Prince Among Men

Frankly, he hadn't expected to get this chance. At all. Didn't matter that he was the top of his class. That he learned things mostly instantly. Sure there was a lot of reasons that this shouldn't have happened. Yet here he was, two days in to an internship at the Genoshan royal palace. And David's been moving through things carefully, juggling a large pile of folders and binders. A lot of stuff went on behind the scenes he'd learned, working as he did under a minister of commerce and trade.

And as an intern his main jobs seemed, at least for these first few days, carrying things back and forth and fetching coffee. He'd networked with someone who did the internship the year before and learned that yeah, it sucked the first few days, but then you started doing cool stuff, so he had his fingers crossed.

Okay, not actually, he was too busy moving quickly through the halls, trying not to trip and drop a massive pile of reports that he was certain had only been given to him because hazing the new guy who had already turned out to be smarter than half of the undersecretaries. Oops.

The big problem, of course, is taking a corner too quick. It wasn't that he meant to run into someone, but there it was happening anyway.

Best of a Bad Situation

The worst part is that he can't REACH. Okay, no, the worst part was that he hadn't seen it coming. That he hadn't been better at this. But he'd been taking their kid, their little boy, to the doctor. It was stupid that he even had to. But David wasn't a pediatrician, and he was big on the 'don't treat your family unless it's an emergency,' and so it had been a trip to the doctor for what was clearly an inner ear infection that he needed to get a script of ear drops for.

They'd taken them in the car. Run him off the road and the car had flipped and were it not for the baby seat, things would have been worse. Everything after that had been... distant. Foggy. Terrible until David had woken up in a non-descript room, woken by his little boy, in a literal cage, crying and screaming. David, chained to a wall and bleeding from his brow and dizzy, just wants to reach across to grab his baby and hold him close. Less than a year old, no way he could understand what was going on. couldn't understand why his daddy didn't just pick him up.

"Shhhh, shhh baby. It's okay. It's gonna be okay."

They want his money. They want his secrets. And they intended to let his son get very sick and very weak to make sure that David was willing to work with them.

And he knew it would work.