Chapter Text
“Wait for me!”
Laughing, Yuuri turned his head slightly to look back over his shoulder, but did not stop running. “You’ll just have to be faster, Phichit,” he called to his friend, a little way behind him on the shore.
“Sounds like a challenge. I accept,” Phichit declared.
The footsteps behind Yuuri grew louder as Phichit raced across the beach towards him. Moments later, he felt two wiry arms wrap around his waist. As Phichit cannoned into him, overtaken by his own forward momentum, they tumbled together onto the sand, bodies rolling over one another in a jumble of limbs and laughter.
Someone else was giggling. Yuuri craned his neck to look up. Yuuko, one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting, was standing with the other attendants on the dune above, hand on her swollen belly, smiling broadly. “Oh, you two. You’re like puppies, you know that?”
“Woof,” said Phichit from somewhere underneath Yuuri’s stomach. He emerged a second later, sand clinging to his jet-black hair. “Hi, Yuuko.”
The stocky, heavy-set man at Yuuko’s side gave a good-natured grunt of laughter. “More like a puppy than a prince, certainly,” he said gruffly, but his eyes were crinkled in a fond smile.
Nevertheless, Yuuko’s face creased into an expression of faint annoyance and she nudged her companion in the stomach. “Hush, Take. Let them be.”
“We’re training, that’s all,” Phichit grinned. “And what could be more princely than that?” He lunged suddenly at Yuuri and trapped him in a headlock. “See?”
Yuuri broke the lock with ease and flipped Phichit over onto his back. Phichit’s movements were easy to read; growing up with him, spending most of his days with Phichit by his side, Yuuri had learnt to read his body, his expressions, almost his very thoughts. It was unfair to match the two of them, really. Not only was Yuuri was half a head taller than Phichit, but at seventeen, he was almost a man; Phichit, three years his junior, was still a boy. There was no contest.
Phichit thumped his arm against the sand, signalling defeat. “You win, my Lord,” he said with mock deference, sticking out his tongue in place of a bow.
Yuuri rolled off Phichit and flopped next to him on the sand, grinning. “You’re getting stronger, though. Minako’s training must be paying off.”
Phichit puffed up his cheeks and let out a long breath. “It had better be. My arms are aching at just the thought of another sparring session like yesterday’s.” He frowned. “Wish I could swap her training for extra dancing lessons.”
“You’d better not let her catch you saying that,” Yuuri laughed, but privately he felt the same. Although – for all her sternness – he liked Minako, he much preferred dancing to fighting. When they got back to the palace, he would ask Minako to let Phichit off training so they could concentrate on the dances for the winter festival. She would scold him, but she could hardly refuse.
Before he could say anything else, though, he heard the tattoo of hooves on sand and, sitting up, saw the great chestnut mare that belonged to his sister. He inched back slowly, but the movement still caused the horse to snort and toss her head. “It’s all right, Ikezuki, it’s just me,” he said quietly, praying that no errant bird would fly past and startle his sister’s mount. Ikezuki was bad-tempered enough as it was.
“What, no greetings for your darling sister?” called a voice from the saddle.
“Hello, Mari,” he grinned, as a familiar face mock-glared down at him from Ikezuki’s broad back.
“Don’t stay out here too long, all right? Mother and Father want us both back for the afternoon court audience with Hanseong, remember.”
Yuuri sighed. “I don’t see why I have to go with you. You’re the one who’s Heir Apparent; it’s not like I’m ever going to have to conduct audiences in real life.”
“You’re still a prince, Yuuri,” said Mari firmly. “It does you no harm to know how to act like one. Just in case – we are at war, or had you forgotten?” She tossed something in Yuuri’s direction. “Here.”
Yuuri barely caught the sheathed sword in time. “Watch it, Mari, are you trying to kill me before Petersburg gets the chance?”
“Yeah, I can’t have you challenging me for the throne, now, can I?”
Yuuri laughed. “What am I supposed to do with this, anyway? In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a beach, not a training ground.”
“I know, I know. I’m not expecting you to train here –”
“Good,” Phichit piped up, rolling over onto his stomach. “Because I’m perfectly happy to be your sparring partner, Yuuri – even if you do always beat me – but I draw the line at trying to fight you unarmed while you’re swinging a sword in my direction.” He tossed his feathered ponytail ostentatiously. “I’ve just had a haircut, and I don’t feel like risking another one until it’s grown out a bit.”
“All I’m saying,” Mari continued, raising her voice over the sound of Yuuri and Phichit’s laughter, “is you should at least look prepared when you turn up for the audience, and that means sword and all.” She fixed Yuuri with a hard stare. “You are going to be at the audience, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Yuuri said. “All Hanseong ever talks about is rice this and silk that.” He grinned as Mari started to scowl. “I’m joking, Mari,” he reassured her. “Of course I’ll be there. I know how important it is to Mother and Father.”
Mari frowned at him, but it was less in anger than in concern. “You do know that they’re not just doing this for the sake of it, don’t you? They really want you to succeed. Look, I all of all people know that audiences can be as boring as hell, but learning how to talk to our allies and how to deal with their grievances fairly is an important part of being a ruler, and they want you to have those skills.”
“Wow, Mari,” Yuuri said softly. “That was very convincing,” He broke into a grin. “Was that one of Minako’s speeches?”
Mari smiled in spite of herself. “Right again, little brother. You know, I hated going to audiences when I was your age, too. I’d much rather have been out in the courtyard, sparring. But Minako took my sword away and said she wouldn’t give it back until I went, if only to make our parents happy. And when I got angry with her, that’s what she said.”
“How’s your training going?” Yuuri asked, tying the sword’s lacquered scabbard onto his sash.
“Not as well as mine, I bet,” Phichit broke in, tackling Yuuri by the legs and bringing him crashing down into the sand again.
Mari suppressed a snort of laughter and tried to paint a stern look on her face. “Just… smarten yourself up before you turn up at the audience, will you? Mother will throw a fit if you track sand into the tatami.”
“Yes, Mari,” Yuuri said dutifully.
“And be careful. There’ve been reports of more pirate sightings recently. They really won’t be impressed if you get yourself into a skirmish.”
“Yes, Mari,” he said again.
Apparently satisfied, Mari nudged her foot into Ikezuki’s side and trotted back up the beach.
The thought of going to another court audience – of sitting in front of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people, most of whom he had never met and some he wished he never had, all of whom wanted something from his mother and father and who would try to work their charms on him and Mari if it was clear that their parents would not grant their petitions – was making Yuuri sick with fear. He could already feel it throbbing behind his temples, twisting into a knot in his stomach.
“Yuuri.”
Phichit’s voice brought him back to reality. “Yes?” Even as he spoke, he realised how harsh his voice sounded, and winced at the unintended curtness.
Phichit seemed completely unfazed. “You want to go and climb the cliffs in the cove?”
Thank you, Yuuri thought. Phichit always knew how to distract him when his thoughts began to close in on him like this. But all he said was, “That sounds like a good plan to me.”
“Hey!” Phichit waved his arm over his head, trying to attract the attention of the group on the dunes. “We’re going to head into the cove. Want to join us?”
A couple of the younger attendants came rushing down from the dune at once, ploughing through the shifting sand so eagerly they almost stumbled. Yuuko’s eyes lit up, too, but Takeshi caught her arm. “Are you sure that’s wise? In your condition?”
“Wise? No, obviously not. Fun? Yes,” she grinned, and came bounding over to join Yuuri and Phichit, her steps heavy on the shifting sand.
Takeshi sighed, and clambered down after her. “I guess I’m coming too, then.”
“Race you to the cove!” Phichit called. “Last one there is a filthy Petersburgian!” He dashed off in the direction of the cove, a little way down the beach.
Shaking his head, Yuuri took off after him, followed at a distance by Yuuko, Takeshi and the other attendants.
As they rounded the rocks that marked the entrance to the cove, one of the attendants called out, “Your Highness?”
Yuuri turned, startled by the concern in their voice. “What’s the matter?”
“What is that?”
Yuuri followed the attendant’s pointing finger. Just beyond the lip of the cove, jutting out into the water, was an unfamiliar brown formation that was not part of the rocky outcrop, whose outline Yuuri knew so well he could have described it with his eyes closed. He narrowed his eyes and it came into focus. A wooden dinghy.
“What the –”
The words died on his lips as a band of men burst out of the cove, brandishing swords. Yuuri’s blood ran cold when he saw the glint of sun on their metal armour. These were no common bandits; they were fully-equipped Petersburgian soldiers.
He tried to call out, to warn Phichit and get the others to stay back, but for some reason his voice would not work; though his mouth opened and closed, no sound came out. He could feel his throat closing over with fear, feel the familiar crushing pressure on his chest. There was nothing he could do but gasp desperately for a breath that would not come as the men came charging out of the cove towards them.
Phichit, who was at the head of the pack, did not stand a chance of escaping. He stopped in his tracks when he saw the attackers, as if debating for a moment whether to make a futile attempt to flee, and then rushed forward and began to grapple with the nearest soldier. “Yuuri!” he yelled. “Run!”
Fear exploded through Yuuri’s body, and he tried to lift his feet from the sand, to run towards Phichit, even to lift his arm to take out his sword, but none of his muscles would obey. They were cemented in place by fear, his joints locked like those of a stone statue. Internally, he screamed at his body to follow his commands, but it was as if there was a broken connection between his mind and the rest of him; he knew what he had to do – rush forwards, save Phichit, open his mouth and yell to alert Mari – but as soon as the thoughts appeared in his mind, they were snuffed out by fear like sparks from a fire fizzling out under rain. He was paralysed, powerless, unable to do or say anything to help as the scene unfolded around him. He saw Takeshi grappling with a Petersburgian soldier and almost subduing the much smaller man, almost, until a second soldier grabbed Takeshi from behind and put a sword to his throat. Takeshi’s eyes went wide for a split second before his face hardened into an expression of terrible determination, and Yuuri knew with horror that Takeshi was willing to sacrifice himself in this fight – and then he saw Yuuko, already kneeling on the sand with two soldiers flanking her, one of them holding her arms behind her back, and although he could not hear the words she was shouting over the noise of battle and the thundering of blood in his own ears, he saw Takeshi go limp in resignation and allow the soldier at his back to force him to the ground and yank his hands behind him.
Even that could not stir him to action. Even the knowledge that Takeshi would rather allow himself to be captured just to stay alive, to stay with Yuuko and see the future that he had with her and their unborn child, however desperate and dark that future might be; even that was not enough to break through the fear that had calcified his body and left him standing mute and unmoving on the sand as his people fought and fell all around him.
Even Phichit’s voice, familiar enough to break through the clamour inside his head and the clamour without. “Yuuri, what are you doing? Run!”
He watched Phichit dart out of the grip of a much bigger man and almost escape another. Saw him turn his head to yell in Yuuri’s direction and his focus briefly switch away from the fight. Saw him take a cut to the arm that made him turn back to the fray and realise too late that he was trapped between two soldiers with swords drawn. Saw the panic finally begin to dawn in Phichit’s eyes as he realised that he was not going to be able to wriggle out of this one, not if he wanted to stay alive to tell the tale.
“Run!” Phichit screamed again, and then one of the swords was at his throat and he was half-screaming, half-crying, and he wasn’t a soldier, he wasn’t a fighter, he was just a boy, Yuuri’s best friend, a scared child with a steel blade held against the pulsing vein in his neck, and the tears were coursing down his face and all the fight had gone out of him. “Yuuri,” he whimpered as the soldier holding the sword to his throat forced him to his knees. “Please –” He reached out his injured arm in Yuuri’s direction, but it was seized and forced behind his back. His eyes, as he looked up at Yuuri, were grey pools of terror and pain and desperation. “Please!”
That final cry at last cut through the ropes of fear that had bound Yuuri’s body and stifled his mind. Heart pounding, he unsheathed the sword at his side and sprinted forwards – and felt arms close around his waist and drag him back.
“No!” he cried out in frustration, swinging his sword at the unseen assailant. He was going to save Phichit. He was going to save them all.
His attacker yelped in pain as his sword made contact with them at random, and his brief spark of triumph was snuffed out immediately. The voice was Mari’s.
“Yuuri. Come with me,” she ordered through gritted teeth, and he could feel the blood from the wound that he had dealt soaking through her sleeve and into the front of his robe, could feel her grip loosening. Pushing aside his remorse – there would be time to apologise later for what he had done – he struggled to break her grip.
“Yuuri!” she yelled again, and with a tremendous effort hoisted him up across Ikezuki’s broad back and kicked the animal into motion.
“No!” Yuuri screamed, still trying frantically to break free. “No, go back, I have to stop them, I have to –”
“You have to survive, Yuuri,” Mari said, hissing with pain as the unsteady motion of the horse’s hooves on the sand jolted her injured arm.
“I have to save them. Please, Mari. Phichit – please –” He turned his head and his eyes met Phichit’s, still looking to him in desperation as the soldier behind him began to bind his wrists. Agony stabbed through Yuuri’s chest and he opened his mouth to call out something, anything, but then Ikezuki rounded the rocks at the far end of the cove and his friends were out of sight, lost, gone. And then his mind began to fracture. He kicked and screamed and Ikezuki began to whinny in terror and Mari cursed him and almost slipped from the saddle. She shoved something into Yuuri’s mouth – a handkerchief, sweat-soaked and foul – and he kicked harder until she looped her injured arm around his neck and squeezed.
He couldn’t breathe; with no air in his lungs, he could fight no longer. He stopped struggling.
The sound of Ikezuki’s hooves grew louder and somewhere, in a corner of his mind that was still coherent, there was the awareness that they were no longer on the beach. Shadows flashed past overhead. Trees. Then they burst out into the open again and the hoofbeats were louder still; they passed through a roofed gateway and Mari was shouting, there were people surrounding them, and he scanned their faces, hoping and hoping, perhaps it had been a strange fever dream, but none of the attendants were those who had been with them at the beach. Yuuko and Takeshi and Phichit were really gone. And it was his fault.
He let someone lift him down from the back of Mari’s horse and take the handkerchief from his mouth. He was dimly aware of Mari being led away with a cloth pressed to the wound in her shoulder, but he could not summon the strength to follow her. His vision was obscured by tears that had sprung up without his noticing and which fell unhindered and soundless – or so he thought until he realised that the strange keening sound echoing through the courtyard was coming from his own throat.
Someone’s voice was whispering soothing words in his ear as they led him by the arm out of the courtyard and into the main building of the palace. Minako, he thought distantly, but the thought carried no import. He did not speak to her, or even turn to look at her, as she led him through the familiar corridors.
She was taking him to his parents, he realised with a shock that finally cleared a path through the grief fogging up his mind. “No.” He pulled himself out of Minako’s grip; she was strong, but she was unprepared, and Yuuri easily slipped away from her.
“Yuuri. Your parents are out of their minds with worry. You should see them –”
“No,” he said again, forcefully enough to make Minako flinch. “Tell them I am alive. But I will not see them.”
“Yuuri –”
He turned on his heel and fled as the tears began to fall again. He could barely see where he was going, but he allowed his feet to carry him through corridors that he knew without thinking, without sight, and did not stop until he had reached his chambers and slid shut the door behind him. He could not see anyone now. Not his mother and father, not Minako, not even Mari, to whom he owed a great apology. He had failed them all. He had stood by like a coward and allowed his people – his friends, his best friend, who had been beside him for as long as Yuuri could remember – to be carried off by enemy soldiers, because he was too afraid and too weak to fight and he was unworthy even to breathe. He shoved his face into the pillow of his futon – he did not remember lying down, but here he was – and tried to wrap it around his head, squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He did not deserve to live. He did not deserve to answer his body’s desperate call for the sweet air that it needed. He deserved only to die – what was his life worth when he had let theirs go so easily? They could be dead now and it would be his fault, his fault, all his fault –
He lifted his face from the pillow and took a breath, and the air came rushing into his lungs, a release that he did not deserve, but he could not help it. His body was moving of its own accord and it would not let him die. He let himself go limp, making no attempt to stop the tears falling; he was too worthless even to have the courage to die. He could feel his sword pressing into his hip, and his hand moved to the hilt, moved to unsheathe it and do what he knew he should have done as soon as he had failed to stop the Petersburgian raiders from taking his friends, but he did not have the strength. He could not even carry out this simplest, this starkest of responsibilities.
There was a knock at his door, the voice of an attendant calling out to him, but he ignored the sound. What could he possibly say to them – to anyone?
He did not know how much time had passed when he finally realised that no more tears were falling, that his voice was too hoarse to cry any more. He didn’t care. He closed his eyes and wished that he could sleep, but he knew he would not sleep tonight – or any night, not until he had atoned for the wrong he had done, for the shame he had brought upon himself and upon the whole kingdom. What must Mari think? To have a brother who had not only not been able to defend himself in battle, but who had actively attacked her – that was probably treason.
Perhaps he would be executed for it. Hope flared in him, then flickered out almost immediately. His parents were strict about abiding by tradition, but they would not have him executed for something he had not intended to do; they would probably try to cover it up, in case one of the less loyal nobles got wind of it and demanded that he be at least exiled. And exile would be no real punishment – he would still have to live with what he had done. What he had not done.
There was only one way to atone, and that would be rescue his friends. But his parents would never allow him to lead a military expedition to save them, not when the cause of the trouble in the first place had been his lack of military expertise, his lack of courage. They would send Mari instead; she was the heir, and she had the training to see such an important mission through.
Or, at least, it was important to him. It was not that Mari did not care, but it was not her friends who had been taken; she was almost a decade older than Yuuko and Takeshi, and Phichit was Yuuri’s best friend, not hers. She would probably agree to go, but the voyage would be forestalled time and time again, superseded by more important business. Before Yuuri knew it, it would have fallen off the agenda completely, and perhaps he would be the only one at court who remembered, who really remembered. He would be the only one who cared about the people Petersburg had stolen.
He was the only one who could get them back. But he would never be able to garner the support he needed – not unless he took Mari’s place.
It was an insane plan. The court would never agree to it. But he had to try.
He levered himself up off the floor, realising as he did so that he was still wearing the bloodstained robes from the beach, and quailing in fear and guilt as the memories washed over him afresh. But he steeled himself and clambered to his feet.
He had to do this.
There was no room for anything else in his mind. Without thinking, he followed his feet back through the corridors and towards the audience hall. He had no idea whether he would find his parents there; they might be in their quarters, or with Mari and the physicians (his gut twisted with guilt at that thought). But the hall seemed like the only appropriate place to make this declaration.
As he stood before the doors to the audience chamber, he felt his courage fail once more, but he slid the door open before the fear could attach itself to a fully-formed thought.
Dozens of worried faces stared back at him as he advanced into the room. Amongst them, he recognised Minako, wearing her full commanders’ uniform and attended by several high-ranking Hasetsian Guards. To the right of the soldiers knelt a group of sailors, Admiral Morooka at their head.
The admiral turned towards Yuuri as if to speak to him, but Yuuri walked past without even glancing his way.
He strode into the centre of the room and faced the dais where his parents sat.
His mother began to get to her feet. “Yuuri – my son –”
For perhaps the first time in his life, he cut her off. “I have come to ask you something,” he said, in a tone that suggested what he really meant was demand, and he would brook no argument.
He expected his impertinence to be repaid with anger, but when his father spoke up, there was only relief on his lined face. “Anything, child.”
“I have come to ask that you make me heir.”