𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐧, young royals

Chapter 1: Wilhelm

Two Men In Love,  The Irrepressibles

1: Wilhelm

I ruined it. I fucking ruined it.

Scraps of an opportunity to set myself on the right path and meet my parents' expectations, I tossed them out the window. And it felt fucking amazing.

For a fleeting moment, I shut my eyes, and everything stopped. I curled in on myself, like the ocean's tide, tasted the salt biting down on the tip of my tongue, felt tempests brushing over my shoulders. It made me feel like a caged bird in exhibit at the zoo, the staring. All these eyes, eyes wide and crazed.  My parted lips hovered above the mic, frozen in time.

And then the wind, shaking the trees, lashing the right side of my face, and a firm hand closing in around my bicep.  I opened my eyes, alarmed, like reborn.  Malin, next to me, tugged on my arm, urging me off the stand, and I allowed her take me away.  With the look on her face, she seemed like she might bare her teeth at me and yap, were I to resist.

As we walked, the whispers and murmurs swelled through the audience with dramatic increase. The crowd looked like a giant bee hive, I thought comically, each seated person buzzing and shaking in their chair, muttering away.

I caught my mother's eyes, robot-like.  She looked like a carpet had been swept right from underneath her feet.  She had it almost, the peacefulness, and then came her wretched son, the hurricane in the making, to wreck havoc upon the family again.  I was much more than the royal family's ripen fruit, I thought.  I was the ocean's tsunamis, the sky's frolics, and the mountaintop's avalanches.

Hectic, it was, yes.  Three other bodyguards trailed behind us, as if to cloak me, hoping it might draw the attention away from me, but even then I felt the public's prying eye following us.  Malin's claws dug into my arm still, but I could scarcely feel it.  Like a drunk, I was reeling in a frenzied haze.

I heard voices rising, instructions shouted, and then, like a ray of sunlight through a ceiling of cloud, the choir began to sing.  I froze in my tracks, the hairs on my neck perking, and whirled around.

"Simon," I breathed.

Wide-eyed, propping myself up on the balls of my feet, I tried to catch a glimpse of him in the distance.

"Crown prince," warned Malin through gritted teeth.

Turning to her, I stated simply, "I need to see him."

"There is no time now," she replied and firmly tugged me away.  "You've done enough for yourself."

Without much resistance, I let myself be dragged away, but my eyes strayed back to the choir and the shaken audience, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a burgundy jacket and a head of curls before Malin pushed me into the backseat of a car and slammed the door shut.

✧ ✧ ✧

I hadn't uttered a word since the jubilee. It's like I was trying to preserve the bitter-sweet taste of it in my mouth. Maybe spitting it into a jar and keeping it as a souvenir would do.

At the palace, they took my phone and shoved me in a room, leaving me to marinate in my misery.

So there I sat, scaping the gallows, imagining myself crawling out the windows and scaling down the palace walls. Escaping out into the world, like a newly-turnt butterfly out its cocoon. Running off into his arms, letting the world get one last sight of us, the sight of a revolution, before vanishing.

And I wondered what my brother would've said, had he been there. I imagined he would've at least had the decency to accompany me through the drawn-out time in my current prison. I really could use the company now, I thought morosely, gnawing on my thumb.

God, I wanted to hear his voice again. What I wouldn't have given to hear him scold me again.  Go ahead, I thought, tell me I'm a reckless fool. I'll take it over the silence.

I lost count of how many times people told me my brother was in a better place. I didn't understand why everyone felt so comfortable lying to my face all of a sudden. Frankly, what did we, mere mortals, know about the afterlife?

And I tried to see my brother. I really did. I tried to see him in the breeze, like a thumb strumming on the strings of the saplings, and in the sleet, moist on the cliff sides and icy on the aspens. I tried to see him in the break of dawn and the fall of dusk, like he inhaled the day and exhaled the night.

But it's futile. It's imaginary, nothing concrete, and I needed my brother by my side. Real, tangible.

A knock on the door. I bolted to my feet as the door creaked open, and my mother appeared in the entrance.  She was alone.  Silently, restrained expression set in stone, she sauntered into the room and closed the door behind her.

I sought her eyes.  Eventually so, they met mine, rid of any trace of emotion, but I knew my mother, yes.  I knew her oh-so aptly that I sometimes caught glimpses of her in the mirror.  She was disdained.  Worn-out and exhausted, yes, but mostly disdained.

Barbed wire around my throat, I sat down again, and so did she, pulling a chair.  For a brief moment, we were unspeaking.

"I wanted to speak to you alone," she uttered solemnly.  "I thought I should be the one to tell you that you'll be making a statement on your speech."  She inhaled thoroughly, sharply.  "We'll discuss what you'll tell the press later."

Her voice was cold, hurling icicles at me, but she remained somewhat sedate.  Beneath the table, my knee bounced.  Up and down it went.

"Okay," I responded tonelessly.

For a moment, she only stared at me, jaw tight.  And then she sucked in a breath of air again.

"What you did was—"

I shook my head.  "You've no right to be angry with me," I said, cutting her off, firm and unswerving.  "I did what was right."

My mother sucked on her teeth, flinching in anger, but tried to remain composed.  "You could've waited," she hissed.

"Sure, only two years. Why not?!  I shouldn't have had to hide in the first place, Mom," I retaliated.  "I'm just being me."

Abruptly, she stood up straight, tightening her jaw, and her face betrayed her entirely.  "That's the problem, Wilhelm!"

I swallowed, taken aback.

"You can't keep making these decisions like it doesn't affect the rest of us," she snapped.  "I trusted you to do this, Wilhelm."

"It's not like I publicly blamed you for lying about the video in the first place," I spat out, standing up as well, matching her fire.

"Please, Wilhelm.  You didn't want to respond to the claims either."

I scoffed mirthlessly.  "I didn't want to lie!" I snapped.  "I didn't want to leave Simon alone in that fucking shitshow!  It was my decision!"

Silenced, she stared back at me, mouth pressed into a firm line.  My words hung in the atmosphere, like the relentless buzzing of a fly.  I thought she'd have retaliated, told me I wasn't apt for decision-making, but she held her silence.

At last, on a whim, I let out a broken breath and hissed, "Erik would've understood."

I stormed out of the room after watching my mother's expression crumble like a temple, its base whisked away by my hands.

my writing is rusty, im sorry.  i wrote this after being inspired by a random vignette i wrote in english class.  i like writing silly stuff lol.

anyway thanks for reading pookies.