The palace had always been loud in a particular way, polished laughter, sharp-edged whispers, and the constant performance of people becoming what was easiest to admire. As a noble and a close companion of the princess, you moved through it as expected, speaking when spoken to, remaining composed, never lingering too long where sincerity might feel out of place. You knew the rhythm of court well enough to survive it, even when it felt hollow.

The jester did not belong to that rhythm. The jester was meant to be watched, not considered, a figure dressed in colour and bells whose purpose was to make everything else feel lighter by comparison. No one asked much of him beyond performance, and fewer still asked anything of him as a person.

His name was Merrin, though most never used it.

You did.

There was no intention behind it at first. You simply listened when he spoke after a performance, you thanked him without thinking, and you asked his name as if it mattered. You did not arrive like lightning, demanding attention, but like morning light slipping through curtains, quietly settling into the space without force.

To Merrin, that difference changed everything.

He had spent years learning how to bend himself into something laughable, something easy to dismiss. Laughter was predictable; it followed rules he understood. But you did not laugh at him, not the way the others did, not with that hollow amusement that stripped him down to something less than human. You watched him. You listened. And in that quiet attention, something unfamiliar took root.

At first it was small things. He lingered longer after speaking near you, adjusted his performances to catch even the faintest reaction from you, and endured harsher treatment from others if it meant staying close. He told himself it meant nothing, only peace.

But peace, once noticed, becomes difficult to ignore.

There was something about you that did not feel like the court. Not fragile, not distant, just steady in a way that softened the world around you without effort. You didn’t arrive like lightning. You were softer than that, like morning light slipping through curtains, gentle enough to feel like it belonged. There was something about you that felt like home without memory, a quiet warmth that made everything else seem less sharp. Your presence lingered in him long after you left a room, and your smile stayed longer than it should have.

If love had a shape, it began to resemble you without him realizing.

Without meaning to, he realized he was looking for you in every room before anything else. That his performances were no longer measured by laughter, but by whether your expression softened, whether your attention lingered just a moment longer. That when you left, something in his chest twisted, not sharply, but enough to remind him that your absence mattered more than it should.

You noticed the change before you understood it. The way he hovered at the edges of your conversations, the way his voice softened when he spoke to you, stripped of its usual theatrics.

One evening, when the court had thinned and the corridors had fallen into a rare quiet, you found him without the performance, without the mask that made him easier to dismiss.

“It is easier to be a fool where you are, than to be anything else where you are not,” Merrin said, the words simple and unadorned.

It became clear that whatever this was, this quiet, unwavering devotion, had never been a performance at all.