Red icing shot out of the squeeze bottle and splattered Leonhard's hand and apron, and he cursed to himself, his face burning crimson with shame at his clumsiness that Heavy – no, Borislav, that's Heavy's real name he wants to be called by – would surely laugh right about –

"Is fine, Doktor, you are new at this and you vill learn."

Borislav, master baker of the finest cakes in town and of his heart, grasped his icing-stained hand and licked it, slide of that warm, wide tongue from fingertips to wrist doing very strange, wonderful things to his lower belly.

"I resigned, remember?" he whispered, his gaze ensnared by that of the penetrating, gleaming, smiling blue eyes in which he'd been born anew.

"Da … you are mine now."


"You giant dummkopf, do you vant to DIE?!"

Sitting hunched over as he was in the stifling confines of the ambulance while a paramedic bandaged the bleeding gash across his upper arm, Victor couldn't help grimacing as his partner's anxious, angry yell pummeled his ears. He'd scared Max shitless when he leapt out of the moving Torino, dashed after the robbers and only got his Magnum out after he got clipped by enemy fire and went down like a felled Redwood tree, he knew, and if Max's pale face, stark eyes, harsh breaths and clenched fists were anything to go by, he might just go home today with a nice shiner as a goodnight gift.

"Of course I do not vant to die, I vanted to catch them before they killed anyvone else and I did, didn't I?"

Eons dragged on before Max's breaths slowed and his shoulders slumped and his fists unfurled, and when Max rasped, "Yes … but if you ever jump out of zhe car like zhat again, I vill shoot you myself," Victor smiled warmly at the pride in Max's eyes of him, already imagining the ways he was going to tell his partner that he loved him too, once they were finally alone.


"Damn, the explosion sure did a number on the Captain," he heard Dell mutter, and warily, painfully, his eyes opened to slits to see the pristine white ceiling of the sickbay and the standing, poised figures of their new spaceship's head engineer and chief medical officer.

He swore as a lightning bolt of agony zigzagged and rebounded in his skull, and he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to sit up and then opened them again when he felt a hot, comforting hand upon his chest. He reclined once more on the biobed, calmed by that touch that he would know anywhere, anywhen.

"Captain Dmitry, as big und fit as you are, you are in no shape yet to return to zhe command deck, und I highly advise you to stay here until zhe healing beam has healed zhe rest of your injuries," Sabine said softly, and Dmitry gazed up at his chief medical officer's ever-composed, handsome face, at the pointed tips of those well-formed ears, at the large, heavy-lidded eyes that were so cold to others but so fiery blue to him.

Sabine said nothing else and neither did he, and when Dell quietly left the sickbay to return to the damaged though secured warp core chamber, Dmitry noticed only the hand still upon his chest, over his heart.


When the ten-story building collapsed on top of the Heavy, Eisen Man was sure that his upper body had collapsed in the same way despite his multi-billion dollar suit of armor, crushing something that beat frantically in the left side of his chest with an icy fear. The Heavy was strong, very strong and massive, but there was only so long that the Heavy could maintain his unnaturally enormous size and strength and with the Chitauri firing upon them like this, still firing at the wreckage, at Heavy

With a shove of his feet against the cracked tarmac, he rocketed into the sky, an invulnerable, streamlined organic structure of imminent death that punched through a Chitauri ship and vaporized to dust the troop of Chitauri soldiers clambering across and into the rubble to get to Heavy. It took all his willpower to hold back and cautiously aim his repulsor blasts to clear a path to Heavy, not knowing if Heavy was back in mortal human form or not, but when Jürgen alerted him in that eternally placid, semi-robotic voice to the gigantic hand that had gripped his lower leg, when he glanced down and saw Heavy covered in grime, dust and scratches and grinning up at him, he was so damn glad that the steel mask concealed his face.

"Ublyudok … you still … owe me five-star buffet dinner date," Heavy panted, still grinning, and Eisen Man allowed Heavy to hear his laughter and his unsaid words through the communication system that linked them.


"Zhat vas a piece of human lung, by zhe vay," Dr. Heiner Lecter said, and Vitaly Grankin, FBI profiler roped like a giant, nude starfish to the good doctor's bed, was torn between spewing out the mouthful of delectable flesh forked into his mouth upon his tongue or swallowing it down and reveling in the incredible texture and taste of it.

"I like you, Vitaly, very much, und I don't like having to vait for your answer."

Heiner was straddling his lap, holding a porcelain plate that flaunted a most gruesome, skillfully arranged meal, as naked as he was, and Vitaly bit off a moan at the viciously attractive doctor grinding down upon his hardening, swelling penis and encasing it between plump mounds of muscular buttocks. Gospodi, he was going to be damned to hell, damned forever with this devil of a madman.

"Yes, the answer is yes," he croaked, his eyes stinging, his soul singing a dark hymn as Heiner lowered himself onto his ready erection, lowered blood-kissed lips to his and sealed his fate.


It was approaching late afternoon when he meticulously cleaned away the last of the dirt from the steel-and-marble headstone.

"Vati, why is his bigger than all the others?" his son, his beautiful, chubby-cheeked, blue-eyed boy said so innocently, and he had to blink several times and wait until he'd recapped the container of wax and put away the soft brush before safely replying, "He was … a great and strong man."

When his son touched tiny fingers to the beloved name engraved on the headstone, he blamed the autumn sunshine for the blurring of his sight.

"Vati, his name is the same as mine."

He said nothing, just like he'd said nothing on that last day in New Mexico after Heavy shook his hand and then grabbed him in one last hug, one last kiss to his cheek, after Heavy smiled at him one last time and walked away, leaving him behind with all his unspoken, dying dreams and eternal regrets that he could now only voice through an abundance of red carnations and the sinless verve of a child who would never know his namesake.