Chapter Text
Alex had lost count of the days since the nightmare began. At first, he had tried to scratch a calendar in the cracked linoleum of his cage floor, but when his captors had seen him they sprayed him with water, and that put paid to that. So he knew it had been more than sixty days, but he had lost track now. With nothing much to do and only infrequent visitors coming through with his captors, the monotony was turning his brain to mush.
In his bored moments, he liked to imagine what his family was doing to find him. Had the news leaked, or did people think he was just buried in his studies or quietly gone off the rails and been shipped back to Texas. His last public appearance had been in London and yes, he’d caused a slight stress headache for Zahra when he threatened to push His Royal Spare-ness into the Thames, but that had been neatly covered up with press smiles for the photographers. Surely the gossip magazines would be on the lookout for some new splash from him by now?
He liked to imagine President Mom tearing the world apart trying to find him, an international manhunt underway for their missing Barracuda. She’d slam her hand on the Resolute desk when they debriefed her, frustrated with the lack of progress. “He can’t just have disappeared!” He hoped that she was keeping Oscar in the loop and that Leo was keeping them from murdering each other in the process.
Nora would be crunching data in a bathtub somewhere, looking for online chatter or tracking “sightings”, looking for patterns only she could spot to bring him home. Redbull’s profits must be skyrocketing in his absence. June… well, he knew June would be blaming herself somehow, seeing his loss as her failure. He didn’t dwell on his sister’s current actions, to be honest.
In his maudlin moments, however, he wondered if they even still thought that he was alive. Of course, there would be no credible leads for anyone to follow. No ransom demands or proof of life. Not a single trace of what had happened to him. The Woman would have made sure of that. How long did the First Son need to be AWOL before people gave up on him?
He heard the strip lighting above flicker and plink-plink-buzz into life. Daytime again then. Day who-the-fuck-knows in the living hell that was his life now. Soon, his captors would slide a bowl of sloppy meat into his cage, later he’d get the daily “toilet” clean out, then another meal before lights out. The other cages in the room were full but there was no intelligent conversation to be had out of any of them. They mostly yowled at each other and spat through the bars. De-fuckin-lightful company, huh?
Maybe today would be one of the rare days when a visitor came. Sure, they rarely made it all the way down the row of cages to peer in at him, but you never knew. He wasn’t exactly recognisable right now, but maybe somehow someone would take pity on him and buy his freedom. The first few times that he’d been taken out for inspection, he’d swiped, sworn, tried to bite the visitors, but that was back in the days when he expected The Woman to stroll in and say that he was forgiven and this was all some kind of cosmic joke. He thought he needed to stay where she’d put him, but these days he just wanted out. He’d take anyone at this point.
He settled on the blanket shoved into the back corner of his cage and tried to curl himself into a ball. In a former life, his brain was never still, never silent, but in the endless days, he had found a way to sink into his breathing and the hum of the lights and out of reality. He never sunk below a wakeful doze, but it was enough to make the hours pass and in this new existence, that was all he could hope for.
He slipped in and out of consciousness until the bang of the outer door raised him into sudden, wide-eyed wariness. Visitors. He couldn’t see far down the corridor - the recessed bars of his cage restricting his field of view, but from the sounds of it a man and woman were making their way slowly down the row. Alex started a list in his head, the only control he had over the situation being to catalogue it.
1. They had those fancy-as-fuck British accents that just screamed “I’ve got three polo horses at my country estate and my favourite pastimes are croquet, tax evasion, and laughing at the poor.”
2. Their movements were slow - they both seemed like they were wading through treacle rather than just walking down prisoner row - but their voices were young. Alex could practically smell the depression wafting off them.
3. Whoever they were taking with them today apparently needed to be a good fit for someone called “David” - the man wouldn’t stop talking about how he wasn’t having “his boy fighting with an interloper”. Why this David would be so ready to throw down remained unclear.
4. They had skipped straight past the babies and moved down to his end of the corridor from the very beginning. Looking for a charity case, maybe?
Right. Plan “GTFO of dodge” was go. Pitiful expression, check. Slow, careful movements, got it. There was nothing he could do about the tangles in his hair or his messy state, but hopefully, that just added to his air of “take me home please”. Alex moved to sit upright nearer the front of his cage, quietly waiting for them to reach him. I can do this. I’m fucking aces at first impressions. Let’s go.
“What about this one then?”
“Ugh. Ginger boys have no brains. I don’t need an idiot, thanks.”
“Okay, this one?”
“Hmmmm. A girl, been here two weeks. Don’t you think she’s a bit too pretty though? No character at all in that face.”
Huh. Point 5 for the list - the woman was judgy af but not afraid of speaking her mind. She wouldn’t be boring to live with at least, Alex supposed. The guy though, just sounded bored of the whole endeavour. Anyone would think he was the one who’d been living for months in a cage, not strolling down selecting some poor bastard to liberate.
“Ooh, I like this one!” The woman had reached Alex at last. He stood up, strolling over to her with his best casual air and hovering just out of arms reach to start with. They studied each other, quiet calculation on both sides. Alex squinted at her, seeing something strangely familiar in her sharp cheekbones but something dull, missing from her eyes. She was like a bad caricature of -
“Isn’t he a bit fat, Bea?”
- Princess Beatrice. That meant… oh, fuck that. Alex reared back, swearing up a storm. Fat?! He could sit on a fucking cactus and swivel, that pompous, self-righteous, stick-up-his-ass wanker…
“He’s not fat, Henry! He’s fluffy. And spicy too, look at him spit!”
“What about David, though?”
“Oh, we’ll keep them apart until they get used to each other. And never mind about Davey, Gran will bloody hate him. She can’t put him on a postcard like one of her bloody show dogs, can she?”
Oh God. When Alex had said he would take anyone, that hadn’t been a challenge to the universe to turn his nightmare into a new, personal hell. He was looking for a trade-up in circumstances, not being forced into captivity with his nemesis. No. Absolutely not. Plan b - time to go all swiping ball of fury and knives. Alex raised himself up, trying to summon every inch of size available to him, and began to yowl directly at HRH Prince Dickhead. With unflinching eye contact, he pushed his way right up to the bars, sticking his arm through and swiping out. If Alex could just snag a thread in that stupid Burberry or whatever designer shit he’d worn to this hellhole, surely Henry would argue his sister down. Heaven forbid he leave Battersea looking disheveled, right?
“Hen. I love him.”
“He’s a bloody menace, Bea!”
“Yeah, but he’s going to be my menace! You got to choose your pet all by yourself, remember. Now it’s my turn and I choose him.”
“But look at his name, Beatrice!”
“It suits him! Now,” Beatrice said, turning to face Alex as he stood still pressed up against his bars in rage, “how would you like to live in a palace, Mr Wobbles?”