Work Text:
“And what will you do once you escape?” Katte asks. “Marry the English princess?”
“Of course,” Frederick says; looking at one another, they burst into gales of laughter. “And you must too, Katte.”
Katte laughs. His teeth are very even. Frederick’s own are slightly crooked; he prefers smiling with his mouth shut. He has always thought about Katte’s mouth too much. He remembers when Katte first pressed their mouths together, laughing, how startled he had been, how he had not known the invitation was printed in his face, his expression. How Katte had teased him afterwards. The Prince is giving me that look again, and sent him scurrying to his looking glass in vain to discern a look, something that marked out his desire in plain sight.
“I’m not,” he said, looking from the glass to Katte to his own face, young and remarkably unlined.
“You want to learn how not to,” Katte said, then, knowing.
Frederick had shaken his head at him. “I want to learn how to do it on purpose.”
Katte laughed. Frederick felt the strange thing in his chest that always constricted at the sound of Katte’s laughter twist itself another time around his heart. “You’re not doing it on purpose?” he said. “It’s just how you look at me?”
Frederick nodded, miserable.
“Of course,” he says, now. “We all must.”
Sometimes in contrast to Katte Frederick feels very old. Sometimes he feels like a newborn babe. Sometimes he feels both at once, one of those wrinkled babes with a face like an old man.
His father is almost an old man now.
He will not think of his father now. This will wound him. This, that they are doing. (All of it.) (Is it possible to wound him? He has such capacity for inflicting wounds; is he also vulnerable to them? And would it be better for him to be wounded or indifferent?)