"It never stops…"
The shaking at the fault line where tectonic plates are moving, shifting, converging points together, always together and never apart. 'Why?' America's furrowed brows ask, 'why do you do this thing when everything you need you've always had?' he says with curling toes nestled inside filthy socks. He's throwing out so many questions- tonguing the shell of cartilage tucked under matted straw hair. Nibbling at the bone of England's jaw line while England listens to the hum of electricity in his old, molding walls and the delicacy of a storm descending from rage. America's curiosity does not begin to wither, it blooms incessantly against touches meant to kill it. Even when England has guided him from the kitchen, it is not so much a mutual stumble as it is a clumsy, conflicted dance.
This waltz they endure is endless.
Joined chest to chest, they are whispering words on one another, quickly, harshly, under clothing and over it, the things they remember-
Stamps, Charleston, Adams, Free Trade, blockades of paper, Trent, Ghent, baseball- no, cricket, no, football, no, rugby- Horse races, golfing, music. Albion who morned the loss of America's hero, far back in May in 1865 after the 67 congressional honors of England's men and the sick, disgusting schizophrenia that had taken America's stability. England's mind.
After that-
Napoleanic-
'We can never trust a People who have thus used us.' America spills out above a sharp white collarbone and England snaps on his shoulder nearly tight enough to draw blood.
That- that- is all he needs to eliminate the befuddled 'waitaminutes', the startled 'fuckhell's. A well placed, criminally smooth slide along the 'Florida' coast and though America is aggravatingly still trying to get answers, at least he is inquiring with his hands. He is gasping. He falls silent. Their spiraling waltz now goes to the cadence of the rain.
At last, against an ancient wooden support long ago built with calloused, muddied hands, England traverses America in peace- in the peace of mind he has craved. The thirst gripping the raw insides of his throat is given purchase on America's smooth flesh, ever more satisfying the quicker he slides cheap fabric over and away, steadying himself with the knowledge that his feet are on the ground and his palms are splayed over a pulsating heartbeat.
Mellifluously, England whispers 'God Save the Queen' over America's sternum.
He is returned with the willful marking of the 'Star Spangled Banner' on his neck. Tendrils of the tune leak into America's breathing as he bites and there can be no doubt the presence of vindictiveness in it.
With the lightest of motions, England passes blunt fingertips along mountainous musculature, dipping, rising, coasting along concaves and convexes until he can alight upon a point of hoarse, breathless pants- passes the ghost of a blunt nail over a nipple he fully intends to exploit.
According to America's hips, It's only ever about exploitation.
England plunges south, grabs and twists.
Once upon a time, hundreds of years ago, there had been a child. A globe of children, and from each nubile, exports, the promise of eternal wealth if it could be but nurtured into maturity. England had tapped the potential of many- his colonies, his family, numerous, insurmountable.
Desirable- every one of them. He had been and would always be a gentleman at heart- whatever the circumstance or countercultural phase might conversely suggest, and despite the urge to conquer much more than the idea of territory, he had never taken a child beyond what they could endure.
Until-
Canada, Hong Kong- dear lord, they had been close. Frightfully close, but not-
"America."
The youth grunts, fumbles at England's nightclothes as he ruts against a leg.
Still so very young when the petty squabbles had become fisticuffs and violent feuds- in the nights that England remembers so vividly when he visits New England's rocky shores. Those days America had lain fuming in a stopped up home in Boston, waiting for his continentals to free him. Waiting while England watched and had wondered, had almost acted on an argument and an adolescent's captured wrists-
What if I claimed it all?
The childish vitality has not changed. America twitches palms over spinal implications as he laughingly continues asking 'what's wrong?'.
For once, here, England will answer without hesitation. He crashes tongues, teeth and mouths together, and when he sucks, he tries to take it all. This is another drink to satisfy his craving, but it is also a message:
I still want you.
An impulse that had gripped him over two centuries past reawakened, it will take more to fulfill than the fling decades earlier that had left him with bitter sweetened sensations, he has recognized it and consented. Just this once, he will obey. America, though young, is no longer what the world would consider a 'child'. He is a man- born of war and fostered by manifest destiny. The sun sets at his shoulder, the moon shines at his brow and the red dust beneath his feet, he tramples upon as much as he covets.
All of this, England grasps at. They are connected again, America is kneeling beneath pressure at his shoulders, licking bloated lips as they part and the smaller of them straightens. Stares down at the embodiment of what is, what was, and what could have been.
He recalls giving toy soldiers-
The kinetic memory of fingers in silken hair that is refreshed because there they are, just like in the past, tangling and petting as, in the present, America swallows England to the hilt.
His breath comes harder than his body, in time, but he will not let it end there. Cajoles and calculated caresses span lifetimes against comely wallpaper and America starts as they begin tumbling into another number distastefully carpet bound. Distant thunder rolling, floorboards faintly creaking. Curtains rustling, the sounds of the world are muted under a long, blissful moan.
When a large hand courses along his ass, a turning point has been reached and it is now the time routines must change. With the force of a nation, his nation- his own power- the questing fool is knocked away and England mobilizes toward mastery anew. He surges over the American- America- in waves of hard, punishing bites, pummeling skin with teeth and hands and tongue alike. Adam's apple bobbing, English dies in the lad's throat before it can breach the air and England observes in fascination the utter speechlessness that comes of his associate's shock. Nimble fingers skim his ribs, seeking vainly, he realizes, for that which is no longer there. Clothing, all semblance of it, has gone somehow. Even America's ridiculous pants- the 'boxers' plastered with the flags of his people- are gone, scattered to the vast domain of England's drawing room.
Where they have gone, England does not care to know and America, beneath him, does not deign to discover. He moves his mouth again, in a pattern reminiscent as 'annoying', then, words release. An unintelligible stream when England's palm on his vital regions massages, eventually evolves into an unintelligible string with grammar.
"It doesn't feel real, does it? It's like a fuckin' nightmare."
It is unlike anything in their waking world. The cool balm he had forgotten to stow away after treating a burn from evening's dinner coats his fingers in the manner of golden honey. Sluggish dripping. Onto his stomach, his aching body, the sword- he inwardly laughs, pins America with the sensation of one finger, two, three- which is thrust into then sheathed, in the land of the brave.
In this house, he is a sailor on the stormiest of seas and on this vessel, he is captain to whom every man- one man- must answer.
It is the dream of an ancient mariner.
For all the ocean is of tears, and there is all the world to drink.