Archive of Our Own

The boy came over the eastern wall on a Tuesday. Or maybe a Wednesday. He'd stopped counting somewhere around the fourth day of walking, when sleep came in snatches against tree roots and the road stopped changing and the whole journey compressed into dust and blisters and the sour taste of traveling alone.

The mortar on the castle wall was old. Crumbled when he dug his fingers in, came apart in chunks that smelled like wet chalk. He pulled himself up, sat on the top for a second to catch his breath and check for guards, then dropped into the garden on the other side.

Nobody saw him.

He'd been paid to do this by an old lord named Nostrade, who had the softest hands Kurapika had ever seen on a grown man. Soft hands, weak chin, a study that smelled like rosewater and old paper. The kind of man who flinched when you pulled a blade, even if you were only using it to clean under your nails. He'd pushed a chest across the table and said the name: Chrollo Lucilfer, the crown prince, young, well-guarded, beloved.

He said beloved like it was a disease he'd caught and couldn't shake.

Kurapika told him he needed a month. Most jobs took a week.

That had been weeks ago.

So here's the thing about the panther.

Nostrade hadn't told him about her. They told him about the guards. One of them was apparently the size of a barn door, another one smiled too much, there was a woman who could tell when you were lying. Fine. Guards he could handle. Guards were people and people had patterns and blind spots and Kurapika had been exploiting patterns and blind spots since he was old enough to hold a knife properly, which was younger than most people would be comfortable knowing.

They did not tell him about Nox.

The servants had a story about her. Kurapika heard it later, days later, from a kitchen boy who'd had too much stolen wine and talked too freely. That the prince had found her as a cub in the ruins of a temple so old nobody remembered its name anymore. Stone altar, carved symbols, no scholar alive who could read them. The prince had been fourteen, alone on a hunt he shouldn't have taken, and he'd walked into those ruins and come out with something following him that shouldn't have still existed.

She was a black panther. But saying it like that was like saying the ocean was water. Technically correct and completely useless for conveying the actual experience.

She was enormous. At the shoulder she came up to Kurapika's hip, and her head, when she lifted it, was level with his chest. Her coat was black in a way that regular black isn't. Dense, light-swallowing, with this faint violet sheen when the sun hit it right, like a crow's wing. And her eyes.

Her eyes were amber but not the normal kind. Darker. Layered. Old in a way that had nothing to do with age. When she looked at you, and she always looked, she always looked, you understood somewhere below thinking that you were being weighed by something that had been weighing things since before your family had a surname.

She moved without sound. Actually without sound. Not quietly, not softly. Without. Like the air got out of her way.

She found him on the second night.

He was on the ledge outside the prince's study. Crouched, throwing knife ready, breathing slowly. Window cracked. The prince was inside reading with his back to the opening and Kurapika remembered thinking this is embarrassingly easy, I'm almost offended and then a hundred and thirty pounds of ancient muscle came off the parapet above him and the world went sideways.

No growl. No warning sound. Just impact. His shoulder, his balance, the ledge gone from under his feet, the sick lurch of falling, and his fingers catching the balcony rail on reflex alone. He swung over and ran.

She was right there. Right behind him. The heat of her, the displaced air, and the silence. God, the silence. She should have been making noise. Anything that big should make noise when it runs. She didn't. Just the brush of air and the sense of something enormous and fast and absolutely certain of what it was doing.

He made it to the garden wall. Climbed up the tree, the old apricot against the east wing, and went up it like a cat fleeing a dog, no grace, no technique, just survival, bark tearing his hands, one boot lost somewhere below.

Nox sat at the base.

She didn't growl. Didn't pace. She sat like a statue, like the temple carvings she'd been born among, her tail around her paws, her amber eyes on him. Patient. Endlessly patient. Looking at him the way you'd look at something small that had wandered somewhere it shouldn't be.

Then she turned around and went back to the castle.

No alarm.

Nothing.

Kurapika sat in the tree with bark under his nails and his heart in his throat and one boot missing and he stayed there for an hour waiting for the guards to come and the guards did not come. Nobody came. The castle stayed dark and quiet and the panther did not tell.

She knew and she hadn't told and Kurapika could not figure out Why?

Two days in a boarding house turning it over. Cleaning his blades. Staring at the ceiling.

Hunting cats, even normal ones, could scent intent. He'd been told this or read it somewhere, one of those survival facts you pick up when your life depends on not being surprised by large animals. The body's chemistry changes when it commits to a kill. The sweat changes. Something about it carries, and old predators, the ones with lineage, with blood, they taste it in the air.

She'd tasted it. She'd hit him for it. And then she'd sat under his tree and looked at him like he was vaguely bored and gone home.

No increased patrols. No locked gates. Nothing.

He went back on the third day because the gold was half spent and he'd never failed a job and he was not about to start because of one very large cat with an attitude problem.

Nox was on the wall. Sitting on the crumbled section like she'd been waiting, like she'd known he was coming back, which she probably had because she was. Whatever she was. Not just an animal. The servants' story about the temple wasn't something Kurapika fully believed but it also wasn't something he could dismiss, not after looking into those eyes. There was too much behind them.

She rose when he came over. Her full height. Her body said leave. Every line of it.

He climbed the old apricot.

Sat on a high branch. Pulled out a bread roll he'd stolen from the market. Ate it slowly, looking right at her, because if he was going to be treed by a panther he was at least going to be treed with some dignity.

Her tail cracked against the wall. Twice. She left.

Didn't tell.

Chrollo noticed the boy on the second day and quietly added him to his mental ledger.

Blond. Young. Quick. Survived a fall from the study ledge after Nox hit him full-force, which shouldn't have been possible. That drop was thirty feet to flagstone and the boy had caught a railing on the way down with reflexes that bordered on offensive.

But that wasn't the interesting part.

The interesting part was that Nox hadn't killed him.

Chrollo's instructions had been limited. He'd known about the contract for weeks. His network was better than Nostrade gave him credit for, which was true of most things, and when the reports confirmed an assassin was en route, he'd told Nox: don't raise the alarm. Let him in. I want to see what comes. That was all. An intelligence-gathering exercise. Let Nostrade's man get close enough to assess, then deal with it.

He'd expected Nox to handle the dealing. She always did. Three prior assassins had come over that wall in the past year and Nox had handled all three with the efficient, ancient disinterest of something that had been ending threats since before it had a name. They hadn't made it past the garden.

This one was in the tree.

Nox had knocked him off the ledge, chased him across the grounds, treed him like a rabbit. And then sat at the base, looked up at him, and walked away. No kill. No alarm. She'd had him. Thirty feet up with nowhere to go, one boot missing, hands torn. She'd had him dead to rights and she'd left.

Chrollo hadn't told her to do that.

He stood at the tower window that night watching the empty tree (the boy had fled back to the city, sensibly) and turned this over. Nox didn't spare things. It wasn't in her vocabulary. Her world was clean: master, threat, furniture. She didn't have a category for let it live and see what happens. That was Chrollo's category. That was a human calculation, a strategic patience, and Nox didn't do strategy.

Which meant she'd read something in the boy that didn't fit her categories. Threat, yes. She'd tasted the assassination instinct on him, hit him for it. But not only threat. There was a second scent on him, underneath the steel, and it made her wait.

Or, and this sat less comfortably, she'd read something in Chrollo. Some shift in the quality of his attention when the reports first came in, when the description crossed his desk, young, blond, Kuruta refugee, fast, alone, and he'd read it twice. She'd been beside him. She was always beside him. And she read him the way she understood the meal.

He stored this information away. Went back to his documents.

By the seventh day the filing wasn't working as well.

He was walking the colonnade with Shalnark when the wind came up warm, the first real warmth of the season, and the apricot tree bloomed. Overnight, apparently. The whole tree suddenly blossomed with flowers, pale pink, loose enough that the wind pulled them free in handfuls.

The boy was on his branch. Same branch as the last three days. He was glaring down at Nox, who'd parked herself between the tree and the colonnade, and his face was flushed and he had bread in one hand and a knife in the other and he was talking to her. Telling her off. Scolding a mythblood panther like she owed him money.

The wind caught his hair. Gold, longer than Chrollo had guessed, past his jaw. The petals tangled in it. Pink in gold.

Chrollo stopped walking.

"Your Majesty?" Shalnark had stopped too. Watching him with that polite, careful expression that meant he'd noticed something he wouldn't comment on yet.

"It's nothing," Chrollo said. Started walking again.

He checked the tree again from the tower window an hour later. The boy was still there. Still on his branch. The petals were still in his hair.

Chrollo went back to his documents.

He checked the window once more before the council. Weather. He was checking the weather.

He started leaving food.

It wasn't anything special. He told himself it was strategic to understand the assassin. Told himself a lot of things. Left a plate after council one evening. Roast partridge, bread, honeyed figs. Told the servants not to clear the plates, came back an hour past moonrise to find the plate empty and a smudge on the goblet rim where someone had drunk too fast.

Did it again the next night. And the next.

By the fifth night the kitchen was getting specific instructions and Chrollo was choosing the dishes himself and the word strategic was doing a lot of heavy lifting in his internal justifications and starting to buckle under the weight.

Braised lamb. Smoked trout. Dark chocolate tortes from the festival reserves. The head cook raised an eyebrow. Chrollo did not explain.

Kurapika kept a list. Keeping a list meant he was still on the job.

Day nine: rose garden, dusk, Nox distracted by starlings for three seconds. Hand on blade. The prince tilted his face toward the sunset and closed his eyes and Kurapika's grip went loose. Couldn't tell why. Just. The stillness of it.

Day twelve: training yard, sparring with the big one. Prince disarmed, back fully open. Perfect throw from the branch. Didn't take it. The distance was fine. The angle was fine. He just didn't.

Day fifteen: study, door unlocked, six feet behind the prince's chair. Close enough to smell candle smoke and ink and warm skin and something faintly like sandalwood. The prince, without turning around, said: "The lamb tonight was prepared with rosemary. I hope that was agreeable."

Kurapika tore both palms open on the windowsill getting out.

He sat in the tree with his hands bleeding and his heart hammering and the full, horrible understanding that the prince had known from the start. Every plate. Every goblet. The careful selection, the specific dishes. All of it. For him. On purpose. From the beginning.

She blocked every corridor. Filled doorways with her body when the boy crept through at night. The word to kill hadn't been given, so she didn't kill. But she made herself a wall.

The boy found other routes. Through windows. Up walls. Faster than she wanted to give him credit for.

Weeks passed.

The master laughed.

She heard it from the study. Small, a breath, almost not a sound at all. She went to the door and looked in and the master was at the tower window and below in the garden the boy was trying to get down from his branch with a stolen peach in one hand and a knife between his teeth and his foot had slipped and he was hanging there cursing the tree in language that would make a sailor uncomfortable.

The master's shoulders were shaking. He had his hand over his mouth.

Nox's gaze went from the master to the boy, peach juice on his chin, swearing.

She stopped blocking the dining corridor.

Not the study. Not the bedchamber. But the food was the master's will, and she was the master's will.

The boy noticed immediately. Froze at the threshold. Looked at her, far end of the hall.

She looked back.

He went in. She closed her eyes. Did not sleep.

Chrollo noticed the same evening.

He'd been walking the east corridor (not toward the dining chamber, not specifically, he had reasons to be in the east wing that had nothing to do with the boy) and the corridor was empty. No Nox. No black shape in the doorway, no amber eyes in the dark. Just an open passage and, from the far end, the quiet sounds of someone eating.

He stopped.

He hadn't given this order either.

She was in the study when he went back. Lying by the fire, eyes half-closed, the picture of disinterest. He stood in the doorway and looked at her and she looked back and between them was ten years of understanding that rarely required words.

"You opened the dining corridor," he said.

She closed her eyes.

"I didn't tell you to do that."

Nothing. The fire cracked. Nox's breathing was slow and even and not remotely helpful.

She'd done it after the laugh. He knew that. He'd been at the window and the boy had been falling out of the tree with a peach and Chrollo had laughed, actually laughed, hand over his mouth, caught off guard by it, and Nox had been in the doorway watching him. She'd seen his face. She'd read whatever was on it.

And she'd opened the corridor.

His own animal was making decisions about the boy based on things she was reading in Chrollo, and the things she was reading were things Chrollo had not admitted to himself and was not going to admit to himself because admitting them would mean. It would mean the food wasn't strategic. It would mean the window wasn't an intelligence. It would mean the reason he'd read that contract twice when the description came in, young, blond, alone, was not professional curiosity.

He sat at his desk. Picked up his pen. Did not write.

From the hearth, Nox opened one eye. The amber caught the firelight and for a moment it looked knowing. Ancient and knowing and completely unsurprised.

She closed it again.

Chrollo sat there for a long time.

The gold was gone and Kurapika was still in the goddamn tree.

He'd burned through the whole chest. Half on supplies, half on the boarding house, a chunk on the replacement knife after he'd lost his best one during the Nox incident. He had nothing. The contract was dead. You took a lord's money and didn't deliver, you either gave it back or you vanished. Both perfectly reasonable options.

Both meant leaving.

He couldn't.

He'd tried. Mentally. Played it out. Climb down, walk to the wall, go over, don't look back. Simple. Clean. The kind of thing he'd done a dozen times. Pack up and move. Next city, next job, next name. That was the life. That was always the life.

Except.

The curtains were open in the prince's study. They were always open now. And the window was always cracked, not much, just enough, and these were not accidents because nothing the prince did was an accident and Kurapika sat on his branch at the angle where, when the light was right, he could see through that window to the desk where the prince sat reading and the candlelight made the planes of his face into something Kurapika was running out of excuses to keep looking at.

One evening he found a cloak on the dining table. Blue wool, heavy, fur-lined. No note. Beside it, quail with pomegranate glaze.

He took the cloak. Practical. Obviously practical. His was falling apart.

He put it on and it smelled like cedar and sandalwood and he stood there in the prince's dining chamber wearing the prince's cloak over his knives and thought I should leave and sat down and ate the quail and didn't leave.

"You could just end this," Shalnark said. Practice blades, training yard, grey sky.

Chrollo could feel the boy watching from the tree. That specific awareness between his shoulder blades he'd started recognizing weeks ago. Present when the boy was there. Gone when he wasn't. And the gone days bothered him more than the watching days and he knew what that meant and he wasn't thinking about what that meant.

"End what."

"The boy. Tree. Your cloak. The kitchen has a betting pool."

Chrollo disarmed him. Harder than the situation called for.

"Venison stew tonight. Wine reduction."

"The festival recipe?"

"For one."

It started raining. In the tree, the boy tipped his head back and opened his mouth and the rain went into his hair and down his neck and darkened the collar of the blue cloak and Chrollo stood in the open yard getting wet and watched.

"Your Majesty," Shalnark said. "Rain."

"Yes."

He stood there.

The afternoon the apricots were almost ripe and the garden smelled so sweet it could impair your judgment. Kurapika had been sleeping, which was stupid and dangerous and the kind of thing that got you killed and also the sun was warm and the branch was his and the cloak was soft and he'd stopped fighting about it.

Footsteps.

The prince. In the garden. Alone. Nox inside somewhere, her weight on stone, that particular sound. No guards. Nobody.

Standing beneath the tree. Looking up.

Their eyes met and Kurapika's hand went to his blade and the blade was in his hand and the distance was six feet and the prince's throat was right there and he was just standing, just looking up with those dark eyes that had no fear in them, not a flicker, nothing, just attention. All of his attention on Kurapika. Like he was the only thing in the world worth looking at.

"The apricots should be ripe next week. I'll have the kitchen make preserves." The prince's voice was lower than expected. Rough at the edges. "Do you prefer yours with honey or without?"

The blade trembled in Kurapika's hand.

Preserves. He was asking about preserves. Standing under an assassin's tree asking about preserves, and the apricot blossoms were loose in the air and one of them landed on the prince's shoulder and stayed, pale pink on dark fabric, and the light was gold and the air was sweet and Kurapika was going to remember this light for the rest of his life. He knew that the way you know a burn will scar. This exact light. This exact gold.

"With honey," he whispered. Didn't mean to. It just came out.

The prince's face shifted. Not a smile. The facade of one, held back. Recognition.

"With honey. I'll remember."

He walked back to the castle. Didn't look back.

The knife slipped from Kurapika's fingers and fell into the grass and the sound was tiny and the sound was everything.

He sat in the tree with empty hands and the cloak and the apricot smell soaked into everything and he was fucked. Completely, irreversibly fucked. The assassin was dead. Whatever was left was a boy in a tree who wanted his preserves with honey.

Nox came around the east wing. Looked at the knife in the grass. Looked up at him. Then she crossed the garden and lay down under the tree with her back to him, her dark flank against the roots, and for the first time in two months she didn't watch.

Two days in the tree. No food. Rainwater from a branch crook.

Third morning he came down because his body made him. Nox was by the wall, looking smug, and he said "don't" and she blinked at him and did not stop looking smug.

The dining chamber had a plate waiting. Bread, cheese, pears sliced into thin even pieces, honey pot, mint tea. Someone had cut those pears carefully. Neatly. With attention.

He ate all of it and scraped the honey pot and drank the cold tea and then he sat there looking at the empty plate and the neat pear slices and he pressed his hand against his chest and breathed and the breathing did nothing.

The castle noticed the changes the way castles do, which is to say, everybody knew and nobody said anything and the kitchen staff started a second betting pool alongside the first one.

The boy came down lower in the tree. The prince walked the east garden instead of the west. Shalnark moved sparring to when the light was best on the east side. Uvogin claimed this was about footwork. Uvogin was a terrible liar.

Kurapika watched the sparring from his branch and told himself it was intelligence gathering and his brain kept showing him the way the prince moved, that fluid, invented, bored-with-perfection style, and the way his shirt pulled across his back when he lunged and his brain could stop doing that at any time now. Any time.

Two weeks after the knife fell with the preserves conversation, the window opened all the way.

Kurapika sat on the sill. Gargoyle position, knees up, one leg in, one out. Ready to bolt. No blade. He hadn't carried one in two weeks and the absence should have felt like a missing limb and instead it felt like putting something heavy down.

The prince looked up from his desk and their eyes met and it was completely different from the garden because there was nothing between them. No tree. No height. Just a room and candlelight.

"There are chairs inside. With cushions."

"I'm fine."

"All that time on a branch. Your spine must be remarkable."

"I'm fine."

The prince did the not-smile thing and went back to writing and Kurapika sat on the sill until the candles burned low and his leg went numb and he didn't care.

When he climbed out he missed the branch. Caught it, barely, dangling like an idiot, and from inside the study the prince laughed, actually laughed, not the almost-laugh but the real one, low and startled, and Kurapika hung there with his face burning and his heart hammering and he thought, I am going to kill you. Personally. With my hands.

He came back the next night.

On the fourth night by the sill, Kurapika said "you know I was sent to kill you" because the silence had gotten too comfortable and he needed to put something sharp in it.

"Yes." The prince turned a page. "Nostrade sent three others before you. They didn't make it past the wall."

Kurapika's stomach turned. "Nox?"

"Nox."

"But she let me through."

The prince's hand paused on his page. Tell. Tiny.

"She did."

"Why."

Long look. Those dark eyes, full weight.

"I don't know yet."

Went back to reading. That was it. That was all Kurapika was getting. The prince wielded silence like a weapon and Kurapika sat on the sill for an hour before he realized he was waiting for more.

Next night he stayed in the tree out of spite. At midnight the prince put a cup of tea on the sill and walked away. Kurapika lasted twenty minutes. The tea was perfect. Mint, hot, sweet. The prince knew how he took his tea and that fact lived in Kurapika's chest like a splinter.

"Kurapika."

Rain hammering the window. He'd come inside, properly inside, dripping on stone, because the branch was slippery and the prince said come in before he fell and died and made a mess the gardeners would have to deal with.

By the fire. Steam off the blue cloak. Nox on the hearth, amber eyes tracking him. Not growling. An improvement.

"My name. It's Kurapika."

The prince set his pen down. Didn't repeat it. Just looked at him, and his expression changed, barely, and Kurapika had been watching this face for months trying to learn it and he caught the shift. Small. A muscle in his jaw releasing.

"Sit down, Kurapika. You're making a puddle."

They talked. Not about anything. The fire, the rain, theology versus philosophy (the prince had opinions, Kurapika had louder opinions, they agreed on nothing). He folded his legs under himself in the chair because he'd been sitting in trees for months and didn't know what to do with furniture anymore and the prince watched this and did the not-smile.

He fell asleep.

Woke at dawn with a blanket on his shoulders. The chair had been moved closer to the fire. Nox was watching him from the hearth.

The room smelled like cedar and old books and the fire and the warm-fur smell of Nox and it smelled like home and Kurapika had never had a home and the image  having of it now was so sharp it woke him up twice.

Uvogin found him in the training yard.

Brisk walk. Hit. Grin.

"Tree boy."

"I'm not..."

"Tree boy. Whole castle. Betting pool. Cook says solstice, I've got money on next month, don't make me lose money."

"I don't..."

"Can you fight?"

"... yes."

"Good. Tomorrow."

Shoulder clap. Kurapika nearly went through the flagstones.

"He's happier, you know." Uvogin, walking away, turning back. "The prince. Whatever you're doing, keep at it."

Kurapika stood there with a bruised shoulder and no idea what to do about any of it. Showed up the next morning anyway.

Kurapika fought dirty and Uvogin thought it was the best thing he'd ever seen.

"WHERE DID YOU LEARN THAT, A BAR FIGHT?"

"Yes."

Kicked him in the knee.

The sparring became a thing. Uvogin on even days. Shalnark on odds, which was worse because Shalnark fought like chess and smiled and Kurapika wanted to hit him harder every time the smile didn't waver.

The prince watched from the colonnade, Nox beside him like a piece of living dark, and then one morning nobody else was around and the prince walked into the yard with a practice blade and said "your footwork is sloppy on the left" and Kurapika's brain went dark for two solid seconds because prince's sleeves were rolled up and his forearms were visible. That scar on the left one, thin and white, and the muscle under tanned skin shifting when he adjusted his grip and Kurapika's brain was not working.

They sparred. Close up the prince was terrifyingly fast, finding Kurapika's weak side every time, pressing it, until Kurapika threw a street strike and the prince caught his wrist.

Warm hand. Firm. Thumb on the inside of Kurapika's wrist, right on the pulse.

"Here. Strike from here."

Close enough to count eyelashes. Kurapika's voice came out wrong when he said "got it" and the prince's eyes dropped to his mouth for half a second and then he let go and stepped back and the cold air rushed in.

Three more corrections over the next hour. Each one required the prince's hands on him. His hip, his shoulder, his back. Brief. Professional. Kurapika couldn't feel his face by the end.

Nox watched from the colonnade with something that looked a lot like pity.

The chair became his. Nobody said it. Second cup on the tea tray. Servants stopped moving the chair. Nox stopped bristling.

He still climbed the tree during mornings. Sometimes the prince was on the balcony. Same silence. Same air.

Once, falling asleep in the chair, his hand slipped off the armrest and brushed Nox's fur. She went rigid. He went rigid. Full seconds of mutual terror.

She huffed. Shifted away. Resettled.

From behind his book the prince turned a page and said nothing and Kurapika's heart rate took about ten minutes to come back to normal.

Three months and Kurapika could have written a book about the prince's habits, except it would have been a strange book, more catalogue than narrative, full of things nobody else would care about. The tea taken black. The reading that went past midnight, the waking before the kitchen staff. Left-handed but he'd trained the right one too, probably on purpose, because the prince didn't leave gaps in anything. There was a scar he'd gotten at fourteen and when Kurapika asked about it the silence lasted long enough to become an answer.

The court was afraid of him. He knew they were and he used it and the using was precise and cold and Kurapika had watched it happen in council and understood that the prince's patience wasn't kindness. It was a weapon with a longer reach than most people realized.

But he was gentle with Nox when nobody was watching. Kurapika had seen it from the tree, from the window, from the chair. The way his hand moved on her head, slow and absent, the tension in his shoulders going slack. The way his voice dropped into something that wasn't the prince's voice at all.

And underneath all of it, underneath the court and the control and the careful distance he kept from everyone, the man was lonely. Kurapika knew lonely. He'd worn it so long it fit like skin. He recognized it in the window left cracked when it didn't need to be. The teacup that appeared without being asked for. The way the prince's hand would pause on Nox's head when he thought nobody was watching, like he was reminding himself that something warm still existed.

The apricots ripened. Kurapika woke to the smell.

That evening the prince carried a clay pot into the study. Set it on the desk. "With honey. As requested."

Kurapika stared at it and his throat closed and he couldn't speak and the prince just sat down and picked up his pen like this was nothing. Like remembering a whispered word from weeks ago and making it real was just a thing people did on a Tuesday.

"Thank you." Rough.

The pen paused. Fraction of a second.

"You're welcome."

He ate the preserves after the prince went to bed. They tasted like the tree and the garden and the season. He licked honey off his fingers and put his hands over his face and sat there.

In the morning the prince found the empty pot with a dried apricot blossom on top.

The last one.

Present for him.

He touched it. Put it in his book. Closed the cover.

The weeks after were the best Kurapika had ever had. He didn't think about it in those terms at the time, couldn't have, wouldn't have known what to compare them to. But the evenings had a rhythm now. The chair, the fire, the scratch of the prince's pen. Tea going cold because neither of them remembered to drink it. Nox breathing on the hearth. He'd look up sometimes and the prince would already be looking at him and neither of them would say anything and the silence was full and warm and it was enough and he let it be enough.

A kid, ten maybe, shoved a folded paper into his hand in the market and disappeared.

Red wax. He read it behind the butcher's. Thirty days. The arrangement changes.

He knew what that meant. Everybody in his line of work knew what that meant.

He folded the letter and bought his apples and walked back to the castle and climbed the tree and sat on his branch and looked at the lit window and thought: everything I care about is in that room and I have thirty days and no money and no plan.

He didn't go inside that night.

The chair was empty for four days and Chrollo didn't sleep.

He told himself things. That the system was fine. That the boy came because he chose to and the system didn't require Chrollo to go after him. That the teacup would be used tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that.

The teacup stayed cold.

Nox was pacing. Nox didn't pace. She patrolled, she stationed, she guarded. Pacing was different. Pacing was a mythblood panther with ten years of bond telling him something was wrong.

"He's in the tree," Chrollo told her. His voice sounded wrong and he knew it sounded wrong. "He's choosing not to come in."

She looked at him like he was being stupid. He probably was.

Fourth morning he went to the balcony. The boy was in the tree. Pale. Hadn't slept. That wrong kind of still.

Their eyes met. The boy looked away.

First time. In three months. First time.

Chrollo went inside and called Shalnark because the system was broken and he was done pretending it wasn't.

Shalnark knew about the letter. Had the boy followed since week two. The letter was Nostrade's, the contents were a death threat, and the boy had been sitting in a tree for four days with it in his cloak not telling anyone.

"He's afraid of what telling you would mean," Shalnark said. "Telling you means asking for help. Asking for help means admitting he's staying. Not for a contract."

Chrollo sat with this.

"Room in the east wing. The one with the tree. Prepare it for him, Shalnark."

He put on his coat and went to the garden and there was no strategy behind any of it and he didn't care.

The prince stopped under the tree and said "tell me" and Kurapika said it was none of his business and the prince said "Kurapika" in the voice that wasn't raised and didn't need to be and Kurapika told him everything.

Nostrade. Thirty days. The penalty for failure.

The prince took a key from his coat. Brass. Small. Set it on a root.

"East wing. Bed. Door that locks. Nostrade is mine now."

Walked back.

Nox's ears flattened at the key, then at Kurapika, projecting pick it up, you idiot with every fiber of her being, and followed.

Kurapika sat in the tree until the moon moved. Then he climbed down and took the key and it was warm and he went inside.

The bed was so soft he almost cried.

He slept twelve hours. Woke to a tray. Bread, cheese, honey, tea. A note in sharp left-slanting handwriting: After council. West corridor, third door. Don't be late.

Kurapika was twenty minutes early.

The Nostrade thing took two weeks.

Kurapika drew maps. Guard routes, window measurements, weak points. Argued about being allowed to go himself. Lost the argument because the prince said "that is what's happening" and the conversation was over.

Uvogin took the muscle. Shalnark took the leverage. The prince paid off the debts and wrote a letter at midnight. Three drafts. Shalnark mentioned this over breakfast like it was nothing. "Twelve years. He's never written three drafts of anything."

Nostrade packed a carriage and rode east. The coalition collapsed. No more letters came.

Kurapika didn't ask what the letter said. The prince would never tell him. That was fine. They'd built this out of silence anyway, the open window, the cracked door, the food on the table. One more unspoken thing wouldn't change the weight of it.

Months passed. He stayed.

Room, sparring yard, council wall, chair by the fire, cup on the tray. His name the prince used only when it would land hardest. No title for Kurapika. The court had given up.

Uvogin still called him tree boy.

The first time Kurapika saw Chrollo without the court mask, it was an accident.

He'd woken before dawn. Nightmare. The old kind, the one where he was running and there was nothing behind him but he couldn't stop. He'd lain in bed until his pulse settled, then given up on sleep and gone looking for tea.

The kitchen was supposed to be empty.

It wasn't.

Chrollo was at the long wooden counter, sleeves shoved past his elbows, hair still messy from sleep. He had a knife in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other, and he was cutting slices with the same precision he used in the sparring yard. No servants. No guards. Just a man in a kitchen at an hour when no one was supposed to be awake.

He looked up when Kurapika came in. Didn't startle. Didn't explain.

"Couldn't sleep?" he asked.

"No."

"Tea's in the pot. Still hot."

Kurapika found a cup. Poured. The kitchen smelled like yeast and woodsmoke and the herbs hanging from the ceiling beams. Normal smells. Ordinary. Nothing like the incense and perfume of the court.

He sat on the counter because chairs felt wrong at this hour. Chrollo glanced at him, mouth twitching, and went back to the bread.

"You do this often?"

"When I can't sleep. Which is most nights." Chrollo set down the knife. "The kitchens are the only place no one expects me to be. I can just exist here. Without being the prince."

Kurapika understood that. The weight of being watched. The relief of spaces where no one was looking.

"What do you think about? When you can't sleep?"

Chrollo was quiet for a moment. Then: "The things I should have done differently. The people I couldn't save. Whether I'm becoming the kind of ruler I swore I wouldn't be." He picked up the knife again, started spreading butter. "The usual."

"That's bleak."

"It's honest." He handed Kurapika a slice. "What do you think about?"

The bread was still warm. The butter was melting into it. Kurapika took a bite and chewed and thought about whether to answer honestly.

"Before," he said finally. "The years when I had no one. I think about whether I'll wake up and this will have been a dream. Whether I'll be back in some cold room somewhere, alone, and none of this was real."

Chrollo stopped buttering.

"It's real," he said. Quiet. "You're here. This is real."

"I know. Doesn't stop the brain."

"No. It doesn't."

They ate bread in silence. Outside the window, the sky was going grey and golden at the edges. First birds starting to sing. The castle would wake soon and Chrollo would become the prince again and Kurapika would become whatever he was to the court, the strange blond boy, the charity case, the rumor no one could confirm.

But right now they were just two people who couldn't sleep, eating bread in a kitchen, and Kurapika wanted a thousand more mornings exactly like this one.

"Same time tomorrow?" Chrollo asked, like he'd heard the thought.

"If I can't sleep."

"You won't be able to sleep."

"Probably not."

Chrollo smiled. The real one. The one Kurapika had started collecting like coins, hoarding them, counting them in the dark.

"Good," Chrollo said, and handed him another slice of bread.

Nox let him touch her once. In the garden, sun, his hand brushing her shoulder by accident. She exhaled and didn't move. From the balcony above, the familiar shadow didn't step back.

Chrollo did not say stay.

At first because it was strategy. The boy had to choose. Then because it was habit. Then because he was afraid, and the fear was ordinary, graceless. He hated it.

He did things instead. He'd always done things instead. But the things used to be calculated and now they weren't. Now they just happened. Kurapika was cold: brazier, moved into the study before Chrollo consciously decided to move it. Kurapika was hungry: the kitchen knew before anyone said anything. Kurapika was in the tree instead of the chair: Chrollo at the window checking, and he was checking because he wanted to see him, and it was so ordinary and so huge it made his throat tight.

He had the kitchen stock apricot preserves year-round. Expensive. Southern merchant. The steward raised an eyebrow and Chrollo stared until the eyebrow lowered.

He caught himself standing in a corridor one night thinking about preserves and the thought forming was: I would burn Nostrade's estate to the foundations for threatening someone who likes honey on his bread. The thought was not kingly. He stood with it anyway.

When the blue cloak wore through he replaced it. Same blue. The old one was supposed to be discarded.

But.

It was in the bottom drawer of his desk. He'd put it there at midnight. Kurapika was asleep in the chair. The cloak smelled like bark and rain and something warm that was just him. Just Kurapika. And Chrollo stood there and pressed his face into the worn wool and breathed and he stood there for a while doing that and then put it in the drawer and sat at his desk and didn't sleep because the boy was breathing in the chair and he wanted to listen to it and he'd long since stopped being able to justify any of this.

Nox, by the desk, opened one eye. She knew. She'd always known.

Cold morning. Sparring. Words not hands, because the hands had become a problem. Three seconds of lost focus when the prince touched him. Three seconds was too long in a fight. They'd both noticed. Neither had said.

"Left foot. Back heel."

Strike. Block. Counter. Locked. Blades crossed. Close. Breath fogging.

Close enough that Kurapika could see, for the first time in full daylight at this distance, that the prince's eyes weren't solid dark. They had layers. Brown going darker at the center. The candlelight had never shown this. Morning light did.

"Better."

Neither of them stepped back.

The yard was empty. Nobody due for an hour. Just them and crossed blades and cold air and the distance between their faces getting smaller and the prince's eyes moved. Down, to Kurapika's throat, to the pulse above the collar, up again. The circuit left heat on Kurapika's skin.

"Again?" Rough. Barely.

Kurapika opened his mouth. Nothing came out. The four inches between them became three and Chrollo's breath was warm on his face...

Nox made a sound. Short. Pointed. The panther equivalent of I am right here and there are sixteen windows overlooking this yard.

They stepped apart. The prince turned away first, which he never did, and sheathed the blade not quite smoothly, and the tips of his ears were red.

Red.

The crown prince of this kingdom, who had never in Kurapika's observation lost composure in public, whose face was locked and steady and gave nothing. His ears. Red.

Kurapika stared at the back of his head and something wild and sharp went through him and when Nox looked back from the edge of the yard her expression was exhaustion.

Kurapika made it to his room before his knees gave out.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands pressed flat against the mattress and replayed it. The yard. The crossed blades. The four inches becoming three. Chrollo's breath warm on his face and his eyes dropping to Kurapika's mouth and the whole world narrowing to that single point of heat between them.

And then Nox. That sound. The spell breaking.

And Chrollo's ears. Red. Actually red.

Kurapika put his face in his hands and laughed. It came out cracked and strange and he couldn't stop. The crown prince of this kingdom, who held council meetings with a face like carved stone, who made grown men stammer with a single raised eyebrow, his ears had turned red because he'd almost kissed an ex-assassin in the training yard.

Because he'd wanted to. He'd wanted to badly enough that his body had betrayed him.

Kurapika fell back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The laughing stopped. His eyes were wet at the corners and he didn't wipe them.

He'd spent his whole life wanting things he couldn't have. Had trained himself out of it. Wanting was dangerous. Wanting got you killed or worse. You learned to stop, to take what you could get and not look for more.

But he wanted this. Wanted Chrollo with a sharpness that scared him. Wanted the kitchen at dawn and the sparring yard and the study at night. Wanted to know what would have happened if Nox hadn't interrupted. Wanted to find out if Chrollo kissed the way he fought, precise, controlled, that focus held on a short leash until it wasn't.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

This was going to end badly. It had to. Things like this didn't happen to people like him. Somewhere along the line the other shoe would drop, the dream would shatter, and he'd be back in the cold.

But that was tomorrow's problem. Today's problem was that his pulse wouldn't slow down and he could still feel where Chrollo's breath had touched his face and he was going to have to see him at dinner and pretend everything was normal.

He grabbed the blue cloak from the chair and pressed it against his face and breathed until his hands stopped shaking.

Winter. The tree was bare. Branches dark against grey sky.

Kurapika climbed it because he always climbed it. Sat on his branch.

The garden door opened. The prince. Dark coat. Nox beside him, black on frost. He stopped under the tree and looked up and it was the garden all over again but nothing was the same.

"You never asked why Nox let you past the wall."

Kurapika's hands tightened on the branch. "You said you didn't know."

"I lied."

The word hung there. The prince who weighed everything, measured everything, never gave anything without calculating the return. I lied. Standing in a frozen garden in the dark.

"She let you in because I told her to. After Nostrade hired you. My people found the contract before you reached the castle. I could have stopped you on the road." He paused. Something shifted in his jaw. "I told her not to raise the alarm. To let me see what came over the wall. That was all I told her."

The that was all hung in the cold air. Kurapika heard what lived underneath it. That Nox had done the rest herself. The not-killing. The corridor. The slow, deliberate opening of every door between Kurapika and the prince. All her.

"She decided the rest on her own," Kurapika said. Not a question.

The prince didn't answer. Which was an answer.

Palm up. Open. In the moonlight. And Kurapika could see, could see the absence of strategy in it, the gap where calculation should have been and wasn't. The prince was standing in the dark with his hand out and nothing behind the gesture except wanting Kurapika to take it.

He climbed down. Took the hand. The prince's grip was too tight, the grip of someone holding on, not reaching out, and that tightness cracked something open in Kurapika because it meant the prince was scared. Not of him. Of losing this.

They walked inside. Hand in hand. Nox at their heels.

He didn't sleep that night. Lay in his bed staring at the ceiling turning it over and over. The prince had known. Before the wall, before the tree, before any of it. Had seen a name on a contract and instead of sending soldiers had sent nothing. Had opened the gate and told Nox to stand down and waited to see what walked through.

Every plate of food. Every cracked window. Every night of candlelight and silence. Kurapika had thought he was being tolerated. Then accepted. Then maybe wanted. But it was older than that. It went all the way back to before they'd ever been in the same room. The prince had chosen him before Kurapika had chosen anything at all, and Kurapika lay there with it, the whole shape of it, too big to hold and impossible to set down.

He turned onto his side. Pulled the cloak off the chair and held it against his chest because he was pathetic and it was three in the morning and nobody was watching.

What kind of man sees an assassin's name on a page and thinks yes. That one. Let him in.

The same kind of man who leaves food on a table and opens a window and puts a key on a root and never once says the word. That kind.

Kurapika pressed his face into the wool and breathed and didn't sleep.

Ambassador Pariston Hill. Forty retainers. A smile that never reached his eyes. Kurapika hated him within the first four seconds of his existence in the great hall, which might have been a record.

The welcome feast. Kurapika against the wall. The prince at the high table, formal, silver at his throat, looking like a different person. Pariston at his right, talking, touching the prince's arm. Twice.

Kurapika's jaw hurt from clenching.

"Pariston's exact words," Shalnark said over breakfast. "'What a charming novelty. Is the boy a jester or a bedwarmer?'"

Kurapika's cup cracked in his hand. Thin line up the ceramic.

"Private audience this afternoon. You shouldn't be there."

"I'm going."

"Left pillar. Curtain. Don't stab him."

He didn't stab him.

Tariffs. Borders. Taxes. And Pariston, twenty minutes in: "That boy at the feast. Remarkable eyes. A Kuruta, if I'm not mistaken?"

Nobody said that word. The Kuruta were scattered. Orphans and wanderers who kept the name quiet. Pariston using it was not casual.

"A beautiful blade is still a blade," Pariston said. "Loyalty is complicated with people who've lost everything."

The prince set down his pen.

"Ambassador. The boy is under my protection. His origins and his position are not your concern. If my court is too unconventional, the West awaits. The trade agreement survives your absence. Whether your career survives my displeasure is worth considering."

My protection. What he meant was mine. Kurapika stood behind the curtain and his eyes stung and he pressed his palms flat against the stone.

After the meeting. The prince's hands rested flat on the desk. Deliberately still.

"You were told not to come."

"Shalnark told me where to stand."

"He said not to stab the ambassador."

"I wanted to."

The prince looked up. His hands were being held still the way you hold a lead on something that wants to lunge.

"So did I," he said. Quiet.

Three weeks later. Nightime. Fire was low.

A shadow over the eastern wall, heading for the prince's bedchamber. The same crumbled section. The same bad mortar Kurapika had dug his fingers into seven months ago.

Kurapika didn't think. Grabbed his blade. Out the window, across the ledge, into the corridor ahead of the shadow. Two assassins in the dark. One who'd come to kill a prince, one who'd stopped being that a long time ago.

The fight was fast and ugly and nothing like sparring. The man was bigger, better equipped. Kurapika fought the old way. Street-dirty, instinct, the vicious efficiency of someone who was not going to let anything past him. Not through this corridor. Not to that room.

He took a cut on his forearm. Put the man down anyway.

Then footsteps. Nox first, running, enormous in the dark. Behind her the prince, barefoot, real steel in his hand, hair loose, and his face was.

His face was open. The mask was gone. What was underneath was fear and the fear was pointed at the blood on Kurapika's arm. Not at the man on the floor. Not at the breach. At the blood. Specifically.

"It's not deep."

The prince crossed the corridor and took his arm and his hands were warm and his thumb pressed next to the cut, not on it, and the pressure was not medical.

"You should have called the guard."

"He was heading for your room."

The prince's thumb stopped moving. Their eyes met.

Dark corridor. Man on the floor. Nox standing over him. Blood on stone.

"Don't do that again."

"No. Someone comes over that wall, I'm in this corridor. Every time."

"Then learn to duck."

The cut scarred. Thin white line. The prince had one in the same place. Neither of them mentioned it.

The prince went north. Three days. Garrison inspection.

Nox stayed.

She'd never stayed. Ten years, temple to castle, shadow to shadow. She went where he went. Always.

He'd crouched beside her in the courtyard that morning and then looked at Kurapika and said "look after her" and rode out and Nox watched from the gate and didn't follow and it cost her something visible, staying behind.

First day she paced. Checked everything. Ate mechanically. Slept by the empty desk. Kurapika read one of the prince's books badly. They didn't interact.

Second day the storm came.

Thunder cracked over the east wing and Kurapika flinched and dropped the book and Nox was under the desk.

She was crammed. Under the prince's desk. This enormous, ancient, mythblood creature who'd knocked him off a ledge and stood over armed men without blinking, and she was shaking. Ears flat. Eyes wide and white-rimmed. Panting.

She was afraid of thunder.

It broke him. Not the slow way the last seven months had been doing it. Quick. Sharp.

He got down on the floor. Sat beside the desk. Close enough to feel.

"It's okay," he cooed. "Hey. It's okay."

He talked. Nonsense. Whatever came out. The storm, the walls, the castle being three hundred years old and still standing. He didn't touch her.

Thunder again. Her muzzle pressed against his knee.

He held still.

She pressed harder. Her whole head, heavy and warm, settling onto his lap. Eyes closing. Still shaking.

He put his hand on her head.

She didn't pull away. She exhaled, long and shuddering, and leaned into his hand. He scratched behind her ears the way he'd seen the prince do and she made a sound he'd never heard from her. Low and vibrating. Not a growl. A sound that meant safe.

They sat through the whole storm. Kurapika on the floor. Nox half under the desk with her head in his lap, flinching at thunder, pressing closer each time. And at some point his own shoulders dropped and his breathing settled and his hand on her head was as much for him as for her. The prince was gone and the castle was big and the storm was loud and he missed him, missed him like something physical, and Nox was the closest thing. The prince's other self.

The storm passed.

She licked his hand once. Brief. Rough. Then she pulled out and shook herself and went to the hearth and lay down and closed her eyes like nothing had happened.

Kurapika sat on the floor with a wet hand and his eyes stinging.

Chrollo knew the moment he rode through the gate.

Nox was waiting. That wasn't unusual, she always waited when he'd been gone. But she wasn't alone. Kurapika was beside her, one hand resting on her back, and Nox was leaning into the touch like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Chrollo pulled his horse up and sat there and looked at them.

Three days. He'd been gone three days. And in three days, his mythblood panther, who had accepted exactly one person in her entire existence, who had spent ten years growling at anyone who came within arm's reach, had apparently adopted the boy who'd come to kill him.

Kurapika's hand moved on Nox's back. Absent. Comfortable. The gesture of someone who'd touched her before and knew how she liked it.

"There was a storm," Kurapika said. Like that explained anything.

"I heard."

"She doesn't like thunder."

"I know."

Nox's eyes were half-closed. Her purr was audible from twenty feet away. She hadn't moved from Kurapika's side, hadn't come to meet Chrollo at the gate the way she always did. She was staying.

Chrollo dismounted. Handed the reins to a groom without looking. Walked across the courtyard until he was close enough to see the details, the dark circles under Kurapika's eyes, the tension in his shoulders that wasn't about Nox, the way his fingers were curling into her fur like an anchor.

"Did you sleep?"

"Some."

"Liar."

Kurapika's mouth twitched. "You look worse than I do."

"I was riding for six hours."

"Excuses."

Chrollo reached out without thinking and brushed a strand of hair from Kurapika's face. His fingers grazed temple, cheekbone, jaw. Kurapika went still.

They stood there. Nox between them, purring. Courtyard full of people who were definitely watching and definitely pretending not to.

"I missed you," Chrollo said. Quiet enough that only Kurapika could hear. "The garrison inspection was tedious and I kept thinking about whether you were sleeping and I missed you."

Kurapika's throat moved. "I missed you too."

Chrollo dropped his hand. Stepped back. Let the court mask slide into place.

"Dinner in an hour," he said, normal volume now. "I want to hear about the storm."

He walked into the castle without looking back. If he looked back he'd do it again. Touch him. Say more true things in a courtyard full of witnesses. Give the gossips enough ammunition to last until spring.

Nox stayed with Kurapika. Chrollo felt her absence at his heels like a missing limb.

He didn't mind. If he had to lose her to anyone, he'd lose her to him.

When the prince came back the next evening Nox pushed her head against Kurapika's hip instead of the prince's. The prince's hand stilled in the empty air where her head should have been. He watched his panther lean against the boy who'd come to kill him and his whole face went quiet. Stripped. Like watching a man realize he'd lost a fight he didn't know he was in.

"She likes you," the prince said. Small. Quiet. Wondering.

"She tolerates me."

"No." Watching. "That's not what this is."

The eastern wall was repaired. Masons, two days. New mortar white on old stone.

Kurapika watched from the colonnade. The gap sealed. The door he'd come through, shut.

The prince found him there. Leaned on the next pillar.

"I'm not locking you in. The gate is open."

"You don't have to say that."

"I want you to know."

Kurapika didn't answer. He reached over and took his hand. Didn't plan it. Just did.

The prince went still. Processed. His fingers tightened.

His thumb moved against Kurapika's knuckle. Back and forth. Slow. The gesture of someone who didn't know they were doing it.

They stood there until dark.

Chrollo's hand was warm in Kurapika's. His thumb had stopped moving, was just resting now, but he hadn't let go. Neither of them had let go. At some point that would have to happen, they'd have to walk inside, release each other, be separate people again. But not yet.

"The wall looks wrong," Kurapika said finally. "The new mortar's too white."

"It'll weather."

"I know. It just looks wrong."

Chrollo turned to face him. In the dark his eyes were unreadable, but his hand tightened.

"Do you regret it? Coming over that wall?"

"No." The answer came fast. Certain. "I regret a lot of things. Not that."

"What do you regret?"

Kurapika thought about it. "The time I wasted. All those weeks in the tree, telling myself I was still on the job. I could have come down earlier. Could have been here longer."

"You weren't ready."

"Maybe."

"You needed the distance. Needed to decide it was your choice." Chrollo's free hand came up, touched Kurapika's jaw. "I would have waited years if I had to."

"You shouldn't have had to wait at all. You should have just told me. Told me to come down, told me you knew, told me any of it."

"Would you have listened?"

Kurapika opened his mouth to say yes. Closed it.

"No," he admitted. "I would have run."

"So I waited. Fed you. Left windows open. Let you come to it yourself." Chrollo's thumb traced his cheekbone. "I'm patient when it matters."

"You're insane. You let an assassin live in your garden for two months."

"I let you live in my garden. Different thing."

The distinction shouldn't have mattered. It did. Kurapika turned his face into Chrollo's palm, a mirror of what he'd seen Chrollo do with Nox a hundred times. The gesture of a wild thing, choosing.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "You know that, right? The wall can be repaired, the gate can be open, I'm not leaving. Not unless you tell me to."

"I'm not going to tell you to. Ever."

They stood there with Chrollo's hand on his face and the new-mortared wall pale in the darkness and the whole castle probably watching from a hundred windows. Let them. Let them gossip. Kurapika was done pretending.

"We should go inside," Chrollo said. "It's cold."

"It's not that cold."

"You're shivering."

"That's not from the cold."

Chrollo's hand slid from Kurapika's face to the back of his neck and stayed there, warm and steady.

"Inside," he said again. "Now."

They went inside. Hands still linked. Nox materializing from shadows to walk at their heels. The servants they passed didn't look directly at them, but Kurapika could feel the attention. The carefully blank faces that would become animated whispers the moment they were out of earshot.

Let them talk.

Tuesday. Fire burning low. Nox asleep. The prince reading. Kurapika in the chair with a book he'd given up on ages ago.

The candle guttered. The prince reached to fix it. The light moved on his face.

And Kurapika looked at him. Not the usual way, the careful sideways glances, the pretending not to stare. He looked. At the line of his jaw and his mouth and the fall of dark hair across his forehead that he pushed back with one hand and the way the candlelight caught the planes of his face.

He closed the book. The sound was loud.

"Problem?"

"Can't understand a word. I think it's philosophy."

"Theology."

"Same thing."

"That's aggressively wrong."

"Chrollo."

He'd never said it. Seven months. Not once. The name just fell out. Landed in the room between them.

And the prince's face opened.

It was small. A lock clicking. Something held tight for a long time easing loose. The composure didn't break. It rested. And behind it was just him. Chrollo. In his chair. At his desk. Looking at Kurapika.

"Say it again." Rough. Letting it be rough.

Kurapika got up. Three feet. Three feet he'd been orbiting for months. He crossed it.

"Chrollo."

The chair scraped. Chrollo stood, came around the desk corner. Close. Inches.

Kurapika's hand came up and his fingers touched Chrollo's jaw. Light, careful, the way he'd touched Nox during the storm. Approaching something.

Chrollo leaned his face into the touch. Slightly. His eyes closed for half a second.

"I was paid to kill you," Kurapika said, because apparently that was the only thing his mouth could produce at critical moments. "I sat in your tree for two months. A man came for you and I put a knife in him without thinking. Not for one second."

Chrollo hummed nonchalantly.

"I've never..." His voice cracked.

Chrollo's eyes opened. And they were in the corridor. Seven months of windows and plates and silence, all of it, turned toward Kurapika in a single look.

"So do I," he whispered, and his hand came up and covered Kurapika's on his jaw and held it there.

They kissed.

It wasn't over the moon. Wasn't sweeping. One of them leaned forward and the other did too and they'd never agree which went first. This became one of those arguments that surfaced at odd times over the years, breakfast, training yard, late at night. You moved. No, you. I felt you lean. That was breathing. You absolute...

Their mouths met. Soft. Warm. Dry. Off center, because Kurapika had never done this and it turned out that all his precision, all those years of steady hands and blades landing exactly where he aimed them, was completely useless for this. He missed by a centimeter. Caught the corner of Chrollo's mouth instead of the center.

Chrollo's hand tightened on his. His other hand settled on the back of Kurapika's neck and he tilted his head and corrected the angle, guided it, gentle, the way he corrected Kurapika's footwork, and the kiss landed.

Three seconds. Four. Tasting like mint tea.

They pulled apart. An inch.

The prince's face. The mask was gone and what was left was the man. Hand on the back of Kurapika's neck, mouth open, eyes wide. Unguarded in a way Kurapika had only seen once before, in the corridor, and what was in them was the same thing. Seven months of open windows, all of it, pouring forward.

His brain was off. Kurapika could see it. The whole apparatus, the strategy, the control, the planning, all of it gone dark. A man in a firelit room who'd been kissed by the person who came to kill him and who had no idea what to do about it.

"Your footwork," Chrollo said, "was terrible."

Kurapika laughed. It cracked out of him, raw, startled, too loud, and Chrollo's mouth twitched and then he was laughing too. The real one. Not the almost. Nox raised her head and looked at them with the deep, personal resignation of someone who'd seen this coming for several months and was not impressed.

They kissed again. Better. Centered. Kurapika's hand in Chrollo's hair, which was dark, thick, softer than it looked, and Chrollo's grip on his neck tightening and the fire crackling and Nox huffing and putting her head back down.

They kissed until the candles burned out and the study was dark except moonlight through the window. The same window that had been cracked seven months ago when a boy sat on the ledge with a knife and a prince sat reading inside and neither of them knew anything yet.

The window was closed now.

Kurapika pulled back. Rested his forehead against Chrollo's. Breathing ragged. Hands tangled.

"Tea with honey," he said.

Something that was a laugh and something else.

"With honey."

The fire burned down to embers and they were still standing there.

Kurapika had lost track of how many times they'd kissed. Enough that his lips felt swollen. Enough that he'd stopped thinking about technique and started just feeling, Chrollo's hands in his hair, Chrollo's mouth on his jaw, the sound Chrollo made when Kurapika bit his lower lip. A small sound. Surprised. He filed it away for later.

"Stay," Chrollo said against his mouth. "Here. Tonight. Stay."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"I mean stay stay. In this room. With me."

Kurapika pulled back far enough to look at him. Chrollo's hair was wrecked. His collar was askew. His eyes were dark and wanting and there was a mark on his throat that Kurapika didn't remember putting there but was glad existed.

"I don't —" Kurapika started.

"Not for that. Unless you want. But just stay. Let me wake up with you here. I want to know what that's like."

Chrollo asking. Not commanding, not arranging, not leaving plates and cracked windows and letting Kurapika figure it out. Just asking. Out loud. With his voice unsteady on the last word.

"Okay," Kurapika mumbled. "I'll stay."

Chrollo's whole body loosened. He hadn't been sure. Had been braced for no.

"The bed is big enough," Chrollo said. "I don't steal blankets."

"Liar. Nox told me."

"Nox is a traitor and I'm disowning her."

From the hearth, Nox made a sound that was clearly dismissive.

They settled into bed. Awkward at first the negotiation of space, of where limbs went, of how close was too close. Then Chrollo pulled him in and Kurapika's head found the hollow of his shoulder and it stopped being awkward and started being easy.

"This is strange," Kurapika said into his collarbone.

"Bad strange?"

"No. Good strange. I've never—with anyone. Not like this."

Chrollo's arm tightened around him. "Neither have I. Not with anyone who mattered."

"I matter?"

"Don't fish for complimenets."

Kurapika smiled against his skin. "Maybe I like hearing it."

"You matter. You're irritating and stubborn and you lived in my tree for two months like some kind of feral cat and I spent the whole time thinking about you. Is that enough?"

"More than enough."

They lay there. Nox's purr filled the room, low and constant. Outside the window the moon was moving and the castle was settling into nighttime quiet and Kurapika was warm and held.

"Chrollo?"

"Mm."

"I would have killed for you. That night in the corridor. When the assassin came."

"I'd rather we let Uvogin have fun, you hurt yourself."

"I mean—I did kill. For you. Without thinking. I'd do it again."

"Kurapika." Chrollo's hand found his, linked their fingers. "I'd do the same."

"Burn Nostrade's estate to the foundations?"

"You heard about that."

"Shalnark talks."

"I'm having him reassigned to the northern watchtower."

"You're not, he's your best friend."

"I'm considering it."

Kurapika laughed into his shoulder and Chrollo's chest shook with his own silent laughter and Nox huffed at them both.

Outside, the apricot tree stood bare in the winter garden, waiting for spring. The knife was somewhere in the grass beneath it. Rusted by now, probably. Buried under months of dead leaves and frost.

The branches would bloom again. They always did. And the petals would catch in someone's blond hair, pink against gold, the same as that first morning when the wind pulled them loose and Chrollo stopped walking and lied to himself about why.

Some things you don't get to choose. They come over your wall with a knife and end up staying for the honey.