*referring to the title, the answer is a lot, but here's the plot of the Baekhyun king!AU i'll be writing because who needs a life and good grades anyways

Kingdom Come

“Fear will be your enemy, and death its consequence.”

***

They say nothing good comes easy.

And, standing in front of the hall, dressed in the traditional robe and holding her breath, she stares up at the giant, wooden doors and tries to calm her racing heart, and wonders that if nothing good comes out of it, can’t it at least be easy?

Byun Baekhyun, Eunjung repeats to herself. Once. Twice. Three times. The name never fails to sound less foreign. She’s never seen him, never spoken to him, doesn’t know what he looks like, doesn’t know a thing about him apart from the fact that he’s murdered thousands and thousands, some perhaps even her own subjects, and that by the time the sun has set, he’s supposed to be her husband. The only stories spoken of him are ill. Witnesses that have survived speak of a demon, a monster, one who kills without blinking. And yet she was standing here, wearing the robes of the bride, and on the other side of the room, the same man of those countless stories was waiting as the bridegroom.

She looks down at the red of her robe again. It bleeds into the ground, intertwining with a rich golden, and she clenches her fists under the sleeves. She thinks about the half-crazed eyes of her father as he shakes her by the shoulders, looking at someone who’s not his own daughter but… a stranger. Nothing more than that.

“You’re to kill him,” he says, words still crystal clear. “Or you’re no child of mine.”

Byun Baekhyun, Eunjung repeats again.

And then the doors into the throne room slowly begin to open, and she takes one last look behind her before stepping inside.

A couple of notes:

-OC fell in love with a “commoner”, though he turned out to be a traitor after the royal family and because of her, her younger brother (the direct heir to the throne) was killed and her father basically goes crazy because of it.

-He begins convinced that the traitor who killed his son was sent by Baekhyun’s kingdom, and because OC’s kingdom doesn’t have a proper heir anymore he agrees to marry her off to Baekhyun as it’s the perfect disguise and he wouldn’t be as suspicious—they get an alliance, Baekhyun gets the throne when OC's father dies. OC ends up as somewhat the spy for her father, looking for weaknesses in Baekhyun’s kingdom.

-Baekhyun has empathy deficit disorder (it's not the exact symptoms, and I tweaked it a bit), so because of the enviroment he grew up in, he has a hard time empathizing with people, which is one of the reasons he's such a cruel ruler.

@all my friends who told me to stop writing baek fics