Chapter Text
Serious business— that phrase rattled around in Dan’s mind, like a loose screw, as he sat in this uncomfortable, ancient chair in this uncomfortable, ancient room in this uncomfortable, ancient palace. Serious business. Serious business. Like a loose damn screw.
On his channel, there had been a Youtube video of him repeating that phrase—serious business—over and over again as he slunk his nineteen year old limbs around the law offices where he’d been sentenced to spend his internship. Like a makeshift Grinch, Dan had imagined stealing the stodgy seriousness of that place a green handful at a time. Like if he could spirit away enough of it, adult responsibility wouldn’t come in the morning like a boulder to crush him.
Over the years, Dan had realized he’d been wrong back then. Responsibility wasn’t something that came crashing down like a boulder. It came slowly, a dropped pebble at a time. As soon as you learned to manage the weight of a new pebble another would drop and you’d have to learn to manage that too. You would, mostly. Most of the time. But not always. Sometimes those pebbles were too damn heavy and you could feel each and every one of them weighing you down in specific, horrible ways and you could imagine all the ones that were to come and that was called a depressive episode. A psychiatrist would prescribe citalopram, so you could stop counting the pebbles and figure out how to take a shower and go to the fuck outside. And that was that.
But this—this Big Thing that was happening to Dan, at him, maybe, felt a lot more like the boulder he’d imagined in his youth than the steady drop of pebbles he’d grown used to.
“You really can’t hunch like that,” Margo said, and not at all for the first time. She’d been harping on Dan’s bad posture for months it felt like. Ever since he’d started what he and Phil had come to affectionately and sometimes not so affectionately call ‘Princess Lessons’.
“I don’t hunch.” He hunched. He absolutely hunched. Dan was a huncher from way back. All big hands and thick thighs and broad shoulders on a body stretched out too long by genetics and not smoking the cigarettes his grandmother had told him would stunt his growth.
Maybe if he’d have just taken up smoking he wouldn’t have this problem.
Margo gave Dan a measured gaze, pressing one of her manicured nails to her bottom lip. Her heels clacked as she walked behind Dan. She put her small hands on his shoulders and pulled, curving in his spine. “Now, that’s not hunching.” Margo dropped her hands away.
Feeling silly, Dan looked at himself in the mirror. He was all puffed up, his starched-looking shoulders back. The position didn’t make Dan feel confident, like Margo and a few online articles said it would. It made him feel huge, lumbering, like a cryptid wearing TopMan skinny jeans.
“I can’t go around standing like this. It’s stupid.”
Margo positioned herself in an exaggerated slump then paraded in front of him. God, his life really had become directed by Gary Marshall. “You can’t meet the prime minister looking like a first draft Victor Hugo protagonist either.”
Dan scoffed. “If you don’t think Theresa May would feel at home in a Victor Hugo novel…”
“And you definitely can’t say things like that.” Margo turned towards him, her lips pursed. He could tell she was disappointing her and Dan hated disappointing her, despite repeatedly and almost exclusively doing it.
“I’m not a royal. The prince’s boy toy still has every right to tell Theresa May to shove it up her tight—”
“Good morning, Daniel,” the queen’s voice came out of nowhere, startling him.
Dan squawked, embarrassingly, then said, “Sorry, ma’am. I… I had no idea you’d come in.”
“I’m stealth,” she said, then looked to Margo with that heir of something otherworldly she always possessed. “You should’ve told him that I’m stealth.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Margo replied.
The Queen was wearing her tortoiseshell reading glasses and her usual uniform of pressed wool trousers and a white blouse, but her shoes were unusually red, candy apple red. Dan smiled. He knew Phil had bought them for her. “How is it going?” the queen asked.
“Alright,” Margo replied. “He’s… alright.”
“Thank you. I was actually talking to to my son’s boy toy, but I do appreciate your help, Margo. As a matter-of-fact, why don’t you take an early lunch?” She shot Dan a look. “I’m sure you need it.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” Margo gave Dan a wary glance, then grabbed her bag and hurried out of the room.
“So…” the queen prompted, eyebrows raised above those thin lines of tortoiseshell.
“We’ve moved from waving to posture so I’m assuming next I’ll be slowly repeating the phrase how now brown cow.”
“I know you don’t take this seriously, but it is important.”
Dan wanted to tell her that he did take this seriously. Like a boulder dropped off Mount Crumpet seriously and taking the piss out of things was just how he dealt with it, but he didn’t want to say ‘taking the piss’ to the queen and he couldn’t think of another way to explain it.
“I’ll try not to be a total embarrassment, I promise.”
“The little things matter. It’s easy to think they don’t, but they do. And they matter more for Phil than they mattered for me. People are going to be looking for the smallest chink in your armor or in his, any vulnerability they can latch onto and exploit. Don’t give it to them.”
“Do I really have to go to this thing tomorrow? Should I even go? I mean, I was joking about the whole boy toy thing, but it’s not lightyears from the truth, at least not when it comes to official royal duties.”
The Queen shrugged. “Philip wants you there.”
“Do you want me there?”
“I want my son to be happy, and I want you not to make a fool out of him.” The Queen regarded Dan, her gaze falling down his body then snapping back up. “And stop standing like that, you look like Sasquatch.”
Dan dropped his shoulders and frowned.
Twenty-seven years old and he was still shit at serious business.
. . .
Phil paced in his bedroom, alternating between gnawing his bottom lip raw and staring at the top drawer of his dresser. Sometimes, when he felt ambitious, he’d do them both at the same time.
Under balled patterned socks and stacks of boxer-briefs was a velvet box. Inside that velvet box was a ring—his paternal grandfather’s ring—it was a simple silver band, something from a long-gone jeweler purchased frugally in a tucked away corner of Manchester.
It had nicks and scratches in it from the years his grandfather had spent toiling away at the shipping yard to put food on the table for his wife and their gaggle of kids. Martyn used to make fun of Phil, when he’d catch him dressed up in their grandfather’s coat playing house with his imaginary wife and kids. Boys were supposed to turn sticks into revolvers and pretend to be cowboys, launch garden rocks like army grenades. They were supposed to live out expansive fantasies of knights or aliens or superpowers. But for Phil, his grandfather’s life was as far away from his own experience as any of those fantasies. It was as much as an impossible dream.
Wanting to see it again, hoping the simple sliver band would ground him somehow, Phil opened the drawer and began to dig inside it. He had two fingers on the soft velvet of the box when his bedroom door flung open.
“Did you know your mum’s here?”
Phil slammed the dresser drawer shut, then faced Dan with his hands bracketed on the dresser and his body blocking the drawer. “Um, what? Yes, yeah, she had a meeting here today.”
Dan yawned, then flopped back on the bed. He toed off his shoes and they thudded on the floor. “You could’ve warned me mate. She interrupted princess lessons.”
“I’m sorry,” Phil said. “I hope she wasn’t too… harsh.”
Dan sat up. “She’s not. She’s fine.” He sighed. “You sure you want me going to this thing tomorrow? I’m a mess. There was an article about it and everything.”
Phil stepped away from the dresser, moving toward Dan. “It wasn’t an article. It was a blog post and it was bullshit.”
“They didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”
Dan had sent the link to Phil when he’d found it. Phil didn’t get past the title— Prince’s Boyfriend is an Unmitigated Mess. He never gave the stupid thing the dignity of reading it. He wished Dan hadn’t either, wished Dan knew it didn’t fucking matter.
“I don’t care what it said.” Phil grabbed one of Dan’s legs and hoisted it up so his foot was placed against Phil’s thigh. He slowly worked Dan’s sock off his foot and then rubbed his foot just how he knew Dan liked it—a strong thumb pressed just underneath his big toe and over towards the middle.
Dan tossed his head back and let out a groan. “Unfair,” he mumbled. “Not that I’m complaining, but do you even have time for this?”
“No, but I’m doing it anyway.” Phil pressed down harder on that spot, rocking his thumb back and forth.
“Phil.”
“Yes, I have time for this. Everything is fine. I’ve been doing this prince thing my whole life. I’ve got it down.”
“You haven’t been doing the prince with the highly controversial boyfriend thing for your whole life though.”
“It would be weird if I had,” Phil said.
“The new, chill Phil freaks me out, you know that?”
Phil let go of Dan’s foot then leaned up and kissed him on the mouth. It was warm and sweet, a simple kind of kiss they’d shared so many of now.
It was true. Phil was “chill” about a lot of things now. He was less concerned about what people thought about him or about Dan, less concerned with how he was going to be king someday, but there were still underlying concerns. And overlying ones too… like the one in his top dresser drawer.
It was one thing to be the prince’s boyfriend. It was another thing to be a prince yourself. They’d talked about it—sure, here and there—in bits and pieces, they’d talked but it was one things to talk and another thing to decide. Asking Dan to marry him would be asking him to decide, once and for all, not just to marry Phil. But to accept an enormous responsibility, a responsibility you would pass on to your children and they would pass on to theirs.
Children… that was another thing they would have to figure out.
One thing at a time, Phil. One thing at a time, said a voice in his head that sounded a lot like Martyn.
First, Phil had to ask Dan to marry him and Dan would have to be stupid enough to say yes to all this.
“Maybe I should take back that thing I said about you being chill,” Dan said.
“Huh.” Phil blinked. “What?”
Dan laughed. “You just kind of zoned out there, babe. For like a while.”
Phil tucked his face into Dan’s neck, breathed in his familiar, salty smell, then settled onto his lap. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Thinking.”
“About tomorrow?”
Phil sat up, stiffening. “Tomorrow? Why’d you say tomorrow?” Did Dan know he was planning on proposing tomorrow? Had Maxwell said something? He’d be so pissed if Maxwell had said something.
Dan’s brow furrowed, his eyes narrowed into slits. “The meeting tomorrow… with the prime minister.”
“Oh, oh right. I forgot about that.”
“You forgot Theresa May? Teach me your ways because I’d love to know how to forget—”
“You’re not going to talk like this tomorrow, are you?”
Dan rolled his eyes. “No, but I’m going to store it all up and when we get home, just blam. I’ll sick Theresa May insults all over you.”
“Sexy,” Phil said with a laugh, though he hoped Dan wouldn’t be thinking of Theresa May by the time they got home. He hoped by the time they got home Dan would have that band of promised silver around his finger and his head would be filled with thoughts of their future together.
As long as Phil could work up the courage to ask him.