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'This is bordering on a fetish,' says Gwaine, and he means it, and he loves it.
'Shut up,' is Merlin's answer to that, running his hands over Gwaine's cuirass to the buckles. Well, running his hands over the cuirass in the vague direction of the buckles. He slides his hands over the steel like he's currying a horse, caressing it as if Gwaine can feel his touch through the metal, or maybe more as if the armour itself can feel it.
The dedication in his stance and the strength in his fingers are unfair.
As Merlin finally lets the breastplate loosen and pulls it away, takes the backplate as well, he puts them on the stand in the corner, reassembling the parts into something approaching the protective whole. 'Sometimes I think I'm just someone to hold up the armour so you can rub yourself all over it,' Gwaine says.
Merlin makes a face, straightening up and unlacing the neckline of Gwaine's gambeson. 'Most men,' he says, 'would be really pleased to have a lover who not only knew how to take off all of this ironmongery without injuring them, but also didn't mind the stink of wet, sweaty steel all through their bed.'
And Gwaine has to concede the point, although he knows that Merlin isn't exactly just putting up with this. He knows it by the way Merlin pushes him back into the horsehair mattress and unrolls himself along the length of Gwaine's body, the way he kisses to savour the taste of every inch of skin his mouth can find. Gwaine knows it's him Merlin wants, maybe loves, but he knows the armour doesn't hurt. Making love is so primal, it bypasses what you think and what you say and takes its cues from what you feel, touch, see, smell, and who is Gwaine that he can judge the scents and textures that Merlin's seduced by?
'Hey,' Gwaine says after a moment, a thought occurring to him. He pushes gently at Merlin's shoulders, backing him up. Merlin's eyes are dark and his mouth is wet and bitten-looking and tempting. 'C'mere,' Gwaine says, and levers himself out from underneath, pulls Merlin to his feet.
'Where are we going?' Merlin asks lazily, rolling his shoulders and pulling his wrist free of Gwaine's grasp.
'Not far,' says Gwaine, moving his hands to Merlin's hips and shuffling him in the right direction. 'Just over here.' And he pushes Merlin gently between the shoulderblades until he has to brace himself on the wall - leaning against Gwaine's armour. He hisses through his teeth.
'Cold?' Gwaine asks, and Merlin nods, but when he turns his head his lips are parted and his eyes are dark, and the chill of the breastplate against his skin clearly isn't the only thing he's reacting to. So Gwaine feels no compunctions about sliding his hand down Merlin's side, watching gooseflesh raise in his wake, and then around Merlin's buttocks, edging his thumb into the space between them.
Merlin's response is to spread his legs. Gwaine smiles against the nape of his neck, and touches higher up, further in. There's still slickness there from this morning, enough to play with at least, enough to slide his fingers through but not enough to stop the gentle catch and graze of skin on skin that makes Merlin arch back against him.
'Do it,' Merlin says in the lowest of voices, barely above a whisper and yet full of urgency. He has no patience in bed at the best of times, but here, standing spread-out and with his breath fogging the bright burnished metal of Gwaine's gorget, the tang of steel flavouring the air as much as the steadily-rising sweat, he wants so much that Gwaine can feel it in him.
'Steady,' Gwaine murmurs, pushes gently where Merlin's tight resistance gives way, smooth and hot, to his fingers. 'Just wait for me.' He gropes for the ointment he keeps on his bedside table, that he buys and claims is to soothe chapped hands and chilblains that he doesn't get.
'You're cruel.' Merlin's voice is breathy but not yet gone rough.
'Now, you know that isn't true,' Gwaine says soothingly, his fingers carefully in and out, his cock blood-heavy between his legs and the sight of Merlin driving back against his hand making concentration hard to keep.
'Gwaine,' says Merlin warningly and hungrily, as if he's considering taking matters into his own hands, and that's not what Gwaine wants - no, he wants Merlin to relax, to let Gwaine take the reins, to lean in and take in the scent and the feel of the armour, because Gwaine has seen the way Merlin's eyes half-close when he's polishing vambrances, the way he touches them like he touches Gwaine in their hottest, brightest moments, and Gwaine wants to feel that, to be part of it.
He draws his fingers out and steps in closer, his cock snug against the sliding wetness between Merlin's thighs. He settles his hands to Merlin's hips, where the swell of his thighs and buttocks curves to meet the flatness of his belly, seamed by the hard edges of his bones underneath. He's put together so neatly and sparely, is Merlin. All it takes is a strong push, Merlin bowing his spine down and meeting him strength for strength, to seat Gwaine inside.
Merlin sways, says 'unh,' like it's been punched from him, and his head drops, showing up the girdle of his shoulders in sharp relief. Gwaine jolts forward with the sudden shock of being in, unable to stop himself, and Merlin rolls with it.
His head turns, and now Gwaine can see that it's pillowed against the cold steel curve of the cuirass; his mouth barely open; his eyes half-closed. He looks calm, almost serene, in contrast to how the muscles in his arms are standing out like cords as he braces himself against the wall, holding himself up against the force of Gwaine behind him, because Gwaine can't hold himself back any more.
'Come on, then,' says Merlin, shoving back, huffing against the armour.
Gwaine does, driving in until he can feel the heat of Merlin's thighs against his own, and leans forward. 'Can you taste it?' he asks, thrusting, dipping his knees fraction by fraction, changing his angle. Seeking, in other words.
Other lovers Gwaine has had were fascinated by his skill with weapons, wanted a knife held to them or for him to bruise them, wanted the air of danger he knows he carries as a trained swordsman and occasional mercenary. Still others were horrified by the whole notion, and wanted him to shed his warrior's nature with his clothes when he was in bed with them. But Merlin seems to neither crave the danger of the blade nor seek to forget Gwaine's purpose and place amongst the knights.
If anything, Gwaine would say that Merlin, of all the bed partners he's had, is the one who understands him the best - that he's a killer and a lover both and equally.
For his part, Gwaine knows enough about Merlin's much-vaunted destiny to know that he was made for war even if he hates it, tied to Arthur's dream of conquest, pledged to his victory. Sometimes Gwaine worries that their time together will be short, that Merlin won't be long for this world he's helping to create. Maybe this is part of that.
All Gwaine can see is that fate never decreed that Merlin would love at all, and that that's cruel - to doom a man to nothing but burning and killing, to not give him anything to redress the shift of balance in the world that he creates. So Gwaine loves him as hard, as fiercely, as he can while he has him in his arms, and hopes it will be enough to keep Merlin from thinking he's nothing but a weapon.
'Can you taste it?' he asks again, sliding a hand up Merlin's long, lean body to find a nipple, to tweak it, cutting pleasure with a tiny shock of sharpness. 'Is it what you wanted?'
'You're what I wanted, what I want,' Merlin pants and growls. 'Do you want this too?'
'I want you to leave me a token,' breathes Gwaine in his ear, suddenly seized with the idea. 'Here,' and he pulls Merlin back against him a little harder, trails his hand down to stroke his fingers across Merlin's fine-trembling thigh. 'Leave me something to wear on the battlefield, for luck.' As he says it he pushes a little further, a little differently, and is rewarded by Merlin's body shaking in his hands. There. All it will take is a little more time, and Merlin will come undone just from the feel of that, inside him.
'I'm no maiden,' Merlin gasps, his eyes screwed shut. 'And that's no token.'
'I know what you are,' says Gwaine, mouthing at Merlin's neck and feeling hungry for more than just the taste of him. 'Let me wear your colours. Let me polish you into my armour so that you're there with me when I fight, it'll be you turning every blade that tries for my heart -'
Merlin does as Gwaine says, shaking in his hands, and Gwaine watches liquid trace the curve of the metal, imagines his breastplate dull and smudged with it, and taking blows in battle that just glance off.
There's so much more to Merlin than the magic he wields or the destruction he can wreak, and it starts here, with him just being, just doing as other men do.