It isn't strange for them to come together gently in the after, even if it does seem to leave off in short order. Some return to form, nipping remarks and the slow dismantling of the thing built together until they occupy distinct spaces once again. This is thought of in some abstraction and with no particular conclusion as Marcus presses a kiss back, leaning into hands, his own suring up around Flint's shoulder, the other tucked under jaw.
Knows a little edge of greed, though. Awfully ambitious, given his own capacities in this moment, that he will likely sleep as soon as settled, but still there, present a little in the way he opens the kiss up just enough to taste his tongue past the other man's lips, before relenting.
That hand at Flint's shoulder slips down to chest as he drops his head, chin nudging the other freckled shoulder, mouthing a kiss there. Feels a little like prodding at a bruise, this, and equally satisfying.
A half turn of his face to follow has him breathing heavily across Marcus' hairline, mouth incidental at his temple. The warm, wet shape of the kiss at his shoulder is sting and balm both; he imagines he must taste like sweat, and smoke from the oily lantern (or from this proximity to Marcus, whose skin carries that scent on it despite having been divested of every stitch of fabric).
No, these are ordinary impulses. To kiss, and touch. To linger close for some short measure until the sweat and come begins to stick unpleasantly instead of just being rewardingly grimy. Give it a minute. Give it two, and the desire to loiter in this space will come unstuck. But for that duration, the wandering of hands stroking idle lines along Marcus' thighs; and the warm, steadying draw of breath; and, in less than a minute, Flint nosing at Marcus' cheek with a low rumble of request until he lifts his face the degree necessary to kiss him mouth again so that he might return that lazy taste of tongue past teeth.
"Where is your cigarette case?" a low spoken question, thickly murmured, when he eventually breaks back.
Lazy, Marcus lifts his head, answering that kiss with a small, contented sound. A hand wandering back up and around Flint's shoulder, sketching his thumb over a line of muscle. Part of him imagining pressing the other man back down to the bed, restarting all of this again, albeit slower and lazier.
The other part of him harbouring a more realistic perspective, and stops him from leaning in to chase Flint back down before the other man speaks.
Hm, and he looks back to the fold of his things on the chair. It does feel a mile away, those few steps from the mattress. "There," he answers. Moves a leg with the intent to go and retrieve it unless stopped, motions all slow and lazy.
He is stopped—the hand at his thigh catching closed. Near him, chasing the tender skin below Marcus' ear, Flint makes a low noise to protest the thing. Some grumbled assurance like, I'll have it, and he unfolds his own leg. Drawing his hands sluggishly away, he twists over with a working of muscle in shoulder and side.
It takes less actual physical effort to clamber across and out of the bed than it really seems like it ought to. Then he is on his feet. Sweat drying skin prickles in the oily lamplight. The night is dark—a purposeful decision to pick some span of time when the moon would be sliced thin for the work Marcus and the others had pursued—, and there is no moonlight to augment the room through the slash narrow windows.
Regardless, a cursory feeling up of Marcus's folded clothes reveals the hard edges of the case. Flint doesn't have to rifle far in the half dark to find the right pocket to raid before he makes to return to the bed.
Marcus moves once they finally break contact. Not far, just a sliding up a little on the covelet, stretching worked muscles in the same motion before settling, back finding the headboard in low slouch. His focus is more on the other man, anyway, considering the sight of him, standing casually bare in warm light, handling Marcus' clothing.
Will find himself watched when he makes to return. Inside, it's half full of cigarettes wrapped in brown leaf, with one mostly finished and stashed away for later dissection. The metal is an orangey tint, brighter in the lamplight, with its scratched in flame shape on the lid that he is sure he's seen Flint glance at skeptically at least once before.
This time, he offers an answer to unasked question, "It was a gift," lest he be accused of such obvious self-styling, never mind that he let it replace the ordinary tin one he'd had prior to it.
It's only a few strides back to the bed even when they're meandering ones. Once he arrives at it, he sets one knee up onto the mattress with enough weight applied there that the foot remaining on the thick rug underfoot is pretense.
(The eyes on him are to be expected. It might be disappointing were he to have turned and discovered Marcus' attention elsewhere. Anyway, it's only fair—he's looking at Marcus.)
His focus wanders down to Flint's hands, but also that stretch of thigh, which he remembers clutching not so many minutes ago, really, and the myriad of other little sense memories attached. Without the same sex-stupid fog clouding his judgment and senses, it's a different thing to look at Flint now, even if the man is in much the same positioning.
Rare, too. They'd likely be half-dressed by now, or making motions towards it, little room for lingering appreciation. Marcus narrows perception back to his hands, lazily anticipatory.
"It was left for me on a Satinalia without a note."
Flint's huff of a breath out as his attention dips to extracting a cigarette is like a laugh. This fucking place. These fucking people.
"Objectively preferable to the kitchen knife left on my doorstep," he observes, flipping the case shut with a soft nip of metal.
Then the case is set aside, a reflecting muggy orange rectangle on the mussed coverlet, and with the chosen cigarette tucked casually behind the ear, Flint clambers easily back into the bed. He sits beside Marcus, but with his back to the rest of the room rather than settling in alongside at the headboard. A bent leg, the line of hip and and thigh and knee incidental against the other man's side.
(It's generally easier to observe a thing from this direction rather than from beside it. To say nothing of the fact that he's tired, and if he lays down beside Marcus in bed made warm from their exertions then he will pass out before he has had the opportunity to
What, exactly? Make use of these minutes where he might study Marcus in his bed? Stupid.)
Leaning forward with the cigarette, he makes a grunt of a request for a light.
Minor adjustments follow Flint settling, sitting up a little further out of slouch to match. Conforming to arrangement, nearness, knee leaning to thigh. His hand falls to gently rest on the inner of Flint's knee, palm teasing over the hair that prickles over that patch of skin before resting.
With his other hand, raising it, he summons a small twist of flame between the bracket of thumb and middle finger, holding it in place for Flint to make use of. No sharp little studies to see if Flint flinches or hesitates, a broader kind of observation that is more appreciative than trying to find something out.
Only once the end of the cigarette catches and embers properly—
"I wasn't spared," he says, leaning back. "I received a bowl from the kitchens, and returned it on the finding. The culprit tried to break into my quarters to retrieve it some days after," because he's an idiot, says a fine flicker to his expression, "and talked only just fast enough to save himself."
He'll take an anonymous cigarette case over almost doing grievous harm to a man in a state of indignant paranoia.
"Do you think we'll still like each other come Firstfall?" And he turns his hand to accept a cigarette being passed to him.
(Surely if he were liable to flinch from the spark, he would have leaned over to the lantern instead. Or, at the very least, would have steeled himself for the brittle tang crackling in the air before all but summoning it.)
Flint's pulls on the cigarette are shallow and briefly held, the perfunctory type to coax the leaf and paper into burning made during some hum of acknowledgement for an idiot. He takes only one proper drag on the cigarette before moving to surrender it into Marcus' possession, turning his face in some easy direction so as to exhale smoke out through the nostrils.
What a question. It pinches at the corner of his eye. Tickles somewhere low in his belly.
"Do we like each other now?" he asks, tilting his face back. It has a scrape of humor to it, cool as it is.
Hm, around the end of the cigarette, drawing in smoke to linger in his lungs. Tips his chin up to breathe it out again over their heads.
"We could try," has an answering scrape of humour. "See how we like it."
Marcus turns his hand to offer the cigarette back, eye contact ticked down to watching the burning end of the object. They are, anyway, sat here like this, with a propensity for finding each other again. Maybe if Satinalia were tomorrow, Marcus would identify two things he knows about Flint and combine them into a gift too.
He still has his hand at his knee, thumb idling against the edge of bone.
He might refuse the cigarette—for all that he'd been quick to fetch the case, it isn't so much his habit; he'd just wanted the sour taste of it in Marcus' mouth in case he kissed him again, and the tang of the smoke on his bare skin should they lie next to one another—or refuse this, but to do both seems unwise. Unfair. Purposefully obtuse.
So he takes the cigarette, saying, "That sounds like the argument I might make if I were trying to avoid having to wake up and secrete myself out of this room in a few hours."
An idle pull on the cigarette comes a flexing of his brow accompanied by the slip of lamplit gold-green eye contact. He isn't saying Marcus Rowntree's present motivations are suspect, however—
When the cigarette is traded back it comes with a faint gesture, Keep it.
This gets a wry twist at the mouth. Cigarette kept.
"And overstay my welcome?"
Pronounced with a silent and dry Never at the end of the rhetoric. In a few hours, he might regret not pushing the point. In a few hours, he might rely on being a warm and tempting (or too pathetic) of a prospect for bed-sharing for Flint to be very motivated to turn him out.
But there is something in these shared entanglements that feels reckless for how little he thinks about whatever comes next, save for that ceaseless need for more of it. Marcus takes from the cigarette in sedate pulls, hand lifting from Flint's knee to fidget, magically, with dispersing the fall of ash and ember into nothing.
His mmm of assent has the shade of a laugh in it. About fifty of them, give or take.
Free of the obligation to manage the cigarette, his hand moves absently to smooth across his knee at the place where Marcus's hand had set. Then shifts to some wrinkle in the coverlet nearby, pinching and scuffing it idly between the fingers. A vague, mundane echo of the dispersal of ash and ember, an unconscious rearranging of the environment.
"I have my suspicions we might find we dislike one another given the opportunity for closer examination."
In the smoky lamplight, watching Marcus' face and hands while sat beside him in his bare skin, it's possible that it sounds slightly funny. Less serious. It helps the impression that Flint punctuates it with a direct look and some crooked slant to his mouth amidst auburn whiskers.
It's slightly funny, less serious, but it's obligatory that there should be a small twinge beneath the surface as Marcus turns his focus back to the other man. Meeting direct look, measuring crooked slant.
He takes another pull of smoke, something heavier in his settling back against the headboard as he releases it again.
"Do you?" is frank prompt. It, too, is accompanied by something a little wry, and also the return of his spare hand, conforming palm to calf. "Maybe you're assuming you've escaped scrutiny this long."
The not unamused tightening flex in Flint's face suggests, yes, that's true. This is in fact the point from which he's operating. Then again—
A faint tilt of the head and a turning gesture of the hand up from the coverlet asks, Hasn't he?
Nevermind that Marcus' hand is pleasantly warm on him, or that he is beginning to know the tang of the particular leaf the man smokes and the scent of it lingering in the air here satisfies something low behind the ribs. That's not the point.
It's true that he could not put together a full page of concrete facts about the other man. Flint has effectively deterred with the kinds of vague answers that Marcus might normally set his claws into without further distraction, and further distraction has nearly always been present. But there is still some sense of knowing. The abstract broad shapes of a person, conveyed in what they do and say. That only so many details could alter it.
Not that Marcus is inclined to make this case, corner of his mouth twitching at wry, silent answer. He can feel confident in it on his own.
Satisfied with having established some of the truth in this fact, his hand returns to that wrinkle in the coverlet at which he might thoughtlessly worry between thumb and middle finger.
The slant of his mouth pitches fractionally deeper, but somehow less like a joke despite the glint of easy humor in his eye. Well.
"That if I answered that question honestly, you would decide to slip away now instead of staying a few hours. Which I think we've both decided we would prefer."
There's a place and time where it's possible that Marcus might reach all the way across to trap Flint's hand where it toys with bed covers, pull it into his own possession. Convey something of what he is feeling in the press and flex of thumb and fingers, or try to detect the same from the other man. That place and time may have resembled this one.
He keeps his hand, instead, where it is, an arcing rub of thumb against muscle. Scoffs, slightly, at the idea that anything short of direct order might compel Marcus out of this spot and into his armor, all the way back to his room which will smell chill and stale and so much like the Gallows.
For a moment, Flint measures him there against the backdrop of the dark headboard. Loose hair, fingers of smoke drifting idly off, the scarring on Marcus' face rendered mild now that there are fewer shadows of moving bodies influencing it and some of the color has faded from his face. Canny eye in spite of the hour and the long trek Marcus has made to get here.
"This stops being an equitable arrangement if we select to like one another," he says. Then adds— "Honestly, it hardly qualifies now. But at some point, we are going to find ourselves in the other's way and I don't think you're going to be pleased when my way wins out on the basis of the weight of that room."
He tilts his head to the closed door. To the darkened division office which lurks beyond it. Flint is not a Templar in a Circle tower. But he is a man who sits at the top of the place where Marcus has had by his own admission made some kind of life; a man makes demands of Marcus, and of Marcus' companions, and gives back remarkably little in return. Certainly, he can expect to receive very few explanations.
"My suspicions tell me that's all more forgivable if this is merely a convenience."
Slow is the release of smoke between teeth, nostrils, not so uncontrolled or emotive as a sigh but with similar depth. Marcus listens, keen eyed in return after having had a few minutes to sit here and smoke, and only difficult to read in that he only appears to be listening.
Then, he gently holds cigarette between teeth so he can use his fingers to put it out at the end, likely more than just callused fingertips extinguishing burning embers. Twists it to save the last inch or so, palms it into his hand, and then moves. An easing forwards, which could seem on his way to shifting off entirely if not for the slide of hand from calf to knee to thigh.
"How about I promise to stay the same amount of displeased," he says, "no matter how inconvenient this becomes."
If he believed them to be of radically opposed positions, he likely would not be here, but Flint is correct; some disagreement is inevitable. There's trace humour in his answer, a reassurance for all the wrong things, and where his hand slips down to rest on the warm span of Flint's inner thigh. As anticipated, smoke-scent is freshly acrid from its recent burning, and promises to linger well after he makes it out.
There is a sense, immediately, that Marcus has said the wrong thing. Not in some cooling temperature between them, of some sobering in the lines of Flint's face—no, there remains a lingering lamp lit kind of warmth here in the bed, dangerously near to the description of comfortable; and that slant of Flint's mouth and the set of his brow has settled back to amusement in answer to the upward slither of Marcus' hand and this easy declaration—, but there regardless. A trace sense that he is humoring the the point not because he sees any sense in it but because noting some alternative has seemed to have become irrelevant in the moment.
That is certainly a promise someone could make. Even if it weren't Rowntree, who would have grappled with a Qunari on impulse, it would still sound like bullshit.
"I hope that's not the way you haggle in the Lowtown markets, or someone is getting rich off you. Possibly multiple someones."
Maybe if he'd said some other thing, Flint might have followed Marcus' hand with his. Touched his wrist and played after his knuckles. Held his hand there, pleasantly warm against the hair prickled interior of his thigh. As it is, Flint makes no effort to dislodge the hand but leans away, back, to fetch the glinting rectangular case from where he'd discarded it. Catches Marcus' knee as he shifts back up, then passes the case over.
They've spent more time together fully dressed and speaking of work-like matters than not, even if these are the kinds of interactions that have quickly come to crowd their way into being the most notable, for Marcus. Here, in low lamp light and the the scent of smoke and sweat wreathing them and bare skin against Marcus' palm, and something like familiar teasing in Flint's words that he might otherwise not know save for these moments—
It is something nearly like rebuke, that feeling. A declination that in its essence more so than form feels more like an interaction had across a desk in that darkened room. Marcus moves his hand once it's given something to do, accepting back his case.
He opens it with an easy click of metal and replaces the cigarette butt inside.
"If you favour convenience," he says, "then it would suit me still to stay."
It could be a little like a shrug, this comment, but there is a slightly searching edge to the way he looks back towards the other man.
There, in that searching look, is the niggling feeling that it would be wisest to drive him off. Make some cruel overture now in the effort to see his point made, and be done with it. If Marcus came back after that, if he made some brisk unilateral decision and tomorrow or the next day they met again in Kirkwall and fucked around in another anonymous room regardless, maybe then he might have some confidence in the man's ability to take some indignity and discomfort on the chin for this.
But he's selfish. And he's already said he would prefer it if Marcus were to stay. So what bearing on that desire does convenience or inconvenience have, really?
Flint's hand on Marcus' knee, the thumb running absently against the edge of his kneecap. Something about prying it up and torturing a man not occuring to him in the moment, given how idle the point of contact is.
"Stay, then," he says, as if it's simple to, although James Flint does very little purposelessly.
It bears analysis why the subtle flex of a thumb against his leg is so convincing, capable of settling the start of some minor disorientation with just that alone, before Flint gives his answer. Capable of overriding errant flinching sense-memory of a wound behind old scars, too. It would be, probably, unwise to read so much into even these minor physicalities, given how much of this is physicality, but it's what occurs anyway.
Maybe Marcus will analyse it, and come to the conclusion that he should guard against the instinct. It's too much to ask he do so right now, however, and he nods.
His leg turns at the hinge of his hip into that hand, a nudge against Flint's thigh.
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no subject
Knows a little edge of greed, though. Awfully ambitious, given his own capacities in this moment, that he will likely sleep as soon as settled, but still there, present a little in the way he opens the kiss up just enough to taste his tongue past the other man's lips, before relenting.
That hand at Flint's shoulder slips down to chest as he drops his head, chin nudging the other freckled shoulder, mouthing a kiss there. Feels a little like prodding at a bruise, this, and equally satisfying.
me, seeing my 800 typos: womp
No, these are ordinary impulses. To kiss, and touch. To linger close for some short measure until the sweat and come begins to stick unpleasantly instead of just being rewardingly grimy. Give it a minute. Give it two, and the desire to loiter in this space will come unstuck. But for that duration, the wandering of hands stroking idle lines along Marcus' thighs; and the warm, steadying draw of breath; and, in less than a minute, Flint nosing at Marcus' cheek with a low rumble of request until he lifts his face the degree necessary to kiss him mouth again so that he might return that lazy taste of tongue past teeth.
"Where is your cigarette case?" a low spoken question, thickly murmured, when he eventually breaks back.
we'll fix it in post
The other part of him harbouring a more realistic perspective, and stops him from leaning in to chase Flint back down before the other man speaks.
Hm, and he looks back to the fold of his things on the chair. It does feel a mile away, those few steps from the mattress. "There," he answers. Moves a leg with the intent to go and retrieve it unless stopped, motions all slow and lazy.
no subject
It takes less actual physical effort to clamber across and out of the bed than it really seems like it ought to. Then he is on his feet. Sweat drying skin prickles in the oily lamplight. The night is dark—a purposeful decision to pick some span of time when the moon would be sliced thin for the work Marcus and the others had pursued—, and there is no moonlight to augment the room through the slash narrow windows.
Regardless, a cursory feeling up of Marcus's folded clothes reveals the hard edges of the case. Flint doesn't have to rifle far in the half dark to find the right pocket to raid before he makes to return to the bed.
no subject
Will find himself watched when he makes to return. Inside, it's half full of cigarettes wrapped in brown leaf, with one mostly finished and stashed away for later dissection. The metal is an orangey tint, brighter in the lamplight, with its scratched in flame shape on the lid that he is sure he's seen Flint glance at skeptically at least once before.
This time, he offers an answer to unasked question, "It was a gift," lest he be accused of such obvious self-styling, never mind that he let it replace the ordinary tin one he'd had prior to it.
no subject
(The eyes on him are to be expected. It might be disappointing were he to have turned and discovered Marcus' attention elsewhere. Anyway, it's only fair—he's looking at Marcus.)
The case pops open with a soft click of metal.
"From who?"
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His focus wanders down to Flint's hands, but also that stretch of thigh, which he remembers clutching not so many minutes ago, really, and the myriad of other little sense memories attached. Without the same sex-stupid fog clouding his judgment and senses, it's a different thing to look at Flint now, even if the man is in much the same positioning.
Rare, too. They'd likely be half-dressed by now, or making motions towards it, little room for lingering appreciation. Marcus narrows perception back to his hands, lazily anticipatory.
"It was left for me on a Satinalia without a note."
no subject
"Objectively preferable to the kitchen knife left on my doorstep," he observes, flipping the case shut with a soft nip of metal.
Then the case is set aside, a reflecting muggy orange rectangle on the mussed coverlet, and with the chosen cigarette tucked casually behind the ear, Flint clambers easily back into the bed. He sits beside Marcus, but with his back to the rest of the room rather than settling in alongside at the headboard. A bent leg, the line of hip and and thigh and knee incidental against the other man's side.
(It's generally easier to observe a thing from this direction rather than from beside it. To say nothing of the fact that he's tired, and if he lays down beside Marcus in bed made warm from their exertions then he will pass out before he has had the opportunity to
What, exactly? Make use of these minutes where he might study Marcus in his bed? Stupid.)
Leaning forward with the cigarette, he makes a grunt of a request for a light.
no subject
With his other hand, raising it, he summons a small twist of flame between the bracket of thumb and middle finger, holding it in place for Flint to make use of. No sharp little studies to see if Flint flinches or hesitates, a broader kind of observation that is more appreciative than trying to find something out.
Only once the end of the cigarette catches and embers properly—
"I wasn't spared," he says, leaning back. "I received a bowl from the kitchens, and returned it on the finding. The culprit tried to break into my quarters to retrieve it some days after," because he's an idiot, says a fine flicker to his expression, "and talked only just fast enough to save himself."
He'll take an anonymous cigarette case over almost doing grievous harm to a man in a state of indignant paranoia.
"Do you think we'll still like each other come Firstfall?" And he turns his hand to accept a cigarette being passed to him.
no subject
Flint's pulls on the cigarette are shallow and briefly held, the perfunctory type to coax the leaf and paper into burning made during some hum of acknowledgement for an idiot. He takes only one proper drag on the cigarette before moving to surrender it into Marcus' possession, turning his face in some easy direction so as to exhale smoke out through the nostrils.
What a question. It pinches at the corner of his eye. Tickles somewhere low in his belly.
"Do we like each other now?" he asks, tilting his face back. It has a scrape of humor to it, cool as it is.
no subject
"We could try," has an answering scrape of humour. "See how we like it."
Marcus turns his hand to offer the cigarette back, eye contact ticked down to watching the burning end of the object. They are, anyway, sat here like this, with a propensity for finding each other again. Maybe if Satinalia were tomorrow, Marcus would identify two things he knows about Flint and combine them into a gift too.
He still has his hand at his knee, thumb idling against the edge of bone.
no subject
So he takes the cigarette, saying, "That sounds like the argument I might make if I were trying to avoid having to wake up and secrete myself out of this room in a few hours."
An idle pull on the cigarette comes a flexing of his brow accompanied by the slip of lamplit gold-green eye contact. He isn't saying Marcus Rowntree's present motivations are suspect, however—
When the cigarette is traded back it comes with a faint gesture, Keep it.
no subject
"And overstay my welcome?"
Pronounced with a silent and dry Never at the end of the rhetoric. In a few hours, he might regret not pushing the point. In a few hours, he might rely on being a warm and tempting (or too pathetic) of a prospect for bed-sharing for Flint to be very motivated to turn him out.
But there is something in these shared entanglements that feels reckless for how little he thinks about whatever comes next, save for that ceaseless need for more of it. Marcus takes from the cigarette in sedate pulls, hand lifting from Flint's knee to fidget, magically, with dispersing the fall of ash and ember into nothing.
"I suppose you've nosy neighbours."
no subject
Free of the obligation to manage the cigarette, his hand moves absently to smooth across his knee at the place where Marcus's hand had set. Then shifts to some wrinkle in the coverlet nearby, pinching and scuffing it idly between the fingers. A vague, mundane echo of the dispersal of ash and ember, an unconscious rearranging of the environment.
"I have my suspicions we might find we dislike one another given the opportunity for closer examination."
In the smoky lamplight, watching Marcus' face and hands while sat beside him in his bare skin, it's possible that it sounds slightly funny. Less serious. It helps the impression that Flint punctuates it with a direct look and some crooked slant to his mouth amidst auburn whiskers.
no subject
He takes another pull of smoke, something heavier in his settling back against the headboard as he releases it again.
"Do you?" is frank prompt. It, too, is accompanied by something a little wry, and also the return of his spare hand, conforming palm to calf. "Maybe you're assuming you've escaped scrutiny this long."
no subject
A faint tilt of the head and a turning gesture of the hand up from the coverlet asks, Hasn't he?
Nevermind that Marcus' hand is pleasantly warm on him, or that he is beginning to know the tang of the particular leaf the man smokes and the scent of it lingering in the air here satisfies something low behind the ribs. That's not the point.
no subject
Not that Marcus is inclined to make this case, corner of his mouth twitching at wry, silent answer. He can feel confident in it on his own.
"What else do your suspicions say?"
no subject
The slant of his mouth pitches fractionally deeper, but somehow less like a joke despite the glint of easy humor in his eye. Well.
"That if I answered that question honestly, you would decide to slip away now instead of staying a few hours. Which I think we've both decided we would prefer."
no subject
He keeps his hand, instead, where it is, an arcing rub of thumb against muscle. Scoffs, slightly, at the idea that anything short of direct order might compel Marcus out of this spot and into his armor, all the way back to his room which will smell chill and stale and so much like the Gallows.
"But now I'm curious," he says, after a beat.
no subject
For a moment, Flint measures him there against the backdrop of the dark headboard. Loose hair, fingers of smoke drifting idly off, the scarring on Marcus' face rendered mild now that there are fewer shadows of moving bodies influencing it and some of the color has faded from his face. Canny eye in spite of the hour and the long trek Marcus has made to get here.
"This stops being an equitable arrangement if we select to like one another," he says. Then adds— "Honestly, it hardly qualifies now. But at some point, we are going to find ourselves in the other's way and I don't think you're going to be pleased when my way wins out on the basis of the weight of that room."
He tilts his head to the closed door. To the darkened division office which lurks beyond it. Flint is not a Templar in a Circle tower. But he is a man who sits at the top of the place where Marcus has had by his own admission made some kind of life; a man makes demands of Marcus, and of Marcus' companions, and gives back remarkably little in return. Certainly, he can expect to receive very few explanations.
"My suspicions tell me that's all more forgivable if this is merely a convenience."
no subject
Then, he gently holds cigarette between teeth so he can use his fingers to put it out at the end, likely more than just callused fingertips extinguishing burning embers. Twists it to save the last inch or so, palms it into his hand, and then moves. An easing forwards, which could seem on his way to shifting off entirely if not for the slide of hand from calf to knee to thigh.
"How about I promise to stay the same amount of displeased," he says, "no matter how inconvenient this becomes."
If he believed them to be of radically opposed positions, he likely would not be here, but Flint is correct; some disagreement is inevitable. There's trace humour in his answer, a reassurance for all the wrong things, and where his hand slips down to rest on the warm span of Flint's inner thigh. As anticipated, smoke-scent is freshly acrid from its recent burning, and promises to linger well after he makes it out.
no subject
That is certainly a promise someone could make. Even if it weren't Rowntree, who would have grappled with a Qunari on impulse, it would still sound like bullshit.
"I hope that's not the way you haggle in the Lowtown markets, or someone is getting rich off you. Possibly multiple someones."
Maybe if he'd said some other thing, Flint might have followed Marcus' hand with his. Touched his wrist and played after his knuckles. Held his hand there, pleasantly warm against the hair prickled interior of his thigh. As it is, Flint makes no effort to dislodge the hand but leans away, back, to fetch the glinting rectangular case from where he'd discarded it. Catches Marcus' knee as he shifts back up, then passes the case over.
no subject
It is something nearly like rebuke, that feeling. A declination that in its essence more so than form feels more like an interaction had across a desk in that darkened room. Marcus moves his hand once it's given something to do, accepting back his case.
He opens it with an easy click of metal and replaces the cigarette butt inside.
"If you favour convenience," he says, "then it would suit me still to stay."
It could be a little like a shrug, this comment, but there is a slightly searching edge to the way he looks back towards the other man.
no subject
But he's selfish. And he's already said he would prefer it if Marcus were to stay. So what bearing on that desire does convenience or inconvenience have, really?
Flint's hand on Marcus' knee, the thumb running absently against the edge of his kneecap. Something about prying it up and torturing a man not occuring to him in the moment, given how idle the point of contact is.
"Stay, then," he says, as if it's simple to, although James Flint does very little purposelessly.
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Maybe Marcus will analyse it, and come to the conclusion that he should guard against the instinct. It's too much to ask he do so right now, however, and he nods.
His leg turns at the hinge of his hip into that hand, a nudge against Flint's thigh.
"Then we should clean up."
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