katabasis | [psl] dos rowdy boys

That hand loosens with a quiet grunt of sound out of Marcus, a reflexive apology that doesn't see him ease back or anything. Just settles his grasp a little looser, higher up near Flint's elbow, which makes for a good loose handhold anyway when he goes to insist a second kiss on the man's mouth.

Still gentle, still slow and warm. An enjoyment in the physical act of it as much as it conveys something. Tasting, feeling, the recent trace of alcohol and the texture bristle still damp and smoothed over from the towel. The last of that kiss brushes against the man's lip, which comes with it that first touch of teeth, a brief nip before the kiss breaks.

But doesn't stray far. Marcus' mouth brushes low on Flint's jaw and then the internal structures of the exchange collapse just a little, just enough for his chin to find a resting place on the other man's shoulder and the arm looped around him to anchor firmly, holding him there and against him.

That hand sliding to his elbow has made it easier too to catch his fingers in the stiff fabric of Marcus' coat, to secure a grip there at his side. Not so high as to actually press through to the pinched scar that he knows lurks across the ribs, but not so far so far removed as to be entirely divested from the sentiment of the thing. Here is the flat of his hand pressed tight to Marcus' side again and the shape of the man's breathing moving under it. And closer: across his neck and under the line of his arm where his hand is still fit to Marcus' nape. It is easy in that instinctive way to turn his face and press a little into the crook of Marcus' neck and shoulder where he smells like the night air the comes across the wall and the tang of tobacco smoke living thick in the fabric of his outer layers.

The sound of his own breathing seems loud in the close knit of this, rasping thick in the narrow space. He lingers there anyway for a few moments in that tight loop of the man's arm; and when he does draw back, it barely qualifies—the line of his body pressed flush, and only Flint's shoulders shifting so he might insinuate enough space into the equation in which to actually meet Marcus' eye.

"Sleep here," has a steady, expectant quality. Not really a question. Barely a request.

It's long enough. Not long enough. Marcus holds him and is held and regards with a kind of remote observation that sense of something burning brighter and brighter, high in his chest, higher. Enough to prickle behind his eyes but only that, the rest of him stone without smothering. He feels Flint move and takes a long breath in, relaxing his grasp just enough to answer that look.

He nods. The affirmative sound, more breath than words, is lost a little in the kiss he brush across Flint's mouth. A reason to stay there a moment longer, pressed in tightly, pairs of boots in close order together on floorboards too sturdy to creak beneath the shifts of weight of two rather than one.

It also makes for a compelling reason to disentangle, once that last kiss breaks.

Barely. But Marcus steps back, disengaging in parts—the leaning into, then his arm sliding back, then finally the hand at Flint's elbow—before lifting the cup to polish off the rum inside. His other hand travels to the edge of his coat to rid himself of less comfortable layers.

As if the possibility were somehow in doubt, though he knows it wasn't, something warms and aches behind the ribs and in the belly at that agreement. Comes prickling up under the shape of that last kiss and the close press of bodies. Teeters between satisfied and a hooked and scraping wanting sensation that only gleams sharper as they disentangle, his hand slipping from Marcus' neck. From his side.

There is a brief impulse when they come fully apart to reverse trajectory and insinuate a hand somewhere close on Marcus' person. Instead, he takes the emptied cup from him and draws back, pulse thick and heavy in his throat.

There is an order to this: the setting aside of the cup, stripping out of the boots he'd removed once already this evening, packing away the things left near the basin with the kind of thoughtless tidiness that speaks of long habit impressed by necessity. There is a cover for the brazier. Fitting it throws the room into the shadow of lamplight.

Undressing in this room, or shared rooms, usually sees a belt over there, a shirt slipped off the end of the bed, boots nudged somewhere unseen for later discovery. Not always, but frequent enough that it feels conscious, finding a place to drape his coat, sitting to unlace and unbuckle his boots and put them aside so that he won't trip over them at a later time.

The room is thrown into dimmer light and shadow once Marcus is standing again, tugging loose the tails of his shirt from his waistband. His skin prickles over, newly alcohol-warm when the air is pleasantly cool, gathering the fabric and tugging it up over his head, his shoulders. Just like the rest of him, healing magic and recovery has done its work—no new scars to boast, this time.

The shirt is tossed lightly over where his coat was put aside. Loosens his belt to start that too, though a sideways glance marks Flint's progress.

A few paces removed, Flint has achieved a similar state. The shirt already hanging loose about him has come up and over his head, and has been folded once over itself before being draped across the room's screen divider. A clanking of metal has evidently noted the unfastening of his own belt, this too laid aside. And, as Marcus' attention rises, he has already begun work on unbuttoning and unlacing his trousers with the intent of stripping down to soft cotten breeches.

Twisting in the shadow of the lamplight, his left forearm is lashed with bruising and a striping of fine speckled petechial rashing born from the hard snap and pull of that passenger's line. Given the givens, it had been too trivial an injury to bother with troubling any healer over but now days later in the daylight it has that ugly purpled and yellowing cast about it. Happily, the glow of the lamp is somewhat more flattering and it appears to give him no trouble when it comes to stepping out of the waxed linen trousers or his socks.

Still, he is very aware of the obvious mark of his foolishness as he makes to strip the rings from his fingers. Can feel the awareness of Marcus' attention prickling down the back of his neck (or maybe it's imagined, just a texture made tangible by the shared rasp of clothes being shed) (or maybe it's the lingering sensation of Marcus' arm looped close around him).

"Do you need anything to be comfortable?" he asks, ringings clicking softly against the metal shell shaped dish into which they're set. A different shirt. Another drink. Presumably Marcus hadn't actually come here with the intention to crawl into bed and actually use it for it's most basic purpose.

His eyeline has caught on that stripe of bruising, curious and considering it as he loosens and steps out of his trousers, leaving his drawers. None of what he's wearing has been worn for more than a few hours and none of the rain outside penetrated much more than his coat, so he shakes his head to the offer as folds the cloth over.

Marcus nods once, which is not a revision—a flicked glance to that arm. "What was that?"

Impossible to draw together a specific conclusion, but he can imagine that it was at least incurred that evening. Much of it is lost in the fog of both his shattered recollection as well as outright exclusion, and it's not quite tentative, fossicking out some piece of it.

Folded trousers tossed over the rest, and then he twists off a silver ring, this one set with a stone the colour of a blinded eye, and moves to find a place for it.

"Stupidity," has a low slant to it and is punctuated with a sidelong glance that suggests that must be true and not simple self deprecation. Nevermind that the catch of friction had probably saved him from losing hold of the line and being bucked straight off Monster's writhing back. It could have been done smarter, and wasn't.

"I took a turn with your tack line about it." He sets forefinger and thumb to wrist, absently circling round and scuffing the joint as his attention snags at Marcus' hip and shoulder and following after him unconsciously at first and then, when he realizes he is looking, with some intent.

Shaking his wrist free of his own grip, he turns his hands instead to removing the stud from his ear.

"You should check your harness stitching the next time you go up."

Marcus sets the ring down next to that shell, rather than in it. Less possibility of it getting lost in the small collection already there or misplaced somewhere else completely.

"That's a good idea," has a little bit of wryness to it. Not biting, just matching tone for tone. There will be, of course, much harness, saddle, tack checking in the near future. For now, he's unwinding the cord that keeps his hair, setting it down, privately holding in suspension of the idea of trying to imagine Flint on the bucking griffon, the blustering wind and the smell of blood magic baking up from the ground, of scrambling into that empty place in the saddle and how easy

well, how easy everything could be different. It pierces, that idea, cuts even when held at range, but that's fine. They're going to bed in a moment.

"Were you going to read, first?"

He is not a particularly fine boned man. Stood there in the lamplight and flecked by the shadows cast by Marcus' nearness, he cuts a sturdy figure in spite of the bruising and being stripped down to his small clothes. He is getting old, and the liquor is catching up to him where six flights of stairs between two and ten times a day isn't holding the impression at bay, and the sense of him takes up more space than he actually does. But it's true. He wouldn't have fallen that distance and lived. People are so very delicate, and the ones outside Circle towers so very breakable in the most literal sense.

—is not at all what Flint is thinking as he fits the back onto the stud earring, and sets it in the dish.

"I was going to try." There's a book on the side table and everything somewhere under those loose papers. But it's some Orlesian moralism doorstop, and may require more chewing than he's presently capable of.

He looks to Marcus. Meets his eye. They're stood near to one another again and the urge to sit his fingers against warm skin itches at him.

"You?"

"No," is honest. A small catch of humour.

Not that he never does. Flint's book is even on his nightstand, in a different tower, but Marcus chose to be in this tower. Aware, too, of his own itch, of being confronted with bare skin he could touch directly instead of mediated through rumpled cloth, and when Marcus instead breaks from that nearness and moves for the bed, it's with the logic that the sooner they actually make it there—

He kneels onto it with a certain amount of proprietary confidence, snatching at a pillow to shove it across to what will be his side, the one with less light and paperwork. "But you can try, if you want," he says as he goes.

A huffed out breath, humor lingering on its edge, follows in Marcus' wake. Wow, thanks.

He lingers for a moment there, absently using one hand to pull at tight finger joints of the other as Marcus rearranged pillows and bed clothes. Studying the shape of his shoulder, and the loose fall of his hair over it. But it's only a moment. In short order, Flint moves to join him—folding back the coverlet, adjusting the pillows laid on this side still. The bed is sturdy enough that it hardly complains under two men's weight moving into it. And once they are there

Flint caps the hand lamp, and the thick dark pressed into the room's margins spill in to fill it. No books tonight.

That shock of unyielding black, until a second passes, and one can see the seam of grey where the curtains are closed and the moon struggling through patchy raincloud offers the barest hint of silver. But otherwise, it's consuming, comfortable, and a little new. They've lain together in darkness before, but not usually.

Marcus sinks down. He probably won't sleep right away, he knows, not unless his body decides he isn't quite done with sudden rushes of fatigue, but he'd already decided it would be good enough to lay near, a kind of quiet company.

All the same. He reaches across, lets the back of his knuckles find Flint in the dark—the slope of a shoulder, by the feel of it, then turning his hand on his wrist to find a place on the other man's chest. There, warm skin, muscle and bone, hair, changing textures. He knows with a rush that he would like to put his hands all over the other man, to feel him out like this in the dark, and that it barely registers as anything like sex—but not not at all.

He doesn't follow that urge with the rush he feels. A slower entangling, one that waits.

Marcus may not follow the impulse with any urgency; Flint, though, bends to it. For in the dark, that first shiver of contact sends a warm sensation swelling up after it; and there is the knot in his belly—tight still, behind the ribs—which wants for easing.

As he shifts down in amongst the blanket and worn thin pillows, Flint turns in answer to the exploratory flat of Marcus' palm. His own hand first finds Marcus' side, and then works up across to his chest. Creeps to clavicle and shoulder, and here is the rest of Flint following after his hand as he rolls over onto his side.

In the slate quality of the dark, it is impossible to parse Marcus in any level of detail to the eye. But he makes for familiar shapes under the hand, and a radiating heat amidst the cooler bed linens. It is easy, actually, to settle in very close against him.

His breathing is slow under Flint's hand, conscious of it in the way that this kind of proximity and an abrupt lack of visual information might encourage. Conscious of Flint, the weight and warmth of him nearer by. It is, in a rush, very good. Good to have company in his bed (or be company in someone else's bed), for form and solidity to be where he's been too aware of its absence.

He shifts to settle in nearer, hand finding its path up Flint's chest. Throat, jaw. In the dark, Marcus traces along his cheek with his thumb until he can find the corner of Flint's mouth. A guiding point, so that he doesn't miss when he kisses him with a panted out sigh of satisfaction.

It's warm and good, that tactile scuff of fingers and the featherlight sensation of gusted breaths. He rumbles low against the press of the kiss and the sound is fuller and closer in the dark. And when it breaks, Flint turns his face. Presses a bristly kiss to the inside of Marcus' palm.

That it doesn't do anything to settle that wound taut sense carried in his center is— inconvenient. In the same way that the flickering of desire that is primed by bare skin and the stirring associations he has with Marcus being in this room, in this bed, is inconvenient (he is tired, and the actual possibility of lumbering after a fuck seems remote at best). But there are worse things than to lay close to a person.

There is an immediate and undeniable pulse of something felt at that brush of a kiss to his palm, somehow sharper, more acute. Stirs something more physical and familiar in spite of (or in tandem with) how affectionate it feels, and Marcus' hand curls, thumb brushing light over lips, chin, still so close there in the dark.

The potential for frustration is fine, if it can be called that. There is enough liquor releasing itself into his blood to both have it burn brighter and eventually consume itself. There is a calculation to be made, in which Flint is tired (how tired) and he is not, and when he kisses him again, it's that touch more insistent, an answering sound from deep in his chest.

His hand has found a place on Flint's shoulder. Thumb pressing as he suggests, "Lay back."

That pressing point of Marcus' thumb—

Flint huffs a low breath across the other man's mouth and his hand, having found its way to the bend between Marcus' shoulder and neck, curves briefly close. Fingernails pressing gently at the nape of Marcus' neck, his thumb a steady if less firm form than the one being applied to his shoulder. A slow kiss answers him, moderating.

But after, he does obey that suggestion. Shifting over with hip and shoulder, fingers slipping loosely up the line of Marcus' arm as he settles toward his back in the dark. Here is that rapt, prickling sensation under the skin yearning for the sound of the bed linens rasping about the movement of limbs and, or the small sounds the mattress makes as they reorder themselves.

Marcus follows, a little. Rising up a little along the curve of his spine as opposed to a more pushy climbing over, though there's a satisfied weight to the hand that hasn't left Flint's shoulder. Presses a kiss to the corner of Flint's mouth, minding less being off the mark when the next one is a deliberate miss to, low on his chin—

The third one lands just over that ridge of clavicle at the same time as his hand moves from shoulder to belly, the whisper of sheets tugging along the edge of Marcus' elbow, drawing back.

"Let me," he suggests, mumbled there, hand stopped.

There is an instinct to duck his chin and helpfully realign Marcus' mouth to his that would have materialized if not for the southerly passage of that hand. As it is, he still lower his chin a half degree—an instinctive lying lower of focus toward the warm shape of the mouth at his skin, the thick sound of Marcus' voice in the dark.

(He is too near to really see well, regardless of how well his eyes have or haven't adjusted.)

"Are you trying to put me back to work?" has a slanted quality to it. Somewhere in the press of the night, something bemused like a smile must be tugging at the corner of Flint's mouth. It's not a refusal, his fingers shifting up off the mattress so his knuckle might lay loose against the line of Marcus' spine.

More movement, the mattress dipping where he puts some weight on a knee. The shift of the arm he has folded under him stretching out and up some, elbow to mattress to raise him up and over. The tickle of his breath at Flint's chest has a quality of a laugh to it. Presses a kiss where there's thicker muscle, lower still.

"No," has that same slanted quality, but sounds sure of itself, as he presses another kiss down. No, Marcus isn't demanding anything beyond what's already been suggested. His hand doesn't move much lower, but idles there, the sweep of his thumb feeling softer skin.

In answer, a low skeptical sounding hum and the gentle adjusting of his hip. It's an automatic kind of flexion, a delicate tensing and untensing of muscle under the motion of Marcus' thumb.

Somewhere in there—the straying of his hand, Flint's fingers playing up across the curve of Marcus' shoulder. In the dark, given the muggy quality of the moonlight through the weather and narrow slot window both, he is just a smudge of something lighter in a black field. But the sense under his fingertips is quite solid. Reassuringly so.

"Then I'll let you," he tells him.

A hummed sound, satisfied with that answer, and his hand moves. Most of him moves, really, knees negotiating some territory around Flint's legs, the brief press of skin below the cuffs of soft breeches. A climb further down, the wandering path of those kisses continuing, although this one is a little clumsier, breathed through, sharply warm and damp.

This feels a little more like making up for lost time when Marcus was on the road as opposed to near dead or bedridden. The curl of satisfaction he feels certainly suggests itself as an answer to it. Scent and taste and feel instead of only sound, and that they lack sight doesn't feel like a lack, exactly, but a natural extension of the thing.

His hand moves, slipping down to palm over the front of Flint's breeches. Something negligent in it, as if not just in search for the shape of the other man's cock as he is interested in feeling it through the texture of soft cotton, feeling the stitch that runs there.

It lends a thick sense to the air, that dark. He is very aware of Marcus moving through it, as if he might sense the eddies of small currents in it caused by the shifting of covers or the warm trail left by a mouth over skin; his own elbow shifting as his hand remains light at the other man's bare shoulder; the way the room's air grows denser with breathing, an low exhale swirling in phosphorescent reply to the shape of Marcus' hand as it finds him through soft fabric.

I'll put my hands on you, he'd told Marcus nearly a week ago by crystal. He'd meant it. They were meant to find a room after a few drinks, and there he would have made a proper through study of every part of the other man in the lamplight—some abstract intent to see if Marcus could be made to ask for it ('Can I come?' he'd asked, and Flint has given the scraped sound of it serious thought in the interim).

So, in a sense, it should feel like wasted mental effort to lay here now in the dark with just his fingers at Marcus' shoulder, or to shift his hand to the more braced of the man's biceps where he might assert a grip, gently squeezing. To be touched, but only barely touching. But then he had thought, maybe, when they laid here in this bed tonight that he might just fit himself intimately close to Marcus and simply fall asleep in his company, and that prospect had seemed something of an even substitute for the other. He can touch him tomorrow. He can sleep next to him without needing to fuck first the day after. They have already been composing a list, and presently continue to have the luxury of adding to it.

"Do you still want me to be rough with you?"

The rustle of sheets follows more cool air against bare skin, push aside properly as Marcus settles between Flint's thighs. It is a satisfying place to be. Giving thought as to why sounds like a strenuous activity when compared to simply finding that satisfaction, expressing it in a low breath out in tandem with the squeeze to his arm, and the luxurious press of his hand about the shape of Flint's cock through the cotton.

There's a version of events where he might have felt this was in some way necessary towards staying the night, an obligation he happens to have hunger for. There's another version of events where he clutches so fiercely to the opportunity to simply sleep alongside Flint without any of this. But maybe it was in the way Flint breathed against his neck as they stood embracing or the gentle kiss to his palm or the scrape of razor against a basin edge or some other vague moment in between everything,

well, it doesn't feel as though he is stealing something for himself. Getting away with it. The future is an ink-dark room, with a warm bed and hands that know the way, and it nearly wasn't.

His hand has moved for the ties at Flint's breeches when this is said, and his answer is, first, a textured exhale. Evaluates the minor twinge he feels at the notion, so he can only say, "Yes," as he loosens the tie. And then, "Sometimes," a little wry, before landing a kiss very low on Flint's abdomen.

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