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1924

The room smells like Alfred, something of steel production and strength that he had feared not long before but amber waves of grain and expensive cologne too. His breathing is still coming hard, chest expanding and contracting under Alfred's hand. Alfred is stronger and doesn't seem so exerted. He's a corn-fed side-of-beef son of a bitch who's probably never eaten a turnip in his life. But Alfred keeps his hand over his sternum where his heart beats. Something about laying there flush with sex, listening to the other recover breath and dignity mimics trust.

“You're a hard nut to crack,” Alfred said, pulling a single finger in swirls on Ludwig's chest. He raises on one shoulder, curls onto his side to take his place like the larger spoon in a mismatched mess kit.

“Am I?” Ludwig smiles a little, proud of himself for lasting as long as he did. He'd always been impressed by his own stamina but Alfred had just railed him like a long haul train. Fucking transpacific railroad on all fours.

Alfred hums an affirmative, lazily pondering something. “Tell me a secret!"

“I don't have any. Gilbert manages the government,”

Alfred snorts like he's adorable. “I don't mean state secrets. Something about you!”

“I read cowboy novels?” Ludwig managed with a shrug.

“I figured that out when we saw that Western for the sixth time,”

“Its a good movie!'

“It is, yeah!” Alfred sighed, pushing those same two fingers up under Ludwig's chin with a solid tap to make his teeth clack together. “But I want to know something new about you,”

“Like what?”

“Something only you can tell me,”

“What do you want to know? How I lost my virginity?” Ludwig frowned at him when he laughed. That was private, serious information.

“I know enough about that,” Alfred tilted his head on his hand, looking nearly like a movie poster ingenue looking up through his eyelashes before a smirk takes over, brings the new power to the surface again, erasing innocence. He gives Ludwig's ass an affectionate smack over the sheet.

“You take a fucking like you were born for it,”

Ludwig takes it as a challenge, sliding a leg and a leg beneath Alfred and flipping them on an axis, from half embraced to Ludwig on the very top. He's very pleased with himself, braced against Alfred's shoulders, ready to flip him over completely. Alfred opens his arms, and Ludwig tenses, ready to be tossed off and fucked. Not that he... Dislikes it when that happens. But Alfred puts them under his head and relaxes like a naked woman in a French painting.

“Well?" He pulled up one eyebrow that all of Europe still gossips about. Everyone swears he has to pluck them or they'd be his father's, like indolent caterpillars on his brow. But, Ludwig fancies he's the only man alive who knows that Alfred hardly fusses at all. Except for his hair. That is purposefully, eternally half mussed to scream freshly fucked and ready to go again whenever. He puts a hand there hairline, runs his hand down to his clavicle, anchors himself there with a kiss another on his shoulder.

He's warm and firm like he's freshly forged. And he is, in his own way. A freshly forged great power. But Alfred arches up, kisses him until Ludwig is breathless and desperate. He only breaks it when Alfred's hands are on his thighs.

"You're shaking. Are you sure you want to go again?"

"Not without a sandwich," Ludwig says, breathy and light headed. The sheets hiss as he throws himself down, next to Alfred, right back where he was. "Maybe... a blood transfusion?"

That makes Alfred laugh and it feels good. To be funny, to have joy there between two bodies. His legs do feel a little boneless. It's only a sensation he knows from a three day double time march on nothing but a canteen of schnapps and erbwurst in the night.

"Tell me something I can't read in a book. Or a dossier."

"A dossier? Is that what you call foreplay?" Ludwig said before he realized what was coming out of his mouth. Where the shit had that come from? Did it matter? It felt good.

"I think you know what I call foreplay," Alfred's fingertips were at his thighs, tracing faint bruisesand red where his mouth had been. "Tell me what you think about planes? Or engineering! What was your first train ride like? Best memory? Favorite color? How'd you first die? Something."