Work Text:
It's three days until the Coronation, and Philip can't sleep.
He wants it to go well; he wants that concatenation of stuffy windbags, that insufferable pack of Old Etonians, to see that his vision – his, Philip’s – was correct. Why can’t they realize that technology is a valuable tool to be seized, not an outrage to be distrusted, mocked, held at arms’ length? Let the British see Elizabeth crowned, let her come into their homes through the magic of their television sets, let them feel a connection to her that will tie them together, now and forever. Yes, let them even feel an ownership – as much as the old guard shrinks from the very idea, Philip feels in his bones that a monarch owned by her people is safe, even beloved. He has seen the way her subjects look at her; hovering on the sidelines, he has often little else to do but watch. Damn those who would see her crowned in opulent, frozen, remote splendour, while her people press their noses to the windows. Let this coronation forge another link between the people and their Queen, and Philip will hold himself vindicated.
He is the grandson of an assassinated king, the son of an exile; he is a homeless royal, a vagabond prince. He will not see Elizabeth’s reign fall to the winds of change. His adopted country has lost India, and Africa may not be far behind. He will not see – he will not allow - it to discard its royal family as cavalierly and abruptly, imperial finery thrown out in one fell swoop. If Elizabeth’s reign is to prosper, it must be by the consent and acclamation of her people, and her coronation is a precious moment of opportunity, one which Philip has seized between his teeth and refused to relinquish. He has faced all the scoffers, bearded all the aged lions in their dens, and now the proof is in the pudding. Now he waits.
Yet the waiting is not the only reason that sleep deserts him, that he flees the echoing, sterile halls of the Palace for the escape of the night roads. He drives his sports car too fast, and grins a sharp grin into the air that whips against his face. Here he is free. No cavilling courtier at his elbow, no never-ending etiquette to remember, no oppressive ostentation and stony politeness and constant watchfulness, only London at night and the wheel under his hands.
Perhaps it is only here, in the open air, that he can admit to himself the things he doesn’t think about during the day. He has never believed in brooding over one’s hurts or slights – best to get on, and prove everyone wrong. Has he not overcome his own childhood abandonment with intelligence, bravery, and sheer bullheaded perseverance? Did he not place first in his class at the Royal Naval College and then distinguish himself in the War? He is a war hero, strong and proud, and whatever the lickspittle courtiers say about him, behind their disapproving glances and tight-pursed lips, they can go to the devil.
And yet, here in the darkness, Philip’s hands clench on the wheel.
He doesn’t care about the courtiers. Their barbs are obvious, and beneath him. He doesn’t even care about the politicians, who were all against his marriage and who continue to distrust his modernising ideas. They care only about votes; when it becomes clear that Philip’s embrace of technology is the way forward, they will fall in line. He looks forward to his victory.
What he cares about is Elizabeth.
He misses her. Yes, he can admit it, as he turns a corner too fast, the wind in his hair. The day her father died, he had held her in his arms, her body bowed with her grief, her breath coming too fast and her hands clutched in his shirt like they would never let go. He held her, her head tucked under his chin, them against the world; if he could have poured all of his own strength into her body, he would have done it in an instant. He held her, pressing his lips against her hair, keeping the world at bay for those first heartbreaking minutes.
And then she had stepped away, and he had watched her push down the brokenness of her grief. It had gone somewhere behind her eyes, tucked away, and her face had settled into the remote mask that he has come to know as The Queen. “We must go home,” she had said, her voice blank, and Philip isn’t sure if he ever really got her back, ever again.
Oh, he’s dramatising, he knows. No doubt she is still herself, under the layers of ice she has constructed, the royal armour she wears. He can still make her laugh. Though they share a bed less often than they used to, back in the heady days when they were just a young naval officer and his beloved wife, she still flushes under his touch, her smooth skin soft as he moves against her. They still have inside jokes, and pretend peeves, and children who make them both smile. Their marriage is healthier than many, he knows.
But Philip misses Lilibet, with an ache that never quite goes away. He misses when she was just his, not the nation’s – when she was just his wife, not his queen.
He turns for home abruptly. His thoughts have robbed the road of its joy. Time to return to his gilded birdcage, to let the palace bars snap back around him. Sleep beckons.
❧
The connecting door is open between their bedrooms when Philip returns.
He pauses, frowning, as he sheds his shirt, dropping it haphazardly on a chair for his valet to collect in the morning. He thought he had shut the door when he left – he didn’t want to risk waking Elizabeth upon his return. It is a taxing week for her, all the glory and the pomp descending on her slight shoulders, and he would not have his restless wanderlust disrupt her sleep.
But the door is open, and when Philip takes a few steps towards it, he can see that she is not in her bed, though the covers are disturbed. It is unlike her to be wakeful at night, and where can she have gone? Perhaps one of the children is ill? Or perhaps she is reading in her armchair by the window?
“Lilibet?” he says, hushed, sticking his head around the doorway.
She is standing by the window, looking out. The curtains wrap around her, the breeze from the open window sending the ends curling gently around her legs.
“Sorry,” he says, when he gets no answer, and half-turns to go, back to his own silent bed.
Then he frowns, as what he saw registers, and turns back.
Elizabeth’s shoulders are not as straight as they usually are, these past weeks as straight and unyielding as a battleship. Her head is bowed, her body small, and her face turned away. That alone is unlike her – she always looks at him, her eyes alight.
Philip hesitates in the doorway. Perhaps she wants to be alone – he would, if the situation was reversed. Perhaps he has forfeited his right to be here in this moment, by all the squabbles and arguments and even fights they have had, over the long months between accession and coronation. He may not always admit it, but he knows he has not handled the transition as well as he might have.
But she is Elizabeth, and he is the man who loves her.
He crosses to the window. “Tell me if you want me to go,” he says, dropping a kiss on the top of her head, resting his hands on her hips, the thin fabric of her nightgown whispering against his fingers.
For a moment Elizabeth doesn’t react, and then she shakes her head, minutely, and her hand comes to rest over his, their fingers lacing together.
He slips his other arm around her waist and holds her, breathing in the smell of her perfume, so light that perhaps only he ever smells it. She is flesh-and-blood in this moment, not the unyielding flint-eyed monarch he sometimes sees constructing herself before his eyes. He holds her, and lets the silence lengthen, restful. Outside, the stars are bright.
“I’m afraid I’ll muck it up,” she says, finally. Her voice trembles, slightly, but it’s mostly just tired.
He smiles into her hair. “You won’t.”
“You say that now,” she says, a touch of peevishness creeping in. “If I trip and fall on my face, and everyone who owns a television set laughs at me –”
“Then I’ll let you chop off my head,” Philip says, and brushes his thumb against the side of her hand, shadow of a kiss. “Crime: High treason. Method: Television.”
This time the tremble is a laugh Elizabeth won’t let herself voice. He knows her, this girl who loves him; he can hear in it her breath and feel it in the almost imperceptible way her shoulders ease. “That’s not a laughing matter.”
“You can do it yourself, if you like,” Philip says. “You can take me to Tower Hill, and make me kneel at the block, and raise the axe high. Or would it be a sword?”
He feels the slight tension in her body at the mention of kneeling – a particularly sore subject of late – but then she relaxes again. “No one’s been beheaded at Tower Hill for two hundred years. I hardly intend to revive the practice now.”
“Even when I’m very, very infuriating?” he teases, unable to keep the smile off his face.
“Even then,” she says, and leans her head back against his shoulder.
Elizabeth is so rarely vulnerable these days. He knows it’s the way she protects herself, thrust reluctantly into her role some two decades early, but he wishes that she wouldn’t shut him out. He is her protector, not one of the bloodhounds of the hunt – or he would be, if she would let him. Perhaps a Queen doesn’t need a husband; perhaps she needs only subjects.
Tonight she has let him in, however, and he wants to handle that trust like the precious thing it is. He holds her close, feeling her heart beat underneath his hand, feeling the night breeze against his cheek. They are anonymous, two lovers watching the stars together; even though they are in a palace, and the head pillowed against his shoulder often wears a crown.
After a few quiet minutes, he says into the hush, “You won’t muck it up.” He is rarely wholly serious, rarely that vulnerable himself, but for this he will give her all the sincerity that is in him. “I have faith in you. You’ll be splendid.”
He thinks for another moment, and then adds, “But if you did – muck it up, that is – then we’d get through it. Together. Good god, it’s not like your ancestors haven’t done some atrocious things. Talking to trees, beheading their wives, burning people at the stake, to say nothing of all the bastard children running about the place. If you trip on your train and the crown goes rolling down the aisle, you’ll still be Queen, and I’ll still love you.”
Elizabeth turns her head against his shoulder, looking up at him. She is smiling, but her eyes are suspiciously bright in the starlight, and her smile is shy.
Philip’s chest feels too tight, and he smiles back. A real smile, not the teasing or sardonic ones he so often finds himself using.
“You’re a good Queen,” he says, watching her face. “Even if I’m an arse about it sometimes. You are.”
“Well,” she says. The shyness in her smile is turning wicked at the edges, making his heart skip a beat. “If you’re an arse sometimes, you’re my arse.”
“Yes,” he says, the word rasping low in his throat, and bends to kiss her.
Her arms go around his neck, one hand caught in his hair, and after a minute he scoops her up into his arms and carries her away to bed, as she laughs, holding him tight.
❧