There's something haunting him.
The prince knows it. Knows it's more than just a memory when the crowds at court part around a guard who isn't there anymore; when the snow-laden wind streams around the shelter he used to take in his knight's side, as though that immovable protection were imprinted on reality itself. It isn't just his own stubborn refusal that's kept another guard from being assigned. None of the company can bring themselves to step into the place his knight has left... open, but not unoccupied.
(The prince has always been sensitive to spirits. Had to be moved early from the nursery, after one too many "fits" at night, the court physician had pronounced. His knight had been the only one there with him years later when they had found the face haunting his night terrors leering from off the portrait hall, removed from the gallery and executed before the prince's birth for crimes against the crown.)
There is only so much death one can see before becoming desensitized. But the prince still shies away from the empty, staring sockets in the corner of his mirror. Bothers with nightclothes in ways he hasn't for years, leery of the looming Presence in his rooms and moved by respect... at first. After his favorite horse loses a shoe, another argument with his father regarding marriage, and an unpleasant encounter with his least favorite of his mother's ladies-in-waiting, he's exhausted enough to fall into old routine... and when he wakes from first sleep that night, his knight's shade is stronger and more present than ever in the breath before sight of the last phalange fades from the foot of the bed.
The prince finds himself... testing this. The limits, causes of this visitation. It's a poor idea, for many reasons, but his safety means nothing to him without the knight who assured it. Either his blade would never, could never hurt him, even now, or... well. Or his knight should have stayed alive long enough to disabuse him of this madness.
(It had come down to his life versus the prince's.)
(His knight's call had been the wrong one, the prince knows.)
Strip shows and glimpsing teases become candid displays dedicated to his absent observer; the lewd strokes of his hand and preparing of his holes move from mocking taunt to desperate, direct pleas to the unseen. His tower rooms, already drafty behind the tapestries, become altogether chilly with unfelt breezes at night and candles blown out by nothing at all, replaced with dark mists and will o'wisp lights glinting over visions of bone. As these phenomena strengthen, day after day, the prince begins startling in broad daylight at ghost-finger touches to his most sensitive parts, felt directly through his clothes, and has to scramble to explain the lapse to politely judgmental courtiers. Frigid winds focused in inconvenient places force great care when dressing, lest his nipples burgeon indiscreetly or a stray gust blow his jackets up over the seat of his trousers; reflections in crown or metal tease winkingly with obscene provocations at every absent glance. The prince has never been so hard in all his life.
When whispers of whorish suggestions and taunts begin to be carried by the breeze, strategic deployment of quill and paper finally allows communication from beyond the veil, but the prince folds his tongue around his apologies and refuses to voice them. It's selfish, he admits when the knight is firm enough to press. To lay out his concerns, to put them to rest... would that not resolve his knight's unfinished business? Would that not remove him again, more finally, from the life of the prince who has missed him like a rib?
Cold air brushes his cheek. (The prince leans in.) He's an idiot, the knight tells him, growing larger and more fearsome as his voice rumbles more deeply through the stone. It wasn't resentment or some noble dedication which turned a crown protector into a wraith â only hunger. A thirst his mortal self could never bear to slake.
Oh, the prince says. Well, that's alright then. Pale and vulnerable, prey surrounded by shadows, he tips his weight into empty air and parts his lips to grinning teeth.
And with all the solemn inevitability of Death itself, his revenant knight's kiss reaches past his royal life-vein to seize his very heart.
stormborns
2087
gracieabrams
romaincrisis
