Work Text:
Royal (adj): belonging or connected to a king or queen or a member of their family.
He was hers from the moment that her hand fell upon him. There had been choice before, the nine Kings with their nine Queens and their many princes and princesses. Now there was only the King, injured and fading, and the Princess, and this strange outsider who was already so utterly the princess's, so utterly royal.
Rourke was saying something, waving a gun, but Milo could not do anything but look at the crystal. Blue was supposed to be cold, that was what everyone said, but it was like a summer day here, warm and dry, sinking into his skin. The tiredness of travelling and the ache of bumps and bruises faded away, and it felt as if he was breathing in the sunlight. Glowing silence filled his ears, blue light filled his eyes, and he might have been walking forwards but it was not him, there was something else reaching through him.
"Milo!" Kida cried out, but as she went to run past the blond woman caught her arm again and wrenched her back. Clenching her fist, Kida punched her cleanly in the jaw, but her hold did not break and she responded by slamming the butt of her pistol so hard against Kida's temple that the world blurred for one terrible moment. Kida rounded on the man who had called himself Rourke. "What have you done to him?"
"Well, princess," he smirked, and her title sounded mocking in his mouth. "I was just about to ask you the same question."
She bared her teeth at him, about to answer, when an incredible sense of peace rolled over her and the very air in her lungs seemed to soothe.
"Be not afraid," said Milo, and yet it was not Milo though the words came from his lips. The voice was both his and not, the Atlantean far more fluent than his had been but the aching hope of the words his, all the same. "We will help him."
She could hear her mother's voice among them. The world turned clear again, the pulsing pain in her head subsiding, as the last taut tendrils of fear drained away from her again. She smiled, and it was strange to feel a pleasure in it without a joy, a deep sense of justice that radiated in her bones.
"Thank you," she said. Astonishment crossed Rourke's face. "For bringing him to me. In trying to destroy us, you will save us."
She had seen his love for Atlantis from the moment she had witnessed him set eyes on the city. He was meant to have been hers, and he was meant to have been Atlantis's. And though he was not of them yet, she could feel him becoming part of the city before the magic of their Great Crystal even rose again, a drop of Atlantean light in the great darkness of the outside world which had come back to them once again.
He was always meant to return, to fight for them.
She holds his hands, the touch hot and cold and painful and exquisite all at once, and looks at the shining crystal of his glasses. There are a thousand hearts there, a thousands minds.
"Well done," they say, through Milo's lips. "Our daughter."
Rourke lies dead, his men scattered, his plans undone. "Thank you," she replies, "our guardians."
As the light fades from his skin and Milo's eyes turn dark brown again, he blinks, confusion and understanding flickering in his eyes as he pieces together what he has done, what he has been. "Kida?" he whispered.
"Milo," she replied, his name on her tongue like a blessing, and with tears on her face and her Kingdom unwrought and remade she knew that their future had returned to them.