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The cold in their room had its own personality. It lived in the corners and under the beds and in the dead iron coil of the radiator that Soviet still had not fixed, and on most nights Ukraine slept in his coat with his knees drawn up and the blanket over his head and hated it in a steady, familiar way, the way you hate a neighbour's dog. Tonight he had kicked the blanket onto the floor. Then the coat. He lay on top of the sheet in his shirt with the sweat crawling down the back of his neck under his collar, and the old leather was wet through, and he stared at the brown-scorched lampshade and tried to decide whether he was dying of something interesting.
Across the gap between the beds, Russia was sitting up against the wall with a copy of Pravda on his knees and his boots off, which was rare. He was home on a Friday night. Something had been cancelled, some reception with foreigners and long tables, and he had spent all of supper sulking about it as though a missed party were a war wound, and Soviet had patted his shoulder and given him the last of the sausage to make up for it. Now he turned a page with a crackle loud enough to be personal.
"Stop sighing," Russia said.
"I'm not sighing. I'm breathing."
"You're breathing like a cow giving birth." He didn't look up. "And it's freezing in here, and you've thrown your blanket on the floor. Are you feverish? If you're feverish, go and sleep in the kitchen. I'm not catching anything off you before the May parade."
"I'd love to catch something off you," Ukraine said. "Right in the face. With a chair."
Russia snorted and kept reading. Ukraine pressed the back of his wrist to his forehead and it came away damp, and the heavy, sweet ache that had been sitting low in his belly since supper rolled over like something waking up. He had been calling it hunger for two hours. That had been an easy lie, since hunger was what everything felt like in this house sooner or later, but it was getting harder to believe, because hunger did not make your thighs feel like that. Then he shifted his hips on the mattress and felt it, a warm, slippery slide between his cheeks, soaking into his underwear, and he went absolutely still.
No. Oh, no. Ta bliakha. Not tonight, not now, you stupid traitor of a body.
He knew exactly how he had got here, which was the worst part. His heats had stopped completely back in the bad years, when there had been nothing in his stomach for a body to waste on anything, and when they came back they came back crooked, months apart, never on any schedule a sane person could plan around. So he had stopped taking the suppressants Soviet doled out on Sundays in a brown envelope. He had kept them instead. Little white pills were the best currency in the house after cigarettes, and Lithuania knew omegas outside who paid properly for them. Two weeks ago Ukraine had handed over the whole strip in the courtyard and got back a ring of smoked sausage wrapped in newspaper, and he had split it with Belarus behind the coal shed, and Belarus had eaten his half in tiny careful bites with his eyes closed. Ukraine had felt clever for a week. He was now feeling slightly less clever.
The newspaper stopped crackling.
Ukraine heard Russia take a breath through his nose, long and slow and deliberate, the way you smell bread through a closed door. He heard the paper fold. When he turned his head, his brother was sitting up straight against the wall with his green eyes gone wide and dark, and the blue patch along the left side of his face looked almost black in the bad light.
"What," Russia said. His voice had dropped about a mile. "Is that."
"Nothing. Read your paper."
"Ukraine."
"It's nothing, I said. It's the radiator."
"The radiator's dead." Russia leaned forward, elbows on his knees, nostrils flaring again, and his whole big body seemed to tighten like a rope taking weight. "You're in heat. You're in heat in my room. Where are your pills?"
"Our room." Ukraine sat up and immediately regretted it, because sitting up pressed his soaked underwear against his hole and he had to swallow a noise. "And none of your business."
"You sold them." Russia actually laughed, a short, breathless, disbelieving huff. "You sold them. To that Baltic rat. Didn't you?"
Ukraine didn't answer. His eyes had dropped by themselves, which he would never forgive them for, straight to Russia's lap, where the fabric of his trousers had pushed up in a thick, unmistakable line. He dragged his gaze back up to the ceiling so fast it nearly made him dizzy.
He got up. He didn't know where he was going, but going was better than staying, and he got as far as the door with his hand on the cold knob before Russia spoke behind him, calm and reasonable, in the voice he used to explain things to Belarus.
"Go on, then, bratik. Walk out there smelling like that. Every nose in this house with any sense in it will know what you are before you reach the stairs, and the ones that can't smell it will still wonder why you're walking like that. And Father's study is at the very end. You can knock and tell him you sold the pills he gave you." A pause. "I'd love to see his face."
Ukraine stood with his forehead against the door and his hand on the knob, and his own scent rose off him so thick in the closed room that even he could smell it now, sweet and ripe and shameless, and he thought about every door between here and the study, and he let go of the knob.
Russia was off the bed before he'd turned round.
He came across the gap in two strides, took Ukraine by both shoulders, and shoved his face into the hair behind his ear, right above the collar, and breathed in like a drowning man getting air. His lips were against Ukraine's skin. A shudder went down Ukraine's spine all the way to his knees, and it was not fear, and he hated it more than he had ever hated anything with a heartbeat.
"Vidchepys." He drove his elbow back into Russia's ribs. "Get off, you svynya, you're my brother, get off."
"God, you smell..." Russia's voice cracked in half. "You smell so..."
"Daddy's dog." Ukraine twisted, got a hand loose and raked his nails down the side of Russia's neck. "You'd fuck your own brother. You sick, spoiled, fat-fed katsap, touch me again and I'll bite your fucking hand off."
Russia put him on the bed. It took no effort at all, which was its own humiliation, and then Ukraine was on his back on his own unmade mattress with both wrists pinned above his head in one red fist and Russia's whole weight on his hips, and Russia's cock was hard as a pipe against his thigh, and Russia was trembling. Ukraine could feel it go through both of them, a fine, buzzing tremor like a wire pulled too tight. He bared his teeth. Russia stared down at him, breathing through his mouth.
Then he let go.
He sat back, touched the scratches on his neck, looked at the blood on his fingertips with mild interest, and stood up. He went back across the gap and sat down on his own bed, tight military corners and all, and picked up his newspaper.
"Fine," he said. "I won't touch you."
Ukraine stared at him. "Good."
"You'll ask."
"I'll die first."
"You won't die," Russia said, and found his page. "You'll ask."
Ukraine lay where he had been dropped and waited for the trick, and there wasn't one. The paper crackled. Soviet's snoring came through two walls like a distant engine. And slowly, and then not slowly at all, the heat came for him properly.
It came as fever first, a dry burning under his skin that made the sheet unbearable, and then, a while later, made the absence of the sheet unbearable too, so he dragged the blanket up off the floor and the coat after it and wrapped himself in both. It wasn't enough. His body wanted weight, wanted warmth, wanted something big to curl around, and in the gap between the beds lay Russia's thick grey sweater where he'd dropped it before supper. Ukraine hooked it up off the floor without deciding to. He pushed his face into it. It smelled of tobacco and cold air and that deep salty alpha musk that was just Russia, and his mouth flooded with spit, and it took him a long, foggy stretch to realize what he was doing. His face went scarlet down to the blue of his throat. He didn't let go of it.
The cramps came next, deep rolling ones that curled him up on his side. Slick kept coming, soaking his underwear, gluing his thighs together, and his cock, that small, useless omega thing he'd spent his whole adult life pretending didn't exist, was hard and aching and leaking against the sheet. He pushed his hand down under the blanket where Russia couldn't see and worked two fingers into himself, gasping into the sweater, and it was nothing. It was like trying to put out a house fire by spitting at it. His body knew exactly what it wanted, and what it wanted was sitting barely two meters away reading about tractor production.
"Russia." His voice came out thin and wrecked. "Go to Father. Tell him I'm sick. Get the... get something from the study."
"And tell him what you did with the last lot?" Russia didn't look up. "Net."
Time went thick and slow like honey off a spoon. Ukraine rocked against his own hand and couldn't stop his hips doing it, and he could hear himself now, small high noises, nnh, hnnh, ahh, wet and pathetic and going straight into the sweater. Sweat stung his eyes. His hole clenched on his fingers again and again, empty, empty, empty.
"Just..." He sobbed it. "Do something."
Russia turned a page.
"Russia. Please. Proshu tebe."
Now he looked up. He lowered the paper and looked across the gap at Ukraine curled in a soaked heap of blankets and stolen sweater, and his face was perfectly calm and his eyes were black.
"Say what you want."
"You know what I want."
"You called me a pig. A dog. A sick bastard." He folded the paper in half, then in half again, and set it down. "I want to hear it properly. Say it."
Ukraine's pride lay down somewhere inside his ribs like an old horse and would not get back up. "I want you to fuck me."
"Who?"
"You." It came out of him in a wail. "You, you, please, fuck me, knot me, please, Russia, I can't, I can't stand it, please, please..."
"Molodets," Russia said softly, and crossed the gap.
There was nothing gentle about any of it. He hauled Ukraine up off the mattress by the collar, the old leather that was supposed to keep alphas away from his neck now just a handle, and threw him face down across the bed, and ripped the soaked underwear down to his knees in one yank. Cold air hit the slick between his cheeks and Ukraine moaned like a whore before he'd even been touched. Russia laughed low in his throat and shoved two thick fingers straight into him, and Ukraine's back bowed clean off the sheet.
"Ahh, oh God, oh God..."
"Listen to you. Dripping." Russia twisted them, spread them, and cracked his other palm across Ukraine's ass hard enough to sting, and a red handprint rose up on the blue. "All that mouth. All those nasty names. And look at you now, pushing back on my hand like a little suka."
"Shut up, just do it, please, please, just..."
The belt clanked. Then the blunt, burning head of Russia's cock was pressing at him, huge and hot, and Russia got a fistful of his red hair and drove in to the hilt in one brutal thrust, and Ukraine screamed into the mattress, haaah, ahhh, because it stretched him wide open and burned and it was the first thing all night that felt anything like enough.
"Tishe," Russia hissed into his ear, and didn't give him a second to breathe. He fucked him hard and deep and fast, the narrow bed slamming against the wall with every stroke, the wet slap of hips on ass filling up the cold little room. Every thrust punched a noise out of Ukraine, uhn, uhn, ahh, ah, and the hand in his hair wrenched his head back until his throat was bared and his collar bit into his windpipe. Russia's heavy balls smacked against him. Slick ran down the backs of his thighs and dripped onto the sheet.
"More?" Russia panted.
"Yes, yes, please, harder, harder..."
"Harder, he says." He gave him harder, slamming in so deep that Ukraine's vision went white at the edges. Then Russia reached underneath him and found that tiny, aching cock, closed it up easily in two fingers, and laughed into the back of his neck. "Look at this. Look at this little thing. Is this what you were so proud of? I could lose it in my fist."
The shame hit at exactly the same moment as Russia's cock dragged over that spot inside him, and Ukraine came, sobbing, shaking, spurting weakly over Russia's fingers and the sheet, his hole clamping down like a fist, ahhh, ahh, ah, nnngh. Russia groaned like he'd been punched and fucked him straight through it, harder, rougher, chasing it.
Then Ukraine felt the knot.
It was already swelling at the base, catching on his rim with every thrust, tugging, stretching, too big, and Russia was grunting now, mean and wordless, forcing it, and Ukraine was babbling yes, yes, do it, give it to me, please, until Russia shoved forward with his whole weight and the knot popped in and locked, and Ukraine wailed, and Russia came inside him with a growl that rattled through both their bodies, pumping him full, hot and deep, again and again and again.
Then Russia's teeth closed on the edge of the collar.
Ukraine went rigid with terror. He felt the hot breath on his neck and the hard press of teeth through the leather right over his gland, and every hair on his body stood up. Russia held it there for one long, long second. Then he let go and laughed softly into his ear.
"Relax," he said. "I'm not wasting a bite on you."
The relief and the insult arrived together and Ukraine couldn't tell them apart. He lay with his face in the wet sheet, tied, full, shaking, Russia's whole hot weight across his back, and the fever sank down to a dull, satisfied throb for the first time all night. Under his shoulder blade he could feel Russia's heartbeat slowing down, slow, slower, maddeningly calm, the heartbeat of a body that had never once been afraid inside this house.
"I'll ask Father for your pills in the morning," Russia said, already sleepy, his mouth in Ukraine's hair. "He'll give them to me. He gives me things." A yawn. "You can thank me after the next round. Spokoynoy nochi, bratik."
Ukraine didn't answer. He reached down past the edge of the mattress, found Russia's grey sweater on the floor where it had fallen, and pulled it back up under his cheek.