Never

"I loved you."

He paused, looking up to the other. Those violet eyes shown in the light that came through the limo of the car. He wasn't looking at him, and if he hadn't spoken, Alfred didn't think he would have really been paying attention to him at all.

Alfred put the phone back into his pocket, the end call screen still showing brightly on the face before he gently clicked the power button. He leaned back in his leather seat, eyes glancing up. The door between them and the driver was shut, leaving them to the intimate privacy of the back of the limo. The expensive champaign provided was unopened, sitting under the front window as though to beckon them forth every time they looked ahead. It was unopened, and would remain that way.

He had loved him. Alfred knew this; he had heard it in touches and felt it in kisses and believed it with each and every thrust. Some nights his body would tremble at the memory of that love, that silent, unspoken love. Years ago..it had been years. Their lips hadn't met since then, since that December day when the world stood silent as Ivan fell to his knees. Alfred had gone, kissed him for the last time in six years, before they were separated again to be nothing more than allies on the battle field and on paper. Russia and America went on, but Ivan and Alfred stood still, forever frozen in that time when the world separated them and when they had never been closer.

Their bosses, their friends, their family; everyone was against them. Hell, they were even against eachother. Politics had torn their people apart, but truthfully, neither one could say that it was all in vein. The hate, the power, the greed, all it did was push them closer and closer to the breaking point, until suddenly fists to the face turned to fists in the hair, and their shouts and screams changed in context.

It was sex. It was raw, hard, angry sex. Ivan liked to leave marks, Alfred loved how the looked on his skin. Alfred liked to scratch, and Ivan loved the way the cloth of his shirts felt against the stinging wounds. An encounter ment for lovers because nothing more than an intimate way to relieve stress and get the other in their most vulnerable of places. It was sex, and it was the only way they where allowed to show what they felt.

Sometimes kisses were too gentle. Nails didn't dig deep enough and those bright eyes shined with something other than brute lust. Nights that should have been spent alone were anything but. Sometimes when the sex faded away and they had their moment, they would stay there, a space between them as they lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes their knuckles would brush as they lay there in their silence, and sometimes their fingers would intertwine just as their lives had. But, only sometimes.

The years had gone on, but their hearts didn't quite. On the dark nights when Ivan would sit alone in his home, watching the fire place burn like the alcohol in his glass, he would remember how Alfred's touch had set his whole heart ablaze. And once in a while, when Arthur lay sleeping in his arms, Alfred would remember how it felt when he was in Ivan's.

The airport was close, they pulled up to the curb where Alfred's boss now was to bring him home. The plane was there and waiting for him so that they could depart and return to his home an ocean away. When the car came to a stop, Alfred grabbed his briefcase, glancing to Ivan for a moment again. Violet eyes were still away from him, and Alfred didn't expect anything less.

It was soft, almost broken. Words not ment to be said or heard, words that came 31 years too late.

"And I loved you."