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The hard-won, velvet quiet that falls over the uppermost floors of an inn when the midnight bell rings and, like honey, makes its way groundward in a steady, saccharine flood has found them nestled together once again.
Kuttenberg, this time. Bellies too full of laughter and good, floral mead to safely stumble home to their little nest above the forge, they'd dropped the groschen for a room with a door to close between themselves and prying eyes and fallen in a tangle of limbs into one of the two beds. Pillow and surprisingly intact blanket pilfered from the bed left lonely, they stretch and strain and giggle breathlessly into the shared air between their bodies as they try to kick free of their clothes without rising again.
“I am very drunk,” Hans breathes into Henry’s face.
“Neither of us can hold our drink for shit anymore,” Henry groans back, finally escaping the left leg of his hose and flinging it in victory to the floor with its sibling.
“I suppose that starving for both food and booze for weeks like monks in hair shirts will do that to a body.” Hans layers the blankets like sheafs of parchment, battlements against the steadily chilling night air prying its way around the panes of glass in the single, small window; the creeping cold encroaching on their halcyon days that neither of them will acknowledge aloud herding them under the covers and into each other’s arms, the desperation for closeness keener each day that passes.
For now, however, the bitterness of time’s inexorable passing is forgotten in favor of savoring time well spent. Hans rests his cold toes against Hal’s ever-warm calves, pressing hard for the simple joy of feeling his lover’s body give beneath his own. They are too deep in their cups for either of them to slip into the other, regardless of how cheekily their braies lay abandoned on the floor with the rest of their clothing. Kiss and touch are exchanged like conversation, meandering from nose to knuckle like gossip wanders on market days: lackadaisical, avoiding the punchline in order to draw the meeting out longer.
The doubled blankets above and the linen-covered mattress beneath them catch the extra body heat they made while wriggling out of their clothing and fold it around them until their bodies go languid, until they are indistinguishable from two tomcats colonizing a sunbeam on a stone floor.
“Birdie,” Henry murmurs into the warm, thin skin just behind his lover’s ear. “When?”
He doesn't have to elaborate. The warmth and softness in his tone, the vulnerable rise of pitch at the end, the bruisingly tender music of the shaky breath he takes after. Hans knows the handwriting of his trailing thoughts well enough to scribble in the missing words in his own handwriting.
“Bozhena’s, when I woke up.” Hans nestles further down on the rented bed and buries his chilly nose in the shallow bowl of Henry’s suprasternal notch, speaks directly to his heart through the cage of bone surrounding it. “Heard your voice, heard you sound hale and whole.” Henry can feel his lips brushing his skin as he speaks, moths flirting with flame. “Started running from it then, too, but it's when I knew.”
Henry wonders what it would've been like to take the paces necessary to cross from within Eden’s hedged palisades out into the knowing sands; how much his awareness of his own nakedness and propensity for sin would weigh as they toppled down on his shoulders. Which of them would've eaten the apple. Or if they'd have held it between them, Hans’ long fingers pressing into Henry’s chin where they cradled the fruit – because he would insist on being the one to hold it, this truth Henry knows in his marrow – as they leaned in, and each took their bite from it together.
Two kisses sink into his flesh, a call and response to the percussion of his heart. Henry feels the question turn back on him in the breath Hans takes, the shy way his arms circle around his waist to count with calloused fingertips the still-too-apparent foothills of his spine. The arm Hans snuck beneath him is pressing into his ribs in a less than comfortable way; he does not care.
“When you stood above me on the scaffold.”
He does not say gallows, he does not mention the bells, nor the captain’s fever, nor the rasp of the hangman’s rope and how, even in the brief moments it kissed skin Henry now considers his sovereign territory, it managed to worry red into the milk-white of Hans’ graceful neck. Hunter-deft hands press flat to Henry’s back, mooring them both to the other.
“The moment I was most sure I'd lost you, I knew how badly I wanted to keep you.” He closes his eyes against the nauseous deluge of remembered panic, frantic adoration, and the landslide of grief that nearly drowned him in that ill-bent courtyard. “The time it took to get you out of Maleshov nearly drove me mad, knowing you were so close but I couldn't see your scowl or hear your laugh. Having to ride all over creation and stop everywhere except where you were.” He turns his head to press his cheek into fine blond hair, breathes in through his nose and softens away from the anxiety-grey memories and into the arms cradling him. “I don't ever want you out of my reach again.”
“If it were up to me I'd never be out of your bed again,” Hans purrs, closing his mouth over the jut of Henry’s collarbone for less than a breath before a yawn distorts his handsome face. Henry cannot see him in this moment, but watching his lover slip into somnolence from inches away has become such a habit he knows each line of bone and flesh, knows which tooth is missing from that tired-wide mouth, knows how dearly Hans’ eyes crinkle up when he yawns. What it looks like when he then sleepily smiles at Henry, those same eyes soft with the promise of another sunrise, another game of dice, another adventure. Like the dream of those things is already playing out on the stage of Hans’ mind and if Hal could only look closely enough, perhaps leaned down and peered in through his sleep-broad pupils, Henry could watch the two of them patter on like a courtly pageant in the rosy haze of his dearest friend’s illustrious imagination.
“I love you,” Henry says, as though it's the simplest truth in the world and not the tangled, knotted, messy thing that it is. He thinks of the apple again, skin crisp and cracking between his crooked teeth.
Hans leans in to bite it with him; again, forever, always. “And I you.”