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Boris has never allowed himself to even look, before.
It wasn’t worth the danger—or that's what he told himself, at least. He lives as he is expected, neat and clean and loyal to the state. He marries Raisa, she bears him a healthy son, he does as he’s told, and he misses nothing. How can you miss something you have never indulged in?
He does not think of boxing in his youth, his opponents and their lean, sweat-slick backs, the rippling of muscle beneath tacky, bruise-dappled skin. He does not think of the searing satisfaction of his fist colliding with the solidity of a man. He does not think of blood on his knuckles, heat in his gut, the chafing of his shorts against an almost erection as he slams forward, flesh against flesh, four arms locked together as if in an embrace. He does not think of trading blows on the mat, and he certainly does not think of what other men trade elsewhere.
But then Chernobyl happens, and Valery Legasov tells him he has five years to live. Radiation rips at his skin with a million microscopic mouths, and he is eaten alive. Changed indelibly from the inside out, all the things he has spent his life denying and running from finally catching up to his altered flesh to circle him like wolves. So only here, in empty, poisoned Pripyat, does he cave to nature, and look.
—-
Chairman Charkov warns him before they leave for the plant. “Watch out for Legasov," he says quietly. “There are rumors of past indiscretions. Tendencies.”
“Tendencies?” Boris asks, lifting a brow, playing dumb. But inside, his guts are icing over, because he knows full well what Charkov means. He has memorized the words, both polite and impolite, men like Charkov use to describe men like him. Not like you, he tells himself. Not like you. You have never done anything wrong. You are strong. You have resisted.
“Homosexual tendencies,” he clarifies, dropping his voice, eyes narrowing behind his tinted lenses. “I thought you might want to be aware, when working closely with him. You let us know if he tries anything that might warrant an arrest.”
Boris coughs, frowns, furrows his brows. Legasov made an impression on him at the briefing, his face already seared indelibly into his mind. There is something fierce buried beneath the layers of ratty apology, he is a dichotomy, soft and barbed all at once. He smelled like cheap aftershave and cigarettes, and Boris noticed this. He does need to be told to be wary of this man—he already is. “Noted,” he murmurs.
—-
In the helicopter, Legasov calls him by his first name, then defies him, then gives the pilot orders. Fury chokes Boris silent, but perhaps it is not fury at all. They pivot in the sky, reeling away from the column of black smoke and the eerie blue glow of what Legasov claims is a blown nuclear reactor core, tilting so that Legasov loses his balance and knocks right into Boris.
He reaches out, shoves him off, his palm sliding from rounded shoulder to midsection in a choppy, desperate motion. Boris’s hand burns for hours after the fact. Burns like the firefighter who gripped a piece of what might have been graphite last night, after the fire. The reason they are here at all, that smooth, black rock, that radiation burn.
He is thinking then, in spite of himself, in spite of Charkov, in spite of years spent in careful, strangling self-control. He thinks of boxing, he thinks of the sweat-stink of the mat, ropes digging into his back. Flesh against flesh. Intentional pantomimes of accidental embraces.
—-
In 24 hours, something softens in Boris. To hell with Charkov, he thinks. To hell with it all.
Legasov was right—they are going to die, the core has exploded, and this incident is far worse than Boris realized when they left Moscow. He is frightened, but he cannot even feel it yet. The terror lies dormant inside him, stunned with shock and grief, and all he can muster is an odd peace. A resignation. An acceptance, even. This will kill me. Yes, the radiation will kill me.
And in the face of such a revelation, every other fear he’s nursed through the whole of his past fades to insignificance. What does it matter? he thinks, looking at Legasov, and letting himself. What has ever mattered? The city is empty. We are alone. His eyes drink, as if they are parched. They drink and drink and drink. Take in every little detail.
Legasov’s pockmarked skin, the tiny lines that splinter from the tails of his eyes, his thinning, pale red hair, the gap between his two front teeth. The secret place behind his ear, chapped from the wind. Tendencies, Charkov had said. Boris wonders exactly what that means. If men have touched Legasov there, on that small tender mound of the mastoid process, brushed their rough fingertips over it, on their way down to where his pulse thrums in his throat. If men have kissed him there.
A siren sounds in his chest, warns him, look away, before you fall in too deeply. Before you cannot stop yourself any longer.
Fuck off, he tells the siren. I am a dying man.
It quiets, and he resumes his looking, and no one dies yet.
—-
Legasov keeps calling him Boris, so Boris begins to call him Valery. It is only fair.
Valery. A fitting name, soft like the rest of him. Snagged like lace on concrete, delicate filigree but rough around the edges. Even Boris’s own name sounds different in Valery’s strange, high voice. Steel-wool scrubbed in nicotine, winter wind whipping through an abandoned building. A sadness, a softness, something precious and melancholy.
Valery is an odd, miserable man. He rarely smiles, and all he can seem to talk about is death. He kneads at his temples and rubs down his mouth when he pores over his papers, and his glasses are always smudged from his exasperation, his suits rumpled and ill-fitting. But he is also brilliant. He knows too much, and no one else can seem to keep up with him, though Boris tries his damnedest.
He likes being close to Valery, he likes understanding the science he has dedicated his life to studying. Most of all, he likes surprising Valery. He likes to see the fine hairs of his brows arch into elegant parabolas when Boris retains something he says, then applies that retention. It makes his heart leap before it clenches, like a boxer recoiling before an uppercut.
—-
“Are you married?” Boris asks one night over vodka, even though he knows the answer, that Valery does not even wear a false ring to hide his proclivities.
He looks up, eyes wide behind his glasses, brows lifted just how Boris likes them. “No,” he says before barking out a humorless laugh. “Never got around to that.” Then he returns to his papers. A few moments pass before he realizes he has been impolite. “Oh—are you?” he adds, gaze flicking to Boris.
“Yes,” he says, carefully. “Over twenty years. You are not missing out on anything.”
Valery snorts. “Of that I am sure.”
I don’t love her, Boris wants to tell him. Or, I love her, but I am not in love with her. She was the right thing to do. One of many necessary steps on the path to my career. And she is lovely, but we are not in love. Our marriage was a business transaction. I need you to know this. I do not know why, but I need you to know.
But the thing is, he does know why. It is creeping into him, a silent invisible sickness just like the radiation. It, too, is rearranging his cells. It, too, is ripping him apart.
—-
Boris does not see the point of even fighting it. He’s heard this about love: it is massive and insurmountable, no man can battle and win once it has come to take him. Plus, there is the fact that it’s novel, even titillating, and the sensation fascinates him.
He doesn't know why he loves Valery, only that he does. He loves sitting close to him, watching him jot down equations and mutter under his breath. He loves studying the subconscious rhythm of his smoking. He loves the shy, unexpected hint of his rare smile, cracking like dawn over the horizon. He loves that he doesn’t enjoy vodka, but he throws it back anyway, often with a minute shiver, a stifled grimace. He loves his hands—loves the way they curl around a pen, loves the way they card through his hair when he's thinking, he loves the way they hold his cigarettes, just so, in the tender, careful cup of his palm with the fingers splayed out in nonchalant grace.
And that is how it happened. In a matter of days, in the exclusion zone of a nuclear disaster he was tasked with remedying (covering up?), after a lifetime of doing everything in his power to avoid his own unspeakable tendencies. There was no hiding, there was no fight. It was mercifully swift. Boris now realizes how futile it was to attempt to outrun love, just as certainly as one cannot outrun death. They come for you when it is your time, and there is not a damn thing you can do.
—
Back when he was younger, Boris wanted to hit the men who he looked at for too long. Destroy them, mar their beauty in blood, make their ears swell and their eyes black so that they were not so compelling. He wanted to hurt them—he wanted to hurt himself. He boxed, and he felt better.
But the thought of hurting Valery in any way makes him physically ill. He has changed, grown old, grown soft with love the way drowned cadavers disintegrate in water.
He can barely bring himself to dream of fucking Valery, even. He knows how men do it, the specifics of that filthy act, and it all seems so rough, such a tight and impossible fit. He’d take it slow, were he ever granted that privilege. Use his tongue and fingers first, knuckles slicked in vaseline. He’d soften him up, stretch him out. He would make him feel so good before he pushed inside of him. He would ask him are you alright, Valera? Is it nice? Does it ache?
He would call him darling, he would sleep beside him. They have five years, Valery said, before they die. Five years of sickness, of slow deterioration, of cancer and pain. But it does not sound so bad, to Boris. He has been fighting all his life, and now, he is tired. He is wiping the blood from his knuckles, icing his injuries. Dreaming of curling up inside a contaminated bed next to a contaminated man, and asking are you alright, Valera? Is it nice? Does it ache?
—-
Watch out for Legasov, Charkov had told him. The warning seems absurd, now—Valery would never risk so much. Boris finds himself lying drunk in his creaky lonely radioactive hotel bed at night wishing Valery would, though. He imagines it in terrible detail as he strokes himself to the ghost of Valery’s cigarette smoke still clinging to his own clothes—how Valery might reach out, lay a warm hand on his thigh, stare him down and murmur give up the act, Boris. I know what you want. He imagines him sinking to his knees before pushing Boris’s apart, coy but practiced. He imagines him lying here beside him on this bed, solid and sleeping, warm under the heft of his arm. He imagines filth, and he imagines mundanity, and everything in between.
When he comes in his palm, for the first time in his life he brings his fingers to his mouth and sucks them off experimentally. It is salty and bitter, and long after he has swallowed, a tingling sensation sticks to his tongue, lingers in his throat. Boris does not mind. He pretends it is Valery’s seed rather than his own, running his tongue over his teeth, wishing.
—-
Boris doesn't remember the last time he slept, but days are beginning to blend together. Long, wakeful hours scattered in restless naps haunted by the click of a dosimeter. It is only natural what little guard left that he has up finally begins to slip in the face of exhaustion.
Valery glances up from a report he’s reading, brows furrowed. “What are you thinking?” he asks.
Boris blinks. He had not been thinking anything. He had only been staring at Valery’s thin, pursed lips as he often did and idly dreaming of kissing them. “What do you mean what am I thinking?” he answers defensively.
“When you stare at me like that,” Valery clarifies.
There is nothing to do but laugh. It comes out choked, rasping, like Boris swallowed wrong around the truth. He knew he had stopped hiding, but he didn’t think Valery would notice. His skin stings from being flayed like this, open and weeping. He waits until his laugh whittles, then he clears his throat. “Nothing,” he says. “Go back to work.”
Valery narrows his eyes. “I always wonder if you are disappointed in something I’m doing, when you watch me. Like you’re waiting for me to misstep. Or else I already have, and you’re waiting for me to realize it.”
It sobers Boris, sends a pang of regret soaring through his chest before plummeting to earth like a shot bird. “I’m not disappointed,” he says. And maybe he is not sober after all. He is tired, so fucking tired, worn thin and gossamer, riddled in holes. His fingers tighten on his sweating glass of vodka, something tripping in his stomach, wild and reckless.
Before he realizes what is happening, he is reaching across the taut divide between their bodies, laying his land on Valery’s shoulder. It is solid beneath him, fever-warm. He wonders how many years they have left, and which of them will die first, come judgment day. Then he does not wonder anything at all. “Do you want to know what I am thinking, Valera?” he says then. Very softly, moth wings against a window pane. No blows, no blood, no boxing. “Do you really want to know?”
Valery lifts his brows. “Yes?” he says.
Yes. Boris digs his thumb into the meat of his shoulder, an anchor point as he leans in and in, falling headlong into the burnt out reactor core until their mouths are slotted. He tastes Valery’s cigarettes. He tastes his fear. He tastes his surprise, coaxes it from his lips gently, until Valery’s slack mouth gives back to him. Yes, he thinks again. Like that.
It is unlike any kiss in the whole of his life. The kiss of death, nuclear meltdown, a kiss he has spent years upon years running from and beating into submission. A kiss he has built a palace of terror to reside in, behind retaining walls topped in barbed wire. But in practice, it is so sweet. Boris feels foolish for having denied himself this—of course, he has missed it. He has missed it his whole marriage, his whole boyhood. He has missed everything, and now, he will die.
Valery shudders against him, licks him apart, makes a fist around his tie. As Boris fumbles closer, their knees knock together under the desk, clumsy and secret. He reaches for Valery’s waist, hauls him closer, pulls him into his arms. The KGB could kick the locked door down right now and arrest them both, and it will have been worth it, Boris thinks.
When his hands find Valery’s belt, there is a sharp intake of breath, a cautious grip on his wrist. “Boris,” Valery rasps into their kisses, his nails making half-moons in the thin skin of Boris’s forearm. The sting makes him pull back, eyes dark, mouth flooded with want. He knows, though—they cannot do this here. Not in this room. He tries to compose himself, eyes locked on Valery’s. They are marine-blue, clean enough to swim in. He reaches up and thumbs over his guilty, swollen mouth, then rubs down his neck, knuckles pausing to brush over that spot behind his ear he once imagined another man kissing.
It is his, now, so he does as he wishes. Gently tugs Valery forward, fixes his mouth to the intended target. “I want you,” he murmurs there, quietly enough he can barely hear himself, so anyone listening in would be none the wiser. It is a plea, a confession, skinned raw. He pets Valery’s hair, counts the beats of his thundering heart. “Where can we go?”
Valery disentangles himself, then nods toward the door.
—
They end up in a supply closet down the hall. There is bleach and borax and rat poison, a crusted mop adhered to the bottom of a cracked bucket. In another life, Boris would be appalled. Loathe himself for stooping so low, stealing off to sordid dirty places to suck the tongue of another man, his dignity lost to a tide of weakness. But it is Valery, and they are in Chernobyl, and so it only feels holy.
Boris is so lucky to be alive. They are both so lucky to be alive. The streets are empty, and the air is toxic, and there is a solitary fly buzzing lazily at the lightbulb overhead, but each one of these things seems beautiful, with Valery flush and breathing against him. Boris kisses his palms, sucks a path from his jaw down into the rent-open collar of his shirt, presses so close that his old bones creak. What a miracle it is that Valery’s heart is beating. What a miracle it is to feel the tremor of it speeding against his lips.
“Have you done this before? With another man?” Valery asks him in an awed hush, lovely hand cupped at the back of his neck.
Shaking his head, Boris ruts against him, astounded to feel he’s hard, that they’re both hard, nudging together filthily through burning layers of clothing. “No,” he admits. “I never let myself.”
Valery hums, fits his palm between their shifting bodies, gasping as Boris fucks against it. “But have you thought about it?”
“Yes,” Boris growls, growing impatient. I have thought about it, I have hidden and buried and outsmarted it my entire life, but now, now I am finished. He unbuckles Valery’s belt and reaches inside, finding fire and steel and softness. Skin shifting delicately around a molten core, a dichotomy, just like the rest of him. Valery groans as Boris swipes his thumb through the sticky-wetness at the tip, brings it to his mouth, and sucks the salt off. “But never so much as I have thought about it with you,” he adds.
“God, Boris,” Valery mumbles, and ah, that look of surprise cracks his heart into fragments. Boris cants forward, kisses it off of him, swallows it whole. “Why me?” Valery grits out into the slickness, and Boris has to stifle an incredulous laugh.
“I don’t know,” he admits, shaking his head, their brows pressed flush and lips ghosting together. He lets go of Valery long enough to get himself out of his own trousers, and then, he holds their cocks together in his big palm, rubs them flush. The friction is burning hot and maddeningly good, it is worth a lifetime of waiting, it is worth a future of slow decay and death. “You undid me,” he murmurs. They shift and hump like dogs, primal and needy. Valery melts against the wall, whimpering, his face crumpled, gaze stricken. He looks so stunned that it makes Boris want to keep telling him the truth. “You changed everything,” he confesses. “I hadn't even loved before this. Not once.”
“Neither had I,” Valery tells him. “What a damned ironic time for it to happen.”
But Boris does not find it so ironic. It had to happen here, he thinks. I had to believe I was already dead. I had to have nothing to lose. I had to face something more terrifying than my own heart. It is too much to say, though, so he tries to spill it all into his kisses. Desperate, rough. Overflowing with spit and with promise.
Eventually, Valery spills in Boris’s hand, onto Boris’s cock. His breath becomes desperate wheezes, his eyes are shut tight, tears glittering at the tails, but here in the supply closet in their dingy hotel in Pripyat, he looks like a statue of Christ. Crucified on the wall between the borax and the bleach, bathed in yellow light, dying from radiation. Beautiful, rapturous. And as Boris follows, he lets himself look, like looking is praying.
It is better than boxing, he decides.