Travel hopefully in life.

“Holy shit,” was the first thing Joe said after he’d wrenched the damn thing open, which was clearly not the greeting Webster had been hoping for, from the way his smile stiffened into a proper grimace. Joe blinked at him for a long, bewildered second and then offered by way of recovery, “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” Webster agreed. He swallowed, throat clenching and tongue darting out over the chapped pad of his bottom lip, and then added like he was afraid Joe might’ve forgotten, “You invited me.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Joe replied, flapping a hand at him and stepping back to swing an inviting arm into the hallway behind him. “I know I did, I just - ” he cut off sharply as the words abandoned him—there were shockingly few polite ways to phrase the sentiment ‘I was only half-serious when I said it and the part of me that was serious didn’t really believe you would come’ without offending Webster’s timekeeping abilities at the very least.

“You understand what I mean when I say ‘cozy up,’ don’t you, Peril?”

Ilya canted his head and waved a hand lazily back and forth in the air between them. “Of the two of us, which is fluent in the other’s mother tongue?”

“технически говоря - ” Napoleon started, protest splintering into an affronted laugh when Ilya fished a decorative seed pod out of the potpourri bowl on the table at his back without looking and flung it hard at Napoleon’s face.

“I’m trying to look out for you!” Napoleon chided, sucking his teeth and brushing the pod to the floor. “After Burma, we all know that you’re perfectly capable of fighting your way out of damn near any impossible situation you may find yourself in, but I think we can both agree that it is overall best to simply avoid the necessity, yes?”

“How’s that, then?” Sean grinned when he was finished. He let the hand clutching the washcloth fall to his side with a wet plop and trailed the fingertips of the other down the slick surface of his chest, through the sodden spray of red hair stuck dark to his pale skin. He flattened his palm out over the plane of his belly when he reached his navel and pushed on under the water.

Even with the moon gleaming like a newly-minted coin overhead, there wasn’t quite enough light to see what Sean was doing. Not that he was being particularly coy about it, with the way he bit his lip and let his head fall back a little, breath hitching as the tendons in his forearm flexed.

“Tidy enough for your fine sensibilities, there, English?”

muccamukk

“You don’t look so good,” Bill agreed. He gave Joe’s shoulder an absent, experimental squeeze, bare thumb brushing feather light against the warm column of Joe’s neck.

Joe choked back a low whimper and screwed his eyes shut.

“Fuck,” he snarled, shrugging Bill’s hand off and pressing his mouth into a flat, miserable line. He mopped his brow with the back of his glove and cracked his eyes open just enough to shoot a worried glare in Bill’s direction. “Somethin’ funny in those Kraut shells, Bill.”