[P] golden child; lion boy

[Vercingtorix]

fearless child, broken boy, tell me what it's like to burn

I assure you I cannot be hurt so easily—you must try harder next time. And you are not from common stock, are you, Vercingtorix?

Clever boy—but, if he is so clever, does he not recognise in Vercingtorix turquoise eyes that he does not hurt in one fair cleft, but in innumerable small wounds? “What makes you assume I want to hurt you?” Vercingtorix asks. He has given more to Adonai already than he has to most in Novus—his full name.

And even as Adonai admits it—we are already of a class—the admission comes with the acknowledgement that, even so, they belong to different ones. Vercingtorix recognises royalty. He wonders if Adonai recognises the well-bred, professional soldier—a man who had been bred for war, raised for it, baptised in it. A man who’s only deity had been death, suffering, plight.

“Even so,” Vercingtorix says quietly, his smile telling in and of itself. “You know we belong to different sides of the same coin.” The elite are nothing without their military professionals, and vice versa.

What he does not say is that his favorite affair had been a politician’s son. There were no princes in Oresziah; only the powerful, only the wealthy, and this had been a young man who had never been touched by war. Torix had first thought he was attracted to him as a saviour; that perhaps he could save Torix from the sins of war. But it had been the opposite. Torix had learned whatever lovely thing he touched was destined to be ruined.

Do you want me to ruin you?

His smile is a blade. His smile is every sinful thing that has ever happened in a bedroom. His smile is the union of innocence and corruption, love and hate, the indescribable curiosity for the things that will ruin us.

Adonai is staring, now, at the sharp spire. Vercingtorix assumes—even as they speak in rhetoricals—that it is his home. I believe what you do. But I do wonder if the price to break a curse is worth the cost?” 

He confesses more, and more. Vercingtorix listens with polite intrigue. Why me he begins to wonder. Why ask me?

And yet, it becomes more apparent. 

It is the scars.

It is belonging to two sides, of the same coin. Wealth, and power. Need, and violence. I was raised to believe that the martyr is revered because he accepts his curse and dies suffering, that there is even beauty, somehow, in suffering.

He might be the most interesting man Torix has ever met.

Should he pay the price Adonai asks. And kill someone very dear to him?

“I know suffering” Torix says, at last. He does not say it vainly. It is the first time he has offered pure seriousness the entire time. If Adonai’s voice is light incarnate, his is darkness. “And I know, also, that the only suffering close to martyrdom is to suffer for a cause. So perhaps this prince should ask himself whether his suffering is worthy, if its for the betterment of many, or only the betterment of one. The only way to romanticise tragedy is if it is larger than yourself.”

Torix’s voice is nearly analytic, now; hard; pragmatic. 

It does not convey how many times he has seen men die for others. It does not convey how many times he has laid awake at night, suffering, for those no longer left. 

Revenge.

Vercingtorix thinks of turning Boudika in; of the long walk to his father’s office in the capitol, the way the words Bondike is a woman, her father disguised her long ago had emerged with all of hell’s wrath. And after, how he had felt empty. After, her betrayal did not seem so large while his became enormous. “If I were to advice the prince, I would say martyrdom doesn’t matter. Only justice does; and even an ugly truth is more beautiful than a tragic lie.”

His mind is full of crimson eyes; the shadow of a laugh; the way he dreamt and dreamt of closing the distance between them, of pressing a kiss behind the small of his ear; the way his body craved to know intimacy; the way his heart ached and ached and ached; and the way the truth emerged from the story of their lives like a monster, and when it wrecked him, it awoke something terrible within him, something vaster than a black pit, than a dead star.

No, Vercingtorix things.

Revenge is never sweet.

Revenge is salt and blood, and going to sleep at night with a slideshow of things he regrets.


“Forgiveness is for saints, martyrdom for fools.” At last, he is done with this story. Torix presses close abruptly; they are chest to chest, the side of his cheek pressed very nearly to Adonai’s. His mouth is at the pegasus’s ear; his lips brushing the fine hair there. “And you do not strike me as a fool.”

The broken find the broken.

The broken break others.

And the pain, fresh like a wound, makes him feel alive. He wants to sink his teeth into this story. He wants to play god; vengeance; justice. He wants to save the Fair Prince and play at love.

He wants to be the hero and the monster.

“speech” || @Adonai || setting inspired by this image

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