Chapter Text
The wedding was fine, and Yusuf’s husband is handsome, and Yusuf is terrified.
Well. Not terrified, no. Apprehensive, perhaps. Accepting, certainly.
His husband’s shoulders are broad; his back strong and straight with training and experience, and while Yusuf himself is no small man, and his own training is more than one would expect of a man of his station, he is not a seasoned warrior. He is an artist, a poet, and a prince, for a given value of the term. He doesn’t think he has anything to fear, necessarily, from his new husband (certainly not nearly so much as his new husband has to fear from him), but that doesn’t make him feel that much better.
His apprehension lasts until his new husband leads him from the wedding feast by the hand, eyes fixed firmly and politely somewhere to Yusuf’s left, and leaves him at his bedroom door with a chaste kiss to his knuckles and a softly accented, ‘goodnight, my prince.’
Yusuf’s handsome new husband spends his wedding night on the chaise in Yusuf’s receiving room, and Yusuf stares at the moon for half the night, wondering exactly what he did, in that nebulous time between existing and not, to deserve a curse such as this.
The first three days of Yusuf’s marriage pass without incident. His husband escorts him to every meal, and then to bed at the end of the night. He says goodnight at the door, and he never tries to follow Yusuf inside. He does it all with a gentle grip on his hand and a soft smile on his face like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.
Yusuf can’t bear to look at that smile.
It would be easier if he was cruel, or rude, or unkind. Nothing would make this easy, but it could have been made easier. He wasn’t prepared for someone gentle. A flower of guilt grows in his chest each day, blooming heavily in his throat, choking him more with every glimpse of his husband’s good nature. He doesn’t deserve this. Yusuf barely knows him—will never know him, not really—but he can see that much. His husband deserves far more than what awaits him. Yusuf turns his face away from him, heartsick with a sorrow so deep he knows he’ll never be rid of it.
Early on the morning of the fourth day, Yusuf’s husband escorts him to the stables. His company is warm and quiet, as it has been for the entirety of their marriage, and it chases away some of the chill of the morning air. It will be hot later; Yusuf can feel it in the way the cold flees the earth, and he wants to ride before the heat comes.
After three days of gentle touches and soft smiles, Yusuf isn’t ready when his husband pushes him bodily away from him with all his strength. He hits the ground hard, rolling with the force of the blow, wheezing for breath from the impact and the shock both when he comes to a stop. His tunic is torn, he notices distantly, dazed. Someone is shouting, but they’re far away. Yusuf raises his head enough to see the guard atop the boundary wall pointing and shouting to someone in the distance. There is the sound of crumbling stone behind him and a cloud of dust around his head.
He always thought, hoped perhaps, that he would feel something in this moment. Some tangible proof that the deed is done. All he feels is bruises yet to form, and sickly guilt.
He cannot bear to look back, but he owes at least this much to his husband.
It’s easier to look at the pieces than the whole.
The minarets at the corners of the walls of his palace are beautiful and stately, and he had thought them all in good repair.
He was wrong.
The lapis tiles catch the sun so nicely from thirty feet in the air. On the ground, they look cheap next to the soil which soaks more rich and vibrant crimson by the second.
His husband’s skin was so pale. He had noticed, try as he might not to, at their wedding ceremony. The rich blue of his wedding tunic had contrasted with the delicate pale skin of his wrist as he’d turned his hand over to offer it to Yusuf. Now, that hand is dusty and still, flung out as though still reaching for him.
Yusuf's husband's eyes had been blue, except when they’d been green. Sometimes, especially in the morning light, they had been grey. Every glance at them felt like picking at a wound, but Yusuf has always felt compelled to seek out beautiful things. Now, they are clouded and vacant, that curious light that followed each soft smile gone somewhere far beyond Yusuf’s reach.
The saving grace of the sight before him is that his husband’s tunic this morning is a deep and heavy maroon. He could simply have spilt his tea at breakfast, for all the colour has changed. Yusuf can only see a little bit of it beneath the crumbled masonry. He doesn’t want to think about what else he can’t see.
There are footsteps now, running towards them, but they’re still a distance away. Yusuf likes to be left alone in the mornings, the guards are well aware. They give him space in the grounds of his palace.
He was never the one in danger here.
Yusuf’s husband’s—late husband’s—customs are—were—different to his own, and his kingdom’s, but some things are ubiquitous.
Yusuf stands, weak with the effort, and tries to take his mind as far away from what he must do as he can, while still honouring his husband as he deserves.
He shoves aside broken masonry with shaking hands, baring the ruin of his husband’s chest to the morning sun. He lies him flat and reaches out to close his clouded eyes. They really were beautiful. Even death hasn’t robbed them of their curious colour, not completely. They almost seem to brighten in contrast with the dust that smears his lovely face. Yusuf touches his hand to his still-warm forehead and whispers a prayer for gentle passing. He covers his husband’s eyes when he’s done, breathing out his guilt and regret, and wishing not for the first time that he knew why this fate was his.
His husband blinks against his fingertips, eyelashes brushing his skin like the finest of Yusuf’s paintbrushes. Yusuf's husband gives a wet and agonised gasp, the space that was his broad chest heaving with the effort like meat thrown on a butcher’s table and Yusuf? Well.
Yusuf faints.
The infirmary is not a place Yusuf has spent a particularly great amount of time in. He’s more accustomed to being treated for any occasional illness in the comfort of his chambers. The staff must have deemed it easier to carry him there, rather than up two flights of stairs. He can’t say he blames them.
It takes him a moment longer to remember why he’s in there at all. When he does, it’s with a swell of horror and disgust, the memory of his husband breathing through such a grievous wound replaying behind his eyes. He sits up, twisting to gag over the side of the bed.
‘Your radiance!’
The court physician is an odious little man, one whom Yusuf tolerates at the best of times only at the behest of the grand vizier, and the promise that he can replace him in the future after all this awful business is over with. Now that that moment is almost at hand, it’s somehow harder than ever to look at him. His hands are clammy on Yusuf’s arms even through the fabric of his underrobe. Someone has relieved him of his tunic and coat. The physician shouldn’t even be touching him at all now that he’s conscious without his permission, but etiquette has never seemed to apply to him.
Yusuf breathes, slow and deep, and wills down the gorge that wants to rise again in his throat. He hears the physician snapping his fingers, ordering water and sweet tea from some unseen servant. Yusuf ignores him until he has control of himself again. He can wait.
‘Did he suffer?’ asks Yusuf, when he can breathe again. He interrupts whatever the physician is wittering about, and doesn't have it in him to feel regret about it.
‘I’m sorry, your radiance?’
The physician has that hungry look across his face again, the one he wears only around Yusuf, like if he just gets to watch him long enough, he’ll get the answers to all of his questions. Yusuf hates that look, it carries with it endless memories of being poked and prodded as a child, searching for where the curse hid in his body.
‘My… my husband,’ the words are like lead weights on his tongue. ‘Did my husband suffer? In the end?’
The physician blinks, looking between Yusuf and something over his shoulder.
‘His excellency is fine, your radiance. Merely startled, as were we all.’ The physician gestures at something behind Yusuf and frowns at whatever response he receives. ‘He helped carry you here. It’s a miracle neither of you was badly hurt. It must simply have not been his time.’ And here again that hungry look, that scrutiny of Yusuf as though the plague of his life will leap from his breast any second. ‘The guard who witnessed it said the minaret crumbled at the keystone. His excellency saved your life.’
A miracle is one word for it. As hard as it was to look at his husband’s broken corpse, looking back at whatever has followed him from that awful moment is harder still. Yusuf feels a terror like he’s never known as he turns to look over his shoulder, that wet and awful gasp all he can hear, playing in his mind over and over again.
His husband is sitting on a bench by the door. His chest is whole. His face is dirty and downcast. He’s looking at his hands, and his chest is whole, and he is breathing.
He is alive. He was dead, and now he is alive, and Yusuf has prepared his whole life for one of those statements, and now that he has the other, he truly does not know what to do.
His husband looks at him with his strange and beautiful eyes, and Yusuf sees every ounce of his confusion and terror reflected back at him.
He was dead, and he is alive, and Yusuf’s husband is looking at him for the first time like he is afraid of him.