Castles in the Sky

Solitude

A/N: Thanks for all of your feedback - sooo this will be a longer story! Updates will mostly be weekly while I'm working, but more frequent whenever I can.

Again, this is an 🔞 work, with ongoing mature themes and different forms of explicit content throughout.

...I hope you enjoy the ride! Please let me know your thoughts too 🦋

~~

There was a spot Gulf liked to go. Just within palace boundaries and so no need for suffocating security - a place of solitude in a wild, tousled, windswept corner of the grounds' outer limits. The edge of the cliff top, looking out over jagged black rocks and the navy rage of waves that crashed and thundered upon them, cormorants dive bombing as torpedos to steal silver fish from the thrashing, salty froths of nature's awesome chaos.

The omega would sit, long legs dangling over the cliffside - sea mist and spray stinging eyes and whipping cheekbones as ocean mustangs - enslaved by the hypnotic, brutal savagery of the elements. Somehow soul soothing: A reminder of the vastness of the world around - he just one inconsequential dot in a pixelation of universe's infinity.

As though, just for a moment, he could blur, disappear entirely.

Peace.

But...not this day.

As Gulf approached through tangled bramble thicket, he halted abruptly, finding a figure occupying his very spot: Dark, silken hair, a powerful frame, hands outstretched to either side as wavy grasses were fisted and tugged from their roots in vacant, cathartic destruction.

This person, too, was escaping, the omega understood - just as the head tilted towards the sound of a screeching, mid-air gull tussle, faraway look in his eyes - an audible gasp as unseen onlooker identified the unmistakable, sharp jawline and unwelcome profile of the King.

Then the seated figure was turning to face Gulf fully. Was it the first time the husband and wife had shared stares? The near-black opaque of a starless night meeting rich, noisette chocolate brown. Before each looked away, unsteadied.

A silence that seemed to stretch from the crest of one galloping wave to the next, until...

"Sit...if you want", Mew patted the space beside him gruffly.

So forwards Gulf reluctantly came, planting himself down alongside the alpha, safe gap between them as each gazed out at an ensuing, swirling whirlpool below.

"You like this place, Ciel?"

"Mmm" - slightest nod of his head - "My homeland, Busaba, is landlocked as you will know, so the ocean is a kind of magic for me"

"How so?"

Some moments of muse, then:

"Its biting cold, its echoey depths, its kaleidoscoping of untameable aquamarines. Its ferocity, its gentleness, its whispering loudness and deafening quiet. But most of all I think, its horizon - because it's the only one I've seen which is not the end, but merely as far as squinting eyes can see"

And when he looked up, the King's brow was clouded, guarded eyes searching his own, as if trying to decipher some riddle he had just stumbled upon, there in that place.

Why couldn't Gulf avert his glance? Like he was magnetised there, unfamiliar ticklishness growing within, until...

Mew broke the spell:

"Shai, it's as you say. This place here - I've come to it since I was a boy. You can visit it too. You're the Queen of this land now, after all"

"And the sea?"