A/N Sorry guys. I know I've disappeared, but life has been crazy. Enjoy ;3
Proteus saw the way people looked at him. The way they watched him, as if he were something valuable, something great and grand. It was the way their eyes lingered, never quite on him, just skirting around his edges. As if he were a phantom, only just visible to them.
And sometimes, he wondered if he was. If they could only see some transparency of him; a ghost settled into the throne and bearing the weight of the crown. A blurry apparition of only lineage and bloodline without hopes and dreams and fears of his own.
For a long time, he had wondered if anyone would ever be able to find solidity; to find a person, to find him. When he had first saved Sinbad on the streets, he had never expected that Sinbad would be the one to see him beyond his princely titles. Of course, he had never expected that there would be a soul in all of Syracuse that wouldn't recognize him on sight.
Sinbad hadn't though. To him, Proteus had just been another pretty palace brat, but never a prince. If it hadn't been for the cocky bilge rat not caring about Proteus's titles, their encounter would have ended their, bloody and in the dust. Even when Sinbad found out the truth, their relationship didn't change. In Sinbad's eyes, he was a living, breathing, feeling person, long before he was an apparition of princely duty. And to Proteus, Sinbad was Sinbad.
His Sinbad.