Chapter Text
The Garden Boy
Akito Shinonome did not consider himself unlucky.
Not when his fingers were raw from scrubbing marble floors. Not when nobles sneered at the shine of his too-worn boots. Not even when he heard his father coughing into a rag spotted red and his mother whispering words like “not long” behind closed doors.
No, Akito didn’t think he was unlucky. Because in spite of everything, he had his family. He had Ena’s laughter (snide and sharp-edged as it was), and he had warm bread in the morning and sunlight in the palace gardens where he worked. Life was hard — but it was his. And it was real.
Unlike the Prince.
Aoyagi Touya was, in Akito’s humble (and unfiltered) opinion, a sad little bitch.
He’d never said that out loud, of course. Ena would’ve smacked him, and their mother would have sighed in that disappointed way that somehow hurt more than any actual scolding. But Akito had seen him — the ghost of Noctaris — floating silently through the halls like a shadow, wrapped in velvet and misery.
And then, one day, he tripped over him.
Literally.
Akito had been carrying fresh linens through the royal garden, too distracted by the daydream of smacking Tenma Tsukasa (one of the more insufferable royal brats) with a pillowcase, when his foot caught something soft and heavy beneath a tree.
“Ow— Hey, watch where you’re—” he started, blinking down. Only to freeze.
There, sprawled ungracefully on the grass, was Prince Toya. The prince’s long, navy cloak was tangled with grass. His black-gloved hand covered his eyes like the light itself was unbearable. He looked up at Akito like he’d just been roused from death itself.
And then, for the first time Akito could remember, the prince actually spoke to him. “...Are you real?” Akito blinked.
“…Dude, you hit your head or something?” Toya stared. His eyes were the same pale blue as frost on stone.
“…I don’t think so,” he said quietly. “But I wish I had.”
Later, Akito would pretend that was not the moment he got involved. But it was. Of course it was. Because the next day, Prince Toya came back. Same tree. Same cloak. Same brooding expression like he’d been carved out of melancholy and glass.
And then the day after that.
And the day after that.
Always when the garden was quiet. Always in the late afternoon, when the sun dipped low and the shadows stretched long over the palace walls.
He never ordered Akito around like the others. Never sneered or gave him that look — the one that said you are nothing but dirt beneath my boots. Instead, Touya would just sit under the willow tree and… watch.
It was deeply unsettling.
Akito, naturally, responded the way anyone would when being silently stared at by a royal weirdo.
“Okay, no offense, Your Highness,” he said on the fourth day, while yanking weeds from a flowerbed, “but you’re giving me ‘sad ghost haunting the garden’ energy, and it’s getting kinda creepy.”
Toya blinked slowly. Like a cat that had just been spritzed with water.
“…I apologize.”
“…That was sarcasm.”
“I see.”
He didn’t move.
Akito groaned and flopped backward into the grass, the sun beating down on his sweat-damp tunic.
“Don’t you have prince stuff to do?” he muttered. “Balls to attend, nobles to tolerate, tyranny to inherit?”
That earned the tiniest twitch of Toya’s mouth.
A laugh? A smirk? Akito couldn’t tell. But something softened. Almost imperceptible — like watching snow melt on a marble statue.
“…I find this preferable,” Toya said at last. “To pretending.”
Akito glanced at him. There was something strange in his tone. Not bored. Not annoyed. But tired.
Like he was centuries old and barely holding himself together.
Akito frowned. “Pretending what?”
Toya looked away.
Akito expected him to stay silent — as he usually did. But instead, the prince said:
“That I am someone my father can accept.”
The words hit like a punch to the gut.
Akito sat up.
“…Shit.” It wasn’t elegant. But it was honest.
Toya gave a faint, joyless smile. “Indeed.”
The garden was quiet. Birds sang. The wind rustled the branches. And in the middle of all of it, the crown prince of Noctaris sat with his knees drawn to his chest, looking like a kicked dog.
Akito lay back down.
“…Okay,” he said finally. “Then I guess we’re both stuck pretending.”
Toya tilted his head. “You don’t seem like you’re pretending.”
Akito laughed — sharp, bitter. “That’s the point. I pretend so hard I believe it myself.”
They didn’t speak again after that.
But Toya was there the next day.
And the day after that.
And for the first time in his life, Akito began to wonder if being noticed by a prince might be more dangerous than being ignored by one.