Castles in the Sky

Shy

Warning: Mature content
Also, implied historical abuse (NOT sexual).

~~

It was halfway to dawn by the time a duo of bedraggled, shivery figures slipped back into the palace, lips suspiciously swollen and eyes sheepish above.

"Staff! Naro-" - Mew's call for reinforcements hanging incomplete in the entrance hall's cloaked atmosphere, as a slender hand covered his mouth, Gulf's eyes glistening through charcoal darkness to say, coy:

"Don't call them - let's go alone...please?"

So it was only the two who entered the palace's bathing suite side by side by candlelight - a sunken, waist-depth, gilded, tiled pool that had been the pride of the old King's ornate, magpie nest splendour.

"It's...enchanting", the omega breathed, warm ripples of golden reflection dancing, projected, across almond eyes and smooth cheeks.

And, "Yes", King Solaris replied, though he wasn't looking at the bath...

Gaze lingering.

"But should I boil pans and kettles? The water must be frigid", younger unaware.

"No need, the place was designed with a hypocaust - the bath is continually heated by the walls and floor around. They're hollow, you see, filled with warm air rising from fires below"

The Queen reaching delicate fingers to drift across tiles beside, wondrous smile dimpling in delight at the comforting caress of heat.

And in that moment of unguarded sweetness, Mew found himself dissected directly through the heart as he was visited, all at once like a sudden, aching draft, by the rush of coldest ghosts of the recent past...

Images of the omega below him on his chamber bed as a new bride: Sound of soft sobs, face never turning, tears falling to the pillow beneath. Hands gripping bedsheets, whole body still and silent. Just there as inanimate object, there for him to use for 'the good of their kingdoms'. And he had.

Moments of unwordable anguish, in which all the groom could do was hate himself, entirely, to his very core.

There was a question he had to ask - he had to know.

Gesturing the omega gently to a standstill on the poolside, and there, behind him, holding both hands in his larger ones as he rested his forehead down against Ciel's nape.

Only the sound of steady drip-drips of water percussion upon ceramic, only the glints of gold shimmering across surfaces as pirouetting prisms.

And their breathing. In, out, in, out.

Until at last Mew spoke, voice haunted, quieted, by a sort of dread:

"Ciel, was I your first?"

Aware as the younger's body tensed beneath his touch.

"Yes, you were my first kiss"

And the King felt as if the ground beneath him could open to swallow him whole into molten, fiery depths, such was his agony.

First kiss...that night, just then on the cliff's ridge, had been his first kisses...so those months in which he had driven his cock, as unfeeling beast, into Ciel's tightness without a thought...he had been his first and only lover.

"Aaahhh", Mew's gritted, exhaled torment, as the omega spun to face him, instinctively pulling face to neck for soothing strokes of tuoksu - primal mates behaviour, although neither knew it yet then.

"Are you...crying, alpha?", the Queen tentatively stroking the silken hair of the larger frame he cradled, unsteadily.

The elder's head rising suddenly to face him, confront him, choked words tumbling, echoing like a cello's tremolo about the cavernous space: