A/N: Just wanted to respond to Lilith, who asked if Mutti would at all reference the Tom story, since that takes place six months before this (give or take). The short answer is: . The fact of the matter is I want that story to contain all of my drama and this story to contain all of my fluff, so really I'm trying to keep them as mutually exclusive as I can manage, which seems to be working since it's not something Erik or Charles would probably want to talk about during their happy holidays! Or at least that's how I'm choosing to think of it!

And now: on to the story!

Erik woke up very slowly, dragged by degrees to the feeling of Charles in his arms and fingers threading through his hair. He sighed contentedly and held the man tighter, and then knitted his brow as his sensory system started to compile a picture of the position he was in. Because that picture included both of Charles' hands fully occupied: the one curled between their chests and the other resting on the small of his back.

Then who the fuck was petting his hair?

He threw his eyes open to find out just that and was met with his mother staring down at him so closely that he yelped and flailed, toppling both him and his poor confused boyfriend onto the floor.

Charles started shouting trying to figure out what was going on and Edie jumped in shouting her apologies and Erik had to join in to shout his remonstrances and all in all it was the most traumatic morning Erik had had since Raven drunkenly mistook their bedroom (and bed) for her own.

Erik glared at Edie over breakfast (coffee for him, actual food for everyone else) for scaring the shit out of him, Charles glared at Erik for pitching him violently onto the floor, Edie glared at Erik for being mad at her, and Irena glared at everyone for doing drastic things to her blood-pressure apparently.

"We're going to the castle today," he told his mother gruffly over dishes.

"Will you be back for lunch?"

"I'm not sure. It's up to Charles."

"If not, maybe I could come and meet you for lunch somewhere."

"Keep your handy on you, I'll call when I know what we're doing," he said, kissing the top of his mother's head. He might have had a bad morning but they had a rule about never parting angry. After his father had died so suddenly it was a quirk of theirs to treat every goodbye as something more permanent.

"Ich leibe dich, alle beide," his mother waved from the front door.

"Ich liebe dich auch, Mama," Erik replied. He nudged Charles so the man could respond in kind also, but the man apparently didn't understand what Erik was doing and didn't say anything.

Erik walked his boyfriend over to the Kapellenweg stop to catch the tram and they arrived just in time to see it pulling away. Erik glaring at the electronic screen that said Nachste Strassenbahn Ankunft 7 Minuten, willing it to count down faster, they sat down to wait for the next one.

Charles was pressed in close to his side against the bitter cold despite how much Erik had forced him to bundle up before they left.

"How do you say 'how are you' in German?" the man asked. Erik frowned, looking around the empty tram stop. His mind wasn't really ecstatic about German lessons so early in the morning.

"Wie gehts es Inhen," he replied nonetheless.

"And how do you say 'I'm fine, thank you'?"

Erik wondered how long it would take Charles to get tired of this.

"You can say 'Danke, gut'."

Charles reached across himself and laid his gloved hand on Erik's thigh for warmth and pressed even closer and when he spoke again he was murmuring straight against the skin behind Erik's jaw.

"How do you say 'fuck me'?" he hissed, making Erik's heart fully stop. His brain too apparently, because he couldn't come up with anything.

"Erik?" Charles murmured, massaging his hand into the narrow channel between Erik's legs. "Well?"

"Fu-um-fick mich," he gasped.

Charles tossed his free arm around Erik's shoulders, grasping him close and nuzzling in even closer, hotter. When the man licked his lips he grazed Erik's throat and made him shiver hard.

"How," he gasped. "How do you say 'Oh god," his voice breathy and shrill " 'fuck me harder'."

"Charles," Erik growled breathlessly, cock trapped miserably against the seam of his jeans which really hadn't seemed so cruelly tight just a few minutes ago.

"Oh my, German really is much more succinct than I had imagined!" Charles pulled back to tease cheerfully. "I never knew my name meant something so filthy. It makes sense now that I've grown up to be such an utter sexual deviant."

Erik still wasn't walking properly when they stepped off the cable car at the castle and probably had a pained expression in all of the pictures Charles insisted on taking. He was surprised there was any space left on the memory card after all the snapshots from yesterday (which had included everything from a view of the city at sunset to multiple close ups on garden gnomes and street signs and shot after shot after shot of Erik). The people on the tram had given him strange stares, he was sure of it, and they hadn't let up when he moved onto the bus. This was all Charles' fault and he didn't understand how he was supposed to have a fun day sight-seeing with a man who continuously got a kick out of giving him blue balls.

Then again, he suspected this was simply thrilling revenge for Erik himself technically turning the man down last night.

The worst part of it was that Charles managed to look so cheerful about it, doing his same fluttering bird routine as at the train station, bounding around the castle photographing everything that moved and plenty of things that didn't. He dragged more tourists into taking pictures of the two of them together than Erik could count, and that was before they even started on the tour inside the castle itself. How anyone could have this much fun in what was essentially a big outdoor lobby (and in the freezing December weather at that) was absolutely beyond him, even after having more than a full year to accrue data on how Charles managed to have fun with normal everyday activities.

The tour guide was some young girl that looked even younger and acted even older: Erik assumed she was probably in her twenties even though she appeared to be a teenager and glared them all down as if she were a ninety-year-old prison warden.

When she called the group together she gave them all a healthy looking over as if X-raying them for possible shank material, pausing with confusion when she got to Charles' beaming smile. She was probably just as baffled by the man's ever-cheery demeanor as Erik continued to be, but at least Erik had been allowed a year to grow accustomed to the bafflement.

She went over the rules of the castle in German, and then repeated herself in an English that was less than perfect but so confidently spoken that it brooked no room for critique or correction. They would not stray on their own, they would not use flash photography, and they would not touch anything. The 'on pain of death' was left out, probably because it was redundant after the way she glared at them.

"She seems to really love being here," Charles murmured to Erik as the tour got underway and sounded so authentic that only month after month of intimate study allowed Erik to know that the man was in fact being facetious.

Erik didn't catch the girl's name, wasn't sure if she'd ever given it, but started thinking of her as Dour Wench. He was once again thrilled that Charles could not in fact read his mind because he was sure to get smacked over that. Really, though, he couldn't help what his brain decided to name people, could he? He had to give her some kind of moniker, didn't he? He couldn't just think of her as Murderous Girl In Charge of the Tour for the rest of the day.

So they followed the Dour Wench through the very important gates that Erik had been through more times than he could remember only because he had been so young at the time that all memories sort of bled into one. He tried to ignore the copious clicking of cameras all around him, especially Charles'. Tourists were the reason he preferred to look at monuments through the computer screen.

"Do cheer up, darling," Charles suggested, taking his picture. "I think we'll have lots of fun!" Erik didn't bother to point out that Charles probably also thought they'd have fun at customs or the DMV or getting their teeth cleaned. But he had brought Charles to Germany to enjoy his fucking hometown and enjoy it he damn well would. So he smiled brightly at the man, no mean feat, wrapped his arm around his waist, and allowed Dour Wench to drag them around wherever she would and try to put a dampener on how much he loved every single god damn miserably tourist moment with this man if she thought she could.

The tour was about half done when Charles stopped taking photos beside him long enough to go completely rigid and cry, "Oh my god! My cell phone! I left it in the taxi!"

Erik just stared, along with everyone else, as the man apparently went into paroxysms of anxiety over a cell phone he didn't have, lost inta Taxi they hadn't taken.

"What's going on?" Dour Wench doubled back to snarl at them. Erik put a comforting arm around Charles' shoulders and explained the situation to her: this young man had lost his cellphone. They'd have to go back and get it. Were their tickets for the tour good all day?

"You can't go back alone," Dour Wench balked.

"That's fine, you can escort us and leave all these actual tourists alone in the castle."

They glared each other down steadily and Dour Wench apparently found him a worthy adversary. "You from Heidelberg?" she asked.

"Ja."

"What about him?"

"I'll keep him in line. No Brit is going to mess around with my national monument," he said, imbuing his voice with enough intense national pride to hopefully assure the girl that he wasn't going to graffiti anything. .

Dour Wench gazed the both of them over appraisingly, and then did the same to her tour group, seeming to decide which she would rather have roam the castle on their own.

"You know the way back to the entrance?"

"Mach keine Scherze!" Erik scoffed. You're joking! "I've lived in Heidelberg all my life! I know this castle like my own mother's face!" And he turned on his heel, dragging the distraught Charles beside him back the way they came.

"Stay on the path!" Dour Wench called to them and Erik gave her a dismissive wave of understanding.

"I'm really rather surprised that worked," Charles said cheerily, allowing them to turn the corner but immediately breaking Dour Wench's rules by leading them into a closed-off bedroom. Normally it was part of the tour, Dour Wench had said, but it was under renovation at the moment and they should please keep walking.

"This is why you faked hysterics for a twenty year old? You want to see a medieval bedroom?" Erik scoffed.

"Something like that," Charles shrugged, pressing something into Erik's palm. He looked down and saw it was a bottle of lube.

Charles refused to let them use the bed out of posterity's sake. He wanted to get off in a famous monument, not deface antiques. Erik liked beds. Beds kept him from jamming a knee bad enough to limp for a week. So he argued up until the point where Charles shook the bed frame and showed off its incredible noise and weakness.

"Okay, okay, I get it! Keep it down!" he hissed

Charles smiled brightly with the joy of being proven right and Erik continued in a growl, "Well where are we going to do this thing then?"

Charles' smile widened and he walked to the wall beside the bed, leaning forward into it and tilting his hips back, spreading his legs.

When he had made his cock-aching impression he looked back over his shoulder to his gobsmacked boyfriend.

"Fick mich, Katchzen," he sighed, rolling his hips and stopping Erik's heart.

Sliding into Charles always felt like coming home, and Erik was pleased to see that even thousands of miles from their actual home that feeling hadn't changed-indeed, he was sure he felt it more so now than at home. The tight clench of that body, the soft sighing of Charles' voice, the way his fingers gripped into any available surface: it was all beautifully familiar and Erik wasn't sure if the sight was more cozy or sexy to his mindset, or maybe the two weren't mutually exclusive.

He wondered if Charles felt this same wave of wondering belonging when the man was pushing into him; and then the brunet was sighing his name and pushing back onto him, coiling his hips, glancing over his shoulder with a bright blue eye and Erik couldn't think of anything except how he was going to move that sigh into a scream.

The noise of a passing tour group reminded him why what wouldn't be a great idea, and he leaned across Charles' spine to breathe into his shoulder, "I'm going to fuck you until you go mad from my cock and you're going to keep that sweet voice of yours down, now, aren't you love?"

"Erik?" Charles murmured quietly.

"Yes?" he hummed back, nuzzling into his hair.

"Are you going to move that cock of yours already or am I supposed to go mad from it just sitting there?"

First order of business: definitely make him pay for that kind of cheek.

When Charles was trembling, when it was everything he could do to hold himself together, when he could scarcely string enough braincells along to remember that he should be muffling those cries, Erik dragged his mind away from his cock long enough to come up with a truly inspired bit of mastery. He decided to kill two birds with one stone, feeding into Charles' love of exhibitionism and his deep-seated hard-on for dirty talk in one fell swoop.

"Charles," he hummed, stroking his hand over the man's bare stomach. His only response was a moan that undulated with each slide of his shaft inside the Brit.

Erik leaned in close to make sure Charles could hear him, speaking directly into the shell of his ear but refusing to slow his thrusts.

"Can you imagine... if someone were to ...walk in here right now? Maybe part of the tour...a whole group of sightseers ...watching me fuck you mindless."

Charles moaned loud, tossing his head petulantly and struggling to push himself back more fully onto that damnable rod.

Erik pulled away farther, holding Charles by the hips to control how much grinding the man could manage. He reached up and scratched his blunt nails along Charles' spine from his shoulders down to his hips and grinned at the squeak it produced.

He continued with as much breath as he could manage, "They could see you gasping for my cock, spearing yourself on me, begging for me to touch you." He inched his hand down, gripping the inside of Charles' thigh but dutifully ignoring the man's aching erection.

"Please," Charles choked on cue. "God, please Erik, please."

"I wonder what they'd say when they caught you writhing on my cock," he mused, leaning into Charles' spine again and snapping his hips hard enough to make Charles yelp. "They'd say, 'Fuck him harder, Erik. Really ream him out. That sweet ass can take it. Fuck him till he screams your name'."

"What the hell kind of tourists are these?" Charles trilled.

Erik ignored him. "Okay, ladies and gentlemen. I'll follow your advice." And he fucked him hard, fully reamed him out, until Charles came screaming his name, muffled against his palm to prevent the whole castle from coming running insomuch as he could manage it.