Chapter Text
“I’m a little nervous, but I’ll try to have fun. I have a friend I haven’t seen in years who’s going to be there,” Miyano says, beaming.
The prince’s smile is so beautiful, Sasaki thinks to himself. There’s something piercing and sharp beneath his gut when he thinks of other people falling in love with it.
Miyano is set to attend a ball tomorrow where he’s meant to meet different women from different countries and lands, all of high status. Princesses and duchesses, all gorgeous and well-mannered and fit for a prince to love and eventually, marry.
It’s the reason the ball is being held, after all. For the prince to start thinking about getting a lover who will eventually become Queen.
Sasaki should have known something like this would happen.
He’d been in love with Miyano for a little over a year now. Spending time with him every day, getting to know him more and more and loving him more and more. He finds himself cheerful and open and relaxed when he’s with him, especially during times like this when he’d successfully convince Miyano to hide from his duties with him in the middle of the hedge maze in the garden.
Before he started getting assigned to guard the prince regularly, he used to dread waking up. Because waking up meant he had to go get ready when the sun is barely up, train and then be sent off to an isolated back garden that no one ever even went to. But ever since Miyano stumbled into that lonely garden, book in hand, and Sasaki decided to turn himself around, he’d been looking forward to each day.
His life is finally better than staring at the backs of his eyelids. Because when he’s awake, he gets to see Miyano’s smile. His sparkling eyes. The genuine kindness he treats everyone and everything with. The way he remembers things Sasaki tells him, even when he’s always busy meeting people far more important than him and attending to various responsibilities left and right. Everything about Miyano. Everything. Sasaki fell for all of it.
It’s not like he ever expected the two of them to actually be together one day, but the image of Miyano with someone else fills him with a foreign kind of panic that makes him feel like he’s falling down an elevator shaft. And once he hits the ground, he can’t even imagine how much it’ll hurt. If the prince walks out of that ball interested in someone, looking at them in a way he never looked at him, then…
He can’t do it. He imagines himself in the aftermath, forced to remember who the hell he was before this, and he can’t.
Who the hell was he before experiencing how wonderful love is?
He didn’t like that person. Didn’t like being him.
He’s pretty sure he’d still be in love with the prince even if he does find someone at the ball, but that’s the scary part. If Sasaki’s heart breaks, where is he supposed to put its jagged pieces? He’ll have to shove them all back into the hole in his chest and act like everything’s fine when Miyano starts slipping away from him.
So, Sasaki looks the prince in the eye and, as if his life depends on it, he utters, “Myaa-chan, I…”
“Yes?” he replies.
“I’m…in love with you, Miyano,” Sasaki says.
The atmosphere feels like the stiff surface of a lake before a storm.
And he feels silly as soon as he hears the words leave his mouth.
He doesn’t even know what he hopes to achieve by telling the prince this. What was the point? Maybe he just wanted to get it off of his chest, or maybe he wanted something stupid and childish like a chance to be loved back. What a fool he is.
Miyano stays silent, and the water falling in tiers down the fountain they’re sitting on sounds much louder now. The dazzling honey eyes he loves so dearly are wide and stunned. Miyano is frozen in place, looking anxious and uneasy. His own heart thundering in his ears, it makes Sasaki regret saying it even more. What is a prince to do when a commoner tells him he’s in love with him? Especially someone assigned to protect him, and someone who’s a good friend, as Miyano considers him.
A friend.
That should be more than enough, between a prince and someone of no status.
But his chest aches so much at the word. Because his head tells him one thing, and his heart another.
“Wh…what?” Miyano finally stutters in reply.
Sasaki pauses. He could try to pretend he said something else, or play it off as a joke. But he knows not even he could cover up something like that. His voice was low and deadly serious when he confessed. It was the most honest he’d ever been with someone in his life. There’s no worming his way out of the situation, and there’s no chance that ‘just kidding’ could get him out of this one. He has no choice but to own it.
“I am in love with you,” Sasaki repeats. There isn’t really a way to state the fact any simpler.
The prince stares back at him, doe-eyed and mouth ajar slightly. “I…um…”
“Your Highness? Are you out here?” A voice— Kuresawa’s— coming from somewhere in the hedge maze calls out. “We’ve got to get you ready for lunch with the Duke!”
“Ah!” Miyano makes a startled noise, whipping his head around behind where he sits. He quickly turns back to Sasaki and meets his eyes, looking even more nervous at the added pressure of the possibility that they may be discovered any minute now. “Um…just— uh…”
“...Listen,” Sasaki starts. It’s unbearable to see Miyano so uncomfortable, especially since it’s his fault. So he’ll take it upon himself to end this mess he’s dragged him into. He’ll do the ripping off of the bandaid. Even if he knows it’s going to leave him shattered. “You don’t have to say anything. I…understand that you can’t be with me, even if you do return my feelings. So—”
“N-no! It’s not like that! I…” Miyano interrupts. He pauses, struggling to find words. “...Can I think about it?”
Sasaki’s eyes go round.
Did he hear that right?
In disbelief, he repeats, “C-can you…”
“I don’t…have an answer for you right now,” Miyano admits. “But I’ll think it over, I promise! Um…is that okay?”
Sasaki blinks. Is that ‘okay?’
He feels like he’s dreaming.
“...Y-yeah,” Sasaki replies in a daze, and he feels the corners of his lips turning up. He can’t believe it. He can’t believe it, but he’s so damned happy. He averts his eyes from the prince in an attempt to sedate the urge to take him into his arms. “That’s…definitely okay.”
“Your Highness? We don’t want you to be late!” Kuresawa’s voice calls out from a different direction. The wrong one, Sasaki notes. He must not know how to navigate the maze.
“Kuresawa-kun’s calling you,” Sasaki mentions. “Maybe you should go save him. Sounds like he’s lost.”
“Ah, um. Right,” Miyano acknowledges, getting up to leave.
“I’ll see you later,” Sasaki says, looking up from where he still sits.
“Yeah. See you later,” Miyano replies, turning his back and leaving to the only path that leads into the maze, calling out Kuresawa’s name.
As soon as he leaves, Sasaki feels like the wind is knocked out of him. He sighs, shoulders slumping and head hanging. The residual nervousness he was feeling makes his hands tremble where they rest on the rough sandstone.
What the hell just happened?