Viva La Vida

Part One: Pillars of Salt and Pillars of Sand

"He's too young," the man who has his hands on Liam's shoulders says, "I can't take a boy in cold blood like this."

"They're going to find us any minute now; if we haven't gotten a message yet they must have failed. Either we take him, or all of this—and their deaths—was for nothing."

Liam doesn't even dare to breathe. The second man—the one who isn't touching him—lets out an impatient breath.

"Don't tell me you're going soft on me, Yaser."

"I'm not," the man named Yaser says stubbornly. "But he's the age of my boy, if that. I can't take him like this in cold blood."

"You know that Emory and Natasha are probably dead, right? So this mission was in vain and they died for nothing?"

"We don't know if they're dead," Yaser says quietly. "And I will not let their deaths stand for the kidnapping of a child. We're leaving him, Irving."

The man named Irving lets out a disgusted noise. "Let's go, then." He shoves past Liam, knocking Yaser's hand off his shoulder. "Move it, boy."

Yaser turns and follows him, and then pauses for a moment at the door, looking back at Liam, who's huddled shivering in the corner of his room. "I'm sorry, son," he says finally.

There are the shouts of guards coming down the hall, and Yaser takes off running, gunshots following him down the corridor. Liam wonders, in a fear-thawed part of his brain, whether he'll make it out alive.

He will never see Yaser again.

***

Liam wakes up jittery, annoyed, and unable to fall back asleep. It's been the third time this week that he's had the dream—startling in its clarity for a vision that has no basis in reality—and he's more than sick of it. There's something about the helplessness of it that bothers him; he doesn't like even the imagined feeling of being at the mercy of others.

Even though he's sure that Harry's already up, or that the guards would let him into the gym even at the early hour, he doesn't get up and get on with his day, instead choosing to lie in bed and enjoy a rare moment of utter quiet. Liam's usually an early riser who doesn't like to waste a moment of the day, but there's something about the dream that always drains him, like the terror he feels when he's asleep takes away from his waking energy.

He has to admit that it's an oddly specific recurring dream—it's always set in the blurry, grief-stricken weeks after his family's death, always laced with the anticipation of whether or not the men will take him, always showing the same argument between the same men, Irving and Yaser. Liam would swear it was a memory if anyone he ever talked to had any recollection of a palace invasion in recent history, but no one does.

It's still a disturbing nightmare.

He gets out of bed and rings the bell for a servant to bring breakfast, resolving to eat and have a quick workout before he goes to the throne room for the day—there's no use in lingering on dreams longer than they last, as his uncle Simon says, and in any case court duty will be a hell of a lot more exhausting than anything some dream could cause.

Ready 4 gym? U better come w me before u go do king things, Harry's text reads when he checks his phone.

Liam grins and types out a swift reply as he gets dressed and thanks the servant for breakfast. It's not his fault that he's being groomed to be the king, and so has to sit in on one full day of royal court hearings once a week, but that doesn't mean that Harry doesn't hate the hours he has to spend alone when Liam's occupied.