Dorian scrounged through the cupboards of their tiny sanctuary. “How’s the leg, Major?”
Klaus, stretched out sideways by the fireplace, moved his sprained and splinted left leg. He didn’t waste energy keeping the spasm of pain from showing on his face. “The aspirin will help it, soon.” He took another judicious sip of water from his canteen. A rumble from his belly reminded him of another concern. “I’ll need food, to keep the aspirin from souring my stomach.”
“You and your picky digestion,” Eroica said fondly. “Can’t bear this, won’t eat that, eating antacids by the pound. I really should whisk you off to some tropical vacation spot for six weeks of nothing but decent food and relaxation. That’ll set you right.”
“Six weeks of food and rest?” Klaus asked quietly, eyes gleaming in the dim light from the fireplace. “Nothing else?”
“Well, there could be a little sex, yes,” Dorian admitted, his own grin playing across beautifully-shaped lips.
Klaus leaned back the wall, allowing himself a mock-sigh of relief. “Gut. I was afraid you were getting bored with me.”
“Like that could happen, in our lifetimes -- hullo? There’s bread!”
“Is it inhabited?”
“It’s fairly fresh. No mold. Smells edible.”
“Is it ticking?”
“Ticking? Tell me you’re joking.”
“Dorian.”
“It is _not_ ticking!”
“Check it for surveillance equipment, then -- it can’t be standard issue rations.”
“Very funny, Major. I wonder what NATO wit bailed out
of a safe house leaving a fresh loaf of bread behind?”
“I doubt bread is high on his list of concerns, in the middle of another Central Asian civil war.”
“Well, he’s got some priorities to rearrange. This is _good_ bread.”
“Then save some for me, goddammit.”
“I will, love, I will. Hmmm. Bread and a spice rack, of all things. I adore all these charming little glass jars.”
Klaus sat up a little straighter, twisting unsuccessfully to look at the spice rack Dorian had taken down from a cupboard. “Is there cinnamon?”
“It’s bloody dim in here, and they’re all printed in Cyrillic, dear heart. Give me a moment -- I think -- ah, even nicer. Cinnamon with sugar.”
Klaus laughed, a warm sound that Dorian would have traded for all the safe vacation spots in the world. “You have a fairly clean knife? Ja? Slice the bread, and bring it over here with the jar. We need a long fork.”
Dorian sighed. “You always demand miracles, Major.”
He found something that could double as a fork, and joined his lover by the painfully-small fire.
Outside, snow fell in a territory that had been a war zone yesterday and would probably be again, tomorrow afternoon. The windows were blacked-out with heavy paint, or boarded where they’d shattered. Outside, horrors were lightly buried in the day’s accumulation of snow, but the immediate area was empty of living foes. Klaus’ sprain came from scavenging a two-way-radio system out of a collapsed Russian outpost. The radio had been silent for hours, battery pack exhausted, but it had served its purpose: a NATO search team would find them in the morning, along with the documents Dorian had stolen from a Russian commander’s own pockets. Something nasty, linking very high-up government cronies with oilfield business gone awry. Dorian hadn’t read any further than the first paragraph of the memo. No doubt, the Russians still thought their men had the document.
If they knew Klaus had it -- Dorian carefully didn’t think of that. Tonight, he and the Major had fire and shelter, bread and spices, and each other.
#
“You’re serious?”
“Ach, ja. Cook and I used to make this, on cold winter mornings when I was visiting from school. Just this way. Cook never had use for fancy toasters.”
Klaus deftly eased the makeshift fork, along with its crisping burden, over the fire. Bread browned. Sugar, caught by flame, caramelized to dark gold. The scent of cinnamon was lulling, a warm smell covering the tang of cordite that still clung to both men.
Dorian sat in the semi-darkness, content with vague daydreams and the solid presence of his lover.
He looked up to say something, and was snagged instead by Klaus’ empty arm. God, the man was strong! Sitting down, one-handed, and counterbalanced against a sprained leg, Major Eberbach could still drag Dorian against himself with ease. The long, sturdy body radiated heat back into Dorian’s bundled-up flesh, a comfort more perfect than any high-tech coat. Klaus seemed to take joy from it too; with a calm sigh, he snuggled closer to Dorian and rested his head on the thief’s shoulder. After far too short a time, Klaus straightened up.
Dorian whispered a protest.
“ ‘S your turn,” Klaus murmured, pulling the toast back from the fire.
“Hmmm?” Dorian asked drowsily.
“This food -- play -- you keep springing on me. Your turn, now. Close your eyes.”
_Really_, Dorian thought. If the moment hadn’t been perfect already, he’d have arranged for a marching-band, banners, confetti flickering down from the ceiling. _What a milestone! Klaus instigating something, anything! We should get trapped in war zones more often_. Dorian closed his eyes happily.
“Open your mouth.”
He did so, shivering with laughter now, instead of cold and worry. Klaus’ fingers brushed over Dorian’s lower lip, tentative touches that left behind a gritty, sugary residue. Then a tiny morsel of toasted bread was dropped, sugar side down, on his tongue.
-- Burst of sweetness, herbal intensity of cinnamon, the nutty savour of toasted bread --
Dorian didn’t even chew, but let it dissolve in his mouth, then swallowed. In comfortable silence, Klaus fed him another bit. Dorian could feel the green eyes tracking his every movement, every response. The thief resisted an urge to ham up the moment and overact. No, this was for real, and it deserved some honest sanctity.
“Does it remind you of Christmas?” Klaus asked.
Dorian didn’t open his eyes. “Winter holidays, yes. Christmas in my family was always a little strained. I’d sneak downstairs after the governess put me to bed, and share the wassail with the servants, in the kitchen.”
“I was always fond of the kitchen,” Klaus admitted, just before he crunched into some toast, himself. “The people whom father invited to the Schloss were almost always old. No children. Before I was sent away to school, I used to long for someone my own age, to talk to. Play with -- ” he stopped, and Dorian could _hear_ the blush starting to colour the Major’s voice.
“It would have been fun, I think,” said Dorian, sensing the proper response. “I’m sure the Schloss has wonderful nooks and crannies only children could reach or appreciate.”
“Ja!” And so Dorian settled into the cozy half-embrace, listening as Klaus fed both of them, and regaled Dorian with stories of an ancient castle and a lonely child forced to make up his own entertainments:
“There was a back stair connecting all the floors in the main house --”
“I made a rope-swing in an elm-tree in the back garden --”
“One day Cook set out a sausage and turned his back, then looked ‘round again to find that a rat was running away with it. The scandal! A rat in Schloss Eberbach! So he let me chase it, with him --”
“One year, one of my distant cousins was to have been at the Schloss for the holidays. I was sixteen? Seventeen? I had never met him, and wondered all the way home on the train if he liked soccer and math, and what kind of toys he might bring. But when I arrived, Cook told me my cousin had come down with the whooping-cough that week -- ”
So lonely, that deep strong voice. Dorian could imagine the child and the youth that Klaus had been. Lanky and coltish, still growing into the long bones, years away from being the fine-tuned human tank. “It could have been me,” Dorian whispered.
“Was?”
“It could have been me, visiting you,” Dorian pressed.
“If our parents had been friends, somehow. Or perhaps just business acquaintances. I can just see Father getting into one of his fortnight-long rows with Mother -- her taking my sisters to Gran for Christmas, and him packing me off to some German stronghold so he’d have the manor to himself and his friends.”
Klaus sniffed. “There’s some years between us. You would have been a little brat.”
“A charming brat, I assure you. You would have been my god and my hero, and there wouldn’t be enough breath left in either of us to explain away the trouble we’d get into.”
Klaus hugged him even tighter. “I am certain of that, liebling.” Then he paused a moment, tugged by an idea.
“What if you had been my age, and visited?”
“Well,” Dorian began cautiously. “You would still have been my hero. I would have fallen in love with you at first sight, you know. I’d have made a fool of myself, following you around and teasing you outrageously.”
“I’d still have beaten you silly.”
“And I would have preened with my bruises, in front of mirrors, just because I had proof that you’d touched me --”
“Perhaps, one day, I might have touched you. Without hitting you. When no one else could see us.” A gentle hand combed through Dorian’s curls. “How long was your hair, back then?”
“Less of a mop. I had to keep it cut, during the term. I looked like some twittery Edwardian children’s-book illustration, when I had shorter hair.”
“Did you know you were --”
“Oh, Klaus. I knew _that_ from the time I was eleven. It wasn’t a traumatic or sudden discovery. Simply the way I was.”
“I envy you, then.”
Dorian kept his eyes closed, with effort, but snuggled closer to Klaus. “When did you really know?”
“Not until I was seventeen,” Klaus breathed against Dorian’s cheekbone. “I had been content with -- with --”
“Mmmm. I _see_. So the peach orchard started something?”
Klaus’ frame shook with silent, rueful laughter. “Ja. But I had to be so careful. And I was afraid. Of becoming addicted. Or of it becoming less wonderful, cheapened with exposure. But that year, I noticed a boy on our soccer team.”
“Should I be jealous of your first?”
“Nein! _You are my first._ He never guessed. None of them did. I was team captain. Honor alone demanded I behave circumspectly. I was careful not to even look too much at him.”
“Was he handsome?”
Klaus thought about it for a moment. “Nein. A very good soccer player. He had a smile that warmed me, made me want to see it again and again. He played too well, for our small school. His family transferred him to a school in Switzerland, halfway through the season. I was glad. No more distractions.”
“Am I just a distraction, then?”
“Sometimes.” Klaus kissed the beautiful sharp plane of Dorian’s cheek then, aware that his honesty must hurt the other man. But how else could he be? “Sometimes you are the most important constant in my life. More than NATO, or Germany -- or myself.”
Dorian sighed and turned blindly, to catch the Major’s
lips in a tender mothwing kiss. “And you are all that, to me.”
Warm, dark-gold silence wrapped around them for several minutes, before Klaus stirred against him.
“It would have been -- good -- to have you in my life, back then.”
“How good?”
“Good enough to be terribly illegal for both of us, I suspect,” Klaus chuckled, one of those flashes of ironic humour that Dorian cherished. The Major laid aside the toasting-fork, and turned slightly in Dorian’s embrace. The elegant hands that could fire a Magnum without strain, or break an enemy’s spine with one blow -- were gentle, almost worshipful as they eased down one zipper and glided inside Dorian’s coat.
Dorian wriggled at those careful explorations. “What
would you have done?” he whispered. “If I’d been there, and if you felt safe enough to touch me?”
“At first, I’d be confused. But later -- I could never get enough of your kisses,” Klaus said, proving that again. “Or your hands on me. Or the sounds you make, the way you move, when I touch you.”
It had been so, for nearly a year of slow progress.
Klaus was a near-silent lover, but Dorian knew his own gasps and groans could drive the Major into mindless, glorious passion. It was happening now. Dorian felt no shame at letting a sob thrum deep in his throat. Klaus shivered against him, pressed lips to Dorian’s neck to drink in that purring vibration.
“Why?” Dorian could barely manage coherency.
“Why, what?”
“You like this -- doing this to me -- even more than when I do it to you --”
“I don’t like losing control, ja? But you are so beautiful in pleasure. You are teaching me how to let go, every time I do this.”
“How do you think it would have started with us, back then? I wish I could have been there for you,” Dorian whispered.
“Then let’s pretend that you were,” Klaus answered boldly, tugging the coat away from Dorian’s now-opened trousers. “That we are both young again, matching ages, and that you’re visiting me on holiday.”
Strong warm fingers probed inside the thief’s admirably- practical boxers. Calluses scraped lightly down his erection. Dorian’s breath caught. “Oh, _Major_.”
“We would fight often,” Klaus assured him.
“Oh, yes.”
“And you would try to interest me in artwork.”
“Mmm hmmm.”
The fingers pulled back, gentled enough for Dorian to begin concentrating on the game. Klaus continued softly. “We’d be so awful, Cook would probably throw both of us out of the house, to make us settle our differences. I would show you the garden, in the snow.”
Dorian rallied. “I’d show you how to make snowmen.”
Klaus sniffed. “I’d rather build snow forts. We’d have our own arms race, stockpiling ammunition for a last, decisive battle.”
“Which I would cheerfully let you win, even though I would be more than capable of winning.”
“By deceit!”
“Ha. By skill, my darling. I have -- and had -- a very good throwing arm!”
“Hmmph! So you’d _let_ me win, eh?”
“Yes. And I’d make you chase me down to claim whatever forfeit you wished -- knowing you’d most likely stuff snowballs down my trousers if you caught me.”
“I’d think of that and worse tricks, ja. Speaking of trousers, lift up.” When he obeyed, the Major neatly slid the loosened garments down past Dorian’s thighs. “There’s a place in the garden, out of sight from any window in the Schloss. Screened from the village below. You would call it in English a _folly_. A little building made to look like a Roman ruin, with grape vines growing over it.”
“How romantic.”
“I’d force you to go to ground in there, my English fox --”
It was delicious, some objective part of Dorian decided. Moving as those gentle hands directed, lifting again, slithering entirely out of the coat for the reward of kisses trailed along his spine. Listening with his eyes closed, hearing a Klaus who was at last able to indulge in shared fantasy. The hand that moved over Dorian’s groin was relaxed and inquisitive, playing him with the same marveling joy of a musician faced with some exquisite instrument.
“You’d catch me,” Dorian admitted. “Throw me into the deep snow, inside the ruin.”
“You’d trip me into landing on top of you,” Klaus whispered. “Or give me just enough of an excuse to do so.”
“What then? Two strong lads wrestling in the snow?”
“Perhaps. Or I would just look at you, a golden angel made real and alive and infuriating. In my arms. I would,” Klaus decided, “have to kiss you silly.”
“It wouldn’t take much, back then,” Dorian answered, “or now.”
One of those strong arms pulled him over until he was sitting on Klaus’ lap, with the ridge of the Major’s need jutting up against Dorian’s bottom. The trouser fabric rasped along his bare skin.
“Your leg --!” Dorian gasped.
“Aspirin’s working,” Klaus growled, hands digging into Dorian’s hips.
“Let me?” Dorian lifted again, nimble hands working behind him to open Klaus’ waistband.
The Major wriggled, helped, breathed a gusty sigh when they were both at last free. His shaft lay clasped between sleekly-muscled thighs, the head pressing up against Dorian’s scrotum. Over Dorian’s shoulder, he could see the Englishman’s long legs sprawled over his, knees bound together by pushed-down trousers and underwear. It was an inelegant but provocative pose, reminiscent of some tawdry pin-up calendar. Certain to strain Klaus’s own hurt leg, eventually. He didn’t care.
“Move,” Klaus whispered into Dorian’s sweat-damp neck.
Once on a mission to India, Klaus had seen a statue of a temple dancer so voluptuous she had been an indecent affront to all good stonework, so well-carved he could almost _see_ her sinuous writhing movements. Dorian danced in just that way, on his lap. The thief’s arms lifted, twining up into his golden curls and exposing the fragile planes of his shoulder-blades. His bottom rocked against Klaus in circular undulations. The scent of their arousal drifted up in the warm air, mingling with the sweetness of cinnamon and their own body musks. Whatever cordite was left added only an exciting trace, a top-note of danger and vulnerability.
“I wish we had lubricant,” Dorian moaned.
“You -- ” Klaus froze for a moment, considering. He hadn’t been that bold yet, and Dorian had never complained.
Kissing and friction was one thing. That other act -- penetration -- still unnerved him. But here, now, in the aftermath of combat and the lure of shared daydreams, it seemed a possibility. “When we’re safe,” he whispered thickly. “You will teach me that, too.”
“_Major!_” A wave of adoring lust made Dorian shudder, simply from that promise. His last remaining control frayed away, uneven breath and quivering haunches signaling his readiness. He brought his hands forward, still tangled with his hair, to muffle his ever-louder moans.
Klaus’ hands and shaft did the rest, dragging out a powerful climax that flooded his clenched fists with Dorian’s seed. He let it trickle down between their bodies. Groaned, when the dry friction changed to a silken, gliding delight. It made possible more speed, more sweet friction, more gasps from an over-sensitized Dorian. Which led, inevitably, to more speed.
If the act was a frenzy of movement, release was agonizingly-slow. An onslaught whose seconds seemed measured in hours. At the height of it, Klaus held back a roar of completion, muffling his cry against the back of Dorian’s shoulder.
The calm afterward was broken only by the small, silent aftershocks that darted between their bodies. Klaus played idly with Dorian’s damp curls, weaving their gleaming strands around his fingers and Dorian’s. Binding them as close as pleasure had, just a few moments before.
Dorian snuggled back against Klaus’ softening flesh.
“Oh, _love_,” Dorian whispered, then yawned. “Sorry.”
“ ‘S all right. It’s been a long day.”
“And you’ve quite worn me out. How’s the leg?”
A pause. Then a soft laugh. “I think it’s asleep.”
Dorian rolled off him with contrite speed.
Klaus grinned. “I don’t care. That was -- thank you.”
#
Dorian had cleaned them both off, in a way that Klaus decided he didn’t want to think about, just yet. But it was efficient and soothing, and it ended with Dorian asleep against his shoulder. Later, when the fire had died down, Klaus nudged his lover.
“Hmm?”
“Can you stay awake? I need sleep.”
“Rest, love. Here -- pass me that semi-automatic.”
“You with a gun? That’s not a thought I can sleep to, easily.”
“You’ve taught me how to shoot. It can buy you time to wake, and start laying about with that Magnum. We _are_ in a war zone, remember?”
Klaus sighed, his turn to burrow against a friendly shoulder. “I know.”
#
The sound woke him before Dorian could, a distant thudding cadence that snapped Klaus neatly awake. His leg hurt like hell, but he could live with that. The Magnum was loaded and ready, out of his shoulder holster and in his hand before he even opened his eyes.
Dorian’s head had lifted, searching from side to side in the faint light leaking in from the outside.
_Dawn_, Klaus’ innate time-sense told him. He listened carefully to the approaching helicopter. “It’s one of ours,” he said.
Dorian relaxed minutely. “Good.”
“Could be hijacked. A trap.”
“You’re paranoid.”
“ ‘M still alive, ja?”
“Well, then. We’d best get ready for them.”
“I’m going to have to call you names and yell at you again,” Klaus apologized.
“I’ll know what you’re really saying,” Dorian assured him.
The rotor noises were so loud, the machine must be nearly on top of them. Touchdown, and the rotors slacked just a little. Never stopped -- this bird must be ready to fly at any moment.
“Major?” called Z’s anxious voice. “Eroica?”
Dorian stood up to greet them.
#
“Get that fucking idiot away from me,” the Major growled, as he took the gunner’s seat up front beside Z. “The safe-house was too small for both of us – his perfume stank up everything!”
“At least I got to finally spend the night with you!” Dorian shot back sweetly, and held up a little glass jar.
Inside, a few teaspoons of speckled brown and white dust glittered in the morning sunlight.
“What the hell is that?”
“A souvenir,” Dorian purred. “Spoils of war. And I just remembered something, Major.”
“Was?” The man’s straight back was turned to Dorian now.
“There is a bakery in Bonn that has _wonderful_ bread.”
fin