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Hilda studies Reinhard’s profile in the low light of the moon. The moonlight doesn’t soften his features; if anything, it renders him more distant, leeching the gold from his hair and the warmth of life from his skin, transfiguring him into a cold figure of marble.
And then he turns to her, with those pale eyes shining with tears.
Surely, Kircheis would have known what to do. Kircheis would have taken him in hand, and drawn out all of this awful guilt; Kircheis would set everything to right, because he had simply understood Reinhard.
Grief and shame and rage tangles in his body, caught without release.
She longs to take his face in her hands, and kiss him brusquely and sweetly, like Kircheis surely did. She longs to touch him; she wants to capture the heat of him in herself, touch that smoldering supernova of his presence and match it, encapsulate it, if only for a moment.
But revulsion curdles in her stomach at the thought of him touching her like a woman. At the moment all that careful distance she has maintained, all the respect she has won in his eyes would fall away at the sight of her bared breasts, at the inescapable femininity of her body. Safe in her suits and lace, the men look at her as an equal; or at very least, something sexless and strange. Reinhard has always met her on as equal ground as he can give anyone.
Has he taken any of the others to his bed? Kind, doe-eyed Muller, or strange, sly Oberstein? Or even Reuental, with his covetous looks and barely-masked bridling? Any of them, Reinhard could have brought to his bed without ruining. But no, he’d never let any of them so close, not even Oberstein. They all share the sin of not being Kircheis, never being able to anticipate his every need.
Still, they might have fucked him as a comrade in arms, drawn out the poison of despair with the strange, brutal sweetness that the soldiers’ poetry sings of. It’s a different thing, between a man and a woman.
She runs a hand through his hair, feeling bold, and he makes a little, broken noise and melts into her hand, leaning forward and almost over-balancing. She twines her fingers in his hair, feeling the ghost of Kircheis settling over her shoulders like a divine possession.
Theolepsy, the ancients called it, when the gods borrowed their bodies. She had learned that at university, between lessons on power and governance and occasional, cautious dalliances with the girls whose gazes caught and lingered on her shoulders, her shorn hair, the strange cut of her clothes.
It is Kircheis’ body she wishes she could inhabit, if such a thing were possible.
Shame is the devouring ouroboros of her body. Had it always lived there, or was it born the first time someone’s eyes drifted to her breasts, to her neck, her legs? Impossible to know, irrelevant; she’s always been a chameleon, taking what form best served her purpose.
If she wanted to simply play Kircheis, she might have relented to the military rank long before, let Reinhard keep dressing her up like he was wont to do with all his officers. But she has no taste for playing pretend in a soldier’s uniform. She knows what the others will say - what Reuental and his ilk will say, their lips quirked and eyebrows raised. She’s no valkyrie, no operatic girl-warrior with flaxen hair and sharpened sword, and cannot fashion herself into one; if anything, Reinhard makes a better valkyrie, and she loves him for it.
She knows her worth, as diplomat, as negotiator, as a lodestone who can match Reinhard in enough that he must consider her words of caution.
And this obscene desire could destroy all that, as surely as a pistol shot.
She takes his hand, and brings it to her lips. Blood rushes to her cheeks; his skin burns beneath her lips — he’s feverish, again, and she should be worried — but her skin is afire too with the impudence of what she is doing.
A little exhalation slips from his lips, as she presses a kiss to the joint of his wrist, over the pale blue veins beneath.
“Fraulein —“ he begins, voice broken.
“Your Majesty,” she says, softly. “This won’t do.” She brushes the tears from his eyes.
He makes another choked sound, and then presses himself to her with trembling shoulders. She enfolds him in her arms — how long has she wanted to touch him, and how perverse a thing to think that is, as the emperor of the galaxy comes to pieces in her arms.
“Please,” he breathes, and she doesn’t know what he’s asking for. For the world to stop? For an end to the pain that shivers through the overtaxed threads of his body? To take back the things that he and Oberstein have done, to bring Kircheis once more to life?
A helpless tremor runs through her. Never has she felt so helpless.
She had stood at Kircheis’s grave, and promised to look out for Reinhard for the kind-eyed boy-admiral who had returned her father to her. If he were alive, none of this would be necessary.
None of this fumbling, dancing game — one step ahead of Reinhard, all that he requires of her is the appearance of confidence, of control. She’s done it before, for the starry-eyed girls at university. A harmless thing — girlish curiosity, they had whispered and their future husbands will never know.
In this moment, is Reinhard so different? His eyes hang on her like she holds the universe, his hard-won universe, in her hands. A strange giddiness washes over her.
He’s strung tight with grief — and something else, that familiar, aching look he gets in his eyes when something is beyond him, but now it is not for the boundless expanse of stars, not for the known universe — it’s for her. Or at least for the pulse rushing through her, or the lover’s touch she is borrowing from the past, like some charlatan’s seance.
“Come.” She draws him from the study to the bedroom, and he bends readily to her hand, too exhausted for pride.
It’s not the first time she’s stepped into his bedroom; that line had been crossed as soon as he first took ill. But the hour renders everything strange; the expanse of his bed is a foreign land, and the chill of the sheets almost shocks her out of her strange mood. But Reinhard is soft beneath her hands, and his eyes are wounds.
Her fingers rasp over the fabric of his shirt as she begins to unbutton it; and the fine stitching beneath her fingers brings her for a moment to the forests of Odin, to Countess Grundenwald’s safe haven, sitting in the chill darkness and running her fingers over the flowers stitched by the Countess’s hand. The same slender pink flowers that bent their heads at Kircheis’s grave. All those hours of labor, all that love or penance or pain, stitched into beautiful forms.
She’s never had a taste for stitchwork.
She banishes the thought from her mind, as she tugs at the edge of Reinhard’s collar and pulls the shirt from his shoulders, exposing the pale expanse of his shoulders and chest.
If Kircheis is watching from Valhalla, what would he think, as she takes the Kaiser’s chin in her hands and tilts it up to meet her lips? Surely, there are moments the dead do not watch; moments that escape the great sweep of history. But she cannot hide away and claim this only for herself, not when she has so invoked him.
Taking his name in her mouth in that moment would be worse than obscene, so she makes her prayers — her thanks — her penance silently, mouthing the words into the crook of Reinhard’s neck as she presses kisses to his skin.
All prayer dissolves when Reinhard turns to kiss her, capturing her lips, and then, there is only the heat of him, and the answering heat flickering inside of her, and she doesn’t think of sisters, or lovers, or emperors, only the nip of her teeth against his lips and the soft little sounds he makes.
When his fingers fumble at her shirt, she shrugs it off easily; swept up in the heat, it easier to not imagine the lines of her body as he touches them, to focus only on the feeling of his hands.
They end up on the bed, with her on top of him.
This, this is uncharted territory; something only she can do, hers and hers alone.
For a moment, she thinks with vague hysteria of the morning when her father had tried to speak to her of such matters; at eighteen, she had heard quite enough already from Magdalena, and had been quite sure she wanted none of it. Even later, with the girls at her college, it had all been kissing and caressing, with the knowledge that they must leave no mark of their fun.
She cannot silence her gasp when he finally slips inside of her; the ache is sharp, radiating into the muscles of her thighs and midsection. It almost makes her panic; it’s real, inescapably real.
Instantly, his gaze sharpens; a panicked, desperate startle-reaction, like a doe before a hunter. “Fraulein?”
“Shh,” she soothes him, leaning into the ache. She cannot frighten him into fleeing, or else this moment, already so fragile, will teeter into ruin. “It always hurts a little, they say, the first —“ She bites her lips, before she starts to tell him about medical trivia. “Hasn’t anyone told you?”
He looks stricken; pale beneath the flush of fever. Surely he hadn’t escaped the vast array of cruel jokes men make about this sort of thing. He’s still there, but so still; still as a statue. She plucks at a lock of his hair, and then lifts her hand to cup his face.
“I’m well,” she says. “All is well. ” She runs her thumb down the delicate muscle of his neck; he’s trembling, though from want or strain she cannot tell. “I promise.”
He studies her for a moment. “You wouldn’t lie,” he says. This takes a little of the fear from his face; and when she leans down to kiss him, he responds with matching hunger. The friction of their bodies awakens all the coiled desire; and then he’s moving against her, inside her, frantic and desperate and seeking.
When he comes, he winds himself around her, sinking his teeth into her shoulder, and she twines her fingers in his hair as he shudders against her.
She reaches down to touch herself as his movements slow against her, caught in the agony of half-release; and after a moment, she finds his cool fingers over hers, his eyes on the little movements of her hips.
A breathless little laugh escapes her; it follows, that he wouldn’t be keen to leave something undone, something unlearned. Even this.
And then he moves his fingers, clumsily but carefully against her, and she lets herself fall back onto the sheets, giving over to the little, exhausted thrills of pleasure.
“Good,” she breathes. “Yes, good.”
There’s a knot of grief and fear inside of her, folded away and away like a pearl; and something in his touch brushes against it, again and again, in a way he never has in their waking hours and perhaps never will. This moment, this moment is hers; there’s no one watching, no one looking, and she dissolves into his touch, moving against him, coaxing him to bring her further and further towards the invisible catch.
When finally he reaches it, when finally she reaches it, she lets herself dissolve into it; become no more than the press of his hands against her and those slivers of blinding pleasure.
Afterwards, they lie together; he puts up a valiant fight against sleep for a handful of minutes, running his hands through the shorn hair at the back of her neck, eyes pensive.
So this is ruin. I’ve ruined myself, she thinks, half-sardonic. Have I ruined him too?
But the touch of his hair is soft beneath her fingers, and she’s always wanted to touch it, so she lays her head beside him and runs her fingers through it, and falls back into the fantasy that when they wake, things will be no different.