Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the months of their friendship – and now their relationship, a word which still sent a shiver of delight through Legolas’s blood – Gimli had been a much more frequent visitor to Legolas’s home than Legolas to his. Even still, Legolas knew the way to his little rented townhouse by heart – and even if he hadn’t known the house on sight, today, it would have been impossible to mistake.

The moving truck took up at least two parking spaces in front of the house, which was surely not doing the dwarves who lived there any favors with their neighbors. (Good thing they wouldn’t have to put up with them for much longer.) It was enough to make Legolas glad he had taken the train here; he doubted even his little two-door would have fit without taking up someone else’s space. But the sight of the huge carbon-belching vehicle with the back hanging open and dwarves bustling up and down the steps to the house made Legolas beam like nothing ever had. If the thing weren’t a monstrosity, he might almost have hugged it.

Luckily, there was someone else here he could hug instead.

“Legolas!” Gimli’s head was poking out through the open door, his hair twisted back from his face in multiple ridiculous little knobs. Several wisps had already escaped in defiance of his efforts, scattered across his forehead in an auburn fringe. “You made it!”

“On time and everything.” Legolas bounded over the curb, up the steps, and into Gimli’s waiting arms – suspiciously empty beside an untidy stack of boxes – for a kiss. “How’s it going?”

“Good.” Even on the cramped stoop of this house he was preparing to vacate for Legolas’s spacious apartment, Gimli’s arms felt more like home than anywhere Legolas had ever been. He kissed Legolas again, and Legolas savored the brush of mustache against his lips and chin. “We have everything mostly packed up; we’re just figuring out how to organize the truck.”

“How can I help?” If there was anything he had learned about Gimli in these months of dating, it was that any attempt to help Gimli do something for which he’d already devised a system would only be getting in the way.

Sure enough, Gimli pulled a wrinkled sticky note out of his pocket and tapped at it, his lips moving silently, occasionally twisting his head around to glance around the room. The entryway and little living room had mostly been packed up – with a few exceptions: the sewing table that usually covered a jumble of shoes (now scattered openly, the heap diminished only slightly by packing), the jar of tumbled rocks, one wicker chair, and a few movie posters. Those must be Folmund’s; he wouldn’t be moving into his new place for another week or so, and he seemed to be making the most of it. One cardboard box had been overturned in the middle of the room, covered in paper plates and beer cans - because apparently that was what Ph.D. students liked to drink at 11:30 AM in the summer? Or maybe if it was weak enough, it didn’t even count as day drinking - and beside it wobbled a stack of pizza boxes.

“We’re packing up the kitchen right now,” Gimli said at last, looking back up from his list. “I’m – oh.” He followed Legolas’s eyes. “Yeah, we decided we needed food before we started packing. We already ate, but there’s some extra if you want some?”

“Is there” –

“An extra cheese,” Gimli said. “The all-veggie one had sausage on it, sorry.”

“No problem.” It was hard to express the surge of warmth that expanded in his chest and throat whenever something like this happened – whenever Gimli anticipated his needs before Legolas could even ask about them. Despite everything he had learned about the way dwarves treated love, despite all Gimli’s reassurances that what he had with Legolas could never have been found with anyone else, he still found it impossible to believe sometimes that no other dwarf had fallen for Gimli at the first sign of this exquisite consideration.

He couldn’t express it in words, but he thanked Gimli with another peck on the lips. “Thank you. I’m good for now, but maybe later.” He’d already eaten, and cold pizza that had probably been congealing in its own grease for awhile didn’t feel like the best chaser for a free-range scramble.

Yet. Maybe after he’d broken a sweat on some boxes.

“Help yourself whenever you want. Aseth owed both of us for bailing him out for gas that one time.” Gimli turned back to his list. “In the meantime, would you mind starting on the bedroom? Everything should be in boxes already, but I just know I’m missing something. Maybe you can use that famous eyesight of yours and let me know if there’s anything I forgot to pack.”

That felt a little too much like a stay-out-of-the-way job to Legolas – he couldn’t help noticing how much had already been done, even though he’d taken special care to show up at the time Gimli had specified – but he wasn’t going to argue with whatever system Gimli and his roommates had worked out. If one dwarf could be particular, three were surely even worse. “Okay,” he said. “Like, under the bed and stuff?”

“Yeah – anywhere, really,” said Gimli. “I haven’t dismantled the bedframe yet since I’m selling it, but you know the room.” He darted a mischievous glance at Legolas, and Legolas’s stomach twitched delightfully with the reminder that Gimli would no longer need his bed since – from tonight onward – he would be sharing with Legolas.

It wouldn’t be that much of a change, really. Gimli already spent more nights at Legolas’s place than he did at his own – but still, the thought that they would no longer be sleeping in “Legolas’s” bed but in theirs, that the slow migration of Gimli’s things to his place would be finishing today – that he would no longer have “his drawer” but his nightstand, a shared space in their bathroom; that their dishes would move into their kitchen –

He couldn’t help kissing Gimli again at the reminder, twisting a hand into his beard – that beard that was his to touch – and tilting his chin up, catching Gimli’s lips with his own, and letting himself melt. This might be the last time they would kiss in this entryway, after all, and Legolas meant to savor every second of this transition.

He barely had time to register the rush of air before something soft and slightly damp hit him in the forehead. He squawked and jerked back, one hand flying to his head in an instinctive motion to pull the projectile off of him and whip it back in the same direction, almost without looking.

It was a dish towel, he realized only as it left his hand. He usually had better aim, but only when he was actually looking at his target - which was why Nadja, the clear culprit, caught it easily where she stood in the kitchen entryway. “Get a room, you two!” she scolded, one hand braced on her hip, the other hand twirling the dish towel in the air.

“You’re one to talk,” Gimli retorted, not releasing his hold on Legolas’s waist. “Anyway, we’re working on it.”

“Working hard, or hardly working?” she quipped as Gimli twisted around to glare at her. “Of course, I’m sure there’s plenty of hard work going on between the two of you” –

“Nadja!” Gimli yelped, drawing back at last to chase her into the kitchen as she darted away, cackling unrepentantly.

Laughing himself, Legolas made his way upstairs.

Gimli’s bedroom was tiny, but it looked much larger with all of his things stripped away. The walls were bare; all of his posters had been rolled up and stored carefully back in their tubes, which Legolas could see sticking out of a narrow cardboard box. All of the boxes were neatly stacked against the dresser, making the stained carpet even more visible than usual.

The room was so small that Legolas wasn’t quite sure what Gimli thought he could have forgotten – surely anyone could see anything lying around. Still, he busied himself scouting it up and down, looking for dents in the wall that would need to be spackled, any papers that had wedged themselves into corners. When he had accumulated a small pile, he sank to his knees in front of the bed – stripped of all covers – and tilted his head to look underneath.

Oh – there was a long flat bin that Gimli seemed to have neglected. Legolas slid it out from under the bed, which required some negotiation to get it around the legs, and across the floor to rest next to the other boxes. But once he had it out, he couldn’t resist a slight twinge of curiosity. The other boxes were labeled according to their contents  – Gimli’s school things, his books, his game system (the one he had said he couldn’t wait to hook up at Legolas’s house, where he actually had a TV), figures and mementoes – but this looked like it had been under the bed for quite some time. What could be missing from everything Gimli had already packed?

He cracked the lid of the bin, inhaled the scent of old paper. Ah – this seemed to be a collection of old journals and sketchpads, high school yearbooks, and the like. Maybe Gimli would go through them with him later. That was what moving was for, right? – stumbling across old memories? He smiled at the thought of celebrating their move with the bottle of champagne he had bought as a surprise and a stack of Gimli’s old yearbooks, making Gimli show him all the pictures of himself as a young dwarf.

And now they would have so much time to do it! Legolas almost reeled at the thought - this bin was like a reminder that there was so much of Gimli that he had yet to learn. and that they had the rest of their lives to share it.

So he should probably hurry up and get packing.

He was about to replace the lid when something glossy caught the light: the end of a word in garish, hot-pink cursive. Guilt twinged faintly in his stomach - both at going through Gimli’s things and at the knowledge that he should be working - but the curiosity was stronger. Legolas shifted over the yearbook on top of the mystery item and pulled it out – and stared.

It was a magazine. A porn magazine, if Legolas wasn’t mistaken, the kind he’d read about in romance novels or seen in the backs of vintage stores but hadn’t ever encountered in real life before. After all, in the age of the internet, the death of in-print materials had been a long time coming. The cover image was a huge – chin down, not even the top of the head visible – picture of an extremely muscular dwarf wearing some kind of leather harness and nothing else. Splashed across his defined abs were the words BAD DADDY/Good Boy - the latter two in that hot-pink cursive that had caught Legolas’s eye – along with several other article titles that made his eyes pop wide in surprise and curiosity.

Wow.

There was something mesmerizing about the image. Not so much attraction – not that elusive feeling Gimli had described and Legolas had only started to understand in tiny sips – but fascination. Legolas was no stranger to nudity, but – there were things he just didn’t understand about this sort of thing. Who found something like this appealing? What were the parts that fit together to make this attractive?

He knew he should be helping, should go back to tell Gimli that he had finished in the bedroom, but he couldn’t resist it. He turned the page.

“Legolas?” came Gimli’s voice from the doorway before Legolas had finished taking in the multiple images of scantily-clad dwarves on the contents page. “Are you – oh. Um. Ahem.”

Legolas twisted from his crosslegged position to see that, in the doorway, Gimli had gone redder than his hair.

“Sorry!” he said, closing the magazine. “I shouldn’t have gone through your things, I just – I saw the bin under the bed and this, uh . . . caught my eye.”

“No, no, it’s – it’s fine, I just – ah.” Gimli cleared his throat. “Forgot that was in there. Here, let me” – He reached out to pluck it from Legolas’s hands, but Legolas dodged him, feeling a little impish. “That can just go in the recycling” –

“No, no, I don’t think so!” Legolas scrambled to his feet and danced out of the way again. “I didn’t expect to find anything like this today. You have to show it to me!”

“I . . . uh.” Gimli stuttered to a stop and stared at him. “You want to see it?”

“I mean, it’s fascinating!” Legolas gazed down at the magazine again: the garish color on an otherwise black-and-white cover; the titles of the articles; those extremely erect nipples on the cover dwarf. He felt almost like a kid with a new picture book – even if this was nothing like that at all. “This is like – it’s like a window into dwarf sexuality. A – a time capsule of Young Gimli. Why wouldn’t I want to see it?”

“It wouldn’t make you feel awkward?” Gimli cleared his throat again. “Typically if couples look at things like this together, it’s for, uh . . . intimate purposes.”

To be fair, Legolas had kind of figured that much out. “Well, we don’t have to use it for that,” he said, eyeing Gimli. Of course he wouldn’t be participating yet, but if this was the kind of thing that got Gimli off . . . well, there was promise there, that was all. Maybe not for now, but for the future. “I’m just curious. You can explain it to me!”

“Oh.” The blush was fading from Gimli’s cheeks; his eyes took on a speculative gleam. “Well . . . I suppose we could do that. But not right now!”

“No, no.” Legolas slid the magazine back into the bin, fit the lid back on top. “I was thinking more about – later. Maybe tonight. Once we’re back at our place.”

He savored those last two words, and watched as Gimli’s smile softened. For a moment, the world was just the two of them and the promise of their shared lives – and then Gimli laughed and shook his head in surrender.

“All right,” he said. “Not quite how I imagined the first night at our place to go, but” –

“It’ll be perfect,” Legolas promised, and bent down for another kiss, as long and thorough as the one they had shared in the entryway. He fancied he could already taste the champagne on Gimli’s lips.

The yearbooks could wait until tomorrow.

Gimli grunted as he lowered the last box to the floor just inside the doorway. Legolas, still in the hall behind him, stared shamelessly as he bent, then straightened, drawing a hand across his forehead. In moments like these, he could almost understand the phenomenon of bodily attraction: everything about Gimli was fascinating to him, from the way he laughed to the way he moved. He made every word, every motion, into a work of art, and Legolas wanted to swallow him with his eyes, devour every part of him, with a sort of hedonistic greed that almost - almost - bordered on lust. It was not quite what he knew Gimli felt, not quite what made him moan Legolas’s name in his sleep or drove him to desperate peaks after many minutes of that deep, hungry kissing, but - 

But it was enough for him. Enough for now.

“Welcome home,” he said when Gimli turned to look at him, his grin stretching his cheeks until they ached. He stepped across the threshold and directly into Gimli’s arms.

It was hard to kiss and beam at the same time, but they made do: short, smiling pecks between huffs of delighted laughter; Gimli’s hands tight on his shoulder blades, both of their shirts and backs damp with sweat from the many trips up with boxes. But at last they were here together, and all of Gimli’s things had - at very least - passed the threshold, and it was home, for both of them.

They pulled apart to rest their foreheads together, hands still on one another’s backs. Gimli’s smile was soft and gooey and Legolas wondered if he would melt into a puddle before he could make it to the couch. Gimli was here, in his home - in their home. It was their home now, and even though Gimli knew his way around here already, it felt so different.

“Well?” he said, hardly able to enunciate through his uncontrollable smile. “Where shall we start?” Just because the boxes were inside didn’t mean they had finished, and he had learned early on that Gimli liked having his things just so.

But to his surprise, Gimli hesitated, and then his wide grin turned a little mischievous. “You know what?” he said. “I don’t feel like unpacking right now. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

Legolas blinked. Had he heard right? “You don’t . . . feel like unpacking?”

“Nah.” Gimli nudged one of the boxes out of the way with his foot. “We’ve already done so much today. The boxes will be fine if they sit for another night.”

Legolas stared at him for another moment longer, then made a show of looking around, squinting into the corners of the room. Yes, maybe he was feeling a little silly tonight, too. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m looking for my fiancé. He’s a dwarf about yea high” - he held a hand at the level of Gimli’s head, nudging playfully at one of the buns - “red hair, gorgeous smile, devilishly charming?”

“Oh, stop it.” Gimli’s hands around his waist tightened, shook him back and forth just a little - shaking free another giggle. Legolas loved being held like this, reminded of the strength in Gimli’s hands that held him so gently. “I’m allowed to be unpredictable on my first night in my new apartment.”

Again that shiver of delight, like his blood was shimmying in celebration. My new apartment. It was true - Gimli had had the spare key for months, but now he could talk to the property manager about making more copies. They’d had his name officially added to the lease earlier in the week, and Legolas had never felt so warm and fuzzy over a signature on a piece of paper before. It was Gimli’s new apartment; his boxes had all been hauled into the corresponding rooms where they would be unpacked to join Legolas’s things - to become their things. But of course Gimli had already brought enough stuff over that he could go a night without opening them.

And if that’s what he wanted to do, Legolas certainly wasn’t going to argue.

“Well, if you’re serious,” he said, “then I have a surprise.” He made to break free of Gimli’s hold, but Gimli moved with him instead of letting go, so they both moved in an awkward hug-shuffle all the way into the kitchen, where Legolas triumphantly pulled out the bottle of champagne that had been chilling. “Ta da!” he said, holding it up. “To celebrate our homecoming.”

“Perfect,” said Gimli. “Oh - and I think my champagne glasses are on top.” He broke away from Legolas at last to rummage in one of the boxes, plucking out two little flutes with a triumphant grin. “I mean, our champagne glasses.”

Legolas refrained from tackling him only out of fear of breaking the delicate glassware. “Yeah,” he breathed. “Welcome home.”

Gimli took the champagne bottle from him and gave it a speculative look. “Hmm,” he said. “You know what would go just right with this?”

“Your porn mag?”

The words were out before Legolas could stop himself, and again Gimli flushed to the ears. “I was going to say something from Sam’s,” he said. “Unless you wanted to cook.” Legolas shook his head vehemently. He was in agreement with Gimli - they had done enough work for the day. “But I guess - if you’re really serious about wanting to see them” - 

“Wait.” Legolas’s cheeks were beginning to hurt again from smiling. “Them?”

“I was a teenager!” Gimli protested.

Legolas had abandoned the effort to sit up straight; he slumped against Gimli on the couch, his feet tucked up against the armrest, his head leaning on Gimli’s shoulder, overtaken by giggles. “Where did you even get all these when you were a teenager?” he managed to choke out. “Does Erebor have a soft-core porn shop I didn’t know about? Did you order them with, like, your summer job money? Wait” – He had heard stories like this before – or, well, read them. “Did you find your dad’s collection?”

“No!” Gimli cried. “Ew, ew – please don’t ever talk about my dad in conjunction with porn again” –

“No, I guess he wouldn’t,” said Legolas thoughtfully, tamping down the explosive laughter until his chest felt it would shudder apart with the force of holding it in. He didn’t quite understand exactly how this worked, but a lot of non-elves had preferences, and these magazines were all males. “He’s married to a dwarrowdam, after all. Are there female versions of” –

“I am going to shove you off this couch,” Gimli said darkly.

“Noooo!” Legolas wrapped his arms around Gimli’s shoulders and clung to him like the world’s most theatrical barnacle. “How could you be so cruel?”

“It’s my couch now; I’ll do what I want,” said Gimli, but he was starting to smile, too, and at last Legolas felt him let out a reluctant laugh.

“Okay, okay,” Legolas said. He too could be magnanimous. “I’ll stop. But just because you had these when you were a teenager doesn’t explain why you still have them now.”

“Look - they cost a lot of money,” said Gimli shiftily. “I couldn’t just” –

It was the wrong thing to say. Legolas shrieked again.

The magazines were fascinating.

Legolas had never been an academic – hadn’t even done an undergrad degree, which always made him feel a little self-conscious around Gimli’s Ph.D. student friends and professor colleagues. But sometimes he felt like these several months of dating Gimli had been their own kind of degree – in Dwarf, or maybe just in Mortal Sexuality. Flipping through these magazines felt almost like a treasure hunt for information.

The magazines encapsulated about as wide a variety of porn as Legolas would have imagined, if he’d given much thought to imagining what all was out there. He found himself alternating between giggling at the inaccuracies (Gimli had given him a very strange expression at his commentary on the one with the goats, but that was a conversation for another time) and being genuinely awed at the thought and artistry that went into some of these pictures. Legolas could appreciate a good pose, after all, even if he didn’t understand what was appealing about this trend of balls poking out of shorts.

Gimli, for his part, was generous with his commentary - explaining things Legolas didn’t understand; naming positions Legolas had never seen before . . . occasionally looking a little shamefaced, particularly when they unfolded the four-page spread in CUB and it nearly ripped, worn from excessive handling. Legolas tried not to laugh too much, but sometimes he just couldn’t help it.

“Help YoursElf?” 

They were onto the “Bad Daddy” one now, that first magazine Legolas had seen – one which, Gimli explained to him, tended to be more kink-specific. There had been some particularly interesting things in this magazine, pictures Legolas had found mesmerizing not so much for the bodies involved but by the possibilities. He’d never known kink could be this involved. But this page was a startling departure from silk ties and leather harnesses. It was just a close-up on a man’s face – clearly a man, but he was wearing very fake pointed ears and a long black wig. Beside the title, there was a list of names that held no recognition for Legolas.

“Right.” Gimli caught his wrist before he could turn the page. “I should warn you, before we get into this next section.” He coughed uncomfortably and shifted in his seat. “There’s a thing some men do – there’s a kind of kink – because obviously these magazines don’t feature elves; most wouldn’t pose for something like this for any kind of money” – 

“Most,” Legolas interjected, because he had stumbled across one or two OnlyFans pages in his time on the Internet. But hey, he didn’t judge what others got up to.

“So some men will kind of – dress up. As elves. And pose. For people who are into that.” Gimli grimaced, darting a sidelong glance at Legolas. “Of course I never got off on it, but” – 

“So you weren’t into elves before you met me?” Legolas teased.

“I didn’t – you don’t – that’s not the point!”

“I know, I know,” Legolas laughed. Gimli was too easy to rile up to resist it sometimes, but he didn’t want to go too far. He patted Gimli’s thigh in apology, toying with the edge of the page. Men dressing up as elves to get off seemed like a weird kink, but hey – as long as it wasn’t violating any actual elves, it wasn’t any of his business. “I’m not bothered by it. But now I really want to see.”

He turned the page and burst out laughing.

Would this magazine never stop one-upping itself? The next two pages featured two more men wearing obviously-fake pointed ears and poorly-attached wigs, posing in the most absurdly provocative – “Is this supposed to be attractive?” he gasped. “To people who find elves attractive?” One of the men hadn’t shaved his dark stubble, even. Quaking with laughter, he turned to the next page.

“I don’t know,” Gimli said. “I never looked at the elf . . . pages . . . much . . . oh, Mahal.” His voice trailed off and his face twisted into a grimace of horror and disgust.

“What?” The next image was just as ridiculous as the last few, but there was something different – ”Why does he have . . .” Legolas frowned at the tattoo on the man’s bare ass cheek. “Is that supposed to say ‘kitchen’?” It was a direct transliteration of the Westron word into the Tengwar script, but not a translation into any elvish language Legolas knew. “Is that what you’re” – 

He looked up at Gimli for help, but Gimli only shook his head mutely, still staring down at the page. Now thoroughly puzzled, Legolas looked again – and this time he saw it: the terrible blond wig; the green wrap over the shoulders; the glass of wine . . . the name across the bottom of the page . . . and all thoughts of the tattoo were forgotten.

He howled. He had laughed more tonight than he felt like he had in his whole life, but that was nothing compared to the volcano of wild hilarity erupting in his chest. It actually felt like flame; his chest burned as he gasped for air, but he could not draw it into his lungs fast enough before it came bursting out again in choking guffaws that sounded and felt like he was dying.

“Legolas,” came Gimli’s voice faintly above him. “Um, Legolas, are you” – 

“Randi – Wail” - he gasped, practically gagged. “Randi – oh no – oh Elbereth – oh Mahal – oh sweet Aulë and Yavanna” – He couldn’t even find words to explain exactly how hilarious this was – the thought of this fake-seductive parody of his straightlaced father; the thought of what his dad would say if he knew – 

“I’m calling him,” he half-sobbed out. Where had he put his phone? “Right now; I have to tell him; he’ll think it’s so funny” – 

“No!” Gimli caught his wrists and held him to the couch, and Legolas could not fight him; he slumped against Gimli again, snorting with laughter. “What is wrong with you? You are not telling your dad there’s a parody picture of him in one of my old porn magazines!”

“I don’t have to – I don’t have to say – it’s yours,” he wheezed. His eyes were stinging, tears forcing their way out of the corners; surely his face was beet red. Breathing was so hard that his fingers had begun to go numb. “Oh Elbereth this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life – bless you for showing me this – oh no” – The hilarity was overtaking him again; he collapsed back against Gimli and gave in to the next wave.

“Great Mahal,” muttered Gimli, but – he too was chuckling by now, Legolas could hear it faintly over his own shrieks of mirth. “You really think this is hilarious, don’t you?”

“What – what gave it – away?” Okay, okay, okay. He could calm down. He could calm down. He smothered another wave of giggles with a massive effort, managing only to moan like a dying animal instead.

Gimli snorted above him at the sound, and that set Legolas off again. Vaguely he was aware that Gimli’s hand had begun patting him indulgently on the back; he could hear the rustling of the magazine pages, the shuffling of Gimli moving over – 

A sharp knock on the door.

Gimli started, and even Legolas found his mirth fading a little at the sound. They weren’t expecting anyone else tonight, and there was a No Soliciting sign on the apartment building.

“Come on,” said Gimli. “It’s probably a neighbor coming to yell at you.”

“Probably,” Legolas giggled. The hilarity was easing slightly, but he could still feel it simmering below the surface if he even so much as thought about – oh no – Randi Wail – 

“Oh, no, not again,” said Gimli as Legolas dissolved once more. “Come on, get up, you have to answer it!”

“It’s your apartment,” said Legolas. “You get it!”

“And this is your fault.” Gimli poked him insistently in the side. “Come on. Up.”

Legolas weaved like a drunk person, leaning on Gimli’s shoulder, as they made their way to the door, sighing as at last the laughter began to fade, save for the occasional stray giggle and – oh dear – a truly ferocious oncoming case of hiccups. He stifled the first two, but it was a losing battle, and he could only imagine how he looked when he finally opened the door.

And came face to face with Lindir.

Legolas didn’t know many of his neighbors, but Lindir had been living here even longer than he had and had dropped in to say hi when he’d first moved in, to welcome a new elf into the building. Otherwise, their interactions had been limited to cordial nods in the stairwell or the lobby. He seemed nice enough, but now he was staring at Legolas in utter bewilderment.

“Hello,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

“Everything’s – hic – everything’s fine,” said Legolas. His chest heaved with another smothered hiccup, and he could only imagine how red his face must be, his eyes streaming, his hair all over his face. “I just – hic – this is Gimli, my fiancé.” He waved a hand at Gimli as if that would explain everything – though mostly just hoping Gimli would take pity on him.

Gimli did. “I just moved in,” he said apologetically to Lindir. “We seem to be a little silly this evening. But everything’s fine. Sorry to disturb you.”

Legolas nodded emphatically, clamping a hand over his mouth as another cluster of hiccups bobbed him up and down. “Sorry,” he managed, and barely managed to keep from hooting as the memory of the image danced before his eyes again. “We’ll try to keep it down.”

It seemed that was what Lindir was here for, after all, whatever his pretense, and they made their farewells and made their way back to the couch, Legolas still rocking with the occasional hiccup.

The magazine was still open on the coffee table to the man dressed as his father, and Legolas all but stuffed his fist all the way inside his mouth to keep from erupting again. “Wow,” he breathed around his hand. “I just – wow.”

“Yeah.”

There was a strange note in Gimli’s voice, enough to sober Legolas up for real. He breathed deeply through the last of the giggles, then looked over at Gimli in concern to see that the dwarf was staring down at the magazine, not looking over at him. “What’s – hic – up?” He grimaced. The hiccups didn’t do much for the attempt at seriousness.

“Nothing.” Gimli plucked at the page. “Just – glad you find it so funny, is all.”

Legolas frowned, pulled himself upright. “Hey,” he said. That had sounded almost bitter. “Did I hurt your feelings? I didn’t want to do that.” The laughter evaporated; surely he hadn’t managed to alienate Gimli on their first night of living together!

“No, no, you didn’t, I just” – Gimli winced. “It’s a little embarrassing, you know? Knowing how funny this is to you.”

“No, no, it’s not!” said Legolas – that was all wrong! That wasn’t the impression he had meant to give. “Or, I mean – this one is; this might be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, but – not the magazines, not really! I didn’t mean to make you feel embarrassed.”

Gimli shrugged. “I mean, you didn’t, not really. It’s just” – He was still looking down at the magazine, worrying one glossy corner between thumb and first finger until Legolas nearly feared this one would tear, too. “I’m not really embarrassed about this stuff, but sometimes it feels weird to have – needs, when you don’t, you know? It’s just kind of” – He waved his free hand over the stack of magazines – “all out there.”

“But there’s nothing wrong with that!” Had he been giving the wrong impression all this while? “I’m just – I’ve just never really thought about sex all that much, Gimli. Not, like” – How to say this? He knew the mechanics of sex well enough; he knew how his own body worked and was unembarrassed about it, but something in that mental connection – in that connection between seeing and feeling – wasn’t there for him. Not yet, anyway, but being with Gimli was the closest he had ever come to understanding how it could be – how it would be. “These magazines – they’re full of so many different ways to be attractive, and things to be attracted to. Some of this stuff – the ropes, the blindfolds, the elf-kink – I don’t know what about it turns people on, but I know it does. And I guess I feel like the more I understand it” – Now he looked down, clasped his knees in his hands. “The better I’ll understand you.”

Quiet expanded between them after those words. Legolas stared at his hands around his knees, at the edge of the glossy pages on the coffee table, listened to the steady sound of Gimli breathing beside him. Considered.

Then there was a hand on his, large and warm, pressing his fingers into his leg. He looked up, startled, into Gimli’s dark eyes, his sweet smile. “You want to look at these to understand me?” he said softly.

“Of course!” Legolas breathed. He would spend lifetimes learning Gimli, if he could, turning every page of his life and his body and his brain like a book, like a whole stack of magazines that would never end. “I love you!”

Gimli’s other hand came up to cup his face, his little finger stroking tingling patterns on the tender skin along his jawline. “I love you, too,” he said, and tilted his head forward for a kiss.

Their mouths met, parted, met again – a long, slow undulation like ripples on the surface of the sea. Legolas was drowning in sweetness, drunk on the taste of Gimli’s lips, the sweep of his tongue.  When they parted at last, his head swam, all memory of their conversation overthrown by the potency of the kiss.

“I want to understand you, too,” said Gimli. “And I want to help you understand me. Whatever it takes – even if that does mean letting you laugh at me.”

“I’m not” – 

Gimli cut him off with another kiss. “Whatever you say,” he whispered, grinning again against Legolas’s lips. “Okay then.” He pulled back and turned to the table again – at last flipping the page from the elf impersonators to see what was next. “Where were we?”

Chapter Text

“I wonder how old he was.”

“Hmm?” Gimli blinked into his coffee cup as though to find an explanation in the depths. Legolas did this sometimes, blurted some random non sequitur of a sentence as though they’d been in the middle of a conversation about it that Gimli had just forgotten. It wasn’t a new thing – wasn’t even new for him to do it in the morning; Gimli had spent enough nights here that making coffee in the kitchen while Legolas talked at him was a well-established ritual – but it was still too soon before the life-giving kick of caffeine and sugar for the words to make any sense.

“My dad.” Legolas was beautiful in the morning, whether he had slept or merely drifted, but it seemed even a long day of moving boxes hadn’t been enough to knock him all the way out last night. His hair had all migrated to one side of his head, a huge swoosh down over one ear in which one of the birds was now happily nesting, but his eyes were clear and focused. He was like this after a night of reverie, as though the night had been a pause rather than a reset and he was ready to resume wherever his mind had been. So perhaps it wasn’t a non sequitur at all; just a conversation with a long break in the middle that hadn’t felt like a break to him at all.

Gimli had always known elves were strange, but he’d never expected to get to witness it up close like this. And now, he had every day and night for the rest of his life to observe and learn to understand.

That thought was more warming than a sip of coffee, but it still didn’t help him click into the latch of Legolas’s conversation. “What about your dad?”

“Oh.” Legolas looked up sharply, causing whichever bird it was to twitter at him in affront. (Gimli would have to learn to tell them apart, now that they were his birds, too.) He raised a hand almost absently to rub at her head with a knuckle until she settled back into his hair. “I meant the magazine. From last night?”

The question in his voice made Gimli realize suddenly that this was new to Legolas, too – the fact that for Gimli, every night of sleep was a reset, not just a pause. It made him wonder if Legolas was like this with his elf friends, too – if every time he and Tauriel visited, they simply picked up exactly where their conversation had left off the time before, as if time itself bent around them. But that was as much time as he had for reflection, because the memory of the magazines last night was crashing down on him again, and he groaned. “No,” he whined. “Please . . . it’s too early . . .”

But he had responded, and that was enough. “I didn’t check the dates on the magazine,” said Legolas. “But you said they were old even when you got them, right? Maybe ten years old when you were fifteen?” Gimli wasn’t sure whether to be touched or horrified at how much of that Legolas had retained – his explanation that when you were a teenager sharing a single-family computer in the days before smartphones, you got your porn in hard copy where you could find it, and if that was vintage stores, so be it. “So I was thinking – that guy impersonating my dad. He must have been” –

“Why,” Gimli pleaded. It was too early for this – though to be fair, last night had also been too late, and was there ever a time when it was okay to speculate about this sort of thing?

“–PM at that time already,” Legolas continued ruthlessly, “because otherwise he wouldn’t have had the name recognition, right? But I think he was elected shortly before I was born. So I started wondering” –

“Please.” Gimli didn’t think he could bear thinking about how old his now-fiancé had been when the magazine he’d gotten off to during his teenage years had been published.

“I’m gonna check.”

Legolas had that light in his eyes that meant he wouldn’t be persuaded, and Gimli had no interest in trying to chase him, particularly with a hot mug of coffee in his hands. So he stared down into its depths as Legolas scampered into the other room and took a long, deep swig. It was still too hot to drink, really, but he needed strength if he was going to get through this ordeal.

“‘83,” came Legolas’s voice from the other room, followed quickly by the sound of his footsteps and the bird’s cheeping as he returned to the kitchen with Bad Daddy clutched in one triumphant hand. “So I would have been . . . thirteen?”

Gimli had been about six, then, and had bought the magazine about ten years later. They didn’t talk about their ages much, since their life journeys had been so different, but it was weird to think about that time of their lives when they hadn’t known each other, when Legolas had been an adolescent entering hoity-toity private elf school in Lasgalen and Gimli just a kid in Erebor. What was even weirder was thinking about it in the context of Gimli’s porn collection. “So what you’re saying is” –

“That my dad was a world leader and single parent of a thirteen-year-old child when this man decided to impersonate him,” Legolas said with something like glee in his voice. “I think that makes it better. Do you think they knew about me?”

“I don’t know,” Gimli groaned. The words single parent were still reverberating in his mind. Legolas didn’t talk about his mother much, still hadn’t given Gimli all the details about what had happened to her – not so much in a cagey way, but more that it just . . . hadn’t come up. Didn’t seem to be something he wanted to mention. They would have to talk about it eventually – there was so much they still had to learn about each other – but . . . 

“Hey.” Legolas shuffled sideways along the counter to sling his arm over Gimli’s shoulders, tug him close. He still wore his sleep shirt and tiny shorts, but his arm was warm against Gimli’s own bare skin, and the bird in his hair peeped in welcome. “It’s nothing against you, or even against the guy, I swear. I don’t want to make you feel bad.”

“You’re not,” Gimli sighed, leaning against him. It was too early for many things, but not for the warm, solid weight of Legolas against him, the silk sweep of his hair, the way he smelled in the morning: like shampoo and sweat and – now – like Gimli. It was restorative, essential as coffee, as oxygen.

“Thank you for showing them to me,” Legolas said, and now there was no trace of laughter in his voice: only an awed sort of warmth. “I love learning more about you.”

“Me too.” He meant so much by those words – he loved sharing with Legolas, loved learning with him and from him. And there was so much he had still to learn about Legolas’s life, about his childhood, about the way he saw the world –

But all that could wait, at least for now.

After all, they had the rest of their lives.