A Fate Worse Than Execution

Shit. I am absolutely, royally fucked.

That was the only thought that would come.

Why? Why, of all things?

In any possession story—villain or background extra alike—the ironclad convention was that you landed, at the very least, somewhere within the orbit of the original work, wasn't it? You possessed a good-for-nothing and got misunderstood, or possessed a villain and ended up in mortal peril, and either way you milked the original's biggest events for all they were worth. That was the fundamental formula of the genre.

So why—why!—had he possessed not the original, but some trashy piece of fanfiction? And not just any fanfic, but an omegaverse—as its omega Cesare, no less!

It wasn't even a respectable omegaverse. It was a trainwreck of an adult-rated smut fic that had taken the original's bleak revenge tragedy and kneaded every degenerate taste imaginable into it.

Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined he would fall into that heinous fan novel—the one that had taken Cesare, who in the original held the Empire in the palm of his hand, and remade him into "an obscene omega moaning 'aah, aah' beneath Leoneld every night."

"Your Grace? You've gone dreadfully pale. Let me fetch you a suppressant at once—"

He instinctively struck away the butler's worried, reaching hand—or no, to be precise, he flared his aura as he evaded it. His nerves right now were more fragile than a crystal glass. If so much as a fingertip brushed against another person, he half-feared one of that novel's cheap moans would come spilling out of him. Gooseflesh crawled up his arms.

Calm down. Just calm down.

Cesare pressed a hand to his forehead. His fingertips were trembling, but he forced his breathing steady, barely.

Even now, the man in the mirror boasted the same elegant, frost-cool beauty.

All right. Think this through calmly...

If he picked apart the differences from the original one by one, a way out might yet present itself. The basic plot and the relationships between characters ought to still follow the original's frame. The only thing added was that deranged "omegaverse" setting.

In the original, Leoneld had been an avenger without a drop of blood or tears in him.

And Leoneld in this fanfic?

"AAARGH!"

The vulgar line, auto-playing on loop inside his skull, wrung the scream out of him before he could stop it. The butler beside him nearly dropped his tray, jumping clean out of his skin.

"Y-your Grace! What on earth is the matter?"

"...It's nothing. Get out. Get out now!"

Cesare all but shoved the butler through the door. Only after locking it and sliding the bolt home did he finally manage to breathe again.

Then he spent a long while pacing the room like a pigeon deep in thought, before flinging himself onto the bed.

...

He needed a strategy. A meticulous, flawless, absolutely impenetrable strategy—one that would keep his chastity safe.

Even if it meant dredging up everything he knew of the original, he had to break through this situation.

First, let's recall what that fanfic contained.

In the original, Cesare is beaten by Leoneld at the very end and executed. A tidy ending—karma served neat. The clean death of a proper villain.

But the omegaverse fanfic was another story.

Cesare, having lost the final battle to Leoneld, is not executed—instead, he gets fucked by him.

As for plausibility... let's just agree not to think about it. That's par for the course with R-rated smut.

Anyway. To put it simply.

If he stayed on this track, his chastity was in danger.

No matter how well he knew the original, there was always room for a "what if."

What if, by some miserable fluke, he lost that final battle to Leoneld—

Shit. Horrifying.

With that moan echoing through his skull yet again, Cesare's face contorted to its full extent.

That alone, and that alone, his pride would never forgive.

"Haa..."

Exhaling a long breath and sweeping the hair back from his face, Cesare muttered, cold:

"At this point in the story... Leoneld has only just regressed."

Before his regression, Leoneld's cause of death had been poisoning.

The princes, gathered under the Crown Prince's banner, had feared his talent and moved to cut it off at the root. They had been feeding him poison, steadily, for years.

...And the one who ordered that poison administered was Cesare.

To Cesare—who had gotten a hook into the Crown Prince's weakness and meant to make a puppet of him and devour the Empire whole—the gifted Thirteenth Prince was nothing more than a pebble to be kicked off the road.

So Cesare had the Thirteenth Prince assassinated.

In other words, the hidden hand behind every last bit of it was Cesare himself.

Running away won't fix anything.

He was already buried under a mountain of his own misdeeds. Stay hidden and do nothing, and the truth would reach Leoneld in the end—and the arrow of his vengeance would swing around toward Cesare.

And in this insane fanfic's world, that vengeance would, nine times out of ten, lead straight to one ending: him on his back on a bed, relieved of his virtue. The conclusion was all too easy to picture.

Shit! Anything but that!

Never. No matter what happened, that future alone had to be stopped. Cesare clenched his fist hard. If only to stay alive, he had to change course this very instant.

There was exactly one way to avert the tragedy of his backside being breached.

It's time I started being good to him.

Redemption. From now on he would play the reformed villain, shower Leoneld with kindness, and wait on him hand and foot. But that was easier said than done—he hadn't the faintest idea where to begin. Just then, through the firmly shut door, came the cautious voice of the butler he'd tossed out earlier.

"...Your Grace, it is time to begin your preparations. You are expected at the Crown Prince's birthday banquet at the Imperial Palace today, are you not?"

Cesare went rigid.

The Crown Prince's birthday banquet...

The stage of the first event after Leoneld's regression. There, hemmed in by the very brothers who would feed him poison, Leoneld would begin sharpening the blade of his revenge.

In other words—

This... is my chance.

The Leoneld of this moment had no power to fight back with. Swearing his future vengeance, he would meekly accept the offered poison and drink it down. And then would come the ceremonial duel held for the Crown Prince's birthday. Still reeling from the poison, Leoneld would be utterly crushed in the match and forced to swallow the humiliation.

But.

If he prevented it—wouldn't that surely stoke the man's favor?

"We depart."

Cesare said it with an icy expression as he swept his coat over his shoulders. I will have his favor. Without fail.

He could never—never—surrender his rear. To prevent that tragedy, he would have sold his soul to a demon.

Beneath extravagant chandeliers, the laughter of the nobility rolled in like waves. The banquet hall glittered, crammed with ornaments bright enough to blind.

Stepping into it, Cesare repeated the same words to himself, again and again. Stay calm. I have exactly one goal today.

To imprint, flawlessly, the impression of I am on your side onto Leoneld. And building on that, to win his trust—so that even on the day every last "truth" came to light, he would not be able to bring himself to ravish him.

So it was, while Cesare gnawed at his lip in agitation and surveyed the hall with troubled eyes—

"...Good heavens."

"Just look at the state of him. Does he even know where he is?"

Whispers stirred near the entrance. Leoneld had appeared, in formal dress shabby past all excuse.

...Perhaps because the regression was so recent, his gaze was uniquely frostbitten and keen.

He took the storm of mockery raining down on him with total indifference, walking toward the center of the hall.

"Oh, if it isn't the shame of our imperial line... my mistake—is that not the Thirteenth Prince?"

The Crown Prince drew near, wearing a smile gone rancid. Mixed among his retinue were the cronies Cesare kept in his usual orbit. Together they ringed Leoneld in like hunters closing on game.

"Isn't that the formalwear from last year's banquet? Well, I can hardly blame him—this is a child of the blood the imperial treasury grudges even a single coin."

"Hahaha! Your Highness, that's going too far—he is a prince in name, after all. Although, dressed as he is, he'd frankly have looked better borrowing a servant's clothes."

They cackled around him in a ring.

Leoneld worried his lower lip between his teeth, but no words came. It was only natural. The poison his brothers had fed him across twenty years lay sedimented deep in his body, and his strength had not yet returned. With his throat liable to be opened by their hands at any moment, rashness was a luxury he could not afford.

Just as the cheap jeering reached its stride, the Crown Prince shoved the wineglass in his own hand roughly up beneath Leoneld's chin.

"I'm feeling gracious, so have a drink. It's a cup bestowed by your elder brother—receive it as the honor it is."

Within the glass, a violet liquid trembled. Poisoned wine.

Leoneld surely knew it too.

And still, he would not refuse. He had no strength—not yet, not now.

"...I accept, with gratitude."

It was the very moment Leoneld reached out with a trembling hand to take the glass—

"Since when has the standard of an imperial banquet sunk to such vulgarity?"

A voice, sunk to freezing depths, cleaved the hall in two.

Silence crashed in all at once. Every noble gaze in the room swiveled to a single point.

There stood the Duke of Valois—Cesare von Valois—violet eyes glinting frost-cold as he came forward.