Chapter Text
9S is sitting at the royal dining table, pushing pieces of his dinner around on his plate. Over his head, his family barely manages to avoid murdering each other with sly words and clever verbal tactics in between insipid grievances about their own interests.
He listens to his father drone on, something about imported cyber-mod black roses for the winter solstice banquet taking place the following week.
Next to him, his older sister bemoans the weather and how it will hinder her daily hunting games, how the snow always stalls the gears in her prized autosteed. One seat further down, his eldest brother, the crown prince, calls for a maid to refill his goblet for the nth time that evening, unheeding of the way his words slur and the liquor sloshing sloppily over the lip of the cup and flecking across his collar.
Across the table, his mother discusses the new shipment of endangered furs and techno jewelry she’s just ordered, and his second older brother jumps at the opportunity to wheedle out a whole new wardrobe for the coming winter season. Demands satisfied, he turns back to the holowatch by his plate, monitoring the dozens of beast ring matches he’s betting on.
A headache is pounding away at his skull. Just out the windows lining the dining hall, 9S can make out the flurries of snow drifting down from the night sky. He thinks about the people just outside the palace walls, the people who are out of work and out of money and food. He wonders how many of them are freezing in the night while their king plans another lavish feast for his inner circle of nobles.
Pushing around more pieces of his dinner yields him no more appetite than before, so 9S excuses himself first, saying something about retiring early for the night. His family barely pays him any attention. They seem too busy with themselves. Too wrapped up in their own lives and their own hedonism to notice the resentment steadily brewing beyond the palace walls, what the servants say behind closed doors, or how their youngest looks at them nowadays.
9S leaves them, wishing he could dredge up at least some faint anger. Instead he only finds a feeling of emptiness and fatigue, a resignation to it all.
He can’t help but remember a time in his life when he could take refuge in simple hatred. He aches for those days now.
It is the silent understanding in his sister’s gaze that grants him the strength to bring his blade down on her neck.
His brothers go down with surprisingly little effort. His father attempts to surround himself with guards who have long lost faith in their king, and they all part easily at the sight of 9S with his clothes coated in the visceral spray of his siblings.
The knowing realization on his mother’s face as he drives his sword through her heart will likely haunt him for the rest of his life.
This is for his family, too. If nothing else, the coup will surely save the last impression of his dead family members. Historians will write them as fair and benevolent figures, their lives cut tragically short. 9S can carry the burden of being the monster prince. He can bear it, he thinks – that distinction of being a tyrant who’s slain his entire family. And once he has the throne, he can finally get to work fixing what years under his father’s negligent reign has done to the kingdom. It is better for this to happen.
He tells himself that even as in her final moments, his mother caresses his face with bloody fingers, stinging his skin from how icy they’ve already become. He clings to that hope as he watches the blood spread around his family’s limp bodies, streaming down the smooth marble stairs of the throne room in thin rivers.
But his head is already starting to spin, his eyes stinging as the sunset spills in through the tall windows lining the hall, highlighting everything brilliant red and gold. Even the cool glow of his hardlight blade seems diminished in comparison.
The cacophony of the riots happening outside the palace and the clamor of the people trying to get into the throne room merge seamlessly with the ringing in his ears. He’d barricaded the doors at the beginning, hacked into the palace’s mainframe and engaged its emergency lockdown procedures after he’d made sure that his entire family was present inside. It was only when the screaming began that the nobles of the royal court realized that something was wrong.
He knows he should go out there, present the heads of the royal family to the kingdom and assert his claim to the throne with hands still wet with crimson. But the scent of his family’s blood is fresh and cloying in his nostrils, and he feels as though he is about to throw up.
He can’t. No time for rest. No space for weakness, he cannot afford to let himself appear vulnerable, because there are people just outside the doors who will swallow him whole if he does.
He has planned this meticulously, over years and countless sleepless nights, cultivating favor in carefully selected factions, gathering information and endearing himself to the public. Obstacles have been broken down and certain figures who stood in his path discreetly done away with. All calculated measures and untraceable means. Blood has been spilled long ago, even if it hadn’t yet been his family’s. He won’t let himself ruin everything he has worked for in a lapse of momentary softness.
His back straightens, he stares steadily forward. He picks up his father’s head by the hair and pulls the crown from it.
The doors finally burst open, and the court nobles spill into the throne room just in time to see him slide the crown onto his own head. It is still slick with blood. Something wet slips down his forehead.
Someone gasps, he thinks, and then others try to call for guards who don’t come because 9S has already bought off their commander with a handful of chipcoins worth a small warehouse of gold.
In the end, there is nothing they can do except watch 9S climb the stairs to the throne. He turns, takes in the view for a moment – a silent and horrified audience, blood soaking the carpet, dead bodies on the floor, the uproar of angry crowds outside the palace who have suffered for far too long. They riot in his name and he can hear them singing it. King 9S. King 9S. King. King. King.
With a sweeping flourish, his bloodstained cape over the armrest, he sits. Props his chin on his knuckles and ignores how it smears more gore on his face, crossing his legs with all the arrogance he can muster.
“Kneel,” he says, eyes half lidded and nearly glowing red in the setting sun’s gleam. He looks like a killer, a murderer. The light of the setting sun from the windows shines from behind, a beacon of victory that settles over him like a mantle. He looks like he belongs on that throne.
They kneel.
It takes a month for him to admit to himself how difficult it is to work alone.
Different now, he realises, to be in the limelight. Before, he had been allowed the relative safety of hiding in the obscurity which comes with being a third-born prince, free to work from the shadows. Now, he is King, and the public spotlight is rather ruthless to the lone hand.
Oh, he has his retainers, his advisors, his court. He delegates and plans and assigns tasks to the people he can trust in precisely measured out portions. He’s busy with implementing new institutions and revising old laws, securing the market and reestablishing relations with foreign nations.
Still the ache for a real ally, a true partner, fails to subside.
He has ensured the loyalty of the soldiers with status and material gain, the palace servants with kindness and a stable job contract. He can trust in the personal greed and self-agendas of his staff to know that they will obey him as long as he is the victor in the things that matter. The noble families stay compliant with a sort of begrudging silence because of their desire to survive this usurping, pointedly aware of all the people that have already disappeared from their ranks over the past years.
He trusts in the conditions to the obedience of the people around him, but not a single one of them is loyal in a way that truly matters.
There had been a time when it was different, he remembers. When he had at least one person to stay loyal to his side. 21O had served as his nanny for eleven long years of his life. She had been there since the beginning, present in the royal chambers listening to the first cries of the newest and youngest prince.
His father was not a man prone to violence, but he had an obsession with control. Contradictorily, he also liked to indulge in certain vices. These traits combined in one person did not make for a stable disposition. When 21O had come between eleven-year-old 9S and his father, shielding her boy with her own body, his father had swung the cane anyway, and hadn’t stopped until she was cold and silent.
It had been, inexorably, one of the biggest factors that have shaped his views on his family, and in particular to the way his father ruled. He’d like to think that his father had simply been drunk and angry and so killed one of the dearest people in his life in inebriated madness, but 9S knows how calculating and controlling his father always had been, and the explanation doesn’t fit the profile.
9S still doesn’t understand why his father had done it, but he will never forget the way the guards had dragged 21O’s broken body out of the room.
The maids and butlers of the palace are his allies, 9S knows, because he has won them over through years of kindness and affection and general human decency. The many citizens of the kingdom’s common class are solidly on his side, because he has promised them a better future, a better kingdom for their children to grow up in. But they cannot protect him.
9S seems plagued by constant accidents and misfortunes. Stray bullets and emissions from untested energy blasters almost hit him when he passes by the training yard. Decorative light fixtures, large paintings, or vases almost fall on his head. An enormous statue of the previous King, currently in the process of being dismantled, nearly crushes him. His saddle fails him in the middle of a ride, and he’s nearly trampled by his autosteed when he falls to the ground.
On one memorable occasion, he wakes up abruptly in the middle of the night to the point of a knife under his throat. Luckily, his sword is never out of reach, even in his bed. His blade sinks to its hilt in the assassin’s chest cavity even as he blinks the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes.
At breakfast, he has a retainer he does not particularly care for taste his food, and watches dispassionately as the man falls to the floor frothing at the mouth.
When he attends court in the morning and sees how pale in the face most of the nobles are, how they cannot seem to look at him, it merely confirms what he already knows.
He doesn’t really blame them for it. He has expected since the beginning that some of them will try to kill him, and it will honestly be unnerving if none of them don’t at least make an attempt. The nobility want to keep their comfortable lives, secure in their luxury and overwhelming wealth. The things 9S is trying to do to shorten the power and financial gap between classes is a threat to everything they have been living. The only surprising part is how long it has taken them to get on with the attempts.
But perhaps the most unexpected part of it all is how much of an inconvenience it is to him.
In the past month alone he has written and processed fifteen new laws. He’s also revised or entirely abolished about twenty more. He is dodging assassination attempts while signing documents. He writes and reviews new mandates as he checks his wine for poison. His sleep is disturbed with a constant vigilance for intruders, he dresses and eats while looking over his shoulder for traitors among his staff. He feels besieged on all sides and it is inevitably taking a toll on his health.
Eventually at the end of the month, he is forced to accept the fact that he needs a guard.
The problem lies in the fact that guards can be bought off. He should know this better than anyone, given how he’s done the exact thing to his father’s royal guard. Soldiers can run away out of cowardice, they can decide to protect their own lives over his in a dire situation.
He needs someone who is ultimately loyal to him alone, who he can trust to watch his back and give their life for his sake. He needs irrefutable reassurance of this fact.
It takes a few more days and sleepless nights before he finally comes to the conclusion. It is a difficult decision and it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. But then again, nothing will ever come close to the decision he made to kill his entire family.
He goes to the hypermarkets.