This fic covers Michael's POV on, and reactions to, a number of the events that occur during the main story of Deva Victrix.
This chapter covers his reaction to the events of Deva Victrix, chapter 10, and Prince Francis' first visit to his home.
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Virtually the only part of his work that Michael actually enjoys is sweeping the street in front of the apothecary after lunch, which, for reasons that escape his understanding, Dylan insists is a vital part of his daily routine.
The draw isn't so much the sweeping itself – which is dull, repetitive, and tends to make Michael's back ache – but that every so often, if he's very lucky, Mr Bondevik will set Emilía to performing the same task at the same hour.
Today is a good day, and when he steps outside with his broom, he glances towards Mr Bondevik's shop and sees Emilía already standing there, leaning on her own, far less tattered brush.
As is their occasional ritual whenever the stars (and their respective guardians' whims) correctly align, Michael raises his eyebrows at her in a way that is meant to convey the sentiment, 'This is a waste of both our lives, isn't it? It's a fucking road; it'll get covered in muck and dead leaves again a few minutes after we've finished, regardless. I'm sure Dylan thinks that he has to get me to do all this pointless crap so I don't have enough time to become involved with the wrong people, the type who will get me addicted to dragonweed which I'll have to turn to crime in order to afford, inevitably leading to my demise in a gutter at a tragically young age.'
Emilía's answering eye roll, Michael would like to believe, indicates her full agreement.
He gives her a wry smile that says, 'What is a tragedy is that we're stuck here, futilely pushing dirt around, when we could be…" Here, Michael's imagination fails him for a moment, as he never really does anything save his training, running errands for Dylan and Alasdair, and his weekly trip to the Lost Antler. 'Lying in bed eating bread and jam, and reading books that have nothing to do with herbs,' is his best attempt, seeing as though it was how he had spent the remains of his morning, luxuriating in the unusual freedom afforded by both of his brothers being otherwise occupied.
Emilía's mouth opens slightly, on what Michael fears might be a shocked gasp.
'Not together, of course,' Michael hurriedly assures her with a desperate flap of his hand. 'In our own separate beds, with our own separate books about –"
Emilía shakes her head and then quickly turns away, busying herself with her sweeping.
'This is why you have no friends,' Michael tells himself sternly, giving his own brush a disconsolate shove across the cobbles. 'You can't even have a silent conversation with someone without fucking it up. No doubt Mr Bondevik's eventually going to get wind that you accidentally propositioned his daughter, then he'll come round and threaten you with that illegal pistol that Aly knows he has but has been pretending he doesn't because he still feels embarrassed about that whole head-butting thing last year, and Aly will be forced to arrest him.'
Michael is still musing on the likely repercussions of Mr Bondevik's hypothetical imprisonment an indeterminate length of time later when Dylan stomps up behind him taps him on the shoulder.
At first, Michael expects to be gently chided on the piss poor job he's been doing of street beautification, but his brother instead says, "What do you think could have caused all this commotion?"
Michael's honest answer of, "What commotion?" makes his brother regard him with mild concern.
"Are you having that trouble with your ears again?" Dylan asks. "I've still got some of that vinegar solution left over from last time if you are."
"My ears are fine." And now he's been roused from his consuming thoughts about how he, Aly and Dylan have likely all been doomed to a shared future of lonely bachelorhood by their divergent yet equally damning quirks of personality, Michael can hear distant cheering. "I was just concentrating so hard on my work that I didn't notice it before. I can hear it now."
Dylan doesn't appear entirely convinced by Michael's claims of aural health. "It was loud enough to wake me up," he says, anxiously pressing the back of one hand against Michael's forehead for an instant, checking his temperature.
It clearly didn't wake him up very well, as Dylan still looks more than half asleep: his eyes red and puffy, mouth slack, and pillow creases etched into his cheek.
"Honestly, Dyl, there's nothing wrong with –"
Michael is interrupted by the sound of pounding feet, and suddenly little Joe Hunter bursts out of the alley that connects to Bow Lane, running towards his ma's ironmongery like his arse is on fire. "There's a great big carriage coming this way," he screams as he tears past them. "The horses are wearing fancy hats and everything."
"Fancy hats?" Michael asks his brother, who is extremely knowledgeable about the eccentricities of nobles due to his partiality for books that use meticulously researched royal courts as a backdrop for their characters' even more meticulously chronicled shagging.
"I presume he means those feather plumes they sometimes put in their bridles," Dylan says. "It's more of a Gallian fashion, though; never really caught on over here. There are a few noble families in Highgate whose ancestors originally moved over here after Gallia was conquered but before Britannia was, so I suppose it could belong to one of them."
That seems unlikely to Michael. Usually, whenever Highgate lords and ladies decide that they want to daringly slum it Old Town for a while, they try and draw as little attention to themselves as possible. They attempt to roughen their accents and wear plain clothes in an insultingly poor state of repair in their efforts to 'fit in'.
"Perhaps one of our neighbours has come into a lot of money," he suggests instead to Dylan. "And they wanted to announce it by rolling up with their new fancy-hatted horses before they pack up and retire to Lusitania or something."
He and Dylan trade increasingly outlandish theories back and forth until the carriage finally rounds the corner into their street, whereupon Dylan says with hushed awe, "That's the Imperial banner it's flying. I think it must have come from the palace." He chuckles dryly. "Perhaps the prince decided to give Aly a lift home to make up for dragging him out of his bed this morning."
Michael very much doubts that, too. From all that he's ever read, and seen from the behaviour of their occasional Highgate tourists, highborn types don't care a great deal about disrupting the lives of the hoi polloi.
When Corporal Jones had called into the apothecary earlier, to reassure a frantic Dylan that Alasdair hadn't been the victim of a kidnapping as he'd been well on the way to convincing himself of, she hadn't even been able to tell them why the prince had demanded that their brother had to be the one to aid him, despite all the other guards who were actually on duty at the time.
Alasdair's hitherto unmentioned role in a top-secret mission for the Gallian royal family had been Amelia's best guess; that their brother's reputation as a guard was superlative enough to have reached even the governor's ears was Dylan's.
Michael had simply concluded that the prince had wanted what he wanted for some reason that he would probably never deign to reveal to anyone – Alasdair included – and hadn't given a single thought or shit about how it might impact anyone's day but his own.
To his surprise, Alasdair does step out of the carriage after it draws to a halt – and after the coachman has proudly announced to the world at large exactly who the carriage belongs to, in case there was any doubt remaining – though his appearance is much more in line with Michael's expectations. His skin has a decidedly grey tinge, and his posture is even more appalling than it normally is, leaving his shoulders hunched up so high that they're almost brushing his ears.
"I can't believe he went to see a prince wearing those trousers," Dylan hisses in horrified tones. "The seat's so thin that you can practically see his entire arse through it. I wanted to turn them into dishcloths, but, no, 'I can get another few months of wear out of them,' he tells me. A few more months of flashing –"
Dylan's words fade into a thin wheeze when the coachman helps the carriage's other occupant disembark, and he clutches at Michael's arm like he's trying to stop himself keeling over from the sheer wonder of it all.
Although he doesn't particularly resemble the woodcuts Michael has seen of him (which give him the sombre air of a much older man, and, for some reason, always have him seated on a rearing horse) there's no mistaking him for anyone other than Prince Francis.
The golden prince, they always call him in the periodicals, and everything about him does seem to shine: his hair, his skin, and his teeth as he briefly flashes them at the crowd assembling at the far end of the street, bared in a dazzling smile.
What Michael sees next – and he's fairly sure, given their respective distances and angles of view, that no-one else does – seems as though it might explain why the prince had apparently taken an interest in his brother.
Just for a moment, and perhaps inspired by near-transparent trousers as his gaze meanders downwards, the prince looks at Alasdair as though he'd like to smother him in honey and then do unspeakable things to his person.
After he's got over his initial shock at the thought of anyone being thus inspired by Alasdair – whose resemblance to the scarecrow Claire keeps planted in her vegetable patch is merely more pronounced than usual, and not driven by the unusual circumstances of his morning – Michael finds that the idea has a certain righteous appeal to it.
As Alasdair likely wouldn't know how to do unspeakable things to anyone even with the aid of explanatory notes and helpful diagrams (and, indeed, it's never been definitely proven to either Michael or Dylan's satisfaction that he'd even want to), the prince is bound to be disappointed in whatever burgeoning desires he might be entertaining.
It could only do nobleborns like the prince some good, Michael suspects, to have their desires thwarted now and again, because if they were, then maybe they'd think twice about throwing their weight around and disrupting people's hard-earned rest in the future.