Portrait Gallery More-than-usually-doctored picture of different boys...



Author: Layna
Title: Portrait Gallery
Series: Briefs
Pairing: Blaine/Kourt
Rating: NC-17 for recollections.
Archive: Yes, at KCFC and Layna's Lounge, if you please, dear Fox.
Feedback: Always welcome! layna@teamandersen.net is the place to send it.

For Fox, who made everything perfect.
For Ruth, because I am her Padawan.
For Dagmar and Dahlia, the twins.
For Linda, who appreciates Blaine.
For Doug, who encourages me to write.
For HiperBunny, who knows Blaine all too well.



Blaine led Kourt down a hall that suddenly widened into a gallery.

"It's a tradition since the crown came into being. Portraits, old-school painted portraits. We sit for them when we turn thirty. The kings and queens hang in the main palace. Spares, the princes at least, we're all back here."

Maroon velvet wall coverings provided a backdrop for a series of elaborately framed likenesses of four hundred years of the younger sons of the House of Garu. Kourt strolled the length of the gallery, studying the faces. He paused at one, a blond gentleman in black, and glanced at Blaine.

"Michel. He was born, oh, three hundred and fifty years ago? Something like that. Never wore anything but black."

"Any particular reason?"

"Probably, but no one knows."

"He looks almost exactly like..."

Blaine laughed. "I know. Most of us do. There's our motto, "The House of Garu runs ever true" -- it's usually taken to imply loyalty, but to be honest I think it's more to do with breeding. For some reason, certain family... resemblances show up more in us spares. Resemblances in looks, resemblances in behavior, resemblances in... well, a lot of things."

"But this fellow here, there isn't much resemblance at all." A man with a round face and brown eyes gazed mildly from another portrait.

"Erik. They say he looked very like the Queen's favorite counselor."

"And this one's got red hair." Red hair, in a long, thick rope of braid pulled forward over his left shoulder, and a long deep green tunic over lighter green tights and knee-high darkest-green boots, and brilliant blue eyes that seemed to glitter with humor.

"Yes, but that's dye. Karl cycled through a different one each season, so we can tell that this was painted in the winter. Summers, he was a brunet." Blaine smiled. "Ramon over there, he always kept his blue, to match his clothes. Rumor has it he had the supernumerary nipple, too. It usually skips a generation. Now, here's an interesting one."

"I thought you said this gallery was all princes?" A slender, regal woman in a dark red velvet dress looked out at them with familiar blue eyes.

"She was. Her Highness, King Bail Rosabel Garu. Born Kevin, but lived as a girl from age twelve up. She was a spare when she was painted, but then her father and the heir died tragically in two separate boating accidents, and she reigned for forty-some years. She's in the kings' gallery too, but this is a much better picture of her."

"Two separate boating accidents."

"Suspicious, yes. But she was one of the best kings of her age. She doubled the size of the kingdom, and established the Hall of Justice. The next one's her son --"

"The one holding the oar?"

"Crew enthusiast. Died tragically in a --"

"Boating accident?" Kourt raised an eyebrow.

"Bordello fire."

"Oh." Kourt browsed down to another portrait, this one of an excessively thin, pale young man with a tight smile and hollow eyes.

"Stefan. Lived just long enough to get the portrait painted, then overdosed on spice."

"Another accident?"

"Doubtful. He'd been addicted for years, he knew his tolerances. His ghost rummages through the drawers in the Blue Suite at night, looking for his stuff. My brother's seen him a couple of times."

"A Force echo." Kourt had heard of that sort of thing, an extremely intense experience hanging in the air for a few hundred years, occasionally visible, usually to children at the verge of puberty.

"Don't be silly. A ghost."

And so it went, down the line of portraits: several dozen passionate young men. Several were painted astride favorite horses, or holding hawks. A few were in sports costumes; three were mostly nude, and seven wore white tunics and veils -- Blaine explained that they belonged to a religious order. The Bails were, almost to a man, handsome, full of life, and long dead. Nearly every one was a close match for Blaine.

"And here at the end is Uncle Niklas. The only living spare, outside myself, of course."

A very thin man with close-cropped blond hair and an ironic smile stood, flanked by a pair of identical, voluptuous red-haired women.

"And these ladies with him are..."

"Dagmar and Dahlia. Identical twins, if you couldn't tell. A very romantic story: he fell in love with both of them, and his father insisted that he make a decision. Of course, he refused. Called it a false dichotomy. Got cut off without a cent."

"That must've been hard for him."

"Not really. They're Dagmar and Dahlia Quarzune."

"Quarzune?"

"You haven't looked at the labels on that chocolate I've been giving you, have you? Gods, if you'd pay less attention to your Jedi stuff, and more attention to chocolate... Candy heiresses. They lose more money in their sofa cushions than the House of Garu has in our treasury. Just plain good people, too. They sent me a case of ices for my twentieth birthday."

"Ices?"

"Well, I had this party... I thought it would be really cool to celebrate my twentieth birthday by giving head to twenty of my best friends."

"You gave... skies, Blaine, when I was twenty, I was --"

"Dodging bullets, sleeping in mud, levitating gnomes, taking assassin lessons, saving the universe, etc. I can't help it if you were raised by wolves."

"It's just -- "

"It was a really good time. There were gatecrashers, of course, and then some people got in line two or three times, and apparently it wound up being forty-seven instead of twenty. At least that's how many actually signed the guest book... Not that I remember the last couple of dozen, because a few of the guys had taken curve, and that's transmitted in semen, so I was... Well. Kerol tells me she took me home and put me to bed, but I don't remember anything 'til pretty late the next afternoon."

"Thank the gods I didn't know you then. I'd have been clean dead of worry."

"Oh, I was fine. I just couldn't talk at all, or eat anything much for the next few days. Thus, the ices, in assorted fruit flavors." Blaine smiled, clearly remembering something sweet and cool.

"Forty-seven. In one evening." Kourt tried to avoid getting his brain around the idea. Just the sheer volume of... Kourt turned his mind to daggers, garrotes, undetectable biotoxins, anything else.

"I was TWENTY. You're SUPPOSED to do that sort of thing when you're twenty. I really can't see doing it again."

"Oh, that's comforting. So I suppose you'll have your portrait painted with a case of fruit ices and a copy of the guest list."

Blaine cast his eyes down, smiled a kind of secret smile. "What I get my portrait painted with depends a lot on what you're doing at the time." He looked up at Kourt for a moment, then suddenly ran down the hall in the general direction of his rooms. "Tag!"



-end-

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