Work Text:
While the Darkness Lasts
He wonders what the scholar will do, now, if he lets him alone, and at that point his mind fills with images that leave a strange ache in the vicinity of his chest. Well, that won’t do.
He’ll merely have to make certain that none of that actually happens. Simple enough. He keeps the scholar with him, not really as a good deed, he thinks, but he still brings him home despite the off-color jokes and ribbing about lost puppies he’ll no doubt receive the next morning in payment from all and sundry. And he begins to realize, even over the course of the night, that the young man is not precisely a scholar. Richard isn’t certain what the young man is, in fact. He can’t pin him down, which bothers him, a bit, until it slips away from bothering him into something else. Something dangerous. Something quicksilver and light, that flutters quickly away from him when he tries to touch it, something like flame or the movement of a sword. And then it captivates him; he can’t seem to stop staring into it, into wide green eyes, the arch of an over-thin neck, the heavy fall of hair. Brown hair—not just brown, something more, with a tinge of red, like chestnuts in autumn; deep, somehow, thick and rich, it should look too heavy for those stooped shoulders, but it doesn’t—and Richard likes brown.
The young man who is not a scholar looks up and catches his eyes, and looks back. A faint hint of a smile touches his mobile mouth. “My name’s Alec,” he said, and the crisp coolness of his accent seems to fill the dingy Riverside room with itself and nothing else. “Did I tell you that already?”
“Yes,” Richard replies. “You did. First thing, after the fighting.”
“Ah. Right then. Must have forgotten,” Alec laughs. Then he blinks, and then lowers his eyes. He lowers more than that, in a moment, sliding off the chaise lounge to thud ungracefully to his knees on the floor. For a moment Richard is startled, concerned, reaches out to, perhaps, pull him back from the fire, who knows what he’ll do, after all—
Who knows what he’ll do, indeed. Alec reaches for the placket of Richard’s trousers and has the first button undone before Richard’s hand is around his slim, wiry wrist.
“No?” Alec drawls. He tilts his head. His eyes are huge and green, glittering, in his pale face. He looks almost mad again.
“You’re not a whore,” Richard says thickly. That much was blatantly, blazingly obvious. Alec was something else. Brilliant. A scholar. A genius. A nobleman. Perhaps none of them, but not a whore. Richard knows whores. He doesn’t know Alec, not at all. But he wants to. “Don’t act like one.”
Alec’s eyes deepen and spark. “Oh, but I’m not,” he says. “Acting like one, that is.” His pulse flutters in his throat, Richard can see it, fine and trembling beneath the pale skin, and he tilts his head back, eyes half-lidded, a pleasured, satisfied expression on his face, as if he’d already finished what he’d been setting out to do. “You killed two men today,” he says. “Right in front of me.”
He doesn’t look as if he objects. Richard shrugs. “So I did,” he says. “What of it?”
Alec smiles, a wry, lopsided, strangely knowing half-smile that stops Richard’s heart in his chest, just for a moment, and skims his hands up Richard’s thighs. “So . . .” he said. “So this has nothing to do with payments, and everything to do with you killing two men.” His breath is quick and uneven; his cheeks are flushed.
He looks, Richard thinks, alive. And then he thinks, oh. It makes a strange kind of sense. He can’t look away from Alec’s face.
He stares into Alec’s eyes, until long thin fingers manage the lacing and buttons of Richard’s trousers, and Alec’s lashes flutter down over his cheeks as he bends his head. His hand curls around the base of Richard’s sex first, strangely careful and in a way that touch, long fingers not at all callused from the weight of a sword, but chapped in a different way, from pen and from cold, and soft beneath, feels terribly intimate, in a different, rarer way than the heat and wet that is Alec’s mouth on him a moment later, the roughness of chapped lips a counterpoint to the soft warmth as he moves downward. Richard keeps back a gasp by biting the inside of his cheek. It has been a very long time since he has given or received this sort of pleasure; he hasn’t sought out a lover for what feels, quite suddenly, at the touch of that hot, willing mouth, like ages. And this particular pleasure is a rare one for him. It has always left him feeling too vulnerable to truly enjoy it, but now, somehow, he does not. Perhaps because Alec so clearly knows nothing of fighting, though it’s not as if that makes any sense, you can still kill without fighting, and hurt, too . . . .
His thoughts trail off into sparks and bright lights behind his eyes, and one hand falls to clench in the thick, luxuriant tangle of Alec’s hair, tangling itself up with it. Alec leaves his other hand on Richard’s thigh, but it isn’t placid or relaxed; instead, his fingers are tight and clutching, almost digging into Richard’s skin through the thick cloth of his breeches, though not with enough force to sting or bruise. Both daring and bitter, the foolish generosity of lending his mouth, and the sharpness in the clutch of his fingers. Something in Richard resonates with that like a plucked harpstring, and he shifts his hand in that silky tumble of hair to cup the back of Alec’s head.
Whatever Alec was expecting from him, it wasn’t that. He loses his rhythm and then is looking up, his eyes huge and wide, wild, in his face. Backlit with the fire behind him, they look very, very dark, his lashes, too. He pulls his mouth off, releasing Richard’s cock with a wet noise, and licks his lips with a quick pass of his tongue. He does not ask what Richard thinks he’s doing, but the question is all over his face, burning on those swollen lips, though when he gets round to it the question will probably be much more roundabout, much more biting and clever, than that. Richard half wants to know what he’ll say, but he already knows that the way Alec tends to say things takes a long while to get around the point, and he finds himself impatient.
“Let’s not do it like that,” Richard says, to head off that inevitable question, and is surprised himself at how even his voice sounds, considering, even if low, husky. And at the deepening of the wild look in Alec’s eyes, the quick way he draws in his breath, he continues, “It’s not fair, for a first time.” And heaven, what is he saying—how does he even know there will be another, and it is always dangerous to presume, especially with someone like Alec, someone so different from him—
At the flush that warms Alec’s features, Richard decides he doesn’t care. He reaches down and modifies an old duelist's trick to easily hoist Alec upward, pull him onto the chaise with him. Alec comes, not unwillingly, eyes still wide and his body tense, poised as if to flee. “There aren't many men who’d refuse a gift like that one,” Alec says with a laugh, “you’re a strange man, Richard—I mean, St. Vier—may I call you Richard? I think we’ve got past the surnames stage by now, but you mightn’t agree—maybe you only do this sort of thing with surnames, after all, and who am I to judge a man for standards?” he says lightly, even as Richard shoves the shabby student’s robe off his shoulders, follows it with his jacket, and starts in on the buttons of his shirt. Alec’s body feels even slenderer, more finely drawn, than he had expected, beneath his hands, Alec’s bones fine and sharp and elegant under his searching fingers, but his shirt is even shabbier than his robe, threadbare and worn. He needs a new one, Richard finds himself thinking as he slides his hands under it to skim them up over Alec’s shoulders and down his arms, pushing already undone cuffs off over slim wrists. Thinking that the fight this past week means that Richard has more than enough money to buy one for him is dangerous.
Richard leans forward and silences Alec’s mouth with a kiss, even as it moves to form more words that are instead lost in a quick, startled indrawn breath of air. Wide and mobile, those generous lips part for him, and Alec tilts his head backward, his mouth surprisingly soft, open and warmly eager and still tasting faintly of Richard’s own musk. Richard moves forward, leaning into the kiss, and Alec leans, more clumsily, backward to accommodate him, his head falling against the hard back of the chaise lounge. His hair is coming undone and tangling everywhere; Richard smoothes it back from his fine high cheekbones with callused thumbs and catches Alec’s breaths on his tongue, sliding his palm beneath Alec’s head to soften the impact of the hard surface.
Alec is liquid and pliant in his arms, but there is a slight touch of a shudder, an edge of tautness, to him, that makes Richard think of wildness, perhaps of a stray cat accepting the caress of a stranger. The analogy unnerves him, partly because he knows it is not entirely apt, that there is something here, in this young man, that he has yet to comprehend and perhaps never will entirely. Instead he chooses not to think about it, he chooses to stroke Alec’s hair back from his face again, kissing that clever mouth deeply. Alec is kissing back, and his mouth is clever, its warm softness changed now into fervid enthusiasm. He kisses as if he is pouring his life’s blood into it, sharply and eagerly exploring Richard’s mouth, but his hands quiver as they reach up to sink into Richard’s hair. Richard opens his eyes and sees that Alec’s eyes are closed, his lashes fluttering over his cheeks. Richard can see the blue veins in the pale eyelids even as he softly, slowly kisses Alec’s mouth. He has a hand free, and he uses it to trace down the line of Alec’s body, revealed now to his gaze and explorations. He skims it over chest and stomach and tugs at the placket of Alec’s trousers.
Alec’s whole body dissolves into a shudder, and he wrenches his mouth away, his breathing hitching into a long string of gasping breaths. Richard becomes abruptly aware that he himself is still nearly fully clothed, and that Alec is staring up at him with dilated eyes like someone looking death in the face—a familiar look to Richard, but not one he has ever wished to see on the face of a lover. Neither his state of dress nor the look on Alec’s face strikes him as acceptable, and Richard wonders if dealing with one might help the other. He begins to work on his own clothing, jacket and shirt.
Alec shivers, suddenly, and sits up, pushing his heavy hair back off his face with both hands. “It’s terrifically cold in here,” he says. “I daresay I’ll catch a chill and be carried off with the next round of them. Chills, I mean, unless you’ve something else around this place to do the carrying off for you. Is it always this cold?” His long arms wrap around himself, tightly, clutching at his own body, and his nails dig in, scoring long red gashes as he rubs at his own arms. He doesn’t seem to notice that he is leaving scratching welts.
“Nearly always,” Richard grunts. His mouth is dry with desire and something else, perhaps it is worry, but it feels so unfamiliar, so unnerving, that he can’t be certain. He wants to reach forward and take hold of Alec’s wrists, hold them still, but he can’t be sure of how Alec will react. He feels as if he is in a fight, but unlike his real fights he feels fear, feels that he might slip at any moment and leave himself open. “It will get worse, come winter.” He doesn’t even feel the cold, but Alec is shivering with it. Richard can see the fine tremors in ripples down the muscles of Alec’s back, the prickling gooseflesh over the pale skin.
Alec’s sudden smile is startling, stunning. “Lovely,” he said, “I love having things to look forward to. Do you think I might freeze?”
“I haven’t frozen yet,” Richard says. He wants to reach out and press a hand to that slim, gloriously pale bare back. He desperately wants catch those hands that are still leaving marks and hold them still, but instead he finishes shrugging out of his shirt. He begins to unbuckle his sword.
“No,” Alec says suddenly, turning back round to him with that fire burning in his eyes once more, “keep it on a bit longer.”
Richard looks down at himself, at the opened placket of his trousers and the arousal straining up out of them, and feels his mouth quirk crookedly. “I’ll look ridiculous,” he says with a combination of amusement and exasperation.
“You’ll look like every swordsman in a bad romance,” Alec responds, his mouth softening and quirking in an even more careless, lopsided grin, desire sparking in his eyes again, and that is good, very good. Good enough that Richard forgives him, rather than taking offense, when he continues on to say, in the tone of one quoting great literature, “He thrust his sword into her warm flesh, impaling her upon the point of his steely desire for her glorious—”
“Don’t finish that,” Richard says, laughing helplessly. He reaches forward for Alec again, just as helpless, and not wanting to make the wrong move yet again—it is like some kind of dream in which he is fighting but cannot read his opponent at all, can never predict what his next movement might be; he used to get them when he was new, first starting to gain popularity on the Hill, anxiety dreams. “Besides, you haven’t got her glorious whatsit.” He runs his hand down Alec’s side, a little shiver following after the path of his hand, and presses the heel of his palm into the hardness in the front of Alec’s trousers.
“Not so far as I know,” Alec says, gasping, his eyes sparkling with his breathy laugh as his head falls back again, exposing the slim column of his throat, “but I may or may not have a glorious something else, if you’d care to find out.” His carelessly bright smile makes the invitation even more inviting.
Richard kisses the arch of his throat, the pulse hammering wildly along one side of it. “Do they really write that shite about us?” he mumbles against Alec’s skin, pressing his hand closer against that straining warmth beneath the rough cloth of Alec’s breeches, and he feels more than sees the quicksilver smile flash above his head, even as Alec arches and moans. “Swordsmen, I mean.”
“All that and worse, I assure you,” Alec drawls, “I could recite some for you, if you like.”
“Please,” Richard says, “don’t.” He kisses that mouth again.
A moment later Alec says, languid, “You won’t always be able to shut me up with kisses, you know.”
“No?” Richard says. “Good. I’d hate to have to stop.” He means it, he realizes with something rather like shock—both that he’d hate to have to stop kissing Alec, and that he would stop kissing Alec to be able to listen to Alec talk. He doesn’t think about it; instead he dips his head to kiss the corner of Alec’s mouth, trailing one hand down the center of Alec’s chest, more carefully this time. This time, Alec’s back arches pleasurably, and Richard feels a thrill of success.
“So would I,” Alec says, after a moment, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He reaches down to close his hand around Richard’s cock again, leaning up to press them closely together. Richard sighs, and his head drops to Alec’s shoulder as Alec curls his fingers and drags up. Richard’s hands tangle in Alec’s hair again, and he turns his head to kiss the angular line of Alec’s jaw, the slim contour of his neck. He trails his kisses up and over the shell of Alec’s ear, flicking his tongue against the lobe of it, even as Alec’s hand on him makes his body shudder and clench, pleasure flowing through him with liquid heat. He begins to undo the placket of Alec’s trousers, and this time the other man remains pliant and relaxed, moving his hips into the touch of Richard’s hand, so he must have got it right. Richard feels a surprising amount of relief, even a kind of triumph, at that, and goes back to kissing, teasing his lips along Alec’s ear. Alec laughs, his voice almost all breath, at that, laughs again as Richard flicks his tongue against the whorl of it, and that makes Richard feel warm, warm, not quite lightheaded, desire rising up in him, going to his head a bit like wine, but a wine that sharpens his every movement and perception rather than the reverse. Alec’s other hand trails down his back, and he gasps.
“Don’t you think we should move this into the bedroom?” he asks. “I do have one, you know.” It is a bit of a joke, because Alec seems to like joking, but Alec’s breath stops suddenly, strangling in his throat, and Richard knows at once that again he has stumbled, again he has somehow said the wrong thing. Alec’s fingers still, and then slip away. He lies gasping beneath Richard, turning his head away, toward the fire, his jaw a mute, working line. Richard stops, lifts his hands and mouth away, not wanting to make another wrong move. In a strange, nearly dizzying reversal of focus, it’s not a blow to himself he fears, but somehow slipping and hurting his partner in this dance that is not truly a dance or a fight.
Alec swallows, his breath coming light and quick. His eyes are very wide, his body trembling, but his voice, when it comes, is light, breathy, almost teasing. “You still haven’t told me what I should call you,” he says. “Do you only take surnames to your bed? For I haven’t given you mine. What shall I call you? St. Vier does have a formal ring to it, doesn’t it? Very dramatic, like that swordsman in the romance.”
“Richard,” he says with conviction, and chooses not to explore his own firmness on that point. He reaches out to touch that rich fall of leaf-brown hair. “And you’re Alec.”
“But it isn’t as if I gave you another name,” Alec says. The mobile mouth quivers a bit, Richard can see it, and then he is moving up, in a quick, half-clumsy surge of motion, and Richard rocks back on his heels to let him. In a moment Alec is up off the chaise lounge, nervous tension in every line of his body. “And here you are, bedding me, or about to, and you haven’t the faintest idea who I might be. Do all swordsmen choose their bed-partners this way, or is it only you who possesses this taste for the mysterious?” He sounds suddenly hostile, even angry.
“I know you’re not from Riverside,” Richard replies, easily. “I watched you provoke two men into a fight today. I know that you seem willing enough to go to that bed with me, or was I imagining that just now?”
Alec looks back at him, smiling, and raises his eyebrows. He chuckles a bit, dryly, indicating his half-naked form and kiss-stung, swollen lips with a wave of his hand that is oddly elegant, even as he catches his breeches with the other as they begin to slide down over his hips. “Not entirely, no,” he says, but then he shudders, and swings to face the fire. The light limns his arms and shoulders and the fall of his hair in gold, and Richard’s mouth goes dry again. “But you don’t know me at all, don’t you realize?”
“Yes,” Richard says, and surprises himself with it. “I realize. But I don’t mind mysteries. Besides, I’m curious.”
Alec turns his head abruptly, to look back at him over his shoulder, and he is still shuddering a bit. His eyes are very wide. “You’ll have to let me know how it ends,” he says. “The mystery.”
“I’m not much interested in that bit right now,” Richard says. He isn’t skilled at twisting words round themselves, as Alec so clearly is, but he can follow the metaphor that far. He stands up, tugging up his breeches as he does, if only because he’s still got his sword-belt on, and he refuses to stand up in nothing but his belt and sword; it’s simply ridiculous. “So,” he says, “bedroom?”
Alec looks at him for a moment, eyes dark and large in his face, as difficult to read as the water that crashes by under the Bridge. He blinks, and Richard can see the flutter of eyelashes over his high, fine cheekbones, and he has to swallow, because all at once Alec is something rare and the fact that he is here, in Richard’s rooms, half-dressed, is in itself wonderful, like a romance, not like something that could actually happen, and it seems precarious enough to be a tale, a dream, something insubstantial that will float, fly away, out of Richard’s grasp.
Then Alec says, breathes, “Yes,” and then, in a normal voice, like discussing a purchase at market, “Yes, all right,” and he steps forward and into Richard’s arms, and his mouth is on Richard’s, his hands buried deep in his hair, which is nowhere near as distracting as Alec’s, Richard is sure, but Alec doesn’t seem to mind, and Richard manages to back them into the bedroom—it’s easy enough, for a swordsman, even that swordsman weren’t St. Vier, and then they’re sinking down onto the bed together, and Alec’s trousers are slipping down his hips as Richard twists so that they both land on their sides.
Richard skims his hands, his fingers down over Alec’s sides, feeling slim lines and the curves of ribs under them, trying to remember where Alec gasps and arches and where he stiffens at Richard’s touch, though he isn’t entirely sure, or ready to admit, why it would matter. Alec’s fingers dig into his shoulders, and then Alec fastens his hands round Richard’s wrists, and with any other man, Richard would have fought that hold, but Alec is different, and there is little strength in his wrists, anyway, compared to Richard’s, so what has he to fear? But Alec’s strength is surprising, as he grips Richard’s wrists to him, tightly, as if afraid that Richard will disappear if he lets go. Richard wants to say something, to reassure him, but it seems impossible, in that moment, to speak.
Alec’s fingers are searching, mapping out Richard’s pulse, and his thumb rubs softly over the old, roughened gash of the scar in Richard’s wrist. “How did you get this?” he asks, his voice as soft as the movement of his fingers.
“It was in the past,” Richard manages to respond, finding his voice, somewhere deep within himself.
“You won’t tell me?” Alec asks, his voice smiling and his body tense, coiled, as if to give the lie to that smiling, even tone. “I suppose . . . a swordsman must have his secrets . . . “
“Not that,” Richard breathes, and even to his own ears his voice sounds uneven, rasping. “It was just . . . a while ago, that’s all. The past is the past. Right?”
Alec gives a deep, ragged breath. “Is it?” he says, and there is a touch of desperation in that even voice now, barely audible, Richard thinks, but there. “That’s good to know, that’s very good . . . .”
“It is right now, at least,” Richard says firmly, and shifts himself up to lean over Alec and kiss him, bracing his hands against the mattress and coverlet on either side of Alec’s head. Alec lets him move without demur, but his hands follow Richard’s wrists, allowing Richard’s movement to pull his arms up over his head, splaying them on either side of his body. His breath quickens and his body tenses even as he lifts his head for the kiss. Richard turns his head to soften the way their lips press together, easing into the warm, ardent welcome of Alec’s mouth with his tongue. They can’t kiss forever, but in that moment Richard feels as if he might like to, even if there is the rest of it to consider. It isn’t even that Alec is remarkably good at kissing, though he is, quite good. It’s simply that the kiss is one that Richard has enjoyed more than he’s enjoyed any kiss in his life so far, except, of course, the kisses earlier. And Richard has no marked preference for kissing over the rest of it. He knows, then, like the certainty in the fatal moment of a fight, thrumming through his bones and down into his gut, that he wants Alec to stay.
He sets about convincing him to, moving to hold Alec’s face in his hands and brush kisses along the curve of his cheekbone, down the line of his jaw, over his ear to his neck, and Alec moans, a soft, pleased sound thick in his throat, and tilts his head back, holding Richard’s head to his throat, his fingers slipping, carding through Richard’s hair. His breath is coming light and fast, and Richard feels his own heart thundering in his ears as he mouths over Alec’s pulse. His other hand travels down Alec’s body, brushing and seeking over the lines of bone and what flesh Alec has to soften them, until Alec twists beneath him, gasping with pleasure, and Richard at last takes his shaft into his hand. He curls his hand and slides it up and down once, twice, purposeful, and Alec’s breath sounds broken with his pleasure, his body shudders and lifts up off the bed.
“So,” Richard murmurs into Alec’s ear, not in an attempt to be seductive so much as his voice is a low, uncertain thing and he doesn’t trust it above a whisper, “how do you want it?”
“I’m supposed . . . to be the one seducing you,” Alec breathes up at him. “Shouldn’t I be asking that question?” His eyes blink, liquid and sparkling in the half-dark, like stars.
“Then ask,” Richard returns, his voice still low, a rasping whisper, still moving his hand in a way that drags twitches and gasps out of Alec that make Richard’s heart pound.
“Oh, I am,” Alec drawls, soft and seductive, even as he shivers under Richard’s touch. “Oh—ah, I . . . ah,” he adds, his head pressing back into the bedclothes. “St. Vier—Richard, I—” His fingers clutch at Richard’s shoulders, travel quickly down his arms, then are at his sides, over his back, his buttocks, his flanks, tangling in the sword belt, trailing worshipfully along the sword. “You can take that off now, I suppose,” he says, and Richard huffs out a laugh at that and waists no time at unbuckling it, laying his sword across the chest by the bed, careful as he always is to leave it within reach of the bed. Alec’s eyes flick to it, and he smiles.
“If someone came in,” he said, “in the night, a burglar, perhaps, or anyone, really, would you kill them?”
“Of course,” Richard said. It was a simple fact. “My reputation.” He shifts out of his trousers, allows them to pool on the floor. They aren’t even good ones, after all. He doesn’t add that his being burgled is the next thing to impossible. There are advantages to living in Riverside.
“I see,” Alec’s words are breathed, felt, his chest rising and falling rapidly against Richard’s. “Is my life in danger, then?”
“Not yours,” Richard told him, and means it. “Not while you’re with me.”
Alec moves quickly at that, as if startled. “You sound as if you mean it,” he says, his voice far-away sounding. He turns his head, toward Richard, and hair, loose and tousled now, falls downward, tangling in soft waves, into his eyes. He doesn’t seem to notice.
Richard brushes it back, allows his fingers to luxuriate in the feeling of it. “I do,” he says, shortly.
There is a moment of silence between them, and then Alec catches his breath, moves fitfully. A slight flush darkens the pallor of his cheeks in the shadows. “So,” he says, quick, his hands skimming up over Richard’s chest, “what will it be? Will you thrust your sword into my warm flesh, even if it’s not so glorious as all that?”
“Not unless you want me to,” Richard says. “I wasn’t . . . exactly prepared to have company in my bed tonight.”
“I . . . see,” Alec laughs. His fingers are clever, stealing Richard’s breath. “Worried about hurting me, I take it? Gentlemanly of you.”
To his surprise, Richard feels the warmth of a blush in his own cheeks. “I’m no gentleman,” he says.
“Applying the term most accurately requires creativity,” Alec says absently. “But you’re right. You’re no gentleman.” It should be an insult, but coming from Alec’s lips it is somehow a compliment, a fervent one, suffused with sudden desire, and more than that, a kind of longing. He lies back on the bed, shifting, and spreads his legs, pale in the moonlight and shadows, his trousers long lost off the side of the bed. It’s an offer, more so as he draws his leg up toward his chest, and Richard catches that leg in one hand, pressing a kiss to the knee. Alec’s breath shudders and catches in his throat.
“I think I’d like to keep it simple,” Richard says, trailing his lips up the skin of Alec’s thigh, concentrating on his trembling beneath Richard’s lips, the thick, musky scent of his desire.
“Simple?” Alec’s voice asks lightly. “St. Vier, is this sort of thing ever simple?”
“Richard,” he insists. “It’s Richard.”
“Richard,” Alec breathes, and then they have shifted positions again, Alec seizing Richard’s arms and dragging him upward, and he could not really drag Richard anywhere, but Richard goes willingly, and they are kissing, as Richard presses their hips together, wraps his hand around the both of them and closes it, twists. It is simple—they are slick, both of them, already, and his hand fits easily around them. He shifts, pressing his hips down against Alec as he kisses him, pressing them closer together, careful not to lean all his weight on him, to give him a way out from under him, if he wants it. Alec’s hair is soft beneath his fingers, and his body arches and shudders beneath his hand. Heat brands Richard through the hand he strokes them with, hot and vivid. He pulls away from Alec’s mouth, lets his lips follow the line of his jaw again, to press against his pulse, lets his other hand wander, following the line of Alec’s body. Alec’s hands skim lightly, quickly, over him, up his arms to his shoulders as if he isn’t certain what to do with them, clutching there as Alec twines them ever closer together. They move together, Richard’s hand a steady, even pace even as Alec gasps and clutches him and kisses him eagerly, as if to quicken Richard’s pace with his mouth. Richard continues slow, for they have the time, and he wants to remember this, Alec’s warmth and eagerness and the taste of his breath as it quickens and dissolves into gasps, as Richard himself loses control of his breathing.
And then Alec is arching against him, crying out in ecstasy, his fingers digging into Richard’s shoulders, and heat is scalding Richard’s palm. He strokes Alec through his climax and then stills and just watches, watches Alec shudder and gasp for air. And then he too goes still, and his muscles slowly relax for the first time, really, since he’s met him, and then it’s one, two, and then three quick, hard strokes on himself and he’s coming, too, bent over Alec, shuddering through his own climax.
Alec’s arms come up and curl around him, pulling him downward, cradling him close, against his body. He says nothing, just breathes, and there is silence, except for Richard’s heart thudding in his chest. Alec’s body feels fine and fragile beneath Richard, and warm in his arms, covered with a light, slick sheen of sweet. Neither of them moves, for a moment, and then Alec breathes out, a long slow exhale.
“All right,” he says. “Simple.” He laughs, ragged and light. “Is it like that with just any swordsman?”
Richard smiles and touches his cheek with the palm of his hand, the one not wet and stained with come. “No,” he says, and then the words escape him, slipping out of his mouth before he can stay them, reckless, “Be here when I get up.”
Alec laughs. “Oh, I’ll be about,” he replies. His eyes seem to shine in the moonlight.
Richard dips his head, brushes their lips together, and Alec catches his breath, his lips parted, beneath the touch, as if he’d stilled in mid-movement, as if to breathe him in. “Do that,” Richard says. “I’ll pick up some extra food for you in the morning, and you can keep your things here.”
“Things?” Alec says. “How very generous of you. It’s a few books. Three, actually. And not too terribly much else.”
“Then they won’t take up space,” Richard says with a smile. It’s good, because he doesn’t have much space to fill. He sits up to look for a rag he could use to clean them up. He finds one without much hunting, and Alec smiles as he begins to skim it over his chest.
“I never thought the Riverside life would be so positively domestic,” he says in his soft, silver drawl.
“We live, same as other people,” Richard says, almost saying “same as University students” before he reconsiders, catching himself, “or close enough.” He runs the rag over himself, finishes with it, and tosses it toward the window. He’ll clean up in the morning.
“Do you think so?” Alec says in that soft, absently wondering tone that makes Richard wonder, about him, and perhaps worry, just a little.
“I think we should get to sleep,” Richard says. “I’ll be irritable tomorrow, otherwise.”
“Oh, all right,” Alec says. “Come here, then,” and though his voice sounds confident, when Richard obeys, surprised, and lays his head on his shoulder, Alec’s body is tense and trembling, uncertain from head to toe.
Richard takes a deep breath and pulls the blankets up around them, sliding his arm around Alec as he does, breathing in the scent of him, mingled with sweat and the scent of sex. Alec takes a deep breath, himself, turns his face to rest it in Richard’s hair, and then he is asleep, all at once, his long-boned body slumping lax and relaxed.
Richard smiles, and stops wondering about him, for a bit, because if nothing else, there he is. He’ll buy him that new shirt, he thinks, while he can still afford it. If Alec will let him. Even if he won’t, maybe.
And then he is asleep himself, surprisingly easily, considering there’s someone else there in his bed beside him.