Chapter 63: A Drunken Night, And Laughs.

Elian had managed to take a total of four steps outside the hallway when Oizys grabbed him by his hand.

"Not yet," She said, already pulling him sideways with a faint glint in her eye that boded nothing good. "You’re not leaving without seeing the one good thing about this palace that isn’t a throne room."

"Oizys...?"

She didn’t answer, instead pulling along him to a familiar face.

"Rudra, you too. Don’t think you’re escaping." She said.

Rudra, halfway through a polite goodbye to one of the officials, paused, resigned, and fell into step behind them without much resistance.

"I have a feeling," he said mildly, looking slightly uncomfortable."that I’m not being given a choice in this."

"You’re correct." She used, voice flat as always but somehow also a lot more elated. "You have very good instincts."

The room she dragged them to turned out to be a small, private lounge tucked away from the formal wing entirely—low couches, a fireplace already lit, and a wine cabinet stocked considerably better than an out of the way room had any right to be.

Oizys produced a bottle with the practiced ease of someone who’d done this exact thing more than once before.

"This is a terrible idea," Rudra said, watching her pour three glasses without hesitation.

"It’s an excellent idea. We just survived a very long dinner with adults talking about demon cults. I refuse to end the night sober." She pressed a glass into Elian’s hand before he could object. "One drink. That’s all I’m asking, the rest if your choice."

Elian, for some reason, found himself really curious about the way royal wine tasted.

Truth to be told, he had ever only had alcohol once, when Roderick had nagged him into drinking with him once... and that had went on a path Elian never wanted to recall again.

Elian’s father never really liked drinking, and their parties and function always had a famous lack of alcohol, ending up in his children never really learning how to regulate alcohol consumption.

Same was the case for Rudra too, he assumed, who looked like his family would hang him if he were to ever let himself be visibly inebriated.

So naturally, one drink became several, the way it tended to when none of them were particularly experienced at pacing themselves and Oizys clearly had no interest in letting the night end quietly.

The conversation started with the details about the dinner, then shifted into less serious stuff, into stories, into jokes.

Rudra, against all his own better instincts, ended up laughing—actually laughing, loose and unguarded in a way Elian had never once seen from him—at some increasingly unhinged story Oizys was telling about Cassian’s third birthday.

Elian’s own head had gone pleasantly warm and soft-edged somewhere around the fourth glass, the whole room tilting gently whenever he moved too fast.

"You’re both terrible influences," he said, or tried to say, the words coming out slightly less crisp than intended.

"Absolutely terrible," Oizys agreed, delighted, scooting closer on the couch until her shoulder pressed warm against his.

"I mean," Elian continued, pouting as he tried his absolute best to not slur the words. "Both of you always look so serious. All the time. It’s like watching two people carry furniture up a hill." Elian gestured vaguely with his glass, nearly sloshing it. "You should laugh more. Both of you. It’s a good look. Wasted really, on being so serious."

"Duly noted," Rudra said dryly, though the corner of his mouth was still soft from whatever remained of his earlier laughter.

"I’m serious." Elian squinted at him with the particular gravity only the deeply drunk can manage, still pouting. "Rudra. You should laugh more."

"I heard you the first time."

"You didn’t, you need to laugh more.

Oizys snorted into her glass, delighted, and it was in the middle of that—Rudra’s rare unguarded almost-smile, Elian’s earnest drunken insistence, the fire crackling low and warm in the grate—that Rudra glanced, almost by accident, toward the window, and went still.

He blinked.

"It’s later than I thought," he said, voice shifting, some of the looseness draining back out of it as he set his glass down with careful precision. "Considerably later than i thought, actually"

"Don’t you dare," Oizys said, without much real force behind it. Her voice was light, without none of the usual blankness of a reserved princess to be heard in it.

He rose before answering.

"I have a briefing with my father’s envoy before I return to Lucenhall. If I arrive to it in this state, it will be reported, and then several people considerably less fun than either of you will have opinions about my conduct."

He dusted himself, straightening his jacket with the automatic precision of someone re-calibrating back into himself by increments.

"I’ve enjoyed this... gathering more than I expected to, honestly."

"That’s the wine talking." Oizys said.

"Perhaps." A faint incline of his head, toward both of them. "Goodnight. Try not to set anything on fire in my absence."

"No promises," Oizys said, waving him off, and then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him, and the room went quiet in a way it hadn’t been all evening.

Elian became abruptly, acutely aware of how close Oizys was sitting.

The fire popped softly in the grate.

Neither of them moved to fill the silence right away, and it stretched out longer than it probably should have, comfortable and strange all at once, the kind of quiet that only existed because both people in it had decided, without saying so, that it didn’t need to be broken yet.

"He doesn’t laugh like that in front of most people," Oizys said eventually, quieter than before, watching the door Rudra had disappeared through.

"I’ve known him since we were children, only managed to get closer to him after Vale’s whole drama. That laugh, it’s rare. I think it’s your influence, it did something."

"Trauma bonding, probably." Elian meant it half as a joke and heard, too late, how much truth had slipped in underneath it.

Oizys didn’t laugh. She looked at him instead, something in her expression shifting, unguarded in a way that matched the loosened wine-warm honesty in his own chest.

"Is that what this is? What we’re doing? All of us."

"I don’t know, maybe."

He turned his glass slowly between his fingers, not really seeing it.

"It’s easier to be around people who already know what it’s like being... marked. Watched. Waiting for something to happen that you can’t control."

He glanced at her, and the distance between careful and honest had gone thin enough to see through entirely.

"You get it, the rest of them gets it, more than most people do at least."