Chapter Text
There are voices everywhere, loud ones drunk on life and soft ones drinking away their sadness. The voices of friends laughing together in groups swirls around and mixes with enthusiastic conversations between coworkers and those just meeting up with others solo. The bar is bustling, absolutely packed as far as Wille can see. He feels himself buzzing as well, happy to have snuck away from his bodyguards for a night alone. He isn’t sure what he wants to do tonight, only knowing that he wants to pretend that he’s a normal twenty one year old boy and not the prince–
“--Heyyyy excuuuseee mee!” The slightly drunk voice of a girl calls out to him as she bumps her shoulder gently into him.
Wille turns to look at her, dreading the look he knows he’s about to see. The look of recognition and awe. The one that everyone gets when they look at him. Well, everyone except his mother. He can’t seem to do anything to make her look at him like she’s pleased. But even so, he positively hates this look. The one where he knows this girl is about to fawn all over him. About to try to act like she knows everything about him, when in fact sometimes it feels like no one knows him at all except his brother Erik.
“Hey,” Wille mumbles back, remembering that he is supposed to be trying to act like a normal person. Maybe this girl really doesn’t recognize that he is the prince. Maybe he is just getting in his own head too much like he always does. Maybe she just wants to talk to him. Maybe it doesn’t matter to her that he’s part of the Monarchy. All those thoughts come crashing down and drenching him like a wave when the girl yells loudly.
“Fridaaaaa! Oh my gosh LOOK WHO IT IS!! It’s the Prince!”
The girl is drunk and giddy, and her equally drunk friend, Frida he is assuming, runs up to the two of them.
“Oh my gosh can we get a picture?” She asks him, wide eyed.
“Um…” is all Wille can reply before a crowd starts to form around him.
His brain starts to feel foggy and his fingers begin tingling. With each camera flash pointed at him he can feel his heart rate start to rise. An impending panic attack is rushing up on him, about to spill over and swallow him while, just as he hears-
“-Alright alright everybody back the fuck up!”
Wille whips his head around to see, oh my god, the most beautiful boy he’s ever seen making his way out from behind the bar and towards the crowd. Towards him. Suddenly Wille can’t even remember what the panic attack he’d been about to have was for. It feels like no one is in the room except for him and this magnificent, dark curly haired, beautiful bronze skinned boy who is now standing right infront of him- oh shit-
“Hello?” The dark haired bartender is asking him in a gentle tone, his voice smooth like silk. “You alright man?”
“Um…” is all Wille can manage once again. Although this time his loss for words is for an entirely different reason.
“I said are you okay?” The beautiful bartender asks him again, his dark chocolate eyes swirling with genuine concern.
“Oh um, yes,” Wille sputters, trying to settle down how very flustered and embarrassed he is at the moment.
“Well good,” the bartender replies, a small smirk creeping onto his face. “Because the bar is really busy right now and you’re kinda causing the line to stop moving.”
It isn’t said with any malice, just pure, blunt and honest. Something Wille isn’t used to hearing when people talked to him. And he’d be lying to himself if he said he didn’t enjoy the feeling of being spoken to so directly, almost scolded. He feels warm and fuzzy all over his body, and he hasn’t even had any alcohol yet. Odd.
“Oops, yeah, my apologies um..” Wille looks down at the boy’s name tag. Simon. Simon. “My apologies Simon. I didn’t mean to cause a scene here.”
Wille doesn’t wait for a reply, exiting the bar and heading back home to his lavish apartment, that he positively hates but is grateful he somehow convinced his mother to allow him to live alone in so that he’d be close by to university, as quickly as he came to the bar.
He makes a point to himself to ignore the way the encounter keeps playing over and over again in his head. The boy, Simon’s, curly dark hair bouncing as he parted easily through the people to get to him. The way his eyes felt so sincere and open that Wille felt like he was both drowning and breathing for the first time. The way Wille feels his heart flutter when he thinks of the adorable little smirk that had passed Simon’s lips.
No
No
He stops himself from thinking about that boy any more. He definitely isn’t going back there. He can’t go back there. He shouldn’t go back there…
He is totally going back there.