#talia my love oof. maybe love languages can be just tangerines and caramels

[bruciemilf]

I saw your Gladiator!Bruce AU idea and I happen to be a fantasy writer/worldbuilder (I hope you don't mind if I throw you a slightly different idea)—

As a prince, Bruce was taught his princely sword fighting and basic hand-to-hand skills. When the coup came, he was a boy.

He was thrown into a pit to die for the crimes of his father, because one death just wasn't enough. Bruce, 10 years old, 50 pounds, looks up to a fully grown man and learns just how inadequate the word dread can be. But the man looks down at him and cannot kill a child.

The new… tyrant, out of the good of his dusty, hateful heart, spares both of their lives.

Bruce is sent out into the ring regularly to be brutalized. Not because people like seeing a child lose fight after fight, but because they were told that Thomas was a terrible king, and they're still so angry, and someone has to pay the price.

Bruce is 17 when he finally wins his first fight. He's punished for it afterwards.

The new heir, a princess, makes her way to the dungeons. No one recognizes her. She creeps through the dark and the grime, silent and unseen, a shadow in the dark. She steps up to the cage bars, green eyes luminescent in the bleakness. Bruce is curled up on his hands and knees to keep the wounds on his back clean. The princess reaches in and rolls a tangerine to him, and it taps against his blood-crusted knuckles softly. By the time he looks up from his foggy haze, she's gone.

Years pass. Win or lose, his little mystery visitor sneaks him treats. Every time he approaches the bars, she disappears. Once he almost caught her by hiding off to the side. But he couldn't bring himself to use his full strength to hold her, and she slipped right through his fingers.

The king isn't getting any older. Bruce has a crisis where he knows he'll die here. When he's too old to fight well, when he's young but his ruined body makes moving fast enough too hard, he'll die. He doesn't even remember the feeling of silk anymore, the smell of perfume, the feeling of well-kept leather. But at least he remembers the sweet taste of berries.

It's not enough. But it's all he has.

The princess is married to some… specimen from a neighboring kingdom. She knows her father's plans to raze it all to the ground. This young man, this boy, is pretty and kind and polite. But her heart is distracted. She takes him to the games under the guise of courting him. Really, she'd just rather be spending the time with her champion.

The new prince (not a king here, either, as the odious king remains), watches with… complete and utter horror. The man in the ring is young — his age. But he wears a dented buckler and a leather skirt that's almost as scarred as his back. Ridges, canyons, burns, lashes — from his back to his fingers, this young man is a tapestry of abuse. And his pale eyes are blacker than night.

That night, the new prince sneaks into the dungeons. He's never really done this sort of thing before, but his hearing is good, his eyesight is better, and he can sneak and creep better than most any novice. He finds Bruce's cage and crouches down.

Bruce looks so much smaller in the dark. He sleeps as if bowing down to something, his back open to the air. But his head moves, and he looks up to his visitor. Bruce sees the most vivid blue of his life, looking down at him with kindness through the dreary night. He knows better than to speak. The stranger wavers.

"I saw you today," he whispers. His voice is… soft. It's airy and warm and gentle. There's no gruffness, no malice, no command. It's like what silk and satin would sound like, fire-warmed and lain across the shoulders. Bruce stares with wide eyes. He didn't know a man could sound so welcoming. "I'm sorry for what they're doing to you." Bruce gasps, quietly, but the wind is taken from his lungs. His mystery visitor never speaks much to him. But this new stranger reached right into his chest and touched the biggest wound.

Bruce turns his head to hide the silent tears. The stranger wavers. Then he apologizes again and leaves. The princess, hidden away, a pair of candies and a large apple in her hand, suddenly thinks she can learn to love the new prince.

The king ruins the neighboring kingdom. The prince is inconsolable, and it's only the princess' blade to his throat that convinces him to calm down and turn away from the thought of murdering her father for giving the order. He flees, breaking and smashing things along the way, because everyone he's ever known is dead and all of his people are being scattered to the wind like ashes. The princess lets him leave. She knows where to find him.

In the dungeon, with slivers of moonlight to cut the dark, the prince sits against the bars, his hand resting in Bruce's lap. Bruce doesn't weep with Prince Clark. That wound scarred over a long time ago for him. But he holds Clark's hand as delicately as his callouses allow, and he tries his best to trace the lines of this soft palm without inflicting pain. But Clark won't stop weeping.

Both broken princes nearly miss when the princess steps out of the dark. She hands them both caramels and sits to enjoy her own. Bruce tenderly unwraps Clark's for him, glad for the chance to be gentle. Talia watches them both, and as the caramel softens and melts in her mouth, she decides it's just about time for her father to learn about death.

.