Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Ellen Claremont was pregnant the first time, the best piece of advice she received was from her mother-in-law. María Diaz had found her in the kitchen halfway through her baby shower, left hand curling protectively around her belly, fingers of her right twitching in search of a cigarette she was no longer allowed to push between them, overwhelmed and panicking over the unsolicited and completely fucking contradictory parenting advice being flung at her from every direction.

“Breathe, mi hija.” She’d pressed a papery kiss to Ellen’s cheek, her hand coming to rest on Ellen’s arm. “Your daughter will tell you who she is and what she needs. Listen to her rather than everyone else trying to tell you how to parent her, and you’ll be fine.”

Ellen’s relationship with Oscar’s family had always been complicated—around them she felt too brash, too loud, too uninterested in being a stay-at-home mom, too nominally Methodist for their quiet, Catholic, traditional sensibilities—but in that moment, it was the one thing she’d desperately needed to hear.

María had been right, of course: Catalina June Claremont-Diaz had slipped into the world on a balmy October evening after a textbook labour and delivery. By eight weeks, she’d been sleeping almost through the night—which Ellen quickly learned not to complain to other new moms about, even if it did mean Catalina was completely uninterested in sleeping during the day, making it impossible to get anything done. She told them who she was, she told them what she needed, and Ellen learned to listen.

Later, she’d be grateful for the practice.

The second time around, Ellen went into labour just before lunch and barely made it to the hospital in time. Her second-born barrelled into the world kicking and screaming, a force to be reckoned with right from the start. It was an entirely different experience to parenting Catalina—who took to the role of older sister with relish—but the foundation still held strong. Her job, and Oscar’s, was simply to listen when their children told their parents who they were.

Ellen listened when the long, heavy tresses—the dark colour all Diaz, the weight and texture entirely Claremont—were eschewed in favour of a wild, cropped head of curls. She bought shorts and overalls when CJ’s hand-me-down skirts and dresses were met with a frown and a fierce shake of the head. And when her confident, fiercely intelligent, beautiful youngest child crawled into her lap at five years old, wrapped surprisingly strong arms around her neck, and asked quietly if Ellen thought it was possible that God sometimes made mistakes and gave kids the wrong parts, she swallowed back the lump in her throat and marvelled at the depths of bravery she knew it must have taken to ask the question.

She made it through the usual bedtime routine by sheer force of will—a yes, sugar, sometimes that happens, and it’s okay if you think it happened to you and a kiss to the forehead apparently enough to assuage any fear at that time—only breaking down in Oscar’s arms long after both kids were asleep. It wasn’t grief or confusion that had her sobbing; she’d move mountains to make her children happy, whoever they were, whatever they needed. It was sheer frustration, seeing so many potential sources of harm and heartbreak laid out on the path ahead, traps waiting to spring, and knowing she would be unable to clear many of them out of the way.

In bed that night, she and Oscar talked through every possibility they could think of. They approached it with the fervour of trial prep; long lists covering every possible thing that might be asked of them. They were in complete agreement that they wouldn’t push, and they wouldn’t take the lead, but that whatever was asked of them, they would not be caught unprepared.

So the next morning, when their second-born admitted quietly that hearing the name Oscar and Ellen had agreed on with such excitement felt ‘itchy’ and ‘icky’, Ellen was able to project calmness and confidence when she offered up the boy’s name that had been on their list ever since her first pregnancy; the one she’d long since assumed would remain unused. The wide grin, the sparkling eyes, the hope that appeared on the small face when the name rolled off Ellen’s tongue—if she’d had even the slightest bit of doubt that the approach she and Oscar had agreed on was the right one, it would have evaporated in that moment. For such a small, simple thing to be the cause of so much joy: how could anyone object to that?

In the summer of 2003, Alexander Gabriel Claremont-Diaz tells his mother who he is and what he needs.

And Ellen listens.

If someone had pressed a pen into Alex’s hand the night his mom won her election and told him to write a list of all the potential scandals he could have been involved in that would threaten to destabilise her presidency, ‘ended up on the floor of a palace next to Prince Henry covered in cake’ wouldn’t have even cracked the top twenty. Of course, the night his mom won her election he’d only met Henry once and wasn’t really thinking of him as anything more than some guy who was a bit of a dick to him once, so he thinks that theoretical past Alex could be forgiven for his lack of foresight.

Here’s what happens, when your mother becomes the Democratic nominee: a bunch of crusty old white guys from the party sit you and your sister down and tell you that your lives are about to become open season for the media; that you should assume you’re on camera and being recorded at all times, no matter what, and you shouldn’t say or do anything that you wouldn’t want the talking heads at Fox and MSNBC to be picking apart within twenty-four hours; that you better not so much as wink at a potential sexual partner without making sure they’ve signed an NDA; that if your mom wins, you’ll all be under a level of scrutiny you cannot possibly imagine, and you need to start preparing for that now, not in November. And then Zahra shoos the crusty old white guys from the party out of the room, and she sits down in front of you with pursed lips and she tells you, very quietly, that all of that goes double for you, because while medical records are private regardless of who you are, you don’t ever want to give anyone a reason to start digging or to try to get around HIPAA—and sure, there are a few conservative chucklefucks who would love to make a meal out of the fact that June went on birth control at fifteen to keep her endometriosis symptoms manageable, but that’s nothing compared to the shitstorm that would be unleashed if anyone got their hands on yours.

So, yeah. If he’d had to bet on it, he’d have assumed that if his name was going to be plastered all over the news headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, it’d be because some opportunistic asshole got their hands on his T prescription, or his fucking packer somehow fell out of his pants at an event, or something. Maybe he should be grateful that instead it was a borderline food fight with a pompous asshole from one of the worst institutions in the modern world. Except that it’s kind of hard to be grateful when he’s pretty sure there’s still buttercream frosting lodged in his ear canal, and it’s definitely hard to be grateful when his mom is looking at him like she is seriously considering marching him down to NASA headquarters and demanding he be put on the next space shuttle launch.

And like, it’s fine. He’ll go back to London and he’ll play nice, even though literally none of this is even his fault. He can fake a bromance for a couple of days—even if it is with someone who has the personality of soggy cardboard.

Except that, as it turns out, there’s a spark of something underneath the aloof asshole Alex has come to know and loathe over the last few years. He doesn’t know what compels him to plug his number into Henry’s phone before Cash whisks him away to the airstrip—maybe it’s the fact that Henry’s impassioned if incorrect defence of Return of the Jedi is the first time Alex has ever truly believed he’s a real guy Alex’s age and not some sort of autobot the royal family pulls out when there’s an overflow of ribbons that need cutting, or maybe it was the way his apology, years late though it might have been, actually sounded genuine. Whatever the reason, he does it, and he very deliberately doesn’t offer his own phone for Henry to return the favour.

He’s not going to be the one to reach out first. The ball is firmly in Henry’s court.

Alex leaves his parents screaming at each other over tinsel and fine china, his bedroom door bouncing off the wall when he flings it open. He should be used to the way they are around one another by now; they’re always like this.

Except… that wasn’t always true. It wasn’t.

Alex was young enough when they moved to Austin that his memories of the time before it are fuzzy, and he never knows how many of them actually come from his own brain and how many are half-conjured up from family stories and photo albums. But their first few years in the Austin house were filled with music and laughter and excitement that slowly gave way to screaming matches and long, stony silences and a tension in the air that always made Alex feel like he was suffocating.

He’s never been good about processing things internally; that’s how the lists started. But right now, he doesn’t want to sit down long enough to write anything down. June’s downstairs, and Nora’s with her family. If he were back in high school, he’d call Liam, or better yet, climb through his bedroom window, but that isn’t an option anymore. Which means…

Really, the only weird thing about calling Henry is how not-weird it actually feels. Sure, in the last few months they’ve somehow gone from weekly texts to practically hourly, but that’s more to do with Henry’s schedule being as chaotic and his sleep pattern being as broken as Alex’s is than it is anything else. Well, that and the fact that he doesn’t really care whether he annoys Henry or not. What’s he going to do—tell the press they’re not friends after all? For all that, though, they’ve only actually spoken on the phone once, and Henry wasn’t exactly helpful when it came to turkey-related trauma. But Alex doesn’t exactly have another choice: it’s talk to Henry or scream into a pillow, and the latter comes with the risk that someone hears him and sends the building into a full lockdown.

It turns out, though, that Henry is actually a really good listener. He makes soft, encouraging noises every time Alex takes a breath, not in the way that Alex feels like he needs to shut up, but more like he’s just confirming that he’s still on the other end of the line without interrupting Alex’s flow. Alex can’t remember the last time someone just let him go like this, and the more he talks, the more words come tumbling out of him. He doesn’t know how long he’s been bottling this up, and he has no idea why it’s coming out now, but at this point, he’s not sure that he could stop the tidal wave if he tried.

“And the thing is, I get it.” He grips his phone hard enough that he knows he’s risking cracking the screen again, barrelling forward before Henry can interrupt him with bullshit platitudes. “They’re both out there trying to fix the whole damn world to make it a little better for their trans son, but fuck, I miss being able to come home and having that be the one place I didn’t have to deal with any bullshit, you know?”

The silence that follows is so absolute, Alex pulls the phone away from his ear to check that the call hasn’t dropped.

“Henry?”

“I’m here.” Henry’s voice is cracked and hoarse, and he must realise it at the same time Alex does, because he clears his throat before speaking again. “Alex, I don’t—did you mean to tell me that?”

“Tell you wh—” But the words are already replaying in his head, realisation slamming into him all at once. “Oh, fuck.”

“Alex—”

“Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck.” He presses one hand to his sternum, trying and failing to quell the rising panic spreading up to his throat like bile. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean to—”

“I know.” Henry’s voice is low and soothing and, inexplicably, incredibly comforting; a distant part of Alex wonders where the fuck this energy was when he was about to be murdered by a deranged turkey. “I know you didn’t mean to trust me, Alex, but you can. Just keep breathing. If you want to get an NDA sent across, I’ll sign it. Whatever you need.”

Alex sinks to the floor, dropping his head between his legs, elbow of the hand holding his phone resting on his knee. The weird thing is, he doesn’t think he needs the NDA to make himself feel better. If he can trust Henry with the rest of it, he can trust him with this, friends or not.

“You could always tell me a secret, even things out.” He scrubs his free hand over his face as Henry splutters on the other end of the line, Alex’s breath coming a little more easily now that his fight-or-flight response has settled down a bit. “Make it a good one; I’m feeling kinda vulnerable over here.” When Henry doesn’t immediately speak, he adds: “C’mon, it’s okay if you cry during all King George’s bits in Hamilton, or you lied to sound cool and your dog’s actually named after Hasselhoff. This is a safe space, Henry. Speak your truth.”

But Henry still doesn’t respond; in fact, he’s quiet for so long, Alex’s stomach starts churning with a swooping, biting sense that he’s fucked up. “Forget it, you don’t have to—”

“I’m gay.”

Alex drops his phone.

“But,” he manages to spit out thirty seconds or so later, after scrambling to pick it back up and apologising profusely, “I always see you in, like, magazines and shit. All those dates—”

“Yes, well.” There’s a tension in Henry’s voice that has Alex conjuring up a mental image of him: jaw sticking out, mouth tight. It makes him ache. “Any deviant desires I might harbour would reflect poorly upon the crown, so.”

“Jesus.” Alex picks at a loose thread on his chinos—for once, he’s completely at a loss for what to say. “That’s fucked up.”

Henry just hums. “The wonders of the monarchy.”

“Well, um.” Fucking hell. All those bland bullshit statements from his and Henry’s press teams about how much they have in common—none of them have any fucking idea. “Thanks for trusting me with that.”

“Thank you for trusting me.” There’s a rustling sound at the other end, as though Henry’s shifting around on the bed. “Even if you didn’t entirely mean to.”

“Mutually assured destruction, huh?”

There’s a long pause before Henry huffs out a laugh. “Something like that, I suppose.”

Three days later, he finds out that Henry is coming to the New Year’s Eve Gala. Which is like… fine. Maybe he wouldn’t have dumped all his child of divorce trauma on Henry if he’d known he was going to have to face him in less than a week, and he definitely wouldn’t have accidentally come out to him, but… it’s fine. They’ll be surrounded by people, and if Henry is more awkward about it in person than he was over the phone, that will be okay; they’ll have June and Nora—and Pez, apparently—as a buffer. Besides, all that etiquette training will mean that, at a minimum, Henry isn’t going to start grilling him about all the personal details in the middle of a crowded dance floor, so it will be fine.

Or, you know. Henry could kiss him under a linden tree and then fuck off into the night while Alex is still processing.

He forgot to account for that possibility, for some reason.

He tells Nora, and she isn’t surprised. Which is, in Alex’s opinion, fucking rude.

“I mean.” She shrugs when Alex asks why the fuck she isn’t surprised. “He’s gay, and you’re hot, so.”

Alex stares at her. From the way Henry spoke about it, he thought that was, like, nuclear codes-level secret. “You know he’s gay?”

“I mean, not officially. But…” She waves vaguely, a drop of sauce falling out of her burrito and landing on her knee. “I just… figured it out.” Then she looks over at him, her eyes narrowing dangerously. “You knew, though.”

“What, I couldn’t have ‘just figured it out’?”

Nora reaches over to pat his cheek. “Alex, I love you. I really do. You’re one of the smartest people I know. But you’re not, like, people-observant, you know?”

And Alex wants to argue with her, but she’s not wrong. “Okay. Fair. He told me.”

Her eyebrows nearly hit her hairline. “He told you? Just out of nowhere? Damn, that boy was testing the waters and I respect it.”

“It wasn’t out of nowhere.” He buries his face in his hands so he doesn’t have to look at her. “I sort of, um, toldhimIwastrans?”

The silence stretches on for so long that he has to look up. When he does, Nora is just gaping at him, a solid dollop of beans now sitting on top of her keyboard. She doesn’t seem to have noticed. “Alex.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. It was stupid; he hasn’t signed an NDA that would cover that. I just trust him, I think, I—”

“No, whoa, hey.” She puts the burrito down on its wrapper, wiping her hand on a napkin before reaching out to grab both of his hands in hers. “I didn’t mean—I’m just surprised, that’s all. You must really like him.”

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? He doesn’t know. Or maybe he does know, but he doesn’t know what it means, or what he’s even supposed to do about it if it means what he thinks it might mean, or—

“Alejandro, you’re spiralling.” Nora digs her nails into the backs of his hands, yanking his attention back to her. “Spiral out loud, come on.”

Alex swallows hard. Takes a breath.

“I knew I was trans before I knew what being trans was.” Nora nods; she knows this already. When Alex first came out to her, before they ever hooked up, she’d asked so many questions Alex had started to worry about her ulterior motives, before he realised it was just the way her brain works. “And now I’m sitting here like… how did I know that, but miss this? How the fuck did I know I was a guy when everyone around me was calling me a girl, but completely miss the fact that I might be attracted to men? I feel so fucking stupid, you know?”

Nora hums, thoughtful. “I can’t answer that one for you, babe. But if it helps, I’m pretty sure you’ve always wanted Henry to dick you down. It’s okay if it took you a minute to catch up.”

Liam has a boyfriend.

Liam has a boyfriend.

(Liam was also pretty fucking unimpressed to hear from Alex, but he’ll think about that after he’s thought about this.)

Here’s the thing: Liam was the only person outside of his family and, like, medical professionals who knew Alex was trans in high school. And when they’d been two guys jerking off together watching porn in Liam’s bedroom, that had been one thing, but after the night they made out in Liam’s bed, Alex had never quite been able to shake the fear that despite everything, deep down, Liam had seen him as a girl, or close enough. Because Alex had been drunk and stupid, but Liam had been stone-cold sober when Alex clambered through his window and pressed him down into the mattress—so why else would he have gone along with it, if he wasn’t gay?

Except that he is gay. He’s gay, and he was making out with Alex in a very fucking gay way, apparently, and Alex might be a smart guy, but it turns out he’s also really fucking stupid.

The way Henry kisses Alex in his bedroom isn’t the exploratory kiss they shared in the garden, nor is it the dam-breaking, furious passion from the Red Room earlier tonight. On Alex’s couch, and then again on Alex’s bed, Henry kisses him like he’s being fucking claimed. It’s shockingly easy for Alex to surrender himself to the slide of Henry’s tongue against his own, to the scrape of Henry’s teeth along his pulse point, to the possessive clutch of Henry’s hands around his waist. By the time he has Henry sprawled out underneath him, Alex feels the way he did when he first got on T—like he’s simultaneously too big for his skin and like it fits properly for the first time, hyper aware of every single point of his body, something primal and desperate unfurling in his stomach.

“I just need you to tell me if it’s awful,” he says, and when Henry promises that he will, that gives him the surge of confidence that he needs to lean forward and wrap his lips around the head of Henry’s dick.

The one good thing about Henry’s little disappearing act is that it gave Alex time to research. There have been diagrams and tutorials and porn and more than a little practice on Alex’s own strap, which he thinks might technically count as autofellatio even if it’s not what people expect when they hear that, but it sure fucking felt like he was blowing himself when he was doing it. Which is all to say that he’s not going in completely unprepared—but there’s the theoretical, and then there’s Henry. Henry, who is the opposite of prim and proper as he squirms and whines and moans under Alex’s ministrations; Henry, who buries a hand in Alex’s curls and tugs gently, only tightening his grip when Alex practically goes fucking boneless at the sensation; Henry, who tries to warn him before tipping his head back when Alex pointedly keeps sucking, coming into Alex’s mouth with a breathless laugh as Alex focuses all his effort into not embarrassing himself right here at the end by choking on it.

When Henry kisses him afterwards, chasing the taste of himself on Alex’s tongue as though he’s fucking greedy for it, Alex tells himself that maybe it’s time he stopped being surprised by all the unfolding layers hidden under that placid, perfect exterior.

Henry gets him on his back, starts kissing his way down Alex’s chest, and it’s only at this point that it starts occurring to Alex to be nervous.

The thing is: Henry is, objectively, kind of fucking big. The ache in Alex’s jaw can attest to that. And Alex is, objectively, kind of fucking not, even though for a trans guy he’s actually pretty hung. He’s pretty sure Henry isn’t going to be, like, an asshole about it or anything—Alex just doesn’t want to be a disappointment.

“Is there anything I should know?” Henry looks up, his chin resting on Alex’s sternum, impossibly blue eyes blinking slowly and a soft smile on his face. He looks… unguarded. Hopeful. “Anything to avoid, or…”

“Just, like, stick to my dick? I’ll probably be pretty wet, but I’m not into penetration—not fingers, not anything.”

“All right. Just tell me if there’s anything—I want you to enjoy yourself, Alex.” Alex’s breath hitches in his throat at that simple statement, but any response he might have given flies out of his brain as Henry presses his thumbs into the divots at Alex’s hips, slides his lips down Alex’s torso with single-minded determination. His tongue dips briefly into Alex’s navel before dragging down his happy trail, stopping just above his pubic bone as Alex groans, his hands finding their way into Henry’s hair as he tries desperately to steady himself. “Christ, look at you—can I suck your cock?”

Alex sucks in a deep breath. “Yeah. Fuck, please.”

For someone who—at least as far as Alex knows—has never fucked a trans guy before, Henry sure as hell comes across as nothing but confident as he laps gently at the head of Alex’s dick. One of Alex’s legs is slung over his shoulder, and Henry grips his thigh so tightly Alex’s muscles are tensing under the touch as Henry sucks him down. It’s overwhelmingly good, and when Alex arches up into the wet press of Henry’s mouth, Henry’s answering groan is muffled; he places one hand on top of Alex’s where they’re still buried in the golden strands, pressing down.

Which, Jesus. If he’s being invited.

He fucks Henry’s face, slowly at first, but speeding up when Henry just closes his eyes and continues sucking his dick and fucking encourages him. The noises they’re making are fucking obscene, Henry’s eager moans almost drowned out by the wet slap of skin against skin, and there are words spilling out of Alex’s mouth that he can only hope Henry isn’t paying too much attention to.

He lets go of Henry’s hair just before he comes, because he needs his hands to grab the pillow next to him and throw it over his face. Henry doesn’t pull away, though, his forehead still pressed flat against Alex’s stomach as Alex bucks up into him, riding out the waves of his orgasm until the gentle ministrations of Henry’s tongue tip over into over-sensitive, and then he reaches down to nudge him back. And fucking hell, Perfect Prince Charming is nowhere to be seen when Alex drops the pillow: Henry’s hair is a mess, sticking up in all directions, and his pink lips are swollen and his entire face, from the nose down, is fucking drenched. And Alex might have felt bad about it, except that Henry’s also wearing a dazed grin and his eyes are bright, so, like, he clearly didn’t fucking hate it.

Briefly, wildly, Alex misses those heady pre-testosterone days when he could actually get off multiple times in a row.

Henry staggers off in the direction of the bathroom, returns with his face much cleaner, which Alex tries and fails to tell himself he isn’t disappointed about. He hovers by the side of the bed for a moment, clearly unsure, so Alex just rolls his eyes and holds out a hand, tugging him back down and kissing him soundly.

“Can I ask you something… personal?” Henry asks after they’ve broken the kiss, his head on Alex’s shoulder and the tips of his fingers tracing a vague pattern across Alex’s chest.

Alex snorts. “You just sucked my dick so good I practically waterboarded you, so yeah, I think we’re at that point.”

Henry laughs, but it fades out as he drags his hand up to one of Alex’s pecs, tracing a line under the muscle. “I was just wondering—you don’t have scars.”

“Never had top surgery.”

“Really? I thought—” Henry cuts himself off, a blush creeping up his cheeks. “Sorry, Christ, you don’t need to be giving me a Trans 101 lecture.”

“Nah, it’s fine.” It’s actually kind of nice that Henry’s interested, but he worries that will sound kind of pathetic if he says it out loud. “My parents got me on blockers, like, the second I showed a hint of puberty, so I never really got more than a suggestion of boobs—nothing I couldn’t get rid of in the gym.”

“That must have been a relief.”

“Not going through female puberty was, sure.” Alex stares at the ceiling, the nagging thing he’s never really talked about with anyone springing to his lips unbidden. “But every trans guy you ever see in the media, and the prevailing narrative in the community, is like: being transmasc means suffering through binding until you get top surgery, and then rocking the scars afterwards. And between that and being stealth, sometimes it feels like… I dunno.”

“Like there’s no place for you in the community?”

Alex turns his head sharply to find Henry looking at him, his smile soft and sad. “I get it. A little. I don’t understand the physical aspects of it all, but I do understand that.”

And Alex can only let out a shaky laugh, because… fuck. He probably does. “Like tweeting ‘happy Pride’ and being flooded with replies about what a great ally you are?”

“‘Happy Pride’ would be far too political for a representative of the Crown, dear,” Henry says drily. “So when your schedule mysteriously has you as far away from London as it’s possible to be when the parade is on just in case you get any foolish notions in your head like showing support, all the social media chatter is about how you probably requested that yourself because you’re so painfully homophobic you can’t even be in the same city as a gathering of queer people.”

Fuck. Henry really gets it. Alex doesn’t have anything smart to say in response, so instead he rolls onto his side in order to kiss him again.

Henry has to go back to his room eventually, though not before Alex has managed to extract something like an agreement that they’re cool. They’re still whatever the fuck they were before tonight. Maybe even a little closer to friends. Just, you know. With blow jobs.

Alex stumbles through a hotel door in LA, giggly and handsy and—well, not drunk, but the usual sharp edges of his anxiety are definitely dulled by the liquor still in his system. The lingering taste of Henry’s come on his tongue after their bathroom blow job was washed away several drinks ago, and Alex aches to replace it and he doesn’t understand why Henry is stopping him. Who cares if he hasn’t gotten off yet tonight? He knows Henry’s good for it, and besides, watching Henry shatter apart and knowing he’s responsible for it is almost as good as an orgasm of his own.

Except then Henry’s thighs are wrapping around him, the heels of his feet guiding him into a slight rocking motion with all the subtlety of a cartoon sledgehammer, and he has to pull back.

“Baby,” he says, both because he’s genuinely regretful and because he likes the way Henry’s eyes flutter shut when he does it. “I can’t—I don’t have the right equipment.”

An array of emotions flicker across Henry’s face in quick succession: confusion, realisation, horror. “Oh Christ, love, I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“It’s fine.” Alex leans in, kissing the apology off his lips. “Seriously, H, it’s cool. I want to. I just, you know, need enough warning to pack the right dick.”

Henry hums, turning his head to where Alex’s packer is still sitting inside his underwear, dropped on the floor with as much care as the rest of their clothes—which is to say, basically none at all. “You’d think by now someone would have come up with one that can do both.”

Alex wrinkles his nose. “I mean, technically they have? It’s just that you either need to stick a rod in it if you wanna fuck someone with it—which just has the same problem of, like, needing to have the rod with you—or they make you look like you’ve got a permanent semi, which the media would have a fucking field day with. Besides, my strap feels as much like my dick as my actual dick does, at this point.”

Henry nods slowly, his cheeks still flushed as he worries his lower lip between his teeth. “And you don’t think you could…” He trails off, glancing meaningfully down between their bodies. “Only if you were comfortable, of course.”

“Not with these polo muscles in the way, sweetheart.” He grabs a handful of Henry’s ass, before letting go to land a playful smack there that nonetheless makes Henry shiver. “But hey. We have a plan for next time—and for now, I’m sure we can come up with an alternative.”

Which is how he finds himself with a bottle of travel lube in his hand, slicking up his fingers before pressing one until the tight, impossible heat of Henry’s body and swallowing the gasp that spills over Henry’s lips as he does so. And, like, he’s had Henry’s dick in his mouth half a dozen times at this point, has exchanged filthy texts and lewd pictures and deep, soul-baring secrets, has ridden Henry’s face to orgasm as though it’s a fucking Sybian—but this is intimacy on a whole different level. Henry’s mouth falls open as Alex brings a second finger up to his rim, and Alex is suddenly incredibly aware of the long, lithe lines of Henry’s body, the way every muscle twitches as Alex buries himself in to his knuckles. Henry grips Alex’s biceps, throws his head back, writhes around as the pad of Alex’s index finger brushes across something that can only be his prostate, based on that response. Dimly, he’s aware of his own aching arousal, his dick throbbing between his legs as Henry rolls his hips, and he doesn’t know if he makes a noise or if Henry just fucking knows, but suddenly he’s looking right at Alex with bitten-red lips and a sideways smirk.

“That’s so good, love.” He drops one hand to Alex’s thigh, tugs it up and over until Alex follows his lead, settling into place straddling Henry’s leg, just above his knee. And then Henry presses his leg up, sliding his hand around to Alex’s ass and pulling him down in tandem, a careful, deliberate motion.

“Fuck, sweetheart.” They’re both grinning into the kiss when Alex leans in, and he takes the opportunity while Henry is distracted to pull his fingers out, adding a little more lube before he goes back in with three this time. Henry just moans, taking it easily, and it’s that which gives Alex the freedom to follow Henry’s lead and start grinding himself off on Henry’s thigh, taking a moment to find the rhythm that works for them both.

Alex comes first, shaking apart with Henry’s leg pressing up into him, a delicious pressure on his cock; it’s only once he’s come down that Henry wraps a hand around himself, jerking himself off in quick, desperate strokes. Alex licks the come from his stomach when he’s done, lets Henry kiss the taste of it from his tongue in turn, and wonders how, if fingering Henry feels that good, Alex is supposed to possibly survive fucking him.

Except: he forgets his strap when he goes to London for Wimbledon, too distracted by the eight million things he’s thinking about for the campaign in the run-up to the DNC. And he doesn’t take it to the DNC, because why the fuck would he, Henry isn’t even supposed to be there, and he wouldn’t be if Raf hadn’t—

God, Alex can’t even fucking think about that without wanting to smash something.

His dad wants to talk about it, though, once they’re all at the lake house, when Alex is in the middle of seasoning the ribs and can’t escape. Except that Alex doesn’t actually have anything to say. Raf was one of the few people Alex actually trusted, and he went dark side and fucked them over. End of discussion.

But his dad thinks there must be a reason for Raf to do it, and that gets Alex thinking about a lot of things that have been on his mind lately. Since he joined the campaign, or since he and Henry got together—the two timelines are so intertwined, he isn’t really sure which one was the catalyst. About the good you can do, and whether you lose some of that as you start looking towards the bigger picture.

“Did you ever want to run for President?” It’s not a question Alex has ever thought to ask, and from the shock on his dad’s face as he runs a hand over his face, not one Oscar ever expected to hear.

“Why do you ask?”

It’s not an answer, but it’s not a dismissal either. “Just… we’ve never really talked about it. And I wasn’t sure if, like, mom running meant that you wouldn’t, or—”

“I don’t think it was ever a case of only one of us being allowed to run, mijo.” His dad stares into the glass in front of him as he stirs. “But no, I never wanted to run. Don’t get me wrong—I think every politician has thought about it, at one time or another. But I like being where I am. The good I can do.”

“Yeah.”

Alex can feel his dad’s gaze prickling at the side of his face long before he speaks again. “I don’t believe for a second that that was just an idle question.”

“I just…” Alex sighs, brushing the spices from his hands before turning to face him. “I dunno. I’m watching all the shit going on lately, and it got me thinking—kids in California are always gonna be okay, but Texas… god, if y’all were trying to get me on blockers here today it’d be so much harder than it was back then. Which is fucked up. And I know mom cares; I know she does. She’s so loud and proud about it on the campaign trail, even though she never tells anybody why. But having a Texan Democratic president doesn’t mean shit if the people we’re electing at the state level want to rip those rights away, and I just—”

“No, I know.” Before Alex quite knows what’s happening, he’s being scooped up in a giant hug, the familiar scent of his dad’s aftershave invading his senses. “It’s a mess, and we’re all doing what we think is the right thing to make it better. Me, your mom—even Raf, I hope.”

“Yeah.” He slaps his dad on the shoulder, and he takes the hint, backing off a little. “Thanks.”

Laughter filters in from outside, and both Alex and his dad turn towards the sound.

“You know, he’s not bad for a European.” There’s a thread of amusement running through his dad’s voice. “Better than half the idiots June’s brought home.”

And suddenly, Alex isn’t thinking about politics anymore. Apparently he isn’t fucking subtle.

Despite his dad’s admonishments about Santa María, he fucks Henry for the first time that night: slow and silent, the breeze wafting in from the open window and the cicadas serenading them. If Alex thought LA was intense, it’s nothing compared to this: sweat dripping down his back as he drives himself forward, his own dick pulsing against the grinder attached to the base of his strap as Henry’s twitches against his stomach with every stroke. Henry presses his lips up to Alex’s ear as he comes, his name a sigh on Henry’s lips, and it’s that sound that drags him over the edge straight after.

Their clean-up is perfunctory at best, both of them already half-asleep between the travel and the sangria and the orgasms. Henry settles himself into the crook of Alex’s arm as though he belongs there, his hair shining in the sliver of moonlight peeking in through the crack in the curtains.

And Alex is… well, Alex is so in love he could die.

Two mornings later, he wakes up to an empty, perfectly made bed, no sign of Henry left in the house except a perfunctory note.

It’s a week before he finds the second note—which is, technically, the earlier note—inside his kimono.

Dear Thisbe,
I wish there weren’t a wall.
Love, Pyramus

Fuck Henry.

No, really—fuck Henry. It’s a mantra that gets him through a seven and a half hour flight, Cash’s worried eyes on him the entire time. It’s his mantra when the skies open up above him practically the second they make it out of Heathrow, as if his life isn’t already enough of a cosmic fucking joke. And it’s definitely the mantra running through his head when he starts screaming up at Henry’s window like a brown John Cusack, Shaan’s enigmatic smile still fixed to his face, but looking more and more forced by the second. Finally, mercifully, Henry—fuck Henry—appears, grants him the common decency of sheltering him from the fucking rainstorm that has managed to soak him all the way through to his goddamn underwear, leading Alex up to his bedroom and shutting the door behind them.

Except.

Except.

Henry is apparently just humouring him, letting him get it all out of his system before sending him away again, because apparently he doesn’t give a shit about Alex at all.

“You think I don’t care as much as you?”

“You’re sure as hell acting like it.”

“I honestly haven’t got the time to explain to you all the ways you’re wrong—”

“Jesus, could you stop being an obtuse fucking asshole for, like, twenty seconds?”

“So glad you flew here to insult me—”

“I fucking love you, okay?” He doesn’t mean to scream it. Really, he doesn’t. But also, like… fuck Henry. “Fuck, I swear. You don’t make it fucking easy. But I’m in love with you.”

The way Henry takes his ring off in response, the weight with which he sets it down on the mantle… it feels so fucking final, in a way Henry disappearing—twice—and ghosting him—twice—never did. The way he says he ‘can’t do this’ is just icing on the—obscenely expensive, tipped over, lying in pieces on the Buckingham Palace ballroom floor—cake.

So he throws the note at Henry, and he yells, and Henry yells, and Henry’s in love with him and it should feel good but it just feels fucking hollow.

“I never imagined you would love me back,” Henry tells him, and Alex is right back to: fuck Henry.

“Well I do. And you can choose.”

“You know bloody well I can’t.”

And for all their commonality, this is where they diverge. Because to Alex, it’s so fucking obvious that this is bullshit. “You can try. “What do you want?”

“I want you—”

“Then fucking have me.”

“—but I don’t want this.”

Henry could have slapped him. Should have slapped him, maybe. It’d sure fucking hurt less. Because this is what it always comes down to, isn’t it? Who Alex is, the very core of him, it’s always going to be too much.

He doesn’t want to know. He thinks hearing it might kill him.

But not hearing it, and wondering for the rest of his life—that can only be worse.

Right?

“Is it the trans thing?” God, he hates how small his voice comes out. He’s supposed to be the righteously fucking angry one here, not pathetically pleading. “Because Jesus, Henry, I know it’s a complicating factor, but I don’t—”

“No. Christ, Alex, no.” Henry’s face falls, crossing the rug in two long strides, his hands wrapped around Alex’s biceps. “If you were cis, we’d still be right here. If the world thought you were a woman and I had the option of hiding behind that veneer, you’d still be dreaming about a career in fucking politics and I would still be here, unable to bear the thought of being more scrutinised and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I’m allowed, all right, and it doesn’t make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don’t get to come here and call me a coward for it.”

Which, fuck that. Fuck Henry. Alex has never and would never call him a coward, and there’s no way he’s letting Henry put words in his mouth.

Two minutes ago, he was ready to run out of here. Now he’s not leaving until Henry makes him leave.

Henry doesn’t make him leave.

Thank god. Alex isn’t sure he could have actually done it, if it came down to it.

He wakes up in the morning, and for a brief, terrifying moment, he thinks Henry is gone—but then he’s back, with coffee and an apology and a truly harrowing tale about Philip and toast.

That night, Henry takes him to the V&A. They dance in front of Santa Chiara, and Alex lets the saints bear witness to the way he kisses Henry’s hand.

The next morning, when he flies home, he has Henry’s ring on the chain around his neck, resting next to the key to the Austin house, two homes side by side, and he thinks to himself: everything is going to be fine.

“The first thing we need to figure out,” one of the crisis managers—Alex is sure he knew her name, once, but he can’t seem to pull it from the recesses of his brain right now—is saying, “is whether this was someone who already knew about both Alex’s relationship and that he’s trans, and just decided to find the proof, or whether someone went digging for dirt and inadvertently struck gold.”

“It has to be the latter.” His mom’s voice is hoarse, and her hand is twitching in the way it usually only does when his dad is in the White House. “Apart from His Royal Highness himself, everyone who has both pieces of that puzzle are either in this building, or they’re family or near enough to it.”

The crisis manager peers at Alex, as though she’s trying to decide whether they trust Henry’s inner circle, but Alex is too busy swallowing back the bile trying to push its way up his oesophagus. “Actually, that’s not—I told Raf.”

Ellen blinks slowly. “I know Raf knows you’re trans, sugar, but he doesn’t—”

“He does.” Alex’s voice is hollow. “I told Rafael Luna about Henry. Two days ago.”

God. How could he have been so fucking stupid? Not just for himself, but for Henry. Henry, he’s pretty sure, is not currently sitting with a team of press staffers who are stressed and hopped up on caffeine but ultimately on his side.

“No,” his mom says slowly. “No, those pictures were taken before that. It couldn’t have been him.”

She says it as though it should absolve him. As though it makes everything okay. But Alex isn’t going to be okay until he’s seen Henry with his own two eyes.

“Bit short for a Stormtrooper,” Henry half-slurs, and for the first time since Zahra’s dulcet tones dragged him out of sleep and into this living fucking nightmare, Alex can breathe.

It’s awful—Alex barely wants to blink, the headlines and the tweets and the fucking callousness of it all imprinted behind his eyelids every time he closes his eyes—but Henry is here, sad and exhausted but solid and real under his palms, and all Alex has to do is hold on.

If he just holds on, everything will be okay. It has to be.

Henry sleeps, or something as close to it as he can manage, and Bea talks to him about grief and Alex tries, he really tries to understand. In the end, he supposes it’s a lot like the way Henry has said he views Alex being trans—he’ll never know, not really, but he can listen and he can pay attention and he can shoulder as much of the burden as he can. Lighten the load, just a little.

Philip comes by later, and the conversation with him—less of a conversation, more of a lecture—is markedly less pleasant than the one with Bea.

“What exactly do you intend to do, then, Henry? Hmm?” Philip’s expression is twisted into a sneer, and somehow even that doesn’t give his face any character. “Marry him? Make him the Duchess of Cambridge—”

“Do not,” Henry snarls, so viciously that Philip actually takes half a step back.

(Alex probably shouldn’t find that so attractive; they’ve got too much to deal with right now. But, well… here he is.)

The weird thing is, he has the distinct impression from the way Philip glances at him for a split second before returning his gaze to Henry that he didn’t even mean it that way; that the point was to demean Henry, not misgender Alex. Which, if true, makes this the most bizarre case of trans-inclusive homophobia Alex has ever borne witness to. He stands back, lets Henry get everything off his chest that he clearly fucking needs to, watches him spin around and stalk out of the room with the threat still hanging in the air between them.

Philip looks like he’s going to be sick. Alex is finding it difficult to muster up any sympathy right now. But he can’t quite resist getting the last word in.

“For what it’s worth, that is the bravest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”

Henry introduces Alex to his mother as his boyfriend, and despite everything, a low hum of pleasure zips up Alex’s spine at the words. They’ve said I love you, have said a thousand percent, a whole lot of things that sound a whole lot like forever—but never boyfriend. He wasn’t really prepared for just how much he’d like hearing it, especially in Henry’s fancy, press-rounded vowels.

“My Bea has told me what you’ve done for my son.” Princess Catherine has Henry’s bright blue eyes, her expression shrewd as it roams over Alex’s face. “And I know it feels like we’re all very focused on that right now, but I’m truly sorry that this has happened to you, as well.”

Henry’s hand clenches in his, and Alex musters up a weak smile.

Catherine, it turns out, has come to fight. Given everything Henry has said, he’s not sure how much he trusts her ability to do that—and it’s clear Henry doesn’t either—but he can appreciate the effort and the show of solidarity, at the very least.

Queen Mary is somehow even worse than Henry had made her out to be, which is saying a fucking lot. She barely stumbles through calling Alex a ‘boy’ by the skin of her teeth, and out of the corner of his eye, Alex catches the way Zahra’s hand balls into a fist as she does. Which, like, she probably shouldn’t punch out the Queen of the United Kingdom while here on official Presidential business, but Alex wouldn’t be lying if he said there wasn’t a part of him who would really, really like to see it. Mary might be taller than Alex expected, but Zahra is scrappy.

He wonders if Zahra, too, is thinking about their conversation when his mom was first nominated. Wonders if the stark difference between that—wanting to make sure that Alex’s choice to go stealth was protected—and this—Henry’s grandmother unsubtly trying to manipulate him into hiding himself away no matter how loudly he says he doesn’t want that—makes Zahra’s stomach twist the same way it does Alex’s. Wonders if he’s ever thanked her for always being so unflinchingly, unfailingly in his corner where it mattered, even if she is so rarely on his side when it comes to the little things.

“Even if you’re willing to submit to the flogging in the papers,” Mary is saying coldly, which Alex assumes is her way of saying she doesn’t actually have a good argument in response to all the good points everyone is making, “it doesn’t erase the stipulations of your birthright: you are to produce heirs.”

A half-hysterical laugh bubbles out of Alex before he can stop it. When the whole room turns to look at him, he can’t resist pointing out the obvious: “Have y’all forgotten the other half of all of this? We could still do that.”

It is, technically, true; Alex still has his ovaries. He’s sure as shit not getting pregnant, but—

“I don’t recall giving you permission to speak in my presence,” Mary snaps back, and then Philip is blathering on about surrogacy and Catherine is sniping back at him, and Alex absolutely does not dare to turn his head to look at Henry, who he can feel staring at him.

He’s not saying he wants to have kids tomorrow, or anything. Honestly, he’s never really thought about it at all—that was always part of the nebulous, post-congress time of his life. Now, though… now he thinks he’d rather figure everything out with Henry. Clean slate. Fresh page. New plan.

And then Bea slams her tablet down on the table, effectively pulling him out of his meandering thoughts.

Alex stares at the screen through increasingly blurry eyes: the Beekman, decked out in rainbows, a sign that says WE ♡ OUR FIRST SON, the word son underlined three times; HENRY + ALEX WERE HERE hanging off the side of a Paris bridge; a hasty mural on a wall in Mexico City, Alex’s face in blue, purple, and pink, a crown on his head striped blue-pink-white-pink-blue; rainbow Union Jacks and Henry’s face on poster boards, FREE HENRY scrawled underneath; a group of teenagers in front of the White House, HISTORY, HUH? hurriedly Sharpied onto their t-shirts.

Henry lets out a wet, shaking breath. He brings Alex’s knuckles to his lips, kissing them right there in front of his grandmother, like he doesn’t give a shit what she thinks.

Catherine is up and out of her chair in a flash, and Alex doesn’t know if she does it deliberately to distract her mother from Henry’s gesture, but he wouldn’t put it past her. She pushes the curtains open over Mary’s objections, sunlight flooding the room before revealing a massive crowd down on the mall. They’re waving banners, holding signs, draping various pride flags across their shoulders—and Alex knows they’ve won.

Even the queen is powerless against a passionate, adoring public.

“Did you know?” Alex asks Rafael Luna the day after his speech, Henry still tucked up in the White House, having sent Alex off with a kiss and a worried frown. “Before it happened, did you know what he was going to do?”

When Raf’s face crumples, he thinks he already has his answer, before the assurance is out of Raf’s mouth. But he needed to hear it anyway.

Henry flies in for the election, which means he’s there when Ellen Claremont is re-elected to the Presidency—when Alex’s home state comes through, holds him up, and says: this is our First Son, whatever it once said on his birth certificate, and you can’t fucking touch him. He’s there to get up on the stage for her victory speech, hand clasped in Alex’s, a part of their family, a show of force. And he’s there to tell Alex that he’s bought a brownstone in Brooklyn, to show him what the first step of forever might look like for them.

They take Liam and Spencer’s bikes, let Amy know where they’re headed so there’s not some sort of search party to kill the vibe, and cycle to Pemberton Heights, fireworks exploding in the sky above them and Alex’s mom’s name being chanted by the crowds on the streets. As Alex unlocks the house, he tries to see it through Henry’s eyes: dark curtains, scratched-up hardwood floors, the crack in the bannister where Alex once tried sliding down it. When he turns back to face Henry, though, Henry’s eyes are locked on Alex, that crinkly, unguarded smile Alex loves so much stretched across his face.

“I love you,” Henry tells him, and it feels so much more momentous here than anywhere else; in this house, where a little boy got to be a little boy, and grew into a teenage boy with a secret who was once entranced by another teenage boy in a magazine. He takes Henry’s hand, leading him up the stairs and into his bedroom, where there’s still a dust cover over the mattress and a few stray boxes in one corner of the room.

There’s something at one incongruous and so fucking right about the picture Henry makes, sprawled out on Alex’s childhood bed, his suit jacket tossed over the balustrade at the top of the stairs and his tie loosened but not discarded, the yellow roses draped over his chest. Alex straddles his thighs, uses both ends of the tie to haul him up and into a deep kiss, his arms sliding up Alex’s back and holding him in place.

If someone had pressed a pen into Alex’s hand the night his mom won her election and told him to write down what he’d be doing in her second term, ‘applying for and being accepted to law school at NYU’ probably wouldn’t have featured. ‘Moving to New York to live with your boyfriend, who by the way is Prince Henry’ definitely wouldn’t have. That Alex had no fucking idea what was coming for him in just a few short years.

Here’s what happens, when your mother is elected President for the second time: life carries on as normal. There are still media appearances, photoshoots, someone (Zahra) constantly yelling at you for being too much of a smart-ass on Twitter. Some things, though, are completely different. You learn to slow down, to breathe, to not need to have the next ten years of your life planned out. You rent an apartment two blocks from your boyfriend’s brownstone and you just date, like normal college students, for the first time in both of your lives. Sometimes, when you’re talking to a crowd, someone will hand you a flag—blue and pink and white, a darker blue and pink and purple, a rainbow—and ask you to sign it, and sometimes they just want to hold your hand and say thank you. You go to Pride, your boyfriend’s hand clasped tightly in yours surrounded by a bevy of stern-faced PPOs and a gloriously decked-out Amy, the very epitome of the ‘looks like a cinnamon roll, could kill you’ meme in full Secret Service attire but with the trans flag drawn in a heart on her cheek, and your community welcomes you both with open arms.

In New York, Alex settles into himself in a way he didn’t know he was missing before. There’s a sharps container in Henry’s bathroom as well as his own for when he has to do his shots, dog treats in his cupboard for when David visits (Henry is welcome to come too, of course, but David is Alex’s buddy), and a bodega he is now officially considered a regular at. Around his neck, he still wears the key to the Austin house, Henry’s signet ring lying alongside it, but he no longer needs them to find home.

Home is wherever Henry is. Always.