Work Text:
I was taking my first faltering steps into adulthood when I first met Prince Rudolf.
Of noble birth, tutored in all matters befitting a king, he was handsome, dashing, and had a spectacular seat on a horse. In my naivety, he was my ideal of manhood.
As an impressionable youth, experiencing new confusing impulses, I knew not if I desired to be him or simply desired him. He was the subject of all the elaborate fantasies that fuelled my solitary vice.
Eventually, his weak profligate nature revealed itself and I came to despise the man I'd once so much admired.
Rassendyll was everything Prince Rudolf should have been.
I knew he would refuse Michael and my propositions as befitted a gentleman. Yet I was strangely enamoured when he turned down mine.
Here was an English commoner with the principles, the noblesse oblige, I'd been raised to admire but had abandoned, with the face and physique that had stoked the fires of my youthful fantasies.
He'd been a soldier and his swordplay matched his wit but his skills did not match mine. Yet I failed to skewer Rassendyll with dagger and sword and I never fail...
Unless I mean to fail.