The walls collected a bit of the morning dew here. He was sure of it now, having stared at the same corner of the room for the past three days. It was just by the opening to the balcony he didn't dare enjoy, looking out on a city he had no desire to see. The slight discoloration of the white plaster walls was more than enough excitement. As exhausted he was, it was probably more than sufficient. The most thrilling question of the day is where a spider would or wouldn't try to weave, and how long he might let it go on before deigning to stop them. On the latter point, it turned out he was letting things drag out ever further. The more the days ground on, the less engagement there was to be had elsewhere. At least the spiders were alive.
Sometimes, he thought this was suffocating. A maddening restriction on his liberty more fit for a toddler. It burned especially because it was too easy for people to say they were right. Yiannis, the intemperate, emotional, beguiled prince. Sealed away in a tower because his heart was that of weeping maiden. Every day he sat couped up here, the legend of the feckless and effeminate prince would grow. Whatever idiotic advisors had persuaded his parents down this path had well and truly finished any public career he might have left. There was just a slow drip-drip of sordid details that he was now in no position to defend himself against.
Truthfully, though, that was at other times a blessing. Not two days past, one of the orators at the Dikastrio had delivered a stem-winding indictment. The predatory Prince Yiannis, despoiling virgin noble daughters. To hear him tell it, the whole moral collapse of civilization rested on Yiannis's raging loins. Certainly, the robbery from the royal treasuries was only the just desserts of the corruption he had himself caused. That was all presuming the maiden from Lyncaea was truly his first victim. His ears, doubtless like those of every person in Midas, were ringing with the condemnation. How he could he defend himself? By explaining how deeply in love he was? How completely idiotic he had been in the last weeks? Even if sitting here meant hearing it second hand from servants' whispers, it also spared him from having to respond.
He didn't want to think about it. Not how quickly his whole world had turned dark. How he still pined to hear the voice of the woman that had destroyed his life, even as every memory of her twisted with bitterness. Every time he tried, his limbs weighed like anchors while his stomach turned as the wine dark sea. His face would go red with tears until he found a new spot on the wall to stare at. He would rather not. This one was just fine. The dew collected there in the morning. The two walls didn't quite meet at a right angle. A wonder more dust didn't collect there. It was getting easier to breathe, when stirrings outside the main door interrupted his reverie. Hadn't lunch already come?
"Just leave it" he said sharply. "Drop the plate and leave.
Vangelis had never felt anger at so many people simultaneously before. First, there was the Lord in the Senate who had decided it would be a good idea to attempt to discredit the third prince, detailing his romantic interlude with his daughter as some kind of recent event in a series of barbarous and perverted escapades.
It had taken all of twenty minutes in the man's company to swiftly inform him of the stupidity of such a decision. The man was no longer a lord, the money had been returned to the royal treasury and Vangelis had left him looking like he might have been about to vomit the second he left his home.
He had held no sympathy at all.
The second to be feeling the eldest prince's wrath was the woman this all hinged on. One Zenais though he knew not her face. All he knew were her schemes and her plans; the way she had seduced and conned his brother into securing money for her family's poor handling of money. There was only one thing Vangelis hated more than incompetence. The inability to own up to that incompetence and learn from it. Stealing from the royal family in order to cover your arse? There was nothing dignified or progressive about such deceit.
Vangelis was an honest man. Blunt to a fault, he did not accept nor tolerate liars. Especially when the lies were only being used to cover up other faults.
By the time he arrived back at the Kotas manor that day he had been back in Colchis for a little over three days. It had taken that long to work out what the hell had been going on in his absence overseas with Zanon, to then fix the problem at hand and finally - as he stormed down the corridor of the second floor of the manor - to approach the third person for whom his ire had been raised.
His brother Yiannis, he had yet to even see since his return, too busy working with Zanon to clean up the mess he had gotten himself into.
Upon reaching the door to the third prince's chambers, Vangelis was in no way quiet as he opened the door but he also wasn't the kind of person to slam things or make his anger known through action. Yiannis would be able to divine that from his face well enough - there was no need to mistreat the furniture.
When his brother, laying on his bed like some defeated mop, his back to the door and his tone irritated at being disturbed, told him to leave the plate and get out, Vangelis felt his features drop into a scowl and his jaw harden.
Turning his head to glance at the lunch that had already been provided for the man, Vangelis' lips twisted and he reached for the golden plate.
Taking it in hand, the food upon it still untouched, Vangelis held it by the rim, tested its weight, and then in one smooth motion launched it with fantastic aim. The piece struck the wall directly above Yiannis' head covering the prince's face with roasted vegetables, a wilted salad and pieces of poultry. The plate made an almighty crash against the wall before falling to hit Yiannis in the head.
"Since when am I your servant, Yiannis?" Vangelis growled from the door.
For hours it had been silent, but that was far from quiet. In as long a space he’d hardly moved, yet he was anything but still. Like an unperturbed pool sits fetid, moss-grown, and mosquito-infested, he had simply lay there. At some point, he had simply yielded. Whatever abuse his own mind could invent he was accepting readily. What physical discomfort could stir up—pain at his awkward angle, a limb falling asleep—was a welcome distraction. A loop from which escape was not so much impossible as unthinkable.
Lying on this bed, all he felt was absence. Not on the mattress. True enough there had been one magical evening between them. A heady rush of emotions he couldn’t begin to process in light of what had happened only hours later. But what he truly remembered was something else. The times he lay bandaged, still unable to move. The noise of her working just outside his room had been his only comfort. How she’d used humor to soften the moments when porridge spilled from his lips during feeding. The lightness of her touch, the encouragement of her smile; there was a thousand ways in which he owed her and needed her and understood now that he could never have again. Maybe he had never had them at all.
Then there were vegetables. The warrior in him heard it before anything. The sound of and arm winding to hurl something. His eyes popped open in time to see the wilting petals of lettuce. He dodged a few and got slapped in the face with a cold, limp carrot. The plate was shattering uselessly onto the wall behind him. Instinctively, he was on his feet, fists coiled. It took him a moment to register his brother’s voice. His emotions already too high strung, the extra surge just pushed him that much closer to tears. Of all people to enter just now, it had to be him.
“When have you ever been anything but perfect, Vangelis?! Did you haul all the way up here to point out how you never would have been wounded in battle to begin with? Spare me the insight you insufferable ass!” he said.
Even as he spoke, it sounded harsh to his ears. Too much, perhaps. But it felt good. The thing he most wanted, as it turned out, was someone to scream at. About all of this. What else could one do, when the last month had been the best and worst of life? And it’s not as if his brother wasn’t judging. Even if he never said so, he was certainly thinking it. There was no way he wasn’t. Given that was so, this certainly was not the day that Yiannis was ready to hear about it. And if it was too far? At least a swollen lips or trickling blood was a reason for pain he could understand. The kind that went away.
Despite his reputation as a man with ice in his veins and a lack of compassion for other human beings, Vangelis was never a man quick to anger. Nor had his reputation ever included fury or wrath. Instead, the whispers that went around about him were more along the lines of him being a man who could commit unspeakable horror specifically without a strong emotional attachment or moment of feeling. Which, to many people, made him all the scarier than an individual with anger issues.
Now, however, he felt an anger boiling in the pit of his stomach. Not because his brother had yelled at him. Or that he had lost the family a large amount of money that Vangelis and Zanon had had to arrange to be returned. Or in fact that he was injured during the battle that had begun events to lead them thusly. No. What angered him now was Yiannis' pathetic hang ups and drudging of misery over a woman who clearly felt nothing but calculated gain when she had thought of him, if she had thought of him at all. Whilst he was technically indebted to the woman for caring for one of his youngest brothers in a time when his life could have been at risk for his injuries, such an owing of gratitude was rendered moot now that it was revealed that her tender compassion was nothing but scripted and plotted scheming. For her own self gain, no less. Which meant that was no good will in her doctoring of the Colchian prince and therefore nothing to be thanked for.
With a calm demeanour and a purposeful stride, Vangelis took six quick and long strides that sent him into the room, around the bed and into his brother's personal space in time for the arm he had drawn back to fling forwards. Not offering his brother the dignity of a fist or equal strike, Vangelis back handed the stupid boy across the face, sending his jaw whipping to the side.
There was a moment of quiet in the room, the resounding slap of his strike seeming to echo in both of their ears.
"Grow up, Yiannis." Vangelis simply started with a harsh and icy coldness that offered zero sympathy or compassion for his brother's aching heart.
Whatever the man's feelings, fears or unfettered emotions had turned him into; whatever the woman he pined for her whispered in his ear or taunted him with in the darkness, Vangelis wasn't interested. No woman was worth such a show of weakness. Yiannis was his brother. A Prince of Colchis. And Vangelis had never seen him behave with such useless depression as to render him stupid. Morose was not a look that appealed on the face of a prince.
The moment was raw to the point of surreal. It was rare that the brothers fought. On those occasions, it was usually about things. Rare that the subject of fury was one another. Yiannis had surprised himself. He had never let himself admit he had felt the half of these things until they were flying from his lips. Or at least this was the first time that he verbalized them as the fault of his older brother. The words felt shocking even to his own ears.
The gap between them closed in an instant. All of it so outside his experience that Yiannis didn't think to react. When Vangelis raised his hand, it truly didn't occur to him what was coming next. Not until his whole lip was stinging and he felt a bitter, irony taste in his mouth, dribbling from a swollen lip. His head had whipped sideways from the momentum, throwing him entirely off balance. He could have caught himself on the bed but didn't, preferring to tumble all the way down.
It was there on the floor that he heard Vangelis say "Grow up, Yiannis."
The insufferable ass. He had never wanted a real brother. Not a human one. Another soldier to throw himself on a sword? A few more Senators to argue for him in the public square? Anything that could augment his own reputation was the Crown Prince's priority. Yiannis had accepted it blindly all his life. He supposed it took knowing one manipulator for him to be able to recognize another. The boy was embarrassed now. Emotionally spent. Politically isolated in ways that shouldn't even be possible for a person of royal blood. His hands were up near his face, nursing his lip. Layered one over the other, he could hide the one balling into a fist. Nor would there be much time when Yiannis pounced. Screaming in a rage beyond words. Haymaker flying for Vangelis's nose. Vangelis of Kotas,
Unlike Yiannis, weak from emotion with senses dulled by lack of sleep and a poor appetite, Vangelis had just returned from war training, held no such distractions and was a better fighter than his younger brother regardless. The man's attempts to get to his feet and charge at his brother were quick it was true, and Vangelis was surprised by the action, but that didn't stop his reactions being quick off the mark.
As Yiannis launched a fist at his eldest brother, Vangelis shifted to the side and reached. His fingers latched around Yiannis' oncoming wrist and pulled, encouraging his forward motion to knock him off balance, using his momentum against him. He turned and spun quickly, sending Yiannis' back into the wall behind him, his forearm coming up to press against his brother's neck, pinning him in place against the wall. He didn't let go of the man's dominant hand.
"Calm down, Yiannis." He told the boy, his arm pushing enough to restrain and to make it a little hard for his young brother to breathe easily, but not enough to cause injury. His gaze bore into Yiannis' his icy blue stare refusing to give in. "You are lashing out because you are wounded."
His brother was no fool. He had slapped the man across the face to knock some sense into him - the strike hadn't even been that hard, and if he had been on high alert with his senses fully functioning and his centre of gravity properly balanced, he wouldn't have lost his footing at all. It certainly hadn't been an invitation to start a fight. And yet Yiannis had launched himself at him, wailing like a banshee.
Secondly, whilst Vangelis had every right to strike at his brother if he so chose, the opportunities for physical violence were not the same in reverse. He was a Crown Prince and heir to the throne of Colchis. Had anyone outside of their immediate family - who of course would do nothing - had seen him attempt to strike the future King, their shared blood would not have saved Yiannis. Another stupid move on his part.
"Look at yourself." Vangelis commanded in a deadly tone, shaking the forearm that was pressed against Yiannis' throat. "This is not you. You are a military man. A strong man." Vangelis' brow dropped into a dark scowl. "This woman has made you weak and clouded your judgement, to the point where you would strike even me."
Vangelis had always had a good connection with his brothers - more so than the average sibling - for they were also brothers in arms. They had fought alongside one another, taken injuries for one another. Almost died in the rescuing of each other where necessary. Whoever and whatever this woman had been to Yiannis, she had taken his very core and muddled it up. Now he was a man who shouted and screamed and tried to start a fight with a man whom he knew to love him deeply and defy the very code of the Kotas family - Blood Above All.
"Is this who you want to be, Yiannis?" Vangelis asked, shaking him again. "Is this what you want that schemer to turn you into?" With a jerk he let his brother go - arm and hand and everything. Just gave him a little shove and then left him standing against the wall, taking a few steps backwards. "Get a grip, Yiannis."