Detrich and Kirschen, dancing

[guardiansverse]

“You do know how, then.”

Kirschen’s voice was soft, his face still, but his eyes smiling. His hands tender about Festus’s shoulder and his waist. That was his gift, Festus supposed. One of many: that damned, serene tenderness, nothing but a hint of warmth in his touch to show that he was just as drunk as Festus was himself, if not more. They’d been going around the room like a pair of fools. No music to be heard, only two men twirling and stumbling in each other’s arms. More stumbling than twirling, as the evening went on, dizzy with cheap wine and costly victory. Or at least Festus was, and he knew it. Kirschen glided across the rough stone of the floor as though it was the scented wood of a palace’s ballroom, as though he’d been born to it.

He was. It was not a truth Festus could escape, try as he might.

He scoffed, which Kirschen took with a warm upturn of one corner of his mouth. “I learned to make that impression at the academy. Apparently, an officer needs the skill.”

“Apparently.” Kirschen’s voice was dry.

“I could’ve been learning more - charting, or gunnery…”

“The good Sun knows, you are short on such skills.”

“Don’t mock me, damn you. When we reform the army, after - “

“Dancing lessons shall be the first to go,” Kirschen said with all his noble-born primness. Festus choked on a grunt that turned, despite himself, into a laugh.

He leaned his balance into Kirschen’s gentle leadership. Allowed the other man - that marvelous man, the finest man in Hyem, for all the raw injustice of his birth - to bodily guide him through a step, a turn. Kirschen’s body against him was trim and strong, wine-warmed. Shockingly steady. He knows how to hold his drink better than me, too. A ruthless indulgence, to brace against such steadiness and strength. A terrible comfort.

“I don’t know how you talked me into this business.” As if he could ever deny Kirschen anything.

Kirschen gave a low hum. His breath flowed into Festus’s hair.

“You are better at this than you think,” he said, as though Festus had not just a moment earlier banged their shins together almost hard enough to trip. His voice dropped - cautious, brushing for yield, and for pain: “Surely, in your village…?”

“Nothing like this.” The village folk had danced in spring, of course, in the village chapel’s garden. And in summer, if the harvest was good, if there was a harvest at all. A riotous celebration of bare survival. They’d gotten drunk for that, too. His father most of all. Kirschen couldn’t know. He was born to this.

Festus couldn’t forget, try as he might. But he found himself quietly saying, “But... we did at university.”

Kirschen blinked, slowed through another turn, then halted. A knowing sobriety stole into his eyes. For a moment Festus almost hated him for it as much as he loved him. Probably it was the wine, eroding his balance pace by pace. Knocking things loose. Fragments of another life.

They were standing still, but Kirschen’s hand remained on his hip. It brushed up Festus’s back, gently along his spine, toward where his thin undershirt hid the still-sensitive scars of battle and revolution. “Do you wish to…?” Tell me, show me -

“No,” Festus murmured. It wasn’t a life. Just a dream.

Kirschen nodded without as much as a pause; and for that, Festus loved him cleanly.

He pulled a deep breath in through his nose, and pulled himself straighter with it. “No,” he said again. “I think I’d rather keep drunkenly stepping on your highborn toes. Since it seems to bring you such pleasure.”

“I think you are rather less drunk than you claim,” Kirschen answered, eyes bright and lips once more quirking. But when Festus leaned into him for the next turn, he did not object.