“Now, I shall take my leave.” Rook left the room with barely an introduction, as if he had just set them up on a blind date.
Silence dominated the room for several moments.
Is that...? “Kuro?”
Kuro the spy had always worn all black, hiding his eyes with his long bangs and hood and even concealing his mouth with a cloth mask. Even though he should have only recognized small parts of Kuro’s face, Herscherik was confident that the man standing before him was the underground agent himself.
“...You’re actually pretty good-looking.”
“What do you mean, ‘actually’?” Kuro the spy-turned-butler grumbled.
Herscherik laughed in response. Ryoko’s nerdy intuition had guessed that Kuro was good-looking, but Herscherik couldn’t help but smile at how handsome he was after seeing Kuro’s whole face. “What happened? Did you switch careers overnight?”
“...Sort of.”
Kuro’s response was less confident than what Herscherik was used to hearing from Kuro.
I can’t very well tell you that I don’t even know how I ended up here, Kuro grumbled in his mind. As an agent of the underground, nobles were nothing but a source of income to him. That’s why he had worked as a spy, which only required a surface-level and short-lived interaction with his clients. But Herscherik was completely different from any of those nobles before him. Kuro had witnessed how Herscherik leaped into action, researching alone in the night and steeling himself to venture outside of the castle if need be. He’d seen the sense of responsibility he felt just because he had been born a royal, and his intense stubbornness. And Kuro saw how Herscherik smiled and showed his true emotions, in contrast to the mask Kuro always wore to conceal his face. As they spent more time together, Kuro noticed a change beginning to occur within him. Before he knew it, Kuro would find himself looking forward to meeting the prince during his next infiltration of the castle. The sense of danger he felt when Herscherik disappeared, the wrath he felt when he found the prince drugged and abducted, the relief he felt when he finally saved Herscherik... All of those emotions, and Herscherik’s sorrowful expression as he pushed his nanny away and continued to deceive his father, had stuck with Kuro. The little prince had done it all to follow through with his resolve of protecting those dear to him. Kuro wanted to help him, and protect him, somehow.
When Herscherik said that he wanted him to be his butler of service, Kuro’s heart skipped a beat. However, that joy didn’t come without a shadow of insecurity. He wondered if the prince only wanted him for his talents. Kuro wasn’t born in this country but had found himself here once upon a time and stuck around. No one had ever wanted him for who he was but only asked for his skills as Shadow Fang. Everyone who had ever asked for his services only did so in pursuit of his abilities; it didn’t matter who he was under the dark hood. Rationally, Kuro understood that this was only natural. Still, he had always longed, deep down, for someone to need him for who he was. “It’s because you’re Kuro,” Herscherik had said. “Did you only help me because I’m a prince, then?” The answer was no. Kuro would not have stuck his neck out to save anyone else, not his own client or even the king himself. Kuro saved the prince because he was Herscherik, not the other way around. Herscherik wanted Kuro and not Shadow Fang. For the first time, Kuro was truly wanted for who he was.
Instead of spilling his heart about all of that, Kuro simply grinned. “You said this was what you wanted, didn’t you?”
“...Thank you!” Herscherik confirmed with a smile becoming of his age. “But don’t they have to vet you?”
“Well, I was scouted by the king’s butler of service himself.”
As Kuro had been contemplating how to infiltrate the role, Rook had appeared before him without a sound. He immediately proposed that Kuro become Herscherik’s butler of service. Kuro couldn’t tell if Rook was acting on his own or by orders of the king. The only thing he took from the meeting was that the king’s butler of service approved of him and that Rook had his own secrets.
“Okay,” Herscherik conceded. “You really don’t have a birth name, Kuro? I feel weird just calling you Kuro.”
“I don’t know my birth name. I do have a name I go by, but you shouldn’t call me that.”
After Kuro began living in the underground and people started calling him Shadow Fang, he no longer needed his real name. He had no one close to him who wanted to know his real name. Whenever he needed a “normal” name during a mission, he invented an alias on the spot. But now, he had grown accustomed to Herscherik calling him Kuro. That being said, he understood that the prince might not want to use that name in public.
“Name me. Whatever you want.”
“Really...?” Herscherik contemplated, his brows pulled together. Soon, he clapped his hands. “How about Schwarz?”
“What does it mean?” Kuro asked, not recognizing the word.
“Um... ‘Black.’ So does Kuro, by the way. Is that too on the nose?” Herscherik timidly tilted his head.
Kuro laughed, and it sounded genuine. “That works. So I’m still your Kuro.”
“Yep!”
In this country, a name granted by a noble carried a special significance. It was a display of absolute trust by the granter and of selfless loyalty from the receiver. It would be some time before Herscherik and Kuro discovered the meaning behind a naming in this country, and share an embarrassed chuckle.