[Fanfiction] "A Common Language" 2/2
<--Part One
Raising an eyebrow, England settled himself more deeply into his seat and regarded Alfred carefully.
“I would hardly classify ‘Not Making a Spectacle of Things’ as dramatics- indeed, I do believe that would be the precise opposite,” he retorted, his thick brows knitting together in what might have been consternation but could very well have been irritation. “‘Declarations of adoration’ might do a better job of falling under that category.”
Speaking of inverse tangents, ‘delving into it’ was hardly what he’d had in mind, and he groaned before he could stop himself. Temple already beginning to tingle with a slight ache- or perhaps that was his imagination- he felt his inner pocket for a fag only to discover that, much like his sense of shame, he’d left his packet at home.
Bloody brilliant. No wonder he was in such a tizzy.
“I’m not playing games, Alfred,” he finally stated, “and I’m not about to ‘beat about the bush,’ either. We’re both too old for that, I think.”
Seventy two years, and he’d hardly aged at all. That was a blink, a drop in the ocean. God, had it been that long? Nearly a century?
Really, even if he’d wanted to get a word in- and he didn’t, not really, because despite his expansive vocabulary and the plethora of various phrases, declarations, and confessions he might have used and the knowledge that he was the one that fucking created the language, damn it, he’d not the slightest what he’d say- and he couldn’t, because Alfred was speeding ahead like a train in the ice.
He looked so tired, he thought with a pang. Far more tired than a man so young had any right to be.
“You are young,” he returned, “because if you weren’t quite so young, perhaps you wouldn’t need to be say….it,” he finished, quite lamely. (By God, the man was right.) “You know precisely how I feel, or you wouldn’t be here. Or I wouldn’t be here. As you so put it, ‘It’s a bit much’. I wouldn’t have come halfway across the blasted world were I to see you as anything less than-“
And, quite without warning, he rose to his feet, the better to pace about the room.
“Ten hours! Ten hours of flight time, ten hours of sitting beside several snoring Germans and listening to a terribly unfortunate looking stewardess and absolutely inedible airline food that I couldn’t eat because you wouldn’t answer your goddamn phone!” Gesturing wildly in the other’s direction, he resumed his rambling with gusto.
“And all of it on a whim, because you might be in trouble, because you might be in trouble. Do you think, do you really, honestly think that I would have done it for just anybody? Do I need to spell it out? You’re bloody brilliant,” he added, “Regardless of what you’ve managed to convince everyone, you can’t hide it from me. You’re brilliant, and beautiful, and evidently a fucking moron, because if there’s one thing I believed in when I was awake on that flight….”
He skidded to a halt, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.
“If there was one thing I believed in, it was that I believed in you. And, if you’d be so clever as to use that magnificent brilliant, moronic brain of yours, you might understand that I’d prefer that ‘you’ to be an ‘us’.”
Scuttling out of the way of Arthur’s path with a muffled “Jesus!” and an awkward backwards crab-walk, Alfred stared up at the pacing Englishman with an expression of mingled surprise and something akin to epiphanic awe.
“-um,” he started, scrambling clumsily to his feet (and slipping just a little in the puddles of soda that he really did need to mop up sooner rather than later). “What I’m getting from this is that you think I’m pretty but a dumbass. A pretty dumbass. Bless my heart,” he added wryly, slapping a palm against his chest.
“Buuuut if it makes you feel any better aaaand it probably won’t, knowing you, at least it was only ten hours and not two or three months like it used to be. Even then, sometimes you’d stay away for a coupla years or so. I missed you then,” he said honestly, with forced casualness, “when you’d go. When you were gone. But, um, I was sort a short little brat then so I guess it was…expected, kind of, that I’d miss you.”
He frowned at the floor for a moment, hands on his hips and fingers drumming out a slow rhythm against them. “So I guess,” he continued, “if you’d skip the pond for less back then, shouldn’t really surprise me that you’d do the same now to see if I managed to brain myself yet or not. But hey, at least the inedible food got more sanitary over the past couple centuries, am I right?”
He turned his megawatt grin towards England, smile dimming slightly and falling away completely when he was greeted with the other man’s back. He took a step forward almost without realizing, then another, and another, until he was close enough to feel the heat coming off of England’s body, bringing with it the faded scent of hours-old cologne.
Slowly, hesitantly, like a cartographer charting new and unknown territory, he lifted his arms just slightly to wrap them around Arthur’s waist, hands clasped loosely over his stomach. He liked the feel of Arthur, he decided. He was not at all soft like a girl; he felt solid and strong beneath Alfred’s arms, like a pillar that Alfred could lean on for once instead of always being leaned on himself.
“I don’t figure,” Alfred said quietly, pressing his forehead against the back of England’s neck, “that you’ll have to spell much out. Nat King Cole did good enough on that, y’know?”
Arthur snorted, his lips forming his traditional smirk as his eyes found the ceiling and examined the hairline cracks deep within the plaster. Pretty, indeed- it was easier that way, was it not? It would be ever so simple, he thought, were he still capable of muddying attraction with affection and pretending that inexplicable (and yet entirely explicable) desire to be around him was merely an appreciation for blue eyes.
Yes, it would be easier, but it had been seven decades of assuring his subconscious of such imagined distinctions and it seemed his subconscious, having spent several long, laborious centuries aiding Arthur in his multitudinous delusions, had finally thrown up its hands and called bollocks. That simply would not do; he’d long endured a sort of uneasy relationship with himself that he would agree to accept emotions only at a surface level.
(And then inevitably resort to writing a plethora of letters that would never be sent, tucked neatly away in old shoe-boxes that would never be seen, by now coated with a thick film of dust and grime. 1998, he thought, had been much more difficult than it really had any right to be.)
His thumb and forefinger tightened round the bridge of his nose and his eyes squeezed tightly shut against the light and sound and thought that wouldn’t bloody shut up and now there was Alfred, before he could catch his breath.
The scent of leather and grease and everything Arthur had come to associate with some semblance of comfort grew nearer and nearer, and Alfred was close, much closer than he’d ever been before. For the first time, his instinct wasn’t to push him away, but to stand his ground and wait and maybe even let himself be happy.
Perhaps. All he had to do was turn around- or he could continue standing here like a statue, marble and cold and far closer to crumbling than met the eye, and pretend none of this had happened.
“Do you know, quite a lot of this could have been avoided had you simply answered your phone,” he murmured absently, and quite without his permission found himself tracing delicate circles around each of Alfred’s knuckles. “I’d still be in London, likely unconscious in my shorts and watching another year go by.”
“But we’d be lost in the same cycle then, wouldn’t we?” His voice, at first quiet, now inundated with assurance, grew stronger with his decision. “We’ve been at this far too long, love- 1964 was far too long ago.”
He wasn’t quite sure how precisely he made the decision to turn round, to say nothing of how he executed it, but Alfred’s warm breath was gone from his skin. Instead, he was looking into his eyes- not through them, not above them, but for once he was looking and letting himself look and letting himself like what he saw there, because he understood it and he didn’t and that was really all he needed.
Fuck it all.
All of his breath left him in a sigh that was part relief and part utter exhaustion as he firmly pulled Alfred forward, and pressed his chapped lips to his and it was hardly perfect, between the sharp stubble and the likely lack of teeth-brushing and the simple fact that Arthur had never quite been practised at holding back, but it was very them and his brain was certainly not tuned in to anything at the moment but the very simple fact that Alfred was very, very close.
(And yet not nearly close enough to make up for years apart.)
The science-oriented part of Alfred’s brain that was still partially functioning (the rest of it had immediately shut off in a wave of disconnecting synapses) would rationalize, later, that there was no logical reasoning behind why a common form of physical contact would be this disorienting, why a simple meeting of skin would send every endorphin center in him exploding into fireworks like a Fourth of July parade.
Another part of him was sending up fervent prayers to God that this wasn’t just some “European thing” or whatever (or, even worse, an apology and a goodbye).
The rest of him had simply stiffened in shock for a split-second before going muzzy and indistinct with a warm, sharply fizzy feeling, like drinking too much soda on an empty stomach and being too happy with the sugar rush to really feel the burn of it.
His fingers tightened reflexively in the wrinkled shirt fabric at the small of Arthur’s back, loosening the firm hold of the starch that had once creased it into perfect straight lines.
(And that, in its own way, was very much like Arthur or so Alfred privately believed: he schooled himself into stiff façades before gently collapsing into undisciplined lines of comfortable softness.)
A moment passed and he was granted the space to breathe, just slightly, just enough that he could still feel the warmth of Arthur’s skin nearby and take in the scent of faded cologne and filtered airport oxygen that seemed to cling for hours, the fine fabric beneath his callused fingers. But he stood there for another moment, eyes squeezed shut while he took inventory of what he could be certain of in this moment, in the subsequent, in the one after that, and all the ones following.
The answer presented itself mutely, without fanfare, as a simple and quiet statement of undeniable and irrefutable fact.
In response, his eyes shot open and he stumbled back a step, which was precisely the wrong
thing to do and he knew it immediately, surging back forward to frame Arthur’s face between his hands, feeling the light stubble and warm skin brushing against his palms and knowing, somehow, that they’d managed to do something right for once.
“God,” he choked out over the lump his throat.
“God,” he said again, quiet and just as fervent.
“God,” he said once more, whispered and tender before he was kissing Arthur again or being kissed, and it didn’t matter.
It was like tectonic plates shifting, two far-distant shores meeting with a deafening crash of light and sound and beautiful thunder, the sun breaking through the clouds with an orchestral murmur of strings touching bows lightly like a butterfly lit upon a flower, two bullets in mid-air striking dead-center and ricocheting away from each other, leaving behind only a sharp tang in the air that meant something incredible had happened.