Work Text:
It had been too simple to keep Alex’s glass full that night. Jack had committed many far more depraved sins than getting his younger brother properly sloshed, and yet it somehow tugged at his conscience more than the rest. He wondered if Alex would let anyone else push him out into the weeds of inebriation or if he only let Jack do it because he trusted him implicitly.
It was a party, the house was full with bodies and the buzz of voices. The servants were busy and polite society was distracted by its own correctness. When Jack helped his brother off to bed when he could no longer force his words to come clearly and his steps to land in a neat row it was just a matter of course. It was, after all, a party.
The stairs were a feat, Alex insisted he could do them himself but leaned heavily on the banister and his legs seemed to go outward instead of upward.
“I can do it,” he argued though he’d sunk down until he was sitting on the step instead of climbing them. He looked a little woozy, like the world was a ship rocking on the sea.
“I could carry you,” Jack said standing a few steps below him. They hadn’t made it terribly far up.
“I can do it, Johnny,” Alex retorted but his hands lifted towards him in a way they hadn’t since he’d grown out of the nursery.
Jack leaned in to allow Alex to put his arms around his neck so he could gather him up like a bride about to cross the threshold. He was not so heavy, though he would be considered a man now, going to Oxford and destined for the church, he still fit in Jack’s arms like a child.
Alex was dozing against Jack’s shoulder by the time they arrived at his bedchamber, or at least thoroughly deconstructing the line between consciousness and the alternative. He whined appreciatively as he was poured down against his bed covers. The drink had liquified him to a puddle of limbs and soft murmurs across his bed. Alex tugged at the cravat at his throat until it gave way but once it was off his efforts slowed to a stop as he slipped back into darkness.
“Shall I undress you then?” Jack asked, needlessly, Alex would not answer him.
Alex’s cheeks were flushed into roses and everything about him was loose and pliant. When Jack reached down to start unwrapping the layers of eveningwear his brother had donned that night, Alex’s eyelashes tremored and he made a gentle sound like he might resurface to consciousness. Jack did not pause or remove his hands from him, if he had learned anything in His Majesty’s Army it was that surety and conviction in one’s actions was as good as permission more times than not.
Perched on the edge of Alex’s bed his hands dipped beneath the fine coat first, easing it away from his narrow shoulders. Its colour and embroidery was matched in the waistcoat and breeches that accompanied it. The material was thick and kept the heat of his body, the slip of the lining inside whispered over the backs of Jack’s hands as he gathered Alex at the shoulders and lifted him as though to embrace him. Alex’s head lolled back showing off the bare curve of his throat. Absolutely vulnerable. When Jack lifted him higher he made sure one of his hands found the back of his neck, cradling it so that he could place him down again against his pillows like a precious piece of jewellery from their mother’s collection.
With Alex’s shoulders free from the coat it was easier to gather his arms from the sleeves. One at a time Jack guided them out of the hold. He took his time with Alex’s right arm, taking his hand in his own, he looked it over. There were shadows of ink stains Alex had not quite scrubbed away, only plain when held up to examine closely. His hands were soft, and felt softer still against Jack’s own callouses. He kissed his fingertips to better appreciate the tender skin and merely because he could with all the world including Alex looking away.
When Alex was small Jack would kiss the palm of his hand and close his fingers around the spot, so he could keep the affection for later. It had been years since he’d done it and he took the opportunity to do it again. He’d looked so beautiful at the party. Jack had gone away for so long that his boy had become a man, or at least had started to become one. Youth still clung to his features but was gone from his voice and the way they stood shoulder to shoulder now. That was why he’d kept filling Alex’s glass, kept teasing him into taking deeper swallows, so he could have him like this. He wanted to have him in the palms of his hands again, possibly for the last time. Their lives kept moving forward, away from this place and away from each other. Whatever guilt Jack had felt at incapacitating Alex slipped through his fingers. He could not hold onto both his brother and the guilt of wanting to, and Jack would always choose Alex, in all things.
Next was his waistcoat and the delicate bone buttons that fastened it. Jack undid each one with careful fingers. When he opened the garment he watched Alex’s chest rise and fall with the even rhythm of sleep. Jack wanted to know how those breaths felt, whether they pained him, whether they felt heavy or light. He still coughed, and the physicians had said he always would. He lowered his head to his chest and listened to the steady beat of his heart, comforted by the sound. A miracle in the mundane, that delicate balance of all things that resulted in persistent life. Jack was not sentimental, and hardly religious, but his brother inspired a strange awe in him. A fascination that was beyond blood. He supposed a man’s divine devotion had to end up somewhere. Even a man like him.
Jack collected himself up, and then collected Alex into his arms again to help rid him of the coat and waistcoat trapped beneath him, the shirt that had to be unlaced and untucked. While he pulled the linen from the waist of his breeches in a continuous motion he wondered how Alex would react to the slip of fabric over his skin while awake. Had he tried it out in the dormitories? Had he had the pleasure of someone undressing him with intent or had this luxury always gone unnoticed while he attended to himself?
As the shirt gave way to skin Jack inhaled slowly, as though he could breathe in the reveal of the smooth and pale expanse. He was warm and slack with sleep, completely unselfconscious. Jack wished he had another set of hands, two seemed too few to manage his unconscious brother and properly enjoy the visual of unwrapping him. However, the darkness outside the windows had turned them to a black mirror and that would do well enough, showing his brother in his arms in the amber glow of candles like an oil portrait.
Alex’s hair had become slightly disheveled in the process of it all so Jack spared a moment to undo the ribbon that tied his hair and set it loose. He put aside the ribbon on the bed and carded his fingers loosely through his dark hair, admiring the contrast where it lay against his fair shoulder. Jack bent to kiss that shoulder and Alex made a quiet noise that sounded a little like “Johnny,” on an inarticulate tongue.
Jack shushed him gently, his heart racing from proximity rather than the fear of being discovered. He lowered him back to the bed and stood to finish the task he’d started.
Jack took off Alex’s shoes, putting them down on the floor. When he righted himself he took a moment to enjoy this distant vantage point where he could take in the entirety of his brother’s candle-lit beauty. The sound of music and voices still carried up through the floor, the party carried on and it was very likely that he would be missed if he did not return in short order but Jack felt no urgency. There were things that one rushed to avoid suspicion and scorn and there were things too important for haste.
Alex was now bare chested and Jack noticed the sparse hairs that had begun to grow at the dip of his sternum and branched outward. There was a line that led down to his navel just visible at the waist of his breeches and Jack was sure it carried on beneath. His nipples were the same bruised rose petal colour of his own. He was paler still on his chest than the rest of him, up close Jack could see the shadow of blue veins beneath his skin. He seemed like something finely crafted as where Jack felt roughly hewn. Though he liked the contrast of his own tanned fingers on Alex’s fair skin tracing a lazy outline of one nipple, the rough pad of his thumb teasing against the unaroused bud.
It did not respond to him and he did not know what he might have done if it had. He had been spoiled with opportunities for his vices in recent years and he worried about his restraint. After all, he would not have been in this current situation if he’d been practicing prudence. The truth of the matter was that many beautiful women had welcomed him to their bodies but he had not been as intensely hard for them as he was for his helpless half-dressed brother, or the tears and screams of anyone else. But he would not hurt Alex, would not damn him with his depravity. He would however indulge in his body while his mind was away in dreams and innocent of anything that took place. Nothing too untoward. Just this one time. It was all balanced on the edge of a knife but Jack was patient and careful, and Alex’s unconscious form was obliging.
Jack undid Alex’s breeches and in pulling them down discovered the trail of hair down his stomach did indeed carry on all the way to the nest of hair at the base of his cock. After years of interloping on his changing and bathing in their youth, Alex’s nakedness somehow felt like coming home to find that time had changed everything just enough to make it unfamiliar. Nearly everything. There was still a constellation of marks at his hip, the little triad of stars was a well-known landmark and Jack put each beneath a finger to orient himself as he admired him.
Alex was left only in his stockings. They were tied just above the knee and Jack ran his thumb beneath the lip of them while he considered taking them off, but there was some lurid appeal to leaving them on. True nakedness was a natural state of being and somehow there was more sex in a little skin left covered. The skirt hiked, the shirt torn, the stockings left on.
He was laid out for him on his bed covers, unwrapped and undone in so many ways. The candles turned his skin to gilded ivory, or fine silk. His dark hair haloed out beneath him. Men were supposed to be hard stern lines but so much of Alex curved and eased. Perhaps he would solidify in time, he still had growing to do. Jack could not help but ache a little at the prospect. The tragedy of it.
Jack’s hand eased in between Alex’s knees and drew his fingers along the downy soft skin of his inner thighs. He was warm there, the stick of perspiration on his skin as Jack’s fingertips climbed closer to the apex of his thighs where his balls rested. His cock was of obvious interest, inert as it was Jack still brought it into his hand, weighed it in his palm and wrapped loose fingers around the flaccid flesh. It felt powerful to hold a man entirely in one’s hand like that, but somehow there was also a soft intimacy to it. An urge to protect and to keep that he had always felt with Alex. Jack eased back his foreskin to reveal the gleaming head hidden beneath, to draw his thumb over the slit as though to take a full inventory of him before stroking him back to rest naturally. Of course he wondered what Alex would be like erect, but even if his brother were conscious enough to respond to the pleasure of a touch Jack had plied him with far too much liquor for him to easily achieve it.
Jack leaned over him, touched him softly with gentle fingertips at all the highest points of his figure. He put a kiss on the spurs of each hip bone and one against the dip of his navel. He pressed his lips to the insides of his wrists and elbows, against his Adam’s apple and his chin. And then, finally, one tender brush against his slack mouth. It was surprisingly chaste considering he could have easily let his tongue taste the spirits that kept Alex safe from him. Jack could feel his heart pound so quick and heavy within his chest it nearly rattled his bones, he all but trembled with a mounting desire. His own cock pressed insistently to the material that confined it, each movement bringing the brief pleasure of friction and an ache for more. It would be a wonder if he did not leak through the material of his breeches. Restraint had always been enough where Alex was concerned and now it was all he had while his mind opened doors he left closed in the search for relief.
He could come on him. Jack wanted to come on Alex. To mark him as his own in some small way. He wanted to give in to the feverish peak of desire and imagine with conviction and his cock in his hand what it would be like to let himself have him. To take him and claim him. Jack imagined leaving him like that, laid out like some sumptuous dish, garnished with Jack’s seed across his belly. Jack would let Alex think he’d done it to himself in his drunken state. The idea thrilled Jack and he covered himself with his hand, feeling the throb of his pulse in his cock, briefly reveling in how easy it would be, how committed both Randalls present would be to their roles.
Some things would only ever be resolved in dreams.
Instead he kissed his forehead, and brushed his hair back the way he would have done years ago. He went to the dresser and found one of Alex’s nightshirts. He still could not bring himself to remove his stockings, but he got his brother decent for sleep. Decent for when the servants would come in to tend to the fire. When he tucked him into bed he made sure to set him on his side in case the drink caught up with him in the night.
When Jack finally straightened to leave he spared a moment to collect the ribbon that had tied Alex’s hair that evening from where he’d left it on the bed. He twined it briefly around his fingers like a dark serpent before he tucked it into his pocket. Alex had grown so much, changed so much, but Jack was still folding him in between the covers and his mattress. He was still his boy, even now that he was a man. One day he would be tucked away in that fussy little keepsake box that was the church, but Jack had this.
He could almost believe it would be enough.