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Laurie never felt like a hero of anything.
An heir, yes. Heir to clocks that kept time with duties; to drawing rooms where decisions seemed made before he even crossed the threshold; to phrases that began with “a Laurence must…”.
A proper prince bound to rules that left no room to breathe: smile this way, speak that way, never falter, never miss a note.
In his world, other people’s opinions cut deeper than they seemed. Corrections arrived measured, precise, offering no shelter. And expectations settled on his shoulders with familiar weight.
He had only a piano… and Jo.
And he had long suspected that, if anyone came charging to defend his honor, it was not the prince.
The first time he felt it clearly was in his grandfather’s study.
The room smelled of old paper and authority. Light entered in straight, regimented lines. Laurie held a wrinkled sheet of music; the paper had imprinted against his palms.
“The music won’t give you a future, Theodore,” said old Laurence. “A Laurence doesn’t live off fantasies.”
The word landed with the force of something that already knew how to fracture him.
He knew the procedure: lower his head slightly, concede, comply.
Then the door breathed.
“With your permission, Mr. Laurence… but that isn’t fair.”
Jo.
She stepped in with a book held tight to her chest like a weightless shield, yet sharp enough to cleave the room in two. Damp curls caught the light; her cheeks were flushed; her freckles stood in crisp defiance against the room’s rigid gravity.
She did not step toward Laurie. She did not face the grandfather head-on. She simply placed herself between them, as though that space had been waiting all along for the silhouette of whoever dared to stand in it.
“I’ve seen him practice,” she said. “If that isn’t serious work, then we’ll have to revise the dictionary.”
The cane struck the carpet. She didn’t blink.
“This house breathes differently when he plays,” she added. “If that doesn’t mean something real… perhaps the problem isn’t the music.”
Her frown was tiny, precise, perfect: the expression that made her defiant without losing tenderness.
Laurie felt the room shrink, felt the portraits diminishing, felt her lighting up the whole space. And something in him—something born of generations of obedience—simply… yielded.
Not toward his grandfather. Toward her.
A sudden, deep heat ran through him. His knees trembled with an ancient urgency, more soul than body: the need to bow, to let his heart submit to that quiet valor she wore without boasting, a blade barely shown, glowing beneath her gestures.
He didn’t do it, of course. But the impulse carved itself beneath his skin, a command that wasn’t his but had, somehow, chosen him.
Then came Ned Moffat, the punch, the weightless laughter of drawing rooms. Laurie, leaning against a column, smiled with the ease of a well-trained heir.
“Come on, Laur,” Ned said. “You’re a bit of a fake. The perfect little grandson…”
“Fake.”
Such a small word, yet it knew exactly where to enter. It slid into the hollow where all the times he’d said “yes, sir” while wanting to say something else had made their home.
He searched for a gentle reply when the air changed. Not a crash; that taut silence with which someone draws steel without sound.
“How curious,” said a voice beside him. “I thought the fake thing here was jokes that keep going after no one’s laughing anymore.”
Jo.
He didn’t know when she had crossed the room, but suddenly she was there, a step away. Simple gown, a couple of loose curls framing her face; cheeks faintly flushed from the warmth of the room and her anger; her mouth pressed into that line that always sparked in him an absurd mix of tenderness and vertigo.
Laurie felt the nearly imperceptible brush of her skirt as she moved forward, a warmth passing like a warning: I’m here, stand behind me if you need.
“We were just joking, March,” Ned said.
Jo deepened her frown. The gesture tightened her features even more, turning her dangerously adorable to Laurie’s eyes, who already knew that expression: just before she spoke a word sharp enough to hush half the world.
“‘Just joking,’” she echoed softly. “A very useful phrase. It almost always appears after someone’s already hurt.”
The circle tightened. She didn’t raise her voice, didn’t make a scene. She shifted only slightly, just enough to put herself in front of Laurie, instinctive guardian of the place meant for whoever takes the bullet.
“Calling someone ‘fake’ in front of everyone, with a drink in your hand…” she added. “That doesn’t sound like friendship. Sounds like cowardice. Or idiocy. You decide.”
The punch lost all its charm. Ned muttered an apology. Jo let it fall, and the set of her mouth relaxed a little, though firmness remained in the posture, as if her body still searched for the invisible weight of armor. Laurie watched her fight the urge to squeeze the glass until it shattered.
She sheathed her blade. But the strike had landed all the same.
He, watching her from half a step behind, could only think there were few things more overwhelming than seeing her like this: furious, cheeks flushed, mouth stubborn, shaping words that defended him like a banner raised in his honor.
Again he felt the pull in his stomach. Not just devotion: that sweet obedience born without force. The intimate urge to bow his soul before his body, to kiss those hands capable of raising walls between him and the world.
He held himself steady. Barely. But the thought pierced him with clarity:
if Jo was a kingdom, he already lived prostrate.
Then came the smallest battles, the ones that never enter chronicles.
“A boy like you should think of something serious.”
“Music is fine, but not as a destiny.”
“With your name, it would be a shame to waste yourself on that.”
Polished phrases, kindly delivered, plated on good intentions. Fine weapons, but weapons still. They repeated so often Laurie began to learn them by heart. And so, between tiny battle and tiny battle, Laurie started to see a pattern.
One afternoon, in the March living room, he said them aloud, just to hear how they sounded coming from himself.
“I don’t have a future in music,” he said, feigning lightness. “It’s a luxury. Someone like me should—”
“No.”
A single word, firm enough to stop him. Jo was across the table, eyes fixed on him, ink-smudged, lips pursed for battle when he only wanted to offer kisses. She had raised her pen, suspended in the air, looking like a poised spear capable of rewriting his fate.
“Don’t talk about yourself like that,” she said. “At least not where I can hear it.”
He tried to laugh.
“I’m just repeating what people say…”
“Then they can come say it here,” she replied. “Let’s see if they manage when I’m standing in front of them.”
There it was again: the tremor in his legs. That sweet, patient obedience that awakened only with her. That urge to rest his forehead against her hands, to swear something wordless to the girl who defended him even from himself.
He began to accept it: it wasn’t only love. It was surrender.
In time, he saw the whole thread. Every blow from the world found Jo already in position. Every decree met its sharp reply. Every time he lowered his head, she stepped forward, guided by an ancient instinct that told her to stand between him and harm.
And every one of those times Laurie felt the same: weak-kneed, chest aflame, filled with the gentle, absolute certainty of bowing without being asked.
He began to think—secretly, silently—that if ever he were to give himself completely, he knew before whom it would be.
Until time, at last, caught them.
The afternoon was calm, far too ordinary for the magnitude of the moment. Jo was barefoot, her braid half undone; a stain of ink on her wrist; her mouth pursed, waging war with a sentence refusing to be tamed.
Laurie entered quietly. She looked up, one eyebrow arched, ready to ask what he had broken. But she never managed.
Laurie was already kneeling.
Not by accident. Not by impulse. But because years of restraint had led him precisely here: to the one instant when his knees found purpose.
Jo took a step toward him, bewildered.
“Teddy… what are you…?”
He raised his hand.
Not a sword.
Not an inherited crown.
But a simple ring, smooth, warm in his palm. The only crown he ever wanted to offer. The only one that mattered.
“Jo,” he said, voice shaking just as it had that day in the study. “If I have to belong to something… let it be this. To you. Yours. For always.”
She let the notebook fall. The frown softened.
Laurie, looking up at her, felt the gesture finally make sense: it wasn’t surrender. It was loyalty—the kind felt only toward someone who bears the blade for you. It was the reverence he had spent years on the verge of making.
When she took his hands, when her trembling fingers closed over the ring between them, Laurie understood he wasn’t asking for anything extraordinary:
Only that, in his own story, the prince was not the one saving the woman with invisible armor, but the one who—with a gratitude that had already become destiny—chose, again and again, to place his heart on its knees before her.
Because in every story, there are crowns.
And at last, he was offering the only one that was truly his.