[He waggles his eyebrows in a way that's already comical for people with normal eyes, but looks downright farcical for someone with mismatched ones, like his. Like a circus act. Entirely as it's supposed to look. For all his brooding persona, Kell prizes himself for always being able to make Rhy laugh. He can make Wilhelm laugh too. Now that Wille managed to do his act on him first.]
What kind of delinquents would it make of us if we required a permission?
[At least he's decent enough not to talk with his mouth full as he gorges half of his cake in one bite.]
[He shoves at Kell's shoulder, shaking his head but laughing anyway. Stop, he's trying to eat without spraying crumbs everywhere. Wilhelm has wondered on several occasions why Kell's eye is all black like that, but it's not the sort of thing you can approach politely, so he has contented himself with the conclusion that it must have something to do with magic. Right now, it's more funny than strange.]
I refuse to believe that you're the responsible one.
[He takes another bite. The best strategy is to finish in as few bites as possible in order to minimize the mess.]
[Kell regrets his greediness the moment Wilhelm shoves at his shoulder. Inhales what he shouldn't and part laughs part cries through a coughing fit. Ends up doubling down in fit of giggles, wiping tears from his eyes as he tries to keep the rest of his cake away from the ground. He wheezes, finally being able to regain his breathing and some semblance of dignity. Enough at least to respond.]
Believe what you will. I really am.
[Kell's smile turns from mischievous to genuine, almost wistful. He'd been so angry at Rhy so often, and yet looking through his memories now, he misses those moments. Those were the good times. When they still were able to get into trouble and cause no more damage than a broken window, a couple of broken chairs and a few broken bones. Bad dog. Rhy called him once when he'd just tipped the chair under a drunkard who spoke ill of the heir to the throne, blissfully unaware said heir and his brother are there, listening.]
Mostly. The things he got us into were usually his ideas.
[Key word: usually. He can't, in good faith, pin it all on Rhy.]
[When that coughing fit seizes Kell, Wilhelm leans over to clap a hand to his back and try to help him through it. Easy, man. He continues chomping on his piece of cake, but all of his focus stays on Kell. Though he can't know what's passing through his head at this moment, he can guess that it's a reel of memories with his brother. The kind of memories you want to take down from the shelf and replay over and over again. Rhy is here, of course, but that doesn't make those times less golden.
It just makes Kell very lucky, that he can make new memories with his brother too.
Wilhelm doesn't want to dwell on that, or the fact that he's coming up on a year here, which also means that he's coming up on a year without Erik. It doesn't seem real. He covers up the shadow that crosses his face with a smile.]
Yeah, like what?
[With that, he finishes the cheesecake. All that's left is the crumbs all over his fingers.]
"Like sneaking out from the castle to see how it feels to walk around the city without all the guards watching over your every step. Drink, flirt, get into fights. Stupid things like that. Rhy would invent the most outrageous of disguises for us, but we always got caught or recognized anyway."
Kell smiles. He snaps his fingers. It turns his usual black coat into a ripped and dirty jacket stained with soil and soot, darkens and weathers his pants and boots. A poor man's clothes. The thing underneath doesn't change. It's just an illusion, a little trick or air and light.
"Because Rhy wouldn't get caught dead wearing something like this. Never would have sacrificed looking good for believability, and always insisted on keeping all his jewellery."
Kell lets out a sigh, a call out to those many times when he tried - and failed spectacularly each time - to convince Rhy to be a little less conspicuous.
"No matter how many times I told him, he'd look as beautiful in more modest clothing, and will be a lot safer looking less obviously wealthy, he never listened. He loved coming up with all those ridiculous disguises. We did get robbed a couple of times, threatened and beaten. It didn't change his mind. I think he liked the risk element involved. Knowing I would never let him get seriously hurt."
Because that was the truth. Even when they were children, Rhy could test the limits of how far Kell would let him push, but he knew he'd never be in any serious danger. Kell could get annoyed, he'd complain all the way, but as soon as he decided things go in the wrong direction, he intervened. Most of the time, all he had to do is reveal who he really was. And watch grown up men flee with a genuine dread in their eyes from one spoiled princeling and one feral creature that protected him. It took Kell time, and no small amount of chastising from Tieren, to stop going all out with his magic in those moments. This part was always his fun part in their illicit outings. He liked the feeling of power. He liked seeing adults fear him. Same adults that would otherwise laugh at him and mistreat him because he looked different from basically everyone in the city. Scrawny, pale and foreign. Tieren had really tough job convincing him to reign his impulses in, but even the guards knew Rhy is safer with him than he'd ever be with them.
Kell snaps his fingers once again to make the illusion dissolve and he's back in his regular Thornean clothes.
He shakes his head as Kell pokes fun at Rhy's preoccupation with his looks, but he's grinning too. That definitely sounds like Rhy. And Kell is right — he could probably pull off anything. Robbed, and threatened, and beaten have his eyebrows raising. But he gets it. The freedom of being a nobody for the night, of trying on a normal life, is worth the cost of a black eye.
So even Rhy, who takes his duty so seriously, who would not lay down that weight willingly, feels that way sometimes.
"I would've been right there with you." Flipping his hair back, he affects a look of innocence that is highly suspect. "Can you believe that I've been thrown out of a club for getting in a fight before?"
Not his finest moment. His mother had been steel forged in fury. His father, quietly and distantly disappointed. The tabloids had pounced on his fuck up and inflated it into a whole narrative of an out-of-control prince addicted to partying. Enough time has passed now, though, that he can squash it down into a funny anecdote.
It was always an attempt to break out of the corset of expectations, a shot at pretending they are not who they are, to maybe try on a life that does not carry this weight. In hindsight, Kell is happy they weren't going for a more convincing disguise. It would have been unfair.
"I bet you would, and I would have dragged both of your asses out of anything that would look too dicey, no matter the complaining."
Kell raises an eyebrow in open disbelief to Wilhelm's innocence act, but then follows along clutching his chest with a mock gasp.
"You? No way."
He's also absolutely awful at keeping a straight face so can't hold it for too long and just bursts into laughter bare minutes later.
"Of course I do. That's just the thing I'd imagine you getting caught at."
It's also something he often intervened at when Rhy got in trouble. It's eerie how Wille reminds him of Rhy at the most unexpected moments.
He's only a little offended that Kell agrees, without even one speck of incredulity, that it sounds like just the sort of disaster Wilhelm would be found at the epicenter of. He can't really blame him. Kell has experienced some of his other not-so-finest moments firsthand. He shrugs.
"This other guy was pissing me off." He appeals to Kell with a gesture. "You know what it's like to be recognized everywhere you go. It's annoying. People don't treat you like a person, they treat you like..."
Tilting his head from shoulder to shoulder, he searches for the right words.
"Like you're a, a publicly owned good or something. This guy kept getting in my space, putting his hands on me, acting like he knew me and all of that, so I lost it."
Kell was just about to say that getting into fights in bars is a time honored tradition for all princes. Nothing gets the stress out of your system like a good bar brawl. No amount of sparring with the guards could compare.
Wilhelm's reaction turns him serious in an instant. He knows the feeling all too well. Even a year after anything similar could happen to him or Rhy, he still gets the chills at the memory.
"A spectacle. An object. An achievement to score."
He looks Wilhelm straight into eye. There's a set to his jaw that tells of countless times of withheld fury. The bones he did not break, the hearts he did not rip, and all those that he did.
"You were right to react."
Kell shakes his head slowly. He's actually mad at Wilhelm's parents. They should have protected him from such situations. Not blame him for trying to protect himself where they failed. They should have stood behind him, teach him how to deal with it himself or have someone who would do this for him. Kell trained from his earliest age to be someone like this for Rhy.
"I've broken quite a few arms, shins and fingers, on people who tried to touch Rhy inappropriately. You should have had someone like me. It's wrong that you didn't. Nobody has the right to touch you if you don't allow it or how you don't allow it. Whoever doesn't understand such a simple rule, just forfeited the right to keep their bones intact."
Kell says all this in a calm and serious tone. Like it's the most obvious thing in the word. Because it is. It should be. He dragged Wilhelm to have fun and relax, but this is too important topic to just let it slide.
"Would you like to learn how to disarm someone that makes them look not dangerous but stupid? So they won't ever try touching you again in fear you'd make a laughing stock of them again?"
Gossip and ridicule are excellent weapons when you know how to wield them.
It feels good, to have someone else validate the anger everyone else says you should keep punched down small. He thinks again of Erik, who was always in his corner, even when he was wrong. Plucking a blade of grass, he twists it in his fingers.
"Mom and dad weren't so impressed..."
They definitely hadn't thought that he handled it the right way. He wasn't supposed to be out partying at clubs anyway. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong company, wrong son. Sometimes Wilhelm misses them anyway, but he loves his freedom better. Despite everything, he thinks of what he has here as freedom.
Kell scoffs, waving his hand dismissively. Seriously, he can't understand why this was such a big deal. If anything, they should be happy their heir is able to stand his ground.
"And they should have been. You weren't causing an international incident. You punched a guy who was getting handsy. Maybe you shouldn't have been there at all, but you were. And you dealt with a situation the best you were able to. I do wonder if they would have you politely apologize if this was a foreign assassin trying to take you down, and not a guy being too friendly."
Kell grins. This is his second set of skills. He's an Antari first, but he was trained to be the heir to the throne and future king's protector. He hated the context, the way he was basically raised to do it, but he never hated the role itself. Nor the skills that he learned with it.
"I'll give the worst, but also the right answer, only because you're smart. It depends." And before Wilhelm rolls his eyes at him for such an obvious non-answer, he continues. "Let's say you're dealing with an average bully. Not really a bandit, or anyone even remotely trained. There are few things more humiliating than getting dragged down by your ear. Most people have spatial awareness of what's going on with their body concentrated in front of them. A lot less with the sides. So it's easier to grab them from the side. Especially, if you're looking straight at them. If they're trying to intimidate you, they wouldn't want to be the one to look away first. So you can use this to your advantage. Work wonders on people with earrings."
Those were the first and the most obvious things that came to his mind, but Kell wonders if Wilhelm was ever even taught how to protect himself. Or allowed to fight dirty.
"I could teach you a few more tricks if you like."
"I headbutted him," Wilhelm corrects. Looking back, it's kind of funny that that was his first instinct. What the fuck was he thinking?
He only learned how to defend himself when Kyle offered to teach him here. He feels good about the progress that he's made since then, though he's always fighting off the feeling that it's never enough. That brawl in the night club would go very differently, he thinks, if he could get a rematch now. He wouldn't be leaving with a shiner this time.
Though he's received formal training for some months now, he's interested in the alternative perspective Kell has to offer, tips and tricks picked up in bars and back alleys. Especially in the shadow of their ordeal in the pit, he'll take anything that could bolster his meager arsenal. So he listens, and he absorbs, and he grabs for more.
How did he miss such an important piece of information before?! Who would have thought that a timid princeling like Wilhelm has can be so viciously fierce to headbutt a guy. Kell sincerely hopes the creep lost a tooth or two.
"Wille, you rascal! This is brilliant!" he laughs. He wishes he could have seen this. The look on the other guy's face must have been priceless. "Well, well, so you do have some fire in you after all."
"Why the hell indeed," Kell replies with a wicked grin. "I think you are going to do just fine, just keep that attitude."
Like it or not, Kell just put himself in charge of making sure that whenever some moron as much as looks at Wilhelm funny, they'd have reasons to regret their lack of manners. Kell has no reservations against imparting the knowledge acquired during his illicit escapades on Wilhelm. If only that means that the younger prince feels a bit more secure, a bit more confident about himself, it's already worth it. But Kell has a more selfish reason for helping. Whatever boosts Wilhelm's confidence will, eventually, help him better control his magic too. It makes all the sense now that Wilhelm's chosen element is fire. He has so much of it, and yet it is so deeply buried and restricted, that no wonder it explodes whenever it finds a crack.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
[He waggles his eyebrows in a way that's already comical for people with normal eyes, but looks downright farcical for someone with mismatched ones, like his. Like a circus act. Entirely as it's supposed to look. For all his brooding persona, Kell prizes himself for always being able to make Rhy laugh. He can make Wilhelm laugh too. Now that Wille managed to do his act on him first.]
What kind of delinquents would it make of us if we required a permission?
[At least he's decent enough not to talk with his mouth full as he gorges half of his cake in one bite.]
no subject
I refuse to believe that you're the responsible one.
[He takes another bite. The best strategy is to finish in as few bites as possible in order to minimize the mess.]
Does that mean Rhy was the troublemaker?
no subject
Believe what you will. I really am.
[Kell's smile turns from mischievous to genuine, almost wistful. He'd been so angry at Rhy so often, and yet looking through his memories now, he misses those moments. Those were the good times. When they still were able to get into trouble and cause no more damage than a broken window, a couple of broken chairs and a few broken bones.
Bad dog. Rhy called him once when he'd just tipped the chair under a drunkard who spoke ill of the heir to the throne, blissfully unaware said heir and his brother are there, listening.]
Mostly. The things he got us into were usually his ideas.
[Key word: usually. He can't, in good faith, pin it all on Rhy.]
no subject
It just makes Kell very lucky, that he can make new memories with his brother too.
Wilhelm doesn't want to dwell on that, or the fact that he's coming up on a year here, which also means that he's coming up on a year without Erik. It doesn't seem real. He covers up the shadow that crosses his face with a smile.]
Yeah, like what?
[With that, he finishes the cheesecake. All that's left is the crumbs all over his fingers.]
no subject
Kell smiles. He snaps his fingers. It turns his usual black coat into a ripped and dirty jacket stained with soil and soot, darkens and weathers his pants and boots. A poor man's clothes. The thing underneath doesn't change. It's just an illusion, a little trick or air and light.
"Because Rhy wouldn't get caught dead wearing something like this. Never would have sacrificed looking good for believability, and always insisted on keeping all his jewellery."
Kell lets out a sigh, a call out to those many times when he tried - and failed spectacularly each time - to convince Rhy to be a little less conspicuous.
"No matter how many times I told him, he'd look as beautiful in more modest clothing, and will be a lot safer looking less obviously wealthy, he never listened. He loved coming up with all those ridiculous disguises. We did get robbed a couple of times, threatened and beaten. It didn't change his mind. I think he liked the risk element involved. Knowing I would never let him get seriously hurt."
Because that was the truth. Even when they were children, Rhy could test the limits of how far Kell would let him push, but he knew he'd never be in any serious danger. Kell could get annoyed, he'd complain all the way, but as soon as he decided things go in the wrong direction, he intervened. Most of the time, all he had to do is reveal who he really was. And watch grown up men flee with a genuine dread in their eyes from one spoiled princeling and one feral creature that protected him. It took Kell time, and no small amount of chastising from Tieren, to stop going all out with his magic in those moments. This part was always his fun part in their illicit outings. He liked the feeling of power. He liked seeing adults fear him. Same adults that would otherwise laugh at him and mistreat him because he looked different from basically everyone in the city. Scrawny, pale and foreign. Tieren had really tough job convincing him to reign his impulses in, but even the guards knew Rhy is safer with him than he'd ever be with them.
Kell snaps his fingers once again to make the illusion dissolve and he's back in his regular Thornean clothes.
"We got in trouble a lot."
no subject
So even Rhy, who takes his duty so seriously, who would not lay down that weight willingly, feels that way sometimes.
"I would've been right there with you." Flipping his hair back, he affects a look of innocence that is highly suspect. "Can you believe that I've been thrown out of a club for getting in a fight before?"
Not his finest moment. His mother had been steel forged in fury. His father, quietly and distantly disappointed. The tabloids had pounced on his fuck up and inflated it into a whole narrative of an out-of-control prince addicted to partying. Enough time has passed now, though, that he can squash it down into a funny anecdote.
no subject
"I bet you would, and I would have dragged both of your asses out of anything that would look too dicey, no matter the complaining."
Kell raises an eyebrow in open disbelief to Wilhelm's innocence act, but then follows along clutching his chest with a mock gasp.
"You? No way."
He's also absolutely awful at keeping a straight face so can't hold it for too long and just bursts into laughter bare minutes later.
"Of course I do. That's just the thing I'd imagine you getting caught at."
It's also something he often intervened at when Rhy got in trouble. It's eerie how Wille reminds him of Rhy at the most unexpected moments.
"What was it about?"
no subject
"This other guy was pissing me off." He appeals to Kell with a gesture. "You know what it's like to be recognized everywhere you go. It's annoying. People don't treat you like a person, they treat you like..."
Tilting his head from shoulder to shoulder, he searches for the right words.
"Like you're a, a publicly owned good or something. This guy kept getting in my space, putting his hands on me, acting like he knew me and all of that, so I lost it."
no subject
Wilhelm's reaction turns him serious in an instant. He knows the feeling all too well. Even a year after anything similar could happen to him or Rhy, he still gets the chills at the memory.
"A spectacle. An object. An achievement to score."
He looks Wilhelm straight into eye. There's a set to his jaw that tells of countless times of withheld fury. The bones he did not break, the hearts he did not rip, and all those that he did.
"You were right to react."
Kell shakes his head slowly. He's actually mad at Wilhelm's parents. They should have protected him from such situations. Not blame him for trying to protect himself where they failed. They should have stood behind him, teach him how to deal with it himself or have someone who would do this for him. Kell trained from his earliest age to be someone like this for Rhy.
"I've broken quite a few arms, shins and fingers, on people who tried to touch Rhy inappropriately. You should have had someone like me. It's wrong that you didn't. Nobody has the right to touch you if you don't allow it or how you don't allow it. Whoever doesn't understand such a simple rule, just forfeited the right to keep their bones intact."
Kell says all this in a calm and serious tone. Like it's the most obvious thing in the word. Because it is. It should be. He dragged Wilhelm to have fun and relax, but this is too important topic to just let it slide.
"Would you like to learn how to disarm someone that makes them look not dangerous but stupid? So they won't ever try touching you again in fear you'd make a laughing stock of them again?"
Gossip and ridicule are excellent weapons when you know how to wield them.
no subject
"Mom and dad weren't so impressed..."
They definitely hadn't thought that he handled it the right way. He wasn't supposed to be out partying at clubs anyway. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong company, wrong son. Sometimes Wilhelm misses them anyway, but he loves his freedom better. Despite everything, he thinks of what he has here as freedom.
"Yeah, how?" He leans in attentively.
no subject
"And they should have been. You weren't causing an international incident. You punched a guy who was getting handsy. Maybe you shouldn't have been there at all, but you were. And you dealt with a situation the best you were able to. I do wonder if they would have you politely apologize if this was a foreign assassin trying to take you down, and not a guy being too friendly."
Kell grins. This is his second set of skills. He's an Antari first, but he was trained to be the heir to the throne and future king's protector. He hated the context, the way he was basically raised to do it, but he never hated the role itself. Nor the skills that he learned with it.
"I'll give the worst, but also the right answer, only because you're smart. It depends." And before Wilhelm rolls his eyes at him for such an obvious non-answer, he continues. "Let's say you're dealing with an average bully. Not really a bandit, or anyone even remotely trained. There are few things more humiliating than getting dragged down by your ear. Most people have spatial awareness of what's going on with their body concentrated in front of them. A lot less with the sides. So it's easier to grab them from the side. Especially, if you're looking straight at them. If they're trying to intimidate you, they wouldn't want to be the one to look away first. So you can use this to your advantage. Work wonders on people with earrings."
Those were the first and the most obvious things that came to his mind, but Kell wonders if Wilhelm was ever even taught how to protect himself. Or allowed to fight dirty.
"I could teach you a few more tricks if you like."
no subject
He only learned how to defend himself when Kyle offered to teach him here. He feels good about the progress that he's made since then, though he's always fighting off the feeling that it's never enough. That brawl in the night club would go very differently, he thinks, if he could get a rematch now. He wouldn't be leaving with a shiner this time.
Though he's received formal training for some months now, he's interested in the alternative perspective Kell has to offer, tips and tricks picked up in bars and back alleys. Especially in the shadow of their ordeal in the pit, he'll take anything that could bolster his meager arsenal. So he listens, and he absorbs, and he grabs for more.
"Sure, why the hell not?"
no subject
"Wille, you rascal! This is brilliant!" he laughs. He wishes he could have seen this. The look on the other guy's face must have been priceless. "Well, well, so you do have some fire in you after all."
"Why the hell indeed," Kell replies with a wicked grin. "I think you are going to do just fine, just keep that attitude."
Like it or not, Kell just put himself in charge of making sure that whenever some moron as much as looks at Wilhelm funny, they'd have reasons to regret their lack of manners. Kell has no reservations against imparting the knowledge acquired during his illicit escapades on Wilhelm. If only that means that the younger prince feels a bit more secure, a bit more confident about himself, it's already worth it. But Kell has a more selfish reason for helping. Whatever boosts Wilhelm's confidence will, eventually, help him better control his magic too. It makes all the sense now that Wilhelm's chosen element is fire. He has so much of it, and yet it is so deeply buried and restricted, that no wonder it explodes whenever it finds a crack.