Chapter Text
One last look in the mirror and you have to puff your cheeks a little.
It’s not that you don’t look good… but you feel weird. This is routine, you’ve gone on ten other outings like this and you always look the best you can look: healthy skin, shaded where it shades naturally, sultry eyes, delicately contoured features and an equally delicate shade of mauve pink on your lips.
But something about tonight makes you extra uneasy. Your hands shake as you try to press out a small wrinkle in your dress, floor length because it’s too cold for anything shorter, and you try to distract yourself by the details in the Prussian blue number, which glides on the marble floors of your room and gives absolutely no space for the high heels you’re wearing beneath the skirt. It tightens at your waist beautifully, drapes around your shoulders and down your back so you feel like you do usually for these type of events, and you try to convince yourself that tonight will be no different from the other nights.
It’s okay, you quietly tell yourself. This is just like all the others. It’s routine. They’re just trying to help.
You move away from your vanity and cross the mess you’ve made of your bedroom and get to the door. There is a man in uniform waiting on you when you open the double doors to your room, and they smile identical smiles at you when they take you in.
“Spectacular as always, your Highness.”
“Please don’t call me that, I have a name that you may use freely,” you sigh, tired of your title because it’s the two words you’ve heard the most in your life.
“As you wish, Princess.”
“Sehun,” you groan again, and the tall, slim man only smiles and turns his back to you to lead the way downstairs.
The halls in the winter house are larger than the palace, you’d spent the entire year here if you didn’t have studying to do in the capital, and not just things of academia. There’s the horse-riding, the tennis, the long sessions of sitting in at audiences with your parents and the even longer hearings with the counselors to the crown.
You’re next-in-line, after all.
Your guards offer their hands to you as you walk down the spiral staircase that centers the home, but you decide to use your hands to lift your skirt a smidgen as you descend. You’re tired of telling your parents that Johnny and Sehun are more like your elder brothers than they are your guards, that you have no need for them now that you’re older… but Father insists. And when he insists, it’s best to just shut up.
“Is he here yet?”
“Yes, he’s waiting in the dining hall of the East Wing,” Sehun supplies as he starts steering you in that direction, and he’s hiding a smirk as he walks on. “He’s going to be interesting.”
“How so?”
“You’ll see.”
The rest of the walk is quiet, you can only hear the heel of your shoes and the heels of Sehun’s, how they echo in the halls you pass. It’s warm, the atmosphere in here, but it always is when the house is welcoming a guest.
You reach the Eastern dining hall sooner than you’d have liked, and you heave a final sigh as you stand before the doors that open up to it.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
The doors open to reveal exactly what you expected. Except for one little detail.
Your blind date is giving his back to you when you walk in, and when he turns around, you nearly gasp. He’s beautiful.
“Your kingdom has a weird wind about it. How do you breathe this air?”
Perplexion is what first hits you. He’s different. He looks different, a soft face with surprisingly sharp features. He looks entirely like a bunny rabbit when he gives you a smile, though it’s not entirely warm. He’s wearing clothes that you’re familiar with but had never seen in person.
He’s a prince, too. From quite far away.
You curtsy, and he bows 90 degrees back. He rises and his smile blooms fully, he looks you over and studies your face and comes closer even though the kitchen staff are starting to come in with drinks and the first round of hors d’oeuvres.
“You’re lovely. They said you would be, my advisors, but you’re lovely,” he extends a hand for you to hold and for a moment, you’re not sure what to do. His voice is soft, it has a texture that exudes honesty of the best kind and still holds a strong presence and you’re a little enthralled. Are you dreaming?
“I’m sure you’ve been told, but my name is Doyoung. I believe I, too, have joined the ranks of the people that would like to become your spouse. And I also believe your search is over.”
Hesitantly, you let him lead you to where you’re meant to sit, but he doesn’t leave your side once you’re sat down.
“In my culture, distance is not so much a thing we like to link to these affairs,” he looks over his shoulder to his own guard, a man twice his size but just as lithe as him, “I hope you don’t mind if we meet halfway when it comes to etiquette at the dining table. I’d prefer tonight to be comfortable and not so much cordial. Do you agree?”
He smiles over at you and it is commanding and not. The guard moves towards the other head of the table, pulls out the chair that had been lain there for him, and brings it over to your right hand side.
At first you’re aghast at the breach in protocol, but after he’s sat down and lain his arms on the marble table, he looks over at you and smiles wide, contented, fearless. “I agree,” you say finally, with a laugh with genuine surprise, genuine glee.
The kitchen staff take it as a signal to rearrange things for the new set up, and his place next to you is assembled how it should be in a matter of seconds. Even Sehun is smiling from his spot at the doors when you spare him a glance. He’s so different, he reminds you of the boys you see leaving the universities in the capitol with books under one arm and friends on the other, full of experience you’ve yet to have and a head full of dreams you’ve never dared yourself to dream.
It’s not been an hour and you already see years with him. This must be the fate your parents so fondly tell you stories about during afternoon tea.
Some more people in white and black uniform enter with the first course of the evening. Which is a bowl of something he’s never encountered before.
“And what’s this?” his tone is comfortable, he’s talking to you like you’re a friend and you’re still a bit stunned, a bit enchanted.
“It is onion soup. A famous dish of this region.”
He studied it for a moment, takes the most familiar piece of cutlery at his place (a spoon) and raises a spoonful of the stuff to his nose. And he immediately makes a face that makes you burst out laughing, because it’s the same exact face you made when you were first presented with this brown broth.
“is it supposed to smell like that?”
You laugh again, and he joins in and for a moment, you’re just a pair of young adults with a whole world ahead of them, and he sees in your eyes the same thing that you see in his.
The spark that ignites the flame of destiny.