Chapter Text
It was not the rain that soaked him— it was guilt, pure and clinging.
It was not the wind that bit his skin— it was shame, coiled like wire beneath his collar.
Wilbur rode through the darkness like a fugitive of his own cowardice, cloak streaming behind him, palace fading like smoke in the distance. He did not tell anyone where he was going. He did not bring a guard. This was not a royal visit.
It was an apology in motion.
A confession on horseback.
The night was silent save for the rhythm of hooves. Stars hid behind thick clouds, and still he rode on, breath steaming in the cold air, thoughts as loud as church bells.
He had not spoken for Tommy.
He had watched him kneel before the court like a criminal.
Watched his eyes search– plead, and Wilbur had given nothing. Not even a glance, and now he came like a sinner to a shrine, hoping too late to be seen as something more than Judas in a crown.
The camp stood crooked and half-starved, pitched into the hollows of the northern moorland, the tents as tired as the men who slept within them. He moves through it unseen, ducking torchlight like a thief, heart caught between ribs like a bird in a cage.
He found Tommy’s tent near the edge, away from the warmth of the fires, alone. He stood outside a long while. Rain licked his shoulders, but he did not notice.
He could hear the scrape of a whetstone, the familiar rhythm of steel being nursed back to sharpness. The sound had once been comforting, back when they’d stolen hours in palace corridors, Tommy always polishing a blade he wasn’t meant to have.
Now it sounded like damnation.
Wilbur lifted the flap with fingers that trembled.
Inside, Tommy sat hunched over a crate, wrist moving steady and slow over the sword that lay across his lap. His hair was damp, his sleeves rolled, dirt smeared across the curve of his forearm. The lamplight burnished him in bronze and ash.
He looks up when Wilbur enters— but not in surprise. No. In something colder. Like he had hoped it would not be him.
Wilbur’s mouth was dry, tone disbelieving, “Tommy…”
“You shouldn’t be here.” Tommy didn’t rise. Didn’t flinch. Just returned to sharpening his blade as though Wilbur were no more than a shadow.
“I had to come.”
“No,” Tommy mutters softly. “You chose to come. Like you chose to keep your mouth shut while they sentenced me to ruin.”
Wilbur enters, the warmth of the tent a cruel thing on his wet skin. “I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to stop it—”
“You were the prince,” Tommy hisses, finally looking up, eyes burning like sun off snow. “You could have stopped everything with one sentence. One word. You could have damned your father’s verdict with a breath.”
Wilbur swallows. “He would not have listened.”
“Then you should have tried.”
Silence cracked between them.
Wilbur’s voice cracks with it. “Do you think I do not loathe myself for it? That I don’t hear your voice every hour of the night, asking me why I let them tear you from the life you built with bloodied hands? You were my—” He stops. Swallowing again. “You were everything good I had left.”
Tommy’s jaw clenches, “You don’t get to say that now.”
“I do. Because it is true.” Wilbur moves closer. “Because I think— I think I stopped breathing the day they took you away.”
“No,” Tommy snaps, rising so fast the blade clatters to the floor. “No. Don’t come here with your pretty grief, Wilbur. Don’t speak of breath and sorrow. You have everything. You still wear silk. You still eat a feast every evening. You still wake in your palace bed while I scrape the frost from my boots and bury boys barely older than children.”
Wilbur flinches as though struck.
“Do you think I do not feel that shame?” He fires back. “ Do you think I don’t look at my own hands and see only the red there—your blood, your sentence, your silence?”
Tommy’s voice drops. “Then why come?”
Wilbur’s hands fist. “Because I needed you to look at me. Because I needed to see if there was anything left in your eyes that wasn’t hate.”
For a moment, Tommy’s breath hitches. The fire dims in his face, and then he said, quieter than Wilbur had ever heard him: “I don’t hate you.”
Wilbur exhales shakily.
“I wish I did,” Tommy continues. “It would be easier. Prime— it would be so much easier.”
Wilbur steps forward, desperately. “I will come again. I’ll keep coming. Let me make it right.”
“You can’t,” Tommy says, voice cracking. “You can’t undo it. You can’t unmake what’s been done. You didn’t lose your name. I did. You didn’t have your honour stripped bare before an audience of wolves. I did.”
“Then let me lose it too,” Wilbur breathes, “Let me be here. Let me fight beside you.”
Tommy laughs— honed and broken. “What, you’ll trade velvet for frost? Come kneel in filth with the traitors you abandoned?”
“I would,” Wilbur divulges. “If you asked.”
Tommy’s eyes glisten, but he blinks them away. “You are a fool.”
“Then let me be your fool.”
Silence. The kind that could shatter if touched.
Tommy looks away, “Leave.”
“I—”
“Please.”
And that word—please—wasn’t gentle.
Wilbur falls back, throat burning. “Will you write to me? If I send letters?”
Tommy’s back remains to him. “The dead do not answer.”
Wilbur stares a moment longer, the weight of that line crushing. Then he bows his head, turns, and leaves— grief following like a shadow.
——
He should not have come.
He knew it before the gate, before the pines, before the ever-watchful sentries who turned their eyes away too quickly. He knew it beneath his skin, in the marrow of his guilt. And still—his hands reined the horse toward the camp, as though his heart had wrested control from his mind.
He could not stay away.
He had tried. Prime knew he had tried, but the silence of the palace had begun to feel like a tomb, and in it, Wilbur had buried a thousand things—his honour, his loyalty, his name—but none so heavy as the absence of Tommy.
The sky was overcast, heavy with unwept rain. Smoke rose from distant fires. The scent of sweat and steel hung in the air, and somewhere a dog barked like a warning.
And Wilbur—Prince of nothing, son of guilt—stood once more at the mouth of Tommy’s tent. The canvas was drawn, lantern light bleeding faint gold from within. He stood motionless, fingers trembling in his gloves.
He told me not to return.
But he was here. Because he had tried to pretend he could live without seeing him, and he had failed. Miserably.
Because the moment he turned his back on this place, it felt as though something inside him had begun to rot.
He raised a hand. Hesitated.
Then: one knock. Two.
Eerie reticence.
Then—
“I said no.”
Wilbur exhales, relieved. The voice was low and sharp, bitten through with exhausted contempt, but the sound of it nearly brought him to his knees.
“I know,” Wilbur murmurs. “I know, and yet I am here.”
“You should not be,” Came Tommy’s voice again, harder now. “Have you no shame?”
“I have nothing but shame,” Wilbur whispers. “And still it has not stopped me from seeking you out once more, Tommy.”
A rustle. Then the flap snaps open, and Tommy stands before him. Rain speckles Tommy’s shoulders, but he makes no move to let him enter. His shirt was unfastened at the throat, collar dark with sweat, chest rising and falling with barely-leashed anger.
“What,” Tommy utters, “do you want from me?”
Wilbur stares at him. The fire behind Tommy gilded the edge of his face, his eyes rimmed in hollow bruises of sleeplessness, and still— still he was the most alive thing Wilbur has ever seen.
“I don’t know,” Wilbur admits helplessly. “Forgiveness, perhaps, or a wound that bleeds a little less.”
“You sent me here,” Tommy spits. “Your father struck the order, but it was you who let it pass. You let me be cast from your side like refuse. You said nothing. You did nothing.”
“I did everything I could,” Wilbur says, voice cracking. “I fought him— I fought them all, but I am not king, Tommy.”
“You’re his son,” Tommy repeats the words from a week ago.
“I know.”
Tommy’s jaw was tight, his eyes burning with fury and pain. “You stood in that throne room,” He tells Wilbur, rancorously, “while they named me a traitor, while they spoke of bloodlines and rebellion, and you— stood there, like a statue with my name in your mouth and not a single word to save me.”
Wilbur takes a step forward. Then another. “I thought if I spoke, they would do worse,” He says. “I thought silence might save your life.”
“And what did it cost?” Tommy hisses. “Your silence was my sentence. Your silence was exile.”
Wilbur falters. “I thought I could bear the weight of your hatred, if it meant you lived.”
Tommy peers at him, something breaking across his face. Not forgiveness. Not even understanding. But something tolerant— something straining at the edge of rage.
And that was worse. That was unbearable.
“Say it,” Tommy speaks suddenly.
Wilbur blinks, confused. “Say what?”
“Say what you came here to say. Say the thing you keep hiding behind your eyes.”
Wilbur’s lips part. A thousand words stuck in his throat. “I—”
But the rest was shame. Was longing. Was madness.
“I miss you,” He decides to say instead, quietly. “I miss you so deeply I think I am becoming someone else without you.”
Tommy flinches.
Wilbur moves forward again, breath shallow. “I see your face in mirrors. I hear your voice in rooms you’ve never entered. I wake with my hand outstretched, reaching for a presence I deeply crave.”
“Don’t—”
“I dream of you dying,” Wilbur whispers, afraid if he says it too loud it might come true. “Over and over. In every way, and I wake suffocating. I wake screaming. And still I come here, because it is the only place left in the world where you might still be real.”
Tommy remains soundless. The air hangs heavy between them, thick with unshed affliction.
Tommy turns away, stepping back into the tent. “Get in before someone sees you.”
Wilbur stares for far too long. “You—”
“Don’t make me say it again.”
Wilbur swiftly enters before Tommy decides to change his mind.
The flap fell shut behind him, sealing them in dim lighting and tension.
Tommy did not so much as regard him. He sat down on the edge of the cot, hands resting on his knees as though he was fighting the urge to strike something.
Wilbur stood still. He wanted to fall to his knees. He wanted to press his forehead to the floor and weep like a penitent in a chapel, but he remains upright because that, somehow, felt more vulnerable.
“I hate you,” Tommy vocalizes, stunted.
Wilbur nods, painfully aware. “I know.”
“I hate the sound of your voice, and the way you look at me.” Tommy lifts his head up sharply. “I said,” He continues, distraught with his own words, “I do not forgive you.”
“I do not deserve it,” Wilbur affirms. “But I am asking anyway.” He crosses the space slowly.
Tommy is stagnant, but when Wilbur halts in front of him— close enough to see the tear trailing down his cheek, though he refuses to acknowledge it— he professes, “I wrote you a letter.”
Tommy’s throat moves. “I burned it.”
Wilbur smiles, just barely, a small, grim thing. “I wrote another. I’ll write a hundred more. Until one reaches you.”
“Sit,” Tommy mutters, dejected.
Wilbur does, and for a moment, they did not speak. They only breathed in the same space again, and he dares to flick his eyes to Tommy. His throat burns at the sight of him.
“Why do you keep coming?” Tommy asks, voice low.
“I don’t know how not to,” Wilbur confesses.
Nothing.
Rain began to fall, harshly on the tent’s roof.
“I thought,” Wilbur starts, elaborating, because he at least owes Tommy that, “that seeing you once more might satisfy some part of me. Some ache I could name, then lay to rest. But I was wrong. I left that night emptier than I arrived.”
Wilbur speaks softly, “I think of you constantly.”
Tommy does not give him anything, but Wilbur notices him waver, the slightest of twitches wracking his body.
Wilbur’s voice falters, “I tried to stay away. I tried to let go. But every time I close my eyes, I see the moment you turned from me at court—the moment they dragged you away. And I cannot—Prime, Tommy, I can not undo it.”
Tommy’s hands grip at his uniform, wrinkling it. “You didn’t put me here,” He replies, not kindly, not gently, but not cruelly either. Just a truth.
“But I didn’t stop it,” Wilbur admits. “And that truth sits in my throat like a blade.”
Tommy turns to him, and for the first time, Wilbur sees something break behind his eyes.
“I thought,” Tommy begins faintly, “that if I stayed angry at you, I wouldn’t miss you.”
“And did it work?”
“No.” He lets the words escape with almost repugnance as though he’s disgusted with himself for being unable to feel anything but hate.
Wilbur’s hand lifts, hesitant, in the air between them, “I never believed you betrayed the Crown,” he said. “Never. Not even for a breath. I knew you were innocent, and still I did nothing.”
Tommy stares down at the floor. “I know.”
“I cannot change what I’ve done,” Wilbur regretfully voices, “But I would give the marrow of my bones, the blood from my hands, if it meant I could be forgiven.”
Tommy’s voice was quieter than the rain. “Forgiveness is not something you bleed for.”
“Then what must I do?”
Tommy meets his eyes, and the sadness in him was a living thing. A sadness Wilbur has engendered in him. “You’re doing it.”
There’s a lump in his throat— hard to swallow. “May I stay, just for a moment? I’ll say nothing. I’ll sit and let the fire speak in my stead. I swear it. I swear it on my name.”
Tommy did not answer, but he didn’t tell him to go, and Wilbur, trembling, sat by the small fire and watched its gold light flicker across Tommy’s hands— hands he remembered in the palace gardens, uncalloused and laughing, now calloused and quiet.
Tommy let him stay.
And Wilbur, for the first time in weeks, breathes.