𝐕𝐈𝐎𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐃𝐄𝐋𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐒 | 𝐛𝐚𝐤𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐤𝐮 | ✓

Finale

A story may be told throughout generations, sung to children in the rhythm of nonsensical lullabies, or whispered and altered by gossiping wives; written on parchment to be forgotten, or read late into the night by those hiding with a torch under the covers.

How will they tell our story? I wonder. A king and his loyal servant tangled in a romance-riddled power play? Star-crossed lovers who's secrecy was the bane of their existence? Or will we be forgotten, reduced to little more than an unmemorable scrap of history, a fleeting event of the past that meant nothing to anyone except the two involved?

Settling back into life in the palace is not the familiar glove-like fit of routine that I would have expected – instead it is almost strange to be back. Because now, with the former king dead, and Deku crowned, what else is there to do? Of course, there are royal duties that I must accompany him to, but there is no longer that ever-present thrill that came with plotting an assassination, the rush of secrecy.

Our alliance with Uravity grows stronger, they remain loyal to the Midoriyan bloodline, and it seems that both parties have begun to trust each other.

Or I so blindly hoped.

It's almost funny, I think, how the very thing that brought about the bitter end was right under our noses the entire time. We were just too foolish to recognise it.

The winter has given way to spring, and with it it brings unfurling green leaves and budding flowers poking up from the garden beds as the snow melts away into nothing but slushy puddles. And rain, rain so incessant in its downpour that it would put Noah's flood to shame. Glancing out a window of the castle reveals only a watercolor blur of smudged greenery, the scenery obscured by raindrops decorating the windowpane, like stained glass.

It is one rainy night – a night like any other that spring (looking back, no one could have predicted the course that fate had charted on such an ordinary night, until it was much too late) – that Deku holds a banquet at the palace. Invitations are sent to all the nobility of the land and the surrounding isles, showing off his hospitality. Jesters and skilled musicians are hired, exotic food of all cultures and a palette of flavours is flown in, the finest silver and china is ordered. A grand event, indeed.

I have just finished dressing when Deku comes to my bedroom in fine robes, a crown perched atop his head impeccably. It is still strange to see him wearing a crown – not the Blood Crown, of course, since he broke that in two halves on his coronation – and it makes me almost wary of him at times, as if at any moment he could turn away from being my lover and into a cruel ruler like his father.

Sometimes, I think I catch glimpses of the man he could be if things had gone differently that day, almost a year ago, when he approached me and demanded I help him assassinate the former king. If he had endured his father's vicious abuse for another few years, if he had succeeded the throne later... if he had not met me, should I dare be so presumptuous to suggest, I fear he may have become hardened and stone cold, may have completely lost that ray of sunshine and goodness that is buried somewhere deep in his heart to the shadows that come bound to royalty.