katabasis | [psl] dos rowdy boys

The question of Barrow and Adjei gets a low Mm in answer, something vaugely affirmative across the lip of his glass. While it's clearly his habit to make brisk work of any cup—no shallow sips here—, he sets the glass aside with half its measure or so left in it easily enough.

"Reliably?" The tie around the rolled chart is stripped, the page opened across his lap. "Two cable lengths, part under. They're no Qun cannon."

Lest this particular bit of nautical bullshit be impenetrable, the unrolled page which Flint shifts in between them appears to be a chart of the Kirkwall harbor, the Gallows, and the various depth measurements of the surrounding channel. A pencil from the collection (they will have to be mindful of clearing those out later, he thinks) is used to mark out a rough arc extending from what is an approximation of the aforementioned position on the wall.

The producing of a chart ahead of the answer stops any twinge of complaint for the impenetrable nautical bullshit, Marcus instead steering his attention to pencil marks. He can see the way having some means of long range offense would likewise play a part in covering on-ground evacuations, but consideration for defensive tactics is stowed, for now, until after stones have been pried loose and reoriented.

He says 'mm', instead, as a marker of thinking, and then, "We can drill the non-riders, to begin with," he proposes, returning his focus to his book. "The griffons will come into play in event of an attack like that."

Man loves a drill. And also: there is no attempt being made to keep up with Flint's longer slaking sips of his liquor. The quality of the drink is less of an issue so much as he knows better about himself than to try. The next sip is likewise measured, with that first helping already pleasantly warm in his blood.

"Fair enough," he grunts, tucking the snub of pencil into the crook of his thumb. "You'll have time enough to arrange for it."

It will take time to shift the stone, and to haul one of the ballistas from the Walrus ashore, and to see it swayed up into its new home. Days, optimistically. Weeks, more likely given the rate at which Riftwatch operates and the scattering nature of their work.

He neglects to fetch up the glass again. Instead, Flint draws the harbor chart back into his lap and goes feeling around in his assembled pile of work to extract a report page—turns it over to its partially blank back and prepares to take a few notes in the open space available to him.

No answer from Marcus, which can be taken as an affirmative. The sound of parchment slithered free of its bindings, and set down on the covelet next to him for reference. From there, the scratch of pencil as he begins about the task of reconstituting the roster over the span of time he can imagine this construction taking.

He finishes his cup out of negligent habit, setting it back down on the desk before follows some shuffling that produces his cigarette case from a back pocket. Soon, the presence of smoke wends its way through quiet room, which mingles nicely in the system with sweet rum and the increasingly more distant after effects of a satisfying fuck.

And, also, this companionableness and this welcome that doesn't feel as delicate as it could. He has plenty of times felt thrilled or aroused or satisfied or tentatively affectionate while in Flint's company, but this settles thicker and simpler in the stomach, in his veins.

"I don't suppose you'd like to take a shift or two," Marcus murmurs, after he's made some work on cigarette and page both.

"Nope." He has moved on from the harbor chart, having jotted down a handful of quick notations on the back of the not quite scrap paper and now rolling them back up together now to rebind the pair with the same cord. He doesn't look up and over from this task, or as he gathers up the thick stack of papers he's brought with him and settles back against the pillow and slab of headboard available to him. But good try, says the brief sideways look that does eventually slide in Marcus' direction once he's propped there.

(This—shifting low against the headboard, not quite lying down and not quite sitting either—is a mistake if he actually wants to get any of this work done. That warm heaviness of having been on his back may have slackened, but the touch of the rum promises to take some of the sharp edges out of the world in its stead, and he can feel himself being too comfortable. Too satisfied. Too familiar.

Depending on the length of these reports, give him three or four of them before these things will creep up on him and tempt him into a nap. Which is fine. Semi-inevitable. Only bad news for the stack of papers, and Marcus if he can't contrive to keep himself entertained.)

"I don't think it would be beneficial," he says, checking the length of this top set of papers and promptly shuffling them to the bottom the moment he marks who's written it.

"Alright."

Fine, says his tone, though not with real complaint. He hadn't paused in his reordering of names and times and days to ask it, but still adds, "It's not so bad, in the summer. And it's quiet. Too spread thin for any conversations to last very long."

Not so settled that Marcus is a nap-risk, he is nevertheless comfortably settled into the pillow behind him. Most of his work is done at his desk in the sparse office he's been allotted, straight backed and semi-hurried, so this is a more preferable mode of doing things. Of course, there is no universe he'd allow his paperwork into his personal quarters, even if it was appended to his office.

Flicks some ash, wills it to vanish with embers that wink out of existence with a flicker of thought.

No, not so settled, because restlessness will start to nip at his heels. A natural response to being sat with paper and pen, never mind the warm body of a person scarcely a foot from him. That he falls quiet again and commits himself to his work means that it makes for a good motivation.

It would be simple, reasonable even, to simply let the non-question (justification, maybe) stand. They agree; he won't be taking a shift. No, it probably isn't even so bad—particularly not in the summer when it's pleasantly hot and the air is thick in a way that suits him even in his heaviest clothes. Leave it, Flint thinks, and read your own papers. That's an important part of this arrangement he'd proposed to Marcus—an efficient way to seeing that they both do what needs doing, and are conveniently to hand when that's finished. It would be annoying to part ways for a few hours and then try to smuggle Marcus back into his rooms later in the evening.

So he does that second thing. Keeps his eyeballs on his own work.

But also, from his mostly reclined position and without tearing his eyes from the literal scrap of paper he's currently reviewing, says, "It's better for the company if they understand that there is a difference between myself and them."

The wording catches at him, even if it doesn't pause Marcus from roughing out some extra lines to write by. Not if they believe, for instance, but an understanding. Not the acceptance of some myth, but the shared agreement of a truth. He is not what he would describe to be well-read (at least, for a mage) but there is a certain natural literacy for discourse of a particular nature.

Enough to notice, anyway. He draws a long, mostly straight line across parchment, to be properly inked in later. Conscious, all at once, of straddling some delicate border. That it would be easy for him to be tipped over one side of it.

Marcus allows a pause to settle long enough before he says, "I suppose that means we won't be fucking over any of my furniture," which doesn't sound very put out. Ostensibly, Darras could choose to one day make use of the desk assigned him at exactly the wrong time.

Beside him (more or less), Flint snorts. A laugh; not entirely kind, although maybe the bite is for the imagined circumstances and not for Marcus' fingertips.

"I'm not sure we'd both fit in your bed."

The scrap report is laid aside. Something to be looked at more closely, perhaps, or that requires filing separate from the rest. If Flint's attention flicks sideways, it's because the next page has reminded him of his glass on the lap desk and the necessity of its contents and has prompted its retrieval.

The 'tsk' sound he makes is a little similar to the mild correction Marcus might make at Monster nibbling for his boot laces or hair tie, not looking up from his book.

"How spoiled we've gotten, all of a sudden."

He's sure that at least one of the rooms they'd tried had a vermin problem, having found some spots on himself the next day, to say nothing of that first scrap of bedroll in the muddy foothills that first time. But if this a point Marcus means to press, it doesn't sound like one.

A glance aside for the order of report, glass, and he takes that cue to add a small splash of rum back to his emptied vessel, cigarette trapped close between knuckles. "Enjoying yourself?" of the reports.

Or the state of the mattress to be found outside the central tower is so dire that they falls short of sweaty let rooms in Kirkwall.

A foot or so away, Flint hums a low note of acknowledgement if not assent. Of course. Paperwork is among his favorite past times and he takes great pleasure in deciphering the chicken scratch of their colleagues. It would be easier to simply have the reports done in person, spoken to his face. If that were to cause problems for a successor should he die unceremoniously and suddenly in the battlefield sounds like not his problem.

But what he says, eventually, after he has nipped down a little more rum is— "More than is usual."

Which is true. In this season and with all his clothes on, if not done, the bed is a little overwarm. But it's wildly preferable to the camping cot and the dry Anderfels air, to say nothing of the encroaching hum if the liquor running through him or the little worked ache in his thighs. And if he is mindful not to look at it too directly or closely, there is that little bright ember of pleasure still hiding behind the ribs. Satisfaction. Not with the fucking or the booze. More—

He turns a page. Smooths the paper. Scans the contents without really reading more than every fifth word. Marcus Rowntree ought to laugh more. Just the thought of that brief fleck of it, not veiled in some exhale or pressed into a slanted mouth, rises unbidden to fit warm at the back of Flint's neck where it's set against the pillow.

"You?"

It's an unexpected answer, in that he'd anticipated some kind of sarcastic nipping remark or maybe a complaint for whatever had compelled him to take back up his glass—the subject or the handwriting or the writer. But the news that it is enjoyable, to some degree, has that pleasantness Marcus had settled into simmer up again at the potential that it's a shared thing.

It also means he doesn't want to give a sarcastic nipping remark either, now, when Flint turns the question back to him. So Marcus says, "Aye," he's enjoying himself, jotting down names and entertaining a bias for relegating Keen and the others like him to the early morning hours, while managing to be more even-handed with his own evenings, and he wonders if Flint makes note of those, too, if his review during meetings and in-between extends further than making certain the thing has been done.

And sense-memory still present and sharp beneath the skin, from whiskery kisses to muscle flexing beneath his hands made hard with pressure, the warm, tight pull of mouth around knuckle and the bucking of thighs on either side of him. That's not nothing, and liable to restart something at any provocation.

All fairly tertiary to having claimed this spot in this room at all, even if it's a matter of convenience. He doesn't imagine Flint is only chiefly motivated by convenience.

He turns a page, once his pencil finds the end of a column, and then smears his cigarette done into his case. "Did you wish to check this?"

"I'm sure it's fine," he says, draining his glass. Setting it, empty, onto the lap desk and shifting the page he's trying to read slightly farther from his nose in the hopes that a longer vantage might render the slanting handwriting more decipherable.

If there is something telling in so casually divesting of this thing that had served to summon Marcus to the division office to begin with, it doesn't occur to him. For somewhere in the jumble of the page, there is something of enough value that Flint goes to the trouble of folding one of the corners so as to remember to return to it and maybe it in combination with the settling warmth of the liquor and the casual heat at the back of his neck is plenty sufficient to sway his attention from his own defense.

This answer is absorbed without comment, and an uninterrupted scratching of pencil over parchment. A little bit of time passes, and perhaps Flint has made some headway in both adjusting his eyes to the slanting letters sketched fast onto paper as well as progress through the content itself. From the other side of the bed, the occasional click of glass set back down, the rustle of pages.

Then the movement of shuffling everything back into order in the leather binding. Marcus doesn't trouble himself in searching through Flint's supplies for ink to commit his work, as surely that's something he can fuss with tomorrow.

No, rather, he sets the book aside with a throat-clearing sound. The light has changed slightly, the sun dipping lower in the sky to slant it strange and slightly more golden through the windows. Marcus eases out from his slouch, hooks a leg in tighter and starts working at his own boot lacings.

It's this laying aside of work and the shifting angle of Marcus' knee that draws his attention over through the pleasant slack quality of the rum in him—a distraction from what papers remain to be skimmed through, though Flint has made considerable headway with his system of dog-earing. Near his knee is gathered the stack of discards. To his left is everything that may bear some relevance around long tables and over maps tomorrow. But he has been made comfortable enough that glancing from them and allowing his eye to be drawn is doable. Marcus undoes his boot lacings; Flint watches for a moment, studying the easing of ties and the flexion of the leather about the ankle.

His attention is slow to wind back. A time passes; presumably Marcus looses his other boot. But at some point, the pages drift down to Flint's middle. And at some point, though it's difficult to say exactly when for it happens very quickly, he nods off.

—And blinks sharply back awake, gone briefly rigid for the disorientation of the altered light.

Both boots have been set down, somewhere off to the side.

(Having done so, and then said something, and the absence of reply and shuffling pages drawing focus. Soon, after some sitting in place, knees gathered in looped arms under some silent study of the other man, Marcus had moved quietly around after that; carefully gathering those pages, but retaining the order they were ordered in, placed upon the desk which he'd lifted away, set down quietly near that chair.

Perused the book case, took out something both written in Trade and promising to be fictional, opting not to frustrate himself with military philosophy in service to resisting waking Flint. The rum-line in the bottle hasn't got substantially down. This too, and the two cups, gathered onto the sidetable.

And speaking of altered light—)

Some candles now lit, the smell of melting wax and burnt wick.

A change in consciousness, particularly an abrupt kind, always comes with a change in breathing, and Marcus is attuned enough to the silence in the room to notice. Maybe a little disorienting is the fact he is back where Flint last left him, nearly—maybe settled slightly closer, without the barrier of the desk, but keeping to his own space. The velvety-covered hardback is set on his knees, held in loose hands.

Bootless and sockless, he closes the book as he watches Flint blink awake. Knees turn towards him, a bodily shift that, if he wished to pursue the logical end of the sense of endearment that suddenly snares in him, it would bring him much nearer. Contents himself, instead, with sliding down a little, turning towards him.

"Morning," is a lie, warm amusement simmered close to the surface.

Weeks ago, in this same bed, he'd slept poorly in Marcus' company. Not restless, exactly. Only kept at the edge of consciousness by the awareness that in a few short hours, he would have to rouse Marcus and chase him from the would-be comfort of this very apartment, and unable to fully settle as a result. The old instinct of a ship's captain—sleeping light in a bunk, ear in some way in tune to the hum of the rigging and the cadence of the wind running through it.

He had dreamed then of a planting plot, snarled with the overgrowth of neglect and all its untended rows grown packed and hard from the baking sun. When the house on Nascere has first come into their possession, that plot had required work no one was particularly equipped to accomplish.

But evidently the rum and the fucking and the shortage of a pressing deadline had accomplished the desired effect. No dreams there in that patch of darkness he's just come snapping up from, just the heavy feeling in his body and some sense of sweat under his clothes. These are too many layers to be in bed with in the height of summer.

And Marcus is warm even without touching him.

Flint makes a low sound, lifting a hand to his chest to shed papers that had evidently already been collected. To touch his face then, rubbing eyes and running his hand from brow past bristling hairline. He glances to Marcus from inside the shadow of his wrist and forearm, dark sleeve still rolled (slept so hard he'd not disturbed that arrangement, apparently). Then to the space between them emptied of the lap desk, and the relocation of the bottle, and the book on Marcus' knees, a flickering assessment, before finishing its rotation back where it'd begun.

"You've kept entertained."

That gets a rumbled sound out of Marcus, holding the book closed and glancing at its cover as if to remember what it is he's been reading.

"It isn't bad," he says, of what is probably a much beloved classic, some sharp little political drama not entirely steeped in over-moral sentiment. "Once you get into it." He may talk Flint into lending it to him, something he can thumb through on one of these longer shifts he's assigned himself to make up for being down a couple men, but for the moment—

Well, Flint is a tempting target. Slack-limbed and warm from sleep in a way that even a humid Kirkwall summer doesn't make less appealing (and it would be all over, if it was midwinter). The book is set on the other man's belly to look at himself on the way to Marcus sitting up. Flint will feel his inner knee caught in a gentle but assertive grip.

Seeing about the boots, first. Lessons learned.

Slowly—

His knee giving, hiking high to permit the unbuckling of the heavy leather gaiters and the undoing of boot laces. Meanwhile, Flint fetching the book from his middle in an effort to familiarize himself with the title. Its contents.

"Ah," he says. No, not bad. Once you get into it.

Heavy eyelids, heavy (pale) eyelashes. Clean shaven cheek, crisply edged even in this candle light. That this is what he'd wanted an hour, two, ago makes little difference. The sensation of it prickles against the skin, albeit in slow motion.

"I've some sympathy for Claudette."

Who is, all things being even, young and wants desperately for a solid dicking. Not that the author in question renders it in such sparse terms.

(It's fine. He can read between the lines.)

Marcus had slept well, when he'd stayed here some weeks back. The deep and satisfied sleep of someone who'd been travelling for hours and then having enjoyed a solid dicking himself and also had been a little too unconcerned with committing to a pre-dawn morning call. It is undecided, now, if he intends to stay the night again.

It would be nice, wouldn't it? And less conspicuous than stealthing out into the common foyer late in the evening, even if he spent some time putting himself to rights first. The thought sits idle at the very edges of his consciousness, more interested in tugging Flint's boot free, in tumbling it and gaiter off the edge of the mattress, a thump where the heavier heel strikes the floor.

"The heiress?" he queries. An ambivalent sound, as he settles that leg against him, a hand scuffing over raised knee. "I'll borrow it from you. Come back with an opinion."

Reaches for the next set of buckles, sitting comfortable on the mattress, settled in close. Unhurried, now that he's here.

(He should. Stay the night. It would be a wasteful not to make use of these hours available to them.)

—Is something he thinks, impulsively, but doesn't say. Instead, he supplies his second boot and is untroubled by the surrender.

"The heiress," he confirms. Marcus is pleasantly close. Pleasantly immediate. Pleasantly warm despite the heaviness of the air. Adds, though it isn't required, "You'll see."

The second gaiter is unbuckled. The second boot is stripped free. Afterwards, he is just a handful of buttons, already partially undone. In the close press of the candlelight, Flint considers him. And asks:

"Do you want me, or do you want to fuck me?" A plain question. It seems important to litigate this directly.

Edited 2023-06-04 06:18 (UTC)

Having liberated Flint of that second boot, he rests a hand lower down, just above the ankle. Parts of Flint he doesn't normally get to just idly touch, even when they're scrabbling for purchase at one another, and it's nice to run his palm up along the curve of muscle and bone before Flint has that question put at him so directly.

Inevitable, the stir of interest, a stupid pulse of physical response that doesn't offer Marcus any specific insight to himself.

"Well, I don't think there'll be any having me over a chair tonight," slyly, warmly, self-satisfiedly for having fucked Flint so properly he fell asleep in his paperwork—was not Marcus' pervasive interpretation for having Flint slide comfortably into sleep in his presence while it was happening, but makes for a convenient bit of a parry now.

And anyway, they're in bed, and he has no interest in leaving it. A slight reconfiguration of position, only holding off for a reply as he gets a steadying hand on a thigh.

As far as counter moves go, it's a deft verbal flourish. Serves to thin that straightforward sensibility made thick from only recently having shed the heavy mantle of sleep, and pulls at the corner of his mouth behind red whiskers. To Marcus' point, there had been some specific reference to the 'next time,' and while it might be perfectly acceptable to ease that specificity and understand it as little more than the kind of rhetoric that comes from an unrelieved cock and fingers pressing into him, there is something to be said about the power of a guarantee. Marcus Rowntree can be difficult man to catch wrong footed, and he can imagine no better way to ensure that he be restless when next he attends to that office.

—Are muddled, on the margin of sleep thoughts which occur to him in flecks and pieces as his thigh shifts gently into the firm curve of Marcus' palm.

"No," he admits, though it seems liable to inspire more smug satisfaction in the man. "That does seem unlikely."

It may, re the smug satisfaction. There is a subtle broadening of that starting smile in Marcus, a glint of tooth and a more assertive sliding up of hand on thigh that could all read as such. But also something of an answer, a mirrored thing read from likewise subtle expression in Flint.

Moves up, the mattress dipping with a load-bearing hand, his other coming to settle high up on ribcage. If that banter on the table had served to sear some desire in Marcus, liable to twinge at him until he sees a delivery on promises made, he is at least for now comfortable setting it aside. Replaced with a different kind of restlessness he is working to keep in check.

He would like to imagine the amount of dog-earring on those reports means it was mutual.

"I would fuck you again," he says. Where it's more comfortable, he doesn't say. Where Flint doesn't have to compress it all down into harsh hissed curses, conscious of the bolted door, the hour. And the luxury and greediness of a thing had twice, the possibility of it, shaping the way he'd occasionally broken his focus off the page while letting Flint sleep.

He'd settled his gaze on Flint's mouth since that small press of a smile, and accordingly drags his focus back up to his eyes. "Would that be excessive?"

The casually opening angle of his thigh, knee still partially bent in service of having his boot pulled free and easily swayed a few degrees further open, is amenable to the touching. Unhurried, but not unresponsive. Something low in his belly twinging pleasantly from the implication of those hands on him, or from the intent behind them, or maybe from that rare glint of teeth.

(Or, even, something lower and secretly more self satisfied—the innate pleasure of being wanted; that Marcus should be hungry enough for being inside him to pursue it a second time in as many hours.)

The slant of Flint's mouth widens by a similar degree in keeping with the turn of his knee, a flicker of amusement that isn't entirely unconscious of having found these designs flattering. An upward tilt of the chin, eyelids heavy. Whatever dregs of sleep might have been clinging at the edges of him rapidly evaporated.

"Little bit, yeah," has a tenor of a laugh in its shape, and in the spark in the eye from the shadow of pale eyelashes. It's not an argument against.

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