Archive of Our Own

It's quite lonely being a prince.

Martin will never deny how lucky he is to be in a wealthy family, to have beautiful clothes, and to have all the time in the world to do things, but it's still so lonely.

The palace is enormous. That's the problem, really. There are so many rooms that the 18 year old has never once been inside, so many hallways he could walk for an hour and still not reach the end of, and yet somehow there's never anyone in them. Just portraits. Just suits of armor that don't breathe. Just his own footsteps echoing back at him like a second person following along behind.

His tutors come and go. The servants bow and scurry. His parents love him — he knows they love him — but they're always busy, always in meetings, always reminding him that a prince must be careful, must be cautious, must only keep company with those of proper station. Hell, even his older sister agrees with that rhetoric. It's safer that way, they all say. You never know what kind of person is out there.

Martin thinks that's the whole point, though. Not knowing. That's what makes a friend a friend. It’s something you find out when you connect with them.

He tried once, when he was small, to play with the baker's boy in the village. The baker’s boy had short choppy bangs, round eyes and was quite smaller in comparison to Martin at the time. They'd built a whole castle out of mud together and stuck twigs in it for flags. It had been the best afternoon of Martin's entire life. He was scolded for a week and the baker's boy was reassigned to a shop three towns over. Martin never saw him again.

So he stopped trying.

One gray afternoon, when the loneliness had gotten so heavy it felt like wearing a coat made of stones, Martin slipped out through the servants' gate with a hood pulled over his hair and walked down to the village market. He told himself he was only going for air, and that he wouldn't buy anything.

Those statements didn’t exactly stay true as he came home with a turtle.

A small one, no bigger than his palm, with a shell the color mix of wet slate and olive green plus a face that was — Martin couldn't explain it — familiar. The round eyes. The patient little mouth. The way it turned its head to look up at him like it was listening.

There was a girl at the stall who'd been selling them, and she'd looked at Martin oddly when he'd lingered. "They don't do much," she'd warned him. "They just... sit."

"That's alright," Martin had said. "I don't need much."

He carried it home in both hands, careful as anything, and set it on his windowsill where the afternoon light came through.

"You need a name," he said.

The turtle blinked slowly.

Martin stared at it for a long moment. Something in his chest went soft and aching, the way old memories do. "Jju," he said finally, and the name felt right in his mouth, like he'd been saving it for years. "I'm going to call you Jju."

The turtle — Jju — tilted its head. Martin laughed. It was the first time he'd laughed in a while, and it surprised him.

After that, things were different. 

Martin talked to Jju constantly. He told Jju about his tutors and their endless lectures on lineage and land. He told Jju about the portraits in the east hall, and how he'd made up stories for each of them because no one had ever told him the real ones. He told Jju about the mud castle, and the baker's boy, and how he still thought about that afternoon sometimes.

Jju listened. He always did.

Martin held him while he read. He held him while he ate, sneaking lettuce leaves onto his plate so he'd have an excuse. He held him at night, curled on his side in the enormous empty bed, Jju tucked warm against his chest, and he imagined that the little shell was a heartbeat and the slow paddling of Jju's feet against his palm was someone reaching back.

Hugging, Martin decided, was what they were doing. He was being hugged.

Sure, it was silly to think of it that way. Even if it was a turtle he was hugging, and it obviously wasn't the same as a real human friend, but it was still something. It was the closest thing to something Martin has had in years.

Being a turtle was, Juhoon had decided, mostly an exercise in patience.

It wasn’t like he had much choice in the matter though. One moment he'd been a boy in the village, and the next… well. The witch had been very thorough and smug about it, and Juhoon had spent the three years since learning exactly how slow a slow thing could be.

Turtles, it turned out, could not scream. He'd tried. Many times. The best he could do was something similar to a hiss or screech. 

But being a turtle did come with one unexpected benefit, which was that nobody thought you were listening.

The prince, for instance. The prince thought Juhoon was furniture. A very beloved piece of furniture, granted — carried from room to room, tucked into pockets, set gently on windowsills like a decoration — but furniture nonetheless. And so the prince talked.

He talked a lot.

Juhoon had learned more about Prince Martin Edwards in three weeks than he'd learned about most people in his entire human life. He knew the prince hated math because the tutors were “so boring.” He knew the prince had once built a castle out of mud and mourned it for years. He knew the prince had never been hugged by anyone except his family, not since he was small, and that he thought about it more than he'd ever admit.

He knew the prince was lonely.

Juhoon had known loneliness, even before the witch. He'd been the boy at the edge of the market, the one whose family was a little too strange, a little too cursed-adjacent for the other children to trust. He recognized the shape of it. Loneliness looked different on a prince, but it was still the same ache underneath.

And so, despite everything, despite the indignity of being carried around like a lapdog, despite the lettuce — Juhoon had started to feel sorry for him.

Which was a problem, because Juhoon was also starting to feel something else, and he did not want to dive any deeper into it. 

Tonight, the prince was reading aloud.

He did this often. Folk tales, mostly about witches and curses and impossible endings, which Juhoon found deeply ironic and unfunny. He'd stopped listening a while ago. He was too busy being warm.

That was the other thing about being a turtle. You got cold easily, and the prince was very warm, and he held Juhoon against his chest like it was the most natural thing in the world, one hand cupped over the shell and the other holding the book, and Juhoon had stopped fighting it. He'd gone boneless and let his little turtle eyes drift shut.

He was, embarrassingly, comfortable.

The prince's voice rumbled through his chest and into Juhoon's shell, low and soft, and Juhoon found himself thinking, hazily, that if he had to be cursed, at least he'd been cursed into good hands.

The prince soon stopped reading.

Juhoon felt him shift, felt the hand on his shell tighten just slightly, and cracked one eye open to look up.

The prince was looking down at him.

He did this sometimes. Looking at the turtle with an expression Juhoon couldn't quite name. It was the expression of someone looking at something precious and not quite believing they got to keep it. His hair had fallen into his eyes, pale gold in the candlelight, and his cheeks were flushed pink the way they always got when he was feeling something too big for his chest.

He was, Juhoon thought reluctantly, pretty.

Annoyingly pretty. Unfairly pretty. The kind of pretty that made you forget, briefly, that you were a reptile of all things.

"Thank you," the prince whispered. "For being here. For listening."

Juhoon's tiny turtle heart did something complicated.

I'm not a pet, he wanted to say. I'm a person. I'm a person and I've been listening this whole time and you have no idea how much of what you've said I've been holding onto.

He couldn't say any of it. He could only blink, slow and stupid, the way turtles did.

The prince smiled. It was a small, sad, fond thing, and it made Juhoon want to bite him and also made him want to never be put down again.

But then the prince leaned down and kissed him on the head. Juhoon had approximately one second to think “wait!” before the world exploded.

The kiss happened on a random weekday.

It was late. Martin had been reading aloud from a book of old folk tales, and Jju had fallen asleep against his collarbone. Martin looked down at him — at that small, patient, familiar face — and felt a swell of affection so sudden and so fierce it made his eyes sting.

"Thank you," he whispered. "For being here. For listening."

And because he was lonely but still grateful, combined with Jju's little face being right there and looking so much like someone he used to know, Martin pressed a soft kiss to the top of Jju's head.

The world suddenly went white.

There was a bang — not a loud one, more like the sound of a hundred pillows being dropped at once — and a great cloud of something soft and glittering erupted from the windowsill and filled the entire room. Martin tumbled backward off the bed, coughing, waving his arms through the haze.

"Jju—?!"

The cloud swirled but slowly went translucent. And when Martin could see clearly again, there was someone sitting on the windowsill. 

A boy. A human boy, about his age, with dark hair mussed from sleep and eyes still half-lidded and confused. He was wearing clothes that didn't fit him, or rather, that didn't fit anymore, and he was staring at his own hands like they'd grown back from the dead.

Martin's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"...Oh no," the boy said, in a deep voice Martin had never heard before but somehow already knew. "Oh no, oh no, oh no—"

He was up off the windowsill before Martin could move, which turned out to be a mistake, because his legs — legs, he had legs — did not remember how to work. He got up about half a step before his knees buckled and he went down hard on the rug, catching himself on hands that were too long, too thin, too pink.

Martin scrambled to his feet. "Are you… are you alright? What—"

"I'm fine," the boy said, from the floor, in the tone of someone who was very much not fine. "I'm fine. Truly."

He was staring at his own hands. He spread the fingers. Wiggled them. Made a small, strangled noise in the back of his throat and dropped them again.

Martin's heart was doing something unpleasant in his chest. He'd watched a turtle turn into a boy. He'd watched a turtle turn into a boy, and the.. quite handsome boy was sitting on his rug wearing clothes that were clearly meant for someone smaller, and the handsome boy's hair was dark and mussed and sticking up in the back exactly the way.. exactly the way…

"You were a turtle," Martin said. Brilliantly.

"Yes."

"You were — I held you."

"Yes."

"I talked to you. I talked to you for weeks."

"Yes," the boy said, and then, with feeling, "I know."

Martin's face went very hot. 

"Every night," the boy went on, and there was something almost hysterical creeping into his voice now, "you told me about your tutors. And the portraits. And the mud castle. You told me the mud castle story four times."

"I—" Martin's mouth opened and closed. "You—"

"And you kissed me," the boy finished, and then immediately looked like he wanted to take it back. His own face had gone pink — a deep, furious pink that spread all the way to the tips of his ears. "On the head. You kissed me on the head and I—"

He stopped.

Martin was aware that he should be doing something. Calling for a guard, maybe, or a doctor, or his mother. Instead he was standing in the middle of his own bedroom in his nightclothes, staring at a boy who had, until thirty seconds ago, been a turtle, and feeling like the floor had been pulled out from under him in the best possible way.

"You listened," he said quietly.

The boy looked up at him. "Yeah," he said. "I did."

The room was very quiet after that. The glittering cloud had mostly settled by now, dusting the rug, bedspread, and Martin's slippers in something that looked like fine silver sand. Outside, the palace was still. No one had heard or come by. 

Martin took a step forward. Then another. Then he sat down on the floor too, right there on the rug, a careful arm's length away from the boy, because he didn't know what else to do with himself.

"Who are you?" he asked.

The boy looked at him for a long moment. "Juhoon," he said. "My name is Kim Juhoon."

Martin's breath caught. "...Jju," he said.

Juhoon winced. "Yeah. You— you named me after myself. That was.. kind of crazy to just sit through, honestly."

"I named you after me," Martin said, and then stopped, because that wasn't right either, because the name hadn't come from him, it had come from somewhere older. From a summer afternoon and a castle made of mud and a boy who'd laughed at his jokes.

The baker's boy. The boy who'd been sent three towns over.

Martin's hands started shaking. He didn't notice until Juhoon reached out and, very carefully, took one of them.

"I remember you," Martin said. "You were.. you were the one who—"

"I know," Juhoon said. His grip was warm. Human. "I know. I remember too after all those story times."

For a moment neither of them said anything. The candle on the nightstand started to weaken slowly, and the silver dust on the rug caught the last of the light like frost.

Then Martin took a breath. "How did this happen? How did you.. how did any of this happen?"

Juhoon's face did something complicated. He let go of Martin's hand, and Martin felt the absence of it immediately, which was ridiculous, because he'd known this boy for four minutes.

"It was a witch," Juhoon said. "Three years ago. My family and I — my mother, my father, me — we were coming back from the market, and there was a woman on the road. She asked us for money." He paused. "My father said no."

Martin winced.

"Yeah," Juhoon said. "So she cursed us. All three of us. Turned us into animals and scattered us." He looked down at his own hands again, flexing them like he still couldn't believe they were his. "I got the turtle. My parents got.. I don't know. I haven't seen them since. I don't even know if they're still—"

He stopped. Swallowed.

"So I was a turtle," he went on, quieter now, "for three years. And I thought that was just.. that was just it. That was my life. Until you bought me at the market and carried me home and started telling me about your tutors."

Martin's ears went red. "I didn't know—"

"I know you didn't know." Juhoon's mouth twitched, almost a smile. "That's the only reason I didn't lose my mind."

"But the curse," Martin said. "How did it… tonight. What happened tonight?"

Juhoon was quiet for a second. When he answered, his voice had gone a little strange.

"The witch had a sense of humor," he said. "She told us the only way out was true love's kiss." He laughed, short and humorless. "Which is a joke, obviously, because who's going to fall in love with a turtle? I figured we were stuck forever. I'd made my peace with it. I was going to live out my whole life as a reptile and die on the side of the ocean or something."

He looked up at Martin.

"So imagine my surprise," he said, "when you kissed me on the head and I turned back into a person."

Martin's mouth went dry and he immediately broke eye contact. "That was…" he started. "That wasn't — I didn't mean — I wasn't in love with you, I mean, you were a turtle, I just—"

"I know," Juhoon said. "I know what it was. You were lonely and I was there and.. I got to know you well enough within these past few weeks." He shrugged, and there was something almost gentle in it. "Apparently that was enough. Apparently that's what the witch meant. What we.. have is real love. The kind you don't have to name."

Martin didn't know how to respond to that other than with a deep inhale. Juhoon just said out loud that they both essentially have confirmed feelings for each other. 

Martin then started looking at him again. Properly looking now, the way he hadn't let himself before — at the dark hair and the cute, round eyes and the subtly pink cheeks. He'd stared at this face for weeks. He'd stared at it every night, and he'd thought it looked like someone he used to know, and he was right the whole time. The realization was sitting in his chest like a warm stone.

He kept looking. His eyes drifted down, and— Wow, Juhoon had thick lips.

Martin had never noticed that before. Obviously he hadn't because a turtle didn't have lips, not like that, not soft and full and slightly parted because Juhoon was still catching his breath. But now Martin was noticing.

He felt the heat climb up his neck and settle into his cheeks, and he knew that it was blatant that his face had gone the exact pink it always went when he was feeling something too big.

Juhoon's eyes flicked to his cheeks. Then back to his eyes.

"...You're doing it again," Juhoon said.

"Doing what?"

"Going pink." A pause. "You used to do that when you talked about the baker's boy, too."

Martin made a sound that was not quite a word.

"Which is funny," Juhoon said, and now he really was smiling, small and crooked and a little bit cruel in the way that only old friends are allowed to be. "Because you know.. you were talking about me. The whole time."

Even though Martin knew that already from earlier, he still felt embarrassed and put his face in his hands.

"I'm sorry," he said, muffled. "I'm so sorry. You had to sit there and listen to me be pathetic about you—"

"Honestly?" Juhoon said. "It was kind of nice."

Martin lowered his hands slightly and peeked at Juhoon. "Nice?"

"Nobody had ever missed me before." Juhoon shrugged, and there was something soft and a little sad underneath the joke. "It was nice to be missed."

Martin didn't know what to do with that, so he did the only thing he could think of, which was to stand up and offer Juhoon a hand.

"Come on," he said. "You can't stay in those clothes."

Juhoon looked down at himself. The tunic he was wearing had clearly been made for someone smaller and rounder, and it was straining at the seams in ways that couldn't have been comfortable. "These are the clothes I was wearing when I got cursed," he said. "I guess the witch didn't account for me growing."

Martin pulled him to his feet. Juhoon wobbled, caught himself on Martin's arm, and then very deliberately let go.

"Sorry," he said. "Legs."

"It's fine." Martin was already moving toward the wardrobe, mostly so Juhoon wouldn't see his pink face. "You can have some of mine. They'll be a bit big, but.."

He pulled open the doors, and the wardrobe spilled out a small mountain of fabric. Silk and linen and wool in every color the palace could afford. Juhoon made a small noise behind him.

"That's a lot of clothes."

"I know."

"You have… how many of these do you even wear?"

"Not many." Martin grabbed a simple white shirt and a pair of soft trousers, the plainest things he owned, and held them out. "Here. These should be the least ridiculous."

Juhoon took them. He held them up against himself, and they hung off him like a tent — the sleeves went down to his elbows, and the trousers pooled around his ankles in a way that would have been comical if it weren't so endearing.

Martin looked away quickly. His ears were warm again.

"There's a screen," he said, pointing. "Behind you. I'll… I'll turn around."

"You don't have to—" Juhoon started, and then stopped himself. "Right. Yeah. Thanks."

Martin turned around and stared very hard at the wall. Behind him there was the rustle of fabric and a few muffled curses as Juhoon balanced himself while trying to put on pants after a long time. Martin counted the stones in the wall. He got to forty-three before Juhoon said, "Okay."

He turned back around.

Juhoon was standing there in Martin's clothes, almost swimming in them, the shirt kind of slipping off one shoulder and the trousers bunched at his feet. His hair was still a mess. His face was still pink. He looked, Martin thought, like a boy who'd been borrowed from somewhere and hadn't been given back yet.

"You look—" Martin started, and then had to stop, because every ending to that sentence was a problem.

"Ridiculous?" Juhoon offered.

"Small," Martin said. "You look small."

Juhoon laughed, eyes crinkling and teeth showing. It was the first real laugh Martin had heard from him and the prince felt something in his chest turn over.

The plan, such as it was, came together over the next hour.

Juhoon sat on the edge of the bed with his borrowed sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, and Martin paced the length of the rug, and together they worked out that Juhoon could not simply walk out of the palace at midnight, because a) the gates were guarded, b) he had no papers, no family, and no explanation for where he'd come from, and c) if anyone found out a turtle had turned into a boy in the crown prince's bedroom, there would be questions. Lots of questions. The kind that ended in witch trials.

"So you stay here," Martin said. "For tonight."

Juhoon raised an eyebrow. "In your room."

"On the chaise." Martin pointed at it, a long velvet thing by the window. "It's comfortable even for someone my height. I've fallen asleep on it loads of times."

"And your parents won't—"

"They never come in without knocking. And they don't knock after dark." Martin paused. "It's… they're busy. They're always busy."

Something flickered across Juhoon's face. He didn't say anything about it, which Martin appreciated.

"And then tomorrow," Martin went on, "I'll figure something out. A position for you here. In the kitchens, or the stables maybe — somewhere the main staff won't ask too many questions. I can say you're a distant cousin. From.. from the country. I have cousins I've never met, it's not even a lie—"

"Martin."

Martin stopped. It was the first time Juhoon had said his name.

Juhoon was looking at him with that expression again — the one from the windowsill, the one that was too big to name. "You don't have to do all that. You already broke the curse. You could just.. let me go. I'd figure it out."

"Out there?" Martin said. "Alone? With your parents still missing and a witch still out there somewhere?"

Juhoon was quiet.

"You're not going anywhere," Martin said while shaking his head passionately. "Not tonight. Maybe not for a while."

He crossed the room and pulled the spare blanket off the foot of the bed — the soft one that he liked — and carried it over to the chaise. He spread it out carefully, smoothing the edges, and then stepped back.

"There," he said. "It's not much."

Juhoon looked at the blanket. Then at Martin. Then at the blanket again.

"It's more than I've had in three years," he said quietly while getting off the edge of Martin’s bed. 

Martin's throat did something tight. "Well," he said. "Goodnight, then."

"Goodnight."

Martin climbed into his own bed and blew out the candle.

The room went dark, except for the moon coming in through the window, silver and thin, laying a stripe of light across the rug. Martin lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest like a corpse, which was not a normal way for him to lie in bed, but he couldn't stop himself with all his nerves.

Across the room, the chaise creaked as Juhoon settled in.

Martin stared at the ceiling. He counted his own heartbeats. He thought about the fact that there was a boy on the other side of his room, a boy he'd just met but also kind of knew when he was younger, a boy he'd technically been holding for three weeks, and that the boy was wearing his clothes and sleeping under his blanket and that this was, without question, the strangest night of his entire life.

He rolled onto his side then rolled back. He also then proceeded to adjust his pillow. Twice.

"...Martin."

Martin went very still. "Yes?"

"You're not going to sleep, are you."

"I am. I'm actually sleeping right now. Honk shoo. "

"You're rolling around like a fish on a dock."

Martin's face went hot in the dark. "I'm… settling."

There was a pause. Then the chaise creaked again, and there were footsteps on the rug, and Martin's heart lurched into his throat because Juhoon was walking over, the moonlight catching the white of Martin's own shirt on his body.

Juhoon stopped at the edge of the bed. He looked down at Martin — and Martin, flat on his back with his hair everywhere, felt suddenly exposed.

"Can I sit?" Juhoon asked.

Martin nodded, eyes wide and staring. He couldn't seem to find his voice.

Juhoon sat on the edge of the mattress again. The bed dipped. For a moment neither of them said anything, and the only sound was the wind outside and Martin's heart, which he was fairly sure Juhoon could hear.

"You've been weird since I turned back," Juhoon said finally.

"I have not."

"You called me a distant cousin from the country and have constantly been jittering around."

"That was—" Martin closed his mouth. "Okay. Maybe a little weird."

Juhoon huffed a small laugh. Then he went quiet, and when he spoke again his voice was different. It was lower, calmer and more honest than Martin was prepared for.

"I've been a turtle for three years," he said. "You know what that teaches you?"

"What?"

"That you don't get to wait for things." Juhoon looked at him. "You sit there, and you watch the world go by at a hundred miles an hour, and you can't do anything about any of it. You can't reach out. You can't say what you mean. You just have to watch." He paused. "I spent three years watching. I'm not going to spend any more time not saying what I mean."

Martin's mouth had gone dry. "What.. what do you mean?"

"You know what I mean."

"I really don't—"

"Martin." Juhoon leaned in a little, bracing one hand on the mattress beside him. "You kissed me on the head and was able to turn me back into a person. You've been pink for the last hour. You looked at my mouth like it personally offended you." A pause. "I'm not stupid."

Martin made a strangled noise.

"So," Juhoon said, and now there was something almost gentle in it, like he was giving Martin the chance to run, "I'm going to ask you something, and you can say no, and I'll go sleep on the chaise, and we'll never talk about it again."

Martin was frozen against his pillows, heart going so hard he thought it might bruise. "Okay."

"Can I kiss you?"

The room was very quiet. The moonlight sat on the rug. Somewhere far off in the palace, a clock struck something, and Martin didn't hear it.

"Yes," he said. It came out barely a whisper. "Yes. Please."

Juhoon smiled — small and crooked, the same smile from the floor earlier — and reached out, and cupped Martin's face in one hand. His palm was warm.

"You're doing it again," he murmured just like before. 

"Doing wh—"

Juhoon kissed him.

It was soft at first. Careful, even, with the fact that the kiss was done by someone who’d spent three years unable to touch anything and wasn’t sure he remembered how. He leaned down over Martin, his free hand still braced against the mattress as his lips gently pressed against Martin’s.

Martin made a small sound against his mouth, and his hands came up, one settling on Juhoon’s shoulder and the other slipping into his hair. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was supposed to do, but Juhoon tilted his head, and Martin followed his lead, slowly finding his footing in the unfamiliar sweetness of it. Juhoon’s thumb brushed over his cheek as he kissed him again, lingering a little longer this time, and Martin drew him closer by the nape of his neck.

It stopped being careful after that. Juhoon kissed him again, and again, each kiss a little less tentative than the last, until Martin found himself meeting him halfway, tilting his face up whenever Juhoon pulled back. At some point, Martin started smiling against his mouth, and Juhoon smiled, too, which only made Martin want to kiss him again.

When they broke apart, Martin’s ears were ringing and his face was pink all the way to his collarbones and he was smiling so hard it hurt.

"Well," Juhoon said, a little breathless himself. "That's a better curse-breaker than the first one."

Martin laughed out loud, bright and startled, the way he hadn't in years and pulled him back down.

"Stay," he said against Juhoon's mouth. "Stay next to me and don’t go back to the chaise."

Juhoon stayed, of course. 

🐢