Work Text:
If it weren’t for the calendar or flowers rising under stone steps of the garden, Mingyu would have guessed today marks the start of spring by the bashful pink dusting Soonyoung’s cheeks. The sun is more generous than the weeks prior to today, sunbeams bathing the once dull green garden into brighter hedges and a still chromatic show at their eyes. Bushes of flowers he can’t pinpoint a name, stumbles of his lips when Soonyoung tries to teach him the names with a foreign tongue. He can name the colors; he’s solid on that, and it seems like that’s enough to reassure the worry knitting Soonyoung’s eyebrows.
“So I’m meeting the princess today” drops like a deadweight between both of them. Their feet halt before the next bunch of flowers, cascading reds that will turn into orange if he wants to listen to Soonyoung’s next words, if he wants to walk along Soonyoung’s steps any further. If he wants to continue protecting Soonyoung any longer. They begin their way between the rose bushes. One strip of red and green down the slope forces them to split their path apart.
“Oh” settles into the thorns. The single syllable loses itself among the birds, trickles of water into the fountain up ahead, and he doubts Soonyoung picked up on it. “Okay” is louder but not quite, more stern but shakes his exhale out even harder to accept reality.
Soonyoung puffs his cheeks, unbinds from the anxious air out his lungs. His tongue laps the nerves all over his lips. The tip of his tongue even clings onto the small beads of sweat over his bow. “I’m not sure how to act around her.”
Before Mingyu can confess he doesn’t know how to act around a princess either, let alone the prince right in front of him, Soonyoung drowns the breeze teasing his hair with his worries. “Do I compliment her right away? Hold her hand? Can I stand next to her?”
Mingyu frees out the airy chuckle to drive the air out of him, to drive out the breeze knocking him into a shiver. Or perhaps it’s the tremble of his chest because of his heart there. “Well, for starters, don’t crush her hand.”
“How do I hold her hand, then?” seethes more angry than anxious. The knit of his eyebrows draws deeper than the lines at his neck when he runs a nervous hand there, fingernails littering red streaks in their pale wake.
Their paths meet again at the end of reds and greens, thorns and petals. “Have you ever held a hand outside of your family?” Mingyu spits.
The anxiety freezes Soonyoung back up, and Mingyu refuses to believe in the silence, the lack of an answer at all. Because this is Soonyoung. Kwon Soonyoung, destined for the kingdom since his very first cry escaped into the world. At the minimum, he must have brushed hands with people who wanted the same land that was handed to him by his own blood, luxury spoonfed to him before his first teeth grew in, his riches piling like a playground by the age of three.
The quiet taunts at Soonyoung for the answer. So Mingyu lowers his voice, softens the rough at the edges of his question, to ask once more, “Have you?”
Soonyoung drops his eyes to his feet and when Mingyu follows the tracks of his vision, he watches him dig fingernails into his fists. His voice flattens. As if through gritted teeth, most possibly through gritted teeth hidden by the slope of his nose and the top of his hair from this angle, crown invisible but present nonetheless, his jaws work out the words before he swallows hard and confesses, “No, I haven’t.”
Glares of his knuckles surrender to the straightening of his digits, denial stopping them from their eyes meeting halfway again. Soonyoung begins slotting his fingers together then releasing them. Slotting, releasing. Slotting. Releasing.
Uncertainty wrecks his words, his judgement when he offers his palm open to him, last fingers curling up and asking for Soonyoung’s hand, rather than the other way around. “Try holding mine, then.”
“No, wait,” Soonyoung huffs and drums his fingertips on his palm instead, “let me reach out to you .”
Soonyoung’s gaze bounds for anywhere that isn’t Mingyu, trips halfway to finally meet his again.
When he slides his hand over Soonyoung’s outstretched one this time, the same form with his palm open and last digits curling up, he watches their fingertips match for a moment and Soonyoung’s own fingers flatten out. A little warm on his palm and cold at his fingertips, he continues sliding his palm up until his fingertips reach farther than Soonyoung’s. But even then, he doesn’t stop himself from slipping his fingers between Soonyoung’s own, squeezing his palm against his.
It isn’t much, a mere practice of respectable manners for the princess and polished gestures just hours following up to their first encounter. It isn’t supposed to be much, but why does he feel his shoulders wear out the knots and tension from Sonoyoung’s palm against his? It shouldn’t be much, but why does Mingyu wish to never let go?
“Like this?” Soonyoung strikes the silence, his thoughts, and hopefully not his wishes.
Mingyu locks the swallow down his throat, and his nod rusts its way up and down. “If-if you want, the princess, maybe-” knocks the wind out of his lungs and he can’t separate if the struggle to breathe might be from the flutter coursing down to his fingertips or the dread of his first exchanges with the princess, of what could happen afterwards- “might like it if you move your thumb.”
At the suggestion, Soonyoung strokes his thumb down the back of his fingers, soothes the red roughs of scars at a knuckle. Healing scars affixed into a dotted line there, like a contract of what they are and what they can’t be, a reminder of the kingdom lines they crossed and all the other lines that should never be considered. “Like this?”
Mingyu’s heart jumps at his question. He nods his head, forces himself to remember that this is for the princess. “Yeah, I-I think she will like that.”
Soonyoung’s eyes map out the scar on his thumb this time, his uneven fingernails he tries to shy from the same plane as the prince’s manicured ones, or the gashes closing up on the back of his palm, his wrist, up his arm, and the failure of bandages at hiding them all.
“I heard this one other prince kisses any princess’ hands the first time he meets them” revives the knit of his eyebrows but replaces the bite of his words from minutes ago. Half of him fools into yearning what he might say, what he might do, given how Soonyoung’s wonderment is met with complying actions. The other half mocks him for even dreaming so. “Do...you think that would be appropriate?”
Soonyoung graces a thumb across his knuckles once more before Mingyu is holding onto a shadow of his hand. The tug of his brows don’t reflect the anxiety of meeting the princess soon nor the anger of Mingyu’s probing question minutes ago. Soonyoung’s eyes linger on the scars up the hand he let go, and he thinks it might be regret that sends his eyelashes batting slow and rare.
It’s nothing , his thoughts urge him to tell him.
Soonyoung is fully capable of glancing at each one of his scars and pinpointing exactly when he got them and how quick the nurses stitched them or wrapped them up. On worse injuries, he’s sure Soonyoung can count the days the nurses forced Mingyu to stay in bed. Soonyoung can pile up those months when the nurses asked Mingyu to lend an unscathed hand to the chefs, rather than running across the castle for the other knights. Because, from the hints of flower petals dusted under his infirmary bed, Soonyoung must have dropped by during his days of recovery.
But as much as he wants to say so, he bites into his lower lip, buries the secret into the pit of his heart. It might be something that stalks him out when the day comes where he kneels before the king and gives up his suit of armor.
Soonyoung shouldn’t be sorry, but his eyes spell out those words a thousand times over.
“I’m not the princess, so I’m not sure” he reminds the prince, reminds himself of what they are and where they stand, “but you can try it on her.”
His fingertips don’t wander far from his own, and millimeters of space brings them back together. Soonyoung’s hand holds onto his fingers again, thumb brushing over the smaller scars closer to his nail beds. He watches Soonyoung lift his hand up and lower his head, despite trepidation coaxing him to snap his hand back because a nurse, a servant, another knight, or the king can walk into the garden any second now. His breath wades across the back of his palm before his lips dip down. When his lips meet his skin, the touch is fleeting but robs his own inhales.
Ghost-prints of his lips nearly block the question out his ears and his answer to it. “Like this, Mingyu?”