Beneath the Same Sky

I have always lived beneath someone else's sun-my brother's, my family's, the expectations that stretch endlessly above me like a sky I can never reach. Shawn Arthur Bernardo-the second son, the afterthought, the one destined to live in another's shadow. No matter how hard I try, the sky never belongs to me.

And then there's him. Augustus Sol Zamora. The golden heir, the brightest star, the one who has never had to fight for his place in the heavens. He was born to rule, to shine effortlessly in a world that has only ever demanded perfection from him. And yet, when I look at him, I see something else-cracks in the sky, fractures in his carefully controlled world.

I should despise him. I should see him as my rival. But instead, I find myself drawn to him like the tide to the moon, like a storm aching for the calm. Augustus is the sky I have spent my life reaching for, but I was never meant to touch the sun.

Because love like this does not belong under the open sky. It belongs in the quiet, in the hidden, in the spaces where no one else dares to look. It is a love we can never claim, a love that exists only beneath the fractured sky we both long to escape.