Nik pauses in the doorway to the bedroom, breath and gaze catching on the sight before him. The only light to be found is filtered in from the blinds and the golden hue bathes him in a soft glow. John Price, bare but for the lip of sheet tangled around his ankles, the whorls of his chest hair matted with sweat, arm thrown over his eyes as he steadies his breathing, reclined on the rumpled bedding like the muse painted in Giorgione’s Venere di Dresda. One of his legs is drawn up a bit, splayed open with his belly bared in a mute offering to be devoured. It takes an unfathomable act of will not to bury himself back between his thighs. To map him with parted lips spilling ardor, muffled to an unintelligible slur against his flesh, until he felt John yield to his desires as surely as he did Nik's tongue. By now it's closing in on when night meets morning and for all his wants, Nikolai is still fettered by the limitations of men.
Still, he gives himself to the urge to press a lingering kiss to John's mouth. Gets a cheeky nip for his efforts before the man reciprocates in kind. A low hum traded for the sigh Nikolai breathes into his mouth. The sensation is soft and wet and familiar. The slide of John’s tongue against his own turns him into a starving thing. His mind quiet, his thoughts still, nothing matters other than keeping them connected until there’s no breath left in their lungs or the sun swallows the earth, whichever happens to come first.
John’s eyes are breathtakingly blue when he peeks between his fingers to watch Nikolai draw back from him. The sharpened glint they typically carry mellowed by the long evening they'd spent together. Sated and drowsy, he doesn’t ask for another kiss so much as he tilts his chin up a fraction, parting his lips as his gaze dips down.
It sends a pang of want through him, strong enough to stagger.
Thumbing his mouth further open, Nikolai cups John’s jaw and cheek with his hand, callouses catching on the soft bristles of his beard as he dips his tongue inside again, feeling his heart swell at the enthusiasm he’s met with.
“Mmngh, Nik,” John groans, grabbing at his neck, his sides, scrambling to pull him closer.
Nikolai obliges. Hovers above him with one knee on the mattress and most of his weight leaning against the hand planted next to John’s head. Explores his mouth as if he doesn’t already know it better than his own. It’s shameless indulgence that leads him to keep going until John’s lips are swollen. A deeper shade of pink than their baseline. Close in match to the flush he glimpses over the apples of his cheeks, mostly hidden by his ridiculously charming facial hair.
To think he’s privileged enough to see the legendary Bravo-6 unravelled. That he’s not simply permitted to touch but actively encouraged to do so. As he listens to John’s steadily winding breaths next to him, basking in the shared heat of their combined exertion, he hopes against all hope that there’s a sliver of calm waiting for them at the end of their service as opposed to a lump of lead burrowing through their skulls. That in some not-too-distant future, their hands will be joined over the armrest of a recliner instead of their blood mingling into the earth of a distant battlefield. He wants a kinder fate for them than men of their mettle deserve. Needs it, when these stolen moments can’t begin to touch how desperately he wishes for them to be habitual. As instinctive as reaching for a gun in its holster, certain and safe in the knowledge of it being there to fall back on.
Their practice of falling into bed together isn’t new but the intimacy of bare skin, of breathless kisses and sharing the bed for longer than the act itself requires, is a recent development. The arm’s length John had kept him at had shrunk to a hair’s breadth. A gradual shift gone largely unnoticed until the evidence was laid plain before him.
“Yer thinkin’ too bloody loud.”
Nik follows the sound of John’s voice, as he always will, and finds him staring up at him with lidded eyes. Indolent in the burgeoning clutch of sleep, brows relaxed, the wrinkles set in his skin smoothed but not erased. Malleable lines trailing paths from his eyes and shown in shallow dips by the corners of his lips, evidence of a life spent frowning and laughing both.
I love you, Nik thinks but doesn’t say. The words stick to the roof of his mouth. Coats his tongue, his teeth and palate – their taste bitter and sweet in equal measure.
His prolonged silence merely serves to have John squint, a frown creeping back over his features.
“Wha’s tha’ look fer?” he growls suspiciously, leaning himself up on an elbow to claim the higher ground, peering down at Nikolai who only now realises he’s smiling.
“Nothing.”
“Hm.”
“I will tell you later,” he swears and it's a testament to John's pleasant mood that he allows the topic to drop with a begrudging grunt. Instead, he contents himself with rolling partially on top of Nik. Head pillowed on his chest, his slow breaths tickling the thick mat of hair there. A leg wedges itself between Nikolai’s, who spreads his wider to accommodate the thickness of John's thigh, grabbing at it to help him along. Leaves his hand where it lies, brushing over the thin scar trailing down the length of it. Pale with age, surgically straight.
He dips his head to smother his broadening smile into John’s hair. Soft from their earlier shower, Nik’s shampoo mingling with John’s own scent and the musk of fresh sweat. There are wisps of grey at his temples. Singular strands as of yet. Another sign of time limping along, slowly but surely dragging them towards the inevitable.
Sleep attempts to clutch at him, its fingers tugging feebly, and sunk into the mattress, pinned by John’s significant weight, it should be easy he reckons. Yet he lies awake as the ticking clock turns seconds to minutes, edging ever closer to the rising dawn, observing the flutter of John’s lashes against his cheek. They tremble whenever his eyes move beneath their lids. Brushes against freckles with every even breath of his. A steady pattern of inhale–exhale Nik seeks to match in stops and starts – until they’re breathing in tandem, for naught but the simple pleasure of it.
Too much time and none at all pass before he unsticks his tongue from the bottom of his mouth.
““You are beautiful" is what I was thinking. That I am a lucky man to get to see you like this,” he says in a low tone, quiet enough to be considered a mere suggestion of sound. His fingertips find their way to John’s forehead, sweeping his hair back from it with the whisper of a touch. A moment later, he closes his eyes with a self-depricating chuckle. “I do not know why I speak half-truths. As much a coward then as I am now. I thought of nothing but–” His voice breaks off, choked to silence by the mix of emotions clogging his throat.
Nikolai had spent his whole life wanting. Remembers the ache of it, how it clamped a ruthless hand around his heart long before he had words to articulate the feeling of loss and longing clawing at the inside of his ribs. Wanting to go back to a simpler time. A time when the love he felt for his country could still blind him to the flaws of its keepers, where his mother yet lived and would wipe the tears from his cheeks with a brusque but loving hand. To those early days, lost in the vastness of a world he hadn't yet grasped the magnitude of, where he sought salvation in the arms of men with eyes as haunted as his then stripped his skin raw with the guilt of betraying principles imposed on him since birth.
Some decades past, the concept of loving a man is no longer foreign to him – not when he’s spent what amounts to a quarter of his life willfully drawn into John Price’s orbit. The struggle lies entirely with his inability to voice the sentiment. It’s mind-numbing, trembling terror that stays his words. Fear of the unknowable, of John’s reaction to his sincerity, of cementing a concept by speaking it outloud, all of it congealing until it immobilises his tongue and jumbles his words before they can hope to form.
Trying to gather his courage, Nik returns his gaze to John and the quirked slant of his mouth.
His heart just about stops in his chest when John cracks an eye open.
“‘M no’ asleep, Nik.’ Yer too bloody loud fer tha’, luv.”
The breath stalls in his lungs for a beat and rushes out of him in a startled “I–” before dying a quiet death. For all the languages he knows, there’s nothing he can think to say. His ribcage refuses to expand the way it's meant to do and pain pools at the base of his throat. When he swallows, he can barely get it past the blockage in his esophagus.
John props himself up on his elbow once more, the space between them cavernous and abruptly devoid of warmth. Something softens in John’s gaze when he reaches out to press his thumb between Nik’s brows. He rubs over the spot then drags it horizontally towards his temple, rough fingertips sweeping across the ridge of bone where his orbital socket is, briefly obscuring his vision and it’s a silly thought, but Nikolai find he’d rather forgo the comforting touch if it meant seeing John in his entirety, this close and open, if it would happen to be the last time he’s allowed the privilege.
“Me too, yeah?”
Nikolai’s throat clicks when he swallows again, the smile pulling at his lips a wane imitation of every iteration before it.
“You are asking me?”
“No, ‘s a statement fer you to agree with ye whopper.”
“Ah.”
John quirks a brow at him. Pats him twice on the chest, leaving the hand there, politely refraining from copping a feel, pressed to where Nikolai’s heart is thrown off its regular rhythm. “Don’t have to put words to it,” he grouses. “‘S you ‘n me, Nik. The way it’s always been.”
From the beginning, yes. When John had slid into the barstool next to him with a determined set to his jaw and convictions he held on to still and in the span of a conversation managed to captivate him so utterly he’d followed a step behind him ever since. As doggedly loyal as a shadow because there was no other way for Nikolai to be.
“Za toboy - khot' na kray sveta,” Nikolai replies, solemn as an oath.
In the quiet night it’s the closest to a confession he’ll manage.
