I love the laura bonus ficlet! Do you maybe can write about her thoughts of when she found out that it was Wilhelm who was there with Simon in Bjärstad?
Thank you for loving Laura! (The previous Laura ficlet is here to give context)
Also for the reblogs, this is a bonus ficlet from my longer YR fic Everybody Loves You Now!
This picks up from slightly later in the conversation in the car between Simon and Laura.
Laura considers her next question for all of thirty seconds before going with her gut. “Is ‘Fuck this Motherfucker’ about Candace?”
Simme laughs. She made Simme laugh! There's a little buzz of pride in her stomach. “Is that what people think? You guys know I didn’t write it, right?”
“I know, but you said you always try to have a concept in mind when you sing, to make the songs about something.”
He gives a little nod, acknowledging her point. “True. I guess it’s about Candace a lot.” He shrugs. “But one time it was definitely about this stretch of highway we’d been on the night before that was so full of potholes -”
“Atlanta to Nashville,” she says, instinctively, like this is some Simme trivia game and not just her knowing a weird number of facts about his actual life. “Sorry. I just… I saw the video.”
She glances sideways at him again. He looks amused rather than mad, and he hasn’t refused to answer any of her questions yet so she kind of has to. “Can I ask… Who do you think about when you sing the love songs?”
“Wilhelm.”
There’s no hesitation to it. No equivocations, no questioning. Just the name, said so softly that it takes her a moment to connect it to the reality of Crown Prince Wilhelm who gives speeches on Year with the Royal Family and gets photographed in suits hugging babies and opening hospitals.
It’s a weird crossing of streams, realising The Crown Prince is a person and there are people he dated in high school who say his name like it’s something precious they want to keep hold of.
But like, that was four years ago. And Simme hasn’t even been back to Sweden since. “Still?” she finds herself asking.
“Yeah.” He’s looking out the window, at the shadows of trees in the darkness. “He’s the only… there’s never been anyone else.”
There have been four years of constant wall to wall news coverage of Simme with this popstar or that actor or this reality TV star. Simme laughing off his high school relationship with the Prince of Sweden like it was nothing at all. “I thought… I mean we all heard about Alfonso…”
He laughs something bitter lingering at the edges to it. “I thought it was a marketing stunt, he thought it was true love. We didn’t last.”
“But you and Wilhelm are still…”
“No,” he says. “We’re not.” His fingers drum against the door handle. “Can you pull over? Just for a minute. I need to do something.”
*
She’s at that point where she’s basically awake but is refusing to admit it, nestled down into the covers trying to avoid opening her eyes, half thinking that if she does everything that happened last night is going to turn out to be a wild dream and she’ll be back in Gothenburg about to wake up and drive to Stockholm to meet Stan and see the show.
Then there’s a gentle knock on the door and an unmistakable voice says, “Hey? Can I come in?” and Laura opens her eyes to a closet-sized bedroom with posters of horses on the walls.
She’d found a nightshirt to sleep in that falls all the way down to her knees, so she’s decent enough to sit up and say, “Okay?”
Simme steps into the room. He’s changed into a purple hoodie, but otherwise he looks much the same. Like he hasn’t slept or showered since he dug out a silk pillowcase from the depths of the linen cupboard. His eyes catch on the horse posters, lingering a moment too long before he looks down at her. “There’s lunch. If you’re hungry.”
She wants to ask ‘are you okay?’ but his eyes keep darting back to the walls, his hands are twitching and he had to pull over multiple times so he could snort a powder that she’s really hoping was not cocaine so she’s not sure she’s ready for the answer.
Also now he’s mentioned food, she’s realising she’s starving. “Sure.”
He nods, takes a step back so she can stand up and then leads her back down the tiny hallway, past family photos that she resists the urge to stop and peer at, and into the kitchen where there are two strangers setting the table and one of them is Crown Prince Wilhelm.
She lets out a noise that might be a yelp, starts a, “You’re-” but thankfully cuts herself off before she can say something completely idiotic like ‘you’re here’ or ‘you’re the prince’ or ‘you’re taller than you look on TV.’
It turns out there is a difference between knowing there is something going on between Simme and the Prince and actually seeing said prince in the flesh wearing Simme’s white hoodie instead of a neatly pressed suit and setting out plates on the kitchen table.
Only the hoodie was oversize on Simme but clearly fits Prince Wilhelm just fine so that’s… a thing.
“Hello,” she says, trying to get back to normal only this isn’t normal because he’s a prince so like. “I mean, your majesty.”
Prince Wilhelm smiles. Up close, it’s the same kind of smile Simme keeps giving her, the one he seems able to paste over whatever he’s really feeling in the moment. “Your majesty is my mother,” he says. “Call me Wilhelm.”
Which of course just reminds her of being in the car the night before, the way Simme’s voice softened on Wilhelm’s name. And Simme had said they weren’t still… but Wilhelm is here, in this middle-of-nowhere town. Not Simme’s team, not Candace, just Wilhelm.
A good half of the internet would pay a large fortune for a glimpse of what she's seeing now. The way Wilhelm's eyes track Simme's progress through the room, the way Simme's whole body seems angled towards the Prince even when they're not interacting at all.
"Have you told anyone you're here?" Wilhelm's bodyguard asks her.
She hasn't. And as Wilhelm and Simon both reach for a plate at the same time and flinch back a moment before their fingers brush, she knows she never will.
