Tony’s fingers are feather-light as they dance down the curve of Namor’s neck. The dusky evening is grey today, filled with the cold kiss of the rains that roil over the ocean. The storm clouds are far, for now, somewhere out to sea. But they can just see them if they squint, gathered threatening, exploding with streaks of frenetic energy, hurling bouts of cold rain against the waves.
Only a hazy image from the window sill of his room.
The storm clouds are far.
Instead, a fine sheen of hazy mist brushes out towards them, gusts chilly in lazy bursts carrying salt and spray in through the open window. Long gauzy curtains whose provenance Tony can’t exactly swear to, Namor’s work, maybe, or T’Challa’s, or both, billow dramatically as the wind swells and falls. He would roll his eyes. He would crack an irreverent joke about crazy fae folk and their taste for chiffon; if only to hear the sound of his voice. He would shatter the way the raindrops clatter secrets against the metal of the sill; if only to know he’s still him. Whoever that is. If only to twist away from the poetry of the moment that exposes something he can’t name.
There’s some kind of archaic magic at work at this moment.
And though he wants to.
Though his throat muscles contract more than once, ready to form sound into words, and words into something profane to ruin the sacred hush of the moment, something stops him.
Not a spell, Tony considers. Only his higher-order functioning.
And isn’t that a scary thought?
The him that is himself is changing. He knows, but won’t recognize. It plagues him, the thought. Draws him in magnetic with a kind of breathless hunger and the urgency of want, and then repels him. He has always been himself. There’s no reason to change. Stubbornness in his gut rises in defense. And he’s torn between the rising oppositions that ebb and flow inside of him.
But for now, he casts both desire and disgust away—out into the maelstrom. Despite indecision, he stays quiet as the waves crash. Casts his eyes back into the room.
Namor has lit candles.
There’s shadow, gathered in the hollows of the other’s collarbones, a dark smudge that blurs and then gives way starkly to a gleaming paleness of skin. Tony traces it with his touch. The complex simplicity of contradiction beneath his fingers.
Though the candles’ flames throw warm light against them, wash everything with hues of golds and orange, they only brush Namor. He stays lit as though he’s out at sea himself, caught, unfathomable in the throes of the thunder. He sits. Silver and pale and murky even as everything else glimmers faintly with heat.
The candles can only touch him as everything else does.
The way anything can touch water.
A distortion, sometimes a ripple, maybe a reflection, and then it’s swallowed. Sunk into the depths. And the surface again remains smooth. Namor remains smooth. A statue of marble, a sheen of ice, dark hollows into pale skin. Still, for now. His eyes, tinged dark today, watching the ocean.
Tony envies him that. In a fashion. Resents it. In another. Tony has never, not once, been still. In this moment, maybe he’s stayed quiet. But...Still, not still. His fingers sweep down over Namor’s chest.
The candle wicks burst fire but only brush Namor. Like everything else, they get lost in the distortion of ocean and magic. But Tony. Tony reaches out and wraps his fingers around Namor’s neck and—Fae, creature, water, or not—there’s a pulse there, thrumming, and it skips beneath the brush of Tony’s hand. He grins, a little more mischief in the moment now. A little more life.
Namor turns his cheek, side-long against the grip of hand, so it runs parallel over his shoulder. He’s not yet looking at Tony, who lets his touch fall away as he shifts back into the corner to get a better look. The taut stretch of muscle in Namor’s neck, the sudden bared expanse of his shoulder, the shifting shadows on his skin, the way his hair, spun finer than any fabric, ebbs inhumanly around him, flows on water currents instead of wind, would make an artist weep.
But Tony isn’t an artist.
Their eyes lock finally.
Namor makes a soft, considering sound low in his throat. And then there’s a sly curve to the set of his lips, barely visible and yet resounding. It makes Tony hungry, watching the subtle shifts. It, the sudden burst of warmth in the hollows of the others fathomless glance, the way the temperature changes in the ice, the way the light around him is suddenly more honied and less arcane, the way its Tony, who is never still, and never sacred, touches Namor when nothing else can, make something roar in his chest, crash, maybe, or is it, sear.
“Do you practice being human in the mirror?” Sound turned to word turned to something finally kicks in, but it comes out more sleek and less discordant. A faint tease that blends into the crash of the water and the low rumble of thunder rolling closer.
“Never.” Namor hums back, unrepentant and magnificent. But touched, all the same. And Tony, he guesses he’s touched too.
He leans forward to actually touch and Namor tilts his head up, doesn’t shift his neck from the intensity of its stretch as their lips meet. Tony lets the sensation steep into his cells as he wraps his hand back in place. His fingers curbe around the tension of the muscles and absorb their flutterings, they bleed into him, they bleed into each other, they bleed together.
Namor’s muscles are coiled, but his hair glides along Tony’s wrist. His lips are gentle, but his teeth flash sharp. A predator, soft beneath his grasp, still ice, still stone, still perfectly smooth, yet somehow yielding.
Somehow warm.
And Tony.
Tony has drowned, but despite everything, he’s breathing.