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The real world is really easy to look at from the window of a private jet, from the steps of the White House, from the seclusion of the cabin near Lake LBJ, the real world simply a mess of scenery stretching beyond forever. From so far away, the real world looks like boundless possibilities and whipping clouds scraping across blue sky and a whole country so small he can fit it on his thumb if he presses it to the window at the right angle.
Maybe somewhere along the campaign trail, Alex had forgotten what the real world is really like. That there are real people in the real world who don’t like him. He wonders now if he’d become so deluded as to thinking change really could happen over night.
Sitting shivering on a cracked curb with cold beer growing rapidly cooler as the night falls flat and blood dripping down his lips as Cash tries, to no Avail, to stop the hemorrhaging, Alex thinks the real world looks a lot like cop cars lined up around the block with their blaring sirens and blinding lights, like an asshole wearing a Bud Light t-shirt spitting on him as he’s dragged away with bruised knuckles. Like a spot beside him that is filled in by various people - Nora, June, his mom, Cash, Zhara - but still feels empty.
He must have forgotten that the real world can kind of fucking suck sometimes.
“Alex…Alex,” June’s voice comes to him in waves until it’s suddenly too sharp and too loud in his ears and he has to flinch away lest it overwhelm him, like a bubble bursting with frightening clarity. All the other sounds come rushing in too - the wailing of sirens, the hoarse screaming of Bud-Light-tshirt-guy as he’s stuffed ungracefully into the back of a cop car, his mom and Zhara both making hushed, rapid phone calls because that seems to be their stress response to everything.
Oh yes, and who could forget the shuttering of cameras just beyond the police barricade.
“I need my phone.”
“Alex, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s fine. Can I have my phone?”
“Alex you’re not fine,” June parrots his own words back at him and they sound childish. But tears are starting to well up in his throat and burn behind his eyes, and the last thing he needs is to start crying in front of a flock of cameras. “Can you please tell me what happened?”
Alex takes a shaking breath in through his lips and gathers the words one by one, hoping to avoid overfilling his throat and allowing the tears to escape,
“He grabbed me. Said I wasn’t his first son. Spilled his beer on me. Hit me. Called me a f-…” his heart lurches up into his throat as he tries to say the word aloud. He swallows it back down. “Called me a faggot.” Then he adds, “That’s it.” Because some juvenile part of him believes that could truly be it - a statement to the police, a one-off incident he never has to think about again, a boxed up case file.
But that’s not what happens in the real world.
“Alex…” June’s voice is tipsy in the way it always becomes when she’s close to tears, swaying from side to side, words hollow. “That’s not just…it. That’s a hate crime.”
The words prickle on his skin like needles sinking beneath the surface, his body feeling too small for him to live in, the nighttime caving in around him as he tap tap taps his foot against the pavement. He can’t breathe.
“I need my phone.”
He needs to talk to Henry - before anyone else tells him, before the news is delivered in words that aren’t his, before his bruised nose and blood-stained shirt are plastered on every journalism site, tabloid, and news channel in the country. He just…needs to talk to Henry.
Mercifully, his phone is deposited in his hands only moments later by Zhara, whose lips are drawn tight in a frown, that angry little dimple appearing between her brows, a tendon bursting from her neck in a look Alex knows like the back of his hand as anger.
He peels his eyes away from her and onto the screen of his phone where Henry’s face illuminates the screen, blue eyes bright and filled with joy, smile cresting his lips as David licks at his face frantically. And some of the nervous energy accumulated behind Alex’s sternum untangles itself just a bit.
With shaking fingers he opens his phone manually, facial recognition refusing to do its damn job just because he’s a little beaten and bruised around the edges, and navigates to their text chain. He taps on the call button and puts his phone to his ear waits and he’s barely able to hear the ringing tone over the sound of blood rushing in his ears-
“Alexander, miss me already?” At the sound of Henry’s voice, something in his chest gives way and he’s crying. Crying in front of the cameras, not pretty. Crying even though his sinuses burn and his body hurts to move. Crying as June pulls him in so tight against her chest that he can barely breathe when he manages to say,
“Something really bad happened.”
—
The plane home is slow.
Normally, Alex finds that these rides don’t last long enough, that there’s always one more thing he wants to squeeze in before they touch down and he becomes FSTOUS again. But the five hours it takes from North Dakota to New York feel like an eternity.
All Alex can do is sit there in his blood stained clothes and beer-sticky skin and the scratchy wool blanket the police had given him and feel dirty. The word clings to him - faggot - and the eyes he’d left behind on the ground thousands of feet below still feel hidden somewhere in the cabin of the plane, watching. And he just really needs to see Henry.
Henry always pulls his world back together when it feels like it’s falling apart.
And it is falling apart.
Nobody looks quite themselves. June hasn’t sopped being in physical contact with him since it happened, her hand always in his, her head on his shoulder now as weary eyes scan the clouds around them for a phantom danger. Nora sits across from him with fury-flushed cheeks and knuckles splitting and cracking and scabbing from leaving Alex’s attacker in a worse state than Alex. His mom glances at him every so often with tear bitten eyes and a sorrow so deep it feels boundless to Alex, like he could drown in it. Her manicure is bitten and fraying on the ends with no more calls to be made.
No one talks. Everyone hurts. Alex misses Henry.
—
The apartment door swings open and relief comes slowly at first, then all at once in an explosion that threatens to bring Alex to his knees when Henry reaches out to touch him as if he might not be real, as if Alex might fall apart in his hands.
Henry’s eyes are wide and stormy blue and brimming with unshed tears, and Alex realizes what an ugly picture he must make - nose bruised, cheek swollen, lips dry and cracked and bleeding. He turns his face away to hide the ugliness, but it catches on the soft muscle of Henry’s shoulder coming around to cradle him as he folds Alex so gently between his arms.
He smells like herbal tea, and Alex’s favorite body wash, and Henry. And Alex has never really believed in God, but right now he thanks her for Henry. Home has never felt so wonderful.
Then in the next second he realizes how terrible it all is. How he’s still sticky and dirty and bloodstained. How he smells like a bar. How he’s contaminating the most pure and precious and perfect thing in his life. The needling feeling is back, just under his skin, crawling.
“No don’t- you can’t touch me-“ in a sudden burst of energy he wrestles his way out of Henry’s arms, force miscalculated, and throws himself against the door, slamming it shut. His ribs shudder and ache as he slides down against it, a sickly feeling digging under his ribs like a knife. “I’ll get you dirty.” He says, voice breaking.
He already has. His thing white t-shirt blooms in watercolors of oxidizing red where Alex had laid his head on Henry’s shoulder. And it’s his fault. Just like it was his fault for the way they were outed, tumbling recklessly into the spotlight. He brought the worst parts of the real world into their safe space and now he can’t take it back.
Tears burn as they trail paths down his cheeks and he presses the heels of his palms to his eyes but it doesn’t stop them, and it doesn’t numb the ache.
“Alex, love.” Henry’s voice comes soft on the waves of silence only broken by Alex’s hiccuping sobs. “We share, remember?”
Alex’s arms are too trembling and body too weak to resist when Henry bundles his hands up and presses a kiss to his knuckles - Alex wants to protest. To tell him that they are covered in bruises and beer and hospital disinfectant. But the words dissolve into strangled breaths.
And when Henry pulls his head to his shoulder, gathering Alex to his chest and holding him gently like one holds a rose or a dove or something precious beyond believe, Alex has no fight at all left.
A tentative hand curls around the juncture of his shoulder to his neck, thumbing at soaked curls, and a kiss of equal reverence is to his cheek, his temple, the bridge of his nose. Alex closes his eyes and lets the tight, painful feeling in his chest unspool itself.
“It’s not you against the world. It’s us, yes?”
He doesn’t trust his voice to work so he nods and lets Henry pull him up to unsteady feet, arm around his waist, free hand in his as they navigate down the hall to the bathroom. Alex doesn’t say much, but Henry does - inane, wonderful things about how David missed him while he was away, so much that he would sleep on Alex’s pillow all day. About how their old, kindly neighbor, Loretta, with the thick framed glasses and hole in her heart where her son used to be brought over a new dessert for them to share over tea each day that Alex was gone. About a dandelion he saw pushing through a crack in the sidewalk outside even though winter has overtaken New York. About a shop owner he watched run all the way up the street to rescue a child’s balloon.
About real world things that Alex had forgotten he can’t see from a private jet or the White House or the back of a bar in North Dakota, beer and blood dripping down his chin.
He takes each one and puts it in his pocket, sets himself a mental reminder to ask Henry for more to add to his collection when his voice returns to him.
For now, he sits on the closed toilet lid and allows Henry to undress him with tentative touches. His dress shirt is the first to go - then his belt and his slacks and his socks, until eventually, he’s standing under the warm spray of the shower, watching blood run down the drain and remembering the smoothness of his own skin hiding beneath the grime from the night.
He lets out a breath when Henry’s hands wash him down gently, filling up his lungs with air that feels breathable again. The bruises don’t sting quite as harshly when Henry kisses words against them - “I love you” - and the tears dry up when he thumbs at Alex’s ribs, sending a ticklish sensation down his spine and a ragged, joyful laugh that is broken around the edges but full-bodied spinning on the tendrils of steam around them.
His face aches when he smiles, but it doesn’t hurt.
“Be careful with yourself,” Henry chides, but he’s grinning boyishly in that way Alex loves. “You risk re-breaking your nose.”
Alex laughs again, smile only growing, “Oh babe, it’s basically like a skin-bag full of bone shards at this point - nothing left to break.”
“Alexander, that is disgusting.”
And it still doesn’t hurt. Not when Alex throws his head back with a giggle. Not when he kisses Henry a little too hard and involuntary tears prick at his eyes. Not when he curves his head into the crook of Henry’s neck and their bodies fit together like puzzle pieces, and the world feels like it’s tilted right side up again.
When Henry is done washing Alex’s hair and rubbing the tension from his shoulders and regaling him with the harrowing story of his phone call with Bea about the breaking news that papers couldn’t possibly wait until morning to release, Alex dresses himself in Henry’s hoodie, which is loose around his shoulders, and Henry’s sweatpants which are tight around his hips, and Henry’s arms, which fit perfectly around his waist.
Henry makes them herbal tea - Alex can only stomach it when Henry makes it. He does something magical with it that saps away the bitterness and replaces it with sweet.
“You could tell me how you make this, and then I could do it myself,” Alex suggests as he holds the mug between hands eclipsed by the sleeves of his sweater. A lilted smile overtakes soft lips.
“Yes, but then you’d have no reason to keep around, would you?”
Alex pouts, “I can’t get rid you, babe. Where am I going to find another you? You’re like, the only good British person.”
Henry laughs something golden as he nudges himself between Alex’s thighs where Alex sits, perched on the counter next to him, “What about Bea?”
“Okay and Bea.”
“And Pez?”
Alex rolls his eyes, “Okay fine, and Pez.”
“My mum?”
“Fine! I give up, you win, there is more than one good British person.”
He can feel Henry’s smile when they kiss, sweet against the bitterness of his unsweetened (read: horrific) tea that only tastes good on Henry’s lips.
Then they slow dance to “And We Danced” which Henry says is “the farthest thing from a slow dancing song” he’s ever heard. To which Alex responds, “Any song is a slow dancing song if you dance slow enough,” and earns himself a raspberry to the neck, then a kiss - and another and another and another, until they’re not so much dancing as they are lightly swaying while they make out and laugh about it.
And Alex realizes that this is the real world too.
That he’d been naive to think that the cabin and the White House and the private jet were not part of the real world. That Henry wasn’t part of the real world. That the real world wasn’t just a fucked up mess of the beautiful and the ugly and the terrible and the wonderful.
He realizes that he’s just lucky to be able to come home to the wonderful when the terrible catches up to him.
“I wish I could keep you safe,” Henry’s voice is low at a whisper when he speaks again over Peter Cetera in the background, soft smile so sad that tears start inching up Alex’s throat again.
They claw their way out when he says, “You do,” and this time, he doesn’t try to stop them. "I love you, Henry."
Henry sighs, stoops, kisses him, holds him, "I love you, Alex."
And the tears aren't so bitter anymore.