The hedge tasted like dirt and broken dignity.
Ash lay spread-eagled in the remnants of what had apparently been a very beloved serpent-shaped ornamental shrub, staring up at the moon, listening to the distant sound of his own dignity leaving his body.
A twig was lodged somewhere in his hair.
He didn't move to remove it.
"Okay," he thought, with the particular brand of calm that only sets in after catastrophe has finished doing its worst.
This wasn't part of the story.
He replayed the last ten minutes in his head with the detached, slightly horrified clarity of a man reviewing security footage of himself tripping down a flight of stairs.
The incense. The horns. The tail wrapped around his ankle like it was made of glue.
The way Ignis had kissed him back.
Ash pressed both palms over his face and made a sound into them that he would take to his grave.
Your body believes me even if your pride doesn't, he'd said. He said Smugly. While sitting on a dragon's lap.
He deserved this hedge.
The thing was—and this was the part Ash kept circling back to, the part that wouldn't let him simply accept his hedge-shaped fate and move on—Ignis had kissed him back.
Not with the mechanical desperation of a man purely at the mercy of enchanted incense. Not like someone reaching for the nearest available warmth. He'd kissed him like he meant it. Like he'd been furious about wanting to for a long time and had finally run out of reasons not to.
Ignis had held him like something he didn't want to let go of, and then thrown him out a window, and those two facts were going to make Ash lose his mind.
He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until he saw stars.
"Okay," he told himself, with the brisk internal tone of someone who had studied three months of dragon court etiquette and could handle this. "Okay. Think."
What would the original Asher do in this situation?
The thing about being transmigrated into a trashy novel that absolutely no one warned you about is: the protagonist's body came pre-loaded with memories, skills, and personality, but the soul crammed inside it—one Ash Marion, age twenty-two, Computer Science sophomore, chronically sleep-deprived, who was supposed to be studying for his Operating Systems midterm but instead he spent time reading a garbage 1200 chapter revenge novel on a dying laptop for two consecutive week.
' The Vengeance of Asher De Michaelangelo'
In a single feverish night during finals week, mostly to avoid doing anything productive. Terrible prose. Worse grammar. A revenge plot so convoluted it looped back around to being accidentally compelling.
The original Asher De Michaelangelo was, to put it charitably, a disaster.
Ridiculously overpowered—the sort of protagonist whose stat sheet read like the author had lost a bet. Politically ruthless to the point of sociopathy. Single-mindedly devoted to rebuilding his family's empire after the dragons burned it down in chapter hundred and eighty.
The seducing-the-dragon-princess plan had been canon.
Ash remembered it vividly because it was the exact moment he'd looked up from his phone at 3 AM and said aloud, to no one, "This man is such a scheming little rat and I respect it completely," and then kept reading for another four hours.
And now he was that scheming little rat.
Fun.
The novel's plot had been clear. Seraphina—proud, sensitive, volatile, deeply loyal to her father's honor—would take offense at a perceived slight from Seiena's imperial court sometime in the next two years. A mishandled diplomatic letter. A public embarrassment at a trade summit. The details varied depending on which chapter you were reading, but the result was always the same: dragon war, fallen empire, everything Asher loved reduced to ash. Ironic, given his name.
Marrying Seraphina had seemed like the elegant solution. Bind the families. Give her a stake in Seiena's survival. Neutralize the offense before it could occur.
It had not occurred to him—could not have occurred to him, back in his old world was—the main antagonist—The Dragon Lord, the destroyer of Asher's empire, the original—Seraphina's father would be like that.
Transcendently, ruinously, unfairly beautiful. Sharp and cold as a blade in public and apparently devastatingly undone by a hand on his horn. Golden eyes that tracked Ash across every room like he was something that required monitoring. A tail with opinions. An eight-pack that had absolutely no business existing.
Ash pulled himself out of the hedge.
Ash was not, historically, into men. He wanted to be very clear about that, internally, to himself, alone in a hedge. He had a perfectly reasonable and well-documented history of being attracted to women. He had never once, in twenty-one years of living, experienced anything that could be described as this.
And as if fate itself wanted to change that fact, he had walked into that throne room, looked up, and his entire operating system had crashed.
Three weeks of prepared diplomatic speech. Gone. He'd stood there with his mouth open like a fish on land while Ignis watched him from the dais with those terribly beautiful golden eyes, and the only coherent thought in Ash's head had been oh, this is a problem.
A thorn caught his sleeve as he finally pulled free of the hedge, depositing him onto the flagstone path with only minor ceremony.
He stood there for a moment, shirtless in the moonlight, bits of ornamental shrubbery in his hair.
Then he covered his face with both hands again.
"I told him I came here for him," he muttered into his palms. "I said it with my mouth. Out loud. To his face."
The garden offered no absolution.
Ash exhaled.
Pressed his tongue briefly to his lower lip, where he could still feel the ghost of it.
Ignis had opened for him like it was something he'd been denying himself for months. Had gripped his waist hard enough to bruise—and the bruises were already forming, tender little crescents where claws had pressed into pale skin—and made a sound against his mouth that Ash was fairly confident was going to live rent-free in his memory for the rest of his natural life.
None of that was in the novel.
None of that was in any draft of the plan.
He retrieved a leaf from his hair, examined it, dropped it.
The cold wind from the mountain brewed in and Ash's shivered from cold.
Currently, he should go back inside. Find a servant's entrance, sneak to his guest chambers, pretend this night never happened. And pray he survives tomorrow from Ignis's cold gaze or his sword.