Chapter Text
Consciousness crept in slowly for Simon these days. Reluctantly, thick and heavy as it pried his eyes open. ‘Here we go again’, it seemed to say as it pulled him out of his dream world. Back into reality.
He didn’t know what he had been dreaming about. He remembered less and less these days. Trivial thoughts had no space in his mind, he was too busy focussing on the next thing he had to do. Get up. Get dressed. Walk out the door. Eat, maybe.
He used to write down his dreams as soon as he woke up. He used them as inspiration for his next song, he would scribble down his thoughts and make a melody out of the jumbled mess inside his head. But he didn’t make songs anymore, didn’t take pleasure in nonsensical things. Now almost thirty one, he had given up on dreaming.
How cynical, he thought to himself, stretching as he swung his legs over the side of his bed. He really had become a prematurely grumpy old man.
He padded around his room barefoot, cursing himself for not putting on socks, like he did every morning. His room was the same as it always was. Tidy, with stark white walls that he hadn’t gotten round to painting yet. That was a lie. He had painted them white himself. Alex had told him that he was ‘so boring’, but he had argued that the white was ‘grown up’. Alex rebutted him, as he always did. Telling him that adults liked colour too. But the colour in his life was no longer there, and the paint had dried.
There were pictures of them still in his living room. He had turned them over one night when he got horrendously drunk because he was horrendously lonely. Alex had broken up with him the day his father died. He claimed that Simon was never happy. That, in the almost three years they had been together, he rarely smiled. Hardly laughed. Barely made a noise when he came.
‘God,’, he had laughed. He knew that was cruel, but he laughed anyway. ‘Why are you even with me?’. Alex looked broken as he caught his eye, handsome jaw jutted out as tears dribbled down his chin.
‘Because I’m in love with you.’ He had answered, voice thick and trembling. And Simon had never felt so evil.
He left him quietly. Emptied his apartment of all things colourful, left the pictures, returned his hoodie- Alex was the only person he had met who was smaller than Simon. His purple hoodie almost drowned him, but he knew Simon liked that. That he liked to hold him close as he took off his trousers, fuck him in it until he was cumming all over him.
It seemed wrong that he’d left it. It felt like it didn’t belong to him anymore, and he knew the reason why he had palmed it off on Alex in the first place… but he didn't think about that anymore. Couldn’t.
He had washed it that day, though, dried it of its years of sweat and cum and tears. Wore it as he got the call from his mum that his father had overdosed. Then thrown it away the day after the funeral.
God, Simon hadn’t thought of these things in years. He didn’t know why he was dwelling now, daydreaming with his toothbrush in his mouth when he should be getting in the shower. Strange.
He showered quickly, as always. Taking care to wash his hair thoroughly and rinse out every last curl, scrunching and lathering with practised ease. There was less hair to wash now, he had been on top of cutting his hair regularly, so that his hair curled only slightly atop his head. It was less hassle, and it made him look older. He liked that.
There were limited outfits that a primary school teacher could wear, so he settled on his same old button down white shirt and a blue tie. He looked smart, he supposed. In the mornings, the silence was always the loudest. Every movement he made, the slightest rustle of a shirt echoed in the vast expanse of the empty, lifeless space. Simon always felt tiny in the mornings, chest aching and loneliness breathing down his neck with a revolting breath. That’s why he always popped the news on as he drank his morning coffee, occasionally over a bowl of cereal or a tangerine. It filled the silence, it was good to hear someone else’s voice in the morning.
But not today.
He had turned his back on the telly, putting the kettle on and loading up a spoon with coffee powder when he heard the headline:
“The Former Crown Prince of Sweden, now known formally as Wilhelm Gronberg, moves back to Sweden with his ten-year-old daughter, Dahlia.”
That name. It had him spinning around on the spot, legs crossed over each other and teaspoon in hand as he gaped at the TV. His heart hadn’t stopped like this since he heard about the kid in the first place.
Suddenly, it was ten years ago. He was stood in the small kitchen in his dorm room. The cool Swiss air whistled through the little window that Annie used to smoke out of. He was twenty, a year into his three-year long music course that he got a scholarship to complete in Switzerland. He was just about starting to move on. To pull together the remaining pieces of his cracked heart enough to scrape himself off the floor and maybe start dating again. Maybe start finally finding other people attractive. Maybe even enough to stop seeing those big, brown, soulful eyes in the eyes of others. But damn it all to hell, it seemed that perfect, gorgeous Wilhelm had moved on perfectly. Enough to conceive a whole fucking child. The cutest baby he had ever seen. And he had it with someone else. A woman.
Fucking Wilhelm.
He was heartbroken.
He still remembered the headline now. ‘Our Favourite Queer Crown Prince- not so Queer after all?’.
Not so queer his ass. It all felt pretty queer, the way he touched him, worshipped his body with kisses, muttered that he was beautiful as he made his eyes roll to the back of his head. The way he looked at him, like he was the only one in the room. The only person that mattered. And he felt it, too. Even though he had so much going on, the weight of the whole country on his shoulders… Wille’s little sixteen year old heart belonged to Simon. He was sure of it. It was clear in the many love confessions he gave him that haunted him in his mind ever since he left him, devastated and broken on his seventeenth fucking birthday.
So it made him physically vomit, the thought that someone else had touched him the way he had. That someone had traced the freckles on his cheeks, kissed the birthmark on his shoulder. That someone else had felt him against them, inside them. Not even just in a crude way, but in the sense that someone who wasn’t him was allowed to connect with him in such an intimate way. It made him loathe her- Sylvia- entirely.
He would bet good money that she didn’t know him like he did. Didn’t know that he liked his ears being touched in bed but never outside of it, or that he spent an hour every morning going through his skin routine- not that he needed to- and that when he was low (as he so often was) all he wanted was to be held.
And he knew that it was Wille’s right to move on. That Simon was the one who left. He knew they weren’t right together, no matter how well they seemed to fit together, no matter how good it felt to call Wille his. Simon had thought that he would hold him forever, that his hands were made especially for Wille to hold, that the nook between his neck and his jaw was moulded to Wille’s face. But it turned out that his hands were just hands, and that space wasn’t meant to be filled up.
He had cried for days, watching a version of his future drift further and further away from him. A couple days later, he heard the news that Wilhelm was abdicating. As if he wasn’t devastated enough.
He was a reasonable man, and logically he knew that this was his child that he was abdicating for. But the immature, heartbroken side of himself couldn’t stop the bitterness that pushed itself through his teeth. Why not for him? Why wasn’t he enough for him? What made this woman so special? Why didn’t he call him? Give him a warning? Did he really care that little?
Or, worse.
Had he forgotten him completely?
Time seemed to stretch around the universe in the weeks it took to remould himself. He spent his days playing 'Alley Rose' by Conan Gray and sobbing until he physically had no tears left to cry. Sara had come over, sat in his pit of despair and kissed his temple, letting him sleep on her lap and cooking him breakfast in the morning. And finally, finally, the gaping wound in his heart had started to dim into a dull ache. He started to accept that Wille had escaped him, had flown away from him. He wrote a song. His third and final song for Wille, full of pain and anguish and loathing. And love. So much love.
He performed that song as his final piece two years later, and never wrote anything again.
“Famously, Gronberg went against the norms, having a child with his lover, Sylvia Bernadotte, without even a sniff of a marriage proposal. And perhaps this is for good reason, we at the studio believe, as sources close to the ex-Royal say that Bernadotte hasn’t been in contact with either Gronberg or their daughter for many years, since they moved to London following the ex-Prince's abdication in 2025. It seems that Gronberg has a troubled love life, as many of you watching will remember his rather difficult and somewhat controversial public relationship with his fellow class mate from the old boarding school, Hillerska- the famed Simon Eriksson. The Prince shocked the public with his sudden coming out live on television, months after a supposed explicit tape of the pair got leaked, only for the whole relationship to fizzle out only months later. Perhaps this relationship was in vain, or perhaps it was only a publicity stunt. It was, after all, the most notable moment in the ex-Prince’s short reign. All this being said, naturally, we have nothing to do but ask ourselves; why are the father and daughter only now moving back to Sweden, and what does the fated ex-Royal have planned for their future?”
The broadcast switches onto the weather, leaving Simon standing, shell shocked. Only when he felt a wet sensation absorbing into his shirt did he realise that he had been crying, watching as they shoved a blown up, grainy image of Wilhelm’s frame, filled out and stretched taller with age, a large hand covering that face that he once knew so well. His other hand was stuck in front of the smaller figure walking in tandem with him, her pretty pink dress all that was visible of her silhouette. His throat contracted violently as the picture flipped onto a photo of himself, his old school photo with his oversized blazer drowning out his frame and a big fake smile plastered on his face.
God, he was so young. He was only a baby when this all happened, but it was so much easier to feel sorry for himself rather than to remember that Wilhelm had been only a month older than him when this all happened. The simple truth of it all was that they were children when their whole world went to shit. And now they were all grown up.
Wilhelm’s presence back in this country didn’t have to mean anything. Sweden was a large place, the chances of bumping into an ex-Royal were slim to none. This didn’t mean anything. It didn’t.
But he couldn’t help but feel he was fooling himself, but the thing was that Simon had always been good at that.