#where he respects the painting Rosaria

[siphoklansan]

🤔 dunno ya too well yet since we’re new moots but Jamil and Leona cause from what I’ve seen it seems like a funny dynamic 😭😭 plus your sona would look good w em!!!!!!

YEAAGSJHSJBHSB JAMIL AGAIN RAHHHHH YOU SEE THAT JAMIL🤨IT’S MEANT TO BEEEEEEE🗣️‼️‼️ this is exactly why he’d hate me /j BUT YES I think it’ll be a very funny dynamic tbh

I’M GLAD YOU THINK MY PERSONA LOOKS GOOD WITH THEM ARGSHJDHSHDKLEHHS AND THE FACT THAT THESE TWO ARE MY FAVES

[sapphicambitions]

My Favorite / Underrated Lines of Red, White, and Royal Blue:

Just did a second read through and marked all of them. We all know and love lines like “Should I tell you that when we’re apart, your body comes back to me in dreams?” and “History, huh? Bet we could make some,” and “America: he is my choice,” but this books is a goldmine for fucking fantastic and romantic lines, so I made a list of them. Long post so under the cut!!

-Alex’s kind of love story is much more Shakespearean.

-”I’m trying to understand why you’re so committed to acting like someone you’re not, considering you just told the little girl in there that greatness means being true to yourself.”

-...and when he turns and catches his reflection in the mirror by the closet, he’s right back in his teens, caring too much about his parents and helpless to change his situation. Except now he doesn’t have any AP classes to enroll in as a distraction.

-Alex tries to imagine what they look like: the prince and the First Son, the two leading heartthrobs of their respective countries, shoulder to shoulder on their way to the bar. It’s intimidating and thrilling, living up to that kind of rich, untouchable fantasy.

-Maybe he can absorb some of the “much” from the place where their shoulders are pressed together.

-He thinks about Henry, and something twists in his chest, like a stretch he’s been avoiding for too long.

-”I don’t know, man. I was in my junior year of high school, and I touched a boob. It wasn’t very profound. Nobody’s gonna write an off broadway play about it.”

-How dare Henry come into Alex’s house looking like the goddamned James Bond offspring that he is, drink red wine with the Prime Minister, and act like he didn’t slip Alex the tongue and ghost him for a month.

-He feels himself standing at a very tall, very dangerous precipice, with no intention of backing away.

-He laughs into Henry’s mouth, instantly caught up in his own dramatic mental portrait of the two of them painted in oils, young icons of their nations, naked and shining wet in the lamplight.

-He rolls onto his side and listens, trails the back of his hand across the pillow next to him and imagines Henry lying opposite in his own bed, two parentheses enclosing 3,700 miles.

-”You have so much in you, it’s almost impossible to match it. But he’s your match, dumbass.”

-...because Alex has never met a challenge he didn’t love, and he--well, Henry is a challenge, head to toe, beginning to end.

-All those nights Henry can’t sleep, just knocking around these endless, impersonal rooms, like a bird trapped in a museum.

-Henry lets Alex take him apart with painstaking patience and precision, moans the name of God so many times that the room feels consecrated.

-He wants to call Henry. He guesses it makes sense--they’ve always been fixed points in each other’s world, little magnetic poles. Some laws of physics would be reassuring right now.

-He looks like something soft and downy Alex wants to sink into, and he realizes the knot of anxiety in his chest has finally slacked.

-If Alex’s head is a storm, Henry is the place lighting hits the ground.

-He truly is a picture, wearing an expression of bewildered panic and absolutely nothing else.

-”The phrase “see attached bibliography” is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me.”

-”I do think I got a gut feeling about you, I just didn’t have what I needed in my head to understand it. But I kind of kept chasing it anyway, like I was just going blindly in a certain direction and hoping for the best. I guess that makes you the North Star?”

-”If I’m north, I shudder to think where in God’s name we’re going.”

-That long. That much.

-He wears the key to his childhood home around his neck, but he doesn’t know the last time he actually thought about the boy who used to push it into the lock.

-The lines of him are long and languid in the moonlight, just skin and skin lit soft and blue, and he’s so beautiful that Alex thinks this is the moment, the soft shadows and pale thighs and crooked smile, should be the portrait of Henry that goes down in History. There are fireflies winking around his head, landing in his hair. A crown.

-He wants to match the new freckles across Henry’s nose to the stars above them and make him name the constellations.

-That, he realizes suddenly, is the danger of allowing love into this--the acknowledgment that if something goes wrong, he doesn’t know how he will stand it.

-What if it was never his decision to make?

-He’s spent too much of his life talking, talking, talking not to know the signs when someone doesn’t want to hear him anymore.

-He thought he was reckless before, but he understands now--holding love off was the only thing keeping him from losing himself in this completely, and he’s gone, stupid, lovesick, a fucking disaster.

-And that is, officially, too fucking much.

-”When have I ever, since the first instant I touched you, pretended to be anything less than in love with you? Are you so fucking self-absorbed as to think this about you and whether or not I love you rather than the fact that I’m an heir to the fucking throne? You at least have the option to not chose a public life eventually, but I will live and die in these palaces and in this family so don’t you dare come to me and question if I love you when it’s the thing that could bloody well ruin everything.”

-Don’t miss it this time. He’s too important.

-”If there’s any legacy for me on this bloody earth, I want it to be true. So I can offer you all of me, in whatever way you’ll have me.”

-...and looks at his fingers and thinks about holding the Bible at his mother’s inauguration with the same hand. 

-He wonders what Santa Chiara would think of them, a lost David and Jonathan, turning slowly on the spot. 

-”Let me know if I need to start practicing gazing wistfully out the window, waiting for my love to return from the war.”

-”I thought, if someone like that ever loved me, it would set me on fire.”

-Alex wants to go to war for this man, wants to get his hands on everything and everyone that ever hurt him, but for once, he’s trying to be the stead one.

-”You and me and history, remember? We’re gonna fucking fight. Because you’re it, okay? I’m never gonna love anybody in the world like I love you. So, I promise you, one day we’ll be able to just be, and fuck everyone else.”

-It would be a lie because it wouldn’t be him.

-”but i’ve kissed your mouth, that corner, the place it goes, so many times now, i’ve memorized it, topography on the map of you, a world i’m still charting. i know it. i added it to the key. here: inches to miles. i can multiply it out, read your latitude and longitude. recite your coordinates like la rosaria.

-The president stands on the edge of a career-ending scandal, measures her breaths evenly, and waits for her son to answer.

-And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he’s know all along.

-One. One. One.

-Alex hasn’t been a good Catholic in a long time, but he knows confession is a sacrament. They were supposed to stay safe. Fuck.

-If Henry’s voice on the phone was a tether, his body is the gravity that makes it possible, his hand gripping the back of Alex’s neck like a magnetic force, a permanent compass north.

-”And he is prepared to give it all to you, which is far more than I ever, in a thousand years thought I would see him do.”

-”Are you so determined to believe nothing could change? That nothing should change? We can have a real legacy here, of hope, and love, and change.”

-Never tell me the odds.

-This is it. October 2, 2020, and the whole world watched, and history remembered.

-It’s been one long, long year of learning Henry inside and out, learning himself, learning how much he still has to learn, and just like that, it’s time to walk out there and stand at a podium and confidently declare it all as fact.

-The way Henry’s looking at him in the pitcher is so affectionate, so openly loving, that seeing it from a third person’s perspective almost makes Alex want to look away, like he’s staring into the sun. He called Henry the North Star once. That wasn’t bright enough.

-All at once, Alex is in love all over again.

-From his side, Henry, whose eyes are wet, seizes Alex’s face roughly with both hands and kisses him like the end of the movie.

-...Alex thinks his heart’s going to break trying to hold the size of this entire moment, the completeness of it, a thousand years of history swelling inside his ribcage.

-Goddamned forever.