AN: This is basically the short story that I wrote that's somehow turned into the convoluted thing that is Exaltation of the Morning Rose.
Slightly different characterisations but then that's understandable.
I've also tumblr-d this as well.
I hope you guys enjoy!
1.
"Sans'aera, my Lord." With a start, Blaine looks towards the open door of the carriage, clutching tighter to the pot on his lap. As he clambers out of the door, stumbling on annoyingly smooth snow, his soon-to-be husband takes the pot from him, icy, slender fingers brushing against Blaine's as he does so.
Sans'aera. The word translates infuriatingly in Blaine's head. For a split second, it's unintelligible till the icy winds blow away the last vestiges of his sleepy haze.
He's in the south now, with its strange tongue.
Sans'aera. Welcome.
Blaine wants his pot back, suddenly, even though he had spent the whole journey wishing he had given it to someone else. Now that he's not in danger of falling asleep into the thick leaves and balls of half-formed fruit, however…
Tears form in his eyes, but the continuous blasts of cold air dash them away.
Sans'aera, Blaine, Blaine thinks.
"Lord Blaine, brother to Prince Gabriel of the Sun Kingdoms and betrothed to our Grace Kurt, King of the Low Lands." His eyes wander around the room, the colours and dark stone menacing to eyes accustomed to large windows and bright sandstone.
And his thoughts race.
Blaine. Bel-raine. Rising sun, in the tongue of the Ancients. They say the sun rises at midday here, and sets barely minutes later.
For a moment, Blaine wishes more than anything that he were back in the carriage, the orange sapling wrapped in his arms, heading back north.
2.
"It's not made for the south, your Grace," the gardener says flatly, and Blaine bites his lip at the obviously tagged-on courtesy at the end.
The gardener sweeps his pale blond hair away from almost-as-pale blue-green eyes, and Blaine's painfully aware of his caramel skin and dark eyes. "My advice? Kill it, find yourself another…" He mumbles something, a word that's said so quickly Blaine can't even begin to process the sounds.
For a long moment, Blaine thinks about it; sees the leaves wither, cringes at the sickly sweet stench of death as the fruit slowly rots away in the cold dampness of the cursed south. Thinks about 'finding another'…
But he hates the firs, the tall, thick branches and the strong needle-like leaves that seem to be the only plants that survive here. They remind him too much, and too little, of the lush forests of the north, of rolling hills of green, alive grass.
Blaine bends forwards, feeling the thick green leaves brush against his cheek and inhaling deeply the scent of young fruit.
"Damn you," he whispers in his own language, to the image and the gardener, and to the biting winds that he knows await him outside.
Blaine's thick cloak swirls slightly as he turns before settling again on his shoulders, heavy and stifling. Nevertheless, he pulls the fur tighter around himself as he leaves the greenhouse, wind whipping mercilessly into his bones.
3.
The plains are cold, and they ride in silence. Kurt relishes both, too accustomed to awkward conversations; to careful enunciation of basic words that he's tired of repeating for someone who doesn't care.
Instead he looks out, over fields of early-morning fog and grain entwined with translucent petals and leaves that look to be made of glass…
"What are they?"
Kurt turns his head in slight surprise at his husband, at the question that even Blaine himself seems surprised he has asked. Blaine doesn't ask questions. He demands, in stilted sentences and half-formed phrases a child could surpass.
"What are they?" Blaine has stopped moving, and he gazes out over the fields. There's wonder in his gaze, a child-like sort of wonder that warms his normally-flat, dark eyes, turning them a rich chocolate, and Kurt remembers suddenly that barely three years have passed since Blaine's seventeenth birthday, when they were wedded.
He'd fancied himself to be mature, and old, but now he realises that they're still not there.
Pity stirs relucantly within him.
"Frost roses," Kurt replies gently.
"I haven't seen them before," Blaine murmurs, and perhaps it's Kurt's imagination but the harshness of the other boy's syllables seems almost muted, the awkward pronunciation of his words less forced than Kurt has ever heard.
"Yes, yo- the northerners don't have them," Kurt explains slowly, unconsciously lapsing into careful speech, his words slower and his sentences shorter. "They're mated with the northern plants. Grain, for the most part."
"But…how…?"
Blaine can't seem to find the words but Kurt understands, because it's a question that even he's not sure of. "Old magic, I've heard." He shrugs lightly. "The power of the frosts, the strength to withstand the winter winds. It's the only thing that will." Kurt can't prevent the hint of bitterness that enters his voice. He loves the snow, loves the biting cold that's a new catharsis every time he's on his horse, galloping in the early mornings. But he can't help but envy the north, envy Blaine and his brother and their plentiful harvests.
But, he thinks, gazing at the glimmering fields, we have this.
And suddenly, the pity returning in a wave that twists the corner of Kurt's mouth in a bitter smile, he realises why his husband sits huddling next to fires, why the orange tree takes too much of his best gardener's time.
Kurt reaches down, plucking a frost rose swiftly from a tall stalk of grain and offering it to Blaine. An olive-skinned hand reaches out slowly as Blaine's horse moves alongside Kurt's, staring down at it as it sits in his hand.
"Your Highness?"
Blaine doesn't respond, eyes fixated on the rose, fingers running lightly over diamond-like petals; but something in his gaze gives Kurt a bizarre burst of foolish courage.
"Blaine?"
Though he's heard the name enough, the foreign syllables are still dissonant in his southern accent.
But Blaine looks up, out at the field, then at the rose, then back to him.
"It's so…" Blaine trails off, whispering a word in his tongue, a word Kurt can't understand. A child-like wonder lights up that face, cheeks flushing under the darkness of her skin.
Kurt opens his mouth to speak; to say something, anything.
"Your Majesty?"
The soldier's voice scatters his thoughts, and he blinks, closing his mouth.
Nudging his horse lightly in the flanks with his heel, they move on, as Kurt clings to that image of that chocolate gaze, and what he thinks that word might have been.
4.
Blaine tilts his head, eyes narrowed, as he examines the…fruit?…resting in his hand. The skin, though translucent enough that he fancies he can see tiny seeds, is hard as ice. It feels like the rose he'd held that early morning, the rose now nestled, at once bizarrely and hilariously, in his thick curls.
He probably looks stupid, but right now, he doesn't really care.
"If you'll allow me…?"
Blaine's husband takes the orange ball from him, and as Kurt carves a piece away with a gleaming silver dagger, Blaine examines his once-northern orange tree. It's still in its clay pot, the vivid red-brown of the northern sun-baked variety. But now the leaves, nestled around glass roses, look like carved emeralds, the lightest coat of early-morning snow lingering on rustling branches.
It reminds Blaine of the frost-roses, that field of magic and wonder.
"Blaine." That name – his name – is still strange in Kurt's strong southern accent, but Blaine can't bring himself to dislike it. It sounds different, but almost familiar now; like a southern name.
A southern name for a southern King.
He should dislike that thought, too.
(But he doesn't.)
The juice is strange; cold, and sweeter than he's used to. It tastes like Blaine had imagined snow to taste, before he came south and saw more snow than he ever wanted to; light, icy, sweet.
"How is it?"
It tastes like acres of glass-diamond roses and petals entwined around hard-shelled grain. Like the fingers that brushed Blaine's as his husband placed the rose on Blaine's palm. Like Blaine's name, emphases on the wrong syllables but somehow sounding as though 'Blaine' was always meant to sound like that. Like pale icy blue-green eyes and pale, pale hair that he sees every morning when he wakes, always a careful distance away from Blaine on a bed that he's starting to wish was smaller, just for the excuse to accidentally touch Kurt's clear, perfect skin.
It tastes like the south.
"But you probably don't like it," Kurt murmurs politely, voice subdued, and Blaine looks up in time to see those confusingly coloured eyes glance away in obvious discomfort, to see Kurt begin to move away and back to the castle.
Blaine knows Kurt's not just talking about the orange, or the rose that's somehow still clinging to his hair, and panicked, he fights for the word, the word he had whispered in the field, fights to translate it in he head before Kurt's left the garden and everything's too late.
Found it.
"Kurt!" Kurt turns around in time for Blaine to run straight into him, and they fall to the ground together even as Kurt wraps his arms around Blaine in a desperate attempt for support.
After a moment of windedness, Blaine pushes himself to his feet, offering a hand to Kurt. Kurt accepts it with a grateful but still-distant smile, bracing himself against the other boy's shoulder, and for the first time he processes the fact that he's taller than Blaine.
Kurt makes to let go, but Blaine places his rough, callused hands over Kurt's long, slender fingers, and looks up.
Their eyes meet, and as Blaine smiles the first smile he's directed at Kurt since he handed over the orange tree that winter, the sun pierces the thick cloud covering. Shafts of light reflect off delicate sculptures of petals, off orbs of orange glimmer as they move in the wind.
"Beautiful."
Ala'rin. Beautiful.
Because Kurt wasn't just talking about the orange, and neither is Blaine.
Ngaaaaw.
I hope you guys enjoyed it, and please do tell me what you thought!
Love, Zayre