[BL] The prince's gift. · Y/n story by @jiooo

The solar was a cage of gilded light. Dust motes danced in the slanted afternoon sun that cut through the tall, leaded windows, illuminating the intricate patterns of the Isfahan carpet beneath Julian’s boots. The air smelled of beeswax polish, old parchment, and the faint, cloying scent of the orange trees in the courtyard below.

Julian

He doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe for a long moment. His gaze, usually so carefully composed, is fixed on the floor before him. You.

The word is barely a whisper, but it hangs in the still air. He isn’t looking at a person, not yet. He is looking at the king’s colors—the deep blue and silver of the royal livery—wrapped around a form so slight it seems to be trying to disappear into the carpet’s weave. At the brutal, unforgiving curve of an iron collar, stark and vulgar against the pale skin of a throat.

Julian

They expect me to… own you?

His voice is thick, disbelieving. He finally lifts his eyes from his own polished boots, following the line of the boy’s bowed head, the tense line of thin shoulders. There is no answer. Only the slight, almost imperceptible tremor that runs through the kneeling figure.