Work Text:
“Two weeks?!” Reinhard asked the doctor who was tending to the wound on his left forearm. His usually melodious voice had taken on a shrill note, and it echoed in the exam room. “I can’t wear a sling for two weeks. I’m an officer in His Majesty’s Imperial Forces, not some schoolkid who can wave a doctor’s note around to get extra time on my assignments. I have responsibilities.”
Sitting by Reinhard’s other side in a plastic chair that wasn’t entirely comfortable for someone of his height, Kircheis pressed his lips together, suppressing a smile. If Reinhard had looked over at him at that moment, he would have been able to read the amusement on his face just fine regardless, but all of Reinhard’s attention was currently focused on haranguing the doctor as if he believed he could change his prognosis through sheer force of will; however, no amount of complaining would change the fact that although the bullet itself hadn’t penetrated all the way to the bone, the shockwave from it had caused a minor fracture, and the recovery would be more than what would be required for a simple flesh wound.
“I’m aware that you have responsibilities, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. Did he put a slightly patronizing emphasis on the last word, or was Kircheis imagining that?
Since Reinhard’s injury wasn’t immediately dangerous and hadn’t been suffered in his official capacity as a soldier, Kircheis had opted to take them to a civilian clinic close to the arena instead of burdening the Schaffhausen’s chauffer with the twenty-minute drive to the military hospital. Reinhard had been visibly displeased with this when the car pulled to a stop and he woke up and saw the building they’d arrived at, but Kircheis had just smiled at him and said, “Sometimes, when you sleep in the middle of the day, other people make decisions for you,” which had earned him a withering glare.
But after a moment Reinhard had relented and said, “Fine, I trust you,” and headed for the entrance with his head held high—almost haughtily so.
The doctor hadn’t been openly disrespectful in any way that could get him in trouble, but it was clear that he didn’t think someone being in the military entitled them to preferential treatment. This probably would have been fine if Reinhard were a few years older and were being treated like any other adult, but the fact that he was being treated like any other teenager was clearly grating on him. Kircheis wasn’t even sure if the doctor believed his story about having fought in a duel—it was entirely possible that he thought that the two of them were a couple of rich kids who’d had an accident playing with a gun that belonged to one of their fathers and were trying to cover it up by going to a clinic instead of calling their family doctor.
“But think of it this way,” the doctor said, “without modern medical science, you’d have to wear it for two months, not two weeks. So try to look on the bright side. You’ll be healed up before you know it.”
“Tch.” Reinhard closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the headrest of the exam chair.
“Don’t worry, Lord Reinhard,” Kircheis said, “I’ll take care of everything.” What he actually wanted to say was I’ll take care of you, but he was worried about overstepping what might be considered appropriate, both in terms of what Reinhard was willing to put up with and in terms of how things looked to the doctor—he was already extremely conscious of the fact that Reinhard had reached for his hand while the doctor poked and prodded at his wound to properly stitch it up, and that now that the most painful part of the appointment was over, the gesture was more and more likely to be read as a potentially questionable act of hand-holding rather than the wholly unremarkable act of helping a friend hold still during medical treatment. Reinhard was stubbornly (and, Kircheis usually thought, purposefully) oblivious to these kinds of things, and so Kircheis tended to pick up a lot of the slack in terms of making sure that they were able to remain relatively discreet. Which he didn’t mind, really, but it was exhausting sometimes to always be the one doing all those mental calculations. (However, even with all that said, at that moment there was nothing that could have convinced him to let go of Reinhard’s hand.)
“Oh, will you?” Reinhard asked with a teasing lilt in his voice, opening his eyes and looking over at Kircheis without turning his head. “I don’t think so. Even you can’t force me to laze about.”
“You live together?” the doctor asked without looking up.
“Yes,” Reinhard said flatly.
“We’re roommates in officer’s housing,” Kircheis clarified. He had written this on the intake form, but he doubted anyone had taken more than a cursory look at it.
“Well, that’s good,” the doctor said, sealing the edge of the bandage and setting his tools down on the tray by his side. He pushed his chair back and stood up. “The recovery will be much easier with someone to help you around the house. The nurse will be in in a few minutes to get you fitted for the sling and show you how to wear it, alright? I’ll upload my notes to your health record so you can follow up with your own doctor in a couple weeks instead of having to come back here. They’ll decide what to do for physical therapy—until then, just focus on resting. And try to avoid getting shot at.” The last part was obviously meant as a joke, but Kircheis thought his life would be a lot less stressful if Reinhard would take it seriously.
“I’ll do my best,” Reinhard said, giving the doctor a smile that had no warmth in it.
Reinhard didn’t sleep in the taxi on the way home from the clinic, but he didn’t look like he was in any fit state for conversation either, and so Kircheis didn’t try to engage him in any. The color had returned to his face—not much color, as Reinhard was naturally almost unearthly pale, but at least he no longer looked like a ghost—and Kircheis contented himself with that for now. Whenever he snuck a glance over at Reinhard during the drive, he found him looking out impassively at the trees by the side of the road with a blank expression that could equally well be a reflection of deep contemplation or deep exhaustion.
He almost looked like a statue—except, of course, that if he were a statue, he wouldn’t be doing fiery and dangerous things like volunteering to fight in duels, and they wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
Kircheis had broken his wrist when he was five years old, but he didn’t remember much about the experience, other than the initial pain and the fact that his mother had let him order a grown-up portion of cheesecake at dinner as a reward for his good behavior at the doctor’s office on the day when he got his cast taken off. (The cheesecake had turned out to be a terrible idea, but her heart was in the right place, at least). The only recent injury he could use as a point of reference for how Reinhard was probably feeling was the time he had been thrown from a horse at the academy a couple years ago. The painkillers the stable medic had given him had kicked in quickly, and after determining that he wasn’t concussed and hadn’t broken or dislocated anything, they’d sent him on his way with instructions to skip hand-to-hand combat classes until his bruises healed. What he remembered clearly was the fatigue that had dogged him through the rest of the day, a kind of fatigue that was impossible to confuse with the regular tiredness that came from not getting enough sleep or from pushing himself in the gym.
It was the sensation of your own body saying stop, leave me alone, I’m healing. It was the knowledge that your body was busy rebuilding some part of itself, that resources that would normally be available for use in powering your way through simple activities were being entirely taken up by that act of reconstruction. It was a kind of information that could not be explained or simulated—experiencing it was the only way to access it, and when you were in the throes of that experience, it stretched out in front of you like a wall that not only extended infinitely in both directions but also imbued you with an eerie, pre-conscious certainty of its insurmountable extent.
He wished very badly that he could reach out and hold Reinhard’s hand. Unfortunately, he was sitting on Reinhard’s left side, which was the arm he had injured, so he settled for nervously twisting his own hands together in his lap and pressing the side of his right knee against Reinhard’s left. The only acknowledgment he got was that Reinhard returned the pressure slightly, but that was enough for him.
They arrived at their block of flats, Kircheis paid the driver, and they got out of the car.
“Come on, let’s get inside,” Kircheis said as the taxi pulled away. He was at the front door, getting his keys out of his pocket, but Reinhard was still standing on the sidewalk, face turned up to the sky like he was looking for something in that navy blue expanse, breath visible in the air. Although it was barely five in the evening, the sun had already set and the temperature had dropped along with it. The first flakes of the day’s snowfall were beginning to float slowly down from the sky, and Reinhard was wearing nothing above the waist except the large coat that Kircheis had thrown over his shoulders; the absolute last thing Kircheis wanted was for Reinhard to catch a cold on top of the injury he was already dealing with.
“Hm? Oh.” Startled from his reverie, Reinhard gave Kircheis a sheepish smile and joined him at the door.
Reinhard went up the stairs slower than usual once they were inside, and Kircheis kept pace with him, keeping a hand on the elbow of his good arm so he could catch him if he fell. It was probably unnecessary, but he remembered that bone-deep tiredness of his own recovery, the way the world had seemed to darken slightly whenever he moved, and figured it was better to exercise too much caution than too little. Nonetheless, they made it up the stairs without incident, and once they were in their own apartment with the door closed and locked behind them, he let himself breathe a sigh of relief that he hoped wasn’t too audible.
It was impossible to say whether or not Reinhard noticed it. He was busy with mechanically divesting himself of the coat around his shoulders and then bracing himself against the wall with his right hand to toe his boots off. Kircheis took off his own shoes and coat and followed Reinhard into the living room. Reinhard flopped down into an armchair by the coffee table and beckoned him over.
“Close the curtains, Kircheis.”
Kircheis did, making sure both windows were neatly obscured before making his way to Reinhard’s side. “Worried about something?” he asked, but Reinhard was already answering the question for him, not with words but with a gesture, reaching up and tugging gently on the front of his shirt to pull him down into a kiss.
Reinhard’s kisses always made Kircheis feel like he was being dragged towards something, but along a frictionless surface. There was usually a hunger to them, not quite desperation but something at least adjacent to neediness. Less about a craving for the physical act and more about the idea that he wanted Kircheis as close to him as possible, and that this was a logical course of action in pursuit of that goal. It wasn’t that Reinhard didn’t love him; it was that his singular dedication to wrapping the two of them up together almost obviated the need for any such clearly identifiable emotion to enter into the equation.
Despite all that, he took his time with this kiss, lips moving lazily against Kircheis’s own.
“I just wanted to do this,” Reinhard said when he finally broke for air, “without you scolding me for being indiscreet.” It took Kircheis a moment to put his thoughts back in order and figure out that Reinhard was answering his question about the curtains. Reinhard pressed a chaste kiss to the corner of Kircheis’s mouth, then another to his cheek, nuzzling against him with a contented sigh. “I was worried about you,” he said finally, dry lips moving against Kircheis’s cheek as he let go of his shirt and moved his hand around to cup the back of his neck, sliding slender fingers into his hair.
“But you’re the one who was hurt,” Kircheis protested, pulling back just far enough to look Reinhard in the eye. Bending down like this was fine for a quick kiss, but for an extended period of time it was untenably awkward. Still, Reinhard didn’t seem inclined to let go of him within the next few seconds, so Kircheis rested his elbow on the arm of the chair that was closer to him and braced his other hand on the opposite side of the chair, extending his arm across Reinhard’s body.
“I know that.” Reinhard’s grip on Kircheis’s hair tightened—not to the point of being painful, but there was a possessiveness to his touch that had been absent, or at least latent, a moment ago. “You looked scared. That’s all. And I don’t want—” and here he cut himself off abruptly, apparently changing his mind about whatever he was going to say next, biting his lip nervously for a moment before he continued. “You should never have to be scared because of me, Kircheis. I don’t like it.”
“I’ll do my best, Lord Reinhard.” It was the only honest promise Kircheis could make in response to that. He didn’t think Reinhard would ever stop doing things that made him fear for his safety, but he could at least try to stand by his side bravely through it all.
“I know you will.” Reinhard sat back in the chair and let his hand drop back into his lap.
Kircheis stood up. “How are you feeling?”
Reinhard frowned, considering it. “Tired.”
“Do you want a cup of tea?”
“Sure.”
Kircheis went to the kitchen and made tea for both of them. When he returned, one cup in each hand, Reinhard had tilted his head back to rest on the back of the chair. The top of the chair didn’t come up high enough to support the back of his head, so he ended up with his face turned all the way up towards the ceiling, neck bent back at practically a ninety-degree angle; it was one of those positions he sometimes arranged himself in that looked uncomfortable but didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. Like a puppet with its strings cut, or a doll with loose joints. It could be unsettling at times, but on this occasion, Kircheis’s attention was quickly drawn away from the peculiarity of it by the way it exposed Reinhard’s pale throat, long and smooth. The light from the wall sconces behind him made shadows pool in the dips of his collarbones. He really was beautiful.
Reinhard’s eyes were closed, but he hadn’t fallen asleep: the corners of his mouth twitched upwards in a smile when he heard Kircheis set the cups down on the table.
Kircheis circled around behind the chair again and gently placed his hands on either side of Reinhard’s head. Reinhard opened his eyes and looked up at him in slight confusion. “What?” he asked.
“Lift your head,” Kircheis said, nudging gently at the nape of his neck with his fingertips.
“Why?” Reinhard asked, but he obliged, sitting up normally.
Kircheis didn’t answer him with words, just moved his hands to the purple ribbon tied in Reinhard’s hair.
It seemed like it was weeks ago—not just this morning—that he’d tied it for him, ignoring Reinhard’s muttered protests about the indignity of the situation. As far as Reinhard was concerned, it was reasonable that he wasn’t allowed to duel in his military uniform, since it was important to maintain the distinction that he was participating solely in his capacity as a private citizen, but it was not reasonable that he should have to wear anything other than a decently fancy-looking set of clothes he already owned and didn’t mind potentially getting blood and dirt on; he had sent Kircheis out to buy something for him to wear at the event while he practiced at the shooting range that day. The justification he’d used had been that Kircheis had done the bulk of the research of the social aspects and behavioral conventions of dueling, while Reinhard had focused on preparing for the fight itself. However, in practice, all this meant was that Kircheis had ended up at the shops with very little to go on, since Reinhard’s instructions consisted in their entirety of “you know my measurements; try not to spend too much”.
(“It’s ridiculous,” Reinhard had said, looking at himself in the mirror while Kircheis made sure the pin at his throat was securely in place. “I look like one of them, Kircheis,” he hissed. “Couldn’t you have found something a little less… aristocratic?”
“That’s the point, Lord Reinhard,” Kircheis had said, finishing arranging Reinhard’s cravat and picking up the hair tie from the box of accessories that lay open on the shelf below the mirror. “Hold still, would you?”)
The ribbon was wrinkled and had slipped down slightly, but it was still tied. However, it was easy to untie; it was just a bow, after all. He pulled on the two long ends and the ribbon came undone with the barely audible hiss of fabric on fabric, and he set it down on the small table next to the arm of the chair and ran his fingers through Reinhard’s hair, returning it to some semblance of its usual glory. It was actually a stroke of pure luck that his hair was long enough to tie back at all. He’d been meaning to get it cut a few days before the duel, but the usual place he went was closed when he’d stopped by on the way home from work, and when he’d complained about this to Kircheis, he had told him that the longer cut suited him and made him look regal, which had led to Reinhard begrudgingly agreeing to leave it that way until after the event.
“Feels nice,” Reinhard said, leaning into Kircheis’s touch as Kircheis continued to work his fingers through his hair.
“Good,” Kircheis said quietly. He rubbed his thumbs over the ridge at the base of Reinhard’s skull and Reinhard sighed in contentment.
Kircheis smiled to himself. He doubted it would be easy to make sure Reinhard took proper care of himself in the coming weeks, but maybe the situation wasn’t all bad.
Reinhard went to bed early that night. It was all Kircheis could do to convince him to eat a slice of leftover meatloaf, brush his teeth, and actually change out of his daytime clothes—left to his own devices, he probably would’ve read the news for a bit and then wandered into the bedroom and passed out in his clothes, getting dirt and sand from the arena on the blankets. He made a weak attempt to convince Kircheis to get into bed with him, but the efficacy of it was severely limited by the fact that he was already half-asleep and that no matter how badly Kircheis wanted to crawl in next to him and hold him close, wanted to throw an arm around his waist and pull Reinhard’s warm body in against his own until he could feel Reinhard’s heartbeat against his skin and let himself be soothed by that indelible proof that he was alive and safe, he had already decided he would be doing nothing of the sort until Reinhard’s arm was at least partially healed. They had one bedroom with two beds—typical for subsidized military housing for people of their rank—and the beds weren’t so small as to be uncomfortable, but neither were they large enough for two people to share without jostling each other’s limbs whenever they shifted positions during the night.
He wasn’t exactly tired, he thought as he returned to the living room, closing the bedroom door behind him so the light wouldn’t keep Reinhard awake. He could tell he was about to be, but it hadn’t really set in yet—he had been so busy worrying about Reinhard and making sure he was properly taken care of that some part of his mind had kicked into a higher level of alertness than where it usually existed, and it would take some time to come down from that.
Still, it was probably unwise to get involved in anything demanding sustained focus. After a bit of deliberation, he picked a book from the bookshelf: Pleiades Exodus, the middle book in a science fiction trilogy that Reinhard had publicly derided as ‘frivolous and gratuitously inaccurate’ but had definitely read in installments by sneaking it off the shelf whenever Kircheis went out for groceries.
The ribbon was still sitting on the small table next to the armchair, practically shining in the golden light from the table lamp, thoroughly wrinkled from having been worn all day. He picked it up, twisting it between his fingers as he settled down in the chair, running his thumb over the smooth material; he didn’t know exactly what it was made of, but the fabric was pleasingly satiny under his touch. It was nice to hold—and, he thought, it’s not like Reinhard was likely to have any need of it ever again, let alone in the next few hours.
He tried to tie it around his wrist to keep it out of the way while he read, but he quickly found that he didn’t have the dexterity to tie it into a bow one-handed, and laughed quietly to himself at the realization that he had just inadvertently given himself some small taste of the frustration Reinhard was about to spend the next two weeks experiencing. It was easy enough to tie it into a simple single knot, but the material was slippery and wouldn’t stay put with just that, and he thought that if he tied it in a double knot it might be too hard to undo later; in the end, he just wrapped it around a couple of his fingers on the hand that supported the cover of the book while he read, leaving his other hand free to turn the pages.
“Do you want me to open that?” Kircheis asked the next morning, watching Reinhard struggle to open a box of cereal. They had finished the previous box a couple of days ago and hadn’t opened the new one before today; Reinhard had set it out on the counter and was trying to open it by sliding his thumb in between the two layers of the top while holding it in place with his palm and fingers, moving incrementally along the top of the box until the two halves of it were fully separated from each other.
“I can get it myself,” Reinhard said. He tried to lift the bag out of the cardboard box, but this was impeded by the fact that the contents of the bag had settled near the bottom and were pressing outward on the sides of the box. After considering the situation for a moment, he picked up the box off the counter, pinned it against the edge of the countertop with his hip, and succeeded in extracting the bag that way.
“Okay,” Kircheis said doubtfully, and set about respectfully pretending not to notice as Reinhard tried several times to tear the bag open with his teeth before eventually giving up, laying the bag flat on the counter, and fetching the scissors.
Kircheis had planned to check in on Reinhard over the course of the day—they usually ate lunch together in the cafeteria, even if their work kept them in separate parts of the building during the rest of the day—but he was busier than usual and didn’t get the chance. He stayed an extra half hour to finish his work, and then, figuring that Reinhard would have left already, he went directly home, only to discover that Reinhard still hadn’t gotten back yet even though the clock was approaching six in the evening. He had changed out of his uniform and was halfway through making pasta when he heard the sound of the front door opening and closing, followed by an annoyed sigh.
He smiled to himself and went to meet Reinhard at the door. “How was your day?” he asked, looking Reinhard up and down: he had been snowed on, and didn’t look happy about it.
“Horrible,” Reinhard said as he shrugged out of his coat and hung it on a hook by the door. Clumps of snow fell from his shoulders and landed on the mat in the entryway. “I can barely type like this. The invoices took me all day.” The invoices were—or previously had been—the easiest part of Reinhard’s job, and therefore his least favorite: plenty of transactions were conducted on paper, ostensibly out of security concerns and respect for tradition (but really because it made it easier to fudge the numbers), and eventually someone had to enter all that information into the computer system. Reinhard usually finished it before lunch.
“I’m sorry,” Kircheis said. “That sounds stressful.”
“It’s fine,” Reinhard said, in a tone that indicated it obviously wasn’t fine. He tilted his head forward and shook the snow out of his hair, then straightened up again with a long-suffering sigh, and Kircheis couldn’t resist the urge to reach out and brush one of the golden locks away from his forehead. Reinhard made a small noise of mock annoyance but didn’t try to stop him. “But enough about my problems,” he said, expression breaking into a smile. “How about you, Kircheis? Did you discover any more irregularities that we can dutifully report and then be ordered to ignore?”
“Uh, no, everything was in perfect order today for once,” Kircheis said, pulling his hand back. He didn’t really want to stop touching Reinhard—he never did—but he often found himself feeling like his movements lacked the natural grace of Reinhard’s; that when Reinhard touched him, it was the most natural thing in the world, but when he tried to initiate some reciprocation, there was a clumsiness to his actions that he couldn’t quite shake. Of course, none of this bothered Reinhard in the slightest, but it often left Kircheis feeling self-conscious in a way that was difficult for him to articulate. “I would have joined you for lunch, but Ensign Brandt couldn’t come in today and I offered to do some of the work from his urgent queue.”
“Oh? Is he okay?” Reinhard asked, following Kircheis to the kitchen.
“He’s fine,” Kircheis said, attending to the pot on the stovetop. “His wife went into labor last night, so he won’t be back at work for a few days at least.”
“Oh.” Reinhard seemed uncomfortable all of a sudden. He always did, when the topic of children came up—Kircheis could hardly blame him, given the state that his own family was in, but privately he had made a conscious decision not to completely avoid the topic around Reinhard, because he thought it might be good for him to be reminded occasionally that not all families were, to put it bluntly, doomed to experience their life together primarily as a sequence of tragedies and traumas. “Well… good for her,” Reinhard said after an awkward silence. He gripped the handle of the fridge, but paused before opening the door.
That wasn’t really the usual response, Kircheis thought, but it was close enough to a socially acceptable congratulatory statement that he let it slide. “I’ll write them a card from both of us,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. You just have to sign it.”
Reinhard glanced over at him, then opened the fridge and frowned at its contents, bending down to examine what was on the bottom shelf. “I doubt they want a card from me. I’ve only met him twice, and I’m hardly well-liked.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Kircheis tried to explain. “Besides, he likes you just fine.” It was possible that this was because most of what Brandt knew about Reinhard was filtered through the way Kircheis spoke about him, but Kircheis didn’t think Reinhard needed to know that detail right at this moment. (And even taking that into account, Brandt was a practical-minded man from a background similar to Kircheis’s own and wasn’t likely to put much stock in the aristocrats’ politically motivated dislike of Reinhard.)
“Fine,” Reinhard said. He didn’t sound convinced, but that was alright. Kircheis didn’t need him to be in complete philosophical agreement about everything—he just needed him to accept, even if only begrudgingly, the necessity of doing certain mildly inconvenient things to maintain his position in the social hierarchy. Actually, it was a source of some amusement for Kircheis that he, as a commoner, was responsible for so much of keeping Reinhard from crossing too far over the line with other nobles into the kind of improper behavior that could get him in serious trouble, as opposed to just cementing his position as an unrepentant and inescapable annoyance. The fact that Kircheis had been tasked with doing most of the research about the social customs of the duel was a natural continuation of how the two of them already navigated their social and political world together, rather than a break in the pattern… but perhaps it wasn’t so surprising, really. After all, wasn’t it those who were on the outside of a system who were often positioned to make the most astute observations about how it functioned?
“Did you want something from the fridge?” Kircheis asked, because Reinhard was still staring at the contents of the bottom shelf like he was psychologically somewhere impossibly far away from the kitchen, practically frozen in place while he waited for some kind of realization or stimulus. All the cold air was being let out of the fridge.
“No,” Reinhard said, suddenly seeming self-conscious. He straightened up and closed the door.
Kircheis doubted that, but suspected it wouldn’t be fruitful to attempt to press the issue. “Speaking of cards,” he said instead, “when are you going to write to Annerose?” It would be a letter, not a card, but it was close enough to serve as a convenient segue.
“I don’t know,” Reinhard said. He leaned back against the kitchen island. “What am I supposed to say to her, Kircheis?” He sounded like he was truly at a loss.
It was unusual for Reinhard to have difficulty figuring out what he wanted to say when he wrote to Annerose. Much more common was the problem of wanting to say too much: it often took him several drafts to arrive at a letter that he didn’t think risked boring her with details of his activities that, while not classified or secret, would only be interesting or even comprehensible to a fellow officer. “Are you angry at her for stopping the duel?” Kircheis asked. Reinhard rarely felt anything negative towards his sister, and when someone had little experience with a particular emotion, it often made it more difficult to figure out how to speak about it.
“What?” Reinhard considered it for a moment, then scoffed and shook his head. “No, it’s… she did what she thought she had to do to protect me. No, it’s the kaiser’s fault. Of course she still thinks of me as a child who can’t protect myself, when we’ve barely been allowed to see each other for six years.” He ran his free hand through his hair, visibly distressed. “And this whole debacle will only make it worse. Damn it, if only I’d won….”
“There will be other opportunities for you to prove yourself,” Kircheis pointed out. “Someday you’ll be able to spend as much time together as you want.” He couldn’t predict the future, of course, but he knew Reinhard’s belief that this would someday be the case was unshakable.
“That’s true,” Reinhard admitted. He didn’t sound completely satisfied, but then again, when was he ever?
It would be fine to leave it at that for now, Kircheis thought. Reinhard would figure out something to say to her—he always did.
It was one thing for Reinhard to be (understandably) annoyed that he’d gotten injured, that he hadn’t been able to secure the mining rights for the Schaffhausens, and that he was having difficulty at work because he wasn’t able to type with both hands. It was another thing entirely for him to mope around like a wet cat, refusing to partake in even the simplest of life’s joys unless he could figure out a way to do it entirely unassisted. Kircheis put up with this kind of behavior for two more days before he decided he’d had enough of it and resolved to convince Reinhard to let him do something—anything—nice for him.
It was Friday night. For the two of them, the phrase “Friday night” lacked the particular cultural implications that it carried in a lot of other households, since they were too young to go out drinking and weren’t the type to do that even if they could, but it did mean that they didn’t have to be at work tomorrow morning, which meant Kircheis had time to cook a nice breakfast for the two of them without having to get up ridiculously early.
If, that is, he could convince Reinhard to let him.
None of his attempts to explain logically why Reinhard should drop his newly individualistic attitude had worked. Intuitively, Kircheis understood that this was because Reinhard’s resistance wasn’t logical in the first place, and therefore couldn’t be broken down logically, but it was still frustrating. He wasn’t sure how else to approach the issue until he remembered Reinhard’s quiet confession—I was worried about you—and realized that he could use the fact that Reinhard was more concerned with keeping him safe and happy than he was with his own health.
Yes, that was an angle that could work.
And it did work, in fact. Kircheis, lying on top of the covers in bed and periodically turning the pages of a book he wasn’t really reading, explained that it worried him to see Reinhard eating dry cereal for breakfast every single day. Reinhard, standing in front of the bathroom mirror and begrudgingly towel-drying the parts of his hair that had gotten wet while he was washing his face, protested at first, but by the time he finished with that and joined Kircheis in the bedroom, he agreed to let Kircheis cook pancakes for him in the morning.
Still…. Reinhard had acquiesced, but that didn’t mean he was completely at ease with letting Kircheis do things for him that he still harbored resentment about being temporarily unable to do for himself. The next morning, he was visibly unsettled—twitchy, almost, in a way that was at odds with the low stakes of the situation—and when the timer went off to indicate that the coffee was ready, he startled like a horse that had seen a snake in the grass, flinching away from it even though he’d been staring directly at the countdown on the device and must have been expecting it to ring. Then again, maybe Kircheis was reading too much into it: after all, in the absence of any particular task that needed accomplishing, Reinhard had always been prone to becoming lost in his own thoughts, and the painkillers he was taking probably weren’t helping.
“I just feel useless,” Reinhard lamented for what felt like the hundredth time that week, fixing the glass coffeepot with a disdainful gaze as he slowly pressed the strainer down to trap the grounds at the bottom. If he was aware of the irony inherent in saying this while doing something useful, he showed no signs of it. The coffee was the one concession to Reinhard’s stubborn independence that Kircheis had no problem making even though this morning was supposed to be about forcing him to take a break from that behavior: Reinhard had already mastered the skill of making coffee one-handed, and he went about it with the casual air of someone going through the motions of a habit to which they attached no particular moral significance, rather than the almost self-flagellatory persistence of someone ruminating on a perceived failure.
“You’re not useless,” Kircheis said, picking up a handful of blackberries from the carton on the countertop and placing them into the pancake batter he’d just poured into the pan. The supply of berries was diminishing more rapidly than could be accounted for by their use in the pancakes; Reinhard had been periodically snacking on them since the moment he’d taken the container out of the fridge.
“Hmph.” Reinhard poured himself a cup of coffee and leaned his hip against the countertop next to Kircheis, picking up the coffee mug delicately by the handle. “Didn’t I promise you I would never lose? What good is a promise like that if I need help with something as trivial as breakfast?”
“Well, are you planning on going into battle against eggs and flour?” Kircheis asked.
Reinhard scowled and turned his gaze to the window. “Of course not. When you put it like that, it sounds stupid.”
“Not everything is a battle, Lord Reinhard.”
“I know that.”
Do you, though? Kircheis thought. Reinhard certainly wasn’t acting like he knew that. “Well, even if the battles are all you care about, you can’t focus only on the moment of the fight itself. The preparation is at least as important. The amount of time you spent practicing with those old-fashioned pistols before the duel tells me you already understand that.” In the context of warfare, the indispensability of proper preparation for a fight was such a basic principle that Kircheis almost felt like he was insulting Reinhard’s intelligence by explaining it aloud, especially since the lectures in which various instructors had drilled it into him were ones they’d attended together, but if Reinhard was going to act like he was incapable of extrapolating it from military tactics to everyday life, he was going to receive an explanation of how to do that, regardless of how he felt about it.
“What are you getting at?” Reinhard asked. He took a tiny sip of his coffee, which was probably still too hot to comfortably drink.
“My point,” Kircheis said, sliding the spatula under the pancake and flipping it, “is that sometimes that preparation looks like studying tactics or reinforcing your supply lines, and sometimes it looks like making sure you rest and let your injuries heal properly so you’ll be in the best condition possible the next time you have to fight.”
Reinhard contemplated this for a moment. As he did so, a look of petulant dissatisfaction crept onto his face, which let Kircheis know he had won the argument even before Reinhard opened his mouth to reply. “Fine, I understand. But,” Reinhard added, one corner of his mouth curling up in a playful smirk as he leaned in a bit closer, “just because I let you have your way today doesn’t mean I’ll let you indulge me like this every morning. Don’t think you can convince me with just facts and logic, Kircheis. I’m not as easily impressed as Dr. Hengsbach.”
Hengsbach had taught the applied cryptography course at the academy. Reinhard and Kircheis had been on track to finish the course with the same grade, since the assignments were all pair work and they always worked together, but the final exam was a solo practical, and while they had both completed it in its entirety, Kircheis had written a solution that explicitly targeted a mathematical weakness in the hash function used by the authentication process on the server they had to hack into, whereas Reinhard’s solution had relied on a precariously assembled web of handwritten test cases which did manage to create a successful attack payload but (at least in Hengsbach’s opinion) failed to demonstrate a coherent understanding of the algorithms at play. This had led to Kircheis being ranked ahead of Reinhard when final grades were given out. The situation was still a source of a not-insignificant amount of consternation for Reinhard, who had always struggled with math and hated being reminded of his difficulties with it; Kircheis would have been perfectly content to never speak of it again, since as far as he was concerned the class was over and what mattered was that they had both done well in it overall, but Reinhard still brought it up occasionally.
“How else am I supposed to convince you of anything, then?” Kircheis asked. He couldn’t stop a playful tone from creeping into his own voice as well. Reinhard’s joy was infectious, especially when this was the first glimmer of it that Kircheis was getting to see after a few days of stubborn sulking.
“I’m not above bribery,” Reinhard murmured, closing the distance between them and resting his forehead against Kircheis’s temple, pressing his nose to his cheek. “Not if it’s you.”
“How terribly anti-egalitarian of you,” Kircheis teased him. He tilted his head slightly, leaning into Reinhard’s touch. “I think there’ll be seven pancakes. You can have four.”
“You’re so kind to me.” Reinhard gave him a kiss on the cheek and then pulled back to take another sip of his coffee.
“I try.”
When they sat down to eat, Kircheis waited eagerly for Reinhard to deliver a verdict on the meal. It would be rather unfortunate, he thought, if he’d gone to all this effort only to create something that wasn’t very good.
“It’s not bad, is it?” he asked when Reinhard finished his first bite. He was asking as much about the experience of being cared for as he was about the quality of his cooking. As for whether or not Reinhard would pick up on that, the question remained open.
Reinhard smiled and put his fork down so he could reach across the table and give Kircheis’s hand an affectionate squeeze. “No, it’s excellent. Thank you, Kircheis. Really.”
Kircheis went to the gym that afternoon for the first time in almost two weeks. His usual schedule had two or three gym days per week, but in the lead-up to the duel, that time had been spent on fencing practice with Reinhard instead, and in the past few days he’d been so busy making sure Reinhard was managing okay with his injury that he hadn’t had time to spend an hour or two away from home. Reinhard hated having him doting and hovering, of course, but he couldn’t very well order him to stop, so even before that day’s breakfast they had arrived at an unspoken understanding about it: Kircheis tried to act like he wasn’t constantly keeping an eye on Reinhard whenever they were together, and Reinhard pretended he was succeeding at it.
Reinhard, to his credit, managed to resist the urge to put up a major fuss about not being allowed to return to his own workouts yet. The full extent of his protest was that he tried to weasel his way into accompanying him by offering to spend the whole time on a stationary bike. However, this was less of an actual suggestion and more of a long-standing joke between them; it was well-established that Reinhard found the boredom of long cardio sessions completely intolerable.
“I’ll be home as soon as I can,” Kircheis said as he was putting on his scarf and coat, raising his voice slightly so he could be heard clearly from the entryway.
“Don’t rush,” Reinhard replied from the small desk in the living room. He had finally started working on his letter to Annerose, using assorted small objects from around the apartment as makeshift paperweights to hold the loose paper in place while he wrote. “If we both get hurt, it’ll be chaos.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” Kircheis reassured him, and headed out.
When he returned after the better part of two hours, he found Reinhard still in the same position at the desk, having accumulated a small pile of crumpled-up discarded drafts but also having managed to produce a couple of pages that he seemed to be happy with and had set aside. Kircheis didn’t try to impose by looking closely at them, but he knew well enough what Reinhard’s letters always looked like: pages covered front and back in neat cursive with wide loops, text occasionally running up against the right edge of the page in places where he had misjudged the length of a word at the end of a line.
Kircheis wasn’t exactly sore from his workout, but he was tired and could tell it would benefit him to have some extra time to rest, so when he went to bed that night he told Reinhard to let him get an extra hour or two of sleep.
He awoke the next morning to the sensation of the mattress dipping as Reinhard sat down next to him, and the gentle brush of Reinhard’s fingers through his hair. There was some light coming in around the edges of the curtains, but not a lot—the sun was in the middle of rising, so it was probably around nine in the morning. Reinhard was sitting on the edge of the bed and looking down at him with a fond, sweet smile that only ever appeared in these private moments.
“I’m sorry for being so stubborn, Kircheis,” Reinhard said, still idly playing with his hair. He was dressed in casual clothes—dark blue trousers, and a gray sweater that had naturally fallen into his possession when Kircheis had outgrown it—and his hair was still slightly wet from the shower. “I hope you can forgive me.”
“Of course.” Kircheis didn’t need to hesitate or think it over before answering. As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t any wrongdoing to forgive Reinhard for, not really; what had bothered him about Reinhard’s behavior wasn’t so much that it was irritating as it was that it reflected a state of inner distress. If the latter was fixed, then the former was of no real concern to him.
Reinhard moved his hand down to rest on Kircheis’s chest, over his heart, drumming his fingertips lightly on his collarbone through the thin fabric of his pajama shirt. “Would you make pancakes for us again today? Please?” He stumbled slightly over the last word, like the shape of it was unfamiliar in his mouth.
“Yes,” Kircheis said, “but I think we’re out of things to put in them. Do you want berries from that market in the plaza?”
Reinhard shook his head. “All the snow’s melted into slush. It’s terrible. I’m not going out there.”
“I’ll go by myself,” Kircheis said. He really didn’t mind. They needed other things from the shops anyway: honey, tomato sauce, and olives, just to name a few, and after making another batch of pancakes, they’d be almost out of milk.
“No, don’t,” Reinhard said. “I want you here with me.”
“Alright, alright.” Kircheis reached up and found Reinhard’s hand with his own, bringing it to his lips and pressing a kiss to his knuckles the way one would to a lady at a ball. Reinhard ducked his head slightly: there wasn’t enough light in the room to tell for sure, but Kircheis thought he might be blushing. “But that means you’re getting plain pancakes.”
“That’s fine, Kircheis.” Reinhard punctuated his sentence with an amused exhale that almost qualified as a laugh, and then reluctantly pulled his hand out of Kircheis’s grasp, standing up and heading towards the kitchen. “Come on,” he said, pausing in the doorway and looking back over his shoulder. “Our coffee’s getting cold.”