There are a few moments Flint has to himself while Marcus does whatever he's doing (a slightly skeptical looking over of a full bookshelf, a speculative glance over the painting, a finger catching against the handle of a razor and turning it like a clock hand on his way past the dresser) which includes the taking off of his second vambrace. It has been set down somewhere, hands empty when he emerges.
The leather of the item in Flint's hands is dark enough to be black in the lower light, with the metal set in it of the same off-gold cast as the breastplate and other touches of plate. The fabric lining it is silvery. Pressed into the leather are fine geometric patterns. It's still warm, on the inside curve, from wearing.
Marcus ghosts up nearer, reaching to take up the cup set aside for him, a motion that transitions easy into bringing it up to his mouth to drink from. Pauses, and then a second sip finishes the cup, an appreciative edge to the breath out. A better bite to it than cheap tavern whiskey, although his palate only differentiates so much.
It clicks when he sets it down. Considers Flint on the seat, the potential for deliberately ruffled feathers, the way he might smooth them again. He moves closer, a boot looking to nudge aside one of Flint's as he offers out a hand for the vambrace.
(To be fair to Marcus—his host doesn't have much in the way of sophisticated taste when it comes to liquor either. It isn't cheap tavern whiskey, or cheaper tavern ale, or rum fortified by months in an algae eaten cask; that means it's fine.)
Sat low in the chair, knees sprawled carelessly, he raises his chin to combat that consideration. The toe of his boot turns out to accommodate the nudge. And then flicks back, a dull thump of leather against offending leather.
The still warm vambrace, leather and metal and the smell of something smoke touched, is passed up.
"Find anything interesting?" he asks, fetching the cup balanced between his thigh and the chair's arm.
A hummed sound. Imperceptibly warmer for the minor thump of boot vs boot below them.
The leather and metal creak together in his hands before he goes and replaces the vambrace back onto the hexagonal table. Looking back down at him, in his sprawl.
"I like your ship painting."
Configured as he is, a decent amount of space between Flint's knees, it doesn't take a lot of heft for Marcus to again push that boot aside, a more insistent nudge this time. Maybe it already crosses a line into objectionable, but the motion is followed with a bent knee, a smooth descent down, the edge of draping leather soft where it strikes the ground before his knee does so.
Hands, finding a place to rest on thighs. Eye contact focused, intent, open. It would be awkward, of course, for Flint to tell him to fuck off around now. Marcus has full confidence he would get past it, if that's the thing he wanted.
He wants things. Things that feel imprecise right up until they're in reach. Right now, the texture of trouser fabric beneath his palms is compelling.
He might have closed the door. Told him to Fuck off, Rowntree; as what possible implication has there been between them that coming here, to these rooms, would be in any way appropriate?
(Or that it's too appropriate. Too removed from the haphazard, wolfish appetite that motivates foolishness like slipping off to blow Marcus in a side hallway at a diplomatic function. How ordinary it is to have the man he's fucking in his office, in his quarters. Just the concept of 'Marcus Rowntree, the man he's fucking' feels uneventful to the point of transgression.)
But seeing as he didn't—
(He of all people should understand that pausing to observe the length of a person's fucking audacity occasionally affords enough leeway to exploit.)
"Thanks," he says, baldly unimpressed with this assessment. Nevermind that he has shifted his knees slightly wider to permit Marcus between them, and that the hands high on his thighs are so sure.
Without interrupting his directly lour study, Flint swallows down a finger width of his cup's contents. An elbow hooks up onto the arm of the chair.
There are things he can do, take, demand, when it comes to following impulse. He can go to Flint's room, and he can skulk around the corners he is not normally permitted, and drink the man's liquor, and even this, kneel down between his legs and touch him as if this were a perfectly welcome and expected thing for him to do. When the impulse arises that he would like Flint's hands on him—
Well, he could ask.
Marcus doesn't need to glance to the arm hooked up to rest just there, a part of the calculation as Flint's hand closed around his cup. Thanks, and there's a subtle tic of tension at Marcus' jaw. But the splay of thighs opening just that fraction more, the direction of his regard, even if that crease of irritation has yet to smooth out, all feel like the subtlest broadening of an incredibly narrow margin.
His gaze ticks down to Flint's mouth, where that swallow of whiskey has disappeared. A thumb following the line of his inseam. The other hand lifts, snags gently at a fold in Flint's shirt, before changing its mind and laying a broad palm against his side.
Catches shirt fabric with friction, tugging it up enough until there's a sliver of skin exposed between it and waistband. It stands to reason that Flint could use some of his own impulses. That Marcus could help him along.
The tracking thumb, that flat of his hand, the blatant wandering of Marcus' eye, the fact that he came to this floor at all after those long days abroad rather than chasing the stairwell all the way to the Gallows courtyard and then cutting off in the direction of his own quarters, evidently so intent on putting his hands on him that it couldn't wait until a reasonable hour or a less intrusive place—these things should be compelling.
Flint swallows the second finger of whiskey. That drains the cup.
There hadn't been a lot of movement to begin with, the gentle drawing up and aside of fabric and the applied pressure of his hand at Flint's thigh. He doesn't have to tip his gaze up far to meet Flint's eyes. He certainly doesn't withdraw. All the same, there is an air of an action going still.
It isn't do you want to fuck or a more open question, but something that knifes close to something thus far unarticulated, and apparently more vulnerable than kneeling down without invitation, that Marcus pauses over it, a more focused reading over of Flint's expression. The grasp of his hand gentles.
Then, "Aye," but, with respect to whose territory he is in, he adds, "I want to."
The cup is empty and Flint's mouth has drawn thin and crooked even before this is offered up to him.
For on asking, he'd instantly become aware of the intimately brittle tension grown out from behind his ribs during that pause. From under Marcus' hand, maybe. That if it were snapped, it might become a collection of sharp points and pepper his insides. That he could bleed from the answer, internal and invisible.
Which answer? It's true that this one he gets does taste faintly of metal. Brushes against some hard line he's drawn in his head and that if he were to clamp down too hard on it, its edges might scrape down to the bone. But maybe the other one would have been the same. Or would have cut sharper. Or turn his belly over in a similar fashion albeit but in an altogether different direction.
Flint trades the cup into his offhand. The hooked elbow works open so as to set the cup aside near its companion.
"You won't get much sleep," sounds like a warning, not like denial. "Not if you intend to slip out unnoticed. Doubly so if you want me to fuck you first. I have Matthias in the habit of starting work early."
Marcus draws a breath in, unconscious to the deep pull of it, mostly unheard beneath Flint's words. On the outside, one can imagine it to be somewhat self-soothing, the balm of cool air against heightened nerves, maybe of the kind that tend to alight and prickle once borders of respectability have been broached, maybe something else.
Relaxing, anyway, out of the slow drawing in of tension that had begun at Flint's direct question. That breath is converted into a hum of quiet consideration. The short hours allotted him, between a fucking and the need to don his armor and sneak back out into the gloomy Kirkwall dawn. They would be warm and satisfied and good, those hours, he is certain.
The hand at Flint's shirt turns back into a grasp, gentle, weighed down mostly from the weight of his fist than a meaningful pulling in.
"I'll manage," he says. And then it is a pulling in, rising on his knees.
The pressure on the back of his neck from the shirt collar is minimal, but he bends to it anyway. First, finds Marcus' mouth like he's meant to. Second, slips his hand down the chair arm to set his fingers to Marcus' elbow. Not grasping after him, just there—marginal points of pressure alongside the sturdier catch of the kiss.
It's only when the buzzing sensation under the skin lingers despite these influences that Flint closes his hand above the joint and exerts some force. Makes to leverage the circumstantial height he has on Marcus; coaxes the next whiskey and smoke flavored kiss deeper beginning with a calculated rasp of teeth.
The other man smells like sweat, and like he's been standing too close to a camp fire; like the sharp air that only griffon's touch. It's only partially masked by the shared bite of the liquor. His bed, it occurs to Flint, is going to smell like this too. Maybe for some time after Marcus has left it.
It's been a long night. Tethers, buckles, supports, practice, courage are all things that keep one in a saddle when inhumanly high in the air, buffeted by high winds, but overworked too is every part of him, it feels like, from the tendons through the arch of his feet that had been set so firmly into stirrups, up though to fingers stiff from grasping reins and riding horn, and the network of muscle down his back all remembers the task of keeping balance. There are few opportunities to relax, up there.
All this to say that he is kissed and still, despite himself, feels a white-hot ribbon of vigor zither through major arteries, a heart-focused clench and also lower still. He closes his eyes and softens his mouth to it.
Opens to that rasp of teeth, registering pressure and shift through the communicative clasp of that hand above his elbow, but also the subtler shift, an imposition. He finds himself, here, relenting to it, sinking slightly lower where he knees and letting his head tip back. Kisses back, too, nothing shy in the touch of his tongue, but something in the angle of the arrangement that is more like invitation than demand.
A fine line, anyway, considering his hand in a fist at Flint's shirt.
Marcus' lap around the office and the room adjacent to it had been something like taking advantage. Of the hour, of Flint having permitted him into the room to begin with, of the tenuous thing (curiosity, maybe) hooked low enough in him that Flint had humored that initiating set of fingers at his knee.
—(Humored. That's a word for it.)—
The point being that it's only fair to take advantage of this permissiveness in turn. Not to impress his tongue on him, or the bite at Marcus' mouth, or to kiss him harder through that flexing give in the angle of his face. He can pepper Marcus with rough kisses and the sharp set of teeth virtually anywhere at all. In any grimy Kirkwall side street. What seems less accessible there: to slacken slightly. To answer an obvious invitation with anything short of a keen, devouring kind of hunger. Maker forbid anything that occurs in the narrow stairwell of any cheap lodging house have the air of a clear headed decision rather than being guided cock first. Here, taking advantage could be—
The next kiss is slower, less strictly rigorous. Shallow, even, while his grip on Marcus's upper arm eases back to a touch. Less playing at some kind of tenderness, and more testing it.
It's an invitation to set a pace, even if there are more expected answers to the question. Kisses go shallower and hands gentle and it's this invitation in the first place that doesn't have Marcus rush to fill that perceived space with pressure and urgency. The satisfying clarity of hunger. Stays where and how he is, even if it is tempting to press back.
Or, rather, not so much tempting as it is instinctive. Still, it's held in check beneath that grip that turns into a touch.
The kiss breaks, as kisses do, and Marcus initiates the next. Something of a nudge back, a quiet vocalisation, but all mild compared to past moments of a wresting for control, mirrored in tenderness. The hand at Flint's thigh is remembered, reawakened by giving a minor pulse of pressure before smoothing out again, a stroke of palm around to the outer muscle. Arousal, after that first spark of contact, coming to a slower simmer; almost less pronounced, to him, than the slow wind of tension somewhere beneath his ribcage.
A small scrape of eye contact the next time its viable, something questioning in it.
Absent that touch of eye contact, his hand might have moved most naturally to— Somewhere not above Marcus' elbow, motivated by that slower and less sharp cadence being returned to him and the rove of the hand on his thigh. He might have matched that gesture with something similar. Run his hand thoughtlessly from elbow to wrist, press a thumb there at warm sinew to feel the flex of Marcus' fingers.
But the hint of eye contact, and the question in it. They want for something more considered. And they prickle directly against a thing in him that's grown frustrated, that has gone raw and therefore slightly irritable from the sting. Marcus came here. Marcus wants to stay. What about the reception of those facts could be so fucking mysterious?
Flint's hand does shift, bluntly traveling from Marcus' upper arm to his shoulder. From shoulder to neck. To lay the warm shape of his palm at Marcus's jaw, callous rough thumb angling against the patchy bristle of his unshaven cheek. Flint leaves it there even as he bows back to press a further slow, heated kiss onto him—not hurried, or without insistence.
It still feels tender, calluses and blunt handling and all, just by virtue of the shape and place of that touch, and more so at the next kiss, the slow heat of it. Marcus' brow knits as he kisses back, answering in kind, a slight levering forward of his body. Flint will feel his other hand release his shirt, just to hook bluntly at his shoulder, the spread of his fingers wide, thumb finding a place to be at the base of his neck.
There, a little urgency, if less bitey than he has been before. His fingers come around to curl over the back of Flint's neck as kiss pushes down along the opposite jaw, up under it. There had been cravings, formless, that he can find a little sated in this nearness, the experience of warmth, familiar smells and textures.
Before Flint can feel like Marcus might just unseat him, a brisk scrape of another kiss meets his mouth, hands gentling.
"Help me get out of all this," sounds like it has a please attached (unsaid) (of course) rather than his customary rudeness. Or maybe it's the same, exactly as he's always been, and some attunement has been made as to whether Marcus is interested in being demanding on purpose or it's just how his voice sounds.
Either way, he means his armor, which is beginning to feel too warm and in the way.
They've been careful about this. Barring hastily unbuckled belts, shirked trouser buttons and hungrily pulling free shirt tails from waistbands, there has been almost none of this—breaking back from a kiss and being pressed to assist with the inconvenience of layers. Very little asking (for it somehow sounds like a request even if it isn't worded like one). Just ordering or doing and very little between the two.
A short exhale, a low rumble of a sound, and he assents to do as he's been told. As he's been asked, clarifies the hand at Marcus' face for it drops an hand and exerts a mild pressure there as if he might lay him partly over the widely sprawled angle of his thigh.
Not really. But also maybe if Marcus were to fold to it, then he would coax him into leaning against his knee and the chair arm.
"Move your arm," he tells him, in no great hurry.
No, he can make do with just turning Marcus's face and exposing pauldron and cuirass buckles to the attention of his spare hand while the other remains warm in that space where it's lain somewhere between Marcus' neck and his face. Fingers wide, palm steady, thumb stroking softly at the lobe of his ear.
Marcus moves as asked and arranged, hand drawing back.
Sinking slightly more relaxed where he kneels and then leans. Tipping towards that hand, at first only giving access to the one that is getting at the buckles by his shoulder and soaking up the attention of the first, not wishing to interrupt it before turning his chin to brush his mouth against the undersides of fingers, palm, barely justified as a kiss.
He reflects that it is going to be disappointing if this pace they've set goes away forever, upon his leaving. That it's a game, of the kinds they have sometimes played a little, and one that wouldn't withstand repetition. But these concerns are all too complex for the moment, nor do they prevent him from leaning into it, letting it soak, and besides, he has armor to doff.
There is, then, a lean against Flint's knee. A hand curling against the other man's calf, the intricacy of a thumbed arc just felt through the leather. He, meanwhile, reaches for the buckles up around his waist, tugging those free.
It's slow—this prising up of buckles and ties, and the warmth on the back of his neck touched there by the whiskey he's swallowed down (a finger or so further than Marcus in that regard), and the gradual attribution of weight across his knee. The buzz that wanders up through his fingers via the rasp of metal and leather which wanders the length of his arm and sinks down in under behind the ribs. Feeds slowly down into his belly where it coils into a purposeful knot.
The undoing of buckles and ties is patient without being needlessly methodical. After all, they're only fastenings, and the disassembly is as straight forward as undoing line of stitches. These things are always easier to take open than they are to put in no matter the warmth of the breath against his palm, or the distant lurking thrill budding from Marcus being so pliant to the hand. There is no great need to examine any part of it.
(Though he does, as compulsive and measured as the meditative stroke of his thumb.)
When Flint has finished one side, the pauldron strips freely away to be set on the hexagonal side table with its coordinating vambrace. The careful hand at Marcus' jaw slides, fingers tucking in under the edge of the loosening breastplate as if to use it as the hand hold by which to—
Marcus uses his grip at Flint's leg as a means of levering himself more centre again. One hand pressing then to his breastplate to keep it in place while the buckles are seen to, the other now leaving off to finish undoing the fastenings at his waist on the other side. The pauldron will come free and then both elements of his cuirass can be pried loose and off.
The rest is simple, less intricate than what all goes into protecting a warrior above-waist. The wide belt over cloth wrap and leather layers, boots with guards built in.
It all feels a little raw, semi-painful in a peculiar way that is, despite itself, good. Still feeling the tickling sensation at his ear and the side of his neck even after the hand is fallen away, occupied currently with the slightly unfamiliar feeling of someone else seeing to the buckles of his armor, of feeling knuckles press to his shoulder and chest where Flint gets his fingers beneath the edge of lined metal.
Still, the vulnerable thing that winds itself tighter has more defensive layers to conceal itself. Muscle, bone, skin. Kept compressed to the point of ache somewhere between it all even as metal and leather is tugged free. He leans back on his haunches in helping remove his cuirass, aiming to land it gently by the table.
He loosens the wrap around his neck, tugging that free. His boot scrapes against the ground, and he grips the arm of the chair, on his way to finally standing.
He makes no move to interrupt Marcus' upward trajectory, though there is a slow sense that he could and wants to. He would like to wrap his hand around the wrist attached to the hand planted at the chair arm, and feel the flexion of tendons as Marcus clambers to his feet out from between his knees. Instead, holding the impulse carefully in his hand like the collected fragments of a broken cup, he waits until Marcus is upright before sitting slightly forward in the chair and following him with his hands.
There is less reason to help with the rest; none of it consists of fastenings placed awkwardly enough to make a second pair of hands particularly expeditious. In spite of this, and the not distant prickling sense of arousal that stings like cool air against a deeper cut, there is some appreciatively studious quality to how Flint uses both hands to unbuckle the heavy belt at Marcus' middle. Less about how expeditiously Marcus might stripped down. More about the rhythm of the thing. Easing fingers under layers and pulling them mindfully up.
(Testing himself to see what measure of vulnerability—and this is that. Vulnerable. More than or distinctly different from asking for Marcus' to use him in a half-lit corridor; some high feeling like irritation or nervousness, or the sound of a hurt dog's whining whistling out from under the skin—can be tolerated.)
He can manage the belt. He can't undo the wrap. But after, once the cloth is freed, he can catch up the end as the last of it comes uncoiled and fold it into a neat rectangle across his knee.
The belt is managed. Without a task, his hands wander to Flint's shoulders for the short duration that they've nothing better to do. Resting lightly, fingers mapping to muscle, and then dropping again to see to the cloth. It doesn't occur to Marcus to back up during this process, relieving the item to Flint's care once it's off.
Beneath, the tunic has fold lines and crinkles sweated into it around the tail ends. No blood stains or new tears, just sweat, some streaks of dirt barely visible in dark grey linen. The scent of earth, smoke, himself. Marcus tugs the fabric a little to loosen it off his skin, a moment spent considering what else there is to do, and Flint's position on the chair.
A hand sets down on Flint's shoulder again, and Marcus lifts opposite knee to set it against Flint's, balanced in a standing kneel. A twinge of amusement barely detectable in his expression for himself as he reaches down and back to loosen boot buckles. He toys with Flint's shirt collar with the edge of his thumb.
Will go on to repeat himself, mirrored, after the first boot is pushed off to thump against the floor.
He makes for an able enough handhold off which to balance, grunting some low note of impatience with it only once Marcus has moved on to the second boot and he's run out of work for his own hands with the cloth wrap having been neatly squared away, an end tucked judiciously into its middle to secure the fold. Not discouraging the use, exactly, just—
bridling a little against his continued occupation of the chair while Marcus' thumb wanders against his shirt collar.
The cloth wrap is transferred from lap to table. It's laid over the book for want of its own free space, crowded out now by the various discarded segments of field worn armor. His hand, wandering to Marcus' propped knee. Knuckles brushing and lingering, not quite benign, while the second boot is shucked.
"Take the rest off in the other room," he tells him. "I've some things to put away here."
Followed by a push at Flint's shoulder, a levering back so that Marcus can duck down to kiss him. Not quite a casual parting gesture, not with his knee braced where it is and the pressure of a hand at Flint's shoulder, but closer to that end of the spectrum as far as the meanings and intentions of kisses.
Flint is relieved of it at the same time as Marcus backs off, pared down, a less bulky figure than how he'd begun. Socked feet on the ground carry a lot less resonance than boots, which Marcus does pick up on his way for the other room. Sets them by the door outside, for ease of finding later, before disappearing back inside private quarters.
And in a different disposition than before. Less compelled to touch things and look at things and leave an impression like his other vambrace which he'd set down on the trunk lid. Hand over hand, he takes off his tunic, and goes to drape it over the chair by the window. Undoes his hair, pocketing the leather tie while the other hand makes some effort at reordering the lay of it from where atmospheric damp and sweat have dictated, as he listens out for whatever Flint is doing, for his return.
Socks, then. As far as the rest of goes, there isn't much left, slowing down some but not stopping by the time he's undoing the fastenings of his pants.
What Flint is doing consists, after a moment, of hauling himself up out of the chair and gathering the cups from the side table—a clinking of glass—, and rifling through some papers on the division officer's long work table. There are pages there that warrant restoring to a locking drawer in his desk if he's to have company. The cups may be left on what constitutes as the sideboard. The lamp on the mantle needs extinguishing. He needs a moment to order himself.
When Flint reappears in the doorway, he has brought the little palm light with him. In his spare hand, the green book, and behind his shoulder a brief glimpse of the black darkness into which the office has been plunged before he shuts the door with the heel of his boot. And now, at once, they are on the other side of a door which has always been closed and whose state seems most natural in that position.
A glancing look to Marcus, with his undone hair and his shirt draped across the chair and buttons being unbuttoned, and then he moves round to the other side of the bed to deposit the book and the palm light beside its smokier cousin. When his attention returns across the width of the heavy bed—
It's less glancing. Somewhere under the bed is a boot jack, and Flint kicks it free without looking away. Hooks a heel deftly into it and begins working his boot free.
"Should I expect to have to wrestle for the right to put my cock in you?"
Thump. The boot topples off and over. He swaps to the other shoe.
Edited (Fusses with a single stupid line of dialogue) 2023-04-25 02:21 (UTC)
A glance, a partial pivot, hands pausing their task as Marcus tracks Flint across the room. The rest of the Gallows has been choked off from them, now, by a span of lightlessness and some closed doors. Nerves raw enough that the sound of wood settling into its frame prickles heat across skin, in the same way that a less-than-glancing look across the bed does too.
Marcus opens his trousers, pushes them down, steps out. The absence of frantic hungry pace means he can go layer by layer, smallclothes still in place as he folds the article lengthwise, drapes it over his shirt.
Now he moves to crest the other edge of the bed, nudging the mattress with a knee as if flirting with getting on it. Probably, in this past while that they've been, to one another, that man they are fucking, there have been enough instances that Flint (unlike most) can attest that Marcus is capable of smiling, sort of, and it is always like this: a replacement for a laugh, and thus brief, crooked, a showing of teeth, mostly gone again by the time he speaks to the thing that encouraged it.
"You'd win too easily," which is probably a reference to the long evening that led him here, but also something in line with these small capitulations he's been making already.
He tugs at a tie, loosens himself of this last layer, nudged aside. It's been a minute since he's been afforded the privacy of simply this much, travel and field work being as it is, where an undressing is done with practicality in mind, no lingering in in-between states. Sleeping with your boots on. The breath out of him is for that much, never mind the subject at hand, and now he kneels onto the mattress edge, a hand skimming down over himself.
"And I want that, besides," to be clear, refocusing in his look across at Flint. Easy to play at somehow doing someone else a favour, or some kind of settling for what he might be too tired to do instead. No, there is a want, there, formless though it'd been until he could find himself at Flint's door, or between his feet.
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The leather of the item in Flint's hands is dark enough to be black in the lower light, with the metal set in it of the same off-gold cast as the breastplate and other touches of plate. The fabric lining it is silvery. Pressed into the leather are fine geometric patterns. It's still warm, on the inside curve, from wearing.
Marcus ghosts up nearer, reaching to take up the cup set aside for him, a motion that transitions easy into bringing it up to his mouth to drink from. Pauses, and then a second sip finishes the cup, an appreciative edge to the breath out. A better bite to it than cheap tavern whiskey, although his palate only differentiates so much.
It clicks when he sets it down. Considers Flint on the seat, the potential for deliberately ruffled feathers, the way he might smooth them again. He moves closer, a boot looking to nudge aside one of Flint's as he offers out a hand for the vambrace.
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Sat low in the chair, knees sprawled carelessly, he raises his chin to combat that consideration. The toe of his boot turns out to accommodate the nudge. And then flicks back, a dull thump of leather against offending leather.
The still warm vambrace, leather and metal and the smell of something smoke touched, is passed up.
"Find anything interesting?" he asks, fetching the cup balanced between his thigh and the chair's arm.
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The leather and metal creak together in his hands before he goes and replaces the vambrace back onto the hexagonal table. Looking back down at him, in his sprawl.
"I like your ship painting."
Configured as he is, a decent amount of space between Flint's knees, it doesn't take a lot of heft for Marcus to again push that boot aside, a more insistent nudge this time. Maybe it already crosses a line into objectionable, but the motion is followed with a bent knee, a smooth descent down, the edge of draping leather soft where it strikes the ground before his knee does so.
Hands, finding a place to rest on thighs. Eye contact focused, intent, open. It would be awkward, of course, for Flint to tell him to fuck off around now. Marcus has full confidence he would get past it, if that's the thing he wanted.
He wants things. Things that feel imprecise right up until they're in reach. Right now, the texture of trouser fabric beneath his palms is compelling.
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(Or that it's too appropriate. Too removed from the haphazard, wolfish appetite that motivates foolishness like slipping off to blow Marcus in a side hallway at a diplomatic function. How ordinary it is to have the man he's fucking in his office, in his quarters. Just the concept of 'Marcus Rowntree, the man he's fucking' feels uneventful to the point of transgression.)
But seeing as he didn't—
(He of all people should understand that pausing to observe the length of a person's fucking audacity occasionally affords enough leeway to exploit.)
"Thanks," he says, baldly unimpressed with this assessment. Nevermind that he has shifted his knees slightly wider to permit Marcus between them, and that the hands high on his thighs are so sure.
Without interrupting his directly lour study, Flint swallows down a finger width of his cup's contents. An elbow hooks up onto the arm of the chair.
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Well, he could ask.
Marcus doesn't need to glance to the arm hooked up to rest just there, a part of the calculation as Flint's hand closed around his cup. Thanks, and there's a subtle tic of tension at Marcus' jaw. But the splay of thighs opening just that fraction more, the direction of his regard, even if that crease of irritation has yet to smooth out, all feel like the subtlest broadening of an incredibly narrow margin.
His gaze ticks down to Flint's mouth, where that swallow of whiskey has disappeared. A thumb following the line of his inseam. The other hand lifts, snags gently at a fold in Flint's shirt, before changing its mind and laying a broad palm against his side.
Catches shirt fabric with friction, tugging it up enough until there's a sliver of skin exposed between it and waistband. It stands to reason that Flint could use some of his own impulses. That Marcus could help him along.
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The tracking thumb, that flat of his hand, the blatant wandering of Marcus' eye, the fact that he came to this floor at all after those long days abroad rather than chasing the stairwell all the way to the Gallows courtyard and then cutting off in the direction of his own quarters, evidently so intent on putting his hands on him that it couldn't wait until a reasonable hour or a less intrusive place—these things should be compelling.
Flint swallows the second finger of whiskey. That drains the cup.
"Do you mean to sleep here?"
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It isn't do you want to fuck or a more open question, but something that knifes close to something thus far unarticulated, and apparently more vulnerable than kneeling down without invitation, that Marcus pauses over it, a more focused reading over of Flint's expression. The grasp of his hand gentles.
Then, "Aye," but, with respect to whose territory he is in, he adds, "I want to."
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For on asking, he'd instantly become aware of the intimately brittle tension grown out from behind his ribs during that pause. From under Marcus' hand, maybe. That if it were snapped, it might become a collection of sharp points and pepper his insides. That he could bleed from the answer, internal and invisible.
Which answer? It's true that this one he gets does taste faintly of metal. Brushes against some hard line he's drawn in his head and that if he were to clamp down too hard on it, its edges might scrape down to the bone. But maybe the other one would have been the same. Or would have cut sharper. Or turn his belly over in a similar fashion albeit but in an altogether different direction.
Flint trades the cup into his offhand. The hooked elbow works open so as to set the cup aside near its companion.
"You won't get much sleep," sounds like a warning, not like denial. "Not if you intend to slip out unnoticed. Doubly so if you want me to fuck you first. I have Matthias in the habit of starting work early."
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Relaxing, anyway, out of the slow drawing in of tension that had begun at Flint's direct question. That breath is converted into a hum of quiet consideration. The short hours allotted him, between a fucking and the need to don his armor and sneak back out into the gloomy Kirkwall dawn. They would be warm and satisfied and good, those hours, he is certain.
The hand at Flint's shirt turns back into a grasp, gentle, weighed down mostly from the weight of his fist than a meaningful pulling in.
"I'll manage," he says. And then it is a pulling in, rising on his knees.
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It's only when the buzzing sensation under the skin lingers despite these influences that Flint closes his hand above the joint and exerts some force. Makes to leverage the circumstantial height he has on Marcus; coaxes the next whiskey and smoke flavored kiss deeper beginning with a calculated rasp of teeth.
The other man smells like sweat, and like he's been standing too close to a camp fire; like the sharp air that only griffon's touch. It's only partially masked by the shared bite of the liquor. His bed, it occurs to Flint, is going to smell like this too. Maybe for some time after Marcus has left it.
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All this to say that he is kissed and still, despite himself, feels a white-hot ribbon of vigor zither through major arteries, a heart-focused clench and also lower still. He closes his eyes and softens his mouth to it.
Opens to that rasp of teeth, registering pressure and shift through the communicative clasp of that hand above his elbow, but also the subtler shift, an imposition. He finds himself, here, relenting to it, sinking slightly lower where he knees and letting his head tip back. Kisses back, too, nothing shy in the touch of his tongue, but something in the angle of the arrangement that is more like invitation than demand.
A fine line, anyway, considering his hand in a fist at Flint's shirt.
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—(Humored. That's a word for it.)—
The point being that it's only fair to take advantage of this permissiveness in turn. Not to impress his tongue on him, or the bite at Marcus' mouth, or to kiss him harder through that flexing give in the angle of his face. He can pepper Marcus with rough kisses and the sharp set of teeth virtually anywhere at all. In any grimy Kirkwall side street. What seems less accessible there: to slacken slightly. To answer an obvious invitation with anything short of a keen, devouring kind of hunger. Maker forbid anything that occurs in the narrow stairwell of any cheap lodging house have the air of a clear headed decision rather than being guided cock first. Here, taking advantage could be—
The next kiss is slower, less strictly rigorous. Shallow, even, while his grip on Marcus's upper arm eases back to a touch. Less playing at some kind of tenderness, and more testing it.
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Or, rather, not so much tempting as it is instinctive. Still, it's held in check beneath that grip that turns into a touch.
The kiss breaks, as kisses do, and Marcus initiates the next. Something of a nudge back, a quiet vocalisation, but all mild compared to past moments of a wresting for control, mirrored in tenderness. The hand at Flint's thigh is remembered, reawakened by giving a minor pulse of pressure before smoothing out again, a stroke of palm around to the outer muscle. Arousal, after that first spark of contact, coming to a slower simmer; almost less pronounced, to him, than the slow wind of tension somewhere beneath his ribcage.
A small scrape of eye contact the next time its viable, something questioning in it.
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But the hint of eye contact, and the question in it. They want for something more considered. And they prickle directly against a thing in him that's grown frustrated, that has gone raw and therefore slightly irritable from the sting. Marcus came here. Marcus wants to stay. What about the reception of those facts could be so fucking mysterious?
Flint's hand does shift, bluntly traveling from Marcus' upper arm to his shoulder. From shoulder to neck. To lay the warm shape of his palm at Marcus's jaw, callous rough thumb angling against the patchy bristle of his unshaven cheek. Flint leaves it there even as he bows back to press a further slow, heated kiss onto him—not hurried, or without insistence.
further heterosexual icon terrorism
There, a little urgency, if less bitey than he has been before. His fingers come around to curl over the back of Flint's neck as kiss pushes down along the opposite jaw, up under it. There had been cravings, formless, that he can find a little sated in this nearness, the experience of warmth, familiar smells and textures.
Before Flint can feel like Marcus might just unseat him, a brisk scrape of another kiss meets his mouth, hands gentling.
"Help me get out of all this," sounds like it has a please attached (unsaid) (of course) rather than his customary rudeness. Or maybe it's the same, exactly as he's always been, and some attunement has been made as to whether Marcus is interested in being demanding on purpose or it's just how his voice sounds.
Either way, he means his armor, which is beginning to feel too warm and in the way.
the AUDACITY
A short exhale, a low rumble of a sound, and he assents to do as he's been told. As he's been asked, clarifies the hand at Marcus' face for it drops an hand and exerts a mild pressure there as if he might lay him partly over the widely sprawled angle of his thigh.
Not really. But also maybe if Marcus were to fold to it, then he would coax him into leaning against his knee and the chair arm.
"Move your arm," he tells him, in no great hurry.
No, he can make do with just turning Marcus's face and exposing pauldron and cuirass buckles to the attention of his spare hand while the other remains warm in that space where it's lain somewhere between Marcus' neck and his face. Fingers wide, palm steady, thumb stroking softly at the lobe of his ear.
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Sinking slightly more relaxed where he kneels and then leans. Tipping towards that hand, at first only giving access to the one that is getting at the buckles by his shoulder and soaking up the attention of the first, not wishing to interrupt it before turning his chin to brush his mouth against the undersides of fingers, palm, barely justified as a kiss.
He reflects that it is going to be disappointing if this pace they've set goes away forever, upon his leaving. That it's a game, of the kinds they have sometimes played a little, and one that wouldn't withstand repetition. But these concerns are all too complex for the moment, nor do they prevent him from leaning into it, letting it soak, and besides, he has armor to doff.
There is, then, a lean against Flint's knee. A hand curling against the other man's calf, the intricacy of a thumbed arc just felt through the leather. He, meanwhile, reaches for the buckles up around his waist, tugging those free.
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The undoing of buckles and ties is patient without being needlessly methodical. After all, they're only fastenings, and the disassembly is as straight forward as undoing line of stitches. These things are always easier to take open than they are to put in no matter the warmth of the breath against his palm, or the distant lurking thrill budding from Marcus being so pliant to the hand. There is no great need to examine any part of it.
(Though he does, as compulsive and measured as the meditative stroke of his thumb.)
When Flint has finished one side, the pauldron strips freely away to be set on the hexagonal side table with its coordinating vambrace. The careful hand at Marcus' jaw slides, fingers tucking in under the edge of the loosening breastplate as if to use it as the hand hold by which to—
"Shift over. I'll have the other side done."
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The rest is simple, less intricate than what all goes into protecting a warrior above-waist. The wide belt over cloth wrap and leather layers, boots with guards built in.
It all feels a little raw, semi-painful in a peculiar way that is, despite itself, good. Still feeling the tickling sensation at his ear and the side of his neck even after the hand is fallen away, occupied currently with the slightly unfamiliar feeling of someone else seeing to the buckles of his armor, of feeling knuckles press to his shoulder and chest where Flint gets his fingers beneath the edge of lined metal.
Still, the vulnerable thing that winds itself tighter has more defensive layers to conceal itself. Muscle, bone, skin. Kept compressed to the point of ache somewhere between it all even as metal and leather is tugged free. He leans back on his haunches in helping remove his cuirass, aiming to land it gently by the table.
He loosens the wrap around his neck, tugging that free. His boot scrapes against the ground, and he grips the arm of the chair, on his way to finally standing.
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There is less reason to help with the rest; none of it consists of fastenings placed awkwardly enough to make a second pair of hands particularly expeditious. In spite of this, and the not distant prickling sense of arousal that stings like cool air against a deeper cut, there is some appreciatively studious quality to how Flint uses both hands to unbuckle the heavy belt at Marcus' middle. Less about how expeditiously Marcus might stripped down. More about the rhythm of the thing. Easing fingers under layers and pulling them mindfully up.
(Testing himself to see what measure of vulnerability—and this is that. Vulnerable. More than or distinctly different from asking for Marcus' to use him in a half-lit corridor; some high feeling like irritation or nervousness, or the sound of a hurt dog's whining whistling out from under the skin—can be tolerated.)
He can manage the belt. He can't undo the wrap. But after, once the cloth is freed, he can catch up the end as the last of it comes uncoiled and fold it into a neat rectangle across his knee.
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Beneath, the tunic has fold lines and crinkles sweated into it around the tail ends. No blood stains or new tears, just sweat, some streaks of dirt barely visible in dark grey linen. The scent of earth, smoke, himself. Marcus tugs the fabric a little to loosen it off his skin, a moment spent considering what else there is to do, and Flint's position on the chair.
A hand sets down on Flint's shoulder again, and Marcus lifts opposite knee to set it against Flint's, balanced in a standing kneel. A twinge of amusement barely detectable in his expression for himself as he reaches down and back to loosen boot buckles. He toys with Flint's shirt collar with the edge of his thumb.
Will go on to repeat himself, mirrored, after the first boot is pushed off to thump against the floor.
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bridling a little against his continued occupation of the chair while Marcus' thumb wanders against his shirt collar.
The cloth wrap is transferred from lap to table. It's laid over the book for want of its own free space, crowded out now by the various discarded segments of field worn armor. His hand, wandering to Marcus' propped knee. Knuckles brushing and lingering, not quite benign, while the second boot is shucked.
"Take the rest off in the other room," he tells him. "I've some things to put away here."
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Followed by a push at Flint's shoulder, a levering back so that Marcus can duck down to kiss him. Not quite a casual parting gesture, not with his knee braced where it is and the pressure of a hand at Flint's shoulder, but closer to that end of the spectrum as far as the meanings and intentions of kisses.
Flint is relieved of it at the same time as Marcus backs off, pared down, a less bulky figure than how he'd begun. Socked feet on the ground carry a lot less resonance than boots, which Marcus does pick up on his way for the other room. Sets them by the door outside, for ease of finding later, before disappearing back inside private quarters.
And in a different disposition than before. Less compelled to touch things and look at things and leave an impression like his other vambrace which he'd set down on the trunk lid. Hand over hand, he takes off his tunic, and goes to drape it over the chair by the window. Undoes his hair, pocketing the leather tie while the other hand makes some effort at reordering the lay of it from where atmospheric damp and sweat have dictated, as he listens out for whatever Flint is doing, for his return.
Socks, then. As far as the rest of goes, there isn't much left, slowing down some but not stopping by the time he's undoing the fastenings of his pants.
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When Flint reappears in the doorway, he has brought the little palm light with him. In his spare hand, the green book, and behind his shoulder a brief glimpse of the black darkness into which the office has been plunged before he shuts the door with the heel of his boot. And now, at once, they are on the other side of a door which has always been closed and whose state seems most natural in that position.
A glancing look to Marcus, with his undone hair and his shirt draped across the chair and buttons being unbuttoned, and then he moves round to the other side of the bed to deposit the book and the palm light beside its smokier cousin. When his attention returns across the width of the heavy bed—
It's less glancing. Somewhere under the bed is a boot jack, and Flint kicks it free without looking away. Hooks a heel deftly into it and begins working his boot free.
"Should I expect to have to wrestle for the right to put my cock in you?"
Thump. The boot topples off and over. He swaps to the other shoe.
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Marcus opens his trousers, pushes them down, steps out. The absence of frantic hungry pace means he can go layer by layer, smallclothes still in place as he folds the article lengthwise, drapes it over his shirt.
Now he moves to crest the other edge of the bed, nudging the mattress with a knee as if flirting with getting on it. Probably, in this past while that they've been, to one another, that man they are fucking, there have been enough instances that Flint (unlike most) can attest that Marcus is capable of smiling, sort of, and it is always like this: a replacement for a laugh, and thus brief, crooked, a showing of teeth, mostly gone again by the time he speaks to the thing that encouraged it.
"You'd win too easily," which is probably a reference to the long evening that led him here, but also something in line with these small capitulations he's been making already.
He tugs at a tie, loosens himself of this last layer, nudged aside. It's been a minute since he's been afforded the privacy of simply this much, travel and field work being as it is, where an undressing is done with practicality in mind, no lingering in in-between states. Sleeping with your boots on. The breath out of him is for that much, never mind the subject at hand, and now he kneels onto the mattress edge, a hand skimming down over himself.
"And I want that, besides," to be clear, refocusing in his look across at Flint. Easy to play at somehow doing someone else a favour, or some kind of settling for what he might be too tired to do instead. No, there is a want, there, formless though it'd been until he could find himself at Flint's door, or between his feet.
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me, seeing my 800 typos: womp
we'll fix it in post
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