Gift for Fairandfey Part 3 of 3

[emansil_08]

Title: Mutual aggravation (must be better than having nothing in common)
Author/Artist:
Gift for : fairandfey
Pairing(s)/Characters: Merritt, Evariste/Merritt, Raphael/Luvander, Anastasia/Natalia, sort of Rook/Thom, if you squint
Summary: There seemed to be no one in the entire world that annoyed Evariste as much as Merritt did. So of course the man had to be in love with him! Well, Merritt was sure there was a flaw somewhere in that logic, but who was he to question his elders and self-proclaimed betters?
Prompt: fairandfey wanted airman life and dragons and whatnot, and she put downd Evariste/Merritt as one of her pairings. So this is what I inflict upon her, and she has no one but herself to blame!
Rating: R
Word count: 20048
Warnings: Swearing, excessive and unecessary use of itallics, strange and possibly feral metaphors, dragon lesbianism, and there might just be sexings in there somewhere too.
Author/Artist's notes: EHGAD WHY IS THIS SO LONG? I don't know why I do this to myself and others, I really don't. Oh, and plot? What is that?


Chapter Four

The following days, he noticed that both Luvander and Raphael were rather... jumpy. Merritt couldn’t really say he blamed them. Despite Luvander’s unveiled threats in the matter, they must be wondering if he was going to give them away any moment now, if he was only waiting for the moment when it would cause maximum humiliation before striking. This was the Airman, after all, and more or less the only way of rising in the internal hierarchy between its dirty grey walls was by making someone else fall. It made sense, in a way, for them not to trust him.

It was still annoying, though. It wasn’t as if he needed particularly to better his station, because it wasn’t all that bad; that was to say, he didn’t overly annoy anyone except Evariste all that much, and he had enough sense to either be on the winning side - i.e. Rook’s - when fights broke out, or to not get involved at all.

So after a few days of them watching him suspiciously when they thought he wasn’t looking, he decided that to hell with it. If they needed a reason to trust him, then he was damn well going to give it to them. But of course, he couldn’t do that if anyone else was present, and he didn’t exactly know how to get them on their own. Did they have a secret signal, or something? Some kind of furtive way of saying “Cindies everywhere, unite”? He very strongly doubted it. So he was left to watch and wait for an opportunity, and once it finally presented itself, he still hesitated momentarily, wondering if this was such a good idea after all, because now Evariste was with them. But it was just as well that he found out too, and besides, Merritt wanted to try something...

So he ambled nonchalantly into the common room where the three of them were all, so it appeared, occupied with completely separate tasks, and not at all aware of each other’s presence. But there was a tension in the air which said that there was, in fact, a reason behind that it was them and no one else in the room at the moment, and that he was trespassing on something as he slumped into a couch and started on the sandwich he’d brought. Evariste glowered over the top of the book he was reading, Luvander sent him a nervous sidelong glance, and Raphael’s pen stopped scraping over the paper. Suddenly, all attention was on him. It was rather perfect.

“Okay, this is getting stupid,” he declared, turning to Luvander, the only person in the room who wasn’t quite as likely to bite his head off as the other two. “I said I wasn’t going to tell anyone, so can the two of you stop actin’ like you’ve just dropped a match down a fuel tank and you’re just waiting for the bang already?”

There was a sucking quality to the silence which followed; the sound of three people scrambling for questions to ask, all of them desperate to be the one to go first. But Merritt wasn’t going to let them. If he was going to do this just right, then he had to be the one leading the conversation. “Besides, you were right,” he said, not really having to fake feeling awkward, because he was taking a bit of a risk now. He only had to hope they would take the hint. “So why should I give you away when you might just as well give me away in return?”

“What exactly...” Raphael began, but Luvander, who apparently was quicker on the uptake, silenced him with a furtive kick, bastion fucking bless him.

“Yeah, well, we weren’t completely sure, were we?” he said, the question ‘What the hell are you doing?’ in his eyes even as he played along. “So how could we be sure that we weren’t going to be lynched in the showers for being fucking cindies any day now?”

There was a sharp inhalation of breath from Evariste and a muffled thud as his book slid from his fingers and hit the carpet. Merritt turned to raise his eyebrows in his direction, grinning. It was nice to have the upper hand. Evariste glared several kinds of drawn-out, painful murder at him, and then turned to Luvander and Raphael; he was looking absolutely disgusted, but also, Merritt noticed, rather terrified. He just hid it really well.

“You told him?” he demanded, spitting the words out as if they were sour to the taste.

“Yeah, well, so what?” Luvander said defensively, and although Merritt knew he was bluffing on a very weak hand, he was impressed at the righteous indignation he managed to summon. “We had reason to. We saw...” And there he faltered slightly, his eyes flickering to Merritt, as he tried to invent something suitably incriminating. Merritt almost rolled his eyes. How hard could it be?

“Me,” he supplied with faked sullenness, kicking at the coffee table. “With a guy.” Was that a wince that Evariste only barely managed to hide?

“And they were being far more than friendly with each other, so to speak,” Raphael filled in smoothly, smirking in a convincing manner. “Unless, of course, you consider licking someone else’s tonsils to be strictly platonic.”

This time Merritt had been looking straight at Evariste’s face, and there was no doubt that there was a flicker of... something there, something that made his mouth tighten and his eyes harden for just a fraction of a section before it was fought down and hidden behind the customary crossness.

“But it was dark and we weren’t entirely sure,” Luvander added with a shrug. “So we thought we’d just come right out and ask about it.”

“And since we didn’t want him to do something excitable and potentially harmful, we told him about us,” Raphael finished, and Merritt thought to himself that it was amazing how good the two idiots really were at working together as long as they were not aware of doing it. “It was somewhat of a hazardous manoeuvre, I admit, but we were fairly certain of what we had seen, so we decided to risk it.”

Evariste stared from one to the other, frowning. “And you decided not to tell be about this because?” he demanded angrily.

“Please,” Raphael said, rolling his eyes. “You would never have agreed to it, solely on the basis of your own negative predisposition towards Merritt.”

Evariste’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, well, then you could’ve shut up about me. If you are willing to be stupid enough to take risks, then that’s fine with me, but then I thank you to have the fucking decency to keep me out of it.”

Raphael looked like he was about to snap right back, but Luvander once more kicked him, and he fell silent with a vicious look in the shorter man’s direction. “You’re right,” Luvander said, nodding. “We shouldn’t’ve brought you into it. Sorry.”

Evariste looked slightly more mollified, but he still got up and left only moments later, not even bothering to pick up his book, which lay open on the carpet by his chair. Merritt got up and carefully picked it up, staring down at the indecipherable strings of letters and numbers on the page so that he wouldn’t have to look at the room’s other two occupants.

“Was that true?” Luvander said, his voice indicating that he was trying to fake nonchalance, but there was a slight edge to it that belied this, the sort of edge that one might expect to turn into a very real kind of edge pressing into the back of your neck at the slightest provocation.

“Not really. Ain’t never even kissed a man.” Merritt snapped the book shut. “But I s’pose I wouldn’t mind it, if I was given the chance.” There, he’d said it. It was strangely anticlimactic, for being a secret he’d assumed that he would be taking to the grave - since that at least was preferable to taking himself to the grave a hell of a lot earlier. It wasn’t as he’d expected a thunderclap or anything, but it would have been nice if the universe just for once could’ve had a sense for the dramatic. As it was now, instead of feeling relieved and accomplished, it just made him feel slightly sheepish. But at least it beat feeling damp, humiliated and noisome, or just not feeling anything at all on account of being dead.

“Why didn’t you say before?” Raphael demanded, sounding insultingly unsurprised.

Merritt shrugged uneasily. “It was a bit to take in, alright? I needed some time. But you’ve been acting so fucking edgy, and it was beginning to get on my nerves, so... I thought if I told you, you’d know I had no reason to tell anyone.”

He looked up to find Luvander grinning at him, Raphael raising his eyebrows with an amused smirk. “And so there’s four of us,” he commented smugly, and Merritt rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, secret club of the cindies, real cosy,” he said. “Don’t it just warm your heart to know that when they string us up by our balls from the roof as warning examples, at least we’ll be in good company?”

Luvander snorted with laughter as Raphael sniffed disapprovingly and glared at them. “’Good company’ is a very relative term in these circumstances, I feel,” he said coldly, and as always when he was feeling affronted he went back to what he’d been doing before interrupted, acting as if the rest of the whole, offending world didn’t exist. Mind, it didn’t seem to be working out very well for him, since Merritt could clearly see his hand tightening to a knuckle-whitening degree on his pen as Luvander sniggered.

“You know of course that this’ll only make Evariste worse, right?” Luvander said after a moment’s pause, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest, and obviously doing his best to ignore Raphael right back.

That caught Merritt off guard. “What? Why?”

“‘Cause of,” Luvander said with exaggerated patience, “that the very reason, right, for him being such a whiney fuck in the first place is ‘cause he thought you were out of bounds. Now he’s found out that ain’t the case, and that means he got himself on not-precisely-friendly terms with you for no damn reason at all. He’ll be thinking he just screwed himself earwise over absolutely nothing, and that means he’ll find you even more annoying than before.”

Merritt felt his heart sink slowly into his stomach as he realised that Luvander once more had a point, and what he said next came from the bottom of his invaded and squashed bowels rather than any thought process, which was why it contained a little more information than he strictly wanted Luvander and Raphael to have. “An’ how the fuck do I make him stop, then?” he demanded, frustration getting the best of him as he slumped back down on the sofa and stared dejectedly at his half-eaten sandwich.

The silence that followed was punctuated by that very fine noise which eyes make when trading pointed glances with another pair of eyes. It is hard to describe this noise in itself, but the sensation of the noise is generally agreed to be “a-haaaaaaa!”.

“You... want him to stop then, do you?” Luvander said, his voice carefully even, and that only made it worse.

Merritt, who had by then realized his mistake and also that there was nothing he could do to repair the damage, managed a half-hearted murmur about that yeah, it was fucking annoying, wasn’t it, while his face burned and he now instead listened to the sound of inverted laughter - which was more like a sound in potentia, since it’s defined as laughter that someone is holding back for now, but you just know will make them bend double the moment you are out of the room.

“You wouldn’t care to explain why, would you?” Raphael said, abandoning all pretences of being busy writing to gaze curiously at Merritt. “He’s spent every second in your presence being hell-bent on making you miserable, so why should you, if you pardon my vulgarity, give half a cheap cunt about him? I know I certainly wouldn’t.”

Merritt instinctively glanced in Luvander’s direction as Raphael said this, and sure enough his smile suddenly seemed just a tad forced. Oh boy, he thought, fighting an urge to roll his eyes. Those two really were too much.

He thought about denying the implication flat out, but the thing was, he didn’t have the faintest clue what to do about the situation, and the only input he was likely to get was from them. Besides, no matter if he denied it or not, they were going to assume that he was lying anyway and probably make even more fun of him than if he just manned up and admitted it.

“I... just... Maybe I just wanna know what he’s like when he ain’t... like that...” Merritt heard his own voice dwindle away into self-conscious silence, and had to force his throat back into working order. “And the if any one of you two bastards fucking coos or says it’s sweet, I’ll make sure he’ll walk around with an embarrassing emptiness in ‘is pants for the rest of his miserable life,” he growled, feeling a lot less tough than his was trying to implicate both with his words and the edge in his voice. Being a cindy was one thing, but admitting that you’re cindy for someone, even if it’s only a little bit, was a completely different matter. Yet another reason for those two sad shits in the room with him not to get their shit together, he supposed.

“Sweet ain’t exactly the word I would choose, no,” Luvander said, and sure as fuck the bastard was sounding amused, just like he’d known he would. “But fuck, each to their own, I suppose.” He paused, crossing his legs and tapping his chin thoughtfully, and then shrugged. “Have you considered just kissing the man?”

Merritt blinked. “What?” he said, with more than a hint of falsetto to his voice. Luvander sniggered smugly. “I can’t do that!”

“Why not?” Raphael demanded, and once again there was that strange silence behind his words when the universe ought to have been screaming in protest at how his and Luvander’s opinions did not differ for once. “I mean, let’s be rational and look at the facts. We know that Evariste is rather taken with you, don’t we? And apparently you, for some reason, wouldn’t mind being a bit more intimate with him. So how could there be any negative outcome of you showing this to him? It’s probably what he’s been longing for all this while.”

And you too, huh? Merritt scoffed inside his head, but aloud he just said, “And s’posing we’re wrong, then?”

Luvander shrugged. “Well, at least you know he ain’t going to tell on you, not unless he wants his beans spilled along with yours. The way I see it, you ain’t got nothing to lose. Mind, you don’t got much to win either, but there ain’t no accounting for taste.”

Merritt snorted and said nothing, but he thought about what they’d said, and determined that no matter if he was going to heed their batshit advice or not, he probably needed to have a talk with Evariste soon.

Chapter Five

The best way of finding one of the airmen when they were on their own was by trying to catch them when they went to spend time with their dragon. There was something innately private about the moments a man spent with his girl, and most of the time no one would walk into someone else’s dragon’s pen without an invitation. So when Merritt had finally gathered enough courage to actually make real of his plans of talking to Evariste - helpfully aided, whether he wanted it or not, by a constant stream of teasing and goading from Luvander and Raphael - he started hanging out down in the machine hall, waiting.

It wasn’t long before Evariste came strolling down the stairs, walking as if he wasn’t even aware of the muck boys running about or the whirring and clanging of dragons moving around him. No doubt he would have noticed Merritt, if he hadn’t taken the precaution of being out of sight. Thoushalt snickered snidely in his ear as he waited for Evariste to reach the right door.

“You’d better not do anything that makes Illarion upset,” she murmured, amused, and gave his ass a sharp prod. Merritt only barely managed to stifle an undignified yelp, and he glared half-heartedly at her. He rather liked Thoushalt, to tell the truth, but she seemed to have a very limited understanding of the fact that human bodies were not all her personal playthings. As she herself said, “You are all so small and pink and soft, you only have yourselves to blame.”

“I’ll try not to, believe me,” he muttered, rubbing his aching backside.

“You’d better, if you plan to have any children,” she said sweetly.

“You’re startin’ to sound like Natalia,” he pointed out in what he hoped was a suitably acerbic tone of voice, watching Evariste close the door behind him with mounting dread.

Thoushalt laughed. “Did I say I was going to do the honours? I am quite sure Illarion is perfectly capable of castrating you all on her lonesome.”

“Wow, that’s a relief,” he said dryly. “Okay, wish me good luck.”

“Whatever is it that you’re planning to do?” she demanded, her voice wheedling. She’d already asked twice.

“None of your business,” he shot back, just as he had before, and she exhaled a cloud of not-quite-but-almost scalding steam over his neck and back in an exaggerated sigh.

“Fine, be that way,” she said tartly. “And good luck, I suppose.”

“Thanks. I’ll need it,” Merritt shot her a bleak smile, one she probably missed utterly, and closed the door of her pen behind him. He sauntered as nonchalantly as he could to the other side of the corridor, took a few moments to draw a couple of steadying breaths, and then edged the door open a fraction.

Evariste was seated on the floor, cross-legged, and he was laughing. Merritt froze in the doorway, fascinated. It wasn’t as he hadn’t seen Evariste laugh before, but never like this, relaxed and unguarded as one could never really be around the other airmen, and without any derision or superiority to mar it. He pretended not to notice how his stomach dropped a bit right then, his pulse quickening somewhat, but it’s a terribly difficult thing to ignore when your body gangs up on you like that.

Then Illarion - who was laughing too, he noticed; a small, tinkling sound like bells being struck - raised her head and looked straight at him. She didn’t say anything, but after a few seconds Evariste turned his head, probably wondering what she was staring at. The laughter was gone from his face in an instant, and then he was on his feet, looking wary and startled and, above all, hostile. “What do you want?” he demanded, and as Merritt sighed quietly, stepped inside and closed the door, he added, “What are you doing?”

Merritt weighed his opportunities. Any flimsy lie about just happening to walk past and coming to think about that he wanted to talk to the man wouldn’t work. Not that he thought Evariste could actually tell when he was lying, but the man was bound to distrust him if he tried to come off as innocent, so he might not even bother. He sighed again and crossed his arms over his chest. “I jus’ wanted to talk, alright? Nothing to get all pissy about.”

Evariste’s pushed his lips into a thin line, and just like Merritt had suspected he would, he started absentmindedly pulling at his hair. “Well, I don’t really want to talk to you,” he said, his voice bordering on outright petulance.

“No, I sort of guessed,” Merritt said a bit irritably. “You never do. You’re awf’ly fond of whining, and grumbling, and sometimes also shouting, but talking? Now why’d you do a thing like that?” He walked a bit closer, cautiously, noting how Illarion was watching him with a curious little tilt to her head, as if she was waiting to see what he would do next.

Evariste’s eyes narrowed to grey slits. “Well, good, then we’re established that we ain’t very fond of each other. So what do we have to talk about, huh?” And then an idea seemed to hit him, and he groaned. “Don’t tell me that just because we both know about each other, you’ve gotten some half-brained idea into your thick head that we’re supposed to be friends? I think Luvander and Raphael are a perfect example of how that’s not needed, don’t you?”

Merritt, who’d kept moving closer despite Evariste’s glaring, couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “That’s a rotten example,” he said, and then he grinned. “Unless what you really meant is that you wanna fuck me, of course.”

Evariste visibly flinched, and his cheeks went very pink. He spluttered. “Wh- You- That’s not what I said!”

Sure it wasn’t, Merritt thought privately. And this was probably when he should stop the damn bickering before it went out of hand and just kiss Evariste. But he didn’t. Because he suddenly realized, standing this close and noticing how Evariste was positively ripping his own hair out of his skull, that doing so would ruin everything. Because things like just kissing someone out of the blue might work well in romans and ballads and shit, but in reality, it would in all likelihood fuck things up beyond repair. And Evariste was a real person, a very nervous real person who was already defensive and all fuck as it was right now, and he sure wasn’t going to like it if Merritt freaked him out even more by kissing him. If Merritt kissed him right now, there wasn’t going to be any moment of grand passions. There was, however, very probably going to be a moment of intense pain in his groinal area.

The reason Raphael had thought it would work was because he thought the world worked like it did in books. The reason Luvander had thought it would work was because when he imagined doing that kind of thing to someone, he imagined doing it to Raphael, and then you were right back at his ass-backward world-view again.

And so, even though he had to admit that it was tempting, and despite that small, childish part of him which insisted that it should work, he didn’t do it. But he stepped closer still, holding up his hands in a gesture of peace, and did something that was a lot scarier than just closing his brain down and letting his body take over, but hopefully a lot wiser too.

Instead of showing Evariste what he wanted, he told him. Well, in a sense. After all, he couldn’t exactly be expected to be fucking eloquent at a time like this, could he?

“No, you didn’t say that,” he agreed with a smile that he hoped was winning, but that probably just looked queasy. “And I think that’s a real pity.”

Evariste blinked. It seemed to take a few moments for the meaning of the words to sink in, and then he exploded. “And what’s that supposed to mean?” he snarled, backing away a bit from Merritt. Illarion didn’t move, but Merritt clearly saw her eyes narrow.

Yep, he decided, it’s definitely good that I didn’t kiss him.

“Look, Evariste,” he said a bit desperately. “You’ve been on my case since the moment I got here, and yeah, if I’m to be honest, just seeing your damn face pisses me off, and let’s not even fucking mention what hearing your whiny voice does to me, but,” he added, more or less shouting the word to drown out Evariste’s indignant reply, “I still... well, I still sort of like you. And that’s just fucked as far as anything can be, but the thing is... the thing is...” He floundered for words as Evariste stared at him either in horror or in shock. “The thing is that if I actually still like you even when you’re being a dipshit of the first degree, then I think I could fucking love you when you’re not.” He laughed, slightly hysterical by now and trying hard not to hyperventilate. “And either that means you’ll be doing nothing but bitching at me for the rest of your life, or the rest of my life, whichever comes first, or it means... or it means that once in a while... fuck, I don’t know, maybe you’ll be of a mind to not do it once in a while?”

In the silence that followed, Merritt tried to calculate whether he’d be able to run all the way to the door and get it open before Evariste got his hands on him, just in case he’d be inclined to strangle him and drop his body from Illarion’s back into some secluded mountain area later. But it didn’t really look like it. Evariste had stopped yanking at his hair now, but his hand was still dangling from it like a dead thing, as if he’d forgotten what it was for, and his mouth was hanging slightly open too. He was blinking repeatedly, and worked his jaw a couple of times in absolute silence. All in all, he looked as if somebody had just banged an anvil against his head.

Then Illarion lifted her tail and very, very gently nudged him forward. “Don’t stand there and look silly, boy,” she murmured, gently chiding. “You know what to do.”

He gave her a panicked look, and Merritt didn’t know for sure, but that seemed like a good sign, so he took one step closer too. They continued edging closer toward each other for more than a minute, step by hesitant step, and Merritt would have laughed at how bloody stupid they must look, only... only Evariste was licking his lips and looking like he was finally about to say something, and anticipation combined with the way looking at Evariste’s lips seemed to make thinking very hard kept him quiet and waiting.

“And...” Evariste swallowed. “Supposing I should stop... bitching,” - he smiled nervously - “right, er, now? What would you do then?”

“Well, y’know I... I think I’d kiss you, actually,” Merritt said, his voice only collapsing into a squeak at the word ‘kiss’, which was better than he’d hoped.

“Oh.” Evariste laughed a bit weakly. “I suppose I should just shut up for a while then.”

“Good plan,” Merritt agreed, and then he grabbed a handful of shirt, pulled Evariste down to a more reasonable height, and kissed him.

The kiss was good, but when Evariste snaked his arms around his neck and pulled his body even closer, laughing in bewilderment against his lips as he did so... well, that was amazing.

***

“What’s her name, and how many times did you fuck ‘er?” Rook asked with a leer as Merritt lumbered somewhat disjointedly into the common room later, feeling better than he ever had before and with a sneaking suspicion that he was smiling like an absolute moron. It took all the self-discipline he could summon to keep from saying, “Evariste, and not even once yet, but considerin’ how I feel after just a bit of snogging, I am definit’ly looking forward to it.”

Instead, he just grinned smugly and winked. “Yeah, I bet you’d like to know,” he replied carelessly, slumping into a sofa.

“You’re full of it,” Niall said with a laugh.

“That’s probably what he told her,” Magoughin said with a grin, and Compagnon predictably started giggling. Amery groaned in disgust and Jeannot launched a pillow and a string of insults in Magoughin’s general direction. He got away with that because Ghislain was the only one that beat Magoughin for size, and he was a bit touchy about people hanging his little brother upside down by the legs of his pants until they slipped off, which was what usually happened to people who annoyed Magoughin. He was very sporting about it, though, and most of the times he even gave you your pants back. After a while.

At any rate, the attention of the Corps had been diverted - which wasn’t really difficult, since the average airman had the attention-span of a small kitten in an aviary - and no one noticed Evariste walking past the door just a few moments after Merritt came in. Well, no one except Luvander, the utter bastard, who had bent double laughing, and his attempts at faking a cough to cover it would have been a lot more effective if he hadn’t been shaking like mad and slapping his leg at the same time. What a dick.

Realizing that there was no way of getting out of this, Merritt rolled his eyes and headed off to the kitchen, knowing that Luvander was going to corner him before his first sandwich was done. Sure enough, he was still trying to locate some bread that wasn’t growing green fur and trying to walk off with Amery’s silver cutlery when a voice said, “Sooo...” and heard the faint creak of someone leaning against the counter.

“Yeah, I fixed it,” he said, hauling some biscuits out of the pantry. They were a bit musty, but at least they weren’t trying to learn how to walk upright.

“You kissed him, then?” Luvander demanded gleefully. Merritt snorted and stuck his head into the fridge, hunting around for the cheese.

“Not just like that, like you suggested, you daft fuck. I thought it’d be best if I warned him first, what with me not wanting to be punched in the teeth very much.” He pulled out something that was either a folded green and blue wool sock or a very old cheese. Knowing the Airman, it could be either of these things. He carefully put it back, just in case. “Nah, I talked to him a bit and explained how things were, and he seemed to be rather fine with it.”

“I can see that,” Luvander said with a snide little snigger. “He seems to have been trying to eat your neck.”

Merritt found some ham that appeared to at least be more dead than alive, and put a few slices on a plate along with the biscuits. “Yeah, well, you didn’t see what I did to his ear. Anyway, don’t you think it’s rather pathetic?”

Luvander frowned. “You lost me. What’s pathetic?”

“Well, gee,” Merritt said, rolling his eyes, “how ‘bout the way that I just sorted out matters with Evariste without much fuss in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, while you’re still not doing anything about Raphael? And that’s even though a blind, addlepated chicken could see that the two of you are all but gagging for each other? I don’t know about you, but I’d definitely call that pathetic.”

Luvander gaped, and Merritt guessed that he had about two seconds before the man went absolutely spare and went at him with the nearest implement - which appeared to be an apple corer, so that could probably get pretty messy. “Look, I ain’t sayin’ that it’s not something of a fucked-up situation, because shit, the man is an insufferable moron with all the charm an’ appeal of an incontinent whore, but since you seem to be stuck with the worst taste in men in the fucking history of the world, you might as well do the best you can of the situation, right?”

Luvander made a strangled sound, which Merritt choose to interpret as, “You are perfectly right. What shall I do to amend the situation, oh enlightened one?”

“Just put your money where your mouth is and damn well kiss the man,” he suggested with a shrug. “And then you can hopefully put something more int’resting there soon enough. It might be worth a shot, don’t y’agree?”

And before Luvander had a chance to say that yeah, that’s right, he didn’t agree, Merritt had grabbed his plate and fled the kitchen.

***

Evariste snuck quietly along the corridor at the dead of night and came to a halt before Merritt’s door, hesitating only a fraction of a second before knocking softly. The reason that Merritt could see this was that he was in fact outside his room, and lurking in the shadows around the common room door. “Psst! ‘m over here!” he hissed, motioning frantically for Evariste to get closer with one hand, while doing the universal gesture for “Keep it down!” with the other. He didn’t see much of the other man’s expression in the gloom, but at least he did as asked, and Merritt silently directed him to the slim shaft of golden light streaming out into the corridor from between the two doors, which hadn’t been shut properly.

Standing as close as they did, Merritt could feel the other man go rigid in shock, and he leaned sideways so he could peer in through the crack under Evariste’s now slack jaw. Ah, it seemed that Raphael now had Luvander backed firmly against the wall, and if all that scrabbling and pulling was any indication, neither of them were going to have any clothes on soon enough. Thank the bastion that everyone else except Adamo were out getting sloshed tonight.

Then Evariste grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him away from the door, all the while glaring suspiciously at him. “Alright, what did you do?” he demanded as soon as he’d closed the door to Merritt’s room behind them.

“What makes you think I’ve done anything?” Merritt demanded, trying for hurt innocence but not quite making it. He busied himself with lighting the old kerosene lamp from home. Sure, the Airman had electricity in every room, but it was too bright for Merritt’s tastes, and he found that it gave him a headache after a while. Besides, he had a hard time sleeping without the faint, sharp smell of kerosene fumes in the air.

“Because,” Evariste said, grabbing his wrist, “those two would never have managed to get their shit together unless someone forced some sense down the throat of at least one of them, presumably Luvander. And you sure were looking fucking smug about the whole thing.”

Merritt, who had completely forgotten that he was still holding a burning match in his hand the moment Evariste moved in close, burned his fingers. He yelped, dropping the offending match and snatching his hand free so he could suck on his scalded digits. “Sho wha’?” he demanded without removing them. “‘Ey sheem ‘appy ‘nough abou’ ick.” He took out his fingers and glared at the shiny patches of angry red skin where the fire had touched them. “So why not?”

Evariste groaned. “Because they’ll be even worse now, you idiot!” He grabbed Merritt by the wrist again and steered him to the washbasin in the corner, turning on the cold water and shoving his hand under it. “If you think they argued much before, how d’you think they’ll be now they’re a couple?”

Merritt thought about this for a few seconds. “Oh,” he said.

“Exactly.”

After a few more seconds, he said, “And’re we gonna be like that too, then?”

“I’d rather eat shit and die,” Evariste said firmly. And then, after only the briefest hesitation, he lifted Merritt’s hand to his lips and softly kissed his burned fingers, one at a time. He did it awkwardly, looking rather embarrassed about the whole thing, but that didn’t matter in the slightest to Merritt. Because in that very instance, he was irretrievably lost.

***

A few more minutes later they were on the bed. The water was still running, but they’d both completely forgotten about that. Merritt’s hand was still hurting, but he’d pretty much forgotten about that too. He was far too occupied with the way Evariste’s hands felt as they roamed up under his shirt, and the way a dull shock raced through his body every time the other man shifted his position and thus rubbed gently against him.

Evariste’s shirt was already gone, and his skin looked almost golden in the light of the kerosene lamp. He was strong and well-muscled just like the rest of the airmen, but with a lanky, rangy quality to him that probably came from being so absurdly tall without actually having Ghislain’s or Magoughin’s bulk to fill it out with. He was thin and lean and wiry, and absolutely fucking beautiful; Merritt didn’t even care if he was the worst cindy ever for thinking it, because it was damn well true. He was the most good-looking thing he’d ever seen, and that included a large portion of the girls at the Fans and a couple of fine ladies too.

He pulled Evariste down towards him to kiss a sloppy wet trail along his right collarbone and heard him murmuring quietly in pleasure, and while it was true that some aspects of this were still fairly terrifying - like the fact that shit, he was doing it with a man - matters were helped tremendously by the way Evariste seemed to react to his every single touch. After all, if the man wanted him that much, he couldn’t fuck up too badly, right?

And once their clothes were completely off and Evariste was on his back before him, his hands clenching and unclenching spasmodically on the sheets and his breath coming in short, laboured gasps... well, then Merritt knew that there was no way he was going to regret it in the morning. He leaned forward and pushed a lock of damp hair out of his lover’s eyes with his unoccupied hand, and Evariste leaned into the touch blindly, his lips parting in a faint moan. Only seconds later, he was begging breathlessly and thrashing on the bed, his eyes wide-open and dark with deep, perfect bliss.

That was the part that he would always remember flawlessly for years to come. What came after was a bit muddled, all snatches of impression without any real coherency. A myriad of long, sweet kisses; the friction caused by the calluses on Evariste’s hands; the sudden, inappropriate urge to laugh when he realised that for once it wasn’t Evariste who was tugging at his damn hair; the urgent, jolting burn of pure pleasure; the way his throat ached as he tried not to scream. And he treasured these memories too, but what really felt important about that first night together was still the way Evariste’s lips had formed his name at his moment of climax. Remembering the rest of it made him feel all sorts of nice things, true, but remembering that made would always make him smile, and for some reason that was even better.

And then they lay in a tangled mess of limbs, Merritt still breathing heavily and Evariste painting faintly tingling patterns on his skin with the tip of his fingers. His hair was a tousled mass of golden strands, his face looking a little less pale and a little less sharp when it wasn’t tied back. His chest was rising and falling slowly, and Merritt idly trailed his fingers along the faint outlines of ribs under his sweat-slicked skin. The silence was a little expectant and a little awkward and a little awed, and the world made no sense at all, because just for a second, it was absolutely perfect.

Epilogue

The years went past, and not much changed, because this was the Airman and it didn’t do no changing just because of what the little shits occupying it were doing. Evariste and Merritt stayed together, even if they sometimes had to drag themselves and one another kicking and screaming through the relationship. It was still worth it in the end. And one day, when the war was over and Volstov didn’t need them anymore, they’d say fuck you to the whole rest of the Dragon Corps and move somewhere else together. Merritt rather felt that he wouldn’t mind moving back to the country, but he knew that Evariste would be horrified by the very idea. Not that it mattered very much what he thought now, though. There would probably be plenty of time for him to change Evariste’s mind about it.

Raphael and Luvander broke up. In fact, they didn’t just break up; they broke up a lot. Twenty, maybe twenty-one times, at least after Merritt’s counting. Evariste said it was less because that one time that was just for five minutes didn’t count, but Evariste was wrong as always. But either way, they never seemed to be able to keep away from each other for very long, and soon they were back together again, both claiming in one breath that they couldn’t live without each other, and in the next that the whole thing had been the other’s fault in the first place, and then they were off again. Evariste said that he was sure that they were both clinically insane, but Merritt thought he knew why they were doing it. Raphael and Luvander liked being angry with each other; constant bitching was the very foundation of their whole relationship. It was when they didn’t fight that they really couldn’t stand each other. And so, because they were in love, they kept the fighting at a constant level, never letting it go too far but never letting it die out completely either. It was fucked seven ways from Sunday, of course, but it still worked.

And amazingly enough - considering Evariste’s habit of sometimes saying the dumbest things without thinking beforehand, and considering the fact that Raphael was just about as subtle as a ton of bricks sometimes - they weren’t discovered. They were all a bit worried when they heard that th’Esar was going to bring in some kind of behavioural expert to make sure they smartened up, but it turned out to be some frightened kid from the ‘Versity who didn’t want to be there any more than they wanted him there. It was easy enough to make sure he was so harassed that he didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, and much less a non-cindy from a cindy.

It was funny, though, Merritt thought as he watched Rook menacing the kid, that the meek little professor seemed to annoy Havemercy’s rider so much. It wasn’t as if Thom ever even spoke much unless he strictly had to because of th’Esar’s orders. And yet his mere presence in the same room seemed to piss Rook off to a point where he seemed in danger of losing all self-control. Things very rarely made Rook angry like that.

And why did that thought remind him of something?

Evariste leaned sideways and murmured, “D’you think he’ll kill the kid?” in a half appalled, half fascinated tone of voice.

But his lover’s familiar scent had made the last piece of the puzzle click into place somewhere in Merritt’s brain, and once it had he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before. He grinned smugly and leaned back with his arms behind his head, watching Rook more or less forcing Thom to back up against a wall with a certain amount of anticipation. “Somehow,” he said airily, “I really don’t think so.”

~FIN~