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—-
In all his dreams and wishes, Legolas did not imagine it happening the way it has been happening: with his head thrown back and the moon filtering through the pines in pale, slanted beams of light. With his thighs spread wide enough to bracket the breadth of Gimli’s shoulders, which are ever-rough and cold with the armor he does not take off. Sunken deep in slick, molten heat until time loses meaning and birds begin to sing as the sun begins her steady lift over the horizon. With the taste of his own skin on his tongue, because every time he reaches down to blindly thread fingers through Gimli’s hair, his hands are slapped back up to his own face. “Put them in your mouth,” Gimli murmurs thickly, voice a wet, drunk thing in the night. “So the others do not hear you.”
That is how it starts, and how it ends. Three nights in a row, now, since they arrived and have been staying in tents scattered amid roots of the vast towering trees upon which Lothlorien is built. They converge in the darkness, and Legolas lies on his back and writhes and tries his very hardest to stay silent even though it feels as if the universe is falling down around him in stars, in fragments, in bits of shattered ice. The sun eventually rises and he eventually finishes in bliss-tattered ribbons down Gimli’s throat, and then they lie there in silence until, eventually, Gimli sleeps. Always, Legolas rolls over on his side as close as he can beside him without touching, because he is not certain Gimli wants to be touched. They have not spoken about it by daylight, and he is always too breathless and terrified to ask beneath the spill of the moon, so. He waits until Gimli’s chest rises and falls beneath its cage of hewn metal and he stares as the sweat cools on his own skin, eyes burning, throat tight.
Legolas wants to touch Gimli. He wants to do so many things. He wants to thread his fingers through the thick, coarse waves of his beard and raze his nails against the skin beneath. He wants to press his face into the ditch of his neck and inhale from him. He wants his world to smell like the bite of spice and salt and earth that carries on the wind when Gimli rides behind him, strong arms clutching tight around his waist, as if he is the one holding the reins, heels down and calves tight and eyes fixed ahead at a point they are approaching as hooves strike rhythmically on packed earth. He wants to taste him. To sink to his knees to kiss him, and then, to his stomach, to suck him.
Instead, he shudders, and stings, and waits. And perhaps he will be waiting forever, for something more. But in the meantime, he will take whatever he can get, where Gimli Son of Gloin is concerned.
—-
Legolas realizes the twist in his gut he feels concerning the thickness of dwarves’ fingers and the secrecy of their ways is intrigue rather than disgust far too late. By that time, Thorin Oakenshield and his company had already left Mirkwood in barrels once meant for wine. Tauriel had already told him, in her own way, I am willing to accept and embrace my transgressions the way you will not accept your own, and so I must bid you good luck and farewell. He was alone, when he realized the truth, as his father drew their borders ever closer, a claustrophobic tightening of the forest as if the trees were twining branches to block the sunlight out.
He does not see another dwarf for sixty years.
When he does, it hits him like a punch to the gut, for every unsettling thing is as he remembers it: the solidity, the broadness, the power. So much easy fire and effortless command for a body so small. The elaborate braids and finely hewn weapons and armor. The glittering light catching in the darkness of Gimli’s eye, like the flint one uses to strike up a fire in the blackest of forests.
Legolas, who does not appreciate being thrown into the ache of something he once ran from, resolves to hate him.
Of course, that is not what happens.
—-
He touches himself as Gimli sleeps, and allows his eyes to wander because it is better than the sting of staring.
Legolas will not get hard again once he has been wrung out so thoroughly, but he still likes to feel the way his skin is worked over and spit-sticky, the way the dusky blonde hair between his thighs is matted down and wet with saliva. He threads his tremulous fingers through the wreck of himself and sidles closer to Gimli’s sleeping form, inhaling greedily, shamefully. Taking what he can get.
Gimli smells like sex, even if he has not finished. Or, perhaps he has, there in the leather trappings of his trousers. The slickness left to thicken and to a crust, adhering ginger-brown curls to the cotton of small clothes. So many scents and spices obscured between layers.
Legolas would lick it up, were he allowed such things. He would suffocate, and drown, and give up the endless stretch of eternal youth just to fill his lungs with such pure and undiluted filth. This is what he thinks of, now, as he spits in his palm and spreads his thighs and reaches between them to spear himself open even as his cock lies soft and twitching against his stomach. He sucks in shuddering breaths inches away from Gimli’s body, gaze climbing over the stout, solid shape of him in the night, face so close to his outer bicep so that he can smell the sweat trapped there in his clothes, in the creases of his skin. Legolas fucks himself open on his fingers, knowing he won’t come again, knowing he cannot be sated by longing, and smells, and wishes, but trying his hardest anyway.
Elves rarely sleep, so once he’s raw and sore and exhausted, he withdraws his fingers, and closes his eyes as long as they stay closed before he must steal glances to prove he is not alone. Gimli’s lids flicker over the subtle motion beneath, and the dawn creeps steadily closer.
—-
It is a myth that elven rope is unbreakable. If anything is pulled taut enough, long enough, under tremendous duress and the harsh glare of the sun so that fibers wither to brittleness, it will eventually snap.
—-
It is a blistering afternoon when Legolas realizes he cannot stay silent any longer. Gimli has finally taken off his armor, perhaps to bathe in the cold silver river that runs through Lothlorien like a jugular vein. Legolas is busy imagining the still mysterious shape of his body dripping in crystalline rivulets when night falls, and he returns with Aragorn and Boromir carrying firewood, armfuls of it curled up to the broad expanse of his chest, which is, for once, exposed.
Legolas loses his breath. It dies like a mortal thing there in his throat, the rest of him thrumming along miserably as he stares. It is like sun cracking over the horizon. Like the earth splitting to swallow him up. Gimli is not wearing his armor. He is in nothing but the rucked-open, wide-necked tunic he dons beneath his armor, the pale grey of it soaked black with sweat where it bunches and gathers under his arms and beneath the heaving shelf of his pectoral muscles. Legolas can see perspiration shining on pale skin. He can see auburn curls. He can see the blue-black shapes of geometric tattoos half-obscured in damp fabric. He can see the motion of Gimli’s labored breath as he dumps and firewood into a heap and stretches, the red of his hair glinting like fall leaves.
And just like that, Legolas is no longer satisfied with his own hands in his mouth, and his cock in Gimli’s. He wants more. He needs it, like one needs air, and water, and denial to soothe the sting of immortality so that centuries upon centuries do not seem so achingly lonely.
He waits until the others disappear, and Gimli comes wandering back to him where their bed rolls lay away from the rest as he always does, because perhaps, they want the same things. Once their eyes catch, something hooks Legolas beneath the navel and pulls him as if he is attached to a string, stumbling along the forest floor through the alcoves of vine and quiet until he is sinking to his knees. “Please,” he says, making a fist in crude linen, pulling Gimli closer, dizzy with the scent of his sweat, his skin, his dirt. His mouth floods, and he must swallow it before it continues. “Why do you not allow me to touch you as you touch me?”
Gimli shoots a stunned, shifty glance over his shoulder before redistributing his weight, tentatively swaying closer. Soon, the stars will be out and that is the light he best likes Legolas bathed in. Or at least, that is what Legolas thinks. What he hopes. So, he sinks to his knees in a single fluid motion.
“I did not realize you desired that allowance,” Gimli says gruffly, before his eyes soften and he tangles his big rough hand in the loose cornsilk of Legolas’s hair, making him groan. “And Dwarves are more interested in providing pleasure than we are in taking it. We are craftsmen. It is only elves who think us greedy.”
“Gimli,” Legolas begs, turning his head to scour the softness of his mouth open on the axe- callous of Gimli’s palm, sucking at the salt and pine of it. “Nothing would provide me more pleasure than you allowing me to touch you. To sate myself with the taste of you. The feel of you. Please.” Gimli makes a fist in his hair, dark eyes flashing with something ember-warm and smoldering. Legolas’s stomach drops. He thinks of centuries of silence, and then he thinks of floods. “If you care to give me what I crave most, that is it. I would give up a lifetime for one drop of your sweat on my tongue.”
It is terribly raw and terribly true, but it rips Gimli down and that is what Legolas wants. To see him bleed and cave, as he has been caved in and bleeding. “Mahal,” he chokes out, yanking Legolas into his arms, hands covering the whole of his narrow back, crushing him into solid slick muscle. “Why didn’t you say so the first time?”
Legolas’s voice is flesh muffled when it comes out. “Because,” he says, rubbing his cheeks raw on the hair which grows in the ditch between Gimli’s pectorals, digging his fingers into his clothes before pushing up under it, the rush of the motion so maddening his vision whites out. “You made me choke on my own fingers.”
“Well then,” Gimli says, untwining braids, heart rabbiting beneath a desperate, hungry mouth. “Seems I’ll have to make you choke on mine.”
Yes, Legolas would sob, had he the air to speak. He is not allowing himself such concessions, though. He is licking over what is exposed of Gimli’s broad, muscled chest in wide swaths with the frantic and graceless abandon of an animal. He wants salt, he needs it. He must drown and every moment he can breathe is a moment that he has waited too long to admit to himself what he wants. A moment too long before he takes it. He spreads long and slender fingers over the tight, hard swell of Gimli’s gut, and gasps once he cannot take it any more.
Gimli peers down into the wet of his eyes, lips twisting into an awe-rich smile. “You’d like me to smother you, isn’t that it?” he marvels, pulling him back in as he’s gasping, rubbing Legolas’s face into his own chest. Legolas nods as much as he can given the commanding grip on the back of his skull, sucking the bite of sweat from linen, and then Gimli’s laugh rumbles through the whole of his body like an earthquake. He splays his knees, digging them into the ground beneath himself to stabilize.
“Ye elves really are filthy, base things under all that starlight, aren’t you,” he murmurs then, hand so warm and tender as it rucks beneath the collar of Legolas’s hooded cape, bringing the three-pointed leaf broach holding it together sharp and sudden against his throat. “Filthy. And so beautiful.”
Legolas sobs weakly, tugging at Gimli’s sweat-stained tunics, chest rising and falling with wild, untethered gasps. “Take this off,” he demands, gaze flashing up. “Show me true beauty.”
Gimli does as he’s told, every motion slow and deliberate. A gift to be witnessed. Cherished. Legolas sits on his heels and licks the sea from his lips, accepting this gift as he should: on his knees and trembling. However, he cannot wait until Gimli is nude, for his patience wears thin at the expanse of new and bared flesh. Brown forearms dusted in red hair, skin several shades darker than the pallor of his shoulders where his tattoos stand out in stark contrast. The thickness of hair in the ditch between his pectorals, sweat clinging to it in beads. His stomach, strong and round, hanging over the waistband of his trousers, expanding with each breath. Legolas cannot resist any of it so in seconds he’s walking in on his knees to touch in greedy palmfuls, rubbing his face into the artful braids of Gimli’s beard. “What you wanted?” Gimli asks, voice a soft thing.
“Yes,” Legolas murmurs, rubbing his face raw in longing, in hunger. “No truer beauty. Let me—I want to smell you. I want my lungs full of you and nothing else.”
Somehow they end up on their sides spread across both bedrolls, legs tangled as Legolas mauls over Gimli’s body. Licking sweat, sucking it from hair, drunk on the overwhelming power of the way he smells. It is unlike anything he’s ever experienced before. Even after days of travel without reprieve or bathing, Legolas never smells this strong, this musky, this overwhelming. It floods his mouth and he cannot get enough of the multi-layered spice. Clove and rich black soil and salt and fire. He sucks one of Gimli’s nipples into his mouth, chewing greedily until it hardens into a nub he can flick his tongue over. It’s not enough though, nothing is enough. Even with Gimli gasping and rumbling, fingers in Legolas’s hair, kneading and stroking. So, he licks his way over the swell of his chest down to his ribcage, blindly seeking until he finds what he wants.
The suffocating wave that hits him when he manhandles Gimli’s thick, muscular arm above his head makes him cry out. “Oh,” he chokes out, burying his face into the humid ditch, matting the hair down with his tongue before sucking the sweat out of it in pulses. “Gimli. Please. Let me.”
“M’letting you—ah. Let you what?” he gasps squirming under Legolas’s tongue.
There’s too much he wants to voice a single thing. Let me kiss you. Let me swallow your saliva. Let me suck you so long I fall asleep with your cock in my throat. Let me have everything you are willing to give. Fortunately, in that moment Gimli presses his broad thigh up between Legolas’s, spreading him open and rubbing against his achingly hard cock. It must be shocking enough it distracts him from his inquiry. “Mahal, Legolas, you’re—just from this. I haven’t even touched you,” he groans, voice a wreck as he tugs at pale blonde hair in fistfuls, grinding his underarm against Legolas’s face, covering his mouth and nose so that he cannot properly breathe. “Your pleasure—your desire. I have never fashioned something so lovely in my life of fashioning lovely things.”
Legolas feels moved to tears at that, light-headed and dizzy as his vision whites out just as Gimli pulls away so that he might suck in a messy breath. As promised, Gimli hooks a finger into the slick of Legolas’s mouth then, rubbing a blunt, rough finger over his tongue. “You know where I want to feel this, don’t you?” he asks, spots of color on his cheeks over the copper shine of his beard. “What I have dreamed of, even as I told myself it was madness, to wish an elf prince on his knees?”
“Please,” Legolas breathes before he sucks on his fingers, pushing a mouthful of frothy spit into Gimli’s palm like a promise. “Let me show you how our dreams touch. How they are the same.”
He pulls off, hair falling in a curtain over his shoulders in pale gold as he mouths his way down Gimli’s chest, his ribs, his sternum. His face smells like Dwarf sweat, his mouth tastes like it, and still, he wants more, heart pounding in his chest with unfettered longing like a building storm. There is a brief and agonizing moment when Gimli pushes Legolas away long enough to roll his trousers down over his hips and powerful thighs, but as soon as he kicks them off Legolas is upon him again, tracing scars and tattoos, moving thick hair against the grain.
Gimli’s cock is so thick simply looking at it makes Legolas squirm breathlessly as he imagines being stretched open, the way his eyes would water at the impossible burn. He curls both fists around the base instead, marveling at the burn, the girth. “You will fill me until there is nothing left,” he breathes, drooling onto the tip. “Nothing but the way I feel for you.”
“You sweet, stunning thing. Better than poetry, and sunlight. Than sapphire—better than gold. Give me your lips,” he demands, and so, Legolas does.
He fits his mouth around the crown, which feels as broad as an apple plucked from a tree in early spring and just as bitter-sweet. He groans, swirling his tongue before letting go with his hands in favor of swallowing the length down, choking himself on it until that apple hits the back of his throat like the whole of August. He palms up the planes of Gimli’s thighs and the firm swell of his gut as he swallows, squeezing taut hairy flesh where ever he can reach it, inhaling and exhaling harshly through his nose, every breath nothing but spice, and filth, and salt, and summer.
It’s been a long time since Legolas did this, and the last time the mouthful was much more slender, a fellow elf fresh from a shared bath. He hardly remembers it, but whatever vestiges were left clinging to his mind like cobwebs are replaced instantly with this: Gimli so thick he cannot breathe around him. The thick copper curls which scrape against his lips and nose every time he slides home. The suffocating, inescapable scent of days worth of travel, of musk and cock and dwarf and desire. Legolas’s eyes are watering, and it is not just because he’s being choked. It’s also because he is moved. Absolved. Finally swallowing the truth, after having swallowed so many lies for so very very long.
Without even realizing it Legolas is kicking out of his own trousers and rolling onto his stomach so that he might keep Gimli in his mouth and rub himself into the bedroll at the same time. The friction is not half as brilliant as the heat of Gimli’s mouth, but coupled with the sensation of sucking on him, it has Legolas dizzyingly hard, stomach tight and cock already leaking and twitching. He bobs his head and ruts in time, but it is not until he pulls off to spit in his palm and rub those slick, sticky fingers into his own crack that he feels he might finish this way, on his stomach, drowning in Gimli’s pleasure.
Gimli groans aloud as he watches Legolas touch himself. “Ah,” he gasps before cursing in Khuzdul, throwing his head back as his cock spasms between Legolas’s lips. “Beautiful. Beauty itself,” he chokes out, craning his neck back up to stare. Legolas’s fingers push past the furl of muscle inside clutching heat, and he cries out, drooling into Gimli’s pubic hair, fucking his own mouth until the combined sensations push him over the edge. Normally he would not take his own orgasm before the lover he serves, but Gimli already told him dwarves take pride in their work, in the things they can do. He knows Gimli likely prefers it this way, so he finishes against the bedroll gasping into the strong flicker of muscle stretching across his thigh, one hand curled around that thick cock, the other pressing into himself, punching small, helpless sounds from his own swollen lips.
He is not satisfied, though, the ache inside him still burns because it is not about coming, it’s about Gimli. His scent, his taste, his body. It is about immersing himself so deeply in the glory of it all, he forgets a world exists outside this moment. He dives back down, sucking Gimli’s fat cock back into his mouth and swallowing it, stomach twisting at the moan is elicits, the way the flesh burns atop his tongue as he lashes it.
He loses time, and could easily spend the rest of his endless days doing this, but. Gimli is young and not so skilled at endurance, so in minutes he’s gasping, bucking. Each frantic thrust hits the back off Legolas’s throat and he loves the relentless press of it, how impossible it is to squirm away because Gimli is holding him fast, thick fingers linked behind his head and tangled in his hair, holding him in place. And that—that is perfect. Legolas wants his mouth fucked to a swollen wound, wants to be reduced to drooling slickness, spit on his chin and tears on his cheeks. He moans rhythmically around Gimli’s cock as he rocks into him gracelessly, and then, when he shoots off, Legolas swallows, and wonders if there is anything in the world so salt-shocked and bitter and perfect.
Gimli pulses on his tongue for several seconds and then releases him, gasping up at the star-scattered night. When he rolls away, Legolas scrambles after him, because he does not want to smell ash and night and green and forest. He wants Gimli, still and always. “You will not be rid of me so easily,” he murmurs, adhering himself to Gimli’s side, spreading a palm over his broad chest to feel the thunder of his heart. Eventually his hand wanders exploratorily, though, because he is greedy, and because he has been waiting so long. He stokes his beard, thumbs over his brows, and then, with his breath held, brushes down to panting lips. “I know little of dwarf customs,” he admits, voice hoarse, reedy. “Or what kisses mean to your people, if they mean anything at all. But know, I would spend every night kissing you, here on your mouth and everywhere else, if you wanted.”
Gimli’s eyes flick open, and he presses his mouth closed under the searching shift of Legolas’s fingers, something dark and unreadable in his pupils. Doubt clenches tight in Legolas’s throat and he briskly adds, “Or, if not, we could continue on as—”
“Ye are so beautiful it’s hard to look at you, sometimes,” is what Gimli says as he interrupts him, reaching up and curling his hand around Legolas’s wrist. Then, he kisses his fingers, gently. “I was planning on serving you every night until you grew weary of it. I never dreamed you might want to do the same to me. Let alone accept something as crude and pitiful as my kisses.”
“There is nothing pitiful about you,” Legolas promises. And he is tired of waiting, tired of centuries. So he does not waste a single second. He props himself up on his elbow and leans down to press his mouth open and hungry to Gimli’s as his hair falls around them like reeds.
Gimli thumbs over his cheek bone, and licks his lower lip, everything slick and sweet. “You taste like the pit of my arm,” he says, smiling against the press of Legolas’s teeth. “Filthy elf.”
Legolas feels like his heart could burst, with the way its fluttering so tight and fierce against his ribs. “Thank you,” he says. “For that is a tremendous compliment, as far as I am concerned.”
And the stars flicker above them in countless points of light, and Legolas forgets every single one, save for the light he is cupping between his palms, bracketing between his legs, protecting so that it does not go out.