It had become a common practice between the two rivals to switch between mic and cell phone, where the more private conversations could take place - not to say that what they said to each other was private per se, but a safer place where they could exchange useless banter that the other bloodthirsty players would find very unfitting to listen to while spraying bullets into another soldier's skull.
And this was where Ivan's fingers could form around something that wasn't an XBOX controller - breathy, short laughs groans, hisses and curses, all not unfamiliar to the others' ear off and on the XBOX as Ivan stumbled around his house and struggled to get things done single-handily. He played with the notion of putting it on speakerphone, but then his sisters would hear the voice that Ivan wanted to keep to all to himself - only in his ears. He had yet to properly learn to tuck phone between ear and shoulder and use both hands for performing tasks, but the scarf made it rather difficult.
Ivan stood in the middle of the kitchen trying to single-handily dice some beets he had boiled during their last round (the kitchen was stained ruby red when the dyed water overflowed, but Ivan had not been willing to stand up and turn down the heat when the temperature of that game was seven degrees short of the sun).
The television was off in the room adjacent, XBOX off as well, having suffered through another round only for Alfred to win and bring it back to a tie again (what was the score again? A year of spraying bullets into each other's Kevlar must have brought it into the four-hundreds by now).
He was under the impression that Jones very much liked the sound of his own voice, as he often had to switch ears when one would become exhausted of the overuse. Ivan only got in a few words here and there, if only to let the other know that he hadn't hung up (yet). After the timer had passed the three hour mark and only one beet had gone diced, Ivan interrupted Alfred's speech on why Superman was clearly more superior to Batman... only to change his mind after leafing through comic books. He liked to experiment with his own voice, listen to the ways it changed depending on the character, and Ivan had come to recognize which hero he was impersonating based off of the fluctuations and tones of Alfred's voice.
(And sometimes it just wasn't fair how hard Ivan got just listening to that voice.)
"What do you say for one more round, Alfred F. Jones?"
And this was one of the instances where Alfred knew Ivan was being serious. (As the American hung his head lifelessly off the edge of the bed he'd spreadeagled himself onto, his eyes flickered to the TV stacked under mountains of textbooks and comic books.) It was natural for a man in the heart of Moscow to have an accent when speaking English, but when that voice dropped and the accent thickened to the point of a fondue's viscosity, Alfred had no choice but to commit for more than just a taste of it. Ivan could hear a smile in Alfred's reply: "You got it, Russki."
Naturally they played on opposite sides.
Ivan's eyes fastened over to the radar as he took cover against a grouping of trees. As he loaded his spare pistol with bullets, his breath escaped into the winter air along with his silent-as-the-wind voice: "Kennedy, did you plant the claymores?"
An unmistakable confirmation whispered into his receiver, and Ivan sighed another cloud of relief- at least until the sound of a spray of bullets ricocheted off the forest. The ally-green indication on his radar instantly faded as the appropriately named man was assassinated, face hitting the snow just a few hundred meters from where Ivan had taken position - "Jones got first kill." As unmistakable figures emerged from the white abyss of the fog, Ivan sank to his knees, then his chest on the blanket of snow as he laid down, coated in his white camouflage uniform with snow and branches, and sighted down his rifle at the emerging enemy. He could hear his heartbeat thumping in his ears over the crunching of snow beneath approaching footsteps.
Just a little closer. "Come on, svoloch, show me your ugly face." He couldn't quite make out Jones's tag yet, or tell the difference between the shadows of trees and soldiers- but the instant one of the 'branches' of the shorter trees flinched, Ivan set his finger on the trigger, adjusted the scope until the cross-hairs were aligned with the location of the shadow-man's neck, just shy of his Kevlar vest. A deep breath, his heart steadied to silence, and then he felt his finger pull the trigger back as if by second-nature.
A shot rang out over the Siberian forest, and the shadow-man succumbed to the cold bite of snow, his body colder than the former as blood unmistakably spilled into the pure white. It was only a matter of panic now. Ivan stayed perfectly still, watching as frantic bullets sprayed across the trees nearby and not-so-nearby - as if one of those stray bullets could hit him or Inglorious_Basterd, who was hunkered down only a few hundred meters from him. The bullets ceased succumbing to the sound of an explosion as body-met-claymore.
(They called him IvantheTerrible, a name infamous on the scoreboard and sometimes second only to the one they called ALphadog. They had a following, people placed bets on who would win by the end of the week, but it was always a tango between first and second.)
Jones stood only a hundred feet away, cloaked in the thick blanket of fog as his allies re-spawned back at base. The others knew they were untouchable, only approachable to each other. These were those precious few moments when Alfred had Ivan all to himself.
Not to say that he didn't on a daily basis, but these were the instances when their pixelated bodies met, across seas and countries and vast continents - where the American international affairs major and the Muscovite psychiatrist could meet on the equal plane of the wintry Siberian forest.
In the corner the clock was ticking. Alfred moved fast between the trees, decoys on either side of him to allude the Russian's spiteful cross-hairs until he was - "Right behind you, babe."
"Come out to play with me?" Ivan's accent was thick enough that Alfred had to physically wet his lips to taste what his ears couldn't catch. Ivan never missed the noise that escaped Alfred's lips before his breath stopped, and it always dissipated into a laugh. But it wasn't a matter of laughing it off, but challenging him. Ivan remained stationary in the snow, cross-hairs pointed at white nothingness while he knew Alfred was watching him, machine gun on his hip and cursor pointed at the small of his back.
"Tell me what you look like."
The question caught Ivan off-guard, and he knew he was being held captive. He knew he and the prospect of pulling ahead of their tie were being held hostage by a boy hanging upside down on his bed, a comic book sprawled over the rising hem of his shirt, with an MP5k pointed at him.
So Ivan obliged. As he told Alfred about his fair skin, lavender eyes, color-dried hair, and stature he could feel Alfred's finger loosen on the (Right) trigger of his gun (controller). As Alfred formed shapes out of the snowy and foggy backdrop, his ears were only able to catch Ivan's last few words "-now tell me."
And between the hyperbolic tales of blue eyes, blonde hair, and muscles, Alfred caught ear of something that made his finger tense on the trigger again: distinctly Russian shuddering exhales between the allied cries of "we got him!" and "oh yeah, that fucker is dead meat." Then Ivan's voice faded back in again - "Tell me more" - and Alfred's voice stopped again. Then he chuckled. His right hand still holding the controller, finger levitating over the trigger as he and his gun held position, Alfred slipped his hand beneath the pages of the comic book, beneath the layers of his clothes, and wrapped a firm hand around his hardening cock.
Beneath the sounds of shotguns, rifles, and victory cries, Ivan's labored breaths and groans would fade in, drowned out again by distant machine guns. "You're... a sick fuck, aren't you? A sick Russian fuck..."
But Alfred could scarcely understand just what his voice did to Ivan, for the second those words faded into the radio, Ivan was already tittering on the edge - his hands were experienced, gamers' hands, dueling for the top spot and oh he couldn't even imagine what Alfred's hands would feel like doing this to him. And without that goddamned phone needing to be cradled against his ear, he abandoned the controller and distantly heard it clatter to the floor, hands working to press new buttons and triggers with the ammunition Alfred's distant, across the continents, groans and sighs between the unheard banter of the other players.
It was their little corner of Siberia, where only groans and whispers could be heard like the wind that carried away the voices and bullets and bombs of the others. The only place the two could physically meet.
And when Alfred saw white again, his eyes had locked on the impossibly white screen of Siberia, but his eyes trailed down to the sea of red gathered by his enemy's feet. As his thumb kneaded against the head of his erection, his trigger had slipped and he had fired into the back of the other man's skull.
"F-fuck..." Alfred arched at the small of his back, toes curling as he heard both controller and comic book fall off his bed somewhere in the distance. "S-sorry."
And as the painfully sweet knot in Ivan's abdomen came undone, he laughed, never neglecting that delectably thick accent of his. "You have no need to apologize. I left behind a little present for you~"
Alfred came with the sound of an exploding grenade.