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On the day the Wall came down, Gilbert sauntered over to the shadow waiting beyond the crowd and smirked.
See. I told you so.
Roderich only gave him a faint musician's smile and bowed once, as if all this had been just another chess match like the ones they had in Vienna back when Vienna was still a center of the world. Gilbert couldn't tell if he had any desire to pull the brunette over and hug him as fiercely as he could or not, and in any case both of them turned on their heels and started walking down separate roads. Roderich, to the neutral vigil he vowed to keep forever. Gilbert, to the waiting bear hug that his brother was all too ready to give.
Their footsteps didn't echo on the pavement. He couldn't tell if Roderich had turned back to look at him at any point, and Roderich wouldn't be able to tell, either, that Gilbert glanced back once, before rounding the corner, just to see his figure melt into the crowd.
Gilbert whistled Fritz's favorite song as he walked. It wasn't exactly 'in' at the moment, but damn if he was not to say anything to Fritz on the day he finally got himself back together again.
On the day they dismembered his state, Gilbert leaned back against the wall and watched the proceedings, quiet. Ludwig argued on his behalf, passionately, desperately, but he was old enough to know how these things went, and it was final. Such was the way these things were decided. He would prefer to die in battle, quickly and proudly, but there were things to be said about dying a long and boring death. Free time, for instance. He could go pester the entirety of Europe like never before. He could raise a whole new flock of birds. Maybe he could even go dig out some old clothes and become a street performer and show those history nerds how old swordfighting was really done.
And there was the sound of someone's piano drifting down through the streets. It was clumsy and amateurish, but it was piano nonetheless.
Gilbert hummed along with it. He later wrote a letter to Roderich, which must have been scrutinized over by at least seven different foreign organizations.
Hey, have you heard? Apparently I'm finally gonna die.
Of course I have. More importantly, has no one told you not to use such unsightly contractions when writing?
He wondered what song Roddy played after he wrote that letter. A celebratory march? Maybe even something a bit sad, if he was allowed a little bit of wishful thinking? He wasn't sure why he wanted that, or what he really thought about Roddy and what he wanted Roddy to think about him, but Roddy was the only person Gilbert consistently hated from the very beginning, and he couldn't help but think that he would miss the man if the latter were to disappear from the map. But what if in his absence, Gilbert had turned from 'archenemy' to 'annoying sideshow that means nothing'?
He wrote back to Roderich, this time in telegram: I'll hate you forever, just so you know.
Roderich wrote back: Really, don't you realize how outdated telegrams are these days?
It's a wonderful thing, being hated. He didn't know how he could live without it.
Gilbert spent most of the following months pestering Lutz and trying to make himself as much of a nuisance as possible, in as much as someone so awesome as himself could be a nuisance. He bugged everybody he could possibly bug, even Ludwig's dogs, and when he wasn't being a troll he sank himself into his old collection of diaries. If he was going to die, he wanted to have as many of his memories with him as he could.
And when he heard that 'Austria' was going to join the fledgling European Union, he rolled his eyes. Even if you made that man promise and swear on all the three thousand one hundred and forty-two versions of the Bible to stay by himself forever, you could trust Roddy to find loopholes in the argument. That bastard would not stay neutral, he just couldn't stand being alone for very long.
Him? Hah. He had Lutz, and he had his birds. And he was used to doing things by himself. He was born alone and rose to power alone, bar a few convenient allies here and there. It made sense that he'd fall alone, too.
'So, how does it feel to play house with everyone you've shacked up with in the past millennium?' Gilbert asked, showing off his new telephone lines.
'First, I did not marry all of them. Second, do you know how much international calls cost?'
For a brief moment his thoughts ran to the memories of the boy who became a girl, and he shook his head. She wouldn't fall with Roddy either, would she, if he were to disappear? Nah, not for all the centuries that they stayed together. She wouldn't, she didn't, and neither would that whole stinking Union. This sort of thing was just a way of saying 'mind your own business and we'll mind ours', in the end.
Nothing permanent. Just paper words and paper names.
'You can only hide behind what's on the papers for so long, Roddy,' he remembered himself muttering. 'Sooner or later you'll let it slip that you didn't like any of them and you never did.'
Immense hatred. It's the only thing that stays. Romance? You only need to look at Roddy himself to swear off that for the next three thousand years. Family? His own brother could be forced to cut him off if their bosses told him he had to. Hate? Now that was the one thing that was his, one thing that could last forever.
'At this rate it's gonna take forever for me to die, but just so you know, I'm still hating you to the end of time and you suck,' he said, munching on some apfelstrudels Roderich made the afternoon he was hiding from all the fuss of the Y2K Scare.
Roderich just flicked him a look and played a new song on his piano. 'New' being figurative, because Roddy was the only person he knew who could play the same songs over and over for more than six hundred years.
Maybe he had an OCD. Maybe he was carnally pining for Mozart. Wasn't that Freud guy an Austrian, too?
It was pretty comfortable, he admitted, to freeload off Roderich's place every once in a while. He had to dodge that bastard frypan demon, sure, but even that was comforting by itself---Erzsébet, too, seemed to have been using that same frypan for a few centuries now. That thing probably belonged in a museum, like everything else in the small house, up to and including its master. He figured that was why it felt more right than being in the house he shared with Lutz, sometimes. As old and tiresome as it was, nothing in Roderich's house seemed to have changed, not even after Vienna lost most of its old glory. The philosophers and the scientists might have all migrated to Germany and left behind only the tourists, but somehow it was as if by being here he could still feel the beating of a very old heart.
Before he knew it, he had his own toothbrush at the house, because it was a pain to remember to bring one every time and Roddy always complained about how much his mouth stank if he forgot. A few years later and he had a few shirts hanging in the cellar. More years still and even Gilbird had his own spot in the rookery, next to the place where an old, arrogant two-headed eagle used to live. It had lain empty and unused for the better part of the century now, but the place was still well-tended. The chick seemed to have found it to his liking, even if it was built for a much larger bird with all the spaces it left behind.
'Just how long do you intend to continue this?' Roderich asked, one day, when they were sitting together on the sofa and watching the newest reality show.
'Eh? Which part? The part where I hate you, or the part where I camp in your house?'
Roderich stared at him. Then he sighed and turned away.
Even that sort of change didn't bother him as much as it would have had it been anybody else. If it was, say, Erzsébet, it would seriously creep him out. But Roderich? Roderich might have settled for a sigh over transgressions that would've caused him to throw Gilbert out with the bathwater just a century ago, but that was fine, because nothing that mattered had really changed. They still hated each other as much as ever, it was just that Roddy had resigned himself to the fact that he wasn't allowed to throw a harpsichord at people anymore. He couldn't ask someone else to do it for him, either, and if there was a constant in this dumb universe, it was that Roderich was a useless sissy when he was alone.
And there was how the way he rolled his eyes made it more fun to poke his cheeks.
More time passed and a few shirts in the cellar turned into a whole cabinet. The cellar itself had turned into a semi-permanent guest room with its own computer and plastic models of Friedrich the Great. Roderich seldom set foot in there unless it was time for dessert or if he was going to play a piece he knew Gilbert particularly liked on his piano, if only because it made the latter a more tolerable company. Roddy was hardly the most pleasant landlord, but he also didn't ask for any help with the electricity bills, and he never said anything when the local bars billed him for repairs every time Gilbert went about drinking. To compensate, Gilbert tended to sneak out in the wee hours of the mornings to put a good chunk of his weekly allowance in the mail, usually addressed to one of Austria's charity agencies. It wasn't as if he felt grateful or indebted or anything, but he wanted to do something to return the favor. He wouldn't be caught dead trying to help the priss, but the idea that he might actually owe him and did nothing for it also didn't sit well with him at all.
'You should come home more often, Brother,' Ludwig told him over Skype. 'You're out bothering Roderich all the time. It's improper, and at this point I don't know when he's going to pull the extradition card on you.'
Gilbert snorted. Roderich extraditing him, really? Pshaw. 'If he's capable of doing that shit, he would've done it hundreds of years ago. Trust me, I know what I'm doing.'
There was a moment of taut silence where Gilbert could almost hear Lutz going, But you don't know how the world works anymore, Brother, I just want to take care of you while you're still here. It sent a bitter taste into his mouth, and he resorted to getting rid of it by posting pictures of Roderich sleeping on a pile of fluffy giant panda dolls.
Erzsébet hit him with her frypan and asked for the RAW files a few days later.
Against all reason, the sense of comfort in Roderich's house was there even when he was sick---it was beyond him how he managed to get sick without an economy, but maybe that was just what happened with their kind when they were dying for real---and Gilbert had lost count of the times he purposely kept the whole thing from his brother and just flopped around on Roderich's sofa, trying to curse away his fever. He did go home once or the twice, the first few times it happened, but there was a sense, this sense that he belonged right here, that this was where some old root of his still managed to dig into deeper soil.
When that happened, Roderich never fussed over him. He would ask a few questions, like how Gilbert was feeling, what hurt exactly, and how bad he thought it was. Then he would leave for a few days. There was always enough food in the refrigerator and everything he needed would somehow be right where he wanted them, so he never lacked for creature comforts. Roddy would even leave a few CDs of his favorite marches around on the couch, and he wouldn't even mind if he came back to find a Rammstein in the CD player long after Gilbert had fallen asleep. And somehow, even if Gilbert went to bed at the height of his fever, hearing Roderich's footsteps in the hall was always a sign that he was about to recover.
That was proof definitive that he really must have hated Roddy with a fire hotter than a thousand suns, right? You don't spring back to health the moment someone shows up, unless that someone happens to be a total supervillain.
And if he ended up donating to Austrian hospitals and volunteering with charity programs? He just figured that it might help with further bouts of illness, and it sure wasn't because he was coming to understand what it felt like to be ill and waiting for death or anything.
If there was a problem, it was just that Gilbert was never sure what to feel when he saw the way Roddy looked after he recovered from his fevers. Roddy wasn't supposed to give him a small smile that could be mistaken for relief, in any way, shape or form. He was supposed to give him a mildly disgusted look, like he was seeing some fungal mold that wouldn't go away. He wasn't supposed to coincidentally make Gilbert's favorite dishes for breakfasts, and when he invited Erzsébet over for dinner she wasn't supposed to bring tarts and chocolates and flowers and other things that might be misconstrued as get-well presents.
It was disconcerting. But strangely enough, this disconcerting was less uncomfortable than the rest of the 21 st century was proving to be.
'If you would like a breath of fresh air,' Roderich would sometimes say, with a perfectly straight face, 'perhaps you would like to accompany me for a short stroll around the park?'
And on those dinners it would be all he could do not to drop his fork before he could grin and answer, 'Just admit that you wouldn't make it back here on your own, sissy.'
Even that sort of thing, which would've been the most laughable thing in the universe in other ages, had turned into something warm and malleable. Something he could reforge into a little melting putty that belonged. Like the increasing number of shirts, pants and neckties that he kept in Roddy's basement, his regular (indeed, routine) work at the hospitals, his evening strolls. Like the Austrian driver's license that he proudly brandished one day just to show Roderich that he could do it, too.
If being hated long enough could do this to a person, everyone should hate everyone else a whole lot more. Being hated felt like he was floating in a sunny pool, his brains and thoughts buoyed by the gentle notes of Roderich's music. Maybe that was why he did it, why he rested his head on the Austrian's shoulder one evening and stayed like that. He could hear Roderich's breath catch, but he didn't try to push Gilbert off, nor did he try to get away. All Roddy did was pry the TV remote from his hand and switching the channel to something Gilbert found utterly boring, like the local orchestra playing some symphony that didn't hold a candle to his daily dose of piano.
Gilbert didn't move, and neither did Roddy. They stayed that way through the rest of the evening. And the next evening. And the next.
That was when Gilbert thought he should say it, because it was beginning to bother him, and he didn't derive a joy from thinking it wouldn't bother Roddy anymore.
So he said, "You know, Roddy, I wouldn't mind if you scatter my ashes around Vienna after I'm gone. Assuming I have any ashes to speak of, anyway."
What he meant to say by that was, he didn't mind staying there for good, in one form or another.
Roderich turned to give him an incredulous sort of look, which was pretty rude considering they were checking some old tiles at the Stephansdom for the archaeology folks. He was talking about serious matters and even picked the sissy's precious Habsburg crypts for it, geez, you'd think the man could at least take him seriously.
He was surprised when Roderich, after an intense bout of staring, finally opened his mouth and the words that came out of it were: "Do you think so little of me, fool?"
What the hell was that?
"What, you're too good for me now?" Gilbert asked, crossing his arms over his chest. "So very typical of the Prissdom of Austria. So that's how it is? I don't even have a landmark to my name anymore and I'm still too awful for your precious soil?"
Roderich flicked a glance to something somewhere outside the building, and he muttered something under his breath. Something insulting, probably, but it wasn't like he could possibly say anything worse than he already did. Sure, Gilbert didn't help, but it wasn't his fault. He was already regretting how he ever thought he could say that sort of thing just because he hated Roddy and Roddy hated him back, what did he even expect? Why did he even think he should , anyway?
But then Roderich grabbed his hand.
"Follow me," he said.
"Hey---hey, wait a second, Roddy. Where the hell do you think you're going!?" Gilbert yelped, stumbling on his toes. Roderich didn't answer and just stormed out of the church with this murder gait that brooked no questions. In older times, getting dragged around by the sissy of all people would've been a travesty beyond imagining for Gilbert, but he was no longer what he used to be. As what he was, if Roderich really wanted to drag him somewhere, it wasn't as if he could just dig his heels in and resist.
It was an ordinary day in the Stephansplatz. Gilbert wouldn't be caught dead admitting it, but he always liked this place. It was old and he remembered praying here often in the past. Everything somehow remained the way they used to look despite the pilgrims turning into tourists with digital cameras and smartphones, there was something he really liked about it, something like sinking into a bathtub of his own after a long dry day. He couldn't tell what the big deal was, though. He had been here with Roderich pretty often in the past few years, and he couldn't imagine why it should matter to Roderich to drag him out here.
He was about to make a quip when Roderich turned at a corner he never turned in their walks, and then turned several more corners still. Gilbert couldn't help but blink. This wasn't an unfamiliar area even if he didn't know where they were going exactly, but there was something different about it this time. There was a sense of something approaching them. Something old and powerful and familiar and right , more right than anything a landless nation about to die had any right to feel.
"Specs---"
"I don't come here often because I thought you'd find it in bad taste," Roderich said. His face was a giant scowl. "But I never knew you were going to be this obtuse about it. Mein Gott , Gilbert. I never knew."
Never knew what, he was about to say, but something took the words away from him.
Something that felt like a hit to the head with a sledgehammer, yet at the same time felt so proud and sweet and so full of joy.
It was a church. An old church, but just about any church in the Inner City was old. The point was that Gilbert knew it. He knew it, loved it, joked about its totally ironic name, called it something else and finally after a while he hated it. The church that stood before him now like a beacon of something long lost that had just been found, its windows gleaming like arms open wide, calling to him and saying, welcome home.
Something rose up in his chest that he knew immediately. It, too, was an old thing. Something he thought to no longer be , but there it was. Shining and beating all the same.
"Mine," Gilbert croaked. It really was all he could do.
Deutschordenskirche. The house of Saint Elisabeth of Hungary. The memory of a boy, clad in the black-and-white of a priest, swearing to uphold the laws of God forever, to love and to protect and to guard the souls of his German flock in strange lands. The boy who looked at the guardian of Vienna, the weirdly wimpy guardian of the East, and thought his eyes were quite pretty. That boy died a long time ago. But here, Gilbert could feel his chainmailed hand tugging at his fingers, the ghost of that boy's voice saying, it took you a really long time to come home.
"I've also had many names, as many as the papers gave me," Roderich said quietly. "Ostarrîchi. Duchy of Austria. Crownlands. Empire. Republic. Ostmark, if we're going there." He looked at Gilbert, his eyes unreadable. "All the same, I've never lost the first one I had. We never do."
In his mind's eyes he could almost see the pale pale ghost of a little boy in ill-fitting aristocratic clothes, unaccustomed to his new glasses and fidgeting with his unruly hair, wavering in the shadows cast on the flagstones. He could almost hear the fading ghosts of a hundred men, a thousand more, making their passage through the eaves, joking with each other, praying at an altar lit with sunlight. Of course he knew what it was. There was no way he wouldn't know.
His.
Gilbert was so completely frozen, put at such a loss that he didn't notice when Roderich slowly and perhaps gently led him away from the church doors. They went into a small corner garden where it was quiet, where the sun was warm and birds were singing from the trees. He sat Gilbert down on a bench and stood there watching him, patiently, as if he was waiting for him to recover.
"So what you mean to say is---" Gilbert started, finally.
"You never stopped," Roderich answered before he could finish the sentence, though it wasn't a question in the first place.
"How long have you known?" The next words came out like a desperate hiss. "How long have you known, while I was out there thinking I was going to die---!"
"If you mean the continuing existence of the Teutonic Order? For a long time. Just as long as you have, I think, though I may remember it better than you. How many Emperors of mine became Grandmasters, do you think? And how many asked me to tell them stories about your glory days?" Roderich sighed. "As for what you are---that's recent. I didn't suspect anything until you fell ill for the first time, and then after that you started making all those donations…I honestly thought you might be adjusting to what the order currently is---"
"Why didn't you tell me before!?" he yelled, leaping up and grabbing Roderich by the collar. "Why didn't you tell me, if you knew!?"
"I thought you knew already! Why else would you be sitting around in my house so much!?"
"Why?" Gilbert faltered. Why else...why else indeed. He should have known why he felt so comfortable in Roderich's house. Now that he knew what he was, it felt as obvious as sunrise. But why did he never question it? Why did it feel so natural to lounge about Roderich's house, filching Roderich's tortes, napping to Roderich's piano, watching Roderich's TV?
Why?
What answer was his heart so set on that he never even thought about anything else, any other reason at all?
"Because we hate each other," he said, blankly. "What else could it be?"
The Austrian stared at him for a moment, then shook his head and sank into the bench. "Surely," he muttered, "surely, you can't be so dense. Nobody is that dense, not even you."
"Who are you calling dense!? You're the dense one here, I tried---"
"If I hated you, Gilbert Beilschmidt, I would've thrown you out on the first day and told my boss that Austria doesn't want your order anymore. I could've asked my boss to abolish it, and you would be dead and I would be a much happier man. If I hated you. If I hated you, Gilbert," he looked up, and his eyes were bright. "If I hated you, I would have wanted to see you gone. I would have been glad to see you die. It should have been so very obvious, if you were capable of employing your brain."
The light in Roderich's eyes made Gilbert feel suddenly anxious. There was something here, something that should be within his grasp and at the same time slipping out of his hands. He felt that he needed to catch it, that he would regret it if he couldn't take hold of it, but he didn't know how.
"Then what the hell was it?" he asked, quietly. His heart was pumping in his chest, and he didn't know why.
Roderich looked at him and said, "Figure it out for yourself, you fool."
Gilbert opened his mouth, about to shoot back a retort, but what he saw on Roderich's face made him stop.
Had Roddy ever looked at him like that before?
The Roderich he knew...the only Roderich he ever knew...seldom ever showed any expression, no matter what he was feeling. He always looked so impassive, so infuriatingly impassive, so ridiculously unaffected by all the vulgarities of the world that Gilbert couldn't help but hate him for it. Couldn't help but crave the idea of tearing down that unassailable indifference, of watching it break and crumble, of seeing it twist into the same hatred Gilbert had for him. Always the unreachable aristocrat always always always, even if his own knight had betrayed him, even if his family had abandoned him, even if he was reduced to a shadow of what he once was.
Had he ever seen Roderich like this?
"Can I ask you for a favor?" he said, quietly. It felt like the only question that mattered.
Still staring at him, Roderich nodded hesitantly.
Gilbert nodded back and moved closer, never taking his eyes off the Austrian's face as he did so. He could feel Roderich flinch, but he didn't move away either, not even when Gilbert reached up with both hands and grabbed his shoulders, as gently and awkwardly as a skittish horse that had never touched a person before.
The light in his violet eyes wavered, like the reflection of a falling star.
"Gilbert, what are you---"
"Shut up," he said. "Shut up and just let me look at you."
Roderich stilled in his hands. It was strange, all of this. It was strange, this closeness. It was strange, this permission. It was as if he had never seen this person before, as if this was a face that he had seen for the first time. And maybe it was. His thoughts raced, looking back through all the Roderich's that he had seen in their thousand years, trying to recall if he had ever seen him like this, through all the bad times and the worst, through the centuries when he wanted to kill Roderich for good, through everything that they shared in their yesteryears.
He remembered more than he thought he would.
The way Roderich's mouth would curve up into a ghost of a smile whenever Gilbert dragged him out to drink with Ludwig. The way he would wander into his own world, lost in some mysterious happiness, whenever he heard a strain of Mozart. The way he used to frown in irritation back when they still met in Vienna for their annual chess matches, the way he scoffed at him when they argued over the future of German philosophy. The way his eyes burned when he lost Silesia, even though he never broke, never crumbled, never shattered the way Gilbert wished he would. Roderich, staring at him with tired finality when their masters signed the treaty that marked the end of the Seven Years' War. Roderich on his wheelchair, looking at his empty house and empty garden and empty rookery with unreachable solitude. Roderich looking back at Gilbert and Erzsébet when he alone stepped out of the Iron Curtain, Roderich, his cheeks still chubby, his eyes still glittering with the sun on the peaks of the Alps, giving some stupid child-knight from nowhere at all a curious smile just because he asked what songs his vielle could play.
It was strange, the way he remembered all this. It was strange, the way he never realized. It was strange, the way it all felt like yesterday.
It was strange how, despite all they've said and done to each other, he could not remember a single face of hatred.
But if Roderich didn't hate him, then what was it?
But if he hated Roderich, why did he remember so much? Why did he keep all these memories with him, like they were something precious, like they were something not even death could take away?
"No way," Gilbert croaked. "That's the most idiotic answer I've ever heard."
"Gilbert…?"
The quaint southerner's accent in that voice, in Roderich's voice, brought him out of his thoughts for the first time, and he couldn't help but stare at that face in wonder. Did Roddy really look like this? Did he really look so soft, so worried, so unsure?
So it was true that the world you see could change with a single thought.
Gilbert removed his hands from Roderich's shoulders and reached up to touch his face, his jaw, his cheekbones. It was soft and new and strange, the way sunlight fell on his skin, the way his chocolate-colored hair brushed against Gilbert's hands. He couldn't help but want to remain like this, to trace the contours of Roderich's face like it was an unexpected treasure. It felt as if there was a new kind of wonder in the shape of his nose, the softness of his cheeks, the face Gilbert had already known for a thousand years and more.
He felt like a ship searching for a place to anchor, and he had no idea what he would do if Roderich moved away like he often did.
Roderich didn't move away. So there his hands remained. Their gazes were locked in each other's, and that in itself was strange, so strange that after a time Gilbert had to look away.
For long moments, all that existed between them was silence.
Roderich was the one who broke it first.
"If you must know," he said, fidgeting a little. "On my end, you aren't quite so far off the mark."
Gilbert's eyes widened, and he turned to look at the Austrian's violet eyes.
The light in them was clear and bright, like there had never been anything in them but the truth.
It was all he could do to keep himself from staring, looking away and staring again. He didn't know what to say or do or think about this new information about very old things, and he wasn't sure what he even wanted. He remained silent for a while, and Roderich did not disturb him.
At last, Gilbert coughed.
"Y' know," he said, embarrassed and wondering how odd his voice sounded. "It's not like I'm against this turn of events, but with all this I'm going to miss you hating me more than a hip-hop band. It's...how do you put it, the bread and butter of our relationship?"
"I'll hate you again tomorrow," Roderich said, a reassuring hand floating hesitantly somewhere near Gilbert's cheek, just close enough to almost touch. It made his breath hitch and filled him with such a lightness that he never knew he could possess.
"Then I guess I'll love you again the day after," Gilbert whispered. Then he grabbed Roderich's hand and pulled him into a hug that must have contained the entire force of his being.
After the briefest of hesitations, Roderich raised his arms and gently wrapped them around Gilbert's back, easing his weight into the embrace. The weight of his years and the words he never thought to exist, maybe. The weight of relief and embarrassment, perhaps. It was strange, it was odd, and it was awkward---but of course that was only as it should be. Like mapping an undiscovered country, they were learning how to share something that had always existed, to call it by its proper name.
It's a wonderful thing, being loved. He didn't know how he could live without it.
"Roddy?"
"Mmm?"
"Can I ask you about something?"
"Of course. What is it?"
"So about that treaty that said you're not supposed to get cozy with any country---were you lying to them all along?"
He wouldn't put it past Roderich. The mild-mannered musician, regardless of how useless he was in battle, was a shrewd old hand at treaties. But Roderich only smiled, gently gently smiled.
"Am I in a relationship with any country, Deutschritterorden?"
Gilbert started at him. Then he, too, smiled.
"I guess not. Pity Francis' boss went through all that trouble making sure 'you' will never get hitched and 'I' will never rise again, huh?"
Roderich laughed and pulled Gilbert into a long, long kiss.
The trees were full of birdsong. The little yellow chick called Gilbird was there, and there was also something else soaring in the sky, far far above the rest of Vienna. Though the two-headed black eagle was long gone, there was a pair of the one-headed variety out there, a pair of new, completely ordinary black eagles. Their cries were different and less dignified, but somehow they rang just as true.
You can only hide behind what's on the papers for so long.
"Yeah," Gilbert muttered, breathing in the scent of Roderich's hair. "Yeah, I know."