Work Text:
His eyes are weapons. Honed ice that guts Mairon deep and he can’t move. He wonders if maybe that gaze is a pair of snares more than knives; blue crevasses, traps. Must be, because when Melkor returns home late at night, hair wet from the rain, sleeves pushed up, the shoulders of his work shirt soaked, the dark of hair and the blur of rain muting his gaze, Mairon feels himself slide. Closer. Ice and earth tilt. There is no arguing with Melkor’s gravity.
But oh, Mairon argues. He fights.
It’s always been like this. Ever since that day in the workshop when Melkor sauntered in uninvited, jaw rimmed in the red of glass pulling and warping with heat. Mairon had, for a moment, considered ramming the blazing tip of his blowpipe into that boldly stupidly absurdly handsome face.
And then he did so. Swept the pipe at Melkor. The satisfaction of thrusting blooming glass at a face of such surliness was still bright in his mind. Missing his mark was still bitter. Melkor met the hot glass with his hand, his flesh did not burn. Loathe as Mairon is to admit it, the memory of liquid sand flowing between Melkor's fingers and down his forearm left him sweaty and sleepless for nights on end.
The second time Melkor visited, Carcharoth was sprawled in the corner, long flanks rising, falling like slow bellows as the wolfmutt slept. Melkor watched the glassblower breathe life into the gather at the end of the pipe, growing a skein of glass-over-glass as he fed it air. Mairon ignored the man, though he shimmered in the heat, eyes stolen fragments from a sun-sharpened winter sky. A god of dog days and hypothermic nights. Mairon pulled the pipe from his mouth, lingering his tongue on its rim, smirking when Melkor's breath quickened, then thrust it into the re-kindling warmth of the glory hole. The glassblower murmured a word to Carcharoth, who rose lunging and snarling. Melkor fled that time, but grinned as he did so.
There were countless other times when Melkor pulled and Mairon pulled back. Grocery shopping, of course; that was always a challenge: Mairon made itemized, color-coded, and chronologically-ordered shopping lists that correlated to perfectly nutrionally-balanced meals and spent hours picking through the local farmers’ markets and specialty food stores for his fodder. Melkor, on the other hand, menaced his way through the closest grocery store, piling his cart high with whatever he pleased. Toothbrushes were also a problem, as Melkor refused to use his own, and Mairon refused to use a toothbrush that had been in someone else’s mouth. They went through three, four toothbrushes a day, and Mairon always brushed his teeth first.
Their conflicts were toxic, intoxicating, but this was their game, and Mairon would have it no other way. Except for tonight.
Tonight, Mairon is tired, and when Melkor comes home from work, smirking and grabbing his wrists and pushing him against the kitchen counter, Mairon only frowns, and sighs, and then, well. And then Melkor-the-brute, Melkor-the-unfortunate-love-of-his-life, is kissing him. So he aligns his callused and heat-scarred hands along Melkor’s warm, heavy jaw, and kisses him back.