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They’re in bed late at night, and Agron is tracing lines of ink on Nasir’s skin. It’s his first and only tattoo, located just below his collarbone—a quote in Arabic calligraphy, so convoluted and elaborate that Agron couldn’t even make out the start of the sentence, let alone what it means.
“The bird is on the wing,” Nasir says, first in Arabic and then English. “It’s from a poem.”
From memory, he recites:
Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
the Winter garment of Repentence fling
The bird of Time has but a little way
to fly—and lo! the bird is on the wing!
His voice is soft and stunning and Agron kisses the dark mahogany ink reverently.
“Omar Kayim, right?” he guesses. Nasir smiles.
“Pre-Renaissance World Lit paid off, huh?” he teases.
“What does it mean?”
“It means—to me, it means that, when times are hard, you regret the things you’ve done, the things you are that people don’t like. But when you are happy and at peace with yourself, you know that you can’t escape them… I was very, very closeted in high school. I got this tattoo once I finally decided to stop… hating myself.”
Agron leans down to bury his face in Nasir’s shoulder and holds him tightly. Nasir ducks his head down to meet him, carding his fingers through his hair.
“I love you,” he murmurs.
“Love you, too,” Agron says, his voice muffled. He tilts his head up and smiles self-deprecatingly. “Sometimes it scares me, how much I love you.”
“I know. Me, too.”
Nasir runs his hands over Agron’s back lazily, scratching lightly with his nails, tracing rivers and mountains on his bones. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply.
“What about yours?” he asks eventually.
“Which one?”
“All of them.” He opens his eyes and extricates Agron’s left arm from beneath him. His fingers brush lightly over the small, scratchy words on Agron’s wrist. “This one first.”
“Arm, aber sexy. It’s a quote from the mayor of Berlin—it means ‘poor but sexy.’ I was born in Berlin, born poor. All of that. And I just wanted to always remember that just because something looks rundown or dangerous doesn’t mean it can’t be…”
“Sexy?” Nasir offers with a cheeky grin, pinching Agron’s ass. Agron laughs.
“Beautiful.”
“And this?”
He touches the jagged blue line that circles Agron’s left bicep.
“A steady heartbeat. When my mom… got sick, I would go to the hospital with all of my homework and stuff and stay there for hours, listening to the monitor. A nurse told me when she died, but I didn’t even believe her until I went in the room and it was quiet. Then, the year I was supposed to start college, Duro got into a car accident. It was really bad; I ended up taking a gap year to take care of him. He was in a coma for over a week, and it was the same thing. As long as I heard the heartbeat, I knew he was okay. 51 beats per minute. I could tap it out in my sleep.”
Finally, Nasir’s hand travel over his shoulders again. The shield on Agron’s back is almost as big as his hand. He knows exactly what it looks like: golden-bronze against Agron’s tanned skin, with metal vines twined around the edges and a stylishly-chipped Greek letter in the center. Agron got it just after they had met, when Nasir was too shy to ask what it meant, or to do anything but stammer out a compliment while his eyes devoured the muscled skin before him.
“That’s the one I’m going to regret in ten or twenty years,” Agron says grimly. Nasir laughs.
“Do you regret it now?”
“No, not yet. I got it after Saxa pointed out that I was always trying to protect everyone—Duro, Spartacus, her, Donar, Naevia. Fuck, I even try to protect Crixus sometimes, and he’s—”
“One of your closest friends.”
“—an asswipe. And, you know, that’s sort of something to be proud of, even when things go to shit. Then, when I was looking up designs and stuff, I found out that the ancient Spartans used to sometimes put lambdas on their shields, and the lambda just so happens to be an international symbol for gay rights.”
“’Just so happens,’ my ass,” Nasir snorts. “You totally planned that, didn’t you.”
“No! I may have planned on getting a lambda at some point, but I swear I didn’t know about the shield thing. Too bad—now I’ve got to look for another excuse to go under the needle.” Agron grins cockily and nips at Nasir’s collarbone. “I kind of like the idea of ‘I heart Nasir’ over my ass. Thoughts?”
“Not visible enough. Make it your face and we’ve got ourselves a deal.”
It’s late at night, and they giggle to themselves like children, and everything feels very permanent.