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Damien is an awfully well-behaved princeling. Perfectly quiet, perfectly polite, perfectly thoughtful whenever their King Mother gently needs him to be. Doesn’t skip lessons, doesn’t duck out of meeting fancy nobles even if he always looks like he’d rather be left well alone in the nearest stuffy room for the foreseeable future. Victor’s firmly of the mind that if Damien wants to be left alone in a dusty library then people had damn well better leave him to it, but that’s not the point.
The point actually is that Damien is almost unusually well-mannered for a nine-year-old, royal or otherwise. Which is the only reason Victor lets their younger brother drag them away from a lesson. He can almost see the excitement radiating from the younger prince, something bright and hopeful shining in eyes that are usually ducked down to examine pristine shoes and avoid looking swordmasters in the face. It tugs at something warm and fond in his chest, and almost makes up for the fact that he’s going to get the sternest talking-to of the century for skipping again.
It completely makes up for it, but, well. Some things can be kept secret.
“Alright, come on, we’ve gone far enough. What’s so important?” Victor asks, glancing around the increasingly halls around them. This is a quieter part of the castle, and the echo of their rapid footsteps comes back sounding oddly hollow.
“Not yet!” Damien insists, tightening his grip on Victor’s wrist. He drags them both out of a little side door, pausing just long enough to keep it from slamming before bounding off. Victor thinks it might be one of the gardener’s exits, if their many, many years of hide-and-seek (with Damien or with exasperated tutors waving assignments, it’s all the same) serves them right. He is immediately proven right when they find themselves directly in front of the gardens, sprawling and brilliant under the warm sun.
There’s a slightly sinking feeling in Victor’s gut, but Damien doesn’t even give them time to bring it up before he’s plunging deeper into the gardens. Victor recognizes this winding route through the blooming flowers. He knows where they’re headed for, and it makes an uncomfortable slurry of irritated-fond-just-let-it-go-already churn in his gut.
“Damien—” he starts, and Damien whirls to look up at him with big, pleading eyes.
“It’s going to be good,” he says, worried and still terribly hopeful.
And just like that, Victor reluctantly lets himself be pulled to the quietest corner of the garden. His quietest corner of the garden, which most people know to leave well enough alone. And Victor loves their brother, sometimes wants to bundle him up away from the Court’s snapping teeth, but they’d really liked this corner. The flowers here were always bright, the shrubs weren’t over-pruned into something stiff and fancy, and it had been just right for hiding from tutors and nobles and lovingly exasperated mothers when absolutely necessary.
And now, well.
Damien came to a stop in front of the shriveled, bone-white and splintering branches of the bush. The unnatural stain by its roots, where whatever well-meaning concoction Damien had made was first poured, looks just as dismal as it had when Victor first found it. Victor braces himself, looks at Damien, tries to remember that Damien is nine and really can’t make the bush any worse at this point.
“Alright. This is definitely far enough,” they say instead, as patiently as they can. “What are we doing here, Damien?”
Damien is squinting at the plant like he’s trying to tell it something. At the question, though, he looks up to Victor with something bright and fierce and excited on his face, and Victor feels some of the irritation slip away. He watches as his younger brother summons his thoughts, organizes them, prepares whatever speech is in his strange sweet head. It’s a little difficult to be angry when a bee is buzzing by your ear and the air smells like sunshine and forsythia, and your little brother is preparing some kind of speech in front of your sad dead bush.
On second hand, maybe not that difficult.
“Your bird plant—” Damien begins in his most serious voice, and Victor can’t resist interrupting.
“Golden oriole is the nickname, Damien, it’s just a regular azalea—”
“It’s named after a bird, it might as well be a bird plant,” Damien insists, and he’s going to be stubborn about it, and Victor very clearly sees the potential to be stubborn right back. On the tip of his tongue is an exasperated well maybe if you’d actually known what kind of plant it was, you wouldn’t have killed it. Maybe Damien knows that already, can see Victor swallowing the remark down, because his shoulders drop a little and he looks at the bone-dry shrub guiltily.
And then, just as quickly, he’s brightening again, like he’s just remembered why he’s dragged Victor all the way out into the gardens.
“Your azalea, then,” Damien says, an olive branch, and Victor can appreciate that. Especially because Damien is tugging on his arm and insisting, “I figured out how to make it better.”
Victor can’t decide if he’s touched that Damien is still trying to fix the accident, or if he’s exasperated that he’s going to get another lecture, this time not even for something fun, and their bush is still going to be dead at the end of it. They end up frowning, but try to keep their tone gentle.
“Damien, I know you feel bad about it. But I told you, you don’t need to keep trying to fix it, we’ll just grow something else—”
“No, listen, Victor!” Damien interrupts, and he’s almost bouncing on his toes. “Just watch, okay? It’s going to be good, I promise!” He drops down by the withered bushes with a muted thump, pressing his fingers to the earth right by its roots. Victor hesitates, watching this with some trepidation. They’re already here, he figures, and he might as well see this out. And if, at the back of his mind, the idea of scoffing at Damien when the younger boy is excited, delighted to share something, leaves a sour taste on his mouth, well, that’s for another time.
So he draws a little bit closer, peering over Damien’s shoulder with budding curiosity.
The younger prince has his eyes screwed shut, brow furrowed in focus. His lips are moving, just barely murmuring words to himself. There’s an odd sensation crawling up Victor’s spine, something strange and almost prickling, and he finds himself leaning closer despite himself.
For a long minute, nothing else happens. Just Damien’s small palms pressed to the rich earth, an unnatural stillness to the boy. Victor’s inhaling, getting ready to prompt their brother again—
And then, Damien says something soft and coaxing to the dead branches, and everything about him shifts. Victor only has time to blink, try to parse what he’s seeing, and then the world around Damien shifts back. And before their eyes, the plant quivers like some kind of breeze snuck its way into the heavy summer air. The azalea shivers, and then slowly, slowly, it begins to shift and stretch. From the very base where it sinks into the earth, where Damien’s fingers are digging deep, it begins to regain its brightness. Color returns to its bleached stem and spreads slowly into its brittle branches, like rain sinking into dry earth.
Victor watches, silent and enchanted, as the delicate green buds unfurl like a thousand tiny eyes, winking open at him. Weeks pass in three heartbeats, and suddenly the bush, Victor’s favorite dead bush, so far beyond saving that they’d had to argue off the gardeners to keep it from getting uprooted, is in full bloom. And Damien sits back on his haunches, exhaling and gulping down fresh air like he’d forgotten, for a moment, that he breathes through lungs and not fragile green veins.
Victor stares at the azalea for a long moment. He reaches out without thinking, touches the vibrant green of the leaves, traces the reverent yellow petals. They’re bursting with life, soft and thrumming under his fingers, and he looks to Damien.
“How did you do that?” He asks finally, reeling from the implications. There aren’t many mages in Leon, there isn’t magic like this in the royal family, how hasn’t anybody noticed, and—
And the prince is grinning up at his older brother, pride and delight making his expression radiant.
“I told you I’d fix it for you,” he says proudly, and then immediately keels over into the dirt.
Later, after the panic and shouting and dragging their stupid clever magical little brother to a healer, after being told he just needs rest, after sitting at his bedside for his hours, Victor will fix the younger prince with his best stern look. The one King Mother does like nobody else, but Victor’s learning fast, and it does at least give their brother pause.
“You worried everyone sick. You need to be more careful,” he’ll say firmly, trying his hardest to sound like a king-to-be, like someone who can actually tell a Royal Price what to do with hope of succeeding. And Damien will look down at the sheets, his shoulders will slump a bit, he’ll be silent and guilty and Victor will cave like snow in spring.
And they’ll huff, reach out to ruffle Damien’s hair just the way that’ll make the princeling squawk. And then they’ll laugh, and grin, and hop over onto the bed so he can bump their shoulders together.
“Now tell me how you did that,” he’ll demand, throwing an arm around lifting shoulders, and Damien will smile like the sun.