#TY PIPIT ILY

[hourcat]

piarles... wait... 🙏💗

It feels like a hundred lifetimes have passed since Charles has seen him, even if Lorenzo had scolded him that it's unseemly to be so dramatic about an ally from the Northern kingdom--you yearn like he is your wife, he'd once deadpanned when he'd found Charles wrapped up in the study poring over a book to locate the next encyclopedic fact to include in his latest letter to Pierre.

But it's difficult to feel anything but yearning, after all this time: two years it's been since Charles has sat across a dining table with the Duke he calls his friend, two years since they'd ridden off into the woods together to hunt pheasant, two years since he'd trembled from the drag of that white silk glove against his unshaven jaw. Upon the return to Maranello, Pierre and his men had ridden back north where they'd come from in a rather disheveled hurry, and all Charles had been left with is the sight of Duke Gasly turning back towards him from horseback, glinting blue eyes cutting through the hazy dawn.

Two years of waiting, against the advisement of his mother and the family priest and even his youngest brother, who's too caught up in the fantasy of war to have an opinion about anything else: they all somehow can agree on this, that Charles Leclerc should not keep up this improper friendship with a man of rank from a kingdom so far from their own.

But Lord Charles has never been one to listen to the advice of anyone he does not seek out himself, and it's with great satisfaction that he reminds himself of that today: in the carefully folded parchment clutched in his hands, written in perfectly scrawled French, is a message from the Duke himself--prepare your chambers, sweet bird, for i will return to you in a fortnight.

send me a ship and a word and i'll write you five sentences <3