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The moon reflects glittery drops on the lake’s surface, the grass is soft and humid under his palms and legs and he can hear the distant muffled shouts of whatever game his group of friends decided to play now. Simon has always needed, in things like this, to take a moment to breathe and reset.
The end of year bonfire idea had been Madison’s, possibly, or even Sara’s, who has been trying so very hard to get into their good graces even almost a year after their fall out, even after they’ve had countless conversations and both Simon, Felice and Wilhelm have understood her reasonings. The pain and betrayal has started to slow and stubbornly fade away in Simon’s heart—it’s Sara, in the end, and as much as that only made the betrayal cut deeper than it had ever before, Simon isn’t who he is without his love and understanding of who his sister is, deeply flawed decisions and all.
Wilhelm, surprisingly after his whole revenge crusade against August, had been the one to help him get to a point where he could sit in the same room with Sara and listen to her side of the story. “I just don’t want to see you push her away because you’re in pain and five, ten years from now, realize you let August dictate yet another thing about your life,” he’d said, one late night at Simon’s room, his permanently cold feet against Simon’s shin.
He didn’t magically forgive Sara after that talk, but the idea stuck to his mind and wouldn’t let go. He had spend all his life looking up to her, seeing her struggles, turning into her protector. So much so that he eventually forgot she didn’t need any saving—Sara had always been cunning, smart and driven and when she found the place she wanted to fit in, and when that place opened its doors for her, she took that chance with no looking back, without a second thought.
He knows now that was just the start of the journey that would lead them to opposite sides of the struggle, but at that moment, in the shooting range, Wilhelm pointing a gun at August’s face, Simon stressed, confused and angry and extremely sleep deprived, he truly felt like nothing could ever, ever explain her decision away.
They’re getting somewhere now, though, after tentative Sunday lunches at home, movie nights in Manor House that end with Sara taking the bus home and Simon going back to Forest Ridge to forgo his own bed in favor of sleeping at Wille’s and many talks with his therapist. The wound inside him feels like it’s stitching itself up, loop after agonizing loop, and he hasn’t breathed this well away from his boyfriend in what feels like forever.
Wilhelm says they’re moving on from the whole thing, but Simon, always the more pessimist, can’t help the voice on the back of his head that questions if he will ever truly be able to not live perpetually in those seconds he realized his most precious memory was being shared with the whole world.
He hears a branch snap behind him and smiles.
“Hey, what are you doing all the way over here,” Wille says, coming up behind him and sitting down, sneaking his legs under his arms and snuggling up close. He drops a kiss to the underside of Simon’s neck and leaves his lips there, breathing in.
“Henry and Maddie where driving me insane, I never know if they’re worse when they’re playing against each other or on the same team but, either way, they get too excited only two drinks in.”
Wilhelm hums, kissing his neck again and then resting their temples together. Simon sighs, letting his weight drop onto Wille’s chest, and runs his hands from his elbows until their fingers slot together on top of his own stomach. As much as their relationship had been defined by loud moments, by choirs, songs ripping out of chests, by words televised to the whole world, Simon thinks there’s nothing he loves more than the silences they share, how the build the space around them in beat with their moving chests.
He’s always been full of music, his mind a constant buzz of rhythms and lyrics, perpetually walking around with his headphones in, but with Wille the energy resting below his skin crawls down to a slow hum and he can finally hear the static drifting away from his mind.
They had fought tooth and nails for this, right here. For sitting under the moon, the gentle warm breeze surrounding them, for their friends knowledge that they were somewhere in these woods, together. For Wilhelm’s fingerprints tattooing his skin, working hard towards having calluses on their hands from holding each other always, skin on skin at all possible times. All the impossible ones too.
He keeps thinking it should feel like a dream, to be able to live what he ached to have at those first weeks, laying in Wille’s warm bed as he flees for breakfast and Simon laid there, trying to catch his breath long after he’d left, long after he was accosted by August and ignored him making his way to class, a breath he probably only stopped tripping over on that first night after Wille’s speech.
It doesn’t thought, and no one but Wilhelm could possibly understand, but it’s as easy as growing up. He doesn’t have to think about it: the days just go by, one by one, and it’s his birthday, and then again, and again, and yet again. Candle after candle, nothing could ever be a powerful enough force to stop it.
It feels not like a dream, but like finally waking up, like coming to your senses, like getting to know your true self. It’s rebirth and the most sacred, divine and human thing Simon has ever experienced.
The lake water is still in front of them and something suddenly clicks in Simon’s mind. He quickly looks around, gasps and pulls himself forward. “What?”, Wille asks. “What happened?”
“Isn’t this where we had our first date?”, he turns and smiles at his boyfriend’s confused face. “The afternoon after… that morning. You took me on a walk around the lake and we stopped to talk, don’t you remember? I think it was somewhere around here!”
He jumps from the ground, tapping the dirt away from his jeans and extends both his hands to Wille, eyebrows high and a big smile on his face. “Come on, come on, come on, I want to kiss you there and I want to do it now!”
He pulls him up and with their hands still joined and takes on a run. Wille is cackling behind him, his beautiful, unrestrained laugh that never ceases to amaze Simon. He’d fought so hard to get to a place where he could allow himself such freedom, to go back to how they had felt on the back of those scooters, and there’s a part of him that swells with pride at being the only one who’s always there for it.
In all honesty, he loses himself a little bit, in the game of taking unexpected turns, of dodging trees and teasing Wille for tripping on his own feet. He actually forgets he’s looking for a specific place until Wille pulls his hand and stops in his tracks, “Wait, wait, wait… I think we passed it just now.” He takes them a few steps back, and there it is.
The tree trunk laying down on the ground, a clear wide view of the lake framed by low hanging tree branches. He remembers standing there and joking with this beautiful boy who had known him so intimately just a few hours before, who’d seen him naked and wanted more, always more—Wilhelm is never not hungry, starving, for human connections—and who kept on coming back, despite everything. This boy that made his heart syncopate when he’d lay in bed at night and made him play over and over again all the moments they shared in a day, that alit his body with so many emotions he’d found himself searching poets at ungodly hours, understanding so many things he’d never found meaning to before.
He remembers thinking, oh, how am I ever going to survive this.
So Simon drags Wille by the hand and places him exactly where he had stood back then. The moonshine reflected by the lake casting his cheekbones in shadows and highlights, eyes bright, squinted, always gentle. He raises his own hands and runs them through his light brown hair, a little bit longer now, messy from their run, and on his tiptoes, he kisses the love of his life in the place he started to let himself fall.
Wille’s lips are chapped, always bitten raw from anxiety, and warm. He releases a breathe that caresses Simon’s face, bringing his right hand to Simon’s neck, strokes his cheek, runs his thumb over Simon’s ear until it ends in the nape of his neck, fingers slotting in between his curls.
Simon’s body feels light and own hands have gradually run down Wille’s chest and as he curls his arms around Wilhelm’s waist, he feels whole. He smiles into the kiss and feels Wille’s own lips respond in kind. What he wouldn’t give to tell that Simon, bright and happy and completely oblivious of what was coming his way, that it all be worth it in the end, to show all the moments he had collected in the past few months that he couldn’t hold in his own hands with sufficient care, for all the ones he knows he’ll get, going on forward.
Rubbing their noses together, he whispers, “so… do you think the water is too cold today?”
Wilhelm looks him right in the eye and smiles cheekily, “are you seriously trying to ask me to go skinny dipping with you in the school lake in the middle of the night?”
“I mean… I’m sure as hell not going to tell anyone, and I think neither would those guys back there and don’t even try to chicken out of this by pretending to be afraid of headmistress Lilja. Or are you just afraid of the fishes?”
“Ok, you know what, let’s do it,” he says as he steps out of Simon’s personal space and grabs the back of his shirt collar, pulling it up and dropping it on the ground. His hands go to Erik’s watch next and he looks straight into Simon’s eyes. “Come on, Eriksson. Keep up.”
Simons scrambles to take his shirt off but Wilhelm had already dropped his watch on top of his shirt and is opening his pants button by the time he gets to his belt and as he takes his socks off he thinks Wille is going to run and jump in the lake but he stands there, naked and smiling, cross necklace glinting in the moonlight, waiting for him.
His heart swells and he rushes to the lake, grabbing Wille’s hand on the way and letting their laughs fill the air around them. As they slide further and further into the warm water, Wille suddenly jumps on his back, arms around his neck and legs around his waist. He huffs and rolls his eyes but catches the underside of his thighs to give him better support.
He can feel his boyfriend’s laugh on his back and smiles when he gives a simple “have to take the opportunity don’t I? You’re too weak to carry me out of the water” as an explanation.
“Shut up or I won’t come to your room tonight,” he threatens without any bite.
Simon stops as he feels the water come up to his shoulders and releases Wilhelm’s legs to maneuver him to his front, kissing his lips and feeling his hair getting wet where Wille’s hand holds the back of his head. They stay like that for a few minutes, simply indulging themselves in their presence, breaths falling in sync as they tend to do these days.
Simon feels like he’s as big as the lake, as the sky above them, the trees shifting with the wind in the distance. He thinks, madly, that the moon has been privy to so many things throughout history, so many friendships, and pain, that it has heard so many laughs and seen so much love destruction, and that, still, after all that, it must be in awe of being allowed to see them sharing this. That they’ve brought something so beautiful to the world that even the cosmos would lack words to explain.
How absurdly lucky he is to be half of the most precious thing the universe has witnessed.
His hands make their way up the back of Wille’s thighs, slotting themselves on his lower back, bringing him impossibly closer. He wants to swallow him hole, eat his flesh, the pit of soul, change him with his insides, have him become the thing that fills his veins, that beats his heart. He’s never not amazed at the effect this boy has in him. It feels like he’s about to rip into a thousand pieces, that his flesh is simply not strong enough to contain the sheer volume of his feelings for him.
“I love you,” he whispers in his mouth. “I love you so, so much.”
Wille hums and rubs his nose on his cheek, drops a kiss into his closed eye, on the bridge of his nose.
“I love you too.”
Simon then slots his head on Wille’s shoulder, kissing the side of his neck, and listens as he talks about his day, what time he’s expected at the Palace tomorrow, how he’s thinking about becoming a vegetarian but doesn’t know how that would go with his mother, how Felice had asked him if he wanted to paint his nails the last time he spent the day with her and he almost said yes, that August had left another message on his voicemail and he didn’t even had the urge to throw his phone at the wall and isn’t Simon proud of him for that.
Body swaying with the movement of the water, he lets himself be with the boy he’s lost, that he’s fought with, he’s kissed, and kissed, and kissed, and pushed away only to pull back in. He lets his love fill his lungs and hopes and prays to the skies above them that he can feel it through the tips of his fingers, on all the places their skin touch.
The thing is, he’s been trying so very hard, the past few months, to allow himself this type of vulnerability with Wilhelm. Where being naked doesn’t mean sex, or sharing his thoughts and feelings doesn’t make his skin crawl with fear—he’s trying to carve a place in his chest that comes from strength and results in love and forgiveness, because what he’d been trying to do until the moment he met Wilhelm just wasn’t going to work in the long run.
He’s realized, after many therapy sessions, that he convinced himself as a child that he was, in some way or another, responsible for all the things Micke did to him and his family. For him leaving, because Simon wasn’t worthy of love; for him beating his mother, because Simon wasn’t strong enough to stop him; for him hurting his own child, because Simon had kept allowing him to come back, time and time again; because love and Simon didn’t just go together like that.
So he kept himself tucked away, hidden behind the armor of the strong, opinionated, stubborn boy, with the friends he knew would always want the best for him, the older sister he tried to keep from pain, the mother that he tried to relieve of the burden of him.
It took him meeting the one person who ripped that armor off, then losing him, feeling betrayed by him and finally understanding that he was just as much a product of his context as Simon was for him to understand that he wasn’t protecting himself at all. He was just alienating himself from the people in his life.
Not that Wilhelm didn’t have his own shortcomings to grasp: he is still struggling with his sense of self, with setting boundaries, his entitlement and occasional short fuse. He’s been learning to actively listen to himself and others and to process his emotions outside of his own worldview before making a decision. He desperately needs to learn how to not take everything bad that happens around him as a direct result of his own shortcomings, that he’s only human after all and that the burden that was placed in his shoulders doesn’t belong with him, isn’t inherently who he is.
It’s slow going, and they often arrive at class with purple tinting their under eyes after staying up talking over the same subject until one of them finally drops the defensiveness long enough to understand where the other is coming from. No one has ever said that finding the love of your life at 16, on opposite sides of life, with the weight of the world watching their every move was easy, but it took only one second of looking at Wille’s crooked smile, his hands reaching behind him for Simon on their way to lunch, the look on their friends face’s when he’d rest his head on Wille’s shoulder on movie nights, for it to be worth it.
They’ll make this work.
They’re already making it work.
Wilhelm drops his legs from Simon’s waist and a quick soft kiss on his lips, “do you want to see which one of us can hold their breath longer under water?”
Simon gives him a look. “Wille I refuse to go back there looking like a wet dog, Walter would taunt us forever with those pictures and you know it.” He laughs at his boyfriend’s pout, “stop being such a kid and let’s go back, I think Sara might be getting worried.”
He starts to turn around but Wille stops him with a hand on his arm.
“No, wait, just… come here for a second,” he says, pulling Simon back towards him. “I know this year has been… well, completely insane. Thank you for sticking with me throughout all of this, for giving me a second chance. You give me so much strength, Simon, I almost don’t know what to do with it half the time. I don’t know, I think I just wanted to tell you this here, because... I had so many things I wanted to say back then and I couldn’t push them past my throat, but, I love you, and I cherish you and our time together, and I’ll miss you like crazy these next few weeks,” he smiles, touching their foreheads.
“I know, Wille. I know. Me too, yeah? I loved you then and I love you even more now and we’ll be ok. You have me even if I’m not there with you,” he touches his fingers to the base of Wille throat, sees it bop up and down and ducks to press a kiss on the tender flesh there. “You’re the one thing I’m certain of.”
Wilhelm gives him a smile that crinkles his eyes and he loves this boy. He loves his skin under the moon, the water on his shoulders, the deep kiss they share. He loves the wet ends of his head and he loves him as he tries to dry the water from his body with his bare hands before he starts pulling on his jeans with a disgusted face on (“fucking worst feeling in the world”, he mutters under his breath, and Simon loves him). He loves that he has his brother’s watch on his wrist, that he always touches it’s surface when he puts it on, a constant reminder, his own personal ritual. He loves him as he tries to pluck the leafs of his shirt and when he puts it on and adjusts his necklace on his neck.
He loves him as Simon is just about ready to start their way back to their friends and he takes the small silver cross in his hand and trails his fingers to the back of his neck, struggling with the clasp.
“What are you doing? It is loose or something? You know you just have to ask for help with these things Wille, come on.”
“No, no, wait. I want you to have it, for now”, he says, looking right in his eyes. He’s always had the most beautiful, unguarded eyes Simon has ever seen. “Just while I’m at the palace. We both know I won’t have that much time with the fundraisers my mom has planned and I just think I’ll feel better thinking that there’s a part of me that’ll always be physically with you…” he trails off, looking away and Simon smiles at his flushed cheeks, his eyes watery with emotion.
“God, you’re such a sap. Come here, put it on.” He turns around and Wille puts his arms through his head, damp fingers closing the necklace on his neck. He drops a kiss where the chain falls and Simon’s skin ripples from head to toe, and all the way back.
He turns again and pulls him down into a searing kiss. They’ll have time, later, for a proper goodbye, but he’ll take any and all the seconds he can get to imprint his lips on Wilhelm, so that every speech he gives until they see each other again is dripping with their shared bond, Simon’s mark in every breath he takes in between words. He wants to watch him on TV and know that behind the repetition of someone else’s words, Wille is thinking about him too.
So he kisses him until he looses his balance and then he takes his hand and walks him back to the bonfire, where they sit, knees touching for all to see, and ignore their friends jabs at their wet clothes, and they laugh until their stomach’s hurt. He kisses him again on his bed as they take each other’s shirt off and lay in bed facing each other, keeps his eyes wide open to watch every breath Wilhelm takes and catalogues them in his mind. He kisses him as they trade slurred I love you’s, he kisses him as he feels sleep tug at his consciousness.
He kisses him and kisses him and kisses him and thinks, oh, I can’t believe I’ll get to do this forever.