Work Text:
Alex comes home one day after spending a whole ten hours in the library buried in law books studying for a midterm and finds Henry sitting on the couch frowning at his laptop. He walks up to him dropping his bag by the coffee table and presses a quick kiss to Henry’s temple when he looks up, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Henry says. He’s a terrible liar. Alex raises an eyebrow at him, “People are stupid, and they aggravate me with their stupidity,” Henry says in the end.
“Is that all I’m getting from you?”
Henry nods and after a beat says, “Actually no, I bought pizza, it’s on the kitchen table.”
Alex groans, grabs Henry’s cheeks and presses kisses all over his face, “I love you so much.” He grabs the pizza box from the table, sits against the arm of the couch and pushes his feet under Henry’s legs, and he’s enjoying the pizza but Henry’s still frowning, “please tell me,” he says before he stuffs his mouth with half a slice. He’s nothing if not efficient.
Henry takes a deep breath and passes the laptop to Alex and suddenly he’s staring at an email. An email asking them to turn their emails into a book, a compilation of your correspondence , there’s an attached file called Projected Sales and Earnings another one that says Cover Art Draft , Alex clicks it. It’s a map, nothing but a black outline of countries on a white background, there’s a little White House on the map where the real one is, a little Kensington Palace too, between them there’s a dashed line, on it a little black plane just off the coast of England and over the line he reads [TITLE HERE]. It’s cute, Alex will give them that. He’d buy this book, even if the story sounded terrible, just for the cover. But they’re not a story, they’d spent a lot of time and money trying to force every media outlet under the sun to delete every digital trace of the emails from the internet. And no they weren’t gone, there were paper copies of all those newspapers and magazines, there were photos, screenshots, they weren’t gone but they were hard to find and that’s how they liked it, it allowed them to pretend their privacy hadn’t been so completely violated.
“Projected Sales and Earnings,” Alex says, “Like we wrote them to make money,” he’s not hungry anymore. Henry starts rubbing his ankle, “I can’t believe they thought this was even remotely near okay. For what? So some pompous asshole in a fancy college can overanalyze the fuck out of them? So more people can pry into our love and act like have any kind of claim to it just because they read them?”
Henry forces a smile and tells him, “Don’t mock pompous assholes overanalysing love letters, that was half of my degree. Besides some of it does beg for some over analyzation.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?” Alex would rather hear this than think about some asshole trying to profit off the very blood that pumps through their hearts, “What did you write that went over my head?”
“I don’t know, love, probably a lot. I was very cryptic in them.”
So Alex starts quoting bits and pieces of beautiful things Henry wrote to him, from the dumb titles Henry made up for him, to things like Henry telling him he thought being loved by Alex would be like being set on fire.
“You didn’t have a favourite?” Henry asks at one point, “Something you went back to and read just because it sounded pretty? Because it felt comforting?”
Alex nods, he had a lot of favourites truth be told, he could think of one that fit the things Henry wanted of him right now, “When I had to do state dinners or fundraisers or campaign speeches and everyone would touch me, shake my hand and hug me and grab me and I didn’t know them, any of them and I didn’t want them to touch me, at least not that much.”
“What was it?” Henry says gently.
Alex smiles and savours the worlds in his mouth, he realizes absently he’s never said them aloud before, “Come back to me when you’re done being flung through the firmament, you lost Pleiade. I’d go back and read that one when I didn’t feel like I owned myself.”
“Yes, that one was something,” Alex raises an eyebrow at him, so he continues, “Do you know about the greek myth of the seven sisters?” Alex shakes his head at him, “Right, so Atlas and Pleione had seven daughters Maia, Electra, Taygete, Celaeno, Alcyone, Sterope, and Merope, they were called the Seven Pleiades after their mother. Every one of them had children by Gods except for Merope. She married a mortal, Sisyphus.”
“Rock up a hill guy?”
“Yes, him. They eventually became stars, and there’s more than one telling of it, as there usually is. One of them says that they spent seven years being pursued by Orion, so Zeus turned them into stars. When their star cluster was found they thought it only had six stars, and then later they found the seventh, The Lost Pleiade, Merope, her light is the faintest because she was ashamed of loving a mortal.”
“So I’m Merope?” Henry nods, “and you’re Sisyphus?” When he nods again, Alex’s heart almost breaks, “You thought I was ashamed of loving you?”
Henry lets out a humourless laugh, “I thought you didn’t love me at all. I thought every day I’d wake up knowing how it felt to have you but knowing I wouldn't have you, not really. That was my rock to push up a hill. The next morning I’d wake up and push it up all over again. I thought you’d only be with me if no one could see, or you’d want to hide too. So I wrote that to let you know that I didn’t care. That I’d happily be miserable for the rest of my life if I only got to have you then and there. That when your life got too hard, too exhausting, you could home come to me, even if we didn’t want the same thing in the end,” Henry’s eyes are wet.
“Henry,” he finds his hand where it’s still wrapped around his ankle, “I love you. I’m not ashamed of loving you. I'm not ashamed of you.”
“I know that. I just didn’t know it then.”
Alex moves closer, takes Henry’s face in his hands and presses their foreheads together, “I’m not Merope. I’m fucking Polaris. I’ll be shining steady in the sky even when you can’t find any other stars.”
Henry laughs and kisses him. Hard and clumsy and perfect. Maybe they need to re-read the emails, just so Alex can tell him all the times he loved him back.