Work Text:
Germany was standing under the World Clock at Alexanderplatz when Poland came up out of the U-Bahn, which surprised nobody, because Germany had probably been standing under that clock since before the clock was built. Poland was six minutes late. He knew it was six because he'd checked his phone on the escalator and felt a small, cheap thrill about it, and then he'd put on his sunglasses, even though it was dark and minus three and the lenses fogged the second the wind hit them. He kept them on anyway. A guy commits.
He crossed the square with his hands jammed in the pockets of a bomber jacket that was much too thin for December and that he had chosen specifically because it made his shoulders look wider, and he did the walk, the loose easy one he'd been perfecting since roughly the eighties, hips first, face set to an expression that said he had seen everything and none of it had impressed him.
Germany watched him the entire way across. Long grey coat buttoned to the throat, scarf folded flat against his chest, black hair dusted with frost, the gold of his jaw catching the light off the market stalls. He looked like a recruitment poster for a country that had its life together, and Poland's stomach did a stupid little roll that he decided to blame on the train.
"Nineteen oh six," Germany said.
"Hi. Hello. Good evening to you too."
"We said nineteen hundred."
"We said around seven." Poland pushed the sunglasses up into his white hair, where they immediately slid back down onto his nose. "Around is a word. It has a meaning. You can look it up in one of your many dictionaries."
"You can't see anything in those."
"I can see fine. I can see you're annoyed. Very hot of you. Very authoritarian."
"Poland! Servus!" Austria came weaving over from the Glühwein stand behind Germany with a mug in each hand and a ridiculous fur hat pulled down over his ears, beaming the way he always beamed, like a man who had been drinking since lunch and considered it a cultural obligation. He handed one mug to Germany and looked Poland up and down, the bomber jacket, the bare red throat, the sunglasses. "You look frozen."
"Never," Poland said, through teeth that were actively chattering. "I don't get cold. Built different."
"Your lips are a little blue."
"That's the lighting." Poland slung himself into a lean against the base of the clock, one boot crossed over the other, and jerked his chin toward Germany like he was introducing a stranger. "He's showing me the market. Work thing. Cultural exchange. Very boring, very professional."
Austria's eyes went from Poland to Germany and back, slow and cheerful and completely unconvinced. "Of course. A work thing." He clinked his mug against Germany's. "Don't keep him out too long, Deutschland, he'll lose a toe and then we'll never hear the end of it in Brussels." And he drifted off toward the carousel, humming something that was probably Mozart, and Poland watched him go with the exact feeling of having been seen through by an old man in a hat.
Germany held out the mug. Poland took it because his fingers had stopped reporting back to his brain several minutes ago, and the heat went into his palms like a confession. Cloves, orange, cheap red wine. He drank half of it in one go, which was a mistake, and coughed, which was a worse one.
"There's a bratwurst stand," Germany said.
"Course there is. It's your land. There's a bratwurst stand inside every other bratwurst stand." Poland eyed the grill, the rows of sausages hissing and spitting under the heat lamp, and couldn't help himself. "Bet you get real competitive about those, huh.All that meat lined up in a row, everybody comparing."
Germany looked at the grill, then at him, with the same expression he used on EU budget proposals. "They're Thüringer. Twenty centimetres. It's the standard."
"Twenty, huh." Poland let it hang in the cold air. "Sounds like bragging."
"It's a regulation."
"Sounds like something a guy with eighteen would say." He waggled his eyebrows, which the sunglasses hid completely, so the whole joke landed on nothing.
Germany bought two anyway, paid with exact change from a little coin purse he kept in his inner pocket like somebody's aunt, and handed one over in a paper boat with the mustard piped in a single straight line down the middle. Poland ate it in four bites while his lenses fogged and cleared and fogged again with every breath, and somewhere around the third bite Germany unwound his own scarf, stepped in close, and looped it twice around Poland's bare throat, tucking the ends flat into the collar of the bomber jacket with brisk, careful hands. It was warm from Germany's neck. It smelled like cedar and laundry powder and faintly of Glühwein.
"Get your gay scarf off me," Poland said, and shoved his nose down into it and breathed in so hard his eyes watered.
"You can give it back at the flat."
"Maybe I'll keep it. Reparations." Germany's mouth twitched at one corner, which was the closest he came to laughing in public, and Poland felt it in his knees, which was ridiculous, because it was a mouth and it had barely moved.
The M4 came at 19:22 exactly. Germany had said 19:22 back at the clock without checking anything, and Poland had said "bet you it's late" and it pulled in while the display was still flipping to the twenty-two, and he made a disgusted noise and got on. They sat side by side on the hard plastic seats with their knees touching, and Poland kept his sunglasses on and his face aimed at the window like a man very interested in Berlin's infrastructure, and he did not move his knee away for the entire twelve minutes, and neither did Germany, and neither of them mentioned it.
The flat was on the fourth floor of an old building in Prenzlauer Berg with a stairwell that smelled of floor wax and somebody's cat. Poland kicked his boots off in the hallway so that one landed upright and the other rolled under the radiator, and Germany fished it out and set it next to its partner on the rack, toes aligned, and then reached over and took the sunglasses off Poland's face, folded them, and put them on the shelf beside the keys.
"Hey. I was using those."
"It's dark. You're indoors."
"It's a look." Poland flopped back against the hallway wall with the scarf still around his neck, jacket half off one shoulder, and tipped his head back and gave Germany the laziest, most unbothered look he owned. His heart was going like a washing machine on spin. "So. We fucking or what."
"Yes," Germany said, as though Poland had asked whether he wanted tea, and stepped in and kissed him.
Poland had a whole bit prepared. He'd been working on it on the tram. It started with "whoa, easy, cowboy" and went into something about how this was a purely recreational, no-homo, between-colleagues arrangement, and he got as far as opening his mouth to start it, and Germany's tongue slid into it, and Germany's cold hand went up under his shirt and spread flat over his ribs, and what came out instead was a high little "hnn" that he would have paid real money to take back. He grabbed Germany's coat lapels. He meant to push. He pulled.
"This is so gay," he managed, when Germany moved to his neck, to the spot just below his ear where the white of his face ran out and the red started. "You know that, right? God's watching. My ancestors are watching. They're up there with God, they're watching together, they've got popcorn, they're..."
Germany's thumb dragged across his nipple and Poland's whole sentence fell apart into a gasp, back arching off the wallpaper, and he forgot about his ancestors entirely, which he would feel guilty about later at Mass.
The bedroom was exactly as tidy as he remembered, which was obscenely tidy. Germany got him out of the bomber jacket and the shirt and the jeans with the efficiency of someone clearing a table, and Poland ended up on his back on the grey duvet with the scarf still on, because Germany had apparently decided it stayed, and he made one last valiant attempt at the cool guy. He folded his arms behind his head. He crossed his ankles. "I'm just gonna lie here," he said. "You do your thing. I'm chill. I'm extremely relaxed about this whole..."
Germany wrapped a slick hand around his cock and Poland's arms came out from behind his head so fast he nearly punched the headboard.
"Okay," he said, voice gone thin. "Okay, okay, okay."
"You're shaking."
"It's cold in here, your heating is fascist."
"It's twenty-one degrees." Germany slid lower, pushed Poland's knees apart with both hands, and pressed one finger into him slowly, and Poland's head fell back into the pillow and he said "kurwa" to the ceiling in a voice that cracked straight down the middle.
He could feel his face burning, and the rest of him going darker red wherever Germany touched. A second finger, and Germany crooked them both with a kind of methodical patience, like a man finding the right setting on a dial, and found it, and Poland made a sound that was so loud and so wet and so stupid that he slapped both hands over his mouth and lay there with his eyes huge above his fingers.
Germany glanced at the clock on the nightstand. "It's 21:41."
Poland pulled his hands down. "What?"
"Quiet hours begin at twenty-two hundred."
"Then fuck faster," Poland said, and heard himself say it, and turned the colour of a stop sign.
Germany did, eventually, though not faster, because Germany didn't believe in faster. He rolled on a condom, lined himself up, and pushed in with the slow, unstoppable steadiness of continental drift, and Poland grabbed two fistfuls of the duvet and his mouth fell open and stayed open. Germany was thicker than him, longer than him, and that fact had been a sore point in Poland's head for about thirty years and stopped mattering completely every single time it was inside him. "O Boże," he whimpered, "oh, oh fuck, Jezus Maria," and then Germany bottomed out, hips flush against his ass, and stayed there, and looked down at him with those stupidly blue eyes, and Poland's legs wrapped around his waist without asking anyone's permission.
After that the cool guy never came back. Germany set a rhythm, deep and even and relentless, and Poland came apart on it piece by piece. He moaned on every stroke, "ah, ah, aah, hhnn," and stopped trying to stop it. He grabbed Germany's shoulders, then his hair, then the headboard, then Germany's ass to pull him in harder, and he talked, God help him, he talked, "nie przestawaj, don't stop, right there, głębiej, please, proszę, fuck, fuck, Germany, ja pierdolę," a stream of filth in two languages that he had no control over and would deny under oath.
His cock bounced against his red stomach, leaking in long strings, and when Germany changed the angle by maybe two degrees, Poland's whole body seized and he came untouched with a cracked, strangled wail that bounced off the wardrobe, "aaahh, kurwaaa, hhaahh," and spilled in hot stripes up his own stomach and across his chest and over the dangling end of Germany's scarf, which was something he would revisit later with an almost theological level of shame.
His body clamped down around Germany so hard that Germany's rhythm broke for the first time all night, a stutter and a low grunt through clenched teeth, and three strokes later he pushed in deep and held there with his forehead dropped to Poland's shoulder, hips grinding in short tight jerks, a groan coming out of him that Poland felt more than heard, a hum through the collarbone like a train passing under a floor.
Then the weight of him settled, heavy and warm and damp, pressing Poland into the duvet, and the radiator clicked, and Poland lay there with his heart slamming and his legs still locked around Germany's waist and his mouth hanging open like an idiot. Germany lifted his head, looked at the clock, and said "21:52" in a voice that was very slightly smug, and Poland would have hit him if he'd had a single functioning bone left.
Germany pulled out slow and Poland hissed and flinched, and then Germany was up, condom tied off and binned, and back from the bathroom before Poland had finished catching his breath, holding a warm damp flannel folded into a neat square. He wiped Poland's stomach with long practical strokes like he was cleaning a kitchen counter, and then he picked up the end of the scarf between two fingers and frowned at it.
"That's cashmere."
"Should've thought about that before you put it on a sex guy," Poland said, and rolled over, which in practice meant rolling directly into Germany's side and wedging his face into the warm gold dip of his shoulder. He did not call it cuddling. He called it nothing, because he didn't think about it, because thinking about it was gay.
Germany's arm came around him and settled on his hip, heavy and sure, and Poland drew lazy circles in the dark hair on Germany's chest and let the cool-guy facade lie in pieces on the floor with his jeans, and thought about Austria at the market, the way those cheerful eyes had gone from him to Germany and back and seen absolutely everything, and then about how many times Germany had heard him make those noises. Hundreds. Hundreds of times, in hotel rooms in Brussels and Strasbourg and once, memorably, in a supply closet at a NATO summit. And Poland had heard Germany make, what, four real noises. Five, if you counted the grunt just now.
The longer he lay there the more it bothered him, the way a pebble in your boot bothers you, small and stupid and impossible to ignore. It was a trade deficit, was what it was, and Poland had opinions about trade deficits.
"Hey," he said into Germany's shoulder.
"Mm."
"Can we do that again?"
Germany glanced at the clock. 22:04. Poland watched him visibly weigh it, the quiet hours against the request, regulation against desire, and then, to Poland's genuine surprise, Germany sat up and reached for the drawer. "Ten minutes," Germany said. "Then we sleep. I have a call with France at eight."
Poland lunged and grabbed his wrist with both hands. "No, wait, wait, wait. Not like that. I mean again, but I'm the one... you know." He made a gesture with his hips that he hoped was clear and was probably just alarming. "I fuck you."
Germany stopped with his hand still in the drawer. He looked down at Poland for a long moment, and Poland watched the sentence travel through him, land, get read twice, and get stamped.
"No."
"No?"
"No." Germany shut the drawer.
Poland sat up so fast the duvet fell off him. "What do you mean no, just no? No reasons? You can't just say no like that, you're German, you have to give me a reason, there has to be a form."
"We have a system," Germany said. "It works."
"It works for you." Poland grabbed for the argument he'd been building on the tram, the one he'd been building for about three years, and found it was mostly vibes. "Look. It's super faggy to only ever take it, okay? Same guy, every time, on his back, making noises like a dying seagull. That's not a relationship, that's a vending machine. It's only fair. It's... solidarity. You love solidarity. You're always going on about solidarity in Brussels."
"That's about fiscal policy."
"It's about sharing, Germany."
Germany's mouth went flat and he looked away, toward the window, toward the dark roofs and the snow, and Poland had the weird, slippery sense that something else was happening behind that face, something that had nothing to do with fairness. "I've never done that," Germany said, after a pause.
"Neither had I, once. And look at me now. Thriving."
"I wouldn't know what to do."
"You lie there! That's the whole job! I've been doing for thirty years, it's not hard, you just lie there and make noises and grab stuff." Poland grinned. "I'll do all the work. You can rate me after. Out of ten. You love rating things."
"No."
So that was that, apparently. Poland stared at him. Germany stared back with the polite immovable calm of a closed border crossing, and Poland felt the reasonable approach die in his hands and reached, without even really deciding to, for the other one.
He let his face fall. He had been refining this particular collapse since roughly 1989, and it went in stages: first the mouth, a small downturn at the corners, then the eyes, which dropped to the duvet and stayed there, then the shoulders, which curled in. He let go of Germany's wrist slowly, one finger at a time, like a man releasing a balloon he knows he'll never see again.
"Okay," he said, very quietly. "No, that's okay. I get it."
"Poland."
"No, it's fine. It's totally fine." He turned away and lay back down on his side facing the wall and pulled his knees up. "I'm good enough to fuck but not good enough to... whatever. That's fine. That's how it is. I always knew, deep down, that you saw me as the..."
He let his voice crack. Just a little, right at the end, just the way it used to crack in his own throat when he was actually upset, and then he sniffed, once, wet and pitiful, and pressed his face into the pillow.
Behind him, nothing. He counted. One. Two. He could feel Germany looking at the back of his neck, at his red shoulders, at the pathetic hunched curve of his spine, and he made his shoulders shake, delicately. Three. Four. Five.
"Are you crying?"
"No," Poland said into the pillow, thick and wobbling, and sniffed again.
Germany sighed. It was the longest, most put-upon sigh Poland had ever heard, a sigh with paperwork attached, and the mattress shifted, and a warm hand landed on his hip.
"Fine," Germany said. "Yes."
Poland rolled over instantly. His eyes were bone dry and he was grinning so hard his cheeks hurt. "Yeah?"
Germany looked at his face for one long second. "You weren't crying."
"I was crying on the inside. Very deeply. You can't see it, it's a soul thing, it's Catholic." Poland was already scrambling over him to the drawer, rooting through it. "No take-backs. You said yes. That's binding. That's a verbal contract."
"It's after twenty-two hundred."
"Then you'd better be quiet, big guy," Poland said, and turned around with the lube in one hand and a condom in the other, and found Germany lying flat on his back in the middle of the bed with his arms straight at his sides and his legs pressed together, staring at the ceiling with the expression of a man waiting for a dental procedure, and all of Poland's triumph drained out through his feet.
"Okay," Poland said.
"Okay."
"You look like a plank. Relax."
"I am relaxed."
"You're lying there like you're waiting for a colonoscopy."
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my arms," Germany said stiffly, and Poland stared at him for a second, because there was something in the line of Germany's jaw that Poland had only ever seen across conference tables, the night before a vote he wasn't sure of. Germany was nervous.
Germany, who had the train schedules for four countries memorised and folded his socks into thirds, was lying on his own bed rigid as a fence post because he did not have a procedure for this, and Poland felt the cocky grin slide off his face and something much softer and much more embarrassing slide into its place.
He got on the bed. He knelt between Germany's ankles and set the lube and the condom down on the duvet beside his knee, very carefully, like they might go off, and put both hands on Germany's shins and pushed, gently, until his legs came apart. Germany let them.
He kept staring at the ceiling. A muscle in his jaw jumped. The gold of his thighs was warm under Poland's palms and the hair there was fine and dark, and his cock was half hard against his stomach, thick and heavy and uncut and annoyingly, permanently about five centimetres more than Poland's, which was a thought Poland had once a week like clockwork and was having now, out of habit, even though it was completely beside the point.
"Put your hands wherever," Poland said. "Sheets. My hair. Your own hair. It doesn't matter, there's no rule."
"There should be a rule."
"There's no rule, Germany, it's sex, it's not the Schengen agreement." He climbed up the length of him and kissed him, and for once he was the one doing it, pressing Germany down into the pillow, tilting his chin with his fingers the way Germany always tilted his, and Germany's mouth was stiff for a moment and then wasn't.
His hand came up hesitantly and landed on Poland's back, flat between the shoulder blades, and stayed there. Poland kissed down his throat, and bit it, lightly, and Germany's breath went out of him through his nose in a short sharp huff, and Poland grinned against his skin like a burglar.
The lube was cold. Poland knew it was cold because he'd felt it a thousand times, so he warmed it between his fingers first, rubbing them together, and felt weirdly proud of himself for thinking of it and then weirdly exposed, because it meant he'd noticed, all those years, every small thing Germany did to make it good.
He slid his hand down between Germany's legs, past his balls, and found his hole with one fingertip and circled it, and Germany's whole body jerked like he'd touched a live wire.
"Was..."
"That's me. That's just my finger. Relax."
"I know it's your finger."
"Then stop clenching like I'm a tax audit." He pressed in, slow, to the first knuckle, and Germany went utterly silent and utterly still, his hand on Poland's back fisting in nothing.
Poland held there. He watched Germany's face, the red band across his eyes going darker, his lips pressed together into a line, his throat working as he swallowed. It was so tight. Hot and tight and gripping Poland's finger like it wanted to throw him out, and Poland thought, with an awful jolt, is this what he feels, is this what I'm like, and his own cock twitched so hard against Germany's thigh that he nearly lost his place.
"How is it?" he asked.
Germany considered the question with visible effort. "Strange."
"Strange good or strange bad?"
"I'm still collecting data."
Poland laughed, a real one, surprised out of him, and pushed deeper, and worked him open slowly, the way he wished he'd been brave enough to ask for the first time.
One finger, then patience, then two. Germany's legs had started to fall open on their own. His breath was coming shorter, through his mouth now, and when Poland crooked both fingers the way Germany always did and dragged them forward, slow, searching, and found the spot, Germany's head snapped back into the pillow and a sound came out of him, "hhah," short and startled and completely unplanned, and his hips lifted off the bed after Poland's hand.
Poland froze. "Oh," he said. "Oh, there it is."
"Poland..."
"Did that feel... was that..." He did it again, and Germany's thighs locked around his wrist and his cock jumped against his stomach, leaking now, a clear bead sliding down the gold, and the noise this time was lower and longer, "nnhh," dragged out of somewhere deep in his chest, and his blue eyes came open and looked at Poland with an expression Poland had never in thirty-five years seen on that face.
Bewildered. Bewildered and flushed and a little bit betrayed, like Germany's own body had gone behind his back and signed something.
"That's... gut. That's very..."
"Yeah," Poland said, and his voice came out rough and stupid and full of something he couldn't name. "Yeah. I know. I know it is."
He couldn't make jokes after that. He'd planned to. He'd had a whole speech, actually, about who was the girl now and how the tables had turned and how history would remember this day, and it all just dried up in his mouth, because Germany was lying under him with his legs open and his face red and his chest going up and down too fast, looking at him like that, and the only thing Poland could think was that nobody else got to see this. Not France, not Austria with his stupid knowing eyes, not America with his burgers. Nobody. Just him.
He rolled the condom on with fingers that were shaking so badly it took two tries, slicked himself up, and got Germany's knees up over his hips, and pressed the head of his cock against that wet stretched hole, and looked up.
"Tell me if..."
"I know how this works," Germany said, through his teeth. "Just do it."
Poland pushed in. It was slow and it was tight and Germany's hand shot down and gripped Poland's forearm hard enough to leave marks, his fingers digging into the red skin, and his mouth fell open on a long, shaky exhale that turned into a groan at the very end, "ahhh... Gott..." and Poland had to stop halfway and squeeze his eyes shut and think extremely hard about the Common Agricultural Policy, because Germany was so hot inside, gripping his cock so tight and so wet that his brain had gone white at the edges.
He was going to come. He was going to come before he'd even got all the way in, like an absolute amateur, and Germany would never let him top again, and he would have to live the rest of his life knowing.
He breathed. He did not come. He sank the rest of the way in and their hips met and he stayed there, panting, forehead dropped against Germany's chest, both of them shaking.
"This is so gay," Poland whispered into the gold skin, and it came out nothing like the way he said it on the street, nothing like a joke, more like a man praying.
Germany's hand came up and threaded into his white hair and held on.
"Yes," he said, very quietly. "Now move."
Poland moved, and it was bad. It was genuinely bad at first, he had to admit that, at least to himself, at least later. He went too fast and slipped almost all the way out and had to fumble back in, and then he overcorrected and went so slow it was basically geological, and then he tried to find the rhythm Germany always had, that deep even roll of the hips, and discovered that his own hips apparently hadn't been told how that worked.
Germany's thighs were clamped around his waist. Germany's jaw was clenched. Germany said "higher" once, in a strangled voice, and then "no, the other..." and then Poland shifted his knees and tilted Germany's hips up with both hands and drove in at a new angle and Germany's whole body arched off the bed like it had been hit by lightning.
"AH... ahh, ja, da, genau da... hhnn..."
Poland didn't speak much German in bed. He spoke enough. Right there. He kept it right there. He fucked into him again, and again, slow and deep and as steady as his shaking legs would let him, and Germany came apart in pieces, orderly even in collapse, one system at a time.
His breathing went first, ragged and loud. Then his hands, which let go of Poland's arm and grabbed the headboard, then the sheets, then Poland's ass, pulling him in deeper with a strength that knocked the air out of Poland's lungs.
Then his voice, which had held out the longest and now just gave up, a stream of low wrecked noises every time Poland bottomed out, "mmh, ahh, ahh, nnhh, fuck, fuck, Poland..." and the sound of his own name in that voice, cracked open like that, hit Poland somewhere under the ribs and stayed there.
The clock on the nightstand said 22:19 in green digits. Poland saw it over Germany's shoulder and felt a grin split his face so wide it hurt.
"Quiet hours," he panted. "Germany. It's after ten. You're so loud. What about the neighbours, huh? What about the rules?"
"Halt die Klappe," Germany growled, and grabbed the back of his neck and dragged him down into a kiss that was all teeth and tongue and no technique whatsoever, the first sloppy thing Poland had ever seen him do, and moaned straight into Poland's mouth so deep and long that Poland felt it in his own chest, "mmmmhhh," and Poland's hips stuttered and lost the rhythm entirely, and he didn't care anymore.
He was going to come. He knew it, and this time there was no subsidy in Europe that could stop it. He got a hand between them and wrapped it around Germany's cock, slick and hot and pulsing, and jerked it in rough uneven strokes that didn't match his hips at all, and gasped, "I'm... I can't, I'm gonna... kurwa, Germany, I'm..." and drove in one last time and came buried to the hilt, a long helpless wail breaking out of him, "aahhh... aaahhhnnn..." his whole body locking up, his forehead crushed against Germany's collarbone, his cock throbbing deep inside that tight wet heat while Germany clenched around him and made it impossibly, unbearably worse.
His hand kept moving. Clumsy, desperate. Germany's back bowed, his head pressed back into the pillow so his gold throat was bared, and he came with a low broken shout that was mostly Poland's name and a little bit of God, spilling hot over Poland's knuckles and up his own stomach in thick pulses, shaking all the way down to his feet.
For a while there was nothing but breathing. Poland lay collapsed on top of him, cock softening inside him, sweat gluing them together at the stomach, heart going like a hammer against Germany's ribs. Somewhere downstairs someone thumped twice on the ceiling with what was probably a broom.
Germany started to laugh. It was low and wrecked and completely silent at first, shaking under Poland like an earthquake, and then it leaked out of him for real, a rough tired sound that Poland had maybe heard five times in his whole life, and Poland lifted his head and stared at him.
"Frau CDU," Germany said. "Downstairs. She'll file a complaint."
"Good. Let her. Put my name on it." Poland pulled out carefully and Germany winced and hissed through his teeth, and Poland, without thinking about it at all, kissed his hip, quick and soft, before he got up to deal with the condom.
When he came back from the bathroom with a warm flannel, folded into a square, because apparently thirty-five years of this man rubbed off on a person, Germany was lying exactly where he'd left him, one arm thrown over his eyes, legs still a little apart, a fine tremor running through his thigh that he was obviously pretending wasn't there. Poland wiped him down. Germany let him. Neither of them said anything about it.
Then Poland flopped down next to him and pulled the duvet over them both and wriggled until he was pressed all along Germany's side, his face mashed into that warm gold shoulder, his knee thrown over Germany's thigh, his hand spread flat across Germany's stomach where it was still rising and falling a little too fast. Smug. He felt so smug he could have floated. "So," he said. "Ten out of ten?"
"Six," said Germany, from under his arm.
"Six? You were screaming. Frau CDU got out a broom."
"Seven."
"We're taking turns now. That's the new system. It's fair, it's diplomatic. I'm being generous."
Germany lifted his arm off his face and looked at him. His hair was a mess, sticking up in the back. The red band across his eyes was still dark with flush, and those eyes were softer and sleepier than Poland had ever seen them, and Poland's chest did something stupid and tight that he would have denied in front of the entire European Parliament.
"Einverstanden," Germany said.
Poland made a disgusted noise, for the sake of his reputation, then reached over the edge of the bed, fished Germany's ruined cashmere scarf off the floor, wound it twice around his own neck, and burrowed back into Germany's side with his nose shoved down into it, Germany's hand already sliding into his hair.