himself to reality.
The silence began to stretch, pulling taut like a wire in his skull.
He stood up. He walked to the window. He looked out at the courtyard, then turned his back to it. He paced to the far corner of the room, running a hand over the bookshelf spines. Nothing anchored him — he felt like he was floating, but the wrong kind of floating. The air felt stagnant, recycled. Wrong. All of it was wrong.
It hit him slowly at first, and then all at once. The avalanche he had spent a lifetime outrunning finally caught him in the center of his own bedroom.
His eyes fell on the scattered correspondence on his desk, and the image of his parents surfaced. Two people standing in the same room — his, theirs, anywhere, everywhere — refusing to look at each other, never looking at each other, bartering away his entire future in a transaction far more costly than they pretended. They were conditioning him for a lifetime trapped in the same freezing, loveless structure he had grown up in.
He dragged a hand through his hair, his chest beginning to heave. He paced toward the fireplace, but the warmth only brought the phantom scent of rose perfume drifting back into his mind. The bodies moving in the dark, the skin, the heated whispers. He had spent years chasing that warmth, desperately searching for any connection that wasn't strictly conditional. Yet nobody stayed. Nobody cared.
The walls of the chamber were shrinking. The velvet tapestries felt as though they were closing in on his throat. The panic rose, hot and blinding.
Another ghost walked into the room. The first knight — his first one. The man who had essentially raised him. The crackle of the fireplace suddenly sounded exactly like a body hitting the dirt. Blood pooling on the ground because of Satoru's own childish recklessness. The king's voice echoing in his skull: Must I bury a kingdom along with them? Over and over and over.
And in the center of it all — silencing everything yet amplifying it inexplicably — your face. The first flush, from the oath-taking, the one he had caused — the knight being sworn into his service, the crest embroidered at the hem of that forsaken cape-skirt, the flush creeping up your neck while you knelt on cold stone and meant every word, eyes hopeful when everyone looked at you will amused contempt, him included. And then the second one, today, different — knees hitting the Commander's stone floor, your sword surrendered across his desk, the flush this time from humiliation and fury and the effort of not breaking, your tear-streaked cheeks. And you were standing right outside his door. Unarmed. Disgraced. Because of him.
He felt guilty. He shouldn't feel guilty — so why did he? Guilt, anger, devastation — emotions stirring, pulling at him under his skin, crawling and ticklish like ants.
His chest caved in. His vision blurred. He couldn't breathe. The air simply wouldn't go into his lungs. He couldn't outrun it anymore. The dissociation, the lazy arrogance, the cruel jokes, the mask he hid behind — all of it was gone, stripped away, leaving nothing but raw, bleeding terror.
He was the prince. He was the heir. His life should be easy. He wasn't supposed to care about anything; he was supposed to indulge himself until he couldn't anymore. So why was this happening?
He stumbled backward, colliding violently with the edge of his side table. His hand scrambled blindly for purchase and closed around the carved crystal decanter of amber liquor.
The suffocation peaked. He couldn't scream, his fingers clawing at his own collar. The bile gathering in his throat tasted like iron and venom.
Instead he hurled the decanter with everything he had. It hit the stone wall next to the hearth with a deafening, explosive crash, shattering into a thousand glittering pieces — the sharp violence of breaking glass tearing through the silence, each shard catching the firelight like a different, exposing fragment of his own failure.
Satoru collapsed against the rattling furniture and slid down to the cold floor, burying his hands in his hair as his lungs dragged in ragged, starving gasps. Air finally went in. He stared at the broken crystal and the splashed amber liquid staining the expensive carpet.
The evidence of his shortcoming was glaring and humiliating.
No. No, no, no. This was a showcase of weakness, and the prince did not show weakness, nor remorse. It was a sign of incompetence, and incompetence was only punished. Laughed at. Executed. Never taken seriously. Only obsolete, only reckless, only and always a child — yet someone who was supposed to take over the throne. How. How could he. How would he. How should he.
He scrambled forward onto his hands and knees, crawling toward the broken glass, frantically trying to erase the evidence before anyone could see him shatter.
Outside the heavy oak doors, the explosion of glass sounded like a gunshot in the dead quiet.
Sickness violently twisted your stomach. You didn't think to knock, to ask for permission through the barrier. There was no time for hesitation. You didn't even remember that your hip was terrifyingly light, stripped of the steel you had carried every day.
Muscle memory and paranoia hijacked your nervous system. You threw your weight against the heavy wood, bursting into the chambers, your gloved hands raising instinctively, fully prepared to tear out the throat of whatever assassin had finally slipped past the perimeter.
You scanned the massive room in a fraction of a second. The window. The shadows. The hearth.
Empty. Empty. Empty.
Then your eyes dropped to the floor.
The adrenaline hit a brick wall. You froze, the breath catching in your throat.
There was no assassin. There was only the prince.
The untouchable, cruel, arrogant heir was on his hands and knees in the center of a ruin. He was frantically sweeping his bare hands through the jagged shards of crystal, his breath coming in ragged, ugly, broken gasps that he was desperately trying to swallow. Blood was already welling on his palms, mixing with the spilled amber liquor, but he didn't stop. He was shivering violently, trying to hide the mess, trying to clean up his own shattered pieces before the world could see them.
The sight of it broke something in you. Something fundamental shifted and took place in the room.
You stood there staring at the boy who had ruined you. The boy who had kept pushing until he finally achieved what he, and everyone else, had probably always wanted.
You should have felt vindicated. You should have felt a sick sense of poetic justice, seeing him reduced to the exact same pathetic, kneeling position he had finally forced you into just an hour ago.
But you didn't. The anger and the humiliation evaporated entirely, leaving nothing but a cold, sharp clarity. You didn't see the crown prince. You just saw a boy who was drowning. You had sworn your life to him, hopeful and determined. And after all, no dog likes to see their master kneeling.
The rigid discipline that had locked your jaw all day finally gave way.
"Your Highness—" The words arrived automatically, though this time much softer. Cautious. Almost silent.
He looked up.
His face — you had catalogued all of his expressions, had built an entire internal library of his registers, his performances, his tells. You knew all of them. This wasn't any of them. This was something you had no entry for. Something raw and unmanaged and completely, utterly unperformed. His eyes were too bright, his breathing ragged. He looked impossibly small and scared, entirely stripped of the regal, imposing bearing he normally wore like armor.
You stepped forward, the crunch of glass under your boots the only sound in the room, and dropped to your knees beside him in the spilled liquor.
He didn't stop. He was trapped in the loop of his own panic, his shaking fingers sweeping blindly through the jagged shards.
"Please, stop," you said, your voice barely a guarded whisper but carrying the unmistakable edge of a command.
He didn't hear you. He was reaching for another sharp piece of crystal.
You looked at his hands. The royal blood — the blood you had sworn an oath to protect at the cost of your own — was welling on his palms, mixing with the amber liquor. And you were sitting there fully armored, your hands shielded by thick leather.
If the master bleeds, the hound bleeds tenfold. A knight does not wear armor when her prince is bare and shattering. If he was going to bleed on this floor, then you were going to bare your skin to the exact same glass. Out of codex, out of training, out of something older than either.
Without a second thought, you raised your hands to your mouth. You caught the fingertips of your right glove between your teeth and yanked it off, tossing the heavy leather aside. You repeated the motion with your left, tearing the armor away entirely.
You lowered your bare hands toward the scattered crystal and started to help him clean it up.
Your fingers closed around a jagged piece. You set it aside. You reached for another. The burning amber liquor soaked into your calluses.
Satoru's frantic, hyperventilating breaths began to stutter.
He didn't stop moving, but his peripheral vision caught you. He watched you sideways as his shaking hands continued to sweep the floor. Stripped of your sword, stripped of your pride, now stripping your own armor to kneel in the dirt and quietly clean up his mess.
You reached for a particularly sharp sliver of the decanter's neck. The edge bit into the pad of your thumb. A thin ribbon of crimson bloomed across your skin.
Satoru stared at the drop of your blood falling into the stained carpet. The sight of it made him sick.
You both reached for the broken base of the crystal carafe at the exact same moment.
Your bare hands collided.
His skin was freezing, slick with blood and stained with his shame. Yours was warm. Your blood smeared against his, mixing with the liquor and the cuts on his own palm — a physical manifestation of your intertwined fates. He was ruining you, and you were bleeding for it without a single complaint. It was so dumbly poetic he might have laughed, if he could have reached his senses.
He didn't pull away though. Instead, as if acting on some desperate, subconscious instinct, Satoru turned his hand inward. His long, trembling fingers slid hesitantly against yours and intertwined with them, his grip closing around your hand with crushing, aching desperation.
He caught you — finally anchoring himself to the warmth of your calloused palm like a man pulling himself out of a grave. For the first time in so, so long, he finally felt the ground fully beneath him. A touch that cost him nothing, a touch that required nothing in return. Yet one that broke something neither of you would be able to build back up.
You froze. The sharp glass was completely forgotten.
Satoru's head dropped forward, his forehead coming to rest heavily against your knuckles.
The dam finally gave way. The arrogant, stupid mask shattered. A wretched, broken sob tore its way out of his throat, his shoulders trembling violently as he wept into the space between your connected, bleeding hands.
You kept entirely silent, your own heart hammering as you felt the heat of his tears against your palm. And perhaps it was the warmth you hadn't felt in so, so long. Perhaps it was everything finally pressing your shoulders down to the ground as you stopped resisting. And perhaps it was the sight of the broken boy beside you. The tears came again — yours this time — and you sobbed silently over his hunched form, staring into the only thing still moving in the room: the uninviting warmth of the fire in front of you.
You knew you should pull away. You knew you should keep your distance, stay angry at him, let him stay angry at you. You should have clung to the bitter reality of your parents paying the price for a trap his own family had built in the first place. Yet you didn't recite protocol. You didn't tell him what everyone else probably would have—to get it together, to pull himself up, to be the prince. You just stayed on your knees in the wreckage and let him hold you.
The storm of everything mixing, everything culminating into devastating, ego-shattering thunder, plunged into your back over and over.
But even the storm eventually ran out of oxygen.
The jarring trembling in Satoru’s shoulders gradually subsided into an exhausted stillness. The ragged gasps smoothed out into slow and silent hiccups. The fire crackled in the hearth, reclaiming the silence of the room.
You didn't move. You let him hold you, your calloused thumbs resting lightly against the pulse of his wrists, feeling the frantic beat of his heart slowly begin to steady.
And then, his conscious mind caught up to his body.
Satoru’s breath hitched sharply. The realization of what he was doing—of who he was holding, of how entirely, pathetically he had just laid himself bare—hit him like a bucket of very icy water. He had never been this exposed in his entire life. And the inviting, gentle warmth of your hands felt like a fire he didn't know how to stand near without burning alive.
He flinched. Satoru yanked his hands out of your grip as if your skin had physically scorched him.
He scrambled backward, the remaining glass crunching loudly under his boots as he put a foot of distance between you. He pulled his knees up, instantly turning his face away so you couldn't see his bloodshot eyes. His chest was heaving again, not with panic this time, but with a terrifying shame.
He raised his shaking hands to his face, clumsily trying to wipe the tears from his cheeks. But his palms were still coated in amber liquor and his own blood, and all he managed to do was smear a streak of crimson across his pale cheekbone.
He looked pathetic. He looked tragic. He looked like a boy trying desperately to rebuild a shattered fortress out of thin air.
"Don't," he choked out. His voice was a harsh, raspy fraction of its usual arrogant self, aimed at the floor rather than at you. "Just... don't look at me."
You were left kneeling in the spilled bitter liquor. Your hands were frozen in the empty air where his had just been, your bare skin still carrying the warmth of his grip and the stain of his blood. The absence of his touch felt suddenly, inexplicably freezing.
You blinked at him, not entirely understanding why you felt so hollow, left confused and more exposed than you had before. But as you eyed his blood-smeared cheek and the tremble in his hands, you lowered your gaze to your own. They were trembling, too, smeared with crimson that belonged to both of you.
You didn't push him. You simply reached out and quietly resumed picking up the jagged pieces of glass.
"Thank you," he managed to mutter.
And as you set the last piece of glass aside, you stood, pulling your gloves back on—one, then the other. The leather settled back into place over your bloodied hands, like each agonizing increment of your resolve getting built back up.
You walked to the door without saying anything, without answering him. More words would have been costly tonight, and not in their usual currency. You grabbed the handle to take your post in the freezing corridor. Bare. And without your sword.
── Dividers from pxrce-lain and seulzitos and pixopix!
The Oath | royal!gojo x knight!reader | masterpost
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: 30k (so far)
masterlist | crossposted on ao3!
fic taglist
Chapter 1 ⊱ ۫ ׅ ✧ The Weight of the Vow
Chapter 2 ⊱ ۫ ׅ ✧ A Chasm Wide Between Us
Chapter 3 ⊱ ۫ ׅ ✧ Where the Hound Kneels
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
── Dividers from pxrce-lain and seulzitos and pixopix!
