Happy New Years, everyone! And just to start off the year productively (crossing my fingers here), I'm posting up the second of six holiday drabbles/short-stories/who-knows-what requested from my f-list this year. This segment is dedicated to Selphish, who is an awesome mod, a great friend, and who wanted to see Larsa and Penelo deal with Christmas Presents. I hope you enjoy muchly.
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Title: The Bloom Upon the Bough, Chapter 4-- Holiday Greetings
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Pairings: Penelo X Larsa future fic
Rating: PG
Summary: The emperor of Archadia had never had much experience with children before. An ongoing series of stories featuring Penelo and Larsa continues.
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The emperor of Archadia had never had much experience with children before.
For one, he had barely had a childhood himself. Sired by an aging ruler of about as grand a land imaginable, he had grown up to be the flower of a prince, to be a credit to his court, to be a miniature adult from the time he could talk. He had spent his earliest years being reared by the lawful protectors of his land, being drilled in courtly etiquette and fencing techniques and the proper way to collapse the governments of the smaller realms that slowly but surely were swallowed up by his own.
All of that had left precious little time for him to learn to be merely himself, merely a young boy set adrift in a world he felt wholly responsible for. In fact, as far as he could recall, the only time he had ever really felt the lightness of his years had been when he had been only fourteen, when he had danced with a barely older beauty with light in her hair and fire in her eyes, at the coronation for a queen he had all but placed upon her throne recently.
But even that time had been passed him by almost a decade and a half ago, and the crown he wore upon his brow had aged him far afterwards. Nowadays, when Larsa looked into the mirror, at the gray already peppering his hair and the dark lines etched beneath his eyes, he felt about 290 years old, instead of only 29. He could barely remember being a man of 19, let alone a 9 year old boy.
No, Larsa had never had much experience with children before. But looking at the ruddy, wrinkled face of his newborn son, Larsa knew that this would change quite quickly.
"Merry Christmas," the empress of Archadia whispered to her husband. Smiling and blinking back the tears that were already prickling his eyes, Larsa took his wife's hand in his own.
After all, of all the lavish gifts any ruler could expect to receive on an eve such as this, she had just given him the best one possible.