Work Text:
HRH Prince Dickhead 💩
I’ll be home a little later than I expected –
just need to finish up some things at the shelter
that’s okay, I’ll see you soon
I love you
I love you too❤️
“Hey,” Alex calls from his place on the couch as soon as Henry walks in the door. “What am I in your phone?”
“What do you mean?” Henry asks, putting his bag down by the credenza.
“What am I saved as in your phone contacts?” Alex explains.
“Alex,” Henry answers, walking across the room towards him.
“Just Alex?”
“Alex. Heart emoji.”
He kisses Alex, who sits up so Henry can sit next to him on the couch.
“Was it always that?” he asks.
“You know it wasn’t,” Henry snorts. “You stole my phone.”
Alex laughs. It happened on the drive to the lake house on Labor Day weekend. When they’d stopped at a gas station and Henry had left his phone in the car when he’d gone to use the bathroom, Alex had snatched it before it locked and changed Alex Claremont-Diaz to ACD 🤠.
“I mean OTHER than that,” he rolls his eyes. “Did you change it at any other point.”
“No,” Henry says. “I changed it back to your name as soon as I noticed; but that wasn’t until I…”
Neither of them says anything. They don’t like thinking about that week. In situations like this they’ve realised mutual silent acknowledgement is the best option.
“But when I did, I couldn’t make myself type your full name. It felt too formal,” he continues. “And even though I vowed it was all over between us, I still loved you. So I added the heart.”
Alex feels tears brimming in his eyes. How can a man who would add a heart to the name of someone he never planned on seeing again ever be someone whose number, at any point in time, deserves to be saved under a name that ended with the poop emoji?
He puts his arms around Henry and pulls him closer. He doesn’t need to speak for Henry to know what he’s saying:
Thank you.
I’m sorry.
I love you.
Alex could probably separate his contact list into three categories.
Most of people closest to him he’s either saved under some ridiculous nickname or with some type of personalised touch.
His mother is President Mom 🇺🇸. He added the flag emoji after she got elected in 2016. His father is saved as Dad 🇲🇽. It didn’t feel right giving his mother a flag but not his dad. But Leo is just Leo. No emoji at all.
Neither June nor Nora have emojis. June is BUG, just to, well, bug her. He’s not sure why he decided on all capitals. Nora is irl chaos demon. Her idea.
Pez is Cardinal Percy, after his Secret Service codename. It felt weird for a nickname to immediately follow the title 'Cardinal'. Besides, Pez is Henry’s nickname for him.
But Alex wonders now if it’s a liability, using Pez’s SS name. Probably. He’ll change it later.
Bea is 👑 Bea 🐝. He often thinks maybe the second emoji isn’t necessary; that it’s too on-the-nose. Also, she’s the only person in Henry’s family who is saved without the HRH prefix. Alex doesn’t have Philip in his phone, but Princess Catherine is saved as HRH Future Mother-in-Law?🤞 – complete with the question mark. By its very nature that one would HAVE to change when he and Henry get married.
Alex thinks about marrying Henry way too much and, at the same time, not nearly often enough.
Then there are the really boring ones. It feels wrong to even try to do anything remotely amusing with Amy or Cash, so they’re simply saved under their names. Same for Zahra; he knows she’d probably murder him if it was anything else.
And then, in a category all his own, is Henry: HRH Prince Dickhead 💩.
Alex knows Henry likes it. Or rather, he knows Henry likes that he did it: he once wrote Alex a list of things of things he loved about him, mirroring one of the final emails Alex wrote to him before they were all leaked and their relationship was outed to the world.
But things are so different now from what they were when Alex added Henry’s number to his phone.
Of course, they won the election. But his mother winning her second term as POTUS was in a way the smallest change. The others changed him. He made friends that he never imagined. He looked awful situations in the face, and won. He gained more confidence.
After all that, he now knows who he is.
But what changed the most is the simplest: he fell in love. He never really hated Henry, but now he capital-L Loves him. The world knows he loves Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor and he’d still happily shout from the rooftops that he ‘feels forever’ about him.
Is the poop emoji fitting for someone you ‘feel forever‘ about?
“Should I change this?” Alex asks. He holds his phone out so Henry can see that the contact name is the same as it was the day he saved Henry’s number.
Alex likes to think he did it as a joke. He wouldn’t have considered himself to be friends with Henry when he returned to DC after that long weekend of Damage Control, even after the two of them had talked some things through that day at the hospital.
But despite being swamped with everything going on at the time – and probably still more than a little jetlagged – he’d rolled his eyes as he added the number to his phone. He hadn’t been angry that Henry had reached out to him first. He hadn’t even been really annoyed.
It was more amusing than anything else.
“Why would you want to change it?” Henry asks.
“Because you’re not a dickhead,” he replies, as if it’s obvious. “You were never a dickhead. That was me.”
“Yes it was,” Henry concedes, kissing him quickly.
“So…” Alex asks again. “Do you want me to change it?”
“Do you want to change it?” Henry counters. “It’s your phone.”
“And you’re my boyfriend.”
“So you’re thinking ‘HRH Prince My Boyfriend’, then?” Henry smirks. “I don’t know. It doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily.”
Alex laughs. From that perspective HRH Prince Dickhead is better. But calling your boyfriend – the person you love most in the world – a dickhead seems kind of a, well, dick move.
“Well no,” he says. “It would be something else. I just don’t know what.”
“Well then, maybe you should leave it as it is until you do think of a suitable name,” Henry replies.
“You’re right,” Alex turns his head, then leans forward so their foreheads are touching.
“Sorry about grabbing your phone that day.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Henry smiles back. “I never used emojis before then. You corrupted me, love.”
“I hope that’s not the only way I’ve corrupted you, sweetheart.” Alex teases.
“Of course not.”
Henry pushes him back onto the couch. Alex barely has time to think before Henry grabs his phone out of his hand and flings it onto the floor.
“Are you happy with how you’re saved in my phone?” Henry asks, leaning down to kiss him.
Alex pretends to ponder for a moment, even though he doesn’t need to. Alex ❤️ is perfect. Especially if Henry loves it.
“Very happy.”
“Well I’m happy to be your HRH Prince Dickhead,” Henry says between kisses. “Poop emoji and all. Don’t you dare change it.”