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Though the surrounding air was warm and muggy, a shiver ran up Edward's spine as Master Alfred rolled up his tunic. His hands were cold as ice and far too calloused for a man who had spent most of his life within the castle's grey stone walls doing little more than shadowing their young king's every step. His were not the hands of Edward's parents, laborers who had had little more to their names than the clothes upon their backs. Like pairs of invisible stones tied around their ankles, life itself had seemed to weigh them down. Their stooped bodies, thin as a sheet of parchment, had at least taken quickly to the plague. Better to fall first than to fight a battle that couldn't be won.
In his own way, that was what Edward was doing. To run would be to risk more than just a few lashes. It very well could put him, day in and day out, back under the same scorching sun beneath which his parents had all but drawn their last breaths.
Edward drew in a breath and shut his eyes. The waiting hurt far more than the fiery sting of leather against his back ever could. Sometimes Master Alfred got right to it, one lash coming so quickly after another that Edward could barely tell where one ended and another began. Other times, he would wait, as if hoping that in the chasm between his first strike and the next that the roaring pressure running up Edward's back might lighten.
Edward's heartbeat echoed in his ears. His sweaty, shaking palms were barely able to keep him from collapsing face first onto the grimy floor.
From somewhere in the distance came a crack like thunder. Then, lightning sizzled across Edward's back.
-
Edward felt as if he'd swallowed a rock. If he opened his mouth, would he even be able to force any words from his throat?
It was a tight ache, no mere small cut, but it was nothing like the pain still rippling along his back. After forty lashes, he had barely been able to hobble back to his shared quarters. He'd looked to his highness before he'd left, but Bruce had not met his eyes. If he had, would Edward even have seen his own face reflected back in them?
For all Master Alfred and Father Cobblepot prattled on about them being equals beneath the eyes of their creator, was it truly a leap of the imagination to surmise that their king saw Edward as little more than a bug beneath his feet? Though they lived within the same walls and studied from the same books, they might as well have been different species. Bruce slept beneath a canopy, Edward atop a pile of straw. His highness wore furs while Edward made do with sackcloth. Bruce's blood was of a noble stock. Edward's was little more than a series of coppery stains speckled across the castle's walls.
Even the yokes they bore were not the same. Oh, sniffling onlookers might murmur "orphan" at their boy king, but Edward would be lucky to even have the term spit at him. Close as he was to their king's glow, Edward had to fight to be reflected in his light.
What did Bruce know of pain, really? What had he ever felt that couldn't be borne across another's back?
Edward bit his lip. He glanced around his room. Except for him, it stood empty, and would remain as such until long after the sun sank beneath the horizon. Yet even within his own skull, there was always the risk that someone might catch word of his thoughts - if not aloud, then written across his face. These were words that could get his tongue cut from his mouth.
Yet as far as he pushed them back, sooner or later they always hovered back to the forefront of his mind. If his short life had taught him anything so far, then it was that no good question went forever unanswered.
Yet these were the the kinds of riddles that he had been asking himself for so long that they might as well have been carved atop his skull. What echoed even louder through his head now was something that he couldn't shove away no matter how hard he pressed them back.
What reason did he really have to believe that Bruce felt anything, anything at all, as he watched Edward bleed like a stuck pig onto the worn stone floor?