"Father, may I go out and play, please?" Dean asked, his green eyes questioning behind shaggy sand-tone hair. There was no real point in cutting it when he would just grow it out and get it dirty again. Men didn't cut their hair until they grew to resemble men, and command respect. Women, of course, didn't cut theirs at all.
"You've done quite enough of that lately, what with skipping your lessons all the time. How is Sam supposed to learn to be a proper prince when his brother does nothing but loaf about in the gardens like a peasant girl? You'll learn Latin, and swordplay, and math and reading like I did, and my father before me. I won't raise a heathen, Dean." King john declared, his anger coming from the heart, but still stinging. He sat on his throne, fingers tapping as he worked out the symphony of a nation close to war, caused by a single note in his political orchestra falling short of perfection.
Normally Dean would have given back a scathing remark, and "you're not raising me at all" certainly ran through his mind, but he couldn't say these things with his father. When you were the first born son, expectations were high, and with a father with whom back talking was treason and a younger brother known for his genius, the noose was so low he could already feel it around his neck, suffocating the life of youth from him.
"Yes, father. I'm sorry, Father." he replied instead, clenching his jaw at his lack of luck in circumstance. So he would one day be king? That was envious only to those who didn't know what the duty entailed. He couldn't play in the yard with his future sons, because such acts were unbecoming of a ruler. He already knew who their future mother was, because his marriage to Lisa had been arranged when he was an infant, before Sam was born, and their mother dead to give him life. Now all he wanted was to go out and wrestle in dirt with his friend, Sir Gabriel's son Castiel, part of the Novak family, known for their abilities in war.
But that wasn't going to happen, and he walked away, his royal-blue slippered feet pattered along the cold stone floor of the palace as he frowned all the way to his tutors chambers for his lessons. Cas would be waiting for him in the small garden, hidden from most and offering some freedoms. He was small, almost feminine in his appearance, but Dean didn't mind. His kindness, and bravery, was more than enough to leave him Dean's favorite person.
They were walking through the city once, as Dean had sneaked away from the walls to interact with the common folk, when they stumbled upon a little girl being harassed by older boys. They were only seven, and the boys were at least twelve, but Cas stepped up anyway, demanding she be let go. Luckily they liked to talk and taunt, and the guard showed up for Dean before he could get hurt, but the point remained that he had been willing to fight people twice his size for a girl he'd never met before. If that hadn't already satisfied the rules of knightly chivalry, then nothing would.
Sometimes Dean wished that he had been born the son of a knight, rather than a king. He would have less power, but he would be far from starving. He wouldn't have to learn all of these ridiculous things, and he would be able to leave without having a host of men in armor following him wherever he went. It wouldn't have been scandalous for his mother to kiss him on the head in public, or for his father to so much as give him a nod of approval. He would be squired to a knight, and then become one himself to fight for the maiden of his own choice. He would raise a son he could show love to, a daughter he didn't have to marry off to some old man twice her age for power, and then die happy in battle as a hero. It was everything one could possibly want, and yet many in that position wanted only the power of the circlet that sat heavy upon his head since birth.
"Hey, Cas?" Dean asked, drawing in the soil as he knelt a year later, at the age of eleven, whispering so that the guard that got bigger and bigger all the time couldn't hear.
"Yes, your highness?" he answered, always having it beaten into him that one never addressed royalty by their name. Dean may not have minded, but the guards would, and this was just safer for everyone involved.
"You're gonna leave soon, aren't you?" the thought brought crushing sadness to Dean's heart. He loved his brother, and he would be starting to learn swordplay, too, but that didn't make up for the lighthearted time he spent with the future knight.
"Yes. I'm apprenticed to my brother. When I come back, I'll be a knight, though. I'll be able to protect you, your highness." He said, as though simply being an attack dog to the crown was what he wanted.
"You could be your own person, Cas. When I'm king, I wouldn't make you do a thing but be my friend." Dean said, puffing his chest out, smiling at the idea that he wouldn't have to send Cas into battle to danger, destruction, and death.
"But then you wouldn't know if I was your friend because I liked you, or because I was using your power to be lazy. Besides, defending His Royal Majesty is my honor, just as it has been that of all my forefathers." He answered, smiling and grabbing his own stick, drawing himself bigger than Dean, who had a crown on, with a sword, slaying a dragon, into the soft dirt. "This is what I want my future to be like."
"You don't want more? Freedom to do as you please? What's the point of living if you're just my extension?"
"What more could one want than to do battle beside their best friend, Your highness? If I could be anything in the world, I'd be the Captain of your Royal Guard." Dean was about to express his confusion when the church bell rang out the sign that it was currently noon. It was time for Cas to leave, and Dean to go to lessons.
"You have to leave now, don't you?" Dean asked, knowing the answer but wanting to postpone the outcome.
"Yes." he looked around, and moved his head closer, "Goodbye...Dean." He said the word as though it were foreign, and then waited as though the sword would cleave through his head right then and there.
"Bye, Cas. I'll see you in ten years, and I'll make you my guard captain. We'll be together all the time, then." Dean promised, smiling at the lanky squire.
"Yeah." The other said, not knowing what else to say. He ran off, to find his father and be taken away to the border, where he would stand guard against the raider threat along with his brother.
Dean went back into the palace, where lessons awaited him, everything he would need to become a good king. He didn't want to, but it was worth it now. He had to make sure that his father trusted him to choose his own captain in ten years, and so he had to work just as hard, if not more so than Cas. Even though he was running off to his least favorite place, he was far from glum, his name falling from uncommon lips, those perpetually dry, slightly pout y lips, bringing a smile to his own.
Dean was in the training ring with Sam, who was now age thirteen. Being four years his elder, Dean was, of course, leaving him in the sweat soaked, ragged breathing dust, as he moved about the room like a deadly dancer. Sam had no tact, relying on pure strength, and the fact that he was now bigger than Dean in height and bulk rather than learning the craft correctly. They had tutors, just as Dean had, for Sam, but Dean preferred to watch his little brother learn and improve with his own eyes, and their father had far more important matters to attend than his youngest. Without the king going against him, there was no one to go against the crown prince. Queen Mary had passed of illness attributed to the second-born's rough birth. No one dared to cross him, for, while he loathed to use it, he still held the power to have a man's head on a pike and his neck in a rope at the flick of his wrist.
"You can do better than that, kid!" Dean taunted, laughing though his breaths were becoming labored as well, and his chest, bare after his shirt was cast aside, was glistening with moisture from their extended bout.
"Just give me five minutes, Dean." He said, one of the few who could get away with calling him by his first name rather than 'your highness' or 'prince'.
"Come on, you can go longer than that. Lady Jessica is going to be disappointed on your wedding night." Dean joked, but sat on the bench and took a long drink from the water basin held there.
"It's been half the day, I think she'll be closer to impressed. Besides, you're just as bad off, and you'll be marrying your princess sooner." Sam said, still not realizing that Dean didn't want to marry her; that they already should have wed, and she should be having his second child by now. Sam loved Jess, and spent every moment he could with her, lucky enough to get a woman who seemed to be his perfect match as part of his duty, marrying the daughter of one of the most powerful lords in their kingdom. It wasn't that Lisa wasn't a nice girl, she showed affection more than most would dare to a future king, and she had a backbone many were missing around him, but something in him refused to have the raw emotion that he had seen between his parents, and even between the younger couple. While he hated her father, and vise versa, with King Crowley being the rival of their nation, always having skirmishes with the border guards, and sending spies, that wasn't it. There wasn't a reason that he could find to logically object, and so he didn't, with getting the arrangement changed, and effectively declaring war, unlikely to start with, and even more so with no real harm.
"But I'll be the king, Sammy. Every woman in the world wants to bed me, even if only for a moment." he smirked, his green eyes shining as Sam gave him a playful punch on the arm.
"Well, I have to go to lessons soon,and I have to get cleaned up first. I'll see you at supper." Sam said, getting up and heading over to the larger tub where to water lay for washing. Dean was about to join him when the bishop, Father Garth, came running in with tears pouring down his thin face.
"Your father, the king, is dead." He whispered, falling to his knees, sobbing.
A pool of blood, an open window, and a knife coated in crimson life had been left on the stone floor where the late kind lay, unmoving, pale, and, in spite of the brave face he had always shown in life, frozen in terror. When Dean saw him, he bit his lip so hard that it ran red, but he didn't cry. Even as they placed the jeweled gold upon his head, he held fast; as he sat in the throne that had been his father's, and his grandfather's prior, he held fast, and as his wedding bells rang, sealing what little of his fate remained open, he held fast, and showed the world a smile that didn't reach his green eyes.
When Jess died, a fire in her room leaving her but a pile of ash, he was strong as his little brother sobbed on his shoulder. As brown eyes came back up to meet his empty, rather than sparkling with the light of his sixteen year old youth, he didn't break as he wanted. Only at night, when no one could see him, would he go to the garden where he had played as a child, and where his son Ben would soon, and shed a single tear, the drop falling from one eye as his childhood called to him, called him to the death that surrounded him.
His one speck of hope in a bleak world, the light to end his infinite black, was that soon he would see his friend again. He was stoic and cynical by the time he was to go and attend the war college graduation for the year he was really waiting for. His face was building lines made from worry and anguish, making the exited smile upon them odd as he rode in his caravan to the castle where he wold finally reunite with his old friend, his mind still seeing him the same, as if he wouldn't have changed like all the others. He would be a constant, a single optimist in a pessimistic palace, and that's what Dean really wanted.
His heart beat faster than when he had carried Lisa into his chambers the first time as he approached the gate, all but skipping to great the battle master and move past him to the graduating cadets.