Detrich and Kirschen celebrate/cope with victory (NSFW)

[guardiansverse]

The night after the new parliament's opening ceremony, they fell into bed as though from a great height, tangled up in each other in the shapeless abandon of men forgetting the boundaries of their flesh and blood. The whole day had been a sequence of pinnacles, moments conjured in the bloody darkness of the battle lines, the safehouse, the surgeon's tent now blazing one afrer another into breathing and full-coloured being. It was hard, after a while drenched in that light, to feel real at all; much less to feel a mortal, a scarred creature of effort, of labour and earth.

For a little while, Festus almost forgot.

The bed was barely that, a cot in the corner of a barracks room that, in the fighting days, had been all even a man of Ander's rank could command for privacy. They could have had better. Every house in the city was open to them tonight. Or they could have had the corpse of the burned-down palace wing, where gold had melted off the frames of portraits of men whose time was over, and charred silks smelled like a new world. But this cot, this corner, this frantic scrambling at each other's clothes and inelegant gasps and urging murmurs were theirs, for so long a shelter and a saving grace through the galloping chaos of war. The world could change in a day; but people could not.

"I shall miss this sooner or later, I suspect," Ander murmured against his breastbone, and Festus almost laughed as he pushed his lover hard against the wall, pinned him with his body as he ripped his uniform jacket open.

"Being practically ravished, in the barracks, in the dead of night?"

"It has - ohhh - a spontaneity to it that I suspect, as Land's Own Guardian, you will not have - " the gray of Ander's eyes was swallowed by black; his throat worked through a sudden, silent moan. "Will you say ravished again?"

And Festus could not refuse him - not anything, not ever. Not now when the day behind him shone with triumphant purpose, and the night ahead with the fires of his people, and all within his skin and bones with the joy striking ferocious sparks through the soul-web. "Ravished it is."

He caught the jacket's torn lapels, pulled and all but shove his lover onto the bed. Ander went willing, his fall feather-light, his arms spread in welcome and in supplication. His belt was undone already, and he worked his trousers off with his feet, inelegant, uncaring, rid of all his noble-born grace as Festus straddled him, bare bodies aligning. The heat was heady between them, dense with musky lust. Ander's head dropped back and his lips parted. And Festus could drown in every detail. His general, his loyal man - laid out before him, flushed and gleaming in the dark, every glance from his hazed eyes radiant with adoration.

Poured full of an dizzy energy, his hand slipped between them, pressed their cocks together hard - Ander made a noise of helpless need and eager pain, bucked his hips, whimpered like an untouched boy at the brust of the hand down his shaft and to the hot rim of his entrance. He squirmed and snatched stuttering gasps, but did not dare turn himself over until Festus urged him to, until Festus pressed him down and spread his legs and rasped the order into his ear to prepare himself. The smell of oil flooded up Festus's nostrils, filled his throat and crept into his brain. In the heat, in the pitch of arousal, the smell reminded him of gunsmoke. He pressed his face against the small of Ander's back and shut his eyes. Imagined sinking into the fine and strong body beneath him, holding on to the finest man in the country. He had held him through the war. The war was over. He could hold him until they died.

In the dark behind his eyelids, he saw it, blazing within the web: the bright, unwavering thread of Ander's soul. Clear. Singular. True. And mine. My revolution, my country, my people - and him.

"Please," Ander whispered, his hands clawed into the mattress, his voice cracked.

He gave a full throated cry when Festus filled him with one hard thrust, clearly not caring who heard. Not tonight. Tonight the revolution had succeeded. The soul-light in Festus's inner eye gleamed fierce as the moon among the stars. It filled more and more of his mind as he moved, or perhaps it was that he was pouring himself into it. Perhaps he truly could forget - here, tonight, his mind backlit by nine million souls, in the heartbeat rhythm of their joining, in the shelter of Ander's body, buried as deep as he could go inside this man who loved his all, his scars and his labours and his rage - he could forget the earth he had come from, and let the light of the new world fill him pure -

The spasm of his climax caught him unprepared, sudden and violent and wrenching. He'd lost track of his own body. His soul was full of wild colours. He was too deep - in Ander, in the web, in the light, too deep -

"Festus?"

He realized he was weeping.

"Ander." His voice came threadbare from a tight throat. His lover had not turned to face him, but lay still as the tears fell onto his bare back. Ander, his loyal man, who would not look at him in his moment of strange crumbling. "I'm sorry, I - I don't know - " what went wrong, he meant to say; but the thought that came was, I don't know how to have so much.

Now Ander did move, shifted carefully to part them, then turned; but still he did not look. He did not need to.

In the dark, his steady soul-light shimmered within his breast, between his arms as he drew Festus into them, and held him close to that smaller, softer glow.

"It's quite all right," he murmured. "It's all right, Festus. Land's Own. We won. There is time for this, too."