I wanted to do this tag game, prompt by @lithugraph. Haha so many character names start with these letters, it was almost too easy ;) All of these excerpts are from my oneshot collection, Pieces of Our Time.
Rules: you're given a word and have to share an excerpt of your WIPs that start with each letter of the word. The word was FORGET.
F -
Feliks took a deep, shaky breath, and the warm air brushed Toris’s eyelashes. Toris didn't resist as he guided his hand, and Feliks pressed a dry kiss to his knuckles. The touch was hot, like a glowing ember hissing on the back of his hand.
Suddenly the space between them felt so wide. It was only about a foot on the bed, not too far for Toris’s hand to reach. But there was an unspoken truth, with Eduard’s face buried in his hair and heart beating against his back. It was the truth that this simple gesture—Toris’s hand reaching across the chasm between them—was the most intimacy they could afford, yet somehow it wasn’t nearly enough.
O -
“Oh.” Toris rubbed his hands between his legs. He said the words he had never before said out loud: “Feliks shot me.”
The cookie dropped onto Tino’s plate. “Shit. Really?”
Toris rubbed his hands again. They were getting sweaty.
Tino shook his head. “I’m sorry. I know you two were close.”
How had Toris told Alfred about what Feliks did to him in the war, yet it didn’t make him feel like this? Somehow it felt so much harder now, with Tino. He seemed to understand more than Alfred did—why his rupture with Feliks didn’t just hurt physically.
“I… really don’t want to talk about it.”
R -
Raivis leaned his weight on the suitcase handle, trying to suppress his heavy breathing. He straitened at the crackled music playing through the speaker.
“That’s Louis Armstrong.”
“What?”
Raivis pointed to the ceiling of the elevator. “That music. It’s Louis Armstrong.”
“I knew that,” Russia said, but Raivis had a feeling he didn’t.
G -
Gilbert really did love these nights. Multicolored lights swirling across the dance floor, beautiful people in all colors and shapes of dresses, lively music that would make any true Communist's ears rot off. Sharing a beer with a nation he readily considered to be his little brother, talking freely in German while they laughed at dumb jokes. If Gilbert closed his eyes and let the sounds and smells overwhelm him, just for one second, he was back in Berlin. He knew by now it was an imaginary Berlin that only existed in human memory – before the war, before the depression, before everything that had led to him sitting here wearing this ridiculous suit in an underground jazz bar in the capital of the Soviet Union.
E -
Eduard smiled at the unique name. "Mm?"
"Have you told him?"
"Hm?"
"You're not listening to me."
Eduard opened his eyes and turned his head. They were so close, all he could see were eyes the color of turquoise and tangled strands of blond hair.
"I'm listening."
"Okay. Then have you told Lithuania or not?"
Eduard turned his head back to the ceiling as the bliss of earlier seemed to dissipate.
"I thought so…" Tino's hands dropped to pull at Eduard's waist, and the Finn was flush against him as he whispered in his ear, "When are you going to tell him?"
T -
Toris lived outside of Vilnius.
He had never been a city person, even if that city was his beating heart and the pride of his life. Like many nations, he felt more comfortable in the countryside with generations of neighbors who knew his true identity and would bring him steaming pastries wrapped in embroidered towels on Sundays.
It was a fairly small house surrounded by a walled garden and a metal gate covered in ivy. There was a code to open the gate — 1323, the year Vilnius became the capital of Lithuania, and despite Eduard advising Toris to regularly change it for security, the code had remained the same since the gate was first installed.
