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 felt the crisp March breeze shaking the trees, pricking the side of my face, and then a firm hand closed around my bicep. I opened my eyes, alarmed, like after a rebirth. Next to me, Malin tugged on my arm like a child's and urged me off the stand.  I tamely allowed her take me away. With the look on her face, she seemed like she might bare her teeth at me and yap if I showed the slightest resistance.

As we walked away, the whispers and murmurs swelled through the audience with dramatic increase.  It was hectic.  The crowd looked like a giant bee hive, I thought comically, each seated person buzzing and shaking in their chair, muttering into one another's ears behind their phone cameras.

I also caught my mother's eyes. She looked like a carpet had been swept right from under her feet, simply terror-stricken. I guess she almost had it for the first time since my brother's death, resolution and pride in her name, and then came her wretched son, the hurricane in the making, to soil our legacy again.

Three other bodyguards began to trail on our heels, as if to cloak or draw the attention away from me, but even then, I felt the audience's prying eye following us. Malin's fingernails bit into my arm, yet I could scarcely feel them. Like a drunk, I was reeling in a benumbed haze.  It was this strange desensitization to everything around me, some sort of post-shock senselessness.

But then, from a growing distance, I heard voices rising, instructions shouted, and like a ray of sunlight slanting 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 exhaled.

Wide-eyed, I propped myself up on the balls of my feet with haste and tried to catch a glimpse of him.

"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 for God-knows how much time, until I seriously considered stringing myself out the window and making a run for it before my mother came in.

Then I started to wonder what my brother would've said if he'd been there.  I imagined he would've at least had the decency to accompany me through the drawn-out time in this room.  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 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 herself.

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

With 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 talk to you alone," she uttered solemnly after a moment. "I thought I should be the one to tell you that you'll be making a statement on your speech." She inhaled thoroughly and 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 lips pulled taut. I waited with the agitation of a tin pail under a dripping drain.  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 spat, cutting her off with a newfound firmness. "I did what was right."

My mother sucked on her teeth, flinching in anger, but visibly attempted 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 sour expression 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 to match 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 tense atmosphere between us 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.