Fright The Fixed Stars
by skazka

Fright The Fixed Stars

skazka

Summary

When he’s ten years old Hal determines that he must be a bastard, and that the man he calls his father is not his father.

Notes

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 2227593.

Chapter 1

When he’s ten years old Hal determines that he must be a bastard, and that the man he calls his father is not his father. He doesn’t dare tell anyone, or he’ll surely be beaten -- and they’d be right to do it, both for the sheer perverse cheek of undermining his own legitimacy and for prying too much into his father’s business-- but he turns over the thought of it in his mind with a jealous thoroughness. Maybe his brothers are bastards too, but that’s their own problem -- what he doesn’t understand is why nobody talks about it -- nobody even insinuates it, and he’s heard what foolish men have said about his grandfather, at least through the backhanded echo of what wise men won’t mention. It needn’t even be bastardy for his conclusion to hold -- it could be an innocent mistake, some mix-up with the wrong baby or duplicitous nurses, but what matters is that something is wrong and Hal is the only one who knows about it. He spends a summer quietly alert to anything that sounds the slightest bit like innuendo, anything said about his dead mother or anything even tenuously related to the subject of lineage or inheritance, and feeling sick in his guts with the certainty of it. First and foremost it means he doesn’t belong here. Perhaps he belongs somewhere else.

(This is the summer it is informally concluded he’s reached the age of reason, and when the responsibilities associated with that begin to encroach on him. This is the summer where he begins to feel awkward in his own skin and like a stranger to himself, when he first casts about with boyish clumsiness for someone different to be.)

This is why his father is so quiet and why he seethes so when it’s Hal who misbehaves and not his brothers. It’s why they look nothing alike, why his father’s lessons never seem to stick despite their mutual best efforts and why he doesn’t feel especially fond of him at all. Henry is dark and Hal is fair; Henry is sober and Hal is gamesome. Henry has an illustrious athletic record dating back to boyhood, triumph after triumph after triumph; Hal has only managed to drill horsemanship into himself through practice, and pretending he’s good at it without having to try is like pretending his new shoes don’t pinch him. Everything that comes to his father so naturally, Hal can only obtain through strenuous effort. Fathers and sons are meant to be alike. It’s just Hal’s luck that he’ll turn out like someone else at his best, and everyone will be surprised.

(This is not why his father resents King Richard, but it can’t help. There’s an awful lot of bad blood between them, and no one will talk about that either. )

It can’t have been King Richard, Hal quickly surmises -- this is aiming much too high -- but if it could have been anyone it ought to have been him. He knows how babies are made, obviously -- if nothing else, the sleek blue-gray brach he got last summer has already whelped a litter, so he’s gathered the guiding principles of the business as it ends, but not how it starts. He’s yet to witness how affairs begin -- probably by not paying attention in church, or not looking away modestly while being introduced -- but he tries to picture it anyway. King Richard has never had any business with other men’s wives, or at least not to the point of notoriety, but his court is full of women and it stands to reason that he had gotten along well with the mother of his cousin’s children. There had been some sort of mix-up, some exchange, and the house of Lancaster had gotten the wrong son. Heroes often have obscure parentage, at least the way Hal has been told it; there are gods involved, or devils, or witches. When he looks at the king from afar, strict and blazing in the summer light, dishonest as it is Hal begins to hope. If he can pin down what the king excels at, he can compare that to his own character, and have some pattern for his own life that isn’t a series of fumbles and scoldings and mistakes. Moreover this would make him a prince, and it seems unfair for a king to have no sons.

Hal doesn’t know the king well -- their paths in life seldom intersect, and the king rarely stays with them any more, his earlier presence a clove-scented blur in Hal’s memory of scrubbed faces and adults’ voices -- but he wants nothing more than to be near to him. If King Richard were to teach him his lessons Hal would have learned them by heart in one afternoon. It’s not admiration, not quite, but something hums between the two of them like a struck chord -- an affinity and a difference.

When he’s twelve Hal knows full well who his father is, never mind who begot him. He makes certain he forgets that he’d ever hoped otherwise. It was a silly thing to hope for, a boyhood whim with no foundation, and he had little to be envious of after all.

**

When he is a young man he sleeps with whores and tapsters and thieves and calls it sport. When he is grown he sleeps with lords and lieutenants and princesses and calls it prerogative. He can’t say that any of them touches his affections, exactly, or that any of them gains any traction in the relentless climb from a man’s cock to his heart and mind. Or at least this progress is possible for other people -- Henry finds himself more or less impervious and it’s difficult to lament that fact, whether it’s a strength and a hidden deposit of admirable continence or a simple deficiency. Other men love, and Henry has admired, but he’s never had any trouble keeping the two apart.

There is something very gratifying in washing one’s hands of a person when you’ve finished with them. It’s good for a king’s health, and Henry is better at it than other men with much less to lose. Having paid for his father’s sins, he’s in the ideal position to set his court in order again and clean house; he will woo a French wife and father a half-dozen Anglo-French sons. This is a skill King Richard never had, and even his own father couldn’t manage.

As it turns out, Catherine is very mannerly and very clean and looks a great deal like her sister, though Henry’s own recollections have gotten blurred by the passage of time. He considers asking her what she remembers of Isabel, but she’s too young to remember her at all.

End Notes

This fic is deeply weird in a lot of ways and a pretty pessimistic look at Hal and how he works, but it was really fun to write, and bizarre Changeling Fantasy stuff for somebody who still ends up inheriting the throne is a blast.