The court does not answer. The blurred figures are still and mute and the silence stretches and Bryn watches it land on the prince, watches him absorb the non-answer. The crown prince of the Drekian Sovereignty is on his knees asking to be loved and the only response is the vast, indifferent quiet of a chamber full of people who value him for what he is and have never once considered who.
This is Ithyris's fear.
Not rejection. Not defeat. The terror that he is lovable only in context. That without the scales and the crown and the centuries of accumulated power, he is nothing anyone would choose. That every person who has ever stayed did so for the prince, not for the man, and if the prince were stripped away the man would kneel in an empty room and beg and no one would answer because no one was ever there for him in the first place.
Bryn's heart cracks.
Because this is not what monsters fear. Monsters fear defeat, the loss of their hoard. Monsters do not kneel on stone floors and ask, with the quiet desperation of someone who has been asking for centuries, whether there is something in them worth loving beyond the power they were born with. The fact that this is what lives beneath Ithyris's composure, beneath the patience and the steadiness and the infuriating, relentless kindness, undoes Bryn in a way he was not prepared for and could not have defended against.
He moves.
The dream does not resist. Bryn's fear fought Ithyris, tried to keep him out, but the prince's fear lets Bryn in without hesitation, as though it has been waiting. He crosses the chamber floor and stops in front of Ithyris and looks down at him, stripped and kneeling and raw.
Bryn kneels.
Face to face. Knees on warm stone. The prince's eyes find his and they are the amethyst he knows, bright with unshed tears, and the expression in them is the one Bryn saw in the corridor when Ithyris told him he was ruined. Naked. Desperate. Certain that what he feels is real and terrified that it won't be enough to make someone stay.
Bryn takes his face in his hands.
No scales. Just skin, human and vulnerable, and the prince leans into his touch the way a starving thing leans toward food, involuntary, helpless. Bryn holds his face and thinks about the man who put his hand on the small of his back and waited for permission and learned that Bryn didn't want flowers and brought books instead without a wounded word. The man who told Bryn he was everything and meant it with his whole body.
The man beneath the prince. The one who is enough.
Bryn thinks it with everything he has. Yes. You are enough without the scales and without the crown and without thecenturies. You are enough because you kneel on this floor and ask to be loved and the asking is the bravest thing I have ever seen. You are enough because you walked through my wreckage without flinching. You are enough because you chose patience when you could have chosen power and kindness when you could have chosen command and you chose me, and I am choosing you back.
The dream hears it. In this space, stripped of every barrier, his thoughts are as loud as shouting. The prince's eyes widen and his breath catches and the tears fall, two of them, sliding down his cheeks and over Bryn's thumbs, and the expression on his face is the specific, shattering wonder of a man who has just been answered after centuries of silence.
The chamber dissolves. The figures vanish. The walls recede. The crystal veins go dark. And then it is just them, kneeling on warm stone in the dark, face to face, Bryn's hands on the prince's cheeks, tears on his skin.
The dream lets go.
***
Bryn wakes with the prince's arms around him.
The real world returns in fragments. The warmth of the bed. The weight of the blankets. The bond between them, louder now, fuller, thrumming with something new and raw. Cedar and smoke and the salt of tears.
Ithyris's arms are locked around him, not the loose drape of sleep but the grip of a man holding something he is afraid to lose. His face is pressed against the back of Bryn's neck and his breathing is ragged and the wetness on Bryn's skin tells him the tears followed them out of the dream.
They don't move. They don't speak. They lie in the dark, breathing hard, tangled together, shattered. The bond pulses between them and it feels different, heavier, weighted with the mutual knowledge of each other's worst fears. Ithyris knows now that Bryn has spent his life in an empty hall. Bryn knows that the prince has spent his life asking a question that no one answers.
The same fear. Different shapes. Different halls. But the same wound at the center: that they are not enough. That the people around them stay for what they provide, not for who they are.
They have been afraid of the same thing and they have been afraid of it alone, and now they are afraid of it together, and Bryn doesn't know if that makes it better or worse. He thinks it makes it both.
The prince's voice, when it comes, is barely audible. Rough. Broken in places that Bryn didn't know the prince's voice could break.
"The hall."
Bryn's throat tightens. He doesn't turn around. He's not sure he can look at Ithyris right now without falling apart, and he has done enough falling apart in dreams tonight.
"You were so small," Ithyris says. The words come out uneven, scraped raw, pressed into the skin at the back of Bryn's neck. "In the dream. You were a child. And the glass was in your hands and you just kept cleaning. You didn't even stop to look at the cuts."
"I never did."
The prince's breathing hitches against him. His arm tightens across Bryn's stomach.
"How long?" Ithyris asks. "How long were you alone in that hall?"
