Chapter Text
The scandal broke before either of them had the chance to miss each other properly.
That was what Est hated most about it later, when he let himself hate things honestly instead of with royal restraint. It did not even have the decency to arrive after a week, or after distance had done its quiet work, or after they had both settled back into the rigid choreography of their lives. It came immediately. Violently. Like the world had been waiting at the gates with a loaded weapon the second the villa released them back into its hands.
By the next morning, their names were everywhere.
Not just mentioned. Not merely circulated in the way public names always were. No, this was something uglier. Hungrier. A frenzy sharpened by the thrill of suspicion and the cruelty of implication. A photograph had surfaced first—grainy, taken from too far away, but clear enough to make denial feel weak. William's hand on Est's face outside the villa. Est leaning in. A moment too intimate to be brushed off as diplomatic friendliness, too human to survive the machinery of politics untouched.
After that came the analysis.
The headlines.
The talk shows.
The panel discussions disguised as concern.
The commentators with careful voices and vicious eyes asking whether the future king of Thailand could afford scandal of this nature. Whether the monarchy could withstand questions of image, lineage, suitability. Whether the president's son had manipulated something private into something dangerous. Whether this was recklessness. Whether this was shameful. Whether this was a phase. Whether this was betrayal. Whether this was what people had suspected all along.
And because the public liked its cruelty dressed as patriotism, they said it all in the language of duty.
Est had been in a meeting room in the palace when the first wave hit hard enough to become impossible to contain. He had entered that room a prince returning from a private weekend he had no business cherishing as much as he did. He had sat down with reports waiting neatly before him, coffee cooling untouched at his elbow, his expression composed enough to reassure everyone around him that he had resumed being himself.
Then his advisor had come in carrying a tablet.
Even now, days later, he could remember the exact look on the man's face. The carefully arranged neutrality stretched so tight it had nearly cracked.
"Your Highness," he had said, voice lower than usual. "There's an issue."
An issue.
As if an issue was what you called the public dissection of your private life.
As if an issue was what you called seeing William's name beside yours in headlines that made your stomach drop out from under you.
As if an issue was what you called the instant, feral fear that had risen in Est's chest—not for himself, not first, but for William. For the man who had kissed him in a parked car with all the quiet certainty of someone choosing him. For the man who had said this isn't the end of anything as if he could simply declare it and make it true.
Est had taken the tablet.
He should not have. That was what everyone said afterward. They should have filtered more. Controlled more. Protected him from the worst of it. But Est was the future king. He had been raised not to turn away from damage simply because it had his name on it.
So he looked.
And the world looked back with teeth.
He had not answered William's first call because the room had still been full of people, half of them speaking over one another in urgent low voices, all of them waiting for him to say something measured and wise and strategic. He had not answered the second because his mother had arrived, and then his father, and then Earn, and the room had shifted from crisis to containment. He had not answered the third because by then he had seen enough of the reaction outside those walls to understand exactly how ugly it was becoming.
By evening there were statements being drafted.
By night there were security concerns.
By midnight the palace communications office was using phrases like stability, reputation, national confidence, public response trajectories.
And through all of it, William kept calling.
At first the calls made Est's chest tighten with helpless relief. William was reaching for him. Of course he was. That was who William was. He moved toward disasters instead of away from them. He would not let silence sit if he could physically break it apart with his own hands.
Then the calls kept coming, and relief curdled into something harder. Fear, maybe. Or cowardice in formal clothes.
Because each time Est looked at William's name on his screen, he could hear the voices around him as clearly as if they were inside his skull.
This will worsen if you are seen together.
The people are already restless.
We can contain rumor, but not defiance.
The public is not your family, Your Highness.
The public does not love you enough to forgive this.
The public does not love him enough either.
And beneath all of that, quieter but more devastating because it sounded like his own voice:
If you answer, you'll want him.
If you hear him, you'll bend.
If you see him, this gets harder.
So Est did the most unforgivable thing he had ever done in the name of duty.
He chose silence.
At first he told himself it was temporary. A day. Two. Just until statements had been managed. Just until the noise cooled. Just until he could think without the whole country shouting into his bloodstream. But days passed, and silence developed its own momentum. It stopped being a pause and became a wound.
He knew William was trying.
He knew because Earn told him in careful pieces, usually when she entered his rooms without waiting to be announced and looked at him like she wanted to shake sense into him with her bare hands.
"He called Mother," she said on the second day, standing by the fireplace with her arms crossed. "Not to plead. To ask if you were all right."
Est, seated at his desk with three unread public briefings before him, did not look up. "I'm fine."
Earn laughed once, sharp and humorless. "That's not what I said."
He kept his eyes on the papers. They blurred anyway. "I can't talk to him right now."
"Can't," she repeated. "Or won't?"
Est's jaw tightened. "Does it matter?"
"Yes."
He said nothing.
Earn came closer. "Mother and Father are not the problem."
"I know."
"I'm not the problem."
"I know."
"William's parents aren't the problem."
Est closed his eyes briefly. "I know."
"Then say the rest of it out loud."
He hated when she did this. Hated how family could strip titles off your fear and call it by name.
When he still didn't answer, Earn said quietly, "The people are."
That word settled over the room like rainclouds gathering.
Yes.
The people.
The same people who smiled when he waved from balconies. The same people who called him the nation's future. The same people who would accept his sacrifice with admiration and call it maturity if he gave them exactly what they wanted—distance, denial, decorum, the neat burial of anything inconveniently human.
"The palace is monitoring everything," Est said, because speaking in logistics was easier than speaking in pain. "There are threats. Demonstrations being planned. The council wants a unified position before this escalates further."
"And?" Earn asked.
"And if I talk to him now, if I'm seen near him now, if anything leaks now—"
"It gets worse," she finished.
He looked up then, because there was no point pretending she wouldn't understand. "Yes."
Earn's expression softened, which was somehow more unbearable than judgment would have been. "For you?"
Est laughed under his breath. "You know the answer to that."
She did. Of course she did. She had grown up beside him. She had seen what monarchy required long before the public ever called it grace.
"For him, too," she said.
Est looked away.
That was the part no one seemed to understand when they told him to fight, or choose, or be brave, or stop thinking like an institution and start thinking like a man. He was thinking like a man. A man who loved someone enough to understand how badly the world could ruin him.
Because people could say they hated princes and survive the saying.
Saying they hated the future king for loving another man was different.
Saying the president's son had been the source of corruption, temptation, disgrace, instability—that was easier for them. Easier to weaponize. Easier to build into a narrative. William was already public enough to be punished and not sacred enough to be protected.
So Est said the cruelest thing he could in order to make the conversation end.
"It would be better if he let this go."
Earn stared at him as if he had slapped her.
"That," she said after a stunned second, "is the stupidest thing you've said in your entire life."
Then she left.
He did not stop her.
He did not answer William's messages that night, either.
They came less frequently after the third day. Not because William had given up; Est knew him better than that. But because the nature of them changed. The first day had been urgent, confused, trying to reach him through the storm.
Where are you?
Answer me.
Est, please.
Talk to me.
The second day had been softer.
I know it's bad.
I know you're being cornered.
Just let me hear your voice.
The third had made something splinter in Est's chest.
Your mother says you're safe.
That's all I needed to know.
I'm still here.
And then, hours later:
I hate doing this without you.
Est had read that message five times and then placed his phone face down on the desk like the words themselves could burn through wood.
After that, there was mostly silence.
Not total.
A few messages. Brief. Sparse. Almost more painful for their restraint.
I'm trying.
I don't know what you want from me.
Please don't disappear like this.
Est did not answer any of them.
He told himself he was protecting them both. That distance would help. That William, with enough anger and enough time, would see the sense in it. That if Est held the line long enough, the storm might pass without taking more from them.
What he did not tell himself was the truth.
That every day without William's voice made him feel less like a future king and more like a coward.
By the sixth day the palace had become unbearable in the way only beautiful prisons can. Every room too large. Every corridor too polished. Every expression around him too carefully neutral. He moved through schedules, audiences, consultations. His father was calm but firmer than usual. His mother protective in ways so subtle only Est noticed. Earn still speaking to him, but with the clipped patience of someone resisting the urge to scream. Even their acceptance, their love, their refusal to make him feel shame within those walls—none of it changed the world outside them. None of it changed the polls, the commentators, the gathering conservative outrage dressed up as concern for the kingdom.
And none of it changed the fact that William had gone silent too.
That silence was worse than the messages.
At least messages meant hope had movement in it.
Silence felt like damage.
On the seventh day it rained.
Bangkok rain, sudden and heavy, turning the palace grounds silver and blurring the city into watercolor beyond the windows. Est had been scheduled for a private review in one of the museum wings—a formal title for an hour spent pretending to care about historical acquisitions while his mind gnawed endlessly at the same impossible thing.
The palace museum was closed to the public that afternoon, the long galleries dim and echoing beneath soft lights. Old portraits watched from gilt frames. Artifacts sat behind glass in mute, glittering rows. The whole place smelled faintly of varnish and old paper and polished stone. Est usually liked the museum. It was one of the few places inside the palace that felt removed from performance. History was heavy there, yes, but it was honest about its weight.
That day even history felt like surveillance.
He was halfway through listening to a curator explain the restoration status of some eighteenth-century map when voices rose at the far end of the corridor.
Not loud. Not exactly. But sharp enough to cut through royal restraint.
Est looked up.
The curator trailed off immediately.
There were security officers near the entrance to the gallery, shoulders set in the rigid posture of men trying to remain respectful while actively blocking someone determined not to be blocked.
That someone was William.
For one absurd second, Est thought his own mind had conjured him.
Then William shoved wet hair back from his face, rainwater dripping from the sleeves of his coat onto the stone floor, and Est knew this was no hallucination. Hallucinations would have been kinder. Hallucinations would not have looked so tired.
His stomach dropped so violently he had to grip the edge of the display table beside him.
William was soaked through. Not damp. Not inconvenienced. Soaked in that unmistakable way that meant he had been standing out in the rain long enough to stop caring about umbrellas or appearances or good sense. His shirt clung to him. Water tracked down his jaw. His breathing was uneven, not from exertion alone but from temper held too tightly.
"Sir, you cannot just force your way into a restricted wing—" one guard was saying.
"I'm not forcing anything," William snapped back. "I'm asking to speak to him."
"You were asked to wait."
"I've been asked to wait for a week."
The words hit Est like a hand around the throat.
Every person in the corridor seemed to feel the shift when Est stepped forward, because the guards turned at once. The curator wisely retreated by several feet.
William saw him.
And everything in his expression changed.
Anger, yes. Relief, too raw to hide. Hurt, impossible to miss. A week's worth of unanswered calls and swallowed panic and pride ground down into one look that made Est want to either run to him or disappear entirely.
Instead, because he was himself and because the palace trained hesitation into elegance, he said, "Leave us."
The guards did not move immediately.
Est sharpened his tone. "That was not a request."
They withdrew at once, though not far. Far enough to obey. Near enough to intervene if needed. Of course.
The curator vanished with them.
Then it was just the two of them in a long museum gallery lined with the relics of dead kings, rain hammering faintly at the high windows, and all the words they should have said days ago waiting like loaded weapons between them.
William laughed once, incredulous and bitter. "So you are alive."
Est flinched almost imperceptibly. "William—"
"No." William took a step forward, then stopped as if even that was too much. "No, you don't get to start with my name like that. Not after a week."
Est felt every instinct in him pull toward composure. Toward control. Toward the version of himself that could survive difficult rooms by becoming colder than everyone in them.
But William was dripping rainwater onto palace marble because he had come anyway.
And that version of Est had already done enough damage.
"You shouldn't have come here," Est said quietly.
William stared at him. "That's what you have to say?"
"It's the truth."
William's laugh this time was sharper. "Right. The truth. Finally."
The hurt in that word made Est's chest tighten. "I mean it. This is exactly the kind of thing that—"
"Gets seen?" William cut in. "Talked about? Used? Congratulations, Est, I noticed. Hard to miss when my face is on every screen in the country."
Est's mouth tightened. "Keep your voice down."
And there it was. The wrong thing. The royal thing. The infuriating thing.
William went still in the dangerous way people do before they decide whether to break or strike.
"Keep my voice down," he repeated softly. "I spent seven days trying to reach you. Seven. I called. I messaged. I went through every respectable channel available to me before I decided I'd had enough of being ignored like I was some national security threat. And your first real response is keep your voice down?"
Est felt heat rise under his skin, not from anger alone but from the ugly accuracy of it. "I was trying to contain this."
"With silence?"
"With distance."
"With cowardice."
The word landed between them like shattered glass.
Est's jaw clenched. "You don't get to call me that."
"No?" William stepped closer now, water still sliding from the ends of his hair. "What should I call it, then? Strategy? Diplomacy? Protection?" His voice roughened around the last word. "Do you know how insulting it is to be shut out for a week and then realize you've probably called it protection in your head so you can sleep at night?"
Sleep. As if Est had slept.
"I did it because the situation is dangerous," Est said, and hated how formal he sounded, hated how much he sounded like every advisor in every room he'd spent the week enduring. "Not just for me."
William's expression twisted. "There it is."
"What?"
"That." William gestured between them with one sharp movement. "The distance. The royal voice. The way you stand there and talk like I'm a report you've read instead of the person you said—"
He stopped himself so abruptly the silence rang.
Instead of relief, Est felt a fresh stab of pain.
"The person I said what?" he asked, far more quietly than before.
William looked away for one brutal second, then back. "Don't do that either."
"Do what?"
"Act like you don't remember the villa. what we had. what we are."
The words tore through him.
Est swallowed hard. "I remember all of it."
"Do you?" William asked. "Because from where I've been standing, it seems like you came back to the palace and decided it was all temporary enough to bury."
"That isn't fair."
William's laugh cracked at the edges. "Fair?"
Rain hit the windows harder, rattling faintly through the long hall. Somewhere in the distance thunder rolled low over the city.
"No," William said, voice shaking now with something deeper than anger. "You don't get fair. I don't get fair. I got headlines calling me a disgrace to public office when I don't even hold one. I got pundits saying I corrupted the future king like you don't have a mind of your own. I got your silence on top of all of it, and somehow that was the part that hurt most. So no, Est. We are long past fair."
The museum felt too small suddenly. Too full of ghosts.
Est looked at him—really looked, perhaps for the first time since the scandal broke. At the exhaustion under his eyes. At the stubbornness keeping his shoulders squared. At the fact that William had come here drenched and angry and still, impossibly, heartbreakingly, looking only at him as if the whole world had narrowed to this one answer he had been denied.
"I was trying to keep them from destroying you," Est said.
William's face changed. Not softened. Not yet. Just sharpened with a different hurt.
"And did it occur to you," he asked, voice lower now, "that you might also be destroying me?"
Est inhaled sharply.
William pressed on before he could speak, because now that the wound was open it had its own momentum.
"You think I don't understand the stakes?" he asked. "You think I don't know what people are saying? I know exactly what they're saying. I know what they're implying about you, about the monarchy, about succession, about image." He gave a bitter smile. "I also know what they're saying about me. That I'm reckless. Predatory. A liability. A scandal looking for a crown to cling to."
Est's hands clenched at his sides.
William saw it and laughed bitterly again. "Yeah. That one bothers you, I can tell. Imagine how I feel."
"William—"
"No, let me finish. Because you never let me finish when you've decided you're going to sacrifice yourself in the most self-righteous way possible."
Est's temper sparked then, sudden and sharp, because even pain has pride under it sometimes. "Self-righteous?"
"Yes."
"That's what you think this is?"
"I think," William said, stepping closer again until the distance between them became charged with everything unsaid, "that you are so terrified of wanting something the public might punish that you decided for both of us that losing each other would be nobler than fighting."
The accusation struck too close.
Est's voice cooled dangerously. "And I think you are so used to charging into problems that you mistake motion for courage."
William stared at him.
Good, some ugly part of Est thought. Feel that.
"You came here in the rain," Est continued, the words gathering force now that they had escaped. "To the palace. To a restricted wing. Past security. Past every possible signal that this is being watched and managed and turned into a national argument. Do you know what happens if someone photographs this? If word gets out that you forced your way in to see me after a week of public chaos? It becomes another story. Another scandal. Another excuse for them to say you're reckless and I'm compromised."
William's expression hardened. "So that's what this is about. Optics."
"It's about reality."
"It's about fear."
"Yes!" Est snapped, and the sound cracked down the gallery so sharply even the portraits seemed to recoil. "Yes, it is about fear. Mine. Yours. Everyone's. I am afraid, William. Is that what you wanted to hear?"
William went silent.
The honesty of it hung in the air, raw and shaking.
Est laughed once, the sound almost ugly in his own ears. "I'm afraid of what they'll do to you. I'm afraid of what they'll demand from me. I'm afraid that if I answer one call, if I hear your voice, if I let myself have one weak moment, I'll choose you and they'll tear you apart for it while calling it loyalty to the crown."
William's face shifted, but Est was too deep in it now to stop.
"I'm the future king," he said, and the title sounded less like power than a sentence. "Do you understand what that means in rooms you'll never have to sit in? They don't say hate. They say stability. Tradition. Perception. Continuity. They say the people are uneasy. They say the country is not ready. They say one wrong move now will follow me for decades. They say the monarchy survives because it is careful." His throat tightened. "And then I hear your voice in my head saying we'll figure it out, and for one second I want to burn the whole careful world down just to keep one thing that feels like mine."
Silence crashed down.
Rain. Breathing. The muted electric hum of museum lights.
William looked at him as if he had just reached into Est's chest and found every unguarded part laid out there.
When he spoke, his voice was no longer angry. That somehow made it worse.
"You should have told me that."
Est almost laughed from the sheer brutality of it. "And said what? Sorry, I love you too much to answer?"
"Yes," William said immediately. "That. Exactly that."
Est stared.
William stepped closer, slow now, the fight still in him but redirected into grief. "Do you know what silence sounds like when it comes from the person you love most? It doesn't sound strategic. It doesn't sound noble. It sounds like abandonment." He swallowed. "I would have taken fear. I would have taken anger. I would have taken one message telling me to stay away because you were drowning. But nothing?" He shook his head. "Nothing makes a person imagine the worst."
"I thought distance would hurt less."
"For who?"
The question was so simple it was monstrous.
Est looked away.
"For you?" William asked.
"No."
"For me?"
No.
"For the country?"
Est closed his eyes.
There it was. The impossible arithmetic of monarchy. Every answer wrong. Every answer true.
William laughed softly then, but there was no amusement in it. "You know what the worst part is?"
Est forced himself to look back.
"I still came," William said.
The confession in that nearly broke him.
"Security stopped me at the gates first," William continued, as if once the truth started moving it had to finish. "Then at the west corridor. Then again downstairs. I called in every favor I had just to get close enough for one of your guards to finally decide that if I made enough of a nuisance of myself, someone might tell you I was here." His mouth twisted. "I stood outside in the rain for twenty minutes because apparently even being humiliated by palace protocol wasn't enough to make me leave."
Est's chest hurt so badly it became difficult to breathe around it.
"Why?" he whispered, though he knew.
William looked at him like the question itself was absurd. "Because you vanished."
Est flinched.
"Because I know you," William said, softer now. "Because when you get scared, you turn to stone and call it discipline. Because I knew there was a good chance you were doing exactly what you're doing now—trying to carry everything alone because it feels cleaner than letting someone stand beside you and get hurt with you."
"That's not fair," Est said again, but there was no force left in it.
"No," William said. "It isn't. But it's true."
They stood there breathing each other's pain in the stale museum air, too close to be strangers and too wounded to be anything easier.
Finally Est said the thing he had been circling for a week.
"Maybe we should stop."
The words came out quiet.
Not dramatic. Not cruel in tone.
Cruel enough in content.
William went still with a violence that frightened Est more than shouting would have.
"Stop," he repeated.
Est made himself continue because if he didn't, if he softened now, this would become another almost instead of an ending. "Before this gets worse. Before they turn it into something neither of us can recover from. Before—"
"Before you have to choose me," William finished.
Est swallowed. "Before I ruin you."
For a second William simply looked at him.
Then he laughed.
Not warmly. Not kindly. A stunned, wounded sound that seemed dragged out of him against his will.
"You really believe that, don't you?" he said.
"Yes."
William nodded slowly, eyes bright in a way that made Est's own throat tighten. "You know what's unbelievable? You think losing you would somehow ruin me less."
Est opened his mouth, but William kept going.
"You think I can just go back after this? After the villa, after the car, after every impossible, infuriating, beautiful thing between us?" His voice shook now, anger and heartbreak braided too tightly to separate. "You think I can listen to a country debate whether loving you makes me dangerous and then thank you for deciding on my behalf that the solution is to disappear?"
"I'm trying to save what I can."
"And I'm telling you," William snapped, "that you don't get to call it saving if you're the one cutting me open."
The words hit with surgical precision.
Est felt something in him recoil and harden all at once.
"Then what do you want from me?" he asked, more sharply than he intended. "Tell me, William. What exactly do you want? That I stand on a balcony and announce that yes, the future king is in love with the president's son and if the country doesn't approve they can simply learn to live with it? You think that ends well? You think love wins because you say it with enough conviction?"
William's face changed in a way Est instantly regretted causing.
"No," William said, very quietly. "I think love loses when you're this determined to be ashamed of needing it."
Est recoiled as if struck.
"I am not ashamed," he said.
"Aren't you?"
"No."
"Then why do I feel like something you're trying to survive?"
That did it.
Something bitter and frightened and exhausted in Est lashed out because pain always looks for a target when it cannot bear itself.
"Because loving you is exhausting," he said.
The moment the words left him, he wanted them back so violently it made him feel sick.
William did not move.
Rainwater still dripped from the sleeve of his coat onto museum stone.
When he finally spoke, his voice was flat in a way Est had never heard before.
"Is that what you really think?"
No, Est wanted to say. No, loving you is the only easy thing I've ever done. Loving you is the one place I stop feeling like an institution and start feeling like a person. Loving you is the best and worst thing that has ever happened to me.
Instead pride and panic and the week of pressure closed over him like a fist.
"I think," he said, hating himself in real time, "that I can't keep doing this."
William stared at him for a long, terrible second.
Then he nodded once.
Not understanding. Not agreement. Just impact.
"Right," he said softly.
Everything in Est screamed at him to fix it. To take it back. To reach. But the habit of restraint held like iron. He had spent his whole life being trained to stand still through pain. Now that training was turning monstrous in his own body.
William stepped back.
The movement was small. It felt catastrophic.
"You should've just said that in a message," he said, and the calmness of it was more devastating than the fight had been. "Would've saved me the rain."
Est flinched. "William—"
But William was already shaking his head.
"No. Don't." He laughed once, thin and wrecked. "God, don't look at me like that now."
"Like what?"
"Like you still love me."
The gallery went silent around them.
Est could not speak.
William's eyes searched his face one last time, and whatever he found there made something in his own expression break completely.
"That's the cruel part," he said. "You do."
Then he turned.
Est watched him walk the length of the museum gallery with rain on his clothes and heartbreak in the set of his shoulders, and for one frozen second the whole world narrowed to the distance between them.
He should have gone after him.
He should have.
But the future king stood beneath the eyes of dead monarchs and did what he had been taught to do best.
He stayed.
By the time the guards reappeared at a careful distance, William was already gone.
The rain had not stopped.
Neither, unfortunately, had love.