Work Text:
There are three hidden exits in and out of Buckingham Palace that the guards know of.
The first is through the Queen’s suite, behind the elaborate painting of Queen Mary that takes up about half of the living quarters. There’s a hatch on the lower right of the frame that if you pull just a few inches to the right, the painting reveals a tunnel that releases into a backdoor, perpetually protected by at least two guards. An escape route, in the case of a mutiny or an attack.
The second is in the kitchens, through the pantry, covered in dust and spiderwebs and half collapsed under the weight of the soil. Perhaps only a rat could get in and out—but that’s why Princess Beatrice always keeps her flock of cats close by.
The third one, the most precarious, is through the roofs, an escape hatch that goes down into the structure of the building, where a slippery or perhaps a stupid thief could climb all the way down to the first floor and slip out. The guards keep a keen eye on that one.
And then there’s the fourth one, the most secretive one, that takes you down to unused tunnels under the castle, through a labyrinth, and spits you out in the middle of the London streets. The entrance is in the servant quarters, behind the latrines, through a cramped hole that seems so unadvisable Prince Henry doubts anyone in the castle knows about it.
Anyone but his late father, Prince Arthur, and now him.
That’s the exit Henry takes whenever the palace feels too suffocating, whenever the walls feel too close and the ceiling feels too low and Mary’s voice feels too loud and he just needs to breathe. He walks through the quiet streets, watches the moon and the stars; or he just sits in front of the exit and closes his eyes and waits until his lungs can finally retain air; or he finds a pub, a tavern, a place with raucous laughter and loud noises, never the same place, but one where he can sit at a corner table and let the chaos wash over him. He orders an ale and sips it slow enough to justify sitting there for hours, wonders the small lives of the crowd of dirty cheeks and wide mouths around him, and puts enough coins on the table to make it worth the barmaid’s time. Usually, on these nights, no one talks to him.
Usually.
“Is this seat taken?”
The voice cuts through the noise of the crowd like a sword through the wind. Henry glances up, already a bitter snap on the tip of his tongue—it’s been quite a long day, the Queen forcing him into one engagement after another, never mind the actual engagement she’s trying to arrange for him no matter how much he tries to delay, and he simply cannot handle another bit of kindness he’s going to have to fake—but the words shrivel and die. Because the man—
Well, he’s weird.
Not that that’s the first thing Henry notices. It’s the expanse of brown skin disappearing under a flimsy linen shirt, rolled up his forearms. It’s tucked into a pair of trousers in a cut Henry is quite sure he hasn’t seen before, boots that look to be leather but not quite, curls spilling out of a hat that has not been in style for nearly fifty years. He’s smiling a beatific smile, with the pristine white teeth of someone blessed with a miracle of hygiene, smells a bit like alcohol but also, underneath it all, a musk that indicates a life of luxury, even if his outfit doesn’t. It’s the beauty encompassed in a collage of contradictions he can’t quite puzzle out, no matter how much he rotates the pieces.
But he’s looking at Henry like he’s discovered gold in a coal mine, holding two glasses in his hands, and Henry finds himself nodding yes, finds himself pulling a chair for the man, and if they end up merely inches apart by the end of the night with warmth in the air, Henry doesn’t think he notices.
Alex, he learns, is the man’s name. He asks about what lordship he belongs to but Alex just laughs and dismisses the question, and when Henry offers him a false name—Arthur, is the first one that comes to mind—Alex takes it in stride. They talk until they’re properly kicked out of the bar, and if he was another man he may have asked Alex to follow him behind the walls for a kiss, but it’s a full moon and Henry is paranoid, so instead he just asks—
“Will I see you again?”
And Alex, like a proper miracle, says, “Absolutely.”
“I’ve not seen him,” Beatrice says, when Henry shows her the rough sketch he’s done of Alexander.
He doesn’t think he’s gotten it right. The eyes feel too dull, the curls too stiff, and that smile, he simply cannot capture the radiance of it. “He must be rich,” Henry insists. “No one could quite afford the level of hygiene he had.”
“Well, maybe he’s not nobility then.”
And Henry guesses that’s a possibility, but that makes finding Alex all the harder and at night, when he’s rolling in his bed, he hopes against hope that it won’t be quite an insurmountable task.
Alex doesn’t show up at the tavern the next night. Henry waits as long as he can, and then tucks his tail between his legs and leaves. He’s chewed out by the Queen in the morning for almost falling asleep during an important meeting. He doesn’t dare leave that night, or the next one, but instead stares out the window and wonders if Alex is there this time, waiting for him.
On the fourth day, during a theatrical performance hosted by the palace, when Henry thinks he’s quite close to losing his mind, a set of curls catches his eyes. There, in the middle of the room, laughing with a courtier. Dressed up in an old-fashioned dress, with a long doublet and a ruff he hasn’t seen in a long time. It’s a ridiculous getup, but then Alex looks around and their eyes meet and suddenly, it doesn’t matter what Alex is wearing at all. Henry can’t quite breathe.
There’s no way Alex recognizes him, not here dressed up like this, not here in his high fashion and combed hair and dusted face, but Alex smiles and excuses himself and makes his way over and Henry wishes Beatrice was here just so he could hold her for support, but then Alex is bowing in front of him and it’s too late.
“Your highness,” that same accented drawl murmurs, even if it doesn’t quite feel natural. “As promised.”
“Promised…what?”
One corner of Alex’s lips ticks up. “That I’d see you again.” And then he straightens up, mirth in his face like Henry isn’t trying to curb his panic. “Not that I think anyone else here needs to know that. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Henry does. He nods, and Alex settles next to him like he belongs there, and maybe he should be mingling more, trying to meet a proper girl like his grandmother wants him to, but the performance starts and Henry is…
Well, he’s quite comfortable where he is.
This time, he stops Alex before he can disappear. “When can I see you again?” he asks. A look crosses Alex’s eyes, indecipherable, before he’s able to smooth it out.
“I don’t know,” he says carefully. “But I’ll find you. I promise.” He glances around, and then, discreetly, presses his lips to the tips of his fingers and brings them up to Henry’s cheek. “Wait for me?”
As if that was even a question.
Alex does, over and over and over again.
He finds him at night, when Henry is able to slip out. Somehow, every now and then, he even manages to slip a note into Henry’s room, invites him to this tavern or this park and lets his face bloom into a smile whenever Henry shows up.
He finds Henry at balls, at masques, at dinners. Always dressed just a bit off, with not a proper style in mind, either outfits Henry has never seen in his life or those so old they could belong in a portrait. Stands perhaps a tad too close for prying eyes, but no one dare say anything to the royalty, and Henry thinks he’s allowed this indulgence, when every other aspect of his life feels suffocating.
And he finds Henry in alleys, in the back rooms of taverns, even in hidden nooks and crannies of the palace. In these places, he holds Henry tenderly, palms on his cheeks and chests pressed together, kisses him until Henry forgets his name and his title and his place in this twisted universe, where he only gets to have this under the cover of darkness and walls instead of on the top of the world, like he wants. But if this is all he’s allowed to have, he’ll hold onto it as tightly as he can, as long as he can, until he’s either free or dead.
He looks at Alex in these stolen moments, tries to memorize every aspect of him, and wonders if this is how love feels like. Wonders if he’d ever find out.
He’s not brave enough yet to ask.
It’s another one of those nights where Henry gets back to his rooms after a bath and finds a note on his pillow. Turn around, the note says in bad handwriting that Henry recognizes at this point, and his heart climbs all the way up to his throat as he spins—
“No one saw me,” Alex says immediately. His hands are up, face so open and honest Henry has no choice but to believe him, even though his words seem improbable. “I promise, Hen. No one knows I’m here.”
Henry presses the note to his chest. “Okay,” he says, and when Alex gets close he lets those fingers take his arms, release his death grip on the note. “How…” he tries, but the voice is stuck in his chest. “How did you…”
Alex smiles. “See, that’s a bit of a complicated answer.” His fingers trace up Henry’s arms, and only then Henry notices what he’s wearing. A soft fabric with short sleeves, in a color he hasn’t seen in fabric before, a dye that must be so unique. And blue trousers with a belt, something quite impossible that he wants to ask about it, wonders if this is some foreign style he doesn’t know, but Alex is faster. “I want to explain,” he says quietly. “But it’s not… Well, it’s not that simple.” He meets Henry’s gaze. “Do you trust me?”
And maybe it’s utterly stupid, but Henry knows the answer is yes. He lets Alex take his hand. “This’ll feel a bit uncomfortable,” the other man says. “But it’ll be quick.”
Only as the world disappears around him that Henry thinks, his accent sounds different.
Alex is from the future.
2020, to be exact, where—when—he’s twenty-one years old, from a place called Austin, Texas, all the way in the colonies. Except in Alex’s time, it’s not a British colony but a country all by itself, and England just consists of a small island, and the British royalty is nothing but figureheads that appear more in tabloids—it took Alex a bit to explain that one—than in any political capacity.
And in 2020, when a man kisses another man in the streets of London, no one even bats an eye.
“I don’t understand,” Henry whispers as he stands next to Alex and watches the procession of what is called a pride parade, and Alex simply smiles.
“You will.”
Alex is from the future, and maybe Henry should scream and run away and demand Alex never come back to the 1600s again, but instead he squeezes Alex’s hands and asks, “When can I see this again?”
So, they do. Not just 2020 but earlier, too, all the way to the opulent Ancient Greece to the American Revolution—Henry thinks he was properly aghast at all the tea spilled into the ocean—to the ups and downs of the 20th century. Alex shows him the good sides of history, and the bad sides too, doesn’t shy away from the lessons humanity had to learn the hard way, doesn’t hide the absolute lowest of history—as well as the highest. The first sparks of equality and pride. The people that stood up for what’s right. The people that fought for it. Alex shows it all to him, with the only caveat that he’s not allowed to tell anyone.
Henry sometimes looks at the Queen, the woman who thinks of the British Empire as her birthright, and the only thing he regrets is that he can’t show her this…tradition she’s hurt so many to protect will be nothing but fodder for the masses at one point.
There’s one thing he does wonder, though. “What happens to me?”
Alex is quiet when he asks that. It’s dusk, and they’re lying down on a beach in Santorini in 1995, sipping wine with two cats curled up by their feet. Henry listens to the waves for a moment, and then glances at his lover, waiting, curious.
“I don’t know,” Alex says finally. “I know I’m not allowed to change the past. I’ve tried, but every time something stops me, or soon after I leave something else happens that sets the course right.”
Well. Henry thinks that explains why Alex hasn’t been able to prevent many disasters. It must be a blessing and a curse, to have the power he does, to witness the past in all its color but not be able to do anything about it.
“I tried looking you up in the history books, but the succession in the empire after Queen Mary’s reign gets complicated. I don’t… I don’t know how much of that I can tell you. But when it comes to you, the information is sparse. Most sources say you just…disappear. There’s speculation that you died from illness, or ran away to the colonies, or lived your life sequestered in the palace. I haven’t really had the courage to…”
Henry stares into the sea, ears ringing, and then, quietly says, “Oh."
He doesn’t know when the idea seeds itself into his mind.
Maybe it’s when Alex takes him to Paris and they walk the streets hand in hand, freely, sharing a croissant the size of Henry’s head. Alex wipes the corner of Henry’s mouth when he spills some hot chocolate there, and Henry thinks he could live in that moment forever and be content.
Maybe it’s when they’re in Los Angeles, in the middle of fall, climbing up to what Alex says is one of the most iconic sights in the world—though Henry doesn’t understand what is so iconic about some letters placed on a mountain—and Alex takes a polaroid picture of them hugging in victory.
(Henry keeps that between the pages his most precious book on his bedside table.)
Or it’s when they’re in Alex’s hometown, and it’s so hot because it’s August so they both take their t-shirts off—that’s a thing Henry wears now, a simple t-shirt—as they go on a run, and then settle down on the grass for a picnic, and Henry can hug Alex without wondering if anyone will recognize him or look at him the wrong way or God forbid hurt him.
Or maybe it’s simply the small moments in between, the laughs and kisses and touches and looks they share that feel more like home than Buckingham Palace ever did, and those expansive walls of the castle feel so suffocating every time he has to return to them, the rooms feel too small when he’s sharing the air with Queen Mary or the other nobles or the list of women Mary keeps introducing to him in hopes that he’ll find someone to marry.
The idea seeds itself, and then grows, blossoms, until Henry finds himself staring at a mirror in a hotel room in 1987 and realizes he doesn’t think he’s Prince Henry anymore.
He paddles out of the bathroom, finds Alex sprawled on the bed in just his boxers, and blurts out, “Why me?”
Alex glances up from his book. “What do you mean?”
Henry gingerly sits next to him on the bed. “You could have anyone from anywhere in the world, any time in the world.” He says it matter-of-factly because it’s the simple truth, on the account of him being a prince in an active and powerful British Empire. Even if Alex’s powers make sneaking around a tad easier, Henry wonders why Alex hasn’t found himself someone he doesn’t have to do that with. Someone he can simply…coexist.
“Baby.” Fingers wrap around Henry’s and only then he realizes he’s been picking at the edges of his nails. Alex pulls them close, kisses them softly, one by one, until Henry finds himself shivering in an attempt to keep tears at bay. “You don’t realize how fucking special you are, do you?”
A snort escapes his lips. “I highly doubt I’m different than any other odd prince.”
“To me, you idiot.” Alex tips Henry’s head up with two fingers and lets a crooked smile take over his face. “Hen, you know I wouldn’t have stayed if I didn’t think this was worth it, right?”
Henry nods because he doubts he can speak through the knot in his throat. His eyes flutter shut when Alex tucks his hair behind his ears. “I didn’t plan for you,” Alex whispers. “I don’t think I could’ve, if I wanted. I just… I saw you in that tavern that day and you had this depth in your eyes, I had to know you. I know technology still isn’t your forte but I literally got back home and looked you up, even though I thought there was almost no chance I would find you, unless, you know, you were a prince or something.” A laugh escapes Henry’s lips and he can feel Alex beam at the sound of it. Gentle lips press along his chin. “I came back to you because I knew I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t give us a chance. And I kept doing it because I knew there was no one else I wanted to be with, no matter what that entailed. Baby, I’ll keep coming back to you if that’s what it takes to have you in my life.”
If that’s what it takes. But it doesn’t have to be that way, right?
Henry opens his eyes and meets Alex’s gaze. “Do you know when I disappear from the history books?”
It’s quiet in the brownstone when Henry unlocks the door to step inside.
He had a long day at NYU filled with advisory meetings and committees and one final late night lecture, and when he toes off his shoes and hangs his coat off, he tension slowly seep off his shoulders. There’s a soft pitter-patter of feet that brings a smile to his face, and then he has an armful of beagle licking his face.
“I know, my love,” Henry whispers quietly, scratching the back of David’s ears. “I know I’m late. But hey, you and I are going to be together all day tomorrow, won’t we? Get you all pampered up.”
David barks and mewls and licks Henry’s face and Henry takes that as confirmation that the little beagle has forgiven him. It’s incredible, really, how large of a heart dogs have, to forgive everything so fast—and, well, maybe how short of a memory. Henry isn’t complaining, though.
The beagle came into the picture only a few months after Henry had settled in 2021 with Alex, in an expansive brownstone in New York City. He was still trying to get his feet under himself then, Alex working day and night to get him a working identity as he spent days and nights teaching himself modern technology. Electricity first, then machines, then internet—though that still baffles Henry so much, that there’s this…network all over the world that connects everyone in an instant—never mind the cars and trains and planes, God, planes, and it was overwhelming and frustrating and Henry wanted to rip his hair out every five seconds…
But, well, then Alex would come home at the end of the day, would wrap him in a tight hug and show him how to navigate a computer or how to use Google or answer his many inane questions with such patience, and when he was too busy to do that he got David to be there for Henry when needed, the little beagle that never tired of Henry’s frustrations, curling up by his feet throughout the day, and Henry knew everything would be okay. At least he didn’t have to hide his desires. At least he could be fully himself.
He wouldn’t exchange that for anything.
Slowly but surely, Henry got used to the future. He learned how to use a smartphone. Learned how to navigate a digital map and a subway system. Learned how to live with a new identity—Henry Fox, for his father, a name he got to choose for himself for the first time—and become a person all for himself. He found that he didn’t miss the past much. He found he didn’t want to return.
That was something they decided together as well, when Alex agreed to take Henry to the future. There would be no going back, no half measures. Two months given to Henry to say his goodbyes as discreetly as he can, to the people that mattered to him. His sister. His brother, to some degree. His mother, though she’s been an absent parent most of his life. And his father, with fingers pressed to his gravestone, tears in his eyes. “I think you’d want this for me, Father,” he whispers in the quiet of the night. “I think you’d want me to be happy.” He knew back then he probably could’ve asked Alex to take him back, to see his father alive, but he also knew it’s a trap, to hold onto something that’s not there anymore and the whole point of going to the future is that he doesn’t want to live in the past anymore.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Move on. That’s what this is about.
Now, ten years in, Henry is thirty-two, with a doctorate in history under his belt, a professor at NYU specializing in British Empire—a bit on the nose, especially when he has to talk about Prince Henry’s disappearance and Queen Mary’s reign, but it’s not like there’s more of an expert in that field than him. Now he knows how to drive but still takes the subway to work, has a smart phone and a laptop but prefers to take most of his notes in aged notebooks—though he appreciates the development of pens—and he has a ring around his finger, all legally done, binding him to the love of his life forever.
His husband that waits for him in the bedroom, glasses on his nose and papers scattered around him on the bed. “I know,” he says when Henry steps in. “I know I know I know, just need to get this in and then I’ll be done and, like, I’m getting paid for this anyway—Oh.” A sigh escapes Alex’s mouth when Henry kisses him lightly on the lips, David crushed and whining between them. “Hello.”
“Hi, my love.” Henry takes in Alex’s bleary eyes and tired face and knows he wouldn’t exchange this to anything. “Tea?”
Alex deflates. “Yes please. God, I love you so much.”
“Then you make sure you’re done by the time I’m back. Right, David?”
David barks again, wiggles out of Henry’s arms to lead them to the kitchen. Henry fills the kettle and turns it on—another brilliant invention, in his opinion—and pulls out the decaf Earl Grey from the cupboards, with just a bit of cream and sugar. Alex’s papers are all tucked away when he makes it back to the bedroom.
“How was your day?” Alex asks. Henry settles down, pulls David closer, and smiles.
“Good.” And it’s true. In the last ten years he’s had tiring days, difficult days, busy days, even sad ones. He’s cried and laughed in equal measure. He’s been pushed to the limit at times and has been elated at others. There have been perfect days and less than perfect days, but at the end of it all they’ve all been good, with Alex by his side.
That’s more than he could’ve ever asked for.