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Geneva – March 6, 2009
Despite the dismaying failure of the American Secretary of State to pronounce the name of Ivan's boss correctly, Ivan decides the press conference was a success. It has put him in good spirits overall, and he is still smiling as he initials the sign-out sheet in the lobby and turns in his visitor badge. He allows his smile to widen a fraction when Alfred calls his name.
"Are you going back to the hotel now?" Alfred asks as he arrives at the security desk. He is slightly breathless, as if he has galloped down a dozen flights of stairs rather than wait for the elevator.
"I am." Although his expression has smoothed, Ivan wonders if his tone has betrayed his amusement.
If so, Alfred does not let on. He does not even glance up as he signs himself out, flourishing his full name across the designated line. "Can I walk with you?"
"I do not know, Alfred. Can you?"
At that, Alfred looks up. He draws breath to speak, but only uses it to thank the security guard as he hands over his badge. Then he turns back to Ivan. "May I walk with you?"
Ivan offers him a smile. "Of course."
The sun is out and the late afternoon feels to be above freezing as they step outside, but Alfred nevertheless shivers as he hunches his shoulders and tucks his hands into his pockets. "What're you up to tonight?"
"My boss—" An opportunity occurs to Ivan: "You know my boss?" he says casually.
Alfred nods as he steps over a patch of black ice. "President Medvedev," he says with perfection pronunciation, eyes focused on the ground as he scans for sure footing.
"Yes." Satisfied, even pleased with Alfred's response, Ivan resumes, "I will report to my boss. Beyond that, I have made no plans. And you?"
"Yeah, same."
A sudden gust picks up the ends of Ivan's scarf, billowing one behind him, sending the other at Alfred's face. With a grin, Alfred flips it back over Ivan's shoulder. Since Alfred made such an obvious effort to catch Ivan in the lobby, Ivan assumed he wanted to know what Ivan thought of the gift, but Alfred is quiet as they walk.
"The reset button." Ivan waits for Alfred's glance to meet his before he continues, "It was your idea, yes?"
"Yeah." Embarrassment colors Alfred's cheeks a charming shade of pink.
"I thought it must be."
"Because of the dumb mistake?"
Ivan smiles. He does not say aloud how he knew the gift was Alfred's; he suspects it would only make Alfred blush more. Instead he says, "I would not worry about it overly much. It was a funny moment."
Alfred sighs, or perhaps it is only another gust of wind. Ivan takes a breath through his mouth, savoring the rough scrape of air. He recalls a conversation from one of Alfred's first visits to St. Petersburg, when he had marveled aloud at how the cold did not affect Ivan. "It is not that I do not feel it," Ivan had explained. "It is that I enjoy it."
"Maybe you want to enjoy it more," Alfred had suggested. "I'll wear your coat for you, if you want to test the limits of your enjoyment."
Ivan had laughed then. He had not given Alfred his coat, but he had unwound the scarf from around his neck and wrapped Alfred in it.
He is smiling at the memory and taking another enjoyable breath of alpine air when Alfred says, "Even so, I wish I'd used the right word. I hate being laughed at."
A serious expression graces Ivan's face as he looks over at Alfred. "I did not laugh."
"You smiled, though. I saw you."
"I did." Ivan smiles again now. Alfred is looking at him like he wants to be reassured but expects to be teased. It makes him look young or at least younger than he is. It is very tempting to tease such a face, but all Ivan says is, "Where in time would you send us to, if the reset button had such powers?"
Alfred's expression turns thoughtful. "Like a time machine?"
Ivan has in mind a return to the feelings of an era, as he interpreted the gift to mean. But if Alfred wishes to conceptualize it this way, he will go along. He inclines his head in assent.
"Anywhere." With a grin, Alfred amends, "Anywhere before the Cold War."
Ivan arches an eyebrow. "World War II?"
"Well, it's just us, right? You and me?" When Ivan nods again, Alfred says, "Then yes. I would go back to Tehran with you. Is that what you were thinking of?"
In truth, Ivan was not thinking of any specific conference. The immediacy with which Alfred chose this one makes Ivan believe Alfred has dreamed the time machine scenario before. "Tehran," Ivan repeats, then laughs.
A flicker of disappointment dulls the smile in Alfred's eyes. "No?"
"Yes," Ivan says. "That was a good conference. I was only remembering the flight there." His boss at the time had a dreadful fear of flying, but Alfred's boss had sent such an impassioned plea that Ivan's had been persuaded. It had not been easy, the persuasion, the flight itself, the restraint Ivan had had to exercise in not letting his mirth show up in the air—but it had been worth it in the end.
Ivan smiles now, and watches the smile come back to Alfred as well. Ivan is curious if Arthur's presence at the moment Alfred has chosen is deliberate or merely a coincidence of history. "And would you send us to February 1813?"
"Ha!" Alfred says the syllable as if it is a word, rather than laughing it. "Not one of my finer moments, that war. Do you know if you ask Matt, he'll probably tell you he won?" Alfred snorts. "He and Arthur didn't win, they—but we're not talking about them," Alfred cuts himself off. "We're talking about you and me. My boss then really appreciated your mediation efforts, even if certain other parties that we're not talking about didn't." He flashes Ivan a lopsided grin. "So yeah, I'd go to 1813 with you."
Satisfaction colors Ivan's return smile. As they turn onto the shortcut through the park that will take them to their hotel, he moves them to another point in time: "1922?"
Alfred's brow furrows, one corner of his mouth turning down as he gives it thought. "I wouldn't wish the Great Famine on you," he says carefully, "but if we wound up there, I would definitely be your friend, just like I was then."
The famine had been terrible. Ivan had felt such hunger before and survived it, but that did not make this one any less painful to endure. It was a few years into his diplomatic difficulties with Alfred, so Ivan was surprised when he learned Alfred's bosses meant to send aid. He was even more surprised when Alfred himself turned up among the workers delivering the promised relief. As they passed by each other on the dock, Alfred had paused and not quite met Ivan's eye, looking instead to that middle-distance he sometimes favors. "Just because you and I aren't on speaking terms right now, that's no reason for your people to suffer." He had not seemed to require a response, so Ivan had not made one.
That was not the first time Alfred provided famine relief, of course. There had been another famine thirty years before, though that time Ivan had thanked Alfred properly. "1893—" he starts.
And Alfred finishes, "—Chicago. The Columbian Exposition. Your exhibits were awesome."
"Not as—awesome, as you say—as the Ferris Wheel." As Ivan recalls, Alfred had ridden it over a hundred times. While Ivan had not come anywhere close to that number, he did have to admit it was impressive as well as enjoyable.
As they walk through the park, Ivan continues to posit points in their shared history. And Alfred continues to say yes to everything.
When Ivan suggests London 1698, Alfred does not reply. Ivan wonders if it is too far in the past, if Alfred was too young then to remember it now and if perhaps he is too embarrassed to say so. Ivan turns, a cleverly circumspect reminder of the Friends Meeting House in Deptford at the ready—
A shock of sudden snow covers his face, gets in his eyes, in his open mouth.
The Tsar had been speaking with the Quakers, the ones from British America, for all of the morning and half of the afternoon. They were still speaking, but since no one was paying him particular attention, Ivan had gone outside.
London was not St. Petersburg, but the long arm of General Winter still reached here, even if only for the touch of a fingertip. Satisfied with the way the lungfuls of winter air were reinvigorating his blood, Ivan decided to stroll the grounds. He rounded the corner leading to the back of the meeting house—and got hit in the face with a snowball.
Wiping away the fragments of snow, he saw a cheerful young boy looking up at him with a question and a hope in his eyes. Ivan's answer was wordless as well: he stooped to scoop up his own handful of snow. When he straightened, he was surprised to find that the boy had not moved at all. He was standing in the same spot, smiling, watching Ivan's hands shape the snow, packing and rounding it. When Ivan drew back his throwing arm, he expected the boy to turn and run, but the boy stood his ground. Ivan faked a throw, and the boy started to duck before realizing the snowball was still in Ivan's hand. Ivan's brow cocked. The boy grinned again.
So that was how it would be.
This time, Ivan put force into the arc of his arm and released. The boy ducked the other way, but Ivan had anticipated this and the snowball caught him squarely in the ear; the boy took a step back, lost his balance, fell. Ivan expected him to start crying, but the shriek that came out of him was laughter. Ivan did not have time to wonder at this, however, because the little boy was pelting him with snowballs, and Ivan realized he had not been knocked over nor lost his balance, but rather that he had dived for a hidden cache of snowballs he must have prepared in advance. With a grin, Ivan dropped to a crouch and began making snowballs of his own, returning fire as fast and furious as he could.
The battle came to a conclusion when Ivan looked up from his crouched position to see the boy carrying a boulder of snow as big as his own torso. The boy was walking towards him and Ivan thought, even though he could not quite believe, that the boy meant to drop the thing on his head. His progress was slow, a slight weave to his steps as he adjusted his body to the weight and awkward size overhead. There was more than enough time for Ivan to get out of the way, or even simply to stand up. But he thought of how the boy had stood there facing him as Ivan packed his first snowball, and Ivan thought he would like to see how this would play out.
When the boy was almost on top of Ivan, he stopped and sought Ivan's gaze. "Do you surrender?"
Ivan smiled. He raised his hands, letting the snowball he was holding fall to the ground.
"I accept your surrender." The boy turned and hefted the snow-boulder off to the side, sending up a spray of snow crystals where it impacted.
Now Ivan stood. The boy craned his neck to keep eye contact. "You didn't run away. You didn't even scold me. Everyone always does one or the other, and sometimes both. But not you." He grinned.
"No."
"You're pretty tall, mister. Can I climb you?"
"I do not know." Ivan's amusement was barely concealed. "Can you?"
The boy heaved a long-suffering sigh. "Jeez, you sound just like Arthur now. All right, then—may I climb you?"
Ivan held his arms out from his sides, widened his stance, and canted one leg. "You may try," he said. Smiled. "And we will see if you can."
With another grin, the boy planted a muddy boot on Ivan's knee, latched onto Ivan's coat, and pulled himself hand-over-hand until he could grab hold of an arm. He shimmied up, his legs seeking purchase on Ivan's hips.
Ivan brought in one arm to support the boy, hoisting him a little higher so they were face-to-face. "Greetings and salutations!" the boy said. "I'm Alfred. Alfred F. Jones."
"It is a pleasure to meet you, Alfred," Ivan told him. "I am Ivan Braginski."
"You're Russia."
It was not a question, but Ivan answered nevertheless. "Yes."
"Someday," Alfred F. Jones confided, "I'm going to be a nation too."
Ivan looks at the nation before him now. Alfred F. Jones is no longer a boy, so the angle of his gaze is different—but the question in his eyes is the same now as it was then.
Ivan's answer now is also the same as it was then: he bends for handfuls of snow. This time, though, he does not stand but drops to his knees as he shapes the snow into a rounded missile which he launches at Alfred, catching him in the hip as Alfred dives for the ground. For a moment, Ivan wonders if he has been set up: if Alfred had asked to walk with him only to lead him past a hidden stockpile of snowballs, carefully engineering the moment Ivan would recall Deptford. But when Alfred reaches into the snow now, he comes up with raw material rather than fully formed weapons.
Rather than firing back, Alfred takes the time to build a small cache. Small enough to be stored in his pockets and held in one arm, Ivan realizes. That will not do, so Ivan leaps to his feet and charges. He has the satisfaction of seeing surprise in Alfred's eyes when he looks up at the sudden movement, but Alfred recovers quickly, springing to his feet as well and firing at point blank range. Ivan has only the single snowball, so he waits for an opening. After Alfred looses his next snowball, which catches Ivan in the forehead, Ivan makes to throw at Alfred's exposed face; when Alfred brings up his free hand in defense, blocking both the snowball and his own line of vision, Ivan changes his trajectory and launches at Alfred's other arm, striking just below the shoulder; the impact causes Alfred to jerk backwards, just enough that all but one of his remaining snowballs fall uselessly to the ground.
With a whoop of what Ivan can only characterize as glee, Alfred flings that last snowball at him blindly, already turning to run. The chase takes them up one path and down another. Ivan has forgotten the snowballs in Alfred's pockets, until he rounds a bend and winds up with an earful of snow. Spotting Alfred behind a tree across the path, Ivan takes refuge behind one on his side, immediately dropping to make a return-fire snowball. The battle resumes full-force, pausing only for the occasional pedestrian on the footpath.
It rages on until Ivan finds himself doused in a small avalanche from above. Looking up, he sees three red squirrels sitting on a now-bare branch, the very picture of innocence. Or so they would have him believe. Across the way, Alfred sounds to be laughing himself sick. Ivan gives the squirrels a last look before striding in Alfred's direction.
Tracking the laughter, Ivan finds Alfred leaning against a tree. When Alfred sees Ivan empty-handed and smiling, he grins back and steps away from the tree—at which point Ivan brings him to the ground with a flying tackle. Alfred's mid-fall laugh cuts off, knocked breathless as Ivan lands on him; but then he's laughing again, twisting, trying to get on top. They roll over and over and over again as each seeks the advantage—and suddenly the rolling takes on a dizzying spin as they careen over the edge of a slope.
They come to a sprawling halt at the bottom. Soft laughter whuffles from Alfred before yielding to the need to catch breath. He makes no move to get up, so Ivan settles comfortably in the snow, hands under his head as he gazes up before a stray snowflake flutters his lashes down. He lets his eyes remain closed.
It puts him in mind of a winter two hundred years ago, rolling down that slope outside St. Petersburg. He wonders what Alfred would do if Ivan named that date. Part of him wants to see how far Alfred will go; part of him always wants to see this. It sometimes has led to tragedy for them, but it has never lacked for interest value. "1809. November."
This time Ivan is certain Alfred remembers the date. He expects Alfred to sit up beside him, to search his face, his eyes, to look for a smile on his lips, to see if Ivan is serious. And yes, he feels the shift beside him; but even as he opens his eyes, Alfred is already bending down to touch his lips to Ivan's. Ivan's mouth opens, and the snow that has melted in Alfred's spills into him, still cold. There was not enough time between Ivan's question and Alfred's response for Alfred to eat a mouthful of snow, so he must have been thinking of the same slope from their past. Ivan smiles into the kiss.
When they part, Alfred props up and looks at him. Just as Ivan is wondering if he ought to name another date, he feels Alfred's hand pushing beneath his coat, finding his waistband. The rush of desire catches Ivan off-guard. An anticipation he has not felt for some time washes over him. It is not that he has lacked for recent sexual partners, but each one has their own distinctive, associated thrill. The one coursing through Ivan's veins right now belongs to Alfred.
Alfred asks no question so Ivan gives no audible response as Alfred undoes his trousers. He does not flinch at the brush of winter across his skin as Alfred takes him out, exposing him. Even when Alfred bends to press a snow kiss to the tip of Ivan's cock before enveloping him, Ivan says nothing; but as the snow melts, yielding to the warmth of Alfred's mouth, as Alfred's tongue paints hot and cold onto him, Ivan does moan. Seasons entwine in each slick breath, winter and summer in each swirl and swipe of Alfred's tongue. Ivan's hips arch off the ground, his cock seeking greater depths of heat; Alfred accepts him, taking Ivan into his throat, swallowing snug around him.
Snow crystals crush to dust in Ivan's fist, and he reaches for a more satisfying touch, winding his fingers into Alfred's hair. When he tugs, Alfred responds to the request by angling himself so Ivan can see his face—but not his eyes, obscured by the fog clinging to the lenses of his glasses. One hand still burrowed in Alfred's hair, Ivan reaches for the frames and takes off the glasses. Their gazes connect. Alfred watches Ivan with big blue eyes as he continues to suck, mouth stretched wide and now smiling around Ivan's cock.
With a guttural cry, Ivan fills that smile as he spills out of himself. Eyes closed now, Alfred continues to suckle, mouth gentling as Ivan's grip slackens, coaxing out more of Ivan's release, drinking him down. Ivan closes his own eyes as the thrill softens in him; as he himself softens, slips free.
Breaths making their way back to him, Ivan opens his eyes in time to see Alfred wipe the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. "That is a yes, then?" Ivan says when he once again has words.
Alfred laughs. Bounding to his feet, he extends a hand, which Ivan accepts. As he's brushing snow off himself, Alfred says, "So d'you have any more for me? Theoretical dates for the reset time machine, that is?"
"No." Ivan tucks himself in and does up his trousers one-handed, Alfred's glasses still in the other. He steps to Alfred and sets the glasses back on his face, carefully hooking the ends over his ears. Although Alfred tries to cover his crestfallen expression by lifting a hand to adjust the set of the frames, Ivan has not missed it. He rewraps his scarf securely and starts up the slope, "In any event," he says as they reach the top, "I know the date you would choose."
"You think so, huh?"
Alfred's casual tone is deceptive, but Ivan is not fooled; he hears the captivated notes stirring beneath the surface. He restrains his own smile as he says, "The 28th of October, 1862."
Beside him, Alfred stops. "'Russia alone.'"
Ivan stops as well and turns to him, expecting to see the biggest grin of the day yet. Instead he finds Alfred's face curiously unreadable. As they look at each other, Alfred's mouth twitches, but he does not smile, he does not speak. After a moment, Ivan realizes Alfred is waiting for him to continue what Alfred has begun. Ivan smiles himself as he quotes:
"'Russia alone has stood by you from the first, and will continue to stand by you. We are very, very anxious that some means should be adapted that any course should be pursued, which will prevent the division which now stands inevitable. You know the sentiments of Russia. We desire, above all things, the maintenance of the American union as one indivisible nation.'"
Alfred moves in and wraps Ivan in an embrace. Smiling as he puts his arms around Alfred in turn, Ivan continues quoting. As he speaks, Alfred begins to nuzzle along Ivan's jawline, behind his ear, even nudging beneath his scarf. His breath is so warm, it makes Ivan shiver a little. He draws Alfred closer as he concludes, "'Proposals will be made to Russia to join in some plan of interference. He will refuse any invitation of the kind. Russia will occupy the same ground as at the beginning of the struggle. You may rely upon it, he will not change.'"
Ivan can feel Alfred's heat through all the layers of their clothes, and most especially in the cock pressed against his thigh. He does not know if Alfred is aware of himself. Ivan means to tease Alfred, and is surprised at the huskiness he hears in his own voice when he says, "This is arousing you."
Alfred draws back just enough to meet Ivan's gaze openly. "You know what it's always done to me when you've told me you love me." His gaze is heated, honest. Self-aware and unashamed.
Ivan cups Alfred's face with both hands, then touches his mouth to Alfred's. Their lips rest against each other; Ivan does not know who opens first, he only knows that his tongue is in Alfred's mouth, that Alfred's tongue is curling around it; now pushing and Ivan welcomes the push, welcomes Alfred's tongue and Alfred's breath, breathes into Alfred in turn. Ivan does not know what will happen back at the hotel, what will happen later tonight or tomorrow or a hundred years from now; he only knows now, right now, this moment, this kiss, this.