This is how you kiss someone goodbye: you don't. Because kissing was a promise, and a promise meant he and Arthur would be together once this whole damn thing is done. A promise meant staying alive and loving freely in a cold world. A promise meant I'll meet you in the square in London, okay? and Arthur looking at him with so much love and whispering I'll hold you to that. Promises meant you were alive.

Promises were sealed with a kiss, and Alfred had promised to save the world or as much of it as he could. He'd promised everything to Arthur, and he could never kiss that goodbye. Promises were all he had left, to Feliciano, to Arthur, to himself.

Sometimes Alfred could feel the eyes of the pale prison guard on the back of his neck. Someone had whispered that he was on their side as much as it mattered for now. He needed the resistance, and they needed him. Alfred didn't ask more. There was wild pain in his coppery red eyes, a pain that cut all the way down to bone. All of him suited this city. All of them were fit to be here, full of gunpowder for the city to set them alight.

'Is it true you're a pilot?'

Alfred sat up, blinking away the heavy heat of the room. The boy was only a little younger than him, with old eyes and a red watch.

'How do you know?'

'I get news from the West.' The boy glanced away, teeth dragging at his lip, hands twisting. 'I heard things about a pilot on trial.'

The familiar jolt of fear twisted into his stomach at people knowing, knowing he had gone up on trial and fought and lost it all, that he had been standing there and being pulled apart to pointless numbers because he'd seen Arthur and thought beautiful, thought that he'd wanted to run fingers through his wheat-bright hair and kiss his curling smile. How people could kill them for that made him sick even now.

'I'm a pilot,' he agreed, swallowing back the oil-slick fear coating his tongue.

'What's it like?'

Alfred thought of the poem on flight he'd found in an old wartime book. I have done a hundred things you have not dreamed of; he had, he had seen Berlin as a beating heart struck through with false constellations of light, he had ran through the rain-soaked streets laughing beside Arthur. He had been close to him in ways he'd never imagined except in the early dark, beneath the covers. He'd showed him the stars and seen his eyes full of gold and love, felt him whisper love declarations over the fragile shell of their ribcages, beating in tune. He'd promised him a life without war, some time in the future when all this was better.

'It's like falling,' he said, hearing himself as if from a thousand miles away, as if he was already up in his silver bird and the atmosphere fell away until he could reach up and paint a new constellation in the velvet dark. 'Falling and knowing you're going to fly. It's like you've spent your whole life asleep without knowing and now everything is full of colour.' His voice dropped, unable to speak about the delirious burning exhilaration as anything less than prayer. 'You understand Icarus. You understand that you'd burn for it all.'

He ordered a bourbon from the bar and the man shook his head and whispered mad Americans as he poured it, eyes gleaming with admiration. Alfred raised his glass to Arthur and high flight and the life they could have after this was done, raised a glass to Berlin and its art. If he could, he'd climb the concrete Wall and paint the constellations across the city, a reflection of how it had painted him the same way. He loved this city, he loved everything he could do, he loved Arthur even though love was the most dangerous thing, even though it scared him so much. What worth was an easy war? What worth was reaching up to kiss Apollo on the mouth if you didn't leave with burns tattooed on your shoulders in the shapes of feathers?

Huddled by the bar, they all reviewed how they'd walk into hell and try to make it out alive. Alfred studied the map of the prison until his eyes burned from the low amber light. Had the guard drawn it for them?

All too soon, he was standing with Kalmar and a group of his people, clutching guns instead of paintbrushes. They looked at him like he was Icarus, flying too high and ready to burn.

'Are you scared?' Kalmar asked, blue eyes curiously bright, as if he too was burning. 'You'd be mad not to. We're jumping into our last fight.'

Alfred took the gun he was handed and found himself smiling back. If this was a jump into the unknown, there was nobody better than him at falling, nobody more of a nuclear warhead than him. He'd split Berlin's heart open and turn it all something glittering and full of art.

The streets were silent. Alfred's pulse was fluttering violet-red against his poems.

'We go on the signal.' Kalmar's voice was barely a breath in the still air. His burning blue eyes rested on each of them in turn, glittering wet in the morning. 'You will go in and I will return to the streets to fight. I may die here today, but it will be for a future better than this. In the future, the only wars will be in our memories and the stories we tell our children. I will fight this war for them. I will fight for you all.'

'We fight for a better future,' his people echoed, reaching out. Kalmar spoke to each of them in hushed voices. This was the kind of leader Alfred wished he could follow. This was the kind of leader who wouldn't give the order to drop the nuclear bomb.

Kalmar smiled at him last, sadness still flickering around him.

'I trust you to guide them in there. Bringing our people out of hell alive won't be easy, but I know you will do it,' he said. Alfred nodded, emotion swelling in his throat.

'I will.'

'Good man.' Kalmar gripped his shoulder, one last moment of being human before he was gone, taking up position first. A fighter more honourable than the commanders who howled to wipe cities away as easily as crossing them out on a map. Alfred was proud to fight beside him.

The signal was given and relayed. Alfred knew what would happen, but it wasn't real, not really, until the guard with red eyes was suddenly there beside the new guard, pressing a gun to his temple. The muffled shot was barely a flicker in the world, but the man's head snapped back and his body went limp and lifeless. With the pull of a trigger life could be gone so easily. With the push of a button the city could be gone. What right did they have? What right did anyone have to kill? There was blood on the ground and blood on his hands.

The man lowered the body to the ground, body bent and almost reverent as he put away his gun. When his head lifted, Alfred could see his bared teeth and his animal pain. He killed like he was born to it. A soldier down to the broken bones. Alfred suddenly knew that he could never do that. He was born for the stars, for laying on top of a cooling car and drinking bourbon with Arthur, for love and life and everything beautiful and starstruck.

In front of him, Kalmar was still as death before he uncoiled, lips peeling back in a grimace.

'We go now,' he commanded, his pain hidden for the mission. They'd all hurt later, if they survived. Alfred pulled up the cloth to cover his face and rushed out into the quiet lavender morning where there was blood and hell and death.

The door the guard had come out of was unlocked. Alfred focused on that, on being their Ace, on the crunch of morning frost in the shade. On anything but the man forged of war and the body nearby.

He looked back at the first dawning blue sky as the door closed behind him, a last gasp of fear and love, oh, Arthur, darling, I wish I was with you instead.

Alfred knew the layout of the prison even dark and blinking the phosphenes out of his vision. Ludwig's cell had been marked with a heavy, angry X. Had the guard drawn that too? Alfred wondered if they knew each other, the guard born for morning killing and the man who'd walked with honor to die. Alfred would ask Ludwig, if he wasn't already dead. A strangled, hysterical laugh caught in his teeth. If they weren't all dead, he'd ask all the questions he was never supposed to and say all the things he'd been forced to keep quiet before.

They stopped by a cell with someone curled on the floor, their blond hair limp and dirty. Still as death. Someone started cutting the lock, but one of Kalmar's men knelt down and reached through the bars, desperately clutching their bruised hands. His tangled brown hair fell in his face, and Alfred realized with a sharp, terrible ache what they were to each other, the fighter and the dead.

'Feliks,' he whispered, voice spilling over with love. 'Feliks, mano meilė, I'm here now. I'm here. I promised I'd come back. I never stopped fighting for you. I never gave up on you, I swear, I would never, ever have left you, I promised.'

Wake up, Alfred begged the body, the seconds stretching. This was why love was so dangerous. This was why promises were so dangerous. They led you here to a concrete hell, begging for a broken body to wake.

The door opened, and they did. Their eyes were green.

Alfred stumbled back, his desperately relieved sob only muffled by the knuckles shoved in his mouth. The man's face was radiant as he cradled his lover.

'I promised,' he murmured again. Alfred wished so, so much to be that way. To be touching Arthur now, promises fulfilled, but not yet, not yet. First came the fighting, before there could be peace.

They kept moving. Alfred saw the grey walls like snapshots detached from the now. This didn't feel real, running through a prison with bolt cutters and a gun. Breath rasping in his throat. Feet pounding against the floor, sending shocks up his spine. He dashed past someone kneeling to cut the locks of a row of prisoners, just one more snapshot in the singing adrenaline haze.

Find Ludwig. That was the only real thing, the only thing he had to do. Find Ludwig and get him to the West, and all of this would be over.

It wasn't real until he turned the corner to the angry black X on their simple paper map, and he saw the blood-covered thing that used to be Ludwig, and the pale guard jerking the door open and sinking to his knees beside him, cupping his gashed jaw and whispering-

'Oh, baby brother.'

Brothers. They were brothers. Alfred felt like sinking to his knees and laughing until his throat gave out, or turning around and running, running until he was under the blue sky and all the way back to the West. Ludwig had traded himself to his brother.

The guard looked up as he got closer, animal eyes wet with tears. They looked alike this close, or they would have if Ludwig wasn't so broken and so covered with blood and the guard wasn't scarred and pale. Alfred couldn't feel himself searching his jacket for his gun, only that he saw it was in his hands now.

'You're his brother,' he accused. The guard bared his teeth, feral and beyond human. 'You're his brother and you- you're a guard, you did this to him!' His scream was trapped in his throat. The world was spinning.

'I will save him,' the guard hissed, voice like wind. He lifted Ludwig's body, arm slung over his shoulder- was it just a body, was he dead?- and Alfred automatically raised his gun. The world froze with the guard and the pilot, East and West, staring each other down in a bloodied concrete prison, trying to save a little bit of the world.

'Do it,' the guard said, lips peeling back. 'All of this is for him. He's the reason an American is standing here to die. He's the only reason I'm not dead yet, so come on, go ahead, kill me, as long as you save him too. I fucking dare you.'

'You killed him,' Alfred gasped. This guard's face had been seared into his nightmares. 'You let him trade himself over.'

Gilbert, that was this guard's name, Alfred dragged it up from some dark-water place inside of him. He didn't like it. Putting a name to a monster.

Gilbert bared his teeth. There was blood trickling down his split lip. 'That was you, not me.'

Alfred's hands were shaking, but this was close enough that he wouldn't miss when he pulled the trigger. If he did.

He remembered Arthur, hands on his, the warmth of his body. Alfred, he whispered in his memories. Arthur had fallen in love with someone who knew not to pull the trigger. I will not start a nuclear war.

He couldn't shoot, not even when he should. The gun wavered and dropped and against all odds, the howling pain in his head lessened a little. The eye of the hurricane was here, in the guard's shocked wide eyes, in the weight of doing something right that would never be remembered in history. Alfred could find a kind of heroism in that.

0o0o0o

:: Laying on your back to watch the rockets or the fireworks, so there's only the sky and the colours