samson mae, district five | finished

Blood is a strange, terrible thing.

To share your father's face, his voice, his eyes — to be his son, and to not be. Because you're a bastard. Because when the sun rises on you, and it catches the crown atop your head, there is nothing but rust and thorns to be seen. Things that could have been.

He loves you, for a time — when his true heir falls sick, just like your birth mother, and he allows you to come into his home and carry his name. When you're strong, and you're clever, and it's like you're the spitting image of him. When you're not fragile.

Your mother calls you her little prince, even as she sets you free. Her story is a simple one; a woman who loved a man, a man who couldn't love her back, who had a child in the dark but knew he was destined for greater things. Things she couldn't give him.

There's no malice between you. Even as you try to fit into the puzzle that was designed without you, when you go by a surname that seems to cut you when you say it, when you hear it, when you try to live up to all the expectations. Trying not to fall; to hold up the sky.

Even as they're sawing off your wings.

But to be a good son is to not be a good brother, and you learn that in terrible ways. When your father tells you that he has great plans in store for you, when the crown begins to shift into something golden, when you visit your mother and she holds her hand to your cheek.

When she says that she's proud of you, when you're just a single step away from the light and being recognized as legitimate, when you can't see the betrayal in a brother's eyes and the way his fingers shake around the hilt of a knife. When the sun finally sets on you.

And you find your mother with her throat slit. Like a warning.

You have nothing left to lose, but you still decline your father's offer. You choose not to be his heir; you allow the rust to creep back in, to consume you, to stare into the eyes of your siblings and to know that you are not wanted. At least not in the form you were meant to take.

To know that you have no purpose if you are not king.

So you become the shadow, the moonbeam, the secret. The orphan with a father, the homeless boy in a mansion, the mistake that did nothing wrong. You find your peace in it. In the nothingness. "Tell me a story," you ask Bamber one night.

They can't take your kindness.

"Let me be the prince in this one."