Orion || RWRB fanfic || Henry's POV

Part 1- Intro

Tucked away in the back of the Victoria Albert Museum, overlooking a bustling street in London, there is an airy room, all soaring, vaulted ceilings and gilded archways that stretch up endlessly into the inky sky, towering columns and sculpted altars and pillars carved from single blocks of marble. Deep, plunging fountains, water rippling in a gentle breeze, are planted between sculptures so lifelike they seem to be almost breathing, captured in black and white and glinting, glittering gold.

Henry likes to come here at night, when the half-twilight suspends and illuminates the room in a soft glow, and when he has the place to himself. He's never taken anyone else here with him, wanting selfishly to keep the magic of this room to himself, not wanting anyone here with him to break the spell; worried that they'd laugh at him, tell him not to be stupid.

All the same, he has a dream that someday he'll come here not alone, but with someone he loves, who loves him, someone who won't judge him, and that they'd dance together in a spotlight cast down by the glowing moon, and they wouldn't break the spell. They'd tangle Henry up in a magical world all of their own.

Deep down, he knows it's impossible; an impossible thing for him, for a prince. But he can still dream.

***

The sprawling warren of twenty-two rooms on the northwest side of Kensington palace, closest to the Orangery, are reserved for the youngest members of the Royal Family. The apartment he shares with his sister Bea has never felt much like a home to Henry- cavernous rooms, footsteps echoing hollowly, gleaming marble, it all seems so strange to him- alien, though he's lived here most of his twenty two years of life. If anything, there's more of Bea here than of him- in a tatty jacket slung over the back of a chair, and in the rude oil paintings she takes great delight in stringing up on the walls.

The one room Henry thinks of as anything like a home is a small parlour on the second floor, converted into a makeshift music studio- hand woven Turkish rugs in rich crimsons and violets scattered across the floor, a tobacco-coloured settee that groans painfully whenever they sit on it. The blank walls are strung with Stratocasters and Flying Vs, violins, a selection of gilded harps, a lone cello propped up in a dark corner and, in the centre of the room, a grand piano, littered with well-fingered sheet music, scrawled all over with handwritten additions in Henry's looping, elegant script.

Henry tries to spend most of his time at Kensington here, in the parlour. His own bedroom is insufferably bland and beige, with a gilded bed in the centre, a large, framed window set in one bare wall with a view over the rambling palace grounds, where he sits on nights when he can't sleep- which is most- thinking, and, occasionally, allowing his thoughts to flow out of him, through his hand, like blood, bleeding onto paper, which he stuffs away under the mattress, where no one will ever read it.

***