you were the answer to my dreams

Money had never been of great importance to the Baron. Or rather, he had never truly searched for it within those he bedded, much less within those he courted. The King's treasury had gone entirely unconsidered until this exact moment, the golden coins so piled upon piles was entirely astonishing for the vampire if only because he had certainly never set his eyes on such a vast amount of that raw currency that so few now had. After all, the gold standard had been abandoned nearly a hundred years ago, and even then paper money had been the chief of British currency for as long as Sebastian had been alive. That simple fact of it's worth rolled off his tongue without quite realizing that the words would be altogether meaningless to the King, at least, not at first. The near shock of the magnitude of what he was surrounded by was enough that the efforts the vampire so often made to explain such complicated modern manners had been forgotten entirely as he simply turned in place, observing every hint of that glittering substance. The sheer wealth that existed here certainly warranted the numerous guards that had lined those hallways before, and too its location and yet, even that hardly held a candle to the realization of what could happen. It was this sense of urgency that caused the vampire to finally turn to his lover, insisting quite directly that Dorian didn't exchange the entirety of his wealth for that paper money.

His crystalline eyes watched his lover in that moment as the King's brow furrowed with clear contemplative confusion, that glimpse alone speaking volumes of the foreignness of those concepts that the Englishman tried, and failed to convey. Still he was decidedly patient all the same, waiting as Dorian so struggled to understand before offering what he had gleamed from those feverishly spoken words. The vampire's head bobbed ever so slightly, his bright blue eyes observing the fashion at which Dorian reached out to pluck a singular coin from the wealth of others before inquiring further for that financial advice on those financial matters. Sebastian's eyebrows rose ever so slightly at the sound of those other places that fell from the King's lips and yet he failed to respond immediately. Rather, it was with delicate care that he reached out to that same stack of coins as Dorian had done priorly, plucking a single one from the mountain only for his fingers to gingerly caress in a glimpse of care for what now rested in his palm. "You know..." He started softly, not directly answering any of those queries or addressing any of that confusion he had caused, "...I've never actually held a gold coin before...before paper dollars, Britain preferred silver coins. It was...quite an inconvenience, as you can imagine."

For several moments his fingers simple caressed the facade of that coin and its details before the vampire placed it back upon the pile it had come from. Rather, it was the bars of gold he directed his attention to gesturing slightly for the King to follow as he stood before the front of many of those towering stacks. "These are what you will want to use, not the coins, the coins, you might consider melting down into these but this is what the banks will accept." He started, simply enough before turning to his lover, a small frown gracing his features in momentary consideration. He supposed it would be...beneficial to explain those modern concepts of banking, after all, he despised the notion that Dorian's ignorance, and in turn that of his advisors, might put the King in an unwanted situation simply from ignorance, it was a fear that had lingered quite often within the vampire during the earlier days of their budding relationship. "Once upon a time, there was the 'Gold Standard', which, is well, a product of all of....this. In most countries, the coins were minted in gold, or, at least, could be exchanged for their weight in gold, which was the case in Britain. Naturally, this became inconvenient when handling large sums of gold, carrying around say, a hundred gold coins got to be...heavy. Countries solved this problem by creating paper money. These pieces of paper money could be exchanged for gold or silver coins at a bank - the same amount for what was written on the bank note. Unfortunately, this meant that there was only a specific amount of money that could exist by any given bank because they only had so much gold, so, they decided to remove the gold standard. That way they could stimulate the economy by simply printing more money when it was needed, like...during the Great Depression, for example."

The vampire paused from his quick lesson on financial history, his fingers gracing the tops of those bars. "Banks still will exchange gold for a set rate. One of these bars is roughly worth what a middle class adult makes in a year. You'll want to exchange...roughly fifty of these to start out with okay? You'll want a million in actual cash to keep in here, and then another million in your bank account. Countries ran into difficulty with paper money the same way they did with coins, in large numbers, it got to be inconvenient so now, the bank will hold your money for you and, in exchange, they give you one of these..." He paused to fish that wallet from his pocket and too, that credit card his lover had undoubtedly seen him utilize time and time again. "The number on this card is attached to my bank account so when I give this card to someone else to pay for something, the bank will transfer money from my account to theirs without me ever having to touch my money at all. Do you understand?" Those blue eyes fluttered towards the King, entirely aware of all the information he had quite literally dumped upon his lover at what had started as a seemingly simple request on the worth of that glistening room.

Still, Sebastian hardly anticipated the fashion at which his lover turned to inspect the contents of one of those bookshelves, the Englishman following in his wake. He watched in silence as his lover's fingers trailed over the spine of those books, though for what he hadn't the faintest idea. His eyebrows furrowed ever so slightly at Dorian's mention of this gift he had mentioned but once within the Orangery at Belton. Gingerly, he reached out to accept those leather bound books, entirely inquisitive as he opened the cover of the first volume. His eyes skirted over the ink and the precise handwriting upon that page, before fluttering upwards towards the King himself as the realization of what he held within his hands so donned upon him. "...Dorian...." The King's name was breathless even upon his own lips before his head shook ever so slightly, "I..I cannot accept this. These should be in museums for the world to appreciate, you have no idea what these would mean to some..." His voice trailed off as his fingers moved delicately across that page, those olden books of art perhaps of far more interest than all the gold that sat behind him and yet, he too knew how incredibly selfish it was to keep such a thing for himself, not when those two men of years long past had impacted the world of art so greatly as they had.

Sebastian Ellington