Work Text:
1978
“Let’s cut to the chase. How much does it take for you to rat him out?”
It was getting cold as the sun slinked towards London’s spotty horizon. Klaus shoved a stiff hand down his coat pocket and felt around it: the cool lining of its insides, the grounding weight of his zippo, a roll of 50 pound bills he’d withdrawn before ambushing Eroica’s accountant at the end of his office hours. Just for good measure, he ran his thumb over the contents of his pocket again. Something about that man made his hair stand on ends.
Klaus looked sternly down at the accountant who brought a hesitant finger to his mouth and scratched at his lower lip. He registered that the padded shoulders of his suit jacket were wider than the actual breadth of James’ body; he was slightly hunched over within his crisp corporate armor. “Seventy pounds?” He offered. It was a reasonable sum - neither unfairly high nor low enough to be merely symbolic - and Klaus found himself irritated at the idea of striking a reasonable bargain with him, a bottom-feeder even before the likes of Eroica.
He plucked two bills out of his pocket, and only retracted his hand once he was most involuntarily given his change. Ever an opportunist, James opened his mouth as though he considered asking if he could keep the two fifties, but in the end he made a clever decision against it. Then Klaus handed James a notepad, and waited close by with his hands in his pockets as he wrote down a few addresses. Klaus pocketed the notepad, suddenly overcome with a sense that he wouldn’t sleep well unless he voiced some type of distaste: “Can’t you put some more clothes on? Your handwriting is shaky. If you’re too cheap to buy your own, take one of those foppish coats from your boss.”
James took half a step back, but Klaus handed it to him for not averting his eyes. Even most of the military personnel who worked under him did so under his scrutiny, just paternal enough to be truly humiliating. For all of James’ prey animal mannerisms, Klaus supposed that Eroica’s whims had beaten a bit of resilience to humiliation into him. He said, “This is my winter suit. It’s pure wool…” Klaus let the non-answer trail off into the evening.
They made involuntary eye contact. James’ lower lashline, thick with clumpy mascara, seemed to be making an in-joke mockery of Klaus. “A new one costs eight hundred pounds,” he said in the end. It was a good-looking business suit that wouldn’t look out of place on Herr A, if not Klaus. It was worn to the bone, though, and bragging with such a belonging was ridiculous enough to outweigh the garment’s quality. It was a paradoxical wretchedness.
“Expensive, expensive,” Klaus agreed. He felt around the inside of his pocket again, tracing the cool lining and the two items inside. “And how much do you cost?” He was making a mockery of the man’s habit to assign things a fixed value. It was also a detriment to the conversation - Klaus didn’t care for high-quality clothing, he shopped out of convenience. The question’s tertiary value was in berating the accountant as an afterthought.
“Sixty pounds for a go,” James held his hand out with exaggerated preparedness. He parried Klaus’ jab, his tone bitter and unserious. Even though he was being sarcastic, he disgusted Klaus with the very idea of buying sex more cheaply than intel. It angered him, pushing him to the realization that he could force the little fucker down and bend him over for nothing, if he wanted to. It’d probably make James too happy for comfort. He liked freebies.
Klaus ran his thumb over the zippo, over the relieved wad of cash. “An amoral bugger who betrays his superior for loose change talking back to me makes me sick,” is what he said. Flaunting his principled nature before James with the afterthought of a violent scene lingering behind his eyelids made him uncomfortable. They looked at each other, and they both thought ‘unprincipled’ was not the worst Klaus thought of James. It wasn’t even the third worst thing.
“Then I’ll be on my merry way,” James flashed his teeth rather stiffly, that servile stretched-out smile that company clerks excelled at. It was a ‘get out of my sight’ smile. It grew weaker with the approach of overtime. Every bit a company clerk, James also said, “Good business.” An excess speck of makeup hit his cheek when he blinked. He wiped it off with his pinkie.
“Let’s do this again sometime…?”
The phrase hung in the air. James left after thoroughly inspecting his pay, ever so wary of counterfeits.
Klaus lit a cigarette, took a very short intake of breath and soon blew a wispy ghost towards the horizon’s blur. A mental note of ‘78-56-80’ flashed in his thoughts, going away as soon as it came.
**
“And you gave him everything I told you to write?”
Dorian left his watch on the vanity, face down between a shaving razor and a tie pin he once nicked from a most unpleasant man he shared a hotel elevator ride with. It was shaped like a dog stretched out in its run - tacky, but its eye was a real ruby. He hadn’t been able to resist the itch.
“I did, Milord! I added a red herring of my own, too. That Major knows you a little too well. ” James chimed from the bedside. He was waiting. The only reason he didn’t sit down on the bed and take his shoes off was the intensity of that fixation. He even seemed to be holding his breath as long as he could before each exhale, like he hoped to accelerate the process by inventing an additional axis of suspense. Dorian felt a pang of pity and fondness in his breast.
“I’ve been overworking you,” he said softly, as though poking at a boulder resting on that mountain top. It began its roll towards Sisyphus’ expectant, open arms.
“Oh, it’s nothing much. You’ve been working hard, so I’m giving it my all to support you,” James flashed his teeth in a business-like smile. It was the pretty kind of grimace that begged for a good review and a recommendation to a friend. It folded when Dorian held his waist; just put his palms flat against the sides of it, and James’ body reflexively unclenched its nervous tension. He twitched back into it as Dorian’s hand slid over his stomach, and then finally dropped it entirely like a millstone falling away. He leaned back into the touch. “Milord, you’ve kept me on my toes. I really thought we’d just go to bed again today.”
“Let me guess - having a comfortable bed to sleep in is an excessive luxury, and it’s perfectly acceptable to have a sofa bed?”
“What a half-baked impression,” James sighed. Dorian’s hands moved, up and down between the jacket’s second button and the first stretch of the trousers. “I’d never buy a sofa bed if I could find an office chair that doesn’t hurt my back.”
“And run on power naps? So ascetic,” He undid the second button, then the third. The suit jacket hung open, held only by that first button at James’ sternum. “Well, maybe it’s not so bad to heed your advice once in a while. Let’s do away with the bed.”
James’ breath came shaky as the last button was undone, and the jacket discarded sideways. He was wearing an old-fashioned tie. Dorian loosened it with his thumb, but chose to leave it on.
“It’s rare that happiness comes to us these days, isn’t it?” Dorian met James’ eyes in the vanity mirror’s reflection. He didn’t know why he thought to say so. Even though he was trembling just from being felt up, James’ eyes were very intent on the exchange. He really did have an eye for a good bargain. He was hardened in a different way from Dorian.
“Don’t say it like it’s not your fault,” James reprimanded the mirror. “You fell for that closet case yourself. Now reap what you’ve sown…”
Dorian’s hand slid below what could be seen in the mirror. It slid out of view. With its abandoning the glass square in which they could see their own image, James was allowed to make a sound.
Dorian leaned close to his ear, “If I obediently reap what I’ve sown, will you serve my last meal? Make it a stingy serving of stale bread if you’d like.”
“Crack your teeth trying to chew on it,” James agreed, and Dorian pushed him over into the vanity. He caught the sides of it for purchase at the last moment, and his face hung close to the mirror, his narrow back rising and falling with labored breaths. He could no longer see Dorian’s reflection, so he looked back over his shoulder as much as their position allowed it. This time around, his business-like smile was in a disarray, retaining its servile quality without the composure required to make it dismissive. His voice was nearly sing-songy, “Half a loaf’s always better than none, isn’t it?”
Dorian pushed him down hard enough for a dull impact to resound through the room. His forehead ended up pressed into the mirror, and it fogged with his breath as he cried out, arousal and surprise. His head slid further down with Dorian’s movements, and he left the reflection entirely, pressed uncomfortably into that vanity’s small tabletop. Dorian could only see himself anymore. He began to fuck James as hard as he could with no buildup, mostly because he was suddenly frustrated with all the empty space around himself, but remembered seemingly out of nowhere that he cared for pretty men’s suffering. Automatization of the artistic process was a dreadfully concerning trend. He brought the image of James back inside the mirror frame with a tug at his hair, and pressed forward until they were joined across the length of their bodies. He put his hand up James’ shirt on a whim and grabbed at his chest. Shklovsky’s Art, as Device put into practice earned him a weak scream. James’ eyes were shut tight, and he was waiting. The only reason he didn’t beg for it was that artificial suspense pushed to its peak, so high-strung that it was sure to hurt in its rebound, like a gun’s violent kickback.
Dorian held the left breast in his hand like something very foreign, even though its shape was lovingly depicted on every other painting that hung across the walls of that house. He couldn’t remember if it was James or himself who had first requested for his shirt to be left on during sex. This, then, was estrangement. The body he held more times than he could count revealed itself in a way that required an employment of conscious thought processes; the meaning of a ‘derangement of familiarity’ dawned on him. He flicked his thumb over a nipple, and James’ forehead met the mirror surface with a slam that carried his entire weight. They fell silent for a while afterwards.
**
1979
Klaus’ .44 Magnum was pressed into the side of Dorian’s forehead, ready to fire. Dorian was very calm about it given the position at hand. The threat kept his heartbeats in his throat and prevented them from straying lower. Klaus’ head was pressed against the wall of that warehouse, sideways along with his back. He was looking down at Dorian, mostly with his left eye.
“If you put your hands on me, I’ll shoot you,” said Klaus. Sweat stuck the finer portions of his straight bangs to his forehead, and his eyelashes hung low, like his lids felt too heavy to keep fully alert. Dorian still couldn’t decide if his face was effeminate or not. His erection pressed into Dorian’s stomach, an arrow to Sebastian. He was struggling to breathe evenly.
“I won’t lay a hand on you. I promise,” Dorian raised his hands at head level to signal surrender. A very thin strand of his own hair was sweat-stuck to his cheek, and he felt its tip in his mouth. He didn’t dare move too suddenly to brush it off. He didn’t know how trigger-happy Klaus was, really. He’d only ever assessed his readiness to make use of his fists.
Klaus didn’t put the gun away, but Dorian could feel him loosen his grip on it. Blood circulated back into Klaus’ knuckles. He leaned his head back flatly against the wall he stood by. He wasn’t looking sideways or down anymore; he looked away from Dorian like he couldn’t bear to see him, even though he had gotten hard from Dorian putting a knee between his legs. His eyes fell shut; a juvenile permission, operating on the principle of ‘things I can’t see cease to exist’. He didn’t put the gun away.
Dorian slid very slowly to his knees. He wanted to look, but he was scared, too. He kept his eyes closed as he undid the button and the fly, making sure not to touch Klaus’ skin. Instead of taking him out of the trousers, he pulled the elastic of his underwear down to the middle of Klaus’ thighs along with them. When he realized he succeeded without breaking his promise, he breathed out a sigh of relief.
A slight pressure was applied to the Magnum at his temple. He wasn’t sure if it was a nudge to keep going or a warning to stop. Keeping his eyes closed, he took Klaus in his mouth, as much as he could with no funny business. He tried to do it like a woman would do it. He remembered that Klaus was a soldier who didn’t go out for fun. Then he tried to do it like a hooker would do it.
For a while there was only labored breathing. Even as Klaus got slightly vocal, Dorian brushed off those sounds that could pass for physical exertion or rasps of breath in the heat of fighting, which didn’t leave him with very much. Finally, there was a weaker groan. Klaus didn’t sound so weak when he was injured. Injury only served to reaffirm his strength and anger. Dorian had taken him into the soft inside of his cheek, so he opened his eyes somewhat apologetically, as in ‘I can’t even see much, now’.
Klaus’ eyes were fixed on him. He was biting down on a leather glove he previously had in his pocket, and looked like a kid caught in something he shouldn’t be doing.
“You look comfortable like this,” he said through his teeth. Maybe it was meant to be an insult, but it came off as an observation. He wasn’t ever too perceptive when it came to Dorian’s feelings. Was he expecting a verbal reply?
Dorian kept it up. He didn’t feel especially strongly about using his mouth for Klaus, it’s just that it wasn’t comfortable. There was a gun pressed to his forehead, which Klaus seemed to have forgotten about entirely. His legs were trembling, and he replaced the glove in his mouth with the entire palm of his hand pressed over it, and kept looking at the alien sight between his knees. He was assessing it.
The gun clanked to the floor all of a sudden. Dorian wasn’t expecting it to make such a heavy sound. Klaus leveraged both his palms against Dorian’s head to tear him away as he came with a shout, but Dorian didn’t let himself be more than halfway pushed off. He swallowed the bitterness down, and finally slid away. His jaw was terribly stiff, and he felt limp as if having narrowly avoided tumbling down a flight of stairs.
As he caught up with his breath, he suddenly realized that Klaus was looking at him with an emotion other than anger and frustration. He even seemed to be a little apologetic. “You should’ve spat it out.” he said with an alien note of concern in his voice, even if he didn’t help Dorian stand and left him to use his own strength to wobble upward.
“Have I really got enough manliness or dignity left in your eyes that swallowing a load is beneath me?” Dorian smiled a smile he knew couldn’t reach his eyes. Because there was no longer a gun pressed to his head, he reached out to fix Klaus’ lapels and eliminate telltale signs of screwing around during work time.
“You should’ve spat it out because you think it’s disgusting.”
Klaus’ eyes, deep green on the verge of hazel, bore into his own. Because Dorian had the leverage of Klaus’ most painful open secret, he sometimes forgot in moments like these that Klaus was a man who earned his wages through espionage and coercion. Being able to leverage Klaus’ queerness against him desensitized him to his own hatred of being perceived. He violently shuddered. “Everyone would be sucking cock if it tasted like creme brulee, but we don’t live in a perfect utopia, do we?”
“It’s not about the taste,” Klaus didn’t move an inch, refusing to budge from where he glimpsed Dorian’s insides hanging out like roadkill. And at the same time, something seemed to have shifted within him, a realization that displeased and discomforted him. “You don’t like putting it in your mouth. When you got close to it, you got scared.”
“You put a gun to my head.”
Klaus’ thin lips quivered on the verge of a small smile or a frown, but they only opened to press down with the entire weight of his observation, “...It’s not about the gun.”
Dorian inched closer. Their faces were at level, because the gap between their heights was much smaller than it seemed at a glance, and when he spoke he purposely let Klaus feel the tanginess of his breath as a warning, “If you’ve got something to say, make my day. I don’t like it when you’re backhanded.”
Major Eberbach was somewhat prone to crude insults. Dorian didn’t have enough fingers to count how many times the man he liked so much made a jab on the basis of promiscuity, sodomy or lechery, all but drooling over all those delicious concepts he’d worked to rise above, those forbidden delights that couldn’t survive in his office outside of locker room humor directed at Agent G. Dorian was used to that kind of talk, and more than prepared to play a lighthearted fairy if it served him any purpose. He was willing to take five or ten verbal dicks up his ass if it lowered his value to a point where he was considered more of a joke than a threat, and walk out with whatever prize he wanted.
However, this wasn’t a joke directed at his orientation or effeminacy. Unlike those vague parroted phrases, this statement had an aim sharpened to a point, and it was held delicately by his jugular. Dorian realized that Klaus wasn’t even taunting or humiliating him with what he learned about him. Just like I do with the fact that he’s desperate to be fucked, he’s dangling the knowledge that I was raped in front of me just to see what I’ll do.
And I’m fucking you right now, darling. Klaus finally moved, a jolt of surprise when he felt a poke at his side, a heavy press into himself through the layers of his suit jacket and the cotton shirts underneath. It wasn’t Dorian’s erection, even though that ached between his legs too, desperate for any unraveling. Klaus quickly swore and tried to wriggle away from him. “When the fuck did you manage to pick that up?”
Dorian pressed the .44 Magnum deeper into Klaus’ stomach and slid it up his body without breaking contact because he knew Klaus would knock it out of his hand and dislocate his arm with a single twist if he gave him even a moment’s opening. He stopped when he reached the underside of Klaus’ chin where it would blow his brains out if it fired.
“You never look straight at me when I work to embarrass you, so I exploit it on a regular basis,” he made his confession lightly, but his tone was dark. He felt furious, with insult and desire alike. He moved the gun a little more.
“If you shoot it, the recoil will break your arm. If you’re lucky,” was Klaus’ response to the front sight of the Magnum touching his lips. Dorian had a feeling if he fired, it’d smash his face in and kill the both of them together. He pushed the tip of the gun into Klaus’ mouth, and Klaus allowed it. He licked the underside, and across the muzzle. The tip of his tongue went into the little opening, and Dorian shook against him so slightly that he may not have noticed. He heard the gun clack against front teeth as he hid his face in Klaus’ shoulder. He refused to lower it until the warmth subsided, and then just dropped it close to his feet. His orgasm drained him of attraction to violence, and he found himself mellowed out as he reached behind himself to gather his hair and make himself presentable.
“Eroica,” Klaus tried, seemingly also exhausted of fighting. “No, Earl-”
“What do you want?” Dorian cut him off with an already theatrical snappiness. He rushed to change again into a lighthearted fool, a queer clown susceptible to generic scorn and insult, much preferable to a sadistic invert who soiled himself to the sight of violating a beautiful person who had frightened him.
“I went too far. I wanted to…”
“Apologize to me?” Dorian’s eyebrows slanted towards his hairline. That would have been almost as tantalizing as the sight of Klaus’ tongue darting out to lick a gun in his hand, but Dorian knew better than to pin his hopes on a miracle repeating twice.
Klaus shook his head. “We should get back to work. Misha still has Z and your Stingy Bug in his paws.”
“Right-o. If you neglect your wife for the mistress, both crash and burn till you’ve nowhere to sleep, right?”
Because Dorian did not elaborate on his insinuation, Klaus leaned over him and said, “You’re no mistress of mine, Eroica.” When Dorian let him know he wasn’t referring to himself, he strode away with an unintelligible string of muffled German and a loud, crisp flick of a zippo lighter. When they regrouped outside he was puffing on his preferred poison, and wouldn’t meet his eyes. Dorian wordlessly handed him the glove he’d left behind.
1979, still
James' lower lash line appeared somewhat prominent against the wan scenery of his small, sullen face in a dark room. His mascara had smudged, deepening the shadow below his orderly row of eyelashes, but Dorian felt so deeply tuned into each miniscule detail of the visage before him, a betrayed lover delicately splayed out on his bed, legs apart at their knees only to cross at the ankles. In all these years, he had never once seen such coldness in his companion’s eyes. It cut deeply into Dorian’s chest and tore flesh in its wake, leaving the heart so fond of its retreat into romantic fantasy bare and exposed before James’ eyes for what might have been the first time, too.
“You liar,” is what James called him when he finally spoke. While Dorian’s infatuation with Major Eberbach was confined to the sublime realm of ‘striving’, James’ grievances with it were loud and theatrical. Pulling that force of attraction into the true world along with the slide and swallow of the Major’s come down Dorian’s throat had seemingly exhausted James of pathos, and he stared Dorian down with a kind of evaluative fury, neither simmering nor chilling to fold underneath.
“I could say the same for you,” is what Dorian retorted though he bowed his head, resting his face against the coarse fabric at James’ thigh. He nuzzled into it as though seeking coverage.
“I followed after Misha because there was something to gain from it,” was James’ reply. The muscles of his legs couldn’t resist tensing as they fell open for the master who trained them for pleasure, but he did not budge from where he planted his heels into vengefulness. “There was nothing for you to gain by involving yourself with the Major. That’s why I’m mad… you cheated on me with a worthless pig who gets off on humiliating you.”
Dorian let his eyelids fall shut, eyelashes fluttering against the fishbone texture. He was so immersed into the unraveling of this scene that such a small sensation nearly felt electrifying with arousal. He strained against his trousers, and had to consciously will himself not to gracelessly rut into the body before him. He planted his elbows and knees firmly into the bed to stifle such an unbecoming instinct. “He -”
“I’ve seen you kick a man out of the house ass naked for thinking he could ask to put it in. I used to think even Jesus come in glory couldn’t get you to open your mouth.”
“You’re profane,” Dorian mumbled into his hip, lightly tracing the small ridges of James’ suit with his lower lip, featherlight touches that couldn’t be felt through the material. James took no comfort in his piety.
“I hope his dick was made of gold to make it worthwhile,” he remarked. His left hand found its way into Dorian’s hair, circular motions of his thumb caressing the exposed bit of skin behind the ear.
“That’s so like you, Jamesie,” said Dorian. “But the salt and filth of coupling are things of beauty I’d pick over gold anytime.”
The hand in his curls stiffened in place somehow oddly, as though rather unwillingly coming to a decision. It resumed its slow, rhythmic strokes.
“But if you must know, he underperformed,” Dorian chuckled. “Couldn’t even endure two minutes.”
“I hate the Major,” said James. His voice felt choked up with something that was not anger. Whatever it was, it was not anger… He moved his hand to the back of Dorian’s head, four fingers arched at the nape of the neck. “I hate him more than anyone in the world, but you let him come inside you… I think that’s horrible.”
Dorian’s crotch hurt from its strain, each nerve tapping into the slow voyage that hand took across his scalp, inching closer and closer to the peak of heartbreak. He felt insane with an inversal of desire that made him discard his commonplace urges with wild abandon, hungry to accept punishment for such cruel neglect unto himself, prostrated before the smaller man who wrapped one leg around Dorian’s torso, a shoe heel digging into the meat of his back. Dorian grabbed that leg for support, threw it over
his shoulder to angle James’ hips. He repented between them:
“Didn’t you do such a horrible thing to me, Milord?” James’ voice carried a distant, wistful, yet impossibly wanton note. His lips parted to let a small sigh escape, dissipating in the slight warmth of their bedroom.
“I did, I did,” Dorian confessed. “I couldn’t help it. I wanted him so badly I could have died, and it was the only thing I could think of that wouldn’t get my jaw broken.”
“My poor Earl Gloria. You’re such a spendthrift with your body,” compassionate, James’ hand twisted inside his hair, combing through the ends where he had shortened it not long ago. When he hunched over like this, the shorter hairstyle revealed the place where his neck met shoulders, usually hidden underneath its weight. It was slightly paler than his arms, and tantalizing in its innocence. James scratched at it. “But that’s okay. When you’re run through and all out of love, I’ll be here to look after you. ‘Cause I save all my love just for you, every penny. When the tough times come, I’ll have enough for the both of us.”
“James,” Eyes shut tight and as rueful as such a shameless man could compel himself to become, Dorian succumbed to the weight of that penitence, its scent slightly sweet and heavy-hanging where his head lay. He mumbled the rest of his lines in a haste, “Please forgive me, Mr. James. I won’t do that anymore, so forgive me.”
Dorian couldn't see James’ face anymore, so he imagined it, the afterimage of a moment where a grudge succumbed to desire, the crystal-clear cling of a penny against the tin insides of a cash register, a skinny serving of love to the hot, slick insides of a cheek. He imagined that, when his eyes fell shut, James’ lashes would blur together into a scene of impressionist quality, distinct details giving way to the lovemaking of shapes and colors.
James’ fist tightened in the shorter strands by his hairline. Hungrily, Dorian pulled his trousers down, almost forcing them past the ankles. He shucked them off the bed to remove such a commonplace item far from the scenery of pale legs that greedily parted for his tongue, far from the wisps of coarse hair suggestively peeking from the confines of cotton underwear. A dual scent, dried sweat and fresh arousal, invaded his senses - the underwear had been his yesterday, and today it was for Mr. James’, a dirty pleasure snatched in annoyance from the top of the laundry pile. Dorian closed his eyes while breathing it in.
“Do it,” said James, his voice choking up in the same way as before, his windpipe fighting for breath against his heartbeats. Dorian pressed the flat of his tongue against the underwear, sliding it from the middle of the smooth plane underneath to its front. Flesh pressed into fabric pressed into flesh, and a wetness unlike that of Dorian’s own saliva came into his mouth, a rich salty taste. He felt the slight texture of hair underneath, and felt the slickness of insides that weren't for him to see as it suggested itself to the softest part of Dorian’s body. Where he found that part of the body unattractive by nature, he found himself aroused again by its seclusion and by running his tongue over its implied shapes. A frustration to do more ignited a passionate drive in him, furthered by its futility - a body’s opening annulled by the cotton fabric that had just recently lain over his own penis. He mouthed at the fabric now more than licked, nose and chin pressed into James’ crotch, lapping up whatever he could of the slow drip of fluid that blended with his drool in an indirect way similar to how this part of James only embraced Dorian’s through an imprint on stolen underwear.
James writhed underneath him, violently convulsed with pleasure that sent his hips snapping up from the mattress, grinding against Dorian’s mouth. Clumsy and aimless in this act, deriving pleasure only from the act of taking, Dorian searched for a place that forced a thin wail out of James, fading off into a greedy sigh seeking Dorian’s exhales - James pulled him up by the hair and he followed the instruction, offering his open mouth for a contact that emulated kissing, James licking his own flavor from Dorian’s tongue. He shuddered more at the idea of finding himself in there than the actual sensation of it - debauchery lying not in what the contact is, but what it signifies …
He pushed Dorian’s head back down, and Dorian buried his face back into him as snugly as it would fit, an aimless indulgence of James’ guided heartbreak coming together in a focal point somewhere at the front of his underwear that he found and pressed into, his jaw as glistening wet and as stiff as it had been that day for the Major - the two men whose taste he willingly ingested, aching untouched, aching…
James screamed, and a slight sweetness melted on Dorian’s tongue, two hands clawed and scratched at his scalp. James’ release was nothing as concrete as the Major’s offering had been, a slight trickle soaking the front of the underwear as Dorian’s jaw twitched once, twice against it to catch the convulsion and loosening of muscle. Finally, he stopped breathing heavily through his nose and gulped down the oxygen he hadn't realized he was missing, wiping at his own sticky mouth in a daze. Chest heaving and tie askew, James was looking up at him, two clear dark eyes to Dorian’s own and a shoe’s rubber heel poking him where it slipped down his back as if to probe around in a somewhat conciliatory manner. It was now an art nouveau scene, twisting bodies to golden foil, entrapped between shadow and daylight. He wanted to chase those final few twitches against the mattress and melt unaroused into the delicate pattern, but the art piece wasn't really concerned with what he wanted, simply with the fact of what he was, understood himself to be…
1981
The chime of Kaiser-walzer filled the ballroom like a gaseous infection, swelling and deflating in the air as if with a pulse of lifeblood, and it must have been its wicked tendons of desperate romanticism burrowing their way through Klaus’ vertebrae that compelled him to take Eroica’s hand and guide him to the dance floor. Even though he accepted the dance under the guise of blackmail, both he and Eroica knew that the bargain was a favor Eroica extended to allow Klaus to humor him - he clutched the strong hand in his in a deathgrip, as though rather than a dance floor, he was being escorted to the gallows for a fatal annihilation of the character he’d built.
“Major…” Eroica trailed off before saying anything of importance. Perhaps even that was a kindness, pretending that there was a follow-up to an ardent whisper of his title to relieve Klaus of the duty of having to chastise him for it. He put his hand on Klaus’ side as though to lead the dance, but Klaus ripped it off and planted it firmly onto his own right shoulder. He wished to be allowed at least so much grace.
“You follow me,” he explained. He hoped that Eroica understood. It wasn’t like a general and his footman, a dance of death where one dragged the other towards hellfire in a Königgrätz March. It was more like a predator stalking through the low plantlife of a prairie, chasing something that wanted to be caught. It was a pitiful serenade of love.
You follow me. And he spun Eroica towards a cacophony of women and men milling about to music in squares of more or less coherence. Klaus wasn’t a graceful dancer, but he made for an efficient one, all of his passion constrained at the limbs. He knew Eroica could feel it - gratitude and shame - in the tugs at his waist and arm. Eroica had to understand that Klaus was done dallying about, and that whatever happened tonight would be the thing they’d been waiting to happen. Klaus was letting it happen, a feeling as wine-dark as the bruise around Eroica’s eye.
“You once hit me there,” is what Eroica said when he caught Klaus looking. Even though he was in drag, he had the airs of a man, not a gentle one. Eroica was a tougher bastard than he made himself look. He knew which way to roll when he fell down, and he only ever rolled in the direction of taking. Klaus thought it was a refined philosophy, pleasure and profit gleaned solely from the act of taking, regardless of whether the value being taken was a dainty little thing or a congested strength refusing to give way.
“I punched you in the jaw, not your eye,” said Klaus. He didn’t know why it mattered so much to him to point out that he was willing to hurt Eroica in one place but not the other.
“But it hurt here too,” Eroica momentarily let go of his hand to tap twice at his left temple where the outer rim of the bruise had already assumed a greenish hue. “See? All the way up to here. You’re terrifying with desire.”
Shouldn’t it be terrified with desire? Klaus wanted to ask him, but he wasn’t in the mood to get caught up playing word games and be laughed at. That was the same thing that always happened, but what happened tonight would be only this once. He wasn’t supposed to act like he doesn’t grasp that. It was half past ten, and Klaus had a morning flight to catch.
“This is the last dance,” he said. The ball would last past midnight into the early hours of Saturday, but because he’d looked in advance at the scheduled times of tomorrow’s flights to Bonn, Eroica understood.
Klaus was the one who locked the door of Eroica’s hotel room behind the both of them, twice for good measure, and put the key in his own pocket. It was a habit of his to keep important items close to his person, ever so wary of the vague construct of “the enemy” prying secrets and confessions out of people in his line of work. He applied his useful habits more conscientiously than ever on this pitiful rendezvous, worthless intel even to the ever-hungry likes of the KGB.
Eroica had slipped out of his ball gown, and he laid on the bed with his hair still in its updo, bare sweaty chest to the cool dark of the tidy, impersonal space around them. Klaus joined him there, and they lay fifteen centimeters apart and not touching.
“What do you want?” is what Klaus asked after a while. He craved a cigarette between his teeth, but he made do with only biting down on honesty. He felt strangely embarrassed of being fully dressed as Eroica reclined naked as though this was a natural thing to be doing together.
Eroica touched his own lip with two finger pads, thoughtful. A thief’s hands, thought Klaus. He had those fingerprints in a database, and if he looked up a name, he could even make eye contact with an international arrest warrant whenever he wanted. Dorian Red, a most depraved voyeur before virtue, its self-appointed reclaimer, the entitled pig of a man grown plump on the ass-kissing of his scummy admirers and the deflected insults of honest men.
“If I lived a life that’s good to me, I’d ask you to admit your love to me,” Eroica spoke frankly and dryly, with little in the way of his usual flowery parables. “And then I’d never let go of your hand, and I’d never touch a man other than you, and I’d always do whatever you asked of me with no holds barred.”
Klaus stared straight ahead, asking himself why anyone would make a ceiling as high as to make it impossible to count indents in the paint there. Having just assessed Eroica as a self-serving bastard, the sincerity of that confession shamed and displeased him. He reached for his pack of cigarettes, but changed his mind halfway through the motion, stupidly grasping at empty air and then at his pant leg.
“But my life is not good to me,” Eroica went on in a voice suddenly somewhat childish and sullen. “So mostly, I just want you to let me fuck you. My life is very shameful, and you’ve never given me grace about it. Even if it’s just once, I’d like to fuck you until you start looking and feeling like a stupid queer, too.”
Klaus closed his eyes. In the lightless room behind his eyelids, there resurfaced the shape of his father and the nun from the gymnasium - no, no, not his father or the nun - only something like a father or a nun. That self-imposed prison fell away at once now, as if it had never meant or stood for anything at all. Across his entire life, Klaus von dem Eberbach had only ever built churches out of whatever forests grew south of the riverbank in his heart and begged for penance from a God who felt cold and foreign, like a military commander. Now, all at once, that wood felt wasted on Him. He wished to tear the churches down for a shrine to some savage force of nature, or a frame for a painting.
“Please,” said Eroica, because Klaus didn’t reply to anything he said. “Can I? I want it so badly it hurts.”
“No. Not that way,” said Klaus. He let his head fall back, and stared at the cheap rubbish painting that hung above the hotel bed, some old fashioned ship half-stranded in sands that seemed to be illustrated with a technique of carelessly splattering shades of brown onto the canvas.
“Okay,” said Eroica. He twirled a strand of hair that fell loose from its updo around his index finger. He had that habit alongside some more dignified tics. In the end he asked again, “You really don’t want me to?”
“No,” Klaus repeated. He loosened his tie with his thumb, not because he was short of breath. He hated the orderly knot simply because it was his chest it laid on.
“Alright,” Eroica replied.
His shoulders were shaking. He wasn’t crying or anything weak like that. He was shaking the way people sometimes did when they were caught, in anticipation of pain. Klaus looked at his stomach, a man’s taut flesh making the slightest outward curve, then dipping down into the waistband of his underwear. He had an erection that wasn’t visible while he was wearing women’s clothing, but once he took that off it couldn’t be explained away, and awkwardly stood half-mast between his legs. Klaus was soft himself. His heartbeats even seemed to be so slow to the point of not belonging to a living person.
“Ask me one more time,” he said. He made it sound like neither taunting nor a threat just to check whether Eroica really understood what he wanted, as if something like that had any merit between them.
“Can I fuck you?” He seemed to have gotten bored with the game, and having followed Klaus’ line of sight, now he was also staring at the tented front of his underwear like it was something interesting.
Klaus released his breath like swinging an axe down on a place of worship with utmost conviction, “Yes.”
“That’s lovely,” Eroica smiled a little at his own dick. “But I won’t.”
“And why not?”
A dry laugh. “Because I forced you to say it, and between the two of us, I’m not the one who gets his kicks out of shaming other men for having the things I want from life.”
Klaus scoffed dismissively, “And that’s a fat fucking lie, or maybe the first funny joke you ever told.”
Eroica climbed on top of him, a leg on each side of Klaus’ thighs, leaning against him with his whole weight. He moved forward and pressed against Klaus’ groin and belly, his palm beside Klaus’ head and their foreheads pressed together. His eyes were shut tight like he was actually in pain. He probably was, considering he was unguarded yet untouched beside Klaus for such a long time. He held Klaus' jaw between his fingers and squeezed, and Klaus obediently opened it up for him.
Eroica spat in his mouth. Besides the warm spot of his spittle that immediately trickled down the side of it, Klaus’ tongue felt dry and calcified.
“Swallow like a good boy, Major,” Eroica’s voice in his throat was incredibly gentle for someone who’d just done such a dirty thing. “It’s exactly the same as yours, right?”
It was somehow a filthier idea than beginning to get hard from being spat on - that the warmth and consistency of their saliva was the same, and that Klaus was also painfully aroused at the heavy press of two male bodies, strength to coagulated strength. That every bit of violence and scorn he dished out at Eroica, or any man who dared to flaunt this inclination the same way he did, only refracted back to himself and cooled in his mouth.
He swallowed, the roll of his throat feeling impossibly strained. He met Eroica’s eyes and surrendered to him there, his body shifting underneath Eroica’s weight to throw shoulders back and open legs, finally wanton to his touch, even the subtle glow and the faint scent of sweat at his pectorals and hairline. The sudden realization that he was the final remaining one who needed to be humiliated culminated in this - Klaus allowed his body to splay for the taking, an implicit permission in the way tension and preparedness seeped away from him. He simply ushered them away.
“I hope for your pride’s sake that you won’t cry,” Eroica made himself known as nothing more than two rows of teeth to the meat of his neck. “But I’ll actually be quite happy if you do.”
Klaus shouted out as Eroica bit him. Blunt teeth dug painfully into his throat, and then a slide of hot tongue soothed the sensation with improper ease. As he unbuttoned Klaus’ shirt, he was even humming some melody to himself. Klaus only moved if it was to allow Eroica to remove his clothing, and though he found himself disturbed by his own passivity, he found himself too impressed with the strength and dexterity of Eroica’s hands, the way he resolutely stripped him as if he would now proceed to dress him in his military splendor and march him to the front lines. The inexperienced hands of rookies and the graceful hands of women now appeared to Klaus as ridiculous movie actors and parade animals, and he breathed wetly through his mouth, desperate to feel the closeness in size and power between their two bodies.
“You’re gorgeous, Major,” Eroica praised him once he was finally naked, running calloused palms over his clavicles, the jut of nipples and the dip of his navel. He scratched at the fine hair on Klaus’ chest, lower lip caught between his teeth the way men were supposed to look at Playboy models, not soldiers. Klaus wished Eroica wouldn’t use his military title when he complimented him like a woman, but he couldn’t will himself to protest against it.
“I know you like to waste your time in art galleries, but I’m not looking to pose for you,” he told him. “Get on with it, just do it.”
Instead of tracing the lines of his muscles with a fingertip like Klaus thought a lover might be supposed to, Eroica grabbed at a handful of his chest and squeezed as much as he could, and a little shameful excitement stirred in Klaus again, prompting him to twitch his hips up into Eroica’s lap.
“Give me ten seconds,” He said very seriously, running his palms over Klaus’ sides now to see how it made him shiver. “I want to remember this for as long as I’m alive, like I’m fourteen and in love and this is my first lay.”
Klaus kept his lips pressed together, and kept himself still as Eroica groped around his body with a somewhat somber expression. After about ten seconds passed, he really did appear satisfied, and now he touched him once more with depraved and unforgiving hands. Eroica backed off a bit to take Klaus’ penis in hand, and gave it a few experimental strokes after spitting in his palm. Klaus jerked back into the pillow, shouting for Earl Gloria or maybe just for God or whatever saint made himself available. When he touched himself his hands were never so resolute, nor did they bring him such ecstatic sensations. Eroica wasn’t even particularly concerned with seeing what Klaus liked… he was primarily indulging his own whims.
Those same hands guided Klaus to roll over, and he lowered his face into the pillow. He was only as ashamed of being put on all fours as he always feared he would be. He shut his eyes tight, and prayed meaningless words to the spongy mattress.
“Are you a virgin there?” Eroica’s voice was light, but despite that lightness Klaus felt like he really cared to know. His hair tickled Klaus’ back when he leaned over him to kiss his shoulder, knees to the backs of knees.
“It’s been a really long time,” Klaus confessed. He was forced further down, and penetrated with a middle finger that curved without hesitation to feel around his insides, not only for the sake of convenience but to get to know that sensation, too. The stretch hurt even though he was lubed up, and Klaus bit into the corner of that pillow, wishing he had a cigarette in his mouth again. Eroica continued to finger him, and at the same time groped at the space between his thigh and ass with his other hand, tracing the indent with his thumb.
“This,” he said once he was through with that, “is exactly what I imagined doing to you when I first saw you.”
Eroica covered Klaus’ eyes with the palm of his hand, cutting him suddenly off from the realm of visual input. At the same time with that motion of his hand, he entered him, pushing forward with relative restraint compared to before until he was fully slotted inside. Klaus groaned into the mattress, blinded and aching, torn between cursing at Eroica to go easier on him and begging for it to be already happening, for him to have already found Klaus’ pleasure in that wretched place. They were still for a while, and Eroica wasn’t breathing much either, maybe appraising the scene of a muscular back arching under him, or maybe even of the place where they were conjoined.
“You -”
He began to fuck Klaus as if he’d lost all that restraint at once, like a dog in a rut or like how Klaus envisioned the heroes of cheap belletristic renditions of his own profession, some romanticized Casanova claiming his spoils of war. Having spent the past five or so years scrutinizing, berating and evading Eroica whenever he was unable to simply forget about his existence, Klaus now succumbed to his failure, allowing shamefully loud gasps of air to escape him as he tried to accommodate being ridden like a prize horse and get any pleasure out of it other than the manhandling. Even though imagining it happening from an outside perspective disturbed him, he pushed his lower half further out and hugged the bed closer, offering more to Eroica who wasn’t looking for it himself, simply lost in whatever he could grab onto. They moved together for a while in a fervent struggle for sensation, and eventually Klaus cried out in a way he usually might have from taking a bullet to the leg, clutching onto the bedpost for purchase in sanity as Eroica finally blindly hit his prostate, pushing his legs further apart to get more of the sound out.
Letting go of restraint hadn’t killed Klaus, but he kept his grip on the shaky wooden bedframe certain that he had to cling at least onto that, or say goodbyes to continued existence as himself. Panting shallowly into his ear, Eroica didn’t seem like he was going to last a longer while, so Klaus raised up his hips to ask for release, too. Eroica’s fist wrapped around him and wasn’t coordinated enough with his thrusts to save Klaus from going insane with frustration all over again, biting into the knuckles of his own left hand. He finished like that, feeling his own bone between his teeth, face pressed into what was either drool or tears, a testament of ruin regardless. Eroica’s seed dripped down his leg as he pulled out in a way that could almost be described as shy.
Because Klaus lit a cigarette afterwards, Eroica did too. They puffed away in silence, covered up to their waists with the thin comforter provided by the hotel. A waft of smoke blended with the stench of sex and exertion, but Klaus felt too lazy to get up and open a window. He leaned back in a leisurely manner against the bedpost he’d recently been clinging onto for his dear life, and allowed the curl of nicotine through his lungs to pacify him.
“Any chances you’ll call me tomorrow?” Eroica really seemed curious, so Klaus entertained his frivolity.
“Probably not tomorrow,” he said honestly. “But if I’m assigned to a mission and need a hand with breaking and entering, you'll be the only one I'll call, like you've been for a while.”
Eroica crushed the butt of his slim cigarette against the metal bottom of the ashtray, and faintly smiled. “So long as you keep paying well, that's fine by Mr. James even if not by me.”
Klaus hesitated, and then put out his own cigarette too, letting its remains rest beside Eroica’s. “And if I want to do this again, you're the only one I’ll call, too.”
He wasn't sure in which direction to sway his guilt for the way he worded that. Eroica’s lips were still pressed so thinly together, but his eyes contained a strange warmth within, an understanding magnanimous enough that he laid down as if wanting to sleep, giving Klaus some privacy to dress his sore body before he headed out.