Chapter Text
“Willie? Can you hear me?”
The bright, luminescent lighting of the hospital shines down into Wilhelm as he blinks his eyes open. “Uh… hello?” he says, eyes squinting. He tries to move his hand, but finds needles poking inside, keeping his body still. He’s able to move his neck slightly, and all he sees is medical equipment and the blurry outlines of bodies surrounding him.
Someone distantly shouts—"He's awake! Get the doctor, he's awake—" and then everything tilts sideways into noise.
Wilhelm flinches at the volume, head swimming. His vision won't focus right; the ceiling tiles smear into long pale streaks, and a woman's face hovers somewhere above him, her dark hair pulled back, eyes red-rimmed, wrinkles prominent.
"Mom?" The word comes out before he even decides to say it. It feels right in his mouth, but he can't place why he's certain that's who she is.
The queen lets out a sound that's half sob, half laugh, and grips his hand so hard it hurts around the IV line. "Yes. Yes, baby, it's me. You're okay. You're at the hospital, you were in an accident, do you understand?"
"...accident?" He repeats it like a foreign word. There's a dull throb behind his eyes when he tries to chase the meaning of it, or trying to pull from some specific memory of an accident— and finds nothing. Just a flat, gray static where the answer should be.
A man's voice, lower, comes from the other side of the bed. "Wilhelm. Look at me. Do you know who I am?"
He turns his head slowly, the muscles in his neck stiff and unfamiliar, and looks at his father. There's a beat where nothing comes, a horrible blank stretch of nothing, and then it clicks into place like a key turning. "Dad."
His father's shoulders drop with relief, but even in his disoriented state and drowning in the inflorescent light and the smell of antiseptic , Wilhelm notices that the relief doesn't fully reach his father's eyes. Like he was braced for a different answer.
“Is… Erik here?” Willie asks. It feels right to ask for him, but the air around him shifts uncomfortably.
The silence that follows lasts half a second too long.
"Erik isn't—" his father starts, then stops himself, jaws working like he's recalculating something. He glances at the queen, a quick, unreadable look passing between them. "Erik passed away, Wilhelm. A few years ago now. You remember that, don't you?"
He doesn't. That's the problem. The name had surfaced on its own, unprompted, wrapped in something that felt like comfort and safety, a familiar ache of I want my brother. For some reason, it's been yanked out from under him before he even understood why he'd reached for it.
"Oh." His throat tightens around something he can't name yet. "Right. Sorry, I just—"
"It's alright," his mother says quickly, too quickly, smoothing his hair back again like the motion might smooth over the moment too. "It's alright, that's completely normal, the doctor said there'd be gaps—"
"How did he—" Wilhelm starts, and his father's expression does something complicated and fast, grief and old practiced composure colliding.
"We don't need to get into that right now," his father says, gentle but final, in a tone Wilhelm doesn't remember but somehow recognizes as the one used to close a subject. "You need to rest. There's time for all of this."
Wilhelm lets it drop, mostly because the effort of holding onto the thread is already exhausting him, his eyelids heavy under the weight of confusion. But underneath the fatigue, something quietly catalogues the flinch in his father's eyes, the half-second delay, the careful redirection, and the wrongness of this moment, even if he can't say why.
He doesn't know yet that grief for Erik isn't the only thing waiting in those gaps. He just knows, distantly, that there's more silence in this room than answers, and that everyone around his bed seems far more prepared for his blank stare than he is.
"What's the date," Wilhelm asks, eventually. His voice comes out cracked, scraped raw, like he hasn't used it in a long time. "How long was I—"
A doctor steps into his line of sight before his father can answer, shining a small light into each of his eyes, asking him to follow her finger. "Your Highness. I'm Dr. Lindqvist. You're at Karolinska. You were in a motorcycle accident eleven days ago. You've been in and out of consciousness, but this is the first time you've been lucid. Can you tell me your full name?"
"Prince Wilhelm." It comes automatically, easy. Too easy, somehow, against how hard everything else feels.
"Good. Do you know what year it is?"
He opens his mouth. Close it. The number that should be there… just isn't. He feels his pulse spike on the monitor before he even registers the fear.
"I don't—" His breath goes thin. "I don't know."
"That's alright." The doctor's voice stays even, practiced, the kind of calm that's its own kind of alarming. "It's common after a head injury like yours. Don't force it."
He looks around, in search of answers, but in the silence, something occurs to him with a slow, sinking dread — he doesn't know how old he is. He doesn't know what he was doing on a motorcycle. He doesn't know who he is past this room, this bed, these two faces that feel like gravity but nothing else.
"There's swelling that affected your hippocampus," the doctor says eventually, gently. "We're seeing significant retrograde amnesia — gaps in memories from before the accident. It's too early to know how much will come back. Some patients recover most of it over time. Others recover pieces. It varies."
"Pieces," Wilhelm repeats. The word sits wrong in his chest, like missing a stair in the dark.
His mother smooths his hair back from his forehead, the way she must have done when he was small — he doesn't remember it, but his body seems to, leaning slightly into the touch before he can stop himself. "You don't have to remember anything right now," she says. "You just have to get better. We'll fill in everything else. We're not going anywhere."
He wants to ask what's missing. His heart aches in a familiar way, reaching out for something, or someone that isn't there. He feels a phantom pressure on his mouth, warmth on his waist that can’t be real in the controlled climate of the room. A distant tune plays in the back of his mind, fractured notes, piano keys, and an angelic voice he can’t quite fully remember. A lock of brown, curly hair.
"Is there," he starts, then stops, because he doesn't even know how to finish the question. Is there someone I'm supposed to be missing? It sounds insane out loud.
"Is there what, sweetheart?" his mother asks.
He shakes his head slightly, the motion making the room tilt. "Nothing. Never mind."
But the ache doesn't go away. It just settles in, quiet and persistent, tucked somewhere under all the static — waiting, though he has no way of knowing that yet, for a sound he hasn't heard in years to come find him again.