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The sun in the desert is pure white and hateful this time of year, blinding and burning. France's mouth tastes vaguely tannic and mint-sweet, though that, like the flinch she's developing, might be psychosomatic. This part of the world loves her things a lot more than her, and she's been wandering around looking for her entertainment until it's really just not worth it anymore.
Typically, that's when her entertainment finds her.
"Frankreich." Prussia does not sound nearly surprised enough to see her. "You've got to do something about these hats."
France turns, shading her eyes, and finds him satisfactorily much more sunburned than her. She's seen oranges with less peel. The uniform--it's the dress uniform, hat and all, and in the negatives column, military uniforms suit him just as well as they ever have.
"I find them darling," she says.
"On me, sure."
"They warned you I was coming," France says. "Base treachery. I should have them court martialed."
Prussia huffs. "I saw you from up there. You're still driving that car my brother gave you." He jerks his head to the base behind them, the awkward minaret-esque tower spiraling up from the squat concrete barracks.
"--Prussia, were you feeding the birds?"
"So what if I was," he says.
France taps her jaw. Prussia still watches her hands as much as her chest when she moves--she had not remembered there were things she liked about him. "I think that is not an answer, Lance Corporal... what is that name you are using?"
His grin is still completely awful. He hooks his hands in his belt, crinkling the pretty white gloves, rocks back and forth on his heels, doesn't answer. "I've been thinking, you know? This whole thing is so you. No one else I know could justify importing foreign poolboys and call it a military expenditure."
"The Legion is a noble and historical institution," France says. "And if you make a comment about my lingerie drawer, I will have you shot. I refuse to stand here in the sun waiting to sprout petals, Prussia, take me inside and tell me how you are enjoying the desert."
She puts out a hand for his obediently crooked elbow and lets him lead her off towards the tiny officer's pub. He should not be allowed inside. France suspects some magical German affinity for alcohol.
"Well," he says, when they have drinks (she ordered, because the world is not completely a mad place yet). "It's very dry."
"I realize you were not the nation of Hugo or Pushkin--"
"Dry and full of your old fuck ups," Prussia says. "So it has the weather over Europe, anyway."
France laughs. "You have never been this clever! You have been rehearsing for me. And in my uniform. I am flattered. Say something in my language, Prusse, make it three for three, I may fall off my barstool."
He squints, takes a large gulp of his beer, and essays in a tolerable accent: "You are a potato, with a face like a guinea pig."
"Ah, you've been visiting the whores. Give me another."
Prussia drinks half of his beer before he answers. Sometime in the past fifty years he’s learned to slouch. France is patient, tracing condensation circles on the bar. Finally he sits up straight, and lets his voice roll out with the strength of old times. If she just listened to the tone, rather than the words, she would have shoved her bottle through his eye, but— “‘In combat, you act without passion and without hate,” he recites. “‘You respect defeated enemies, and you never abandon your dead, your wounded, or your arms.’”
His back curls over the bar again. France reaches over and takes his almost empty bottle away, and covers his hand with hers. “‘Légionnaire, you are a volunteer,’” she continues. “‘Serving France with honor and fidelity.’”
“Yeah, that,” Prussia says, like his erection for militaria was not indefatigable.
France trails her nails lightly up the back of his hand. “Have you died in my service, Lance Corporal?”
“Give me my beer back and I might tell you.”
Instead she finishes it, and sets the empty bottle down on the bar. “You know that I outrank you, technically,” she says. Prussia’s mouth twitches, and he looks away from her chest down the bar.
“How’s Germany?”
“Alive, I imagine, I haven’t seen him in ages,” France says.
“In my day ‘twin economic engine’ would have meant at least a handjob.”
“You think I have not tried!”
“You’re too subtle for us,” Prussia says. “Put a beer between your breasts.”
“If I wanted to hear about Bavarian purity laws, perhaps I might. Prusse, if it is that you are worried about your brother--” She squeezes his wrist. “--if I could have him, would I have you instead?”
Prussia blinks. “Oh, that’s true.”
She squeezes him again, and having clarified matters, orders them more drinks. Ancient monsters are good drinkers as a rule: Prussia (shortsighted, violent, German, odd looking) and France (female) are on their own wobbly tier. The sun is going down before France decides it’s time to leave.
They stagger out, laughing at something probably tragic at the time, into the blue evening and into that margin that makes nations unreal, that has them everywhere they need to be and yet on none of the newsreels. No one stops them on their way to France’s apartment in the city, though Prussia is in uniform and has a horrible high laugh like bottles breaking, and France has decided she’d rather keep her arms in his clothes instead.
They stumble through the door all of a piece. The furnishings are decades out of date and dusty, and however this is going to happen, Prussia is going to be between France and any of the flat surfaces, because attractively smudged is a look for gamines. She tugs his face to hers by his ear and kisses him efficiently. Her other hand she puts on his throat.
“Penance is tedious,” she says into his mouth, as his hands go still on her breasts.
“Aren’t you Catholic?”
“I am neither all embracing nor churchgoing, these days, and I--” She tightens her grip, and he doesn’t move. “I would not grant you absolution if I had it, you dramatic, cowardly German.”
“Dramatic?”
“Your dress uniform?” France shoves Prussia down, and he goes. It’s too dark to see his face. She straddles him and yanks his shirt out of his trousers, then the undershirt, so she can feel his skin against her, the way his stomach muscles tighten against her thighs. There’s nothing under her dress. “Did you think you could die for me and I would care, Prusse?”
“Not everything is about you,” Prussia blusters, and she laughs and kisses him again.
“Tell me how you died, Prusse,” she says, in between little kisses. France finds his hands in the tiny bit of moonlight scratching through the dirty window--his gloves long since lost--and directs them to the buttons on the front of her dress.
“Machete. To the stomach. Fuck--” She’s pressed down against him a little, at that, and she has a hundred years worth of knowing how his throat would bob as he swallowed, as he would have swallowed to feel the touch of wetness against him. His hands on her breasts are hot and careful.
“Pay attention to all of them, Lance-Corporal, I’m not a radio to be tuned,” France says. She shrugs out of the dress. “What then? You fall down. The lights go dark, you shit my lovely uniform--”
“My captain was born in Stuttgart,” Prussia says. “He hides me. I... wake up.”
France leans away from his hands, reaches behind her, pops his belt loose, the top button, hasn’t got the leverage for the zipper. “Off!” She lifts up just enough to let him crumple them down. The tile is gritty under her knees, but blessedly cold. In this new world Prussia doesn’t try to tug her down, or buck up against her, and France knows something, suddenly.
France moves over him until she’s almost lying on top of him, bracing herself with one hand by his head, widening her knees, until his hard cock presses between her legs.
“You thought you wouldn’t,” she says, and he does not get less hard, and she does not get less wet. France moves against him in tiny increments. “Did you hope that you wouldn’t? Did you think you could finally get to die?”
“I am not drunk enough--”
France puts her thumb against the hollow of his throat and presses. It slips a bit in the sweat. The muscles of the throat, in the middle, feel like hard stacked rings, whether you are a man or an idea.
“Yes,” Prussia shouts. Some neighbor bangs against the wall. He doesn’t flinch under her hand.
She removes it slowly, to reach between her legs and grab his cock, and he does flinch at that.
France sits up again, rises and sinks again, taking him inside her in one smooth motion. He tries to hide the noises he makes. She doesn’t. She lets little moans slip out between her words as she works her hips slowly, leisurely.
“That you want to die does not surprise me,” France says. “You are joining at last a cast of thousands that has been recruiting since you crawled out of the slums of Acre, but that you chose me--”
Prussia finally lets his hands come to rest on her hips, and she rewards that by going faster.
“Shit,” he says in a thick voice. “Do you have to be so--can’t you just--”
“What? Grant you a properly clean and narrative end, make things easy? Lance-Corporal, do something better with your hands--”
Prussia is fumbling, but she’s close anyway. The strips of moonlight on the floor are widening enough she can just see him underneath her, in her uniform, and she knows what he looks like wrecked and lost. France doesn’t consider herself one for fraught lovemaking, but Prussia has never brought out her best side. He rubs at her roughly, and she slams down onto him, once, twice, three times, and he doesn’t stop rubbing when she puts her hands around his throat and squeezes.
His touch has become lighter, confused, laboring, by the time France rides out her orgasm and lets him go. She lets herself go limp on top of him, uses his shoulder as a pillow.
“No,” she says, into the abraded skin of his neck. “I am not interested in your problems. Die on your own time.”
His chest swells like he’s going to speak. France thumps his shoulder with her closed fist and demands he finish. She doesn’t help, beyond being stupendously attractive and draped over him like a scarf. Prussia comes with a cry, and she rolls off him onto the tile.
“Damn,” she says. “I forgot the dust. Prusse, this is really much too hot.”
“And you don’t even have to carry body armor.” His voice is still a touch uneven.
“Are you really going to finish your--you are staring at me, I can tell, stop that.”
“Of course I’m going to finish my tour of duty, Frankreich.”
France spreads her limbs a bit, trying to get as much of her sweaty skin pressed to the tiles as possible. “I think if I ever decided to die I’d have an auction.”
“Frankreich.” There’s rustling next to her, leather squeaks from his boots as he finally undresses fully.
“I’d print out invitations and Russia would become extravagantly drunk,” she continues. “Who do you think would win?”
“Frankreich.” There's a laugh trying to get past his teeth.
France rolls onto her side and finds him in the dark. Her questing fingers trace his hip like the rim of a wineglass. “Is Angleterre too cheaply cinematic, do you think? He’s the most likely candidate, anyway, unless the fucking pound loses some value soon.”
“Are you getting wet again?”
“How amusing would it be if it were someone else?” France continues. “Some twitchy ex-Soviet with a fetish and a name I can’t pronounce--”
“You are, aren’t you.”
France walks her fingers up his body until she can loosely grasp his chin. “Investigate the situation, Lance-Corporal,” she says, and he obeys.