January of 1878

Romania was cursing as he stormed up the twisting staircase, shouting for maids to start heating water for the tub immediately, laying out his cargo on the wide bed and stripping away the drenched clothing; the wet clothes burned his fingers with their chill and he couldn't possibly imagine what it had to have been like to wear them through the long ride on horseback back home in the midst of snowfall and biting wind.

"Basa," he cooed quietly, pushing the sodden auburn curls away from his young ward's closed eyes, "Basarabia. Ion, pui, wake up for me."

Basarabia was unresponsive, naked and with his skin blanched pale and frigid beneath Mircea's fingertips. Too cold to even shiver and warm himself up. With a hissed curse, Mircea gave a furtive glance around the room before fumbling clumsily with the clasp of his cloak, the buttons of his waistcoat already undone before the cloak had even settled on the ground. He tried to toe off his mud-encrusted boots while still standing, but it only unbalanced him and sent him careening backwards to land heavily on his rear. With a frustrated groan, he yanked the boots off and threw them away into some distant corner, taking his irritation out on them before awkwardly shimmying out of his riding breeches.

Thus denuded, he rose slowly, arms crossed over his chest in a pointless attempt to retain some of his modesty as he shivered in the cold chamber. Mircea squeezed his eyes shut tightly and gave his bottom lip a harsh bite to distract himself from any possible licentious thought; God knew he'd been dreaming of something like this with entirely different circumstances for decades now, but this was no time for his fantastical whims when Basarabia was suffering from hypothermia.

Even with this reasoning to bolster him, he couldn't help the slightly hysterical laugh that bubbled up in his throat as he climbed onto the bed and hovered over Basarabia's prone form, all of it echoing the fabric of his dreams too perfectly; Ion's long hair (almost inappropriately long for a fourteen year old boy) fanning out over the pillows, the baby roundness of his cheeks, the delicate structure and length to his limbs, and endless expanses of bare porcelain skin—

With a hiss that came half from the sheer iciness of Basarabia's skin and half from the realisation that he was naked and on top of an equally naked Ion, Mircea propped himself up on his elbows and lowered himself down until they were flush from chest to toe, biting his lip fiercely to distract himself.

Hearing the first of the maids with the pails of heated water coming up the stairs to fill the tub, Mircea rolled on his side and pulled the thick quilts up over them both and took Ion's unconscious body into his arms.

"You're going to be the death of me," he murmured into Ion's damp hair. "Why can't you just hurry up and grow?"