Chapter 9 #2
He scrubs his skin until it's pink and stinging, his arms and his chest and his stomach and between his legs where he can still feel Ithyris, still feel the stretched, used ache of his body and the slickness that isn't just water.
He washes his short hair and his neck and the places where the prince's mouth left marks, dark bruises blooming along his throat and collarbone in the shape of the prince's lips and teeth, and he presses his fingers against them and they hurt and the hurt is satisfying in a bleak, punishing way that he recognizes as unhealthy and doesn't stop.
But he can't erase it.
He can't scrub away the feeling of being wanted.
It has settled into his skin and his muscles and his bones, deeper than the surface, deeper than the bruises, woven into the tissue the way the thermal rivers are woven into the volcanic stone of this palace, and no amount of hot water and rough cloth will remove it.
His body remembers the prince's hands. His body remembers the weight of Ithyris above him and the stretch of the prince inside him and the sounds Ithyris made and the way the prince said his name and the eleven seconds where the world was warm and still and he was wanted, and he sinks deeper into the water and presses his face against his drawn-up knees and breathes and tries not to think about any of it.
He fails. He fails completely and comprehensively, because his body is a traitor and his mind is worse and together they replay every moment of the forest clearing with a fidelity that is cruel.
The knock comes while he's still in the water.
He knows who it is. His body knows before his brain does, the back of his neck warming, his pulse spiking, every nerve ending that the prince woke in that forest lighting up in recognition, and the involuntary nature of the response makes him want to drown himself in the thermal pool, which would be dramatic but is increasingly appealing.
He sits in the bath and stares at the door and wills the prince to go away.
Ithyris knocks again.
Bryn gets out of the water. It takes effort.
His muscles have stiffened in the heat and his body protests the loss of warmth and the soreness between his legs flares fresh as he stands, a sharp reminder that travels up his spine.
He pulls a robe from the hook on the wall, the heavy Drekian kind that drowns him in fabric and is designed for someone a foot taller and significantly broader, and wraps it around himself and belts it at the waist and it's still gaping at the chest because his chest is not the chest it was designed for.
Nothing in this palace is designed for him.
The clothes, the furniture, the robe, the expectations. Everything is too large.
He is dripping. His hair is wet and plastered to his neck and his skin is flushed pink from the scrubbing and the heat of the bath and the robe is slipping off one shoulder because the shoulder it was cut for is twice the width of his. He opens the door.
Ithyris stands in the corridor.
He's dressed again, his hair still windswept from the flight, and his eyes drop to Bryn and the look that crosses his face is so many things at once that Bryn can't catalog them all.
Relief that Bryn opened the door. Worry at whatever he reads in Bryn's expression.
Pain at the redness around Bryn's eyes. And want, always want, his gaze catching on the wet hair at Bryn's neck and the bare collarbone where the robe has slipped and the flush on his skin that could be from the bath or from the crying or from both, and the prince's jaw tightens and his hands curl at his sides and he pulls his gaze back to Bryn's face with visible, considerable effort.
Bryn flinches. It's involuntary, a full-body recoil that he can't control and can't hide, because the want in the prince's eyes is the thing that broke him in the clearing.
It is the evidence that he interpreted as proof of his own inadequacy, and seeing it again, here, in the corridor, while he's standing in a wet robe with his eyes swollen from crying, is more than he can absorb.
He tries to close the door.
Ithyris catches it. His hand flat against the wood, holding it open with an ease that reminds Bryn of the fundamental physical disparity between them, and his strength means Bryn can't push it shut no matter how hard he tries.
The prince doesn't push it open further.
He just holds it where it is and looks at Bryn through the gap, and his expression is patient and pained and steady.
"I cannot leave you upset," he says. His voice is quiet and strained and stripped of the authority it usually carries.
"I can't, Bryn. I can feel it through the bond, the distress, and I cannot rest with the thought that I've done something to hurt you.
I will stand in this corridor all night if I have to, but I would prefer to understand what happened. "
Bryn stares at him through the gap in the door. Water drips from his hair onto the stone floor. The robe is sliding further off his shoulder and he doesn't have a free hand to fix it because both of his are on the door, pushing uselessly against a strength that doesn't even register his effort.
"You didn't hurt me," he says.
"Then what happened?"
He presses his forehead against the edge of the door and closes his eyes.
He should send the prince away. He should tell him he's fine and close the door and lie in his too-large bed and feel sorry for himself in private, the way he's always done, the way he did in Everen when the numbers didn't work and the grain was running out and there was no one to tell because telling someone would mean admitting he couldn't handle it alone.
But the bond, the thing Ithyris told him about in the library, the thing he didn't fully believe in, is doing something to him that he can't explain and can't ignore.
He can feel the prince's worry. Not as a thought, not as words, but as a pressure in his chest, a second pulse of distress layered over his own, and it's Ithyris's.
The prince is standing in the corridor hurting because Bryn is hurting and the feedback loop of it, the shared pain, the knowledge that his distress is causing the prince distress, dismantles the last of his resistance because Bryn can endure his own suffering but he has never been able to endure causing it in someone else.
It's why he held the kingdom together. It's why he took Mithri's place.
It's why he's letting go of the door now.
He lets go of the door.
Ithyris enters the suite slowly, as though moving through a space that contains something fragile, and closes the door behind him with a care that makes no sound.
Bryn has retreated to the center of the room, arms crossed over his chest, holding the robe closed with both hands, dripping on the stone floor.
The prince doesn't approach. He stops by the door and waits, giving Bryn the full width of the room, and the patience of it is the same patience he has shown Bryn from the beginning and it makes Bryn's eyes sting again.
"It's not your fault," Bryn says.
"Tell me anyway."
He looks at the floor. The water pooling at his bare feet. The hem of the robe dragging on the stone, absorbing the puddle. His toes, pale and pruned from the bath.
"You weren't satisfied."
Silence.
"After. You were still... you were still hard.
I wasn't enough. My body wasn't enough to satisfy you and I don't know what good I am as a mate if I can't even provide that, if the one thing I should be able to give you isn't sufficient, and I know what that makes me and I know what Syreth would say and I can't..." He stops.
His voice has gone rough and small and he clamps his mouth shut because the sentence was heading somewhere he can't go, somewhere that involves the word worthless, and he is not saying that word out loud in front of the prince.
He has some dignity left. Not much, but some.
The silence stretches. One second. Two. Three. Four.
Then Ithyris crosses the room and takes Bryn's face in his hands.
Bryn jolts. The prince's palms are warm and large, cradling his jaw, and he tilts Bryn's face up and Bryn is forced to look at him and the expression on Ithyris's face is something Bryn doesn't have a word for.
Not pity, because pity would make Bryn close down and the prince seems to know that instinctively.
Not amusement, because there is nothing amusing about the boy standing in front of him.
Something broken and fierce and so tender it hurts to look at, something that says I see what you've done to yourself and I am going to undo it, and the determination in it is so absolute that Bryn's breath catches.
"Bryn." The prince's thumbs brush his cheekbones, slow and warm.
"Listen to me. You are worth everything to me.
Everything. Regardless of whether we have sex.
Regardless of whether you ever let me touch you again.
I would rather be beside you and never lay a hand on you than be without you. Do you understand me?"
Bryn's eyes burn. He clenches his jaw against it. He is not going to cry again. He has already cried today, on the trail, with the dragon circling above him, and that was more crying than he's done in the past three years combined and he is finished.
"That said." The prince's voice drops. His thumbs keep moving, slow and gentle, tracing the line of Bryn's cheekbones with a tenderness that is at complete odds with the intensity in his eyes. "You are wrong."
"I saw..."