Chapter Text
"A bride for my brother before a bride for me," the prince says, and Ryuji raises an eyebrow.
"I'm pretty sure I'm not a bride."
"It's... metal...phorical?" He says, trying out the word. "Bride, groom, whatever, I'm not getting married before my brother finds somebody!"
"I didn't even know you had a brother." Ryuji says, carding his fingers through Rin's hair. The prince grins up at him, from where he's resting his head on Ryuji's lap.
"Yeah, I think you'd get along. He's really cool, but he's really shy." Shy enough that Ryuji's never heard of him, despite having been Prince Rin's bodyguard for years. Something's up. "When we were kids, I promised him I'd find him somebody before I got married, since he... doesn't go outside."
That last part's weird. This whole thing's weird. Ryuji's got no idea what's going on here.
"Let me get this straight. You have a brother-- little brother? older brother?"
"Twin, but he's younger."
"You have a twin brother, second in line to the throne, but nobody's ever seen him or even heard of him before, but you can't marry me until you find him a bride?"
"Yeah! You've got it!"
"Is it a curse?" He asks, and Rin glances away, looking slightly shifty. It's a terrible look on him, he's so bad at it. "You're cursed not to marry anyone until he gets a bride?"
"No! It really..." Rin frowns, looking serious. "I really did promise him. And he..."
Ryuji waits, quietly smoothing down Rin's bangs. If he waits quietly, Rin will continue.
"He's cursed." Rin says, glancing back towards the castle with a frown.
There it is. That's what Ryuji was waiting for, there's the other shoe dropping. A cursed prince isn't totally unheard of, princes and princesses are more likely to end up cursed than commoners after all, but somehow the idea that King Shiro and Queen Yuri have a secret second cursed son hiding in the basement of the castle is almost unbelievable.
"He's cursed to have to get married before you do?"
"No!" Rin swats at him, halfheartedly. "He's just got a weird curse on him. Mom says it was an accident, and I think she feels really bad about it, so don't bring it up around her."
"The queen got her son cursed?"
"No! Just--" Rin hops up, and grabs Ryuji's hand to tug him to his feet (Kuro gives a sleepy little mrrp as he slides off Rin's lap, eyes cracking open just a little to look at the two of them, before the cat yawns and goes back to sleep). "Look! We just gotta go meet him! It'll make more sense then!"
And so they do. And it absolutely does not make any more sense then.
"Your brother," Ryuji whispers, tugging Rin closer as they stand in the door of the room. "Is a giant snake."
"Yeah!" Rin whispers back. "Isn't he cool?"
Cool is not the word Ryuji would have picked. That's a giant snake. Not earth shattering dragon size, not bigger than a thousand men, but still a good twenty five feet of shimmering black scales, a snake that could probably eat a goat and not complain. The snake rears up in front of them, bringing its head to Ryuji's eye level, and an inky black tongue flicks out a few times. Ryuji isn't sure if he's being considered as a person or just as potential food.
"Older brother," says the snake, and his voice is surprisingly human. "Who is this?"
"It's Ryuji!" Rin says excitedly, and tugs Ryuji closer to the snake. Ryuji would really much rather not be this close to the snake.
"H-hello, prince." Ryuji says, and he's pretty sure that Rin isn't really capable of playing the long game and getting involved with him just to feed him to a giant cursed snake, but that doesn't really make him feel any better about this. The unease doesn't get any less as the snake circles him, tongue flicking and eyes like two shining emeralds. He stands very, very still.
"Hello, Suguro Ryuji, friend of my brother. Are you coming here to announce your engagement?"
Ryuji doesn't breathe for a second. It's a long moment, as he and the snake watch each other. And then Rin breaks the tension, grinning and rubbing a hand over the snake's shining head.
"Come on, Yukio! Not until you meet somebody! I promised!"
"Y-yeah," Ryuji says, a little nervously but playing along. "You like girls or guys? Or either?"
"I'm a snake." Says the snake. "It doesn't matter who you bring me, they'll just run away."
"Don't be so gloomy! You're a prince, there've got to be a lot of hot girls who want to marry you!"
Ryuji thinks suddenly, as he watches the snake turn and move back off into the elegantly furnished rooms under the castle, that a hot girl isn't exactly what's needed here.
"Can I bring someone to meet you?" He asks, impulsively. Bad manners, but he looks at the lonely form of the snake, at the library's worth of books on the walls, at the maps and globes, the jars of alchemical ingredients, and he kind of has an idea.
The snake pauses, looks back at him with a glittering eye, and slowly nods before moving away.
Rin looks up at him in slight confusion. "You seriously know somebody? They don't have to like snakes, I mean I don't think he even wants somebody who likes snakes like that, but if they run away when they see him I'll kick their ass."
Ryuji nods, leading them back into the passageway. A guard, pale and serious, scales tattooed on her face, locks the door behind them.
"Your brother's kind of a nerd, isn't he."
Rin laughs, and nods. "He'd be a nerd even if he didn't hide down here all the time! He's really smart, maybe even smarter than you!"
"So, he'd probably get along with someone who's also a quiet, kind of nerdy person." Ryuji's going to ignore Rin's unintentional jab, it's much more of a compliment to Prince Yukio than it is a dig at Ryuji's intelligence, and he knows that. "Probably somebody who's got experience working around curses."
Rin nods, looking a little bit puzzled, not quite catching on yet, but still looking like he likes the idea.
"Konekomaru." Ryuji explains, and Rin's eyes go wide.
"Really?
"Yeah, of course. He's smart, he's got good manners, he knows how to deal with people, and he's got experience breaking curses."
"No way," Rin shakes his head, frowning a little bit.
"Why not?"
"Koneko's too cool. He's way too cool for my brother!"
"What is this coolness ranking? Seriously, Rin?"
"You know how cool he is! He's almost as cool as my dad!"
There's an actual coolness ranking. Prince Rin has pulled an actual scroll from his carrying pouch, and is waving it in the hallway where anyone can see, pointing out the coolness of apparently everyone he knows. The fact that the queen is the coolest person on the ranking isn't a surprise, or that the king is second. The rest is... interesting. Konekomaru being third is really unexpected. Yukio and Kuro's places having been switched at some point by Rin messily scribbling through their names is extremely amusing, as is the complete omission of Shima.
There's a quiet laugh from behind Ryuji, and he turns to see Queen Yuri standing there, dressed in royal purple, golden crown on her head. Ryuji bows, and she rests a hand on his shoulder.
"If you've met Yukio, then that means I'll be calling you my son soon enough, and I've never been one to ask my sons to bow for me."
He raises his head, a little bashfully, and straightens up. There's a sort of sadness in the queen's expression, one he hadn't noticed before. But the context makes it pretty easy to guess why.
"Prince Rin and I were just talking about--"
"What do you think of Konekomaru? For Yukio!"
Queen Yuri smiles a little, and Ryuji thinks that she doesn't like the idea, despite the fond way she looks at Rin's exuberance.
"I think you need to ask Yukio and Konekomaru both what they think, before throwing them into this. Don't try matchmaking them just because that's what you want, Rin."
She doesn't say it to Ryuji, but he feels a pang of guilt. He was the one to trying to set one of his best friends up with a snake just so he and Rin could get together.
"It might be interesting," Konekomaru says, considering Ryuji and Rin and the proposition. The modified offering isn't you should get married to a snake, it's changed without actually consulting Yukio into something more along the lines of there's a cursed prince who needs to be un-cursed, and it might involve true love's kiss and a potentially handsome boy, which is practically like catnip for someone as interested in weird things as Konekomaru is.
"Do you have any information on how or why the curse was laid on him?" Koneko asks, squinting up at Rin, who shakes his head.
"I dunno. Mom said once that she always wanted kids, but couldn't have any, and then we were born, so maybe that's part of it?"
"It could be," Koneko says, frowning a little. "You hear about that kind of thing a lot, people wishing for a baby and then getting one with a curse or a special requirement attached."
"You want to ask him?" Ryuji says, and Koneko and Rin both look over at him. "It isn't like we can just go ask the queen about it, and I don't know much about the other prince but it didn't look like he got enough chances to just hang out with people. He could probably use a friend or two."
Rin grins, and gives Ryuji a thumbs up as Koneko grabs his slate and stylus and a roll of paper, expression already set in that familiar focused way Ryuji knows so well. "It would be best, that way we can get as much information about the curse as possible. No offense, Prince Rin, but I think he might have a little more information than you."
"He probably does! He's probably tried like fifty things to break it already, and bugged mom and dad about it."
The mental picture that Ryuji is forming of Yukio's personality just keeps shifting, but Koneko just nods, as Rin rushes out of Koneko's room and hollers for Kuro to give them a ride.
The ride is as easy as ever, and so is the walk through the castle, Rin leading the way and Ryuji and Konekomaru following. They've been friends long enough that Ryuji knows Koneko's moods, can practically read his thoughts. Now, as they wind their way down through passages and through doors, Ryuji knows Koneko is starting to get concerned.
"What is it?" Ryuji asks, quietly, leaning down towards where Koneko is walking beside him. The pressure of his friend's hand on his elbow is familiar, as is the frown building on the shorter man's face.
"Just something I heard the other day," Konekomaru says, voice not quite a whisper but low. "About missing servant girls."
The idea of Prince Yukio eating someone isn't entirely far fetched. He's a giant snake, he could probably eat a serving girl or two easily. And Konekomaru is smaller than a lot of serving girls, certainly washes fewer dishes and hauls around fewer buckets full of laundry.
"Rin's brother isn't going to eat you." He says, and then. "We're here."
The guard (a different one than last time, but close enough to be her sister) frowns slightly at them, but lets them in.
Prince Yukio doesn't hear them come in, apparently, though Konekomaru can't help but gasp slightly at the sight of the inky black snake in front of them. Apparently even with Koneko's limited vision, he can see the dark coils on the floor, the treelike way the snake rears its head to--
get in a fight with a book, apparently. The book is closing, Prince Yukio is nudging it open with his nose, the book is falling closed again, and Rin laughs.
"Here, I got it!"
There's a huff from the snake, not a hiss but absolutely something annoyed, and he lets Rin open the book for him, holds it open with his body as he turns to face the little group of them.
"And you are?" The prince asks, a little bit annoyed but Ryuji can't blame him.
"Konekomaru Miwa," Koneko says, taking a step forward, the carved wooden staff in his hand scraping lightly against the tiles. The snake flicks his tongue, considering.
"I see." There's a glance at Rin, a slight shift in the nearly expressionless features of the snake, and Rin rolls his eyes. Apparently, twins can communicate without words and without even having the same type of face.
"Why are you here, Konekomaru Miwa?"
"Bon said you're looking for a cursebreaker." Koneko's voice is steady, even as the snake moves forward, circles him, tongue flicking. "So he called me."
"I doubt that anything you do will be helpful." And there it is, the challenge thrown out with quiet resignation.
"Please don't discount my abilities before I've even made an attempt." And that challenge is picked up with a new determination in Konekomaru's expression. Ryuji knew that would work.