Chapter Text
Wilhelm is hanging out with Felix’s friends outside. Felix is sitting on top of the picnic table, legs crossed, and everyone else falls around him in a circle. Felice and Wilhelm are on the ground, Wilhelm’s jacket spread beneath them. The conversation crosses and overlaps, travelling around the circle in sequence or jumping across the diameter. Everyone flows easily. It’s been great, meeting these people, it really has. He came to this school, aware as always that it takes a while for the glare of his title to fade and he can start to have regular conversations with people. It’s one of the reasons he didn’t want to go to Hillerska and it’s one of the reasons it sucks that he can’t go there anymore. The other one being that he’ll never see Simon again. But it ended up not being so bad. He had Felice and he was fully prepared to cling to her, but on the second day Felix came over and introduced himself and was so blindingly, blissfully normal. Better than. He’s been so real with Wilhelm and he makes everyone else do it too. So even though Wilhelm doesn’t know everyone else that well and he’s still in the habit of keeping himself to himself he likes hanging out with the group.
“I get how scissors beats paper,” Imane says, “but really I don't see how rock beats scissors.” These are the important scholarly questions of their times. Wilhelm is glad they’re considering it.
“You hit the scissors with the rock,” Aye says.
“I'd have to hit the scissors a bunch of times,” Imane counters. That’s a good point. Scissors are pretty robust, especially if they’re the solid metal kind, but even the plastic ones with the metal inlaid aren’t going to be taken out in one rock hit.
“Maybe it's a really big rock,” Felice suggests.
Wilhelm pictures it, imagines in his mind’s eye a dinosaur killing asteroid strike to take out a pair of scissors. There’s a fatal flaw in this answer, though. “Then it would have to be an even bigger piece of paper,” Wilhelm teases.
Felice gives him a look. Just then his phone chimes and not enough people have his direct number for him to ignore it. The missed calls from his mother when Erik died still haunt him. So he pulls it out to check it. He sees the contact and Hi Wilhelm, sorry, and his stomach drops, fingers tightening around the phone. Everything in him feels like it’s falling into the space that organ used to be.
Felice tunes into him immediately, reaching for his knee.
“It’s from Simon,” Wilhelm says quietly.
Felice’s eyes widen. “Is he okay?”
Wilhelm shakes his head, then he shrugs, which isn’t an answer but it’s all he has because he hasn’t read the rest of the message, just sorry.
The conversation is going on around him but it feels far away. He’s dropped out of the bubble and he hopes it isn’t obvious. He doesn’t want to be drama, doesn’t like it when everyone stares at him. He sneaks a look up and Felix is gesturing bigger than ever, acting something out and everyone else is laughing, focused on him. But the corner of Felix’s eye is fixed on Wilhelm. He’s running interference. Wilhelm couldn’t be more grateful. It lets him breathe. Warm air rushes back into his lungs. So maybe he is being obvious, but it’s okay, because Felix is covering him; he has friends now who look out for him and that makes it safer to be himself.
It gives him the power to look back at his phone. Wilhelm quickly reads the message. “No. I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like it.” She nods slowly. “He wants to have a call.”
“Okay,” she says. “Are you going to?”
“I have to.” He needs to know.
He looks at Felix deliberately this time and gestures that he's going to go. Felix nods. He waves and that catches everyone else's attention so they wave too, Wilhelm already halfway out of the circle. Felix is great at these little maneuvers. And in the meantime, Felice has spoken to Malin and so the car is coming around. Again, gratitude lifts him up.
Next thing he knows Felice is settling next to him on the couch in the living room in the palace.
He feels a little dramatic rushing out from the hang like that. The conversation with Simon probably could wait, even though it didn’t feel like it. The moment he saw the message, he had to know what Simon needed, how Simon was doing, and the thought of waiting sounded impossible. Now that he’s sitting here, about to get the answers, that feels impossible too. Talking to Simon? His heart flutters a little.
“Can you…” Wilhelm starts. Is he bold enough to ask for her to stay? He knows he should be able to handle it alone.
Felice gets it immediately and sits down next to him. She’s holding his hand when he exhales and presses dial.
It rings and Wilhelm vows to himself that whatever it is that Simon wants, Wilhelm will do it. It can't have been easy for him to ask.
Simon describes the problem. “It’s the third years at school, they have it out for me.” That could mean so many things. Physical? Hazing? Other bullying? “Me and Sara. They were bullying her before, that’s why we went to Hillerska.” So it must be bad. “I’ve tried ignoring it, but they, um, aren’t backing down. It’s all that stuff—I mean, you know.” Wilhelm doesn’t, but then Simon talks a bit more and he gets it. Yet another downside of having dated Wilhelm.
All he can hear is Simon telling him, everything in my life gets fucked when you enter the picture. It’s happening again. It’s still happening. The ridges of his phone dig into his hand. He puts it flat on his thigh before he accidentally squeezes too hard and ends the call.
How can Wilhelm fix this? He can’t leave Simon to deal with that alone. Not if he’s under threat. Not again.
Felice is giving him the illusion of privacy by scrolling Instagram while they talk. Right now she's looking at a reel of a bunch of kittens sleeping in a pile. Kittens don't have these problems.
“What do you need from me?” Wilhelm isn’t going to be overbearing. He isn’t going to push. He’ll be there. He’s been learning. He’ll follow Simon’s lead.
Then Simon tells him what he wants.
In one of his earliest memories, possibly his earliest memories, he is making Christmas cookies with Erik. Making is an overstatement, at his age what he was doing was mashing the cookie cutter down on the dough and having the cookie itself come out a bit misshapen. In his memory, he is surly and Erik cheers him up by playing with the cookie cutters. He makes a goat dance and Wilhelm laughs and declares that goats will always be his favourite cookie shape. The thing about this memory is that Wilhelm is so young he’s not sure if he really remembers it, or it’s that his mother has shown him the video of them doing it so many times, has told him how cute they were then. It’s a memory with two layers. In one layer, his brother is kind to him and makes him joyful and it’s a sweet family moment. In another layer, Wilhelm was four and already knew that when the cameras were out he wasn’t allowed to leave the room and go play with legos, even when he was bored and they’d been at it for ages. In this layer, Erik is doing the best a nine-year old can do to keep Wilhelm engaged so they could all go home. Now, did Erik do that because he’s an attentive big brother who wanted his little brother to be happy at Christmas, or did Erik do that because he was a Crown Prince with an awareness of what the expectations for him were?
Some would say it doesn’t matter, that at the end of the day the video was cute and goat cookies are still Wilhelm’s favourite. But it does matter. It does.
Wilhelm knows he told himself he would do whatever Simon asked, but.
Everything in him rebels against the idea of taking the only thing that’s ever been real in his life and turning it into a show.
“Are you saying—do you want me to come by and pretend?” Wilhelm needs him to say it. Felice’s head whips around.
“Yeah,” Simon says and something inside of him, small and grasping, starts to wail.
Wilhelm has wanted so badly to be real.
He’s wanted it desperately. Like the taste of water after weeks at sea. Wanting it in the way that he knows that if he ever had it, he’d feel like someone who lived in all of his body from the tip of his head to his fingertips, instead of puppeting it in an off-tempo ungainly way.
Simon knows that. Everything has felt fake to Wilhelm. Wilhelm has felt fake to Wilhelm. Until Simon, Wilhelm had never been honest a day in his life. But loving Simon was real. Wilhelm was real when they were together.
Now his task is to take what’s true and make it a lie. In all the world, Simon knows best what he’s asking from Wilhelm, the last refuge he’s asking him to excavate and turn into a series of pantomimes that Wilhelm can be judged lacking for.
He tells himself to breathe. His ribs can move, his fingers touch each other. Oxygen is moving blood to his brain. He is more than this moment. He can think, he can.
Wilhelm thinks: Simon wouldn’t ask that unless he had to. He must be desperate, he must be struggling very badly. It makes Wilhelm take the request even more seriously.
So precisely because it’s the thing that hurts Wilhelm the most, scraping at his insides until it jars his bones, saying no isn’t an option. Because it's Simon and Simon is asking him to.
Wilhelm is blanking out a little, struggling to focus.
“I’m not trying to get back with you or anything,” Simon says. Like Wilhelm had any doubt.
Wilhelm is dead clear that his only use to Simon right now isn’t as a boyfriend, or a confidant, or a partner. He knows what he’s good for.
Maybe he's wanted to be more than that, but that's one of his many problems. He isn't grateful for what he has. It's the wanting that kills. That makes him grasping. Needy.
He smacks the reaching tendril inside of him down. It has no place here.
He can’t be in this conversation anymore. For once, it’s not because he’s at risk of blowing up. It’s that everything feels so far down inside of him that the words are struggling to get out. Black hole. “I’ll do it. I owe you,” he says.
They hang up.
“Wille?” Felice turns to him with worried eyes.
He’s going to have to tell her, he’s going to have to say it and then it will be happening.
He's never had to second guess himself with Simon before. When he reached for Simon, Simon reached back. Now he's going to have to learn to be cautious. To stifle the natural impulse and replace it with something more visually appealing. He's going to have to take every instinct for every feeling that comes naturally and stuff it down as hard as he can and cover it with the more palatable shell.
He's been working with his therapist on trying to let who he is make decisions sometimes. But what is the point? If the thing that is his touchstone for how good it can feel to not always be pinching himself is also better as a lie?
“Simon needs…” he says to Felice. “He's got bullies and… it would be better if the Crown Prince came by. So people would know…” his throat is dry. He forces the next words out. “That he has a boyfriend who cares about him.”
Felice hisses, a long slow exhale. “Better for who?”
Wilhelm stares at their hands. Her nails always look so nice, nail beds carefully pushed back and softened. His get ragged despite everyone's best attempts. He runs his nails along the edges trying to clean them up but it makes them worse.
“He needs it,” Wilhelm repeats.
“And what about you?” Felice sounds upset. He doesn't want to make her upset. “What about what you need?”
“I have everything,” Wilhelm tries to explain. All of these awful choking privileges. Everyone agrees he should be doing something better with them. Something worthwhile. “I took everything from him. This could help.”
“Wille that isn't true!” Felice squeezes his hand. When Wilhelm doesn't say anything she says, “What would Noah say if he heard you say that?” Invoking his therapist is her way of telling him he's being a dumbass.
If explaining didn't work, there's always plan b. “I think he'd say ‘how did you get in here Felice, sessions are confidential’,” Wilhelm says primly.
Felice laughs, like he meant her to. He appreciates her so much. He leans his shoulder against hers.
“Will you help me?” Wilhelm asks, looking down at her. She can help tell him what being a good boyfriend would look like. Separate from what it would feel like. What Simon would find useful.
It hits him again. The pretending. Whatever it looks like won't be it. He's going to be touching Simon but he won't have him. Can he even do that? Be so close with everything connecting them painted on?
Maybe there's something he can keep back for himself.
Felice puts her other hand on Wilhelm’s knee. “Of course.” They snuggle in together, getting more cosy. She puts her head on his shoulder, and he slumps down a bit to be less bony. Then she speaks again. “Are you doing this because… well, you'd spend more time together?”
He gets why she asked, why Simon had to warn him off but, “You can't make something real out of something fake.” Being a good boyfriend and acting like a good boyfriend are not the same thing. When it's always about how it looks then it's not at all about how it feels. Wilhelm's always known that. That's why he's so fucked up.
That's why his whole family is.