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One night, in the midst of Tilsit, Napoleon dreamt.
It was vague, dark and blurry at the edges, as the most twisted and secret of dreams are wont to be. He was laying, floating, in the darkness; the faint sounds of war penetrated his reverie; Alexander was above him.
The rhythmic sound of heavy breathing followed the tempo of the distant drums exactly. So, too, did the fluid movement of Alexander’s body, rolling above him, rising and falling to meet him like the tides lapping at his hips.
Napoleon became aware of his hands on Alexander’s waist as he felt more than saw his muscles flex beneath his grip. They were awash in the kind of darkness that tinted everything a blue-gray, but he could still see perfectly the blonde curls falling over Alexander’s smooth face, obscuring his half-open mouth and furrowed brow.
Napoleon breathed out his name, but Alexander did not respond. He noticed that, nonsensically, Alexander was still partially clothed in his royal uniform; the buttons of his jacket glinted like eyes.
Alexander sighed, a breathy thing, and Napoleon felt him arch under his fingertips. He was pulsating with heat. A delicate droplet of sweat coalesced on his stomach, slid down, and dripped onto Napoleon’s. He suddenly felt an unfamiliar and wild desperation.
Alexander dipped down and met Napoleon’s lips with his own. He was soft, impossibly so, and Napoleon felt as if he was going to melt and fuse into him at any moment. Alexander’s tongue slipped into his mouth, and one of them moaned. How funny that was—a French kiss, between an immigrant and an enemy.
Enemy—Napoleon could not call him a friend. Tilsit had been almost idyllic, but like all good things, it would inevitably be short-lived. Their time spent conversing like birdsong, flitting glances and carefully-controlled laughter, would vanish soon enough; this was the way of peace.
If they had met as boys and not as men, if they were anything more than their nations—then maybe. Maybe Alexander could kiss Napoleon while cupping his cheek rather than shaking his hand. Maybe they could let themselves say what had to be left unsaid every time they found themselves alone again in the sunlight. Maybe they could both sleep more easily at night, and would not dream of things like this because they would not need to.
But that was foolish fantasy, and though Napoleon did not think himself one to discard even the smallest shred of possibility, he, for once, recognized that this was a pointless endeavor. So he allowed this phantom of a façade of a friend to lick into his parted lips like a starved bear and cant his hips downwards to where the two of them slid together.
“Baisez-moi,” Alexander panted, breath hot and liquid against Napoleon’s neck.
He almost laughed at how bizarre the formal conjugation was in combination with such a vulgar phrase. Josephine had sent him a letter once, all the way back in Egypt, in which she had addressed him with the impersonal “vous”. He hardly remembered his response, only that it was full of wounded, visceral rage; perhaps an overreaction, although he would not admit that to anyone but himself. He was not at all upset now, though. Alexander was a foreigner, after all, and the number of masks they wore as leaders necessitated a certain degree of distance, even when pressed so tightly together.
Alexander broke away from his lips with a small wet sound and tilted down to worry the thin skin under Napoleon’s jaw between his teeth. What should have been sharp pain was muted, as was the diffuse pleasure building in the pit of Napoleon’s stomach. He tried to lift a hand to tangle in Alexander’s golden hair, but found that his body would not cooperate—all he could do was lie floating, limp, malleable under the tsar’s touch.
Soon enough, the rhythm of his movements quickened and became unstable. Pale thighs trembled minutely around paler hips.
“S’il vous plaît,” he begged, and his hips stuttered. “Mon empereur.”
Napoleon hissed out a breath at the pained timbre of Alexander’s voice. He could move once again, although the effort was reminiscent of sloshing through muddy water, so he gripped more tightly to Alexander’s slim waist—curved gracefully as a noblewoman’s—and thrust into him slowly, with effort, meeting each jerk of his body.
“Ah—Bonaparte—”
He could not remember the last time someone had referred to him with his family name. Inexplicably, the strange intimacy of the word ratcheted his pleasure almost to its peak.
Alexander’s spectre came apart first. His breath hastened, then turned to little choked-off gasps and whimpers, and then all at once he tensed and shuddered and moaned, long and low, as his release dripped like saltwater onto burning skin. Napoleon dragged his hand between Alexander’s legs to work the aftershocks from him; he bucked into his touch.
Napoleon’s own climax washed over him with shivery ecstasy, like a great wave arching and crashing to the shore. He groaned, and heard his own voice echo back to him as if emanating from the darkness. Alexander was silent and motionless.
By the time the pleasure had faded to a distant smolder, Alexander’s figure had all but melted into the shadows. His coat buttons were all that were visible, still irrationally gleaming as if lit by individual sunbeams.
As the dream blurred and faded, the faint sounds of war encroached, hoofbeats and gunshots rising in volume. Among the noise, Alexander’s warped voice murmured, “Je vais vous montrer comment vraiment faire brûler le cœur de la Russie.”
—
Napoleon blinked awake at dawn, as the morning sun cast a dim orange glow through his curtains, dappling on his bedspread in the otherwise dark room. He shifted and felt, with a tinge of horror, a patch of wetness in his undergarments.
He sighed and turned his back to the building light from the window. The last remnants of the dream buzzed in the corners of his mind and the pit of his stomach. He allowed his eyes to close again, attempting to ignore his vague discomfort and the awareness that he would be awakened again soon by an aide to start another tedious day.
As Napoleon slipped back into comfortable unconsciousness, the blurred image of sunlight and flames flickered in his mind.