Chapter Text
Two bottles of wine into the evening, Reuental is feeling something perilously close to contentment.
The wine is a good vintage, pale and sweet, from the orchards near Odin’s equator. It’s not exactly to his taste - he’ll have a devil of a headache on the morrow - but it’s the stuff Mittermeyer prefers, which is why he keeps a stock of it on hand.
The wine has brought a pleasant flush to Mittermeyer’s freckled cheeks; somehow, his fellow admiral avoids the fishbelly pallor of months spent only under the artificial glow of his ship’s fluorescents. It must be that he spends three-quarters of his shore leave in his wife’s garden.
The rest he spends here.
Happiness has never felt within Reuental’s grasp — he’s ill-suited to it by nature — but if anything comes close, it must be this; the pleasant tenor of Mittermeyer’s voice, as he lays out imaginary fleets over the table in the form of playing cards, conjuring a battle where their golden admiral comes head-to-head with that rebel thorn Yang Wenli.
“Say,” Reuental says, reaching for the third bottle waiting at his hand. He can already feel the evening spooling out before him; he’ll have the pleasure of Mittermeyer’s company until dawn, when he’ll rouse and stumble to the door, and then Reuental will suggest, in all innocence, that he’s had far too much to drink; why not sleep it off here? “I saw Marquis Lohengramm and Kircheis at the officer’s club yesterday. Why is it that one never sees one of them without the other?”
“The officer’s club?” Mittermeyer asks, looking up in just the way Reuental hoped he would. “What, without me?”
“You were occupied,” Reuental says. He could make a joke here - with what, I couldn’t say - but he’d seen other officers make jokes about Eva’s noted lack of children, and there’s nothing tantalizing in the way it makes Mittermeyer’s eyes go so flat and dark. A gentleman does not offer blunt insult to his friend’s wife, and it could sometimes be argued that Oskar von Reuental is a gentleman. “Anyway. They didn’t see me, at first — they were quite occupied, whispering to each other in that way of theirs. And I saw Marquis Lohengramm lean forward, like this —” He leans in, and reaches up. Mittenmeyer’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t pull away; Reuental’s fingers brush against the gold of his hair, catching a lock and tucking it back behind his ear. He leans back. “Just like that.”
A slow blush creeps across Mittermeyer’s cheeks. “Truly? His Excellency is fond of Kircheis.” He shakes his head, shaking the idea off like a dog shaking water from his coat, but his lips purse thoughtfully. “They’re a fine pair.” The note of admiration in his voice pulls at a thread in Reuental’s gut, reverberating in a strain at once keen and sharply envious.
“Certainly.” His hand hovers by Mittermeyer’s face, perilously close to his skin. “But our dear admiral pets his second like a dog.”
“If His Excellency will touch Kircheis like that in public, can you imagine what they’re like behind closed doors?” Mittermeyer muses. There’s a note of challenge in his voice.
“I have little trouble imagining,” Reuental says, darkly.
Mittermeyer’s eyebrows rise, and he gives him a look, mock-scandalized. “Just what are you thinking?”
Before Reuental can think better of it, he stands, coming to stand before Mittermeyer. He tips Mittermeyer’s head back with a tilt of his fingers, and shifts closer to him, until their thighs touch. His fingers snake up, curling in Mittermeyer’s hair roughly, with that same casual callousness that Lohengramm can summon at a whim; and the admiral’s eyes go wide, looking up at him with an innocent curiosity that looks so very Kircheis .
Reuental would praise him for playing his part, but that he suspects it is entirely genuine.
The moment lingers. He’s leaning over, almost into Mittermeyer’s lap; he has Mittermayer captive, caught in his gaze like a mongoose before a snake. He could — should — stop there, but instead Reuental leans down to press a crushing kiss against his lips.
Mittermeyer makes a little sound, surprised and puppyish.
“Something along those lines,” Reuental says, lazily, relaxing his grip on Mittermeyer’s hair. “Can’t you see it?”
Mittermeyer’s blush is almost as bright as that awful gaudy ship Marquis Lohengramm had given Kircheis, and his eyes are dark, irises swallowed up by the pupils. “Reuental.” He blinks, and swallows. “You’re drunk,” he says, and then his eyes narrow, going from the bottles on the table back to Reuental’s face. “Really drunk.” As if to confirm his suspicion, he catches Reuental’s shoulder, pulling him down to sit beside him on the couch.
Reuental knows Mittermayer’s game; he’s so rarely pliant, rarely less than unbending, except in moments like these. But the heat of Mittermeyer’s hands, even through his uniform, is enough to make him comply, and he ends up half-sprawled over Mittermeyer. “Perhaps.”
Mittermeyer laughs, and waves a hand. “Say things like that, and you’ll get people talking — about Odd-Eyes Reuental, and his morbid fascinations.”
“I can’t help but be as I am. Would you have be otherwise?”
“No,” Mittermeyer says, and there’s a note of — something in his voice. Hesitation? It slips through Reuental’s muddled senses. “So you really think it’s like that, between Kircheis and Reinhard?”
“You can’t see it?” Reuental says. “Well, who are we to speculate? But I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Mittermeyer holds his gaze for a moment, and then looks away. “Hm.”
“Have I shocked you?” Reuental teases. “Surely not. We cannot all have tastes so mundane as yours, Wolf.”
Mittermeyer shoots him a look, nettled. “I know the value of responsibility,” he says, catching Reuental’s shoulder and giving him a little shake. “As foreign a concept as that may be to you.” He untangles himself from Reuental to grab the almost-finished bottle, and tip the rest of the contents into his mouth. The light catches in the glass of the bottle, catching the dun pink of his lips and refracting it over the glossy green surface for a few fractions of a moment, before he slams it back onto the table.
He beats a retreat out to the hallway, leaving Reuental looking at the curve of his uniformed shoulders, something between caution and shame curdling in his chest.
“Ill-mannered,” Reuental murmurs to himself. It’s half fond, half a curse.
In the glass of the washroom, Mittermeyer runs a finger over his lower lip. The feeling of Reuental’s kiss lingers there like the blistering aftershock of an electrical burn.
The way Reuental had looked at him - the light catching warm in his brown eye, imperious and cold in his blue —
This must be how Reuental’s women feel , Mittermeyer thinks. When they manage to lure him to their beds, for however fleeting a time. His stomach twists sharply, revulsion and giddy desire twining together under the fog of the wine on his senses. In the murk, it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins.
He rests his head in his hands, until the cold of the tapwater draws the foolish flush from his face.
A joke. It didn’t mean anything. It never means anything; no more than any of Reuental’s morbid flights of fancy, no more than the way he’ll kiss Eva’s hand in Mittermeyer’s doorway to scandalize the neighbors.
Damn him for the provocative fool he is; he’ll say anything, do anything, just to test the weight of it. Thank the gods he is sharp enough to guard his tongue around others. Most of the time.
Whatever passes between Reinhard and Kircheis, it’s plain for all to see that Reinhard hangs the stars on his second in command. Reuental has no regard for his conquests. He’s proven that, again and again.
This is just another of their games. And what would Reuental do, if Mittermeyer betrayed himself?
Would it simply be another game won?
The room spins a little around Mittermeyer, the floor seeming to list under his feet like a cruiser deck absorbing the jolt of enemy fire. He catches the edge of the sink. The timbers of Reuental’s awful, aristocratic manse creak and shudder around him, moaning under the chill night breeze.
He’d half-hoped Reuental would have fallen asleep by the time he reemerges; his friend is not half so good at holding his liquor as he thinks he is. But he’s still awake, looking to the doorway with uneasiness glittering in his eyes.
“Mittermeyer?” he says, and Mittermeyer hears a trace of worry there too. Hah, worried that he at last had pushed things too far?
Mittermeyer flops down beside him. “Too much wine,” he murmurs, trying to muster sanguinity as he rests his head against Reuental’s shoulder. It’s an excuse not to look into his face, he tells himself.
The fabric of Reuental’s jacket creaks as he lifts a hand. Cool fingers are pressed to Mittermeyer’s cheek. All that cold water, and he still feels like he’s running a fever; it must be the wine in his blood, or Reuental’s stuffy old manse.
“Hmm. Shall we turn in, then?” Reuental says.
He’s forgotten the part where he persuades Mittermeyer to stay, but Mittermeyer can’t bring himself to care. If he goes back to Eva tonight, he’ll fall to some sort of strange pieces and confuse everything.
Once, under Alliance guns, they’d passed a terrifying night, pressed back-to-back in a snowbank; Mittermeyer had been bleeding slowly, from a terrible wound to his side, and half-convinced he’d never see the lights of that miserable Imperial outpost again, never mind the welcoming glow of his parents’ house. That night, Reuental had been the only point of warmth in the whole world; one unyielding point of hope in the dizzying snow.
And then again, when he had come to save him from the firing squad.
Most of the time, the intensity of feeling fades the the soft glow of fondness, a time-tested friendship that is one of the pillars on which Mittermeyer has built his life. But every now and then, when he looks at Reuental, what lies between them becomes that dizzying thing again, that line between himself and death, hooked right in his sternum, as sure and inescapable as the gravitational pull of a black hole.
“Mittermeyer?” Reuental prompts, and now he’s starting to sound downright sober.
Mittermeyer laughs, despite himself. He’ll try his damnedest to disconcert Reuental, and only ever succeed in doing it by accident.
“Let’s turn in,” he says, and lets Reuental haul him to his feet. And if they end up in the same bed, they can blame it on the wine, and not speak of it after.