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Hal sits in his den in the dead of night and contemplates symmetry—or something like it. How the blocking of actors must be perfect to convey the tension of a scene. How the players and the crowd must both participate for theatre to truly sing…
… how Azune sits across from him by the fire, leaning against the left wing of his chair as Hal leans to the right, their drinks both long finished on the table between.
Hal knows they’ve been talking for hours, but the words are already thinning in his mind, reduced to texture rather than text: Murray’s latest crusade against common sense in the face of authority, concerning changes in Azune’s patrol routes, the meaning of all that fucking paint…
He has no idea how long it has been since the conversation lulled, because Azune is still speaking to him, in a sense: those eyes communing silently beneath heavy lids. Even his pupils sit like tiny suns, balanced on the seam of dusk and dawn—action and resignation.
When he’d arrived, he’d paused at the threshold with his face bathed in lanternlight and the night pooling behind him, and for a moment Hal had the absurd thought that if he did nothing, Azune might simply remain there forever: curling like a question mark in the doorframe.
“From Murray,” he’d said then, breath fogging faintly in the cold, offering a folded message like a talisman.
Hal couldn’t feel the warmth of his fingers through his gloves, but their pressure was precise: easy enough to remember or forget.
“Can I offer you a drink?”
Azune’s smile was small and wry. “Still trying to get rid of that Yahrgraz?”
“No. I buried it with him…” The confession hung briefly heavy, before Hal pushed onward: “But I can offer wine, brandy—or tea if you’d prefer something hot…”
Azune hesitated again—long enough that another gust of winter air whipped up his cloak and braid as it tried to wrestle its way past him.
“And if I said tea with brandy?” he asked, finally, like it was an imposition.
“Far be it from me to make you choose,” Hal replied. “Just, please get in here, and close the door behind you.”
From that moment onward, Hal had been feeling like a man trying to lure a magpie down from the rafters, offering hospitality in carefully measured crumbs and baubles to keep Azune from bolting back out the door. Come pick out your favorite tea; just take off your boots first. Have you eaten tonight? Stay awhile and I’ll make you a plate. Speaking of plate, you’ll be more comfortable if you leave your armor by your boots…
You’re safe here. Let me take care of you.
It wasn’t as though Azune was shy by any means, or even that he truly wished to leave. No, it was a subtler thing than that: a hyperawareness of his presence in physical space, or a lingering uncertainty about his purpose in any given moment. Hal had seen his affect before, in young actors waiting in the wings for a director to cast them into character. This is a man half onstage and half off, he thinks.
But Hal isn’t in the director’s chair tonight. He’s lazing in his favorite wingback, blood and belly warm with hot toddy and an extra pour of brandy—and something that licks lower and lovelier as Azune continues to hold his gaze…
“On the stage,” Hal says, finally breaking the silence, “—you learn to telegraph your every move, so even the folks in the back can follow along. And for better or worse, it’s a habit that follows me home, so I’m not going to be subtle:
“Do you want to come to bed with me?” He asks. “We can fuck, or mess around a little, or just sleep, if you’d like. And if you say no, absolutely nothing changes. But this house was made for people—plural—and I hate being here alone.”
For all that his eyes were practically undressing Hal a moment ago, the reality of the proposition seems to catch Azune off guard.
“… I’d have thought you would ask Bolaire.”
“I do ask him, sometimes,” Hal admits. “But he’s not here tonight. And honestly, physical affection isn’t really his domain.”
The corner of Azune’s mouth lifts, just faintly. “What makes you think it’s mine?”
Hal lifts an eyebrow to match him. “I’ve seen you with Murray—and the others, for that matter: Teor, Kattigan. You held Bolaire not five minutes after he told us what he was.”
Azune’s voice drops low enough that it barely carries over the smolder of the fire.
“So, you watch me touch other people and wish it were you…?”
And oh—that’s bolder than Hal had been expecting—a full step over whatever line they’ve been holding. He leans back in his chair and tilts his head to the side, basking in the slow kindling of his desire.
“… if I said yes?” he asks. “What then?”
A log collapses in the hearth. The firelight sketches Azune in liquid gold as he rises from his chair.
He slowly rounds the coffee table, intention in every step that lifts the hair on the back of Hal’s neck and stalls his breath. Earlier, he had watched Azune bounce his knee, restless as a bird in the Rookery—
Now he plants it firmly into the seat cushion beside Hal’s thigh as their mouths collide.
Hal hums in approval as Azune sinks into his lap, his weight alone soothing a primal, needy thing in Hal that never quite shuts up. The tea Azune chose was bold and dark, the brandy thick with spiced plum, and Hal feels the heat of him spill through his chest like a third drink.
“What if I said it goes both ways?” Azune whispers as they breathe together, and Hal fumbles through his lust-muddled mind for some memory of their conversation—for some memory of how words work.
Fortunately, Azune keeps talking: “I watch the way you touch Bolaire—and I wish it were me.”
And, well, that gives Hal pause.
“… how do I touch Bolaire?” he asks, genuinely curious.
“Like he’s no different from anyone else. Like you’re comfortable with him, regardless of his body. Regardless of—of which one he chooses…”
“… and,” Hal frowns and reaches gently for Azune’s face, trying to parse by touch the expression that shadows hide from sight. “—you wish that were you?”
When Azune’s eyes press shut it’s like watching stars wink out in the sky. He turns his cheek and nuzzles briefly into Hal’s palm, breathing slow and deep…
“… fuck.”
Hal feels more than hears the curse skitter across the thin skin of his wrist, before Azune grimaces and reaches for the hem of his shirt.
Hal’s brain briefly empties of coherent thought again as he’s gifted a breathtaking view of bare skin—the deep, bronzy musculature of a soldier’s abdomen and arms on firelit display as he drags his shirt over his head and drops it to the floor. Hal feels his cock rousing at the prospect of learning every inch of Azune’s body before the night is through, first with his fingers, then again with his mouth…
And Dead Gods, he wants to start with that tattoo…
A falcon spans the breadth of Azune’s chest in earthy ink, body sitting low upon his sternum as its wings ride the curve of his lower ribs. Citrine and sapphire and ruby span remige to rectrice like a chandelier, and the detail is astonishing—every feather stippled to the very brink of molting off his skin.
Hal reaches to touch without thinking, almost expecting downy softness, or for his fingers to tangle in the chains. He finds only hot skin, a stomach that shivers beneath his scrutiny—
—and then he feels them: some of the feathers are not feathers at all.
Bronze scales scatter across Azune’s body in a mottled patchwork, hidden almost entirely by the ink and the dim light of the room. But now that Hal knows that they’re there, it’s impossible to miss the way they reflect the firelight just a little more brightly than skin…
Azune is holding himself deathly still, breath stalled in his lungs as Hal’s fingers continue to creep up his torso. And Hal, intimately acquainted with suspense from a lifetime of building and breaking it, can sense the difference between a man awaiting a verdict and a man still holding a confession.
He glances up to meet Azune’s eyes just as his thumbs meet the twin scars arcing just beneath his pecs, hidden by layers and layers of careful linework.
Azune swallows tightly, jaw jumping, and Hal thinks about symmetry again, and then, unbidden, about the tear tracks that carve through Bolaire’s cheeks: a testament to how he was made, heedless of anything he might wish to become…
“You’re magnificent…” Hal sees no reason to tell him anything but the truth. He slides his hands down to Azune’s waist and nuzzles into the falcon, feeling the heart just beneath that pounds with a lifetime of fight or flight—perhaps quite literally.
And Hal is a simple man at the end of the day; he writes little stories for a stage. Azune is a story, tumbled into his arms in the midst of its telling, and Hal is suddenly desperate to know how it goes. He has so many questions—how could he not?
But only one of them truly matters.
He kisses his way back to Azune’s mouth. Pulls him a little closer by the hips. Searches his eyes as he speaks:
“Will you tell me, if there are ways you’d rather I not touch you?”
Azune remembers to breathe so abruptly that he almost chokes, his muscles shuddering through the release of seemingly endless tension. And though Hal had coaxed him into his home hours ago, he understands—as Azune all but melts into him—that he hadn’t really crossed the threshold until just now.