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Mingi didn’t know what he was doing. Honestly.
“What the fuck are you doing, Mingi,” he mutters to himself, as if logic will come to him in the dark hall of the castle. There was music behind him from the party he had left behind. “Just go back, go back and suck it up.”
A flicker of light appears around the corner in front of him, along with the soft shuffle of shoes, and Mingi ducks into a curtained off alcove in the hall and does his best to make sure the curtain covers as much of his large body as possible. When Mingi starts to hear the footsteps get closer and that flickering firelight shine brighter on his toes he holds his breath and doesn’t let go until the hall gets dark again, letting it all out in a silent hiss.
“Go back. Go back and deal with it like a proper prince.” Mingi mutters again, leaning his head against the cold stone and feeling it seep the heat from him. But he can’t help shivering from the memory of women hanging off of him and tugging at his collar just from the memory of all their overpowering perfume.
He needs a break.
He needs a break, the balcony is full and the allotted garden is a guaranteed no go if he wants to refrain from being accosted by women tonight.
Nevermind that he shouldn’t be wandering the halls of the King’s Palace. Nevermind that he should be showing face for his family at the King’s party.
Mingi needs a break.
Just as he reaches for the curtain to peel it back and start sneaking back out a body rushes in and collides straight into him.
“What—” a hand comes up to silence him that Mingi quickly brushes off, affronted at the action. “How dar—” It’s not often Mingi looks up at someone with his height, and it’s not quite what’s happening now but the effect is there when Mingi straightens up from the collision to see the barest glint of a crown. Mingi feels the blood pool down at his feet and locks his knees to stop himself from toppling straight onto the King.
“Your Ma—”
“Yes yes, silence please.” King Yunho says in a rushed whisper, a large hand wrapping itself over Mingi’s mouth again. “The guards.”
Mingi blinks rapidly, not understanding for a second, before the sound of shuffling footsteps reach his ears and he notices King Yunho stepping deeper into the shadows of the curtain—closer to Mingi. There’s another long second where Mingi almost reaches for his sword, sure that the King must be hiding from an enemy, before he reassesses and decides that no… this is actually happening. The King is hiding from his own guards with Mingi.
The shuffling steps go away, taking the light with them, and the King breathes out slowly.
“I’m so sorry, I was desperate.” He says in a hushed tone of voice somehow still more fitting for a royal audience rather than Mingi as he takes his hand off of Mingi’s mouth. Mingi tries his best not to lick his lips because that would be improper and not at all something he should be doing, even if the heat of that large hand was lingering. “I found myself a bit surrounded—not surrounded, I meant…” Mingi could see the King’s ears turn dark even in their small corner hidden from light.
“You needed a moment, Sire.” Mingi does his best to phrase it like a question.
“Yes. Yes, I needed a moment.” The King’s shoulders slump the slightest bit before straightening and Mingi only notices it in the flutter of the cape. He notices the wince in the King’s face when Mingi’s eyes flicker to it so Mingi lowers his eyes in as much of a bow as he’s capable of, when the King is pressed against him in this crevice.
“Of course. I’ll leave you to yourself, Your Majesty.” There’s a mantra in Mingi’s head of get out get outgetoutgetout because this is King Yunho and he just got caught by His Majesty roaming the King’s hall during the King’s party. He needs to leave now. Immediately. Unfortunately, with half his body out the curtain he gets yanked back in by a firm hand on his arm.
“So sorry, I’m so sorry for my rudeness.” The King… doesn’t sputter because Mingi would never describe anything the King does as sputtering, but he does say it quite fast and haltingly. “But don’t tell anyone where I am. Please. I won’t order you but this is a request.”
There’s a voice in the back of Mingi’s head that sounds very much like an echo of all of his teachers who ever had to teach him manners and anything proper. It’s screaming at him to take the request that is actually an order because no King ever requests anything, it’s all an order in a pretty bow and leave with lips that will never speak of tonight. But Mingi takes another look at the King with his cape that flutters once more and dark ears and is suddenly harshly reminded this man is the same age as Mingi.
“Where do you plan to hide, Sire?” is not what Mingi planned to say but it’s what’s asked so he sticks with it. Mingi moves all the way back inside the alcove as well, unintentionally crowding the King.
“Well…” Mingi watches the King flit his eyes this way and that before apparently deciding Mingi was somewhat trustworthy to know. “I had planned to retire to my room.”
“And be caught before a squire even has to think of where to look? Your room is the first place any good servant would check.” Mingi says and tries not to sound exasperated, even more so when the man in front of him starts pouting.
“Well where were you planning to hide away, Sir Mingi?” The King asks easily and it startles Mingi. Both for the fact that the King knew he was planning to hide in his castle and would have allowed it and that he said Mingi’s name.
“I wasn’t—” Mingi starts but decides against it at the sudden hard look. “I had planned on looking for the guest rooms on the East end of the castle.”
The King blinks, nodding for a while. “Right. The East end… why the East end specifically?”
“Your party is held in the West end of the castle, Sire. Most of the guests would have been put in wings closer to the party. If your servants are like mine,” Mingi says with only the fondest tone possible, “only the worst guests would have been given the honor of taking the furthest rooms in the East end, of which I can’t imagine are many guests of such nature. There should be many empty rooms for someone to take a break in.”
The sudden silence worries Mingi into thinking he misspoke. Maybe he should have just walked away with a promise to forget tonight. But the slumped shoulders fighting to stay up and the sudden reminder of the man's age pulled at every heartstring Mingi was told to throw away to be King of his own land. The silence stretches long enough to be uncomfortable and Mingi shuffles in place, waiting.
Finally the King says, “brilliant, as always,” with a smile so wide it seems painful, throwing Mingi for a loop, before grabbing Mingi by the hand and dragging them out of the alcove carefully into the hallway.
‘As always.’ What did that mean? Mingi wanted to ask but they needed to be quiet so he bit his tongue as they snuck between shadows and dodged guards.
‘Brilliant, as always.’ Either of those statements on its own from King Yunho’s lips to Mingi would bring a hundred questions but together there were a thousand.
Mingi trails behind His Majesty as he navigates the halls and heads straight for a room. It seems smaller than others they passed, when Mingi closes the door behind them, but the bed is large and the fireplace is clean and well tended so Mingi has no complaints. The King stands by the door, like a statue for a moment, before turning to face Mingi.
He has a second to wonder if he’s officially getting kicked out and being reminded to stay quiet about tonight before the King opens his mouth. “Hi. Can you help me take this damn cape off, please?”
Mingi is reaching for the cape before he even thinks and then it’s only as he’s unclasping the thing that the words finish processing and his fingers stutter over themselves and slip and drop the cape. “Oh no, I’m so sorry.” Mingi says, rushing to kneel and pick it up only to be stopped by a hand on his arm dragging him up.
“Don’t bother, you did what I was going to do anyway, Mingi. Can I call you Mingi?” The King asks, Taking off his crown and walking over to the table in the middle of the room to toss it haphazardly onto it and throw himself onto a chair with a groan.
“I… yes, you may, Sire.” Was Mingi supposed to say, no?
“Please stop calling me Sire,” The King says wearily, “my name is Yunho. You can call me Yunho. We’re the same age.” There’s something wanting in the sad smile.
Mingi remembers a friend that walked away from him the day he officially took the crown as a prince in his small faraway land. ‘You can’t be friends with a stablehand. I can’t be friends with a Prince.’ They had said. It had broken Mingi for months. Mingi isn’t a king yet but he can’t imagine a king has very many friends.
“Okay, Yunho.” Mingi tumbles and trips over the name with no titles but he manages and Yunho smiles, small and delicate, and makes Mingi’s ears warm. “Do you know who I am?” Mingi asks, and watches Yunho stretch a hand out to pat a free chair. Debates for only a second before walking over to sit.
“We crossed roads often, before I took the throne. Lots of border meetings and boring parties.”
Well… yes. That wasn’t supposed to be how Yunho knew Mingi, though. It certainly wasn’t supposed to leave any amount of impression on the man. So can he really be blamed for the single, yes, he gives? He doesn’t think so.
Yunho smiles, patient. “Yes.” He says back.
“You called me brilliant.”
“As always, yes” Yunho says, again, and his voice doesn’t waver. All the grace of a King that Mingi spends weeks and months trying and failing to be. “All those meetings proves grueling for one’s back but quite entertaining for a tired mind when they know where to look. Namely at you and your casual corrections that everyone else would inevitably circle back to an hour later.”
Mingi huffs out a slow controlled breath just at the reminder of those meetings and being brushed off for the size of his land.
Yunho laughs. “Yes, that reaction of yours, as sorry as I am to say, is always entertaining to see. It’s exactly what I feel.”
“You could help.” Mingi says, irritated despite himself, standing and heading to the bed. Behind him he hears Yunho stand and follow. “I don’t know if you noticed in your watching, Sire, but I’m not often listened to.” Mingi bites his tongue and leans on the bed, acting as if he’s testing the softness of it, to take a moment for himself. It’d do no good to take his anger out on the King. Before he can turn around to properly apologize for his tone Yunho flops onto the bed next to him with none of the decorum of a royal.
“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed anything about me at all, Sir Mingi, but I find myself hard pressed to get any real support from my advisors, let alone the men and women from surrounding lands.”
Yunho had been crowned King the past Summer. Still young and new. It makes sense except it doesn’t. Everyone loved the man from coast to coast, already more than the last king though mostly admitted through hushed whispers behind hands. Every royal with a son spoke of “that prince turned king Yunho” while straightening their child’s shoulders.
“I notice a lot about you, Sire.” Mingi mutters under his breath as he lays on the bed and stares at the ceiling.
A hand touches his arm and Mingi jolts, looking over at Yunho who has rolled onto his side to stare at Mingi. “Like what?”
“Like the fact that, respectfully, you’re a liar.”
The hand on his arm goes away to cover Yunho’s face as he laughs, startled. “Me? A liar? I would argue that anyone with any sort of power over someone’s life lies at least a little.”
Mingi wants the hand back on his arm. Wants that laugh again. Doesn’t want to think about how many years he’s thought about this exact thing happening in silence. “Not everyone lies to their friend that they’re a stablehand, Sire.” And Yunho stops laughing.
Mingi sits up. Too much energy under his skin from the very thing he’s been dreaming of for years happening. Yunho sits next to him and Mingi stands, needing distance. “Sir Mingi?” A hand comes towards his arm in the corner of his eye and Mingi evades it. “What do you mean? What?”
“It’s Mingi, Yunho.” Mingi turns around, glaring at the man he’d dreamed of for years. Mourned for months. “Gods above, can’t you have the grace to recognize the man you tricked into befriending for two whole summers?”
The man in front of him stills before his face turns hard. Standing up Mingi ends up staring right into his eyes but Yunho gives the effect of looming. “It’d do you well, young prince, to never speak of what you think you know, again.” Turning around, Yunho heads for the table, snatching his crown and putting it on.
Infuriated, Mingi dashes forward to grab the man and stop him, spinning him around to face each other. The crown goes flying off to the side with the force of the turn but neither of them could care less. “I think I know plenty when you’re the one who left me, asshole.”
It’s shaky ground Mingi is standing on. Insulting Yunho who is the King of the largest land in the region. If all this goes wrong his people will suffer for nothing but Mingi is seething. He may be a prince but for once, he wants to be a person too.
Yunho violently shakes off Mingi’s hold, a scowl on his face that could kill. “My friend’s name wasn’t Mingi. It was Song, so let go before I call the guards and have you and your people escorted off of my land.”
It takes until Yunho is angrily putting his cape back on for Mingi to fully process that statement.
“Are you an idiot?” Mingi walks over and slams the door shut before Yunho can actually leave. “My last name is Song!”
Yunho stares.
He stares some more and Mingi has the delight of watching the steady rise of red in the face and ears. It gets to a point where it matches the red of Yunho’s cape and Mingi finally laughs, suddenly all that frustration that was boiling over smoking out into relief. At some point Yunho covers his face, though his ears are as red as they can be, and starts a high pitched, embarrassed, whine along with a steady mantra of “no no no this can’t be happening no nononono.”
It only makes Mingi laugh harder.
“A liar and an idiot. I’m never letting you live this down.” So maybe some frustration is left.
Mingi grunts as Yunho pushes at him, face red and dots of tears in his eyes. “Shut up, oh my gods. Please don’t. Can we just forget this happened? Please? It was just a misunderstanding! You’re the one that told me your name was Song!” Yunho says with a finger in Mingi’s chest.
“Right… because there are so many princes with the name Song out where I live?”
Yunho kind of gapes for a while. “Well… no! Why do you think I never found you?” He asks back incredulously. Mingi gapes back.
“You looked for me?”
“We were friends! Of course I looked for you!” Yunho says it like it’s a guarantee. Like Mingi is the dumb one here for not realizing. “I sent people out from coast to coast looking for a prince named Song! Why would you lie to me like that?” Yunho pouts. He pouts.
Mingi almost laughs again, this time at the absolute hypocrisy. “Yunho… I was going to be the crown prince of my land. Of course I wasn’t going to go hang out with a random person from a different town hoping to be normal and give my name away. I just wasn’t creative. I even told you I was going to be prince in the end!” Mingi gets worked up again. “You’re the one who said you were a stablehand and left!”
Yunho throws his cape off again, tossing it on the ground, and drops his crown on top of the pile before walking over to the bed and crawling on top of it. Mingi watches this all silently up till the point where Yunho smothers his face into a pillow and screams. Mingi runs over and smacks Yunho’s shoulder. “Stop that! What if the guards hear? Stop!”
“Let them come so I can tell them to execute me!” Yunho screams into the pillow.
“As if they would! Stop that!” Mingi grabs another pillow and smacks Yunho with it, finally silencing the man.
Peeking out of the pillows with round eyes that look defeated, Yunho mumbles something that gets lost in the feathers of the pillow. When Mingi asks him to repeat it Yunho scrunches his face up, holds the pillow tighter, forces his face up and speaks. “Do you hate me?”
Mingi sits so that his back faces the man and fiddles with the pillow in his hands. It’s a heavy question because for a while he thought he did with his anger. “I don’t think anyone can hate you, Yunho.”
There’s rustling behind him before the press of knees at the small of Mingi’s back. “You’re not anyone, Mingi.” Mingi clutches the pillow and breathes into it, smelling the dusty musk of it that never quite leaves these things.
“No. I don’t hate you.” Mingi slowly lays down and feels those knees move so that Mingi lays his head on Yunho’s stomach. It’s a familiar position that was lost to the years to the point it became unfamiliar. The breathing under his head is no longer something he remembers. The hand in his hair is not the one that used to lull him to sleep under summer suns. Regardless. “I missed you.”
The hand in his hair clutches a bit just for a second before going back to combing through. “I missed you too. Immensely.”
“So much so you couldn’t recognize me right in front of you, Your Majesty?” Mingi can’t help but tease.
“You changed a lot, Mingi. I’m sorry, I should have recognized you, my friend.” If Mingi was sitting across from Yunho the calm voice might have let Mingi move past it, but here, laying on Yunho, he can hear the heartbeat speed up. Mingi stays quiet, wondering if it’s a good thing, wanting it to be a good thing. Yunho beats him out again. “Sorry. I just meant, you look good. Stronger?” The heartbeat stutters. “I mean, not that you weren’t strong! Just that you look good. Not that you were bad! More like—”
Mingi rolls over to stare at Yunho’s red face as he waves his hand in the air while talking, almost as if he’s trying to find the end of his sentence tangled in some line. It’s adorable.
“I get it.”
Yunho looks down at Mingi for a second before looking away, hands folded on his stomach, nodding sharply. “Okay, yeah. Yeah.”
Mingi crawls up the bed so he’s laying next to Yunho and stares at the ceiling together and takes a deep breath. “I think you look good too. Strong. Not bad.” He can see Yunho staring from the side but Mingi keeps looking at the ceiling, hands firmly on his own stomach.
“Okay… yeah. Yeah.” Yunho says again. “Thank you.”
“Right.”
It’s quiet for an uncomfortable moment that Mingi planned to break before Yunho speaks again. “I didn’t mean to lie to you… back then.” Mingi breathes and breathes and keeps staring at the ceiling, counting the stones. “I just… I was supposed to study there for a few summers. I thought you were a regular boy so I just… I wanted to be a regular boy too.” Mingi knows how that feels. “I used to escape lessons to go meet you,” Yunho says laughing. “It was the best two summers of my life, I think, until you told me you were a prince.”
Mingi almost apologizes.
“I should have told you then. But I had… I was…” Yunho covers his eyes with his palms and Mingi glances over for a second before staring at the ceiling again. “I was scared.”
“You should have known we would meet again someday.”
“I had hoped.”
Mingi finally looks over properly. “What were you scared of?”
Yunho doesn’t take his hands off and laughs, sardonically. “Of myself, I guess. I knew I would take the crown early. Everyone knew my father was in poor health.” An open secret really, if Mingi was honest. “Your father is healthy, young still for a King, and you have the leisure of time. Even without the difference of labels… we both know not all kings are equal.”
Coming from anyone else Mingi would have bristled. Would have been insulted. This was something Mingi and his family spent generations battling. Unfortunately, even Mingi knew this was a truth they could only fight against in so many ways.
Not all kings are equal. And even if Mingi was king, Yunho and Mingi would be in two different worlds.
Yunho finally looks over, an apology all over his face. “I was afraid of what that would mean when you found out. Of myself when my family found out. So I lied.”
Mingi looks away, back to the ceiling and mulls over this. “But you looked for me.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When I became king.”
Mingi sits up. “Okay.”
Yunho sits up as well, frowning. “Okay? Okay to what?”
“To everything?” Mingi says while standing and stretching. “I get it. I’m not that upset anymore. You’re not in the clear yet but I get it. No sense wasting too much time on that, though, is there?” Mingi fixes his rumpled clothes as much as he can and signals Yunho to stand and fixes his clothes too. Brushing fingers through his hair, Mingi walks over to the pile of Yunho’s cape and crown.
“That’s it?” Yunho asks, trailing behind him. Letting Mingi put the cape and crown back on.
“Yes, for now. And now we’re going to go back to the party so no one questions where we are for too long and you’re going to dance with me.”
“Dance?” Yunho asks, eyes wide, and Mingi almost wants to pinch the man’s cheeks.
“Yes. Dance with me tonight, Yunho.” Mingi says, fixing the crown and Yunho blushes. Mingi smiles when Yunho stutters through a response and hands land on his hips. “Come on then, lead the way, Sire.” Mingi opens the door and Yunho smiles before grabbing Mingi’s hand as they leave the room for the party.
“You can’t be friends with a stablehand. I can’t be friends with a Prince.”
“What if I want to be friends with a stablehand?”
“Not with this one.”
“What if I do?”
“Then I’ll find you. Later. I’ll find you later, Song, okay?”
“Do you promise, Yunho?”
“I promise. And if not… I’m sure you’ll find me first.”