Fic: For Now
The next time he opened his eyes, the sun had set again, and the room was illuminated by a single candle burning at the head of his bed. “How funerary,” he thought, as he tried to focus his eyes. He felt a hand press tightly around his fingers. A soft hand. But a man’s hand. “Am I dead?” he asked.
“Not yet,” a familiar voice replied, “which is not to say I, personally, am not going to kill you for allowing this to happen to yourself.”
“You came back,” Athos whispered with a smile, not certain that he was truly awake, or if it was all just a continuation of a pleasant dream he’d commenced before.
“I told you I would,” Aramis simply confirmed.
“I feel like I was run through with a sword,” Athos muttered.
“Very funny,” Aramis said coolly and while narrowing his eyes in such a fashion that his friend could understand he thought the matter anything but as funny as he claimed. However, the pressure on his hand tightened, and Athos felt the glow of a reassurance that this was probably not a dream. “What am I going to do with you?” Aramis asked in the same cool voice, but with a tinge of exasperation that Athos was so fond of when it was caused by him.
“Uh…” Truth be told, there were at least a dozen things that Athos could suggest that his friend do with him, but the exhaustion had rendered his mouth incapable of cooperating with the will of his active mind. “Hmph.”
“Really?” Aramis snickered, as if he could read the convalescent man’s mind. “Don’t you think we should wait until you’re slightly more healed, as it were?”
“Ppphaw!” was the reply of Athos.
“No, truly, I hate to take advantage of an invalid,” Aramis asserted with as much of a tone of mockery that his actual concern for his friend allowed him.
“Take advantage? My dear boy, I’m older and more besmirched than you, by far!” Athos was immediately wracked by a new sharp pain at this utterance, and bit down on his lip to stop himself from crying out: a maneuver that did not go unnoticed by his friend.
“Athos, you’ll kill yourself. Please return to your usual state of reticence before you cause yourself more damage than the thrust that you already received.”
“You were speaking of thrusts?”
“Athos!”
“Truly, you find all this very shocking, do you, Aramis?”
“If you could see in the dark, I would be blushing,” Aramis snickered in response. “After all, I have been in the seminary since the age of nine.”
“I would have thought that was exactly where you had learned to cast lovelorn gazes upon drunken musketeers!” Athos would have laughed himself, but the pain was making it just barely possible for him to jest in the first place. “And yet,” he said quietly, “Here you are.”
“Here I am,” Aramis confirmed and stretched out like a luxurious cat on the bed with his arm around Athos. “For now.”
“For now?”
“It is always just for now,” Aramis whispered.
Their lips met again, softly at first, then more ravenously, as their tongues battled for dominance.
Athos had come up for air to whisper, “Let go of me, you infamous seducer!”
Aramis had stared at him like a frightened doe and his body shuddered.
“What? Don’t stop!” Athos had wrapped his fingers through his friend’s hair and pulled him closer again.
“But you said…”
“Don’t ever listen to me: I am a roaring idiot!”
“I’m going to punish you for that!” Aramis said and brought his mouth back down over the partially incapacitated man below him. “I’m really going to hurt you!”
Athos found himself wrapping his legs around his friend’s torso, as much by sheer instinct as by necessity, as one of his arms was still lying uncooperatively in a sling on his chest. He bucked entirely wantonly at the contact and convinced himself that he was definitely going to Hell for this because he was leading an angel astray. A real angel this time, not the demon from his past… And yet, Aramis was doing things with his hands that were far from what Athos would expect from an angel. He felt the breath of Aramis on his neck, the heat and moisture from it making him moan with pleasure and throw his head back until it hit the headboard with a loud thump.
“Get control of yourself, man!” Aramis whispered hotly. “You’ll wake your servant!”
“God in Heaven, Aramis!” was all Athos could muster in return, just as his friend’s hand had found what it was looking for and gently squeezed. It occurred to him that if he were to die, it would be in the heat of battle after all. The hand stroked him with superb finesse and the pair of eyes that he found in the darkness glowed and smoldered with an insolent fire.
“Don’t blaspheme, my love,” Aramis said calmly, not slackening his assault.
“Jesus!”
“I said, shut it!”
Athos banged his head against the headboard again, and, to keep himself from crying out in ecstasy, he bit down on the same pillow that earlier in the day he was biting on in agony.
Finally, the waves of pleasure had subsided, and the hand that was bringing him to the brink of Paradise had loosened its hold. Athos was still aware of the pain shooting through his chest, but it all seemed very distant now. There was a beautiful head of wildly spilling, wavy black hair, resting peacefully on his chest, as if listening to the sound of his heart beat returning back to normal.
“I’m afraid that’s all you get for now,” Aramis whispered, as he was drifting off to sleep.
“For now,” Athos repeated and breathed in the scent of his lover, as he too closed his eyes. Tomorrow there would be time for more talking. And, perhaps, more battling.