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Roderich has come to know some things about them both in the current years.
He knows Gilbert, he always has. But he knows him more now, the quirks of his smiles and the specific timbre of his voice in the morning and the way he grins up at him when he’s proud of himself, hair sticking up like a bird.
He thinks of that as he’s combing the snarls out of his silvery hair. Gilbert lays his head on his chest and his calloused fingers trace patterns on Roderich’s stomach around the scars.
‘Don’t you ever brush your hair?’ Roderich asks fondly. Gilbert’s eyes flash back to him, gleaming through his eyelashes.
‘It looks better this way.’
Roderich doesn’t dignify him with an answer, only tugs the feathery scruff at the back of his head where it curls away from his neck. Gilbert laughs, rough and far too pleased with himself, and rolls over to kiss him. He tastes like the cinnamon rolls they made.
‘You know you like it,’ he teases. Roderich slips his old, stretched-thin shirt off his shoulders and traces the familiar scars there.
‘I do.’
Gilbert grins again, eyes crinkling, his broad snarling mouth gone a little softer for this moment.
‘You love me.’
‘Of course I do.’ He kisses him again. ‘Arrogant fool.’
They lay in the sunlight, and Gilbert presses his mouth to one of the scars over Vienna. He traces it with the practiced touch that only comes from love, from a thousand years of crashing their messy lives together just to revel in the way they sparked all across Europe. Roderich slips a hand across his shoulder blade where the black ink eagle shows through the threadbare fabric and feels his answering smile against his chest.
‘This is mine now,’ he says. The sun brightens him silver and everywhere they touch feels wonderfully alive.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he tells him, heart fluttering faster under his hand. He leans down to kiss him again, sinking into that struck-iron heat of a knight’s devotion.
‘Love you too, Prinzessin.’
0o0o0o
Sometimes they lay awake together in the dark, not speaking. Gilbert has days where he refuses to sleep. He prefers silence to nightmares.
He has a habit of sleeping with his head on Roderich’s chest, listening for the beat of Vienna. It helps keep the bad dreams further, he says. Not far enough, not all the time, but further. Roderich maps the starved angles of his face in the absolute dark. All that exists is the warmth of his skin under his hands and their breathing, and the stuttering thrum of Berlin.
He thinks in those moments it is the endless bloody vitality of that city that keeps him alive. It has been a Prussian city, it’s his Gilbert’s heart-city, electric and fierce the same way. He skims fingertips across the pulse in his crooked wrist and Gilbert breathes a laugh, the first noise he’s made in three days.
‘It’s yours if you want it,’ he rasps, voice hoarser than normal from disuse, and still as familiar as breathing.
‘I want you,’ Roderich answers. They find each other in the dark, taking their time to find every part where they fit together. When they kiss, it is simply the way they are meant to be, the way they fall together, the way they fell together.
Gilbert is not who he goes to when life is calm and easy, but Gilbert is there, always, when the world wants to burn itself to ashes and Roderich wants to forget. They understand each other when they have to hold the weight of their pasts and their wars.
‘I love you,’ Roderich whispers, simple and endless. Gilbert’s heart rushes and stumbles and picks itself back up. It won’t stop again.
‘Love you too,’ he murmurs. They wait for morning together.
0o0o0o
Time, it seems, makes fools of them both. Gilbert has become the person first on his mind when he thinks of important things. Gilbert comes over when nobody else is home, and they play duets, they make music , glorious and endless, testaments to themselves. And sometimes, sometimes Gilbert will give in and stop pretending he has forgotten how to waltz.
They turn slowly in the sun-drenched room, Gilbert’s hand on his hip, thumb stroking the scar. This dance changes leads but it has never changed tone. The first time they danced, it was in the ashes of a country tearing itself to shreds, Gilbert with blood in his mouth and Roderich with nothing left to lose. Music let them forget that they were nations. Music let them pretend everything was better.
Roderich tucks his head against Gilbert’s chest. They both breathe easier now, but music is still their drug of choice, deep and rich and drowning. Gilbert croons the lyrics as they sway back and forth.
‘I know this song,’ Roderich murmurs. Gilbert’s hand finds his nape, winding strands around his fingers.
‘It’s ours, liebling.’
The word ours still has a way of curling its way into his heart, and that endearment makes him smile slightly.
‘Ours, darling,’ he agrees. Gilbert catches his smile, and brushes the corner of his mouth, face lifting at the gentle name. With a chuckle of delight, he sweeps him up into a spin, twirling around the piano room, laughing and beautiful.
Maybe they have started to forget to only dance together when people are not over, because Roderich remembers that sometimes he goes over to discuss a new composition with Gilbert and Ludwig gives them both a look like a smile before he disappears back into his study.
Gilbert scoffs and says little brothers should keep their noses out of things that don’t involve them. He pushes Roderich’s hair back from his face and kisses him breathless.
Time has made them both softer, too. Gilbert has always been sharp and brilliant and deadly, and he still is. When they touch, Roderich can feel the fighting instincts in his muscles, can feel his hollow eagle bones filled with gunpowder, ready to light. He has seen Gilbert fighting, knuckles bloodied and pupils blown wide like it’s a new drug to fight, smiling in the deadly way he used to when he thought the world was his.
He has seen him coo over blackbirds and magpies, how they flock to his scarred hands to roost. He has seen him bare teeth for the few people anchored into the softness left in his heart. Gilbert does not love easily, and sometimes Roderich looks at him asleep and vulnerable and wonders how, how, how. He loves Gilbert more than he’d ever know.
Gilbert lays his head in his lap as Roderich plays piano one day, eyes closed, eyelashes silvered. He breathes, and Roderich listens, watches the way Gilbert’s hurricane pulls apart at his fingertips.
‘I wrote something for you,’ Roderich tells him, and he blinks open, his electric system sparking to life.
‘Show me,’ he insists, hand closing around his wrist. He only lets go when Roderich begins to play, and he never takes his eyes off his face.
In the silence after, Roderich still feels charged. Gilbert abruptly sits up and kisses him, full of teeth and adoration, hissing yours, yours, you’re all mine, Prinzessin, and I’m all yours.
Gilbert is not a soft thing and neither is he, but he croons when Roderich cups his face and kisses back. Domestic life has never seemed their thing, but when they are like this, sitting together at the piano, improvising music around each other, it feels like it could be. Time has made them better in each other. Time has given Gilbert to him, here, teasing and sharp but allowing himself to be touched, to be held at night and kissed here in the middle of the piano room with the sunlight through the curtains.
Time has passed and Berlin lives on in Gilbert’s proud chest, marking the new beat to their dances together.
0o0o0o
The final thing he has learned is that Gilbert is wonderful and perfect in every way, and maybe Roderich really has gone soft, but he adores him, all of him.
The way he talks to his bird in soft chirps and the way he sprawls over couches and the way he stays close when Roderich practices piano. The way he plays his flute and his bright eyes gleam red over the silver instrument.
He loves the way he laughs and how he looks because Gilbert is striking and scarred and looks better than anyone in suits. He loves his voice when it’s loud and brash and bragging and insulting him, and he loves it when he’s trying to sweet-talk him and when he’s speaking quiet hoarse words against Roderich’s chest in the middle of the night, calling him beautiful, calling him songbird and liebling and Roderich thinks his heart might suddenly stop because it felt too much. He kisses his tangled white hair and tastes salt.
Gilbert and him will never be truly domestic. They argue for fun and Gilbert calls him aristocrat and priss as endearments. They need the fire that comes with their conflicts, but they protect each other. It’s the only way he wants it.
And so they sit together in the back of a meeting, where everyone is too scared of Gilbert’s sharp-tooth smile to tell him he’s not allowed inside, and hold hands underneath the table. Gilbert is crooning again, a soft noise at the back of his throat as he strokes the back of Roderich’s hand. His palms and knuckles are calloused and his hands look made for breaking things, for handling deadly instruments, but they are also for setting off fireworks in Roderich’s bones, for touching gently, gently.
‘I missed you while you were away,’ he murmurs. ‘You didn’t forget me too much, did you?’
‘The day I forget how much you irritate me will be the day I die.’
‘That’s just how I like it.’ He kisses the pulse at his neck, looking endlessly satisfied with himself and how far they’ve come. Arrogant fool , Roderich thinks fondly.
‘You would, darling.’
‘That’s right. I’m your darling and don’t you forget it.’
The speaker at the front flips to a new slide. Nobody will pay attention to two people in the back. Roderich catches Gilbert’s flash of a smile a second before his other hand is curling up behind his neck in the short hair there and pulling him into a proper kiss. He tastes like his coffee and something sweet.
‘You’re mine, my darling Gilbert,’ Roderich says indulgently, and Gilbert nearly purrs.
Everything has changed since the beginning, but he still knows Gilbert. The world has moved beyond their wars and yet they have both survived. And so now they are here, and when Gilbert breaks away, smiling, and kisses his neck again, all that history and power and love shines under an ash grey suit.
He really does look good in it.
0o0o0o
Gilbert looks made for the spaces between breathing in the old Teutonic church, kneeling at the altar with face tilted skyward, the soft bulb of his throat moving as he mouths a silent prayer.
Roderich stands and watches the multicoloured light spill through his scars, how it paints him into a beautiful thing made of nothing but memory and colour.
When he finally stands, his usual restless energy is somewhere further away. He doesn’t look surprised to see Roderich watching him.
‘Time to go,’ he says, taking his hand. Their fingers twine and settle together like they’ve been for long before they could admit it.
They walk out into the streets of Vienna and Roderich’s heart beats faster because the man he loves is beside him and because the world is so beautiful, and because Gilbert smiles a secret smile only for him. The headquarters of his knight soars behind them.
‘Don’t you find it interesting the Teutonic Knights are in Vienna now?’ Roderich asks, smiling.
‘I think it proves something,’ Gilbert responds. He taps Roderich’s chest where his heart beats behind a new eagle inked in purples and reds, and leans closer, offering a wolfish grin with so much impossible tenderness. ‘This is mine now.’
Roderich laughs and kisses him, sinking into the liquid wonderfulness that is his rival, his knight, his lovely, darling Gilbert. He can feel their pulses melding like their music, more beautiful together than either apart. Everything that Roderich is, he’s willing to give to him.
‘Of course it is.’
The sunlight flashes against their rings as Vienna sings around them, and they both feel incredibly and endlessly alive.