The sky was an iridescent crimson, streaked with the white contrails of seven frigates slowly closing on Rune Station. Forty-eight days ago, there had been three times that number. Without the ceasefire, there would have been far fewer.

Relief at the sight of the battered Valiant overrode Briar’s distaste for the armistice. His heart pounding with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension, he fought the urge to rush ahead of his fellow officers. There were only a dozen of them, far fewer than the hundreds of civilians gathered to welcome back their loved ones, and none of his peers were given over to displays of sentiment.

Flexing his hands behind his back, Briar blinked back the moisture in his eyes.

One after the other, the massive hatch doors of the ships hissed open, disgorging blue uniforms, then gray, then the familiar black of the Expeditionary Forces, more colloquially known as the Executioners. Murmurs rippled over the crowd, cresting into shouts of bewilderment and consternation.

Not all of the men and women exiting the frigates did so on their own two feet. Steel boxes draped in the Federation flag gleamed under the dull morning sun.

Suddenly, the mob rushed the barricades, leaving the infantry guardsmen torn between repelling what was beginning to look like an insurgency and treating inviolable military families as though they were cattle.

A familiar pair of shoulders stretching a black jumpsuit distracted Briar from the budding fracas. Could it be? The procession thinned gradually to reveal the silhouette in its entirety, all six feet two of it mercifully stalking down the landing strip unaided, head down, hair a little longer than Briar had last seen it. His fingers itched to knot in those reddish strands. His chest ached even as the weight upon his heart lifted.

All around him, men and women wept and kissed and embraced, their voices like so much white noise, and yet he stood there, frozen, waiting for Kai to glance up.

Briar knew the precise moment when he was recognized. Kai’s whole frame loosened, his full lips almost twitching into a small smile. Then, shadow, his features darkening. Briar’s first thought was that Kai had been wounded, that something was wrong. He even thought he might be hallucinating. But no, that was very much his partner marching toward him, his broad strides now slightly less purposeful. It took him a long beat to register the silver lead in Kai’s hand, tethering him to the bound wrists of the prisoner beside him.

In the forty-eight days since Kai had left, Briar had imagined and reimagined what he would say when they were reunited. At no point did he expect to begin with, “What have you done?”

He also didn’t expect Kai to look to the handsome stranger on his right and say, “Briar, meet Dallan. He’s—”

“Yours.”

Between those dark eyes and dimpled cheeks, even a saint would’ve forgotten himself with the man—never mind a lonely captain in a high-stress environment.

“Ours,” Kai corrected, though it was visibly a technicality.

The cacophony of sobbing and laughter echoing all around them finally pierced Briar’s bubble. “I see,” he said, making himself nod. “The cog’s this way.”

He turned away before Kai could see him grimacing, the pressure on his chest well and truly restored.

* * * *

“Nothing’s changed,” Kai breathed, his voice laced with stupefied disbelief as he peered out of the rounded portholes of the cog.

The cinder-gray walls of their compound had been visible on the horizon for some time, but it was only as they approached that the mirage gave way to the solid lines of a twelve-foot-high perimeter wall, clustered domes and slanted rooftops barely visible beyond it.

Briar said nothing. He had envisaged telling Kai about their neighbors’ new pet and the updated policies on rationing and fair use of oxygen, but with a stranger peering over his shoulder he was unwilling to breach such private topics. He drove the cog to the pressurized security checkpoint, where he flashed his wrist for identification, then out the other end, into the square grid of Theta Compound.

Their unit lay halfway between the main entrance and the communal area. Briar guided the hovercraft through at a slightly elevated angle, carefully ascending to their level so as to spare Kai the climb. “Some things changed,” he said, unbuckling. He mustered a smile as he led the way inside.

Per regulations, their unit was minimally furnished and only with items provided by the Federation Corps. A member of the Expeditionary Forces had no more right to luxury than a humble cadet in the Sanitation department. The same thinly padded backrests and low table made up the seating area in the front room, and the same foam mats made up the bedding. Administrations inspectors could be persuaded to turn a blind eye to variations in personal arboretums, but that was about it.

Kai stood before the glass wall of the hydroponic garden with an unreadable expression. “Is that…?”

“Fennel,” Briar confirmed, childishly pleased. “Lettuce and chives. The basil seeds rotted before I could use them, but I’ll try to get more.” All he’d had to do the last time was trade half his month’s ration of water—easily done when Kai was away on a mission.

Of course, it hadn’t crossed Briar’s mind that while he was trying to make ends meet and coping with solitude, Kai had been hard at work taking his pleasure elsewhere.

A press of fingers around his sent a shiver up his spine.

Briar glanced down at their joined hands, Kai’s rough and scarred, his own shamefully soft. It was real. Kai was real.

He had come back when so many had not.

Umbrage dimming slightly, Briar let himself be tugged forward, too weak to deny himself the kiss he’d craved for so many sleep-cycles spent all alone in their bed. His mouth parted for Kai’s as thoughts of the prisoner fled his mind.

Cool glass met his shoulders. Kai deepened the kiss and pressed against him with the full length of his body. He had to stoop a little to slide his hands down Briar’s flanks, but he didn’t seem to resent the added effort.

“I’ve missed you,” he rasped, pulling back for breath.

Briar clasped him at the nape. “Prove it.”

Air left his lungs in a sudden rush as he was lifted by the hips, his legs naturally winding around Kai’s waist to hold him up. He briefly considered a protest—Kai was fresh from the battlefield, where he had surely amassed new aches and pains—but desire got the better of him. He felt more than saw the partition slide open and shut, sealing them into the bedroom portion of their unit.

Kai lowered him down to the bedroll and stretched over him, muscles rippling in the confines of his uniform. Between them, they got the top part of the jumpsuit unbuttoned and shoved out of the way of Briar’s greedy hands. He hadn’t been wrong to assume the existence of new aches. A trio of pink scars showed evidence of surgical intervention on his left shoulder. Dark bruises marred his chest and belly, and a particularly ugly mark, shaped vaguely like a boot, vanished under his waistband.

Briar’s gaze ticked up. “What—?”

“They put up a good fight,” Kai said and sat up to strip off his uniform and underwear. His boots had been toed off by the door. Once his socks followed, Kai was left to kneel, naked, astride Briar’s hips, his expression pinched with worry. “I wasn’t sure—”

“I was.”

Although his post in the Federation’s Propaganda department didn’t exactly lend itself to guessing military strategy, Briar had systematically cleaved doubt from his mind whenever it arose. He couldn’t afford to believe the Valiant might not return. He couldn’t afford dread whenever his office had to spin reports of a new tragic loss into a blessing in disguise.

He curled a hand into Kai’s long hair and yanked him down for another kiss. The memory foam bedroll sighed and squeaked as he reversed them. Briar made a mental note to put in a request for a replacement. His partner was a returning hero. Surely that would carry some weight with the fastidious compound administrators.

“Get these off,” Kai bit out, tugging at Briar’s uniform with very little success. He couldn’t seem to stop arching his back, his arousal evident as a flush crept over his pale skin, highlighting his natural freckles.

Briar bit lightly at the shelf of his jaw. “Can’t go a month without me, can you?”

“A month?” Kai groaned. “It’s been two hundred days for me.”

“Two hundred days of celibacy? Sounds trying, indeed…” The quip was cruel, the loose clasp of his fingers around Kai’s cock doubly so. But if Kai had wanted a fair lover, he would have pledged himself to someone else. Instead he had promised fidelity and to a man wicked enough to take his sweet time before giving him satisfaction.

He cursed a blue streak as Briar took him into his mouth at last, arching off the bedding. His inner thighs tensed and spread wider around Briar’s shoulders, as if in invitation.

None was needed. Briar sucked him deep, greedy for his pleasure. It had been too long. He barely remembered the last time he’d gone to his knees for Kai. It must have been just before he’d shipped out, a hasty blow job to see him off. Back then, it had felt momentous, like the last time he would ever see Kai delivered of all self-control.

Now, it wasn’t enough.

Pulling off with a vulgar pop, then slowly kissing his way up the flat, scarred planes of Kai’s body, Briar stopped before he reached his lips. “I want to be inside you.”

Expression shuttering, Kai swallowed and made to roll onto his side.

“No.” Briar stopped him with a hand over his sternum. “Like this.” He didn’t say I want to look into your eyes when you come because that sort of Earthling cajolery didn’t fly with Kai’s people, who preferred actions to words. He didn’t say much of anything as he prepped Kai with shaking hands and slid into the tight stretch of his body. Their joint pleasure was loud enough to fill the room with sound.

Briar spared a thought for the prisoner in the other room but couldn’t quite muster embarrassment. Kai clutched him with such desperation that all Briar could do was clasp him just as firmly.

Their bodies met and parted with no finesse, no rhythm. Kai groaned into the crook of his neck and trembled like a virgin, unable to relax. Briar wasn’t much better off. His arms shook within seconds of entering him and the need pulsing through him threatened to erupt at any moment. He was aware of Kai’s breaths hitching when he pressed in deep, his lover's whole frame seizing. He wanted to apologize, to say this wasn’t the way he had pictured Kai’s return, but the words clotted in his throat. The best he could do was infuse all of his longing, all of his regret into the kiss he pressed to Kai’s mouth and hold on as orgasm ravaged him.

Tremors shook his body hard and it was almost painful to feel Kai reach between them and stroke himself past the point of no return. His inner muscles squeezed Briar as he came, turning pleasure into the sweet ache of excessive self-abuse.

As soon as he could, Briar pulled out, collapsing onto the bedroll beside his husband. He hadn’t even undressed properly and cum sullied the front of his uniform, an inevitable consequence. He’d worry about cleaning it later. For now, he had Kai in his arms, safe and sound. The war was over.

Long live the war.

From the corner of his eye, Briar spied movement on the other side of the bedroom door. He craned his neck for a better look, but there seemed to be nothing worth his attention. It must have been a trick of the light. He glanced back at Kai, who was watching him with half-lidded eyes.

“We have to talk about it, don’t we?” he asked, voice rough with exhaustion. He was too sharp not to have grasped the root of Briar’s discomfort.

“It’ll keep.” Sliding a hand over Kai’s chest, Briar shifted closer, aligning their bodies from shoulder to calf. “We’re only getting started.”