Work Text:
Henry had been prepared for that question, he had rehearsed the different ways he could answer it. But it did nothing to prepare him for the actual question when he had been presented to it face first. He can’t help but look at Alex, his eyes framed by the beautiful and impossibly long eyelashes as he confirms that yes, of course, they’ve been friends since the climate conference. “It’s like we’d known each other all our lives.” He says, and can’t help smiling to himself, his lips ticking up as he remembered the first time he saw Alex across the room. It was as if time had stopped around him and the only thing he had become aware of at that moment was Alex and the way his heart beat erratically in his chest. How, despite everything that had happened in those last few years, there was that boy across the room that seemed to make it all better.
And then he walked up to him and introduced himself. Alex Claremont-Diaz . He finally had a name for the boy across the room that had somehow made every Jane Austen novel make sense in regard to love at first sight. And he couldn’t function, could feel his heart constrict in his chest and his blood run cold in his veins. So he turns to his equerry, and he begs in a low, raspy voice, “I need to get out of here.” And he leaves and he tries and tires. Tries to make it his life mission to put as much distance between him and Alex as humanly possible. But Alex is like a magnet, every time they share a space his eyes gravitate toward him, and he’s powerless to stop it. He’s not sure that he ever wants it to stop.