SandersSides Oneshots

Fake Smiles and False Confidence

Waddup my good dudes before we start just know ilysm <3 

Okie! So this was written for my friend Bells' birthday (and i was like 3 days late posting it omg) but its angst again. I'm actually like.. really proud of this one and I don't even know why, its probably not my best, but it was fun and I worked hard on it. It was written as platonic but you could ship towards the end if you squint I guess! Hope you like it :)

(Real talk though guys, why is there not more Prince angst?? I need more lol. I love my boy and I love him being angsty)

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"El príncipe es estúpido." Prince is stupid.

That one... that one stung. Not because he was being called stupid, no, Roman had heard that many times, and he knew it was true, so there was no point in getting offended about what he was being called. It was that Logic had said it in Spanish.

That was Roman's thing, the one thing he could do that the others couldn't, the one thing he knew that not even Logan did. He'd always been able to speak Spanish, it was his little ability, but now Logan had to come along and learned it purely to insult him, as if Prince wasn't hurt enough in English. His one special thing had been stolen, taken from him, used as a weapon against him to hurt him, and he knew that Logic would keep going and keep learning and keep insulting him with a new Spanish word every time because that was who he was. Unlike Prince, he was intelligent. Logan liked to learn, and soon he'd know almost as much as Roman, and Prince wouldn't have anything special for himself anymore. No more private conversations that nobody could understand, no more having something close to his heart just for himself. In any other case, he wouldn't mind if one of the other sides learnt Spanish, except it had been learnt purely to hurt him, to insult him, to belittle him. And that was was stung the most.

****

Prince always brought up self love and saving himself because he knew he didn't. Roman didn't love himself, he hated himself, and he wanted to change that but he didn't know how. His quest to save himself, to love himself, was taking so long and it wasn't working at all, no matter how many fake smiles he shone and how much false confidence he oozed. It was all pretend, a mask to hide that on the inside he was hurting and didn't know how to cope, it was to cover up that he hated looking into the mirror and he had no faith in his own abilities and he wasn't confident or full of self-love, he just acted like that. To hide. Because acting was the one thing he knew how to do. Acting was the one thing he could accomplish well, was the one thing he could do right. His acting was convincing. They all believed it.

****

"Even Prince knew that."

Logic scorned at Morality. Roman, who was busy taking selfies, heard it clearly.

"Yeah, even I knew that." He agreed, the camera on his phone going off. There was no point in protesting the statement, it was true. Roman didn't have a very high intelligence level. In fact, he was stupid. It'd been said before and it would be said again, because it was a fact; if Princey knew something you didn't then you had to be clueless. Because Roman was dumb, an idiot, not smart enough to do anything right. He kept posing for the camera, brushing the words off, hiding the hurt they inflicted behind a good angle and a coy smile. Prince could deny the words stung until his last breath, could brush them off as a fact and say that it didn't matter, that it didn't affect him, but deep down he knew that was a lie. Every time he was insulted, be it his intelligence, his place in the group, the skills and assets he brought to the table, his abilities, the black hole of pain inside him grew a little larger, hurt a little more. Sometimes, on a bad day, he thought back about the things that had been said about him and it felt like his chest was tearing open, caving him, like a hole was opening up inside him. But he smiled, he joked, he acted happy and confident and narcissistic and everybody believed him, nobody looked any closer.