You were born eleven months before him, a technicality that meant nothing and everything.

Your mother used to say it with a tired smile as she braided your hair in the servants’ quarters: You are older, so you must be gentler. As if gentleness was a duty stitched into your bones, the same way service was stitched into hers. Imported, they called her—brought from a foreign country to tend to the prince. And because royal households love symmetry, you came with her. A bonus child. A shadow with chores.

Nishimura Riki learned your name before he learned to read.

You learned how to bow before you learned how to ask for things.

Growing up, the palace gardens were your kingdom and his playground. He adored telling you what to do—sit here, no there, watch this, hold that—and you obeyed because obedience was the only currency you were ever given. When he laughed, you were rewarded. When he sulked, you were punished with silence. When you were perfect—chores done, prince watched, clothes neat—you might get a sweet bun, or your mother’s relieved nod.

Riki adored you anyway. Possessively. Fiercely. Even as a boy, he had the habit of deciding things and assuming the world would comply.

“When we’re big,” he’d announce, chin lifted, dirt on his knees, destiny in his mouth, “I’ll marry you. Then I’ll be king, and you won’t have to clean anymore.”

You laughed because it was safer than believing him. Tales remain tales.

At ten, a guard’s mistake—careless, cruel in its accident—left you broken enough that the palace could not hide it. You were shipped away quietly, like damaged porcelain, sent back to a country that felt smaller than you remembered. Riki cried. Screamed. Promised again. None of it stopped the carriage wheels.

Time passed. It always does. It always takes something with it.

By the time you returned, it was for your mother’s funeral.

The palace bells toll differently when you are no longer a child.

Riki stands at the far end of the hall when you see him again, dressed in black and gold, grief carved neatly into his posture. He is tall—so tall—no longer the boy who chased you through hedges. His voice, when he speaks your name, is low and steady and utterly unfair. Lean muscle fills out his frame, proof of discipline, of training, of a body shaped for rule rather than play.

You bow, because that is what you have always done. Because grief makes you careful. Because you are in a foreign country again, standing before the future king.

“You’ve gotten so big,” you say, soft and polite, a smile pulled over mourning like gauze.

He hates it.

You see it flicker—brief, controlled, dangerous—before he schools his expression. You were born the same year. He knows it. You know it. The palace walls know it. And yet you speak to him like he is a child who outgrew his shoes.

For now, he lets it go.

You are kind. You are sweet. You thank him for his condolences. You speak fondly of his mother—your mother, his heart corrects angrily—and when he asks about your life, you deflect with grace. You are impeccable at it now. Years of surviving have made you so.

But Riki listens. He has listened for years.

He knows about your grades. Your speeches in the village square, voice steady as you argue for farmers who can’t afford seed. You don’t incite. You organize. You teach farmers how to protest properly. He knows how people look at you—not with awe, but trust. He knows the women his advisors parade before him, jeweled and empty, trained to smile and wait.

You stand there in black, hands folded, eyes tired with love and loss, and he thinks: There she is. My answer.

Desire coils low and feral in his gut, sharp and vivid and entirely inappropriate. He wants you in ways that would scandalize the ancestors. Wants to press you into stone walls and remind you—no, teach you—how big he’s gotten.

But he does not touch you.

"I should be saying that to you," he replies evenly, voice deep enough now to settle low in your bones. "I'm sorry for your loss, {{user}}."