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Divine Right of Kings - 2

pairing˚˖ִ໋❀ knight!yuji x princess!reader

summary˚˖ִ໋❀ raised together yet divided by rank, a princess and her knight have spent years loving each other in silence.

tags/warnings˚❀ yearning, yearning, yearning, poison, forbidden love, refrenced childhood trauma, tension, angst, romance, medeival au, requited love, hurt/comfort

wc˚˖ִ໋❀ 6.5k

Dawn does not arrive gently,

The sunlight slices through the heavy velvet curtains of your bedchamber, a relentless golden hue that throbs behind your eyes. You wake with the ghost of a laugh trapped in your throat and the copper tang of ale lingering on your tongue.

You place the pillow over your head.

This helps for approximately thirty seconds.

Your mouth is dry and your head feels like a city the morning after a siege. You do not move. Moving feels like a negotiation you are not fit to enter and so instead you lie still in the dark of your closed eyelids and let the previous night return to you in pieces.

The city first. The cold air and woodsmoke and the clay cup, the way the spiced wine had tasted. Yuji’s coat that was not his good one. The bread still warm when you pressed it into his hands, and the brief transfer of heat that lasts longer in memory. The particular warmth of Cupids Chalice.

You press the back of your hand to your forehead where his lips had branded it with a kiss.

I think you know exactly how I feel about you

You had said it. In a bar, slightly drunk, lamplight and heavy burdens, you had said it plainly and he had not looked away, his fingers closed around yours across the table with a slowness.

You think about propriety.

You think about one day.

You press your face into your pillow and stay there for a long moment, breathing into the linen, feeling the whole of the previous night settle into your chest like something stubbornly present.

Your feet ache. You become aware of this gradually, a sharp, stinging heat that blossoms across your soles, the particular consequence of dancing too long on cobblestones and packed earth. Each ache is a memory of Yuji’s hand at your waist, the way the world had blurred until everything narrowed to the rhythm of his breathing and the scent of woodsmoke.

You sit there for a moment.

Mercy knocks twice before entering. She comes into the room with the scent of lavender and sharp tea trailing behind her. Entering with enough noise to be charitable. The curtains pull back in two practiced motions, winter light spreading across the floor, and you make a sound into your pillow.

Mercy does not ask why your boots were caked in dried mud or why your commoners dress lay in a tangled heap inside the linen trunk. She takes one look at you and heads back out of the room. She returns with water, a damp cloth, and something hot that smells of ginger. She sets these things on the bedside table with care.

“Good morning,” Mercy says,

You push yourself upright and the room tilts before settling. Your head makes its displeasure known and you sit at the edge of the bed and look at your feet, which are still sore, and at the floor which is cold.

Mercy appears before you with a cup of something that smells like ginger and black pepper.

“Drink,” she says.

You drink. It is unpleasant and effective in equal measure.

Mercy crouches and takes your right foot in her hands without comment, turning it. She examines the sole–the reddened skin at the ball of your foot, the tender arch.

“Before you say anything,” you say.

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were composing it in the corridor.”

“I was composing nothing. I was simply, observing. Quietly.”

“Mercy.” She stops and looks at you for a moment. Her hands folded.

“How are you,” she says. The real question. The one underneath the others.

“Something happened,” you say carefully. “Nothing–nothing irreversible. Nothing–” You stop and search for the right word. “I am not sure I have the language for it yet.”

Mercy looks at you for a long while. “But you are alright.”

“I think I am something,” you say. “I am not sure alright is exactly the word.”

She is quiet. This was one of the things you loved about her, the way she could be quiet without it being a withdrawal. Her quiet was a presence, always a specific deliberate form of attention.

You two have gone through many silences through shared mornings and difficult nights. She had held you through your first real grief at twelve, you grandmothers death, sitting on the edge of this same bed saying nothing just, present and warm and certain. She has stood beside you through years of your mothers particular brand of cruelty, without ever saying a word against her directly. Mercy is too careful for that, instead she had found other ways: the extra blankets on cold nights, the tea made slightly stronger, the hand on your shoulder when no one else was watching that said I see what is being done to you and I am here.

“Your feet,” she says now.

“I know of them.”

“You danced.”

“For some time.”

“In the square.” “Perhaps.”

“Were you alone?”

You look at the ceiling.

“No…”

The silence that follows is very specific. It was the silence of a woman who had her own suspicions for quite some time and had just received confirmation.

“Mercy,” you say, before she could. “Don’t.”

“I am not doing anything.”

“You are thinking very loudly.”

“I am thinking,” she says with great dignity, "absolutely nothing.” She stands. “The council meets at the second hour.”

“I know.”

“You will want to look unassailable.”

“I always want to look unassailable.”

“You will want to look particularly unassailable today.” She moves toward the wardrobe. “The dark blue I think. The one with the high collar.”

You watch her work. Mercy's hands move with a sureness you had come to depend on in a way that you rarely articulated. She lays the gown across the chair, smoothing a crease at the sleeve with one thumb.

She helps you dress in comfortable silence. Her hands are sure at your back, working the laces with a practiced efficiency, straightening the collar with small adjustments.

She begins with your hair. You sit before the mirror and watch her hands in the glass, the careful sectioning, the patience she brings to your coils, you let yourself be managed for a moment without resistance.

“I will wrap your feet before I put your shoes on. You will not feel it by midday.”

“Thank you.”

You look at yourself in the mirror. The dark blue is correct, it gives you a severity you don't entirely feel but can borrow for the morning. Your complexion is pallid, but Mercy has already accounted for this, and her hands are at work with the small cosmetic arts.

“There,” Mercy says eventually, stepping back, meeting your eyes in the glass with a fond look. “You look like someone who has slept.”

“I look like someone who has tried.”

“That is a distinguished thing,” she says. “Very affecting.”

You almost smile. You recognize the echo of it, from the morning after the funeral, when she had said the same thing and made you laugh despite yourself. She knows that you recognize it.

You look at her in the mirror, at the woman who has been standing at the foot of your bed since you were a young girl and has never since looked away.

She holds your gaze in the glass for a moment, and something in her expression shifts just slightly, the way a door moves when a window opens somewhere in the house.

She wraps your feet with the same quiet efficiency she brings to everything, deft and careful, and then eases your shoes on without being asked.

You stand. The soreness recedes to something manageable. You straighten, find your posture, and put your shoulders back. The woman in the mirror assembles herself around you and you take a breath.

“Right,” you say. “Breakfast.”

The smaller dining room again. Mercy has arranged it without being asked, no great hall, no long table with its watching eyes, just the fire and the pewter sky and a plate of things you might actually eat.

Yuji stands two paces behind you.

You have not looked at him directly since he had taken his position at the door. You were aware of him still, the quality of his presence, the sound of his breathing, the knowledge of his hands behind his back and his eyes trained above your head, those same hands that had held yours last night and covered yours.

Then you look up.

He is watching the room, not you. Or that is what he would have you think. His gaze sweeps the door, the window, the professional attention of a man doing his work. There is something different in his posture this morning, a slight and particular stillness. The kind he wore when he was managing something carefully.

He had not slept well either. You can see it now that you are looking. The faint shadows beneath his eyes, the set of his jaw. You have a catalogue of his silences and this one you knew.

You reach for the tea, your sleeve catching the edge of the cup, a small wobble, nothing spilled, yet you feel him shift behind you, and then stop because nothing needed catching. Because he was two paces behind you and the distance was the distance.

You pick up the bread again and eat it.

“You should eat something too,” you say.

A beat.

“I ate earlier,” he says, looking at nothing in particular.

“Good.” You look at your plate. “Good.”

Yuji stands two paces behind you. Neither of you speak. It was, for all its silence, the loudest breakfast you had ever sat through.

“The council meets at the second hour,” you say.

“Yes, I am aware.”

“I know what they intend to discuss.”

“Yes,” he says again, more quietly. A word that held its shape around the thing neither of you was saying.

You think about the bar. The matter of your settlement. Certain parties who have expressed interest. You had dissociated though much of the previous meeting, pulled under by the weight of everything that had come before it, and surfaced only long enough to hear the shape of the thing. Today, you would have to hear it whole.

You look at the fire.

“Lord Naoya,” you say. The name sits in your mouth like a brick.

Yuji is very still.

“He has significant holdings,” you say. “The western territories. It would be considered a sound alliance, strategically.”

“Yes.” His voice is even.

“And I am to be considered in terms of strategy.”

He does not answer that one. He does not need to. The silence does it for him, and it is characteristically honest.

You look at your hands on the table, look at the space between them. The empty space where last night his fingers had closed around yours.

“I will need to be particularly steady today,” you say, finally. “In there. I need you to–” you stop.

“I know,” he says.

That is all. I know, and the two paces and the door to the council chambers opening ahead of you as the hour approaches, and the world with its indifferent commands. You rise, you straighten, and you go.

The council chamber receives you with its customary gravity before you enter it. The low murmur of voices, the scrape of a chair, the silence that befalls the room when it becomes aware of your approach. You pause for just a moment in the corridor outside it, one hand not quite touching the door, and breathe.

Behind you, you hear him do the same.

Then you push the door open and walk in.

The lords are assembled around the long table, beneath the banners of your fathers line–your line, now. They rise as you enter, the well practiced choreography of deference, and you incline your head as you take your seat at the head of the table and fold your hands. The meeting begins.

Lord Edmure opens proceedings. He had always opened proceedings, it was a role he had appointed himself to so long ago that it had calcified into expectation. He had his papers spread before him and his practiced air of measured authority.

You listen. Your face is composed. Your feet ache distantly inside their wrappings.

The northern holdings, first. The question of disputed land rights along the border that your father had allowed to drift into ambiguity for reasons that were never explained. You ask two clarifying questions and receive two answers that contain less info than was required.

Then the coronation.

Lord Balthus speaks to this, old Lord Balthus, who had served your grandfather and carried himself like living architecture, a man made entirely of precedent. He sets out the timeline. The preparations already underway; the cathedral booked, the invitation lists already compiled, the question of the processional route.

You press your hands flat against the table, very slightly, and keep your face still.

You were going to be queen. You had always known this, in an abstract way. But the coronation had a date now, an address, a cathedral and a processional route, and it sat in the middle of the table among the papers and the pewter cups like something with mass.

Yuji stands at the edge of the room.

You do not look at him. You look at Lord Balthus and nod, at the appropriate intervals and feel something settle into your chest.

“And the matter of the settlement.” Lord Edmure smoothly changes the topic. He has particular papers for this. He had brought them already prepared, you notice, already ordered–he had known the shape of today before you had walked in.

You look at his papers. You look at his hands on them.

“Lord Naoya of the western territories,” he continues, “has expressed a formal interest. His holdings are considerable. The alliance would stabilize the western border, provide a significant addition to the treasury and,” he lifts his eyes to yours, briefly “resolve the question of succession with appropriate haste.” He sets his papers down. “As it happens, Lord Naoya arrived in the city this morning. I have taken the liberty of arranging an introduction, a private meeting, this afternoon, in the east receiving room. The fourth hour.”

The room is very quiet

“I see,” you say. “How considerate of you.”

“I thought it prudent,” Lord Edmure says, “to move efficiently, given the proximity of the coronation.”

“Yes,” you say. “You seem to think a great deal about efficiency.”

“It would be a sound match,” Lord Aldric offers, carefully from further down the table. He is around your age, Lord Aldric–young enough to be aware of his own youth, old enough to have learned to speak as though he weren’t. “Strategically and politically.”

“Yes,” you say. “You have said.”

A small silence.

Lord Edmure straightens his papers. “There is some urgency to the matter, given the proximity of the coronation. An announcement before the ceremony would be favorable. It would signal stability.”

“It would signal,” you say evenly, “that the kingdom's first order of business following my coronation is the management of my marital status.”

Lord Balthus does not change his expression. Lord Aldric looks at the table. Lord Edmure looks at you with a patient, clipped expression.

“Your Highness,” he says, “the matter of succession is not–”

“I understand what the matter is.” You keep your voice level, pleasant even. “I am simply noting the sequencing.”

Lord Edmure pauses.

“Of course,” he says. “There is no obligation to formalize anything before the coronation. Merely–a consideration.”

“Merely,” you agree.

The word sits between you.

You move on. The subject of Lord Naoya does not leave the room; it relocates, taking up residence in the corner, watching the remainder of the proceedings with quiet patience.

It is Lord Edmure who raises the next matter.

“There is also the question of the charity visit,” he says. “To the lower quarter. There has been some discussion of scheduling–”

You look at him.

“--of course, the timing would require council approval,” he continues, “given the current security climate. After the incident at the funeral, it seems prudent–”

“I was not aware,” you say carefully, “that my movements required council approval.”

“Not approval. Consultation. Naturally.”

Lord Aldric is looking at the table again.

“Naturally,” you say.

Something is off. You cannot name it yet–it is a texture, a quality, a faint wrongness in the grain of the exchange.

Lord Edmure looks at you with his careful, patient eyes, and says:

“Grief reshapes a kingdom, does it not? We all must endure what takes us by degrees.”

The room is silent.

The sympathy is there, on the surface, the appropriate gravity, the measured sorrow. But underneath it something else. Something that was watching.

“Yes,” you say, after a moment. “We do.”

You hold his gaze for a beat longer than necessary, and then you look at your papers.

The meeting continues.

It is Lord Aldric who, near the end of the second hour, raises the question of the grain shortage in the southern districts. He does it with some diffidence, as though uncertain of the rooms appetite for it. It is not, strictly, a matter or high politics; it is a matter of the people, of the common machinery of daily life.

“The last harvest was poor,” he says. “The southern villages have petitioned for relief. It is not–it is not a crisis, precisely, but it could become one, and there is the matter of how it is handled.”

Lord Edmure does not quite roll his eyes.

“We can refer the matter to the stewards office,” he says.

“The stewards office has referred it here,” Lord Aldric says, mildly.

“Tell me about the southern petitions,” you say.

Lord Aldric looks up, slightly surprised.

“Three villages along the Ardent River,” he says. “Poor harvest, early frost. They are asking for a reduction in the autumn levy and some access to the crown’s grain stores.” “What is the current status of the grain stores?”

A beat. Lord Edmure shifts his papers. “Adequate,” he says.

“Adequate for whom?” you ask pleasantly.

The room holds its breath.

You think about the city at night, the warm press of it, the quality of people simply going about their work and being alive. You had wanted, once, to know what it cost them to do it.

You think about petitions, three of them, people who had gone through the trouble of petitioning the crown because they had nothing left to do but ask.

“I should like to review the petition documents,” you say. “Before they are referred elsewhere.”

“Of course,” Lord Aldric says.

“I believe that concludes today’s matters,”Lord Edmure says, gathering his papers.

“Almost,” you say. “The charity visit to the lower quarter. I will inform the council of the date once it is arranged. I appreciate the security concerns, they are noted.” A pause. “But the decision is mine.”

The silence that follows is brief. Lord Balthus nods, his primary loyalty being to the institution rather than to any individual sitting within it.

“Of course, Your Highness,” he says.

The others follow. Lord Edmure last, his expression entirely composed, his papers neat in his hands.

“Of course,” he echoes.

The Lords file out. You remain seated until the last of them has left the room, your hands flat on the table, the banners of your fathers line hanging still in the cold air.

You sit with it for a moment. The coronation. Lord Naoya. The grain stores and the petitions and the charity visit that required consultation. The shape of your future being built around you from the outside, by hands other than yours, people who have decided that management and governance are one in the same.

They are not.

You have known this in some abstract, unexamined way, but it sharpens now, here, in the quiet of the emptied chamber. There are people in the kingdom who are not abstraction, who are not line items in a stewards ledger.

It is the job.

It is your job.

You press your palms flat against the table and feel the solidity of it.

The door opens. Yuji enters; the lords had gone, and he moves to stand nearer than his usual two paces. He is aware of every inch of the space between you.

He is watching you with that expression, not the managed one, not the one he wore in public with its careful professional angles. He was looking at you, really looking at you with pure unadulterated devotion. Simply, privately, devastanginly devoted.

“I am going to be a good queen,” you say. It comes out quietly, not a declaration but a discovery. Not because you were supposed to, not because duty demanded it, not because there was no one else. But because the petitions were sitting in the stewards office, and the grain stores were adequate, and the three village along the Ardent River had gone to the trouble of asking. Because your duty was to your people.

“I know,” he says.

You look at him. He looks at you, steady, unambiguous.

“I know,” he says again, softer.

You allow yourself, just for a moment, to hold that. He had been watching you for twelve years, learning you like a sailor, learns the weather, and that this–this particular version of you, tired and bruised-footed and clear eyed in the empty council chamber–this is the one he was looking at with that expression.

You rise and walk toward the door.

He falls into step, two paces behind, as always. As propriety requires. At the door, you pause.

“Yuji.”

“Your Highness.”

You turn to face him.

"When I am queen," you say quietly, "will you still be my knight?"

Something moves across his face, brief, careful and entirely his.

"Always," he responds.

Not yes. Not of course or it is my duty or any of the other words that would have answered the question and meant nothing.

Always. Complete and unqualified and offered without hesitation, the way he does everything for you--as though there is simply no other possible answer, as though the question itself was never really in doubt.

You go through the door.

He follows, two paces behind.

Lord Naoya Zenin arrives at the fourth hour.

The receiving room has been arranged for the occasion, the good chairs, the fire built high, a tray with wine and honeyed milk that was a preference of your guest. You stand by the window when he enters and turn at the appropriate moment.

Lord Naoya is handsome. You register this plainly, without particular feeling attached. He is tall and fair and carries himself with ease. It is clear that he has never been made to feel that his is in the wrong room. His clothes are expensive. His eyes, when they find yours, are pale, and assessing and faintly amused.

He does not bow, you note

“Your Highness,” he says, his voice pleasant. “I had heard you were remarkable. The reports did not do you justice.”

It is the kind of compliment that functions as a small act of possession, framing you as a thing being described by men to other men.

You smile. “Lord Naoya, Welcome.”

He takes the chair that is offered. He speaks easily about the journey, the western territories, the political landscape.

Yuji stands by the door.

You do not look at him, but you are peripherally aware of him. His posture is immaculate, his expression still.

Lord Naoya turns the conversation toward you with a practiced pivot.

“I imagine,” he says, acting as if his input was a courtesy he is extending, “that the affairs of state are quite new to you. It is a great deal to inherit.”

You look at him.

“I have been preparing for this inheritance for twenty-three years,” you say.

He smiles. It is a patient one. “Of course. Though preparation and practice are different animals. I expect you will find it useful to have–exeperienced male council in the early period.”

The early period.

“I have a council.”

“Indeed.” His eyes are still faintly amused. “Though councils are formal bodies. I speak of something more…immediate.” He turns his cup in his hands. “A partner who understands the western territories, the border questions, the trade routes. These are not things learned from documents.”

“No,” you agree, “they are learned from governing. Which I intend to do.”

The smile holds.

A servant enters with the tray. Wine for you, the honeyed milk for Lord Naoya and, by extension, a small cup of it placed near you as well. The servant sets it down and withdraws.

Naoya lifts his cup and looks at you across the rim with those pale, assessing eyes.

“You are not what I expected,” he scoffs.

“No. I rarely am.”

You reach for your milk. Behind you, quietly, you hear Yuji move.

It is not dramatic. He simply crossed to the tray and lifted the small honeyed milk that had been placed near you and drank from it.

Naoya watches with mild curiosity. “Your knight has strange habits,” he says.

“He has thorough ones,” you say, still looking at Naoya.

Yuji sets the cup down and returns to his position by the door. You allow yourself one glance.

The meeting continues for another quarter hour. You are present for it, more or less, you answer what is asked. Lord Naoya leaves as he arrived: easily, pleasantly, with unhurried grace.

The door closes.

You wait two beats. Three. The sound of Lord Naoya's footsteps recede down the corridor until there is nothing left of him.

Yuji is standing still at the door. His posture is correct, his hands are clasped behind his back, his face composed. But his jaw is tight.

You had noticed it during the meeting. The shift in the quality of his stillness when Lord Naoya had said experienced male counsel and the early period–a stillness that was not peace but its opposite. Controlled fury wearing the clothes of composure.

“Yuji,” you say.

“The meeting went well,” he says, his voice entirely even. “Lord Naoya is–”

“Yuji. Are you–”

He looks at you. There is something careful in his face, a particular concentration.

“I am fine.” he says before you finish asking.

“You are not,” you say. “You are not, and you know you’re not, and I need you to–”

“I need you, he says, low and precise, “to let me stand here for another three minutes and then we will both walk out of this room in the appropriate manner and address the rest later.”

You look. There is a sheen at his temple. A faint one, barely visible in the afternoon light. You have spent twelve years learning the weather of him, and this is not correct.

“Yuji.”

“I am fine,” he says again.

“Three minutes,” you say.

He makes it to two.

He takes one step toward the door to open it for you, and then stops.

It is the stopping that tells you. He is not a man who stops mid motion. He is deliberate, practiced, continuous in his movements. He does not stop.

He puts one hand against the wall. He goes down slowly. That was the mercy of it–not a collapse, not a sudden drag downwards but a gradual yielding, his hand finding the door frame with deliberate care. His knees go by degrees and you are across the room before you have decided to move.

You get your hands on him. That is the first thing. You close the distance between you and take his arm in yours and he does not resist, which tells you more than anything else could.

“Can you walk?”

“Yes.” A pause. The briefest pause. “Mostly.”

You tell the first attendant you pass that Yuji requires rest after a long morning. You say it pleasantly, with mild authority. The attendant does not question you further.

The walk to his chambers is not long. It feels long. He keeps pace beside you, his arm beneath your hand, and he is steady enough that no one who passes you in the corridor sees anything worth inquiring about. But you feel the faint tremor in him. You feel the effort, the sheer, exhausting labor of it.

His chambers are plain. A narrow bed, a table, a window that faces the inner courtyard, various knick-knacks and books scattered about. You bring him to the edge of the bed and he sits heavily, hands braced on his knees, and simply breathes.

“I can manage,” he says.

“I know you can.” You kneel before him anyways and begin at the buckles of his vambrace.

He is quiet while you work. The armor comes away piece by piece, the vambrace, the chest plate with its complicated fastenings. Each piece you set aside with care, on the table, on the chair. He does not help you, exactly, turning his arm when you need it turned, lifting when you need him to lift.

You reach for the cloth from the basin on his table. The water is cold. You wring it, and press it carefully to his forehead, to his temple, and he exhales, a quiet controlled sound, almost silent.

“You shouldn’t be doing this,” he says.

“And yet here I am.”

“Your Highness–”

“Don’t,” you move the cloth to the back of his neck where the heat is the worst. “Not right now.”

He is quiet.

You sit on the edge of the bed beside him and continue your work, the cloth and the basin, the slow process of cooling. Up close, in the grey afternoon light of his window, he looks drawn. The shadows beneath his eyes are worse, his face a particular pallor.

“You could have warned me,” you say softly.

“There was no time.” His voice is thinner than usual. “And I did not want to–” He stops.

“You did not want to what?”

“I did not want to cause a scene,” he says. “In front of him.”

You look at him. He is looking at the window now, jaw set, the last of his composure doing its work even now.

“You were angry,” you say. “At him.”

A silence.

“He spoke to you, as though you were a problem being managed. As though you required containment.” The word comes out with precision. “As though the last twenty-three years of your life were a mere footnote.”

You are quiet.

“I am aware,” he says after a moment, “that it was not my place to–”

“It is always your place,” you interject. “I give it to you.”

He turns to look at you, then. His face in this light, stripped of formalities, is simply his face, the one you have been memorizing without meaning to for twelve years, every line of it familiar as scripture.

The cloth has gone warm. You turn it, find the cooler side, press it back to his temple.

He closes his eyes.

“Lie down,” you say.

He lies down. You pull the blanket from the foot of the bed across him, and he does not argue. His hair spreads loose across the pillow, dark against the white linen. You pull the chair from his table to the side of the bed and sit.

For a while, neither of you speak.

His breathing slows and deepens. You continue with the cloth. Forehead, temple, the line of his jaw.

“Forgive me,” he murmurs.

“There is nothing to forgive.”

“I have failed. It should not have–I should have caught it sooner.” His voice is quiet.

“Yuji.” you lean closer. “You are not allowed to apologize for saving my life. That is not something I will accept.”

“You are very difficult,” he says, faintly.

“You have had years to form that opinion.”

“Yes.” The ghost of something warm in his voice. “I have.”

His hand, resting at his side, shifts. Not reaching, exactly, just shifting slightly, toward where you are sitting. You move your hand to cover his.

He turns his palm over.

His fingers close around yours with a slowness. His skin is warm from the fever but his grip is sure.

“I have been thinking,” he says. His voice barely above a murmur.

“What a dangerous thing. Rest”

“I am resting. I am also thinking.” A breath. “I have been thinking about the bar. About what you said.”

You are very still.

“I think you know exactly how I feel about you,” he murmurs. He is echoing you back to yourself, you own words in his voice.

“Yuji…”

“I did not say it back,” he says. “Last night. I did not–I could not find–” He stops. His thumb moves, slow and careful across your knuckles. “I could not find the right shape for it. I do not think I am built for finding the shape of it.” “You do not have to.”

“But I want you to know,” he says, “that it is there. That it has always been there." He exhales, a careful sound. “That I have been watching you for twelve years and there is not a version of me where I am not entirely–”

He does not finish. The sentence trails off into the warm dark of his half-conscious thoughts, and you hold onto his hand and let yourself feel the whole weight of it.

“I know,” you say softly. “I know.”

His breathing steadies again.

You reach up and brush his hair back from his forehead, a simple thing, a small thing. He does not stir, but something in his face softens. You let your fingers rest there for a moment at his temple, at the line of his hair.

He is still but his hand tightens around yours.

He lifts your hand.

It is slow and deliberate and entirely conscious despite the fever, and he brings your knuckles to his mouth, he does not simply kiss them. He holds them there, his lips warm against your skin, and he speaks against your hand, low and private, the words landing directly onto your knuckles like a second kiss beneath the first.

“You are the only thing, that I have ever–”

He stops. Breathes. Tries again, quieter.

“Every room,” he murmurs against your hand. “Every room I have ever stood in, I have been standing in it for you.”

You do not move. You do not breathe.

“Twelve years.” His lips barely leave your skin between words, his voice a bare thread of sound. “Twelve years and I have never… I have never once wanted to be anywhere that you were not.”

“Yuji.” His name comes out fractured.

“I know.” His thumb moves at your wrist. “I know what it is. I know what I am not allowed, I know all of it.” His mouth is still against your knuckles and his voice is fevered and unmoored and more honest than you have ever heard it. “But I want you to know that it is there. That it has always–” Another breath. “That you are not…you have never been merely–”

He cannot seem to finish the sentence. The fever keeps taking the end of his thoughts, pulling them under before he can surface them completely. But you understand. You understand every unfinished word of it.

You reach up with your free hand and brush his hair back from his face. His eyes are closed, his lashes dark against the pallor of his cheeks, his lips still lightly pressed to your knuckles. You let your fingers stay there at his temple, at the soft edge of his hairline, and you feel the warmth of the fever underneath it all.

Then you lean forward and press your lips to his forehead.

His entire body stills.

You hold your mouth there for a long moment, against his fevered skin, feeling his hand tighten around yours, not pulling you closer, not grasping, just tightening, the smallest possible closing of distance, as though he is afraid that if he moves too much it will end.

You straighten slowly.

His eyes open. He looks at you across the narrow dark between you, the chair and the bed and all the distance that is not really distance at all.

He brings your hand back to his lips. Against your knuckles, so quiet you feel it more than you hear it: “One day.” “One day,” you say back.

His eyes close. His grip does not loosen.

You stay. The fire burns down and the city goes on and neither of you move. His breathing evens gradually, the fever sitting but quieted, and your hand is in his and the chair is pulled as close as it will go.

Tomorrow there will be Lord Edmure with his watching eyes and his careful papers. There will be Lord Naoya with his patience and pale amusement. There will be talk of the coronation and the processional route and the question of the western territories and the management of your marital status.

But that is tomorrow.

Tonight it is this: the quiet of your own hands, the fire and the dark and the way he will not let go even now.

Tonight is enough.

In the deep still of his chambers, somewhere between one hour and the next, with your hand held against his mouth and the fever finally easing and everything he cannot say living in the space between his lips and your skin.

Yuji ponders.

Itadori Yuji does not believe in love at first sight. But he believes in you. He has always believed in you. He thinks he always will.

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