American people as they handle this very private matter.” The Daily Mail’s report this morning revealed that First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz has been involved romantically and sexually with Prince Henry since at least February of this year, according to emails and photographs obtained by the paper. The full email transcripts have been uploaded to WikiLeaks under the moniker “The Waterloo Letters,” seemingly named for a reference to the Waterloo Vase in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in one email composed by Prince Henry. The correspondence continues regularly up to Sunday night and appears to have been lifted from a private email server used by residents of the White House. “Setting aside the ramifications of what this means for President Claremont’s ability to be impartial on issues of both international relations and homosexuality,” Republican presidential candidate Senator Jeffrey Richards said at a press conference earlier today, “I’m extremely concerned about this private email server. What kind of information was being disseminated on this server?” Richards added that he believes the American voters have a right to know everything else for which President Claremont’s server may have been used. Sources close to the Claremont administration insist the private server is similar to the one set up during President George W. Bush’s administration and used only for communication within the White House about day-to-day operations and personal correspondence for the First Family and core White House personnel. First rounds of examination of “The Waterloo Letters” by experts have yet to reveal any evidence of classified information or otherwise compromising content outside of the nature of the First Son’s relationship with Prince Henry. For five endless, unbearable hours, Alex is shuffled from room to room in the West Wing, meeting with what seems to be every strategist, press staffer, and crisis manager his mother’s administration has to offer. The only moment he recalls with any clarity is pulling his mother into an alcove to say, “I told Raf.” She stares at him. “You told Rafael Luna that you’re bisexual?” “T told Rafael Luna about Henry,” he says flatly. “Two days ago.” She doesn’t ask why, just sighs grimly, and they both hover over the implication before she says, “No. No, those pictures were taken before that. It couldn’t have been him.” He runs through pros and cons lists, models of different outcomes, fucking charts and graphs and more data than he has ever wanted to see about his own relationship and its ramifications on the world around him. This is the damage you cause, Alex, it all seems to say, right there in hard facts and figures. This is who you hurt. He hates himself, but he doesn’t regret anything, and maybe that makes him a bad person and a worse politician, but he doesn’t regret Henry. For five endless, unbearable hours, he’s not allowed to even try to contact Henry. The press sec drafts a statement. It looks like any other memo. For five hours, he doesn’t shower or change his clothes or laugh or smile or cry. It’s eight in the morning when he’s finally released and told to stay in the Residence and standby for further instructions. He’s handed his phone, at last, but there’s no answer when he calls Henry, and no response when he texts. Nothing at all. Amy walks him through the colonnade and up the stairs, saying nothing, and when they reach the hallway between the East and West Bedrooms, he sees them. June, her hair in a haphazard knot on the top of her head and a pink bathrobe, her eyes red-rimmed. His mom, in a sharp, no-nonsense black dress and pointed heels, jaw set. Leo, barefoot in his pajamas. And his dad, a leather duffel still hanging off one shoulder, looking harried and exhausted. They all turn to look at him, and Alex feels a wave of something so much bigger than himself sweep over him, like when he was a child standing bowlegged in the Gulf of Mexico, riptide sucking at his feet. A sound escapes his throat uninvited, something that he barely even recognizes, and June has him first, then the rest of them, arms and arms and hands and hands, pulling him close and touching his face and moving him until he’s on the floor, the goddamn terrible hideous antique rug that he hates, sitting on the floor and staring at the rug and the threads of the rug and hearing the Gulf rushing in his ears and thinking distantly that he’s having a panic attack, and that’s why he can’t breathe, but he’s just staring at the rug and he’s having a panic attack and knowing why his lungs won’t work doesn’t make them work again. He’s faintly aware of being shifted into his room, to his bed, which is still covered in the godforsaken fucking magazines, and someone guides him onto it, and he sits down and tries very, very hard to make a list in his head. One. One. One. KEK