Tolys will never get used to how loud Alfred is. Alfred is loud and cheerful and his people are loud and wear loud colors and play loud music and everything is loud loud loud, not loud like shocked Europe with its rumbling discontent but loud with money and new inventions (too loud, maybe, hiding the creaking weight of falling farms). So different from his own land, where Polish sounds in Wilno (Vilnius, Vilnius and how dare Feliks) but everything is muted by economic sickness and the pall of postwar.

But Alfred and America are loud, and Alfred plays jazz records and dances down the hallways and hides liquor in the backs of cabinets because his government may say no but oh, his people say yes, and he hauls Tolys out to see the growing cities and watch the new films and shows and even the monetary dance of the stock exchange.

Alfred is vital, and loud, and it is hard for Tolys to associate that with the pale, shocked look on Alfred's face when he walks in on Tolys dressing in the morning.

He doesn't say anything, the look on his face is question enough.

"They're—old," Tolys says, which is not quite a lie, since to a human they would be.

Alfred doesn't push the subject, and Tolys does not say anything.

Later, Alfred does ask, only if you want to talk about it he says, and if he doesn't then that's fine because he's got some too.

Tolys quietly tells him, then. About how Ivan was unstable (as revolutions always made them), unstable and angry and one night he'd just—snapped.

And Alfred is quiet, and when he crawls into Tolys's bed because he remembered watchingThe Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari and got scared (Alfred scares easily, too, Tolys thinks, more easily than Tolys has been able to) his face is still drawn a little.

"It's—I've had worse," Tolys mutters. He has, and so has Alfred, wars and insurrections are common.

"Doesn't make it better," Alfred replies. "Doesn't make it okay."

The next morning, Alfred is back to loud, and he does not ask again, and over the following years Tolys adjusts a little, to the loud and the cheer and sharing a house with someone who laughs because things are funny and likes to dance him down the hallways when he's had a little and rubs his back, kissing the base of his neck, gentle fingers and lively chatter and life.

He knows Alfred's scars, and Alfred knows Tolys's, and neither of them have to talk of them more than they want to.

even in the roaring twenties, farms were failing due to urbanization, poor soil, and poor weather conditions; the poles invaded part of lithuania after wwi and annexed vilnius, the capital; the cabinet of doctor caligari is a super creepy early horror movie